Little eccentricities and other aspirations

I have discovered a chocolate bar that seems to be 50% sugar (quite literally) and is called 'Margot'. It's sort of a coconut flavour, but without the desicated coconut bits of Bounty bars and with an added dash of rum flavouring too.  I'd take a picture of it, but of course, I can't, because I haven't got a camera anymore.  Needless to say, the architect introduced me to it.  (All of the food I'm addicted to that's terribly bad for you has been discovered thanks to him.)  So I'm trying to ration it out like Kendal cake, to help me through each draining day. 

I started organising things for meet-ees at 7.25am today.  This is a miserable way to start the day, made worse by having to survive on Czech coffee, which is ok, but doesn't do the job of waking you up quite as well as the Fair Trade Peruvian packets of coffee I used to just about be able to afford back in the UK.  And the stupid institution I still have to work another month for, is still messing me about and causing me all sorts of stress.  I've had enough.  More than enough.

I shall have to fantasise that one day, one of the meet-ees will lavish great gifts on me, such as sponsoring me to have regular French lessons or commissioning me to write some songs or just offering me a week's holiday staying in their sumptuous chateau.  Or maybe something totally random but thrilling like a free course to get a licence to ride a motorbike.  Except I think I know now that the likelihood of that, even if I had the money, is zero.  Because I'm too short.  My legs are not long enough for me to sit on a motorbike and still put my feet flat on the floor either side of it.  Which is enormously humiliating and makes me feel really rather pathetic.

I did go on the back, as a passenger, on Saturday again, but the weather was awful and we froze our socks off even with a fleece jacket on underneath the extra gear.  It was so cold, that I was shivering by the time we stopped at our destination.  We actually did a very strangely grown-up thing.  We went to look at a flat.  No, please, let me explain...

It was a flat that the architect was thinking of buying as an investment, because he feels that money put into something is better than money sitting around in stupidly low-interest savings accounts.  He wanted me to come with him.  But, let's get this straight, it is another world to me.  The idea of money you can invest...  The idea of having property.  Absolutely alien to me.  He already has a flat, albeit a less than typically desirable one, in a 'panelák' in Prague 4.  This he inherited thanks to both the socialist state and his, now both dead, parents.  I have no intention of ever moving into either.  That's the other important point.

I don't see myself living with anyone else, ever, except when rents go up and I'm priced out of the rental market and forced into sharing again, of course.  To move in with a boyfriend would require some gargantuan re-thinking on my part.  Not least because I am a musician (whether I like it or not) and I cannot conceive of a time in which I would feel comfortable enough with another human being to haggle over what pictures are on the wall and where my books would go and all of the necessary inspirational things around me that would either help or hinder in my ever being able to write anything ever again, let alone sit and play.

I suppose I never even thought of it with my ex.  Even when we looked around places he was thinking of buying, when he left the West Country and moved east.  But more importantly, I never feel I have any right to anyone else's money or advantages due to that money.  When ex-partner saw his projected pension, I refused to think of that as a 'done deal', even for him, as things can so easily change with government policies and financial crises and so on.  And as for this flat the architect was looking at, I saw it entirely as his and even imagined that if he did buy it, he would probably have someone else in there with him by the time he got his hands on the keys.  

But it strikes me that this is an unusual way of thinking, at least in this country.  Women somehow see their partner's money as theirs.  All of those hours of work, even if the work is better paid for men than for women in the same job, still add up to funds that do not have anything to do with me.  I didn't work those hours, so I don't deserve to benefit from them.  But somehow, some women almost automatically start adding up these material goods and bank balances as part of assessing a potential partner, let alone while in a relationship, as though they will automatically belong to them.  Why would anyone do that?  I just don't understand it.  I want to earn my money fair and square.  The fact that I can't f***ing find a way of ever doing so, is MY problem and MY fault and always will be.

In anycase, the architect needs to find someone PROPER to be with.  Someone capable of growing up enough not to need about a hundred pictures on the wall to encourage creativity, someone who can do a 9-5 job without it nearly killing them.  Someone NORMAL.  And that, I am afraid and sad to say, I just can't ever achieve.

