elaine4queen

actually autistic author, lives in Brighton, UK

[elaine4queen]

Here you are!!

HA! Hello!

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Unexpected observation

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Wistfully at the window

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Let Sleeping Dogs

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Recovering a Connection to Ireland

I'd be entitled to an Irish passport if I could trace the line between the birth in Ireland, name change in Scotland, and subsequent link to me, of my maternal grandfather. This wouldn't matter if not for Brexit, but lots of people in the UK busily scrambled to get an EU passport, if they had any right to one, since that ignominious day.

Being disabled and reliant on the state, and less and less able to travel, this is a pipe dream in any case, but something I've been aware of since then, and, of course, I have known that my maternal line was Scottish and Irish for my whole life, and that my English side had Traveller (of some sort, unknown, except that they were probably bargees) and Huguenot - for what it's worth, I didn't inherit a house in Spitalfields, unfortunately for me.

I've lived in both Scotland and England, and despite being moderately well travelled, never visited Ireland until a couple of years ago. I went to Dublin to meet Terri who had an academic conference to go to. I visited the installation of Francis Bacon's studio in the Hugh Lane Gallery - here was a man who couldn't have lived in Ireland for a different reason than my own family's fleeing during the Great Famine. He was a gay man who made his life in London, where his sexuality was still illegal but where, historically, there was certainly a way of life for him to be had, as well as an obvious place to be an artist. Over the few days I was there I was aware of not just a lack of personal connection, but also a kind of resentment for my family having to make that uncomfortable journey of displacement.

Since then, though, something has made an inroad in my Celtic consciousness that has warmed me like the sun draws the face of a sunflower. I started listening to the Blindboy podcast.

The Blindboy Podcast

Hosted by Blindboyboatclub, who is an artist and author. An eclectic podcast containing short fiction, interviews and comedy.

Somehow he's softened me up, and I'm more receptive to a narrative that isn't about beautiful landscapes or other Tourist Board approved versions of national identity, and since then I've found myself in a shift of cultural identification that doesn't require presence but is more about letting go of resistance. It is surely reasonable to dislike Irish dancing. Scottish country dancing was taught at my primary school, and it has the advantage of being extremely social, and a life skill if you ever find yourself at a ceilidh, which does happen if you live in Scotland. Courtesy of Instagram I've found myself seeing lots of clips on an account called mystacrooks who critiques Irish dancing from the point of view of the quality of whimsy and skidaddling. This, again, feels warming.

Honorable mentions go also to Kneecap

and to a thoroughly whimsical Blindboy tribute act from Canada clare.voyeur

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Magic Numbers

Hazel told me, last year, that people born in 1962 were turning 62. I'm not a numbers neurodivergent, so it seemed tidy, but it was 2024, so it wasn't a special line up, just matchy matchy. For my Nana, though, she was born at the beginning of the 20th century, and I know what age she was every year of the century until she died, so, suddenly I realised I was now the age that she was when my mum had me. This has given me pause for thought because I've been wondering what exactly it is that my mum sees when she looks at me, because it's not something she likes. Is it her former mother in law? I mean, it needn't be anything like that, but it could be.

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If you are in the Arctic Circle the sun has just gone down, and it won't rise again until February 15th 2025. I follow an instagram account about life on Svalbard, so this is how it came to my attention - the last sunset on Svalbard, she said. I think we all know it gets dark, it gets light, it's gardening at midnight, it's dark 'all the time'... no it really is! It really is dark ALL the time.

Then the NZ Antarctica posts started again - and those guys won't see a night for just as long. Daytime, daytime daytime, for four whole months.

It happens that I know someone on this year's British Team. I'm so excited for her. They'll study the climate, document the penguins, look after the tourists that visit, and the station itself.

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London Stock

So when I’m using google to look at John Fisher Street it’s an interesting contrast. In my mind, for instance, John Fisher Street is a very soft grey, even in the sunshine. There are two spaces where blocks used to be - one was in the very middle, with the others arranged around it, which I think was deliberately razed, and which became a kid’s playground, and another to the south west which, when I lived there, was a car park and which has now, finally, been built over, with what looks like quite posh flats, which gives the estate a gentrification I couldn’t have imagined at the time and closes up a space which was very open for the 12 years that I lived there.

