Becoming reconciled to a squirrel

 

For years

you have hung upside down to steal my birdseed,

nibbled away at suspended coconuts,

arrived before the birds at any scraps,

dug up my newly planted bulbs

and stripped the crop from my walnut tree.

 

But today

I tidied my winter window boxes,

discarding matted whitened fibrous herbs

and straw-like nasturtium trails,

delving into the moisture-starved soil with my fingertips.

 

And laughed

to find you have buried one of my own walnuts,

here, under my nose, in the kitchen window box –

and it has sprouted.

 

There,

next to the parsley that survived the vicious frosts,

are two tiny rowing-boat hulls,

joined together at the lip,

a shrivelled brain between them,

sending up two inches of brave green flame

towards the light.

 

You have planted me a walnut tree.

LUCERNE STATION

 

Waiting room, at minus twelve. Perched on frozen metal, but out of the biting wind. Automatic doors open and in flies a limping pigeon.( Flies first, then limps.) Struts about in front of the line of seats. Somebody asks it if it's got a ticket. A family comes in with three plastics sleds, two children and one dog. The dog, on an extendible lead, eventually meets the pigeon. Everyone at Ice Station Minus Twelve cheers up. The community of station waiters unites to co-ordinate

 

a) dog (small, white and jumping)

b) pigeon (large, grey and leap-frogging)

and c) doors (glass, sliding, automatic).

 

Doors finally open on approach of adult, rather than of dog, but not quite fast enough for self-launching pigeon, which now limps on both feet.

BUS JOURNEY

 

 

Rastaman, standing, holding forth,

reels off a list of St Mungo's fare –

champagne, DVDs and condoms –

to a good-humoured girl with a ready smile,

some banter and short pink hair.

THE OTHER HALF

 

Things to do in Kensington

while waiting for a daughter:

Order a plate of salad

and a bottle of mineral water.

Walk down a cobbled mews in the dark

And wonder if, given the money,

You'd find anywhere to park.

Watch a little rich girl in a French beret,

and a velvet-collared, tailored suit,

on a silver scooter speeding away

with her golden braceleted mother

in overheated elegant pursuit.

 

CLASSICAL PIANO

 

Solemn piano chords in the changing-room today replace the jazz dance, salsa or Sinatra we are more used to as we strip off, shower down or lycra up. Do the staff take turns to select our ambient music? Maybe it's finally the chance for the gardener to decide what goes out through the loudspeakers and he's a reflective type who has just suffered a bereavement. We shake heads in disbelief and water out of ears. Don't they play martial music when there's been a military coup? Down here there's no network reception. Who would tell us if the Queen has died or if the country has been taken over by anarchist aesthetes? But no, the next track is Beethoven's Ode to Joy – the European Hymn. Does this mean that Greece has defaulted and is being mourned? Or has Scotland joined the Euro and taken with it its bagpipes and its North Sea gas?

 

Tomatoes

 

Never store tomatoes in the cold

At four degrees or less they lose all taste.

The essence dies. The flavour can't unfold.

 

Tomatoes from the freezer can't be sold.

Though you may safely chill tomato paste,

Never put tomatoes in the cold.

 

Lest enzymes wither, wrinkle, fade, grow old,

The fridge is not where this fruit should be placed.

The flavour dies. The essence can't unfold.

 

The skin stays whole and won't develop mould

But something of its spirit goes to waste.

Never leave your lover in the cold.

 

Love dies if chilled and has to be cajoled.

When she can't feel your arms around her waist.

The essence disappears and can't unfold.

 

Conjure up Verona where you strolled.

Feel the sparks of fire her fingers traced.

Never leave tomatoes in the cold.

The essence dies. The flavour can't unfold.

