Hi fans! I know you are out there. Extremely slow proceedings tonight, for I am drunk on cider and sangria, most vile stuff, and only for the most desperate. ie me. haha get it? I am cold.  Cold.  It’s not that bad, if you ignore the fact it tastes like red wine and red wine tastes like shit! What the hell are they singing about?

I am listening to Radiohead. Ho ho.  The sound of our generation.  I’ll have to know what they are singing.  I have to look.

‘Hysterical and let down and hanging around. Hysterical and useless. Crushed like a bug in the ground. Let down and hanging around. I am going to grow wings’.

THIS IS WHAT YOU GET IF YOU MESS WITH US!!

‘karma police, I’ve given all I can. It’s not enough.  I’ve given all I can.  But we’re still on the payroll. For a minute there, I lost myself.  I LOST MYSELF!’

It’s not late yet, I don’t have to worry.  This stuff is actually not that bad.  It actually is ok.  It reminds me.  I am nineteen.  Every year I hit seems to be a weird one.  Every single age I am.  But maybe it’s just me maybe.  Don’t know.  I am not fit.  Not fit in many ways.  A Pig In A Cage On Antibiotics. What a great line! Possibly the greatest line ever written.  I will write a book about it one day.  I am merely trying to avert attention to myself.  Fair enough.  Go backwards.  I just don’t want to get on your nerves.  I am trying very hard to do this with two hands, all fingers, and no mistakes, putting all my effort in.  I have always been good at spelling.  I was in a weird sad mood and I decided to get drunk alone.  Very unlike me.

‘I am the key to the lock in your house.  That keeps your toys in the basement. And if you get too far inside you’ll only see my refection.  I am the face when she sleeps tonight.  I am the pick in the ice.  Do not cry out or hit the alarm.  We are friends til we die. Either way you turn I’ll be there.  Open up your skull. I’ll be there.  Climbing up the walls!’

WEIRD STUFF!!! Yes very unlike me.  In fact this is a new experience for me because I have never got drunk alone before.  Wowee.  I know it is sad.  But you have to try everything once.  Will you help me.  Hey now given up and gone back to one hand one finger and proceed very slowly but still correctly because I always was very good at spelling and still am.

Chan’s talents; reading fast, reading lots, reading good, great, magic stiff, understanding the magic once in a lifetime stuff, writing, wanting to write, spelling! Knowing what programmes are on what channels, liking the best music, understanding it, observance of all, silence, wanting, dreaming, losing, crying, vomiting oh yes, ten out of ten, burning, thinking, now I can add one more, drinking alone!

My life is so fucked up. I’m all alone, all alone.

‘This time I feel my luck could change, kill me again, with love, it’s gonna be a glorious day, pull me out of the aircrash, pull me out of the lake, I’m your superhero, we are standing on the edge.’

My life.  I cry at my life.  I cry at my past.  All the time it is with me. Can’t breathe.  Lucky.  I am so fucked up.  In secret, I am the most fucked up sad person that I know.  I hide it from myself every day.  I laugh at myself and I go along and smile.  What has happened?  What has happened? Waiting for the sun.  Haha I am the biggest joke I know.  I am so fucking obsessed.  I am obsessed, and no one knows me.

‘Staaaaaay for a while, I won’t mind if you do, I been getting nothing done, and I can’t blame it on you’

I’ve never cried such silent tears. Feels like my eyes are gonna explode.  What I’ve written is a load of shit.  I need to help myself.  I need to tell the truth.  I want to have kids one day, and I want to be a fit mother.  I am an adult now.  That’s the scary thing.  More woman than child.  I can’t hide anymore.  This year has gone so fast and so much has happened, and we’re not kids anymore. Got to figure out what to do…This stuff I’m drinking looks like blood.  I’m so lonely.  I wish I had a friend here.  But then I would look a state and pathetic and I don’t want people looking down on me…won’t you let me see you smile? Nothing.  No one.  Nothing.  No one.  And now I’m never gonna’ be happy and I’m never gonna be satisfied and I’m never gonna stop.

