meish dot org: life, unfolding

Words I never thought I’d hear myself say: I miss going to the gym. I learnt so much there.

I used to think it was the perfect place to study – all the way through college and uni and my MA, I would head over most evenings at about eightish, prop up my book (Nietsche, Kant, Sexual Objectivism in Anthropology, 500 Spanish Verbs – books so dull that I simply couldn’t bring myself to read at any other time, because there would always be something better, more interesting, more active to do) on the handlebars of the stationary bike, and ride twenty miles while reading about man and superman or radical changing verbs.

Later, I progressed onto paying people (undergrads, gullible freshers) to record themselves reading chapters of the same books, or chuntering away in Spanish, to which I could then listen while doing bench-presses or whatever…

And then I discovered the joy of running through a forest, and was spoilt forever. Springy floor, soft blanket of pine needles and earth, clear path through the trees, sound of leaves falling or rain in the treetops, high above. Running on a Rotex was never the same. And as for city streets….

The same is true of cycling – backwoods trails or gentle pottering along country roads has spoiled me for city riding, and certainly made me tire of the stationary bike. Who wants to ride nowhere, working up a sweat, watching your world stay stagnant, ending up where you started? Not me.

Swimming, too has been spoilt. The Holmes Place pool is too chlorinated and stings my eyes – and the relentless ploughing up and down of serious swimmers desperate to get in forty laps before their two o’clock meeting is offputting. I’ve been spoilt forever by wading out into the surprisingly warm waters of Port Ban or Market Bay at sunset, spreading the clear water with my arms, shimmering the incandescent sunset into the ripples, or completing long lazy laps of the crystal blue bay in Sifnos as the Greek sun beats down. No pool can possibly compare.

What I learnt in the gym was not how to correctly conjugate caer or the difference between a posteriori and a priori knowledge. I learnt to think of my body in terms of function rather than form.

Ask me what my favourite bit of my body is, and I’ll tell you. Hands, because they let me tinker and type and create. Mouth, because it lets me communicate, taste, love. Ears, because they open the world of music to me. Feet, because they let me explore. Function. Not form.

It’s about physical potential and power in the raw sense. Can you run for the bus? Can you fix things? Can you communicate? Can you use your body to live, laugh, love to the full? That’s what’s important to me. More important that BMI or callipers or whatnot, more important than doctors’ charts or arbitrary numbers. Potential, not perfection.

I could get fit again. I just need the right environment the right context, the right lifestyle. Trust me, the life of the passionate noomeejahoor is not compatible with jogging around Hampstead Heath at dawn. Unfortunately.

I once attended an interview in which my fellow interviewer asked the hapless candidate a surprising question. After quizzing her about personal work qualities, experience of working within tight deadlines and what she thought she could bring to such a challenging role, he asked her whether a Jaffa Cake was, in fact, a cake or a biscuit.

She launched into a response (“It’s a biscuit, obviously”), and then pondered out loud at the name (“…of course it’s called a cake…”) which caused her to stumble and lapse into silence, unable to answer conclusively.

The correct answer, of course (and you might want to bear this in mind if you have any forthcoming interviews) is that it’s either or both – it all depends on where it’s shelved. If the shop owner puts it among biccies, then a biccie it is. If it nestles in next to the cakes, then let it be a cake.

The cold fact is, there is no right answer: it doesn’t matter. In the context of an interview, all the panel want is to see you choose a position to argue and stick to it. It’s all about conviction.

Actually, there is a correct (legal) answer, used only by smartarses in interview situations, which states that it’s been a cake since the British government decided that chocolate-covered biscuits attracted a higher tax rate (17.5%) than cakes (0%) and tried to have the humble Jaffa reclassified as a biccie much to Mr McVitie’s dismay. They still insist it’s a cake.

Living in Liverpool in my final year, the man who shared the flat downstairs from us in a strange old converted victorian school building was called Al, and was not a cakey kind of person. I know this because he said at least once a week – more frequently on festive occasions – that he was not a cakey kind of person. Gradually it sank in.

