angelic fruitcake

2009-12-28T03:49:00.003Z

There are far too many things to say.

I'm here - here as in 'on my blog' - purely because the Boyfriend, his friend and I ended up back at our house watching Alien. I started telling a long story about watching Alien for the first time when I was 17, in my AS Film Studies class and being forced to watch it for the first time, and this came up. This, being: the horriblescaryface I drew whilst watching it and determinedly staring away from the screen so as not to see the chest bursting bit. Naive I was, but even I had heard about the chest bursting bit.

So I drew this picture, then, watching Alien, and tonight I showed it to the Boyfriend so he might better understand my neuroses. The outcome of the venture remains to be seen, but it reminded me of a time when blogging was not only a thing I needed but a thing I enjoyed - perhaps right now, right here, that's an important recollection to have.

(As I write, the chest bursting thing has happened and other Alien-related things are unfolding. Perhaps I should go and partake of them. Wish me luck.)

Merry Christmas. Anyone else know why they didn't just jettison the dude as soon as he got the face-hugger? Because I'm at a loss and it seems like that would've solved all their problems.

tragic

2009-07-12T18:01:00.005Z

So, I spend a good portion of time updating all the links sections on my blog and - hey! - it looks good, so much more relevant and up-to-date. Excited am I, and carried away to the point where I click 'change template' and lose every single last damn one of them. Ta-da! Shiny, different coloured blog. No links.

I guess if any of you are desperate to know which right-on, left-wing, too-hip-for-words news sources I read every day, you'll just have to ask. I'd be happy to tell you all about it.

Oh, and labelling posts? Who knew?

petition for healthy living

2009-04-13T11:52:00.003Z

Having a mosey around the Official Site of the Prime Minister's Office reveals some interesting petitions (We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to...):

...not support a state funeral for Baroness Thatcher. Apparently one was offered to Florence Nightingale and she was a thundering racist, so why the hell should Thatcher be denied just for hating poor people? /Snark.

...direct the government to provide Jaguar Land Rover with the targeted assistance it is requesting to weather the credit crisis and retain its central role at the heart of the UK's automotive and manufacturing industries. Yes, because the beauty of striving for deregulated capitalism during a boom is that when it all goes tits up the government that were expected to mind their own business are now expected to cough the fuck up. Mmm, taxes.

...increase the sentences of those found guilty of attacks on horses, ponies, and other equines. Increase the sentences of those* found guilty of attacks on members of the public?

...capital punishment for paedophile's and child murder's (sic). Mandatory smacks upside the head for those who attempt to petition the Prime Minister using improper punctuation and spelling?

...call on The Sun newspaper to back the social work profession. Makes more sense if you read the details. Nonetheless, actually asking the government to control the free press seems ill-considered.

...make urgent representation to the Broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, the broadcasting institutions operating in the UK and film regulators, asking them to stop the use of unnecessary swearing and bad language in their productions (including those available for downloading from websites) and to urge providers of user-generated content to take similar action. Couldn't agree more - about fucking time.

...establish an automatic buffer zone of at least 2 km between any new industrial size wind turbine and any home. Not in my back yard, etc.

...change the law to allow children born alive the right to life. Because everybody knows that currently, children born alive are tossed out the window by Act of Parliament.

Yes, yes. I'm being horribly facetious, particularly with that last one. It actually refers to children born before viability and makes a good point. I just really think one should check the wording of their plea to government to make sure it, you know, makes sense and junk.

(As an aside, the act of tossing something out the window is called defenestration. The simple fact that we have a word for this should be broadcast on the Beeb daily, in order that the petition-wrights of this world - myself included - might momentarily unclench.)

*****

In other news, I'm eating toast. Hurrah! I no longer feel like my body is trying to turn itself inside out and - as a thank you - shall now embark on that time honoured campaign of wishful thinking known as 'looking after myself'. I.e., no booze, fags, Dominoes, KFC Fully Loaded, or drinking coffee as a replacement for both food and water. I shall henceforth replace Coke Zero with fruit juice and a slice of lemon, endeavour to eat my five-a-day (and stop trying to convince myself that having lots of salad on my foot-long Sub makes it ok), cook simple yet delicious meals from scratch and curl up with an improving book and vegetable smoothie sprinkled with hemp seeds rather than getting wasted.

I give it a week.

But really, I'd like to be a little different. I wonder what my friends are like when I'm sober?

* read: police officers.

Edit: This I would sign a petition against.

2009-04-12T21:11:00.002Z

I thought it was a hangover - which, technically, it was - but it was also so much more than that.

It says something, though, about my alcohol consumption on the average Friday night that when I'm praying to the porcelain-altar at 4pm the next day I don't really think there's any cause for concern. Anyway, whatever it was, it blew.

So the boyfriend and I have spent a pleasant Easter curled up in bed watching golf (him) and surfing the blogs of former America's Next Top Model contestants (me), drinking Lucozade (both of us) and occasionally dashing to the bathroom to make deals with God (thankfully, just me).

Good grief! I have one week left of my impossibly, beautifully long Easter break and then it's back to Brighton, early mornings, Metro, Nero espresso at Gatwick, the shit-stained smell of trains and endless reading and dissertation doing.

Now? I'm happy with an evening of South Park, rice cakes and the contemplating the inner complexities of the toilet bowl because - believe me, the way I feel is no laughing matter but still - I'm really enjoying hanging out just the two of us. If roles were reversed, I'd feed you Rennies and stroke your hair too.

*****

In other news, my parents, brother and half of the Scottish extended family are currently out for dinner in Aberdeen and I am jealous. Oh, for a plate of stovies. And the ability to digest food.

thinking

2009-04-08T13:06:00.003Z

That deciding to do a dissertation about free-market economic theory was probably slightly ambitious. That is to say, I am indeed fucked.

This is amazing.

This is horrible.

This is terrifying.

This is so bizarre it's almost funny. Until you think about it.

Of course, I should be grappling with the finer points of Milton Friedman at the moment, so reading news blogs is obviously the sane choice.

tubs of fun

2009-03-04T22:02:00.002Z

Tonight I am blogging as the latest weapon in my defense against the powerful urge to cut my own hair. I KNOW it's a bad idea, I KNOW. But I WANT to.

*****

My appearance is on my mind (or, my mind is on my appearance? Boyfriend has a thing for switching the nouns in a sentence - switching the sentences in a noun - and it's catching) today. If I don't have time to get a paper on my way to uni, I'll just read whatever I find - Metro is always good, on the way home there's sometimes even a Times - and on Tuesday I found the Daily Mail.

Horrors. In the Mail, they had a surprisingly enlightened article about women and body image (and if you're thinking they thought body image was political correctness gone mad or immigrant invasion gone mad, you'd be wrong, as was I). This woman did a creative writing competition where women wrote in how they felt about their bodies, and the Mail published some of the entries. Other than the earth-shattering counter-productivity of having women compete to see who can hate their body most eloquently, it was interesting.

One entry completely ripped off an entire page of Wasted, which fucked me off because it's a stunning book and so personal. This girl had absolutely no right.

One was by a girl with cerebral palsy, talking about the perceived asexuality of the disabled. It was fantastic, nothing self-indulgent, none of this 'we are all unique and beautiful snowflakes' bullshit, just 'Alright, this is me, I'm fantastic and sexy and clever and why the hell wouldn't you want me?'. Good lady.

It gets me thinking about things that I hate to think about.

Today I went shopping with my gran, aunty and mum. Good times. Granny and I are looking at big jumpers, and I say that I want to get a really oversize one and wear it as a dress. So I pick one up that's about 4 sizes too big and hold it up and my granny says - "Yes, that should fit, you're like me, bigger than you look."

Out of the mouths of grans...

*****

God, I hate putting on weight and I hate even more that I hate it. I want so much to be right-on and feminist and 'lalala' I love my curves because - honestly - most of the time I do. It's just that I've crossed that line between Tyra Banks bootilicious and looking slightly pregnant. I'm not being mawkish, it's true. But girls are so impossible to talk to sometimes.

Eg., hearing two of my skinnier than me friends talk about how fat they are, I try to interject - don't be stupid, I'm bigger than both of you and I love the way I look - but I don't get as far as 'I'm bigger' before it's oh no, oh no, you're way skinny, we're fat.

How patently fucking ridiculous is that? These girls weigh less than me, take a smaller dress size, eat better than me, drink and smoke less, work out more - of course I'm bigger than them, to me it doesn't seem like a big deal. Until they start trying to tell me otherwise, because then I think - you protest too much.

I hate the whole thing so much. And now that I do feel fat, I want to hear 'oh no you're not' even less.

*****

Why is this such a mountain we feel like we have to climb? If I get a bad essay mark, I'll find out why and work harder on the next one. If I don't like my hair, I'll cut it or dye it. If my house is messy I'll tidy it but GOD FORBID that I should be so flippant about this. God forbid that I should casually remark that I'm packing more junk in the trunk these days - this is the one problem girls actually can't talk about.

Perfect world?

Girl 1 - I've gained weight.
Girl 2 - OK. Do you care?
Girl 1 - Yes.
Girl 2 - Then go to the fucking gym.

Simples. I so wish it wasn't a big deal, for me, for any of us.

books, turn up for the

2009-03-02T14:31:00.003Z

So, I just got round to watching the Terry Pratchett programme, Living with Alzheimer's that's been saved on Sky Plus for a few weeks. Other than crying, a lot, I also found the time to panic about losing and forgetting things. Recurring nightmare No. 347 - this blog suddenly, mysteriously gets deleted from the mighty interweb and I lose my only copy of about 4 years of writing.

I'm sure there's a better way of backing up your blog, but I don't know it, so I've spent the last hour going into the posts from every single month and copying the whole text into a Word document. Are you curious?

303 pages; 150,131 words. My God. That's long, that's book-long. That's a crying shame.

Since my angst-spectacular resignation from the blogging world, I've only really come back for the occasional rant/hangover story/misery-fest. It seems like I only actually want to do this when I'm feeling something bad so - just to reassure you - I'm fine.

Really, absolutely. Amazing, hey? In case you're wondering I wouldn't ever trade. I miss being a creative person (I don't think I quite deserve the label anymore), miss feeling like a writer. But being happy and comparatively well-adjusted is far better than I ever could imagine it was. It's so alien in fact that sometimes I get paranoid, start looking for problems because I really can't believe that days and weeks can go by where I'm just ok. Just, fine.

Anyway, I think I'm on here because I feel like I have something to say again. No idea what, as yet, but I seem to be spending a lot of time on the net at the moment, on message and debate boards/whatnot. It seems strange to be spewing all this opinion out anonymously while this blog - which I am so proud of, so attached to - just moulders away. Not literally, y'understand, that would be impossible. But metaphysically, yes, it is covered in mould. *chases mice out of long-abandoned photo section*

Theoretically, I could do this again. It's not like I'm incapable of writing now, in fact I'm enjoying studying so much at the moment that most days on the train home I'm frantically scribbling down my two-cents about pretty much everything. What's stopping me is that I am so not the same person that started this blog, or even the same person that was writing it until maybe 2 years ago. I'm not that borderline-bipolar, born-again Christian, hyperactive drama student, head up my own ass, pious little motherfucker. And that's not a bad thing. I never really loved that girl, she was pleasant enough to be around but pretty shit to be. So as far as I'm concerned, I've lucked out.

Now? Ha. Relatively sane, heavy-drinking, chain-smoking, cheerful, atheist humanities student? Slightly heavier? Better dressed? In the same, constant, dire need of a haircut and a good bath? Hm. I guess I've spent the last couple of years learning to just get shit done. I pulled my head out of my ass long enough to sort my life out, then messed it up again, and now - balance! Fun! Domesticity! Cynicism!

I could write a whole blog about the cynicism alone. Maybe that's where I start.

(Tenner says I never post again.)

to the various horror-story fundamentalist republicans i've come across recently

2009-01-13T22:21:00.005Z

Note: There's a high chance of incoherence here because I'm quite tired and absolutely furious about a couple of articles I've just read. I want to rewrite this into something better and longer but I also wanted to break the posting drought, so here it is. Apologies also for horrific sweeping generalisations, this is about a particular kind of religious/political hybrid that in no way represents wider Christianity of wider conservatism. I hope.

As far as I've gathered, one of the key desires of conservative/right wing political movements is the reduction of state power, ie the preservation of individual liberties. Economically, this often translates into a preference for neo-liberal or laissez-faire markets, in which trade is deregulated, institutions are private rather than nationalised and state spending is cut dramatically. Meaning - every individual has the right to bear arms, to worship and vote as they see fit, to earn a living, start a business, make a profit as best they can and, importantly, pay only the bare minimum of taxes, as the only functions of the state would be bare necessities - police, law and order, military protection and the wages of a skeleton government.

It's important to note here that, as was seen in the 2008 US election run-up, socialism is considered a dirty word almost on par with communist, hinting that even for those Americans not down with their economic theory, this must, by default, be the kind of thing they're going for. Also, traditional neo-liberal theory (Friedman and chums) states that the market itself can only be perfect when left alone. Any kind of state spending or intervention in pretty much anything will upset the delicate flower of capitalism and that is bad.

Anyway, that seems to make sense to me, rationally if not morally. The economic principle of the free market ties in pretty nicely with the conservative values of the American dream - work hard, earn bucks, protect family against communist invasions and be ruled by yourself, your God and then your government.

*****

But I stand confused. Factor in the undeniable link between fundamentalist Christian values and this particular political framework, specifically in the US, and it stops making any kind of sense.

If individual liberties (rather than social liberties) are to be protected, how can gay marriage possibly remain illegal? If every citizen has the right to look out for themselves, what business is it to all the other individuals if two gay individuals wish to marry? State interference in personal lives is surely an example of the nanny-state that proud, upstanding conservatives supposedly revile.

Not to mention the right of every woman to make decisions about her body. Not to mention the hypocrisy of a state that could potentially turn a blind eye to the children in ghetto poverty whilst declaring the womb a site of state intervention.

Censorship, too. Traditional Christian values are apparently at risk from the filth in the media, but if a state can't intervene to provide subsidised farming or unemployment benefits, then why on earth should it beep out the dirty words on South Park? And, even if you wanted it to, intervening for the moral fibre of a country rather than allowing individual families to choose what they watch, whilst allowing individual families to choose to bear arms despite the risk to the country's moral fibre seems... contradictory.

And Jesus? Who bid us to love each other, to feed the poor, the Bible that tells us it's easier for a camel to get in through eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven? What would he make of your self-regulating market that, in order to be perfectly balanced, can have no welfare state, no fixed minimum wage, no state programmes for helping young mothers balance work and child care because that would count as excessive state spending ?

*****

How exactly does it work in your head, this right wing Christianity? How do you figure you can have the prejudice and inequality and still have the god-given warm fuzzies? You think the state is a puppy that you play with, that runs to catch the big-gay-stick when you want it but is quite happy to piss off into the study while you watch your favourite get-rich-quick-and-damn-the-working-class-tv-show. Because you don't really like the idea of being told what to do, unless you're the one doing the telling.

These two girls can't marry each other to solidify their loving commitment and raise some children, but you can buy lethal weapons from supermarkets.
That woman isn't allowed to have an abortion if she chooses to have one, but you don't want to pay taxes that could potentially help her support the baby.
God talks to you, but not to the liberals.
Jesus loves you, but not him or her or them.
You must have religious freedom, but everyone else has to agree with you.
I'm going to hell, but you who take God's name in vain every time you pretend to know what he's thinking, you're ok because God tells you who to vote for.

*****

You know what an awful lot of people, Christian and not, think? If Christianity is comparable to any economic system, it's socialism. Parts of the New Testament read like a slightly more flowery Communist Manifesto. Jesus didn't want you to get rich, or isolate you and yours from the world and its poor. He wanted you to embrace the poor, invite them in for dinner, share whatever you had so that everyone ended up with more - you don't want the poor to ever be with you.

The conservative politics that seem to suit you do not satisfy your religious obligation in the least, and your religious beliefs are often at odds with the system you support.

*****

I cannot, cannot, get my head around this Jesus-Politik that bears so little resemblance to either Jesus or politics.

ain't it just beautiful?

2008-09-21T10:35:00.002Z

I get terrified by how quickly things are passing. I'm twenty-one, in 3 days it will be 3 years since my parents dropped me off in Egham. Now what?

This summer was amazing, really lovely. I've been living with the boy in our little bungalow since February and - save a couple of vicious disputes regarding the merits of Sex and the City versus endless endless sports channels - that's been lovely too.

I just like how things change. I like that I've become an Arsenal fan and more of a heavyweight drinker than I ever could have imagined. I like that I had some fun with substances and I like even more that I don't like that anymore. I like that the house is tidy these days, that we actually clean and things. I like that UKTV Gold are showing Jonathan Creek. I like how life is going.

- Also that you can chart our financial fortunes, like so many people's, by the supermarkets we've been shopping at. Tesco turned briefly to Waitrose, which turned back to Tesco, then Aldi, Lidl, a brief peak back to Sainsburys until this weeks Iceland extravaganza brought frozen comfort. We're so disloyal though, as soon as pay day comes Iceland can shove it. -

And this, thing. This really odd sensation in the gut that we are all twenty-somethings now. We're relating more to early Friends than Skins, suddenly we know what Council Tax is (and why it's a Bad Thing) and, my God, the weddings. People are getting married like it's going out of style and I love it (how do you hate being bridesmaid for the friend you've known since infant school?), don't get me wrong, but again the fear.

I'm a sucker for the whole first dance thing. I cry, without fail, the inner girl-cliche comes racing out and I'm not ashamed. But there's a difference between imagining your own wedding and actually realising it. After an embarrassing incident in York (in which a friend and I actually jumped away from the bouquet, causing it to hit the floor with an unceremonious thwup) I'm trying to stay realistic about things - I don't want to get married, I just really, really fancy a wedding.

And elsewhere? I'm returning to Brighton in a week, after a year's absence enforced by the tight-ass student loan company who - I'm sorry - should be doing a fucking tango for the amount of interest they'll be getting off me in the next few decades. My brother's starting his photography degree, my pet snail's been looking awfully sluggish recently and I'm still not over how absolutely incredible Rage Against the Machine and Manic Street Preachers were at Reading this year.

We don't talk about love
We only wanna get drunk
And we are not allowed to spend
'Cause we are told that this is the end
A design for life
A design for life
a design for life

All in all.

the morning after

2008-06-18T14:12:00.004Z

I count sixteen mosquito bites. Legs, back and shoulders - one exactly in the centre of my knee.

It takes two washes - a drunken shower at 5am when I peel off my tights and see the muddy tide marks on my thighs; a long bath today - to soak the stink of the lake out of my skin. In the tub, steaming with half a bottle of bubbles my legs are lobster red with heat and swelling. I turn the cold tap on with a clumsy toe and the icy water drifts up around me, blissful as falling asleep.

While I wait, I count my vices: caffeine, nicotine, booze booze booze. I can feel excess weliing up inside me, the nausea from a near permanent hangover. What am I doing to myself?

Outside, the sun is setting on a day spent in bed, nursing our wounds. Inside, the cool water subsides swollen skin and my legs look like legs again. I count the bites, touching my finger to them; tight red lumps, yellow, I've been scratching in my sleep again. But more than that. Red scribbles cover my feet and ankles, tiny cuts appear on the pale skin. What? Nettle bites from the long walk there in flipflops; skin rubbed raw from the longer walk home; skin grazed from the gritty, sucking mud of the shore.

My left foot. Still swollen from a slight sprain three nights ago, the tight bandage unravelled somewhere out there in the cold black. I remember splashing out there and thinking of the album my brother's band wrote, when they were living in a town of the same name - Black Water.

Was there a moon last night? Up close I could see their faces, count the bodies treading water, struggling in warmer depths. I left my underwear out there somewhere, I remember that. Will someone fish them out?

Naked, six or seven of us nightswimming. Someone pushed my head under and I froze, let myself float back up, too drunk to push up from the floor. Deadman's drift.

*****

Jenny and I swim out, almost to the centre of the lake, shout and hear the echoes. On dry land the bonfire blazes, we head back, someone throws me a jumper, music booms across the field, someone flies on the swing by the Chinese lanterns.

People laugh at us baking dry by the fire, tell us we smell like swamp.

*****

I came home with ears and eyes full of silt, minus my flipflops, legwarmers, panties.
I don't want to be here hungover, by lamplight, the football blaring in the next room - - I want to be drunk again, striking out across the water at dawn so silent, hand in his hand.

isn't it ironic

2008-06-11T13:29:00.002Z

Spending twenty minutes searching Amazon in vain for a particular book, trying quick searches, advanced searches, every combination of the words "Understanding Cultural Globalisation, P. Hopper, 2007" that can possibly exist, scrolling through page after page of vaguely related results, finally admitting defeat and accepting that they just don't have the damn thing....

...Before realising that despite the inexorable march of American culture across the globe, despite McDonalds and Starbucks appearing in every continent of the earth, despite it all, we Brits still spell globalisation with an S, not a Z. And that bloody book was right there all along.

news in brief

2008-04-29T13:34:00.002Z

It's pretty hard to get your head round sometimes, for the people I try to explain it to, but also for me.

I get to live in a bungalow with a lovely man. Lovely, very tall. Like an Ent. I have a pet snail, called Stan, who's currently on the roof of his tank, upside down and weeing. We have a big TV and lots of DVDS and I get to sit in the doorstep to smoke so I don't get rained on. Also we might get a dog. Brilliant.

I don't have a job, nor am I studying. There was a cock up with my finances and, oh, lots of things, so I'm going back in September. As for the job - I got bored of doing the work of three people for the pay of one and getting treated about as well as a half, so I left. Then I got ill. It all starts to sound like an opportunity for the world's smallest violin, I know, but it's not. Because of all the things I have, because of the house and the boy and the snail and, well, because I was given a tax rebate the size of Surrey just as I got ill so I don't have to go back to work until I'm ready.

So, once you get your head round it, it's actually pretty damn good. The only thing that I have yet to figure out is why, with all this spare time on my hands, I'm still not writing that novel I keep thinking about.

pennies

2008-04-28T23:10:00.002Z

"It's not death that you should be afraid of, but living, and how quickly we have to do it," he said.

"And whose quote is that?"

"Some girl's. It's like, that death shouldn't really be scary. There's nothing to be afraid of after the event, nothing you can really believe in anyway. Heaven and hell are just so many rumours, who cares? When you get there, if you get there, you're there and - well, that's that. Trying to aim for one or the other is shooting in the dark, it's dangerous."

"Dodgy insurance policy."

"Exactly. Life? That's scary. What's interesting about death is not the thing itself but everything that's left, everything we do to try and get around it. Believing in heaven isn't half as important as the fact that we do - I mean, there's pennies on gravestones, shrines by roadsides. That's scary. Why exactly do we think that any of that matters? But we do, and we should, because being alive when someone else is dead is scary."

"That's crazy," she said, "you don't think death is scary?"

"Oh yeah, I do, but it's the fact that I do that's terrifying."

motivation

2008-01-03T00:41:00.000Z

You are absolutely right. I do take my job too seriously; I give too much and get too little in return. I should work somewhere else and do something else before that place eats my mind. But I don't want to.

Because it makes sense.

Wiping tables makes sense, customers make sense. I know that place and those people and this work inside and out and through and I do it well. And it's the only thing I can say that about, the only thing I genuinely think makes sense.

And that takes the piss.

celebrity

2007-12-30T03:42:00.000Z

The notoriety gained from working in the friendly neighbourhood boozer would be slightly more enjoyable if every person who tapped you on the shoulder in a club to shout "Hey, you work at 'Spoons, I know you!" didn't then follow this up by saying "If you can remember what I drink, why can't you remember how old I am and stop fucking ID-ing me?"

That, or trying to lick your face and insisting on introducing you to all their friends as "My mate what works in that pub what I drink in, innit."

Why bother? Any physical attributes you may possess are, I assure you, far outweighed by the possibility of you being there tomorrow morning ordering breakfast and complaining about your hangover when I've been at work for three hours still drunk.

I am not your mate. Not until you can remember my name without prompting, and certainly not until you stop thinking I'm easy because I serve you beer.

a letter to esther

2007-12-28T03:21:00.000Z

Marra, I don't care what time it says I published this, it's now half past four in the morning and I just got in from work. It was a very long shift indeed - somebody called me a 'titbag' and then was sick in the garden (deliberately, I think).

I'm addressing this blog post to my marra for two reasons. One, it would be pretty damn rude to call you at this hour - although you're probably awake and doing something horrendous involving vino and Frankie - and two, my phone has been cut off by Orange because I haven't paid my bill. An overreaction on their part, I feel, and definitely not worth being charged to call them and pay the bill. Stalemate continues. It's all very complex.

Everything is very, upsettingly about money. I wish it wasn't, because it's such a sad way to look at life, but money is the reason I cannot sort out my phone, or get the train, or go for drinks. Money is the reason that I have to work until four in the morning just to not have enough money to do the things that would make the job worthwhile. I fucking hate it, so fucking much it makes me swear.

Also, I thought it would be fun to write you a blog letter. Sort of creepy, because it's not from me as such, it's by me. This could well be fiction. Except it's not. I'm pretty tired.

On the plus, Santa brought me a hench bottle of Bombay Sapphire for Christmas. Tonk, if you like. It's massive; it's calling to me.

I love you very very much and missing you makes me sad. Royal Holloway feels fucking years ago, I can't even tell you how different everything is. It's like it never happened and I've been in this shit job the whole time; I've always been a hard-ass bar bitch and I just happened to take some drugs one night in Cambers that made me dream that I sat in a kitchen with a souped-up Soho mincer and made ransom-note poetry. "Biting in love/ in French/ in death/ in England."

I am still a pikey, but with less of a knowledge of scripture. I want to go and sit underneath Queen Victoria on the North quad and drink wine and talk about how uncanny things are. That was one of the best nights I've ever had.

Love,
FUF

ho ho ho

2007-12-26T01:20:00.000Z

Thank you, to the drunk man with the dog who I almost walked into whilst sliding my way across Yateley on Christmas Eve in boots with no grip. He had what looked like several days worth of conjunctivitis scum around his eyes and reeked of booze and worse, but after I skidded to a halt in front of him and shrieked "I'm sorry!", he said something.

"Huh?"

"I said, happy Christmas."

"Happy Christmas."

