Five years old

Hello my darling,

It’s your birthday tomorrow, and I spent a little while today flicking through some of the things I’ve written to you over the years. Every now and then your father likes to remind me how fortunate we are that I was once such an avid archivist of your habits, and then I feel a little sad that I’ve not kept up my writing here, if only to produce a comprehensive record of your most fleeting characteristics.

I still unthinkingly refer to you as My Boo; sometimes you allow this, though just as often, you furrow your brow and say “I’m not a Boo,” because:

Boo

n.

1.     A baby, most often male, of a similar age to Hartley.

eg. “Will there be other Boos to play with at the party?”

You’re no longer a baby, by any definition, and even when you pretend, you approach the task as one who has never visited that sunken Atlantis – you unfocus your eyes (your gaze was locked and penetrating as an infant, but never mind), go slack in my arms, and make exaggerated gurgling noises that mock the very essence of your babyhood until I grow frustrated with the game and suggest we play Lego instead.

At nearly five years old, you are already a far more eloquent speaker than most adults. Words come easily to you, as do their context, and if I dither in my attempt to answer a question, or provide you with some information you’ve asked for, you come to my rescue brandishing the very syntax that eluded me. 

You’ve taken the phonetic approach to literacy quite seriously, and during your first term of school, would try to spell something, anything, upon waking. The first words out of your mouth in the morning as you loosened the shackles of sleep wouldn’t be Morning, Mummy! as in the proceeding months, but an enigmatic Puh. AH. Ullll. Pal! 

Your favourite thing to do at bedtime story is to point out words, or groups of words, and identify them as those I’ve just read, or to stop me mid-sentence and find a word at random to read out. When you were very sad last week, I promised you I’d read you a hundred stories, or as many as it would take to get you off to sleep, and you were so taken-aback by this proclamation that you immediately stopped crying and fled to collect your library.

Speaking of literacy, one thing you did this year that utterly shocked me was you texted your Daddy while I was in the shower one afternoon. You didn’t just text Daddy: you texted him your own name, spelled correctly. And that’s not all. Thereafter, you started texting both of us sentences strung together like one long word, which you’d deduce letter-by-letter as you phonetically sounded them out. These texts are perfectly legible, and perfectly you. It is a pleasure and an honour to receive a text from you when you’re with your Dad.

Your inner world is saturated with characters from your favourite programs, video games, and the comics your father shows enthusiasm for, whether you’re around or not. You’re Daddy’s number one fan these days and, not wishing to deprive me of first place, have designated him at Zero place, zero being “better than first, but only slightly better – The Best.” You and Daddy often interact like brothers who possess a genuine affection and mutual respect for one another, when you’re not squabbling about injuries, real or perceived. Unsurprisingly, your mannerisms and attitudes are nearly identical, and I sometimes feel left out when I’m in both your company. But then I collect you after school and you slowly shed the vestiges of that home and you are Mummy’s boy, curled into my side on the sofa and sucking the meat of your hand.

Oh darling, I could go on and on, but this is stolen time, and tomorrow you’ll be five years old. I still remember when you were sad about turning four, because you wanted to be your own age: “three and three-quarters.” You’re not as anxious about growing up as you once were, and looking back at all my letters to you, I can say with a small amount of confidence that I’m better able to let go of each year with enthusiasm for what’s to come. Whenever I think about the future, I feel a bit of trepidation, but I’m thankful every day that you’re indelibly in that picture. 

Happy birthday, my growing boy. I love you number zero (the best).

Love always,

Mummy

Alone with the music

Sometimes I feel a tiny pang of grief for the girl who thought she was held aloft by love, amplified through the music she listened to on headphones while walking up the South Bank towards work, not realising in all those moments that she was alone.

The journey ahead

Lately it seems as though my memories - those internal anchors of identity - have loosened themselves from their sheaves to float about aimlessly in the ether; here, an unlikely pair brush past one another, while other, tighter chronologies careen away, as though repelled by their like poles. The ephemera of this stagnant rock pool reflects a self so fractured it hardly bears peering into, but I can’t seem to pull myself away at times.

