Black Doggerel

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I love the crisp freshness of the air. I love being able to walk more than two minutes without being flushed and sweaty. I love the cold. My metabolism makes it easy for me to warm up and hard for me to cool down; I was built to work best in cold weather.

I love frost and snow. I love the brittle crunch of frozen grass underfoot and the visible plumes of my breath. I love the smell of ice or cold rain. I love the wet, earthy smells of mouldering leaves and dead branches, and the sculptures the frost makes of them. I love ice-pearled spiderwebs on leafless hedges, and the silhouettes of bare branches against the moon. I love the way sunlight makes ice glitter. I love romping with my dogs in fresh snow. I love romping with them in rain and mud. I love the smell of wet dog. I love how bad weather and wet ground keeps everyone else and their dogs indoors. I love the hunger of winter birds and the thick coats on winter foxes and squirrels.

I love the short days. I love the slanting long shadows of winter afternoons and I love the long, merciful nights. I love that two out of three of my dogwalks happen in the dark. If I can get my sleep patterns right I sometimes don't see daylight for days, and this is FINE.

When I take over the universe I'm moving Christmas to August. I might enjoy festivity and socialising more if it didn't disrupt my lovely bleak midwinter so much. Though the neighbours' tacky-ass Christmas lights do look pretty glittering in the long dark nights.

ALL YOUR WINTER ARE BELONG TO ME.

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Such a long long time to be gone
and a short time to be there

from Box of Rain, by the Grateful Dead.

ETA: LOL, I accidentally the subject line. How amusing XD

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I'm pretty damn well acquainted with her already, thank you. So is everyone reading this. What you see is what you fucking get.

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I already have, for well over a year and probably for the next several. Black coffee and cigarettes. I can't do food till I've woken up.

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One shot of sambuca, raki, Pernod or whichever anise liqueur you fancy.

One shot of blackcurrant concentrate. Ribena will do, though I'd prefer actual concentrated blackcurrant juice with nothing added. If you use cheap-ass offbrand blackcurrant cordial or anything with artifical sweeteners I will hunt you down and troutslap you.

ETA: Or creme de cassis, if you want more of a kick. Bit sweet for me though.

Fill to the top with champagne. Garnish with an orange slice and a sprig of mint.

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Spike would be a professional footballer with a successful second career as a film actor (known for doing all his own spectacular stunts) and occasional standup comedian. Squish would be an MI5 field agent. Cassie would start out as a syndicated advice columnist and work her way up to feelgood talk show hostess. Naamah would be Lady GaGa.

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Ahhh, that would be Mrs King. Pretended to teach English when I was at Sherborne School for Girls. Taught literature straight out of Brodie's Notes (seriously, I'm not sure she'd ever actually read the texts or would have understood them if she had) and occasionally attempted to (wrongly) correct my spelling.

Those who know me and my mad Human Spellchecker skillz can imagine how that went down. I would take great delight in proving her wrong with the dictionary. When I was feeling more than usually bored or annoyed with her I'd experiment on her by padding my essays with lines of pure gibberish. If she noticed, she never called me on it. If I hadn't had the luck to have parents who fed me books from an early age, plus an excellent English teacher at my previous school (hi Mr Lewis, you may have been a sadist but you knew your arse from your elbow - respect) I would have left Sherborne practically illiterate.


I think I'm still angry about her, because, dude, it was English. You can have a happy and fulfilling life without knowing shit about physics or geography or foreign languages if you need to, but English in an English-speaking country? Those are the molecules that form every bit of communication and contact you have with every other member of your species you'll ever meet. Knowing how to use them is important. And maybe I'm biased because words are my lifeblood: nearly every good thing that's ever been in my life has come out of my love for reading or writing.

It's not a subject where it's hard to engage children's enthusiasm, either. We're born wired to communicate, we're born craving stories. All it would have taken was someone who loved stories too, and was articulate enough to show us why - and Mrs King couldn't even manage that. She went through great romances and tragedies like someone balancing a chequebook. It never seemed to occur to her that books were intended for pleasure; we learned, by rote, exactly what was needed to pass exams and that was it.


Mrs King was murdered a few years after I left school. According to gossip it was a spurned lover, but in my headcanon it was a raging ex-student who'd just found out how very, very badly she got shortchanged in the English department. I suppose I ought to feel shocked or sorry that it happened, but I never could bring myself to.

Mrs King, I would have one thing to say to you if you were here now: Why the fuck were you even doing that job? You hated it and you sucked at it. And you ruined Jane Austen for me, too, and that's fucking unforgiveable.

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miss my dad.

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Haaa. I have both but that is ENTIRELY Spike's fault. I got a cat because he becomes mopey and neurotic if I try and make him live without one; I have two cats because the cat I found for him came preloaded with MORE CATS.

Don't get me wrong. Cats are beautiful creatures; I would never refuse to help one that needed it, and I love my own cats dearly. But living with them has taught me that I am so very, very not a cat person. They annoy the piss out of me. I don't like the noises they make (no, not even the purring), their fur makes my face itch, I don't find it cute when they steal my chair or jump up on my keyboard, Cassie's nose drips whenever she's being affectionate, litterboxes are so much more of a pain than poo bags, and what's with that MY ARSEHOLE, LET ME SHOW YOU IT! routine?

The roommate/partner question doesn't even apply; I'll never be willing to share my living space with another human again, never mind someone else's pets.

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I'd put Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing It All Back Home, Street Legal, Planet Waves and Blood on the Tracks into a bag and pick one at random.

Maybe include Oh Mercy and Desire in there too.

Why? Because it's Dylan.