I was ushing last night

Ben is one of my work colleagues, a slim man, height-wise he's in Tom Cruise's neighbourhood. Before our shift started I followed him upstairs to the staff kitchen noticing that his trousers were so tight that his bottom looked like two boiled eggs in a small hanky. Also his shirt was straining at the seams.


The staff kitchen had been recently used for a brainstorming team meeting - the white board was headed up with the title 'What am I going to achieve this Year?' - positive assertions were scribbled all  over the board, I focused on the section that read:

eat more healthily

make quality time with my family  

get more exercise

learn to make sushi 

smash global capitalism
  

While I was reading, Ben had been shaking together brown powder with a litre of water I watched him glug down the mixture and when his eyes had stopped watering he said

I'm on a Plan - I have to eat a meal every three hours, it's like ten chicken breasts a day and I'm finding it really hard to get that much inside me

The event was a talk called Why Has Everything Gone Wrong? - when it got underway, we closed the doors on the audience and sat in the foyer watching as someone filled the venue's Twitter feed with porn

for breakfast

the cats share a pouch of what looks like shredded rubber suspended in gravy, the cats usually lick the gravy off the rubber, their tongues flicking the rubber pieces around the floor where they dry into sharp little shards    

this  morning Wheezy got to breakfast first and wolfed down both bowls without doing the licking  thing

within a minute she had regurgitated bits of rubber and gravy all over my computer cables

I went for lunch

at a vietnamese canteen near school, it's best known for dishes of steamed savoury buns, little dumplings and spring rolls   

two asian women bustled in and sat next to me - a very quiet one and a bright shiny one who was talking loudly ...  

this is so great that we didn't have to negotiate we both just knew to come here it's like we can read each other's minds ... my god i've just bought tickets to go back to hong kong  - five thousand pounds and that was cheap ... we've booked into the four seasons which is very nice but it'll be like a staycation because we're not planning to do anything ...

there was a bit of quiet as they looked at the menu then the quiet one spoke for the first time

do you want to share ....  

and was interrupted

of course i don't want to share i'm a very greedy person

the elephant in the room

might have to be made visible for a moment

I've been at school for a few months now and have barely mentioned it that is because I'm struggling with some aspects of the experience and have been waiting for understanding to descend from the heavens:

i) there are a lot of special words which sound like Real World Words but in School World they mean something different - also the meaning slides around depending on who's using these words (abduction, affordance, agency, alterity ...)

ii) anything I might wish to say should be validated by referring back to a select group of European gentlemen - this is an example of what they call Cultural Capital*

iii) I need to learn how to 'strongly assert my position' - I may need to get a sex change before I can be this certain about everything

iv) it's all about arguments and a lot of the time the things being argued about aren't very interesting


* on the upside my Nosey Parkering is sanctioned by this sort of education - forming part of my newly acquired Cultural Capital

a cashmere charity shop jumper

was too tight and being similar in colour to my own flesh, if I put it on, I looked like a raw furry sausage 

BUT IT'S CASHMERE!!!


I unknitted it and dyed the yarn and yesterday I finished the reknitting

It's like wearing a warm boggy cloud

me and Karl Lagerfeld

the day I met David Bowie's sort-of-landlady a man had taken my navy jacket leaving me with his black blazer*.  

[for the full story follow this link and if you're reading on a mobile device I think this blog works better if you can see the web version]

My reefer jacket was a good fit and was an everything jacket, it worked with my skirts and trousers and meant that while I'm in london I can survive with that jacket and the rest of my wardrobe in a small holdall.

The big black blazer makes me look as though I'm two little boys standing on each other's shoulders in their fathers coat - which isn't the look I'm going for.

I searched the charity shops to find a replacement and after a couple of days settled on a black-and-orange baseball jacket which is great for when I'm feeling a bit varsity but not when I'm concerned about mutton-and-lamb issues and certainly not if I'm trying to look like a grown-up.

