"I like your art," my friend said yesterday when she popped around to see if I was still alive (I was, but - after previous email - I was hitting things and swearing rather violently). "But I`ll tell you something: I`m so not bringing my teddy bear round for a visit."
"Fair enough," I said, and went back to working out what in my house really needed breaking.
I don`t have a death wish, contrary to popular belief: and I don`t hold any particularly vindictive feelings towards toys either. Frankly, if I had a death wish, I probably wouldn`t draw pictures all about it: I`d like to think I would be a little more subtle, and draw a little less attention to it. Because if I had a death wish, I`d want to get on with it as quietly and as efficiently as possible: not allude to it wherever possible in ink and pencil and little phone stickers I bought from a shop in Fukuoka.
So I don`t have a death wish. I do, however, have a slight fascination with hanging, for a number of different reasons, of varying importance. Which I am going to clarify, mainly to put my mum`s mind at rest and stop her visiting. ("Holly," she said. "If you keep hanging things in pictures I`m flying out there and I`m not going to come back until you`ve stopped.")
First of all, it`s aesthetically pleasing. That straight line is pleasant; I enjoy drawing it. It gives height to a composition, and a certain geometric pleasantness, and that`s all there is to say about it.
Second of all, it`s a nice way of getting rid of a bit of anger without actually harming anyone. Hey cute teddy in my head, you can say: come here and attach yourself to this here rope and dangle for eternity. And - afterwards - you immediately feel a little bit better, and nobody had to hurt for it (although my teddy, Malachi, does edge away on the bed whenever I get cross now; I`ve seen him do it).
Third of all, it means something. For instance, in the picture of the teddy, it`s inspired by the Japanese quote: to get something, you must first give up something. If you want adulthood, you must first give up the things that you loved as a child. In the picture of the Blythe doll, it`s about the irony of Good Luck (Ganbatte in Japanese): the doll is hanging from a tree of four leaf clovers.
Fourth of all, when you kill something it means that you can start again; from the death of one thing becomes the start of something new. I kill things in my art so that I can rise again from them. Even if it`s only ever a tiny, momentary kind of rebirth.
But fifth of all, and absolutely most importantly, it`s because I`m fascinated by the throat and neck as a sort of metaphorically physical link between brain and heart. It feels like where - if anywhere - the two collide; it`s where the emotions travel up to your mouth and brain; where the thoughts travel down to your feelings. (Or, in my case, don`t.) It`s the most vulnerable, sensitive part of the body, and it`s both the lovers` part - the part that is kissed and slept next to, nestled together - and the part used traditionally (in literature and outside of it) to kill; a slit, or a rope, or a stranglehold. And if the heart is the metaphorical representation of the emotions of love, and the head is the metaphorical representation of the reasoning of love, then the neck has to be the metaphorical representation of where the two collide.
So I hang things. My heart and my mind are always warring - always communicating, always fighting, always at odds - and most of my unhappiness comes from their unanimous hatred of each other; from my mind`s inability to understand for a single second the way my heart feels, or from my heart`s inability to listen for a minute to what my mind says. They never agree, and so - when I`m stuck between the two arguing sides, both constantly trying to make me listen to them, both tearing me apart between them - hanging something seems like the best way to make it stop. To take away the lovers` part of me - or of the unfortunate toy - and cut off the source that causes the mind such pain, and the source that gives the heart so much confusion. And the rope becomes simply a symbol; a way of finally taking control of the two, and suspending them both in the air: separated and - for the first time - permanently joined together.
So it`s not a morbid wish at all, mum, and it`s nothing for you to worry about. In fact, it`s the opposite. I kill off the pain caused by the fight between heart and mind so that I can start again; I let go of one thing so that I can grab hold of another. And even if I struggle to do that properly in every day life, at least I can still do it metaphorically in my drawings.
"I want one," my friend said just before she left last night, "even if they`re a bit creepy. But can you kill off something else other than a teddy bear, perhaps? I like teddy bears."
"Sure," I said, ripping up bits of paper for no reason and remembering the animals He loves best. "How about a badger or a duck?"
"Works for me," my friend said. "Give them a nice, merry send-off."
So I will. And then, perhaps, my teddy bear will sit next to me on the bed tonight with a little less sadness on his little face.
And perhaps - afterwards - I will sit next to him with just a little less sadness on mine.
Monday, 31 May 2010
Sunday, 30 May 2010
Response
Bloody blogs.
I got a response, which must have been what I secretly wanted, even though I thought I had blocked Him in every way possible. And sometimes, frankly, being right is far more painful than being wrong ever could be.
With an eloquence that I can only ever try and match, he simply said:
Love is torture, women are poisonous.
And I don't love her either.
Be good.
S.
Succinct, to the point, brutal, honest; slightly like an extremely painful modern poem, in fact, and better than most of the things I write. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be 'good' about, but it's nice that he's looking out for my moral welfare.
It doesn't make me love him less, obviously - or it wouldn't be love - but it's going to make never ever talking about him again in public a hell of a lot easier.
I might be a fool, and I might well be poisonous, but I think I'll be a poisonous fool in private from now on.
I got a response, which must have been what I secretly wanted, even though I thought I had blocked Him in every way possible. And sometimes, frankly, being right is far more painful than being wrong ever could be.
With an eloquence that I can only ever try and match, he simply said:
Love is torture, women are poisonous.
And I don't love her either.
Be good.
S.
Succinct, to the point, brutal, honest; slightly like an extremely painful modern poem, in fact, and better than most of the things I write. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be 'good' about, but it's nice that he's looking out for my moral welfare.
It doesn't make me love him less, obviously - or it wouldn't be love - but it's going to make never ever talking about him again in public a hell of a lot easier.
I might be a fool, and I might well be poisonous, but I think I'll be a poisonous fool in private from now on.
Healing
I scared I'm healing in the wrong direction.
Not the pneumonia. That's healing as physical illnesses usually heal: in a direction that makes it all better again. My pathetic immune system has kicked in, finally, and I'm healing as I should. Until the illness is gone.
What I have realised in the last few days is not healing as it should, however, is my heart, or whatever the metaphorical organ is that holds together and splits apart my emotions. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's healing completely the wrong way, and I'm not sure what to do about it. And - frankly - it is terrifying me.
I have never been heartbroken before, so I made some assumptions about what would happen when I was. They were sensible assumptions; assumptions based on logic, and based on books, and based on heart-bruisings which I thought were probably quite similar. The assumption was this: when something breaks - a foot, a leg, a nose, a heart - it hurts. And it continues to hurt until it's fixed, and then it stops hurting and you can use it as you used it before. And the healing process - the fusing together of bone cells or muscle cells - is steady, and regular, and in the right direction: a direction that leads you first to forgive, and then to forget, and then to start again.
It's not working like that at all.
My heart is mending the wrong way. It's fusing together in a different shape, all jumbled up, and - instead of making me forget him - it's making me love him all over again. It's as if the hurt (still there; oh definitely still there) is easing away, little by little, and the hate is mending, and the anger is leaving: and all time is doing is making me forget the reasons why I never wanted to see him again, and reminding me of all the reasons why I fell in love with him in the first place.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. I was supposed to love him less every day: not more. I was supposed to feel less for him every day: not more. And yes; the immediate pain and the immediate missing has gone entirely. I no longer feel any desire to tell him how my day was, or to text him when I wake up in the morning, or to tell him I love him before I go to sleep. He is no longer the person I think of when something good happens, or something bad. I no longer plan things around him, or wonder how loudly he would laugh at something I could tell him, or what he would say about my kittens. Those strings tying me to him - those little, daily, habitual, strings that made him part of my day, and part of my every action - are cut, and my days are free without him; my habits, my jokes, those first few waking thoughts, are free without him.
But the deeper part of me is not. As I forgive and let go of the pain, and the hurt, and how utterly and completely he broke me apart, so the man I fell in love with comes back to me. During that six months - the six months while he loved me and someone else and I fought so hard to make it just me and failed so horribly - we both fell apart, little by little, both apart and together, and by the end that was all we were to each other: tiny pieces of what we had been. And so I assumed that those pieces would be easy to blow away: they were so light and so dead and so, so dry.
And they have blown away - the pieces of that wreckage - except that where I thought there would be nothing left, I was wrong. Underneath all the burnt bits, and all the dead bits, and all the dusty bits - underneath the black bits caused by the pain - the love is still there, as pink as it was at the beginning, and every day it gets clearer and firmer and brighter again. It becomes as it was in the beginning. And I love him - him: not us, not our relationship, but him - all over again.
I love his laugh, and I love the way his nose wrinkles, and I love the curls on his neck and the way he bounces up and down on his heels when he's excited. I love the way his eyes open wide when he's nervous and the way he grinds his teeth when he's asleep and the scars on his hand from a time he told nobody but me about. I love the lines on his face when he's tired, and the way they disappear when he's not. I love him - not his love for me, not my love for us - and that is not going away: it is becoming stronger. And time is not being kind. It is making me hurt more, but in a different kind of way: a pain that becomes fresh again just as my feelings do.
There is nothing I can do. He is gone. He doesn't feel the same way at all - he loves her, now, not me (and never did, he says), and fighting to get that love didn't work then and it won't work now. And, even if he did feel anything for me, I am not healed enough to be able to let anyone close again, and I won't be for a long, long time. Until I can believe again that my love is worth keeping, and it won't always be thrown away or given to another girl instead. Until I can believe somebody when they tell me they love me, and not ask them why or for how long.
But I'm scared - terrified - that when I told him, all those times, that I loved him and would always love him: I was right. I'm scared that when I told him he would always be a part of me, I just didn't know how big that part would be, nor how permanent. I'm scared that when I said - half asleep, with my chin on his shoulder - that he was the love of my life: I meant it. And I'm scared that the love will not go away: that it will get stronger, and it will stick in me, and it will be there when time has erased everything else and everyone else, and that nobody will ever replace him or the way that I feel now.
And, mostly, I'm scared that I am healing, always healing, but only ever in the wrong direction.
Not the pneumonia. That's healing as physical illnesses usually heal: in a direction that makes it all better again. My pathetic immune system has kicked in, finally, and I'm healing as I should. Until the illness is gone.
What I have realised in the last few days is not healing as it should, however, is my heart, or whatever the metaphorical organ is that holds together and splits apart my emotions. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's healing completely the wrong way, and I'm not sure what to do about it. And - frankly - it is terrifying me.
I have never been heartbroken before, so I made some assumptions about what would happen when I was. They were sensible assumptions; assumptions based on logic, and based on books, and based on heart-bruisings which I thought were probably quite similar. The assumption was this: when something breaks - a foot, a leg, a nose, a heart - it hurts. And it continues to hurt until it's fixed, and then it stops hurting and you can use it as you used it before. And the healing process - the fusing together of bone cells or muscle cells - is steady, and regular, and in the right direction: a direction that leads you first to forgive, and then to forget, and then to start again.
It's not working like that at all.
My heart is mending the wrong way. It's fusing together in a different shape, all jumbled up, and - instead of making me forget him - it's making me love him all over again. It's as if the hurt (still there; oh definitely still there) is easing away, little by little, and the hate is mending, and the anger is leaving: and all time is doing is making me forget the reasons why I never wanted to see him again, and reminding me of all the reasons why I fell in love with him in the first place.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. I was supposed to love him less every day: not more. I was supposed to feel less for him every day: not more. And yes; the immediate pain and the immediate missing has gone entirely. I no longer feel any desire to tell him how my day was, or to text him when I wake up in the morning, or to tell him I love him before I go to sleep. He is no longer the person I think of when something good happens, or something bad. I no longer plan things around him, or wonder how loudly he would laugh at something I could tell him, or what he would say about my kittens. Those strings tying me to him - those little, daily, habitual, strings that made him part of my day, and part of my every action - are cut, and my days are free without him; my habits, my jokes, those first few waking thoughts, are free without him.
But the deeper part of me is not. As I forgive and let go of the pain, and the hurt, and how utterly and completely he broke me apart, so the man I fell in love with comes back to me. During that six months - the six months while he loved me and someone else and I fought so hard to make it just me and failed so horribly - we both fell apart, little by little, both apart and together, and by the end that was all we were to each other: tiny pieces of what we had been. And so I assumed that those pieces would be easy to blow away: they were so light and so dead and so, so dry.
And they have blown away - the pieces of that wreckage - except that where I thought there would be nothing left, I was wrong. Underneath all the burnt bits, and all the dead bits, and all the dusty bits - underneath the black bits caused by the pain - the love is still there, as pink as it was at the beginning, and every day it gets clearer and firmer and brighter again. It becomes as it was in the beginning. And I love him - him: not us, not our relationship, but him - all over again.
I love his laugh, and I love the way his nose wrinkles, and I love the curls on his neck and the way he bounces up and down on his heels when he's excited. I love the way his eyes open wide when he's nervous and the way he grinds his teeth when he's asleep and the scars on his hand from a time he told nobody but me about. I love the lines on his face when he's tired, and the way they disappear when he's not. I love him - not his love for me, not my love for us - and that is not going away: it is becoming stronger. And time is not being kind. It is making me hurt more, but in a different kind of way: a pain that becomes fresh again just as my feelings do.
There is nothing I can do. He is gone. He doesn't feel the same way at all - he loves her, now, not me (and never did, he says), and fighting to get that love didn't work then and it won't work now. And, even if he did feel anything for me, I am not healed enough to be able to let anyone close again, and I won't be for a long, long time. Until I can believe again that my love is worth keeping, and it won't always be thrown away or given to another girl instead. Until I can believe somebody when they tell me they love me, and not ask them why or for how long.
But I'm scared - terrified - that when I told him, all those times, that I loved him and would always love him: I was right. I'm scared that when I told him he would always be a part of me, I just didn't know how big that part would be, nor how permanent. I'm scared that when I said - half asleep, with my chin on his shoulder - that he was the love of my life: I meant it. And I'm scared that the love will not go away: that it will get stronger, and it will stick in me, and it will be there when time has erased everything else and everyone else, and that nobody will ever replace him or the way that I feel now.
And, mostly, I'm scared that I am healing, always healing, but only ever in the wrong direction.
Saturday, 29 May 2010
Violence threatened
I'm being threatened.
"I'm coming to Japan," my mum announced when she found out that I had pneumonia.
"No, you're not," I said.
"I am, I'm coming."
"Mum, you just had surgery. You are not allowed to fly."
This made mum even angrier. She thought about it for a few minutes.
"If it wasn't for this stupid hand," she said - gesticulating with it, in case I was wondering which one it was - "I would be on the first plane. My daughter needs me."
"She doesn't, mum," I told her, reverting to third person as well in case it helped. "She needs a cuddle but by the time you get here your daughter will be perfectly healthy again."
Mum looked even angrier, as if she couldn't believe I would have the audacity to get better without her.
"You had better count yourself lucky that I'm on doctor's orders, that's all I'm saying," she said menacingly. "Because I swear to God if you get any sicker - any sicker at all - then I am on the first plane out there and the doctors are just going to have to come and drag me off, kicking and screaming. Do you hear me? If my daughter is sick, then the doctors can take a flying leap if they think they're keeping me away from her." And then, looking violently maternal, she went to make a cup of tea while dad took over.
"Your mum's making all sorts of noises about flying out to Japan," he told me immediately, as if that hadn't already been made abundantly clear.
"She's not allowed. She's not allowed, is she dad?"
"No, she's not allowed. Thank God for surgery, eh?" And we both laughed. "Get better quick," dad said, "or she will fly out, and nobody wants that to happen, right?"
And we both laughed again. Mum's going to hit Japan with full force at some stage next year - along with the rest of my family - and it's going to take the twelve months between then and now to prepare her for Japan, and - more importantly - Japan for her.
"Just don't go and die on us, alright?" dad said casually, and then wandered off and left me to stare at an empty wall in Welwyn Garden City for three minutes while I listened to them arguing over who was going to do the washing up (mum only has one hand, so she won).
The truth is: nobody is as fierce as a mother with a sick daughter. And nobody in the world is more of a mother than mine is.
"I'm coming to Japan," my mum announced when she found out that I had pneumonia.
"No, you're not," I said.
"I am, I'm coming."
"Mum, you just had surgery. You are not allowed to fly."
This made mum even angrier. She thought about it for a few minutes.
"If it wasn't for this stupid hand," she said - gesticulating with it, in case I was wondering which one it was - "I would be on the first plane. My daughter needs me."
"She doesn't, mum," I told her, reverting to third person as well in case it helped. "She needs a cuddle but by the time you get here your daughter will be perfectly healthy again."
Mum looked even angrier, as if she couldn't believe I would have the audacity to get better without her.
"You had better count yourself lucky that I'm on doctor's orders, that's all I'm saying," she said menacingly. "Because I swear to God if you get any sicker - any sicker at all - then I am on the first plane out there and the doctors are just going to have to come and drag me off, kicking and screaming. Do you hear me? If my daughter is sick, then the doctors can take a flying leap if they think they're keeping me away from her." And then, looking violently maternal, she went to make a cup of tea while dad took over.
"Your mum's making all sorts of noises about flying out to Japan," he told me immediately, as if that hadn't already been made abundantly clear.
"She's not allowed. She's not allowed, is she dad?"
"No, she's not allowed. Thank God for surgery, eh?" And we both laughed. "Get better quick," dad said, "or she will fly out, and nobody wants that to happen, right?"
And we both laughed again. Mum's going to hit Japan with full force at some stage next year - along with the rest of my family - and it's going to take the twelve months between then and now to prepare her for Japan, and - more importantly - Japan for her.
