Ode to albatrosses

When I set out on my path to find true love I never considered that I could find it so soon. Falling in love seemed like the difficult part. In reality life doesn't work like that; falling in love for most people is remarkable easy, its the not getting your heart broken once its taken the leap that is the problem.

My sister regularly has her heart broken. When I see her I try to understand her need to put herself out there but I just don't get it. She falls in love, has her heart totally trodden on, mopes, whines and begs, and then when things are so totally over even she starts to admit it, she falls in love with someone else.

Someone asked me once, if you and your fiancé broke up, you wouldn't be like that, you would survive wouldn't you? I guess the implication was that she couldn't survive a break up. I could survive a break up, I wouldn't want to, but I could and I'd move on. I'm a survivor, my heart gets hurt less because even when I'm in love, my heart is still closed.

We argue and he says horrible things, and I say horrible things and I can't cry. I cry afterwards, on my own, when I'm sat in an empty room after he's left our flat in anger, but I cant cry in front of him. If he broke up with me I wouldn't do the usual female litany and beg or stalk or cry and scream. I did all that once when I was seventeen and too young to know better. I learnt from my mistakes. But sometimes I wonder if I could be too closed off.

Right now he hates me and I don't blame him. I'm pushy, aggressive and demanding. I hold all the power in the relationship and right now I'm stressed out and making him miserable. I'm terrified that I'm leaving him behind and I can't talk to him about it because he just won't listen. I'm just about to get my BSc and he hasn't got anything to show for the last three years together. We adore each other when we have any time to ourselves, but he has to work full time in a crappy no hope job just to pay the bills and I have too much coursework and revising for exams at the minute to find time for dates and being loving.

Everybody has faults, I more than most. Someone once offered me a bracelet that apparently would give me good luck in love. I told him that thank you, but no thank you, I don't need luck in love. I am lucky in love, I've found the perfect man for me and there's nothing that is so wrong with him that I need to worry about my relationship. Unfortunately there's a lot that is wrong with me.

I would survive a break up. He wouldn't survive as well. I don't worry any more about our relationship ending, I worry that if it does, would he survive it and retain his innocence? If I could go from a whiny pathetic regular girl to a callous bitch in the space of one break up, I don't think I could live with watching something I did do that to him.

Labels: Being the Duck

I like to think that I’m wiser than my years. I guess that sometimes I just feel like I’ve lived slightly more than most people of my years. It’s probably just vanity, but it leads to the question: what do we have to endure to say that we’ve lived life more than most?

Do you have to endure great hardship? Can a person who lost their child say that they have lived life more than someone who never lost anything? Or does it rely more on reaching the point where you can say that you are truly happy with your life, happy in your own skin? Is it none of these and based on how much a person has travelled, how many different jobs they have done and languages they speak? Is it just a matter of perception: if you believe you’ve lived life to as full as you could?

At Christmas my mother went missing. If you’ve followed my blog before this won’t come as a complete surprise. I’ve never spent a huge amount of time with her as she left the country when I was six and I hadn’t lived at home with her until I was five. However, as awful as abandoning your children may sound it was the kindest thing she could do for us as she suffers from schizophrenia and her and dad had very loud, and sometimes almost physical, fights literally every day they spent together. So causing quite an unpleasant atmosphere at home.

I forgave her everything years ago because of her illness so when she went missing I was very worried. In late January after numerous missing person’s ads, and phone calls around every hospital and morgue in the city she surfaced in a mental ward under a pseudonym. She had admitted herself under a different name and when queried stated that she was no longer my mom; she had undergone a transformation and was twenty eight years old and Latina rather than Chinese. According to her doctor while it was good for us to speak to her and that her fantasy would allow her to still recognise us as her daughters regardless of age discrepancies, we were not allowed to tell her that her fantasy was not real. We couldn’t call her crazy.

