So the flat being sufficiently warmed, we’ve started to get down to the business of living. This involves dealing to the backwash that bubbles up in the shower around our feet each morning. Mine is the first shower. Don’t start confusing yourself that this makes it somehow better. It’s still floating up from God-only-knows-where and lapping up against my skin. We’ve tried the coat hanger, the Draino and next it will be baking soda and vinegar thanks to the infinite wisdom of YahooAsk. Nick is off to get the vinegar now on the way back from the gym. After that, we’ve been told that boiling water might do the trick and failing that it’s a matter of filling the bath and then letting it empty; something about the pressure. What more could there be? A plumber, naturally, but we have such lovely landlords that we mustn’t bother them until it’s absolutely necessary. Or so I’ve decided.
The other chore is the toilet cistern. It takes an inordinately long time to fill and it’s just frightful. I don’t know about you but I tend to use it twice in one sitting – I’m a fan of roughage and sometimes that’s what it takes. Well, I’m sure that cisterns cannot be that complicated.
You might notice that it’s Monday night and I had said that I would take a seat in the audience of a lecture. Well, let’s imagine that I didn’t pike at the last minute and pretend that I worked late, as planned, and walked down to Russell Square to join the other avids. When I walk down to Russell Square I feel a sense of connectedness with the world. This being the setting for much of Woolf’s most brilliant Night and Day. I recommend it. Some is set further West in those suburbs. But here, the suffragette, Mary, has her offices where she works for free typing up pamphlets for one of the women’s causes and takes walks in the Fields and sometimes happens upon Ralph whom she loves. They’re not suited. You can see that he loves the heroine. I forget her name. What’s in a name?
When you walk down to Lamb’s Conduit, there is a small open space allotment-type area with goats and the like. Completely out of place. Thought-provoking…
I’m listening to the Dirty Projectors. They are playing at Coachella, which I’ll be attending in just over a month’s time. What a thrill!
Back at the lecture, we’ve found the door to the lecture theatre on account of the fact that it was clearly sign-posted. Academics are such careful creatures. There are a number of us suits. It’s so cold, we’re all sitting on our coats and it reminds me of an Odgen Nash poem about how women always tend to sit on their coats. If you’re not familiar with his work, I can recommend him to you. He makes me laugh. I promise you’ll be laughing too. Daddy sent me a LP of him reading his oeuvre. Come round and listen to it. Jon did. He brought wine and cheese. We also listened to The Wasteland and then watched my favourite Wes Anderson, The Darjeeling Limited. Such unapologetic pseuds! Needless to say, it was a riot. You needn’t bring wine and cheese. I used to have a “coming to visit? Bring a bottle of whiskey” policy. I dropped that policy during my temperance phase, lucky for you.
A long-limbed woman with dark rings under her eyes and shy public-speaking mannerisms, such as speaking too fast and throwing fingers up and down uncomfortably, is introducing the speaker and for the next hour I’m numbed by the fluorescent lights, projected slides and dulcet tones. The topic? Perhaps that there must be a court for grave environmental decisions and perhaps there is even a case for grave environmental crimes. Each country signs up to the creed, so why shouldn’t it be enforceable in practice?
Now, my views are that we’re all going to hell in a handcart. I consider myself lucky that people forgive me for joining in with the mode. That mode seeming to be that people live in houses on top of each other, produce a certain amount of carbon, buy food covered in packaging and go to their office each day (I shudder at the fact that I spend so long in an office – if you’d have told me that this was my future ten years ago… well…). On weekends they let their hair down by going to the pub, filling themselves alcohol, wake up the next day and keep house, pop off to lunch with friends, perhaps a movie, a museum, a walk through the markets and then back to the pub or home for a quiet night. Perhaps we put on our best clothes and meet with others to dance or something… personally, I wish I could spend my whole life dancing… We all jump onto our Facebook pages each day and see whether others are doing the same. On Twitter, we can follow our interests and when we tire, it’s to bed, alone or with another - in my case alone.
