I choose lofty spires. And Chaka Khan

Oh help. For a brief, but serious moment today, I considered online dating. Two things stopped me:  pride, and the (not-entirely unfounded) belief that most of the men I have ever dated/aborted relationships with/known, are already there, waiting to be ‘harmoniously matched’ with my profile in a brutal twist of fate/inevitability/act of God known as the ‘muhahaha’.

And come to think of it, thirdly: Cupid might be a nefarious little dickhead with a ‘GSOH’ and an arsenal, but I’ve always believed he struck in truly candid moments - when our guards are down and our egos are on coffee breaks. That’s how you let love in, I thought; you let yourself be seen, truly seen in all of your flawed vulnerability, and you pray that understanding and recognition fan into the beginnings of ‘something’.

If we’re all little independent shops, with wares to sell to the world, there are plenty of things we put in the window to entice passersby. Bunting perhaps, a well-placed teapot, a suggestively tasseled lampshade. But inevitably, there are things that make it into the window we don’t consciously place there: a gurning clown mask of social clumsiness, the dusty old jewellery box of long-ago-loves that still manage to get us dancing to their haunting tunes, bogeys. And in the tactile hustle and bustle of the high street, all of these things are on show, and available to touch and hold (but once broken, considered sold).

In virtual second lives we can be who we want to be, or worse, who we think we should want to be. Stay with me, I know, these cyber projections can be just as revealing of the real life bogeymen feeding the reel, (if you know where to look in their Microsoft shop windows), but gone is the dragging of coat tails and the smell of adrenaline. I’m no die-hard romantic, but every dalliance I’ve had, good bad, or unpublishable have all arisen (not a euphemism) from some conscious decision I made. To go to that party, to take that job, to queue for body paint at four in the morning; (his name was Darcy, I kid you not, on a beach in Thailand - no white shirt, but you can’t have everything).

I’m going to have to smash the metaphor here, because I can’t get my head round ‘window shopping for soulmates’ Guardian or otherwise.

I, like hordes of women before me, wanted to be Bridget Jones. I wanted to be Bridget Jones because I wanted her flat, and her job, her friends and her nineties London lifestyle. (I grew up in Singapore, and the idea of a poky flat in London had for me, all the romance of a gothic spire). And to top it all off, despite all the fags and the booze and the misery – which, with all that disarming ‘British humour’ ends up looking quite fun - she got her Mr Darcy. Not a metaphor, an actual Mr Darcy (Colin Firth, squared). 

Recently the scales have fallen from my eyes, although so far I’m not hiding any under my clothes. I’ve noticed I’m getting perilously close to the tipping point into singular singleness at every table I sit at. In every room I enter, all the good ones are taken and the rest have been taken in ways you don’t want to remember, or worse, they remember that night you got really drunk on sambuca and nearly took someone’s eye out on the dancefloor.

And that’s fine, fun, even - I don’t mean in a hair-twirling, prick-teasing ‘fun’ kind of way, that way psychosis lies. (I can’t keep from calling a spade a shovel even when sober, so you can be sure that on a date – and for ‘on a date’, read, ‘after several large gins’ - there ain’t no chance I’ve got any ‘gee mister, how’dja get all that clever stuff to fit in your head’ going spare). No, I just mean I have good friends and none of them have tried to set me up with ‘Clive from Accounts’. For which I am very grateful. 

And up until recently, say, yesterday, holding court was just dandy. ‘Why not settle down with a well balanced main course m’lady? implores my world weary inner-butler. ‘What, whilst the buffet car is still serving?’ I trill, and swan off down the carriage for another vol au vent. A word about vol au vents – they’re full of hot air, and if you’re unlucky, crab paste. 

 

The point is not, that I am single, but that I now notice that I'm single. And for the most part I find myself becoming everything I wished for: typing this diary in an (albeit borrowed) flat in London, pursuing my career in penniless glee, with legions of smack-the-pony-and-blow-me-down-with-a-feather brilliant friends standing by, ready to rush in with gin at the drop of a proverbial pillbox. Enter Mr Darcy right? Emerging from the cyberlake, white shirt plastered to his alabaster profile? Or in terrible knitwear, captioned ‘let’s see what happens’. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman, in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a - "

Not this time, dear reader, for now, I’ll hang onto my stubborn whimsy of taking life as it comes. For now I will resist being ‘saved’ from the perils of impending spinsterhood by ‘click-and-collect’ knights in silicon armour. This beige box in Islington is not a tower: it is a spire, my spire. For now, I like me, just the way I am. 

**Just realised Bridget is back, single and onlinebloodydating. Fuck it Fielding, just when I thought I had a handle on this.

Blurred lines and spinning tops

For Petronaut,

A post in which I am particularly poncy, and overuse the word ‘and’. 3,2,1, and-

Every once in a while someone tells me about their last two promotions, or the next wedding or christening and I get a little pang. And out come the photos of the last holiday in the South of France, and I do like Pinot Noir, and that villa does look lovely. And on the other side of the sliding door my mardy doppelganger tugs the cord tied from my rib cage to hers, and sends pulses down the line, they say: ‘could have been you’, ‘you’re being left behind’. Old friends that have continued on a path whilst you, perhaps, have veered off into the woods and lost track of which track you were supposed to be following, but this is alright, and ooh, climbed a tree, but then spied the finish line and remembered it was supposed to be a race, ‘how much? yes, very reasonable, out of season, well, of course.’ And then I square my shoulders, look myself straight in the eye and sing ‘no, we can’t all be climbing ladders and building Roman roads up and down and forwardforwardforward. Some of us spin, like moons and planets, we ping from one thing to the next, and gravity isn’t up or down, it’s here or there, to me to you; but it’s still onward and I’m here and it’s alright. I am alright.’

