Oh the boy's a slag...

... the best you ever had, the best you ever had is just a memory. And those dreams - not as daft as they seem, not as daft as they seem, my love, when you dream them up...

I did my life back to front. I’m convinced of this. If my theory is right, then I am steadily regressing towards old age. By the time I’m eighty, I shall be happily hot-wiring disability carts and mixing crystal meth in with my Birds’ Instant Trifle.

     
Luckily for me I live in a city where such a regression goes by unnoticed. I’m camouflaged in the place that defines itself by its bohemian and hedonistic status. I can stay as young as I like, for as long as I like. I can work in my unstable, irregular job, have my increasingly peculiar writing habits, inhabit my strange social life and incestuous relationships and no one bats an eyelid.

     
Brighton is the Dorian Gray of the South-East. And I might think that because I now live in Hove, sandwiched between The Willows nursing home and Otello's, the organic free-range, local shop where they charge four pounds for a tin of Polish soup made from lard, that this might alter things. But it doesn’t. My anonymity here makes it even easier to disappear into my life, into my small attic flat where I can hear the waves at night if I concentrate really hard and no permanent lover enters.

     
Which is of course what I’m really getting to here. Stable relationships. Don’t you just love ‘em? Cosying-up of a Friday night with your fifth DVD from LoveFilm because, in a fit of Let’s watch all of Herzog’s masterpieces, even though we turned them all off half-way last time, you ticked the box “Unlimited’. And now you’re sitting there, wishing you’d gone for 40-Year-Old-Virgin instead of watching Klaus Kinski lose his mind on a festering boat with some monkeys.

     
I digress. So you’re sat on the couch, with your 2-for-1 pizza and your Ben & Jerry's, unable to move because of the twelve thousand calories in your stomach. And then, out of the blue, there’s one those inexplicable moments of deep affection. Perhaps one of you casually brushes the other’s ear with your mouth as you whisper into it, or one of you flashes a smile that says you doesn’t really care about Klaus, or the monkeys, or even that great story about Herzog getting shot during a live interview. No. You both know it. Because for tonight, and for the foreseeable future, you are each other’s and will be sleeping in each other’s arms (or at least within shoving distance) until dawn breaks.

     
Awww. I remember that. The days of long-term relationships. Now I know at least one person who might read this and proclaim “But you had a bloody relationship of two years up until just over a year ago!” I agree, and maybe I shouldn’t be talking as though I’ve not known that kind of intimacy for a decade. It’s kind of insulting to those who haven’t. And a lot of long-term relationships are far from happy. But it’s more that I’m interested in how, aged fifteen, I embarked upon a relationship that was to last nine years and then followed it up with one that went on for five years. And how, after they finished, aged thirty, my ability to sustain a relationship has been patchy at best. At the age when everyone else is either getting married, popping out babies or, in the least, mooning over them in Costa, I’ve been having ‘scenes’, ‘flings’, ‘things’, ‘goings-on’, ‘special friendships’ and the worst, ‘connections’. This is the kind of thing that should have disappeared in my mid-twenties along with living in communities, sharing boyfriends and thinking I could get Enlightened by having a nervous breakdown in India.

     
But I'm looking on the bright side. In fact I'm reclaiming my ever-increasing inability to move towards any kind of romantic stability, (as well as dignified job status, secure financial standing etc). After all, as numerous people have said to me recently, a slight twang of pity in their voices “Hey, it’s all good writing material!” Oh indeed it is. And not only that, I’m realising what my greatest fear in life is (apart from obvious things like tidal waves, climate change, choking to death on cupcakes, and all those other things I don’t want to tempt fate with by mentioning). It’s ending up stuck. Bored. Trapped. Claustrophobic. No way out, even if you know where the exit is. Like in Batman, when he's locked in a room and the baddie presses a button and the ceiling starts slowly coming down. I've been there and I don't want to end up like that again. Like the subject of this Arctic Monkeys song I quoted at the start of this post.

     
We all walk a wobbly line between sharing and loneliness, and we walk it whether we're in a relationship or not. And when does closeness turn to settling down turn to dependence turn to choking with indifference on your pork chop every Sunday? And at what point do we solitary commitment-phobes stop running?

You used to get it in your fishnets/Now you only get it in your night dress/Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness/Landed in a very common crisis/Everything's in order in a black hole/Nothing seems as pretty as the past though/That Bloody Mary's lacking a Tabasco/Remember when you used to be a rascal? …

Fluorescent Adolescent

click me!