Yesterday on my quotidien charity-shop trawl/quest for a neat navy jacket I came across a neat black coat, the sort of thing Karl Lagerfeld wears. I tried it on and looked just like a pale version of Karl Lagerfeld then I looked at the label and it said 'Karl Lagerfeld'


it's black and it doesn't go with my skirt, or any of my clothes except jeans and I'll have to go out and buy a different sort of jeans that work better with this coat but it's Karl Lagerfeld and I'm surprised by how nice it feels so I keep it on and pay for it at the same time as a lady buying a crochet pot holder - she made an impressed face and said

nice

and I said

Karl Lagerfeld

* I asked the bus company to help trace the man and effect an exchange but that hasn't worked out

I took a melon

and, in expectation of an evening spent politely toying with a salad, I ate a hearty supper before setting out to the 'air supper' invitation.


Turns out that when my friend says 'it'll be nothing much' she means that she's baked a big dish of kedgeree.     one of my favourite things!!!

I've had a supper invitation

I said lovely can I bring something?

Sure but we don't normally eat in the evening unless someone's coming round so could you bring something that's practically non-existent - like fruit?

this happens most nights

click image to enlarge

I'm staying in a very interesting neighbourhood

the houses are small-to-average sized and it all looks like a neat little nuclear-family zone but now I've been here a few days I'm noticing details like this car and I'm wondering how the rest of the family are going to fit in it and what sort of holiday are they going on.   

Just nearby is Hipster Central - shops selling faux workwear for the cost of a ballgown, hipster barbers where the men in funky spectacles go to have their beards combed and a Wholefoods Market full of groovy folk buying artisan cordial. these shops jostle next to halal butchers and everything-costs-a-pound shops and then the hipster shops stop and there are lots of the sort of greengrocers that burgeon out on the pavement selling the kind of bananas you have to cook and big thick hairy-rooted vegetables that I don't have the confidence to name correctly.

Today I walked east and the whole world was out in the sunshine. After the hairy-rooted vegetable shops came the all-sorts-of-groceries-plus-money-transfer shops and  the population became noticeably muslim; women in hijabs and lots of men out with their sons looking summery in long shirts and white crocheted caps then I walked through an invisible forcefield to a completely different neighbourhood thronging with people coming back from the synagogue, the men looking regal in furry cartwheel hats and shiny coats, women and girls trailing after them in a curious mix of scarves and rainhoods.

Two minutes later I'm in the countryside walking past a huge park to the river where I met a lady with a narrow boat that I am going to live in after Easter.

cardboard boxes

are strategically placed around the floor of the flat that I am currently looking after 

the  cats use them as surveillance posts.

devil-cat is particularly fond of my shopping basket which alllows her to hide while keeping a close eye on me through the handles

I'm looking after two new cats

 one is very quiet and a bit asthmatic, the other is a devil. If I put food out for both at the same time the devil goes over to where the other one is eating, fishes out the food from under her nose and eats it off the floor in front of her.

I have been visiting Bristol this week

-  my stepson came for breakfast and said -  I'm moving to a nice flat soon    

there was a pause then he said      

its not nice because it's nice, it's just nice because it's cheap

It's still all about David Bowie

The day started out peculiarly because the man sitting next to me on the bus to London got off before my stop and took my coat with him.    

By the time I realised, he was long gone and I was standing at Victoria in an ill-fitting blazer. I am really hoping that he isn't enjoying being squeezed into my neat little reefer jacket and will get in touch with the bus station in the same way that I did so we can swap back.  

