jonahkat.com

Hello?  Hello?  Over here.  Here I am.  Waving my arms madly at you.  Can you see me? Ah there you are.  I’m waving, not drowning.  Okay I might come in soon.  I seem to have been adrift for quite some time.  I’ve been clinging to this… well I’m not really sure what it is.  Driftwood? An old mattress? It’s rather abstract and changes form almost daily, but it is security.

Anyway – let me just shuffle up and sit on this old mattress for a moment – that’s better.  It’s hard to think when paddling madly to stay afloat.  This is nice.  I have a new perspective from up here.

So here I am.  All at sea. The sun is shining and it’s pleasantly misty – just that kind of mist that obscures the horizon, so you don’t know quite what you’re heading into.  Can you hear the seagulls? They’re wheeling overhead, mewing and screeching encouragement to small children, to drop their ice creams.  Ha! The children are too smart to fall for that one though.

It’s nice here.  The sea is bobbing a bit and I’m getting splashed, but that’s okay because the sun is drying out my clothes and my hair is all kind of salty and crispy.  I’ll never get a brush through it.  But I don’t care.  For now, I’m just going to sit here and contemplate the view and the feel of the sea breeze on my skin.

I haven’t looked up like this for a while.  I found this piece of driftwood and clung to it, paddling and paddling with my feet, feeling a bit cold, and then it changed into this old mattress and became kind of comfortable. Apart from the bit where the spring sticks out – that’s caught me off guard a few times I can tell you.

Did you think that I had drowned? I’ve been gone for some time. Is it egotistical of me to ask? You all have busy lives, paddling your own rafts or riding your bicycles or oiling your aeroplanes.

Well I suppose I had better think about where to go next.  I did try to hang on to this mattress.  I tried really hard, you know, even to the point of ignoring the spring sticking into me every time I tried to get really comfortable.  The things is, I promised myself a swim a while back.  A chance to dive into the dark, salty waters.  I can breath underwater you know.   I promised myself that I would let go of the mattress and dive into the cool deep.  Down and down.  And now it’s time to do it and what do I do? I climb up on top of it don’t I.  Just to take a better look.  And to talk to you of course.

You know why?  I’m scared really.  I wouldn’t admit this to anyone else, but I am.  What if I’m not a very good swimmer? What if my hair gets tangled in the coral, or I get eaten by a shark, or I find when I’m miles down that I can’t breath underwater after all?

Anyway – it doesn’t matter really because the recycling ship came past yesterday.  Made a proper big wave.  I nearly fell off!  It’s coming back next week and they’re taking my mattress.  I think they saw the spring sticking out.  They said it’s not sustainable and not good for the environment.  They don’t care that it’s my security.  That’s not in their sustainability plan.  I mean, I was going to dive off it anyway, to see if I really can swim.  But I will have to if it’s gone, won’t I.

All I can say is, I hope I really can breath underwater.  Because if I can’t, I’ll have to find another piece of driftwood and see if that turns into a mattress.  And if you see me waving my arms, there is no need to worry.  Just wave back will you?  Because I will be waving, not drowning.

Probably.

Our pretty little house

Once again, an abysmal amount of time has passed since my last blog.  Anyhow – here I am, so what’s been going on?  And why am I showing my knickers in public?

Lee, Edie and I have been living in Sussex for just over a year now.  It’s been fun, it’s been a brilliant experience and I’m so glad that we took the opportunity when it was offered.  But it’s also stressful.  It’s hard being away from family and friends, it’s hard trying to manage two homes at the same time and of course it’s expensive!

We considered – for a short time – moving south.  Selling our house in Nottingham and moving here, but the comedy house prices put us off – £350k for a 2 bed terrace anyone?

My contract was drawing towards renewal – or not – time and in what seemed like another nail in the coffin, our landlady gave us notice on our gorgeous little graveside house in Billingshurst. With so many variables floating around – will they / won’t they renew my contract? Will we / won’t we manage to find another furnished house in time, it seemed that fate was pushing us back in a Northern direction.  So, I threw it up in the air a bit.  I found a house I liked, furnished, but it only became available on 6th October – the same date our old house had to be vacated.

I told my boss that if they were to offer me the usual 3 month contract extension I would have to decline, as any let is for a 6 month minimum.

And Lee applied for a job at Derby University.

The house dates worked.  My boss offered me the 6 month contract extension.

