Sometimes Funny is All I Have

Editing's For Losers

2012-01-25T11:35:00.003Z

A few days (weeks? months?) ago I started to write a post, then, in a total departure from character, I got distracted and wandered off. This is what I had written then:

"The plumber is back.

(Not a euphemism, although I am enjoyed considering what it would be a euphemism for, if a euphemism it indeed was. Perhaps... no, I don't know. Answers on a worrying postcard sent anonymously to someone in authority, please.)

It isn't very exciting news that the plumber has returned. It's just that last time he did a thing then the tap leaked and now he has to do another thing. This time I didn't stockpile water or do anything weird like that, I just talked to him about stuff. Mainly tap-based stuff, to be honest. I tried to tell him something about the boiler that Ben had told me earlier but I got it wrong and forgot what it was halfway through my sentence and then the plumber asked me a question about it and I longed as usual for a verbal backspace button. I think I just got carried away because I was feeling all confident after having correctly identified a tap. It was a lesson in knowing one's limits.

Today is my Day of Working For Myself, At Home, Being All Well Creative And Excellent.

It is a pretty intimidating title for a day. I have already done all my planning and boring work, so now I am strapping on my wings and preparing to soar through the skies of art until I need a wee or get hungry or someone uploads an amusing cat video to youtube.

I met up with my friend Lowri the other day in order to make plans for this year. We sat in the café bit of Royal Northern College of Music and wrote importantly in our diaries. As we were discussing our imminent world takeover some music students started singing"

And that's it. That's as far as I got. Now I read it back I can identify that, rather than distraction being the problem, what most likely happened was that I started writing about Stuff And Plans and got so overwhelmed by even the idea of it all that I had to go and lie face down in a darkened room until I could breathe normally again. Anyway the upshot of it all was that the music students started singing Happy Birthday but in a proper way, with vibrato and harmony, exactly the way my friend Daniel hates it most of all, and we laughed a bit. As they reached the second to last line (ha-ppy BIIIIIR-thday dear who-eeeeveeeer...) and the windows in my head smashed one by one, it occurred to me that this is what I feel like I'm doing every time I sing. Showing off. Smashing people's inner windows. Being, basically, really unnecessary and annoying.

And it occurs to me now, when I write this down, that this probably isn't the correct attitude for someone who claims to be a singer.

I haven't got some big epiphany-type solution to this problem, I just thought I would share how ludicrous I am with you. Feel free to share your own idiosyncratic lunacies with me (I know you have some), it would make me feel better.

Today the hills are pinkly tinged with snow, and the sun is bright and low. I have cycled into the wind, dodging buses and worries. Now I have work to do if I am ever going to feel like I am not screeching into the wilderness like a opera student with something to prove.

I am also boringly resolving to write more blog posts (for the writing ritual of it, rather than to sate the hoards of drivel-hungry readers who clamour daily at my virtual door). So expect more agonisingly painful navel-gazing and self-indulgent crap in the very near future.

Resolute

2012-01-04T12:45:00.004Z

Wow! This year is going to be good! I am going to be such an excellent person this year.

This year is the one in which I turn thirty, so it has to be magnificent. I am going to be thin and well-dressed. Busy but not stressed. (Rhyming but not all the time.) I am going to wear just the right amount of make up and only drink up until the point just before I start to have very strong opinions about everyone else's life. I am going to achieve quite staggering amounts of stuff, including, but not exclusively, world peace. I am going to stop hating my speaking voice. I am going to stop worrying about everything. I am going to stop grinding my teeth and inspecting my profile woefully. I will go to bed at a reasonable hour. I will do exercise. I will be insufferably zen. All my relationships will be honest and not alcohol-dependent.

Imagine how annoyingly confident I am going to become! Sure, I will lose friends. Yes, you will hate me and want to kick me in my toned shins (can shins be toned?) (mine will be!). I will begin to have normal pastimes instead of my current ones ("Imaginary Counting" is the best - you sit on public transport and pretend to be counting stuff on your fingers, but really you aren't counting anything! Ha ha! Everyone is always fooled.)

And wow, my productivity. We haven't even touched on that yet but it is going to be through the ROOF, my friends. So far through the roof that the roof will look like a tiny ant roof from where my productivity will be. And I will not mind failure. Not this year. I will learn from my mistakes, have some green tea and reflect on things, pausing only to jot something profound in my recycled notebook with the pen that I will keep on me at all times. Then I will practice my cello and go to a life-drawing class.

I will not eat crisps, even in secret.

I bet you're going to have this sort of year, too. See you at yoga!

Art Is Definitely A Real Thing, OK?

2011-12-08T09:24:00.004Z

I am waiting for the plumber.

He was meant to be here twenty-five minutes ago but has not showed up, and frankly I am beginning to feel rather rejected.

I wasn't sure whether or not he would need to turn off the water so, just in case, I have filled the kettle and two pints glasses full of water, imagining somehow that I might die of thirst between now and 11.30 when I have to leave for work, that Ben will come home to find me strewn across the floor like a bison, all ribs and woe.

(Some time later)

He is here now. Very, very clatterbangcrash-based activity going on upstairs. I am crouching over my computer trying to ignore the fact that almost as soon as he arrived and therefore I could no longer use (ahem) the facilities, I began to need a panic-wee. I am ludicrous.

He is big with big boots on, and has brought into the house a massive trolley with what can only be described as 'tools' on it. Loads, though, not just the ones I understand like screwdrivers and hairdryers. I am a bit in awe of him. He can just wander into someone's house with loads of bits of metal (welded specifically to be useful) and understand how a bath works and what to clatterbangcrash to make it into a shower.

I, on the very stark other hand, am nervously writing about him on the Internet. What forking paths we take. (Please note: 'forking' to mean diverging, rather than a pretend swear.)

I am relieved that I am teaching this afternoon, so at least I can feel like I am giving something to society.

Yesterday I had an excellent day of working on The Project: 2012, which is a show that I am, along with two excellent friends, taking to Edinburgh next year for the festival. We are working together in some respects but each of us is creating our own work. My show is going to be about £$^*&()*_)*%£ %^&((* %^£@£&*@ &%$%$^*()%$$^^.

(I am not able to say it yet, because I am too scared. I have been practising saying HELLO I AM AN ARTIST AND THIS IS WHAT MY WORK IS ABOUT without wanting to throw up. What always happens is that I mumble something about a cello and then quickly say that I also teach so we can talk about teaching rather than AAAAAAAHHHHHRRRT (vomit) because it's much, much, much easier and doesn't involve spontaneous panic-weeing.)

Yesterday was cool, though. I did, like, stuff and it was good. Part of it involves trawling the wide-eyed archives of this blog, which is pretty forking embarrassing, I can tell you. I quite like doing it, particularly because it's for my ahrt and so not as self-indulgent as it could be. Although it is still pretty self-indulgent. Sometimes that's OK, perhaps.

Oh God. Is it acceptable to ask the plumber to wait outside the bathroom so I can have a wee? I might just risk implosion and wait until I get to the station, which also will cost me 30p. Maybe I will ask for some wee-money for Christmas.

(Some more time later)

Oh my God he just left the flat, not saying when he was coming back, so I locked the door to the flat and dashed upstairs (I would have just locked the door to the bathroom, but it was propped open heavily. I am not so mental that I have to lock the front door every time I have a wee). I wonder whether he has just intuited that I needed a wee so discreetly left for a bit. That must be the sign of someone who is good at their job.

This is all too dramatic for me when I have work to do. I cannot concentrate at all. My concentration ability must be extremely flimsy.

I am going to go and do some ahhhrt before I do my teaching (LOOK I AM NOT A WASTER I HAVE A REAL JOB LOVE ME LOVE ME VALIDATE ME, etc etc).

Off you go, do something excellent.

Today, I Am Mainly Avoiding...

2011-11-22T19:03:00.005Z

...videos. Well, I suppose I am probably safe as, although I was on the radio today, I wouldn't claim to be a star. (I would, but just not in public.)

Actually, I was quite terrified of saying anything in case the listeners texted in and demanded to know why a seven year old girl from the Home Counties was in a radio studio in Manchester and not at school being precocious in an Advanced Elocution lesson or something. I said the odd high-pitched "yes!" and "thank you!" until it was time to sing, but managed to avoid getting tangled up in my own accent.

The DJ was called Lauren, and she definitely had a radio voice. I am not criticising her for this. In her position I would no doubt develop an entirely different personality although I fear the jokes would probably be tellingly similar. I would want to develop a whole alter-ego based on Graham Torrington.

Do you remember Graham Torrington? DJ impressario and smooth-voiced wonder of that classic show, Late Night Love?

Graham had a radio voice. Desperate women called Sandra would call him and tell them all about the various infidelities of the Garys, their erstwhile lorry-driving boyfriends. Graham gave terrible advice in silken tones before fading in the twenty-fifth Lionel Richie song of the hour.

If you do remember him I would like to know about it. Out of interest, partly, but also for A Reason. Tell me your Torrington tales.

Anyway, Lauren was not like Graham. She was really nice and hardly told me to leave my husband at all. Ben, Dan and I (aka Geddes Loom, remember?) were on the radio to promote the show we're doing tomorrow night at Contact, Manchester(the same one that we performed at the festival in Leicester and more recently in Dartington, Devon), so we did a song (February Town) and Ben did a poem. Ben did most of the talking, Dan and I did radio smiles, which are like normal smiles but tinged with the futility of knowing that the people you are smiling at can't see you.

Lauren was a one-woman hive of activity. Pressing buttons and pulling up faders, reading text messages as they came in from listeners (many of whom seemed to be asking her out on dates), introducing tracks and mixes, cueing up things and fading down others. It was fascinating to watch. Reassuringly, though, she was still incorporating my old favourite method, known as the Things Written On Bits Of Paper Technique. At one point she looked at her left hand and said ponderously, "Now, why's my finger pointing at that piece of paper?" before remembering that it was the title of the mix she was just about to play.

Still, my favourite bit of the whole thing was when we were on air and Ben, perched on a bit of desk to get closer to the mic, set off a turntable with his bum and set it revolving (the turntable, not his bum) as he blithely chatted about upcoming shows.

We walked home feeling dangerously upbeat until we remembered that we were really hungry so we all got a bit cross. Well, I did.

Tomorrow we'll be rehearsing and soundchecking at the theatre and performing in the evening. If you're about and you want to come you can! If you like. Not if you don't*.

*Please note my amazing marketing and promotion skillz.

There is plenty of other news, but I am so exhausted from being a radio star (does local radio count or will video only kill you if you've done a BBC session?) so I am currently lying in bed waiting for a decent time to go to sleep. It's nearly nine-thirty now so that's probably legitimate.

(I was not joking about the Graham Torrington thing. Do you remember him?)

Not Doing Taxes

2011-11-09T11:28:00.003Z

My God. It has been ages. It's not that I haven't thought about it. Of course I have. It's just that thinking about it leads to the question of what to write and then it all gets complicated and my brain wanders off for a little cup of Earl Grey and a lie down.

Why now, then? Well, it's mainly because I have a 'to do' list in front of me, and right there, in my own lovingly-crafted biro scrawl, are the hellish words "DO TAXES".

Wow, I suddenly really want to write a blog post.

And clean the bathroom. Oh, and paint my toenails. And write a song and practice my cello and clean the cupboards and call my sisters and put some stickers on my face and plait the neighbour's cat and see what I look like with writing on my eyelids and sit under the stairs.

(You may have noticed that only a couple of things I use for procrastination devices are actually productive in any way. I win.)

I want to write about all the stuff that's been going on, and there has been loads and most of it has been exciting and cool and some of it has involved lying on the floor of an old mill clutching people's ankles, being dragged along as they try to kick me off with genuine force and feeling. But when I tried to start writing about it all I wrote the sentence "last week I did a thing", which is factually accurate but would not score many points in a French Oral examination (not least because it is in English).

It is grey and miserable outside. We have a new sofa. Well, it isn't new, it is second- (or possibly third- or fourth-) hand, but it is new to us. It is massive. About the size of our entire flat. It is blue leather, but nicer than it sounds. It is squatting in the middle of the room, daring anyone to sit on it. It is a monolith, and I can't shake the feeling that it disapproves of me.

The old sofa, the tiny, uncomfortable red corduroy abomination with its cat scratched arms and frankly hideous odour, is cowering in the back of the room. I feel sorry for it. I feel like it is keening plaintively at me, wondering what it has done wrong and why we don't love it any more.

I have got to stop anthropomorphising furniture and get on with my tax return.

Annoyingly I have already planned my workshops for this week, although I could spend an hour or two re-doing it, although that would no doubt send me into a panic and I would then have to relegate it to the towering procrastination pile as well.

I have spent a bit of time ensuring the lighting is exactly right for the task of taxes, and making a cup of coffee which I won't drink because I am already feeling jittery from the first one and it's making me feel weird about the sofa.

The thing is, tax returns aren't even hard. All you have to do is sort stuff out and write it into the form, so actually I don't mind doing it, but I did just suddenly feel that I couldn't possibly do it without writing a screechingly-tedious blog post about it first.

Which I have done. Well done me.

Foot Pets and Theatre

2011-08-21T13:00:00.003+01:00

Sunday morning has just ebbed into Sunday afternoon and I have a picture of a cat on my foot. Last night, as we were eating dinner before going out, Ben asked me a question.

"Um, what shoes are you going to wear tonight?"

It's not like he is usually disinterested in my sartorial choices, but I'll admit the query took me back.

"I... I don't know. Why?"

"Well, I was wondering whether you're going to wear open ones or closed ones?"

"..."

"It's just that I quite want to draw a cat on your foot with this permanent marker."

"Oh. Right. Well, I don't know what shoes I am going to wear, but I definitely want you to draw a cat on my foot. Make it good, though, because I was actually planning to wear 'open' shoes."

So, giggling like a sweet but possibly not intellectually over-burdened child, he began to draw.

"Those" he explained after a while "are the ears."

I wore boots.

****

I am having a cup of tea, and considering cleaning the flat. In a few hours Lowri will pull up on her bike (cue screeching tyres and burning rubber) and I will leap upon Glinda, and together we will go and get Fergus and go to a housewarming/babyshower. I am almost resigned to the fact that I will sit considering cleaning until the point when it's really too late to start anything now and I will shrug my shoulders and go and get ready. Later on Fergus and I are planning on going to a life-drawing class. I am hoping for an interesting naked person. Somebody with some good topography to test our pencils properly. Basically, I want a morass of a subject, preferably with an evil glint in their eye and weird hair. I will be very disappointed if we get there and there is someone average, or even worse, someone who clearly likes gyms and soya products. I might take a marker pen in case I have to make the subject more interesting by drawing cats on their feet.

****

On Friday night we went to see some street theatre in Castlefield, an area of Manchester underneath the railway arches where the canal threads through. It is all red brick and cavernous spaces: dark and brooding. Castlefield is an area that could be really interesting and weird were it not for all the identikit wannabe-fancy, not-a-hair-out-of-place bars that have slithered up there, all moody outdoor lighting and Dyson airblades. The sort of place where you slide off the shiny sofas whilst desperately trying not to spill a drop of your pint because it cost £4.10.

Anyway, that aside, the theatre was amazing. It was part of the xtrax Platform 4 festival, and, as usual with these things I didn't really know what it was or even where we were going, I just trailed behind Ben whining vaguely about food until something amazing happened. As The World Tipped was stunning. About 1,500 people sat on the steps and watched as actors came onto the stage dressed in office clothes, and... well this is what it says on the website:

"At the Secretariat of the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, harassed staff fail to notice as the world around them, literally and metaphorically, slides toward disaster. Suspended above the audience in the night sky, the performers struggle to control their increasingly precarious world as they do battle with the effects of drastic environmental catastrophe."

Which is all true. What the website doesn't point out is the whole OHMYGODWOWDIDYOUSEETHATNODON'TTALKTOMEIAMWATCHINGWOWOWOWOWOWOWOW of the whole thing. It was impressive, sure, but more than that it was so moving and poignant. I just loved it. I don't want to bang on about the details because I am not a theatre reviewer, but I will just say that I totally forgot about needing a wee for about an hour. It's that good.

Also: free. I don't know how many people would have been there even if they had had to pay, probably quite a few, but not as many. It was a really strong reminder of why arts subsidies are so very important.

****

We are going to Edinburgh tomorrow! To the festival, just for a couple of days. I plan on spending a millionsquillion pounds and getting a cold, which is usually what happens in Edinburgh at festival time. I strongly believe we can be there for just two days and come back as broken and penniless as if we had been there for the whole month.

(Brief interjection to say that the impatient buzzing coming from the window area and what I assumed to be a fly is, in fact, A WASP. My arch nemesis. (Please insert dramatic "dun dun DUN" music here.) I am going to have to go and get in a cupboard until one of us dies.)

I am looking forward to Edinburgh, the hectic, street-pounding existence of it all where time moves in strange ways and everyone is cocking joyously on about THEIR SHOW and how hungover they are all the time. It's fun and brilliant and deeply exhausting.

(Now I have noticed the wasp I am finding it very, very distracting. I might phone Ben and get him to come back from town where he is doing street theatre and tell him FUCK ART THERE IS A WASP and hope he comes back to rescue me. Even Foot Cat is beginning to look nervous.)

****

I have to stop droning on now. I have successfully wasted most of the time I should have been tidying up, so my mission has been accomplished. Well done, me. I am going to see exactly how permanent this marker actually is, because if Foot Cat doesn't come off I will be forced to draw a matching one on my other foot. Or maybe a Foot Dog and make them chase each other by doing some kind of dance.

Tantrums and Triumphs

2011-08-16T17:24:00.005+01:00

What I am currently supposed to be doing is research for my new job, which starts in a month, as music coordinator in a special needs secondary school. I will be there for a day and a half a week, leaving the rest of the week wide open for massive excellence in other areas. I worked in this particular school on a project for a term earlier this year, and as serendipity would have it they were looking for someone to take over the music position, and offered it to me. I leapt at the chance. It is a lovely school and the kids and teachers I worked with were brilliant. Despite having worked there before, however, I am anxious to prove my worth quickly, so I am researching and planning like a mad dog (a very diligent and surprisingly literate mad dog who is easily distracted by their much-neglected weblog).

Well, that's what, as I said before, I am currently supposed to be doing.

What I want to be doing is going over and over the last few days until it all settles down in my brain and I can move on to the next thing. I know I should allow time for this, but it's a tricky thing to achieve. As a result, everything I am doing is half-hearted and woeful, every minute that ticks by without significant achievement is mourned. This, I know with every fibre of my drippy little being, is not useful or productive. I am sitting staring forlornly at my computer like I am a chocolate bunny and it is a radiator, knowing that if I continue to sit here I will just become more and more melty, hoping that someone will come along and pop me in the fridge of fun for a bit until I feel better.

That analogy got away from me a bit.

Last week was a shitstorm, wasn't it? All the rioting and the ensuing callous bigotry made everyone I know feel exhausted and appalled. I started to write a post about it all, about how hideously Tory loads of people on my Facebook feed seemed to suddenly get, but there has been so much written, so much said, that I'm not sure I can contribute in any meaningful way. Instead I will write about my weekend.

Ben had been commissioned by Phrased&Confused to write a twenty minute piece around the word "protest", to be performed first at Summer Sundae Festival in Leicester, then Devon in September then Manchester in November. He asked Dan and I to work on it with him, and it ended up as a piece called This Poem Is On Strike, about what Poetry would say if it could protest. We ended up adding Music into the mix as an advisor to Poetry (sort of) and the whole thing ended up being kind of absurd and comedic with a Serious Message. We were booked to do a performance of it on Friday, one on Saturday and then a Geddes Loom set on the Sunday.

Last week we rehearsed every evening, having hired out the theatre space in our building. We live about a mile from central Manchester, and so things felt tense. Rumours were zipping around and nobody knew what to think. I was staring off into the distance, scouring the cityscape for clues as to how the riots were happening up here. I felt obsessed by it, like I wanted to be checking what was going on every five seconds. It felt like London after the 7th July bombings (which I wrote about on this blog) in that everyone felt weird and shaken, but different, because this time there was nobody to turn to. In my naivety in 2005 I felt that we could stand together and help each other. Last week it felt like such a painful inevitability that the reaction was going to be the (further) abandonment of a whole group of people and the effect would be even greater societal division. I felt heartbroken. I'm sure you did, too. We rehearsed into the night and wound down, went to bed and woke up. Gathering props and costumes, cycling into the rain to find last minute festival necessities, I felt like I was just about holding it together. I felt like if I stopped for breath that breath would come out as tears.

(I suppose I couldn't not talk about it, really, could I?)

On Thursday I was sewing a cape to a t-shirt (of course), and I bit the thread. My front tooth chipped (or, more specifically, a bit came off my tooth that they had put on when it chipped last time).

I burst into tears. I mean burst. Burst like a water main bursts. I went from sewing serenely, imagining myself to be much like a Jane Austen heroine, to wailing and gnashing of broken teeth, with Ben looking at me, stricken and confused. I couldn't explain why I was crying so very, very much.

"You can hardly see it" he pointed out.

But that, unfortunately for him, was not why I was crying. I didn't really know, it was just all the stress and panic and loss of faith pouring out in great rivers. At one point I wondered how my ears had become covered in tears. I couldn't explain, but nor could I stop.

We rehearsed that night in the theatre. The following morning I got up, resolving to be cheerful through tiredness. Not something I am normally very good at, but I tried really, really hard and went like this: Shower! Hairdryer! Clothing! Look at the cheerfulness dripping from me! Right, I'll just find my handbag and then... hang on... Ben, have you seen my bag? The blue one?... Oh shit... I had it last night... don'tpanicdon'tpanicdon'tpanic...

Panic.

Panic, which had been following me about all week like a heavily-shod stalker with no sense of personal space, chose that moment to leap out with a triumphant cackle and land on my head.

In my bag was my wallet, with my cash card and one of Ben's cash cards. Other stuff, too, but mainly that stuff. I rushed around the flat, picking things up and putting them back down, opening drawers uselessly and at random, then closing them and opening them again. I rushed down to the theatre space and rushed around it, picking up chairs and muttering to myself as panic chuckled and stuck its fingers into my eyes.

My bag wasn't there. I went back up to the flat and got Ben (Panic took the opportunity to give him a swift kick in the ear), who came down and looked again.

No bag. Tears. More tears. We had to leave, so we left and I felt like I was in disgrace. I couldn't stop crying all the way to the festival. Sitting on the train opposite Dan and Ben, Panic had metamorphosed into Despair and poured from me. We played Scrabble on Ben's phone but I kept getting things wrong, I felt too tired and sick and hopeless. Paranoid and paralysed.

It was not a good train ride.

At some point someone phoned Ben and told him they'd found my bag and would keep it safe, but by then it was too late. I had embraced Despair and it was not letting go. Trees waved their leaves at me and I loathed them quietly. Every sheep in every field felt like a little woolly stab in the heart.

We got there, and I trailed in, selfish in my sadness. I felt awful for being so quiet, I knew it was making the boys feel worried, but I couldn't bring myself to cheer up. We were showed to the backstage area and we got ready, and I tried to focus on my words and my cello bits, I got changed and applied more make up than was necessary to my swollen eyes. On stage we went, and we did it. It was kind of OK, not great. I fluffed some lines, but it was alright.

Afterwards, we had beer and food. Then, suddenly! I realized! Food makes things better. I sat slouched over a something-and-chips in the Special Artists' Marquee of Nourishment (or something) and as I ate, I was like Alice eating the cake, growing and growing. Oh, I thought. It's probably all OK. Colour returned to the world and my cheeks and stuff was funny again.

The rest of the festival was lovely. We performed the piece again on Saturday and it was much, much better, possibly due to the fact that we had, instead of being stressed and tearful on public transport, had coffee and bacon sandwiches and a free massage that morning. After the set we wandered and saw some music, had some beer and watched the millions of teenagers at the festival float around in straw hats and posh wellies, flirting self-consciously with each other and screaming at wasps. As a mature twenty-nine year old I, of course, did not scream at any wasps, merely wafted them away with a sigh of contempt.

On Sunday we were on the LastFM rising stage at three, and so we went over before to check it out. It was one of those big, circus tents. They had asked us whether we'd prefer to be on a smaller stage and we had replied that no, we wanted to be on a massive stage! Any smaller than Wembley, we said, and we will not play! Well, it was pretty big. There was a barrier a few metres in front of the stage to keep back any audience members who might want to fondle/kill us.

I had looked up the band before us online before the festival and seen Guardian write-ups and EP launches. Trying not to be intimidated, I gave myself some brazen-ness pep talks, but backstage it kind of faded a bit. Standing around in the worst denim shorts in history and some badly-applied lipstick (amongst other things) I spotted the lead singer from the band before us. A tiny, immaculately backcombed, sultry-looking blonde girl with smokey make-up and perfect glitter, surrounded by her band of twenty-year old, instrument-wielding male models. They were announced and on they rushed, managing to run and swagger at the same time. Hundreds of teenagers whooped and camera-clicked as the band launched into their first song with booming insouciance.

"Shall we find somewhere to go over our songs?" one of us suggested.

In the corner of the field we huddled together as far from the looming circus tent as we could get. Dan played and I leaned in to hear the notes over the Topshop-rock* hurtling from the stage.

*Bitchy, I know. I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.

We got through the song, then did some stretches and tried to shake off the nerves. I applied more lipstick. Ben gazed at me with what I chose to interpret as loving confusion.

"I... I'm not sure you need to put any more on..."

"It's a nerves thing. Shut up."

Eventually they finished and bounded off stage, the male models drenched in sporty, youthful sweat and the lead singer looking exactly how she looked when she went on.

The crowd went wild then left.

On we went, and, as we sound checked, another crowd drifted in. Yusra was there, at the front, smiling. A group of teenagers nodded their heads at Ben's beatboxing and sat down. A man stood by the barrier clutching a can of Strongbow.

We began, and they stayed. More drifted in, not the marauding teens but an older crowd full of people who laughed and listened and smiled. I said something about how trying to be edgy whilst holding a cello was a bit like trying to be edgy in Waitrose, and people laughed. The sound was great, the atmosphere was lovely and I totally and utterly loved it.

I realized that as much as I would quite like to be tiny and blonde and not be wearing terrible shorts, I quite love what we do. Dan and Ben are better than any twenty-year olds with thin arms and asymmetrical hair. I like telling jokes on stage, and I like it when people are kind enough to sit through them.

I am going to publish this post now before I start getting even more sentimental and gushy, and before it becomes even more apparent that I am bitter about not being a blonde waif who can apply make-up properly. Bring on Shambala, our next festival, which will definitely be more wild, with dressing up and mud, and hopefully with fewer tears. I can't wait.

EXCITED! (tired) EXCITED!

2011-06-30T21:32:00.007+01:00

I am shattered. It is still just about light outside and there is a pile of washing up to be done, taunting me from the kitchen making cruel, mocking noises. I am attempting to drown it out with AfroReggae, and I must admit, it is pretty much working.

Cycling home from Contact today I chatted with Lowri, who was also doing the wobbling-into-traffic style of bike-riding that is required when having a conversation with another cyclist. I stopped briefly to say goodbye at the gates to her flat, where a small, round, ginger-haired girl gave us a hard stare, possibly for interrupting her important game of kicking balls and shouting.

We finished the tech run at about quarter past eight, and waited for notes from Rachel, Lee and Lawrence (director, lighting and sound, respectively). "You've just got to have fun with it now" said Lee. "Embrace the jokes." The other two nodded.

There was a collective sigh from beneath costumes. We all felt exhausted, like enjoying stuff was asking a little bit too much, actually, and we might all be better off lying face down in a darkened room for a couple of hours while a whale or two sang gently to us. Back in the dressing room we peered at each other through our individual fogs and all decided that going home was an excellent idea.

It's a hard job, all this dicking about on stage*. Woe is me, I thought balefully as I skidded into a spotlight on stockinged feet. POOR US.

Yes, we're all tired. But in the most brilliant, excellent of ways.

There was a moment today when I was crouched down, waiting to leap up from behind a box (SPOILER), and I just thought: this is so much fun. THIS IS SO MUCH FUN. THIS IS CAPSLOCK-INDUCING FUN.

Last Friday afternoon we needed a break. An uplifting, light-hearted, Friday-ish break. We needed something to force us to stop thinking. Drugs and alcohol seeming like a less-than-practical choice, we instead went for the only real option available to us at that time. Someone brought out the laptop.

Halfway through "One Moment In Time (with lyrics)", Rachel found some pens to use as microphones, and the karaoke really took off. Time After Time, Black Velvet, Proud Mary, I Love Rock And Roll and En Vogue's classic Don't Let Go later, and we were all sweaty and exhilarated. Later on I was told we could be heard in the car park. (The information was not imparted with much enthusiasm.) It was totally worth it.

The show is going to be really good. There are bits that are so funny that I think we should maybe provide Tena Lady for the audience, and the other day Roxy, the producer, wept copiously at one particularly heart-wrenching part that she must have heard at least five times. And it's fun. Today we were all weary and blinking, but come Saturday night the adrenaline will be coursing through us and sparks will fly, I don't doubt it.

I love being tired like this. Buzzing and weird, excited and aching. Proud of what we've made, like we could do anything. Bring on Saturday.

(What, haven't got your ticket yet? Don't panic, here you go.)

*Dear Arts Council, we are obviously not just dicking about, but actually doing meaningful and important work. Love from Eggs Collective x.

Life and Death

2011-06-23T16:38:00.004+01:00

I am sitting in the upstairs foyer in Contact Theatre. It's kind of, orange and purple. And curvy. The walls bend drunkenly. Kate Bush was playing, ethereal and weird, and now it's a lounge version of Don't You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me. The sofa I am sitting on is blue and squishy. It enjoys me, I think.

Over to my right Lowri is talking to herself and pacing around precisely, as if performing a ritual. Dawn was on the opposite sofa, but has now gone to the shop to find some berries to satisfy her pregnancy fruit-craving. Upstairs in the big rehearsal space Dora is sharing her work with Rachel, who is picking over it and examining it for truth. Sara and Lydia are home, writing. Sophie is resting, having spent the night with her aunt who has just given birth. Helen has gone home after her session with Rachel. I am not sure where Ro is, but I know that Roxy has taken Dawn's place opposite me and is tapping away on her laptop.

I spent the morning working with Dawn. One of her pieces is a movement-and-words piece, for which she has asked for some cello. I have been quite wary of 'just' playing cello, worrying that people will think I am 'just' a musician. I realized that I actually have a bit of a complex about it, something I have only really developed since I came to Manchester. I never really considered myself a proper cellist, mostly due to the fact that I can't sight-read (or really even second- or third-sight read) and usually just make it up as I go along. I was anxious at the beginning of the process that I would be the desperate musician at the edge of the stage, keening at the spotlight, crying into my sheet music. It hasn't really happened like that, though. Rachel, the director, asked us what we most wanted to do on stage. What, she asked, have you always wanted to do?

I told her. And I am doing it. Oh, God.

We are all doing it. It's mental. And now that I'm not 'just' playing cello, I am really enjoying the parts where I am. Today I was feeling tired and a bit scattered but as I sat down with my cello I relaxed.

It's all kind of intense. There have been some tears, but no tantrums (yet).

I just feel like, wow, am I really allowed to spend my days like this? Being creative and loitering about with people I really like? I feel like I should do some temping just to balance the universe out a bit.

The other day, in rehearsal, I was worrying about getting it right, feeling anxious about being good enough and deserving to be here. Rachel understood, she told me.

"Don't forget, though" she added afterwards, "it's just a show."

It's just a show, but right now it's brilliant and consuming and I am totally loving it.

(Click here to watch the trailer and here to book your ticket.)

Let's Aim For Good

2011-06-19T20:11:00.005+01:00

I am perched at the "breakfast bar", clattering about on my laptop and supervising the cooking. And when I say 'supervising the cooking' I of course mean 'whining hungrily and staring at the pans in case maybe I have Matilda-esque powers and can make the food cook faster'.

I love Sundays. Today Manchester has been sunny, and I have ventured as far as the bench outside our front door. I moved the little pot plants carefully and got comfortable with my notebook. I biro-scratched for twenty minutes, a freewrite for a character in the Life and Death of Eggs Collective for which we are now in full-time rehearsals. I willed the sun to tan my blue-white legs as I scribbled, squinting at the bright pages. After the freewrite I scoured what I had done, picking out the bits that weren't awful and transferring them onto another page. I tried to mould those bits into something coherent and, well, good. Good is my aim in these things, really. I haven't got the energy for excellent today. It is Sunday, after all.

I pulled words and phrases from the page like loose threads, trying to embroider them into a monologue. I instinctively try to use too much description, I think, or at least too much for a spoken monologue. I find it hard not to feel that flowery = clever, despite knowing it is not the case.

I will take what I have written into rehearsals and seek feedback, although that is still scary. Oh, wow, rehearsals have been cool. My thighs feel like they have been battered with a spiked metal club, as a result of Friday's physical stuff. "I want you to know" I told Ben yesterday "that every time I go up or down stairs I am being exceptionally brave."

"Because" I continued bravely "it really, really hurts."

On Tuesday we filmed the trailer. I arrived late as I had been in Bradford since stupid-o'clock, and I went into the theatre space via the wings, so I walked out onto the stage. It was like walking into a dreamworld, tall, be-costumed people floating about, everything dark but for a single spotlight onstage. I felt like I had wandered into Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. It felt a million miles from trains and Bradford and hundreds of school children getting my name wrong. I had wanted to make myself wings out of some heavy, velvety material, preferably with sequins, so that when I opened my arms to play my cello the wings would undulate like treacle. However, I had very little time to source the material and make the wings. That is how I ended up being filmed wearing two halves of a shower curtain, one on each arm, scraping away on my cello, hair backcombed and face painted like a drag queen. I'm not totally sure that the shower curtain has quite the ethereal effect I was going for, especially given the whimsical cartoon water droplets it has all over it. Never mind.

The trailer will be out shortly. It's brilliant. The show is going to be brilliant. (I am a bit overwhelmed to be in it. Don't tell anyone.) The other evening, after rehearsal, I was cycling home and I just thought, oh, please, don't let me die now. Not when it's all getting so good.

Whirr Buzz

2011-06-07T21:11:00.002+01:00

My brain is asking me disapproving questions. Why, it intones in a not-angry-just-disappointed tone, are you writing a blog post when there is washing up to do? Why, it continues, becoming terser by the syllable, are you writing a blog post when you have a script to learn? And why, may I ask (it is getting a bit nasal and whiny now) are you writing a blog post when you haven't even unpacked?

My brain is not wrong. None of these accusations are false.

My brain, however, can go and take a massive running jump. I have a gin and tonic, silence and the desire to share, all of which point towards doing right this, right now.

Crikey, things have been all go around here. This weekend we did falconry in Northumberland, which was brilliant. The falcons were great, as were the kestrels, owls, and... all the other ones (I learned a lot). The falconry man wore tweed and knew everything there is to know about birds. The more obscure the question the more he seemed to enjoy knowing the answer, which I suppose can be said for most people. His hands were the sort that have been pierced by eagle claws many a time but can still hold a pint of ale and stuff a piece of raw chicken into a leather glove to entice a passing buzzard. My only reservation about him was that he made a couple of jokes of the chauvinism-lite variety, which basically means if you react negatively to them you get told they're "only a joke, love" and are labelled a "typical woman" for not enjoying being told that you are moody and a bad driver because your bits go in instead of out. (He didn't do it a lot. I am just sensitive to bigotry, probably because I am a stupid idiot girl.) The following day we did a long walk, which started off kind of awful but ended up being brilliant, even though it was nine miles long and raining, I didn't have a coat and my boots decided they didn't want to be waterproof anymore on mile one.

Oh, also, we had falcon outfits for the falconry! We already had hats with eyes and beaks on them (made from felt, not real birds) so I made wings that tied around the back and then to the wrists so you could flap. We didn't actually turn up at the place wearing them, although that was the initial plan, but we put them on at lunchtime and Ben wore his costume for most of the afternoon.

Things That You Must Come To If You Can But If Not Don't Worry:

1. This Friday 10th June. Geddes Loom is supporting Caulbearers for their EP launch at Islington Mill, Manchester. In case you have forgotten, Geddes Loom is me, Ben and Dan being excellent.

2. Parklife Festival. 11th June. Platt Fields Park, Manchester. I am performing with Eggs Collective, on the Saturday, on the Cabaret Stage or something. In case you have forgotten, Eggs Collective is...

3. The Life and Death of Eggs Collective. 2nd and 6th July, Contact Theatre, Manchester. This is a show we are currently devising. Look at the site! Wow, you say! Yes, you did, I heard you. I am a bit gutted not to have been able to be in that totally amazing photo, but it was day three of being housebound from back-tastrophes so I had to stay at home and keen at the windows. I will write more about this whole massive exciting show another time, but right now I feel a bit paralysed by the enormity of the task. Like, shit, I should write something about this, but it's too scary. Basically, we go into rehearsals from the middle of next week. It is going to be weird and brilliant. 'Weird and brilliant', surely, is the best combination of words ever (although it is very closely followed by 'gin and tonic').

