Tag Archives: Myth & Folkore

Throwback Tuesday Payback

Posted on by
Reply

Lost and alone, I relentlessly haunt my own back catalogue, visiting and re-visiting the failures of my past. This piece – The Global Underbelly of Mexican Culture – was first printed in the pamphlet Necro-Tourist from 1999.

The Global Underbelly of Mexican Culture

Coyacan suburb, on the edge of Mexico City, was about the most unMexican place I’d seen in Mexico. In contrast to the crowded tumbledown streets, alleyways and markets I’d seen around Alameda Park and Zocalo, streaming with people, Coyacan was all lawns and driveways, villas set back behind flourishing palm trees, hardly any traffic here, hardly any people. It felt spacious and wealthy and paranoid. Like the British Ex-Pat barrios of the Spanish Costas, Coyacan had the same sense of furtively concealed lifelessness about it. Like photographs of Beverley Hills, or TV.

The Metro journey from the station in central Mexico City, across crowded town and through her endless undulating outskirts had taken almost an hour.  The Metro finally coughed us up right deep in the centre of shiney, Americano chain-store shopping mall. Here the incurable cyst of corporate-branded consumerism bubbled forth its phosphorescent plate-glass pus, depositing in the wake of its rancid slipstream, inter-continental brand names, sportswear, fast food, Wendys and Fucking McDonalds. All over again, just like anywhere. O Hell.

From here we consulted our guide book and scuttled our way through the network of dull closed-curtain unpromising Coyacan suburb. We were looking for The Blue House, home to the Frieda Kahlo Museum, housing the largest collection of her works in the world.

Magically, we found the Blue House. We also found the Blue House was closed for the next eighteen months for essential repairs. As we consulted our guide book again, without much hope for other interesting places in Coyacan, it began to spit rain. After some serious trawling in the culture section, the guide book threw us the Trotsky Connection…MORE

Extract from Necrotourist – originally a limited printing of a hard-copy A5 folded stapled photocopied pamphlet produced in 2001.

Sunday Flashback

Posted on by
Reply

Here is a reprint of a piece I wrote, as Jean Dark, back in 2012. I am astonished by how the memory still makes me feel happy and fulfilled.

Gaunt’s House Labyrinth

In December 2012 I took this series of photographs of the stone-laid labyrinth at Gaunt’s House in Dorset.

The Labyrinth at Gaunt’s House is a classic seven-circuit labyrinth in turf and brick, laid out in the private grounds of a Dorset Retreat Centre. It has been used for meditational and spiritual purposes by visitors to the house since it’s construction around the turn of the millennium.

In December 2012 I was staying at Gaunt’s House for a fortnight volunteering. We were painting and decorating a cottage on the grounds, in exchange for bed and board. The food was good and wholesome, the company, my workmates and fellow volunteers, were generally cheerful and uncomplicated. My accommodation was a sparse but comfortable single room in a converted stable block, it was called a “Meditation Cell”. I was at a difficult time in my life and I was struggling at home to regain my composure and maintain my solitude – I had been tempted to take a Vipassna Retreat. Obviously the Meditation Cell felt like a miraculous gift.

Meals were served four times daily in the dining hall of the main house, and the walk from my cell to the dining hall could be prolonged and enchanted by taking a long route through a pond-ridden wooded area to the back of the labyrinth at the far end of the lawn. As I was still waking in sweaty panic early in the dark in those days, I would get straight up, put jumper, trousers, waterproofs and wellies over my pajamas and walk, ramble, explore, what you will until I had to go in to breakfast. Along hedgerowed field-side paths glimpsing a wren, across sloping green meadows to a cluster of Ashes, through thick untrammelled unhunted woodland alone, over swollen winter streams following Fallow Deer, in a circuit around the artificial lake. I tramped in the morning half light, in frost, fog and ice. It was a gloriously empowering start to the day, giving me a gentle daily dose of solitude and contemplation.

