in the evenings

the man who lives two barges away from me on the canal takes a double bass and a chair to the park railings. 


He puts the chair and the instrument over the railings then climbs over and settles down to play

Barge life

is very tranquil - I am on a stretch of canal near an enormous park in East London, sunlight sparkles off the ceiling and it's all very beautiful. Last night I cooked my sweet potato supper in the woodburning stove.

Yesterday I walked across to the main road which is lined with Fancy-Gifts-for a pound-shops, pawnbrokers and counselling services, shops with shutters-down-long-closed and 50p burger bars. 

Today I crossed the park to a universe where everyone is slim and accompanied by stylish children in Bugaboo pushchairs, in this world the cafés are smart and vegetables organic. I purchased two of the most expensive sausages in the world and took them home to pop them in the stove for lunch.

Tate Modern

with mother-in-law having coffee. The actress Judy Dench is being discussed and she says

you know she's my twin? 

same birthday? 

same age, same height - five foot exactly, I'm keeping a close eye on her to see if she shrinks

Despite being keen on neither Opera

nor Philip Glass, I had really enjoyed a recent production of Aknaton, so I accepted an offer to go and see a Harold Pinter play at the Old Vic this evening*

The show started at 7.30 - at 7.35 I was standing alone in the foyer watching a fuzzy version of Timothy Spall on the foyer screen. I hadn't been able to contact my friend who had my ticket and who I thought was meeting me early enough before the show for supper.

A thought crept into my head and I walked up the road to the Young Vic where my friend was waiting for me to join her for the show that started there at 8pm. It starred Jane Horrocks so I guessed that it would be an acting thing but it turned out to be singing and dancing thing - the sort of thing that I really don't like.

Also, before all that, my bus from Bristol to London waited in the bus station for seventy minutes before its driver turned up - I don't feel that I've had the best use of a beautiful day 


* I feel the same way about Pinter as I do about Opera - one day I will like them and then I'll know that I've grown up

I've been home

and I'm still here, seeing friends and the Man and sniffing round the house throwing out all the potatoes whose sprouts have encircled the larder and doing laundry and filling an enormous bin bag with my most stupid shoes (actually I kept the MOST stupid shoes for just-in-case) and then hefted them down to the charity shop. Then I wrote my next essay for school and I have forgotten to get my hair cut twice and I've been wearing my freshly knitted tank top and skipping in the spring weather.

Today I walked up the steep hill to my house as two young women were coming down - one of them handed me a daffodil as we passed each other. 

Tomorrow I return to London I will go and see The Caretaker at the Old Vic and on Friday I will take charge of a narrowboat on the canal - for one whole month I will be a Bargee

I ushed a film this evening

It was a film about economists and fiscal irresponsibility.  Usually I can shut the doors once the event starts and sit peacefully in the lobby but the older men in the audience were nodding off and the auditorium was periodically rent with the farty sound of raucous snoring. So my duties included Snore Control which involved creeping around and poking anyone sleeping too noisily.


It was a long bus journey back to my hipster loft with the taupe-coloured-cats-that-match-the towels-and-carpets. The Snoring Control made me hungry so I just have eaten a tin of sardines (straight from the tin of course) I now realise that was a big mistake and I am going to be eating those fish all night and the kitties want some too

never live far from an eel dealer

This one is opposite the end of my street

Sping is here

also noted by the local primary school

Exotic Matter

- a weekend event run in a trendy East-side location by continental young men in fashionable trousers and cardigans.

The proposal for the weekend was incoherent and the attendance fee extremely inexpensive, leading me to think two things about it:

i) it would be bad

ii) I should at least go look-see 

The event location was an hour's walk from where I'm staying via a section of London's canal system that I was previously unaware of - that in itself was worth the entrance fee.

The event turned out to be a brilliant combination of imagineering about future materials, revelations about the exotic-ness of everyday things and hearing some truly impressive people discussing their research into the subject of futuricity, materiality and weirdness.

moral of this story: I am taught several lessons in a very short amount of time and realising, yet again, how I never learn lessons that I should've previously learned about making assumptions etc.

I went to the Coliseum

 a building so gorgeous that I was dazzled at once when I walked in and then double-dazzled by the show -   Akhenaeton.

