Barely just got through the door.
I’m suddenly on the culture shock equivalent of jetlag. A week in the Scottish wilds of the Highlands makes you realise how noisy, rude and dirty this city can be. A week of eating well cooked food over candlelight with friends makes you appreciate just how much salt Tesco put in their microwave lasagnes.
And I’ve come back to the email of equivalent of mail piled up behind the door – EIGHTY THREE distinct emails from friends, relatives, literary contacts, estate agents and faceless Nigerian businessmen offering me a $25,000,000 cut of an unclaimed inheritance. A Level and GCSE students will also know of the cruel irony in receiving an important letter you recognise instantly by the fact it is addressed in your own hand – my letter from the Soho Theatre. I thought it was a make or break decision, but they’d merely dropped me a note kindly confirming receipt of the script I scribbled back in July and returning the originals, assuring me they’ll let me know if I’ve been accepted onto the 10 week course asap. There was also another letter from the Royal Court reminding me to apply for their September course. And since I left London last Friday in a manical flurry of activity that would make Katchachurian hang up his sabres as an inspiration for cymbal-clashing chaos, I’m still catching up on the loosely tended to list of Things To Do I speeded through in my desperate domestic triage. Battlefield medicine was the best I could manage after racing from the terror of a huge last-minute workload at the office, to the estate agents to put down a holding deposit on a new flat (with hilarious consequences) to home to do some panicky last minute hurling of clothes into a suitcase with one hand, whilst filling out a background/credit checking form with the other.
Tomorrow I’ll upload a few blog entries in retro (coo, “in retro”… I like that) which I scribbled into my jotter whilst in Skye, as well as a few of the stupid amount of photos I took whilst I was there. I’ve also completely neglected to mention that the play Little One and I have been writing has made it through to the second round of funding for the Samuel Beckett prize (or maybe I didn’t forget – maybe I just didn’t want to jinx it. Either way I can’t afford to be superstitious now when I still need to finish the second stage application due by the middle of this month).
But, today, for the few precious minutes of my Saturday night back in London left, all I want to do is eat my nasty microwave lasagne, breathe and have a nice sit down.
Oh, Auntie Em, there’s no place like home. Home – overflowing dirty dishes home; insane amount of work to do on novels, plays and sundry writing projects, opportunities and applications home; soon to be moving out of but haven’t got a clue how that’s going to work home.
Home.
Home home home!
