I’d hoped it might make me look rather hipsterish, that its wool would hug me with an ironic coolness. But I just looked like an idiot in a tank top with a big Christmas pudding on it.
Tuesday December 18th
I was singing to myself as I walked to the Poetry Club Christmas lunch:
‘Last Christmas, I ate a la carte
But the very next day I was ill straightaway.
This year, to save me from tears,
I’m choosing from one of the specials.’
It was the same restaurant that I’d been to last year for my work Christmas lunch. That occasion had not ended well. I made a note to choose my food with caution.
‘Once bitten, vegan pie,
Broke my resistance, the microbes multiplied.
Tell me, pastry, do you recognise me?
It’s been a year since I have looked at a cranberry.’
I had the Wham! CD with me. I wondered what Secret Santa had brought me. Not another scented candle, I hoped.
‘Happy Christmas, I chewed you up and ate you.
Next day by the toilet, I quickly learnt to hate you.
Yes, I know, what a squalid scene,
And if I ate you now, I know you’d floor me again.’
I was the last to arrive and I had no choice but to sit next to Toby Salt, who’d decided to grace us with his presence. He had a ‘serendipitous window’ in his schedule in between all the interviews and book signings. Mercifully, Liz was sat the other side. She pulled my cracker and I blushed again, thinking of her poem.
I ordered the stuffed peppers. The Secret Santa gifts were handed out by Mary. Mine was book-shaped. I unwrapped it. This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave.
‘I wonder who could have bought you that?’ said Toby Salt, chuckling.
I didn’t admit to him that I already owned a copy.
‘Someone who buys their Christmas presents from charity shops, I suppose,’ I responded as my food arrived.
‘It’ll be interesting to see how you get on with it,’ he said. ‘I know my poetry can be a little too clever for you.’
Luckily for him I had no pistachio shells on hand or he’d have been peppered. I wondered if I should shell him with my peppers instead.
‘Not so clever that he couldn’t figure out your postcard,’ interrupted Liz. ‘If it wasn’t for Brian, you’d still be sat chained to a letterpress in your underpants.’
I could have hugged her.
Toby Salt glowered. ‘I wasn’t just in my underpants.’
‘That’s not what Brian said.’
‘Well, we all know how jealous Brian has been of my success,’ he said, reaching for the bread sauce. ‘He only resents my book because he knows he’ll never have one of his own.’
But that’s where Toby Salt was wrong.
Wednesday December 19th
Eleven Days
In the beginning, there was emptiness and then He said, ‘Let there be white,’ and there was white.
On the second day, He said, ‘Let there be words to dance upon the white,’ but there was still just white.
On the third day, there was white and not much else.
On the fourth day, it was all about the white.
5th = white.
On the sixth day, there were words but they failed to dance and they were cast asunder and white prevailed once more.
On the seventh day, the words returned and danced upon the white, albeit in a rather tentative fashion as if they were attending their first school disco.
On the eighth day, He said, ‘Let there be a plot to make sense of the white and the dancing of the words,’ and there was a plot, if only a loose one.
On the ninth day, He said, ‘Let there be characters, strongly drawn, to drive the plot, which though it may be a loose one, is all I have to make sense of the white and the dancing of the words,’ and there were characters but not of the strongly drawn type.
On the tenth day, He said, ‘Let there be love, whatever that means,’ and there was love, whatever that meant.
And on the eleventh day, He rested.
Dear Diary,
Without you, I don’t know how I would have made it through this year. You have been my friend, my confidant, my constant companion. There have been days in which I may not have risen from my bed at all, had it not been for you and the joy of filling up your pages.
But I have a confession to make. And an apology. I am sorry that I tore some of your pages out and burnt them. I was not in my right mind. I had been ashamed of what I had done and wanted to leave no trace of it.
It had all started as a joke. I had never meant it to go so far. We’d just had so much fun reading A Surgeon in her Stocking that I had thought I’d try to write a send-up of it. For Dylan. And that’s how A Poet Up Her Chimney started. But, a few chapters in, I wondered whether there might be money to be made out of this. I was broke. And desperate. It didn’t take very long to write. It took me longer to come up with a nom de plume; Brian Bilston was never going to cut it as a writer of romance fiction. Delores Wildflower, on the other hand, had every chance – and she took it. Delores sent it off to a publisher of romantic fiction, who loved it so much that they offered her an advance for a whole series of titles, provisionally entitled Poets in Love.
It would seem that I’ve made it as a writer, after all.
But none of this could ever justify my rough behaviour towards you, my dear, beloved diary. I hope you can find it in your papery heart to forgive me.
Yours sincerely,
Brian
P.S. I would appreciate it if you could keep this information to yourself.
Thursday December 20th
I squeezed Grief is the Thing with Feathers into my coat pocket and headed off to book group. Liz was already there when I arrived and she introduced me to the rest of the group. They seemed like a good bunch and smiled sympathetically when I confessed that I hadn’t quite had time to finish reading it.
