frustra et partiones

[helenic]

So last night = the happiest I've been in a good while, the sort of ridiculous, silly, drunk happiness that comes with good friends and good music and alcohol and fitting comfortably into my 20" corset. I didn't get much sleep, I'm not thinking straight and I've been overtired and emotional today but I want to write yesterday down before I forget, like I put off writing about the munch and the Calling and then suddenly it was too late and I'm liking my social life at the moment, I want to record it. However, I am fuzzy and sleepy and this will not be in proper sentences.

Seeing verte was particularly lovely this time because I'd been worried all week that our friendship was changing and not in a good way, but there are times I like to be proved paranoid. She bought me coffee and we gossiped and laughed about men and things (the day I cease to find the goth social scene a source of tongue-in-cheek amusement, please shoot me in the head) and had one of our proper long walking-through-cities conversations that I've missed, and I bought a long velvet skirt from Oxfam to rip up and wear that evening. We then met up withbeeswing, whom I don't see nearly enough, and the three of us had extortionately priced tea and Jamaican Ginger Cake ("Traditional Yorkshire Parkin", apparently, but I know jamaican ginger cake when I see it) in Betty's Tea Shop, which is one of those posh tourist places where the waiters have ankle-length black aprons and you pay to satisfy your curiosity rather than for what you actually get.

It was a wonderful afternoon, actually, wandering through York talking and stopping to buy ribbon and beads from craft shops. Then cocktails at the Evil Eye (where they asked us for ID - the cheek! - and I laced the corset which might become Gabrielle's with the ribbon I'd bought), gothing up at her house and back into town for the gig, which was Zombina and the Skeletones (I can't remember the name of the support band) and utterly fantastic. Standing and grinning to utterly feel-good music, being given a quadruple of Southern Comfort when I'd only asked for a double, lusting after a beautifully vulnerable guitar/keyboard player with fake blood running down his face who incited unprecedentedly dominant urges in me (although when we told him afterwards he didn't seem very impressed), chocolate-flavoured water, and verte and I dancing by ourselves in front of the stage and being thoroughly leered at, although we didn't manage to get anyone else to actually join in. Afterwards we bought chips and pasties and ate them on the way back before putting on several more layers of clothes and shivering our way to the station to catch the 1am train. It had snowed a little, earlier, and the wind was far too cold for fishnet stockings. On the train I dozed and over-heard snatches of conversation which seemed to make no sense: "the planet Earth kept stopping! and they had to get everyone off, put them back on and re-start it again ..." Or perhaps I dreamed them. We ended up playing drunken twister with her flatmates before falling asleep to Singing in the Rain. Yes. Happy. There should be more days like that.

I wasn't so happy today, but I put that down to sleeplessness and hangover. Felt lonely and randomly tearful on the train, which was delayed an hour and a half in Stevenage so when I got back I was already late for choir. I needed a shower because there'd been no hot water that morning, my bike has finally broken, I got an email from my dad saying I forgot my mum's birthday on Thursday and several from people complaining I hadn't written them back, which all somehow combined to create an absolutely foul, stressed, weepy mood that had no apparent cause. I arrived late to choir to find about six new people, one of whom had taken my music and my seat so I had to stand off the edge of the pew because there wasn't enough room. It was most likely just tiredness but I couldn't cope for some reason, and after ten minutes of trying to hold back tears excused myself and left again, which was hugely humiliating. Iain was the only person willing to actually cheer me up, so I drank tea and we played computer games and he made me eat, which helped. I got several text messages from worried choir members as well, which made me feel simultaneously better and guiltier.

In the rooms ballot yesterday I picked a large, middling-priced room in my second-choice house, as my first choice was half-full of the boys currently on my floor and another year of us getting in each other's way is best avoided. It's all worked out unexpectedly well, actually: they're in number 38 Lensfield Rd and I'm on the top floor next door, but the top floors of 38 and 36 are joined to form a single corridor, and as well as myself are three girls I know from chapel, two of whom I think are lovely and interesting and want to be better friends with. I spent the final day of last term watching Labyrinth and The Princess Bride with them, and deciding I liked them very much indeed. Plus I will have the perfect kitchen, with french doors opening out onto the paddock, our own washing machine and two ovens. I shall cook ambitious meals and throw dinner parties, and afterwards we can sit on the grass and drink obscene amounts of wine. Yes.