a sea of forrest January 27, 2009

Wanted to say something about my for once relatively impressive anger drowning out Bob Dylan, and cooking pasta in your mouth, and also Edinburgh  last year, walking all day for three days, and harnassing energy to power lightbulbs, also my mean chicken fillet, and the Cat Woman’s dynamism, but made the mistake of checking my mail and then ambling over to my pigeon hole and I could actually spend THE REST OF THE WEEK reading everything for tomorrow’s supervision. If there were some parallel universe in which my supervisor and his hideous orange-brown Simon Cowell trousers with the yellow-brown pinstripes culminating in an unavoidable, unmissable, a screaming-out-for-attention triangle (one could say arrow) at his crotchal area did not exist, that would be very nice. Also if in this parallel universe I had not walked in on him in the bathroom, that would be even nicer.

coffeecoffeecoffeePROPLUS ANYONE?

 

Anyway so yes. I won’t talk about those things. Ben Johnson and the million and two people who wrote things about his green world and his corpulence are whispering seductive things into my earlobe. Hell yes.

January 23, 2009

J rings me. It sounds windy where she is, or else she is speaking from under the duvet.

 

I’M AT THE SEASIDE! she shouts. I have not been to the seaside for years and years. Mami used to make wholemeal cheese baps, and we ate them with peanut butter and flew a pink and blue kite, and one year C fell from a roundabout and stopped breathing.

 

I LOVE YOU!

 

I am sitting in Nero with A reading ‘Apology For Poetry’, and the man behind us is talking very loudly about his trip to India, to a blonde woman with a mop of frizzy hair. She sits right on the edge of her seat and clings onto his every word. She fills every gap with breathy laughter.

 

EXAMS ARE OVER AND I CAN SEE THE IRISH SEA! I think I hear seagulls behind the duvet-rustling, roaring sea. Can you IMAGINE what I’d have done if I’d missed the flight, stuck in  New Delhi with no money, hahaha! The blonde woman throws back her head and laughs with her eyes shut for an inordinately long time.

 

THE TIDE IS OUT! I imagine J tottering across a stretch of wet sand in inappropriate footwear, crunching shells underfoot.

 

COME SOON, she shouts, I WILL TAKE YOU TO THE SEASIDE!

January 21, 2009

Between sieving eyelashes from rice pudding, learning to juggle with soft oranges and doing a little bit of pitiful weeping into literary criticism in Nero, I find I have very little time. Ocassionally I meet Dylan Moran’s gaze of cutting disdain shining unto me from my pinboard. I am developing new and drastic procrastination techniques – for example I have begun taking daily stock of the vegetable situation in the fridge; examine the black bits of my bananas, peel icey carrots from the back wall, and count my Sainsbury’s Basics onions, which tend to fall apart when I tentatively touch their wrinkled skins. I ring J, who tells me she has slept with her flat mate, that he has a girlfriend who is also her flatmate, that she has become a social outcast overnight, and that she is running out of money. I duly make noises of suprise and empathetic outrage. Also, I have had a fight with the woman behind the bar. (My empty capuccino cup made the table look messy.) My director of studies writes ’sentences!’ pointedly on my essay, by which I think he means they are not very good.

procrastination January 16, 2009

Things I have not had time or space or finger energy to write about since I got back to uni are the footprints with the four toes leading from the shower and down the corridor to the door of my room. Very suspect.

 

Pleasure in Bacon. There is very very little, only he did say ’some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested’, which is fitting since I have been only tentatively licking of late. Real bacon I haven’t had since back home. No one here understands the avocado-bacon toastie combo.

 

Visited the University Library for the first time and got lost somewhere on the fifth floor of the south wing between heavy navy-blue journals on the economics of farming. The UL is a paper maze guarded by fierce guarders of books stalking the aisles, the corridors, the toilets and tearooms, hiding little scanners up their sleeves and saying aha very quietly into their bristling moustaches apropos of nothing. Fiercely.

 

I bet underneath the many onionskin layers of impenetrabe, invisible armour you also are human, and you have bubblebaths and weep into tubs of haagen daaz and drink coffee with your friends and wake up with your hair plastered against your forehead or with pillow imprints on your forearms. And you will walk not stalk, sometimes. Enjoy the smell of cut grass maybe and perhaps a long time ago you once just for a laugh or because no one was watching at that precise moment, or perhaps because it was dark out, you took a running  jump and landed on top of a crisp autumn leaf mountain.

 

Ridiculous! You sleep standing up in your flinty grey suit and for lunch you eat the silent fears of trembling subordinates.

How to cook curly kale and fritter away valuable minutes of the day January 13, 2009

I am back in the concrete block which lurks at the outskirts of the town of spirals. Witnessed a brief interlude in what I thought was the fixed and unchangeable lengthiness of the bar woman’s face. I have never seen her smile before. When we make eye contact my legs quake. Darling, she called me, as she took £1.40 from me for my bowl of cereal. Half an hour later she all but spits into my cappuchino. It looks as though in order to accomodate this window of pleasantness I may have to adjust my breakfast time this term to 10:30 – 11:00am.

I never wroted January 9, 2009

An ode to your little toe, and all those other things I never oded for fear of your scrupulous eye finding out the cracks in my creative foundations, the faultlines in my fictions, and discovering that what you are reading here is in fact (not?) yourself, ill-disguised and painted purple with sweeps of alliteration and pointillistic fragmented letters of your name in capitals where they should not be.

 

See I guess I always thoughted and maybe at times still thinkit that you are possibly the most complicated person I have ever met, like the knottiest knot in a three mile stretch of string or those four page equations I chose English Literature for never having to unravel… I guess what I am trying to say is that the knottier the knot in a three mile stretch of string, the greater the sense of achievement after unpicking. (I am not sure I want to unentwine you, however, and leave you straightened out but crinkly.)

