Blue Dress Hot Mess

Evening:

I need to remember all the things which bring me joy and the pockets of sunshine and the dying sun. There is a slip of a jockey moon and girls with Prada bags singing on the station. I think ruefully that I’d be singing too if I were carrying a Prada shopping bag. Instead I sit and watch Bicester go by out of the taxi window, a grim smile attempting to light my taught lips. I feel continually nothing. I feel heavy. I physically feel the bags under my eyes, like they are weighted and dragging. They are the cloths around the spectre, the rags which mummify the body. I feel like a toddler dragging her feet, but I feel like an emotionless snowman at the same time. I feel sick. The fake leather of my coat mixes badly with the synthetic stench of the taxi’s interior. (This emanates from a tree swinging in the artificial wind of the air conditioning from the rear-view mirror). I need the loo; I am cold. So much negativity. So little time. 

My heart and mind feel like they’re breaking. I think I’m going to cry on the train. I think my tears won’t be quiet – more like noisy, wracking sobs – so I won’t cry them at all. 

A man on the train has a Christmas Costa mug; it is 27th October. Too early, just a little. I want Christmas; I pine for Christmas (stupid joke). I want sunshine though, too, and frost and mulled wine and more than anything I want to cry. 

28/10/25:

I walk through Mayfair at night and eat yoghurt straight out of the pot by Hanover Square. I am carrying a PR goodie bag from Armani Beauty, and I am going home. I feel London-ified. I feel young again, girlish. Giddy.

31/10/25:

I have Baron Bigod and blueberries. I have a copy of this month’s Vogue. I have a heart and a soul and a face and I am conscious of all of the above. I am trying to make my way in the world. I board the tube with a lot of witches and blood. I am conscious (not self-conscious. Merely living, alive, aware, awake, alert – all the synonyms of ‘conscious’, so Google Thesaurus tells me): the Baron Bigod smells, despite its wicker wrapping. The blueberries are days old already, and satisfactorily squidgy to touch. My Vogue is wet and a handsome boy has got on the tube: what to do: rush hour; nothing to do but fantasize. My heart, again, I am aware of. My soul is quieter – shadowier – at the moment. It is the shade under the apple tree; it is the cat cowering in the gutter. (I think of Cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and smile at my visual replay of the final soggy scene). My face I am conscious of: it is there, made-up, tight. It is 22. It has been covered in foundation since 7:35 this morning and it is suffering for it; too much rain, too many tissues, too much stale air and gum-fresh breath on the tube. (Severe delays). Halloween. I have Baron Bigod and Blueberries. And if nothing else, I like the way that sounds. 

03/11/25:

Men queue for fish and chips at 16:43pm. They are all men; they all stand with their feet apart as though they are pirates rocking on a ship’s bow, looking out — far out to sea. I am on my way to London, in the back of a taxi, feeling headachy and grateful and windswept and sad. All at once. My mind is like a wind-turbine and it churns, churns, churns. I pull my hood up on the train, the way I like to on a Monday evening. I never thought I’d be a hoodie girl, but I am, and I embrace it. I embrace the November wind, the clouds so fast they have overtaken the scudding stage and are now speeding through the highway of the sky with no regard for the tourist stops (viz. the moon (so nearly full again), the stars (so nearly out again), the pink (so clearly blushing behind the 4pm foundation of darkness)). This foundation is two shades too dark; if I were a make-up artist I’d lighten it a little, highlight the space between the moon and the station platform, contour the edges of the train tracks which disappear at the tip of the horizon. Perhaps God is not a make-up artist. Perhaps God chooses not to illuminate our earth’s face all the time to make way for the shadows to dance; I feel I am in the blue-smudge tired eye bags of the day, of the year, of the period in my life. I stand in the under-eye shadow. I stand in the puffs of dust which fall after long days at work. The concealer fades; it reveals nothing. It concealed nothing in the first place. The secrets I thought were hidden by the patchy drugstore make-up purchased after school in a teenage desire to be a grown up are darker now I see them through adult eyes. I have discovered nothing in adulthood. I buy more expensive make-up, and try to patch over the same dark circles as slumped beneath my teenage eyes. Nothing changes; everything is different. Everything is the same; nothing perpetual. I am sitting under my hood on the Monday evening train to London Marylebone. (I think later: I am sitting under my hood like a gnome under a flowerpot. But I don’t think gnomes actually live under flowerpots. I feel topsey-turvey; Little Miss Pepperpot). My work lies ahead of me, my friends, my life. The tracks yawn into the distance; they are un-contoured. Ill defined. 

