SO busy

Lady readers, Darlings, apologies for my slack posting. I have been so busy working on my BOOK(!) A Year Off the Ward and culturing this season's batch of lovely psychedelic Morning Glory seeds (tee hee, don't tell my mental health case worker Lauren, she'd be furious as they'd *probably* send me back into a psycho-neurotic hell-hole, but who frankly cares?) that I've had little time to update my beloved blog. SO, a quick run down of activities, diary style.

Late August.

I attend Climate Camp, or The Camp for Climate Action, Edinburgh. Don't worry, I didn't get up to too much mischief - not! I attended some fascinating debates on the future of the green movement (it's looking very ropey, everyone is so obsessed with fixing our pointless economy that they've stopped worrying about the planet. Economy - planet = death of everyone (only we go and live in space or something, which, let's face it, would be awful. I can't even watch Star Wars, (which is a very accessible film) because it looks like 'space' (you know, grey walls, electronic panels, little windows looking out onto stars: bleak!) How would I cope if ecological meltdown forced me to live in space? I'd basically just have to give killing myself a proper go for once, which would be a shame). Why can't the bankers understand that? Anyway, here's a picture of Melody, Lara and I protesting with our new friend Rowan outside Gogarburn, the RBS' devious rural headquarters. Don't the police just look hilarious?

Even later August

I return to London. Emergency meeting with my agent Olivia Bloomsdale-Corfu. She tells me to get my bloody useless act together and get the book finished. My mind is in meltdown! I've never had to work before, not properly, this is beginning to seem like all too much.

Early September

I jet off for a week to sunny La Rochelle. I eat beef carpaccio with delicious tomato and basil ice cream. Resolve to buy an ice cream machine on my return and try out some exciting flavours. Garlic? Sorrel? Yum!

Mid-September

Olivia is back on my tail. The deadline fast approaches. I feel another breakdown coming on. I notice this article in last month's Guardian, on women in the workplace, and how they're too shy to ask for a pay rise. How ridiculous! I had no idea (having never worked) - is Olivia ripping me off? Should I ask for an advance? It would certainly inspire me to get going on the book...

This week

London Fashion Week! I rediscover HATS! Resolve to buy this season's entire collection of Hedonist Millinery. Winter 2010 is all about HATS!

I also Easyjetted up to Edinburgh for the launch of this lovely little magazine, Scree, edited by Lila Matsumoto. A review of the night is here by the lovely Colin Herd, there were ambient sounds provided by glitchy bloop darlings Conquering Animal Sound, shoegazing electromaestro Dead Leaves, the formidable Lamplighter and heartbreaking, wild-fen crying Illiop, which made me feel like the heroine in an Icelandic remake of Wuthering Heights, a feeling to which, you may imagine, I am quite, quite partial. Poetry was provided by ME, also nick-e melville, a cool political concrete poet who gave me a copy of his book and a hug - I like him, & I urge you to find his book. Francis Crot charmed the crowd as ever, but honestly he's such a wonderful and unpredictable performer he could basically just read us sections of last month's G2 at random and we'd be like "Oh how clever, ha ha ha!" He's that good.

Kisses!
xxx

August - a Cultural Month

Hello lady readers.

Just checking in from the Edinburgh Fringe!. Tragically, my slot on the Poetry Takeaway 'slam' stage on the Royal Mile (due to take place now) has been cancelled due to gross mismanagement (cancellation notification through Twitter? I ask you Tim Clare) so I've taken a moment to fill you in on all my exciting going-ons in Edinburgh, city of arts, theatre and meddlesome twenty-somethings.

I began my tenure in Edinburgh (I'm staying at the Malmaison, no student hovels for me, sharing a bed with a sweaty Tamburlaine from the Cambridge ADC this decade, thank you very much) with a trip to The Kitchin, Edinburgh's only Michelin starred restaurant (can you believe it?) I ate fois gras at least twice, once in my starter and once in my main, and was unable to move by the time the lemon and sorrel tart was effortlessly deposited in front of me by another ninja sommelier. I would heartily recommend the experience, and the food, for anyone of appropriate incomes - don't go if you can only just afford it, it'll be 'a total bum-out', as Melody said when I refused her a second bottle of claret. I could (of course) afford it, it's just important to stall such dependency in one's middling income friends (Melody's landscape gardening company has been hit pretty hard by the recession, and with so many parties to go to on the weekend, she finds it hard to get started at the beginning of the week, and tends to write off all work until Wednesday. It is the Summer after all. Thank god I don't have a job!)