Because even though I spent the rest of Monday night serving copious amounts of shit booze to other drunks and partaking in banter such as "If you wave that ten pound note in my face one more time I'll bite your fucking hand off" and "No, mate, I don't fancy your mate, your mate thinks my name is Sharon, mate", even though there was drinking and dancing and singing that do-they-know-it's-Christmas song, even though a beautiful man gave me a Christmas card made from a Marlboro Lights box - that crusty old man almost made my day. Almost.

fuck lucky

2007-10-29T16:50:00.000Z

M4 towards Cardiff, just after a junction, the traffic grinds to a halt. About a mile from the services. The car forces its way in from the outside lane to the hard shoulder, pulls up, stops by the concrete steps below the bridge. You get out into spitting rain and start to scramble up, bogged down with brambles and honking horns because three lanes of trucks can see you, know what you're doing, have precious little else to do but watch. Your boyfriend cheers as you slip on a wet leaf, throw out your hand to break your fall and feel thorns embedded in your palm as you run on.

Out of sight (you hope) you find a sheltered place to squat and remove six, seven spikes from your skin. It's bleeding, you're bleeding.

Back down the steps, you throw your hands up in a victory salute and notice that (after you've just pissed in the bushes) the traffic is miraculously moving again. You're so incensed by this, and trying not to slip, that you somehow don't notice what actually just happened.

*****

She was sitting in a chair, in a bedroom, in a building; she was glassy eyed, staring at her lap. On the desk in front of her was a razor of the expensive sort, with the block of moisturiser and the plastic bed around the blade to make them virtually snag-proof on the skin. It was chosen for this exact reason but past its usage now, lying mangled beside a pair of nail scissors.

What people fail to realise about sharp objects is that they are everywhere. Prison guards, health professionals - trained to search them out in any room - they know. Lighters, badges, safety pins, compasses, broken photo frames. It takes a certain turn of thought to see them. To see that a scissor blade or similar (no matter how blunt) can be taken to an overpriced shaver (no matter how snag-proof) and used, with perseverance, to lever a skinny sliver of steel from the plastic bed, bending it in the process to a corner that will hack much harder at skin than a simple sharp edge.

She was the mistress of her own undoing, beautifully adept at avoiding bread and fruit knives in the washing up, throwing out the craft blades she used to use in art class, buying the safest and bluntest of everything. She knew how to remove the more obvious of temptations, but not all of them. There always had to be something, something vulgar and harmful, in a black cloth pouch that was hidden so as not to be thought of, in a secret corner of the room that her thoughts went back to several times a day.

*****

You know, when you reach Cardiff and find your phone is missing, that this isn't exactly new. In two years you've lost/been robbed of four debit cards, three sets of various house keys, one passport, two NUS cards, one university ID and more miscellaneous items of clothing than you can count. A mobile phone lost (and really lost, as in, somewhere between Wales and England lost) is unusual but not unexpected.

Let's just say you're not too worried.

Ten years old and, after weeks of waiting, breathless trips to Toys'r'us, sold out shelves and nagging and nagging, you finally get your hands on a Tamagotchi. You celebrate by leaving your little pet on top of a vending machine in a service station in Scotland. Your parents are understandably annoyed.

On a whim, on the way back down south, you convince your father to pull back in at the services because maybe, just maybe, it'll still be there. The man in the shop smiles, hands it back to you. They've been playing with it, keeping it alive for two weeks. It's been something of a running joke.

"You're a lucky little girl, you know that?"

*****

Back then, on days when the way it felt was completely separate from the way it should be, when the misery was a tangible, physical force, she chatted shit a lot. For this person and that cause, for general edification and spiritual growth. With the controlled, delicate sincerity of someone who likes the sound of their own voice - she would ask God for stuff.

Sometimes, on her own and not nearly as often, she would actually pray. The kind of gut-spoken prayer that's more like yawning or being sick than actually trying, the cry that bubbles up behind the eyes and hurts.

Please, make it stop.

She couldn't stop asking anymore than she could stop crying and, when that failed, she'd sit up and breathe in and get back some of that calculation that served her so well in church. Hating it, knowing it didn't work that way, she'd strike a deal -

if ever I don't have to feel like this, if this ever, ever goes away, I promise you there will never be a day that I won't get down on my knees and thank you. I will never take it for granted, never stop being grateful, I'll do anything, give up everything, just please, please, make it stop.

God, if ever he saw it as a bargain, was dutiful and kept his part. She threw away the black bag, stopped crying, felt it lifting. She smiled, put on her new life like a new outfit, checked her make-up in the mirror and left the room humming to herself. She forgot all about her side of the deal.

*****

On a whim, two days later, you tell Ben to come off at that junction, go over the bridge and wait while the two of you jump out of the car and clamber over the fence to the hard shoulder. Down the steps, shining torches into the brambles, you find your phone snug in the grass by the steps, soaking wet with two days rain.

You dry it out, switch it on and find it works perfectly. Not a scratch on it. You tell the story of the Tamagotchi and remark how you've always been lucky with things like that. The little things, the eleventh hour, twist of fate, would-you-believe-it anecdotes. As if the fairies were on your side.

The irony hits you like a punch; you stop talking. Fuck lucky. Your sporadic ability to get away with things by the skin of your teeth, your smug, jam-covered approach to life's little complications - you think that's what makes you lucky? You think there's something called luck at all?

*****

That night she got into bed and decided to stop talking about luck, once and for all. She rolled over into him, pushed her face into the gap between his shoulders, listened to him breathing, counted her blessings, one by one. She thought about it, but not for too long, started to whisper in that sincere-little-church-voice and then the prayer bubbled up from somewhere deep and happened, sort of by accident.

Fuck lucky.
Thank you.

the fruitcake

2007-10-17T14:20:00.000Z

So I decided to rip off RLP by rewriting this post with his man in black substituted for my own. Shameless, hey, but I thought it was a good excercise - personifying your unconscious, the parts of you that cause and create your writing. What would they be like, what would they say, would you get on with them?

Anyway, I tried it, hoping I could get to the bottom of my complete inability to write and then post it on here by way of breaking the block. It half worked, in that I figured out pretty quickly why I'm not writing anymore, but then got upset. Really upset.

It turns out that I know exactly why I'm not writing, it's screamingly fucking obvious but it's also tied up, achingly so, with pretty much every other issue in my life. I do want to try and explain it here. if only so (if this is the last post I ever make) passers-by will see an appropriate full-stop on this rambling journal of the last three years. But the 'man in black' format really isn't the right way of doing it. See, once I coaxed him out, put a drink in his hand and sat him down by a roaring fire for some chit-chat, he wouldn't shut up. That bastard thinks he's got an answer for everything. Mainly because, well, he does.

I haven't quite plucked up the balls to tell you what he said, yet. First I want to say a couple of things about this blog, why I'm so fixated on my failing to keep it up.

1) It's almost embarassing to admit it but this stupid little site means an incredible amount to me. I've been painfully open about my life on here, using it as an ill-disguised source of therapy throughout the absolute hardest period of my life. There's been periods where I literally could not have coped without having this as an outlet, where the only comfort I could find on black days was planning these posts, putting them up and waiting on tenterhooks to see who might comment and what they might say. It sounds pathetic, even to myself, but when you're that low, a friend or someone you barely know dropping by to say 'that was good' or 'hang in there' can mark the difference between a hideous day or a better day. Writing here, striving to write well, not only gave me immense satisfaction in the work itself but the comfort of knowing people were listening. However distantly.

2) I guess this is the same point, but writing is the only thing I've ever really felt that I was any good at it. I knew I was sometimes good at drama, sometimes clever, sometimes pretty, sometimes funny, but I've always been able to write. It's the only thing I've ever felt was talent rather than fluke. When I was 15 I won a literary competition at school and the judge said a lot of things, about how I could turn professional, how he would give my name to his publishers. It was flattery, a nice little prize, but it didn't stop me waiting every day for someone to call. It also started me writing for real, in earnest, constantly. Obsessively. I never got a call, there was never any publisher but the can was open and worms were everywhere. I didn't stop writing until about September last year. That's about 4 years of constant scribbling. Now it's gone. Take a moment to imagine what this sudden absence feels like.

3) I know this blog isn't dead yet. Most months show a couple of posts, however bad or pointless they might be. And I know that the sheer volume of writing I produced during the first year of uni couldn't last forever. It was insane. I was posting almost every day, alongside writing two separate diaries, countless poems and pieces of fiction. Then there was the compulsive note taking and essay writing and just shit that I couldn't stop putting down. Was physically terrified of not writing. It became a symptom of the illness, it became an actual fixation, but I think I would have died without it. It was an extreme, but the material I produced then (some posted on this blog, some not) is one of the only things I am actually proud of. Now I've reached the other extreme. For the last year or so, what you see on this blog is actually the sum total of my output. It's shit. I am no longer proud.

4) There aren't that many coincidences in how my relationship with writing has developed. I started working at it when someone told me I was good; started blogging when I was feeling particularly confident about my ability to be interesting; started blogging about serious matters as soon as I realised that the internet wasn't gonna laugh at me. Then, I left home, started uni, and everything changed. The only constant things were being miserable and wanting, needing to write about it. So I did. As I got more and more depressed I wrote more and more, with increasing honesty, about myself, my illness, my faith, my life. I reached breaking point. Got help. Got put on meds. Lost my faith.

Six months later, I guess it was, I took myself off meds, got a new boyfriend who subsequently came to live with me. It's difficult to get lost in your head when you and the person you're in love with are cohabiting with everything you own in a comparatively small room with a single bed. I blogged, occasionally, but it was nothing like the same. Worse, he wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. He never read a single word I wrote. I desperately wanted him to.

That was a distraction though, from the biggest single change. I was still messed up, certainly. My estranged granfather dying, the realisation that I was going to have to leave Royal Holloway, losing touch with most of my friends, all made it a difficult year. But apart from a few very black days, I wasn't depressed anymore. The process of becoming happier didn't just cost me my faith. It cost me this as well.

*****

So present day, I'm staring at this blog, feeling utterly disconnected. I don't know how to process any of the things that are happening to me and (this is very important) I FUCKING HATE every single thing I've written here for the last year or so.

I try so hard to get it back, to shake off this block, but I can't. On the train, by the beach, in the park, over and over again, I snatch so hard at every idea that hits me, try to pin them down and find some way of getting back to that place where I could just express myself and I can't. I cannot write a single word without instantly, instinctively criticising it. Too wanky, too blunt, too boring, too pretentious. Everyone will see right through that and smell the desperation coming off a girl who's lost her edge.

Even this post. Especially this post.

Why?

Because right at the heart of everything, is this one fear. When you strip away all the pretty words (which the meds did pretty well) and spiritual crisis (the meds took care of that one too) and even the depression itself (counselling, balls of steel, but yeah, the meds) the only real thing that's left is this one fear. Not a mental illness fear, a chemical imbalance fear or a religious fear. Just a me-fear.

I'm so so scared that I will fail. Why I didn't apply for drama school. Why I never try to lose weight despite the fact that sometimes I hate my body. Why I didn't go for Oxbridge. Why, on changing universities, I went for somewhere that asked far lower grades than the ones I actually have. Why it took me so long to acknowledge I was ill. Why I have never ever pursued any interest other than writing to any sort of challenging level. Why I stopped auditioning for plays as soon as there was a hint that I was out of my depth. Why I cannot, cannot write.

Deep down, on the most primal level I think I have, I'm convinced that, basically, I'm a twat. That if I was to dress snazzy, lose weight, have perfect hair, amass this wealth of knowledge on every conceivable subject, have impeccable taste in music, sing, act, work hard, be published... if I could be proved worthy in every possible area of my life, then I could be confident. But what if I'm not found worthy? What if I'm found wanting? Surely it's easier not to try?

It's the most ridiculous cliche. If I heard one of my friends say what I've just said it would break my heart, but I'd be furious. How could anyone genuinely believe that anyone expected them to be perfect? That it was better to atrophy than to attempt to improve? And yet... and yet.

*****

The man in black didn't love me so well. He didn't reach over to stroke my face, there was no heart to heart over french toast and diet cokes. What he said was horrible, and true, and I hate him for saying it because it's taken so long for me to realise it:

This is the only part of your life where you've ever felt like you've achieved, where you've actually done something you feel proud of. You feel like you've lost everything else you knew about yourself and if you lost the ability to write that would be the end of you. But you know what the saddest thing is? You're so scared of being shit you're actually gonna let it happen. Just like dropping out, just like every opportunity you've ever thrown away, every time you've been too lazy or scared or sad to get up and do something with your life. You'd rather never write again than write badly and have someone else think badly of you.

So end it, stop it, stop trying, give up, why don't you? What the fuck made you think you could do it anyway?

*****

What title do I give this? What snappy one-liner do I save for the finish line of the most uncomfortably, brutally honest thing I've ever written? How the hell do I end this?

I guess by saying that even though I don't want this to be my last post, I don't see how it can't be. For so long now I've been so unhappy with everything I've written for this site. Whether anyone reading picks up on that, I can't tell, I absolutely cannot be objective anymore. But now you know. Now the self-conscious writer is revealed. Now you can see exactly what I'm thinking when I try and put the world to rights.

It's horribly embarassing. But here's the silver lining: it's the feeling you get when you sit down and take a long, unforgiving look at yourself. No secrets. No excuses, no tiny-violined and artily worded railing against god, no stilted accounts of piss-ups and break-ups and falling apart. No poetry. No essay. No structure. No photos. No humorous similes or analogies about the G8 or student life. No fucking bullshit effort anything. Just writing exactly what I saw when I looked, and exactly what that means.

I take it back. If this is the last one ever then that's ok, because this one at least, I was a little bit proud of.

:)

12 bar acid blues

2007-10-02T13:38:00.001Z

Dropping out, being in debt, breaking up, cheating, moving home, sleeping on the sofa.

Kings of Leon - On Call
Mika - Grace Kelly
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Pin
Finger Eleven - One Thing
Maximo Park - Postcard of a Painting
Athlete- Tourist
Stereophonics - Dakota, Local Boy in the Photograph
Steve Harley and the Cockney Rebels - Come up and See Me (Make Me Smile)
Muse - Endlessly
REM - At My Most Beautiful
Gnarls Barkley - Just a Thought
Johnny Cash - Hurt
Snow Patrol - Set the Fire to the Third Bar
The Fray - How to Save a Life
The Kooks - Seaside

New job, no money, no boyfriend, the drinking binge, pulling that terrible man, 8:30am hangover walks to the bus stop, getting perved by alcoholics, inappropriate work place crushes, living at home, sleeping on the sofa, sleeping in the back of Charlotte's car, Camberley with the marras, pissed in Janine's car.

Dizzee Rascal - Fix Up Look Sharp
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole
VAST - Pretty When You Cry
The Cranberries - God Be With You (Ireland)
Linkin Park Feat. Jay-Z - Numbencore
MIA - URAQT
Justin Timberlake - Sexyback
Siobhan Donaghy - Man Without Friends
Bush - Glycerine
Beck - Go it Alone, Black Tambourine
Rihanna - Umbrella
Dresden Dolls - Coin Operated Boy, Girl Anachronism
Editors - Munic
Modest Mouse - Float On

Things getting steady, the summer starting, the big unfriendly giant, walking home from Camberley, small-talking and the awkward hug goodbye, nights at the Red Cross Hut, smoking in Sian's car, last ever legal fags in pubs.

Nelly Furtado - Say it Right
Moody Blues - Nights in White Satin
Oasis - Champagne Supernova
Longview - I Would
Ash - Barefoot
Kings of Leon - Fans
Shaun Colvin - Trouble
Faithless - Salva Mea
Chemical Brothers - The Boxer
Peaches - He's not Dead
The Noisettes - Don't Give up, Count of Monte Christo
Head Automatica - Beating Heart Baby
Fall-Out Boy - This Ain't a Scene
Justice Vs Simian - We Are Your Friends
Bloc Party - The Prayer

Reading '07.

Smashing Pumpkins - 1979, Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Stand Inside Your Love
NIN - Hurt
Maximo Park - Going Missing, Graffiti
Jimmy Eat World - Sweetness, Get it Faster, The Middle
New Young Pony Club - Ice Cream, Hiding on the Staircase
Arcade Fire - Neighbourhood #1, Wake Up, Rebellion, No Cars Go
Kings of Leon - Knocked Up, Black Thumbnail, McFearless, On Call
Gogel Bordello - Start Wearing Purple
The Gossip - Standing in the way of Control
Lostprophets - Last Summer
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Turn Into

Brighton, the last two weeks, the endless train journeys, everything.

Kate Nash - Foundations
Idlewild - You and I are Both Away, Paint Nothing, Everyone Says You're so Fragile
Ellegarden - Mr Feather
Imogen Heap - Goodnight and Go
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps, Y Control
Regina Spektor - Fidelity
Siobhan Donaghy - 12 Bar Acid Blues
2 Many DJs - Androgyny
Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees, Idioteque
Maximo Park - I Want You to Stay
Kings of Leon - The Runner
Peter Sarstedt - Where do you go?
Kanye West - Stronger

Can one song sum up your entire summer?

Time is never time at all
You can never ever leave
Without leaving a piece of youth
And our lives are forever changed
We will never be the same
The more you change, the less you feel

Believe
Believe in me
Believe believe

That life can change
That you're not stuck in vain
We're not the same
We're different tonight

Tonight, so bright
Tonight, tonight

And you know you're never sure
But you're sure you could be right
If you held yourself up to the light
And your embers never fade
In your city by the lake
The place where you were born.

Believe
Believe in me
Believe believe

In the resolute urgency of now
And if you believe there's not a chance tonight

Tonight, so bright
Tonight

We'll crucify the insincere tonight
We'll make things right, we'll feel it all tonight
We'll find a way to offer up the night tonight
The indescribable moments of your life tonight.
The impossible is possible tonight
Believe in me as i believe in you...

Tonight
Tonight, tonight
Tonight, Tonight

bright

2007-10-01T18:08:00.001Z

How good does it feel to be typing up notes from today's seminar, last week's lectures; how messy my handwriting is now, after six months of nothing much at all.

A week ago today, two years since my parents drove me (shaking) to Egham and dropped me off in a flat with Kate, Adam and Reena. I can't even remember the last time I spoke to them, but I remember meeting them. Kate, bounding down the hall behind her boyfriend and not knowing which of them was actually moving in. Reena, unlocking her door with her mother, and thinking she said Rita. Adam, waving while the door slammed shut on him. We went out for drinks, we girls, but everywhere was full so we came home again and went to bed. Around midnight, feeling bored as hell, I went to get some water and ended up talking to Adam in the kitchen until daybreak.

I remember him saying he'd idealised university in his head to be this utopia of coffee shops and ragged jeans, budget cooking and deep and meaningfuls. We bonded over the unshakeable feeling that the better party was happening next door. As it happened, they were having a party next door, but we weren't invited.

This time round? My introductory letter gets lost in the post and all I can wrangle by way of information is to show up at Pavilion Parade at 9am on the first day of term. Oh, and bring passport photos.

I rock up late, 9:15, after a 6am wake up call from my dad, a two hour train journey and getting hopelessly lost in the Lanes in the pouring rain. Sit down in a room full of painfully cool people and think, oh God.

It gets better, quickly. I realise that several fashion students have mistakenly wandered into our induction and, with them gone, I see a lot more hippies. Good sign. It's also reassuring to realise that everyone else seems to be as disorganised as I am.

An hour and a half later a transvestite called Janine asks me out for a 'smoke'. Is that smoke or smoke smoke? Smoke smoke. Some time after that I queue outside the ladies in a pub only to see two men walk out together and see the shiny red condom they left in the toilet bowl.

Everything you've heard about Brighton is true. TRUE.

I can't tell you how surreal it is to be doing this again. Visiting Charlotte's halls, seeing the empty curry trays, the cider cans, the fags out the window. It's so familiar and yet several thousand miles away. I leave our coffee shop conversations to commute home, change out of my hippy clothes to the black shirts of bar work. I don't stay for a smoke, or a pill, or even a drink. I have work to do if I'm gonna afford this.

Walking into a talk in an actual lecture theatre. There's a power point presentatio set up, the SU Sabbs waiting in the wings, royal blue curtains covering the concrete walls. A room full of nervous, buzzing freshers. I'm told that university, no matter how old you are, is a once in a lifetime opportunity. The irony doesn't escape me.

The journey, door to door, takes three hours each way. That's 24 hours a week, £55 of rail fares, £13 bus fares for six hours of classes. Jo, a Leeds girl clutching a multicoloured book called 'The Politics of Ecstasy' says I'm more than welcome to crash on her floor, in fact, I could easily stay on a different floor every night of the week but it's not really an answer.

I smile instead, secretly made up that they like having me around. It's unbelievable, how easy they are to get on with. Unbelievable how much I love this city. Unbelievable how incredibly, life-shatteringly tired I am from trying to work and study full time simultaneously.

I can't remember the last time I was this excited, this nervous - except I can, it was two years ago and part of me feels so incredibly guilty that I should really be a finalist right now. I'm not though, I'm a fucking Fresher again and it feels very, very good.

why my mum is standing in my doorway, holding a salt shaker and threatening to evict me

2007-09-18T00:17:00.001Z

My room is a funny old place to be at the moment. Aside from the obvious (it being the size of my armpit), it is now also the home of two important things - the first one being every item of clothing I own.

Because my chest of drawers and wardrobe are outside on the landing (they have to be - I told you it was small) I've needed to readjust my usual clearing out routine. I tend to follow the 'make a gigantic heap of everything you own and only put things back in their rightful place if they're necessary' regime but the fact that the landing is already occupied by my furniture means that every item of clothing I own is now in a gigantic heap on my bedroom floor. Which is to say, my bed, because I have no floor. My floor is where I keep my books. If I mention the only two things I own in any great amount are clothes and books (not make-up, DVDs, music, jewellery, nic-nacs, just clothes and books) then the picture may become clearer.

I've spent most of today rifling through the heap (or, Mount Fi, as it has been called) trying to whittle down the sheer amount of crap that I've accumulated. Half of it I don't even remember buying. Or 'obtaining'. Why do I have a 'Topshop Couture' grey lycra jumpsuit that doesn't fit me? Or a fluorescent blue 'Pavlov is my bitch' t-shirt? From which man did I once steal tartan boxer shorts? Is that shiny thing lurking underneath my favourite jeans actually a cape? Yes, it actually is. I conclude that working in a charity shop is actually a bad career move for those living in anything less than a house sized wardrobe.

Lots of hard work. But unfortunately most of Mount Fi is still there, because of the second very important thing. Stan.

Stan is a giant African land snail, or 'achatina fulica' and it's important to note that despite all the very interesting qualities this breed possesses (such as being able to crawl along the edge of a razor blade without getting hurt) and their many advantages as a pet (such as being able to eat pretty much anything), there's only one reason why I now own one:

When I was pissed one time last Easter I thought having a pet snail would be the funniest thing ever and convinced my snail-breeding friend to save me the next egg that her snail (Vince) and her mate's snail (Fibonnaci) created. Not really fully comprehending that I was swearing the life of another into my hands.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very much on board with this. A creature that moves at 0.004mph and positively thrives on neglect is well up my street as an irresponsible human being. But I wasn't prepared for just how distracting a gastropod can be. When it gets quiet, I can hear him eating. He's got a little mouth and everything, and if I stroke his shell he comes out all 'who the hell are you?' and looks at me.

What I'm getting at here is, I think, a perfectly rational and valid explanation for why I spent most of my day off sitting on a mountain of badly matched and hideous clothing holding an enormous snail in my hand and cooing. Is that so wrong?

upon the side of this mountain of mine

2007-09-17T13:51:00.000Z

Work

Saturday, you get a call early in the day. Can you come in early? You settle on six, but a rash of Morris Men distracts you on the way so you don't get there til half past. Apologise profusely, then realise that the pub is dead, so grab yourself a packet of crisps.

Discuss new members of staff with your co-workers and finalise names for them (smoking hottie; flaming hottie; cutey pie; nice but stupid; lanky pleb). Explain for the fifth or sixth time why you won't be moving away quite as soon as you thought.

Clean the cappucino machine, polish some glasses, retell the story of the family that left dirt nappies on table 39 to your friend who just ate at table 39. Clean the ale-lines, flirt with one customer, twat tax another for calling you 'darling' more than six times during a single transaction.

Realise that you've called your area manager a wanker on your Facebook profile page - the same page where you've named the company you work for. Shit.

*****

The evening picks up, you sneak out for a cigarette and chat to Cider and Black, who just got some bad news, and Smiths in an Abbot Glass who wants to know why Old Rosie in a Chilled Glass and Carling (Fosters on Mondays) got barred. Explain, get upset about the whole thing all over again.

Crack on, serving ten deep at the bar, cut your finger on a broken glass, drop ice cubes down someone's back, start to develop a weird sense of ESP with people's orders.

She wants a pint of Fosters, a glass of Rose, two apple sours, a Summer Fruits Kopparberg, a pitcher of Vodka Red Bull and a double Jack and Coke/Archers and Lemonade/Malibu and Diet Coke....

Either that she's just weird, plain weird, and she wants Bells and Ginger or Malibu and Milk or Absolut Appletise or one shot Bells, one shot Amaretto and one shot Smirnoff in a glass with two ice cubes, half a slice of lime and a dash of soda.

It wears on, you're shattered. There's time for a sandwich, sat by the food lift, flicking cherry tomatoes into the bar, into the ice dumps; time for a fag on the roof, resting your head against the railings, counting to 100, screaming.

You close early, bouncers roaming up and down "Les-be-aving-ya ladies and gents please!" and people whinge, as always, the same way they whinge at quarter to 1 in the morning when they should've been gone half an hour ago and they think you're stupid enough not to notice that they light a new cigarette everytime you come outside to yell at them.

"Ah just let me finish this darling.. I ain't getting kicked out in the middle of my fag.. you want me to leave you oughta give me another fucking fag innit.."

Hold the door open for the last one. Shout FUCK OFF as you lock it behind them.

Hours pass. You scrub the tables, sweep the garden, take the furniture back out, clean the ashtrays, wash and shelf every glass in the place, recycle every bottle, wipe the bar, the taps, take down the Pepsi hoses, soak the nozzles in soda, empty the drip trays, count the wastage, buff the fridges, wank the wines, decant the spirits mop and sweep and scrub and empty and -

at half 2 in the morning realise that a rotary club is coming in tomorrow for a Sunday lunch and you need a table set up for 50 people so

at half 4 in the morning sit down in the garden with a pint and a fag and the three out of six of you that made it to the bitter end shoot the shit for a while until

half 5, get the bones from the rack of ribs you ate and hide them in the fridge for the morning shift manager then

climb the stairs into the flat, two of you, hear boss setting the alarms and curl up on the sofa beds under the jacket and blanket you found.

Half an hour later you hear the morning manager taking off the alarms, hear the beer delivery coming in.

Half an hour later you realise your colleague is a snorer.

