Hypatia Avenue

WOW AND MORE WOW

Okay, this being such a busy and squishy Monday afternoon and all that, I completely didn't notice that it is a busy and squishy Monday 28th October . Which means that on this day, I will finally be able to purchase and read a copy of The Little Friend. I have been waiting 7 years for this book - 7 years since I read The Secret History and fell totally and utterly in love with it, to the point of seriously considering taking up Greek and Latin for my A levels and at university, and taking off into the frosty wild plains of an insular and snobby place of education where I could reinvent myself Talented Mr Ripley style and pass myself off as an aesthete, an artist, an exclusive and elitist eccentric throwing "ironic" cigars and port parties in my college room late at night, chipping my front tooth on a sink whilst being pyrotechnically sick after being pyrotechnically sick all over a grandiose courtyard, going to lectures on crutches because of drunken and eventually very painful boxing lessons the night before, never doing any work then doing it all in one nightmarish 72 hour period, eating nothing but cheese and marshmallow teacakes and going blind with malnutrition when the bank won't give me any more money, climbing in through windows and climbing out of them, saving hedgehogs and stealing 9 foot tall hollyhocks, swanning around in a self-absorbed fog of black clothes, Marlboro Lights, hangovers, theatrics, hysterics and hilarious drunken accidents...

I was so impressed with snooty little snowy Hampden College and its range of fucked up poor little rich girls/boys, I went to Cambridge. My parents blame my innate ability for timewasting and petty melodrama for this particular career path but I blame Donna Tartt. She put me where I am today.

7 years ago I was about to sit my GCSEs. I had seen my first operas and traditional ballets at the Opera House, I had chosen, booked and attended my first play without parents or teachers interference (it had a lot of naked gay men and the box office staff had to consult senior management before they would take payment from me), I was trying to choose an A level college and A level subjects and doing a lot of visual art, cutting and pasting made and specially prepared images in a primitive Photoshop kinda way. I wore an odd combination of Doc Martens, chinos, tiny t-shirts and a suit jacket or fifties style pedal pushers and floaty scarves, I read a lot of good novels and bad poetry, I wrote introvertive poems and funny dialogues based on what I heard amongst my classmates in maths...it was a funny old time.

What were YOU doing when you were 15?

I MUST have that book.And to make it a double wow day, Tori Amos' new album is released today! Woo-HOO! More red-headed wailing and piano thumping. And aha! more money spent that I as yet don't really have...