little.red.boat.

Thursday, October 31, 2002

There are two kinds of people in the world.
People who look good in costume, and people who don't.

People who look good in costume do it as often as possible, as flamboyantly as possible, and make everyone else look terrible in comparison.

Most of the world, or at least most of Britain, is made up of the other kind of person.
The kind that wastes three rolls of cooking foil to dress as a triangular dairylea slice.
The kind that writes 'ce n'est pas une costume' on a vest and makes do.
The kind that claims to be in costume as a lightbulb, further claiming to be getting turned on...

I went to a party once as Kurt Cobain, and managed to end up offending several people.
I made one girl cry.

Sorry, did I say as Kurt Cobain? I know that doesn't sound so offensive, but think about it, the water-pistol shotgun filled with Vodka Tonic, the artfully red streaked hair sticking up from one point at the back of the head...
It wasn't, I admit, terribly tasteful.

Not at that particular party.

But come on, who has a renewal of vows on Halloween?

I thought 'come as you are' was an oblique instruction for a themed costume party...

So I'm going as Isadora Duncan this year. Much more tasteful.
Now if you'll excuse me, I just have to go and attend to my neck...

Thursday, October 31, 2002 |

Wednesday, October 30, 2002

...Big, dirty, oyster.

It's a phrase, been running through my head all day. No, scratch that first bit, it's not a phrase at all, if it were a phrase I would have heard it before, at some point.

The world is your oyster...
Is a phrase.
London would be their big dirty oyster.
Is not.
It's the product of a sick mind.

Sorry, I said 'sick mind', there. I meant to say,
It's the product of a BBC Political Correspondent.

I'll put this in context for you.
I was watching the BBC last night, they were having a parlimentary debate on whether it would be a good idea to move to more 'normal' working hours, you know, 10 - 7 or something, rather than what they work now.
2am til 4am.
Or something.
Anyway, not the point.
So the BBC Political Correspondent is talking about these reforms, and why it might be a good idea or a bad idea, and the main reason he could come up with against it was;

"Well, the fear among the Labour whips, and I should think among some spouses too, is that if they finish work at seven and get tipped out into the city so early in the evening, the whole of London is their big dirty oyster, and goodness knows what will happen."

Paraphrasing only slightly, although 'big dirty oyster' was definitely mentioned, and left me with the impression that what this Political Corresponent was saying, with a big leery look on his face and everything, is that the only reason that every single member of parliment isn't out on the streets, shgging, cock-fighting, snorting all manner of things and frightening old ladies is because they're forced to work late.

Because apparently, otherwise, they'd be out there, doing all those things.
So, basically, they're in detention. They can't get out without a note from their mum.
Until now.

Because now, if we follow the logic, we should be afraid. The reforms have been passed.
Lock up your daughters and clear the streets of London after seven at night, the MP's are roaming the streets.
The streets of their big, dirty, oyster.

Wednesday, October 30, 2002 |

I'm kind of in downtime at the moment, so this explains if I can't write so good.
This is no kind of excuse, don't get me wrong.
I'm working out how I now relate to this piece of writing that has nothing different to offer than any other blog or journal in the world.

Everyone lives in cities, everyone knows this shit, what more can I say on the matter?
I seem to be dropping hits all the time, but whether that's because I can't write anymore or what I neither know nor care at the moment.
What I need is katharsis, and writing doesn't feel very Kathartic, (before anyone points out spelling things, I try my best. And that was how it was spelt in some translation of Aristotle's 'poetics' I was reading, anyway...) at the moment, or what I need is...
I don't know what I need.

A glass of wine and a damn good shag.
But what's new?

Wednesday, October 30, 2002 |

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

100 Great Britons, in response to the BBC's version. In no particular order...

1. William Shakespeare.
2. John Webster.
3. Charles Darwin
4. Ezra Pound
5. my friend Bruce.
6. Christina Rosetti.
7. David Shrigley.
8. My mum.
9. Paul Whittaker
10. William J Turner
11. my sister.
12. my sister's boyfriend.
13. Gerry.
14. Eric Morecombe.
15. Eddie Izzard.
16. Nick Drake
17. Juliette
18. Sophie
19. Leah
20. Nick
21. Diarmuid Gavin
22. my brother; his girlfriend; my dad.
23. Tibor Fischer
24. Lizz and David Patterson.
25. Jeremy Paxman
26. Rod Liddle
27. Brian Patten
28. Roger McGough
29. John Fuller
30. Adrian Henri
31. John (and Katrina).
32. Damien Hirst.
33. Richard Long.
34. Roald Dahl
35. John Donne.
36. WH Auden.
37. The bloke in the Binns Newsagents in New Mills.
38. Quentin Blake
39. People who work in hospitals.
40. Mr Owen, my secondary school French teacher.
41. Ms Howard, English Literature.
42. Mr Lord, Maths.
43. Mr Thompson
44. Mrs Coutts.
45. Sheila Emmanuel.
46. Tracy Emin.
47. Stephen Hawkings.
48. Adrienne, my tutor.
49. Ted Hughes, (for his translation of the Orestia and the poem 'Full moon and Little Frieda').
50. Margaret & Griff.
51. Hannah & Rachel.
52. Jimi Mistry
53. Ross Noble.
54. William Shakespeare.
55. Richard Harris.
56. Alexander Clements.
57. Graham Coxon.
58. Sir Ian McKellan (from Burnley).
59. Stuart Galligan.
60. People who write good childrens stories.
61. Judi Dench.
62. Douglas Adams.
63. Toria, Rachel, Rachel, David, Laura.
64. Damon Albarn.
65. Boudicca.
66. Simon Hattenstone.
67. John Peel.
68. John O'Farrell.
69. Steve.
70. Wendy Cope.
71. Eddi Reader.
72. Bea Nilson. (Bea Arthur's on the next list)
73. John Bell.
74. Nick Park
75. Anthony Sher.
76. Mary Wollstonecraft.
77. My nana.
78. window cleaners.
79. David Bowie
80. William Shakespeare.
81. Miranda Richardson.
82. Maggie Smith.
83. Brik.
84. Teachers.
85. Brian Woodcock
86. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
87. People who set crosswords.
88. James King.
89. Johnny, Pip, Philip, Others.
90. Paul Boteng.
91. me.
92. William Shakespeare.
93. Nice people.
94. Aunties Les, Hil, Ruth, Karen and Mary.
95. Uncles, Peter, John and Tony.
96. Beatrix Potter.
97. Moira Stuart.
98. People who work behind bars.
99. You. (if you're British)
100. Everyone you know. (If they are).
101. A whole bunch of other people, several million, lets say.

I know people like lists, but come on... 100 great Britons? When the list could viably include people like my Mum and Maggie O'Kane, my friend, a doctor in A&E;, and concievably any member of the spice girls, how could I possibly bring myself to vote for Lady Di or Michael Crawford?

Tuesday, October 29, 2002 |

I haven't got the energy.
It's raining.
It's been raining for more than a week.
I thought that rainclouds held rain, dropped rain, and then were empty of rain, ready to fill up with rain once more.
It's simplistic, but that's the way I like things.
How in that case, can the sky simply open and pour upon a whole big city hour after hour after hour of rain?
it rains and it rains and rains.
Leaves that crackled underfoot a week ago, now slippery and rotting into mulch.

I haven't got the energy.
I am getting all wet.
There does not seem to be anywhere to shelter.
I have not got the energy to run. It wouldn't help.

Tuesday, October 29, 2002 |

I had the best day.
There are days, so far, when I've come home questioning,
there are days when I've come home grumbling,
whining,
ranting,
tired.

Today I came home dancing.
And singing. And punning.

I just had a good day.
My seminar was fantastic, my tutorial rocked and the library was sweet.
It rained for 95% of the day but never on me, and best of all, I didn't get shat on.

I will get shat on.
It will be the polar opposite of this day, and it will be the thing that breaks me.

