meish dot org: life, unfolding

In 1998, I lived in a horrible flatshare with an Australian woman from Brisbane who insisted that everything (TV, food, weather, you name it) was soooooo much better at home (leading to the oft-thought but seldom-expressed question: “then why don’t you simply go back there?”) and an Irish guy, who couldn’t bring himself to say the word “lesbian”.

We had absolutely nothing in common – nothing at all. It was when I first moved back to London, and I was renting a room in a flatshare in a dingy house in Putney. He never said more than four words to me, unless he’d had a drink, and then he’d rant endlessly about ‘darkies’ and ‘feckers’ and other racial slurs (ok, so ‘fecker’ isn’t strictly a racial slur, but he substituted it for just about any other noun – “Yer feckin’ post’s on that fecker by the door” he’d shout in the morning, to no-one in particular, where “fecker” means “table”) and the like, or shout at the TV while the rugby was on (“Come aaaahn you fecker!”).

In short, a horrible man. In fact, a short horrible man.

He went out one night in Soho, which was rare, because he preferred the local boozer, and when he got in, I was making a cup of tea. I asked if he’d had a nice evening.

“Yes,” he replied, “but the feckin’ bar we were at was feckin’ full of….feckin’ Libyans!”

I balked slightly. “What?” I asked, “How could you tell?”

“Oh, they were all over each other,” he replied, “feckin’ kissing and all that.”

Curious, I thought, I wasn’t aware that the people of Libya were famous for their tactile social interaction. Then he continued.

“An’ they all had feckin’ short hair,” he ranted, “it was feckin’ disgusting.”

I viewed his own cropped noggin with amusement.

“It shouldn’t be feckin’ allowed, I’m feckin’ telling you,” he continued, “feckin’ women, with other feckin’ women. In feckin’ public and everything. Feckin’ Libyans…”

And with that he pottered off to bed. I didn’t know whether to laugh or thump him. So I did neither.

But I moved out two weeks later.

Last night Brian Eno saved my life.

For reasons best known only to themselves, the property management company responsible for my flat last year gave all the woodwork in the place a lick of paint – including all the sash windows – which was very nice of them, we thought, until we realised that they had painted them all shut.

Half the windows at the back of the property don’t open, and every single window at the front is sealed firmly shut with white gloss, with the hardly-worth-mentioning-at-all-because-it-makes-sod-all-difference-frankly exception of the left hand window in my bedroom, which is actually painted open. About half an inch. Negligible airflow, I can assure you.

In March, when we moved in, closed windows were not an issue. The cold of a London spring (snow, sleet, wind) combined with the cold of a house which hadn’t been lived in for two years (and which, prior to that, had been inhabited by religious loonies, though that hasn’t been known to affect ambient temperature, except in extreme cases – c.f. The Exorcist) meant that it was pretty chilly, and as a result, having the windows shut was, frankly, marvellous.

Not so in April, when the first few days of sunshine began to creep in, and when we had our first party. Suddenly, we realised, the living room was very difficult to air out, and my bed was uncomfortable at night. That is to say, I realised the bit about my bed. We’re not that kind of household, thankyouverymuch.

The last week has been hell. Sweaty, humid, unpleasant hell. (As opposed, presumably, to the cool-waves-lapping-on-the-beach kind of hell, which religious loonies don’t often tell us about, for obvious reasons)

Remember ages ago when I wrote about getting a new alarm clock? One that had the loudest beep in the world? Well, these days, I don’t need it anymore – at least, not to wake me up, as I tend to wake myself up fighting with the duvet long before dawn (how does it manage to radiate more heat than a nuclear reactor? How?) or berating my S.O. for hogging all the oxygen. These days, my main use for my uber-alarmclock is to note the climbing temperature of my room, and weep silent, hot, salty tears of frustration in the wee small hours.

Last night, at about half nine, despite the twirling of two fans (on opposite sides of the room, on full blast – I’m aiming to create a vortex above the bed, which I’m hoping will suck me into oblivion at 4am one of these mornings. As long as oblivion is sort of cool.) the ambient temperature of my room reached a horrifying 37 degrees – that’s in the high nineties, in old money. Bleargh. They should be passing out bottled water at the door, I swear.

When I lived in Seville in 1995, I can distinctly remember sweltering inside (except I didn’t, really, because Moorish/Andalucian architecture is so brilliant at climate control that you often can’t tell how hot it is until you leave the shady recesses of the house – I’d usually have to leave the house twice every morning; once to check the temperature, and then again five minutes and a change of clothes later, for good) on a particularly hot day, listening to a local radio station. The presenter was going on about how hot it was that day – 44 degrees, and still only the end of May – when he struck upon a plan.

