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.

As the whiskey soaked in, it occurred to him that a spouse was the person who listened to the story of your life and who, making certain allowances, chose to believe you.

I love Jay McInerney. I'd put a link in there but I just found one to his first-hand account of TTEOSTE written three days later (harrowing) and one to a snotty Salon thing about how he's "the Dan Quayle of American literature". "'Story of My Life'", it snotted (in brackets even to denote its flimsiness as a work and even as a point in a snotty article), "was particularly thin". Damn swine. I know McInerney is lumped in with his mate Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahnuik (pron. 'Paula-Nick', apparently, and it gives me great satisfaction to know that) and Douglas Coupland as some trendy vacuous ponce-a-like, but . . . for fucksakes. I know critics have to make sense of the world in such ways, but I tried to negotiate around that as much as I could when I was one, and while good criticism can enhance your experience of art, so much of it is so lazy and limp and corrosive. It's even lazy to talk about 'lazy journalism'. I hated that expression so much. Hate, hatey hate.

But there's lazy and then there's blog-divertingly, bewilderingly crass. Last year I read 'Wasted' by Marya Hornbacher, this prodigious recovered anorexic-bulimic. I'm fascinated by eating disorders anyway, but her memoir was astonishing in its clarity and sense of responsibility and lyricism. Struck me that anyone of such galloping intellect couldn't have avoided succumbing to one psychological eruption or another. Such people have a very hard time finding their place in the world, and other people find them hard to accept. So I looked it up the other day and found some of the contemporary mag reviews of this brave and important book by this extraordinary woman including this one from Harpers & Queen:

‘The mind of Hornbacher is sharper than were her collar-bones when she weighed 4 stone, was given a week to live, and suddenly decided not to die. It is her 23-year-old body that was wasted by fourteen years of anorexia and bulimia. Her true story is painfully honest, analytical, complex and

No, shut up, look at your first clause, you fucker. 'Mind sharper than her collar-bones when she weighed 4 stone'. You just rendered all the earnest admiring glurge to come redundant, you posturing, blinkered, embarrassing idiot. You have lost touch with everything that is good and decent. Look, there it goes, your last shred of integrity, floating away on a sea of offensive bollocks like a burst lilo. Clear your desk and go into politics right now.

I wonder when the first Terri Schiavo book will come out. Someone wrote that she was being kept in a "persistent legislative state". A rare gem, that, the worthy and pertinent pun.

Anyway, Jay McInerney is as worthy as anyone. Never mind lazy journalism, consumers are lazier. They refuse to look past any conspicuous stylishness, flourish and foppery in books or music, and get to the good stuff, the stuff that stays with you. Some of the music that means the most to me (and I'm smart, discerning, I've read hefty books and listened to terribly serious music) is the glossiest pop. It can leak stuff that wasn't even put there by the people who made it. As for literature, it's tempting to dismiss simple sentences as trite or glib or inconsequential or naive or cynical but it happens occasionally that a nail is hit on its head with a resounding sob and some penetrating truth is pinned.

It never lasts. I haven't seen one example yet. But there's still this ideal in your head, you know, like a vision of a place you've never visited, but that you've dreamed about or seen in a movie you've forgotten the title of, and you know you'd recognize it immediately if you ever saw it in real life. It would be like going home, tired and whipped after a really long time on the road, if home was like it's supposed to be, instead of the disaster area it actually is.

Meanwhile, the sun is still shining, I've got nothing done besides pillaging the buy-one-get-one-free rail at Top Shop and taking the beast for a brief prowl. The pillage was committed whilst trying out new contact lenses (which are OK, I suppose, but I just had to take them out because they were trying very hard to mate with my corneas), and I didn't realise until I got into the changing room that I still had traces of orange dye around my eyes. Fumbling optometrist poked it in there with bits of sterile paper and observed that "no one else ever does that" when I blinked madly and orangey tears rose in protest. Well, I'm terribly sensitive.

I've had to consider today whether or not I'm generally successful in balancing near-complete transparency (I believe in it, but even if I didn't I would have to grudgingly concede to it because most of the time everything I'm thinking is blazoned on my dumb face, although I've been told twice in the last few weeks that I might as well be standing on a plinth in a square, much to my distress. . .must. . .reach. . .point) and discretion. Both of these are important if you want to be able to live with yourself and hold onto your friends (squander your cash, be rash, just. . .). Truth activity must be monitored closely. You can't just assume that, as a fundamentally nice person, you're going to trundle along the path of niceness with no hands and saying "ooh look, a curlew". No. You must. . .suddenly slip into the second person, which is rarely to be used unless you wish to avoid saying 'one' which is pretentious and archaic, or if you want to be accusatory in your tone.

Um, you have to take care. And read more Jay McInerney. And then wonder what happened to Tim McInernney. Oh, he did 'Notting Hill'. Bummer. No one deserves that.

Good grief. Look at this. I nearly got a job writing for those people. I'm sure I would have got sick of it very quickly, and also it would have been nearly impossible to get to the Lakes every day, but I was in my desperately-applying-for-anything-remotely-interesting period. Haven't looked at a job section for what feels like months of blessed rose-petal-strewn relief. Considered it briefly today, though.

