1) Don’t do that.

2) Music really does sound better through earphones.

3) The grass is always greener. Be happy with your lot, not unhappy over someone else’s.

4) Wear sunscreen.

5) Don’t bank with Abbey National. Ever. EVER. Unless of course you want to waste money, have high blood pressure and go grey before your time. In which case just start smoking. It will work out healthier for you in the long run.

6) You can do anything you want…

7) … but always be polite to and mindful of other people. If even a tenth of the people who live in London did this, I’d never leave. I’d probably even use the tube without instantly calculating how to avoid Oxford Circus.

8) One day in your mid twenties, overnight, the things you do in life will suddenly seem arbitrary. You’ll think it won’t happen to you, but it will.

9) You’ll only ever truly regret not doing something rather than doing it.

10) If you must get a credit card “for emergencies”, keep it in a drawer with “FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY” written in thick red marker pen on the front. Keep a live tarantula in the drawer. One that really hates you. Never, ever, take the card out with you. Especially not to the pub.

11) Blonds are evil.

12) Politely ignore all advice and make your own mistakes.

13) But trust me on the sunscreen.

It happened again, somehow more as teenage viscera than the teenage innocence of before but no less warm in effect. Only there were three this time. One was a boy - a cheeky, impudent libertine. Another was an ex, tacitly competing with me for the libertine’s attention’s. And one, curiously, was a girl.

I know. So far this reads like a BBC Sitcom proposal.

I met the girl on a bus. There was some sort of major delay on the underground (a dream clearly not steeped entirely in fantasy) and we were two of several hundred people who found themselves shoved together in typical London commuter joined-up thinking, trying to board a rail replacement bus. We got chatting. She seemed to think I was straight, and I let her (for some odd reason, a lot of women seem to. Note to self: say ‘whoops, duckie!’ more in company). Next we were kissing, and I went along with it. Somehow it wasn’t all that bad. Y’know, for a girl. I even remember feeling something close to genuine affection at the time (about as much as I’m capable of offering any man these days, certainly, not that that’s a great deal), but I’m relieved it’s merely a dream. Waking up remembering kissing a girl the night before is, I’d imagine, a similar response to waking up remembering you had a cigarette after one month of virtue.

The libertine meanwhile was your typical nineteen year old - dangerously clever, impossibly energetic, impishly witty and intolerably cute, blue eyed (naturally, though surprisingly neither blond nor Canadian) with all the chutzpah of someone recently aware of people laughing louder at their jokes as an act of foreplay itself, and the reluctant attraction to them you increasingly submit to as a result. I say ‘typical nineteen year old’, but I’ve yet to meet any such boy. If my life were a Raymond Chandler novel, this sort would clearly be my homme fatale. This apparently grants me a future somewhere between Quentin Crisp as Philip Marlowe and Uncle Monty.

Immediately my ex silently declared a cold war as far as this boy was concerned, a war he seemed to immediately win by the event of my surrender. If you ever want to win against me, simply force me into a competition. I will instantly walk away. I rarely compete against anyone except myself. If you ever want to lose against me, give me an ultimatum. I will nearly always choose the alternative that didn’t. I think the ex factor (ho ho) probably represents my insecurity of separate friends I’ve made ‘coupling off’ after I’ve introduced them to each other and leaving me behind. It also makes me realise that I can be very passive aggressive / passively defeatist in relationships by immediately refusing to ‘fight’ for someone I’ve just met, surrendering to the assumption that if they were truly interested in me then they would do a little fighting of their own. You can only chase after something that leaves you a trail to follow after all.

I’m not quite sure what lesson this was meant to teach me however, as my habitual passivity ultimately won out. After an age (or a nanosecond according to current oneirological studies) of watching the ex peacock-step about my Devil-May-Caring Lolitus, the latter trumped the former’s colourful display with a quick turn to me and a politely wicked enquiry as to whether he and I should bathe together now, or just go straight to bed. In a gloriously unsportsmanlike victory, we then proceeded to eat each other’s faces off for the remainder of the evening, until my ex slunk away sullenly from the dream as a deposed alpha male. Serves him right. Even in the dream he had a boyfriend.

I woke up at the precise moment my dream self fell asleep in his Rimbaudish lover’s arms. There was no eczema on my paw this time, but my right hand was sore from where I’d slept on it, my wrists and metacarpels already sprained from yesterday when I sat down somehow stupidly in Soho Square, distracted by the self-satisfied offensive tramp who had invited himself to join us. As I slowly became aware of the dim light of the real world, Friday flavoured from behind the curtain, I recognised this playing on iTunes beside me.