Sometimes I look at other people and wonder if they are anything like me inside, or if in fact, I am a complete weirdo.  I look at them and wonder if they get a kick out of anything.  I wonder if they wonder, I wonder if they wonder about me. I wonder if they think anything at all, ever.  or are they truly what they they look like?  Sort of plastic, and tedious, and stiff and stodgy inside, where all their feelings should be.  Sometimes after a few minutes of talking to people I am not sure if they are human at all.  Or maybe it is just me.  Apparently I just need to get some discipline in my life.

We all wanna change the world.  I just want to be a writer. I just want that and only that forever. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but something has to happen.  No one can understand this thing. I might as well confine it to my own heart and head.  Simpler like that.  Seeing as how I feel different every day anyway. That’s why no one takes me seriously, because they know I don’t know what I want.  I am dozy, dopey, in a dream all the time,. It’s all dreams, isn’t it?  That’s what they all think and know.  All those stiff people and their stiff plan B’s. I so want to prove them all wrong.

You don’t have to follow a mapped out direction like everyone else.  You can do whatever you want, and still be someone. Of course.  Am I always going to be like this?  I always have been.  My guts run out.  I remember that at school.  Panic.  Total fear.  Those days when I would wake up with a distinct lack of courage.  Days when I knew I couldn’t even go outside, let alone go to lessons and sit there feeling like a freak, trying not to cry.  Whole weeks, one after the after, when this huge black cloud would just sit over my life, and nothing meant anything anymore.  Nothing.  I would feel like I was fading away.  Becoming invisible.  I was losing all my grip on things, and it was like everything was a weird sort of dream, all hazy and meaningless, and transparent, and it comes to me now.  Life.  Everything.  I feel swamped and trapped and confused and lost, and so worked up, and I can’t see the future, my future and it scares me, not knowing what I want, or what I’m doing, and it’s driving me insane.

I am so amazed. Listening to new Oasis album. It’s totally like the summing up of the 90’s and our generation, and it’s totally everything, every single song is amazing.  I am so blown away.  Listening to this all alone. ‘We’ll have our way, in our own time, we’ll have our say, ’cause my star’s gonna’ shine’. What a cool song. ‘You got a feeling lost inside, it just won’t let you go, life is sneaking up behind, no it just won’t let you go…’ Maybe things will be good, if I just believe it, if I just be strong, and stand up, and don’t crumble or give in every time something goes wrong…

Was gonna go and buy a print ribbon today and print up some chapters of my now rewritten first chapter of ‘I Knew A Place’ so that I can take it to my class tonight and let the bastard tutor read it, and see what he thinks?  Am I going to be a classic writer or what? Don’t feel like it no.  Don’t feel like doing anything.  Just hanging around here.  It’s gonna be a great day.

Three months until 1998. I still don’t know what happened to 1997. Hello, where did you go?  I didn’t notice. I remember something I wrote in amongst my sociology notes at college once, up in the library, in a free, with friends around me, not working, but laughing, and receiving warning looks from the dragon-lady.  We were younger, younger than we are now, and it wasn’t all that long ago, but really it feels like a lifetime, like we were just children then, and now we are adults? We all liked Pulp, and it was 1996, a good year for us.  Nothing bad, nothing scary, just nice, fun and easy.  We knew what to do.  There was a structure.  Now there is such an urgency about all that we do, and the walls, we have to build them ourselves, routines and order.  Making our futures, that’s what we’re all trying to do now. Like busy little builders.  Figuring it out, doing our best, crying, when the bricks all come tumbling down again, and we have to start from scratch, wondering, who the hell do I want to be? I wrote, from Disco 2000, to my friends, I wrote, ‘et’s all meet up in the year 2000, won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown?’ And now the year 2000 is only two years away, and then, we were all friends, different to how we are now, not ever suspecting that time might really move on, and take us with it, and make us older.  But it did.  What?? I thought, I’m sure, that just a couple of hours ago we were there, skiving from lessons, ripping the piss out of each other mercilessly, laughing until our sides ached, and when since then have I laughed like that? Discussing the future, ’cause it was never gonna really arrive, doodling in the margins of our notes, avoiding revision, and we were young and sweet and had plans, didn’t we?  Plans and promises and dreams.  Life just gets in the way folks. You are forever in the present, and maybe that is why it hurts so much, in a strange, aching, nostalgic way, when I hear a song that meant something back then, and it makes me feel, oh, all kinds of things, like Disco 2000 and how I wrote it to them.  I’m scared when I look to the future. But it will come.  And what will we mean to each other then?  Will Sam and I still be together?  Will any of us be married or have kids?  Will it all be good?  Will it be better than this?  What I’m listening to now, the music, will it come back to haunt me then in the future, and poke a finger deep within my heart, and say cruelly, ha ha, don’t you just miss the good old days?  I fear that it will.  I know myself too well.  Here is another song from back then, and this is how I am feeling right now, and have felt for a while:

‘Oh yeah, they say that the past must die, for the future to be born,

In that case, die little mother

Stomach in, chest out, on your marks, get set. Go!

Now, now that you’re free, what are you gonna be?

And who are you gonna see?

And where, where will you go, and how will you know?

You didn’t get it all wrong?

Is this the light of a new day dawning?

A future bright that you can walk in?

No, it’s just another Monday morning

Do it all over again.’ Pulp, Monday Morning, 1995.

That was another one./

I remember….

I remember a woman that caught my eye, from the back of the car, she came screaming into the road, ghostly in her pale terror, some flimsy nightie flowing out behind her, with her hair. We drove on and nobody saw her but me.

I remember my grandad, a man of so few words, he was not my real grandad, and he had white hair and a white moustache, and he walked with a stick, and he was very very tall, and he used to drive the buses, and he loved my nanny with all his soul, but everyone could tell she did not love him the same way back…and he kept boiled sweets in a jar on the coffee table next to his chair, and he ate grapefruit for breakfast every single day, and he dressed and shaved before he came down the stairs, and that was how she knew he was ill, because he did not come down the stairs at the same time, and he fixed peoples bikes, and he had his own cellar where he went for some peace, and I remember when we went to see the deer at Bolderwood, I didn’t know how to talk to anyone, or be anything, and she hurried us all on like she always did, and he was left behind, just staring, just standing there leaning over his stick, watching the deer, and I wondered what he was thinking, because he rarely spoke…and they said that she threw herself over his body when he died in the hospital and she called out no.

I remember sitting on my red and yellow trike…feeling sad and alone, picking at a scab on my knee and squeezing out the blood, and throwing myself to the ground and crying, and looking around to see if anyone had noticed, if anyone was coming, but nobody did.

I remember a long car journey, sitting in the front of the van with my dad, and he pointed out the stars in the sky and he told me things about them that I cannot remember, and I loved him a bit then, and I thought maybe we could get along.

I remember sitting on my nanny’s step, and shelling peas from the garden into a bowl, and the smell was summer.

I remember hearing father christmas steal into my room at night, the creaks of the floorboards, the slow laboured breathing, the rustle of packages, followed by the weight of the stocking laid at the end of my bed, and I held my breath the entire time and kept my eyes squeezed shut, and it was the longest time til morning.

I remember my first walkman, pushing the earplugs into my ears at the table on Christmas day, so that I could not hear the crying or the arguing, or the adult voices that surrounded me in a day that had become a steaming pile of disappointing shit.

I remember broken biscuits, and Christmas hampers saved up for year long, and Provident loans, and the Avon lady calling, and hiding behind the sofa when you didn’t have the money to pay them.

I remember a tunnel between the broken car and the conifer hedge, where I wriggled on my belly, plastic farm animals in hand, and I found a fat white maggot and it appalled me, but it was covered in dirt and looked like it was struggling, so I brushed it off and put it somewhere safe, and went back to my toys, knowing that I was getting too old for them, that time was running out.

I remember spinning around and around in the garden in a lovely summer dress, white with flowers on, and I tied the bow at the front, and my mother opened the door and said it’s winter, you can’t wear that in winter.