This year I want to do more doing, and less lying wounded along the shoreline of my personal histories. I want to stop worrying over little, incremental units of time, and simply live the big picture. Rather than brace myself for the slap of each wave as it comes, I want to climb up and over the whole roiling froth of it and learn to ride the swell.

Most of all, I want to cast off the suffocating hopelessness I’ve felt over the last few years, and the certainty that I’m not only destined for pain, but that I deserve nothing else. I’m less sure about how to conquer this particular barrier to contentment, but I’ve a feeling the answer lies somewhere in the journey ahead.

The end

The fibres are knitted tightly round the tear of that old life, and I'm starting to believe it was something I only read about. Once upon a time, there was me and you.

Dial tone

"Nobody in this family answers their fuckin' phones," she said, slamming the car door, her new boyfriend laughing politely, even though she was already out of earshot.

I recall her as a baby. A child of three. She moved away when I was 19 and she was still too young to say things like "fuckin' phones" - an unnatural utterance, even now.

It's cold comfort, because I know why that particular phone isn't being answered today, and so does she. I know why, but I don't know why. I'm not sure there's a true answer, or at least one that would speak to a shared reality.

I was going to start a blog today. Somewhere new to come out to, before remembering that nobody reads here anymore. It's okay. I don't need readers so much as a space against which to throw these materials - to try once more to divine the entrails. It's at least a little better than trying to divine the silence of an unanswered call. Isn't it?

First Day

Chicken,

Yesterday you started your first day of real school. You slept at Mummy’s and we tried to eat a big breakfast that morning. Then I brought you to Daddy’s to get you dressed and ready. We took some pictures of you in your new school uniform, and then we walked over together.

I have to admit that even though you were your confident self, I have struggled with the idea of you beginning school in a system I’m unfamiliar with, in a country of which I’ve only scratched the surface. Lately, too, it’s started to sink in, what it means to be a full-time working mother. I won’t be able to provide that secure framework around these uncertain hours (thankfully Daddy is able to do this still), which makes it all the harder to try and ascertain your experiences there.

When I first got your acceptance letter a few months ago (in a text, from Daddy), I was at work, and I sobbed silently at my desk with my face inside my jumper for a good ten minutes. I’m still coming to terms with the notion of letting you go that little bit more, which of course started the minute I told you that one day soon you would have two houses. You adapted to this change far better than the rest of us, and when we left you at the discovery table inside your little classroom on your first day of school, you said “Bye, Mummy!” and smiled brightly and waved your arm.

And when we stepped into the schoolyard three hours later, you marched out the door, saw us, and ran to us, giggling. You lifted your arms and I scooped you up. You wrapped yourself around me and pressed your face into my neck and sighed like you did when you were just a baby. I clutched the fat of your thighs, covered in the thick material of your alien school shorts, and carried you all the way back home.

It may not ever be possible to breach or fully comprehend the world you are effortlessly a part of here in England, but our language is bone-deep, and the means through which we will always find one another.

I love you my tiny boy, and I’m so proud of you.

All my love,

Mummy

Roundabout

Dear Hartley,

This weekend I was so sad, and scared out of my mind, and putting up a fairly bad front, even by our standards. You made me get-well cards while I hid my face in a pillow and worried about the future, and then some time later we both curled up for a late-afternoon nap.

When we woke, our friend M came by and we all went to the playground for a picnic. There was a band in the bandstand, and even though they played for the benefit of a film crew filming a fairly uninspired playground scene, it provided a lovely atmosphere.

I watched you join in with a group of bigger children, who spun the roundabout you clung to so quickly it made my mouth go a little dry. But there was a girl with you who made it her mission to keep you safe, so I relaxed and enjoyed watching you smile and laugh and interact with her while the wheel spun out of control.

Later, my heart broke a little when it became evident that she’d tired of being your protector and began dodging your advances. You don’t yet understand the frivolity of friendships, particularly between boys and girls, but you knew that it felt bad, and that made you try doubly hard to win her back. While she sat posed on a bench (the film crew had drawn nearer), I watched you run to the green, crouch down for a moment, and run back with something clutched in your hand. I knew what you were doing, as you’ve done it for me countless times, and indeed, you handed her a tiny daisy, which she gracefully accepted.