"Just don't go and die on us, alright?" dad said casually, and then wandered off and left me to stare at an empty wall in Welwyn Garden City for three minutes while I listened to them arguing over who was going to do the washing up (mum only has one hand, so she won).
The truth is: nobody is as fierce as a mother with a sick daughter. And nobody in the world is more of a mother than mine is.
Kittens
Let it be known that I believe in fate: especially the kind you really have to force into being.
If I like you, I will follow you. I will work out where you live, and when you try and crouch behind bushes I will make kissy noises at you until curiosity makes you come closer to investigate. I will be there in the morning, and I will be there in the evening, and I will be there at night even when the mosquitos are after me. I will kneel on the floor and stay there for hours, making cute faces to make you love me. I will tell you how beautiful you are, and how clever you are, and how bouncy you are, and I will tell you and tell you and tell you until your head is full of me. And, if I really, really like you, I will have a blade of grass in one hand and a bowl of milk in the other: one of which I will twitch enthusiastically, and the other I will be sniffing and saying mmm mmm mmm about as loudly as I can. I will make you love me. Because if that's what fate wants, then that's what shall happen. And if that's not what fate wants, then tough cookie: I'm making it happen anyway. Because I believe in the kind of fate that gets me what I want.
Especially - and I need to make this point perfectly clear - if you are a stray tortoiseshell family of four kittens and you have little white bellies and big orange eyes and little meows that sound like a clean plate being squeaked with a finger. Especially then.
I don't know who they belong to - almost certainly nobody, because Nichinan has a stray cat problem - but I love them already and I only met them this morning. They're brand new - perhaps a week old - and they appear to be sleeping in the vegetable patch outside my bedroom, which is how I found them: I went outside to see who was squeaking plates while I was trying to sleep off pneumonia. They're orange and black and white and absolutely teeny, and when I went outside there was a flurry of orange and black and white streaks, disappearing under the wood pile.
All, that is, but one.
"What's all this racket about?" I said crossly.
"Squeak," said the naughtiest kitten, peering around the corner of the wood with big eyes and a head cocked rakishly to one side.
"Oh, hello," I said (this isn't strictly true, actually. What I really did was immediately get hit by two hundred tons of maternal instincts racing like a runaway train, drop to my knees and croon "heellllloooo you adorable little kitten," and then - when I realised it was Japanese - try out a few random Japanese words strung together in the hope that it might understand me).
"Squeak," the kitten said, and then disappeared behind the wood.
I waited. I'm good like that. I can be very patient in very short bursts as long as I know I'll get exactly what I want before I'm bored of waiting.
And then, sure enough -
"Squeak," the kitten said again, putting his head back round.
"Squeak," said another, copying exactly.
"Squeak," said the third, and there were three little stripy heads peering at me in a vertical line like a really cheap calendar front cover (or maybe not the front cover; maybe March, or July, or a month that nobody really likes like October). So I waited for the forth kitten to line up but apparently only 3/4 of the family were interested in me.
"Hold it there," I said, and went inside to kit myself out with a piece of straw and a pneumonia mask (it would be incredibly evil to give week old kittens pneumonia just because I was too lazy to put a bit of material over my face).
And then I spent a good hour and a half, crouched on the road, trying to coax them out from under the shed with the grass and a bit of milk in a saucer.
It didn't work. It nearly worked: one of them made at least fifty cautious attempts to get over the ditch and then decided the gap was too big (they are really, really tiny kittens), the other moved its little eyes and paws every time the grass twitched (and then got distracted and tried to eat a buttercup in its way), and the other slipped down a sheet of metal and then spent twenty minutes trying to get back up again. But it didn't work. They were too scared, and too tiny, and I looked a little bit like a gay Hannibal Lector in my pink flu mask.
"I want one," I told my friends said when they dropped off another bag of icecream (I'm getting ice cream deliveries every two and a half minutes at the moment; I'd like to see that happen in London).
"Take one, then. They're almost definitely stray."
"I can't go round stealing kittens."
"Ok, fair point. But if you really want a kitten, you could go and get one. There's a company in Miyazaki that take in stray kittens and try and find them homes so they don't have to be put down by the council."
"They put kittens down?"
"Not if they can help it. But it's a big problem in this area."
"But if I go to a company then it's not fate, is it. I can't go and make a choice to have a kitten; the kitten has to choose me."
Mainly, I added silently, because it would be totally irresponsible of me to get a kitten when I work all day and will only be here a year or two. Therefore the cat has to make the decision: not me.
"The cat has to choose you of its own accord?"
"Of course."
My friends looked at the pieces of grass and the saucer of milk and the cushion outside my front door with raised eyebrows.
"Looks like you're doing a fair bit to help fate on its way."
"Of course. As long as I can force the kitten to love me and live with me because it wants to, then that's ok. That's fate. And I can use every method in my power to get them to do exactly that."
"Does fate work like that?" my friends said doubtfully.
"My kind of fate does," I said, looking at the pile at my feet and wondering if a tiny toy mouse might help swing the balance slightly.
And my fate does work like that, even though it shouldn't. It's usually half a sign, and then me dogmatically hanging on until I get what I want. And if I should have learnt one thing in the past year with The Boy, it's that fate - and love - will not be forced, and it will not be coaxed, and it will not be bribed, and it will not be chased: no matter how much I want it, no matter how happy I think it would make me, no matter how strong the sign seems to be, no matter how strong my dreams are. Fate goes where it wants, with no help from me, and there isn't the slightest thing I can do to help it one way or another.
Luckily I haven't learnt a thing, so I'm going to spend the next few days hanging around outside and seducing some tiny kittens into loving me.
And if they don't now, they damn well will when I'm finished with them.
If I like you, I will follow you. I will work out where you live, and when you try and crouch behind bushes I will make kissy noises at you until curiosity makes you come closer to investigate. I will be there in the morning, and I will be there in the evening, and I will be there at night even when the mosquitos are after me. I will kneel on the floor and stay there for hours, making cute faces to make you love me. I will tell you how beautiful you are, and how clever you are, and how bouncy you are, and I will tell you and tell you and tell you until your head is full of me. And, if I really, really like you, I will have a blade of grass in one hand and a bowl of milk in the other: one of which I will twitch enthusiastically, and the other I will be sniffing and saying mmm mmm mmm about as loudly as I can. I will make you love me. Because if that's what fate wants, then that's what shall happen. And if that's not what fate wants, then tough cookie: I'm making it happen anyway. Because I believe in the kind of fate that gets me what I want.
Especially - and I need to make this point perfectly clear - if you are a stray tortoiseshell family of four kittens and you have little white bellies and big orange eyes and little meows that sound like a clean plate being squeaked with a finger. Especially then.
I don't know who they belong to - almost certainly nobody, because Nichinan has a stray cat problem - but I love them already and I only met them this morning. They're brand new - perhaps a week old - and they appear to be sleeping in the vegetable patch outside my bedroom, which is how I found them: I went outside to see who was squeaking plates while I was trying to sleep off pneumonia. They're orange and black and white and absolutely teeny, and when I went outside there was a flurry of orange and black and white streaks, disappearing under the wood pile.
All, that is, but one.
"What's all this racket about?" I said crossly.
"Squeak," said the naughtiest kitten, peering around the corner of the wood with big eyes and a head cocked rakishly to one side.
"Oh, hello," I said (this isn't strictly true, actually. What I really did was immediately get hit by two hundred tons of maternal instincts racing like a runaway train, drop to my knees and croon "heellllloooo you adorable little kitten," and then - when I realised it was Japanese - try out a few random Japanese words strung together in the hope that it might understand me).
"Squeak," the kitten said, and then disappeared behind the wood.
I waited. I'm good like that. I can be very patient in very short bursts as long as I know I'll get exactly what I want before I'm bored of waiting.
And then, sure enough -
"Squeak," the kitten said again, putting his head back round.
"Squeak," said another, copying exactly.
"Squeak," said the third, and there were three little stripy heads peering at me in a vertical line like a really cheap calendar front cover (or maybe not the front cover; maybe March, or July, or a month that nobody really likes like October). So I waited for the forth kitten to line up but apparently only 3/4 of the family were interested in me.
"Hold it there," I said, and went inside to kit myself out with a piece of straw and a pneumonia mask (it would be incredibly evil to give week old kittens pneumonia just because I was too lazy to put a bit of material over my face).
And then I spent a good hour and a half, crouched on the road, trying to coax them out from under the shed with the grass and a bit of milk in a saucer.
It didn't work. It nearly worked: one of them made at least fifty cautious attempts to get over the ditch and then decided the gap was too big (they are really, really tiny kittens), the other moved its little eyes and paws every time the grass twitched (and then got distracted and tried to eat a buttercup in its way), and the other slipped down a sheet of metal and then spent twenty minutes trying to get back up again. But it didn't work. They were too scared, and too tiny, and I looked a little bit like a gay Hannibal Lector in my pink flu mask.
"I want one," I told my friends said when they dropped off another bag of icecream (I'm getting ice cream deliveries every two and a half minutes at the moment; I'd like to see that happen in London).
"Take one, then. They're almost definitely stray."
"I can't go round stealing kittens."
"Ok, fair point. But if you really want a kitten, you could go and get one. There's a company in Miyazaki that take in stray kittens and try and find them homes so they don't have to be put down by the council."
"They put kittens down?"
"Not if they can help it. But it's a big problem in this area."
"But if I go to a company then it's not fate, is it. I can't go and make a choice to have a kitten; the kitten has to choose me."
Mainly, I added silently, because it would be totally irresponsible of me to get a kitten when I work all day and will only be here a year or two. Therefore the cat has to make the decision: not me.
"The cat has to choose you of its own accord?"
"Of course."
My friends looked at the pieces of grass and the saucer of milk and the cushion outside my front door with raised eyebrows.
"Looks like you're doing a fair bit to help fate on its way."
"Of course. As long as I can force the kitten to love me and live with me because it wants to, then that's ok. That's fate. And I can use every method in my power to get them to do exactly that."
"Does fate work like that?" my friends said doubtfully.
"My kind of fate does," I said, looking at the pile at my feet and wondering if a tiny toy mouse might help swing the balance slightly.
And my fate does work like that, even though it shouldn't. It's usually half a sign, and then me dogmatically hanging on until I get what I want. And if I should have learnt one thing in the past year with The Boy, it's that fate - and love - will not be forced, and it will not be coaxed, and it will not be bribed, and it will not be chased: no matter how much I want it, no matter how happy I think it would make me, no matter how strong the sign seems to be, no matter how strong my dreams are. Fate goes where it wants, with no help from me, and there isn't the slightest thing I can do to help it one way or another.
Luckily I haven't learnt a thing, so I'm going to spend the next few days hanging around outside and seducing some tiny kittens into loving me.
And if they don't now, they damn well will when I'm finished with them.
Friday, 28 May 2010
Diagnosis
I have pneumonia.
It's taken a good 36 hours to establish this - 36 hours after the test results were issued, thanks to the language barrier - but I have finally been told that I have fully fledged pneumonia. Which (thank God) explains why I sat in the hospital car park yesterday and sobbed my eyes out because I was so goddamn hot and I couldn't find my car. At all. For half an hour. Despite having parked it there myself.
It also explains why I was so desperate to start a fight with anybody I could find on Wednesday. I always become utterly foul when I'm poorly.
"I don't feel that good," I told my colleague in the morning as I got hotter and hotter.
"You don't look sick," he replied.
I immediately took offence.
"What do you mean by that?"
"You don't look sick," he said a bit more slowly, confused by my aggression (this is Japan. They don't really do violence).
"What are you trying to say? That I'm faking it? Are you trying to accuse me of pretending to be sick?"
"No, I'm saying that you look pretty."
"Oh." Normally this would be enough to shut me up, but this time it wasn't.
"It's make up," I said. "Have you heard of make up?"
"Yes."
"It's what women wear to make themselves look like something they're not. In this case, healthy."
"Yes."
"So I am sick. Just to make that clear."
"Yes. And pretty." I'm sure he would have broken into an Alanis Morrisette track if he had only known it existed. "And bad tempered," he added when he thought I couldn't hear him.
That didn't work, so I made contact with England instead; they're much more prone to arguing for the sake of it. In particular, I made contact with an adorable boy I used to date a long time ago, who therefore knows just how foul I am and wouldn't be surprised in the slightest or stop being my friend because of it.
"Start on me," I demanded.
"Why?"
"Just start on me. I need to fight someone."
"I don't want to fight with you."
"Oh so help me God, what's wrong with you, you pansy: just start on me!"
"Ok, ok. Get off your arse and start writing your book."
There was a silence.
"That was really unnecessary."
"You told me to start on you! I didn't mean it."
"Start on me, don't start on my book."
"But... But... You wanted a fight!"
"Now I just want to cry."
"Do you need a cuddle?"
"Yes, but I can't have one because everyone is so goddamn far away."
"You're the one who's far away, Hol. Everyone else is still here."
"Oh whatever. You're rubbish."
And then I left him to get down on his hands and knees and thank every single lucky star that he doesn't date me anymore.
Colleagues and friends having therefore failed me, I went home and was greeted by the mosquito.
"What's up?" he said.
"I don't feel well," I told him.
He started hovering around me, looking suspiciously happy to see me.
"You're fat," I added. "You look like a marshmallow."
"Yes, I've been eating you a lot," he told me happily. "Can I have another nibble?"
"Oh for the love of God, do you have no shame? I'm sick."
"Just one?"
"No."
"Half?"
"No. Seriously, don't push me today. I'm not in the mood."
"Please?" Then he landed on my arm anyway and made to stick his little nose out like a hungry, sharp elephant. And I decided that I'm sick of the kind of love that hurts, and lost my temper.
"You little bugger," I said.
And then, reader, I squished him.
I'm going back to bed, with my pneumonia and my temperature and my incredibly bad mood, and I warn you: if you try and contact me - and especially if you don't - there will be no mercy.
The mosquito would now testify to that. If he only he still could.
It's taken a good 36 hours to establish this - 36 hours after the test results were issued, thanks to the language barrier - but I have finally been told that I have fully fledged pneumonia. Which (thank God) explains why I sat in the hospital car park yesterday and sobbed my eyes out because I was so goddamn hot and I couldn't find my car. At all. For half an hour. Despite having parked it there myself.
It also explains why I was so desperate to start a fight with anybody I could find on Wednesday. I always become utterly foul when I'm poorly.
"I don't feel that good," I told my colleague in the morning as I got hotter and hotter.
"You don't look sick," he replied.
I immediately took offence.
"What do you mean by that?"
"You don't look sick," he said a bit more slowly, confused by my aggression (this is Japan. They don't really do violence).
"What are you trying to say? That I'm faking it? Are you trying to accuse me of pretending to be sick?"
"No, I'm saying that you look pretty."
"Oh." Normally this would be enough to shut me up, but this time it wasn't.
"It's make up," I said. "Have you heard of make up?"
"Yes."
"It's what women wear to make themselves look like something they're not. In this case, healthy."
"Yes."
"So I am sick. Just to make that clear."
"Yes. And pretty." I'm sure he would have broken into an Alanis Morrisette track if he had only known it existed. "And bad tempered," he added when he thought I couldn't hear him.
That didn't work, so I made contact with England instead; they're much more prone to arguing for the sake of it. In particular, I made contact with an adorable boy I used to date a long time ago, who therefore knows just how foul I am and wouldn't be surprised in the slightest or stop being my friend because of it.
"Start on me," I demanded.
"Why?"
"Just start on me. I need to fight someone."
"I don't want to fight with you."
"Oh so help me God, what's wrong with you, you pansy: just start on me!"
"Ok, ok. Get off your arse and start writing your book."
There was a silence.
"That was really unnecessary."
"You told me to start on you! I didn't mean it."
"Start on me, don't start on my book."
"But... But... You wanted a fight!"
"Now I just want to cry."
"Do you need a cuddle?"
"Yes, but I can't have one because everyone is so goddamn far away."
"You're the one who's far away, Hol. Everyone else is still here."
"Oh whatever. You're rubbish."
And then I left him to get down on his hands and knees and thank every single lucky star that he doesn't date me anymore.
Colleagues and friends having therefore failed me, I went home and was greeted by the mosquito.
"What's up?" he said.
"I don't feel well," I told him.
He started hovering around me, looking suspiciously happy to see me.
"You're fat," I added. "You look like a marshmallow."
"Yes, I've been eating you a lot," he told me happily. "Can I have another nibble?"
"Oh for the love of God, do you have no shame? I'm sick."
"Just one?"
"No."
"Half?"
"No. Seriously, don't push me today. I'm not in the mood."
"Please?" Then he landed on my arm anyway and made to stick his little nose out like a hungry, sharp elephant. And I decided that I'm sick of the kind of love that hurts, and lost my temper.
"You little bugger," I said.
And then, reader, I squished him.
I'm going back to bed, with my pneumonia and my temperature and my incredibly bad mood, and I warn you: if you try and contact me - and especially if you don't - there will be no mercy.
The mosquito would now testify to that. If he only he still could.
Sickness
Well, it has been a relatively dramatic 24 hours - relative to what I normally do on Thursdays - and I am now in quaranteen, or whatever it’s called when you are escorted off the school premises like a leper and told to stay in your house until further notice.
I don’t have Legionairres disease. Seven hours, three doctors, two surgeries, one hospital, one urine test, one blood test, one spit test, one chest x-ray and 8,000 yen established that. What they also established, unfortunately, was that I do have something.
