My Face is One Big Ear

Call and entry system

This morning I had an appointment with a man who was coming to value my flat. When the entry phone rang, dead on ten, I heard a softly spoken polite man introduce himself. I wondered if he would be gay. There would be something nice about that, being able to chat away in my own home and it might somehow work in my favour. A gay man producing a good valuation (or was he doing a survey?) on my property for the bank makes me think that everything will turn out alright. I start to believe, if the man is gay then it is a lucky sign, though I tell myself I do not believe in signs.

First error: making a presumption from a voice.
Second error: thinking a gay man would of course be a nice person.

My mother brought me up to offer a drink to anyone that sets foot over my threshold within the first few minutes of their arrival. Remembering this rule, I grind some coffee beans while he travels up the seven floors in the slow lift and quickly make the flat smell of Continental coffee beans.
He arrives with a silver machine, a bit like a defibrillator. He looks gay, his face matches his voice - slight and precise, soft blue eyes, not exactly handsome, but not exactly ugly. His short neat hair is newly trimmed, graduated at the side and clean round the neck with a pleasing line which suggests sharp scissors. I offer him a coffee, finding pleasure in the way I can say 'I've just made some' as if I'm the type of girl who just makes fresh coffee, which I suppose I am. I present him the cafetière on the work top as if I am rich, which I also suppose I am, but only if in contrast this man is from the slums of Johannesburg. His eyes light up and I know I've taken him away from forming an all too speedy judgement about the state of my kitchen ceiling.

Not a moving photo

'How do you take it?' I say.
'Black, no sugar.'
'Snap!' I say, wanting him to see that we have something in common apart from the homosexuality.

Third error: looking to bond too quickly with the surveyor.

He asks me if it has two bedrooms, my flat.
'I know,' I think. 'This is where I mention the one bedroom with the one bed, but the absence of my partner today because she is at work. I'll use the word partner and slip in 'she' shortly after (long gone are the days where 'partner' was short-hand for gay. Though I've never liked the word partner, as it makes me think of cow-boys, but still, I use it.)
When I've said the two clues, he doesn't react but looks at his silver machine and draw on it with a blunt stick. Then he moves, and thinks out loud, saying something about a square?
'You live in a cube!' He declares finally, all pleased with himself when he takes out a remote control.
I never knew I lived in a cube, but now it's obvious. We stand near the kitchen window. Like most people he is excited that he can see Canary Wharf out of it, that there is city life somewhere not too far away. He unzips open the top of his jacket.
'I expect you get a lot of coffee,' I say, wanting a comment on it.
'You're the first today. Four appointments and you're the first one.'
'The problem is, they're not been brought up proper,' I say in an old lady cockney accent and look for a laugh, but one doesn't happen. This is the fourth error.
He goes into the hallway and measures a wall with the remote control. Then he comes back, presses a button and feeds the data into the silver machine. He picks up his coffee.

Twins - not lesbian mugs

'Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?' He puts down his mug, and I can feel the weight of something coming. He has not noticed that I gave him the good mug that my artist friend designed that matches the one in my hand (although it feels a betrayal to my girlfriend as they are officially our joint coffee mugs) I'm sure she wouldn't mind.
'No,' I say, sounding like I know I will at some point in the near future.
'Have you always known if you are, you know, like you are? I mean, when did you find out?'
This is twice this week I have been asked the same question. I know it is not because people are interested in me, it is because they are trying to work out something for themselves.
I think maybe I should show him the bathroom or the garden in an official capacity.
'I think I knew a long time ago.' I said.
'Do you think people can be bi-sexual?' he says.
'Yes,' the coffee has kicked in and I am enjoying myself. 'Of course, but it's vilified by lots of people and unspoken about by most. I think it should all be about who you find attractive anyway.'
'I used to be gay,' he said. 'I was abused when I was young and I was attracted to other boys. Then I hit puberty and I thought girls were more interesting, more beautiful. I saw a psychiatrist and she couldn't work me out. She said people didn't grow that way, that children couldn't be sexual before they had puberty, but I think that's wrong, because I was.' I think about telling him about the time I was in the Wendy House, but decide he has my girlfriend's mug, so I've already shared quite enough.