This evening, possibly inspired by a day in gorilla-ish sleeves I managed to leap onto a bus  just as it was setting off back to Bristol and plonk myself in the front window seat next to a nice-looking lady. We chatted then she dozed and I knitted and then she woke up when we were near Swindon and we talked a bit about me and then I asked about her and she said       

Well I'm busy doing publicity for my book about being David Bowie's sort-of-landlady   

 and I said you have to tell me everything      

she didn't look as though she wanted to tell me everything so I said that I would definitely buy her book (and I just have) and that she should tell me everything because I used to work for Peter Gabriel   

She told me that she'd been David Bowie's sort-of-landlady until Ziggy Stardust, they set up an Art Lab together at the pub up the road and her house was always full of rockstars and fans and she'd been working on the book for two years and was going to launch it at Christmas but then heard about Blackstar and decided to wait until the 8th of January.      

then she told me   
I'd had lunch with Tony Visconti just the week before and he didn't say a word   



this is a sliced-off version of my all-time-favourite David Bowie/Brian Eno/Tony Visconti film

when i placed my jeans inside the freezer yesterday

   i discovered a tub of christmas pudding ice cream ...   

it's not there any more

It's been a tough week

David Bowie died first thing Monday. In the evening I walked to the bus stop and the top part of the post office tower was spinning with a lit up a message to him  and in Brixton there was a mass David Bowie singalong - it was a very emotional day.  

I sat on the top deck but didn't pay attention to my actual seat until I wanted to get off the bus and realised that the long ride had melted a gob of well chewed gum onto my jean-clad backside.   

Because getting off the top deck of a London bus can be a God-awful affair and because of David Bowie and because I was ravenous, the gum was forgotten by the time I made it to the pavement. Back at the house that I am taking care of for strangers I put David Bowie music on and made supper.  

Then I sat in one of the expensive black leather dining chairs owned by the people who are trusting me to look after their home*, I sat in that chair and ate my delicious supper and then I stayed in the chair for a really long time watching old David Bowie videos. When I finally tried to stand up I couldn't because the gum on my jeans had welded my bottom onto the seat. I peeled myself off gently and then stared in horror at the mess.  

Warm gum smears worse the more you wipe. 

I panicked  but luckily I'm also the kind of girl who reads Top Tips  

I put my gummy jeans in the freezer along with a folded wet cloth that had a nubbly side and then I went to bed  

In the morning I chipped the gum off my jeans and rubbed the iced nubbley brick on the leather seat and it cleaned up like new. 

*bum-crayon cat house

Yay! My essay was delivered yesterday so I have words again   

procrastination

I should be writing an essay but I've run out of words, so I came here to see if a blogpost might dislodge some:


nope ... nothing

New year, old cat

I'm back in London with the bum-crayoner who has now totally associates me with the disappearance of her human slave - this cat is angry

She's not speaking to me at all but waits until I'm out of the living room then sneaks down to wipe her bottom on the white sofa, the mdf skirting boards have melted in the places she goes to urinate in rage at my presence and all this rage is fuelling a huge appetite, she's wolfing food like a ... wolf

I'm sitting in the white sofa right now, trying to avoid the cat's artwork, rain gushing down outside, writing my first proper academic essay.

In an hour my mother will be visiting

The main point of Italy is the food

 In another life, about a century ago, I took the position of Cook for a Contessa in a Palazzo just outside Verona. A lady called Itsi Maraschino drove me around the neighbourhood pointing out where I must buy food; for vegetables I was to go to a massive barn where farmers dropped off crates of freshly picked produce - rows of aubergine and courgette varieties, vegetables that I'd never heard of, ten different sorts of artichokes - and all that was before I discovered the lettuce barn - or the cheeses.

Last week (while in Rome... ) we visited the Colosseum and then we were too hungry to read a map properly so we kept getting lost and all the while looking for THE place to eat - finally we fell into a cafe run by a Chinese family who served frozen pizza with a comedy sideshow.

Today we got in the car and drove to Frascati, a town apparently full of good restaurants but so full of cars and traffic jams that we drove on past, winding our way up a hill towards another town.

On the roadside we spotted a 'hostelerie' that looked probably-closed. We stopped and it seemed almost definitely closed-for-the-winter but we walked round to a side door that appeared to be the private house section, we were going to creep away but I was so hungry that I became brave and opened the door expecting to surprise a family eating fish fingers in front of their television.