I digress. After stuffing myself silly with bulimic duck, I found myself in a late night stand up session by Dutch rude man Hans Teeuwen . The misogynist gaffaws some of his more risque jokes raised in the baby-testosterone emitting teenagers affront of me belied the complexities of his politics (he's a real defender of free speech and ranted against religion in a eulogy for assassinated Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh - YouTube it I dare you), he is probably a feminist, after all, and made everyone who laughed sound very stupid indeed.

The next day I saw Paper Bird's production Others a play about how bloody easy it is to 'other' other women. For those of you who have just been born, or didn't take a degree in the humanities, 'othering' is a term found in Lacanian, postcolonial and feminist theory predominently. It is a way of designating someone as 'other' from yourself and shoring up your own fragile identity in relation, or against, how you perceive your other. My other, for example, is probably some kind of post-feminist, or, god forbid, one of those women for whom feminism is simply not an option. Yuk. And if this play taught me anything, it's to be extremely careful about who you other, because it's desperately important that women try to achieve solidarity rather than marginalising one another in order to feel good about themselves. The play script was put together from letters written by real women who the play writers/actors had previously designated as others. After having explained the concept of othering to these 'real' women (who obviously had not taken a degree in the humanities) they asked them questions like how they felt about themselves, what are they afraid of etc, in order to find ways to identify with them. It was a moving and inventive piece, I immediately liked the actors (not others) but did feel that too little was made of the texts sent up the real women. At moments it came perilously close to dance theatre, something which I will absolutely not abide, and there were a few too many scenes where they repeated the initial premise of the play (Hello, I'm going to ask you a few questions to find out how to understand you) instead of using proper dialogue, which seemed like wasted space (of course I had grasped the premise in the play's first moments, and didn't need it explained to me, although I am very intelligent...). I would ultimately recommend it.

I think now I must leave this computer. I ran into the delightful Armchair Books on West Port because it was raining and begged to use the computer to find out about the cancelled poetry reading (read his bloody tweet if you want to be shocked by human indifference. Too ill to text me Tim Clare? But have enough energy to recommend the play you saw last night you careerist fuck). Anyway, the bookshop people have just offered me tea but I don't think they mean it. Better leave soon.

More reviews to follow - I'm about to head to Climate Camp! Hunter wellies in tow.

Hitler's cat's mistresss

Emmeline and I have been looking through her old family photo album and we stumbled across this sensational snap of her old Aunt Ratzingher III, a mistress to Hitler's cat.

Look at this shot of her yawning on the pussy grave of Kempa, Hitler's pet.

Charming. Sometimes I think Emmeline's family herstroy might be more thrilling than my own, but it's not of course.

Will keep you posted with any more kitty shots.

Toodles!

Vagina sofa

just purchased this incredible sofa for my loo.

Home sweet home....

You're probably all wondering where my life's intimations have disappeared to in recent months? Well.. I've been decorating!

That's right Lady readers, as well as throwing myself into my poetry, I have also moved house and decided to make yet another fresh start! Naturally I decided to resettle again in the N1 and I can assure that the area is impeccable. I live opposite an organic cheese shop and an Odbins, although there is admittedly the sad presence of a Sainsbury's Local in between them, like some cursed unstylish philanderer ready to come between you and your man.

And talking of men I cannot stress enough that this re-location has very little, in fact it has nothing at all to do with men, nor does my sudden immersion into the poetic scene (I all know what you're thinking: poesy + Posie / the cathartic forests of verse x genius = Depression). But my reasons for moving are purely theraputic. Spending most of my time penning that incredible literary object: A Year off the Ward, has brought back all kinds of memories that I could really do without.

Indeed, I shall be recounting some of them here on this blog. For instance, do you remember the chapter about my eating too much around Christmas time? Yes well that's just one part of my journey into the recreational boarders of insanity. Heaven.

So, I have been spending the last month or so putting the finishing touches to my new, much larger and opulent abode. I have included some 'design ideas' for your viewing pleasure below. But best of all Melody Wittgenstien has found me the most incredible workwoman's hat to wear as I paint, hammer and drill.

See above.

Isn't it charming? Why, yesterday I went to Hackney for some reason (to be honest I'd rather forget about the entire expereince- incredibly dirty place) and I wore it there as self defence. It worked a treat and some young people were rather complimentary.

Toodles!

Posie in public - reading success in Cambridgeshire!

