Blue Dress Hot Mess

The Diaries of I, February to April

The skyline is a bruise which grows darker and more purple by the minute not the hour. It looks painful. (I wince for it). 

I smell of rhubarb and toasted oats, and I weep my pretty little heart out in the car. 

I walk to work and play Chic/Not-Chic in my head. Martinis – chic; espresso martinis – not chic. Diet Coke – chic; Coke Zero – not chic. Thinness – chic; having an eating disorder –

I walk through Kensington Palace Gardens on a Wednesday at lunchtime. It is early March. The sun is warming us through the morning fog and the daffodils are bright yellow and being plucked at by a toddler like a pecking pigeon in the pavement gutter. If I were in Paris I’d know I was in heaven. As it is, the pavement is maroon and there are nuns pulling Nando’s chicken off their greasy thigh bones with oil covering their bared teeth in a layer of slickness, one leg tucked under their habits, one foot planted firmly on the park bench between them – Penny loafer, black, patent leather (can it be real? Can nuns wear leather?). I am not imagining; I write only the truth. There is a man bending down to pick up dog poo (down-up); he holds the yellow-rope leads of three Golden Retrievers, each with a different colour dyed tail; one pink, one green, one blue. I wish I were exaggerating; I am not. I write only the truth. I smile and think I am in Wonka-land, then smile wider and wish with all my heart that that were a place. I return to work, turning my face finally towards the sun before heaving the door to sit again behind a triple screen computer for another four hours. I enjoy it (I know now this does not last: a sense of darkness, that metallic taste of thunder, that bruised cloud bursting suddenly with fat, fat drops of rain. The storm is coming; the clouds will break. I believe there are rainbows after events like these). I research trips to Las Vegas and marble baths. 

11/03/26:

Someone’s burnt their toast. 

14/03/26:

All I smell is cigar smoke and all I taste is Greek yoghurt. The sun is out and the birds are very noisy, like they want to make their presence extra-felt after so long in their nests. They are babies waking up from a nap. Hungry.

20/03/26:

“We’re not giving you the bloody five pounds, the five pounds is for the cupcake!”. I smile ruefully and try to hide it as I walk to the tube, because I know that were I the frustrated bob-haired mother carrying her screaming son’s blue plastic scooter to school while he throws a fit on a Chelsea pavement (mind the pigeon poo) I would whole-heartedly resent the girl in the leopard trench coat smirking at herself as I attempt (loosing battle) to discipline my golden-haired boy. After all, the bloody five pounds is for the cupcake. It is 8:24am.

She wears a pink striped nightie and hand weights – pumping like a body builder down the Chelsea street. Belgravia is full of surprises this morning. I place her in her mid-sixties. Pink striped nightie, little blue weights. Up, down, up, down, all the way to get coffee. She has trainers on her feet, and creases running marathons up her goose-fat arms. Good on you girl, I think. How bloody patronising I am.

Single stars in the sky. Leopard print. All Over.

26/03/26:

He has good looking hands. (I am reading this back, and I have no idea in the slightest exactly who, on the 26th March 2026, had good looking hands. On 20th April 2026, I wish him well).

There is a false nail on the pavement. Pink. Crusted. It is a typical portrayal of my life, this phoney world of Clients and achieving a lifestyle which is not your own; it cannot be my own; I do not want it to be my own. I believe they are unhappy. I believe wealth buys experiences but it cannot buy happiness. I believe fun comes for free. 

A single sheet of seaweed lies on the pavement outside the office, green on grey. A little out of place, so I smile at it. 

31/03/26:

I have decided my world should be rhubarb. Pink and green. Streaks of stewed stripes all pink in the sky, tart on the tongue, painted sugarplum across my lips. I buy a pink and green ring just to prove it. Easter is pink and green, cinnamon spice and rhubarb. 

