Sunday 8th October 2006

Sunday 8th October

Last night as I walked to the ballet I noticed a sign on the church, "Are you really loved?
It's the church where the homeless man with the bulbous nose and crutches usually stands. For hours on end. He wasn't there. I wondered if homeless people worry about love, or being loved. Or if it's only about where is there food and water, a toilet, and somewhere to sleep without getting beaten up. Is there camaraderie never mind love?
A different world. I have no clue.

I remember some scale of needs: shelter, clothing, food, water. I'm sure that love was more important to people in the scale than anything else.
There are 5 basic needs apparently.
Survival: food, water, air, safety, shelter, warmth, health and sex
Belonging: To belong we must connect with people by cooperating, caring, sharing, and being involved, and have people with which to connect.
Power/Self-Worth: the need to be capable, to be able, be heard and respected
Freedom: the need for independence and autonomy, the need to make choices, to create
Fun: the need for enjoyment, pleasure, relaxation, laughter and learning

Wish I hadn't googled that. I didn't know I was so short on some of these.
Perhaps I did.
Perhaps it explains a lot.

To hell with survival, and anyway, it starts with feeding the soul. Well, the desire to survive does.
The great Why?
Because there is beauty and wonder all around.
Starter for ten.
To witness human beings at the peak of what human beings can be, create and perform. Human creativity. It is a force of nature. The other side of groundlessness.
The great Answer for Saturday night.
The Scottish Ballet.
From the composers of the music; Stravinsky, Arvo Part, Nine Inch Nails, to the good looking musical talent in the orchestra. And then, the choreographers and the dancers.
Dancers.
It's too small a word.

The ballerina in Agon, Eve Mutso. There are no words. This woman's dancing skill is an experience to witness. It'll strike you dumb.
All the time as I tried to catch my breath and stop tears filling my eyes, I was thinking in an awe-filled whispered thought, "My God, these are human beings.

It was enthralling. 'The Pump Room', such a sexy piece and 'Agon', created in 1957, I'd never have guessed, it looks sensual and hot as if it were created yesterday.
I swear I floated home lifted up by their tenacity, their courage, their art.

And the theatre was half empty.

In Union Street, people throwing up and buying junk food to soak up alcohol and pissing in shop doorways, it runs like a river of piss on a weekend night. The rest, at home, brains and arses turning to mush with the latest bullshit of nonentities wanting their face on a tee shirt or to be the first person to fuck a wine bottle on television.

And this glory. This experience. This spectacle of ballet, is half empty.
I wanted to run into the street at the interval and shout come in and see this you won't believe it's humanly possible.
But I had a glass of wine instead.

This morning was glorious, I put out some washing and walked down to the movies. An appointment with Jack.
Streep and Nicholson, what a weekend.
Is there a Frank in the movie?
Yup.
'The Departed'. Colossal. Not on the Scottish Ballet scale of colossal, and where British gangster movies just strike me as cheap and dodgy, somehow this has class.
And some fabulous lines.
The somehow of course is the story first and foremost, Scorsese, DiCaprio and Nicholson. They are all inspired.
I don't think Ray Winston works really.
Bit like the new James Bond.
In the East End of London, they work. Globally, they don't. It's not the blondness, it's their look in general. THE James Bond is dark and looks like a suave, sophisticated, Celtic killer. The human equivalent of a black panther. A man, you don't know if he'll kiss you or shoot you - probably both and necessarily in that order.
If you're lucky.
James Bond the current, looks like a short-arse chav and his eyes are too sad, like the wee boy in 'Kes'.
An SAS grunt I'd believe, some poor world-weary Lancashire miner in 1920's Britain, maybe. James Bond. Nowhere close.

Wasn't he the guy in that gross ear wax ad for cotton buds years ago? If he wasn't, he looks like he could be and that's it in a nutshell.
James Bond. Ear Wax. I think not.

Clive Owen.
Now we're talking shaken not stirred.

Which is what I was when I came home. It had clouded over and I decided to take the washing in right away.
I've witnessed the highest in human creativity, I suppose the lowest has to make an appearance sometime.
All my underwear had been stolen off the washing line. The clothes pegs left in a circle on the grass. The rest of the washing looking like a face that had just seen a ghost.
There is a funny side, I understand that. Stealing knickers and bras, who the hell would do it. It's laughable right?

