meish dot org: life, unfolding

As you may remember, as well as bizarre morning marmite rituals, the Armenian deli around the corner does delicious food, but getting hold of it sometimes requires a surreal transaction with good cop/bad cop staff, and you may not necessarily get what you asked for. Here are a few classic examples from recent personal experience:

Sigh.

The thing is, bad cop seems to only be able to process one conceptual ingredient at a time. Ask for mozarella and avocado on brown and you get cheese and ham on a bagel. She just fixates on the concept of “cheese” and the rest is mere detail. It’s refreshing, if a little…um…surprising, sometimes.

Every lunchtime is an adventure. Who else can claim the same?

Eleven years ago (eek!), I went to an international college in Canada, with two hundred students from eighty-seven different countries in attendence. I represented the UK, which was an oddity for someone who had never identified herself as being especially British before.

I was born abroad and brought up in Nigeria and in the heady racial and cultural mixing bowl of Notting Hill in the seventies and eighties. My family travelled often, and picked up bits of the cultures we encountered along the way. As a seven year old I could jabber away happily with snippets and words in seven or eight languages (wheras now I struggle with just a couple). I was (and still am) just me, not defined by my language or passport or nationality – at least not from within.

And so it came as a shock to represent a country I didn’t necessarily agree or identify with – politically, culturally, linguistically, historically – in front of the world. I’m not going to go into the whole nationality thing here, though there’s a lot to say about it, except to point out that for a lot of formal functions (special events, performances, concerts, fundraisers etc) all the students at the college were expected to wear national dress, to represent the rich cultural diversity of the institution.

Let’s just stop and think a minute, shall we. What exactly was I supposed to wear? Jeans? A Beefeater outfit? A Bowler hat? Morris Dancing costume? Er, none of the above. I had no costume.

So of course I improvised. In my first year I wore a sari a few times, then graduated on to a Kazakh waistcoat and hat and black polo neck (I was reading a lot of Satre at the time). At verious choir performances and fundraisers I was Polish, Basque, Pakistani, Texan, Norwegian. Often, after the performance, we met with the audience – and frequently, I simply could not be arsed to explain
a) that I was English (the person I would talking to would invariably say “Oh, do you know John Brown, from London?” which would force me to get evil and say “oh yes…terrible about the divorce, wasn’t it?” and watch their faces fall in horror…but that’s a different story) and
b) why I was dressed up in the Thai national costume. So I began to act. Well, okay, lie. If I thought I could get away with pretending to be from another country, then I would (of course, the irony that I actually was from another country was completely lost on me). So I would put on outrageous accents and swear blind that I was from Portugal, Italy, Iceland, Paraguay.

It was Paraguay that got me into trouble.

[I've always wanted to say that. Makes me feel like a spy.]

We were singing for some charity event at the Empress Hotel in Victoria. I was wearing the Paraguayan costume that I’d borrowed from a girl on my floor, and afterward, milling around with the audience and a cup of lukewarm tea, an old man came up and said “Hello, where are you from?”

I summoned my best outrageous accent and said “I yam frrrrom Parawaaay”

“De veras?” he asked “No me diga! Que raro! Trabajaba en Paraguay por unos trece años. De que parte eres?“

Gah. My face fell. I had found a flaw in my plan. The fact that I didn’t speak any spanish at all (apart from a few choice phrases) and understood even less. Like, in fact, none. At all. Eek. So I mumbled something about the coach leaving, and ran for the door, resolving next time to stick to my own nationality, whatever that nebulous item was.

Sure enough, ten months later, I managed to be British at another fundraiser. It was two years before the Commonwealth games were due to come to Victoria, and the international choir was again singing at some press junket fundraiser thing, providing local commonwealth-flavoured colour to what was essentially a royal visit by Prince Edward, patron of the Commonwealth games committee or something. The point being that we got on stage, sang a bit about world peace and jolly old international group hugs or something, and then afterwards, suddenly, instead of milling around with lukewarm tea and rapidly cooling enthusiasm with the audience, I was dragged into a line-up (a shaking-hands-with-royalty type one, not a police identification one – that’s another story…) to meet Prince Edward.

I was wearing a particularly horrible floral Laura Ashley type creation which I’d borrowed from a Canadian, and which made me look like a strangely camp american football player (I’d shaved most of my head in Mexico, a few weeks earlier, and the dress had enormous shoulderpads). I think it was supposed to look country-garden-ish, but it actually reminded me more of the sort of product pattern that would emerge if you gave Ermintrude a rather powerful emetic. I was also wearing stupid heels, which made me at least six foot tall. So picture a tall butch amazon in heels and a pool of floral vom, and you’ve pretty much got the picture.

Anyway, Prince Edward was working his way along the line-up, greeting people and exchanging a few words with them as he went. I always imagined (because I gave it soooo much thought) that royalty had a standard two or three lines which they used in rotation along the line-up, so it looked as if they were having new and original thoughts and covnersations the whole time, in much the same way as I used to play three songs when busking on Portobello Road – two songs was the optimum passing time for people who were walking slowly and browsing at the stalls, and three meant I avoided repetition, bumped out the set and didn’t have to bother expanding my repetoire. Besides, people only ever gave money for the Beatles or the Smiths anyway.

