childhood

Ode to a ‘passion fish’

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The passion fish knows our secrets.
It curls up in each palm,
head, tail, sides, writhes
squirms in mute alarm.

The passion fish knows our secrets,
reveals we are in love,
or passionate or jealous
or only just alive.

The passion fish knows our secrets.
It teases out ahs and oohs,
‘I knew it!’ and ‘who is it?’
It even helps us choose:

The passion fish tells us secrets;
who scorns to play the game,
who will not take a turn of fun –
the ‘cold fish’ is his name.

Note:  If you have never won a ‘passion fish’ (also known as ‘fortune teller fish’) in a cracker, you are missing out, but perhaps you will find one this Christmas…

things I want to tell my children but might forget – winter walking

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Walking in streets

Wherever we decide to go, we will be likely to be walking down streets to get there.  Hopefully it will be a sunny day, either crisp and cold, if it’s winter, or a fresh feeling in the air if it’s spring, or a hazy sunshine if it’s summer, or a bit blustery if it’s autumn.  If it’s raining, we will all have umbrellas.

As I am writing it is winter, so we will think about winter walking in streets.  There are two main kinds of winter walking.  The first kind is on a bright sunny day with blue sky.  On bright sunny days, it is normally colder, so you get some startling sensations.  One is the sensation of the bright light dazzling your eyes.  It is true that there might be a brighter light in summer, but in winter your eyes may not have seen such brightness for a while, so it feels more intense.  Also, if there is a frost or snow, the bleached colours reflect the sun more, adding to its intensity.  Another sensation is the breathing in cold air through your mouth.  Winter time often means spending lots of time indoors, with only indoors air to breathe.  This makes the sensation of breathing in outside air startlingly distinctive.  It is like breathing in freshness and adventure and mystery and delight.  As well as the feeling of the cold air in your lungs, there is the sharp tingling of the cold air being breathed through your nose.  However warm the rest of you is, your nose is poking out and gets the full freezingness of the atmosphere.  Even if this is a little bit painful, it makes you feel alive.  And this distinction between warm and cold is something you can only feel in winter.  In the summer, your body is warm, the air is warm, your breathing is warm.  But in the winter, while you may be warm as toast, the air around you is cold as ice.  These changes in sensation are one of the most exciting things about winter walking.

The second kind of winter walking is on a day when the sky is filled with a blanket of cloud (this is called being ‘overcast’).  Unlike the crisp clear blue sky winter walking, overcast winter walking feels mysterious.  The cloud dampens all sounds and makes even your steps sound covert.  Overcast winter walking calls for quiet voices and holds a sense of waiting – will it snow?  You are huddled together with everyone under a winter duvet, but everyone is in their individual world wondering what will happen next.  Even if the temperature is the the same as crisp clear blue sky winter walking, the sensations of seeing, sniffing and breathing are all a little bit attenuated (this means being held back a little bit, or reduced).  This makes it just a little bit easier to go quickly going about your business, as if under the radar, always ready to make a run for home.

inventory of subpersonalities – commentary

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The minute I heard the word ‘subpersonalities’, I was fascinated to find a concept that allowed me to explore different aspects of myself as if they were actual people.  The idea of different inner ‘me’s is something that I had been aware of for a little while.  My name lends itself to multiple nicknames, and it fascinated me why people chose a particular diminutive (interesting word) and what it meant to them and to me.  I also recalled my childhood love of playing roles from The Great Escape; I was fascinated by which role was chosen by which sibling, and by the potential revealed in those early choices.  I was aware too, of the odd diversity of my reading, which over the last two or three years has encompassed all my childhood favourites, mountaineering literature from the 1950s, Russian history and culture, stories from Bletchley Park, and several times, The Happiness Project.  The choices seemed so disparate as to belong to different readers, yet they were all me.

Since I started writing extraplorer, I’ve had the phrase ‘inventory of subpersonalities’ in my head as the starting point of a kind of poem.  Now that I’ve had a look back at the sheet of paper where I first drew and labelled them all, it occurs to me that it might prove interesting at some point to give each one an actual voice and see what happens.

A couple of notes on the poem:  The mixture of capitalised and lower case first letters is intentional as the words appeared in my mind complete with the variation in these aspects and I think it is significant.  Also, originally I just wrote down the list of subpersonalities, but it seemed incomplete.  Then I added the story of their discovery, but still the list itself seemed too clumsy, too concrete for something experienced as fleeting, shifting.  The addition of the inverted commas made the poem coincide with my inner feeling.  This makes the subpersonalities relational.  You can hear the poet identifying them, rather being faced with a flat kind of list.  This made the poem feel complete in a way that I felt happy with.

The inventory of subpersonalities might initially seem a bit spooky – after all we are reaching towards the fringes of our consciousness – but really it is merely a development of our ordinary everyday experience of the different roles we play – daughter, sister, worker, friend.  Some of the ones in the poem are everyday – (‘businesswoman’ for example) and some are metaphorical (‘enigma code-breaker’, sadly).  Each image holds a kind of magic and fascination that is big enough to grow into, or evocative enough provide a warning (it is not healthy to spend too long as an orphanage worker or speck).

inventory of subpersonalities

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drawn on a sheet of A2 paper,
in fine black ink,
and coloured in with caran d’ache,
labeled with more care than usual,
a window on an inner world:

‘enigma code-breaker’
‘French resistance worker’
‘Businesswoman-globetrotter’
‘Rebel with a cause (there’s no rebellion more radical than goodness)’

‘orphanage worker – or orphan’
‘good little girl’
‘Poet queen’
‘secret lover’

‘storyteller-pied piper’
‘speck’
‘dancer-choreographer’
‘Mountain climber’

an inventory of subpersonalities.

at the barre

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I take my place
in Degas,
one knee bent, to
slide my foot into pink leather.
I wish I had ribbons and a tutu.

I walk over to the barre,
stand in a line with
Pauline, Petrova and Posy,
but the self I face in the mirror,
is a grown-up woman.

My head turns into
Coppelia, a line traced
through generations.
My toes point with
Bull and Bussell,
Pavlova, and Guillem,
almost.

I plié and rise,
and I am in a
pirouette of dancing
bliss.  The landing is askew;
I am alight.

‘And one and two
and three and four’
echoes all around
me and all around the
world.  A hundred little girls
and companies of swans and mice
and courtiers and peasants.

Did someone just call me a
ballerina?  Oh!