And the parade of the poorly dressed.  One man has seen fit to slit his trousers from waistband to hem, so that from behind we catch the sight of his naked bottom, the crack between cheeks.  At night the girls flock to nightclubs and wear getups that even Fellini could not have imagined.  And always in pairs.  One girl in a zebra-print skintight dress that doesn’t quite cover the twin bulbs of her rear, the other wearing rubber tights and something resembling a top.  Disappearing into the pulsating intestines of a place called Raw or Moles.  Hens in chefs hats meet stags in kilts on street corners, lose themselves in a cloud of smoke, emerge with outfits askew and cigarettes burned to the filter.  The air is heavy with shouting.  I think it’s happy shouting; but how to tell, when the calls of the drunk before he (or she, in ripped denim skirt, sequin blouse) slips finally into the realm of not-remembering are so close to calls of anguish?  Perhaps it’s the sound of the self letting go, leaving the conscience behind, two aspects parted by a sip too many.  Will the zebra girl wake with ears still numbed by techno, breath still seeped in rum and the empty taste of a late-night kebab-shop feast, and have a regret?  Even a single one, a small one: those shoes, she might think, they’re too high, my knees are sore from dancing now.  The naked-bottomed man might sit, later, upon a cold park-bench, might feel the metallic chill in new places, places he didn’t know could feel things.  Perhaps in this way the senses seem suddenly to expand.

But you see them together and you think that some sort of game is being played, surely.  That the girls fumbling with purses on the street corners are deliberately emulating the hookers of bigger cities; that the blokes, staggering in zig-zag patterns, letting their English voices loose upon the town, are deliberately ignoring every siren call until the last, choosing not to look up a zebra-patterned skirt or at the way a pair of rubber legs is crossed.  Each human his (or her) own, complete, exhibit.  And each exhibiting for an invisible audience.  Not for the disdainful eyes of you or me, or of the girl in jeans holding her boyfriend’s hand.  No, not for us do they strut and pose.

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The Man and I are taking an impromptu midweek holiday.  We’re spending the night in a swanky Cotswold hotel (one of the more unusual perks of the Man’s unconventional set of jobs).  So of course the morning dawned cold and wet.  Already late for work, I spent twenty minutes reading Sharon Olds in the dark house.  Then got on my bicycle and swam through sheets of mist.  Remembering something a friend told me last night about using the balls of my feet for more power, about imagining not that I’m pushing the pedals but that my legs at each revolution are being lifted up.  Maybe it was my imagination, my willingness today to believe all things are possible, but I think I expended less energy than usual getting to the office.  This feeling of possibility started yesterday evening, after I’d spent hours hard at work on The Book and we were at the pub.  Blowing off steam.  Live acoustic music.  Somehow listening to that music gave me a strange sense of power.  Or maybe it was the red wine. 

But now, here I am, hours away from what should be a much-needed romantic and relaxing getaway (nothing better than abandoning the week halfway through, pretending to live more spontaneously than we do), trying to mentally pack, and all I can think is this (and I know it’s shallow, but somehow the fate of this experience seems tied to how well I’m dressed when we arrive):

What on earth do posh people wear when it’s raining?

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I look at the Sartorialist and then buy Primark dresses from eBay.  I have a pitiful collection of shoes.  My boots constantly need repairs, my ballet flats have paper-thin soles that flap when I walk, my heels are woefully under-used.  Why care about something so transient?  I don’t know, but if I had money I suspect that the first thing I’d do is squander it on dresses.  Why am I late to work every morning?  Partly laziness, partly indecision.  Standing in front of the hallway mirror thinking, will this do?  who cares?  but will it do?

One of my favorite pastimes is to peruse online shops for hours, actually hours, on end.  Select things I would buy if I could.  I hate this lustful nature of mine, this hunger for things; but I seek comfort in it anyway.  I like to think about what Jeanette Winterson wrote in her preface to Oranges are not the Only Fruit: “When Keats was depressed he put on a clean shirt. When Radclyffe Hall was oppressed she ordered new sets of silk underwear from Jermyn Street.”  And I think: if a clean shirt or a new set of silk underwear (ah how I’d love to order sets of silk underwear, how I’d love, even, to have matching underwear, something that said “sexy” and not “you need new pants”) extinguishes the fear, the oppresive mould of our youthful poverty, allows us some freedom of thought and imagination, then why not?  Why not buy eBay dresses and lust after shoes we can’t afford?  Why not consider our appereance carefully in the mirror, consider whether or not we feel comfortable with the reflection?  Perhaps it’s shallow; but sometimes it’s the best we’ve got.

