Monday, November 23, 2009

The Importance of Being Idle

As I sat and waited for the cold that won't die to leave my body - contemplating leaving my body myself, just to escape the bloody thing - I did, well, nothing today. Largely due to the fact that every time I attempted to move, either I suffered from separation anxiety (my tissue box and I are besties at the moment) or I suffered from extreme white-hot rods of pain through my sinuses. Or maybe that was just the anxiety kicking extra hard. Given choice between idleness, anxiety or pain, I chose idleness.

It's amazing what your brain throws up when you have vaguely hypochondriac tendencies and are actually sick. I spent a good half hour this morning wondering what would happen if the sinus infection took the worst case scenario and did actually do what it has threatened before, leaving me bed ridden while it slowly turned my head to mush. I'm not generally given to end-of-world scenarios, so it was amusing to indulge in every little detail, particularly dwelling on the guilt that would afflict Flatmate L when she discovered that her slurs about me pulling a sicky were completely off-base. I was interrupted by a phone call from her, wondering why I wasn't answering my work email address, and being cheered up no end by the observation, "Didn't you have Friday off as well? They're going to sack you." Thank you for the mood enhancer.

So, with my mind back at work, if not my body, I drifted to other thoughts, carefully lying still and watching Top Gear on BBC iPlayer (why does everything have to have an 'i' in it now? Even the electric car that they guys on Top Gear made had an 'i' somewhere in the name they gave it. And why is is always lower case?) And somewhere along the way, I strayed into pondering one of the guys who sits on the floor below mine.

I've had plenty of time to observe him. He started not long after me and, on days when I'm only slightly late, rather than horribly, I follow him into the office and he holds the door for me. We bump into each other in the kitchen sometimes, too. It's not a big office, so it's hardly surprising, really. But what is a little strange is that I've never heard him speak. I'm fairly certain that he can - word would have passed around far more quickly if he was mute, given our office-wide love of talking about each other - he just doesn't. It's only recently that he's even acknowledged that he's holding the door open for another person, giving a gentle smile and looking somewhere in the vicinity of my knees. I don't have great knees. There's no reason to stare at them. Mind you, I have to admit that I find his ankles inordinately fascinating. And it's for no other reason than them being on show so regularly.

He's a tall man, with the stoop of those over six foot who are generally surrounded by shorter people. I always assumed that it was to make it easier to hear what people were saying. I know I always end up bent double with my shorter friends, and I'm not nearly as tall as him. The thinning hair on top of his head suggests that he's kind of outgrown it. It never seems to get any thinner, so I assume that's just the way it's always been. With blond hair, blue eyes and seemingly good dentistry by English standards, he's not a bad looking boy. That's kind of why I noticed him in the first place. He dresses fairly stylishly on casual days. Not being lucky enough to be on my new floor, where they hide the cretins they don't allow the clients to see, he's generally dressed in business clothes. Which are a whole other story to his casual gear.

It must be easy to dress most men for the office. A pair of black trousers which may or may not be part of a suit. A white shirt. A tie to give a bit of variation. There are less rules about what's appropriate for different occasions. Some seem to wear the same basics and just shuffle the ties around to different days. This guy is no exception in that area, but there is one part of his wardrobe that I think someone really needs to sit him down and talk to him about. His trousers.

Have you ever seen the old movies, things where Cary Grant or Walter Matthau had their trousers pulled up around their arm pits? Think the male equivalent of granny-undies, but much more obvious to the world. Combine that look with bad posture and long legs, and you've got something close to what I'm talking about. His ankles must have frozen on snow day earlier this year, but he never thinks to pull the waistband down to sit somewhere near his hips, giving his ankles the coverage I've got no doubt they crave. Sometimes I get a tingling in my hands as I see him, and itch to go and give a good tug to the legs. He's known for it among the girls of the office, who call him Harry-High-Pants and rarely know his actual name. For someone who seems to go to such great lengths to hide themselves away, he draws an awful lot of attention with his trousers.

His jeans, well they seem to fit. It makes me wonder if his mother buys his work clothes, and has never quite gotten used to the idea that her son is all growed up now. He does seem a little like the type to get the final bit of his toothpaste wiped away with the corner of Mum's apron just before he leaves for work, packed lunch in hand. His casual clothes, he picks for himself. He looks far more comfortable in them, that's for sure. I think I've seen him actually talking to someone when he was wearing his jeans and a checked shirt. The change in him was remarkable. Not quite Clarke Kent/Superman, but not far short.