You see, there's this bridge that I have to go under on the way to school.
There was another bridge, just like it, on the way to another school, 20 years ago.

It's a bridge. With added pigeons.
Little fuckers that they are.
Rats with wings, flying diseases.
Living under bridges, train and car bridges that, when they rattle, as carriage bridges will, cause the nesting vermin to shit.

A bunch.
Twice in the last week, I've almost slipped, walking under the bridge, on slippery pigeonshit.

And I know that one day, one day just when I need it least, one day, they will shit on me.
Or, more probably, on a day where I've been ostracised, dismissed, rejected and confused elsewhere, I will walk under that bridge,
slip in one of the enormous piles of guano that gather there,
land in birdshite,
and then be shat upon.

And then one of them will land on me.
And give me the plague.

But not today.

Tuesday, October 29, 2002 |

I can't decide.
I quite like the bar, I quite like the clientele, but

To me, and it may be infantile, but,
a bar staff that don't even smile when asked then question

"Hi, do you have Nuts?"
Make me uneasy about the whole place...
I could be wrong.

Tuesday, October 29, 2002 |

Monday, October 28, 2002

I just nearly got run over trying to light my cigarette on the edge of a busy street.

So there we are, proof. Smoking really is potentially deadly.

Monday, October 28, 2002 |

Sunday, October 27, 2002

ilhu ehuiresroj sodihf zolp;edn987okp k0piojJOJOPJ
xduhvD oihn
b

The post above was typed by a kitten.

Sunday, October 27, 2002 |

It was another one of those 'in my head; 4, Reality; 0' games of the season.

A lecture on 'how to use the library' by one of the most pleasant, unassuming librarians in the world - and god knows there've got to be a few of them.
And yet, every ten minutes of his pleasant, unassuming talk, ( to which I was trying to listen, I swear...)
some other alternate ending to a sentence would appear in my head and I'd want to laugh.

"So, obviously the Cambridge Reference book here is best used for" .... "killing big fat hairy spiders" ... "research into individual dramatists."

"...And the ninth floor of the library is where you'll find" ... "acned students losing their virginity behind the periodicals stack" ... "biography."

I have to say, the worst moment, (or best, if you ask my head) was when, having spoken so long in the middle of a powerpoint presentation, his screen saver was displayed 7-foot-high on the wall.

And replacing the screensaver actually there (the time in times roman, I think), my head immediately produced several, more comedy screen savers that could have appeared...
"I (heart) Buttplugs",
or
"Who's been a very naughty librarian?",
or
a naked picture of Bea Arthur,
or
a quickflash of rhinos humping,
or
"remember: bread, milk, hava beans, chianti, mouthwash".

The very thing that someone wouldn't want to appear behind them in a situation where they're being taken seriously, that's what I want to have appeared.
It didn't, of course.

But, Damn, I'm sure there's a scene to be written there somewhere...

Sunday, October 27, 2002 |

I've just wasted two and a half hours of my life watching 'The top 100 thrillers of all time'
Not only half scaring myself to death a dozen times,
and not being able to concentrate on the worthy play I was meant to be reading,

but also ruining for myself the twist at the end of 50 films that I have not yet seen.

Well, two and a half hours down, I guess that's a bunch of hours I don't need to spend watching those films...

Sunday, October 27, 2002 |

Saturday, October 26, 2002

Forced to watch Annie this afternoon, and found myself quiet disquietened by it.

It's a millionaire falling in love with a lower class ten-year-old tart with a heart, that he pays for.
He orders a child to come and live with him for a week.
He may do this weekly, we don't know, but he gets home-delivery orphans.

I have issues with this.
And the music also sucks, but I can't really make a high moral point about that, it just sucks.

Saturday, October 26, 2002 |

Having one of those 'bemused by the brain' evenings brought on by gin, this evening.
Don't worry, I have these every now and again.
They won't last. (mind like a sieve, you see...)

And it's my mind like a sieve that bothers me.

I can't remember primary school. I think that perhaps I should, other people seem to. I don't. I can remember the map of my house completely, but ask me to remember people or events before I was about 19 and names and faces fly through my head and I can just about grab hold of some...
I don't know if this is right.
I've a feeling it's wrong, but everyone else seems to be able to remember with Kodak-Klarity.

Anyway, this was not the point, the point was this.
When can you be said to have 'stopped thinking' about a person?

Certainly, every now and again, you are forced to remember an aquaintance or colleague that for years hasn't entered your thoughts, but do you ever stop thinking about people?
The people you care about? Anyone, in fact, surely once they're in your head they're there.
For good.
Or until your head gets cut off.
I find myself thinking about the people who I've known and have meant something to me often.
Even people I've not talked to in yonks.
They'll flit through my head as often as those I spoke to yesterday...

But since, in all these books I've read, not thinking about someone anymore is a sign that one doesn't love them anymore,
But if you always - even fleetingly, think about someone, about many other 'someone's in fact,
does this mean you're still in love with them?
Or does it just mean your head is full of junk?

Saturday, October 26, 2002 |

blogger hates me, and is refusing to post anything, and I don't know why, because I haven't done anything wrong and blogger's got no reason to strop so.
Of course, if you can read this, you'll be witnessing the fact that
a) blogger will post stuff, and
b) I'm prone to the occasional hissy fit.

In the meantime - why does blogger hate me!? not fair!
I don't want to play any more.
Nobody loves me, everybody hates me...

Saturday, October 26, 2002 |

Friday, October 25, 2002

One of my professors is called Dr Bottoms.
teeheeheeheehee.

I don't want to find that funny, but I do.
It's infantile, and silly, but sometimes so am... The 9-year-old I live with told me off today for being childish.

Teeheehee.
Bottoms.
You can see why he didn't go into High School Teaching.
But then, I suppose if you've lived with it so long... A friend of mine had a teacher called Mr Cool.
Who wasn't, apparently.
I always used to believe that there were some names with which one simply shouldn't go into teaching.
With my reaction to professor Bottoms (teeheeheeheehee) I can see that my position may not have changed.

Teachers with funny names. Did I have any?
I can't remember. Did you?

Friday, October 25, 2002 |

Thursday, October 24, 2002

if anyone feels they have too much time to spare in their lives, you could happily waste a little bit of it reading the official report from the Scottish Parliment for me, because I've not myself enough time to propery digest my lunch and this.

I did scan the relevant paragraphs though (somewhere in the low thousands), and was amused by

a)One Member of Scottish Parliment calling the Arts Minister and his colleagues 'A bunch of luvvies', and

b) the following exchange;

Allan Wilson (deputy minister for sports, the arts and culture): ...The more culturally astute members will have recognised that my speech so far has been liberally littered with literary references.

Mr Kenneth Gibson (Glasgow) (SNP): Say that again.

Allan Wilson: That is easy for you to say.

If they'd told me this was going to be funny I'd have read it days ago...

Thursday, October 24, 2002 |

"You've got such lovely skin. And so much of it..."

there are rewards for telling me where this line comes from.
It's still on a loop in my head and it's killing me.

I'll give you prizes...

Thursday, October 24, 2002 |

So last night I dreamt that I was competing in a Decathlon.
But I couldn't dredge up many more sports than swimming, running, and cycling.
So the decathlon I competed in, and eventually won, comprised of competitions in;
swimming, running, cycling, reading out loud, mud wrestling, playing the piano, trapeze, egg-and-spoon race, sneezing and algebra.
There was something else too, or perhaps another couple of things, but I can't remember what they were...

Thursday, October 24, 2002 |

So, the bank is taking fifteen days to process my application because they don't believe that where I used to live exists.
The island or the abbey.
How does that work?
Well, lets see, their postcode system, the some one used by the post office, is denying the existence of my old address, so they have to spend the next 12 days trying to work out what to do about it.
Does my old address exist?
Well of course it does, I could prove it.
I have photos.

