The Point

"I don't understand the point of fiction," somebody said to me recently. They picked up their fork and they said it: as if it meant nothing. As if it was something you could say while you picked up a fork.
"What do you mean, 'you don't understand the point of fiction'?"
"I don't see any reason for it. I mean, it's not even real, is it. It's just made-up stories."
There was a silence while I looked at him and at his fork and at the man I thought I loved.
"What kind of book do you see the point in, then?"
"I don't know. Facts. Autobiographies. Self-help books."
"Self-help books?"
"Yeah. At least there's a point to them, isn't there?"
I opened my mouth and then shut it.
"You don't see the point in fiction writing at all?"
"No."
"None of it?"
"No."
"I... I'm not sure... What do you... I...". And then I stopped. "I'm sorry for that," I said, and put my fork down because I was no longer hungry.

What I wanted to say - what I couldn't say, because he wasn't listening, and would never listen - was: fiction doesn't have a point. It is the point.

We all live - each of us - in our own little worlds: trapped in our own minds, in our own bodies, in our own existences; bubbled into our own thoughts and our own loves; condensed into our own hopes, our own fears, our own daily routines and personalities and obsessions and families. We have but one world each - our own - and from that there is no break, and no holiday. We cannot escape our own stories - cannot escape the story of ourselves that grows as we grow, and follows us as we move - and we are walled up inside it: trapped into the person we are and have been and would be, no matter where we travel or how far we go. Through that we struggle, or we glorify, or we nestle, and within that we make mistakes and we do great things and we hurt and we love and we help and we cherish. And because of this one, solitary world each - a world divided into pieces as small as the people in it - comes all of the greatness in all of the world, and all of the damage. Wars, heartbreak, murder, peace, kindness: all created by the separate worlds of individual people, understanding themselves and themselves only.

Fiction breaks these walls down. Through books - especially through great books - we don't read about other people: we become other people. We see the world through different eyes, in different places, in different situations, with different hopes and dreams and ambitions and fears. Through books we travel, and we empathise: through books we leave ourselves behind, momentarily, and are no longer walled up inside ourselves. And it doesn't matter where we go, or who we become - whether we are suddenly a young wizard, whether we are a starving family in outback America, whether we are a Jewish girl locked in an attic, whether we are a milkmaid on the Devon moors, whether we are a savage caught in a Utopian world three hundred years from now - we are no longer ourselves: we have left ourselves behind, and we have crawled into the deepest parts of other people and seen a new world from inside them. And with these new fears, and new thoughts, and new loves, and new hopes, we learn more than we can ever learn from just looking inside ourselves: we learn compassion, and we learn understanding, and we learn what the world is, and not just what it seems to us. We learn love and hope and pain and horror that are more than our own loves and hopes and pains and horrors. They are love and hope and pain and horror as they stand: multiple and brilliant and different to every single one of us.

If there is one thing in the world that can save the world, it is fiction and the compassion that is entwined in it. There could be no murder if the thoughts and fears of the victim were known: there could be no war if the pain of those warred against were understood. There would be no unnecessary heartbreak if the feelings of others were dealt with gently, and kindly. In escaping from ourselves through literature, we do more than escape ourselves, and we do more than take a much needed break from the suffocating presence of our own thoughts and desires and overwhelming sense of I. We take pieces of other people's worlds, and - in so doing - build another world entirely: a world composed of more than just ourselves. A world as it is, rather than as it is to us.

There is no point to literature if your own world is the only one that matters. But if you can ever hope to help yourself - if you can ever hope to really help more than just yourself - you have to understand others, and you have to see through their eyes, and you have to understand the world as more than just yourself. And there is no more complete way to do that than through literature: through burrowing into the lives of others - whether real or imagined - and living through them.

If there is a point to any of us, it is in being more than just ourselves: it is in seeing the world from more than our own tiny corner of it.

And if there is a point to fiction, it is in enabling us to do just that.

Paris

Paris is the city of love.

I know it, you know it, and the Parisians certainly know it. Coffee pots for two; red wine bottles with two wineglasses; romantic hotels with four poster double beds; chocolates on pillows; trips down the river; Le Louvre and the tiny, disappointing painting that is the Mona Lisa; the lights of Le Champs Elysse; glowing faces in the windows of Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent; heart shaped photos at the top of the Eiffel Tower; bicycles ridden in wiggly couples, laughing exactly as they laugh in Amelie. Love is in every brick, every glass, every window; romance is in every chocolate, every coffee pot, every garlic bulb (strung around the neck of people who say hawhehawhe a lot).

And when a relationship is floundering, Paris is the one city in the world that can save it. It is the one place that can heal a broken heart: can force a couple back together again, and fix the gaps between them. That can give hope to something that has fallen apart; can shine the light of romance back into something that has grown dark and dull; can lift a couple that have fallen into deep levels of miscommunication back into a place of heart and companionship and trust again.

So - with this in mind - I have just booked two tickets in a beautiful boutique hotel: to eat, to drink, to wander, and to gaze lovingly at each other in the sunlight. To put together the pieces of our broken hearts and our broken relationship. Because it is not too late for us. Where there is love, it will never be too late to stop trying.

"Will you stop calling it a romantic weekend?" they asked me yesterday. "Seriously. Stop calling it that or I'm not coming."
"It is a romantic weekend! Me and you, red wine, bread, fake moustaches: what's not romantic about that?"
"It's not even a weekend: we're going on a Monday."
"Okay, romantic non-weekend then."
"But it's not romantic either. I'm your best mate. You haven't got a chance in hell, frankly."
"Pfff. Let the lights of Paris shine into your heart and then say that."
"There's not going to be chocolates on our pillows are there?"
"Don't know, but we get a free boat trip. Very exciting."
"Are you going to make me get a photo with you at the top of the Eiffel Tower?"
"Yep. And then I'm going to put it in a heart shaped frame. Just watch me."
"Did you get separate beds?"
"Does it matter?"
"I'm starting to think it might do."
"Then yes, I got separate beds. But me and you, Grimbott: we're going to have the kind of weekend we haven't had since we were 19 and living on borrowed money."
"We're going to drink too much wine and then vomit and pass out in the beds of strangers again and wake up not knowing where we are?"
"Exactly. Although we have a nice hotel so maybe we should get them to pass out in ours."
"It's not a romantic weekend, though. It's a non-romantic non-weekend. Okay?"
"We'll see. A trip down Le Seine might just swing it for me, I reckon. I'm extremely charming when I'm wearing my fake moustache."
"Pff. You're going to need more than a fake moustache to win me over, Smale."

I've always wanted to go to Paris for a romantic weekend: I've always wanted to prance around playing with shower gels and little chocolates on a white linen bed and take photos with the Eiffel Tower that cunningly play with perspective and make me look really big with the Eiffel Tower in my hand and eat cake until I feel nauseous and then get into a fight about some really old art because we don't agree about what it all means. And I'm sick of waiting for the right man to find me and take me there and have the kind of weekend I want to have: fun, and relaxed, and sweet, and ever so romantic. I'm sick of waiting for the right man full stop. I'm sick of waiting for life to come and get me before I can start living. Because while I'm waiting to start living, my life is wearing itself and me out.

So I'm taking one of my best girl friends instead: a friend I've not seen in a year. To bond together a relationship that has slipped somewhere too dark; to have fun with a relationship that means more to me than any silly boy. A relationship that will always be there for me, and a love that will last whatever else my heart does; that will still stand up in twenty years when I'm divorced and chain smoking 30 cigarettes a day and claiming dole money while wearing tracksuit bottoms covered in toothpaste and baked beans (admittedly it might struggle a little at this point: she's very elegant and works for the government and might not be too impressed with my continual inability to work a washing machine).

Love is worth fighting for and working at: no matter what kind of love it is. And if a ten year friendship isn't worth a Romantic Weekend in Paris, then no relationship is.

Regardless of what you call it.

Crabs

I've got crabs.

Not the type nice girls don't get. The type that walk sideways and have little pinchers and eyes that wiggle backwards and forwards. I've just managed to get rid of the ants, and the cockroaches, and the mosquitos, and the flies, and now I have crabs.

Luckily, they're a bit politer than the last set of monsters.

"Where do you think you're going?" I asked him as I opened the front door and he shuffled sideways towards my welcome mat.
The crab stayed very still, and held his little red claws in front of his face, as if he was trying to hide.
"You want to come in, do you?"
The crab said nothing.
"You're actually quite cute, so I wouldn't mind. But I don't think you'd be happy here."
The crab took one step towards me.
"Honestly, it's not for you. There's not much to do for a crab."
The crab wiggled his eyes and I bent down to get a closer look.
"You're very pretty, though."
He waved one of his pinchers at me.
"I would suggest that you scuttle back over the road and into the sea. I think that's the place for you."
The crab looked at me, and then looked at my welcome mat, and then looked at the house with very few leaves to pick up and carry around or watery ditches to play in or grassy patches to hide in. He did a quick evaluation, and then shuffled two steps away.
"You can come back and visit, though," I told him. "I'd like that. It would be nice to have some company."
The crab waved both of his pinchers merrily, and then - with a quick circulation of his eyeballs - disappeared down a crack in the pavement.
"Bye, then," I said a little sadly. I'd been kind of hoping he'd force me to change my mind.

There are monsters, and there are monsters. And the cute kind that wait to be invited in and leave when you tell them to: they're the kind of monsters I don't mind dealing with.

Monsters with manners.

Wizards and kissing.

Harry Potter and Rounders. The only two English things in existence that Japanese ten to fourteen year olds get excited about. That, and my marital status.