The tenuousness of this encounter fills me with more dread than the sight of your figure clamped to a careening roundabout, because as much as it hurts to fall off playground equipment, the pain of rejection can take years to recover from, particularly if it keeps happening. I hope this will not happen to you too often. I know you’re a beautiful, friendly boy with good intentions. I hope you’ll always remain quietly confident, and that one day you’ll learn how to brush off your heart and keep going.

 I love you so much, and even if I don’t feel worth the weight of my words here any longer, I certainly think you’re worth all the words in the universe.

Love always,

Mummy

My first and last word of advice on love

Love is a topic I prefer to steer clear of. I like making it, feeling it, having it in my life. At a push, I'd call it a gift from the universe; one that becomes smeary with scrutiny, to the point of disappearing altogether (at least until you look away, and then there it is again - sweetly bothering your peripheral vision). You're not meant to question it - you just enjoy it for as long as it stays.

Given that I've never found cause to examine love, then, it's no wonder I've developed few techniques for tending it. Someone is forever saying that love is hard work - that it won't always come easily, and so you need to work at love. I picture myself prodding a slumbering cupid with the butt-end of its archery bow. "Come on now, Cupid," I'd say. "Time to get back to work." I don't know how you work on love, or coax it into action if it decides to take a sabbatical of indeterminate length.

In recent months, though, I am learning (or maybe discovering) how to maintain that hottest and most volatile of gardens. The old adage would have us believe that love is like an eternally hungry hearth fire. If it exposes the glowing embers of its empty belly, throw on another log - easy peasy. Prod Cupid in the arse with a hot poker now and again and you're laughing all the way to the sperm bank or something. But to what does the metaphor (mixed or otherwise) actually portend?

It's only by taking note of what I'm doing in these earlier stages that I've discovered my slight misreading of the tale. Do you want to know how? It's not earth-shattering.

The way to keep love motivated is to keep working for it, rather than on it or (heaven forbid) against it. It might be more helpful to think of love as a small child. Anything you do now that could hurt its feelings, or fill it with anxiety or sadness, will come back to haunt you when you need it to do its homework or tidy its room. But as long as you ensure that you are acting in love's best interest, it not only does your bidding - it thrives. It sticks around, because it likes your company. And it's really that simple.

Anyway, I'm not here to disrupt your day or tell you what to do. It's just that these lessons are hard-won for someone like me. I've had to learn them alone, and for the most part through the distorted lens of anger. Where that anger came from is something I'm sick to the teeth of talking about, and I'm not even sure I'd like it to remain attached to my narrative. In fact. Why don't we just…

There, that's better.

Leaf drop

Dear Diary,

Life is going too fast for me to process. I’m afraid that when I look up finally, I will be old. On the one hand, it’s exhilarating, and not as stressful as when I used to wonder what it was I was meant to be doing; when all I had was handfuls of time to make the moments I’d just spent amount to something meaningful. 

I want to do some fairly meaningless things now, for rather a long time. I think that’s called ‘holiday’.

I no longer wish for time to write here. I no longer wish to write. I wish that frightened me but it doesn’t. I wish the self was as reliable as birch bark, blanching in the sun but always shedding layers to expose fresh familiarity.

When I was small, I used to lie beneath the neighbours’ birch tree in summer. The neighbours are long gone and the tree was cut down and I moved away, but I remember how its leaves stirred the air above my face. That moment is happening forever inside me, like all of them. I have to believe that this is still enough to constitute a self; that this is more birch than air.

Yours,

Friday Films

Why be happy

“And here is the shock – when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy.

You are unhappy. Things get worse.

It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded.

And then all the cowards come out and say, ‘See, I told you so’.

In fact, they told you nothing.”

- Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Separation

It’s been so long since I’ve written anything. I’ve eradicated all familiar points of reference and, as such, I’ve not given myself a great deal to write against, or towards.

