Ink Polaroids
I've moved my blog somewhere else. It's nowt personal. Email me via the contact page if you want to know where. xx
EDIT: I live here --> inkpolaroids.vox.com
My first cat
I'll blog properly inabit, but for now, here is a photo I just found of me with our first cat. Note the cardboard box in the background, which I decorated in a transparent attempt to buy the cat's love. Note the look of fear in the cat's eyes. "Help me," he is pleading at the camera, "a creature whose flesh makes me cringe is touching me. Also, does this angle make me look fat?":
Orange dungarees! What a tres fashionable child I was.
still ill
Well, I appear to be back from Dublin, still vaguely ill but with symptoms so nebulous that they would be laughed out of a doctor's surgery:
- Tiredness, despite the sleeping patterns of a cat;
- Aching everything;
- Short-term memory loss (I have to carry my keys, book and tea with me at all times else I'll forget where I've put them);
- Intense dreams of domesticity with 20sixers I've never met.
Any guesses as to my affliction? My family labelled me variously with flu, ME and Alzheimers. Hope you all had a fabulous Christmas - mine was brilliant, what I remember of it.
Glaargh
Somewhat inevitably, the instant I stopped work I got ill. This is what happens when you work all hours in a job you are indifferent to at best. Now, I am rarely ill, so when it happens I treat it as a rare scientific experiment. Illness is a curiosity, an oddity, like a baby panda or a happy goth.
I am sickly and feverish and achy and don’t really know what’s going on. I realised something was up yesterday morning when I left the house and didn’t recognise the streets I walk down every day to the station. It was like being in a David Lynch film – there was something not quite right about suburbia. I knew I was probably ill when I got home last night and lacked the energy to do anything but lie on the sofa. Illness was confirmed when I cried during Bruce Almighty. I am ashamed to write that last sentence.
When I’m unwell, it’s my sleep that suffers most. I wake up with the most bizarre delusions – I really should stick a note to my ceiling saying “IT’S OK. JUST SHUT UP AND GET BACK TO SLEEP.” The last time my body failed I woke up convinced one of my friends had texted me to say he and his friends were all coming round at 3am. I was a sweaty panicky mess.
Last night, I appear to have sent myself a text at 1.34am. I was going to elaborate on my train of thought, but the SMS alone is almost a poem:
Delirious? Brain sends messages to limbs. Visualise myself doing it.
No!
If you don’t fix this you won’t be able to sleep!
Somewhere, a siren stirs – could this be carbon monoxide poisoning?
Brain, rouse yourself!
End – we are cold.
Merry Christmas, you beautiful people. Hope you’re not all hallucinatory zombies at the mo. I probably won't remember writing this in an hour! Woo!
Halfhearted
What are Sunday afternoons for if not mooching around complaining I'm bored, taking photos of the cat looking grumpy, lying on the floor listening to Nick Drake and finally attempting to tidy my room? I've dumped the contents of my cupboard all over the floor but have got distracted by my Big Box Of Paraphernalia. "Inspired" by 'Squash, I thought I'd blog what I found within:
-mobile phone bingo, devised on a train to Coventry. Points are awarded for “I’m on a train”, “I’m outside Milton fucking Keynes” and “Is Dave there?”
- letters from a friend in an eating disorder clinic, with increasingly insistent demands to send train times so she could run away. They stop suddenly;
- a card saying goodbye, a card so devastatingly sad it makes me weep if I even glance at the words. I have blue-tacked it shut;
-rules written on a train on the way to an Elliott Smith gig with a boy, all of them gleefully broken and danced on within the month, all except the last which we both agreed was most important;
-recipes my mum wrote for me before I went to uni, including “Omelette” and “Rice”
-a book of newspaper clippings that amuse me. Among them:
-Quentin Crisp’s film reviews, one of which includes the line “Now we know what Mr Travolta has been up to. Mr Travolta has been eating”;
- a local paper story about a springer spaniel who had 12 large stones removed from his stomach. There is a photo of him looking ashamed, captioned “You could shake him around him and he sounded like a bag of marbles”;
- Lioness Adopts Another Antelope. “Theories to explain the phenomenon include: Kamuniak is colour-blind; Kamuniak wants to be a vegetarian; Kamuniak wants to be loved.”
Stuff
I hit a man on the tube this morning. It was entirely involuntary. He was one of a growing band of men who flagrantly, disgustingly and persistently pick their noses and flick the mucusy treasures over the floor of the carriage. And they’re what I hate most about commuting, more than tourists who are physically incapable of removing their backpacks or city types who sigh heavily when I ask them to move their bags or hypochondriacs who slam the windows shut on the Central line so the carriage turns into a sauna and I drown in my own sweat.
Before I knew what I was doing, my hand shot out and I whacked his arm. Not hard, but clearly deliberately, like a parent rebuking a child. We were both shocked – me by my errant hand, him that he had been caught. (Yes, nosepickers of the tube – you are not invisible! You are vile, filthy scum! You make baby Jesus cry!) We made fleeting eye contact, both terrified at having transgressed the boundaries of the London Underground that say thou shalt not communicate with one another. He buried himself in his Metro and I was suddenly very interested in my book. He got off at the next stop.
I have some rather dull questions for you now, imaginary people of the internet:
1) I’m going to get my mum vouchers for a spa/massage type place for Christmas. Question: which one? I’m in danger of booking her into a dodgy “massage” joint if I try to do this on my own. I don’t want my mum ringing me up halfway through worriedly asking what a “happy finish” means.
2) I need a new mobile phone. My old one is four years old and keeps turning itself off. Do I just go into a shop and…buy one? And then put my…SIM card…in it? Is that it? NOTE: do not bamboozle me with brands and special features. I do not care.
3) Where shall I go on a short holiday in January? One word answers, please.
Meat!
So, I've just returned to the office after a 2.5 hour lunch break with these lovely bloggers. I had TUNA! Also CHICKEN! I have never had chicken before ever ever ever, and it was lush. It was the most glorious, decadent lunch ever. Thank you, Moobs.
I also had wine, beautiful smoky red wine. It was fabulous.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I must ring lawyers in Illinois to talk about sewerage systems. I may fill in the gaps later.