Parallel Parking

For the first time in my life I am learning to drive. It is very difficult, but I’ve already had more than six lessons and I’ve passed the Theory Test, so you have to take your Driving Test within two years of doing that. I am actually paying for the privilege of putting my nerves through strenuous exercise every Saturday morning, I murmur to myself as I tie up my laces at the bottom of the stairs, so best get on with it. My driving instructor, John, is a hero. Pushing down on his brake pads when I’m about to slowly crash in to the stationary car in front. Or swerving my steering wheel as I narrowly escape clipping the white van parked by the side of the road. When I stutter and stall in the middle of Lewisham junction, almost every time we go through there, he fends off the angry drivers with a wave of his hand and gives me clear and quiet instructions on how to fix this problem.

I am concentrating so hard on driving that my neck and upper shoulders are permanently tense, and when I go down bends on a road, it feels like when you're strapped inside a rollercoaster by one of those over the shoulder safety mechanisms, only releasing and letting you breathe when the ride’s over. I’m not a natural driver, but then I never imagined I would be. I have rarely sat in a car during my growing up years, my parents didn’t own one and I rode around on mini-buses at school, quite far back from the driver. John says, ‘People usually pick up little rules of the road paying attention to their parents, or whoever’s driving them around.’ Even when I’m in a car I don’t pay attention to what the driver is doing. I'm always staring out the window at the other people and the colour of shopfronts! Or something equally un-drivey.

Today we do a new route to Blackheath and I find myself doing exactly that and staring out at things instead of concentrating on the driving. It’s because I used to come here when I was at school. The heath looks so different when you’re driving around it. It looks smooth and manageable, but I know underfoot it feels rough and takes an age to walk over. The No. 54 bus crosses my path and I remember that’s how I used to get home. We follow the one-way system as plump pedestrians walk out in front of parked cars (hazard!) and I wait at the traffic lights, with the clutch pressed firmly half down, trying to hover for John.

Once we’re on a quiet residential street I have to practice my parallel parking. I don’t understand parallel parking. Conceptually and rationally, yes I understand parallel parking, but in practice of having to make the car I am in control of do it, I cannot fathom how. Because you have to turn your steering wheel right in many different angles or degrees (John tries to make me understand by drawing and explaining laboriously, pouring out his care and due diligence trying to make me see), but when you put your vehicle in reverse you have to steer in the opposite direction. It hurts my head and tortured neck looking out the back window trying to understand it. For now, I will just do exactly as John tells me to and one day I hope that I will get past this.

As I’m doing this painfully slow reversing and neck craning, I see all shades of life through the multiple windows and mirrors. A Royal Mail van is parked up quite close. The postman opens his red double doors and is shuffling through letters and packages, then stuffing the ones that fit inside his courier bag slung low below his hip. A funny looking family come ambling down the pavement towards me, a grandma wearing an oversized sweatshirt with NAVY stamped on the chest, a little girl, and a grandad wearing baggy khaki clothes, walking boots, and an enormous neon yellow bucket hat with a floppy rim. Reminding me of those stereotypical Australian hats, with the bits of cork hanging off string. He also has a little leather pouch. Now a second postman comes out from a side street and crosses the road behind me, making his way to the parked van. I must wait. Next time I look through the windshield I see the two postmen having a natter, I wonder if they’re on eachothers’ turf? Next time I look out of my rear window, I see the grandad smoking a pipe sat on a low garden wall, still in his hi-vis hat but no longer with the kid.

Looking from a car out in to the world is a very strange perspective. It’s like a moving room. Usually the view stays pretty much the same from a window of a room, apart from the change of seasons, or maybe if you live somewhere without light pollution, the stars will sometimes look different. But in a car you can study people in the outside world, with no real offence taken. You can even say stuff about strangers who are only a few metres away from you, without being heard or harassed. I guess I’m describing some of the grounds for road rage, but I feel no rage, only nerves and wonder.

Thank You, Moon Gazing Hare

I want to thank the Moon Gazing Hare, appropriately. She who sits on my chest of drawers, with her neck cranked back waiting patiently, sniffing the air. She watches stellar time and I, sometimes crouched with her, sitting low on my dark blue carpet stared out to space. She came from a trip to Cambridge, which ended in a disaster. Retrieved out of a handbag, unbroken. The Moon Gazing Hare is made from alabaster, she is white and chalky like how we imagine the moon to be. But she looks soft, like cheese or mochi, which is also how we imagine the moon to be. In flux / many things at once / ‘the inconstant moon.’ I love her. I fear her. I am in awe of her.

