Blue Dress Hot Mess

She said she had quinoa in her teeth when we had that conversation. I don’t remember that at all. I just remember her laughing. 

The homeless lady outside Victoria station tells me she likes my coat. I think of her, without one, and feel guilty. 

Underground Contemplations:

There is a group of school boys who think the they’re old enough to discuss girls’ profile pictures on Instagram but still suck the velcro handles of their rucksacks between tube stops. The world feels perverse.

She reads Nancy Mitford’s ‘The Pursuit of Love’ and I think oh Madame you are in for a treat. We are standing on the Westbound platform at Victoria, standing clear of the closing doors. It is the 1st of October. I feel fresh; shiny-new. My hair is up and I wear a leopard print designer coat which I bought cheaply off a second hand seller online. I mind the gap as I step onto the train: I am London-ing. 

She makes her way through her second banana just as the tube from Hammersmith to Barking begins to roll. Between bites she speaks loudly in Russian, silver hoops pulling at her lobes like they’re abseiling down her neck. She tucks her banana skins into a stray black plastic clinical glove she happens to have in her Primark bag-for-life, and I watch her and wonder whether she’s a masseuse. Or a murderer. Her coat falls back over her knees, revealing stretched transparent yoga leggings. It begins to make sense: the post-gym bananas. Of course. 

I watch a mouse run between the tracks on the tube. I smile at him. He pokes his whiskers out of the rocks and peers at me wisely. No one else can see him. We share a secret, he and I. The secrets of the vibrating silver lines of railway under the vibrating yellow lights of Hammersmith. 

04/10/25:

I am high off my first drink in a month (champagne, what else?) and a sparkly slinky dress. Trying to go to a concert in rush hour is like marching over a field when your boots are weighed down by mud; a worthless task.

I see Lady Gaga; I sing to songs I don’t know and I scream to songs I do. I conclude that there is nothing more bonding than the 11PM tube back from a concert: the drunk gays talking about bumming each other and recommending moustouriers; the ladies from Derbyshire, horrified by the conversation of the drunk gays and tired by sparkles and Shallow. The drunk gays burst into song. We’re far from the shallow now. A lady complements my trousers. (She means dress, but thanks anyway). We ride high off the tingling drug of one artist, whose lyrics run like coke through our veins, up our noses (we all smell of sweat, having danced for four hours. No one cares), to the very follicles of hair on the tops of our heads. We feel intoxicated. We feel like friends, Lady Gaga and I; Lady Gaga and that beautiful gay man who looks like a Greek Adonis standing at the opposite end of the carriage; Lady Gaga and my friends, my world, my people all connected tonight — all close under the stars of iPhone torches waving to the Shallow: Now. 

05/10/25:

I have new hair and I feel like Rachel Green. Between the ages of 17 and 19 she was all I wanted to be. I am getting back to that, somehow. I walk down the platform at Marylebone as part of that crazed pack which has assembled in front of the big screens in the foyer area before the train is announced and which waits, tongues lolling (often encircling AMT sandwiches) like salivating beasts, waiting, waiting for the platform number to be announced. We are like hyenas around a corpse, but there is invisible wire around the body and we cannot touch it. We pant. We eye one another warily, conscious that someone else’s shoulder in front of the barrier poses a threat of mammoth proportions to your front-facing seat at a comfortable table-of-four on the 16:45 to Oxford. We all pretend we don’t know exactly which platform is about to flicker in orange neon onto the big screen; we find it easier, somehow, to engage in this race, this panting madness, this self-imposed hunted threat. It is platform 6: it is always platform 6. 

I join the rush, standing tall and shaking my umbrella. I am above running. Instead, I sway down the platform, watching hunched, stick-thin ladies power walking ahead of me and wondering who hurt them when they were children to make them face the world with a staircase climbing their spine (they wear it on the outside, like dinosaur spikes. It looks heavy, a permanent crick, a bend). A seat, to me, is not that important, though I am tired (18,000 steps were danced to Lady Gaga last night) and wet. I sway my head; caramel blonde hair ripples in a wave from under my hood. If I were being truly specific, I’d call it salted caramel; perhaps even toffee cappuccino. Or salted-caramel-maple? No, too far. It makes me feel new; it makes me feel like Rachel Green; it makes me feel happy. I have a job as an assistant in fashion; (this means I post parcels, but that doesn’t matter). 

