Annie sleeps like a walrus. That’s not to say she’s an inelegant sleeper — she isn’t, she sleeps in this weirdly prim manner like Dracula, on her back, face up, mouth closed. It’s just that she sleeps forever. Whenever we hang out we always go to bed at the same time, of course, but my body clock simply refuses to allow me through the morning. Annie, if undisturbed, will sleep for 16 hours. It was for this reason that, on our second day in Manchester, I spent around four hours lying awake in my bed, looking at memes on my phone, awaiting the moment my friend would rise from her crypt.
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AK ’23 | Dr Knobhead, I Presume?
First thing she did was ruffle my hair, that incorrigible Yankee dickhead. I’d been extra careful that morning to get it just right. Now I was a mop-end scarecrow once again, angel-pube loofa head. God damn. I’d been thinking about how cool my entrance would be all the way there: I’d sweep up beside her, unseen, and I’d mutter some obscure literary reference, some fantastic quippy masterclass in British understatement – but no. She ruffled my hair, and after a year apart the first thing that escaped my mouth was something like:
“Dick!”
Continue readingAt Home | More Scheming, Less Steaming
You wouldn’t know it – I mean, how could you know it – but I write these diaries all the time. I just never publish them. What usually happens is that I begin doing some other thing, like working or reading a book, and at that instant I am struck by inspiration, and I throw everything aside and sit down and hammer out 2000 words in an insane blur that I barely even remember. Then I sit back and crack my knuckles and read what I’ve written, and while I read my jaw gently slackens, until finally I think ‘nobody must ever discover how shit a writer I am, how inane, how poundingly mediocre my thoughts are’ and I delete them all in an orgasm of self-loathing.
Continue readingAt Home | Beard-Growth as a Form of Self Discipline
I’m in the library. I’m in the coffee shop. I’m in the combination library and coffee shop (and also art gallery).
Continue readingAt Home | All A-Glow
I finished my book!
I finished my book this morning, the Australia one – rewrote the end, finally found the right words after weeks, months of sitting at my laptop and writing things and then deleting them over and over until I finally go ‘PRICK!’ at myself and slam it shut. But now it’s done.
Continue readingAt Home | Total Inner Peace and Absolute Fucking Nirvana
Here’s a little trick to write better. Just start. Don’t worry about what’s gonna come out or where it’s headed or if it’s good or not, just start saying stuff and – look, here I go. Sometimes when I start writing I write the first thought that comes into my head. Sometimes it’s really pathetic things, or stupid things, or just bland. My teeth hurt. Wish I had darker hair on my legs. There’s a fly in my room and I want it dead – and then you just go from there.
Continue readingAt Home | Attention DOOFUS Disorder, Am I Right???
Should probably write something, if only to procrastinate editing the DAMN BOOK THAT’S TAKEN ME THREE YEARS TO MAKE GOOD. It still isn’t good – it’s amateur and passable at best. Why God?
Continue readingFrance | Deluge
Heading back to England in a few days!
Continue readingFrance | Better!
Avignon’s been nuts. Nuts! Nüts!
Well it hasn’t been that nuts. But kind of. Here – watch me as I write another gorgeous diary entry for you.
Continue readingFrance | Pickles
I turned 30 on Sunday. Wasn’t that big of a deal in the end. It’s sort of mad to think that I worried so grandly about it for like, ten years – and regularly made a right mess of things because of this mad looming fear of being Too Old for Stuff – and then it just happened regardless and it’s basically fine.
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