September this year marks ten years since I made my first, tentative and over-sharey, foray into blogging. I hope you’ll forgive a little self-indulgence on my part, but I’d like to do something to celebrate a pretty significant milestone. I’ve hit upon the idea of publishing some selected takes from my archives – there’s a little bit of poetic license required here, as some of the proper cringeworthy teenage stuff is (thankfully) lost in the mists and pixels of cyberspace, but what I’ll publish every Friday from here until the end of the year is culled from the LiveJournal years, 2003-2006.
12th March 2004
An unspoken, uncivil war has been declared in Flat 9; two camps armed with doorslams and barbed comments, divided on lines based on who goes out with who at night and who doesn’t do their dishes. My room has become a veritable sanctuary of fairylights, rock music and the whirr of my laptop where the opposing parties retreat to complain and for tactical advice. They fight for a space to sit on my bed with biscuit packets, discarded clothing and Get Me A Murder A Day!
I feel more and more like a mother as I tell them I’m not taking sides and I love them all equally, nor am I going to pass on what the others have said about them. They all have their faults, and I agree with what everybody has to say (a policy that will surely come back to haunt me at a later date but I honestly couldn’t care less). It’s just that on the rare occasions I’m bothered by any of it I’ll tell the person concerned to cut it the fuck out, rather than letting them believe everything is fine for days before going into a massive sulk.
The dynamics here have traditionally been two groups of two and then me, either out having my own life or shut in my room. It hasn’t become unliveable yet but it’s getting there rapidly, just as my own partner in crime disappears home for a month. Although that’s probably for the best as, apart from what’s in my purse, I have no disposeable funds until next Thursday. I have a pre-paid cinema pass, four packets of pasta (anti-Atkins in the extreme from now on, I fear) and – with five major assignments due before my own Easter break – plenty to be getting on with.
My Easter break is, of course, not a real break at all – I have a work placement organised for some of it, and the rest I’ll spend catching up on everything I don’t have time for in termtime. After that there’ll be a month of classes and exams and overtime, since I’m planning to quit my part-time job to save complex negotiations for time off for my cousin’s wedding the last weekend in May. I’d have to quit pretty much as soon as I get back from England anyway, for then begins the complex process of shifting my life back where it started.
I’ve nearly finished with Edinburgh. As she’s away for the rest of March and myself for most of April I told Kaite on Monday night we only have a month left of our reign as Edinburgh’s cocktail-and-lipgloss fuelled fairy-winged princesses. “Fuck YOU,” she yelled into the wind, storming off to a few feet in front of me. “You can only refer to it if I let you,” she told me, but it doesn’t make it any less true.
I never thought I would settle into a routine here, but I have done. And I think that’s what I’m going to miss – not the city itself, although there will be aspects of it that will catch me off-guard. Not my horrible accommodation with the constant noise and moronic neighbours and stairwells crawling with filth, although I love my flatmates to death on their good days. I’ll be glad to see the back of the kamikaze buses, and hopefully the crushing, demoralising poverty.
I’m just not really one for change and taking risks – in theory yes, but in practice I’d prefer two paracetamol and a couple of extra hours in bed. I could name any number of Fairly Scary Things over the past year it took me forever to do.
My latest fear is that Glasgow won’t have me back… I don’t know if I can explain this properly, but when my sister was through here the other week she was talking about her plans to redecorate our bedroom at home and I remember this feeling of utter helplessness. It’s as if the world as I once knew it has moved on completely in my absence, and I’ll never be able to fit back in with the people who have grown accustomed to not having me around.
Perhaps new starts really aren’t the scary thing. Perhaps that’s when you try to go back, and find that it’s become impossible.
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