I'm utterly refreshed having returned victorious from a visit to the playground of my late teenage mind, the University of Cambridge. As well as having enjoyed a nostalgic Dolmades Kebab at Gardi's (still standing! still counter-hegemonic!) and a vigorous cycle to Grantchester on a be-basketed bicycle, I had the utmost pleasure in giving a poetry reading to some keen young students who reminded me all too much of myself as a siren of truth circa 2001. The temptation to ink the JCR was quickly dismissed in favour of late talks into the night, over endless bowls of noodles & impossibly weak spliff, concerning Aeschylus, the Utopian potential of renga and the lyrical verse of Kool Keith. I've been so sad since I got back to N1 having left Cambridge's gentle shores that I've returned with a frenzy to the drama I began there as a second year - Put That Woman Down!: the life and times of Meredith Lynchfield, Cambridge Suffragette and Assassin, in three Acts. Emmeline is heartbroken - I promised to take her on a kitty voyage to Eel Pie Island yesterday to throw an effigy of King Charles VII into the Thames to commemorate the capture of Joan of Arc at the Siege of Compiegne, but I told her she'd have to wait until the 30th to commemorate her burning (I thought we'd torch the French Embassy). Needs must when creativity calls.

Here's a nice picture of me in front of a display created by clever techy Mike W-H to accompany a reading from my chapbook, tristanundisolde (Arthur [C]hilling Press (at the moment at least!)) It communicates how I feel better than I ever could do myself in words.




Helpful imp Joe Luna over at All Over the Grid / Fallopianyoutube had this to say about my collaboration that night with shouty-man poet and mere part-time patriarch Jow Lindsay:


"Posie Rider & Jow Lindsay’s reading on Friday night (21st May) assumed much less than it would perhaps be safe to assume a Cambridge Reading Series night of experimental avant-garde poetry would assume, but by this very play was able to open up a space in which the performance of the reading constantly flirted with, insulted, disparaged, castigated, comforted and barely became a means of effecting a communitas based upon what was already there, what we already have, and what we might possibly become. Recent national political discourse was both appropriated and mocked, but also re-constituted into the political space of the reading, tracing a line of constant watchfulness over the machinations universally predicated upon and in the name of the folk whilst at the same time tragically powerless to prevent those machinations from organising/mobilising satirical negations & refutations of constructed collective identity. The creation of the radical experimental "we" through such a gathering was tempered with a dangerously isomorphic "we" of satirical invective and absurdist comedy, the laughter of the audience perhaps the most realistic effect produced by the Wagnerian, mythological, polysemous diatribes flitting between the two barely realistic personas of the poets. The potential for a delineation of a universal WE to be reductive and obscurantist is enormous, and these are the precise means by which corporate advertising and party political affiliation seek to homogenise humanity into demographics and target audiences destined only for differences in the vagaries of their consumption and tactical voting preferences. To say, as I believe I heard Posie Rider say, that "we are the poets laureate" in the midst of an exhausting and increasingly overwhelming dialogic code is a re-appropriation of a political right and the creation of, or at least the exciting image of, a fragile community existing, fleetingly, in the heart of the multi-national flux of assumed identity. What is "assumed", that is, taken as given, a priori, implicit, hereby becomes inverted to be that which is passed over in haste, ignorance or ambivalence, and what must be attested in the act of the reading is the human capacity for engendering caucuses of radical community so that we may attain enough trust to assume in the positive sense once more. The figures of Jow Lindsay and Posie Rider are mythological tricksters, ever playing with our trust in assuming that we are assuming the same thing/s as the poets we heed. We are not simply given to assume that we can all trust each other and can therefore sing together the firmament of the new world, but rather the intimidation and awkwardness these trickster aspects produce in the audience (for example, naming specific people in the audience, something I’ve seen Lindsay do a number of times both in improvised performance and in published work) work to make the sense of place more malleable in order that we may mould new ways of listening to and being with each other. Those moments of joyous augmentation, (self-)plagiarisation and re-organisation result in a mixtape-like quality that presents not only a plurality of voice, but voices of real collective experience and instantaneous memory.

Only by carving difference into the universally reductive notion of humanity itself can we become truly human, and by dint of this, humane. That is the axiom at work on the macro-level of experimental poetry communities and the micro-level of the individual reading.

This is also how readings act theatrically without becoming theatre. The creation of such communitas is contingent upon its only lasting as long as the reading itself, its durational nature perhaps the key to the feeling of common endeavour, even if only articulated negatively. Lindsay’s exhaustive prose performances are, I think, a beautifully doomed attestation of the occasion of the reading as the productive mechanism by which communities are made, defining themselves against both an undifferentiated humanity-at-large replete with built-in sensors to detect love, companionship, truth & beauty as well as by more positivist means declaring a space for the activation of radical subjectivities inexpressible within the nexus of the everyday uses of language. The temporality of the reading as play is therefore the crux of the meaning of the performance in terms of its delineation of our time, our language, our wound, our response. It is the proper occasion of song which frames and therefore reveals the event itself as constitutive of a collective grand narrative forged from the desire of those for whom pre-packaged national, gender, ethnic or sexual identities have become useless and restrictive."

