RIP ARI

I also just heard that it's 5 years today since Ari Up died.  It's bonkers how fucking quickly time goes by - I thought it was a year ago, maybe two.  Honestly.

She was so cool and so beautiful and she gave precisely no fucks.

After reading Viv Albertine's utterly brilliant memoir (several times) I actually feel kind of like I know them all.  I cannot recommend that book enough.

RIP ARI.

I love this.

What she wants to be is a modern girl.

I am trying to have a productive week.  I am weirdly obsessed with this song.

A subtle form of compliment.

Today I am mostly trying to channel this song.

I only just found out today that the 'Talky Bit' - or Victorian-style rap, as I like to think of it - is actually from a poem by Edith Sitwell.  How I never knew this wonderful fact before is beyond me.

Hot as any Hottentot and not the goods for me...

"Your Memories on Facebook"

Eleanor, we care about you and the memories that you share here. We thought that you'd like to look back on this post from 1 year ago.

This was at the top of my Facebook feed this morning.  Below it was a photograph taken during one of the worst weeks of my life.

Doesn't look it, does it?  I can't believe it was a year ago.  Facebook is weird.

This Is England

The original film This is England came out in 2006.  I was 25; it was not long after I had moved to Brighton.  I saw it as soon as it came out, being a Shane Meadows fan after watching A Room For Romeo Brass (brilliant) and Dead Man’s Shoes (terrifying).

I loved it, but I’m sure I had no idea how attached to these characters I would become.  When the TV spin-off started a few years later – that’s when I fell truly in love.

By this point, like so many of us do, I feel as though those characters are my friends.  Nearly 10 years have passed.  They have grown up as I have.  We’ve all been through a lot (admittedly, I have not been through anything quite as traumatic as some of the characters have – thank gxx).

It sounds frivolous, but it’s funny how we can measure our own lives compared to those of fictional characters.  I remember so clearly what was going on in my life and who I was with when every new instalment of the series came out.

This Sunday night is the last ever instalment, apparently.  I hope it isn’t.  I want it to go on forever.

Last week, seeing Lol and Woody together after so much has happened, I cried and cried and cried.  ‘Christ, I love you; it’s ridiculous,’ he said.  After everything.  They look older, different.  I think of the ways I do, too.

I can’t wait for Sunday night.  I also kind of want it never to come.  I want them all to be OK; I don’t know if they will be.

Lucky Chances

Jackie Collins will always be one of those writers who has a special place in my heart, because I discovered her at exactly the right age.

I read Chances (stolen from my mother’s bookshelf, of course – like me, she has a particular fondness for a well-executed potboiler) when I was about 13 and reading ‘adult’ books for the first time.  Among my favourites were Jilly Cooper, JD Salinger, John Wyndham and, um, Bret Easton-Ellis (I had somehow procured a copy of Less Than Zero under false pretences).  Chances quickly joined my list of favourites.

It was unimaginably exciting.

I’m not saying she was Tolstoy, but I think Jackie Collins was a very misunderstood writer.  Even the articles in the wake of her death have been saying things like ‘a sad loss to the romance novel world’.  Jackie Collins never wrote a romance novel in her life.  I like to think she would be appalled by the very suggestion.

There was sex, but there was mostly crime, intrigue, glamour and ridiculous drama.  Her greatest inspiration was The Godfather, and it shows.  Chances is basically a gangster novel with a bit of extra sex and glamour (which makes it extra fun).

Honestly, if you love a classic gangster novel, read the Santangelo series.   Starting with Chances, then Lucky, and then Lady Boss and beyond.  The Santangelos are one of the great crime families and Lucky is one of my all-time favourite heroines.  She’s ‘kickass’, as Jackie herself was wont to say.

In small tribute to kickass Jackie, I will be re-reading the Santangelo series in its entirety, for the first time since my teenage years.

I was genuinely sad to hear of her death.  She wasn’t that old, at 77 – but because she looked so bloody great for her age, it felt like the death of someone much younger.  Of course, we are all so familiar with her family that I immediately thought ‘oh, poor Joan’, as if I actually knew them.  There was something admirably old-school about the way she kept her illness quiet, completing her book tour and all media commitments only days before she died.

She was one of those women who seemed so indestructible.  She was staunch.  Women like her seem as if they will go on forever.  I wish they could.

The Kindness of Strangers

So, a few days after my bag was stolen (or I was 'a victim of crime' as the email from the police said), I received an email from a nice man called Josh.

He had found my bag dumped by the side of Waterloo bridge and picked it up.  My email address was written in the front of my diary.

I was SO happy to hear this.  It not only restored a little bit of faith in the kindness of strangers (it would be much easier to leave a dumped handbag if you spot it than to pick it up and contact its owner, right?) but I must say I was delighted to get the bag back.  It was my mum's, bought in California in the early 90s, and has many stories behind it.

Nearly all of my things were still in it (minus card holder, phone, Kindle - and, weirdly, a cheap pair of sunglasses and a couple of bits of make-up, which I can only think must have fallen out at some point).

It made me wonder (and cringe slightly) what the assorted contents of my handbag would say about me to a stranger.  I don't keep a diary, as such, but in there was a tiny Moleskin notebook containing a few very overwrought passages from last year, plus a bigger notebook containing some inexplicable novel-writing notes.  My Mooncup probably marks me out as a hippie; the detritus of old tissues, receipts and leaky biros and such as a bit of a mess.

I didn't get to meet Josh - he even went to the trouble of cycling to my office and dropping it off, but I wasn't there at the time.  Still I will be eternally grateful for this lovely little bit of London kindness.