unfashionablylost

I hate emails, but having puzzled over my hatred of them for some time now, I’ve realized that it’s because I’m not very good at them. I can’t think of nice things to write in reply, I never send what I think of as extraneous ‘confirmation’ emails, and the sign-off and title issues flummox me. But I’ve started doing a new thing with emails, and I think it’s improving everything. Nowadays, I’m providing, in written form, my real-time reactions to reading other people’s emails, just before my actual, also written response. Let me explain:

THEM:

Hey

I’m excited for the theater this eve. Let’s meet at 7ish for dinner before- say outside the theatre? I hope I don’t fall asleep during the play, am hungover- last night was a work event with a free bar, OOOPS

XXXXXXX

ME:

OOH ME TOO OK but I will have a snack first as sometimes I get hungry post-school oh no that is far too nebulous a place to meet I am bad at picking people out of crowds and what is this ‘ish’? WHAT NO WHY oh not because I am boring cool oh no poor you huge sympathy for hangover ooh work event sounds glamorous WHAT FREE BAR IM SO JEALOUS oh too many kisses weirdo

 Sure, sounds great. See you at 7pm by main entrance to theatre. Hope you feel better! X

I just got lost on Hampstead Heath. You might think that this was a pleasant experience, strolling amiably about the trees and hills and other greenery whose name momentarily escapes me, but whose images will continue to haunt me for some time, but it wasn’t. Being lost on Hampstead Heath was one of the most unpleasant things to happen to me for a very long time. (Before my little sister jumps in, I will point out that most of my days pass very happily indeed, merrily sitting alone at my desk, safely inside, chuckling to myself at things I write and making endless trips to the kitchen for ‘sustenance’).

But yesterday morning, full of the joys of Spring (is it still Spring? Are we in Summer? My current diary is a sheet of A4 which I write things I remember to attend on, although I’m never quite sure if months have 30 or 31 days, so I’m often a day or two late), I decided to go for a run. I called my Mother before I left, because I wanted to share some good news with her, and also because I wanted to show off about how good I was being, you know, ‘going outside’, but she was on her way to the hairdressers, and far too busy to talk to me at that time. ‘I’ll call you later,’ she promised, or possibly, ‘I’ll call you never’, because she was simultaneously air-kissing her hairdresser with far greater enthusiasm than she ever greets her children.

I ran up to Hampstead Heath happily, realizing as I ran that I only had one album on my iPod: Graceland, by Paul Simon. Graceland is one of my top ten favourite albums, and Gumboots is one of my top five best songs ever. Often, when my Mother asks with increasing pointedness why I am not yet married, I sing parts of Gumboots at her: ‘You don’t feel you could love me. But I feel you could’, which I think succinctly explains my phenomenal success in the world of dating.

I entered Hampstead Heath through a little sloping path, watching carefully because I once saw some old people kissing there. I ran up my usual way, across the big lawn where show-off yoga-types do stretching exercises, and down past the tree which almost anyone can climb up to, but is far trickier to get down off. I turned left at the muddy bit, and dodged a throng of dogs on the sloping hills leading to Kenwood House.

‘Good,’ I thought, as I stopped to look out over London. ‘I’ll be getting home now.’ I turned around, and made to retrace my steps. Only I got distracted by Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes, particularly the line: ‘She makes the sign of the teaspoon/ He makes the sign of the wave’. I was thinking about this, and about the possibility of putting just a few, subtle diamonds on the soles of some of my own shoes, when I looked about me and realized that I was lost.

The trouble with being lost in a forest, as Hansel and Gretel quickly realized, is that all trees look the same.

I had run about in ever widening circles for about 10 minutes when my phone rang. ‘Oh thank goodness,’ I said. ‘I’m lost.’ ‘Oh darling,’ my Mother began. ‘I don’t really have time for another one of your little poems.’ ‘No,’ I tried to explain. ‘Physically. I’m physically lost. In the woods. I may never get out of here alive.’ ‘How unfortunate,’ my Mother said. ‘I’ll call you back.’

She didn’t. I don’t want to cry wolf, but if it hadn’t been for the fact that if you run in any one direction long enough, Hampstead Heath becomes over-priced, large family homes, I would have been lost forever. And that, my friends, is why for the rest of Summer, you will find me indoors.

One of the most stressful things a person can do is go jeans shopping. There are several reasons for this, but the most pertinent is that there are too many jean choices. Dealing with jeans shopping, as with everything else, requires the ability to funnel.

 Every day, we receive more information than we can possibly retain, or pay proper attention to. We develop funnels, which allow the pertinent information to reach us, disregarding less important facts such as the many reasons why my little sister thought it was OK to eat my popcorn. (‘Starving after a 14 hour night shift’ or not, all my funnel heard was ‘there’s no more popcorn’).

The trouble is, some people’s funnels are skewed. Take employee evaluations. Some people are told 14 excellent, commendable things about themselves by their employers. They are also advised to work on one particular area – say, cooking the night before, so that when they return home after a night shift, they don’t have to steal someone else’s food. Some people’s funnels only hear one thing: I am ill-prepared, and a bad sister. (Or at least, that’s what I was hoping for).

I spend a great deal of time talking about funnels, gesticulating wildly in case people are not aware what a funnel looks like (it is confusing how often people think, after seeing my hand gestures, that I am talking about something else entirely, but I suppose not everyone can be as good a mime as me). I am very keen for people to develop funnels more like my own, rather than their own, highly subjective ones. I cannot tell you how much more pleasant life is, when your brain will only allow you to hear positive things.

