on being long distance

image via tallulah fontaine @ tumblr

Since previous posts, things have changed. (As they tend to do when you don't update a blog for a year and a half.)

I have now moved away from my teeny tiny town in the middle of nowhere, and currently live in Manchester, which is obviously a bit more exciting. I have emerged from a year's living there so far with high expectations about public transport (there's a bus every thirty seconds rather than once an hour!!!!!), a paranoia about my so-called posh Southern accent, and a new-found appreciation for Greggs (who am I kidding, I've always loved Greggs).

I love Manchester, and how there's always something going on there. I love living away from home, and the freedom to visit people whenever I want and get in at 4 in the morning, and the technical ability to eat chicken dippers for tea without my mum clubbing me to death with the packet for cooking junk food in the house. I love living up north (everyone is friendly, it's cheap, and they call bread rolls barms which is really cool).

The only problem is that my boyfriend has moved away from home too, and now lives in, as far as Manchester is concerned, the arse-end of nowhere. The journey from Manchester to Cambridge, if you're taking the cheap route, is five hours long and involves a train and a coach: almost literally planes, trains and automobiles. It also requires money, and a lot of planning. Spontaneity is supposed to be sexy, isn't it? Sitting on National Rail Enquiries a month in advance is most decidedly unsexy, as is waking up at three in the morning to get the first train with unbrushed hair and dribble on your chin. Even less sexy is watching somebody be sick in a Tesco bag on the X5 bus and lob it out of the window into Milton Keynes Station. The X5 bus is not a place that fosters romance or elegance.

 Being in a long-distance relationship also makes me an extremely boring person. At home I was always confused about people who couldn't spend a day without their partners; being alone can be so lovely! Then I got into a habit of spending every evening on Skype talking about the inanest shit (for example, extreme interest in what the other had for tea), starting to miss my boyfriend after two days of not seeing him, and, worst of all, may or may not have fallen asleep spooning a pillow on more than one occasion.

As difficult and lonely (and expensive) as a long-distance relationship can be, however, there are silver linings. Neither the freezing walk to the train station at three in the morning, nor Milton Keynes Station, nor the X5 bus are particularly romantic. But running into the arms of the person you love the most, bags and all, on a sunny morning on a Cambridge green is rather cinematic. And curling up in somebody's arms after months of not seeing them, laughing in almost disbelief that they're real and you're with them, is probably one of the romantic things around.

Then again, I say this from the perspective of somebody who's home for the summer and is a fifteen minute walk away from the love of my life. So think of me next September as I slump on the 4:30 train with bird's nest hair, feeling as unenthustiastic and unsexy as humanly possible.

Writing experiments

image via tumblr - unknown source

Recently I found this list of writing experiments and am absolutely intrigued. I love the idea of writing about a single thing every day. I have recently rediscovered a list I wrote once of all my favourite things, including:

• the smell of cumin
• the amber colour of tea when the sun shines on it
• orange roses
• how legs look underwater
• recipes written without measurements

I am really tempted to start writing a journal about things I see from the bus, however, which I feel would be far more interesting. 

Coatspiration

image via

As far as I'm concerned, this year's pastel pink winter has been the most irritating trend since leggings-as-trousers. (Irritation at said trend may or may not be to do with the fact that I definitely participated it when I was 13 - oh god, the cringing involved in looking back on old photos!) Not because it's aesthetically displeasing, but because I'm ginger, freckled and generally unsuited as a person for wearing pink. There is a woman who lives in my town who has the most beautiful tailored pastel pink coat and since she is blonde (an AW13 free pass to looking nice) looks amazing in it. I will admit that I'm jealous.

Even if I can't wear pink, I'd still settle for a beautiful pastel coat. And I would very definitely nick the little boy's look: shiny shoes, white shirt and a gorgeous powder blue coat. Beret optional but preferred. In an ideal world the walk to school would not instantly muddify my shoes and my shirts would not always be creased and I would be able to look chic and tres parisienne in a beret... But then again, in an ideal world, I'd be pretty in winter pink.

(As for the artistic rebel on the left, a baggy white t-shirt dotted with random colour and a very simple necklace and something denim seems like a great summer option. Thank you, opinionated 50's ad!)

The problem with the future...

...Is that it's completely unknown. A room full of darkness. I am seventeen years old and The Future is something that I'm currently having to feel my way through prematurely, tapping on the walls and sliding my palms around hazy shapes of university courses and job opportunities. What you might think is shaped like an A-grade might actually be a C in disguise. The bannister of work experience that you brush your hand along might lead to a solid shape of Well-Paid Job but the stairs might vanish into an unemployment trap-door instead. It's a dangerous thing to do, mapping out your future. It leaves no room for disappointment.

