Wednesday 25 May 2011

SO TWO GIRLS WALK INTO A VEGGIE SHOP...

I'm in perhaps the best veggie buffet in North London, chapel market - the popular Indian Veg Bhelpoori House  - Chapel Market N1. I'm really hungry because  all day I had been working with no breakfast or lunch. Its 6.30ish, so i come here,  my regular north London oasis of healthy food.
Two girls walk in. They're tall, fashionable, young, fresh faced and skeletal. Now I don't mean skinny. I mean bones in Top Shop attire. It was almost like they weren't there. Only they were.  They were like whispers, like unanticipated breezes on your neck in a still place.
I'm just finishing eating paneer and green pea curry, mixed veg curry, parathas, a couple of bahji's and salad.  I went back for seconds. My plate is waxed.  I sip my spiced masala tea, fiddle about on facebook on my phone for about 10 minutes relishing the full bellied afterglow of all-u-can-eat.

Meanwhile, the wraith-like girls have been up to the buffet bar to get food and I try not to stare because I began to feel empathetic pangs of hunger, light headed, a little nauseous. This look could not be right. Bones strained through their skinny jeans and tight cropped tops. This look was manufactured.
The pre-domninant thought that came to mind is 'anorexia'. But they're in an all you can eat buffet?! They get seconds, chit chat and giggle quietly, like every other girl should  and I get over it.
Its when  I go to the ladies toilet that I see the remnant trails of vomit over the seat of one of the toilets....

"Its kinda hard to pee now." I thought. I did the math and anorexic bulimia flitted about in my head like a fat annoying slow flying blue bottle.

Tuesday 24 May 2011

A POUND OF WOMAN

... and he puts his hands all over her..
And he puts his hands all over her sketched and written by Zena Edwards

there are days when being a woman is tide up
in the weight of her 'knowledge' of the 'way it is'
The status quo must be kept
so keep you body right and you mouth in check
be ready to be the object I select
from this day until the next
don't complain

Her man is poisoned against her
Just because he walks down the high road
without the blinkers
and she, bombarded with kilos and pounds
of sweet and salt constraints dressed up as
good-for-your-love-life home remedies
when the visual complexities wind their way though
her subtleties and feast on her insecurity