The Moon Gazing Hare has been a constant. As I turned over another year, changed offices, visited continents, said goodbyes, wept at brides, left a job and started a new one; she has been steadfast and still. Her elongated ears swept back and streamlined, her tiny eyes marking the heavens. Apparently a Norse myth, a pagan belief, where if one clocked a hare looking up at the moon it was a good omen. A sign of stirring hope, new beginnings, re-birth and growth. That was all stated on the package I received her in, which is now in the recycling. The Moon Gazing Hare will stay with me still, I’ll put her on my window sill. For tonight the moon is full, a yellow dot high above our polluted air, beaming.

Peckham Perspective (or how World Cup fever worked)

WHITE HORSE

A pub where the interior decor is like a greenhouse with hanging succulents and skylights, lifting that heavy dingy pub atmosphere. You can breathe in here. The average age is 24, in fact it’s the most healthy and nonchalantly dishevelled crowd I’ve seen. Stylish ironic sports caps worn askew, and frayed backpacks that look like hand-me-downs from war veterans at Dunkirk. A vegan burger is over £10 and doesn’t come with chips - that are handcut by the way. The football is playing on one screen at the end of the room. It’s the England Vs. Colombia Round-16, I’m not very familiar with football but I’m here. Leaning across the bar with splayed elbows to cool down, at least I can see the ball. With my glasses on I can also see everyone else. Around a third of those watching care about the game, but the rest are hanging out with their tribe in a chill environment sipping on their locally brewed beers. Even in the height of summer dark ale is being supped. Once, the ball grazes the side of a goal post and skims off the pitch, people clap and give a single shout that feels like a pat on the back.

NAG’S HEAD

An England flag hangs under the telly. Tacked to the wood panelling with drawing pins, stamped in. The white of the St. George’s Cross is stained by nicotine and time. There's clenched fists and pint glasses filled with lager - lager - lager - you can even buy tinnies in here. The guy sat alone at the back with the sideburns and mullet is draining his can right now. He leers at the girls on my table like a maniac and grins with no frills and broken teeth. Everything is brown in colour, mauves and maroons seep through. Upholstery like the carpet of a forgotten ferry, docked in the shipyard since the late 1970’s. Around the island of tables in the middle of the pub are Great White Sharks. Big Fat Lads with Bald Heads. Bellies.

Gawan my Son
Not laaaaaaikely
Playin’ like bollocks
Take it daaaaaan tha liiiiiine
BOLLOCKS!
Keep ‘old of it son
Take your time, son

The match is being played over three screens. Every man is steaming, shouting, seething at all angles. I see spittle and raw joy, incensed blokes who look like they’re having the time of their lives but are about to explode. Slurs and You Wot!? Chucked at the Colombian shirt wearing cunt, perched like a pile of meat skewered to a stick on his stool. Jeering. Eruptions of laughter. You can’t take a joke? 

It’s what we call an Old Man Pub but I feel more raw energy in here than a playground. A fruit machine flashes wildly against the wall. When Colombia scores the mood gets cut. Silence like a soldier got shot. The guy in orange hi-vis punches the door and walks out on to the street, where we go next.

It’s Extra Time as we walk the length of Peckham High Street. Every window, in every shop is playing the Game. Hairdressers, chicken shops, John the Unicorn, newsagents. We peer through panes of glass at the scores staying static. We walk on through the quiet and empty street. The summer heat hangs heavy with pressure over the tarmac, and the traffic lights change colour to no oncoming vehicles. 

PECKHAM LEVELS

A converted car park with a good heavy-handed lick of paint, since I last saw it. I remember a bare building with you know those holes between the car park levels, between floor and ceiling. Because you know car parks are concrete slabs made for sheltering cars not people, though sometimes skaters use them and homeless people. Well let me tell you! Now there are windows! And fluorescent tinted tubes and industrial sized fairy lights, and wacky chairs and a working bar and proper toilets, the works. They’ve got a big screen playing the match and now it’s on to penalties. Groups of thirty year olds in tight polo shirts and arm bulges, wearing espadrilles, share a jug of beer and gesture with boyish excitement. Boho chic, tussled hair, the ambient mood-lighting is flushed with pink, setting off the sunset hues dissipating over the city scape outside and damn - this is so Instgrammable. England scores! The room erupts and hushes. Colombia misses. The room claps and hushes. The final kick is coming. The ball is soaring. England SCORES!!!!!!!! 

