stories about running away

She can't even remember if she's used this title before, so she'll use it anyway.

It's not the internet I miss, I don't think. This girl I met at work, an Indian girl whose name I forget, only said two things that I remember. The first was about the internet, how much she missed it, how it was her life. She was one of those girls who's bubbly and cheerful and pretty and has everything going for her except for the fact that she lives out of her Myspace and discussion forums and band websites and communities.

It's not the connection to the internet that's bad, it's how she can't really deal with real people.

The second interesting thing she said was, in justification for her household not only having a chef but a butler who cooked for the chef, that labour is very cheap in the developing world. Yes, replied the room full of left-wing fundraisers. Yes, it is.

I don't want to be one of those people who can't interact with things in 2d. I don't want to freak out and whinge whenever I can't get online but my god I hate not blogging. I'll put it this way - as therapeutic as keeping a diary is, and as glad as I am that I've finally managed to get into that habit, I firmly and completely believe that writing without a reader is talking to yourself.

You can't write without a reader, you can't just write to nobody. Anyone who writes a diary with no intention of it ever being read is lying, in my opinion. Ask yourself if you'd burn your diaries when you died. If the answer's no then you want someone to read them. If the answer's yes then you've proved me wrong and it's obviously just me that cannot abide the thought of not being heard.

Sometimes, it scares me to think it, it feels like blogging is the main form of communication in my life. At uni, when I blog everyday, no matter what happens and how I feel it'll all be sorted, neatly pinned down into words by the time I go to sleep. As if everything I forgot to say that day can be said online instead.

It scares me into talking more often, to having real conversations even when I don't want to because I don't want to be sucked into that kind of relationship with the internet. If it's making me open up to people that can't be bad. But still, this feeling of uneasiness when my safety net is taken away.

On the plus side, the realisation of the last six weeks' separation from broadband has made me realise something. The only thing that keeps me sane is this, not just blogging but writing, somehow pinning it down and forcing it out and getting myself sorted. I have to do it, can't stop doing it. Sometimes it's a ritual, sometimes it's a compulsion, as long as it gets done I'll get to sleep at night.

Decisions have been made. Next time someone asks me what I'll do with my life I'll tell them I will be a writer. That is where my energies will go for now. I can't be done with deciding between dance classes and film studies and politics modules when all I really know how to do, all I'm good at and all that helps is writing. Realism, I suppose.

And the story. The story (stories?) that I started when I was still at school. People like Barony and Costa and Nathaniel who I never mention on here and I suppose only Meffie, Emilie, Stacey and Laura would really remember. They're coming out of whatever fictional cupboard I put them into because I can't keep staring up my own arse any longer.

I need something to write, something big, a project. I need to see if I can do this, if I can do it well. So I will do it, and later will look back and see how I did.

Wish us luck.

sunshine barcode

The stripes of sunshine, dappled and shade, they exist solely to remind you of the cost of things.

You want to know the cost, you want to hear prices, numbers, currency like threeseventynine and fiveeightyfour and nothingatallforthefirstyear. How about the real currency, like lies and deceit, like labour and children and baking sunshine?

You don't want to think about how much things really cost. You walk in that kind of light, evening late, when your whole shadow elongates until your sandals are like platforms, your toenails rise up like claws.

You drink soft drinks, branded, and write pretentious essays about the economy of sunlight. You don't want to know about the cost of things.

Your human rights have laid out your obligations - yourself and your children first, with other people way down the line. You would rewrite the charter, and obligate people above people. You would force the charity from people's hands if you could.

And they say, it's not giving if it's an obligation. You will be obligated to pay tax, to work in industry, to consume and reproduce and be happy and spend and believe and not question and toe the line and shut the fuck up and eat your Happy Meal but God (that charitable God, the one you pray to) forbid that you be obligated to selflessness.

The sunshine barcode covers your feet in blisters. You stop, apply plasters, leave your Pepsi can on the floor to rust in the bushes.

You don't think about the cost of things. You go home instead.

blog in sixty seconds

So much to say, so little time.

I'm in the computer centre on campus with Est, checking emails in sweltering heat and trying not to sweat on the chair too much.

It's a public chair; it's a matter of respect.

I'll tell you about my house. There's no bed in my room, what used to be the dining room, so I pulled a mattress downstairs and I sleep on that instead. I feel so bohemian that yesterday I placed a request with the landlord to not buy me a bed after all, just a mattress to sleep on. He pointed out that there was already a spare mattress in the shed and, if beds weren't important, couldn't I just sleep on that?

Just so everyone knows where I stand on this - beds aren't important, but not sleeping on something you found in the back garden is DAMN important.

I can sit on the windowsill (one leg in, one leg out) to smoke, listening to the Pixies and reading pretentious books and ain't nobody to tell me off except maybe the delicious next door neighbours, foreign as a lawnmower to my new back garden, and fit as the pizza we ordered for breakfast this morning.

Fucking bohemia. The other wonderful thing about my house is that it's mine. Currently Est's as well but she's only paying rent in love and cigarettes - this house is mine, baby, and I'll stub my fags out on the rusty stepladder you left in my yard if I want to.

White trash doesn't even cover it.

This has run well over sixty seconds but I don't care so I'll tell you the rest of the good news.

Est and I get to see Philippa and her lovely chum Charlotte tonight. Philippa and Charlotte bear the dubious pleasure of being two of the few people to see just what a mess I was at the Reading festival. Charlotte and Est bear the even more dubious pleasure of being the only two people I know ever to challenge each other to a 'Jew-off' - if you've never seen yamulkahs drawn at dawn then you shouldn't ask.

