Holiday snaps: Carcassonne 2009

To take beautiful photos of your partner on holiday, ideally, you need two things. First, the sun needs to be shining and secondly, they need to smile. By the time the sun came out in Carcassonne, the smiles had left for good but because the sun had been so thin on the ground I took the photo anyway.

It was on our last full day in the city, by which time we were just wondering when we could go home. It had started out so promising; my mother, my stepfather, Kelly and I staying in the hotel at the airport the night before our flight, excited and happy about our trip away together. Even now I don’t completely understand how it all went so badly wrong in four short days.

The rain didn’t help. It started the day we arrived and it pretty much didn’t stop. At first it was funny, as we sheltered in cafes and waited for it to blow over, but it never did. It was the shape of things to come; a lot of what came out of that trip didn’t blow over. Of course, it wasn’t so bad for my mother and stepfather because they had come prepared - head to toe in waterproofs, they were ready for everything. With their bulky backpacks they were like nylon and neoprene snails, and I can still hear the smug, reproachful whiff, whiff, whiff of their trousers even now.

We walked along the battlements of the old city, lashed with rain, dodging through puddles, waiting for the moments when it would subside enough for our cameras safely to come out, and we pretended we were having fun in spite of it. I don’t know if they were convinced; I know we weren’t. My umbrella was nearly turned inside out, along with everything else.

On something like the second day, my stepfather had had enough and decided he wanted to take a flight home. We on the other hand, desperate to rescue the situation, decided we could take a train to Toulouse. I had no idea what Toulouse was like but at least we would be soaked somewhere new and besides, it might have shops. My stepfather decided he would sooner stay behind, so Kelly and I walked to the station, checked the trains and tried to decipher the timetables - only to discover that it would cost a small fortune to get there on a tariff we didn’t understand.

So we were thwarted and I learned another new thing; it’s hard to spend a day with people when you’ve recently declared that you’d rather be in a different city to them, especially when they’ve recently declared that they’d rather be in a different country.

There’s not a lot to do in Carcassonne when it rains. With hindsight, we should have just retired to the hotel room with a novel and written it off, but with hindsight we shouldn’t have gone at all. Instead, we carried on spending time together, like picking at a scab. We sometimes went our separate ways in the daytime but we always made sure we met up for dinner, an occasion designed to showcase our glaring incompatibilities. Them: into simple, hearty food, moderate eaters, teetotallers. The standard fare of the Languedoc - meat and lentils and beans - was right up their street. Us: fond of fine dining, big portions, a bottle of red with every meal. “Didn’t you do well finishing all of that?” my mother would say at the end of courses. You fat sods, the subtitles would flash at the bottom of the screen.

On our last night Kelly and I deliberately chose the finest restaurant in town. We enjoyed a five course seasonal menu in a tasteful, sparsely populated dining room with the same awful record by Seal on repeat throughout. Each course was delicate, pretty and miniature. If I remember rightly my mother and stepfather passed on the cheese course - it was all just too much - so we ate theirs with no shame at all. Things had got so bad that a part of our pleasure was their discomfort: food as revenge.

At first I thought the deep red room was formal and slightly sterile, but then came the horrible moment when I realised it was us.

Not that things hadn’t started to get niggly long before then. My stepfather, a keen photographer, took a fraction of the pictures we did but every one was stunning. Carefully set up, beautifully framed, tripod in place, he paid painstaking attention to everything. On the walk up to the south gate of the city, up the long hill towards the battlements, he would stop to get his equipment out and Kelly would dash in front, snap away on her point and shoot and say “It’s all right, we can move on now, I’ve taken the perfect photo of that.” It was childish and mean; funny, too, but a week before the prospect of being that spiteful would have been unthinkable.

At the very end - of the holiday and of something else - we touched down in Stansted Airport, early in the morning, and went to Pret for breakfast, just as we had at the start of the holiday, because it seemed like the right thing to do. But everything was spent. We just sat there waiting for it to be over so we could be sealed in the bubble of our own cars and start talking about what an awful time we’d had.

So the sun didn’t come out very often, and Kelly smiled less often still, but in any case there was a moment when the rain stopped and the clouds cleared and you got a momentary vision of what should have been: what the city should have looked like in summer, the ancient stone walls glowing and shining rather than damp and grim. You could imagine the hordes of satisfied tourists sitting in the square and drinking rosé, and an accordion player filling the air with notes. You could see why people came here, and why we came here. So I took the photo while I could, because it was the best it was going to get. But it was far, far too late to imagine how that holiday should have been.

Holiday snaps: Prague 2008

We end up in the pool hall. We always end up in the pool hall when we come to Prague, those are the rules. Dave, who is a creature of habit, has been coming to Prague for years, and coming to the pool hall for years, and so when you visit Prague with Dave you go to the pool hall. It’s just how it works.