When I moved to this country five years ago, I didn’t imagine that one day I’d remain here to orbit the uninhabitable planet of my old life, where my errant genes - my own heart that multiplied and grew around it an entire person - would need me to circulate for the foreseeable future. I am here for my son. On the margins of that relationship, I am building a life of my own out of new and untested materials, out of people and places and experiences born from my own, small initiative.

When I find that I’m plumping for a more substantial intersection between the old and the new, I remind myself that the union will take some time to resolve, that it will be one of substance over symmetry, of perspective rather than location.

My old life is a fishing rod cast into the sea of my day. As the hours tick over, I am reeled in by my heartstrings, and by dinnertime I am kissing and bathing my tiny boy. I’m putting him to bed and I’m slipping out the door into the dark matter of this new self who does none of these things, in a home that is, for the time being, insulated by objects instead of memories.

I used to worry that I would disappear without the props and settings and characters that helped to define who I was. Who wouldn’t be? But it was easily done, to put the book down and leave the room - frighteningly so. To walk like Gulliver through the landscapes of my history, brushing the clinging, miniature ghosts of identity from my arms and torso and thighs, until all that remained was myself.

All that ever remains is a self, and then one day, that self disperses, like a ghost, or like fog over an infinite, roiling sea, and is gone.

500 days of nonsense

I’m finding this whole ageing* business a bit of a nightmare. The older people get, the further into themselves they seem to tunnel. I used to think that tunnelling into others was a viable solution to an identity crisis, but these days I’m just trying to dig my way out and into the light. I’m not sure if anyone or anything lives up there, or whether I’m actually tumbling disoriented inside a dark sea, swimming my way down, the air and answers at my feet steadily gaining distance.

This weekend I watched a film called It’s Kind of a Funny Story – it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets 500 Days of Summer, if you can imagine such a thing. It was at once heartening and completely irritating to see a film try so earnestly to normalise the experience of being admitted to a psych ward. There were familiar elements to the story (Who is that figure beneath the blanket, are they dead, and do I really have to share a room with him/her?) and elements that make a mockery of mental illness, however unintentional (the David Bowie sing along, and the Hasidic-Jew-with-sensitive-hearing shtick, for instance).

As I said, I did enjoy the film, and I think it’s a fairly good primer for the uninitiated, but if you come away thinking that suicidal feelings, mental illness, depression and personality disorders are the binding agents of universal solidarity in an institutional setting, you’d be wrong about that.

I’m not going to arrive at an actual point, or weave these into an afghan to hide beneath, in case you were holding out for something of that nature. This is simply an unhelpful map of my tunnelling – a kind of You Are Here for anyone who crash-landed on Planet Me today. Apologies, Earthlings - themes and variations, themes and variations.

I’ve been busily inventing new forms of self-alienation (I don’t know, I’m not Freud, am I?) and one thing that occurred to me before the weekend hit, which I think might be true, is that some houses are dead. Am I right? Just as it would be wrong to manipulate the arms and legs of a corpse and call that corpse alive, I also think that people mistakenly believe that moving their shit into an accommodation that died decades ago will somehow turn that place into a home**.

Wanna come over and watch movies? Didn’t think so.




*‘Aging,’ not ‘getting old,’ I hasten to add; it’s an important distinction. Especially if you’re old. Which I am not. (Yet.)

**I don’t believe my house is dead, but I’ve lived in a fair few dead homes, and this is the only explanation. Shut up and let me have my explanation.

Systematic unpicking

Other people frighten me. I approach them and pull faces and they react and I back away slowly. Sometimes I’ll lie right up against the glass and trace their topography for hours, imagining they spent their childhoods hypnotised by the dirt clods that sprung off their bicycle wheels as they bounced over broken tarmac slightly faster than their reaction times dictated, and then I can almost feel the barrier dissolving.

Our lives are predicated on this underlying assumption that we are known, and that we can know others. We think that because we can agree to certain fundamentals that keep the motorway generally unclogged, we must also conduct more or less the same symphony beneath our shirts. But regardless of which parade we succumb to, amidst the props and paints and perfumes, the vagaries of continuity will invariably betray a lie that remains most invisible to even ourselves. I’m talking about our souls here.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a religious person. I don’t think you can peel away the pragmatic layers of a human to reveal the frightened inner specter of their gossamer truth. Life winds its expert fingers around the lip of our trembling essence and we emit a tone that answers in the only way that it can. Others glimpse our identity through a whirling zoetrope that blurs our static moments into a unified narrative, into a seamless 'you', until one day...