So why have I just written so much about a guy at work who doesn't speak to me, whose mother may still be buying his clothes, and who makes me giggle? Chalk it up to too many fluffy romance books while I've been sick. The winning out of the pain over the tissues is hopefully a sign that I'm on the mend. Or that the antibiotics will be kicking in soon, at any rate. Until then, I'm doomed to schmaltz. I apologise in advance.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Nutty matters

The squirrel sat on the roof of the shed and looked at me, almost daring me to blink. Half asleep, I stared back before shaking myself out of my reverie. I moved to take out some bread. When I looked out the window again, the squirrel had moved. In the seconds I hadn't been looking, he - because it's almost always a he, in my mind - had darted from the shed to the brick fence that separated the two large gardens behind my building. In summer, he'd be camouflaged there but now, in the Autumn, he was still visible. He twitched his tail at me.

I weighed up opening the window and throwing out some of the nuts that we keep on the bench for Charlie and Lottie, our squirrel neighbours, but decided it would take too much time. Instead, I put my bread in the toaster and began to ready my other breakfast things. Yoghurt, juice, Vegemite.

The toast seemed to take forever. I moved back to the window, but the squirrel - Charlie, Lottie, or just a random visitor - had vanished. The toast popped and I sighed as I noticed that, yet again, the toaster had spat it out too soon. Instead of the crisp golden brown, it was white and patchy. That's what you get when you buy the £10 kettle-and-toaster combo, I guess.

The flat was quiet as I sat down at the kitchen table to eat my toast, book in hand. A movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. The squirrel was back, playing hide and seek with me, apparently. Either that or statues. As I turned back to my book, I heard childish voices in my head; "What's the time Mr Wolf?" Breakfast time, I answered them, chomping down on a soggy piece of toast and getting absorbed in my book. Twenty minutes later I looked up at the clock in a panic. I was late. Again.

I downed the last of my juice, rinsed my dishes and put them in the dishwasher. Standing over the sink, I noticed that the squirrel was back on the roof of the shed, almost at my eye level. He seemed to be laughing at my sudden haste. I made a snap decision. I was already late, so why not?

I wrenched the window open - it's a stretch to make it across the bench and still have enough leverage to manage the large, heavy sash; a stretch too far for the shorter Flatmate C. Opening the bag of nuts, I threw a few out one by one, watching them land in the leaf litter of the courtyard below. The squirrel looked at me and if he'd had eyebrows, he would have cocked one. Clearly, he was not to be bought off with nuts. I shrugged a shoulder and slammed the window closed again before dashing downstairs and into the bathroom for a lightning quick shower.

Later in the morning, I sat at my desk in the misery of a sore throat and ear ache. "Toughen up," came the email from Flatmate L. "It's all a question of mind over matter." Maybe she's right. Then again, maybe she's not. I wonder if the squirrel has eaten the nuts yet. It's tempting to head home and check, but instead I stay at my desk and throw back a couple of paracetamols. The throat and ear improve, but I'm still curious about the squirrel.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The Sighting

I think I had an out of blog experience yesterday, and there was a certain amount of coincidence involved. I was even more late than usual. It was Monday, after all, so allowances must be made. I stepped off the tube at Waterloo, intent only on not walking into any of the twits who were blocking the exit pathway. On a side note, why do people stand pressed up against the doors as they wait for them to open? There are people in the train who are waiting to get out; it’s far easier for everyone if you stand back and let them get through first, so why the hell do they insist on trying to be the first into an emptying train? Is it that they’re worried the people who wave the little plastic paddle and declare the train “ready to depart” aren’t going to notice the fifteen people clustered around the door nearest the entrance to the platform, through the yards of empty space further down where two sensible people have already boarded? So as I gracefully pirouetted my way through the ravening hordes like a rhinoceros on the charge, I spotted a vaguely familiar face.

Let me be clear here. I’m not certain that the person I saw was the person I thought it was. There was a resemblance to the photo of what I can only assume is him at the top of his blog, sure. But it was only a glimpse, we were both hurrying, and – have I missed any possible caveats, just in case it wasn’t him? Add them here if I have. I think I had a glimpse of none other than blogger-extraordinaire, Mr London Street.

