The Apologist

I have the most passive aggressive of bad habits: a penchant for apology. I am constantly sorrying out of me. Would that I wore a cap! I could wring it remorsefully.

It's not that I've an awful lot to atone for. Well, I do, but that's beside the point. I've plenty of cause for contrition that I don't necessarily admit to. Breakages, and the like. Hearts, wind and crockery. But I dole out my sorries like sweeties for the stupidest of reasons. I do it because I want some in return. The slightest of slights sees me falling over myself, fawning over whoever has caused me to smart. It doesn't have to be much. I'm a sensitive soul. I go out on a limb for folk, sometimes all four limbs. Three points of contact? Pah. I'm poised for a fall. An idiot optimist, I am constantly dismayed when people don't always respond in kind. People are kind, I find, just not always thoughtful.

And so I apologise to them. My ego convinces me that I am leading by example, that this is a surefire way to elicit some reciprocal remorse. It's not a tactic that has served me well. I'm an insistent idiot optimist, you see, so inevitably (for peace and pity's sake) my apology will be accepted.

Which is not what I wanted at all.

So passive am I in my apologetic aggression that I work myself into right snots. For one who prides herself on her emotional intelligence, it's a spectacularly stupid habit. I can't even claim to have been clever enough to have self-diagnosed this dickheadery, it was instead pointed out to me by my admirably brave boyfriend.

What a frustrating pleasure, to have met my match in a man who has my measure.

Caught By Defuzz

I was blessedly ronnie-free until relatively recently. I spent ten years on Dianette as a result of my having polystyrene ovaries and so never had to worry about facial hair, so bursting was I with ingested womanly hormones. I was fat, mental and darkly depressed, sure, but sublimely smooth of skin.

Yes, until relatively recently. Some three years ago I began to wonder if my chubby crackedness could be blamed on the meds rather than my gen for chocolate and high drama, so I sought alternative treatment. In the hope that I might some day be able to have babies, and the like. Though I haven't dropped any sprogs just yet, I now sport the merest hint of a mustache and a pair of peachy soft sideburns. I'm told you wouldn't notice them, but then he also tells me that I look beautiful in the morning, when I know fucking well that I look like Wurzel Gummidge after a bottle of cooking rum when I wake.

It's been bugging me, though, and now that I'm shaving my legs and waxing my ladygarden in an effort to appear kempt and tempt his affections, I decided it might be time to tackle the 'tache. Depliation seemed wiser than epilation what with my delicate skin, so I came home this evening and slathered my mush in Boots' finest no-more-mo' cream. Timed the four minutes carefully, washed it off to reveal slightly reddened skin and luxurious swathes of sideburn still stubbornly clinging to my rosie cheeks.

Rinse, I did. And repeated. Four minutes later I washed it off again, this time revealing the makings of a rash. Not all over, just where the 'tache and sideys had been. A nice dead giveaway. With a bit of luck the makeup I put on to try to hide it in the morning will cake to the cankers and my glamorous new look will be complete.

It ain't easy, being this sexy.

It's Not Off The Ground I Licked It

It was Thursday evening. Jelly, I thought. I haven't had jelly in years. I rooted around at the back of the cupboard and found two packets of raspberry jelly. That'll do. And fruit. All I could find was pineapple, and tinned pineapple at that. Does raspberry go with pineapple? Probably not.

I wanted a good set, so I put both packets in. Remembering how frustrating it was as a child when the lumps refused to dissolve, I took the kitchen scissors to the slippery blocks and cut them into slimy little nubbles before adding the boiling water. Andrew used to eat bars of jelly as a kid, instead of chocolate. I thought he was disgusting. I popped a square of it into my mouth. It was disgusting.

I chopped the pineapple rings into raggedy chunks and spooned them into the warm jelly. They smelled of tin, not coconut, like fresh pineapple does. I don't like fresh coconut much, but fresh pineapple smells like furze and tastes like sunshine. Tinned pineapple smells sad, and tastes a little bit lonely.

They floated. I hadn't expected that, and for some reason I found it horribly disappointing. Perverse, really, as floaters are generally more exciting than foodstuffs which sink. I think it was at that point that I realised I wouldn't be able to eat it until the morning, and that I didn't really want to eat it anyway. How depressing.

It was a ridiculous episode, and alarmingly typical. I don't know where I get these notions or why I feel a compulsion to tell you about them.

I had a bowl of jelly for afters in Nana's on Sunday evening. Somewhere along our conversational meander she mentioned that she'd had a cup of Oxo the evening before. I asked her if she meant Bovril (which is also mankygank) but no, she meant Oxo. She dissolved cubes of beef stock in hot water and drank it. "Funny" she said, "I didn't enjoy it". I'm not fucking surprised. We're not that different, my nana and I.

