sllester - Tumblr blog

sllester · 5 years

Text

Love and understanding in the time of coronavirus

An intensive care physician from Limerick has advised us to treat each other like pariahs in order to avoid spreading the coronavirus. This may seem counter-intuitive at a time when a lot of people are confused, terrified and need, more than ever, human warmth. But look at her face, she’s not joking. She’s not politely suggesting that you think about changing your behaviour the way Boris might tell you to refrain from going to the pub. She is saying: if you don’t practice social distancing people will die. In fact, she looks like she might kill you herself if you don’t comply. But pariah is a confusing analogy here, because really what she’s also saying is: we are all connected and your actions have consequences beyond yourself. Care for others by not being close to them.

We live in an age of hyper individualism but it’s a fallacy that we ever believed we were individuals in the first place.

For the last few weeks I’ve been puzzling over why other people seemed to be far less affected by these warnings of a fast-approaching apocalypse. I couldn’t figure out why there was little public outcry over the suggestion that over 60% of the population should catch this virus that we know little about (with a death rate estimated between 1% - 3%) on the offchance that we build up herd immunity to a virus that may in any case mutate. The herd immunity idea has since been retracted, and described instead as an unintended consequence, as opposed to a desired outcome. This shift in policy has been attributed to the results of a study from Imperial College, which showed that the original strategy would overwhelm the NHS many times over. Adaptive policymaking is to be expected when the science is shifty and uncertain and decisions are ultimately political, but the lack of transparency means that people in the UK genuinely don’t know if they should take it on the chin and get infected…or the complete opposite. When you need trust in a government above all else, that’s a pretty big problem.

As it happens, my anxiety around the potential knock on effects of coronavirus grew to such an extent that I naturally achieved a pariah-like status without even trying. I’m not particularly worried about catching COVID-19 myself, but I’m terrified of unintentionally infecting people who have worse health than me, I’m worried about how our decimated public services will deal with the strain (even with the extra resources), and I’m haunted by the steepness of that exponential curve, fearing that we’ve done more to make it spike than to flatten it. I’m worried about the role state violence will inevitably play in keeping order. But more than any of those things, I feel a strange mix of terror and hope at the transformative potential to change the very way that we relate to the world and each other.

People are coming together in amazing ways to navigate a new normal, but people are also divided, helpless and angry. We’re living in the wake of ten years of austerity and this crisis represents a decisive point – do we get better at understanding each other and changing our behaviour or do we refuse to think beyond ourselves?

“Selfish middle class bitch” shouts one woman in the street to another who is wearing a facemask “what do you think you’re doing?”. Assuming that this insult is aimed at her ‘selfish’ mask wearing – I wonder what makes the abusive woman assume she isn’t trying to protect others as much as she is protecting herself. She might be a healthworker or chronically ill or pregnant. She may be trying to protect her elderly friends and relatives. Please don’t shout at her, I want to say, but I keep my distance like the pariah I’ve become.

The regular homeless man who roams round our street looks on at the people kitted out in gloves and masks scurrying about with shopping bags in bemusement, a wry smile on his lips. Apparently, they are going to tell the contestants on Germany’s Big Brother, who have no access to news, about the coronavirus live on air. Will they go straight back into the house to quarantine? How will they know what reality is any more? How does anyone?

Meanwhile people send memes mocking those who are scared of food shortages, a recipe for a quarantini, or messages complaining about their kids not being allowed in nursery. I take a deep breath before responding to anything, consider the situation from all angles so as not to get upset that somebody’s take on it is different than mine at that precise moment.

I have a heated conversation with my Dad, who is 71, because he laughed off my suggestion that he might change his plans in order to mitigate the risk of catching or spreading the virus. Things go from bad to worse when he says he was pleased to hear Boris say he was led by the science. I get angry and say it’s meaningless. What is ‘the science’? At that point I couldn’t find anything to show what he was referring to, and this obfuscation leads me to speculate that he was planning a eugenics experiment inspired by Dominic Cummings. Children get infected to pass it on to grandparents and the ill. He chastises me for the Hitler comparisons, even though I didn’t mention his name directly, and we talk momentarily about the undesirables. “I’m not a fan of mass murder” my Dad says after a pause and the absurdity of the statement makes me laugh for the first time in what feels like weeks.

He asks how much we’ll need him over the coming months, and I tell him I have no idea, it’s difficult to quantify. I explain, wincingly, that I don’t want to put other vulnerable people at risk if he’s not going to change his behaviour. “If I’m expected to stay in my house for four months, you may as well give me an injection”, he concludes. My Dad may be stubborn but he’s not prone to dramatic outbursts. This made me sit up and listen.