It’s not as if the pool hall is the only attraction by any means; there is an awful lot to like about Prague. The old town is still the stuff of films and postcards despite all the best efforts of marauding British revellers to mar its beauty. Narrow twisting lanes lined with jewellers, bars and intriguing looking restaurants are everywhere, the sort of maze that could completely take the stigma out of the concept of getting lost. The Charles Bridge, despite all the caricaturists and hawkers selling tat, is still a gorgeous, if crazy, thoroughfare. And of course the castle and all the steep, stunning streets which run down through Mala Strana towards the river have the sort of appeal that even cliché cannot detract from. The streets are thronged with tourists all taking the same photograph, but who could honestly blame them?

Walking across the bridge earlier that day, Dave and I had got stuck behind a phalanx of elderly people in some form of uniform, bright blue clothes like overalls with orange sashes round their necks. All of them were wheeling trolleys of some kind, but we thought nothing of it. Anyway, it meant I got a chance to pay attention to the jazz orchestra camped out on the bridge, on the side nearest to the old town. They played tirelessly, a mixture of standards and songs which, while unfamiliar, had tunes so right that I had to stop to realise that they were new to me. Dave ended up having to drag me away, because I could have watched and listened for hours. The trumpet player was in a wheelchair but had a pair of lungs that put mine to shame, even years after I stopped inflicting all those cigarettes on them.

We strolled up Nerudova, itself one of the prettiest streets, before taking a detour to look at the outside of the Church Of Our Lady Victorious. It’s a stone’s throw from the Ed Hardy shop, which is the sort of contradiction Prague excels at.

“What’s in there?” I said.

“A statue of the Infant Jesus Of Prague. It’s downright disturbing.”

“Shall we go in?”

“No, it’s not worth the money. Besides, you can see quite enough of the Infant Jesus in the shops round here.” said Dave. He quite enjoys playing the tour guide, and I am happy to indulge him. So instead we crossed the road and looked through the windows of a gift shop, filled with porcelain statues of the holy toddler in every gaudy colour combination known to man.

“Jesus.” I said. Dave smirked, and I could tell he was fighting the urge to counter with one of a dozen of obvious comebacks. I took some photos of the figurines, experimenting with my new lens because this holiday was its first proper outing. I quite enjoy playing the photographer and Dave is happy to indulge me.

“Shall we head for the pool hall?”

I smiled. You can’t fight progress, which in Dave’s case means progressing in the direction of the pool hall.

Heading back to the bridge, we noticed quite a congregation in a little square to our right, so we made a detour to investigate. Our blue-uniformed friends from earlier on were there, in a big group with many others, packing away instruments into cases and folding up sheet music. A crowd, which had assembled to watch them, was starting to dissipate, like the smoke at the end of a firework display. But there was time for one last hurrah - they all lined up for their official photographer to take a picture of them all, a motley crew of blue smocks, waistcoasts and naval uniforms. One was holding up a placard which explained everything: SHANTYFEST PRAGUE, it said. I was simultaneously thrilled that such a thing could even exist, and devastated that I had missed the show. The man put down his placard just as I trained my lens on them, and sheepishly he picked it back up and held it aloft just for me, the unofficial photographer.

“Shantyfest sounds like the best thing ever. We should see if they have a website and go next year.” I said as we escaped over the Charles Bridge in search of the real world we had temporarily become disconnected from.

“Why was one of them carrying a mop?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

The pool hall is just off Wenceslas Square, and is a well-kept secret. It’s at the bottom of a dead end street with nothing else of note on it and it’s hard to imagine anyone finding it by accident. You open the door, head down the steps and take your slip from the unsmiling man behind the desk before going to your table. If you lose the slip, terrible things happen to you when you try to pay at the end. I have no idea what they are, but the threat of them ensures that I will never find out. If George Orwell had faced the man behind the counter at the pool hall, he would have scrapped Room 101 entirely.

Inside, the pool hall is just incredible. It looks like it used to be an old ballroom; massive high ceilings which are crumbling and threadbare, with ornate chandeliers hanging from them. The crowd, when there is one, seems to be mainly locals, often teenagers. There is an incongruous bowling alley down one side, which I’ve never seen anyone use, and apart from that it’s just rectangle after rectangle of green baize. We walk over to our appointed table, one of the only ones lit from above, and start to set up. Two huge foaming pints of pilsner are collected from the bar and plonked on the nearest side table and I know we’re going to be here for a while. Dave’s friend Gannon, who teaches English here and is ostensibly the reason for our visit, will be with us any minute and then we will spend a comfortable few hours doing what men do; lots of competing, a bit of posturing, a fair amount of drinking and general complaining about our poor luck or the unmerited success of others. Our chattering mixes in with the clacking of fluke shots, in-offs and half-chances.