She’s still in hospital five months down the line and the doctors and nurses caring for her have only just started calling her by her real name. So far I have not managed to visit her as a cross-continental flight costs more than my student loan and supermarket wages allow for. Somehow, as much as my mother has been through, I don’t believe she’ll ever reach the point where she can say she’s lived life fully. Giving up seeing your three children grow up will be a lot to come to terms with if she ever gets through this. She seems slightly less insane every time I talk to her but she’s probably past the point where they can properly cure her, and way beyond the point where if she were cured she’d be able to find happiness.

Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. Growing up without a mother made me become a lot more mature earlier, a lot more neurotic generally, and made me search for a mate who was so stable he couldn’t even comprehend the meaning of the word dysfunctional. Mostly I feel sorry for her. I can find happiness, she has to create fantasies of billionaires falling in love with her and magically altering her to become younger and a different person to cope with her unhappiness.

One day I will be a better daughter. Going through all this has taught me that as awful a mother as she was; I’m a much worse daughter as I don’t have a psychological illness to blame it on. I know I will be a better mother than she was. But, I have hopes that even if she never becomes a better mother to me, with continued treatment she will one day become a decent grandmother and that my children will not hate me for letting her back into my life.

Labels: dynasty, Reflection

For our two year anniversary we decided to go somewhere different, somewhere completely new. We decided to go to a loch in the centre of Scotland, a few miles away from Loch Lomond, and a train, bus and taxi ride away from civilisation. My sweetheart’s initial idea was to go camping; however this did not fit in the least with my ideas of cleanliness or comfort. So, instead, we stayed ensuite bed and breakfast in a village that consisted solely of hotels, bed and breakfasts, and was approximately fifteen houses big. It did not however have any mobile network reception with five miles of it which unfortunately meant that I could not use my laptop or phone as planned. It also didn’t have any TV other than channels one two three and four, or a DVD player. What it did have was amazing scenery, ridiculously loud deer, and a shop that mostly sold wellie warmers and was so used to customers that we had to wait five minutes for the owner to realize he had customers and unlock the door.

It was beautiful if isolated and cold. We walked fifteen miles, failed to find a tea shop anywhere regardless of promises that the scenery was inundated with them, and drank the local bitter in a pub that had only three other people in it on a Saturday night. And, more than anything else, it was strange. To a girl who believed that she had been brought up in the middle of nowhere, I found myself having to readjust my idea of what exactly constitutes nowhere. There wasn’t even a bus service, there was little other than a couple of fishermen and some deer. While I was completely enamored of it, and loving having the complete and unwavering attention of my sweetheart for a weekend, it was a little too different to be completely comfortable with.

I learnt something. I love the outdoors, I love being where there isn’t anything else. I never thought I could appreciate those things since I rarely appreciate life without a starbucks in my hand and a place where I genuinely can’t get away with wearing any of my enormous shoe collection seems a waste somehow to me. I love four inch heels, I love takeaway food, I adore regular bus and taxi services, I can’t live without Saturday afternoon clothes shopping, and I wouldn’t be able to live without a Sainsburys, Asda, Tesco and Morrisons all within fifteen minutes of my flat. But, regardless of the lack of every single one of those things, I enjoyed myself, and almost saw a life without those things, and with a couple of replacements. It’d be a good place to raise small children.

But that’s not for a good ten years yet. I may not have been single for a long time, and I may live with my (I assume) life partner already, but it’s too early to decide what will happen next. So, a little regretfully, we returned to the city, put the walking boots in the back of my shoe closet where they belong, and cuddled up in our centrally heated flat in front of digital television- the least number of channels I believed anyone could survive on until this weekend.

Labels: Flying

I saw him for the first time in over a year. I was sat in my dad’s car with my sweetheart nuzzling at my neck having just picked him up from the train station. I wasn’t expecting Him.

There wasn’t anything to it. I used to envision the time when by some small twist of fate we managed to be in the same place at the same time. I’d be loved up with my boyfriend on my arm and he’d be just as he always is, we’d exchange small talk and meaningful glances and then I’d walk away with no regrets. That was a long time ago.