I’ve never knowingly thought I saw a fellow blogger before. I’m sure, given the vast numbers of them out there, that I’ve passed them all unknowing. And I know, thanks to the lovely Veronica Lake, that I won’t be recognised myself. That and the fact that I have an audience of 5, two of whom I knew before they started reading. But to even think I saw someone I only know from their writing, well it was almost like glimpsing a celebrity. I pretend to be all cool about it – I’m not into celeb worship, I don’t read OK or any of those, I figure they’re just people – but whenever I glimpse someone whose work I’ve admired, whether they be an actor (Jude Law, Sainsburys, Finchley Rd, late last year; Damian Lewis, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, earlier this month) or a writer (well, I’ve never seen any of them in the flesh, to be honest, but I would love to), it gives a little buzz. It’s interesting to compare the reality with the image, if nothing else.

So it was even more interesting that, later the same day, MLS came out with this post, about meeting other bloggers in person. He provided elegant character sketches that give a sense of the people he writes about. I’d love to be able to, but all I can offer is that, if it was actually him, he wasn’t shoving his way into the train before I was out of it – high commendation indeed. It was just the briefest flash of possible recognition. And, in my defence, if it’s not him that I saw, well, his profile pic is quite small. And MLS? If it wasn’t you, I offer a response to this: it’s not the beard, it’s because you have a doppelganger out there somewhere.

Monday, November 16, 2009

The morning tap

This morning I woke up with a tap attached to my face. It was there in place of my nose, and it was dripping. Constantly. When it wasn’t dripping, it was tingling. Well, I suppose you get that when someone replaces your nose with a tap. It’s bound to feel a little funny. In this instance, the funny made me sneeze regularly. The tap has been there for a few mornings, recently. It seems to disappear before lunchtimes. It’s a morning tap, a spigot without an ‘off’ position. It’s visited me before.

During my school days – back before the dawn of time, or of the millennium at the very least – I struggled through mornings just as I do now, a wodge of tissues permanently at the ready and the constant threat that, if I ran out of them, I’d end up looking like a toddler with a cold. Mothers would come up to me, pinch my nose and demand that I ‘blow’. I lived in fear of morning assemblies, daunting ceremonies that always had an uplifting theme, designed to stir us on to ever greater heights, illustrated through stories of inspirational women and uplifting hymns. We were expected to sit silently through these events three times a week, not wriggling too much as we sat on the hard wooden floor, or being caught talking when we were deemed old enough to have a seat in the balcony of the school hall. Most of the girls had their blazer pockets stuffed, one with their hymn book, the other with various coping mechanisms – usually of the sweet, chocolate- or sugar-coated variety. I always carried things that might work well as nose plugs, should the need arise. I’d always assumed that it was something in the hall that triggered my - sorry, this is going be gross – river of snot, but it turns out it wasn’t. It’s the morning generally that does it.

I’m allergic to mornings. By lunchtime, it’s gone. It was always second period at school before I could breathe through my nose, before I could enunciate clearly and not sound like a rugby player who’d just been pinned on the bottom of the scrum by his head. Now, it clears by the time I’m at my desk and have cleared my email inbox – a time that, admittedly, gets later and later every day. And rather than a pocket full of tissues, I have a roll of toilet paper sitting on my desk. I’m all class.

The way I see it, some people are morning people, and some people aren’t. I clearly fall into the latter category. I would love to be able to bounce out of bed in the morning, doing my very best impersonation of Tigger, but I have long resigned myself to being a shambling incarnation of a crime scene photograph when I first arise. The tissue plugs up my nose probably don’t help the appearance.

I’m going to be forced to get my act together, though. Word came down from on high that I am to be at a new desk location by the end of the week. The moment will be put off as long as possible. As much as I want the company of other people, I enjoy the luxury of having nobody nearby to see just how late it is when I first plant my head on my desk and reach for the toilet paper. Sitting with other people, I’ll have to start functioning through the snot. At least there's no mothers handy to offer me a handkerchief.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Ladies who lunch

While I was putting together my cheese and toast sandwich today, I was suddenly hit by a memory. It was a hit, not a gentle reminder or anything so subtle. It was the cheese that did it. Or rather, the foil that the cheese was wrapped in. But in order to understand why foil-wrapped cheese could trigger a moment of vivid recall, I need to start way back in September, during my trip back to Melbourne for a few days.

It was Mum's birthday. I was jet lagged out of my mind, feeling the effects of a horrendous plane trip that had ended at midnight the night before. The flight was awful, not least because somewhere between Singapore and Sydney, or Sydney and Melbourne - I still can't narrow it any further than that - I lost not only the denim jacket that I'd been carrying, but also the scarf that was with it. Beyond that, there were delays, annoying people and a malfunctioning entertainment system. Another day on Qantas, essentially. But I digress.