I am terrible at pool but I play because it’s fun, and because I am in Prague with Dave and those are the rules. And besides, the feeling of fitting in far outweighs the feeling of being useless. In any case, if Dave wasn’t going to win at pool he wouldn’t play, because that’s the sort of person he is. I know that because I am that kind of person too, at least most of the time. I start out well, but as the afternoon wears on Dave finds his rhythm and I lose mine, and Dave flourishes after a few pints and I don’t, but best of all is that by about half-four I find I really don’t care whether I win or not. Instead I make the most of my rare flashes of competence, and laugh at Dave when Gannon trounces him, and head to the bar and bring back fresh full glasses. It’s a summer afternoon, and I know that Prague has all sorts of things to offer, but I wouldn’t be anywhere else.

I leave them bickering about who is having the worse run of form, like old women complaining about their ailments, take my Czech crowns and head to the end of the room, to the jukebox. It seems to have pretty much every song ever released, which means it takes the best part of a century to spend the money that I’ve put in it. I toy with all sorts of novelty hits, or songs I know that Dave and Gannon would like, and then my eye chances upon something I really want to hear. I queue it up first, rush through the rest, and walk away. And then comes that moment I won’t forget; as if by magic, with the afternoon sun shining through every window on the far side of the hall filtered out by the tattered gauzy curtains, God Only Knows by the Beach Boys rolls out across the room, rich and warm and glorious as I return, perfectly backlit, to my friends at the table.

And I’m happy. I’m as happy as I could possibly imagine.

Show and tell

I am demob happy on my final day at work. Nobody is in, my boss is working from home and the list of things I have to do, while not getting any shorter, is starting to look a lot less important. Besides, it’s a red letter day because I am meeting my dad for lunch, something which never happens. He is between spells working out in the States and has realised - not a moment too soon - that he doesn’t live all that far from my office.

I get the call from him, rush down the stairs, scuttle out of reception and jump into his car. I feel a bit like I’m bunking off, though I successfully fight the urge to ask him to take me to the zoo. Lunch in a proper restaurant on a school day seems strangely decadent and we sit outside, even though it’s not strictly warm enough to do so, because we can. He orders a glass of red and I have a glass of rose, to get in practice for the holiday my brain is half on already.

“I brought my new toy to show you!” I tell him. This is true, I packed it in my bag specially, because he’s one of the few people I know who would appreciate it.

“Excellent, I thought I told you to. Let’s have a look at it.”

He coos over my new camera, raises it to his eye and enthuses. He’s always been a camera fan; I get that from him I think.

“You can see my latest toy too.” he says, reaching into his pocket and retrieving a fountain pen. My dad must have over fifty of these by now - fat ones, thin ones, ones with italic nibs, ones with oblique nibs, ones you fill with a pump, ones you fill by squeezing, solar powered ones, you name it. He’s never been one for doing anything by halves. I take the lid off, inspect the nib, try to look knowledgeable.

“How do you fill it up?”

My dad is beside himself with excitement at this stage.

“Twist the bottom of it!”

I do, and the nib slowly rises up out of the body of the pen, like an organ coming through the floor in an old-time music hall. The waiter, who introduced himself by name (“Hi, I’m Mark and I’m going to be your waiter today”) when we sat down and seemed a bit peeved that we were talking too much to show interest in the specials on his blackboard, must wonder what to make of us - two grown men getting excited about our new gizmos.

We talk about all sorts of things. My dad is impossible on the phone, he only rings you if he has information to convey and once it’s done you can’t keep him on the line however many questions you ask or tricks you try. But in person he couldn’t be more different; he’ll hold forth about anything. So we discuss his work, my work, my holiday, family and general gossip. This contract is the last one before he retires, and I can’t imagine what will happen then. My dad has worked hard all my life, somehow the image of him pottering isn’t one I can conjure up.

“What do you think you’ll do?”

“I don’t know. It was much easier a few years back when I had more stuff going on.”

“What, like the poetry?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

It’s a shame my dad stopped writing his magnificent poems. I don’t know whether he dried up, or gave up, or just got fed up. And the irony isn’t lost on me, that he owns all these beautiful pens but the words that come out of them are probably prosaic stuff - shopping lists, or notes of work meetings, signatures on cheques and letters. I can’t help but feel that they deserve better. It’s odd that he moved away from the act of creation and into the mechanics of the equipment. I suppose he’s never really stopped being an engineer.

“Do you think you’ll ever pick it up again?”

“I don’t know, I might do. I do try from time to time, but it’s not easy.”

“I know what you mean. I’ve been finding it difficult too.”

Instead my dad tells me that he can see himself fixing fountain pens when he retires, repairing and restoring them. I get an image of him squinting at a desk, looking at nibs and fillers by the light of an anglepoise lamp, and suddenly I can imagine my dad pottering after all. It is a very comforting thought.

“I suppose it’s the one time that the age gap between you and Tricia might be a problem, in that she’ll still be working.”

My dad makes a wry face, as if to say don’t be so stupid, kid.