Field Notes from an Anthropologist: There are three pubs in Peckham filled with three types of people. I’m part of it. The hipsters, working class, and yuppies. There are invisible barriers that exist between the pubs and their clientele but the footie breaks them down. Because when you are all sharing in one activity (you could call this common activity a ritual), you can be different but it’s okay because you are all doing the same thing. 

Friends at the centre of the universe

It was the hay fever. The pollen count was exponential and my eyes itched and I couldn’t breathe. I had to speak with an open dry palate, every - breath - effort. As your brain snapped in to gear it would stop intermittently with sneezing fits turning it in to sludge. 

I arrived at the bar and burst in to tears. A gin and tonic ordered straight away and they listened, carefully like teachers and molly coddled me like a newborn puppy. I cried the world was too much! My job, the work, the state of it. I couldn’t breathe! I blew my nose and had a nose bleed and drank my gin and felt better. The pair of them. Dressed in dungarees, a mustard yellow baggy sweater, crop top, bright socks, hair messed up, scrunched atop their pretty heads like bird’s nests. I loved them. And they told me tales of theatre.

Imprisoned indoors because of the grass I was sad and spoke to Susan. She listened and offered to wash my towels because of my conjunctivitis. I bought hair perming solution. Susan positioned a seat in front of the bathroom mirror, twizzling my hair, making me feel better. Her delicate fingertips massaged my head and pushed me adrift on to a swimming pool, where I lay dozing on an inflatable alligator. Not a single strand left loose, she’s a pro. I clumsily rinsed my hair out twice and woke up with curls. 

Brixton Market on the hunt for a shopfront with ‘a blue hue’. It rained the night before so the air has clarity. I feel almost human again. Sunglasses acting as protective shields, vaseline smeared across nostrils to stop particles. She lets me tell my sorry tale. Encourages, coaxes, gives me fuel.

I have a sty in my eye but it doesn’t matter, I believe. Bounding my way across London to a pub at The Centre of the Universe, where all my Friends shall meet. Four friends who’s paths rarely cross between London, New York and Berlin but it happens. Get a round-in, pork scratchings and pints, gin and tonics for me (because wine and beer contain histamines). Spilling over the pavement then filling our booth. It looks like a cabin from a timeless fleet, with portholes of stained-glass windows peering out on to the street. How much time has elapsed. None at all. Ten years. We end with pizza at Pollo’s and a bottle of red to wash it down.

Now I lie on my bed. The final night. Peripeteia complete. Annina lies by my side with her asthma inhaler, I with a bloodied tissue pressed against my nose. She tells me to tilt my head back and I can’t because I’m lying on my back. ‘Do you know the story? Of the man who is standing in the middle of the square. Looking upwards. In to the sky so people start to wonder, what is he doing? One stranger stands next to him and looks up too. Then another joins the pair and begins to stare upwards. Soon whole crowds are joining the men, all wondering what can he see? Then the first man stops and looks down. The second man asks him with awe-inspired breath, ‘What did you see? What could you see?’ And he replies, ‘Nothing. I had a nosebleed.’

I smile and believe that my friends have saved me.

Consuming and crying

I have been crying a lot lately. Like untowardly crying. At things that don’t usually make me (or anyone stable) cry. I was reading a free magazine. Picked up unthinkingly from the vendor who shoves them in to our underarms, never making eye contact, continuously thrusting bundles until someone takes it. I take it. On the morning train - I am reading about a photography exhibition at a gallery on the Southbank, I could do that during a lunch break? A black and white portrait of a front living room, mantel shelf heavy with trophies and mascots and wallpaper peeling under colourful frames of loved ones, deceased, young, alive. An upward angle shot captures an ageing woman walking laboured to the front steps of her local church. It’s like her religious commute. Going to church religiously every Sunday for a sermon and now I am crying. Not floods. Never gushing: I cry like the robots who think they’re human in Blade Runner 2. Silently crying for no real reason standing in a packed train carriage at 8:54am.

