Blue Dress Hot Mess

I start a new job on the full moon and pick up a £10 note on Kensington High St as I step out of work on the Friday evening. I feel somehow lucky; I hope they are lucky signs. I am charmed. 

(June bridesmaids dresses in January). 

30/01/26:

I watched the rain tumbling down the train window as we sped out of London on a Friday night — the last in January — and thought about writing: it is raining. I didn’t. Too much is happening, too much reflection, too much pain, and oh – oh – too much hope, for such a useless phrase to be written down, again. I bit noisily into an apple and picked seeds from my peanut butter out of my teeth with my tongue. I am going to the seaside. That soothes the senses in my brain which have stared at a three-screen computer all day, all week. The sea. 

He reads Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ on the train from Ipswich to Lowestoft and looks like a spoddy student from Cambridge. (He is bored, and goes on Instagram less than 10 minutes into the journey; not so spoddy, perhaps). Hard going for a Friday night. 

(It has reached that time on a Friday night when Wonder Wall is playing on the taxi radio when the driver eventually picks me up, having left me waiting station-side in a downpour even Noah would have been jealous of. Maybeeee you’re gonnabethe one that saves me. I do hope so; his driving does not feel safe). 

01/02/26:

I have spent much of my life on the bus. I feel suddenly some affinity with my younger self, day after day, morning — evening, in and out of Oxford along the endless mole-brown of the Banbury Road. Now I sit in the rain on a Sunday evening next to a man I don’t know who wears a baseball hat. He put his seat belt on, so I did too, though I’d never have done that before (what is it about busses and taxis which mean legality is forgotten, changed, or ignored? A second () for what is it about being unintentionally influenced by the actions of a large male at one’s side; implicit sexism; societal patriarchy; explicit inferiority complex? – all dull, all mundane issues). I saw myself on the train pushed up against the window, coiling blonde hair and an enormous multi-coloured coat with rain drops crying ceaselessly down the pane and an open book on my knee. Ted Hughes changed nappies (the interviewer appears shocked). The bus is warm, like being in a cocoon which crawls steadily towards the Metropolis, full of strangers. In baseball caps. 

Busses are far more intimate spaces than trains. Proximity and direction. Close, one-way. Pods, in which we sit like peas. 

07/02/26:

I feel low and I feel empty and I hate it. I feel like the endless stretch of grey cloud, the February sky, the puddle in the gutter which spreads thickly over two yellow lines, inexplicably dividing the road from the pavement. I am the tarmac and the dishwater-down-the-drain. Dull. 

09/02/26:

Even the longest days come to an end. 

10/02/26:

I ate Ibuprofen for breakfast and walked in the rain. Kelly had Pina Coladas for breakfast in Barcelona because there was no one to tell her otherwise. She is 55. I am 22, the future looked bright (according to Lily Allen). I think it does, sometimes. There are kisses in the clouds and orange sunlight gleams out of the curved windows of skyscrapers. 

11/02/25:

London conspires against you. I leave early to get to work (still new enough to try to impress) and the doors stop working on the tube so that a whole train full of people sit at Sloane Square station waiting to begin their days while the driver runs down the platform with an engineer in an orange jacket (like that will help him), and the doors open and slam to a constant soundtrack of beep-beep-beep. (Little do they know their days have already begun). 

A woman mouthed “I like your jacket” at me on the tube and I mouthed “Thank you” back. She smiled, and sipped her coffee. I re-adjusted my ear muffs and looked out of the window with a little smile on my lips. We are British: what to do after a compliment? 

It occurs to me that Memory grows cleverer every day. 

13/02/26:

I am a year since Paris and I could write about it but I don’t want to. I could think about it — that best time of my life — but I don’t want to. I thought at the station this morning that this is my third Friday in a row taking an evening train going — anywhere. Somewhere. Somewhere new. Tonight, the building blocks of metropolitan society fall away to snow fields. I cannot see them. They lie outside the dirty windows (wet, dusty), outside the confines of my thoughts and my head and my peppermint tea (my stomach is full of the breakfast I never got to eat and I am tired). I thought, as I waited at the tube platform-edge this morning, that I could write about the people; the lives of all those people I have traveled with — somewhere — on a Friday night train (going anyway) in the past three weeks. (Once, it was to Southwold; once, it was to Bicester. Now, it is simply To The North). East, Middle, North. Where can I go that’s West? Tonight, everybody is kissing. It is too much. It is Friday the 13th and it is the night before Valentine’s Day, but I am not going out (instead, I am (of course) getting on a train with a peppermint tea). I have no date to go on (I eat them instead). I am not the kind of girl to eat men for breakfast. I hope, perhaps, that one day I might be. (And aren’t thoughts funny little things?).

