meish dot org: life, unfolding

For the first time I can remember, I woke up last night after being physically hurt in a dream.

I don’t remember all the details; only that at one point I was sitting with a lot of people at a long restaurant table, and someone I don’t like very much came over and, just as I was silently wishing she wouldn’t, sat down opposite me. I felt despondent.

Then there was other stuff which is all a bit blurry, but somehow I remember quite specifically that I was at a cash machine on a corner, though it may have been inside, as there was overhead lighting around. Maybe in a shopping centre?

Anyway, I was just about to get some money out when I saw out of the corner of my eye two youngish blokes approach, both wearing baggy parkas and hard stares. I know I’d recognise them again, which is the weird thing. I turned back to the machine, determined to get my money and finish up and clear off, because I sensed trouble.

Suddenly, I felt a paralysing blow to the stomach – I remember falling to my knees and receiving another kick, and the world – well, the dream world – turned extra bright, as if the contrast had been suddenly whacked up, then black and white, as if all the bright hues had been drained out. And that’s when I woke up with a start, eyes wide open and clutching my stomach.

Very odd.

Strictly speaking, it was a nightmare; though not the worst nightmare I’ve ever had, the one that has haunted me since I was eight.
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During an IM conversation with my lovely sister today, we somehow ended up talking about childhood hymns.

Oh no, wait, now I remember. I said “hello” and she was away from the computer, and then I shut the window and wandered off and when I got back it was to an IM from her saying “hello?” which I thought was an opening, except she of course was responding to my opening and…well, a lot of greetings ensued, concluding with me saying “Good MORning Mr ROBertson” which is what we used to have to say – well, chant – in primary school every morning in assembly – Mr R being the headteacher (I nearly wrote “Prime Minister” there – good grief) at the time. The second part of the couplet was “Good MORning EVrybody” – and let me assure you, a more unwelcoming greeting one can scarcely imagine than a hundred children of varied origin and age shouting at you in the morning.

Anyway, this then led on to a discussion of the hymns – well, songs, really – which we had to sing in primary assembly. The school was in the middle of a multiracial, multifaith area, and as such, we couldn’t really sing anything too religious, so instead we had a lot of nice stuff about peace and love and things – Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Peace is Flowing Like A River (but we didn’t sing “captives”: we sang “people”) Love Is Like A Magic Penny, Blowin’ In The Wind, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? – that sort of thing, all projected via OHP onto the back wall of the main hall.
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I’ve never had Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Actuallly, I’ve never had any fast food fried chicken, even though London is peppered with red-and-white liveried rip-off outlets – Tenessee Fried Chicken, Cottage Fried Chicken, Kansas Fried Chicken, you know the kind of thing.

This possibly all stems from an occasion when I was about seven, and asked my mum if we could have a bucket of fried chicken for tea one night, and she referred to it as Kentucky Fried Rat. While I’m not casting doubt on the provenance of the meat in the aforementioned restaurants, I haven’t quite managed to shake the picture since.

Computerised Female Voice: Hello Meg.
Meg: Hello.
CFV: Please choose your first category.
Meg: [leans forward to touch screen] Faith & Fortune
CFV: Please choose a number on the screen.
Meg: Number eight
CFV: If you came back as a ghost, who would you torment?
Meg: Anyone who had rejoiced at my death. That'd piss them off. Number seventeen.
CFV: Do games of chance appeal to you?
Meg: No. Well, yes, but I try to steer well clear, in case I get too tempted.
CFV: Thank you. Please choose your next category.
Meg: [leans forward to touch screen] Sweet and Bitter, please.
CFV: Please choose a number on the screen.
Meg: Number two.
CFV: What is the nicest thing someone has ever said to you?
Meg: That I inspired them. Number twelve.
CFV: Name one thing that you have in your life and that you would like to be rid of.
Meg: Anticipatory worry. Number five.
CFV: What type of person makes you uneasy?
Meg: Angry people; people who shout or argue.
CFV: The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth. Please concentrate on the following questions and try to answer as sincerely as possible. If you do not tell the truth, you will not be able to show your video.
Meg: Okay...
CFV: Why do you still bother keeping your weblog updated?
Meg: Habit, I suppose. I don't particularly feel the need to stop, though it's often difficult to think of what to write - or rather, how to write what I want to say. Too much audience consideration can be stifling.
CFV: What is the most unattractive trait of web users?
Meg: Inability to distinguish between the public and the truly personal. The third place is a sort of public intimacy, which is still public, after all. But it's not the same as that which is actually personal.
CFV: Thank you. Please choose another category.
Meg:[leans forward to touch screen] Love and Passion, please.
CFV: Please choose a number from the screen.
Meg: Number one.
CFV: Have you ever been in love?
Meg: Yes. Number six.
CFV: Do you truly hate anybody?
Meg: Yes, but I try really hard not to. But yes. Number eleven.
CFV: What is your favourite place to be kissed?
Meg: Not telling.
CFV: Thank you. Please select five characteristics on the screen which best describe yourself.
Meg: [leans forward to touch words on screen] Impatient. Resourceful. Creative. Open. Kind.
CFV: Thank you.
Meg: No, thank you.

