The Orphanage

a film on the theme du jour, a missing child. The leading actress is a rail- thin Kate McCann lookalike, her patron saint is St. Anthony, a portuguese saint for the ‘missing’. Why didn’t the police search the basement?
Strange equinox: intense, something is in the air… last night a squat party in Hackney. Our band played. We are like family, we bicker but we’ve bonded. After playing, we danced crazily, taking over the dance floor, my teenager, her Wimbledon friend (who is also a vernal equinox birthday) and I, with about 30 members of the band to the next group, a gritty gypsy folk trio. Saw lots of old friends, Naked John from the Naked protest, who has recently been employed as cloakroom boy at a naked disco. Doing cloakroom duty at this sort of event requires more than just a few coat hangers…”It’s like a warehouse back there” explained John “black plastic rubbish bags full of clothes which we have to keep carefully labelled or things could get serious afterwards”.
The bar was kept by Dvd, my favourite Jewish scholar, who is the only bloke, gay of course, who I have taken with me to an ‘internal’ with a doctor. I always feel gay men need education in these matters. Just cos they only shag men doesn’t mean they should get away with not knowing about the stuff of life, procreation and all that. A few years ago, Dvd and I drove around in my French farmer’s van, with my miscarried baby’s body in a jiffy bag on the floor, me sobbing while he trilled Thoroughly Modern Millie (he’s got a Big Theory involving the holocaust I believe, about that musical, which I must write about sometime). That particular baby, Forest, is now in my back garden, under a bird feeding table and also caught under a snow drift in a compost heap in Les Voges. My missing child, one of many…their ghosts, 3 of them, is it fanciful of me to imagine that they accompany their mother on her travels? The things I have done, my female stories of war, my battle scars, my grief remembered but this is spring and we must fete the living…
My teenager is 14 today so we celebrated with sushi and horror…I bought her a couple of books “God is not great” by Christopher Hitchens and “The selfish capitalist” by Oliver James. Gotta counteract her strictly mainstream education somehow…also we are reading a book on fractals written by a friend…