Long ago and far away etc...


When I was a kid I always used to wonder what it'd be like when it was the year 2000.
I was aware that I'd be 25 - yeah, like might as well be an octopus - and that I might be doing something vaguely more interesting than hanging about in Emma Goodwin's backyard peering through the fence at Boys in the park on the other side, or dancing to the Rolling Stones with Harry, my stepdad, in the front room of a Grimsby semi.
I suppose I guessed I wouldn't have changed very much, maybe have longer legs and never have my mum's ankles. I would always dress in jeans, I knew. Never was a skirt sort of a person.
Then the year 2000 came along and I found myself in Edinburgh in a flat filled with people who really weren't my friends, who hadn't really meant anything to me at all. I slept on a couch with a mouth full of ashtray before walking back over the litter-blown empty city early in the morning to my friend-come-cousin-come-sister's flat near Easter Road. The one where you could see Arthur's Seat from her kitchen window when we smoked out of it and drank diet coke. She's diabetic.
Jo Jo, Jo Bananas, Joanne Tierney, or Miss Tierney, as she was known at school, the daughter of the Glasweigian MP Dennis, is as dark as I am strawberry blonde.
She's all Greek looking with long legs and is a great laugh, you'd like her, everyone does.
She's pregnant now is Joanne. (Some guy I haven't even met yet. What's that all about?)
And I got back to hers and we lazed around for the day in her bed, she made beans on toast and we watched crap on the telly.
Not really what I was meant to be doing when I was 25, I thought. But, at least, I should be happy I'd got here. The realisation of an ambition fulfilled doesn't happen every day I had come to notice.
Unless you're my friend Rosee, who I work with now. She's one of these people who does something every day. Like, she'll say to herself: "Today, I'm going to grow tomato plants", or, "I will swim a mile without stopping" because the singular achievement of accomplishment is in itself a total bonus. Affirmation that the day has meant something.
I sometimes look at her with envy - something I'm not prone to - but, usually, there's a mild curiosity. How do you do that Rosee? What's it like being you?
She's angling for a promotion at the moment and watching her do it is like some Channel Four docudrama called Raw Ambition or Hard-headed Women. She's turned into a bit of a monster actually.
But I digress. Back in the year 2000 on January 2, I left Edinburgh and drove home to Dundee in my Metro death-trap, to my flat on Baffin Street, to Roger the Lodger, to
pizzas baked to an acrid charcoal, to fires being left on all day. To DC Thomson's, where I worked, to mum and Harry - to my life.
This is where the huge skies reflect in a mirror-still River Tay and the small minds reflect about nothing very much at all.
Whch isn't true, actually, but that's how it felt then.
When it's not sunny, everything in Dundee looks gun-metal grey, it's dark granite skyline that rises up in the middle to the top of the Law, with it's war memorial, is just dark, dark, dark and kind of awesom.
When I first moved there from Grimsby I was 12 and I thought it was disturbing, all these light changes, where if you tipped the city one way it shone and tip it another way it went black like smoke, heavy like lead.
Grimsby had always been the same colours. Blue and green mostly, with yellow and pink tinges. I loved Grimbsy, People's Park (great name for a park, don't you think?) and hated leaving. Waltham swimming baths, next to the park outside Emma's back yard, had never looked so good on the last day I saw it, with it's 70s school-look, white and light green trim.
Emma's mum Barbara took me home to my house in Manor Avenue on the other side of town - Harry only ever drove mortorbikes and was already in Dundee - and as I waved them off I was incredibly sad. But I never said, apart from to Lucy my tabby cat, and she just looked at me. "So what?" she tried say. But I could tell she was feeling a sense of forboding, too.
We travelled by train, the Intercity 125. We had to put our Alsatian, Eric, in with all the boxes and crates and our two black cats. Then we put Lucy in a bag and I had her on my knee. It was horrible. I couldn't stop asking my mum about the animals - Eric was neurotic at the best of times and Jota and Katana (both named after obscure motorbikes by Harry) were going to hate us even more than they seemed to since we'd taken Jota's favourite son Webster away from her. Katana was always just a moody simpleton and did everything Jota told her to, although she was the slinky one with all the looks, which I think Jota was always a bit jealous of.
But, somehow we all managed to get up there in one piece.
I remember being mortified that Eric had diarrohea all over the carriage. It was so bad they had to hose the entire thing out and it reeked, but he was even more mortified than anyone. He was so scared, so, so scared and we couldn't hug him because he was covered in shit but we kept telling him that we wanted to really badly. Then we had to go to the lawyers and pick up the keys; the cats were in a state - Lucy had also crapped in the bag and was covered, which having become accustomed to treatment of a higher order, she was not best pleased and wouldn't speak to me for days.
We got to the house, we had Chinese, I sat on the floor to eat it, because the furniture hadn't arrived. I got into my sleeping bag and lay down.
It was my tweflth birthday.

