different names for the same thing

What a great weekend. Even most of the crap bits were sort of great. It started on a beautiful sunny Friday evening as killalla, kauket, Adam and myself went punting from Magdalen Bridge. So terribly Oxford: calm green water, weeping trees, spires hazy in the distance, people studying on the riverbanks. It all had that too-idyllic-to-be-real feeling I had in winter when I started cycling around town, like we were in a period drama. Kat had brought cupcakes. We didn't talk that much. In between fending off banks and other boats with the paddle, I touched the water with it to make intersecting patterns of ripples. Once Jo made a sort of "ahhh" noise which was exactly what I'd just been thinking.

Then to Templars for barbecue and games.

I slept in on Saturday, into the afternoon. That was the plan: it was going to be a very late night. Then I set off to get a top-up of London to keep me going. On my way down on the Oxford Tube, the sun was shining on yellow fields and hawks were hovering. When London came up around me it didn't feel draining, like it sometimes had before. It buzzed, and I was fresh enough to catch the buzz and run with it. The music I chose got faster the closer I got to the centre.

As soon as I got on the tube I saw three people in completely ridiculous outfits the like of which I'd never seen before: brocade tracksuits with short legs, flat caps and beaver hats made of patchwork and gingham. Fancy dress? The new style among Shoreditch Twats, or is it Whitechapel Twats now? Yeah, London.

Across Trafalgar Square – Nelson's Column is covered in scaffolding with scary ads about climate change, shots of landmarks under water – and down the Mall, getting tree pollen in my eyes, and I arrived at the ICA to see the Beck's Futures exhibition the day before it closed.

( Much banging on about modern art )

So after some coveting of the entire bookshop and some texting to find out the plan, I headed down to Borough for the next bit. And what a next bit it was.

Let me know if there's loads of space between paragraphs. LJ doesn't seem to want to put in line breaks, so I've put them in as html. It was like this the last time I posted too. Hmm.

This is way overdue, written on the laptop a while ago but not posted due to internet woes. Maybe you're all sick of people banging on about London by now. What the hey. I want to tell you all about my amazing, sudden, colourful journey, but I'm going to talk about this first.

There I was last Thursday in Luxembourg, watching BBC World News into the night, with channel-surfing breaks (naked chicks playing badminton, news channels full of exploded bus shots and the story of the blasts in three different languages, bizarre garden-centre shopping channels. European TV that night was all sex and death and garden gnomes). The next day, reading LJ and laughing at the tea icons. Being amazed at how the plan came together, buses ferrying the injured. Seeing several people independently posting the lyrics to London Pride. Well, I was proud. And on Sunday evening, heading out to kesstrel’s Drury Lane show (for a whole different kind of pride, the “that’s my friend up there on the stage!” kind) I asked the Underground man at Highgate station if the tube was running and he beamed and said “yes, business as usual”, and I couldn’t help beaming back and saying “Fair play to you,” as if I wasn’t just addressing him but the whole underground system.

And I kept thinking about a gorgeous sunny day last summer when I set out to Brentford to meet lostcarpark at a Robert Rankin convention. It was a few days after the big storms that filled the Thames with sewage, and Brentford smelled a bit like Bangkok, but as the tide rose it got better and we sat and drank cider by the water with the truly ubiquitous mzdt who was doing the sound. I headed back, in a happy bubble of drunk, as the sun was starting to set. I’d just bought Orbital’s Blue Album and by the time my train pulled into Waterloo I was blissed out on music and buzzing with energy as if the cider fizz had migrated into my whole body. I decided to walk from Waterloo to my bus at Tottenham Court Road. The sky was blue-pink-lilac and everything looked larger than life – the South Bank buildings and bridges, the London Eye spinning above me. One Perfect Sunrise was on the discman, Lisa Gerrard singing on the last track of Orbital’s career, and I felt like I was at the centre of everything and wanted the walk to last forever. I found myself actually crying, wiping my eyes with a huge stupid smile, getting very strange looks from passers-by. Most of that summer I felt like living in this city was hammering me down into powder, but right then it was all worth it to be there at that moment. Can you be in love with a city the way you can with a person? Has anyone else felt that way? Some people must have done. The guy who wrote Waterloo Sunset must have done, in the same place at the same hour. Have you?

( This is what I scribbled in my notebook when I finally got on the bus. )

I'm up way too late. From my attic eyrie I can see the trees threshing in the wind, throwing shifting shadows across Colney Hatch Lane. Hardly anything is going by on the road except all-night delivery vans. It's sad that I won't be here much longer, so I'm enjoying it while I can. No school tomorrow, and I like the feeling of being awake while most of the city's asleep.

After ripping what I want off the CDs I'm selling, I've made a playlist, six hours long and counting, of music they used to play in Dublin at Fibbers and Dominion. Music for dancing and moshing and pogoing, squealing with glee and dashing off to the dancefloor on hearing the first bars of a favourite song, waking up on Sunday with a sore neck from too much headbangage. It's got The Smiths and Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine and Covenant and The Cure and the Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and so much other stuff, and I have it on random. This is the sound of me before London, before most of the music I actually listen to now, before I'd written anything much, before I had a proper job, before I ever danced all night, before I had any politics, before a lot of things. God, what's left when you subtract all that? Still in the womb, like Douglas Coupland says.