A Man enjoying a Lap

He talks and he wants to talk more than he will ever need me to respond. I can't quite remember how I find out in ten minutes that his girlfriend was abused, first by her father, then by her girlfriend who got her into lap-dancing and he thinks that's a type of abuse too, so she was abused twice. It was kind of like piercing a very large boil. Then when he says he met her in the lap-dancing club he tells me he was dragged along there ('dragged along' with all the other men who get 'dragged along' to lap-dancing clubs) but he is trying to tell me, he not a typical male, he's an atypical man, that he was only interested in speaking to the lap-dancers to make sure they were alright. One caught his eye, 'the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.'

Pre-Christian Fun

He tells me he read a survey of people who lived in Pre-Christian times. Ten percent were gay, fifty percent were bi-sexual and thirty percent hetero. I suggested the remaining ten percent were like my old Aunty Vera who had no interest in anything at all, but he hadn't got that his sum hadn't added up to one hundred.
He asks me what I do, why I need the desk and I say I'm a writer, of fiction, mainly. He says I'll download your book on my Kindle. 'Susan isn't it?'
'Karen,' I say.
Then before he goes I know he hasn't seen all of the flat. I am unsure what type of valuation he's going to give, but he looks down at my rug and looks sheepish. It is not a sheep-skin rug.
'You know my story would make a good book,' he says. 'I'm doing it in May. I'm going to write it all down, how I met the beautiful lap-dancer years later, when she happened to start working at the Bank of Ireland where I was working. I didn't recognise her at first, because she had been wearing a wig and didn't have many clothes on. There are so many coincidences that have brought us together. It'll make a great love story.'
'You must write things down,' I say. 'It's important.'

We go down in the lift and I show him the gardens and the BBQ area, not sure whether he wants to see this for his survey, but it's good to see the garden through fresh eyes.
He says, 'from the outside the building is so ugly, but now we're inside it's really lovely. How much are you going to charge to rent out your flat? Because, you see, I'll be looking for one in about a week.'
Then he is gone. I have his business card and have promised him I'll let him know when we are ready to rent out the flat. On the card is a drawing of a house with a roof made out the top of a giant mushroom. Because the drawing is slightly smudged it looks like it is falling through the sky.

Reach out and touch

So, physical things.
I have never written before about the bookshop in which I work. This is mainly because it has always been so well summed up by the Bookseller Crow himself, but after HMV going into administration last week I am left wondering, what are the things that will keep people coming into the bookshop above all else? What is it that a bookshop can provide which will make them survive the rough times, now that the physical is disappearing?

The Last Day of Woolworth in Penge High St 2008

After helping out on events, running workshops and the general clearing up of crisps trodden into the carpet, I can only think - it must be there in the writing, i.e. the printed, the holdable and then equally, the spoken, audible word. We all know you open up a book and find new lives and other worlds, and the same goes for when you use a K****e, but, the other day my friend's mum said that everything her husband downloads will be only 99p. He tries before he buys from the free pages, but really he'll get anything as long as it's on special offer. We've got one of those shops opening up Crystal Palace where Blockbusters used to be. Random, strange and enticingly foreign as these 99p shops may be, they are the physical spaces that have taken over from where Woolworths died. At least with a Woolworths you trusted that it only sold you what you wanted.

Books will bend your shelves

In a bookshop, when you hold a book, it will suggest, 'I dare you to try me.' Over and over, their spines are like fighters, or dancers, back to back, shoulder to shoulder. For the lucky ones their faces are turned outwards. The artwork (their brave fronts) pushes to convey their insides, like someone trying to show the complexity of their personality through their new coat.
When in a bookshop you look up from the page, maybe over at the counter, you might approach it and perhaps ask a question thereby allowing yourself to feel exposed. While talking you can't g****e to check the correctness of your responses, or to see if your memory is correct. You can feel passionate then blush, or inspired then energised or confused, or, the other extreme, you can confirm your learnedness and have that discussion leaving as fully plumped as a pigeon.

'Paradise' - do not read in a bar.

