Gertie on the incredible lightness of being

Last night this nice bloke gives this talk about nothing. He calls it insubstantiality.
He says I don’t exist and neither does Syd. He talks about how you look up at the sky and it’s all blue and lovely and dotted with white clouds that look like bits of cotton wool. You thinks about angels sitting on them playing their wotsits.
But when we was flying to Toromolinos they wasn’t like that. More like being surrounded by a grey fog. Then, back on the ground, look up, cotton wool again.
The bloke says we‘re a bit like them clouds. He talks about quantum whatsisnames. All about atoms and energy.
I say we’ve all got our little ways though. Like Syd. He loves his Charlton Athletic: every Saturday there he is at the game. And I never misses East Enders. And Friday nights we always goes down Tesco’s together.
I say together but are we? Syd and me ain’t really been together for a long time, not since the kids left, or before that even. When we first met we was together then. Couldn’t get enough, though we didn’t speak.
I don’t have a lot of time to bother about it ‘til this fella brings it up last night in this Buddhist howsyafather. Such a lovely speaking voice he had – sort of gets you going, I’d say.
He made me think about dying. I fancy one of them cardboard coffin thingumies in a nice little forest. Then the maggots could eat me up like in that song, Ilkley Moor Bar Tat.
In apples nowadays you never find a good maggot like you used to. It takes the danger out of eating a Cox’s Pippin in bed when you get famished in the middle of the night. I blame the supermarkets. I bet if they get hold of me when I’m done for they’d have me sprayed with preservative and wrapped in cling film. Special offer, Syd and me, two for the price of one.
If I did have maggots I’d be spread around, recycled, like they say is good to do. I’d go into the food chain, maybe even go back up to the stars where we come from.
I dare say Syd would remember me too, though maybe not as fondly as I’d hope.

Gertie Contemplates her Buddhist Writing Retreat

Dhanakosa Retreat Centre

Last week I goes on this writing wotsit,
retreat they calls it.
I wondered if it would be a bit
la-di-da, but it wasn’t.

There was these two fellas
with funny names
but they turned up trumps,
made us feel very comfy.

I was gobsmacked at
what come out of my mouth.
You’d call it filth, I dare say,
but they took it all in good part.

People wrote some lovely stuff about
kids playing with stones, red squirrels,
Indian slums, shopping in Lewisham,
and this creepy one about being killed by a lilly.

They did this thing called meditation
where you sit very still for a long time:
sometimes you shift about a bit
but sometimes you feel tingly and calm all over.

In my dorm four of us was sharing.
Two of us roaring snorers
but we had this stuff called
Snoring Stop you had to gargle with.

We did it to the tune of
Come on Baby do the Locomotion.
I laughed so much I could have wet myself
If I hadn’t just been.

We was in this lovely place
called Danny something.
And there was this big lake
what Scottish call a loch.

This loch is huge
with high hills round it
all green they was
with grass and loads of trees

It’s sort of quiet
Like your heart has found its home
You want to never leave it; plunge right in,
though it was bloody freezing when I did.

(Published in "Writing Your Way" by Manjusvara, Windhorse Publications, 2005)

Gertie contemplates the universe

So I wanted to tell ‘im. About the universe.
“Don’t give me that!” he snaps. (He always was a surly bastard.)
“Yes!” (I have to insist. You do with ‘im.) “When it all started. I heard it on that program. You know. The one with Melvin Bragg. He was talking to these scientists. It was so interesting, though me and Melvin never understood the half of it.”
“Get on with it,” snarls Jim, his gob filled with baked beans.
“All right. Keep your hair on!” I tell him. “Yes, before it all started, the universe and that, it was smaller than, guess what?”
“No idea,” he mutters, his eyes glancing towards the Daily Express propped up on the HP Sauce.
“Smaller than the head of a pin.”
“Right,” he says.
“But a million times smaller. Even smaller than an atom what’s so small you couldn’t even see it with the naked eye.”
“Oh yeah?” he says.
“Oh yeah!” says I.
Then I tells him, “All our whole universe started off cram packed into just that teeny weeny space, so small you couldn’t even see it.”
“Go on, you’re having me on!”
“No. Straight up. All cram packed. You know, planets and suns and every bloody thing. Tooting and Balham and even Lewisham all in there.”
"Buckingham Palace and the Old Kent Road as well,” he says. entering into the spirit.
“Yes. And the bloody Maritime Museum.”
“I suppose so,” he muses. “Then what?”
“Well, then we got the big bang. And whoosh!”
“Whoosh?”
“Yeah whoosh! There we are lots of hot stuff like from the biggest volcano ever known and when it cools down there’s the planets, suns and all that, stars shining.”
“Come out of all that little stuff?”
“Yeah. It’s energy, you see. Building up.”
“What made it do it then? Explode like it did?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Dozy cow. I thought you’d explain it all. What did these boffins have to say about it then?”
“They didn’t know either. They was going on about strings or something.”
“What about God? Did he have a hand in it? I thought they’d have clocked that by now.”
“No. Seems that nobody knows anything about what triggered it. They says they was only guessing – at this stage.”
“Well then, at this stage,” he says, “at this stage what I’d like is for you to fill up the bloody teapot!”
“Do it yourself you lazy swine!” I says. But I did fill it up anyway.