Homecoming

Monday is my new writing day, and naturally, I've spent the morning making pea soup, washing-up, re-vamping blogs, going to the doctors... anything but writing. Even writing here is a bit of a cheat, but I'm telling myself it's a way of easing myself into the avalanche of imagery that's waiting in the backseat of my mind, and that on some level, I do not want to face.

     
Often I feel caught somewhere in between childhood and here. There are days when a rose's scent or the dark green of a climbing ivy is enough to make me ten years old again. When  sunlight on glass makes time spin. As I grow older this seems to happen more and more. As I reach an age where there's no doubt that I'm clear of the boundary of youth, I increasingly feel  as I did before I even knew what puberty was.

     
I want to go home. Of course, I know that home doesn't exist any more - the home I remember is now occupied by strangers, a couple of kids, cars I don't recognise and pets I don't know about. It is re-vamped and re-constituted; lawns mown in straight lines, fences properly put up, the house walls now a yellowy white. Of course I hate it, this sanitisation of our rambling family home. The pruning of its madness. The killing of its dreams.

     
But more than this, I realise that where I want to return to exists mainly in those same parts of my brain that it always did, not simply out there, with the grass and the beetles, but in the home of my imagination. When I remember childhood, it isn't the real conversations I did or didn't have with my mother. It isn't how I felt when my father walked in a room. It's in how I hid under the cherry tree to feel protected. It's how I ran in a frail white nightie, rain on my reddening cheeks - around clumps of lavender, over wilting delphiniums. It's the crumbling grey brick of the convent wall as I crept unseen against it, chalk on my t-shirt, shielded by dark hedges. It's sunshine through poplar branches. The rooks lining up on a cold winter's evening. It's the crackle of crusty leaves around my ankles as I ran up our drive from school. It's the call of the wood pigeon, ever-etched in my synapses. When I awake to the memory of back then, it's a garden I always go back to.

     
And this garden is as alive for me today as it was back then. It's an Eden in my eyes. I feel its leaves against my skin, the grass between my fingers, the chill of evening air drawing in. Growing up took me out of the garden and into the world, it eroded the pathways leading back to the home of being. As an adult, I know I can't quite see what I saw in the veins of a dying leaf when I was nine years old. How that leaf glowed with it's own essence before me as I turned it over in my palm.

     
But writing takes me home. Perhaps that's why I do it. It takes me by the hand and leads me back through the shrubbery, up the winding tracks, over the wall to a vegetable patch and to toes peeping from under rough brown cloth; to next door at the Convent, where the nuns are singing, blue eyes to heaven. My hand is small, my fingers long; my shoes are wet and muddy. I rub my eyes and I can see again.

Bank Holiday

It was back to work yesterday after a gorgeous Bank Holiday break. Happily, however, I'm taking a couple of days 'off' again to finish these dreaded MA application forms.

I turned 35 on Sunday, and my birthday was one of the happiest I've known in years, stretching over three days. Saturday night turned into a joyful return to the Spiegeltent for the end of Guilty Pleasures, where we danced drunkenly with dressed up gangsters and their molls to Islands In The Stream and Guns N'Roses. I'd considered staying in and being maudlin over my approaching birthday, with only BBC Iplayer for company, so I'm glad I didn't give into such drabness.



Sunday, we drove to Steyning for cream tea and a walk up the hill, then to The Windmill for drinks later in the evening. The weather was balmy and lush, the first swathe of warmth we've known this year. There was a flutter of rain in the evening, but even that felt enticingly warm.

Monday was even hotter, with bright sunshine, and I pootled off with George and Bob to find the end of a local hippy festival. When we arrived, we quickly bumped into familiar faces, all high from their weekend. Some of the more eccentric Buddhafield Order members were even there, blissed out, no doubt, by all the donging of bells and raising of empty skulls to Padmasambhava himself they'd been doing in their late-night Pujas. We then lay by the glistening lake at the bottom of the hill and drank tea till it was time to leave.

From there we ventured out to the Bluebell Railway, something I've wanted to go on ever since I arrived in Brighton almost ten years ago. Winding our way through the patches of bluebells, and past the lush green fields, we returned to the tiny station, replete with Station Master and some interesting luggage.







So today I'm home, distracting myself from my application forms by blogging and watching too many spectacled bears. I've noticed my Paddington Bear crush has not abated over the years, refreshed recently after Bob and I came across a picture of him in Oxford. He's such a cool and chaotic bear, it's no wonder he used to make my heart flutter.