It is a broom cupboard in a Georgian mansion reached by pressing a brass buzzer and waiting for a large door to swing open. You enter, glance to the left and see the Members Room decked out in hardwood and heritage-brand paint and ornamental coffee tables and drooping, white I want to say hydrangeas. The society who live below keep twelve cases of wine in case of callers. Stairs, you expect to see a swishy lady in a green tea dress. The banister iced repeatedly with off white gloss.


The broom-cupboard, as I said, has shelves and shelves of catalogues for conferences, exhibitions, symposiums that happened once. I sit in the middle and collect lists, in cells and columns and rows, of international art galleries and I spell them in their native French, Italian, Spanish. I take care to transpose their accents and combinations of vowels exactly.

Christmas

Home is the tide and swell of dirty cotton knickers, carpet lint and sticky lip-gloss tubes. Unfinished walls, ham and cheese, broken plumbing, bathe-never-quite-clean, my sense of smell, the contraceptive pill, nowhere to telephone, too many cosmetics and thirty empty video cases lined up in dust against the wall.

Here I eat Christmas pudding in bed, catch my pillow in a lover’s clasp and every exchange is one step away from ‘Carry On’. I try to read novels by Mary Butts for an imminent piece and just can’t, just can’t and instead forage through tins of hair curlers and photos of myself naked, aged three with a rubber ring and a pair of neon plastic sunglasses.

Home will never quite be mine again. I open bags from elsewhere and a puff of smoke emanates, same as my mum, before, home from mucky pub with a bag full of lighters and crumbs and the smell of the place.

Today is Christmas day. A day spent alternately snoozing and popping Roses chocolates into my mouth systematically one-by-one. I ask: ‘Why did no one ever warn me at thirteen that Christmas would never be the same again?’ and I do not speak only of Santa Claus. I find stashes of old letters, congratulate myself on ‘how far we have come’ and think about recycling a few turns of phrase.

Holt

So, another awayday, this time in the shape of a broadsheet travel supplement feature.

First a bus, from the rejigged Norwich Bus Station, now entirely made up of aluminium stalks and blue light (shorthand: “futurespaceage”), but still with the same overpriced bottle of travel-sick Coca Cola. Then, accidentally, a steam train on the revived Poppy Line from Sheringham to Holt; a North Norfolk enclave built from tasteful twentieth century cultural reference points. The barbers, decked out in red and white and black and chrome with shiny marble steps and art deco signage, the bakers a patisserie, and the sweet shop a fragrant confectioners. A bobbed lady in a dim shop, arranging swathes of sable and mink and jet beads and old feathers and lace. These things gave me the same pleasure as sugar cubes and a wrapped biscuit with my coffee: most things in Holt were “just so”. And of the rest? Maternity pilates in the church hall, impossible accents, wind chimes and galleries showing vague, impressionistic nudes. This place charmed me with its Let’s Pretend game of representations but unnerved me a little too. Just as dusk set, an auctioneer asked me to mind his lots in the Memorial Shelter, and I spread a tourist map out on my legs, looking for a way home.

Go and look at this: http://www.rememberbutlinsfiley.co.uk/ A strange feeling; someone is making a research project, a book and a DVD for Hull County Council from one of my ephemeral obsessions. One that led me over the fences of a construction site earlier this year, and onto a vast plain of scrubland overlooking Filey Bay. I was too late, they’d cleared away the detritus of the Butlins resort to make way for a new holiday camp. For twenty years past it had lain exactly where it fell, with prefabricated timber chalets collapsed like dominoes in regimented sea view lines signified by a roadside stall selling off the timber piecemeal.

Text this number to see the boobs jiggle

Bah, this thing is turning into a litany of 10AM dispatches from low-grade temping 'assignments'. I write now from a Portakabin under Norwich's Milennium Bridge. I am Telephone-Answerer on the building site on one of those past-ubiquitous riverside redevelopment projects. Three days' sitting on an office chair in a sand pit doing ostentatious keyboard tip taps when a Hi Reflective jacket walks past. I have just been handed a home-grown cucumber as a leaving present. My response, an attempt at a little saucy administrator humour, fell flat. I think I have this office flirting thing all wrong, the emailed wink good, the weak implication of unspeakable acts with a vegetable, bad.

Clearly, then, I have been putting this period of unexpected eight hour slacking to good use. Well, yes...

I've been listening in on the mostly-impenetrable chatter on the message board I Love Everything. That is, a load of people talking Clever Clogs Patois about almost anything at all. Its here: http://www.ilxor.com

I've been spying on the lives of miserable American over-achievers here http://www.livejournal.com .

Oh, and I've been making friends with others in the seamy underbelly of seaside aficionados over at http://www.westpier.co.uk

----
Cut to Wednesday evening and I'm doing a little Teach Yourself Microsoft Office for my latest temp "assignment", beginning tomorrow. Another day of lolling and blowing smoke at drying laundry has passed with seven internship applications fired off to Penguin and all those types, part of my latest bout of conscientous forward-planning...

I'm paying by the minute, so best to go

Jx

So, an awayday to Tracey Jacks’ Walton-on-the-Naze., and this is truly London-by-the-Sea, whatever they say about Brighton. There’s coach loads of black-snotted promenaders, as proven by the kiosk vending tiny pots of jellied eels (Jesus, people really eat those things). We join them, edging our way along the sea front, passing the tongue-and-groove verandas of a rag tag line of beach huts.

We walk a long slither of concrete concourse bisecting the Naze’s marshland. We imagine this place as the setting for some terrible duel, pen-directed by Ian McEwan.

And now I write from my new job. A swivel chair in the box room of a Victorian semi-detached which smells, variously, of Matey bubble bath, dirty laundry and modems. I work for a French couple who bring me coffee whilst I organise roller-discos in satellite towns. Wednesday, I leave Norwich for a ‘holiday’ in Hatfield, as a jumped-up English-teaching Redcoat. Sounds dreary, I know, but I’m realigning it and its two weeks holed up in the University of Hertfordshire halls of residence with a gigantic pile of books, a full ashtray, a cardigan and a little frenzied cerebral activity.

So I made a dissertation out of a picture.

Tripper Boat, Beachy Head, 1968. Tony Ray Jones

Peanuts

The library has bent my knuckles behind my back and I have shouted "Mercy!"

Why is it that here, library, mezzanine level (ha!), I am secretary: able only to copy-type and hair-fiddle, and I have to retreat homeward in order to even begin tying the strings that make an essay?

This afternoon is six hundred disjointed words long. Home is in seventeen minutes. Tonight I will pace and clench my teeth, droopy fag and coffee-in-a-pint-glass, and await the penny-dropping one a.m. frenzy.

Nixtion

So, needless to say I quit the job. Not the way of gallantry, but rather the way of spilt milk. Thereon in, I wrote an essay about Borges, which at two-in-the-morning amused with its subtly-Borgesian style and small-scale quips, but retrospectively I realise was all-over Dad humour.

Yesterday, I shuffled around in the confusing detritus of the night before (thanks for the reminder, "ds85uk"), ate three close attempts at a bacon sandwich and thought about thinking about beginning a thing about Thomas Pynchon and silence. Crouched on volumes A to E of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, I foresaw deviations from the prescribed essay title, it'll meander into some unrestrained paragraphs about my favourite literary niggle: American domestic life. A prime-time weekly sitcom, aired on NBC in 1967, it features Jack, Babette, Oedipa, Mucho, Rebecca and Alice and Ramona, with Murray from 'White Noise' as a Fonz-type character, and a special bout of canned applause reserved soley for his entrances and his exits.

Anyway, best get on...