Fantasy wish list and poverty monsters

I know it's terrible to just 'want' things.  Things you can survive without, but if you go without all of them all of the time, it's a bloody miserable existence.  Perhaps I should see this kind of need, the result of bankrupting myself due to music for so many long, pointless years, as some kind of entity.  Maybe if I call that entity 'Malcolm' or something 'totally made up by a 5 year-old'-sounding, such as 'muftystuffenslop' or 'megahoopylops' or 'stoneybrokasaurus', I could feel better about it.  I could just see it as a mass of horrible monster-ness that has no real power.

So here we go; in a bid to cast a spell over 'Malcolm' or 'Stoneybrokasaurus', I shall write my most tantalising, silly but nice and/or urgently needed wish list thoughts and hope that somehow at least one of them might simply appear in my life one day: 

1) A pair of jeans that actually fit well and look good on me.  (May as well put the most impossible thing first, eh?!)

2) A simple, red summer dress.  Something like a 50s shift dress made of cotton.

3) An electric guitar.  (I'm too furious with the world to play a keyboard and I can't have the Yamaha U2 I used to have, let alone the Yamaha C3 I'd love to have, let alone the Bösendorfer any-size-at-all I'd KILL to have, which would be preferable, but actually louder, causing me to be evicted forthwith.)

4) Some citrus-smelling shower gel (because small things make a difference too)

5) A tub of chocolate ice-cream (hell, even a magnum would do)

6) A flight to New York and a flat I could do a swap with for a few weeks

7) A new pair of black canvas ballet shoes (because the ones I do aerobics in are falling apart)

8) A good camera (or even just a good camera phone)

9) An external hard drive to back-up work to (boring, but could avert a major crisis one day)

10) A copy of the latest series of House on DVD (or in the meantime, the last series of ER that I never got to see before I left Blighty)*

I did almost put 'a three hour booking in a piano practice room' but I know that this would only break my heart, as I would wonder when I would EVER get to play a real piano again and I might have to kill myself there and then for having had to sell mine to try out a life that stood a chance of not finishing me off for good.

*(Note to FaerieGodmotherTrainee: this is NOT your job to fulfill, ok?!  I just needed to write a wish list.  I know you know how important little fantasy wish lists are.)

P.S. Does writing two posts in one day partially make-up for such a long absence and lack of regular posting lately?  Maybe just a little bit?

Poverty and other preoccupations

As you may have guessed, work and other depressing things have been getting progressively more difficult, tedious and time-consuming.  I have had to write a letter of resignation, an email of explanation and a further email to confirm that the reply hasn't changed my mind.  All the while I'm being totally messed about by this particular institution, to the point that I am now losing money due to their disorganisation and have had to re-do adverts and search for work in any viable ways that I can think of in order to try not to lose out all the more.  I'm not even getting to take time off properly, because I'm not being given much notice of the work that 'might' be available.  So hello 'hand-to-mouth existence' once again.  My, we are such old friends...

I can't even find time to do anything creative as I'm still between meetings and organising things and my life is filled with the kind of tedium that saps every last drop of inspiration or creativity and kills it dead in an instant.  The expression 'burn out' comes to mind, but that has already happened.  That was probably two weeks ago at least.  I am now on the edge of the platform again, and to quote a Kate Bush song I often play, I'm "wondering what on earth I'm doing here".  Back in my usual spot.  No particular hope, no time to go out and see anything, do anything, not even enough money to buy something to cheer me up.  Such as nice shower gel from the rather posh, Body Shop-equvalent here, Yves Rocher.  Even though they keep taunting me by sending me leaflets detailing the appallingly small discount I could get on things, for having a loyalty card and having stupidly given them my address.

Whoever it was that said, "I've been rich and I've been poor.  Rich is better," knew what they were talking about and not only that, probably knew that even when you've got a tiny bit of money, it's no use in helping you if you've been under-investing for over ten years and the next time something breaks down (and let's face it, that may well be me) you're going to go bankrupt.  The worst thing about poverty is that it is simply BORING.  That aspect alone could finish you off.

My landlady just died

The brilliantly eccentric and amusing crazy-lady that was Paní Brožková has died.  I didn't even have time to go and have a coffee with her, as she'd suggested last time I saw her.  I somehow expected her to be around for years, being eccentric long into her twilight years, even though she was probably a heavy smoker and had a fondness for Vatican wine.  I was a fool.

