"Okay, what have we got?" I say to Mike. We're standing outside the Co-Op. We're both
so broke. But we do need to eat, and the Co-Op does prevent us going out for meals we are not supposed to.
"Right, I have ten pounds, ten pounds," Mike says, counting. "So twenty."
I open my purse. "Okay, I five, five, ten. And one pound and ... six pence," I say, emptying it into his hands.
"That shouldn't be too bad, forty one pounds and six pence; dinner for tonight and a week's shopping."
"Ooh, I have found another pound," I say. "For the trolley."
We make our way around the supermarket. I manage to resist buying fudge although I do buy some smarties ice creams due to post-Rome ice cream cravings. We have a small tiff in the fizzy drink aisle because Mike does not feel coke is essential. I however know that coke is essential to my wellbeing but alas we return with none.
We reach the checkout and Mike begins loading it whilst I go in search of last minute bread. I come back with a miniature loaf which is so cute and looked lonely on the shelf. Mike rolls his eyes.
I survey the shopping. "What do you think it will come to?"
"I hope not over forty," he says. I bite my lip. It looks like there's an awful lot of shopping there. Chicken, sauces, naan breads, peppers. I watch it anxiously as it goes through the checkout, wishing there was a subtitle window.
"I'm going," I say. "I refuse to be present if we have to put items back on the shelf."
Mike kisses my forehead. "You are not going anywhere. Besides, it'll be fine."
He packs the last of the food away as the lady at the checkout opens her mouth.
"That'll be forty one pounds and six pence," she says. My mouth drops open.
"You added that up!" I say.
"I DID NOT!"
"I am very, very scared by you."
Yesterday I was sitting in a public toilet. Having
used the toilet I reached over and realised there was no toilet roll.
Obviously, I was stuck. The options aren't great, are they? Pull trousers up and walk into another loo - that's pretty nasty.
Call out lamely for someone to come and supply you with toilet roll?
I mean honestly, no holds barred now, what do people
do in these situations?!
"I'm lost in The Time Traveler's Wife," I said to Mike who was equally absorbed in
Lost. An no, he did not understand the ending for all those who watched it.
"These characters are so real," I said. "I keep wondering what they're up to."
Mike smiled. "Good. I'm surprised you understand it."
"Pardon?"
"Well, come on. It's about time travel. You thought if you travelled for less time than time zones you covered you could
call yourself."
I tutted. "When I said our flight needed to be half an hour shorter for that to happen in Rome my Dad just agreed."
"Right."
"Anyway I
don't actually understand the time travelling," I said. "There was this bit with a painting -"
"Hold on, we need paper and pen for this," Mike said.
"Mike, it's half twelve and I have a nine."
He turned and stared at me as he walked out of the room. "You started this."
He sat down next to me on my bed, pen and paper in hand. "So, the painting."
"Yes, he sees a painting in his future with no date on it. When he goes to his past he finds her painting it. She goes to add a date on and he stops her, saying it doesn't in the present. She write it on anyway, because she wanted to test causality. Eventually, in the future, she rips it off because she gets frightened." I pause. "So what I don't get is whether the painting had no date on it anyway, or whether it never had a date on because of what he said."
Mike paused. "Time isn't necessarily linear like that you know," he said, drawing a timeline. "If you do something in the past here," he said, indicating an X, "it doesn't necessarily transcribe to
this future," he said. "It can transcribe to another future. The future is just a piece of time. It's like what that Buddhist guy said about turning the boat around."
I started rocking. "So there is no definite future?"
"Nope. We have no future."
"Is this a warped, mathematician's way of dumping me?"
"I'm bored," I said to Mike. "I can't take any more judges' ramblings."
Mike handed me a Jaffa Cake in sympathy. I nibbled the loose sponge off from around the edges, peeled off the jelly and put it on my tongue. Mike watched me.
"That's weird," he said, putting one into his mouth whole.
"That's weirder," I said. "Your mouth doesn't even look full."
The video below is where we ended up.
I leant over the barre, my hair stuck to my forehead, and stretched my leg-warmer clad leg behind me.
"I completely can't do ronde de jamb en l'air," I said to Hannah. This is where you put your leg in the air to the front, and carry it round to the back. So you go from the position on the left and end in the position on the right of this post.
"I know, it's impossible," she said.
I took a sip of my water and thumped my leg over the barre to stretch it out. "It's like, I can move it so far round but then I have to drop it in order to get round my hip." I paused. "I feel old."