So, in a weird reversal of my teenage years, I’m yelling at my Dad about not going out, and he’s telling me that he’d rather live life on the edge, ignore the public health advice and play tennis with his octogenarian friends. I realise on reflection, that while I’m worried about my Dad, I instinctively feel that he will be alright, but as my partner has a chronic illness and is on an arsenal of various opiates I am worried that he may be badly affected. An overwhelmed health service is unlikely to be able to deal with anomalies such as rare diseases should he need medical care. It’s all speculation of course, and my partners’ anxiety is mainly about protecting his parents, who I’m also very keen to keep safe too. So there is a web of connections and half-voiced concerns between all of us, and what I want for one of the people I love is not compatible with the free will and intentions of another person I love. One wants to bunker down and wait it out, and the other thinks this approach is laughable. In a way, in the case of such overwhelming uncertainty, both of them are right.

I save most of my emotional strength for the time I spend with my 3 year-old daughter, which is also the time that I should be working. My partner reminds me gently not to look at e-mails or the news when I’m playing with her. She gets upset when she doesn’t have my full attention and I’m grateful for the reminder. I’ve been obsessively streaming through commentary and evidence and opinion pieces, trying to form a balanced view of all this, to try and understand the rationale for certain decisions that have been made. It does me good to stop.

The more I talk to different people the more my views, which a week previously I’d been sure about, shift. I was convinced that we should be following China, South Korea and Singapore’s model: strictly enforced social distancing measures, contact tracing and an aim to suppress, rather than mitigate, the virus. This seemed logical to me, as somebody who lives with other people that I love. My Dad, who lives alone, saw quarantine more like a death sentence. I suppose solitary confinement is a punishment for a reason.

The next morning my wayward Dad jumps on the last plane (urgent travel only) to Germany to see his girlfriend. Once he’s settled there he calls on what’s app: “I’m embarrassed to say that I’m having a good time”. He puts me on his car insurance, says we can use his house which is up near Hampstead Heath and has a garden (=heaven) everybody is, in that moment, happy. We all need some fresh air. We are physically distant but emotionally close. I ask him to send his address in Germany as I have a fear that the internet is going to stop working at some point. Can the internet disappear? Or would it just be temporarily suppressed?

The next day I call my 91-year old Nana anticipating she might be afraid after the announcements about the over 70s. Again, I am proven wrong. She appears even less bothered by all of this than my Dad. Maybe she thinks, at her advanced age, that she is in a different category altogether. She’s been working in her son’s DIY store that day, handling coins, riding on the bus. She’s been selling lots of toilet roll, she laughs.

“It’s just a matter of luck, whether you get it or not” she says. In a way, she’s right. Many people won’t have the means to avoid it. But I tell her it’s a good idea to wash her hands all the same and to try and lie low for a while if she can. “I’ve had lots of phone calls lately” she says. The phone is making a comeback we agree. Yes, and there are dolphins in Venice’s canals and the birds seems to be singing louder than normal. And then she warns me that the phone will cut out because her phone battery only lasts for 25 minutes intervals. “We’ll just keep talking until it cuts out”, she says. And then it does.

We’ve all been rearranging our lives in light of a new virus, to accommodate something we don’t fully understand. A week ago, I was certain I had all the answers but that was because I had a very narrow view of the problem. It might seem obvious to do something from one perspective, but there are inevitably unintended consequences, both good and catastrophic. Every intervention (such as school closures) brings with it an array of unintended consequences (e.g vulnerable children not receiving free school meals; parents going insane from trying to work and look after their kids at the same time, rise in domestic violence).There isn’t such a thing as a single solution to something so complex, only a series of momentarily meaningful decisions made in the face of dizzying ambiguity. We are making it up as we go along, and we have to make sense of it together. Even when physically apart.

1 note · View note

sllester · 7 years

Photo

jean rhys - still undecided on which hat to wear

#jean rhys #hats #gif #seine #indecision #yolo

0 notes

sllester · 8 years

Text

Books of the year: 2016

Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson by Laura Sims

“Simsy, you’re a pisser” Markson starts a letter to the poet who wrote him a fan letter which sparked a seven-year correspondence. Through all the mutual encouragement, genuine friendship and witty repartee, there is an overriding sadness in these letters. Markson becomes increasingly frustrated with his body as it fails him; he is barely able to keep to any social engagements, he cancels at the last minute for the second, third, fourth time. He reminds Sims over and over that he is old enough to be her grandfather. And then he is gone. Like a line in “This is not a Novel”.