Lo! the door opened to a proper restaurant dining room with a blazing fire and other diners and a kitchen where cooking was happening and a table for us where we were served artichokes and ham and polenta that was crisp outside and soft inside with orange zest, then torteloni with truffles and cheesy cream then an astonishing salad of white crunchy stems dressed with garlic and anchovy.

Home tomorrow!

the pigs won't eat broccoli

but they love apples, carrots and cucumber and they especially love banana

we have fallen into a routine:  breakfast is dropped off at the manpig's estate, the ladypig waddles out with me to the oak tree to snorkel for acorns then returns to remodel the interior of her home

I can now tell the cats apart - this is mainly because the one who's been getting five breakfasts daily since my arrival is now 'the fat one'

My Christmas projects have been to watch the 'Star Wars Trilogy' and to read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' - all this catching up with the latest in popular culture has emboldened me to consider finding out who the Spice Girls are and how to do a 'selfie'

did I mention the pigs?

the manpig has curly tusks - due to excessive boisterousness he lives in a secured enclosure, a sort of overgrown quarry with roman remains in the middle of it. The ladypig lives separately in a wooden house encircled by a wire enclosure, inside the wooden house she has constructed a giant nest of hay.

She lets herself in and out of the enclosure via a spring door that she can manoeuvre with her body, she spends her days trundling around the garden, visiting the neighbouring olive grove or chatting to the boisterous one through his fence.

The pig owners met us briefly to discuss feeding schedules and health issues - they are concerned that the ladypig seems unfeasibly fat and are sure that it's down to her lack of exercise - the Man and I have a strong suspicion that her fatness is due to soon-to-arrive piglets.

This morning the ladypig and I walked down to the oak tree for an acorn-ey breakfast accompanied by cucumber and carrot, she looks even bigger than she did yesterday and she made a very nice leafy nest for her afternoon nap.

I've been scanning the interweb for pig-mid-wifery tips: rubber gloves and iodine and  a special piglet box need to be on hand.

we are staying in a house on a hill

about 15 miles outside Rome  - there's a great view over the city

the Man is explaining the Olden Days to me


They used to stand here and look at Rome, and when Rome was burning they said 'Fuck Me -  Rome's burning!'

I am being played

when I get up this morning a cat sticks herself to my legs until I feed her then she disappears outside

the other (identical) cat is nowhere to be seen 

five minutes later a cat appears asking to be fed this must be the other cat so I feed her then she goes outside and out of sight

five minutes later a cat walks in asking to be fed

it takes 6 bowls of food before I am convinced that each cat has eaten at least one bowl of food

currently in charge of 2 pigs and 2 cats

the cats are called Ping and Pong, they seem identical but their human has assured me that they are completely opposite in personality - one hates being touched and the other loves attention - Touchable and Untouchable.

It seems very common for cats to have personality transplants as soon as their human has left the building - both cats throw themselves at our feet demanding caresses as we try and walk around their home

end of term

 back in Bristol  spending an afternoon knitting with my Japanese house-mate - today was a day off from her job in a Japanese restaurant

she'd been out for lunch

I asked her where she went and what she ate

a cafe for sandwiches, I always go and eat sandwiches on my day off - at work it's so much rice

How people behave:

  the faculty christmas party turned out to be two parties, the first was full of new students being garish in the strip-lit common room. The other party was in the room next door, it was attended by  faculty staff and people who'd been students a really long time. In order to keep the second party secret from the first party, the second party turned the lights off and giggled together in the dark.

Last lecture of term

5pm yesterday.  last week's newsletter made passing mention of a forthcoming presentation in one of the lecture theatres by Kate Tempest, a young poet whose prodigious and varied output as a writer and musician, garners awards and accolades in abundance.

she came to Bristol earlier this year and people were murdering each other for tickets

at 5pm I was seated at the front row of a half empty lecture theatre, Ms Tempest seated behind a desk as a few more students trailed in late

we got a show 

it was impressive 

at 6 sharp a booted skirted fierce woman appeared at the door to tut-tut and look at her watch she walked away slightly then reappeared to tut a bit more.

we hurriedly clapped and all got up to go but the next event which involved trolley loads of sandwiches was already being wheeled in and we all got stuck together in the doorway.

