Glass Mountain Writers - Kate Bryan

Kate Bryan was introduced to 'the trials and tribulations of creative writing' several years ago when she took a part-time English Studies degree. Since then, she says she has ‘dabbled on and off (depending on the phase of the moon) with this most noble art form’.

She has written several light-hearted book reviews and other short comic pieces for a local magazine and performed her work at the Off the Shelf festival. She is particularly proud of the fact that she survived the reading on one of her own narrative poems in front of 200 school children at the Crucible theatre.

Kate celebrated her half century last year and says she still can’t quite believe she can ‘officially go on a Saga holiday and buy moisturiser for mature skin’.

At a Supermarket

The old woman fumbles to find the coupon

worth ten pence off a packet of biscuits.

Arthritic fingers scour the red plastic purse,

a present from her niece last Christmas.

Donna, enthroned at the check–out

surveys her pink painted nails

and wonders whether to meet Robbie

after work.

The queue grows longer.

Toddlers scream in annoyance

Mothers dish out slaps and feel better

or worse, indifferent perhaps.

Damp Proofing

I have often walked close to the water’s edge.

The incoming tide that once tickled toes

Offered infinite possibilities.

I was not careful.

I would leap over a hedge

Hang upside down in a tree,

Pretty much do as I pleased.

When the water lapped around my ankles

I could still dare

To thumb a lift home at two in the morning,

Smoke cigarettes despite the warnings,

Drink Jack Daniels and wear a short dress.

I did not care.

I wanted the lion’s share

Of adventure and adrenaline.

I didn’t notice the water rising

Until it sloshed against my knees.

At first a gentle chiding,

Later a more insistent plea

To avoid diving in and other tomfoolery.

To make calculations, have reservations,

Dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s,

Limit the risk to absolute nothing.

I wonder at what point did I ever agree

To such a course of damp proofing?

In Praise of the Forty Watt Light Bulb

I don’t know about you but I think there is too much artificial light about these days. I accept that you need a ten thousand watt bulb on a lifeboat or a police helicopter but not, I would have thought, in a Dorothy Perkins’ changing room.

I was there the other day, searching through the rails of clothes, when I spotted a lovely lilac top shoved right at the back. Perfect I thought, and sallied forth to the changing room. I felt as if I had stepped into an irradiation chamber. Squinting in the bright light I hurriedly tried on the ‘lovely lilac top’. To my horror as I looked in the mirror an apparition of unloveliness squinted back. The lilac top had turned into a truly shocking pink and the crown of my head looked as if I had been suspended upside down into a bucket of white emulsion. Thank goodness I had remembered to draw the curtains.

It’s not just in changing rooms though that my life has been harshly illuminated but at home too. Hubby decreed one day that he was fed up with living in the twilight zone and an electrician must be called for immediately. I couldn’t understand it. For years the forty-watt light bulb in the lounge pendant light fitting had served us well. O.K. I admit if you wanted to read the evening paper you had to go and ferret about in the kitchen drawer for a torch, but a small price to pay for what those interior designers on the telly call ‘ambient lighting’. We now have two triple ceiling lights and two double wall lights in our three metre square lounge. When I sit on the settee I swear I can hear the frantic whirring of the electricity meter on the outside wall.

It isn’t just the lounge that’s been subjected to this radical light therapy. We now have two spotlights over the front doorstep. When people come to call they must think they’re entering the Starship Enterprise and a voice will boom out ‘Beam them up Scottie’.

The bathroom hasn’t escaped either. ‘I need to see what I’m doing when I’m having a shave’ Hubby told the electrician. So in a flash we are the owners of two down lighters above the bathroom mirror. Hubby might not have a face cut to ribbons anymore, but I have to endure the agony of catching a glimpse of my complexion in the unforgiving light. What I thought were a smattering of laughter lines in the subtle hue of the single forty watt ceiling bulb, have turned out to be more lines than the National Grid.

I know the Bible says people don’t light a candle then hide it under a bushel, but if you have a bushel or two to spare then I can certainly find a use for them in my house, especially in the bathroom.

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