I couldn't have tried harder. I showed them England condensed into picture format: the Queens (Elizabeth 1 and 2) and Prince William (they thought it was David Beckham); Ascot, Wimbledon, Glastonbury, Halloween, Guy Fawkes night; Keira Knightley, Kate Moss, Judi Dench and James Bond; Christianity and Christmas and Easter and churches and pubs; football and cricket and darts and snooker; Take That and Queen and The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and Oasis and Radiohead; David Cameron (I may have called him James Cameron by accident); London and Cambridge and Oxford and Brighton and the Lake District and Devon; an English breakfast and Sunday lunch and bangers n mash and fish n chips and all other British foods with n in the middle; multiculturalism and hinduism and buddhism and curry and pizza and chopsticks. I got England by the throat and I squeezed it into a big fat Yorkshire sausage in a slide format and pushed it down their little throats: all 58 of them. And the only time they sat up straight was when I mentioned the words: Harry Potter. The boy is, truly, magic.

Once I had figured this out, of course, the presentation was easy.

"Where is this?"
Shrugs, nodding heads: general disinterest.
"This is Oxford University. It is one of the oldest Universities in the world."
Glazed looks, slumped shoulders.
"I used to live in Oxford."
Pencils being tapped up and down.
"And - Harry Potter is filmed right here."
"Ehh??" Suddenly sixty children break out into shouts and incredulity; start asking questions, pointing, clapping.

A few minutes later:
"And what about this?"
More shrugs.
"London."
More glazed looks.
"This is where Harry Potter is filmed too. You know the Hogwarts Express? That's Kings Cross station."
Uproar: suddenly every child in the room wants to go to Kings Cross Station.

So I abused it slightly. Bangers n mash? Harry Potter eats it. Radiohead? Daniel Radcliffe is a huge fan (I'm sure he is: that covers pretty much everyone in England). The English public transport system? That's where JK Rowling thought up Harry Potter. Churches? All the basis for Harry Potter. You know where the children meet and Harry's in the invisible cloak? That's a pub. Yup. The actress who plays Hermione went to Glastonbury. And if I could have got Dumbledore playing at Wimbledon, you can bet your arse that I would have done it.

By the time I had struggled through an hour of pointing at pictures and saying "what's this?" and "who's this?" to absolute silence (not one of them recognised even one James Bond), I was ready to push my Powerpoint presentation straight off the table. So I gave them the chance to ask questions, and fifty six hands went up.

"Yes?"
"How old are you?"
"28."
"Do you have a boyfriend?"
"No. I do not. Any questions about England?"
And fifty six hands went down.
"No more questions? How about you?"
"I was going to ask the same question."
"And you?"
"Same."
"You?"
"Me too."
"Right, so no more questions?"
"No."
"Good. Let's go and play a traditional English game of Rounders."

Harry Potter and smacking a ball around a pitch and running from post to post: they love both of them. Possibly because I told them that Daniel Radcliffe played Rounders when he was their age, and if Harry Potter hadn't been a wizard, he'd have been forced to play it at school too. The key to being a good teacher, you see, is in working out exactly what interests children, and then bending the truth to fit it: known in other jobs as lying, and known in education and the media as being creative. JK Rowling can rest in peace at night knowing that an entire nation of children know where England is because of her. And I can rest in peace at night knowing that an entire classroom of children now want to eat bangers n mash and go to Glastonbury for entirely madeup reasons.

I did my best. But to a thirteen year old Japanese child, there is nothing more interesting than a thirteen year old British wizard and whether or not the teacher is getting kissed regularly. England, and her many, many glories, will just have to wait until they're a little older: at which point they will no longer care quite so much about who I am kissing.

And, by which point, I may be able to give them a very slightly more interesting answer.

Endings

Just as all stories need a beginning, so they all need an end.

Eighteen months ago, I fell in love for the first time. I moved 10,000 miles for love, and I had my heart broken. I would be a robot if none of this filtered into my writing (or a much better writer than I am). I have written about it until there is nothing left to write. It has become my story.

There is nothing left to write, now, and there is nothing left to say. The emotions I have lived with and through for nearly two years have gone: for him, although not for me. We spoke for the first time since we broke up in March, and he is happy, he is dating again, he does not love me anymore, and he does not miss me. He told me this as I sat and cried; watched me without a flicker of emotion. And, because this is the first end he has ever really given me - the first end that hasn't finished with love for me and hope for a future together - it is the first end I have believed in. And the first time I have been able to actually let go with my heart, as well as with my head.

All I now need is a hug and quiet and space and my family around me: time to lick my wounds, feel adored and decide what I need to do next so that I can move forwards into a future that does not have him in it. I will not be writing about love again for a very long time: will not be thinking about it again, or feeling it. I do not want it in my head, and I do not want it in my heart. I was too scared to feel it for 28 years - too scared that it would hurt me as it has done - and now I'm putting it back where it came from: away from me. There is nothing left to say, and there is nothing left to feel. I am written out.

My story is no longer a love story: quite possibly never was one. It has been everything, and it has been too much. It has taken too much from me for too long, and given too little.

Just as all stories need a beginning, so they all need an end. This one is finally over. All I can hope is that perhaps, now, a new story can finally start. 

And that it will be a much better story than the last one.

Holidays

School`s out for summer, and - for the first time in a decade - that`s a statement I can actually participate in. And I feel 13 all over again.

I now have five and a half weeks of unbridled free time: time to write and swim and surf and get my arse on a plane back to England and Morocco and Paris for a whirlwind trip, so the unbridled free time isn`t perhaps quite as free as it could be. In fact, considering the fact that I`ve spent the last four months sitting in the staff room, using Google and eating biscuits and staring at my fingernails, there`s a good chance that my unbridled free time is going to be a damn sight busier and more tiring than my bridled work time. Which sounds delightful, and I`m going to thoroughly enjoy wearing myself out so I can come back to work and sleep at my desk in September.

This school, though, certainly knows how to send the students off. I can`t remember much about the last day of term in England, but I`m pretty sure it involved writing on t-shirts, tossing shoes over the hedge and covering the teachers in some kind of gunk. This morning, as I sat in a hall full of 400 dark little heads, all sitting in exactly the same position (on their knees), with their hands neatly in their laps, bowing in perfect timing and in utter silence, I eventually came to the conclusion that my chances of being gunked were slim to none; my chances of being respectfully bowed to 400 times, on the other hand, were pretty much total. There was a traditional Japanese ribbon dance from Hokkaido performed by 20 students - so brilliantly, and with so much energy, that I got little bumps all over my arms - there was a 15 minute performance from the brass band that was without exception one of the best live music events I`ve ever been to, and - to top it off - each of the teachers was re-introduced informally to the hall by the oldest students, and I was declared "the most beautiful and sweet teacher," which meant that I immediately screwed up my lines, went red, bowed five or six times and burst into tears.

I`m very lucky: as much as I am looking forward to being able to see my friends and family and write the damn book (and it will be written: I am focusing on that now as a priority), I am also part of a school that I`m not at all sad to be returning to in September. A school with warmth, humour, intelligence and - just as importantly - very, very good taste in female attractiveness. Which is all a teacher can ever really hope for. That and presents. I have high hopes for my birthday in December.

I`m not 13 anymore, but it feels like I am. School is out, and the holidays - in all of their teenage, summer glory - begin now.

And I couldn`t be happier about it.

A modern education

When I was at school, I learnt many things. I learnt how to calculate the volume of a triangle using the lengths of its sides; I learnt what happened on Bloody Sunday in Russia; I learnt how to do long division by hand; I learnt how to make dove-tail joints, how to stand in the cold and get shouted at by the netball teacher, how to make speeches about Hinduism and how to draw bowls of fruit surrounded by candlesticks and artfully draped bits of silk. I also learnt - and this wasn't necessarily on the curriculum - how to make myself invisible, how to hide in the changing rooms during lunchtime and how to pretend that I couldn't hear a single word about me that anybody was saying.

The last set of skills have been useful - although finding changing rooms to hide in is more difficult as a teacher, and I often have to resort to the staff toilets - but the first set have not. Not once in my entire life have I ever used the wonders of trigonometry, despite being forced to study it week in and week out for five years. I have never needed to know how to draw a map that shows various geographic complexities, and I have never needed to divide seven figure numbers by five figure numbers in my head. There is no maths, in fact, that I need anymore that can't be done with my fingers or my mobile phone.

What they didn't think to teach me, however, in all of my GCSEs, in all of my A Levels, in my entire BA and an entire MA was: how to pump a bike tyre.

This piece of knowledge was lost, somewhere: presumably tucked away in the same place as how to unblock a shower or what gets rid of mould or how to check the oil in your car. Perhaps the teachers themselves didn't know either: perhaps their teachers didn't show them, and - like me - they're living in a muddled, confusing world of things they don't understand and can't admit to anyone for fear of admitting they don't actually know anything worth passing on.

One hour and fortyfive minutes. One hour fortyfive minutes, sitting on the kerb outside my house, fiddling with tiny little bolts and nuts (and - let's be honest - I don't actually know which one is a nut and which one is a bolt). One hour fortyfive minutes, talking to my bike.

"Why has this got a pointy stick coming out of it?"
Silence.
"Well, where on you is a hole that would fit a pointy stick?"
Silence.
"If I jab it in to the wheel, is that going to make matters worse?"
Silence.
"Is it a good idea to take this off?"
Bike lets out loud wheezing noise, as remaining air escapes.
"Okay, I guess not. What about if I just screw everything together, and then pump as hard as I can?"
Silence, punctuated by the sound of air coming out of the pump, and then - after I had squeezed the tyre and realised that there was absolutely nothing inside it - the sound of lots of swearing.

I'm considering buying a new bike; just wheeling this one into the river and getting another one. One with air in its tyres. This one lasted four weeks before the air came out: I could average out at another 12 bikes before I leave Japan, and never have to touch another bike pump again.

In the interests of economics, however, I've just had to make yet another embarrassing cry for help.