“I don’t know, somebody’s got to keep making some money while I’m at home.”

I don’t think he means it.

The time passes much too fast, but there’s still enough of it for dessert. We make a pact that each of us will have dessert provided the other one does, and I have a sneaking feeling he’s using my gluttony as an excuse to indulge. I don’t mind, I’m happy to help him out. At the end he drives me back to the office, even though I don’t really want him to.

“I need to be back for this two o’clock call. If I’m not running it, it will just descend into anarchy.”

I never feel less like a convincing grown-up than when I’m talking to my dad about work. I wonder if he can tell.

There’s no big moral to this story, no magical denouement. We say goodbye in the car and I clamber across and give him a big hug. It may be months before I see him again. But later that afternoon I find myself thinking about how much things change. My dad was fearsome when I was a kid, then he was distant when I was a teenager, and now I’m an adult he’s something else, something I might struggle to describe. But when we sat in the sun, having lunch for the first time in as long as I can remember, taking a childish delight in one another’s gadgets, it was almost like we were eight year old friends.

The twenty-four hour robot

I don’t do fancy dress, not on any account. The closest I ever came to embracing the idea was a fancy dress party at a stag and hen weekend a couple of years ago. Kelly went as a pirate – she had the headscarf, the boots, the frilly shirt and a plastic flintlock she bought from the pound shop. When you pulled the trigger, it emitted a synthetic “bang” (I know that, because I pulled the trigger a lot). She looked magnificent; I on the other hand wore a check shirt with a sheriff’s badge – also from the pound shop – pinned to the breast pocket. Nish, the bride-to-be, tapped Kelly on the shoulder at one stage. “Thanks for persuading him to make some effort.” she said (some effort, not so much effort), because she knew how much of a gesture it was. A one pound badge and my only check shirt, those were all the concessions I was willing to make. I don’t do fancy dress, because there is nothing fancy about me.

All of that makes my twenty-four spell as a crap robot particularly ironic.

Kelly and I arrive at the hospital and the nurse explains to me what they are going to do this morning. There’s a bit of me that always wishes they would skip this bit and just get on with it, but that never happens. She tells me she is going to pass what she describes as a “small tube” into my nostril and down the back of my throat. It will descend to different depths and they will measure the pressure on my oesophagus to work out whether the acid that is the bane of my life is rising up because the valve isn’t tight enough. A monitor – blocky green writing on a black screen – will tell them everything they need to know about my innards.

I wish I had a screen which could tell me what was going on inside me, because I never really understand that.

“Do you feel okay about it?” the nurse says.

She is friendly and efficient; I imagine she used to be quite a looker. That said, looking at her I’m also struck by how cheap and unerotic nurses’ uniforms always look. Another to add to the long and regrettable list of things that are better in theory than they are in practice, like family holidays, fast food after ten o’clock at night, and getting off with your friends. I hope that having a tube down your throat doesn’t fall into that category too, because it sounds horrendous even in theory.

“I can’t honestly say it’s going to be a highlight of my day.”

Kelly, perched on the chair at the end of the bed, gives me a small supportive smile. The nurse’s assistant – surly, swarthy and hairy – does not talk or react. The radio is on in the corner, blaring out vacuous chat and forgettable tunes; the nurse put it on, telling me that it might take my mind off things.

I wish I had a mind like that.

She reaches over to a nearby trolley and retrieves the ‘small tube’. I nearly pass out; it looks like a garden hose from where I’m sitting. The assistant stands to my left and holds a cup of water up to my face until my lips manage to catch the straw poking out at an awkward angle. I am instructed to take a few sips and then, once I am suitably lubricated, the nurse starts to feed the tube down, threading my throat like the eye of a needle. The next ten minutes are an unpleasant blur. The assistant keeps telling me to take a sip and then I have the awful creeping feeling of the tube descending a mere matter of millimetres. The nurse calls out a number: “forty”, “forty-one” referring, I assume, to depth measurements. Either that or they are all playing a game of bingo and I’m the only one not in on the joke. Then they take a reading, confer, tell me to take another sip and the process repeats itself.

My right eye, which started watering when I first saw the tube, can no longer open and my left eye keeps looking at Kelly. She gives me a series of reassuring half-smiles. At one point, the especially difficult stage when my gag reflex is being most tested, her hand reaches out and grasps the tip of the boot on my left foot, squeezing, desperately trying to feel my toes. She can’t make contact with any part of me, but I am touched none the less. Take it from me though, I am doing a magnificent job; I am a miserable coward in anticipation, but like anybody else I am a brave soldier there in the moment.

They reach the halfway stage, just before the tube begins its ascent. At this point I am urged to take bigger mouthfuls and swallow hard so they can take different measurements. Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now comes on the radio.

“I just want you to know that this has ruined this song for me forever.” I tell the nurse, between sips and readings. Nobody cracks a smile except Kelly, visible through the teary blur of my left eye. Finally, it is complete and everyone is telling me how well I’ve done, which is something I already know.