Does anybody have any idea what I’m talking about? At all?

To jog your memory: Star Test. 1989. Channel 4. A celebrity sits in front of a camera/TV screen and a well-spoken female computerised voice gets them to select from categories such as Love & Passion, Power & Glory, Bitter & Sweet, Faith & Fortune and so on. Within each category there were twenty blind questions. The celeb answered five questions from each section they chose, in order to win the opportunity to play their latest video or a clip from their new series or whatever.

I always always wanted to be on it. I liked – still like – answering questions. I liked the choosing of categories, the seemingly intimate bite-size revelations. Of course, they only featured celebrities – but I’d play along at home, in my head. Is there anything anyone would like to know?

In 1980 and 1981, the GLC (Greater London Council, headed by Ken Livingston, now London’s Mayor) put up posters all over the city. They gave them out to schools and churches and mosques, pasted them outside tube stations and near museums and shopping centres. The posters depicted a simplified map of greater London, with blue lines drawn to demonstrate which areas were at greatest risk from flooding, should the Thames ever spill its banks.

The map showed clearly which areas would remain safe – the high ground of Notting and Muswell Hills and Hampstead, for example – and which would be glugging under water when the time came – Pimlico, great swathes of Fulham, Chelsea and South London. The maps were entitled “What To Do If London Floods” to which some cheeky scamp had generally added “swim for it” or “the breaststroke”.

I studied the maps with fascination and awe, slightly peeved that in the event that Lonodn did flood, my home would be perfectly safe, and there would therefore be no possibility of climbing out of the top floor bedroom window into an inflatable dinghy, and paddling off to school – a fantasy which occupied a great deal of my thinking time, aged seven, because it was so potentially exciting.

Of course, in those days, I neither knew nor cared about structural damage, contents insurance and the special health perils of stagnant water. Probably a good thing, too. Kids shouldn’t have their fantastic fantasies intruded upon by harsh reality like insurance.

When the Thames flood barrier was opened in 1982, I was sad, because that meant we’d never see the city flooded.

I soon switched my attention to other disasters, though. In school, aged eight, nine and ten, they teach you an awful lot about the plague, the Great Fire of London and the Blitz. Of all of these, I became preoccupied with the Blitz: incredibly worried about the possibility of London being bombed.

Bear in mind that this was at a point when there was a lot of talk about nuclear weapons and what to do in the event of a nuclear attack (paint your windows white, do something inventive with a door up against a wall, and hide, as I recall). This was the eighties, the time of Thatcher and Reagan and When the Wind Blows.

Nuclear war was (and is!) petrifying. But the stories about the Blitz caused more worry to me. Why? Because the main bit of information that I carried away from my lessons about the bombing raids on London was that when the bombers came, most people were OK because they hid in the depths of the tube stations. Sorted.

Except that my local tube station was Ladbroke Grove, on the Metropolitan (now Hammersmith and City) Line. Above ground. The next nearest was Latimer Road. Above ground. Westbourne Park, Royal Oak, Goldhawk Road – all of them, above ground. Fuck. Where would we go? How would we stay safe?

The worry about where we would go in the event of bombing worried me for years, until I grew old enough to realise that the threat had receded, and that in the event of a nuclear blast in London, we’d all be buggered anyway.

I’ve recently started worrying again.

Weekends start well with fiery Salata Daqua and chili dressing at Mandola in Notting Hill.

And although this will mean very little to anyone, the first 7-11 in London, where they did coke and fanta flavour slurpees which Jane and I used to get on the way to go skating at Queen’s on Saturdays, and which turned into a b2b in recent years, has now been shut completely and is a showroom for a bunch of luxury flats which are being built on the adjacent block.

Because London needs another luxury apartment development. Pretty soon, we’ll all be living in the lap of luxury, but we’ll have to drive out to Staines to work and Reading to get a pint of milk, because everything else in the city will have been converted into swanky pads.

And they knocked down Sweaty Betty too.

When I was born, the doctor wasn’t there. In the maternity ward, the air was thick with humidity and women hollering for relief. My mum, self-trained in National Childbirth Trust breathing techniques, from a book sent over by her mum, remained relatively quiet, panting through the pain.

