One of the things in this crazy old life is that you never can tell when you’re going to come face to face with a Nazi hoard. I was round a mate’s house for supper and she was baking beetroots from scratch for a puy lentil salad. Yes that’s right. I do health now. But I put cheese on almost all of it.
We’d been having a Michael Jackson dance off with her son on the kitchen tiles and I’d come the closest I’ve ever come to doing the moonwalk. Which was about as close as the moon actually is to my feet. So still quite far but not as far as, say, Mars. Or Uranus. Never has there been a more felicitous way to kill time before the beetroot’s done. Four women attempting the moonwalk arm-in-arm while a seven year old watches shaking his head. (He can do the moonwalk easily, see. Maybe it’s just something some people are born with. Like a full head of hair, or six toes.)
It was a long-awaited girly catch-up night and we’d been dashing from topic to topic like dragonflies, skimming lightly across the tops before moving on to the next thing. Work, love, food, romance, garden furniture, T K Maxx. 
There was a natural lull.
“Ooh! Do you want a glimpse into my dark past?” My friend and host suddenly offered out of nowhere.

“Er. YES!” We shrilled back as she dashed out of the room.
She returned moments later with an old biscuit tin. She laid it on the table, and opened it up. It was packed to bursting with old cigarette cards of movie stars from the 1930s. Gold embossed things little bigger than the face of a matchbox. The colours were turned up to technicolour, vibrant emerald greens and corals and peacock blues, eyes blackened, vermilion lips, coquettish little smiles and beaming gleams of white teeth. Some character types in big quirky costumes, with knowing looks as if that was what had made them famous enough to be on a cigarette card and they were damn well going to keep wearing it. Most of them were strange names we’d never heard of. Mostly Germans, though some were your usual suspects. Gable. Dietrich. Garbo. You know the types. And, oh, was that…Hitler? Yes. That looked a bit like Hitler.
Then she pulled out the piece de resistance. An album of photos once owned by her German grandmother. From 1933. “Aw!”, we all cooed. Then she went to the page she had been meaning to show us. And there was a Nazi rally. Hundreds of German soldiers lined up in a great expanse of concrete doing the famous salute under billowing flags. Under the photo was written in a cute old-fashioned hand – ‘Heil Hitler’.
We all went a bit quiet. I think the sight of a swastika will always cause a chill in the blood for years to come til this small phase of history is as obscure as Ghengis Khan or the Egyptians – if humans make it that far – but you’re usually used to seeing it in books and documentaries, not in an old biscuit tin on your mate’s kitchen table. I pointed out that the album was from 1933 and that Hitler had not perpetrated any of the world-changing havoc and cruelty at that point and had been seemingly the one who would save Germany. He had been…a hero. He had been Hope.
We went back to the cigarette cards and soon began chatting about something else. 
Would I keep souvenirs of a terrible part of history, or would I throw them out in disgust, as though there is a dark complicity in the keeping of things. But sometimes it’s the tangible items from the past that make us think. Sometimes a biscuit tin in the attic wields more power than a lesson.
And it just goes to prove that you can never tell where an evening will go. Conversation moves on. The world moves on.

  

So I’ve got post festival blues like you wouldn’t believe. I’m sloping around at home, leaving a trail of woe like a hormonal slug. The dog is staring at me balefully from the sofa, wondering what happened to his mummy, and I have no answers for him, just an intermittent stream of sighs into his soft ears. If you collected all the sighs that have ever been exhaled chestily in every period costume drama that’s ever been made and played them all in a row, you would pretty much be in my lounge with me right now. My dog would probably give you a ‘get me out of here’ look. I’d let you take him. I’m not cruel. 

I suppose it’s just your usual comedown stuff. No biggie. But it feels bigger when you’re in it, doesn’t it? Like you’re stuck in an opaque orb of emotion that you will never emerge from. Will you ever see the same world again? Is it all changed forever? It’s the same kind of potent comedown you can get from an amazing holiday or strange head-flipping experience, like an evening of talk with people who light your brain up like fireworks. The dancing rushes of adrenalin, oxytocin, and serotonin, all the madcap science that makes it worth being alive. I’ve just had a whole month of that. The ‘break’ away, the fun, the booze, the people, the brain-lighting, the chemicals of being human. I’m not ready to let it go, to subside, to settle. I’m mourning it.