Edward got closer. I don’t care much for royalty, but that wasn’t the issue in this particular situation. My palms would have been equally sweaty if I’d been meeting my boyfriend’s parents, or an MP, or whatever. I’m prone to momentary gasps of nervousness just before I meet someone – even if it’s someone I already know, but haven’t seen for a while. I get a huge adreneline rush, my heart hammers in my chest, and I get a bit shaky – but it all passes within seconds, usually. As soon as I open my mouth, I relax and it’s all fine – I’m in my element taking control of strange situations, talking to people, making things work. As soon as the waiting is over, I’m fine, which is why I so detest people saying they’ll come over or call some time on saturday afternoon. I hate waiting, because it means that sense of anticipation, expectation, goes on far too long.

And now I’m making you wait for this story. Oops, sorry.

So eventually, Edward gets to me, and his Aide says “This is Meg Pickard, she’s a student at Pearson College. She’s the British one.” which is a funny old introduction, if you ask me – but he didn’t. So I stick out my hand, and then remember and do a little curtsey, though I feel like a complete and utter tube. He opens his mouth to say what I imagine is going to be the usual little bon mots or simple question, and then he says

“So, have you ever met royalty before?”

“No,” I reply, honestly, “this is my first time.”

“Ah,” he says, in his weird strangulated-plum accent, “what do you think of it so far?”

My brain goes into hyperactive WHAAAT THE FUUUUUCK mode. What kind of a dumbass question is that? What? Is there any kind of protocol for answering such a question, I wonder, and as I’m wondering, trying to formulate my response, I hear the words just sort of slip out.

“Well, you’re shorter than I thought,” I say, because he is, “and you’ve got less hair,” which he most certainly does.

All that’s going through my head at this point is that he’s a short, balding plummy little man, and I just insulted him and I really didn’t mean it, well, I did, but I didn’t mean it to come out like that and now I’m wondering whether they’re ever going to bring back hanging as a punishment for treason and/or insulting the royals.

He sort of snorts with laughter, and I wonder if he’s even heard me, and then he sort of raises one hand to smooth the back of his hair and says “Yes, I suppose I am…” at which point the aide grabs him by the elbow and firmly guides him to meet the old lady next to me, who is the chair of some committee or other, wearing an awful lot of cat-wee flavour perfume, and was fishing her knickers out of her crack three minutes earlier. She, of course, follows protocol to the letter, giving me a snooty glance as Eddie moves on to the next guest. She bloody would, because he didn’t ask her any unexpected questions, oh no. He asks her the equivalent of the busker’s Panic – safe, secure, everyone can sing along, no threat whatsoever – he asks her something about the weather, in other words, and she answers smugly. Silly cow.

So there we have it. My first and only brush with royalty, and I called him short and bald within the space of about thirty seconds. Bring on the queen mum, I say, I’ll bloody well ‘ave ‘er!

My brother gave Princess Di some lilies in his underpants, once, but that’s a different story entirely…..

I’ve got a sound in my head – an earworm. You know how usually it’s a song? This evening, all evening, it was Craig David (due to Davo and Luke and I singing “Luke Martin all over your *BOINK*” for reasons I can’t remember during Davo’s lovely dinner). And then, about an hour ago, listening to John Martyn (who slurs his words so enormously, it’s difficult to hear what he’s saying) I started thinking of the mantra of the Trufi-boys in La Paz.

By my second month in Bolivia, I was living in a chalett in Sopocachi Alto, a relatively good neighbourhood of La Paz close to the canyon wall. A chalett is not a Heidi-log cabin type affair. It’s a prefab, freestanding house (in my case, free-standing only by about six inches on all sides. I swear, if Bolivia had anything like the trade descriptions act) with a big sink on the roof to do the washing, and a view out towards mount Illimani on the other side of the canyon. I would stand on the roof in the early morning beforte heading into town for work, having huffed and puffed my way up the spiral metal staircase through thin Andean air and cold morning wind, and watch the city waking up in front of me, with the cold shadow of the canyon wall only a hundred feet behind.

To get into the centre of town, I could walk for half an hour or so (which was fine on the way down the hill, but hellish coming back up, especially tired at the end of the day and at 11,000 feet above sea level), catch a cab, or take the Trufi – a converted VW combi van capable of carrying thirteen people, squashed in tight, and travelling a fixed route through the city. My local Trufi started at the bottom of our road, and traversed the centre of the city to get to La Ceja (literally, eyebrow), a satellite development clinging to the top edge of the canyon wall above La Paz.

