Of Penny Whistles & Moon Pies;

So I’m back from North Berwick and I am in fact in a jollier mood! However, I have quite a bit to diary about, so I’m just going to rattle through it all.

Saturday, 29 May 11;

A certain someone came over to help sort out my head. There was a letter and Tegan & Sara and a giant pink elephant in the room. A few hours before I discovered that my copy of The Nutcracker Prince misspelt the word ‘holiday’ in its tagline. The strange indie movie my life has become recently played on and everything that could be sorted in a couple of hours was sorted and even after that I still felt like crap on toast. The remainder of the evening passed by in a languid void of The Simpsons and then toward night I panicked and begged for metaphysical tea even though I knew I’d regret it later and that didn’t pacify me one iota and I couldn’t sleep and so I got up and went into the living room and sat for half an hour watching some crime drama with my mother and then I told her everything. All of it, from beginning to end. The whole nine yards. Totally didn’t expect that when I woke up that morning. Didn’t really ever expect it. There was just too much to tell, and it was all so inextricable, and the longer I didn’t tell her the more I couldn’t tell her. And I couldn’t tell her before anyway when there was still so much to know. But by that point I guess I knew enough and I was laying in bed with this horrible realization pressing down on me, like, No matter how many little surface problems you try to fix, you’re never going to fix the real one underneath. As long as you keep thinking of it like a jigsaw, as a hundred separate components that can be solved with logic and rationality, you are going to keep feeling like crap on toast. And I do not care to feel like crap on toast. So I told her and it took a while and she didn’t get mad or react in the way I’d feared at all; she listened and she tried to understand, which was all I could ask of her. And then it was four o’clock and the birds were waking up and I finally fell asleep. In the morning she bought me Coke and a Galaxy caramel.




North BerwHick;
Do not be alarmed, I do know how to spell, I have not completely lost my mind. It’s just that when Meejin and I were a little tipsy we resumed our conversation about Family Guy, or, more precisely, cool wHip, and got into the habit of over-pronouncing the letter h or confabulating it altogether. It’s fun. So when we decided we were going to North Berwick, it was an easy target. Now, originally we were supposed to be going to Durness, but public transport doesn’t exist in the highlands, so Meejin then came up with her childhood playground of North Berwick, which is actually in the south east. Rather confusing. (It was between there and Barcelona, and we opted for the former. Clearly we need our heads examined.) Anyway, by serendipity my father had just been down there, staying in his rich friend and his wife’s holiday house—a couple who feel so guilty about having the place that they practically force friends and well-wishers to stay there for free. Within a phone call and a couple of emails it was all set up and the only catch appeared to be the fact we would have to bring our own bedding. Au contraire.


So we trundle onto the train in the pishing rain at Singer’s station with our heavy bags and suitcases, have a minor tiff and dance with insanity at the ticket office, board the train to Edinburgh, note with horror the increasing disparity in opulence between the two cities evident everywhere, get freaked out by the shrunk-down size of the mall and are taunted by the Edinburgers’ accents, fall down some stairs in the act of doing everything to save half a poke of McDonald’s chips, board a final train that smells of onions and laugh at all the place names (Drem, Prestonpans), and eventually arrive in North Berwick where we get lost and the following conversation takes place;


“Where are you girls headed?”


“Fifteen, Beach Road, North Berwick.” (I really may as well have indulged in the joke we’d shared the whole time about the address and said “Fifteen, Yemen Road, Yemen.”)


*guy squints at us dubiously*


“...It doesn’t exist, does it?”


Thankfully, it did exist. With the help of the bizarrely friendly locals, we located our locale. (Just to explain the bizarre part; where we come from, if a stranger approaches you, you back away.) Kilmory House, with a Beware of the Dog sign, a dog my father had described as a ‘terry’ which apparently has a ‘snubbed nose’ and ‘thick, black curly fur’. What the fuck kind of dog is that?


Long story short, we had a great time. Highlights include; watching Meejin fall in love with Pretty in Pink, her watching me be horrified by Matchstick Men, the Turkish chip shop with the best pizza alive and the guy who looked like Luigi, our failed attempt to get to Bamburgh Castle via a train that doesn’t exist and how within five minutes the whole damn town knew us as The Girls Who Failed To Get To Bamburgh Castle, when BBC 2 mysteriously cut out and we were left with BBC 1 and ITV, when we watched The Scheme, when the tourist information board at the bottom of the Law said Did you know? the whale jaw bone that had been up there since 1709 blew down and was replaced by an IKEA replica whale jaw bone in 1935, when our shopping list consisted of Party Rings, Brillo pads and beer, the death seats and JD thinking faces, being on the beach at eleven-thirty at night with beer, my France hat, dancing to this, when Meejin read aloud the book of one-liner golfing jokes, arriving back in Glasgow and hearing some obscenity that we'd been starved of for five days and turning to each other and saying "Home sweet home".

La view.

Meejin & the first sunset.

Lol.

Another sunset.

Meejin's JD thinking face in her death seat cause they're where you ponder life, yeah?

