It took my sister yelling at me to use my skype

for me to even remember this blog existed. I linked to it in my "mood bar" or some such.

Scary really how I spent a year pouring out my heart  and then just left it abandoned, it's been so long it took me three password resets and a lot of guessing to find my way back.

And what did I find? For the most part a version of me that doesn't really exist any more. I'm years older and non the wiser than I was at 21.

What might be scarier is the things that haven't changed.

Or which keep on looping back to where they were a year or five ago.

Apparently in some things you can stop time.

A Beginners Guide - Sleeping on commuter trains.

As a fledgling commuter I have been carefully observing train sleepers, sleeper haters and the insides of my eyelids. To help other AM train newbies, here's a simple guide to making it to London alive and dribble free.

1. Before attempting the morning sleep complete the following steps.
 a. Analyse your past sleep behaviour. Are you a walker or a talker? Call your ex and ask them if you snore. Have a snooze on the sofa and establish whether or not you are likely to sprawl. Check your pillow for drool. Categorize the above behaviours from 1-5 where 1 is never and 5 is always/severe. If you score more than 8 points you should never attempt to sleep on the train as you are likely to be clubbed to death with a briefcase by that banker you snuggled, dribbled on and called mummy. At the very lest you'll end up dribbly and ashamed at Charing Cross as death-stares follow you all the way to the Bakerloo.

b. Work out when you need to wake up for your stop. Set an alarm. Without this there will come a day where dreams of  showjumping bunnies will carry you all the way to the end of the line, avoid at all costs.

c. Drink water, not juice. Juice will make you dribble, dribble will make you ashamed. You'll also feel about 8 times perkier when you wake up again. Needless to say espresso is also not your sleep buddy.

d. Make up a good sleep excuse. If you are a hugger and end up overly intimate with a fellow assenger, a heartfelt story of a night in emergency vetinary surgery, or a child with croup (that still happens right?) is much better than trying to explain that you just couldn't not watch the latest series of Toddlers and Tiaras.

2. While step one relates to humiliation avoidance. Step 2 is all about practicality. Which side is the sun? Avoid it. Sit by the window as occasional head bumps are much less embarrassing than toppling in to the aisle (field test #15 21/08/12). Dress appropriately, sleeping you is much less concerned about keeping her knees together and shirt pulled up, and no-one really wants to see that. Also, train air-con is cold, so don't get all trigger happy with the British summer and wear a chiffon shirt in September.

With all the above in place you may now enjoy a stress free, mildly refreshing and only occasionally bumpy train-sleeping career.

XX

New Beginnings

As the mourning/post-university/summer season comes to an end, I'm turning over a new virtual leaf. And that means dispensing with the melodramatic prose which has accompanied my third-decade breakdown.

Instead I will now document my attempt at being a grown-up, until that gets boring.  I hope you enjoy reading my 'Very Important Opinions'.

To begin then, REAL WORLD EXPECTATIONS OF THE 21st CENTURY GRADUATE

Hello virtual (and likely non-existent) reader.
Welcome to my newly revamped blog - read below this post at your own peril.

I’m going to keep things simple here, because lets face it, I spend too much time online and so, probably, do you.

I’m a graduate, eg. A naive, inexperienced, fairly sheltered, hardworking, occasionally drunk and well intentioned new adult with big plans and absolutely no idea where to start.

The first thing I have learned about adulthood, is the importance of having a point of view. It enables more in control adults to figure you out, aids conversation and most importantly gives the impression that you haven’t just spent three years in the heat magazine lined bubble better known as university.

The problem is, you’ve spent 17 years in education being told if not what to think, at least how to present it favourably, and to add difficulty to difference you’ve lost your audience. Post-teaching, past parental tolerance of long winded philosophies and pre enforced audience in spouse/offspring, all these thoughts and opinions are floating around my newly liberated headspace with nowhere to go.

So where better than the Internet. Between the cat videos, naked women and angsty teenagers, I’m filling one more remote server with the barely formed opinions of an as yet untested adult.

There will be typos.

BXX

Back in Black (but not for long)

So I've been missing awhile and then some, as life rather got on top of me. A lot of good has come from these silent months, sadly tempered by a little tragedy and this is to clear my mind for my future, which after I graduate University in June, will finally be my own to shape. As a result this post is not flowery, verbose or grandiose. These are just simple words to try and do justice to a very complex sadness.

  For anyone who has followed a while, you may be aware that my grandfather was unwell. Sadly he passed away on Feb 29th (an individual to the last dying on the leap day!) and we celebrated his life with family and The Inkspots, the java jive will always make me think of him singing while making coffee, a cuppacuppacuppacuppa cup.

It's been hard on all of my family, we're a close bunch and see each other most days, so it's still sinking in really. In the weeks since I've had a lot of time alone at uni to think over what his life has meant to me, and how I have been changed by his presence. At first I mourned the idea of living without him, of my wedding without him there, not knowing what he would have said about my agrees, kids or haircut. It took a while to realise that I will never have to do these things. My grandfather is present in everything I do, in every decision made, he has shaped me and I know exactly what he would say. Every time I ask myself how I will live without him, I just have to remind myself that I'll never have to.

