My refusal to acknowledge a shift from 2020 to 2021 has nothing to do with covid yet everything to do with loss.
No auld lang syne. No opening the back door to let out the old before opening the front door to welcome the new.
No bubbles. This evening I'll sip a glass of Italian or Spanish or Portuguese or French red, and pour one out for our bond with the EU. Brexit can get to fuck.
I think maybe what I need is to live in a soap. When you live in a soap you turn up with a career, or pick one up over two episodes (so within a week). When you change careers you get another job top speed: usually working in a cafe. Were I in a soap, instead of still wondering what the hell I want to do when I grow up (I'm fifty in Feb) I would be working in a cafe. In Roy's Rolls. With Roy. (Currently take-away only: Tier 4 tomorrow.) Roy. I would rock that.
Also, when you live in a soap, your house decorates its sweet self. In between episodes. I would sit at my kitchen table with a brew and the feature wall would shift and shape around me. Like Bradbury's jungle wallpaper, but with a floral yet geometric repeat design you could never acutally choose, but why be picky? It's done for you, whilst you dunk the last of the Danish butter cookies into your PG Tips (now compostable plastic-free).
When you live in a soap you have to take your turn with seventeen divorces, three spousal deaths, one spousal re-appearance, a daughter who believes you are her big sister, a big sister who is your mother, a brother who steals your laptop for drugs, your own drug habit that ends with a beard and homelessness, three train crashes, a tram crash, two plane crashes, too many hospital stays with a beep beep machine to count, twelve court appearances (eight aquittals), three prison terms, a body under the patio, and at least one stint as a landlady. At the very least. Fair doos. But alongside all that soap life gubbins you get regular employment and a quickly decorated residence. I could do soap life.
I got locked out of my head. I'd noted the password down on a scrap. I'd put that scrap between the pages of a story. I forgot which.
I stared at all the stories, with all the pages, and all the scraps. To flick through would cause disruption at a time when things need a flick of tidy. Blimey, though, I could use a good story. One with wolves which curl up to sleep deeply, ogres which become distracted by flickering lights, and flickering lights which susurrate as starlings.
I looked away from the stories. The password, a docile thing which avoids a direct gaze, rose on its soggy scrap, and softly, silently, I think I picked it up. Did I pick it up? Can I?
Over there today the tangerine cretin continues to claim he has evidence of anomalies in the Dominion Voting Systems machines, dead people voting, and corruption in Democrat-run cities that were won comfortably by Biden/Harris but you don't know her, she goes to a different school.
Over here today the craven entitleds bray that a vaccine co-developed by the German biotech firm of the child of Turkish immigrants and manufactured in Belgium is a British triumph, and that grabbing it first is a feat of Brexit, even though the supply was authorised using provisions under European law.
I expected the tory sonic boom as misdirection of the cliff edge of the 31st of December that is some Thomas Hardy shit, but the lies, the straight-up deceit? Why do these... perfidious, I'll say perfidious, it's a cracking word... lies still shock? Why, when we've lived this since we tripped over the cat into that rip in the space time continuum that was 2016, does my stomach still cement in an impotent fury that really can't be healthy?
Summon the court physician. Call an intermission.
Why did Danny Kay not add a verse noting that the boy who observed that the king was in the altogether was strung up on a lamppost and left, spit-soaked, until his small, decayed limbs dropped off one by one?
It's altogether too chilly a morn.
what has she done now?
She says she hates using icing sugar with a passion. She's only saying that because she saw on my gingerbread Instagram that I hate using icing sugar with a passion.
that must be the answer
She's got my Lakrids. Only she calls them bonbons. Bonbons, I ask you.
what's she making with those?
Nothing. They are in her liquorice case, next to the dragees... I had no idea you said it that way... and the pellets she's using to make a sauce for the burnt Basque cheesecake I was going to make next week before she stepped in and made it this week for everyone to see.
you can still make it. it would be nice.
It Won't Be The Same. And there was my crispy chilli, the same jar, my sweet smoked paprika, the same tin, my kimchi, and my posh tinned toms, and I keep those right at the back of the cupboard. She must be coming in at night and having a right old ruttle. I think she hides out the back in a hedge and peers in through the door.
like julianne moore?
Would that make you happy, love?
yes. very happy.
Just like Julianne Moore, but with the exact same Danish dough whisk I just gave to Mrs Parker for her birthday.
is there no end to it?
Then, just to rub it in, she put black banana peels in a curry. She knows I can't eat ripe/cooked bananas because ripe/cooked bananas give me sinus ache.
what a cow.
And she eats what she does, like she does, yet looks like she does, and says she never diets. She's sent to try me. I tell you, if she comes for the fairylights, she's a goner.
that'll show her.
Zig has got me her book for Christmas, like I hinted, hasn't he?
He wasn’t much cop at keeping his mask on straight, and even worse at the two metres thing, but he knew when a house wasn’t for staying put.
Yup, it’s definitely moving, that.Underpinning is drastic and too hasty. Doing nothing will make the crack gape wider. ‘You cannot solder an abyss with air’, but you can fit an expansion joint. Who knew. Did you, Emily?
First off: an expansion joint between the old and the new. Something that should have been fitted when the work was done, but not to worry, a retrofit is doable, if more inconvenient, messier, than fitting it from the off. An expansion joint allows for movement, because houses move. It could be seasonal, it could be water, it could be worms. Could it be worms? I think I made that bit up. Importantly, If you add what’s new to what’s always been there, the movement isn’t always in the same direction. Obvious, once he said it.
That I have no foundations makes me flinch, and sometimes stare at, sometimes wince at, the thinner crack in the front wall with that permanent line of wet. No foundations are, the man said, surprisingly common.
You wouldn't think it. Curtains will cover that crack.
So, he’ll email the report, with the invoice. He grappled his mask as he left.
I’ll see about fitting an expansion joint. To absorb the gap between old and new. First off.