Instructive, n'est pas?
xxx

Tristanundisolde! Chapette book of the YEAR

LOOK!

Isn't it lovely? And it's MINE, by ME! Hooray! Many thanks to the chivalrous, man-about-town, Mr. Harry Godwin Esq. of The Arthur Shilling Press for taking a chance on a gal like me. I truly am the happiest gal in town. Pink fizz for all.

Details can be found at The Arthur Shilling Press website - obviously my books have sold out all at once, flying off the shelves like the proverbial 'hot cake', considered to be a cross between a scone and a pain au chocolat, but live in hope, readers who may have missed out. Fingers crossed for a pdf, or get in touch with Hal or I for a sneaky e-look.

Once again I am published!

Women: inherently irrational?

Halt, lady readers, don't book your hostels in Cambridge just yet, as the Valentines launch has been postponed. This time, it's not because I tried to kill myself, but due to publishing technicalities. I'm not bitter, but I do wish I had a bloody boyfriend. Oh the world of a lady writer! Speaking of Lady Writers, in 1925, Scottish Lady writer Willa Muir penned Women, An Enquiry, in which she frustratingly linked the Freudian unconscious with the female gender, and the rational, decisive consciousness with, you guessed it, men. Now, far be it from me to support gender essentialism: I've met plenty of Transfolk and I tell you, it's definitely not as simple as all that. Some mornings I don't feel anything like putting on a bra, and my formidable skills at Scrabble alert me to the fact that frequently I am able to be perfectly rational and on top of things, unlike poor Willa Muir who thought that women were given an important 'creative outlet' in motherhood to match all the fun inventions and science the boys got to do. Silly bitch. The irrational, spontaneous and emotional outbursts of the unconscious/women could, Muir claimed, be channelled creatively and supply society with valuable growth, vitality and humanism, something which starchy men, trapped in their mechanical functionalism, were unable to supply for themselves (for some reason).

Generally, I disapprove, but when it comes to publishing schedules, perhaps Muir was right about women's inherent inability to meet deadlines. Now, one publication which definitely did get off the ground successful was Issue 2 of the Cambridge Literary Review which launched last night in (you'll win a pair of my knickers if you guess it successfully ...) yes that's right, Cambridge! I was trapped in familial pow-wows last night with Aunt Lily over what to do with vast chunks of the family 'fund' which were invested somewhere truly ghastly which might not exist anymore (further proof of our gendered inability to cope with masculine rational constructions, I'll thank you Helene Cixous). The outcome of this was that I missed the launch, which promised to be a good one, with readings from tender Valkyrie Marianne Morris and Tony Robinson from Time Team! I was very glad to have a poem I composed in honour of fleur du mal, Tom Chivers included, and to be able to represent the gritty London scene in the formidable, ivory cloisters of Cambridge, like a female Jude the Obscure, although of course I still use my cantab.net address occasionally.

Do please check it out. Finally, many apologies to those who turned out to see me at the Edinburgh Student Fringe Festival's feminist poetry event, Shout Out! on the 18th Jan, where I had intended to read. After walking around an intimidating student union, full of 'young people' and scores of the sort of idiotic girls who are produced like Sea Monkeys every time a new 'mega-trend' takes off, this time wearing fake fur jackets and palpable Topshop irono-novelty brogues, I chanced upon a sign which made me realise the reading had in fact taken place the day before. Proof, if proof is necessary in your gendered framework of fixed texts and unambiguous language, that women are subject to what Julia Kristeva calls feminine time, which is circular, reproductive, and eternal, in contrast to masculinity's linear, teleological time and its association with culturally valued 'progress'. I contend that if the poetry reading had been feminist, it would still be going on now.

Finis

(or is it? another feminist question)

Merry Christmas indeed!

I've left the slushy doom of London for Hampshire with Aunt Lily. She avoided the dangerous roads by saddling her prize pony, Emily Davison, and sending her to the station to meet me - such a clever pony. I can't ride, unfortunately, having had a series of equine dreams as an infant which my psychoanalyst attributed to penis envy - since then, horses have always struck me as inherently patriarchal, even when ridden side-saddle. Emily courageously led me on foot through the icy forests to Aunt Lil's, and we've been sharing bottle after bottle of mulled Martini Rossi since Sunday night.

