We’ve become these people that, like, act almost kind of cool, and adult, and stuff. We lounge around with our Macs, in our slightly hip outfits (him: Croc sneakers–though please don’t picture these, because his are actually really, surprisingly groovy plus he bought them from a man on the street for the price of two pints–khakis, and a Banana Republic jumper; me: black skinny jeans (yes, I finally caved), slightly ethnic scarf, long cardigan (according to the Observer magazine, cardigans are “in”)–actually, the image almost disgusts me. We cook breakfast, have friends over for casual lunches. I sit under a duvet drinking lots of tea and eating clementines (and I’m not the only one) while he catches the second half of the Spurs v Portsmouth game. When he comes home we watch a few episodes of 30 Rock and order a curry.

“You’re not eating the nob of your sausage?” he says when I remove the end of my lamb and place it back in the container.
“No,” I say. “I got bored with it.”
He picks it up, eats it. I’m chewing and gesturing wildly, like I have something really important to say.
“You’re going to make a joke about the nob of my sausage,” he says. I swallow.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I am.”

(Maybe not so adult.)

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There’s this song by The Be Good Tanyas called “Light Enough to Travel” that I’ve always liked. It’s a good song anyhow but I find these lyrics especially pertinent to today’s post:

It’s how I feel. Not by nature inclined to meet people someplace I can’t be heard or seen, I’ve squandered my prime clubbing years by spending my time perched on park benches reading, and participating in other similarly docile activities, like evenings at the pub or long Sunday lunches. We tend to like to talk to our friends. We’re funny like that.

But last night, to celebrate the fact that I was feeling like a human being again, and not a weary monster made of snot and soreness, we went into town to meet up with a good friend who has recently relocated to London (which makes it feel like he’s on another planet, because, well, we’re basically old people in young people’s bodies). He was in town for the night and I thought a glass of red wine would aid the healing process (they say there’s good stuff in red wine, you know, and anyway, I couldn’t stay in the house any longer), so under cover of January darkness, buffeted by a city wind bordering on a gale, we left the house and headed for one of our regular pubs to share a bottle.

The problem with a Saturday night, however, which we so often forget, is that things get crowded, and there’s a sort of madness in the city right now, related I think to it being a New Year, a cold month, the heart of winter. After a charmingly frigid December, after all the Christmas trees have been taken down, Oxford in winter becomes a strange place, fitful, full of waiting. Bled of students, she waits for term-time to begin; bled of warmth, of light, she awaits a new season. You can feel on the wind that there’s an edginess, a nervous and mysterious force, but you can’t pinpoint where it comes from and you can’t escape it just by knowing that it’s there.

So the crowd in our pub was not an ordinary Saturday night crowd. It was someone’s 26th birthday (I know this because he wore a flashing badge that said so) and he had apparently invited all of his hairdresser friends: girls with black-and-white hair swept into contorted shapes, boys with slicked, spiked ‘dos and very tight trousers. The girls were barely dressed–that’s another thing about Saturday nights in the dead of winter here. Hotpants, backless dresses, no tights, high, high, high black heels.

Then another friend called and said she was at the nightclub across the street and wouldn’t we join her? And we said no, because we’re not like that, we object to nightclubs, they’re horrid places, they’re rank and foul and there’s no fun to be had unless you actually want to be dry-humped by a slimy stranger and then possibly go to bed with him (or her) later, which we definitely DON’T.

So it came as quite a surprise to me that, ten minutes later, we were maneuvering our way past about seventeen large bouncers in black jackets and neon armbands, climbing the stairs, ordering a drink. It came as an even greater surprise that we actually enjoyed ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong: it was loud, and dark, and I was beyond overdressed, but the music wasn’t the ordinary drab string of thump-thump-thumpy songs (they played the Proclaimers, and any establishment in which I can belt out, “and I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more…” without being asked to leave gets at least a small nod of approval), and we had a place to sit, and the best bit of it all was the people.

Next to us, a cowgirl-themed hen party (short denim skirts, plaid shirts, and fuzzy pink cowboy hats) was winding down; the women all looked nonplussed, almost businesslike in their consumption of alcohol, their trips to the toilets, their brief interludes of hip gyration. Most of the girls wore bare shoulders, or bare legs, or both, and heels so high you could practically call them stilts, and still, very few of them looked genuinely sexy. But over the course of a night you’re bound to find one or two who exude sex, who actually convince you (if only for an instant) by their walk, the sway of their hips, the way their eyes pass over you, that you’d go to bed with them, if they deemed you worthy.

