Is there honey still for tea?

Tanvir Naomi BushUncategorized 10 Comments

The writing is going swimmingly ( 13,000 and counting) and the disgraceful lifestyle of hermit thriller-smith suits me rather too well. I forget to get all the way out of my panamas. I don’t brush my hair. I am in my socks for 9/10ths of the day. Occasionally I break out of the house to breathe fresh air and practice walking. Unfortunately I keep forgetting to double check my ‘personal brand’ in the mirror on the way out.

Yesterday I went to buy some maple syrup from the famous health food store on Mill road. I thought I had built up quite a chatty rapport with the woman behind the counter and as I was waiting for my card to do its thing without crumbling into dust I just mentioned something I had heard on the news that morning.
‘The honey,’ I said. ‘British honey did you hear? Its going to be gone by Christmas.’

‘Err..,’ the woman’s smile had faltered slightly. ‘You mean prices are on the rise?’

‘No the bees are dying. I heard on the RADIO that there will be no honey left by Christmas. This is really terrifying. Without bees there is no natural pollination…crops won’t grow. It could be catastrophic!’

The woman’s smile had dripped off her face like organic egg white. Suddenly I saw her myself through her eyes. A short, over-talkative woman without make up in an grotty track suit (or was that a pajama top?) with a old lady hat and strands of hair escaping around her face…. in a health food store….talking about the end of the bees and the end, therefore, of the world.

I looked like an official loon.

‘I not bonkers,’ I hissed to myself as I sulked away down the street scaring a couple of tourists walking the other way.

Today I had work at Citizens Advice Bureau and at least remembered to clean my teeth.

Its still quite novel: Day the Third

Tanvir Naomi BushUncategorized 8 Comments

You may be pleased, appalled or give a tut of ‘well, durrhh’ to learn that the protagonist in my potential fluffy little thriller is a visually impaired pole dancer. Of course being MY creation she is actually doing an MA in dance practice and desperately behind on her thesis on masked dance in the Sub Saharan region (that’s for you Tam and Miranda! I have a funny feeling she might even bump into you a little down the line..) She dances because she needs the money and also enjoys it but being VI can’t get too close to the audience without falling off the stage (hence saving her a tiny smidgen of dignity)

She is smart, tall and has no trouble with her ‘social’ life shall we say for my more delicate readers (so obviously not based on her creator) and things are hotting up for her at the moment as the club’s owner just got murdered and all the addresses for the dancers have been stolen. There is the added problem of a mother whom she presumed dead suddenly popping up again and of course the lean jawed FBI agent…(well its hard not to get clichéd at this daily output…forgive me)

I give you my opening salvo: if you want more or need me to please stop then comment my dears. comment!

The Dying Light

The lights go down and the men hush. She steps forward, left, right and puts her hand out, grasping the pole in resin coated fingers. She waits a beat and then the music hits and the floor lights slash up between her legs, elongating her outline, sparking up the mica dust on her skin and the glitter in her hair. The crowd roar into life; the music thumps and kicks her hips forward. She steps and swings and her legs fly out behind her with her five inch spike heels slicing through the air. In the wings there is a small gasp from a technician called Barry as a man’s toupee is dislodged by the jet stream.

Four minutes later and the last screeching guitar chords crash. The men are on their feet hollering and waving money but the woman disdainfully uncurls herself from the top of the pole, swirls around and down and without even a backward glance stalks off the small overheated stage. It is Barry, resembling a benign Grizzly, who catches her shoulder before she smashes into the loudspeakers.

‘Left a bit’ he hisses handing the woman a long white cane and a torch.

‘Cheers Bazzer’, she says sweat dripping from her hairline and catching the light like jewellery. ‘Good crowd tonight!’

‘It’s the way you do your do my dear Remember the ..

‘Ouch! F**k!’

‘Overhead spot….’

Casilda taps her way out of the throbbing darkness behind the stage and makes her way into the cold, concrete floored corridor and across into the bright mania of the dressing room. Eight other women compete for three large mirrors and pancake makeup, talcum powder and false eyelashes are everywhere. Casilda has glitter in a place no glitter should be and needs to shower so squeezes between the rails of show clothes to the locker room beyond.

The Boy Who Died Twice.

Tanvir Naomi BushUncategorized 2 Comments

A few years ago I had just finished shooting a documentary at an HIVAIDS hospice outside of Lusaka where my father was volunteering as a medical supervisor The hospice was on the grounds of a catholic convent run by a Polish order of nuns and one afternoon Dad and I were asked into tea. In the living room was already ensconced a large bearded Catholic Father from Italy whose massive eyebrows were constantly twitching with chuckles and suppressed laughter. He prodded the nuns to get them to giggle. He even prodded my Dad – he was brave I’ll give him that.