I find myself wondering whether the man on the tube is married to a man or a woman. He is wearing a thick gold band around his left ring ringer, green socks tucked into grey loafers and a garish orange and red cardi, undone. It doesn’t matter, I am just curious. These people have lives. Like me. 

There is a rat amongst the pigeons. Rat not cat. On the tube. Not a mat in sight. Take that, Dr Seuss.

I read Normal People on the tube and feel very like a Normal Person and an Extremely Abnormal Person all at the same time. I have felt lately completely separate from myself, as though I am either my head or my body but I am not both. The two are not connected, rather the former looks down on the latter – down the immense space which is provided by the stretch of my neck – with eyes which are squinted in observation, intensely curious but entirely separate and above. I am like the angels of heaven and the eyes of the monsters. The gap between myself and my brain – or my brain and my bodily self, because sometimes I am more in my brain than I am in my slight body – means that I can have multiple conversations, go hours, days, parties, dinners, nights, without once being present at all. I function like a Normal Person. I feel nothing. That cannot be Normal. If I feel anything, it is like one of those dashboard dolls with a bobby head on a wire spring which wobbles every time the steering wheel moves. They are often miniature Queens of England. At least their wobbles are topped off by crowns. My wobble seems endless, my neck giraffe-like long, the top of my head appallingly bare and exposed and empty. I should find a hat. I should shrink my neck, come down to earth. I should drink Cosmos on a Saturday night and make miso pesto and watch Gilmore Girls with the dog on my knee. I should feel like I am actually there, drinking the sugar-sweet pink liqueur, pulsing the pungent leaves of fridge-cold basil, pulling the burrs out of the dog’s long leg hair. I should shrink myself back down to earth, push my head into my neck and my neck into my shoulders and my shoulders into my body (because the thigh bone is connected to the hip bone and The hip bone’s connected to the backbone and we’re Doin’ the Skeleton Dance). I am nothing but a skeleton; but my vertebrae ache. I roll my neck; it makes a clicking noise, and that feels real. The physical sensations of my body make me more than a skeleton; I conclude on Sunday night that I am a skeleton who drinks Cosmos. If that is my destiny, I am happy with it: it is me; it is kismet. 

We bury my second grandfather with tears and incense. 

I feel like a stowaway in dungarees and a fur coat. People pull up their little red cars next to me in the street in order to wish my mother well. (They are so kind it makes me want to cry, but that is not their intention, so I won’t). I scoop peanut butter onto dates and feel it squidge around my teeth, around the tips of my gums. I make pesto and cookie dough and store both in the freezer. Perhaps I am a squirrel; perhaps a hedgehog. (Perhaps a frog). Oh how I’d like to be French. 

London seems unusually lifeless from the windows of the train on a Monday evening. It is barely 6pm, and I see few lights. The sun set as I walked up the station steps — bags on each shoulder, loafer over loafer over the platform bridge, glance at the baccie box on the ledge which looks on the brink of suicide. Death by the 4:53 to Marylebone. It’s only tobacco. Let it die. The air is suddenly cooler now that the pink orange sky has turned black.

4.5 degrees in glaring, blinking white on the taxi dashboard. The skeleton thinks, feels, knows. Shivers. December comes; I hope it brings the snow.