Selected Tweets by Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez

As someone who tweets on average about twice a year I feared I would get social media fatigue but a few pages in I realised that it was just bloody brilliant. Both writers play with a sense of jeopardy and bleakness, and their twitter personas are as nuanced as they are hilarious. After reading Mira’s section I soon started to think like her. Or, at least, I was processing the world in a manner akin to Mira Gonzalez (or at least a version of Mira Gonzalez as filtered through me). In fact I liked her tweets so much that I wanted to call my daughter after her. But couldn’t quite pull it off with an English accent.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

I picked this up when I was around 4 months pregnant, just as my body started to morph into a shape which was both alien and indisputably my own. I don’t think anyone could have described the process of family-making more poetically or insightfully than Maggie Nelson. Making room where there is no room. My new favourite writer.

Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Knausgaard moved to Bergen to study at the writing academy when he was just twenty years old. And he really couldn’t have fucked it up more. He plagiarises another student’s work, he eventually stops turning up because the tutors criticise his work. Then he hates himself for it. He gets heavily into drinking and glasses his brother instead. And hates himself for it. He gets accused of rape and leaves his wife. And…you get the picture. Whether he’s writing about this high drama, or an in- depth account about hiding a bag of tinnies on New Year’s Eve as a teenager his writing is so compelling and his honesty is so searing that I just can’t wait for the next instalment.

Do No Harm: stories of life, death and brain surgery by Henry Marsh

I know so little about brain surgery that I was relieved that I got past the first chapter of this book, never mind finish it have it on my books of the year list! I feel indebted to Henry Marsh for writing so accessibly about his world and helping me to understand it a little. Apparently, the hardest thing about brain surgery isn’t knowing where to drill, or even keeping your hand steady, but it’s often the decision whether to operate or not, and how that risk is presented to the patient. Marsh’s readiness to admit his own mistakes is disarming and, at times, moving. I welled up at some point during each chapter. Marsh has Knausgaard levels of honesty – which perhaps explains Knausgaard’s own obsession with the man.

Honourable mentions: Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, Jenny Offill’s The Department of Speculation.

2 notes · View notes

sllester · 9 years

Text

tescos - bishopsgate - liverpool street station (an ethnography in 3 parts)

Wednesday 1:17p.m

Hovering above the rows of self-service checkouts in tesco silver and red helium balloons, in various states of deflation, bear the message Double Points Extended! You fail to be excited. You move a few inches further down the queue. You are standing in line with city workers in pinstripe suits and garish ties; they clutch onto sandwiches, bottles of water and cans of Red Bull as they shuffle along within the parameters of the black detachable barriers. Mostly they don't say anything but you imagine they are loud. Heart-shaped boxes of chocolates are now half-price.

A middle-aged man kicks a basket full of blueberries which have travelled by air from Uruguay further down the queue whilst he instructs the person on the other end of his mobile to just type it into google-he doesn't remember the actual name. Whilst you are waiting to pay, the headline 'massive jobs cuts' appears at least three times on Sky rolling news on the screen above you; the clip of a news reporter live from outside a factory in Bristol is interspersed with footage of an avalanche in north-west Pakistan and an image of J.K Rowling.

A man with a cotton Rough Trade bag is holding a Dostoyevsky novel in the queue behind you; you wonder which novel he is reading but his hand is obscuring the title from your view and his eyes are fixed on the screen watching the death count from the avalanche rise. The bleeping gets louder, there is an unrecognisable item in the bagging area and when a man called Sandeep finally beckons you forward like an air traffic controller you panic slightly as he repeats 'number 4, number 4'. On a screen above Sandeep's head there is a screen with a bird's eye view map of all the self-service checkouts, displaying which are in use, which are out of order and which are free to use. Numbers four, twenty-two and eleven are now flashing. As you are heading to self-service counter number four you hear the girl with an om tattoo on her lower back scream "why won't you let me pay?" at self-service counter 15.

Self-service counter #4 guides you step-by-step how to put your items through, asking only once if you have a club card and reminding you twice that double points are extended. Once you have taken back your bank card and picked up your items, it thanks you and issues your receipt.

You see someone who looks like your brother on a monitor which is linked up to the CCTV cameras but before you even turn around to check, you remember that he's in Berlin, that he's not physically in the country.

You think of Ethan Hawke playing Hamlet, when the apparition of his father's ghost speaks to him through a closed circuit television screen in a Blockbuster [now closed down?] video shop. Ophelia throws herself into a fountain inside a shopping mall.

The man with the Rough Trade bag walks past, first on the screen and then in real life.

