Agent of Distraction

Felled, like Achilles

The Management would like to apologise for the dodgy spacing in this post. I blame moody technology.

Last weekend with considerable strain to our backs and our friendships Z and I moved houses, and as an alternative to burning all our worldly goods we piled them into and from vans. It actually all went pretty smoothly until the point when too crazed with tiredness to know what I was doing anymore I did an unspecified something horrid and unnatural to my foot and it was a trail of OWWWWs all the way from there. I had long suspected that evolution did not design me with an active lifestyle in mind, and now we know for sure.

                              

       My incapacitated state meant I could not go to work and as much as I enjoyed the opportunity to watch My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss and snuggle with The Cat Of Fluffyness, eventually I got so fed up of looking at all the messy random disorganised unpacked untidiness that I got up and did as much cleaning as a woman hopping around on one leg could reasonably do.

                            

This impressed the Cat of Fluffyness not at all, and he entertained himself by trying to kill a variety of boxes.

                                 

However, I feel wrong complaining at all. Even one little bit. Because it’s a beautiful house. With a beautiful garden. And the fact that it looks like it’s inhabited by crazed nomadic lumberjacks is just a temporary glitch until we superglue all the furniture back together again.

                                                      

Z keeps proving himself to be a gentleman by carrying all the heavy things, and I’m impressed that we’ve managed to move a bajillion boxes and bags of stuff all by ourselves. And as a result of all these heroics we’ve been dropping to bed exhausted, only emerging from our drug like sleep to trudge to work.

                                                                                                         

               Last night after dinner Z collapsed on the sofa and I accepted his invitation to join him. We lay there, all quiet like- his back moulded to the sofa, my face pressed against the side of his neck, His Fluffyness stretched in the cat’s cradle of our limbs. I moved to get up, to do cleaning or something useful, but Z held me back, whispering: Do you realise that this is the most romantic thing we’ve done since we began moving? Don’t move. Just stay.

So I did.

And we stayed like that with the light fading, and slept to the sound of the radio and the rhythm of the cat’s footsteps across our torsos and heads.

As we drufted off to sleep I had the strangest sensation that the room was shifting and tilting upon its axis and that we were floating up from our bodies, buoyed on the breath of flowers.

And so the end

It's been a long time coming, but the woman whom I thought of as a second mother died over the Easter Weekend and was not resurrected. However the fact that she's not the Messiah did not diminish in my mind the memory of her as a person of great beauty and charm and stunning necklaces and that I loved her for these things (among others) since babyhood.  She was a wonderful part of my childhood and my adolescence and I'll always treasure the warmth and accessorising tips she showed me.

In a surreal way she's been dying of lung cancer for so long (four years) that I thought she'd just go on forever but of course nothing ever does.

She believed that people should die in the nearness of their loved ones. She was one of my father's best friends and when he was dying she was the last one to stay with him, and she stayed right until the end. It comforted me knowing that she was there, just as I'm glad that when it was time for her own departure her family was there to see her off.

And so it ends. At least the part which we can see. In my mind the part of her that was her never ceases to exist. It inhabits the air and the light. It smiles at the absurd thing my stepfather did. It plays all night card games with my father in the sky.

what it means to love someone even more than shoes and cake and stuff

Prior to the union of Z and myself I enjoyed a happily sedentary lifestyle. My life was embroidered with many simple and deep pleasures: like langurous baths, and steaming drinks in bed with books, and delightful sessions of trashy television observed from the sofa. In the holidays I knew I could look forward to long periods of lying on beaches or in my own or someone else's bed, munching gummy bears and finding as few as possible reasons to get up.

And then I made the ill-considered decision to attach my life to a man who enjoys physical activity and believes that all that free time bestowed by not working should be filled with lively leisure activities.

Yesterday, it was sunny. And to celebrate this we went out to lunch, and then to appease the incresingly wild look in my beloved partner's eyes we went out walking. Impulsively we ended up in London Zoo, and after the initial shock of their exorbitant entrance fees we whiled away enjoyable hours watching snotty fish, and amorous lions, my namesake an arthritic camel and small yellow-black monkeys who were not caged in at all.