Now, this block that used to be there, was bombed near the end of the second war. My neighbour Ethel was living in the council estate next door with her family. She was a young woman at the time and she worked in the docks. Her friend, who lived in that block, had just had a baby and she asked her mum if she could go and visit. Her mum said no, and then there was an air raid. 

The people in the council estate sheltered in the railway arches which now have the Dockland Light Railway tracks on them, but which used to service the docks. Ethel said that the people in the Peabody shelter in their basement. This would certainly protect you from flying glass, but what happened was that the bombs they called the doodlebugs had just come in. These bombs could fly along with their own little motors that made a noise, and when that noise cut out the bomb would explode. This doodlebug flew into a window and exploded killing everyone in the building, including Ethel’s friend and her baby. Ethel said that when the bomb went off and the building exploded into rubble all of the air was sucked out of the railway arch. So for her, a space which had been left empty for decades and just used for parking cars, was a site of a very visceral memory.

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Soft Light

I wanted to know what year Edmonton Ikea opened and one of the first articles on the page was a Guardian piece called 'Slowly but steadily, madness descended’. I didn’t say that it opened at midnight because it’s one of those things that you think, later, couldn’t possibly be true, you had to have made it up. But no, there it is, one minute past midnight! What were they thinking? Like, can you imagine being in the meeting where they decided that? Or when they told the employees? Did no one actually say aloud 

“That is a terrible idea!”

I mean, they probably did, but to each other. And not only that, but I’m reading now that the sale was only on until 3am! 

2005, it opened. I was living in John Fisher Street, a tiny one bedroom flat, which New Yorkers might call a railroad apartment, except that I did have a hall, which was a terrible waste of space. A railroad apartment isn’t about being near a railroad, but about the layout of the rooms, all in a row, leading one to the other. I visited someone in New York who lived in one, and I quite liked it. Probably actually bigger than mine, but I liked the feeling of one room opening into another. 

Anyway, mine wasn’t like that, but all the rooms faced the same way, onto a playground which was often full of screaming children. It was loud, and south facing, incredibly hot. It was around the time of my Big Health Crash, and I was a shade off 40. Roland was probably still living at my dad’s in Kenton. I can imagine both my flat and that house, in detail, in my mind. When I cast my mind back it’s got a dream like quality though. I remember, or my brain reconstructs, some of the things in granular detail, usually from a sort of hovering above and to the side eye view, but oddly a bit higher than my own eyes, like one of those 3D house tour fly throughs, where there’s been a camera capturing stuff at certain nodal points. I would like to like those more than I do, but they make me feel a bit sick. It’s the movement. In my memories of rooms the viewpoint is fixed and a bit saturated, and has certain close up features for textures, but there’s no zooming, just an ability to visualise the specific kind of carpet, or wallpaper, or furniture, and the light is less sharp than a digital reconstruction could ever be.

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IKEA 666

The Ikea in Edmonton, where there was rioting, or at least, mass bad behaviour, was build 666.

My brother was involved in the build, and they'd been given a deadline that was undeliverable, and management decided to have an opening sale at night.

Ideas are usually on the edge of a city, and this one was just off the North Circular. People who couldn't find their way off the main road but who could see its lights shining parked on the hard shoulder and trudged over. Some people were drunk and fighting over bargains. The fire doors hadn't been secured and collapsed to the touch.

At one point one of the shop floor sales people stood on a sofa and shouted THIS IS NOT HOW TO SHOP!

My brother was at home asleep when a friend from work phoned him.

"Roland, don't come in, but it's all kicking off here!" he said. "Put on the radio!"

I had his 666 fleece from the build for a while. I wanted to keep it. Legendary shopping chaos!

Ikea have bought Churchill Shopping Centre in central Brighton. I rarely go into town these days, and I don't have the energy for a big Ikea trip, so I'm looking forward to that. I can't help hoping that Brighton is chaotic, because Brighton does chaotic very well, but mainly I just want some new crockery.

As a side note, if you've ever been to an Ike you'll know that they are laid out in an unusual way for a shop. It's laid out like a museum exhibition, and you are funnelled through displays for quite a long time before reaching the cafeteria area, and then the 'marketplace' and then the warehouse and the tills. If you have a low amount of usable hours in your day or week you might want to avoid the first bit, and you can, because you can cut straight through to the cafeteria.