A couple of Christmas treats for you then, a la Posie. Firstly, Laura Dekker, a 14 year old Dutch female has been found on a Caribbean island after running away from sexist bureaucrats who have been trying to stop her achieving the world record for the youngest individual to single-handedly sail around the world. The record is currently held by one Mike Perham, a 17 year old boy from Britain, and apparently the authorities intend to thwart Ms Dekker until she's old enough for it not to be a record, or until a younger boy comes along who's able to beat her. Well sod off, cried Ms Dekker, as she escaped from her captors and sassily sailed off to the Caribbean, proving herself to be both physically and mentally capable of the trip, as well as a feminist icon in the making. We've heard of the plight of Shakespeare's Sister - but what about Sir Francis Drake's? Or Columbus'? Let her sail - Elizabeth I would have and how cool was she?

Secondly, Rage Against the Machine are Christmas number one! I've never heard of them before, I think they're some kind of funk band, but isn't it great? Better than last year's Christian fundamentalist rip-off vom fest.

Finally, three cheers for Melody who is the first woman to walk the Channel Tunnel alone without informing the authorities. She's text to tell me that last night she became so bored of waiting in Folkstone that she parked her Merc in a privet hedge, slipped stealthily, like a fox, through the barriers, underneath a high speed train and into the Tunnel itself. She's just resurfaced in Calais and, having only stopped once for a quick pee beneath a signal, is resting in a refugee encampment and sharing her story with local would-be travellers. So not only has she beat the system, she's also helping to overhaul the Anglo-French fascist immigration policy. You go Melody! She's hoping to make it to Rouen by the evening clinging to the underside of a HGV.

So, hope you have a lovely time and all my festive kisses to you, wherever you may be, as long as you're not a Post-Feminist!
xx

The curious case of the Bluestocking Pony and a warning to us all...

Can you believe it? ANOTHER one of my great ancestors has been written about AGAIN in terribly important historical work. This time it's about the bluestockings and my great great Auntie Polly Constance Rider.

She features in a wonderful book by the author Jane Robinson called Bluestockings - The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education. I read about it on the F-word. Although my great great auntie is not directly mentioned a dear anecdote pointed me in the right direction:

... the story of Constance Maynard, for example, appears across several chapters and eventually the mention of her name is like rediscovering an old friend. That Maynard’s father tried to bribe her out of accepting a university place by offering her a pony seems to tickle Robinson in particular, as she brings it up repeatedly. You can almost see her eyes rolling.

Well indeed, because my great great Auntie Polly Constance Rider, was indeed that very Constance! She later married a Maynard and dropped the Polly (she went on to work for Mi5 in Moscow and they thought it was a bit of a giveaway). But what Robinson doesn't know, and what history books won't tell you, is that she accepted that pony with eager joy: and do not roll your eyes Robinson! For she used that pony to become a highway robber, which gave her financial independence, the kind an education could never buy.

Indeed as feminists we must step outside of these pre conceived 'notions' of 'education'. It's very small minded. The whole of life is an erudite force cleaning the tunnels of our minds like a lavender-scented aromatherapy candle (divine!). In this respect one has to conclude that you are either born highly intelligent or just plain dumb, and I think we all know what category the Riders fall into.

Hugs and Pugs!

Melody disapproves of my lesbian wedding

Melody has just left after a very long and very 'honest' tea party. I had prepared a delicious spread of cucumber sandwiches, lemon tarts and vagina cakes, alongside a pitcher of Irish coffee, to break the news about my civil partnership with Ann.

Melody reacted badly. She claims that I'm not taking my lesbianism seriously and that its just a 'phase' I'm going through. She obviously doesn't care about my feelings because actually, as it happens, Posie is very much in love and wounded to the core! Ann is coming down to stay with me this weekend and I'm insisting that Melody button up and be civil. I'm going to have a supper party to celebrate our engagement on Saturday, I'm going to make Raclette, and be happy and be a lesbian forever!

A Year in The Mind of Posie

Well readers, those of you who have worshipped at the temple of Posie since those heady days of mid-2008 (is it just you Lara, or are there others too?) will remember that it is nearly a year ago that I was released from hospital after an unfortunate self-harm episode with a Bic disposable razor (in hot summer pink). The past year as been full of trials and tribulations: failed relationships (yes, Anna and I aren't speaking, it turns out the orchid wasn't mine) psychotic episodes, restraining orders and endless literary rejections (Harper Collins, I'm talking to you). I've also gained 5 pounds in the last two days, which I didn't even know was possible.

