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.
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