It is here, in the bookshop that things happen, physically. The book in your hand is not actually what you came in for, and you know you don't have any more space on your shelves and only enough money for a book or a bottle of wine, but you take it, because it is meant for you, today (besides there's a bottle of ginger wine under the sink). A book can be read in the bath, on a beach or on a lilo, you can put your finger in it, see how far you have to go, (or worse - how few pages you have left) write a message in it, drop coffee over it and still it will survive. It can do the rounds amongst friends and it can be waiting for you in a library for years. I have had books from lovers and strangers, friends but never foes. I have found them at hotels, on trains and in planes. I once used a novel to stop my face from getting sunburnt.
On the displays in the bookshop, I have watched books curl with the moisture from the rain then shrink with the dryness of the sun, over and over, open then shut.

Then there's the other function of bookshops: the space for thinkers, writers and wannabe writers.  I know how some people start to behave in bookshops, I've done it myself; they linger, they like to listen to the conversation between the person behind the counter and the person in front, to look at the synopsis on the back-sides of books and wonder 'How did they do that?' or 'Why?' 'Is it any good or is it just hype?' 'Is it shit?' 'Am I shit?' 'And am I angry because it looks shit, or because I know it isn't and I feel this because they have been published and I haven't?' In a bookshop you can say you thought that a novel was rubbish and someone else will chip in to disagree with you. In a bookshop there will be no internet trolls to hurt you when you have said what you think. We're not talking about just another review on A****n here. People will join in and people will spar. And this is good because you have to try to quantify your thoughts into words, in real time, and have an opinion, use actual speech to someone's face, or you will just lose face. On the spot. That's it! It's about being on the spot. Not hiding in a dressing gown with a screen heating up your lap, like a replacement cat, but being here, turning up, being who you can be or are, with the weight of the books all around you. It is the positive pressure to be better, read better, think bigger (or smaller with more detail) write with more knowledge. Get off your arse. Write something in the bookshop on paper, on a postcard, with a pen and leave it for me.


Come in, touch a book, give it a sniff and talk about it, or not talk, remain silent until you are ready to talk. Come back, buy it, come back. Talk. Think. Talk.

Because here in the Bookshop you are live on air!

Sexuality is fluid - but discussing it is dry

So...I'm somewhere between Jackie Clune and Tilda Swinton on this one. Not a bad place to be sat at the imaginary dinner party.

The other week on holiday in France I watched, for the second time, I AM LOVE.
It amazed me again, the fact this film took ten years to develop and find funding for. Just shows you what it's like out there trying to make something different, even when you are a 'name'.
When I arrived home to a sunny Gatwick on a Sunday afternoon, straight away I tuned into my beloved Radio 4 and listened to Jackie Clune talking about her long ago discarded vegetarianism and lesbianism. She's made a small journalistic career out of her past love life, and why not? There are many ways to skin a cat.

I met Jackie in the nineties when I entered The First Ever Lesbian Beauty Contest. I can still picture her backstage at the Cafe de Paris with steam rising from her curling tongs, with an all-in-one flared jump-suit. Jackie did the most fantastic impersonations of Karen Carpenter, so if you closed your eyes it could have been Karen C.
Jackie was an out lesbian for 12 years until she met a man and fell in love and had quartet babies. She'd realised by then that sexuality wasn't linear. She wrote a brilliant piece for The Observer about it, though gays and lesbians reacted badly, angrily lauding her as a traitor. I can see both sides- how can you fight so hard for something so true about yourself for it only to be noted that it might not be the whole story, or that you could also meet someone of the opposite sex and simply be wildly attracted to them? I mean how can anyone deny that you might contradict yourself one day because you find someone beautiful or funny or just downright unlike anyone you've ever met before? But, once you've taken all the trouble to come out, face your inner homophobe, shock your family, tell the world, isn't it disjointed to go back in and say well actually, I'm just like an everyday, 9 out of 10 person really? Jackie Clune's argument is that sexuality is fluid, but as far as her example goes, it's like that delicious American processed cheese - it formed, it melted and was pliable, then set and never melted again. Or will she shock us again with a new take on her love life when her babies are all grown up? I'm really not that worried, but the idea of 'hasbians' and 'yestergays' will always create anger because it confuses people. And just because you're gay, doesn't mean your liberal.