Well, one day I discover that you’ve saved every tissue your mother has ever sneezed into inside a desk drawer. And there is nothing in my toolbox of experience that can answer the 'why?' of this one anomaly. I’ve pulled a thread, and the entire fantasy of knowing you unravels and spools around my feet. A realisation swims up from the deep: You are not me. And, furthermore, I am alone. This gives me a terrific sense of vertigo, and then I must wait for the normalising properties of time + space to whitewash the graffiti this notion produced.

If ever you find yourself seeking your reflection in the shallow pool of someone else, instead see if you can appreciate the illusion that you’re not buried alive inside a fiction of your own making. Scatter the crumbs of your history and watch the birds make off with them, one by one.

Not waving

I’m meant to be writing a blog for work, but it’s not happening just now.

How do you say "I had a strange dream last night" without a hundred ears tuning out before you’ve even gotten to the significant bit? Nightmares, wet dreams, dreams specifically about the listener – you might entice a few more ears to stick around, but not many. I’ll listen to your dreams, in as much detail as you can provide, because I enjoy the thought processes that go into the telling, and you can sometimes even glimpse a hidden feeling that marbles the convex underbelly of its imagery. Dream imagery is certainly more stunning than any I’ve experienced tangibly.

But I had this strange dream last night (goodbye, gentle readers, until next time); it was terrible, actually. My niece and nephew were little children again, and I could see by my tracking system that they were still on the beach playing, and specifically where they were playing (in the tide, and Christopher is only a toddler), so I went to check on them. I knew before reaching the shore that my nephew wouldn’t be there, and my mind scrambled to assemble the narrative - abduction.

I spent many hours crying and shouting and looking inside horrible containers, all the while knowing that he’d never be found. At some point he stopped being Christopher and started being Hartley, and then I had to wake myself up.

Sometimes my dreams will trail their coattails through my waking life, and their details can inform things that I feel or think about. I once thought I was in love with a real person because of a dream, and I acted on it, and that’s the last time I will ever do something so foolish. If anything, now I worry that the symbolic sediment left to dry on the surface of consciousness may prove fatally prophetic, if ignored. I’ll tell Bruce to keep a more careful eye on Hartley or I’ll wait for the green man before crossing a familiar intersection, and I’ll still wish I’d kept everyone at home, wrapped in cotton wool.

On the flip side, real life issues can find monstrous architectural counterparts in dream threads that get woven into the fabric of one's psyche, so that you don’t always know if you’re awake or asleep or somewhere in between. Though life has a way of dispersing the clouds and making that distinction immediately, and sometimes even painfully, apparent.

Killing tigers

I read somewhere that there are only 3,500 tigers left in the world. Could that be true? We haven’t even brought about the extinction of whales, and look how long we’ve been in the process of saving them. How did tigers manage to slip through unnoticed? Those blunt, vicious heads of dusty pumpkin whorled with salt liquorice, mouths open and dripping black gums – can you even imagine the absence of tigers?

Today on the bus, I watched Hartley sleeping and tried to visualise the world in another thirty years. It frightens me to think of all the things he might lose, even though I’ve only the faintest idea of what we’ve inherited from centuries of civilisation. What will he fear? What will he love, and how? His atoms will weld themselves to the circumstances of whatever shapes them until the two are indecipherable, and we will spend our final years palming that smooth obelisk without any hope of penetrating its mysteries a second time.

Last night I fell asleep thinking: The social media celebrities are the pied pipers of the counterculture, leading the rats straight to us - to the beating heart of our secret inner lives. When I woke up, I had an entirely different thought, which was: humans are essentially here to die and replenish the earth’s resources; we are this planet’s living fertiliser. Gee, thanks brain! I deprive you of alcohol for weeks at a time and you repay me with nihilism.