‘Never mind,’ one said. ‘Life gets so hectic at this time of year, doesn’t it? I’m sure you’d have finished it in any other month.’ I nodded vigorously and bought some wasabi peas for the table.
‘It was good to see you tonight,’ said Liz, as we exchanged our goodbyes outside the pub. ‘I wasn’t sure whether you’d turn up.’
‘Oh, you can always rely on me,’ I said. ‘Happy Christmas.’
She raised an eyebrow, reached across and hugged me before we parted; she, striding off towards her bus stop and I, in search of mine.
Friday December 21st
Traits of the Artist as a Young Anagrammatist
When life gives me lemons, I see melons;
it sometimes makes me solemn, too.
Because when a word bores me sober,
and starts to wane, I shake it up anew.
I’m alerted to how words are related,
how, when altered, they might enmesh;
shuffling letters like a pack of cards,
then dealing them out, aligned afresh.
Faced with a poser and on the ropes,
I’ll make a poem from its prose.
An education to be cautioned against?
It’s character building, I suppose.
A gory orgy of words put to the sword:
these are traits the artist understands,
largely, and in whose gallery
the Ars Magna of anagrams hangs.
I filled in the gaps of the final clue at 31 down, A_T_T_M_Y, and then looked it up in the dictionary:
AUTOTOMY (noun): the casting off of a part of the body by an animal under threat. For example, the tail of a lizard.
It was done! I held it out in front of me to survey my accomplishment and began to wave it around like a chequered flag of victory. I couldn’t wait to show Dylan tomorrow. My thoughts turned to how he might help me with the next one. I would teach him the Grand Art of Cryptic Crossword Solving. The two of us sat together, dictionary at our side, decrypting clues,
unscrambling anagrams, finding all the answers. We’d finish it in half the time!
And then, suddenly, a vision of the future without him in it came out of nowhere and hit me. I reeled backwards, doubled up with loneliness. I sat back down on the sofa and breathed deeply.
I would give my right arm for him to stay.
Saturday December 22nd
The bell rang and somewhere an angel was getting his wings.
Dylan and his mother were at the door. Sophie took one look at me then burst into tears. I often have that effect on people. I invited her inside with Dylan and made some tea. I arranged some custard creams on a plate. It was one of those occasions.
The police had paid a visit, Sophie said.
I asked her whether one of them possessed the most magnificent beard. She glared at me and I decided to keep quiet from that point on and let her do all the talking.
They’d been making some enquiries into Stuart’s charitable works, they told her. Stuart was out at the time, hosting a Zumbathon in aid of maimed Bulgarian circus workers.
The police had received an anonymous phone call. The mystery caller claimed that the funds Stuart had been raising from his good deeds had not quite been making it into the bank accounts of his supported charities. What’s more, many of these supported charities didn’t seem to have any charitable status at all. The following day, in the post, the police received copies of all Stuart’s bank statements for the last three years on which a number of rather sizeable deposits had been circled in red with an exclamation mark written next to each one. Also enclosed was a recent leaflet featuring Stuart and advertising a ‘Motivatathon’; the list of supposed charities featured on it were also accompanied by exclamation marks.
I noticed the faint traces of a smile on Dylan’s lips as Sophie mentioned this.
Stuart didn’t return home on the day of the Zumbathon. Nor the next. Sophie sent a series of increasingly frantic and angry messages but heard nothing back, receiving no news of him at all until the police called her to say that they’d intercepted him at Heathrow, attempting to board a flight to Spain. He was wearing one of his motivational T-shirts; it was the one with the phrase ‘SOME PEOPLE ARE SO POOR, ALL THEY HAVE IS MONEY!’
I tried very hard to keep my face looking concerned and sympathetic as she told me all this. When she got to the part about never wanting to see Stuart again, I suppressed my laughter with a fit of coughing – and then as she told me that all thoughts of moving were over, I sat on my right hand to stop it from punching the air.
I offered Sophie more tea but she said she had to be getting on. There were a lot of things still to sort out. Out of respect for the gravity of the situation, Dylan and I waited for Sophie to drive off before we began a prolonged bout of whooping and fist-bumping.
I ordered in pizza and we turned the TV on, just in time to catch the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.
Sunday December 23rd
We See Gigs
We see gigs of ambient ska,
Acid jazz and indie guitar.
Blues and Britpop, soul and hip hop
Following yonder stars.
O stars of reggae, stars of punk,
Stars of Belgian neurofunk,
Sublime evenings, sometimes leaving,
Trying not to get too drunk.
Avant-garde industrial rock,
Honky Tonk and bubblegum pop.
Cuban mambo, duelling banjos,
Seventeenth-century baroque.
O stars of country, stars of trance
Stars of new age folk from France,
Find some new kicks, dump the Netflix,
Enter into life’s great dance.
In December, we have to take a flexible approach to 27th Club. There are not many gigs to be found on the usual date so we just have to take whatever we can find.