The jet lag had left me a little silly by the time in the afternoon that we made it to Nana's house for the hello visit. After the usual welcome back conversations ('When will you be back for good?' 'Have you seen Anabelle yet?' 'When do you leave?' 'Have you got a boyfriend yet?' 'You should go on Farmer Wants a Wife.' 'I got served by a lovely boy in the supermarket. So helpful, he was. I thought of you. You should get his number.'), talk shifted to the dinner plans for the night. We were off to the Cross Keys, a local pub that used to have a somewhat seedy reputation but now does a half decent meal and, most importantly, has discount vouchers on the back of supermarket dockets. The gist seemed to be that Nana was all prepared for the dinner already.

It seems that the meal sizes at the Cross Keys aren't to Nana's liking, though. Too big, apparently.

"They give you two enormous pieces of fish," she told me, gesturing with her hands. She could have been the fisherman describing the one that got away, with a piece of fish as large as the one she demonstrated.

"One that size is too much." I agree with her. One piece of fish that large would see me through a week. But Nana, ever-resourceful and always known for such behaviour, went to her handbag and showed us her solution; she had a freezer bag and a couple of pieces of paper towel already stashed, ready and waiting to receive the extra piece of fish and as many chips as she didn't want to eat. She's always been known for loading up on dinner rolls from the table, but it seems she's been picking up bad habits from her friends in the day club. I feel sorry for the bus driver on their outings, a load of senior citizens coming back from some destination, each with a piece of battered fish concealed in a wedge of paper napkins in her handbag. The stench must be mind-numbing by the end of a two hour trip.

"The only trouble," she told me, "is that it all goes a bit pappy by the next day. After ***'s birthday the other week, it was a soggy mess when I pulled it out of the fridge."

You have to remember, I was jet lagged. I was feeling silly, and I was still adjusting to having to conceal my giggles. And I'm always a little bit of a smart arse - er, always helpful. So I offered a suggestion, a hint.

"You should take some foil, keep it crisp."

Her eyes light up like the flashers on a winning pokie machine. It's all she can do to keep from running to the kitchen and stuffing the roll of foil into her bag there and then. She manages to contain her excitement, somehow, and the rest of the visit goes off without a hitch. ('You should be saving.' 'You need to come back and settle down.' 'About as welcome as a red-headed step-child.')

Later that night, clustered around the family dinner table, I heard a rustling from the far end of the table, and suppressed giggles from the cousins and their partners lined up opposite me.

"Was that foil?" demanded the newest addition to the family group, the girlfriend of a cousin. She sounded incredulous. I looked down the length of the table and there sat Nana, forcing the zip of her handbag closed over a clearly bulging foil-wrapped parcel. She looked up at me and beamed. I don't think I've ever made her as happy before in my entire life.

When I saw her again a couple of days later, she was still beaming.

"That was a lovely bit of fish I got from the Cross Keys. It stayed all crispy. I'll have to tell Mary to keep a bit of foil in her bag."

Friday, November 13, 2009

Whatever Anonymous

I have a flatmate in need of an intervention. Maybe both of them do. Either that, or it’s time I got out and got a life. They’re both in extreme states right now, brought about by their own foolish actions. They each have a dependency situation that is coming to a head and will cause them pain in the not too distant future. Their uppers of choice vary, but the result is still the same: they’re both exhausted, and unable to stop themselves from going back for more.

Take L, as the first example. She’s just discovered what I can only call the joys of a night out drinking, at the age of 35. It was never going to end well, really. For 30 years barely a drop of alcohol passed her lips. By all accounts, her mother virtually insisted that she have a drink of some sort at her 21st birthday party; everyone knew better than to expect her to be ‘merry’ by the time her 30th rolled around. Now here we are, five years later, and she has come under the influence of her work friends who are the typical residents of London – verging on liver failure thanks to the lifestyle that is expected of all and sundry in the city and its surrounds. She goes out for dinner during the week, like this week and, because her tolerance is so low and she never learnt the coping tools that the rest of us picked up when we were young enough not to suffer from hang overs, she gets drunk. She never believed me that she was feeling the effects of alcohol, until recently. She still insists, the morning after, that she’s not drunk. She’s just tired, dehydrated, has a headache. But the last couple of sessions have seen her bleary eyed and chugging water. My personal favourite was the night she nearly fell down the stairs, giggling as she saved herself.