That’s only half of what I’ve turned up for today, because the second half involves them passing a narrower tube down my throat and leaving it there for twenty four hours to measure just how bad the acid gets. This tube isn’t quite so intimidating, although I’m still not looking forward to having it inside me for a whole day. I opt for the same nostril, and the process begins again but this time it takes nowhere near as long and involves nowhere near so many sips of water. Once it is in place, the nurse runs the wire coming out of my nose along my cheek and tucks it behind my ear before passing it down my chest, under my t-shirt. The whole thing is kept in place by huge slashes of white tape on my face and neck. The other end of the wire is attached to a plastic box which I wear on a belt around my waist. It looks as if it ought to bleep constantly, and I’m disappointed to discover that it doesn’t. The overall effect on my appearance is more than a little ghoulish.

The nurse explains to me that there are three buttons I need to know about on the device. I am to press the first one every time I start eating and every time I stop eating, and I have to record the start and end times, along with everything I eat, in the photocopied handout she gives me marked “Food diary”. The second one, the big button in the middle with the jagged lightning bolt symbol, is to be pressed whenever I experience any symptoms, and again these have to be recorded on the handout. Finally, a crude depiction of a horizontal figure is underneath the third button, which I have to press when I go to sleep and when I wake up. Simple, really. The other button has an exclamation mark next to it and is pressed when you require attention, but since I will be walking round with a wire coming out of my nose and taped to the side of my face, I have a feeling I won’t be needing that one much.

The nurse also gives me some guidelines. To make sure we get representative results, I am not to eat or drink anything which will produce too much acid. I am advised to avoid alcohol, although I can have a solitary drink with dinner if I really want (the tone of voice this permission is delivered in is strangely reminiscent of my mother). Fruit juice and squash are also discouraged, and if I do insist on drinking something like this I should do so quickly so that it doesn’t distort the results over a long period of time. But apart from that, I should carry on doing whatever I would normally do if I didn‘t have a wire coming out of my face and attached to a non-bleeping box tied to my waist on a cheap nylon belt. She does however advise me against driving. If she knew me at all, she’d realise that this particular piece of advice is unnecessary, but then if she knew me that well she would probably also give me a list of proscribed reading material.

In the spirit of trying to live as normally as possible, Kelly and I decide to go into town for lunch.

“I’m making a unilateral decision that any woman looking at me today is just using this wire as an excuse to check me out.” I say to Kelly as we head for the centre.

She grins indulgently, I think she’s just relieved that I’m being so constructive for a change.

My food diary records that I have a cheese sandwich while sitting outside Picnic, my favourite café. The process of eating the sandwich takes approximately eight minutes. What my food diary doesn’t record is that eating food when you have a tiny wire dangling down your throat is not an enjoyable experience. However much you chew, every mouthful you swallow jerks the wire, as if it has snagged an energetic fish. First you bite, then it bites. It’s not a sensation I would ever want to get used to, I tell myself at the start of lunch.

By the end of lunch I find myself wishing I could get used to it.

Towards the end of my lunch, my stepfather wanders past us with a work colleague. We haven’t spoken in well over a year and it would be bad enough to see him even if I didn’t look so freakish. So Kelly looks down and I look off to my right, hiding the side of my face with the wires, a ridiculous tableau of awkwardness until we can see his slim frame and the back of his bony, close-cropped head in the distance. I finish my coffee and write Coffee, 13:45 in my food diary. I am gratified to hear that it does make a beeping noise when you press the button on the device.

The rest of the afternoon I try to get on with my work as if everything was normal, which of course it isn’t. Keeping a food diary is an intriguing experience, something I’ve never tried before which tells me things about myself which I'd probably rather not know. For instance, on average I take twenty-five minutes to finish a hot drink, the majority of which time is spent waiting for it to cool down between the first and the second sips. Seeing that figure there in black and white on a page, it seems silly even to me. What will the nurses think?

It also acts as a powerful moderating force. When I write Cornetto, 15:45 to 15:51 it seems bad enough, but only the fact that I am keeping a diary and somebody will read it further down the line stops me running to the freezer and demolishing another one. I think of all the things I’m not writing in the food diary: I fought the urge to have a second Cornetto, or I just put “risotto” in the diary, but actually it had dressed crab and a dollop of mascarpone and it was bloody gorgeous. And then all the stuff I could write in there that has nothing to do with food at all: I’m scared this won’t work or I really don’t want to have an operation.

Obviously I play up my discomfort, because if you can’t feel sorry for yourself when you have a tube down your throat I don’t know when you can. At one point, I catch Kelly looking at me with what I like to think is fondness.

“What is it? Am I cute?”

“Well, sort of. You’re… kind of pathetic.”

My face falls. If it fell any further it might have tugged the wire out.