“No Legionairres,” the doctor told me after an entire afternoon spent reading F Scott Fitzerald in an incredibly uncomfortable chair.
“Good,” I said. “I’m glad about that.”
Then she pointed to my blood test results.
“Sick, though.”
“Yes, I thought I might be. I don’t feel great.” I knew that I definitely didn’t feel great because I had just cried three times in the doctor’s waiting room, and I only cry for no reason at all when I’m pretty sick.
“Very high temperature, big white blood cells, antibodies.”
“Ah. So what’s wrong?”
“Sick.”
“Yes, but what’s wrong?”
“Big white blood cells, antibodies.”
I got ready to cry again.
“They’re symptoms of my sickness, not what’s causing it. What have I got?”
“Sick,” she said again. “Medicine.”
“For what?”
“Take medicine.”
I gave up, because I was too hot and tired and weepy to argue.
“Fine, just give me the drugs,” I told her, and then I got up and left and cried in the car because of how much they had charged me for what was now technically half a day’s holiday allocation.
This morning, I woke up and got out of bed; by which I mean that I opened swollen eyes and rolled onto the floor so that I could wedge my way upright with my elbows. My throat hurt, my head was hot, my ear felt like something was using a pick axe to climb into the inner part of it, and I was so tired that even a wooden floor looked comfortable to curl up on.
Which meant, obviously, that I went to school. I’m British; if you can still move you’re alive, and if you’re alive you’d better get your arse to work or everybody will whisper about how weak you are, and how they should have employed somebody a little less wan.
My school, unfortunately, did not agree.
Midway through my first lesson they rang the hospital to get my results (which would be highly illegal in England, but is standard practice here). And then: chaos. A teacher walked into my lesson and dragged me out almost bodily.
“You must go home now.”
“Huh? I’m okay. Honestly, I'm okay. I feel fine.” And comparatively I did: I've felt much worse and gone to work.
“Are not okay, are very sick. We spoke to hospital.”
“Huh?”
“Very bad news.”
“Am I dying?” I laughed, and then I stopped laughing because they weren't laughing. In fact, they looked very angry, and/or worried and/or anxious (I don’t know: I haven’t worked out those subtleties of Japanese facial expressions yet: fierce politeness means that it all kind of looks the same).
“You have serious illness, go home right now and stay home.”
“Midway through my lesson?”
“Right now.”
"It's just a cold."
"It's not just a cold," they said, which threw me for a loop, because what do people get if it's not just a cold? I thought that was the only type of illness there was.
“Oh,” I said, and then I was escorted off the premises without being allowed to say goodbye to any of my students or get my coffee, still sitting on my desk, and still not having a clue what was wrong with me or when I was allowed to come back or what I was supposed to do in the meantime.
Now I have nothing to do but sit at home and wait until somebody tells me what the hell is going on. And I'm not very good at sitting and waiting at the best of times, let alone with a very angry, if not raging, temperature.
So - until I have any idea of what is wrong with me - I think I'll just sit and have a nice little pointless, reasonless cry instead.
I don’t have Legionairres disease. Seven hours, three doctors, two surgeries, one hospital, one urine test, one blood test, one spit test, one chest x-ray and 8,000 yen established that. What they also established, unfortunately, was that I do have something.
“No Legionairres,” the doctor told me after an entire afternoon spent reading F Scott Fitzerald in an incredibly uncomfortable chair.
“Good,” I said. “I’m glad about that.”
Then she pointed to my blood test results.
“Sick, though.”
“Yes, I thought I might be. I don’t feel great.” I knew that I definitely didn’t feel great because I had just cried three times in the doctor’s waiting room, and I only cry for no reason at all when I’m pretty sick.
“Very high temperature, big white blood cells, antibodies.”
“Ah. So what’s wrong?”
“Sick.”
“Yes, but what’s wrong?”
“Big white blood cells, antibodies.”
I got ready to cry again.
“They’re symptoms of my sickness, not what’s causing it. What have I got?”
“Sick,” she said again. “Medicine.”
“For what?”
“Take medicine.”
I gave up, because I was too hot and tired and weepy to argue.
“Fine, just give me the drugs,” I told her, and then I got up and left and cried in the car because of how much they had charged me for what was now technically half a day’s holiday allocation.
This morning, I woke up and got out of bed; by which I mean that I opened swollen eyes and rolled onto the floor so that I could wedge my way upright with my elbows. My throat hurt, my head was hot, my ear felt like something was using a pick axe to climb into the inner part of it, and I was so tired that even a wooden floor looked comfortable to curl up on.
Which meant, obviously, that I went to school. I’m British; if you can still move you’re alive, and if you’re alive you’d better get your arse to work or everybody will whisper about how weak you are, and how they should have employed somebody a little less wan.
My school, unfortunately, did not agree.
Midway through my first lesson they rang the hospital to get my results (which would be highly illegal in England, but is standard practice here). And then: chaos. A teacher walked into my lesson and dragged me out almost bodily.
“You must go home now.”
“Huh? I’m okay. Honestly, I'm okay. I feel fine.” And comparatively I did: I've felt much worse and gone to work.
“Are not okay, are very sick. We spoke to hospital.”
“Huh?”
“Very bad news.”
“Am I dying?” I laughed, and then I stopped laughing because they weren't laughing. In fact, they looked very angry, and/or worried and/or anxious (I don’t know: I haven’t worked out those subtleties of Japanese facial expressions yet: fierce politeness means that it all kind of looks the same).
“You have serious illness, go home right now and stay home.”
“Midway through my lesson?”
“Right now.”
"It's just a cold."
"It's not just a cold," they said, which threw me for a loop, because what do people get if it's not just a cold? I thought that was the only type of illness there was.
“Oh,” I said, and then I was escorted off the premises without being allowed to say goodbye to any of my students or get my coffee, still sitting on my desk, and still not having a clue what was wrong with me or when I was allowed to come back or what I was supposed to do in the meantime.
Now I have nothing to do but sit at home and wait until somebody tells me what the hell is going on. And I'm not very good at sitting and waiting at the best of times, let alone with a very angry, if not raging, temperature.
So - until I have any idea of what is wrong with me - I think I'll just sit and have a nice little pointless, reasonless cry instead.
Leg Pulling
Health and beauty are important to women; especially women who are nearing their thirties and are therefore rapidly losing large quantities of both.
As my friend and I are two such women - me far more than her, although we are both the wrong side of 25 - we go at least once or twice a week to the local onsen, the Cherry. It’s not the nicest onsen in the area, it’s not the biggest onsen, and it doesn’t have the best free shampoo, but the water is known across this part of the country for being - well, pretty much magic. Which means we both spend as much time in it as possible, as often as possible, in the hope that we may accidentally step out one day with the skin we had ten years ago (a watery time machine much, much better than anything Michael J Fox ever climbed into).
I feel like crap, I texted her last night. I’m exhausted constantly and I’ve got a sore throat and I’m hot and cold and I’ve been up all night coughing up green shit.
Me too, my friend texted back. It must be work stress.
I didn't say anything, because it might be work stress for her but it is quite tangibly not work stress for me. I barely do any.
Onsen? she suggested.
So - as I never need persuading to sit in a hot tub of water and do nothing for two hours - we headed to the onsen, chatted cheerily to the naked old ladies and straightened out every problem the world had ever gallantly offered us.
“I feel so much better already,” my friend eventually admitted, after we had popped up again from holding our breath under water as long as we could.
“I love that this water is so smelly,” I said. Which - for those of you who have never been to an onsen - it is: a yellow colour, sulphorous, salty and full of minerals and other stuff I know nothing about but sounds really, really fun and good for you. The smellier the better, as far as my friend and I are concerned. It shows it must be doing something.
“It really feels like we’re getting better, doesn’t it?”
So we dived under the stinky water again, and - after another fifteen minutes of turning into salty little prunes - we eventually climbed out, feeling wonderful, coughed up some more green shit and went for a cigarette.
All of which means that the round of emails I woke up to this morning did not exactly fill me with the sparkle of a million fairies.
The Cherry Onsen was on the news last night, a local friend had emailed the Nichinan group of us. Legionairres disease has been found in the water. Does anyone go there?
Wouldn’t touch that place; it’s minging, another friend had replied.
Don’t Nam and Holly go there every week?
Yeah. Nuff said. Hahaha.
I wouldn’t worry. Apparently you just have to be concerned if you have cold like symptoms.
Are you pulling my leg-ionairres? Ahaha.
They said on the news you were only at high risk if you go under the water. And if you smoke.
Who goes under the water at an onsen?
Probably those two dickheads, the email round concluded, as if both of us weren’t cc’d into every single one of them.
I’d just finished reading when my phone beeped with a new date suggestion from my friend.
Two words: Irony, and Doctors?
There are very few things as important as being healthy and beautiful, you see. And not being dead or hospitalised from Legionairres disease is probably a step in the right direction. As is getting out of the healthy and beautiful smelly water that may have given it to you and getting into a doctor's surgery.
I just doubt that it will be as much fun.
As my friend and I are two such women - me far more than her, although we are both the wrong side of 25 - we go at least once or twice a week to the local onsen, the Cherry. It’s not the nicest onsen in the area, it’s not the biggest onsen, and it doesn’t have the best free shampoo, but the water is known across this part of the country for being - well, pretty much magic. Which means we both spend as much time in it as possible, as often as possible, in the hope that we may accidentally step out one day with the skin we had ten years ago (a watery time machine much, much better than anything Michael J Fox ever climbed into).
I feel like crap, I texted her last night. I’m exhausted constantly and I’ve got a sore throat and I’m hot and cold and I’ve been up all night coughing up green shit.
Me too, my friend texted back. It must be work stress.
I didn't say anything, because it might be work stress for her but it is quite tangibly not work stress for me. I barely do any.
Onsen? she suggested.
So - as I never need persuading to sit in a hot tub of water and do nothing for two hours - we headed to the onsen, chatted cheerily to the naked old ladies and straightened out every problem the world had ever gallantly offered us.
“I feel so much better already,” my friend eventually admitted, after we had popped up again from holding our breath under water as long as we could.
“I love that this water is so smelly,” I said. Which - for those of you who have never been to an onsen - it is: a yellow colour, sulphorous, salty and full of minerals and other stuff I know nothing about but sounds really, really fun and good for you. The smellier the better, as far as my friend and I are concerned. It shows it must be doing something.
“It really feels like we’re getting better, doesn’t it?”
So we dived under the stinky water again, and - after another fifteen minutes of turning into salty little prunes - we eventually climbed out, feeling wonderful, coughed up some more green shit and went for a cigarette.
All of which means that the round of emails I woke up to this morning did not exactly fill me with the sparkle of a million fairies.
The Cherry Onsen was on the news last night, a local friend had emailed the Nichinan group of us. Legionairres disease has been found in the water. Does anyone go there?
Wouldn’t touch that place; it’s minging, another friend had replied.
Don’t Nam and Holly go there every week?
Yeah. Nuff said. Hahaha.
I wouldn’t worry. Apparently you just have to be concerned if you have cold like symptoms.
Are you pulling my leg-ionairres? Ahaha.
They said on the news you were only at high risk if you go under the water. And if you smoke.
Who goes under the water at an onsen?
Probably those two dickheads, the email round concluded, as if both of us weren’t cc’d into every single one of them.
I’d just finished reading when my phone beeped with a new date suggestion from my friend.
Two words: Irony, and Doctors?
There are very few things as important as being healthy and beautiful, you see. And not being dead or hospitalised from Legionairres disease is probably a step in the right direction. As is getting out of the healthy and beautiful smelly water that may have given it to you and getting into a doctor's surgery.
I just doubt that it will be as much fun.
Thursday, 27 May 2010
See-saw
Ignorance is bliss. Which is lucky, because it`s a state I quite naturally revert to without much effort at all. It`s trying to change it that gets me into trouble.
As an experiment, three days ago I attached a meter to this site. I was curious; first of all to see how many people read what I write, and second – when I realised that the application showed me a lot more than just numbers – to see who was reading it, where they were reading it and how long they were reading it for.
I know a lot about you, now, reader. Not as much as you know about me, but I know a lot more than I did. I know what computer you use, I know precisely where you live in the world – down to the city - and I know what network you`re on, how you found me and what you clicked on to accidentally stumble upon this site. I know what time you read it, how many times you read it, which pages you click on. I don`t know your name, age or gender, but I`m convinced that if I could just work out which button to press, I would not only be able to work these out; I would also be able to find out what you had for breakfast this morning, whether you`re thinking about getting a new haircut in the next week or so, and if you pick your toenails in front of the television or not.
Luckily for you, I haven`t established which button this is yet.
Which was interesting for about three seconds – somebody reads this in India? Do I know somebody in India? Germany? New Zealand? Denmark? – and then became confusing and slightly scary. I started worrying over every single detail: would somebody from Canada be offended if I wrote this? What about Essex? What about Hatfield? What could I write of interest to someone in Denmark? Why did one person only spend one minute on the page? You can`t read anything in one minute. Didn`t they like it? Did I upset them? What did I do wrong? How can I make them like me more? Why is my sister not reading it? Why is my best friend not reading it? Is that entry one of my ex boyfriends? Is that daily click – from a precise area of Japan – from the ex boyfriend (heart spirals into mouth); and if not – definitely not, wrong language, wrong computer - why the hell is he not reading it too? Why doesn`t he care anymore? Why doesn`t anything I think or feel make a difference to him when he used to read it religiously, every single morning? Why do I still care so much about him - what he`s doing, what he`s thinking, how he`s feeling - when he doesn`t even stalk me sporadically anymore, and it`s so goddamn easy to?
And, before I knew it, my beautiful, invisible readers – mysterious and international and kind and forgiving and utterly unknown and strange to me, even the ones I knew – had become horribly real: horribly known, horribly transient, and horribly discerning. And – most terribly, in one particular case - horribly absent. The faceless, nationless, invisible people who visited my blog suddenly had computers and locations and `click numbers` and short boredom thresholds, and I realised that I had forgotten the fundamental rule of writing; that the reader is always, always half of it, and what the reader brings to each sentence is equally as important as anything written there. And that I need you all far, far more than you could ever need me, because writing does not exist without readers, whereas a reader will still exist without a writer. And my dependency on you to be who you are in my imagination was even more important than your dependency on me to be that way in yours.
It has made me so sad - so incredibly sad - because, as always, I pushed too far. I couldn`t just write and be read. I had to try to make sense of that relationship, as I try to make sense of every relationship: and, in trying to hold it in my hand and pull it into pieces so that I know more about it, I nearly crushed it. I had forgotten that the reader`s unimaginative, cruel and base exposure to me - in the form of scary, unsympathetic numbers, and scary, unforgiving silences - could be as damaging to my writing as my total and callous exposure would be to my readers.
The writer and reader have – always have had, always will have – a unique dependency on each other; they balance on the see-saw of creativity with such fragility that one tip too far can be enough to push it over and stop the process altogether. And I need you all to be what you always have been; as much to my imagination – as mysterious and infallible and invincible - as a writer should always be to yours. Even if I am partly writing, secretly, for a reader I love that has long since gone.
So please, readers, whoever you are - whether I know you or not, whether you read for one minute or two minutes or five hours or two seconds: keep reading. Keep your side of the see-saw off the ground, and I will do the same to mine.
I have turned the meter off, now, and it will stay off. You have your privacy back, and I will force out nothing else. I don`t need to know, and I never did. Not who you are, not how many you are, not where you are. Not whether we had a past, or whether we have a present, or whether we might have a future. It doesn`t matter. I write, you read, and the rest should just be as perfect as we imagine it to be.
I don`t want to destroy something beautiful by pulling it apart to see what it`s made of. I have done that to my heart already. I will not do it to my writing too.
As an experiment, three days ago I attached a meter to this site. I was curious; first of all to see how many people read what I write, and second – when I realised that the application showed me a lot more than just numbers – to see who was reading it, where they were reading it and how long they were reading it for.
I know a lot about you, now, reader. Not as much as you know about me, but I know a lot more than I did. I know what computer you use, I know precisely where you live in the world – down to the city - and I know what network you`re on, how you found me and what you clicked on to accidentally stumble upon this site. I know what time you read it, how many times you read it, which pages you click on. I don`t know your name, age or gender, but I`m convinced that if I could just work out which button to press, I would not only be able to work these out; I would also be able to find out what you had for breakfast this morning, whether you`re thinking about getting a new haircut in the next week or so, and if you pick your toenails in front of the television or not.
Luckily for you, I haven`t established which button this is yet.
Which was interesting for about three seconds – somebody reads this in India? Do I know somebody in India? Germany? New Zealand? Denmark? – and then became confusing and slightly scary. I started worrying over every single detail: would somebody from Canada be offended if I wrote this? What about Essex? What about Hatfield? What could I write of interest to someone in Denmark? Why did one person only spend one minute on the page? You can`t read anything in one minute. Didn`t they like it? Did I upset them? What did I do wrong? How can I make them like me more? Why is my sister not reading it? Why is my best friend not reading it? Is that entry one of my ex boyfriends? Is that daily click – from a precise area of Japan – from the ex boyfriend (heart spirals into mouth); and if not – definitely not, wrong language, wrong computer - why the hell is he not reading it too? Why doesn`t he care anymore? Why doesn`t anything I think or feel make a difference to him when he used to read it religiously, every single morning? Why do I still care so much about him - what he`s doing, what he`s thinking, how he`s feeling - when he doesn`t even stalk me sporadically anymore, and it`s so goddamn easy to?