I had to go in and talk to my meet-ees right after I'd heard the news (or rather read the news, on a note with a rather sober-looking orange flower stuck to the notice board of our building) and I wasn't altogether 'with it'.  So I put on a song to use as a diversion as well as a listening exercise and it helped.  The song was the recently Ivor Novello awarded 'The Fear' by Lily Allen.  Relatively ordinary; sad, but not too sad, "a bit lost", as Lily Allen herself described how she felt writing it, and yet something that had energy to it.  Just what we all needed at that point.  So Lily, I thank you.

I'm going to run away and take some red roses with me to the architect now and hope that he can withstand another evening of me as a sad version of myself, not sure what the future holds but at least trying to hang on in the present.   With a beautiful shade of red to offer as compensation.  At least it's not orange.

"That'll do, Pig...that'll do"

I'm writing this in between eating leftover chocolates from Easter (seriously, I'm currently typing one-handed, while the other gently feeds me the necessary medicine...) because I've just finished one of those gut-wrenching, all-out, going out of fashion, weeping-like-a-lost-and-desolate-soul crying sessions to end all crying sessions.  You know the ones, where you find yourself practically praying by the end of it, just begging through the sobs, "look, just help me or kill me, I don't mind which", except suddenly I find myself angrily bargaining with the universe that if it is going to kill me, it had better bloody sort out the lives of the people who might be a bit ticked off or even, maybe upset, about it, by bringing them lots of love and miraculous lives to make up for the grief they might otherwise experience a bit of.

That should actually go down as a significant improvement on previous sobbing sessions.  I never used to say that before.  I must have developed a modicum of self-worth.  Where the hell did that come from?  Don't tell me that working for a heartless, unappreciative director from the depths of all that is heartless and unappreciative, who treats me as though I could be replaced tomorrow (and yet still can't actually find another person to do the same job as me...) is actually a self-esteem booster?!  What cruel irony is that?  So, what, I only stand up for myself when someone treats me like dirt? 

Well it doesn't help much anyway.  No good having a remaining amount of self-esteem when the world couldn't give a damn that I exist.  I toil meaninglessly to survive one week to the next, contemplating stupid things like whether I can afford printer ink again. (Printer ink - seriously, isn't that just the most tragically pathetic part of all?)  And isn't it a sorry a state of affairs when you have to regularly get up at 6 am but the job you're getting up to do doesn't pay you enough to afford the decent coffee you need to actually stand a chance of being properly awake by the time you start work?

All humour aside, I wonder if this is some genetic defect that pre-disposes me to gargantuan amounts of depression hormones (or whatever causes this) or am I right that music has tortured me from beginning to end and just as I try to escape it, it comes back for another round of its own brand of 'water-boarding'?  Is it my fault?  Have I brought this on myself?  Have I made music my drug of choice and now become so addicted that I cannot live without it?  Or is that just the usual curse of being a creative person.? And I do mean curse.  I wanted to be normal so that I could just about live with this meaningless existence of working all the hours in the day to pay for the roof over my head that I so longed for, but have little time to enjoy, but somehow I still cannot come to terms with it.

This Catch 22 is the story of almost everyone's life - you do a job you hate for the majority of your time, to pay for the food you need to fuel doing that job you hate, and only get enough free time to just about stave off death so you can work another meaningless week.  Other people have learned to live with this.  But I can't.  I find this fact just about the most desperately hopeless, despair-filled, depressing thing about life that there is and I will NEVER get used to it or learn to accept it.  Even in the midst of my crying, I was still angrily threatening the universe that I would never accept it.  That I'd rather die than accept that this will be the way of things for the rest of my life.  And I know that even if I do have to carry on like this till the despair and meaningless work kill me, I will still be adamantly refusing to accept that this is the way it was meant to be.  Even if that defiance is the first stepping stone to my demise, I will never accept that this is simply the way life is.  I don't fucking care.  IT SHOULDN'T BE!.  