After the zoo's closure, emboldened by ice cream we kept walking through Regent's Park where the trees were blooming and the small children were running and the iPod was playing and we felt happy happy happy. And it was good. And we walked for five hours and that was good too, and dare I say it somewhat heroic on my part since I did it of my own free will. And I only got one blister which was tolerable. We walked all the way to Leicester Square to try and see The New World in Prince Charles Cinema, but it was sold out (at £1 a ticket, I'm not surprised), so the next obvious thing to do was have cake which was good also.

All in all a day filled with wholesomeness and the knowledge that all this fitness was making my mother proud. Clearly, I win at life, if not immigrating houses.

Here's a selection of the day's pictures (the first by Z, the rest by my phone cam):

   

The Sunlit Self

 

Postcoital Lions

The Sun Salutation Of the English

Yesterday I discovered that helping your partner make dinner is almost as satisfying as being on the internet while he makes dinner, and that Z entirely sees my point re: Oprah Winfrey.

I declare that he should be issue with a British passport forthwith!

Hiccups of Mass Insomnia

Tonight's accomplishments:

1. Getting in touch with my transatlantic friend Susan (a feat made significantly more difficult by my loss of nearly every address book).
2. Managing to wake Z from two rooms away with hiccups.

Since then he has taken a position of greatly reduced sympathy as regards complaints about his snoring.

The Oprah Winfrey Barometer of Britishness

Nowadays I am charting the progress of my growing Britishness with its correlation to my growing dislike of Oprah Winfrey.

e.g. 1999 - the unstable and confused and lethargic young Nia with 'Indefinate Leave to Remain' rewards herself for sleeping too late to go to her Cruel-and-Convoluted-Things-We-Did-To-Animals In-the-Name-of-Neuroscience lectures by tuning into the Oprah Winfrey's show and watching it with great enjoyment.

2000 - The student Nia has a British passport but still has not been repressed by the spirit of Britishness. She hates beer! She thinks the food and the weather and the pub crawls are awful! Instead she continues to supplement the void left in her life by the loss of Sunset Beach with Oprah. She turns to this show for inspiration and spiritual guidance and attempts to eradicate the word "difficult" from her vocabulary and supplement it with the word "challenging" upon Iyanla Vanzant's reccomendation.

2001- The working-for-peanuts Nia dreams of the day upon which she herself will be famous and inspirational enough to be on Oprah. Occasionally she evangelises about important life messages gleaned from that show to her friends and they are good enough not to smash her skull with a wrench.

2002 - Nia still continues to tune in to Oprah, but the glamour is fading slightly since she bought Jewel Kilcher's CD on the Oprahtic reccomendation and discovered it was a pile of cat-skinningly awful crap.

Fast forward to present day where say:

It is rare for Nia to be able to sit through an entire episode of Oprah without wanting to stab herself with a pencil in the eye or do damage to the furniture.

And what are my objections you might ask?

• It's so twee. It's airbrushed wholesomeness grates at me and all that I've learned of Rightness from a nation whose soap opera heroes are ugly people living in bad housing.
• It's oversimplification of human pain into "lessons you've learned"; I believe there are lessons in everything and often these are Thou Shalt Not Take Thyself Too Seriously.
• It's too big and bold and brash and sanctimonious!
• Everyone's teeth are straight and dazzling and unnatural.
• The aura of smugness and moral superiority which radiates out from the telly and scratches at my black heart.
• It's full of all that Genuiness! And Wholesomeness! And Sincerity! And Self-Congratulation! And it reminds me of the creepily chipper saccharine children from old movies and I did not like those either.

In translation this is the emergent British in me battling against the glaring Americanisms of Wrongness (too simple, too serious, too sincere, devoid of irony) in its struggle to promote The Importance of Understatement and Not Being Too Earnest.

Don't misunderestimate me. Individually, on the whole, I like Americans a great great deal. I think they are wonderful people and great lovers. It's just that certain American principles of Big! Bigger! Louder! Brasher! Earnester! are direct challenges to all those Britishisms I have grown to treasure (yes, even weatherspeak and pub crawls). [For a deeper and more witty and articulate treatise on the intricacies of Britishness check out the writings of George Mikes or Kate Fox's excellent book Watching The English.]

