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.