“No! In a good way!”

I decide not to make her explain, as she's clearly suffered enough, so instead I plan an assault on my stash of chocolate. It takes place, according to my food diary, at approximately 21:40 and lasts for ten minutes. What I don’t write in the diary is what I had, or that it was probably more chocolate than a person should consume that close to bedtime. I decide they don't need to know that.

Here’s another thing I don’t write in the diary: I’m dreading trying to get off to sleep. Actually, it’s not so bad once I unclip the belt and rest the box on the bedside table next to me, though it feels strange to lie on my back and not be able to turn round and curl myself around the figure next to me. The real challenge is getting undressed in the first place, juggling boxes and belts and wires and clothes. I probably make it much more difficult than it should be, but part of the slow awkwardness is hating that feeling of infirmity. The diary I didn’t write that day is far longer, and a far sadder read, than the diary I did. All the nurse will know from the diary I kept is that I take a long time to drink hot drinks and I eat lots of soft food. She might also get at least an inkling of how middle class I am; that word, risotto, screams bourgeois to me.

I wake up once in the night to press the symptom button. I scribble in the food diary by my bedside, squinting without glasses, hoping the light doesn’t wake Kelly up.

The next day I have breakfast in a last ditch attempt to fool the nurses into thinking I’m a better person than I really am. They told me to head back to the hospital and they would remove the device for me to save me yanking it out myself, but oddly by this point I’m quite comfortable with it and happily institutionalised into filling out the time I finished my Crunchy Nut Cornflakes or tackled a cup of tea. Bang on the twenty-four hour mark there is another bleep and the display says Recording complete, minutes before an unpleasant bout of acid. I have been off my medication for a week so they can observe me under “normal” circumstances, and of course my insides have been lying in wait for the recording to finish so they can go back to making my life uncomfortable. It’s much the same as the incredible effect a doctor’s waiting room has; sit in one for twenty minutes before your appointment, and your symptoms go away. If you’re there over half an hour, you can forget why you turned up in the first place.

I stroll to the hospital feeling grubby; you aren’t allowed to get the device wet, so I haven’t been able to shower. I take great pride in taking the busiest roads, hoping to scare some small children, but my luck isn’t in. With my outsized headphones on too, I look like a bad parody of a Cyberman.

My twenty-four hour spell with the wire inside me ends not with a bang or a whimper. The nurse sits me down, tells me to take a deep breath and… nothing. I didn’t even feel her pull, didn’t feel anything but the wire is in her hand and the tape has been pulled away from my face with only a slight feeling of tackiness to remind me it was there at all. She connects the box up to the black and green screen and we sit there looking at charts of my insides. There are lots of jagged lines, a lot of which correspond with moments when I pressed the button with the lightning bolt on it. I feel like it ought to have a profundity that is somehow missing, but I'm not the only one. She doesn’t know what it all means either, or what will happen next, but tells me the consultant will be in touch.

Leaving the hospital, I perversely feel like I will miss the attention. One thing I’ve learned over the last twenty-four hours is that it’s interesting watching people try to avoid staring at you when you are so worthy of being stared at. They tend to adopt one of two approaches; either they take a very quick but intense peek and then act as if they cannot see you or, if they’re braver, they properly stare but adopt a facial expression which suggests they mean nothing by it. But what it really makes me think about is how I must have looked in the past few weeks every time I’ve walked past the young girl in town with the bizarre swelling that seems to distort the whole of her jawline, as if she’s being seen through a funfair mirror. I assume it’s something like cancer, and I never know whether to avert my gaze or act naturally. When you see someone like that, it’s hard to decide what “naturally” even means. Or the old woman who’s always there when I stroll down Smelly Alley, sitting outside the internet café, wheezing away on a cigarette. The huge growth on her eyelid is so big she can barely open that eye at all.

I want to stop them both, next time, and say I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to stare. I know how it feels, but simultaneously I know that’s not really true, and I know I never will. So instead I make my way home unencumbered, enjoying the sunshine, dying for a shower, with only the phantom trace of the tube pressing against the back of my throat.

Kissing in pubs

“I think he’s about to kiss her, look. He’s leaning in.”

There was a pause while we both stared across the room, watching intently for developments.

“Yes, they’re definitely kissing. Why has he got his hand behind his head, what’s that about?”

”Search me, I have no idea.”

There had been time for one more drink after dinner so I’d taken my friend Sarah to Sahara. It had seemed alliteratively like the right thing to do and besides, she was more of a wine bar person than a pub fan. The seats were muted beige leather and the music was the kind of naff jazz I’d thought only existed in clichéd dinner parties. It was quiet enough that you couldn’t make out the melody or anything of interest, but loud enough that you had to struggle to talk over it. I think sound systems in bars are fitted with a special button which sets the volume at exactly that level. Everybody seemed to be in their thirties, which made me more comfortable. Their early thirties mind you, which wasn’t quite so comfortable, but I was trying not to think about that.