And, before I knew it, my beautiful, invisible readers – mysterious and international and kind and forgiving and utterly unknown and strange to me, even the ones I knew – had become horribly real: horribly known, horribly transient, and horribly discerning. And – most terribly, in one particular case - horribly absent. The faceless, nationless, invisible people who visited my blog suddenly had computers and locations and `click numbers` and short boredom thresholds, and I realised that I had forgotten the fundamental rule of writing; that the reader is always, always half of it, and what the reader brings to each sentence is equally as important as anything written there. And that I need you all far, far more than you could ever need me, because writing does not exist without readers, whereas a reader will still exist without a writer. And my dependency on you to be who you are in my imagination was even more important than your dependency on me to be that way in yours.
It has made me so sad - so incredibly sad - because, as always, I pushed too far. I couldn`t just write and be read. I had to try to make sense of that relationship, as I try to make sense of every relationship: and, in trying to hold it in my hand and pull it into pieces so that I know more about it, I nearly crushed it. I had forgotten that the reader`s unimaginative, cruel and base exposure to me - in the form of scary, unsympathetic numbers, and scary, unforgiving silences - could be as damaging to my writing as my total and callous exposure would be to my readers.
The writer and reader have – always have had, always will have – a unique dependency on each other; they balance on the see-saw of creativity with such fragility that one tip too far can be enough to push it over and stop the process altogether. And I need you all to be what you always have been; as much to my imagination – as mysterious and infallible and invincible - as a writer should always be to yours. Even if I am partly writing, secretly, for a reader I love that has long since gone.
So please, readers, whoever you are - whether I know you or not, whether you read for one minute or two minutes or five hours or two seconds: keep reading. Keep your side of the see-saw off the ground, and I will do the same to mine.
I have turned the meter off, now, and it will stay off. You have your privacy back, and I will force out nothing else. I don`t need to know, and I never did. Not who you are, not how many you are, not where you are. Not whether we had a past, or whether we have a present, or whether we might have a future. It doesn`t matter. I write, you read, and the rest should just be as perfect as we imagine it to be.
I don`t want to destroy something beautiful by pulling it apart to see what it`s made of. I have done that to my heart already. I will not do it to my writing too.
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Fame
The paparazzi just won't leave me alone. A year ago I was on telly for eight minutes - bitching and glaring and saying exactly what the director told me to say because I'm nice like that - and the media are apparently still hungry for my blood; twelve tiny months later and they've tracked me again so that they can suck me dry with all their unwanted attention.
This time, it was embarrassing: the way they tried to force me into any context so that they could compromise my privacy and sell more papers.
First, they didn't tell me they were going to be there. That was the first sign that they wanted me in their newspaper. Then they didn't mention me by name at all; that was the second sign that they had organised the entire article around me. Then they didn't mention me in any context whatsoever, even slightly, and talked about something else entirely, and that was the third sign that they were just going to keep trying to force me into the media limelight whether I liked it or not. Then - shameful, shameful journalist - they put at least twenty five people in front of me in the photograph, and waited until I was facing the wrong way and half way through a sentence before they immortalised me: they clearly weren't even going to pretend that anything in the world mattered but me. Blood sucking immoral scum, that's what the media is.
"Where?" my friend said when I showed him the picture. I have five, in case four of them get ruined.
"There," I said, pointing.
"Where?" they said again.
"There," I said a little bit crossly, getting a pen out and circling my head which is bobbing around somewhere at the back of the group.
There was a pause.
"It looks like you've been photoshopped on."
"It does not."
"Yeah it does. Look: you're not the same colour as anyone else at all."
"That's racist. You're racisting me."
My friend laughed, the bastard. He's clearly in on it with the media, trying to suck my life into an egocentric void. I won't let it happen. I'm real, you know. My dad was born in Hatfield.
So I took a copy to Baba instead.
"Doko?" she said, and even I know what that means, so I pointed to it a little more crossly.
She went to get her glasses, and then - after a few minutes of peering - she laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed until I grabbed the newspaper back off her. I think she's racisting me too.
They didn't stop there, though: oh, no. The local media all got wind of it, and twenty minutes later Baba was sticking herself to my spare room window like one of those little gummy toys you throw from a distance and yelling "T.B" at me, even though I was sitting just the other side of it.
"T.B!" she shouted. "T.B!"
So I followed her to her house to watch my fame blossom further.
It defied belief, really. Different journalists - ones with filming cameras this time - had filmed exactly the same story that had nothing to do with me whatsoever and then (how they can look themselves in the mirror at night, I don't know) failed to put me in it. At all. I was in the staffroom at the time, tie-dying bits of paper. I didn't think they would sink that low, but they had: they had made the story all about me again, because what was everyone in Nichinan going to be thinking except: where's that white girl that looks photoshopped on? Exactly. How horribly upsetting for the people the feature was supposed to be about. Sidelined because of my glory, once again.
It's shameful, really, the way the media hounds and hounds us until we're driven to our own obliteration. It's a good thing I'm so grounded, really, or God Only Knows what would happen next. As it is I'm that close to falling out of a Nichinan nightclub with my skirt tucked into one of my three remaining pairs of knickers, just so that the media can take another piece of me. And - if it wasn't for the fact that there aren't any clubs within a 200km radius - then I probably would do exactly that.
Luckily, the slippery slope of fame and glory out here isn't particularly slippery or slopey: there aren't any clubs to go to or drugs I can abuse when the attention gets too much, and there isn't an rehab to enter myself into when the drugs get too much, and there isn't any magazine I can sell my story to when the rehab gets too much. There isn't anywhere to slide into, frankly, which I think might be a restriction of the inherent freedom I should have to destroy myself in public.
The next time the media wants to coast off my fame, if there aren't at least thirty five people in front of me before they take the photo, I'm going to sue.
Those soul sucking paparazzi bastards are just going to have to try harder if they want to try and make fame change me.
This time, it was embarrassing: the way they tried to force me into any context so that they could compromise my privacy and sell more papers.
First, they didn't tell me they were going to be there. That was the first sign that they wanted me in their newspaper. Then they didn't mention me by name at all; that was the second sign that they had organised the entire article around me. Then they didn't mention me in any context whatsoever, even slightly, and talked about something else entirely, and that was the third sign that they were just going to keep trying to force me into the media limelight whether I liked it or not. Then - shameful, shameful journalist - they put at least twenty five people in front of me in the photograph, and waited until I was facing the wrong way and half way through a sentence before they immortalised me: they clearly weren't even going to pretend that anything in the world mattered but me. Blood sucking immoral scum, that's what the media is.
"Where?" my friend said when I showed him the picture. I have five, in case four of them get ruined.
"There," I said, pointing.
"Where?" they said again.
"There," I said a little bit crossly, getting a pen out and circling my head which is bobbing around somewhere at the back of the group.
There was a pause.
"It looks like you've been photoshopped on."
"It does not."
"Yeah it does. Look: you're not the same colour as anyone else at all."
"That's racist. You're racisting me."
My friend laughed, the bastard. He's clearly in on it with the media, trying to suck my life into an egocentric void. I won't let it happen. I'm real, you know. My dad was born in Hatfield.
So I took a copy to Baba instead.
"Doko?" she said, and even I know what that means, so I pointed to it a little more crossly.
She went to get her glasses, and then - after a few minutes of peering - she laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed until I grabbed the newspaper back off her. I think she's racisting me too.
They didn't stop there, though: oh, no. The local media all got wind of it, and twenty minutes later Baba was sticking herself to my spare room window like one of those little gummy toys you throw from a distance and yelling "T.B" at me, even though I was sitting just the other side of it.
"T.B!" she shouted. "T.B!"
So I followed her to her house to watch my fame blossom further.
It defied belief, really. Different journalists - ones with filming cameras this time - had filmed exactly the same story that had nothing to do with me whatsoever and then (how they can look themselves in the mirror at night, I don't know) failed to put me in it. At all. I was in the staffroom at the time, tie-dying bits of paper. I didn't think they would sink that low, but they had: they had made the story all about me again, because what was everyone in Nichinan going to be thinking except: where's that white girl that looks photoshopped on? Exactly. How horribly upsetting for the people the feature was supposed to be about. Sidelined because of my glory, once again.
It's shameful, really, the way the media hounds and hounds us until we're driven to our own obliteration. It's a good thing I'm so grounded, really, or God Only Knows what would happen next. As it is I'm that close to falling out of a Nichinan nightclub with my skirt tucked into one of my three remaining pairs of knickers, just so that the media can take another piece of me. And - if it wasn't for the fact that there aren't any clubs within a 200km radius - then I probably would do exactly that.
Luckily, the slippery slope of fame and glory out here isn't particularly slippery or slopey: there aren't any clubs to go to or drugs I can abuse when the attention gets too much, and there isn't an rehab to enter myself into when the drugs get too much, and there isn't any magazine I can sell my story to when the rehab gets too much. There isn't anywhere to slide into, frankly, which I think might be a restriction of the inherent freedom I should have to destroy myself in public.
The next time the media wants to coast off my fame, if there aren't at least thirty five people in front of me before they take the photo, I'm going to sue.
Those soul sucking paparazzi bastards are just going to have to try harder if they want to try and make fame change me.
Tuesday, 25 May 2010
War
The ceasefire is over. Baba invaded my territory today - just like that, just because she felt like it - and she has crossed a line.
Last night I did my laundry. Actually, this should read: last night I did my laundry again, as I did it two nights ago and then forgot about it and left it there to stink and ferment in the washing machine so I had to repeat the exercise yesterday. This morning, late for work again because I was too busy writing witty comments on my Facebook page that nobody ever, ever reads, I piled my washing into a basket, took it outside, hung one pair of knickers, looked at my watch, swore profusely and jumped into my car so that I wouldn't get sacked from a job I actually quite like this time.
It'll be fine, I thought. I'll just have to wash it for a third time when I get home this evening.
I have just returned from work, driven into the car space in front of my house, parked very, very badly and then found myself thinking - for a few, confused seconds - that I must have accidentally trained my washing to jump from a basket onto a clothes line, pin itself there very neatly and then completely forgotten about it. And then: no, I thought. Everything has been hung inside out and straightened and pegged perfectly at the seams, and there's no way anything belonging to me would do that of its own accord.
I was just walking around and talking to the washing, hanging there in well behaved submission, when Baba pops her head out of the house next door.
"Horri," she shouts, and then she points to my washing and her watch, to show she understands why I ran off this morning with one shoe still untied.
"You did this?" I said in English.
"Of course," she said in Japanese.
And then we stared at each other with a glint in our eyes; a glint that - and I could be wrong - looked remarkably like the reflection of a gauntlet being thrown down.
Japanese grandmas are unbelievable; they just don't know when to stop. I knew Baba was going to cross a line someday soon. I was prepared for it.
I just didn't know it was going to have my washing attached to it.
Last night I did my laundry. Actually, this should read: last night I did my laundry again, as I did it two nights ago and then forgot about it and left it there to stink and ferment in the washing machine so I had to repeat the exercise yesterday. This morning, late for work again because I was too busy writing witty comments on my Facebook page that nobody ever, ever reads, I piled my washing into a basket, took it outside, hung one pair of knickers, looked at my watch, swore profusely and jumped into my car so that I wouldn't get sacked from a job I actually quite like this time.
It'll be fine, I thought. I'll just have to wash it for a third time when I get home this evening.
I have just returned from work, driven into the car space in front of my house, parked very, very badly and then found myself thinking - for a few, confused seconds - that I must have accidentally trained my washing to jump from a basket onto a clothes line, pin itself there very neatly and then completely forgotten about it. And then: no, I thought. Everything has been hung inside out and straightened and pegged perfectly at the seams, and there's no way anything belonging to me would do that of its own accord.
I was just walking around and talking to the washing, hanging there in well behaved submission, when Baba pops her head out of the house next door.
"Horri," she shouts, and then she points to my washing and her watch, to show she understands why I ran off this morning with one shoe still untied.
"You did this?" I said in English.
"Of course," she said in Japanese.
And then we stared at each other with a glint in our eyes; a glint that - and I could be wrong - looked remarkably like the reflection of a gauntlet being thrown down.
Japanese grandmas are unbelievable; they just don't know when to stop. I knew Baba was going to cross a line someday soon. I was prepared for it.
I just didn't know it was going to have my washing attached to it.
Time wasting
Sometimes people accuse me of wasting my time. And, frankly, I have no idea what they mean. I think I invest my time very wisely.
Harai Rocks, I wrote on a piece of tie-dye paper I made in one of my free periods today. Then I handed it to my colleague.
“Here`s a present,” I told him. I give him so many hand-made presents (I have so many free periods) that he barely even looked up.
“Thankyou,” he said when he eventually did. Then he looked a bit confused.
“Do you know what it means?” I asked him, realising from his expression that he didn`t.
“Yes.”
“Which bit?”
“Harai. That`s my name.”
“Uhuh. What about the other bit?”
“Yes.” And then he made a hand gesture to indicate being smashed over the head with a rock. “Hard thing. Throw at me,” he said a little sadly.
I laughed for the first time.
“You think I want to throw rocks at you?”
“Yes,” he said.
I laughed for the second time.
“Just a minute,” he said, and then got his computerised dictionary out and looked it up. “I shake?” he asked me, showing me the entry.
I laughed for the third time.
“No.”
He looked perturbed, and scanned the dictionary again.
“I swing from side to side?” he said in complete earnestness.
I laughed for the fourth time.
“It means you`re cool, Harai. Rock n roll.”
There was a silence.
“You have heard of Rock n roll, right?” This - after all - is the man who thought Hey Jude was “the cleaning music”.
“Mmm,” he said unconvincingly. “Michael Jackson?”
And I laughed for the fifth time.
Three minutes that piece of paper took me to make; five belly laughs I got out of it. So for anyone who accuses me of wasting my time, there`s the proof that it`s nonsense. Three minutes exchanged for five laughs.
By anybody`s standards, I think that`s a very wise investment.
Harai Rocks, I wrote on a piece of tie-dye paper I made in one of my free periods today. Then I handed it to my colleague.
“Here`s a present,” I told him. I give him so many hand-made presents (I have so many free periods) that he barely even looked up.
“Thankyou,” he said when he eventually did. Then he looked a bit confused.
“Do you know what it means?” I asked him, realising from his expression that he didn`t.
“Yes.”
“Which bit?”
“Harai. That`s my name.”
“Uhuh. What about the other bit?”
“Yes.” And then he made a hand gesture to indicate being smashed over the head with a rock. “Hard thing. Throw at me,” he said a little sadly.
I laughed for the first time.
“You think I want to throw rocks at you?”
“Yes,” he said.
I laughed for the second time.
“Just a minute,” he said, and then got his computerised dictionary out and looked it up. “I shake?” he asked me, showing me the entry.
I laughed for the third time.
“No.”
He looked perturbed, and scanned the dictionary again.
“I swing from side to side?” he said in complete earnestness.
I laughed for the fourth time.
“It means you`re cool, Harai. Rock n roll.”
There was a silence.
“You have heard of Rock n roll, right?” This - after all - is the man who thought Hey Jude was “the cleaning music”.
“Mmm,” he said unconvincingly. “Michael Jackson?”
And I laughed for the fifth time.
Three minutes that piece of paper took me to make; five belly laughs I got out of it. So for anyone who accuses me of wasting my time, there`s the proof that it`s nonsense. Three minutes exchanged for five laughs.
By anybody`s standards, I think that`s a very wise investment.
Monday, 24 May 2010
Mosquito
I don`t like mosquitos. I don`t like them more than I don`t like celery or egg, and that`s a lot because celery and egg are both revolting.
The feeling, unfortunately, is not mutual.
Last night I was very busy, writing and then immediately deleting lines from The Book and ultimately getting nowhere at all, when a mosquito plonked itself on my computer screen.
“Hi,” it said.
“Excuse me,” I answered: “could you move, please? You`re blocking my cursor.”
The mosquito kindly moved himself so that he was blocking the letter a in that instead.
“Are you here to bite me?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
“Would you mind not? I`m allergic and I swell up and it hurts a lot.”
“Sorry,” the mosquito said: “but I`m hungry and you taste like tiramisu.”
“That`ll be all the coffee I drink,” I told him.
“Mocha!” a little voice from somewhere behind me yelled. “There`s lots of chocolate in there too.”
“Oh bloody hell,” I sighed, turning around and seeing nothing. “There`s two of you?”
“More than two,” the initial mosquito replied, matter of factly. “You left one of your fly screens open slightly.”
“Which one?”
“Well I`m not telling you that. You`ll just go and shut it.”
He had a point; I would just go and shut it.
“So you`re definitely going to bite me?” I asked him.
“Definitely. You`re delicious.”
“Then I`m going to have to kill you,” I said sadly. “Sorry about this. Could you move off my computer screen? I don`t want to get you all over my book.”
The mosquito politely flew to the wall, and waited. I lifted my hand and approached him slowly.
“I don`t want to do this,” I told him crossly. “But you`re going to bite me in the middle of the night and I`m going to itch and swell up for a week afterwards.”
“Yes,” he said. “I understand.”
I got a little closer.
“Why did you have to come in?” I asked him.
“Because I`m hungry and you`re delicious.”
“That makes sense I suppose.” I got a little closer. “I`m going to kill you now.”
“OK,” he said. “But let me just make one point: if I don`t bite you, I die. If I do bite you, you itch. It`s a small sacrifice for you, and a big one for me.”
I paused.
“I hate you,” I said.
“I adore you,” he said.
“Ugh.”
“You`re not going to kill me, are you.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Go on.”
“I am.”
“Do it.”
“I AM.”