0 notes

sllester · 9 years

Text

Bishopsgate (part ii)

Wednesday 1:43p.m

You exit through a set of alarmed barriers, which are flashing but not sounding, and then through a set of automatic doors which seem to be perennially open. A double-decker bus drives past which is advertising a car which is as individual as you are. You can still hear a disembodied voice thanking you for shopping at Tescos as you step out onto Bishopsgate, where a man with drawn-on whiskers stands with a bucket collecting money. You shrug apologetically as you give him twenty pence, wonder if face painting charities are genuine things, and then cross the road to Liverpool Street Station.

You head towards the escalator avoiding eye contact with the people handing out fliers and the free newspaper distributors. An over-zealous teenager in a navy blue cap and high-top pumas asks you if you want to join Fitness First gym for free. Through the murky, plastic foyer which covers the two sets of escalators and stairs which transport people between street level and the station concourse you can make out the brickwork of the original station building in front of you; as you start your descent you see minature Starbucks Coffee and Cornish Pasty Co. stands vie for custom on either side.

A little way down the escalator you are faced with three brightly illuminated screens that show three different individuals (two friendly looking men and one very attractive woman) who simultaneously posit the claim "I'm a PC and Windows 7 was my idea". The man whose image resides on the largest screen, the one directly in front of you, looks a little sheepish and you wonder if he isn't secretly a Mac. You're told to keep to the right, to avoid steep edges. There are seven or eight clusters of CCTV cameras surrounding this side entrance to the station. They have huge spikes on top of them which are covered in dust.

0 notes

sllester · 9 years

Text

Liverpool Street Station (part iii)

Wednesday 2:14pm

A yellow notice with a drawing of a CCTV camera at the top tells you that you are constantly being filmed for your own security; you know that this station is at high risk from a terrorist attack but it would never stop you from using it.

Earlier on this morning there was a heavy rainfall and Network Rail advises you to please take extra care. You are warned that ‘floors may be slippery when wet’ via a sandwich board with the word HAZARD printed in bold above the image of a photograph of a yellow hazard sign and then, a few metres on, by a line of actual yellow hazard signs- exactly like the one that featured in the original photograph. A man, who appears to be a tourist, navigates his way through the crowd looking down at a map on the screen of his iphone, earphones in his ears and chin on his chest, he never once looks up.

As you assess the electronic departures boards, you see that there are delays and you hear an apology from Network Rail as a young man falteringly announces over the tannoy system that there are serious disruptions due to a person under a train at Witham. This is followed by a recorded message of a woman, in a monotone, relaying the fact that “Smoking is prohibited in the station and on all Network Rail services”. It is replayed intermittently with a message (you think it’s by the same woman, but you’re not sure) which tells you that your unaccompanied luggage may be removed and destroyed. After a couple of minutes the station worker makes another live apology about the person under the train. Halfway through, something happens to make his announcement distorted, then there is some feedback, but after a couple of seconds everything returns to how it was before.

You need to put some money on your Oyster card so you can get through the barrier onto your train and as you make your way to the entrance of the adjoining underground station you walk in between two large screens which mirror each other exactly. Either way you look you glean that the latest BMW is an exploration of beauty™ and that the temperature in Nottingham is currently 5°. The arrow next to the FTSE is pointing down.

With your Oyster card in your hand you make your way back to platform number two to take the Chingford train to Clapton. On the way you buy a coffee from Le Delice de France and watch a screen which displays adverts for Turkey on a loop. The first one tells you that you should visit Istanbul to see why it has been voted the European Capital of Culture 2010 and the second one simply shows a woman in a red bikini on a boat and invites you to ‘feel the Turquoise’. You wonder if something has been lost in translation.

As you look up to street level you see an old man in a deer hunter hat peering over the balcony watching the movements of the crowd below. He is standing just in front of the war memorial (you’re not sure for which war, but you imagine the first), as he turns to leave you see that he is very unsteady on his feet and you keep watching him until he turns to go into the McDonald’s beside the Kindertransport statue outside.

As you are about to present your Oyster card to the barriers a young girl in sequinned gold leggings cries out in fright as a pigeon flies directly towards the sandwich she is eating- she ducks, and the pigeon swoops upwards- finally settling on one of the iron beams in the station’s ceiling. The girl, now laughing, puts her arm around her friend’s shoulder. As you look upwards you see Fireman Sam’s face on a helium balloon, it is rocking slightly, disconsolate and trapped against the station roof. The longer you look the more balloons appear into view- heart-shaped ones, simple, round red ones (Double Points Extended?), a Pizza Hut one and golden ones the shapes of letters which used to form a longer word.

