In the museum, people move with false reverence. What we’re affected by is not so much the painting, the sculpture, the historical or the avant-garde–it’s the way we’re all here together, but all separated by experience.

In front of my favourite Monet (and why should this be my favourite, this image of a cathedral I have never seen, cast in a light I have never experienced?), two women with their studying faces on. One (short dark hair, glasses, very still), hands crossed at chest; the other (longer dark hair, full of nervous energy), hands placed at the small of her back, bag worn across her chest and in front, as if she’s afraid of something, wants to hold her possesions close. They seem to be looking for something in the painting, something, perhaps, in the cathedral itself. Sharing (or trying to recall) a memory that neither of them actually owns. I want to sit in front of the painting, as I do every time I am here (there is a bench placed before it as if just for me) but they distort my view, they may as well have stepped into the image itself, and I’m too fascinated by watching them watch it to pay any real attention to Rouen Cathedral.

Walker Evans’ collection of postcards. Americana distilled. The streets were wider then; no, that’s not right, they were only emptier. People against a patchwork backdrop: LA, Nashville, church spires, telephone wires. Shiny black automobiles, from the days when they could still be called “automobiles,” still had some dignity.

Gauguin’s Tahiti is enough to make anyone crave a warmer place. I photograph it in black and white to see what, when the image is bled of colour, is left. Still something, I’ll tell you that much.

Irrisistible for the artist to make a sketch. One girl, on the floor, cross-legged, pony-tailed, makes a sketch of a lumpy, pasty female nude. Her breasts uneven (the nude, not the girl). A man, in flat cap and scarf, has brought his own folding chair, sits before a scultpure, balances his pad on his knees. People peer over his shoulder; the rendition is good, exact.

Back on the street, the Upper East Side, the sunlight is almost too much after the shadowed light, the light made for looking at things. We squint our way down Park Avenue. There’s nothing to eat in the Upper East. What, I say, do rich people not need to eat? Do they, I ask, as we pass Gucci, Prada, Christian Dior, get their sustenence from expensive shoes and ugly handbags? Do they get off on knowing that we will find their wide-avenued world unpenetrable?

Probably, the Man says, to shut me up. I’m hungry, therefore irrational.

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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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Another visit to the Rusty Bicycle tonight–a quick stop after a lovely evening. I keep promising to write more on this place and I will, but for now, a summary:

• We like. Very much. Warm, cosy, and exactly the pub you want on the end of your street.
• Some very trendy people; apparently some sort of message went out to the big-glasses American-apparel wearing Cowley road crowd.
• Therefore: good people-watching.
• But not sure how we feel about the cowboy-boot-wearing, Guiness-drinking Tibetan with no sense of social convention. I’m not usually very supportive of stifling and oft-arbitrary customs, but there are some that you just need, and this dude, he broke all the rules.
• The bike rack out front is getting lots of use. How very cool.

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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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