Musical intrusion

I was on my morning commute this week, completely squished with some woman's giant moo-skin handbag forcing me on to tippy-toes with my spine arched like a glamour model, when I decided to shuffle around so that I got to work without some kind of injury.

She did that funny thing people do when they're stabbing you with their bag and they feel their bag move as you buckle under its mass, and they shoot you suspicious glance.

At that moment an urge bubbled up in me to break into a hearty refrain of 'You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two' from the musical Oliver.

I didn't do it. That song is a bit racist.

Having a chat with myself

Television can eat your life.  But people who don't watch television are sometimes missing out.

I find television transformative, in the way that when I was younger I used to find Milan Kundera books transformative.

My current interest is the profundity of the so-called 'shallow'; the wisdom of the understated and compartmentalised. It has a lot to do with survival.

Channel 4 have a new programme called Hidden Talent, and they taught an A&E (ER) nurse called Maggie to be a top level rock climber in the space of less than a month.

If you can follow the link, the bit which I found amazing was at 43 minutes in. If you can't follow the link, basically Maggie is half way up a giant cuss-off sheer rock face, out to sea, in poor weather, with a murderous drop beneath her.  Suddenly she is faced with a section of the climb where there are no available hand holds, where she is too far from her supporting guide to get advice, and she begins to despair and become afraid.  She pauses for a few seconds, considers a solution, executes it and afterwards says with a smile of relief 'You just really have to have a chat with yourself, don't you.'

Sometimes you really do just have to have a chat with yourself. I'm not sure what Maggie was saying to herself in that chat but it was something which gave her the energy and belief to continue, rather than something which made her break down and drop into the sea in a state of existential despair, which is frankly what I would have done, probably in my final watery moments wondering whether a spot of being on telly was worth it and what pathological narcissism led me to choose this terrible end.

The documentary picks up earlier in the show that Maggie has somehow through her experience as an A&E nurse and working single mother of 3, developed the ability to focus only on what she needs to do to get through a task, and to regulate her stress response.  Maggie is not a shallow person, she is a very wise person, and she has learned that certain kinds of thinking, those which are held up as 'deep thinking' but are probably better described as 'bigger thinking', are at times the enemy of functioning. Compartmentalising, or shutting off certain spirals in your mind in this way is really about focusing attention. It requires a lot of skill, and is the complete opposite of denial. Rather than 'how did I get here', it's 'okay, I'm here, how am I going to get out?'

I have a belief that when you are at the very depths of a very complicated or hopeless situation, 'trite' statements like 'pull your socks up and just get on with it', 'falling apart is not going to fix things', 'there's got to be a way out of this' and 'tomorrow is another day' can be life-rafts, provided that they come from within and not from other people. There will be time for deep thinking later when you aren't dangerously out to sea.

"I'll have one of those, please"

Decided to defect queues at Waitrose yesterday.

Whenever I fear I am going to order takeaway and spend more money than I have on foods which will hasten my death, I go instead to the posh supermarket and spend the same money on buying extremely nice ingredients for several healthy meals instead. Waitrose is a palace of beautiful ingredients which I can just about afford as a treat, and it is directly opposite the Japanese supermarket, where I like to buy luminous pickles.

It was after waiting for slightly too long in the self-service queue with only a few things in my basket that I realised the aisle next to me was free, and wandered over. A second before I reached the till a man with a snotty baby side stepped into my way. He didn't have any shopping, he just was just standing there with his snot-faced baby, who was staring and cooing at me. I said jokingly 'I'll have one of those, please!' which is something spinsters sometimes say to people when they have a baby and you don't and you are by the till of a shop, and then went to step around him. But he moved into my way, and stared at me, wordlessly, with a gaze of total hatred.

It was supremely weird. I stood there, stuck to the spot for about five seconds with this peculiar man and his mucus-bubble orificed infant in front of me, both pairs of eyes locked on me. I wondered whether he spoke English. Then I walked past him towards the till but before I could put my basket down his wife came puffing up the aisle behind us with a giant shopping trolley, like a cross between an Olympic athlete and a Sherpa, and she overtook me and proceeded to unpack her goods on to the conveyor belt in front of me.

'Oh, sorry' I said to the man. 'I didn't realise you were queueing, I thought you were just waiting about with your baby.'

Neither grown-up looked at me.  She spoke to him about something in English.  I stood behind them and felt really uncomfortable and strange.