Happy shopping! Ⓐ

[elaine4queen]

Ballard and Ishiguro

“In the future everyone will need to be a film critic to make sense of anything.”

(Dick - The Kindness of Women, JG Ballard)

On the second day of the succession of Sundays Easter Weekend represents I woke early to no WIFI and a dog keen to go out at the earliest opportunity. I drank Chai and took the sliver of amphetamine that is enough to kick start my brain, but not so much to kick off breakthrough migraine. 

In the chill of the sun we beat the bounds of the park while I listened to Ballard’s autobiographical work. To me, the endless descriptions of the car crashes he became obsessed with as a symbol of the twisted modernity of the 60s, were one of his least compelling narratives, and, as my brain awoke I wondered if this was because it was borrowed from the mind of his Shanghai boyhood and lifelong friend, David? 

***

It occurred to me that the months leading up to my Ballard/Ishiguro season had created my sudden deep dive to this Yang and Yin of authors. Ballard’s violent extremism, Ishiguro’s repressed, internal violence. I wondered if they’d ever met? If they’d read each other?

One of Ishiguro’s novels abandons his usually Pacific tone to explore the chaos of Shanghai. It takes place during the days of the opium trade which the International Settlement of Ballard’s childhood created, then moves to London for an inter-war pause for the protagonist to grow up and become a detective. While the foreshadowing of World War Two is playing itself out he returns to Shanghai to find his probably long dead parents, with the enthusiasm, simplicity and hubris of a boy. And it is in Shanghai, already staging a violent struggle between the Chinese and the Japanese, we find the arrogant English treating the bombings as a kind of fireworks show, and a backdrop to their incessant social lives. The trail is, of course, cold, and he is about to leave when he gets drawn into a search for his parents in an area which Dickens would recognise as a Rookery. This is where the Chinese factory workers live. There are no streets, but shacks built against other shacks in a formless anarchy. What he finds there is an hallucination of a boyhood friendship with a Japanese boy. I think, if Ballard had written When We Were Orphans it would have been celebrated, but apparently this book is a duff and an aberration from Ishiguro’s pen. We prefer him to talk about ignored violence, while we accept any kind of excess from Ballard without question. 

[elaine4queen]

The journey home

Terri’s flight was hours before mine, so I didn’t leave with her but pottered about getting ready to go. I’d been awake since whenever she’d got up, threeish? and although I’d packed already I knew not to leave much earlier than necessary. Time spent in the room in comfort and controllable lighting was a better idea than time spent in the clutches of the airport. 

Everyone gets anxious about travelling now. Between cancelled trains and the paranoid paradigm of airport security there is a culture of anxiety, so when you bring your own to the situation it’s not out of place, but that doesn’t mean it will be ameliorated. 

Once I was prepared I headed down to reception and asked them to get me a taxi. The drive was quick and uneventful. I’d been lulled into a false sense of security by my own absolute preparedness. It was still very early, and I was starting to struggle with signage, so I made the dreadful decision to start checking in my bag rather than ask someone where Special Assistance was. Special Assistance is never well signposted, but if you use an airport more than once you know where it is. I’d never left from Dublin Airport before and the bag check was seductively easy so I got sucked in to the procedures that came next and those that came next and those that came next. It was fine. It really was. Very simple. 

On arrival at Gatwick, however, I started to fail, and of course, since I hadn’t triggered the Special Assistance at this end by using it at the Dublin end there was no one to meet me. I struggled through, and eventually found that I had no way of finding Matt who was coming to pick me up. I had the luxury of not having to use the train to get back to Brighton but nowhere to tell him to come to. I asked for help, but by that time was more or less averbal. Not only did I have to explain my problem but I had to do it on a telephone and I had also to explain to a woman who wanted to put me in a wheelchair and take me to a flight that that wasn’t what was happening. After a terrifying journey down long and steep ramps I eventually found myself at the Special Assistance drop off point we came in at. I let Matt know where I was and he was there in five. 

We spend a lot of time problem solving everyday tasks so I really didn’t need to tell him this sad story. I said that I’d had to emote to get my needs met and he could fill in the rest. He’d re-charged the cup holders in the car with cans of Coke and it was certainly the medicine I needed.

