Blue Dress Hot Mess

She calls it yog-hurt. This makes her the Posh Grandmother. I giggle. I call it Yog-hurt too. 

29/12/25:

There are shadowed parts of my soul which I intend to expose to the light in Australia. I picture myself under the shade of a tree, holding an Aperol Spritz. I am staring out to sea – clear, turquoise blue – and, occasionally, I am writing in this pink notebook. The one which came with me to Paris. The one which will come with me to Australia. To Melbourne. To the clean patch of sand in the shade of my tree. My soul’s shadows blow and change shape in the wind. Shape and depth – grey to black to chestnut-light brown. They are cats lying on the hot tiles of some Grecian villa (where I have never been), and they are flexing their claws threateningly at Australia like she is a mouse caught in their grasp. She is no such thing. She smiles at them: all kangaroo. Not a mouse in sight. A Joey. A “good’day mate”. A cork hat (a smug cricketing jibe). A best friend, laughing in the blinding sunlight, viewed through jet-lagged bagged eyes (other than on my face, I packed remarkably (impressively) lightly) from the passenger side. Put your claws away, cats. I’m coming to Australia. Açai bowls and Aperols only from now on. 

Later:

I push open the door of Chipping Norton theatre with the shoulder of my grey denim jacket. I have smiled goodbye to the ticket ladies (“I have a flight”, zooming motion with my hand), and the air smells fittingly like chips (the crispy kind. Deep fat fried). I leave the pantomime behind me (yes, it’s behind you); I leave the singing Beauty (almost an hour in, and we’re yet to discover her Beast). She sings of the world external to her own heaving chest, of the blue skies and big cities and fears to be conquered beyond the fictional walled horizon of her short wooden stage. (The stage lights begin to feel clinical, like those in a doctor’s waiting room. Fake; stuck. Unlike the rushing headlights of the motorway, which (as I write this in my head, pretending to sleep but feeling excitement like a burning pot in my stomach — I am going to Australia) feel like they are flowing, pulsing, glowing towards a future destination — unknown — which keeps them roaring, driving between Christmas and New Year, between every promise of the future and disappointment of the past). I am leaving behind me the faces of my family, expectant in the stage lights, leaning forwards off their front-row crushed velvet flip-up seats in order to observe my reaction to Beauty’s discovery song, as though somehow this pantomime star and I must resonate with one another, as if somehow she and I are one on our great adventures in life (young, innocent, hopeful: exploring. A Beauty — a Beast? A Princess and I). I am their Intrepid Explorer. I am their Brave One, their Columbus. I am only going half way across the world (or is Australia the whole way? Can one go the whole way across the world? East to West, West to East? Is it even possible? That is a maths question I could never solve) to lie on the beach and sit with a friend and laugh, laugh, laugh. To escape from other people’s problems. To inhabit only my own. It is their problems, their lives I will leave behind. Beauty’s world is external. My world is internal. (I am aware of how selfish i am). They are worlds of vast horizons, but different country. I feel prepared for them, wholly. I sit and eat my first açai bowl of the holiday, and drink kombucha at 7:30PM. My gate will be announced in 20 minutes. I wait, wait, wait. 

I had forgotten what it was like to be writing. To be in a writing state. To be constantly aware, as though every second as I live and breathe I want to write too. It is as present as living or being. Every face is a story and every action operatic in its drama. I grieve in this state; like butterflies, uncatchable, I grieve in the swell and the wake of constant emotion. (I am satisfied with the double entendre; morbid, perhaps). 

Oh, baby, I’m going to Australia. The chestnuts roasting on an open fire seem obnoxious in the Terminal 4 ladies loos. So does Frosty singing in a squeaky voice about being a snowman. It will be hot in Australia. He will melt. 

England is nothing but lights beneath me. I am tucked under a blue rug in the central aisle of a China Eastern Airways flight which smells like bodies and fish. (Unsexy). Heaven is above me, around me, below me: a faint haze on the horizon at the tip of the motorway, a blur of orange glowing at the peak of a runway. I am skating on the mirror ice-rink of the earth. It sits horizontal (a position I will not be in for another 48 hours, by the time I have sat on this plane and the next) between Heaven and Earth, a reflective pool, iced over in December and chipping, chipping — frost on the morning windscreen. I am a skater, an ellipsis. A hovering.

I am grinning. Ear to ear in the queue in Heathrow Terminal 4, section B (am I sectioned?). I am going to Australia. Quite alone.

I pick one of my dog’s long white hairs out of my suitcase’s wheel in airport security and smile. I feel like adventure. I feel like Pret. 

I do squats in the air to wiggle my legs, and borrow toothpaste off some girls in the queue. When I am brushing my teeth I picture my white foamed spit trickling down the key hole in the sky, falling, falling, some odd kind of winter snow. I have never brushed my teeth on a plane before. Perhaps in some kind of way I am growing up. 

I find it funny to think that in another 24 hours I’ll be in another patch of sky. Earth feels very far away. I am so high. So far. So oddly happy. Elated. 

It begins to feel less fun at 3:17AM. My eyes feels drugged, my mind razor-foggy. It is as though someone Chinese-whispered the playground chant: Silence in the courtyard, silence in the street, the biggest, fattest idiot is just about to speak. The plane is hushed. Silence in the aeroplane, silence in the sky. The most annoying passenger is just about to cry. 

Sleeping bodies lie. I begin to feel better at 6:38AM exactly, after the most disgusting sausage and egg omelette and the most delicious croissant I’ve ever tasted. You win some you lose some. I brush my teeth again for something to do. I will arrive in Shanghai exhausted and minty fresh, but at least I am full of croissant. I intend to find coffee; and then somewhere to sit and rest. 

She sings that the Beauty is within us. It is without us too. If we were not here, the Beauty would still exist. I am glad I am here; is beauty true beauty if it is unappreciated? Silly question: it seems to me, quite plainly, yes.