 My only regret is being stuck hours away from the family as they knit back together. I thought I'd found surrogates to help me pick up the pieces but have found that as I crumbled, so to did the friendship I'd been counting on. It's hard to tell someone that you need them especially when you know that saying as much will make them feel awful, but if you don't ask you don't get. The problem is that when you ask and you still don't get you begin to realise that that relationship, whether out of disinterest, busyness or spite on the part of the other person, is not a true friendship but a support structure for them. It's hard to withdraw the support,but sometimes you have barely enough left to keep yourself standing.

 So when you fall, they can fall with you or just let you go. And if it's the latter, especially when barbed by poisonous words which to be spoken must first be thought, drunk or otherwise, it is all you can do not to throw poison back and to resign yourself to the fact that to keep being the person you want to be, you have to lose someone else who matters to you, and all of the things which you shared.

 In the last two months I've lost a father, a best friend, the respect of many, the freedom to enjoy my last months as a dancer and the opportunity to say many goodbyes. I'm holding on to my new beginning and getting through this last month in a dark place.

 Some people can never be forgotten.
Some words can never be forgiven.

 Right now I'm lonely, scared and miserable, but I know that it's got to get better. Last dark post. Promise. XX

A Long Weekend

Travelling to a home away from home which doesn't quite feel like home any more.

Living two worlds, one is empty and the other is a lie.

Choosing; sickness or deceit, tears or a forced smile, castles in the sky or eulogies and flowers.

Who am I when I am in this world where no-one can live forever.

XX

Bravery

After a summer surrounded by those I can tell anything to, it seems I am once more in need of the catharsis of writing out my worries if only for my own peace of mind.

Yesterday was a dark day where sadness stripped the world of colour and I couldn't have spoken to anyone, even if they'd been here. There are some things which must be borne in private. But today has been a day of choices.

I've spent days making up excuses for things which I want to avoid facing. Sometimes it is irrational worry or premature grief, perhaps it is a drawn-out and poisoned friendship or a relationship which is only half of what it should be, stopping just short of true happiness. Things become the norm which an earlier or a later version of yourself would see as out-of-character but happen nonetheless, because the alternative is difficult. It is almost impossible to abandon grieving and expose yourself to the greater injury of firmly holding on to the thing you are going to lose. It takes heartbreak to recognise that an old friend is no longer a good friend and to leave that chapter of your life unresolved. It takes heartbreak to look at somebody and realise you have outgrown them after they changed your life, even in a small way, for the better and to refuse to settle for less than perfection, when less-than-perfect has been so terribly good to you.

I think what I'm trying to say is that living a life which avoids heartbreak is cowardly. I can sit in my room and feel that the world is ending or I can go out and pretend that everything is okay, but when I look inwards all I see is regrets hiding behind excuses. I have to be brave and work for the things I need. I have to throw myself in to the final chapters of a closing book, I have to leave where I am no longer welcome and push away those things which while comfortable, no longer fit me. I can't wait for someone or something to break me, I have to jump, damn the consequences and then live with the pain until I can turn it in to a story of the places I have been.

XX

Love and Loss, or the breakdown of a sensible girl

I've always been one of those people that other people tell things to. Friends rely on my generally sunny disposition, wise sounding philosophy, ice cream supply and absorbent shoulder to catch them when they fall and put things back together again and I'm proud of that. But the problem is that I'm not the one who is meant to be broken, I don't know how to fall apart because I have no idea if I can put myself together again, which is why I'm breaking my blogging fast.

For the first time in my life I'm set to lose something I truly love and I'm absolutely terrified. Blessed as I have been to be a part of a stable home the passage of time is one trouble I can't explain away or plaster over or even lie to myself about any more. So I have to spell it out.

Some time, probably before Christmas, my grandfather is going to die.

The man that gave me my curls and taught me to read and made me love literature, who I was terrified of disappointing with my work, who paid for me to follow my dreams and loved me quietly from behind his newspaper even when I was a squealing annoyingly exuberant eight-year-old is done fighting.

I don't even know how to express how it feels. It's kind of like anger, a disbelief that he wont take any more medication or let them experiment on him, though it's the last thing I want, coupled with a crippling helplessness that I'm so far away and that I can't run to his side and spend every last moment in his company. And all wrapped in selfishness, the fact that I can't imagine Christmas without him, or him not being in the photographs at my wedding, never knowing what he's have wanted me to name my kids, or whether they looked like him. I don't know how to remove him from my expectations. It's just a numb stupidity.

And sadness. It's almost like he's gone already. I can't think about it without wanting to cry, the most well-meaning of friends will find a kind word reduces me to a puffy-faced wreck, curled up in bed, frustrated at my weakness and completely at a loss as to how to make it feel better.

Whoever said that it is better to have loved and lost than never to love at all must have had the benefit of hindsight, because while I would never wish away a second of the days I have spent with my grandfather, the mere anticipation of his loss hurts me more than anything I have ever experienced. I can't imagine ever being able to summarise it with such blithe succinctness.

Really I'm just lost.

Morning has broken...

And it's beautiful.

Even a mere four hours sleep and the prospect of a twelve hour day cannot mar the beauty of this morning. Outside the train the sun is glorifying wheat and grass alike with a white gold glow and the mist is lingering between heaven and earth, reducing trees to silhouettes against the almost colourless sky.

I defy anyone to look on a morning such as this and to see anything other than the blessings we so often forget. In the face of all the darkness, inequality and uncertainty the universe shines through with a hopeful dawn.

I've been doing an awful lot of thinking this past fortnight, but in the serenity of this sunrise I have to have faith in the great logic of existence and trust that I will find a way out of my self-made messes. As a very wise scriptwriter recently wrote, when a character asks what happens after one's faith in reason and consequence is shaken,

"Then what happens?"