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After Dublin my mouldy bathroom ceiling was dismantled and disposed of and three cheerful men made a new, imperviously perfect job of replacing it. True, there would have to be other work to rectify the damage of four months of untended leaking sewage, but the completion of this one act flipped a switch in my mind and I began to take pleasure in my home again. I moved some things around, cleaned and cleared. As I did this my mind became calmer and happier.

The meeting of my writing group was a happy occasion too. Two of our number had begged off and rather than making the remaining foursome too small and apt to think we should stop altogether or cancel if more than one person couldn’t come, the intimacy gave us a certain freedom to pursue lines of thought and open up ideas. We talked, too, more about personal things and other interests. Keith talked about his choir - he said that you need a lot of altos in a choir because their pitch isn’t as strong as the higher or lower notes. He also told me the shocking - to me - news that different countries have different pronunciation for Latin, which in an international choir could cause chaos. I’d done a bit of Latin at school and remembered that unlike any other language no accent should be attempted because Latin was a dead language. It did not occur to me that if other people in other countries were told the same that their idea of unaccented Latin would lean towards their own pronunciation. This obviously doesn’t matter in a classroom or on the page, but in the one place where Latin lives orally is also a place where how something sounds is essential, paramount, and communal. I loved hearing about these technical details, irrelevant to his book or anyone else’s. 

There is something about a short factual story that I find immensely comforting, almost blissful.

I showed the group a picture online of the aluminium collator I’d bought to divide my chapters up and keep them in view. I struggle with writing partly because of not being able to see it all at once. At art school you could see how your work hung together, you could walk into another person’s studio and do the same, or go to a gallery and see how artists of a period talked to each other in their work, or how a single artist was thinking. This is not true of the written word, and although the collator doesn’t allow me to see everything all at once in the same way it is at least not as bad as putting it all away in a folder, and worse, into a cupboard. 

I told the group that I’d put each chapter, with it’s own earlier versions and notes into the spaces on the collator. I’d ditched a chapter on London which disrupted the continuous present of the book, and made more of the material on FILMuary on the advice of Terri in Dublin. I was ready to edit.

This nesting, too, was driving towards recovering enough to write again. I was ‘back in the room’.

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She slept all that night then most of the day and then the night again. She thought she might have Covid and I allowed myself to worry about how I would have to rearrange my life if I got sick and had to quarantine here. But by Monday morning Terri was better. We went out for breakfast then suddenly I was exhausted, so she went out to look at thrift stores and I went back to bed. I don’t nap so I rested for a while then got ready to swim. Terri got this hotel especially because I said I liked that it had a pool but it’s felt like a tyranny, not using it. She says this is normal. Anyway so now I’ve used it and feel even more tired. Terri messages me and tells me to get something from the Starbucks to eat. I never use Starbucks but I’m too tired to argue or to go any further. 

In the Starbucks there’s a wall of windows covered from the outside. It is as though they are framed works of art. They are what would have been very old factory or warehouse windows, with metal frames and handles. I can’t tell whether they are the original windows or someone has brought them from elsewhere and used them as a design feature, so afterwards I look at the outside to figure it out. There’s metal gates to what looks like a yard, and it takes a bit of effort for me to satisfy myself that the windows were real and original. From the outside you can’t see the windows, but whatever they’ve used to cover them, and the bars which they haven’t removed. 

The Bacon studio was an exercise in preserving the real, and so is this, even though the tolerance for the real does not stretch to the view of the bars and the yard. In terms of gentrification there’s only so much reality people can take. Facebook’s headquarters are opposite our hotel and the cross street is literally called Misery Hill. The gruelling dockyard work is all but erased here. Public sculpture is of the abstract kind - tall metal poles painted red, stuck at jaunty angles, perhaps echoing the idea of a mast at sea in a terrible storm, but still, and with seagulls perched on top of them. As anodyne and denatured as most dockland makeovers. And none the worse for that. 

Is this the dock my own grandfather’s family left from? It is peculiar to imagine that I may now have walked alongside or across my own ancestors’ footsteps - unknown to me and lost to time.