The night out was a treat offered by a dear friend who slipped some salmon pink silk culottes into my handbag while we were sipping Chardonnay in the Coliseum bar -  she'd found them in a charity shop up north and thought they were very 'me'

here's a trailer for the show

In other news 

I have moved to an über-trendy location in Hackney, the local butcher shop is fitted with mahogany-faced refrigerated cupboards - in the evening it becomes a restaurant where people sit on high stools at the marble chopping counters sucking bone marrow, discussing chitterling and comparing face-hair products.

The new cats are excitable blonde bushbabies, bouncing off furniture and leaping improbably high heights as they stalk and pounce on each other. We are housed in a heavily securitised city loft within sight of a long-established eel-pie shop  - the sort that used to serve people who worked on slagheaps or collected nightsoil for a living.

Foot Foot

is as soft as a very soft thing and she's all mine for the next 3 days

In other news I am about to embark on a survey of Thames houseboats - the weather was dazzlingly good today and I spent it drifting slowly upriver with people-who-know-things pointing at dutch barges, lighters and clippers. 

In the morning I will leave the monster house

I'm anxious about leaving this place super-correctly with everything properly clean and locked up and I've quadruple-checked that I'm leaving on the right day because I muffed my entrance by arriving a day early last week. All very embarrassing, I'd been given a key the previous week so I just barged my way in while calling out to the kitties and then there I was in the hallway and looking up to see two shocked faces peering down at me from the upstairs bannister.

Luckily I had somewhere else to go and I just went away and arrived again the next day but the cats have made no attempt to hide the fact that they think I'm an eejit.

I think I'm looking after a little deaf cat next week but the owner doesn't want to meet me until the day before she goes away and there's always the possibility that one of us is a mad axe murderess.

I did a bit of shopping

then caught the bus back to the monster-cat house. It was a busy bus and I sat next to a woman who was muttering angrily, I thought she was just a regular mad person but then I caught some words about kids and biscuits so I agreed wholeheartedly and we were soon best friends exchanging information about our tea habits:

first thing through that door I make a cuppa 

me too 

with plenty of condensed milk

?

and if I go anywhere on holiday my bags are full of teabags and tinned milk

a large polar bear bean bag

has been moving around the house.  I usually have to step over it when I come in the front door, I put it back on the piano stool and in the morning it's been dumped in the hallway or the kitchen. At night after I've gone to bed I can hear frenetic cat activity - I took this to be the cats playing or fighting which seemed strange as the lady cat seems to spend most of her time snoring on her bed-on-a-pole

Last night the male cat demonstrated that the polar bear bean bag is actually a very hard-working sex slave, also the rug ... and the blanket I had put over my legs.

monster cats

at the new place - the lady cat exudes a muscular air of menace, right now she's snoring loudly but when she's not snoring she's glaring at me from her bed-on-a-stick, if I walk within a foot of this panoptican, she swipes at me with her slashy claws. The boy is more feminine and mews at me incessantly - they both want to know what I've done with their people


I'm somewhere near Dagenham and I'm finding it pretty exotic, the local shops are multi-purpose, selling food and non-food items, in interesting combinations. The shelves are packed with English-ey tinned things that I'd forgotten existed: potatoes, curry, cling peaches and evaporated milk. There are also loads of not-English-ey tinned things like ackee and saltfish. Sacks of many different brands of rice are piled high against the windows and the freezers have pizza and ice cream one side and bags of exotic fish the other - I got two big bags of frozen anchovies for £5.50 just because I could, I'm now stuck with how to eat that amount of fish before leaving on Friday*


*I'm under strict instructions to feed nothing but Whiskas Cattameat to the monsters

went to post office with parcels

at the counter my attention is riveted by a sprawling handwritten list of 'Useful Numbers'

a box has been drawn around one particular number, the heading in bold outlined caps

HOSTAGE HELPLINE

I've moved east

on the bus to my new home I sat across from a woman dressed up to go out; careful make-up, nicely done hair, a big shaggy zebra coat that tied at the waist. On her bare tattooed feet she wore blue carpet slippers with images of poo on them.

I couldn't stop staring at her feet, trying to read the tattooes, also the slippers-coat combo was interesting 

but mainly I was trying to de-code the poo.

I travelled east for most of the afternoon, to the far reaches of London - this new place contains a high level of sleepwear-as-daywear: fluorescent fluffy bathrobes, fun-fur pajama bottoms, slippers.