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So I know no one wants to hear about my illness, but the fact is, it’s the most significant thing that’s happened in my life over the last few days and I can’t help it if it colours my perspective.  More importantly, I have eaten, since Monday, a bowl of cereal, a tiny tub of yoghurt, two bowls of plain pasta, a bag of lightly salted crisps, and several slices of toast (sometimes with butter, sometimes without), so you’ll have to forgive me if I seem to be fixated on the trite, but I want to bring up a few things today, in no particular order:

1) First, let’s discuss men who wear sweatbands (I mean the ones that go round your wrists, not the ones round your head, though that would be weird on a whole different level) whilst doing something ordinary and untaxing–say, walking down the street eating a pack of crisps.  Wearing a perfectly respectable shirt and jeans.  And flip flops.  Not trainers, but flip flops.  (Did you ever see anyone play sport in flip-flops and look anything but silly?  Come to think of it, did you ever see anyone play sport in flip-flops period?) Because I just don’t understand this one.  Maybe in the 1980s this was cool (it made you look preppy, sporty, ready-f0r-anything?), but in 2009, it just makes it look like you’re either a) suffering from worryingly overactive sweat glands, in which case why is that crisp Jack Wills polo so miraculously dry? or b) strangely concerned with dripping sweat into your crisps or indeed, c) both.  So I guess what I’m trying to say is, boys, get a grip: either on a tennis racket, in which case, please feel free to wear wristbands to your hearts’ content, because Roger Federer does, and it seems to work for him; or on reality.  You look silly.

2) Shops.  Let’s talk about shops for a moment.  I don’t mean the high-street, high-fashion variety, or the second-hand charity kind, or anything in-between.  I mean, I sometimes don’t know where to go when I need to get something very basic, like, say, Vogue (just this once, don’t ask the inevitable “need?” question–remember, I’m ill).  Not either of the two corner shops within a stone’s throw of our house, certainly–though I can go to either if I need the basic ingredients for a meal, and one or the other if I’m short on newspapers or booze.  Not the Co-Op down the road, either, apparently (I stuck my head far into the magazine rack to check, but all they had was Cosmopolitan and about a billion tabloids, so I bought the Cosmo and spent a furious half hour on the couch wondering how the editors get away with it all and, if they really know all the secrets to success, happiness, self-confidence and a sizzling sex-life, why anyone bothers to buy the magazine anymore–shouldn’t we all be out fucking and shopping?).  I struck gold at the newsagent across the street from the Co-Op, unsurprisingly, but here’s the thing that gets me: the newstand seems to carry just as much food, and as many household odds-and-ends, as the Co-Op.

I always thought that newsagents, like newsstands, were temples to the printed page, where glossy magazines and dozens of newspapers in dozens of different languages stood proudly on display, while cigarettes and the occasional bit or bob hid behind the counter, but this is obviously and vastly untrue.  There’s even one on the Cowley Road with a post office and, allegedly, a dry-cleaning service.  I’m just not sure that in the US, there’s a comparable complexity of shops.  Sometimes I want to pop into Boots, which I’ve had a hard time learning is not, despite appearances, synonymous with CVS, to buy something I think I should be able to get there–a magazine, a house-cleaning product, laundry detergent–only to be whisked by the crowds past baby clothes, expensive perfumes, women standing idly at designer perfume counters, seven aisles that encourage you to shampoo-condition-colour-moisturize-stylize your hair, and a thousand other things I didn’t know I could use to improve my appearance.

3) On a similar note…when I’m sick, there are two things that I crave invariably: lots of love and attention, and an infusion of brand-name artifical American goop.  The former has been bestowed well and kindly upon me by the Man, who has been nothing short of angelic these last few days; but the later has proven far trickier to get hold of.  Specifically, I want Gatorade, I want PowerBars, and I want saltine crackers.  The first and the last I can more or less find replacements for, but there is not, I don’t think, in all of England, a single PowerBar.  Ordinarily, fake food shot up with vitamins, made chewy and artifically flavourful, wrapped up in shiny plastic, would not particularly appeal to me, and I certainly wouldn’t mourn its absence in a country which has given me so many other good unwholesome foodstuffs, like Jaffa Cakes and Curly Wurlys (they do know how to name things here).  But PowerBars are like comfort food for times of physical woe, and when I’m sick I get particularly irrational about this.  Obviously.

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1. If you absolutely must wear leather-look leggings (and I don’t condone this at all, but some of you out there seem to find them irrisistable), for the love of God, wear a thong. Or, since you’re pretty much baring it all anyway, don’t wear underpants at all. But what you mustn’t, mustn’t do, is wear panties that dig into the blubber on your bum, because everyone else can see it.
2. It’s unfortunate, but painting your lips a paler colour than the rest of your face doesn’t look pretty, or even edgy and cool; it just makes you look like a corpse.
3. There’s only one sort of man who will wear a canary-yellow jumper over a collared shirt (with baggy cords, no less, and patent-leather shoes): the man who wants to be seen as more successful than he actually is. The canary colour is his way of being weekend-y and “playful”–his concession to fun whilst still trying to prove that he’s too good at his job to ever really go off-duty. He’s probably going to play golf tomorrow. In the same jumper. Avoid him.
4. If you’re the manager of the store, don’t hold an impromptu gathering of staff in front of the doors while students are queueing all the way to the back of the store trying to buy as much Jacob’s Creek as they can before closing time. It makes it hard to leave. Or enter. And it kind of makes it look like you don’t really care about your customers. Just saying.

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