"Two plus two equals four, I put sugar in my coffee and it tastes sweet, the sun rises because the world turns. These things are beautiful to me. [...]Life is good again"

And life is good.

XX

The Spark and the Fire

Speech has a tendency to be taken out of context, to be muddled by propriety and fear. This is the written word. This is honesty. This is my mind.

Time passes and circumstances change. People change, they grow apart and up and away. It's only natural. But above or perhaps below all this there is a spark. Some connection which means that every time you smile at me I smile back the way I did the first time it happened, it's a simple pleasure, happy and foolish and I don't want for it to go away.

But we're not the same people as we were a year ago, a part of me wishes that we could be but I honestly believe we're better people now. Except that I have no idea what we're doing. There's a gnawing fear that I'm a bad person for not being able to give you up as a friend, when while I accept our terminal friendliness I always see a remnant of something more which is simultaneously beaten back by rationality and terror. Because if I act, if I breathe a word of the confusion and hurt and laughter and list of things I've been meaning to tell you, then something will change. Like it changed when I pushed you out of my front door when I wanted more than anything to have you stay, Because strong though I am, and good though I may be with words, I don't know how to tell you that I can't choose between being a friend to one of the few people who challenges me intellectually, makes me laugh who I can talk to for hours but have to hold back from, and telling you everything and perhaps losing everything, which for a long long year I've tried, and failed, to forget.

I'm not a bad person. But for tonight I have to be a weak one.

Creative Writing Two

This story was born out of my below frustrations which you can find evidenced in the last year of my ramblings. As with all my creative writing, it's more just me talking than having any agenda or aspirations as one of the few English Lit. students who doesn't want to be a writer, lawyer of teacher.

Vocation - A Trio

I've never been privy to the lazy mornings of the TV generation. Waking up is a quick and painful duty. Cracking the sleep from my joints I stand bruised in front of the mirror, counting my ribs in the half-light. It's 5:30 am and Pilates starts at 6. Jake's still in bed, a shifting mass of duvet resolutely on the left hand side. I can't remember the last time I wanted to reach out and touch him or even to talk to him . Mostly when we're together I just sit and stretch while he sits stoic at his laptop with eyes full of hurt; his frustration at sitting on the wrong side of the literary agent's desk taken out on its keys.

This is our life together; like the north and south hemispheres we coexist, revolving in harmony, but always separate. I bind my toes round with gauze, swaddling blisters and masking the bunions until I'm left with a clean canvas. Today I will create something a miraculous to justify the theatre rental and to prove wrong the ballet teacher, who told me I couldn't do it. I scrape my hair in to submission, driving pins in to the thinning coil of hair and look deep in to my own eyes, willing success to come from 28 years of life experience. Constanze said that dancing is like dreaming with your feet and it's been a long, long nightmare. Grabbing water and a banana I run for the tube.

***

It is a perfect morning on the Westminster Bridge. Sliding in to a minor cadence, I leave the small group of Nikon wielding tourists waiting for more and lean back against the balustrade. The air is clean and it sings in my lungs and caresses my cheeks. It's that early spring warmth which melts away the winter despondency; warming your chest and crowning green beauty with a rhapsody of blossom, I breathe it all in. The change falling in to my guitar case is superfluous noise as London composes its own never-ending soundtrack of bells and languages, traffic and water. Filled with the hope of the morning, I swing my guitar round and serenade the harassed commuters who are hurrying past with the good in the world, as told by Aerosmith.

'It's amazing , with the blink of an eye you finally see the light
It's amazing, when the moment arrives that you know you'll be alright'

***

09:06am and I'm still tired. 12 hours sleep, 3 cups of coffee and a 15 minute cycle won't shake the lethargy of a Monday morning. I wonder if perhaps this is what it feels like to be dying; to be slowly melting in to nothingness with no way out and no idea when it will end. Or maybe I'm dead already and passing time in purgatory by filling in God's paperwork, one author rejection at a time.

Dear Mr Patterson,

Further to your phone call, we would be delighted to read a sample of your manuscript with a view to representing your work. Please send an extract of no more than 50 pages, a brief summary and a covering letter to the address provided along with a self-addressed SAE for future correspondence.

Sincerely

<>

What I should really tell them is not to do it. Not to bastardize what is likely a terrible, generic but ultimately beloved manuscript in to 50 pages which will be skimmed by a bored intern, assigned two adjectives and returned to them in a A4 paper coffin whose weight will tell them that it's all over. It takes a certain cool callousness to do this job; the ability to detach human emotions and consequence from the sealing of the envelope, dismissing the tender memoirs of a grandfather as easily as an expose on cheating at the Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling Festival.

I don't think I'm cut out for this; this temporary job is taking over my life. My own writing is suffering, buried under the weight of all the rejections as I imagine each one I address landing on my doorstep. Every lunchtime I ignore the invitations to go out and live, curling in my chair and deleting page after page of what I had written the night before. There's always stuff to delete, born out of the ashes of my relationship with Anna, pages of hurt, tawdry in the light of day, cheapened by my lousy prose and clumsy metaphor. It tells the story of a writer who cannot write, but instead destroys the work of others and a dancer who dances around the truth of an injury which will never fully heal. Seeing her each evening, contorting her body in an attempt to regain the technique which age and a drunken motorcyclist have stolen from her breaks my heart, but the words which I find are no longer a language she can understand. The tragedy of our small lives is not lost on me but bows to the greater sadness of the world.

