Blue Dress Hot Mess

She drinks water out of a strawberry jam jar on the tube at 8:51am. We are going to Ealing Broadway (I descend at Hammersmith: late on my first day of work). I drink coffee out of a travel mug like a normal person (not out of a strawberry jam jar like an abnormal person), and hug it closely to my chest in the cram at Victoria like a Mummy Bear with her first-born cub. I must have become one of those people to whom coffee is so important that they use it like a crutch; I am not yet a bent-double coffee-abusing invalid, but in my newfound Career-Me Persona, a travelling coffee mug has become a personality trait. 

(Later): I feel surprisingly clear-headed after three cocktails and a team event on a Tuesday night in an unknown part of London. I feel proud of myself: like I’m growing up. (I feel this should be written in italics).

24/08/25:

My skin is warm in the last of the summer sun. Everyone around me seems in love – arms up over the other’s shoulders, hands entwined and head resting on the other’s lap. I am not in love. The sea sparkles: there are crystals in my rock (which is hard, and grates my bikini-bare bottom like Parmesan in every reshuffle-to-get-comfortable I try (and fail) to make. We are in Wales; the waves lap and the sky is grey on the horizon). My skin is warmed by the sun and I am not in love. These seem in the light of day to be sure-fire certainties in a world of unknowns, as certain as the hardness of my rock and the grating of my bottom. There are so many facts surrounding my life: my mother has cancer, my grandfathers are dying, my dog is howling and sitting on an abandoned surfboard because another dog on the beach is on heat and he wants to hump her. I do not want him to be a sex-pest; he is being castrated next week (shh, don’t tell him). My skin is warmed by the last of the summer sun, but my bikini bottoms are wet and claggy and cold and I am wearing a woolen jumper over my bikini top so that the dampness seeps into soft sheepskin and smells like a tired ewe on a rainy day. A stray saltwater drip runs like a tear down my back. My family play cricket. My friends play with them. My dog howls. I will release the dog and go and play cricket too. 

You can’t bark with a ball in your mouth. That appears profound, somehow.

31/08/25:

My mother announced at breakfast that she thinks it’s her turn to have a mental breakdown. Her father has just died, and she has breast cancer. Isn’t that breakdown enough? I take the dog for a walk around the canal, and it looks like it’s about to thunder. I meet a man with ginger hair with an enormous black rucksack who looks like he’s training for the army. When he gets closer, I see the Sandhurst crest pulled taut over the left-hand side of his chest. We smile at each other through the wind, and he wiggles his fingers at my dog who greets him like a long-lost friend. You’al’right? he asks. I smile and say hiya and walk on, pulling the dog. Am I all right? His question is a – question mark–thought bubble–uncertain –; it’s an empty cloud above my head. I leave my family at lunchtime and feel guilty that I do, but I go and meet two Australian girls who regale me with tales of last night’s adventures: they drank two bottles of wine; got locked out; slept on the doorstep; couldn’t get back into the houses in which they are nannies. I drive them to collect their bags at last night’s drinks spot, and as I sip my smoothie I feel very far away from myself and from my family and yet I feel wholly in my body and in my head. Laughing with them feels so normal that I am glad – so glad – that my dog and I went for brunch on the day my grandfather died.

I smell pesto on the wind and think I must be hallucinating. Maybe Grampy is sending me whiffs of my favourite food from heaven. I picture my grandmother bringing him a large bowl of pasta and pesto and smiling, in the way they used to do after they’d picked us up from school on a Monday night. She carries over the pasta and pesto in my favourite blue bowls, which I haven’t used since she died five years ago. Now my grandfather has gone too I might claim them as my own. I picture them drinking tea and watching Gavin and Stacey in heaven. I picture Granny ticking him off; she is so pleased to see him. A large tear runs down my cheek, and it still looks like it is about to rain. He is now meeting with parents I never met, with a grandson who never got to grow up, with a wife who died too early, and with friends he worked with for years. He talking about crop yields and is solving the world with politics. And all his dogs – Socrates, Plato – all his cows are with him too. He will miss us: his three little girls, their four little girls, their families. He will miss us.

Tea is at 10 past 4. It always was and it always will be. That is a legacy which will not go unmarked. That and the fact that I will never look at a corned beef sandwich and not think of him.

The Tube:

People hear terrible news everyday and they hear great news everyday. People do their make-up on the tube and have chihuahuas which look like white rats. People learn Chinese out of text books with airpods in their ears, hair tucked back, fingers tracing unknown characters in the stagnant underground air which has a heavy, languid scent of men’s aftershave. (I balk silently; it is too early for Lynx Africa). The chihuahua settles in its owner’s lap, yawns, and sleeps. A 7:59am nap. I have become a little fond of the chihuahua-rat. He sleeps soundly and I sympathise. Curl-up and let the world go by. 