My name is Sarah Leontia Sheridan Key. It's a name with a bit of history that I may get into later. I am engaged to Damion James Rice and we live in a top floor flat at 30 Cromwell Road, St Andrews, Bristol.
We're a good couple. We have lots of friends, LOTS of them. We both have jobs. I'm a journalist and Damion is a personal trainer. He owns his own company called Momentum Personal Training and is doing well.
We met four years ago out clubbing and basically fell in love immediately. Like looked at each other and we were in love, then he patted my arse as he walked past - classy - and that kind of sealed my fate.
I moved down from the district hole-in-the-wall office and into the Bristol Evening Post offices on Temple Way, near the Old Market area of the city.
When I was working in the district offices of DC Thomsons, for the Courier and the Evening Telegraph, I would interview old couples for their Golden and Diamond wedding anniversaries and when you would ask them how they met, four out of five of them say: "at the dancin'".
And I suppose it's the equivalent of that. Although we met at a club called The Depot and the night we met is called Ripsnorter, so maybe it wasn't too similar.
But there's a lot of things that people don't know about people aren't there? Things that you may assume are straighforward and aren't.

WHATEVER

Hey, welcome me back.
It's been a blahdy long time since I was on here, looking out at you, wherever you are.
Here's a few things to be getting along with....oh and Rob M, email me when you see this cos it's all your doing!

Crim words

Dress up Christ

Chamonix June 22, 1997

Anton Decrimone's fingers drummed on the metal box attached to the glass panel in front of him.
The lights on one of the big round buttons fixed on the box flicked on and then off, followed by a sharp ringing noise. He picked up the intercom phone on the wall and said something nearly incomprehensible into the receiver before replacing it.
His back was turned against the crowd that were jammed in with their skis and poles, snowboards, cameras, maps ... everyone was hushed as they stared up the mountain to the half way point and beyond to the Aiguille de Midi.
His palms were sweating, as usual, as he felt the heave of the steel ropes, the initial sway of the cablecar. They had started the ascent and a trickle of sweat rolled down from under his green cap as he stared at the black speck of missing paint on the green doorframe.
They were climbing now, the ground suddenly veered away from the tiny box of people that disappeared as they floated alongside the foothills of the Mont Blanc Massif, more than 7,000 ft above the sea.
A woman, French, was gabbling on about a beauty treatment she'd had in Paris that weekend. An American teenage girl, all blonde hair and Bambi legs, jeans sprayed on, was staring solemnly down at the far away earth, the tiny box houses in the Chamonix valley.
Two English couples and their goofy friend stood at the back of the telepherique, shouting at each other.
One dark-haired girl with a too-big jacket on was holding on to one of the poles in the middle of the car staring at the floor of the car, not looking at anyone or anything. Her concentration was matched only by Anton's.
They were coming to the point, he knew, it was just here...
On queue, the swaying started, backwards slowly, look down to the thousand miles of space, upwards and forwards, the mountain face looming. His hand tightened on the rail he was holding onto.
"Huh," he grimly thought to himself as he saw the French woman grab ontot the side of the car, "not so worried about those wrinkles now."
He looked at her behind her shades - smoothly botoxed face and collagen-laden lips, her whole face seemed to be pouting and shiny in the early afternoon sunlight reflecting off the snow, still laying thick on the mountain.
Hadn't he read somewhere that collagen was made out of crushed chicken's feet? He looked away, disgusted. Stupid whore. Back to his spot on the doorframe, he turned his back on them all and he never looked down.
A kind of strange creaking silence descended on the 19 people on the cablecar, light streamed through the perspex cube. Only the young Danish couple with their skis and trendy outfits continued their conversation in hushed voices.

