Hope in coins

There are times when suddenly you remember the reasons why you love somebody. You have never really forgotten, of course: but sometimes they do something and it throws it into such sharp belief that you could reach out a hand and touch it.

"Oh my God!" my dad shouted last night. I was on the computer, discovering that job hunting in Japan is no easier than job hunting in England. I span round in time to see dad jump off the sofa and punch the air.

"Eh?" I said.

"Oh my God!" he shouted again, and stared at something in his hand. "We're rich! Holly, we're only fucking rich!"

This, in itself, was not enough to cause alarm. We're always teetering on the brinks of 'rich', according to dad. That's why very few of us in my family have a pension. 

Dad, grinning like a small child with a new puppy, grabbed the newspaper and thrust it in my face. 

"Look!" he cried, jabbing his finger at an article. "It says there's been an error at the Royal Mint, and they've printed off 20p pieces without dates - and they're all worth £50 each!" His tail wagged so hard I was worried he was going to fall over. "And look!" he exclaimed, shoving an open hand in my face. "The very first 20p I look at - it's worth a fortune!" He gave me a pat on the head, and then raced upstairs to collect his coin jar. "The very first one in my pocket!" he screamed from upstairs. "We could have hundreds!"

Once he'd disappeared, I picked up the paper and had a quick read. Upstairs, I could hear dad shaking his life savings out of the jar and shouting "all of them!! All of them Holly!"

I took a deep breath, and then I walked up the stairs slowly.

"Dad," I said as carefully as I could. "It says these valuable coins have no date on them."

"I know!" dad grinned at me, pointing at a little pile of 20p pieces on the floor. "What were the chances?"

"Dad," I said even more carefully. "Turn them over."

Dad's smile faltered a little bit, and he looked at me like I'd just run over his rabbit with my push-bike.

He turned one of the 20p pieces over and stared at it for a few seconds.

"Oh," he said flatly. "That's got a date on the other side." He picked up another one, and looked at that too. "This one has too," he announced sadly. "Bollocks."

I walked over, put my hand on his shoulder, assured him that we'd be rich enough soon, and then went back into the living room and locked myself in so that he couldn't hear me laughing.

Only my dad, at the age of 53, would believe - so quickly, so genuinely, so instinctively - that luck and fate had favoured him so astronomically. Only my dad keeps a jar full of 20p pieces by the side of his bed. 

When I came back out of the living room - face straight again - I promptly had to go back in again so that I could finish the job off. Because dad was still sitting on the stairs, looking through all the 20p pieces, one by one, just to check. And that, I think, says everything.

The essence

If I wasn't already moving to the other side of the world, this week would be a good time to do it. On Thursday, The Best Job In The World documentary airs on BBC1, at primetime, and both Sarah and I - the two 'competing' (and thus losing) female UK candidates - are sitting in separate bedrooms and rocking backwards and forwards, terrified. I know this, because I checked.

Smelly, Sarah texted me yesterday (a lot of people call me this. I hope it's because it sounds like my surname, and not because I don't wash enough). It's hit the Radio Times. One of us is in trouble for being obnoxious already.

I messaged back immediately with something I'm not going to repeat here because I'll get in trouble with my mum.

It says, Sarah answered, "as one of the female candidates discovers she didn't make the final, she glumly cheers herself. And that says it all." I think that was me, she added.

I stared at my phone, shaking slightly, and then I went to the toilet to vomit. It wasn't Sarah who 'cheered herself': it was me. On a boat in Bristol, I remember shouting dryly "here's to me!" before drunkly raising a glass at the camera: attempting to acknowledge what a loser I was, and actually only making myself seem even more of one. (In the meantime, of course, Ben had not only gone through, but had unselfishly claimed that he had "done it for love". True love, apparently - the kind that exonerates you from accusations of egotism - costs over £70,000 these days.) 

The problem is: I've already seen a chunk of the documentary. I see all of it on Wednesday, but I've already seen enough to know that I'm going to be running scared for the rest of my time in the UK. Despite spending the entire five week process telling the camera how little I wanted fame or notoriety, how uncomfortable the whole thing made me and how lovely everyone else was (Doug, Sarah and Sam, for instance, are now extremely close friends), the BBC have edited it down to three minutes of me hungrily fame-seeking, bitching about Hayley-the-Australian (very ineloquently: I believe I make a high pitched noise like a child, and a slapping motion with my hand), and being unceremoniously dumped by Producer Boy on TalkSport FM. My hair is ginger (goddamn hairdresser from hell), my face is shiny and spotty (new moisturiser), and my appalling clothes are falling apart and have paint all over them. I bitch, I fail to open doors properly (not metaphorically: there's a shot of me struggling at the entrance of a radio station for a good 15 seconds), I am rarely out of my pyjamas and I look like a sulky, boring cow because they kept ordering me to walk across bridges looking 'thoughtful' so I just frowned and glared instead.

