A few summers ago I got super into that drone thing. I bought a tie-dye dress, spent most of my time listening to Pocahaunted, and got stoned way way too often. Sadly, no-one I knew really got into the whole drone thing. I tried, I really tried! But no matter how many times I played Wavves’ second album to my friends they just weren’t into it. Which is how, one warm summer evening, I found myself in The Old Blue Last, watching a guy play the cello, while he made gurgling noises through a microphone strapped to his neck.

That, I have to say, was horrible. Eventually he finished and a band came out. As the crowd began to pogo in time I found myself swept over to the merch table where a good looking boy sat alone.”This is terrible.” He whispered. We snuck off for a cigarette and got chatting. We’ll call him Holden, as that was nothing like his actual name. He was American so we had a sort of cute but awkward conversation about New York “I don’t live there.” London “It’s warmer than I thought it’d be.” and tonight “That guy with the cello was really bad.”. Eventually we decided it was ‘time’ to go back upstairs.

As we reached the merch table he asked me why I’d come alone.
“Well I really like the headline band and I couldn’t find anyone to come with.”
He stared at me as he shuffled CDs around. “You like [name redacted]?” He raised an eyebrow, and now, retelling this I am mortified I didn’t realise what was going on.
“Why?”
A silence so long you could have parked an SUV in it. “I am [name redacted].”

After some very English babbling about how the promo photos were fuzzy, and really I don’t look at the photos of bands I like, because like if I like the music, what do I have to care what they look like? I mean unless it’s Girls Aloud, and then that’s different, and then as I took a breath after 2 solid minutes of talking, he put his arm on mine and said “I have to go onstage.” The next half hour was alternately brilliant and pure torture. The problem was that no matter how hard I tried it was impossible not to look like a moonfaced groupie dazzled by the spotlights. When he came off stage I shuffled to the bar, bought myself a stiff drink and necked half of it before he came over. “Are you ok? You looked confused during the show.” He paused. “Or ill.”

An hour later Holden, Holden’s stoner friend, and I were sat on the fire escape out back of the pub smoking weed and talking expansively. Suddenly I realised I was totally blitzed and Holden realised his friends had left for the night and he had no idea where he was staying. The last tube had been and gone. “Let’s explore the city!” I waved my arms around like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and for once it didn’t seem weird. Holden and I began wondering around, and soon we were holding hands and sitting outside the bagel shop. “I live nearby, do you want to stay the night, since you can’t get home?” I made it sound like it was my idea and I think I thought it was.

We made out on the bike rack outside the bagel shop, and in the alley way that smells of pee, and in the park where junkies sleep, the edge of the playground on the block before my flat, and then while walking crablike up my stairs and into my bedroom. Which was where things got odd. I was wearing white lace underwear, which somehow Holden thought were part of me, and he began rutting against me listlessly. After a few minutes I suggested I take them off. He seemed confused. “I thought you were naked.” It didn’t get much better from there on.

The next morning on the tube we held hands and in a foggy haze I kissed him goodbye and went to work. It was the summer, I was probably wearing something else tie-dye, everything felt lovely, I had a braid in my hair and Best Coast on my ipod. I thought I’d never see him again, that like every American dude who comes to London once for a gig, he’d never come again. He’d do an ipod advert maybe, maybe support Bloc Party.

And then he did well, his other band began doing well, he befriended a bunch of my friends in New York, and now he’s making amazing music and playing awesome gigs and I can’t enjoy any of it because every time I listen to his music I cringe from my head to my toes. I’m listening to the music of someone I had a stoned, scrappy, one night stand with. I wish I could enjoy it for the blissed out haze that it is, but I can’t stop thinking of those lace pants, and his smeary glasses.

Photos by Elizabeth Mahoney and Gudny Ros

Although, early on in this blog’s life I declared ‘three is not the magic number’ now I want to take that back. Three is an excellent number, but not if there’s three of you getting it on, that still seems like more work than it’s worth, but in the sense of dating. Three is most definitely the best number of people to have on the go. Two gets odd, like you’re playing one off the other, and one means all your eggs are in the same basket. Which is great if you’re crazy about them, but less so if they turn out to be a dick. Lest you think this is just me pontificating, I’ve been testing this theory out, and it works, honest. Over the last few months I’ve cycled through a variety of people (all for you readers! all for you!) and have decided that 5 is way way too many to be seeing at once, 4 kind of confusing, 3 stellar, and less than is well, it’s better than none when you’re not serious about anyone, but not as good as 3 can be.