The Babacycle, I emailed as far and wide as I could, has two flat wheels and I don't know how to get air back in them. Can somebody come and save it from the river for me?
How are you still alive? a friend emailed back. Seriously. How have you got to 28 and are still alive? I'll be over later.

9 GCSEs, 3 A levels, a BA and an MA, and I know absolutely nothing of any use to anybody at all: least of all to me. Nothing at all. All I am is a silly girl with a blocked, mouldy shower and no oil in her car who can't pump up her own bloody bike tyres. I would have been better off staying at home throughout my teens, reading How To guides on the internet and working out how to hang my laundry so that it doesn't get peg marks in it or fall on the floor. Which is exactly what I'm going to be doing for the rest of this evening.

School, apparently, is very useful in teaching us the things that life will never bother asking from us: like revising as hard as you can for an exam and then finding out when you get in there that the pages that fell into the bathtub were the ones you needed to read. And I have the rest of my life to find out just how much else I missed while I was learning the periodic table by heart and sanding down the edges of a plastic clock I made that looked like a hummingbird but didn't actually work.

And - now that I am a teacher, even if temporarily - I can enjoy passing on yet more useless information that none of my students will ever actually use. And then I can also enjoy laughing at them in twenty years when they're all riding around on flat-wheeled bikes, smelling slightly.

Thank God for a thoroughly modern education.

Kristin

Into our lives, now and then, come people who change us. For the dozens - hundreds, perhaps thousands -of people we meet, only a few of them leave an impression that lasts long after they have gone, and alter the shape of our lives.

I have met two of those people in Japan. One is the boy I love who broke my heart. And one is the girl I love who helped put it back together again.

"Mmm," she said half way through our first phone conversation, four months ago. It was all she had said for five minutes, and I was already convinced that - despite having met me only once - she hated me with a passion usually reserved for people who have met me lots of times.
"So what time are we meeting?"
"Uhuh."
"What time?"
"Mmahem."
"Is 7.30 okay?"
"Mmm?"
"Er, okay...Great I`ll see you there."
"Uh - erm - uhuh."

"Holly," she eventually admitted, ten days later: ten days of wrong times and wrong places and phone conversations I had started avoiding. "I need to tell you something."
"You hate me, don`t you."
"Nope. I can`t understand you, especially on the phone. Not a word. You`re harder to understand than the Irish."
"You`re kidding me. I`m harder to understand than the Irish? Is that possible? I mean, I know you`re from LA, but surely you`ve heard some accents other than American before? I`ve got a perfectly normal English accent, you know."
"Hmmm? What? No, you lost me again."

Since then, we have walked together, onsened together, eaten together, driven together: all the while, talking and sifting the world into piles. And she has been all I could hope for from a friend: she has brought me ice cream when I`m sick, she has cuddled me when I`m crying, she has cooked me dinner when I`m hungry. She has calmed me down and bolstered me up: been there, even when I asked her not to be. The few words I`ve managed to communicate in the right language have been listened to carefully, attentively and thoughtfully: with consideration, with wisdom, and with infinite patience. What`s more, she has shown a level of compassion I have rarely seen in anyone: cried when I cried, was happy when I was happy, was angry for me when I needed her to be and defensive of me when I didn`t expect it. In the process of picking up the pieces of my heart, one by one, and trying to fit them into a shape that makes sense to me again, she has been pivotal: never impatient, never cruel, never frustrated, and always with a unique perspective that comes from being thoroughly good, and thoroughly kind. From having infinite belief in people, and in love, and in hope, and in trust, that has risen above her own past and own terribly broken heart and made her one of the best, most loving, most genuine people I have ever met. A person who will stand by a friend who she has only ever seen in pieces - only met in pieces, and who had nothing much left to offer anybody - and patiently help to build her into something whole again.

"Smaley," she said last night, as she dipped her tempura into my sauce. "You are going to be so loved, one day."
"Do you honestly think so?"
"No, I know so. How could you not be loved? You are so good. You have such a good heart, Hols. Even when you`re hurting and in pain you`re good and kind and brave and honest. One day somebody is going to see that and love you so incredibly much for it, and they won`t stop or change their minds. Not ever."
"Really?" I asked her, tears springing up immediately (I`ve seen little evidence to hope for this so far). "Do you really think that?"
And then - as I started blinking as fast as I could - she promptly burst into tears.
"And," she said, "it hurts me so much that you can`t see it."

In showing me such kindness and compassion, she has made me want to be better; in seeing in me so much goodness, she has made me start seeing it too. In reminding me what loyalty and thoughtfulness and selflessness can be like, she has made me start seeing the world as a beautiful place again: in understanding my pain, and in loving me in spite of the lesser person it has made me, she has made it easier to bear and to try and hold myself straighter.

In two days, Kristin leaves Nichinan and I am on my own again. But - as much as I am going to miss her, and as lonely as I`m sure I am going to be with her gone - she is leaving me a different person to the girl she met on the doorstep, four months ago. I am still hurting, and I am still broken, but she is leaving me with more hope, and more faith, and the knowledge that there is nothing in this world more important than kindness, compassion and the dignity and grace that come with them. Because, when our hearts break and our minds stumble, it is kindness and compassion that will lift us back up: in others, and inside ourselves. It is the people who love us that will put us back together again, and - in loving us so much - teach us how to love ourselves again. And it is the people who stand by us, and pick us up when we don`t have the strength to do it ourselves - who listen to us, and cry with us, and fight for us - who make our hearts whole again and give us something to aim towards.

I don`t know when I`ll see her again, but I know that when I do I will be a stronger person and I will be a better person because of her. And - because I don`t know how to tell Kristin that in words that she will understand - I have written it down.

So that she can read how much I love her instead.

Betty

I think I have to sell Betty. My surfboard. Not my grandma.

"Betty," I said this morning, struggling back into my wet bikini and rash guard. "It's time. We're going surfing."

"Really?" she said, looking down from the wall where she's been propped for the last six weeks.

"Seriously. I'm feeling pretty genki this morning."

"You're not just winding me up?" Betty asked me, looking suspicious.

"Nope. It's just me and you and probably a whole lot of rain but I'm game if you are."

"Oh God, anything to get me out of your study," she whimpered, convinced - as she has been for some time now - that she belongs to a category of my possessions that includes dumb-bells, an iron, a yoga mat and fake eyelashes: good ideas at the time, but currently rotting in various cupboards all over the house.

And I was feeling pretty genki. I've spent the long holiday weekend at the beach, learning how to ride a motorbike (sorry, mum), learning how to sit behind a crazy Japanese boy on a motorbike travelling at 80mph on wet sand screaming aaaarrrggghhhh stop Shin, stop, for the love of God, stop, you total bastard, or when I get off this thing I'm going to sodding kill you, do you hear me? and discovering that not only can I bodysurf properly and thoroughly enjoy it: I'm actually good at it. Which is a fantastic thing to find out, because I can count the amount of physical things I'm naturally good at one one hand (and no, I'm not telling you what they all are). 

So, tired and red and full of beans and the conviction that I'm probably immortal, I got up early this morning and decided that Betty was coming out of early retirement. 

It started relatively well. We walked down to the beach and I nodded to a few handsome surf boys - that Yeah, we're cool aren't we surfer look combined with a big dose of and - double take - yes, we are different races - and Betty did her utmost not to trip me up or tip me over, which is the most you can really expect from a 7.5 foot surfboard. We both made it into the sea in one piece, Betty grumbling that it looked like rain, and then stood in the shallows and assessed the situation for a few minutes.

"They're quite big, aren't they," Betty said eventually.

"Don't be such a wuss," I told her crossly. "I'm a strong swimmer and you're basically a raft. We'll be fine."

"I'm not sure about this," she moaned in a low voice. "All the other surfers are over that way."

"Yes, well, thanks to the fact that you're twice the size, weight and volume of all the others - and covered in pink flowers - I've decided to take us somewhere a little bit more private. It's hard to look cool with you tied to my ankle."

"Are you saying I'm fat?"

"You're huge and you know it."

Betty sniffed.

"I'm in perfect proportion," she told me in a huffy little voice. "And you're not exactly diddly yourself either, you know."

"I'm in perfect proportion too," I snapped back. "Now pipe down and focus on catching waves, please."

Except that it was really, really hard. Betty is such an absolute beast - twice the size of a normal surfboard, twice the weight - that everytime I tried to do anything she resisted. When I tried to duck her under the waves, all of my weight wouldn't make her go down; when she slipped away from me she dragged me with her by my foot rather than the leash serving to keep her with me. If I needed to turn her around quickly she did it in her own sweet time, and when I tried to get her back out of the water for a rest I didn't have the strength in my arms to pick her up. True, there was no chance of sinking on her - she's like a small boat - and true, I can get up on my knees quite easily because there's a six inch gap between me and the water, but it didn't make up for an hour of arguing, negotiating and bitching at each other. ("Right, turn, turn, turn and go. Turn, Betty. Turn. Oh for the love of.. Nope, we missed it." "I didn't feel like turning." "I didn't ask you if you felt like turning, I told you to turn." "Well I fancied the wave behind it." "I wasn't ready for that one!" "Well I was.")

As bad as the arguments were, however - as much as we sniped at each other and wrestled together in the rain (she was right: it had looked like rain) - none of them, I think, necessitated her trying to kill me.

It was a good wave; Betty and I were coordinated, we were both sailing quite nicely towards the shore, I was up on one knee, Betty had piped down. She slowed down too soon, as she would (she's too fat to go very fast), and I lost my balance, went under the waves and popped up with Betty, dragging me in one particular direction and testing my immortality theory a little too fervently.

"Betty!" I shouted. "I'm five feet away from the rocks! What are you playing at?"

"You brought me here. I told you the other surfers were the other way."