And then without wanting to in the slightest I brought my hand away.
“I knew you weren`t going to do it,” the mosquito said happily, flying away. “People who taste like pudding never can. Too sweet.”
And then he disappeared into nothing as only mosquitos can.
Late last night, I woke up drowsily from my sleep with a buzzing in my ear.
“You`re going to do it now?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
"Promise to bite me once?"
"OK."
“OK.”
“I love you,” he reminded me. “Now, hold still.”
And this morning I was covered in bites.
The feeling, unfortunately, is not mutual.
Last night I was very busy, writing and then immediately deleting lines from The Book and ultimately getting nowhere at all, when a mosquito plonked itself on my computer screen.
“Hi,” it said.
“Excuse me,” I answered: “could you move, please? You`re blocking my cursor.”
The mosquito kindly moved himself so that he was blocking the letter a in that instead.
“Are you here to bite me?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
“Would you mind not? I`m allergic and I swell up and it hurts a lot.”
“Sorry,” the mosquito said: “but I`m hungry and you taste like tiramisu.”
“That`ll be all the coffee I drink,” I told him.
“Mocha!” a little voice from somewhere behind me yelled. “There`s lots of chocolate in there too.”
“Oh bloody hell,” I sighed, turning around and seeing nothing. “There`s two of you?”
“More than two,” the initial mosquito replied, matter of factly. “You left one of your fly screens open slightly.”
“Which one?”
“Well I`m not telling you that. You`ll just go and shut it.”
He had a point; I would just go and shut it.
“So you`re definitely going to bite me?” I asked him.
“Definitely. You`re delicious.”
“Then I`m going to have to kill you,” I said sadly. “Sorry about this. Could you move off my computer screen? I don`t want to get you all over my book.”
The mosquito politely flew to the wall, and waited. I lifted my hand and approached him slowly.
“I don`t want to do this,” I told him crossly. “But you`re going to bite me in the middle of the night and I`m going to itch and swell up for a week afterwards.”
“Yes,” he said. “I understand.”
I got a little closer.
“Why did you have to come in?” I asked him.
“Because I`m hungry and you`re delicious.”
“That makes sense I suppose.” I got a little closer. “I`m going to kill you now.”
“OK,” he said. “But let me just make one point: if I don`t bite you, I die. If I do bite you, you itch. It`s a small sacrifice for you, and a big one for me.”
I paused.
“I hate you,” I said.
“I adore you,” he said.
“Ugh.”
“You`re not going to kill me, are you.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Go on.”
“I am.”
“Do it.”
“I AM.”
And then without wanting to in the slightest I brought my hand away.
“I knew you weren`t going to do it,” the mosquito said happily, flying away. “People who taste like pudding never can. Too sweet.”
And then he disappeared into nothing as only mosquitos can.
Late last night, I woke up drowsily from my sleep with a buzzing in my ear.
“You`re going to do it now?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
"Promise to bite me once?"
"OK."
“OK.”
“I love you,” he reminded me. “Now, hold still.”
And this morning I was covered in bites.
Friday, 21 May 2010
Return of the Knickers
I think my mum had a little word with my Borrowers. I'm not sure how; perhaps I left Skype running last night while I was swearing at my washing up and telling it to do itself for the fifteenth time. Perhaps they climbed up on to my desk and had a conversation with her while I was in the bath for the third time (it's very humid in Nichinan at the moment). Either way, she had a word with me and then she had a word with them, and it obviously worked.
Holly Smale, she emailed me.
Except that she didn't, because she's just had large scale surgery on her right hand and can't really do anything with it apart from hold it aloft like an injured boxer and pull faces.
Hollly Smle, my mum emailed me with her left hand. Are u tlling me tht u have no wy of loking ur door and no wy of escping and no knickers on? Are u tlling me tht u just tld the whle world that u hav no underwear and an opn house? Am not happy. Not sensble of u. Am snding knickrs straght away. Find ur KEYS. And she capitalised KEYS, just in case I had problems working out what the hell she was talking about.
I didn't say I had no underwear at all, I emailed straight back, rather offended. I do have some. I just have to do my laundry every three days, that's all. And that is far too much.
But it was too late; preservation of her daughter's wavering dignity came first, so mum obviously had a very strong word with the little people and threatened them with necessary violence, because things immediately started coming back.
First they returned my car keys. They left them in my third drawer, inside an empty box of ChocoPies. I think they ate the ChocoPies first - because I certainly don't remember eating ten when the box was full on Tuesday - but, as they left all the wrappers in my waste paper basket, it's going to be hard to prove anything.
Then, the following morning, they returned my house keys. They put them in the pockets of my jeans, so they were cleaned nice and thoroughly by a spin through the washing machine. This was very considerate of the little people, even if it did risk both breaking my domestic appliances and putting a hole in the only pair of jeans that will fit me in the next year or so (I am not Japanese jean size; I don't think I ever have been). But - as the little people bravely put their lives in danger by climbing inside the machine to leave them there in the first place - I'm not going to be too critical about it. They returned them, and that's what counts.
They also - in a bid to apologise and encourage my mum to leave them alone, presumably - returned three lighters, six hair grips, a biro and a mini packet of peanuts, unopened. In a fit of overwhelming strength they had lifted up my futon and placed them all under there, scattered at apparent random; a momentous feat, because even I struggle to pick it up as often as I should.
As a result I've been rather hopefully waiting for the return of my knickers. I've even carefully cleared a space in my underwear drawer for them, which involved taking everything else out and dumping in at the back of the wardrobe in a strategically managed lump.
Nothing. Not a peep. Not even the minging beige ones with pink flowers on them. Nada. I am still knickerless (relatively, not absolutely).
So, Borrowers; this is a message to you, in case you've worked out how to read this blog. Return my knickers, or I will get my mum on you. And she's already got one hand bandaged up; she's got nothing to lose my smashing up the other one as well.
Holly Smale, she emailed me.
Except that she didn't, because she's just had large scale surgery on her right hand and can't really do anything with it apart from hold it aloft like an injured boxer and pull faces.
Hollly Smle, my mum emailed me with her left hand. Are u tlling me tht u have no wy of loking ur door and no wy of escping and no knickers on? Are u tlling me tht u just tld the whle world that u hav no underwear and an opn house? Am not happy. Not sensble of u. Am snding knickrs straght away. Find ur KEYS. And she capitalised KEYS, just in case I had problems working out what the hell she was talking about.
I didn't say I had no underwear at all, I emailed straight back, rather offended. I do have some. I just have to do my laundry every three days, that's all. And that is far too much.
But it was too late; preservation of her daughter's wavering dignity came first, so mum obviously had a very strong word with the little people and threatened them with necessary violence, because things immediately started coming back.
First they returned my car keys. They left them in my third drawer, inside an empty box of ChocoPies. I think they ate the ChocoPies first - because I certainly don't remember eating ten when the box was full on Tuesday - but, as they left all the wrappers in my waste paper basket, it's going to be hard to prove anything.
Then, the following morning, they returned my house keys. They put them in the pockets of my jeans, so they were cleaned nice and thoroughly by a spin through the washing machine. This was very considerate of the little people, even if it did risk both breaking my domestic appliances and putting a hole in the only pair of jeans that will fit me in the next year or so (I am not Japanese jean size; I don't think I ever have been). But - as the little people bravely put their lives in danger by climbing inside the machine to leave them there in the first place - I'm not going to be too critical about it. They returned them, and that's what counts.
They also - in a bid to apologise and encourage my mum to leave them alone, presumably - returned three lighters, six hair grips, a biro and a mini packet of peanuts, unopened. In a fit of overwhelming strength they had lifted up my futon and placed them all under there, scattered at apparent random; a momentous feat, because even I struggle to pick it up as often as I should.
As a result I've been rather hopefully waiting for the return of my knickers. I've even carefully cleared a space in my underwear drawer for them, which involved taking everything else out and dumping in at the back of the wardrobe in a strategically managed lump.
Nothing. Not a peep. Not even the minging beige ones with pink flowers on them. Nada. I am still knickerless (relatively, not absolutely).
So, Borrowers; this is a message to you, in case you've worked out how to read this blog. Return my knickers, or I will get my mum on you. And she's already got one hand bandaged up; she's got nothing to lose my smashing up the other one as well.
Borrowers
I think I have Borrowers; tiny little people who live under my floorboards or perhaps behind my fridge or perhaps in my sink drain (something is blocking it), and come into my house when I am asleep and take away small things they think I don`t need and won`t notice. Things like needles and pins and socks and bits of thread and hair elastics and hair pins. Things that I buy, and I buy, and I buy, and yet I never seem to have, even though there should be thousands of them somewhere in my house. Which I wouldn`t mind, except that – as they don`t ask me for them first and they certainly don`t give them back – they are less `Borrowers,` and more `Stealers.`
These little thieves, however, have recently gotten a little ambitious. Whereas I will reluctantly keep buying hair pins and hair elastics for the rest of my life – until I get fed up of it and shave my head to spite them – I can`t very well do that with my house keys. I have no idea what they want my house keys for – perhaps they`re sick of waiting to run in behind me when I open the door in the evening – but they`ve nabbed them and snuck them to whichever part of the house they are luxuriating in (a tower constructed entirely of different coloured cigarette lighters, I would imagine).
“Awesome,” they will have said to each other, dragging the keys along the floor behind them and wondering what they are going to do with my massive, fluffy Hello Kitty keyring (“a kitsch Japanese sofa?”). “We can now come and go as we please,” they will have said, and been very pleased with their new `borrowing` (theft). Except that they seem to have forgotten that they can come and go as they please anyway now, because I have no keys with which to lock my house and therefore have to leave my door open at all times, which would be a problem if I didn`t live in Nichinan.
Which I wouldn`t mind so much, but this obviously gave them a taste for keys and they decided to increase their collection; a few days later my car keys also went missing. I can only assume that they are currently building a very tall car seat and some kind of long stick so that – between the group of them – they can navigate the steering wheel, use the breaks and `borrow` my car to go on little trips to the countryside where they can steal milk and apples and whatnot (just like my mum used to do; they called it "scrumping" to make it sound more cute and less illegal).
This also wouldn`t be so much of a problem – I trashed the house looking for them, failed to find them, cleaned the house back up and then used the spare keys to get to work – but I draw the line at them taking my knickers.
They took my knickers in Yokohama: them or another set of similar borrowers.
“It`s not Borrowers,” my ex-boyfriend would explain every time I told him that little people were stealing my underwear. “It`s perverts walking past your washing while you`re at work.”
“Are you sure it`s not Borrowers?” I said.
“I`m sure it`s not Borrowers.”
"Are you sure it`s not you?"
"I`m sure it`s not me. I don`t want anything to do with them."
“But they`re taking an awful lot of them.”
“Yes, somebody has a lot of your pants. They`re probably selling them on the internet. Stop drying them outside.”
“But.... why?”
“Three words; we`re in Japan.”
And we were both lost in silence for a few minutes, thinking of all of the strange and wonderful things those three words, in fact, cover.
“I still think I`ve got borrowers,” I insisted eventually, partly because I`d rather have little people living in my bathroom pipes than weird men making money out of my underpants without giving me a cut of the profits, and partly because I`d rather have my clean knickers sniffed by weirdos than dry them inside where they`ll start to smell unsniffable.
It can`t be perverts in Nichinan though: Baba would string anyone who went within ten metres of my knickers on the line next to them, and – trust me – she is always, always watching (sometimes, when I`m feeling antisocial and bad tempered, I creep into my house and keep all the lights off just in case she can see I`m home). So it has to be Borrowers.
God knows what they`re doing with them, though. Cutting them into clothes, using them as bedspreads, hanging them up at the windows as curtains: attaching them to a pole and using it a sail for their summer getaway boat. I`m just glad they`re all Primark and cheap as chips, because the seams should be incredibly easy to pick apart.
It`s hard not to feel a little resentful – unable to lock my door, unable to drive, wearing the same three pairs of knickers in rotation – but I just hope they`ve made the most of my goods. I`d hate to have to borrow them back.
And mum – if you get a chance – a pack of knickers in the post would be lovely. I`ll ask my Borrowers what colours they`d like you to get.
These little thieves, however, have recently gotten a little ambitious. Whereas I will reluctantly keep buying hair pins and hair elastics for the rest of my life – until I get fed up of it and shave my head to spite them – I can`t very well do that with my house keys. I have no idea what they want my house keys for – perhaps they`re sick of waiting to run in behind me when I open the door in the evening – but they`ve nabbed them and snuck them to whichever part of the house they are luxuriating in (a tower constructed entirely of different coloured cigarette lighters, I would imagine).
“Awesome,” they will have said to each other, dragging the keys along the floor behind them and wondering what they are going to do with my massive, fluffy Hello Kitty keyring (“a kitsch Japanese sofa?”). “We can now come and go as we please,” they will have said, and been very pleased with their new `borrowing` (theft). Except that they seem to have forgotten that they can come and go as they please anyway now, because I have no keys with which to lock my house and therefore have to leave my door open at all times, which would be a problem if I didn`t live in Nichinan.
Which I wouldn`t mind so much, but this obviously gave them a taste for keys and they decided to increase their collection; a few days later my car keys also went missing. I can only assume that they are currently building a very tall car seat and some kind of long stick so that – between the group of them – they can navigate the steering wheel, use the breaks and `borrow` my car to go on little trips to the countryside where they can steal milk and apples and whatnot (just like my mum used to do; they called it "scrumping" to make it sound more cute and less illegal).
This also wouldn`t be so much of a problem – I trashed the house looking for them, failed to find them, cleaned the house back up and then used the spare keys to get to work – but I draw the line at them taking my knickers.
They took my knickers in Yokohama: them or another set of similar borrowers.
“It`s not Borrowers,” my ex-boyfriend would explain every time I told him that little people were stealing my underwear. “It`s perverts walking past your washing while you`re at work.”
“Are you sure it`s not Borrowers?” I said.
“I`m sure it`s not Borrowers.”
"Are you sure it`s not you?"
"I`m sure it`s not me. I don`t want anything to do with them."
“But they`re taking an awful lot of them.”
“Yes, somebody has a lot of your pants. They`re probably selling them on the internet. Stop drying them outside.”
“But.... why?”
“Three words; we`re in Japan.”
And we were both lost in silence for a few minutes, thinking of all of the strange and wonderful things those three words, in fact, cover.
“I still think I`ve got borrowers,” I insisted eventually, partly because I`d rather have little people living in my bathroom pipes than weird men making money out of my underpants without giving me a cut of the profits, and partly because I`d rather have my clean knickers sniffed by weirdos than dry them inside where they`ll start to smell unsniffable.
It can`t be perverts in Nichinan though: Baba would string anyone who went within ten metres of my knickers on the line next to them, and – trust me – she is always, always watching (sometimes, when I`m feeling antisocial and bad tempered, I creep into my house and keep all the lights off just in case she can see I`m home). So it has to be Borrowers.
God knows what they`re doing with them, though. Cutting them into clothes, using them as bedspreads, hanging them up at the windows as curtains: attaching them to a pole and using it a sail for their summer getaway boat. I`m just glad they`re all Primark and cheap as chips, because the seams should be incredibly easy to pick apart.
It`s hard not to feel a little resentful – unable to lock my door, unable to drive, wearing the same three pairs of knickers in rotation – but I just hope they`ve made the most of my goods. I`d hate to have to borrow them back.
And mum – if you get a chance – a pack of knickers in the post would be lovely. I`ll ask my Borrowers what colours they`d like you to get.
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
Baba.
I am having a fight with my next door neighbour. It started out as a little battle, and it's now a full blown war. It was foolish, really, and I should have known not to get involved; fighting somebody who has spent 70 years practicing was inevitably going to end up in humiliating defeat. And - predictably - I have just been humiliatingly defeated.
It started, I think, for a few reasons. Firstly, we don't speak a word of the same language, which means that we have to communicate in international gestures. Secondly, the Japanese culture means that you have to retaliate, and you have to do better. Thirdly, we seem to have mutual, unspoken feelings for each other that we are both desperate to express, and no words with which to do it.
First of all, she attacked me with food. Tempura, to be precise. She turned up on my doorstep, willynilly, and handed me a basket of home made, hot, deep fried vegetables and fish that smelled absolutely delicious. And then, to top it off, she made me call her BaBa, which is what little children call their grandmas (Obachan is the more grown up term).
That was the beginning; and I have to make the point at this stage that she started it.
So, to pay her back for the tempura - and not knowing quite how to - I took her a big bunch of flowers. It was a good shot, and she was suitably cowed by my retaliation. She wasn't taking it lying down though; she started knocking on my window to let me know when it was about to rain, and then she delivered the right bags so that I'd know how and when to put my rubbish out.
I wasn't having any of that - obviously - so I picked a bunch of flowers from a field near my house and took them round to her (I'm not very imaginative and I can't cook; so she got flowers twice). Then I got home from work and discovered that she had saved my washing from a rain storm by climbing up onto my step and taking it into her house, and then drying it and ironing it for me, and I had no option: I had to make sure she never, ever did it again by inviting her and her husband (Gigi: grandpa) to my house party with a little note that had balloons drawn all over it.
BaBa and Gigi were so utterly furious that I had invited them into my home when none of the other gaijin had after two years, that they turned up with a table, cushions, sake, umeshu and six home cooked dishes: including chicken nanban, the local speciality. Then they tried to cheer me in public, just to really, really piss me off.
