bloody homework

well apparently i have to make some list of stuff about things – why do i participate in such blog-related chain-letter stuff which means i have to write about me… ahahhhh! i have just realised it is an illuminating and artistic exercise that will be of interest to my vast readership. how can i deny my public?.

A – Available or Single? no idea; ask my CLP and see what response you get.

B – Best Friend? CLP as above.

C – Cake or Pie? pie eternally, pastry being the food of the gods. (preferably with potato and onions therein)

D – Drink of Choice? tea – virtually any style any way any where, but preferably no teabag and no sugar

E – Essential Item? probably my cricket bat (or should that be my box?)

F – Favorite Color? you know… i’ve never really been able to decide. it’s all so visual and (as one may deduce from an entirely word-based blog) i’m not. let’s say whatever colour you, my readers, prefer. it’s so interactive round here.

G – Gummi Bears or Worms? worms – liked them as a kid and we never had gummi bears (filthy german invention); anyway, they are so good for the soil and leave the door open to the possibility of a really weak mediaeval christianity-related pun. (diet of worms – for the one person on the planet who is yet to groan at it)

H – Hometown? North Shields – always in my heart (no really – sad but true)

I – Indulgence? good wine; doesn’t have to be expensive, but made with care and dedication and drunk with friends – but not champagne, that’s just muck with bubbles in it.

J – January or February? January – you get more for your money and there’s less of the year gone so less guilt at having done nothing with it.

K – Kids? horribly, stupidly in love with mine

L – Life is incomplete without… art – specifically theatre; not the rsc stuff, particularly, but small productions with good actors up close where you can see their eyes, working inventively and honestly. it lights up life and has been lighting up mine ever since i first went.

M – Marriage Date? nobody’s told me about it…

N – Number of Siblings? classic spoiled only child

O – Oranges or Apples? apples – off my tree on the balcony in my urban oasis

P – Phobias/Fears? – i’m not sure i fear anything. when my dad died i decided if i could handle that i could handle it all – i’m not so certain that’s true, but i don’t have anything to fear as such. we deal with anything – that’s what my mum managed to do and she had so much more to deal with than me, so i should be able to have a go at that too. there are a lot of things i would hate to happen, but oddly i don’t feel like i fear them – what difference would it make?

Q – Favourite Quote. none or too many and as this is my choice, i shall opt for too many:

‘ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet…’ – and the whole bloody lyric, damn you, bob

‘the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on: nor all your piety nor wit

shall lure it back to cancel half a line nor all your tears wash out one word’

prospero’s speech beginning ‘ we are such stuff as dreams are made on …’

‘let’s go’ ‘ we can’t’ ‘why not?’ ‘we’re waiting for godot’ ‘ah yes…’

ode to a nightingale – one long quote; it’s so good it’s like dylan

‘and now abideth faith, hope, love; these three – but the greatest of these is love’ (sorry; i’ve bastardised the king james because i want sugar on my jam on my chocolate)

R – Reasons to smile. CLP, the boys being good, the boys being bad, coming back and seeing the boys after a week, a day, 10 seconds…, friends, that first pint on a summer evening, taking a good catch, taking any catch, people who enjoy writing and reading at my blog, someone being kind for no apparent reason, reading over a piece i’ve written or edited and thinking it’s as good as i can make it, walking round the boundary at a certain time as the afternoon just starts to become evening with a pint in hand, seeing my chillis grow, having been up against it on a tricky pitch and finally hitting a ball for four after overs of grafting, anyone getting my sense of humour, the cork coming out clean from a bottle of 40 year-old port, dylan, moments when for no particular reason you feel the shaft of sunlight hit your soul, a successful run chase, just breathing sometimes, life, death, anything, nothing, everything

S – Season? summer – the first half of the cricket season when you remember that you can still score runs after all and stiff limbs manage to move quicker than you dared hope

T – Tag Three. do i even know three who haven’t been tagged? i’d love to tag daisy and fidel, but you’d have to do it here, so i’ll try teacup newt, manxome and aradhana. i don’t even know how you tag someone – great playing a game without quite knowing the rules…

U – Unknown Fact About Me. i have appeared naked on stage and screen

V – Vegetarian or Oppressor of Animals? i am frequently nasty to pigeons and imprison small dogs to power my home using treadmills; would probably make cutting remarks about cats but i fear their powerful lobby of supporters.

W – Worst Habit? laziness, lack of concentration (probably laziness) – or agreeing with people putting almost directly opposed viewpoints

X – X-rays or Ultrasounds? who cares, but i really hate the conservative party and wish the blight on the planet of right wing politics and hatred would just fuck right off and leave anyone who cares remotely about people not money to try and run this place a little less horribly.

