Early ears

1. The Very Best of The Beach Boys

I was sitting on my best friend’s bed on a warm day in late spring. We were twelve. ‘This one’s got a palm tree on it and surfer writing,’ she said to me. ‘And this one’s similar but in pink.’ Holding up the t-shirts for me to inspect, she added, ‘they were £3.99 for two, from this shop called H&M.’ 

Get Mum to take me to H&M, I told myself. Then I noticed the CD lying on the bed next to my friend’s feet. A blue silhouetted surfer riding a wave under a yellow sky, the words ‘The Very Best of the Beach Boys’ typed across the top. Suddenly I recalled a drive with my aunt and uncle on the way home from the Year 6 disco three summers ago. My undersized ears were full of DJ Otzi’s Hey Baby, the closing song at every school disco, and my aunt was trying to undo the damage with a tape full of sunny jangly guitars and soft harmonies. The tape was faded green and black with a photo of a white goat on the front. It sounded ok, but I was more interested in remembering how we’d all punched the air at every ‘ooh, ah’ of Hey Baby. 

The CD came from a bargain bin in HMV, bought by my friend's older sister. We played it, and Fun Fun Fun ran through my head for days afterwards. It wasn't long before I had my own copy of the CD. I never found those t-shirts though.

(twelve, reading a teen music magazine while waiting for my second Busted show - practising for future Springsteen pit queues maybe - and feeling far more excited than I look)

2. Eye of the Tiger

State schools don’t offer much in the way of music lessons. One hour a week until you’re fourteen, no grade 8 cello players in sight. We did attempt the basics of reading music. But then we also spent two weeks learning about the Tudor pavane. Inedible and pointless for a group of kids who mostly consumed rap music.

Then, aged thirteen, a glorious half term devoted to rock and roll. Nobody else seemed that bothered, but I loved learning the basic riff of Rock Around The Clock on piano, and a simplified version of When I’m 64. I practised secretly for days until my hands fell in sync with each other, so that when it came to playing in front of the class, I was pretty fluid. One week, a pared down drum kit sat in the middle of the room and we were taught how to drum along to Eye of the Tiger. At home I constructed makeshift drum kits out of jars and pots in the kitchen: babysitting, I found the children’s toy drums and practised on those: until again I hit that moment where my body and the music worked together in one rhythm.

Frustratingly, I never went on to learn piano, or guitar, or drums. I was too interested in books to make time for anything else, too shy to make noise, didn't like trying new things, and didn't know many other kids who played instruments. Maybe this is where state education failed me: I had the interest, but not enough external push to kick my stubbornness up the ass. Something stuck though, from those hours of listening to Bill Haley over and over. When I look at the music I love today, I realise how important that basic Beatles riff on a sticky school keyboard must have been. 

(fourteen years old, then twenty-four years old, and still no better at guitar)

3. Biro tattooed Converse

I only did my Catholic confirmation because I had a vague crush on one of the boys in the group. We were fourteen, and once a week we sat in the cold function room behind the church, which smelled fusty like those dark green bricks you stick plastic flowers in, and talked about God stuff. Orange chairs arranged in a circle, an overenthusiastic nun, and twenty teenagers looking at nothing but the floor. I did not believe in God, but I believed in all the band names I’d tattooed in biro across the sides of my Converse, and I believed in the way the boy I had a slight crush on cocked his head to read those names and nod approvingly. Blink 182. White Lies. Dashboard Confessional. The Jayhawks. The Libertines. Green Day. Jack Johnson. The Killers. 

A giant Federer tattoo sits on top of most of those names now, but look closely underneath and you'll detect a few of them. Ten years on, I still wear the shoes.

Two hundred hours

In the last ten weeks I’ve spent two hundred hours either creased and crumpled on trains and buses, or blown to bits along Waterloo Bridge, or hunched at draughty bus stops trying to avoid the drunkard’s eye. I watch the city slide past me: late at night, the streets glistening with life; or during the quiet midday, suspended alongside brick and window on high line trains that pull serenely past the scurrying Thames, blocks of sunlight clasped in their empty carriages. I’ve inhaled the morning waft of suited males and the evening tang of crisps and gin. 