I had these thoughts, in this order:
'How funny.'
'He must have thought me very strange and rude.'
'But he could have just said, 'Oh sorry I am queueing.' That's what normal people do.'
'My basket would only have taken a couple of minutes.'
'I hope he didn't think I meant I wanted to have sex with him and have his baby.'
'Probably they are tired and feeling tense. The baby looks ill and they probably haven't had any sleep.'
'Why am I even caring about this?'
'Why do I always have to worry about what other people think?'
'I hope your wife shags your best mate, and someone sets fire to your car while you sleep and your child grows up to hate you, you evil bastard.'
'Maybe their parking ticket is going to run out soon and they are in a rush.'

Then I felt better and went home in a good mood.

My mother always taught me that forgiveness makes you feel better than hatefulness. But sometimes if you do a bit of hating first it makes forgiving much more effortless.

Part 1: What I thought being a grown up would be like vs being an actual grown up

Image: Going to shops and doing lots of montage-style dressing up fashion shows in the changing area with my cool friends
Reality: Feeling so ashamed at noticing there is a non-kinky and throroughly slatternly hole in the crotch of my work trousers that I go to Marks and Spencer and pick up fourteen pairs of ugly trousers. Buy the only pair that fits, without even looking in the mirror. In the queue, get asked 'When are you due?' Go home and cry.

Image: Baking a cake whilst my cherubic toddlers mill about, and my husband (a very domesticated and un-dead version of Edward Furlong or Corey Haim) reads the paper to me.
Reality: Shouting 'Stop biting me!' over and over again at my cats.

The risk

I often worry about whether I am making the best of my life.



Looking back, I've lost so much time feeling bad about time I've already wasted.

I've decided I don't plan wasting another second letting my guilt snake eat its own tail.

The Joy of Jams

There's a French deli in town. I used to find it hard going in there on account of the airborne cheese particles, which like neutrinos seem to reach you before the deli door is even open despite that being physically impossible. But they've contained the stinky cheese behind a glass screen and now I like going in there quite a lot.

I prefer to go in there when I don't have any cash on me, so that when the woman tells me she will charge me fifty pence for any card transaction under a tenner I can economise by making up the difference with jars of peculiar jam and tins of haughty French artichoke hearts. The artichoke hearts are more expensive than the supermarket version, but they also don't have that weird gritty texture around the stem which requires you to exfoliate them like ageing elbows.

Recent jams have included Sour Cherry, Quince ('Coings!'), and Rhubarb. The rhubarb jam is especially helpful because I have developed my second-ever crush on a cake.

My first ever cake crush was the tarte au framboise, ideally in a dark chocolate lined pastry case. But like so many things in life it becomes tainted with the memory of the person with whom you shared it, and now I'd rather eat a toasted slug and sawdust sandwich. But Marks and Spencer have created a swiss roll aka roulade which has a rhubarb and custard filling in it instead of jam and cream.

Rhubarb and custard swiss roll. If that revolts you then you're clearly not of British descent.

I haven't tried it, but ever since I saw it in the shop I've been thinking about it. I use it as something to think about to block out the thoughts I have about
1. That little girl in China who got repeatedly run over and nobody helped her
2. Those kids in Surrey who mutilated a swan with a toy motorised boat
3. Cops going on a big game hunt in Ohio.
4. Everything bad ever which might make me want to cry on the bus

Maybe that's another reason why I'm fat. Because life is so bitter, something has to cleanse the palate.

I don't think I will ever try it. Instead the jam will do. It's never good to eat your idols.

Perseids

When I was 20 I went on a walking trip along the coastal path from Minehead to Newquay. I soon gave up the walking. The girls who had planned the trip had done Duke of Edinburgh Gold and they were happy to walk 19 mile days. I am not happy to walk 19 mile days. I can walk 10 miles with no problems and possibly even 15 miles but the next day I'll probably just want to have a sit down with a scone. 19 mile days makes your toes bleed and your knees click and makes you cry in a phone box to your mother.

I started getting the bus with the tents. After the initial guilt of having given up the attempt to walk his was great. This was a pre-internet bus navigation mission and I spent lots of time talking to old ladies and eating chips and petting dogs and paddling on the beach and wandering around strange town centres looking for visitor information kiosks.

When we got to our destination we watched a total solar eclipse. It was absolutely amazing. I almost broke my friend's fingers I was squeezing her hand so hard with joy.



The following night there was a meteor shower and the sky was filled with shooting stars. I made possibly a hundred wishes and not a single one came true. I think I was too greedy. Maybe if I had only asked for one...

The perseids are returning tonight. I am going to make one wish, and only one.