When you’re out there, dating around, your main aim should be maximum fun. Fuck finding the one, because let me break it to you: there is no ‘one’. There are billions of people in this world and about 100k are going to be suitable for you, so chill the fuck out. Dating is about fun, getting drunk, doing neat stuff it’s boring to do alone, and meeting people who aren’t awful. Obviously along the way you’ll spend an evening or two so dull you’ll want to gnaw your own face off, and you will probably meet some jerks too. (FYI If you don’t: you’re the jerk.) And for this you ideally need three people. Each of the three has their role. Let me break it down for you…

One of them has to be the flakey one, there’s always one. They text you incessantly for a day or so, then disappear for a week. Return with gifts and promises of swanky bars, you go out, it’s fun, life’s a blast, then they have to go to Dubai for three weeks. If this was your number one pick you’d be going mental, or I’d be going mental (this blog operates on the phallacy that you’re as unhinged as me, deal with it), but since you’re not relying on them for all your emotional needs you can Kanye shrug it out and let it slide. This kind of person is highly unlikely to ever make it to official boyfriend status, but yeah and, so what? It’s fun, don’t overthink it!

The other two are kind of interchangeable: one is probably going to be sexier, the other one maybe more into spooning. Maybe one’s always dragging you out and the other’s got Sky. You need a balance here: you can’t be dating two party mad mentals who are pulling one arm each because you’ll just burn out. Equally you can’t date two dudes who spend all their time in their slippers because you’ll die of boredom. In an ideal world you want one to be James Franco (suave, urbane, witty, hot) and the other to be Keanu Reeves (beautiful, stupid, likes parties).

Obviously this is not an ideal world. And therefore sticking to this kind of formula would be setting yourself up for a massive disappointment. However if you shoot for Ryan Reynolds, you might at least end up with Shia LeBoeuf.*

 
*FUCK YOU. SHIA THEBEEF IS HOT, OK?
P.S: Use condoms and don’t lie about seeing more than one person to the other people unless you want to see no people at all.

The day I first shaved my legs is etched on my mind forever: it was summer, the first genuinely hot day of the year, and I was sat in the front seat of my Mum’s car looking down at my pasty legs when I realised that strips of stubbly black hair were everywhere. In my haste to shave my legs I had not realised I might need to go over some spots more than once, or at least check that my razor strokes overlapped. The rest of my day’s movements were carefully choreographed to show as little skin as possible. Dashes from desk to desk, sitting on the field, with my legs tucked under me and my jacket over my knees. Swinging my jumper and rucksack jauntily around my legs, and then running all the way from the busstop back to my house. Did anyone notice? No. Of course they didn’t. The fear of being seen as a lesbian in my school was so great that had my nipple been somehow hanging out my buttonhole no-one would have told me.

In the intervening 15 years I’ve gotten a lot better at shaving but I have also realised that there are three kinds of shaves:
- someone’s going to nuzzle their face against my legs
- it’s summer and I’m wearing a skirt
- it’s winter and the hair on my legs has got so long that my tights are really itchy, so I should probably do something about that

There is something quite joyfully lovely about being single and growing all your body hair out till you look like an Allen Ginsberg groupie, and yet equally there is something just as wonderful about shaving it all off and feeling like a newborn baby seal. Over the years I’ve wondered though, who am I doing this for? It certainly isn’t the people I’m seeing: I’ve found the ones who have a vested interest in my bikini line are generally total fucking idiots. I would go as far to say that any overt interest in another person’s pubic hair probably marks you out as a douchebag. A trim is good, in fact, often (I’m looking at you here, men) it is highly necessary. It’s not about length, or cleanliness, it’s about me not wanting your fucking pubes stuck in my teeth like popcorn shells. Get it? Good.

No matter how much I love trimming and shaving, seriously there is nothing better than growing your hair. That complete lack of effort and yet such results! Crests, waves, spirals, tufts you did not know you had. Patterns appearing on previously creamy skin. There’s something almost creative about it. Which is why I just can’t get riled up about Movember. If I could grow a ‘tache and get sponsored to give money to charity I would! Hell: I’m growing my armpit hair right now, just to see what it looks like.