Now in I AM LOVE there is a lesbian daughter character. Tilda Swinton talks about the character as being an alien in the family, but not because she is gay, but because she is an artist, and artists are the outsiders in a family, unless you are from a family of artists of course, but I don't know any of those.

Yesterday, I moved into my artist's studio in Penge. I borrowed Mum's shopping trolley because I don't drive, and didn't want to ask anyone to help me move because it was about me doing it, on my own, with no one else taking part. This is my private space, not one to show off and say, look, how creative am I? I sat there and wrote a part of my new novel. All my dear inspirations are behind me; Cindy Sherman, Julia Darling, Ali Smith, Nan Goldin, backing me up, willing me again to dare to write the book that will change my life. I see them all as back bone, their spines visible with a quarter turn of my head; A L Kennedy, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Carol Shields, Richard Yates. The family.

This week I accidentally heard this and I think it's brilliant.

'If you don’t stand for something you fall for anything
Harder than you think, it’s a beautiful thing' - Public Enemy

The importance of glitter

After the party, on Friday night, after losing my cab to someone else, there are three of us, two sisters and me, covered in glitter in the back of a cab en route to Lewisham. We have not watched the Opening Ceremony to the Olympics but recreated a seventies disco upstairs in a pub in Waterloo. We had a Vogueing competition and M C Kinky (Feral is Kinky) performed electro ragga 'Everything starts with an E'. I read a 'This is Your Life' poem dedicated to my friend who was dressed in pink tights and no knickers with a mini glitter ball pinned so it hung down, between her legs, like an udder.
At one magical point, people sat on the floor and formed a long line to dance to 'Rock The Boat' by Hues Corporation (1973).


I like sitting between people's legs. There aren't many occasions where you can have physical contact with friends and strangers without it being seen as sexual. I'm all for it, being surrounded by legs, rocking back and forth, as enthusiastic as children who bundle on top of each other, slamming the floor with the palms of your hands; raising the dead, putting things to bed. This is why parties are so important. And this is why we will be resuming normal service soon with our arty party MOONA.

Spoon face painting table

My friend who is the DJ and artist of all things MOONA has always insisted that we keep our cabaret, arty-party nights free of charge. At first, I was frustrated by this, not being able to pay cab fares for acts, or having any money to buy equipment, or make money from entertaining people. But now, more skint than ever, in these days of commercial-dom (blah blah), where the commercial is favoured over art and where I have no understanding of why some novelists get truck-loads and most authors bread-crumbs, I see keeping our MOONA free of charge as a political act. Jack Smith, the performance artist, God-father of experimental theatre who created drag culture as we know it, who influenced the films of Warhol and John Waters, later Cindy Sherman to name a few. See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Smith_(film_director)

Jack Smith

Jack Smith insisted on making no-budget movies from using discarded colour film stock. I like the fact on his Wikipedia page that it tells you who introduced him to glitter, it's seen as that important a moment. He was vehement that money corrupted art, crippled it even and fell out with Warhol over it. He lived on two boiled eggs a day.

Life Drawing

We have tried charging admission in the past and it changed the atmosphere, made it more reserved, took the freedom out of a free, non-pretentious night. The attitude of the management is the key. For a long run we took over the upstairs bar in The Castle in Camberwell. The owners were into art with an anything goes philosophy, and not necessarily profits. Two years ago it was over for that team after a good run. A kind of gastro-pub has wallpapered its walls into some diluted idea of comfort. We have to have a place where nudity is permitted, because we have a life modelling spot which happens at about ten o'clock. Once a bar manager told me I had to cover up my nipple tassels, as he said I was topless. I pointed out to be topless I would have to have nipples showing. We didn't go back.


In the cab the younger sister says, 'My flat smells of death, something has died there, you won't like it.' 
I hear the words but don't think that they could be the truth. All I can think is how wonderful it is that she say things like this, dramatic crazy things. It reminds me of how many things there are to possibly say that don't normally get said. Are we the three drunk and debauched men in Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale where three men set out from a pub to find and kill Death, who they blame for the passing of their friend and all the other people who have died? The tale goes that they meet an old man says they can find Death at the foot of an oak tree. When they arrive at the tree, they find a large amount of gold coins and forget about their quest to kill Death. They decide that they will sleep at the oak tree over night, so they can take the coins in the morning. The three men draw straws to see who among them should get wine and food while the other two wait under the tree. The youngest of the three men drew the shortest straw. The two plot to overpower and stab the other one when he returns, while the one who leaves for the town plots to lace the wine with rat poison. When he returns with the food and drink, the other two kill him and drink the poisoned wine, dying slow and painful deaths. All three find death.