THE END

#Liverpool Street Station #Ethnography #Marc Auge #Nonspace

0 notes

sllester · 9 years

Photo

Hannah Hoch. Heads of State, 1918–1920. I saw this photomontage at the Whitechapel gallery I think around two years ago. Every few weeks I’ll take another look at it, and I’ll have a little chuckle to myself. There is a figure in the background that looks like it was drawn by Tove Jansson, the Moomins creator so I like to imagine those two artists having a good old drink together next to a roaring fire. It seems immaterial that TJ would have only been four when HH started making this. Or that they lived in different countries. Or probably never met.

#Hannah Hoch #Moomins #Tove Jannson #Whitechapel Gallery

0 notes

sllester · 9 years

Text

social experiment

When I was having a run of tedious jobs that made me want to smash my face against the wall every morning I met up with a researcher because I thought he might save me. I’ll call him John Breed (JB) because that is pretty much his name. He works for the historian and philosopher Theodore Zeldin (actual name) who is President of the Oxford Muse Foundation and ‘star’ of a film about Ikea called The Philosopher and the Superstore. As far as I can tell Zeldin used to write intimidatingly erudite books about France and humanity but is currently interested in instigating meaningful conversations. Circles of friends don't tend to have much variation, he argues. Looking at my own circle of friends, he's got a point. He wants to see what happens when people have long conversations with people they would not ordinarily meet.

I enjoyed talking to JB, mainly because after he let me in to his flat he ate a cantaloupe melon in a slow and uninhibited manner and then progressed on to other fruits throughout the course of the morning, but also because he told me how his research focuses on the subject of why so many people find their work disaffecting and boring. Since the best paid work I could get at that point in time was a job where I entered sequences of numbers into a database all day - it was (and still is) a subject dear to my heart. As it happens, I actually work as a researcher myself now, which is marginally more gratifying, but I still feel like people are afraid to question the real value of their jobs - as if it would be an admission of failure on their part to admit their job was boring or pointless rather than it being a wider societal issue. David Graeber, who used to be my anthropology lecturer at Goldsmiths, wrote an essay called ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, and since then a lot of Occupy movement type students reverently distribute copies of it at zine fairs, but aside from that, the Sleaford Mods seem to be only ones willing to talk about it.

The week after I’d watched JB eat fruit I sat in on some of JB’s interviews in a room next to a surgery in Lewisham and I thought ‘yes, a job like JB’s would be interesting and would probably put me outside the remit of desired interviewees for this project’.

I felt momentarily positive, but then started fixating on how JB has years of experience and a Phd from Oxford then felt very far removed from ever doing a job which I’d find satisfying, never mind interesting and varied. A couple more weeks passed and I’d become less defeatist about the situation. When, in my improved state of openness, JB asked if I wanted to go along to a Zeldin-related ‘have meaningful conversation with a stranger’-type dinner I actually agreed, despite the fact that in normal circumstances this kind of dinner would closely approximate my idea of hell.

The ‘event’ came at a time in my life when I was trying to bolster by (non) career by using twitter. Apparently that’s where all the cool kids get their jobs. I wanted practice in condensing things I wrote into 140 characters . So as a way of immortalising this important cross roads in my life - I pared down sentences which described the ‘feast of conversations’. Whilst trying to maintain some meaning, if not my dignity.

If I had to sum up the entire evening in a single tweet I’d say:

@thesarahlester  at social experiment reading questions off a ‘conversation menu’ to smug bastard I’ve never met before. Want to be sick out my own eyes.

But one of the great things about Twitter, is that you can tweet more than once a day. We live in fast-paced times. So long as you can fit it into chunks of 140 characters or less you can write whatever you want.

So – if I had been live tweeting throughout the evening, it would have looked a bit like this:

I get to Southwark ten minutes early. I walk straight past the restaurant on the opposite side of the road #pretendingIhaven’tseenit.

I walk up and down The Cut vaguely looking for an ATM then return to the restaurant.

I ask the staff if there is a table booked for ten people. They look at me blankly. I say ‘I don’t know them so it’s difficult’.

A waiter instructs me to sit down in the waiting area but doesn’t tell me what’s going on. He acts as if I’m threatening…..

I take my phone out and gesture towards it. I am trying to show them I have JB’s number. Doesn’t help.

The next person who walks in announces she is there for John Breed. I jump up as if this is a #codeword and say ‘me too.’

She seems responsive so I step outside the waiting area to shake her hand. My hand stays outstretched as she runs off to the toilet.

I sit back down. Feel really anxious that no one can understand or see me.

Two Portuguese-sounding women arrive. ‘Are you here for the conversation?’ I ask. Then add unnecessarily ‘You’ve come from Lisbon.’

