Picture the scene: you’re alone in a room that isn’t your own. You know that you have 20 or so minutes entirely to yourself. A computer is open in front of you. There are notebooks and scraps of paper everywhere. There are drawers and cupboards begging to be opened. What do you do?

What I did was sit on my hands. I sat firmly on my hands because I couldn’t trust myself not to snoop. For five solid minutes I sat there biting my lips, fingers going numb and itching all over with the painful urge to root and root and root. Eventually I decided that rather than risk dead hands I’d check my email, which meant shutting my eyes and hammering ‘sign out’ as fast I could. If I dared open my eyes more than a tiny chink I ran the risk of reading email titles, snippets of messages, possibly incriminating things. And the lure of a snippet would cause me to click the email, open it, write words in the search bar, possibly my own name, and then maybe go utterly insane, and be discovered lying on the ground turning in slow circles using only my feet and nearby cupboards.

Having freed my hands and logged out of all social media presences I found myself rather bored. I laid a hand on a nearby notebook and thought hard. The last time I’d read someone’s diary (hi Paul! Sorry about that!) it had revealed precisely nothing about ‘us’ being a diary with nothing but social engagements noted in, and I was heartily disappointed. The time before had been disastrous. I wondered what exactly I was trying to find: admissions of a homicidal nature? Declarations of undying love? I wasn’t sure which was creepier.

The desperate urge boiled up in me. I shut my eyes and jiggled like a child desperate for the bathroom. I thought about how horrible it would be to leave someone alone in my room and risk them finding my stash of diaries. Or the box of sex toys. Or that one diary, right at the bottom of the diary stash, that is full of emotional things like ‘WHY DOES NO-ONE LOVE ME?’ and ‘I SAW ALIENS’ from when I had a nervous breakdown in 2005. It’s surprising how embarrassing mental illness can be.

Back to the room. I’m sitting there jiggling, a feeling of denial so strong it was physically painful. I wanted to snoop more than I wanted to do anything. My whole body ached, yearned to open a dozen drawers, lie face down in a pile of coats, roll around eyeball deep in a pile of diaries with sordid words wafting round my head like feathers. Just as my jiggling white hot need reached boiling point the door swung open, relief flooded over me. It felt as good as an orgasm on a warm day. For the first time in months I needed a cigarette.

Everything was going to be ok, until of course I was left alone in the room again…

Pictures from unknown Tumblrs!
Title from one of my favourite songs ever: Hide and Go Seek by Bunker Hill

Another friendly reminder that I’m swimming 2.5k in April, to raise money for Marie Curie. If you want to sponsor me then click here and make both myself and a very worthy charity immeasurably happy.

10. Pretended I liked Cro-Mags

9. Was told by a minor celebrity that they fancied my date. Later in the evening told my date that the reason minor celebrity was staring at him was because she thought he was noisy and obnoxious.

8. Pretended I wasn’t scared of fish, until I broke down and cried next to a pond.

7. Developed a really bad Lancashire accent*

6. Told him the reason I’d eaten an entire box of Jumbo size popcorn alone was because I hadn’t had dinner. The real reason was because popcorn is delicious.

5. Got a loan, then spent 75% of it on a new dress.

4. Demanded to borrow a book I had no interest in just so I could return it to them at some point.

3. Carried a copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (in French) in my bag for a year and pretended to read it on the bus in the hope that someone would see me and be terribly impressed.

2. Pretended I wasn’t bothered by the fact that he had another girlfriend in America.

1. Cut my hair like his ex-girlfriend’s. Thankfully it was very flattering.

Picture of my 2nd favourite model ever ever Lindsey Wixson by unknown! 

*I was fourteen, it was summer camp. Let’s not talk about it anymore.

Every time I think about ‘what I want’ from a relationship I get confused. I think about how I’m hungry. Or how I’d quite like a puppy. Or about maybe we might have bedbugs again even though I don’t think we do but what if we do? Because that’s what I’m good at: avoiding situations until they become a big ball of fuck and then blow up in my face.

What I want is to have, as a skeazy guy once told me in a bar, ‘a good time’. But not the sly, winking way that he meant it in. No. What I love about a relationship is the unbridled sense of fun. That feeling of being in a gang or team. That me and you against the world feeling. Dashing across Hampstead Heath and laughing on a swing. While this is starting to sound like a Colgate advert, I think there is something to be said for those fizzy feelings of love and sleep deprivation that a relationship causes, especially in it’s early days. I used to think I wanted someone to hold hands and look deep into the eyes of. Now I think that I want someone to scream at while on the top of a rollercoaster.