The Trufi team consists of two people – the conductor (driver) and the niño, the boy who collects fares from the passengers and operates the sliding door on the side of the vehicle. Back then, each ride cost between sixty centavos (about 7p) and one Boliviano (about 12p) and could take anything from ten to forty minutes, depending on the traffic and other passengers. See, the Trufi may have had an established route, but it stopped wherever the passengers dictated. Even if you were wedged firmly between two cholitas on the back seat, with nine people and an awful lot of shopping bags and skirts between you and the door, when you wanted to get off, you had to call out “bajaré en la esquinita!” (I’m getting off on the corner), “me lo para!” (stop for me!) or “voy a bajar!” (I’m going to get off), and then clamber forward over the laps, seats and heads of the other passengers, chanting the whole time “discúlpame…con permiso…perdon…” to squeeze through the sliding door on the side of the vehicle. The thing is, you couldn’t call out too soon, because you’d end up being ejected from the Trufi before your intended destination, and you couldn’t start getting up before the Trufi had stopped, because you would be quite literally wedged into your seat by the huge and expansive skirts worn by the cholitas who frequented the route. So you had to wait until the last possible moment before yelling out, and then the vehicle would suddenly stop, and you’d all be hurled forward, shopping, small children and everything. The the process of self-extracation would begin. See, the thing is it was relatively easy for the people in the front two rows of seats, and even easier for the ones who sat up front with the driver. But if you were stuck in the back seat, especially way off in the back corner, you were pretty much screwed. Also, if you were a good six inches taller than the average Bolivian, headroom was always an issue, most especially when removing yourself from a crowded and tiny van, but also when sitting in the Trufi, and every bump and pothole in the road (and there were many) caused you to make the sudden and uncomfortable vertical journey between sparsely-sprung seat and hard metal roof. Yowch.

Since the Trufis have no numbers by which to identify them (partly because of high illiteracy rates, and partly because of flexibility), one of the niño’s main jobs was to intone the places through which the Trufi would be passing on its route, shouted out repeatedly against an ear-bleedingly loud cueca or merengue compilation tape blasting tinnily from the driver’s stereo. But in the same way that Evening Standard salesmen on Tube stations who say the same thing again and again throughout the evening begin to sound like they’re shouting “Stennah!” or “Ay-lay!” for “Paper Late”, the Trufi boys manage to turn their litany of destinations into a mesmerising mantra “S’pcachi-Plaz’spaña-IsabellaCatolica-Praaaa-do-Estaciónes-AltaCeeeee-jaaaa…” All the places through which the Trufi passes – Sopocachi, Plaza del España, Plaza Isabel la Catolica, El Prado, train station, bus station, Communidad El Alto and La Ceja, but rolled together, like a long and strange name, as odd and yet as strangely familiar as every journey.

That’s what’s been in my head this evening. That litany, especially the way the boy intoned AltaCeeeejaaaa. And suddenly, without realising, it’s time for bed, where I’ll listen to another litany as I fall asleep – the > it’s an adult lullaby”>shipping forecast, circumnavigating the country, calling in safety and security to those on the sea, and those tucked warm and fluey under dreamy duvets and over clean, cool egyptian cotton sheets.

[Incidentally, here's a site about the extensive and efficient Micro and Trufi network of Cochabamba, Bolivia, which is the second city I lived in, for nine months, although I never took a Trufi there, because by then I'd bought a bike. And all I can remembver of public transport in that city was that they seemed very keen on running me over....]

The Grauniad lists 101 things we won’t miss. Hmm. I beg to differ on a few points:

2. Smash

No, you see you the writer has got the wrong end of the stick entirely – she thinks that Smash is supposed to act like a foodstuff. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. That’s like trying to pass off Alka-seltzer as a refreshing soft drink – it’s just not. Smash is, however, a genius hangover concept. In my final year of uni at Liverpoool, my flatmate Charlotte and I figured out that it was clinically the only way to recover from a tequila hangover. We spent a lot of time hanging out in a tequila bar for various reasons that year – work, friends, stress – and we had rather too many opportunities to experiment with alleviating the particular circle of hell that is created in the aftermath of a lot of tequila. We tried all sorts of things – tea, alka-seltzer, plain bread, fry-ups, all to no avail. Eventually, however, we found the perfect remedy. Whoever is least hungover (and that needs to be a voluntary state) or at least most able to stand should prepare for the other a big glass of weak Ribena light made with normal-temperature water (not cold) and a Smash sandwich – that’s slightly moist Smash on white bread, with no butter whatsoever (that’s why the smash has to be a bit runny) and a small dob of ketchup on the side (in case, miraculously, you feel like you can handle some taste towards the last couple of bites. Usually goes untouched, though). The Smash sandwich: completely bland, completely inoffensive, yet pads out the stomach quite well, and requires no effort for the body to break down. Even vaguely manages to wave some carbohydrates (well, stodge) near your poor abused stomach lining. I won’t hear a word said against it.

15. Blue gym knickers

I wouldn’t go as far as saying we missed them, but we certainly appreciated that there was at least one item of clothing in the world that could make everyone look universally awful. Well, two if you include the knee-length four-box-pleat blue serge uniform skirt.

