November 2003 Archives
Information has been received that 2 bombs have been planted in Cambridge, which are to be detonated at 2pm. One in the City, and the other within the University. Will anyone who may see a suspicious package, leave the area and contact either the Police or University Security Control Centre immediately.
The pleasures of working near sponsors of primate laboratories; the above is a recently issued security warning, and we've been given leave to quit the premises if it is our wish to do so.
We used to scramble down to the water’s edge in swimming trunks and cheap t-shirts, grab handfuls of wet sand, and then try to blind each other. When the novelty faded, we’d drop onto our backsides at the point where the swash and backwash of the breaking waves heaved to and fro over the gentle slope of powder-fine sand, to dig our feet into its wetness, and feel the weird sucking sensation of the tiny grains being drawn out from under the soles of our feet by the rushing current.
We’d lie back, scooping handfuls of gloop onto our stomachs and limbs, smearing it all over until we were hideous creatures unrecognisable, or innocents made suddenly, shockingly aware of our terrible, advanced states of untreated leprosy; cue much vile retching and groaning, rolling over onto stomachs, rotating ourselves back toward the waves, and then dragging our disintegrating selves into the water – a panacea, don’t you know – to recover.
Being one of the shallowest seas on the planet, equatorial no less, the waters of the South China Sea are warm, and where the coastal drop-off of the east peninsula labours for hundreds of metres, to plunge merely a foot, they are as good as hot. Here, bellies down, ankles and heads protruding, we’d creep around exploratorily on the new found strength in our arms, determined, like Acanthostega, to conquer first the shallows, and then the beach beyond. We always succeeded. And so we live.
My fleeting moment as the boy wizard came, last night, as I sat at my desk; a burning sensation in my elbow from, of all places, the fading impression of one of my most dramatically acquired scars. We've all experienced that unusual effect where a pain, or itch, can be felt concurrently at two different places on the body - at least, I assume it's common - a simple function of the structure of our nervous systems.
Part two arose somewhere in the middle of my head, producing an intense wave of nausea, something I've rarely experienced proper, and quite so consuming that I had to stop what I was doing and lie down for a long while. Now there was a first; it's obviously the beginning of the end, though I doubt that this will involve the dark Lord coming for me; that would make for an interesting change of routine. Alas, certain, fundamental rules continue to be obeyed by the world around.
As it passed, quickly enough, it left me staring at the ceiling and thinking about all the little marks that I've picked up along the way, and where they came from; 1980s, chin, childhood accident, boy meets barbed wire; 1986, right thumb, dog bite, leave road kill well alone; 2000, right elbow and both knees, hit by a truck, god bless Chicago; 1982, right hip, tuberculosis vaccine, I will get you one day, evil Singaporean; 1998, left index, snake bite, not venomous, but so much blood; 1992, right arm, chickenpox, a relaxing Christmas; 2001, ruptured appendix, somewhere below my underwear line, thank you for two years of misery and misdiagnosis, NHS. Who needs a journal?
I did not miss the imperative
What I had in mind was a terrible cliff, sharp, razor rimmed rocks piled at its base. If there was any sign of my injury making manifest, I would throw myself from its edge; I've seen my own friends close to tears in the past, not through pain of injury, but because a recurring grievance can further remove you from the activities that you enjoy the most. Sure, there's always R & R, but some ailments are too stubborn to shake without drastic action.
Well, the cliff can stay, but only because those rocks look great in the fuzzy light of the morning; I haven't taken a good picture in weeks, and my legs feel great.
I've been staring at the outside. It's dark, and though she hasn't yet risen above the horizon, what light there is allows me to see the rain; at least, the staccato-like spattering of its numerous, pin-point splashes over the glassy surface of the many puddles that orientate themselves about the unevenness of the road. The breeze that blows through my open window is warm, but am I too, even more so; my hair stands on edge. Comfy, yeah, but I am on the wrong side of the glass.
My predilection for being wet, rather, drenched to the bone, is well documented. I haven't been able to run for weeks, and my energies aren't venting, but they sure as hell have to now; whoah, positively sexual. I guess that today is as good a day as any. I've stretched the offender as best I can, and have only to take it slow, to know what it is my body is telling me, and to watch for that one pain. And I will get wet, flick my hair around like a l'Oreal idiot, and probably grin orgasmically, like a maniac, all the while.
I wish a fond goodbye to my sister today. Her stay in London is, for the time being, over, but unlike the last time, it won’t be an age before I see her again; between this visit and the last, we hadn’t seen one another in over a year, and for someone to whom I feel so close, this wasn’t an ideal state of affairs.