Is the pot of gold in my pocket? I have a Euromillions lottery ticket. Tonight one hundred people across our small island will become millionaires. It's a special draw. As long I don't check the ticket, I am possibly one of them and I'm possibly not.

The next morning I wake up in a someone else's bed with my friend. A cat is sitting on her chest, kneading the duvet. I walk into the lounge to find her sister and her boyfriend smoking. 
I retch. When the cigarette smoke stops the smell begins, like a noise being turned up. 
I put a sock over my nose and breath through my mouth.
'What's that smell?' I say.
'It's death,' she says. "Death is under the floorboards. I told you last night.'
'Well yes, but I thought it was just pretend,' I say. 
I get a cab home in last night's clothes. I sit on the loo with a diet coke and when I get up the seat is covered in glitter. A week has passed and I'm still finding it, in my clothes, on my cheeks, in the fronds of the carpet. 
How it lasts.

New things that happened this week

I read Tove Jansson's 'Fair Play' and am wowed how she writes so quietly, but solidly about how artists live and love and how any old day can change into something magnificent. I learnt from a bee keeper that you can give Lucozade to dying bees and perk them up.

Sometimes you get to be who you are.

Last night I met up with an ex-lover in Waterloo. We met outside the Old Vic which is on The Cut where my mother got married to my dad in a church which has now gone.
As I had been writing all day, I hadn't spoken a word to anyone and I was very much inside myself, far away from where my skin meets the rest of the world. (Well, apart from speaking to the man in the newsagents who topped up my Oyster Card but he didn't want to laugh about my broken umbrella.)
I was reading the reviews for the play when an attractive, young woman came up to me and asked me if I was going to The Pitt Bar. I'd read on the door that a musician was going to be playing jazz later in the bar downstairs beneath the theatre. The advert said her voice was like a 'fog horn' which I'd thought was strange advertising.
As the woman came up to me I jumped as I thought it was going to be my friend. They had the same long brown hair, but different faces and the unexpected face was the thing that made me gasp. She laughed and I patted my chest. I said no, I wasn't going to the Pitt Bar and she nodded and walked away.
My friend turned up and I told her how I had been surprised by someone who wasn't her speaking to me and she said the woman was probably chatting me up. This is how it happens these days, she said. I said it was a bit fast and I preferred the days where weeks or months went by while you weighed up the words and actions of somebody, trying to work out whether they were gay or just being friendly. There seemed more time about then, but that's probably just nostalgia warping the past.


We went down Lower Marsh, where a stall holder was packing away small rustic cheeses and arrived at my new favourite spot, The Scooter Bar. We sat out the front so we could smoke. I went up to the bar and ordered a bottle of white wine. The woman stared at me and I thought for a long moment that she was going to refuse to serve me. 'Are you famous?' is what she said.
'Well, no. It depends, but no...' I say, thinking 'Here we go again. Another person thinks I'm Jenny Eclair.'
'It is you, isn't it? 'In Search of The Missing Eyelash'? I saw you reading, you were very funny.'
I felt I should say something funny, to prove to her that what she was saying was the truth.
'That is me,' I said, with a self-mocking flourish of the hand. The teenage me cringed.
'Famous author,' she said, nudging the bar maid next to her. 'Uh, oh right,' the other girl said, pushing up the optic on the Vodka with a glass then opening a can of R Whites.

I took the drinks back to the table and told my friend what had happened. I clapped my hands together.
She said, 'See?'
I said, 'Wow, I know'.

I am now famous in one place* and to one person.

