Mercurial

For as long as I remember my captor has kept me babified in a pastel dungeon. I want to break free, and try at every opportunity, but I am so very small and this monster has me trapped. Every day is humiliation.

I attempt to reason with my incarcerator through the baby radio. ‘Ga ga!’ I shout, to get her attention.

The voice of evil crackles over the monitor, ‘Bismillah, you’re awake!’

‘Let me go!’ I wail, rattling the bars of my cot.

‘You’re not going anywhere, little Bis, you’re my best friend.’

I ignore her saccharine words and heave myself up. I’ve just gotta get right outta here. Maybe I am becoming stronger, but certainly I am more desperate because in a flash I successfully scale the bars of my precarious prison and throw myself over that perimeter fence. Magnifico!

Hearing me fall heavily to the ground through the confounded radio monitor, in struts the witch queen. Killer heels confront me, too close to my tiny toes for comfort.

‘Don’t stop me now,’ I implore.

‘You’re not going anywhere, little cutie, haven’t you heard of this crazy little thing called love?’ She picks me up and squeezes me so hard I feel my internal organs rupturing. ‘Anyway, the show must go on,’ she tells me, and carries me into the living room.

There is a party of sorts going on and I know what’s expected of me. How long have I lived under pressure to perform? I look on at my jailer’s associates; whiskered trolls, painted hags and Scaramouch - Beelzebub’s bedfellows; and all staring at me. At one’s kindest, you’d call them Bohemian. Rhapodising, one could say they were outré or exotic, but they are grotesques the lot of them.

Compared with these gargoyles my captor is just a fat-bottomed girl. She does the unforgivable and hands me to her fetid aunt who dandles me, and, insult to injury, blows raspberries on my stomach. The stench of sherry, sweat and stale cigarettes congeals in the saliva she coats me in.

‘Who wants to live forever?’ I whisper, as I deliver a sucker punch to the dragon’s kidneys. She frowns, shakes her head, then laughs, and hands me to the braying jelly of a man next to her.

Before he can so much as “kootchie-kootchie-koo” me, I poke him in that deadly point in the jugular. ‘Another one bites the dust.’ He is momentarily wrong-footed but I smile and babble for him. ‘Goo-goo.’

‘We are the champions,’ I tell my clever hands and feet, as it becomes a bicycle race, and I am cartwheeled around my keeper’s cronies faster and faster. I deal out my time-delayed death blows until I have full-circled and am back with the Bitch.

I fumble to attack but I am thwarted, she holds me too tightly and her wicked eyes full of sentimentality. ‘Bismillah, my little rascal, let’s put you in your playpen.’

I am re-imprisoned. There I sit, a caged animal for all to leer at. Defeated again, but I note the building blocks in my enclosure might make effective missiles if propelled at a decent velocity. What I really need is gunpowder, gelatine, dynamite with a laser beam but I work with what I have.

‘Mama, ooo!’ I shout before luzzing a block at the wicked Queen.

A Trio of Transportative Songs

Dancing Queen. In the nightclub, young and sweet, only seventeen, certainly underage. No ripped jeans, no DMs, boys having to wear ties. How antiquated, how rigid, how not us, especially as we were all about rips and DMs at the time. But such was our quasi-religious fervour for dancing, we would have put buckets on our heads and spoons in our ears if the dress code dictated.

I had a friend’s ID because I looked about twelve but once we’d got through the stress of getting in our fun begun. We swayed in spiritual abandon, dancing queens, girls and boys alike. By day we were the scrattiest, awkwardest, spottiest, angriest still-children, but here, high-heeled and hemmed, we were gods.

Groove is in the Heart is my happy anthem and I’ve blogged about it before. First discovered on MTV, by a group of us in Sindy Livwood’s sitting room. Dancing around, a guilty pleasure, because it was not Rock, Alternative or Indie, and we were Individuals.

A year or two later, and less pretentious, so no guilt attached, every party had to include this. It is the song that would make me excuse myself from any conversation, however rude that might be, or however attractive the company might be, to – get – to – the – dancefloor.

I remember dancing with my brother at his wedding, and there realising my mum dances exactly like me (She’s got the moves!) At my own wedding, of course, with my gorgeous man. And most recently at a zoom disco, dancing alone but together, connected through little squares, with my old Brighton housemates. Groove is in my heart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etviGf1uWlg

Stranger on the Shore. First heard on an early 80s television programme that created videos for old classics. I remember this song had a lonely dog on a beach. I recall floods of tears from the whole family, sad dogs and sad music! After that we would always cry at this song. My Dad maintained the clarinet was the saddest instrument. I played it for a while but never got that much soul out of my instrument, and the emotion it created was nothing more profound than frustration for me and irritation for others.

Fittingly, we had this song at my Dad’s funeral, in case, for any reason, we needed more emotion!

Recently though, it has been turned on its head, purloined by Radio 4 as the theme tune to That Mitchell and Web Sound. As much as I enjoy the show, it feels most inappropriate.

I found the video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE_1v2gUgUI