In short, by 9.30pm on Thursday, I'm going to want to throw the sofa cushions at myself. God only knows what the rest of the UK is going to want to do. 

The thing is: I have to put things in perspective. I told my doctor last week that I am having minor panic attacks quite frequently at the moment, and - when he asked why - I mentioned the documentary. "I think it's quite normal to panic about having your life exposed on national telly," he pointed out calmly. "I'd be more worried about you if you weren't reaching for a paper bag now and then, to be frank. It would show a lack of normal sensitivity." Nobody has died, nobody will die (apart from my ex-hairdresser), and no harm is done: I didn't have a life before the documentary aired, so there's not a lot it can do to ruin whatever I've got left. 

But I still don't want it to happen. I don't want to see myself portrayed as something other than what I am; but much, much less do I want to see myself portrayed as exactly what I am. And that's what scares me the most, I think. Because who's to say that the bitching, stupid, minging, arrogant, ginger version of Holly Smale isn't the Holly Smale that the rest of the world sees anyway? Who's to say that the few minutes where I let myself down aren't what I'm defined by: aren't what I deserve to be judged by? Because - ultimately - it doesn't matter how nice I was for the rest of the time, or how humble: the documentary hasn't put anything there that wasn't there already. All my worst qualities - my strident opinions, my arrogance, my coldness, my intensity, my vanity, my cattiness - are all there: all the BBC has done is reduce me down to them. Which I can't blame them for. I'd have done exactly the same thing if I was in the editing suite as well.

So - as with everything else in life - it's a learning curve. Never let the BBC in your home. Never mouth off about another candidate or date in public, no matter how horrible she has been behind your back (for the record: she inferred that I was sleeping my way into the media, but she did it off camera) or how hot he is, and how humiliated he has made you. When a door says 'push,' don't try and pull it. Wear a proper bra, and clothes that don't make the builders laugh at you. Don't cry on film, or announce that 'nobody ever asks you out' (this is not true: I don't even know why I said it). Never allow your hairdresser to 'warm your hair up', because they'll make it orange. And try - try - to be the best version of yourself you can be. 

Because, when the essence of you has been boiled down, you should - if you're a decent, worthwhile, good person - be able to watch it on television without being sick afterwards. 

Minutes

It's an unavoidable truth that you take yourself with you wherever you go.

I am currently working as a temporary secretary in an HR department: a job that requires fast fingers, a professional level of subservience and glasses perched on the end of my nose. I'm there purely to type the minutes; to sit in the corner of the room and record what is being said during meetings, and then to quietly clean up the mess I've made of the notes and hand them over before scurrying back to my desk with my hand across my face so that nobody knows what I really look like. Which I did, admirably, for the first week or two: mainly because I wasn't even remotely interested in what was happening. It's easy to be professional when the topic of conversation is policies and legislation and the condition of the toilets. 

In the past week or so, however, I've been asked to record disciplinaries; to sit, quietly, and type up exactly what has been said. And I've found it fascinating. It is, essentially, real life stories: tales of jealousy, heartbreak, anger, revenge, hurt, all played out in a tiny little meeting room with too much air conditioning and dust on the blinds. It's like pocket Shakespeare, and I've not been able to stay quiet in the slightest. I've specifically asked to be put in the 'other side' of the hearing, even if it means missing my lunch break; I've stayed late so that I can record what the other person says; I'm asking questions that I have no real business asking; I'm giving my opinions when nobody has actually asked for them. Yesterday I was the only person to sit through two sides of one disciplinary (a 'his' and 'hers' of anger and hurt and downright childishness), and - when she had been fired and cried and I had very nearly cried all over my computer - I glared at him for the entire two hours and promptly told the manager during the adjournment exactly what I thought of the little git who had caused all the problems in the first place. Luckily, this particular manager found my fierce stance quite amusing, but there's no doubt at all that - with a different, less lenient boss - I may have ended up back in the employment office (with the girl I had been so vehemently defending, quite possibly).

I wish I could write details about these cases - I'm absolutely aching to - but conscience and contract dictate that I can't. The point is, however, that no matter how shut off I always try to make myself when I'm temping, I'm still me. I can't escape myself. I can't hear half of a story: I can't not get emotionally involved. I didn't speak to anyone for at least two hours after the girl got fired because I was so angry and upset, and my chin was wobbling uncontrollably when a gentleman stopped talking half way through a sentence so that his voice didn't break. I try to concentrate on the job, but I can't stop myself caring. And I can't stop myself jumping in with an opinion as soon as there is a gap in the conversation large enough, or trying to defend what I think is right even when it could get me in trouble.

