Tumblr has been an adequate interim solution, but I’ve moved on - as threatened - to a grown-up blog.
I hope you’ll come too; to keep me company and delight me with your perceptiveness, wisdom and friendship.
Imogene xxx
Fell asleep to an owl crying like an audible beacon through inky-black silence. Woke up at 2.15am to a nauseating stench violating the stillness. Sat up straight in bed, switched on the bedside lamp for fear of treading in a pool of cat wee or a dismembered rotting creature and followed my nose into the hall, into the bathroom, back into the hall, through to the kitchen. Searched for telltale signs in the corner where the matriarch once succumbed to a bout of gastric flu. It was winter, the night was cold and the tiles warm and well… you can imagine the rest. Lost the scent and returned to the bedroom, where it accosted me again like an olfactory furnace. Scoured every square centimetre of the floor and under the bed for evidence, prodded the LDR awake purely out of spite, because I knew he’d say “I can’t smell anything. Turn off the light and go back to sleep.” He did. Got back into bed, curled up, nested head into pillow and fell asleep almost immediately. Woke up in the same position to cold crisp clean air. Wondered whether I’d imagined the whole thing.
I’ll be sharing a bed with Maria the weekend after next. I’m a popular bedfellow with most of the people I’ve shared with: they invariably report that I’m a neat sleeper, requiring little space. I don’t move a lot, they say, and never snore. I sometimes talk in my sleep, in a language no one understands. It’s fortunate that I sleep small: the LDR sleeps big. He has a tendency to kick and hit out without warning. That’s why the boy cat, not usually such a quick learner, sleeps between my feet rather than his. I instinctively sleep with my face turned away.
I miss my old blog, and the blog before that. I wish I’d stayed at Squarespace and hadn’t deleted them. There’s a link to a website in a post from last December that I need and can’t locate. (I might have stumbled across it a couple of months ago, but couldn’t figure out how to unzip it. Oh, and my C drive is showing up red and I think my laptop is on its last legs - this is unfortunate, because I don’t have the spare funds for a new one right now. It might turn me into someone who goes into an office to work, which would mean I’d have to find the self-discipline to work like a normal person or spend evenings and early mornings there, which I don’t fancy.) It’s got me wondering, not for the first time, why I’m so careless with my own words. I cherish and collect others’ words and treat my own like yesterday’s news (which of course they are). So just know that if I read you, I do so because I find enjoyment and wisdom in yours. Mine don’t count.
Firstly, I’d like to thank Swiss TV news for not featuring him last night: yesterday’s lead story was on next year’s health insurance premium hike, an autumn perennial. And then there were natural catastrophes in far-flung places to leaven the mood a bit.
Secondly, I think this is the lamest piece I’ve ever written. Truly. I mean it.
The Facts, and you’ll already know about this unless you live beneath a giant boulder in the middle of the deepest depth of the Mariana Trench: Roman Polanski, a film director with dual French-Polish nationality, is enjoying the hospitality of the Swiss prison system. Or, if we’re going to be pedantic, he’s enjoying the hospitality of the prison system of canton Zürich, where he is being held at the behest of the Swiss federal government, which is acting on a specific request by US authorities. Switzerland, like other countries such as the UK, has an extradition convention with the US. This, somehow, did not stop Mr Polanski from purchasing a chalet in Gstaad, alpine playground of the rich and famous. It’s not so strange; the last time I had to produce my passport when crossing the Swiss border is at least 15 years back. Switzerland’s entrance into the Schengen accord has reduced border controls even further.
Thirty-two years ago, Mr Polanski was a film director at his career zenith who took the casting couch (or was it a Casting Jacuzzi?) thing too literally. He jumped bail in the US in 1978, shortly before being sentenced for raping a 13-year-old girl. He has since lived in France and become a French citizen. He was safe there: France, like Switzerland, does not extradite its own citizens.
He had the good sense not to return to the US; not even in 2003 when he won an Oscar for The Pianist, a cinematic holocaust masterpiece that leaves no one who has seen it cold. I haven’t seen it, but the LDR has. (The LDR and RP have something in common: their wives were born on the same day.) The LDR watched it late one winter’s evening when the rest of the house was asleep. He later wished he hadn’t. “The onslaught of terror towards the end took me completely unaware,” he said. “It was a solid mass of atrocities that held me mesmerised, like a rabbit caught in headlights.” Staring into the abyss was made all the more terrifying by the historic veracity of the event. The Pianist gave him nightmares.
(We’re talking about my husband, the man in whom I confide my dreams. “Tell me yours,” I plead. “I never dream,” he replies.)
Just think: Roman Polanski stared his demons in the face by making a movie about them. This was exposure therapy by proxy, and the victim sat in the directing seat, controlling the full measure of the horror that unfolded on screen.
He made a mistake: he was invited to a film festival in Zürich to receive a prize for his life’s work, announced his arrival and was arrested at the airport. We know from the media camped outside the prison they think he is being held in that RP has to wear a tracksuit and is allowed to spend SFR 5 per day on sweeties phone calls. It has been reported that his fellow inmates and the prison officers are being kind to him. I’m sure the latter aren’t being paid to be unkind to him; merely to keep him from walking away.