But no, they don't want photos.
They want to spend 12 days on a comupter that doesn't believe that something that exists, exists.
And then they'll come back to me and refuse to open an account because if it.
And I'll in the meantime, spend an hour more on hold and an hour more on the phone trying to....

I f***ing hate banks. I hate money, I hate banks...
I hate the fact that they make me so f***ing angry.

Thursday, October 24, 2002 |

yet each man kills the thing he loves

I hate the theatre tonight.
I know that's a irrational thing to say, and I know also that I don't mean it.
But I hate the theatre tonight.

I haven't been, I realised, for a long time, not to see a proper play. I've seen musicals, but, well, you know...
So I went, I got a free ticket, because the play was on at the theatre that (since yesterday) I work at, so I went. On my own, I went. Full hearted and quite excited, I went.

I'd heard good things, and I understood that the reviews had been really quite excellent.

Well, either I'm stupid, or it actually was shite.

I've calmed down over the last couple of hours, but my summary would still be something like -

1. Overly clever-clever North American play...
2. converted to non-specific British setting with little thought for language shifts. A glaswegian saying "get outta here, bud" sounds wrong, and could easily be adjusted. "Get... Out of... here... pal." It's not hard.
3. Mumbling. fuckwits. These people will have spent at least three years learning how to project their voices, the least a director can do is say; "I understand that you're feeling a lot at that line, darling, but could you speak up a little? We can't hear you past row B..."
4. Most of us realised at age 7 that "And then I woke up and realised it had all been a dream..." was a shit ending to a story. You'd think that someone would have told this guy.
5. The set was so busy being meaningful and clever that it forgot to function as furniture, which is what it is.
6. Comic timing. My postman has it. My favourite barman has it. The seven year old that I live with has it. My kitten has it.
   Lead in, appropriate pause, punchline. It's what makes jokes funny.
   I know I'm sounding all sarcastic and pompous here, but I don't care.
   The script had jokes in it, you could tell, but no one laughed because of the
   
   timing.

And I know this is only going to get worse. The more I study the tiny bits, the minutia, the workings, the less I'm going to be able to do one of the things I love best - sit in a theatre and just watch a damn play.

No, that's wrong. Sometimes, I'm still going to get carried away. When it's a good play.
Which, in my opinion, this wasn't. It's just me, I didn't get it, I'm not that kind of clever, it wasn't my cup of tea, whatever.
Whatever. I do. I love theatre. I love plays. They carry people away.
But now, all I need is a hole the size of a fingernail and I can't seem to rest until I'm sitting inside the play, tearing it into little bits.

this makes me a little bit sad.
And I have a Billy Bragg song running around my head;

"The temptation to take the precious things we have apart
to see how they work
must be resisted for they never fit together again..."

Which is, of course what I'll be doing full time. For a year.
Arse.

Thursday, October 24, 2002 |

Wednesday, October 23, 2002

I was reading a leaflet today and came up against the term 'multi-sexual'.
Have I missed something?
Is that a term now?
Because I've never heard it before in my life, and here it was, used as if it was everybody's word (like 'table' or 'fishslice').

I understand the context;
An exciting event for multi-sexual people
So yes, an exciting event for hetrosexual people, homosexual people, bisexual people, transexual people... yadda yadda yadda....
That's actually just 'people' then, isn't it,
without all the PC rubbish, it could just say, 'for people' and that would mean all those things.
Unless I've missed something, and just everyone, everywhere is using the phrase 'multi-sexual' now.
I hope they're not.
Because it sounds like a car-park.

Wednesday, October 23, 2002 |

Ladies and gentlemen, congratulate me, I've now officially got no shame at all.

Being me has many rules. As being anyone has, although I wouldn't know, because I've never been anyone else.
There are, it seems, lots of "do's" and "do not"s, "can" and "can not"s, "will" and "will not"s, and giving your phone number to some guy in a bar just because you found him extremely attractive would generally fall into the latter of all three categories.

We'd been playing the looking game all evening. Looking and them looking away, looking, watching the passage from one side of the room to the other... all that kind of...
I even practiced the 'smile and sway' manoeuvre a couple of times, as did he.
the 'smile and sway' or 'the diana'manoeuvre.
you know, that thing where you look, wait until they look and then as soon as they do,
smile slightly and look away, in a fluid, head dipping, slightly shy kind of sway.
so they can see you smiling at something else. Or at your shoes.
but they know you're really smiling because you were looking at them and they caught you.
It's the best thing I know.

And you know what? I don't even care if he phones.
He may, he may not.
But I did it. It was a confident thing to do, and I did it.
I said, basically, "I'm attractive" (ish) "And you should phone me, you really should."
Obviously, what I really said didn't sound a bit like that.
There were more 'erm' s in there, for a start.

But it's a start.
Phone or no phone.
I'm shameless, congratulate me, I'm proud.

Wednesday, October 23, 2002 |

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

A girl near-shouting into her mobile phone at the bus stop after barraging all of us with tales of her sordid weekend and ungrateful comments about daddy and mummy back in Surrey;
"No, I can't talk any louder without sounding like a twat!"

my dear, sweet child, it's far too late for considerations like that...

Tuesday, October 22, 2002 |

Attractive man walks beside one at protest march.
Same attractive man turns up in high street store 2 hours later.
Same (we think) (or really f***ing similar) man sits beside one at pub quiz.

What do the fates say?
What are we supposed to say?

Tuesday, October 22, 2002 |

memo to self;
When attending pub quiz nights at self-righteously 'clever' Post graduates club, questions will be 'post-ironic' and phrased as "With reference to the Greek root of the word, which blahblah blah had a number one hit with the renaissance influenced pop song blah blahblah blah, in 1681"

reminder to self;
this, we well know, is academic wank posing as fun...

Do not, my dear, take seriously.

Tuesday, October 22, 2002 |

Monday, October 21, 2002

Meg was talking about how we spent our pocket money as children. It's true, we did buy the same amount of sweets, for the same amount of money (she may have got slightly more, three years older and that, but I don't remember, as I don't remember much of being small...) and yes, she managed to make her sweets last until at least tea time, while mine were lucky to make it as far as the corner of the street.
I believe in indulgence, that much is still true. Or to put it the way I put it the way I put it in my sister's comment's system....

Well, yes, fair enough, I used to eat all my sweets at once,
but I don't now...
I really don't.
Or at least, I don't think I do.

I mean, I do with money. I'd rather live like a queen for a week and then like a pauper for the next three than live modestly for four.
I suppose I do with other things too. I'd rather have something with a full heart and then mourn its passing than carefully mind it to stretch it out.

If I have something, I enjoy that I have it, and then, when I don't have it, I'm not sad.

I guess that's what's changed over the last, let's see, twenty years - what's changed about my personality since I was five is that although I still eat all my flying saucers at once, I now don't wonder where they've gone.

I ate them. And I enjoyed them all the more for eating them all at once, thank you very much.

Better to live like a princess for half an hour than a shoe salesman for 6, say I.
And I am, of course, a princess.
Youngest child and all that...

I believe greatly in youngest child/ middle child/ eldest child things.
I've realised that quite a few of my friends are youngest children, I think somehow it produces some kind of... ach, I don't know.

A kitten's just been sick on my foot.
I may work on this train of thought later.... but ... sick.. foot.

Monday, October 21, 2002 |

i like kittens less when they are sick in my shoes.

Monday, October 21, 2002 |

Set a creative writing exercise 5 days ago of getting up and writing solidly for half an hour the moment I woke up.
Completely forgot until at least half way through each day.
Of all the things that were pointed out in the setting of this exercise, the fact that we did it 'as soon as we wake up' and that this was 'very important' was mentioned at least 15 times.

With no classes today, I'm thinking of going back to sleep 5 times just so I can wake up 5 times and do this thing.
I'm not sure it'll work as well as the natural method, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

Monday, October 21, 2002 |

Damn it, it's raining.
After 3 unseasonably dry weeks, it's raining.