The clientele was a funny mixture – a loud table of hipsters had congregated in the middle of the room, laughing at their own jokes and making us all feel less interesting by association. By contrast, dotted around the edge were couples on dates. First or second dates, most likely, because there was still the sheen of awkwardness about them. You could sense people still picking their words carefully, deciding what they could and couldn’t say, sending out and suppressing signals in equal measure. I suppose in their way, everybody in the place was trying hard except Sarah and me.

Three younger men came in wearing lumberjack shirts, all variations on a theme. The fineness of the pattern varied, so did the colours, but fundamentally they were all pretty much the same. So was everything else about them; slightly more stubble on this one, slightly more product on that one, slightly more weight on the other but pressed from the same unremarkable mould. I’m never sure whether the fact that none of us are really that different from one another is depressing or reassuring, which probably means that it’s both.

“I used to wear shirts like that at university.” said Sarah. I found that rather hard to imagine. She was neat, slightly built, almost birdlike, a pint-sized personification of Middle England; the conversation in the restaurant had covered garden centres, pushchairs, the contents of her iPod (which were of course an anathema to me - “I like Eliza Doolittle!“ she said. “She’s very perky.“) She wanted to think she looked like Helen Baxendale but in fact more closely resembled a young Glenn Close, which probably tells you more about Sarah than she would ideally like you to know.

“You don’t even want to know what sort of things I wore at university.” I said. She probably did, but I didn’t want to tell her; even the thought of those light grey jeans still made me wince.

“And I had this jumpsuit – well, it wasn’t a jumpsuit, more like a one-piece – from Laura Ashley, with flowers on it. My mother bought it for me, and I don’t even think it was a good idea at the time. There are some photos somewhere, I should try and track them down.”

I couldn’t really process the idea of an eighteen year old girl in a big floral baby-gro, so I didn’t know what to say. I pondered it briefly and decided to go for the suitably non-committal “Ah, the nineties.” I made a mental note to remember that non sequitur, I had a feeling it might come in handy in the future.

Anyway, we were paying special attention to the table nearest to us. He had a shaved head and was wearing a slim-fitted striped shirt, the sort that always looks crumpled whatever you do to it. She was considerably more dressy, showing off cleavage, pretty in the way that is almost entirely the result of considerable effort. On balance I thought she could have done better, but then again you could have said the same about the woman in the couple nearest to the door. Come to think of it, you could say that of most women. The man with the shaved head was holding a pint glass with a huge frothy head, like an ice cream. His companion had a bottle of wine in an ice bucket on the table in front of her. Either they had been there a long time, or they had only just arrived, in which case it was one of two things: a sign of her nervousness or a tribute to her ambition.

When the kiss eventually happened, I wondered whether it was the culmination of her ambition, or whether she just didn’t feel she could say no and had given in to her nervousness. There was no real way of telling, we were too far away and we had been spying rather than eavesdropping. The kiss seemed to go on for ages without developing into anything more, and all that time his hand stayed firmly behind his head rather than straying across the invisible line you always know is there. I didn’t know whether it was sweet or sad, but it certainly wasn’t erotic; watching people kiss in public never is.

“That reminds me of being at university. I had a boyfriend and all he ever wanted to do was snog in pubs. We’d go to a pub and he’d just want to sit there kissing all night.”

“And did you want that?”

“No. But I did it anyway.”

As if I hadn’t been feeling old enough already; somehow that exchange seemed to sum up an awful lot about the transition between the twenties and the thirties, that in your twenties you did all these reckless things and heartily didn’t give a toss, and then you hit your thirties and said things like “not here!” and “people are looking”. Or maybe there were just people who cared what people thought and people who didn‘t, because with a dash of hindsight I couldn’t remember ever necking recklessly in pubs whether I wanted to or not, and I probably did want to, back then. Besides, this couple were in their thirties and they weren’t letting it stop them. They weren’t letting anything stop them.

Over dinner, Sarah had been telling me about her fifteen year old stepdaughter.

“The worst thing is that I don’t think I’m old, but to her I must be ancient. I’m like a dinosaur.”

“Well, you probably are.” I said. I was mainly joking but not entirely; she had mentioned garden centres, after all.

“But I’m not old in my head. The thing is, I don’t feel old until I look at young people.”

“I know. The worst thing is that we refer to them as young people at all, that’s a sign right there.”

“It’s the hairstyle though! They all seem to have the same hairstyle, with their hair swept over from god knows where.”

I knew exactly what she was talking about, but I was loath to agree because I didn’t want to be the sort of person that refers to that sort of person as a young person. Because that’s where the slippery slope begins, but it evolves into you describing popular music with the wrong kind of alienated bafflement and culminates in an enthusiasm for compulsory national service which would previously have been unthinkable.

