The more it snows tiddlely pom

9 1 2010

Pooh may have made up songs in the snow, I slip and slide and swear like a trooper, luckily I have a wide and colourful vocabulary with which to express myself and old ladies look at me with respect, the old ladies in this part of east London are tough and use swear words like punctuation when roused. A Town Unlike alice is up and running as an alternative to the content on my website, www.aliceworeareddress.co.uk, it looks a bit bare apart from the Alice Springs photo which my brother took as a laugh while he was travelling round Australia working illegally, he got his wife to stand behind the place name with the piece of cardboard, up a bit down a bit etc. I'm going to look for photos of blackberries, snowy woods and fireworks to liven the bareness up a bit, all that unrelieved text is a bit intimidating. I was annoyed by a couple of journalists on Breakfast TV talking about the latest attempt by members of the cabinet to unseat Gordon Brown, they're mad said one, no, I felt like shouting, don't blame the mad we don't do things like that, we're only too grateful to anyone who shows us kindness, they're sane it's the sane who can be so horrible to each other and everyone else. They kept repeating they're mad and I thought well I know you're on TV so constrained a little but surely you could come up with something original instead of stale old abuse.

It's not the vocabulary per se that annoys me so much it's the ill will with which it's used and the assumption that the mad are sub human and incomprehensible, reiterating that does nothing to increase understanding and common humanity it reinforces unreasoning fear and ignorance. Being mentally ill is like being Black back in the nineteen fifties, you hear abuse wherever you go and it's so common people don't hear what is coming out of their mouths nor how offensive they're being to people who are sensitive and vulnerable already. It's the ill will that causes the offence and it's frightening.

I have my 2010 Writer's Handbook and currently I've been revising poems ready to send them to editors of poetry magazines, the Writer's Handbook published addresses but I've had a look through the list of magazines and several are listed that have folded. It's very much trial and error when you confidently post work off, some magazines don't bother to reply and I always include an SSAE, others are quick, efficient and professional, all praise to their hard work because they're in it for the love of the thing. Seven months later I got a reply today to say the magazine had gone, courteous because they didn't have to bother, cross that one off the list and thank the Lord it wasn't a rejection! The Reater is one magazine that never responds, I looked up their website and Myspace adddresses, status: drunk, it said of one of the editors, oh so that's why you don't respond, then there was something about wanting to f@ck an old man in a supermarket, if I ever go to Hull I won't be using any supermarkets. Quantum Leap, Carrillon, Fire and many more are clean different things, intelligent, interested and interesting, Pulsar, Awen and Imagenation are also very good, any of you out there with work to send off try any of them they'll treat you with intelligent understanding and professionalism.

I've replaced the u in the above paragraph not because I'm mealy mouthed but because I'm unsure of the rules or firewall, the firewall at the Environment Agency where one of my daughters works is hyper sensitive, Nads short for Nadia had it screaming and blowing whistles and posting pornography warnings. As my brother in Australia says, computers are stupid and can't think or tell you what you need to do, he's just learning and has been heard to threaten his machine with being unplugged and then it won't look so clever, aha got you there! Firewalls display the same characteristics, it's like trying to hold a conversation with someone who takes everything literally so you can't communicate any abstract sense, it leaves you feeling that belting them over the head with a chair might get through. My husband encountered a Fundamental Christian with those characteristics on a bus, she was horribly rude to a little Asian lad and when my husband remonstrated with for God's Sake be reasonable she denounced him for taking the Lord's name in vain and carried on with the rudeness for the rest of the journey. He'd meant for the sake of God because the Asian kid was tearful, but what can you do?

Off the point as usual, but perhaps Dirk Gently was right and everything is connected and happens for a purpose, hats off to Douglas Adams I'll go with that,

Anne Rees