I remember digging holes in the garden and placing sticks over them to make traps. Flower fairies in the hedges.  Skateboards in the close.  Our bikes were our horses.  If we lay on our bellies on the skateboards, we were crocodiles and the road was our river.  The hollow oak tree overhung the road, and I sat up there and used my penknife to make arrows, and I never wanted to grow up, never, ever, and I didn’t believe I ever would. I pretended to be a dog in the house when no one was looking; up the stairs on all fours, trot, trot, trot, I am a poor stray dog looking for food. Higgledy piggledy lego houses we called them. Layers of lego, stairs and eccentric windows, the crazier the better, and they lasted for years, and they were epic, and they took over the landing, and were covered in dust, and we swore that we would have real houses like them one day.  Our captain beds were ships, and the toys on the floor had fallen overboard, so we made lassoo’s out of skipping ropes to get them back. I leaned out once from the bottom bunk and my sister was sick on my face. I peered through the neighbours fence and felt red ants crawling in my hair.  The dog next door was called Sam, a white bear that snapped and growled, and the man was Barry and he shouted at you if you rode bikes down the alley, don’t you scratch my car!

We got stuck in the mud in Wales, and it was funny at first, but then we were scared, and someone had to run and get the adults. We got the dog because someone my mum knew tried to break in, but I didn’t know why. She cried when he left her on Christmas day, she said the pain was going to kill her. My sisters guinea pig gave up on life and twitched to a stiff death in its box on the same day.  She said, that is life, and she said, sleep through the pain.  And she was the best.

I remember sitting on the landing, listening in, a soft tiger in my lap, crying, because Christmas was over, and the adults were all still up, laughing and talking, the TV on, the sweets going around, the glasses chinking, and it wasn’t fair.

Dad was always at Bobs, fixing cars. They both wore green overalls and they didn’t know how to talk to children except how to tell you off.  My nanny said nice things came in small packages, and I was a big girl for my age.  Big girls don’t cry, except me, because I couldn’t stop crying, except they called it grizzling, which made it worse.  I cried once because my brother rode over a snail on purpose.  I cried when the boy next door to my nanny through an acorn at me for no reason, I cried so much I could not speak.

My sister held my hand in the playground.  My sister combed my hair when we lined up to get our school photograph taken. My sister got my care bear figure back for me when another girl stole it. My sister took my hand before I crossed the road.  My sister held my hand at her baby boys funeral, she took it and held it and she did not let go.  And after that they said my nanny wanted to go and be with him, to look after him, and it gave them comfort to think of that, and the good thing was, she died in her chair and not in the hospital, and my mum who had never felt loved, stayed at the grave for hours and hours and could not speak…

I remember sitting on the coal bunker and singing loudly with my headphones on. I felt alive. I remember lying on my bedroom floor with the speakers on either side of my head, so the music could thump and shake through my brain.  When my brother slept on the top bunk, and I was on the bottom, I would put up my feet and kick the slats up and down and make him giggle and scream on his rocky boat on the ocean.  I remember the view from my bedroom window, when I felt the time to say goodbye nearing…I wrote it down, it was my view, not hers, it was mine, mine, the close, the cars, the trees, the flats, the long sun parched green stretching up to the left of the flats, the allotments on the other side of the green, the man with the wheelbarrow and the two black labs, and the time the rabbit escaped and we chased it into the allotments, and into Bob and Mary’s back garden, and had to climb over planks of wood and bits of cars to find it again, and the spider, red and yellow, right in the centre of the green, how we used to hang upside down on it, and blackberry picking along the hedge there, and walking the dogs up and around, and that was my view, and I didn’t want to say goodbye…

Summers were so hot that we lay on the floor, our bare feet against the cold radiators.  We were always too shy to ask my nanny for ice lollies from the freezer in the cellar.  Summers went on forever, and we paddled in the water at the secret garden and caught tiddlers in buckets, and jumped over cow pats, and pretended to be sharks on our bellies in the paddling pool.

Winters were cold and it always snowed, and once my brother lost his cp30 in the snow outside, and he cried and cried about it, but he found it again when the snow had melted, but it had a leg missing and no one knew why.

I remember…witches fingers in the toilet bowl, waiting to claw at you, and gremlins under the bed who wanted to catch your ankles and drag you under, and getting out of bed to go to toilet in the night and my mum screaming get back in bed!! Banana splits made me sick and I should have known better. Lego is the most painful thing in the world to step on in the night.  You can spell out words to each other with a glo worm from your bed.  One day your dreams will all come true.  Never give up on your dreams, my mum said to me.

I remember that and she was right.