And just as often, I meet other galactic travellers orbiting in the black: making it up as we bob along. And we reach into the vacuum and dance in the darkness. And sitting round our cosmic campfires, we never fail to acknowledge the songlines ringing through us: making us yearn for the straight and narrow: despite all of our travelling the ‘trajectory less travelled’, or just not getting-our-act-together. And in those moments of intimacy with my fellow vitanauts, I feel, truly, weightless. All burden is lifted in the moments we admit (with tears glassing our eyes and wine filling our glasses) that though we love the open road, and wide open spaces, there is still a designated space in our hearts for hearth and ‘home’. And maybe I could raise chickens. But then it is time for the packing of suitcases and count down to lift off.

Recently, ageing has felt a lot like vertigo. It’s just a number, and each year you press the button, plug in a different decimal and hardly notice that you ascend a little higher, until ‘JESUS MARY AND HOLY ST JOSEPH THERE’S NOTHING TO HOLD ON TO’. The Voyager 1 just left our solar system, and the earth shattering thing is, it’s the furthest anything stamped with human fingerprints has ever been posted. I’m not about to tell you that turning 30 is like standing at the edge of the solar system, except, if for a light year you imagine the world revolves around you, then it is, a bit. There’s something simultaneously thrilling and melancholic about passing out of our twenties - the line we’re about to cross is only a line because it divides what we know, or thought we knew, and what we’re about to find out. For now, everything you know is behind you, at your back, willing you onward. Here we go humanity, the baggage we’ve got now is coming for the long haul, the grooves in that record are deep, this is the song we have chosen to sing, so lets sing it loud or not at all, set the compass needle and let it spin baby, let’s spin.

I bloody love you Petronaut. See you when you next touch down. And, happy bloody birthday.

What do I know?

This week I’ve had a blast at ARC, helping the dynamic duo at Encounter Productions with R&D for their next show ‘On Knowledge’. I also had three meetings that have challenged me to question what kind of artist and member of the community I want to be. It has been a week of visceral improvisations on uncertainty. And some actual dancing with actual contemporary dancers. You didn’t need to know that, but now that you’ve got the image of me attempting contemporary dance firmly lodged in your cortex, here are some things I ‘know’ at the end of this week:

1)            I will never use ‘through the medium of contemporary dance’ as a punchline ever again.

2)            Inarticulacy can sometimes communicate more than all the words in my head.

3)            That what I perceive as being ‘limited’ to physicality is in fact liberation to an entirely new vocabulary. And one that I want to be better versed in.

4)            Psychotherapy training is annoyingly attractive as the next method to extend my capacity for debt.

5)            The A19 is better suited to canal boats than cars.

6)            Knowledge is the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning. It’s always personal. 

7)            I am making my first solo show.

8)            I don’t know what that will look like. I do know what it will be about.

9)            I have not written a script, I have written ‘material for development’.

10)         Not knowing is productive. Answering questions before I’ve properly asked them is not: back to the drawing board do not pass GO, do not collect £200.

11)       Grant for Arts applications are long. COMMUNITY CHEST  Advance to GO, collect £200.

12)          There’s no more red wine.

Dirty thirty

When I was sixteen I was certain I’d have it all figured out by now. My sixteen year old self had me married off at 25, 28 at the absolute upper limit, with sprogs following in quick succession until my pelvic floor shrieks ‘HALT.’  And of course, amidst all of these undigested expectations of womanhood, I’d have definitely played at the National, at least twice.

I turn 30 in a matter of weeks… This is a letter to my sixteen year-old self:

Dear Kathryn,

Didn’t quite make the targets you set me. It was all going pretty much to plan, top university education, flounced across a few stages, bagged you a scholarly boyfriend early on: fell passionately in love (sacked off the degree a bit, but you know, love conquers all) and moved in for our ‘happily ever after’ by the time you are 25.

Thing is, he was a bit of a shit. I won’t go into it now, because you’re going to have to figure this stuff out for yourself, but love is blinkered and fogs up your barometers. I ignored my instincts because I thought I was falling in line, I’d bought the fairytale hook line and sinker, and then sank. (We made a schoolgirl error there me old girl, fairytales are all written by men).

Anyway, that whole shit storm took some time to get over. I had to leave my home, city, country for a bit. Clear my head. Make sure he wasn’t still following me, that sort of thing.

I just want you to know that it’s ok, I’m ok. In fact, I’m fucking brilliant. Yes I am over-qualified and unemployed. No, I’m not married, or looking like getting married, or having babies, or buying a house or any of the other stuff you are so sure I would do to put footholds in life’s cliff face.

I’m going to make my own stuff. Really, I’m going to write our story and other stories and tell them. Maybe for money, maybe not. I might go back to university, get another masters; I’m thinking psychotherapy. You’ll briefly consider it as a degree option when you pick your IB subjects, and then discard it because you don’t want to have to do a science at higher; but it’s ok, because I can pick up that baton for you now.

Basically what I’m telling you is, it took this long to get here. Stop frowning like that; it’s giving me a semi-permanent crease in my forehead. Trust me, here is good, and the view is breathtaking. I can fill a courtyard full of people I know and love, who bring me riches you can’t bank and feed me brimful with joy. And they all tell you a bit about every turn in the road, every crossroad, every time I tripped over, every time I decided yet again to ‘fuck it and see what happens’. There’s a person in your life for every single decision you made, and when you get here you’ll not want to unmake any of them, I promise.

So, I’m sorry if I’m not who you thought I would be, but I’m not done yet.

Good luck with your IGCSEs (you’re gonna ace them).

Lots of love,

Me xxx