Y – Your Favorite Foods? potatoes, onions and anything that contains them… also everything else in quantity please with just a little more of that thank you very much – oh i couldn’t … well if you insist, just to be polite (oh yes alphabites and potato waffles – that’s for me online mum and her boring friend sarah and her annoying kids who are so not as grown up as me, whatever she says)

Z – Zodiac? scorpio – couldn’t you guess???

this blog is porn – official

i can exclusively reveal that there’s a place for us features on a search for ‘hot north eastern women’ (admittedly on tiscali). assuming big dave c has not started working as a transexual escort service in the percy main area, it can only be sparkle’s occasional numinous presence (perhaps a link to that one of her in her jamees and a rather fetching wheelbarrow) or the odd mention of my gran. take your pick.

may day

it’s unfashionable – even over here on the left – to celebrate may day as the day of the working people. nobody flies red flags, nobody even complains they aren’t allowed to celebrate it like st george’s day. it is rarely mentioned at all.

but on may day i like to think about where i came from; about my great grandfather Thomas Milburn, a cumbrian lead miner until the work dried up and he came east to the durham coalfield and became a durham pitman; about my grandad, who followed his father into the pit and never became a deputy despite passing his exams, because Thomas was the lodge chairman – no masonic lodge, this, but a trade union and the chairman was its shop steward – and lodge could never be management. coal cutters both; ‘hewers’ as they were both precisely described on my grandfather’s wedding certificate – as was his new father in law; men who worked for hours at a time with a pick, cutting the coal by hand as it was done until not so long ago. and my grandad worked the thin seam – 18 inches at its narrowest – he told me about it without drama, without making any of the obvious points about how easy i had it – an actor rehearsing a play about what he had lived – he did mention it was a wet seam, which meant you lay in the water to cut the coal. he survived a roof fall to be invalided out of the pit relatively unscathed – though he showed me how he couldn’t raise his arm above the horizontal; fortunately he wasn’t a great drinker.

he bought a shop from one of his wife’s family – if you see the picture of it, shop is much too grand a title – a cross between a phone box and an outside toilet – and sold cigarettes at the pithead as the men came out from shift – presumably just in case they weren’t dying fast enough from silicosis or pneumoconiosis; many of them his old pit marrers. in time he graduated to a real corner shop which he kept until a little before his death. i went past it the other day and there was a mercedes parked outside.

two great ironies – a great grandad who got on his bike and looked for work (or would have if he could afford a bloody bike) and a grandad who ran a corner shop like alderman roberts (never became an alderman – too much against the grain for that; still too much a lodge man). but neither of them ever would or did believe those two great tory lies, of tebbit and thatcher that combine in the myth that anyone can make it if they pull themselves up by their bootstraps. they lived and died socialists; men who were strong enough to fight for their rights and the rights of those around them, because they realised that humans are too big to be bought and sold and humanity too precious to be commodified. or more likely because they wanted their family to be able to eat. and because of their efforts, my mother became the first in her family to continue her education after school; i in turn ended up with an education deemed (rightly) to be among the most privileged. not because capitalism allows everyone a fair chance if they work hard – but because they organised and combined with others like them to claim their rights as human beings.

when people decide that my education and new place firmly among the middle classes make my socialism of the champagne variety (my best friends will laugh at that – they know i would always hold my hand up as a vintage port socialist), it has as much logic as the accusations leveled against some feminists of being ‘academic’. the implication is somehow that both socialists and feminists should eschew education, which might indeed find favour with those who wish both women and the working classes would know their place and keep to it. as the starving artist loses his magic when he graduates from his garret, so the feminist and the socialist should not avail themselves of education (or presumably a good meal).

the subject of feminism is pertinent because, while socialism may not always foster the feminist cause, i am certain that socialism, is a natural partner of feminism. and equally certain that conservatism, built on the commodification of the individual, has no place for feminism.

blair and new labour have been here for ten years and things are bad – but ten years earlier it was a different prime minister, a different party and the same bloody stupid war with even less excuse; a couple of years before that, she was fighting her war on working people in this country. to reclaim a popular phrase from those days: ‘if an etonian in a loud waistcoat is the answer, it must have been a bloody stupid question’.

i don’t imagine Thomas Milburn would have thought much of either of them, but he knew where he came from. i, in my turn, am pretty sure where i have come from – i live in a world a million miles from theirs, but built on their strength and courage, bought by their blood and the blood of those like them. i owe them. and i won’t forget it.