Twi slept until midday and it was 2.30 before, plastered with sunscreen to maintain (or at least try to regain) our alabaster complexions, we made our daily excursion out of the apartment.

We set off along a certain street, which will remain nameless because I've forgotten its name and Twi is sleeping as I type this. (How else would I acquire the computer?) Our quest was to find a fabled shop that sold British food, whose existence was revealed to us the previous day by a guy who worked in a convenience store that carried every type of chocolate except Dairy Milk, for which I had been enduring a two-day-long craving. (No, I'm not pregnant. I'd better not be, anyway.) All we knew was that it was supposedly next to a shop named Music Millennium or Music Madness. (Whichever, this too sounded like a good thing.)

However, we saw no sign of either, so we told another guy in another (identical) convenience store of our plight. "Oh, you mean the shop that sells gothic fetish stuff?" he asked.

Um, what the beep?

1. Goth may have originated in Britain, but from my intense surveys of the streets of the various towns I've visited in the last couple of years, I can conclude that an overwhelming majority of British people don't have a gothic bone in their bodies. I suppose this isn't such a bad thing, since gothic bones would no doubt be black, and look a bit rotten and icky. Nevertheless, "British" and "gothic" are two only barely interconnected adjectival subsets of human society.

2. Goths don't eat chocolate. It shatters the façade that they are actually vampires, or at least live lives suffer deaths that don't involve any gestures that could expose them as mere wannabes. And chomping chocolate, especially bearing in mind it sheds brown sticky crumbs over one's black clothes is a definite no no.

3. Did we really look soooooo gawffeek that our asking for chocolate could only be a euphemism for our sole reason to shop, Becoming More Like Siouxsie? Between us, we were looking our least gothic since arriving. I was wearing an admittedly black t-shirt but that bore bright green letters spelling "The Stranglers" on it and blue jeans. Twi was wearing an admittedly black t-shirt but had blue and red and white bits - oh, all right, it was a Cure shirt - and blue leggings. Oh, ok, so they were dark that they looked close to black. And I was buying black nail polish, but it was the sort that costs a dollar and looks more and more blue the more times you look at it.

Oh, all right, so at a first glance, he was able to cast the label goth upon us. But whatever his reasoning, after that spectacularly long aside, we continued up (down?) the street, and despite our misgivings about it carrying Dairy Milk chocolate, entered the said shoppe très gawthique.

It was scary. Scarier than Hot Topic, even, but in a different way. The woman in charge (the only person present) seized our backpacks the moment we stepped inside. I still feel a bit uncomfortable having to shed mine (although it does make browsing without knocking entire shelves of products onto the floor a whole lot easier), but I don't mind doing so as much in a gigantic store filled with small, easy-to-steal products. In this case, however, the shop consisted of two small rooms, one of which we were ushered out of as it was being closed for no apparent reason. Furthermore, the proprietor kept an eye and an ear on each of us at all times, which was quite unnecessary because 1) everything was too big to fit in a backpack anyway (they had boots that came up to your chin) and 2) most things were trapped behind counters and pinned at unreachable heights to the walls.

We were most upset with the kewlness / sanity / purity test we took the previous day, due to one of the fifteen questions asking, "What is your favourite activity for a Saturday afternoon?" which forced to pick "shopping". One of the options was "stalking", but having Carlisle as your nearest excuse for civilisation, home of . . . actually, I think our greatest celebrity is the completely incomprehensible bloke who's been trying to flog newspapers (probably the same ones) on the central shopping street for over fifty years . . . doesn't really allow for this, so shopping it was. Which no doubt made us sound more teenybopperish, normal and pure than we really are.

However, the whole purpose of a Twi and Zed shopping excursion is to laugh at hideous products and, if possible, their even more hideous prices. We had proven our capabilities to do this in London over a year ago (to Smill's chagrin) and time hadn't diminished this ability much. Actually, I must report that Twi has been heard to say, "Actually - oh, this is so embarrassing - but I kind of like this" and has then go on to buy the offending item. However, this would have been an ideal place for mockery, had it not been an impossibility.

"Two hundred pounds for a skirt?" I asked incredulously (for I still have not come to terms with the fact that the $ sign means the final word of the price is pronounced 'dollars'. Well, 'bucks', but that would be surrendering my Britishness too much.)

Which is Twi's cue to say, "Oh, God, who would pay that much for a skirt?" But before she could, the woman interrupted, "Yes, isn't it great? It's on sale, usually it's five hundred dollars" and went on to explain that it came from the top designer and had been worn by all the most famous celebrities in the world (female or otherwise).

Um, did we, in our respectively chocolate-stained and slept-in band shirts, really look like we would happily shell out that much for a single item of clothing? We couldn't afford half of it between us, even with the miracles of debit cards.