And then I think that I already have that person in the shape of one or another of my friends. Maybe I should want someone who’s stable, who can help me live a better life by encouraging me to reach my goals. Someone who’ll run a bath for me, hold my hand at the dentist, that sort of person. Or do I want someone who’ll rock up in a drop top Cadillac, blasting music and spirit me off on a road trip for days on end. Who smokes Gauloises and wears pomade. Tattoos or none? An old soul or a silly joker?

The problems is that I want all of that. I want a tattooed dude with a scooter who likes A$AP and Ann-Margret, who wants to swing on a star, then jump off a cliff into a warm blue sea. Basically, I want the moon on a stick. Is this unreasonable? Should I be tailoring my taste to create someone in my head who might actually exist? Until recently I thought so, and then I saw him. A man on the tube platform wearing a checked 3 piece vintage suit, and covered in old school tattoos. I shuffled near him and realised he was listening to Kanye West. For a brief second I looked straight into his eyes, and then he got on the tube and disappeared. That moment made me realise that it’s ok to want someone to be the moon a stick for you. And that it’s better to want that than to settle for second best.

Illustrations by Anti-Skewl Propaganda and Lauren Gregg

There is rarely if ever a good time to throw out a good chat-up line. It’s creepy in a bar, and terrifying on a bus. Not only is there a layer of thoughtlessness in them, but there’s the implication that you’ve been throwing out the same line to hundreds of girls and waiting until one bites the bait. What anyone wants in a relationship, especially the start, is to feel special, and starting off with a line you read in a book is not special in any fucking way.

That said I do find there are little tips and tricks you end up relying on. Those little phrases that seem to work even though there is nothing at all sexy about them. For a long time I lived about fifteen minute’s walk from my favourite bar and would find myself outside, drunk, with some poor man blathering about phone numbers and cabs, when I would blurt out “Would you walk me home? So I feel safe of course.” This homage to my new found paramour’s chivalry worked every time. No-one wants to leave a lady walking home alone in the dark, and everyone knows that at the end of that walk is my house. What’s not to like? Whenever I said it I was genuinely concerned about walking home alone: my ex had been mugged on the way to my house once, and I am lazy and prone to taking shortcuts across fields in the dark. No matter how effete the man I figured there was safety in numbers.

And so this became my idea of a chat-up line, a coy phrase to throw out there, that had worked so well, that always seemed so spur of the moment, so heartfelt, so vulnerable. Until I was out on my birthday a couple of years ago, hitting on a friend who knew all my tricks. It got to the end of the night and I was stood outside the pub smoking a cigarette. I was cold and drunk, I didn’t want to have to stumble home alone. “Will you walk me home? I’d feel so much safer if you came too.” He smirked and took my arm. “Of course!” We began the trudge home. Five minutes in I dropped his arm, shrieking. “No! No! Not like that! You know all my tricks!” I was mortified I’d misjudged the situation and offended him horribly. He took my arm again. “Why do you think I’m walking you home?”

Reader, we fell in love.*

Still from an artwork by Jeremy Blake

P.S
Thank-you to everyone who nominated me, then voted for me in the Cosmo Blog Awards! Without you I wouldn’t have won! Thank-you a million times over, you are all amazing. I had a lovely time at the awards ceremony and my award is now in our bathroom so I will think of you all each time I pee!

*We also fell out of love, but that’s not such a good ending.

Have you ever had a migraine? It’s like a headache, but a headache so bad it wakes you up in the middle of the night and leaves you lying on the pillow trying to turn your head slowly over without crying. It’s like a headache in that it’s in your head but a headache doesn’t make you start raking over everything that’s happened in the last two years while forming your duvet into a vaguely human shape which you hold then lie on it’s ‘chest’ sobbing. It’s like a headache, sure.

Last night I was dreaming about glitter and cupcakes and buttholes, when a banging noise in my head woke me up. As I opened my eyes the room was spinning. Somehow I dug out the migraine pills in the biscuit tin on my bookshelf, took one, and lowered myself gently back into bed. In the morning when I woke up it felt like the banging had turned into a huge pulsing balloon of pain. More drugs, more painkillers, more darkness. It was all going ok till I ran out of painkillers and realised I couldn’t leave the house as the building’s supervisor was coming over to do a spot check. So I made my little duvet person and hugged it hard.