Perhaps it would be better if I went out today.

***

The lunchtime rush is about to begin and I'm singing Jerome Kern to an audience of confused teenagers. I continue, rising through a semitone and spiralling up through every note of the scale. This is a gift, exposing them to something new which is so old and so perfect in its construction; though it's a gift they refuse. They move off leaving a young couple behind, standing loosely apart as the diminuendo in to the final lines begins and I give them the words of Oscar Hammerstein,

'You are the angel glow that lights a star, the dearest things I know are what you are'

Their hands move unnoticed, bumping together and they look at each other as if they hardly realise what is happening.

' Someday my happy arms will hold you, and someday I’ll know that moment divine,

When all the things you are, are mine.'

As the final chord dies they smile in the sunlight, bound by the song and walk away, each wrapped in the perfection of the other.

***

Inhale and lengthen my spine. Feel each sinew separate and the muscles knit to control the movement; extend, extend, extend, tipping forwards in to beauty as my leg rises in an arc towards the ceiling. The perfect arabesque. Until I glance at the mirror and see the kink in what is supposed to be a straight line. This is the gift of the accident, a pelvic fracture and a deformed sacrum. My ballet will never be the same again and I've known for a year.

God! What am I doing? Am I really going to sell the apartment just to pay for a third class theatre to put on a show that I can't even perform? This isn't vocational anymore, it's deluded. Deranged. A lie. As I stand upright, the world falls in to focus, the sun is shining and I can hear music on the street. And I'm hungry, starving. I don't even pay for the studio before sprinting down the stairs to rejoin the world.

***

I sit down on a bench in the Victoria Tower Gardens and watch a pair of kids chasing each other around the Buxton fountain. I've always loved the fountain, especially the story it has to tell of freedom and of family. Today it glows against the sky, all the roof's little tiles wearing the sunlight, sparkling erratically where imperfections in the glaze refract the light. If ever there was a moment to write, this is it.

Ignoring the manuscripts in my bag I open up my Mac. I swear I can almost see the imprints of my fingers on the keys, the whole thing looks battered and tired matching itself perfectly to its owner. It strikes me as a sad comment on us all that you can identify a person more accurately by their appliances than by their hair colour or their clothes. Seems like we all look like our blackberries now instead of our dogs, I'm just a guy in a tired suit with a cardboard coffee cup working through lunch on his laptop .

Now that it's fully booted I hesitate to open the file, not wanting to sully the day with the imperfections of my writing. But I do it, beginning to read; there's no colour here. My work and I sit here, a dark spot on a postcard picture; conspicuous in our lack of vitality, our lack of life. I start to edit. Normally I cut out anything that I would reject in a submitted manuscript, but today I decide to cut out anything which is not real to me. I remove the forced sentences, delete the pretence and the dead hopelessness, the sections where nothing happens to anybody likeable. And I find myself staring at a blank page.

Nothing. Empty nothingness.

At a loss I close the laptop and pull out the scripts. The first, a story of a Polish immigrant whose brother transforms in to a dog, goes straight to the no pile. The next, Life as the Bird Flies, catches my eye as the sun slowly toasts me by the river.

***

In the mid afternoon lull the bridge is at its quietest. Pigeons search for the smallest scrap and take advantage of the lack of traffic to shake out their feathers in the sun. I strum a few chords with no one to sing to and serenade the day with David Gilmour's melody and the words of the bard,

'Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.'

***

Who am I if I am no longer a dancer? Ever since I was a little girl I've pictured myself dancing, alone on a stage framed by a single spotlight. I never imagined how lonely that spotlight could be; all-consuming and cold, holding you apart from not only other dancers but from everyone. Swallowing the last of the hot-dog I bought, I smile at the grease on my hands and marvel at my body's easy acceptance of long-forbidden carbs. On a whim I pull out my mobile, wanting to find Jake and tell him of my realisation, but then pause before pressing the button.

How must it have felt to live with me? After two blissful years of almost sickening happiness he watched me replace him with a guest soloist role at the Royal Ballet. But it was him who sat at my bedside for a month when the motorbike tore my body apart, taking a job he didn't want to pay for private surgery and my recovery. He must hate me. I would hate me.

I've been walking a while so I sit to take stock of where I am. It's the South Bank, quiet on a week day but still dotted with of entertainers and families. I sit on a bench absently running my fingers over the inscription, thinking of Jake and how to prove to him that the girl he fell in love with still exists.

The inscription says

'Dearest April,

Love sat here every Sunday for 52 years, but will be remembered forever.

Always yours, Jack.'

***

All the things I ever wanted to write but couldn't find the words to say; words of comfort and hope for Anna, an imagined future for myself, a lovingly crafted spectrum of emotion encompassing the history of human grace, tragedy and remembrance. There is a twinge of sadness as I realise that a long-cherished dream of writing may never be realised, but at the same time I feel a new faith in the ability of humanity to survive and flourish.

I will survive and I will flourish. I yank out my phone and dial the number on the front of the script. I tell the answering voice to send me the rest of the book post-haste and schedule a tentative meeting should the conclusion match the breathtaking opening. My first book, first author and I know I can succeed. I consider running back to the office, to start planning my new life; mentally listing publishers, potential reviewers and readings at Foyle's. But I decide to wait for the rest of the script. Instead I begin to walk along the river bank towards Covent Garden determined to find Anna, and to make her look me in the eye. Tonight is either the end or the beginning for the two of us; I'm scared that it's the end, she's been so far away but I can't live like this anymore.