I always ended my walks by stopping off at my cell, changing into workclothes and detouring through the woods to the labyrinth. Outlined permanently in bricks it remains imprinted on the earth even if no-one walks it. I walked it daily for a fortnight in December 2012, kicking through frozen woodland leaf-litter, marking out the spiral path, moving inwards to the centre, inwards and then outwards. Then breakfast, refreshed.

One afternoon towards the end of the fortnight, I had a block of freetime and decided to spend that time working with the labyrinth. I spent the dull-lighted December afternoon throwing, sweeping, raking, kicking leaf litter off the paths, to the sides where they marked out the ‘walls’ covering the bricks with moist fecund leaf mould. The path was revealed as a swathe of soft green grass.  I was finishing the centre as the sun set and I walked the newly cleared labyrinth at twilight. Managing to make it across the lawn to the main house in perfect time for tea.

The photographs

Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012

In December 2012 I took this series of photographs of the stone-laid labyrinth at Gaunt’s House in Dorset.

Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012

 I spend the dull-lighted December afternoon throwing, sweeping, raking, kicking leaf litter off the paths, to the sides where they marked out the ‘walls’ covering the bricks with moist fecund leaf mould.

Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012

The path was revealed as a swathe of soft green grass.

Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012

I was finishing the centre as the sun set and I walked the newly cleared labyrinth at twilight.

Next morning the scene was bejewelled with frost.

Gaunt's Labyrinth
Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012
Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012

Word of That Week

Posted on by
2

“Metastasised” They said.

That week it was a new word for me. I had to google it.  It means the spread of cancer to distant parts of the body. I’d never heard it before.

And now, I’ve heard it three times in a week.

I sat down in the kitchen, paused the washing up, poured myself a glass of tequila. Tried to understand why the interviewed novelist on the BBC Radio 4 arts show had chosen to use that word, that big awful stupid bloody word, to describe her creative process.

I mean, writers do understand the impact of words, writers do grasp how to use the esoteric power of words, that’s the magic of spelling.

I wondered what self-defeating disgust she was expressing against her own art.

“Metatasised” she said “the characters simply metatasised into the internal drive of the narrative arc…”

I switched the radio off, gulped at the tequila, trying to drown the word in drunkeness.

I’m familiar with “frequency bias”, I’ve heard of “selective attention”, I’ve wikipediaed “confirmation bias”. Over and over again.

The second time that week that I heard the word “Metatasised” was from some second-rate TV celebrity. He was making a pre-emptive denial on YouTube, in advance of channel 4 running a damning exposē of his misogynistic abuse of his co-workers. “Metatasised” he said, “the media metatasised my open promiscuity into very agregious accusations…” he blustered in vain. The channel 4 documentary cut him down anyway, in spite of his invocation of cancer.

“Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon – a cognitive bias refering to the tendency to notice something more often after noticing it for the first time” As if Red Army Faction hijacking, kidnapping, bombing and assasination, as if violent delusions of terrorist revolution, was simply a psychological repetition of a re-repetition. Over and over again. As if a terminal diagnosis could be just clever hyperbole.

“Metatasised” He said.

Earlier that week I had sat with my friend in the clinic at Addenbrookes. That’s the first time I ever heard the word in my life.

“Metatasised” the oncologist said. He said my friend’s cancer had Metatasised.

=============

Bin Day

Posted on by
Reply

It vaguely caught my eye a couple of times and I thought it was one of tribe of black crows with white-flecked wings that inhabit my street. But it wasn’t, it was just a discarded black bin bag enjoying a bit of freedom in the Bin Day afternoon.

I think the crows are naturally black, but are developing white flecks on their wings. The crows are turning white, feather by feather. This colour change is possibly due to vitamin and mineral deficiencies, leading to loss of the melatonin in the feathers. Of course the creatures are malnourished, they are urban crows, they are surviving on trash, eating from bin bags. Left over ultra processed ready meal gobets and soiled cat litter pickings a plenty.