Instead I stayed in the car silent. I waited until he’d got into his car and driven away before I left it. There’s nothing left to be gained by deliberately causing an encounter, and too much to be lost if I were to somehow appear even vaguely reminiscent.

I move in with my sweetheart in September. Or, more correctly, he moves in with me. My flatmate is leaving for reasons not entirely unforeseen and we’re going to see what it’s like to live together properly. We effectively do it now anyway. I told him everything before he agreed though. Once upon a time a girl made a mistake with a boy she’d loved for a long time, while she was starting a relationship with another man. And it was a long time ago, over a year and a half, only three months into our relationship. I still thought I was in love, and the other relationship didn’t seem that serious. That night I realised I was wrong on both counts, and regretted it almost immediately. But I stayed silent because what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him, and hurting him seemed like such a waste when I’d realised I could never do anything like it again.

But he always wondered about that month I was away from him. I knew it, he knew it, and we just avoided talking about it. Mostly I forgot the experience entirely. It wasn’t until we started talking about living together that I started thinking about it all again. I felt horrible, immensely guilty. I even started having dreams in which I was almost on the point of infidelity with various nameless men, except just before the point I would push them off me, plea I was in love with someone else. It doesn’t take a dream dictionary to work out what they were relating to.

Sleeping around has never been a big deal to me. Sleeping with too many who had commitments was to be avoided simply to prevent complications. And sleeping around and causing hurt is always the biggest of sins- it’s a pleasure not something to cause pain. But it was a big deal to him and that’s what’s important.

So I told him. I told him I thought I’d been in love; I told him the circumstances and my reasoning at the time. I didn’t make any excuses, I hadn’t been drunk, and I wasn’t going to try and make it sound better than it was. I told him why I hadn’t told him until now, and I told him why I was telling him at all.

It was simple. I hate lying. I don’t feel that you can start a life with someone without complete trust and while he trusted me, it was a misplaced trust rather than something earned and worked at. However had it been just by my judgement I may not have told him even then, and everyone else told me not to. But he’d told me that whatever happened, if someone cheated on him, he’d want to know. He hates lies, and I trusted him. So I ignored everyone else, and trusted his judgement. He forgave me.

So I didn’t get out the car. I watched him and even felt a vague tugging to get out the car and go to him, but it was not due to attraction or even a small place left in my heart for him, but due to a wish to greet someone who had been a good friend. But nothing is worth hurting someone you love. So I watched, I waited, and when he’d finally gone I pulled my sweetheart out of the car and walked along happy knowing I was with the right person for me.

Labels: Mistakes

I wouldn’t go back and see the psychologist. Sometimes you’ve gotta keep looking back over your shoulder, constantly vigilant, worried that if one little thing breaks then it all will. My mum wasn’t so vigilant, or, if she was, then something got through and it all broke apart. I’m too scared of that happening to me. But I can watch on my own, I don’t need some awful woman watching for me and adding extra pressure.

When she left she spat words in my face. I had my arm trapped in the door trying to stop her, begging her to stay, promising that I didn’t mean it, that I was sorry, hysterical. But she left anyway screaming at me, clawing at my arm. And afterwards for four days the words just repeated over and over in my head, echoing.

“You’re just like her; you’re mum all over again.”

There are so many people so much more screwed up than me. And so many people who are less. I don’t know why I am the way I am, I don’t know how my mum ended up the way she is, and I’m not sure whether I can change any of it. These last few months I’ve been completely lost. I can’t change any of it, and I can’t prove to myself that I will never turn out like her, I can just promise myself that I’ll try to hold it together for as long as possible. Though, for some reason right now, that isn’t working. Maybe I’ve already past that point, maybe I’ve already lost it all.