Everything is about to start whirring and buzzing about. I am a bit scared. A bit part of me just wants to go and sit in a corner and read a nice book for a while, and stop pretending I am some kind of real person who does stuff.

Now the washing up is looking at me and I have finished my gin and tonic. Time to top up and wash up.

A Tale in Three Parts For No Reason

2011-05-18T13:13:00.002+01:00

Friday 13th May

I am in the B&B again, although I have definitely left at at some point since the last post. I am in our bedroom this time, drinking my seventy-fifth cup of tea of the day.

I was about to have a shower but the hot water has run out. I stood crossly in the shower with my hand slowly numbing itself under the icy spray as I went from patient to impatient at breakneck speed. Ben popped out to find the owner, who told us that yes, he had just done some washing so it might be twenty minutes or so before the hot water trickled its weary way back to room 4, before darkly adding that most of the guests "have had their showers by now". We didn't go down for breakfast because we were tired from rehearsing all week and Ben was up until 2am making adjustments to the script, so the chance of a lie-in the day before the show was eagerly grabbed. This course of action, however, seemed not to sit too well with John, who I suspect prefers the sort of guest who doesn't take such scandalous liberties. Over the next two days I fully expect him to dock our pocket money and tell us off for treating the place like a hotel.

Anyway. Rehearsals have been going well, apart from briefly yesterday when a hornet the size of my arm starting swooping around the room like some kind of angry, buzzing pterodactyl. I hyperventilated with fear behind a pillar that I hadn't seen before but which turned out to be very useful for cowering behind while Dan coaxed it out with a school exercise book. I nearly died. Later on a robin came in. The robin was considerably less frightening but I still kind of didn't want it near me. I think I might be frightened of all living things, which bodes excellently for when Ben and I do falconry in a few weeks (my present to him for his 30th birthday).

Band name-wise, well. Some excellent suggestions in the comments from the last post, so thank you.

However, there is nothing quite like a name with a story behind it, so here goes.
On Sunday the four of us went out to get some dinner. Afterwards Cheryl decided to turn in so she could be bright-eyed for the passive-aggression and toast which is served every morning here at 8am sharp. Dan, Ben and I decided to have a night cap at the local pub, which is called The Albert (after Einstein - one of its ales is called Realaleativity) and is wonderful, with its own micro-brewery and sense of whimsical country charm. We procured drinks and sat down at a wooden table near the bar, then took up our usual game of "Band Name?".

Tuesday 17th May

It is now Tuesday and I am sitting in a café because being in the flat was doing my head in. I am having proper post-show come down time, which Manchester's grey unpleasant prospect is doing nothing to assuage. Anyway, I should finish the story, but please be prepared for it to have a distinctly gloomier tone from here on.
We were in the Albert, for an after-dinner "one drink". I was vaguely aware that a couple had entered the pub and were talking to the regulars at the bar. The woman's voice was loud and emphatic. "She was-sh the besht cat. Such a beey-eautiful... such... the besht cat". The words wafted over to where we were sitting and I felt a twinge of empathy, recalling our recent sad little loss. I tuned back in to our band name conversation. Something good, that doesn't necessarily mean anything, but that kind of sounds good and works in an ineffable, excellent way. Preferably with some kind of story behind it.

We suddenly became aware that, over at the bar, a coincidence was taking place. The were also talking about band names, and of one in particular. Drunk woman disapproved of the name, which she roundly said was rubbish, an opinion with which I roundly agreed. Apparently the band in question was a good band, but with a terrible name. Ben, Dan and I all looked at each other with silent, high-eyebrowed, "what-a-coincidence" expressions.

We began talking about band names we liked. Either Dan or Ben mentioned the band Daisy Chainsaw, and how brilliant a name that is. Yes, the other two of us agreed, Daisy Chainsaw is an excellent name. Shame it's taken, really.

Suddenly, from across the pub, we heard the words "who'sh talking 'bout Daishy Chainshaw?". We looked up and the drunk woman was lurching towards us. She had blonde hair and a thick jumper, and her mascara was smeared underneath her bloodshot eyes. "Hey" she said as she weaved through the empty pub. "You were talkin' 'bout Daishy Chainshaw! How do you know Daishy Chainshaw?" Someone explained that we were talking about band names.

Wednesday 18th May
I am yet another café. I am one of those people in who sit in cafés crashing self-importantly on a laptop while all decent people are at work. I just had a meeting. I am in better mood today owing to an excellently exciting devising meeting last night.

Band names, we repeated, to the drunk woman's blank expression. We were saying how Daisy Chainsaw is a great band name.

Another blank, mascara-smeared look.

"How do you know Daishy Chainshaw? I know them. D'yous know Vinch? Ch'drummer."

No, one of us explained. We don't actually know the band, we were just talking about them. We don't know who Vince is. We just like the name.

Another one of us piped up to tell drunk woman that we are a band looking for a name, so we were talking about names we liked, and we think the name Daisy Chainsaw is really brilli...

"Vinch?"

No, we don't know Vince.

At this moment or another moment very similar to this one, drunk woman budged Dan along and sat down next to him. We all silently and inwardly groaned as she leaned forward with an expression of confusion and sambuca clambering across her face.

"Why" she began in a whisper "were you's talking 'bout Daishy Chainshaw?"

I will spare you the agony of having to read the exact conversation and myself the tedium of having to write it all down. But, to summarize, she knew the band a bit because she went to Australia and met someone who had just broken up with his girlfriend and nobody was looking for a relationship and then someone else (possibly her) went to Canada and then Green Day came round and then she went out with Vince or was it Frank then she met Daisy Chainsaw before they didn't go on tour with Nirvana.

"And that" she finished, with a dismissive wave in the direction of the bar "is how I met George."

We nodded.

"Wait. What was I saying?"

We nodded again, hopefully.

By this this time, against all the odds, she seemed to have sobered up a bit. She called over to George to get her another drink.

"My cat died today, that's why I'm this drunk. I don't usually drink in here" she whispered conspiratorially "the wine's horrible." Then, "oops" as her glance drifted down to my glass of red. I told her I didn't mind it, that we usually drink the two-bottles-for-a-fiver wine from the shop down the road and quite enjoy it, but she had stopped listening by then.

"Anyway, what are you all doing here?"

We explained again about the whole band/show/name thing, and she nodded sagely.
"I've always wanted to do that sort of thing." Another vague wave. "But I'm not actually sure I am talented. Last Christmas George asked me what I wanted, I said a piano. So that's what I got."

Dan began to say how that seemed like a good thing, to get a piano, but she shook her head.

"Trouble is, I've never played it. Not once." She shook her head again. "Think how much Botox that could have paid for."

We collectively did not know what to say.

"I did write into The Word magazine once" she continued, undaunted. "But they didn't write back. Just sent me my own letter back to me! Bastards! Although I suppose my letter was more of a complaint that said I should be there instead, so I'm not that surprised. Anyway, I always had a band name that I liked that I thought I would use if I ever had a band."

(At this point George brought over a round of drinks that included a shot of sambuca each. There was a brief conversation about hats as both Dan and Ben were wearing them, which prompted the barman to leap about in various different comedy hats. At one point I requested a contemporary dance, which he duly performed.)

"What" continued the drunk woman, whose name we had now discovered, was Charlotte, "wash I shaying?"

We reminded her.

"Geddes Loom. That's what I would call my band. I think it's from Citizen Kane. Have you seen it."

"I have" replied Ben.

"What?" said Charlotte.

"Seen it."

"Seen what?"

"Citizen Kane."

"Oh. Why?"

"Because of Geddes Loom."

"That's my band name!"

As it turns out, there is a character in Citizen Kane called someone Geddes, but as far as we know he doesn't have a loom or indeed any particular weaving experience or training.

To cut an already very long and boring story down to mere epic length, we decided to name the band Geddes Loom. Because of Charlotte. Because she was excellent and funny and weird and totally loved Dan's bald head and said I was really pretty (although later on I overheard her saying to Dan "she's pretty isn't she? I'm mean, at first, you're like, no, but then after a while, you think: yes". Hey, that's me, I'm a grower.) Because we were in a pub telling each other that we wanted a name with a story behind it and then, out of nowhere, a story started. A story started in the place where all the best stories start, in the pub, an hour before closing.

So, we are Geddes Loom. Thank you, Charlotte.

Headliners: Front Room Yurt

2011-05-08T17:52:00.003+01:00

I am in a lovely B&B in Totnes. I am currently in the Lounge, trying to keep to a corner of the neat, cream-coloured sofa and occasionally having a little panic about spilling something dreadful on it even though I am not eating or drinking anything I could spill. There is nobody else in here, but I feel a bit scruffy somehow, like I shouldn't be allowed up here on the couch. (I am trying not to consider what implications it has for my self-esteem that I don't feel like I should be allowed on the furniture, like some grubby, freckle-nosed hound.)

Totnes is LOVELY. Full of hippies, of course (the noise pollution from all the little bells attached to people's clothing is quite distracting), but totally delightful. Last week we were in a self-catered apartment overlooking a river and a beer garden, and this week we are in a delicious B&B. Ben is upstairs writing furiously, Dan is relaxing like only a musician knows how*, and Cheryl is out wandering the sun-soaked streets. I am meant to be lyric-writing, and I have been but I was distracted by a woman barking at a dog and have now lost concentration.

*This is totally unfair. Dan is a very hardworking, talented person.

Over the past week Dan, Ben and I have been in the lovely space at Dartington Hall. Dan and I have been writing music, which has been absolutely brilliant. It was weird getting there and all the equipment and engineers and stuff, just there, all for us. Of course I pretended to be super cool about the whole thing, like I am used to trotting off to the Albert Hall every other weekend to do a self-penned opera alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, although I probably did say "wow" and/or "cool" one or two more times than was necessary. I'm not sure how the final piece is going to look yet, but this time next week it will have been done. Eek.

In the times when we've not been working on stuff for the piece, Dan, Ben and I have been working on material for our band. (We are now a band.) Ben on beatbox, me on vocals/cello and Dan on guitar/piano/technology. (Dan is Good At Technology.) We're currently trying to think of a band name, but we can't think of any, except joke ones. Everything we look at sounds like a band name now, and it has become pretty dire because now all conversations are punctuated with the words "band name?". Like this: "Hey, look at that sheep!" "Band name?" or "Do you know where the toilets are?" "Band name?". It's getting very annoying and we are no closer to alighting on something charming, original and unpretentious. Excellent suggestions are welcome.

Last night we were in a B&B above a very noisy pub, before we moved into this lovely one today. It was a last minute booking for various thrilling admin-related reasons, and Ben had made an agreement with the landlord that we would pay him when the money clears tomorrow, which was fine. As we were leaving this morning the landlord and several of his meaty chums were gathered around the bar. We called our thank yous, and Ben mentioned that he would be in tomorrow to settle up. The landlord nodded and then grinned lasciviously. Jabbing a raw sausage finger at me he leered "you could leave her as collateral". His buddies guffawed with delight and Ben and I stared at him in mute horror. I then mumbled something about not being a very hard worker, hahaha, you wouldn't want me, then we made a swift exit and Dan, Ben and I trundled up the hill to this lovely place. When we got here the marvellous owner, John, welcomed us warmly, showed us to our rooms and left us to it after a quick reminder to make sure the front door is always shut properly. We nodded, thinking of thieves and rogues. "Thing is" continued John, "Totnes is full of strange types. We're on a ley line crossing here, so if you're not careful about security you can come back to find a yurt in your front room."

I think I like it here. Front Room Yurt. Band name?

Too Long To Proof Read, Sorry

2011-05-02T18:27:00.004+01:00

Right, so, I went to Australia, then came back, now I am in Devon, which is like Australia in many ways (climate, kangaroo population, shrimps, barbies, etc).

We did attempt to get upgraded on the plane by brushing our hair before going to the airport and then telling them about my prolapsed disc and trapped hip nerve, but the conversation didn't quite go as planned. In my head I imagined myself swanning elegantly up to the desk and exchanging a few pleasantries with the airline person behind it. If it was a straight woman I would compliment her hair and ask her where she got her teeth done (or something) then show her Ben's pretty eyes, if it was a straight man/gay woman I would flirt gently but harmlessly, if it was a gay man I would (GENERALIZATION ALERT) sing a show tune. After a small amount of delicate bonding the conversation would no doubt turn to my health, at which point I would modestly but sadly mention my crippling agony, downplaying it enough to seem brave but not so much that it actually seemed somewhere in the region of a moderately stubbed toe. At this point I would gaze wistfully into the distance for a bit while Ben would explain in a whisper that I was possibly the most courageous person he had ever met. The airline person by this point would be wiping the tears from their cheeks, marvelling at this lionhearted (but ravishing) vision before them. After a quick tiptap on the keyboard, she/he would, with hands quivering with emotion, hand over our boarding passes, with the words FIRST CLASS emblazoned across the top.

As it happened, I managed to say "um, excuse me, but I have got a really sore back" before we were turfed into Economy with the rest of the blithering plebs.

Apart from the flights (which were actually better than expected, apart from the cold, barely-restrained fury of the stewardesses at every request. As I said to Ben, I just wanted to write "I'm sorry" on my face to save having to say it every time I requested some extra gin) it was a fantastic trip.

We went round Tasmania! After Laura and Rob's lovely wedding we did a road trip, which was brilliant. Tassie is apparently the butt of many jokes down there in the under, but we thought it beautiful. Lush and gorgeous with beaches that laughed in the face of our camera ("do not think you can capture my splendour with that thing, fools"). I cannot possibly summarize it properly, so I will do it like this:

driveboatdriveweddingdrinkdrinkdrinkdrinksleepcablecarscorpiondrive(viewview)
walklake(view)eatdrinksleepdrive(view)beacheatdrinkbarbequewallabywallab
ykangaroowombatpossumhoteldrive(view)eateateatdrinkdrinkdrinkmonopoly
sleepdrive(view)fishandchipsboatartgalleryeatdrinkplanedrivesleep.

It was fantastic, as you can tell from my lyrical and expressive turn of phrase. The one thing I will say is that, if you are ever lucky enough to go to Hobart, I must insist that you visit MONA (the Museum of Old and New Art). Ben and I were there for about four hours and we saw about two thirds of it. Some of the art I saw there made my brain somersault and my heart trip up. Some of it was fucking disgusting, some of it weird, some of it beautiful. I loved it so much. When you go in you get given an 'O' phone, which is basically an iPhone. It locates you and then finds which pieces you are near, so you then click on a piece and it comes up with information about that piece (there are no signs in the whole place). You can then press the 'artwank' symbol, and it will come up with an article or two about that piece, or 'ideas' and it will give you an (often irreverent)fact or idea or 'audio', at which point you plug in your earphones and you can listen to an interview with the artist. But you don't have to do any of this, you can just experience it. There was work by Jenny Saville, Marina Abramovic, Kandinsky, Damien Hirst and just loads and loads of insane and fantastic stuff. God, I loved it. You get on a boat from Hobart there and back, and on the way back I couldn't stop talking, I felt like my little horizons had just been stretched apart with a satisfying creak.

There were loads of other things I loved about the trip but I must stop gushing like a twat. Melbourne is delightful. People kept assuming we must be really excited about the royal stupid wedding and it kept being a bit awkward when we weren't. (I didn't watch it. I think it was a shameful waste of money, and any benefit it has for 'the country' is lessened because we are a country with no libraries, youth services, allotments, etc. At the very least I think every tax payer should be allowed to wear Kate's dress once, seeing as we all paid for it.)

It was my 29th birthday, so I am now considerably more mature and less prone to whimsy (and political, see above). On the way back we didn't get upgraded in much the same manner as we didn't get upgraded on the way there, only this time we weren't upgraded with two stopovers and more screaming children than I have ever seen in one place, and I work in schools. Seriously, I considered putting on a production of Oliver! to warm the frozen, be-lipsticked hearts of the stewardesses.

So we went there, then came back. My back was awful for a bit, but is now better. Ben's sister Laura is a physio and so had the dubious pleasure of watching me bend in various directions saying things like "that hurts slightly more than the other time but not as much as the time on the other side", but she was lovely and gave me lots of pilates things for my rehabilitation process. I am no longer walking like an incontinent crab.

Now we are in Devon. Totnes! We are doing a project which culminates in a performance on the 14th May, so if you are in the area you may attend. I cannot promise free wine or quality (on my part) but I can promise enthusiasm and a degree of love. We bought a cello pick-up, which is basically a thing that attaches to my cello and picks up the sound. We have plugged this in to the loop pedal along with a microphone, and I have barely been able to stop playing with it since, it's bloody incredible. Ben is writing furiously. The other music guy, Dan, is coming down on Wednesday, and the director, Cheryl, is coming on Friday. I have no idea what it's all going to look like, but I do know that my whole way of musicking has just been blown wide open. It's brilliant and terrifying and kind of makes me want to go and sit in a corner and read a book for a bit, just to calm down.

We are in a bar as our accommodation doesn't have wifi. People are beginning to come in and drink heavily, so we must depart and stop bringing the mood down with our relentless tapping and frowny concentration. Also I am starting to find it difficult not to eavesdrop and laugh at the jokes of strangers, which is always a signal to leave.

Happy May Bank Holiday, everyone.

DAY SIX

2011-04-06T12:02:00.003+01:00

I got up this morning, to make my own breakfast like a massive champion. I was heroically fiddling with oats when suddenly I really had to lie down flat on the floor. Which I did, because I was at home and only Ben was there to give me his (by now excellently perfected) 'poor you' look.

There are, however, plenty of places where suddenly lying down flat on your back might not elicit such understanding, and in fact might prompt a sturdy man with metal in his boots and the A-Team in his heart to ask some pretty shouty questions. I am nervous about going to such places.

It has been six days since I first willfully ignored the warning signs that something osteopathically hideous was about to go down. I am a bit better (see: walking) but not actually better (see: lying on the floor). My lovely physio told me I had done something to a disc (hurray!), which mis-aligned my pelvis (yippee!), and trapped a nerve in my hip (wahoo!). Oh, and there is also a delightfully-named 'fibrous lump' in my back which is possibly the most disgusting thing I have ever heard. I am going to rename it 'unicorn kiss', although the unicorn would have had to have kissed me pretty aggressively for it to be this painful.

Oh, and then I woke up this morning to PERIOD PAINS which are written in capital letters as that's how they feel.

I turning into Marvin. Pain in the diodes down my left hand side! Brain the size of a planet (albeit a very small, barren one), etc.

I have been reading Simone de Beauvoir and a book of sci-fi short stories. I have watched enormous amounts of stuff online. I had a brief phase of singing all the power ballads I could think of, but had to stop when Ben came home. (I don't want to make him sick too.)

I am willing my back to get better before Sunday and a 24 hour flight. I can't bear the idea of 24 hours without being able to lie down flat, it makes me feel anxious beyond belief. I wish I was the sort of person to get upgraded, but I am far too scruffy and wouldn't know how to ask.

"Um, hello. I. Um, hi, you look nice! Nice earrings" I might start, casually. "I like, you have nice, um. I like hair! I mean, your hair looks nice. Yes, I packed my bags myself althoughitwasreallyhardbecauseI'vehurtmybackandpleaseupgrademe.
Please? Yes, ok, I will move away from the desk now. Do you have any wheelchairs?"

Maybe if I write to Jimmy Saville he might help.

It just has to be better by Sunday. I have got another physio appointment in a few hours so I hope she says it'll all be fine and proclaim me fixed, and I will dance out of there singing power ballads to the buses. I am not totally sure that will happen but I might take my dancing shoes just in case*.

*When my back gets better I am totally going to get dancing shoes.

OW OW (boring) OW

2011-04-02T18:53:00.004+01:00

It's Saturday afternoon, nearly evening. That delicious part of a Saturday when those who are going out begin to think about having a shower and a G&T before deciding what to wear (but then just deciding on the same old things because they're comfortable) and trotting happily out to throw themselves headfirst into the giddy melée of Saturday Night. Some people might have been out all day, and are wearily returning, their capitalist yearnings sated for another weekend, to consider a curry and a Blockbuster latest release.

Which of these, you ask (sort of), am I?

Well, neither. Nor have I been working or rambling or drinking heavily in front of any kind of sports 'match'.

I have been bitterly, angrily lying down, eating delicious things and watching iPlayer.

I had quite a full-on week, work-wise. Monday through to Thursday were full days of schools workshops. All in different schools, all different ages and subjects. All involving a hefty train journey and cycle ride before eight-thirty in the morning. Now, I am sure that for many that is just their normal, hard-labour routine. I am not born for six o'clock starts.

All was fine. On Thursday evening Ben was finally getting back from tour and we had Friday off. My plan for Thursday was to tidy the flat and relax a bit before he got home. I planned all week on being very, very relieved when Friday rolled around.

On Thursday morning I was going to Liverpool. I cycled to the station, lifted my bike onto the train and then sat for the hour long journey. Nearing my stop I stood and began to manoeuvre my bike towards the door, picking angry commuters out of the spokes as I did so. The train stopped and the doors swooshbeeped, and I hurriedly yanked my bike down to the platform. I gasped as my back was covered with a flash of warm pain, but still weaved through the be-suited throng, carried Glinda down one set of stairs and up another. Then I cycled to the school, delivered a two hour workshop, then a one hour workshop, noticing swells of pain as I bent or jumped about.

Eventually, cycled to the station. Lifted Glinda onto the train and hunched onto a seat, flowering pains in my lower back and stomach muscles.

Ten years ago I jumped off a fifty foot waterfall in Australia and landed badly, squishing my back (medical term). I get intermittent angry pain but never this bad.

I got off the train and cycled home, noticing some quizzical looks shot my way as I became a cheerleader for my own legs ("Come on! You can do it. That's it, push down on the pedal, good. Right leg. Left leg. Right leg. Left leg. Right leg, left leg, right leg, left leg, rightlegleftlegrightlegleftleg that's it you're doing it!" etc etc.).

I made the mistake of going to Asda, but I needed painkillers and wanted chocolate.

Finally, home. I lay down. Probably, I told myself with more hope than logic, if you lie down for a bit and take some ibruprofen it'll all be totally fine.

Then I tried to get up again. A cacophony of swear-words ill-befitting a delicate Home Counties girl filled the flat. I lay back down and had some chocolate.

Cut to two days later.

I am in bed. When I try and walk I look like a crab that's had a stroke. I am extremely bored, in spite of having the luxurious charms of the BBC at my fingertips and all the tea I can drink.

Yesterday was alright. Ben and I decided we would go and have breakfast Kim By The Sea, the café downstairs. Once he had helped me get dressed (after I discovered that, no matter how much I may wish for it, I am not Matilda and my jeans will not put themselves on me if I stare at them hard enough)we walked down. I clung to his arm as we crept along agonisingly slowly.

"Do you feel like you're taking your Grandmother out for a walk?" I asked.

"No! Yes. A bit."

We continued on, considering as we went the vital differences between one's grandmother and one's girlfriend.

I had a Bloody Mary with my breakfast, contemplating alcoholism as a coping strategy, before dismissing it as being too expensive.

After breakfast I got straight into bed. I haven't really moved since. Yesterday Ben made me tea and brought me tiny chocolate eclairs, but today he is performing in Shropshire and won't get back until midnight. I have ventured downstairs twice for tea and food, walking in tiny, slowlyslowlythat'sitslowly steps and holding my body at odd angles to wriggle out of the pain. In the mirror it actually looks like my hips are wonky. I hope I am imagining it. I have also got a bad case of Pain Tourettes (shrill barking when a sudden pain is felt, which is often enough for it to be quite annoying).

I can see town from the window, where some friends of mine were doing a brilliant photo shoot for an excellent project we're doing, which I had been so looking forward to.

Whinge whinge. It is horrible. Yesterday might have been alright it hadn't been for the agonising pain. I was waited on hand and foot, lots of tea and lovely sympathy and, when the time was right, some wine.

Today is awful. Today there are better options than lying about in pain. I am very, extremely bitter and ungracious about the whole thing. I demand my money back at once.

We are going to Australia one week tomorrow. In all my thinking time between watching inane drama on my computer I keep dreaming up worst case scenarios. I dreamt that I was in a wheelchair. I was getting so stressed about it today I had a nosebleed. Oh God, does an immobile back and a nosebleed mean anything? I keep imagining it being like this for weeks. (Idiotically I keep thinking about how all this lying around doing nothing eating medicinal chocolate is totally destroying all trace of my pre-holiday health trip. I win the Shallow Award.)

I am on the fourth floor and the sunset is beautiful. I am bored and in pain. I have run out of painkillers, although there are more downstairs I can't face the journey.

SEND WINE.

Let's All Drink Herbal Tea (Or, This Is What My Brain Is Like When I Am Hungover)

2011-03-09T11:41:00.005Z

Saturday, 1pm - on a train from Manchester to Oxford.

Is it acceptable to tell someone off for eating crisps loudly in the Quiet Zone? She's not even eating them particularly loudly, but I can tell she's trying to be subtle about it so telling her off would be funny. To see how much more quietly she can suck all the flavour off each crisp before mashing it, replacing any crisp-enjoyment with excellent amounts of crisp-awkwardness. After texting Jackie for her thoughts on the subject, I am advised to "stare at her menacingly", and do so accordingly, although she is in the seat in front of me so I fear some of the effect might be being lost.

I am feeling crowded by the guilty remains of a train sandwich which managed to be dazzlingly bland whilst also costing more than my entire wardrobe. Outside the sky is low and snotty.

My eyes are feeling swollen as I am hungover, and, unlike the girl across the aisle who just announced cheerfully into her phone (QUIET ZONE, IDIOT) that she had a "tequila hangover", I can no longer drink my own bodyweight in alcohol without waking up looking and feeling like I have been beaten over the head repeatedly with a wine bottle. I sneak a look at tequila girl and she looks suspiciously fresh and peppy. I spend a few happy minutes loathing her before deciding that she probably only had one tequila, or perhaps just a tequila-flavoured sweet. Lightweight, I think.

We stop at Wolverhampton. It is resplendent in grey.

I am on my way to Oxford. I feel genuinely shocked and appalled that people are freely using their phones in the Quiet Zone. I consider saying something, perhaps stalking the aisle waiting for someone to so much as send a text so I can whip the offending technology from their paw. I decide that I am too hungover, but if I did I could make some kind of contemporary art piece from the phones I collect, perhaps spelling out the words I HATE YOUR VOICE, MORON in six foot letters. I spend a few enjoyable minutes wondering how I could get funding for such a project, but I get stuck on the budget and give up.

We trundle past low, crumbly factory building with mysterious signs on them saying things like J.N Fettings and Outer Space Storage Solutions!. I assume the latter is actually a portal to another planet, possibly the Fifth Moon of Stor (mainly comprised of usefully-sized shelving).

On a canal path a tiny dog optimistically wrestles with an massive stick. I am jealous of its innocent happiness and (presumably) lack of hangover.

We pull into Birmingham. A man is taking a photograph of a couple grinning happily, arms wound tight around one another as though they are standing in front of the Eiffel Tower rather than on Platform 9b at Birmingham New Street.

I texted Aisling earlier (she lives in Birmingham) to tell her that my train would be passing through, in case she wanted to come and stand on the platform and wave to me.
I text her again now.

"At Birmingham! I know you couldn't be here yourself so you sent a man with a beard to stand around looking vacant instead. Thank you!"

My hangover is making me weird. I hope she gets the joke.

Later on I receive a text back:

"I did send Julian to wave, but he says he "doesn't do waving". What a square."

I am relieved. I am weird, but so is everyone else, and my jokes are crap, but so are other people's. What else, after all, is there to life?

Both the train and my brain continue on their stupid little journeys. Past decrepit buildings, once busy and useful, now wastelands dripping with graffiti and lost potential.

I decide I have scribbled enough, so close my notebook and tip my head back to the seat, idly contemplating more coffee.

Monday Morning

2011-02-28T11:16:00.003Z

Outside all is Monday drizzle and February dissatisfaction. Inside is peeling hands, radio jollity and books about bread. My hands are peeling because I cleaned some bits of the housing co-op we live in yesterday and didn't wear gloves. My hands look interestingly elderly, much like the time I tried to dye some hot pants (I was not wearing them at the time) and managed to get black dye all over my hands so had to soak them in bleach. They turned from black to red pretty quickly.

The radio is bordering between annoying and merry.

Ben wants to know whether or not I like rye bread.

Someone is banging and crashing around outside, but I cannot quite face the walk to the window to investigate.

Last week was half term so I didn't have to go to any of the schools I am currently doing projects in, which was a total joy. I swore to myself that I was going to Make The Most Of The Time by being extra creative and probably making some quite staggering leaps in the worlds of science and maths. As it turned out I was a bit creative and did nothing to further scientific progress whatsoever (unless the whole peeling hands thing can help somehow?).

Today, though, all is back to normal, and I must go to a school to run a drama club later on. Oh, you are thinking, that sounds lovely! How sweet! Well, yes. I am trying to feel that way about it too. (WARNING: DO NOT BLOG ABOUT WORK IT IS DANGEROUS! ABORT TRAIN OF THOUGHT NOW.)

Before that I am going to go swimming. After going swimming last week I wrote about my very mixed feelings towards it. Here, for your procrastination, are those thoughts.

*****

I just went swimming. I love it. I love sinking my head underneath the cool surface and then pushing out, chin up, to feel my hair sweeping back from my face. I love pushing off from the wall and aiming deep, with long, frog-like strokes pushing me towards the bottom until I have to come up for air. Before I started wearing goggles I never realized that swimming for exercise could be fun, but I love having open eyes in an underwater world. Watching the shimmering white webs of reflection on the bottom of the pool, stretching my arms towards them as I pull myself, suddenly light, through the blue water. Before googles I would have to swim, neck craned up, eyes squinting and ears pummeled by the echoing pool shouting and splashing. The difference is immense. I can hide in goggles. I feel in disguise, like I am shielded from normal interaction by having my eyes covered. I am a superhero of the slow lane.

I hate, totally and deeply loathe, every single moment until I get into the water. I hate queuing at the front desk. I hate the sodden, half-way between pool and outside world changing rooms with their sometimes muddy floors and the pants someone has accidentally left behind having inexplicably forgotten to put them on. I hate having to shove my stuff into a locker, something always threatens to leap out at the last minute, leaving me scrabbling on the wet tiles for a stray sock or pair of knickers. I hate that half the people are dressed and half are not. I hate the men, who appraise half-heartedly and leave me wanting to put many, many more clothes on. God, I hate walking along the side of the pool, covered only by the thinnest of purple sheen. I stare upwards and tell myself nobody cares, nobody is looking. Sometimes I see other people strutting, trotting or loping along, chatting or dreaming, and I wonder whether they too feel agonized by those transition moments.

Once I am in and my eyes are covered I am anonymous and dive through my imagination, back and forward. I watch the clock with half an eye.

Time spins and I swim, and eventually I have to get out, so I swim to the edge and cling with one hand to the steps while I adjust my swimming costume, pushing breasts under material as each one in turn tries to float helpfully to the surface. Hooking my thumbs into crucial bits of costume and tweaking, I push my chin in the air as I exit, and pretend to be rubbing my neck as I walk, covering my chest and trying to seem relaxed.

In the shower I stand facing the wall until I am finished, and walk, fake-relaxed, to my locker, around which three teenage boys have clustered. They are dressed for the outside and poised in strut-mode, confident and uproarious. I push through them, dripping and feeling horribly, painfully naked. I breathe in and pretend they aren’t there, they fall silent but do not move. I get my towel and wrap it quickly, then retrieve the rest of my things and make my way to a cubicle.

*****

So I will swim and then face the most difficult bit of my week at the moment (weirdly enough for something that seems as innocuous and adorable as a drama club - like a firebreathing puppy). Then it will all be over and I will have lived through it and the rest of my week will feel easier.

I am watching the clock in agony, knowing that soon I have to leave and then it will all nearly be happening. Time is being hugely unfair by refusing to skip past the shitty bits. Time is a bastard.

Pink, With Sparkles

2011-02-14T18:59:00.003Z

Hey! What's this in my hand?

Yes. It is a glass of pink sparkling wine.

(Actually I just put it down to type.)

(I just picked it up again, sipped, gave the sort of smug, tinkly laugh that makes fairies burst into flame, then put it back down.)

Last post was all WOE WHINGE HALP ME THE WORLD IS GANGING UP ON ME WAH, but this post is some grotesque opposite version. This post is tra la la, isn't life wonderful, raindrops on kittens and whiskers on roses, etc. Today I have discovered that even when you have a really, really awful work-related day, if someone lovely runs you a bath with bubbles and candles, gets you your book, waits until you are in said bath, then sneaks in with some pink sparkly wine and SNACKS, life can really pick up.

Did you get that? Snacks! In the bath! Imagine!

For some reason I feel like that is totally scandalous.

Last week I played my guitar in public, for the second time ever. I was still terrible, still fumbling hopefully around the thing like I am trying to give the Heimlich manoeuvre to a swan. I tried pretending that the desperate, chord-search pauses were deliberate, hoping that people might think I'm over-dramatic rather than crap. Naturally, nobody was at all fooled. However, some people said that my total lack of skill is "endearing", which is nice. I bet nobody ever said that to Jimi Hendrix.

I have written about four endings to this post, but all seem weird and not in keeping with the pink sparkly feeling.

Maybe I will do some guitar practice, probably I will just see whether I can find any more wine.

If You Like Childish Whining, You'll Love This Post!

2011-02-06T20:27:00.005Z

The rain just won't stop falling. There is all this bloody weather going on and I feel well and truly under it.

Under darkened skies I trudged for ages today, alongside a duel carriageway. All the cars careened hilariously past, all bright lights and Radio 1 (I expect). I muttered unwarranted obscenities at them but they didn't care. After fifteen minutes of trudging I remembered the umbrella in my bag, and so put it up, only for it to flap wildly about like a oversized stick insect having a fit. I wrapped it back up. My boots chose that moment to dramatically stop being waterproof.

Maybe I would be no drier on my bike, but probably I would be less wet for less long. Being a cyclist is more fun than being a pedestrian. At least when cycling I can look forward to a few thrilling brushes with death under the wheels of a Preston-bound Megabus. The only danger with walking is that I might get so bored I attempt to ram my umbrella down my throat.

I will get my bike fixed when I get some money through, but until then I will be sporting worn-down boots and a frayed temper.

Probably I am totally fine, but I feel a very strong urge to throw things and sneer at innocent creatures. If the cat was still alive I would definitely be showering him with scathing comments whilst stroking him in case he did really understand English. (I wouldn't have put it past him.) As it is I can either be really mean to Ben, which I don't want to as I am fairly sure that he actually does understand English, and anyway he is making me dinner, or find some other way of venting. I am casting about with narrowed eyes to find something to soak up my crossness, but nothing is presenting itself.

Probably this is why people have children.

Oh, I give up. The world is stupid. If there is an innocent creature in your vicinity, please swear at it for me. Thanks.

First Kiss

2011-01-15T14:02:00.007Z

The Guardian has encouraged us all to be fondly nostalgic about our first kisses by pretending it's a "First Kiss Memory Study" to make it feel a bit science-y and not quite so self-indulgent. They don't need to make up science, though, because sometimes a bit of self indulgence is OK.

I have two first kiss memories. This is allowed, I have decided, totally arbitrarily.

I met Boy One at the local outdoor swimming pool. I don't remember particularly fancying him, I don't even remember agreeing to go out with him, although I suppose I must've done at some point. He was called Ahmed, I think, and he was nice, probably. My nostalgia is very vague on this, although I do have distinct memories of always paying for entrance to the swimming pool in 1p and 2p coins and the constant gnawing fear that a wasp had crawled, cackling, into my Coke can. Anyway, once Ahmed bought me some flowers (his parents had a shop, he told me, which explains how a ten year old boy could get hold of a pretty nice bunch of roses), and gave them to me in my back garden. I was quite surprised, although I think I was aware that I was supposed to be delighted and a bit swoon-y. He leaned rakishly against a tree and asked me to guess who he thought the most beautiful woman in the world was. I thought about this for a bit. "Sharon Stone?" I guessed. He shook his head, no. "Julia Roberts?" (This was about 1990.) Wrong again. I went through a few more lady celebrities. "Cindy Crawford? That one off Baywatch?" All wrong. I gave up. "Who?"

"You" he told me, proudly.

I was totally baffled. I was ten. I had freckles and skinny legs. There was just no logical way that I was even beautiful at all, let alone more dazzling than Pretty Woman or that one off Baywatch. He was, quite clearly, really stupid, I decided. I was just about to tell him this when he leaned forward and planted a kiss on my confused mouth. But it was too late. I had already stopped trusting anything he said. Boys must think girls are stupid, I thought. (I still mostly think this.)

Boy Two was a few summers later, at a party in a tiny, dusty hall, which seemed to meld seamlessly into the car park next to which it squatted. I wore (judge me if you must) blue checked hotpants, a white crop top and pale blue, high heeled jelly shoes. Go on, read that sentence again, then imagine the ensemble. Take a moment. I've come to terms with it, you can too.