The even more exciting news is that, despite missing so many lectures and seminars that I technically failed this year, I've actually passed this year, and better than I expected to. My relief is tangible. Come closer. You can stroke it.

I must adieu, to a house full of fag-smoke, Irn Bru bottles and, due to my recent friendship with a girl who used to work in a sexual health clinic, several packs of condoms and a sachet of Liquid Silk. Again, if you don't know, it's best not to ask.

Who says doing nothing is boring?

air

In terms of playing catch-up, I kept my word to the marvellous Becci Brown and her creative efforts by writing down one thing every day while I was away that was cool. Expect them up and about as soon as I find broadband and time.

*****

We'll talk about a book I read once instead. It was called Music and Silence, I forget who it was by, the only memorable things about it were a whole family of sons sleeping with their stepmother and the way that the perspective changed from character to character.

The best passages in the novel started: "the thoughts of Marcus Tilsen, plucked from the air."

It was years ago, but I remembered that.

Thoughts then. Not from the air as such but from bus tickets, train tickets, roach paper, leaflets and envelopes. Things that I've put down and refound today.

Darling, shall we see if there's anything special for sale in Bristol? To Hayley, on the back of an evangelical pamphlet, in reference to our ongoing search for a dealer.

Did you forget that this was supposed to be GOOD NEWS? Found on the same pamphlet, beneath the phrase 'eternal fires', accompanied by someone else's handwriting - Wankers!

In the margins of my diary:

Back to back, he says, no funny business-
I
just
don't
know

They say today is the longest day. Yesterday felt longer.

Only 1% of the public give regularly to charity. Over-committed my arse.

She sings, more damage than a heart could hold. How can yuo be so wonderful, why won't you answer your phone?

Across a bus ticket, a packet of Swan filter tips and an envelope:

Homeless guy; homeless Peter-

Peter is playing the pipes, topless, selling burning bundles of rosemary on the pavement; he whiskery kisses my hand as we part.

Ten pounds for two bundles, I say, some drinks and a smoke mate, enjoy yourself.

Mini Milk for the lady, fundraising, stressed with the rudeness that rich can afford, a present, unbidden, from a man -

- a man who sneaks into the cathedral and cold, grinning, behind graves rests.

On a London Travelcard:

Consider a girl, on a bench, in a churchyard, wondering the nature of things. She knows to tell things precisely, for out of words, exactly as they are, the greatest stories come.

The churchyard is appropriate for it is answers she considers; 'consideration' is important for it is of judgement that she writes.

The breeze, the bench, the cigarettes, the ticket stub will tell this story. The conclusion she will take is only this: her words will be all that is considered; her said and how she said it will tell this story.

this is what happened

So it's been about four weeks since last we spoke.

Since then, I've done three weeks as a pavement fundraiser. They call us 'chuggers' - charity muggers. I tell a man in Bristol that I prefer to think of it as romancing rather than mugging - making us 'chancers' I suppose.

Bugger me it's hard work.

Consider leaving the house at 7:30am, driving for a couple of hours to wherever it is you're supposed to be, stopping for a cuppa and then spending the next 10 hours pounding the pavements, with no lunch break and all the vitriol the British public can throw at you (and believe me, there's a lot of it).

Consider losing any kind of faith in humanity by your first fag break. Consider hating people so much that sometimes you forget how to speak.

Consider old men grabbing you by the ID badge and groping you. Consider being told to 'fuck off and die'. Consider being told that children with learning disabilities should be drowned at birth.

Consider working yourself into the ground, six days a week, for £212 because you can't meet target on account of people already giving two quid a month to cancer research so, no thank you!, they're sorted as far as far as charity goes.

Consider smiling next time you see a chugger.

Then again, consider this.

Waking up at 7am with a glorious hangover, in a house full of people you didn't know a week ago, people who are now your closest friends.

Squeezing into a Skoda Fabia which you are definitely, absolutely, under NO circumstances allowed to smoke in, sparking up and putting on some 'motivational music' - think, Tina Turner, Mungo Jerry, Rage Against the Machine, Cotton Eyed Joe.

Ordering your double espresso with cream and a bacon bap, sitting on the pavement for breakfast.

A homeless man buying you an ice cream because he feels bad that no one will stop and talk to you.

A passing busker giving you a musical accompaniment - Mencap, with chips and with salad it's Mencap, even Buckingham Palace have Mencap...

A student signing up to give £20 a month, following a screaming argument with his mother in which she insists he can't afford it and he insists that yes he bloody can.

A guy with learning disability coming to give you a hug because Mencap helped him find a job as a gardener and he's so much happier now.

Getting home, smoking fatty-bombatties in the back garden, going for a swim in the accomodation pool, sitting in front of log-fires, in pubs in Weston-Super-Mare, talking to Welshmen, Australians, South Africans, Russians, Geordies, Americans about life and charity and how every fucker who's too rich to give to charity fades to grey when a biker the size of a house tells his mates off for using the word spastic and signs up for more than he can afford.

You love people; you hate people.

*****

There's too much to tell you. I've got time off at the moment for exhaustion and fainting in the street. At the moment I'm not especially good at this job but I will be, because they would be the hardest, most mindblowing three weeks of my life and, basically, I'm a glutton for punishment.

Come on general public, make my day.