The doctor came to check on her and, when she saw how little pain my mum was apparently in, concluded that there was ages left to go before I made my entry. The doctor went shopping. Twenty minutes later, I popped into the world, protesting loudly.

My mum always said I was born within earshot of lions roaring, which always seemed fitting. If you’re going to be born in Africa, where better? The truth is, the lions were safely contained within the zoological gardens nearby.

Over the years, I’ve spent birthdays variously:

• sledging on teatrays in the Isle of Man;
• raising money for Comic Relief by standing outside BBC television centre with an enormous birthday card;
• eating dinner on top of a mountain, with a view over the Olympic mountain range, while serenaded by an opera singer;
• Getting my nose pierced in Vancouver;
• waiting for flowers in a run down tenament in Muirhouse;
• eating pancakes in Liverpool;
• dancing Sevillanas under orange blossom;
• in a moutain hut in North Wales, while people raved all night;
• eating welsh rarebit in a cafe-cum-bike-repair-shop in Liverpool, run by that bloke who used to be in Brookie;
• Having a shiatsu massage in a hut overlooking the Amazon treetops;
• on a rooftop in Soho;
• at work, and then in the pub.

Today, on my birthday, I’m getting ready to go on a three hour train journey northwards, closely followed by a three-hour train journey southwards. Every year brings new adventures, experiences and surprises. Every year is different, and new.

The other day, I asked what this might be a detail from:

The answer? It’s a drum.

Specifically, a Yoruba Oba drum – a talking drum.

My parents brought it (and us) back from Nigeria in the late seventies, and throughout my childhood it lived in the front room, to be squeezed and tapped experimentally once in a while by small hands.

The point of a talking drum is to make noises which sound like words spoken in a tonal language – like Yoruba. The drum is played with a curved stick, while the drum is held under one arm and the drum is squeezed. The leather cords tighten, and the skin on either end of the drum is pulled taught, causing the tone to rise. It does sound eerily like talking, when played properly.

This drum has a past, though. This drum stopped me running away from home.

In the very early eighties, my mum, who was working as a journalist, had to go to Sri Lanka for over a month in the summer for a conference. My dad was busy as ever with work, so the family drafted in a distant cousin to help look after me, my brother and my sister during the summer holidays. Helga was from Switzerland, and had curly hair, which I liked, and a huge mustachioed boyfriend called Georg, which I didn’t.

In the finest fairy tale tradition, H & G were nice as pie when parental units were around, but wicked when they weren’t. Well, I say wicked…they were in London and in love, and not particularly interested in looking after three smallish children during a hot summer when they could have been rowing hired boats in Regents Park or checking out the buskers at Covent Garden.

One afternoon, after a screaming match with Helga (in which, to be fair, I did the majority of the screaming), I resolved to run away. That’d show her.

I packed a small backpack with clothes and books (always a priority) and left through the back door, down the ginnel, through the gate and out onto the road. I struck off in the direction of the shops around the corner. I turned right. I walked past the shops and then turned right again. I walked the whole way along the road and then turned right again. At the corner, I started to worry about the Oba drum. I didn’t want Helga to have it. I didn’t want to leave it behind, because it was precious and it belonged to our family, and I didn’t want Helga and her smelly boyfriend to touch it, steal it, have it.

I walked the length of the street, and turned right again, back onto our tree-lined street. I picked up speed, worried at the thought that H & G would have the drum. Ten houses later, I was home, sliding in through the back gate, up the ginnel and in through the kitchen door.

I hurried into the front room, where it smelled of warm dust from the carpet and overstuffed formal furniture, and wood polish, from the huge table in the middle of the room, never used (except for sliding along on our bottoms when we knew we wouldn’t be caught). By the fireplace stood the drum.

I hauled it up onto one shoulder. It was too heavy, big and awkward to carry along with my bag. I had to choose, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave without it, but I couldn’t take it with me.

So I stayed. I hid the drum behind an armchair, unpacked my bag, put the backpack back in the bottom of the airing cupboard, and stayed.

I’d managed to run away for all of fifteen minutes, never got further away than the other side of the block, and ended up back home because I was worried about the safety of a treasured family posession. Running away seemed like a good idea in theory – it was just a quetion of logistics – but not nearly so simple in practice – when emotions were involved. It seldom is.

Have you ever run away?

The brazilian bikini wax shop (that’s what they do, not where they come from) next to the deli where I go for lunch has got a strangely wilting valentine flower arrangement in the window – a cluster of miserable and tired-looking roses and greenery, interspersed with glitter-covered hearts on sticks, poking out of the foliage, like antennae.

When I was eight I had a pair of heart-shaped deeley boppers, covered in red glitter and attached to a head-squeezingly tight alice-band. I wore them everywhere, for a short time.