Can anyone tell me if this is a 'thing' (the poo, the sleepwear) or did I just stumble across an East London version of Zombie Day 


I have new monster cats, the lady cat sits on top of a bed-on-a-post and tries to flay me with her claws when I walk past

Mother's day call to mum-in-law

she tells me that my father-in-law had a nosebleed that got out of hand last week so if they venture out these days they go prepared.

we were at the theatre last night with our pockets full of torn up underpants just in case it happened again 

she misinterpreted my concerned noises

it was all white underwear, nothing gaudy

joining in with student socialising

I was invited for chilli  along with some other classmates by a fellow student who put it out over the facebook

any time after 3pm   

I arrived at 4.30 by which time the inviter was a little stoned, no-one else had arrived yet

we shared a bowl of chilli in the living room - the sofa was made up as a bed and there was also a bed in the room (London student houses look for maximum occupation)


a housemate was having noisy sex above our heads

the anti-empiricist

i counted an apple and an orange
it came to two  
this was on tuesday  
by thursday it was still two  
but at four minutes to ten  
it was three 

hello i thought, i'm on to something 
and continued counting  
but it was only three that once  
i must've made a mistake that one time

ivor cutler

from the jelly mountain series on bbc radio 4 which can still be heard for a few more days here

Today was gorgeous and sunny

I took a bus to Wapping and walked west along the Thames. 

There's a part where you turn a corner and suddenly see Tower Bridge and the Shard and City Hall and loads of boats with tall masts - in that sunshine and the blue blue sky it was dazzling. 

I had just recovered from my initial dazzlement and resumed walking when a young French couple came around the corner, I knew they were French because he went totally over the top and shouted

OOoaaHHH
(that's French for wow!)

and then more noise and then silence while she shrugged and went

Bof

and he stared at her and there was an argument which got louder and I heard him say

Non, on n'a pas ça a Paris

and then he walked off

today

there was an academic seminar, the panel game sort where people take turns to speak for a few minutes about their research. From my limited experience these things are attended mainly by people with NHS haircuts and sensible shoes but this one was enlivened by two women, one who had come dressed as a Superhero and another as a sparkly land-mermaid.



I have finished knitting a tank top, it has a red neck area and a pink tummy area dark grey-and-pale stripes in between

today I played hookey from school

to attend a textiles masterclass, by the fabulous Faye McNulty who makes slinky devoré fabric interlaced with thermodynamic ink that glows when you get warm. She also made the massive batik sails for Yinke Shonibare's ship in a bottle that sailed across Trafalgar Square last year and  she makes wild runway creations for the fashion shows.

I have come away clutching recipes for acidic dyes and discharging dyes and instructions for how to burn through the threads of a fabric to reveal an underneath layer. Also I made some very pretty pink and green silk fancies

in cat news
If I leave the valise on it's side with the sections unzipped the cats can slide between the layers and hide while also peeping out to watch me knitting

Hell is other people

    The Divine Comedy - is a firey road trip where Dante and his friend Virgil  go to various places and look at bad naked people on fire. The Botticelli drawings depicting the story are currently on in the Courtauld Gallery and it's brilliant, the link doesn't show the best pictures which is why I've had to make my own version - I particularly like the one where bad priests have been plunged head down into boiling pits of pitch with their feet on fire - Dante has spotted one that he recognises and is trying to say hello.

I also enjoyed the image of soothsayers being punished for trying to look into the future - they've had their heads pulled off and put back on - backwards.

Mainly I've enjoyed how Dante deals with all the horror: at the beginning when it's really monstery and flaming he's clearly screaming like a girl but he soon gets used to it all - here he is in purgatory which is not as bad as hell, this is where people can atone for their sins, like this proud person who can't stand up properly because he's bent under the weight of lots of rocks - also the man is naked, there's nothing to help the chaffing so he's probably really uncomfortable, but there's Dante again trying to make chit chat.

[this blog looks better if you view the web version]

When I see this shop

I'm near the school and it's time to get off the bus

we have a testicle restaurant

in Stoke Newington, there are photographs of testicles and Tripadvisor reviews stuck in the window, this review is my favourite: 


Went with my husband as, despite having lived here for nearly 4 years, we'd never been and we wanted to try the famous testicles. Busy, buzzing atmosphere on arriving. Husband ordered lambs' testicles. I, being less brave, ordered the ribs. Told there would be a 30 minute wait for testicles so ordered humus with lamb.