"You know what that's called?" Hannah said. "It's called
having a pelvis."
"I thought that bin liner was a cat," I said to Mike as we walked back from the Co-Op in the darkening evening.
"You really need to get contacts," he said.
"I wish it was a cat," I said. "
Our cat."
Mike sighed. We walked past the big purple lavendar bush and round the road work signs as I turned to walk up our steps.
"Er! That's not our house," Mike said.
I looked up. "Shit, it's not is it," I said, quickly exiting next-door-but-one's drive.
Mike stared at me. "
This is our house," he said, carefully guiding me up the steps.
Maybe I should wear my glasses more.
I was walking home after my lecture today, freshly fallen leaves at my feet and my nose streaming with what feels suspiciously like freshers' flu. The bright street was full of road works, builders, JCBs digging up tarmac. I walked past one of them just as the tray bit (?) of the JCB swung out. I ducked dramatically and one of the builders smiled at me.
I was so busy being embarrassed that I walked into a tree.
I stepped out onto the back garden patio after my bath, a towel still wrapped around my hair and my bare feet cool on the ground. I looked at the purple sky and fingered plants and herbs as the breeze cooled my face.
I write about the past a lot. I'm not sure at what point things become the past, but something definitely happens. The ridgid structures of facts and everyday events become unwound by memory; suddenly there is magic in scenes you saw, and songs and smells will forever remind you of what felt like moments but were simply pieces of time.
I used to think I remembered school too fondly. At university I have looked back longingly at mindless hours spent in the common room, playing cards, people watching, becoming people ourselves. I remember scrunching my nose up in physics, the smell of our tiny library, the first time I read Chaucer.
The summer before university was life changing. Full of secrets, and long nights, and gazing out of windows. Me and my friends drove miles to secluded pubs, where we would order wine for the first time, and sip and try to discern the fruits. I would sit in my bedroom after these nights, wonderfully nocturnal, and light candles and memorise tarot cards and run my fingers over runes.
I remember reading Woolf's
To The Lighthouse that summer. It conceptualised exactly how I felt. If I had an ocean, there would have been walking and painting, and shrubs glistening in moonlight. I walked a lot in the fields near my house. They felt like my first true home.
That summer cemented my English degree for me; it felt right, to be creative, to read other people's deep thoughts. How wrong I was. What was right then, was not memory, of fondness or rose-tinted glasses. No, it was some direction. It was logic and reason in what I did. It was knowing where I wanted to be. It was maths, and physics and structure in my studies, which allows my mind to float above with thoughts of love, and candles, and magic.
I feel that magic again now, as I sit in lectures. I love it. Everything lines up.
I returned to my desk after my bath and resumed reading a case. I put my pen down for a moment and smiled.
This is exactly where I am supposed to be.
I slammed down my Contract Law book as next door's music began again. This time it was Sean Paul. I have to admit, I am biased if the noise pollution isn't even in good taste.
I debated cranking Coldplay up, but a) that's not a very nice solution and b) Coldplay aren't very threatening, especially when compared with Jamaican-nonsense-talking-freak.
I tried to carry on reading. Really, I did. But it was just too much. I could even hear the lyrics, and you know how hard that is with Sean Paul. Indeed I got so obsessed with the lyrics I Googled for them. Turns out, when I thought I heard:
"And we praise the roof until it rises"
(poetic I thought), the lyrics are actually (according to here)
"An make we blaze it the roof we haffi raise it again".
I think we had better add "grammatically nonesensical" to our description of Sean.
"I think I'm going to go over there," I said to Mike and Ali.
"Good luck," Mike said, whilst Ali cheered.
As I walked out of our porch (yes! porch!) into the sunlight, the music got a lot louder. I beheld next door's open windows.
I took a deep breath and rang the bell.
A short, black lady answered the door. "Hold on will you," she said into her mobile.
"Oh um," I said. "Sorry to disturb you. Could you please turn your music down? I'm trying to study," I said, fiddling with the zip in my jacket.
"Where is he," she said, looking around her. A small five-ish-year-old ran past. "Taylor!" she said, "turn it down."
She looked back at me. "He's almost fully deaf," she said. "Music is the only pleasure he gets at the moment."
I felt colour flood my face. Making my excuses, I scurried back into my house.
"Yeah, he's deaf," I said to Mike, walking into the living room.
