Simeon's Food Diary

Simeon the Seagull was a bit on the lardy side. He was getting a bit out of breath after taking off, and he thought he caught his girlfriend looking at him with disgust one time, when she thought he couldn't see her. He wasn't sure though; her eyes were always like that because she was a seagull.

Simeon went to see a dietician. The dietician asked him to compile a list of everything he eats on a typical day, so she could get some idea of where he was going wrong. Like a food diary, she said. 

Simeon came back the next day with his list. This is what it said:

Breakfast:

Half digested kebab from a puddle of sick

2 cold McNuggets

Half a dead jellyfish (shared with Gary)

Elevenses:

1 soggy BLT sandwich, found in a bin

Lunch:

Leftover fish and chips (with ketchup), found under a bench

Half a burger (stole it from Brett) 

1 doughnut (snatched from a girl's hand)

1 dropped icecream

Afternoon Snack:

A cocktail sausage from a nice old lady's picnic

Dinner:

Cold pizza cheese from the inside of a box

A few strips of donner

Another dropped icecream

Fish guts on the beach

Half a dead pigeon (fought over it with Mitch and Nige)

Midnight Feast:

Cheesy chips

Kebab

Pizza

More sick

More Kebab

Few more chips.

Well, said the dietician.

Well? said Simeon.

Well, she said, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with your diet, anyway. Maybe try some more exercise?

Twenty-ninth of the Sixth

Today was my twenty-first birthday. I wore a long black dress and a denim jacket that was my mother's from the Eighties, and a silver and moonstone ring my father bought me. We went to Brighton and sat on the smooth pebbles in the warm-cold sea-breeze, eating ice-creams in the watery sunlight. For lunch we'd had sushi and plum wine. We got soaked by choppy waves, and wasted 2p coins in the arcade, and gazed at jewellery in shop windows and later a seagull snatched a doughnut from me, in the split second pause between hand and mouth. I felt its wing brush my cheek. Later we lay on the damp grass by the pavillion, and the sky was forget-me-not blue. For dinner we ate cheese, salami and bread and kettle chips, and the salty wind blew my hair into my mouth, and whipped bruisy clouds about over the grey-green sea. In the car I slept and dreamt. Back home we had champagne, strawberries, and chocolate cake.

It was my mother's birthday too. Thirty-four years ago, on her twenty-first birthday, she wore a pink mohair cardigan and a yellow skirt. Her parents bought her a bicycle. Her beau took her to dinner and then to the pub, where she drank four Irish coffees and felt 'sick as a dog'. Then they went to the carnival. She didn't give her parents much of a thought, she admitted.

I wonder if she thought about me, back then. A future daughter conjured from nothing more than herself and some person she hadn't even met yet, who thirteen years later would be born on the very same day. Of course she didn't. But for the last twenty-one years she's thought of me every single day. I couldn't ask for more than that. I am sorry, of course, that she had to give half her birthday away to me, every year. She deserves a whole birthday. Or two like the Queen. Or three hundred and sixty five. But I must say I am grateful, and glad, to have shared twenty-one birthdays with someone who I love above all else.

Ink (part 2)

Marla was let down by the tips of her fingers.

This was because her pen began to leak.

When Marla started drawing, she was submerged in a deep trance, a dream-like, automated state in which she focussed so much on what she was doing that she had little awareness of the world around her. By the time she noticed that her pen was leaking, she already had black ink all over the fingertips on her left hand. It had run down her index finger almost to the second knuckle. The blackness was startling. She was surprised she hadn't noticed before, and relieved it hadn't ruined her drawing which, almost halfway through, was still as pristine as she'd set out for it to be.

She scrubbed her hand in the sink. She scrubbed it in the shower. She scrubbed it with nail polish remover, with tooth paste, with bleach. It wouldn't come off. It only faded a little. She gave up.

When she turned up at work the next morning, her manager noticed it immediately. What the hell is that, he asked her. Ink, she told him. Why haven't you washed it off, he asked her. I tried, she told him. You should have tried harder. You can't work here, not with filthy hands like that, he told her. Marla took a deep breath to hold back what she'd have liked to say. The breath wasn't deep enough. Fine, she said. I don't want to work here anyway, she said.

And she walked out. And on her way out she snatched a £90 bottle of wine from the wine rack and didn't look back. No one followed her because they hadn't paid her monthly wage yet, and that was worth a lot more than £90. Not that they cared about money.

Marla cared about money. She cared very much. She marched home angrily, furiously. Furious with herself. Furious with the restaurant. Furious with everything. And when she got home, she closed her eyes and screamed at the top of her lungs with fury. 

And then she brought the bottle of wine high up above her head, and furiously down again against the faux-granite counter.

And then there was a deafening smash followed by a deafening silence, and all that was left in her hand was the bottle neck, with its brand new jagged edge shining wet and red.

And she opened her eyes in shock, and everything went suddenly from black to red, as though her eyes were veiled in blood. She blinked. The red didn't go away. It was splattered everywhere. What once was white was now stained a bloody, blackberry red. She froze. She blinked again. And then she screamed in horror.