Right now I (and most other people of my age) are being shot at with questions about the future. Where do you see yourself in five years? Ten years? What they mean by this, of course, is: Which job will you be working in? How much money will you have? Will your education have been worth it? Work, work, work.

Like many people, my answer is an increasingly-panicked I don't know I don't know I don't know! Some people take an exploratory squint into The Future and immediately stub their toe on a vocation. From there the work may not be easy but the planning certainly is. If you know that you are going to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a vet, it's easy to see yourself in five years or ten. Once the distant shape of success is obvious in the landscape of your life yet to come, it's easy to make a route to it. If you know what job you are going to have, it's easy to imagine yourself performing it, easy to conjure up images of somebody with your face in the appropriate uniform, frozen in industrious imagery like scenes from a children's reading sample. For people who know what they want to do, it's easy to present yourself via your job, because your dream job is part of you already.

As a result of having no clue what I want to do, my answers are all slightly unorthodox. My visions of my future self all seem to revert to frivolity. I know I don't want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a vet. I know I'd like to see what living in a city is like. I see my twenty-seven year old self as a red-headed figure in heels coming home from an unknown job to a flat with books and house plants and a cat. I see, perhaps, a wedding to a man with a greyed-out face. Children who look like me for lack of any other factor. I want to be successful enough to shop in Waitrose on a regular basis, for lack of better job description, but that isn't as such an acceptable answer.

I want to study English and French at a good university (with old buildings and trees), and I want to write, and my vision of The Future doesn't stretch any further than that. A satisfactory answer for now, perhaps. But when I see myself in five years, a girl with my face but different clothes on, the one thing I know for certain is that this answer will not suffice anymore.

On paleo mothers

image via ren-hang at flickr

Recently I have gone on a crusade of healthy eating, which is partially due to a desire for slim, tanned summer wholesomeness and partially due to the crippling guilt of a recent impromptu lunch of pizza and ice-cream. As a result, I have been joining in with my mother in smugly declining bread and cakes in favour of salads.

My mother has been Paleo for a few months now, and the rest of my family has somewhat got used to it. There was the initial shock, of course, of the banning of orange juice and cereal and puddings every day. Pasta became a high-risk substance, sugar in tea became the work of the devil and talk of sandwiches was met with dirty looks. Suddenly chocolate was something furtive to sneak into the house wrapped in a jumper or stuffed into a bag, like attempting to smuggle alcohol under the nose of my parents, only ridiculous. My mum spent days on end reading health articles and constantly updating us on what she'd eaten and how it made her feel and the state of her health. Every conversation was warped by her into a discussion on her eating habits. It was as if she had become devoted to religion overnight, obsessing constantly about cauliflower rice and the Omega 6 content of almonds, rapturously quoting food statistics like Bible passages. Instead of urging miserable people to find Jesus, she would proclaim that all their problems could be fixed with a Proper Food. We (my brothers and I, that is) were her reluctant converts, rebelliously chomping crisps and sausage rolls in the Tesco car park as a sort of sullen refusal to conform, our vanilla version of dyed hair and tattoos. Blasphemy was confined to two words, always spoken with a definite capital letter at the beginning and a slight impressive whisper: Grain, and Rancid Fats.

It is only now after the fervour of resistance that I am perhaps realising that food as a form of rebellion is not necessarily the best thing in terms of health. It is a trap that I have fallen into before. As a child, my mother, ever well-meaning, was determined to feed us the best things she possibly could. And she did. We ate organic vegetables and cooked breakfasts, home-made dinners and whole-fat milk. Cereal was strictly banned if the of which sugars section on the packet was over 10g, and Nestlé was exiled from the house after a political incident. She worked her fingers to the bone keeping us well-fed. Not a single ready meal passed my lips my whole childhood; she never stopped working even for a night. And now, of course, I am incredibly grateful for her efforts, even though as a child I was blind to them. I longed to fit in with the other children, you see, particularly in primary school. This combined with a natural sweet tooth made my daily packed lunch a nightmare. I would pull out my squashed hummus and carrot or cheese and onion brown-bread sandwiches out of my lunchbox with weary distaste, gazing longingly at my classmates slurping milkshakes and munching on chocolate bars. My small tupperware box of nuts and dried fruit would never quite compare to the crumpling of packets of Wotsits and Skips. My dream was to be able to open crisps at lunchtime by squeezing the ends of the packets - POP! - like those in the lunch hall with effortless cool, the sort I thought could be obtained by eating the right things for lunch and wearing the right hair accessories. More than once, I have been met with the cry of 'Urgh, what's that?' upon biting into a radish, which was hell for a self-conscious wallflower such as myself.

