All roads lead to the sea and a list
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009It’s late. I’m 9 months pregnant and I just did a 14 hour day so I could clear a little desk space to spend some time on the big LOVE project – ie Notebooks. Wanted to upload some pics, but short on time and energy. This is a bit like when someone’s in a workshop and makes all these excuses for their draft before reading it. JUST GET ON WITH IT. (This is also the sort of NOTE I write in my Notebook, but going straight to screen here. Making amendments as I go – edit is on. No touch scratch of pen, paper. Sense of audience is stronger whether that is mythical or not.)
1. Woke clutching the long sausage pillow that alleviates aches due to drum stomach big as an old, creaky schooner, full of mercury, saline and child.
2. Delivered a hard disk full of words and words and words about beds. Frames. Timber. Mattresses. Editorial signs. Camden. No ocean: just canal. Water though. Keeps me afloat.
3. Business lunch Savile Row. Never walked down it before. Stuffed sardines rolled with a bread and cucumber salad. Cuttle fish kebab with Sicilian prawns. Sent back the cuttlefish to get it heat blasted.
4. Walked up Regent Street in the sloshing rain. Didn’t want to go underground but couldn’t find the bus-stop. Scared of waters breaking in the tunnel, flooding the whole Underground system in one, mighty gush!
5. Took tube to Brixton. Lost my mineral water somewhere en route. Must have left it in Z’s office in the cobbled yard where W used to keep two horses. Sniffer dog sniffed me: black labrador.
6. Had half a mind to slope to the Lido to swim. Wanted to swim in the rain. In the heavy rain. The urine-soaked chlorinated water. Blue and grey. What colour is rain? Almost empty. Opted for desk that is made of glass – the colour of rain.
7. Ordered Singapore fried rice, egg fried rice, pok choy. No more prawns. Ignored tuna maki. Watched S bite into the back of a soft shell crab.
Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. Her poetry pamphlet The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She is also an editor.
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