30. Badges

I used to have an enormous shoebox of badges from childhood, including my Dennis the Menace badge, one with a picture of a big screw on it (no, I wasn’t aware what it meant when I was a child), lots of “nuclear power – no thanks” type ones, a Blue Peter badge or two and umpteen badges from Peel Castle, Crich tram museum and Beamish. Jesus, Beamish. Haven’t thought about that place for decades. Did you ever go to Beamish? Was it a school trip or did your parents drag you?

35. Indoor fireworks

Now, I’ll admit that they weren’t very exciting, admittedly, but they did weird things (Remember the one that just sort of spurted out black alien poo? What the fuck was that about?) and smelt strongly of carbon and sulpher, and that was OK by me, frankly.

37. Mini milks

Were and still are the cheapest lollies in the freezer cabinet, and were the only ones considered healthy by my mum, therefore have a special kind of nostalgia attached to them. Ah, nostalgia’s not what it used to be, eh? They did taste alarmingly wall-like, though.

41. Monkey

I’m sorry, but Monkey and the Water Margin were genius. Fucked up, sure, and not very well scripted (see also: Rentaghost), dubbed (see also: Heidi) or in fact very gripping or exciting: (see also: The Adventure Game) but they beat the pants off Sons and Daughters. Who is the woman who wrote this article? Silly moo.

57. Serving hatches
Yes, we miss these, because they’re just sort of handy. Except we don’t have to miss them, because we have one in our flat, so there.

Now, I’m going to come up with a list of 101 lazily-written articles that the Guardian really should have thought twice about paying for. Honestly, there’s better-written and researched fodder on at least half of the personal sites I visit regularly….

My grandmother had an ancient Scottish remedy for flu, which she shared with me, aged seven.

1. Get a bottle of whisky
2. Get a hat
3. Put the hat on the left bedpost
4. Drink the whisky until it looks as if it’s on the right bedpost
5. You’ll either be cured or you won’t care about being sick.

I was seven.

I dreamt last night that I was crewing an enormous fishing boat on the Atlantic, responsible for bringing it into harbour, navigating by the stars – only I got distracted by the meteorite showers over the weekend, and ended up taking us into Caracas instead. The captain’s wife was not impressed, because there was only condensed milk for the tea, and the crew (which included my brother’s girlfriend’s brother, two members of my department and a couple of blogging types) were pale-lipped and silent. We entered the harbour so fast that it felt like we were just skimming across the water. I leant out over the bowsprit and touched the necklaces of lights reflected in the calm ocean.

In the early nineties, I spent a summer crewing the a sail training vessel circumnavigating the UK, taking groups of probationers, ex-offenders and young people who were at risk (usually from drugs or homelessness) on ten day trips.

It’s a 92′ Victorian pilot schooner, a classic, beautiful ship, and a pleasure to sail, though bloody hard work. Most of the trainees had never been on the ocean before, offshore or inshore, and it was sometimes a bit stressful trying to get things done. If things went well, at the beginning of the week, the four crew would be doing all the work, explaining what we did as we went along, from putting up sails to navigating, polishing the brasses, building weather charts and making the tea. By the end of the week, the trainees would be doing all of that.

The skipper was called Hugh, though we all called him Shuggie. He was Scottish, late thirties (though he looked older) and monosyllabic. He always had a roll-up clamped between his lips, and its state was a good indicator of the gravity of a situation. When we hit bad weather in the open ocean, and the whole boat was heeling at an angle not conducive to sleep or gravity, the trainees would often get scared, and panicky – which sometimes translated into agression and violence. Violence is something you don’t want on a relatively small boat, out at sea, so situations had to be rapidly diffused. I would tell the trainees to watch Shuggie’s cigarette. When we were in bad wether, it would remain there, clamped between his teeth in a Clint Eastwood style. As soon as he felt the weather was turning, even if the swells were still massive and the boat was still further to one side than it felt like it should be, he’s whip out his zippo and light it again. And then everyone knew it was going to be ok.

My main job was to oversee the navigation and the charts – my love of maps plus fascination with meteorology coming into good use – and it was bizarre to be listening to the nightly shipping forecast and actually using it. Actually needing it. Even now, when I hear it, I still mentally trace the coastline of the UK, following the names around, clockwise.

There’s a longer story about sailing into the Corryvrechan whirlpool, plus sheep-ticks on the paps of Jura, an eerie confession on the graveyard watch and a horrific realisation as we rounded the Calf of Man, but I can’t find the words today. Sorry, am fluey and delerious. Hate everything. Going back to bed.

There is an elephant sitting on my chest. It hurts to breathe and it hurts to open the curtains and it hurts to move…but typing’s ok. Just.

I’ve been saving up getting ill for a while now. While those around me have been toppling to the strains of London flu, colds, coughs and chills plus foot and mouth of course (not really), I’ve been slogging on, driven by the knowledge that with two vacancies in my team, and me covering their workload until I can hire anyone, any illness would be catastrophic for the department.