All the girls were in similar outfits and the boys had that glorious nineties hairstyle known as 'curtains'. A friend of mine had found out that I had never "snogged" anyone before, and decided it was about time I started. Shy, and fairly ambivalent about the whole snogging thing, I entreated her not to tell anyone, but teenage girls are cruel and of course my words went woefully unheeded. Before I knew it I was being pushed out the back door of the hall with a boy called Lewis, who I found horribly unattractive but who had blond curtains and therefore counted as "fit". We stood awkwardly together, or at least, I was awkward. Lewis seemed to have a bizarre confidence which he wore like his orange-lined bomber jacket. My friend, of course had told him I had never done it before, and so he was about to initiate me into the delightful world of teenage "snogging". He, it seemed, had done it before, and to my considerable consternation began immediately demonstrating his expertise on my face. I knew I was supposed to close my eyes, and as I did so I wondered in horror whether it was meant to hurt this much and whether all the disgusting chewing was really necessary. After a while it was over, and as I tried to discreetly wipe the tide of saliva from my cheeks he regarded me, head tilted. "Not bad for a first time" he proclaimed, knowingly.

I wandered inside to find my friends, to lie to them about the whole spit/chewing fiasco. I made a strong, silent pledge to myself at that moment that I would never, ever do that again. Ever.

Tell me about your first time, if you like. (You can have two.)

2011

2011-01-11T16:18:00.003Z

Well, I haven't posted since 1986 (approx.), according to Blogger. I feel I ought to buy it flowers or something. It must feel very neglected. I want to tell it that I haven't passed it over for a younger, trendier, more streamlined version (Twitter), nor have I gone back to something old and dependable (actually seeing people with my eyes and, like, talking to their faces). I have just stopped interacting. Honest! I literally haven't communicated with anyone in any way for ages, I promise.

Perhaps.

Life did go all whirly for a good few months before Christmas, though. If I had posted it would have been only to shake you by the virtual shoulders and beg you to help me, please sir/ma'am, help me before collapsing into your virtual arms in a weepy faint, my virtual mouth just a little bit open so you could pour some virtual gin into it.

The cat went and died, which was a pretty shitty thing to do, if you ask me. (Three years is not enough cat-time.) He was all weak and forlorn, staring at me and squawking, so I took him to the vet. The vet was called Bernard and had a very reassuring manner about him. Bernard gave me some pills and some disgusting orange goop to shove down his throat twice a day (the cat's, not Bernard's). It didn't work. Pony/Murko/The Cat needed surgery, which was a bargain at only £400, but we decided we would rather have a cat that a full set of kidneys so took him in. (I had to work that day, so Ben was taking him. Before I left I kissed Pony's tiny, sad little ears with an ugly, sunken feeling, and cried onto his head a bit.) He died on the operating table. We still owe the vet £300, but cannot even sell our kidneys now because we had to drink so much to get over the whole thing.

Other things that have died: my bike (Glinda) and my computer. Glinda has Back Wheel Disease, which means that no matter how many times you replace the back wheel inner tube she gets a puncture almost immediately. The thing about Back Wheel Disease is that nobody can work out the cause. Not me (technique: look at wheel, prod wheel, say "um"), not Ben (technique: take bike apart, prod, poke and scrutinize all parts), not numerous bike mechanics (technique: unknown, possibly involving smoking rollies and smearing hands and face in oil). It is a mystery, but one that is making me pay for buses and taking away the only form of exercise I get, unless loathing fellow passengers has some kind of aerobic value. My computer just inexplicably packed in. It isn't that old (although it is for a computer, I suppose). I haven't taken it to the shop where the clever computer people live yet as I know they will say HA HA YOU HAVE TO BUY A NEW ONE, IDIOT, and I will cry and offer them body parts which they will of course turn down. "Eye for an iMac?" I will beg, at which point they will kick me in the face, probably quite rightly.

So, poverty-stricken and catless, we enter this new year. Maybe I will blog more often about my devilishly exciting life, more likely I won't. Actually this is how most of my New Year's Resolutions always go. Maybe I will get really fit and be exceptionally attractive this year! Most likely I won't. Maybe I will save all my meagre earnings! Most likely I will fritter them away on pointless, unattractive things like food and shelter. Maybe I will write more songs! Most likely I will keep performing the same ones and hate them all. Maybe I will be more assertive with my resolutions, so as to instill some willpower and force myself into a glorious state of betterment and success! Most likely I will continue on in the same desultory way, reading and re-reading the same books, looking and thinking the same, until I die of Back Wheel Disease while being pawed by an oily bike mechanic with a rolled cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth.

I did have my hair cut, though! So my 2011 promises to be much like my 2010, with the added pleasure of looking like an over-developed twelve-year old. Hurray! Happy New Year.

Three Minutes and a Power Ballad

2010-10-21T12:14:00.002+01:00

I can hear the cat scritch-scratching about upstairs. It is a worrying sound, given that recently we awoke to him performing what we could only assume to be some kind of protest wee on a flannel. Yesterday I found him weeing on a pot plant, looking at me with wide eyes and an expression of resigned satisfaction. I shouted at him, but didn't want to shoo him off in case I found myself holding a fountainous feline. I would have ended up putting him in the kitchen sink like a burning saucepan, which would have been less than hygienic. I have worked in kitchens, so I know for a fact that animal urine + food preparation area = major breach of health and safety regulations.

My fingers are freezing. I have been sitting all morning here at my desk, sedentary and concentrating, and only now I come to type have I started to notice how cold I am. I have been arranging versions of various Christmas carols for the show I am working on in Halifax, and it is making me chilly. Trying to work out how much harmony I can expect a group of young people to hold and sing a cappella, that is confusing. It seems pretty easy to me, but I am supposedly "good" at, like, music and stuff, so how much less do I put in? Or do I expect loads from them and be like in a film, where I am hard on them and a bit scary at first but they grow to love and value me as I push their singing to the limits and they end up winning the All State National Championship after getting implausibly better in the duration of a three minute montage sequence?

I would like my life to contain more montage sequences and less actual work.

Things I would definitely do if I could have a montage sequence to do them in:

1. Drive
2. Do exercise
3. Release an award-winning album, produced myself, against all odds
4. Train the cat not to wee in plants
5. Train the cat to make tea
6. Train the cat to dance on demand

What things would you have a montage sequence for?

The Other Day and Today

2010-10-03T16:02:00.002+01:00

ON THE TRAIN, THE OTHER DAY

Out of the train window the valley is bluey-silver and shining. (I am on my way back from Huddersfield.) As I trudged up the hill to Manchester Piccadilly earlier on the rain was swooping across the pavement, sending people scurrying into doorways like damp mice. It's thick, intrusive rain. The kind that pokes at necks, spits in eyes, and makes people hunch their shoulders and complain gleefully.

I like the bright, gleaming clouds over these valleys. They make everything look mysterious. Yorkshire looks magical in the rain.

I'm so busy. Scampering this way and that, from one thing to the other, making constant lists which I inevitable lose within about half an hour. Every so often a lost list turns up and prompts a few minutes of frantic ticking before it gets (recycling) binned. I am doing lots of things, jobs in various places doing various things. I keep saying yes to stuff, so pleased I am to be working in the field I enjoy (music/theatre) and mainly doing non-office stuff, I forget that I need to do things like sleep, eat, and sit slack-jawed in front of CSI.

There is a woman sitting opposite me. She is in her seventies, and is round and pleasant-looking. She has careful, discreet eye-make up on and pink lipstick to match a rose-coloured scarf. One hand is holding her ticket and smoothing it with her thumb, while the other clutches the table. She has just finished a plastic cup of white wine and is now gazing hard into the distance as if she is plotting something dastardly. I like her.

A few weeks ago I played my guitar in public for the first time! I was pretty crap (it went like this: strum strum strum str... (sorry) strum strum strum) (oh, and this: sing sing sing si... (sorry) sing sing sing) but I did it so now I can do it again and be equally crap only without those first time nerves. Ben and I did a cool gig together. It was a night for Manchester Peace Festival (yes, we are bloody hippies - pass the houmous) hosted by Single Cell Collective. It was at Night and Day, and we loved the sound man so much we wanted to take him home and keep him in a box. It wouldn't be a bad life, he could share the cat's biscuits.

Speaking of the cat, we let him out of our new flat the other day, for the first time. He was so! excited!, but unfortunately then quickly got stuck on a roof. Ben woke me at about 3am to tell me. From our flat we could see him, a little, hunched figure, miaowing in anguish. After various foiled rescue attempts, we took a ladder down four flights of stairs and propped it up against the wall. I held it steady while Ben teetered up to drag the protesting cat (who seemed to have decided that he liked it there, thanks, and could we just bring him some biscuits?) off the roof. I was wearing Ben's dressing gown and my running shoes. I felt like Arthur Dent, only with less travelling through space and time and more small, cross cats. The following day he went missing, which is another story. He is back now (and grounded).

NOW

It's Sunday and I am having a Day Off. Ben is fixing my bike and making biscuits and I am blogging and wondering about the rain. (Division of labour fail, I think.) Yesterday I was holding auditions in Halifax for the Christmas show I am doing the music for. The auditions largely involved trying to get eleven-year-olds not to try to sing like Beyoncé, and being positive about their performances whilst trying not to get their little hopes up. I succeeded in one more than the other, I think.

I am staring down the barrel of another busy week. It's all good, but I can't shake the feeling that when I was trapped behind grey desks in muffled offices, surrounded by men in ties and women with expensive yet practical shoes and proper haircuts, when life was boring and to be rebelled against, I used to write more. I think I obsessed about it in a way that I just don't have time for now.

Ah, whatever. It's Sunday, the radio is on and I will soon be eating a homemade biscuit. (They smell amazing. How many is too many?) (Four, I reckon.) It's stopped raining but the clouds are swelling and shining in the sky. I'll think about it all tomorrow. Monday is for thinking, Sunday is for lying comfortably somewhere and popping (at least four) delicious things into one's mouth.

Let's all eat biscuits.

Chocolate

2010-09-12T17:22:00.002+01:00

I can see the hills from our new kitchen window. I look out. The light, bright patches shine underneath the glowering sky. There is drama and majesty where the hills preside, while the banal is left in the hands of the city-scapes, these broken misshapes and scuffed souls.

I am gazing at the hills in the knowledge I have to go to Debenhams to buy a cotton rich percale fitted sheet. Super king size, chocolate brown. Eighteen pounds.

I cycle through rain damp shining streets, standing on my pedals probably too much because it makes me feel like a twelve year old boy which, for some reason, I find liberating.

I lock my bike in the town centre next to a bench where a sockless man eyes me. I unclip my basket and, hooking it over one arm, hazy Sunday daze my way to the corner where Debenhams squats. The doors slide back to reveal Justin Timberlake doing his sultry best to sell me perfume, accompanied by a fire-eyed girl who dangles lustily from his arm. I avert my gaze from theirs just in time, so they quickly move on to their next victim.

I wander past rows of glitzy shoes, who arch their backs and wink at me. I am dazzled but don't alter my course, knowing the sure fate of girls who stray from the path into the dangerous woods with their bountiful diamanté fruit.

On the escalator models writhe. They are glossy. Glossy hair glossy skin glossy eyes glossy lips glossy teeth. I glide by them and am reminded of flayed horses, eyes wide and teeth bared.

Homeware is on the third floor. On the second escalator I pick my nose and idly gaze at the linen-clad bottom of the lady in front of me. I am delivered to the third floor and I wander into it, basket on my arm, suddenly lost. Surrounded by a thicket of towels and clocks, pans, cushions and CD racks, I cannot see the bed bit and fear I am in the wrong place. I am too involved in my own dreamy experience to want to ask for help so instead I wander, my eyes caught by sequined cushions offering me a more glamorous sitting life and thick piled rugs promising an eternity of cosy comfort.

Eventually I see the sheets, and study the array. I bend down to pick one up and read aloud from the label. "Cotton rich percale fitted sheet. Super king size. Eighteen pounds."

I can't see where it says that it is chocolate-coloured. It is definitely brown, but I don't want to get home and find out that what I assumed to be chocolate is actually shit.

A tiny label on the back reassures me, so I buy it.

Out. Past the oily models, past the pouting shoes, past Justin (who is still turning his snake-hipped charms on everyone who dares to enter) and out, into my own bright light patch.

I wheel home, standing up on the pedals. Up, up into the new flat. I go to the kitchen and realize I am sweating slightly. I look out of the window, past the razor sharp angles of the city. I look to the horizon where, I realize, the hills are rolling with laughter.

Beer Bloggles

2010-08-23T20:10:00.006+01:00

I am having a beer. It is Monday, and I am tentatively exploring the delights of beer after writhing about in only-slightly-exaggerated agony for the last few days due to what actually turned out to be quite a mild and short-lived cold.

I went to Edinburgh, to the Fringe! It was, as usual, a heady combination of the grubby and the glamorous, everyone experiencing the diurnal transition from arty drunk into a glowering hungover husk of humanity. Ben was doing a show as part of the Free Fringe, so lots of time was spent loitering grimly in dungeon-y pubs, clutching pints of Tennents and trying not to touch the walls. The show was great. People were great. It was great*.

(*I have become a luvvie! Albeit one with a very limited vocabulary.)

I did notice that I am becoming officially Too Old And Set In My Ways to party like I used to, though. I am quite sure that, ten(-ish) years ago when I came up with University, I could party properly. All night and all day if necessary, then do a show in the evening and start again. Nowadays 10.30pm has me glancing worriedly at my watch and anxiously pawing the ground, as I switch to chamomile tea and wonder when I am going to finish off that lovely needlepoint piece with the kittens on. Perhaps it is not that bad, not yet, but still. I am drinking a solitary beer on a Monday night and feeling a touch outrageous, so maybe there really is something amiss.

Also, we are moving house!

From house to flat, specifically. From a terraced house in Moss Side to mezzanine flat in Homes For Change, a housing co-operative in Hulme, even more specifically. It is really exciting, but we have only a few days to move all our stuff (although most of it belongs to Ben, really, I am a woman of little stuff). August is busy, we are performing at Shambala Festival this weekend and then going down south for some days. When we come back Ben is going away for another few days, leaving me and the cat to wander around the house aimlessly putting things/sitting in boxes until Ben gets back and does all the real work.

I am worried about how to tell the cat we are moving. He loves it here, although he pretends to be aloof and disinterested in life and all its forms. I don't know how he will adjust to all the changes. I'm not even sure he really knows what a mezzanine flat is, even though I have drawn him a few diagrams.

Tomorrow and the following day I am leading some Glee workshops that are taking place in Bolton. All day today I have been pretending to hate learning all the songs and acting like it's not my fault that I have to sing "Defying Gravity" along to a backing track at the top of my voice whilst dancing jerkily along into the bedroom mirror. Ben has totally fallen for it. Secretly I think it will be quite fun. I might even buy some leg-warmers on the way.

Anyway, my lone beer has sent me slightly delirious, so I will go and lie face down until I stop wanting to terrorize the cat with the words "just a small town girl". Mezzanine or no mezzanine I think he might make a break for it. Probably quite rightly.

Right. Beer = finished. Therefore, blog post also = finished.

Christina Explains It All

2010-08-01T14:32:00.011+01:00

Idly leafing through the Internet the other day somehow I found myself reading this majestic pile of crap, written for Esquire Magazine by Christina Hendricks. Christina is the Celeb World's latest manifestation of the Every Woman, so-imagined because she has breasts and hips and doesn't resemble an overly made-up Skeletor. Ignoring the fact that she is at least eighteen thousand times more beautiful than most people, she is being lorded as an average woman who can speak for all the women in the whole world.

Those men reading Esquire will presumably be relieved to finally have our delicate, paisley psyches translated for them by the obviously-completely-normal Christina. I have cut and pasted some of the article below, but you can read the whole thing here.

(Christina's pearls of wisdom are in bold, mine are not.)

If we haven't smelled you for a day or two and then we suddenly are within inches of you, we swoon. We get light-headed. It's intoxicating. It's heady.

Oh, there is nothing we like more than to rush up to you when you walk through the door, push our faces into your glorious, manly armpits and inhale. If we haven't seen you for a few days, and in those few days you happen not to have showered, so much the better. You know us women, we love a good swoon. But remember, Esquire Men, with great power comes great responsibility! Do not unleash your pheromone powers on us when we are operating heavy machinery. We are not insured against Acts of God-like Men.

When you mention in passing that a certain woman is attractive...your comment goes into a steel box and it stays there forever. We will file the comment under "Women He Finds Attractive." It's about learning what you think is sexy and how we might be able to convey it. It's about keeping our man by knowing what he likes.

Yes! Yes, that's what "it" is all about. Thank goodness. I can stop pretending that inferior little me could possibly be good enough for a man, and instead focus my pretty little attention on the real task of attempting to become an amalgamation of every attractive woman in the whole world. Of course. That's what "it's" about. I will also be taking myself in for an x-ray in an attempt to find this "steel box" I am carrying around. I was wondering why my head felt so heavy all the time.

We also remember everything you say about our bodies, be it good or bad. Doesn't matter if it's a compliment. Could be just a comment. Those things you say are stored away in the steel box, and we remember these things verbatim. We remember what you were wearing and the street corner you were standing on when you said it.

That steel box sure is getting full. This is why I cannot get much else into my brain, because my steel box of Stuff You Say About Me Or Any Other Woman Ever takes up so much room. What with that and all that walking and breathing in and out I am forced to do all the time, it's not surprising that all I want to do the rest of the time is sitting about waiting for you to grace my nose with your armpit.

Never complain about our friends — even if we do. No matter how many times we say a friend of ours is driving us crazy, you are not to pile on. Not because it offends us. But because it adds to the weight that we carry around about her.

Do not add your opinions to the "weight" I carry around! Only talk about my friends if it is to compare my body/face with theirs and therefore give me something to add to my list of Ways I Can Be More Like Other Women So As To Be More Attractive To You.

We want you to order Scotch. It's the most impressive drink order. It's classic. It's sexy. Such a rich color. The glass, the smell. It's not watered down with fruit juice. It's Scotch. And you ordered it.

I don't care what you like to drink. No drink-tastes will be filed away in my steel box. Drink Scotch like a fucking MAN, you pansy. Fruit juice is for girls.

Stand up, open a door, offer a jacket. We talk about it with our friends after you do it. We say, "Can you believe he stood up when I approached the table?" It makes us feel important. And it makes you important because we talk about it.

Sometimes in the world I feel so unimportant. The universe is so big and I am so small, and nothing I do will ever change that. There is so much injustice and intolerance, how can I, one tiny, insignificant being, really make any diffe... Wait! OMG did you just open that door? I AM THE QUEEN OF THE GALAXY! Problem solved.

No man should be on Facebook. It's an invasion of everyone's privacy. I really cannot stand it.

But it's alright for women. We need something to do between all that swooning and steel box-maintenance.

You don't know this, but when we come back from a date, we feel awkward about that transition from our cute outfit into sexy lingerie. We don't know how to do this gracefully. It's embarrassing. We have to find a way to slip into another room, put on the outfit as if it all happened very easily, and then come out and it's: Look at me! Look at the sexy thing I've done! For you, it's the blink of an eye. It's all very embarrassing. Just so you know.

You don't know this, but it takes quite a lot of practice to make slipping into a clown costume look easy. As we shuffle awkwardly into the bedroom, trying not to trip over our massive shoes and smiling shyly out from behind our big red noses, we sometimes feel a pang of girly embarrassment. We do it for you. It's all for you. Just so you know.

Panties is a wonderful word. When did you stop saying "panties"? It's sexy. It's girlie. It's naughty. Say it more.

Job interview? Funeral? War crimes tribunal? You know the magic word!

There are better words than beautiful. Radiant, for instance. It's an underused word. It's a very special word. "You are radiant." Also, enchanting, smoldering, intoxicating, charming, fetching.

Better yet, lean in very close to me, stroke a stray wisp of hair from my simpering face, and scream the word PANTIES at me over and over again until my eyes bleed.

Marriage changes very little. The only things that will get a married man laid that won't get a single man laid are adultery and whores. Intelligence and humor (and your smell) are what get you laid. That's what got you laid when you were single. That's what gets you laid when you're married. Everything still works in marriage: especially intelligence and humor. Because the sexiest thing is to know you.

After the word panties, obviously.

This Post Might Make You Itch

2010-07-26T13:12:00.003+01:00

This morning I had some tea and stroked the cat enthusiastically. Then I got out of bed, and wrote a generally positive To Do List. (I know it was generally positive because it didn't include any items such as BECOME BETTER PERSON underlined six times, and HAVE MORE MONEY decorated with skulls and bloody daggers.) I finished the list, replied to a few emails, and took myself off to have a shower before starting a day which I was sure was going to be positive and productive, peppered with only the mildest of self-flagellation.

I dis-robed, turned on the shower, and stepped in. I began to sing a bit. As I la-la-la-ed, I noticed a small, weird black thing on my side. Upon further, horrified inspection it was very small, very weird, really only brown-y black and very gross. I immediately assumed it was a mole, sprung into melanomic existence and about to make sure that every future To Do List included the item DON'T DIE OF CANCER TODAY. Panicking slightly and no longer singing, I poked at it. Actually, chipped in some long dormant logical part of my brain, I didn't have a mole there yesterday, so the likelihood of developing one and getting cancer in it overnight is pretty small.

I was relieved to have avoided cancer, but I was no closer to solving the mystery of the small weird black thing that was so determinedly clinging to me in spite of the shower water sluicing past it.

I poked again. It came off slightly, increasing the disgusting factor a bit. I picked at it. It doggedly and disgustingly remained. "This" I said aloud to the rubber ducks lounging casually on the side of the bath "is disgusting". Their silence rang with agreement.

I picked and poked, and finally the small, weird, black thing came free. I held close to my eyes, such was its smallness, but far from my mouth, such was its weirdness.

"Oh my God."

Out of the corner of my eye I am sure I saw a rubber duck gag.

It was a tiny, tiny insect. Probably a flea.

A flea had dived from the cat and attached itself to my innocent skin, there to extract elevenses from me until it was satisfied. Then I had stepped hummingly into the shower, whereby it had drowned horribly, leaving its disgusting mouth still clinging on to me, resulting in a considerable amount of fingernail force needing to be used to pry it off.

"This is disgusting." I turned to the ducks, but they had edged over to the corner of the bath, and were facing the tiles. They wanted no further part in my disgusting flea/shower drama.

I inspected my skin, where a red bump was forming. I inspected the flea, which remained resolutely and disgustingly dead.

There I stood. In the shower, mouth open in horror, holding a small ex-flea.

"I am disgusting" I called to the recoiling ducks. "Nobody must ever know about this. I definitely won't write a blog post about it. That would definitely constitute a blogging overshare."

I flicked the soggy parasite out of the window and picked up the shampoo, already composing the first line in my head.

DRAMA!

2010-07-20T12:36:00.003+01:00

Help! Send wine! Send chocolate! Send a pony!

Send a pony made of chocolate carrying a bucket of wine!

Oh, no, no, everything's fine. The sky has not caved in. Nobody has kicked me in the shins, the cat hasn't hidden all my shoes, nobody has even forced me to watch back to back Tom Cruise films until I bled through my eyes.

Things are just all a bit grey and flat. Nothing is fun and everything is shit and whatever, it's my blog, I can be dramatic and hyperbolic if I want to. Summer is meant to be fun! I was promised leaping about all sylph-like in floaty white clothing, sipping elegant cocktails and laughing tinkling laughs at the sun. Festivals and hay bales and possibly the odd adorable puppy. Nobody actually promised me any of that stuff, but they should have done and I should have got a written contract. Then I could sue. I would sue. Well, I would be cross with a bit of paper, anyway.

Instead, here I am. Broke and sulking in front of a computer that won't leave me alone, wearing actual clothes that don't even float. I am even bored of tormenting the cat with an old shoelace. I never thought it would come to this.

What a drama queen (me, not the cat) (actually, both). I was on holiday last week in Wales. I know! Another holiday and I am already sullen and discontent. It was good, pretty active and tent-based. I cycled twenty five miles up and down hills with full paniers and a guitar on my back, which I believe makes me officially Sporty. We did a thing in wetsuits and met lots of nice people.

So I am being woeful and dramatic pointlessly. This post belongs firmly in the comments section of Belgian Waffle's excellent 99 First World Problems post.

All my earn-y money-y work seems to kick back in at the end of August. (By "kick back in" I of course mean crawl in slowly and painfully like a squirrel with pins for legs, but still.) Then, by October, I am assistant directing/devising the music for a show so will be Busy and Paid! Imagine! I can't.

Right now I am wondering whether I can Tipp-Ex out the decimal point on my computer screen every time I check my online balance, and NatWest might be tricked into giving me enough money to buy a pony made of chocolate.

"Stop whingeing!" I hear you thundering. Well, sorry, I can't. I am too into it now, wearing my pathetic problems like a floaty summer dress.

How am I supposed to be arty in these conditions?

Woe.

Back!

2010-06-21T12:52:00.003+01:00

Didn't I mention I was going away? I'm sure everyone has been weeping softly into their RSS feeds all week, not knowing what to do with themselves without me there to tell them that it's hot in Manchester and I am poor.

It's hot in Manchester. I am poor.

I have spent the past week in the Outer Hebrides, on the magical (not literally) (although maybe) Isle of Lewis. My Mum and Dad whisked Ben and me away from the trials of inner city life (see: screaming neighbours, financial woe, the cat) to the remote island, where we were plied with wonderful food and majestic scenery. We stayed in a beautiful guest house - Baile na Cille. Our bedroom had implausibly stunning views and a sofa in it, a far remove from the two metre wide room we share here with its crumbling red brick outlook. The beach there is as wide as the sky.

We went out on a boat, looked at other islands, saw basking sharks and seals and big birds that we are going to believe are eagles, went fishing, actually caught fish, actually gutted fish, actually ate fish, walked up hills, walked down hills, ran out of words for the views, learned to play bar billiards (thanks, James), lost many times at bar billiards (again, thanks, James), played table football (ditto), lost many times at table football (ditto), ate loads, got taken to a ramshackle beachside bar in the middle of the night where we were force-fed port and fun, and generally had a fabulous time.

(Last time I went on holiday and then wrote about it in a blog post someone said I was doing "Léonie as Bill Bryson". Obviously I am totally over it, given that it was well over a year ago and I am of course not that sensitive. Anyway, I like Bill Bryson.)

The weekend before that we were in Leeds for the concert at the end of the project I have been part of for the last ten months. It was wonderful, could not have gone better. It took a few days before the post-event anxiety dreams started to trickle through, but they are here now. Last night I had to do the whole thing again but I hadn't washed my hair and they had changed all the music at the last minute. Also someone was playing the trumpet incessantly. I look forward to at least three more weeks of this, but I promise this will not become an "Analyse My Dreams!" blog. (What do trumpets mean, though? Are all my teeth about to fall out? Is the cat going to win a tombola? Help!)

Now I am floundering in a no-money state of delirium. I am trying to get shifts at the café, but without much luck. My other money-making technique, staring out of the window feeling anxious, is not proving very successful either. I am considering doing a Musical Theatre Holiday Club for kids, which just involves backing tracks, a church hall and watching Glee for "research purposes".

I need to prepare for some festivals, as well. Ben and I are performing at Shambala, and I am performing with Eggs Collective at Big Chill.

The sun is shining. I feel that I should be outside, leaping ecstatically through a sprinkler. It is not to be, though, for I must persevere with my fortune-building. Please let me know if you have any ideas, particularly if they involve sprinklers or songs from the shows.

Over the Ginnel

2010-06-06T20:31:00.002+01:00

The cat and I are sulking. He is better at it than I am. More committed, I think.

Ben is in (stupid) Bristol and there are no more (stupid) trains back to (stupid) Manchester tonight. I couldn't go and sing at the festival this weekend, and have been consoling myself with the idea that he was going to come back tonight so we could lie around in our pants watching the second season of Mad Men. Now he is not and I am forced to lie about by myself. Sulk.

The cat is sulking because I won't give him any more biscuits. He is not allowed any, he is meant to be on a diet. He's downstairs, muttering darkly to himself about "unrealistic expectations of body shape" and how he might just "go anorexic" to prove a point. I feel sorry for him, because he doesn't have a blog to moan at. (If he did it would probably be called 'Sometimes Disdain And Apathy Towards All Other Forms of Life is All I Have'.)

This week is a Big Week for me. Saturday is the culmination of the project I have been doing for the last year(ish) in Leeds with Opera North. I am excited and completely terrified, depending on how tired I am feeling at any given moment. I usually feel pretty confident about the whole thing when I am whooshing about on my bike (Glinda) (who I totally love), and then when I sit alone staring out of the window trying to ignore all the feline anger wafting up the stairs at me I begin to feel a bit jittery.

It's raining and warm. The roof tiles opposite are slick. I sat for a while leaning on the windowsill with my head out of the window, listening to the sounds of cars and sirens far away. I love looking out over the ginnel, peering into the back yards crammed together unevenly behind each terraced house. Most of them have bright weeds struggling defiantly from brick cracks, and off-white washing lines slicing across them at odd angles. I love the shock of the bright plastic pegs against the paving and the aching, rusty bricks. I have been watching with interest the progress of the naked Action Man, who came to our attention when he was splayed provocatively on a roof, unclothed and rakish, but who is now lying face down in a gutter. The chimneys are relics, withering and unused, but without them the scene would be incomplete.

On the sill of the back, downstairs window of the house opposite me are a pair of very small, brilliant-blue wellington boots. They are upside down. I imagine the wearer splashing about gleefully in puddles. I can hear the children next door, playing loudly, blissfully and unusually free from either parent screaming lashing recriminations.

I like the way the slate roofs are shining. I like the damp air and Sunday calm. The evening sun just awoke and hit a chimney pot, setting the red bricks aflame.

The cat is still silent and being aloof downstairs, but I have stopped feeling so sulky. I will perhaps concede and give him a few more biscuits. Maybe he will come upstairs and lie about with me until Ben gets home.

Sunday, 7pm

2010-05-25T11:25:00.005+01:00

I am walking through Moss Side, coming home from the park. The bright blue sky is making the red bricks sing. My feet on the baked pavement flip and then flop and then flip and then flop. A breeze lifts my hair briefly from my neck.

I was lying alone in the park, alternately reading and eavesdropping. Someone not far away had a guitar and was strumming it lightly.

A woman in a hot pink sari leans in a doorway, speaking quietly to a small, serious-looking boy. Bass beats drift over the slate roofs of the terraces, mingling with the smell of the charcoal ovens on the Curry Mile.

Earlier I went swimming with Sophie and Anna. Lengths then a jacuzzi chat, until a hairy-chested man with wide eyes slid into the bubbles beside us. We made our way to the children's area, full of toddlers and Dads. Sophie and I queued up with the tiny, be-arm-banded army for a go on the elephant slide. Sophie had promised me that it was faster than it looked, and she was right.

I pass a few of the lucky terraces with front yards. A man grins toothlessly at me as he slaps cream over leathery, tattooed shoulders. "Lovely day!" he calls. "Isn't it?" I reply, smiling. He nods enthusiastically before adding "I won't be saying sorry in six months time!" I shake my head and laugh uproariously. I have absolutely no idea what he means.

After our swim Anna, Sophie and I stood outside, refreshed. We started to walk, proclaiming how we felt like new people, any hangover remnants having flown off on the way down the elephant slide.

Two young boys pass me, probably ten or eleven years old. One is riding a bike, slowly, dragging one foot along the ground, to keep the same slow pace as his friend, who is walking. The boy on the bike is singing "The Way You Make Me Feel (You Really Turn Me On)" in a loud falsetto, while his friend stares, vacant, into the middle distance.

I flip flop onwards.

After hugs and goodbyes, Anna hopped on a bus. Sophie and I continued to walk. We bought ice creams from a man in a turban who called us both 'duck'. More hugs, more goodbyes, and we parted. I tucked my ice-cream wrapper into a bin and wandered to the park. I found a spot and sat, retrieved my book and hitched my dress up over my knees.

A group of men are standing around a shop on the corner. One of them groans as I flip flop past, which I decide to take as a compliment. I stare at the bright red bricks and read the old markings on the walls. The sky is still rich.

I slow down as I turn onto my street. Flip. Even slower. Flop.

Pushing my key into the lock I take a breath and think what a nice day it's been.

Something Inside So Monday

2010-05-17T16:08:00.005+01:00

I had some errands to run today, so I hopped on Glinda and made my way into town. Manchester is all blue skies and spring breezes. The boys are wearing sunglasses and girls are wearing sandals.

(The girls are also wearing expressions of horror because they don't look anything like the new H&M posters. Clearly they are going to have to if they are to 'do' summer properly, like a real woman. Luckily you can buy one of H&M's 'tunics' for £7.99, which is guaranteed to make you look like a gyrating model tripping along a sun-kissed beach.)

(Rant over. Well, it is over in this post, but in my head it never stops.)

I pulled up at some traffic lights and stopped as they went red. A white van pulled up alongside, windows wound down fully. As soon as it stopped I heard the words "ALL TOGETHER NOW!" shouted in a gravelly but excited male voice.

Two other similarly gravelly voices joined in for the most enthusiastic version of 'Something Inside So Strong' I have ever heard, complete with turned up stereo and rudimentary beatboxing.

I grinned at them, but they were so caught up in the moment that clearly the world outside that van faded away. The lights changed and they sped off, leaving me with the strains of "...though you're doing me wrong, so wrong" and a broken stereotype.

I accidentally told the man in the vegetable van that I was cooking a Thai Green Curry tonight. I am not cooking a Thai Green Curry tonight. Ben is cooking something, and I was buying ingredients. One of these ingredients is some galanga. I asked for some. The man cheerily replied that they didn't have any, and that I should probably go to China Town. Alright, thanks, I said. Then the conversation went like this:

Van Man: Are you making curry?
Me: *he seems to really want me to be making curry*
Me: Yes.
Van Man: Oh, great. A green one?
Me: *um*
Me: Yes.
Van Man: Oh lovely. What else are you putting in it?
Me: Oh, you know. Bits and bobs. Bye!

It was awkward. Lying is one thing, but lying out of potential social awkwardness is just silly.

I went to China Town and found somewhere to lock my bike. A few feet away from me a tall girl was taking a photo. I glanced over to see what she was photographing, and saw a tall man standing by the Chinese arch. He was grinning, and pulling out the corners of his eyes. She was laughing.

I did a double take and dropped my bike.

Picking it up, I looked around again and he was still doing it, but had stuck his teeth over his lower lip. She was still giggling. I dropped my bike again.

If Glinda is broken and I have to claim on the insurance, I am going to file that the reason for the damage was "casual racism".

Then I went to Maplin, the electronics shop, and overheard a man in stonewashed blue denim claiming that "a man can never have enough string lighting", much to the gleeful agreement of his friend.

As excursions go, it was quite good. I have decided need to stop lying just because I sense that someone really wants me to be able to cook, people have to stop being racist and men have to stop loitering in Maplin saying stupid things.

I would like more white van man karaoke, though.

On-whine

2010-05-11T11:54:00.004+01:00

Ennui has hit. I am housebound and feeling low. The sky is grey and I have eight million Internet tabs open, all containing things I have started to read and then lost interest in.

I put the radio on to cheer myself up, but, in a fit of complete appropriateness, it is playing The Smiths 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now'.

I am housebound because I have no key to get back in once I leave it, and Ben has borrowed my bike lock, so even if I wanted to go somewhere I would have to WALK or get a BUS and oh GOD that would be awful. I feel like throwing myself on the floor in a tantrum, but nobody is here to see so I would just have to get up, dust myself off and go back to sulking quietly. Except this time with more cat hair on my clothes and even less dignity.

There is nothing really the matter. It's just the 'old waking up feeling like a train has hit me' thing, my head is crowded with anxiety and paranoia. No amount of self-motivating inner pep-talks seem to have any effect, I just feel like I am floating around on a wave of my own angst.

I can hear our neighbours screaming and throwing things, and it feels like I'm listening to the inside of my own head. Something just hit the wall behind my computer as I typed that sentence, and it felt completely appropriate.

This is a stupid post, just self-indulgent wailing and gnashing of teeth. This time tomorrow I will be on a train to London, where I will no doubt be cheered by the prospect of The Big Smoke and a change of scene. Until then I will have to rely on the neighbours to express my frustrations. Perhaps I will go and slip a note through the door that says "he just called you fat".

Maybe Every Other Day

2010-05-06T11:14:00.003+01:00

Well, isn't this all going perfectly to plan? "Every day!" I yodelled, gleefully. Completely aware, of course, that it would not happen. It was the blogging equivalent of a breezy "I'll call you!" on the way out of the door.

Yesterday I worked in the café, avoiding making lattes. The highlight was the new boy telling us that he and his girlfriend have just set up a band, with him on the ukulele and her singing Disney songs. We then all sung some Disney songs for a bit until we couldn't remember any more, then we stopped. Well, they stopped. I have been singing (and acting out) Part of Their World ever since. I enjoy pretending to float around the kitchen I can find picking up random objects, singing "you want thingamibobs? I got twennie!" to the cat. He looks at me with a look that seems to say that he has quite enough thingamibobs today, and will I stop being weird just for a bit? Unfortunately he knows the answer to that one.