When they tell me they’re here for 4 days I make some generic comment about there being lots to do in London. ‘Yes’, they reply, laughing.

#Ilikethem. They are enthusiastic in a friendly way.

The toilet woman is back and starts talking to all of us. I wave hello and smile but don’t try to shake her hand.

#Weareleddownstairs.

A neatly dressed man and woman are standing at a table laid for ten. They know each other already and say hello to the group #withauthority.

I stand next to the man for two whole minutes but don’t say anything. He says ‘Theodore’ to his friend. At least 4 times.

It gets #harderandharder to interrupt their conversation in order to introduce myself.

I rest my coat over the back of the chair two away from his and step away slightly.

Everyone has formed groups and is laughing non-stop. I wish I’d stayed with the Portuguese contingent. Or hadn’t come.

JB arrives. I am relieved. I say ‘Hi’ but it gets lost in general cacophony of restaurant noise and other peoples’ hellos.

#Weareledbackupstairs.

As we all take seats I end up sitting opposite the man who I haven’t spoken to yet.

#Iwanttomove.

Catch myself thinking ‘I can’t be a conversationalist in these conditions’ spoken in a shrill, pious voice.

The man opposite is called John, like JB. His womanfriend leans in and says ‘John and John’ as if she’s just come up with a great witticism.

She smells potently of a floral perfume. She leans in #disturbinglyclose when she speaks.

I say #‘that’seasythen’ in a restrained manner but feel too much time has elapsed for my comment to make sense.

The John opposite me has a tendency to cackle insanely then straighten his face suddenly into a snarl as if he was being sarcastic.

The theatrical laugh and backwards headtilt is #offputting, it comes without warning or apparent reason.

He responds to something I say with ‘it comes with time’ and then ‘believe me I know’. This makes him laugh like a lunatic.

#Idon’tknowwhatheistalkingabout. Start to feel any amusement or interest on his part is completely feigned.

Two girls in their early twenties turn up. They are both wearing #sheerblackshirts through which you can see their bras.

One of the girls is called Rose and she shakes JB’s hand formally. She is from the Netherlands.

They both seem too studious to be wearing matching and/or revealing outfits. Feel like everyone around the table is thinking ‘fit’.

The one whose name isn’t Rose has an innocent face. It makes the shirt ‘work’.

John starts describing working in the Old Vic theatre before the area became gentrified. His account seems exaggerated beyond recognition.

He talks about gaping holes in the ceiling and homeless people living in their offices in an end of the world kind of scenario.

After he speaks for around five minutes I say ‘Gosh, that sounds apocalyptic’

‘Yes it was. If we worked late we were escorted out by bodyguards. [Cackle]. [Facedrop].’ # Idon’tknowwhatheistryingtoprove. I say something else but he doesn’t hear me. By the time JB ‘unleashes the questions’ I feel that John and I have already established a tacit mutual disinterest in each other. When asked when I have felt most isolated I spoke uneasily of the traumatic death of someone close to me when I had just left school. He responds #nonchalantly, ‘yes I had the same thing’. Wonder idly if we could have meaningful conversation about this but it turns out it wasn’t the #‘samething’ at all. John is almost certainly gay but gives no definitive evidence in conversation about his sexuality. He starts talking about how brilliantly happy he is around ‘interesting people’. I find this strange but don’t comment on it. My mouth becomes dry and I ask a waiter for water.

A gallon-capacity glass jug of water is placed right by my plate. John laughs uproariously and says ‘let’s pass that on, shall we?’ I hoist the jug up and offer it to the perfume-woman who shakes her head in the negative and carries on with her own conversation. I can’t catch anyone else’s attention so I get up from my chair and carry the jug round the table with me. I have to use two hands. I feel blood rush to my cheeks, everyone is engrossed in conversation and no one notices me hovering with the jug. I am still holding the jug. I think of a guy I used to know who said he had a ‘cloak of invisibility’. Feel bad that I’ve forgotten his name and can’t picture him properly. I have almost completed a whole lap of the table when the toilet woman pipes up ‘yes’. As I pour her water more people hold out glasses. I imagine John rolling his eyes and sighing heavily. As in: ‘Typical. Now she’s the fucking waitress’. ‘Cloak of invisibility’ guy may have been called Richard. Feel guilty for not trying more but don’t want to sit back down. John’s comments have become increasingly self-satisfied and asinine. I don’t think I am projecting my voice very well. I wonder if I have a speech impediment which is exacerbated in awkward social situations. As John talks at length about the various countries he has given talks in, I notice the woman sitting opposite JB leaves the table. JB is stuck sitting opposite an empty place whilst everyone around him is carrying on with their ‘conversation menus’. #feelasifthatwouldnormallybeme.