Part of the reason it hits her so hard, though, is the reason she needs an intervention. The woman doesn’t sleep. She insists that the smallest thing wakes her up, that it always has. But lately her exhaustion has been so deep that I’ve been able to bang around the flat at 3 a.m. and not disturb her. Her four hours of sleep are deep, but not enough to replenish her. I spent a fortnight of barely sleeping in the lead up to the end of this semester, studying until the wee sma’s, culminating in a memorable night of 2 hours sleep. I still looked more alert and awake than she did. I was the one pulling her back from stepping out in front of cars, in spite of being so exhausted myself that I was mainlining caffeine and hallucinating that walls were rippling. Maybe she has that problem too. Maybe that explains why she walks into the walls to often I've started comparing her to the ball in a pinball machine. I’m tempted to tie her to her bed and force her to sleep, because she won’t stop driving herself and I’m getting the feeling that collapse is imminent.

C has a slightly different problem. Her addiction is to Shoreditch. It’s like a vortex, sucking her in a couple of nights a week. The eye of the storm is her boyfriend, a cheerful Irishman who lives up to the reputation of his countrymen for putting away booze. C, in contrast, is a petite Japanese girl with a lower tolerance for it than even L. I’ve seen her literally legless, before, being carried out of a party with the kind of jelly legs that are usually seen in cartoons when someone has been hit over the head with an anvil. She staggered in at 4 a.m. this morning and woke with red eyes, exhausted. She’s off out again tonight, and probably tomorrow as well. Right now, I think she’s single-handedly keeping Nurofen in business. Just like an alcoholic, she goes to Shoreditch for one or two, planning on hitting just the one bar. She emerges hours later having done the rounds of any number of haunts, but few clear memories of which ones. It’s not even that she’s drinking too much – she’s sworn off mojitos, now – it’s more that she’s also just not sleeping. In her case, the intervention would be removal from her boyfriend, the enabler to end all enablers given that he works in Shoreditch. He leads her into the Twilight Zone of its bars, and they emerge later having lost several hours without knowing where.

Her intervention is coming though, whether she wants it or not. The boy is off to Thailand very soon, and they won’t be seeing each other again until Christmas, when they meet at her family’s place in Indonesia. Her liver will have time to regenerate, if it's given the chance. But December is party month. It won’t have a hope.

And then there’s me. I probably need my own intervention right now. It’s to pry me away from the flat. I’ve got an invitation to the party C will be at tonight. It’s the 30th birthday of a mutual friend. There will be loads of people there, it’s an 80s themed dress up. And I should go. I know I should. But somehow, I just can’t muster the enthusiasm to go and be the sober person in the room. And I can’t bring myself to go and spend my hard earned on booze. I’m becoming a stick in the mud. And what’s worse, I like it. Someone get a crow bar and pry my fingers loose from the door frame. It’s the only way to get me out and about tonight.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

From the Old School House

Imagine an old school house. Lofty ceilings, hard surfaces and a fairly large space that would once have been crammed with grimy little critters of all ages; this is south London, after all, a place where smog and smut would have dominated the air, rather than just the brains and mouths of certain locals. There’s another floor above, where yet more urchins would have been packed literally to the rafters. There are windows letting natural light flood in, but they are too high to allow for any view that doesn’t involve pigeons perched on drain pipes. The birds always seem to be mating; I've stared at them a lot. Through the window, open to negate the stifling central heating, wafts the slightly stomach turning smell of a fish and chip shop that hasn’t changed its oil in far too long.

White painted walls, bars on the windows. It was an institution of learning, but it seems to have a much harsher purpose now. The swearing of the children who like to get up to who knows – or really wants to know – what in the alley beside the building adds to the feeling of being in some netherworld, the kind only seen by many in Guy Ritchie films and the estate sections of The Bill. But it’s not a movie set. It’s my office, the place I spend a depressing amount of time.

At one end, by the door that leads through to the stairs and the toilets, sit two people. In theory they sit there, anyway. In reality, they have their desks there as a base for the moments when they’re not on site, somewhere to put their coats while they have meetings, a phone to store their messages, a computer to write instructions for the builders. They’re not there very often. Then there’s a gap, not quite ten metres, but more than five and feeling like the Sahara desert of office space - vast, unfathomable, uncrossable. It’s been filled over the past few months. Detritus from other people’s desks has made its way down here; empty desks are magnets for this kind of thing in an office still adrift with paper and samples of stone, tiles, carpets, tap fittings. There’s even a broken photocopier in there. It’s wasteland, the car wreckers yard of the office.