Between that and the photos I was looking at earlier, I feel completely dislocated. I've remembered the name of the Man called Kate, finally. And I found a picture of the DJ I was infatuated with, and a picture of me on the same night. I can wonder now why I thought he was so out of my league, because I didn't look as crap as I thought. "Wise Up, Sucker" has just come on. That was my song of the time, because he loved PWEI and I was the sucker who needed to wise up.

Back then I always had a feeling that I hadn't really started living yet. At least that's gone away now.

Yeah, time for bed.

It was a funny, ambiguous week. Coursework panic at school. Running around South Ken with no time to take a lunch break. An election where everyone I talked to seemed to feel they'd 'voted wrong'. But after all that, yesterday came like a reward.

A Tube Walk first, from Bank to London Bridge and from Barbican to Farringdon. Even though I think the less obvious, less scenic Tube Walks are often better - places you'd never go to otherwise, and more surprises - this one was great. It rained on and off, between bursts of sunshine. We crossed three bridges. Crossing bridges in London makes me feel I'm at the heart of things.

Sitting outside The George pub at London Bridge, with drizzle coming on, we had the 'what would you do if civilisation crashed?' conversation again. Every time I go out lately I seem to end up talking about the Apocalypse. katstevens said she'd be the DJ in our post-apocalyptic commune, if mzdt could build a bicycle-driven DJ booth. So long as you didn't have to pedal at the exact RPM of the records it might just work.

myonlyhome said I was the first person to get her username, and we enthused about the Magnetic Fields, and I told her about the chocolate-hurling incident at the Festival Hall gig. Then, when she saw the Lost Things Saved In Boxes badge miss_newham made me, she told me her grandmother had a box in her house labelled "Bits of String Too Short To Save".

haggisthesecond was encouraging as usual, and told me about the Worst Novel Ever, and sadly I can't tell you about it, but trust me - it was hilarious.

We walked through some of the prettiest parts of London. There was a wedding going on at St Paul's full of people in spectacular hats. I had a fish-fight with tjej and miss_newham and lost. We ended up in a sunlit, cosy pub in Farringdon where I found cloudy, appley cider, talked to sherod and took a straw poll: should I go on a nightclub expedition with almost total strangers? The general opinion seemed to be yes.

When the tube walk dispersed I wandered around the South Bank for a while, waiting for my phone to ring. Went into Tate Modern to stare at Rothkos with my eyes blurred, and passed a party down on the riverbank at Festival Pier, hundreds of people dancing on the edge of the water.

Then, starting in Bermondsey and ending up in Brixton, the nightclub expedition with almost total strangers. Going on expeditions with almost total strangers is great. Not least because, if it goes well, they stop being strangers. It's really quite amazing that I hadn't met julietk before, because she knows pretty much everybody I know. But now I have, and she's got blue!hair! and three beautiful rats (who are sane and gentle and don't bite!) and knows about Stuff from counselling to quantum physics, and is generally Very Cool.

Today has been a day of sleep and films and work (maths tutoring! Thank goodness for penguin mints) and fluffy stripy bedsocks. I've made a playlist for sleepy Sundays, soft music to curl up and dream to.

It's working. Goodnight!

[Poll #490194]

England really made an effort as I was coming back from Gatwick yesterday morning. It hit me with the works: darling buds and clouds of blossom on the trees, baby lambs who were definitely gambolling, morning mist lifting softly from the fields, half-timbered houses covered in climbing rose, shafts of sunlight beaming from the clouds. "Look at me! Look at me!" it was saying. "What a green and pleasant land I am!"

But despite all that, and despite deciding halfway across the Atlantic to cram my ears with all the music I could think of that would remind me where my loyalties lay - the Streets, the Clash, the Pistols, Saint Etienne, "Irish Blood, English Heart" - I'm sorry to be home. I'm back in the flat, which seems poky and grubby and cheerless, and my suitcase is sitting behind me, reproaching me for no longer living out of it.

I've had three weeks of adventure, exploration, converting strangers into friends, and freedom from all the burdens of ordinary life. London and work and bills and daily grind were literally on the far side of the world, not my problem. This is part of what holidays are for. I'd forgotten.

That could apply to any holiday, but also... I went to America full of preconceptions. Most of them got proved wrong. But the one thing I wasn't expecting was getting completely smitten with the place. I have a new crush on America. I left my heart in San Francisco, I could actually feel the drag in my chest as we sped away from it on the BART, and then went on to leave other vital organs in Portland and Seattle. I loved small things (peanut butter milkshakes; beatnik bookshops with sections labelled "Anarchy", "Class War" and "Muckraking"; endless coffee; smoking cloves on a balcony in Seattle looking at the sunset over the Olympic mountains) and big things (the way they've got proper, vast, breathtaking wilderness; the way everyone we met seemed so politicised, principled and angry with the government and generally not apathetic). Of course there was bad stuff too, like beggars with one leg and the hollowness of Hollywood, but I was expecting the bad stuff. I wasn't expecting the love, so it knocked me over.