Four hours later, get up and pull back on the blouse, the trousers, the hideously painful shoes, put on some make up, sort out your hair, eat the shakiest bacon sandwich you've ever had and by 5 to 11, get back behind the bar and pull the first pint of the day.

Play

Saturday you get a call early in the day, will you come out tonight? You settle on 9 but dinner with your parents distracts you so it's more like half past. Buy a bottle of wine and some tobacco on the way, listen to Kanye West up the street and allow yourself a little dance under a streetlight. Night off, yeah.

Arrive at the house and discuss Mutual Friend's Hair. She's devastated, says she's never had it this short, she went there with a picture and everything, pixie cut, she said, she thought a pixie cut would look good. Friend has messed with the cut, snipping at it and bigging it with mousse until it actually looks lovely, just a million miles away from what she wanted.

She takes her bottle of wine home untouched. It's not her fault, says the Friend, if you don't have much confidence something like that can really kick you. You say, she should've come out, just said fuck it and had a laugh and reminded herself that she's a really fun person to be around.

You say, look at me, I'm over 12 grand in debt from a course I've never finished, I work like a dog for shit all money in a pub full of wankers, I'm starting uni in two weeks and I have no house, no job, no loan, no nothing, my parents are mad at me, my boyfriends mad at me, I've put back on all the weight I lost at Easter and my hair hasn't been cut in a year. Am I gonna let it ruin my night? Fuck am I.

Friend smiles. Cock it, shall we just get some pills?

*****

In the car, towards Hawley, on the phone all the time "Left where? That field? Where... if you can't see us then we're lost."

Headlights slicing the darkness, a man appears, flinches, so you shut them off and don't see him til he appears by your window. Gonna let me in then?

He's got some but not enough. He can get more though, five minute drive, same price, £2.50, no problem. How many?

Well, he chuckles through his drink, his cigarette hanging out the window, he's picking up about 200 so - how many?

By the time it happens, there's four of you in the car and this man in the doorway, with a medallion. It's the medallion that does it for you, you've never been part of this scene, this meeting up in car parks and corners, it's always been friends and house parties and sharing alike and this man (he takes a swig of your wine and grimaces, 'you wanna get straight off that shit, darling') is not someone you'd want to be seen with.

Even so. It happens. You stare firmly out the window, as if you've no idea what's in his pockets, you hold open a plastic baggy and look up at the ceiling as if he's handing you a packed lunch but your eyes flicker down as he counts them out and he grins, all Cheshire Cat in the dark. "You girls can have one extra for your petrol money, yeah?"

****

At half eleven you drop, washing it down with red wine. It tastes more horrible than you remember and you sit in the car, reliving licking it off in the inside of a baccy tin at Easter, off the inside of your hand on a floral carpet in Surrey, choking one down dry at Reading. This one goes down easy, too easy.

Midnight is crunchtime. If they haven't sent you up in that half an hour then you know you'll lose your nerve. You're there finally, the club, after a nervy drive to arrive before the chemicals start working. Car safely parked, you sip some water, leave the wine for your mates who haven't dropped, head inside.

Half twelve and something is happening. Your cheeks are hot and swelling like a chipmunks, you could store food in there, or hot air, you push your hands slow and hard back into your face so that no one can see. You're on a rollercoaster, you're sick, you just feel bad, bad, bad and you think of Mutual Friend and her haircut and how bad feeling bad can be for you.

Black, red, yellow, smoke, green, lasers, beats, Faithless, friends, your whole world goes two degrees left, right, forward til you have to shake your head.

Twenty five to one you start dancing, working against it, you will not feel bad you will not feel bad, you will not. You pretend the drug isn't real, that it's a placebo and it's only you that can make it happen and you dance and you fake happy so hard and then suddenly-

Like a geyser, like a volcano happened beneath you and you were shot up skywards, like a net scooped you up and swung you, like taking off, like hitting the top of the ride, like standing on top of the mountain.

Oh. God.

Everyone is incredible. Everyone is amazingly beautiful and the feel of other people, their touch has never been so good. This vodka and coke is the darkest, sweetest, strongest thing, this roll up is the sharpest heat you've ever inhaled. You could stand or sit or run or dance anywhere for however long with anyone because you are absolutely invincible, you are strong and beautiful and happy and you feel in every inch of your body that you are having sex with the entire world and you love it and it loves you.

A couple more drinks, a couple more drops and you've made gold, defeated alchemy, found the magic combination to the meaning of life.

You stay on top of that mountain for 15 hours. You sleep on a dew covered lawn. You talk to strangers. You tell a taxi driver that you love him. You slump on a sofa, smoke a joint, spend minutes or hourse with a boy and a girl, running your fingers along the inside of her wrist, stroking his cheekbones while someone plays with your hair.

You sleep, briefly, then walk out across the town in blazing sunshine, sweating in your leather jacket, reach your boyfriend's house, give him a kiss and fall asleep while he watches the Grand Prix.

He doesn't want to know about the drugs; you don't want to know about the football. When he drives you home, the car jerks around a corner while the music is playing and you dig your heels in and struggle but gravity takes you back down the mountain and you hit the floor.

And go get ready for work.

the teaches of jesus-man

2007-08-31T02:37:00.000Z

Lesson 1. To write, even when you don't feel like writing.

Lesson 2. To work, even when you don't feel like working.

Lesson 3. To run, when walking seems difficult.

Lesson 4. To fail, when success seems frightening.

Five, to pour three pints with two hands.
Six, to eat and smoke at the same time seven, to fall in love (and hard).

Lesson 8. To allow, when something knocks, to answer.

*****

I call him the Jesus-man. They, the regulars, all end up with names of some description (Julie, Pete, Steve, Graeme...The Doctor, Stinky McSpectacles, the Guitar-man, the Good-luck-man), if only because referring to them by their drinking habits seems somehow impersonal.

The Jesus-man could, for example, be called Fosters on Curry night about half-7, usually with two friends (Fosters), likes to sit on table 26, you know, the nice one. He deserves a special mention beyond his statistics, but to get a nickname you have to really stand-out.

The Good-luck-man was the Good-luck-man before I came to work in Camberley. He was a regular at Help the Aged in Egham -along with Flower-lady, who waters the plants on a Tuesday- but it wasn't his face I remembered, it was his incredibly individual habit of grabbing one's hand and reciting (repeatedly) I wish you good luck for this year next year and all the years to follow I wish you good luck for this next year I wish

Jesus-man was like that. We'd met before, you see, one time, but it wasn't his face that rang the bell. It wasn't even the dog-collar. It was him on his phone, mentioning a funeral.

Sitting outside the church, leaning against a pillar, writing. The vicar was on his way out and -it seemed like a good idea at the time- I stopped him and asked if he had time for a question. He was on his way to a funeral. I said, then, in 30 seconds could he give me a reason to believe in God again?

It was the stupidest of stupid things, my penchant for the dramatic getting out of hand. But he answered. The fact that the very next day was D-Day, the losing-my-faith day, didn't matter. It stuck with me. I thought about it. Still think about it.

That whole love concept.

See, people tend to drift in and out of your life. These people now, the pub-dwellers, I spend more time with them than with my own family some weeks. I chat to them more regularly than half my friends. I know which of them are having operations, what they used to do before they hit the bottle, what they still do in between times. They want to know about uni, how's my boyfriend, have I been to the doctor about my toe yet?

Nobody really makes much difference to anyone.

But then Jesus-man comes in, answers his phone at the bar, I hear him say that word funeral and click click click, I know why he's familiar. I know that he knows that I'm the kind of girl who sits outside churches smoking and pondering, in my own special way, the questions of the universe. Before I really think it through, he's off the phone and I'm telling him that I know him and he remembers.

"Yeah... you asked me why you should believe in God... I was going to a funeral."

"Yeah!... Yeah."

I'm mortified, no one who comes in the pub to drink should know about that side of me. You have to keep people away from you, the other side of the bar, the other side of a thick wall of make up and a black shirt. Otherwise you forget who you are. And yet.

I want to sit and talk to him. I want to collar him again and ask him questions, get that little bit closer to the faith I used to have. He has that vibe, you know, that peaceful vibe. Talking to him makes me feel like I'm in church - that love, or God, or whatever it is, shines out of him in the most amazing way.

It makes me feel tired and small, like an orphan meeting their parents' friend and feeling that perhaps the burden could be passed to them, that they might take over and look after and fill that gap. The 'good, the grown ups are here' feeling.

Because I miss it. I miss that. I want to talk to this man because he's suddenly the only person in this pub, in this town perhaps, who would really understand what I mean when I say that I miss God and how it felt... That peace he has - I miss it because I never quite had it, but sometimes I felt I came close.

*****

i wish you good luck for this year and next year and all the years

*****

Lesson 1. To sit down at 4am, after work, and blog when you don't feel like blogging.

Lesson 2. To work at it, even when you can't stand what you produce.

Lesson 3. To jump in, headfirst.

Lesson 4. To fail, but not set out to fail.

Five, to learn interesting facts and drinking habits of customers to encourage familiarity.
Six, to talk and pray at the same time, seven, to act like a lovestruck teen with the vicar.

Lesson 8. To look through the peephole, squint, whisper who's there?

i didn't want to go back there, to its gently welcoming glow of a door

2007-08-28T21:28:00.001Z

Three times.

Once a week ago, once two days ago and once today. Three times I've sat down with the spangly new broadband we just got installed in our house and tried to blog. Three epic, rambling, confusing, over-detailed, vain, pointless posts that I didn't finish. Honestly, no one cares how many boys I've kissed or times I've been pissed since last we spoke. I've become harder this summer, impatient with myself. I don't want to read my own bullshit.

Looking through Facebook... pictures of friends. Sailing, acting, making puppets, going to festivals, travelling, playing in bands, doing charity work, church work, painting, dj-ing, graffiti design, starting careers.

Whichever way you look at it, I've spent the last four months since leaving Egham working like a dog behind the bar and getting pissed. Yeah, there's been other stuff. The end of one relationship, the beginning of a new one, getting to know my parents again, making new friends, losing an entire stone through being too stressed to eat and then putting it back on again when I chilled out a bit.

But mainly, yeah. Work/Drink.

Oh/God.

When did that become me? Some smarty-knickers left a comment on this blog once, I can't remember what I'd written, it just said 'who are you, Fi?'. I seem to remember I wrote something snippy back. Anonymous comments are the height of cowardice - if you can't say it with your name attached you shouldn't say it - and I didn't like the implied disapproval.

Would that they would ask me again. A few months later, the dizzy thoughts of moving back home to find myself have somewhat disappeared. I think I've learnt a lot, etc. I feel more adult, etc. I feel like I'm fading away, etc.

Because I'd like to say I have a lot more interests than I do. These things you do that tether you to the world around you. Ice hockey or your love of whittling; your encyclopaedic knowledge of electro music or your complete works of Plato. Gone. You become transparent.
You don't know anything.

The only thing I've ever been good at is this. Writing. I don't do it anymore. This is the first thing, other than a couple of drunken poems (about a boy who smelt of Armani; about a club I went to) that I've written in weeks and it's taken me four goes.

This is... depressing.

Some of the stuff in the archives of this blog feels like it was written by someone else. I can't believe I used to be able to take the way I was feeling and actually explain it. Now, I can't even feel it. It's sickening to think I was miserable for years because I could feel things so keenly and now, now I feel nothing at all and I realise the only thing that kept me alive through that time was doing this, writing, and now-

Sometimes I even wish that I could go back. I think, perhaps it was worth it to be able to capture it. Then I realise what I'm saying, how utterly wanky it is to even suggest that a knack, a way with words is worth the incredible darkness of that cloud.

No. Nope. Nope. No.

This is... the problem is that I've been writing this for an hour, trying to break the block, to get it moving, to employ every constipation-related analogy I can in order to relieve the backed up emotional blockage. I can't.

Because I don't want to admit that I'm unhappy again. And I can't even remember how it happened, when it started. But I don't want to do anything, everything seems like I'm watching it through glass again and every time I smile I'm faking it and all of these cliches. These black cloud, don't wanna get out of bed in the mornings, feel like I'm missing out cliche.

This dirty great cave I used to live in, with the big bed in the corner for me to sleep all day. The piano that only plays the minor key. There, over there is my teddy bear and there's the little black blag that no one ever, ever gets to look inside.

And there's me in the doorway, looking slightly stunned.

I'm going to uni in September. To Brighton, a new life, new course, new city, new everything. And now, after four months of relative simplicity, working and dating and enjoying life - NOW - the bad place finds me.

At least I've managed to write something.

quickfire

2007-05-20T16:11:00.000Z

Back in Egham for the first time in a long time, I have about half an hour to write this before I go home again.

Home's a funny one, hey?

My bedroom at home, my bedroom for over a decade, has this big bunk bed type thing in it, except instead of a bottom bunk there's a miniature desk and wardrobe. Space saving in a room roughly the size of a double bed. Nobody gets to see my room, ever. I like it that way. This year, we're pulling it to pieces, hours spent with my father ripping posters off the walls, pulling wood and metal apart until what's left is (the requisite heap of junk on the floor) and countless slats and planks of wood. My bed, no more.

It's been therapeutic. I love it because it's my room but its claustrophobia, the sheer amount of mess is a testament to the state of mind I maintained in the years that I occupied it. Now I'm back, and pulling it apart has been the most healing thing. Bag after bag leaves the room, to charity, the tip, the dustbin. Papers, diaries, photos, clothes, schoolbags, jewellery, notes, paintings I did - my self-portrait.

From age 13, an A2 sheet of olive green construction paper, charcoal and chalk. No hair, no neck, just cheekbones, chin, an enormous pouting mouth and eyes. Charcoal eyes. My mum asks, what the fuck is that? I say, that's me, seven years ago. How I saw myself. More black than white, smudged and blended til the paper started to disintegrate beneath my fingers, those enormous scowling eyes.

This. This I'll keep, if only because it's important to remember how it looked like, if not how it felt.

*****

Almost twenty now, an official university dropout and full-time barstaff. Living back with my parents. Single.

That one hurts most. Single. My birthday's looming up on the horizon, soon it'll be a year since he came outside the pub where he worked to chat to some mates and saw this girl, drunk on champagne, playing with the flowery parasol someone bought her that day, and said hey, who's she?

A year on since sitting on the playground, reciting Shakespeare together.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

Before you ask, our diplomatic conclusion is that it's both of our faults. I do, of course, blame myself.

*****

And the future?

Well that's a toughie. Last night, tucked up in my cousin's double bed, whispering like we did when we were 5, I tell her I'm terrified, secretly. Coming round, slowly, to the idea, she asks why?

Tells me this is good, that I have every imaginable opportunity in front of me so why on earth aren't I excited?

*****

Honestly, I am. Maybe I'll travel, find a charity to work for. Stay at the pub and cultivate that drum and bass habit I've always wanted. Write that book. Go to those festivals. Take night classes. Learn to drive. Learn to cook. Join a gym. Move to Spain. Buy a bicycle. Do an internship at Amnesty. Give fundraising another bash. Sit down at the computer and write that goddamn book.

Go back to Church. Try and find the compromise between who I am and what I believe. Play the guitar.

Be happy.

Maybe once the dust has settled, as it's finally starting to do, it'll become clearer to the rest of the world that this is exactly what I want to do, and the dawning realisation that I've actually done it has made me feel better, stronger, happier than I've been for a very very long time.

Maybe this is the right thing.

fix up look sharp

2007-04-25T18:28:00.000Z

Angelic Fruitcake
335 posts
Last published 14th March 2007.

About 30 of those posts are drafts, unfinished, unpublished. Topics like - smoking, hating the world, loving the world, drinking, studying, current events. The things that matter.

I'm getting thicker, I swear. Too much time working, too many pints pulled, too many clothes labelled, too much practical woman-in-the-rice-field style callus earning labour. I exaggerate. I just haven't been studying. Because I've basically already failed this year and now I'm not even trying to save it.

Because I said if they make me repeat I'll leave and all I want to do is leave. Not for the place, not for the people (God, not for the people), but for the general bad feeling one gets knowing one is wasting one's time on a degree one does not like. One gets pissed with that pretty quick.

One wants to start again, to do well in a degree that is useful (if slightly easier to get into) rather than spending four years scraping a pass in a degree one simply cares so little for.

In short - I want out.

Thinking: Brighton, London, Middlesex, Greenwich, Scotland, anywhere, anywhere where I can find out what I want to know. I want to learn again, I want to love learning again.

Learnt: I will not work unless I want to, there is no discipline here whatsoever, which is entirely my problem and I need to get the hell down and fix it - to an extent I have been. I've stopped spending days at Help the Aged trying to skive and started getting shit done whether I want to or not. I've stopped putting the issues I need to solve in a box in order to forget them and started actually solving them. I've taken on a full time job, I've started the process of moving back home, I've vowed never to skimp on my rent again.

There have been positive changes.

But ask me to stay here another year and watch me flinch, because the one thing I cannot bring myself to do is all this theatre shit.

Isn't it sad that I say that now? When I used to love it so much, the watching it, the doing it, the reading it and learning it and understanding it. I used to think that theatre would change the world but I never really knew why. And I guess that's the point.

Realising: that the ego boost of being the best in my class has diminished year by year, stage by stage, until I'm firmly at the bottom and have no inclination to strive any higher.

Realising: that I only loved this subject when I was the best at it. And I was, once. I couldn't tell you when it went wrong but-

we're in class, in the 'space', trying to interpret the stage directions for a physical theatre piece and try as I might I can't get beyond them. I can't see the point anymore and even knowing that sometimes the fact that there is no point is the point doesn't soothe me. I can't do this, can't throw my arms and body around and push my voice out in the strangest of ways for a reason I can't see anymore. I don't trust in the fact that this is art, because it seems to me that somewhere along the process someone should at least understand why we're doing it, but no one does.

Me least of all. I suck it up and do what the group tell me and meanwhile, in my other course, the one about environment, I go crazy and get sucked in and talk for hours about politics and ethics and philosophy and, shit as our final presentation is, I feel like crying because I really believe in this. I really understand why.

*****

If it was just that my course was lame, or seemed wanky, I could hack it. But look at me. I barely write anymore, listen to music anymore, paint anymore. I'm paralysed by the fear of the pretentious, I can't even breathe in case the irony isn't immediately apparent. I'm subtle and subtle and subtle til there's nothing left to me but skiving and getting fucked to forget about it.

Perhaps God's plan still has a chapter with my name on it, but I'm done looking over his shoulder to see the pages. I'm waiting to write another book, all about me, with the preface devoted to apologising to Him for my arrogance, but the next thousand pages screaming with defiance.

Someone needs to be in charge of my life; I don't like where I am and what it's doing to me so I'll go somewhere else. And it's terrifying, but no more so than the thought of dying tomorrow with nothing I'm proud of to my name.

I gave up worrying about disappointing people when I walked out of church for the last time, but I know I have. I know my parents are waiting, my friends are waiting for me to pull off the mask, shout 'kidding!' and get the fuck on with my work. I know so many of my family are waiting for me to open the door and let Him back in. I feel guilty that I won't be able to give anyone what they want, but the whole point of becoming a heathen (sic) was to take control of my life, on my terms.

I can't believe I'm writing something this unforgivably corny but here it is - I'm a lot more worried about disappointing myself and right now, I do. I disappoint myself every day I fail here.

It's time to make myself proud.

what we did

2007-03-14T20:39:00.000Z

There's nothing quite like telling your boyfriend what you did.

Come in, hug me, kiss me, sit with me. Back against my bedroom wall. Listen, all along your lips are moving, we're mouthing the lyrics to that last song we sang, the story of what you did. Tit for tat never felt so ugly.

And all the questions. You have less than I did: is she pretty, is she soft? How long for and where, who was on which side and where were your hands when she touched you? I wanted to know, to the inch; to the second.

You drive us to McDonalds, let me tell my own story. We were here, then we were there, and then we were somewhere else and then - somewhere else again.

I falter, let it hang in the air as the man leans in, takes the order. And then -

- and then I thought about everything we've ever said, when you asked if we went 24hour shopping when we ran out of things to say, if I still wanted you then, if I still want you now (which I do, of course I do but there's so much to say and we're just not -) or when we met the parents, when we drove to family dinners, when we sat by the stream, paddled and listened to Incubus - do you remember? When we had a midnight picnic, played 'Maybe I'm Amazed', when we were fighting and you spat on my hand for a laugh and it felt so disgusting I gagged, when I threw beercans at your window, when you covered my room in post-it notes, when you slept on the sofa at my house and I slept on the floor, when i fainted and you gave me your t-shirt, when we got drunk, got stoned, got happy, when we sat outside the club and I wanted to say it but you said it first, do you remember how we started (which I do, of course I do but there's so much to say and we're just not talking) -

- I ask for double cheese and tell you what you asked.

We live beyond our means, you and I, spend more than we can afford, drive further than we know how to get back, make promises we might well prove unable to keep. We walked for 7 months before we learned to talk; we forgot to trust each other.

*****

About our pasts, then. You walking for three hours to see your first girlfriend, me dating older guys, while you were a skater and I was a goth, while we attended playgroup and college and school together, while we worked together and clubbed together and never knew each other. When I got depressed and you first started smoking, the girls you've had, the boys I've wanted, the jobs you've worked, the A-levels I got. The different paths we took to end up there, my 19th birthday, and how by the time we got there, I was too drunk to even remember meeting you.

Apparently we spoke. I know you got my number because you called, but I didn't answer. So when I saw you down the line through sober eyes and realised how beautiful you were, it was only fitting that I be ignored.

Until I called you.

And you answered.

And then -

- no money, no jobs, no place to live, no car to keep, no prospects, no faith, no trust, no clue and very little chance. But cheer, and -

2007-03-06T20:07:00.000Z

Of course, the difference, the one difference (if you don't count gender, accent or ability to play the mouth organ) between you and I is that you gave up. You just accepted the fact that you'd ruined your life and never entertained the thought that you could begin to make amends.

I promise, with me at least, you could have.

So I will. Because I will not die alone like you did. Not when there is still one moment in ten to live for.

black sheep

2007-03-06T19:01:00.000Z

This is the dragon, the Maeshowe Dragon, that's cast in silver on my grandad's ring, that I wear around my neck.

Maybe if he never knew I came to university, he'll never know that I'm failing. I don't want him to see me lying, or fucking my life up like this. I don't want anyone to but, see, you can't lie to the dead. Because they know, and all apologies can't shield the truth from the people with arial view.

But who lied first?

I'm drunk on my own right now, but who drank first? Who fucked up first? Who let down the team? Who isolated himself long before I did, who made this path that I'm walking?

I think maybe you know a thing or two about the darkness, think maybe you understand what that feels like.

You and I, you selfish bastard, think we were two fucking peas in a pod. And you could've known that, I could have fucking told you that if you'd called. If you'd even called.

Who should I call? Which member of the clan would I let down if I left today? See I don't have eighty years of wrongs to right, I barely have two decades and that alone hurts so bad I don't even know how you stood.

With eighty fucking years on your shoulders, how did you stand?

I'm nineteen. I can barely even lie down right.

I won't stop this til I have no one left. I won't stop til I have nothing. I will destroy myself and as many else as I can before I sleep, just like you. I breathe for any little thing I can grasp of your long existence, like scraps from a table because you never called.

I hear your voice from ten years ago, I hear your voice reading me stories because it's the only time we spoke. I smell your scent on my pillow from that time you fell asleep because it's the closest we ever sat. I feel your hands on my wrists as I danced on your shoes because that sometimes feels like the only time I've smiled.

You're dead, so tell me, what does it feel like to be free? How does it feel to not be eating yourself from the inside? How does it feel not to hurt anymore?

They say that suicides go to hell, but they never mentioned you. They mention murderers and thiefs but on the subject of absenteeism go strangely silent. Perhaps if I died, you and I in all our heathen joy would find each other.

Perhaps you could explain.

I'm in arrears, apparently, with my lost job and failed degree and tendency to both spend and drink my pain - no one ever said that scars would heal but money gone is gone - I can't even think straight. I can't even smoke right.

Yesterday I went home with a guy from one of my classes and got so stoned that I kept falling asleep on the way back. I spoke to people I didn't know, saw old friends in strangers' faces. I saw you. I saw demons; I saw you.

Funny how, when you're fucked, the nearest, strongest voice is the worst, and it sounds a lot like God's. God, who used to tell me to keep my legs shut and dump this guy or that guy, to not think or dream or feel or taste or love or live and promised me peace in return for brainwashing myself - yesterday he told me to run out into traffic.

Couldn't be God, you say, but if he sounds the same and dials the same number to get into my head then who else can it be? Maybe someone stole the poor bastard's mobile.

So I get home and play my favourite songs and tell myself that they remind me of times gone by - there is no greater misery than to remember in sorrow a time when we were happy - except perhaps remembering that this feeling has always been here

and I have always been this way.

All the God and gin in life cannot save me.

I am what I am.

And that is just like you.

And I'm drunk on my own. Are you proud of me yet?

you can tell from the state of my room / that they let me out too soon

2007-02-26T22:09:00.001Z

This morning I woke up earlier than I needed to, gave the boy a brief cuddle and grabbed two towels, primed for the longest, most satisfying shower of my life. Upstairs, at some unsure moment between flushing the toilet and turning the tap on, I got the distinct impression of having been slapped in the face.

That sudden, whingey protest, the indignity of it, the pain of someone striking you.

But no one did, so why that feeling? Why the sudden unbidden wobbly lip, the lumpy throat?

Back downstairs, no shower. Back into bed, at which point the boy is conscious enough to ask me what's wrong and at that unsure moment between me beginning to speak and the end of the sentence, I'm crying like a child.

Crying like I haven't cried in, ooh, about a year.

*****

So maybe it's poetic justice, or perhaps this time of year just really isn't good for me. Seems like every time of year is bad for me recently, but Sunday is the first anniversary of my love affair with happy pills and, though we've been on a break the last six months or so, I think it's time that we got back together.

I miss them. Not the yawning. Or the tiredness, or the dependency, or the way it feels when I forget them or the way it feels to tell my parents or the look it earns me when I first tell someone.

Pills? Wow. Like, anti-depressants? Wow. So, are you like, fucked up, or just weak?

Weak. Weak weak weak. For all my fighting talk I am nothing more like that. One year on and cigarettes are no longer an adequate replacement for scars. Neither is alcohol an adequate replacement for actual help, you see, the hangover is sort of a signpost reminding me that I'm not in fact a spy, or a sexbomb, or a shaman like I thought I was the night before and at the end of the smoke they're all still dead. And I still feel weak.

But I was even weaker when I convinced myself I was better. I miss the lying to myself.

