O sweet spontaneous

O sweet spontaneous

 earth how often have

 the

 doting

           fingers of

 prurient philosophers pinched

 and

 poked

 thee

 ,has the naughty thumb

 of science prodded

 thy

       beauty      .how

 oftn have religions taken

 thee upon their scraggy knees

 squeezing and

 buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

 gods

         (but

 true

 to the incomparable

 couch of death thy

 rhythmic

 lover

           thou answerest

 them only with

                         spring) 

e.e. cummings

  

For some reason this poem was going through my head when I was shivering in the (astonishingly cold) operating theatre undergoing a c-section. I was in labour (unimaginable pain, waves of it), for minutes, hours (all day): the closest parallel which occurred to me at the time, in my drugged state,  was that I was being oppressed by an enormous ceiling fan beating ceaselessly overhead, Apocalypse-Now style, delivering layers of agony). Birth by c-section, the crucial part, takes 5 minutes; the longest part is being stitched up again. When the baby was removed, I could feel a strange stretching and tugging sensation. I think I must have been deliriously equating the poem with the reality: the doting fingers of prurient doctors pinched and poked me so I answered them only with Max.

Now that's really something

I was lying awake this morning thinking about Edinburgh and about how certain streets and places connect directly to memories from my late teens and early twenties. The particular street I was thinking of is in the west end of Edinburgh, and connects Haymarket to Fountainbridge.

• A family from a "community" near Ullapool (in the far north west of Scotland), whose two red-headed sons went to my school, had a flat in the street. (The first time I ever saw the older son, the one who was in my class, he was opening the car door outside the school as we drew up behind - he then bolted away down the street in the opposite direction, which I would also have been doing if I'd had the guts. For both of us, it should have been our first day at that school; it ended up just being mine because, as we were solemnly informed, he had "school phobia"; he didn't appear for another few weeks.) I was a bit intimidated by their flat: the parents rarely seemed to be there, and it was known as a drug hangout and a place to go after the pubs closed. My brother was friends with the younger son and in my prejudiced assessment, if he was drinking hard liquor at the age of 13, it was because he used to go that flat.
• Me and my friends used to go a rockabilly nightclub (believe it or not such things were very trendy in the late 80s)  in Morrison Street, in the basement of the now long-gone White Swan pub, called "The Lazy H"; there, Edinburgh hipsters kicked the night away to an eclectic mix of "The House Of Bamboo", "At the Hop", and northern soul scene favourites like "Cross the Tracks". To get home from the White Swan, we'd walk along the street in the early hours. 
• There, after a night dancing  at the Lazy H, I stood in a doorway talking to a friend and watched my much-lamented ex-boyfriend's brother, David (a dark-haired, good looking, insouciant character who first put the idea into my head of studying law; he was a law student at Aberdeen and it seemed very glamorous. Needless to say, when I actually went to Aberdeen, the scales fell away), walking along the street hand in hand with his new girlfriend, a very attractive girl called Louise, who always makes me think of this song. Louise had ringlets, but it seemed to work; she looked like Lisa Bonet. I was madly jealous of her, because she seemed to have everything.
• When I started my job as a legal editor in 1993, I soon got terrible shoulder and back pain from poor posture while editing (this was in the days before computers, so I was sitting at a desk looking down). I went to a chiropractor and he cracked me around: the pain went immediately, in a rush of relief so powerful that it was almost like taking a drug. His clinic was in the same street. I enjoyed it so much that despite the cost I went back for a second session; he gently told me I didn't need to come back for a third. Not all chiropractors are charlatans.
• My sister and I went for dinner with a friend of hers who had a flat there. It was in the days when everyone had just discovered woks and lots of people had one, but few people knew how to use them properly (soggy soy broccoli anyone?). My sister's friend had made a stir-fry with ginger, but had sliced the ginger into large chunks. I bit enthusiastically into a piece, thinking it was a nice juicy bit of chicken. This must surely equate to the moment (happily, not on the same evening)when my sister ate a piece of chalk that was nestling in a bowl of peanuts.
• Me and my sister saw Edwyn Collins there, at Marcos Leisure Centre, in the early 1990s. He wore a checked "western" shirt with silver clips and (I could have sworn) a bolo tie, sat on a stool and played acoustic guitar to a hushed audience of devotees. To my sister's disappointment, he didn't play "The Coffee Table Song" (if you don't follow any other link, follow this one). I was hoping to see someone there who also (as a pseudonym, as it turned out) called himself Edwyn.

The street, of course, is Grove Street, but amazingly, I had such a mental block about the name that I couldn't remember it till I found it on Google Maps.

Sensoria

Continuing a recent theme of the evocative nature of scent, this website, I Hate Perfume, contains some intriguingly-named perfumes, the descriptions of which, while they often skate perilously close to laughable, are more interesting than, for instance, the revolting cheap knock-offs on sale in a chemist's shop near my flat in Byres Road, Glasgow, in the early 1990s: if you liked Christian Dior's POISON (a late 1980s, overpoweringly strong and cloyingly sweet scent which was unpleasant enough in itself), you could buy the charmingly titled KILL ME in a nasty purple bottle just differentiated enough to avoid a lawsuit; instead of Calvin Klein's OBSESSION, you could buy a classy amber coffret containing COMPULSION.

Christopher Brosius ("CB"), the "olfactory artist" behind I Hate Perfume, can create custom perfumes, but is currently not taking orders, so I'm afraid Childhood tantrum ends in woodshed is out for the moment; but I think Gathering apples may be an acceptable substitute. It's described as "Thousands of ripe red Mackintosh apples and a bit of old weathered wood from the bushel baskets".