However half way through the visit one of the nuns came in with biscuits looking grave.
‘That is a terrible story you bring with you Father,’ she said
Dad and I turned surprised to the priest who up til then had seemed as jolly as Santa.
His eyebrows settled and sunk. His lips thinned. All laughter was gone and a dark gloom filled the air.
‘Sister, he responded quietly, ‘ I had put it to the back of my mind but you are right. It has been a terrible week’

‘Are you all right Father?’ asked my dad.

The Father it turned out had just come from a funeral in Northern province. The funeral was for a boy who had died twice.

The lad had a form of epilepsy that caused him to fall into deep coma like sleeps after a seizure. Little was known about his condition but people understood that he would take an hour or so and then wake. He was 14 and one day he didn’t wake up. Eventually his mother panicked and took him to the local health centre. There a medic declared him dead. His heart broken mother was taken away to help prepare the funeral and his body was taken to the local morgue.

In the morning when the relatives and the priest came to collect the boys’ body they were horrified to find his head staved in and the body mutilated. Noone could understand why his body had suffered such abuse and then the priest noticed the morgue orderlies were looking terrified and guilty. He demanded to know what had happened and they told him the boy’s body had been possessed by demons.

In fact the poor kid had only been in a deep post seizure sleep and not dead. In the night he had woken in his metal drawer in the morgue and of course panicked and smashed and pounded to be let out. The two orderlies, believing the boy had returned from the dead as a demon, had opened the drawer armed with hammers and sticks and beaten the boy back down. Then they had laid out the body and kept watch until the grieving relatives arrived.

The priest finished his story and in the silence that followed he reached for a biscuit and munched it contemplatively.

‘The morgue attendants were arrested still protesting their innocence…in fact still thinking they were heroes. Dio mio! What could I do? We buried the boy in the grave prepared for him the day before he died.’

And that my dear friend’s, is God’s honest truth. Really. Ask my Dad.

Happy Halloween.

‘Basketcase’: Tanvir Bush (c) 2007

National Novel Writing Month

Tanvir Naomi BushUncategorized 8 Comments

This morning I walked into a fist of bureaucracy kindly supplied by the Department of Work and Pensions. Not only does it ensure I remain in penury for several more months if not longer but it also emotionally knocked me flat on my back. Having been knocked down hard just last week by the non- job situation I decided not to bother getting up for a couple of days.
Self Portrait: Tanvir Bush (c) 2008

’I will just stay down and watch the fists whizz by from the safety of the dirt. I can grovel and whine from here,’ I thought, practically, to myself. ‘I know there will be some kicking whilst I am down but at least I will avoid the constant smacks to heavily dented brain. ‘

I was therefore lying in the dirt in a pool of my own self-pity when a ping ponged on my email. November is National Novel Writing Month and I, being careful to keep on my knees, reached up to my shining computer and subscribed. I have pledged to try and write a 50,000-word essay in four weeks. If you would like to keep tabs on this ridiculous exercise, join in or even sponsor me a bob or two then the links are below, below, below.

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
http://www.nanowrimo.org/
Page details: Tanvir Bush’s Fundraising Page

http://www.firstgiving.com/tanvirbush

I think I might try standing up now. I have to make up some splints for the repetitive strain injuries in December.

This is all very exciting!
Read in Blue: Tanvir Bush(c) 2008

Pink Ball Blues

Tanvir Naomi BushUncategorized 13 Comments

I bought a pink pilates ball. I blew it up and put it in front of the TV. The idea is that when I am watching endless amounts of mind numbing, soul zapping ,flab spreading, wibbling, rubbish; honing the shortness of my attention span and ensuring all my ethics, polices and global current affairs come filtered through the glib, greedy, greasy saturated fat of pressurised media methodology…any way when I am doing that..I get to work my core muscles at the same time.


I will be an empty shell but the shell will have good abs.

However…..what I actually do best on that Pilates ball is eat vast quantities of stir-fry bouncing idly and whooping at the Daily Show.

I can eat twice my body weight because the bouncing seems to ease the food down.


Eventually I will burst the bloody thing…..ho hum…
.