*****

I do this or I give up entirely. I go to live in a hippy commune, or join a cult, or become a slut or a heroin addict or an air hostess. I drop out of uni and eventually I'll die, which of course is the only thing not up for debate here. I'll die no matter what so why the fuck can't I die happy? Or at least on enough substances to feel happy.

Going back to the doctor on this, my anniversary, this week of all weeks, admitting that I can't do this, that I have fucked up, that I do give up and give in is actually the only thing I'm strong enough to do.

So here we go.

Again.

troubled

2007-02-25T22:31:00.000Z

Apparently just one more post before I am obliged to whore myself to Google. I say whore myself, it really means nothing at all, I just object to the fact that I cannot continue to use this software unless I sign up to Google as well. What if I don't like Google? What if Google shot my dog?

*****

Out last night, after Kit's memorial gig, I see so many things, feel and hear so much that I tell myself to remember. But here I am, pissed yet again and all I can remember from last night is how pale my legs looked in the streetlights in the car on the way home, how yellow they looked, even in yellow tights.

Before the Ag, of course, I remember a lot. I remember Sid singing that Ellegarden song from his Myspace, and the slideshow of pictures. And holding onto Matt. And 99 red balloons and a dozen other emotions in different colours.

*****

And the car, passing it round and realising I can take it down, right into the bottom of my chest and keep on breathing, blowing back several minutes after I toked. So it was that by the time I got inside the place, I thought I was a spy, and that every one of my friends had never looked so beautiful.

Who says drama never taught me anything? If I'd known that seesaw breathing could get me stoned as well as help me riff Shakespeare... I'd have practised, is all.

*****

Now? I'm wearing my grandfather's ring, the ring he died wearing on his little finger on a chain round my neck. His little finger, and I could fit three of mine in there. He was, I learnt today, a man in possession of very big hands. I won't think about the mysterious entry in his 1992 diary, nor will I stare at the two pictures of him that he kept himself. I will not wonder at the weight of his war medals and wonder what he saw.

I'll wear his ring, though, as a reminder that people can be both bad and flawed and beautiful, that men can leave and still make music, that people can hurt and still have sentiment. I'll remember that people die. And remember what that means.

calendar year

2007-02-19T03:07:00.000Z

I suppose the problem is that hit me harder than I thought. The funeral, those days sleeping on my nan's sofa, that was by far the hardest. But I suppose I thought it would get easier.

Sneaky feeling, sadness. The way it lurks, the way it hides, most of all how it persists. Far better a smack in the face, a bruise I can see. This has been the emotional equivalent of several broken bones, but at least a plaster cast would have come with a removal date.

I feel... old. Because every year is the same.

*****

Summer is when everything is light. The heat gets into things and sends them skyward; thunderstorms to make you clean again. You forget everything in the summer, until it seems like there's nothing but barbecues and pub gardens to even remember. Festivals and the real resolutions.

Autumn, and the buying of the autumn jacket, the flimsy little thing that you use to pretend that you are still warm. Perhaps in leaf red or khaki, with flowers in the cuffs. Maybe a belt. November makes you cold but there's heat in the fireworks still. Autumn you can stand.

But winter is when people die. Those five anniversaries of family, acquaintances and friends swing by like traffic that hits you harder every time you try to get up.

So spring is when you grieve, until the flowers come out and that little gasp of surprise at the first hot day, when summer's back and you're too pissed to care.

Then autumn brings a sense of foreboding.

*****

And I wonder if this is how it's always going to be, with the deaths. Will I spend my whole life in that moment of stomach plunge, the words that you should brace yourself because there's bad news.

It always seems like bad news.

So that's where I've been this term. That's what I've been doing. Shrinking, and shrinking some more, getting some grief done, some downright worry.

I won't pretend that I feel better because of some resolve inside myself, some healing underneath. I feel better because the sun's coming out in the least metaphorical sense - the seasons are changing and I have time to pass.

anything you like

2007-01-31T00:33:00.000Z

Do I attract you?
Do I repulse you with my queasy smile?
Am I too dirty?
Am I too flirty?
Do I like what you like?
I could be wholesome
I could be loathsome
I guess Im a little bit shy
Why dont you like me?
Why dont you like me without making me try?

I could be brown
I could be blue
I could be violet like sky
I could be hurtful
I could be purple
I could be anything you like

9/11 Mysteries (Full Length, High Quality)

2007-01-29T21:33:00.000Z


Who hates freedom?

the one missing

2007-01-29T17:13:00.001Z

I can remember every day dragging but you know, we both know, that when I write the recollection will come in flashes. Brightest colour flashes.

I'm sitting right here, right at this undersized table, staring vacantly at the screen and my father calls to tell me Grandad's dead. He was taken into care on New Year's eve, moved to hospital a few days later and, being that age and this time of year, I couldn't say I was surprised.

I can say that I was shocked. So shocked that I stared at the wall for a full ten minutes before I even began to react.

*****

I guess it's like knowing there's a leak in your ceiling, that everytime someone spills water in the bathroom it gets damp downstairs. We all know it's there and there's a thought, nay, a certainty that one day we really ought to get around to fixing it or something's gonna go wrong but still, when the almighty crash happens and you find your iron clawed tub on the living room floor because you left the tap on - shock.

It's like contents insurance for my student house. It's like getting cancer from smoking, or having to sign over a grand in backdated rent because, secretly, I hoped they'd just never notice.

Why do the things you expect still hurt you that way?

*****

Euchre. My family's game. My grandfather's game, and every time he dealt a joker he'd make hearts trump and every time he'd win.

I've never played before, it seems years since anyone has so I am taught, and play opposite my father, in the place where he sat.

*****

And there is someone missing. Not just in the euchre pairs but in the car, where I sit on my own instead of on his lap and in his house, where my parents sleep in his separate bed and downstairs, I lie rigid, imagining the moment his face will come round the side of the door, his gentle voice to tell me a story.

It is sad, not because he's gone but because I am a child again, and he has always been gone. I miss him, not as an adult, not as a young woman with a degree in the making and my own place and my own life, but as a child.

He hasn't been here for years but I want to be sat on his lap, I want to be read to, I want to come upstairs to find him sleeping in my bunk bed and smell his smell on the pillow.

The one missing has been missing for years, and I miss him more now, not because I thought he would come back.

I thought I would go to find him.

*****

The funeral is the brightest January morning, in a hospital chapel that is small and peaceful and the buzz, such as it is, is that the organist from the cathedral will play. And she does, the Dark Isle and songs of Scotland and in the midst of it, the Saints.

how I'd love to be in that number, when the saints go marching in

And it's a lovely service, they say, the eulogy my mum and I wrote together is read, how he worked and where and how hard and for how long and that he liked cars and to read and to play the accordion and mouth organ and the names of we fortunates who survive him.

It reads as if my mum and Alice sprung into being from the earth. It reads as if he'd never married, which is how Granny wanted, as if he'd never loved a woman in his life.

*****

The burial at Holm, blinding, freezing sunshine, so close to the sea you can smell it, the green grass and the earth and the whiskey my cousin passes round and down he goes, my family and his friend carrying the coffin, then the earth.

The earth. And it's really, really over this time. And I never went to find him, like I always said I would, and he never knew me like I hoped he might.

****

And his friend, his Bruce, tells us about the nights of talk and hip flasks, cards and my grandfather on his stool, playing tune after ditty til morning, with everyone praising him. And my grandfather, walking for miles each day. And my grandfather, taking a knife and pulling the peel off an apple in one long spiral. And talking about his family.

And the last photo I took of him, last summer, my grandfather, walking away.

blank

2007-01-14T19:30:00.000Z

So my Grandad died, a few hours ago. I found out about ten minutes ago, and I guess I'm writing this because I have to do something, anything, but sit and think.

Because, you see, there are no songs or books or things to remind me of him, all the memories are in my head and it's very very important that I don't think right now.

I can count the times I've seen him in the past years on one hand, can count the times I've spoken to him since I was about 8 on one finger.

He's gone now, so no time left to make amends. Nothing left really to do but sit and try and find anything anything anything to distract me from the fact that he died alone.

and you ought to write that on the ceiling

2007-01-14T01:04:00.000Z

abode - an ode

2007-01-12T22:27:00.001Z

He says he only has nightmares at my house.

Which is fair enough, because even the fact that my landlord is coming over tomorrow to inspect the place hasn't inspired me to tidy.. That Matt will even sit, let alone sleep in here is testament to his devotion but still. Eventually his inner 'queer eye' is surely gonna snap and just burn this monstrosity down.

Although, if I could drive him to just burning the rubbish, that would save me a job.

Because of course, there is the fact that, with my bed being on the floor, everything is even more inclined to gravitate downwards. Y'know, Cup'a'Soup packets and the like. Even my lamp is on the floor, meaning that anything teetering above ground level (say, balanced on the desk) becomes a fire hazard. Like my teddy and bed companion of a decade - Floppy the bear - who made the ill advised move of falling from one to the other, thus scorching his ass and making me cry big baby tears.

There is this incredibly long list of reasons why I will never be a good mother and housewife.

The toilet brush, that was a good one as well. The brush bit actually fell off the stick bit whilst I was cleaning the loo, begging the immediate question - did it fall, was it pushed, or did something actually grab it and pull?

Note to self - make sure the poking device constructed out of used toilet rolls in order to chopstick said brush head out of toilet is in the bin-bin and not the kitchen bin. That would be gross, and questions would be asked.

And then the blue Bloo block I bought as an offering to appease the toilet beast, but then couldn't lift the cistern off to put it in so, having left the task to Christoph, grabbed it off the windowsill a day later to find it was... wet. And turning my hand blue. With what I can only assume in the long sleepless nights was toilet water.

Perhaps if I offer Mr Jones a cup of tea, he won't notice the fact that his old family home looks like it's been home to some kind of Greek beer orgy.

Then, of course, the fire damage - two net curtain holes and one scorched table to date.

Perhaps if I light one stick of incense for each fag I smoke with the window closed, the smells will balance out into zen-like scent of calm. Then again, think how many holes in surfaces that might cause...

I can get rid of the booze bottles, at least. That won't take more than ten... thirty minutes, yup, and I can hide the pizza boxes. And the only thing wrong with the bathroom is that the gigantic bar of Lush soap I got for Christmas is engaging in some kind of merging/Pagan hand fasting ceremony with the wall and the... other bars of soap.

Of course toiletries are a whole new issue. Where exactly are all the really embarassing ones? The Immacs and Veets or whatever they are, the razors and deodorants and spot cream and tampons and lady painkillers and empty pill packets and - oh! - the novelty inflatable boyfriend, where the hell is he?

Why is it the only mortifying thing I know the whereabouts of is the cystitis medicine the previous German occupant left behind that I've been saving for when Christoph's family come to visit from Munich? How is it I've only just realised how easily that joke could backfire on me?

More to the point, it's 11pm and I don't really know where all my underwear is.

Ok.

Clothes = wardrobe. Rubbish = bin. Books = bin. All dirty cutlery and crockery = ...bin. Miscellaneous - garden. (There was a mattress, street light and desk out there when we moved in, will a traffic cone really scream negligence?)

Perhaps I could just sleep in and come out in my pjs looking all bleary and confused and he'll feel so awkward he won't want to impose further by looking into my 'Primark vomiting into an ashtray' modern art spectacular boudoir. Although, then I'd have to explain Morning Matt, who'd also still be knocking about all bleary and confused. Morning Matt is different to Daytime Matt or even Evening Matt. Morning Matt scratches itself and tends to kiss people.

Hmm.

Of course what I want, what I really want to do is to answer the door in my £2 dressing gown, fake satin extravaganza with 'Fuck the Pain Away' by Peaches blasting simultaneously out of all three of our computers (while Craig and Christoph adjust studded dog collars and Matt snorts a line off a heap of dirty laundry on the stairs) blow a big cloud of cigarette smoke and say - may we help you?

But knowing my luck it'll turn out to be my parents and they'll notice that I haven't hoovered before anything else.

begin again

2007-01-09T22:03:00.000Z

This feeling.

That I need to explain myself. That I don't want this blog to be a depression blog, a pity blog, and in order for me to write even when I am not unhappy, certain things must be said. Like shit, and fuck, and even cunt, and sex, and drugs and all the things that are in my life and my thoughts and so will be here.

That I want to censor my writing as little as I want to censor myself. Cuiusmodi sum - whatever I am - this is what I will write.

This feeling.

That religion just makes me angry. Jesus Christ and God as he taught him are the most beautiful things I have ever heard of and I want, so so so badly for what I believe in them to be true. I want there to be a love that strong and that pure, I want that passion to exist. But I can't find it, because whenever I get near all I hear is hype and hypocrisy, and so many amazing people, so many amazing friends who I love and who love me but none of them can quite help me to understand how this religion is in anyway related to this God.

This feeling.

That I let every one of those friends down every day that I fail to see the world as they do.

This feeling.

That my grandfather could die at any moment and I will never see him again. And this, I have come to realise after a decade of denial, is just the way it has to be.

This feeling.

That the man I knew as a child has long gone anyway.

This feeling.

That I hate my degree and I feel like I am wasting my life.

This feeling.

That my job makes me feel hopelessly inadequate because no matter how hard I try I always fail and I have not got the sense of self to separate the way I view myself from the way my bosses view me.

This feeling.

Of trying to think of another feeling that warrants a mention so that I can delay the inevitability of the next sentence which I know is coming but I am currently too scared to write.

This feeling.

That depression is not something that just goes away. And I haven't been feeling low because of some weird after effect of the drugs or the pill or even the illness itself. I am low because I am still ill, and if I don't take some kind of positive action soon I am going to deteriorate and by the first anniversary of my love affair with anti-depressants I will be back there again.

There. The bad place. The anxiety and insomnia, the nightmares and occasional hallucinations, the sadness so crippling that sometimes I couldn't even move. Literally, physically, could not move.

I don't know much but I know that I cannot go back there again. You don't win against depression. Every day you feel ok is a tiny little victory but the battle is not the war. Perhaps the war will end someday but I realise now that I am going to fight again.

And to fight, I need this blog. That might sound awful but I do. I need this outlet, this space, because I only realise now that every time I created something out of a terrible feeling I won. Just a little bit, just for a little while but that writing that I put on here and the strength it gives me now to read it back and the comments I received - they are each tiny little victories against this bastard feeling that wants to defeat me.

This feeling of how much I need those little victories.

This feeling of wanting to fight.

the stubborn one

2006-12-31T15:18:00.000Z

You know this is sick, right?

Because after all, after everything, he was still a human being. And Christ said that an eye for an eye should not be so, and Gandhi was right that it'll leave the whole world blind.

Because you can see the videos of the noose being dropped round his neck on CNN. And you can see pictures of his body in the Daily Mail, and it's so dark and such gossip, God, how we love to be sickened by shit like this because nobody knows that it is sickening. This is what makes us sick.

And if you say it out loud, perhaps suggest that maybe this was wrong all you'll get is raised voices, a fight to see who can say 'genocide' the loudest, that righteous fucking indignation, as if arguing his right to live is condoning the things that he did. As if by pitying him you somehow become him.

So I'll just say it like this: nobody, nobody, nobody has the right to take the life of anyone, anyone, anyone, no matter who they are or what they've done unless it's self-defence. If Saddam Hussein ran at me or anyone I care about with a knife and I happened to be the gun-toting hillbilly I secretly dream of, I'd pop the bastard.

If I thought he might try to pop me first.

But you see, I don't think Hussein was really all that much of a threat any more. He was broken. He killed hundreds, thousands of people and committed war crimes that I can't even name, but he was caught, he was stopped, he was, for want of a better word, neutralised the second he was found eating Mars bars in a hole in the ground and some cocky American soldier told him that President Bush sent his regards.

He was the world's biggest joke, unmanned and finally harmless. And now he's a martyr, and more dangerous than he ever could have been alive. It just seems to me that it's this sick fascination, it's this glamour that makes dead leaders so appealing. Seems to me if I'm looking for a hero, a scruffy little nobody in a cell isn't half as sexy as the man they sent to the gallows. Perhaps it's just me but doesn't it seem like the more we try to destroy the things we hate, the more power we give them?

So congratulations to all of us. We can rest our superstitious little heads now that we've seen his broken neck on YouTube, that he definitely won't be coming back. Now we've seen him stepping onto the trapdoor, we can sleep easy. We won. I mean we didn't just win, we really really won. It's almost like we won twice because we didn't just stop him, we really fucked him up.

We like that. We like it so much we're gonna watch it over and over and it'll be on the internet forever and ever and maybe one day we can show our kids and say this is what it was like, back when we were civilised.

best yet

2006-12-29T00:18:00.000Z

A list of reasons why this is the best Christmas ever is really just an inversion of all the reasons why the last two sucked.

No members of my family died this Christmas.

No members of my family contracted weird, 24 hour vomiting viruses this Christmas (like the last two years running).

My remaining grandmother, technically the last grandparent I have, was and still is in wonderful health this Christmas. There was no medicine, no breathing machine, no fear of death this Christmas.

I was not unhappy this Christmas.

I did not fantasise about getting run over by Santa's sleigh this Christmas.

Like the last two years I did end up sprinting around Basingstoke at quarter to 4 on Christmas Eve trying to buy last minute presents, however I managed to get everybody things they liked this year and the incredible pathos didn't quite kill me this year.

This year, this difference is not just the circumstance, the notable absence of terrible bad luck. This difference is about me.

If it had happened again, the annual sojourn into family chaos, the half-hearted celebration overshadowed by the fact that everybody feels like shit - if that had been my Christmas I'm not saying I wouldn't have hated it. I'm not saying the inner child wouldn't have gotten the better of me and had to sneak me off for a cry after lunch. I'm saying that it wouldn't have broken me this year.

Maybe I feel stronger because December didn't shit on me; maybe December waits til I'm good and broken before he drops his daks.

Maybe. Maybe.

Or maybe fortune was on my side and this Christmas when I feel happy just happened to turn out ok.

This Christmas when I feel happy.

I'm ok. And it's been what, 6 years? since I felt that, felt uninterrupted and whole.

Sometimes, unmedicated and relatively sober, godless and loved, I can hardly remember what the Bad Place felt like. But I know that things aren't simple, that habits old and bad die hard and slow, and depression is the oldest and baddest one I know.

Perhaps that's why. Other than this incredible need to say thank-you, perhaps it's that fear that sends me itching for church.

Perhaps it's just the time of year.

acoustics

2006-12-17T17:13:00.000Z

You know, if you've ever recorded yourself speaking, how awful it sounds when you hear your voice played back to you. You can't really explain why, or what about it is so creepy, but you just know that it doesn't sound anything like you.

I'm doing a module on radio playmaking this year, so to get rid of the collective stage fright, we talked about this first. You don't really hear yourself speaking so much as feel yourself speaking. The words come bouncing back at you off walls and people but mainly, you feel them, shaking up through your chest and your skull, ricocheting off your teeth on their way out. The world doesn't know what that sounds like, only you do. The world only hears what the tape shows you. That really is what you sound like.

For most people, once they've realised this, it's fine. We do these excerpts and improvisations, edit them on computers, add some zany sound effects and play them back to the class and, most of the time, it's not quite the ordeal you think it's gonna be.

Writing is different. The words sound different in my head, not because of the way they bounce around my chest and up through my voice box, but because of how they sound in my actual head. As in, right up here in my skull. The reverb must be different up here or something, perhaps it's the dust or the hangover. They sound fantastic. They echo and harmonise and variate and it's like a lovely symphony of all the things I want to say. Sometimes I'd swear there's even instruments.

But then they come out here - and they sound dead.

Not just dead but embarassing, like someone not only hearing you sing in the shower but knowing exactly how good you think you are and vehemently disagreeing. Letting them out of my head, not even the sounds but the words themselves, onto paper or computer screen - it's mortifying.

Maybe it's the acoustics out here. Maybe the internet is just plain unflattering for a voice like mine.

Or maybe they didn't actually sound so good to begin with.

disparity

2006-12-05T00:16:00.000Z

The conversation is racing on, faster than I can write this.

Double bed, feet touching. He watches the ceiling, I face the sheets until breathing gets difficult; I only turn my head when I have to. There's space enough in here for conversation, room between the sheets to talk about the big thing, that real thing, the who and what we are. And it starts with the past, which I love, and the thought that it doesn't really matter, which I hate.

I shouldn't care, we think, about anything other than this moment. What led up to it, the infinity of glances and words that brought us here mean nothing now that here has arrived. But how will I know where I am if I've forgotten all the street names I've taken?

We set the fire to the third bar, we're miles from where we are. I tell him I want to staple these moments down, to pin something and keep it, to read it again and get something back. So I can know where I once was, and see myself from years away not lessened by perspective but as big and bold and awful as I used to be.

And, and I don't see what's wrong with using the internet to do that.
But it's a little bit egocentric, Don't I think?

*****

At work, I become Chen's token white friend, immerse myself in the language issues and ask him why every Asian volunteer at the shop has asked me - the painfully English teenager whose job it is to train new starters - about films above anything else.

I try to explain that in all of my relationships, all of my conversations, Hollywood has never been so discussed.

He tells me, in English, exactly what it is to try and break through the divide and make friends with a native Westerner like myself, how it is to be dependent on someone being patient enough to speak slowly. How much effort it takes on both sides to do that.

I tell him how incredibly stupid I feel when him and Li break into impenetrable Chinese mid-conversation. He asks me how I think it feels when I banter with English customers, who make jokes that I then have to explain to him, how patronising people can be.

They were told by their tutors that the best way to make and hold conversation with someone who knows nothing of your language or culture, is to find some common ground and in Die Hard, Tom Cruise, Pearl Harbour we have something to talk about.

And I tell him that that's sad, that I don't want to talk about that with him or with anyone, I don't want that to be the way my culture is defined. I don't want the fact that the culture I belong to is slowly taking over the world to be the basis of our shared experience.

I want to know about your family, and what you want to do, does it rain a lot in Shanghai and what do you reckon to Communism, does it make you sick or glad to be here?

I guess I just want to have a conversation with you.

*****

We smoke in bed, dotting ash into a glass vase, and I try to communicate the vastness of it, how overwhelming it is. How this experience of mine is so meaningless and so transitory, and yet so mine, and it's not that I think my words so special that I want them preserved, it's that this gigantic world, this mass culture, this loss of self - it terrifies me. And the only way I can see of getting round it is to try, in some small way, to defend myself. To staple a little bit of what I feel to some great technology, and how that makes me feel somehow safer.

I tell him that everybody has the right to tell their story, and that they should, because all we really ever learn from is each other. Everything you know is the result of everybody else, as if every thought were a grain of sand pushing the heap upwards.

I could cry, but it sounds so pretentious here in the dark, with miles of sheet between us, and when I move my foot away, the gulf of opinion in the bed seems somehow larger than language could define.

*****

What he doesn't know is that I wake up later to watch him sleep and I realise how stupid I am. I want to know about experience and other people's thoughts and here it is next to me and I just won't listen.

Nine times out of ten the 'otherness' I'm obsessed with only matters when I agree with it, and he'll wake to find me over on his side much sorrier.

The conversation carries on while we're speaking, but I'm the arse because I'm just not listening.

He's definitely not right about the ego thing, though.

Hell no.

pride

2006-11-28T23:07:00.001Z

The first I knew of it was seeing the big shiny billboard in Camberley, the close-up of sweaty hips in a shiny thong. I didn't approve, not through any kind of general decency, more because the blatant sexualisation of those poor little lesbians - bless 'em, they just want to get along and here we are exploiting them for the benefit of hetero men.

Forgetting, of course, that straight guys aren't the only demographic in society who like watching girls make out.

The next thing I knew, my bisexual girl-who's-my-friend-type-girlfriend was telling me about watching it with her lesbian more-than-friends-type-girlfriend and I was searching YouTube for The L Word back episodes and, despite not falling into either of the demographics in question (I am, as far as I can discern, neither a lesbian nor a straight male) LOVING IT.

Shit, I thought, I actually really like this show. Boy was my face red.

Despite my embarassment, my recent boyfriends haven't seemed to mind, in fact they've seemed practically euphoric about having a girlfriend who postively encourages them to watch what they see as girl-on-girl porn with them.

But I was starting to wonder. As my third term at uni began to take an undeniably butch turn (what with the haircut, the steel capped boots, that picture of me kissing Catherine), a supposedly straight girl staying up late to download yet more of season 2 off of YouTube became more and more suspicious.

Unfortunately, Philippa, Tim and everybody else who thinks I'd look good in rainbow stripes - I wasn't experiencing a change of heart. Much to my surprise, it wasn't the sex that kept me watching, it wasn't even my not entirely honorable crush on Sarah Shahi that kept me watching. Turns out I was in it for the gay. The absolute, loud and proud, unashamed gayness of it.

You end up watching some sexed up TV show and suddenly there's butches and femmes and bitches and benders and transgenders and men who don't want to be women, just lesbians - and how do you go about being a liberal then, when you can't help but flinch because you know you really should disapprove? Because someone once said you should disapprove.

I used to just skirt around it. You know, 'it', the gay thing. On the one - the things I'd always believed about tolerance and freedom. On the other - everything that church said was right. Everything that everyone around me seemed to think was right. Tricky, huh?

I remember two men at church, stood before the congregation with entirely straight arms around each others' entirely straight shoulders, proclaiming that they could not, would not support the appointment of John Jeffrey, the first openly gay bishop. It was that word, 'openly', that got me. Finally someone had the stones to stand up and come out in the clergy and he was being denounced.

No one had ever denounced me that way. With all the history I brought along to church with me I had never once even considered that these beautifully accepting people could actually say, gently and with no malice, that the way this person was made was just not suitable.

I did what everyone does when they can't handle the facts and went into pious, evasive denial for three years, which is how long it took me to realise that I didn't believe this, I couldn't pretend to and I was sick of being told to.

For me, it's the flinching. Greer wrote that you can't truly know your own femininity until you've tasted your own menstrual blood. When I read that the thought of it made me flinch, because she's talking about a deeper, more primal view of womanhood than the sterilised mass media will ever let girlies see.

And when I watch The L Word, which, let's face it, is barely scratching the surface of alternative identities and lifestyles, I flinch. I flinch when I see the transgender doing his moustache and binding his chest, I flinch when I see the butchest middle-aged woman dancing with the skinniest femme because these are so far beyond my experience thus far.

Trust me, that doesn't make me glad, or righteous. It shames me. This androgyny, this diversity, this is just another kind of peopleness. Another little bit of humanity that I have so little understanding of because of the alternating fear, pity and disdain that has been bred into me for people who do life differently from us.

It makes me flinch because it's alien, not because it's wrong, and at some point during this infatuation of mine I started to feel real anger for the first time. Not the generalised, I'm angry because it's wrong anger that I used to have, but a real fury that there are people who still seek to say that diverse is less, that difference is wrong.