We had the kind of loose open flat arrangement which allowed the respective residents of his flat and mine to wander between the two freely. Over a year of frantic revision and experiments in social culture, we swapped university social lives (they dated friends from our course, we went to see an Abba tribute band at their student union), cleaning products, study tips and celebrations. On birthdays, one of us would bake a cake (usually carrot or chocolate), and when the slabs of sweetness went around the gathering on paper napkins, a bass voice would pipe from the corner “No thanks, I’m not really a cakey kind of person”. Al would pass on the cake, thank you very much, and grab another beer.

It didn’t matter how nice the cake was, or how lovingly prepared; Al was just not a cakey kind of person, and that was that. Over the year, we tried to find the limits of his objection, to define exactly what a cakey kind of person was and wasn’t. The defining characteristics seemed to be a loathing for the consistency of the foodstuff, rather than the particular taste or texture.

Whenever offered a biscuit for dunking in tea, Al would enquire whether it was a soft biscuit or a hard one. Rich tea, digestive, nice, even your standard custard cream were all fine and perfectly acceptable for general dunkage and munchage, but he’d have none of that lucury cookie nonsense. The world of the cookie, he explained, was fraught with the suggestion of softness, and frankly there wasn’t a world of difference between a luxury triple choc dipped thick cookie (89p from Tesco’s on Allerton Road) and a cake, when you got down to it, despite having different ingredients, behaviours and properties.

Sometimes, he scared us with his crazy cake talk.

On the pro side, I’d say that my mum is definitely a cakey kind of person, and that for that reason I probably am too. It’s got little to do with the taste or texture for me, and everything to do with the decoration. My mum has always specialised in making cakes to remember. They may not have been enormously professional, and they could arguably have been fairly average tasting, but I can remember nearly every birthday cake from childhood. Elaborate use of food-colouring, marzipan, other decorative edibles and props meant that every cake was both memorable and intensely personal. I may never have had a party in a burger restaurant, but in my time I’ve had birthday cakes shaped like maps, guitars, shoes, a bathtub and a dragon, complete with painted cornflake scales.

I am a cakey kind of person. Childhood holidays visiting relatives in southern Germany were like a cake-filled dream. I could say Schwarzwaldekirschtorte before I could ask where the bathroom was. I can make a simple sponge without consulting a recipe – though I haven’t for ages – and I will happily argue long and hard that the best possible topping for stewed apple is, in fact, not crumble, but sponge and then evaporated milk, as in eve’s pudding.

Question: if someone said today “let them eat Brioche” would we still think they were being quite so elitist and condescending, I wonder?

I am a cakey kind of person – squishy and sweet and sort of sickly after too much – and I could murder a brownie right about now…

I was telling my current flatmate the other day about a girl I lived with in uni who was from Cornwall (“Oim fram snozzle,” she used to say. Took me forever to figure out she meant St Austell) and (how can I put this delicately?) a little, er, dumb. Not in an offensive way. She just had a habit of telling pointless stories – and some of them repeatedly. Like, if you wanted her to go on for a bit to let you concentrate on adding up the phone bill, or cooking dinner or whatever, all you had to do was mention honey, and she’d be off:

“Oi do loike a bit of ‘unny. Oi mean, it’s a bit loike sugar, but not quoite. You know? It’s kind of…sweet, but it’s loike naaatural, ennit? You can do laaats of things with ‘unny, caaan’t you? Oi mean, you can put it in cakes, and in puddings and…”

You get the picture.

So anyway, one day I was hard at work, writing an essay at my desk (I know, unthinkable) when she started hammering on my door, and then burst into the room.

“Meg! You’ll never guess what just ‘appened to me!” she gushed.

“What? Did you burn the kitchen down? Did you just get engaged? Have you just had a baby? Were you abducted by armed gunmen? What?” I enquired.

“Well,” she said, breathlessly and with all the excitement of a five year old “Oi just opened moi cupboard….and oi didn’t ‘ave any beans left!!!”

The door swung closed in her face.

Ever since then, that has become shorthand for someone telling a pointless story – you interrupt and say “what, and then you realised there were no beans?” – or something to say when you realise that you’ve completely lost the attention of your audience “so anyway, there we were in the middle of Ikea with fourteen of those stubby little pencils, when…er….oh *beans*. Okay, alright…I’ll shut up now.”

I must have that kind of face.

No, wait, scrub that. I must have that kind of mind. I always seem to feel guilty when passing through customs, even when I’ve got nothing to declare – which is always.