Last week

I had a two-day turnaround between cats, these were 'no-school' days so I went home to Bristol, the Man was away in the USA but there was a bar of chocolate on the shelf and bacon and cheese in the fridge, the chocolate contained raisins to ensure a balanced diet.

last week was all about listening - highlights include:

a talk about the pebble-iness of a section of east devon, how it came to be that way and all the things people do with pebbles from Bronze age cairns to the bounding walls of new housing-estates via victorian farmyards

being shown images of brightly painted designs on ritual houses in an area of Indonesia and realising that we were looking at thousands of vaginas

I ushed another talking event, this one with David Attenborough about what we need to do to halt the progress of climate change, someone described trees as being blocks of congealed carbon and how we need lots more congealed carbon - the best ways to do this included growing lots of seaweed and thinking of things to make with seaweed. Methane is also something we need to deal with - in Korea they have worked out a way of capturing methane in used coffee grounds.

I am back in London now, looking after bum-crayon cat who is currently stalking me in big circles but refusing to let me touch her

She-who-sits-with-cats

I'm packed and ready to leave my latest home, the cat that I've been looking after, recognising the signs of desertion, is howling mournfully and trying to trip me up

I shall stay until her real people come home - I have told her this but she doesn't believe me!

Thanksgiving meal

My fellow students are much younger than me and frighteningly competent. On Thursday I was invited to dinner by one of them.

out of her tiny kitchen she conjured

squash with walnuts and pomegranate
roast new potatoes with fig
fig and kale stuffing
roast cauliflower
macaroni cheese
green beans
roast chicken

ten of us hunched around the coffee table each armed with a single utensil and an item that could serve as a plate  and we devoured this feast

when we couldn't eat anymore, the coffee table was cleared and a perfectly square Austrian cake appeared: layers of chocolate sponge alternated with layers of chocolate cream and topped with a slick of molten coffee/chocolate.

utensils were rinsed, we crouched, encircled the cake, then spooned/forked (sporked?) this glory directly into our greedy mouths

This week I'm in Haggerston

where the porridge is fancy and the cat is disguised as a giant growling puffball with ears

It's not just porridge that's fancy around these parts, the cake is fancississimo, I have just bought and eaten a big slice of cherrycustardcrumblecreamtart

The weather has suddenly become freezing. I came to London with only two jumpers and a rubber mac that is now torn in so many places that I can't make out which are the armholes so I have been raiding the charity shops bringing home more jumpers, a wool scarf and an excellent box-pleated navy wool skirt who's only problem is that it has flappy woolly wings attached to the thigh area (in case the wearer wanted to appear fatter) but these can be cut off.

This weekend I am preparing for a week ahead that will be mainly full of Pierre Bourdieu

I have been talking to a vet

about animal nutrition, specifically elderly cats with kidney problems and he said

You'll often notice that a black cat with kidney problems has brown fur around her sides and shoulders, that's where she's grooming herself most

Soft Molly is an old black cat with kidney problems, she has gone a bit brown around her sides and shoulders

That's the effect of the ureic acid in her mouth coating her fur and then the acid reacts with sunlight


I said that I had noticed that cats rarely ate anything that looks like actual food these days

That's partly convenience but mainly it's due to a conspiracy between vets and pet food companies

Today we had a school trip

to visit the store rooms of the Horniman museum*.

The location is so secret that we had to promise to turn off our phones and be blindfolded on the way in so we can't reveal where it is.

The store-room building is enormous and used to be an institution. It is entirely (and beautifully) institutionally tiled inside, the windows have all been tiled over. Most of the rooms are entirely filled with huge cupboards that have to be slid open with little steering wheels, these contain thousands of drawers and shelves with carefully packaged clothing and puppets and poison arrows and shrunken heads and dolls and teapots.

