Subject matters

What pretty day. I really ought to go out in it, but it's Saturday which is my day for total indolence. I'll have to give it up at some point. I mean, I really enjoy Doing Stuff, it's just that there is something magnificent about the Doing of No Stuff.

TWU has retreated and retracted and all that. Thank frick. She did this by proxy of the managing agent, having by the sound of it had a bit of a talking to by my actual proper bona fido neighbour. Typically, I felt a bit rotten and was going to go round and make nice, but while I believe in the sorting-out-of-things and the making of the nice very deeply, I've also learned that with some people it isn't worth it. Not that I'm going to be hostile. Just as neutral as an inoffensive colour on a rental flat wall.

I was going to paint these walls, in fact (my literal actual walls - keep up), if only because it's great to be allowed to do it by a landlady. When I also asked if I could knock a few nails in the walls to hang pretty things thereon, she agreed without a moment's calculating hesitation. Yep. Go nuts. Fill your boots. And your rented walls. With pretty. This is wondrous in a world that frowns on tenants' use of Blu-Tac and knocks the little smudges off their deposit to the tune of hundreds. Even though they should damn well give a place a lick of paint before new tenants move in anyway.

So, yes.

Oliver James has a new book out called 'Affluenza', about how capitalism makes us miserable. I've had a sneaking suspicion for yeeeeeeears. Sometimes I want things that I don't even want. It's nasty. Someone now needs to do a book about how the media make you miserable. You can't escape it - even mostly avoiding the papers, as I'm having another phase of doing (and it really is very relaxing), makes you feel terribly Guilty. Surely the price you pay for your complacent fatness and frivolity and relative comfort is being made and kept aware of the misery of others. But then a lot of the time you can do nothing about it. So what kind of an obligation is it? Are we just supposed to bear witness to it? I think to an extent we should. And yet and yet.

Still, the papers unsettle me in a hundred different ways aside from their actual content. I hate reading good writers because it makes me feel like a worm. I hate reading bad writers because I want to know why they are getting work at all, and then start to fret about the dumbening of everything and all. I hate the sensationalism and the pandering and the wankiness and posturing, and how there isn't a single paper I really feel I can align myself with at the moment (I mean, you expect it with political parties, but come on, how many papers are there?) I can't bear my own tiny attention span, and skipping down pages and skating across paragraphs makes me feel queasy. The stuff I can focus on often makes me flappingly incensed, and then I have to find someone to rant at, and they have to put up an umbrella, and no one benefits.

I suppose it all comes back to capitalism and the whole too-much-choice-is-no-choice-at-all thing. This probably goes for people as well. Just too many. No one has enough time to adequately maintain all the friendships and acquaintances they'd like to. I'm constanly guilt-ridden or perhaps guilt-stricken or guilt-nibbled by my neglectfulness. If I get in touch with people I haven't heard from in ages, and send them a lot of breezy wiffle, I make them feel guilty. It is horrendous!

Sigh. The only solution is the boringly predictable one of mild hedonism and indulging the lower instincts. Which I will be doing in the usual polite and legal Saturday-approved fash as soon as I've done the washing up and something about my hair.

The Book is in mock-up form. I am sort of thrilled and sort of not, as usual. There are going to be several things I am going to have to Let Go, I can tell. Writers are always going to be tiny scrabbling worker ants, and ultimately we just have to feel grateful that we haven't been fried to an ant-crisp by the cruel magnifying glass of the universe.

Loud + clear

Findy-term of the day - you are an idiot dancing rabbit. Surprising number of people arriving here with variations on 'I have waited for you all my life'. I bet they're disappointed.

Weekend of pleasant and unpleasant surprises, which still weren't quite proper surprises in that I could have figured them out or extrapolated, projected, or wotnot. Sad stuff and happy stuff in dizzying proximity. Terribly melancholy Saturday rescued in its final hours, followed by pretty fucking good Sunday which lasted about three days - although it didn't involve Chinese New Year, because evidently I'm destined never to experience it. I think it has been Written that I shall be trampled by an over-enthusiastic dragon or something, so the universe is trying to keep me from it, at least until 'my' book comes out.