I’ve been walking about the house since I got up with a feeling that I’m meant to be somewhere else - that I’ve left someone behind, and that I’ve forgotten their name. And that this clearly won’t be the last time. Somewhere in my head is lodged this stubborn conception of a phantom lover, more real and familiar than anything I could encounter from the moment I wake up to again falling asleep.

From the journal…

Friday 22nd: The first day of summer

I watch the leaves wave like abandoned wives beyond the glass as clouds roll majestically away behind them - moving west, always ever further west. I sit unblinking in my almost empty room and watch the world move, change and grow - the clouds cruising away like a mighty fleet. I try not to feel somehow left behind.

Saturday 23rd: A week today the clocks go forward.

It snowed this morning. The clock has only now just folded past twelve. I lay in bed and watched the clouds fall in graceful showers as if the world and its thoughts had slowed. Then came the gales. Then, soon after, the sun. I lay in my warm sheets amidst the chaos of my soon-to-no-longer-be room and watched the sunlight sparkle from the snow-speckled rooftops like perfectly polished glass. Like looking at the world through a diamond. It was the purest light I’ve seen.

Betty and The Key have now moved out and most of my stuff is in a lock-up in Romford. I feel like a little like I should be wearing a wedding dress and spouting misandry. Have started mooching about the place and sitting in my empty former flatmates’ rooms sighing whistfully at coffee rings. Cats do that sort of thing when another cat dies.

Sunday 24th: Variations on time as a theme

Today, clearing out my baubles and trinkets from my old metal cabinet, I found my old watch. Time stopped as I found myself clutching it. The watch stared up at me, its hands fixed into an awkward easy smile. Old friends. I gently blew dust from its face and, on a whim, opened it up to see what time had preserved inside. With all the serendipity of a text adventure, I found a spare battery in another drawer that fitted it perfectly. It is now wrapped snugly about my right arm as I type, breathing in the fresh minutes, the hours, as the seconds tick backwards in a steady anti-clockwise heartbeat. As of today, I once again control time.

Wednesday 27th: All of these voices

I sat in the pub as The Key went to the bar. He’d come back to the old flat from his new one, where both of them are settling in. Suddenly I felt alone. People sat around me living their lives, eating, arguing, flirting with each other. Already I felt like a stranger in my local. The Black Moods were slowly soaking into me, like a coat tail touching dirty water. Before I could wonder what would become of me I head a familiar sound, friendly words - a song. It was Regina Spektor singing Fidelity. I smiled and sang along, playing an unseen piano atop the table, indifferent to the strange looks from stranger people and The Key as he returned to the table with my drink.

Thursday 28th

I watch a single raindrop sparkling on a leaf outside my window - brilliant brief flashes of of blue through to green, purple - there’s a yellow, a burnt orange. Back to blue. Subliminal snapshots of infinite colour, reflecting the sun, the universe - all in a tiny opal of water.

Friday 29th: All the strange, strange creatures

I loathe the West London sky. I stare at it, the past beyond it and myself like a traveller from the future incased in plastic amber and glass. I catch my reflection - is it smiling more than me or less? I close my eyes and let words and noises be whatever they want, not what we hear them as. “The next station is almost there. Change here for the Fault Line. Please ensure to take all your problems with you when leaving the train.”

Saturday 30th

exhausted. mother. tired. hungry. feel like bursting into tears. feel like getting drunk. feel like not feeling anything. feeling too much. done so much, survived so much, got rid of so much. so much still to do.

Tuesday: April Fool’s Day

My first morning in her house. Tried to have a much needed lie in after ten days of four hours sleep. Woken up at 7:30 and again at 9:00 with cold trivial demands as if they’re the most important thing ever. Couldn’t fulfill them. “Oh,” came the reply. Pulled the duvet over my head as the door slammed. Your own problems are a luxury. Independence is not a right. Your feelings are no longer significant. Thought about last night’s discovery - how I can no longer afford to leave. How I’m stuck here, away from my friends, away from love and joy and life. Pretended I didn’t exist. Felt nothing. Suddenly fitted in.

Stupid things I remember about that love affair:

We met at a friend’s house. A huge house. I can’t remember the first thing who said to who, only that he was tired and wanted to go to bed, too polite to say so when I stopped him outside his room to talk to him. I had to talk to him.

