All My Relations

Photographs of my great-grandmother Ito-san (top) and my grandmother Obaachan (bottom) when she was young

I have a piece about my Japanese grandmother Obaachan published in a zine in America called All My Relations. It's a new publication about ancestry, memory and the meaning of family.

My piece is called Where have the waterways gone? on p.79-83. You can read and download the full issue here.

If you like the writing and artwork in the zine then kindly send a donation via Ko-fi saying in the message that it's for All My Relations. The donations get paid out to BIPOC, gender diverse, and disabled creatives.

Warming thoughts for coming Winter

Cat scrambles up tree chasing after squirrel. 

Her tails whips around the trunk

Squirrel’s tail twitches furiously round and round

The chase becomes a mad scramble. 

Does she catch him? 

Claws and fur.

Leaves.

I have been inundated with books. It’s no bad thing but I need to make time to read them all. No examination coming up. But lethargy is a killer and I always moan that I want to be learning something so I should bloody well open up my brain to all the words. 

It’s autumn now and winter tomorrow. The outside weather makes us all want to stay inside. This happens every year and still it’s unpredictable for me, difficult to commit my heart to. The reason is because it’s unwanted, when it’s getting sunnier and warmer it’s easy to expect it in fact you can’t wait for it. 

I love summer. Friends invite more people out in the summer. We all went swimming in a pond once, no twice. The muddy cold fresh water of Hampstead Heath, leaves stuck to the hair and algae skin. A tiny pool more like a contemporary puddle in the midst of skyscrapers and the new Google outfit, we shared the water with ducks and ran screaming in to a sauna that looked like a barrel.

You can think fondly of those things because it’s life affirming. Exhilarating. But now. Now it’s wet and cold and a political shitstorm so, why would we choose to get out of bed. 

Hole up and read for the winter and eat warm nuts and soup. That’s the life.

(Hangover Poems)

HANGOVER QUILLS

I am very hungover today

And I will work on poetry

I read your poems Pooja Nansi

And they reminded me of

A time when I wore a broken

Healing wretched heart

Like a pin on my lapel

Men I couldn’t really tell

Apart fell in to my lap

Like drink spills, I

Didn’t really miss them

When they’d gone

*

I woke up with no recollection of how and why

Top half still on (bra and all)

Bottom half relegated to the floor

Lamps still on and bright white light

Flooding in from the window and at first

You’re numb from the truth which is

Oh no. It’s daylight and last night I drank too much.

Then it’s the dread of what happens next

If I move? And then it’s some odd recurring thought patterns

That flit in and out of dreams or delusions or both;

I am at a training camp where you must raise your hand

And share with the faceless class an occasion of

Heartbreak and humiliation

No body makes to move so I raise my hand and yell

Quite loudly – a time I waited for someone who never came

I get some nods of approval

I wake and I crawl to fill my glass with water and

Sup and wait and set my alarm to be back again

At that camp but it’s an assault course this time

In the dimmed dark, it’s wet like Scotland outside

Inside my friends are climbing walls and it feels

Ominous. The one I love has an accident, grisly

Head splits open and comes to sit by me

And I look at his smashed skull with brain bits but his face

Still looks fine to me and I need to wake up before

I am sick with horror and dread and fear of it all

It’s a dream you sick sad fuck

*

I will sleep on my desk

As the ticker tape rolls

As the typewriter clicks

And flags wave for goals

Evaporated Milk

Never really written on the back of a bus before. Legs swung sideways out in to the aisle, there’s nobody here, the top deck is mine, no need to worry. Why has evaporated milk become so much part of my waking life than before? Because on the boat we have a tiny fridge that is crammed full of grapes and orange juice and cheese, so, there’s not much room for milk and Mer doesn’t drink milk. When I have cups of tea on the boat I usually have the ginger one or the knettle and jasmine one but sometimes you just hanker for tea, right? Regular nice builder’s tea with sugar and milk and everything Good about hot beverages. But there's only this thing called evaporated milk on board and it comes in a tin. 

The first time I put some evaporated milk in my tea it tasted fine, creamy but fine. Not like a normal cuppa but it was like not so different, you know. A day went by, I went to work where also I had cups of tea in the office and coffee and nothing that unusual. Another day, in the afternoon I bought a salad and went to eat it on the deck, which is much like a sun porch or a patch of grass that somebody owns out front. I had my book on British Birds and I was checking out the birds, the only kinds really are the coot and moorehen, both of which are labelled “confusion species” of one another; the coot is plumper and larger than the moorhen with a bright white stripe down the middle of its face, and they make a racket with their whirring click click clack clack noises. The tea I had on deck then tasted a bit odd but then I couldn’t remember how the first evaporated milk cup of tea had tasted, so I started to doubt whether the tea had ever tasted normal so I just drank it in sips and left the rest.