I sit on the other side of it, a solitary figure with as much space again behind me. All I have to keep me company, most of the time, is my ipod, my computer, a skeletal dodo and a fluffy flamingo pen left behind by the occupant of the next desk when she was made redundant. And the randy pigeons on the rooftops outside. A telephone list with more names crossed out than not is held to the partition behind the computer screen with a piece of yellowing sticky tape. It’s a lonely old existence, some days. On others, there’s so much foot traffic going from the stairs to the kitchen, which opens off a corridor on my side of the room, or to the print area behind me, that I never get a chance to indulge what I’m doing now. You never know who is going to stop for a chat on their way through, surreptitiously checking your screen to see if you’re working on a juicier project than they are. In a world where two thirds of the people you know have been made redundant, you’re always on the look out for the project that looks like its going to last. You don’t want to be the person left clinging to the wreckage when the client gets the jitters about the state of the market and pulls the rug out from under you. Because you won’t have the wreckage for long before it – and your job – is snatched away from you.

L was bitching the other night about not having had a pay rise in the last six months. She wondered why I nearly bit her head off. She’s not familiar with the empty office, the fear, the boredom of not even being able to afford to buy the postage for your Christmas presents, let alone the presents themselves.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

A Little Bit of Something

It happened again this morning. I was running late. That’s not what happened again, it seems to happen pretty much every morning, so I hardly ever comment on it these days. No, it was while I was bustling to the tube that it happened. A short anorexic girl out for a jog went by me and nearly took me out.

I’m not small. In fact, there is no dimension attached to me that could possibly be classed as small, except for my attention span, which is too tiny to measure. I shouldn’t be difficult to see coming. I was wearing a blue coat and a pink/purple/blue striped hat. I have big hair. I should have been clearly visible, especially from behind. I wasn’t walking up the middle of the footpath, but, rather considerately, I thought, was off to one side. There was nobody coming the other way. But still Little Miss These-Lycra-Leggings-Are-Flapping-Loose-At-My-Bum felt it necessary to try to cut between me and the brick wall I was walking beside, and in the process nearly overturned me. And it’s the second day in a row she’s done it. Being bumped into by her is like having a bag of rulers thrown at your back; she’s all sharp angles with, quite literally, no padding. The only reason she didn’t end up on her arse herself was that there was nothing of her to bounce off me. Kind of like a feather doesn’t really bounce off things as it falls to the ground, it just slightly alters its course, she was able to keep her feet.

But aggressive vertically challenged folk have been out in force of late. Last night I had one standing so close behind me on an escalator that her face must have been getting hit by the bag I had slung over my shoulder. Every time she breathed, I could feel some part of her against my thighs. She would have climbed the stairs, I’m sure, but for the stream of other midgets passing on the left. One of these bolted past at such speed that I was nearly sucked into her slipstream as I stepped off the top. I watched her weave through the crowd when I was caught in a lull, waiting for some moron to find their oyster card while they were at the gates. I couldn’t see her, she was too low down, but I could see the ripple of consternation her passing caused like wind through a field of wheat. It was around about then that I put together my theory about why shorter people are often so much more aggressive in crowd situations than taller ones. The taller ones can see the impact their movement has on the people around them. They can often see that by jostling the person next to them, they bump them into another person, and the contact travels like a wave out from the source. Shorties, on the other hand, barrel through hordes of people only able to see the ones they elbow out of the way – and sometimes it seems that they don’t even see them – until somewhere, Ashton Kutcher blacks out or a there's a hurricane in Texas. I think it’s time I tested out my own version of the butterfly effect though; the next stunted excuse for an adult who sideswipes me and nearly knocks me over because they hit me below my centre of gravity? Yeah, I might just land on them. We’ll see what that does to the butterfly.

*Apologies to all my short friends. You know I don’t mean you. None of you have knocked me over yet. But be warned, if you do…

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Dial M for...

I was away from my desk when my mobile rang. I didn't hear it - nobody would, since it's switched to silent during work hours. The only sign of any activity, when I got back to my desk - was the flashing light at the centre of the keypad and a little arrow showing on the screen. There's something about a missed call. Until the caller details come up on the screen, it could be anybody. It's a frisson of excitement in an otherwise mundane and boring day. But not today. Today, the caller details simply say 'Private'. There is no symbol in the top right of the screen to suggest that they, whoever they may have been, left a message. Excitement turns quickly to frustration, annoyance.