My lackadaisical attitude to shaving has in the past seen me caught in some odd situations, and I have found myself stood on one leg in the bathroom, shaving my legs at 4am. Each time has been a disaster, cuts, cold wet legs, a man flicking through his phone in my bed, tired and confused. And for what? To make someone who is well aware that I have body hair think I naturally have none. When the rest of me looks this good, why does it matter that I have 2mm of leg hair? And the truth is: it doesn’t. As I have said a thousand times in a thousand ways on this blog: if someone is going to judge you on something so minor and arbitrary as having body hair then they are not worth your time. You’ll forgive them wearing hair putty in their manga character hairdo, and having a beard that gives you a terrible face rash, or wearing aftershave so strong it makes your eyes water, then they can forgive you wanting to keep your legs warm this winter.

 Illustration by Justin Coffee

Two years ago I was at Latitude Festival with Andrew Kendall. We were both working and therefore not drinking, I was also unknowingly coming down with Swine Flu, and so we spent a long time wandering round in the middle of the night talking. I wanted to start a blog, I wasn’t sure what to write about. My last blogs had just been rambling about my life in general and that wasn’t cutting it anymore. Did I want to talk about music? Put my fiction up? Maybe I should get into photography again. As we clambered a hill looking for some Red Bull, Andrew said something which was to change my life: “Why don’t you write about all the idiots you date?” and so I did.

It would be so wonderful to be able to say to you all that I’ve learned so much and that I’ve grown as a person. That you readers have helped me find true ever lasting love mixed with total filth. But I haven’t. And you didn’t. Instead let’s see what I haven’t learned in the last two years.

1. If an evening starts to go wrong, it will probably continue to go wrong, and get worse and worse, and then someone will pull out pina colada flavoured lube and then you’ll have that stuck in your gums for the next 12 hours.

2. People do not ever change. They don’t change if I ask them nicely. They don’t change if I squeeze my eyes shut and cross my fingers. They don’t change if I date them and try to get them to stop put their dicks in every clunge in a 2 mile radius. They only change when we break up and they date someone else. Do you reckon they might change if I pretended to like prog-rock again? Scrap that, I’m not willing to pretend I like prog for anyone. Sorry.

3. Having a crush on someone is ok. Checking their Facebook and Twitter multiple times a day, then reading deep stuff into everything they post is not acceptable. Neither is meeting someone once, falling in crush with them, ODing on their social media prescences, and then falling out of crush with them because they like Strictly Come Dancing, and consequently being really rude to them the next time you see them.

4. Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream may not be a song which is suited to all occasions despite what you think at 4am when you are drunk. Or 2pm when you are sober.

5. Despite it being an unalienable fact that people who toast their bagels are the wrong sorts of people, I may want to try and be a little more tolerant of alternative lifestyles and admit that these people may occasionally have valid points to make about life. However they will never be my one true love.

This evening I’m off to the Cosmo Blog Awards, something I wouldn’t be able to do without all of you amazing readers voting for me, so thank-you! And here’s to another two years!

There are so many different people to date. There are the kind you smuggle to your house at 4am in a cab and sneak out again under the cover of darkness. The ones that you bump into your friends with and suddenly realise that you do not, under any circumstances want to be seen with this person ever again. There are others who you want to follow around with a kleig light screaming “Look at them! Just look at them! They are so fucking amazing!” I haven’t dated anyone like that for a long time. There has been more than one dinner in a restaurant where I have been sitting on my hands praying that no-one I know walks in so that I don’t have to have an awkward conversation or introduce my date as my ‘uh…. friend’. And so I have devised this simple test: Is this person someone I would like to sit in the window of a cafe near my house with during the day time?

Let’s break it down.

Is this person someone I would like to sit in the window of a cafe near my house with during the day time?
Although the likelihood of me sitting in the widow of anywhere as I shovel food into my mouth is pretty slim, the concept is still valid. If we are sat in the back this could be a morning after breakfast, during which we will have an awkward conversation about jobs (“I don’t really have one”) or families (“They’re all dead”) or even the night before (“You were really drunk and screeching”). It’d be nice to be able to be sober and perky enough to sit in the front of the cafe and see the sun shine on someone’s face and not want to cringe.