When Mer came home to the boat on my lazy Saturday afternoon which had been provoked by a great hangover incurred after Alex’s birthday, I offered to make her a cup of tea.

’Sure. I’ll have the knettle one! No - actually yes… no, I’ll try the melon and raspberry one.’ 

I boil the kettle and wait, tapping on the side of my white porcelain mug. I ask, ‘Mer can I have some of your evaporated milk?’

‘Sure you can but just check it hasn’t gone off.’ 

‘How do I check that?’ 

‘Well I’d pour it out somewhere and have a look.’ 

So I reach for a utensil and pour this gloopy substance on to the face of a spoon and it slides in to the shape of a white chocolate button but glossy. 

‘I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like though’ I say in anticipation for some big reveal by the evaporated milk, but it gives me nothing. Mer comes over to have a look too. 

‘Maybe give it a taste?’  

So I pop the spoon in my mouth and immediately have to spit the fucker out because it tastes sour and gross.

‘If it’s off spit it out!’ Mer desperately scrabbles to make some room for my spittle in the sink and then I have to spit it out.

The evaporated milk had definitely gone off so I would have thought I’d be scarred for life from that tin-held impostor, but then this morning I woke up quite early and had a freezing cold shower because I’d messed up the heater settings due to daylight savings time (the clock was wrong basically), and I needed a cup of tea. Like normal tea. So I boiled the kettle and put the tea bag in and pierced open the tin lid of this new evaporated milk and strangely enough, the tea tasted great. So, my overall feelings on evaporated milk are as yet undecided. 

Boat Days

I smell of sweet stale bananas. I can smell it in my hair. Tad self-conscious that I smell too sweet for my fellow tubers, but heck, more worryingly I could smell of damp and just not notice - this smell of artificial sweet covering up the odour of the natural banks of the canal. Actually, I hope I smell of biscuits, which most would agree is nicer than pondweed.

I live on a boat. Just moved in on Monday night, right after I did a show with my theatre troopers at the recently (half) burnt down Battersea Arts Centre; post-show I retreated to water with the mild feeling already that it had been an unusual day, but what’s usual these days?

The sail boat (not a barge) is a liveaboard that’s in a continuous state of ‘work in progress’. It floats nicely and comes with an interesting liveaboard ‘landlady’, but with us being on water I’ll just call her by her name.

‘What shall I call you?’

‘You can call me whatever you want, whatever’s easiest.’

‘OK. But I don’t know your name so that’s quite difficult.’

‘Oh. I haven’t even told you – it’s Merrill.’

‘Like the bank.’

‘No nothing like the bank – nothing like that – what bank? - friends call me all sorts of thing like Margaret or Merry or Lily…’

‘OK. So they call you by lots of names then. I’ll call you Mer if that’s alright?’

‘Shure.’

So at the moment Mer’s moored the boat next to a giant biscuit factory: McVities. It’s in northwest London in a place called Harlesden and the air surrounding the station is the smell of concentrated sweet. I can almost taste the dough kneaded in industry quantities, its constant stream of puffy air wafting over canal and pouring across the junction into the Underground station down the steps towards the commuters.

There are definitely worse things to smell of than biscuits and so I’m not complaining, they also make Hula Hoops there because I see the vans but I can’t smell the crisps so much. When I leave for work this morning Mer tells me we’ll move the boat this week.

Dead Seal Scrolls

‘Merry Christmas!’ says my Grancha, ‘who wants some sherry?’

‘It’s Christmas Eve not Christmas yet’ interjects Granny, ‘you always want to be early for things.’

‘Oh. I see darling. B’won’t stop us from having sherry though will you?’ He asks sweetly but already up and meandering over to the drinks counter. Grandparents in Orkney are the sort of people who have a drinks counter; two bottles of Castelgy Gin, bitter lemon Scheweppes - almost certainly flat, aged sherry sweet and dry, a vintage Taylor’s port, and some red wine that I drank the whole lot of last night. 