If you thought that children could throw mortality off your scent while you hid out in the countryside of familial paralysis, think again. Now you need answers faster than you can keep up with the questions, and each day that angelic clay you threw with such hope and abandon just hardens around the features of everything you still can’t account for. Your son is human, and one day he might never see a tiger. One day...

You try to pull back from these thoughts but you rub them in faster, and they explode into a million points of ink. You use that ink to write love poems in the dark, and you hope that it’s enough.

Blog of Revelations

Have you ever gone to bed for a month wishing that you could just wake up a saner person? That happened to me today. It was awesome.

Unrelatedly (perhaps), I spent Sunday alone, and in spite of still feeling flu-ish (on top of the effects of a late night out) I managed to propel myself out of bed for breakfast and an early-morning film on television. I chose Un Poison Violent - a coming-of-age story that sounded a bit saucy (young girl explores her sexuality amidst family drama), but which actually turned out to be much better than it sounded.

The narrative explores themes of flesh/spirit, mind/body, old/young and the necessary tensions of these apparent dichotomies when called upon to behave themselves. Unexpectedly, the most poignant scene involves neither the young girl nor the dying grandfather, but the parish priest - a peripheral character that by rights should have had these issues tied up tight.

Early on, the film lays the groundwork for his impending crisis (he spends a lot of time silently ruminating in wet or dripping locales), and demonstrates that although he’s serious about his vocation, he’s also human, and especially invested in the mother (with whom he shares a [chastened] past) and her fast-blossoming daughter. You don’t see much evidence of his internal struggles until quite a bit later on, when he lies on top of his single bed and begins fervently praying for God to bring him peace, an activity that ends with him curled up and weeping.

The characters all spend a lot of time holding each other up to these rigid codes of conduct with varying degrees of dismay and alarm when expectations are thwarted, but with none so much as they reserve for their own perceived shortcomings (except maybe the father, who only seems repentant towards the end, after his father dies).

I suppose the idea is that no matter how good we try to be, not one of us is godlike in nature, and we are ever in danger of being thrown off our paths by these so-called sins of the flesh.

Hello Blog

It's been a while. Yep.

For those of you waiting for something more, you'll be waiting a while yet. I'm actually composing this in Blogger's unreliable editor, if that tells you anything about my commitment to these words.

There is nothing inside me that I want to transcribe here. Furthermore, I'm not sure that what's inside me is transcribable. Evenfurthermore, each time an untranscribable issue emerges that I'm not comfortable *sharing, I tend to create an anonymous journal for that issue...and then it magically disappears (the issue, not the journal, though I wish they would).

So it appears that by concretising my tempestuous insides by way of transcription, I can make issues disappear. Good to know for the long term, but there are things I'm not ready to let go of yet. I'm terrible at living without something resistant to push against, and hence I must reserve a little, purely for **pedantic purposes.

Now that you're wishing you could go back in time and unread these cryptic and senseless-to-all-but-me sentences, I'll leave you with one final thought:

I'm starting to fear old age. I've never given it much thought, because I've always been young, but in the last twelve months, the fact that I'm aging has finally dawned on me, and it's terrifying. I've always known that I'd make a terrible old person, and I'm not someone who is going to celebrate ***laugh lines and grey hairs, because all of these things signal the end of what little I feel I have that's worth celebrating. I'm not saying I dislike the aged as a whole, but in the same way I feel I wouldn't suit blonde hair, I don't think that I will suit old age. But I will wear it like a moth-eaten suit and that will be that.

Anyway, so if you think I'm behaving strangely, it's just me working out a way to own the old. I guess? Fuck, I'm starting to wish I hadn't bothered with this entry either.

Okay, ending on a positive:

I'm very much in love with my job, my town, England and all their ensuing complexities. It makes the hard stuff a lot easier to cope with.

*of course I mean ' sharing with my mother,' who I strongly suspect reads here now. Hi mom! Nothing personal. It's just, you know. Well...hi!