Well, I say always. I mean always as far as I know – because sometimes, you’ve got no way of knowing.

At university in the second year, I lived with five blokes. I’ve mentioned them before – they were the ones who were responsible for the electricity bill nightmare and the sorry tale of the seating rule.

Anyway. Five blokes, all a bit lairy and crusty. All a bit alternative and long-haired. I think I was the only one who graduated out of the whole lot – and in fact, I may well have been the only one who finished the second year – but that was only because I moved out of the madness and went to live and study in Spain. They may be equally crazy there, but at least it’s warmer than Liverpool.

Now this may come as a shock to those of you of a sensitive nature, but sometimes, students do bad things. Naughty things. Illegal things. Not me, obviously – I’m as pure as the driven snow slush, but some of my student housemates indulged in – how shall we put this delicately? – artificial stimulation to help them through the exams and to stay up all night writing essays occasionally. This is not unheard of in student circles, though not everyone did it, and not all the time.

I was a loss when it came to stimulants – still am, in fact. More than two cans of diet coke a day sets my heart racing, and if I have a cup of tea after about five I’m up all night. I once took some Pro Plus the night I had to write three essays in the computer lab. They gave me such bad palpitations and shakes I couldn’t actually concentrate on Brazilian hyperinflation or the ritual uses of the cenote in Mayan culture. All I could do was wonder when my heart would feel normal again.

So no, I don’t bother with artificial stimulants. I’m too hyper and edgy as it is. Which apparently made my room the perfect place for the lads to hide their stashes.

I was not aware of this.

I wasn’t aware that one of them, Brummie J, had discovered that if you pried up the coloured bubble segment of a Natrel deodorant lid – say, mine for example – there was a small compartment which was just big enough to store half a gram of speed. I was not aware that he had discovered this by fiddling with my Natrel deodorant, and that he was keeping his speed in my bedroom, on the mantelpiece, stashed in the lid of my deodorant. I was not aware of this, and if I was, I’d have been fucking livid, believe me.

He, meanwhile, for his part, was not aware that this was completely out of order. It hadn’t occurred to him that as well as being illegal, what he was doing was also deceitful and downright stupid. Furthermore, it hadn’t occurred to him that if I went on holiday, I might possibly take my deodorant with me.

A flight there. Two weeks. A flight back. Completely oblivious.

Arriving back at dawn on a Sunday, I traipsed into the house, expecting everyone to be asleep after a heavy night. But there was Brummie J, pacing the floor of the living room.

“Oh thank god you’re back,” he said, helping me off with my backpack. That’s sweet, I thought. He missed me.

“I was so worried,” he told me, emptying my backpack onto my bed. Not like him to help me unpack, especially at half seven in the morning, but still…

The truth emerged. He’d stashed his gear in my deodorant, and then I’d gone on holiday. I was speechless.

Now, had I actually unwittingly smuggled a quarter gram of someone else’s speed through two sets of customs, or had the deodorant actually run out and been thrown away the day before I left? Or had it fallen off the mantelpiece and rolled under the bed during my frenzied packing, or been sussed and nicked by the other housemates? It didn’t matter.

I was incandescent with rage at the thought that someone I considered a friend (albeit a slightly flaky one) would be so thoughtless. The outcome didn’t matter. The intention and the lack of consideration did.

I moved out and went to live in Spain, and I gave up using that brand of deodorant.

Since then, whenever I pass through customs, I feel guilty, even though these days I’ll make doubly – triply, quadruply – sure that I’m innocent. The trouble is, I’m fine until I think about it. As soon as I think about it, I’m doomed. As soon as I become aware that behind the glass, people are watching my every move, I become Mrs Shifty. Then I catch myself and try to remember to walk like I’ve got nothing to hide because, after all, I’ve got nothing to hide. Then I look like a guilty person trying to look innocent. And then I get pulled over.

I once flew from La Paz to Lima with giardia. I don’t recommend giardia – it’s horrible, it turns you feverish and shaky and makes you vomit and crap a lot. The day before the flight, I’d dosed up on coca tea (a natural andean stomach-calming remedy) and planned to do the same in Lima, to see me through a night in the city and then twelve hours to Santo Domingo.