"No, I brought you there. 50 metres that way. Where my bag is, you see? We are now up against the rocks. You nearly smashed my head open."

"Don't blame me."

"Right - fine. I'm not arguing about this. Move away from the rocks."

"No."

"Move away from the rocks."

"No."
"Betty, move away from the frigging rocks." 

I started dragging her away from them, but Betty had decided to play dead and all of my weight and strength couldn't get her to move the right way.

"Betty, you're going to kill me!"

"No, you and your crap surfing skills are going to kill you."

"My inability to move you is going to kill me, Betty! Now move."

And we struggled, shouting at each other, back to the shore where I finally heaved Betty onto the sand and collapsed in a heap on top of her, still shouting at her.

"This isn't working," I told her when I got my breath back. "It's just not. Is it."
Betty shrugged.
"The guy who bought me was 6 foot 5 and built like a brick shithouse. You're a bit puny."
"And you're too fat."
"I know. Stop reminding me."

So - after a few tears and a lot of apologising from both of us - we've decided to go separate ways. I love surfing, and I love Betty despite her flaws, but she is too big for me, too strong for me, and too argumentative for me. The chances of ever standing up on a smaller board are much lower, but the chances of being killed in the process are lower too. Plus I won't spend my entire time out on the water shouting and struggling and arguing. And - frankly - I've done quite enough of that this year. Surfing is supposed to be my escape from all that: not just another source of drama.

She'll will be fine. I'll find a nice, big, strong man to look after her: a man who secretly likes being controlled and shouted at and nearly being killed (and there are more of them than you might think). And I'll find something a little more placid, and a little more malleable. Something I can have more fun with, and a few less fights.

Betty was useful, but it's time to sell her up, now.

My surfboard. Not my grandma.

Babacycle.

When acquiring a nickname, there are a few basic requirements.

The first is that it subtly, and yet poignantly, points towards one or more of the qualities you want made public knowledge: if you are good in bed, you want this known; if you are prone to breaking hearts, you want the opposite sex to be aware of it; if you are unfairly elegant, beautiful, intelligent or witty, it should be known as widely as possible. The second is that it creates an identity with which you will be forever associated: one that condenses the essence of who you are into an identifiable, pinpointable form and allows it to be recognised by others. The third is that it's not one you're embarrassed to have shouted at you in a supermarket.

After much consideration, I have decided that 'baba' (grandma) ticks absolutely none of these boxes.

The first strike was when I searched in my handbag and offered my friend a sweet.
"Where the hell did that come from?" she said, looking at it as if it might start moving.
"My bag," I told her, rather obviously.
"Where in your bag?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said. "Somewhere in there. Don't worry, it doesn't have fluff on it. I checked."
And then I dropped my bag and coins rolled out on the floor.
"You," she said as she bent down to help me pick them up, "are such an old lady."
"Hey - these sweets are thoroughly modern sweets," I responded indignantly.

The second strike was when we turned up at the onsen, and out of the boot of my car I produced a little pink basket filled with a sponge and a back scrubber and a toenail scrub and a little hair towel and a little bottle of moisturiser and a little rolley thing to roll on your face and make you look younger.
"Tell me you don't have an onsen basket in the boot of your car," she said.
"You can see I do."
"You realise that's a little old lady basket, right?"
"No it isn't. It's a perfectly logical way to carry everything around."
"But why do you need all of that stuff?"
"Well I need all these things to get clean properly, don't I."
My friend looked at me, and then - after a long silence - she shook her head and said:
"Old lady Smaley."

The third strike was spread far and wide when I turned up to a beach party with my bike.
"What the bloody hell are you riding?" about six people yelled at me.
"My bike," I told them. "Cool, isn't it? Look, I personalised it."
"Why does it have a large green plastic basket tied to the back with shoelaces?"
"So I can carry my shopping, obviously."
"Haha - it's BaBa and her BaBacycle."
"You won't be laughing," I told them with my nose in the air, "when I can carry far more beer than any of you."
But, as it turned out, they were; because it was me that had to carry all of it, while they raced ahead with their ten speed numbers and I huffed and puffed behind them on my own with just my little bell to keep me occupied.

The fourth and final strike was today, when I turned up for a beach picnic. Due to a little absent mindedness - and due to being a little bit preoccupied with The Mill On The Floss - I accidentally sat on the beach yesterday in a t-shirt and shorts and burnt the buggery out of my arms, neck and face: proving - if there was any doubt - that English people abroad are exactly what the stereotype of them is. Which means that today I took a few precautions to make sure I didn't do it again.
"Baba, what are you wearing?"
"I'm protecting myself from the sun."
"We can see that. You're wearing arm mufflers on a beach."
"Do you like them? I got them for 100 yen. And look at my hat! It has a little bow on it."
"Uhuh. And you're wearing a scarf. In July."
"To protect my neck."
"Oh Baba," one of my friends laughed. "You really are the cutest."
"I'm not cute," I said, sticking my nose even further in the air. "I am emminently sensible, and when you're all burnt I shall be laughing at you all and waving my arm mufflers in your faces."

I didn't get to wave anything, unfortunately; the sun managed to find my nose anyway, and while my friends all got golden glows, I got a bright red centre of face.

My nickname, thus, is set, although luckily not for long: these friends all leave Nichinan at the end of the week, and I get to start all over again.

With the next set of friends, I am going to be cultivating an entirely different nickname. I'm not sure what it will be yet, but it won't have anything to do with little old ladies.

And I think my bike might need a new makeover.

Rice

Sometimes the little things we learn make a big difference.

"Where are you going?" my colleague asked today as I walked out of the school with an extremely gung-ho attitude. I was walking towards a green square of plants, just as I had been told to do.
"You told me to go to the rice field," I announced. "I`m going to the rice field."
"That is not a rice field."
"Oh."
"The rice field is there."
He pointed in the opposite direction.
"Oh. What's that, then?"
"Grass."
"Oh. Will these shoes be okay for weeding? Why are you laughing?"
"You`ll see soon. And you might want to roll your trousers up," he added.
"Why?" I asked, and he laughed again.

A rice field, apparently, is filled with water and wet, light grey clay. Which explained why all my students were in their t-shirts and shorts, and didn`t explain why I had been sent out in all of my work clothes.

"Right," I said when I had waded into the middle and stood, in my suit trousers, knee deep in clay. "We`re pulling up the weeds, right?"
"Yes," one of my students replied.
I bent down and grabbed a handful of grass and pulled at it.
"It's quite tough, isn't it," I pointed out when it wouldn't come out.
"Holly Sensai," my student told me calmly. "That`s the rice."
I pointed at the grass.
"This is the rice?"
"Yes."
"But -" and I leant down a little closer. "Where is the rice?"
"Eh?"
"Is it underground?"
"Eh?"
"Like potatoes?"
"No."
"Where, then?"
"This rice is too small. It's there." And she pointed to the next field, filled with what I thought was corn.
"That`s the rice?"
"Yes."
"On the grass?"
"Yes."
"Hanging from the grass? Like grass seeds?"
"It`s not grass. It's rice."
"Ooooohhhhh."

There were quite a few lessons to be learnt, in fact. I discovered that a frog is called a kaeru in Japanese, and that it will sit quite still in your hand while you stroke it on the head. I discovered that if I say a frog is cute, I will immediately get offered twenty five of them as gifts. I discovered that I can pick up a caterpillar without feeling squeamish. I discovered that my shoulders get extremely burnt in 2 hours of weeding, and I discovered - too late, unfortunately - that my top was too loose and I had shown most of the 9th grade what teachers aren't supposed to show the 9th grade. And then, when I was bright red and covered in clay and frog juice and little spiders, I discovered that I'm allergic to rice plants and that the school nurse wasn't very happy with whoever had sent me into a rice field without sun protection and in a suit.

Some little things make a big difference. I've been eating rice every day for a year now and now I finally know where those little things come from.

And the answer is: not underground.

Sunsets and running machines

If ever I have been a fool, it has been in the belief that the body and the mind are two separate things.

I don’t remember when I made that decision; made that fatal choice, like Sophie, and picked one over the other. As a small child, nobody could stop me dancing in the rain without any clothes on (mum tried to get me to wear at least a coat but I promptly took it off and threw it on the doorstep), or racing down a hill on a toboggan, or climbing a tree. True, I was never very good at it - often fell over or got stuck or fell out of my wellies into a puddle - but I did it with exactly the same eagerness I had when I picked up a book and tucked myself into a corner; felt it as much a part of me as the characters I loved that weren’t real. Fiction and reality played with each other happily, and my body and my mind were two parts of the same thing - to be loved and enjoyed equally - and I was made up of both of them.

At some stage, this changed. I don’t know what it was that did it; perhaps the ridicule of always being the last picked in PE, perhaps reading too much Austen - the most stationary of all novelists - perhaps sheer laziness, but at some point I decided (without ever realising I had decided) that my mind was important to me, and my body was not. That what my mind could do meant infinitely more than the unattractive vehicle I carried it around in, and I was no longer interested in humiliating one with the failure of the other.

Further, somewhere in that strange process - the process of choosing one side of me over the other - I convinced myself that people who cared about their bodies were somehow… lacking. In soul, in spirit, in thought. That - in a world of many important things to see, and think about, and feel - they had chosen to focus on what they looked like; the ultimate sign of spiritual emptiness. And, in choosing an identity - as we all do, at some early, early stage - I probably asked myself: did Sylvia Plath go to Fitness First? Could I imagine Oscar Wilde or Shakespeare sweating like pigs on the cross trainer? Did Dickens do yoga? And - since the answer, as far as I knew - was not in any of the pictures I’ve seen, I decided not to either. The world was clearly split into fit people, and clever people, and I wanted to be the latter.