Hugging is not something I am very good at. In general I dislike being touched, I hate hugging, and will not pat someone’s arm unless I am under extreme duress, or they are crying. Outside of a relationship physical contact is pure, utter, torture. As I lay hugging my duvet person I thought about the last time I hugged someone properly. The last time I really meant it. And I missed it. I started to think about all the little things I missed from a relationship; like giving someone little gifts, or watching someone do something nice for me like cook dinner, or run a bath, and feeling that swell in my heart. Duvet person was collapsing under the weight of my hug so I rolled onto my back. I wished I had someone to go to the shop for me and buy the fancy Neurofen that has the magic mix of things that make migraines go away. I wished I could reward them with a slice of pie I’d made the night before. I wished they could stroke my hair and watch X Files with me and tell me it was all going to be ok.

Obviously, none of this happened. The building supervisor came over, I went to the chemist, I bought the magic pills, they halved my migraine, I got back in bed. The duvet person got demolished, I lay down and let the chemicals do their work. I wrote this blog post. I did not buy anyone a pair of socks to say thank you for helping me. No-one brought me a cup of tea. But it’s ok. I think it’s ok. In the future when I am being brought painkillers and tea and hugs and X Files I will think back to this day and it will have not been for nothing.

“You’ve got the craziest tits I’ve ever seen.”
I am lying, naked, on my back, looking up at him. It takes a while to form the words. “What did you say?”
We both look at my breasts. “You have got the craziest tits I’ve ever seen.”

Earlier, in the bar, as we kissed, arms listlessly by my sides, I wondered what I was doing there. Then the optimistic part of me, the part that wants to make a rainbow out of every shit storm, decided that maybe if I got into it, faked it a little, that maybe I’d get there. So I leant in and imagined I was kissing someone I was crazy about. Someone who was going to bang me into next week.

“I thought you had the cigarettes?”
“I thought you did! Wait here. I’ll go ask that guy for some.” A minute later I return with two Luckies. “Ugh.” I slip into my high pitched voice. “Look at you! Whoring me out!” Even though he is frowning, I laugh.
“You’re being weird.” He lights our fags and passes one back. “You’re hot when you’re normal.”

In the shop, buying more cigarettes for the journey home he opens his wallet. The free drinks are swirling round my head: rum, absinthe, tequila, beer. The constant imploring to ‘just be normal’ is making me act out like a naughty toddler. I am hopping from one foot to the other, thinking about the time I danced round a 7-11 in Guadalajara with my friends, high as a kite. He takes out his wallet, checks how many notes he has. A couple of receipts are sticking out and I grab them, tear them up and throw them on the floor. He calls me weird again and I tell him I’m going home. Outside I can’t decide if I’m more angry with him for being so square, or myself for deliberately acting like a manic pixie dream girl. I hail a cab for us anyway.

“If you want to go home with some normal girl who doesn’t do silly voices every two seconds then you’re standing with the wrong person.”
He pushes the beer across the table at me. “But you can be normal, I’m sure you can.”
“Why bother trying to be something I’m not?”
“Like I said, you’re hot when you’re normal.”

When I wake up I stare at the wall for a minute or so. We are spooning and there is nowhere to wriggle to. When he wakes up it starts again. I wonder if I pretend a little more whether I’ll start to enjoy the seventh hour of fingerbanging. In my head I am flying through a glitter filled sky fucking Michael Pitt but even that can’t get me there. For the first time in five years I fake it. It seems, to the uninitiated, rather convincing. He leaves looking chuffed and a little hungover. I shut the door before he can ask for my number, go back into my flat, put on the loudest song I can find and bunny hop round the front room till I feel ill. Me and my crazy tits feel much hotter now we’re not pretending to be normal.

Stills from artworks by Jeremy Blake

The last time I got dumped I knew it was coming. My boyfriend and I had been dating for more than a year and we were thinking of moving in together. Life was, I thought, pretty good. In the past we had broken up twice: once for an afternoon and once for a week. Even though I have always told myself that on-off relationships are for people who don’t believe they deserve real affection and are happy with the emotional equivalent of table scraps, somehow I had found myself in one.

