I'll Cry If I Want To

The first time I got drunk was at my cousin Elaine's house. She gave me some blackcurrant hooch and two bottles later I was addressing the sofa and telling the lamp to behave. I had to leave early as, and I kid you not, I was due to be at clown school that weekend. She gave me a lift and I rolled in to possibly the only place on earth my uncoordinated stumblings would blend sweetly in. I had a very strange time over those few days, I remember sitting on the grass with Hattie discussing whitefaces, holding hands in a circle chanting to my inner clown, watching truly atrocious mime, and getting make up tips from men. I'm not sure what I make of that phase of my life, it's all part of the journey I guess, I try not to dwell on it. The reason I tell you this story is that a few years ago, on a birthday such as today, I went for a meal at a TGI Friday's, in Croydon. Above the bar they had a television, in case you ran out of conversation or were simply drinking alone, and that television was showing one of those Friday night gardening shows. And at the moment I lost interest in those around me and looked up, at that exact moment, Hilda, one of the attendants of the aforementioned clown unconvention, sauntered on to the screen and spoke to me. Directly to me. Granted all she talked about was shrubs, so it wasn't exactly profound, but as her words came tumbling out of the screen into my ears, it was certainly memorable. See, birthdays make you think about life, and that day I looked at my life, and what I saw was a strange collection of surreal moments, of half-meetings in half-places. And if I join the dots of these erratic experiences swimming in the empty space of the mundane, what do I get? Concerned is what I get.