Here I am after a rather long absence. No longer in Somerset, but in Sussex. I am perched on my pale leather and blond wood, ergonomically designed Scandinavian stool (the kind you kneel on rather than sit on) in my office that is perched above the living room and I am looking through a skylight at a dark and threatening sky. It’s lovely. A pied wagtail keeps looking in at me, although I think it might be looking at its reflection instead. In fact I’m being extremely narcissistic even thinking that I have any part to play in its life. It just wags its tail up and down all day and collects insects from the grass and parades in front of the skylights. I play no part in its life whatsoever. Although I do think it might live in the roof of the barn, so we could be housemates. Possibly.
The barn in which I live is full of my Jack in the Pulpit glass collection and early 20th century paintings by obscure artists. As well as a new piece by a fantastic artist called Meryl Donoghue. It depicts a girl with a stag’s head and perched on the antlers are magpies with beautiful blue streaks in their feathers. The girl is standing next to some mushrooms that look rather poisonous. She is wearing a little girl’s dress but she has women’s legs (tanned and toned, slightly Californian perhaps). Her red shoes are a bit ‘Don’t Look Now’ and add to the discomfort produced when perusing it. It’s huge and I love it.
I am listening to Strauss's Four Last Songs (Jessye Norman) and the rain is coming down. I’m on my own, which is rare, and I’ve put some vivid lipstick on my lips just for my own pleasure. The doors and windows are open and the air smells of tomato plants and geranium and dirty rain. I have a lovely courtyard in which I’m growing various things in pots. There’s an expanse of wild grass beyond the courtyard and something that could be a garden if it were not full of weeds. Then there’s a small lake where our geese live when they’re not pooing directly outside the house. Goose poo is quite fragrant. It smells of undigested grass and has that potentially sexually alluring smell of horse manure. I often find myself wandering around the land in a vaguely aroused state. I’ve only just realised that.
Today brown water is coming out of the cold tap. I think I might have boiled some inadvertently when I made my pot of Love™ tea this morning. You should try Love™ in the morning. It’s calming and seems to get better the longer you leave it in. I hope it’s not sewage that is coming out of the pipes. The lady on the phone said that one of the utilities must be messing around with the pipes. I had a look along the road but nearly died three times due to big lorries whooshing past and making me lose my balance. The verge is not a safe place for humans, nor for deer or rabbits (or two foxes last week).
Zelda, my daughter, is full of love and is getting a taste for Love™ too. She told me last week that she learned to love in heaven before she was born. When she was four she told me that John Coltrane was God as his initials were JC. She has always been obsessed with ‘A Love Supreme’. She is an old soul. She knows far more about the world than I do. This must be my first time around as a human as I just don’t understand other humans and this strange life of ours. On the other hand give me a geranium or a horse to converse with and I’m fine.
I’ve just put on a scent, Sonia Rykiel's 7me Sens, that a French woman I used to know used to wear. It has long been discontinued but I found a small sample on French ebay recently and I wear it whenever I’m on my own. I don’t dare wear it around other people as it seems a bit strange (and inappropriate) smelling like someone else. Even though no one I know knows her, I feel something of her spirit comes out in me when I’m wearing it. She was a very beautiful woman and she used to take me to nudist beaches where I hid in her tent eating medjoul dates, pretending that my skin was too white to expose myself to the sun. She was the mother of a French friend and she told me all her secrets. I knew her and her husband’s bodies better than I knew my own as whenever I stayed with them they took their clothes off as soon as they got home. Given that I have never managed to see myself naked from every single angle I still think of her body more than I think of mine (very wishful thinking). I have a vision of her standing naked in her bathroom, lifting up an enormous bottle of her scent which was in the shape of a Waterman inkpot, dabbing the scent on her bare arms and chest. We drank tea together all day and she sprinkled sugar substitute on French toasts in order to stay slim. She taught me how to pluck my eyebrows and stop biting my nails. Her husband had big feet and a slug-like smile. I was convinced he was unworthy of her love. It was she that introduced me to the great French perfumes. In her tiny lavatory was a fabulous collection of perfume samples on a glass shelf. I would shut myself in there smelling all the vials and trying the most delicious ones on various parts of my body. Later I would lie in bed smelling myself and trying to remember which one I had dabbed where.
My house is lovely and sparkling as my cleaner has just been. She is a beautiful Romanian girl who is studying to be a psychotherapist. It is somewhat discomforting to think what she might be thinking as she wields her mop.
The others are back now, I can hear the gravel crunching, so I must go and wash my wrists and greet them. Goodbye for now.
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