The manager (a friend of a friend) gave us a bottle of champagne and as I sat sipping I thought I could almost feel, here, the draw of the nightclub. It’s about abandon, I thought, abandon, whether reckless or careful, abandon to the dark, to the movements of each limb, to the curve of the long night. It’s not about other people at all, in its purest form; it’s a kind of implosion. A long time ago someone tried to teach me how to meditate, and I’m not sure he suceeded, but I always remember the things he told me, the things about clearing your mind, about letting thoughts pass through your head, acknowledging them but not opening them–and isn’t that, in a sordid sort of way, what all these people, rapt with dance, are doing?

Drowning out thoughts not by silence but by sound–well, I suffer from more anxiety than some, I know that sometimes it’s not what you think but what you don’t that matters, that sometimes, especially when the madness of winter has crept up on you, it’s abandon and not control at all that you need. And it’s a cheap way to dull the senses, I know that. They’re still slimy, underneath it all–but for a moment I thought I could just about understand places like this.

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What is it about television shows? I’m not an addictive person by nature, but I find it impossible to simply watch TV. For starters, it mostly bores me, and I’ve never been very good at watching without doing something else at the same time (eating, primarily, but also, at various stages in my life, playing computer games, writing, researching, doing homework, doing sit-ups, you get the point…).

But then, every once in awhile, something jumps out at you. Someone recommends a show and you rent a DVD (this is usually a few years after the show has been popular), or you stumble across something (again, this is usually ages after everyone else has discovered it), and, suddenly, without warning, without being given a fair chance to stock up on canned foods and powdered milk because you’re not leaving the house anytime soon, you’re hooked, in a seriously unhealthy way. There’s something that happens in the brain, and all you can think is: I. Must. Watch. Every. Episode. Of. This. Show. That. I. Can. Get. My. Grubby. Hands. On. NOW.

It’s a fickle addiction, though, a fragile relationship, and before you know it you’ve watched every single episode ever made, and all the outtakes, and all the special deleted scenes, and all the interviews with cast members, and all the tribute videos on YouTube, and there’s a brief period–a week, maybe–during which you feel bereft, as if a piece of your soul has gone missing somewhere amongst the empty Chinese takeout boxes in your lounge. And then you’re so over it. Like, come on, give me something good to watch.

So you tumble into a new addiction and stay up all night watching your beloved characters negotiate their way through whatever new scenario has been created for them, and when you finally fall into fitful sleep, you dream of them, you become one of them.

I guess you could say that I’m not a casual television-show-watcher. A casual drinker I may be, but I never have just one watch. There’s no such thing as just one watch. If I like a show, I have to have it all. I’m not saying it’s healthy (and I’m certainly not saying it’s as destructive as other addictions, so I guess I should count myself lucky), but that’s the way it is.

Over the years, I’ve had these obsessions often, and over the silliest things, sometimes. It pains me, as someone who considers herself well-read and literary, who doesn’t own a television, who believes that you can never have too many University degrees, to admit that at various points in my life I’ve loved and watched with religious but transient intensity South Park, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, the X-Files, Law and Order: SVU, NewsRradio, The Office, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and dozens more, some of them even more embarrasing to name (I refer, as I sometimes do, to the quote in my “About Me” section). With the Man and I, it’s been House, Gilmore Girls, Spooks, CSI, Mad Men, Teachers, and, most recently, 30 Rock, which we’ve been watching with great zeal ever since we reluctantly agreed that, since everyone else though it was like, the best thing ever, we should, for the purposes of remaining culturally aware, probably take a look at it. And sure enough, within viewing the first few episodes, a hundred previously-puzzling references suddenly became clear in my mind.

Of course there are always those classics–for me, The West Wing comes to mind–that stay with us longer than a week. But for the rest of it, well–it’s all in the name of cultural education, really it is.

(and yes, you get two posts today, because I broke my [already rather tenuous] resolution to write one a day yesterday!)

❧

The pub down the road, the Eagle Tavern,has been a curiosity for some time. It’s at the end of our street, a matter of yards from our house, but I can count the number of times I’ve been inside on one hand.

There has never been anything overtly wrong with it; just another pub in a sea of pubs. The Vicar who lives next door (I don’t think he actually is a Vicar, that’s just what he’s called), in the house called Seaview cottage (we couldn’t be any further from the sea), who dresses impeccably, talks impeccably (like an overwrought English gentleman), and is certifiably loony, has been drinking there more or less every night since I moved in. Once a bridal party had their after-wedding drinks there, and a brawl broke out. The police moved in and carted off every single bloody-fisted male in a matter of minutes.