Lunchtime talk

the venue had a big notice outside announcing the theme:

TAKING CONTROL OF THE BANKING SYSTEM 

I was standing next to this notice preparing for ushing duties - the young man on the reception desk came over,  stood next to me, looked at the title and said

What's that going to be about then? 

I said that I expected there'd be quite a bit of discussion about Iceland and he looked surprised

I bought some adult lady shoes

to go with the smart trousers that I can zip up but not sit down in

I made myself late for a meeting yesterday because I was looking for the perfect sock to go with the adult shoe and the smart trouser to attend a serious meeting today

I got home and rehearsed the outfit but decided that the look needed more practise in a less risky arena so I went to the meeting wearing 'normal me' clothes

and it went really well  

It's Reading Week

click on image to enlarge

I returned to London

with a valise which turns out to be perfectly cat-sized, the black cat has taken ownership - the tortoiseshell sits on my knitting waiting until the black one has to go off for a drink or food, then she nips in and tries to assert squatters rights until chased off in short shrift.

The cat thing is to distract me from remembering that I was in Bristol yesterday getting a tooth pulled - last time I had a tooth out it was a lady dentist who just reached in and clicked the molar as though it was a light fitting and I barely noticed. Yesterday it was like the man was uprooting a redwood. By the time the grinding and scraping stopped I had gone transparent with shock.

I'm surprisingly normal today, back in London I took the 211 to Chelsea. On the Kings Road I walked past a man wearing a huge blue macaw on each shoulder like a pair of mardi gras epaulettes. He was quite a small man and the parrot's heads towered above his. He was walking in a way that indicated he hadn't noticed the birds but quite hastily and with his head thrust forward and furtive as though he thought someone was following him

pink breakfast

in honour of Valentine and in anticipation that I'd be spending today unromantically, I took myself out  yesterday to the most-expensive-cafe-in-the-world where I ordered as many pink things as were available on the menu

and several not-pink-but-tasty things


The Trousers of Despair

I brought some 'optimistic' trousers to London:

i) they are smart and will be good to wear if I get invited to a smart interview 

ii) they fit me too snugly, my aim has been to make that aspect less so

also,  the hems need taking up - today I set out needle, thread and the Trousers which now fit too snugly for sitting down

My current neighbourhood

serves the most expensive breakfast in the world in a building site

cakes in the local market - freshly baked this year

I was ushing last night

Ben is one of my work colleagues, a slim man, height-wise he's in Tom Cruise's neighbourhood. Before our shift started I followed him upstairs to the staff kitchen noticing that his trousers were so tight that his bottom looked like two boiled eggs in a small hanky. Also his shirt was straining at the seams.


The staff kitchen had been recently used for a brainstorming team meeting - the white board was headed up with the title 'What am I going to achieve this Year?' - positive assertions were scribbled all  over the board, I focused on the section that read:

eat more healthily

make quality time with my family  

get more exercise

learn to make sushi 

smash global capitalism
  

While I was reading, Ben had been shaking together brown powder with a litre of water I watched him glug down the mixture and when his eyes had stopped watering he said

I'm on a Plan - I have to eat a meal every three hours, it's like ten chicken breasts a day and I'm finding it really hard to get that much inside me

The event was a talk called Why Has Everything Gone Wrong? - when it got underway, we closed the doors on the audience and sat in the foyer watching as someone filled the venue's Twitter feed with porn

for breakfast

the cats share a pouch of what looks like shredded rubber suspended in gravy, the cats usually lick the gravy off the rubber, their tongues flicking the rubber pieces around the floor where they dry into sharp little shards    

this  morning Wheezy got to breakfast first and wolfed down both bowls without doing the licking  thing

within a minute she had regurgitated bits of rubber and gravy all over my computer cables

I went for lunch

at a vietnamese canteen near school, it's best known for dishes of steamed savoury buns, little dumplings and spring rolls   

two asian women bustled in and sat next to me - a very quiet one and a bright shiny one who was talking loudly ...  

this is so great that we didn't have to negotiate we both just knew to come here it's like we can read each other's minds ... my god i've just bought tickets to go back to hong kong  - five thousand pounds and that was cheap ... we've booked into the four seasons which is very nice but it'll be like a staycation because we're not planning to do anything ...

there was a bit of quiet as they looked at the menu then the quiet one spoke for the first time

do you want to share ....  