 

Don’t get me wrong – I do feel suitably pathetic and am laughing at myself at the same time. I am not so self-indulgent as to be gracing this mess with the romantic glow of actual tragedy. Life is not one long festival, I do know that. I’m not a moron. But also – I am a moron. Half an hour ago I tried to tell myself that a month in Edinburgh had managed to wrest from me the same emotional response as leaving my high school after seven years. One month does not equal seven years. It doesn’t. And yet, today, it does.

 

I miss my friends.

 

They were the important part. I lay on squishy sofas in bars with some of my dearest friends, some of whom I hardly ever get to see, and there we all were together. And there I was, watching them all meeting and getting on like a house on fire, with so much love in my heart I don’t know how I didn’t shatter the optics with telekinetic energy.

 

We were all fun and vulnerable together. We were Funerable. That’s it. We were all there, being vulnerable together, talking, being honest and real and broken and silly, laughing like drains, and crying and hugging, and now we are apart, and we will never convene in quite the same way again. We will all change and have new stories to tell and won’t be in the same bars at the same time in the same combination with the same feelings in our hearts. That was that time, our time.

 

Everything is ultimately about the people, isn’t it? It’s not really the place, or the play, or the bits that go into the writing of the play, or the reception of the play, or even the feeling of success that can come from doing a play well, it’s the people. Your ego is there, but it’s not there for you. People are. That’s what it’s about, and that’s why it hurts when things come to an end.

 

And I’m no good at ends. At goodbyes. If I have a recurring theme in anything I ever write, it is probably that. Well, that, dads, suicide, and being a general twit in life. You’re all probably terribly bored of me. I’ll write about something new next week, I promise. But in the meantime I’m a twit huffing about in my pyjamas and I miss my friends. Give us a cuddle.

  
 
 

 

I think it’s safe to say I needed to cry. It’s the only explanation for the fact I sat there in the front row, face streaming by the time the first song had finished. It must have already been there, waiting to spring out at the slightest provocation. There was a time when I was permanently primed to sob at anything; Eastenders, a nice dinner lady dropping a ladle and looking dead embarrassed, dead bees. The embarrassing list is embarrassingly endless. But I cry less quickly now. Age, I think. Perhaps my hormones govern me differently, perhaps I’m just a bit more used to the world being a difficult beast to wrangle with, but though I cry less often, when I cry I really like to get it all out. And it all comes out of those tiny little orifices we call tear ducts. How strange that those tiny channels through which our pain rages, small as pin-pricks, can stretch wide as a river-mouth to purge our souls.

It’s unfortunate, though, when it happens at a friend’s gig, in the front row, with no tissue and only a sleeve to dispose of the mess. My friend Ross was doing a big gorgeous gig in an old church under his musical guise Blue Rose Code, up here in his native Edinburgh, or Edina as he calls it. He’s a superlatively lush singer-songwriter who’s got Ewan McGregor and Ian Rankin banging on about how they can’t stop listening to him, which is pretty cool.

I don’t suppose it helped that I had had a glass of white wine beforehand. It is the demon juice. I don’t know why I do it. It is tantamount to standing naked on a cliff, screaming at the gods to smite me. But in a glass. (Self-destruction tastes sweet sometimes, doesn’t it.)
I also don’t suppose it helped that I was teetering at the emotional end of the spectrum anyway. The Edinburgh Festival is a glorious privilege, but you fucking pay for it by being dragged to the city limits of your vulnerability, draped in the torn flag of neurosis, swigging 100% proof doubt from a hipflask. But it also didn’t help that Ross, that beautiful tyke, writes songs deliberately designed to make a mess of you.

So let’s blame him. As he played, singing songs about love – old love, new love, Edinburgh, London, running away, coming home, breaking things, being broken, mending, loving again, all accompanied by wondrous musicians – those tiny little pin-pricks in the corners of my eyes dawned open and it all came tumbling out. Everything. And I did it in silence, but for two loud humiliating honking sniffs. The moment Ross finished playing I legged it to the loos to sort my face out. I straightened myself up like a Picasso on the wonk. Then I went out to tell him he was wonderful and I hated him.