Her drawing. Her drawing which once was fine black lines against blinding, snowy white was now tarnished, soiled, tainted. Ruined. The city was awash with a sea of red. As though it was aflame. The black ink smudged and merged. Red-black ran down in rivulets. Rivers of blood.

Marla fell to her knees, and winced as she felt the shards of glinting green bite in deep.

That night Marla was strangely calm. She walked steadily, and with purpose, though her knees pained her greatly. 

When she reached the restaurant she walked straight through to the back. No one seemed to notice her; they were too absorbed in their extravagantly priced dining experience. The chefs were smoking outside the back door; no one saw her enter the kitchen. 

From her bag she pulled a big pot of black ink.

And she poured it in every pot. In every pan. Over every dish in the kitchen. Until all the food in the kitchen was poisoned pitch black. And then she walked straight out again.

This time she didn't take any wine.

And she went home smiling madly, to finish her wine-stained painting. 

The next day the police turned up at her flat to arrest her. They needed no evidence.

All the evidence they could want was all over her fingertips.

Ink (part 1)

Marla was a waitress. She worked at an upmarket restaurant, the kind she could never afford to eat at in a million years. Not on a waitressing wage. And not that she'd want to. The restaurant served the kind of food there was little point in eating, because its key functions were to look aesthetically pleasing and to cost a great deal of money. Gold-flake flecked caviar sprinkled over a single poached wrens egg, perched on a slice of rare-breed calf tongue. She hated the customers because the kind of people who ate there were the kind of people who only ate there to impress others and in her experience, the kind of people who could throw away that kind of money on that kind of food to impress others were awful people, and the people who were impressed by it were the most awful of all. They were rude, cold hearted people who did not acknowledge her as a human being. The people she worked for were not much better.

Marla was also an artist. She was working on a large ink drawing. It was enormous; it took up an entire wall in her albeit small apartment. She was drawing a cross section of a city using an old fashioned fountain pen and a pot of black ink. The skyscrapers were as tall as she was, and she was detailing every room and every object and every person inside every building. She had completed around a third of it, after over two weeks of working on it during every spare second.

It was long and tiring work, and progressed very very slowly because she was being very very careful.   She was drawing the hair on people's heads and the rats in the cross-sectioned sewers, and the hair on their heads, too. She was hoping to exhibit it at a gallery in the city, and she was hoping someone would buy it for a lot of money. She needed to pay off the hefty art school fees she'd amassed during her degree. This was why she was waitressing at a restaurant she hated serving food she hated to people she hated. The only thing she loved was this drawing. Estranged family and work-widowed friends aside, it was the only thing she cared about. Every day she considered quitting her job, but without it she couldn't afford rent or to feed herself, let alone paying back her debts. And jobs were so hard to come by that she clung on to it for dear life, despite how much she despised it. She clung on by the tips of her fingers, wanting to let go but trying desperately not to.

It would be the tips of her fingers, however, that would betray her...

George

It is the worst type of humiliation.
What I am subjected to.
I, who am older than time.
I, who have lived on this Island for
longer than they have,
since before they were born.
They who walk so hastily on
two thin limbs, cast in
flesh flimsier than the
petals of a
flower.
I am as slow, as sure,
as sturdy as a stone.
I am older than time.

And yet,
they control me.
Because I am old,
and slow, and alone.
How can I be such a
novelty, when I am as
old as a stone?
Yes they feed me,
bring me water to
drink, but did I not
survive without them,
since the dawn of time?
And what's so wrong
with being alone?
(Why won't they leave me
alone?)

They bring me
female after female.
They coax me into it,
they cajole me into it,
to no avail, of course,
and the females mock me.
They all mock me.
Too old, they say.
Too tired. Impotent.
Ignorant youths!
To them, there is
nothing more important than
sex. Their lives revolve
around that primal urge.
That rush of blood
to the head.

All means nothing,
to me.
I am as still as a
stone.
I am older than the
sea.
I need
nothing,
and
no one.

And I don't
care,
if my seed is not
sown.
I don't care
if there is
never another
George because
that is a foolish,
human thing
to want for.

I older than the
trees and
carved
from
stone.

I am the
Last Giant Tortoise
and I'll
bloody
die
alone.

Headache

My head hurts. It feels hot and heavy, like lead, like the head of a snowdrop, hanging low, burning white against the black winter dirt. Hot and heavy and full. Full of thoughts and boredom and hate; full of nostalgia, full of fear, full of love. All of these things burning up together in a big furnace in my skull, and the pressure is building up behind my eyes and I want to let it all out. In words, or tears or screams or big, heavy sighs.

Or perhaps I’m just coming down with a cold.

Ode to the Victors

I'd like to hate them,
but I find it hard,
when sweat gleams
so nicely on their
victorious cheeks, lit up
with the verdant light
of the vast green pitch
and offset by deep
lapis lazuli kit.

Look at their
lovely Italian faces!
Like Caravaggio
painted them.
Like Michelangelo
sculpted them!
No, I cannot hate them.

My only regret is this:
That Balotelli's not as
poor at taking penalties
as he is at putting on a
bib.