bee feast

Ah, the soporific effect of the parental house, combined with staying up to watch all but the last ten minutes of The Shawshank Redemption and a windy wiggly two-hour drive that almost always makes me sick. Note to self: book driving test and in the meantime find a non-sadistic instructor.

Kaine has been dragged, if not kicking and screaming then pulling and huffling, into the kennels. (Actually he did the dragging himself so it doesn't count.) It's the first time he's been in a kennel since his nine months at the rehoming centre. I shall not twitter, though. I'm enough of a dog bore as it is. And he is too much of a momma's boy. Walks all over me. Climbs all over me. Dribbles all over me. Yes, absolutely time for him to learn some manners by being locked in a concrete enclosure and forced to listen to a cacophony of anxious yaps and threats of doggy violence which will transport him back to his previous imprisonment and make him drool copiously and leap compulsively up at the walls like a panther out of its panther mind in a zoo under investigation by the RSPCA.

No, he'll be fine. He is not people.

Hell.

Before leaving my house I thought I'd pick up the one and only decentish bit of jewellery I own, a brushed-silver little ingot thing on one of those chains that isn't a chain, as in it hasn't got links but looks like a very tightly-coiled and delicate spring. I got it last year or maybe the year before from my dear friend the Fellow Zombie (we met while volunteering as hem-hem background artists on that British romantic zombie comedy that did a bit well). She was working on a jewellery stall in Camden Lock market and I got it for more or less cost price. So I went in my drawer and it wasn't there. It kept not being wherever I looked, and there weren't too many other places it could possibly be. It was lost, and so was I.
The fact is that I hardly ever wear it, and when I do the chain-that-isn't grabs my hair and knits it into some kind of mat, but that's not the point. It was not where it was supposed to be, and then it couldn't be found. This scenario - thankfully it doesn't occur that often - really takes me apart. There's nothing like losing something you must have in your hand right now - the more inconsequential the item, somehow, the deeper this feeling goes - to make you feel adrift in a senseless universe. So I raged round the house feeling helpless. It's invigorating and draining simultaneously, like you're pouring fuel in as fast as it's schooshing out into a puddle.

Perhaps it should now be acknowledged that I have control 'issues'. But then I am also fairly big on chaos, the sense and order thereof and the need to surrender yourself to it in order to remain sane because you cannot take responsibility for everything that your life throws up. I should read about that. I'm so fucking ignorant. I really am. I was told this once by the Quaker, my terrifying yet wonderful solicitor boss. One of the other legal secs had a leaving do a few weeks after I started, and the Quaker and I huddled in a corner and bitched heartily about the girl I was replacing, who had given me seven shades of sneery snotty hell during the changeover. The Quaker got steaming drunk which was very funny. She quizzed me about my then bloke's psychology degree. "Where did he do it?" "Um, Durham or Cardiff, I can't remember which." "What was his specialism?" "Actually, I don't know."

She regarded me off-focus with half-lidded giant eyes behind big glasses.

"You're fucking ignorant."

As was bound to happen eventually I ran into Brief herself in town the other day - she chastised me, with total justification, for not being in touch. We agreed to get wine soon and as she said "put the world to rights, because it's been getting away with it in the meantime". We have barely a thing in common but then I have barely a thing in common with my oldest friend Kaito the man-eating accountant, and Boy, for that matter (although I fear I may have somehow pummelled him into my own image, buahaha - certainly his life is now made hell by punctuation malfunction where it wasn't before).

Did I have a point there? I don't know. Maybe that having nothing in common can be relaxing, and even if you can't be Yourself you can be another version of that which takes less energy to run.

London tomorrow, me and all my unsuitable clothes but without the lovely beigey strappy interesting thing that realistically was never going to work but I tried, Lord how I tried. I don't know if it makes me feel evil pleasure or simple dismay but there is no one I know who could carry it off that I could give it to. I must be allowed the odd mistake, though. I'm just pleased that I can enjoy going shopping now where it used to be misery. Things now mostly fit, and if they don't I know that it's the crappy measuring of high street shops rather than my own inability to conform to something. I've still got the handy shoplifter's gap at the back of new trousers, and they're too long, but it's tolerable and it doesn't give me the sinking feeling it might once have done.

Just let me remember next time that there is no point in strolling into M&S and blithely expecting to be able to purchase lingerie. I have bra-amnesia. I'll go into M&S or Top Shop or somewhere and start tripping happily through the racks until the same pattern asserts itself - la la la, ooh, that's nearly my size, it'll be the next one, la la - oh. Back to the As. Oh. Oh fucksakes. Stomp.

So me and my long-searched-for support will be in King's Cross tomorrow afternoon. I did get mistaken for a hooker once there when I was waiting for someone, jeans and not much makeup, but obviously some kind of new-Londoner nervousness and attempts to mask this with insouciance projecting as Get It Here. Belle de Jour never had this problem. Something amphibious approaching.

"Evening luv (yes he did say 'luv' as far as I remember, if I had been a hooker I might have said "ooooh you're a long way from home, new in the city are you? I might just sting you for all you've got then, did I say that, I only meant to think it")."

"Non-committal sound."

"Any business?"

"Shoo, shoo naughty punter. Begone and cease to stay, get utterly outly out."

I used to tell shifty men who I met and didn't like that I was a lapdancer called Rose. That was funny. Except for one time when someone called my bluff and claimed to know all the girls at the place I claimed to work at. Tee hee. I bluffed my way out intact. What fun. It's amazing how self-contained and capable and safe and solid you feel when you pretend to be someone else. It takes one or two details and your real self is locked up tight and you don't have to worry. Power, power. When it comes to lying I'm a total tourist, though, that's the only way I've ever been able to do it, when it doesn't matter.

It's nice being here, makes me ashamed I don't keep my place cleaner, although there's something Holiday Inn-like about an immaculate living space that makes me want to spill things on purpose. A certain degree of familial tension, thankfully nothing to do with me. (On a long ranting dog-walk a year or so ago I told my mum that mclusky had a song called 'Your Children Are Waiting For You To Die'. She laughed.) My sister is now thirteen and frightening, I don't ever remember being like that, but she seems happy and sturdy and ready for life.
Hoping to catch up with Pookie, which is what he used to call me but it's either that or 'Blumbleroogh' and that is too sacred to be thrown away on a nom-de-blog. So I hope to catch up with him, and to have the opportunity to say 'blumbleroogh', which term denotes a sense of pleasing drunken or otherwise substance-addled befuddlement, usually in a moment of calm between two roaring instances of decadence in a single evening.

I've got some squirming anxious feeling in my solar plexus. But I'm not sure where my solar plexus is located. I'm fucking ignorant.