And Derby University kind of offered Lee the job.  They offered him a part-time job.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

There was no way he could take a part time job and support us all on the offered salary.  It looked like he would have to decline the job and we would move, and realistically he wouldn’t be then able to look for work for another six months – not great when you’ve already had three years out of the workplace being a house Dad / supportive partner willing to travel with the wife.

And then we talked about it some more, weighed up a few pros and cons, and the net result is that Lee has moved back to Nottingham and Edie and I have moved into a gorgeous little terraced house in the beautiful town of Arundel – we have our own castle don’t you know!

The house is three floors, two bedrooms, small, warm, cosy and has a creative energy.  I managed the move pretty much on my own, with help from an unexpected and very welcome couple of friends doing the lifting and shifting, but the unpacking, moving about and generally setting up has all been down to me.  I now appreciate what the single parents among you do every day.  I am constantly ‘Mummy.’

Part of the deal was, that unless we could find an excellent childminder, Edie and I would throw in the towel and go back to Nottingham – but we managed to find a lovely lady who is a vegetarian and so understands our weird dietry ways.  So every morning I get up, get myself and Edie fed, dressed and out of the door with the relevant work / lunch / change of clothing bags.  Then I go to work.  Then I come home, cook dinner, bath and feed Edie, get her to bed and then make lunch and get our clothes ready for the next day.  And then it all starts again.

But we love it. We do everything together – make dinner, tidy up, make a mess, plan for Daddy to visit, and hang out the washing.  In the communal garden.

Which brings me to the knickers.

The garden is strung with communal washing lines and here you can really learn a lot about your neighbours without actually ever seeing one.  I think most of my neighbours are older ladies and gentlemen, probably retired, with a penchant for floral bedding and well washed Marks and Sparks garments in larger sizes.  Our washing is distinctly different.  We have floral pyjamas, cute little T-Shirts and vests, appear to be the only ‘jeans’ wearers in the block and of course, we hang our ’smalls’ out there too.

As I have not yet met many of these neighbours, they, too, will be forming their opinions of us based on our washing. It will be interesting to note the looks or greetings as we meet the neighbours, one by one.

Actually I did meet one lady – she lives next door, and is eighty-eight.  She has a box of red wine in her kitchen window and she is spectacular.  She wears big, floppy hats and oversized shades.  She wears crimson lipstick and has diamond rings flashing on many fingers, and she is extremely well spoken.  She came outside to tell Edie and I that we were using the ‘wrong’ washing line – clearly we misunderstood the heirarchy – although she was very pleasant.  I invited her to pop round for a cuppa. ‘No you’re alright thank you’ was her reply.

And so we will see what sort of adventures we can get up to here.  I suspect many of them will be around eating cake and drinking a lot of tea.

And art and writing!  I’ve unpacked the writers bureau course.  Now all I need to do is write assignment 2.

Hello and apologies AGAIN for the radio silence on the blog site.  It’s been too long.

Since starting the writing course I’ve been marred by the twin forces of having lots and lots of creative ideas, and being too busy doing people and office moves for my day job.  My notebooks have been scribbled in, and I have copious notes to type up, and I’ve started a series, yes, a series, of children’s books.  I don’t do things by halves!

But now it’s time for a well earned rest.

When my project team were on it’s collective last legs, roundabout Christmas time, we submitted a plan to Chief Executive Board showing how many people we could move at each time, and how many offices we could open / close / do up with a lick of paint.  But we sneakily also planned in two weeks of holiday.  Each.  At the same time.  And they didn’t notice.

Last week saw us travel from sunny West Sussex and the South Downs, our temporary home, back to Nottingham – yes – I do realise people usually do this the other way around.  And this, the second week of our break is our ‘proper’ holiday – a week with my lovely Dad in his cosy little bungalow in Chapel St Leonards.

Little Rabbit Foo Foo is super excited to be near the sea.  We actually live near enough to the sea, when in Sussex, and Brighton is our regular Sunday haunt, but this is ‘proper’ sea to her because it has the essential ingredient – sand.  And really, it’s beautiful.  We’re a good few miles along the coast from Chapel St Leonards’s better known and far more socially confident and gaudy sister, Skegness, and it still wears the badge of being fairly quaint.  Not in a cobbled streets and fishing restaurants kind of way, but in a holidays of my childhood way.  Some of the amusement arcades still have rides that have been there for decades.  The village isn’t overrun by retail outlets, although there is a co-op, a second hand bookshop and place to buy decent ice cream and buckets and spades, and the beach is clean, sandy and stretches for miles.  The locals aren’t too keen on the wind farm that stands in the sea, churning power with their big windmill arms – some think it an eyesore.  Which is an observation that I think, given the decor and amusement installations in most of the nearby towns, could be considered a little ironic.

