Things to pack for a summer month in San Francisco
Or : what autochthones don’t tell tourists :

A/ First Principle: San Francisco in August is bleeding cold.

B/ Second Principle: Within one hour, you can get sunburnt, then need a woolly hat and scarf.

C/ Third Principle: after 6pm on most days, you can’t find your way round because of that incredibly sly fog that’s moved in when you were not watching. Pfuuuuuuitt. Like that.

D/ Therefore: heed your friends’ advice and, when packing, think of onions; think layers, socks, long sleeves - the whole autumn paraphernalia. Just forget about Summer; over there ,it’s a myth until after you’ve gone back to London.

So far I have made piles on my bed:
- Favourite jeans, grey cords for normal onion-like days, assorted jumpers
- Light linen skirt and assorted flimsy tops for intense sunburn days
- Knee-length lace up boots just because
- Smelly trainers to try and blend in
- Jacket and woolly scarf
- Bikini
- Misc.clothes in various shades of black

I’m trying to not obsess over looking like a tourist.

Apparently Not Necessary:
- moose soft toy called Emilio

Administration

The good things : I now have a new passport and I only queued up for an hour with fifty other sweaty and frustrated people at the Embassy. I can now leave the country.

The bad thing: I'm stuck with this fugly picture for ten years.

Pèle-mèle

I’m home.
Isn’t that’s what we call our parents’ house?

Maybe regression is inevitable when going home. Although, it isn’t home anymore, of course. I don’t like the idea of regression, so I hold myself in check, so as to not slip back into obnoxious teenage mode. I am silent and unquestionable, but as considerate as I can manage.
Yes, it is good to be here.
I have spent most of the past six days in horizontal position under a tree, reading my way through a pile of novels; few of them have managed to fully capture my attention; maybe they just do’t talk about me and my own self centered vicissitudes enough... Maybe I should stick to classics.

I have reintegrated my old room, still dark, still full of my Goth velleities. The old plastic spiders are pinned onto the wall; the cupboard is still full of black rags. There are also stacks of old letters, held together by purple ribbon; I was such a romantic.
My mother never acknowledged the right to privacy, and only gives a perfunctory knock on my door before barging in. She is glad to have company, albeit the silent kind.
She has given away my brother’s clothes but kept his books and his collections. My brother was a serious collector: notes, coins, stamps, postcards, exotic paquets of cigarettes, lead soldiers, rocks, sand from deserts from all over the globe, poured into little glass vials. His bedroom was, and still is, a display case.
In every room but mine, there are pictures of him, taken on one of their journeys together in Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Laos, Turkey, Afghanistan. One of them shows him, minute, walking up a gigantic dune. How appropriate. He against the world?
I went into town and looked proprietally at things and places; so many changes! no one consulted me before digging up huge holes in the town center.
I went to visit my grandmother, who will tell anyone who will listen that I am her favourite grandchild. With me she is brisk, dismissive of gestures of affection; I tried to hug her once, a few years ago. That wasn’t too successful.
She gave me money. I won’t cash the cheque, because her monthly pension is probably less than what I make per week.
My grandmother is 85; she won’t let anyone else wind up her old clock, which involves climbing onto a chair and standing on the kitchen table. Her house is full of hazards, which she dismisses cheerfully; she barely allows her sons to chop her wood for her.
She showed me pictures of my cousin’s wedding; her husband looks like an idiot; my grandmother and I agree.

I have decided to go to San Francisco after all and see if my relationship can be patched up.

Normal service and proper paragraphing will resume on my retun to London.

Things to not do in times of Break up Apocalypse

Look at pictures/read letters/reminisce and cry.
Stare at very pricey and obviously non-refundable plane ticket and cry. Not because it was pricey, but because it won’t be used, and it embodied all your hopes.
Dwell on the notion that no one, ever, can live up to her.
Break useful household things that a little superglue won’t fix.
Wish that there was some sort of relationship superglue.


