Miss Goody Two Shoes

[originally written Fri 1st July 2005]

Well, here I am at the other end of the week. It’s been brilliant - a great success and... well, a kind of failure. I planned to plot out 33 scenes of Novel II: 5.5 per day. And I managed... er... six. Altogether. In total. But I invented two new words, and word-inventing is very hard work.

Word number one: Happenable. That’s what Novel II is, now. It wasn’t before, but now it is.

Word number two: Anality. That’s what I suffer from. Analness. Analdom. Anification. Anality. I had diarrhoea here two days in a row before I finally decided I was probably eating too much fruit. It’s not even as though I was particularly enjoying it. I mean, I wasn’t not enjoying it... apart from the runny bum, of course. I was not enjoying that. But anyway, the problem with eating less of it was that it would have disrupted my plan. Which was to reduce the big pile of apples, oranges, bananas and grapes by a certain number of pieces each day. It was satisfying, watching it dwindle. At first it had spilled over on the table, but it was gradually forming a smaller and smaller pile in the middle of the roasting tin, which was the biggest thing I could find to put it all in.

I’d make a brilliant Mad Old Lady Living On The Hillside. I think I might do that one day.

So why the fruit? Because I have been Little Miss Goody Two Shoes all week. Apart from not plotting 33 scenes, of course. Anyway, I've run for at least half an hour every single day. Up hills! Down dales! In the rain! On Wednesday I had to run up and down the stairs, because I hadn’t yet hardened enough to brave the weather. There are 12 steps. I ran up and down them 50 times. Which, by pure synchronity, came to 600 up, and 600 down. And guess how many it is up from the bottom of the valley? Yup, 600. Honest. I counted. And weirder still... I didn’t count the steps on the stairs until after I’d run up and down both them and the path into the valley. Uh-huh. I am the queen of anality.

But the thing exercising my brain this evening, as I worship yet again at the altar of John Martyn (The Church With One Bell. Listen to it.), is where do the slugs go? Every evening they slip in under the cottage door and start sniffing about on the lilo. And then... they disappear. I’ve tried following them, but they move sooooo slowly I keep getting distracted by the perfect tesselated-diamond pattern on my left knee. Where the hell did that come from? But anyway, the slugs. Although I don’t know why I’m telling you about slugs when there’s that matter of the frog. Sitting there, happy as you please, gazing up at me from the hallway. Hello frog.

Paddington Bear is my friend. Michael Bond is a genius. And not only did I vastly enjoy reading the P Bear book I found on the shelf, which was given to the cottage-owner the year I was born... I kept hearing all the voices off the telly. “Bear!” says Mr Curry, and manages to inject at least four different syllables, with each on a different note of the scale. I wonder who that actor was?

Update: The diamond pattern, it appears, is from the faux-coconut vinyl matting on the floor. If you kneel on it... I know, because I experimented with the right knee. It makes a great effect. I’m going to show Felix how to do it when he comes with Ally tomorrow morning to pick me up. Yup. They drove me here last weekend, and then drove away. Stranded. Without phone, internet, TV, chocolate... Miss Goody Two Shoes with my vegan lesbian Buddhist honey and apricot pie, and my yoga and freshly squeezed juice and writing and running... aaaaaaaaah. Bliss.