01/04/26:

April. I look up at my little flat and smile. I have cooked two salmon fillets, before 8am. I have washed my hair; packed my lunch. I can hear birds in the blossom and smell the sour tang of raw fish on my fingertips. Life feels monotonous in its whirlwind. The same family I see every morning pass me on the Pimlico pavement. A chubby-cheeked baby in his push chair, gurgling dadada as his mother walks the Pom-Pom dog with its lion-bush tail and insists, exphasises, mamama by his side. Dadada pushes the baby along, studiously not getting involved in what is clearly a long running debate. I give him a smile, like the dapple of sun through trees; shaded, hidden, strong in its liquid weakness. He nods. Bye-bye Baby Baby Goodbye.

A mother and son board the train. They have matching mullets.

Unknown:

The street looks like Thursday Night Pub and smells like the salt on the top of fish and chips. Fish and chips are like the Earth’s crust, layers of soil, batter, scent, vinegar, sea, salt, and a molten core of body. I am swimming currently in the outer-shores, between the layers of salt and vinegar. We sit in a church and sing. Thursday Night Pub and the intense holiness of Evensong collide, organ music in pipes and a pulsing beat behind the gin-sticky bar. One man’s incense is another’s salty chips. The passage between the church and the pub is a meeting place of God; He dwells there, in the shadow of an archway, on top of the cigarette butts and awkward stammers of first dates, with the mice who live under the railtracks of the tube. I see Him here, and smile.

Sunday morning, naked cooking. Sunday is love heart balloons and a Christian fish, and friendships falling apart in the March sunshine, spring and new beginnings, or homecomings to blue lights wear. I think about rhubarb cake and turn my face towards the sun, and run to church in the morning, except for once I am not late. I am wearing a leopard print jacket and pony hair shoes. My fingers still sting in the cold, but my cheeks blush red in the sunshine. I am makeup-less. It is Sunday, my day, alone, in Pimlico.

It is Thursday night, this time. In the space of three weeks, I have lost a best friend and a job. She has not died. Only decided she no longer likes me. And considering a mutual level of admiration is an important component of best-friend-man-ship, I consider that, on the whole, I have lost her, to the wind. Not the idea of her. Not the ghost. But the physical body – mislaid. (Or buried?).

02/04/26:

I sit on the train, with a fillet of salmon in front of me. I consider its pinkness, compare it to my own (flushed cheeks, heavy bag, misread Google Maps). Pink and green. I am in the pink.

I saw my ex-boyfriend at the station. Split second; recognise him anywhere. What is it with that?

The sun sets somewhere outside of Gratham. There are rape fields outside the window, and hot cross buns on the train. 

07/04/26:

The heat is blushing behind the sun. She isn’t brave enough, not yet. She is springing, softly, like a field mouse’s petal velvet nose. She needs a darker shade of blusher.

09/04/26:

Temple station is empty on the platform out of the City at 9:21am. I stand, bereft of company. I text a friend whose grandmother has died. She was a beautiful and wonderful woman. It is not enough. I curse my job and wonder if I’m wasting my life, then remember smiling at the sun and realise how it doesn’t matter – it doesn’t matter – because I’m here and I’m living and even on an empty tube platform where the black tarmac stretches into infinity alongside a cliff-drop to the tracks — too close — London is living all around me. I saw Bill Nighy in Pimlico and a girl who looked like Timothy Chalamet on the tube. (Yes, a girl. And, yes, frankly she was very beautiful).  

12/06/25:

I dropped my phone in Waitrose. I blame the post-Hen Do hungover shakes which made me extend an exhausted arm towards the row of cheeses, and thank the kind shop assistant who runs across the road waving my iPhone in the air like she’s at a concert with the torch on. Perhaps it’s Ed Sheeran — Perfect — Wembley. (I am on a pilgrimage to Tescos. I look round shadily, like an embarrassed monk caught in the act. (I need not specify of what.) It’s their fault, my hungover brain thinks angrily. I do not know who they are. But they really shouldn’t have put Tescos and Waitrose right opposite each other. Of course I’m going to be the Guilty Pilgrim in search of cheaper cheese. Of course I am. I am only 22. Pilgrim’s Choice. The shop assistant catches up with me, and presses my phone into my outstretched hand. Thank you, Waitrose, thank you). I cook. The sun shines. Heat is coming. One day.