She’s still doing her make-up. She’s given up doing Chinese. The dog is still asleep. I’m in Hammersmith – must get off. 

The sun shines and that makes me happy. The commute on the tube feels like a long, slow-moving goldfish swimming now above the rubbly water of London’s hollow stench. We are in a glass-house – there are reflections on the floor, shadows of the door in the morning light. It is early September and things are changing. I get off the tube. 

I left with an open bottle of flat champagne and returned with a closed carton of almond milk. What is my life? I wonder vaguely, as I smile at the blonde girl in the reflection of a clapped-out office window in West London who feels just like Andy in The Devil Wears Prada. Believing this is the only way to keep it glamorous.

As I stand and wait for the right train (go me; living in London means knowing you don’t just board any train on the right line at the right station – they may be going to the wrong place) Westbound platform-side in an empty St James’ Park at ten past eight AM a small lady shuffles past, pauses, reverses. She pulls a wrinkled flyer out of her pocket. Jesus loves you? she asks, smiling. I smile with relief (although what else did I think she was going to do?) and say – to what I’m not quite sure – “I’m fine, thank you!”. I am about to tell her I already Believe (capitals surely unnecessary? They make me feel a) evangelical or b) like a Belieber – which I am) when a train to Richmond rumbles up. She seems not to mind, beams a well-meaning grin and shuffles off again. I want to reassure her it’s All Alright. My grandfather is dead and my mother has cancer. It’s All Alright. No, really. 

I have forgotten earrings. I never leave the house without earrings. I feel oddly empty and embarrassed of myself. At least the single hoop which rings my right mid-ear remains unmoved. She clings on like the last one on the dance floor when the club closes at 3am. She is all diamonds and no cares. A constant.

The train arrives in the pouring rain but I think that it’s going the wrong way. Physically, I mean. It is definitely going to the right place, but I think it’s travelling in the same direction as the train I stepped off from earlier this morning. Can’t be. Mind playing tricks. Circle line going in circles? Today I have made an uncooked batch of meringues, sent parcels, walked, counted out post-it notes (24) and ordered washed up milk frothers. I visited our new office. I spoke to the builder and pretended I knew about fibre-plug sockets. What is my job, you wonder?

I saw a man pissing on Hammersmith station. I did not want to see his penis. It was an unexpected and probably unwelcome surprise, but I am not giving it enough thought to survey my emotions on the subject. 

03/09/25:

I am sitting and eating alone in Itsu’s window minutes – seconds – away from my sister’s flat where she and her boyfriend are also sitting and eating. Too much is happening and I want to think about it but all I do is suck up noodles and correct my posture and watch a pigeon have a foot bath in an enormous dirty puddle. 

Grim faces peer out under dripping umbrellas. The British ability to smile at the rain – good for the crops – is failing slightly on the 8am commuter trail down Westminster pavements which resemble Niagara falls. 

Evening, 04/09/25:

The stars come out halfway down the M25. We leave London behind us, and with it the moon. (We drive due North). 

I run a bath with no plug. Surely a first sign of madness? I picture myself writing this down, and call the plug a tap. I run a bath with no tap. Surely a first sign of madness?

14/09/25:

The lady opposite seems stressed for a 5pm Sunday evening journey to London Marylebone. The girl at High Wycombe shouts “Is this the train for Marylebone?” and lugs her suitcase through the closing doors just in time. “Those stairs are brutal“, she says, to the carriage in general. I give her a sympathetic smile: we are each in our own worlds. I am in mine: it consists of a good book, a court case, a murder. It consists of London Fashion Week and bone broth and my father sitting next to me reading a detective book in French. Cold raindrops stream down the window, tears on the hot, flushed face of the carriage within. A 60-year-old lady eats vivid orange sweets as noisily as if she were at the cinema, which is the only permissible place to eat vivid orange sweets at such volume. Murders, a court case, a book. An alternate universe which is as unhappy as our own. 

I see tiny babies and parrots on cyclist’s shoulders and inside-out dresses and one-earringed girls and men watching porn in the morning. I see a letter blu-taked to a red phone box addressed to ‘Dear Stranger’; I conclude that none of us are strangers: we are colleagues in the work of life. (How sickening).

It smells like autumn and acorns and conkers and dead fruit. We eat tiramisu at midnight: September.