I spent an hour or two writing a letter to them in Japanese (I got somebody to help me, obviously), but BaBa - who has a good forty five years more experience than me - had obviously decided that she was totally fed up with all this nonsense and she was going to finish the war once and for all. Today, when I got home from work, she called me rather aggressively into her house and plonked into my arms the most beautiful, raw silk, pale pink kimono that - it transpired, through hand gestures - that she had made specifically for me because of my blonde colouring and because she knows that I love them (I have one hanging on my living room wall because they are the most beautiful clothes in the world).
"Presento," she said, which would be the only word we have exchanged thus far that both of us understand: mainly because it's the same in both English and Japanese.
I don't know what to do now. I thought I was warring nicely - half obeying the ancient Japanese gift tradition (Omiyage), and half giving her things because I genuinely think she's awesome and want to show her it somehow, and I like giving presents - but I'm not quite sure how to respond to a handmade, specifically designed, silk kimono. Somehow I don't think giving her flowers for the third time is going to cut it.
I feel a little guilty because I don't need another grandma - I already have the best one back in England (still eating birthday cake) - but I think my own Baba will be pleased that there is somebody like her in Japan, looking out for me and my washing when I am so far away.
Now I just need to think of something that will knock this old lady next door out of the water, once and for all.
I don't give up battles that easily. Especially not when I'm fighting grandmas.
It started, I think, for a few reasons. Firstly, we don't speak a word of the same language, which means that we have to communicate in international gestures. Secondly, the Japanese culture means that you have to retaliate, and you have to do better. Thirdly, we seem to have mutual, unspoken feelings for each other that we are both desperate to express, and no words with which to do it.
First of all, she attacked me with food. Tempura, to be precise. She turned up on my doorstep, willynilly, and handed me a basket of home made, hot, deep fried vegetables and fish that smelled absolutely delicious. And then, to top it off, she made me call her BaBa, which is what little children call their grandmas (Obachan is the more grown up term).
That was the beginning; and I have to make the point at this stage that she started it.
So, to pay her back for the tempura - and not knowing quite how to - I took her a big bunch of flowers. It was a good shot, and she was suitably cowed by my retaliation. She wasn't taking it lying down though; she started knocking on my window to let me know when it was about to rain, and then she delivered the right bags so that I'd know how and when to put my rubbish out.
I wasn't having any of that - obviously - so I picked a bunch of flowers from a field near my house and took them round to her (I'm not very imaginative and I can't cook; so she got flowers twice). Then I got home from work and discovered that she had saved my washing from a rain storm by climbing up onto my step and taking it into her house, and then drying it and ironing it for me, and I had no option: I had to make sure she never, ever did it again by inviting her and her husband (Gigi: grandpa) to my house party with a little note that had balloons drawn all over it.
BaBa and Gigi were so utterly furious that I had invited them into my home when none of the other gaijin had after two years, that they turned up with a table, cushions, sake, umeshu and six home cooked dishes: including chicken nanban, the local speciality. Then they tried to cheer me in public, just to really, really piss me off.
I spent an hour or two writing a letter to them in Japanese (I got somebody to help me, obviously), but BaBa - who has a good forty five years more experience than me - had obviously decided that she was totally fed up with all this nonsense and she was going to finish the war once and for all. Today, when I got home from work, she called me rather aggressively into her house and plonked into my arms the most beautiful, raw silk, pale pink kimono that - it transpired, through hand gestures - that she had made specifically for me because of my blonde colouring and because she knows that I love them (I have one hanging on my living room wall because they are the most beautiful clothes in the world).
"Presento," she said, which would be the only word we have exchanged thus far that both of us understand: mainly because it's the same in both English and Japanese.
I don't know what to do now. I thought I was warring nicely - half obeying the ancient Japanese gift tradition (Omiyage), and half giving her things because I genuinely think she's awesome and want to show her it somehow, and I like giving presents - but I'm not quite sure how to respond to a handmade, specifically designed, silk kimono. Somehow I don't think giving her flowers for the third time is going to cut it.
I feel a little guilty because I don't need another grandma - I already have the best one back in England (still eating birthday cake) - but I think my own Baba will be pleased that there is somebody like her in Japan, looking out for me and my washing when I am so far away.
Now I just need to think of something that will knock this old lady next door out of the water, once and for all.
I don't give up battles that easily. Especially not when I'm fighting grandmas.
My sister responds.
My sister now thinks I don't love her.
"Don't you love me?" she asked me as soon as she read the last blog post. I should, of course, have seen that coming. The fact that I didn't shows just how stupid I can be.
"Of course I love you," I told her.
"You just said you don't believe in love."
"Not that kind of love. Romantic love. I don't believe in romantic love. But I love you."
"What's the difference?"
I was just about to start explaining the birds and the bees - a little late, given that she's 26 and has been in the same relationship for seven years - when she interrupted.
"I don't mean that kind of difference. I mean: in terms of your argument, what's the difference?"
"Eh?" I succinctly answered.
"Well, you love me, right?"
"Of course. Very much."
"And mum and dad?"
"Of course."
"And grandma and grandad?"
"Of course."
"But, according to your argument, you love us because of a biological urge to protect, presumably? To make the family unit stronger, and thus preserve the species?"
"I guess."
"But it's love you can feel, which makes it real?"
I didn't like where this was going already, because my sister is clearly more intelligent than me, but I grumped a little and then said:
"I guess so."
"Then why is not romantic love given the same allowance? Even if it is a biological instinct."
"Because familial love doesn't go anywhere. It's permanent. And romantic love isn't."
"But it can be."
"But it's not."
"But you can't believe in one kind of love and not another."
"I can. That's what I'm saying: both are biological instincts, and I can choose to believe in the one that lasts and not believe in the one that doesn't."
There was a pause.
"Are you okay?" my sister finally asked.
"I don't know. Maybe not."
"Because you don't sound okay."
"I know."
"You know what I think?"
"Probably."
"I think you're in the fifth stage of heartbreak. First comes denial, then comes pain, then comes anger, then comes general rejoicing."
"You're wrong. I don't feel anything. At all."
"Ask me what the fifth stage is."
"I don't want to."
"Ask me what the fifth stage is, Holly."
"What's the fifth stage."
"Coldness."
"Oh."
"It's the stage where you switch off entirely so that you can heal, and you stop feeling everything completely. You become numb to all love and emotion, and you think that it will last forever."
"Oh."
Considering it, my ex - who has been two steps ahead of me at all stages - told me he didn't believe in love anymore about six weeks ago, which nearly destroyed me because I was still at the 'pain' stage. Maybe I had just caught up.
"And then what?" I asked my all-knowing younger sister.
"Then, when you've had numbness for a while, you love again."
I almost threw my computer out of the window at the thought of it.
"I won't."
"You will."
"I don't want to."
"So? You will. You can't avoid that biological instinct masked by a collectively overactive imagination any more than the rest of us."
"I can."
"You won't. You'll love again and you'll be loved again, even more than before, and there is nothing you can do about it. Whether you believe that now or not."
And - although I don't have to think about that right now, and although I don't have to feel that right now, because I'm in the fifth and final stage of a broken heart, and although an overwhelmingly large part of me just wants to hide in a corner where love can't find or hurt me again - a tiny, tiny part of me hopes that my little sister is right.
"Don't you love me?" she asked me as soon as she read the last blog post. I should, of course, have seen that coming. The fact that I didn't shows just how stupid I can be.
"Of course I love you," I told her.
"You just said you don't believe in love."
"Not that kind of love. Romantic love. I don't believe in romantic love. But I love you."
"What's the difference?"
I was just about to start explaining the birds and the bees - a little late, given that she's 26 and has been in the same relationship for seven years - when she interrupted.
"I don't mean that kind of difference. I mean: in terms of your argument, what's the difference?"
"Eh?" I succinctly answered.
"Well, you love me, right?"
"Of course. Very much."
"And mum and dad?"
"Of course."
"And grandma and grandad?"
"Of course."
"But, according to your argument, you love us because of a biological urge to protect, presumably? To make the family unit stronger, and thus preserve the species?"
"I guess."
"But it's love you can feel, which makes it real?"
I didn't like where this was going already, because my sister is clearly more intelligent than me, but I grumped a little and then said:
"I guess so."
"Then why is not romantic love given the same allowance? Even if it is a biological instinct."
"Because familial love doesn't go anywhere. It's permanent. And romantic love isn't."
"But it can be."
"But it's not."
"But you can't believe in one kind of love and not another."
"I can. That's what I'm saying: both are biological instincts, and I can choose to believe in the one that lasts and not believe in the one that doesn't."
There was a pause.
"Are you okay?" my sister finally asked.
"I don't know. Maybe not."
"Because you don't sound okay."
"I know."
"You know what I think?"
"Probably."
"I think you're in the fifth stage of heartbreak. First comes denial, then comes pain, then comes anger, then comes general rejoicing."
"You're wrong. I don't feel anything. At all."
"Ask me what the fifth stage is."
"I don't want to."
"Ask me what the fifth stage is, Holly."
"What's the fifth stage."
"Coldness."
"Oh."
"It's the stage where you switch off entirely so that you can heal, and you stop feeling everything completely. You become numb to all love and emotion, and you think that it will last forever."
"Oh."
Considering it, my ex - who has been two steps ahead of me at all stages - told me he didn't believe in love anymore about six weeks ago, which nearly destroyed me because I was still at the 'pain' stage. Maybe I had just caught up.
"And then what?" I asked my all-knowing younger sister.
"Then, when you've had numbness for a while, you love again."
I almost threw my computer out of the window at the thought of it.
"I won't."
"You will."
"I don't want to."
"So? You will. You can't avoid that biological instinct masked by a collectively overactive imagination any more than the rest of us."
"I can."
"You won't. You'll love again and you'll be loved again, even more than before, and there is nothing you can do about it. Whether you believe that now or not."
And - although I don't have to think about that right now, and although I don't have to feel that right now, because I'm in the fifth and final stage of a broken heart, and although an overwhelmingly large part of me just wants to hide in a corner where love can't find or hurt me again - a tiny, tiny part of me hopes that my little sister is right.
Giraffes
There has been a backlash; a defence of love. It was inevitable, I suppose - nothing in the history of man has as many followers - but it has made me a little cross.
Humans are unique in one respect and one respect only; the ability to forget that we are animals. Take an animal - any animal - and give it intelligence and consciousness of any kind, it will eventually (over a number of years, perhaps thousands) start to behave like a human. Moreover, give more than one of these animals consciousness, and they will form a community that behaves exactly as a community of humans behave. They will believe in the same things, fight for the same things, despair of the same things, die for the same things. And they, too, will forget that they are also animals.
Take an animal; say, a giraffe (I like giraffes). Make the giraffe aware: aware, for the first time, that it will die; aware, for the first time, that it will eventually become nothing; aware that it eats to survive; aware that it is alone, even when it is not alone; aware that it mates to reproduce or because it feels nice; that it has territory to protect and territory to attack; that - to survive - it must ensure its place upon the earth. Then give the giraffe opposable thumbs, sit back and wait for the inevitable to happen.
First; war. The giraffe, to protect itself and the giraffes it has produced and give itself the best opportunities, will want more space. It will want to defend this territory from other giraffes who want exactly the same thing, and so the giraffes will fight; first to expand, and then to protect. Eventually giraffes will form groups - so that they are stronger - which will force the other giraffes to form bigger groups, and so on, until the individual battles become organised wars.
Second; religion. The giraffe, suddenly aware of its own mortality and vulnerability and loneliness - and the fact that it will eventually become nothing - becomes terrified and childlike and seeks something that will undo this knowledge; something like a large giraffe that they cannot see but who will act as an all powerful mother that will be with them always - thus removing the loneliness - and will protect them - thus removing the vulnerability - and will make sure that they never disappear entirely from themselves by offering them an alternative; thus removing the terror of mortality. They then - while they`re at it - give the Big Giraffe the ability to see everything, which removes the knowledge that they are alone, and the ability to control them, which removes the fear that they are directionless, and the ability to avenge and reward, which removes the overwhelming realisation that nothing they do means anything or is noticed by anybody.
Third; love. The giraffe, needing to reproduce and simultaneously ensure protection, stability and constancy for its offspring - as well as legitimise a constant desire for sex because it feels good - takes the biological sensations that arise in order to provoke this outcome and intellectualise them into an emotion that will make them stay with another giraffe and reproduce further. This, however, has a second - equally important - effect, because neither giraffe is now alone: which - along with religion - makes sure that there is no longer a fear of loneliness. This made-up emotion thus becomes celebrated; mainly because it allows each giraffe to have both sex and company without ever having to admit what has driven them to want either, and because - by being `loved` by another giraffe - it makes them feel better.
Fourth; art. The giraffe, having created religion, war and love, and - much more importantly - now being aware of them, even if no longer aware of the fact that they created them in the first place, feels a need to express each; first, to reinforce their existence; second, to convince themselves further; third, to show that their existence makes them non-animal; fourth, to show that they have opposable thumbs and nobody else does. So they bang things and draw things and say things to show how very deeply they feel about each topic, and how individual they are; thus quenching the sudden overwhelming awareness that they are all exactly the same.
Thus the giraffe, quite neatly and without knowing it, creates war, religion, love and art, and manages to convince itself that these things are what make them superior to other animals, rather than that they have been created so that they can believe exactly that.
Love will always be defended, just as organised war and religion will always be defended, because to admit that it does not exist is to admit that none of it does; it means admitting that we are animals with a collective overimagination, developed over thousands of years, who simply seek to quench our own self-awareness as completely and as swiftly as possible; who seek to shut out the loneliness, and the fear, and the desire with reasons and stories and excuses. Who seek to deal with the self-destruction that our own intelligence has inevitably bought with it. Who have created an internal culture - regardless of type of religion, or type of war, or type of love (and how else to explain their existence in every culture, in every age?) - to stop them from crumbling under the weight of knowing.
I don`t blame the giraffe, but I can`t believe in something that I don`t think is real; worse, something that I believe causes more pain, more hurt and more destruction in the search for it and belief in it than in the discovery of it, which always comes from a need within ourselves that has been projected outwards. I already write, to believe I am a different type of giraffe when I am tangibly not: I can convince myself of nothing else, no matter how much I desperately want to.
So, please, whoever you are, wherever you are, and whatever you believe: defend love, and defend religion, and defend art, and defend war - because you are entitled to - but don`t make me try and defend them too. Don`t be angry with me, or indignant with me, for not thinking the way you think. Don`t be cross with me for attacking them, or sad that I have done so. Life can still be happy, and full, without any of those things. It will just be slightly different.
We each have a private collections of the things we believe in, and the things we cannot. And - for me - love has now joined the second list. I didn`t want it to - and I fought against it - but I have been given no choice; as with religion, I am simply no longer one of its followers.
And, for the record, I still like giraffes: very much. Even if they are just animals.
Humans are unique in one respect and one respect only; the ability to forget that we are animals. Take an animal - any animal - and give it intelligence and consciousness of any kind, it will eventually (over a number of years, perhaps thousands) start to behave like a human. Moreover, give more than one of these animals consciousness, and they will form a community that behaves exactly as a community of humans behave. They will believe in the same things, fight for the same things, despair of the same things, die for the same things. And they, too, will forget that they are also animals.
Take an animal; say, a giraffe (I like giraffes). Make the giraffe aware: aware, for the first time, that it will die; aware, for the first time, that it will eventually become nothing; aware that it eats to survive; aware that it is alone, even when it is not alone; aware that it mates to reproduce or because it feels nice; that it has territory to protect and territory to attack; that - to survive - it must ensure its place upon the earth. Then give the giraffe opposable thumbs, sit back and wait for the inevitable to happen.
First; war. The giraffe, to protect itself and the giraffes it has produced and give itself the best opportunities, will want more space. It will want to defend this territory from other giraffes who want exactly the same thing, and so the giraffes will fight; first to expand, and then to protect. Eventually giraffes will form groups - so that they are stronger - which will force the other giraffes to form bigger groups, and so on, until the individual battles become organised wars.
Second; religion. The giraffe, suddenly aware of its own mortality and vulnerability and loneliness - and the fact that it will eventually become nothing - becomes terrified and childlike and seeks something that will undo this knowledge; something like a large giraffe that they cannot see but who will act as an all powerful mother that will be with them always - thus removing the loneliness - and will protect them - thus removing the vulnerability - and will make sure that they never disappear entirely from themselves by offering them an alternative; thus removing the terror of mortality. They then - while they`re at it - give the Big Giraffe the ability to see everything, which removes the knowledge that they are alone, and the ability to control them, which removes the fear that they are directionless, and the ability to avenge and reward, which removes the overwhelming realisation that nothing they do means anything or is noticed by anybody.
Third; love. The giraffe, needing to reproduce and simultaneously ensure protection, stability and constancy for its offspring - as well as legitimise a constant desire for sex because it feels good - takes the biological sensations that arise in order to provoke this outcome and intellectualise them into an emotion that will make them stay with another giraffe and reproduce further. This, however, has a second - equally important - effect, because neither giraffe is now alone: which - along with religion - makes sure that there is no longer a fear of loneliness. This made-up emotion thus becomes celebrated; mainly because it allows each giraffe to have both sex and company without ever having to admit what has driven them to want either, and because - by being `loved` by another giraffe - it makes them feel better.
Fourth; art. The giraffe, having created religion, war and love, and - much more importantly - now being aware of them, even if no longer aware of the fact that they created them in the first place, feels a need to express each; first, to reinforce their existence; second, to convince themselves further; third, to show that their existence makes them non-animal; fourth, to show that they have opposable thumbs and nobody else does. So they bang things and draw things and say things to show how very deeply they feel about each topic, and how individual they are; thus quenching the sudden overwhelming awareness that they are all exactly the same.