From my window I have watched the crows dunking cigarette butts into puddles to rid them of their paper skin, then gobble down the puddle soaked filters like a delicacy.

Then it catches my eye again. The free range black bin bag in the street shudders across the road, like a flurry of ferrets, back and forth in the wind.

And again, contorting into a hunched half torso straddling the white line down the middle of the tarmac.

Wet grey rainy bin day, twilight afternoon midwinter, the crows warily eye a stray black plastic bin bag waddle to the kerb, finally settling down in the form of a metalic grey arrow headed dragon child, curled in the shade of next doors toyota, his squamous wings and gills rhymically fluttering in his sleep.

The Passing Tale of Rimmer and Moomy

Posted on by
Reply

His nickname was Rimmer, sometimes just Rim. I don’t know why he was called that, thankfully I only met him a couple of times.

The first time was when his girlfriend invited me out for a coffee. The girlfriend’s nickname was Moomy, I only went the once. I only went the once because Moomy simply couldn’t stop talking, speaking loudly and rapidly, barely comprehensible in her non-native English. I don’t know what was wrong with her to be so aggravatingly and pointlessly vocal, some said it was an undiagnosed mental illness, I think it was cocaine. To be honest, she did look like a cokehead, and she was self-absorbed, overbearing and boring enough to be on cocaine.

Anyway, Moomy invited me out for a coffee through the friend of a friend, and she brought Rimmer along because he couldn’t be left on his own at home, I don’t know why. Moomy was relentless, rambling, arse-achingly dull. Every once in a while Rimmer, whose voice was booming and plonky, would start pontificating himself, like when one disturbed barking farm-dog sets off all the others aroundabouts. Moomy would indulge Rimmer a little, allowing him to run his mouth for a few minutes, then she would shut him down “No minding if him, he just autistico” she would shout and continue with her own tediously incoherent monologuing.

I never went for coffee with them again, between them they made me feel socially violated.

It took me a week to wash them out of my head.

The only other time I spent with Rim Rimmer was when Moomy had flown home to have her anal glands expressed, I think that’s what she said. She said “I cannot NHS fucking stupid. In my country dentist make all anal glands for sixty euro. In this fucking country NHS you wait five years on list for down there is same relief. I no fucking wait for NHS. I go my own country is better than fucking England.”

So Moomy was away for a month or so and she was furiously messaging my friend to visit Rimmer, have drinks with him and check he was okay. The friend, horrified at the thought of spending a whole evening alone with Rim had insisted I come along too.

We arrived at Rimmer and Moomy’s flat as late as politely possible, he showed us to the sofa, and quickly poured us what he called “cocktails” pink gin and tonic in full pint glasses, it looked like he was going to really stretch the evening out. “There’s more where that came from, plenty of drinking here” He shouted as he sat himself down at his computer desk, his chair back facing us. The interesting thing about Rim was, that without the controlling influence of Moomy’s constant verbalising, he himself was an insufferable monologing bore. For two hours, which is when we finally managed to get away, Rimmer spoke incessantly into his computer screen, although I think he thought he was talking to us. The first thing he said was “Back in the day we would make proper cocktails, we made molotovs and let them off in bus shelters”. My mind was boggling, I wish now that I’d been recording him on my phone, then I could be sure of what he actually said. Anyway, here is my undoubtedly unreliable recounting of his speech.

Back in Barn Hill where he grew up, a village outside the city, the teenage Rimmer and his school chums regularly raided a disused factory where there were abandoned explosives. They would drain jam jars full from pierced steel drums of unspecified flammable fluids, priming them with readily available noxious household poisons. They would combine and mix and prime and refine these little glass bombs, then they would take them to bus shelters at night and put a match to them. Rimmer’s friends would crouch in safety behind the bus shelter glass, while he would boldly ignite the jam jars and run. Sometimes the explosions were terrific, shaking the bus shelter to it foundations, sometimes the young men were deafened, ears ringing and leaking blood for days, sometimes he barely got behind the safety glass before the detonation. And sometimes nothing at all happened, and they would walk back home, despondant, leaving the dangerous jam jars behind in the bus shelter for children and dogs to find the next day.