 

 

 

Wild life

 

Three generations. Two young girls. One, old before her time, has been allowed a bling handbag and slightly elevated heels. She is too dignified to ask to sit on her mother's knee but feels excluded from the grownups' conversation, so she whines continuously on the edge of their talk: Mummy, speak louder so I can hear. Her parents and her grandparents are discussing exotic holidays and safaris and all the animals they have come across. Tigers, Siberian, white, endangered, striped. What kind of teeth they have… What kinds of mosquito they have been bitten by… What nets are best to use…. Chimpanzees in sanctuaries and in forests… They have travelled far, expensively and wide. Silverdale, just north of the Euston Road, arouses their excitement. Only here, running along a balcony, their first ever rat. Viewed from the top of a London bus.

The island

Thirty years ago, the castle, centuries old and built by a king, had trees at its eyes and rhododendrons growing into the rooms. Statues in the old sunken garden had been visible only as floating heads on the blanket of shrubbery and creepers. The owner had been in the news occasionally, banishing the island's four hundred inhabitants, cottage industrialists, daffodil cultivators, the baker, the butcher, the tanner and the ferryman, so that she could be alone with the vampires and demons and wear a veiled hat curtaining her features like spiders' webs. She'd had her female bodyguard fling a young Dutch girl, an intruder, from the causeway, so, as she claimed, the birds could breed and nest undisturbed, feasting on the armies of mosquitoes that drifted over the island like a vicious fairy cape.

Ladies, lunching

Desert Island Lunch.

Jane, born in South Africa, meets independence at college. Though she now has a two year-old in tow there is a nanny; there is a car; there is sunshine and steamy heat. There is a cassette she plays again and again. She never goes back to the good-looking husband, who was not a nice man. Carole has travelled with her camera, giving permanence to the shifting sands of deserts, to the melting blocks of icebergs. A young and beautiful musician has found her images online and wants to meet her, wants to compose around her photographs. She is his album cover. Susan returns to her political roots and celebrates two men in horn-rimmed glasses, Scottish Everlies. Sheelagh plays Jacques Brel. Ne me quitte pas; she has just walked out of the life of a man. Alone in her room, she plays this borrowed track, dissolves in tears, turns and walks straight back into that same life. Diana and Elvira Madigan meet at times of childbirth or impending death; Mozart moves her world. Marianne's memories recall the songs of the dustbowl's Woody Guthrie.

Everyone has their stories tied to strings of notes. They fly up like kites.

Yogaglow

Yogamama came over this morning

to praise the progress that I've made.

She asked if there's a man in my life,

because I suddenly had that glow.

"Yes," I said, in surprise. "There is."

"And has there been all along?"

"Yes, I said, "all the time, forever.

But does it really show?

And anyway - he's away right now."

"Aha," she said triumphantly

"so that's the reason for the glow."

Make of this what you will.

TIME

Us creative types need lots of time on our own.

You give me masses of that.

WHITE WELLIES

 

Muswell Hill's long-established fishmonger is steaming with anger, his apron slimy with blood and scales, his wellies white. He leaves his line of customers, abandons his shop to an open-mouthed apprentice, storms out of the premises with its salmon-pink salmon, translucent steaks of white cod, lobster-hued lobsters, heaps of crushed ice, glistening dark-green samphire, and he thunders down the road. The street is jampacked with twilight traffic. The fishmonger bludgeons his way in his white wellies through the stationary cars; he marches over to the street corner by the church pub, where a cheerful Geordie is selling Northern wetfish out of the back of a white van to passing pedestrians. He, too, is wearing white Wellingtons."Get off my fucking patch," bellows the sturdy native, his red face pushed close to the Geordie smile. They are white toe to white toe. The local man wins the white welly stand-off. The Geordie, half his size, backs off.

Watch

 

She has taken off and hidden the wristwatch because its ticking makes it impossible for her to write. Now there is no way of knowing whether or not there is time to do any writing.