 

There is letter space for the elevators of my nightmares and the common at your doorstep and the violet colour you stole from the garden, and possibly even your little toe and the hardened honey on the shelf, but mind the cracks, the paragraph breaks in which the you from the bit before morphs into a you which might be my father or even Dodo the Budgie.

 

(I would write you an ode but I am not the most poetic of people and you would laugh and then run away very quickly. Perhaps once I have reinvented myself as Philippa, the Pip of the neon fishnet stocking, of never saying never maybe I guess, the Pip of the carrot stick and the Pip who says no to the curdled butter, the Pip of the hidden musical talent and authorial genius, the brashest Pip in the apple core…)

January 8, 2009

I went back, my legs shaking a little bit.  My words ran into and over the top of one another, alphabet soup into the bowl of the room. I said like and intense too much, and only just in time stopped myself from putting my feet up on the coffee table. From my bottomless bag of diversion tricks I pulled a packets of Halls, unwrapped one very very slowly and tormented the paper as she spoke. I used to be a chronic tissue-shredder. I remember being very excited about her baby. She said, when I used to go off to Woolworths on my own, that’s when they stopped talking to me.  

 

I left feeling elated and sixteen and stupid. B said over her hot chocolate, you love tupperware too much. And then she told me a secret and I told her a secret, and I felt sixteen even more, like the next thing we might do is camp out at the bottom of her garden and make up games with scraps of paper and a stubby Ikea pencil and talk about boys. Did we do this when we were sixteen? Maybe eleven, twelve, thirteen. I don’t remember what we used to say about them, but I know we used to picture them vividly, perhaps a few gardens down, making their own top-ten lists. What do you look for in a boy? Number nine, good forearms.

 

I haven’t slept in a tent for years, not since truth or dare went wrong, and B talks as if she might get married next month. J fucks and tells over facebook, or else we are witness and invited to join. (No thank you, I say at five in the morning, I have known you too long.) And if not we end up with our heads under her kitchen tables, woken by the cleaner at 8.30am. I ring her and she tells me she is in bed with Specimen A. We don’t talk for long, she tells me about pills and MDMA at some warehouse rave and I am a little bit scared and her voice is crackly with tension and I can hear Specimen A breathing.

January 6, 2009

Doggerel is ironic highbrow, rhyme clanking, says my father. Stop me, I could go on for years. He’s talking about Heine, or I think he is, when he started pacing I stopped listening. Doggerel catches at my ears.

 

I spent a lot of my time in London both in bed and on the tube. Not at the same time, however I did sleep on the tube, brief uncomfortable bursts, my head on a shoulder dreaming of string. I have two invisible bruises, one on each hip, from the slats of the futon bed. A only disappears in the dead of the night once, to be where the wild things are maybe, trees sprouting from the living room carpet and A in a little white cat outfit (is this how it happens in the book?), only I think I dream this, because when I wake up he is saying things into my back like look at the snow. I am still dreaming, of cat people putting out fires, and anyway I am not a morning person which I should maybe have tattoed into my back. So I missed the snow but not the cold. This morning we watched the rooftops, and I imagined falling off.

 

I have Tamsin Greig’s autograph (and her love) in purple pen on a little corner of an old envelope. I do not want to think of what I said to her or how inanely I grinned. We are at the actor’s bar after Oedipus at the National. A little man who insists he has met me before says, she is so thin, did you see her WRISTS and how THIN they were, did you WATCH HER WRISTS as she wrote? I run away to a Latin bar and drown my embarrassment in a pina colada.

happy new year baby, we could probably fix it if we clean it up all day January 1, 2009

I am not making New Year’s Resolutions. They came with a warning on the radio, may cause mental damage. Last New Year’s Eve being almost certainly less that a year ago, I remember exactly what my resolutions were. We escaped from the party for a while (everyone asked about you this year), the kids scribbled on the cream bedroom walls with wax crayons and we got high in the black on the hill above an invisible lake. I counted them off on my fingers walking back through a deserted campus. I’m not sure how big an effect these seven promises I made out loud (and the few secret silent ones) had on my mental wellbeing. If by this time next year I am not doing anything such as sitting in a draughty attic room with my head wrapped in cling film, then this will be an improvement and it is irrefutable that the resolutions were to blame.

 

This year I was the sole young person floundering in a sea of the inebriated middle-aged.When Big Ben said so I ate twelve grapes, one on each chime. The Spanish did this in 1909 to solve the problem of a grape surplus, and are still doing it today. Everyone got very excited about this and forgot to swallow the grape from the previous chime before shoving in the next one with reckless abandon, and after the twelfth they fell about spluttering and spitting out little bits of grape skin. I did not like this very much, the darker hours of my childhood years having been spent perfecting the art of Magically Compressing Time Using Nothing More Than A Single Grape And My Two Wobbly Front Teeth. Stage one was pulling the membrane from the fleshy part of a large green grape with nails and teeth, which could take up the better part of an afternoon depending on size and ripeness, and stage two was keeping the remains under my tongue for as long as possible, testing both my willpower and the defenses of the naked grape. Those few seconds of what was intended to be joyous symbolic grape consumption were overshadowed by a remaining shred of childish ritual. (DO NOT SWALLOW THE CLOTHED GRAPE, a booming voice from above commanded.)

 

My father, momentarily blinded by the champagne cork, tripped over the coal shuttle. I flung myself at his ankles, and it was only by a mere two inches and as a result of my quick reflexes and sacrificial dive that he was saved from a firey toasting in the open fire.

 

This did not actually happen. I wish it had; it would have been immeasurably more exciting than his waxing lyrical about his new FiloFax and the London tube map inserts he bought for it from WHSmiths for £4.50.