So on Friday I finally completed my new hires, who will start in a month or so, and then I quite simply sat down and got ill.

Imagine wearing a lead-woven coat, which is bloody heavy and really uncomfortable, but which you know will protect you from evil x-rays, whether you know they’re there or not. Just in case, you know. And then one day you decide to take off you coat and deal with the x-rays, there or not, because not dealing with them is a pain in the ass, frankly, and most uncomfortable and tiring.

It’s like when you’re being attacked by mosquitos in the middle of the night. One night in Peru, I fought the battle of the mozzies, and I found the way to win. In much of South America, mosquito nets are seen as essential, but are not always very practical. There’s nothing to tie them to, for example, and besides, the mozzies are usually either so small that they just pop through the holes in the netting, or so big that they just lift up the hem and march right under. Bastards. Mozzies throughout Latin America have very different tastes and behaviours, and it’s difficult to find one thing that will repel them all efficiently without killing fish, or melting your skin, like DEET. I found that in general, a diet rich in vitamin B12 (lots of vegemite) worked wonders, plus citronella essential oil dotted on clothes, and liberally slathering myself in Avon Skin-So-Soft body lotion, which made me smell like an old lady, but kept most biting insects away a treat in the Amazon.

Skin-So-Soft is the top-selling Avon product in the Amazon, because it’s such an effective repellent. All the gold miners deep in the jungle use it, which is always a bit weird (you meet one, and he looks like he’s about to kill you, gun at the ready and swarthy and foul, but smelling strangely of your great auntie Jean). In fact, SSS has been so popular for it’s repellent properties, that Avon have actually started marketing it as a repellent, which is a new development in the last couple of years.

The trouble with repellents, though, is that they can’t be 100% effective. So occasionally, I’d find myself dozing off in a hut somewhere, and then suddenly brought back to wakefulness by the sound of a mosquito buzzing past my ear, closer than the mozzie net should have allowed.

Why do they do that, I wonder? Is there something especially tasty about the human ear? Or do they do it just to piss you off? I tend towards the latter viewpoint. I mean, think about it. You wouldn’t be able to hear a thing if they just flew around your feet, would you? So why do they do it? You’re lying there, resting and relaxed, about to drop off, despite the howling of the jungle around you (incidentally, jungles are bloody noisy places to be, especially at night), when suddenly…

….zzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

…and suddenly you’re awake, with a start. Whatthefuckwasthat? Where is the little bastard? Gah!.

In the tropics, I tend to travel very light, but I always have with me one or two light sarongs, or lengths of material about 1.2m by 2.5m. Pakistani headscarfs work well, as do sarapes, or any bit of local material – most cultures have an equivalent (I think ours is the shell suit, but never mind). Why? Because it comes in extremely handy. It’s an undersheet, a towel, a scarf, something to wrap fruit or laundry in, a knapsack (if you tie it right), a skirt, a shawl, a screen, something to cover you in bed, something to sit on, a head-covering and something that dries within minutes, if it’s made of light cotton, which they generally are. Genius.

So I got used to sleeping under a sarong, and suffering the attack of the lone mozzie. They would skim my earlobe so closely I swore I could feel little wings flapping. Bastard. What keeps you awake after such a fly-by is not the noise, but the thought that there is one of them inside the mosquito net with you, and sooner or later, they will be back. The anticipation of noise is worse than the noise itself. You find yourself straining to every tiny hum.

“Was that it? Is he gone? Hang on, hold still, I’m sure he’s…” zzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz “…FUCKER!”

It’s too hot to wear earplugs, and unbearably uncomfortable if your entire body is covered by the sarong, including your head. So sooner of later, you realise that you have to make a sacrifice.

One night, in a jungle frontier town, I made a pact with the mozzie population of Peru. In my head and under my breath, I offered to sacrifice one limb, if they would just leave my damned head alone, becuase I had to be up in four hours to catch a boat to the next place up the river (even though I was well aware that the boat would probably leave nine hours late, I had to keep up the pretense of showing up early, as expected, otherwise I could guarantee this would be the one time it would leave on schedule). So I sacrificed my left calf and ankle. I stuck my legout of the sarong, into the stifling night, and said “go on, take that you bastards, and then leave me in peace” and sure enough, they did. When I woke up in the morning, my left leg looked as if I’d been wooed by an amorous hedgehog, but the little bastards left my head undisturbed, to sleep. Bliss. Sometimes you’ve just got to make sacrifices in order to get through.

Incidentally, a favourite pass-time in the amazon (which confirmed to at least one passing tourist that I was a mad anthropologist who was hard as nails and a bit scary – it’s all an act, I tells ya. I’m a real softy, though I reserve a special place in my heart lined with bitterness, bile and vitriolic contempt for mosquitos, cockroaches, little yappy dogs and one or two exes) was exploding mozzies. The thing is, when you realise that a mosquito is biting you, there’s little you can do. Even if you kill it, it’s still going to itch like hell, raise a welt, and piss you off. Might as well have some fun, then, eh? Fun, in this very limited context, means that you don’t swat the mozzie. If you can see it biting you, you simply pinch the skin on either side of its proboscus, which means it can’t extract it and fly away. Which, in turn, means it just keeps on sucking your blood. Which means eventually it reaches capacity and explodes. I’m telling you, the nights were veeeerrrry long in the jungle, and I had to find something to wile away the hours.