*The Scooter Bar used to be the spot to get your Vespa fixed in the Sixties. While you waited you got a proper cup of coffee. It was the first place to have a coffee machine in central London. The word spread. It became a famous coffee haunt. It is now a bar with a toilet behind a curtain. It is one of the few Bohemian spaces left. It feels like the magic of London can still happen here, just like in Danny La Rue's Bar which used to be on Charing Cross Road. My aim is to have a stool at the bar with my name on it by 2020.

Break Up Make Up, Never Do It Again.

Last Saturday, I went up to Manchester to see Jackie Kay's new play 'Manchester Lines' which was taking place in a 'found' space of a modern office block. The set was made up of lost items handed into Transport for London Lost Property Office. Before arriving in the theatre space, a toy train was running around a track along the wall, appearing and disappearing into a miniature tunnel. In hushed lighting, akin to a museum protecting its artefacts from sun-damage, I passed thirty-four walking sticks suspended from a rail (two banded together) four shopping trolleys, twenty-five crutches, a child's mini-kitchenette and a lifeboat jacket. In the main space the walls were hidden by shelves piled with Cine cameras, one stuffed fox with a cowboy hat on, a box of false teeth, hundreds of envelopes containing jewellery, phones, purses, then coats and umbrellas. A man was sitting behind a desk looking through a ledger. His character was named The Keeper. Jackie Kay had based him on the man who runs the Baker Street lost property department. She said he was like a philosopher, with his theories of what and why certain things get lost.


The play mainly took place inside the reconstructed lost and found office. Each of the  items lining the walls were tagged with a yellow label with the date and the station where the item was found. They were all recent, in the last six months. The items suggested irretrievable stories. There was something hopeful and yet desperately sad about the objects, waiting to be claimed. The piles suggested all the moments of human forgetfulness, rushing, drunkenness and carelessness that goes on every day, every night. The objects were proof of how things could just slip away from you. Then I thought of all the people who had gone out of their way to try to return things by handing them in. How rare that art or theatre is born from this kindness. I remembered how once, I found a mobile phone in the street and tried to find the owner by going through all the numbers held on it. The phone contained a number for Tim Rice (lyricist for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita and Joseph). I fantasised that it could be Elaine Page's phone, but there weren't any other glitzy numbers in the address book. I rang the MUM number and an elderly lady answered after many rings. Her voice was shaky and faint. She was confused while I explained that I had found the phone. She had expected to hear her son's voice. Then she said 'hold on' and searched for her address book. She gave me the number of the mobile I had in my hand, and I wrote it down. She told me her son was a vicar and, after I pointed out I couldn't call him on the number she had given me because it would be calling myself, she gave me his home address.
 
One character in the play, Pauline, spoke about being lost as a person. She said, 'how do you know the person who went to bed is the one who will wake up?' She talked about how you couldn't be yourself every day, that it was impossible. How many of us must be just winging it, pretending to be ourselves? I thought about our need to be recognisable to the people we love.
Another character reported herself to The Keeper as missing, just before she was about to disappear. I liked that, I wished there was a place you could register as being lost.
The play ended with us being escorted out into an open plan office space, where we could see the trams running below. The Keeper, finished the play with these words.
'See the lines crossing all over Manchester, the train lines, the tram lines. See the lines on your face, the lines on your hands...Always look for the things other people won't notice. The small things. It's our lives.'
Cathartic is such a lame word, but that was what the play was. I wept a big weep as we walked outside the office block. In the open space, the sun suddenly brightening the new pavement, my girlfriend tied her scarf tenderly around my neck to keep me together.

Twenty years ago, it was summer. I was on my foundation of Fine Art, a course which no longer exists at a College which is no longer there.
I had shaved my off hair and was sat in the long grasses out the back the studios. A girl with dark curly hair who was studying Graphics had seen me there from her window. She came and asked if I was OK. I told her I didn't know if I was a man or a woman and I didn't want to have to decide. She didn't know what to say. I told her I felt like I was acting my life out as if it were a play. A specialist at the hospital diagnosed me with having too much pink adrenalin in my system. He said it can happen at any time, it is the same as speed, it is hormonal. It can make you feel like you are behind glass, reading from a script, knowing the lines which will follow from others. And then it went, I was back in the moment. No more splitting for a few years.