"Japan?" my best friend said a few days ago. "Huh. Cool." And then she looked at me. "Are you running away again?"

"Nope," I said. "Not this time." 

She stared at me for a few seconds over the shoe rack in Primark: concerned and fiddling with a price tag.

"You can't leave yourself behind, you know that right?" she said eventually.

"I know," I said. And then I grinned at her, because I love that she knows me so well, and I love that she loves me enough to tell me. I picked up a shoe. "But I think I might be getting to the stage where I don't want to anymore." 

The bits of me I spend half of my life trying to escape from, I've realised, are never going to go away. I can't do anything about it: whatever country I'm in, whatever office I'm in, whoever I'm with, I can't run away from myself. But - maybe it's age, maybe it's tiredness, maybe it's drugs - I'm not sure I mind anymore. Whatever it is that makes me me will stay the same wherever I am, and whatever I do, and whatever role I put myself in, and that - for better or for worse - isn't such a scary thought after all. I can't escape my own minutes, because they're all laid out behind me and in front of me, even if I can't see them. Maybe all I can really do is keep writing them down.

Stepping

What's the opposite of Sod's Law? Because whatever it is, I've landed smack-dab in the middle of it.

I've not written this blog for over a week now. It's the longest I've ever gone without writing it (unless you count the time before I started it, and even then it still existed: it was an embryo in my brain that I just didn't know was there yet). I wish I could give a good reason - a disaster, perhaps, or a long, exotic holiday somewhere without computers - but the truth is that my world is never without computers, rarely filled with disaster, and infrequently particularly exotic. The simple fact is: I was sad. And when I'm sad - when I'm truly, truly sad - I am lost, and I can't write. Whatever it is in me that needs so desperately to write every day (like the part of me that needs so desperately to drink water when it's hot) goes numb, and there's nothing I can do: words just don't fit together. It's been a while since that has happened so entirely, but there it was: The Write Girl couldn't write a single thing.

Why was I sad? I'd reached an inevitable crossroads. Everything had suddenly stopped moving. I'd had my heart broken, was very sick (the two are often interlinked: as my mum says "when you're miserable you get poorly, Holly, so I wish you'd either stop playing silly beggars with boys or start taking vitamin C regularly"), I hated my job - it's cack - and I'd just finished my novel and sent it off. What was - I thought - supposed to be a congratulatory moment (a mental high five) turned out to be a huge anticlimax, and I posted the manuscript and went home to have a little cry because no fireworks had gone off at all when I dropped it in the post slot. 

The thing about a dream is that it's a direction. Once it's over, it's easy to find yourself spinning in a circle and not really knowing which way to look. I've never wanted anything other than to be a writer and see the world: having written, and with nothing left to do but wait, I was lost. I've never felt so thoroughly that I had nowhere to go, and nothing to do. I'm not happy here - I have never felt at home in the UK - and the thought of returning to my old life (PR and bars and commutes and drinking so much coffee in the morning that you vomit in the toilets at lunchtime) made me want to get back into bed. Which I did: getting out only to go back to my crappy old temping job, whimper in the loos, and slink back into it again wearing pyjamas that I hadn't washed all week.

And then - just like that - the world turned on its head, and everything became shiny again.

My unicorn was the first thing to come back to me. He said he still adored me, and it would take more than a couple of erratic hissy fits to scare him away. Which was very sweet, even if entirely and utterly unbelievable: I'll test him on that the next time I feel like being bonkers.

Then my dad suggested that I go back to my original idea of teaching in Japan, and try that out for a year. Get a bit of space, learn a new language, get some money together and then go and travel. I'm not a 'career girl': I never have been. If I can't write for a living, then I don't actually give a crap what I do, so it's not like there's a career ladder I'm slipping down by seeing the world for a bit. Thus, after a long discussion ("Will you be leaving the house?" "Yes." "Great.") he's lending me money, I've booked my teaching course and I'm flying out in August. Never mind the fact that all I can say is 'Good afternoon' in Japanese: it is often afternoon, and I'm tall and blonde. It's not like the locals will run out of things to say to me (they'll say to me - in Japanese - "gosh, aren't you tall and blonde," I'd imagine). 