People, please help remind me why I love London. I do. It's always mixed with hate, but every time I think I've had enough of this city it shows me something amazing or tantalises me with a story, and I feel the rush of being at the centre of things and forgive it for another while. That feeling will come back given a little time, I know.

I feel completely stateless right now. I don't want to move back to Ireland any time soon, and it isn't quite the Ireland I left anyway. I feel dislocated from London, and I've always known doing the London Thing wasn't forever, and I can't think of anywhere else in the UK I'd really like to live. And everyone knows brand-new shiny crushes are not to be trusted. Where on earth do I belong?

Last night I went to kesstrel's for Heathers and enthusiasm soup, and when I left to walk up the hill everything was silent and frozen, with an almost-full moon shining, and some weird compulsion made me draw stars and faces and things with my finger on car windscreens, the tops of wheely bins, and any other flat surface I could see that had snow on it.

That morning on my way to the bus I'd passed another windscreen with "ZAPPA!" written across it in the snow.

*

I'd been worrying that he'd been locked up in a detention centre for illegal aliens and not made it to America at all, but verlaine just phoned from Miami. Apparently triple-breasted women swim around town totally naked, but he can't get on LJ because his local library has declared it to be "tasteless".

*

It was a day of small embarrassments.

I teach this boy GCSE English. This is the demanding one I've ranted to some of you about, who rings me up at all hours of the night to ask me to set him essays. Last week he asked if I'd give him an extra half-hour each week. Fine, I said. That would be an extra x quid. "No, free," he said, "as a favour. All my other tutors agreed happily to do it." Hmm, said I, I dunno. This week he asked again. I said I was quite skint and couldn't just go around handing out free half-hours that I could be spending earning money. Or going home for a rest. (I might have done it if I liked the kid, but something about him always puts me on edge.)

He got his dad in to back him up. Dad makes me even edgier than Kid. "All the others are very pleased to do it," he said, "and they live further away than you." I still said no. "Well, then," said Dad sulkily, sounding younger than his son, "one hour, not a single minute more, if you want to be like that." He flounced out. I was expecting him to kick something on his way.

I went to the tube, alternately feeling triumphant and brooding that maybe I was a horrible person (am I? Answers on a postcard, please), and in mid-brood completely failed to recognise eviltwinemma. Her hair is short and red and I've hardly seen her since 2001 when my hair was blue, but still. Duh.

Then I timed my return home perfectly so I could run into Mad Claire Downstairs in the hall as she was going out. She smiled a stretched smile that clearly pained her. "I haven't seen you in a while," she tinkled laboriously. "No indeed," said I, and went on up the stairs.

*

Can I have a new womb, please? Do they sell them on eBay?

*

Oh, the fun of dropping letters for postwodehouse.com. The thrill of standing behind things and watching people examining them, or ignoring them. Today I dropped three in the Science Museum and two in the Natural History Museum. Last I saw them, one was being treated as suspicious by a security guard, who seemed to be scanning it with some sort of raygun thing. Another was snatched up almost as soon as I dropped it, which was cool, because I'd put it in front of an ecology display which announced that we were connected to all other living things. Another, sadly, was being repeatedly trodden on.

I think I'm going to update the site every week from now on. I'll try to incorporate some sort of experiment blog. A lot of you seemed quite interested to see how it progressed, so I was thinking of setting up a mailing list to notify people when an update's been done. If you'd like to be on it, put your email in the box. I won't spam your inbox; in fact I won't mail you more than once a week, promise.

[Poll #443184]

And miss_newham, of course you can have another go.

In other news, I've pretty much given up on Nano. I've been working late most evenings of the week, but it's not just that. I seem to have lost the knack of fast writing. I'm planning every bit before I write it, especially with the Choose Your Own Adventure story (working title Traffic Lights). And planning doesn't count towards your word count, but I don't want to dive in and write confused, badly-thought-out stuff. I remember the sheer tooth-pulling agony of turning The End of Words from a Nano-novel into a proper final draft this summer, and I don't want to knowingly write stuff I can't use.

But I've got 27k of words I didn't have before. If I could do 30k a month, I'd be finished a draft of another book by February. Maybe I'll try to do that instead?

*

A man on the tube yesterday, wild-haired and unshaven and holding a can of strong cider, was addressing the whole carriage in a thick Northern Ireland accent, barely moving his lips so that I was looking around for a long time wondering where this Ian Paisley blare was coming from. He was saying 'No' a lot, which added to the Paisley impression, and 'I'm not running away. I'm facing up.' The girl opposite him fiddled with her water bottle and looked around and shielded herself with her pink handbag. Two others moved away. He said something indistinct ending in 'words', but it wasn't till he stood up to get off that I worked it out. He was saying 'You think I'm talking to you because I want something. I don't want anything from you, just words. Words, that's all."