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Thirty Years: Thirty

Wednesday 30th June, 2010

“Who are you?”

I’m driving down the Pacific coastal road to LA with my fiancé and two of the most selfless and loyal friends I’ve ever had. If life is a journey, I feel I was always heading this way. I’m picking up things I loved from my childhood and making them work. Once I get home, I’m going to work hard to get back into university to follow a new career. I’m not going to try to be a writer anymore. That isn’t a job or an occupation I can aspire to do. That’s just something I’ve always been.

•  Ben's 100 words at 12:05 am • 4 Comments

Thirty Years: Twenty Nine

Tuesday 29th June, 2010

“Our absence was my language.”

I remember the agonising wait in that muggy basement, feeling increasingly sick as it gets closer to my turn. In the audience I hear my friends laughing at the others. I consider another cigarette but my mouth is dry and I know I’ll be sick. Suddenly Sarah’s up there. That means I’m on next. Oh my God, I’m on next. She finishes. Everyone claps. My heart is pounding. He calls my name. I step into the light and… don’t remember a thing. I’ve watched the video back since and don’t remember a thing about it.

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Thirty Years: Twenty Eight

Monday 28th June, 2010

“For the dawn.”

I was trying to escape. I’d set everything on relocating to Canada, perhaps seeking that feeling of home felt when I’d visited Vancouver years before. I even moved home to save money. Standing on the shores of English Bay in an impromptu birthday holiday, I thought this was where the story would end. But instead I soon found myself stranded. Mother kicked me out of the house and I lived off the charity of friends for several months. And I met a boy. Life doesn’t give you what you’re looking for. It gives you what you need.

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Thirty Years: Twenty Seven

Sunday 27th June, 2010

“This is a war.”

When I quit my job they asked me where I was going to. I replied I was going to write. I received a pitying look in response, as if I hadn’t yet figured out how the world worked. As an unemployed writer I would sleep during the day, working all night finishing my novel, drinking black coffee and smoking roll-ups. Sometimes I’d walk the haunted streets and woods of old Highgate. At the time I felt impoverished, perhaps a little trapped by my choices, but responsible for it. Looking back I only remember feeling utterly free.

•  Ben's 100 words at 3:19 pm • 1 Comment

Thirty Years: Twenty Six

Saturday 26th June, 2010

I’ve never been an “office job” person. By 26 I’d grown desperately unhappy, aware of time moving unbearably fast, frantically grabbing at each wasted second. I felt isolated, somehow exiled in London, desperate to escape. I remember once leaving work, inexplicably on the verge of tears, and staring at traffic on Euston Road. The city lights and sounds blurred and muffled past until I was suddenly in Leicester Square, hours later. My doctor called it a ‘fugue’; the conscious mind, unable to cope, essentially shuts down. It still happens when the moods swell dark enough, once or twice a year.

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Thirty Years: Twenty Five

Friday 25th June, 2010

Twenty five saw the rise of the Canadians. If my life were a drama then this ‘season’ saw an influx of new characters, none of which I could now comprehend having ever lived without. We moved closer to Highgate Cemetery, its legendary cobbled streets often echoing ghostly carriage-wheels clattering across them. It all felt like something was beginning in my life. As usual, looking back, I was then too impatient to understand what it was. I was in a Wildean prime of youth: confident, solvent, inspired, capable and unafraid. The world was my oyster, and everything suddenly within easy reach.

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Thirty Years: Twenty Four

Thursday 24th June, 2010

I discovered I was allergic to blonds far too late. One in particular took me to Vancouver; the first place I’d felt at home since university. While there I took an Amtrak to Seattle to visit my older brother, following the Pacific coast under a full moon. When I arrived we hugged awkwardly. “There’s no easy way to say this,” he said, and told me our uncle was dead. Cancer. We spent the night sitting on his porch drinking beer and smoking cigarettes like two kids from a John Hughes movie, sharing memories of the man who’d shaped our childhood.

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Thirty Years: Twenty Three

Wednesday 23rd June, 2010

Graduation was intense; I moved back to London without focus or direction. I started a beautifully destructive and turbulent relationship. We no longer speak. I moved to Highgate, but fell out with a friend over trivialities like washing-up and laundry. In autumn my mother developed cancer and I moved home to look after her between hospital visits. Writing feverishly, I produced my best pieces, was finally published and won first prize in an international competition. Months later I still hadn’t found a job. I fell apart and my doctor reluctantly prescribed antidepressants. Happiness became meaningless because I couldn’t feel sad.

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Thirty Years: Twenty Two

Tuesday 22nd June, 2010

Anyone who’s done Edinburgh will tell you it’s incredible. You meet so many people: both rising new talent and veteran faces of stage and screen. When not performing, flyering or watching shows we’d grab unhealthy snacks from Piemaker, sing songs on the Royal Mile about Jenny Bond selling used underwear on the internet or grab brief rests over sticky pub tables of beer and burgers for five pounds. The venue we played at has since become an Indian restaurant. One of us became a successful standup comedian, the other a successful musician. The third tried to become a writer, unsuccessfully.

•  Ben's 100 words at 3:27 pm • No Comments

Thirty Years: Twenty One

Monday 21st June, 2010

My abiding memory of my 21st birthday was sitting beside a dual-carriageway in Victoria eating soggy overpriced sandwiches as I watched the traffic pass. My mother later pretended she hadn’t forgotten by rushing to Sainsbury’s before closing to buy a fruit salad spongecake, gone soggy from being left out all day. Realising that all my friends leaping out to shout “surprise!” was increasingly unlikely, I drank a bottle of Soave, smoked cigarettes and went to bed, drawing a veil over the whole empty, soggy experience. Ever since I’ve not bothered much with birthdays. Why even try to top that little winner?

•  Ben's 100 words at 1:42 am • 1 Comment

Thirty Years: Twenty

Sunday 20th June, 2010

I adored university. No one judged you by the music you listened to or the clothes you wore. Suddenly I could relax and be myself long enough to find out I actually liked it. Suddenly I had friends, without even really trying. In summer 2000 I was the gayest thing since Liberace’s underpants; all bleached hair, tight T-shirts and blue contact-lenses. In my first serious relationship, I held my boyfriend’s hand as we walked through Piccadilly on my first Pride march. And I was proud. Fiercely so. Proud of who I’d become and everything I’d achieved; everything I’d finally earned.

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Thirty Years: Nineteen

Saturday 19th June, 2010

My best friend and my sister, noses pressed against the window, as I heard my results; some moments you remember forever because you know you’ve earned them. I was off to university. The last summer of the Twentieth Century sped past: lazy mornings watching T4, stalking Ben Shephard; wine-soaked candlelit evenings with my oldest friend and his boyfriend; spontaneous daytrips in his Mini watching swaying cornfields under blue skies. Months later I was looking out from my St Andrews’ bedroom window as my mother told me she was divorced. They had been divorcing all my life. Suddenly anything seemed possible.

•  Ben's 100 words at 1:19 am • No Comments

Thirty Years: Eighteen

Friday 18th June, 2010

I left school having fucked up my A-levels (because I was “stupid”) and fucked up friendships through soaking “confused” teenage hormones in booze. It wasn’t the last time I’d do that. My dad paid for me to retake my A-levels at his old college in Notting Hill. Stuck at home for another year, it was the first time I truly worked hard for something. I sat in Kensington Gardens a lot, on my own, revising or writing my journal. I felt left behind, and through my own fault, but not sad. Solitary perhaps, but only as that moment between breaths.

•  Ben's 100 words at 12:15 am • 1 Comment

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