Memories of Scorching Shame
Well it’s finally happened, Steve’s visa and medical registration have come through and we’re definitely moving to Oxford! Yay for dreaming spires! Hopefully we’re leaving on the 28th Feb, but it's still undecided.
But anyhoo, one of the things about moving overseas when you have very limited storage space is trying to chuck out as much stuff as possible. So I have like a million ‘touching mementoes’ boxes and I started going through them trying to consolidate. (Why do I have a million boxes? Because I keep everything. You want the first rose I was ever given? A perished dessicated balloon from my 21st? The scores of games of Hearts from 10 years ago? A hooter from the Last Night of the Proms in ’94 and ’95? A T-shirt signed by everyone in my tent from Parachute ’96? I got ‘em all.) I found all kinds of awesome things, like all the spare photos from my first ball (in which I looked like a DOG’S BREAKFAST), cards galore from you KO and KB, ‘legal’ letters from you AG, heaps of notes between us in Form 4 Kirsty, a tape of your songs Shirley, and a hilarious anecdote that you wrote in my law notebook CS, about the time you excoriated someone after an interview and the intercom was on... great times. Good memories.
Then I found a letter that I’d written to a potential amour, which I never sent, because even in my noxious overheated just-post-adolescent state I realised it would be the mistake of a lifetime, so I made myself read it, and then I remembered the time I fell over in front of him... in a very short skirt and very high heels... and he caught me... but too late to avoid clocking an eyeful... and now I’m actually orange with shame. And I can’t stop thinking about it and LALALA I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF, nope, that didn’t work, and it was actually worse than the time I walked in on my flatmate in the bathroom but not as bad as the time he walked in on me a couple of weeks later and now I’m thinking about THAT. Oh, the horrific spiralling of the memories... But somehow casting my mortification into the heaving vastness of the net makes it better.
But anyhoo, one of the things about moving overseas when you have very limited storage space is trying to chuck out as much stuff as possible. So I have like a million ‘touching mementoes’ boxes and I started going through them trying to consolidate. (Why do I have a million boxes? Because I keep everything. You want the first rose I was ever given? A perished dessicated balloon from my 21st? The scores of games of Hearts from 10 years ago? A hooter from the Last Night of the Proms in ’94 and ’95? A T-shirt signed by everyone in my tent from Parachute ’96? I got ‘em all.) I found all kinds of awesome things, like all the spare photos from my first ball (in which I looked like a DOG’S BREAKFAST), cards galore from you KO and KB, ‘legal’ letters from you AG, heaps of notes between us in Form 4 Kirsty, a tape of your songs Shirley, and a hilarious anecdote that you wrote in my law notebook CS, about the time you excoriated someone after an interview and the intercom was on... great times. Good memories.
Then I found a letter that I’d written to a potential amour, which I never sent, because even in my noxious overheated just-post-adolescent state I realised it would be the mistake of a lifetime, so I made myself read it, and then I remembered the time I fell over in front of him... in a very short skirt and very high heels... and he caught me... but too late to avoid clocking an eyeful... and now I’m actually orange with shame. And I can’t stop thinking about it and LALALA I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF, nope, that didn’t work, and it was actually worse than the time I walked in on my flatmate in the bathroom but not as bad as the time he walked in on me a couple of weeks later and now I’m thinking about THAT. Oh, the horrific spiralling of the memories... But somehow casting my mortification into the heaving vastness of the net makes it better.