Thus the giraffe, quite neatly and without knowing it, creates war, religion, love and art, and manages to convince itself that these things are what make them superior to other animals, rather than that they have been created so that they can believe exactly that.
Love will always be defended, just as organised war and religion will always be defended, because to admit that it does not exist is to admit that none of it does; it means admitting that we are animals with a collective overimagination, developed over thousands of years, who simply seek to quench our own self-awareness as completely and as swiftly as possible; who seek to shut out the loneliness, and the fear, and the desire with reasons and stories and excuses. Who seek to deal with the self-destruction that our own intelligence has inevitably bought with it. Who have created an internal culture - regardless of type of religion, or type of war, or type of love (and how else to explain their existence in every culture, in every age?) - to stop them from crumbling under the weight of knowing.
I don`t blame the giraffe, but I can`t believe in something that I don`t think is real; worse, something that I believe causes more pain, more hurt and more destruction in the search for it and belief in it than in the discovery of it, which always comes from a need within ourselves that has been projected outwards. I already write, to believe I am a different type of giraffe when I am tangibly not: I can convince myself of nothing else, no matter how much I desperately want to.
So, please, whoever you are, wherever you are, and whatever you believe: defend love, and defend religion, and defend art, and defend war - because you are entitled to - but don`t make me try and defend them too. Don`t be angry with me, or indignant with me, for not thinking the way you think. Don`t be cross with me for attacking them, or sad that I have done so. Life can still be happy, and full, without any of those things. It will just be slightly different.
We each have a private collections of the things we believe in, and the things we cannot. And - for me - love has now joined the second list. I didn`t want it to - and I fought against it - but I have been given no choice; as with religion, I am simply no longer one of its followers.
And, for the record, I still like giraffes: very much. Even if they are just animals.
Monday, 17 May 2010
Sonnet 116
When I was seventeen, I fell in love with Shakespeare's Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.
I adored that poem. I wrote it on a piece of paper, and then I typed it onto another piece of paper, and I carried it with me, and I learnt it by heart; I read it aloud in the bath, and I said it under my breath on trains and I doodled lines from it on my hand during maths class. I even, in later years, drunkenly recited it on a first date to a boy I liked very much, and then - predictably - never saw him again (although he was very impressed, he said, with my intonation and the way I emotionally clutched my fist in a ball by my heart throughout).
For a girl who grew up reading and rereading Wuthering Heights - who stole Pride and Prejudice from the school library when she was 11 and never gave it back (and this was before Colin Firth rendered it quite an attractive read) - this poem told me everything there was to tell: it summarised nearly two decades of reading (or what I had kept with me from two decades of reading, which is the same thing), neatly and succinctly. Love, I knew, finally, did not bend with the remover to remove. O, no (no!) it was an ever fixed mark, that looked on tempests and was never shaken; it was the star to every wandering bark, whose worth was unknown although his height be taken. It was not time's fool - which everybody else seemed to be - although its rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass came, and love altered not with his brief hours and weeks, but beared it out: even to the edge of doom.
It was all I needed to know. All, I thought, anybody needed to know. I didn't know quite what the edge of doom was, and I didn't know what a wandering bark was, and I certainly didn't know what a sickle's compass was, but I knew what it meant to never be shaken, and to never be altered, and to never be removed. I knew that it meant simply: that I might change, and I might fade, and I might alter and weaken and fail, but love - when it found me, which of course it would because it found everybody, just as death and taxes did - would not. Because otherwise it was not love.
I'm not seventeen anymore, and another ten years of reading has done nothing to prepare me for my experience of what love is and should be; another ten years of carrying that poem around in my pocket - of reciting it to myself in the bath and in bed when it's dark - has done nothing to make any of it even slightly true. And, just as my view of love has changed now, so - too - has Sonnet 116. Just as I have now altered, so - too - has the poem I grew up holding on to.
Where it used to be an affirmation of love, now it is a question. Where it used to be a celebration, now it is a mourning. Far from being about what love is, Sonnet 116 is more about what love should be: what, in short, it is not. And the doubt and the insecurity in Shakespeare's voice - the doubt I didn't see at seventeen, and now see too clearly - are everywhere. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments; impediments that he can see, too clearly, or they would not need admitting and he would not need to struggle against seeing them and voicing them. Love is not love which alters; it is alteration that undoes the love, instead of being love that wins against the alteration. The worth of that wandering bark is unknown - for worse, as well as for better - and it stands, unsuccessfully, against the sickle that cuts down the beauty that he accuses it of creating to start with.
It is - perhaps - not a cry for love at all; rather, it is a cry against the difference between the love we hope for, and the love we get. For, in the final two lines -
And if this be error, and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved -
maybe he means: if love does not exist in the only way it can - permanently, inflexibly, infallibly - then his writing doesn't exist either, because it has all - every last word of it, from Othello to King Lear to Hamlet to Much Ado About Nothing - been built on the hope that it does, and the fear that it does not. And - for all the apparent positivity - at the very end the only thing left hanging in the air - the part that still echoes when the poem has finished - are the final four words, which undo everything else;
no man ever loved.
The meaning of my favourite Sonnet has changed, for me, along with how I now see love. I have stopped reading those books; I have stopped loving Wuthering Heights, or Pride and Prejudice, or anything else that makes love the point of it. I have stopped assuming that it will find me: I have stopped assuming that it exists at all. My love of love has finished; my hope of it has totally gone. I don't believe that it exists, anymore, the only way it can: the only love I have seen is temporary, and fluctuating, and cruel, and painful, and changing, and brief, and I have seen nothing to prove otherwise. I have seen nothing to turn that poem back into an affirmation, or to answer that question. And so, finally - after nearly thirty years - I have stopped believing in it, or wanting it, or wanting to have anything to do with it. I want to stay as far away from the pretense of love as I can, for as long as I can, and have a life without it, and without the hope of it.
But I still carry the poem with me, and I still recite it in the bath and in the dark when everybody else is asleep. Because the poem is real and permanent, even if the love hoped for within it is not. And although love may not exist - and I'm not at all sure that it does - I believe that it should do.
And, if it does, it should exist exactly as it is in Sonnet 116.
I adored that poem. I wrote it on a piece of paper, and then I typed it onto another piece of paper, and I carried it with me, and I learnt it by heart; I read it aloud in the bath, and I said it under my breath on trains and I doodled lines from it on my hand during maths class. I even, in later years, drunkenly recited it on a first date to a boy I liked very much, and then - predictably - never saw him again (although he was very impressed, he said, with my intonation and the way I emotionally clutched my fist in a ball by my heart throughout).
For a girl who grew up reading and rereading Wuthering Heights - who stole Pride and Prejudice from the school library when she was 11 and never gave it back (and this was before Colin Firth rendered it quite an attractive read) - this poem told me everything there was to tell: it summarised nearly two decades of reading (or what I had kept with me from two decades of reading, which is the same thing), neatly and succinctly. Love, I knew, finally, did not bend with the remover to remove. O, no (no!) it was an ever fixed mark, that looked on tempests and was never shaken; it was the star to every wandering bark, whose worth was unknown although his height be taken. It was not time's fool - which everybody else seemed to be - although its rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass came, and love altered not with his brief hours and weeks, but beared it out: even to the edge of doom.
It was all I needed to know. All, I thought, anybody needed to know. I didn't know quite what the edge of doom was, and I didn't know what a wandering bark was, and I certainly didn't know what a sickle's compass was, but I knew what it meant to never be shaken, and to never be altered, and to never be removed. I knew that it meant simply: that I might change, and I might fade, and I might alter and weaken and fail, but love - when it found me, which of course it would because it found everybody, just as death and taxes did - would not. Because otherwise it was not love.
I'm not seventeen anymore, and another ten years of reading has done nothing to prepare me for my experience of what love is and should be; another ten years of carrying that poem around in my pocket - of reciting it to myself in the bath and in bed when it's dark - has done nothing to make any of it even slightly true. And, just as my view of love has changed now, so - too - has Sonnet 116. Just as I have now altered, so - too - has the poem I grew up holding on to.
Where it used to be an affirmation of love, now it is a question. Where it used to be a celebration, now it is a mourning. Far from being about what love is, Sonnet 116 is more about what love should be: what, in short, it is not. And the doubt and the insecurity in Shakespeare's voice - the doubt I didn't see at seventeen, and now see too clearly - are everywhere. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments; impediments that he can see, too clearly, or they would not need admitting and he would not need to struggle against seeing them and voicing them. Love is not love which alters; it is alteration that undoes the love, instead of being love that wins against the alteration. The worth of that wandering bark is unknown - for worse, as well as for better - and it stands, unsuccessfully, against the sickle that cuts down the beauty that he accuses it of creating to start with.
It is - perhaps - not a cry for love at all; rather, it is a cry against the difference between the love we hope for, and the love we get. For, in the final two lines -
And if this be error, and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved -
maybe he means: if love does not exist in the only way it can - permanently, inflexibly, infallibly - then his writing doesn't exist either, because it has all - every last word of it, from Othello to King Lear to Hamlet to Much Ado About Nothing - been built on the hope that it does, and the fear that it does not. And - for all the apparent positivity - at the very end the only thing left hanging in the air - the part that still echoes when the poem has finished - are the final four words, which undo everything else;
no man ever loved.
The meaning of my favourite Sonnet has changed, for me, along with how I now see love. I have stopped reading those books; I have stopped loving Wuthering Heights, or Pride and Prejudice, or anything else that makes love the point of it. I have stopped assuming that it will find me: I have stopped assuming that it exists at all. My love of love has finished; my hope of it has totally gone. I don't believe that it exists, anymore, the only way it can: the only love I have seen is temporary, and fluctuating, and cruel, and painful, and changing, and brief, and I have seen nothing to prove otherwise. I have seen nothing to turn that poem back into an affirmation, or to answer that question. And so, finally - after nearly thirty years - I have stopped believing in it, or wanting it, or wanting to have anything to do with it. I want to stay as far away from the pretense of love as I can, for as long as I can, and have a life without it, and without the hope of it.
But I still carry the poem with me, and I still recite it in the bath and in the dark when everybody else is asleep. Because the poem is real and permanent, even if the love hoped for within it is not. And although love may not exist - and I'm not at all sure that it does - I believe that it should do.
And, if it does, it should exist exactly as it is in Sonnet 116.
Procrastination.
My new computer keyboard has turned up already. I'm using it to type at this very moment.
I'm a bit cross, actually. They said five working days, and it's been less than eighteen hours and here it is: willy nilly arriving at my flat when I have no other excuses to procrastinate with. I blame Apple Mac. You'd never catch a Windows company delivering your goods before you expected them to, on a Sunday morning to boot. Frankly, it's just bad manners.
I have no other excuses now. I'm all run out. The keyboard is perfect, beautiful and a technological phenomenon - smooth, easy to write on, not sticky or hard work in the slightest - my computer screen is big and the right height, my chair has been adjusted appropriately and my butt is totally cushioned. My frantic interior designing has come, reluctantly, to an end because I can't fit anything else in my house, and I have cleaned every inch of the flat to within an inch of its life (because you can't write a bestselling novel in a dirty house: everyone knows that). I have nothing else to fight myself with. I have to write the book.
My agent will be both thrilled and surprised, I'd imagine. She agreed to look after me while I was still in England, and - as since leaving England I haven't written a single word - I haven't really lived up to my side of the bargain. I've been an agent's worse nightmare, frankly: the flakiest, most emotional writer you could hope to work with. To start with I lied: I told her when I initially submitted the manuscript for consideration that it was finished, when it was actually only six chapters in. Then, when she told me she was still interested, I told her I knew what was going to happen in the rest of the novel. Then, when we had a two hour, incredibly detailed meeting and I confessed that I didn't have a clue what happened in the rest of the novel, she told me that she still loved it and "believed in the characters" and wanted to represent it, and would help me finish it: unheard of for any agent, let alone one who represents Booker Prize winning authors. To which I said thankyou, that I would finish it in Japan, and then promptly ran away and didn't do a single bloody thing because I was too busy getting my heart broken by a pretty boy, thankyou very much.
I have always told myself - from the age of three, when I decided that all I really wanted to do was write - that if I was ever lucky enough to get a good agent, I would make sure that the relationship was sophisticated and creative and rather profound: that we both wore black as often as possible and discussed works of great authors - past, present and future - over coffee, and I referred to them in the 'thanks' page of all my books in terms that totally transgressed the boundaries of author and agent ("to my darling Kate... to my friend and agent, Kate, without whom this would not be possible").
She is amazing, of course - still at the other end of email, still waiting, still positive, still patient (considering that she is representing a writer who has nothing to represent) - but I'm not nearly as sophisticated and professional as I should be, and I procrastinate more than any other writer in the history of procrastinating writers (which is most of them).
"I've got wrrriiitttterrrs blloooooccck," I whined after one month in Japan.
"Just relax, have some tea, and let the juices flow," she said sympathetically.
"I'm tooo tiiiirred after work," I moaned after two months in Japan.
"Of course you are: it must be such hard work. Just get lots of sleep and do it a little at a time."
"I'm confuussed about the ploootttttt," I exhaled at her after three months in Japan.
"Let's work on it together, then."
"I'm so upset, my boyfriend is cheating on me and I'm trying to forgive him and it's really hard and I'm so miserable and I'm just crying all the time and I want to ddiiiiie," I moaned after four, five, six and seven months in Japan (at weekly intervals).
"You poor thing, take a break and all the time you need."
"Now I don't know what I'm doing with my liiifffe," I admitted after nine.
"You're going to be a great writer, you just have to have faith."
"I don't have faith," I confessed eventually.
"Yes, I can see that."
At no stage has this amazing, high profile, successful agent said: "Holly. I took a chance on you because I thought you had something sellable. My time and advice is precious and I am giving it to you for free. In the year since I last met with you, you have so far proven me wrong. Get off your arse and write the goddamn book before somebody writes something similar but better and we no longer have anything to sell, ok? And please stop treating me like your agony aunt, because - frankly - I'm trained to represent your book, not to put your messy and chaotic life back together again."
Which, if I was an agent, is exactly what I would have said. About nine months ago, actually.
So: no more excuses. I gave up my life in PR to write; I have no other career options. Everything I have done has been to allow me to write; teaching, living by the sea, moving away from England. I have already done the hard bit; all I have to do now is sit down and finish it. I have a main character I love, an agent who has stuck by me, a family who has stood by me, and the time and weather and house and seaside activities to keep me happy in the process. I have everything I need to sit down and bang out the novel. I now even have the perfect keyboard.
Procrastination can be fun, sometimes, and sometimes it is necessary. The last year of procrastination - when I put my book down and failed to pick it up again - helped me to really use my heart for the first time and have it broken for the first time and heal and grow up properly because of it (I'm not the person I was when I left England: the last year has changed me more than the ten years before that put together). It changed me for the better, though - it made me a little wiser, and a little less childish, and a little less blindly optimistic - and I think the person I am now will write a better book than the person I was then ever could have. A book with more thought, and more heart, and the knowledge needed to be truly innocent. So it was procrastination that will become - in one way or another - a part of the book it was there to delay.
It has been long enough, now. My agent deserves the rest of the novel. And so - much more importantly - do I.
The time for procrastination has finally come to an end. And the time for writing has finally started.
I'm a bit cross, actually. They said five working days, and it's been less than eighteen hours and here it is: willy nilly arriving at my flat when I have no other excuses to procrastinate with. I blame Apple Mac. You'd never catch a Windows company delivering your goods before you expected them to, on a Sunday morning to boot. Frankly, it's just bad manners.
I have no other excuses now. I'm all run out. The keyboard is perfect, beautiful and a technological phenomenon - smooth, easy to write on, not sticky or hard work in the slightest - my computer screen is big and the right height, my chair has been adjusted appropriately and my butt is totally cushioned. My frantic interior designing has come, reluctantly, to an end because I can't fit anything else in my house, and I have cleaned every inch of the flat to within an inch of its life (because you can't write a bestselling novel in a dirty house: everyone knows that). I have nothing else to fight myself with. I have to write the book.
My agent will be both thrilled and surprised, I'd imagine. She agreed to look after me while I was still in England, and - as since leaving England I haven't written a single word - I haven't really lived up to my side of the bargain. I've been an agent's worse nightmare, frankly: the flakiest, most emotional writer you could hope to work with. To start with I lied: I told her when I initially submitted the manuscript for consideration that it was finished, when it was actually only six chapters in. Then, when she told me she was still interested, I told her I knew what was going to happen in the rest of the novel. Then, when we had a two hour, incredibly detailed meeting and I confessed that I didn't have a clue what happened in the rest of the novel, she told me that she still loved it and "believed in the characters" and wanted to represent it, and would help me finish it: unheard of for any agent, let alone one who represents Booker Prize winning authors. To which I said thankyou, that I would finish it in Japan, and then promptly ran away and didn't do a single bloody thing because I was too busy getting my heart broken by a pretty boy, thankyou very much.
I have always told myself - from the age of three, when I decided that all I really wanted to do was write - that if I was ever lucky enough to get a good agent, I would make sure that the relationship was sophisticated and creative and rather profound: that we both wore black as often as possible and discussed works of great authors - past, present and future - over coffee, and I referred to them in the 'thanks' page of all my books in terms that totally transgressed the boundaries of author and agent ("to my darling Kate... to my friend and agent, Kate, without whom this would not be possible").