Despite all of this festivity, there were downsides, such as Meejin stripping every time I turned around and contorting herself into disturbing positions, Meejin never shutting the bathroom door, waking up in the morning to find Meejin staring back at me like an axe murderer, and the biggest downside of all—the fact the house was haunted. Yep, h-a-u-n-t-e-d. That was the catch. Well, that and the fact nobody warned us.


In retrospect I suppose it’s only fair that in order to have the penthouse apartment in a Victorian mansion with seafront views for five days free, we would have to face death every night of our stay there. It was like The Shining meets The Blair Witch Project meets Paranormal Activity. Seriously scary. Our house was bipolar, it had a split personality, which kind of makes horror-movie sense when you take into account the fact the guy who gave us the house was called Dr. Hyde... By day it was known as Albert, and by night as Norman. Norman was evil. Norman made the fires of Mordor burn behind our heads in a chimney without a fireplace, he made the flimsy wooden door three flights of stairs away sound like it was being rammed from outside by an escaped lunatic, he made the attic with one of those pulley staircases creak right above our heads, he made K-dawg’s phone unusable and cut off Davidoff’s reception and he made Meejin ask Rosie, what would you do if that doorknob started to turn? I was nearest the door, so I would have got it first. He also made us unable to open the fire escape in our bedroom, and then not find the key until the last night, and then he made us get the key stuck in the door so we were royally trapped, and then he made us realize the next day on the way home that it was the key for the cupboard we’d found it in... Besides Norman there was also a malicious oven called Rick (or Rickle, affectionately) who liked making the first thing we done when we got to the house scrubbing inch-thick grease from God knows what animal off the pan, burning our dinner and not heating up pie and letting the butter run out the bottom of garlic bread, even though that is clearly impossible. We actually began to dread the sun setting, and watched its safe glow slowly fade from our death seats... There were also two real-life encounters, both on the last day. Around five o’clock Meejin and I were sitting out on the roof eating lunch and not looking particularly come hither by anyone’s standards (my slippers have no soles and Meejin was eating mushroom soup), when three guys across the street caught her eye because one resembled her boyfriend and I happened to look over my shoulder to investigate without much interest, and next thing we know they have disappeared round the back of our house and are knocking the door and sitting in our garden...waiting. I know that sounds like a nightmare that turns totally banal in reality, but if you’re a girl you’ll understand. I think. At any rate, I’ve had quite enough of sexual harassers this year thank you. And then later that night whilst we were watching Matchstick Men, an unearthly wailing rose up through the window from the dark street below, and it went on for two hours, and the words How could you do this to me?! were the only discernible ones amongst the Exorcist-esque screams. We thought at first some ass was just dumping his girlfriend in the street and she was taking it rather badly, but then it sounded like she was giving birth to a rhinoceros. Eventually the police showed up—one car, one van, no sirens—and after two hours of disembodied torch light bobbing about the golf course, she was coaxed from the shadows and brought to the road where she had several mental breakdowns in the foetal position until her husband dragged her into an embrace and into the ambulance and crazy was driven silently away. No signs were left. Cue the X-files theme music.


All this dramarama resulted in us getting absolutely no sleep the entire holiday. Okay, that’s a lie. But what we did get was precious little and turned us into vampires. One morning I woke up and said “High-five for being alive” and I was quite serious. Death was bloody everywhere, from the top of the Law with the guardian angel/murderer and the Wizard of Oz wind, to the roof verandas devoid of railings and offering a three-story drop onto a parquet brick driveway. I wasn’t this tired even when I came back from Australia, and that was a looong trip. Anyway, all in all, great holiday, if you can call it that. Best quotes; “Can I ask you an honest question? What would it have been like if you were wearing flip-flops?” and “Life’s short” “Short and shit”.






So now I’m back home and I’m going to the doctors and then hopefully to therapy and a happy ending! I’m a nut, it’s great. People seem to be saying this to me a lot; "...Rosie...what did you mean the other day when you said you were scared of what you might do if you were left alone?" Summer’s kicking in now and I have a few resolutions;


- Read all of these books (plus Sisterhood Everlasting, out on June 14th :D!) and review each of them to keep my brain’s analytical side exercised

- Get a job


- Learn to drive


- Finish writing the Extended Short Story and send it off to agents and then wait with bated breath for the inevitable rejection letters


- Put on at least four pounds and get my BMI out of the underweight category. Hello Dominos!


- Quit biting my lips


- Be happy!






Okay, I was totally going to end with that last one kind of fulfilled—especially because of the breaking news that I just found out I got a B in philosophy thanks to everyone’s praying to trees and gods and LSD apparently, and so I will get into second year uni and not become a bum—but I just made a silly mistake and then saw a spider crawl across my desk seven minutes after said silly mistake so that’s out the window!




Still, I went out on a limb last night and Suzy just text me out of the blue to meet up because we are becoming a pair of old women and I have Coke and friends and things can only get better right :)?

Woy Woy Bay, Australia, October 2009.



Happy June :)!