Is this your life? Best to join in. It’s the kind of life that your parents can be proud of. You’re a professional. You’ve got a job and a house and you’re not full of tattoos and drugs and piercings. Forget that tattoo hidden down there and that thing in my nose. This is why they brought you into the world. You’re their little experiments and you’re independent enough and at the same time a part of the whole. What more could be expected of you. Except perhaps that you all pull together to make sure that we don’t set fire to the sky and desecrate every single natural resource that we can find whilst turning a blind eye to poverty and suffering.
Isn’t it only human to focus on the positive, forget the negative? Wouldn’t it drive you mad otherwise? What would mother say if we all went mad from caring too much about one thing? Forget that it’s one of the most important things on earth and that’s a reality, not an idea or a philosophy. Set aside the fact that this one thing will be the end of us.
Wouldn’t it be nice to live without all these concrete and highway, footpath and building complications? I mean, how much do we need? Personally, I get along just fine without meat. That means I need nothing but a patch on which to grow some food. Silly really.
But then where would I get my record player to listen to my Ogden Nash? And where would I get my Ogden Nash. The technology gets me connected and the technology is fuelled by the battery made from that thing that they mine in China to the detriment of their natural resources. I think that I’m confused to want to be connected in this way and it’s sad that I long for it. Or do I? Remember, this is the “ironic blog” - emphasis on foolish pastimes.
And now I’ve come full circle, the lecture is finished and I’m walking back to the bus that will take me home.
I’m listening to Leonard Cohen singing about Suzanne. I met a man on my travels through Thailand called Jez. I say travels – it took me twenty-four hours to get from London to Koh Phanang and there I stayed put for one month swinging on a hammock reading War and Peace. When Dave arrived, he got me moving and shaking down to the beach nightlife, which we later came to rule, mainly on account of the fact that it was the low season and we’re terribly self-involved. Jez was a young fire-dancer. I used to be a fire-dancer perhaps ten years ago when the late-nineties hippy movement came to town. Pan, the Thai boy who was having a love affair with me although I took no part in it, built me some quarterstaves and I joined in the game as if I had walked back into the past. And the past was nice. I’ve written a poem about it, which I will post if you remind me. Generally it was nice because Jez turned his staff around his lovely shoulders and his lean muscles ripples under the flames and the moon.
Goodness, there was one night, the moon was so full and so resplendent and there was a ring around it, just like Coleridge’s poem and there could be no despair! The ring was so wide it took up the whole sky and the stars disappeared. Jez had downloaded the star charts onto his iphone so that we could explore them but to no avail because the ring had completely blocked them out.
I see sometimes that his Facebook profile photo is the mast that the proprietors of the bar put up on the beach, wrapped in fairy lights from an extremely foreshortened angle. That was the nicest holiday. I wish that I was there right now with him, listening to his odd theory about how, when I was having a midnight swim in my knickers, it looked from the shore as if I was walking on the water, and it just happened that Leonard started to sing about Jesus, walking on the water, and Jez balked at the coincidence and sought to celebrate it, finding that mere words just couldn’t serve his purpose. I like to think he was a romantic. I like to think fondly back, but sometimes, when I recall how sublime it all was, I can’t think about it any more because it hurts.
How dramatic. I sound like a phony. I “real phony”, I hope.
So sometimes, life is very nice. Tonight, I’m sitting with my back up against the heater. I have a very indulgent second glass of wine at my side and I’m mildly content but mainly ravenous for the weekend to come around again so I can smash it to pieces.
Nick has suggested that we find some cheap fun on Thursday night. Perhaps the weekend will start early. Until then, I’m sure that I’ll have some more mundanities for you. In the meantime, another poem:
Wishful light,
Careful night,
Winking time,
Laughing mine,
Catch my breath,
Shibboleth,
Post-modern,
Down-trodden –
Tine E Sign
Tres nonsensical. Tres Da-da. Don’t you agree?
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