Pleasuresome worlds
[Tapped out on my IPhone whilst waiting for The Paper Chase gig to start.]
When I was about fifteen, I used to go to the pub every Friday night with my friends. We would go to The Alma, where it was rumoured that a twelve-year-old had once been served, and where any cabbie who stuck his head in looking for his fare would, inexplicibly, be greeted with shouts of, “Woodward! Woodward!”
We would sit and drink and, when I felt part of things and people were cracking jokes, I would have a good time.
One week, I had been Reading. lesbian-themed novel called Rotary Spokes that was about a motorcyclist and the women she met. I was at a stage where anything to do with lesbians was exciting and, that Friday, I took my book to the pub with me. It stuck out of my trouser pocket as I drank and spoke and my evening sparkled with another-world possibility.
When I was eighteen, I took a gap year and worked a job in my hometown. After leaving the office, I would occasionally go to a cafe/bar and drink bloody marys and read my book. It felt like a secret, possibilitous world that was mine.
At some point that year, I went to a poetry reading that my Mum had organised in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Afterwards, me and my Mum and step-Dad and a lovely couple they are friends with wandered around the medieval exhibition and laughed at the armour until we cried. And I felt so happy because I had a just-started game of Half Life waiting for me at home.