It had been Anton's mother who had eventually dragged her drugged son into therapy for his vertigo and fear of these "bloody telepherique".
You see, there had been an accident, he had eventually said. Everyone screaming, legs and arms sticking out awkwardly from parts of the compacted cablecar, like some grim modern art installation.
They brought it down on ropes and pulleys, like the system that had let them fall in the first place. His four-year-old eyes had watched in disbelief. Papa.
Anton's doting mama had been too late in covering his small face with her firm hands.
From that moment on, the mountain and the cablecars throughout Chamonix - his world - had never been touched by Anton Michel Decrimone.
But Cordelia Decrimone had had enough of seeing her son retreating into himself. He had become a shaddow, a dark creature living from fridge to bedroom.
He could be so handsome, she would say to her friends as they sipped Rose and watched the mountain tops turn pink. "I can't do anything with him", "he doesn't comb his hair", "he's 260 pounds". "Why did he have to see his father die on that fucking mountain". She would cry some nights, sobbing into her pillow for her son, who was becoming more dead by the hour.

Coredlia would later say that she'd had a visitation one of those nights, that God had told her the only way to save her son was by making him face his biggest fear.
As she watched the Aiguille de Midi cablecar from her small cabin half way up the Brevant mountainside, facing Mont Blanc, she smiled. It had been a hard battle, but there were results already.
She wrapped her shawl around her and went indoors to make coffee.

Anton knew his mother would be watching but was not thinking about her.
It was his 79th ascent and this was the worst bit. The cablecar had to stop when the rocking became really severe and today it had been halted for more than 10 minutes, as the faces around him grew more and more anxious.
He focussed on his spot. They were all going to die.

TBC

Entrancing

I've decided that by far the best way to spend time in life is by kissing.
I used to have this stuffed toy, that was actually about my size when I got it. It was a Rupert the Bear and I used to kiss it to death, and my dogs, and my mum and dad and everyone I know really. I've snogged most of my friends and could not even begin to tell you how many people on the whole. Probably thousands. Or at least nearly one thousand.
My first reaction os oral, it always will be, I can't help it.
Now I have stopped kissing (so many people) I want to know from all of you .... what kind of kisser you are.
You must email me your answer on s.key@bepp.co.uk. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Since I've not been writing very much on Fit Your Space, I thought I'd better rectify it, otherwise most of you will never look again as it is DULL.
I have been a bit busy perusing this and contributing in a small way.
Also there's been a lot of STUFF going on.

I@m sort of searching. Looking. But like you look at a film, watching it out and waiting to find out what happens in stead of changing the plot as you go. More on this later as I have to work. Does anyone have a computer I can have at home please?

Touch

Make me sure that you are in me
Make your torso black and blue with effort,
Struggle to stay with me as I grind and kiss you.

Step up with me from the tower, far away from the Earth
Give me all the power I deserve
Make me give you all I am worth

Switch off your screen and feed me full of sunny hue
Take these hands that stroke and feel your body,
Make them work for you

But as life makes funny streaks and stains apon these sheets,
Those blankets impressed by your strain,
It leaves nothing on my body - nothing - over and over again.

Funny