Blue Dress Hot Mess

Someone is wearing peppermint perfume on the platform. It is not quite sweet enough to smell like candy canes, or I’d draw the comparison with Christmas. Try hard. 

I catch up with a friend for a steaming peppermint tea in a fogged up Pret near Hammersmith station. We bemoan our underpaid first jobs and gossip about longstanding mutual friends. They are hooking up. That world feels a million miles away, but it is very near really (just two stops on the tube). The tea is hot and the first sip through the plastic lid scolds my tongue so that for the rest of the drink all I taste is bitterness with a hint of mint. It is delicious nonetheless, and entirely useless because really the drink is an excuse (a teabag string to fiddle with) for a twice-rescheduled catch up between girls who were thrown together aged 2 and never quite grew apart. The stage is a little further from the playground, the eyes a little tireder, the conversation more rapid and jaded. 

03/12/25:

The roofs are teenage boys lingering outside the school gates. They have frosted tips and puffs of smoke rise surreptitiously from the creases in their coat collars. 

04/12/25:

I feel somehow lighter. I woke up at 6:20AM and danced around the flat to Last Christmas. I greeted the lady who clears up the bins on the opposite side of the street, and as I threw in my recycling she smiled at me like a local. Part of some sort of furniture; street-side: Pimlico. I decide on my way to Victoria Tube that I do not want to BE anyone else. I would like to live someone else’s life, just for a day. But still live it by being me. I think I’d like Lila Moss’s existence. I don’t know why but her name is the one which knocks persistently at my mind during this internal morning debate on the way to the tube – Lila Moss, Lila Moss, Lila Moss – like somehow Kate Moss’s wide-cheeked beauty of a daughter’s existence is in any way easier or more thrilling than my own. (The internal debate is loud — raging — and drowns out the external business of normal London life; I hear sirens, very far away (a police car flashes by). I smell the familiarly pallid stench of the homeless man’s camp outside the Chinese Pink Pancake shop, but for once the smell does not overwhelm me completely (he sits, hunched, with a cigarette on a suitcase). I know I am happy to be me. I’d still take Lila’s life, just for a day). 

I begin to recognise the people on the tube. We go about our morning lives together, daily, never saying a word (we occasionally grunt when someone pushes into us, but that can’t count in the Oxford English Dictionary even as City Slang). One little girl has a different snack every morning. Yesterday it was a croissant from Greggs; this morning she is half way through a wrinkled packet of Pomm Bears. It is hardly a nutritious diet, but it is varied. She bubbles with laughter, and makes the journey between platforms at Hammersmith like the most seasoned mid-life commenter. I would put her at about 8 years old. The age is a figure and nothing more. 

My sister got engaged and I got a tattoo. It is not a direct correlation, but she wears a large blue sapphire on her left hand and I wear stars and moons down the spine of my right. Both are forever. For ever. I wonder what that means. I wonder it at 3AM when I cannot sleep and I hear the December rain wetting the Pimlico streets; I wonder what it really means. For Ever. She has chosen her fate and sealed it with a ring below her knuckle, and I chose mine and sealed it with ink below my skin. I would not say no to a diamond. But, for now, ink will do. Ink and Jude Law in ‘The Holiday’. 

08/12/25:

I am in the Christmas lights of London and I run to catch the train at Hammersmith. My burst through the closing doors is less than dignified, but it means I will push open the gold grate which guards the Pimlico flat’s black door 10 minutes earlier than usual, and that feels significant. It is not; in the scheme of December, my week, my life, it is tiny. I smile at my own insignificance. I am in the Christmas lights of London, and I am wholly responsible for locking up an office which does not belong to me. I have ink down my fingers and I smell weed on the tube. (I smell the weed; I do not smell of the weed. There is a distinction). I like her pleated suede loafers, so I send her a smile which I hope conveys this fact. Smiling is a hard language to translate; a hard parcel to deliver to the correct door. (In this case, I think she missed the delivery; no one was home behind the distracted blue eyes and tired, end-of-work glaze (not the doughnut kind). I hope I can redeliver to the correct address another time. (Please reschedule online). 