Luckily these days I am more likely to have an impressive lunch if it unfalteringly healthy rather than the other way round, and hummus sandwiches and radishes are more likely to evoke the envy of my crisp-crunching coke-sipping friends. And while I am still reluctant to completely give up Grain, Sugar and Rancid Fats, I respect my mother a great deal more for her efforts to get us to eat healthily.

Girls who hate girls

image via cryybaby at etsy

Today, an acquaintance of mine announced in a conversation about one girl notorious for doing fairly nasty things: 'All girls are bitches'. A female acquaintance, that is. With one disparaging sentence, she condemned half the population, leaving the rest of the girls in the conversation to raise eyebrows and glance knowingly at each other. There will always be girls who hate girls: girls who are frightened of other girls, girls who don't want to be 'like other girls', girls who believe that other girls are weak or silly. I think that this particular specimen was a mixture of all of these things: a girl of the 'ladette' variety, fixed in the belief that other girls are drama-spewing mascara machines.

It's never entirely clear what the word 'bitch' actually means, and from what angle she was approaching it. Was she referring to cattiness, the assumption that a woman can't meet another woman without planning the right moment to stab her in the back? Or did it take on a slightly weaker connotation, the idea of a 'man's bitch', a criticism of the audacity of girls to have boyfriends and sometimes cry and occasionally get emotional about shopping? Either way, she deliberately isolated herself from these so-called 'other girls', casting them as a generic hair-flicking chocolate-guzzling mass of mood-swings and betrayal.

Aside from the obvious offence I took at being directly called a bitch merely on account of having two X chromosomes, I just felt sorry for her. Because if there's one lesson I have learnt in the past few years, it's that girls need girls. Oh, I believed precisely the same as her, even as recently as last year. Long story short, a drawn-out adolescent drama occurred which left me temporarily minus a group of friends. We were all very young, we were all hopelessly attempting to grow up, and none of us were particularly well-tuned to the feelings of others. Angry, frustrated and most of all confused, I found myself isolated from Girl World. Around me, friendship groups seemed to weave tighter into each other as I approached. I discovered flirting mostly out of desperation and to my utter wonder I found myself having easy conversations. Boys were just easy to be around, I found - no need for anything complicated, to feel guilty for not having organised a shopping trip or to wonder all day about slightly ambiguous remarks. No-strings attached, quick-and-easy friendship. The sort of friendships that were the equivalent of a pot noodle over a roast dinner, perhaps, but I would rather have eaten metaphorical pot noodles for the rest of my life than starved.

Months passed. I acquired a boyfriend and started talking to his friends: an instant, blow-up friendship group. Suddenly I was instantly invited to events and my social life picked up again. I was determined to be a real part of the group, to slot in perfectly. Embittered, I savagely convinced myself that I hated my girlfriends. I was determined for them to be boring and air-headed, not worth my time. That I had Real Feelings and Real Emotions, whereas they had pale imitations of the real thing. I truly believed that I had poetically suffered loneliness and therefore had bragging rights to some sort of tragic eccentricity. From afar, I watched them have sleepovers and worry about calories and discuss the events of Made in Chelsea, and thought them shallow. I, however, had substance - I was Not Like Other Girls, I was different and special!

Only, of course, I wasn't, and I'm not. Not unlike other girls, that is. After growing up a little, I discovered the astonishing truth: that all girls have emotions just as strong as anybody else. Real love, real hate, real happiness. Even girls who are nothing like me at all: even girls who have modelesque looks, even girls who play four different sports and go running for fun. As it turns out, they were sad that I'd disappeared from their lives and I was actually completely deluding myself about this so-called hatred and I discovered the truth: that having sleepovers and counting calories doesn't make you any less of a human being, and that actually, I was no less lonely in my attempts to be a girl in a group of boys.

Sisterhood is an anguish-ridden thing that utilises those Real Emotions in the best and worst ways possible. It's a feeling of belonging, of knowing that there's no possible other place to be. Of secrets and the sharing of secrets of varying importance. Of terrible competition and debilitating jealousy and sometimes absolute infuriation, and the most ridiculous, inextricable fondness. I still haven't watched an episode of Made In Chelsea, but I'm not entirely sure I need to.

a first post

Follow my blog with Bloglovin I am a 17-year-old girl living in Britain with an penchant for writing and a love of vignettes. I like girl power and the fauvism movement and charity shops (and the smugness that goes with a good purchase). Sometimes I wax poetic about 60's clothing and showy costume jewellery and fully believe that fashion is the best way to pretend you're somebody else. Though mostly, when I'm not rambling self-indulgently, I have a fairly dull life mainly consisting of cups of tea and over-usage of Tumblr.

So - welcome to my blog then, I suppose.