Last night Ben and I went to the Bridgewater Hall to see Rokia Traoré, supported by Sweet Billy Pilgrim.

Sweet Billy Pilgrim are a four piece folk rock band, and they were great. For the first half of the first song I was uncertain, not quite sure where they were going to go. As they went on, though, they built up an incredible sound, swapping instruments unpretentiously and filling the hall with harmonies. It was the sort of sound that means that you don't have to listen too closely to the lyrics, but when I did they were beautiful as well. Also the keyboard player had a very impressive beard.

Rokia Traoré, though. Wow. She's this tiny, muscular person, kind of frail and strong at the same time. She and the band walked on to applause, which faded as she stood in front of the microphone. The lights were down, and she just said an accented "thank you", then began to sing. Her voice was weird and mesmerizing, kind of fluttering and breathy. She sang in French, and when the band took over during the first song she jerked up her chin in time to their rhythm, a bit like a really musical rooster. I was captivated.

The rest of the show just kept hitting new heights. She wheeled around the stage, dancing and grinning, speaking very earnestly about Africa, paying tribute to South African singer Miriam Makeba. In her band was electric guitar, electric bass, drums, backing vocals and a guy on a wooden, stringed guitar-like instrument, which made for an interesting blend of sound. Her voice got bigger and more exciting, I completely loved it.

By the end of the gig, about half of the audience were out of their seats and dancing. The other half were sitting tensely wondering when it was going to be over so they could go and watch the rest of A Touch of Frost over a cup of chamomile tea. This, of course, is grossly unfair, although I am feeling mean about it due to the woman next to me who, from her seated position, sneered at my dancing for about ten minutes. It was disconcerting. I'm glad we danced, though, because really it wasn't the sort of music to sit sedately to. (A few years ago we went to see The Buena Vista Social Club there [um, OMG] and a similar tentative dancing thing happened at the end. There are some gigs that just should be danced at.)

I enjoyed the enthusiastic couple at the front, though, who I bet have a flyer taped to their fridge that says "Spice Things Up With Salsa Lessons!".

Rokia and her backing vocalist danced at the end of the gig, and they were incredible. The energy filled the hall, which is impressive, as it's bloody massive.

Right, enough. I have to go and VOTE! and then get on a train to Leeds to lead a choir rehearsal, then come back for a rift cuts writers meeting/workshop.

VOTE! first, though. I have to cast my vote into the winds of it's all the same and cycle off knowing that by tomorrow we'll all probably be made to feel bit blue.

My Hands Fell Off And Then I Died, Sorry

2010-05-04T21:59:00.002+01:00

Every time I think about writing a blog post I start to feel all nervous and guilty. Like my blog is a friend who has been calling and sending gently enquiring texts, and who I for some reason have been completely ignoring. All I really want to do is forget the fact that I have been off-radar for a bit and launch into a chat over a glass of wine, but I feel weird about the whole thing and so am just leaving it to become more and more awkward.

Excellently, because this is my blog and nobody really cares, I can just pretend I haven't be mysteriously absent and leap headlong about something I overheard on a bus today or an amusing rabbit anecdote.

Less excellently, I have neither been on a bus today nor encountered any rabbits.

It was my birthday the other week! Ben took me to Wales, where we stayed in a cottage and went pony trekking. My pony was called Peggy and seemed, if I am honest, a bit depressed. I tried to cheer her up by suggesting she come back with me to Manchester and be my best friend, but she just sort of shrugged and muttered something about not liking the accent, so I left it.

Our ponies trekked us along the beach, sinking hooves into the sand. I tried not to think about the scene from The Never Ending Story where Artax sinks into The Swamp of Sadness. (I just looked it up on youtube for reference, and couldn't even watch the whole scene. It is unbearable. I got to "Artax! You're sinking! C'mon! Turn around! You have to! Now!" and then had to turn it off. I would have then had to watched the bit with the flying dog to cheer myself up, and I really don't have time for that sort of thing. I am very busy.)

The beach was beautiful, though, helped by the glorious weather. Later on in the afternoon we saddled up our bikes and heaved ourselves over the hill to the next village. We found a quaint-looking pub amidst the slate-grey cottages, so we locked up and went in for a pint. Inside, the locals were playing dance music and getting loudly drunk. We sat at a picnic table on the patio, trying to ignore them and retain our urban notion of the rural idyll.

It was a perfect weekend, and I felt like I needed it. Plenty has been 'going on' recently, and it's been draining at times. I have felt quite overwhelmed, and it was wonderful to be able to relax and dream, and not have to make any effort. Things, family things mainly, have been happening.

It's all quite topsy turvy. No nine-to-five daily graft here! Flitting and rushing about on trains, at meetings and in workshops. Or holed up at my desk writing. Or staring out of windows feeling guilty about not writing. Or working in the café making frankly-still-not-up-to-scratch lattes. Or cello practice. Or staring out of windows feeling guilty about not doing my cello practice. Or worrying about money or cleaning the house or listening to/reading stuff "for inspiration". Or looking for music work. Or staring out of windows feeling guilty about not looking for music work.

Yeah. Staring out of windows has always been quite a key part of my existence, and I suspect that, as long as there is a window nearby, I will always find it for a bit of a stare.

I am going to finish this rambling and dull post, and make a resolution to post every day for a week.

There! I will start tomorrow.

I'd better go and look for some amusing rabbits.

Dough!

2010-04-14T21:26:00.007+01:00

Yesterday Ben went off to a meeting, after spending an hour making some dough. By making, I of course mean constructing and then beating the crap out of, as is the preferred technique for the domestic god/ess. After the ritual flogging, he carefully laid its beleaguered body in a tin, shrouded it in a tea towel, and left it in the grill part of the oven, warmed from underneath by the main part.

(Or something. I was clearly too busy anthropomorphizing to pay attention to the actual procedure.)

Then he left me some basic instructions. I started to write them down, but stopped after a while, thinking to myself that of course I could remember basic instructions. I am not a child, I thought. Or a fool.

Confident that his basic instructions had been heard, Ben kissed me goodbye and sailed off into the bright afternoon, bike wheels spinning off over the cobble stone alley. Overcome with enthusiasm, I leaned out of the window and waved, blowing kisses at his retreating, be-hatted form.

Then I settled happily back down to carry on writing my song, picking up my blue guitar from where it was reclining on the bed next to my cello.

I had been recording for most of the day, pausing only to whoosh out to my friend's house for coffeegossip. I was into the music, into the song I was writing. Time ebbed. Hey, I thought to myself after a while, I'm on a roll.

An alarm bell went off in the deep recesses of my brain. Roll!

The bread!

Panicked, I hared down the stairs, terrifying the cat (who had been keeping a safe distance from the singing-y playing-y horror of the bedroom). I threw open the grill door. Plucking the bread from where it was cowering, I shoved it mercilessly into the fiery belly of the hot oven.

Blithely I trotted back upstairs.

I carried on working as the house became infused with the smell of baking bread, like the walls themselves were rising.

On and on, I played and sang. Recorded and re-recorded, gazed out of the window and scratched, scraped, squawked and plucked. Time trickled by and any instructions, basic or otherwise, sank deeper into the quicksand of my mind.

Days passed. (Probably.)

I wandered downstairs a while later, thought for a bit, then texted Ben.

"How long do I leave then bread in? X"

Beep beep.

"Check it after half an hour. X"

I felt a basic instruction bob to the surface.

Looked at my watch. Fifty minutes had gone by.

I flung open the oven, and smoke billowed out over my horrified face.

The cat sniggered.

I grabbed the oven gloves and pulled out the poor, deceased doughnomore. It was not the bread that was causing the billowing smoke plumes. It was, in fact, the tea towel that I had neglected to remove from atop the bread before committing it to its 240 degree hell.

I set it on the rack (it shuddered at the prospect of more torture) and peeled the black rag from its crispy skin.

Some of the rag remained.

Later, when Ben arrived, he was carefully kind. We might, he suggested, have started a new trend! Fluffy bread! It's edible, he insisted, we can just cut the top off! It's fine, he lied, I think it's quite sweet.

I went to lie face down for a while, while the cat guffawed into his non-fluffy biscuits. Next time, I suspect, the basic instructions will be given to him.

We had cereal this morning.

Art Smells Like Flan

2010-03-16T18:45:00.003Z

I decided to take myself along to the Whitworth Art Gallery today. It had been the first day of breatheinbreatheout no stress for a while.

I wandered around for a while, very aware of the fact that it was shutting in twenty minutes. I had loads of time, really, but I was irked by the feeling that some be-polo-shirted employee could, at any moment, tap me on the shoulder and tell me to leave. This, of course, would have been fine, I would have left. I do not have a history of gallery tantrums. It is unlikely that I would have started screaming and windmilling, demanding to be allowed to finish perusing the series of tree-themed paintings. Still, when I came to realize that I was spending more time thinking about that than appreciating the art, I left.

(Also I find the Whitworth gallery always smells overpoweringly of school canteen flan.)

I sat outside on a picnic bench next to my bike (Glinda). I tried to feel arty, to channel some inspiration from the tree paintings I had just seen, but before long realized I was sitting next to the open window of the ladies toilet, through which I could hear someone scrubbing the floors and complaining. Also just in front of me was parked a slightly grubby Ford Focus. It was just starting to turn from a eye-splittingly bright spring day to a nose-searingly chilly spring evening. I gave up and went home.

This morning I played my cello for an hour. Last Friday I was part of a performance by Manchester collective rift cuts, at the Yard Theatre in Hulme. There was brilliant poetry and a warm audience. (My favourite line of the show came from Vanessa Fay "when we laugh/it's like the sun smacking the sky/with diamond knuckles")* I played my cello while people were coming in, and then played and sang one of my songs in the middle. It was cool. I mean, cool, like actually really cool (for me). It sort of just clicked, that playing and singing thing. I felt liberated and comfortable. Today I practiced, and sang. Belted open strings and matched it with a wide, open voice. Tried scribbling about up the top of the range and plucking strings, and bowing tricky, happy rhythms. Matching and mismatching voice and strings. It was fun. When Ben gets back after he has been in Devon for two whole weeks** we will no doubt try beatboxing (him) and looping stuff up and generally being very high tech and excellent (also him).

Right. I only really started this blog post so I could have something to do to get me to a time I wouldn't feel guilty about opening some wine, and it's now ten past seven! In fact I have just heard Ben sneak out of the study and clink something, so I suspect he might have had precisely the same idea. I must investigate at once.

*This may not be accurate, but anyway it was brilliant, whatever it actually was.
**Two whole weeks! This is a problem because since living with him I have entirely forgotten how to cook and therefore may well starve to death.

Bounce

2010-03-08T12:53:00.005Z

I'd hosted a night at the Thirsty Scholar, which had gone well. Sophie, Simon and I had decided to go and hunt down another beer at a bar nearby: Revolution. On the way in the three towering bouncers stopped Simon.

"Sorry mate, you can't come in."

"What? Why not?"

"You're wearing jeans, mate. And trainers."

Sophie and I pointed out that so, in fact, were we.

The three headed bouncer grunted.

"You're pissed, then."

He wasn't. Two pints, at most. We relayed this, reasonably.

Eventually they conceded, and, glowering as one, stepped back to let us through their bald bouncer barrier. One issued a meaty warning.

"No trouble, though. I mean it."

(It was Derby day. They were ready and primed for trouble. I could practically hear them panting for it.)

We sat down and had a drink in the noisy bar, crammed on to a corner of a table that was already heaving under the strain of six or seven revellers. After a while I wanted to make a phone call, so I headed for the door.

One of the meaty towers stood, arms folded, in my way.

"Where are you going?"

"I need to make a phone call. It's too noisy in there."

He raised a pale eyebrow and shifted an enormous tank of a boot.

"Alright. Two minutes."

I looked around, confused. The bar wasn't closing for another hour.

"Why?"

He winked, lascivious and nasty.

"Because I say so, love."

I grimaced slightly and walked outside.

After about a minute he caught my eye. Winking slowly again, he raised a thick wrist and tapped it.

Ignoring him, I finished my call, then walked towards the door.

"With those boots" I began, unsure of the wisdom of the sentence I had just started, "you should be in the SS."

"The SAS?" A smile began to amble its way across his face.

"No. The SS. As in the Nazis."

To my surprise, he barked a laugh.

"Well, I am half-German!"

I shook my head and the smile, clearly exhausted by the effort, gave up and died.

"Go back inside, you've had your two minutes."

I looked at him.

"By any chance, is this your way of flirting with me?"

He tilted his head.

"Would you mind if it was?"

I laughed.

"Yeah, I would."

A while later, I headed up to the bar. On the way I found myself staring at the polyester chest of the same bouncer.

He was pointing at my left breast.

"Is that your name, love?"

I followed his watery gaze and saw that I still had a name badge on from a workshop I had attended earlier that day.

Before I had a chance to reply he asked again.

"Is that your name?"

This time, though, he extended his sausage-like finger and poked my breast.

"Is it?"

I took a step back.

"Please don't poke me." Calmly, logically. Please don't push your hammy digit into my breasts, you mouth-breathing cretin. I didn't say that. I just asked him not to poke me, and went and sat down.

I relayed this to Sophie and Simon.

Simon stood up and walked over to the offending moron.

"Did you just poke my friend in the breast?"

(Trouble. Derby day. He shouldn't have said anything.)

"No."

"Well, she said you did."

(Simon is even smaller than I am.)

Suddenly, all three bouncers were there, looming over him like meaty monoliths.

"That's it" we heard, and it was.

They piled on top of him like bomber-jacket clad synchronized swimmers on steroids, and Sophie and I stood up.

They wrestled him to the door, and as the were throwing him, all three together, to the street, I ran over and shouted. "Hey! What are you doing?"
(It was a rhetorical question.)

SHOVE. An slab of a hand slammed into me and sent me clattering onto the street. I stood up, enraged.

"You can't do that! I'm half your..."

SHOVE. Spinning around to another SHOVE.

Soon, the three of us were standing around the corner, Simon's chin trickling with blood. Sophie shaking her head wearily. She'd seen it too many times, you don't risk it. They're all like that.

Furious, I went home, and seethed at the injustice for days.

***************

Saturday night. At Sound Control, where the beer is horrible and the sound quality awful. Gift of Gab, who was performing, was apparently very good if you were standing right at the front of the stage, but from our vantage point half way back, no words could be heard or beats distinguished from one another.

Disappointed, we were finishing our beers at the end of the night. One bolshy bouncer was striding about like a malevolent rhino, shouting orders and instructions at those punters who were daring to stand in slightly the wrong place or just be smaller than him. Projecting his voice like the most expensively-trained drama student, he was clearly having a marvellous time.

He chased someone outside, someone who had been, until that moment, chatting with me and Ben. It was comical, the way the bouncer heaved himself after this guy, who had clearly bruised his fragile little ego in some way. Ben and I automatically moved nearer the front of the club to see what was happening, and slightly giggling at the Carry On Bouncing-esque scene.

The bouncer strode back in, and clocked the two of us and decided to have another bit of a shout.

"And you two can fuck off as well."

Plucking my two-thirds drunk bottle of beer from my surprised hand, he picked me up by my upper arm and threw me forcibly down the three concrete steps at the front of the club. SHOVE. Behind me tumbled Ben, crashing into me from the force of the throw. We picked ourselves up and turned to where the bouncer was still swearing at us.

I took Ben's arm and we made our way down the crowded street, where people had begun to stare. Furious, again, at the bitter injustice of being SHOVED by someone twice my size, to whom I have done nothing.

Today is International Women's Day. I have no experience of living in a regime of violence and aggression. I don't know what it means to be so driven to desperation by oppression and pain that I have to set myself on fire to escape. I don't know how it could possibly feel to have no options, no freedom, no voice. These are only times I have ever slightly tasted the bitterness of testosterone-induced injustice.

I must recall that feeling, and multiply it by a bigger number than I can ever know, and then be grateful that I will never be able to comprehend the pain suffered daily by women all across the world.

It is not comparable, but it made me feel impotent and wronged.

I am going to demonstrate today, and show support for women across the world for whom those feelings are constant, and injustice a daily reality.

SHOVE.

Stream of Thursdayness

2010-03-04T20:01:00.004Z

The train slides over the Pennines. I scrutinize the glimpses of pink sky that brushing the stillsnowy hills. Trees spike their stillbare talons jaggedly into the smokey, cupcake sky. A reminder that, despite the sun glory of the last few days, spring has yet to settle in.

I am prodding a plastic fork at a too-small pot of pasta, purchased on a hungry whim at Leeds station. I have already devoured a tiny pot of Greek salad. I glance guiltily at a piece of cucumber nestling underneath the polyester-clad thigh of the woman next to me. I flicked it there moments before in an attempt to snag a tomato. It has gone as yet unnoticed by the vacant-looking owner of the thigh, caught up as she is in her own commuter dreams. I toy with the idea of flagging up the tiny green high-diver, but decide against it and picture her puzzling over the small olive oil stain later on.

This morning I wheeled gleefully up to Manchester Piccadilly station, before locking Glinda up safely alongside the other faithful steeds in the bike locky uppy area. Swinging my helmet like a badge of honour I wandered into the station to find I was twenty minutes early for my train (I mentally patted myself on the back for speedy cycling). Ticket and grotesquely over-priced soya latte bought, I found a bench and waited on it. To amuse myself I decided to pick a person and watch only them. Luckily for me I picked a very pretty girl, blonde hair piled precariously on her head, meticulously designed to look completely non-meticulous. Lips pursed and eyebrows arched, she wandered delicately through the station, pretending to be elegantly unaware of the numerous lascivious gazes of the suited commuters. Oversized bag dangling from undersized arm, she floated through the crowd, pausing only to throw a disdainful glance at a pigeon who had deigned to nearly cross her path. She wandered out of sight, so I picked someone else, and so on. After unfairly judging the Great British Public for a delicious fifteen minutes, my train was announced.

Still clutching my café a la pretension, I found a good seat and began to plan my choir session. Lots of warming up today, I decided. I found some songs that included the word 'sun', so that we could all sing our happiness through the roof.

The hall was full, and the children raced around. We sang for an hour, I bounced about in front of parents and kids, music in one hand and wild gestures in the other. Today I felt high, the sun streaming through the windows and spring tantalisingly close.

Afterwards, happy, I sauntered back to Leeds station. I stopped to look at some shoes I can't afford, and instead frittered away my cash on small pots of food that in no way filled me up.

The train pulls into Huddersfield. The sky is resplendent in its papal robes. (You know you're onto a good sunset when even the Huddersfield skyline looks majestic.)

I read until Manchester, when I am surprised by the station and have to tumble from the train in a panic.

Glinda awaits, and I switch on her lights and wheel joyously home, through the deserted streets of Moss Side and up to my front door. I put the kettle on and consider chocolate, still feeling the sunset on the backs of my eyes.

POOR ME

2010-02-24T10:36:00.003Z

Whine whine whine. (Not to be confused with wine wine wine, which is considerably more fun and less annoying to read about.)

I have now been ill for about a week. Not ill enough to justify lying around delicately looking wan, refusing food and being all Jane-Austen-heroine, but just ill. Crap, boring, hating-everything-but-mostly-myself ill. Coughing my internal organs out by night and wandering around freezing cold and miserable by day.

The meeting I was meant to have this morning (and cycle six miles to) has thankfully been cancelled, but I still have to go to Leeds and back and then host Thirsty Music tonight, and then lead a choir workshop tomorrow and a music workshop on Friday. WOE. Oh GOD I have so much NICE STUFF to be doing. Indeed I am to be pitied.

I feel so dramatic about it. I want to shout and demand to be wrapped in a slanket and placed in front of every episode of Charmed ever made. I want a little bell I can ring when I want the cat to bring me tea and toast and large doses of sympathy. I want it not to be bloody February, I want warmth and comfort instead of cold, hard snow-imminent crapness. It's got to the point where, when people ask "how are you?", I am actually telling them. This is not good.

I am meant to be planning stuff, and instead I am sulking, blogging and listening idly to the next door neighbours as they kill each other (a daily practice). The walls are so thin that I can hear every word, so much so that, if I wanted to, I could take sides. I don't want to, though. Partly because I am terrified of them, but mostly because both sides of the argument are completely insane. I am sometimes a bit envious, though. I've never really gone in for the shouty, screamy style of arguing, preferring instead the pursed-lipped, tense low discussion technique. I wonder if they would do a seminar.

("Hi there, yes, I'm from next door. So sorry to bother, I just wondered if I could borrow some of your rage? Just a cup of salt-of-the-earth, working-class shoutiness, I don't seem to have any in. I can exchange it for some middle-class terse, passive-aggressive, bottle-it-up-until-you-need-therapy anguish, I've got loads of that.")

My guitar is gathering dust and my valentine's roses are dead. I am sulking. The cat is asleep, oblivious to the fact that if he just got off his arse and made me some tea, he would make me eight billion times happier (approx.).

The neighbours have quietened down. Perhaps they can hear what I am typing and are going to kill me for referring to them as working-class. I WAS JOKING! Look, I put that bit in capitals! Oh, God.

Right, off to do be morose and self-pitying until I have to get on a train to Leeds. Good times.

Meet Glinda, Darlin'

2010-02-08T20:51:00.006Z

Today I got a new bike. I reserved it a few weeks ago, making the kind of decision I like to make ("That one's nice. And it's on sale? I'll take it. No, I don't need to see the others.") and finally today managed to actually go and collect it. Complete with basket, helmet, lights, wheels, brakes and those other things you're meant to have. Pedals, that's it.

She's light blue, and more elegant than I could ever hope to be. I have decided to call her Glinda, after the Good Witch of the North. If she was a human she would have blonde ringlets and shy away from swearing. She would wear pastels and gilets and never have missed work because she was hungover on a Wednesday. Her notebook would be covered with line drawings of kittens and she would say "golly" a lot. In spite of all of this, I like Glinda, and suspect that she will be a good influence.

Ben and I cycled to B&Q today. My first outing on Glinda. She went calmly and without a fuss, as if B&Q is her natural home. It isn't of course, now that I have decided she is female. I'm not saying women can't cope with B&Q, I just mean that I feel like the workers there, all men, clustered around bits of wood talking about padlocks, looked at me a bit askance as I trailed in behind Ben. I crept past the planers, singing their siren song to a few unfortunate men who stood lost in woodwork dreams. I was dwarfed in the roofing aisle, where glorious clouds of loft insulation billowed to infinity. We discussed shelving and stuff that makes damp rooms less damp, then Ben piled our spoils into his trailer and we set off home again.

Back home and Ben clomped about in our diminutive yard, affixing all three bikes to some heavy weights and chains, while I made some tea. (Finally, back from B&Q, in the kitchen messing about with jam, where I belong. What a relief! Please note: I am embroidering this blog post.)

Where we live you have to weigh things down to prevent them being nicked. (That is why I have been eating more crisps recently.) When my family was up this weekend, my Dad wandered into our kitchen, gazed out over the redbrick terraces, and began quietly to whistle the Coronation Street theme tune. I do not want Glinda to get stolen. Other people might not know she's a Good Witch, and just think of her as some kind of mode of transport. The horror! Luckily she is sleeping restfully underneath some lovely blue tarpaulin with two bodyguards. I might sneak out in the middle of the night with some faux fur and a sleeping mask.

I have been meaning, recently, to write about a word I hate. Darlin'.

It isn't principle. It's experience. It reminds me of being addressed by patronizing, put-you-in-your-place men. It's the lexical equivalent of a wink and a gentle bum squeeze. Thanks, darlin'. You're a love, you're a star, oh, that's lovely, darlin'. Just take your top off and make us a brew, be a love. Cheers, darlin'.

Not all men are Like That, very few, in fact. I'm not being sexist, most men I know wouldn't, you know. You're looking fresh you're looking so good, oh I could just. Have you washed your hair, it's looking nice. You're looking. Nice. How could I not believe blue eyes like that? Stand still, let's have a look.

(Laughter) Don't, you're scaring her!

(I'm not scared, I'm being sick in my mouth.)

Stand still. While I mentally undress and airbrush.

I'll have some salt and vinegar crisps, please, darlin'. Those ones, on the bottom shelf. Not really, just wanted to see how you bend over! S'alright, darlin', I'm only kidding. Just a joke! Don't look so. She's scared, you've scared her!

Slavering eyes and indulgent chuckles.

Sorry, darlin'. Thanks, love.

It isn't principle. It's association. Most men aren't Like That but those who are stick in my mind and my ears with their comments and their obsequious false respect.

I know why I hate that word. How can I sum all this up? Does that make sense?

Tomorrow I will take Glinda for a spin, after I have been to Birmingham and back (on the train. I am not over-estimating my cycling prowess quite that much). I am hoping that, as a good witch, she will be able to plow over any sleaze who calls me darlin'.

Mmm, nice (pannier) rack.

Lazy Sunday

2010-01-24T17:31:00.002Z

The only way I can seem to write this blog is if I scribble things in notebooks when I am on public transport, then type it up when I have time. When I worked in offices I had time to muse at length about life while avoiding doing some menial task or other, but now I have to rely on having something to write when I am at home, and it rarely happens that way.

Highstepping over the hills, I was on a train this time. A late train, the one I had planned for and then ran for, was cancelled and I made my muttery way to catch another one. It seems that I am destined to always be LATE, but this time it's not my fault and I feel I should be compensated in some way.

The clouds hung over the glowering hills with their gunmetal linings.

I was on my way to a training course in Leeds, which Opera North are paying for as part of my choir leading apprenticeship. The next day I used some of the songs I learned when I lead the Family Choir in the school, the children enthusiastically joining in while their parents slowly dropped their collective guard and began to sing out. Nasty thoughts try to elbow in as I stand in front of them. My cruel brain imitates their voices and whispers imagined thoughts in my ears. She's posh. She's crap. I wish we had someone else leading our choir. Do you think she's even done this before?

I manage to ignore them, but only just. The previous week I was even more flustered by the presence of a photographer from the Yorkshire Evening Post, crouching down to snapsnapflashsnap while I waved my hands in the air and taught three part harmonies to one hundred and twenty people.

No photographer this week, no unflattering angles to consider.

Walking back to the train station afterwards my sense of exhilaration was only slightly tempered by the sudden, unwavering conviction that everyone around me was wearing a prosthetic nose. Luckily it only lasted five minutes.

Today is Sunday, and I should have been busy. I should have done things other than lie about, having breakfast cooked for me and watching things on the computer.

I have to practice my cello. I am going to a rehearsal tomorrow, for the Uprising fundraiser at the Contact Theatre on Saturday. Eggs collective want me to play marvellous music for them. I am just planning to play weird things and hope that nobody realizes I am just a bit rusty. I am going to use words like "experimental" and "contemporary" to throw them off the scent. Who knows, I might even slip in a "post-post-modern" if I really panic. (If anyone from Eggs is reading this: consider that whole bit about me being rusty to be a lie. A pointless lie, made up for the purposes of this even more pointless weblog.)

I also have to practice my guitar playing. I am hosting another night at the Thirsty Scholar this Wednesday (to which you may consider yourself cordially invited), and have decided, like the complete moron that I now understand myself to be, to premier a song, accompanied by my guitar. Considering that I a) have not yet written the song and b) have a four-chord guitartoire*, this is rather a silly decision. Of course, I could always just not do it, but unfortunately as things stand I don't really seem to be considering that option.

*I just made up the word "guitartoire".

I should really also plan this week's choir workshop. Or get dressed. Or perhaps tidy up a bit, put away all the clothes on the bed. Although following the cat's excellent lead and just getting on top of them for a restorative nap seems an altogether more appealing option.

I think I will wander downstairs and pressure Ben into ordering a Chinese. I think a spring roll is what I need, and then I can really get started.

Missives from the Bus.

2010-01-18T21:19:00.009Z

HOME TO TOWN

It's Monday and I'm LATE. I wasn't going to be late (if I leave at ten thirty I can make it no problem) but then it got to ten fifteen and I had stuff, twenty five minutes' worth of stuff, to do. Now it's ten to eleven and I am twenty minutes away.

This is normal.

The bus rumbles its complaints along the pot-holed roads of South Manchester, collecting dispirited-looking people and students.

LATE. I try to tell myself it doesn't matter (it never has before) but I still feel anxious, my nerves tightening with every stop.

The wheels on this bus go square.

Past Whitworth Park. A gritty, misshapen lump of snow squats stubborn amid a new shock of green grass, twigs stabbed into it at odd, violent angles. One of the few remaining survivors of the recent holocaust thaw.

Past the Contact Theatre. Ben is inside, rehearsing for the show that is coming up in just a few weeks. His fleeting kiss goodbye as he flew from the house, after a flappy flurry of breakfast-eating-lunch-making-email-checking and instructions to hang up the washing. I smilescowl at the recent trauma of hanging up eighteen-billion sopping socks with only five minutes left before LATE and still having teeth to brush.

I glance down to my wrist, where my watch sits, and smugly informs me that TICK I am now TOCK officially LATE.

BEEP. My phone. It's Teemu, to tell me that I can go to his flat for my guitar lesson anytime from five.

Past the BBC. I glower enviously at the people walking about gaily, free from the burden of ever-increasing LATE. The bus rounds the corner onto Portland Street. I text work. A tiny white lie.

The boy in front of me finishes rolling his cigarette.

11.01 says the Portland Tower clock.

I shift in my tights-under-skinny-jeans and lick my lips.

The rain begins to polka dot the window and I stand up.

TOWN TO HOME

Red lights from the cars in front bleed through the drizzlesteam glass. Tinny R&B squawks from the back seat where three teenage girls in headscarves giggle and shriek. Another teenage girl sits across from me speaking quietly and seriously into her mobile, blue-trainered feet crossed neatly. I steal a glance at her as she sighs wearily and gestures, a discreet display of adult frustration.

Traffic lights green.

We overtake a cyclist, and another.

I am thirsty and my arms ache. I was late for work, flustering into the tiny kitchen, coat half-off. Becky laughed. The boss wasn't there. I slowed down, regretting my tiny white lie. All day I alternately bounced and sloped about, making coffee, sandwiches and customer conversation about weather and weekends. Making lists and writing words on tiny scraps of paper.

The bus judders, sending my pen screeching across the page.

At four thirty I retrieved my guitar from where I had hidden it in the store cupboard. I walked to Timpsons, then to Boots. I drifted around the make up counters, Estée Lauder, Chanel, Dior, drawing red stripes on the backs of my hands. Hotly aware of the stares of the make-up counter girls, blinking slowly at me, eyelids weighed down with more mascara than most people would wear in a year. At the Lancome counter one approached. I am looking for some red lipstick, I explained. She nodded sagely and pulled one from the rack. I shook my head. "Too orange." I motioned to my left hand, where that particular shade nestled in stripe form. She scrunched her face, and I watched for any falling chunks of orange foundation.

"This one's lovely" she begins again, brightly. "Loads of people are loving..."

I interrupted her pitch. "I think that's too dark."

Then felt a bit guilty. "Thanks, though."

She sniffed, blinked, and turned to another customer without another word.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for some mascara."

"Oh, did you want mascara that really gives your lashes amazing volume?"

"Yes!"

"Well, this one's perfect..."

No, I thought, spitefully. She wants mascara to make her lashes hang flaccidly from her face like narcoleptic spiders.

(I was just jealous. I always want salespeople to like me.)

I bought a lipstick, eventually, from Benefit, where the girl did a passable job of pretending that in another life we might have been friends.

I trudged to Teemu's flat, where he let me in with a flourish. He sat regally in his arm chair while I show him my new guitar. "It's blue!" I exclaimed, pointlessly. He inspected it and nodded. Very nice. (He knew I was getting it, Ben having let him in on the secret before Christmas.) I played him the song I have been practicing, messing it up because my hands were cold and I really wanted to get it right.

We had our lesson, he gave me a chord sequence he has already written a song with, so I can write one and we can compare. He talked about Bob Dylan, we discussed films we've seen and the choir concert from before Christmas.

After a while he walked me through town, where I abandoned him to run for the bus, hooking my thumbs around the straps on my guitar case to stop it leaping about. Jumping onto the bus, I was disappointed that the driver offered no word of congratulation for my impressive sprint. I climbed the stairs and sat.

The bus pulls around the corner.

I should stop writing now. I hope Ben is home, and I hope there is some wine.

Right Now...

2009-12-07T22:40:00.003Z

I can't stop eating chocolate HobNobs. I know how I react to chocolate HobNobs, that they are my nutritional kryptonite and I am Not To Be Trusted in the same room as them. Yet even armed with this certain knowledge, I bought some from the shop only moments ago. The man behind the counter selfishly sold them to me, in spite of the fact that I had obviously meant to pick up a small packet of walnuts and an improving broadsheet.

I am Home Alone. The cat is making himself scarce, presumably for fear of being taken for a HobNob and swallowed whole. Ben is down South. Spye (housemate) was around, but now isn't. I am pleased, as nobody should have to witness this biscuit frenzy. He was downstairs smoking and talking about washing up, but now he is quiet. No washing up has been undertaken.

It's quiet. I have to work early tomorrow, then rehearse, so an early night is an excellent thing to have. Really, though, I want to stay up late, eating biscuits and watching bad horror films. This would lead to a night of clutching wakefully at the duvet and staring tensely into the dark, while the cat waited for the perfect moment to give me a heart attack by jumping softly onto the bed.

I will eat one more HobNob, then go to sleep. The sugar will send me right off.

Good night.

OPEN MIC, MANCHESTER! (Sorry for shouting)

2009-11-23T18:26:00.004Z

Wah, I couldn't go to the party! Poor me. Sob, whinge, etc.

(Oh, grow up you over-sized infant.)

Please excuse the interminable whining of my last post, I was feeling Glum About Life, a life that contained nothing but shelter, food, love, clothing, art and a large packet of cheese and onion crisps. Oh, woe! How stricken I must have been, as you can imagine.

Today I was in Leeds again, which is similar in damp Northern cheer to Manchester. Although in Leeds everyone calls everyone else 'love', even grown men say it to other grown men. (Or so I have heard.) In Manchester people do say "thanks love", or "stop touching me or I'll bite ya love"*, but it is generally not something that straight, burly chaps say to one another at the pie shop/strip club/sports place.

*Interestingly, this was the first thing I heard anyone say after I left the house this morning. (It was not directed at me.)

Does anyone from Manchester read this? If so, would you like to come to a gig/open mic night this Wednesday, at the Thirsty Scholar? Unfortunately, this is the same night that some excellent poets are putting on their marvellous, poetry-orientated night called Inn Verse, so mine will be more musicky. I don't want to snaffle any of their potential performers. I would like just anyone to come and do whatever it is they enjoy doing on stage. Music, of course, is completely welcome, as is poetry, but I am also open to any other form of expression. Comedy, magic tricks, circus skills? Yes, yes and yes (provided nothing gets set on fire or cut in half). (I mean, you can set the room on fire, but the Health and Safety people really do prefer that you do it in a metaphorical way.)

What will I be doing? I hear you ask (although I heard it very faintly so it's possible I imagined it).

Well I will certainly be telling this joke:

Q. What do you call a racist, bigoted wizard?
A. Nick Griffindor.

When I told this to Ben he paused for a bit after I asked him the 'Q' bit, then said "um, Gandalf Hitler?", which is an excellent answer but loses points for being slightly less topical.

OPEN MIC, MANCHESTER, 25th NOVEMBER!

I am trying to get some Google hits.

OPEN MIC!

I don't think it helps to write it in capitals.

MANCHESTER!

But you never know.

WEDNESDAY 25TH NOVEMBER!

Well, I'm sure there are some people that know, but I don't.

THE THIRSTY SCHOLAR!

I just like feeling like I'm calling out to the Internet.

So, if you're around, come along. If it's more poetry you want, then head to Inn Verse. My night will incorporate more poetry again in 2010.

I hope to see you there. Oh, and if you're here through Google then HI! WELCOME!

Gutted

2009-11-22T20:38:00.003Z

I wanted to go to the party. I was going to go, all ready and excited. I would think about it and be so excited to meet so many people whose writing I have followed and admired, and then. Oh. I couldn't. I couldn't scrape together enough shiny money, and am finding it difficult to scrape together any energy for anything at the moment. Still, though. I wanted to go. If I could be arsed to stamp my tired feet I would.

Never mind. There will probably be another one, and people are worse off than me, and life could be so much wor...

Oh, I can't.

*Tries to stamp foot, but stops for a sit down halfway through, and doesn't get back up*

Saturday Night. In.

2009-11-14T19:03:00.007Z

The radio is on and Ben is cooking. Apron on, wine poured. My feet ache from a busy day rushing about in the café, but as I sit and sip my wine and flick through the Internet I begin to feel better. In the next house along doors slam and fury slices through the thin walls. This no longer makes us glance up. The cat is sitting on the hairdryer, keeping his enemies close.

My week has been hard work, but heady. I hosted a music and poetry night on Wednesday, which went brilliantly in spite of the fact that I spent the whole night on stage sporting some dubious knitwear, my "comfy" jeans and no make up.