Darren questioned whether a carol service actually counts as a gig but I pointed out to him that it bore all the hallmarks. There was a flamboyant frontman (the vicar), a rowdy crowd (the congregation), alcohol (mulled wine) and a band (choir) who played (sang) all their greatest hits (including ‘Silent Night’, ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, and ‘We Three Kings’) as well as some of more obscure songs (‘A Virgin Unspotted’ and ‘Whence Is That Lovely Fragrance Wafting?’) to keep things real for the true aficionados. Like all annoying gig-goers, we sang along in the choruses.
Darren enjoyed it so much that when it was over, he got a book from the merch stand on the back pew. He says he may come back again next Sunday.
Monday December 24th
Tense Christmas
I The Ghost of Christmas Past Perfect Progressive
Midnight. Awoken by a ghost.
I thought I must be raving.
But then he went and showed me
how badly I’d been behaving.
II The Ghost of Christmas Present Perfect Simple
The next night, a ghost again:
with a much more recent scene.
More evidence piling up
of how unpleasant I have been.
III The Ghost of Christmas Future Unreal Conditional
A final late night ghostly vision.
But this one lacked the pain and strife.
I saw if I could be a kinder man,
I would create a better life.
I went to Mrs McNulty’s house and watched The Muppet Christmas Carol with her. She tells me it’s her favourite Christmas film, along with Gremlins and The Shining. Mrs McNulty may be as crazy as a wheel of cranberry-infused Wensleydale but she’s not so bad, really.
Christmas can be a difficult time for some, particularly the lonely. I stayed with her to 11pm until she asked me whether I was ever going to leave, hadn’t I got a home to be going to?
Tuesday December 25th
The big advantage of spending Christmas Day on your own is that you remain entirely in control of your own agenda: what time to open presents, what to watch on television, what food to eat, when to fall asleep on the sofa. The downside is the relentless gut-wrenching loneliness of it all.
Perhaps it was just as well, then, that Sophie had invited me over to lunch. She’d rather I weren’t there, she told me, but Dylan had asked and I could at least help them get through some of the food and drink that she now seemed to have over-catered for. I headed over with my microwaveable nut roast.
For one day, at least, we were a proper family again. We exchanged presents; I had a new diary notebook from Sophie and Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man on vinyl from Dylan. In return, I gave Sophie a Desk Calendar containing 365 Inspirational Quotes and Dylan got a copy of Meat is Murder by The Smiths. Then we ate too much food, argued about what to watch on the television and collapsed on the sofa, happy not to be going anywhere.
Wednesday December 26th
Job Interview with a Cat
Tell me, what is it about this position that interests you?
The warmth, perhaps? The security?
Or the power you must feel by rendering me useless?
Feel free to expand if you wish.
I see you have had experience of similar positions.
Can you talk about a time when you got someone’s tongue?
Or were set amongst the pigeons?
Have you ever found yourself in a bag only then to be let out of it?
Tell me, how would you feel if you had to walk on hot bricks?
What about a tin roof of similar temperature?
With reference to any of your past lives,
has curiosity ever killed you?
Finally, where do you see yourself in five years?
In the same position? Or higher up to catch the sunlight?
Or would you like to be where I am now?
Oh, it appears you already are.
Being sociable is exhausting, I find, and it was a relief to find some space for a bit of me time. Or to be more accurate, some cat and me time. She took up her usual position on my lap and I set to work on the ne
w Guardian Bumper Christmas Cryptic Crossword.
It was a promising start: six hours in and I was already two answers to the good. 12 down, symbiosis, which Chambers defines as ‘a mutually beneficial relationship’, and 18 across, catatonic. The latter was an anagram. The clue was ‘Action cat? Not this one.’
Thursday December 27th
I remained on the sofa through the night, so deep was the cat’s sleep. She looked so peaceful that I had no mind to disturb her. The morning hours passed in that way, too, but by mid-afternoon I was in need of food and thought it was about time I moved.
It was as I picked her up that I noticed her stiffness – and that what I had mistaken for a lightness of breath was, in fact, an absence of breath. I placed her gently back on the sofa and stroked her, as the winter sun shone softly down upon her fur.
For she loves the sun and the sun loves her.
Mrs McNulty joined me in the garden as I was digging the hole. From beneath her apron, she handed me a hand-sawn wooden box, shaped like a miniature coffin. It was decorated with a series of elaborately carved runic symbols. The inside was lined with red velvet.
She said she had many more boxes back in her house if this one wasn’t right. But it was perfect.
I laid the cat down inside it. She looked content. She was dreaming of her next life.
The service was a short one. I read a poem:
‘I should like to sleep like a cat,
With all the fur of time . . .’
while Mrs McNulty recited a variety of incantations of her own devising.
‘It’s over now,’ she said.
I shovelled the soil on top and walked back into a house full of emptiness.
Friday December 28th
Diary of a Somebody Page 27