Hi, I can see your butt-crack. But I presume that is deliberate, since you have taken such an inordinate amount of care with your hair. The t-shirt you are wearing is not very long. The leopard-print thong you are wearing is, well, not very modest. And no matter how casually you sling your cross-body Topshop bag over your shoulder and sigh impatiently as you wait for your rum-and-coke at the bar, you cannot convince me that you are particularly fashionable. I may be the girl wearing a jumper with elbow-patches, but I have looked at Vogue! And I know that even the avant-garde models with their stern chins, smoky eyes, exaggerated postures, do not wear sheer leggings as trousers.

So I can only conclude that before you leave the house, you check the mirror to make sure that every hair on your head is perfectly in place – you’re creating the illusion of carelessness, and it’s such hard work! – and then you step back and you survey yourself, making a full circle, and you think, my, what a fine butt-crack I do have! So tonight I shall do exactly what every article in Cosmopolitan has ever advised and accentuate my best features. And you find the sheerest pair of sheer leggings in your closet, and you make sure that your shirt does not ruin the view. And then you stand at the bar with one leg cocked so that we can enjoy your handiwork.

Thank you, ladies. Now excuse me while I look tactfully away.

❧

Nine years suddenly seems an awfully long time. To mark the 9/11 anniversary, here’s a letter to the president I wrote in high school. I think it was a history assignment, but that doesn’t change the urgency or earnestness of the voice (nor does it excuse the particularly overwrought metaphor at the end – but my being 14 probably does). And I know he probably had better-qualified advisers telling him what to do, but gee I really wish George Bush had listened to me…

September 16, 2001

Dear Mr. President:
I am a fourteen year old sophomore at a small private high school in Central California. I am writing to convey my feelings about last Tuesday’s events and the current crisis in the United States.

I want to be perfectly honest. To my young mind, the attack on the United States was profoundly motivating, and, in an ironic way, inspiring. I have never felt compelled to express pride at being American. I took my country for granted. I enjoyed complaining about what I felt was wrong with American culture. But after Tuesday, I want to declare to the world that I am a patriotic American, that yes, my country has her faults, but look how strong she stands, look how courageous she is in the face of terror. I am inspired to follow the footsteps of our nation’s great heroes and be a force in my own generation.

My generation is the next in line. We can shape the face of tomorrow, and the atrocities of September eleventh will burn bright in our minds in the years to come. The suffering and the shock have contributed to a new awareness. You, as our nation’s leader, can use this to your advantage. You must not exploit it, but know that the nation’s youth stands in a different place now than we did a week ago. Your responsibility is massive, and I admire anyone who can shoulder this burden. Remember that if you are a wise and prudent leader, you will have the support of a nation of youths who have been changed for the better by this event.

As one of these youths, I ask that you take care as you consider how to respond. Know for sure who is responsible before any action is taken. Retaliate only in order to ensure that this sort of event never happens again and not for the purposes of revenge. Do your best to avoid further injuring or killing of innocent people. Follow these guidelines and the people of your nation, particularly the youth, will follow you.

The events of September eleventh, 2001, changed all of us. As I watched them unfold, that small spark of inert patriotism in me turned at last into a flame. That same flame now burns in the youth of a nation. Use it to light up the path for the future.

Sincerely,
Miranda R. Ward

It’s a coincidence that I now live in another country. (I think).

❧

I.

It’s that time of year when the rose hips near our front gate reach ripeness. I know it also by the sudden quiet, like a vacuum, a pause, after the tourists, before the frenzy of term-time. A new set of students moves in on either side of us; we feel like the constants, the clear, steady lamp post amongst a blur of pedestrians in a time-lapse photograph. There’s a softness in the light. I never know whether to be nostalgic or optimistic; all that summer (punting, picnicking, sweating in summer dresses) gone, all that autumn (wood fires, thick jumpers, ale in pub snugs, leaves like paper) still to come. And if we’re not yet in either place, where exactly are we? Suspended in September. Both waiting and not-waiting for something we both want and don’t want to come.

II.

Now is the time to appreciate the green of the trees: soon they will be the colour of fire and then they will be bald in preparation for frosts, for a heavy dousing or two of snowfall.

III.

But then in Oxford, it’s always the end of an era, the start of another. It’s a transient land. Nobody stays here or intends to stay here for long, so you can really only end up staying without meaning to.