Is this person someone I would like to sit in the window of a cafe near my house with during the day time?
In the last three months I have strayed further than 6 miles from my house precisely twice. This is partly because I live in East London and am fucking lazy and partly because: why bother? I work from home, Westfield just opened in Stratford, everyone I know lives near enough to walk over, and if it’s any further than a 30 minute tube ride why are we friends? What I’m saying in a roundabout manner is that the streets around my house are my whole life. If I have to take you to Crouch End to eat (and it’s not for some great secret restaurant that no-one’s ever heard about) then why are we doing this again? The sex had better be amazing.

Is this person someone I would like to sit in the window of a cafe near my house with during the day time?
Nighttime eating is a whole nother thing. It’s both knife and fork. Napkins. Ordering. Booze. Dimmed lights. A daytime meal is talking, properly, no sex after (well, probably no sex after), eggs that are about to burst when you cut them, sandwiches stuffed with filling until there’s no way to eat them sexily. It’s, as the song goes, getting to know you, getting to know all about you, getting to like you, getting to hope you like me. I’ll stop now because that clip, despite the cringe-inducing cultural insensitivity, is making me feel weepy. The point is lunch is like anal sex: you should only do it with someone you really truly trust.

Basically what we’re saying here is: “It’d be nice to want to be seen in public with someone I’m dating.” Jesus, that’s depressing.

Photo from Fuck Yeah Foods That Make You Fat. Yes. That is two Krispy Kremes with a fried egg, cheese and bacon in between them. There is little I want more in life, than this.

3. That dude who lives in the flat above me and has really nice hair.
Sadly a photo of him is not available because that’s a bit creepy, so here’s a nice rabbit instead. It’s about 20% cuter than him.

2. You
Do you want it? Do you deserve it? Hit me up. I’m bored and single. Let’s see how this pans out.

1. Ryan MOTHERFUCKING Reynolds
He can GET IT and TAKE IT and go WHEREVER HE FUCKING WANTS with it.

Photos from the magic of Google Image Search.

(If you want the short version of this story, scroll to the end of the post)

Being a fun, affable, single, girl about town, I recently got an invite to a sex party, which I was promised would not be creepy, or full of ugly people, and where everyone would be really nice and fun. At first I said yes, because I figured opportunities like that don’t come around often and anyway, I didn’t have anything planned for that evening. Mostly I just thought about my outfit, after all what does one wear to a sex party? Will I lose my dress? Where will my underwear go once I’ve taken it off? I thought about all the fun sexy things one could do at a sexy sex party. Sexy sex with sexy people in a sexy place while sexy sex music played.

And then I began to freak out.

Each time I thought of the party, a little knot began to form in my stomach. For years I’d imagined scenes where a rotating cast of nameless strangers came and did terrible awful wonderfully fun things, and yet now that opportunity was right in front of me I wanted to puke. The feeling grew and grew. I kept trying to imagine frolicking around, smiling, laughing, having a whale of a time, boobs and penises everywhere. The knot in my stomach got bigger. The genitals became disembodied and evil with faces on. They chased me round a red lit room trying to gnaw on my hair. I started crying and curled up into a ball on the floor in my frilly tartan knickers until the genitals whizzed off to harass someone else.

The ludicrous thoughts pervaded all my dreams. I woke up crying about a pair of boobs smothering me as I tried to order a frozen pina colada. Later while absentmindedly folding my washing I started to feel itchy and began scratching the back of my leg. Twenty minutes later I looked in the mirror and realised I had a purple rash across the back of each thigh. I won’t lie to you: I cried again. At the doctor’s later that evening I was told it was part stress, part having had tonsilitis earlier this year, and part because you really shouldn’t scratch a rash with a ruler. “It’s very very bad.” The doctor said as he put his face an inch from my arse. “Very bad.” Briefly I worried that I would fart on him, but I didn’t. He gave me some cream and told me to go home. I cried half the way home and the cream did nothing.