and was interrupted

of course i don't want to share i'm a very greedy person

the elephant in the room

might have to be made visible for a moment

I've been at school for a few months now and have barely mentioned it that is because I'm struggling with some aspects of the experience and have been waiting for understanding to descend from the heavens:

i) there are a lot of special words which sound like Real World Words but in School World they mean something different - also the meaning slides around depending on who's using these words (abduction, affordance, agency, alterity ...)

ii) anything I might wish to say should be validated by referring back to a select group of European gentlemen - this is an example of what they call Cultural Capital*

iii) I need to learn how to 'strongly assert my position' - I may need to get a sex change before I can be this certain about everything

iv) it's all about arguments and a lot of the time the things being argued about aren't very interesting


* on the upside my Nosey Parkering is sanctioned by this sort of education - forming part of my newly acquired Cultural Capital

a cashmere charity shop jumper

was too tight and being similar in colour to my own flesh, if I put it on, I looked like a raw furry sausage 

BUT IT'S CASHMERE!!!


I unknitted it and dyed the yarn and yesterday I finished the reknitting

It's like wearing a warm boggy cloud

me and Karl Lagerfeld

the day I met David Bowie's sort-of-landlady a man had taken my navy jacket leaving me with his black blazer*.  

[for the full story follow this link and if you're reading on a mobile device I think this blog works better if you can see the web version]

My reefer jacket was a good fit and was an everything jacket, it worked with my skirts and trousers and meant that while I'm in london I can survive with that jacket and the rest of my wardrobe in a small holdall.

The big black blazer makes me look as though I'm two little boys standing on each other's shoulders in their fathers coat - which isn't the look I'm going for.

I searched the charity shops to find a replacement and after a couple of days settled on a black-and-orange baseball jacket which is great for when I'm feeling a bit varsity but not when I'm concerned about mutton-and-lamb issues and certainly not if I'm trying to look like a grown-up.

Yesterday on my quotidien charity-shop trawl/quest for a neat navy jacket I came across a neat black coat, the sort of thing Karl Lagerfeld wears. I tried it on and looked just like a pale version of Karl Lagerfeld then I looked at the label and it said 'Karl Lagerfeld'


it's black and it doesn't go with my skirt, or any of my clothes except jeans and I'll have to go out and buy a different sort of jeans that work better with this coat but it's Karl Lagerfeld and I'm surprised by how nice it feels so I keep it on and pay for it at the same time as a lady buying a crochet pot holder - she made an impressed face and said

nice

and I said

Karl Lagerfeld

* I asked the bus company to help trace the man and effect an exchange but that hasn't worked out

I took a melon

and, in expectation of an evening spent politely toying with a salad, I ate a hearty supper before setting out to the 'air supper' invitation.


Turns out that when my friend says 'it'll be nothing much' she means that she's baked a big dish of kedgeree.     one of my favourite things!!!

I've had a supper invitation

I said lovely can I bring something?

Sure but we don't normally eat in the evening unless someone's coming round so could you bring something that's practically non-existent - like fruit?

this happens most nights

click image to enlarge

I'm staying in a very interesting neighbourhood

the houses are small-to-average sized and it all looks like a neat little nuclear-family zone but now I've been here a few days I'm noticing details like this car and I'm wondering how the rest of the family are going to fit in it and what sort of holiday are they going on.   

Just nearby is Hipster Central - shops selling faux workwear for the cost of a ballgown, hipster barbers where the men in funky spectacles go to have their beards combed and a Wholefoods Market full of groovy folk buying artisan cordial. these shops jostle next to halal butchers and everything-costs-a-pound shops and then the hipster shops stop and there are lots of the sort of greengrocers that burgeon out on the pavement selling the kind of bananas you have to cook and big thick hairy-rooted vegetables that I don't have the confidence to name correctly.

Today I walked east and the whole world was out in the sunshine. After the hairy-rooted vegetable shops came the all-sorts-of-groceries-plus-money-transfer shops and  the population became noticeably muslim; women in hijabs and lots of men out with their sons looking summery in long shirts and white crocheted caps then I walked through an invisible forcefield to a completely different neighbourhood thronging with people coming back from the synagogue, the men looking regal in furry cartwheel hats and shiny coats, women and girls trailing after them in a curious mix of scarves and rainhoods.