And then - this evening - I got an email from an agent. I wasn't even looking for an email: I'd vaguely checked my post for the little brown envelopes I sent out, and then - realising I was being premature because I only sent anything out 3 working days ago - felt rather silly and watched The Simpsons instead. 3 working days is enough, though: apparently. It's not Missed Connections, though. It's not my baby novel: the one I've spent a year honing and honing and loving and torturing myself over. Nope: it's three chapters of an idea I whacked out over Christmas, which I thought was kind of fun and then promptly forgot about. Last week, I figured that - as I was in the post office with stamped addressed envelopes anyway - I might as well send out The Metamorphosis of Harriet Manners as well. And it's Harriet they love. Which I'm unfeasibly, air-punchingly delighted about, but I can't help but roll my eyes a tiny bit at the irony of it. I could have done that without leaving my job and getting into debt and living in my dad's spare room for a year.

Anywho. I'm not punching any gift horses in the chops, so I'm rolling with all of it. I've got my Japan travel book next to my bed (strangely my brain refuses to compute any word that is not English: it simply pushes it back out again), I'm trying to work out in my head just how many shoes I need in one year (two: I don't wear them very often), and I've sent an email back to the lovely agent to say that I haven't actually finished Harriet, but that I wrote 50,000 words of it in 3 weeks so I can probably finish it pretty quickly. If they want it. Which they might not. But ey: 'tiz still better for the ego than a finger up the nose.

Every time I get sad, and every time I get lost, something comes to make me feel foolish for ever feeling that nothing could be wonderful again. And - okay - you could say that I make my own fate (I sent the manuscripts out, I booked my Japan tickets), but it's bigger than that. As I tell myself each morning, just before I burn my toast: take each step you make bravely, and they will all lead somewhere.

But I've got to be honest. I'm not religious in the slightest, but - no matter how big or how brave my steps are - I just can't believe that there isn't something else out there - something invisible, something huge - secretly holding my hand. 

Rum 'n' lollies

I've had a rough week. Actually, as weeks go, I've had the Bugger of all of them. I've been very sick, I've broken my own heart, I've been fired, and I've had a big spot on my cheek that just will not go away no matter how much toothpaste I put on it. Plus I've stopped smoking for good, so I've been entirely unapproachable: dad asked me if I wanted fish and chips a few days ago, and I pretty much snapped his neck with one hand.

At the end of a week from Hell, therefore, I did the only thing you can do when the house of cards comes tumbling down: I drank more rum than I should have been allowed to drink (and then ate pickled artichoke hearts out of a jar), ate more Knobbly Bobblies than I should have been allowed to eat, sat in a park until my shoulders went bright red (again: when will I learn that I am not a tanner?) and attempted to make sense of my life with a few long-suffering friends. We didn't get very far ("you're a tit: again," was all I managed to achieve), but it didn't really matter: what mattered was that I had people around me who were prepared to spend hours and hours trying to make me laugh, until they finally managed it. (Well: them and the most ridiculous item of clothing I have ever seen: an office shirt that transforms, half way, into a g-string knicker which then clips up under the crotch. My friend and I had to leave the shop because I almost collapsed with laughter in the handbag aisle.)

The strange thing about blogs (some of them, anyway: mine included) is that they're incredibly navel-gazing. The nature of them means that daily minutiae and outpourings that probably should be locked away next to your bed - with a hair across the top so that you can check nobody has read it - suddenly become public, and you are essentially exposing your tedious misery to the entire world. And by God do you expose it. I've had some really sweet emails this week from readers telling me to 'keep my chin up', and they have been both incredibly uplifting and ridiculously humiliating: the fact that I have demonstrated my sadness so clearly that strangers are worried about me is actually very embarrassing. And it's not very British, to be honest. We're supposed to be all reserve and stiff upper lip: not whining online because you're having a bit of a crappy old time of it.

I'm going to do my best to bounce back, and show a little strength. To stop whining, and start accepting the consequences of my actions with my chin up. And I'm going to do my best to make this blog a little less self-indulgent (making my life a little less self-indulgent would probably help that). On the grand scale of things, I am a lucky, lucky girl: and the fact that the majority of my own pain comes from my own hand (I am unbearably self-destructive) should be reassuring, because at least it means that I can do something about it.

So I'm starting again. It's a sunny day, and I need a sunny perspective to go with it. And, if it all goes wrong, at least I know where to find a bottle of rum, a Knobbly Bobbly and friends that know how to make me laugh. And a shirt that will never, ever untuck from my trousers.

"You're Fired"

said Heartbeat FM.

"Okay," said me.

Shortest blog post I've ever written.

PS

I would just like to make the point that - should I ever meet an actual unicorn, rather than the metaphorical variety - I would not burn it. I don't want to be accused of cruelty to mythical creatures. I'm pretty much vegetarian, you know.

