back up blog

So I’m voluntarily between homes right now and I didn’t pack the right clothes. I have only the jeans I’m wearing, and shoes that don’t really match, but if I wear a headscarf with everything at least I’ll look like I have my PhD because everyone knows PhD candidates have great headgear? Did I mention I really wanna go back to university? I say it and then I change my mind and then I forget and remember and forget. Being homeless and travelling and reuniting with old friends reminds you of what you really want. I want to learn some more. I forget how nice it is to remember. * I left my old home on August 4 th , and my new home won’t be ready til the middle of September. That’s six weeks of sofa surfing, and it’s an adventure and crazy and home-is-wherever-I-lay-my-headscarf except not really because as kind and wonderful and amazing as the generosity of my friends has been during this transitory time, if they own matching plates I hate them. I hate them if they have a special place ...

I call her Vanilla Toes because at the end of every day, in our little shared hotel room, she’d take off her Toms to reveal thick, smeared tan lines across her feet. The Italian sun had coloured her all the way to the middle of her feet, so that her toes stayed Ben & Jerry’s cream, the polish she’d had done by an Asian lady for fifteen bucks back in Brooklyn chipped at the edges. “Fifteen goddamn dollars I paid for this!” she’d drawl, whipping out her iPhone to text home. She’s always on her phone. “What?” she’d shrug, as I rolled my eyes. “Can’t I have friends?” I never did university like everyone else. I didn’t land as a wide-eyed 18 year-old Fresher in a city far away from home. I didn’t spend three or four years drunk and bonding and working hard and playing harder. I took it all too seriously. I take everything too seriously. My university was, instead, four summers teaching out on the Riviera, in my mid-twenties. My “college BFF” is Vanilla Toes. I didn’t meet Vanilla Toes u...

You know what braveness is? Braveness is trust. Braveness is boogying in your own freaky way, sugartits. Braveness is knowledge. The knowledge that there might still be so much left to do, but so much has already been done. Look at you go! Braveness is faith. Braveness is having faith in yourself. Braveness is paying goddamn attention when it’d easier not to. I’d like to be braver- short of wearing spandex knickers and a cape to Starbucks there’s no greater way to feel like a motherlovin’ boss on the daily. So I wrote a list. I did it for me, mainly. But then I didn’t get round to Monday’s blog post because I got drunk and passed out in the wrappers of two cream cheese frosted cupcakes, waking up with my new contact lenses still in, and my eyes were scratchy, and my head hurt, and I thought to myself “Oh shit, now I have to tell the Internet that I’m totally drinking again, even after I swore off booze forever .” And then I fell back asleep. Still without having written a blog post. So...

Housemate wanted to share cosy three-bedroom apartment by Southwark station, on London’s Southbank, with two (caring, care-free, impossibly shiny haired) late twentysomethings . We’re a Gemini vegetarian writer and a Sagittarian celiac barrister, both of whom believe that a house is a home.  You’re probably a water sign: intuitive, imaginative and nurturing. You’ll have your own life, because lord knows we ain’t nobody’s babysitter, but you’ll also know how to integrate that life into two others to make a handpicked and dysfunctional London family so that nobody has to use post-it notes to communicate because yay for open and honest dialogue about who used the last of the milk! Kisses! Potential housemate should probably be down with a mostly quinoa and plant-based diet, though one of us eats steak like it’s a chocolate-covered snack i.e. all the time. If you’re lactose intolerant so much so the better, since we’d both like to reduce our dairy intake because urm, cow hormones much?...

I spent the weekend sleeping on the couch in my house. Except, it’s not my house. It’s my brother’s apartment; I don’t live there any more. A girl with the name of a flower has made my room her own. I gave her my key. It’s a rite of passage to make an East London council estate home when you first move to London, and I get why. It’s gritty, it’s edgy. The beer is cheap and the clothes are cool. It’s “keeping it real”. But I came home from a weekend away last month and there was a pool of blood by the elevator. That’s too real for me. I had to leave . So I won’t miss Crazy Caroline, the woman who lives opposite with a sign on her door saying “Please knock gently, this is a new handle” in childish scrawl. The sign has been there three years, they tell me. I won’t miss whoever plays marbles on the wooden floor of the apartment above my bedroom at 10 p.m. every night. Well. It could be marbles- it could also be extreme hotbedding. I won’t miss the Indian cooking smells that permeate the wa...

iPhone users are wankers. It’s simple fact. They text when you’re talking, leave it out on the table at dinner, and don’t know what to do with their thumbs when the battery dies. And the battery always dies. My circa 1998 Nokia C3 and I have been getting along just nicely, thankyouverymuch . We’ve prided ourselves on calling over texting, of learning how to read a map instead of following Google’s little blue dot, and of acquiring numbers over usernames. It’s been quite the point of pride, and one not hindered by the fact that underneath that cloud of iPhone judgement is the dirty little secret that until last year, when my bag got stolen in Rome , I was actually an iPhone Wanker myself. DETAILS WILL SELDOM GET IN THE WAY OF SOME HEARTY PASTIME JUDGEY-NESS IN THESE PARTS, FRIENDS. I’ve been jonesing for some smartphone lovin’ for a while now. Half of my favourite people live overseas and it’s hard to arrange a Skype date when everyone is home and able to talk and OH HEY I GOT HELD UP A...