I have not exercised since. For six weeks three years ago I went through a momentary gym phase - prompted by dating a boy who was particularly good looking and quite liked toned arms on girls - but gave that up when it ended, and since then I have simply sat, and thought, and sat, and then thought a little more, and gone a little bit bonkers at some intervals and very bonkers at others.

This evening, I joined the local gym: further, I went. I did the cross-trainer and sweated and grunted and swore, and then I went on the treadmill which - being Japanese - I couldn’t understand a word of and nearly fell off and broke my head, and then cycled on the cycling machine until I couldn’t see anything and my face was beating and the only thing my brain could think was why can I feel my legs?

And then, wobbling and dripping and red, I wandered back to my bike with my t-shirt stuck to me in places I didn’t think t-shirts stuck and sat on it, utterly still, huffing and puffing and thinking absolutely nothing apart from: Jesus Christ, my body is just as weak as my brain is.

When I eventually got the strength up to cycle home again, I didn’t get very far: in fact, I only got to the river before I stopped.

I had never seen the mountains before. They had been there, obviously - mountains don't move that frequently - but I had never seen them. Never noticed the dip in the middle of them, or the different shades of blue and green and grey. Never seen the river like that; never seen the clouds turning as pink as they were turning. And, putting my bike down on the edge, I sat on a bench (smoking a cigarette but let’s pretend I wasn’t) and watched the sky turn bright red behind blue mountains in the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen; watched eagles - kestrels, hawks, whatever they are (big things with hooked beaks) - gliding over the trees, and white Japanese cranes skimming the water; felt wind in my face and mosquitos biting my legs (nothing is ever perfect).

And, although my legs were aching and my t-shirt was still wet and my cheeks were still purple, I was calmer than I could remember being for a long, long time. Calmer, possibly, because my legs were aching and my t-shirt was wet. And I knew, suddenly, that it was my favourite moment of being in Japan. In an entire year of waiting to find out why I am here.

As I sat and watched the sky get darker and redder and then blacker and the stars pop out, I wondered just how many sunsets I have missed in the last year. How many eagles I haven’t seen, how many winds I have not felt, how many mosquitos have not bitten me, because I’ve been too wrapped up in my own head to see or feel them. How many important things I had not seen, or heard, or felt, because I was too busy trying to see and hear and feel them with just my mind instead of all of me. 

Body and mind are not separate at all; they are part of the same thing - intwined in each other - and when I chose one over the other I ruined both of them. Sylvia Plath and Oscar Wilde? One killed themselves, and the other died, alone and ostricised, in a French prison. Half an hour on a running machine might have done both of them the world of good.

As the sun set over the mountains next to my house, I realised two things. That it was my body, as well as my mind, and looking after one was the only way to look after the other; that I had to make them both strong at the same time. That I would be smarter for it, and happier for it, and not less. 

And I realised - with a burst of relief - that it was my sunset, and they were my mountains, and now that I had them nobody could take them away again.

Paths

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference


- Robert Frost


A year ago, I took a path. Without knowing, I came across a fork in the road that separated my life into two pieces: what could have been, and what was. And, without knowing I was choosing, I chose one.

I don`t know when that fork was, exactly. I don`t know whether it was long term unemployment, or The Best Job In The World, or starting this blog, or falling in love for the first time, or moving to Japan; I don`t know whether perhaps the fork was actually a series of tiny ones, trickling into one road little by little, or whether it was a short and sharp change of direction: an abrupt turning.

But I now know that I have to turn around and go back the other way.

I am not who I was a year ago. From the minute I landed in Japan - from the second the plane wheels touched the tarmac on the 16th of August 2009 - I have been somebody else, and somebody much, much less. I have been self obsessed, selfish, mean, impatient, crazy and negative; I have thought and written only of myself, and of my own desires, and of my own wishes, and of my own happiness or unhappiness. I have tried to control everything and truly cared for nothing; I have given nothing, and tried to take all I can. I have clung, I have cried, I have shouted; I have shown no dignity, no composure, and no patience. Kindness and compassion have all been for myself; I acted only to get what I wanted, when I wanted it, how I wanted it. Pain and heartbreak I have blamed on others; loneliness and misery I have not blamed on myself. For every hurt I have felt I have caused more, and for every hurt I have felt I have accused others. I have allowed my world and everything and everyone in it to shrink to one size and one shape: that of myself.

It is my fault entirely. When I got on that plane a year ago, I left myself behind in a sunny bedroom in Welwyn Garden City: left behind any of the qualities that made me worth loving. If I was ever kind or loyal, compassionate or funny, generous or sweet, I stopped being all of them a year ago. Whatever made me me, I stopped being, and my life broke simply and purely because of it. I broke my own heart by being spoilt, nasty, selfish, controlling and hateful; for being impatient and showing him only the worst of me; for never giving him the girl he fell in love with. If I was lonely, it was because I made myself unlikeable and whiney; if I didn`t experience Japan properly, it was because I shut myself away from it. I have not been the victim of bad luck at all: I have been the conductor of my own misfortune, and my unhappiness has all been down to me. I have deserved nothing else.

It is too late, now, for many things. I cannot pretend I never walked down this path; I cannot pretend that I have not become who I have become. I have lost forever too many things I will never get back again: the man I have loved most in my life, friends I still miss who grew sick of me, the chance to experience Japan from the beginning, the respect of the people who are still close to me, the admiration of a sister who thought I was better than this. I have lost so much, and I will never get them back again: can only respect and love them all the more for turning away, because it shows that they were worth loving in the first place.

But it is not too late to run back down the path and try and meet the old me somewhere back there. Somewhere on that old path, one year back, is a good person: a person who is not bitter, and jaded, and cruel, and angry. A person who does not control, and manipulate, lash out continuously and yet think of herself as a victim. A person who laughs and believes in kindness and compassion; a person who thinks first of others, and not of herself, and who is able to love because she is, too, worth loving. A person who puts a good heart above the demands and needs of her own.

The person I became a year ago has not only destroyed me: it has destroyed the man I love, the family I love, the friends I love and writing I love. But it was much less the fault of the path that was taken - which could have been so happy, and so beautiful, and exactly what I dreamed it was when I was still able to dream - and more the fault of the person who took it. Somebody who would have ruined any path she took, but happened to ruin the best one for her, and the right one for her.

Going back will be difficult, and it will be slow, and it will take everything I have to let go of the path I wanted, but if it was anything less it wouldn`t be worth it. And - if I try hard enough - perhaps the next path I take will be happier because the person who chose it is a much, much better one. Somebody who loves herself more because she thinks of herself less.

And that, I think, makes all the difference.

Patience

Patience is a virtue, and one that I do not have.

At all.

On a patience scale of one to ten - ten being Ghandi, six being Rhett Butler and one being Scarlett O Hara - I`m a 0.2. If I don`t get exactly what I want, exactly when I want it (which is always absolutely immediately), I throw my toys, my blanket, my dummy and most of the mattress out of the pram, and create such a hullabaloo that I make myself sick. In fact, I`m worse than a spoilt child; I`m a spoilt adult who has never actually been spoilt, and so where this utterly demanding selfishness comes from I have no idea: it certainly wasn`t from either of my parents or either of my grandparents. I can only assume, therefore, that it was hard wired into me in the womb - at some stage between developing toes and growing ears - and that insisting on being born one day early while my mum was cleaning the kitchen floor was just the first sign. To hell with what she wanted; I was ready, I had decided, and I was bored of waiting and that was enough.

Which is why, when I saw my friend yesterday, I made myself utterly unbearable yet again.

"It`s not working," I told her.
"What isn`t?"
"Exercise. It`s not working."
There was a pause.
"What do you mean it`s not working?"
"Well, I`m not much happier and calmer at all."
"Okay...."
"And look," I demanded, and showed her my arms. "They`re exactly the same as they were. They`re no stronger at all." I wobbled them to prove it. "And my legs, they`re still pathetic. Look at them."
My friend dutifully looked at them, and there was another pause.
"It`s been three days," she said eventually.
"Yes, but I`ve done exercise every single day."
"For three days."
"But something should be happening, shouldn`t it? I mean, shouldn`t I be feeling calmer and stronger and fitter by now?"
"In three days?"
"Three days is a long time!" I exclaimed, actually - and I`m ashamed to say this - meaning it with all of my heart. "Three days is ages!"
"Three days is only three days, Hols. People can go without water for longer than that and barely feel thirsty."
But I want to be happy and fit and calm now, I almost cried, and then managed to stop myself.
"I should keep going, then?" I asked her eventually.
"Yes."
"And it will work?"
"Yes."
"How long do I need to keep going for?"
"Take it three days at a time, Holly. But I think the answer is forever."

If people can be born with a fatal flaw, then impatience is mine. It undoes every good thing I try and do; it undermines everything in me that is worthwhile. I am bad at cooking because I am impatient -  turning up the heat too high, wandering off to do something else half-way through - and I am bad at writing a novel because I want it to be finished now. I am bad at being tidy because I am constantly moving on to the next thing and too impatient to clean up behind me; I am bad at maintaining or building friendships because I want intimacy and closeness straight away; I have destroyed countless serious and budding relationships because of an inability to let things be, and I broke my own heart this year by not waiting when I should have, and for wanting everything immediately. And - just to really condemn my own happiness - I have utterly broken any chance of a reconcilliation - in friendship or anything more - by demanding that reconcilliation now, instead of giving it time and waiting with the patience and attitude of an adult, instead of a small, spoilt baby.

Every single day I ruin the present by impatiently lusting after the future: by never, ever knowing how to wait. And - in my demand to live life now - I`m not living it at all. All I`m really doing is twirling around in panicked circles, destroying everything and everyone around me and creating a demanding, selfish hole that my life falls into.

This morning, I got up early before work and I went for a run. When I got back, I felt exactly the same, but more out of breath; my legs were still weak, my arms were still squidgy, and my heart was still tired. But I have to try to remember that good things come to those who wait; and if I do not learn how to, any bad that comes to me is entirely of my own doing.