Between the rash and the persistent images of me sobbing while genitals ate my hair and called me a horrible person I thought it probably best I didn’t go to the sex party. People would be going to have fun and me wandering around with bush baby eyes, chewing my nails and saying “Don’t touch me!” would probably be a huge downer. Instead I went out with my housemate and got absolutely fucking wrecked, then made him stand on a chair playing rock paper scissors with me while listening to Outkast and waving sparklers in the air. It was probably for the best.

(Short version: I have crippling anxiety and a rash)

Pictures from Magic Eye and Caravanserai

One of the best relationships I ever had was with a guy who’s surname I didn’t know, who’s job I didn’t care about, and who’s phone number I didn’t have. We met on New Year’s Eve and found ourselves shambling around London, drunk and cantankerous, until the early hours of New Year’s Day where we broke into a pub, stole a lot of booze, took it home to his suburban Tudor mansion, and drank it while watching Addams Family Values. At some point during the shambling I sprained my leg, we got chased by an angry bus driver, and 3 days passed in a giggly boozy haze. Even though we’d had a perfectly nice time I didn’t particularly want to see him again. Not because he wasn’t smart, hot, or funny (he was, obviously, all three, give me some credit), just because there didn’t seem to be much point in it. I was busy, he was busy, also I realised that we just weren’t compatible in the long run. But it was fine, no-one cried about it, we went on with our lives.

In the next two years I bumped into him twice, late at night, in some dingy bar or another, and we did it again on both occasions. Each time it was exactly what you want from that sort of thing: sex, a few laughs, a cig in bed, and maybe a nice conversation. When I got up to go to work, and told him he could let himself out when he liked he replied,”You’re not asking me to call you, I’m not asking you to call me. That’s perfect.”

When I think about what I want from a relationship, that’s pretty much it, with just a little more certainty. I’m past the need for someone to listen to my bullshit, or, God forbid, support me emotionally or financially. Neither do I particularly want to do that to someone else. Firstly I’m pretty shit at it and secondly it’s a drag I just don’t need. I wouldn’t mind having someone to come over and watch telly with sometimes, and maybe eat dinner with because the only thing I love more than sex, is food. And that, nebulous as it seems, is a ‘relationship’. It might last a month, it might last 40 years. Who knows and who cares?

It seems though that I have some difficulties in conveying that sense of nebulous ‘let’s just ramble on and see where this goes’ thing to other people, and so everyone I date ends up running away in fear. Because yeah, I’m pretty intense even when the plan is just to watch telly, and I’m loud, and I’m emotional, and I’m probably kind of crazy and demanding. But you know what? I’m a lot of other things too, things that are smart and good, and I’m not only an excellent cook but also a competent baker.

Friends tell me I should ‘be cool’, books tell me I should ‘play hard to get’, but why should I bother playing games or being someone I’m not? Surely pretending to be easy, breezy is as bad if not worse than being the screwball that I am? There’s the axiom that if you keep doing the same thing and expecting different results each time you’re thick, but when it comes to relationships I really don’t think you can apply it. People are twisted little beigels and logic doesn’t come into almost anything they do. I don’t think you, me, the authors of The Rules, He’s Just Not That Into You, Why Men Love Bitches, Women Who Love Too Much, Stop Kissing Frogs, or even that poor woman who you just know has all of these books and twenty thousand more hidden in a basement shelf in her batchelor apartment, know what to do: we’re all just stabbing in the dark until we hit the right spot.

Photos from Vintage Gal’s, and Elizabeth Taylor Loving’s Tumblrs.
Title from, what I think Santigold says in the LehtMoeJoe remix of Major Lazer’s Hold The Line

The other night, while standing in the kitchen of a party, surrounded by beautifully dressed people, all drinking Polish beer and slipping around on a damp lino floor, I had a minor crisis: “What,” I thought to myself, “does one do at a party when you’re not trying to pull?”

That thought sloshed round my head alongside some fag smoke and cider for a while. I looked around at everyone else and tried to figure out exactly what they were doing, which seemed to be talking, or rather, shouting, at each other and drinking. “I’m good at shouting and drinking.” my internal monologue reminded me, “In fact those things, and eating, are probably my top three skills.” But as I looked around it seemed impossible to get into the flow. I felt myself standing against a wall and just staring, goggle eyed at everyone over the top of my bottle and wondering what it was that I normally spent most of my waking hours yammering about. “Bullshit” my internal monologue snapped.