House Dad packed the car to come here.  When you have a three year old you have to be efficient, organised and full of distraction techniques.  Because I’m usually at work, and Foo Foo has her Daddy most of the time, when I’m off work she only wants Mummy.  Which makes it very difficult for Mummy to do anything on her own, like pack, go to the loo etc. And when packing is constantly peppered with ‘Mummy….’ (grabbing of chin in small hands and pulling of face towards eye level of small child)  ‘…I want to tell you something’ (the ‘something’ could consist of anything from ‘my belly’s rum-bell-ing’ – euphemism for ‘I know there is chocolate in the house and I know you want to get on and I will be quiet for two minutes if you go get it for me’ – to – ‘I want to tell you….. I want to tell you……’ – which means ‘I have your attention, but I don’t actually have anything to tell you’ there is a very good chance that said packing will be missing such essentials as my iPhone.  Or underwear.  Or my make-up bag!

So I make a deal with House Dad – I will take Edie up the road to see our Eco-neighbours who have recently installed solar power on their little house, which I am incredibly curious about as they now have their own little green contribution to the National Grid, and not only do they have minimal energy bills, they also have an income.  Eco-neighbours are lovely, friendly and make great coffee.  They ply Edie with picture books, they show me the space age roof space wrapped up in a thick silver insulating jacket, we play with the knobs and dials on the solar panel controls and we ‘oooh’ and ‘aaaah’ over the graph showing how much energy is being generated.  Then we go home.  I expect the car to be packed, I will cook a quick lunch of vegan bangers and burgers and then wash up, House Dad can entertain Foo Foo whilst I quick checklist my packing, and off we can go.  But the car isn’t packed.  House Dad has a headache.  He is prone to headaches, so this is a minor setback.  I manage to cook lunch, wash up, throw bags in the car, get everyone in and do the driving.  But the cost to me is a frazzled head as I’ve not had the five minutes quiet checklist headtime to ensure I have everything I need and have done everything I needed to do.

So the beginning of the journey is fraught, but we soon settle into holiday mode and by the time we arrive at the seaside, we are all singing radio songs (House Dad’s headache seems to have disappeared).  It’s lovely to get here.  Brilliant to see my Dad, and for Foo Foo to see her Grandad.

We unpack our far too much luggage and are installed in the double bedroom – my Dad’s usual room.  He has de-camped to the twin room next door which is tiny, and has two smaller than usual single beds and no floor space for a camp bed.  We have a lovely day and Foo Foo is a dream.  She plays on the beach, we go running in the pools left by the tide, pointing out the dead crabs and one live starfish, we throw a couple of quid at the grabbing machines that are filled with no chance wins of particularly cute Hello Kittys that the grabber can actually hold for all of five seconds and then we come home, eat and bed.  House Dad, Foo Foo and I are sharing the double bed.  Now this is a standard double – we are spoiled at home and have an oversized bed – and Foo Foo has established herself as a star shaped furnace in the centre.  After an uncomfortable night it is clear that this cannot sustain and so House Dad and Dad agree that they will share the twin room, leaving Foo Foo and I to the double.  This arrangement works much better – or would do – if I were to lay off the G&Ts and go to bed at a decent hour and not sit up chatting to my lovely Dad for half of the night (which is the point of the holiday – actually).  At 5.30am the sun is streaming through the curtains and Foo Foo is bouncing up and down.  I try every conceivable sleep bribe – most of which she agrees to and then breaks after three seconds by whispering ‘Mummyyyyyy – I want to TELL you something…’  By 7.30 I think that this is a reasonable time to go and wake House Dad, who has had an uninterrupted nights sleep in a bed of his own, and get him to go and do breakfast duty.  I push open the door to go and wake him – there is something endearing about the sight of two big, grown up men, snuggled up in a pair of tiny lavender single beds, just so that Foo Foo and I can have enough space.  House Dad agrees to the plan and gets up with Foo Foo.