I’ve altered every feature that god if the bastard is real gave me. I even got jet black hair to go blonde for a while. I can look like my mother, or I can look more English like my dad. None of it really changed anything at all; it just made for some interesting variation in my different forms of ID. I dunno, somehow I thought that maybe changing the outside would change the inside too. I suppose I really never completely expected it to work.

I dreamed of growing up, escaping it all, and I did. It just wasn’t as good as I thought it would be.

Labels: Growing Up

I don’t miss it. I honestly don’t. I don’t know what to tell these people. Sometimes I can see how it would be easier to just give in and tell them what they want to hear. But I don’t need Prozac. I don’t need a therapist or so many drugs I have to alphabetize and cross reference before I can remember which I’m meant to take on that particular day of the week. And I’m not in denial. I’m not even sure what I could be in denial about.

I’ve been having trouble staying awake recently. Trouble waking up in the mornings, trouble staying awake once I am awake, and trouble keeping awake after that. If I rest for too long, or eat too much so I feel satisfied and comfortable then suddenly I’ll be knocked out. For someone who’s always had problems getting to sleep this whole situation is slightly surreal. So I saw a doctor, had the requisite blood tests, and booked myself in with a psychologist to rule out any psychological reasons I might be feeling permanently fatigued.

I’ve never had any problems with shrinks; in most circumstances I’m sure they’re useful. My mom needed one, I was more than happy to accept that. But I’m not crazy. I know what it’s like to be crazy, I’ve seen it up close and personal, and okay, I’ll accept that everybody has something wrong with them; no one can be completely whole. But I know what my problems are.

I have abandonment issues, I hate being alone, I’m stubborn, shallow, and I have so many different mood swings even I can’t keep up. I don’t let people see the real me for a long time after knowing them, and even then generally I just keep up a façade because it’s easier. And yes, the reason I didn’t like talking to her was because she kept on asking me questions about me which I object to because honestly, I just don’t like talking about myself unless I’m feeling in a particularly introspective and open mood. And even then, I’m disinclined to fess up to strangers.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, and I wish I could concentrate on staying awake as my whole life seems to be falling apart at times and the constantly being unconscious is hardly making it easier to keep appointments. I’m getting threatened by our previous landlord even though we’ve finally escaped the hell hole, and I’m pretty sure my lecturers are right now torn between convincing me not to drop out and kicking me out themselves. I’ve got more holes in me than a pin cushion from all the blood being taken and I’ve had enough. I had to go eighteen hours without eating the other day. I’m not fat, clinically I’m underweight I’m that naturally skinny so I’ve never had to diet in my life before. This whole going without eating when I’ve never before had cause to cut back was awful, within an hour and a half I was clawing at the walls trying to stop myself from opening up a packet of crisps.

I’ve had enough. My mother left fifteen years ago. I’m not suddenly reliving the experience, nothing has happened that could trigger that same feeling of loss. So I’m grouchy and sleep a lot, I’m getting tested for diabetes and everyone’s on my back. I’m scared about getting kicked out of uni and having to work in a supermarket for the rest of my life, I’m not in denial about my mother leaving, I’ve long come to accept that, I’m just irritable that the shit has hit the fan and that doesn’t make me a head case that just makes me normal.

Labels: Demons

Hey sweetheart,

I’m no good at Valentines, really never have been. I was always the girl that watched other girls with hugely elaborate bunches of roses and mountains of cards. I was the girl who called it an over-commercialised waste of time; an exploitation of the media to ensure Hallmark didn’t go out of business in the mid February card sending abyss that is the late aftermath of Christmas. And, while it totally is all that, it doesn’t mean I didn’t check my mail every two minutes from the 10th of February to somewhere around the 20th, or wish that someone would give me just one card.

You weren’t my first real Valentine, but you’re the one that’s mattered. You’re the only person that I’ve ever properly fallen for, the only person that made me say, “I love you.” Even if I mess things up somehow and lose you, you’ll always be my perfect other half, my soul mate. You’re the only person who can make me almost normal, the first person who’s managed to make me happy.