If I have to learn one lesson, now - and learn how to carry it with me at all times - it is that of patience. Because if there is one virtue I desperately need and do not have, it is that one.

England

I am English.

I was born English, I am still English, and I will die English; whether it`s in England or not. Wrapped in an English flag, covered in little Union Jack pins and tea towels, reading Shakespeare and doused in English chip fat, probably. Or whatever it is they want to do to prove that I am, in fact, still English.

This does not mean, however, that I know the slightest thing about England.

"You`re English," my American friend told me the other day. She tells me this all the time in case I forget, although her inability to understand a single word of what I`m saying makes it a really unecessary point to make.
"I am, yes," I replied.
"Great. Can you cover my final High School class for me in July and do something about England?"
"Umm," I said, because - and I`m going to be perfectly honest, here - High School students scare the bejesus out of me. My kids are all under 14 years old - still vaguely under the impression that I`m an educated adult - while these ones are old enough to know that I don`t know what I`m talking about.
"Please. You owe me."
And so, because I do actually owe her about six, I agreed: assuming that she meant I would be standing at the back of the class, using a British accent occasionally and perhaps saying the word potato repeatedly (that`s what my American friends make me do, for kicks).
"An hour PowerPoint presentation on England should do it," she concluded happily; "and then an hour of English games."
I stared at her in silence for a minute or two.
"A PowerPoint presentation?" I eventually managed to repeat.
"Yup. Cheers!"
And then my friend ran away before I could tell her I didn`t and would never owe her a favour that big.

I did not get into teaching so that I could do PowerPoint presentations; I did plenty of them when I worked in PR, and - contrary to popular belief - I don`t actually like the sound of my own voice, continuously and without interruption, for an entire hour. Whether the subject is how to improve brand management for Homebase or an entire country, compressed for the digestion of 18 year old foreigners, I do not enjoy standing up in front of a room full of strangers and watching them fall asleep in front of me: proving, if there was ever a doubt, that what I`m saying really isn`t rendered interesting by my dynamic and charismatic personality. Either that, or what I`m saying is rendered uninteresting by the exact opposite.

A presentation about England, though, presents another kind of problem: what the hell does it mean? What is English? What is England? I`m English, and I have no idea. And neither, apparently, does anyone else.

"Harry Potter," was the unanimous answer.
"As a fictional character he doesn`t exist; as an idea, book or brand he`s JK Rowling`s, not her nationality. What else?"
"Fish and chips."
"Fish and chips are eaten everywhere in the world; they`re just called by different names."
"Tea."
"Which comes from China."
"Red buses."
"That`s just London, not England."
"David Beckham."
"Lives in America."
"The Beatles."
"Dead, mostly, and unheard of here anyway."
"Other music?"
"The only music they have heard of is American."
"What`s the most popular food?"
"Curry. Which is Indian."
"Ok, what about places of interest?"
"Like what?"
"London. Bristol. Manchester. Umm... the Norfolk Fens."
"Big cities and then a big patch without them."
"Stone Henge."
"Big rocks."
"God, you`re being negative."
"Not really; I`m just trying to work out what is not going to make an 18 year old Japanese boy with no interest whatsoever in England not fall asleep for an hour."
"You could wear a low cut top. You`re British too, you know. That would count."

The point is: England is not to the English what it is to the rest of the world. When I think of home, I don`t think of fish and chips and cream teas and knives and forks, no matter what my friends here think to the contrary (the Nichinan impression of me goes something like: "Ooooh well helloooo there, would you lark I nice cup of teeeeeaaaaaa deaaarr and perhaps a few ccrrrrummpppeetts wiiittthh jaaaaammmmm and a sit down with the Queen?"). When I think of England, I think of my family and the bars I like and my dad`s tuna and mushroom pie and the smell in Waitrose once the bread has been cooked and that little space in the local park where I sit with a cigarette and the sound of the airing cupboard in my bedroom and the sound of Oxford Circus at 7.30 in the morning when you`re on your way to work. Not: David Beckham, The Queen and JK Rowling. And - while England is different to each and every single English person - I doubt very much whether "Stone Henge and Paul McCartney" are what anyone English thinks about when they`re away from home, or how they would like to be represented to the rest of the world.

I can`t avoid it, unfortunately: a debate on what Nationality is, and how it means something different to everyone, isn`t what I`m being asked to do, and certainly won`t be appreciated by 45 teenagers with a basic grip of the language I`m using.

I`m English. I was born English, I am still English, and I will die English. But it doesn`t mean I have any idea what it means to be any of those things, other than that I was born on the same island as a whole bunch of other people. We are so multicultural that there is no `England`; not as a concept, not as a nicely outlined PowerPoint presentation. And we are not just multicultural: we are a nation full of separate people to whome `home` means something entirely different. And all I can do is try and explain that, tell them about JK Rowling, red buses and fish and chips and follow it all with a nice game of British Bulldog. Which is, incidentally, played here too, but under a different name.

Either that, or I`m going to have to wear a really, really low cut top. And perhaps enter the classroom, wearing a crown on my head and eating a hot buttered crumpet.

Chopsticks

When you`re shocked by another culture, it can be easy to forget that they are shocked by you too.

"What are you doing?" a table of nine year olds asked me at lunch today. They had been staring at my right hand for at least three minutes, and this was a final outburst of indignation and confusion.
I looked at my hand.
"Is it wrong?" I said.
"Yes," they told me emphatically, and then tried to do what many people have tried to do over the last year: get me to hold chopsticks correctly.
I couldn`t do it. Whatever way I have trained myself to use chopsticks might be wrong, but it`s the only way I can pick up anything at all. Once I`ve finally got the right grip on it I can`t do anything at all with them; worse, I get cramp and have to keep putting it down.
"Like this," they told me, holding their hands out.
I did what they were doing.
"No, like this."
I re-did what they were still doing.
"No, like this."
And then they laughed because my little finger kept popping up, all perky, and did exactly what it does when I`m drinking tea too: makes me look extremely ridiculous and unintentionally posh (it`s actually a tendon thing, and not a class thing, incidentally).
"It`s hard," I exclaimed eventually, and they looked at me with total bewilderment.
"Why?"
"Because we don`t have chopsticks in England."
Silence. And then, eventually:
"None?"
"No." (I omitted eating in a Chinese restaurant or Japanese restaurant: that does not count.)
"What do you eat with, then?"
"A knife and fork."
"Ehhhh?" They looked at each other. "A knife and fork?"
"And spoon," I told them. "Here, here and here." I showed them where they would be on the table.
"Eeeeehhhhhhhh?" they said again. "How do you pick things up?"
"You cut them with a knife and use a fork to pick them up. And you don`t take bites from something too big, you cut it up first, and you don`t pick your plates up to eat, or drink out of the bowls."
There was astonishment, and then one of the boys bent down and stuck his face in his soup.
"Like this?"
I laughed. "Not quite. You use a spoon."
"Ehhhhhh?"
"And there`s usually one plate of food, not lots."
"But where does the rice go?"
"On the plate with the meat."
"On the same plate?" they all said at the same time. "What about vegetables?"
"Same plate. One plate. With a knife and a fork and a spoon."

I took so much pleasure from their faces that I almost continued and told them that we often left food on our plates too, but didn`t want to shock them irretrievably.

"England is weird," one boy announced finally, and the little girl sitting next to him slapped him.
"That`s rude," she told him sternly. "Holly Sensei is English."
"Well she`s weird too, then," he said, and got slapped again for his indiscretion.

I`ve spent the last year struggling with chopsticks and different plates and slurping loudly enough and picking things up with my hands and eating every single last rice grain, and yet it never occurred to me that it would be a shock to Japanese children if they realised it was any different elsewhere. A shock, I think, that they probably needed.

"I want to go to England," the little girl announced suddenly as I stood up to go and brush my teeth (another Japanese custom ingrained in me as normal, now).
"Me too," another one said.
"Me too."
"Me too, even if it`s weird."

And thus knives and forks had done what teaching them English had never quite managed; to make them interested in another country.

It`s great, learning about another culture. But I need to remember to take my own with me sometimes too.

By bike

Next to my house is a road that runs in between the sea and the mountains. In a car, it is beautiful; by foot it is calming.

By bike it is bloody hard work.

With messy relationships - particularly those that begin messily, and then continue messily, and then end very, very messily - the mess doesn’t necessarily limit itself to one room: it gets carried far and wide, and it’s only later - when you can’t get it out of the carpet - you realise how long it is going to take to really clean up properly. And that the explosion was just the beginning.

On Saturday, I went with my closest friend to the hairdressers. It was my idea, but she ended up dragging me: I decided at the last minute that I didn’t want to go (and went as far as offering to pay her to cancel it).

“No; you’re coming,” she told me. “You’re going to sit there and you’re going to get your hair cut nicely, whether you like it or not.”
“I don’t like it,” I told her.
“I don’t care,” she replied briskly.

Ten minutes into getting my hair cut, I was bright red and my chin was wobbling. As the hairdresser chatted in Japanese and I tried to reply, I realised that I couldn’t meet her eye in the mirror: worse, that I couldn’t meet my own, either. And - as I stared at the table and the ceiling light and my hairdressers’ apron - I realised that I hadn’t looked at myself in a mirror for nearly a year. To wash my face, to brush my hair, to clean my teeth: yes. But I had not looked: not at myself, not making real eye contact, not liking what I saw there or who I saw there. I had avoided it completely. And now that I was being forced to, it was making me want to cry.

I spent the remaining twenty minutes staring at my lap and speaking in a smaller and smaller and wobblier and wobblier voice.