And it's going to keep raining.

I know this because I've just bought a cardigan.
A gorgeous, chocolate-brown chunky cardigan.
Which I love.
Not a coat, but a cardigan.
It was a silly thing to buy.

Not waterproof, but warm, I will end up waterlogged on the streets of Glasgow.
Wet, and heavy, just like the brown brown sheep of home.
Damn it.

Monday, October 21, 2002 |

You see, contrary to popular opinion, there is, in fact, a plan.

And the plan involves pickled onions.

It's not a world plan, it's not the 'Grand Plan' that we traditionally think of, although I think it's grand.
The plan is this.
I like;
Croissants.
Doughnuts.
Sausage Rolls.
Sausages.
Steak.
Cucumber.
Toast.
Peri peri sauce.
Vegimite.
Mashed Potato (butter and cream version)
Danish Pastries. All of them. At once. I like them a lot.

And many other things. I like salads with rich dressings. Sandwiches, Good Sandwiches, with a million different fillings. At once.
I like rich food.
I like food that tastes.
I like food that's bad for you.
It's good.

And I don't like?
Lots of things.
Tomatoes, apples, oysters, yadda yadda yadda.
But also pickled onions.

I don't like pickled onions.
To be fair, liking them or not never entered my consciousness, until I walked past them in Sainsburys.
And then came the plan.
The Pickled Onion plan.

So that's the deal.
I've bought myself, for snack food, pickled onions.
There may be other things in the house, but when I want a snack, I have a pickled onion.
I may not like them, but that's the snack.
I may not like them, but God damn it, I'll eat them til I do.

I may still not like them much, but I like them more than I did a week ago.
I know this sounds like masochism.
It's not, really.
I like onions, I like vinegar, there's no logical reason why these things should be quite so cheek-sucky.
At some point soon, I'll like them. I'm sure.
In the meantime, at least they're not lardy.
But hell. It's just a plan.

This is the latest in line of many plans, and it may be slightly masochistic,
but by God I'm stubborn.
We're already 2 weeks and 3 jars of Pickled Onions down the line.
Just think how many pizzas could have been eaten in that time...

Monday, October 21, 2002 |

So, two kittens behaving in a delightfully, and predictably kitten-ish way (but then, do I expect the kittens to be aware of existant kitten-stereotypes? it's probably hoping for a little much)...
All eyes and ears and claws, they're tearing around the house at full throttle (as I type, the smallest has just run from one end of the top floor, down the stairs, straight up my leg and bounced off the monitor, springing straight into the kitchen and ending in a rather undignified skidding sprawl on the kitchen floor. bless).
The only thing I have a problem with now is their names.

Finn is one.
Named, unfortunately, for an old man named Michael Finnagan (he had whiskers on his chinnagan), rather than after someone cooler, like Finbar, or the giant, Finn Mac Cumhail (0898... Cumhail?... it sounds... oh, it doesn't matter), or Fingal, as in the big cave on Staffa, near my old house.
But I can cope with Finn. I can call him Finbar. Or Fingal. He won't notice. He's a kitten. I'm a lap and a scratchpost to him.
I can live with Finn.

I can't, however, live with Breamas.
It's a stupid name, and I can't remember it without first thinking of the name Beavis, which is, 70% of the time, what I've ended up calling him.
And if I get used to calling him Beavis, then sooner or later Finn will become Butthead, and that's no good.

No, Breamas has to go.
Not the kitten, the name.
Any ideas?

Monday, October 21, 2002 |

Sunday, October 20, 2002

I've got kittens.

That's not an oblique term for an STD, I actually have got kittens.
Well, the family who I live with have just got two kittens, so by proxy, I also have.

They're small, and big eyed, and well, kittenish.
1,2,3... aw.

Sunday, October 20, 2002 |

Saturday, October 19, 2002

It's been a long time since I went shopping. I hate shopping, and I'm not terribly good at it.
I wander round looking like a lost child pawing things for a while, and then panic and pick up something which neither fits nor suits me.

So I went into another one of those shops where they've made up their own sizing categories just for, it seems, fun.
So you can buy bras in
"'A' - Small bust,
'B' - Medium bust,
'C' - Large Bust,
'D' - Very Large bust, and
'DD' - Hubba hubba big knockers."
They didn't have a DD. But I thought it rather short sighted, I mean, they'd not left themselves room for growth at one end of the scale.
If you see what I mean.

I also had a moment of sympathy for short round people.
They had a small people section, and a wide people section, but nothing for the poor unfortunates in both categories at once.
The wider the waist band, it seemed, the longer your legs were supposed to be.
By the time it reached the larger larger sizes, it seemed you'd have to be the height of three buses to make the most of them.

"Run! Run! Hide! We are being attacked by the fifty-foot-woman!"
"Yes, but doesn't she look marvellous in those trousers?"

Saturday, October 19, 2002 |

Suprisingly enough, they do breed a particularly good-looking type of peacenik in Glasgow.

I'm not sure if I'm a protest marchy kind of person.
I mean, obviously I am, because I was there, but I still couldn't do the whole 'shouty' thing.
I'm very supportive of those that do, it's just that, I personally, feel like a twat.

So I went, and I marched, and I quietly supported the shouty people and I sat down in the road, and yes, perhaps I did sneak off to Burger King as the demonstration ambled past it, but we weren't supposed to be marching against Burger King, so that's not that bad.

And then I went shopping, bought a bunch of clothes probably made by small Indonesian children for tuppence a week, drained a can of coke, polluted the atmosphere by blowing some extra cigarette smoke into it and now I'm not sure where, I am, ethically.

All I know is that I quite fancy another burger.

Saturday, October 19, 2002 |

The fact that I disagree inherently with the whole 'war' thing, is, of course the main reason I'm going to a peace rally just now.

The fact that there will be cute boys there is only a marginal consideration.

Although the amount of time I've taken choosing my outfit and combing my hair clearly shows that not to be true.

So if you're walking through Glasgow city centre today and notice that in the middle of the crowd of people shouting "War is Bad! Trees are good!"(?), there's an Anna shaped glamourpuss shouting "So, does anyone want my phone number then?", try not to point and laugh too hard.
It's mean.

Saturday, October 19, 2002 |

Friday, October 18, 2002

It's great the way you can experiment with new things when you have the time.
If the day hadn't been quite so long and stretchy and empty, I never would have done all the things that I have done.

For example, this morning, when I woke up, I decided to be a patriot for a few hours, then I was a communist for a short while over lunch, and spent most of the afternoon being bisexual.

I have to say that, although I felt quite comfortable in all three new lifestyles, I drank more coffee as a patriot and spent more time hoovering while bisexual.
You may draw your own conclusions, I merely do the experiments.

Tomorrow I think I will be a New Age Goddess for most of the morning, and ex-president of a small South American nation for some of the rest of the day. I may well be a Anarchist over lunchtime, but I'm not sure how well that will sit with the Peace Rally I might go to.
I tell you what, I'll be an anarchist until I leave the house.


I'm very, very bored.

Friday, October 18, 2002 |

Thursday, October 17, 2002

Kicking some little gritty-ass.
It's alright to like my eyelashes again. I had something in my eye, and it wasn't an eyelash.
It was grit.

At 7.30 last night, while I was on the phone to my mum, just before I started on my 40-something-pages of reading (weighty academic on the history of the history of methodology of theatre or some wank, anyway) for this morning's seminar, something got into my eye.
And it hurt.
A lot. I couldn't open my eye for 10 minutes, and when I could, it hurt, so I shut it again.
And opened it, and shut it.
Blinking was like dragging an open flesh wound across heavy-duty sandpaper.
Over and over again.
I couldn't stop blinking.

Off the phone, I tried to do my reading, I bathed my eye, and tried again. I bathed my eye again, I blew my nose, I made myself cry and nothing seemed to dislodge the painful wodge of rock that was lodged under my eyelid.