I love you more than I ever thought it possible to love anyone. I adore every single aspect of your personality from your warped sense of humour and complete loyalty to your complete obsession with football.

The first time I said it I didn’t mean to, but this time I mean it- you’re the love of my life and I fully intend to spend the rest of my life with you even if I drive you crazy.

Happy Valentines gorgeous,

Your Harriet

Labels: Courting

This year I never made any resolutions. It came to the right time and I just didn’t know what to say. Usually they seem so… predictable. I must lose three pounds, I will exercise regularly, I will be more considerate of those around me, I will dedicate myself to my career. And how many people stick to them?

I once rejected a boy for the sole reason that he would never go anywhere. He loved his “home comforts,” his job which kept him as close to the nest as possible, I just couldn’t be with someone who never wanted to do anything. A little while earlier, that sweet but hopeless boy not even an issue, I made a resolution.

“[I will] Fall in love. Not just lust or like. Actual love. Somehow I think this one may take longer than a year to be fulfilled.”

It took me five or six months, but I fell in love. He was… I don’t know, just someone there at the right time maybe, or perhaps he was right for me. He was what I thought I wanted but almost exactly opposite to what I needed. He was unsupportive, antagonistic, and made me feel like I was somehow less than I actually was. It ended, as always, badly.

That boy who I rejected, that one who I could never grow to love, he was the one who appreciated me. That one who I loved never could. Of the two, I would now say both were wrong, but wrong for the same reasons. Neither will escape their comfort zones, those homes where they are spoilt and looked after, and I can never go back to mine like that.

I now resolve not to make resolutions. The ones that are forgotten are probably best that way, and the ones that come to pass should never have been uttered in the first place. Events will take place when they are meant to and resolving to do something important can come at any time of the year, while new years resolutions are made solely because we’re forced into saying we’ll do something.

Falling in love is good, and always a lesson. But it should never have been hurried, and while I don’t regret how it came to pass, I’m glad of the fact it ended, and I wish that when it did it had ended more definitely. I have done some truly stupid things. I’ve betrayed people and never been able to apologise because the damage finding out the betrayal would cause is more awful than the lying and hurt from having to lie. Resolutions just remind me of how naïve I was, and how much I don’t want to look back in future and realise how naïve and stupid I am now.

I can never make an apology without causing hurt, and no matter how hard I try I can’t take back the mistakes I already made. But I don’t have to repeat them, and I don’t have to make myself remember them by writing down pointless resolutions that will hurt me in the future.

Labels: Reflection

How do good relationships fall apart? Maybe we fall into ruts, get tired of doing the same things, the same people, again and again. Maybe we fall in love with someone else- we don’t mean to, but sometimes you can’t help when you fall, or who it happens to be for. Maybe life gets in the way, a far away job, an illness, even a death. Maybe you’ve just forgotten who it was you fell in love with, and realise that the person you’re waking up next to every morning isn’t it anymore. Honestly I don’t know, if you love someone, why let them go?

I never intended to fall in love. I asked him how it felt to be loved by me once, he replied, “how does it feel to have broken the girl who couldn’t love, who didn’t want to, and who loved being single? It feels awesome.”

That’s how he sees it- he broke me, changed me into someone slightly different, someone maybe slightly better. But I never asked to be broken; it’s just something that happened accidentally along the way. And, occasionally, I wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t been broken. I wonder what it would be like if I were allowed to kiss other boys, to act a little more my age, and to shake off the ties that are currently holding me back from doing those things.

We have a good relationship. I have a white gold commitment ring that promises, and reminds me, that I am promised to him, and that I must stay faithful. I love him more than I ever imagined I could love anything, or anyone. I don’t think I could ever love anyone more than I love him, but sometimes I wonder if we found each other too young.