 ‘Really, young lady,’ my mother began last week. ‘I must talk to you about some of your comments at brunch.’ She went on, but I was so thrilled that she still thought I was young, that I didn’t hear anything else. When shop assistants tell me that they don’t have things in my size, I congratulate myself on being so ‘on trend’- both in shape, and in what I wanted to buy. My little sister likes to steer me towards the maternity wear section, but the joke’s on her, because having elastic at the top of my jeans has been amazing.

‘I ate the popcorn as a favour,’ my little sister said, looking pointedly at me, as I pranced about in my new, excessively comfortable jeans. ‘Well, favour rejected,’ I retorted, pulling a bowl out of my trousers (honestly, you can store anything inside maternity jeans. They give and give). ‘With these jeans, I can eat all the popcorn I want, and never have to buy new jeans.’ ‘That’s not necessarily a good thing,’ my little sister pointed out, but all I heard was ‘good thing’, and have been happily eating ever since.

Recently, I was sitting on a sofa listening to one of my friends. While she was talking, I ran my hand around the back of the sofa, under the cushions and into the crack, where I found a playing card. I was disappointed, because I had been hoping for 50p (it’s something about the angles of the coin- they’re much easier to pull out of tiny spaces than, say, a plump and rounded £1), but when I looked at the card, I saw that someone had written on it: ‘“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.” And at first I was irritated, because not only was I still poor, which I didn’t like, I was also being told what to do, which I also didn’t like. But then I realised that it was possibly the quote itself, which irritates me in a myriad of ways, that was the problem. I don’t have any playing cards (my little sister steals them at a rate which exceeds my own ability to remember to buy new packs), and I can’t think of much I’d like to do less than walk about London, dropping pieces of advice into other people’s sofas, but I do have a great deal of wisdom to share, so here are some instructions for living:

1. Have a great bedside book. Preferably, read it, but even if you don’t read, have something interesting there for show. My little sister currently has ‘Everything you need to know about your water supply: The Thames Water household guide’. I know this, because I went into her bedroom a moment ago to steal a box of tissues. Which brings me on nicely to:

2. Have a box of tissues by your bed. The multi-purpose use of tissues is not to be under-estimated. It was only yesterday that I used a tissue to save my sheets from some dill sauce, to blow my nose, to provide a moveable plate for my melon slices and to place over my left eye, because I thought I might have put my contact lenses in wrong way round. 

3. Don’t dance if nobody’s watching. That’s the kind of thing that gets you picked up on CCTV cameras and put on some kind of watchlist.

4. If you’re going to live for the moment, pick a good moment. This morning my little sister was in the loo when I needed to wee, and that moment lasted for ever, and it was hideous. 

5. There is no need to learn song lyrics correctly. Simply sing them with authority, and louder than other people. 

6. Never use the following words: fulfilment, ROI, panties. 

7. Never cross the road at a red man if a child is watching. How will they learn?

8. Carry at all times a wooly hat and a pair of sunglasses. At least 1% of the time you’ll need them, and be able to say smugly, ‘Who looks like an idiot now?’

9. Don’t talk on the phone on public transport. It’s super frustrating for the rest of us, because we can’t hear the other side of the conversation.

10. If you’re feeling particularly flush, leave a 50p coin down the crack of someone else’s sofa. You have no idea how grateful someone* might be for it one day. 

*Me

Size matters, and I know this because we’ve lost our tape measure, so I had to guesstimate the length of my new curtains using ‘my mind’ and a 15cm ruler.

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t fit. ‘They sort of fit,’ I said encouragingly, standing with my little sister at the opposite end of my bedroom. ‘I could move my bed, so that you can’t see that they’re too short.’ ‘Yes,’ my little sister agreed doubtfully. ‘But then when you close them, they’ll fall onto your head.’ I considered this briefly, because when I was little I had these sort of lace canopy things over my bed, which provided hours of pretending I was a princess, until my little brother got over-excited and yanked them off the wall. ‘That could be very pleasant,’ I suggested. My little sister’s face suggested otherwise. (I think she was still a little jealous, because her bed was noticeably devoid of any princess-like aspirations. I told her at the time this was because she was adopted, and that mum and dad didn’t like her as much).

We took the too-short curtains down, and now I wake up at 5.30am, because I haven’t yet replaced them. This has given me a great deal of time to lie and squintingly examine other aspects of my bedroom, very little of which meets with my approval. Yesterday, therefore, I bought a new pair of bedside tables. My little sister and her friend watched in amusement as I assembled them without the aid of a drill (I used instead my patented ‘brute force manoeuvre’, and simply smacked the flat of my hand against the wood until it quietened into submission. (This is the same technique I used with my little sister, until she turned 10, and was bigger than me).

Filled with a sense of accomplishment, I got stuck into my next task: making a birthday card for my friend. I had a very specific idea of what I wanted to make: our heads, on top of otters, holding hands in water. I dutifully printed out the photo of the floating otters, and began scouring facebook for suitable photos of our heads. ‘This one is perfect,’ I told my little sister. ‘I look great, and it’s about the same size as that photo of my friend looking weird.’ (It was imperative that our heads were properly proportioned, or the whole thing would have looked very silly).

I got distracted at this point, and was busy realising that the bedside tables I had assembled were very much smaller than the height of my bed, so I wasn’t there when the photos of our heads printed out. ‘They’re the wrong size,’ my little sister called out helpfully. ‘It’s not an exact science,’ I replied. ‘I’ll just trim them a bit with these nail scissors.’ (Our full-sized scissors are currently with our tape measure somewhere, playing a very impressive game of hide-and-seek). ‘OK,’ my little sister replied. ‘I’ll leave them in the kitchen.’

Which I thought was odd, until I walked into our kitchen to see this:

Like I said, size matters.