Besides, difficult to feel any sympathy for the little bastards when you realise that the blood splattered on your arm after you raise your palm is yours, not theirs.

What is it about teenagers in UPAs that makes them produce so much saliva?

Last night on the way home, I had to change trains at Willesden Junction, sitting on the cold platform, huddled in my duvet coat and my book, for nearly half an hour.

There were four teenagers sitting on the bench next to mine, two boys, two girls, all smoking and laughing loudly, insulting each other and occasionally breaking into rhythmic tapping of the metal bench.

And spitting.

I have never seen so few people produce so much saliva in one twenty-three minute period (well, not since my travels…). By the time the train pulled in, the platform around the bench was ringed with little round moist patches, foaming polka dots on the grey asphalt.

The Hampstead Delight kebab shop, which I pass at least twice a day, was gearing up for a busy evening when I got off the train. It smelt of drunkness and botulism and thick, old grease.

Parents can be so cruel.

It’s spring, so I’ve recently noticed a blossoming in London of collection boxes and posters for the annual Capital Radio Help A London Child charity drive. This always makes me uncomfortable. Why? Because of my secret criminal past, naturally. You couldn’t see that coming? Oh please. I’m not all peaches and cream, you know. I had to claw my way to the top (etc etc – well, I figure if you’re going to try and pull off a rags to (ahem) riches story, you might as well fulfill all the cliches you can along the way. Saves time in backstory later. Now where were we? Oh yes.)

Cast your mind back to the early eighties. We were young. Springs were brighter. Summers were longer and hotter. Clothes were itchier. Music was more memorable. The Prime Minister was an evil witch. Oh, sorry that was just the interpretation of politics I was given as a child. We lived in Notting Hill, West London, before it was considered a chi-chi and respectable place to live. At the time, it was considered a shabby place to live, because, well, we were a shabby family. Globetrotters and reformed hippies and teachers and writers and musicians and intellectuals for parents do not make for tenth birthday parties in the local Wimpy (I know this for a fact, I tried very hard to convince them, we ended up going to the Commonwealth Institute instead, I think – more educational and alternative, but the Michael Jackson dancing contests and lard-shakes were thin on the ground. My friends were unimpressed.)

[Tangent: Once, aged about nine, we'd been learning about class hierarchies in school. I went home and that night I asked my dad what class we were in - you know, were we upper class, middle class, working class or what? He thought for a minute and then said "Meg, we're shabby intellectuals" which conjoured up this fantastic mental image of people in corduroy jackets with elbow pads, scratching their heads and pondering, with big hair and cups of cold coffee beside them. Come to think about it, that was not so far off the mark when it came to family reunions. I still think I'm a shabby intellectual - overeducated and with more important things to think about than ironing.]

My best friend at the time (and for five years through primary school) was a girl called Jane, who lived seven houses down St Quintin’s Avenue from me, and who I thought was the epitome of up-to-date modernity. She lived in (*gasp*) a flat which was (*oooh*) painted white throughout and had (*wow*) wooden floors. Her parents owned a car (C320 BYK, I can still remember the numberplate, because it was such a novelty to have a numberplate to memorise. Stick with me.) She had a gloriously complicated family history (I didn’t, at the time) including divorces, stepfathers, half sisters and brothers and a Flemish granny who was mad as a box of frogs, lived in the garden flat and let us watch Top of the Pops on a Thursday night, as long as we didn’t tell anyone. Jane had a little brother who was annoying, a mum who she called ‘Mum’ and her room even had modular furniture (also white) and its own record player. I was so jealous.

[Tangent: In the summer of 1981, we spent many long happy hours playing a game of our own invention, which we liked to call Torture. The game involved clamping on big headphones and listening to Meatloaf's Dead Ringer For Love at excrutiating volume until you just couldn't stand it any longer, and you ripped the headphones off with an anguished cry. I think I held the record of around about a minute. We were strange children.]

Jane, meanwhile, was fascinated by my family set-up. We lived in a rambling victorian manse with about seven bedrooms, one of which was a darkroom. I called my parents by their first names (still do, in fact). The house was decorated in a combination of African ethnic objects, picked up on our travels, and over polished family-heirloom-type dining tables, along with eye-bleedingly seventies floral wallpaper and thin carpets throughout, and no television. Jane was fascinated by my family’s apparently bohemian lifestyle (though from the inside, I can promise you it felt completely normal), our rambling house and most especially the kitchen. For about a decade in the late seventies and early eighties, my parents allowed us to write on the walls of the kitchen. Not just us, though. Anyone. Anyone who came over for dinner or a meeting or just a cup of coffee was given a pen, and allowed to write all over the yolk-yellow walls of our enormous kitchen. Once a year, or so, we’d haul out this big bucket of paint, and slap yellow eggshell over the top, and then the whole thing would start again. The writing was anything from song lyrics and drawings and signatures to quotations – my favourite, I remember, was by Atila Joszef: “Culture drops off me like clothes off a happy lover” – I had no idea what it mean, but it was remarkably cheerier than the Hendrix/Dylan lyrics which surrounded it.