I went to bed at 8.45, thinking that in my sleep it would remove itself and I would get up at 6 to read.
I got up at 6 to read, and it was still there, I was reading, and blinking, and reading, and blinking.
I was reading in strobe light. The only comfortable thing was to rest the ball of my hand on my eye, in which case I couldn't write notes.
It sucked.
So I went back to sleep for a while.

In college, a couple of hours later, eye red and weeping and sore and still blinking 50 times a minute.
Pages still unread.

So I went to the hospital. And the most lovely nurse in the whole world, surely a contender for the Nobel prize for humanitarianism-in-eye-nursing, poked my eye, and prodded it, and poured dye into it, and flipped my top eyelid over, poked it, shone a big light in my eye, the whole Clockwork Orange deal, and then, with a polite little "Ooh, looky here!", she removed the tiniest little bit of grit in the whole wide world.

It was a fullstop. A tiny full stop, a 6-point full stop. No, smaller.
An ant's testicle.
Not that that's what it was, that was the size it was. This bit of grit.
tiny, tiny tiny.
teeny.
ickle.
wee.

And this was the thing that had felt like a razor coated brick on the skin of my eyeball.

As soon as she took it away, the relief was astounding.
I could have kissed her.
I may have done, I can't remember.
It's all a bit blurry.
But that'll be the ointment.

Grit?!
For goodness sake.
How did I get grit in my eye? It's not like I spend a lot of my time rubbing my face in grit.
Not that much time anyway.
And I certainly wasn't last night.
Well, I don't know how it got got there, but I swear, when I find out,
I'm going to be kicking some little gritty ass.

Thursday, October 17, 2002 |

There seems to be a song on the radio about 'Electric Toasters'.
Or it could concievably be 'Electric Toothbrush'.

Is that U2?
Why are U2 singing about household electrical goods?
Jesus, I hate U2. Because they're far too clever for their own good.

Actually I just hate them.
And now I hate them even more. Because they're singing at me about toasters.
It's probably a political analogy or something.
fucktards.

Thursday, October 17, 2002 |

better than a poke in the eye?

Some things it's important to know about me before we head into the main body of this post.

1. I like my eyelashes. Although not so long as to be cowlike, they're still a reasonably good eyelash length, and I'm generally very fond of them.
2. I'm not scared of doctors, or hospitals in any marked fashion. I certainly don't avoid going to see them, although I don't believe in wasting their time, but I would never say that I am, in any way, scared of doctors. Or hospitals.
3. Although generally quite a touchy-feely person, I never back away from physical interaction, unless, particularly, that physical interaction should be focused on the eyeball.
   I don't like the idea of anyone touching my eye, I don't like to touch myself on the eyeball, I don't wear contacts (or wouldn't if I needed them) because it would mean man-handling my eye.
   I shudder at the thought of anyone touching my eye. Even when I'm dead.

Pre-ramble over, to the main pupose of this text;

There is something in my eye.
I think it is an eyelash. It has been there for 16 and a half hours.
It hurts.
I hate my eyelashes.
I have to go to the hospital now.
I am very scared.
They will poke me in the eye.

Thursday, October 17, 2002 |

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Bus driver's groupies; a whole lot of lovin' for the sake of a concessionary fare?

I'd completely forgotten they existed.
Not buses, I remembered them, but the groupies.

They existed in Manchester and, - in London too? I can't remember...- they always have puzzled me.

Women. Or perhaps girls, standing by the bus driver, all the way along the route.
Or I assume they go all the way, I've never hung about long enough to find out...

Just standing. And chatting. Flirting, leaning into the drivers cab on every tight corner, giggling and giggling and giggling away.

I do not doubt that bus drivers are attractive enough to warrant this kind of attention, but for goodness' sake, you'd think they'd be able to keep it outside work...

I mean, I've never been inside an ambulance, but I'd like to think that if I did, there wouldn't be a short-skirted, blonde-haired, bespectacled girlie sitting next to the driver, gossiping about her friends, giggling at his cornering skills and sending him text messages with little hearts in.

I've seen a good deal more attractive firemen than bus drivers, and yet you never seem to see these girls hanging off the fire engine door, asking the driver if he fancies her...


The day I turn up at a job interview and next to the boss there's a girl, leaning on the desk, chewing gum and reapplying her lipstick while he asks me questions,
Or the day I turn up at the doctors and he asks his little blonde groupie to hold his cigarette for him while he gets out his swab,
The day the anchorman appears on the Ten O'clock news with a little blonde head bobbing up and down under the desk;

These are the days when I may accept the fact that taking your groupies to work with you is an acceptable workplace practice.

I still won't like it, but at least then I'll understand that it's not just bus drivers.
Until then, I kind of feel that sometimes it's better to leave your groupies at home.

I don't know.
Maybe I'm being harsh. Maybe I'm just being grumpy because when I asked for a ticket she looked at me like I had no place chatting up her man.
Perhaps his driving skills were entirely unimpeded by her presence.

Maybe even if she wasn't there he would have hit that bin.
Mounted the kerb.
Clipped that Van.
Braked so hard that the lady next to me fell off her seat.
Twice.

Perhaps, all these things would have happened if she'd not been there.
Because, lets face it, that would have given him more time to spend on his Mobile Phone.

grr.

Tuesday, October 15, 2002 |

Either I've already got something in this crossword wrong, or
"10 across; Weapon (3)"
is Bun.

Although I suppose it could be Bin.

Tuesday, October 15, 2002 |

Just down the road, there are some people, or there were, earlier, letting off fireworks in their back garden.
Every couple of minutes a whizz, and a bang, the sound of a catherine wheel, with sparks flying over the back wall.

Or a machine gun blast of bangers, fired off and lighting up the alley between our houses.

The Perfect girls in the house opposite stand at their patio doors, noses pressed against the glass.
Curtains twitch at house after house after house, kitchen window after kitchen window.

I sat at my window, at the end of my bed, reading and watching the fireworks outside my bedroom window.

And the thing that confused me was that whoever lit those fireworks, whoever's personal display it was, was watching them in complete silence.
No laughter, no excited shrieks.
No 'oohs', no 'ahs', no giggles,
no voices.
Not a murmur.

Tuesday, October 15, 2002 |

Monday, October 14, 2002

The worst Cesar Salad in the world. Ever. - an impartial review

Sunday, sleeping in and being a little bit hungover, telephone calls and visits and nice.

And dinner.
I wasn't very hungry. I'd eaten hugely halfway through the afternoon (what do you call a meal halfway through the afternoon? This is not the lead-in to a joke, I just want to know. You know, something between breakfast and lunch is brunch. So something halfway between lunch and dinner would be 'dunch'? 'lunner'? Unless you're somewhere where they call dinner 'tea', obviously, in which case everything changes and -
You know what? I've decided I don't care after all.
Where was I?)
So when I got to the hotel restaurant and we looked through the menu, I thought;
"Not very hungry - Go for a starter. Still a bit full, trying to healthy - Go for a salad... Ooh! Cesar Salad! I love Cesar Salad!" This was my thought process exactly.

Well, not exactly, exactly. The 'exactly' version would probably run something like;
"hmm. not hungry very much. What's little? What's cheap? Where are my keys? Pocket or bag? Pocket. I hope. Does that pocket have a hole? Shit. What's that on the menu? Is that soup? Some messy fuckwit's been pouring soup on the menu. I should be reading for school tomorrow. Christ, that waiter's got no arse at all. Carbonara's cheap. Is that my phone beeping? I wonder how K is... "
etc, until the waitress arrived and in a panic I blurted "Salad".

Anyway, after about 15 minutes, my salad arrived.
I'm not questioning the time it took to arrive, I'm generally very patient with these things, I recognise that food can take a long time to prepare, so I try not to get grumpy about these things.
And, once it had arrived, I could see why it must have taken so long to prepare.

