The Only Thing I Turn-On In Bed

My sugar levels are 'up' enough as it is (had to give-up drink last year – border-line diabetes), but in bed this morning, I suffered a sudden German sugar-shock. The day had started normally: did my pull-ups, inhaled some chalk and lightly sandpapered rough calluses off my hands whilst I made coffee. Yesterday I’d found Georges Perec’s novella The Exeter Text in a secondhand bookshop, so I couldn’t wait to get back into bed with it. Years ago I read Perec’s other lipogrammatic novel A Void; a full-length detective novel containing not a single letter e. But all the e’s Perec saved (he wrote under a very strict set of rules) didn’t go to waste: where A Void avoids all and any words containing the commonest letter of the alphabet, The Exeter Text uses none of the vowels except e.

I jump into bed and turn on the hairdryer; but as I open The Exeter Text, a sachet of sugar (German in origin) falls out and lands on my pillow. The sachet is like a miniature pillow – perfect puffiness and size for the head of a mouse or a frog: and though European pillows (and duvets) always feel plumper than our own, imagine trying to sleep on a pillowcase decorated with an illustration like this!

German sugar in a book full of e’s - I study the disturbing illustration: it’s the hairdryerness of his hand – like he’s blow-drying his beard over a plate of food – like he’s got a hairdryer for a hand; a hand-dryer - Helmut Hairdryer Hands. 

I’ve been dealt a worse hand than Bermuda, or that advert for Alpro soya (see: No Smoke Without Soya, 14/11/09).

There’s a hairdryer on my pillow, there’s a hairdryer on my sugar, and my sugar is like a tiny pillow, and my novel has no vowels except e. I get out of bed and search for a drawing I once so nearly turned into a photograph; but in the process of trying to do so, frightened the life out of a woman I'd only known for a fortnight. 
I was working late and she’d gone to bed. I went into the bedroom for something and noticed that she’d fallen asleep on her side, with her mouth wide-open and her face pushed into the pillow – she looked like she was gripped with pillow-biting angst. But far from it: she was deep asleep, breathing gently. On the bedside table two black bound notebooks lay flat, one on top of the other, spines aimed into the pillow - like the end of a double-barrel shotgun. Why didn’t I just photograph it like I saw it? Why did I have to start meddling? Isn’t fact stranger than fiction? But meddle I did. I tiptoed over and gently nudged the books towards the pillow, mindful not to disturb their gun-like composition, and aimed them so that they appeared to shoot more directly into her mouth. Then I went and fetched my camera. Crouched over the sleeper, like a burglar, I composed the suicidal image in the viewfinder. 

Why didn’t I just press the button? I could have secured Weegeesque photograph there and then; I could have prolonged – hell, might still be in - a very meaningful relationship: Why did I go back into the sitting room and go through a sleeping woman’s handbag? I’ll tell you why: I needed lipstick. Her mouth was still open as I smeared rouge over the pillow - a little bit of blood goes a long way: but I went too far. She opened her eyes, focused on a blood-splattered pillow and screamed and screamed and screamed. Next thing; she jolts herself up, sees me looming there, armed with lipstick and a long lens. By now, her eyes are open wider than her mouth, but I'm first to speak: “ It’s all right, it’s only lipstick -  your own lipstick”. I wave her own rouge in front of her nose - like some quack-hypnotist. This only makes matters worse: “What in God’s name do you think you are doing”, she shrieks. Then she starts hitting me with the pillow (a ‘real’ if somewhat one-sided, pillow fight). I get lipstick all over my face; but I don’t say anything because I don’t notice it until after she’s gone. Nor did I think it was the time or the place to tell her she’d just ruined a shot of herself being shot.  After she’d stopped screaming; after she’d dressed; after she said “The hairdryer’s the only thing you turn-on in bed”; after she’d left the flat; I dashed this off this drawing. Actually, I did a few drawings – drew the same drawing again and again - until daybreak. I posted her one by way of explanation. No reply; but time’s a great healer (and lipstick’s thicker than blood).

This all happened years ago. But I recently tried to recreate that photograph that never got to become a photograph (using myself as the model, sans lipstick – even though I’ve still got the lipstick - all I've got left of her – she never requested its return). I don't know whether to send it to her - it's been a long time. I think I’ll sleep on it.

Wildfowl Management - Not Golf Course Management: And Elephant Memories

I bumped into a tree - a tree with a split personality. It had a trunk that wasn’t its trunk (in the tree-trunk sense): it’s trunk doubled as a nose. The tree was both an Indian elephant and a Red Indian, depending on how you faced it.