I’ve never been in any doubt over how much affection I have for her, but there have been times when I have wondered whether the two of us really know each other anymore; she has been living in California for nearly a decade, and for much of that time most of our interaction has been by telephone, and not really all that often. The result was that when we did speak, our respective situations had always shifted; one didn’t know exactly what to be asking the other, not that our conversations were ever based on formula, but it felt less than natural than I, perhaps either of us, would have liked.
Us and our trivial insecurities. Having her here has been refreshing; we’ve re-established a measure of something long since diminished between us. I like knowing that I can interrupt her while she works, to find out this, to offer that, to make baser, biological noises across the analogue void, or to be bugged, in return, when I really can’t afford the time to talk, covered, as I can be, in biohazardous waste.
There is no reason to justify our need to communicate; as brother and sister, we owe each other nothing. It’s reassuring to know that little has really changed. Like, d‘uh.
From a colleague:
In a weird addition to an experiment i'm doing i need to use some sound clips that are associated with different emotions. I could do with any suggestions you might have; basically, if you can think of any sounds you might associate with -
Fear (e.g. thunder? gunfire?)
Disgust
Anger
Happiness
Sadness
Surprise
- it would be most helpful! Thanks people!
Apparently there are Cliff Richard records which cover fear, disgust, anger and sadness, but individual ideas are preferable. There we go; all suggestions welcome. And if you're reading this at work, I suggest that the least you can do is lend him some of your processing power.
Vanessa Mae was in town this evening, to talk at the Union, and since I was at a loose end, I decided to go along; pleasantly surprised.
I can clearly remember when she made her popular debut in the mid-nineties with her album, The Violin Player, soon going on to steal the show at Zurich's Out in the Green, where her twenty minute ovation kept Rod Stewart off the stage for a full half-hour, or the live broadcast from Sopot where - billed alongside Annie Lennox - her explosive performance drove the crowds crazy, and pushed the prime-time news clear of its slot.
She was never a particular favourite of mine, but her obvious passion and skill certainly made her a pleasure to watch. In person, she remains utterly engaging; very modest, though not self-deprecative, animated, not at all cagey, rather funny at that. And since she answered my silly questions with patience and saccharine sweetness, she is in my good books. If any of you ever become famous, remember to humour the small-folk; it makes us feel good.
With a smile, she gamely offers to help remove items from the boot of the car; heaving a large bag from within, I smile in turn as I look back to see her trying to do the same. Little imp, barely waist-high by my side; the bag is far too big for her, but with that insurmountable determination that so many kids possess, she goes at it anyway. I'm making my second trip by the time she has it in the door, but no sooner has she set it down when she's off to the car again, yammering on about something that I can't quite make out.
I used to resent this one; we have one parent in common, and there was a time when I looked upon her as the embodiment of the relationship that tore my family in two. At that age, it was all I could do not to think of her in any other way, yet the time soon came, though perhaps not as quickly as it might have, when I was won over by her brutal innocence, my stubborn rationality, the fact that she and I shared something that ran deeper than my resentment of the afflication that was our forced association. It can be a difficult thing to ignore the real beauty within one's circumstances, particularly where blinding hate isn't on the menu; there isn't any of that here, it doesn't suit me.
Her accent makes me smile; I used to talk like this all the time; we even have a name for it. Nowadays, I carry the accent of the Home Counties, but slipping back into my demented pastiche of a mother tongue comes easily; I didn't know anything else until the Queen's English was laid gently upon me, discretely hacking off idioms here and there, and smoothing over my many -isms until I was as regular as Oscar. What is it they say, a monkey never forgets how to scratch his balls?
As I walk toward the car, she is handed a steel box of fishing tackle, small but heavy, requiring two hands to manage. Taking a few steps, she stumbles heavily; uncertain of herself in the urgency of the instant, she lets go so that she might catch her balance, and the box falls. As it hits the ground, the catches fail, the lid flies open, and an assortment of colourful spinners and glinting shot spills onto the metalled surface of the road. She wears a look of dismay as some of them race down the hillside, well beyond any means of recovery, and turns imploringly toward the man in charge.
She has barely turned to register him when he is upon her, two decisive strides, a raised hand; he slaps her so hard across the face with the back of his hand that she is thrown to the ground with a weak, involuntary cry of shock. A wave of nausea passes through me at the dull thud of his knuckles against the side of her pretty head, the sound of her body hitting the road; I feel it in the pit of my stomach; it makes my eyes burn; I quiver on the spot, paralysed somewhere between a rush of fear and some brand of rage and disgust.