The minute I came out of the hairdressers, I got a hair band out with a sensation of panic and tied my hair back again.
“What the hell are you doing?” my friend demanded. “Why are you tying it up?”
“I just want to,” I mumbled.
“But it looks great!”
“It doesn’t,” I mumbled again. “I just… I want it out of my face that’s all.”
My friend stopped walking and grabbed my arm.
“Let it down again,” she said. “This minute.”
“I can’t. I just can’t, ok?”
“Why not?”
“Just…. Just let it be, okay?” I snapped, my cheeks getting hotter and hotter.
“Why?”
“Just leave me alone,” I said as politely as I could, and tried to carry on walking.
My friend grabbed my arm again, and this time her chin was wobbling too.
“Oh, God, Holly. Look at you. I didn’t realise how much of a mess you still are; I didn't realise what all this has done to you. You don’t have any confidence at all, do you.”

And - confronted with confirmation of what I thought I had managed to hide so well - I abruptly burst into tears and sat down on the kerb.

The Boy has been in contact again: is doing very well, apparently, and healing nicely. I, however, am not: the mess exploded too far and too wide, and got into all of my carpets. I no longer believe I am worth anything: I can no longer meet my own eyes in the mirror. And admitting that I have started to hate myself is one of the hardest things I have ever done.

I don’t really know what to do; I don’t know how to get myself back. I don't know how to get back to being somebody who can sit in a hairdressers chair for an hour, chatting to a hairdresser, and look us both in the eye when I'm talking; to get back the girl who walks out believing she looks good. I don't know how to get back the girl who thought she was worth loving, or talking to, or being with. Because, right now, I don't at all. Not at all.

“Start running,” my friend said when I had eventually stopped crying. “Do sport. It makes me feel better immediately.” And I laughed, because “sport” seemed a ridiculous way to solve the problem: what was wrong was on the inside of me, and having nicely toned limbs wouldn't change a thing.

When I had stopped laughing - and realised I still felt the same, and neither getting my hair cut nor crying on the kerb had fixed anything - I decided I didn’t have a lot to lose by trying it.

Today, I went for a bike ride on the road that runs in between the sea and the mountains. The road that I normally take by car, and occasionally by foot. The road that is normally beautiful, and calming, but that is all. On a particularly hard hill, I fought the incredibly strong urge to just stop cycling and walk: swore and cursed my way up until my legs were burning and sweat was in my eyes. And then, when I got the top, the pain abruptly stopped and I sailed down the other side: in between the mountains and the sea, with the sun in my face, crying for a reason I couldn’t understand. Crying, perhaps, because it had stopped hurting. And because coming down was so amazing that it had made it all worth it.

The climb at the moment is so incredibly hard; the climb to believe in who I am again, and what I am, and who I can become. It seems, at the moment, impossible; and it's getting harder with time, not easier: the hill is wearing me out. But it’s a journey I can't take my car, or by foot: I can't take the easy route. I have to take the road by bike: the hard way, and the way that hurts, and the way that means something. The way that makes my body stronger, in the hope that it will make my mind stronger too.

And maybe when I've cycled far enough, and I'm strong enough, it will stop hurting, and the bit on the other side will make it all worth while.

Games

"All women become like their mothers. That`s their tragedy. No man does. That`s his."

- Oscar Wilde


I`ve been very busy, over the past twenty eight years, turning into my father; as much as one can be busy turning into somebody they were already like in the first place.

If we have children to see another version of ourselves - which some people think we do - then my dad did a good and thorough job of it. I have his hot temper, his mood swings, his sense of humour, his impulsiveness, his generosity; I have his hair, his legs and his nose (even if it`s "not quite as pretty", as my mum points out regularly). We get angry at the same things, hurt at the same things and laugh at the same things; if something happens to our family, we almost always react in the same way. As a child we used to have battles that were worryingly even: I would stomp, he would stomp, we would both shout and huff and puff like little dragons, and then be firm friends again within ten minutes and forget all about it. He is the original version of me, and I am just the little mini carbon copy: the compressed, smaller, female version of somebody better. Which makes it very difficult to write about my dad: just as it is hard to see myself objectively, it is also hard to clearly see my father.

I`ve been so very busy being him, however, that I didn`t notice that at some stage along the way I had turned into my mum as well.

Yesterday I taught a class of 37 nine year olds; and by teach, I mean that I did my best to stand at the front and entertain them like a clown while attempting to shovel new knowledge in while they weren`t looking (I am far more performer than I am a teacher, and would ride a unicycle into class and beep a rubber horn if I could only learn how to, as long as it got them to listen to me).

Attempting to get them to remember the names for body parts not included in "Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes", I stuck features all over the blackboard, divided the class into teams and got them to race to the board and smack whatever body part I chose with a fly swat, earning points for their team. Which they did, with great enthusiasm, except that the classroom shape meant that one team was at a distinct disadvantage: they couldn`t get to the board as fast, and so fell significantly behind. In an attempt to even it back out again, I announced that the last two rounds would be double points: a rule that meant the under-dog team tried extremely hard, and ended up winning.

Amid the screams of sheer jubilation (I gave them all Disney stickers, and nobody can over-state the impact of stickers on Japanese children), however, there were other sounds: moanings, groanings, outright shouts of indignation and quite a few tears. Everyone else in the class, in fact, had kicked off, and there was outright mutiny.

"It`s not faaaaiiiirrrr," they whined as loudly as they could, sitting with their little arms crossed firmly and their bottom lips stuck as far out as they could get them. One losing child slammed his pencil case on the floor and stomped off to sit behind a cupboard at the back of the room with a face like a screwed up crisp packet; another burst into tears and started tugging at her own ponytail in a worrying display of self-abuse.

As the roars of anger and indignation got louder and the tears became more pronounced, the winners looked more and more shamefaced, and I watched the chaos in guilt and dismay: regretting the day I had purchased Winnie the Pooh merchandise in the first place. Which I continued to do, until - finally, after the umpteenth indignant little roar - something inside me snapped.

"Right!" I screamed in fury. "Sit down. All of you, sit down immediately!"
And they did exactly that in terror, because I am normally the teacher they plait the hair of and try and climb up the legs of during break times, not the one who goes purple and bangs her stick on the board (which is what I was doing at this stage).
"I will not have this, do you understand?!" I shouted. "This is an absolute disgrace and I am ashamed of all of you! If you are going to play a game, you will do it properly, do you hear me? You will lose with dignity and you will win with dignity or you will not play. If you cannot be happy for the people who win and take your own losses with good grace and with a good attitude, then I will not allow you to play games at all, do I make myself clear? I will not have bad losers!"
And they all stared at me with round eyes.
"Do I make myself clear?" I yelled.
"Hai," they all said in unison.
And then - because I had shouted in English and none of them had any idea what I was talking about - I turned to my colleague.
"Translate, please," I ordered.
"Umm," he said, clearing his throat and looking anxious. "I`ll try."

Later, as the children filed out of the class, I turned to him.
"I`m not having it," I told him angrily. "I`m not having it, Harai. That was absolutely not acceptable."
"Maybe we can play games with no winners?" he suggested. "Children get very upset if they lose."
"I don`t care," I snapped at him. "School is more than just about learning maths and history. It`s about learning to be a good person, and to win and lose with grace. They are never too young to start learning that, and it`s about time they started."

And then I suddenly fell silent.

"It`s not faaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrr," a five year old Holly Smale screamed in my head, throwing a board of Snakes and Ladders on the floor and declaring that she hated the universe and everyone and everything in it.
"Pick it up," my mum said angrily.
"No, it`s not faaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiirr."
"Pick it up and go straight to your bedroom, young lady," my mum shouted in a fury that she rarely ever shows; in a family of people with hot tempers, my mum is the noteable exception and remains calm and gentle at all times.
"I haaaaaaaaattttttttttttttte yooooooooouuuuuuu," I yelled at her, and got taken up to my bedroom bodily and thrown on my bed, still kicking and screaming.
"I will not have this, do you understand?" she told me, and then gave me exactly the same speech I had just given my nine year olds.

It`s only the beginning, I know: my mum is going to start coming out of me more and more as the years go on and I have children of my own that I have to try and stop being little monsters. But Wilde was wrong: becoming my mother is not a tragedy at all.

Life is full of many, many games we are forced into playing; both those inside the classroom, and those outside of it.

And it was my mum that taught me the importance of knowing how to lose them.

Balls

Gender is a funny thing. It is often less about what`s inside your trousers than the fact that you are wearing them.

This weekend, a group of roughly 20 of us piled into a log cabin in the middle of nearby mountains for a final hurrah: the majority of the teachers here are packing their bags in two weeks and going home to wherever it is they came from (America and Ireland, although the Irish girl is in fact going to Hawaii instead and I`ll leave you to work out what that says about Great Britain).

The party was as most parties are: fuelled with drink and music and food and a rather large homemade beer bong and people being sick in the toilet (although not nearly as much as five years ago, which is the key benefit of getting older: knowing when to stop). For the majority of the evening, girls and boys were much of a muchness; the beer bong was enjoyed by both, dancing was done by both, food was cooked and eaten by both, and drink was certainly consumed by both.

At midnight, however - perhaps because Cinderella is ingrained into all of us - the girls all promptly declared that they were tired, put themselves into their pyjamas, took off their makeup and started brushing their teeth. The boys, on the other hand, took a ball outside and started playing touch rugby in the rain.

I went with them, and was the only girl to do so. I was not tired, I was not ready to end the evening, and - as much as I obviously enjoy brushing my teeth and wearing pyjamas - there is a time and a place for touch rugby, and 1am in the pouring rain in the middle of the mountains is absolutely both, as far as I`m concerned. The response, however, was mixed: the seven boys gave me a good natured thumbs up, and most of the remaining girls brushed their teeth on the front steps for five minutes before they went to bed, looking at me with quite readable unreadable expressions (namely that of confusion, disgust and a vague suspicion that it was obviously some kind of desperate and unsubtle flirting effort on my part).