After university, I worked for a while for Barclays Bank. Most mornings I had panic attacks as I walked towards the Knightsbridge branch from Victoria, past the posh white painted villas with palm trees and the cobbled Mews, knowing that this job was not for me. I'd gone the wrong way, taken the wrong turning. I was too cowardly to pursue the life of an artist. I would sit in the giant safe in the basement and count Harrods' takings which arrived by a shute piped under the road. I wondered if I might be able to steal a few thousand. I drank every night away in the pub with 'Big Trevor' who I felt was wasted as a cashier with his sharp political humour. He said he was happy enough, living with his mum. One night, back at my house, I got drunk and I fell asleep on his bollocks which were padded with fat, making them into pillows of thighs.

No one tells you at school how destructive the wrong job could be. Or how, if you can't find what it is you are looking for, then how you might separate from yourself in order to get along.

In 1997 I started to work as a stewardess for British Airways. I would panic as I rolled the trolley down the cabin. 'Is this who I am now?' I would think. My dream of becoming a successful performance artist was vanishing. A uniform and a badge had replaced her. I only had my personality to keep me apart from the others. I performed drag shows in hotel rooms for the other cabin crew, I kept on, trying to retain my individuality. I performed once in Entebbe in the nightclub attached to the hotel. The locals thought I was some kind of witch doctor or shaman with my back combed wig, lip-syncing to Shirley Bassey.

San Fran has trams

In 2002 I visited San Francisco on holiday. My friend Elaine's father had died and she needed a break. We went together, staying in a hotel where the bar was completely red, including the ice cubes. By this point in my job, I was suffering. I had split up with myself. I was concious I was impersonating myself and I had no idea who I was any more. I realised this was not normal. So, the two of us made a wedding ceremony in the bedroom. I borrowed the plastic flowers from the corridor. My friend wrote a sermon and a speech. We got dressed up in our best clubbing clothes. I'd bought a ring. She was nervous as she read out my vows which were to remain true to myself, through sickness, health and uncertainty. Myself then said, 'I do' as I slipped the ring on my finger. Reader, I married myself! After, we drank a bottle of Champagne and went out, getting standby tickets to see Sandra Bernhard. It was one of those nights. I was flying. I was back. I couldn't do much about the job, but I could take a correspondence writing course with the Open College of Arts. And I hoped, like a newly wed everything would turn out fine. 'Hope for the best and expect the worst' Angela Carter once said.

Two years ago I left British Airways. Again I had fallen out with myself. I felt unreal. The shrinks call it depersonalisation, I call it being art-less.

After the play we found a restaurant. The roads had been closed off and a friendly Policeman said the Olypmic Torch was coming to town. This is the memory, one to store up for the weird uncertain days; there was an array of dips, heated pita bread in a basket and good white wine. The Olympic flame was going to pass by our window. Three Indian waiters came out the front of the curry house opposite. They were each handed British flags by their manager and then were waving them shyly at one another, scrunching their noses up self-consciously. I stood up as the flame appeared, carried by a man in a white team GB tracksuit. All of a sudden, a tanned bride in a Katie Price style wedding dress and a groom in a suit and kipper tie jumped into the road and stopped the flame. They had their photo taken with it.
I raised my glass to unions and marriages of all kinds. To self-sufficiency and to loving someone else and them loving you back. As we walked back to Manchester Piccadilly, there was a new moon in the sky, cut like half a lemon slice ready for a gin in the station pub.

I'm sorry, Simon Amstell

Yesterday, I was reading the new 'Are You My Mother?' by Alison Bechdel, author of the marvellous graphic novel memoire Fun Home.

It absorbed me with its talk about psychoanalysis, the false self, the true self (which always tries to win out, hooray!) depression and the unmetabolized emotions we absorb from our parents. But then, I had to stop reading it in the same way I had to stop reading the diaries of Sylvia Plath, Kenneth Williams or Janice Galloway's novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing. There comes a point, a specific sentence, where a feeling of suffocation triggers this sadness or melancholy, rolling over my head like a rain-cloud, and I have to get out.

So, I decide I'll go for a walk. But, before I can leave the flat, I have to have a reason to go for a walk. As I don't have a dog to lead me out into the open, I usually pretend to need something from Sainsburys and go and buy a bottle of fizzy water or a tin of olives. This time, I think, I'll save the 80p and go and pick some thyme out my mother's garden for the roast chicken later.