Stepping wobbly of the plane, I made my way to the baggage reclaim, to pick up my backpack before getting the bus to my hotel in the centre of town. There was a long wait for the bags to arrive on the carousel. I was shivery and shaky, and my knees threatened to disappear from under me. Pale and clammy, I glanced around nervously, looking for the nearest loo.

By the time I passed through customs, the uniformed officials had clearly been watching this nervous, sweating, pale foreigner get off a plane from Bolivia and glance around nervously while waiting for her bag. Pulled over. Open the bags. Paw through everything.

There was nothing to find, except one solitary coca teabag in my wallet. The guards’ puzzlement was palpable, so sure that they were about to make a bust. For one long, horrible moment, I thought that they were going to either cavity search me (not wise, when your subject has giardia) or arrest me for bringing coca over international boundaries, which could be illegal, apparently – though not strictly speaking in teabag form, especially when you can buy boxes of the stuff in any Lima tiendita, the same as in La Paz, plus Lima airport was stuffed full of plastinated coca-leaf souvenir keyrings.

The lead sweaty official berated me in carefully modulated language, explaining as he ripped open the remaining teabag (the only thing between me and a major gastric event) that coca is used to make drugs and that you shouldn’t bring it over the border, though obviously he’d let me off one teabag’s-worth for a small processing fee.

Bribes. You have to love them.

I paid gladly, stuffed my things back into my backpack and walked twenty-three feet out onto the main concourse, where I plonked down in a chair in front of a cafe and ordered a mate de coca while I waited for the bus to town. I glanced over and saw the sweaty guard behind his glass window, watching me, stirring his own tea, and smiling. He waved, and raised his gourd. I did the same, smiling wanly.

I read this story with amusement. A thief in germany left a note in a car he broke into, complaining that the radio was rubbish and not worth stealing.

While at university in Liverpool, my mate Dan’s car (a red 2CV, about as secure as a cardboard box) was broken into, and the would-be thief made off with nothing except for a pair of prescription sunglasses (useless to anyone but the driver) and a compliation tape I’d made for Dan the week before, which was sitting in the car stereo at the time, labelled “chill groove” in tippex pen.

Dan was mortified that the robber had broken into the car and deemed its contents unworthy of theft, while I was secretly chuffed that my musical taste was worth stealing.

I once attended an interview in which my fellow interviewer asked the hapless candidate a surprising question. After quizzing her about personal work qualities, experience of working within tight deadlines and what she thought she could bring to such a challenging role, he asked her whether a Jaffa Cake was, in fact, a cake or a biscuit.

She launched into a response (“It’s a biscuit, obviously”), and then pondered out loud at the name (“…of course it’s called a cake…”) which caused her to stumble and lapse into silence, unable to answer conclusively.

The correct answer, of course (and you might want to bear this in mind if you have any forthcoming interviews) is that it’s either or both – it all depends on where it’s shelved. If the shop owner puts it among biccies, then a biccie it is. If it nestles in next to the cakes, then let it be a cake.

The cold fact is, there is no right answer: it doesn’t matter. In the context of an interview, all the panel want is to see you choose a position to argue and stick to it. It’s all about conviction.

Actually, there is a correct (legal) answer, used only by smartarses in interview situations, which states that it’s been a cake since the British government decided that chocolate-covered biscuits attracted a higher tax rate (17.5%) than cakes (0%) and tried to have the humble Jaffa reclassified as a biccie much to Mr McVitie’s dismay. They still insist it’s a cake.

Living in Liverpool in my final year, the man who shared the flat downstairs from us in a strange old converted victorian school building was called Al, and was not a cakey kind of person. I know this because he said at least once a week – more frequently on festive occasions – that he was not a cakey kind of person. Gradually it sank in.

We had the kind of loose open flat arrangement which allowed the respective residents of his flat and mine to wander between the two freely. Over a year of frantic revision and experiments in social culture, we swapped university social lives (they dated friends from our course, we went to see an Abba tribute band at their student union), cleaning products, study tips and celebrations. On birthdays, one of us would bake a cake (usually carrot or chocolate), and when the slabs of sweetness went around the gathering on paper napkins, a bass voice would pipe from the corner “No thanks, I’m not really a cakey kind of person”. Al would pass on the cake, thank you very much, and grab another beer.