The thing that stops it being funny is it has happened before and it's a married man, two kids, the freakiest freak you've ever seen in your life, who peeps in windows and over walls wanking his way to his own personal five basic needs. Wanked on the driver seat window of my car, wanked and wiped it on my cat, wanked and peeped so much that the police couldn't even tell the student nurse across the road what he'd told them he'd seen and done at her window as it would have 'scarred her psychologically for life'. They just asked to come in and fixed the chink in her bedroom blind she hadn't even noticed until she saw the freak by accident that one night.
He TOLD them. He told them and he's still out there. And he thinks he has a 'relationship' with us all. He wants us to know he's here and to be seen by us.

It's not funny. It's not about the theft. It's about my basic need to feel safe.
And I don't.

The worst thing is, the police don't take him seriously. They have a nick-name for him 'Spiderman' coz he keeps getting caught. They think it's funny.

I'm not sure what's more upsetting. That this creep is allowed to increase and increase his behaviour until someone is raped or murdered or that the police let it go on without locking him up and throwing away the key.
He got 'tagged' last time. For all I know he's tagged again which is why he did this in broad daylight.
He also used to steal the clothes pegs too, then take just one item at a time. There are ten clothes pegs in a circle on the washing green. He wants me to know he's back and he wants me to know he's not kidding and he's not scared.

Last time we were due to go to court. For ten weeks, twelve women were waiting to appear as witnesses. When I told the police I caught him stealing the underwear that first time, they didn't believe me.
"That's not his M.O. Head shaking.
"Well it is now. Why the hell would I make that up?

He's so freakish looking that there was no mistaking who I was talking about. They've known about him for a decade all over Aberdeen. He has routes he uses. And he's still carrying on, chums with the police laughing telling them the fucked up stuff he does over a cup of tea.
Like wanking in the underwear and hanging it back up on the line.

I phoned the police anyway. I want it recorded so if I'm found strangled by my underwear one night on the way back from the ballet, my family can sue.

It's not okay. And it's not funny. I hate that I was shaking in my flat. Having a brandy, giving a statement over the phone. Grateful it's a woman.
An officer will come and take an official statement so it's circulated.
It might take three days.

I wish I had a Goodfella chav husband with ear wax.
Break his knees.
Vicious thoughts.

I felt better after reporting it, but decided to put my Winter curtains up. The IKEA branch nets are too sheer for the dark evenings, even if they do fill the floor with sunlit shadows of tree branches in the Autumn sunshine. I shall miss that.
But not enough to not feel safe. If a peeping tom has nothing to look at will he go elsewhere?
I hope so.
Peeping Tom. It's such an innocuous title. Like Hans Christian Anderson created it.
More like the Brothers Grimm.
Oh I wish a suitable fairy tale ending to the baddie would happen to this dickhead.
Cut off his hands and red hot poke out his eyes.
Peep and wank now tosser.

It'd be worth doing the karma.

I recently read that eating yellow, orange and red foods, flame colours in fact, can help burn karma.
Sounds good to me.

Somehow, opening the linen cupboard for the thicker curtains, I managed to pop the glass doorknob out of it's holder. Leaning too hard down on it I suppose. Hanging on for Brothers Grimm life perhaps. I don't know. That feeling of the sky is falling, God how can my mood all change so quickly from ten clothes pegs in a circle on the washing green?

I put up the curtain and somehow, it became all important that I get that clip back on the mechanism to hold on the glass in the doorknob. That I fix it, that I put it back together and have the door as it was before. Complete.
Unsullied?
I did it.
I was fixing it back to the door (and I'm conscious and annoyed that I don't want to even write the words 'screwing it back on') before I noticed the blood.
I'd cut my thumb in the blind effort of pushing the iron washer back on.
In the anger of doing it, if I'm honest.
The 'I will not take this' of a lovely weekend marred.
Like a new lipstick that snaps and smears down your face on first application. All you're left with is a clown scar and an overpriced piece of wax under your nails, that you can't wash out of your clothes.

Ah but there is romance afterall. Jane Eyre night and a documentary about Moira Shearer, Scottish ballerina of the Red Shoes, who was married to Ludovic Kennedy. He fell in love with her at first sight and thought she was out of his league. But, by chance, he was invited to a Sadler's Wells ball and there she was. He asked her to dance and she said she wasn't very good at dancing. He laughed, but it was true. She couldn't let him lead.
They married in 1950.
She turned down working with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Cf 'leading' above.

And in 1957 starred in a film called Peeping Tom.

The Universe does like a laugh.
Still, now I get to buy new underwear - coz I sure don't want it back if they find it.