Bus

 

I count to eight before she does it again. And to ten next time, and then twenty and then back to eight again. Long, well cared-for hair and red, well cared-for nails, fingers busy with shifting her life around on her phone. She has sat herself down on the seat next to mine on the top of the 134. It will be another half an hour before I reach the terminus. It will be pointed if I were to get up, push past her legs and choose another seat. It would be rude. It would be politer to pretend that I was getting off at the next stop, and go downstairs where there may be no free seats, but where there is a screen showing all parts of the bus. And it will show me, not having got off the bus. So I sit tight and do nothing and the rudeness of the sniffing continues. Fifteen. Eight. Can I offer her a handkerchief? Would I do that now and then have to sit in embarrassed silence for six more miles? Or should I endure till the end of the journey and hand it over as a parting gift with a superior gesture?

Orange

 

The young weekend man on the checkout turns it disapprovingly in his hands and tells her that the fruit she has selected has a great big hole in one end. Now she regrets choosing the 30p orange and wishes she had gone for the two bags of four, presumably without holes, for three pounds - an option she had rejected because of the extra weight to carry home. What use the bargain if there were then no room for the toilet paper she had come to the shops for? Dismay at having chosen less than brightly, at being exposed as the old lady who should know better but has failed to pick a blemish-free example of the citrus from a mound of otherwise acceptable fruit, turns to relief as she looks more closely and sees there is no fault in the orange, no dent in the rind, no softening of decay. She explains that the navel orange has no seeds and that this is a baby orange growing out of the base of the fruit and that this is how the tree propagates itself. She senses that she is talking herself into deep orange water now and she needs to escape before the young man can challenge the logic of what she has told him. She packs up the rest of her groceries and the toilet paper, for which there is enough room in the bag, and she tells him sharply that obviously he cannot be in the habit of eating sufficient fruit. Or else he would have known.

The Reunion

 

It wasn't what I thought it would be. I would never have gone on an outing with my two daughters, my son, and my two grandchildren, have asked my niece, my cousin-in-law, her husband, her son, her daughter, her two grandchildren, and a very sick relative for whom this would be one of the last outings ever, if I had thought about it less idealistically. This was to be the opportunity for bridges and fences to be mended, and for it to be done on a shared boat trip on the Thames, with the relative safety, barring nautical disasters, of an enclosed space for the grandchildren to run about while the two families got to know each other in a civilized manner, distracted where appropriate and when conversation grew awkward, by the witty onboard loudspeaker commentary and, for visitors from abroad, interesting details about the landmarks we would pass on each bank. The other family were to be in the city for one day only and would be unlikely to want to spend it sitting in a cramped living-room in North London rather than seeing the sights. A meal out for a dozen people was beyond my means. How carefully chosen the meeting-place, how carefully explained by email the rendezvous. How excellent if we all met up and passed the time pleasantly, with all thoughts of familial rifts dismissed out of hand and memory. How unnecessary to take such precautions as an exchange of mobile phone numbers. How unprecedented the downpour. How difficult to recognise people with upturned collars and struggling with recalcitrant umbrellas, lashing rain and sudden squalls of wind. How sad to surrender and realise that we were not meeting. How subdued the boat trip. How well behaved after all, the grandchildren, Well, mine. How blazing the sunshine on our disembarkation at Greenwich. How full of reproaches at the day's end the messages we left on each other's landlines. "We were there. Where were you?" "We were there. Where were you?"

No need for neon

 

On a ladder in the sunlight

a girl teeters, laughing,

while West End crowds brush past.

This cinema does not do technology - on the outside.

There is no need for neon.

Digital script is anathema

to the Curzon cognoscenti.

She is changing our prospects,

and handing down

(one letter at a time)

the used-up attractions of the week:

the films she deconstructs,

as rigorously as a critic,

treating vowels and consonants with equal care.

One letter at a time comes down

to the young man who holds her ladder.

From the foyer only her legs are visible

and one hand

when she adds to the young man's harvest.

Her giggles live in the wobble of her ankles,

Like her teachers and mother before her,

from one generation to the next,

she stands laughing on her ladder

and hands down the alphabet.