I love the regular faces: the bearded hipster on the bus looking out of place in this corner of suburbia, the three schoolgirls who always meet at the bus stop outside Tesco, the girl who clutches a different homemade cake every Thursday, the heavy breather watching Seinfeld on his ipad, the fine-boned Asian boy with a man bun and tortoiseshell glasses who sits, eyes closed, so still on such a busy train. The tanned man in tight jeans with a handbag. I sat next to him once in my tomboy clothes, and there was a strange moment when we simultaneously crossed legs at the knee, his movement far more graceful and feminine than mine'll ever be. 

Then there's the disorientating transition between leaving the house in the early morning black, feeling like you're the only person alive in the world, and thirty minutes later boarding one of the sweaty sardine tins herding hordes of suits into the city. Arriving to class late, damp and frazzled. 

I happened to be reading Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust on many of these journeys. And what she says about how modern transport messes up our idea of space, time, scale - our idea of what it is to be human - played itself out as a real life example every day I made that seventeen mile journey between home and city. It was hard to connect the suburbs with the city: the suburban girl with the city girl. Living in the middle of London last year, whenever I came home to the suburbs I felt overwhelmingly different, like I was pulling on somebody else's clothes. This year that feeling repeated itself daily. By the time I’d stepped off the train at Waterloo and breathed the grimy, busy air I was somebody else entirely, with different priorities and preoccupations. And in the evenings, with every inch I was tugged back towards home, I could feel myself shedding that identity. To commute for four hours a day is to be in a permanent state of transition, without actually getting anywhere - it is to be two different people at the same time.

I complain a lot about commuting but actually, the secret is I quite like it. Not the dandruffed shoulders of middle aged men in the morning, not the gladiator tactics of traversing Waterloo Station at rush hour, not the lady at the bus stop who went into great detail about her toe operation while I cast my eye desperately down the road, not the buses that smell of hot breath and squashed stale crisps. 

No, I love the travel, and the knowledge that for a certain amount of time I don't have to do anything, make any decisions, be anyone. I am neither here nor there. I love it when two trains converge to run alongside each other and for a few minutes the two bouncing interiors are not-quite reflections of each other, and my reflection is of somebody else.

___________________

'They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home, in some narcotic dream, now that they are free from the desk and have the fresh air on their cheeks. They put on those bright clothes which they must hang up and lock the key upon all the rest of the day, and are great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need. Dreaming, gesticulating, often muttering a few words aloud, they sweep over the Strand and across Waterloo Bridge whence they will be swung in long rattling trains, still dreaming, to some prim little villa in Barnes or Surbiton where the sight of the clock in the hall and the smell of the supper in the basement puncture the dream.'

- Virginia Woolf

Bits of the mind's string | 01

A friend recently reminded me of the joy of the drafts folder: that unintentional accumulation of Didion-esque bits of string you were too shy/embarrassed/tired/lacking in internet connection to share.

__________


from the summer:

There was music from her neighbour’s flat that night, bluesy notes billowing under the door frames and beating about the windows. Voices mingled with the bass notes in one steady hum. A square of yellow light hung suspended out across the street, so still and solid she felt she could take hold of it and pull it inside.

standing at a bus stop thinking about minimalism and the decluttering trend and Marie Kondo:

I threw out more and more things, clothes and ornaments and books and jewellery and photographs, until I realised I’d made the same mistake my dad did, the winter he pruned the forsythia. ‘It’s just a stump!’ my mum wailed. ‘It won’t flower!’ He’d cut the branches back too far; overpruned them of their precious buds, the things that made the plant alive. In the same way, I’d pruned too much of myself. Not just the things that kept me clothed and occupied, but the things that made me me. I’d clipped my mind’s string too short: I had no extraneous thought to lead me to new, interesting places. I’d furiously scrubbed my brain with whitewash until it was a tabula rasa in the unhappiest sense. I was an empty shell, a husk.  

from Bruce Springsteen's recent Chicago show:

'Independence Day was the first song I wrote about fathers and sons. It’s the kind of song you write when you’re young, and you’re first startled by your parents’ humanity. You’re shocked to realise that they had their own dreams and their own desires, because all you could see was the adult compromises they’ve had to make, and when you’re young you haven’t had to do that yet. I remember the idea of it frightened me, the idea of how they seem locked into a certain world... and all you could feel was the desire to escape that world.'