Once I made the comparison of love to flying, once I thought love a myth similar, just out of reach, like I were built to love like I’m built for flying. And now that I’ve had experience of one, I think I wouldn’t be able to handle the other. As soon as you think you’ve got it sussed, suddenly something happens to make you think that you don’t know anything.

So how do good relationships fail? They fail when one person wants something slightly more, when everything is no longer enough. They fail when someone like me looks around and thinks that it might be nice to kiss another boy, when someone like me makes the biggest mistake of her life because she thinks there’s a better time for love.

Labels: Being the Duck

“One day, eventually, will you marry me?”

He gave me that look, the one where they’re not upset or worried, just questioning. “Are you proposing to me?”

I giggled, “No, that’s your job.”

He smiled, “Then yes.”


My mom’s been diagnosed with schizophrenia. At last. In my early childhood she was forever in and out of clinics, psychiatrists, therapists, etc. Dad took her to everyone he could think of but Mom’s always been good with people, and totally convinced there’s nothing wrong with her. She’d go in, and an hour later Dad would pick her up and the therapist would look at him like he was scum, like the problem wasn’t with Mom, it was with him.

We knew the bouts of manic happiness and extreme anger weren’t normal; the promiscuity while spouting values on abstinence and no-sex-before-marriage. But we were the only ones who saw it; everyone else just saw an attractive vivacious woman and a jealous angry husband. They didn’t see the children scared, or the man being pushed to the edges of sanity by a woman so far over them that at times couldn’t tell you what year it was or how old her own children were.

She would accuse my brother of stealing her jewellery, or have screaming fits about our selfishness when she made food for herself and we’d ask if there was anything for us to eat. Three months before my grandfather- her own father- died of cancer she refused to see him anymore because she’d convinced herself he was looking at her lustfully. The man had Alzheimer’s and cancer of the liver, he was so drugged up on morphine he probably couldn’t tell when she walked into the room, never mind who she was or what she looked like.

When I look back on my mum and dad’s marriage I don’t have anything good to look back on. I try to, but it always seems to be the bad memories that stick in your head, the good ones just seem to fade away. I never expected anything good from my relationships and found them satisfyingly unfulfilling as I’d always thought they would be. And then I met someone else.

I got a shock, and I’m still in shock. I think he’s perfect, and for some reason he seems to think something similar about me. My mom’s going to get treated now, my dad has been put off women for life, and I’m going to just try and pass my exams without getting too distracted by men who make me happier than I ever imagined.

Labels: Reflection

An albatross can fly for thousands of miles without getting tired. I've always thought that love is similar to flying; therefore we should aspire to be like the albatross.

I’m not an albatross. I can’t fly, I’ll never have wings, and I just don’t have that sort of determination. I’ve been told that some people have dreams that they’re flying, I’ve never had those. I’d love to dream that I’m flying, instead I have crappy dreams where I’m riding a bike along a motorway and that I never get anywhere, or that a giant disco ball falls on top of me, completely flattening me, and just as I’m dying Matt tops it all by breaking up with me using the excuse, “I’m breaking up with you before you break up completely.” Apparently my subconscious has a really bad sense of humour.

So anyway, according to me, one day I’ll meet someone, test my wings and I’ll be able to fly. Thing is, I don’t actually really believe in The One. I hear people talk about it, this ideal we’re all looking for, one person who will complete us, our perfect other halves, the one person who will allow me at last to fly. But, while my belief of The One is limited, if not incredulous, I do believe at least in happiness. I believe that you can find someone who you can spend every night with, and still want to see more of. I believe in someone who can make you that little bit better, that little bit happier.

I never believed in him, I wanted to, I craved to. I’ve always found myself to be lonelier than other people alone are, at the time I didn’t know exactly why, I just sort of thought it was me. I’m clearer headed now, less guarded, less troubled by demons; I know what it is that makes me worse. And I don’t need it confirmed and questioned by other people.