Because it's not just about gays and straights, it's about every different kind of person and lifestyle, about trying to prescribe one way of being above another. And it's not just Christianity either. It's the American dream or British stiff upper lip or anything that tells you that there is a certain person you have to be to be accepted.

If you watch it, if you can get past the lady-on-lady antics and the frequent and lusty swearing, maybe you'll only disapprove, but that's fine. It's not really about the show, it's about a whole new kind of epiphany, about the beliefs I'll stand behind, and the ones that I won't.

pause

2006-11-28T02:23:00.001Z

He's falling asleep on the sofa, doing that twitching thing as he drifts off on his own. It's warmer here than it is there but I get the sudden urge to go and write this down, to try and chronicle this feeling.

Now he's up, heading for a cigarette and then to bed, and I'm here alone, tapping away on Craig's laptop, the Stereophonics telling stories of boys who died too young. And all his friends lay down the flowers, sit on the bank for hours, talk of the way they saw him last, local boy in the photograph. And it's funny, sitting here, how we've talked about feeling happy, how this evening, the candles and the food and conversation feel so good. We talk about ancestry in the semi-dark, take pictures of each other, cushions on the floor.

It doesn't even feel like we tried that hard. These good times just keep on happening, whether we ask for them or not. And that's a good feeling for tonight. Content, I guess.

It's something in the way I don't want to wake him as I leave the sofa and come over here to write this, how slowly I move without even realising, til one song has become another and he breathes on. I want to write the perfection of this moment, to step out of it and try to keep it here to come back to. If I could bottle it, share it, breathe it.

I feel happy, right now, happy, and it's so beautiful, but something wakes in me and sends me to the computer because I guess I'm frightened that if I don't pin at least a part of this down on the page I might never find another moment like it. And that's worth pausing for.

this is cool

2006-11-27T17:31:00.000Z

I'm sitting down to force myself to blog. I promise nothing, but at least it's something.

*****

Est just txted me to ask if I want to audition for the RAG pantomime tonight. At last count I've auditioned for only two plays since I've been at uni and performed in none. This, for a drama student, doesn't look good. But here's the thing, it's a big thing and the thing is that I don't actually think if I got into a play I'd be able to hack it. At the moment I have only 8 hours of lectures a week, plus rehearsals, and then 15 hours at work, but I'm shattered. It feels sometimes like that's all I can handle. And that makes me feel pathetic, but it also makes me loth to waste even more of the little time I have here doing nothing at all.

*****

Catherine and Sam came home from France for the weekend sounding relatively unchanged in terms of accent. I don't know how I'd convinced myself that they'd pick up accents when all they're speaking is English with English people and French to French people, but still. I think I'm really gonna need to hear that Franglais twang.

Cat and I sit in the union looking terribly chic, listening to a man with a lovely voice, nursing drinks and cigarettes. Perhaps to compensate for the fact that we fancy ourselves rotten, talk turns to the important things. The God things. And I say that I'm not ruling it out, I'm keeping it at a distance. That if I'm wrong, so wrong about how I'm living my life now then I'm gonna have to wait for God to come to me. Because when I went searching for him I just got lost, so to speak, and there were too many tears for my liking.

Back at the house we talk verses, and the bit in Hosea - it's funny how quickly the numbers have left me - that Tracey gave me at the end of last year, and that was given to Catherine as well.

I will lead her into the desert and speak to her there, I will win her back and she will give herself to me as she did when she was young.

And it's a comfort, but a strange kind of comfort, because I don't know how happy I'd be about being won back.

*****

I promised Catherine and Steph that I'd blog more often, so I'm going to. I have broadband in my room again now, which is wonderful, so I really have no excuse except for the horrendous block that appears in my head when I open up blogger.

So I've decided to resurrect my part in that was cool, Becci's project for the appreciation of the simple things. I don't think I have very many big things to say so the little things seem like a great place to start.

If you're wondering, I keep it
<-------over there.

boo hoo

2006-11-13T18:48:00.000Z

So Kate's moving out, and as much as I love (like last night) emerging from my room to see a lounge full of boys I don't actually know, I'm pretty pissed. See, four of us agreed to live together and now, all these months later, two of them and the two who would replace them and now Kate have all found better offers. What can I say, 9 days out of 10 it's actually pretty funny that yet again I'm waiting for 'somebody' to show up and move in. I enjoy it, the not knowing who the hell it's gonna be.

But today I'm in self-pity central. I've torn a muscle in my back. It's not gonna heal for six weeks and in the meantime I have a very important performance to do, three days a week of work at Help the Aged to do, tidying my room to do, laundry to do, leaving the house to do - all kinds of activities that involve being able to move. Plus, I have flu, and as much as I love Craig and Christoph, I suddenly feel very very alone. You know, there's really not much else I can do but sit and watch tv in my bedroom.

It's made a little bit harder by the fact that I'm doing this all unmedicated. I took myself off Citalopram a few weeks ago and, while I did it gradually and managed to avoid too much withdrawal, I'm feeling the difference. Really, badly feeling the difference.

These things come in cycles, right? I'm in the bad place now but I'll be in the good place soon.

Yeah, fucking right. You know I don't even care?

emphasis on living

2006-11-01T18:35:00.000Z

I hate being dependent on a drug. Hate it more than I can say. But if the alternative is a proud stoicism in the face of sorrow accompanied by prolonged and unspeakable despair -- well, I'll take dependency.

something funny to say

2006-10-23T17:40:00.000Z

There comes a time in every girl's life when she has a defining moment, an epiphany if you will, that basically consists of giving herself a telling off.

Mine goes like this: get it together, you pussy.

Still not having internet in my house has cut off one of my cheapest and most accessible forms of therapy, namely- this. Getting accustomed my new 2nd year routine (less lectures, less booze, more part-time job) means getting used to not blogging. I don't like that, but whilst getting to a computer is far from impossible, the following makes it not a happy option-

1) The computer centre being a ten minute walk away.
2) Laziness of self.
3) Mental association with PC lab and library with the doing of actual work.
4) Bad habit of incessant smoking whilst walking anywhere meaning that said ten minute walk is likely to add greatly to the suffering of lungs and wallet. Ugh.
5) Complete lack of inspiration.

When I do get on here, it never turns out how I want. My last few offerings appear to have been nothing but frustrated drama-related rants and wanky speeches about my place in the world. Granted, most of the last academic year's blogging fell into these categories, but sometimes it seems like I can't even get the necessary despair to do that well. Damn antidepressants. At least it was good for something.

So this time I'm just going to go ahead and give you a nice boring update of where I'm at. Life-wise I mean. Geography-wise I'm in the same place I always am, the beautiful clicking hubbub of the PC lab, RHUL. Blee.

This year it has become financially necessary for me to get a term-time job. Technically it was necessary last year too, but this year I don't sleep so much so it's actually feasible. My two days a week at Help the Aged are actually one of the best things about uni life at the moment. The other day my manager and I spent several hours creating a Halloween window, complete with joyriding skeletons and an owl wearing a witch's hat. Tell me you wouldn't love it?

My course is... well, it's interesting. I'm only doing two options this term, neither of which I wanted to do but, believe it or not, they're not that bad. Radio Playmaking is mainly playing with minidisk recordings and making sound effects with carrier bags and bodily functions, which I like. My performance research project is mainly acting out bible stories (good) and getting drawn into the inevitable religious discussions about said bible stories (not good).

I've been to church once this year. Needless to say, it didn't feel all that good. I miss it, the church itself I mean, the people, but I can't do it. The Journey is the kind of interactive, relational church that I've always loved but, now that I'd rather eat the mouldy orange peel I found behind my bed than actually discuss how I'm doing in my walk with Jesus, I'm suddenly longing for impersonal mass worship. Hum ti tum.

Honestly, I'm just sick of talking about it. Having already had the obligatory, yes I'm a Christian, yes that means no sex before marriage, no I don't like the Pope discussion with everyone I know, I'm now left with the not quite as fun task of explaining why no, I'm not a Christian, no I'm not waiting anymore and no, I still don't like the Pope.

I'm done with it. Losing my faith wasn't some flippant decision I made whilst pissed during the summer (I didn't get pissed til just after), it was a horrible, painful transition that I'm still pretty raw about. It's like the aftermath of a break-up when you keep having to say, actually he dumped me, yes I want his ass to burn but of course we're still friends. I'm so tired of saying it. It's over, that's all.

Which is weird, because for a long time the majority of my posts on here were inspired by or about my faith. It's been such a talking point for so long, but now it's gone. And I know a lot of the people who read (that's read like 'red' not 'reed') this blog are people I know through church and... I almost feel guilty about it. Like I've somehow let you guys down.

If it helps, for the first time in many years I'm actually Ok with who I am right now. I don't know what about Christianity stopped me from feeling that but now I feel it. I like me. I'd give me a cuddle and ruffle my own hair if I wasn't in a room full of students.

And there's a boyfriend now too. He's sworn, quite vehemently, that he won't ever read this blog and has no wish to and really isn't keen on the idea of a blog at all (not much of a cyber geek is our Matt) so it doesn't matter what I say about him on here...

HAH! I'm not making that mistake again. But even if I was stupid enough to mouth off on here I wouldn't, there really isn't anything bad to say. He's a squidgy little chef with a Gordon Ramsay complex and a passionate love of bad cigarettes. He suits me just fine, and the best part is he knows exactly how crazy I am and doesn't seem to be scared at all. Good man. Good, brave, stupid man.

The only other news is that I've had my hair cut short. Oh, and I want to get a giant African land snail as a pet.

All is well.

too angry for poetry

2006-10-02T17:22:00.000Z

So why am I here? Not here on earth so much as here at Royal Holloway.

In the computer centre all I can here is some drunk Fresher giggling hysterically and shrieking about how someone burnt her with a cigarette. Step over here darling, I'll see if I can make your day even better.

My timetable consists of 8 hours of classes. Two days. Giving me a five day weekend in which to obtain another job (to complement the one I already have) in order to pay my rent and buy my food purely for the pleasure of being here to do a course I don't care about to prepare me for a career I no longer want.

Now she's gnawing on her boyfriend's neck, pushing her whole mouth across his ear, he's moaning and I am feeling ever so slightly nauseous.

Nausea. That's back. I feel sick. Just like last year. Two lots of pills a day aren't helping that, although they have succeeded in destroying my... lust for life, shall we say?

So, why? Why and why and why. To drink? To smoke? To sit in my room and watch Frasier?

Everything feels meaningless, and I feel superfluous. My skin is crawling.

I don't know why I'm here, except that there is absolutely nowhere else I'd rather be.

Fuck. FUCK.

fresher's week revisited

2006-09-25T17:38:00.001Z

This time last year I disappeared altogether. Here's what actually happened.

I arrived at Royal Holloway on the 24th of September 2004 and found that I was the first person to arrive in my flat. Having mistakenly believed that I was in fact living in the flat upstairs I was quite relieved not to have anyone to share this humiliation with (I tried breaking into the room above me, how do you think I felt?)

Then Reena arrived, then Adam, Kate. Days later, Endrit. Then Jay, the Korean girl who didn't seem to like us that much.

Adam, being the only guy initially, became our unofficial bodyguard. He happened to be out of the flat when we found the spiders, then later told us that they might nest in the hoover and come to get us. I didn't sleep well.

The next day we went shopping in Egham and I got the monthly fun known as stomach cramps. Went home, went to bed.

Monday I went to a drama induction meeting. A blonde girl came over and spoke to me, her name was interesting, Jewish. I forgot it later that day when, feeling queasy, I went home to nap and woke up with an incredible need to vomit.

And vomit I did. And again. And then some.

The first three days I remember in crystal detail, from what time I napped to when I woke up, the exact time I first vomited, everything I ate that day, at what time and who with and the order in which it came back up.

The cheese and pickle muffin that I called Adam to ask if I could eat. He said I could, they were out of date anyway.

The lasagne and coke from Founder's dining hall, lunch with Naomi, Matt and Fflur, telling the rudest jokes we could remember.

The strawberry wholegrain yoghurt and shredded wheat.

The Ribena.

The next few days go blurry. I remember calling my parents and begging them to come and get me. Calling everyone I knew just to chat, to hear a friendly voice. I remember curling up in my bed and weeping uncontrollably, wanting to be held like a kid.

Thursday I finally left the flat, went to the Fresher's fayre, lost my debit card.

It was the worst week.

The next week I approached the blonde girl and told her what a shit time I was having. She agreed that, oh my god, uni is brass, and we went to get pissed on vodka and fruit juice. Things started looking up.

My flatmates and I baked a cake wearing dresses and high heels.

I started to have fun. I started to have a lot of fun.

I've watched so many mates go off to uni in the last couple of weeks and when I think about it, how amazing and awful and long and short and exhausting and exhilirating the whole Fresher's experience was, all I can think of to say is - brace yourself.

You're never gonna be the same again. Brace yourself.

2006-09-10T18:17:00.000Z

Things that have been said:

Him to me - Dave reckons we're just exactly the same person. You're fucking lovely. You're always tired, you're always angry... it reminds me of people in prison, how they start to sleep so much just to try and make the time go faster, that's how you live your life. You're pushing me away. When I die I want them to fill me with porridge and make me into a posable action figure. I never, ever want to read what you write on your blog.

Me to him - You don't let me get away with anything, do you? You don't trust me, do you? You remind me of that Alanis Morrisette song, you treat me like I'm a princess / I'm not used to liking that. I can't write anymore. I feel I've been running the whole summer from this stuff and I haven't stopped to deal with it yet and that scares me. You're so pretty, though.

You know you shouldn't try to save me, right?

Things that have changed:

I smoke more, drink more, swear about as much, take more medication, cry less, write less, wander around on my own less, like myself a bit better. I'm older and probably wiser, but what I know now is that a lot can happen in a year. An awful fucking lot.

Things that have been lost:

Big and little things, like faith and weight, dignity and children.

Things that I will cling to, to get through this, to stay sane:

Irn Bru, frozen Frubes, my student comfort food, bacon and brie sandwiches from Mario's Lunchbox.

The pub, a pint, a cigarette, some conversation.

The club, the noise, the heat, the people.

The boy, the hugs, the spark, the cups of tea.

The books.

The walking around.

The sleeping; the simple things.

be my everything

2006-09-02T20:07:00.000Z

There's a disclaimer because there has to be - I don't want to piss off or insult anyone. If I do, in this or anytthing else I am so sorry. But I've always been honest about faith on here before and I'm not stopping now.

Last week a lady came into the shop and we chatted. She told me about her nephew, two years old, and how he died out the back of A&E while they waited to be let in, with his mum pushing the bed and his dad holding his drip in the air. She tells me how they're all going to wear Bob the Builder t-shirts to his funeral.

A man chips in. 2 years old, he says, that's ok, he'll only be in purgatory.

What?

He wasn't christened, was he? So if he's under the age of 7 he'll only go to purgatory, not hell, so you don't have to worry too much.

There is a kind of Christian that stands in the face of complete tragedy and tries to make a fucking point. They are the reason that I can't do this anymore.

*****

7 days after my birthday, something happens at a party. The next night I'm at the Ag, and one of my best friends puts his arms around me. I lose it, utterly, I don't want anyone near me or touching me, all these bodies and people, all this touching in this tiny space, it makes me frightened.

I feel sick, and guilty, and dirty. And familiar.

Familiar? How can I already know this feeling? If last night was the first time I've ever done something like that then how on earth can this be deja-vu?

Then I remember. Being sixteen and the absolute shame I felt for sleeping with someone I was in love with. Tell me, someone, why I ever let myself feel that way? Thanks to the guilt, the shame, the self-loathing, I ruined something beautiful because someone told me God didn't like it and

I never asked why.

Now, I've done something I actually do think is slutty and I realise just how bad I let myself feel before, how I convinced myself that it was somehow faithful to feel this way over nothing. Nothing. I did nothing wrong. Except lie.

*****

So, apparently, this is some kind of death warrant. My rejection of this, my saying 'no' to this is what will damn me. I wear the hoodie I stole from Catherine to work, the one with 'saved' written on the back and Joan asks me - saved from what?

From what indeed. If I play good, if I keep my legs shut and my mouth shut and force myself to believe that an all-loving God is prepared to die to save our souls but won't give us enough of a heads up to save us from hell, if I think this and breathe this and throw myself against the brick wall and ask to be healed until I'm too weak to wonder why I'm still sick - if I do this, I'll be blessed.

If I walk away, and start thinking. If I find the balls to say actually I feel that sex has been demonised, and there isn't anything wrong with being gay and words are just words and that people who tell other people that they'll burn are the worst kind of people.

If I stop lying, in short, I'll be damned. But I won't be a hypocrite anymore. From that at least I'll be saved.

it's not over til it's over

2006-08-15T20:24:00.000Z

It isn't over, I haven't given up, I just don't have the internet connection or will to do it right now.

I'm working in Egham for a couple of weeks, running the Help the Aged charity shop. Go figure, they take me on as a paid Saturday girl and suddenly the manager's going on holiday and... here I am.

In other news, I have no money, no hair (haha), no bed and no DVD of Series 2 of the L Word. Life's tough sometimes.

On the plus, I do have a job, a house, a 35 year old German housemate called Christoph and a new man. (Before you ask, it's not Christoph.)

So, in short, sorry. My blog is shit at the moment and if any of you are still around come me getting broadband, I'll treat you all to some spiteful vitriol about the following - Coca Cola, automatic flush toilets, Lily Allen, James Blunt (still not over him yet), Western attitudes to terrorism and people who steal from charity shops.

Ah... I miss this.

well...

2006-08-05T18:38:00.000Z

Wow.

I can't remember how to blog anymore.

Huh.

consciousness

2006-08-01T22:38:00.000Z

Come to. You're in a bed, the softest and warmest, the howling wind can't reach you and it's dark outside. Dark. It's evening and you've fallen asleep before your dinner, your fish and chips, your parents have gone to fetch.

Walk downstairs, past the landing covered in the photos of ancient family, past the painting of the Moulin Rouge, past the light of the living room. Leave your grandmother's house, pull the door to behind you. Light up and keep walking. Up the hill and to the right, between two fields, past a scrambling track clinging to the edge of a valley.

Sit down, inhale the smoke and silence as separate essences to the air and faraway noise. Stare down at the bay, hundreds of feet below you. Watch the fog rolling in from the sea, the thrill of it enveloping you so quickly, you wouldn't have had time to run.

Watch hills and grass and quarries disappear. Hold your hand out in front of you, lose your fingertips.

Jump, run home, your filthy hair in your face, skip across the lane and back into the house. Look back and instead of the place you were sitting, see mist.

*****

Come to. You're on a bridge, with your family, the south of Scotland somewhere, the sea rolls below you and music belts into your ears, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, brittle and euphoric.

Stretch, your muscles cramped, remember the last time you did this journey you took the endless hours of the journey to pray. Consider it and then decide the only people who can hear you are right here in the car.

*****

Come to. There's saliva on your face and it's the first thing you notice, falling from your lips, cold. Your hands, your head, your body is crushed into the grass with the wait of being asleep.

Your bag is behind you, spilling receipts onto damp ground, where it landed when both of you fell.

He's shaking you awake while your brother's taking a piss by the fence. He says you scared him. Tell him that you scare yourself.

Wonder what pills you'd need to take to fix what these pills have done to you. Wonder about September and no pills at all.

You think that fainting is fuck all compared to the way you used to blackout, emotional blackouts, with no one to wake you.

You feel like saying, now you're scared?

*****

Come to. Another morning, another place. The floor of your parents' living room, the carpet rubbing grazes into your limbs, your head a bucket of concrete.

Beside you, on the fireplace, a pair of nail scissors, an orange and a phone charger, inexplicably gathered in drunken logic last night. This morning, even, an hour and a half after you turned 19.

It occurs to you, when comparing this morning to the fresh-faced 29th of July that happened last year, that if your alcohol consumption continues this current growth rate, you will die very soon.

The sight of the orange makes you sick, your breath smells like piss, there's a txt from a man you don't know on your phone and you don't feel entirely fulfilled.

You try to move but can't, and in your head a voice begins to sing, happy birthday...

*****

Come to. You've been scaring at the screen for over an hour now and you still have no idea what to write. All you have these days are pretty stories, you're pretty sure if you had morals they'd come through too but at the moment -

all you can express is confusion, a vague apprehension, a certain lack of consciousness.

stories about running away

2006-07-21T16:30:00.000Z

She can't even remember if she's used this title before, so she'll use it anyway.

It's not the internet I miss, I don't think. This girl I met at work, an Indian girl whose name I forget, only said two things that I remember. The first was about the internet, how much she missed it, how it was her life. She was one of those girls who's bubbly and cheerful and pretty and has everything going for her except for the fact that she lives out of her Myspace and discussion forums and band websites and communities.

It's not the connection to the internet that's bad, it's how she can't really deal with real people.

The second interesting thing she said was, in justification for her household not only having a chef but a butler who cooked for the chef, that labour is very cheap in the developing world. Yes, replied the room full of left-wing fundraisers. Yes, it is.

I don't want to be one of those people who can't interact with things in 2d. I don't want to freak out and whinge whenever I can't get online but my god I hate not blogging. I'll put it this way - as therapeutic as keeping a diary is, and as glad as I am that I've finally managed to get into that habit, I firmly and completely believe that writing without a reader is talking to yourself.

You can't write without a reader, you can't just write to nobody. Anyone who writes a diary with no intention of it ever being read is lying, in my opinion. Ask yourself if you'd burn your diaries when you died. If the answer's no then you want someone to read them. If the answer's yes then you've proved me wrong and it's obviously just me that cannot abide the thought of not being heard.

Sometimes, it scares me to think it, it feels like blogging is the main form of communication in my life. At uni, when I blog everyday, no matter what happens and how I feel it'll all be sorted, neatly pinned down into words by the time I go to sleep. As if everything I forgot to say that day can be said online instead.

It scares me into talking more often, to having real conversations even when I don't want to because I don't want to be sucked into that kind of relationship with the internet. If it's making me open up to people that can't be bad. But still, this feeling of uneasiness when my safety net is taken away.

On the plus side, the realisation of the last six weeks' separation from broadband has made me realise something. The only thing that keeps me sane is this, not just blogging but writing, somehow pinning it down and forcing it out and getting myself sorted. I have to do it, can't stop doing it. Sometimes it's a ritual, sometimes it's a compulsion, as long as it gets done I'll get to sleep at night.

Decisions have been made. Next time someone asks me what I'll do with my life I'll tell them I will be a writer. That is where my energies will go for now. I can't be done with deciding between dance classes and film studies and politics modules when all I really know how to do, all I'm good at and all that helps is writing. Realism, I suppose.

And the story. The story (stories?) that I started when I was still at school. People like Barony and Costa and Nathaniel who I never mention on here and I suppose only Meffie, Emilie, Stacey and Laura would really remember. They're coming out of whatever fictional cupboard I put them into because I can't keep staring up my own arse any longer.

I need something to write, something big, a project. I need to see if I can do this, if I can do it well. So I will do it, and later will look back and see how I did.

Wish us luck.

sunshine barcode

2006-07-14T19:45:00.000Z

The stripes of sunshine, dappled and shade, they exist solely to remind you of the cost of things.

You want to know the cost, you want to hear prices, numbers, currency like threeseventynine and fiveeightyfour and nothingatallforthefirstyear. How about the real currency, like lies and deceit, like labour and children and baking sunshine?

You don't want to think about how much things really cost. You walk in that kind of light, evening late, when your whole shadow elongates until your sandals are like platforms, your toenails rise up like claws.

You drink soft drinks, branded, and write pretentious essays about the economy of sunlight. You don't want to know about the cost of things.

Your human rights have laid out your obligations - yourself and your children first, with other people way down the line. You would rewrite the charter, and obligate people above people. You would force the charity from people's hands if you could.

And they say, it's not giving if it's an obligation. You will be obligated to pay tax, to work in industry, to consume and reproduce and be happy and spend and believe and not question and toe the line and shut the fuck up and eat your Happy Meal but God (that charitable God, the one you pray to) forbid that you be obligated to selflessness.

The sunshine barcode covers your feet in blisters. You stop, apply plasters, leave your Pepsi can on the floor to rust in the bushes.

You don't think about the cost of things. You go home instead.

blog in sixty seconds

2006-07-12T15:18:00.000Z

So much to say, so little time.

I'm in the computer centre on campus with Est, checking emails in sweltering heat and trying not to sweat on the chair too much.

It's a public chair; it's a matter of respect.

I'll tell you about my house. There's no bed in my room, what used to be the dining room, so I pulled a mattress downstairs and I sleep on that instead. I feel so bohemian that yesterday I placed a request with the landlord to not buy me a bed after all, just a mattress to sleep on. He pointed out that there was already a spare mattress in the shed and, if beds weren't important, couldn't I just sleep on that?

Just so everyone knows where I stand on this - beds aren't important, but not sleeping on something you found in the back garden is DAMN important.

I can sit on the windowsill (one leg in, one leg out) to smoke, listening to the Pixies and reading pretentious books and ain't nobody to tell me off except maybe the delicious next door neighbours, foreign as a lawnmower to my new back garden, and fit as the pizza we ordered for breakfast this morning.

Fucking bohemia. The other wonderful thing about my house is that it's mine. Currently Est's as well but she's only paying rent in love and cigarettes - this house is mine, baby, and I'll stub my fags out on the rusty stepladder you left in my yard if I want to.

White trash doesn't even cover it.

This has run well over sixty seconds but I don't care so I'll tell you the rest of the good news.

Est and I get to see Philippa and her lovely chum Charlotte tonight. Philippa and Charlotte bear the dubious pleasure of being two of the few people to see just what a mess I was at the Reading festival. Charlotte and Est bear the even more dubious pleasure of being the only two people I know ever to challenge each other to a 'Jew-off' - if you've never seen yamulkahs drawn at dawn then you shouldn't ask.

The even more exciting news is that, despite missing so many lectures and seminars that I technically failed this year, I've actually passed this year, and better than I expected to. My relief is tangible. Come closer. You can stroke it.

I must adieu, to a house full of fag-smoke, Irn Bru bottles and, due to my recent friendship with a girl who used to work in a sexual health clinic, several packs of condoms and a sachet of Liquid Silk. Again, if you don't know, it's best not to ask.

Who says doing nothing is boring?

air

2006-07-07T17:29:00.000Z

In terms of playing catch-up, I kept my word to the marvellous Becci Brown and her creative efforts by writing down one thing every day while I was away that was cool. Expect them up and about as soon as I find broadband and time.