(side note: slight possibility I might be over-obsessed with Springsteen, ha ha, but had a seminar today on Joyce and Beckett, and how Joyce might've fulfilled a father role for Beckett, which led on to the topic of fathers in general, and how when we're young we behave in opposition to our fathers to escape them... and all I could think about was this quote)

walking through Tavistock Square on a particularly Februaryish day:
Bone cold. The kind that is mirrored in the sky and on people’s faces. Air a purplish white-grey, like a bruise or a gloveless hand. 

__________

Liner notes | 01

(Note: I should have published this ages and ages ago. But hey. September was alright.)

01. Sitting on the ha-ha after several long shifts at work, watching the September sunshine warp n weft.
02. Drinking more coffee than is advisable after buying a cheap handheld milk frother.
03. Saturday morning, sunlight illuminating my bedroom.
04. Finding a ticket stub for the opera in Manchester inside an old copy of Carson McCullers.
05. Nau Sea Sea Sick, short stories about the sea, one of my favourite compilations.
06. Post-run coffee is always a good thing.
07. Struggling through Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, almost giving up, warming to it immensely by the end.
08. Reaching next for Ali Smith's How to be both; a lucky £1 charity shop find.
09. Since their sunset show at End of the Road festival, where I danced so hard I snapped a dungaree buckle, revisiting Future Islands' back catalogue - especially the song Balance.
10. Also listening to a lot of Tame Impala, Sufjan Stevens, and Nathaniel Rateliff's new album. Very excited to see him play in London next month.
11. Watching the BBC adaptation of An Inspector Calls and thinking of when a friend's dad thought we were studying a play called 'Spectacles' for GCSE.

The shower dial

When I moved into a new flat in January this year, I didn't just have to adjust to a new room, a new locality, a new supermarket, a new flatmate. I had to adjust to a new shower temperature.

The personal discipline of a computer science student who was also in the army reserves was something I could learn from. He'd already been in the flat four months, and the shower dial was kept at lukewarm. I knew it had stayed that way for a while because limescale had formed around its position. That first morning, standing under what felt to me like an icy torrent, my hand automatically stretched towards the dial to twist it hotwards. Then I hesitated. I could stand under a hot, comforting shower for a long time. I could sleep in every day. I could eat chocolate for dinner. I could skip lectures. I could smoke. I could quit running. The world was my oyster.

And I did end up doing some of those things. But I never turned that dial.

'Chaz'

March, cold, drizzling. I was returning to the city on a bus full of raindrops and permed hair. I stood by the window and watched the quiet streets stretch along. It was by the river that I saw the elderly gentleman I'd served a cappuccino to every day in the cafe last summer ("not too much froth, just a touch of chocolate"). His stooped lope was painfully familiar to me, but his white hair was longer, still thin on top but puffed out like a white cloud or an Elizabethan ruff around his neck. The drizzle came down heavier now and as the bus swept past I caught a glimpse of him, paused on the stone steps up from the river, trying to extend his umbrella as rainspots flecked his beige trousers.
I thought about the gentleman for the rest of my journey. I thought about his life, every day the same walk, the same cafe, the same order, the same paper. I wondered if he ate the same meals every day and watched the same television programmes. How different his existence was to the lives of the people around me in London, so busy and spontaneous and hectic and unscheduled. I remembered that he was well into his eighties; that he'd lost his wife a few years ago; that he had a son, a tall hairy chap who would occasionally join him for soup in the cafe. And sometimes on a Saturday the gentleman would be accompanied by his best friend of over fifty years (I know this because one day this friend - wiry, energetic, chatty - showed us an entry from his diary of 1963 detailing his first shift as an engineer at the local television studios, where the gentleman also worked - they've been good pals ever since). This friend always referred to the gentleman as 'Chaz'.
I was sure Chaz's life as a studio engineer would've been just as busy as the London lives I witnessed now. I wondered what he made of his past, and whether he was able to link his youth and career to the quiet, loping routines of his existence now, to the silent effort of trying to unfurl an umbrella on a rainswept, empty street.