BUT on a positive note, this is one year in which I haven't been sectioned! Hurrah! To celebrate this fabulous achievement, I'm planning on writing a book, entitled 'One Year Off The Ward', or something else, not yet decided. I was inspired by this BBC article on Annualism an exciting new form of publishing which sees self-obsessed bibbles (usually journalists) confessing that they did one particular thing for a year which, in publishing circles, is tantamount to saying: I'll provide the text, you sell 50,000 copies and we'll let the public provide the critique. In shorthand - this is some money making nonsense here!

Some examples include Neil Boorman's Bonfire of the Brands where an oaf pretended he didn't always have his shirts fitted in kooky West London boutiques, or Hephzibah Anderson's pointless Chastened: No More Sex in the City, where she manages the extraordinary feat of not getting laid for a year. There's even specialist titles like A Year Without 'Made in China', in which one woman recounts her rollercoaster experience of looking at labels in shops and not buying certain things like funny little plastic gonks and Kikoman Soy Sauce.

And it's not just my year of fraught sanity which I'm planning on turning into a compelling narrative: it turns out there are lots of things I've done for a year now which could be newsworthy. Being a feminist and living in North London are obvious places to start, but what about my year of celibacy? Ok, that'll have to be next year (Anne's bra is still folded meaningfully in the fridge next to the milk) but the way things are going that'll be no-problem-o. I've also downed the booze content in the last year, only been to Hampshire 3 times and not assaulted anyone! (apart from Martin's son Jake, which I don't think counts because he's a minor???)

These changes, I can tell you, are MASSIVE in my life. Who wouldn't want to read about them? Hampshire Exhile or Ex-Hamp: My Life out of the Shire, are working titles at the moment. Also, it was just over a year ago I had the trust fund settled ... perhaps call for a Tom Hodgkinson-esq biopic in the nature of How To Be Idle, where I recount my day to day experience of doing absolutely nothing except for watering my window box a little before it died (due to neglect) and trying on all my dresses, but not going out in them, safely buffeted by the wealth of my aunties.

Ps. if anyone has any stories to share for inclusion in prospective My Year Failing to Get an Arts Council Grant (because I live in London and didn't fill the form in properly) please email me!

Ahoy there!

Sorry for my absence for the last week gals. It's been no doubt lonely without Posie in your world and I haven't had an easy time either. Its been tough, but after much timely deliberation I have decided that I am in fact a lesbian.

I've been on this cruise you see:
http://news.varadinum.com/lesbians-save-the-world-one-cruise-at-a-time.html

"A lesbian eco-friendly cruise?" I hear you ask. Yes that's right. It all started when Melody (landscape gardener to the stars, who is at the moment tending to Gwyneth Paltrow's organic vegetable patch) who is EXTREMELY zen / eco-friendly / earth-mother, suggested we go on this amazing cruise which uses absolutely no carbon emissions whatsoever! So we did and on board soon realised the the ship was destined for Lesbos island!

On board I met Anne, an artist from Suffolk. She's by far my social inferior, but you know what they say readers: 'love knows no bounds'. We haven't done anything physical yet, and its quite difficult communicating by letter all day, but I think I might finally be happy.

Lesbianism- I can't believe I hadn't tried it sooner (except that time in 2002). It's brilliant! Anne and I would sit around plaiting each others hair and sharing period stories. Heaven...

Toodles x

PS Anne if you're reading - thank so much for my painting: I love orchids!

Women and Burgers: A Traumatic Account

I have been experimenting with female writing recently, and I have to say, I think I’m rather good. The following piece was inspired by a revelation I had the other day. For years now I’ve considered my low self-esteem to put me at a severe disadvantage, but actually I think it might have aided me in my sublime quest for female truth. Why on Friday night I had my brocade Cath Kithson wallet stolen / I dropped it on a bus after one too many bottles of Chablis with close friends in Primrose Hill. Of course I never think about these things; my head being like ‘a quick forest / filled with sleeping birds’, so only realised my fatal error when out buying myself a little treat from M&S on Saturday night. I was most alarmed; I had a mere £1.50 on my person and was forced to shop in the discount section of Sainsbury’s. I had to stand next to a man with a ponytail while surveying the rows of rotten burgers and then I had to buy the rotten burgers because it was all I could afford: awful!

So anyway the following is an exposition of that most traumatic experience written in the female economic style (i.e. disrupted syntax):

I skip, I, I, I, skip. I skip. Why does honey in the rain disappear? I loved you once. Oh red compile, I saw you making that pink sludge in your fingers. Oh how could, I forget those fingers you have. Their meat. Yes I know that, now, but at the time I was so lonely without you by my side and the burgers. I ate every one of them and you said I was greedy. Was I, greedy? Maybe. Who can tell? The long clod of myself, the wavering banded brackets of love that I would pour out all the same. The man with the snake like grey of silver ponytail: “Beauty,” he said. “Beautiful burger, I am yours.” Breathe.