Jane and I spent a lot of time hanging out together, at a time when it was completely fine for two young girls to spend hours and hours hanging out on the wall outside my front garden, kicking our skinny legs against the bricks and making mischief or idle conversation, whichever seemed more appropriate at the time. We did the usual things – glued ten pence pieces to the pavement. Pretended to be from Albania when asking passers-by the time. Even played knock-down-ginger a few times, before the neighbours got annoyed and told my mum. So in early spring, 1983, it was the Easter school holidays and we were bored. So bored. Very very bored.

Sitting on the wall one day, as we always did, with cherry blossom sprigs tucked behind our ears, we struck upon a genius plan. You know those Help A London Child posters we kept seeing everywhere? Well, weren’t we London children too? And couldn’t we do with a little extra help? You know, for sweets and stuff? Well then. The plan was settled. I ran inside and got an old shoebox and some coloured pens. With our tongues sticking out of the corners of our mouths, Jane carefully wrote on the side of the box “please help the poor children of London, thankyou” while I drew a picture of some poor children of London. Well, I drew us, but wearing rags. I was never very good at subtlety in art. We propped the box up on the wall, next to the overgrown bramble bush, and waited. And waited.

Amazingly, people started to put money in the box – just coppers and five pence pieces, but still more than we’d expected. This was at a time when I got 15p a week pocket money, which was enough to buy the Beano and a Curly Wurly (though fudge bars were better value for money – less air) and a couple of flying saucers or chocolate cigarettes. The thought of someone voluntarily giving us the equivalent amount of pocket money for no reason whatsoever seemed like the best thing that had ever happened to us. Genius.

We sat outside my house for a couple of hours, then gathered the money into the front pocket on my cagoule, hid the box under the rosebush, and went home for tea. The next day, we were outside again, oh yes, absolutely. We collected for abour four hours that day. And two the next. We were both flabbergasted. We had money. Our money. Because we were London children, it was definitely our money. But what to do with it? We debated this for long hours, while waiting outside for the next donation. Sweets, maybe. A Beano annual. A single or two. Some earrings (I thought that was a little unfair given that I hadn’t yet had my ears pierced).

Eventually, we were busted, of course. After the third day, we again stashed the cash in my now-straining-at-the-seams cagoule front pocket and hid the box, and then went in for tea. After tea, my mum went to move my coat from where it was hanging to another peg, and noticed that the rain jacket was somewhat heavier than it probably should have been. And it went clink when you moved it. We were in trouble. Lots and lots of trouble. Jane was summoned from her house, fetched by my brother who had a smug grin on his face. We sat at the huge dark dining room table, the room that was always a bit cold, and which we never used, the room which was reserved for meetings and the occasional dinner thing and which, most heinously of all, overlooked the scene of our crime, the cherry tree, the rosebush and the low front wall. We sat at the big table and watched my mum count the coins, stacking it all into neat piles by denomination. When she finished, she told us how unfair it was to have collected this money, wouldn’t listen to our logical explanations about being London Children, and for a moment, I though she was going to make us find all the people who had donated and give it all back. But no. She had a much more devious plan.

She explained that since we’d collected £6.83 in coppers and shrapnel for poor children, we should make sure they got it. She pulled a Save the Children Fund catalogue out of a drawer and said we had to buy something from the catalogue. Jane and I looked at each other with enormous relief. No problem. Buying from a catalogue we can do. It may not be sweets, but we could still get something fairly cool. Then my mum added her caveats. We had to buy something for our teacher, Mr Abbott, and we had to give it to him in front of the class.

Our faces dropped. No way. No way. I burst into tears. Jane pouted. Eventually, we thumbed through the catalogue and chose something, dread building in us with every turn of every page. No way.

So there we were, on the first day back at school, standing at the front of the classroom, giving Mr Abbott a black and white perspex desk tidy, complete with matching pencils and drawing pins and paper-clips. The entire class hooted with laughter, and poor Mr Abbott just looked a bit confused. When he asked us why we were giving him a present, we just blushed – our shame at the real reason was interpreted as a crush. So for the rest of that year, and much of the next, we had to put up with not only the teasing of our classmates, who though we were a little bit in love with Mr Abbott, nor just his pitying uncomfortable glances, but also, most horribly, the terrible reminder of our devious scheme, laid out in black and white desktidy form, on his desk at the front of the class, mocking us in every lesson.

