jeudi 30 août 2018

Not In Front Of Family

  • I have been listening to this repeatedly and weeping for a multitude of reasons. It is utterly perfect. Especially the song Not In Front Of Family.
  • I have been making my own homemade vegan Nutella (I am not a vegan) and it is very satisfying, because it’s much greater than the sum of its parts or the effort made in putting them together.
  • Over the years, I have been conflicted in my feelings about the Smashing Pumpkins. However, I must concede that I have recently been educated in how listening to Siamese Dream first thing in the morning gets the day off to an excellent start. Preferably with coffee and crumpets.*
  • Anyway, I am as obsessed as everyone else is with To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. It is sweet and lovely and I love it and Peter Kavinsky with all of my haggard but perpetually teenage heart.
  • I read Motherhood by Sheila Heti and I think we probably all should because it has made me feel better about myself and other people and the whole world.
  • I have been to see the Picasso 1932 exhibition at Tate Modern twice now and it is awe-inspiring. On a very basic level, just that he managed to get that much done in the space of one tumultuous year, quite frankly.


*Incidentally, this also prompted a weird realisation that boys seem to use Smashing Pumpkins as a definite wooing tactic. The first time I heard them, it was when an older boy called Jago (dream holiday romance when I was 15) played me Disarm on his Walkman. I carried on listening to the song on repeat long after I went home and went off him.


Then, on my seventeenth birthday, a boy called Futoshi gave me Adore on CD. Futoshi was from Tokyo and played drums in my boyfriend Nico’s band. He confessed his secret crush on me with that present, announcing ‘if you like me, you can kiss me’. I declined and ended up giving the CD to my friend Tommy, as it had also soundtracked his much more grown-up New York holiday romance. Circular, no? I can now see that I was an idiot. That Smashing Pumpkins CD was a sweeter and far more thoughtful gift than Nico ever gave me. He was handsome but flaky (in retrospect I realise: mostly because he didn’t like me that much).

mercredi 22 août 2018

Potential names for a feminist play you wrote with your best friend*

Tissues and Issues
X and Why
I Solemnly F*cking Swear
Til Death Do Us Part
Lawfully Wedded Spinsters
Feminisn't
Feminasty
What Would Emmeline Pankhurst Do?
What Would Emmeline Pankhurst NOT Do?
The Fempire Strikes Back
Dearly Beloved
Queerly Beloved
10 Things I Hate About Men
That's What She Said
Commitment Fears And Male Tears
Man-Hating Lesbians
That's What She Didn't Say
Men Are Shit
Ms. Angry
Fucking Autocorrect
Ms. Andry
Dying Alone
7 Things To Do With A Penis (That Aren't Sexy)
Fun Things To Fuck When You're Single
Single And Ready To Die Alone
Single-ty Pleasures
To Hate And To Hold
To Hate And Two Holes
You, Me And The Cat
Single Girls At Weddings
I Feel Like These Are Getting Worse The Drunker I Get
Men Are Shit And I'm Going To Die Alone: A Love Story
Bi The Numbers
Menamissed
Hits And Mrs
I Hate Yourself And Want To Cry: A Comedy
His And Hurls
It's Not Me, It's You
Girls Rule! A Sci-Fi Story
You Say 'Misandry' Like It's A Bad Thing
Misandreams
The Girls You've Read About On Bathroom Doors
Splitting The Bill: A Romantic Comedy

*as suggested by the boy you are going out with, late at night while he is drunk at Edinburgh Fringe (although, full disclosure, I wish I could take credit as these are fucking genius and I am definitely nicking at least one of them for this play and possibly future ones as well...)

mardi 7 août 2018

Swiss Cheese

I highly recommend going on an impromptu holiday to Zurich with a handsome man you barely know, if ever you get the chance. Especially if you take a 6am flight the morning after your dog has just died. Sometimes it turns out that a change of scene and unexpectedly kind company are exactly what you need.

Zurich is lovely. It’s a city perfect for people who don’t like cities. We went hiking up a mountain and swimming in the lake, all within view of skyscrapers and highways. We also took a train to Vaduz in Liechtenstein for the day, because why not go to two different countries if you can? This means you can also take very Instagrammable pictures of each other on the bridge that straddles the border between the two countries, a foot in each one. It’s fun.

We played travel Scrabble and enjoyed the very Heidi-esque train views and tried to decide which mountain cottage we would live in and whether we would ever get bored. We then spent a very pleasant day out in Vaduz, which involved excellent pizza, Shakespearean gangster rap, oversharing conversations, and the Postal Museum (which really delivered a first-class experience, obvs).

We stayed in west Zurich, which for shorthand purposes we just called ‘Brooklyn’. We stayed in a high-up flat with a balcony and a tall twisting staircase and a skylight that reminded me of being at the Chelsea Hotel. Behind our building, there were art studios under railway arches, expensive coffee places, outdoor flea markets and pop-up bars with live jazz and many, many fairy lights, not to mention excellent sweet potato chips.

We walked into downtown Zurich most days, where we looked around old churches and graveyards and botanical gardens, saw Marc Chagall stained glass windows that made me think of Jandy Nelson books, ate a lot more pizza. We drank wine on our balcony while listening to the Tom Waits version of Sea of Love. We ate Frosties for breakfast every day, like children who had been allowed to go on holiday by themselves with no parents, and watched stupid horror films every night under our blankets on the floor.

We missed the World Cup final, and were quietly bemused by the sound of car horns and cheering below our balcony. We ate sandwiches in the park and also drank quite a lot of beers in the park, which seemed like an entirely OK thing to do in Switzerland.

We felt very at home at the Brockenhaus (basically a Swiss version of Snoopers Paradise). We ate chips at the top of a mountain. We sat and looked at views a lot. We talked about a lot of things. We ate noodles in an empty restaurant that played early 90s soft rock.

The very best place in Zurich is the China Garden. It is unimaginably peaceful, whatever else is happening in the world. There are koi carp (you too might want to give them names), and there are pagodas and you can make a wish on a friendly dragon statue as you go in, as long as you step in with the correct foot first. You can spend the whole afternoon lying around half-asleep by the lake, feeling dreamy and with David Bowie songs running through your head. You know, if you want. (Actually, you can't: we did but eventually a security guard woke us up and told us off for lying on the grass).


When it’s time to leave for the airport, you can sit on deck chairs on a terrace overlooking the runway. There you can drink glasses of white wine bought with the last of your Swiss Francs. If you don’t want to go home, maybe you can be secretly relieved when your flight is delayed and you get to stay longer, even if you have an early breakfast meeting with a publisher the next day. You can be sad when it’s all over and you have to go home. But maybe you can decide you will go on holiday together again.