The elephant face had an eye – I’d heard of Elephantiasis – swelling of the lower torso: thick legs and swollen scrotums; I’d seen Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” (1980) with John Hurt as the unfortunate John Merrick who spoke like a door sticking; and let’s not forget the beautiful Hannah Gordon (the wife of kindly surgeon Antony Hopkins); I’ve been in love with her since 1972 (“My Wife Next Door"; “Call My Bluff”).

The last time I clapped eyes on her she was as fragrant as ever, presenting the highly successful “Watercolour Challenge” on Channel 4. In the episode I was glued to a group of Sunday painters were trying to depict the archetypal English village churchyard at Crowhurst, East Sussex, in watercolour.  The place seemed to have a placid beauty – in fact the village of Crowhurst is just the sort of wisteria cottaged village I’d imagined Hannah Gordon had retired to (she’s 68). Perhaps she just popped out from under her thatch – found a window between the jam pachón and her pension collection (from the village post office) to present “The Watercolour Challenge”.

I felt a sudden itch - an itch that could only be scratched against Hannah Gordon’s thatch – or at least, on the very gravestones the star of “My Wife Next Door” had rubbed against as she’d faked praise on those Sunday painters.

My guidebook says: “Crowhurst, with its famous yew-tree, is within a quarter of an hour's railway journey from either Bexhill or Hastings”; so I set out from London and alighted at Crowhurst an hour or so later, with a photograph of Hannah Gordon – book-marking “The Crowhurst Yew” – her face flattened against a mustached Victorian, jammed in a crack in the tree: A typical autumn day – thin sun between heavy showers. I make my way towards the Church. Here’s the guidebook again: “On the south side of the Church stands the famous Yew Tree, said by some to be three thousand, and by others fourteen hundred years old. Its iron-bound trunk and propped-up branches betoken its age: and the visitor, as he gazes upon it, may reflect with tolerable certainty that it was flourishing here when the Norman defeated the Saxon close by, more than 800 years ago. The tree is now 50 feet in circumference at its base, and 38 feet in circumference 6 feet from the ground.” The guidebook I am using is a bit out of date: Ward Lock &Co’s Red Guide, 1907. Would the ‘famous yew’ be still standing? My heart, like my pace, quickened. As I entered the village, I thought: funny, if this yew tree is so famous why I don’t recall any of the watercolourists painting it, or Hannah Gordon hugging it – why shun it?

Look: the ancient yew’s still standing; it dwarfs the 15^th Century Church. I fight my way beneath the limb-like lower branches and vertical supports in search of the crack that leads to its heart – if I couldn’t photograph myself beside my favorite aging actress I was going to photograph myself inside one of the oldest trees in the land.

But look at this: the yew’s been fenced off. But would I have entered the crack? The tree’s infected - riddled with kind of disease (can trees catch elephantiasis?)

I’m looking for a crack and I find a bottom: this overhanging, seeping, bulbous, buttock-like branch reminds me of the baboon, Bosse-de-Nage (literally, “bottom-face”) who’s glowing buffed backside guided Jarry’s Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician, through Paris (by night) in a bed-boat (see “Hanging Around Toilets”, 29/10/09). But it looked too much like a zoo, this yew.

In search of a pew, I made for the church: but I didn’t get further than the porch, where I came across these books for sale. I was half-hoping to find a novel, often encountered in charity shops: “A Crack In Forever” (a great name for a climb) but I was out of luck. I settled for “The Manual of Ornamental Wild Fowl Management” instead. Look: it shows you "how to hold young birds for sexing".

Equipped with this knowledge I dropped a few coppers in the honesty box and headed off into Battle.

On the train back to London I replayed the day – examined my photographs. Bored, I blew up the books – look at this:

Not only did I miss out on Woody Allen’s “Without Feathers” – the perfect bookshelf companion to “Wild Fowl Management”- I failed to notice a novel about a hairdryer. Me who can’t fall asleep by just reading in bed: me who can't sleep at night without a hairdryer blowing me on the pillow! Me who’d once tried to shoot a thrush with a hairdryer! 

But I can’t really be blamed for missing these books next door to one another, I’d visited some ‘sacred sights’: elephants; memories; Red Indians; ancient burial grounds; buttocks; cracks; baboons; noses; split yew trees; split-personality trees, and Hannah Gordon, my wife next door (but here, next to a tree).