He looked at me, like, well, yeah.
"No, really." I said. "He's deaf."
"Wow, I bet you feel like a shit, don't you?"
"I was asking Mike the other day about boats," I said, at newly-wed
Suzy's birthday meal.
"Here it comes," said my Dad.
"Yeah, well, we currently spend 9 - 5 with this contract guy who specialises in boating law." I said. "In 1875 they actually made an admiralty court, because of all the boating cases."
"Yes..." My sister said.
"So I said to Mike, why on earth is there an entire court for boats? I mean there are like, what, 6 boat owners in the world, and they're yachts."
My dad sprayed his drink.
"So Mike rolled his eyes and lost the will to live again, and in the end I learnt all about oil tankers."
There was a pause.
"I would love Rob to be here," my sister eventually said. "He always realises I'm not too bad when you're around."
"Thanks."
"It's okay. You see, there's blonde," she said, marking the air, and then, moving her hand about a foot down, she said "And then there's Billygean."
My dad applauded.
I flopped into the living room, having had enough of debates about whether tapestries are fixtures, and put my head on Mike's lap.
Mike was watching a bizarre fat camp programme. Perhaps now I should point out that Mike used to be - ahem - well rounded, and having dieted to his sexy self (and acquired a not at all shallow girlfriend who loves him for who he is), has developed a fascination for such programmes.
I think, anyway. It can't be that he just likes reality TV. No way.
"Reality shit," I said, stretching, as a mother was told her child was in danger of diabetes. "It's so mean."
"Er, no more so than the X Factor," Mike said, hitting a sore point. Not that I watch that shit.
"Making fat kids go on treadmills so that people can watch their reactions is mean." I paused. "That one there isn't actually that fat."
"Which one?"
"That black one."
"That black
one," Mike said, "Is Ian Wright."
I sit in the waiting room. A man with a bleeding leg and a bushy moustache sits opposite.
I feel a little shifty holding a urine sample in public. I look around. Everybody looks scared. The waiting room could be life changing for some, horrifying for others. I bury my head into the case I'm reading. Indeed, is an elephant-keeper liable if the elephant attacks a midget at a fair? I shake my head at the Latinisms in the case and reach for my bottle of water.
I take a long sip, and moustache-man catches my eye. I look down. Pee in left hand, evian in right. We are thinking exactly the same thing. I smile. He crinkles his eyes.
Rome is a crazy city, it never sleeps. It's full of men in suits on mopeds, stalls and stalls of bright fruit so fresh it looks like it may burst, and when you round corners past beautiful women talking on mobile phones it's natural for breathtaking monuments to pop up right before your eyes.
Rome was full of laughter, and amiable silences where nobody needs to speak. It was a haven for me. It was also filled with tiredness, getting lost and being blonde. These moments would be dumbed down if I put them here; they're moments my Dad and I will always treasure.
So instead I'll give you the photos, because you always like that, don't you?
But of course, lush!
A person!!
The Pantheon. Not the Parthenon.
On our way to the Vatican. I swore this was in a different place and got us lost.
The River Tyber, which boasted an entire swimming pool complex. I would post photos of here, but I am too embarrassed. One, because I look emaciated in a bikini, and two, because a lady asked me the time by tapping my watch. Instead of responding with *the time* as most people would I presumed she liked my watch, so told her where to buy it. Oh the embarrassedness.
Hotel one. Yes, disaster struck and we moved hotel. None of the rooms had baths. None!
Hotel two, wherein I complained to the manager that there was no hairdryer only to be embarrassed once more when he pointed out that this strange pipe thing was in fact one.
Fashion advertisement. Two wolves and a bird. Anyone?
Overlooking the Vatican. You know, that religious place?
We climbed 552 stairs with walls like this. But the view was totally worth it.
Hat.
*NOT THE SISTINE CHAPEL KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT IN THE FUTURE BILLYGEAN*
Fun on a roundabout. In the Matalan trousers.
Trevi Fountains.
Spanish Steps.
And now the real reasons to go to Rome?
Which cornet do I want?
Keats' death mask!
Notte Bianca. The city opens all night. 7am start.
Three hours' sleep.
Fucking knackered.
Have constitutional law lecture tomorrow at 9am.
Therefore blog is postponed until tomorrow.
"Ooh, it says here I could visit the Vatican," I said to Mike. "What's the Vatican."
He stopped walking down the hallway, slowly turning around.