As it turns out, it was significant that I burst onto that tube. That I bothered to run for it. That I left work 10 minutes early because I was the last one in the office on a raining December Monday. Hugh Grant was on that tube. He got off at Earl’s Court and he wore a new navy Barbour jacket. My stomach did about 15 flips before I decided to stop grinning and attempted an “I know who you are and I LOVE YOU and I don’t want to embarrass you by acknowledging either of these facts” smile. I mentally checked how I might look; blue woolen hat, blue woolen scarf in a much darker shade (dammit – they should have been matching), leopard print coat (this, at least, I like). Long red-blonde plait down my back. Tired eyes (tiredness hidden by the light of love and flush of unknowable pleasure and immeasurable joy). Love Actually is All Around. I message my uni friend’s group chat, and receive three immediate replies: one – what does he smell like. Two (from my ex boyfriend) – don’t be silly, I haven’t got on the tube yet. And three (which sums my emotions up entirely): Merry Christmas, Cressy!

I touched the same pole as he held on my way off the tube. Gosh how I wish that were a euphemism. We are connected, he and I. Our souls have mingled in the December cold of the Underground. Shared Earl’s Court breaths and mindless stares. 

09/12/25:

I catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window and smile because she looks entirely like Me. Wide-eyes and hair unleashed from a two-day old braid sprouting like a rained-on lion’s down my leopard-printed back. If Hugh Grant were to see me like this, I hope my untamed (unbrushed) look would remind him of youth; distraction; indiscretion. (Every tube I board I wait for him).

24/12/25:

I sit on Christmas Eve and I write. I write, aged 22, a letter to Father Christmas. I write it and I burn it, sending with the creeping, curling flames a prayer for Life. For my own life, for the lives of my family, my animals, my small and perfectly ill-formed world. A woman sings ‘White Christmas’ badly on the telly, her voice wobbling in from next door over the silence of the night which is never silent, and the darkness of the window panes which eclipses all twinkling stars. I do not know if they are out there — the stars. I wear one round my neck, one on my finger, two on my heart for my grandfathers for whom last Christmas was their last – really their last – their last walk with God. Emmanuel. God with us. (They do not walk with him in Heaven; there, I have decided you dine and dance and drink – all the ‘d’s’ and not a walk in sight). There is a moon out of the window; the black panes cannot block her. She is a strip of a thing – brand new two days ago and waking with the lethargy of a cat. I wonder whether the baby Jesus was quite so slow when he flickered open an eyelid. I can smell oranges, and I taste whiskey. My sister prepares the turkey in the kitchen. My mother watches the warbling woman in telly, who has moved on to ‘O, Holy Night’. I write my letter to Father Christmas. Wish upon a star I cannot see. Wait for Midnight Mass and blow kisses at angels. I would like to spend forever blowing kisses at angels. It seems a fitting way to spend Christmas Eve. Curly hair and pig’s ears and smudged mascara. I am a nut caught in the beard of the Nutcracker; I am Tinkerbell, fluttering in a jar. I am a pine cone and a roasted chestnut, and my letter is burnt so I will stop this writing; ring the bells: Christ is coming (and Santa Claus comes tonight)…

Christmas comes; the tattoo heals; my family return to the fireside like shepherds —wise men to the manger. The candle wicks feel significant, their flutter all-encompassing. There was Eton Mess in the baubles and life was “elevated, premium”. I left one job and walked into another. I am flying to Australia, just to see the New Year out (in?). I wish to fall in love above Novosibrimbsk because there is nothing better to do; I am smiling at 3:40AM because my brain cannot, will not sleep so far above the clouds which usually cap its horizon. Australia is a crouched kangaroo, sitting back on her haunches, watching the sky for me to come.