on having NO LIFE
R’s lover-man failed to materialise. ‘I am not,’ he said apparently, enigmatically, ‘unattached.’
‘Emma is better than sex, anyway,’ she says. We watch about ten times the part where the farmer’s crotch advances from across the fields towards the camera very slowly. Tonight she is cycling to a house party two miles away wearing pink and blue and yellow shoes two sizes too big for her. ‘I am keeping them on,’ she emphasises, ‘it’s hard to be irresponsible wearing massively colourful shoes.’ She eats black-pudding and lends me her tweezers and a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album.
Tonight I will, between reading Morte d’Arthur and Oscar Wilde, be plucking my eyebrows. Tragically by Monday afternoon I will not have left college for three days, only having performed sporadic expeditions between room and bar to buy milk. I envisage an eyebrowless hysterical future-me. Possibly hairless also. The dissertation plan and the writing the unconscious essay – which supplanted the five hours of quasi-obligatory college-wide drinking and make-up and drinking and dancing and drinking and drinking and crying and puking - mysteriously were no longer on the laptop this morning. Much hair-tearing out and gnashing of teeth ensued. (They lurked undetected for a good half hour amongst the fletsam and jetsam of my computer memory.)
An Education never really did answer Lyn Barber’s (very relevant) ‘what is the point?’ question. It is definitely not to equip us with the frankly unenviable non-ability to supress the 3rd person middle english commentary I have going on - he[o] rente oute hir lokkes, fore sytthen thre dayes hence, the faire damesel hath toke hireself beyaunde hire chambre bot ones to purchasith oon pinte of milke.
Joshy comes round for a while and we watch The Thick Of It and contemplate buying tiny tiny £700 pigs. Which is lovely. I can tell that he too is suffering, when he sticks his forefinger into a little alpacca finger puppet with very red thread lips and has a five minute conversation with it about the stasis of his dissertation. He at least has the excuse of being a third year.