Polanski, now 76 years old, poses no threat to society. Nevertheless, his chance of getting bail is minimal considering the precedent he has set on that score. In his heyday, he appears to have had a taste for young girls: it’s said he got his paws on the teenage Nastassja Kinski (I revered her – she was five years older than me and so beautiful I was riddled with envy), daughter of Klaus, acting genius who was madder than an entire mad hatter convention.
The apologists see RP as a genius and cultural treasure; an icon who must be judged by different standards than a mere mortal. A famous US TV celebrity has been quoted as saying it wasn’t ‘rape-rape’ (which makes it OK, then). The opposing camp sees him as ‘pure evil’ (a vilification that seems to enjoy the same hyperbolic, inflationary misuse in the media as the term “bereft” for “upset”); a paedophile who should rot in jail.
Let’s have a little perspective, please. The truth lies, as ever, somewhere in between.
So he drugged her instead of holding a knife to her throat or beating her into submission. It still sounds like coercion to me. And it’s on record that he asked her permission to perform some or all of the acts (“would you mind if I ass-raped you, sweetie?”) to which she replied “No!” Maybe it was a slurred ‘nnngg’. Maybe she shook her head. It was still a ‘no’. More importantly: she was underage. RP, unfortunately, seemed to belong, at least back then, to that category of stupendously thick male who thinks females mean ‘yes’ when they say ‘no’. And let’s not forget: he pleaded guilty to all of this. Maybe he thought fucking a young girl would make him immortal. Maybe it was just about power. Maybe he was out of his mind. He still did it.
I’m trying to get a little into his head, and I’m doing this solely for my own amusement, but, believe me, it’s been one of those weeks and this enters the ledger under the title ‘light relief’. The tragedy of his personal history stuns. How can one man be stricken by such a cluster of calamity? The man who as a child lost his mother to a violent death, escaped the Krakow ghetto, witnessed the depths of cruelty humanity can plumb and then became a feted film director and celebrity. His first wife was carrying his unborn child when she was stabbed to death. His was a life that swept in a trajectory from helplessness to the pinnacle of an industry that practices idolatry like no other. He must have felt worshipped. He must have felt omnipotent. None of this excuses his actions. I don’t understand why a 43-year-old man would find a 13-year-old (even one who looked like an 18-year-old) an object of sexual desire. Maybe he dissociated while he raped her – it wouldn’t be such a far-fetched notion given his tragic history. What does strike me is that he chose to perpetrate the helplessness he felt as a child on a child. It’s a classic case of victim-as-perpetrator syndrome.
Apparently the judge who was due to sentence him, now deceased, was a sandwich short of a picnic. But then Mr Polanski would know all about the corruptive effect of power.
He could have wrapped the whole thing up years – decades – ago. Made amends. Unnecessarily prolonging his victim’s suffering like this makes him a bastard in my book.
Pear rust [Gymnosporangium sabinae]. All of my favourite colours in a fungal disease.
I was going to tell you about my attitude towards footwear. The LDR wears expensive running shoes. He needs the most expensive running shoes known to mankind because he needs support: he is, after all, an LDR. With the physique of a decathlete. And he runs a lot – he’s the man who can outrun his own… no… that would be unkind. I do not begrudge him the shoes - running makes him happy. He easily gets through four to five pairs a year. The situation in our household is that the LDR’s shoe expenditure, spread across a calendar year, mostly exceeds mine. Alas, this does not steer me towards frugality. I have to outdo him; if I don’t, it has not been a good year. He does not encourage me not to outspend him. Because the ‘less is more’ mantra is second nature to me, I do my very best to spend more on less. Shoe shopping is usually planned and rarely spontaneous. It’s an occasion. I have never been the woman who feels the Guilt or a compulsion to sneak a new purchase out of the repository of dirty dingy secrets at the shameful back of the wardrobe and pass it off as a ‘bargain’ or “These old things! Tsk! I’ve had them for years, darling.” (Besides the fact that we never address one another other as ‘darling’ – now that would set the alarm bells jangling.)
Therefore, my attitude towards footwear is simple: the sensualista likes well-made shoes that are pleasing to the eye and touch. They do not come cheap. They should not come cheap; quality has its price. (And I’m from Yorkshire, right? There’s always a catch in ‘owt for nowt’, be it merely the bad karma.) They do not necessarily come exorbitantly expensive, either. They are invariably Italian: it just happens that way, because Italians make the best shoes.
Anyway, I was going to show you this image. It was in the Friday supplement (called, surprisingly, ‘Friday’) of a commuter freesheet daughter picks up at the railway station most days. It’s called ‘20Minuten’, presumably because that’s how long it takes you to read it. I would call it ‘Siebeneinhalb Minuten’.