I manage to get about another hour of sleep before I hear the bedroom door being pushed open slowly. ‘Mummyyyyy…’ comes a voice ‘…I want to tell you something…’  This time the ‘something’ is that ‘Daddy is in the toilet – again (said with a theatrical roll of the eyes) and he’s being a LONG TIME…’  I do the only thing a good parent can do – I tell her to go and tell Daddy to hurry up and that I have said she can have two chocolate raisins.  She skips of happily and I snuggle back down knowing that I owe him one – especially as I can hear some of the resulting conversation of ‘I’m sure Mummy didn’t say that…’, ‘SHE DID!!!’

And so now, I’m finally up, in the cosy living room having sneaked an extra half an hour sleep.  My Dad is still snuggled up in his little lavender bed, and House Dad and Foo Foo have gone out to the beach.  She is in her pyjamas, pink wellies and cardigan, as House Dad didn’t want to disturb me with the clothes rummage, and she thinks she is having a tremendous adventure.  Again, I owe him one.

And now there is only one way to make the most of the peace and quiet whilst I still have it.  A big pot of coffee…

Go on.  Look up at it.  What can you see?

From the beginning of time, mankind has been gazing at the sky.  For direction and bearings, for inspiration.  For a key to the meaning of life.

For the last week, it has been a truly awesome experience to watch the sky.  For the first time in my lifetimw, there have been no planes flying overhead – thanks to the eruption of the Icelandic volcano and the subsequent risk, or not, depending upon who you choose to believe, of volcanic ash shutting down aircraft engines everywhere.

The skies have been much clearer.  Less cloud.  Blue.  The nights brighter.  More stars.  And silence.  Respite from the ever present distant drone and vapour trails that usually make up our skyscape.

I am reminded of childhood days, lying on my back on the grass, staring up at the sky.  Air travel in the 1970s was less common.  Yes, the package holiday was becoming a popular necessity for us Brits, no Summer complete without jetting off to Spain and returning with a straw hat, a gigantic stuffed donkey and a fashionably deep and not so fashionably pink and peeling sunburn tan.  Cheap flight travel as we know it now, with ridiculously low fares, increasing demand and pollution, had not yet emerged.

The airlines are complaining of the vast cost to their businesses.  The economy will probably suffer.  Supermarket shelves usually stacked with non-seasonal produce from across the globe must be getting a little sparse.

But it’s beautiful.

It is so wonderful. And quiet.  And a small, precious glimpse of how things were meant to be.  And probably a one off, a once in a lifetime experience.

I watched some footage of the volcano erupting, sent to me by an Icelandic friends.  It was breathtaking, natural phenomena that acts as a powerful reminder that actually, we dont run the place.  Mother Nature does.  I’ve been to Iceland – such a beautiful, awe inspiring place where nature is truly spectacular, terrible and varied – from the long, long Winter darknessto the Summer midnight sun, the extreme cold and natural thermal springs and pools, the Geyser erupting at regular intervals shooting jets of hot spring water skywards.  It is incredible that such a small, quiet, powerfully beautiful country brings the mighty babbling, trading, fast paced, commuter infested Europe to a standstill and I stand in quiet awe and salute the phenomenon that blessed me with the quiet skies.

But such is our need to control, to mass communicate, to be informed and to inform others, that nobody is stopping to look and listen.  Everybody is talking; providing there anecdotes, theories and conspiracies.  Today I overheard someone telling his coffe companion that there was no reason for the volcanic ash to stop air travel, and that planes had been grounded and airports closed as a social experiment, to see what would happen if a major part of the world was brought to a standstill. His coffee companion offered anecdotes of her own.  Tales of European taxis being taken over by bandits and travellers being charged up to 3000 Euros to travel from one town to another.

Tomorrow, I hear on the news, air travel will be resumed.  The 150,000 Brits stranded abroad can begin their homeward journeys and likewise, those stranded here can return home.  The respite will be over, the clouds and the vapour trals will return, and Egyptian asparagus and Spanish strawberries will once again appear on our supermarket shelves.  Apart from the newspaper headlines changing, will any of us really notice?

How many of us took this precious time to look and really listen?  How many of us even noticed the opportunity to observe the world as it should be?  To watch the sky…?

Sometimes a little bit of cheekiness can have unexpected and very welcome results.