We eventually escaped: we were rewarded with our backpacks after Twi proved that we weren't just up to no good by purchasing a pair of flimsy will-fall-apart-if-you-look-at-them-the-wrong-way stockings for $4.95. But not until the owner had grilled her about the exact technology of her corset, which she had confessed to just buying on eBay to prevent being convinced into purchasing another. After a bit of cynicism about the cheapness ($45), she seemed satisfied with Twi's answers, although was clearly upset that her ploy to expose us as being the ultimate unblickness of posergoths had failed.

I know, I'm being unnecessarily evil. (But it's fun!) She did, after all, reveal that the existence of a British food shop and a Music Millennium or Madness was just a big juicy myth.

So we aborted The Mission (how evil of us, killing our fellow goths!) and went to the park, where read a mile-long notice about why we shouldn't feed the ducks (apparently they'll eat anything they're given and get all sorts of eating disorders) or dispose of animals in the pond, as this will unbalance the ecosystem. Not that this stopped some people: as we sat on a bench, reading and writing, we observed two dogs swimming in the lake.

Friday 25 August 2000

Anna and James are apparently back together. You're probably wondering, "Who the smenk are Anna and James?", since I've never mentioned them, but as far as my rather minute circle of acquaintances is concerned, they have fairly prominent roles. Anna I've known since I was four (we went to Sunday school together and she was in the year below mine at secondary school) and James was in my class for three years (he's The Ghost in this entry).

Anyway, they had been going out for about two years, but broke up a little while ago, due to her getting off with someone else on a few occasions. However, last night they turned up at The Griffin together and unaccompanied, so presumably they've worked things out. Which is good because the chances of the other contender for The World's Longest Lasting Couple lie in shreds:

Alice and Dave (of the imaginatively titled Alice And Dave and Verbal Voodoo 3) have gone their separate ways. Apparently Alice needs "more space" and "room to grow". Er, I know Dave is quite a big bloke, but with her in Australia and him in England, surely that's space enough?

As if I hadn't had enough of online friends in the last few months, on Tuesday, the day after I got back from America, my online friend Helen came to visit me.

Yesterday, I managed to wake up at a more reasonable hour yesterday morning than the day before. (Read: eleven instead of twelve. Well, I stayed up for sixty consecutive hours the previous weekend, thanks to aeroplane seats being unsleepable in and sleeping in airports while on your own being a Bad Idea.) We went to the post office so I could send off some student loans bumph that had arrived while I was in America. Then we spent the afternoon playing Rummy and doing quizzes in my ancient teenybopper magazines from 1995 and 1996.

Some of them were really funny! In the "Test Your Sex IQ" quiz, a possible answer to "Boys get erections when" was "C. They get excited watching football". (Cue: Zed's hit count soars. "Football" is one of the most commonly searched for words on the Internet, you know.) It also had the question "What's the 'Double Dutch' method of contraception?" with the possible answer "When you say a prayer in Dutch before having sex."

I still can't say much for the fashion section, though, which claims ideal January wear is a fluffy pink jumper, a short white skirt (that costs £24.99) and knee high silver boots topped by white fuzzy bits. Apart from making you look about four years old, wouldn't it be kind of, you know, cold?

And the lack of foresight is rather interesting. The "Smash Hits 1995 Sticker Collection" listed the thirty best artists at that time, yet it included Pato Banton, D:Ream, EYC, Let Loose, Sean Maguire, MN8, MC Scar And The Real Mccoy, Rednex, Scarlet and Ultimate Kaos. If anyone recognises over half of those names, they get a gold star.

Moving swiftly onwards, I'm very regretful over the uniquely Cumbrian things Helen never got to do during her stay here. Namely:

1. Seeing The Shop. After all, I did spend the best part of eight years loitering there, and is therefore an Essential Part of Zeddic History. Also, all the staff were excited by the prospect of being visited by a potential purchaser of a Steinway Grand. Never mind that she's a nineteen-year-old broke-student-to-be, anyone is fair game.

2. Playing the Let's Go Round The Clothes Shops In Carlisle And Insult All Their Contents game, which is my favourite.

3. Seeing south-west Scotland. Not that there's anything very appealing there, with one exception: Gretna G(r)een. We could have got married properly - they did a (rather silly) ceremony for two people in the school year above mine, so why not?

However, the car's extreme evilness made all of these possibilities seem unappealing. (The previous time we'd been out in it, it had contracted violent hiccups on numerous occasions, which could only be cured by driving at seventy miles per hour at all times.) Besides, Thursday afternoon was given over to a far more important mission: arranging for Helen to meet all the geens she's only ever heard about in my journal and e-mails.