I don't know what to make of this British Takeover of my soul. Melodrama is no stranger to me. After all I was born to a Balkan-Jewish Mother (a hybrid practically genetically engineered to produce World Domination through guilt trip). I understand the value of minding everyone's business and dropping by for coffee unannounced and tell people things like: "Ah! Why did I not succumb to typhoid as a toddler but lived this long to hear my own child whom I birthed through invasive medical procedures say such things to me???"

Once upon a time I loved all those thoroughly un-British things. The spontanaety, and the warmth and the drama. And now they've seeped out of me. I still dig the black humor and the self-mockery of the Serbs but I've increasingly started to value Minding One's Own Business, Queueing in an Orderly Manner and Not Taking Anything Too Seriously [and other Cardinal Rules of Englishness]. Whither hast my previous personality trickled away to? How is it that I am Actually Getting Resigned to the Weather? Why do I think that steak and kidney pie sounds like a good idea?

I don't know the answer to these questions. Perhaps I have been brainwashed into Britishness by Emmerdale and Eastenders and formative years of my life in a country where people addressed me as "duck", or "love" and apologised when I bumped into them. Or perhaps it is the chemicals in the water, perhaps the same ones that seem to have made everyone around me to either get cancer or get engaged in the last few months.

And as my last anti-litigation and excessive outrage note - please don't get me wrong; none of the above is to say I don't actually watch Oprah*. Instead I watch it every chance I get so I can keep my Righteous British Indignation fit and healthy and well exercised. It could be that I am just an emotional masochist. This would explain the high heeled shoes and many other of my life's hopeless unrequited infatuations.

* I just make sure to keep the sharpened pencils well away from myself.

Foule Young Ron

On the way in to work this morning I sat next to an adorable little two year old girl. So I admired her bow-festooned shoes and we showed each other our dimples.

And then the child (smiling angelically all the while) said: “Fuck”

“Eh?” said I.

“Fuck,” repeated she. “Fuck. Arse. Bollocks. Buggr’it.”

“Shit,” I told her solemnly in parting, ever-attuned to the developmental needs of a growing young vocabulary.

The Secret Life of Relationships

Normally I am the more outwardly impulsive and affectionate half of my relationship. I phone Z more often than he phones me and have been known to ring up briefly and frequently to express the surges of powerful fondness that I am known to feel*

(As in: Hello! It’s sunny/rainy/afternoony/two hours since I last called and this reminds me of the fact that I LOVE YOU! That’s right! I love you! Take it like a man mister!)

I am very vocal and immediate with my affection. (Within I am but a child, I tell you, a child!) I am prolific with hugs and kisses and I have a tendency to bounce around and clap my hands when I get properly excited. I am not affectionate all the time – but when there is love flowing inside me then it just gets everywhere. It leaks from my throat and my pores and erupts from my phone. At its core my love is immediate and spontaneous and utterly excitable, and I repeat it often.

On the other hand Z with his Venus in Capricorn is a more sedate and dignified and silent person. Not for him my fireworks of affection! I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he loves me deeply and powerfully but passionate declarations are not his style.

Having said all that, Z did something uncharacteristically romantic yesterday and I want to record it here for posterity:

Yesterday was one of the rare nights we spent in separate houses. I was exhausted after a long day at college and my intention of staying up to watch Medium predictably fell apart as soon as my bum touched the sofa and it was only the ringing of the phone that roused me.

N: Gnuh.

Z: Awww, I’m sorry I woke you.

N: S’fie

Z: I just wanted to hear your voice before I went to sleep

N: Gnuuuuh (<i>but one invested with  warmth and affection</i>)

Z: Good night sweetheart

So I fell asleep with much happiness which lasted all the way until morning when my alarm informed it was time to get up and earn my daily bread.

Also, it is SUNNY! This is such an innovation that once my eyes adjusted to the light I haven’t been tempted to fall asleep (that’s right, not even ONCE) during the course of my working day.

* (well either that or throw mock insults at each other in a French accent. Whichever seems more entertaining; As far as I'm concerned you haven't lived if you have yet to address your partner as Vielle Mule!)