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I’m in Dublin and in a lot more company than I’m used to when writing. I forgot I’d joined Brighton Wrimo, but here I am and I’m in it. Suddenly everything is on Discord and because it was designed for gamers it’s really powerful. Terri’s on the other bed doing her thing, and I’m writing when I didn’t expect to be because other people are, too. 

I have no idea if any of this will be usable but I’m going to do it anyway because here I am doing it. 

I think this is mainly a group for fiction writers but I’m crashing it because I think they’ll let me and I am sure they’ll kick me out or I won’t want to be here if I don’t fit. 

I arrived on Friday and Terri was at her conference on Decolonising the Internet and didn’t get back till late. Yesterday was the last day of the conference so I was on my own in Dublin. I had canvased opinion about what to do here, but found my pick accidentally, just because Belette happened to post about how Francis Bacon’s studio had been reconstructed in Dublin. 

Reading about it I discovered that this was not the work of a curator, but a conservator, and it wasn’t just art conservationists who worked on it but a team of archaeologists who mapped the studio and it’s 7000 objects in three dimensions so that the replication would be precise. 

I didn’t quite trust my phone to map my journey properly so I wrote myself some directions - go past 6 bridges then turn left, and the gallery is just past the hospital. 

On my walk I passed statuary commemorating famine and struggle, protestors on hunger strike for homelessness, and a small but noisy protest about something with shouting and megaphones. This struck me not only because I haven’t been in a city centre for a long while, not even my own, but also because in the UK protest itself is no longer legal. 

I walked at a clip, and arrived at the gallery ready to sit down and take a moment. I asked at reception where the installation was and got a map. I walked through a few rooms housing a permanent collection of mostly general European stuff, with no particular theme. Ahead of me was a sliding glass door with the words Francis Bacon Studio etched in it in something like Helvetica, lit in the orange glow of a Quality Street toffee.

The space is arranged around the installation of the room, which can be looked into only through the doorway or the site of the original windows. So the walls are walls. You can’t see it straight away, you have to go up some steps, then there’s a projection of an interview in the studio with Bacon talking to Melvyn Bragg. He talks about his studio, what he likes about it, and his relationship with the chaos. Behind the projection you can glimpse the entrance to the room. The door into the studio and the windows into the studio are sealed in glass so the whole thing is a vitrine, and the light comes from the daylight that comes through the skylights in the roof of the studio then the gallery’s own skylights. So you are seeing the room as though you were approaching it in real life.

In Ways of Seeing John Berger said

The days of pilgrimage are over

He could not have been more wrong.

He was talking in 1972, at a certain point in the proliferation of imagery and it’s reproduction, and he was expanding on Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, and he could not have known what we know now. His argument was that the more images come to you the less you need to go to them. 

For me, though, in this moment in 2022, I was time travelling to Bacon’s studio at the time of his death in 1992. As far as the conservator, Mary McGrath, and her team could make it, this is time travel made concrete. The vitrine which holds the entire room including floor, walls, and ceiling, has a small entrance which you can stand in, where the floor is under your feet, the hinge of the door and the door is on your right, and a dressing gown and some towels are right next to you on your left, and the famous scene is before you. But in front of you, above you, and on either side is glass.

Tears formed in my eyes.

I made my way around the room and looked in the windows. I sat on the floor and took photos. I wandered back round to the projection room again and allowed the soothing tones of Bragg and Bacon talking and sat in the space.

When I was sure that I’d have it to myself I approached the doorway. There is the handle that Bacon touched to open the door. There is the iconic round de-silvered mirror with paint smears around it on the wall. 

I couldn’t take much more in. I almost took photographs instead of looking. I had no reason to stay in the gallery, and there wasn’t anything else I wanted to see. Terri had messaged to tell me where we were supposed to be meeting later and it wasn’t nearby or soon, so I walked slowly back to the hotel. 

I set myself up for yoga on the floor. I took one of those weird decorative runners they put on beds in hotels and lay it on the floor in place of a yoga mat. I wrapped pillows in towels for bolsters, and took two small cushions off chairs for props. 

I lay on the floor and tears slid out. Then I headed inwards and down and down in supported twists, meeting my own body in this moment on this mat now.

When Terri came back and said she was sorry but she couldn’t handle the end of conference meal I was ready to go, but glad to stand down.