Why call at all, if they will not leave a message?

I assume it is a friend whose office number always comes up as private, then go back to work as I wait for a reply to my email asking what she wanted. But when it comes half an hour later, 30 minutes of distraction and futile attempts to keep working, to not pick up my phone and play with the buttons in hopes of finding out who it was, it is a denial; she didn't call me.

I log into various webmail accounts, hoping against hope that whoever it was has simply decided to email me instead. But no. There is no email waiting in either gmail account, nor is hotmail showing any news. Whoever it is, they have not left me a message anywhere.

Which means that it is not the publishing company I applied to for a job last week. It is not somebody wanting my services as a seamstress, giving me the cash to survive this month in a little more comfort. Nobody was actually desperate to contact me. And suddenly, I feel unloved instead of anxious. Melancholy.

It's cold and grey outside today. Meteorologists are forecasting fog overnight. And I'm surrounded by the over-warm fug of central heating, struggling to stay awake. I wish the call had come a few minutes earlier, a few minutes later, when I was sitting beside the phone. Anything to relieve the dull routine, the frustration of unsatisfied curiosity.

Update: I have identified my mystery caller. It was no mystery. It was the mobile phone carrier that I left earlier this year, attempting to win my custom back. They called again this afternoon, having called twice yesterday as well. I almost wish I'd never found out.

Monday, November 09, 2009

The Winter Coat

Winter is definitely upon us. The days are noticeably shorter, with stick figure shadows like children’s drawings attached to our feet by lunchtime. The trees shrugged off their leaves over the course of a couple of days last week, leaving a treacherous, slippery sludge on footpaths after it rained on Friday. Until the rain it looked pretty, tempting me into turning into a six year old again and kicking my way through the drifts for the joy of the sound and colour. I didn’t, but only because, in the grown up land I inhabit, I was perpetually rushing around, always late for whatever my next appointment was.

I had to dig out my longer winter coat today as well. The knee length black number that I bought with the winnings of my one and only soccer bet. Thank you, Tim Cahill, for keeping me warm for three years by being the first to score against Arsenal way back in 2006. I was looking the coat over before putting it on this morning and I noticed that the elbows are looking decidedly worn. I don’t think it’s going to see me through another winter after this. It will be added to the list of things I will be leaving behind when I leave London. And I’ll miss it; it features prominently in my winter travel photos, the few occasions that I have let myself appear in them. There I am, wrapped up against the cold with varying hats, gloves, scarves, and my trusty black, double-breasted, knee-length coat, always looking more stylish than any other coat I’ve managed to find. With the coat will vanish something of my self image.

Of course it saw less wear last winter than before. The second round of Heathrow injection kicked in to make it a little too snug to wear with enough layers underneath it. This year it seems to be more snug, but I’m fairly certain that it’s just me. If it was really any more snug than it was last year, the bottom button wouldn’t do up, rather than just straining ever so slightly. But whatever its fit, whatever the reason, it is gradually inching closer to the charity shop haul at the end of my London life.

It sounds like I have written that as a metaphor for my London life; it’s really not. It’s just an ode to a coat that has seen me through a lot. I could write a similar tribute to my boots, but they can’t handle the pace and need to be re-heeled at the beginning of every winter. The coat, in contrast, something that never truly gets packed away in a place like London, just needs a quick brush and it’s ready for service. It might be poetic to link living in London with a tired, worn out piece of clothing that no longer fits me properly. Hell, I’d think I was pretty darned clever if I could do that and make it work. But at the end of the day? It’s just a coat. There’s a new one in a shop out there waiting for me to have the right combination of time and money to find it. At the moment, it’s going to be waiting until kingdom come, but I know it’s out there somewhere. I just need to get off my butt and find it. In the mean time, my old faithful will have to serve. And do it well, given that we’re headed into the first week of temperature not reaching double figures this week.

I can’t tell if it’s the beginning of Christmas, or then end of the year. Either way, there is a touch of melancholy to the season for me. It’s my last full year in London, my last northern hemisphere winter. There are reasons to look back and reasons to look forward. I think I’ll focus on the forward, today.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

So you think you can...