I remember, just when I thought he was only being polite, him giving me the sandwich he’d made for his long journey home. I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I just stared at it. I wanted to keep it in a box forever to remind myself that the moment was real. He said it was ‘Manitoba and cheese’. I looked up to see a huge grin on his face. We laughed. We said goodnight and hugged briefly, politely. I was certain I’d never see him again. Minutes later we kissed for the first time.

There was a knock on my door as I lay in bed. “Come in,” I said, hoping, hoping, hoping. It was him. He was babbling nervously and I just kissed him. He kept on babbling - still talking whilst my lips pressed against his. After that we lay in bed all night talking. Then he told me he had a boyfriend. I pretended to be shocked, but I think even at the time I knew. I just didn’t want to acknowledge it. It wasn’t fair.

I remember the last time I saw him, the night we kissed properly for the first and last time. He gave me a card with his details on it because he had to go away. I took it without reading it, and suddenly he was kissing me - we sank to the floor in a crowded room kissing like hungry teenagers. We stopped. Breath. Warmth, Staring at each other with an involuntary warm glow and grinning like simpletons. Then he made some comment I took completely the wrong way. The glow left me. I slapped him like Scarlet O’Hara, and ran away through the crowds of people, unable to stop crying. He ran after me, somehow reassuring, apologising and making me laugh and cry all at the same time as he chased me down the stairs. He held my face in his hands and made me look at him. He said, deeply, that he was sorry - that he didn’t mean what he said in the way I took it. That what he meant but couldn’t say was that it was the most perfect kiss he’d ever shared with someone. Then he did that thing he did - singing “you’re still the one I lust for” to Shania Twain’s ‘You’re Still The One’. Beautiful fool. We laughed holding each other on the busy stairwell - reassurance, uncertainty and restraint surging through us.

I remember waking up, instantly knowing where I was and trying to get back to sleep to read what it said on his card, knowing all the same that it was pointless. I buried my head under the pillow, breathing in the lingering warmth of the dream, chasing at its misty heels as it faded back to that impossible place where dreams exist. All I could see in my mind was the slow swaying of a silver pocketwatch - back, forth, back, forth.

I remember looking at the back of my right hand as Spring’s sun peeped through the curtains, used to the inexplicable routine now, over and over like a lesson not being learnt. Nothing - no eczema, no bleeding, broken dry skin. Then I remembered last night - the back of my left hand before I had gone to bed - red, inflamed, dry. Whilst I was awake. I don’t understand any of it - the significance, the coincidence - waking up with a physical pain and yet feeling a warmth and confidence for the rest of the day, despite none of it being something you can touch or keep. Despite none of it being real. I tell myself it isn’t real, that these things aren’t important. This is probably why I keep having these dreams that are more real than anything I’ve known.

Miss Havisham: burned to death

Potter about. Diddle on work website. Scratch as iTunes peppers the day. Stare at the piles of unpacked books and unsorted clutter and feel like the end of university all over again. Door goes. Ignore it. Hear key at the door. Throw on dressing gown. Politely suggest to buzzarding estate agent that he give 24 hours notice next time. Go back into room and stare at books and clutter again. Big mistake. Is it just me or are they getting bigger? Call mother. Bigger mistake - when will I learn? End the phone call having staved off the habitual argument resulting from an equally habitual and belligerent incomprehension of broadband internet whilst securing the promise of packing crates. Think about food but don’t feel hungry enough. Notice vodka bottle but don’t feel Christine Cagney enough. Contemplate cigarette but think of how nice it would be to get my deposit back at this creeping critical stage, so stand outside in insidious February sunshine, freezing my eczema off in pyjama bottoms and slippers. Contemplate creativity.

Matthew: regenerated

Realise my current mental state is only capable of creating a fine mess and quickly give in. Come inside, but it doesn’t feel any warmer. Listen to The Song and feel hollow, unfilled, unsoothed by any monotone. It just wheals up a rash of fresh neuroses. Listen to generic late nineties chillout music with sitars in it and collapse face down on sheets already smelling old after a week and try to think about nothing at all. Try not to think about work, about how I’ll get another job when this one ends. Try not to think about six months in a house with my mother, and how nice the veins on my wrist look at the moment - all nice and conveniently tucked away under dry itchy skin.

Egg: became an author. Finally.