***

An hour later and I'm still sitting on the bench, palm resting on Jack's everlasting love letter. I'd never really thought before about how long life was, and how beautiful it could be. A little girl in a pink dress and tiny ballet shoes runs across my consciousness. I try to block out the memories, squeezing my eyes tight shut and to imagine the future instead of the past. The tiny dancer stubbornly trips across the floor, arms raised to her father and it's Jake scooping her up and holding her close, kissing the auburn curls. He crosses the room smiling at someone and I see myself, the dance teacher, healthy and happy, watching my daughter and her father together. I don't want to open my eyes and break the picture but as a pigeon brushes my leg the spell is over. I sit a moment longer with ancient love at my back and a tentative future before me and then start to walk towards Westminster Bridge.

***

She looks as though she's sleepwalking; tiny steps and a detached expression, ballet shoes dangling from their ribbons in one hand. He's just watching her. I think they know each other, or at least they used to but I can't read his expression. I'm struggling to find the right song to make things right for them. It's melancholic but beautiful, a song of hope and recovery and I can't think of it. I search her face, delicate features picked out in a pale ecru, eyes shadowed and almost violet in the sunshine. Something more or maybe less than human in her manner, she leans on the railings dangling her shoes over the drop and closes her eyes.

I find the song, Sarah McLachlan's Angel, and as I strum out the opening lines I see a tiny smile.

'Spend all your time waiting, for that second chance, for a break that would make it okay There's always a reason, to feel not good enough, and it's hard at the end of the day'

I'm glad that she knows it, and I see him mouthing along eyes fixed on the side of her face, where her beauty is cut by a cheekbone sharpened with hunger. When a passer-by brushes her elbow, my fingers tighten on the frets, as if they could break her. I see him take a step forward too but still he's unsure. The verse's not enough, so I roll in to the chorus, pouring a lifetime of small moments in to the words,

'In the arms of the angels, fly away from here.

From this dark cold hotel room and the endlessness that you fear.'

But it falls short, she won't turn around and he's taken a step back again. Desperate I reach for inspiration and with a rush of breath I leap up on the balustrade. Someone shrieks and she turns around and darts towards me as he does the same. Feigning obliviousness I deliver the last two lines and leave them to end their story.

'You are pulled from the wreckage, of your silent reverie.

You're in the arms of the angels, may you find some comfort here'.

***

She's a body width away from me and looking at me in a way I barely remember.

'Anna', I reach a few millimetres in to the gap between us and she's in my arms, tiny and broken but all mine again. She doesn't say anything but just breathes in to me, filling my chest with her warmth. She fumbles for my hand, unsure of a welcome and I take it without hesitating.

As we turn to leave I see her pointe shoes are still on the railing. She sees me looking, tugs on my hand and with a smile she says,

'Jake, leave them there'.

Three Wishes

1. That everybody would stop moving. The summer is spreading people across the world and there's always that feeling of loss. Some are moving physically, others just flit between friend and stranger. People should stay still and stay the same. Whatever is the truth I want to be treated like the same person in all company, at all times of day and night.

2. A euromillions win.

3. That I could decide what it is that I want. I need direction, need a path. Without blowing my own trumpet I'm pretty good at whatever I do. I'm an excellent waitress, a damn good student, I leave the other interns miles behind, but I keep finding myself moving in a circle. I'm so frustrated I could cry. I can't seem to get beyond where I was last summer, and I thought I had. With work, planning, money, men, there's a circularity and it's really scaring me.

Conceit

–noun

1.

an excessively favorable opinion of one's own ability,importance, wit, etc.

2.

something that is conceived in the mind; a thought; idea: He jotted down the conceits of his idle hours.

3.

imagination; fancy.

I am conceited. I create conceits to protect my vanity. We are a conceit of my wandering mind.

1. I long to be the best, to be the ultimate. To be the one who is remembered and praised. I carry myself bold-faced among the rich and famous, tray held steady, the best goddamned waitress in all the world. Lady in waiting, waiting for the chance to be more than I am. Vainly anticipating my own advancement, privileged and cold.

2. At the station building a little story around a coffee cup meet-cute which ended abruptly when it became too real. My dancefloor syndrome replicates, I'm too afraid to advance anything beyond the meaningless impulse of a kiss in the dark, or a quick chat. But in my mind, these things meander on.

3. And under it all there's you circling. A friend who is both more and less than a friend. I think you talk in riddles, or am I just reading between the lines and making something out of nothing. I cant seem to let it go, in moments of weakness I move, and the old spark flies again, before fading against the light of truth. But some days, I imagine it's not just a spark but the first sliver of a glorious sunrise which burns away all the conceit and my fear, and leaves us standing there for at least a little while.

XX

Creative Writing Assignment

This term's creative writing module is a weird one, but as I spent a fair period working on this I decided I may as well pop it up.

The brief was for a 1500 word autobiographical story, relating what seemed, in retrospect, a defining moment.

Sparrowhawk.