Things to do:

Purchase pile of thick engrossing novels for that instant vicarious feeling of having something to get up for.
Remember to eat from time to time, and not just pre-digested slush or cereal.
Not assume that friends don’t care. Of course, some will say that timeisagreathealer, and that youllgetoveritsoon, but the proper friends won’t.
Remind yourself constantly that It wasn’t working, wouldn’t have worked, can’t work, won’t work. Try and believe it a tiny bit more. Try some more.
Try and sell ticket on ebay to some homonym who also shares your date of birth and passport details.

Camouflage

I spent yesterday dressed in a black ninja suit, a matching balaclava and pair of goggles.
In the rain, amidst a horde of testosterone-fuelled adolescent boys. And girls, trying to be equally tough, or stupid, depending on how you look at it. Here’s some of the things I learned:

- You are not allowed to climb a tree and stay there for the entire game. My plans at being the sly sniper were therefore nipped in the bud.
- Injuries sustained by paintballs are 2 inches wide and concentric in design.
- They turn into dark purple bruises that can be proudly exhibited to friends and family.
- Even when you put your hands in the air as a gesture of surrender, some people will still shoot you. In the back.
- There is no court martial on paintballing camps. All the idiots go home free at the end of the day.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Today is the first day of my summer holiday and I have a terrible vacuous feeling, coming with the very likely end of my relationship. All the hope and expectations attached to it are now dissolving; all the memories, bad and good, are to be stored away.
My response sways between staying in bed in the dark for a few weeks, and cleaning the flat in a giant wave of denial.

It’s losing hope that makes it so bad.

Friendship

"Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person: having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them out. Just as they are - chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away."

George Eliot

My mother wasn’t exactly a hippie.

In May1968, when a seething hive of French students were busy growing their hair and starting a revolution, she was sporting a respectable hairdo complete with metal pins, and trying for a law degree. I believe she even owned a twin-set. Whilst her contemporaries were busy theorising compulsive shagging, she was living with her mother and her mother’s lodgers. I think she stayed at home a lot. She didn’t go out much to meet men; as it happens, home was where she met my dad; he was one of the lodgers.
My mother got married in a thigh-length off-white macramé wedding dress; my dad borrowed a suit for the occasion. The other lodger was a witness; but he’s since been a minister, so it’s ok.

Later, much later, when everyone had cut off their hair, after my dad had grown his and subsequently lost most of it to the practice of politics, after he’d run off with a female fellow socialist with freckles, my mum made a lampshade out of her wedding dress.
Then she met my stepfather.
He wasn’t exactly a hippie either. That is to say, he wouldn’t smoke pot.
However, within one week I was familiar with his own brand of ecological idiosyncrasies.
He held the very green belief that washing powder was evil.
In fact, washing machines were evil. To this day I believe that he doesn’t own one. He would use (cold) water from his well (dug with his own two hands in the garden) into an oversize bucket, shave some economy soap into it, and stir with a large stick. Repeat twice, and hey! His bed sheets were still grey. But ecologically washed.

Shampoo was evil too.
Therefore, rainwater was collected in various receptacles, placed on the balcony.
Some days, twenty years later, the pungent aroma of nettles macerated in rainwater for six days still lingers in my olfactory memory. The green mixture (in a smaller bucket than the one dedicated to clothes-washing) would wait in our kitchen, always at room temperature, before rinsing his proud locks.

I got a slap the day I mentioned acid rain.

I wished my mum had been a hippy, rioted and erected barricades, slept around and got her attraction for dirty long-haired guys out of her system before I was born.

Next time I might tell you about the dried up henna all over the telephone, as well as the Sock Recycling.

Look at me, I’m socialising!

I spent Sunday night in one of my favourite Old Man’s pubs in Soho with my friend S, drinking beer and eyeing up bartenders. The short pony-tailed one in particular was to his taste; on our way out, he held his breath and went to introduce himself.
Afterwards he was shaking, so we had to walk into another pub and get him a drink to calm his frazzled nerves.

In the second Old Man’s pub, he recounted this not so-ego-enhancing anecdote: on some night out with friends and a potential date, he got so..impressed with the said potential date that he felt some stirring in his lower regions. He excused himself, stood up, probably just that tiny little bit too close to the table, and knocked over his drink. Without using his hands.
Only the girl noticed; she squealed.
They never went on a date.

Inhibition

The sale is on; I wish communal changing rooms were abolished.