The sad stuff is a rotten deal out of which I have got lightly, which always makes for Guilt. But it can't be helped. Being a control freak, of course, I resent this enormously. At least it was preceded by nice things, even if there aren't going to be more of them. Shows the very serious and pressing need to appreciate people and situations and all while you are fortunate enough to have 'em in yer orbit. And a bit of Coleridgey melancholy never hurt anyone. Much. As long as it doesn't descend into Keats, obviously.

Woman From Upstairs is continuing to be a bit batshit. I've got on OK with her previously, although she is a cantankerous, kvetching, self-centred sort of an annoying neighbour. But she will complain about me and the dog with relation to the garden to neighbours outside within my earshot (alright, so I had to stop eating my cereal so the crunching didn't obscure the poisonous gossip, but that still qualifies as earshot). And then she will proceed to dump some junk at the bottom of the garden, which is arguably worse in petty terms than a stray bit of poop. She has pedantically divided our shared garden into two halves, with a flimsy fence ensuring the dog gets 50% less gambolling/mooching space - part of the fence is fine netting, in which a squirrel nearly met a harrowing dolphinesque end the other day. (I would have presented its contorted corpse to her and made her think, as they say in the north, on.) But the junk - bits of old bed and wood and stuff - are in 'my' half. Which begs the question - why doesn't she just fuck off?

I can't grumble though really - it's a lot less bad when it's someone you know and have spoken to and can get on with who's being obnoxious. I've generally been lucky with my neighbours, and just as I don't think WFU has any real reason to complain about me considering how awful and selfish and abusive and evil neighbours can be, I don't have much reason to whine about her. She occasionally crashes about upstairs swearing and being industrious, but then I crash about downstairs getting the dog to leap over my legs (fun and good exercise) and getting annoyed about the lack of hot water or telling the dog to stop savaging his toys when the post comes. (In fact most of my crashing about is by proxy, or at least assisted.) So we're probably even. And my other neighbours I know by name and they are proper, good neighbours, the kind everybody needs but usually has to suck up not having. Their benign presence makes me very happy, because I know how rotten it is to have nasty tensions or just massive indifference from people you hear, if not see, every day. It's sad. I want to start some sort of Scheme. Cakes and tea and little considerate notes and trust and engendering of the sort of minor fondness that is unique to neighbours, who will never see each other again once one moves.

Oh! I will never see Lovely Woman Next Door and her boy again when I split, and there will be no one to be the keeper of my spare keys. I must try and appreciate them while I have them, and I do try. With whatever new ones I have it will be charm offensive ago-go, which is the minimum necessary when you have a giant lumbering creature with the canine equivalent of the 'TOXIC' symbol on his head in your care.

Two - count 'em - instances of inverted-comma-ownership in this post. And also the neighbours aren't really mine, and nor are the spare keys, or the main ones either. Alas! Nothing is quite mine. I just lent out a book, one of my favourites, which I half-inched from my first London flatmate, so it's never really been mine. If I ever see it again, it means karma has not been correctly installed in this supposedly improved but actually quite rubbish version of the cosmos. But this all prepares me for the bizarre concept of house 'ownership', which still seems like a hilarious misnoma. Latest figures show that only five people in the UK actually own their property, and are blissfully mortgage-free, and are so posh that you need a translator. I find the whole thing quite daft, but as long as things don't start to own me, I suppose it's not a big deal.

I have a new project to start on, which isn't mine either. Once you start to think of things in these terms, you realise that the only thing you can actually lay full and permanent claim to is a small pot sheep with one chipped ear. It's quite liberating, although I suspect all that clutter that doesn't quite belong to me is still going to require sorting out soon. Bah!

Incidentally, did anyone else immediately think of this when this was shown everywhere? Oh, and whatever she's done and however much of a fuck-up she may be, headlines like 'Grab a front-row seat for Britney breakdown' are not cool, asshole.