I quickly realised that when I walked with a certain lolloping, bouncing gait, the red hearts would oscillate and bash together rhythmically with a series of satisfying polystyrene thwaps above my head.

thwap – thwap – thwap – thwap – thwap – thwap – thwap

…as I wandered down the street.

The unfortunate biproduct of this amusing activity, however, was that the red polystyrene hearts quickly shed their glittery covering through the constant thwaping together. This meant that I ended up with red glitter all over my hair and sticking to my scalp, which combined to give the not altogether unpleasant appearance that I had red spangly dandruff, which shimmered down whenever I moved my head vigourously.

I wish I still had them. It’s much harder to get away with wearing heart-shaped deeley boppers when you’re practically thirty, though.

And the spangly dandruff would clash with my suit.

At the risk of sounding like a girl (but that’s ok; I am), I’m having an exceptionally good hair day today. It’s clean, shiny, and it’s doing what it’s supposed to, for a change, which can be basically surmised as “sit on my head and look fabulous”.

My hair is weird. Dark dark dark brown, dead straight and smooth and fine, and pretty long (to the middle of my back) but pretty much never worn loose (it gets in my way and annoys me), I’ve been growing if for ages, but I can’t remember why.

When I was younger, I always wanted to have long hair, but I didn’t. I didn’t brush it enough, and it wouldn’t stay in hairclips or ponytails or plaits – whenever I put ribbons or bands or bows in it, they just slid out, because my hair was so shiny and smooth and straight. And so, like so many others in the late seventies, I ended up with what was quaintly known at the time as a “page boy”.

“No,” I said to my mum, stamping my little foot on the pavement outside His’n'Hers on North Pole Road, “I don’t want a boy’s haircut”

But I got it anyway, for years and years and years.

And then, finally, I reached secondary school at eleven, and had a say in my hair. We went to the hairdresser (Klassy Kutz, on Barlby Road) and I gazed in rapture at the soft focus pictures on the wall, demonstrating the possible haircuts available. The mullet (think Kajagoogoo). The bouffant (think Barbra Dickson). The triangle head (think Elaine Paige). The city boy (think Tucker’s Luck). And then, my favourite. The one that shone out above all others.

The model had dark hair, which made a change, because at the time it was seen as very cool to be blonde, and so most models were. She had pierced ears, too (which I didn’t), displaying gold orbs which glowed in the soft light. Her skin was vaguely peach-coloured, and radiated strange luminescence – you could see this because she wore a fetching off-the-shoulder purple blouse (very 1980s), and she had a faraway look in her dark eyes. Her hair was sort of bouffant on top and short at the back and sides, and seemed to be big and bouncy and bold. I thought she was, in a word, gorgeous, and I vowed to have that haircut, or die (dye?) trying.

When he asked what I wanted doing, I didn’t say a word to Tony, the hairdresser, but pointed silently at the poster high on the wall, above the wall of mirrors. That one. I want that haircut. He did that thing, that comic double take, from my head to the model’s a few times, and then said “oh,” his mouth forming a perfect little moustachioed circle. “You want the Princess Di?”

Well, that just confirmed it. It was the mid eighties, and how could I possibly fail to have a haircut called after Her Royal Loveliness?

I nodded. Tony started to snip. Time passed.

Forty minutes later, I emerged from the salon, shell-shocked and hairsprayed to within an inch of my life. I had the Princess Di, oh yes. But where HRH looked divine and otherworldly, and the model in the poster looked sultry and beguiling, I looked like an eleven year old with a surprised hedgehog taped to my head.

See, in order to get my fine, straight hair to even vaguely do the bouffant standing-up thing, Tony had had to go at me with hairdryer and tongs and more hairspray than you might see at the average Miss World contest. My whole head felt sticky, and my hair was solid, like a helmet. If I’d leant against a wall, I’d have bounced off.

I caught glimpses of myself in shop windows as I passed, wandering home, stunned, and I couldn’t quite reconcile myself with the big-haired person reflecting at me. I patted it occasionally, which had no impact, and left sticky residue on my palms. This was not the glamourous result I’d been expecting.

Needless to say, lacking both hairdryer and hairspray at home, I was thankfully unable to recreate the look in my own bedroom. Instead, until the haircut gradually grew out (and it took forever, believe me), I ended up looking like a boy – and a boy with a bad haircut, to boot. Flat, uninteresting, badly shaped and definitely nothing like HRH. More like HRT, in fact.

So now I’ve got long hair. Long, boring, straight and not shaped, bouffanted or anything – a couple of layers here and there, but nothing like that Joan Franceton off the telly. Just there.

And now I remember why I’ve been growing it all this time – to get as far away as possible from looking like my eleven year old self. I think I might have just about managed it. Finally.

How’s your hair?