As a result of blogging about my experience  of writing my first assignment for The Writer’s Bureau, I had a very nice lady from TWB leave a comment asking me to get in touch.  Now, she either wanted to discuss the blog (likely?), or she was about to tell me that my tutor had fired me and would be forwarding on the bills from the counselling sessions for the red lipstick remark (more likely).  But, shockingly, it turns out that it was the former.  The very nice lady wants to feature my blog.  Did I say feature? Well, what she actually asked me is if she could link to my blog on TWB’s Twitter account, and possibly their E-Zine, and would I mind?

Would I mind?  Would I MIND??  Let me think about this for…oh…three seconds or so.  No, I would be ecstatic, delighted, elated, honoured and excited and I would not mind.

Writing can be a lonely business, a bit like throwing stones into a long disused well and waiting for the distant splash or dry clatter that indicates contact.  The writer pours her heart and soul, and the insides of her spaghetti head onto paper and awaits the elusive echo.

A comment on a blog is an astounding reward.  Somebody, somewhere, has heard – and we all need to be heard – just ask that nice Carl Rogers, humanistic, person-centred super psychotherapy forefather.

For those of you who don’t already blog, (why not? We all have something to say), when you get a comment on a piece of writing, you have to approve it before it appears on your public page – a little safeguard so that people can’t just write horrid things without you knowing about it first.  When you have had a blog for a little while, or when you are not very technically competent, like me, you get a lot of spam comments.  So you log in, note excitedly that you have 17 new comments, and scroll down only to find 17 invitations to purchase extensions to appendages you don’t even have.  On a particularly lonely, ego squashed writer day, however, even these spurious automated intruders are a welcome sign that you are, somehow, getting ‘out there’.  It’s the old Transactional Analysis theory of positive and negative strokes.  Have you ever noticed how, if a child is good or does something new, and is ignored, that behaviour is soon followed by something a little more destructive and guaranteed to provoke a reaction?  The theory is that a negative reaction is better than no reaction at all (because is there is no reaction – do we really exist?).

So, given this, you can imagine I was rather pleased to get such a wonderful reaction from a respected writing establishment of which I am a fully paid up student member.  Not only will THEY hear me, other students might hear me too.  Oh dear – I’d better brush up on my punctuation and find some interesting things to say.  There are some very clever students indeed, if the forum is anything to go by, who might stumble across my ramblings.

So, if any of you DO link here from The Writers Bureau, please stop and leave a comment, even if it is only to offer me some kind of feature enhancing surgery.  And if you’re not blogging already, get yourself started and share the link.  I love a bit of nosiness into other people’s lives.

And as we’re talking about all things Writers Bureau, I had better get on with some swotting up for my second assignment.  Apparently I have to read a lot of magazines for this one – let’s call it research.  Sometimes study can be very taxing indeed.  Now – where did I put that pile of celebrity ‘Who’s Doing Who?’ and ‘Who’s Wearing What?’ mags…?

So I’ve started.  I mean, I have actually, properly, really started writing, in a grown up proper manner.  Rather than just committing my random ramblings to my loyal lot of regular readers, all five of you, who have to like me anyway because I send you birthday cards, I have now made a commitment and paid real money to The Writers Bureau long distance learning course.

Now here’s a not so secret secret – I’ve done this before you know.  About ten years ago I subscribed to the very same course, for the very same quite a lot of money (but of course excellent value, just in case anyone from TWB is reading this).  I got as far as the first assignment, entitled ‘Why I want to write’ – and found I hadn’t got a word to say.

Ten years on the course material arrive and they haven’t changed much.  The first assignment is still the same – ‘Why I want to write’.

Okay so here are a few reasons that spring to mind:-

• I like looking studious in cafes, with my posh Moleskine notebooks and Muji pens.
• I quite fancy living in a sprawling country house, gazing out of my wood panelled back bedroom office over green fields – all writers live in houses like this – right?
• I would have a reason to dress in black and wear red lipstick and glasses, hair tied back in a writerly fashion.
• I could legitimately live on a diet of strong black coffee and Green and Blacks’ finest dark cherry chocolate – a proper writers diet.
• My morning commute would consist of lugging my coffee and white MacBook from the kitchen and up the rambling stairs of said country house, into my office.
• I would get to attend fancy lunches with my agent, and awards ceremonies in London, which I would travel to by train.
• I would constantly have royalty cheques thudding onto the doormat instead of bills.

I didn’t write any of that.  Instead, I wrote a nervous paragraph about wanting a better work / life balance and enjoying writing.  I might have mentioned the MacBook – sure to impress any tutor that!