Uphill

Tanvir Naomi BushUncategorized 12 Comments

Yesterday I found myself striding over a grassy ridge with the wind in my hair and the sweat trickling down my back. I was finding it all a bit hard going as every time I paused for breath I was overtaken by corduroy clad pensioners. It was slightly disturbing.
‘You’re a bit red,’ said a woman speeding past whose hair retained shape even as the wind gusted past scattering crows and low flying squirrels. She was perfectly cool, her dentures and mascara flawless.
‘What vitamins have this lot been taking?’ I puffed irritably to my aunt. This was after all her regular hiking group and she should be privy to their secret stash. She just smiled sagely and swinging her specialised bag of super nuts and raisins, deftly leapt over the next stile and disappeared into the woods beyond.

We did over 11 miles all in all up what she called ‘gentle slopes’ and what I called ‘bloody hills’ over Royston Heath. The landscape changed mile by mile from empty farm land with golden stubble fields and chalky mud to thick woods opening up to quaint villages followed by golf courses and heath land. The sun shone, then flagged then shone again and the wind blew keenly.

At the lunch break I surreptitiously massaged my knees and put blister packs on whilst the oldies caroused, clinking pints and talking loudly about whose funeral they had last attended. I tried to feign fresh youth by flicking my hair nonchalantly and cricked my neck. By the time we got to the tea and cake bit I was walking like Frankenstein. The rest of ‘em could have gone on till supper. Bloody pensioners. .

Actually it was lovely to get out and just stride out for miles. I have been worrying so much about things lately and I needed to clear my head and get perspective and it seemed to have worked. I did not get the job but I can now tell you that I was a strong candidate (it was a producer position for BBC Africa Service) but they were looking for an anchor and the bloke who got it had 17 years experience. Not a lot I can do about it

At midnight last night I lit candles for Teelo (and the cat)..already gone a year. I toasted all of his friends and family and mine and gave Teelo a shot of gin for the journey as I didn’t have a stone to lay on his grave. Then I slept and dreamt that I had a story that I needed to give as a gift. It was written in ink on yellow parchment. I know it is here somewhere.

Not particularly mellow fruitfulness.

Tanvir Naomi BushUncategorized 3 Comments

The world is in a very bad way. Proof? OK. Waitrose, the Glamorous Supermarket, has a new advert out. Carefully lit portrait shots of humps of bloody meat turning into Sunday roasts, fireplaces and hot pototoes, squally rain and cosy kitchen sponge cake makers… the famous Mersey side poet Roger McGough pottles on about seasons of mellow fruitfulness..only the riff, that sweet music mandolining and wheeling in the background is the Stranglers ‘Golden Brown’ which I believe is a sonnet to heroin.
Hmmm.. What pray is the subliminal marketing message in that one then, mate?

DON’T’ ask about the BLOODY job!!! Still haven’t heard. However to distract myself I did overtime at CAB and I was given a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates by two Lithuanians hoping to set themselves up in the burger business. It’s a long story, all legal and life is sometimes most marvellous when we least expect.

Have a good weekend y’all! And just so that The Man cannot steal the sumptuous, extraordinarily beautiful poetry of John Keats to sell battery farmed chicken and spotted dick (tis a pudding..honestly ed) here is ‘To Autumn’ for you to enjoy in Technicolor (that’s TechnicolOR to you New York cuz) In the second verse Keats too turns to poppies… perhaps some poor media executive at Watirose was actually being clever?! Nahh..surely not…

John Keats: To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
II
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

III
Where are the songs of Spring?
Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
-While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

getting out of my head.

Tanvir Naomi BushUncategorized 5 Comments

I apologise. Have been out of sorts this week..scratchy and irritable due to the fact I have been slightly more blinded (complications happen…they pass) and I am still waiting to hear on the job from 17th . As I didn’t hear on Friday I suspect I shall be getting the ‘Dear John’ letter next week. Ho hum.

I couldn’t concentrate and my blogging kept descending into ranting. It had started low key along the lines..If this blog were a room I’d be trashing it. If this blog were a cage I’d be pacing up and down up and down
It gradually got more disturbed. …. If this blog were a photocopier I’d be the empty toner cartridge. If this blog were Georgia I’d be a Russian road block. If this blog was the new Zimbabwean power share I would be the paper it wasn’t worth writing on. (Errr? Ed.) If this blog were a swan it would be the flu under its pin feathers.. etc. I thought it best to ‘select all’ and delete’.

Today though, my eyes released me and the light was lovely, golden and warm. High skies of blue. I decided with deference to the lovely Gold Puppy person to take myself off on a long walk and chill the hell …out! (Do check out her blog and especially her gorgeous photos. This one’s for you!) I walked for nearly 4 hours and am so knackered I still can’t think properly!