As I sat talking to the musicians who had played that night, I realised why I had been rendered such a mess. The songs had coaxed out old things. I think it was the first time I had cried for my marriage. That silly too-brief thing that should never have happened in the first place. I had walked away from it and barely looked back and I had certainly never mourned it or missed him. Isn’t that dreadful. I found instead that rather rude alternative; happiness. But of course those songs should have born a spike up here in Edinburgh. I had performed up here for years with my ex, and then once we broke up Edinburgh became a new place altogether, of my own work, my own fun, my own self. It occurred to me I had never looked back and been outwardly thankful or sad for the nice things we had had together briefly at the start, because I was so focused on looking forward and finding myself after having felt like I’d been in a pocket for years. Ross’s music, so exquisitely bare and open about love, made me see I rarely talk about love. I think I’m still figuring bits out. Perhaps I will write a big book about it in a couple of decades time when I’ve let my hair grow out grey and I walk in total candour. But Ross provoked a response in me that I was not expecting. I’m not sure if I was given a time machine whether I would erase my marriage altogether because you can’t ever really want to be rid of the things that teach you about yourself and life, but I do think I would erase certain things. Even though we are better apart, even though it feels like another life, a forgotten page in a book I’ve not read for years, it turns out that some part of me – perhaps the quietly toiling archivist in my heart – needed to honour the time we were together – just for an hour, with tears, before forgetting again. Because that was my life then, and by wiping things from our minds we shorten our lives. It takes courage to live unabridged.

Add some Blue Rose Code to your life: http://bluerosecode.com

I’m not very good at being hot. I know this because when I got my arm stuck in the slats of a venetian blind earlier while trying to push the window open wider I just stood there because I didn’t know what else to do. My brain was so sluggish and my arm was so happy to feel a breeze that I just let myself be stuck for a bit. From the outside it must have looked like someone had been drugged and kidnapped and was trying to make an escape out of the box room office of a suburban sex dungeon. But no one came to my aid because they were all suffering their own hell, inanely holding mini-fans to their faces and dreaming of that time they nearly drowned in an icy lake when they were five.

Heat does funny things to people. Like, I am staring out of the window right now, in between prodding these sweaty keys, melting like marshmallow at my touch, at a lady in the street who has tied her hair up in a turban fashioned from what looks like a t-shirt, and has tucked her long skirt into her knickers. It makes her look very exotic like an African queen, but like you wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lift with her because she’s hosting orphaned pigeon chicks in her pubic nest. Actually that would be awesome, what am I saying, I’m smacked off my tits on Vitamin D. Over there by the tree that shits purple wax on cars are boys kicking their heels with their tops off, smoking. That just isn’t safe. They are past the point of having any moisture left, they could go up in flames like a hay-bale. Elsewhere the panting of dogs is causing minor tsunamis five thousand miles away, people are stockpiling fruit cider torn from the shelves of ravaged off licences, and no one is talking. Tongues have swelled too big to get the words out, and besides – they all hate each other.

Earlier in the day I caught myself at various instances doing the following:

1) Shaving the dog and thinking about running the clippers over my head too. (I thought better of it. I haven’t the cranium for a GI Jane and people already think I’m enough of a lesbian as it is.)

2) Lying face down on a pile of newly-washed and still-wet towels on the kitchen floor because, well, why wouldn’t you. They’re cold and wet and you are in a survival situation. It’s a Bear Grylls basic.

3) Conducting heat tests around the flat to see which bit was cool enough to get around to replying to a text in. Not managing to work my thumbs, I left a friend hanging on an important question because I just didn’t care enough. So what if they needed me. Sort your own life out, you selfish shit. I’m dying.

4) Splaying my fingers into a V sign from my prostrate near-death position in the hall at a plane that flew overhead in case it were off to somewhere like Iceland or the North Pole. Bastards.

5) Leaning into a big freezer at the supermarket and consider dragging all the peas and nuggets out onto the floor so I could fit my whole body inside, shut the door and pretend I was in Narnia or a morgue fridge or some other frosty dreamscape.

6) Getting home and standing in front of my own freezer because no one was there to judge. Rubbing ice cubes over myself in a way that might be sexy on a Brazilian model but on me probably just looked like I was having a delusional ice-related Disney breakdown after hearing ‘Let It Go’ one too many times.

7) Finally caving and watching the clip of Kanye West being an unutterable twat at Glastonbury. (Something I would never have been compelled to do when of sound mind.) Thinking I saw an old friend coming on stage to be his backing dancer but assuming it was just a mirage like when Hunter S Thompson sees weird shit in the heat-wafts of Vegas off his cock on acid.

8) Forgetting what I had been intending to write my column about before the nation was attacked by forces from outer space (i.e. the sun). Deciding it would be a good idea to write about how rubbish I am when I’m hot instead. Et voila.