She’s replying to WhatsApp in Westminster Abbey Evensong. I find something immoral in it. 

17/04/26:

I am sitting on the train trying to be atmospheric, except I have sat by the wall between windows and my bag wafts intermittently of yoghurt and peppermint tea. Children Railways is not such a romantic end to a Friday. I have finished my last day at work; so much for that lucky penny on the street. I feel whole and wholly empty, my half-eaten yoghurt pot open between my thighs, my 7:30am make-up peeling, my dress waiting in an Oxford college, waiting for me to fill it and to dance, dance, dance and forget my failures. The failures are chains around my neck, heavy black and gold necklaces which leave red wheels against my pale skin where they’ve got caught under my coat collar. I need to wear a pendant for a while. (My ears have pearls in them. This tea is too hot). 

I wonder vaguely if it’s symbolic that I am writing again, just as soon as the job is over. It is not that I do not write when I am unhappy, but that life becomes a vortex of monotonous whirlwind and I get caught. It is all very well being Katy Perry’s Paper Bag until one gets hurled onto a car windscreen going 80mph down the motorway. I picture Alice Through the Looking Glass; I picture myself with curly hair. I have done a Big Thing today: I have saved myself. (A girl sits on the train; she eats Doritos with one hand, and holds her phone up to her mouth with the other. I cannot see her face – the blue velvet seat (how many bottoms? How many sticky hands?) obscures it. She is wearing terracotta linen trousers – Free People, I think – and has a rucksack on the seat next to her which gives the impression that she’s been travelling for months. From her telephone conversation, I realise that she hasn’t. She repeats, increasingly frustrated, gently patient as a teacher with a toddler, “doctors appointment… sooner… time OFF work… experiencing burn out. Experiencing burn–out. It’s all in my original appointment request. I need time off work – they say I’m EXPERIENCING BURN out”. She swallows the “out”; out, out fine fiend. It is over, done. Thank you ever so much. Well done, Daisy. I believe you too have saved yourself today. Our carriage is a haven of female success. I turn back to my yoghurt. She sticks her hand in her rucksack: pulls out the packet of Doritos). 

I realise I will never see the man who sits on the McDonald’s steps selling the Big Issue again. He leaves every day by 12pm, like clockwork, like he has somewhere better to be. He is the McDonald’s cuckoo; out every morning, in every afternoon. Cuck-oo, cuck-OO. He has always worn a blue cotton jacket, which bulges over his stomach and he has not changed this – not once – every morning since January 19th. It is now April 17th. I couldn’t even stick it three months…

18/04/26:

I have decided to become a teacher. Because one tiny life is some person’s whole world. I can make that difference. 

Later:

She smiles, all white-glow and soft. I think of baby sheep, wooly cashmere, The White Company socks. Motherhood is coming — two weeks away. I sit in my dungarees, pink scrunchie pulling my hair back, tawny sunglasses rammed on my head staring blankly at the ceiling of the jam-packed cafe. I am the Carrie to her Charlotte. I am completely in awe. 

19/04/26.

Note to self: don’t grab the wrong fake tan bottle in the bathroom and end up slathering “Quick Ibiza Sun” all over yourself the day before you start a new job. It makes your hands look like you’ve been smoking for a hundred years. Not a good look when you’re about to start working with kids. 

We drink champagne and eat rhubarb cake and nobody cries. That feels good. I look up at the lavender sky – purple-pink, French grey, borage field hue – and think: Hi ho, hi ho, and it’s back to School we go. I have a mental picture of Snow White and a snail of school-children trooping down a Belgravia pavement with their rucksacks slung over their shoulders like the spades on the dwarfs. Life is resuming a new normality; I believe it is Orange.