About fifty miles outside Seville is an area known as the frying pan of Spain, because all heat seems to concentrate there, ferociously. In the middle of this furnace is a small dusty town. The radio DJ called up a random resident of the town, and asked her if she would check her patio thermometer – every good Spanish household has at least one thermometer knocking around. She said okay and toddled off to look. After a minute of dead air, she bimbled back, picked up the phone and announced, deadpan “It says fifty three degrees”

You could almost hear the whole of Seville heave a massive sigh of relief: somewhere else was hotter. In contrast, we suddenly felt cool. Positively balmy, in fact.

So last night, I struck upon my own fiendish plan. Before I went to bed, I had a freezing cold shower, and then I lay on the bed in the dark, and listened to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports as the fans swooshed cool air over me. I let the music drift me away to another place – a cooler place – and I blocked out my frustrations about work, home, weather, everything, and just listened instead, for a while. I was asleep in no time.

Thank you, Brian. You rock (in a kind of quiet, ambient way).

A couple of years ago, when I lived in Maida Vale, my looney flatmate (who had appalling taste in tourist tat – ethnic carvings and folk art and the like: truly shuddersome) informed me one day that she doesn’t like books, because they clutter the house up. Even on the bookshelves.

“So where,” I inquired, “do you propose I keep them?”

I shouldn’t have asked. Apparently, bookshelves are for ornaments and photo frames and candles, while any books that I’m not reading at the moment (and there are many, many, many), should be packed into boxes and “stored in the airing cupboard or something.” So now we know.

That conveniently decided for me what I was going to do that weekend, then. Rather than spending my hard-earned in IKEA or down the pub, I headed down to the Notting Hill Second Hand Book and Comic Exchange where I proceeded to buy as many books as I could physically carry home. And some more shelves, to boot. I love it when a plan come together. There’s nothing quite so contrary as a bookworm riled.

See, the thing about my fucktard flatmate was not that she didn’t like books, but more that she just didn’t get them. In a conceptual way. I think she just had a psychological block – she couldn’t see why someone might want to have books, rather than read them, especially if you can’t read them all at the same time. She subscribed to the disposable book theory, I think – books are to be bought at an airport John Menzies with neon covers for £5.99, consumed on interminable flights and crowded beaches, then left in the top drawer of the bedside table in the Gran Hotel De La Squeegymop as you jet home.

No. Quite simply. Wrong.

I’ve got gazillions of books. I worked in Waterstones and then Dillons in Liverpool for 4 years while I was at uni there and I swear I never made a penny. Every bit of my pay ended up being ploughed straight back into buying books (with hefty staff discount, natch) – when I supervised the bargain basement for the christmas season in 1995, I found myself facing a series of moral dilemmas.

As well as selling Penguin classics to the Liverpool public (Thin grey paper and cheap watercolour card covers, a bargain at �1 each. Top seller: War and Peace, because it had the most pages. I swear.) I had the responsibility of pricing damaged or worn books according to a strict list of criteria – you know the kind of thing: jacket torn: 25% discount, pages folded or torn: 10% discount, spine bent or creased: 10% and so on. As books came in from the other 4 floors, I’d have to go through them in my little back office with a bunch of price stickers and a calculator. And you know, naturally, there would sometimes pop up something I wanted – or rather more accurately, something I neither wanted nor needed specifically, but wouldn’t mind having. I’m sure you know the sensation. So then I’d look at it and decide what was wrong with it…and the temptation occasionally to bend the spine just a little bit more for that extra 10%, to fold back a few pages, to make a tiny rip in the back cover….well, it was sometimes irresistible. Whack a 35% staff discount on top of whatever I’d had to take off for damage and…well, lookey here, wouldn’t you know that book gets added to my pile of things to buy on payday?

If you visited Dillons in Liverpool in 1995, I apologise for the paucity of books on display in the bargain basement. They were all on my shelves at home, looking slightly tatty. (Of course then there was the whole guilt thing about damaging books – but that’s another issue entirely.)

One of the hardest things about working as a bookseller, though, was undoubtedly having to deal with people who did not share my passion for books. As well as the hoards of people buying penguin classics, you’d inevitably get those who would come in around christmas saying

“I’m looking for a book”

and when you asked which particular one, they’d hold their thumb and forefinger an inch and a half apart and say

“oh, I dunno, something about this thick. For me gran.”