The fire is grinning and burning up, toasting the backs of old socks and yesterday, I, as the Youngest of the Lot was on my hands and knees digging ash out of the lead bucket that’s been stuck in the fireplace for over a decade. The grill has snapped in two due to the continuous fires overhead but it still works and can’t be replaced anymore. Scraping ash in the morning - and seven piles of it - when touched feels cold and smooth, like the pebbles on the beach outside. When I was six I threw a tantrum and ran down to Watersound and had a go at the sea, I was angry about something with a burning desire to kick everything to bits and to quell my rage I shoved my hand in to the cold wet sand and dug down until about my whole arm was lost in the depths of the shore that clenched it. When I pulled it up it popped out from the suction and a small yellow-green crab had it’s pincers around my middle finger! I shrieked for the tiny life of me and waved my arm about frantically yelping and jumping about until the crustacean plopped off and scuttled back in to the sea. I ran back home no longer angry or crying but at peace with whatever had just gone on. The ash in the grate was cold as silt and smelt distinctly of nothing.

*

‘Hello. Big fat gross dead Mr. Turkey’ it sat there as a lump in shallow pools of watery-blood, ‘We’ll eat you tomorrow. Sleep well.’

*

When the door bell rings twice succinctly in two onerous rhymes that means Colin’s at the door, he is my hero and 90 years old and wears a fluorescent jacket that has Duck Patrol printed on the front breast pocket and Game Warden emblazoned on the back. It was a joke present from his longstanding friend but he wears it with pride and jauntily. Recently Colin took in Lily, an abused rescue-dog who hangs by his side enduringly and always looks so nervous of being hit again, what brutality can sear in to even animals’ brains I thought, and my hero’s bushy crown of white hair and weathered toothy-smile is what brings life to our laughter. 

‘Someone to come and see you’ Colin says nodding at Lily on the end of the leash, she turns her side to me and only dares to look up with twitchy eyes when she thinks I’m not looking (I am). ‘And to drop off this.’

‘An Orcadian dictionary, perfect. Thanks.’ I bend down to touch Lily but her leg wobbles and I just put my hand out for her to sniff.

‘Merry Christmas then!’ Says Colin as he saunters off with Lily tight by his side, and Granny tuts and murmurs to herself about it only being Christmas Eve. 

Don’t say ‘noo’, say ‘now’,  

Don’t say ‘ku’, say ‘cow’. 

(C. M. Costie, Speech)

The language of Orkney seems to have passed from the Norn to the Scots and then to the “correct way” of English, taught throughout the schools during 20th Century to standardise their spelling and speech. That’s fine I see it happening that way everywhere, I think, but it’s a shame. Now the dialect is known as Orcadian and to be honest when I speak with some I still miss half the conversation or the whole meaning. ‘Back of four’ means anytime after four o’clock and I find the logic sort of odd, just as I find it sort of odd how the sun rises and settles in one low position above the horizon for half an hour in the day before it starts to set again. Darkness is here by four.

*

‘Maybe after lunch you’d like to go beach combing together?’ asks Dad hopefully.

‘Only if we find treasure.’ I say non-plussed, stirring my tea with a hot spoon.

Wrapped up in layers of wax coats and fleece wearing a hat with a flap on both respective heads, the two stride up the drive, atop a cliff edge and down to the Playgroup Beach. Here, if you were to walk in to the sea and carry on straight you’d arrive in Norway, tells me my father, god know’s why we talk in as-the-bird-flies hyperbole. Totally unrealistic. I wanted to look for treasure, odd bits that fell off boats or deep-sea-shells that got thrown up by the swells but all I could see were thick mats of seaweed; layering sinews dripping wet and ripped up from the ocean bed, strewn across the sandy beach and now covered in little skippers (sand midges) eating away at the decaying water-fauna. Then lying there on the shore - I was drawn to it - a body like form. Corpulent; whale-ish in demeanour not size and not yet bloated, actually very calm and still like a sleeping policeman. 

One dead seal.

A big grey body and two little paw pads where the tail should be. I asked in that swallowed-shrill-cough I save for times of shock and persistent calm - 

‘Where’s the head?!’ It was severed clean off.

‘Probably cut off by a propeller of a boat. Nice and clean.’ There’s me looking at the dead thing in disbelief and he sees that and walks away.

‘What boat?’

‘Could have been your ferry. About the right timing.’

‘Hey, I was not involved in the murder of this sacred seal.’ I protest and I have an urge to get close up to it, it doesn’t smell yet and it’s fresh just headless, that’s all.

‘Don’t go near it. Sea-knits.’ Dad walks away and so do I. I don’t believe in sea-knits but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. 

‘Merry Christmas, dead Sacred Seal, I’ll pass on your regards to dead Mr. Turkey.’ Another year washes by.