Now I believe in that person because I found him. I found someone who I can spend hours with, and still wish to see more. I found someone who finds it endearing that I’m completely insane. I found someone who loves me regardless of my insecurities, and who I love regardless of his flaws. Its that perfect ideal that I always so hated, the people who are happy, the people who don’t need others recognition or acceptance because they have one person who matters, and essentially everyone else who does not.

I am the albatross; I can fly better than any other I’ve ever met. I don’t have the problems of my egocentric schizophrenic mother, nor my jinxed and perpetually lonely downtrodden father. I no longer have fears of both commitment or rejection, I don’t get depressed, and I’ve kicked my alcoholism to the extent where I rarely drink, and when I do, I do so carefully. From a nineteen year old this all sounds a little to middle aged, but from the shit that I’ve put myself through, it’s finally just an acceptance of life, and happiness.

I have my problems, but they aren’t with myself anymore, they’re the small things that hurt me the external factors. Inside myself, I’m always going to get through them, because inside, after all these years, I’m whole. The battle was fought, the war was won, and whatever happens with my sweetheart, even if we end, it won’t matter because he made me better, he made me happy, and it’ll hurt to lose him, but I’ll never lose the gifts he gave me, or the changes I endured. I can’t go back to the ground once I’ve learnt how to fly.

Labels: Flying

Yeah, I know, I lied. But christ, I don't have any sofas, now I'm meant to live without therapy via blogging? I don't think so. (Some of the deleted posts may come back if I feel like it over time, but this a stressful time and place for me right now and honestly I can't be arsed.)

Right, so here's the deal.

My flat is a glorified death trap. The bathroom floor is mouldy, as in green and slightly fluffy. I was just lying there on the floor thinking "Woe unto me being hungover" and moaning faintly, when I realised that as ill as I was, the bathroom smelt really funky. So, about two days later when eventually I'd managed to recover, I lifted the bathroom carpet and discovered a colony growing out of the chipboard.

Those of you who know the slightest thing about building, surveying, generally manual labour type bathroom fitting (obviously not me but my dad told me) will know that chipboard is about the stupidest thing you could put down in a bathroom. It's going to get damp, go mouldy, smell icky, and eventually just collapse. Nice.

So, as a rightfully outraged tenant, I phone up the estate agents, bitch and whinge, and beg for the floor to be fixed. And then while I'm on the phone, tactfully remind him that he'd promised me a new sofa set before we moved into the flat four months earlier (that being the one condition upon which I agreed to live in the place), and that said sofa set had not subsequently arrived.

To cut a long, and very much agonising story short, the agency did absolute fuck all about said floor or sofa set, and I got upset. So we phoned the council, and they got upset too, and we wrote the agency a very professional and ridiculously outraged letter demanding work be done within a week. Three weeks later I'm walking back to the flat, and as I'm walking towards it I realise that the front door is open. I'm the only one in Edinburgh with a key at this point and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be seeing it open at this angle had I been inside the flat. Inside is a rather large Bulgarian wandering around our furnitureless flat, he informs me (there are hand movements involved as his English is less than adequate) that he is there to remove the sofas. I ask him to continue and to bring the new sofas and chairs in. He tells me he doesn't have new sofas, he's just removing.

Phone up agency, sofas will be in the flat within two days according to the guy I spoke to. That was a week and three days ago. I've been sat on the floor to watch TV ever since. I'm not especially impressed.

Anyway, apart from the green bathroom floor and lack of furniture in previously advertised FULLY FURNISHED flat, I'm okay except for the fact that yet again I'm being threatened with being kicked out of uni, and my boyfriend is working with me which is just plain weird. I'd like to tell you things are great, but as per usual I'm on the cusp of falling apart and there's only a very fine piece of thread holding me back. Luckily for me, I have a very good habit of bouncing back, and I can always find someone to bounce on to get there.

So, as sporadically and badly as I will write in this, for now I think I'm here for a little while longer, though I can't really be sure.

Labels: Buggrit