(The boy I sit down opposite is only semi-handsome until he opens his mouth. Australian, slight accent: hot). 

I am meeting friends for dinner in an Italian in Bicester Village and I feel like a lady who Goes Out to Dinner on a Friday night. We will eat pasta; perhaps drink wine (one of us is pregnant). I will go home, show off my new hair, feel guilty and sorry and horrible because I have new glossy caramel latte hair when my mother is having hers shaved for cancer treatment in two day’s time. I will go to bed feeling a little dissatisfied with my familial situation, but full of pasta (and possibly wine; one of us is pregnant) and full of the love and the banal gossip of girlfriends I haven’t seen for months. I will go to bed full of thoughts on just what to call my new hair (toffee Werther’s Original. Cinnamon butter coffee). I will feel pleased, because I am writing again (a week of drought left me parched and waif-like, silently begging the part of my brain – beneath the cookie batter hair – to rouse from its stupid self-indulgent slumber itself and write, write, write). 

I will bury my grandfather tomorrow. 

09/10/25:

All it took was a bit of love and a Thursday and I felt myself again: leopard coat; blue mascara. I am the same girl who wished this life upon herself four months ago, walking the same gum-infused staircase and smelling the same weed. Now I wear Victoria Beckham make up and eat breakfast in the office. October is here, and this year I have chosen to like her. She is moody: she makes the trees dance naked for her, conducting them in a raucous cabaret until all their inhibitions have floated slowly to the pavement. She makes me pull a thick white scarf on every morning, and makes me carry it home every evening because it is suddenly too warm to wear around my neck. I am never warm. The chill has set in, but it is not unshakable yet. That only happens when I’m ill. And this year, I refuse to get ill. October is the innocence of the little girl screaming “A moon — a whole moon!” at 8AM and thrusting a stubby little finger into the morning-blue sky; it is the used condom in the Victoria street which makes me balk and block out all thoughts on my way to the tube. It is the school boys eating bright pink Greggs donuts and the academics studying the intricacies of politics in Prague during the Second World War. October is a dichotomy. A contradiction. A slice of oozing caramel latte hair and chocolate oat bars in the afternoon. I buy a Dyson airwrap in the Amazon Prime Day sales and look at flying to Australia for New Year. Life feels present: here, on the balcony, in the bedroom, in my sofa in a little flat in Pimlico. I watch the lift of Battersea Power Station rise tentatively above London. The lift looks out at October: front row seats in the Heavens on the dancing cabaret below. (The trees are removing their skirts. Only stockings remain).   

14/10/25:

I stop myself from singing in the shower. I am ill, and I have to preserve the rasp of a voice I have for my 9AM Zoom call. After that, I can rasp all I like. I wear my grandfather’s blue jumper and sleep in his bed; he died a month ago. I feel close to him in a nice way, but as though I am a foreign body, a phoney 22-year old all alive and breathing and making soup in his hot kitchen and wondering where he is. The next day I stuff an M&S red velvet cake into my bag and head out of the door to pick up a Gail’s breakfast treat for someone’s birthday in the office. I wear my grandfather’s red waistcoat which hangs like a dress over my white balloon trousers, and I chuckle a small smile to myself because his waist was at least 7 times larger than my own. 

15/10/25:

It is too noisy and it smells like sick. London is suddenly very much somewhere I do not what to be. I walk down the middle of the pavement and feel as though I’m swimming; my eyes are open under water but the peripheral is blurred and all my focus, all my energy, is channeled into surging forwards, pushing pushing towards that space between the water and the air, that space between the cracks in the pavement, that space around the tunnel of the tube. I am in space; I most definitely have a fever. Perhaps it’s called Country Girl in London? Code name: COVID. 

18/10/25:

A bird in the house means death. My other grandfather died overnight, and now I have no more left. He was all Carry On films and angels. The house phone rings at 6:16AM. There is a bird in the upstairs bathroom: delicate, tiny, golden and tawny and singing loudly-softly in pain and fear and sorrow; winged death perched on the loo seat.