Home or alone

In the same week that I moved from one flat to another, and was, for no reason at all and for every reason possible, crippled by the blues, I read two essays and one poem. All three seemed connected in that they each captured a slightly different fragment of what I was feeling. Homesick, sort of, missing my family, yes, January blues, definitely. I think I was also finally mourning an end to a part of my life I'll probably never return to: meandering through the months at home with only vague ideas about growing up and adult life.

Adult life. I'm doing this now. I've bought my ticket. I'm on the road to adulthood whether I like it or not. I can go home and have Mum cook my dinner and make my bed and I can sit on the sofa and pretend that the journey is over and I've returned. I know, though, that the journey doesn't end. Like our old video player, the pause button will unpause itself after a bit. The idea of staying at home, of committing to nothing, of burying my head in the sand, ostrich-like, reminds me of that oft-tumblr'd F Scott Fitzgerald quote: 'I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone'. I don't want to leave home, but I don't want to be gone.

Maybe this is why the words of James Wood in his essay 'On Not Going Home' were comforting, his talk of:

'the slow revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’, which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.'

My first week or so in the new flat was very quiet. I was in the centre of the capital yet I hardly saw a soul. My flatmate and friends were still on their Christmas breaks. The longest conversations I had were with baristas and shop assistants. I had unwritten essays to cobble together and every day I walked from flat to supermarket to coffee shop to library. I was lonely. Those first few nights I would stand at the window and watch the city: the outlines of buildings, the columns of yellow squares blinking on and off, the red tail lights disappearing round corners, the odd smudgy black figure slipping past. For the first time ever I felt no love for it. Just a cold, empty feeling, the emotional equivalent of sirens fading into the distance or headlights glancing round an dark empty room. One evening I downloaded a poetry app onto my ipad, and quite by chance, the poem recommended was Amy Lowell's 'A London Thoroughfare, 2am'. It expressed that cold feeling better than I ever could.

Opposite my window,
The moon cuts,
Clean and round,
Through the plum-coloured night.
She cannot light the city;
It is too bright.
It has white lamps,
And glitters coldly.

Then Eva Wiseman tweeted a link to a recent piece by Durga Chew-Bose, 'Since Living Alone'. Beautifully written in itself, and even more beautiful to me for articulating the things I really needed to hear, for turning my ear to a more positive idea of loneliness.  

'In those moments,' Durga writes, 'the whiplash of loneliness can impose temporary amnesia. How did I end up here? Had I lectured myself into some smug and quarantined state of solitude? Was living alone analogous to the emotional moat I construct around myself whenever I listen to one song on repeat, again and again? No, not exactly.'

Because (and here I think of my mum again, and how she always tells me that the lows are just as important as the highs) whilst these one-way-plane-ride moments of loneliness and newness are temporarily terrifying, they're kind of good for me too. 'Staying put in my new place all to my own was akin to the emotional clarity yielded from those first few sips of red wine, or from riding the subway after seeing a movie'. When I resurface in the fleshy, noisy, human world of people and lectures and coffee trips and pubs and parties, my skin feels that little bit tougher. I think Durga might be right: 'living alone ... is a form of self-portraiture, of retracing the same lines over and over - of becoming.'


(It's funny how sometimes, unplanned, the things you read link themselves together, hold their hands out to whatever's preoccupying you at the time. It's nice.)

____

On Not Going Home by James Wood: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n04/james-wood/on-not-going-home
A London Thoroughfare, 2am by Amy Lowell: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/london-thoroughfare-2-am
Since Living Alone by Durga Chew-Bose: http://thehairpin.com/2015/01/since-living-alone

moments from home

I'm going home tomorrow. It's been three months since I moved to the city centre. "Home is a state of mind," I keep repeating to myself, and there is some truth in it. Home is a feeling, a group of people, an occasion, a sort of nostalgia. A house might not be a home; sitting at a bus stop with a loved one might be. There's something tangible there too though. Home is an emotional space, but it's usually also a physical one. Something constructed out of thoughts and senses and moments. And roast dinners.