The second part of the assignment was an invitation to visit a fair or sporting event and write about it.  Sport? Me? Hmmm.  And it’s March so not exactly fair and fete season, so instead, I took a solo trip to Brighton, Moleskine and pen in hand, and sat in a lot of cafes drinking coffee and nosing into other people’s conversations – see?  I’m practically qualified already!

My subsequent submission was a Terry and June version of my usual style – I thought it best to leave out the acerbic wit and sarcasm for the first go – after all, I am trying to learn to be a nice, proper writer and I don’t think ‘Woman’s Weekly’ would go for my usual observational style.

Assignments complete, I was able to e-mail them off.  Yes, e-mail,  I think that a great deal of my reason for failure to complete the course the first time was good old fashioned laziness and the thought of organising envelopes and, God forbid, having to buy stamps was just too much.

And you know what? I can’t believe how nervous I was sending off my little assignment.  Normally I just publish and damn the consequences, but knowing that my work would be READ and CRITIQUED by someone who actually earns a living from writing (and no doubt lives in a sprawling country house) was quite terrifying.

Now, I sent this off YESTERDAY – Sunday – and so expected to hear back in 5, 10 or maybe 14 days, but today I opened up my in-box and there it was – ‘Message from your Tutor – I have marked your assignment’.  Crikey that was quick!  Heart beating madly, I found several things to do before opening that e-mail.  Of course!  The quick turnaround was probably because my submission was rubbish – that can be the only explanation.

I scan nervously through to the ‘Welcome to the Writers Bureau’ blurb, through a few notes that prove he (yes, it’s a he) has read through my obligatory ‘about me’ notes and down to the section that will tell me about my tutor.  ‘Read my blog’ is all it says, with an accompanying web link.

And then I get to the ‘track changes’ part of the document and spot several red lines and text boxes.  Looking through my fingers I start to read the comments. ‘Well done for double spacing your text’ (see?  I read the instructions!). ‘As an Apple convert myself, you’ve just stepped up to the next level already, in my opinion!’ (Ha!  I KNEW that MacBook comment would work!).  And it was all okay!  It was really okay!

So I check out the Tutor’s website.  Oh – there is a photograph.  Yes, he’s dressed in black. Check.  He’s wearing glasses.  Check.  I can’t tell whether or not he’s wearing red lipstick because the photograph is shot in arty black and white (note to self – change camera settings).  And he looks nice and normal and a bit like my hubby actually.

And the best thing of all is that I have a feeling we will get on just fine, because he seems to love ellipses as much as I do…

I want to be a writer and write stories all day long

I want to sit in Cafes with my coffee, black and strong

I want to type the words out on my writer’s Apple Mac

And write things in a corner, looking arty, dressed in black

I want to wear red lipstick, whilst I sit there, with a look…

That says ‘I am creative’ as I scribble in my book

I want someone to print my words and pay me lots of cash

To sit and write, and drink, and muse, and cut an arty dash

I want to gaze out of the steamed up windows at the rain

And write, and then go home, come back, and do it all again.

She is here

The Swimming Teacher

Wet, uniformed, black lycra knee length shorts and T-Shirt made transparent

With ‘Teacher’ on it

Just in case anyone should doubt

Thick bobbed hair made wet and frizzy

With the splashing of her toddler group

She is here

The Swimming Teacher

Her chlorinated Saturday home

With her bags of bright plastic rings and toys

And long foam floats that are for use only by The Swimming Teacher

But I know.

I know she has another life

Of briefcases and meetings

Of expensive coffee and smart young men

Of networks and smart shoes with heels

Of dry hair and make up

I know because I have seen her

And she doesn’t know that I know her secret

The Swimming Teacher has another life.

The Swimming Teacher sits across from me in the Cafe

She has a secret life,

This Swimming Teacher, seen in shorts and T-Shirt, thick bobbed hair in a chlorine frizz

Is talking about virtual networks

She has a laptop computer

And printed leaflets with diagrams on

She sits opposite a young man with a metal briefcase and business cards

She is smiling at him,

Saying ‘Really? Okay… Really?’

They drink expensive coffee

And point at note books

She writes things down

And says ‘hmmm…server…desktop’

And passes him a plan, smiling lucratively

On Saturday,

She will be telling me that I can’t use her floats, as they are for her class only.