First, the waitress had taken the order to the kitchen, where they had discussed her upcoming holiday for 5 minutes.
After this, a symposium was held, discussing the nature of food in general and of salad in particular.
After 6 minutes, this discussion was narrowed to the field of Cesar Salad.

Having comprehensively redefined the common culinary definition of Cesar Salad, my order was brought to me in the following form;

approximately 5-8 small leaves of rather tired looking lettuce. Not interesting lettuce either. Just your bog-standard lettuce.
I tomato, cut into 8 pieces. (Have I ever mentioned that I don't eat tomato?)
4 slices cucumber. Not really slices. More 'wodges'.
17 pieces of small toast pretending to be croutons.

All slice-amounts given here are approximate.
I would have counted them, but, well, I couldn't.
The dressing, you see.

The 'salad' was presented in a bowl. You know, like a salad bowl, not a plate, not deep enough for a soup bowl, but still, you know, deep.
The dressing filled the bowl.
To the rim.
Out of the dressing poked the corner of three tomato bits, like little scarlet shark, and small toast bits floated a-top it like little toast ships on a big white creamy fat-filled sea.

People who know me know that I love salad dressing.
In fact, I probably love salad dressing about as much as it's possible for a person to love salad dressing, but quite frankly, even people obsessional about their salad-dressing desire would have found this too much.

It was a bowl of cold, creamy, Cesar-salad dressing flavoured soup, with drowned lettuce resting at its bottom.
And croutons.

Don't get me wrong, I ate it.
Of course I did. Too bloody polite to do anything else.
I ate it. I now feel like my body is 75% Salad Dressing.
If you cut me, I would bleed salad dressing.
In the whites of my eyes can be seen traces of mixed herbs and pepper.
Filtering through the spaces in my brain, soon I will be able to speak of nothing but salad.

I feel sick.
I don't want to talk about Cesar salad anymore.

Monday, October 14, 2002 |

I'm pretty impressed with Aristophanes.
He's a funny guy.
Not funny like, you know, 99% of other things described as funny, but funny in his own, special, fifth century BCE Greek kind of way...
Funny like...
no.
I'll not say anymore, because it will soon get dull.
Not as dull as Euripides, but then again - Christ, now I sound like a complete twat...

Please God say that I can retain some small part of my brain to function like a human being, even though the most of it may now be taken up with digesting and dissecting all this crap.
Please?...

Monday, October 14, 2002 |

Sunday, October 13, 2002

I've mentioned before my stance on writing poetry? Have I?
I don't.
That is all.
Before anyone took me at all seriously.
As people seem prone to do...

Sunday, October 13, 2002 |

In praise and celebration of the city.
A poem in blank verse by anna pickard.

The end of the afternoon, and
Perry Mason, and
a bad children's film on Channel Five.
A Saturday spent doing gloriously f***-all, reality cushioned by hangovers and disbelief in reality,
Perry Mason on TV, and
a bad children's film on channel five.
Paul Drake gets smacked on the back of the head with a lamp,
Perry wins the case,
the world is at
Peace.

Saturday.
City.
Choices abound but none fit into the armchair but
tv
pizza
telephones
bottles of beer.

Life on the island, a billion miles away comes racing in wave after wave of telephone calls,
gossip
and loss
weather and
just general things
and I miss... but

Here,
in the city,

You phone a number,
chat, for a short while,
with a nice young woman with a soft, pleasing accent
"Of course" She says, "Whatever you want..."
And twenty minutes later it arrives, the thing
that encapsulates city life, for me, arrives.

Pepperoni.
Passion, pepperoni passion with extra pepperoni, extra jalapeno peppers and a coke.
Mobile Lard, brought by the
underpaid guy on the bike that winks as he hands over your
Pizza
Made just for you and
Delivered.
Your interaction ends and he
Goes away.

He goes away, and you have, now,
A big f***-off Pizza.
And that, for you, makes Saturday queen of days.
Makes the city queen of
Places.
And Pizza.

We may have built this city on Rock and roll, but the supporting walls are made of Pizza.

Yes, I've done fuck all. It's been the most 'saturday' Saturday in three years, for me.
I have nothing to offer but the lard-addled beer-addled saturday-night-tv-addled contents of my head.
I love how Saturday goes.

Sunday, October 13, 2002 |

I never thought I'd reach a day when finding the complete lyrics of ABBA would be a relief, a joy, a moment.

But then, I wasn't anticipating a day when a seven-year-old girl would make me listen repeatedly to to an ABBA Karaoke CD without the box and accompanying lyric sheet.
Although I knew more words to Mamma Mia and Waterloo than I like to admit, I was frustrated, extremely frustrated not to know more and,
I have to confess that with this website in front of me and the house to myself, I truly was, for some short while, loudly, Agnetha.
Or Frieda.
Sometimes Bjorn.

But that's a whole other post...

Sunday, October 13, 2002 |

Saturday, October 12, 2002

That's the third time in two nights that I've had to pick a fly out of my drink in this house.
It's either suicide season for small insects or there's one seriously alcoholic fly around here.

I find it odd though, when I find it paddling around in my whisky I fetch it, revive it, blow it dry, walk it along a table, encourage it to fly.

If, however, the same fly had crawled on me in the night, I would have absolutely no qualms about squishing it.
Dead.
Immediately.

Call it double-standards,
Call it misplaced sympathy toward alcohol-dependent-flying-small-insects (I'm thinking of starting a charity...)
Call it whatever you like.
The little fuckwits seem to keep flying into my beer.

Only mine, too.
Perhaps they're trying to tell me something.
But what?

Saturday, October 12, 2002 |

Still trying to get to grips with my life, right here.
Not sure how to do that, since at the moment it doesn't sound like my life at all.
I, for example, describing my day, could never say;
"Spent the morning writing notes on Aristophanes. By the afternoon I moved onto Sophocles, and struggled.
Later went to a friends exhibition opening at the Royal College of Art, had too much free wine and came home on the tube with a 2-foot silver platter of canapes, feeling like a complete twat."
Well, I could say the 'complete twat' thing, obviously.
But not the rest.
Because the rest sounds like the life of that pretentious wanker that sits next to you in the pub sometimes and tries to engage you in conversation about how f***ing impressive and bohemian their life is.

I can't with any conscience, engage in that conversation.
It just isn't.
But my life doesn't fell like my own.
I mean, It's pretty cool, but it's not really mine.

Sooner or later, someone's going to find me out...
Does anyone else have that feeling?

Saturday, October 12, 2002 |

Alright, so, for the four people that have asked, the answer is this.
I'm studying Dramaturgy.
Yes, it exists, yes, its a word, no, it's not a disease along the lines of 'thespian's cough'.

You know how, when you go to the theatre (if you don't ever go to the theatre, imagine that you do, it's important for this next bit...) you might buy a programme. In the programme, there will be notes about the play and what it means, and notes about the author and why he/she wrote the play.
These notes may have been written by a dramaturg.

The person that helped decide which plays should be be put on in that theatre?
Sometimes they're called a literary manager, but they could be called a dramaturg too.

And if that was a new play, that was being put on?
Then the person that would have worked with the writer, workshopped their play, helped with editing and stuff...
They could be called a dramaturg.

People that work with scripts for TV, Film and Radio; soliciting, workshopping, testing, and editing scripts,
they can be called script-editors, but they could be called dramturgs too.

The person that goes into schools and says "Hey Kids! Shakespeare's Cool!"
They could be called a dramaturg. (As well as a 'tit', obviously).

So I'm studying the bit of drama that's about scripts.
And to answer any other questions, yes, my first day was fine, yes, the other people on the course are basically my worst nightmares (young thrusting types straight from uni research courses, unlike me, three years out of uni, and that was a practical acting thing...) but I know I'll not be intimidated by them, in fact, knowing me, the competitive thing will be a little helpful. I'm scared, I'm excited, and I'm happy.