A woman on the tube receives a message from a friend saying “I hope you’re looking after yourself. I hope you’re eating enough xx”. She replies: “I am x”. “That’s what I always said, too” the friend responds, ditching the kisses. I feel sorrow for the woman which wells at the base of my heart (an empty place, tonight, it seems). I have received too many of the same texts; they never help. They are unanswerable because, as in this case, no matter what you say in the reply it falls on deaf ears. Mute. (An owl). I look at the woman, hard, through my tired end-of-the-working-week eyes (weighty with mascara and bags larger than the weekender at my feet): she is put together (though perhaps not, since the texts suggest otherwise), and she is wearing bright red mock-croc ankle boots with thick indigo wash jeans and a navy and white striped over-sized blazer. Trendy, middle-aged, stylish; a woman of the world in a way I aspire to be. In a way which defies ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ and falls into ‘strong personal style’. Definitive; clear. If only her life were so simple. (Her ring spells LOVE in gold italics around her middle finger: does she need the reminder? I wonder it vaguely, the thought dancing like a hesitant guest at a wedding. I conclude that I dislike the way it feels, so I dismiss it. The guest turns away from the dance floor and walks self-consciously back towards the bar. It is over-crowded. They walk towards the loo instead). Her blazer has stray grey hairs abseiling down its felted wool, blowing precariously in the synthetic weed-scented breeze of the Circle Line. (Her silver hair is shoulder-length, chopped with shaggy 60s bangs). I want to do something to help her – to make her feel better. I try to catch her eye as I get off at King’s Cross, but she is scouring for a seat in the train I am leaving behind. I like her blazer, I think. I would have told her: I like your blazer. I send it mentally, and hope she has a wonderful night. I hope my mental-mail arrives safely at her door: Package Successfully Delivered. Message Received and Understood. The only trouble is, they so rarely are (sorry Royal Mail).

Coconut matcha and a ginger shot. Empty tummies and bagels with red-hot hot sauce: drips. Dates on the train. My life. (Next week I will eat hummus and crisps exclusively. And perhaps some Parmesan. I love Parmesan). 

It feels weirdly like Christmas, and very very far from Christmas. Everyone is chatting on the train; they are friendlier up North. A baby rides his Mummy’s shoulders on the pavement opposite High St Kensington tube (his Daddy trundles along with the empty push chair resignedly). The baby screames “Ruuuuudolf the red nose reindeer – yipPEEE!”, bouncing and giggling as his mother throws him by the legs into the air to the beat of his tuneless tune. I smile up at them. (My own shoulders ache. Weary world). 

There are diamonds in my heart, and they glisten like iced snow in the morning sun. She tap-taps her heels along the street and I feel the blood from my blister seep gently into my sock.

20/02/26:

It is a great love story. She is beautiful, and it is raining. There is so much pain, unhidden, bare in his eyes. He kisses her and there are ghosts — there are always ghosts in our love stories, alive and dead, living and breathing, waking and sleeping. They are the former lovers and the ellipses which end the book, the credits at the end of the film and the billowing net curtain illuminated by lightening half way through. Love is war and war is all because of love. (There is an obvious English teacher in the row in front of me, a large glass of white wine on her little plastic table and a large chuckle in her throat at each literary quote Margot delivers on the Curzon screen). The two girls I am with have rivers of tears streaked down their pretty faces as the lights flick on and I turn to them with a unfazed grin. I wonder if love stories are felt more deeply when you are in love? (I open this to the floor for discussion, and the panel of my thoughts (or are they a collection of middle-aged, Chardonnay-ed, cardigan-ed women at Book Group?) chatter excitedly). This leaves Me – unaffected by the affliction which plagues their eyes, and Them – sobbing. (Though ghosts of the film haunt me – haunting, is how I would describe it, were I a critic – as I walk back in the splatters of rain and sick which line the pavement between Victoria and Pimlico on a Friday night). They cried softly, their emotions at odds with the intensity of the drama we had silently witnessed (bar the occasional slurp), their matching long blonde hair falling around sad faces. I am not in love; they (ostensibly) are. Do they replace Heathcliff with their lovers and Cathy with themselves? Am I heartless or simply loveless – without-heart or without-love (perhaps that would sound better in Greek)? I believe I have known love like it; I believe in its cosmos, its depth, its breathless endless Yorkshire-grey sky. There is a witchery in Wuthering Heights. It is a witchery I subscribe to and it is a witchery I believe. That much I know to be true. (The sirens sound in Pimlico. Cinema is art; I am a lover of the arts – and I despise myself for saying so). 

21/02/26:

Wuthering Heights feels like a late-night fever dream. Her pool of blood, the crudeness of love, the reality of humanity so rawly exhibited on an unreal screen. I sit now on the 36 bus to Porcester Road. There are two puppies vying for the bus’s general attention (a grey speckled English Setter and a liver-and-white Spaniel), and my green and white striped Stanley cup is tilting dangerously as I write. I am going to a Barre class. It is my first ever, and I feel oddly nervous, despite having been to lots of other exercise classes alone before. I am a ballerina. I am ensconced in a patchwork duvet-coat, and I have been invited to the Buckingham Palace Garden Party. I eat truffle crisps and Parmesan, and buy anchovies and pomegranate. Ginger shots on a empty stomach. That, that, is my London.