Two minutes later I'm in the countryside walking past a huge park to the river where I met a lady with a narrow boat that I am going to live in after Easter.

cardboard boxes

are strategically placed around the floor of the flat that I am currently looking after 

the  cats use them as surveillance posts.

devil-cat is particularly fond of my shopping basket which alllows her to hide while keeping a close eye on me through the handles

I'm looking after two new cats

 one is very quiet and a bit asthmatic, the other is a devil. If I put food out for both at the same time the devil goes over to where the other one is eating, fishes out the food from under her nose and eats it off the floor in front of her.

I have been visiting Bristol this week

-  my stepson came for breakfast and said -  I'm moving to a nice flat soon    

there was a pause then he said      

its not nice because it's nice, it's just nice because it's cheap

It's still all about David Bowie

The day started out peculiarly because the man sitting next to me on the bus to London got off before my stop and took my coat with him.    

By the time I realised, he was long gone and I was standing at Victoria in an ill-fitting blazer. I am really hoping that he isn't enjoying being squeezed into my neat little reefer jacket and will get in touch with the bus station in the same way that I did so we can swap back.  

This evening, possibly inspired by a day in gorilla-ish sleeves I managed to leap onto a bus  just as it was setting off back to Bristol and plonk myself in the front window seat next to a nice-looking lady. We chatted then she dozed and I knitted and then she woke up when we were near Swindon and we talked a bit about me and then I asked about her and she said       

Well I'm busy doing publicity for my book about being David Bowie's sort-of-landlady   

 and I said you have to tell me everything      

she didn't look as though she wanted to tell me everything so I said that I would definitely buy her book (and I just have) and that she should tell me everything because I used to work for Peter Gabriel   

She told me that she'd been David Bowie's sort-of-landlady until Ziggy Stardust, they set up an Art Lab together at the pub up the road and her house was always full of rockstars and fans and she'd been working on the book for two years and was going to launch it at Christmas but then heard about Blackstar and decided to wait until the 8th of January.      

then she told me   
I'd had lunch with Tony Visconti just the week before and he didn't say a word   



this is a sliced-off version of my all-time-favourite David Bowie/Brian Eno/Tony Visconti film

when i placed my jeans inside the freezer yesterday

   i discovered a tub of christmas pudding ice cream ...   

it's not there any more

It's been a tough week

David Bowie died first thing Monday. In the evening I walked to the bus stop and the top part of the post office tower was spinning with a lit up a message to him  and in Brixton there was a mass David Bowie singalong - it was a very emotional day.  

I sat on the top deck but didn't pay attention to my actual seat until I wanted to get off the bus and realised that the long ride had melted a gob of well chewed gum onto my jean-clad backside.   

Because getting off the top deck of a London bus can be a God-awful affair and because of David Bowie and because I was ravenous, the gum was forgotten by the time I made it to the pavement. Back at the house that I am taking care of for strangers I put David Bowie music on and made supper.  

Then I sat in one of the expensive black leather dining chairs owned by the people who are trusting me to look after their home*, I sat in that chair and ate my delicious supper and then I stayed in the chair for a really long time watching old David Bowie videos. When I finally tried to stand up I couldn't because the gum on my jeans had welded my bottom onto the seat. I peeled myself off gently and then stared in horror at the mess.  

Warm gum smears worse the more you wipe. 

I panicked  but luckily I'm also the kind of girl who reads Top Tips  

I put my gummy jeans in the freezer along with a folded wet cloth that had a nubbly side and then I went to bed  

In the morning I chipped the gum off my jeans and rubbed the iced nubbley brick on the leather seat and it cleaned up like new. 

*bum-crayon cat house

Yay! My essay was delivered yesterday so I have words again   

procrastination

I should be writing an essay but I've run out of words, so I came here to see if a blogpost might dislodge some:


nope ... nothing

New year, old cat

I'm back in London with the bum-crayoner who has now totally associates me with the disappearance of her human slave - this cat is angry

She's not speaking to me at all but waits until I'm out of the living room then sneaks down to wipe her bottom on the white sofa, the mdf skirting boards have melted in the places she goes to urinate in rage at my presence and all this rage is fuelling a huge appetite, she's wolfing food like a ... wolf

I'm sitting in the white sofa right now, trying to avoid the cat's artwork, rain gushing down outside, writing my first proper academic essay.

In an hour my mother will be visiting