My favourite classic bookselling moment came when a woman from the posh suburbs of Liverpool came in looking for Millers Antiques Guide. I showed her the new edition for 1995: it had a green cover. She asked if we had any previous editions. I explained that this was the most up to date. She said

“Yes, I realise that. But do you have it in blue? I want it to match my living room curtains…”

Sigh.

I adore books. At home, I have seven doublestacked bookshelves in my not-especially-big house, and I know for a fact that there are another 6 or 7 boxes at my mum’s house, waiting until I find that mythical home with lots of storage space that I long for (the quest continues apace).

I know exactly where my addiction comes from, too – my mum is incorrigible when it comes to books. I grew up in a house where the carpenter was a regular visitor, being called out every few months or so to install another set of shelves in a ridiculous place – along the stairwell, above the kitchen door, in the hallway – as well as all the usual places. Like living in a library.

When my mum – a journalist – had to go away to Sri Lanka for two months for a story, she left presents for me and my brother (aged 6 and 8, respectively). Books, wrapped in pairs, to be doled out from the top of the wardrobe once a week. Two books a week was nothing for voracious readers like us, and so each word was savoured, turned over in our minds like boiled sweets in the mouth. We grew impatient waiting for the next dose of reading matter. We ached for the next words. That was our contact with Jan while she was away. I learnt everything I know about feeding my book addiction from a master.

So it was no wonder that my illiterate flatmate and I failed to agree on issues of book storage. The entire time we lived together – a year and a half, though I’ve no idea how we ever managed it – she complained that my books (on the bookshelves) made the living room look cluttered.

A week before I was due to move out, she was still showing the flat to prospective room-mates (presumably holding out for the mythical perfect flatmate who pays double rent, likes washing up and is never there). A couple of days before the move, I packed three huge packing crates full of books from the living room, because I knew it was going to take forever and I had to do it sometime. In one final, brilliant moment of idiocy, she stopped me on the stairs on the way to the bathroom one groggy morning and said, with no hint of irony or mischief

“Oh, I wish you’d left the books in the living room. It made it look much more cosy. I’m showing the flat again tomorrow – would you mind putting them back on the shelves?”

I nearly fell over laughing.

On the back of a sleepless night (yes, dear neighbours, I like Achtung Baby too, just not at top volume at half past two on a weekday morning when I’m trying to sleep), I was just beginning to foster doubts in the future of humanity when I received notification that Rupert, a dear dear old friend (who I lived with in Manchester) has just become a proud dad in Scotland. Hoorah!

Mother doing well, dad chuffed to bits, baby fit and fine and beautiful – and called Meg.

This is the second time a close friend has given my name to a child. I am insanely flattered, even if it’s got nothing to do with me personally – knowing Roop, it’s infinitely more likely that she was named after a unit of digital storage. I am the only Meg most people know – it’s just not that common a name over here – so when it crops up in people close to me, I grin like an idiot.

In any case, it certainly beats sharing my name with a dog, obviously.

When I was living in Edinburgh in 1993, I was walking across the Meadows to work one day when I heard a woman shouting “Meg! Me-e-g!” at the top of her voice.

Curious, I turned around just in time to hear her screech in a fantastic Edinburgh accent

“Hoi! Meg! Stop licking that dog’s erse!”

The person I was walking with didn’t let me live that down for months. Well, it could have been worse, I suppose; I might have been Rover. Or Fluffy.

Phone rings. I answer.

“Hello?…. Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?”

The sound of silence. But no, not quite silence. Quietly punctuated by faint laughter, the distant, distinct sound of Chef from South Park singing Chocolate Salty Balls.

Someone must have sat on their phone, and dialled our number. This has happened before, and it’s frustrating and mystifying because obviously you can’t make a call (e.g. to 1471) until they hang up – and since the phone is probably wedged between the sofa cushions, there’s not much chance of that.

Ten minutes later, through careful, studied listening to the occasional muffled guffaw, P manages to identify one of his mates from the North East, and calls him on the land line. Faintly, through a sofa cushion, we hear the phone ring. We are hiding in his living room and he has no idea. We hear his mum walk to the phone, and then loudly shout for F to come and answer it. P speaks:

“Hello mate, enjoying South Park are you?”

*Sound of stunned silence, which we get in stereo, on both land line and P’s mobile*

Click.

