..Caterpillars

I am a tiny and very hungry caterpillar. I have put down Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse 5' to indulge in a tad of midnight biscuit-tin torture. Of the, it's all the way over there and I'm all the way over here and it's not nutritious but oh there's ginger ones, variety. And also because Slaughterhouse was a tad dismal for a young woman sitting at a desk alone in the small hours of the morning, especially after the subtle romantics hinted at in the recently put-down 'The Little Stranger' (Sarah Waters, signed and addressed to me and consequently treasured!)
But yes, I am a tiny and very hungry caterpillar. Or at the very least am gestating a tiny and very hungry caterpillar. I have gained almost thirty pounds since before I was pregnant, and perhaps most irritating are those people who tell me that I look 'better' for it, with my general haggard appearance, hair I cannot afford to have cut and bloody great spots. Yes, I look fabulous, please, lie to me. It makes me feel great.
Ooooh, I am being bitter and sour these evening. Time for a ginger biscuit, methinks.

..No-Glow Areas

So where's this 'glow' I'm supposed to be experiencing then? Well towards the end of my second trimester of a so-far slightly troublesome pregnancy, I look like I have yellow fever and the onslaught of teenage acne, combined with a drunk old man's ruddied cheeks and flared damp nose. This is not, in any way, shape or form, to be compared with the smiling, airbrushed mothers lovingly stroking their rounded bumps and looking the epitome of health and vitality in my cope of Dr Miriam Stoppards Guide To Conception, Pregnancy & Birth. I feel vile. Probably because this is my second night shift in a row, and I haven't slept since I woke up early on Tuesday morning and took it upon myself to stroll down the seafront, take voyeuristic photographs of unsuspecting old boys dragging their bait boxes out to sea, and head to see a girl about a chicken. Or somesuch.
The 'glow' is absent, but who cares? Not me, anywho. Right now all I care for is a cup of hot cocoa and the next nine hours to poof themselves away. Faster.

..Happiness Will Get You In The End

"No, Paddington, I've just hoovered my room and you're a grey cat and this is a navy carpet..." I stop myself, realising my lovely little kitty only wants a cuddle with mummy, and she can't help being a light grey colour and of the molting variety. Guiltily, I pick her up for a cuddle, albeit onto my white bed, where her fluffiness will show up less. Method in my mothering.
Embrace once sang to me that happiness would get me in the end. And on the scale of things, looking around and counting my blessings, I have a great home, fantastic friends, lots of hobbies to keep me busy when I'm not doing my well-paid job with lots of time off. I have a baby boy growing in my now-sizeable tummy, and am not too fussed about the weight gain, a sunshine-yellow bedroom, a cupboard full of food and a Mum and Dad round the corner for when the food runs out. I have Radio 4 on, the kettle boiling, and some hot buttery toast. I suppose there's a lot of reasons to be cheerful when you look at it like that.

..Just Another Morning Here

It's just another morning here, as Ms Griffith once said. So far, I have been woken up by a phonecall from a coffee shop I worked in up until six-ish months ago, at about 7am. I didn't make it to the conversation point, just assumed they were short of staff and this being a Saturday in close proximity to Christmas, desperation ensued. This is all an assumption, of course, as I just got to the "Hi Mel-" part of conversation and, realising that it wasn't work, put the phone down and shoved it somewhere in my duvet. Too late, awake now, and venturing downstairs for water. Which actually turns out to be a delicious vanilla latte, and vitamins- blergh. But a necessary blergh. Must keep the little dude- Jonathon this week, and finally a name Daddy and I agree on- healthy and full of vitamins. Lord knows it doesn't get it from my paltry poverty diet. Must have a look through the cupboard and see what I can make out of all the ambient things I bought in the 'big shop'. So far, fruit and nut cous-cous, which was actually delicious and I could happily live off it until Christmas. Good job really, as it looks like I might have to.
"Hello, Captain Cock-Up here..." That's Mrs Next-door, who we learn this morning is looking after a dog that barks every time we laugh in the kitchen- and laughing in the kitchen is something that happens on a pretty regular basis in this house. Which, while good for general laughter levels, is not so great for Mrs Next-door's nerves, as she isn't too keen on the dog. Vow to laugh more quietly. Dismiss vow immediately as it is not possible to do anything quietly. Except orgasm when you share a house.

