Wing mirrors, backs and booky wooks

Quite a productive day today, all things considered. And I feel unusually calm. Good Lord, do you think Lord H has finally resorted to putting things in my tea? Can't say I blame him however ...

Anyway this morning, Marian and I have played a stonkingly good game of golf and I even got a par on the 9th, hurrah. Not that I deserved it though - as on the 8th I was so overcome by her wonderful off-green putt which was heading straight to the hole that I forgot to remove the flag where I was holding it just in case, and the dang ball rebounded off the pole and spun back onto the green. Goddammit. It's astonishing she didn't slit my throat there and then. Really If I had any kind of golfing honour at all, I would have gone quietly behind the clubhouse and beaten myself to death with my own clubs. But, as you can see, I'm still here. As Marian said, thank goodness we're not playing for cash ... And indeed I was already on a dubious footing to start with as I was five minutes late for our tee time. I would have been on time but today I am driving Lord H's supercharged new car and I couldn't work out how to make the wing mirrors go out and resume their normal positions, as when he parks he presses some kind of magic button that puts them to bed. As it were. Could I find that button??? No, I could not. So in the end I had to resort to phoning him at work from the mobile (our flat is 32 steps up and I couldn't be arsed to go back for a real phone ...) - which I couldn't do in the car as it was parked in a no signal zone, so I had to leave the car running and then trot like a crazed animal up and down the road waving my mobile until I could get a signal. Lordy, what will the neighbours think?? Anyway, Lord H solved the problem for me so at least Marian and I managed to play. I couldn't possibly drive anywhere without wing mirrors. Why was I driving his car? I hear you cry ... Well, my dears, this is Surrey after all, and the good people at the golf club have decided to offer a valeted car cleaning service while you play. Because of course the leisured classes couldn't possibly wield their own sponges. And it's brilliant value for a great clean - last time I had my car done and this time it's Lord H's turn. No doubt once the neighbours cotton on to this exciting new slave trade, I will be driving all sorts of vehicles all over the place and getting them nice and clean. Should I draft a business plan, I wonder?...

Meanwhile, once back at the ranch, I've been puzzling away at Ralph's predicament (the mountain dogs! the magic well! the women! the old family emeralds! Where will it all end?? Hell, don't ask me ...) in Hallsfoot's Battle and I've now raised my word total to over 85,000, so that's something anyway. I'm enjoying Ralph at the moment. It's the rest of the gang that are giving me grief.

Anyway, inspired by that and also by author Clare London, I've submitted The Bones of Summer to another gay fiction publisher as well. Just in case it's the sort of book they might like. Thanks for the tip, Clare - much appreciated! I'll have to wait and see what they say though ...

Talking of writing, here's this morning's meditation. It's true too.

Meditation 61

The purification
of women
is a puzzle

men have always pondered.
Odd how
a daughter’s birth

made a woman
twice as impure
as a son’s.

I think slowly
of my own mother’s
purification rite

in a small southern church
only forty-four years ago
and understand how

some things never change.


I've also had my third Alexander Technique lesson. The tutor is very good. I think it's helping my back and shoulder problems. And at a mental level too. Funny how what she says about "the importance of filling my space" somehow makes sense. I spend 99% of my life feeling pressed down and somehow trapped, as if I'm apologising in a physical way just for existing - you know: head down and slightly hunched in the hope that nobody will notice I'm there. But if I think instead about filling my own space (and it's not easy after 44 years to alter familiar habits, believe me ...) and let my shoulders and back relax outward into where perhaps they should be, then I do feel taller. It's a quite liberating sensation indeed.

I've finished reading Russell Brand's My Booky Wook. I have to admit he's not a man I greatly warm to, particularly after recent disasters, but there are moments in the book where I laughed out loud and it is written with a rather endearing honesty. There's something essentially Byronic about the bloke, in my opinion. And in some ways the book has made me like him better. But the astonishing thing - and the reason you must consider it as one for your reading list - is that it absolutely has the best last two pages I have ever read in any biography. Or any work of non-fiction indeed. And the utter best last line. It's stunning and it left me (a) in tears and (b) hugely impressed. If the bugger can write like that with such piercing clarity and depth, then more please and soon.

Today's nice things:

1. Feeling calm
2. Golf
3. Writing Hallsfoot
4. Submitting Bones
5. Poetry
6. The AT lesson
7. Books.

Anne Brooke
Anne's website - keeping its wing mirrors out ...