Hey y’all. I’m back! Well, back for a little bit – from late on Wednesday night until Sunday, in fact, and then holiday part #2 starts on Sunday 
Croatia, unsurprisingly enough, was hot and sunny and very restful! I feel under a bit of pressure to blog well about it, though, since we were sitting around one evening discussing blogs – as families do – when my own mother opined that The Musings of a Red Dalek has gone downhill over the past six months. A stab to the heart is what it was, I tell you, a bloody heart stabbing incident indeed. (Between mournful gasps, I countered that at least it was still going, and has comfortably outlived most of its contemporaries. So there.)
Croatia woo!
If you’re short of time, this basically sums up my holiday
No Self holiday is complete without air hockey
Aww…
As you may have gathered, Tasha was having an eventful time doing other things this time round, so Katie and I held the generational fort with a raft of silly activities. These included a developing a serious addiction to German MTV – or Mighten Tighten Vighten, as it shall now forever be known – to the extent that I now have a bunch of German-only pop songs stuck in my head: an itch that Spotify sadly fails to satisfy. Wir war’n Geboren um zu Leben, mit den Wundern jeder Zeit!
I have to say, though, that acting as a family of four for a while did confirm to me that being one of three siblings is clearly best. I know this is controversial territory. Only children in particular can be rather militant in demanding equal rights these days, and I’m totally not prejudiced – some of my best friends are only children! – and liberal enough to believe if consenting adults don’t want to share their toys that’s alright, as long as they do it in private and don’t try to teach siblinglessness in schools. But just one sibling still isn’t enough. Don’t get me wrong: Katie and I got on great in Croatia, as we (almost) always do, it’s just that family mealtimes with five people are even more competitive in terms of getting a word in edgeways, and I rather enjoy this constant shouting healthy dynamism. Maybe even more would be even better…
Oh yes, and on the subject of me and Katie – we had a wonderful moment together in Split, after petulantly refusing to accompany our parents to see the interior of a church and opting instead to stay outside in the glorious sunshine. (It was borne of an immediate but nonetheless remarkably firm conviction that we rather liked our own shoulders, thank you very much, and weren’t about to cover them up without a more enticing incentive than, um, the interior of a church.) Yet the moment they went in without us a pagan alternative suddenly turned up outside, in the form of a bunch of toga-clad, crowd-pleasing ancient Romans. Hurrah! No matter how much gold was inside that church, in the coolness stakes our team totally won.
Down with Theodosius!
Also: mum, Katie and I went rafting, which was lots of fun…
Row, row, row your boat
…and included an optional rock-jumping stop. Now, before I conclude on a photo of said rock-jumping, I must say a word about Katie’s sneakiness. Because there’s also of photo of her jumping off the rock – a photo I won’t be blogging, because it makes me look stupid by comparison – with her arms outstretched and a carefree, isn’t-this-fun look on her face. Great. I, on the other hand, am clasping my life jacket like a fool. But, ladies and gentlemen, we were told to do this! Honest! Katie just abandoned health and safety in pursuit of a cooler photograph – it’s her that you should judge 
Down, down, down, down, down
New shoes! Specifically, new shoes that I bought using a newly discovered and much valued technique: namely, gather a crack team of concerned girls together and get them to do it for me. So many thanks, Abbi, Maryam and Jules – you’ve collectively returned me to that (sadly always temporary) phase of my life when I don’t walk around with holes in my shoes.
Some of the shoe-buying team
(Oh yeah, Katie and I are building a Dalek btw)
This past week I’ve been working on another UCL(funding cuts)-QPCS summer school, and although the kids were all pretty sweet it does leave you with a sense of relief when you can return to talking to people your own age, tempered by a fear that you will inadvertently start shouting at your friends to stay in line or stop talking. For this reason, amongst others, it was very very nice to unwind in the pub with Matthew on Friday night – Matthew being someone that I see often enough to feel in touch with yet rarely enough that I feel compelled to blog his name. And then last night I went to the wonderful Alice’s birthday party, in which Elizer Eliezer and I were both mistaken for 23 (ahem), a corner of the room became dedicated to telling Jewish jokes and we all ate Emily’s delicious cake. It was great, and slightly nostalgic, for I remember being the age when you gathered at someone’s house for a birthday with vaguely illicit helpings of blue WKD…
Right, planned engineering work on this blog: I’m off on holiday to Croatia! (Again!) Have fun in my absence – and if you do find yourself without anything to do, try listening to a song about birds.