Vagina Island

You can imagine my excitement upon discovering that only a few miles away from our resort in Italy lay Vagina Island (pictured). Vagina Island is one of southern Italy's best kept secrets and was home to the Vulvac tribe led by the famous Queen Ovarian.

Discovered by the Swiss in 1 BC, the ancient island was entirely populated by women , or so they thought, until the said men (obviously women weren't allowed to travel back then!) ventured down into the island's cave in search of gold only to find the Vulvac's treasure was of a male variety. Yes, that's right lady readers, the Vulvacs traded in men. Thoroughly ahead of her time Queen Ovarian overthrew her husband, seized control of the kingdom and ordered the island's tallest mountain to be crafted into the shape of a giant vagina. Women ruled supreme and men were sold to work the land whilst female kind turned her mind to higher pastimes, such as philosophy and art.


Herstorians know all this because of the cave drawings left by said explorers before they were mauled to death by the mythical sea creature known as 'The Blob', which scientists have recently identified as being a modern-day Walrus.

Vagina Island's ecosystem operated in total accordance with nature. There was peace on the land, sister loved sister, and soon enough they developed the technology needed to manufacture sperm so decided to do away with men altogether. Herein lay their fatal error. Never before has the expression 'empires fall from within' rang more true, for when the population's menstrual cycles became synchronised with no men around to dissipate the overwhelming barrage of oestrogen with pure prejudice, oppression and misogyny, the island imploded. The entire city, Phallopianinia, was buried underground, leaving only the famed Mount Vagina in tact.


I'm reading a fascinating study on it the moment by Camile von Vag, who's been desperately trying to raise funds to excavate the site.


Will let you know if I hear anything of note about their ancient culture and way of life, you know.



Been there got the t-shirt!


Toodles!

Comtesse de Saint-Ridier

I found the strangest thing when I arrived home the other day - a letter from the British Museum informing me of an archaeological artifact uncovered near my ancient ancestral home in Hampshire.

Being a fervent feminist-Marxist-occasional Maoist (as a teen), I naturally shy away from my patrician roots. However owing to the exciting content of the letter in question I feel obliged to equip you with a short her-story of my great ancestoress the Comtesse de Saint-Ridier, aka the Amazonian of Hampshire.

The Comtesse was a bold woman who lived between 1638-1684 - that's right - during the English Civil War. Her husband the Comte de Ridier (of French origin) was sent into battle and perished in the ballads of dead men's cries on the field of battle (N.B. great creative description - use in prose). Naturally the two had been Republicans who strictly adhered to the codes of the Bible, so that each time they whipped, pillaged or ate a servant they would instantly to the priest confess their sins and be most joyously accepted back into the fold of sheep.

When the Irish launched an unprecedented attack upon the family castle in 1642 the Comtesse defended the fortress for at least two days. She became know as the Amazonian of Hampshire and called upon her maids to take to arms. They wore bright bronze helmets and nothing but bloomers, boots and facepaint (painting to the right is an artist's impression).

The Irish surrounded the mighty Ridier battlement and resolved to starve her out, but following reports from her chambermaid of a secret tunnel running between the grand ball room and a nearby dairy farm the Comtesse proceeded to defy the enemy by tipping the castle's entire supply of potatoes over their lepricorn heads. However, after celebrating their clever coup the Comtesse asked to be shown the tunnel in question and was most agitated to discover that she had misheard: the maid had actually said 'fairy charm'. It turned out the young gal was having her period at the time and had turned quite quite mad. The Comtesse swore never to trust in the sisterhood again.

Needless to say the poor maid was whipped and exchanged with the Irish for five potatoes that were soon consumed and twelve hours later the Comtesse most willingly surrendered to the brutes. She later retired to Herefordshire, where her legend preceded her, never again to trust women. How very different the Riders are today indeed.

And now the most exciting news! The British Museum have unearthed the original feather-plumed hemet in which she fought the Irish. Of course I was most flattered by the prospect of seeing my great ancestress' head regalia stand alongside the Rosetta stone, however the museum seem to consider it "of relatively little histroical value" and so have offered it to moi!

This is fantastic news, although it has come somewhat late: I must now wait an entire year for Ascot. Can a lady still wear a giant girl-skull hat of pure bronze and ruby ostrich pearl to such events? No, maybe a mere woman could not but a feminist can!

So glad to be home. Toodles xx

PS must have a matching one made for Emmeline Pankhurst - she gets awful frock envy ...