(This was not The Plan. The Plan consisted of Ben nipping home after a workshop we'd been at, and picking up some nice clothes and make up so I could transform before the night started. Unfortunately, we neglected to define the term "nipping", and he arrived well after I had to introduce the first act. By the time he got there, and I could have changed I couldn't be bothered any more. I only care now because there are some pictures floating around of me, microphone in hand, looking like a shiny-faced mongrel in a jumper made of sticks. Bloody Facebook. It's alright, though. I am over it now.)

(Although clearly not "over it" enough to prevent me declaring it to the Internet in a whiny, self-pitying manner.)

There was lots of music and poetry, plenty of drinking and general carousing, and on the whole it was declared a success. There was a dodgy moment when I told a few of my jokes, and was heckled into telling the most controversial joke I know (and love), but at least I now know what it's like to be on the receiving end of a Mass Sharp Intake of Breath. In spite of that momentary lapse of judgement and what will henceforth be known as That Fucking Knitwear, I enjoyed it immensely.

On Friday I had to get an early train for the culmination of a project I have been doing with Opera North, in a primary school in an estate in Leeds. Along with a more experienced vocal practitioner, I have been going into this school for the past ten weeks and doing singing workshops with the whole school, divided into year groups. Yesterday we invited the parents in and the school performed the songs they've been learning, and it was incredible. Four years ago this school was one of the most challenged in the UK, and now, due in large part to the amount of music they have been doing over those years, it has been transformed. Coming in at the beginning of the term, I was struck by how enthusiastic and respectful the kids were, to us and to each other. When one of their classmates got up to sing, they listened and clapped, with none of the sniggering I have seen in other schools. Of course this is due to so much more than the work we did in the last few months, but the teachers unequivocally said that it has been the introduction of music in every aspect of school life that has transformed them. The challenge next term is to set up a choir for the kids and their parents, as well as any other members of the community who want to come along. There thirty-seven different languages spoken in the school, so I hope to be introduced to lots of different music from all around the world. Every time I think about it I feel so excited, and then my brain switched me on to ohmygodterrified and I am forced to go and think about ponies for a bit until I calm down.

(I will now stop writing like I am doing a covering letter for a job application.) (I probably wouldn't put that bit about the ponies.)

The last few months have been great in some ways, and incredibly tough in others. Ben won the BBC National Poetry Slam (you can see why here or here) (when he watched the second one, Ben just shook his head and said "I wish I hadn't worn shorts"). The next day, suddenly, his father passed away. We were there, having rushed down South to the hospital as soon as we heard from Ben's Mum that his Dad was intensive care. It was, and is still, very, very hard for Ben, his Mum and his sister, who flew over from Australia a day later. We, including Laura's boyfriend Rob, spent a few weeks in Hertfordshire. Then they went home, and we came home, and life trickled by. Of course it doesn't stop there. People who have gone through such a thing will know this. I haven't experienced it, so I can only watch and do that thing we are all told to do in times like these: Be There For Him. Strange, though, how the five of us glued together during those weeks. It was extremely painful, I know, for everyone when Laura and Rob had to board a plane and go back to Australia. It was painful for Ben and his Mum when he had to come back to Manchester. So much pain, but so much love and connection that came from it.

I am just writing what comes into my head at the moment, trying to find a way to get Back Into Blogging. I want to write more, but somehow I never have time, and when I do I don't know what to write.

So here it goes with the honest drivel that I used to scrawl. This is a weird, all-over-the-place post, but it will have to do.

I am now going to go downstairs, re-fill my glass and loiter around Ben as he creates deliciousness in the kitchen.

Is That You?

2009-11-06T18:07:00.002Z

Oh? Hi!

Hey! Hiya! Hello.

How's life? Alright?

Me? Yeah, yeah. Fine. Good. Good!

You? You alright? Haven't seen you in, no. Yeah, ages. God.

I've just been busy, you know? Still, probably my fault.

Um, still in Manchester. No, not gone on X-Factor yet, no, ha ha, um, LOL.

Oh God. This format is not sustainable but, honestly, I have no idea how on earth to write a Returning To Blogging post without cavorting recklessly into some classic blogging trap or other (e.g. wondering rather desperately whether Anyone Is Out There? and if so whether and how much they've missed me). I would quite like to neatly summarize my life as it has been in the last few months but am incapable of doing anything neatly, as demonstrated by my fringe after I whimsically attacked it with the kitchen scissors some weeks back. (Ironically, that is a pretty neat example.)

I suppose I can say the following things:

1. Manchester. I am still living in it. It is still raining on me. As it turns out, fairly excellently: Rain + Fringe = Much Shitter Fringe.

2. Music. I am still doing it, singing and writing and the like. I like to think the fringe adds a institution-ish air to my latest efforts. This is an delusion I am fighting to maintain.

3. Men. I am still living with Ben, although I have had to insist that he wears a blindfold until the fringe grows out. I do not consider this to be unreasonable.

4. Money. I work in a café and do singing workshops in schools. Both are quite fun. I am a better workshop leader than I am a barista, but maybe I will combine the two and make la-la-lattes or cappuccin-ooooohs. (The fringe does not really come into this one much.)

I want to start blogging again but I don't know how. I'm pretty sure that the best way is not to blurt out a few poorly-chosen, unfunny sentences that barely make any sense, but this is the route I have decided upon and I am sticking with it.

More soon, for sure.

This Week, I Have Been:

2009-06-05T17:05:00.003+01:00

A - Applying. Suncream. Furiously. The other day I went to the park to sunbathe, but slathered my skin in so much factor thirty that I think I came back whiter than I was when I left. Somehow it actually soaked in so that even with my freckles I look like I have just been spattered with white paint.

B - Basking. In the knowledge that in a few months I won't have to worry too much about money for a little while. I am to be a music practitioner in a primary school for the rest of term, which means that every Monday I get the bus to Burnley to spend the day working with a drama practitioner, two teachers and lots of small, eager people (children, not dwarfs).

C - Calculating. What I will be able to buy! Then quickly reminding myself that I will only cover some rent for a few months, but then going back to typing How Much Do Glittery Ponies Cost? into Google.

D - Drinking. Beers in the sun. Wine with dinner. Endless coffee at work. Peppermint tea with my mate Jess in a shisha café round the corner. Earl Grey tea (no milk). Dark rum and ginger. Gin and tonic. Pint after pint of water.

E - Eating. I made spicy bean burgers last night. This was A Treat for Ben, because usually he is in charge of cooking. I am usually on washing-up duty, which is, as everyone knows, a really shit duty.

F - Furrowing. My brow. I am quite often confused.

G - Giggling. On the megabus a few weeks ago I happened to overhear (read: was eavesdropping intently) a conversation between the coach driver and a few of his colleagues who had joined us at Watford Gap to come the rest of the way to London. Their conversation was a delicious insight into the world of the long distance coach driver. Example 1:

Coach Driver 1: National Express? Nah mate. They don't have a clue.

Coach Driver 2: Yeah. They don't have a clue. I was following a National Express coach round Buckingham Palace the other day. He didn't have a clue.

Coach Driver 1: (chuckles, and nods knowingly) Yeah. They don't have a clue.

Can anyone spot the lesson learned here?

Example 2:

Coach Driver 2: What you have right here is fifteen metres of heavy metal underneath you.

Coach Driver 3: Yeah. We are heavy metal.

Coach Driver 2: (sagely) The ultimate.

Really?

Coach driver 2 is also the only person I have ever encountered who has used the word "phwoar" without even a trace of irony.

H - Hurting. I walk everywhere. EVERYWHERE. (Alright, apart from when I got the coach down to London.) My back does not like this. It rebels.

I - Irritating. To walk along with, because of the above. It means that I have developed what I have termed Pain Tourettes, which involves yelping with pain at random, probably mid-sentence, and then carrying on as if nothing has happened. This is, I have been informed, rather disconcerting.

J - Joking. I have not, however, discovered any new jokes in quite a while. Anyone?

K - Knickerbocker Glorying. We make them at the café where I work. They look amazing, but too much of a hassle to eat. Is this weird? Am I weird? Validate me?

L - Léonie-ing. I have been correcting people on the pronunciation of my name nearly every day. It is a problem which has jabbed me in the ribs on a regular basis for my whole life, but I failed to anticipate how much of an arse it would be on moving to a new city. I hate correcting people, it makes me feel like a twat, but I feel more of a twat when I meekly answer to Lee-OH-nie. Just call me Laney, I say. They nod, sure, and promptly forget. I feel guilty for adding to the no doubt terrible pressures of their everyday existence by expecting to be called by my correct name, so slink off into a corner and feel shit. They brightly beckon me over, sing-songing "Lee-OH-nie" at the top of their voices, at which point everyone else who might be on the brink of pronouncing it right quickly assumes they were wrong and joins in. "Lee-OH-nie". Oh God.

M - Murderous. See above.

N - Narcissistic. "Waah, nobody will pronounce words the way I WANT THEM TO. I am going to have a tantrum on my blog."

O - Oniony. A bit. It is tricky, because after finishing my shift at work I am allowed to make myself a delicious sandwich from the sandwich ingredients cabinet, and this usually leads to me lurching off with a bizarre concoction involving most of the options, sprinkled lavishly with red onion. Probably nobody else would touch it, declaring it "disgusting", maybe, or "an affront to sandwiches everywhere." I can't help it, though. I feel like a child making a sandwichy potion. Yum.

P - Percussive. Or at least I will be. One of the activities I plan to do as music practitioner is Musical Instrument Making. Pringles tubes with lentils, anyone? Ice cream tubs and foil?

Q - Quetzalcoatlus. Well, I'm not, but I wish I was, because isn't that a brilliant word? Although Quetzalcoatlus might be even more difficult to explain over the phone to complaints departments than Léonie.

R - Rained on. Well, this is Manchester. When I was coming back from work just now I passed a woman and a little boy cheerily waving at me from inside a phone box. Given that it has not yet stopped raining (an hour later), I am beginning to wonder whether perhaps I should take them a snack.

S - Singy. Well, yes. Much singing is taking place. Hurray!

T - Truthfully? A bit bored of this alphabet thing now.

U - Up Yours. Not you, no. Unless you are all the people I hated or felt belittled by when I lived in London and worked in shitty offices. Up yours if you are that short, arrogant, moron of a woman who fired me, or that loser recruitment consultant who make me feel like shit. Or many others whom I allowed under my skin, who thought that their way of living is the only valid one. You're wrong, dickheads.

V - Violent. I am beginning to worry. See above. Also I just threw the cat on the bed with a bit more enthusiasm than I had intended, and now he is looking at me, hurt, confused and a little bit cat-like.

W - Waiting. For Ben to finish his rehearsal and call me, so I know what time we're going out later.

X - X-tremely. Tempted to move the letters on the Scrabble board he has carefully laid out. This would be naughty, as it is not just any game of Scrabble, oh no. It is For A Show about gangster Scrabble. I would be in trouble if I moved the letters, and assigned to washing up duty for the rest of my life. Much like Cinderella, except without the helpful fauna (the cat is not looking very keen) and nobility and good that will out in the end.

Y - Yeah. I just moved a letter.

Z - Zzz. If I pretend to have been asleep he will assume it was the cat.

No Pors Here

2009-05-19T13:19:00.002+01:00

I am in an Internet café and the keys are sticky. There is a sign above by head that reads:

"ANY CUSTOMER FOUND VIEWING ANY FORM OF POROGRAPHY WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE"

It is duly signed:

"TE MANAGEMENT"

I voluntarily removed myself from Ben's house today, as he is busy applying for jobs and things, and so does not need me hanging around putting the cat on his head. All three of us tire of that quite quickly. We also tire quickly of me diving onto the computer as soon as he so much as lifts his hands from the keyboard. So I have left him in peace. Although I strongly suspect that as soon as I shut the front door he was frantically searching for some illicit porographs.

I like Internet cafés. I find the proximity of strangers makes it easier for me to blog, and write in general. Perhaps because, over the years, most of my blogging has taken place whilst avoiding work in busy offices. This is better, though, because I don't have to constant threat of senior members of staff asking awkward questions that force me to lie badly about a report that is "nearly done" or fabricate some kind of "problem with the photocopier".

Guerrilla busking was cool. I found it very nerve-wracking, what with all the daylight and in-the-middle-of-the-street-ness, but I'm so glad we did it. We were without a loop pedal in the end, but it didn't seem to matter. It was a bizarre feeling, singing to people in anoraks, leaning against bicycles or pointing cameras through the light drizzle. Some people stopped and put money in the hat, others just looked away quickly, as if somehow making a spectacle of oneself in the street might be catching. I loved the whole atmosphere of it, though. It felt so naughty. Although later on I was told that at no point did anyone try to stop any of the acts. It might have been more fun if we'd had the chance to stand up to some angry policemen, but that, I have been assured, was not the point of the day. There was some music played and money raised for an excellent cause.

The following day (Saturday) I went to work. To get to the café I walk through Piccadilly Gardens, and there I saw something that made me feel quite shouty. A big P.A. system, a huge red banner, and about thirty people wearing red t-shirts. Emblazoned across the t-shirts and the banner were the words "JESUS SAVES! (Manchester)." People were whooping their applause as one man finished speaking into the microphone by saying "If Jesus wasn't alive, I wouldn't be either!" He passed the mic on to someone else and he began in a similar vein. "I love Jesus! Who here loves Jesus?" More applause, and a bit of hugging.

Shoppers were crowding around, clutching bulging Primark bags and looking baffled. Probably about one hundred people had gathered so see what all the fuss was about.

Now, Piccadilly Gardens can't be an easy place to set up a camp like that without council permission. There is no chance that this demonstration, the message booming and echoing around the busiest part of Manchester on the busiest day of the week, was not sanctioned. Somebody looked at this proposal and thought it would be appropriate for a Saturday afternoon in one of the UK's most ethnically and religiously diverse cities, to allow people to spout their particular brand of propaganda into microphones turned up to eleven.

Jesus Saves! Fine, I thought, speak your beliefs. Fine, if the council thinks it's acceptable to have this group speak, then that's alright. (Although it isn't.) But, in the name of equality, surely they must offer the same opportunities to everyone else with a belief system. The Muslims, can they have a go? How about the Buddhists? And, pray tell, are you extending your microphones to the Scientologists?

I am all, as they say, for freedom of speech. But get a sandwich board and a megaphone, like the rest of the fucking crazies. If the council is allowing one group to take over a city centre on a busy shopping day, but not another, that is discriminatory and wrong.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I came to spend my Saturday night writing strongly-worded emails to the council. I wonder, have I got this wrong? Is it no worse than a big advertising campaign, coming down to who has the money to buy their way into people hearts and therefore wallets? I couldn't find anything about who it was, or why that particular day, so if anyone knows or can tell me anything about it I would be very interested.

So this Saturday I am singing at a wedding for someone in Coronation Street, in Salford Catherdral. Yikes. My solo is "We've Only Just Begun." I am quite scared.

But my fear will have to wait, as I have been here now for over an hour and I've got a hankering for some hardcore porography, so I'll have to go home.

Gorillas! Busking!

2009-05-15T12:41:00.005+01:00

Do you live in Manchester? Do you have a job that allows you to work whenever you like or, if you so choose, not at all? Do you have an appreciation for crispy duck pancakes with a musical accompaniment?

If you have answered 'yes' to the above questions, then I really must insist that you make you way down to the pagoda in Manchester's glittering China Town at four thirty this afternoon. There you can witness me and my be-hatted companion, Ben, performing a twenty minute set of our own devising, to the rain-smeared streets and, I imagine, a certain number of bemused-looking Chinese people. (Although if you are not free then, there are plenty of other acts on around the city - have a look.) In spite of a small but fairly drastic hitch when we realized that there is no power for the loop pedal, we're excited about it. We're doing two of my songs ('Song for Lori' and 'Surrender'), one of Ben's poems ('Bullets') ('Bullets'! He's so street!) and a mash-up version of Summertime. In one of the verses of Summertime I am going to beatbox! Well, I'm not, not really. I am going, in fact, to sing the bass line while Ben sings the lead, but to me it totally counts.

The drastic hitch arose this morning, when Ben was scurrying about packing things for his workshop. He frantically texted about it, trying to sort it out, whilst I sat on the bed, said "um" quite a lot, and tried to compose my facial features into 'concerned but not panicking'. It is still uncertain whether we will get the extra power. If not then we will just have to not use the loop pedal (there is an amp and two microphones, so it will not be so bad).

Over the past few days I have been down to That London and back, singing at the Dorchester, seeing friends, seeing my Mum and Dad. I managed to cock up my travel arrangements on a fairly massive scale, which culminated yesterday in my lovely Mum* driving me to Milton Keynes to try and bypass the Peak Times Of Death. I had an off-peak return Manchester-London, but had forgotten that those arch-warlords at National Rail deem that anyone travelling after three-fifteen in the afternoon should be forced to pay double the fare. I remembered this whilst having lunch with my Mum. I sat bolt upright, clutched my head and shouted "PEAK TIMES!". (She later told me that in the thirty seconds before I told her the source of my considerable consternation, she thought maybe I had forgotten to buy a copy of some little-known publication centred around the goings on of a National Park in Derbyshire. "I thought maybe they'd done an article on Ben... or something.")

Being the wonderful and kind person that she is, she drove me to Milton Keynes, an expedition that turned out to be completely fruitless as they charged me a peak ticket there as well.

Feeling glum and carrying a big rucksack and a heavy amp, I trudged to the ticket barriers, which were being manned by two identikit, acne-ridden teenagers with mid-nineties haircuts and suits that they were clearly hoping to "grow into".

I put my amp down to retrieve my ticket from my purse. The one on the right barely glanced at my ticket, but took a big sidelong look at the amp. He took a moment to think of something witty to say.

"That's a big amp" he eventually managed.

I looked at him and nodded slightly.

"Yeah. It's pretty heavy, too."

He had nothing left to add, clearly having exhausted his mental capacities earlier on in the conversation. I sighed and made a show of picking up the amp again, and began to make my way to the platform. Luckily his mate was there to pick up from where he'd left off.

"Cheer up, love."

I turned and stared at his sullen, twatty little face and laughed, bitterly. As I walked away, I said (under my breath) "What would cheer me up would be an offer of help with what is, as was helpfully pointed out just a moment ago, a very heavy fucking amp. Not being told to cheer up by a spikey-haired little cock monkey like you."

Luckily I got a good seat on the train, bought a gin and tonic, and took my frustrations out by telling the woman across the aisle from my to turn her music down. I suspected that when I got up to go to the toilet she turned it back up again, but the initial victory was mine.

So I am off to decide what to wear for my busking debut! I suspect it will involve bright colours, as today the sky has chosen "Manchester Grey" for its palate. I actually wanted to find two gorilla costumes, although Ben's would have to be rather longer than mine. I would wear mine with stilettos instead of feet, and Ben would have to wear a hat.

I have three hours to make it happen.

*Look! My Mum's on TV! (She's the nutritionist.)

Australia (Warning: This Post Is Almost As Long As The Film)

2009-05-10T14:31:00.007+01:00

It's May and things are going from good to better, to bad to worse, to great, to alrightish-once-I've-had-this-cup-of-tea-and-oh-is-that-a-muffin? to just life. I have far too many things to say in one post, so I will attempt to whittle them down. (I have failed to do any real whittling. More wittering that whittling, really. Sorry.)

Australia flew by in a flurry of dismal attempts to be upgraded on planes, gingham tents in garages, small, energetic dogs, beaches, kangaroos, sunsets, beer, sushi, birthdays and suspended vegetarianism. It was marvellous. My impulse when attempting to describe three weeks of holiday in a few sentences is to launch into detailed descriptions of the weather. I am going to resist, though, and try and tell you what the holiday itself was actually like. I will aim for brevity. (Again, FAIL.)

There were four of us visiting - Ben, his Mum, his Dad and me. Laura (Ben's sister) and her partner Rob live in a wooden floored house in the suburbs of Melbourne. Ben and I stayed in a delightfully-constructed gingham gazebo in the garage. (However, unlike any that I have seen, this garage was free of dusty boxes of crap, which made the experience considerably more pleasant for us.) Some days Laura and Rob were working, so we all took ourselves off on adventures around Melbourne. I hadn't realized quite how nice a city Melbourne would be. I have been to Sydney, Cairns, Brisbane and Darwin, and I must say I preferred Melbourne to all those places. It seems small and friendly, whilst also managing to be lively and a bit glamorous. What a clever balance to strike. At first I was a bit suspicious of all the happy, trendy people in the bars and cafés. It all seemed a little too perfect. Laughing trendily and sipping at excellent wine, they all had a joie de vivre that confused me. It seemed odd to me that nobody was screaming at their children or swearing at passers-by. Their skin was tanned, and not at all the shade of grey to which I have become accustomed. The sun was out, and yet all the men appeared still to be wearing their tops, and none of them were proudly sporting third degree burns. It was baffling.

I quickly found that, even without these simple home comforts, I felt pretty relaxed in Melbourne. Ben and I traipsed about taking pictures of the amazing graffiti in the lanes, and went to the achingly cool Until Never gallery. We did this on our own, so as not to bore his parents and sister with our joint love of street art, but there were plenty of family trips as well. We spent a few nights on Phillip Island, where we watched the penguins on their twilight journey from the sea to their hillside nests. We sat on the beach with our binoculars, peering at the little birds as they huddled together and ran across the sand. The following day we went to a wildlife reserve. By that point I had started to feel a little interesting-animaled out (we had seen some extremely soporific koalas that day), so trailed into the wildlife reserve without a great degree of enthusiasm. I was wrong, though, as it turned out to be brilliant.

Kangaroos and wallabies boinged freely about, eagerly nibbling the feed we had been given to offer them. At first I found the kangaroos inexplicably scary. I think it was the way that they could be right over there, looking idly at a piece of grass and contemplating life, then suddenly, at the merest rustle of a paper bag, they would have bounced over in a single, terrifying leap, nosing into your hands and slapping their great tails in the dust. I did a lot of hiding behind Ben's arm, until he managed to shake me off and I was on my own, nervously being eyed by ten hungry marsupials. They paled, though, in comparison to the emus, who were also freely stalking the sixty acre park. Huge, ungainly things, I couldn't help but interpret their cold stare as that of a gangster who is planning to wreak some terrible revenge on you, but who will psychologically torment you first by silently standing behind you while you are warily feeding kangaroos. Walking through the mob of emus (that is the actual collective noun, I looked it up) all I could think was I CANNOT OUT RUN THEM. THERE IS NOWHERE TO HIDE. Ben fed one, and it nearly snapped his hand off. I crept back to the kangaroos, who suddenly seemed like adorable newborn kittens in comparison.

My birthday was lovely. Ben made french toast for breakfast, complete with maple syrup, strawberries and cream, and delicious coffee. The rest of the family went off belt shopping, while Ben and I caught the tram into town, and wandered about, happily going to galleries and sipping Champagne. We saw some of the most amazing photography I've ever seen, an exhibition called On The Quiet Water by Yang Yongliang. (The photos on the website do not do justice to the incredible power of his work. It is somehow at once peaceful and apocalyptic. He combines ancient and modern methods to create awe-inspiring, delicate pieces that held us enraptured as we walked around.) After a delicious day, we needed to go back to Laura's, to meet up with the family, have a small slice of the lemon cake Ben had made for me the previous day, and go out for dinner.

We walked through Flinders Street station, and at once heard the telltale sounds of a group of beatboxers and rappers, otherwise known as a cipher. We watched for a bit, and then, after a bit of nudging from me, Ben joined in, energetically adding his own beatbox sounds to the group. I stood at the side, took pictures and grinned, wishing for the millionth time that I too could magically beatbox without actually having to do the hours of practice it would take for me to be any good.

Eventually we caught the train back, and after a quick turnaround and a bit of gift giving/receiving, we walked along the road to a lovely Japanese restaurant, where we devoured miso soup and edamame, after which they brought out three of those wooden boats piled high with sushi and sashimi. It was amazing, and by the time the taxi cam to whisk us into the city I was heady with sushi delirium.

Ben had found a place called Bennett's Lane Jazz Club, at which was performing a man called Mr Percival. We hadn't heard of him before, but the descriptions on the site of his use of loop pedals and vocal dexterity attracted us. We were not disappointed. As soon as he started his set it was clear just how wonderful his voice was, smooth and effortless. He started by looping the backing to Ain't No Sunshine, building it up with harmonies on top of harmonies. By the time he came in with the first line, we had been waiting in exquisite agony and so burst into applause. He continued like this, using three separate microphones and connected to three pedals, recording and playing back his voice as he leapt across the stage to manipulate the sounds. The most impressive thing, though, was that while he was doing all this, he was chatting with the audience, merrily inviting our participation and jokily making everyone feel completely relaxed. It was beautiful, but also seemed that we were witnessing myriad feats of engineering, using the technology to eliminate any need for anyone else to accompany him.

All throughout the first set, Ben and I were on the edges of our seats. Ben uses his loop pedal a lot in his work, and I love layering up vocals on my tracks, so we were both in awe of Mr Percival as he played with the pedals, and his voice, so expertly. It was no surprise then, I suppose, that in the second set, when Mr Percival was singing Superstition and asked whether anyone wanted to come and sing, I scrambled to my feet and practically bit the microphone out of his hand. Laura shouted out that it was my birthday, so after that he made a few more references to me. Later on, he decided to get a man up on stage, and selected Ben (as the Birthday Girl's boyfriend), who he seated on stage and forced to sing, while Mr Percival came to where I was sitting and began dancing with me. Ben sat, eyes squeezed shut, singing, until he had clearly had enough, and started to beatbox. Mr Percival's head whipped around, and he promptly threw me aside from the ballroom pose in which he was holding me and leapt up on stage.

They did a duet for the next few songs, and the audience couldn't believe it. Ben is an amazing beatboxer, and not unused to being up on stage, so together they whipped up everyone in the room into a voice-wizardry-induced frenzy.

After the show we chatted to him, and he and Ben gazed into one another's eyes, clearly each a bit in love with the other. I smiled, and tried to pretend that I didn't mind that Ben had totally stolen my thunder ON MY BIRTHDAY. I was secretly just really, really proud. Then we all went drinking.

It was a bloody marvellous birthday, all in all.

Actually, it was a bloody marvellous trip. I hated the flights as much as I always hate flights ("Ben, wake up. Wake up. My feet have turned into bear feet. I've got paws! Wake up!") but other than that I loved all of it. We ate in wonderful restaurants and saw some excellent comedy (Tim Minchin, marry me). I developed an allergic reaction to guide book speak ("browse the enchanting language of the enticing tourist information pamphlets, carefully crafted by people who think you're a moron to provide you and your family with an unforgettable experience that will transform you into people trying to work out the best way to end your own lives using a copy of The Lonely Planet"). I loved spending time with Ben and his family, and I love Melbourne.

Manchester had become green in the time we'd been away. Rainy, yes, but greener. Since being back I have found a nice little café job in the Craft and Design Centre, have a few gigs, including doing some Guerilla Busking this Friday. Ben and I are writing a proposal for a commission about words and music, which, if we manage to win it, would be shown at the Summer Sundae Weekender festival in Leicester. I am moving into Ben's house soon, as soon as there is room for my clothes, computer and terrifying costume jewellery collection.

Australia was brilliant, but I found myself glad to be back. Manchester is becoming home now.

I have to go and lie down now, after this epic post. Oh, and also because I have a cold so I need to go and moan quietly to myself whilst trying to learn words and come up with a groundbreaking idea for a commission proposal. Sniff.

Sunday Meanderings

2009-04-05T12:25:00.009+01:00

I am testing out some new shorts. By 'new' I mean that I have borrowed them from a friend. And by 'testing out' I mean that I am wearing them whilst sitting at the computer because they were the closest things to me when I decided to clothe myself this morning. They seem to be in good working order.

I am in Ben's house. (This is normal.) The cat is stretched out on the bed, luxuriating in the hot tile of sunshine that is dappling the duvet. Ben went to Devon early this morning, for a meeting. Some terribly nice people want to give him a residency and support him, so he has gone to meet them. He is excited, and has taken his bike for cycling around the countryside when he is not having his meeting. He has also taken lots of books and things to do on the seven hour train journey. He's coming back tomorrow, by which time the cat and the sun may have moved but I may well have not.

The other day Ben brought Last Chance To See back from his Dad's house, at the sight of which my eyes leaped out of my head and did excited dances, what with it being the only Douglas Adams book I've never read. He had already started to read it, so I expected him to have taken it for his train journey, but when I got up I found that he had left it out for me. It seems that have found a man who knows that I cannot wait to read a Douglas Adams book. I am a lucky girl indeed. (Either that or he forgot to pack the book. I do not really care which way round it is. I have the book.)

The cat is shifting, pushing his head back, green eyes fluttering.

I am making preparations to go to Australia! I am trying to think about things in an organized fashion, trying to write lists and plans. Realistically I know that all this means is that for months to come I will be finding small scraps of paper with the word 'Passport' written in them. I have, however, acquired shorts, and found some flip flops. I spoke to a woman I know who works at the airport, about upgrade tactics. I have been giving my skin pep talks, in a bid to explain to it that, though I will try to protect it from Evil Rays, it really must toughen up. Getting all pink and het up after exposure to half an hour of watery Manchester sunshine last week was not, I have informed it, an excellent start. Anyway, I have suncream. Every so often I contemplate getting a haircut for the trip, but then remember that I still have zero money, and have to just hope nobody takes any pictures, or if they do that I can pass myself off as a messy-haired local koala bear.

I am super-excited. Having the trip to look forward to has caused an eruption of enthusiasm in me, which is has been quite fun. It also means, though, that I have things to do before I go. Music to listen to. I am listening to a CD with music to write to and it is very cool, I love it. I am already scribbling down ideas. I also have a website to create. I promised to turn my hand to the site even in spite of the fact that I'm not great at technology. I've had this blog going for nigh on four years and have made no attempt to fancy it up, or indeed even change the "is" in the title so that it begins with a capital letter, as would be proper. (This annoys me every time I see it.)

The other afternoon I went out to meet one of the guys that I did a gig with, who, confusingly, is also called Ben. We exchanged CDs with samples of our music on them (this is the CD I am currently listening to), and I got myself a pint to join him and his friend in the sunshine. Another guy I know turned up for a bit, and my friend Aisling came along as well. We hung around in the sunshine for as long as it took for us all to realize that it was actually no longer warm, then went inside. I had a brilliant evening, not least because I kept looking around and thinking, wait a minute, I made all these friends myself! They're like, people I am friends with! In Manchester! I spent the evening exchanging little coy smiles with myself. In retrospect this may not the best way to maintain friendships.

Ben was down in London, and I was up in Manchester hanging around with my friends. It was a bizarre but excellent feeling. I chatted to lots of people, was inappropriately honest to a woman I'd just met about a man she was interested in ("If he doesn't take your number when you offer it to him, I would say he isn't interested. It's not worth it. Move on."), met a guy who plays with Single Cell Collective and have been in contact since about getting involved with a guerrilla busking thing they're doing, and generally had a wonderful time.

Ben returned from London on Friday, after having spent his time at the G20 protests. We went out in the evening, to Saki Bar for a night called Not4Prophet, which was great, except for the fact that during most of the performances people kept standing in the wrong places so they couldn't hear what was going on. During Ben's set there was a rather rambunctious gentleman in the crowd who decided that the very best thing he could do with himself was to gyrate up against Ben in the manner of every single British man who has ever gone on a Lads' Holiday to Faliraki. There was a moment of uncertainty, when he turned around and handed his beers to his mate, as to whether he was going to dance or smack Ben in the face, but thankfully he chose the former. I'm not sure quite why he took it upon himself to dance quite so provocatively, but Ben threw himself into it as well, and soon we were all watching that most ancient of northern English traditions: two grown, heterosexual* men miming sexual acts to an audience, whilst one of them recites poetry. It was difficult to tell quite how much either of them was enjoying it because both of them, in keeping with real northern protocol, still had their coats on.

*I can only be certain about one of the parties involved.

In two weeks time (on the 24th) I will turn twenty-seven years old! My goodness. I started this blog only a few weeks before my twenty-third birthday, when I was sad. When I didn't know this little cat, his owner, or what it might be like to live in Manchester. I had no idea what the years that have trundled by would contain. I knew I wanted to sing, but no idea what that would involve. I still don't, really. I think that I was less resilient, that receiving an email like the following would have hurt me:

"Whilst you think that I was agressive when we had previous relations
in music.. it was more out of frustration that I ever attacked you..
My reason for this email is this.. I think your writing on Half Full
was great.. And something which people respond to very well.. But you
didnt nail this track.. Your chorus is very sloppy... Did I force this
chorus on you? I dont think so.. you had plenty of time to think about
this track... Music should come from the heart and you certainly have
the talent.. If you can correct the time frame issues I would love to
work with you again."

Now it does not. I understand the meaning behind it, and can merrily post it on the Internet without giving it a second thought. (It is quite funny.) ("Time frame issues?" Excellent. What a cock.)

I didn't know what my life now would be like, how I would recover from some things and find others to mourn. I am so thrilled that this blog is still going, though.

Nothing like a birthday and an insulting email to make one go all reflective. Time to go and listen to some excellent music, I think.

Chimps and Barbies

2009-03-25T12:23:00.006Z

What's that quote? "Good girls keep diaries, bad girls don't have time".

I assume they don't have time because they're off doing scandalous things. Leaving the lid off the Marmite, perhaps, or antagonizing the cat.

I am not such a girl. My lack of blogging hasn't been due to my wild and dastardly lifestyle, but more due to the fact that every time I think about writing a post my brain fills up with things that I want to say but can't seem to find ways of saying them.

I know! Categories!

Job/Money/Employment

I don't know if you've heard, but there's this thing on at the moment. What's it called again? Oh, yeah, um, recession. Credit crunch. Worldwide economic meltdown. Did you know? I only just heard, because I don't go out much and they haven't really mentioned it much in my bi-monthly copy of "Horse And Pony" magazine. Anyway, what this means for me is that I haven't got a job. I am still Well-Mannered, Articulate Dole Scum.

I did land a job at one of Manchester's infamous gay clubs. However, when I got there it transpired that there would be no actual bar-work involved. The role was comprised of pushing through crowds of teetering women wearing hen night sashes, lurching around to Dancing Queen while their fake tan dripped down their faces to mingle with the spilled Bacardi and Diet Coke that pooled on the increasingly sticky floor. Collecting glasses, basically. Oh, and keeping an eye out for any vomit on the dance floor. The manager eyed me. "Best to keep a pair of rubber gloves in your back pocket at all times" he smirked, as I tried to conceal my horror. "And check the toilets. People block them, so you have to unblock them. Basically."

Twenty minutes, I lasted, before I announced that it wasn't really "for me" and skulked back to Ben's.

"You smell of hen sick" he announced, as he opened the door. I congratulated him on the line that had only taken him half an hour to come up with, and walked inside.

"I smell, I think you'll find" I said, accepting the glass of wine he was proffering, "of self respect."

Music

Choir is still brilliant. I sang at Old Trafford, which is some kind of sports-related place, apparently. We did a concert at an awards ceremony, and I opened with a solo. My knees shook and I forgot the words a bit, but it was brilliant, and I bloody loved it. Oh, and we're on TV on Thursday! On Channel M, on the breakfast show. Also they have a professional agency affiliated with the choir, for which I am auditioning on Monday. I haven't decided what song to sing, but I am considering penning my own for the occasion. Perhaps entitled "Choir Is So Great And Fun And Super-Brill!".

As you can tell, I haven't managed to curtail my extreme keenness. I suppose I must just accept it, and understand that I will always want to sit at the front, sing loud and know all the words. It is a fact of my life. I must try to think of ways to be cool in other ways. (Suggestions welcome.)

I did a gig with a band, and am going to do some writing with one of the guys from it. I sang at a gig in an Oxfam shop, and have been asked to go back to the Dukes Theatre in Lancaster to do a gig in their autumn season. Actually, Ben and I have been asked to come up with a show (that includes my music and his poetry) to put on in their theatre space, which is in the round and seats about three hundred people. I would also like it to involve a unicorn and me being lowered down in half a giant disco ball while Ben circles the stage in roller skates reciting haikus, but it is still in early stages and we are still in talks with the unicorn's agent, so we will have to see.

Friends

I have some! One is leaving to go and live in Birmingham. She is a Bad Influence, always suggesting just one more glass of wine or some extra cake (it is never me). She is an actor, and funny and cool, and I like her, and now she is going to live in another city and I cannot help but take it a bit personally.

Other

I am going to Australia next week! With Ben and his family, to visit his sister. They have had it booked for ages, but it was decided that Ben would be no fun without me, what with all the crying, drawing pictures of me in his diary and general pining, so in a fit of unprecedented generosity his wonderful Dad has bought me a ticket. Can you believe it? This happened two days ago, and we leave on the 8th of April. Hurray! I have been dressed as a kangaroo ever since my ticket was booked for me, which is fun, albeit a little impractical. Luckily the buses all have those ramp things for people in wheelchairs, so I can hop up those. The pouch, it must be said, is handy for grocery shopping and an environmentally-safe alternative to plastic bags.