Then the Royal Wedding took me by surprise. I was sat cross legged on the living room floor, sorting boxes of old belongings in to piles for the charity shop and then, the bin. The wedding was on in the background but my mind was engrossed in some old Adidas tracksuit bottoms, sporting stripes the colour of fire. Until this rude trumpet chorus made me look up. On the screen flared a white robed queen and the church doors were flung open, light broke out over her smile and I was crying. Again like a robot. One tear that rolls off in to the shadow cast by my right eyelid. Always the right tear-duct.

I am slowly realising that my twenties were an age of anger. I could be angry at everything! It was like a hobby that became part of my personality. I loved being vocal about stuff that didn’t matter, for example, my hatred of glass modern buildings*. Recently though, I can't muster up the vitriol and instead I am overcome by emotion. Here are inexplicable things that have made me cry in the past weeks. 

Hearing a nature podcast about the decline of moths in Britain

Catching a glimpse on ITV of the NHS Heroes Awards

Seeing a music video where an old woman with push-permed hair dances with an invisible hula-hoop

And all of these things caught me completely off-guard. I had no control over my weepy eye but I just let it happen. All Hang Out. Whatever, I don't pretend to understand why. But I cry. It has something to do with nature and the passage of time. It has something to do with feeling older and how the world carries on without you and that's fine. It doesn't matter. It has something to do with memories that don't seem to go backwards but are laid out before you, as if you have a million memories to be had but are not sure when or how it's going to happen. Uncertainty in certainty, that's likely what it is.

*I still stand by this

Plays, Pints & Places 1. The Grinning Man

I stayed up really late to make this and then my garageband crashed and I lost everything. Then I did it again. Please listen if you would like to, it's a ropey podcast where me and Lou Dicko talk-rant about a play we've seen, over a few pints, in a place, which this time is my favourite pub, The Chandos. The play is The Grinning Man at Trafalgar Studios - May 2018

Spirit level

I had to spend the hot sunlit days caged inside an office. Outside there was the repetitive pounding of a crane, breaking up the hard ground beneath the silt under the Thames. I imagined it giving migraines to those walking by, but filtered through my thick walls it was like the quickened strikes of a clock tower, madness. 

I ride the train every morning and some days I can concentrate on reading, other days I cannot and stare past people. There has been a lot of that lately and the views are not great. The backs of buildings and concrete. Scaffolding. As we approach the city there is too much glass. The whole train carriage overhears something that sounds salacious to the speaker - sleeping with a middle manager - but for the rest of us it as a nuisance disaffecting the daily commute.

Amongst one of these days I am leaning against a luggage compartment, blockaded by a rucksack and some shoulders, then holding on to the railing before me I see the back of a hand close-up. In biro it is written SPIRIT LEVEL. I think hard about what this could mean, until I follow the hand up the arms to see it is connected to a man dressed in overalls, with dust and paint all over his shirt. I turn back to stare at the grey everything with an extinguished sense of wonder. 

But for the last weeks I have been thinking about what it could have meant before I realised what it actually meant. ‘How’s your spirit level?’ Is a good question. If I asked myself that recently it would be, ‘Particularly low today. And your’s?’ There have been invites sent in the post sealed with happiness about weddings for me to receive in my pyjamas to feel slightly saddened about. My twenties are over. I have managed to accumulate things, which remind me that I once got that with the hopes of... then I feel a twinge of disappointment in myself or the thing for not following through with it. 

An ex-boyfriend sends me an e-mail about turning thirty and living in Honolulu or ‘Wherever the wind takes me’. The billboards on the side of buses carry slogans that don’t make sense with the aim to make me linger on their messages; I fall for it. The possibility of getting a dog seems distant, while I get invited to flat-warmings and take in the nice scenery and accept that people are moving on.

Though spirit levels are about balance and some days I am high. Like when sitting in the sunshine in a park I have only just discovered and fallen in love with, for it’s the site of a Victorian ruin. Resting a sleepy head on my lap, stretching apart my toes and watching a grandmother fanning herself, as her grandson shows off tricks on his new scooter. Spirit level rising. Later I had a bubblegum flavoured ice cream from a van, which was bright blue and had a similar chewy consistency to gum. Proving that childhood memories can be bettered by current ice cream flavours. 

So things are not all that bad and not all that good. But I do feel slightly off-balance.