JB is red around the ears, but it might just be that he still has his jacket on and is too hot. I find JB’s situation far more interesting than my own conversation. He keeps staring ahead and drinking wine. I try to talk about Nicholson Baker as a way to introduce the subject of boredom to the conversation. John’s only response to this is ‘I love being bored because I hardly ever am. [Cackle]. [Facedrop].’ I start to recognise John’s inability to talk about anything other than his own success and limitless compassion. I wonder if my own inadequacies have induced his narcissistic conversational style. Think ‘Morally I should care, but at this point I don’t’. By the time John and perfume woman talk of leaving any rapport I may have previously had with them feels truly severed. I feel thirsty again but can’t see where the jug has gone. #Stupidjug I wonder if I am supposed to hug John goodbye but feel strongly that this would be inappropriate. John and perfume woman are the first ones to leave. I feel like I have failed. As they rush out he tells me he’ll see me again soon. I presume he is saying this out habit rather than having any actual real meaning. I stay to talk to JB about the rejection. He says that it wasn’t anything dramatic – he had known beforehand that his ‘date’ would leave. Everybody else seems to have found the feast intensely satisfying. Women hug with tears in their eyes. The sheer shirt girls are beaming and taking notes. I wonder if I am a bad person or a vacuous human being. When we speak as a group the concept of instigating #conversationswhichwouldntotherwisehappen suddenly makes a lot more sense. I start to feel better through having conversations with people who seem to understand what I am saying JB says men are often ‘duds’ at these things. The word ‘dud’ is amusing. I got the only man/dud aside from JB. Everyone is leaving the restaurant and I say I have to go the opposite direction to catch my bus. I see three different women crying in between Southwark and Leicester Square. #1 A homeless woman with a dog outside a 24 hour shop #2 An overweight woman arguing with a man outside Charing Cross station. She seemed to be almost hyperventilating. #3 A girl sat by herself, looking at her iPhone On the nightbus home I get into a conversation a girl is having with a guy from New Zealand about the novelist Janet Frame. I only say about two sentences but feel much better for it. I feel somehow more socially acceptable than before

0 notes

sllester · 10 years

Text

thinking across continents

setting: the shunt vaults

You being disparaging about minimalist techno me thinking "what even is minimalist techno"? then immediately hating it too.

Sitting in a clapped out car in the sand and you saying “I love it here I can't believe they would shut it down” me starting to love it there because it was ‘on the cusp’

Taking pills on a work night but them having no effect. You apologising and me being secretly grateful for no bad trips. My suspicion that your constitution always was tougher than mine. Heading back to yours in south London, a route which was so rare and an evening sky so light against the sky scrapers that it felt like a completely different city, a completely different time zone, one that belonged to us alone.

setting: work

The three of us at work, a meaningless job that was outwardly acceptable because we could say we worked in something tangentially linked to higher education. Me, Jess, and you meghna Meghna, meaning beautiful river

Our loud abrasive antipodean boss saying “we like shortening names here so we'll call you "Meg"”. You a month later confiding in the two of us, not angry but bemused, “but it's not my name”.

setting: bishopsgate

You doing a live report from my pants in a menstrual rather than sexy way. Dismissing the ‘anal sex brigade’ together whole-heartedly over eggs florentine. Then laughing when we realised we didn’t even need to explain what that meant.

setting: cyberspace

Casually e-mailing each other about how much we both like the word crepuscular, and the phrase cash cow, but neither having the confidence to use them in a real world scenario. How we’ll write to each other and make it into a blog which would then be made into a radio four-worthy thing about two women on two continents. Neither of us knowing if we meant radio four or radio two. That never happening anyway.

setting: houseparty in Bloomsbury

The party where three girls dressed up in Mexican style shawls with bright plastic flowers and had an actual real pig’s head and performed something nobody understood but kind of enjoyed. The same party where we played Tim Bingo which everyone understood but nobody liked that much.

You talking to the oldest, most sedentary guy at the party until 6 in the morning – the one who everyone else was avoiding. You being genuinely convinced that you'd had the most awesome, best possible time.

Theme: general recollections

Your Lollywood grandma who was driven off a cliff and died in a tragic and perhaps not so accidental way. That being so long before you were born that you tell it as you would the plotline from a suspense film. Lollywood, in my mind at least, being cheapened by the ubiquity in recent years of LOLs.

You going off to sunrise festival alone because you had the money for a ticket and wanted to be a total hippy for the weekend.