1. When you are unable to sleep in because of prior commitments (work, travel, appointment) you will snooze through the alarm.
2. When you are perfectly able to sleep in (Bank Holiday, Sunday, unemployed), you will either
   a) wake at your normal time and be unable to sleep again (see boyfriend)
   b) wake up inexplicably three minutes before your alarm usually goes off and get sleepily confused about what day it is or
   c) be disturbed from slumber by someone outside shouting, or hammering, or digging up the road, or doing whatever people are possessed by doing on a Bank Holiday.
3. If you do a big online grocery purchase, to be delivered on Tuesday night, you will inevitably run out of cereal/toilet roll/milk/some other small but important household item on Monday morning, and then you will be torn between waiting until the delivery or going to the rip-off Supersave around the corner to purchase a replacement. Some things are necessary, some less so, but it’s the principle.
4. When selecting a locker at the gym early on a deserted Bank Holiday Sunday morning, you will unwittingly pick a locker which will attract other early-morning gym attendees like flies to a particularly sticky bun. When you arrive back in the changing room after your workout, you will find that the space is completely deserted, every locker empty and unused with the exception of the corner in which your previously-selected locker is situated, which is packed full of naked amazon women jostling for space, preventing you from reaching your locker and retrieving your towel, etc.
5. Presented with a cluster of amazonian women, it will be quite difficult to look nonchelant, especially if you are the only one wearing clothes. It will be difficult to know where to look when waiting for the space around your locker to be vacated. Good options include: the floor; the bench; the ceiling; your water bottle.
6. Long weekends are never quite long enough.
7. Short weeks are never quite short enough.

When we trundled off to bed last night, just after one, we shut the windows at the front of the house, and the door to the living room and kitchen, because the noisesome arse across the road had just come in and flipped on his stereo at top volume again.

After all, it’s way after midnight; the street is dark and quiet; everyone seems to be asleep or on their way to bed; what else to do but whack on some thumping drum’n'bass? And while you’re at it, crank it as loud as it will go. Go on, all the way to eleven.

We shut the doors and went off to bed.

Now eight hours later, I’m up and on my way out to the gym – but first, I pop into the living room to check my mail. What do I hear? Oom-cha oom-cha thumk thunk from across the road. His window is still wide open, the thumping bass comes tumbling out. Either he’s started again, or he never stopped.

Sigh. There are two things I don’t get: one, how his closer neighbours cope – surely they must be able to hear and feel the thumping bass throughout the night. Do they just have higher noisy-twat-tolerance than I do? Or a lifetime supply of earplugs?

The other thing I don’t understand is how a person thinks that that sort of behaviour is totally fine and has no impact on anyone else – or alternatively knows that it’s loud and irritating and disturbs half the street but just doesn’t care. Are people really that selfish?

Apparently, the double glazed window in our bedroom has dropped slightly in the casement. This makes it nigh-on impossible to shut the window (which is not a problem at the moment because it’s relatively warm out, still, but I’d like to have the option of shutting the window at some point in the future).

How do I know this? Simple: the landlord’s lackey just told me.

After a couple of days of fighting with it, I called the landlord’s lackey today and said “the double glazed window in our bedroom won’t shut. I think the frame has dropped slightly in the casement.”

“No bother,” said he, “I’ll come over tonight and have a look.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I think you might need to get the maintenance guy to actually fix it.”

“Let me take a look,” he urged, and we left it at that.

At six, I hurtled home, and waited for him to show up. I know he could be arriving at any moment, and for that reason, I of course needed to go to the loo desperately from the moment I got in, but couldn’t. Now he’s gone, I don’t need to go anymore. That’s the way these things always work, isn’t it?

Anyway, at twenty past, he rang the bell, sprinted up the stairs, ran into the bedroom, took one look at the window and sucked air through his teeth.

“You know what’s wrong with that, don’t you?” he asked, probably being rhetorical, because he went on to tell me, “the frame’s dropped in the casement, see? That’s going to be a bugger to close…”

Exactly what I told him a couple of hours earlier, and exactly what I’d predicted to P that the landlord’s lackey would say when presented with the problem.

He leant forward and grabbed the handle on the window frame, pulling it firmly towards him.

“See, when you want to close the window, you’ve just got to push the frame up with your shoulder, like this.” It slammed shut, noisily.

“I know,” I said, “that’s what we’ve been doing for days. I want it to be fixed, though”

“Oh,” he said, “I’ll have to let the maintenance man know about this, then. He’ll have gone home now. It’ll be tomorrow before he can come and fix it, I reckon.”