Try not to think about V Day, and whether that’s the biggest mistake yet, if this is all just a rehearsal to prepare for what hopeless loneliness is truly like. Try not to think I want to get out of the flat and go to the pub. Realise everyone who doesn’t know where their life is going inevitably ends up in a pub. All romantics meet the same fate someday - cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe. Realise I just want to get out. I just want to go somewhere. Text people to see if they want to meet up later. Ask them if they want to go out. No replies. This is it. You reap what you sow. This is what they tried to tell you about taking responsibility for your actions, and getting your just desserts. This is all about accepting your fate.

Today is the first Down Day of the New Year.
To celebrate this, at precisely 3:41pm today in the past, a man will be standing in Leicester Square, dressed in a business man costume and smoking a cigarette.
He’ll be watching the pigeons pecking and scuffling amongst the scraps underfoot. He’ll be looking, empty-eyed at the near-faceless people who pass him, clacking and scuffing the heels on their feet. He will glance, indifferently and without focus, at the clouds rolling past overhead, fluffing up the sky in frayed un-safety-pinned cottons, and the seeping sunbeams that bleed from between them.
He’ll be wondering which of them got it right, and why that means he got it wrong - why he can’t be a person, anymore than he could be a pigeon or a cloud.
But mostly he will be smoking a cigarette and wearing a business man costume, standing in Leicester Square at precisely 3:41pm.
The performance will last for, at most, several months.
Hurry. You will miss it.

>_ Crash.

Too full of crap. Too many problems. Too much running (at any one time). It just doesn’t work anymore. This is a permanent fatal error? Type 0. Type more. Backup (selectively). Uninstall. Empty the trash with nostalgia. Those silly attachments: those unread files, unopened folders. “That’s made some space.” All that space - all that vast empty space just waiting to be filled - pictures, ideas, words and memories. Reinstall. Wait. Watch the clock, the date. Don’t look at the trash. Suddenly all is a new version.

>_ “You shouldn’t have any memory problems now.”

Close the laptop as if it were a box. Outside, back in the past, there are twinkly lights lit up like synapses, memories wrapped in plastic like the smell of old tinsel on real and severed trees. Frozen sparks. Inside there is candlelight, untroubled by the wind - bright, orange, steady. Safe. We are in its glow, months before closing time. Every sip is a sentence, every bite a Sunday roast.

Backpack, books, laptop. You are allowed only two items you do not need. The toothbrush? The unwritten-in journal? Buy a new one of each. All this stuff - this junk, this crap, these unread pages and unopened books.

>_ “You can’t take it with you, you know.”

Take care, of all of it.

I can’t think of a metaphor for finding old albums you used to listen to as a teenager. There must be one. Time travel, maybe. No, that’s not a metaphor. That’s what they do. Old teenage albums - dog-eared cardboard CD covers and sticky coffee-ringed plastic cases - they’re metaphors in themselves.

It’s a Fire - these dreams have passed me by.

Ten years ago, unsurprisingly, it was 1997. 1997 and 1996, which was the year before that. I was all black T-shirts and badly-bleached hair. I had a blue bedroom permanently thick with the scent of caked candlewax, belching out Portishead from every speaker. Beth Gibbons lived under my bed, didn’t you know? Playing Portishead now reminds me of paints - oil and acrylic, mostly, but white spirit is there too. The bedroom window view of a West London nowhere. Massive Attack’s Protection makes me smell glue. That’s smell, not sniff. The Boy Nextdoor™ with the pale blue eyes (Mr Ocean Colour Scene) who let me photograph him playing the guitar, and the blonde best friend at the bar with the Bacardi and Richmond’s. Camden Market by day - looking for ties - Hammersmith riverside by night - back to mine for dip and Eddie Izzard, talking and smoking till 6am when my mum would come downstairs and look at us both like the disgraces we were. You were going to be an actress. I just wanted to go to university. I just wanted to share a flat with some friends and be Anna from This Life. I used to down Vodka then like I use full stops now. That was the year that Princess Diana died, as if you didn’t know. We were both there in Kensington Gardens after all, smoking, still drunk from the night before. The year we held juvenile dinner parties with boys with real blond hair and a packet of cigarettes stolen from your mum’s drawer. We only ever pretended to be grown up. We never needed a fake ID.

This post, which probably makes no sense to anyone who hasn’t suddenly realised they’re not 17 anymore, was brought to you by incense from Camden Market, the Girl From Mars and Oh Yeah. As I type these words, Tim Wheeler has just sung “it was the best time of my life”.