And that is The Passing Tale of Rimmer and Moomy, and why I hope to never see them again.

Cat Anna

Posted on by
Reply

From “the Wall of Girls” series

1.Black Annis

Also called Black Annis
Image by Jenny Clarke
taken from the cover of
Leicestershire Legends retold by Black Annis (Bob Trubshaw ISBN 978 1872 883 779)

Deep in the Dane Hills area of Leicester there is said to be a dark dank cave inhabited by a terrifying woman-creature known as Cat Anna. Her skin is blue, her hair is matted unkempt fur, her fingernails are blood-blacken claws, her tongue long long and sandpaper rough, she is naked apart from a girdle made of babies-skulls.

They say that Cat Anna has her own underground tunnel running from her cave-lair right into the compound of the Leicester Castle, a building of ancient repute. It is not known if Richard III ever walked this tunnel, but I could resist the opportunity to band-wagon-jump the latest Leicester-related tourism-myth.

I have heard tell that there is a certain gatehouse in the Castle wall, that to this very day children refuse to pass through after dark. A place where youth tremble, weep and withdraw, calling out piteously the name Cat Anna.

According to the local folklore Cat Anna lives in a deep dank cave at the foot of the Dane Hills, rehearsing ambush tactics in her head. In her lair she is peaceful contemplating dinner. Her long blackened fingernail-claws click-clack and she thinks again about dinner.

It is said that the trees around the entrance to Cat Anna’s lair are adorned with the empty skins of dead children. Her victims slain, sucked dry, their skins discarded, like dirty linen, strung out to dry out on the death-trees thereabouts.

Children have told me that Cat Anna drops on her victims from the vaulting in the gatehouse arch, like a ginormous bat, enveloping her dinner in her boney  black membranous batwing arms. Scuttling back through the tunnel with boys-bones a-crunching, Cat Anna lurks in the shadows of her lair and devours. She sucks out the very essence, from wobbling guts to slithery bone marrow. Then she flings away their skins, which catch on the up-thrown branches of the yearning yew-trees ranged around the entrance, to dry in the sun, like pork-scratchings, or parchment.

Leicestershire Legends retold by Black Annis

Confectionary Psychosis

Posted on by
Reply

Waking early, he groaned inwardly, he hated Sundays. Sundays always meandered, everything went late, still, shut or slow.

And as usual, his larder was empty, he needed to go shopping. A trip to the local supermarket was always a trial, but on a Sunday! Phew! No thanks!

For a start, they never opened til ten, hours to go. And then, the crowds, the Sunday shopping crowds, they did his fragile head in no end.

Dragging around the kitchen in his pajamas, he searched the cupboards again. Still nothing. Just ¾ bottle of home-brand red, a mouthful of brandy and four hash truffles he’d bought for his birthday, but hadn’t yet found anybody to share them with. He poured the Brandy into the wine, took one hash truffle and went back to bed.

Perhaps he could get back to sleep til the shops opened.

Within an hour the munchies had driven him back to the kitchen. Rummaging through the empty cupboards. In blood-sugar free-fall he scoffed another of the hash truffles.

Then another

Sugar sugar sugar!

Then he scoffed the last one, went back to bed.

On a whim, he climbed out of bed, put on his coat and shoes, he decided to walk the streets till the shops opened. He was munchie-ravenous, but maybe a walk would help.

At the Pelican Crossing at the end of his street, he pushed the button and waited. Slow tailbacks of Sunday drivers clogged the road, inching in both lanes of the Ring Road, into and out of the city. He waited.

Slowly at first, then with increasing urgency his attention was drawn into a big blue SUV stopped at the lights. The car seems implausibly big, large and it began to fill his vision with its impenetrable blueness. He felt he was falling into it, into a midnight blue night sky. It took a huge effort of will to pull his eyes away from the overarching hugeness of the SUV’s blue bonnet. He dragged his eyes upwards towards the windscreen. There was a woman at the steering wheel, she had an implausibly huge head, a huge blue head.