If this blog were a book it would be missing the last two chapters.

Cambridge: River Cam. Oct o8. Tanvir (c)

Pole…ish.

Tanvir Naomi BushUncategorized 9 Comments

The woman on the make shift podium has got stuck half way through her ‘body ripple’. She has over intellectualised the move and stuck out her bum AND her breasts at the same time so setting up what should have been Newton’s second, (“F = ma: the net force on an object is equal to the mass of the object multiplied by its acceleration”) but now seems to be his third equation. (Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” )

This is potentially painful, certainly hysterically funny and obviously embarrassing. She squeals and a tall blonde, lithe, lady in pink micro shorts leaps up and smacks her hard on the rump so precipitating the rest of the ripple and reversing the potential inertia.

Now why am I applying Newtonian physics (inappropriately – apologies to the physicists out there) to pole-dancing is a good question. Why I am standing in shorts and bare feet in a pole-dancing workshop on a Sunday afternoon at all is potentially a good question too.

Pole dancing is associated with sex. It comes pumped up and platinum-blonded from the sleaze pits of strip clubs. It involves gyrating around a sweaty, central pole in such a manner as to offer up various bits of body at different angles to whomever. It is not cute. It is lewd, crude and not in any way bashful. It is, when push comes to shove, a blatant parody of the notion of romantic love.
However, recently it has been hijacked by the endless pursuers of the body perfect as a dynamic method of body shaping. It combines simple dance moves with gymnastics requiring strength and agility. Thus we can neutralise its nasty odour of dank bars and prostitution by claiming it as ‘sport’.

As an educated, well brought up, culturally sensitive and gender aware woman, going to a pole dancing class for ‘fitness ‘ is rather like a vegan working in a abattoir for the overtime. There is conflict in my heart as well there should be but I did see ‘Flashdance’ when I was an impressionable teenager so there is no escape.

The room is chilly and bright and two poles have been stuck into the two make shift podiums There are nine women grouped in the darkest corner all looking sheepish and uncomfortable so the scene, what with the rough scaffolding, rather resembles a public hanging. The two instructors clap hands and start chivvying us out of our middle class angst. Daisy the one in pink shorts is very posh. She is a dance teacher who works as a pole-dancer at the weekends. ‘Its really rather jolly fun’ apparently. Tina is blonde, in charge and, surprising all of us, rather plumb. It is with immense relief that we watch her initiating the moves. She is entirely relaxed and graceful even with her white belly foaming over her trouser tops. We all loosen up a bit in out raggedy shorts and t-shirts.

We begin with a group stretch that morphs into the infamous ‘body ripple’, the base of any pole dancers craft. None of us can do it and walk at the same time. The woman next to me gets the giggles and falls over. Then there is the ‘walking and touching yourself’ exercise that would make me howl with laughter only I catch myself in the mirror and am struck dumb with mortification.

A mousy woman next to me tells me that she took belly-dancing classes. In order to give the dancers the right facial expression of seductive, winkyness, her teacher told them to imagine someone they really fancied in the audience.
Good god! I thought. If I saw someone I really liked watching me in a pole-dancing club I would be tragically relieved of my liking for them. I would throw my bra shrieking ‘what the hell are you doing in a strip club?!’’

But then we get to play on the poles.

I can only compare it to getting into a playground and finding the climbing frame free. (both as a child and occasionally as a drunken adult). We learn to do the ‘Fire girl’, step, step, whip around and around wheee… and the ‘Catherine Wheel’ step, step and whip around but this time leg follows at 90% (don’t worry if you can’t picture it..believe me its better that way.) There is the ‘under arm slip’, the ‘double knee lift with bum slap’ and the ‘back bend’; and all the time that ‘body ripple’ proving we are all very silly after all. We put them all together and I am having so much fun that when time is called by Daisy I am devastated.

The teachers spend a couple of minutes showing us a few advanced moves that involve being upside down and ..well..lets say you should pay for it if you want to see it.. the woman has trained hard enough, called ’the Black Widow and ‘the Eagle’. I ask if there is a move called ‘the Beaver’ but quietly as I am impressed by their agility and don’t want to ruin the moment with post feminist irony.

I have bruises everywhere and a strange feeling of adrenalin tinged with wickedness as I leave. It is not an unpleasant sensation. Someone has written a letter to the gym saying that the pole dancing has lowered the tone. I do a quick under arm slip and double knee lift with bum slap and leg it for the door.