*****

We'll talk about a book I read once instead. It was called Music and Silence, I forget who it was by, the only memorable things about it were a whole family of sons sleeping with their stepmother and the way that the perspective changed from character to character.

The best passages in the novel started: "the thoughts of Marcus Tilsen, plucked from the air."

It was years ago, but I remembered that.

Thoughts then. Not from the air as such but from bus tickets, train tickets, roach paper, leaflets and envelopes. Things that I've put down and refound today.

Darling, shall we see if there's anything special for sale in Bristol? To Hayley, on the back of an evangelical pamphlet, in reference to our ongoing search for a dealer.

Did you forget that this was supposed to be GOOD NEWS? Found on the same pamphlet, beneath the phrase 'eternal fires', accompanied by someone else's handwriting - Wankers!

In the margins of my diary:

Back to back, he says, no funny business-
I
just
don't
know

They say today is the longest day. Yesterday felt longer.

Only 1% of the public give regularly to charity. Over-committed my arse.

She sings, more damage than a heart could hold. How can yuo be so wonderful, why won't you answer your phone?

Across a bus ticket, a packet of Swan filter tips and an envelope:

Homeless guy; homeless Peter-

Peter is playing the pipes, topless, selling burning bundles of rosemary on the pavement; he whiskery kisses my hand as we part.

Ten pounds for two bundles, I say, some drinks and a smoke mate, enjoy yourself.

Mini Milk for the lady, fundraising, stressed with the rudeness that rich can afford, a present, unbidden, from a man -

- a man who sneaks into the cathedral and cold, grinning, behind graves rests.

On a London Travelcard:

Consider a girl, on a bench, in a churchyard, wondering the nature of things. She knows to tell things precisely, for out of words, exactly as they are, the greatest stories come.

The churchyard is appropriate for it is answers she considers; 'consideration' is important for it is of judgement that she writes.

The breeze, the bench, the cigarettes, the ticket stub will tell this story. The conclusion she will take is only this: her words will be all that is considered; her said and how she said it will tell this story.

this is what happened

2006-07-06T12:28:00.000Z

So it's been about four weeks since last we spoke.

Since then, I've done three weeks as a pavement fundraiser. They call us 'chuggers' - charity muggers. I tell a man in Bristol that I prefer to think of it as romancing rather than mugging - making us 'chancers' I suppose.

Bugger me it's hard work.

Consider leaving the house at 7:30am, driving for a couple of hours to wherever it is you're supposed to be, stopping for a cuppa and then spending the next 10 hours pounding the pavements, with no lunch break and all the vitriol the British public can throw at you (and believe me, there's a lot of it).

Consider losing any kind of faith in humanity by your first fag break. Consider hating people so much that sometimes you forget how to speak.

Consider old men grabbing you by the ID badge and groping you. Consider being told to 'fuck off and die'. Consider being told that children with learning disabilities should be drowned at birth.

Consider working yourself into the ground, six days a week, for £212 because you can't meet target on account of people already giving two quid a month to cancer research so, no thank you!, they're sorted as far as far as charity goes.

Consider smiling next time you see a chugger.

Then again, consider this.

Waking up at 7am with a glorious hangover, in a house full of people you didn't know a week ago, people who are now your closest friends.

Squeezing into a Skoda Fabia which you are definitely, absolutely, under NO circumstances allowed to smoke in, sparking up and putting on some 'motivational music' - think, Tina Turner, Mungo Jerry, Rage Against the Machine, Cotton Eyed Joe.

Ordering your double espresso with cream and a bacon bap, sitting on the pavement for breakfast.

A homeless man buying you an ice cream because he feels bad that no one will stop and talk to you.

A passing busker giving you a musical accompaniment - Mencap, with chips and with salad it's Mencap, even Buckingham Palace have Mencap...

A student signing up to give £20 a month, following a screaming argument with his mother in which she insists he can't afford it and he insists that yes he bloody can.

A guy with learning disability coming to give you a hug because Mencap helped him find a job as a gardener and he's so much happier now.

Getting home, smoking fatty-bombatties in the back garden, going for a swim in the accomodation pool, sitting in front of log-fires, in pubs in Weston-Super-Mare, talking to Welshmen, Australians, South Africans, Russians, Geordies, Americans about life and charity and how every fucker who's too rich to give to charity fades to grey when a biker the size of a house tells his mates off for using the word spastic and signs up for more than he can afford.

You love people; you hate people.

*****

There's too much to tell you. I've got time off at the moment for exhaustion and fainting in the street. At the moment I'm not especially good at this job but I will be, because they would be the hardest, most mindblowing three weeks of my life and, basically, I'm a glutton for punishment.

Come on general public, make my day.

conclusion

2006-06-03T23:47:00.000Z

Friday to Friday, the weirdest week of my life.

Between raving with my brother, smoking lots of substances lots, drinking lots of drink lots, watching lots of L Word lots, pretending to dj, dancing to Latino music and drinking cocktails, kissing boys, getting dressed up and finding places to go, sleeping on the quad in a stolen quilt, lifting an armchair off the street in Belsize Square, sipping gin and lime in a luxurious Old Street apartment...

This may also be the most hedonistic week of my life. Don't judge me...

*****

And it's been one of the hardest, the last few days. Apparently you do read this blog now, so, if you're there, hey Sam, welcome aboard.

Getting used to not seeing someone is easier than getting used to seeing someone in a different way to the way you did before. But being someone's friend is worth that. Like they say, things can only get better.

*****

On Wednesday afternoon I went to see the college psychiatrist, hopefully for the last time. I say hopefully, not because I dislike him or dislike seeing him, quite the opposite. I hope I don't see him again because I don't ever want to be in a place where I need to again.

Strange working relationship that, where I tell all my secrets in the hope of being sent away.

At the end of our session he asks me as he has done every time we've met, if I need to see him again. Not want to, need to.

Instead of a teary-eyed 'yes', I think about it and the biggest smile comes out of nowhere.

"No, I don't think I do."

If all goes to plan, I'll be coming off my medication in September.

*****

Friday, I'm talking to Catherine and Vicky and out comes the question that never fails to strike fear into the hearts of many.

"How's stuff with God?"

I say I've taken a step back, I tell her I can't call myself a Christian now because, labels aside, to be a Christian to me is to put God in control of your life and I acknowledge that that is not the case.

If the bible, or a word, was to tell me to do something, or to not do something, I wouldn't. To stop kissing boys I don't care about, to stop smoking things my mother wouldn't care for, to stop having rude thoughts about Kelly Clarkson when I think no one's looking...

I took my life back, because I got mighty sick of lying to myself, of immersing myself in a religion that, in the end, was the most painful thing in my life.

When the depression gets under control but you still can't stop crying at church, you gotta prioritise.

What's worse, picking and choosing which parts of a religion you follow, or following it all out of a frightened obligation and a desire to conform? If I don't believe that God cares whether I sleep with someone, then aren't I a beautiful fool to wait?

*****

The other thing I talk about on Wednesday, is how much happier I am now. Situations can be shit still, and are, and I can still have a good cry like anyone else.

The word he uses is 'normal', and we can bang on til dawn about what 'normal' is but here's what I think:

Normal is the state of mind in which I feel ok. Not necessarily good or bad, just ok, myself, the way I am. Each to their own, and this, finally, is my own.

awesome

2006-05-29T15:26:00.000Z

I'll tell this one in snippets, just like I used to.

Friday, Joe and I sit by the pond behind Founders, talk about relationships, how and why and if they're worth it. When you're happy you feel like you can never be hurt again; when you're hurt you want to become celibate, to close yourself off from ever having to feel.

It lasts until you get bored of crying, til someone catches your eye, and then suddenly falling in love doesn't just seem like a good idea, it seems like the only idea. Sometimes can take ages, years, to get to that place again. Sometimes it doesn't take half as long.

In the end, deathbed thoughts won't be of the pain, but of the joy. And in that, this is worth it.

*****

Saturday, my brother's house, his room full of things that used to be in my parent's house. That's the bed I slept on when I was 10, that table in the living room I used to play under as a kid.

I lie flat on my back, stare up underneath at the black capital letters printed on the tables underside. I tell Dave I used to fixate on those letters, on what they meant. He asks what they mean. I grin, tell him I don't know, I'm eighteen now and I still haven't figured it out.

*****

Chris and Dave, North for the Winter, play at the Point in Fleet. They're good, very good, about four years older than the oldest person there and with a kind of musical sophistication that the little shits can only dream about.

I like the way people, couples, stand together at gigs. This is the kind of music that makes guys hold their girlfriends a little bit tighter. I love it.

*****

Mex and I drive home from Fleet, listening to Jimmy Eat World, driving far too fast. Too fast, too dangerous. If I could drive, that would be the thing that killed me.

Dubiously, Mex lets me drive his Smart Roadster around the industrial estate. I'm terrified, but it's so much fun. The temptation to put my foot down, to get away faster is almost uncontrollable.

It's a good thing I don't drive. I'd never come back.

*****

The Ag, a guy from Tesco I had such a crush on is putting the moves on me and it's a lovely bit of closure I'll admit. A year ago nothing would have made me happier.

Tonight, I go outside and talk to a bald guy called Nathan, who tells me that no one can take control of my life but myself. Only I can fix myself.

He tells me not to worry, he's 31 and he's only starting to work himself out. I've got plenty of time.

19 year old graphic design students are all very well, but Nathan's got my heart tonight.

*****

The big white elephant you drive past on the way into Camberley. I get the urge to break in somewhere and, a traffic cone and a salsa central advert later, we're climbing over the fence and taking pictures of ourselves on the elephant.

I used to be terrified of that thing. Sarah swallowed a penny when she drove past it once, or was it me? I can't remember. Either way, I'm not scared of it anymore.

*****

Shaun says, "if your brother knew you were doing this, he'd kill us both", and he's right.

I'm in a shopping trolley in Andrew's front garden, smoking something special and trying to remember all the French words I know.

Half an hour later I'm asleep with Mex on the sofa. No, not asleep, just pleasantly incapable of moving.

*****

The Monaco Grand Prix wakes me up before I'm ready and Chris, my other big brother, watch it together.

*****

I talk to Liz at the pub. She wants to know how it's going so I tell her what's true, that now I'm starting to understand it all it's much easier to deal with.

I tell her I'm not a Christian anymore, that I've started smoking and I'm terrified that my parents will find out and be disappointed, that I'm taking control and losing control all at once but that every day is better than the last because finally, I'm figuring myself out.

She grins. "That's awesome."

bittersweet again

2006-05-27T00:28:00.000Z

It's late. I'm drunk. Clearly it's time to blog. Blogtime!

Sometimes the moment is more important than the moment after. A lot of the time in fact.

As always, I have nothing to say; I'll find something to say, as always.

Nothing to say out loud, anyway.

It's been a while since I've said what I've been doing.

Today I did this and that, talked to Sam, talked to Joe, talked to Est, talked to everybody. Saw Tim off at the station. I'm pretty sure I talked to him too.

Drank wine, got locked out of my flat and had to gatecrash a party in the block opposite to steal a knife to break my way back in. Also managed to cadge a bottle of wine and two cigarettes off lovely Italian men named Alessandro and Lorenzo respectively.

I've had so many conversations with so many people about the same things that I can't remember who said what and all the words are overlapping into one big mess and I'm attributing the wrong phrases to the wrong people.

In theory, it doesn't matter who said what, only that it was said. In actuality it matters so fucking much, but what I want right now isn't what I'll want tomorrow.

It doesn't matter which 'he' said it, because even if 'he' said it, sometimes the moment to come is more important than this moment.

This moment, 'he' ought to call and tell me he loves me, he ought to come over. But it cannot happen unless it does. Everything that happens is a product of what happened before. Tonight, and the unfair thing that I chose to do, was already going to happen this morning. This morning was already going to happen the way it did because it had to because of last night.

Cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and fucking effect, til there's no point in worrying about tomorrow because it's all already in hand. Not in the hand of God, but in the hands of what every one of us is doing right now. Only that will affect tomorrow.

See how it goes up and down?

I knew in that moment that the moment that followed it would be painful, but our minds were made up. I know in this moment that is painful that the next moment will be better. Things will rise again.

Cheap wine and Italians and closure. Thank God it's Friday.

Roll on Saturday.

stronger / the best thought i've had all day

2006-05-24T22:18:00.000Z

The realisation is sudden, scary even. I'm txting my parents to say thank you for an evening out at the cinema (conveniently forgetting that, by twist of fate, I ended up paying for it - how they must love a daughter with a debit card?) and trying to reassure them, above all, that I'm ok.

How 'ok' I am is probably debatable, but I'm less worried about myself than I was last week. Last week I had the luxury of a relationship, a shoulder to cry on. Now that I'm not there anymore, I'm faced with two choices. Wallow like a pig in shit or pull myself the fuck together.

Oddly enough, this stupid situation gives me more, not less, of an incentive to come off it and sort it out. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned; getting dumped means that being ok is a matter of pride, of principle.

It's not hard feelings as such. The fury isn't at him but at feeling bad itself, misery itself. I don't want to feel bad - God knows I spend enough time doing that already - so we'll send the fury somewhere better instead.

Txting my parents, trying to find something comforting to say about my bad situation, all I can think of is this: I'm harder than I look, it takes more than this to bring me down.

Which isn't true, really. I get down about misplaced library books, running out of cigarettes, no one being online, someone not smiling at me when I smile at them. Now I have a reason to feel down, an actual bad thing to worry about, for some reason I'm having none of it.

Maybe it's because the little things get to me. Because it's not the little things themselves it's what they spark in me. A misjudged conversation, a funny look, a bad day and it's like a chain of gunpowder with a very tall building instead of a keg at the far end. And that, I think, is something to worry about.

I think I've been suffering from depression for anything as long as five years. During that time several people I care about have died, and I've literally lost count of the times I've wanted to give up on life altogether.

And that's why now, after the initial sting has worn off, I can see the silver lining in this particular cloud. I've had so many big clouds, so many rainclouds, that I can see this for what it really is - an unpleasant situation in an otherwise fantastic life, in which I feel better than I have done in years.

I tell my parents that I'm stronger than I look and it's true. What would I be to give up now?

This is the Yateley girl in me, this is the stubborn in me, the hardass in me. I'm worth more than bitterness and regret, than feeling this way. I am worth more than this.

this is cool

2006-05-24T15:27:00.000Z

Becci has had a good idea. Every day for a year, something that made you think, hey, that was cool. So you blog about it, just that moment, one moment, each day.

I'm in. Partly because I like the novelty of the thing; partly because the doctor informs me that postivive thinking is a good thing. Whatever. It's not like I'll pass up another excuse to blog every day.

Cool, huh?

pretty when you cry

2006-05-22T22:21:00.000Z

You get sick. You get sad.

What scares me is the loss of control. I'm realising more and more that control is a real issue here. I only want to smoke because I don't like the thought of it being unknown to me. I want to experience things just to prove that I can.

I'm more confident with my hair short. When I was twelve I just looked like a boy. Now I look like a girl, and that is good.

I hate to be defeated by an empty screen, but I genuinely don't know what to write.

Yesterday we discovered our broken kitchen window opens wide enough that we can smoke out of it. Est, cigarette in hand, told me to come and yell out of the window, let it all out.

I screamed. Pigeons upped and flew away.

I feel like just screaming, over and over again, I want to scream away 19 years of emotion until I'm actually clean.

I want to scream at myself for wanting to scream. I feel like smacking myself in the face, on behalf of everyone who suffers worse than I do and doesn't complain half as much as I do.

I feel like smacking myself from thinking that emotions can be compared. For thinking that that matters.

But I can't do those things.

So I'm blogging instead. I'm always fucking doing that.

Fucking difficult to express things sometimes.

I feel like... like I'm going to keep typing until something comes of this.

The other night I said that what scares me about life is that there's no end to the pressure, there's always this to deal with and this to deal with, thing after thing until you die, and no one expects anything of you anymore. I tell him that's why death seems so appealing sometimes.

He said he agreed, and he was surprised to hear someone else say out loud what he'd always thought.

What hope I took from that conversation.

I don't want to write about breaking up. I don't want to write about depression, or pain, or misery, or hopelessness. That seems to be all I write about sometimes.

Sometimes you look at people and they seem so fucking unaffected by it. You get people who look like they've never had a bad day in their lives, people whose misery is only a temporary response to an unpleasant situation, rather than a constant. A pimple rather than a birthmark.

And then you listen to something beautiful and sad, or read something ancient, or just get that feeling in your gut, that knowledge that the strongest emotions are the most universal. More poems, more books, more songs to love and sadness than to anything else because they are the two, I think, that hit you hardest.

And they're the two that hit everyone.

Everyone wants to be loved. And everyone gets sad.

Does everyone find it shocking that someone can look at the most important emotions in life and think of joy only as an afterthought?

It only just occurred to me that happiness should be on that list.

Is that pessimistic or am I just low tonight?

I'll end this now, because I'm low tonight, and writing this barely seems worth the effort anymore.

Ugh.

maybe maybe maybe

2006-05-21T22:58:00.000Z

You live; you learn.

Today I learnt that being dumped is shit.

I told everyone that you were sunshine. How appropriate that it won't stop raining.

Good thing you don't read this blog. You never got round to it.

Jusqu'ici tout va bien.

So far so fucking brilliant.

student safety

2006-05-21T11:58:00.000Z

Last night this guy was following me.

Or maybe not. Maybe he was just walking home the same way as me.

Walking about 10 feet behind me, turns right into Harvest Road when I do, drops behind when I turn round to stare him out.

Blind drunk am I, shouldn't be on my own, should have stayed at Catherine's after all, shouldn't have gotten it into my head to go and see Sam, should have stayed at the party with people and people.

I call Sam when he's further away, ask him to come meet me. By the time I reach Victoria Street I'm on the phone and he's feet away.

I stop outside the chip shop and there's two guys with a pizza, I ask them to wait with me. The guy is nowhere to be seen now, but then there he is, hunched over, walking towards us, crosses the street before he gets to us, carries on.

Probably nothing. I'm drunk and I probably got Sam out of bed for nothing.

I'm more scared of the part of me that wants this guy to catch up and try something. More scared that I'm disappointed to find myself safe.

What the fuck is that?

the greatest epiphanies happen with cigarette in hand

2006-05-20T13:47:00.000Z

Go and read this.

I said to Paul, the last time I was in Yateley, that I didn't really care if it was an emotional thing or a chemical thing, or exactly what the drugs are doing to me because my concern is that I felt bad before and now I feel better.

Sometimes it's as simple as that; sometimes it's not.

I've been thinking an awful lot about depression, about what the fuck it is.

They used to talk about the body being made up of humours, I think they were blood, pus, bile, water, I forget exactly, but all ailments and conditions of the body and soul were just a result of an imbalance of your humours. This imbalance would lead to jaundice, this to the pox, this to melancholy.

The melancholic figure, he who simply wasn't mixed right. They were talking about imbalances even then.

The Good Morrow by John Donne has been one of my favourite poems since A-level English:

"whatever dies was not mixed equally;
if our two loves be one, or thou and I
love so alike that none do slacken, none can die."

I liked to think that maybe even if you weren't mixed right, someone out there would balance you.

But no, I don't believe in yin and yang anymore. There is no perfect complement for you, there is no one who can make you 'ok'.

Chemical or not, depression is simply a part of who you are.

She says that she thought when she met me that I was like her, something in the way I spoke, the way I didn't speak, the way I was too terrified to trust that someone would catch me when I fell backwards.

I tell her I thought the same, but I couldn't say why. It's something in how people look at the world, perhaps a certain wariness.

Maybe some people are just more prone to misery than others. And everyone says that those who feel the greatest misery can feel the deepest joy, and those who are crippled with doubt are those that find the richest faith, that writers are the most tortured souls of all.

Byron was in love with his sister; Kane wrote 4:48 Psychosis and then killed herself.

Occasionally there is a day like today when I'm ok with being the way I am. I couldn't tell you the cause and effect but I can tell you that I'd take this misery, this depression that I resent so fucking much, the pain and everything because I am the way I am and to be any different is to be less. I don't know if I write because I'm unhappy, or I love to laugh because I've cried so much, if I'm so desperate to change the world just to feel validated.

Couldn't tell you. Don't really care. Not even because I feel better, just that maybe this is the way I'm mixed and maybe I'm ok with that. Maybe that's just the way some people are.

drunken daylight

2006-05-18T18:48:00.000Z

Let it be known, Catherine, that I wrote this in the brief period I was away from Medicine when I said I was going home to do stuff on the internet.

By stuff I mean BLOGGING.

Because you're drunk, the memories don't mean less. I said to Tim the other day, laughter when you're drunk is still laughter, the illusion of control of control that self-harm offers is still a comfort, however ill-founded.

We are the self-harm society. We know what it's about, we know it's cool.

It's not. But, like everything else, it's so good.

I will post this, just for the thrill that Cat will get to see her name in print.

I love you Cat. Mind you, I love everyone right now.

It's sunny but it's still raining - pathetic fallacy says that the weather and myself are in tune right now. As always, as always.

Love. Yeah? Important, right?

So drunk. Yeah!

readme

2006-05-15T22:48:00.000Z

Suddenly it's all a bit too much for me again and I don't know I don't know I don't know what to feel.

Ugh.

What's odd is that this feeling will just be one out of many others when I look back on it and that's the strangest thing about life I think, how the present is the only real time, changed before you've even completed the thought of how fragile it is. And yet for all its fragility it's so fucking inescapable.

I cannot escape this moment, the crest of the wave that doesn't even exist. I'm already different to how I was when I started this post, to when I walked down the hill, to when I said goodbye to Sam, to when Est called.

Emotions last longer than moments, they're the only things, if cells and body and time are constantly renewing, that stay the same through all these different seconds.

Some feelings last longer than others.

Six months down the line, I flick through the archives and find this post, called 'readme' and I'm intrigued, forgetting, so I read this and remember this night in particular when I felt so bad and considered how strange it is to even feel bad at all from one moment to the next.

You savour the time like nothing else, you feel every second pass because you long for them to pass faster, I want it to be tomorrow, the next day, to be somewhere other than this. To the next day, the next problem, the next sick feeling.

The past and future don't exist. Time travel can't exist. Only the present has any link to eternity. And the present feels bad.

To be outside of time. Cigarettes burn down too fast and I want to be somewhere else with scars that don't heal because feeling better is so hard and I don't match up to myself yet.

not that i see myself as a prostitute, but...

2006-05-15T15:56:00.000Z

Church, then.

Romans 7 is the reading. I don't even realise it til I hear it but these are the verses I read in the prayer room the night that I walked out and left being a Christian behind me. I wouldn't say they were the catalyst, but they certainly made me realise a few things.

Colin talks about the flesh and the spirit, and how they want different things and that's how we end up doing the things we despise. He talks about little steps, how each harmless cigarette is another step closer to being somewhere you don't want to be, eg addicted to cigarettes.

He makes a wise point, and illustrates it well. But it's too much like straight lines to me. I can't see life as one pathway, one straight road anymore. I see it more as being a pond, and we're sort of treading water and dipping under and what's more important is just breathing and enjoying the feeling of the lilies rather than getting to the other side.

I finally get the courage to pray, and ask God for someone to talk to who will understand. At which point Catherine comes and sits next to me to paint something on the wall, and I smile quite contently.

Before I leave, Tracey gives me Hosea 2:14-15, "but then I will win her back once again. I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her there. I will return her vineyards to her and transform the valley of trouble into a gateway of hope. She will give herself to me there, as she did long ago when she was young, when I freed her from captivity."

Hosea was told to marry a woman who he knew would be unfaithful to him, and he loved her quite faithfully until she was able to do the same for him. As with God and the church, he waited patiently til she tired of her other lovers and returned to give him the affection he craved.

Sat on Catherine's windowsill, as we are wont to do, I say that I think I'm too scared to give all of myself to faith. I threw myself into it wholeheartedly, with little thought, and I got hurt by it. I was encouraged and enriched and transformed at so many points but in the end it just hurt me too much because I knew deep down it wasn't going to work. Because I didn't really believe it.

I built a wall between myself and God and then threw myself at it, which I imagine is why it hurt because, let's face it, bricks are hard.

I don't disbelieve, but I don't believe, and I simply do not trust that I won't get hurt again by this.

If and when I go back it won't be because I think it'll be fun or because I'm so desperate for self-worth that I'll pretend to believe anything. It'll be for love, just like with Hosea.

consider a girl, descending a hill in the downpour

2006-05-13T16:58:00.000Z

I'll start this post by informing you that I have nothing to say, which of course isn't true because now that I'm typing I'll end up going right ahead and saying something anyway.

My quest to eradicate Coca-Cola from my life is going slightly better since the discovery of Whole Earth Organic Cola at Egham's Holland and Barrett store. Bonus. Made with apple juice as well as kola nut/bean/whatever it is. Really nice as well.

And... I've started trying to write a play, more out of frustration at the lack of student-written drama being put on at RHUL than anything else. I don't know if it'll be particularly good but hopefully better than the only student-written play put on this year, Capital Punishment, which was well-acted and well-intentioned if nothing else. It'll be fun. It might never come to anything, but it's fun.

Being back on medication is fantastic and, so far, I haven't had any readjustment side-effects which makes me a happy bastard indeed. As it were.

This week has mainly been doing tech work and feeling ill. The tech work is getting better - yesterday I got to ride in the van and paint things, which was fun, and I get ony really well with my crew (crew in the actual sense of the word, not the ghetto sense of the word).

Tonight sees Est and I heading off to Ash for a hedonistic evening with Tim, everyone's favourite musical skinhead.

Tomorrow sees me going to church.

We'll talk later.

chocolate voice

2006-05-11T18:21:00.000Z

You can tell with people. You can see it on their wrists and in the way they take too long to smile. It's like a gaydar for depressives and people who don't like themselves, we call out to each other like angsty beacons. You can tell sometimes - but then sometimes you can't.

What I realise is that the closer you look, the sadder people are. You take someone shiny and wonderful and either get them drunk or just take the time to talk to them and suddenly stuff spills out, secrets land on the grass and there's nothing to do but just try and hold it, because that's all you can really do for someone. You can't take someone's burden, but you can step underneath it, hold it with them for a while.

Yesterday, the psychiatrist asked to see my legs. As if short skirts and shorts hadn't given it away, he wanted to see, to really see.

No no. Because it's secret, isn't it. So secret that I can't even think about it sometimes, let alone talk about it on the internet. You just don't tell people. Misery is like that. Such a bad conversation starter.

On the quad I hear a guy telling another guy that he doesn't need Valium, he should just stop taking them, he doesn't need them. His dad's dead, he says, and he never needed them. It's as if, if people would just pull themselves together, there wouldn't be any depression or pain.