As I lean back tonight (with a mug of hot chocolate – yum) and prepare to organise my thoughts in handy blog form (yes, this thing you’re reading now) I am filled with that strangely comfortable achey-leg sensation – that one you get after a decent amount of walking (or ‘pacing’) around the place enjoying happy summery days with an array of great people. Which is not, I grant you, a very profound observation. (It’s just true, is all. Although ‘array’ was a strange choice of word.)
Now, how’s this for commitment? On Monday I started out taking part in a protest against the mass cancellation of Building Schools for the Future, which reminded me how very silly it feels to chant a slogan over and over again, but had to dash off before very long in order to *whispers* have coffee at the BBC. (Although it was actually tea, I think the whole story sounds better with coffee.) It was all in the service of stalking Bill, of course, who showed me round TV Centre (ooh exciting!) before we relocated to Bush House for the recording of Digital Planet. All great fun, and an opportunity to see Gareth Mitchell’s stylish leather which is left cruelly untransmitted by the medium of radio, so I’m sure the gods of political chanting will forgive me. (Still, ‘free schools’ rather than rebuilding actual schools? C’mon, government…)
Still, on the topic of a strong and stable coalition, what was most lovely this week was that Matt, Caroline and I full took advantage of all being in London at the same time. On Wednesday, Caroline braved the journey to Willesden in return dinner – OK, in return for fish and chips – and then on Friday night I successfully gathered people together at Camden’s Bar Gansa for ever-popular jugs of sangria and tapas. (And thanks especially to Saoirse for agreeing to come and making sure the political spectrum was about as wide as humanly possible )
Much love to all!
And then today, we three got together again for Hyde Park pic-a-nicking and Inception: a great watch, and likely to engender a good deal of existential teenage angst for years to come. (Now just don’t go and ruin it by making dull sequals a la The Matrix, yeah?) One thing bothered us about the film, however, and although it’s not much of a spoiler you may want to stop reading here if you haven’t yet seen it. OK, so: if you were in a long-term ‘dream’ with just you and your partner, in which you had the time and ability to create the entire world around you, then why on earth would you create a bland city of scarily symmetrical copy-and-paste skyscrapers and no greenery at all? Not even a little park? (It’s a lack of imagination which our theme park at least will avowedly avoid, you can be sure of that.)
Rise and shine!
“I… I… I thought we had something. I believed in you! I loved you, dammit, I loved you! But you kept this from me – you lied, lied about the most important thing… all those times you looked me in the eye you knew what you’d done…”
I could barely speak anymore – great waves of horror kept building, bigger and bigger, and then smashing over my head until I was struggling just to stay standing. She was still sitting on the sofa, motionless, frozen, numb from the shock. When I think back I imagine her eyes as pleading with me, apologising, begging for me to forgive her, but they weren’t – they were just lifeless. Dead. All so suddenly it was over, and we both knew it.
Please! A little background.
We met on Omegle: a beautiful union of You and Stranger, or Stranger and You, depending on which way you saw it. “Hi!” – the exclamation mark did it at once – that effortless burst of joy which came so naturally to her. I signed off with my Facebook page, just in case, and the next morning there she was, new friend request, new lives together. She posted on my wall. I liked. She tweeted, I retweeted. Tagged you in a photo. Tagged you in a note. In a relationship? (I became mayor of her bed on foursquare.) In a relationship! Lots of love, xxx.
By the next iPhone release cycle I had moved into her place for real. It was a perfect little flat, just off Swiss Cottage, cosy, homely and with an unsecured wireless network from that nice Mr. Papucci next door. We would spend whole evenings together just snuggled up on her sofa, planning our futures together – and then our future together – feeling utterly safe from the bustling world outside. We had each other, and that was the only news feed story that mattered.
“Ding!”
My phone flashed lazily with a new message. I paused from my current task – stroking her beautifully long hair – just long enough to lean over to the table and pick it up.
“Hey, do you sometimes think we’re too dependent on technology? xxx”
I laughed. “Nooo…”
She turned round smiling. “Well of course, I don’t really. But sometimes I think it might be nice to try living without it all for a day or something, y’know, like our ancestors did.”
“Yeah, that could be fun actually. If we went really primitive, just for a day, as an experiment.”
“I mean, obviously I’m not saying go crazy.”
“No.”