Life is good. I have had a few panicked, sitting-on-benches-staring-at-pigeons moments, and my living arrangements are still in a constant state of flux. I flit between my grandmother's house and Ben's, both of whom are "happy to have me there", but in my darker moments it feels like I have no home. I struggle with that feeling. I am trying to build my life, doing training for things, courses and music, still refusing to do things I hate and live a life I don't like.

I am going to Australia! Pass me the flip flops and throw some more chimps at some Barbies! (Is that the phrase?) Laura (Ben's sister) lives in Melbourne, so we are going there. I have been to Sydney, and up the coast to Cairns. Also Darwin, I have been there, but I am excited about Melbourne! I am excited about going away and about the films on the plane that I otherwise would not have bothered watching! It will be my 27th birthday when we are out there, which is exciting. Also exciting is the fact that before it had been decided that I would come out as well, Ben arranged a birthday-day for me tomorrow, fueled by love/guilt, so has booked a surprise theatre trip and dinner at a "fancy restaurant".

I am a lucky girl. Now I must go as this kangaroo suit is rather hot and cumbersome and it is becoming increasingly tricky to type.

This Post Is A Security Risk

2009-02-23T11:50:00.003Z

I was in Manchester library last week. It is a cavernous, domed building, and it is beautiful. I've been in there a few times now, just to sit and read. I love big libraries, listening to the muffled sounds of people working, shuffling the books from the shelves, each in pursuit of his or her particular brand of knowledge. It is a bit like being inside the Internet, only without so much porn.

When I lived in Paris I used to go and sit in the Pompidou Centre library for whole days, to avoid the cold anonymity of the city outside. In a library you can find familiarity in books, and silent solidarity with the people sitting all around you. I love the curious looks people sometimes give each other in libraries. In Paris I read the entire work of Jane Austen in a fortnight and then moved on to the Bronte sisters. I found it endlessly comforting.

Last week I decided to find some books on fairy tales. I perused the shelves until I found some that looked interesting, and took a seat at a table in the main dome. I had just started to make some notes and indulge in some library-echo listening, when my phone flashed. I took the call in the stairwell, leaving my coat and small suitcase tucked underneath the chair.

It was Ben, with bad news. I spent a while on the phone, to him and then to my sister.

When I returned to my seat, my bag and coat had gone. The women sitting on the desk nearby leaned over.

"Were you sitting there? Sorry, we didn't see. The security man came and took your bag and coat."

I went to the Information Desk. The woman was on the phone, and gestured that she would be with me in a minute.

Five minutes later she listened as I whispered my plight. She sucked her teeth briefly.

"If security have it they'll have taken it round to the back. You have to go outside."

Clutching a biro-scratched map I stepped outside, internally grumbling.

Why'd they have to take my bloody coat? It's February, for fuck's sake, and they're making me run a freezing gauntlet as punishment for leaving my stuff unattended for twenty minutes. I can understand then taking my case, but my coat? Did they think there was a bomb in the pocket? Fuckers.

Consulting my map, I climbed the steps to the security booth.

Two middle-aged, rotund men looked up from their heavily-pawed copies of The Daily Sport and smirked.

"Someone took my stuff." I said. "I was on the first floor, and stepped out for a phone call, so security took my bag and coat."

I waited. The closer one raised a greasy eyebrow.

"It wasn't taken, love. It was removed for security reasons."

I stared at him.

"You should never leave your items unattended."

A pause.

"Security reasons" he added, in response to my blank expression.

I shivered. "Sorry, I wasn't aware that my coat posed a security risk. I will be more careful in future. Can I have it back now?"

After a bit more telling off and some light perving I escaped with my things.

Anyway.

This week I am going to London, as Ben has a gig on Wednesday. Unfortunately on Friday we are going to a funeral, at which I am singing. I am very, very nervous about this. The nerves are outweighed by the feeling that I do want to do it, but still. Since I was asked I have been lying awake at nights, thinking about it. Not really worrying, just thinking. I feel it is the least I can do, so I want to do it.

But, yikes.

When I am back up in Manchester I am going to go to the library every day and leave innocuous things on a desk, to see what security deem as a "risk". A scarf? A scale model of the security booth? A dead pigeon? It will be an interesting experiment.

Everything and Nothing

2009-02-17T10:44:00.003Z

There is too much happening, and too much not happening, for me to write about.

I still have no job, but I did have an interview for this shop. The woman interviewing me asked me a series of complicated questions including which brands of flour were gluten-free and the names of the animal products in some toiletries. Shockingly, I could not answer her. It was a five page application form, and a twenty minute interview. In my head I asked her to confirm that this was, in fact, a shop assistant job and not the new head of brain surgery, but I wasn't cool enough to say out loud. I just smiled and stumbled through my answers, hoping I didn't actually have to work somewhere that clearly had such lofty opinions of itself. I'm sure my disdain must have shown through, though, when she started the interview by saying "your experience doesn't really match what we're looking for, but your CV was interesting so I thought I would see you anyway". What an excellent waste of my time, I thought, as I walked away from it. "We're having second interviews" she said at the end, without looking at me. "So you'll find out tomorrow. There have been some very strong candidates." Second interviews? I thought, incredulously. For shelf-stacking? It was no surprise when I received the haughtily-penned email the following day, informing me that I had not been successful. I was quite relieved.

On Sunday night I tagged along with Ben to an Oxfam shop in Chorlton, South Manchester. It was a night called Do It For The Love, and involved poets and musicians performing to raise money for Oxfam. The organisers had brought along wine and food, and soon people began to cram into the shop, sitting on tiny spaces on the floor to listen. Ben and Martin (another member of the collective) were doing some pieces, and asked me whether I wanted to sing one of my songs. At the end of their set they called me up from where I was sitting, cross-legged on the floor, and I sang Writing In Pencil while Ben beatboxed to provide a beat. It was weird, singing into a silent shop packed with people. No microphone to hold or hide behind, just Ben slightly behind me, keeping time. After I sung that one Ben carried on beatboxing and Martin freestyled some lyrics. I improvised little melodies, and then did a freestyle verse of my own, which ended up being about the fact that I couldn't really freestyle. People seemed to find my ineptitude funny, which was lucky. If only more people thought the same way, I would probably have a job by now.

The week before I had done a similar thing at The Dukes theatre, in Lancaster. I sung a few more songs, and thankfully there was a microphone. Afterwards the producer of the theatre came and spoke to me, telling me she was booking the autumn season, and would really like to book me. She took me into the large theatre space to show me. I nodded, mutely, grinning. I had already told her that I didn't really have a band yet, but I blinked at the stage and pictured my band, certain that things would happen soon.

Oh, yes! Valentine's Day was brilliant. I sat on a fancy cushion on the back of Ben's bike (something that happens quite regularly) and we went to the park. We found a picnic table, looking out to where the sunset was mingling with the warmth of the streetlamps, Ben reached into his bag and brought out a half bottle of wine and two glasses. We sat, sipping, listening to the sounds of the kids playing football nearby and watching the sky change colour behind the black spindly trees.

That evening we babysat so that our friends could have a rare night out, while we wrestled with their one- and two-year old. As I finished reading the stories, Ben slipped downstairs and started on dinner. A dressed crab for starters, with salad. Lightly cooked tuna steaks for main course, and crepes for dessert. It was delicious. We stayed up, listening to music, until Nathan and Thea rolled in from their night of dinner and dancing, and we all hung around until they went to bed. Ben and I watched a DVD, and listened out for the babies. The one year old, also called Ben, woke up, so we got him and played with him until the early hours, giggling as he crawled over us and played deliriously with the curtains.

The following day, after a hangover-quashing breakfast, Ben and I left. We went back to his house via the park, and then rested until the gig that evening.

It was a delicious weekend.

Now I have to go and rush around, making sure that the house is span and spick for when my grandmother arrives back this evening. I am quite scared that I will have mucked something up horribly, but I am sure a spot of hoovering will do the trick.

Happy post-Valentine.

Project Roller Disco

2009-02-05T18:22:00.005Z

I am very cold. My neck is cold, and my ankles. The skin behind my ears, my eyelids and my elbows: all are deeply chilly.

This is due to finally having secured two days worth of employment! It is a very glamourous position, and involves standing outside Manchester Students' Union trying to force bits of shiny paper into the be-mittened hands of passing students. It is truly an exciting step on the career ladder.

The only thing that buoyed me about this potentially extremely miserable type of work was that yesterday my friend Aisling had been handing out these flyers, and when we saw her last night she told us that she had been invited to a roller disco as a result of handing someone a flyer! I was secretly hoping for a similar result. Actually, I was hoping for exactly the same result. I wanted to be invited to a roller disco. I would decline the offer, of course, but I really, really wanted to be asked.

At nine thirty I was standing in Ben's kitchen, sipping tea and staring forlornly out of the window at the wind and snow. I then realized that there was nobody else in the room to witness this spectacle of dejection, so I cheered up a bit. Then the cat came prowling in, looking for balls of paper to torment, so I quickly rearranged my shoulders into a slump and sighed plaintively. (I am not sure he noticed.)

By ten I was positioned at my post on the Oxford Road, wearing eighteen layers of clothing (or thereabouts) and clutching a bundle of flyers that said the words "Hot Jobs!" on them. On my back was a rucksack contained many, many more. The snow was still flit-fluttering down and landing in my eyes, but nevertheless I began to hand out my flyers.

By eleven I was feeling miserable. I had handed out loads of flyers, and said the words "hot jobs!" at people for an hour, and had not once been invited to any kind of disco. I was very disappointed. Oh, and very, very cold.

I slunk off into the union and bought a paper cup with some stuff in it that claimed to be coffee but which was really just brownish water. I sipped it and reflected on the bitter irony of the situation. Here was I, a graduate, working for £5.73 an hour handing out flyers for a graduate recruitment fair. It could, I supposed, be worse. I could actually be working for... (I glanced down at the flyer) ...HBOS. Ack.

Back on the streets, I upped the smiles, and attempted to look alluring from underneath my oversized hat and pulled-up-to-the-nose scarf. By this time I was also jumping about a bit, from foot to foot, as the cold had seeped into my bones and I needed to remind myself that I was still alive. A man stopped. Bingo! Roller disco invitation, here we come! The first thing I noticed was the overpowering smell of Special Brew, and the second was the fact that this particular Lothario was staring down the barrel of his late sixties. Nevertheless, he began to work his magic, and took one of the flyers from my hand.

"What do you study then, love?" His watery eyes attempted to focus on my face.

"Oh, nothing. I'm not a student."

He took a swaying step back and looked at the flyer, then back at me. "What is it you do, then? This is no sort of job."

"I, um. I'm a. Um. I'm a musician."

His red, veiny face took on a sceptical expression. "And what is it you play?"

I began to wonder when he was going to get around to asking me to the roller disco, but thought perhaps he wanted to get to know me first. Quite right, really. You can't just go around asking strangers to roller discos. Anything could happen.

"I'm a singer" I said. "I play cello as well, but..."

I trailed off as he twisted his features into a sneer and looked back down at the flyer.

"Right, love. Good luck with that love. Ha ha ha!"

Chortling drunkenly, he shambled off.

At lunchtime Ben came to give me warming broth, in the shape of homemade artichoke soup in a thermos.

"Nobody's asked me to a roller disco!" I exclaimed. "Although I did get chatted up."

He patted me on the arm. "Well, that's good, baby!"

"Although it was by an elderly drunk man who went off me when he realized I had no prospects. Does that count?"

He patted me again. "Yeah. 'Course it counts."

Satisfied, I drunk my soup.

By the end of the day I was no nearer to a roller disco, but I was considerably closer to a severe case of hypothermia. It has now been three hours since I came inside and I am still cold. All I can hope is that I warm up before I have to go back and do it again tomorrow.

Now I am going to go and fashion myself a badge that says "ASK ME ABOUT ROLLER DISCOS!" in hopes that someone does, and I can pretend that they asked me to one.

I'm not sure why this particular obsession has developed. I think perhaps that I like to have stories to tell about my experiences, and so far all I can say about this one is that I got really cold and didn't get invited to any roller discos.

Project roller disco re-commences tomorrow morning at ten AM, sharp.

In Which I Do Not Mention The Weather!

2009-01-29T19:29:00.004Z

No, I still haven't managed to get a job. The places that looked promising have mostly decided not to hire staff because of "the current situation". My only real port in the unemployment storm is one place which perhaps might be expanding in the next month or two. The manager/chef is the boyfriend of a friend, so he promised that if they do take on an extra pair of hands those hands will be mine. I hope that they'll want the rest of me as well, but hey, if I'd be getting paid I'd be prepared to compromise.

So much has been going on. I went the Lanternhouse in Cumbria, a few weeks ago. Sumit Sarkar was unveiling two year's worth of work in an exhibition entitled "Ananta" and it was tremendous. Based on Hindu mythology, he took the pantheon and re-created it using various exciting techniques (the explanation of which is a little beyond me, best to check out the website). Through the different rooms were carefully-placed representations of the Gods, some animated, some appearing to be made from plaster, and one particularly impressive one that looked like a giant, shiny, three part transformer. They were like comic book/manga-hybrid heroes and heroines. It was brilliant, and I loved it. Sumit's whole family were there, as well as his girlfriend from Slovakia and her whole family, so after the opening we all got excellently drunk on Champagne and wine and stayed up until the early hours.

I have been to a quite a few other events, in spite of my impecuniosity. (Part of my blogging paralysis has been due to the fact that there seems to be too much to write about.) Ben and I did a "guerrilla gardening for clowns" course last weekend, which was really cool. We spent two days with an eclectic group, exploring the idea of clowning as a form of protest, and guerrilla gardening as a means of direct action. Koogie, the teacher, had some wonderful tales of life in the Clown Army, a group of trained clowns who appear across the world at protests and camps, subverting the notions of authority and turning protests on their heads. Like mythological tricksters, they are powerful and anarchic. We did some clown training, and it was emotional and extremely exciting. Ben and I both loved it, and I came away feeling somehow slightly altered.

Oh, and wow. The Manchester Sing Out choir turned out to be one of the best things I've done since I got to Manchester. Three weeks ago I arrived at the first rehearsal of the year, feeling small and nervous. I chatted to some people until Wayne, the director, started the rehearsal. There were about fifty or sixty people there, a mixture of ages, races and genders. The new people introduced ourselves and then we started to sing.

The thing is, I bloody loved it. I loved singing those uplifting songs and hearing the harmonies ring out around the hall. The more we sang the more excited I felt, so when Wayne asked people to fill the front row, I leapt up like an over-eager (singing) puppy. Since that time I have always sat at the front. I listen intently to every word he says, drink in the harmonies and sing at the very top of my voice. On the first practice I was so overwhelmed by it all that I felt my eyes well up with tears, and sang as if I had just been freed from a silent prison.

This, of course, is a good thing. Of course! It is wonderful to have found something that makes me feel so great. I want to go every day. I want to write music for us to sing, as well, which is something they are more than open to.

However. I can't help but think that all this keen, wide-eyed eagerness makes me look like, well. Like a bit of a twat, really. Part of the reason for going is to make friends and honestly, I really don't look cool when I am there. I feign nonchalance for about five minutes, but I just can't keep it up. I slip into a breathless fervour and I know, I know how it must come across. Twattish, basically. I'm going to have to accept it, though. Embrace it. Perhaps I should just abandon myself to it and make myself a T-shirt that says "I HEART CHOIR" on it. To be honest, if it continues in this vein I think I will need a matching hat.

So, Manchester thinks I am a loser, and maybe I am. For the last few days I have been restless and frustrated. I still live in my Grandmother's house, for which I am very lucky, but I do feel less independent because of it. The other day I made quite a serious, and quite idiotic mistake which could have ended in disaster (but didn't). It was a stupid mistake to make (yikes, it really was very stupid), but adults, as far as I know, make mistakes. The chastising I received, however, from family members, was a very strong reminder of whose charity I am taking, so it is not a situation I want to stay in for much longer. Part of the reason I moved from London was to escape watchful eyes, and I just need to move a bit further. Ben and I are planning to apply to housing associations, so hopefully I can find more independence soon.

(That last paragraph was probably a mistake.) (Another one.)

Life is so good, mostly, but there are a few wrinkles which must be ironed out before I feel like I am settled. It feels, to extend that metaphor beyond all decency, like I have just a very small iron and the wrinkles are pretty big, but I suppose I just have to carry on and things will eventually be smooth.

In the meantime I will just sing my eager little heart out every week, carry on looking for jobs, keep writing my little songs and hope for the best.

Will Work For Ponies*

2009-01-11T20:57:00.008Z

*This means that I am happy to be employed by ponies, or paid in ponies. Obviously.

Friday's job-hunt very quickly began to resemble a montage from a bad film. Imagine, if you will, a thirty second sequence involving lots of people peering over the top of various counters, saying "NO" loudly, and shaking their heads resolutely. All different kinds of people in all different kinds of establishments, but all united in their opinion of the chances of me being employed. Most of them were perfectly nice about it. Only the girls about my own age seemed to be able to say "no" without being fettered by all that horrid human decency. Walking out of one place, where the reception to my question had been a mirthless smile, the curving of an neatly-plucked eyebrow and a slow head shake, had me saying "oooh" with all the sarcasm I could muster as I pushed the door open on my way out. I wanted to tell her that working somewhere with posters on the wall and fairy lights does not automatically make you cool, but I'm not sure she would have heard me, what with being all that way up her own arse.

Actually, some places claimed that they would be taking people on in the next couple of weeks, in which case I duly handed over my CV. One café had said the same thing last week, though, so I went back in again. It was a different girl this time. When I spoke to her she went red and shrugged. "I don't know if they'll have seen your CV. There's a pile of like, hundreds, in the back. So, yeah. Dunno." She avoided my gaze and knocked over a coffee cup.

Her manager was not available to talk to. He or she was probably making an origami swan from my GCSE results whilst sitting on a chair fashioned from eight hundred pieces of paper that each read "in my spare time I enjoy socializing and watching Celebrity Big Brother."

I have reasoned that it is a numbers game, and that eventually I will be employed. By the time I reached the Royal Exchange theatre to ask I was thoroughly dejected. The manager, like all the others, did not seem hopeful. He took my CV anyway.

"We just took on two people last week, so, I can't promise anything" he told me, shaking his head and looking through my CV. "What sort of thing are you looking for?"

"Anything."

He looked up, clearly wondering whether to make a lewd joke and deciding against it.

"Right. When can you work?"

"All the time."

"Weeke..."

"Yep. All the time." I smiled, to try and take the edge off the desperation.

"Right. Well that should improve your chances!"

He still couldn't promise anything. Nowhere could, but I reckon if I keep up this level of perseverance somewhere will eventually take me. Although by that point I will probably be so desperate that I will be cleaning floors for fifteen hours a day on a salary of half an old tuna sandwich and the odd copy of yesterday's Metro.

I am still keeping my spirits up, though. Yesterday my friend Thea came over with her son Ben, who is nearly one. I was helping her out with an application, and in return she bought me a beautiful scarf. The scarf was gorgeous but totally unnecessary, as the pleasure of playing with Ben was payment enough. We all had a lovely evening, Thea and I drinking tea and Ben mashing bits of apple into his face and giving us high fives. I walked them to the tram station, then returned home, thinking what a lovely, free and healthy evening we had just passed. No money spent, no alcohol consumed, just a wholesome, happy time. Wholesome is not my usual state.

Today I have been going through all the music I have written on my computer, and deleting loads of the rubbish that I have seen fit to hammer out over the last few years. It felt good to do this, even in spite of the fact that lots of it has been very painful to listen to. I have muttered "God, did I really write that?" to myself more times today than I care to mention. There was one track that I had titled "shit". Accurately, as it turned out. I also got a bit of a shock when I pressed play on one, secretively named "vm". Out boomed my voice, proclaiming in cut-glass tones that "I love vaginas!". I had forgotten that, when I was in a production of the Vagina Monologues a few years ago, I had recorded my monologue for rehearsal purposes. That one went in the trash file pretty quick sharp. As a result of this cull, though, I have a clearer idea of what I need to be working on to post something else on my myspace, and which can be adapted for live gigs.

Tomorrow I am going job-hunting again in the morning, then to meet another friend, Aisling, at two. She is an actress and has no money either, so we are going to have free adventures in Manchester. I have meandered around the Art Gallery a few times, now, so I am on a mission to find alternative free delights in this wonderful city. The arctic conditions will not, I suspect, help us in our ambition, so I am taking a fiver for coffee/a single glass of wine.

On Tuesday I will hop onto the bus to Bury Job Centre, to sign on. When they ask how I have been trying to find employment I fully expect to collapse into a puddle of woe, as I inform them of how many trees have been wasted on copies of my CV that are now floating around the seedy café underworld of Manchester. I am going along to a choir in the evening, but first I am meeting my friend Lorna, who has an induction day at the Royal Northern College of Music.

On Thursday I am going to The Lanternhouse, in Ulverston, which is where Ben has been since last week. His friend Sumit Sarkar is the artist in residence there, and it is the opening of his exhibition on Thursday. I am very excited about going, as Sumit is an amazing artist and a wonderful person. You can look at the details of the exhibition here.

I am looking forward to seeing Ben, who has released himself from writer prison today in order to go off on his bike and explore the coastline. He sent me an email with some pictures of where he went, including some gorgeous beach shots and some of a Buddhist temple he found. These were great, but the best by far was the video clip of a pony he met, to whom he fed some grass and with whom he had a brief chat about the pros and cons on glove-eating. I'm not sure why I find the notion of a glove-chewing pony so very hilarious, but I do. I really, really do.

So on that uplifting (albeit slightly concerning) note, I am going to go and Google "free stuff to do in Manchester" and hope that it doesn't just bring me straight back here. May your week be full of fun and impish ponies with a penchant for outdoor hand wear.

2009: The Year of the Updated Myspace!

2009-01-07T20:51:00.004Z

In an unprecedented flurry, I am about to write my second post this week. This can only be due to my new-found dedication and motivation, and is nothing to do with the fact that I don't have anything with which to fill my time because I am a) jobless and b) penniless.

Ben has lent me his loop pedal, which I have fitted to my pre-amp and then my amp, so I have been practising this evening. It was all going wonderfully until I decided to see whether I could make new effects by pressing and twisting the "flange" (yes) and turning the volume up. The effect created was one I shall henceforth call "Torment And Pain In The Belly Of The Underworld". It scared me so much that I turned everything off and scampered off into the other room, to cower at my computer for a bit. It made the room vibrate so much that a copy of Woman And Home slipped off the table (n.b. this belongs to my Grandmother, although I sometimes do still read the problem pages, so that when my children leave home or I become incontinent I will know what to do).

In other music news: I have finally updated my myspace page! After only two years I have made some changes, and added another song. It is one of the songs I recorded straight onto my computer, just layering up vocal tracks on top of one another. It was recorded in my bedroom in Brixton, so the only sound you can hear apart from my voice is that of the buses rumbling, and the sounds of people spilling out of the Brixton Academy across the road. It is not a new song, in fact I recorded that in 2007. It is still the most complex a cappella one that I have ever done.

See what you think, and please tell me. Bear in mind that I am not, nor can I ever imagine being, a producer, so the levels/length, etc, are unspeakably amateur and horrible.

It is called Do Something, and it is HERE on my myspace.

Ben has gone to Cumbria for a week, to do a week of hermit-like re-writing of his one man show. He toured with it last year, but he wants to change it, and apparently he can't do it at home, because the cat distracts him. So off he went this morning, having made me some hummus to take home with me. I was not allowed to take the cat, which I deem very unfair.

I have been making continued efforts to find gainful employment. This has involved trawling round cafés, walking up to the counter smiling in a way that I hope is not threatening and/or manic, and tacitly begging for a job. Most of them have seemed very positive, but I am wise enough to know what this means, so I am going around tomorrow, and the next day, and the next until someone lets me make coffee and tell them jokes. Today I was chatting with a friend and he mentioned that there were some jobs going. I asked what they were and he said, oh, it's just on the phones, in some office, but... I cut him off. No office work. Not a chance. I will find something else. Thank you.

I have found a choir to join, which is cool. I have never been one for choirs, but the idea of singing regularly and meeting lots of people is an appealing prospect at the moment. I am also going along to the Social Media Café, which is a bit intimidating, because I know nothing about computers, not really. I'm going because I am curious, and I would like to know what other people in Manchester do with their online obsessions.

It is frozen up here. The sky hangs, grey and weighty. It feels like the daylight is so fleeting, and the minute I leave the house my fingers and toes lose all feeling.

Today, though, I was walking from Ben's house in Rusholme to get the bus into town. There is a tiny piece of park that serves as a shortcut, and I took it. The path was bright white amid the silver-topped scrub land. The dim light that leaked from the sky bounced from it onto my face, becoming bright and comforting. A man was coming the other way, black hood pulled up, hands pushed into his pockets. He was singing loudly, his song Indian-sounding to my naive ears. As we passed each other he grinned widely at me and did a slippery dance on the icy snow.

"Hey!" he shouted through his smile. "It's OK! You can just GLIDE!"

I laughed and carried on walking, smiling down at the frozen path.

"Yeah" I thought. "I can just glide."

I liked him, and his care-free slippery dancing. This year I resolve not to worry to so much, and free myself up to glide.

Now I am going to tentatively go back into the other room and have more loop-pedal adventures.

Testing, Testing...

2009-01-03T22:37:00.004Z

Oh, not the old "testing, testing, is this thing on?" joke? The one that's wheeled out every time some dormant blogger comes out of the web work to try to revive his or her online persona? No, surely?

Yes, I have sunk to such depths. It is tricky to know how to start the first post of the year. How about this:

At the dawn of 2009 I have many ambitions.

Hmm. I'm not sure. Maybe an exclamation mark to denote excitement and/or positivity? I have many ambitions! No, too peppy. How about caps for emphasis and meaning? I have many AMBITIONS. God, no. Maybe those caps were in the wrong place? I have MANY ambitions. A touch psychotic, perhaps. No, I think I might just leave it.

Still, though. It's a bit pretentious. Alright, a lot pretentious. True, yes, but that is neither here nor there.

Before Christmas I kept sitting down to write, but collapsing slightly at the prospect.

There are too many things to say. Too many adventures to recount, but also whole boring snow-drifts tales of self-doubt and uncertainty.

Christmas was, as always, a whirlwind of present-anxiety and family. My most memorable day took place in Milton Keynes Shopping Centre on the day before Christmas Eve. My Dad had to buy some presents for my little sister, and I wanted to buy some complicated and confusing kitchen equipment for my complicated and confusing boyfriend. Within five minutes of parking the car both of us were crouching, terrified, in the coffee shop at the top of John Lewis, staring out of the window at the miles of bare, grey horror that is Milton Keynes. Feeling myself start to wonder whether the window was, in fact, bolted shut or whether I could make I leap for it, I decided to act, and promptly stole a pen from an old lady. Having written a comprehensive shopping plan, we embarked on a six hour journey through the whirling torment, held up only slightly by the fact that I had decided to wear four inch heels for the occasion. My Dad bought excellent presents for my sister, hindered only slightly by the fact that he sometimes had the audacity to disagree with my expert judgement. I came away empty-handed but for a thermometer and a huge, completely useless, terracotta tile.

(Actually my most memorable Christmas occasion was my surprise present from Ben. He took me for a meal, and then to a gig. As we walked into Manchester Academy I had no idea who we were seeing, and we headed for the bar. Ben ordered the drinks and turned to me. "Oh" he said. "You might need this." He handed me the ticket and I looked at it, and saw the words JOAN AS POLICE WOMAN written across the top. My jaw dropped, I looked at Ben's smiling face and jumped a bit. I first saw Joan and her band three years ago, and have loved her since. Her music is incredible, and her presence on stage is captivating. She is bewitching, funny, unpretentious and supremely gifted. I watched the whole gig standing in front of Ben with his arms around me, mesmerized. I know the first album, but the songs from the second are wonderful (I couldn't believe she would be able to out do the first, and in fact they are more like a complement to one another). Afterwards she was signing autographs, so we queued and spoke to her. During the gig I had shouted out "I LOVE YOU JOAN" (I am not cool) and she said she loved me too, in her liquid New York drawl. When I spoke to her I told her it was me who had shouted that (God, I am really not cool) and she said, "yeah, I said I loved you too!". "I know" I said, pushing my new CD towards her. "But I want it in writing." She laughed and wrote it. "I'm a singer, too!" I chattered, excitedly. She looked at me for a moment and smiled. "Yeah, I can see that." Oh, she might just have been being kind, but if I choose to believe she saw a kindred spirit then I will, and you can't stop me.)

I had two gigs over the Christmas period. One was in Pizza in the Park jazz club in Knightsbridge, and the other was yet another excuse to experience the delights of Milton Keynes. At the former there was a full jazz band, complete with grand piano and a variety of different microphones. I sung a short set, finishing with Santa Baby, for which I was forced to wear a shiny, over-sized Santa hat. Both the hat and I made another appearance at the end of the night, singing Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas with two other singers (n.b. the hat did not sing). Afterwards Ben and I stayed with my sister Alex and her boyfriend Andy, and the following day we all went for a lovely walk down the canal near her house. Sitting in a cosy little pub in muddy jeans and trainers, eating chips and pretending to work the slot machine by pressing the buttons at random and occasionally letting out a plaintive sigh, I had no desire to get re-vamped up and do another gig. Nevertheless I had to, so I said goodbye to them all and trekked to South London, where I was collected by two chaps called Ed and Eddie (a pianist and a saxophonist, respectively).

Up the motorway we trundled, discussing the last time we had met (in Paris, 2006) (can I say that again, please? It makes me feel well glamourous. Yes?) (in Paris, 2006) (Sorry). We played together then, having met through my sister Sophie, and I had called on them for this gig. We eventually pulled up at the house in Milton Keynes, and I jumped out to ring the doorbell. The door was opened by two excited-looking seven year old girls, who bore sticky labels, pens, and eager expressions.

We were asked to set up the equipment in the corner of the rather capacious living room, and as we did so we met the woman whose birthday it was and were handed drinks. Strictly birthday party stuff, so no Christmas songs or hats here. As we began to play our first set people edged into the room, clutching wine glasses or bottles of beer and watching us with a mixture of interest and trepidation. I encouraged people to dance, and some did. The rest stayed firmly where they were, avoiding eye contact in case that in itself was some kind of signed contractual agreement obliging them to dance naked with their underwear dangling over one ear for the rest of the night.

A couple of hours later and we had finished, having played for two hours with a break in between (during which everybody cheerfully started wiggling away to Let Me Entertain You and a selection of ABBA classics). My Mum came to pick me up, which delighted me no end. I said goodbye to Ed and Eddie and hopped into the car, to be whooshed back to my parents' house, in which were waiting my Impish sister Sophie and her boyfriend Tomas, who were over from Paris for Christmas. I sat down with them and started upon what was to be the first of many, many cheese-and-wine binges of the festive season.

The rest of Christmas whistled by in a blur of wine, cheese and actual real life games of charades. Charades was conducted on Boxing Day, when Ben and his Mum were over, to be confronted with the extent of the family for the first time. I hoped that alcohol consumption would mask the fact that we were playing games that people only play in sitcoms from the fifties. Although trying to convince my thirteen year old cousin to act out Sex and the City in front of twenty family members sticks out as a highlight. (He refused. Free Willy was also, apparently, a no go.)

For New Year Ben and I came back to Manchester. We went out with a few friends, danced and drank, then came back to Ben's house, where we set up an elaborate sound system involving two amps, a microphone, a loop pedal, a bass guitar and a rather baffled-looking cat and made drunken "music" until about seven the next morning. This was roundly looked upon as an excellent thing to do, in spite of the terraced house thing and the fact that everything we did sounded like loads of drunk people going LA LA LA (with a bass part).

Now all the festivities are over, and I have not started my diet/detox/life-improvement that I am sure everyone else is well into by now. Everyone else, I bet, has rejected all offers of extra toast and has gone to the gym at least eight times. I have been hiding, putting off all the things I had put off until after Christmas. I have not experienced any epiphanies, or found any magical serum that will make me less nervous about this process (at least, none that last) (or are legal). I had hoped this would happen, and am disappointed that no ponies have trotted up to me with magical, life-sorting scrolls between their sugar cane teeth (I could probably find a serum to help me imagine it, though).

I am on the dole and my life is a blank canvas. I have a new coat that is black and furry and makes me feel like Liza Minnelli. I have two woolly hats and an excellent collection of cheap, shiny jewellery. A roof over my head and the great opportunity of having absolutely nothing to stop me doing whatever I want.

2008 was a year of change, and I am hoping that 2009 is going to be another such. I am intimidated by how much I could do, but also how much I might not do.

I am scared by 2009. There is so much to be doing, and all I am doing is sitting at my computer, wearing a huge hat for no reason, and talking about it. I think I need another slice of toast, and then I will definitely start.

Growl

2008-12-12T20:49:00.003Z

I am stroppy. I think it has something to do with the full moon, something to do with being in on a Friday night, and something to do with feeling so cold that I am constantly surprised to look in the mirror and not see icicles hanging from my nose. I am already wearing four jumpers, a hood and a scarf, as well as tracksuit trousers and the biggest socks in the world. Any more clothing and I would barely be able to move my arms enough to write a tediously whining blog post. It may or may not also have something to do with hormonal anguish, but I will snap you in two if you suggest it.

Everything is good (although for some reason I feel the need to say that with narrowed eyes and a snarl). Ben arrived back from Nepal with a tan and presents (you can read about his trip and things here). I went to the airport to meet him, and only just made it in time, in spite of the fact that he had missed the first flight and so was two hours later than planned. I was nearly late because I had decided to use the extra time wisely, by sitting in a gruesome station pub drinking horrible wine and calling everyone I know. I drank one glass, then headed to the bar to buy another. I had a horrible cold, so I sniffed as I ordered. The barman was a different one than had served me before. He leaned lazily on the beer taps and made a show of looking me up and down.

"I.D.?" he intoned, smirking.

I stared at him.

"I'm twenty-six. I don't have any I.D. as I don't drive, but, I'm twenty-six, so..."

His eyebrows crept upwards, and he smiled slightly, returning my incredulous look without blinking.

"I'm not serving you."

I explained to him that I had just been served earlier, to which he replied, "Yeah, love, but not by me. I'm the manager. I'm not serving you."

I argued further, then started rummaging around in my bag, hoping perhaps that my passport would magically appear. As I was looking down my nose dripped conspicuously onto my bag. I felt my cheeks flush red as I angrily wiped my face.

"Look" he said. "I'm twenty-six too and I get asked for I.D., so..."

"So you do believe I am over seventeen, then? But you still won't serve me a glass of wine?"

He shrugged again. I swore at him then, and went to the toilets. (Perhaps I shouldn't have sworn, but he was being deliberately obtuse and deserved it.) On the way out I was on the phone to my sister, and I saw him up a step ladder, putting up decorations. He caught my eye and grinned. To my shame I, without thinking, put my tongue into my bottom lip, in that age-old gesture of people under ten everywhere, and gurned enthusiastically at him.

I keep getting asked for I.D. in Manchester. I am not going to take it as a compliment, because it has been quite humiliating most times. I am pleased that I don't look older than I am, but I am not thrilled that on meeting me people assume that I am not old enough to drink, smoke or download porn off the Internet.

It is a strange thing to feel angry about, but then I am in a strange, angry mood. I have been glowering at things ever since I got home. Apportioning blame to inanimate objects and getting internally cross with people, not for things they have said, but for things that they might say (although probably wouldn't).

I went to the Job Centre yesterday, where the lady told me I "seem to have my head screwed on" before writing the word "waitress" in a little box on the screen. While I was waiting to be seen there was a fire alarm, so we all had to trek outside and wait in the snow for the security guards to decide that it was a false one. Once back inside I watched the staff and tried to guess who was going to get off with whom at their Christmas party.

I have a gig to prepare for, which is at Pizza in the Park in London next Friday. (It is not paid, so please don't report me as a benefits fraud like that woman on those adverts who somehow manages to iron guiltily.) I am singing some Christmas songs, and some other jazz standards, but right now I am feeling far too cross to even consider rehearsing. I am going to think about it crossly and hope that has the same effect.

I am too cross to blog. To stroppy to write anything other than that I am stroppy.

It might be hormonal, lady things that are fueling the fire, but I don't care. I am going to glower a bit more, eat my body weight in chocolate and then sulk off to bed. Although before I do I might phone up that idiot bar manager at the train station and ask him whether he believes that I am old enough to menstruate.

Classy Scum

2008-12-03T11:06:00.002Z

Everything is crunchy. The snow sparkles invitingly, making me wonder whether one could make snow ponies instead of snow angels, and what sort of contortion would be necessary for such a feat. Out of my window there are trees stretching up into the blue sky, gilded by the sun. Washing lines arch this way and that, leaning at precarious angles over the thickly covered garden.