Inside, the Eagle was sad, as if all of the pub-ness had been drawn out with a siphon. No merrymaking here; just hard drinking, lone men drowning in bibulous despair. It had thick patterned carpet and stale air, and you got the feeling you could get lost inside, though it wasn’t very large. Once we played pool and once we watched the football but even the drecepit facade seemed to warn us off having fun.

I mention this because the pub has changed ownership. A new sign has gone up; no longer the Eagle Tavern but the Rusty Bicycle. Though we think maybe it would have been cleverer just to hang an actual rusty bicycle outside, we’re heartened by this move, and by the fact that, peering inside, it’s evident that they’ve ripped up the carpet and revealed the wood floor. It won’t be open for a while yet, but I am harbouring secret hopes that we may end up with a cosy little pub literally on our doorstep.

❧

I think I’ve finally figured it out. High-fashion (as in, runway models, couture, fickle designers) is like really, uber-esotaric art (or, indeed, writing)–you know, like those three-minute videos in galleries set on loop, with a close-up of a woman’s belly-button and a fly buzzing around it. Bear with me–I think this one is good.

The way I see it, each is as obscure as the other. Pretty to look at, maybe, sometimes, and kind of interesting, if you’re stoned, or feel like entering an upside-down world where nothing makes any sense, but otherwise empty.

Enter the fashion magazine: our guide to the fashion world, a dictionary, if you will, an art-history major for the catwalk. Today, you see, I walked to Tesco (the longest walk, in my current state) to buy soup, drugs, and a Vogue.

My Vogue, as it turned out, came with bonus material: The (Topshop-sponsored) Ultimate Catwalk Report. I was so excited! I eat this stuff up! Pages and pages of high-resolution photographs of popsicle-sticks-with-lips strutting (or whatever it is they do) down the runway in….you name it. Jumpsuits? Check. Toutous? Check. A snakeskin-print bag “that’s part luxe backpack, part roomy tote”? Check. Pyjamas? Check! See-through dresses? Check! (Who says men aren’t interested in Vogue?) A swimsuit with belt, heels, and leather trenchcoat? Che-eck. (Yep, you heard it here first: Spring is all about pairing your old bikini with a designer coat to give it new life–that’s some sharp credit crunch thinking!)

It’s like a freakish combination of pornography, people-watching, and well-timed comedy rolled into one glossy, and very colourful, package: amazing.

In the midst of my elation, I started thinking: how do they do it? How do they look at all these clothes (clothes? can you call them that?), at all these images of models dressed up like the emaciated dolls of our nightmares, and determine that there’s a pattern for the upcoming fashion season? Like, wow, this poor model was made to wear a plastic yellow bubble over her head (check it–page 34–if you don’t believe me), so that means that flamboyant hats are the thing for Spring!

No: honestly, I think they’re making it up. I think if you put a group of editors in one room and another group of editors in another, and didn’t let them talk to each other, they’d come up with completely different visions for Spring/Summer ’09 (as it’s called, apparently). I think they see what they want to see in the designer collections, and interpret it for us. To be honest, it’s good of them: that stuff needs translation. They give us the trends with such authority, but frankly, I think they’re probably sitting in their offices right with a glass of champagne thinking, whew, fooled ‘em again!

And then, there are the pet-trends. The ones that they mention every year, the one they throw repeteadly against the wall of consumerism and pray sticks. Like the Midi-length skirt, which crops up every few seasons and looks like a good idea (but then again, what doesn’t on a life-size pencil): it’s a long skirt, no, it’s a short skirt, no, it’s–in between! But then you try one on and you realize that unless your legs are six feet long on their own it’s never going to look anything but frumpy, and besides, you can’t walk properly.

Or the jumpsuit. “Vogue still loves…jumpsuits,” says this month’s issue. “Get to grips with the all-in-one. It’s here to stay.” I’m sure it is: in the pages of magazines. Have you actually ever seen an ordinary woman walking down the street on her way to work, or to the pub, or to go shopping, in a jumpsuit?

Neither have I.

So I salute you, high fashion: for your ingenuity, your artistic endeavors, and, mostly, your balls. And I eagerly await the day when someone realizes that anyone can interpret what’s happening on the kalediscope we call runway. In the meantime, I’m off to consult the encyclopedia Vogue in the bath.

❧