She is amazing, of course - still at the other end of email, still waiting, still positive, still patient (considering that she is representing a writer who has nothing to represent) - but I'm not nearly as sophisticated and professional as I should be, and I procrastinate more than any other writer in the history of procrastinating writers (which is most of them).
"I've got wrrriiitttterrrs blloooooccck," I whined after one month in Japan.
"Just relax, have some tea, and let the juices flow," she said sympathetically.
"I'm tooo tiiiirred after work," I moaned after two months in Japan.
"Of course you are: it must be such hard work. Just get lots of sleep and do it a little at a time."
"I'm confuussed about the ploootttttt," I exhaled at her after three months in Japan.
"Let's work on it together, then."
"I'm so upset, my boyfriend is cheating on me and I'm trying to forgive him and it's really hard and I'm so miserable and I'm just crying all the time and I want to ddiiiiie," I moaned after four, five, six and seven months in Japan (at weekly intervals).
"You poor thing, take a break and all the time you need."
"Now I don't know what I'm doing with my liiifffe," I admitted after nine.
"You're going to be a great writer, you just have to have faith."
"I don't have faith," I confessed eventually.
"Yes, I can see that."
At no stage has this amazing, high profile, successful agent said: "Holly. I took a chance on you because I thought you had something sellable. My time and advice is precious and I am giving it to you for free. In the year since I last met with you, you have so far proven me wrong. Get off your arse and write the goddamn book before somebody writes something similar but better and we no longer have anything to sell, ok? And please stop treating me like your agony aunt, because - frankly - I'm trained to represent your book, not to put your messy and chaotic life back together again."
Which, if I was an agent, is exactly what I would have said. About nine months ago, actually.
So: no more excuses. I gave up my life in PR to write; I have no other career options. Everything I have done has been to allow me to write; teaching, living by the sea, moving away from England. I have already done the hard bit; all I have to do now is sit down and finish it. I have a main character I love, an agent who has stuck by me, a family who has stood by me, and the time and weather and house and seaside activities to keep me happy in the process. I have everything I need to sit down and bang out the novel. I now even have the perfect keyboard.
Procrastination can be fun, sometimes, and sometimes it is necessary. The last year of procrastination - when I put my book down and failed to pick it up again - helped me to really use my heart for the first time and have it broken for the first time and heal and grow up properly because of it (I'm not the person I was when I left England: the last year has changed me more than the ten years before that put together). It changed me for the better, though - it made me a little wiser, and a little less childish, and a little less blindly optimistic - and I think the person I am now will write a better book than the person I was then ever could have. A book with more thought, and more heart, and the knowledge needed to be truly innocent. So it was procrastination that will become - in one way or another - a part of the book it was there to delay.
It has been long enough, now. My agent deserves the rest of the novel. And so - much more importantly - do I.
The time for procrastination has finally come to an end. And the time for writing has finally started.
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Catwalk.
I've seen many funny things during my time in Japan. I've seen three hundred children brushing their teeth at the same time; I've seen karaoke lyrics so badly translated that they are unidentifiable; I've seen t-shirts that are entirely inappropriate because the wearer can't read them; I've seen families camping with full steel stoves and full sized mattresses; I've seen noodle sandwiches and bread sushi; I've seen the kind of dancing that everybody should see at some stage of their lives. But I have never - and I mean ever - seen anything as funny as a man walking a cat.
Two cats, actually. A black one, and a white one. Both attached to the end of a lead, and both enjoying a nice stroll along the beach front with their owner.
Except that "enjoying" isn't really the right word, in this case. Where a dog will happily be attached to a lead and led at a swift pace - stopping now and then to pee or sniff or poo - a cat is not quite as happy about it. First of all, they're not really in it for the exercise: these cats were clearly absolutely indignant that they were being forced to use their legs on a perfectly nice weekend afternoon when they could be sleeping on a windowsill somewhere. Second of all, they had one idea of where they wanted to go, and the owner had an entirely different one: the result being that it was less of a walk, and more of a dragging session as each cat made a bid for a different direction and then dug their heels in. Third of all, the cats clearly couldn't decide which they liked least: walking, their owner, or each other, and thus they were trying to pull away from him, and the walking, and the other cat, as far as they could. None of which is conducive to a particularly elegant or productive exercise session.
The best bit, however, was when the cats saw me. Terrified by the big white girl, they immediately flattened themselves to the floor; ears down, legs spread, tails between their legs. And they were not moving for hell or high water; these little cats flattened themselves out and started hissing as the old gentleman - with absolutely no sentimentality or affection whatsoever - continued to drag them along the surface of the path with their eight stiffened little legs scraping lines in the dirt behind them. What ultimately resulted was a kind of strange cat dance: a combination of flattened heel digging - a tug of war between two cats and their owner - and then, as the tension became too much, a sort of quick step in the direction of the lead while they struggled to get a grip on the sand again.
As they got nearer to me, both cats simultaneously decided that the best possible course of action would be to stop resisting the approach, and - instead - to get as far away on the other side as they could. So what was a heel digging dance now became another waltz entirely as each cat zigazagged as fast as they could and strained with all their might to go past me, in utterly different directions: stopping and starting as they reached the end of the leash and had to wait for their owner to catch up. And never - ever - looking at me at all: shiftily racing past me with the whites of their eyes on full display.
All of which was dealt with intense irritation by their owner, who clearly had been forced to take them out and thought they were tiresome animals and also quite wanted to be back in a seat in the sunshine, asleep, and not walking the damned cats. And - more specifically, from the way he glared at me - thought that I was making a bad job worse, and that none of it was funny in the slightest.
As I sat on the kerb and I laughed until I started making piggy noises at the back of my throat and had to use my sleeve to wipe my face dry, I decided that I was going to have to politely disagree with him.
Two cats, actually. A black one, and a white one. Both attached to the end of a lead, and both enjoying a nice stroll along the beach front with their owner.
Except that "enjoying" isn't really the right word, in this case. Where a dog will happily be attached to a lead and led at a swift pace - stopping now and then to pee or sniff or poo - a cat is not quite as happy about it. First of all, they're not really in it for the exercise: these cats were clearly absolutely indignant that they were being forced to use their legs on a perfectly nice weekend afternoon when they could be sleeping on a windowsill somewhere. Second of all, they had one idea of where they wanted to go, and the owner had an entirely different one: the result being that it was less of a walk, and more of a dragging session as each cat made a bid for a different direction and then dug their heels in. Third of all, the cats clearly couldn't decide which they liked least: walking, their owner, or each other, and thus they were trying to pull away from him, and the walking, and the other cat, as far as they could. None of which is conducive to a particularly elegant or productive exercise session.
The best bit, however, was when the cats saw me. Terrified by the big white girl, they immediately flattened themselves to the floor; ears down, legs spread, tails between their legs. And they were not moving for hell or high water; these little cats flattened themselves out and started hissing as the old gentleman - with absolutely no sentimentality or affection whatsoever - continued to drag them along the surface of the path with their eight stiffened little legs scraping lines in the dirt behind them. What ultimately resulted was a kind of strange cat dance: a combination of flattened heel digging - a tug of war between two cats and their owner - and then, as the tension became too much, a sort of quick step in the direction of the lead while they struggled to get a grip on the sand again.
As they got nearer to me, both cats simultaneously decided that the best possible course of action would be to stop resisting the approach, and - instead - to get as far away on the other side as they could. So what was a heel digging dance now became another waltz entirely as each cat zigazagged as fast as they could and strained with all their might to go past me, in utterly different directions: stopping and starting as they reached the end of the leash and had to wait for their owner to catch up. And never - ever - looking at me at all: shiftily racing past me with the whites of their eyes on full display.
All of which was dealt with intense irritation by their owner, who clearly had been forced to take them out and thought they were tiresome animals and also quite wanted to be back in a seat in the sunshine, asleep, and not walking the damned cats. And - more specifically, from the way he glared at me - thought that I was making a bad job worse, and that none of it was funny in the slightest.
As I sat on the kerb and I laughed until I started making piggy noises at the back of my throat and had to use my sleeve to wipe my face dry, I decided that I was going to have to politely disagree with him.
Two weeks later
My sister's birthday is thirteen days before mine. I don't know what my parents were doing, frankly; organising it like that. In fact, they had aimed for both of us to be born on the same day - two years apart - but she was pigheaded even as a foetus, and decided to show up before they had even fully explained to me that I was no longer going to be the centre of attention anymore: that there would be someone smaller, cuter and - unfortunately - prettier to distract everyone from what I saw (at two years old, but - let's be honest - much longer than that) as The Point Of It All. That being: me.
I quite liked my little sister, what with her being tiny and fat tummied and quite capable of fitting neatly into all of my teddy bear's clothes; a fact that immediately rendered every single of one of them utterly naked (and my sister rather jaunty in a navy sailor outfit and Paddington's hat). She was pretty cool, as it happened, and I carried her around with me as if I was Christopher Robin and she was my very own Pooh. In fact, the only thing that stopped me dragging her down the stairs by one foot was that my mum rather insensitively wouldn't let me.
What I was not happy about, however, was being forced to share my birthday. And it was a shared birthday, no matter how much my parents tried to separate it back out again (too late, mum and dad: too late). The month run-up to my birthday had been cruelly taken away from me - the month that should have been all mine was snatched out from under my eyes - and I was not impressed. If I wanted a present, she could ask for it first and get it before I did; if I wanted to go somewhere, she could - two weeks before the Big Day - hear about it and decide she quite fancied it too. And - I was utterly convinced - all the best Birthday wishes were given out to her and never quite reached me. Because - and I knew this in my heart of hearts - everyone knows that there are only a certain amount of genuine cheers when the candles get blown out, and mine always sounded a little lacklustre.
So I took it back. I took my birthday back, and I stole my sister's with it.
"It's my birthday in seventeen days!" she would shout, jumping up and down on the bed.
"It's my birthday in thirty days!" I would shout, jumping next to her.
"It's my birthday in five days!" she would remind mum and dad from the back of the car.
"Mine in eighteen, remember?" I would inform them immediately afterwards.
And then, when the big day came, my sister would run into mum and dad's bedroom, screaming "it's my biiiiirttthhdaayyy!" and I would run behind her, yelling "and it's neearrrrlly miiinnnnee!!"
Eventually - after four or five or six or maybe seventeen years of this - my little sister burst into tears and asked me to keep my grubby hands off her birthday so she could have one day for herself, and my mum and dad repeated what they repeated every year: which was, more or less, "stop it, Holly Smale, or we're cancelling your birthday altogether."
Now, I'm left to wonder if this is exactly what happens with my grandma and grandad when we're not looking, who have all but shared a birthday for the last 50 years of their marriage. A marriage that has lasted even though I'm certain that - when the rest of the family go home and they're sitting down with the rest of my grandad's birthday cake - is filled with my grandma's cries of "it's my birthday in twelve days!"
Twelve days, and I wonder sometimes if my grandma also feels as if all the best Birthday wishes get used up two weeks earlier; as if all the best singing and hugs and cards and blog posts get sent to my grandad instead. So it is a sign of her utter dignity and composure, I think, that she doesn't kick my grandad's birthday cake off the table on the 3rd of May, and demand that everyone begin a twelve day countdown to the 15th of May immediately. An utter dignity and composure that my grandma is famed for, because if my grandad is the greatest of all wizards, and - let's be honest, we all know it's true - behind every great man is an even greater woman, you can only imagine the woman he goes home to when he has finished saving the world. A lady with a mixture of fire and serenity, determination and kindness, thoughtfulness and sheer gumption that most women aim for and frequently fail to combine as perfectly. A grandma with honesty and warmth and humour; who quietly and firmly holds the family together, and singlehandedly cooks - at the age of over 80 - a full Christmas meal for fifteen people every year without once telling us to do it ourselves; who - every single week - takes a slice out of her homemade apple pie before she heats it up because my dad prefers it cold; who keeps track, in minute detail, of exactly what each of her six granddaughters is doing at any stage - who they are dating, how they are feeling, what mood they are in - because she knows that is what a loving grandma does. Who cooks the world's most amazing roast potatoes, who has the world's most incredible, lineless, translucent skin (I'm keeping my fingers crossed for genetic inheritance) and smells just like a grandma should. Who has dedicated an entire life to caring for other people more than for herself, every single day, in every single action, and who never, ever thinks to mention it to anybody. And whose wit, candid sharpness (when I was five I told her that "one day I would be bigger than her" - which was true by a good seven inches - to which she replied - with similar accuracy - "yes, but you will never be wiser") - kindness and wisdom I have tried to replicate since I was old enough to realise how precious they are, and what a rare combination.
So, grandma, this is my birthday gift to you: a birthday gift that is no less heartfelt, and no less meant, just becomes it comes rather close to grandad's (and I wanted to get you flowers too but they would die in the post; roses aren't very good at travelling 10,000 miles in the air apparently). I miss you and I wish I was there to help you celebrate properly, because the cheers will never be lacklustre for you: not from any of us. Not from the family you hold so perfectly together.
Today in particular - and, in fact, most days - for all of us you are most certainly The Point Of It All. x
I quite liked my little sister, what with her being tiny and fat tummied and quite capable of fitting neatly into all of my teddy bear's clothes; a fact that immediately rendered every single of one of them utterly naked (and my sister rather jaunty in a navy sailor outfit and Paddington's hat). She was pretty cool, as it happened, and I carried her around with me as if I was Christopher Robin and she was my very own Pooh. In fact, the only thing that stopped me dragging her down the stairs by one foot was that my mum rather insensitively wouldn't let me.
What I was not happy about, however, was being forced to share my birthday. And it was a shared birthday, no matter how much my parents tried to separate it back out again (too late, mum and dad: too late). The month run-up to my birthday had been cruelly taken away from me - the month that should have been all mine was snatched out from under my eyes - and I was not impressed. If I wanted a present, she could ask for it first and get it before I did; if I wanted to go somewhere, she could - two weeks before the Big Day - hear about it and decide she quite fancied it too. And - I was utterly convinced - all the best Birthday wishes were given out to her and never quite reached me. Because - and I knew this in my heart of hearts - everyone knows that there are only a certain amount of genuine cheers when the candles get blown out, and mine always sounded a little lacklustre.
So I took it back. I took my birthday back, and I stole my sister's with it.
"It's my birthday in seventeen days!" she would shout, jumping up and down on the bed.
"It's my birthday in thirty days!" I would shout, jumping next to her.
"It's my birthday in five days!" she would remind mum and dad from the back of the car.
"Mine in eighteen, remember?" I would inform them immediately afterwards.
And then, when the big day came, my sister would run into mum and dad's bedroom, screaming "it's my biiiiirttthhdaayyy!" and I would run behind her, yelling "and it's neearrrrlly miiinnnnee!!"
Eventually - after four or five or six or maybe seventeen years of this - my little sister burst into tears and asked me to keep my grubby hands off her birthday so she could have one day for herself, and my mum and dad repeated what they repeated every year: which was, more or less, "stop it, Holly Smale, or we're cancelling your birthday altogether."
Now, I'm left to wonder if this is exactly what happens with my grandma and grandad when we're not looking, who have all but shared a birthday for the last 50 years of their marriage. A marriage that has lasted even though I'm certain that - when the rest of the family go home and they're sitting down with the rest of my grandad's birthday cake - is filled with my grandma's cries of "it's my birthday in twelve days!"
Twelve days, and I wonder sometimes if my grandma also feels as if all the best Birthday wishes get used up two weeks earlier; as if all the best singing and hugs and cards and blog posts get sent to my grandad instead. So it is a sign of her utter dignity and composure, I think, that she doesn't kick my grandad's birthday cake off the table on the 3rd of May, and demand that everyone begin a twelve day countdown to the 15th of May immediately. An utter dignity and composure that my grandma is famed for, because if my grandad is the greatest of all wizards, and - let's be honest, we all know it's true - behind every great man is an even greater woman, you can only imagine the woman he goes home to when he has finished saving the world. A lady with a mixture of fire and serenity, determination and kindness, thoughtfulness and sheer gumption that most women aim for and frequently fail to combine as perfectly. A grandma with honesty and warmth and humour; who quietly and firmly holds the family together, and singlehandedly cooks - at the age of over 80 - a full Christmas meal for fifteen people every year without once telling us to do it ourselves; who - every single week - takes a slice out of her homemade apple pie before she heats it up because my dad prefers it cold; who keeps track, in minute detail, of exactly what each of her six granddaughters is doing at any stage - who they are dating, how they are feeling, what mood they are in - because she knows that is what a loving grandma does. Who cooks the world's most amazing roast potatoes, who has the world's most incredible, lineless, translucent skin (I'm keeping my fingers crossed for genetic inheritance) and smells just like a grandma should. Who has dedicated an entire life to caring for other people more than for herself, every single day, in every single action, and who never, ever thinks to mention it to anybody. And whose wit, candid sharpness (when I was five I told her that "one day I would be bigger than her" - which was true by a good seven inches - to which she replied - with similar accuracy - "yes, but you will never be wiser") - kindness and wisdom I have tried to replicate since I was old enough to realise how precious they are, and what a rare combination.
So, grandma, this is my birthday gift to you: a birthday gift that is no less heartfelt, and no less meant, just becomes it comes rather close to grandad's (and I wanted to get you flowers too but they would die in the post; roses aren't very good at travelling 10,000 miles in the air apparently). I miss you and I wish I was there to help you celebrate properly, because the cheers will never be lacklustre for you: not from any of us. Not from the family you hold so perfectly together.
Today in particular - and, in fact, most days - for all of us you are most certainly The Point Of It All. x
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