One floor holds the really big things; shelves with big wooden crates full of mummies and mummy-sarcophagi, the crates are chalk-marked with the weight of it's contents. Piled up beside the mummies are harpsichords. Big items like the harpsichords and elephants that don't fit into crates are covered with fitted shrouds to keep the dust off, there is a volunteer lady who has been going to this secret building to sew big fitted shrouds for the last ten years.



The Horniman was created by an Eminent Victorian, having filled his home with collections from his travels and opening this to the public, he built the existing museum for the collections which he left in perpetuity to be enjoyed for free by the British Public for ever.

This is Soft Molly

she spent the entire weekend sitting next to me helping with my homework

today's lectures are all about bones, exhumations and leaky bodies

Delaying my essay-writing assignment

I visited Verbatim Poetry

and found this song to encourage Singaporeans to procreate

I’m a patriotic husband,
you my patriotic wife,
lemme book into ya camp
and manufacture life.

Only financially secure adults
in stable, committed, long-term
relationships should participate.

The weeks have flown by

my highlights since the bum-crayon cat

i) visited sister-in-law - we talked so hard the roof started leaking

ii) attended lectures on themes including:  'Dirt and Excrement as Political Resistance', 'The Game of Rugby as an Embodied Phenomenon in Tonga', 'Polynesian Funeral Wrappings', 'Why Merleau-Ponty is Worth Considering' and 'Look How Useful Archives Are!'

iii) returned to Bristol for a few days, two young women are now living in my house, one of them is Japanese, she dresses in stylish monochrome and sews beautiful textiles, the other is an Indian film-maker, she wears long jewel-bright skirts.

iv) visited friend in Newcastle: three months ago her heart stopped for no good reason and for two weeks she was almost dead but then she made a miraculous recovery - this is partly due to Kate Bush

currently back in London and have embarked on a whole new cat-cycle - starting with Soft Molly in Hackney

Going back to school

has sent my my menopausal body barometer into orbit. I have to dress in a way that I can be almost undressed really quickly at any time - even jewelry burns me when I'm blazing

Currently I am staying with my mother-in-law she watched me fanning and sweating and said

I've got some left over HRT patches from when I was a girl would you like to use them?

I said yes please and stuck one on last night

today I am almost a normal person

I've run out of cats

until mid-November

to fill the void in my life I went online and arranged to look after some pigs

in Italy

over Christmas

One of them is dangerous - his food is lowered down to him in a bucket!

New Language

I've been struggling in this country of Ackedemia with its words that sound like words I already know but which have been ascribed completely different meanings - the made up words and words that mean one thing when one man is using them and something else entirely if another man is talking

Here there are miles upon miles of corridors in which I clatter around like a extra from a Monty Python movie saying the sort of things that made sense in my own country but apparently no meaning here

I need to assemble the appropriate audio-visual equipment quickly - before my head drops off

This week's cat

is small and sleek and nervy

sometimes she pees against the wall

The disadvantages of MDF skirting boards has become most apparent in the kitchen where the compressed sawdust has expanded to create a beige and fluffy edge between floor and wall

I cycled to school today

It was the first time and I was so nervous cycling through That London.

I tagged on to some other cyclists which felt safer so I carried on following them, we were like ants in a Game Park scooting alongside herds of migrating vehicles and I lost track of exactly where I was but I was cool in the bike pack so I figured that they probably knew the best way to go.

Unfortunately this meant that I took a very long way to school and I'd have got there quicker if I'd walked.


When I got back to this week's lodgings I walked into the living room and discovered that this week's cat had been in her dirtbox and then used her poo-ey bottom to draw a long skid mark all along the arm of the fat white sofa - it's like a child with a box of brown crayons came to visit.

Ushing for a living

I am employed as a some-time usher at an institution that hosts public events. Tonight we debated the question of  ‘Are Things Getting Better or Worse?’

The two main speakers were a gentleman with exquisitely sculpted hair and excellent trousers and a physicist with a pudding-bowl haircut and floppy leisure pants. The physicist said things are getting better because we know more stuff and will make really good robots to fix everything then the well-trousered-gentleman said things will get worse because of all the ways people could easily use technology to do bad things and anyway climate change and population growth.