Because I Chose to do this course.
I found the word somewhere, didn't know what it meant, looked it up and found out that Dramaturgy was what Annas liked best.

Saturday, October 12, 2002 |

Friday, October 11, 2002

I think we're going to need a bigger bag.

Today, in my first introduction to the course type meeting, I received approximately 542,764 pieces of paper about all the really hard academic stuff that I'll be doing in a few days time.
I received a book list containing dictated reading of 9107 books, and suggested reading of 80,896 books.

I went straight to the library, and read two fifth-century Greek plays.
One was a 'tragedy' and was, if not sad, then at least pretty fucking tragic.
The other was a comedy, and, I have to say, not in the least bit funny.
Not even slightly.
Not even when I went back and got the right translation.

I don't think you should be able to label something a comedy if it isn't remotely funny.
I don't think you should be allowed.
I think there should be rules.
But I digress.

Around the 340,000th piece of paper (did I mention that all the writing on the paper was really really little, just for added joy...), my course tutor, who'd sounded perfectly normal up until that point, started to sound an awful lot like Charlie Brown's Teacher.
"Wawawawaaa, woowawawawawa"
Or at least, I think she sounded like that.
It was hard to tell what she sounded like over the very loud screaming in my head.
Which was annoying for a while, but then my head exploded, so that was much better.

You know, it's a bloody good thing I can read, because there's going to be a whole bundle of that reading thing going on.
Puts a little bit of a cramp on anything else I'd been planning on doing... (dating, movie-going, painting, eating, sleeping....)
It puts a little cramp on my whole 'walking' plan too.
Because I'm quite possibly going to be carrying approximately 678 books to university every day.

I think we're going to need a bigger bag.

Friday, October 11, 2002 |

It's probably not the sign of being a grown-up post-graduate lady if, every time my slightly scary course tutor mentions the words 'Internal placement' I have an almost insatiable need to giggle.

I mean, there's nothing rude about the words "Internal Placement" is there?

"And some point this first week, of course, you will have your first internal placement"

teeheeheeheeheeheehee.

Friday, October 11, 2002 |

Wednesday, October 09, 2002

Portrait of a simple lady.

A fringe, slightly uneven, as if cut by a drunkard on a boat, above two big round eyes in a round face.
The eyes look directly into the lens, staring unashamedly at the new gadget, this miracle drawing machine that makes a perfect portrait of a girl while she sits there in front of it.
It's only going to take a minute, and they promise it won't hurt, or steal her soul.

Her cheeks are slightly flushed, perhaps embarrassed at being the sole focus of the machine's attention.
Perhaps wondering what the folks at home would think, if only they could see her now.

Her lips are pressed into a simple smile, giving her a pitted dimple and making the chubby cheeks chubbier.
Her smile says "Well! Look at me! Aren't I proud!"
Her smile says something about the honour of sitting in front of the magical picture machine.
Her smile betrays something about her innocence, her naivity, her simple, simple nature.

And this is the ID card I get stuck with for a whole f***ing year.
Christ, I asked the woman if I had 5 chins in the photo, and she honestly answered no.
She could have at least told me that I looked like a professional village idiot.
So that's me for a year.
Registered post-graduate student and your favourite Country Cousin.

"Yehaa!"/"Ooh-Arr"
(depending on your cultural reference points...)

Wednesday, October 09, 2002 |

I'm not saying that 11.30pm is a bad time for sawing most of your furniture in half. I realise it is a viable time for doing so, especially if you are a busy person.
I would simply question whether it is the best time to be sawing most of your furniture in half.

In your back garden. In the middle of a terraced street full of young families. On a Tuesday night. At 11.30, right outside my bedroom window.

I can't deny anyones right to do it, obviously, or I would have been vehemently denying Mr Onthetoilet's rights very loudly out of my bedroom window.
I know that some people would pick 11.30pm as the optimum time to saw most of their furniture in half.
I just think it's a waste of candles and expensive bubble bath, that's all.

Having not slept well at all on monday night, on Tuesday I made damn sure I was going to sleep well.
I made sure I felt entirely prepared for the morning, got my room to the perfect temperature, laid out my pajamas, my book, my glass of water, sprinkled oil of lavender on the pillow, and drew myself the perfect lady-bath.

Candles, smelly things, soft music, glass of wine, bubbles.
And then quite a lot of sawing.
And then I went to bed, and there was more sawing.
Loud, grating, seemingly endless (45 minutes! What do you possibly need to saw for 45 minutes?!) sawing.
Loud sawing.
I don't even know what was being sawn. (Sawed?)
It had the hint of metal about it, with a regular screech to the sawing sound (krkrrrkkrkkkkrkrkrk, Squeeeee!, krkkrkrkrkrkrrkruk, squeee squeeeeeeEEE!), which led me to wonder if he was trying to break into our back yard by sawing through the railings between our gardens.
For Goodness' Sake, man, they're only two foot high.
Just step over.

So, I was about as relaxed going to sleep as I would have been trying to nap on the wing of a 747 in flight, held on by marshmallow ropes.

Anyway. I don't know whether it was Mr Onthetoilet or Master Onthetoilet, But I've decided I'm going to shorten their name to The Toilet Family, because in some petty way, it makes me feel better.

Wednesday, October 09, 2002 |

Tuesday, October 08, 2002

Our downstairs toilet, for various reasons, is a primary school toilet.
The top of its seat somes up to the middle of my calf.

I only mention this because at some point in the future it's surely going to be the basis of some kind of physical accident, and I don't want to have to start from scratch expaining at that point.

Tuesday, October 08, 2002 |

One of the most beautiful gifts I was given when I left Iona was a small wooden bowl, carved out of London Plane.
I'd seen these bowls, light, rich brown with a beautiful grain, and wanted one immediately.

And eventually I got one.
When I was a child, the street outside our house was lined with Plane trees, with their bark that peeled and big multicloured leaves that fell and made rustling piles when it was dry and strong smelling mulch when the air was wet.

I was thinking about them today, kicking through my first Autumn leaves in three years.
Many things we did in Iona, trees we never did.
It's an island thing.

So I walked again through the streets to the university, and kicked through piles upon piles of leaves.
I used to love doing that, jumping feet first into quivering mountains of brown and red, kicking my way through the gutters where the leaves collected best.

And then there was that time when I jumped on the roadkill, and booted it halfway across the street.

And I've not been so enthusiastic since, funnily enough.


Today though, it were lovely.

Tuesday, October 08, 2002 |

So, I'm walking around the campus today, trying to work out where everything is, and half way between my department and the library, I realise why I'm feeling so old.

It's not only because the library's up a big hill, and I'm breathless (Anyway, that's not because I'm old, that's because I smoke (Don't bother, I know, I know, already).)
It's because everybody around me looks as if they're twelve.
I know I'm technically a 'mature student', but I never expected to feel this mature.
There they are, lining the road from the theatre to the library.
With their long shiny hair, and their bags bursting with books. And folders.
They looked like High School students...
Fashionable clothes, new mobiles pressed to ears, young, and confident, and slouching.
On campus.
They looked, to me, about twelve.
I walked by.
With my chin in the air, and my walk that said 'maturestudent... maturestudent... maturestudent...
I've-had-more-sex-and-lectures-and-drunken-nights-than-you've-had-hot-dinners-dear-child...'.
With my old fashioned (It's retro, ok?) mobile, pressed to my ear, hoping to hell someone older than me would pick up at the other end, tell me I'm young again.

No one did.
So I walked through the sea of seeming twelve year olds, feeling more than twice their age.

And then realised why they loked like twelve year olds.
It was because they were twelve years old.

There's a High School on one side of the campus, and those people that looked like High School Students?
Well they were...
They looked twelve years old because.... well....
Obviously.

It was just me being paranoid.

Or so I thought.

But then I got to the university library. And sitting outside, waiting for my friend to arrive, I watched the new students come and go.
And they looked like they were twelve years old.
And this time there was no excuse at all.

