I remember a long time ago someone telling me about a girl he used to live with, who every single night without fail would blow her nose before coming to bed. He loved that about her. That was what he missed, now they weren’t together.

And I remember being impressed. I remember thinking, imagine knowing someone so well that you’re actually charmed–no, not charmed, something deeper than charmed–by their little human habits. The expulsion of snot, or some similarly banal act, becomes something to adore, something which reinforces the rightness of your union.

I also remember thinking, why? If you weren’t sick or allergic or a bit cold, why would you need to blow your nose every night? I remember thinking it sounded overwrought. Surely she didn’t. Surely he’d mis-remembered. Surely the whole thing was really a whole lot less sweet than I was making it out to be.

But now, some years later (not as many years as I’m pretending, maybe), I find that I’ve become someone just like that. Every morning I get up and go to the bathroom and the first thing I do is not to brush my teeth or relieve my bladder or study the pillow lines on my face and try to wash them away with cold water, but to blow my nose. I find that no matter how healthy I may be, or how mild the weather, I always have something in my nostrils to expel.

Perhaps it’s the effect of long-term intimacy. Perhaps we find routines, develop physical quirks, to mark each other out, to say, this one is mine, see, look, he does this funny thing and nobody else would know that and maybe he didn’t even do it before me, but now it’s a part of him, and so am I.

Now to the man I live with I am and always will be the girl who blows her nose every morning without fail.

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I’m intrigued by the Migration Advisory Committee’s review of the Tier 1 visa scheme. Am I surprised that money, in the form of previous earnings, is the most influential factor here–or, for that matter, that a higher degree of education counts for less and less? Of course not–the system has always been biased. Do I disapprove of the visa scheme? God, no–I wouldn’t be here without it. But do I think we should just start issuing anyone who makes upwards of £100,000 with an automatic, free, self-renewing pass to live wherever, and however, they like because they make so much money? At this rate, yes. Sigh.

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This is exactly how I feel right now.  I don’t mean right now in this moment; I mean right now in general.  I mean this sums up the sense that I have constantly.  I’m both scuppered and free.  At any instant I may hit a brick wall or discover opportunity.  In a way this is how things always are.  Impossible, amazing.  How do you reconcile the fact that you always want what you don’t have with the fact that you have something special?  You don’t, because this is how we have always been, this is how we always will be.  You just sit there and thing, everything is impossible, anything is possible. You think that until you don’t know what anything means anymore.

Then, I suppose, you go from there, wherever there is.  Is that right?  I don't know.

What I do know is this: a few weeks ago, the Man showed me this article about luck.  I don't often react well to things that he shows me.  Perhaps I'd like to think that I don't need guidance; that I could do better; that he's not-so-subtly trying to tell me something.  In any case I want to see flaws in the articles he shows me, and I saw a thousand flaws in this one.  I saw this one as a personal attack.  If you're naturally negative or naturally anxious (and who can deny that I am both?), I pretended the article was saying, you're fucked.  He tried to tell me that wasn't it at all, but I was in a foul mood, and I'd convinced myself, and that was that.  (That's always that).

But then last night he said to me, you're more positive lately than you have been.  You're happier.  It's nice.

Yes, it is nice, and yes, I am, and no, I don't know what it's related to, exactly, but I do know that on the "everything is impossible/anything is possible" scale, I'm leaning towards the anything is possible side.  What this means, specifically, is vague, and hardly matters.  What it means generally is what he said.  More positive.  Happier.  Nice.  Everything is so bloody hard.  And at every moment there's the possibility of something.  I can just about deal with that.  I can just about feel the tremble of possibility.  Who can say what luck's got to do with it?

 

 

*Thanks to a good friend for helping me work this one out tonight...

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…all shall be revealed tomorrow, but do know that I’m at work on something exciting!