The crossing lights changed to green, but he stayed, entranced by the blue headed woman, trying not to stare.

The lights changed back.

He waited, transfixed in ignoring blue.

With deliberate dispassionate curiosity he allowed his attention to focus on the woman’s huge blue head, and decided it was the woman’s hair that was blue, the same blue as the car. Quickly he closed his eyes. Too much. He switched his eyes to the pelican crossing lights, he waited.

The Lights changed, the green walking-man blinked. Repeatedly tearing himself away from the blue vision machine, he stepped into the road. Halfway across the lights changed “Don’t Cross” screamed in his ears and he beat a hasty retreat back to the kerb. He suddenly felt he was trapped, like in the Pink Panther Cartoon – Think Before You Pink! He thinks the Blue Lady in the blue car with blue punky hair glared at him, telepathically. He suspects she has an animosity towards pink and in particular  the Pink Panther, her being so blue and all.

But it meant he was psychologically prepared when the green-man lit up again. He skipped into the road

“dudum dudum dudumdudum dudum dudum dudum duduuummm“.

Halfway across the lights changed, green man extinguished. But he didn’t get mown down like the Pink Panther because the ring road traffic was gridlocked and nothing moved.

He slid into the supermarket.

By now he was swimming in a sugar-philic haze, the cakes in the supermarket bakery seemed sentient, calling out to him. Perhaps latching onto the munchie-mania that seemed to surround him, like a famished aura.

In the street again, trudging with 5p carrier bags stuffed with red warning label sugar, fat , carbohydrate snacks, he crossed the Pelican crossing without pushing the button or waiting for the green man, he just stepped into the road.

But he didn’t get mown down because the ring road traffic was gridlocked and nothing moved. The blue SUV with the woman with matching blue head is still there. But the car now is kind of green-ish and the woman is wearing a hat, a huge silly green hat.

Still waiting, still gridlocked, still Sunday.

He hated Sundays.

The Keeper of Confessions

Posted on by
Reply
Keeper of Confessions A.I. generated image

I am told I am a good listener, like it’s a compliment. I have been called a calm beacon in a tempestuous verbal sea, a paragon of serenity, a wise woman, a crone, a santuary of silence. They called me the keeper of confessions.

I try never to be dependent on other people. I live alone and I’m happy that way. I actively resist offers of lifts into town, shy away from being obligated to anyone, I am wary of owing a favour and I shirk social expectations repeatedly. It’s not that I am introverted, so much as self-reliant. Not misanthropic, just easily disappointed. I keep myself to myself, and I wish others would do the same. I am a good listener, but I hate manipulative and malicious gossip, bad-mouthing is a cardinal sin.

So I am a good listener, and as a result I have struggled over the years to cope with people who talk too much. People with issues around personal boundaries, issues around anger, all that misdirected energy and wasted time.

People whose mouths run away with them, people who tell me things, people who tell me things I don’t want to know, about people I don’t even know. People who become personally affronted when I tell them I don’t want to hear it, who lash out and tell me things about myself, things that I also I don’t want to hear. In the midst of all this over-sharing shit show I find I am losing my voice.

And they called me the keeper of confessions.

King of Potato

Posted on by
Reply

Emblazoned gold on unfurling crimson swags, the cracked old bone china cup read:  “King Edward VIII Coronation 1936”.

They paid cash, crisp twenty pound notes. The assistant slid the tissue wrapped  commemorative cup  across the counter. “Dad, why did he abdicate?” The youngster asked as they left the shop.

Later, they sat on a park bench. The son handed his father a small hammer. The older man placed the King Edward parcel on the ground and smacked it smartly, a single cracking strike.

“Because, Son” he explained as he dropped the smashed memorial in the bin. “He was a Nazi”.