It was one of those nights where the very air seems thick. An unhealthy orange pall diffused from the streetlamp and settled thickly on the courtyard, reducing the contrast of green varnished doors and white walls to a vague stripe. The light quality is the thing I remember most clearly, its levelling effect broken only by the metal dustbins which stood in the centre of the space. These glowed dully, refracted images carried to my feet by the thin layer of water which always remained, no matter how long the rain stayed away. I hated the courtyard. Spiders lived behind those doors, brushes and mops and spiders. I avoided it when possible.

But today was bin day. I had the bedroom bin, and I was cross. It was cold and damp here and I'd had to put my shoes on, which meant a battle with the laces and with my mother about the laces. The resulting knot was loopy and trailing in the wet, and I knew that I was going to have to touch it when we went back indoors. I was cross. Waiting, barely higher than the bins, absently crushing the red berries of the overhanging yew with my toe, the first thing I heard was the thud.

I spun, fighting a brief but perilous battle for balance with the now undone shoelace, and saw nothing. Nothing? But something had happened, I was sure of it. From her five foot five vantage point, mother was my scout, and following her gaze, I saw it.

Crumpled on the top of a wheelie bin lay an enormous bird. Fallen from the sky, one wing so abstract in its brokenness that a childish instinct to fix had me moving forward, hand outstretched. This was not the birds of my window box, or of my grandparents' orchard, darting for crumbs one moment and the next a 'V' in the sky. This was a museum bird, striped and mottled, cruel eyes, hooked beak, fixed in position and unable to move. It didn't matter how many times my father told me that these were birds who ate other birds, even the babies, I admired these savages, wondered at their way of living, jealous of their wings, and pitying them in their immobility. But those birds were dead. My bird was alive.

Moments from contact, I paused. Perhaps it was my mother's shout, or the bird's eyes. Wide and yellow, they regarded me with no fear, me the giant, great clumsy fingers reaching towards its broken wing. Seconds passed, and it never blinked, just watched defiant, confused, banished from the sky. The chest rose and fell, so quickly, I tried to match its breathing, panting, and failed. My mother took my hand and I flinched, so isolated had I been in my vigil as she pulled me towards the door. But I wouldn't go, what did I care if it was damp and cold, or that my shoe was undone or that I was in pyjamas. I needed to fix my bird. She sighed and called for my father.

A sparrowhawk, he said. My sparrow hawk, mightier than the urban sparrows, hunting them as they scrounge crumbs on the pavement. Lost, he said. Oughtn't to be in the city, or even in the night, they are country birds, day birds, sky birds. Why was my bird here? Why did it fall?

Another move towards the indoors, this time the sparrowhawk came too. Covered in a towel, lifted oh so gently in to a box, in to the light. It looked so small now, edged in pink towelling, trapped by cardboard and walls and a ceiling. I wondered if my bird had ever seen a ceiling, what it must be like to travel upwards, without boundaries, without gravity and stupid short legs which could only jump so high before tumbling down again. Whatever my bird thought, it did not blink, only lay still, chest fluttering, its yellow stare challenging, but cloudier than it had seemed in the darkness.

There was a plate of chicken in the fridge, raw, waiting for dinner time. I had eaten fish fingers already. The chicken was a special meal for my parents, a treat, leaner times called for emptier tables, but my mother took it, and cut it up for my sparrowhawk. I knew then that more was broken than his wing.

Next came one of those silences where even as a child, you know that something is being communicated that you are not supposed to understand. Through the partition wall I could hear my father on the phone, in the dining room, nothing but breathing. I watched the hawk lying still and grave, a strip of meat inches from its beak. Another swayed from my mother's fingers, pink on pink, a metronome as uneven as the bird's breath marking the seconds until something happened. Something must be going to happen. This was our world, our house, where the things my mother and father wanted came to be. My faith in their ability to heal was absolute.

Then suddenly as the bird had fallen, everything started to move. Winter coats and gloves. Car keys. The bird borne to the back seat. Hurried exchanges of foreign sounding words. Toxicity, decline, RSPB, quickly, quickly. We drove outwards, away from the house and from the city, pools of lamplight giving way to the subtler tones of the moon. On the seat next to me lay my sparrowhawk, a shadow in the box with a single shining eye. As we pressed deeper in to the landscape the night grew wilder, calling the hawk home, winds tugging hopefully at the car.

But wilderness was not our destination. The prim Georgian property which awaited us seemed even less suited to the savage we were carrying than our city flat. Striding towards the car, a man who seemed an extension of the house, tall, angular and impressive, this was the bird doctor. Glancing in to the box with a brief noise of concern, he gathered us in to the house before drawing my father and my bird in to a separate room. Minutes passed, me gazing at my shoes, mother picking at her fingernails, both straining against the silence to hear an explanation of the bird's condition which would justify our presence in the home of a stranger at midnight. A lifetime later my father and the bird doctor returned. Words told me to return in the morning, how lucky it was that I had found the bird, that the doctor was the best, but their faces told me that this would not be a happy ending.

Back at home my mother asked if I wanted to sleep in her bed. I told her no, I wanted to be by myself, to think and to dream, but sleep never arrived. Morning broke in a washed out fashion, the sky dowdy and the air wet. Returning to the country we were flanked by other vehicles, by people, it was not the same place I had been before. Arriving at the bird doctor's house we were greeted by a tiny shake of the head. I understood, but pressed forwards anyway, desperate to see for myself. For the first time I saw my sparrowhawk in the light of day. Tawny wings rearranged in a semblance of nature, the chestnut breast fringed with white, it was utterly still. This was a different bird now, a dead bird. I asked if I could bury it, but the doctor said that it wasn't safe, that someone had poisoned my hawk, and that he needed to keep it. It didn't matter. My bird wasn't there anymore.