I had to dart around with a microphone so that the audience could join in. An orange-haired woman pointed out that better and worse is not at all a clear-cut issue:

there could well be people here who want London to be a clean city full of bike-riding vegetarians - this is my idea of hell

At the end of the talk I stood smiling at the door as everybody filed out or stopped to complain, there was a lady who’d had to sit next to someone eating a muffin and getting drunk and another with deaf aids who couldn’t hear a thing but had hoped for a bit more philosophy.

This week's cat

has pale blue eyes and maintains a posture of permanent outrage, she is the hairiest cat I've ever looked after. I've had to zip all my clothes inside my suitcase except the outfit that is the least cat-hair sticky.

She's very vocal - her language mainly sounds like when you dial the knob across the stations on shortwave radio at night but she also mixes in the sort of noises the girl with the swivelly head made in The Exorcist.

Once in a while she clambers her way up on to the table, it means that she wants to be brushed -  I do this and she rumbles in a way that suggests she could explode at any moment.

top deck of bus

adolescent girl with strong east end accent keeps up constant stream of chat to woman sitting beside her

... when i grow up i wanna be an actor but if i can't be an actor i wanna be in the acting area, like if i have to be a set designer i'll do that or a director that's telling people where to stand 

i'd be a good director

woman realises that pause is for her response but she's been thinking her own thoughts for last 5 minutes

director ... at a marketing company?

an acting company

My home

this week is in the far depths of London - so far away that I'm not even sure if it's still in England.

to get to school I take a bus then a train then the tube and a change on the tube and if it all goes well I can do it in one hour

but there's always a thing.

today when I was nearly there the tube got stuck and stopped. I got out and walked and got lost until I found a bus going in the right direction and the whole operation took two hours.

when I get back to this outer sphere there are two pretty grey cats waiting for me. One is fine-boned and affectionate and  slightly camp, the other one is stout and won't speak to me during the day 

but he comes and sleeps on my feet at night

oooh i was poorly yesterday

heavy and slippy

new thinking new people new routes to new homes new ways for the worldwideweb to frustrate me

a heavy pile of new is sitting on my head

also

there are also too many things in my bag because i don't know what i need yet

brain heavy and shoulder-achey heavy

and it's raining and london pavements are slippy when wet

see that guy in the photo - put him on ice in rain - that's me




photo: John Paskievich

I am learning so much

my classmates are a lot younger than me - we were sitting together and they were talking a foreign language - the beautiful androgynous girl translated:

Tinder basically means sex whereas Okcupid means notnecessarily sex I like Fetster, that's for people who are into weird stuff like getting whipped or urinated on or eating faeces, with Fetster you can hook up for 'Munchies' which is usually breakfast in a public place so you're basically just meeting people who are into weird stuff without having to do anything

I lost Crunchy

In the people ocean

It was a blazing hot sunny day so I bought a slimy sandwich and sat on a wall to eat it

A person wearing skinny black jeans, black multi-buckled biker boots big black glasses, black duvet jacket and black leather flying hat with black side flaps came and sat next to me. From her big black bike panier she pulled out the biggest bowl of dressed lettuce in the world.

I thought she might be a radical vegan so I hid my sandwich and we got talking

she's nice

Second day new school

Young people in shiny purple satin sashes direct new students to their various destinations; crocodiles of shy jean-wearers following beauty kings and queens to get identity cards and sign their lives away.

I need to find a lecture theatre, the address is in a special code, I ask some sash-wearers but they need to be pre-programmed with a destination - they don't just know where things are. I can't decide whether this is dispiriting or exciting - this warren of buildings is forever unknowable?

I passed NewBestFriend Crunchy in the student ocean we were waving (or drowning) at each other - I called to see if she could take a break but she yelled back that she was on a fire drill and I had to go and be introduced to twenty million libraries.