As he walks away, she looks up from the road, her lower lip trembling, brown eyes full of hurt but too confused to cry, then towards me. My vision wavers as my own eyes threaten to fill, and I can't move; in her young face I see the slow death of a happy spirit, a crushed vitality, and recognise that once, not so long ago, this was me.
There are days when a bit of blue sky and radiant, morning sun are all it takes for me to feel like nothing in the Universe is unachievable. Naive as the sentiment may be, in the face of my own pragmatic realism, it feels wonderful to be on so irrational a high when really, between this morning and the last, little has changed in the world that I know; so this is what it is to ride the crest of a wave.
Here's to the death of remarkably violent states of ill humour.
And another hand-job.
I can't answer your questions for you. There was a time, long ago, when even I wanted, with all my soul, to be straight, despite coming from the liberal lot you well know. It was largely my perception of peoples' expectations of me that made me so miserable, to desire to change myself in this most fundamental way. These thoughts subsided as I came to realise that it wasn't a selfish thing, being true to my own feelings, that I wasn't in any way wrong; it is your right not to have to deny your own essence, but I understand that circumstances peculiar to your situation didn't play a part in mine; I didn't have to live with those concerns, and can only imagine how they must make life seem. You already know what I would say, but it isn't my place to give you answers that only you can arrive at. Keep talking.
What I like most about G o o g l e is probably the one thing that slows it down, if only a smidgen; their crazy, multi-coloured logo, as most anyone will know, changes to reflect particular calendar-events, some of which are pretty obscure on the world-circuit; since the engine is my homepage, these novel logos are usually the first things to greet me over breakfast on those days when someone, somewhere, has something to celebrate, or remember. Trivial, yes, but a sensitive detail that usually brings a smile to my face. What wasn't cute about that Chinese New Year sheep?
The day has been rather pleasant, pretty much amounting to an extension, of sorts, to the action-packed weekend that has just passed. Though I spent much of it working on a presentation that I am to give at some stage or another, I was able to do so at my leisure, taking occasional - if sometimes extended - breaks to chat to loved ones, to eat, or carefully map the finer details of the thin coat of paint that covers the plasterboard wall against which my desk rests.
That the week starts in earnest come the morning is no hardship; it's not often that I get the chance to spend time with my sister, living, as she does, 5441 miles from our family home. It's nice to be reminded, even if infrequently, of how it feels to be a complete family, whether all of the traditional posts are filled or not; ours aren't, we were broken fifteen years ago, but that doesn't matter now; the pieces at the core of it all were never really pulled apart, bound, as they were, by that one, best-defined gravity.
There were fireworks, real ones, the dazzling radiance of an artificial sun and its duotone landscape, snow angels where there were none, and the strengthening of those ties that I like best to wear; you make for the finest company, Matt; that's not common. Leggy Swedish women with strong hands, amusing conversations with humourously depraved homelanders, and tonight's long and crazy dinner, with far too much port, sherry and claret for a non-drinker.
And freezing fogs; we stop dead as we step into the cold of the night, sending the torpid air swirling visibly outward, the smell of coffee and log fire in tow. Everything is cast into soft relief; built as it is, Cambridge goes over the top in lending herself to my perception of otherworldliness.
There are times when I wish that I could capture moments.
She slips through the door, "I'll be back in a few minutes", she says, smiling on her way out and dimming the lights. I take a moment to look around the darkened room; candles flicker along the skirting board, also here and there on the shelves, and in the corner, a compact, ultra-modern hi-fi glows a gentle neon blue through fissures in its chrome casing, the slow beats of Enigma - the mood music - setting the tone.
I drop my robe onto a chair, and stand, dressed only in my boxer briefs, alongside the raised bed. The room is very warm, but cool air is washing down onto my skin from somewhere above me; in seconds, the plane of my chest rises with goose-pimples, the concomitant tingle sending a shiver down my spine, making it even worse; I muse that my nipples would punctuate a fairly thick jumper, right about now, and run my fingertips over my skin as I have always done when roused this way.
I love getting goose-pimples on my chest; it reminds me of my earlier youth, when we'd make occasional trips to a golf-club in the Malaysian highlands. There, my sister and I would splash around in the pool, whizz down the water-slide, do whatever it is that we were supposed to do as kids, all the while trying to stay in the water for as long as possible; heck, the air was freezing, hovering somewhere around twenty degrees centigrade (I told you I hated the cold), falling even lower when the clouds came in like a heavy, rolling fog, which they always did by mid-afternoon. And there, trying to keep the cold fabric of my trunks away from my skin, I would break out in goose-pimples. All over. And nowhere was it more impressive than across the flats of my pectorals, which I would smear with the palms of my hands until they went away.