Why are we so unkind? We change the subject before I get to yell, much to my chagrin, because I've grown a few opinions about pills recently and I just love to shoot my mouth off. Mainly I just want to ask this guy if he's ok. Not in the way he's been asked, not in the 'what the fuck's so bad that you can't get through it without drugs' kind of way. People are so confrontational, like if they ask the awkward questions that psychiatrists have never thought to ask that they'll somehow find the answer, they'll prove themselves stupidly right and break that person a little bit more.

I want to give the guy a hug, because I can't make it better, but I can tell him that he's not the only person in this circle. Of course he's not.

You learn this about being unhappy - you have never been and will never be the only one. No matter how low, how awful you think you are, there's someone else who feels the same. And it doesn't diminish it, or take away your right to be unhappy because everyone has the right to eat and breathe and feel like shit.

You have the right to be weak.

Heart to hearts recently, it's like chocolate voice. You know when you eat too much chocolate or anything really sugary and the back of your throat clogs up with the syrup and when you try to talk you sound like a Fraggle? That's chocolate voice. When I got it one day, Est pointed it out and I was so fucking stunned. How could it be that someone else knew about chocolate voice? How could anyone else possibly understand the thing I thought only happened to me?

Being miserable is like chocolate voice. We all get it, even if we never notice it, and the moment you start talking about it out loud you realise that no one's immune.

Suddenly you see that everyone has chocolate voice, to some degree, and suddenly you see that no one's talking about it. Why aren't we talking about it?

getting what you give

2006-05-10T13:06:00.000Z

"Hello, is this Get Stuffed taxidermy? I'm calling from Royal Holloway, University of London. We're putting on a production in the drama department and we're looking for a rather unusual prop, I was wondering if you could help us?"

"Certainly love, what is it you need?"

"A dead rabbit. Please."

"Well, I'm afraid most of the animals I have are family pets..."

"Oh no, not stuffed, just dead."

"Just dead?"

"Yup."

"Not stuffed?"

"Nope."

"Why don't you just go out and catch one?"

Why indeed.

"No, sorry, actually we're looking for one with the skin still on, if that's possible..."

"Um, I don't suppose it matters what colour..."

"Preferably not too cute, we don't want to upset anyone.

This, ladies and gentleman, is what you get for doing drama.

*****

And for kindness, what do you get? For being a pussy, maybe. This woman stops me in Egham town centre in her car, says her mum's in hospital in Chertsey, she lives in Basingstoke, she's got no money and sure enough she's run out of petrol, could I lend her some cash?

She'll give me her name, phone number, address, license plate...

Never mind love, consider it a good deed. I'm far too polite to call you up and ask for it back and I doubt you'll call me up to offer so just take it. Whether she's lying or not matters less than whether I'm willing to part with money, which in this case I am.

And it comes around, then. After my shopping, I'm suddenly exhausted and Egham hill has never looked bigger. A man at the station, heading to a conference at Royal Holloway offers to share a cab with me and pays for my ride, giving the driver two extra pounds to take me right to the door of my halls.

Everybody wins. This time anyway.

*****

In other news, I got the job. That's the toned down version of yesterday's reaction ("Yes!!! I got the fucking job!!!") but I'm still over the moon about it.

I'm also over the moon about having to buy a dead rabbit, but that's another story.

*****

My call register has never looked better, with the numbers of Dialogue Direct, two butchers and the college psychiatrist respectively.

Coming off meds without the knowledge of your doctors is a bad idea. Mainly because when you go back on them, you have to readjust to them all over again but also because when you eventually do get them flowing through your bloodstream again they might not actually work anymore.

This does not bode well.

My bag has never been more loaded with substances, between the alcohol and nicotine and Anadin and Citalopram... Up to my eyeballs. It's fantastic, even if the future does seem upsettingly full of withdrawal and adjustment and withdrawal and adjustment again.

*****

Sometimes, it's all a bit much, a bit scary. Sometimes it's not, sometimes it's so easy I just want to smile. Isn't it always that way?

pharmaceutical epiphany

2006-05-09T21:35:00.000Z

I've been off meds for about 5 days now. Health centre chaos meant that I wasn't going to get a new prescription for a couple of days anyway and after a rough 48 hours last week I thought I'd come through the worst and stupidly decided to take a lax approach to drugging myself up again.

Turns out, that wasn't the worst.

Constant low-level nausea, come on down. Moodswings and teariness, come on down. Sudden urges to down a whole bottle of painkillers, come the fuck down and bring me a headache while you're at it.

Ugh ugh ugh. Completely self-made misery am I. On the plus side, I have discovered two important things.

1) After weeks of deep curiosity, I now know exactly what would happen if I were to 'just stop taking the damn things'. It's not pretty.

2) Anti-depressants do, in this instance, in my case, at this time, for what I need, work. In that I wanted to feel better and, whilst taking them, I did. In that I felt shit before, then I felt better and now I'm not taking them I feel shit. That's a pretty simple kind of science, simple even enough for me to understand. Yes, I know it's not always that simple, but simplicity is beautiful for me.

Suddenly, start to feel sick, have to lie down. Try to get up, collapse on Sam, which is oh-so dignified, have to sleep for a while, dream about being in Scotland, then feel a bit better and go for a walk.

Having to lie down though. It's genuinely terrifying how quickly depression hits you again. Without expecting it, it's like suddenly projectile vomiting as opposed to knowing you're going to be sick and taking the necessary precautions.

Fuck me, is all I can say about that.

Also, that no one's ever seen me that vulnerable before. Before, I could recognise when the Bad Place started yawning like a chasm underneath me; today I just thought I felt a bit tired and should sit down and was actually rather surprised to find myself paralysed in bed with utter exhaustion and misery. You know, you don't really do that much in front of people, least of all your new boyfriend.

How to explain it?

I guess the reason I'm writing about this is because I want to say that it's actually a good thing. I can't wait to get back to pill-popping. I'm practically salivating for it. Blah blah blah. Drugs are bad. Fuck it, not when they make you feel better they're not.

Today I realised how bad life was before. I don't ever, ever want to put myself through that again.

recurrence

2006-05-08T12:07:00.000Z

These are the things I dream about most frequently:

Being chased and my legs being trapped in slow motion so I can't run away.

Having pet hamsters, and them dying.

Lifts. Always, always, always, lifts.

Someone getting ever closer, walking through every locked door I try to put between us.

Kit.

Kelly Clarkson.

Wells and underground prisons, being stuck in them.

The killer from Scream.

Going out for meals with strange selections of people.

University, but not as I know it. Specifically halls of residence, Runymede and Founders most often, but different, better, more spiral staircases, more pubs, less of my own stuff.

Being stuck in an MRI machine.

Suicide. Mine, other people's.

I'm not lying.

A big wooden house with a room containing a giant Christmas bauble that, somehow, visitors get stuck in and have to cling on for life with their fingernails. Not as fun as it sounds.

Soul Survivor.

Going on a date with someone, only for them to change into someone else, someone hideously inappropriate, at the crucial moment of the goodbye kiss.

People I'm annoyed with, normally so we get to argue.

Having my hair cut.

Giant, corporate parties where I'm the gatecrasher.

People dying and it being my fault.

Having a baby.

Meeting George Bush and not shaking hands with him for political reasons. Chaos ensuing.

Sometimes I quite look forward to getting to sleep.

that's me in the spotlight

2006-05-07T11:34:00.000Z

I think I thought I saw you smile. Losing my religion. This song coming on WMP isn't as funny as I thought it would be.

Blogging, then. You find that essence, the overriding feeling of where and who you are at the moment, you put it up on the screen and send it out and sometimes lovely people comment on it and that makes you happy.

Then, then, then.

I'd like to write essays. I'd like to put more into this, to plan and draft and edit and come up with something more polished. I want to be a writer, but only because I can't be a preacher anymore.

Friday, sitting on the quad in exquisite sunshine, Sam, Cat, Est, Joe, Paddy, David, Ro. Mmm. Cat gives me a French lesson, I want to get a tattoo, someone steals our magazines and I smoke til my head hurts and it's wonderful.

Accidental conversation with God the other night. A beautiful moment, reading Bakhtin on the steps outside, ideas and universality and global culture flowing off the pen, pretty smoke, people walking past, Yateley's finest Elle Milano playing on my phone.

I think, what am I here for now? The little voice says, there was a calling on your life, there still is. There was standing on street corners, shouting out loud, there was wanting to change and be changed, to make films and write books that make people think and making some dent on the mess that fallen people make.

There's still that. I tell the still, small voice that it'll have to speak louder than that now. I want a voice so loud that I know it's not just my own before I'll listen again. However, whoever, this voice is right about one thing. I still know what I'm here for. What I wanna be here for.

I like to think that somewhere in the darkness, something's smiling. Maybe it's God, maybe it's my reflection in a car window.

Job interview. Hill says: if you were an animal, which animal would you be?

I say a cat, because they're wise and feisty, they're independent, they're adventurous and they've got the kind of class that dogs can only dream about. Afterthought: also, they're pretty.

Hill grins and I see him write the word 'pretty' down.

Hill says: you have thirty seconds to talk about something you're passionate about, doesn't matter what, we just wanna see the passion.

I smile, say "I'm really into politics..."

Thirty seconds later I think I've said far too much. Probably still got five seconds to go but it's fine. Passion and all that, the timing's allowed to be loose.

In the meantime, there's this headache. Above my right eye. It's the headache you get when you ran out of medication on Thursday and you are coming down. And you can feel it.

And it's as simple as, you stop taking the pills and you get sick again. The doctors say I'm on them for six months or I have relapse.

I tell Paul I'd rather be happy on pills. Yeah, everyone wants to be organic, we'd love to just sniff flowers for medication but life doesn't work out that way sometimes. Maybe I'll be dead in the ground. Doesn't get more organic than that.

Chemicals, then. Too many, not enough. I say that smoking is the least of my worries. A girl has to feel better somehow and if I'm not smoking them I'm stubbing them out on my legs. I make the call. Smoking them is far more social.

You make yourself happy. Sometimes it feels like every way of feeling better is just another kind of self-harm. Maybe I'm doing this all the wrong way. I feel much better though.

Apart from the headache. I could do without the headache.

And the guilt. Fuck the guilt.

try being happy

2006-05-05T16:30:00.000Z

I wanted to call this 'sunshine', because that's more what it's about, but this deeply engrained superstition (probably more to do with my writing habits than anything else) says that to call a post 'sunshine' is to ensure that there will one day be a post called 'rain'.

It will rain again, inside and out, but who cares? There'll be pain again, and crying again, but isn't there always? Find me someone who can give that kind of guarantee, that you will always feel this way and you'll have found me a fucking liar. I'm not in the mood for fucking liars. Ever again.

It's so sunny, every fleck of dust on my screen has a shadow of its own. Poetry is like that.

*****

Anthony says "This is the best interview ever", and he's right.

Imran, Anthony, Tara and I are sitting in Hyde Park, overlooking the fountain, smoking and talking and drinking cheap booze, eating bread, moral values and a wish to change the world all fresh out of the oven.

All we have in common is this job interview, our fascination with the interviewer's name (Hill - the kind of hippy you want to be your friend), the cancerous bad habit that they let us do in the hotel lobby to soothe our nerves. And this vibe, the good vibe.

The good vibe is at uni as well, spilling people onto the quad to drink and pretend to work. Catherine and Sam are trying to teach me French, someone steals my magazine, it's fine, it's all fine.

Sunshine has come, and I realise that the single most important thing you can do is to learn to get by, and to help others get by. Love breeds love; karma is only a cliche because it's true; sunshine brings out the best like sunburn. Red, irresistible, painful I guess, but everything is.

Get by. So what if you get burnt?

gainful employment

2006-05-03T17:55:00.000Z

Tomorrow I have a job interview with these nice people, hopefully my employers for the summer.

I'm reading up on Amnesty International for a role play in which I have to try and convince another member of the interview group to sign up for a monthtly donation. That's right guys, I'm gonna be one of them.

It's annoying, isn't it, when they show up with their clipboards in the street and make you feel guilty. On the flip-side, it's nice, isn't it, when charities get money to do good things with.

I won't pretend it's as simple as that, because it's really not, but if I have to earn money (apparently it's quite important these days) I'd rather do it with an organisation whose purpose is merely questionable rather than downright shit. By that I don't mean that DialogueDirect are bad, I mean that working for *insert corporation here* would just be really, really bad.

I'd like to go home at the end of the day knowing Help the Aged or Greenpeace or Childline are getting an extra £5 a month because of someone I signed up. That's the kind of satisfaction I'd like this summer.

In the meantime, what better opportunity to piss people off?

this is my ticket

2006-05-02T20:34:00.001Z

I get in, throw down my bag, eat a banana and ten minutes later find a slice of it, perfectly formed, still waiting on my desk to be eaten. I love that. You think it's over, but it's really, really not.

Fun recently has been writing essays til my fingers bleed, mastering my first and last magic trick, getting a bump on the head that yes I'm going to mention on my blog because I love sympathy and going on a jaunt to London to interview this band.

*****

Arrive at Tottenham Court Road tube, take the wrong exit, wander up the nearest street making hopeful noises. We're interviewing them at the Metro in... 3 minutes. Right.

Est calls their tour manager while I approach some helpful looking strangers, huddled in a doorway with a cart marked 'cool gospel'.

"Alright guys, don't suppose you could tell me where the Metro club is?"

"Umm."

"No."

"Uh..? No. Don't... reckon. Sorry, love."

"Cheers anyway..."

"Uh, actually love..." The brightest of the three cottons on to something and points upwards to the sign above their doorway. Metro Nightclub and Venue.

Huh.

Before I can point this out to Est, she's gotten directions to the other Metro nightclub, the one we're actually supposed to be at, so I decide not to feel too stupid about, you know, that.

The band are from Aberdeen, which makes me like them instantly, and their tour manager is quite a dashing fellow called Scott Forrest, which makes me like them even more. We're worried that they're going to be arsey, but they're not. They're very friendly and each of them shakes hands with both of us.

There's nowhere quiet for us to go so, after my suggestion of sitting on crates in the alley is unanimously squished, we go to sit in Sloane Square, bundled up across two benches.

It's not every day a girl gets offered a seat by a Scottish bloke whose actually in a real band. A real band!

My function in this venture is to start conversation by mentioning that my family are from Aberdeen and generally be eye-candy, while Est handles the interview like a pro. We both fulfil our roles admirably, with the added bonus of getting kisses from the tour manager as we leave.

Will we stay for the gig? Nah, sorry darlings, we've got places to be. Keep 'em keen. We'll be in touch, see you soon!

Fantastic. The mp3 recorder worked and everything.

Having kept our cool for almost forty minutes in such esteemed Northern company, disappearing out of sight around a corner leaves us in absolute hysterical chuckles.

At which point a man in an official looking fluorescent jacket stops us and informs us that we've been under surveillance and are suspected of loitering with intent to give to the poor.

Say what? Have some money, have all our money because we're so ecstatic about not making tits of ourselves and getting sugar from Mr Forrest and we're also quite pleased that we're not actually in trouble.

Thank goodness for that mate, we thought it was about the drugs!

I learn that Pret a Manger do damn nice sandwiches, that The Needles are lovely blokes, that I am in fact capable of working an mp3 dictaphone and that scampering the length of Waterloo twice just for Krispy Kremes is so, so worth it.

Did I mention that today was wonderful?

be thou my vision

2006-05-01T16:44:00.000Z

When they tore down the old halls, they sent the wildlife scurrying. They say there's an infestation in the pub, so last night I dreamt about cockroaches.

The only way to find the cockroaches was with these sticks, like drumsticks. We sifted through piles of clothes in the house trying to find them and kill them.

When I left my sticks on the floor, they started to spin.

Why's that? What's making that happen?

Someone from church comes over and tells me that's what happens when people die, their spirit leaves through the floor and makes objects move.

I say that's not very Christian. They ask, what would I know? The sticks start spinning again, a cockroach runs across my bedroom ceiling and music starts to play.

I'm talking in my sleep a lot more recently. And crying, apparently. I have 2,500 words to write for tomorrow. I'm not... bothered, exactly, but sleeping's getting kind of tough. He tells me I worry too much and I think, you have no idea.

Since writing this, three worship songs in a row have come on WMP. The big ones, the sad ones, the ones that make you cry when you're beating your head against the door and waiting for God to answer.

Some things hurt more than others.

The blister on my ankle is fine. That's fine.

The twisted ankle from falling off the pavement last night, it's not too bad.

The 'I've just discovered triple gin and tonics' hangover hurts pretty bad.

The dream last night hurt the most. I fell down the stairs at my parents house, dropped the dinner I'd been carrying and hurt myself. I was too sad to get up, but no matter how much I called out, none of my family would come and help me. I woke up whimpering, why won't daddy come and help me?

What hurts? That picture, the light of the world, the door being opened and Christ walking in, face full of concern.

The door jammed shut. Must have been the bugs.

there was absolutely no point to this

2006-04-30T15:21:00.000Z

Bubbles in the can on my right. The sexy red sound of addiction.

I'm stuck on coke.

Beats and rhymes and things from speakers.

Typing and less typing, the keyboard in front of me.

Shampoo in my hair.

Cigarettes on my fingers, Mayfair, like my grandfather smoked before he died. I like to crumble the ends in my finger, flick the tobacco out and peel back the filter paper. The smell will stay on my hands for hours, it makes me want suck on my fingertips because I can't bury my face in his chair anymore.

The deodorant I borrowed off Kate three months ago and never gave back.

Clouds outside.

I've spent the day playing with pictures, trying to find a headshot for a website. I've blogged some of my favourites, but still haven't found one of me I like enough. I want to write for a website, but I need something pouty and black and white for their homepage. Pouty. Hm...

I get halfway through these blogs and lose track, utterly.

I taste chewing gum, fags again, it's really filthy, but Toby's just given up so I must be restoring some kind of cosmic balance. Billy tells me I smoke like a drama student and tries to correct me. Sam tells me my breath smells. They're all completely right, particularly Toby, who is sensible in this.

Between Sam, Cat and Est, I can now say several things in French, such as 'fuck the police', 'do it now', 'nothing is going well', 'hate breeds hate', 'hell is other people'... The total of French films I've watched now stands at two - La Vie Revee Des Anges, which was ok, but didn't have English subtitles, and La Haine, which was stunning, and not just because it had English subtitles.

Huber in La Haine (The Hatred) says that it's not how you fall, it's how you land. Learning is fun.

It's not that I have nothing to say, so much as I don't know how to start. I'm back to that place, searching for the ultimate adjective to describe what the hell I feel.

I get to see the psychiatrist one more time before I'm officially given the ok. What the 'ok' is, I'm not entirely sure, but I don't find it very reassuring.

Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good... so far so good... so far so good. How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land.

Jusqu'ici tout va bien; so far so good.

apology

2006-04-28T17:59:00.000Z

Happy is the day I go 24 hours without letting someone down. Happy is the day I don't have this feeling like, huh, a punch in the stomach that I deliver to myself. Purely as poetry, so you don't have to, everything is justified because I hate myself enough for all four of us.

Me. And you three.

this is how i am

2006-04-28T13:29:00.000Z

There's an awful lot to say, but pictures speak louder than words.

And there's a lot of people whose words are better than mine today.

“I guess I’m writing this here to help myself heal. I feel better writing about it, despite the risk of having people send me judgmental email telling me what a pathetic and selfish person I am. As needlessly dramatic as it sounds, my husband can only hold my head as I cry for so many hours before I have to get up and force myself to breathe again. I can’t look at the backyard or the place next to the bed where she slept without wanting to crawl into a hole in the ground. Is that dramatic? It probably is, but when you’re depressed, everything is dramatic. Breathing is dramatic. Perhaps I’m writing this to reach out to others who have suffered depression and have overcome it without the aid of medication. How do you get the drama to end?”

It was this kind of failure that overwhelmed residents of Al Rashad Psychiatric Hospital as Baghdad fell to US forces. Terrified, all 1,015 residents fled as looters stole medicine and equipment, then stripped the hospital of doors, windows and light fixtures. On April 25, aid worker Steve Weaver... visited Al Rashad. Amid the destruction, he saw decades worth of patient records scattered about. A lone member of staff was painstakingly sorting through the piles of papers, trying to re-file them... Weaver was told that some 700 patients were still missing from Al Rashad. Staff were concerned that they might have been wandering Baghdad's lethal streets.

So many of us have lost our sense of home over the years. Others never had a home to speak of. And that is why I say that we have journeyed long and far to be here together tonight. For those of us who are Christians, the bread and wine are symbols of something old and rich and meaningful. The bread nourishes more than our bodies, and the wine loosens more than our tongues. This meal is a celebration of the redemption we have always hoped for, always sought, and desperately needed to find. We consider ourselves to be a family in this faith.

If you wanted to know where I am - this is where I am. All this stuff, this is me today. Listening to Hindi Sad Diamonds from Moulin Rouge. I don't know much about truth. I feel rather a lot about beauty. Freedom and love...

...are interesting things.

The more days that pass, the more certain I am that I've made the right decision. The quieter it gets round here, the more suspicious I am of what's previously been said. The less I believe in God, the more beautiful the world appears to me, the more free I feel, the less I understand what I believed before. The further I get from faith, the closer I get to figuring out who I am and what I'm doing.

That should be sad, but it's not. Truth, beauty, freedom and love. Life in abundance. These things don't work out the way you expect them to; you don't find those things where you once thought you would.

break your heart and raise a glass of gin

2006-04-25T19:10:00.000Z

Cat and I are perfect mirror images, each leaning out one side of the window, a Spanish cigarette in one hand, a pink plastic glass of cheap Cava in the other.

We're watching a French film, talking about God, various failed attempts to fight the slut within. Faith should be something constant, deeply understood. I tell her I'm taking a step back, trying to start again with the whole thing. It's odd, trying to explain it out loud for once, not to just anyone, but to Cat, my big sister and partner in crime.

She says, as your cell leader, I'd have to advise against taking hard drugs. She leans out the window, stubs her cigarette on the sill. "I wouldn't want to get into something that might be addictive."

She doesn't know it, but our plans to head up to Windsor Great Park and get even worse are the most encouraging thing that's happened to me in quite a while.

*****

Up to the point where she rescued me and took me to Budgens for junk food, yesterday was a bad day.

I sat down at my PC, face to face with all the work I've been ignoring for three weeks and suddenly realised how lazy I'd been. Which made me feel bad.

And there's a turning point, I've realised. It comes somewhere between the initial 'huh, I've cocked up' and the resultant trauma of 'I'm such a horrible person'. In that point, maybe that half hour, I should have cracked on with an essay, or gone for a walk to get some air, or done something.

Should should should.

I haven't thought about the turning point for ages, because I haven't thought about the Bad Place for so long. The Bad Place bit me in the ass yesterday.

They reckon pride comes before a fall. They can fuck right off. Whoever needed a proverb to tell them that?

*****

And after yesterday's antics, my own ones, rather than the ones undertaken with Cat (which I happen to believe were both necessary and productive), I don't know qualified I am to talk about pride. About self-respect, really.

Pride's a sin, yeah? One of those awful things that we fallen humans do for kicks. Not Good. I like to think I'm pretty self-deprecating (even if I'm not very good at it), but we lions are proud things.

I don't like to be patronised, or patronise. I like to look people in the eye when they're talking, to shake their hand when I meet them, to respect their opinion, their personal space and I expect people to do the same for me.

The only man I get down on my knees for is God. As far as I'm concerned, his is the only ass I've found in the world worth kissing.

What if you stop believing? Whose ass are you kissing then? Whose rules are you following then?

As a Christian, my self-respect comes from being right with God, from trying to be good with him. Looking at myself in the mirror without flinching is from that and only that.

I might be a mess sometimes, spectacularly so, but a girl has to look in the mirror to see to do her eyeliner, and if I'm pretending to be something I'm not then I just can't do that.

As someone who isn't a Christian, my self-respect comes from kissing ass for no one, and getting my eyes done properly. And you can take that however you like.

pull it together, love

2006-04-24T17:32:00.000Z

You can't remember if you've showered yet today.

You know you've eaten, you know you've slept, you know you've drunk three and a half glasses of water, called Kate, txted next year's prospective housemates, updated some profiles, done some work but not nearly enough.

You tidied your room a bit, but haven't hoovered, spent far too long pissing about with music today.

You go to Pandora, type in a band you like, listen to some songs.

You go to Napster, download the ones you really liked, and listen to them again.

Your favourites, you put in a playlist and spend some quality time with them whilst eating, writing, painting your toenails.

The ones you really like you pick out of your Napster library and pay 79p for, unless your computer has lost them, in which case you have to go to options, change the target folder for your new downloads, redownload them and then pay 79p for them.

Then, you try to transfer them onto your phone using Disc2Phone, only to discover that WMA format is not supported by your phone. Huh.

You browse the internet for software that can reformat songs. You get some.

It doesn't work, you get some more.

You use it to convert some songs that you got off CD from WMA into mp3. It works. Hurrah!

You try it with songs you got off Napster. It doesn't work. Balls.

You email Napster and complain.

You eat lunch.

You receive a reply from Napster saying, why don't you use the Napster software for transferring music to a portable device?

You reply saying, because my portable device hates you, and so do I.

Napster says, try burning them onto a CD first.

So you dig out the CDs you bought over the holiday and burn three CDs worth of Napster tracks that you bought for 79p each having already downloaded them twice on account of your computer losing them the first time round, thus converting them into mp3 files.

You then rip them back from the CD onto your computer, and pluck them from the evil clutches of Windows Media Player, transferring them onto your phone before the bastard can do whatever it did to make them unusable in the first place.

Realise that every single track on your phone has no name or artist.

Spend considerable amount of time renaming and sorting every last one of them.

Call your parents to find out how to wind your watch up.

Decide to go for a walk and listen to your new music.

Spray on some deodorant, look at your hair in the mirror and think, have I showered today?

Smell your armpits and think, you know, I really can't remember if I have.

Say, cock it, and go out anyway. There's music to listen to and work to avoid doing.

baby, did you forget to take your meds?

2006-04-23T17:31:00.001Z

I should word this carefully. Coherent thoughts are few and far right now - I guess it's a hazard of the trade.

...If I could string something better than this together than I would.

The last couple of days have been wicked, if hectic. Far too much work, for a start, four essays due in for the beginning of May. Fab.

On the plus, we had Philanthropy at the Forum in Kentish Town, which rocked fucking hard, and meant seeing Tim for the first time since August. Everyone say Hey, Tim!

The other two acts we saw on Friday, Caroline Alexander and Bungalow Zenn, were good, but Not My Thing. Philanthropy put on the most energetic show I think I've ever seen. Plus, there was balloons, and a cover of Boom Boom Boom Boom by the Vengaboys. What a happy girl I was.