"What's the Vatican?" He said.
"Yes, what, or who, or where," I said.
He was silent for a very long time.
"I hate these moments," I said. "They make my toes curl."
"The Vatican is an independent city in Italy where the Pope lives."
"Wow, could I meet the Pope?"
"No. He meets important people."
"And people who know what the Vatican is?"
Yes that's right folks. Billygean and Mad Father are off to Rome, in 12 hours' time. Is that late availability enough for you?
In the meantime, until Sunday, you might want to amuse yourself with
this. Yes that's right, Billygean is now a SET TEXT for a class.
How fucking cool is that?
Last night Mike and I went to Las Iguanas.
During the day, I ate a bowl of cereal for breakfast and then starved myself (Hi, Dr. B!). Consequently I was actually having dizzy spells when we got there so I ordered most sugary drink in the world.
"Hi, are you ready to order now?" the waitress said, just as I took a sip of The Drink.
"Yes," I said after swallowing.
Oh holy crap. There is something in my mouth. Multiple somethings."I'll have the erm... Quiso..." I decided to point. A) because I don't speak Spanish, and, to waitresses, I barely speak English and b) because THERE WAS SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH.
"Mike," I hissed after I had finished ordering. "What the fuck is in my mouth?"
I opened my mouth to show him the contents. He raised his eyebrows.
"Okay Gill, a) this is completely gross in public and b) there are about 20 black round things on your tongue."
I practically wretched and spat them into a napkin, which the waitress promptly removed.
"I can't take you anywhere, can I?" he said.
I actually managed three courses. A parcel of melted Brie and mangos, a shoulder of lamb in coconut sauce and coconut ice cream with pineapples (so three deserts then).
And yes, my tongue did swell up.
And yes, it was totally worth it.
(cold)
Mike: I have big ears, don't I?
Me: Yes, you do.
(horsey)
My blog is one today. Well, actually, my blog is almost two, but billygean.co.uk is one. By way of celebration I am inviting you to delurk and leave a comment.
Partly because the slightly scary boy next door was having a Sean Paul marathon in his bedroom, Mike and I were lounging on my bed with my stereo up high. I'm quite particular about the stereo. It's got to have good bass. It's got to be surround sound, 5.1 in particular. It's got to come with a boyfriend willing to wire it up for you.
We sprawled on my bed to the dulcet tones of The Stereophonics when Mike asked me what my 'desert island discs' would be. Admittedly, having never listened to Radio 4 in my life, I thought this was a dance track. Mike informed me they are the only five albums you can take to your desert island that you listen to for the rest of your life.
A pretty heavy question for me.
"Right," I said. "Can I have best ofs?" Better to establish the geeky rules.
"Nope," he said leaning over and tucking my hair behind my ears.
"Okay,
REM and Automatic for the People. It has Nightswimming and Everybody Hurts so it's a given."
I paused. "
Muse and Absolution. Because it's fantastic."
Mike squeezed my hand.
"I think I would have
David Gray..." I said. "And although I am enjoying his latest one I think it needs to be
White Ladder. Because it's timeless.
"And
Linkin Park - Meteora. Because I have to have some rap but Eminem doesn't have one good album."
"And lastly it has to be
Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head. Because it has politik on it."
"And you?" I said.
"I don't know," Mike said. "I can't do it. I would have U2, but I don't know which one. I would have Queen but I don't know which one. I wouldn't know where to put people that should go in like Clapton because he's great, or Skunk Anansie because I love them, or Faithless because they're my dance music."
I realised then, lying on his warm belly listening to the rain that he was right.
It's all about deciding who
makes you. Who you're going to tell your children about. Who you'll still listen to in 20 years, in the rain on a Saturday afternoon. Music transformed my walk to work. Suddenly there's romance in passing cars and drifting clouds. It's the nearest connection we have to poetry.
So now, delurk, and tell me yours (yes, even you). Take five minutes out of your day to contemplate which albums complete you, and I guarantee when you go and put them on, you'll feel a little more alive.
"Can we get a cat?" I said.
"When?" Mike said.
"Next year."
He raised his eyebrows and shifted the co-op bags to his other hand.
"Please," I said. "It would be so sweet. And called Keats."
"I'm not convinced", he said.
"Please can we get a cat, please can we get a cat, please can we get a cat -"
Mike dropped the shopping bags.
"You're going to make a
great lawyer."
