I’m sitting at my desk wearing an antique-gold coloured compass round my neck. It’s a little bit Northern Lights, a little bit mysterious Dickensian seafarer. It always attracts comments, and I have been known to call it an heirloom.
I got it in a Christmas cracker. The chain originally bore a Captain Jack Sparrow pendant I bought from the Disney Store for a kick-ass Halloween costume.
My grandfather – the watchmaker, the jeweller, the man who knew beauty when he saw it – would be horrified.
I have a complicated relationship with jewellery. As a child it was a brattish instrument of power over my long-suffering older sister. We spent hours playing in the remains of Grandman’s shop where, with the tyrannical talent of a fledgling Mrs Slocombe, I transformed her into my lackey and every visiting family member or friend into an artfully tortured customer. I can still feel the sharp scree of skin-warmed gems skitter over my hands as I sweep them through trays of semi-precious leftovers. The soft slide of the blue carbon paper in the double-entry level ledger with the irresistible scent of dust and ink. The heavy, sticky keys of the receipt machine, each laboriously typed bill signed with a bitten-biro flourish. The prison-guard jangling of the ring-sizing torc, and the mild cruel pleasure in forcing cold circles of steel down demurring digits.
(My grandfather had unforgettable hands.)
And so for me, jewellery has always been about either family or play.
As for family, there are four pieces I wear regularly like anchors in my blood. From my dad, on my fourteenth birthday: a golden Russian wedding ring, miraculously still in situ despite many brief sojourns on the floors of clubs, under the wheels of buses, upon muddy tracks in fields and, on one particularly frustrating and fairytale occasion, in a giant stack of hay. From my mum, on the day I went to university: a self-made charm necklace, bearing two ancient coins, two tiny enamel crosses, and an engraved disc with the Lord’s Prayer; one of the coins and the Prayer were swallowed by the SU and a U-bend respectively, but it still shivers, denuded and loved, on my breastbone. From my sister, for my eighteenth: a simple multi-stranded bracelet of silver chains. From my man, one Christmas: my first diamonds, two, discrete and dancing on a silver thread.
All very elegant, subtle and womanly; but when I buy baubles for myself, the attention-seeking, story-telling seven-year-old takes charge. A big bronze initialled M from Broadway Market; an enamel and silver HB pencil pendant; an Untitled choker from Tatty Devine; that Christmas cracker compass, of course. And I’ve recently discovered RockNRose, a fantastical site full of pieces inspired by the likes of Alice in Wonderland, Jules Verne, mixtapes and Scrabble. I’m putting in an order for the typewriter key rings today.
Oh, I’ve turned out messy, and materialistic, and vulgar, Grandman. But you always knew I would. And you’d like my stories, I think.
Love the golden compass. I have a silver bottle of dragon’s breath I wear these days.
Heard you on A Good Read. Book sounded great but can’t remember the title. Can you email it to me, and have you read The Girl with Glass Feet? I think you would like it.
Jackie
Blimey, you look like Russell Brand in your pirate outfit. Do you like Algernon Charles Swinburne? I like your geological and semi-precious references.
Jackie: The Vintner’s Luck by Elizabeth Knox. It’s beautiful. I’ll check out GWTGF…
Dagmar: Ah, Swinburne. I love that comment from Wilde: “a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestialize”. I fear we have a few things in common.
… louchely slouched in the purple pools of Lethe, yet in fact settled in Surrey or such purlieus, pretending to be flouncey, but actually, Algernon, merely a little poncey and certainly living longer than a truly sold soul should…
Can you judge a book by its cover?
I once found a nice Hogarth Press large-format paperback copy of William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity” that some chump had dumped out in the rain, completely sodden, utterly soggy, virtually returned to pulp.
I took it home and conservateured it, drying out the pages, one by one, by turning them daily as the book sat limp and gasping on the radiator.
Gradually it stiffened.
On the cover is a fabulous black-and-white photograph of the lined face of Empson himself, stretched and weirded-out by the sheer g-forces of his queer and drink-marinated vision.
So that is he!
Previous, po-faced Pelican editions of this great book – which dates back to 1930, for Beelzebub’s sake – had no such image on the cover and one ploughed through the pages with clod-clagged labour.
But read with the slurred, slightly lisping, ever so camp tone of voice of the face on the cover, the book came to life, literally.
He is a big fan of Swinburne and talks of his ambiguities expertly and deftly dissolved in the immersive properties of poetry and verse.
May I say your own tone is infinitely more Molly than Flatt, drenched in fresh meanings that rain effortlessly on the hot brow and longing limbs of those who hunger for stimulation & satisfaction in this over-heated, dazzlingly lit retail space we wander lost around in, parched and blinking.
Haven’t read Empson, but now of course I must (just as soon as I’ve finished big ole Christmas Vogue, guilty smile).
Anyone who is a slurred, lisping, queer, drink-marinated, deft dissolver, not to mention dead, is a friend of mine.
Profound sense of own ingrained, utter ordinariness engulfing me. I’m off for a Ferrero Rondnoir, that’ll make me feel special.
Merely evoking the transient, frail, gossamer thought of the sheer fragrance alone of the Javan vanilla in Ferrero makes you special, Molly.
Carson McCullers, my dear! Loneliness, loveliness, transgression, humidity and death in the deep South, pass the chocs! Peel me a grape!