“Here’s something that shows how old I’m getting.” said Sarah, reaching into her handbag and pulling out a keyring. It was a small round disc emblazoned with a badly drawn white hand that looked like a breakdancing swan, and the words SELBY HANDS OF HOPE written along the bottom. If I’d stared at it for hours and had hundreds of guesses I would never have figured out what it was for.

“What is that?”

“You know when you go to the supermarket and you have to put a pound coin in the slot to unhook your trolley? That’s what this is for. It means I never have to fish out a pound coin ever again!”

I looked at her blankly. It was the sort of invention you expected to find in one of those catalogues full of inventions like this, the ones which proudly boast that what they sell is “not available in any shop!” as if that was somehow a good thing. It never was, of course; if these things had been any good shops would have been all over them. A more accurate slogan might have been “Even the pound shops won’t touch these with a barge pole”, though it would hardly do wonders for sales.

“Sorry, did you really buy this?”

“Yes! Don’t look at me like that, it’s perfectly normal. I’ve seen several old ladies with one. Though the worst thing is that it works at Tesco and Sainsburys but for some reason it doesn’t work at the Co-Op. It‘s just disgraceful!”

I couldn’t really think of anything to contribute at that point, so instead I took a photo of Sarah’s gadget and put it on the internet. That way, I knew that I’d be able to prove I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. The waiter came to take our payment - a friendly, shaven-headed man with the thickest beard and the thinnest tie, prone to gesticulation but free of over-familiarity. He didn’t even call us “guys”, not once.

“I liked him.” I said as we left the restaurant.

“Really? I thought he was creepy. He was being nice because he had to be, not because he wanted to be.”

I had never met Sarah’s mother, and almost certainly never would, but I was starting to feel like I already had.

“Is this what your mum is like?”

“Oh no, not at all! She likes anyone who’s nice to her.”

The kissing couple soon lost their appeal and our wineglasses emptied, not to be refilled. We stopped drinking at eleven because we had meetings the next day and we’re grown-ups after all, so we left the bar and the couples and the hipsters behind and I walked her to her hotel. On the walk back to the flat, I passed the three men in check shirts again. Where they were on their way to was anybody's guess, a house party or a rave or a check shirt convention or something. I almost considered tailing them, in case they knew where all the fun was in this town and it was my only chance of finding out. And then I wondered how all those other evenings I had intersected with would end; whether the couple would work out and whether the hipsters would get old and complacent and find themselves sitting on the sidelines watching everyone else talking louder than them. And then I felt unworthy and ungrateful, because my evening on the sidelines had been fun, just a different kind. Would I have swapped places with them for all the skinny jeans in all the department stores in Reading?

It’s okay, because I don’t have kids. I thought to myself all the way home. I don’t have kids so I will stay young forever. I half believed it, too.

Hippocampus

I’m hugely proud to be able to say that one of my pieces, Vaseline, has been published in the debut edition of Hippocampus Magazine, a new online publication devoted to creative nonfiction. You can check out my piece HERE - it might be familiar to long-time readers as a longer version appeared on the blog last year. If you like it, please leave a comment!

While you’re there, I think the rest of the first issue is well worth a look. The range of subjects, themes and styles in there is quite something and there are some brilliant pieces, including an excellent meditation on transience and permanence ("Everlasting Gobstoppers Aren’t Really Everlasting") and a lovely vignette depicting a dysfunctional father/daughter relationship ("Rig").

Hippocampus is accepting submissions monthly from now on, and I think a lot of you write excellent stuff which could quite possibly find a home there so please consider giving it a go. They also need people to spread the word about what they are doing - aside from the magazine they can be found on Facebook here and on Twitter here. I think they definitely deserve support as there are very few websites that accept creative nonfiction submissions, and fewer still that are dedicated to this kind of writing (I can‘t think of any others).

Personally I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the term "creative nonfiction"; it’s always struck me as an admission of defeat in the face of a general assumption that the only writing of literary merit is fiction. If I had five pounds for every time someone read my stuff and mentioned the N word ("do you have a novel?" "are you writing a novel?" "you should write a novel") I could self-publish from Bermuda and get on my private jet to plant copies in bookshops around the globe. All right, that’s not true, I’d have about fifty pounds, but the general principle’s still there. The suggestion is that the only way to give validity to the sort of writing I (and many good writers who blog) do is to package it all up as fiction and turn it into a novel; all a bit depressing and unimaginative, I reckon.

Of course, the flip side is to look on the bright side - not something which comes naturally to me - and to view the creative nonfiction genre as an attempt to carve out a niche for good non-fictional writing in light of that overwhelming bias towards fiction. So I’m going to try and see it that way instead. Anyway, I’ve never been too interested in writing about writing (it’s right up there with blogging about blogging, and that’s before we get on to the unique tedium of blogging about Twitter) so let’s leave it at that: I hope you enjoy Hippocampus, and I’m incredibly proud to be part of its maiden voyage.