And so when my boyfriend told me he needed to come round now I became immediately suspicious. For the ten minutes it took him to cycle to my house I paced. What was he playing at? What was so urgent that it needed happen at 6.45 on a Friday evening? The pacing turned to running in circles and by the time the doorbell rang I was hyperventilating. My boyfriend, we’ll call him JingleJangle, was stood in the porch looking at his feet. “JingleJangle, ever since you told me you needed to come round now, now now, I’ve been worrying that you’re coming over to break up with me. So before you say anything, can you just tell me I’m being silly and then we can talk about whatever you wanted to talk about?” JingleJangle looked up from his feet: “We need to talk.”

We need to talk. Those words. I asked him very calmly what he thought we needed to talk about. “Us.” came the reply. And that was when I totally lost it.

The person being dumped is supposed to listen graciously, counter a few egrarious points possibly, then shake hands and give back the dumper’s personal items before cordially wishing them well in their future life. Crying is almost certainly allowed, but to be kept to a bare minimum. I did not respect any of these rules. For the next two hours I alternated between screaming things like “If you think anyone will put up with your bullshit and love you like I did you’re fucking delusional.” and crying while telling him that I ‘refused’ to love him anymore, as though he were desperately trying to make me. JingleJangle tried to explain to me exactly why he didn’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore but I didn’t want to know. All he would tell me was some subjective viewpoint that would have precisely no impact on my future behaviour other than to become a grain of sand around which a pearl of worry would form. “I don’t respect anything you like.” was his first explanation to which I believe I replied something like “Go **** yourself and then take your ***** ****** and ****** ***** with all your ***** ************* while you ******* **** ****** in the ***** ***”.

The crying and screaming was taking it’s toll, so I began to mix it up with some ‘grabbing random things and throwing them at him’. And then he dropped the clanger “You talk too much.” At that point I just began to laugh. It had taken him almost a year of friendship, and another year and a half of dating to realise that? People who sit next to me on the bus know I talk too much! Bartenders know I talk too much! My dentist knows I talk too much! JingleJangle had only just worked that out? I got up, wiped the pools of mascara off my face, opened the door and told him to leave. After the front door had slammed shut, I had trashed my room, and screamed until my vocal chords hurt, I realised that if it took someone that long to realise I talked too much and we had nothing in common then it was probably for the best that we were breaking up, and I logged onto OkCupid to see what my new options would be.

Photos from Suicide Blonde‘s tumblr (by Sam Shaw) and Vanity Fair

- Men should wear socks with their shoes

- Where do all these blonde thin girls with fluffy hair and lots of eyeliner come from and what did they do before they dated these guys who don’t wear socks?

-  If I got a job in PR and was able to stop hating everyone and pretend that I rilly rilly like herbal teas would I date a man with a tan who had a house in the Costwolds and buy Louboutins and would I enjoy that kind of life? Would it be preferable to wearing my pj’s all day and never going beyond zone 3 on the tube?

-  I need to learn how to control myself in the presence of free booze.

- What I also need is an intern

- In my next life I will be lactose tolerant, two inches shorter, have bigger boobs, but a smaller arse, and one of those little doll faces, and really thin wrists, and I will be able to wear high heels without snapping my ankles, and I will probably be a minor heiress and have a boyfriend in a pea coat.

- How do you walk that line between “I am great and hilarious and this booze is just putting a beautiful sheen on the awesome prize that I am” and “There was a…. how…. where’s the…. is that my face?”

- How do I become one of those Miranda July girls who no-one really knows what they do but they never have to wear ripped clothes unless it’s intentional?

- Bunches make me look older rather than younger

- Watching men dance is kind of scary

- Smoking is fun, but it will kill me, also I don’t like the taste, but I feel like I can’t function without the action and ritual of smoking. Does this mean I’m addicted?

Sometimes an object is not just an object. It is a memory, a feeling, a reminder, an albatross round your neck. And that object just stares at you, day in day out, from a mantlepiece, mocking you. It could be anything. Once, for me, it was a 3ft high Winnie The Pooh teddybear, which now I think about it is pretty menacing in itself, but that fucking thing stared at me every day with it’s big goggle eyes and I hated it’s guts. A stupid gift someone had given me with no thought other than ‘you’re a chick, you’ll like this’. So one afternoon I took it out to an abandoned lot opposite my house, stuffed it full of deodorant cans and set light to it. It was bliss. A wave of pure endorphins shot through me as it’s legs careered of in different directions. I had never been happier than I was in that pure moment.

