back up blog

For seventeen days in a row I’ve eaten beans on toast as my main meal of the day. The deposit on my new flat, rent that is, quite frankly, extortionate, a splattering of unexpected bills, as well as putting money aside for the $10k savings target I’ve got , meant money was tight this month. So tight, in fact, that by Friday night I was down to my last £4. I dragged my feet sadly, despondently, to the supermarket on Saturday afternoon, knowing my coins wouldn’t get me very far. In a burst of optimism I checked at the cash point so see if I’d been paid early, knowing I wouldn’t have been. BUT AND LO AND FUCKING BEHOLD I had. I could hardly believe it! I’d been so poor for so long! I swiftly withdrew a crisp £20, before the cash point could decide it had made a mistake. After such a frugal few weeks, it was like having all the money in the world. I entered the sliding doors and went right to the jacket potatoes because: moneybags knows how to treat herself. I put it in a see-through bag, ...

My friends (“friends”?) are currently on a campaign to make me cooler r.e. music. This is largely because whenever we hang out I pretty much spend the whole time saying the same thing, over and over. Well. Whole time being the bits when I’m not starting sentences with and another thing about my grad school application . My friends are being very patient with me about that right now. ANYWAY. I spend a lot of time yelling, “Ooooh! This song everyone else seems to know the lyrics to is quite good, isn’t it?” The one time I said Drake’s new album was pretty rad everyone collapsed into hysterics because “WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH THE WHITNEY HOUSTON?” I am not known for being, as they say, down with those kids. I had to be reminded that my Spotify is linked to my Facebook, and so everyone can see what I am listening to, all day. And I do listen to Spotify all day, because my job is to write, and I can’t write when people are talking. That’s tricky when you work in all female ...

I can’t find the word. I think it’s respect. It might be admiration. Inspiration? It could be them all. My determination to phrase this exactly right is why I don’t ever seem to explain this to you properly. You smile, you get coy, you shift your gaze away and look very sad indeed when I try. I don’t want to make you sad. I want to tell you how perfect you are. Will you let me tell you how perfect you are? Oh Buddha, what you’ve been through. You’ve been a beautiful baby ladybird, bright and colourful and fascinating and almost ready to fly. A delight, a day-brightener, a smile warmer than the patch of light by an open door. And then you’ve been taken between thumb and forefinger at whimsy, examined, prodded half-heartedly, squeezed tight. Squashed. Left for dead. My treasured sunshine trampled on. All of those times I sat quiet, frozen, as it happened, I wanted to explain that this isn’t about you. I look to you for ways to be kinder. Your tolerance, the way you accept everyone – and ...

Darby I didn’t realise how much I’d missed you until you were lay out on my bed, spitting remnants of Cadbury Whisper as you yelled at me for picking a shit, depressing film with no plot , drunk on a bottle and a half of rose wine. I just has this moment of, God you’re my favourite. You’re my favourite even though you shaved off all your hair for charity and are bald . As you met me from work that day, coming around the corner in a hat that revealed no hair line, just scalp, I thought crikey. That’s. Hmmmm. You’re not cute anymore. And that’s not being mean that’s just true. A bit like when I had you take my photo with the picture of Naomi Watts dressed as the Princess of Wales when we went to see Diana and I got cross that you couldn’t take a decent picture of me , and ended up snapping PHOTOGRAPHY JUST ISN’T ONE OF YOUR SKILLS, OKAY? That’s true, too. We went back to your place and lathered up your head to get the bits you’d missed around your ears and down the back of your neck, an...

I said to my housemate last week, ‘The thing is, if I don’t do at least one thing towards my grad school applications every day, I hate myself when I go to bed. I lie there, and I think to myself, “You stupid pig. You say this is what you want, and you couldn’t even find an hour to add another 500 words to your writing sample today. You’re pathetic. You’re not worthy of a place on a program. If you can’t prove that you want it, you can’t have it.”’ ‘WOAH!’ my housemate said. ‘Alright then, Harshy McHarsh-son of Harshville. Calm down a bit.’ Also: welcome to my imagination, warm snuggly home of self-love and positive re-enforcement. The process I’m going through right now is… extreme. And I know exactly why: I’ve never wanted anything this much in my entire life. We bandy round dreams and fantasies about ideal lives, architect-ing futures where this perfect version of self meets precise version of environment, not really worrying what might happen if it comes true because that’s the poi...

You’ll arrive unsure of your shoes, but quite certain everybody knows you’re not from here. That will embarrass you. Everyone is a somebody with their hair, and their beard, and the way they upturn their trouser bottoms that way. London has a special kind of energy, like an older brother who has been travelling in Nepal this past year and now smokes roll ups and seems impossibly cool- he’ll chat with you, but you know there’s somewhere else he’d rather be. It makes you crave his approval all the more. You’ll try on different parts of yourself for size, figuring out which version of you London will like more. (It will take you almost twelve months to realise it’s actually you who has to decide which part of London you like more.) You’ll drink out of cans in Trafalgar Square at twilight, and shelter from the elements with an order of deep-friend courgette and a best friend one rainy Sunday in Soho. You’ll bump into a favourite writer one random Monday off Oxford Street, sit and look a...