Gone away. Alone in the box my bird lay dead. Deader than the birds of the museum, the stillness of its chest made my own heart beat harder, willing the hawk's to flutter back in sympathy. I looked at my parents looking at my sparrowhawk, they seemed smaller than they had before, standing with joined hands braced against a lost battle. And then they looked at me, a measuring look which would lead to sugared half-truths that would soften the blow of the new understanding which the night had delivered. In the box the yellow eyes had closed. I closed my eyes and breathed in.

And opened them again. This was not a bird to be pitied. In death, as in life my hawk lay proud and beautiful, resolute in his refusal to regress from hunter to prey. Poisoned or not, here was the end of the food chain. In spite of myself I felt a tear forming and defiant, I crouched down and began to retie my shoe. A crisp knot, loop, tight twist, and pull through. I checked, it was all connected, all entwined. Far from the paisley carpet the wings of my knotted bow stood secure, ready for the journey home. Reaching out one hand, I gently stroked my bird's head, from the beak to the back of the firmly feathered neck. Breathing out, I smiled, turned away and walked onwards.

Disappointment

Can be a grey cloud on the perfect day. However loosely you hope for something, when it becomes certain that it won't happen it can put a damper on a beautiful day.

And no matter how much you see both sides of the story, you have to let it go. Breathe.

Go out in to the sunshine, smile and get on with it.

Because face it Beth, this is what you love.

XX

How to: Start a riot and upset the bandwagon.

I have been extremely amused over the past couple of days by heated debate which this article triggered. http://www.wessexscene.co.uk/features/2011/01/04/say-no-to-nestle/

In the 48 hours since its publication, the huge volume of commentary and hatred directed towards it and its author has staggeringly overwhelmed any positive/negative implication of the issue at hand, and so, without further ado I give you How to start a riot, lose the plot, become hated, become loved, overshadow the issue at hand and achieve very little but become a legend of sorts. (As a note, I bear no malice to anybody involved, and hold great respect for some, but still find the whole thing pretty hilarious).

1. Create a persona. This need not be who you really are, in fact it helps if it is disingenuous as this will give your supporters/critics a label to throw around or vehemently reject. Ways to achieve this include sit ins, student rallies, political heckling, paint throwing etc. This must be as high profile as possible or else people will struggle to find the relevant information when attacking you.

2. Choose a cause. This should be well known so that people can consider themselves informed enough to disagree with you. Check if there's information on google about it so that people who want to get angry and righteous can find some basic information and get involved without having to work hard. It must be something people can get sympathetic over, African babies, kittens, alcohol prices, tuition fees, Asian babies, babies in general and global warming are good places to start. Avoid anything religious, political, foreign or globally relevant as this will alienate the less informed haters, and also spoil the later comparisons which some pompous numpty will inevitably provide.

3. Write an article/make a petition/impassioned speech, in a heavily biased, didactic tone, and post it somewhere exposed with an amusing picture and an inflammatory headline. This way lots of people who otherwise wouldn't care will find it and make it their duty to join the discussion. Don't include too many facts, especially statistics, as people are uncomfortable disagreeing with numbers which may actually prove them wrong.

4. Have lots of friends/frenemies. These will support you when people begin to attack you personally after they get bored of shredding your arguments. They will also 'like' the link to your story on facebook and twitter and spread the rage/adulation amongst their own circle of friends.

5. Sit back and watch the fireworks. If you have successfully completed the above four steps, then by now you probably have a fan club (composed largely of the member of the step 4 brigade) and a hate page. At best, the original issue will be buried under allegations of agenda,brand hatred and personal attacks, and will be briefly supported/trashed for the duration of the bunfight. At worst you will have created enough opposition that whatever you were arguing for will inevitably be blocked by people who want to do what you were fighting against, people who enjoy being difficult and people who just don't like you very much.

Either way, you become a legend (for 15 seconds), but it may well be to the detriment of your cause.

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The Naked Truth

Dishonesty is a way of life. Simple, convenient and awful.

I cannot remember the last time I went a day without wilfully concealing something or misleading someone. Whether this arises from a need to protect myself, to shield others or simply to make life easier, it is something that never ends. While I am far from a pathological liar, I hate that I accept dishonesty as a convenience on a daily basis.

As the first untruth that passes your lips more must follow, to conceal the first foray in to the realm of the not quite true. And by the naively experienced age of 19, you are surrounded by people and circumstances who only know as much of you as you dared to show them at first, and now believe in somebody who doesn't really exist.

From here on out, I want a detox. If I can change my body by controlling my exertion and diet, why can't I take down my façade by controlling what leaves my mouth. I feel false, and I want to be clean again. I know that removing the trace of all lies is impossible, people who have departed will forever believe the stories I spun them years ago. Doubtless I will lie again. But from this moment onward, I am vowing to myself that I will practice truth with my words to the best of my incredibly flawed ability.

Starting here, a few truths, unexpressed or previously twisted, for some clarity at bed time.

1. I am constantly afraid that the fragile balance I have found between home and university will be ended by a disaster at either end.

2. I hate Ricky Gervais. He is an idiot, whether or not I have ever watched The Office.

3. Last week I skipped work to sit alone in the living room eating crackers, my granddad is ill, but I wasn't with him.

4. That I very occasionally look at a facebook profile picture for a couple of minutes and appreciate very good looks whilst contemplating the poor timing of the summer holiday.