..Stitching & Bitching

Knitting. I used to be able to knit one, purl one, to the tune of an unfinished scarf. Scarves were easy, you just carried on going until voila, one very home-made looking article with which to warm your neck in the chillier months of the year. Or rather, shove embarrassedly at the back of your wardrobe and plump for the striped and horribly expensive high street version instead. I might take up knitting again, with this free time I allegedly will have on my hands. Trouble is, with it being such a specialist venture these days, all haberdashery products seem to have skyrocketed in price. An embroidery hoop for example, when I had half a mind to make my own cot mobile for my unborn child, set me back almost a tenner for the biggest one they had in the only sewing-type store for miles around. I'm sure, ten years ago, when I would cross-stitch enthusuatically with my mother, an embroidery hoop could not have cost that much. But then, mother always bought them, so I can't be sure. I'm not sure now, if it's because I'm so darned fussy, or because they are a rare and lesser-spotted species, that a ball of wool would set me back a fiver. And I'd need two or three. So for fifteen quid, I could get a scarf from John Lewis and be done with it, and wear it immediately in all of its scarfy goodness, instead of it being merely a concept, then a half-finished scarf, then discarded for next weeks Big Idea.
That said, I AM going to make a scarf. Out of pom poms. I was in Monsoon with my Nan a few weeks ago, and one of their winter window displays had a string of pom poms all in a row. I asked the smiling lady in the store if I could have it when they replaced it with their forthcoming Christmas display, and was glowered at. Smile- poof. Gone. I am not there to buy a several-hundred-pounds frock for a 'do', merely to enquire about stealing their window display, and thus am not warranted what would be classed as customer service. Ah well. Nan and I resolve to make one. Soon. When I get paid so I can go buy extortionate amounts of wool. Maybe I'll just ask Nan what odds and sods she has lying about. I'm seeing her later. I'll ask. Ah good, I feel all resolute now, like I'm going to be Doing Something.
I used to french knit a lot, with the four prongs on an eerie-looking doll that would just straggle some long crotcheted worm out of it, faster and faster as I'd deftly work the wool around it with my little seven or eight-year-old fingers. There was nothing much to do with the worm except spiral it up and make coasters out of it, and one only needs so many coasters, and my mum preferred her expensive glass ones instead, so the eerie-looking doll went away. Probably been thrown away by now. Shame. I'd like to teach my little sister to french knit. Maybe her coaster efforts will be slightly more well recieved than mine.

..Ouch!

I just dropped my telly on my head and am sitting here glowering at the offending article lying helplessly on its side on my bedroom floor. I'll be damned if I'll be the one to try to pick it up and put it back on the shelf again- look what it did to me this time? It doesn't care. It's just a TV. With particularly pointy corners and more weight to it than its size suggests. Argh, my head is throbbing. Maybe I should go rummage in the freezer for some frozen peas; there's a rather formidable looking lump on my head. And a small child doing somersaults in my abdomen where I went down like a sack of potatoes, clutching said telly. I should probably go to bed. I'll pick they TV up first. I won't be able to sleep with it all askew on the floor like that. I dislike mess, you see. Bugger and arse, my head hurts.

..Paisley Tablecloth Sky

I love the sky in the early evenings. The shy pink blush and the swirls of cornflower grey evoke memories of a horrible paisley tablecloth my mum used to use when I was just old enough to toddle about and notice these things. Pale creamy oranges lounge languidly amongst dusty mink colours and I stop to lean against a lamp post and watch nothing move above my head, as ignorant cars shoot to destinations and probably fail to notice how breathtakingly beautiful the evening is. There are discarded Fanta bottles at my feet, spat-out chewing gum, a copy of the Sun newspaper rolling dismembered above the well-trodden promenade, a wheel missing from the bicycle chained to the railings, and lights twinkling across the estuary. I am well and truly here, this place called home.