The Forum was very pretty, for various reasons.

Saturday was meeting up for a coffee with some lovely people who I don't get to see half as much as I'd like.

My favourite relationships are the ones that consist not of a series of meetings but of one continuous conversation. You'll never reach the end of the conversation, because that takes too much time. Only your spouse, your oldest friend, ever gets to the end of the conversation. Those are the ones where it's enough just to sit, to be near each other, but I'm far too young to have many of them yet. I want conversation, I want people I could talk to forever.

The people I talk the best with seem to be the people I see the least. Cruel fate. I've seen a few of them in the last few days, which makes me a happy bastard indeed.

I've also watched some ace films - Shooting Fish, Ocean's Twelve, Spanglish, High Fidelity, Sliding Doors, Blazing Saddles and The Corporation.

If I needed any more convincing on the topic of 'what to do with my life', then The Corporation was it. That simple. If you haven't watched it, watch it, or if you haven't read it, read it. Or anything my Michael Moore, if you want some humour with it, or anything by Naomi Klein or Noam Chomsky or the good boys down at MediaLens. Get some of that down you and you'll start to see where I'm coming from.

Meanwhile, I'm getting horribly tired again and keep wanting to retreat into my room for hours at a time with no human contact. Luckily there hasn't been much opportunity for feeling sorry for myself, but it begs the question - how much of my mind belongs to me right now?

If I forget my Meds, baby, then I feel it. I really do. Just... shattered. I've managed to get into the habit of taking rather than forgetting them, but this hasn't stopped me feeling decidedly odd recently. I'm better now than I have been for ages - this sadness keeps coming back to me.

So, that's my issue. What's a bad mood and what's depression? What's me and what's my pills? Do I call the doctor and ask to up my dosage everytime I feel shit?

...Or do I pretend that I feel fine, and restart the cycle that caused all this in the first place...

i am spitting out all my bitterness along with half of my last drink

2006-04-21T13:15:00.000Z

It's gotta be said that I love my room.

I love that it's mine, that there's a lock on the door, that the bathroom is mine, the toilet is mine, the shower is mine, the sink and the toothpaste and the bin and the diary on the floor.

The walls are covered in my photos and newspaper clippings, it's my dirty cutlery, my empty tin of peaches, my books on the floor.

I don't even have to say 'fuck off and leave me alone' because if the door's locked then people just have to.

Switch your phone off, sign out of msn, lock the door, turn up the music, curl up under the desk and don't wish to be somewhere else for once.

Today I hate Madonna. Specifically, I hate 'What it feels like for a girl' by Madonna. The bit at the beginning I really love, "you think that being a girl is degrading", so much so that I didn't really listen to the rest of the song's lyrics for a few weeks after I downloaded the song.

Silky smooth / lips as sweet as candy, baby / tight blue jeans / skin that shows in patches / strong inside but you don't know it / good little girls they never show it.

Do you know what it feels like for a girl?

Does she know?

Piss off. I don't think being a girl has ever felt like tight blue jeans, silky smoothness and lips that are sweet like candy. That is what it feels like to be an image in a magazine.

I would never presume to be able to define what being a girl is like in one 3 minute pop song, or even a book several thousand pages long, but I know that it's never felt anything like that for me. Feeling like a girl is something utterly different. You'd think Madonna had never had a period in her life.

Sweet as candy indeed. How fucking patronising.

I can just sit here in my room in whatever state of undress I choose, listening to Suzanne Vega and New Young Pony Club and Madonna can piss off.

I love my room.

Next year's house, very nice indeed, I think, I've only seen it once. Four bedrooms, only two of them filled. At least now that both the boys have dropped out, Kate and I are definitely getting the big rooms.

Would I trade in my en-suite for a double bed?

Maybe. These are good problems to have. Silly little problems, not life and death problems. I could die happy with stupid problems like Madonna's misrepresentation of the female psyche and having to share a toilet.

With PMT this bad, a girl can be forgiven for thinking about comfort.

i'm going missing

2006-04-20T15:15:00.000Z

Now is one of those amazing times when song lyrics don't so much speak to you as jump down your throat and fill your lungs.

I'll do graffiti if you speak to me in French.

Now, happily, is also the time for using New Phone to take deeply pretentious pictures of myself and my aptly named diary.

What did you used to be?

I used to feel like shit. Let's raise some flags and talk about space, and time, and listening to new music and feeling so so so much better.

Let's talk about not knowing what to say. Or what to write.

"It's time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet." - Marcus Aurelius.

I'm not entirely sure what I want to say today. I guess I just wanted to say that I feel absolutely wonderful. Really wonderful. I haven't felt this faithless or this free, I haven't felt this happy in years.

divorce

2006-04-15T21:11:00.000Z

And I'm sitting outside High Cross Church in Camberley, leaning against a brick pillar to keep out of the wind, writing on the A4 pad that's now my diary, clutching carrier bags of stationery, waiting for my phone to ring, my lift to arrive.

The doors to the caretaker's cupboard are swinging open, bang, bang, smacking against the wall, making me jump. When's somone gonna come on out and close it? I won't.

I'm writing, funny how I still feel safer near a church. Now the mystery isn't enough to draw me in, just to keep me sitting in the doorway.

And the vicar's leaving through the sliding doors, leather jacket, book in hand, and as he walks past I'm rolling out from behind the pillar like an agnostic ninja and - is it the drama of the thing or just that desperation? - asking him for a minute of his time.

He's on his way to a funeral, in a hurry.

All I want is thirty seconds. Give me one good reason why I should still believe in God.

He shrugs, opens and closes his mouth, looks at his watch, we pause and listen to the wind beating through the carrier bags at my feet, the struggling pages of my diary.

"Love." he says, eventually, definitely.

I smile. Good answer.

"What other answer is there? In the end, when you take away all this stuff about control, all this crap about dos and don'ts and people thinking they know God's will, all that's left is love, and honesty. Either you see love as an emotion between humans or you see it as something divine, something underpinning everything. You make a call and that's it. I made the call and -" he tweaks the dog collar "-that's just what happens."

That's the best thirty second answer I could have hoped for. Thank you.

I roll back behind my pillar, find my page again and starting write down what he said before I forget it.

*****

And I'm reading Romans 7:7-13, about the law and sin, and how sin corrupted the law which was good and pure and turned it to something that brings death. And she's telling me how all you can really be sure of is Christ, and if you have Christ, the rest will somehow fall into place but without Christ, it's just a law. And laws don't make you right with God. Or yourself.

*****

And I'm telling him a secret, the new secret, which isn't that I'm depressed but that, ever since I've been getting treatment for the depression, I don't believe in God anymore.

And I've said it, and he's sorry, we both are.

And I think about marriage. How there's lust, and infatuation, and if you get married on nothing but that your marriage will fail because you'll only be following the laws of marriage, and not the love behind it.

And how if you get saved for what you can get, if what you want is someone to love you because you can't love yourself, if you're not in love with God but merely infatuated with the mystery and comfort of it all.

Someday you'll learn to love yourself, and wonder why you're following this law that only brings death to those who have no love for Christ at the heart of it.

*****

And I'm sitting in the church and I'm supposed to be praying. I'm looking at the instructions I wrote out for people to pray with, the theology I typed out and how I don't believe any of it and there's people with heads bowed at each prayer station and I have never felt so insincere.

I put the stone I've been carrying at the foot of the cross. It's a mute gesture, because I don't know what it means. It's the way you hug an old friend to silence the awkwardness, the way you kiss your wife on the cheek before you leave to cheat on her, the way you stroke someone's face when you've argued and neither of you know what will happen but what's important now is not words but a gesture.

It says, I think I love you, but I don't know if I can be with you, so right now this stupid sentimental token is all I can give you. It says sorry, but I have to be myself and... I'll call you.

*****

I walk out an hour and a half before I'm supposed to finish praying, walk for 40 minutes in the dark to a field where I light up a cigarette, listen to Evanescence and drink an alcopop. Not because I want to, you understand, just because I can.

If that was a break-up then this is the pull. Changing my degree and writing and drinking and smoking and partying and volunteering and kissing and thinking and listening and changing and growing and talking and learning to love myself is me eating chocolate with my girl mates and watching chick flicks.

This is me being single.

all things in misery considered

2006-04-09T15:47:00.000Z

Tomorrow, all will be made well. Tomorrow, I'll be heading back to my halls for a few days to, theoretically, get some work done. Tomorrow, my overdraft will kick in, Napster will get their £9.99 which means that I can a) listen to music again and b) put mp3s on to my spangly new phone. I'll also be able to post pictures from my spangly new phone which means, oh yeah, I'll be blogging again.

If I haven't mentioned it before, I hate not being able to blog. It really is like a kind of amputation. When all else fails and you have too much to say - resort to lists.

Things that have been good
1) Real food, courtesy of my parents.
2) Doing absolutely no work whatsoever, courtesy of my God-given gift of procrastination.
3) Yateley, and all the strange and wonderful people who live in it.
4) Going to the Ag again.
5) Counting the seconds between saying hello to Mike(22:38:59) and Mike's first mention of his penis (22:39:03). The boy is fast.
6) Playing with aforementioned spangly phone.
7) Reminiscing about good times with old friends (when we used to play together, when we built treehouses together) and even better times with even older friends (how we used to lie to each other, steal from each other, plot against each other).
8) Going to LDN with the marras - not only was the club a part-time strip, but the drinks were 80p a time, and that made me happy.
9) Waking up in Belsize Park.
10) Watching Deal Or No Deal, always an emotional roller coaster.

Things that have not been good
1) The ongoing 'do I don't I' saga of myself, Christianity and the man upstairs. Don't ask me, because I simply don't know.
2) The way some people react when you say you're not having the best time with religion at the moment. I can't decide which is worse: people being so smug you wonder if they realise how much losing your faith hurts, or people being so dramatic about it that you want to smack them upside the head with a palm cross just to shut them up.
3) Realising that my orthodontist wasn't joking when he said that if I didn't wear my retainer after my traintracks were removed then my teeth would go crooked again.
4) Burning my retainer in a pagan ritual of thanksgiving and then realising that, huh, my teeth are going crooked again.
5) Not being able to blog. Also, not having Napster, broadband, money, sanity, et al.
6) Returning to the Ag to find that it too has fallen victim to the emo virus. I would like to reiterate that my horrible prejudice towards emo kids will only end when I can go to a club without one of them burning me with a cigarette. Are their subliminal messages in their music that tell them to burn me??
7) Having to go through my new phone and spell out each of my favourite swearwords into the predictive text dictionary. This is taking longer than one might imagine.
8) My nan going back to Scotland.
9) Having secrets.
10) Feeling small.

Other than that, there's been a lot of books. And a lot of chicken. That's me in a nutshell. How are you guys?

blip

2006-04-04T19:25:00.000Z

The problem is that we've had our family's computer for about 8 years, and its age is really starting to show. Poor thing.

In a similar vein, current lack of broadband means that the OAPC is the only one I can use for blogging or, well, anything.

So that's the state of things. Millions to say and not quite enough internet access to say it. Accessing the internet from grandpa Compaq tends to make him crash. Nuff said.

For a couple of weeks at least, expect nothing from me and you'll only be pleasantly surprised. Love you all.

i guess i'm slightly relieved

2006-03-29T21:34:00.000Z

90 minutes in a claustrophobic MRI machine has its upside - ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you - the Fruitcake Thought Process. This, I guess, is where all the shit really comes from.

thoughts from founder's: the beercans and balconies; walkways and statues; the cigarettes and above all the sense of poetry to this

2006-03-29T15:47:00.000Z

I’m not ‘cooked’ yet. to become myself. not for your sake, for god’s sake, but for my sake, because I must do something, to be immersed in something. I must be involved in something above and beyond myself and to find myself, this time, is to lose myself in something about life. something to do with life and truth.

not a binary truth, or a singular one, but the truth that acknowledges all truth, the necessity of trying and the futility of hoping. the importance of writing and walking and reading and knowing and singing and being better than what you thought you were. could be.

I want to open eyes and start fires, to burn down council houses and dreary weekdays. I want supermarkets to fall apart in this deepness, for people to know and be known, to fall apart in their existence of stupidity. perhaps this feels superior. mm, perhaps. I want.

psst, if we all gave freely and sweetly of ourselves, we would all end up with more.

the problem with my trusting in god is firstly the absolution of a sense of my own responsibility and secondly the purity of the fact that I don’t. I just don’t. like I don’t trust you to catch me, like I don’t trust doors not to hold dead bodies. would I trust myself? to save myself, no. to make myself, yes.

I said maybe, you’d be the one to save me.

No.

I’ll sit on your bed four minutes more, to put the song on repeat, to make this moment loop and last forever. let’s not finish this conversation, let’s not go and bake, let’s not be cooked and whole, let’s stay imperfect and make each other sick. jesus, I’d make you sick. let’s not leave. let’s not rise.

wish I could stay sick with you.

superiority then. a sense of responsibility. in the end, and only in the end, only you can open your eyes. making and waking yourself is your own task. that alone is what we are here for. make me a propagandist, let me scream at you from street corners.

not for evangelism, but for the love and the hate and the sickness of it all, let’s talk about beauty and pain, let’s find some truth in the myriad, the fucking blur of it all. a sense of urgency.
my Christ, what have I lost?

I will not be binary. nobody is singular. bakhtin and the collective entity. we are each other and if I am damned then so are you.

I will not believe in your two, your consequence of two, your heaven and hell. there is more than one path, or we would surely trip over each other.

no and no and no. and no.

there’s not a lot noble about this, except I will not quiet myself any longer. I will not pretend to pray, I will not attempt to kneel, I will not rationalise away the pain of millennia, I will not subvert and conform and dilute in the way you want me to.

I have lost myself, and I have gained no life from you.

I have lost myself to you. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where we end and where we begin. I will be singular about that, at least.

when it comes to You, my ‘self’ will stretch forever. all I am will reach to the edge of space to cover up and comprehend the fact that you are there. you are everything and I am talking to myself. I am everything and I will define myself.

I will find spine again.

your hot water grew cold on my tongue and I, I am lukewarm. I am tepid. I am near death with searching for some kind of change. I will change myself now. I will miss you. but not enough.

it’s a social release, like crime or smiling.

it’s uncanny, the way we are, we’re just uncanny.

demolition

2006-03-27T16:25:00.000Z

Jesus, when do I finish?

Since Friday I've started drinking again, had several heart to hearts, discovered two beautiful new songs, realised what I want to do with my life, had two adventures in Founders, found intellectual motivation for the first time in months, slept, not slept, sat an exam, completely and utterly lost my faith and then found it again.

I'll work through it.

Giving up Lent and giving up Christianity happened pretty much simultaneously. Friday was not a great day, I was pissed off about the insignificant things so did what I usually do and folded myself into bed with some sad music on. Somehow or other, my WMP playlists were irrevocably fucked up when I downloaded Napster and so I'm never entirely sure what's gonna come on.

In bed, on comes Obsession by Delirious. This is one of my favourite songs, hands down. Aside from being a simply awesome song, it's been the soundtrack to many a defining spiritual moment for me. Including this one. The lights are off, it's nice and dark. I'm in a shit place. Delirious are playing. Perhaps I'll pray?

Jesus. There's no one listening.

What?

I give up, and it's a poetic moment. I take the cross down from above my bed, and pour myself a gin because I'm a drama girl at heart and I love that kind of symbolism.

Talk about formative statements, 'I bequeath you', 'I bet you', 'I name this ship'... Things that don't just say, they do. I say, I'm not gonna do this anymore, and suddenly the whole thing is over. What to do but run off to Founders with the marra and drink some gin under the stairs? What else can you do?

One day I'll explain it properly, exactly why I thought I'd jack it in, exactly why I decided not to. I had to leave church on Sunday, singing worship songs was like the first time you hear 'your song' on the radio after a breakup. I walked out, then ran, and kept going til I didn't know where I was. I stopped for a while, then turned around and walked back the way I came, down the footpaths and back into church.

I'm starting to realise that God is like heroin. There will never be a last hit for me, and sometimes it pisses me off. Actually a lot of the time it pisses me off. I'm strong enough to walk out of church, to say fuck it and run away, but I'm not stupid enough to forget that that's giving up the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm not strong enough to stay away. I don't care.

*****

Heart to hearts then, under the statue of Victoria on the North quad, at opposite ends of my kitchen table, over the phone and on the floor of church. A high-five, an understanding that left my palms sore, a JD and Coke to melt your eyeballs.

Beautiful new songs then: a cover of Wonderwall by Ryan Adams and First Day of my Life by Bright Eyes. Mmm.

The rest of my life then, investigative journalism and filmmaking. I want to write, will always write, I want a camera, I want to shout louder. Someone says, why don't you take time to report the good things in the world instead of the bad? Because the bad things we think we know aren't really the worst. Should I devote myself to making the West feel better?

Adventures in Founders, discovering some of its secrets, namely: the beercan mountain, the secret library ghostmaker, monument to Fat Barry, mysterious windows into the dining hall and the quickest way to get to the Nice Green Carpet.

Intellectual motivation. Reading books and liking them, wanting to immerse myself in something, wanting to find something. Wanting a PhD and to know what I'm chatting about. Wanting to chat about stuff that matters.

And an exam, in what's apparently one of the finest drama departments in the country, in which we don't have desks and I end up writing on a piece of plastic balanced on my knee and I see someone else with her paper flattened on her lap.

Sigh.

They also demolished the majority of Cameron hall this weekend, and cut off the internet to our block this weekend, meaning that finally, finally the view from my window is something other than deserted halls and I haven't been able to blog about any of this.

The most reassuring thing about a demolition site in a university campus, even when the rubble's hitting the floor so loudly that your bed's shaking, is to know that someone, somewhere is writing a poem or acrostic about destruction.

Down goes Cameron
Erudite and
Strong...

I won't pretend I haven't noticed the poetry in Cameron falling and me being able to see the sky from my bedroom again. I just haven't gotten around to writing a haiku or limeric about it yet.

Pictures of the fun as soon as I can get them. Something that makes sense as soon as I can write it.

not only do i understand freud, i think i like him a bit too

2006-03-23T17:42:00.000Z

In Medicine with marra, talking about drugs, saying how stuff just feels better at the moment, you know, my emotions make a bit more sense, it all just feels more genuine in that respect. Better to feel genuinely ok, surely, on drugs, than to pretend to be happy and be genuinely miserable?

Mental Thursday. Is today just too good?

Didn't get enough sleep. I suddenly find myself playing the insomnia game again, I just can't sleep in my own flat. Can't imagine why. Woke up and had an argument with myself.

Marra, you need to have a shower. Fuck off, I don't wanna. Tough, you have to, it's called hygiene, c'mon. No. Yes. Shan't. Shall! I hate you. Good, now get in the bloody shower you skank.

Whatever. In the end though, I arrive at my lecture ten minutes late and my shower pays off when the most beautiful man in the yearifnotworld clears a seat for me. Bonus.

I think, today shall be a good day, for I am showered and the world is sweet. Ah. Sweet like my newly showered self.

In the break between my lecture and seminar, I eat some more lemon bar cake and rewatch the last episode of Sugar Rush. Ah...

In critical theory, I finally grasp what Freud was banging on about, have a much-needed rant about feminism and decide to write relevant article for the student magazine. The guy sitting beside me starts chewing tobacco halfway through the seminar and I feel good on the inside.

Then, to Medicine with my marra, where I eat the most BEAUTIFUL baguette known to man (freshly baked, melting butter, brie and warm bacon, peppers) in the windowsill, with pints of coke and sunshine and Jack Johnson and Scissor Sisters playing on in the background.

Lounging on leather sofas, talking about everything in the way that only marras can, about babies crying and people being happy and how there's so much emotion to be spread over so many things and women and men and Sugar Rush and how sometimes blokes seem to want to do the exact thing you never thought they'd want to do and that's fine if they wanna do that but they do know that, well, you know, like, it's not mutual?

(It's ok, only Est is supposed to care about that last bit.)

A couple of hours later I'm in the psychology department, pulling my bra out from under my t-shirt and handing my belt, jewellery and hoodie over to Aimee, who then lays me down on a sort of bench type thing and rolls me up into the MRI machine.

It's noisy in there, and small. Very small. There's a mirror above my face so I can see what's being projected onto the back wall. The voice in my ear reads out numbers which I add and repeat and get wrong and it's noisy, very noisy in there. I'd like to pretend I'm not scared. It's actually quite fun, and looking into the mirror makes it feel like there's more space than there actually is.

Occasionally I look down at my feet to remind myself and my claustrophobia that I'm not actually in a coffin. There's not much that scares me more than that.

In between reading numbers and speaking the answers into the mic on my chest, I take a moment to consider how good today is. Not much of a moment, mind you, because the sums I have to do really are quite hard and, well, it's sort of tough to think much when there's that much noise going on in your skull.

I can feel my pulse thundering in the headphones but this is actually fun. I'm only slightly terrified by being effectively trapped in such a small space, so I wiggle my toes a lot out in the open air. I like that today I'm getting my brain scanned for PhD research, I like that I get to see a picture of the inside of my skull, I like that I have to walk back to Crusters with no bra because if I'd worn it in the MRI my boobs would have stuck to the ceiling.

I like that I like today. It seems like today likes me. I like that I don't have to pretend to be happy today.

stream

2006-03-22T22:23:00.000Z

I rather like these entries, where I start typing with no real idea of what I'm going to say. It's a nice change when I've been trying so hard with writing recently to just let some thoughts flow.

Hmm.

What am I thinking?

Actually what I'm doing right now is eating. A slice of lemon bar cake that my mum bought me and a handul of frozen pineapple, peas and sweetcorn. And before you ask, yes, of course they're still frozen. What kind of girl do you think I am?

That whole joke about the student diet. It's really not so funny when you're dipping ever deeper into your overdraft, paid double your house deposit out of your own money and your primary joy in your flatmate getting a job at Medicine is that now you can get free food. Hoho, the grown-ups say, they're off to uni to eat beans on toast all year...

To which I say, who the hell can afford toast?

How's it going?

We talked a bit about healing at the Alpha course tonight. The course has been wicked so far, such an opportunity to just chat to people and have some really challenging debates. Tonight was something of a tough one.

Does anyone have any experience of God's healing? You're looking at me?

The first story on my lips is about a couple whose son was declared braindead and, by some miracle, is now married with children.

The second story is about Kit, lovely Kit, who will not be married with children. Kit, who God didn't heal.

Should I tell you about myself? I'll tell you about last Sunday, when I had stomach cramps so bad that I was shaking, and all the praying in the world wouldn't take them away.

Perhaps I'll tell you one day about the shit I got up to when I was thirteen, pain that drove me crazy til I went to church and I asked for it to be taken away and it was.

Maybe I'll tell you about how I slept with the light on until I was sixteen, became a Christian, asked to feel safe and now always feel safe.

Maybe I'll tell you about the first time someone actually prayed for me to be healed, last summer. How I cried uncontrollably and everyone said it was the Spirit in me and I didn't have the balls to say that actually, no, I just needed to cry.

I asked that it would end. And a voice in my ear said, not yet.

My mate tells me the drugs don't work. I ask if they'll just make me worse, but he means it, says they don't work. I tell him to shut up, to tell that to the people whose lives have been saved by anti-depressants.

Maybe I'll tell him how much better I feel. Maybe I'll tell him I secretly think he's right.

It's scary. Everyday at about six, I pour a glass of water and wonder what would happen if I were to stop taking them.

Days before you came / freezing cold and empty.

I've cried twice, I think, since starting the drugs. Once in that horrible dark week after Kit's funeral, when all the life was sucked out of me, I thought I'd fail my course and felt, if possible, even worse than I had done before.

The second time was on Sunday, when some very well-meaning people asked God to heal me of my depression.

Not yet.

I've learnt not to go for quick fixes. Let me get this straight - I believe that God heals people, fully and completely. I've heard too many testimonies and seen too many things, I've had far too much amazing change in my own life to doubt that.

I also know from bitter experience that God doesn't always heal people. Sometimes the lame stay lame, the blind stay blind, the miserable stay miserable and the living die. This is life in the real world, the fallen world, and it's shit sometimes.

In all things God works for the good of those who love him. Is that the toughest verse the New Testament asks us to get our heads around? I believe it's true. But I believe the world has a pretty crap view of what good is.

What you want isn't always what's good for you. I want my parents to win the lottery so they never have to worry. God knows better. I want a biscuit, I want ice cream, but my Dad knows that it'll rot my teeth.

I want God to take the pain away. But what I want more is to trust him. I don't like praying for healing because I think this is a process. I think there's a reason I've been so unhappy, some cause of these feelings, and I know that, eventually, I can figure it out and that, somehow, things will work out.

Sometimes all you have to do is ask. Other times all you have to do is trust.

I don't like it. I don't like the implied thought that perhaps I could be healed if only I'd focus a bit more, if only I'd pray a bit harder, if only I'd step out a bit further. I don't know how to put myself on the line any further than I already have. I'm all out, and I've gotta be honest, the only thing making me unhappy at the moment is standing there with my arms outstretched with people speaking tongues over me, somehow feeling like I've failed when the cramps don't ease, when the pain doesn't go.

Christ gave us authority over all illness. I'm still trying to figure out what that means. I know that it doesn't give us authority over life and death, or over God. It's not a matter of just getting up the guts to pray because if that was fucking true then I'd be fine and Kit would be alive. Stop saying that all it takes is guts. Please. Stop.

Funny how this goes. You sit down and start typing and pretty soon you get right to the heart of what's actually bothering you. I'm not gonna edit this, change it, or even re-read it until I've published it. This is as raw as you get it from me.

How to finish. A positive thought? I'm not worried as such, just a bit frustrated. I'm at peace with the fact that I'm in a bit of a spot and I have some issues to work through. I feel immeasurably better now that I'm getting help, some counselling and some useful medication. I don't want to become dependent on drugs, I don't believe they can 'fix' me, but as plasters go, they're pretty good at stopping the bleeding.

I don't believe that depression is just my lot in life. That's not the way it goes. Someone once spoke over me to say that they see incredible joy in my future. Which is fine. If nothing else, I get such hope from that. I believe that I will be ok, better than ok, I do believe in God's healing. Perhaps this is just the way my body is, the way my brain is, that's fine. People live with sickness and disease their entire lives. God doesn't always heal our bodies, but he can always heal our hearts.

And if that makes you want to vomit, that's fine too. This is about me learning to trust, in God and all kinds of other nice things like friends and family and (brace yourself) myself. It's more than a bit nauseating, but it's true. It's just gotta be done, hasn't it?