5. I exaggerate anecdotes in an attempt to impress teachers.

6. I never read A.J Ayer fro my IB coursework, thanks for the A though!

7. You were number 2 in male influence, but I thought you might be hurt given how bummed you seemed the day before.

8. I am obsessed with certain television shows and cyber stalk my favourite actresses until I move on.

9. I have never been in love, despite having told past boys otherwise.

10. I always hope that the people who occasionally filter in to my blog will read it, then am simultaneously terrified when they do, and relieved when they fail to recognize that they appear more than once.

Life Carries On

Today the ceiling fell in. Again.

I also stewed apples and made pork with apple ginger and shallot compote.

Then I did laundry.

It seems strange to think that for 5 days, your life can stop. Everything which usually spins by so fast, is thrown in to focus in a sickening jolt. The eye of the storm is a strange place to stand, with chaos in every direction, where stillness gives you the time to recognize the many places you can fall down and disappear.

And when the spinning starts, it is almost a blessing to forget the cliff edge for the moments it takes to make a gingerbread man, to iron a shirt or even to try and stop the ceiling falling in.

The forgetting process proves that time stops for no man. Tomorrow doesn't care if its arrival is dreaded, it just keeps ticking on, callous in its refusal to acknowledge even the most beloved in their moment of pain.

Life just carries on.

Bleak House

Yesterday I walked in the valley in the shadow of death. I was afraid.

I came home to escape from the hell-hole my life had become in the last week, and was confronted with a more terrifying reality. What happens, when a part of your framework can no longer stand? The rest tumbles in is what.

I have spent the last two days in and out of a hospital, watching somebody I love more than myself fight his way back from the edge. To see someone so big, and immortal, looking so very small and vulnerable makes everything else meaningless. This is the farce of the hospital. The wards in visiting time are full of people, hiding their pain from their loved ones, to save them pain. The loved ones hide their terror, to help the patient. In the corridors, behind closed curtains, both parties can silently break. The empty sobs of an old man, holding on for his young. The silent tears of a son, wiped away for a brave face to hide the truth which is death. Because there, the only constant companion is death, whether you can escape it, or welcome it as an escape, it is there. And all we can do is push it away for those few minutes, and live that lie.

Even the tiny light of the maternity ward, cannot illuminate the darkness of the crying football team outside intensive care. Through those hospital doors, the immortal, the youthful and the brave, become so many dearly loved pieces in a cruel game of give and take.

Dear God, whatever you are. Please give him back to us.

Amen

Small Beauties and Secret Places

Life, for the most part, goes by in shades of grey. Days roll together, not happy or sad, just happening as the things we have to do fill up the hours. But within all this averageness, there lie those things which can make life beautiful. Some of them are planned, holidays, birthdays, the fruition of long laid plans, all of these are wonderful in their place, but nothing compares to the magical moment in which you experience a small beauty.

Dozing off in the sunshine in the library and waking to a sunset, catching leaves as they blow off the trees in the garden, sitting at the piano and picking out a tune. It is these moments that make me so profoundly grateful for the life I am lucky enough to lead.

But when the shine fades, and I'm left without direction, I can run to my secret places. The secret places are not necessarily private, perhaps they even hold little beauty to other people, but they are the places I love. A windy hillside, a bookshop, the end of a garden, the top of the world, or just a bench hidden in the middle of a busy world where I can sit and think, and catch a leaf from the liquid amber above me. And then looking at the leaf burning red in my hand, I remember the beauty in the world, and I can get up, and move on.
XX

The Way We Write

Yesterday somebody asked me why I began writing this blog, and I had to think about it. I am not a person who writes with agenda, I do not aspire to be a great writer, I have no expectation that my words will change the course of history, or if they will even make sense to those who stumble upon them. And yet I write.

Some days I write for self discovery, to force me to be cogent in my thoughts. The process of typing arranges whispers of ideas in to a web and holds them for me to better understand. But this is not the reason.

Some days I write for the beauty of words. The structure of a sentence, for the glory of expression. It is on days such as these that I am staggered that there are so many to whom this simple means of expression is denied, and the idea that 200 years ago, I would have been one of them fills me with a sense of how blessed I have been. Worthy though this is, it is still not the reason.

On rare occasions, I write for somebody else. A message in a bottle, with little chance of reaching its intended subject, and a slighter yet chance of being understood, so cryptically do I package it for my own protection. The thought that they may read it, understand it, understand me, is a motivation and a fear. But it is not the reason.

The reason is this. I cannot let my life pass undocumented. One of over 6 billion tiny pieces in an enormous game of win and lose, I am essentially unimportant. I have no idea at what point my life may be ended, but should it be tomorrow, I know I will have lived without having left behind anything which will transcend the memories of those who have known me. This is true of most people who have lived and died on this earth. But I cannot accept this as a certainty. In writing myself, I am putting a little of my life in to the ether, where should I disappear, it will remain. It is likely that that is where this simple memoir of a simple girl will remain, but should chance favour me with just one person reading this in my absence, then for that moment, I will live again, and I will be remembered.

Flesh is transient, but words, especially virtual, indelible and quietly desperate words will linger on. Unnoticed perhaps, but with the hope of one day being uttered again. And this, this sad little truth, is why I write.

XX