But sometimes a teddybear isn’t enough. There was a night once which involved a group of very polite skinheads who were into Morrissey, me, The Columbia hotel, and £5k worth of damage to a hotel room. My memory of the entire night is a flashing Skins style montage of leaping insanely around, dressed, then in my underwear, and at one point wearing only a shower curtain as a toga, and standing on a burning mattress while I commanded the skinheads to circle the bed and chant at me. If I had thought burning the teddybear felt good then smashing a toilet seat with my bare hands across a bathtub was like a four hour long orgasm.

Today I was tidying, in a perfectly good mood, dancing to Big Pimpin’ and thinking life was pretty good, when I came across a cache of notes, letters, and a book. Each one in turn upset me so much that I ended up sat on the floor in a pile of crumpled notes and dirty bedsheets, and feeling like I was going to need to listen to Fiona Apple for about five hours to recover.

I hated those stupid bits of paper I hated all of them. I wanted to burn them but I’m very clumsy and our house is pretty rickety and old, so I thought better of it. All I could think of was how every time I saw them I would be sad or angry or pissed off and thinking about something that I didn’t want to think about. They weren’t even particularly erudite, and so hardly worth keeping for posterity. A dirty mixture of anger and sadness was welling inside me. Then I had a great idea.

I opened up my sash window as far as it would go, ripped them all up into tiny pieces and let them flutter away in the breeze. And it felt great.

Me aged (in clockwise order): 6, 18, 9, 12

Growing up I was a huge nerd. I had glasses, gappy as fuck teeth, a unibrow, and horrible frizzy hair. My family were vegetarian, foreign, leftie, and compared to all the normal Jewish/Hindu kids I grew up with, totally fucking weird. We went on crazy holidays (Russia! India! The Isle of Skye…) and I went to galleries and marches with my parents instead of my Auntie’s house. I was a speccy nerd who read Zola’s Nana aged 9, yet was banned from watching Pretty Woman. Without any brothers or sisters around I became one of those strange mini adult children who had a snarky reply for everything, and who knew who Caro was. Basically, if I could meet my child self now I’d think she was an insufferable know-it-all brat with terrible hair.

Self-loathing aside I was a total outcast who could barely understand or connect with other people unless it was about early morning cartoons or Nancy Drew. Consequently I grew into a kind of odd adult who sits around alone a lot, talks to the stray cat on my street menacingly, and puts on bunny ears when miserable. I also hold that frizzy headed teenager inside me despite learning to use grooming tools correctly. And so when someone expresses an interest in me it is almost impossible to believe them. Not only is it hard to believe them, but it is hard not to obsess constantly over how they might be lured away by sexy girls who wear eyeliner and high heels, and never have knots in their hair.

As a kid I was horribly jealous of a girl called Kimberley who I was at school with for 10 years. She was pretty, funny, maybe not the brightest spark, but she could bogle and do the butterfly, and all the boys wanted me to ask her out for them. One year her boyfriend got her Prince’s ‘Most Beautiful Girl In The World’ on CD, and said Prince must have written it about her. Even then I thought that might be slight hyperbole because I didn’t think Prince would fancy a 12 year old, what with him being a fully grown man who wasn’t a paedophile, but it was such a nice thought I let it slide. I wanted to be Kimberley so much it hurt.

Every time I am miserable, like today, I find myself thinking of the Kimberleys of the world. And then the universe, as if powered by my furiously cycling legs, starts to lose it’s lustre. Everything seems like a turn off. Even Baptiste Giabiconi licking ice cream off my fingers naked would make me sigh. Jane Fonda rubbing herself down in vanilla scented moisturiser: ugh. Louis Garrell cycling in very tight trousers: yawn. As I start to feel myself as attractive as a curry in a carrier bag, dripping down the legs of a tramp, the rest of the world becomes a grey bore. The irony of such moods is that Kimberley herself is living a deeply unsexy life. Instead of turning into Jessica Rabbit she is a bedraggled Lois Griffin, with a gaggle of children and glasses that make my teenage ones look smouldering. I wonder how things could have gone so wrong; the only conclusion I can come to is that she stopped doing the butterfly…

Photos of me as a child are obviously from my own personal collection. To the person who anonymously asked me on Tumblr where they could see more photos of me, there they are, and you’re welcome. Prince photo is a still from Purple Rain.