Do I make a noise when I speak? I mean, when I talk, does sound come out, or do I just flap my lips noiselessly into the air? I could have sworn I just said that.

When living in Seville, I once returned a stereo to El Corte Ingles department store, because the mains lead was connected loosely to the machine, and to make the thing play you had to put your hand around the back and push the lead in. When I got to the counter, the assistant listened to my problem, and then said cheerfully,

“Oh, that’s easy to fix…you’ve just got to push the lead in at the back when it’s playing, like this…”

Yes, I know.

The narrow patios that separate the backs of the houses on our side of the street from those on the next street along act like a canyon, amplifying the sound of the fat raindrops.

There are few things more indulgent or relaxing than lying in a darkened room with the windows open full, listening to the chatter of the rain on the roof terrace, and the patio flagstones, four storeys below.

This evening, I realised the difference between a middle-class culture vulture and a pseud.

The former goes to random cultural events because they feel they ought to, while the latter talks endlessly about going to specific cultural events, but never actually goes, or if they go, they spend the entire time moaning about it. However, despite this, they remain under the impression that they are not only better informed about the event, but they also somehow have ownership of it too – which means that no-one else is really allowed to have an opinion.

Why do such pseuds moan so much about the very things they go out of their way to experience? There seems to me to be an obvious solution to this…don’t go! Mind you, they generally don’t. It’s far easier to sit at home, see, and be informed about these obscure things, without going to the effort of actually doing them.

There were many of both types (but mostly the former) at tonight’s Daksha Sheth dance company performance on the South Bank (part of the National Theatre’s Watch This Space programme of free events throughout the summer).

It was pleasant to walk along the South Bank in the cooling of the evening, after such a hot, long day – a day which also included a lengthy trip down to Denmark Street to pick out a new bass for P (he will be able to tell you muso-type details if you’re interested; I can’t. My knowledge of bass guitars runs out just after “they have four strings” and before anything very revealing or interesting – but I can confirm that today’s acquired instrument is indeed a thing of tremendous beauty – and noise) and a new 60GB hard drive for me on TCR, all of which entailed much sticky walking in the sweaty city, and a few too many shops without air conditioning. Mind you, at least that meant we were happy to escape out into the couple-of-degrees-cooler St Martin’s Lane – and it’s not often you’ll hear someone say that.

Summer in the city. An acquired, sticky sort of taste. At least my windows open this year – last year, as you may remember, the landlord had helpfully painted them shut, so we sweltered in stuffy rooms throughout the heatwave, relying on one rather tired fan to circulate the warm air back around the room. Not very conducive to sleep at all.

In contrast, this year, with windows wide open, we get the full benefit of not just living on a relatively quiet street (to be fair, last year, even if we had been able to open the windows, we’d only have ended up shutting them at night because we lived on the busiest road in the north of the city, pretty much) but also listening in on all the neighbourly ambient noises from the houses which back on to ours, and those adjacent.

Modems dialling up, fridges buzzing, arguments, barbeques, parties, people making love (the girl downstairs is a real screamer) and the mad old bat who lives in what must be an institution of some kind, in the basement of the house that backs onto ours, who spends many long hours over lunchtimes sitting in the back garden with a cup of tea, having incredibly loud shouted conversations with some unseen person indoors. We can peer down through the leaves, three storeys below, and see the top of her head, but are unable, alas, to aim projectiles into her tea (perhaps a biscuit with the word “shush!” written on it in permanent marker?), because of the bush in the way. Ah well. Perhaps when winter comes?

All sounds very cosmopolitan, doesn’t it? Very New-York-hot-in-the-city slowly-turning-fans people-dripping-with-sweat framed-in-dark-windows and lone-saxophonist-on-the-rooftop, eh? (Actually, on reflection, that sounds more like a lemonade commercial or the start of a bad eighties porn flick. Sorry)

The truth is that as I type some twat is letting off fireworks in the very narrow space between the back of the terrace on our street, and the one behind, and I’m so paranoid that one’s going to come in through the window (not by accident; on purpose. Teenagers around here would do that kind of thing, just like the teenagers in Liverpool who once through a mountain of snowballs through a window I’d left open when I went to a lecture. I came back two hours later to find my bed covered in melting slush. My bedroom, let the record show, was on the fourth floor, and the window was open six inches. Those kids could go far in cricket, I tell you….) that I’m going to have to go and shut all the windows at the back of the house.

We’ll swelter in a stuffy room tonight – it’ll be just like old times…