Things change at a faster pace than they do elsewhere. Your friends from three years ago are not always people you know anything about now. It’s like being dislocated in time and space every time you leave and come back again. Very briefly disjointed, disowned, expatriated from everything. London is not just another city but another time zone, no, another universe. The trains are like rocket ships out of this town.

So here I am in the stagnant and yet not stagnant waters. Floating with Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder, Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. The tension between what’s preserved in aspic and what’s not is always the most beautiful part. Time is so confused here. Jan Morris writes: “Summer is more summery here than anywhere else I know; not hotter, certainly not sunnier, but more like summers used to be, in everyone’s childhood memories.”

❧

I had this moment the other night where I thought, oh my god, I’m an adult. I’m in a strange country and people keep asking me what I do and I have an answer. I’m someone who does something. I’m someone who takes trips to see friends get married and who goes shopping with her partner for practical things like trousers that don’t have holes in the crotch.

Then I thought: I was born in Orange County. I live in Oxford. And now I’m at a mehndi-and-martini party in Toronto wearing a sari and sipping something alcoholic that tastes like lychee. I don’t even know what a lychee looks like. How the hell did this happen? And I felt comfortably out of control again. Like, ha! Just kidding. You’re not really an adult after all.

When I was little grownups were my friends. I didn’t have any siblings, and mostly I was content just to wander around in circles outside the house, talking to myself, making up elaborate stories in my head, bouncing a ball against the wall until the rhythm drove my parents crazy, or at least until dinner. And I had friends, but I also had the grownups that my parents knew. Turns out that when you’re a kid, grownups aren’t so bad.

And also it turns out that when you’re a grownup, you’re not really a grownup. Maybe the whole secret of adulthood is that they made it up. It’s like discovering that magic doesn’t exist; but also a little like thinking you were bound for a prison sentence and finding out you’ve been let off, you’re free to go.

Am I grown up yet? Does it matter?

❧

I love Twitter. I could find a thousand good things to say about it. But today I woke up in a grump; I cannot bear the smugness. And there’s an awful lot of smugness. There’s a particular brand of tweet: the what I did this morning tweet. It just gets me every time. I’m someone who has to set seven alarms and still only manages to get up with enough time left for a bowl of cheerios, half a cup of tea, and a frantic dash for the door. So who the hell are these people who get up, go to the gym, walk the dog, cook breakfast for the whole family, paint the walls in the spare room, write a blog post, and teach their newborn child calculus before they’re at the office at 8.30 a.m raring to go? Who then spend the rest of the day saving their company, emailing 365 separate people about separate issues, bemoaning the useless intern, and standing on their heads whilst juggling seven balls and meeting with twelve important clients at the same time in different cities?

Worse are the ones who continue this sickening faux-productivity through the weekend. The ones who party it up on Friday down the pub with some mates, wake up at five on Saturday with a wicked hangover, go to yoga instead of feeling sorry for themselves, and then proceed to spend the next 48 hours enjoying absolutely every second of their weekend. They go to films, bookshops, museums, picnics, pubs, nightclubs; they attend festivals, stumble upon quirky new corners of their neighbourhoods, try new restaurants, have brunch, lunch, dinner, sunday roasts, ice cream, coffee and muffins. They go to the farmer’s market and the gym, they buy things, they visit cousins up north and old friends in Cornwall, they take up surfing, they continue to train for the half-marathon, they bake a cake, they cook lobster bisque from scratch. Basically they do more in one weekend than I’ll probably do in a year, and then they tweet about it, using all 140 characters to imply that they’ve really grabbed life by the balls, and they want us to know about it.

Seriously. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? Where do they get their energy and their drive from? And what’s going to happen when one day they wake up to discover there are no festivals on, all their friends are worn out, their boss is out of town, the farmer’s market is closed, their cousins are on holiday, no new restaurants have opened up, they’ve seen all the exhibits at all the museums within a 100-mile radius, their knees are sore from too much training, it’s too cold outside to sit in the park sipping champagne, and all the films look shit?

Suddenly they’ll be just like the rest of us. Lazy, time-wasting humans with an average appreciation for the day and a much more reasonable expectation of how much stuff we can fit into 24 hours. And then they’ll have to tweet about that.

❧