..Vettriano

I see four whole police officers parading the high street. And not of the Community Support variety either. Given this morning's revelation in either the Guardian or the Telegraph, I am sure I am witnessing most of the county's force standing outside Primark. Another Kodak moment missed. I wonder when I lost the limb that was my SLR, the battered chunky camera that used to be attached to me with such ferocity that I was given a 'friendly word' at the train station upon suspicion of being an IRA member, and had it removed from my shoulder as I went with a friend to court to hand some paperwork in, and dropped it in the sea at 3am convinced I was a desperate hero trying to coax a local doorman out of ending his life. None of these were isolated incidents, but I no longer carry it around. Used to living in a council-estate nowhere, with no sea, no cafes, no people to photograph, nothing but row upon row of dreary flat-packed houses and hoods pulled up and fag ends, it sits on the shelf in my sunshine yellow bedroom, winking its big eye at the same wall day in, day out.
I stride past the supermarket, an unlikely scene-setter for a love affair, and a foreman pointing a camera towards some handiwork mistakes my smile for flirtatiousness, and smiles back. I am in the way. i strike a pose for his camera, laugh to myself, and stroll on.
The shop on the corner still displays the Vettriano that watched me, unsympathetically, stand and sigh and sob in bursts after each rekindled moment of a doomed whatever-it-was, and I stand there again and still wish I could afford it.

..Bankruptcy For Cellular Blankets

There's nothing to love quite so much as a brisk stroll along the promenade, especially on such a blustery day when the cloud cover has been puffed away and I can see all the way across the clear miles of the wind-whirling estuary to the sleepy county across the water. I kick myself, wishing I'd brought my camera for the hundredth time since I moved back here three days ago. Catching a glimpse of my reflection in an empty shop window, I giggle and spit lemonade down my too-small coat; my hair looks like a blow-dried porcupine. A woman with similarly shocking hair walks past in a vest and Dickies boots, and smiles at little me, blowin' in the wind, kept upright against ferocious weather by a baby bump that strains against big plastic buttons, and clompy work shoes. Two boys in bobble hats and bomber jackets sit in the cemetery, smoking Benson and Hedges and rubbing their hands and looking for something to do. I almost fall in a newly-dug hole in the road, my head in my Blackberry trying to pointlessly get all of this down, and shove it in my pocket, quickly retrieving it when I see a SALE sign in the Mothercare window and decide falling in holes is a far more desirable option than bankruptcy for cellular blankets. It's cheaper. Ouch. Lamp-post there.

..Baseball, anyone?

Today the news reports that my local police force is the most poorly funded in the country, with figures published ahead of a regionalisation propsal, stating the budgets for each force, broken down into £'s per head of each region's population for less mathematical people like myself. And my streets are the poorest streets. My force allocates £118.00 per year to deal with me. Fun. Good job I've only needed them once in almost 22 years, but how will I know if I recieved my £2,816's worth of Victim Support? Surely the pithy letter didn't cost that much to send- makes the banking charges look almost plausible.
That wasn't what I was initially going to write about, but the great thing about reading the news online is that it can provide a marvellous tangent and one forgets completely what one was going to say. Well that's it for me. As one believes absolutely everything one reads in the papers, the only course of action is to keep calm, carry on, wear sneakers, and carry a big stick. "I'm just off to play baseball, Officer..."

..Wild Things

Trawling through poetry websites midway through at fifteen hour stint on a night shift at work, a popular way to waste ten minutes discovering somebody new, I came across The Peace Of Wild Things by Wendell Berry, and was entirely distracted from what I was supposed to be doing. At times like these, 05:45am on a wintery Wednesday morning, when the Bean is snoozing away inside me, it's easy to forget how pregnant and afraid I am. Until the line "in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be" leaps out and wraps its gnarly fingers through the place where my gut instinct should be, and for the thousandth time since the little straight line appeared on the ASDA's own testing kit, I am frightened for what the future holds. Time to go find me some wild things. Perhaps I shall take a walk by the sea late morning, when I finish here, and plonk myself down and ponder and get a little wet.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The Peace Of Wild Things— Wendell Berry