“Not kill ourselves doing this!”
“No!”
“But like, there’s something quite noble about the old days really. Take phones. We take this all for granted, but in the past people had to cope with much lower screen resolutions…”
“God yes. No HD screens for them – nothing even close. Sometimes they weren’t even full colour! And polyphonic ringtones…”
I felt a little shiver of excitement run down her spine. “Y’know, my grandfather had one of those phones, or something even older! It was a Nokia, a 3310, yes that’s right, and before he died he gave it to me to keep!”
“Do you still have it?”
“Of course! I think it’s over in that box on top of the wardrobe somewhere. Y’know, the one I need a stepladder to reach…”
I laughed. “Aha, but I don’t, shawty. I’ll go get it for you.”
The box was pretty heavy as I lifted it down, and covered in dust, so I put it down and began rummaging through it in the corner rather than spreading the dust all over the living room. It seemed to be a wonderfully eclectic collection of stuff from over her life: photos from her childhood, a signed Ethereal Fire gig ticket, a human skull from her gap year in Tyrgyzstan. (“It was all so exotic!” I remember her saying to me about it, “and like, so interesting! We got there just as the civil war was really breaking out, so there was so much to do – in their culture when there’s a civil war it’s traditional for the different groups to really go for each other, like really brutally, so there was always room for volunteers to pitch in, laying mines, shooting, executing prisoners of war… and they were so grateful, those guys we were with. It felt like we really made a difference to their world, y’know?”)
Aha, there it was! Laying right at the bottom: a battered old Nokia 3310 lying peacefully at the bottom of the box, frozen in time. I reached in to pull it out, but then something else caught my eye… a little piece of card, tucked neatly between some photographs. There was nothing remarkable about it, and it looked innocuous enough, so I can’t explain why I pulled it out other than idle curiosity. But I did.
And then my life fell apart.
Fade out. Background over. Back to the start.
“I… I… I thought we had something. I believed in you! I loved you, dammit, I loved you! But you kept this from me – you lied, lied about the most important thing… all those times you looked me in the eye you knew what you’d done…”
What could she do? I mean, what could she do? Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, she did at least try and make a go of it – taking the card weakly from my outstretched hand and trying, at least, to feign ignorance.
“Look, it’s nothing… yes, it is a wedding invite, and yes, it is my wedding invite, and yes, Dave and I were engaged once. But you knew that, or near enough: I told you all about us, remember? I don’t know why I kept it really, but it doesn’t mean anything, I promise…”
She trailed off. I stared at her. She stared at me. I started to well up, and tried as hard as I could to stop the tears from coming as I forced out more words.
“Please. Don’t do this. You know as well as I do that this is nothing to do with Dave, nothing to do with you being engaged… fuck it, I wouldn’t mind if you had forty two children living in a shoe somewhere. This isn’t about that. This is about you.”
She looked down.
“Look, I just need an answer to one simple question.”
She said nothing, but nodded slightly.
“This invite…”
It was so hard to speak. So hard.
“You… designed it?”
She looked up, avoiding my eyes.
“Well, um, I mean, I can’t remember exactly, I think, maybe, maybe Dave did some of the work, I don’t…”
“It was you. I can tell. It’s you all over. Look, you’ve even included your website on it. This was you.”
Silence.
“But… but…”
“STOP IT!” she yelled. “Yes, it was me. YES, OK, IT WAS ME. There, I said it, I confessed, I’m guilty. I designed that invite. I designed that invite down to the very last pixel. And I…”
I took a deep breath, and then finished her sentence for her.
“…used Comic Sans MS?”
“Yes. Yes. I used Comic Sans MS.”
“For your wedding invitation.”
“For my wedding invitation.”
I breathed in deeply, again.
“And the WordArt?”
“At the time, it just… seemed… so… zany…”
By then I was already backing out the door, re-arranging the furniture of the flat in my head to be without my stuff, mentally packing up my Blu-ray discs and USB cables.
She remained still. And then…
“So, this is goodbye, I guess…”
“Yes. The end.”
Now she was crying too.
“Look, I hope we can still be friends. Y’know, on Facebook and stuff. LinkedIn.”
“We’ll see.”
It was all I could manage. My voice was cracking. I had to get out of there.
We was over. Finished. Sans serif, sans us.
And then I was gone.
Helen on It’s (waiting) time.: “Fabulous news, congratulations to you both! X” Jun 8, 21:51