You having photos appear on facebook with groups of effortlessly beautiful people. Me being jealous.

You helping your sister get to university by sending money home. Your sister totally fucking everything up, squandering your money and not even trying. Your Dad being violent. You having to share a bed with your mum. You taking acid on New Year’s Eve as if that was totally normal. Me never having taken acid being impressed, and wondering if it was totally normal.

Theme: relationship problems

Me being surprised at how much you liked the inbetweeners - even, or especially - in the aftermath of one of your feeling close to suicidal nights when we made a wholesome, technically complex and, under the circumstances, improbable, mushroom noodle soup.

You getting angry with your boyfriend because he put a jumper in the bin "it didn't even occur to him that he could take it to a charity shop.” You not being able to ‘look him in the face’ afterwards.

Your boyfriend, the same one, breaking his foot in anger at something you had said or done, that you only ever alluded to but never explained fully. You feeling sheepish when our mutual friend asked if you wanted to bring a +1 one to her wedding, and you had to say that your +1 was injured, you’d be attending alone but with friends.

Theme: nation-ship problems

Your anaemic line manager at work not filling out your visa request form You repeatedly asking her to the point of exasperation.

The Con-Dems getting voted in.

Us beginning to despise these things and ourselves (as we’d gathered armfuls of clothes in topshop)

You finding out you had 5 weeks to vacate the country.

You trying desperately at lunch time to find out about shipping costs to India. Your whole life being uprooted. Our loud abrasive boss saying that you could carry on working remotely from India. But that you’d be paid in a way that reflected local rates in rupees as opposed to continuing on the same £ salary.

The anaemic woman at work admitting, between talking of plans for her wedding (to a man I heavily suspected to be a close blood relation) that it was one of the worst things that had happened during her professional life. Me wanting to correct her statement from the passive to active voice to be: “this is one of the worst things you have done in your life”.

You having a leaving-the-country-for-good-party in some distant relative, or family friend's flash soho apartment. (Why hadn’t we even heard of him before?. He was cool and had a roof terrace!) Everyone being careful to avoid talking about the reality of the situation. Some of your friends being lairy and puking on the expensive looking leather sofa. You wearing a skater dress and having no idea how ridiculously beautiful you looked.

Me splitting up with my boyfriend because he said he was going to stay in and translate Heine rather than come to the party. You having specifically mentioned that at least my boyfriend, who was perennially penniless but sometimes charming, would be able to come to your leaving party because it wouldn’t involve spending too much money.

1 note · View note

sllester · 10 years

Text

my journey back from the spurstowe arms in discards

Last night I walked my friend Jess from the spurstowe arms to the overground, and then came back to my flat. Jess had told me earlier that evening how she had set up a twitter account but that it wasn’t going very well. I asked her to show me and when she did this was the only tweet she had sent:

Jessica Moule ‏ @JessicaMoule

@jessymayhew I don’t understand- am I doing it right? (ah I feel old!)

We had drunk a few things and I found her attempt funny. Inordinately so. Only in an endearing way, because we grew up with cassettes and landlines and dial-up modems (if we were lucky); we have to make an effort to not feel technologically decrepit. I told her that I find it hard to write things in a limited number of characters,but it’s something I want to work on.

After we said goodbye I walked back to the pub. In between there and my house I saw:

and:

Neither of these things did much more than make me think "I"ll take a photo". But they weren’t standard rubbish either. I liked how close in proximity they were to each other and the way that ‘DAVE’ seemed somehow involved with the gaudy pink debra-ing even though it was probably years since he was last there.

On the way home I realised that if someone asked me ‘who out of everyone you have only met two or three times is your favourite person?’ I would say, without hesitation, Jess’s brother, Jack.

I was with Jack the night Michael Jackson died, it was an ordinary weeknight which became unexpectedly momentous. People were giddy, as if it were suddenly snowing and everybody had eaten too many tangfastics and felt hyper and sick at the same time. Jack kept shouting things out to people we didn’t know. He verged on being lairy but in a way which was funny considering the hysteria.

Jess has told me stories about things her brother did at school which make me like him more too. Teachers held an ‘emergency meeting’ about his sexuality once. Even now, no one seems less concerned with his own sexuality than him. When Jess and Jack's mum died when they were teenagers he was taken into a psychiatric ward.

I feel like Jack is above the trivialities that most people focus their energies on, but then I know it’s easy to glorify him because he left London soon after that night and I only have a few memories of him. He lives and works on his Dad’s farm now and reads a lot. As far as I know he's not sleeping with anyone. Of any gender. We have the same birthday but he was born the year before me.

0 notes