This is – would you believe? – an advert for a chain of shoe shops called ‘Max’. I pass two branches of Max on a regular basis. They are emporia I have never felt drawn into. Max shoes could best be described as knock-offs of knock-offs. I am utterly indifferent to them and I suspect many people are, hence the need for this style of advertising, which makes me yearn for a stringent bondage session or at least the attentiveness and skill of ‘Mr Chang Hong Kong Tailor – in town for two days only’, but not those shoes. The shoes are meh, which is why you aren’t being encouraged to look at them. The man who buys them is the man who walks on women (old Chinese proverb). As for the message: If I were of Chinese (or Japanese?) ethnicity, I’d be a bit pissed off. What’s the link anyway? Is it an allusion to foot-binding, or an homage to her sister who sews them together in a Shenzhen sweatshop? If I were a bondage master - OK, mistress - I’d be very pissed off (and you wouldn’t want to cross me if I were a pissed-off bondage mistress). Having had the good fortune to experience the bliss of being put into a karada body weave by someone who knew what they were doing, I have to tell you: that is a piss poor example of the art of rope.
The bottom line: Max shoes have sturdy laces and are good for people who don’t know their kink from their konk and would rather spend money on holidays than shoes. I, as I’m sure you’ve deduced, am an adherent of a contrasting doctrine. I’m the Russian Orthodox to their naughty Lutheran. Confession: I don’t really like holidays… I don’t like the upheaval. I’ve been as far away from here as you can get on this planet. It was lovely, but it’s been done. I like going away for a couple of days and then coming home again. I also like pretty shoes, intelligent insults and excellent advertising. Below is a celebration of the antithesis by Jung von Matt, an agency that holds in its portfolio the likes of Mercedes-Benz and Evian.
Addendum 21.9.09: Read advertising insider Copyranter’s take and some background info. Thank you to Copyranter and Tess.
I have a diagnosis. It wasn’t the one I was expecting – Coeliac disease cannot be detected in the blood in the absence of around six weeks’ worth of gluten in the diet. There is NO WAY I am reintroducing wheat products for six weeks to obtain a positive test result (so I already know, don’t I?) Bread, pastry, pasta are POISON, although I do indulge once in a while to inflict the short sharp shock that gets me back on the straight and narrow. So: I might be wheat intolerant. I may have Coeliac disease. The symptoms point strongly to one or the other (both?). I’m not sure about the spelt - I can eat it in small amounts. It’s bloody confusing. The GP doesn’t recommend a biopsy, which is the only diagnostic test that delivers positives rather than indicators. His more pressing concern - and now mine - is that my iron levels are shockingly low (this could be a symptom of Coeliac disease – isn’t medicine bloody baffling? Why anyone would want to study the human body and all its brittle, gory and squishy bits and pathways flowing with icky fluids I don’t know). Colour me surprised. Being the moderate pessimist I am, I dialled the phone number and braced myself for a litany of vitamin and mineral deficiencies (nope) and possibly something moderately scary like a worn-out liver (unlikely, but sod’s law!), high cholesterol (nope). Or possibly something leading to the diagnosis of a syndrome so rare they’d name it after the eminent specialist who would sweep in, gaggle of medical students in tow, prod at me and confer with his colleagues in hushed tones (silly woman!).
My iron levels are almost as low as they were in my second pregnancy, when I ran out of breath just waddling up the cobbled street leading from the main road to the house. It isn’t steep. You’re eight months pregnant - it must be those extra 12kgs, I thought. Errr… no. Gynae got in a bit of a flap – my c-section was scheduled for two weeks thence and my iron levels needed to come up, fast. Post partum, the nice midwife recommended I top up the supplements with pears soaked in red wine. That seemed like a bit of a faff so I just quaffed the wine. (This was nine years ago so my memory’s a little hazy.) It must have worked.
I honestly didn’t expect to be a candidate for this. I bleed regularly but not copiously, I eat red meat. Well done, medium, rare and raw. My diet doesn’t lack iron. But… everything makes sense now! Hurrah! Now I know why I’ve been fishing too many hairs out of the plughole in the shower… at a ratio of roughly 90% brunette to 10% blond (you’re getting old, I rationalised). I have a feasible explanation for why I’ve been taking until lunchtime to creak into gear (you’re lazy; you don’t know when you’ve got it good) and going for clandestine little naps in the afternoon (you’re pathetic).
I wouldn’t have been diagnosed if I hadn’t gone to the doctor to flash a mole (“you should have it checked out,” my mother said; “it’s nothing,” my husband said; “is there anything else?” the GP asked). I’ve learned to see doctors as Bearers of Bad News. The four-year-old who saw her mother become ill, decline and die within six months wasn’t too impressed by the accumulated knowledge and skills of the medical profession. The daughter of the hypochondriac has always had this niggling fear that it might be catching should she cross the GP’s threshold. That said, I am reasonably good: the lady bits get checked out once yearly by the gynae. And I don’t have a high-maintenance, high-performance bod like the LDR, who gets his bloods ‘done’ once a year.
Maybe it’s time I grew up.