It didn’t matter how nice the cake was, or how lovingly prepared; Al was just not a cakey kind of person, and that was that. Over the year, we tried to find the limits of his objection, to define exactly what a cakey kind of person was and wasn’t. The defining characteristics seemed to be a loathing for the consistency of the foodstuff, rather than the particular taste or texture.

Whenever offered a biscuit for dunking in tea, Al would enquire whether it was a soft biscuit or a hard one. Rich tea, digestive, nice, even your standard custard cream were all fine and perfectly acceptable for general dunkage and munchage, but he’d have none of that lucury cookie nonsense. The world of the cookie, he explained, was fraught with the suggestion of softness, and frankly there wasn’t a world of difference between a luxury triple choc dipped thick cookie (89p from Tesco’s on Allerton Road) and a cake, when you got down to it, despite having different ingredients, behaviours and properties.

Sometimes, he scared us with his crazy cake talk.

On the pro side, I’d say that my mum is definitely a cakey kind of person, and that for that reason I probably am too. It’s got little to do with the taste or texture for me, and everything to do with the decoration. My mum has always specialised in making cakes to remember. They may not have been enormously professional, and they could arguably have been fairly average tasting, but I can remember nearly every birthday cake from childhood. Elaborate use of food-colouring, marzipan, other decorative edibles and props meant that every cake was both memorable and intensely personal. I may never have had a party in a burger restaurant, but in my time I’ve had birthday cakes shaped like maps, guitars, shoes, a bathtub and a dragon, complete with painted cornflake scales.

I am a cakey kind of person. Childhood holidays visiting relatives in southern Germany were like a cake-filled dream. I could say Schwarzwaldekirschtorte before I could ask where the bathroom was. I can make a simple sponge without consulting a recipe – though I haven’t for ages – and I will happily argue long and hard that the best possible topping for stewed apple is, in fact, not crumble, but sponge and then evaporated milk, as in eve’s pudding.

Question: if someone said today “let them eat Brioche” would we still think they were being quite so elitist and condescending, I wonder?

I am a cakey kind of person – squishy and sweet and sort of sickly after too much – and I could murder a brownie right about now…

P: What are you watching?
Me: The Lost World
P: Ah right. Not the Jurassic Park one? Was Bob Hoskins in that?
Me: No, this is the other one – made for TV. It’s by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
P: Oh right
Me: He wrote the Sherlock Holmes books
P: [beat] … Really? Gerraway.
Me: Yeah
P: [grinning] …That reminds me – you must tell me more about this HTML you keep banging on about…
Me: [blush]

Sometimes I forget that P’s got a bloody good education. Oops.*

Talking about HTML like that is a sort of running joke in our household. It stems from a wedding I was at a couple of years ago, at which I met the partner of a colleague. Since the last time I’d met him, this bloke had changed careers from civil engineering to web design. I’d met him a few times before, at work shindigs and the like, and we’d always managed to chat quite amiably about the bridge he was working on or whatever, or about my work on the web, but this time it was different.

He was entirely full of himself and his opinions. Over canapes and champagne, he explained to me in excrutiatingly patronising tones that web design involved using a coding language called Aitch-Tee-Em-Ell, which was very complicated indeed.

When I pointed out that I’d actually been in the industry for four years or so, he laughed and said, disbelievingly, “Oh really? Well in that case, what do you use to program HTML?”

I told him fingers, notepad, imagination, sometimes Homesite or Dreamweaver, but mostly I just prefer to handcode.

He snorted derisively and told me most professional web designers worth their salt use Dreamweaver.

So I pointed out that while I could see why, I personally found it clunky and sometimes restrictive, and didn’t like the imposition of its superfluous code structures on my work.

He told me that I only felt like that because I clearly wasn’t using it properly.

I tried very very hard not to kick him in the shins with my posh wedding shoes.

HTML is not a black art. It’s not programming, and it’s not design. It’s markup code.

Anyway, since then, asking someone to explain this fantastic H-T-M-L programming language is a sort of shortcut for saying “Yes, I’m aware of that. Tell me something else I’m already aware of…”

* I should point out that at this stage, a mild (and good-natured) quibble erupted over P’s assertion that he went to a better university than me. He was joking, but I still disagree.

He went to Durham, I went to Liverpool, we both got the same class of degree in totally different subject disciplines.