I lie down on my back and close my eyes. A few moments on, and she re-enters the room; I hear her moving about behind my head, and then her hands are on me. Hot, hot hands, with a strong grip made fluid by scented oil, the smell of which I can't place, but certainly feel a reaction to; as she drives her hands deep into my musculature, I literally fly down that steep slope between anxiety and total relaxation.
This is, if the hands of lovers can be discounted, my first proper massage, and hot damn. In times long past, I may have presented a couple of minor symptoms of body dysmorphic disorder - a usual early-teen afflication - but have felt, for the greater part of a decade, entirely comfortable with my body. This doesn't stop me from feeling a little reluctant to get my kit off in front of people, perhaps a matter of my own perception of what is modest, but though I was quite aware of this today, it was little more than a niggle.
And so she asks me to roll over. Eyes closed, I start to imagine the inevitable - the hands pressed against my shoulder blades are as strong as any gorgeous man's - and just as quickly become aware of the potential embarassment that this might lead to. I take it down a notch, and really start to enjoy. Her hands run up the centre of my back and, suddenly, reflex sees me purring as deep and throaty a rumble as I can muster; above me, I hear an exhalation of mild amusement; as many times as she's done this, I'm sure that the reaction she gets must be fairly universal; it's all a question of when.
Over the soothing bass of the engines, I can overhear two women talking animatedly in Italian; they've been to Ouarzazate before, and are planning to make an excursion or two to cover the areas that they missed during their previous and all-too-brief soujourn in the desert town. I spend much of the flight with an arm hooked over the back of my seat, chatting to them about all that there is to see and do in the area; I won't be disappointed, I am promised, and if I love eating as much as I say I do, then I'm in for a treat. Not half.
Outside, the lights of Casablanca have long receded from beneath us, and all is an inky sea of black as we pass across the range of the lower Atlas. The occasional point of light hovers into view, nothing else around as far as the eye can see; I can only think of some lonely boat lost on the vast expanse of an ocean, this, my only means of rationalising such a tremendous degree of solitude, so heavily inhabited are the lands that I roam.
We touch down in a rare sea of twinkling lights, a 737 with an airport all of its own, and are taken along quiet roads to our hotel, which overlooks part of the town. The hotel is made of mud. I am over the moon; as far as I am concerned, this isn't just any mud, this mud is five stars. I fall into a deep sleep to wake, early in the morning, a little disorientated ball of me, like some blurry-eyed hamster newly out of hibernation; I reassert my masculinity, stretching for a spell, and eventually walk out to find that the heat has been turned up a good ten degrees or more; though the temperature will fluctuate between 35 and 45 centigrade over the next few days, it is so dry out here that it remains bearable provided, of course, that one has enough to drink. Aha.
Exploring the streets is a leisurely business; people are few and far between off the main thoroughfares, and are consistently dressed with greater modesty here than the more cosmopolitan crowds of Casablanca; the men wear long cotton djellabyas with embroidered hems, some wrapping their heads in layers of silk or cotton to keep the sun out of their eyes, while others sport trousers and t-shirts, much as anywhere else. The women show a little more flair, draping colourful shawls across their shoulders, some covering their heads, some not, but almost all are in simple, attractive dresses.
You can spot the tourists by their shorts; whatever the locals might wear on the street, bare arms, bare heads, they don't seem often to bare their legs, but even if they did, they'd have to attack themselves with bleach, peroxide and polish before they could achieve the fleshy, glittery radiance of the untanned, north-European leg.
Prior to lunch, a local kasbah happens upon me, the Kasbah de Taorirt; having never seen one outside of the world of celluloid, exploration is a must, and it is a good hour or so before I emerge from the veritable maze of cold, winding passages, shady rooms decorated artfully with beautiful scriptures, and "Oww, fuck - I didn't see that!" low rafters in all the right places. In minutes, I find myself at Erraha, a street café, sat in front of a bowl of freshly baked, unleavened bread, crumbly goat's cheese, and a plate of nutty zeit zeitoun - olive oil - a perfect first meal.
Things are happy enough before the young, amused-by-the-foreign-stranger waitress emerges with a tagine, steaming lightly from beneath its pyramidal clay lid. With a little flourish, she lifts off this covering, nods a smile, and walks away. Oh, divine sumptuousness! Oh, heavenly lamb köfte stewed to perfection in a rich, spicy tomato sauce! Oh, bizarrely conceived fried egg, capolavoro of this masterpiece-for-one! Mmm, yum ...yes Mr Matris, wonderful, wonderful; I pass out in good spirits.