**untrue

***well, grimace

9 hours

• Hot air balloon mishap
  
  
• Freefalling and looking through a bag for instructions on how to land
  

• A play w/ 3 new characters related to The Talented Mr Ripley

• A dead kitten on the sidewalk

• The bus is threatening to leave and I can’t find my case

• A man helps me down the awkward steps of the bus

• Remembering that I forgot my travel case on the bus

• A hidden stash of notes and clean clothes in the slotted drawers of my caravan

• Disco vomiting up a pile of dry cat food

• Unable to see the time on our mobiles

• Asking why electronics never work in dreams

• Combing giant nit eggs out of the baby’s hair

• A cloaked figure, like an Orc with long metal gloves, on a deserted road at 6AM

• It’s death up the road and I can’t shake him

• It’s 9AM and I’m going to be late for work

• It’s 8AM and I’m going to be late for work

• It’s 8AM and I ask Bruce to call me a taxi so I won’t be late for work

• The shower is broken and the bathroom is massive

• There’s nothing to wear; the drawers are full of baby clothes

Mosh pit of rubbish

It’s funny how something you really want to say in the morning can become irrelevant by lunch. I know you’re supposed to be lucid and inspired during the earlier hours, but that’s the time I’m more likely to come up with a phrase like “Mosh pit of flowers” and then share it earnestly with others. If you want to feel like you’re getting anywhere, with documentation and whatever else, please don’t waste your inspiration on describing what tulips do on your way to work.

I’ve been eating lunch at my desk against my better judgment, so that I have more time to bash these out, but instead I have interested parties staring over my shoulder because they assume that I’m still working. And then I hope they’re short-sighted and can’t easily read text at 30%. I certainly can’t. Also, I have one ear to the office and suspect that they are right at this very moment having an impromptu web meeting without me, which cannot happen. Just a second.

Nope, it’s 'hideous stuff,' apparently. So where was I?

Oh yes, I was going to tell you about the little girl I saw emerging from the station; this singular, sensational figure who moved steadily against the grain of early morning commuters rushing in to catch their train to London. I wanted to stop her and say, “Wait! Don’t do a single thing more, because I am going to make you very, very famous.” Except, of course, I’m nobody, and know nobody who is anybody who is making movies in need of child stars. Not as far as I know, anyway.

Then I became obsessed with why she was coming into Hitchin at that strange hour on her own, when it’s most common to see children commuting in groups, closer to the time when school begins. I started to imagine that she was being stalked online by a sexual predator, and that she was on her way to meet him on the pretext of him being a child himself. And I took note of the time (8.07AM) and the date (3.03.11), and then wondered if there was something inherently creepy in that. So of course I came straight to you with the information. Maybe she was on her way to an audition.

I am going to see Deerhunter in 28 days and I’m very excited about this still. Do you remember how, when I first moved to the UK, I bought tickets to see The Sea and Cake on my birthday and then forgot about the show by the time it came around? And they haven’t played in London since? Yeah, that isn’t ever happening again.

Girl I see on the train

Now might be a good time to tell you about this girl I see on the train every morning. I’ve been wanting to write about her for ages, because I find her intriguing in a way that I can’t put my finger on, at least off-paper.

The first time I saw her, I thought she might be drugged. Her head rested against the window, and her face mimicked an expression of sleep (glazed, narrowed eyes; a drowsy, permanent smirk), even when she occasionally sat up straight, or stood to disembark. It worried me a bit, because she was clearly school-aged, maybe fourteen or fifteen, but when I saw her again the following morning, I realised that this was simply her natural expression (at least before 9AM).

Other aspects of her appearance lend themselves to an overall impression of a sleep-walker, such as the blonde tendrils of hair that escape a hastily trussed ponytail and the soft, worn fabric of her leggings and t-shirts, outward-turned feet nested inside slouching UGGs. Her telephone number “in case of loss” is printed in black marker directly onto the cotton of her pink, drawstring rucksack (one of three that she uses – none of the others bear a visible number), and has bled and turned purplish in the wash, or the rain.

And that’s it, really. I’m not sure why this lanky teenaged girl with an odd dress sense and enigmatic fatigue has made such an impression on my imagination, but maybe that’s all it takes. I see her so often now that I almost feel I know her; part of me hopes that she’s somewhere across town in a classroom, sketching her own private portrait of that strange woman who steals glances at her while she time-releases the universe into her consciousness.