I have a cork notice board in front of me, with white paper covering it like snow. Lists of things to do, people to talk to. Songs to write and late night brainwaves that in the morning seem to reflect just a mental dead calm. I have a bit of paper with a flight number and time scrawled in blue Biro. Ben is flying back from Nepal tomorrow, and I am dutifully going to meet his flight. I have spent some time trying to work out something amusing to write on a sign to hold up at arrivals, but all I can think of so far is some kind of lewd drawing, to embarrass him in front of all the other passengers. It won't be that embarrassing, though, as I am quite good at drawing.

I am relieved that he is coming back. Obviously I have missed him, etc., but also, in spite of my fierce making of friends and experiencing new things, I am beginning to hit a bit of a plateau. Initially it was terrifying, then brilliant. Now it's just, normal. I was worried about making female friends, but now I have some. Ones I text and have had coffees and drinks with, and one who even felt comfortable enough with me to ask me whether my breasts are real (answer: they are actually imaginary. This makes bra shopping easier). All this newness and adventure has been fun, but now it is all settling down a bit, and I have run out of things to make happen. Now I am just a bit (dare I say it?) bored. Ben can come back now. I have forged a bit of a life. A start, anyway. I love Manchester, and I hope that these things I have started will continue.

On Thursday I went to see Sam Sparro headlining a cabaret in the Manchester Academy. It was sponsored by Smirnoff and they were handing out all sorts of "wacky" paraphernalia: top hats, feather boas, fake eyelashes, transfer tattoos, large inflatable musical instruments. On arriving at the event we quickly had to make a choice between standing at the side sneering in a cool fashion, or just getting involved. My latent desire to be Sally Bowles quickly took over and I was soon flapping my eighteen foot eyelashes from beneath the brim of my hat whilst a willing young man pressed a large skull transfer tattoo onto my upper arm. Thea underwent the same treatment. Every so often her husband Nathan would appear from nowhere, having escaped the confines of the sound booth, and whisk her up in his arms, kissing her and spinning her around. At these times I smiled at them and danced with a little more solo mentalness.

I took loads of pictures on my phone. It was in my hand for most of the night until I decided to briefly attempt to be one of those people who can experience stuff without needing to document it for the sole purpose of re-living it on the bus the next day, and put it in my bag (which was on the floor).

A few hours later, Thea and I were back at their house. Nathan had to carry on working until the early hours, but Thea and I had jumped in a taxi, whereupon I had regaled both her and the lucky taxi driver with my best Sally Bowles singing. (The taxi driver said "cor*, you should be a professional singer, love!" Score! That's enough validation to keep me going for at least a month!)

*He didn't really say "cor!", but I put it in because I somehow feel that all taxi drivers should say "cor!", really.

Just about to go to bed, I was fishing about in my capacious bag, searching for my phone. Suddenly I was sunk by a familiar sinking feeling.

"Can you call my phone?" I asked Thea, wearily.

She did. Straight to voicemail.

Once again I have managed to lose my phone/have it stolen.

I have been relegated to my old (camera-less, old stickered) phone, which is disappointing. I have lost my numbers. I have lost all the pictures of Thea and myself peering up from beneath our fake lashes like coquettish inflatable guitar-sporting drag queens.

This week I have also been informed that I will not be starring as an elf this Christmas, due to being formerly employed by someone who doesn't understand that promising someone two days work and then retracting it is not good at any time of year, but over Christmas it is downright horrible.

So, £200 down on budget, I have been looking around desperately for pre-Christmas work, only to find nothing. So I have signed on. I am now, as my friend Kate put it, "very classy dole scum". Excellent. I am dole scum. I must nip down the shop to pick up a copy of The Daily Mail and ten B&H. (Middle class stereotyping? What? Where?)

Some nice stuff has happened. I have found another music project to get involved with, and have also heard that I get my pick of songs to do at my Very Exciting Gig at Pizza in the Park on the 19th December. My little sister is coming home from Paris for Christmas with her delightful French beau. Ben is back tomorrow. There is crispy snow on the ground and some tea to drink. I have to go on the dole for a bit, but I have been diligently paying taxes for the last five years so, yeah, I can cope.

Dole scum, yes, but classy dole scum. That's what's important.

Got Up, Had Cup Of Tea, Looked At Stuff.

2008-11-26T12:16:00.006Z

North Manchester is freezing, and I am listening to Billie Holiday. These two things somehow match, in spite of the fact that the recordings of Billie are crinkly and infused with dusty heat. My favourite Billie track is God Bless The Child, closely followed by her delirious version of Summertime. In Billie Holiday's voice every song sounds like a torch song. I daren't listen to Gloomy Sunday too much. Strange Fruit is wonderful, but is so eerie, and fills my thoughts with blood.

This blog has turned a little more diary-like. Everything around me is new, so I feel I need to document it. Writing it down in the same place where I have written about every other stupid detail of my life makes it more manageable. What I mean is: I have become rather more gotuphadacupofteawalkedthedogsawamusingsquirrelhadaspotoflunch recently. Apologies if this is dull. Go and read better blogs.

On Saturday morning I was awoken by the sound of children. I shifted on the sofa, adjusted the small duvet and squinted at the clock. Ten o'clock. Thea and her children came down the stairs. Audrey (two-and-a-half) and Baby Ben (eleven months) were in good spirits, and Thea seemed to be feeling no ill effects from the night before, which had lead to us sitting on her kitchen floor at two thirty in the morning, talking earnestly and causing her husband to hear us from upstairs and chuckle, before slipping back to sleep. I had met Thea at eight o'clock in central Manchester, under the bus stops. She was grinning, and looked radiant, pleased to be out and dressed up. Her escape from her children coincided with my escape from friendlessness, and we were in high spirits. The prospect of a shared bottle of wine in Manchester's famous jazz club shimmered on the horizon, and we chattered as we made our way there.

An hour and a half later we left the club set off for the train station, to meet her friend Jo from the train, as well as my friend Luke and his boyfriend, yet another Ben (this blog is rapidly becoming riddled with them). I was so happy to see Luke, particularly as he had promised me a present, apropos of nothing (apart from my wonderfulness) (I might have added in that last bit). As it turned out he had forgotten it - "Oh, don't worry! I am just happy to see you!" I lied - but asked whether I wanted to know what it was. Which, of course, I did.

Luke and I met at University, in rehearsals for a production of The Wizard of Oz, in which he was playing the scarecrow and I was playing Dorothy. I look back on that time with very fond memories, not just because I got to wear real ruby slippers and hold Toto (a hand puppet), but because I made some really good friends. Although standing on stage singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow in a plaintive voice whilst making Toto stare questioningly at members of the audience was probably the most fun I have ever had.

Luke had bought me a big print of the Lion, Tin Man, Scarecrow, Dorothy and Toto as they are setting off down the yellow brick road. What an excellent present! I was, and am thrilled.

Thea, Jo and I set out once again to another bar, agreeing to meet Luke, Ben and his friend Grace later. We stayed out late, and Thea said I could sleep on her sofa as Jo was in the guest room.

The next morning, after extricating myself from the clutches of their (really very comfortable) sofa, went to meet Luke, Ben, Grace and her friend Sam at the Famous Manchester Christmas Markets.

Unfortunately the rest of Manchester had woken up with similar ideas. I wandered around looking for them, nose to nose with the entire population of the North West. My phone had run out of battery, so after a wrinkle-nosed phone call from a phone box that smelled of wee and drug deals I launched back in to the fray. I have never seen so many people forcing themselves to be merry in one place. It is difficult to feel any genuine Christmas cheer when you have just been elbowed in the back by five seventeen year old girls attempting to take pictures of a singing moose, then tripped over a push chair the size of a tank and ended up with mulled wine in your hair. Eventually I found them, looking relaxed, sipping cups of afore-mentioned hair tangler. I grimaced, and spent the rest of the time glowering like a slightly hungover and agoraphobic Grinch.

The next morning I was on a coach at six thirty in the morning, heading back down to London to run a kids' party in Hammersmith. I stayed the night before at Thea's again. Nathan, Thea and I drank red wine (un-mulled) and constructed a gingerbread house, using the sweets provided as well as many, many Haribo sweets. We listened to reggae and then electro music. The endeavour was a roaring success, not least because it caused Thea to utter the following, historic sentence: "Oh! I was so busy robot dancing that I forgot to hold the frogs!". I do love a sentence that makes no more sense in context than it does out of it.

The Sunday kids' party was a difficult one. The kids ripped bits of my dress, pulled my hair and demanded sweets at every juncture. The birthday girl, unfortunately, was not particularly interested in the Special Magical Princess! that had been ordered for her birthday, and was in fact far more interested in my iPod than she was in me. I sat on the tube afterwards, exhausted and sullenly eating the leftover sweets, and wondered whether it really is necessary to travel for five hours just to dress up in ridiculous clothes and have children demand to sit on me and attempt to press my nose stud further into my face whilst refusing to pretend to be a naughty goblin (again, context doesn't help). Almost as soon as I got home my phone beeped with a text. From the guys whose band I auditioned for last week, for whom I wrote three songs (two of which were alright, one of which was utterly shit).

"Hi Leonie. Thanks for coming down, we liked your lyrics and melodies, but we're going to carry on looking for a singer. Sorry to waste your time. Good luck with everything."

Tears of rejection and humiliation rushed to the backs of my eyes. Then I forced myself to think about it rationally, dismissing my hurt pride. They were nice guys, but I sensed that they were after a salt-of-the-earth Northern band. They kept quizzing me about my jazz background, concerned expressions fluttering underneath their artfully-positioned fringes. I tried to sound confident as I assured them that I could write and sing in a less jazzy style, but I don't think any of us were convinced. Remembering how I had almost sprinted out of the rehearsal room after singing them my songs, how I had called my friend to express my uncertainty, and how my first thoughts had been "well, those lyrics and melodies could be used elsewhere", I knew that the rejection was no surprise. The hurt pride dispelled and I composed a gracious text reply. Then I paused, allowed a little hurt pride back in as I realized how short-sighted they were to be so insistent on being like every other male guitar band in the North, and snuck in a little passive aggression. Then I took a deep breath, deleted the text, and got back on with what I was doing.

The following morning I went to Upper Street and met Ms Robinson for a couple of hours and a couple of coffees. It was brilliant to see her, she was on great form. Sparky and entertaining, and full of wit and straight talk. I came away feeling energized and happy. Happier still when I made it to Euston, collected my train tickets and realized that something excellent had happened and I had accidentally booked myself a first class single back to Manchester.

I reclined in the big seat and was astonished to find that, in First Class, not only do you not have to squish in next to a spotty, deodorant-shy teenager listening to stadium rock as loudly as possible on a poor quality mp3 player*, but that they actually give you free stuff.

*This is invariably who I sit end up next to. It is like magic.

I wasn't hungry, but when the man came around I ordered a glass of Chardonnay. Free, please. He looked at me askance for a moment, before asking "are you old enough, love?".

I looked at him and smiled. "I'm 26. Is that old enough?"

He blushed a bit and poured me the wine. "Yes, love."

The next time he came round he topped up my glass. "Sorry about that, love."

I watched him fill a spare glass with wine and put it down next to my already-full first one. "No problem" I said. "I'm flattered."

I did have to keep reading my book very intently for the rest of the journey to avoid conversations with him, as he then got a bit chatty. A first class train journey on a Monday afternoon, though, complete with an empty carriage and free wine, was so much better than sharing a seat in a Megabus for five hours in the early grey-black hours of a Sunday morning.

This week I have been busy. Writing, and trying to convert the kids' parties thing in London to one in Manchester. Also I have to sort out my website before the 19th December, when I am doing a gig at Pizza in the Park, one of London's most well-known jazz venues. I am going to a gig in Chorlton tonight with Sarah, the girl I went on a blind friend date with last week. Tomorrow I have a guest ticket to go and see Sam Sparro, with Thea.

Billie has just started singing the blues, but I am not. I am going to go now and write those songs into my style, ignore the rejections that I will inevitably face, have a nice cup of tea and then look at some stuff.

Phone Fear = Pointless

2008-11-21T11:33:00.003Z

On Wednesday morning I stepped out of the shower and heard my phone ringing. I loathe telephones, and usually have to give myself quite serious pep talks before picking one up. There are certain people, of course, whose calls I don't worry about answering, but even with friends it takes a few deep breaths before I will press the little green button.

I was a bit hungover because the previous night I had gone into town to meet my friend Martin's sister, Sarah, and her friend Lizzie. It was my blind friend date, but it hadn't occurred to me to be nervous. It was only when I was sitting on the tram into central Manchester that the thought crept into my head that, hang on, we might not get on. They might hate me! What if they don't like my jokes? I swept the thought aside (particularly the bit about the jokes). Meeting people face to face is never scary for me, not really. Picking up the phone terrifies me, but meeting in person is mostly not a problem. (Is anyone else like this? I don't understand it.)

I was right not to be worried. Sarah was lovely, and her friend Lizzie was great as well. They had been friends at school, but not once did they exclude me by talking about their shared memories without explaining contexts and bringing me into the conversation. Sarah is an artist, who also does voluntary work and does shifts in a restaurant, and Lizzie is a stand-up comedian and writer, who also looks after elderly people on an in-home basis. Within the first twenty minutes we had already come up with a plan to do storytelling for kids in Manchester, Lizzie having recently written a children's book that she had been planning on asking Sarah to illustrate. I told them about my experience as a storyteller in London, and we all laughed at the neatness of the situation. We sat in a bar and had a drink, and then wandered through town to the Christmas Markets, which had opened that day. Towering above the square is a dangerously obese-looking Father Christmas, resplendent in red and white. (I tried not to look for too long, as the image of his twenty foot frame rolling forward and crushing everyone below kept flashing before my eyes. I pictured the carnage: quaint wooden stalls flattened, pine needles piercing the fleshy stomach of Santa as rivers of mulled wine sluiced out, flooding the streets with red.) (This did not happen.)

We meandered through the throngs of people, found a little stall and sat down. Sarah spotted a beer stand and went to retrieve more drinks as Lizzie told me all about her experiences in Australia and America, where she had spent the last few years. After the markets we went to Canal Street, and sat outside a bar that was rather subtly named "Queer" to have more drinks and share some chips.

It was a lovely evening, I was so pleased that my first new friend date went so well. Sarah invited me along to a gig next Wednesday, as well, so I have the second date all planned. What does one do on a second friend date? It is all very exciting.

I awoke on Wednesday morning feeling the effects of the four beers I had merrily drunk the previous night. Buoyed up, but hungover, and aware that I had three songs to write in the space of two days. My phone rang.

I heard it from the bathroom but didn't rush through to get it. When I came back into my room it had stopped, but immediately started ringing again. Private number. Drying my hair, I let it ring. They'll leave a message, I thought, and then I can call them back. It carried on, and I let it. It stopped, and paused, and then started up again. I stared at it.

I walked over to reluctantly pick it up, by which time it had once again stopped.

A minute later the message tone beeped. I pressed the button to access my voice mail.

"Wake up, lazy!" a familiar voice said, all the way from Nepal.

My mouth dropped open as I listened to the rest of Ben's message.

"I will try and make it to a phone again, call you about nine my time, but we're going on our trek tomorrow so I won't be able to contact you after that."

He didn't manage to make it to the phone again, but nevertheless I spent the day carrying my phone about with me and regularly slapping my forehead at my own stupidity. Time to get over my phone-fear, I think.

That is one of the many ways in which I am an idiot. Another is the fact that, although I now live in Manchester, the only means I still have of earning money is down in London. There are many others, but tales of me losing things, booking trips for impossible times and forgetting stuff are not worth telling.

However, despite all this idiocy, my days are going well still. I managed to get the songs written to sing to that band (they had sent me the instrumental, I wrote the melody and lyrics). They seemed impressed, but they seemed to be a bit over-polite, somehow. I think they want a male singer. Instinct tells me that they are really looking to form a lads band, a salt-of-the-earth, northern set up. They seemed reluctant, somehow. I don't know, perhaps they didn't like what I had written, but I suspect it's more that I am just not what they had in mind. They have some other people to see and they said they would be in touch, but I think I might pull myself out of the running. Even if they do say that they would like me to be their singer, I think I would constantly feel that I was being too jazzy for them. (Jazzy in a musical way, rather than a "jazzy trousers" way.) I think my being female, and southern, made them feel a bit awkward. I don't want to be in a band with people who feel that they can't swear in front of me.

I am going to get in contact with some local libraries about the storytelling thing, and keep trying to find fun ways of earning some cash. Tonight I am going to meet a wonderful girl called Thea, and later my friend Luke and his boyfriend Ben are coming up to Manchester for the weekend. They are staying with Luke's friend Grace, to whom I will be introduced in another blind friend date sort of way.

On Sunday morning at 06.30 I am catching a bus down to London to run another kids' party dressed as a princess. On Monday morning I hope to go and meet the delectable Ms Robinson for a coffee before jumping on a train to come back here, and resume my search for meaning, music and money.

Off The Bench

2008-11-18T14:29:00.004Z

For the last week I have been sheltering in Hertfordshire, having had too many plans in the London area to merit coming back to Manchester in between.

During that time I have been for dinner at a friend's house, gone to a discussion on IT and climate change at the House of Commons*, gone to see some friends in a production of Rent, slept in another man's bed (he was gay, but still! Scandal!), run another party for five-year olds whilst dressed as a princess (got chatted up by one of the Dads, most disconcerting), gone to my cousin's eighteenth birthday party (got chatted up by a sixteen year old, even more disconcerting**), laughed so hard at some toys in a shop window that I had to pretend I was crying, laughed even harder at some middle class marketing manager-types trying to breakdance on a very slippery floor in a bar in Clapham, felt suicidal whilst being flapped at by pigeons in Victoria Coach Station and generally had a jolly good time.

*I would love to just nonchalantly mention this as if, oh, yes, I go to interesting and socially pertinent discussions at the House of Commons all the time, don't you? The truth of it was, though, that I only went because my Dad was doing a talk and I spent most of the time wondering whether the man to my left was asleep or just mentally ill.

**James introduced himself to me whilst I was once again taking advantage of the limitless Champagne bar. "Hello James" I replied, amused. "I'm Katie's older cousin". He tilted his head, looked at me and said "How old? Like... twenty?". I told him, no, twenty-six, and he looked a little aghast but quickly covered it. He then leaned in close and told me "I am sixteen, but can be however old you want me to be, baby." I am not that ashamed to say that I laughed. Later on I was chatting with my sister and was most alarmed to feel a stealthy hand creeping onto my left buttock. Horrified, I looked up to see James standing there sporting what he clearly assumed to be an alluring smile. I snatched his hand away and exclaimed "James! Stop that at once!". Apparently being hit on by teenagers makes me think I am Mary Poppins.

I am back, now. In Manchester, that is. Yesterday I had a meeting with a lovely lady from Music Leader. Music Leader is a government-funded organisation which supports people who want to work with young people in a musical capacity, one of the (free) services they offer is a one-on-one meeting with an experienced advisor. You discuss what you want to do, your goals and experience, etc, and they advise you and guide you towards training or networks to join, etc. Since doing the children's parties in London I have been more and more convinced that I would like to develop music workshops for schools, as something to do alongside composing and performing my own music. I went bravely into Central Manchester yesterday and found my way to the office, where I met Sue. She took me to a nearby café and bought me a coffee, and we chatted for about an hour. At first I felt like I felt for the first five sessions when I had that therapy, like I should have been saying "anyway, how are you?", but then I relaxed, stopped making incessant "jokes", and managed to establish that I just want to do everything, now, please. As we talked, I felt my enthusiasm levels rise to an embarrassing, screaming pitch.

An hour later I bounced out of the café, fueled by caffeine and unachievable dreams, and went to meet my friend Lorna, who had spent the day auditioning at the Royal Northern College of Music for a post-graduate course in opera singing. It had gone well, so we we were both in good spirits as we hunted around for a bar to sit in for an hour or so before she caught her train back to Birmingham, where she was staying that night.

As we sipped our drinks (blackcurrant and lemonade for Lorna, who is preserving her voice, and a beer for me, who will no doubt eventually be preserved by the alcohol levels in her bloodstream), Lorna asked me about my impressions of Manchester, compared to London, where she still lives.

Well, I said. I still think of Manchester in relation to London, I suppose, because I spent so long coming up to visit, and then trudging back down to whatever face-meltingly awful temp job I happened to have shackled myself to at the time. So perhaps I am still in my honeymoon period with this city, despite the initial shockwaves of bench tears-inducing newness. But I moved here because I don't think Manchester crushes a person in the way that London does. There is arguably more going on in London, but London is expensive and I felt constantly like I was just living to pay the rent and so could never be involved in all the cool stuff that was happening. Maybe other people could hack that, and be happy and fulfilled. I couldn't.

In Manchester it feels more acceptable to be an artist, and be enthusiastic and passionate about what you do. In London all anyone talked about was how much rent they were paying. Everything happens in London, and you are told this every single day, but you have to be really lucky, or really rich, to access it. I feel that in Manchester it is not like this, and so far I think I am right.

In Manchester I am luckier and richer, of course, because I live with my Grandma and already have met loads of artistic types through my boyfriend, but I still feel that even if this were the case in London it would be harder. It is harder.

Lorna listened to me spout all this unsubstantiated crap, and nodded. "Yeah" she said, thoughtfully. "I can tell even by your voice that you are happier already."

I am happier. Because in London I wouldn't have said any of this for fear of sounding like a pretentious twat. Up here, I am still a pretentious twat but am somehow more comfortable with it. It is a nice feeling.

Today I woke up, did exercise, ate something. I wrote a list of what I needed to do. I emailed. I wrote quite a bit of one of the three songs I need to have written by Thursday. I received an email from Sue from Music Leader, with some details she had mentioned she'd send and a promise to send me a full summary of our meeting as soon as she can. I arranged to meet a girl called Sarah, with whom I am going on a blind friend date this evening. I spoke to another girl called Thea, who invited me out on Friday. I have investigated means of earning money, steering well clear of any office work, and made plans on top of plans. I know that if I just keep exploring all avenues then things will work out.

I have spent the day feeling lucky to be here, and growing increasingly certain that I am finally in the right place at the right time.

Whining Twattery (Includes Moderate Sweariness)

2008-11-12T12:02:00.005Z

I have been on a blogging hiatus. It has not been deliberate, it's just that I don't like writing the sort of whining twat of a post that I have felt like writing. I have, however, written it anyway. Well done me.

I have found the last few weeks very difficult. I have been rigid with the overwhelming conviction that I don't fit in. Anywhere.

I am staying at my parents' house this week, because I needed to be in London on Sunday and again on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

The crux of my problems have come down to two, simple facts: I am a ridiculous moron and will, given half a chance, persuade myself that I am superfluous to everyone's requirements.

(Any ex-boyfriends reading this must be thinking, oh, yes. That's why I got bored with her, she is a mental. Not a cool, interesting mental, just an insecure girl who knows how unattractive insecurity is and so lies about it until it is too late.)

Although I have had some cool times in Manchester over the last few weeks.

On bonfire night we went with some of Ben's friends and their beautiful little children to a park and watched the startled looks on the two-year-old's face as the sky was filled with firey spiderwebs. Then we went back to their house in Moss Side for baked potatoes with chili and mulled wine.

Ben and I smuggled a bottle of rum into the cinema when we went to see the Quantum of Solace and came out giggling and declaring it to be the best film we'd ever seen. We got a taxi home and I swear I heard the driver snort derisively as I listed the reasons that I thought the new Bond girl and I could actually be really good friends (although perhaps we wouldn't lie next to each other on the beach).

I went to meet a band that need a new singer, and they were lovely and we jammed (man), then they sent me some tracks to write over for next time.

Ben has cooked me many delicious meals and I helped him tidy his house before he left (although admittedly at one point my "help" just involved me wearing a sombrero watching him move furniture).

We went to a gig in a church in Salford, where we sat on the floor on cushions, drinking lager out of the can and watching Petra Jean Phillipson. Ben and I chatted to her afterwards. I was initially too shy, but Ben shoved me forward like a pushy mother, and soon Petra and I were chatting about our respective "I'll Make You A Star, Baby" moments. (Mine was when I was at an "audition" that turned out to require everyone to pose for pictures in "lingerie" selected by the producers. I flatly refused, only to be asked "is it because you think you're a bit fat?" by one of the other girls.) I loved Petra. When we were leaving, either Ben or I made a joke about having a great record deal for her, if she'd just come out the back, and she laughed and then said, with a completely straight face, "Yeah, alright, but I don't do anal." Her manager nudged her and squeaked "Petra! We're in a church!". We also chatted to the amazing supporting act, John Fairhurst, with whom I have since exchanged emails about doing some work together.

I have been with my Grandma to Asda and have eaten a million fairy cakes with lemon curd.

I went back to London to to a children's party dressed as a princess, which went well if you discount the one child who threw up, and the fact that all the others seemed to think this was their cue to hurl as well. By that point all the parents were there and watched me try and convince twenty children that this was not a vompetition, and that another game of musical statues (around the sick) was the best thing to do.

On Saturday we went to Ben's Mum's house in Hitchin, to go into London the next day. Ben and his co-traveller/actor Will were leaving straight from the show to the airport to catch their flight to Nepal. Ben's Mum and I went into London on Sunday late morning (Ben had left earlier), and met his Dad and my Dad for lunch, then went along to the show, which was excellent. In the interval we saw Ben, who said he wasn't sure whether he might have to leave before the end of the show. He hugged me and kissed me goodbye. He was wearing his costume, a first world war uniform, and I was wearing my vintage tea dress, so it felt all very poignant, although it wasn't, really. He had to leave before the end of the show, but he called me from the airport. In the middle of our conversation he said this: "...oh, hang on, baby. Will, why does that say 'flight closing'?...(a mumbling in the background)...Oh, shit. Um, I think I have to go now. Love you! Bye!". They made it, but they did have to abandon their pints, which I suppose is suitably dramatic.

Writing all this makes me realize that it has, in loads of ways, been a lovely few weeks. I suppose feeling lost and alienated is inevitable at the moment. I knew it was inevitable, but I didn't think that feeling lost and alienated would make me feel quite so, well, lost and alienated. I want to make friends, so I have been in contact with a few people and signed up for a bellydance class next Wednesday. I will also find a 'job', although I do have a few more princess parties lined up. (I am also going to be a Santa's elf at Christmas, somewhere in Central London. When I know where I will tell everybody I know. I am not joking.)

I have just felt really insecure, which is fucking irritating, to be honest. I have an indescribably huge fear of being "needy", and as a result I just go quietly insane and utterly paranoid. O, how I wish I was a tantrum thrower. I would love to be described as "firey". Yes! Firey people are cool, and a bit scary. I have never scared anyone in my life, and as a result am doomed always to feel inconsequential and paralysed by my own self-doubt. It is fun spending time with me when I am like that.

Self-indulgent self-analysis! It is excellent, and doubtless why blogging was invented. (At Christmas it will be elf-indulgent elf-analysis, something I find disproportionately amusing.)

It is a transition period, I suppose, and to be expected. It is hard, though. Last Thursday I sat on a bench in central Manchester and cried. I am so tired of sitting places and crying, as I have done in every city in which I have lived. I couldn't bear to call Ben, because then he would know for sure that I am not some cool, confident woman but just a boring, moronic loser. I could not call my friends because they would think the same things, and anyway my battery was low.

If you have read this far you can stop now. I'll be fine, of course, it is just my narcissism playing up again, it makes me tetchy. I wish I was an elf all the time. Having bells on my feet would make things so much better.

In Manchester

2008-10-27T20:25:00.002Z

It is strange to be here. Every so often it swings from 'strange' to 'strange-but-good', but then I catch a glimpse of my now-useless Oyster card in my wallet and veers back to 'strange'. Today a surly youth knocked me as he walked past and turned and said "sorry, love", in thick Northern tones. It is strange to be called "love" by everyone. I'm not sure whether I like it yet.

It's cold and rainy, but then it's cold and rainy in London, too. Here, though, I feel that escape is at my fingertips. Last Sunday Ben and I got a little train out to the Peak District and walked up a peak (I'm not sure of the name, but it was that one, you know, with all the heather, gorse and sheep). When we reached the top we leant on the wind and gazed at the hills overlapping each other, creating horizon upon horizon. The sky floated past on its own dusty mountain ranges and I smiled as I thought about the clean air I was breathing. After a while we headed back down, running down the side of the peak to get to the pub. Faces cold and pink, we ordered two pints of Fox's Nob beer and an array of crisps and nuts and settled down in the part of the pub that allowed muddy walking boots. Hours earlier, as we had walked past the field at the back of the pub, we had spotted two tiny little ponies, chewing impishly on the grass. A man came out from the kitchen with some vegetables for them, and they came up no further than his burly knees. I watched them for a while, feeling that my heart was going to burst with glee. I turned back to Ben, grinning uncontrollably. "Aah" he said, in a worryingly-familiar tone that I like to think of as 'fond', "you look like a right mental." After our first pint and packet of Marmite crisps, Ben went to the bar to fetch more. He came back and shook his head, sadly. "We can't go and feed the ponies" he said. "Apparently, when miniature Shetland ponies are grazing they bite." If allowed, I would have done it anyway just so I could have told people that the injury on my hand had been sustained by a tousle with an errant pony.

Since PonyDay I've been back to London for a few nights, to sort out some remaining details of the Brixton house. Back in Manchester I have been following Ben about, annoying him by asking every five minutes whether he would like me to leave, and apologising for distracting him from like, work and stuff even though I am just hanging about reading books. I know that it will just take a bit of time for me to find my feet here, and that in the meantime I am bound to feel a little disorientated and over-sensitive. However, in spite of such sensibly-intentioned mental preparation, I appear not to be very good at talking myself out of the sudden rushes of fear I keep feeling.

I now am sitting in "my" room in my Grandma's house (the inverted commas are meant to denote that I do not quite feel like it is mine, even though I have attempted to make it so by sprinkling clothes and jewellery about the place with careful abandon). We have had tea (this is Northern for dinner). Today I walked from Ben's house into town, where I got on a bus to come back here. The bus wound through the wet streets of Greater Manchester, which are peppered with shops called things like "Fone X-change" and "The Thrill of the Grill!", and about eight million Morrison's supermarkets. I watched the unfamiliar roads unfurl and listened to the other passengers discuss their lives.

Tomorrow I suppose I shall go into town and wander around, with the intention of working out where to get some kind of job that will keep me in loose women and fast cars while I live the dream here up North. Although, actually, I don't want to do that just yet. I have spent the last four years lurching from shit job to worse one while I attempt to wrap my head around the fact that I am trying to live some kind of artistic dream. My CV is a graveyard of horrific former miseries. Looking at it is like staring at a list of equally-horrific ex-boyfriends, and I can't face adding to it yet.

However, I know that getting a job is the best way of making friends. Given how abjectly terrified I am that I will end up becoming too reliant on Ben (who is leaving in two weeks to hang around Nepal for a month, where he will be of less use to me) I feel that I should go and make some friends by means of shared humour about terrible hours/customers/managers.

I will see how I feel when I wake up tomorrow, and hope that I can bring myself to get out of bed and face the terrifying prospect of my new (improved) life.

Snowdrops on Ponies and Kittens as Mittens

2008-10-09T12:17:00.004+01:00

I am grateful that Justme has tagged me for a meme, for otherwise I would have to write about this life-changing move I am about to make, and I can’t be bothered. It’s sunny outside, and I have yet to decide what to have for lunch.

Favourites

Clothes shop:

At the end of my Brixton street there is a large, dubious-smelling Barnardo’s charity shop. It has a big clothes section, packed with shiny tops from the mid-nineties, inexplicably horrible jeans and jumpers that look as though they have been knitted out of sick. However, following much perseverance and muffled sniggering I have been recently been able to unearth some gems that have become my wardrobe stalwarts. Why, the dress I am wearing today is a prime example! Black with cream art deco-esque designs, with little sleeves and tiny buttons, and every time I wear it people ask me whether I have lost weight (answer: no). I wait with barely contained glee for someone to tell me they like it before leaping on them and shrieking “IT ONLY COST THREE POUNDS!” over and over until they run away wildly, clutching their faces in agony. A selection of other items I have bought from this shop are: polka dot play suit (1); pink silk top (1); cardigans/jumpers (4); terrible crime thriller books written circa 1984 (767).

Charity shops are my favourite shops. I hate Next and Gap, and would rather eat my own face than set foot in a Primark. Normal shops-wise I love Joy although I slightly hate it now that I have looked at their website.

Furniture shop:

I don’t have a favourite furniture shop. I hate walking around those shops and soaking up the sinister you-must-own-this-or-your-life-will-be-shit thought rays that they pump through the air-conditioning vents. They are trying to control us with their consumerism! Kill!

Now excuse me while I go and polish my tin foil hat.

Sweet:

I love Green and Black’s Maya Gold chocolate, but I love it even more when eaten in tiny pieces combined with a cup of Twinning’s Lemon & Ginger tea. (Do I win the prize for the most middle-class sentence ever written? I hope so.)

I like sweet things in small doses, so that I can taste them properly. Chocolate with red wine, spicy tea or strong espresso – these things appeal to me more than just falling head first into a vat of melted Dairy Milk.

City:

I feel it would be cruel to whip London from the top spot just as I am about to turn my back on it. I love London, it has been my home for years and has mostly been good to me (crime and heartbreak aside). I do love others, too, though. Paris is beautiful, and New York is awe-inspiring. I loved Lisbon when I went there last summer, with its steep cobbled streets and bleached-white buildings. The Barrio Alto district was my favourite part, with its seediness and ever-proliferating street art. Brighton is also amazing for street art and murals, and I love its glorious kitsch-ness and proximity to the sea. I have only been to Edinburgh at festival time, which means that I probably have a biased view of it, but I consider it to be close to my heart. A lot of things have happened to me and for me in Edinburgh. Prague I loved, cold and mistily mysterious as it was. Other cities: Sydney; Salzburg; Bangkok; Kuala Lumpur; Singapore; Christchurch; Chicago; Milan; Athens; Cardiff. I loved Cardiff, but I suppose it is about the people you are with rather than the city itself.

Manchester is a great place and I cannot wait to live there, but I suspect I will always have I HEART LONDON etched somewhere on my heart, alongside little pictures of a red telephone box and a London bus.

Drink:

If I am not drinking-drinking then I will have a sparkling water, please. Or just tap, whatever. On the rare occasions when I do drink (ahem) I am blessed with a taste for many and varied things. I love good wine (red, white or rosé), but sometimes would prefer gin and tonic. There are moments when a pint of cold lager is delicious, and others when real, proper beer makes everything seem better. Guinness makes me feel warm and, oddly, a bit stoned. I would drink Champagne for breakfast everyday if I thought I could get away with it.

Sambucca causes massive memory loss, and should be avoided unless someone else is paying.

Music:

I was almost tempted to leave this one out, because really. It’s too hard!
I don’t like most guitar band, indie rock-type music. I don’t hate it, and if it comes on I won’t cover my ears and start banging saucepans together (difficult to do both at the same time), but it never really moves me. It doesn’t make me cross my arms around my waist and say “oh”, or want to dance insanely, or throw up (in a good way). It’s more like, well, that’s alright.

I love singing and listening to jazz. Georgia on My Mind is my favourite song to sing, along with Summertime (obv.), Black Coffee and Bad, Bad Leroy Brown. Actually, along with about forty other jazz standards.

I love words in music. Paul Simon is one of the best songwriters of all time, along with Leonard Cohen (Famous Blue Raincoat makes me want to throw up and die) (in a great, incredible, amazing way). Jill Scott is a poet and a singer, and the harmony and lyrics in her music is adjective-defying. I saw her live once, and my God. That woman should be king. I also love Joan As Police Woman, to such an extent that I wanted to punch people at her gigs for pretending to love her more than I did. I really like mash-up albums, and always listen to my recently-acquired Kleptones album before I go out.

I don’t know. I love music that means something, lyrically and melodically. Guitar bands with their 1-2-3-4 rhythms just leave me a little cold.

My single favourite piece of music ever, though, is the Elgar Cello Concerto (particularly when played by Jacqueline Du Pré). I used to play it, and when I did I would feel like it had taken over my whole body.

TV series:

Well, this one is potentially a bit embarrassing. There I was, making myself seem dashingly refined and cultured by claiming that I loved classical music, and now I have to go and admit that my favourite TV series is Charmed.

Shit.

Film:

The first one I can think of is Priscilla Queen of the Desert. I also like Kill Bill (both volumes). I like crime thriller type films and heist movies. I can’t watch anything with Tom Cruise in it, and if it starred Renée Zellwegger I would definitely think twice.

Workout:

I do this most mornings. I used to go to the gym, but discovered a great alternative that was much more fun and life-affirming: not going.

Pastries:

Those little Portuguese custard tart things, O, they are delicious. The Brixton/Stockwell area is otherwise known as Little Portugal, so these delicious treats are scattered along the pavements with joyful abundance.

Coffee:

I am a slave to a good cup of coffee, but it must be strong, and either black or with a splash of milk. To me, latte tastes like baby vomit. Good coffee is delicious, but starting the day with a cup of watery coffee makes me spontaneously fall over with disappointment. I like my coffee like I like my men: in a pretty cup with a small biscuit on the side.