That was undoubtedly the craftiest, most creative punishment I ever had, though my mother swears blind that she thought it up on the spur of the moment. She still laughs about it now, and, even better, she still insists on bringing it up in front of new boyfriends, especially at this time of year, when the posters for Help a London Child are everywhere, and my guilt starts to loom again. Thanks, mum.

So, in the sprit of springtime generosity, won’t you help a London Noomeejahoor?

I was explaining to someone earlier about my theory of smoothness.

Don’t look at me that way. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. You just don’t know it yet.

See, some people are smooth, and some people aren’t – and everyone’s circle of friends, relatives and acquaintances is made up of a combination of those who are smooth, and those who are not. And I’m not talking texture here.

[Tangent: texture is another flavour classification I remembered the other night. In much the same category as ming and cat wee and wall, texture flavour is the precise flavour of overprocessed MSG-laden, coloured and scented and crunchified ready meals and Pad Thai noodles in Maida Vale StreetHawker cafe. They're not horrible. They're not offensive or even just blah. They're just...texture. They taste of texture. An oral sensation, without the excitement of flavour. Wall, meanwhile, is texture without the crunchy bits.]

The opposite of smooth is not rough. It’s not crunchy either, now you come to mention it. The opposite of smooth, in Meg’s theory of smoothness, is sexual. Not convinced? Bear with me. I’ve been formulating this theory for years.

Imagine Ken (not Livingstone, Dodd or Brannagh – though they’re all prime examples of smoothness, now I come to think about it – maybe it runs in the name?) – as in Barbie and. For that matter, picture GI Joe, or Action Man. Each of them is buff, in a chiselled sort of way, but utterly utterly smooth in the crotch region. Same goes for Barbie, Sindy and any other 11 3/4″ plastic poseable doll you’d care to mention – you can dress them up as chippendales and hookers, or anything you like, but they’ll always be completely smooth underneath. They are, in a word, non-sexual entities. In a similar way, according to Meg’s theory of Smoothness (patent pending), there are people that surround us in everyday life who are just smooth.

Now let’s be reasonable for a moment. I’m not suggesting that people are actually lacking genitalia. I don’t want anyone to think that I’ve gone around and checked and evaluated exactly who is smooth and who isn’t. I’m not that sort of girl, and besides, I don’t have time, and I think it may be illegal. Smoothness is a state of mind, baybee. It’s not about whether someone is sexually active or experienced or anything – it’s about whether they actually register in your consciousness as a sexual being or not.

Here’s a test. Imagine your geography teacher from school, or your boss, or your aunt, or your neighbour. Male or female, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t about fancying them, or trying to imagine them gettin’ jiggy with it or you or anyone else. This is about smoothness. Now close your eyes. Wait. Open them, otherwise you won’t be able to read. Dang.

[Tangent: Years ago, I was working in an outdoor adventure camp in scotland, and we had a group of 16 deaf kids staying for the week. One rainy evening, were stuck inside and everyone was getting bored. I signed to them all that we were going to play a game called Wink Murder, and that they should all close their eyes. They did. I continued to sign the rules of the game, and then, feeling stupid, had to go around and shake them all to get them to open their eyes again, so I could continue explaining. I am an idiot sometimes.]

OK, picture one of those people in your mind’s eye. Now imagine them naked. Eeeuw. Stop gagging or giggling, and imagine drawing them. Imagine drawing their head and shoulders, their arms and stomach. Now imagine drawing their crotch. Does your mind refuse blankly to try and fill in the details? Are you left with a sort of childish frustrated scribble, that screams “and then there’s something else here, I know there is, but I just can’t draw it”? If so, then they, my friends, are smooth as smooth can be, as far as you’re concerned.

[Tangent: I was very fond of drawing animals when I was a kid. Trouble is, I could never draw the feet. Always cocked up when I got below the knee joint, and it used to frustrate me so instensely, I'd screw up the paper and fling it away in disgust. So anyway, I found a couple of work-around solutions - the first of which was to learn caricature and cartooning, which meant that animals all looked pretty much the same, but with boggly eyes and comedy boots on. The other coping mechanism was simply to draw every animal either running through long grass, standing in a shallow stream, or hanging out behind a hay bale. Problem solved. I was always a canny kid.]

This is not a universal theory. One person’s smooth is another person’s rrrrrowr, and that’s natural and to be expected. But there are exceptions, of course – some people are just undeniably smooth, in every way and pretty much at every level of DNA and human experience. Robin Cook. Prime example. The Queen Mother. Your own parents. Mostly (nb, this law does not apply in Norfolk or Arkansas).

There’s no precedent here. There’s no way to dictate or tell who’s smooth and who’s not, and you cannot convince yourself that someone is smooth when they’re not, or vice versa. Some people just are, and they can’t help it – though this can change in time, of course. Close friends and flatmates may be smooth, even though you know intimate details about them. You might even be smooth, to someone else (though hopefully not yourself).

Incidentally, long and bitter experience has taught me that if you think someone is smooth, at least to you, it’s probably not a good idea to tell them. It’s hard to take, apparently.

Who do you think is smooth?