Glorious, I return!

Hail, readers and cohorts! And welcome to all my new American friends. I'm back and 'all up in the UK', complete with lots of new lingo and a huge boozy grin after having been reunited with my old friend Martini Rosso. I'm a little jet-lagged after having been travelling for 26 hours, all random and painful connections and mishaps included (I sort of missed a plane a little after I caught up a little too quickly with the M.R. at Philly. It turns out it doesn't mix well with the over-the-counter diazepam I picked up at Walmart. I was eventually found wandering the airport and was popped on a good old BA flight and sent on my way by a kind, though slightly patronising, staff-type person.

On board I met an attractive but gauche young 'grad' student (??? I don't know what that means either!) who started telling me how excited he was to go to England and about various other spiritual experiences gained on his many travels, so I quickly put him off scent by lecturing him on the virtues of staid community life, then explaining the plot of the sublime Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell to him (and no I didn't see the fucking TV adaptation, though I'm sure it was dreadful). After an hour or so's laborious retelling of what is really quite a short book, he was suitably lulled, so I quickly slipped in my headphones and watched Bride Wars (inexplicable dross - avoid) followed by He's Just Not That Into You, which conveys the timeless "he doesn't love you/maybe he loves you/you're a pathetic dolt/he's cheating/you have no judgement/omg he does love you now you can marry him" message with effortless grace. A sigh and back to Cranford.

BUT just an hour ago I received an email from this young star-traveller, whom I had left this morning in Gatwick with one of my cards and with the idea in his head of avoiding London in favour of the quaint pleasures of Knutford. Instead he set to writing a poem for me about this 'incredibly moving experience', detailing all the other things in his life that had taken about the same time as our little literary chat, and their absolute insignificance compared to unimaginable, life-defining hour and 23 minutes he spent talking to me. BOR-ing! I knew I had him pegged for a chauvinist on the plane (exhibit A: beads. B: a tattoo of a bird on his thumb), but this really took the biscuit. Because every time an attractive and young (I am both, of course) woman discourses competently on any subject, even an intentionally alienating and uninteresting one, does a man treat her as an intellectual equal, a fellow traveller in search of the truth, a worthy friend or adversary? Of course not! Instead he falls hopelessly in love with her, and becomes incapable of offering any stimulating responses to her conversation unless they're directed at her knickers, or her 'beautiful soul' (excuse me while I raze off my own corneas).

And what are intelligent women to do? Stop being so intelligent is the only thing that comes to mind. That, or quickly get yourself a boyfriend as the best guarantee of being completely ignored my men in conversation thereafter (the no-chance-of-lady-garden-access:no-beautiful-soul paradigm). The moral of the story, and the general content of the email I returned to the pathetic lad, was:

"Of course you find me interesting, I AM interesting. The fact you find this surprising/intriguing/fragile and rare only proves that you are a person with terribly dull friends and also a massive chauvinist. Do you think I found you interesting, or did you just take that for granted? Now begone!"

Lady readers, beware the advances of doe-eyed graduates with romantic notions, lest 'he's just not that into you' becomes 'he's completely obsessed with you and I think he's written a fucking poem about it'. Help!

Poesie Rider - is there no end to my transatlantic stardom??

Great news fans! I'm hitting the bright lights of Buffalo tomorrow for the final leg of my sell out poetry tour of the Americas. Those of you based stateside should seriously check me out!

Back in Blighty soon for Martini Rosso.

xx

Poesie Rider in the New World!

Look! I'm on tour in North America being a poet! Fuck you Steve! I've gone to a land where they can appreciate me, as a woman, for who I am - a woman! More news and photos soon darlings! xxx

This weekend I...

• Tried to go to Martin's house and sort things out but he had gone to Centre Parks without moi! Being most distressed I travelled down to Richmond to toss my distraught frame into the murkey serpentine waters. Another beautiful young lady writer, pushed over the edge by patriarchy! But what goes? I did take spirit of empowerment within my meek heart and remembered my feisty poem to my mother Mary Wollstonecraft (see below). So I got back in my panda and went home to make fairy cakes and listen to Beyonce (see below).
• Tried to self harm my ankle.
• Bought a jumbo pack of pink bic razors and several large bottles of Martini Rosso, but was spied by Melody on the way home, who proceeded to remove them from my person.
• Had a party for Mary Wollstonecraft! Made vagina cakes - but, alas, Melody's camera broke! We did manage to get one shot though: Emmeline Pankhurst's friend Samantha in fancy dress. Unfortunately the silly animal didn't realise Wollstonecraft lived in the 18th not the 19th century. What a waste of film!