I maintain that certain universities are more reknowned for particular subjects than others, and that individual course reputation is more important. One of the main reasons I went to Liverpool is that it had the best reputation in the UK for the course I wanted to do – plus it offered a third year of fieldwork abroad. Pretty important.

The reputation of the university as a whole wasn’t that important to me – though I’m still convinced that once you get over the classist nonsense of Oxbridge and the Oxbridge rejects institutions (Bristol, Durham, you know what I mean) universities are all much the same, and courses are more important that university standing, as well as location. Or am I wrong?

Some universities have a hard time because of the city they are located in – I’m thinking here of Bradford or the University of Essex. Nothing wrong with the universities, but they have a stigma because some people don’t particularly want to study in Colchester or wherever.

If you went to university, where did you go (or where are you studying now, or where will you be going?) and why there?

Woken up this morning at half seven by a phone call to my mobile from Liverpool.

Not the whole city, obviously – that would just be weird. Nearly a million crammed up against the mouthpiece, and one massive scouse shriek of “Awright kidder!” No, not the city. But a Liverpool number all the same.

People or institutions in Liverpool who may be calling me:

1. The university (to take back my degree?)
2. A professor in my old department (to congratulate me on making such excellent and effective use of my degree since graduation)
3. My downstairs neighbour from the house in Ullett Road in which I lived during fourth year, who was last reputed to be pregnant with the lovechild of a scouse taxi driver, and working in a Lark Lane brasserie. Not sure how she would have got my number, though.
4. The passport office (though they don’t open until ten, and only on the second tuesday of each month, as I discovered when queuing to renew mine in 1994)
5. My old boss from the 051cinema (though it has since closed down, and I haven’t heard from him since 1997 anyway)
6. S and L, who I lived with at the beginning of second year (he thought he heard the voice of god, she relieved herself in a pint glass, and last I heard (in 1998) they’d had a baby boy)
7. Um. That’s it

Whoever it was, they didn’t leave a message, and now I am staring at the number and wondering whether to call. But then, if you call, what do you say?

“Someone rang me from this number first thing this morning. Who are you?”

It was probably a wrong number. But maybe…

I have only ever been able to drink half a cup of tea.

If you make me a mug the size of a bucket, I’ll only drink half of it. If you make me a dainty little china cupful, I’ll drink half of that, too.

I’ve no idea why, though I suspect it’s got something to do with the temperature of the beverage. When it’s first made, it’s too hot to drink, and by the time it reaches a bearable temperature, I only get through half a cup before it gets too cold to drink – otherwise I’d have to slurp the whole mug down in one, and that’s not really the point of a nice cuppa, is it?

I never used to drink milk in tea, either. I could never quite get my head around the concept of milk and water in the same beverage. Er, what? No thanks. So for years I drank my tea black.

And then, at about half past four in the morning of a day in November of 1996, I was at a friend’s house in Liverpool. We’d been out clubbing all night, and we were coming down from a fun evening. I sat on a beanbag on his floor, and he padded around and made tea. When he handed it to me, in the biggest mug I’d ever seen – a veritable vat – it was milky, and I didn’t have the energy to complain. I took a sip, and tasted a little bit of heaven. I was converted instantly.

Tea. With milk. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

I did a bad thing tonight.

I realised at some point between Edgware Road and Baker Street stations that the man standing next to me with his nose in a french novel was F, who I’d been to university with, and who had lived in the flat below mine in Liverpool in 1993.

He was home-counties posh, and he knew it – older than most of us, a mature student, with years in the OTC behind him. He had a habit of getting roaringly drunk and shouting Hamlet out of his bedroom window – which irritatingly, was directly below mine. I got into a corresponding habit, at three o’clock in the morning, of writing “SHUT UP F——!” in thick black marker on a bit of A4 paper, attaching it to a clipboard, looping the top of the clipboard with a bungee cord, attaching the other end of the cord to the belt of my dressing gown, and lowering the notice slowly in front of his window – just out of his grasp, but near enough to make a point.

He owned a battered old combi van and used to charge us 50p for a trip to the supermarket. We met again briefly last year at a restaurant in Soho, and had little to say to each other. Perhaps that’s why tonight, when I saw him standing next to me on the train, I didn’t say anything at all, but hid in my book.

Is that a terrible thing?