I have been to enough parties in the past to surely have this knowledge stored away somewhere in my brain next to how to unclog a drain and what to do when the cat sicks a hairball on you, but I couldn’t dig it out. I knew that at parties when I had been looking for someone to squeeze on that I hadn’t spent my whole time rubbernecking and swapping conversation partners like I was speed dating, but I felt like I just didn’t know what my purpose at the party was anymore. It would be impossible to talk to the friends I had come with as music was super loud, no-one was dancing so I couldn’t jump up and practice my bestest wine. The other people? Well, uh, yeah. I scanned the room, the room stared back. A man who sounded like he was eating cotton wool walked past saying “Babes yeah, the thing is The Groop were a totally underrated band.” to a girl who looked like she’d lost control of her eyeballs.

For a while I worried that the only three options for party behaviour were i) screaming dancing on tables retching on people’s heads drunkenness, ii) silent eyeballing, or iii) humping the leg of anything human that passed. Looking around most people had gone for i and iii, while I was solidly sticking with ii. I told myself this was all good research, as though I were writing some as yet untitled novel about losers who go to parties and just glare at everyone through their fringes. But suddenly through a fog of Bloody Marys and menthol cigarettes the answer floated towards me: I should just leave. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t not trying to pull, it was just a terrible, horrible, no good party and the only thing that would happen was that I would end up at a busstop in Dalston eating chicken wings, reminding myself that text messages post midnight are 100% less cute than I think they are.

Photos from Music Babes’ Tumblr and Playboy magazine.

All our lives we are told to treat other like we want to be treated, to put our hearts out on the line in emotional relationships, and always be true to ourselves. Films tell us, books tell us, some of our parents tell us, music warbles it at us – over and over again it’s the same fucking message from everywhere. DO NICE THINGS! THINK NICE THOUGHTS! BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER! I just want to ask one question: Why? No make that two questions: Why? And: Does this ever work?

While I can’t say that I’ve always been perfect in my romantic dealings I’ve always tried to act the way I’d want someone else to act with me. I’ve been nice, asked questions, gone to social events I wouldn’t have otherwise attended and been gracious throughout, and for what? What exactly have I had in return? NOTHING. Maybe, just maybe, I’m being a little bit dramatic here, a little bit extravagant with my misery, but that’s what it seems like. You’re nice to people and they dick you about incessantly. You try and treat other people with a shred of respect and you put yourself out there, you admit to yourself, to other people, that you might have feelings (feelings! God forbid you admit you have feelings!) and then the rug comes out from underneath you and you’re left worse off than when you began.

The worst thing is that the only other option is worse than the first: being a dick. When you look at it objectively (and I’m nothing if I’m not objective, right? RIGHT?) being a dick seems to have all sorts of things going for it. Being a dick gets you good jobs, it gets you sweet raises, it gets you buff girl/boyfriends and it gets you a totally awesome life even if you are spiritually bereft. Having spent a good portion of the last 10+ years not so much wrestling, as rolling around in the dirt flailing, with issues I don’t even want to start going into here, being spiritually bereft, and able to enjoy vaguely emotional films without blubbering incessantly seems like a nice life. I want nice shit! Fuck it – Patrick Bateman had a good life, right? Can’t I even have that?

But being a dick isn’t an ‘option’ really is it? It’s something you either are, or aren’t. And maybe I’m a terrible person in dozens of other ways, I can’t be like that. I just can’t be Patrick Bateman, which is reassuring in some ways, I can’t be a heartbreaker, I can’t do it the way other people do. If I am to follow the hippie dippy shit that self-help books tell me to, like ‘being yourself’ and ‘staying true to you’ then I’m a cantankerous curmudgeon with a dash of hopeless romantic. It’s a shitty mix to be honest, and it’s fairly alienating, but it’s who I am. It’s what I do best.

What’s the solution? Is there one? Do you just keep rolling the dice and hope that one day it’ll turn up trumps? Are mixed metaphors the answer? Why am I even asking you all? In my heart of hearts I know there is no answer. Life is a crap shoot and you either luck out or you don’t. Whether I will not remains to be seen.

Now, er, don’t mind me I’m going to watch some films and stuff my face with Party Rings till I explode in a cloud of icing sugar and misery.

Photo by H & L Metz