I worked hard to try to avoid it and to do something that had meaning for me.  I worked hard to build myself up from absolutely zero support, no 'pre-disposed to a musical education' for me.  I paid for every bit of that 'music education' myself.  And it may well have bankrupted me, but I had to do it.  There was just no way I was going to miss out on playing the piano just because I was born into a working class family that didn't know the difference between a casio keyboard and a Yamaha C3.

Wow.  I think the chocolate really kicked-in there, right?  Or else I really am that bitter and twisted.  Probably the latter.  But I can't be bitter and twisted if I'm still capable of appreciating those who might still succeed instead of me and can be pleased for them that they will/they have escaped the Catch 22.  Those I thought of today, the Russian Countess, the coffee and cake friend, the Faerie Godmother trainee.  All of them have or will succeed and rightly so.  I just still don't know what it is I have done to be the one who didn't and won't.  But I mustn't forget, Francis Bacon has the definitive word on this one: "Life is so meaningless, we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary."  I mustn't forget that life for some, really is meaningless (especially if ill-health robs you of opportunity) and maybe ultimately, with the way in which things can come to an end, it is meaningless for everyone, it's just a matter of time before you realise it.  Before you're forced to see it.

So I have thought all these thoughts today and cried till I had nothing left to express, and I've done my best by those thoughts and that crying, and all I could find to say after all that, was not some kind of solution or wise insight, but the words from a children's film:

 "That'll do Pig...that'll do."  

God bless you, James Cromwell, wherever you are.  

Idyll

It's been a tough week.  This reminder of last Saturday's idyllic picnic spot (well, the view from it) is warming my soul and keeping me going though:

(It's a shame we didn't notice the clear heavy vehicle tyre tracks in the distance before we got all peacefully lain out on the blanket, but then it wouldn't have been as funny to have been disturbed by a whacking great lorry.)

By the way, does anyone want to donate me a camera? (I think the likelihood of getting any money back for my stolen mobile from the airline people is about as great as the likelihood of AV being the popular choice of the UK.)   It's just taking so much longer to get copies of photos from other people's cameras...everything's now at least a week behind.  (,,Ach jo".  Sigh.)

Fragments

I got a reprieve.  I got a re-match.  And had a beautiful weekend.  And one of the most romantic days of my life.  A stream, a picnic, a blanket and seclusion.  Just the two of us.  (And an occasional lorry that went by with comedy-moment precision timing, but eventually left us alone.)

And then.

This week came the unavoidable truth.  How do you tell someone you loved (do I really mean that use of past tense?  I don't even know...) that you've embarked on another relationship?  How do you tell them you've taken that leap of faith, even if only on the basis of BTO's 'You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet', that: "any love is good love, so I took what I could get"?

Oh the pain.  All over again, the self-questioning, the analysis, the apologies, the tears, the sense that I'd betrayed him...  And yet we both knew that that wasn't the case and that this is what one is supposed to do, if you want to regain some kind of mental health and see a future ahead of you.   Does that make it easier, knowing that it's allegedly 'good for me'?  Absolutely not.

Late nights and no sleep and all the crying, the sense of loss all over again, all in waves of emotion; it's been exhausting.  I need some simple things now to help me through.  I need magazines and chocolate cake, a lonely piano in an isolated location, silly DVDs and more chocolate cake.  I need a scene from the film with Daniel Auteuil and Vanessa Paradis in 'La Fille Sur Le Pont' where he takes her to a department store and buys her a bunch of make up from the posh make-up stalls and she comes away with all sorts of top quality cosmetics to experiment with.  I don't know why I wish I could have this, why I feel the need to lock myself in with such silly things, but I feel like I need some room to patch myself up again after an incredibly traumatic week.

And I know he was shocked too.  I can't tell him everything.  Nor can I tell the architect everything.  I have to keep some things entirely to myself and find a way to either digest them or just live with them, even if they cause continual pain.

I was reading some extracts from a book I got in Paris full of writings from Marilyn Monroe's notebooks and letters and I found this:

"Only parts of us will ever touch parts of others -

One's own truth is just that really - one's own truth.

We can only share the part that is within another's knowing [...]

perhaps it could make our understanding seek another's loneliness out."

