Saturday 6 May 9st 5, alcohol units 6, cigarettes 25, calories 3,800 (celebrating end of
rationing), Instants 2. Feel
strangely unhappy about VE day fever. In fact, "left out"
might be the expression I am groping towards. I do not have any
grandpas. Dad has got all worked up about a party being hosted in the
Alconburys' garden at which, for unexplained reasons, he will be tossing
pancakes. Mum is going back to the street she was brought up in in
Cheltenham for a whale meat fritter party, probably with her Portuguese
Lothario. (Thank God she didn't run off with a German.) None of my
friends are organising anything. It would seem embarrassingly
enthusiastic and all wrong, somehow, suggesting a positive approach to
life, or that we were trying creepily to annex something that was
nothing to do with us. I mean, I probably wasn't even an egg when the
war ended. I was just nothing - while they were all fighting and making
jam out of carrots or whatever they did. I
hate this idea for some reason and toy with calling Mum to see whether
she had started her periods when the war ended. Do eggs get produced one
at a time, I wonder, or are they stored from birth in micro-form until
they are activated? Could I have somehow sensed the end of the war as a
stored egg? If only I had a grandpa, I could have got in on the whole
thing under the guise of being nice to him. Oh sod it, I am going to go
shopping. 7pm. The
heat has made my body double its size, I swear. I am never going in a
communal changing-room again. I got a dress stuck under my arms in
Warehouse while trying to lift it off and ended up lurching around with
inside-out fabric instead of a head, tugging at it with my arms in the
air, rippling stomach and thighs on full display to the assembled
sniggering 15-year-olds. When I tried to pull the stupid dress down and
get out of it the other way it got stuck on my hips. I
hate changing-rooms. Everyone stares sneakily at each other's bodies but
no one ever meets anyone's eye, and there are always those girls who
know that they look fantastic in everything and dance around beaming,
swinging their hair and doing model poses in the mirror saying,
"Does it make me look fat?" to their obligatory obese friend,
who looks like a water buffalo in everything. It
was a disaster of a trip, anyway. One must only ever shop when one has
no money and no need to get anything (when everything you see will be
perfect) and never, as I did this afternoon, when you absolutely have to
buy something that day. The
trip to Prague - suggested by Daniel for this weekend - was subsequently
never mentioned again. When it got to Wednesday, I mumblingly brought it
up, feeling bizarrely ashamed for doing so. As if it wasn't him who had
suggested it; as if it wasn't peculiar behaviour to invite someone to
come to Prague in eight days' time, have them accept, then never mention
it again. As if I was a total sad-act to have failed telepathically to
realise that he'd gone off the idea, and then been so goatishly
inconsiderate as to make him feel uncomfortable by bringing it up.
"Oh God, yah I'd forgotten about that. When was it supposed to
be?" he snapped, as if I was a nagging ex-wife trying to get him to
take the children to the water slides. "Look, I can't this weekend.
I'm completely snowed under." "Fine,"
I said, walking off with my nose in the air, then dived for the ladies'
loo and slumped on to the seat in shock, staring at the door crazily
with one eye. Later that afternoon, he asked me to come to some agent's
summer party in a marquee on the river next Tuesday night. Wanting to be
happy rather than sad, I accepted - then realised I had nothing to wear. I
still have nothing to wear. The answer to shopping, I know, is simply to
buy a few choice items from DKNY, Nicole Farhi, Joseph; but the prices
so terrify me that I go scuttling back to Warehouse and Miss Selfridge,
rejoicing in a host of dresses at pounds 34.99, get them stuck on my
head, then buy things from Marks and Spencer because I don't have to try
them on, can take them back later and at least I've bought something. I
have now come home with four things, all of them unsuitable and
unflattering. One will be left behind the bedroom chair in an M&S
bag for two years. The other three will be exchanged for credit notes
from chain stores that I will then lose. I have thus wasted pounds 119,
which would have been enough to buy something really nice from Nicole
Farhi - like, er, a T-shirt. It is all a punishment, I realise, for being obsessed by shopping in a shallow, materialistic way instead of wearing the same rayon frock all summer and painting a line down the back of my legs; also for failing to join in the VE Day celebrations. Maybe I should ring Tom and get a lovely party together for Monday. Is it possible to have a kitsch, ironic VE day party - like for the Royal Wedding? No, you see, it isn't - you can't be ironic about dead people. And then there's the problem of flags - half of Tom's friends used to be in the Anti-Nazi League and would think the presence of Union Jacks meant we were expecting skinheads. I wonder what would have happened if our generation had had a war? Maybe we would be a bit less mad. Ah well, time for a little drink. |