Well, not all of them. AevilSteve would be a bit difficult (well, that's nothing new), although she did get to listen to my end of a Stevic telephone conversation on a Wednesday. And a trip to Uganda to see Smill was also a little outside our budgets and beyond even my insanity capacity. However, my aim was to let her meet, at the very least, Will and Chris.

And althought this proved incredibly difficult, somehow, miraculously, not only did she get to meet both of them but Roe and Paul as well. We went to the pub and saw "Shanghai Noon" at the cinema, which was surprisingly very good. Then me and Helen went back to Chris's for the night. This turned out to be not the best of plans - we would go on to refer to the escapade as "Nightmare In Penrith" - since he spent most of it trying to seduce Helen, against her wishes.

(Yes, he still has a girlfriend, but they have an open relationship: he told her about his evil intentions over MSN Messenger.)

He claimed, later, that he thought I'd wanted him to do that, but, er, what the beep? I know I've spent most of the last few years trying to set Smill up with everyone I know, but only to annoy her! I don't have any genuine wish to matchmake my friends and in any case, I'd never given any indication that I approved of this pairing *and* there's the whole me-STILL-fancying-Chris thing, of which he is fully aware! Much as I wish I didn't fancy him, setting him up with someone else is hardly a logical way to overcome my feelings, now, is it? I'm the one who needs someone else! Hargh! I cannot get to university, where hopefully I will find a new target for my irritating lust, fast enough!

Thursday 31 August 2000

Stuff that's happened lately:

Chantelle (my online friend Flink's girlfriend - yes, Flink is female) and I chatted on MSN Messenger for the first time. It went fairly well, I think, judging by the fact that we ended up getting married shortly before she logged off.

I also married Flink's journal but we decided that it only counts as half a spouse. Still, I'm up to thirty four point five now.

Twi has joined Flink in thinking that I fancy Noj. Rumours about me and anyone else, I could tolerate, but he's my brother! Where do they get these ideas? Twi, have you actually been reading that V. C. Andrews (Virginia Andrews in Britain, for some reason) book we got out of the library as a joke?

I start my course (in Film Studies) at The University Of Kent in a few weeks' time. However, in preparation, I have been checking out the "Computer Service Regulations" online. (Hey, I'm paranoid, I don't want to get disconnected.) I was most distressed to see a section titled "Antisocial Behaviour". Does this mean they're going to storm into my room and kick me off the computer if I stay there for over three hours? Mimph!

Another traumatic thing I learned, from the bumph they sent me, is that you're not allowed to have toasters in your room.

Now I can see exactly why not. When I went to Cambridge, in the middle of the head porter's talk on fire safety, he suddenly yelled, "Toast!" (We would have raised our drinking glasses, only this was the sole part of freshers' week that didn't involve alcohol.) "How many of you have brought toasters?" About 70% of the audience raised their hands, and he said, "Typical, you've all brought flipping toasters!"

The following day, I learned his concern was well-founded, but in vain. "I nearly set fire to my room with my toaster," Alan-whose-sole-claim-to-fame-was-that-he-helped-change-my-lightbulb admitted.

But, as anyone who has ever spent over a day with me is aware, toast is my lifeline. I eat toast for at least two meals every day. And not only am I not allowed to bring my toaster with me, but they don't provide one in the kitchenette. I ask you, how am I going to be able to make proper toast with only a kettle and hotplate?

Roe instructed me to this website. (I advise you visit it before reading on, as long as you're not in a hurry.) When it asked me what I wanted to talk about, I typed the first thing that came into mind, which was "grass". Naturally, I meant the green stuff that grows in fields and animals eat, because I'm quite a boring person at heart.

It replied, "Grass? What a dumb thing to talk about! Are you stoned or something?" Wow, it really did understand what I said!

Random wondering: is there Bono / Edge slash called "Ride In The Name Of Love" and "I Will Swallow"?

While I was in America, the town where I live acquired its very own a record store! Not just a building that people call a record store because "CD shop" doesn't have the same ring, but a shop that sells actual records. Black vinyl things with large diameters in sleeves! Naturally, I can't appreciate the true funchieness of a Pretenders greatest hits album for £3, for the simple reason that I don't have a record player, but the "High Fidelity" chic appeals greatly.

And as of 30th August, I am in a band.

Admittedly this is a band with no name and no intention of ever playing in public or writing any original material.

Admittedly, this is a band where I play the clarinet parts in Sting, Supertramp and Genesis songs.

And admittedly, this is a band I am in with Noj, who is 17; Alex (my half brother), Mike (who I went to see The Australian Pink Floyd with) and Jerry (ditto) who are in their thirties; and Dad and my former Biology teacher / pseudo godfather, who are in their fifties.

But still. For the twenty remaining days before I go to university, I'm in a band!