After a slew of proper actual work, I've fallen prey to a bunch of timewasters. This is what you get for dropping your pay-per-click budget - pay a bit more and you get serious people who give you money in exchange for services; a bit less and you just get silly fools arsing about. Boy with dissertation wanted much detail about my work, including do I charge by word count of original document, or by number of errors found? "No, Person, I charge by the number of dots I can count on lower case Is and Js before I start to go dizzy." He ended up backing out because of something incomprehensible. Girl about to go to university wanting tips on essay structure. Someone else wanting to know how to get into proofreading as a career, runs her own business with husband but fancies doing something else. Right. Let me help! I bet you've got a dinky little portfolio of property, too, doncha? Why don't you go and ask your stuck-in-rental-trap tenants if you can borrow a fiver, damn you, and stop bothering me.

Eye test to see if my specs are to blame for my bout of crazed wobbliness yesterday - was so dizzy I couldn't even open my eyes when I was lying down for a while. Apparently my eyes are fine, hardly any difference. Which is good news, of course, but it still means that I'm ill with something inexplicable. Look, I refuse to die unpublished, OK? So you can just wait until I get my shit together to write something of worth, mysterious ailment.

Spent too much money on crap in town, but resisted the call of a nice dress. I have lots of nice dresses but they never see the light of day, or even the light of night. The one I tried on today was lovely except for its curious framing of my legs, which have never been my favourite thing but are now suffering a bit from lack of exercise. And paucity of sun, since circa 1988. I know 'transclucent' skin denotes some kind of angelic beauty but in my case it just means that you can practically see my shinbones. Plus I'm pathologically averse to wearing flimsy shoes.

I'm very happy that the weather is warming up and that I was able to walk home today in my top, but the usual sense of mild dread descends. The world will suddenly turn into one big Coca-Cola ad with girlies everywhere in little wafty dresses and sandals and me all awkward in the usual tit-scaffolding and leg coverings and overheated trainers and not a builder's van's honk to call my own. Although someone did honk me the other week. Yes, I am a good feminist, but I demand my share of honkage. Thank you.

Got home to find one of the usual strange children in the Pagan's garden next door - she has two of her own and seems to do childminding on and off, although she also has lots of friends with children (and dogs, they all have dogs, but NOT on strings, that would just be too much). This one was around six, and very friendly.

"Hello!"

"Hello there."

"I'm digging a hole."

"Are you?"

"Yes, we're going to plant seeds. Would you like to see?"

And we discussed mud and the ickiness thereof, and how much room dandelions need to grow. Children are so wonderful sometimes. The Pagan's Daughter is the most beautiful child, eight or so, spitting image of Drew Barrymore in E.T. only brunette, and she is so talkative and sweet and full of something like the innocence that has just ended up as pornographic roadkill in the pages of The Sun. But it only takes one horrible nerve-shredding screeeeaaaaaam from some brat in a pushchair to cancel out any affection I might be developing for small people as a species.

I lied, being single is a bit rubbish. The evening opens up before me like a big hole in the ground. I'm secure enough now to not care about the status of it, it's the practicalities of having nothing where once there was something. Well, I don't have nothing, I'm very lucky to have two new friends (providing I can hang onto them, please God/secular deity), but there's a definite sense of lurking dissatisfaction and loneliness just outside the nice comfortable campsite of the solitary-by-nature. I think it's just raccoons, not bears. It'll be a while before I can downgrade to squirrels.

That's the second time this year I've spent half an hour running around after a rabbit. Last time was at work, wild rabbit with myxomatosis, grabbed it with teatowel, put it in an empty paper box and took it to the vet to dance with the Black Rabbit of Inle. This time - alley near house, fluffy pet dwarf thing, finally captured in green jumper after much fannying about and conspicuous lack of assistance by one of my dear neighbours. Despite being about ten yards from my house, I'd tied the dog to a fence because I didn't want to lose sight of the critter, and strong as my arms are after a year of carnage-prevention I didn't fancy my chances trying to walk dog past rabbit to back door.

Rabbit having rabbity fun lopping around the bin bags didn't want to be picked up. More than once it lopped away from me, turned the corner and faced off with Kaine (whose EXTERMINATE face was rendered a bit less shit-yourself by his head collar squadging his mouth into a big smirk and one eye into a wink). It didn't seem to get the idea that it was literally staring befanged death in the face. Its little lettuce-munching life should have been flashing before it. But it seemed more bemused than anything, at least until Kaine went "WURRRRRR" and it went ". . ." and lopped off again.

Yes, so woman practically had to step over the thing to get to her gate. "Do you know whose this is?" I puffed, my grammar barely suffering even under stress. "No-oo." OK. "I've been trying to catch it." "Ohh." And fucks off. Every day I find new ways in which to hate people. If it'd been me I would have rolled up my sleeves, I would. Thankfully a couple of nice men did. One was passing and tried to help chase it in my direction, although he mumbled that he "wasn't very good with animals". It ran over his feet. Then another one of my neighbours appeared and succeeded in assisting capture. He showed me where he thought it lived, and said he'd look after it if there was no one in. There wasn't, so he's got it now. It's just as well the idiots weren't in because I would have scolded them. Like an old scold.

It's astonishing how little people give a shit about their supposedly beloved pets. Next door's crazed lurcher runs off all the time, isn't vaccinated and was only recently spayed (I didn't know before that there is actually a morning-after pill for errant bitches). I've tracked down the home of a wandering mutt and been greeted with "Oh, I didn't know she was out". Was aghast at a bloke strolling back from the park with empty lead in hand, saying "He's up there somewhere, I'm going to get the car and look for him". Tra la la la laaa.

As the owner of a brawly psycho-dog, that has got out once and has run in the road more than a couple of times, I can't really take any moral high ground. But for fucksakes, people, if you can't keep a hutch-dwelling rabbit from roaming, forcing passers-by with a conscience to get their nice jumper soiled with bunnystench, you should really stick to keeping giant African land snails.