This has been a fun meme, thank you Justme for tagging me. In turn, I will tag the following people: Ben, Fishwife and Clarissa.

Freewheeling

2008-10-03T11:53:00.000+01:00

“Are you ready for a downhill?”

I gripped tightly onto the sides of his jumper, leaned around into the wind and shouted a muffled but delighted yes.

We sped up. My hair whipped out behind me and he begun to whistle that Peter, Bjorn and John tune. The road hurtled by as I grinned into the faces of people stuck in cars in the jam-traffic. Schools and bus stops stood and silently watched I raised my knees further up over the back wheel and started to whistle as well.

About half an hour previously we had been sitting outside a pub in Chorlton, sipping beer in the golden, late afternoon sun.

“Um, I could get the bus and you could cycle?”

He scrunched his nose.

“Not the bus. We could both just walk?”

My turn to scrunch.

“Yeah, but it’s so nice now, and we’re both in such good moods. If we spend an hour walking along roads with you wheeling your bike we’ll be all tired and cross by the time we get home.”

He took a sip of his beer and turned to look at his bike, peering at the writing on the side.

“How much do you weigh?”

I took a sip of mine and shrugged.

“Don’t know in kilograms. Last time I weighed myself I was 8 stone 12.”

I looked at my beer, feeling its familiarity in my hand and thinking back over the last few weeks.

“Might have gone up since then, though.”

Some elaborate calculations later and we were attaching my scarf to the rack, to pad it out and minimize bike-bruising. I swung my leg over the wheel and sat down precariously, feeling the back of the seat press into my ribs and the bars of the rack digging into the soft flesh of my upper thighs. I was wearing his rucksack which, heavy with food, was pulling me backwards. Ben got on the bike and I took hold of the sides of his jumper and lifted my feet off the floor. He turned around.

“You’re not wearing a skirt, are you? Want to go side saddle?”

“No, I’m fine. Anyway, I’m wearing shorts. I’m fine. Go on! Let’s not fall off and die!”

He pushed off and we started down the road. Weaving at first, past a village green, its grass gilded by the dying ember sun, but then faster and stronger. Past little houses and quaint pub, outside of which a man inexplicably told us to fuck off. We did, increasingly steadily. Before long Ben was pedalling confidently and I felt comfortable enough to chat inanely.

“You know” I shouted, leaning round. “You could fit more lady friends on here! Loads! As many as you like!”

“Yeah! Let’s get loads! I want loads!”

I dug him lightly in the ribs, so as not to throw his balance and send us careering into any traffic.

“No, you don’t. You don’t want loads!”

“Oh, yeah, right, no. I don’t want any! No lady friends for me!”

I dug him again, a bit harder.

“No! You want one! Me, remember?”

“Oh yeah. Just one. Just you.”

Satisfied, I leaned back around pressed my cheek against his woollen back.

We whizzed and whooped through busy streets, across lanes of cars and alongside buses that were so close I could have stuck my tongue out and licked them (I didn’t).

Ben swerved past a police van, next to which a couple of policemen were loitering.

“Oi, that bike’s only made for one, mate!” one of them called out, sounding a little bored.

He doesn’t know that, I thought. We could have had it re-vamped.

We sped on, feeling like anarchists.

We wove through streets that were teetering on the brink of Saturday evening. Gin and tonic and the delicious meal Ben was about to cook shimmered on our horizon, and then a Saturday night of dancing that would go on until the sun poked spindly fingers into the sky once again.

“Here we are!”

Ben stood up on the pedals as we swooped into his street and braked by the curb.

“We’ll have to get you a bike when you get here” he said, as we both dismounted.

“Yeah, definitely” I agreed. “Shall we do this anyway, though? Every so often?”

“Yeah” he said, and gave me a kiss. “Let’s.”

He wheeled his bike into the house and I followed, smiling as I closed the door behind me.

Losing London

2008-09-24T16:00:00.004+01:00

My housemate looks at me, smiles and shakes her head.

“God. I just can’t believe you’re moving to Manchester, Lé.”

I shake my head back at her, raise my eyebrows in an expression of mild surprise, and smile.

“Yeah, I know. I can’t believe it either.”

I can believe it, though. Change shimmers on the horizon, replete with opportunity, and I am impatient for it.

Recently I have felt like Alice who, having bitten the mushroom, watches helplessly as she shrinks to almost nothing. London is exhausting and unforgiving: a violent lover whose caresses can so easily turn to blows. I have been working hard to pay my rent and working hard to pursue my dreams. Both have left me unfulfilled. Most days are silent frustrations, with nights looming as dark clouds of anxiety about what will happen when the sun rises again.

I try to write songs, but can think of nothing. I sit myself down with a pencil and paper and order my brain to create but all I can see when I close my eyes is the neon flashing pound sign, blinking behind my eyelids. Every day I spend at a desk in an office I shrink further: a vision of defeat.

I can believe I am leaving.

Of course I can.

Suddenly, though, I realize what I am leaving.

I am leaving all my friends. I am leaving Soho. I am leaving Brixton. I am leaving the bus routes I know and the pubs I like. The pubs! I know they have pubs in Manchester but they aren’t the ones I know. I will miss all the things I know. I know where the good charity shops are, and where to get a great chocolate brownie. I know where you can get a drink after everywhere is shut and I know where you can go dancing. I know the bouncer on the door of Madame JoJo’s, who always hugs with just a little too much enthusiasm. I know how to walk places to avoid the tube, and I know to avoid Topshop on Oxford Street at all costs. I will miss the familiarity of the things I know.

Ben is going to Nepal (to do this) for all of November, by which time I will already have been in Manchester for a few weeks. He has promised to show me round and introduce me to people before he goes, many of whom I have already met. He will help me to find a nice little café/bar job somewhere, to help me settle in. Then he goes and I am on my own. This is good, of course, as it means I won’t be able to rely on him too much. I am not shy about meeting people. (I am shy about other things: making phone calls; eating cereal in front of people; walking into restaurants; maths.) I love meeting people, in fact. I would go so far as to say that I am quite good at it.

But how do I find those people? How do I create opportunities for myself, musically? How will I know where to go? What if people don’t like me? What if I am too southern and I can’t stop making jokes about working in mills and owning whippets? What if it rains too much and all my shoes are wrong?

Primarily I am scared of being lonely.

I lived in Paris once. Those months of loneliness and subsequent depression triggered so many of the problems I have had since. It was awful. Once my Mum came over for a visit and when she was leaving I begged her to let me come home with her. Not realizing the depths of the problem, she refused, saying that I needed to see it through, so I stayed. I regret that decision deeply, because in those remaining months I became more depressed and anxious, and more reliant on somebody whose psychological abuse will affect me for the rest of my life. (N.B This person was not a bad person, and if he is reading this I urge him not to contact me in self-defence. There is no more to be said.)

Of course this time is different. That was eight years ago. I was eighteen then, and shy. This time I am going to live with my grandmother, who is a lovely, caring and fun person to be around. I keep telling myself that the awfulness of Paris will not come back. I am a grown up (well, ish). I have travelled the world, performed in the strangest places, talked to innumerable strangers and faced a lot of fears. I am different now. There are (two) people in Manchester who already love me, so if it takes a bit of time to make friends then I still won’t be alone.

London has beaten me and I am running into the arms of another. But, but. Oh, I have had some good (great, amazing) times in this city. I do not want to run from it feeling sad. I want to remember how incredible London can be, and when I visit (regularly) I want it to still feel like it is partially mine, that I will always be a Londoner, really. For the last three weeks I am going to re-capture the spark. Take risks and live the London life I always felt that I should be living.

I am excited about moving: eager for change and reinvention (and a bit of a rest). It will be amazing to be able to see Ben more often. Wow, I am excited.

I can believe I am going.

I can believe I am leaving London, but I am not gone yet, and there is a part of me that will never quite be gone.

I have three weeks to conquer London in a way that I haven’t felt able to do for the last four years.

Suggestions welcome.

The Night of the Senses

2008-09-19T12:05:00.003+01:00

I could have summed up my last post thus: estate agents are wankers! Hooray! They are in the same box as recruitment consultants. It is a box marked “Cocks, etc.” and sits next to my enormous costume jewellery collection, just underneath all the crayon drawings of ponies.

Nearly a week has passed since my jaunt at the Night of the Senses Ball. Compared to the Rubber Ball the weekend before, it had a much kinder, more bewitching atmosphere. The Rubber Ball was more edgy, more dangerous and dark (like being in The Matrix, in that lots of people are wearing black, shiny stuff and I was never quite sure what was going on).

The Night of the Senses was, as the name suggests, a lot more sensuous. It was decorated with care, all velvet drapes and twinkly lights. Mass in Brixton is full of little cave rooms, a dimly-lit and twisting venue with alcoves and corners everywhere. Spread over a few levels, it was easy to get lost, but, unlike the Rubber Ball, getting lost and being alone was not an invitation for others to stalk you as prey. I wore a black velvet corset, a pink tutu and a pink and black fascinator. My friend Lily had on a lovely black dress with a real and lovely corset, with a lilies tucked behind each ear. One woman was dressed only in a tiny lace waistband, accessorised by endless blonde dreadlocks. There were people in rubber things, lace things and leather things. All sorts of people wearing all sorts of things.

I had brought my amp and microphone with me, so when I arrived Bob showed me where to store it and went at once to get me a gin and tonic. We then went off to the photo booth to get some photos taken. For Bob’s story of his day/night/day, and some pictures of us, you can go to his blog (you will need to scroll down a bit).

I watched the Erotic Awards show, sitting at a distance from Lily, who was on the judging panel and therefore could not be influenced by mere observers. I sat next to a couple who told me that they come to the Night of the Senses every year and love it. The woman was wearing a sparkly white corset and beads in her blonde hair, and the man had on a top hat and black waistcoat. They looked fabulous, but their demeanours didn’t seem to match their exteriors. As I chatted with them I felt that they were shy. They watched the acts intently, clapping politely at the end of each as I whooped and cheered enthusiastically. One act involved a woman picking the feathers from her fan and sticking them through the skin on her arms and breasts. The feathers turned out to be needles, and the act got increasingly dark. Bubbles of blood appeared and then smeared over her skin as she took the needles out and danced on the points of her feet to Swan Lake. I turned to the woman next to me and she wrinkled her nose at me. “I don’t like this” she said, as her partner shook his head and frowned. “Too much” he agreed. I felt unfazed, fascinated by the darkness of her performance. I wondered what drew the seemingly nice and normal couple next to me to this event every year, and reflected once again how much more inclusive it was than the Rubber Ball. There, a needle through the arm would have seemed trivial.

After the show Lily, her friend Raf and I wandered around together. We went outside to the marquee. We came back in. We talked to people and explored the different rooms. We hung around, and I sang. I sang in the Sensuality Chamber, otherwise known as the Couples’ Room. A room where anything goes.

In what will probably go down as the weirdest gig I have ever done, I sang for ages. There were some bongos, and at times people picked them up and jammed along. For the most part, though, I sang on my own. I sang my own songs and jazz standards. Songs from the shows. I made up songs. At one point a girl came over to me and asked me what my “status” was. She pointed across the room to a dark haired girl wearing a nurse’s outfit. “My friend thinks you’re beautiful and asked me to find out.” I told her that my status was “most definitely taken”, and she shrugged and smiled. “Cool. Well can you sing a song about my friend, anyway?” I asked what her friend’s name was and obliged, singing a whole song which, of course, I have now completely forgotten.

Around me people were doing all sorts of things. For the most part I was in my own world, so happy to just be given license to sing and sing and sing. A couple watched me, not engaged in activities of their own. A man and a transsexual woman. The woman watched me closely. I sang one of my own songs and she clapped sincerely. “That was one of mine” I said, into the mic.

At the end of the night she came over to me. “The songs that you had written were the best ones” she said, clasping my hand. “Don’t stop doing this.”

It was one of the best gigs I have done. I sang whatever came into my head, and it was so liberating. I felt confined by nothing. Perhaps the permissive atmosphere of the room had freed me from fear of judgement for my singing in the same was that it had freed others to express their sexuality.

Lily and I made our way back to my house at about seven on Saturday morning. We sat in my garden for a bit before going to bed and talked about the night. It had been beautiful. I will remember it as being the strangest but best gig I have ever done.

Fury

2008-09-15T17:16:00.002+01:00

(I have a big post to write about the Night of the Senses ball on Friday night. It was a very different atmosphere to that of the Rubber Ball last week, but still brilliant. At one point I was standing on a stool in a room full of people in various states of undress and debauchery, singing Life Is A Cabaret from Cabaret in impassioned tones through my microphone as a semi-naked man accompanied me on the bongos. There is something I need to say first, though.)

Back in 2005 I had a nasty experience involving an unwelcome visitor in the flat in which I was living at the time. I wrote all about it here.

Fast-forward three years and that experience is a fading memory. I do, however, feel I have a heightened sense of security and privacy as a result. When alone in a house, even in my parents’ house, I still do find myself sitting still and rigid, listening for evidence of some malevolent intruder.

After the ball on Friday my friend Lily stayed over at my house. By about midday on Saturday we were still under the covers, discussing the night before amid glorious girly giggles. Each of us in one of my night dresses and sipping cups of tea.

The door bell rang. I looked up from tea and chats, confused. In central London people don’t just ring doorbells. They call first to announce themselves. Perhaps, I thought, one of my housemates had left their key and their phone somewhere, and needed to be let in. I got out of bed and started looking for my dressing gown to put on. Taking my time, still chattering with Lily, I left the room.

I started making my way down the stairs, then stopped, frozen, halfway down. A startled-looking teenage boy stood in the hall, facing me. The front door was swinging open, wide onto the busy Brixton street.

My brain leapt to a reasonable explanation. The door had been left open and he had been ringing the bell to alert us to the fact. Something reasonable. Laughable.

Then I saw the key in his hand, and walked down the rest of the stairs.

“What are you doing?” I asked, simply.

“Um, yeah. I rang the bell.” He gestured towards the door as if to illustrate this point.

“Right.” I pulled my thin dressing gown around me as realisation dawned. “Wait, you have a key? Why the hell do you have a key?”

It transpired that he was from an estate agent down the road. Not, I hasten to add, the estate agents that we are with. Different ones.

“The landlord said we could come in and do an evaluation.”

“Oh” I said. “Did you have an appointment?”

“Nah, but the landlord, said, like, if nobody answered, just come in.”

I rarely lose my temper. I am rather good at sulking, at brooding and thinking dark thoughts, but I cannot remember the last time I truly lost it. Those times are indeed rare, but this was definitely one of them.

I went, for want of a more sophisticated phrase, completely mental. This moronic teenager stood there, backing out of the door whilst I told him exactly what I thought of his estate agency, of the landlord, and of him. I raved at him, a wild woman with insane hair and not very many clothes, feeling righteous anger bubble and pour tumultuously from my mouth.

Eventually I let him go, acknowledging that if he had been told to let himself in then he wasn’t solely to blame, but also in complete disbelief that anybody could be so stupid as to let themselves into someone else’s house without permission.

Then I called my estate agent. They weren’t there (it was a Saturday) so I told the answer phone what I thought. I was so, so angry and I told them as much. I wanted, I said, to know exactly what had happened, and for them to call me first thing on Monday morning. First thing.

They, of course, did not call.

At ten thirty this morning I called them. I was put through to a dismally stupid-sounding woman called Kelly, who informed me in bored tones that they had called my housemate, Ed, to apologise to him. Had I not spoken to him? “Yeah, he’s our point of contact, Lee-oh-neee. So we called him.”

I explained that I had specifically told them to call me. That they had my number, and that I had left it in the answer phone message just in case.

Then Kelly, having clearly run out of brain cells for the week, saw fit to tell me off for my tone of voice in the answer phone message. Instead of apologising profusely for a massive error on the part of her company, she decided to chastise me for reacting to it the way I did.

“I can understand it wasn’t a nice thing to happen, Lee-oh-nee, but we are looking into it and your message really upset the girl who checks the answering machines. There was really no need.”

For someone who doesn’t often lose my temper, it was an odd sensation to have twice in the space of three days.

“How dare you tell me off for my tone of voice when thanks to you I came downstairs to find a strange man in my house. I refuse to be spoken to like that.”

Kelly, in her infinite wisdom, thought best to tell me off a bit more.

The rest of the conversation was the most aggravating one I have had in a long time. Being reprimanded by someone with the intellectual capacity of half a slice of ham, and having her whining, patronising tones slithering down the telephone at me was too much to bear. I hung up.

So, what to do? We have two months left on our contract in the house (a contract that clearly states that they must give us twenty-four hours notice before a visit, and that we have a right to veto that visit). My housemates were not there and have not had the same previous experiences as I have. They are, needless to say, not at all as upset about the whole thing as I am. However, entering a house without permission is breaking and entering, whether it is by means of a key or by means of smashing the front door in. I know from painful first hand experience the possible consequences of having a stranger in the house.

I want an apology for that, as well as compensation. I know it shrieks of this hysterically litigious society we’re in, but I am deeply upset by it. I also want an apology from the estate agent Kelly for treating me like an errant five year old and not calling me immediately to discuss what had happened.

Please let me know what you think. My past experience has made me more sensitive to this, but no matter which way I turn it I cannot see that I am being over-sensitive.

Seriously In Need Of Some Kittens In Cups

2008-09-10T15:46:00.004+01:00

Last weekend I volunteered at the Skin Two Expo, handing out flyers for the Night of the Senses ball that is coming up this Friday in Brixton. The ceremony for the 2008 Erotic Awards which will comprise the first part of the evening, and then the party will start. The ball has been an annual thing for the last twenty years, and usually attracts about nine hundred people. The exhibition was a fetish/alternative fashion exhibition in the Students’ Union of UCL, and I was helping out with a lovely gentleman by the name of Bob.

Over three floors, the exhibition was large and varied. There was clothing (primarily leather, latex and lace), toys, swings, whips. Photography. Things that buzzed and whirred, crackled and hummed. People selling cakes shaped like naughty things and naughty things shaped like cakes. A woman dressed as a dog, curled up in a cage, waiting for her master (sporting jodhpurs and a frilly shirt) to take her out for walks around the exhibition.

Our stand was next to the doggy-cage, just opposite the bar. Posters for the ball were laid out on our red, crushed velvet table cloth, along with information booklets for Outsiders, the charity for which the Night of the Senses raises money, and a trophy shaped like a large golden penis with wings. The trophy is an example of those awarded to the winners of the Erotic Awards, one of which my friend Lily won a few years ago for her burlesque performance (she is now on the organising committee). Bob fetched some drinks and we sat around chatting for a while. I learned that he had been helping organise the ball for the last twenty years, and that it has gained a reputation for being a very welcoming event, open to all. Not arrogant, not posey, just a place where people can go to explore their alternative, true selves. The more I heard about it the more appealing it sounded and the happier I was to be helping out. As we chatted I sipped my gin and tonic and looked around. Music poured out of a nearby speaker. At the tables in the bar all sorts of people congregated, laughing and talking, soaking up the energetic atmosphere.

Bob and I decided it would be best for me to walk around, exploring and flyering.
I wore black skinny jeans, a corset and gold accessories (make-up, shoes, belt, and necklace). I wandered around, handing out flyers and chattering to people about the ball, about the event, about life, the weather and everything. People were dressed up and down and everything in between: masked, costumed or casual. On the first day I watched the fashion show in the main hall. Cameras flashed like strobe as the models walked on stage in their weird finery. Dresses that looked like they were vacuum-packed, hooped corsets, wings and zips and chains. A man with a mohawk bent a woman across a chair and flogged her with a ten-foot long whip. Things were decorated with buckles, feathers and fur. The models writhed and pouted, sometimes enacting a fetish fantasy and at others standing, hands on hips, smouldering at the crowds.

As the afternoon continued I was asked over and over if I was planning to attend the Rubber Ball that evening, in the SE1 club near London Bridge. I was informed that this was much more of a hardcore event than the Night of the Senses next Friday. The sort of night where people go to show off their rubber finery, in all its forms. I hadn’t heard about it, but was offered a free ticket (a considerable mark-down from the usual £35) and, in the interests of new experience, accepted.

Once home, though, the excitement dissipated. Tired and aching from the day, I made some dinner and ate it, thoughtfully. The prospect of leaving my warm house at nearly midnight, to make my way in the dark rain to the cavernous arches of London Bridge and the SE1 club, filled me with a weary dread. No, I decided. I wouldn’t go. I would watch some television, drink some tea and get a good night’s sleep before the next day of flyering. It was the sensible thing to do, and I was exhausted as it was. I moved to the sofa and started to flick through the TV guide.
My phone beeped.
“Hey Léonie. We’re getting to the club for midnight. Can you come? It’ll be cool. See you there!”
I stared at the message for a bit. Standing up, I sighed. I had two hours to get ready and get there.

Made up of some the arches that crouch underneath London Bridge station, SE1 is cavernous. The rooms continuously branch out from each other, leading you through a brickwork labyrinth of enormous, dark spaces.

A seven foot being encased in rubber strode past, with only eyes and mouth visible. It was difficult to tell whether it was male, female or indeed even human. People were naked. Others were strapped and chained. As I walked around submissives fell at my feet, begging me to be the dominatrix. I stepped over them, no desire to play that game. There were performances and dungeons, although it was difficult to tell one from the other at times. I hung out with the people I had met during the day, and some I met there. Some had been on “the scene” for ages and others, like me, had never been to anything like this before. At times I clung to those people. To be in such a charged atmosphere whilst being completely unavailable was at times difficult. Never in my life have I received so much male (and at times female) attention. I was very glad to be able to tell people that I had a boyfriend, that, no, he wasn’t there but that it made no difference. Smile, walk away.

I got to bed at about eight o’clock the following morning. The party, the after-party, the Sunday morning tube journey.

By four o’clock the same day I was rushing down Tottenham Court Road. Late for my flyering duties, back in my corset.

Breathlessly I rushed up to the stall, and upon seeing me Bob leapt from his seat.
“I’m so sorry...” I began, but was cut off.

“They need someone for the fashion show today! I said you might do it? Do you want to?”

Images from the previous day’s show flashed through my mind. The cameras, the posing. I inwardly shrugged. It was, I supposed, a weekend of new experiences.

“Yeah, ok! Where do I go?”

I was dressed by a blonde woman with sparkly lipstick. A corset with purple trim, a short, leather skirt and a fascinator in my hair. I would be modelling for a company called B Barbarella.

Without even having a chance to look in the mirror I was rushed backstage, where the models for all the different designers were waiting on the stairs. Lounging in their wild outfits, I was put next to a sullen-looking Asian girl with immaculate hair and tattoos all over her shoulders. The feathers began to slip through my messy mane even as I roughly pushed the grips back in place. The girl was to be going on stage with me, just the two of us.

“So what do we do?” I asked, urgently, as my corset strings were being tightened.
She shrugged. “You know. Walk on, then to the front. Pose. Then walk round and, like, pose, sexily, on the chair shaped like a shoe.”

I took as much breath as the corset would allow.

“Right. How long do we have?” Please say thirty seconds. Please.

“Oh, not long. Only about, like, four minutes.”

Resisting the urge to laugh hysterically I turned to look at the rest of the models in the queue. I watched one girl run the four flights of stairs from the dressing rooms to the stage whilst encased in a knee-length rubber dress. Another was telling her friend how she gets a rash on her upper lip from wiping away the sweat that comes from wearing leather and latex under stage lights. The man with the mohawk was there, his whip coiled around his arm like a giant, tapered snake.

Suddenly it was our turn. The other girl sashayed onto the stage as I stood and waited, shoving the fascinator desperately into my hair.

I walked into the lights and to the front. Posing, pouting. Copying. Staring into all the lenses of all the cameras and trying to suppress the feeling that I was a twelve year old imitating the glamourous ladies from Vogue. The seconds ticked slowly as the feathers slid down my head and over my face.

Hold your nerve, I told myself. Don’t show the fear. Keep going. Relax. Resist the urge to roll your eyes. Resist the urge to run.

“B Barbarella!” exclaimed the hostess after what felt like years, giving us our cue to leave the stage. In the wings I turned to my sullen partner, but she had disappeared. I walked backstage to a mirror and stared at my reflection and, looking at the feathers jutting out the side of my head like some kind of vision-impaired exotic bird, burst into peals of laughter. I did an impression of myself posing like an idiot and laughed until my sides hurt. People, I thought, just took pictures of that.

Off-stage I walked back to Bob, who took some pictures of me in the outfit and told me I had looked great. I laughed, not at all believing him but appreciating the comment anyway. Modelling, I think, is not my thing.

I retrieved a gin and tonic from the bar and sat down. I went to the toilets to change back into my own clothes. There were some other women in there and I chatted to them about the fashion show, telling them about it laughingly, until one of the other models came in and I was silent, not wanting to show my amateurish status. Although, I reflected, it was probably fairly obvious from the fear in my eyes.

The hours trickled on and before I knew it I was back home on my sofa, sipping tea and waiting for Monday. Relieved to be out of my corset, out of the shoes that crunched at my feet, but holding onto the exhilaration of new experience. Shutting my eyes and revelling in the thrill of adrenaline sparking still.

(Bob's take on things and some pictures...)

Bob has sent me over some pictures. Here I am in my fashion show outfit (I think the fascinator grew wings and flew off):

Cash and Curry

2008-08-28T09:38:00.004+01:00

At about one this morning I was standing around watching three jazz musicians argue about how best to get a drum kit into the boot of a car. They were standing around in various ponderous poses, quietly contemplating matters before all suddenly leaping into action to try and fit more in. I waited, patient and tired under the street lamps.

We had been paid for the gig with a curry, some drinks and a grubby ten pound note each. Underselling ourselves, perhaps, but it had been fun. When we had arrived at the little café/bar in London's borderline-insalubrious Catford, it had been filled with clusters of be-capped youths shouting to each other over the tinny RnB pulsating from the speakers. As I set up my PA the amplifier kept buzzing loudly, screeching angrily every time I plugged it in. Each time this happened the groups of kids turned at looked, laughing loudly and calling comments, and I turned slowly redder. Martin and I were just concluding that there was something wrong with the plug socket when a tracksuited man shambled over. He sniffed. "Hey baby!" he said to me, leaning back and looking at me through narrowed eyes. "Have you got the X-Factor? Ha ha ha ha!" I laughed vaguely and turned back to switching off the equipment. The man sniffed again and turned his attention to Martin, who listened as the stranger launched into a protracted tale of woe, revolving around the fact that he had one hundred and seventy one firearms convictions (one of them, apparently, was not even a firearm! It was a machete! O, the injustice!) and therefore had a curfew from his parole officer and could not stay and watch the gig. The clock ticked as the man chattered, his sentences punctuated only with the occasional sniff and wipe of his nose. Martin stood rooted to the spot so I flicked the switch again and a loud howl of anguish emanated from the speaker, causing more laughter, but a thankful distraction. The man forgot his self-pitying monologue and patted me on the arm. "Can you even sing, baby?" he growled, eyes shining. I ignored him and turned to the sound mixer. He nudged me again. "Nervous, are you? Are you any good? Let's hear you!" I turned my back. Martin did the same as I felt the anger bubble up. "Fuck off" I muttered under my breath, then suddenly regretted it, picturing the headline "Girl Killed In Coke-Fuelled Machete Frenzy After Accidentally Swearing A Bit Too Loud". Luckily for me, he appeared not to hear and, after a few moments, man slid away, presumably to talk to someone else. A lot.

The gig was cool. The crowd became less of a crowd and more of a small group, but they were nevertheless appreciative and clappy. The kids had sloped off, having finished their shared Diet Cokes. We played for two hours, pausing only to eat some delicious curry and accept drinks. The band (piano, bass and drums) were really good, and I felt that we worked together really well. The bar lady was happy because we played her favourite song (That Old Black Magic) and the rest of us were pleased because we tried out some new tunes, and some new versions of old ones. I arrived home at about one-thirty. The car journey home had included a particularly delicious moment when, whilst paused at a junction, we had looked up to see a woman in an upstairs window, energetically playing a solo boxing game on her Wii.

Today I am a bit tired, but tomorrow is my last day at this job so I can cope. I am casting about restlessly to try to work out some kind of great Last Day Rebellion, but honestly I have had so many temp jobs and therefore so many Last Days that after a while it just loses its thrill. There's only so much stationery one can usefully steal.

On Saturday I have another gig. This time it will be a private one, and therefore much better paid, but I suspect it will not be as fun as last night. There is always someone who makes a hilarious joke about the X-factor and so makes me want to kill them. I suspect that even if I did a gig in Buckingham Palace itself there would be some wisecracking footman doing a Simon Cowell impression.

I am off now to scout for things to steal/systems to alter slightly/salt to put in the sugar pot. Don't let anyone tell you that I am not a rebel.

Notice

2008-08-22T10:36:00.004+01:00

"...next Friday. Um, sorry it's not with more notice, but... I'm leaving."

The manager looked at me with her bovine eyes, staring but not seeming to see much at all.

"Next Friday? You're leaving?"

I nodded, affirmative.

*********************

On Tuesday night I arrived back to the night-glittering arches of St Pancras station, having left it the previous week. Paris had been warm and humid with occasional hammering rains. Sophie had met me from the Gare du Nord, a little blonde head bobbing around in the gaps between other people's shoulders. A bendy bus took us, snake-like, to her tiny studio flat near Montmatre, currently occupied by four people. I was to make a fifth.

That evening her friends came over for a drink, which turned into a tiny apartment party. The balcony looks over what seems like thousands of windows, behind which thousands of lives unfold. At some point during the evening some of Sophie's neighbours decided to put a light show on the opposite wall. From four tiny spots on their balcony bursts of colour wheeled around a whole building face, picking out patterns and pictures as we watched in wonder, glasses in hand.

The following day Soph and I headed off to meet some of her friends who were to give us a lift to La Route du Rock festival in St. Malo, Brittany. Five hours later we were unloading, cut corn sticking like broken spokes under our feet. We set up the tents with only minimal bloodshed and recrimination, and, under darkening skies, made our way down the tree-edged path to the main festival.

There was one stage on site, but in the fort town of St Malo there was a beach stage and an indoor stage as well. Over the next few days we listened to music in a field (mostly), on a beach and in a hall. The music was not always to my taste. I spent quite a few hours staring forlornly at some men with shiny guitars trying to work out what made them different from the earlier men, who had identical haircuts, confused profundity and shiny, shiny guitars. Whilst Sophie and her friends enthusiastically discussed the different bands, I was forced to stay silent and wonder how I could once again say "I didn't love it" for the eighth time that day without sounding like Sophie's over-negative, boring sister. Sigur Ros, though, were incredible. Their music poured out from the stage, eerie and wonderful. I wondered whether they perhaps were from another world, with their peculiar words and air-infused tones. The rain sliced down while they played, capturing the bright sweeping lights and upturned faces of the crowd.

We went in the sea and walked along the ferocious-looking stones of France's northern coast. Sophie and her friend Zoe stood by the water's edge picking out shells from the sticky wet. I sat quietly and dug both hands deeper into the sand, pushing and watching the grains clamber up my arms.

A few days passed, and soon enough it was time to go home to Paris. We had drunk and danced, eaten meals of crepes and cider and listened to more guitar bands than I knew existed. As well as Sigur Ros I liked Notwist and a DJ set in the middle that involved some hip hop and a bit of drum n bass. Truly, I am street.

I was relieved to arrive back at Sophie's little flat (adorably named "The Pocket"). I had seen too many chemical toilets in the last few weeks and was craving a bed and a clean shower. Food that hadn't been rained on and clothes that didn't all reek with the death smell of the inside of a dirty rucksack.

The next few days were lovely. Perfect. Sophie, her friend Evie and I sat around drinking coffee, and I basked in some much-needed quiet time. Evie and I read books while Sophie worked on her new project. (It is a very exciting project! All sorts of cool things going on. I urge you to go and read, and help if you possibly can.) On Monday Soph went to her teaching job for a few hours, and Evie and I took our time getting dressed to saunter out into sunny Paris. With leisurely ease we browsed some book shops before heading to the Marais area, where we sat down outside a little café and chattered over some espressos. People wandered by frenchly and the air was warm. All that was missing was a rendition of "The Sun Has Got His Beret On" played on an accordion by a nonchalant passing Jean-Paul. Sophie came to meet us and we spent the rest of the afternoon rifling through vintage shops for bargains. In one shop that seemed like it might burst with musty clothes and fading baubles I bought two dresses and a red belt. We had a cocktail and headed back to the flat.

The rest of the time was lovely. On the Eurostar on the way back my smile was hardly even wilted by the noises of the raucous hen party discussing how best to get the cork out of a bottle of rosé with just a lipstick and a stiletto shoe, or the awfully well-spoken chap who insisted on reading, in his best Radio Four voice, large chunks of the Paris guidebook to his rather vacant-looking wife. (I am not sure quite why he would want to do this on the way back home, but I assumed it was perhaps some kind of family ritual. One of those family rituals that lead to divorce and/or murder.)

I arrived home to Brixton with a renewed sense of perspective and possibly even purpose.

The next day I handed in my notice at work.

*********************

"...I know it's a bit short notice, and I am sorry for that, but. Well. That's just the way it is."

She continued to stare before swivelling her head back to face her screen. Manager and screen blinked together in dull rhythm.

"Right. OK, well, I suppose, you're a temp, so. OK, Leeeohneee."

(Some people just don't know how to pronounce my name properly. It's only the people who don't care who really bother me.)

Now I watch as people pass my desk and I don't care. The memory of the panic seems like a frozen film picture - I remember the image but I can no longer feel the earcrash lungcrush squeeze. In two months I am moving up North, but that is no reason to live out those months hating and hating, waiting for change. The change starts next week, but in me it has already started. I feel different, and am going to act on it.

P.S. Go to Sophie's site and look! Also help, if you can.

North

2008-08-10T17:06:00.005+01:00

I am in Manchester. This morning Ben and I got the train back from a festival in Leicester, where he had been performing and I had been sitting around variously supping coffee and wine, depending on the hour. His set was brilliant, as ever. Here is his myspace page, if you want to and listen. My favourite is Television Will Not Be Revolutionised, which is great, particularly if you are a fan of Gil Scott Heron. Also incredible is Excentral Tempest, whose poetry and performance is some of the best I have ever seen. While watching her perform I feel as if I have been turned to stone, unable to move or tear my mind from her words.

The festival itself was quite small. We wandered around hand in hand, occasionally getting a bit stuck in some mud. Ben and Excentral/Kate were on a panel poetry quiz game show. Before it started they both sat on stage, Ben grinning deviously and Kate looking as though someone was about to force her to re-sit ever maths exam she had ever done. Except this time she would have to be naked except for a pair of comedy, over-sized sunglasses. The game was very funny, though, and their team won. They came away with a shiny gold medal each, that had the word "WINNER!" etched onto one side. As Ben brandished his rather smugly I told him that having "WINNER!" etched on a medal around his neck was tantamount to having "LOSER!" etched on his forehead. Annoyingly, this did not seem to faze him.

Another act we saw left us both stunned and near to tears. Henry Rollins: rock star, songwriter, spoken word artist, human rights activist. An incredibly inspiring man. Listening to him should be mandatory for absolutely everyone.

I'm staying up here in Manchester for a few more days. At the moment Ben has gone to work and left me to idly hang about his house, blogging vacantly and having chats with his cat, who does have a real name but who, some months ago, I renamed Pony. This has, to my unending glee, stuck. Pony is currently standing cat-like on the bed, eyeing a balled up bit of silver foil suspiciously, as if it might at any moment spring up and attack him. This is a game Ben calls Space Mouse, and it does seem to be one of Pony's favourites.

(Am I really blogging solely about my boyfriend and his hilarious cat? Is this what it has come to? God. I loathe myself.)

On Wednesday early morning I am going to Paris to see my sister, who is looking even more impish since she cut all of her peroxide white-blonde hair off into a little pixie short-cut. We're going to a festival in Brittany to hang out listening to bands I will not have heard of, but who I will sometimes pretend to have heard of to look cool. I am borrowing Ben's tent, and am already wondering how I will break it to him that I have lost it/broken it/had to set fire to it in order to change the subject after a particularly embarrassing instance of band knowledge fakery.

Also this week I wrote a blog post on another site. You can read it if you want.

In other news: in October the lease on my house in Brixton runs out. I am going to move to Manchester. It has all been decided. I will live in my grandmother's spare room for a bit and see if I can haul myself out of this depressive fug into which I have slithered over the last few months. I will continue with the music projects I am involved in down in London, traveling back and forth on the train. In Manchester I will not have to be stuck in a shitty job to pay extortionate rent, so I will work somewhere nicer and have more time for writing and music. No more lunchtime panic attacks. New people, new ideas and, hopefully, new horizons. It seems very peculiar to leave London, but I need change. I have been miserable recently, and have hit a wall that has NO MORE written on it in bright black graffiti.

Now I am going to go and forage in the corner shop for some snackery, then find a film to watch until Ben gets back later on. The window is open in this room. The wind flutters in and lazily rustles the leaves of the tall plant in the corner. Outside Manchester hums and children play. The thought of being here makes me relax and let those change-winds flutter into my lungs.