01/01/05 - New Year
Apparently we've left the public sphere. We've retreated and shut the door. We don't do community any more. We don't join clubs. And we don't talk to strangers. So how are you supposed to meet anyone if everything goes on behind closed doors? And when people do come out to play, it's for a few hours of alcohol-fuelled hedonism in dank nightclubs that I can't really see in any more.
I used to like clubbing a lot. Then one New Year's Eve I realised that my favourite pursuit was fast becoming a hazardous one.
It was the 90s. I went to a rave in a tent somewhere in rural East Anglia. I drank. I danced. I stubbed my cigarette out on my friend's forehead. I did a high kick on the stroke of midnight and fell over. And I snogged two men without really realising the difference. I wasn't drunk. I just couldn't see in the dark any more. It was time to stop.
I was still young but my ailing eyes meant I was forced to grow up before my time. So I've been waiting patiently for my contemporaries to catch up and quit the floors, too. Now they're hurtling towards (or past) 30 and suddenly they're all looking for new places to lure lovers. They needed new ideas, so I asked the lady next door about 'meeting people'. She's 85. 'What about by the salad counter in the supermarket? Or maybe a club or society?
'I read somewhere that the scouts take girls these days,' she added.
07/01/05 - Smurf Man
I used to live with a man who collected Smurfs. Each week he'd hatch a Kinder Egg and add another little blue man to the army adorning every window ledge and door frame in our flat. It wasn't a good life. I was competing with a 300-strong militia of plastic figurines. We argued about them. He said they were the 'collectables of tomorrow'. I said they were rubbish. Then one day Smurf man asked me to marry him. He said his little friends could go if I said yes. But I said no.
Now he's marrying someone else. He's happy and I'm a bit jealous around the edges. It's my own fault, I dumped him long ago for being too 'dependable'. I was young and careering down a road to blindness. There was lots to do before it was too late. A life of dusting horrid little ornaments in some suburban semi just wasn't on the list. I needed to live fast while I still could. The magnetism of London was calling, so I got rid.
Now, years on, I'm further down that road. And for a while after I heard of the engagement, the image of predictable old Smurfy wandered romantically through the dusty antique shop of my nostalgic mind.
But then I remembered his little chums. I'm in no doubt that the blue army has been relegated to a shoe box under the bed. But they're there. I know they are. And once he's married they'll be deployed to the nearest mantelpiece and his wife will receive a feather duster every Christmas for the rest of her life.
15/01/05 - Reactions
People react to stuff in different ways. If you tell them something that's a bit tricky to comprehend, like 'I'm a man but I used to be a woman' or 'I used to be sighted but now I'm undergoing a rather irksome transition to blindness', they usually react in one of two ways. Either there's an awkward pause before they kick under the carpet the nasty business of 'real-life-that-won't-go-away' and change the subject with a comment like, 'You're only six people away from knowing the queen you know?' Or they launch into a torrent of largely irrelevant questions, such as 'How many fingers am I holding up?' or 'Will you lose your sense of smell, too?' There are exceptions, though.
He was a director with a self-confessed past in pornography. We'd been set up by a friend who'd arranged a highly exclusive cocktail party. There were only two guests, him and me, and to reinvent the 'fixing-up-your-friends' wheel, it was fancy dress. I was a peanut. He was a banana. On arrival he informed me he'd spent the week avoiding calcium in a bid to cultivate a bananary curvature of the spine.
We mingled over the margaritas and mini spring rolls. Then he asked for my life story. I told him the truth, predicting his response to go one of the two ways. But instead banana-man concluded I had all the more reason to live in the moment and should get naked with him there and then.
22/01/05 - Ext Message
I had a lover. He was willowy and inexplicably beautiful. I adored him. But we were like salmon. We struggled upstream in the hope of something better. We never arrived. Instead, we split up.
I felt glum. I wallowed in my loss for months and wondered who'd want me now. Not only was I back on the market, but while I'd been out of circulation I'd been robbed of half my vision. Now I was burdened with a whole load of other rubbishy stuff to explain to potential suitors. For a while, I felt a bit dead on the inside. But then I resurrected myself on the anticipation of what might be. In one week I drank with a philosopher, an ad boy and a tall potter with an intense stare. He devoured my thoughts and robbed me of my clothing with his gaze. It didn't feel very nice.
Dating can make you feel alive - and desperately sad. Great times make you imagine the future, and bad times make you hark back to the past, even if the past wasn't actually that thrilling. The nights were about moving on. But somehow each ended with a 'How R U?' or 'I miss U' text to my ex. I'm patenting these late-night mobile mistakes as the 'ext message'. It's a nasty and humiliating little thing. Invariably sent under the influence of alcohol, often in a state of nostalgic melancholia, it always seems like a devastatingly good idea at the time, but never feels that way in the morning. Especially when you don't get a reply.
29/01/05 - Asia
I spend my days skulking about with the threat of inevitable blindness hanging precariously above me. Should it happen, the precious sight I have left will be snatched away in one foul instant. It makes you think.
When I found out, I quit school, got a job in a poster shop, saved up and got on a plane to Asia. I had an empty archive in my mind that gagged to be filled with the visual images of a lifetime. I scrabbled about with others who'd quit materially saturated lives to talk nonsense about 'finding themselves' and undertake self-indulgent, introspective contemplation under the palms. I was after some explanation as to why things had, in my 19-year-old mind, gone very, very wrong.
I didn't find one. Instead, I met a bloke from Surrey who suggested meditation would cure me, an idiot who said it was 'all in the mind' and that I could re-learn to 'see', and a doctor's wife who told me I must have been very bad in my past life - obviously I'd been a very naughty 17th-century wench who'd had more than her fair share of illicit tomfoolery.
The quest for answers was clearly rather barren. I resigned myself to the fact that science is probably the only reliable explanation, life is rather short and everyone and everything is finite. They were bleak days.
Then they got bleaker. I got a call from my boyfriend in England, apologetically informing me that he'd mistakenly had sex with a girl from Hull in a tent in Prague. As you do.