(from 'Fragments' ed. Stanley Buchtal)

That's certainly one of the things I connected to with the architect.  Our mutual sense of loneliness and loss that had gone before.  But it was that very sense of loss that almost broke him, because he could tell it wasn't easy to eradicate.  The things we share with others must not only be things within another's understanding, "another's knowing", as Marilyn puts it, but also within their pain threshold.  I suppose I have discovered just how high my pain threshold really is.   And it's clearly a lot higher than most people's and a lot higher than I had previously given myself credit for.

Emotional turmoil and then some...

Bad timing.  Dilemma.  No planning time.  Builders giving me a headache with their drilling.  Me giving someone else a headache with my insistence on honesty.  Confusion.  Pain.  Mistakes.  Pain.  Confusion, misunderstanding.  Pain.  

Mis-match or re-match?  That is the question.

Misery, mishaps and Le Meurice

I have been overwhelmed with a kind of existential crisis which has been building up for some time, but feels worse than ever since getting back from Paris.  (Though if you're going to have something as grand-sounding as an 'existential crisis' befall you, where better than Paris for it to occur?)  Some disasters started off the trip.  For starters, a two and a half hour delay, which ended up making me late for getting to the ballet, so carefully booked and planned by the faerie godmother trainee.  Then the realisation that my tiredness in packing had led me to supremely idiotic packing, which meant my old mobile, the one with the camera I had been taking photos on and posting too many of on here, was stolen.  (How ironic.  That'll teach me not to reprimand myself for taking too many photos.)

After all of this, plus a fairly horrible arrival in Terminal 3 (Charles de Gaulle would be horrified to have his name put to such a concrete warehouse of an airport terminal) I made it out alive and had the longest conversation in French of the whole trip with the cab driver who took me to 'l'hôtel Le Meurice'.

And then there was a kind of sublime calm that gradually descended over the course of Friday and even a little into Saturday, as I soaked up the ease with which one can live if unburdened by poverty.  My French didn't fare as well as I'd hoped, what with my lack of experience of using aristocratic-like levels of politeness, but nonetheless, I got by.  I "enjoyed" the banter with the audacious waiter on the street who tried to entice me and my friend to his cafe by calling out to my friend about how beautiful she was, and then when I responded, because she didn't speak French so didn't understand, he told me, "not you, her! I wasn't talking to YOU!  She's beautiful, not YOU".  All with the most delightful Parisian charm, of course.  (I.e. none whatsoever.) 

Thank goodness I have years of training in this kind of scenario, what with Madame Charlita and the times I went out with her and was totally ignored, to the point of people looking at her while I spoke, which must be what it's like to be the best friend of a supermodel or a celebrity.  No-one talks or listens to you, even when the celebrity is tired and has nothing to say, or, indeed, even when they don't speak the language but you do.  (In fact, this even happened a little bit in Prague, with my visitor, who was also rather glamourously dressed compared to me, and certainly prettier, and even though she remained silent during (my) conversations in Czech, everyone looked at her and not me, hoping she was about to say something devastatingly interesting.)

However, I got my 'French fix' with lots of books and magazines to read in French (now all I need is the time to read them...) and I even got some lovely postcards and took some pictures with my friend's camera instead, so all is not lost on that front.  The bookshop nearest the hotel had a picture of Jacques Prévert in the window, so there was no way I could avoid going in, 

unlike the Patisserie, which we gave a miss in the end.

And walks in the park and moments of quiet to sit and write at the kind of desk I would LOVE

in a most inspirational room filled me up on the 'rest and recreation' front, along with absolutely sumptuous food and even champagne.  So my doom and gloom should not have hit me so hard really, but somehow it crept up on me nonetheless.  I miss the double bed, the armchair and cushions,

the time to think, the opportunity to speak French and the delight of a companion almost as eccentric as me, who just needed a friend to accompany her this time.  By next year, she'll have moved on to have an entourage of friends and personal assistants and I will be a distant memory, but I hope I'll still get to return to Paris soon and do things the pauper's way and console myself with a glass of wine while I sit on my own in a bar in Montmartre and write forlorn poetry about being constantly overlooked.

Non, je ne regrette rien.  Ni le bien, ni le mal...tout ça m'est bien égal....