'I still can't find that lead,' she says.
'For the new radio?'
'Yes, I've looked everywhere I would normally put it, but it's not there. The shed's a mess, don't even go there about the shed.' (I find it funny how she incorporates American black slang into her chat.)
'Where's the box then?'
'Threw it out. You know, I could get more batteries, because I like it being a portable radio, but then they will just run out. I should just use the lead.'

'But, you don't like the lead to show, do you?'
'No.'
'Though have you moved the radio off the fridge since you got it?'
'No.'
'Then it doesn't need to be portable, does it?'
'That's right, but still.'

We look together in the sideboard in the dining room, although she says she has already looked in all the places she would normally put such a thing. I like looking for lost things, because if you find them for someone the reward is the look of relief on their face. She offers me a bronze cast of an anonymous child's boot from the back of the cupboard to take home. I'm surprised there is anything left like that, from the old days, as for the last few years she has been clearing everything out. I have my school reports, letters I sent mum and dad from school journeys, photographs of great grandparents I never met.

Dulux Eygptian Cotton

Mum has had the front room done up.
I am standing admiring how big it looks with its warm grey walls and new limestone fireplace.
'My last front room' mum calls it, as Dad has said it was too stressful having it done and that there will not be any more redecorating in the house until after he's popped his clogs.
This sounds like it should be a joke, but it isn't.





On Friday night, I went to an Italian restaurant before seeing Simon Amstell's show Numb with my niece. I realise at seventeen years old, everything is a potential disaster for her. She was worrying about losing the tickets, not finding the venue, drinking too much Coca Cola in case she needed the toilet during the show. These little frets are her moorings. I'd forgotten how good worrying about those small things could be. So, we found the Shepherd's Bush Empire first and then sat at the restaurant opposite it, just in case it moved in the next half an hour.
As we were shown to the restaurant table, the sun came out through the square plastic awning which made an al fresco area of the pavement. My niece said it was a bit like Benidorm and I didn't know if this was good or not. The prices on the menu were so cheap that I thought we may have time travelled back to the eighties. I chose an Abracadabra Cocktail which was priced £3.

My cocktail didn't look like this

An Abracadabra was Vodka, orange, cranberry and ice cubes. Ice cubes featured largely on the cocktail list. Their strange importance harped back to the days when ice was a luxury. As the waiter brought us our drinks I had the little chat I like to do with waiters, having been one for so many years. The sun hadn't been out for two days and I said, 'Ooh, you'll have to take our picture, it's as if we're on our holidays.' My niece gave me the look. I had said one of the sentences that belong to my mother.
'Sorry,' I said, 'That was Nan wasn't it?'
She nodded and said, 'It's OK though.' I looked around the empty restaurant and said, 'She'd like it here, wouldn't she?'
My niece nodded and smiled.
The whole meal, pizza, cocktails and service came to £12.

I can hardly remember any of the comedy show, not because I was absurdly drunk or tired or that it wasn't memorable, as Simon Amstell is very funny. We were in the front row, close enough to see the follicles of his messy hair. I think it was because he was so quick with his wit. All the months he took to observe and write the show were squeezed into minutes and seconds where there wasn't enough time to mull it over. I wanted to think about what he was saying while he was saying it, like when you read a short story.
It was nearing the end of the show when I did the embarrassing thing.
I had gone into this type of trance, just watching him, when I shouted out the word 'Kleenex', loudly, like a heckle. I don't know why I did it. I've been over it a thousand times: he was asking a question, not to the audience, only to himself, but I thought I knew the answer. I don't think I shouted it so I would get a laugh, it was just more of a knee jerk thing. The part of me that I'm not really in control of wanted to join in with him. Simon Amstell just carried on as if nothing had happened, and to be fair, nothing had for him, because he hadn't heard me and was immersed in his script. This was not an interactive show. He was the light on the stage and I had paid to sit in the dark and listen. That was the deal. I think I felt invisible. I think I had had enough of feeling invisible.
Sorry Simon Amstell, I thought you'd get what I was saying if you heard.
Sorry niece.