Blue Dress Hot Mess

26-27th May 2025

26/05/2025:

We have just had a couples Thai Bali massage. It lasted an hour, and was a full-on Leisure Centre swimming pool emersion. She did waterfalls down my calves and raindrops on my feet and flips on my stomach. It was ticklish and encasing and felt like oil and tasted like ginger. It was a full-scale bodily assault – a five year old’s birthday party at that Leisure Centre pool – but pure Bali-sent Heaven at the same time. 

27/06/2025:

Breakfast is not busy, but everyone here appears saturated; stagnant; as though I’m sitting in an Edward Hopper painting and I’m the only living thing. Except here it’s in reverse — it’s not night time, not a bar, but morning – 9 o’clock – and breakfast — breakfast, surely the most hopeful meal of any day, so full of possibility (cheesecake?; Polish blood sausage?), the day like a slug stretched out before you? I wonder at all these people, on their tables, in their freeze-frame worlds. I wonder that their lives can weigh so heavily on them at breakfast. I hope their days improve. (I, the Hopper-esque redhead draped over the midnight bar – the 9am breakfast table – am going to get my nails done. When in Eastern Europe and all… My slug is slinking happily towards a day of modern monuments and ancient history: that is Poland).

My face feels sticky, and I have been waxed and plucked and pulled in so many directions I feel like I might have got a free version of a face lift. They brought me a coconut iced coffee and I sat on a high-spin chair staring at myself in a pink-edged mirror as the slug (which had been my Day at breakfast, slinking towards culture with a sticky trail for me to follow in his wake) became two thick brows above my suddenly smaller blue-green eyes. Between the thick black – black! I asked for ‘natural brown’ – slug-eyebrows was a red-raw bridge which completed my new monobrow, the less pretty effect of the sparkly gold wax my Ukrainian beautician (who looked younger than me) had painted around where she thought my eyebrows should be (I think she must have visited Essex; or perhaps she’s a fan of TOWIE). The slugs are now a paler black, but far from natural. The central red bridge which had been rivalling San Francisco’s Golden Gate is now fading to my usual pale-white skin tone. The upper half of my face still feels frozen in place, but I like the feeling of being “beautified” so much that I would do it all again. (In fact, I am about to; my nails are still untended and unkempt, and carry both the remmenants of a coral varnish I theoretically removed three days ago, and some of the soil and mud of Oxfordshire under their whites). A feminist twinge deep within me baulks at my desire for “Beauty”. I had a very interesting, unusually objective conversation with my mother on the way to the airport, in which we disagreed over the “Beauty” of a friend. Should it be Big B and little b for the beauty of the soul and the standardised beauty of society? Should the societal expectation of beauty simply cease to exist and give way to Beauty of personhood towards which we all surely should strive? If we strive for that and that alone, I would have saved over £70 this morning. Beauty of the Self is entirely free. But the secondary beauty, the societal beauty, is perhaps – can be, perhaps – just a form of self-care. In that case, it is undeniably worth investing in. (I hear someone from the back of the crowd heckle: “Excuses!” at my cringing inner-feminist. I ignore them, and move swiftly on).

12:26pm:

I have found a park, an empty bench, and am sitting writing and eating a cardamom and rose bun with my trousers rolled up and my legs tucked under me and my face (still immovable from the eyebrows up) towards the sun. I am being ogled at by about 30 school children – still young enough for even the boys-pairs to be holding hands – but I think they are only jealous of my cardamom bun. (I am making love to it, slowly, with the appreciation of an artist). I have said it before but I will say it again — life is gentle, done my way. It has been a tough day, after all. One and a half hours of intense beauty treatments – only nails and brows, but who knew a French manicure could take so long (clearly that Oxfordshire soil was hard to budge)? A coconut iced coffee, a caramel-haired spaniel with a bow around her ear. Poland is a cloudless sky with cobblestones, and I am going in search of its culture. Castle-bound. (The white tips of my French manicure are sticky with sugary bun. Roses and sweets. Sunshine down my neck. A man in dungarees; red checked shirt; cigarette. Everyone’s lives are on their sluggish trail. Nothing is more or less complicated than that).