In the meantime I remain busy and tired.  I look tired, and I know I do because several people have remarked upon it with both grace and innocence, and it’s hard to explain how this is good tired, as opposed to bad tired, but it is.  The last few weeks have been full of writing, reading, working, running, plotting, researching, and socializing, punctuated by a few frantic bouts of cleaning and resting.  If I were to wake tomorrow and discover it already winter, I would hardly be surprised; part of me is still stuck back in springtime, while the rest of me feels as if time has sped up.  The book is coming along well; I no longer know what my deadline is but I’m working towards it every day nonetheless.

We’ve spent the weekend in the countryside, under a rare blue sky.  Yesterday I went for a run along country roads; the early evening silence was stunning, and the smell of wheat and sheep dung and grass was delicious.  Descending back into the village, I had a whiff of warm barbecue smoke, and could hear the hum of pub-goers and children playing before dinner.

So if I’m tired, at least it’s in the name of something good.  I’ve never felt so energetic about my own weariness before.  And the silence on this blog is deliberate, because I’m stretched wonderfully thin.

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Recently, a friend blogged her commentary about this year’s (spectacular) Eurovision Song Contest.  Read the post here; but then read the comments.  She suggested I might be interested in contributing to the discussion on the difference between US and UK/European entertainment tastes.  It turns out I was so interested that my brief comment on her blog has turned into an entire post on my blog.  So think of this as an extended comment, if you will.

I can really only speak about British and American television here, and as someone who doesn’t own a TV and hasn’t for several years now, you may want to take anything I write on the subject with a massive grain of salt.

But I’ve always felt that the best British television tends to fall into one of two categories: the classic (often costume) drama, or the witty/deadpan comedy show.  Neither of which is something we tend to do particularly well in the US; instead, we’ve chosen to perfect the art of the sitcom, the slick crime show, the glamorous reality show (which, yes, tends to take itself just a little too seriously).  We (in the US) are subsequently afraid to laugh at our own product, because we haven’t set it up as something to be laughed at.  We can laugh at the jokes in a sitcom, or the spoiled 16-year-old girls on MTV who cry because Daddy bought them the wrong colour Humvee, but there’s always a flashiness factor that wows even the most skeptical audience (myself included), and suddenly, making fun of these things seems almost more trouble than it’s worth.  It’s like staring at a remarkably shiny diamond, glinting in the sun.  Pretty.  Interesting, even.  But eventually you need to avert your eyes.

The reason, I think, is this: there’s a culture of celebrity in the US–specifically television and film-related celebrity–so powerful, so pervasive, that what we create when we create a TV show is not just a conduit for entertainment.  It’s actually a shrine to this celebrity culture–something like the grand European cathedrals, only in a modern form, an offering not for a god but for an entire race of beautiful, smooth-faced people who spend their lives behind a camera.  The entertainment industry is as much a religion as it is a business; so it’s only natural that we’ve come, over the years, to take it undeservedly seriously.

Obviously, there’s a culture of celebrity in Britain, too–and if ever there was a nation that had perfected the art of tabloid journalism, this is it.  The difference is that there’s also a culture of entertainment which hasn’t been lost somewhere in the CSI footage of dead bodies and unlikely lab experiments.  We’ve forgotten how to be merely amused–now we demand that we’re actually (in the truest sense of the word) awed when we look at a screen.

There are exceptions to this on both sides of the Atlantic, of course.  And it doesn’t exactly explain the cheesiness factor of Eurovision; but Eurovison is, I suspect, a beast so unique that it will defy any categorization, any sociological explanations that we try to attribute to it.  The only thing left to say about the song contest, then, is this: it all has to do with Graham Norton’s commentary catchphrase.  “He’s huge,” Graham said so many times over the course of the evening that I lost count, “in the Balkan states.” Greece’s Ricky-Martin lookalike?  Huge in the Balkan states.  Azerbaijan’s entrant?  Huge, I’ve heard, in the Balkan states.  Meaning that we should all look Balkans-ward to find the secret to that amazing Euro-pop sound.

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