Olympus Circa 2016

I have one hour. This hour can never be paused or restarted. What would they think?

Whatever guise I've taken, the laughing surf fan,
the music festival drug taker, the good sport drinker in the pub, the politician..

[interlude]
'Are you loving any body? No no don't answer that.'
'You're not frightened of ghosts are you? It'd be awful if you were'.
'I'm not frightened!'
[ends]

Why am I always too tired to write my thoughts? Falling back instead on shallow brain blame, and anger, and frustration, and gossip.

Whatever guise I've ever taken, whatever anyone has believed me to be, I'm the girl who can't stop crying at songs, when the mood takes her thus. That's the main thing. It's the only thing she can't help. Everything else is constructed somehow.

I need to tell them that when I see them again. Those shadows, those ghosts from the past. So there are no lies, no half-truths.

Did I make you watch Bringing Up Baby with me? And what did you think? Did you laugh, as I did, up in the air high on wine, and tears at the corny films? Or did you sit through it stoically for my benefit?
The 'Mr Bone' bit was the best.

It's late, it's Friday night, the husband is away again, the baby is in bed, I'm at the kitchen table diluting work with music and comedy and housework and searching for life-enhancing services such as people to prepare a series of salads on a Monday (not found any), and now I should be wondering what the Olympics means. I think it does mean quite a lot. I made sausages and mash for tea because it has rained all day, hard, after a week of Spanish sun in northern England, and as a treat Bisto gravy. I had forgotten how nice it is. I hope that in this brave new world they don't take that away from me. It connects things up, that taste, that image, different times of a life, different periods of history, bewildering the subconscious ephemerally. The Olympics does the same. I don't think it's gone downhill, not really, but then we have to say everything has now. When we watched it back in the 80s my mum said all the Eastern bloc athletes were on drugs (they were, I think), and that the female shot-putters were all actually men. Well, some of them (maybe one). Bad things happened then too. In 1984 the IRA tried to kill the prime minister Margaret Thatcher in a Brighton hotel, and instead killed 5 people, one of them an MP. Then, it was just news - I mean, I guess that was pretty big news. But it was news you read at breakfast with your coffee, and then saw again with your dinner at 6pm, maybe the headlines at 10pm, and that was it. News was often boring, especially when it was the same thing day after day.
But the Olympics, they were exciting. They've always worked as a 'thing', albeit a mismatch of singular and plural, something to look up to, a definite and broad enough to be worth aspiring to. They still are exciting - they bring the world's attention together, to one place, give one topic of conversation. I mean, they connect up now with our childhood, and it's history that's quite hard to mess with - it is what it is.
Is that crying I hear, or the fridge? Is that the cat or the clock? Have the Olympics finished yet? Have I used this hour well? I don't think so, really, and I apologise for that. The spirit didn't speak. My emotions are, somewhere low low beneath the surface, messed up; I cried at that Bicycles in Beijing song this morning. In fact, a Parthian shot, I stayed in Beijing opposite the Olympic stadium while it was being built. But it was just being built; it didn't do anything. I have a lot of stories from that trip, some great, hilarious ones which really should be told - god, they are good actually, the camera, the spring rolls, the morning after pill (sorry) - but none of them involve that stadium. Perhaps that's the thing: none of our stories none of our stories none of our stories are about the Olympic Games. I'm sorry again. Bye for now.