It was probably the best fun I`ve had in Japan; some of the best fun I`ve had ever, actually. We roared, we slipped over, we ended up covered in mud and grass and dripping from head to foot. The lawn was ruined, our clothes were ruined, and if I had make-up on at the beginning of the evening it was in entirely different parts of my face by the end of it. Nobody broke anything, but it was extremely close: there were at least three group tackles that ended up with somebody at the bottom, shrieking about one limb or another.

I played like a girl, obviously. To get the ball I often slapped them; once I had the ball I picked up the edges of my sopping skirt, screamed and ran the wrong way. The boys didn`t tackle me with nearly as much violence as they tackled each other - I was the only person on the pitch not to get headbutted - and when they did run full pelt towards me I frequently put the ball down, lay down in the mud voluntarily and shrieked "I`m down! I`m down! Don`t hurt me!" (And they tackled me anyway.)

When we were worn out, we went down to the pitch black, freezing cold river.
"You know," my friend said as I sat in the water and started scrubbing mud out of my hair, "you`re officially a man now, right?"
"Mmm," I said dubiously, looking at the remaining six boys: all of whom were standing in a line on the bank of the river, rubbing their arms and muttering darkly about how cold it was, and how dangerous, and how they knew a friend of a friend of a friend who had died, once, bathing in a shallow river at night and they weren`t stupid (before putting a toe in, whimpering and pulling it back out again).

Femininity can be lost in more ways than one, however. The same friend has been setting me up as a private English tutor with a slightly older Japanese lady, with whom I had an introductory consulation last week. At the end of the meeting she told me the price she currently pays for English lessons - minimum wage - and asked if I was happy with the same. Embarrassed, I nodded politely and ran away, muttering to myself.

"Ask for more," my friend told me.
"How can I ask for more?" I whimpered. "I`ve already said yes, and that`s what she pays an American at the moment: it would be so presumptious."
"She might say yes."
"But she might be offended! And what is it saying? I`m worth more than the American man who teaches her right now? How can I say that? How can I price myself above another teacher in the same city?"
"You are worth what you tell her you are worth."
"I can`t do it," I muttered. "I`ll just do it for minimum wage and hope that she hates my lessons."

When I had finally got the mud out of my hair yesterday, I got as much courage as I could find and sent her a polite message:

I`m so sorry, but I should not have agreed to tutor you for that fee. I am a good teacher, I have a Masters degree in English and I think I could really help you. It would be wrong of me to ask for less than I am worth.

And then I tripled the fee we had agreed on.

"Nice work," my friend rang ten minutes later to tell me. "She wanted me to ring you . She likes you even more now: she thinks you`ve got spunk. She says she`ll pay whatever you want her to pay."
"Really? Three times what she pays her other teacher?"
"Yes. She says you`re worth it."
"Really?" I said, shocked.
"Yes. Told you."
"Awesome."
"And I have to say," he added, "this is the second time this weekend you`ve impressed me with the size of your massive balls."

Femininity is a precious commodity: valued highly, lost easily and rarely very genuine. It is also, apparently, maintained by being very careful about the kind of fun you have, and having no courage, and no belief in yourself or what you are worth. Which makes it, as far as I`m concerned, a commodity I`m not particularly interested in keeping.

When the boys leave in two weeks, they are being replaced by four girls; girls from Australia, Canada and America. I don`t know what kind of girls they are, or what they like doing, or what they like talking about. I don`t know whether they`ll like the same things I do: if they`ll like South Park, or surfing, or Withnail and I, or touch rugby in the middle of the night. I don`t know if we`ll get on at all.

But I know one thing.

I am keeping my fingers crossed that they all have absolutely gigantic balls.

Mirrors

Not long ago, I had a rather large fight with my mum.

"You need," she told me, "to stop writing about That Man."

Mum, incidentally, always calls The Boy 'That Man' because - as she points out - "he is a fully grown, 31 year old adult, and not a child who cannot be held responsible for how he behaves, Holly, which is clearly how you are trying to depict him". A fact that is not without some truth, obviously, because she's my mum and they are actually usually right even though we often resent them for it.

"Don't tell me what to write about, mum," I replied angrily.

"There's no need to write about love, that's all I'm saying. Write about other things instead."

"Mum! I'll write about what I want to write about! It's my bloody blog!"

"He has done enough harm already, Holly. Don't let him damage your writing too. Your writing is so much better without him in it. We want to read about other stuff instead."

At which point, I thoroughly lost my temper.

"I'm not a fictional character, serialised for public amusement, mum. I don't tailor my thoughts and feelings to cultivate some kind of invisible audience. I'm a real person, with real thoughts, and real feelings, and if I want to write about my bloody ex-boyfriend every single day of the week and alienate everyone in the entire world, then I will sodding do so, okay?"

"I'll stop reading," she threatened.

"Then stop sodding reading!" I shouted at her. "I don't care!"

"I'm just saying," she said, trying to appease me, "that it's time to let go, baby. He is not worth your thoughts, or your time, or your emotions. He never was, and he never will be. That soulless little prick doesn't know what he has lost, and he is worth nothing. And he is especially not worth your writing."

Which shut me up immediately, because - unlike me - my mum never swears unless extremely provoked; and extremely provoked she clearly was.

Of course, on some level - a level I dislike admitting but will anyway - she's absolutely right. There are distinct and set limits to how much you can talk about an ex-boyfriend, or a boyfriend, or a potential boyfriend, or a wannabe boyfriend - whether publicly or privately: whether on a blog or in a pub - without sounding bonkers, sad, obsessed and like a girl, as my dad would put it. Women all over the world spend their time discussing, analysing and thinking about the opposite sex and the harms done to them, or the potential for harm that could be done to them, or the prospect of harm that will be done to them in the future; time that could be put to a lot of other good uses, and could create a lot of things that would last a lot longer than bitterness, hope or lust. My dad only has to say the words Liz Jones to abruptly shut me up about anything male at all; nobody wants to be an enraged, crazy old cat woman who writes for The Daily Mail. Not even - I would imagine - Liz Jones herself. She seems to want to be somebody else entirely.

It is therefore true: my writing is better without him, just as my sanity is better without him and my life is probably vastly improved, if considerably emptier.

The problem I have, though, is that if writing doesn't tell the truth, it doesn't really say anything at all. If art is a mirror held up to life, then it is the responsibility of that mirror to be accurate, and to be brave, and to show what is there: not what looks better, or what sounds better, or makes everybody else feel better and a little less uncomfortable. It is too easy to preserve face at the expense of emotional honesty: too cheap to flatten experience into something that makes the writer look good. Simply: if writers cannot write with honesty - with a candid view of the human heart - then what the hell is the point of them writing at all? They're just putting together words that sound pretty and they're communicating nothing. Infinitely worse, they are deceiving the world by showing it a reflection that is not. Something that - with enough writers, and enough mirrors - could be believed, eventually, as truth. And - with enough readers, and enough conviction - could become exactly that.

Nobody needs all of the truth, all of the time. Fiction is fiction because it is life: tailored, cut up and sewn together as it may or may not have happened, and so much the better for it. Thus this blog is therefore also part fiction: much is done, and felt, and seen, without being recorded here, for - done properly - privacy and dignity can always be maintained, no matter the circumstances. But - and this is the one and only rule of writing: the only rule that can never be broken - you cannot touch the human heart without writing the human heart. You cannot say something if the thing you are saying is not true, in one shape or another. Because the heart is the one thing that never changes: the one thing that remains the same, and that draws humanity together, when everything else pulls it apart. Flawed, erratic, embarrassing; irregular, crude and contradictory. And wonderfully, wonderfully real.

There is a time for comedy, there is a time for tragedy: there are times for as many types of writing as there are readers to read them. But if writers shy away from honesty and truth in any of these, then they are simply making marks on paper: if they cannot try to shine a new light on the world as is - at the same time as creating a new one - then they are writing for a world that is not this one. If the emotions of the heart, both romantic and otherwise - love, loyalty, hate, revenge, bitterness, confusion, insecurity, jealousy, obsession, pain, hurt - are swept under the carpet by writers as being unworthy of writing about, or of embarrassing the writer, then the writer becomes more important than the writing and the writing is lost. If Shakespeare or Eliot or Dickens or Hardy had been less honest with the human heart in all of its guises, their books and plays would have died with them. For it is the human heart in them that has lasted; not the context they are written in.

It is true that it is time to put The Boy behind me, but it is also true that I am finding it very hard: that I am still hurting, and missing, and loving, even if quietly and deeply and behind the scenes. And - while it is important that I move on with my writing as I move on with my life, which I am doing as best I can - it is also true that if I totally ignore what my heart is doing in my writing for the sake of embarrassment, I am being dishonest to myself, I am being dishonest to my readers, and I am being dishonest to our hearts: all of them. Because I am saying what is not true: that the heart understands embarrassment, and knows timing, and lets go when it should and holds on when it can. That it is consistent, and knowable, and vaguely controllable. And if I pretend that the heart is something other than it is, then I am not doing justice to it - mine, or yours - and I am not doing justice to the power of the mirror I can attempt to hold up.

I will not spend my life talking about either a man or a boy. I will not spend all of my time writing about love, or hurt, or any of the other things that happen to all of us, whether we like it or not. There are many things in life to talk about, to think about and to occupy ourselves with: things that are of equal importance and relevance. But I will also not pretend that these things do not exist, or that I feel something that I do not, and don't feel something that I do. That the heart behaves as you want it to: respectably, and with decorum.

Because if I want to write much, much better - and I do, and always will - then I need to put myself second to my writing, and hold up the clearest, brightest, most honest mirror I can find.

Even - dare I say it - if it upsets my mum.