The Last Unicorn

When you're scared of something, there are three options. You can run away from it; you can hide; or you can run towards it, screaming. Or - if you're really really scared - you can run towards it, screaming, and then you can catch it and swing it round your head and maybe pop it on a bonfire and burn it and burn it until there's nothing left to be scared of anymore, because it is well and truly dead.

A few days ago, I said that I was scared of unicorns. Of love, and of unicorns, and of anything that threatens to spike you through the middle. It was a big declaration, it was elaborate, and it was stupidly over the top. When that was dramatically and emotionally announced - and I knew he would read my blog - I promptly took myself off and dramatically and emotionally announced my feelings to the person I claimed I was 'falling for'. When that was done, I announced myself a few more times. And - when he didn't really flinch - I upped it a notch. Then I upped it another notch. Finally, when he was still relatively unfazed, I whacked the crazy on full volume, dialled up the angst and the emotion until I could barely hear my own rantings, and blasted love and anger and unreasonable demands at him until he made a squeaking noise and skipped - whimpering - into the distance. (I believe he is currently still there: peeking over a tree stump and wondering what the hell has just emotionally assaulted him.) 

As soon as he was gone, of course, I retreated back into myself: heartbroken, exhausted and wondering why the bastard legged it. I was furious: was this, I thought, what happened when you declared your love for a man? Couldn't they handle a little bit of emotional inconsistency now and then? It didn't occur to me, of course, that I had done it on purpose: that the overblown declarations, and the bizarre, unpredictable behaviour, and the ridiculous demands, had all been done on purpose. It didn't occur to me, that is, until I sat down and I realised that - under the heartbreak, under the exhaustion - I was relieved. Because, simply, there is nothing left to be scared of anymore. All the emotions that had frightened me - all of the vulnerability, all of the need, all of the potential for hurt and for loss and for rejection - were tied up in him, and by blasting declarations at him at full volume - louder than they actually are, very possibly - I knew he would run and he would take it all with him. And the louder I blasted them, the crazier I got, the more I demanded, the faster he would run. Until I'd got that damn unicorn and I'd popped it on the fire, screaming, and I'd burnt it until it couldn't hurt me anymore.

And now I'm safe. I'm miserable, and I'm lonely, and I miss him, but I'm safe. And I'm not proud of it, but there you go. I wore my heart on my sleeve for 'daws to peck at, and then I got the 'daw by the throat and I throttled him for it.

You see, I've just realised that there's a fourth option. If you're frightened of something, you can hold your ground. You can put your hand out, and you can try to stroke it; you don't have to run away, and you don't have to run towards. You can just be there to greet it, gently, and make friends with it, and maybe - given time (and when do I ever give things time?) - it won't be as scary. You don't have to make as much noise as you can just to prove that you're brave. 

Which is an excellent realisation, but a little too late for this one, obviously. He's still behind his tree trunk, and he now thinks I'm bonkers. But if - please God - I'm ever lucky enough to find another animal with a spike coming out of its head (a rhino, perhaps), maybe by then I'll know how to handle it. 

Sick

Too sick to write. Never happens. Flu. Not pig flu, just regular flu, I think. Am still dying. Possibly. Possibly not, but feels like may be. Nose about to fall off.

Will update when no longer shuffling off mortal coil. Mortal coil currently sucks.

Pepper spray

Mum is furious with me.

"I cannot believe you just told the world that you're going to be cycling down a disused railway track first thing in the morning," she snapped this morning. 

"The world?" I said. "How many people do you think read my blog?"

"That's not the point," she said, raising her voice ('don't you raise your voice to me' is one of her favourite expressions, but apparently it doesn't work two ways). "It's who reads it, not just how many. There could be weirdos out there. It's dangerous. I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all."

"Mum," I pointed out. "They're announcing it on radio. Thousands of people across Hertfordshire will know where I'm going, and at what time. And I still don't care. What are they going to do? Chase me down a path with their flies open?"

"It's not funny," mum wailed. "It's not funny at all, Holly."

"Dad'll be at the beginning, and he'll be at the end," I sighed, feeling - yet again - like a kid. Never mind the fact that I went around the world on my own aged 18: apparently a 4 mile bike ride in my home town is fraught with danger.

"Have you got pepper spray?" mum demanded.

"Of course I don't. Who has pepper spray?"

"Then take a can of deodorant and spray that in their eyes instead."

"Won't do anything: not since they took all the alcohol out," I pointed out. "It doesn't even stop you sweating. But okay. I'll weapon myself up."

"Good," mum said. "Unless," she added more hopefully, "you get fired this morning? Then you won't have to do it at all."

So there we go. A sacking or death, apparently: they are my options. That, or turning my phone off after writing this blog.