...Write.
Well yes, actually, there is the occasional day when I'm pretty sure I can write. There are days in between when I'm convinced of my general crapness, certain that I can barely string together a sentence. People who get emails from me will know all about those days, the ones where I take all the words I want to say and just throw them up in the air to see where they land. I like to think of it as free form sentence structure, much the way my word inventions (witness:crapness, found in no dictionary I know of) are driving language forward; purists call it gibberish. One day I'm sure that someone will recognise the almost Joyce-ian genius of it. After all, they thought his novel-without-punctuation idea was pretty kooky at first, too.

The days when I know I can write are the days when I use a lot of adverbs. I like adverbs. In fact, I love them. Lovely, cheerfully, merrily, disgustingly, horrifically, mercifully. It is one of my favourite kinds of words. I've been known to write sentences without a single verb, with barely a noun, but with plenty of adverbs. On days when I feel ten feet tall and invincible, I scatter them with gay abandon - gaily, even - throughout my fiction. But apparently, this is the wrong thing to do. According to the experts, they should be used sparingly - that's their adverb, not mine. So lately, on the days when I believe everything they tell me about how to write, when I don't trust my own instincts, I go through and take them out. I strip ever single word that ads something descriptive to a noun. If it ends in -ly, it gets culled. I'm trying to be ruthless, really I am. And it has its advantages, too. Like at the moment, when I'm trying to do NaNoWriMo, a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Today is day 3 and I'm ahead of the curve, so I'm optimistic about reaching the word count. Part of this is because of just how many more words are involved in saying 'a tone full of doubt' than just a simple 'doubtfully'. But the experts know best, after all.

Or so they would have us believe. Because the experts would get rid of all the fun in language. I know plenty of people who use adverbs when they speak. Are they saying that we should get rid of them in speech as well as writing? And shouldn't writing be all about finding an individual voice? Because if we make everything uniform, it suddenly becomes a whole lot more bland. Instant grey. Why read a book if you could have those thoughts, in that voice, in your own well-ordered mind? Personally, I like something a little more disorderly. Which might explain my liking of fluff-literature, as I consider it; fluff is all about the exuberant over statement.

Besides, if you iron all the quirks out of literature, you lose something delightful. Like the man in the shop I go to for my caffeine supplies at work. He recognises me now and even raises a half smile, no longer the surly morose individual who would barely grunt the total to me after pinging the cash register when he saw me pull yet another bottle of Coke from his drinks fridge. Now, I not only get a hint of smile, a hello, a nod, but once I've given over my money, I get a wonderful little gem of English-as-a-second-language that should never be wiped out: rather than just the ordinary, 'Thanks', he delivers up the delightful, 'Thank you please.' It might sound like I'm patronising his English; I'm not. I have seen him have conversations with people in languages I don't know enough to recognise anything about other than there being more than one of them. I know from experience that my own understanding of languages other than my own is sadly lacking. But I challenge the experts to keep English evolving, keep it going in the way it has for centuries as it steals from other languages, is innovated by people with the strength of will and personality to impose their own speech patterns on those around them. I challenge the experts to keep the intuitively, delightfully unique in the language.

And yes, today I think I can write. Tomorrow? Meh, who can tell?

Sunday, November 01, 2009

More than a tweet, less than a blog

I'm just jumping on to distract myself from what I ought to be doing, which is finishing various writing tasks. Just to give some idea of what I'm up to, here's a couple of stats for you...

Word count on 5000 word essay due in about an hour's time that I've been working on for the last two weeks: 1931
Word count on day one NaNoWriMo novel-in-a-month-insanity: 1862
Phone calls from guy on Match that I swapped numbers with on Thursday: 2, plus a couple of texts.
Face to face meetings with guy from Match that I swapped numbers with on Thursday: 0, although that is likely to change on Wednesday
Level of worry that he may in fact turn out to be less the nice guy he seemed when he first called, more like annoyingly clingy stalker type: Excessively high
Hours of sleep last week, not counting this morning's accidental forget-to-set-alarm debacle: Approximately 14
Statistics I have left to offer: 0
Amount of life I've wasted playing Spider Solitaire instead of writing 5000 word essay due in about an hour: 1879354 hours. Or at least it seems that way when I look at how much work I still have to do.

So, what with the novel-writing insane plan I have running at the moment, and the fact that my life is about to shift into overdrive (yes, I'm allowed out of the house without feeling guilty next week AND I've just been paid...double whammy), I'm thinking the posts might be easing up over the next month. Maybe. Fair warning!