Damnit.
25 years old isn't old.
It just isn't.
Is it?
No.
It isn't.
It's mature.
Ish.

Tuesday, October 08, 2002 |

So I spend most of yesterday afternoon walking around the campus.
Once at least down every street.
Just so I feel like I know where everything is.
Just so I don't feel out of my depth tomorrow.
(Just so I feel at least a little bit in control of the whole thing.)

I find out where the library is, find out where my department is, do a full circuit around the outside of each, to familiarise myself.
To help me when I need to find these things in a hurry tomorrow.
(And to feel in control of the whole thing.)

You'll notice the control thing is a marked observation in this piece.
I'm just saying that you shouldn't read into these actions that I'm trying to have control over the whole thing because I know that already.
I realise that by pointing this out, I'm pointing out that I have control over not only that particular 'whole thing', but the whole thing in general.
I have control over the fact that you're reading that I need to have control over this.
I'm controlling myself into a whole.
Should I point out that control and anxiety are linked here?

Don't you come round here and try your amateur psychology on me.
I can amateur psychology your ass into the ground, boy....

I've lost the plot on this post. I'm going to start again.

Tuesday, October 08, 2002 |

You know that advert, with an M&M; eating other, smaller M&M;'s out of an M&M; packet, yet while still being an M&M;?

Well, I don't like it.
It seems wrong.
That is all.

Tuesday, October 08, 2002 |

Sitting around unpacking boxes wasn't atttractive enough a prospect.
I mean, I like boxes, and I like the stuff in them, but it's not really, you know, fun.

Especially when these last few are filled with crap that I never intended to bring anyway.

When we ordered the carrier to take down my boxes of stuff, I was asked to specify a number.
10, I said.
And so, whenI started to pack my boxes, I started to pack ten.
One box filled. Closed. Sealed. Addressed. Labelled - 1/10.
Second box filled. Closed. Sealed. Addressed. Labelled - 2/10.
And so on.

But by the time I got halfway through box eight, I'd packed all the things I really wanted to take. All I was left with was the sometime useful, sometime interesting crap that I was going to put into storage. But I couldn't stop. If I stopped, I'd have to close a half-packed box and label it - 8/10.
I couldn't leave it so. I'd paid for ten.
Besides, the first carrier man would be confused, the next carrier man would be confused, whoever recieved it at the other end would be confused - even if it was me, because, let's face it, I'm easily confused.
So I started throwing in random things, a feather boa, another feather boa. A box of old photos, an inflatable globe, inflated.
A pen, covered in sequins, with a dolls head stuck on the end, two random curtains, a child-sized, paint-covered apron.
Another feather boa, 7 odd socks, a squeaky dog-toy Nun.

So yesterday I unpacked seven and a half boxes.
This morning I woke up, approached my two and a half boxes of tacky tosh, poked them and suddenly decided to go for a walk.

Tuesday, October 08, 2002 |

Sunday, October 06, 2002

Reminder to self;
Never going to lose weight if, every time we find squirty cream in fridge, we spray it directly into our mouths.
Right?

Sunday, October 06, 2002 |

So, just to recap on our living situation so far, we have, opposite my bedroom, the family room of the perfect family (mummy perfect, daddy perfect, Jocasta, Quentin and Cressida Perfect - these are good names.)
Next door, opposite the bathroom, we have the nice retired couple Mr and Mrs Onthetoilet.
Never actually met them, but from our bathroom, opposite and slightly above theirs, we have a perfect view of them sitting in their most private place. We don't want to, but we do.
Three doors down, there's the family from every BBC murder mystery you've ever seen, middle class - husband a professor, neglected alcoholic inteligent wife... - family, two cute-as-button children.
I experienced this morning the postman, who apparently every saturday finds an excuse to ring every doorbell to chat, just because he knows everyone will be in... ("worst fecking route in Glasgow this, will you look at this bag? Bucnch of fecking medical journals. Fecking Doctors. I've had to go and refill my bag three bloody times....")

Jesus, put a writer in this street and they'd have a field day...

Sunday, October 06, 2002 |

Saturday, October 05, 2002

Rear windae

It's not a tenament block I live in, not like the ones you imagine when you think of Glasgow. If that's what you imagine when you think of Glasgow. You might not imagine anything. Or you might imagine Pigeons.
Or football games.
Or naked women. But then, you're probably the kind of person that would imagine naked women whatever I said.

Its a house. A nice house in a posh street, and the family I'm living with rock, and it's a lovely area, and yes, thankyou, I've landed myself a cushty number. Hurrah.
The street seems to be full of the kind of people that appear in Murder Mystery novels - not that I intend on seeing any of them murdered, but it's all professors and doctors and all those other nice middle class types that keep their curtains perpetually open.

Why else keep your curtains open than to allow everybody to look at your house, your family, your stuff, your life?
Why else?

So why not look? To be frank, you have no choice, with huge windows blazing with light there's nowhere else to look.
Not to stand there and stare, but it seems a human compulsion to look.
Or maybe just mine.

Anyway, straight out of the window, the window in front of my new desk, the desk where, the last few nights I've sat and looked over again and again at my university paperwork, trying to feel prepared, and
straight out of the window, on the other side of the alley between the backs of our houses, lives the perfect family.

Mummy, daddy, three cerubic curly haired children.
My bedroom window looks directly into their family room, their breakfasting room, where they sit, and eat dinner together, play together, read educational comics, paint pictures, sit and smile and chatter and laugh.
They never seem to shout, or if they do, they move to another room for that express purpose.
They have dinner parties each night, after all three cherubs have come downstairs to have their teeth inspected and tops-of-heads kissed by daddy.
They eat breakfast together, lunch, dinner.
They eat all their vegatables. Even the icky ones.

Soon, hopefully, there will be a computer, blocking my view of the perfect family across the way.
In the mean time I pull my blind and block their view of the disorder and imperfection of the bedroom over the alley.

Saturday, October 05, 2002 |

Marked differences between the city and the island.

1. The noise of sheep and corncrakes and tide is replaced by sirens, cars and leaves falling (I mean, the wind blowing through trees, causing leaves to fall. The leaves falling don't actually make that much noise. It's not like they're big fuck-off metal leaves or anything. Although it would be good if they were. Well, good in some ways. Autumn would certainly be more dramatic, although more people would probably die. Where was I?)
2. You can get channel five on the television. I have not watched it yet.
3. It rains in the city, as it does on an island, but people do not wear plastic waterproof overtrousers here. They have either not evolved to the point where they realise the sensible nature of these trousers, or they have evolved instead to a point where they realise that anyone wearing these trousers looks like a water proof twat (to clarify - that's 'twat' meaning 'idiot', rather than 'minge' or 'vagina'.)
4. When posting to your blog on the island, there are no adolescent girls yelling swearwords 2 feet from your head. - Unless your particular island is simply one large internet cafe, in which case may God have mercy on your soul. - I'm going to kill them.
5. There is no IKEA in the Inner Hebrides. This is a failing.
   There is one here. I feel incredibly smug today, for just on, tiny little reason. I chose the shelves, I measured the shelves, I took the shelves to the till, I paid for the shelves. I built the shelves. I will use the shelves, all by myself, said the little red boat. I mean hen.
6. There are people, by the ton. Dozens of them. Loads. Bunches.
7. Also Buses
8. Pubs
9. Cinemas (Damnit, I'm going to go to the cinema in a second! Just because I can)

I feel like a little kid in a city sized sweetshop full of lots of things as well as sweets.
Excuse me if I seem over-excitable.
I just am.
It'll wear off. Soon enough.

Saturday, October 05, 2002 |

Friday, October 04, 2002

Je suis arivee a glasgow.
Je suis tres fatigue.
Il pleut.
Ma boxes (boit?) arrive a dimanche.
J'ai non parle pas de francais.

Friday, October 04, 2002 |