Hell Freezes Over

The Swede wandered into the kitchen to find me ankle deep in puddles and tits deep in tantrum, the floor destroyed and the contents of the fridge laid out unappetisingly over every surface in the flat. It was 5pm on a Saturday evening, and I was defrosting the freezer.

"Are we feeling guilty for something?" he asked with a lewd wink, presumably referring to my propensity for men and mayhem as opposed to mundane housework. "No" I snapped, all set to berate him for not noticing the cleaning I do around the place and then biting my tongue as I realised it's generally limited to my own bathroom. He laughed at my temper and reminded me that he'd done it last time (a year and a half ago) before setting down to watch The Simpsons. I recommenced hacking at the solid ice with my makeshift pick (a bottle opener) and boiled the kettle for the 47th time, huffing and muttering direly to myself. Because in truth I was feeling guilty. Not because the Swede does all the work around here (he doesn't) but because I had spent all morning and most of the rainy afternoon luxuriating in the easy company of a new beau. And I'm just not used to things being that easy. The irrational idiot in me feels undeserving and sits eating her hair, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She shouldn't. I'm prettier than I let on. I'm smarter than the evidence would suggest. I need to learn to accept good fortune with good grace, and stop peeling the silver linings off my clouds.

4 bath towels, 8 tea towels, two scalds and several floods later I gave up, and went to meet Annie for a pint. She was appalled at the idea of me spending Saturday night standing on a chair with my head in the fridge, thought it very un-Rosie. But it's very me. Swings and roundabouts, rock and roll. Tuesdays are dreary enough without housework - there's no better time to do it than on a Saturday night when you're still basking in Wednesday, Thursday and Friday's glow. I arrived home in a pleasant fuzz of wine, well-being and patatas bravas and made straight for ground zero to inspect my handiwork. The ice was melting; coming away in satisfying, weighty chunks.

Those Bedbugs Bite

I suffer from nightmares a lot and have done for as long as I remember. Most of the time I wake, turn on the light, realise that the horrors are just in my head and roll over into slumber again. I don't have curtains on my window so when I wake in a sweat, the dawn is usually breaking outside and I am reminded that it was just a dream.

The majority of these nightmares are of the woo! scary monsters! variety; harmless, clichéd, common. Easily dismissed and soon forgotten. Some of the recurring ones are almost comforting in that their tricks are now old hat. The familiar dread becomes simply familiar and I know that eventually I'll wake up, it will be 5am on a Tuesday and my dog will not have been eaten by a viking. Probably. Sometimes I don't even remember them; I will wake up after a good night's sleep to face a concerned lover who woke in the wee small hours to hear me sobbing. They'll suggest psychoanalysis and I'll suggest that they fuck off and make me some tea.

But very occasionally I will have one that leaves me badly shook. One that my subconscious convinces me is possibly maybe plausible, if not exactly probable. Zebra-striped zombies are not going to break into my room and eat me. Probably. But human emotion and common-or-garden cruelty is just as terrifying, and my psyche likes to cover all the angles. There have been times when I have shied away from friends or family after a dream of casual abuse or careful violence. I can't tell them why I'm uneasy in their presence so I'm left muttering vagaries about bad dreams. Nothing good can come of the truth, nobody should have to hear that the bogeyman was wearing their face as his mask.

The worst of all are the ones where I am the cause of the upset, the instigator, the catalyst for whatever calamity unfolds. I had one a couple of years back where I found my grandfather dead in the bathtub. He'd slit his wrists and although I couldn't articulate it, the dreaming me knew it was because he was disappointed in me, because he thought I was fat. It goes without saying that Grandad was alive and well at the time, buoyant and full of both love and admiration for his eldest grandaughter. The memory of a nightmare like that still sickens me to the stomach; that I project my insecurites onto my nearest and dearest, that I have the gall to portray myself as a victim and then the stupidity to torment myself with the consequences.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. I need to learn how to splatter my bedbugs with a shoe.

To Don't List

Prompted by this letter to Dear Lover, I have a confession of my own to make. I keep lists of pros and cons for my objects of affection; the pros in my head and the cons on paper (as they are the ones I tend to need most reminding of). I have such an embarrassment of shortlived relationships and friendly encounters behind me at this stage that I'm considering opening a spreadsheet in Excel. Looking back at some of the written examples that I've kept, it seems that the only absolute dealbreaker occasionally listed among what I perceived as people's faults was that they didn't interest me. My willingness to put up with most else is no doubt unhealthy and a symptom of low-self esteem; I should probably stop billing it as tolerance. Some of the gripes listed are petty, some are not. Some are funny, some are unreasonable; I suspect a lot of them are all too common - I identify very much with the author of the Dear Lover post. Here's a selection of them, a meascán meidhreach of different times, different lovers and different Rosies in some cases (depending on whether or not I'd had breakfast that morning):

• You smother me, and it gives me the creeps.
• You're not affectionate enough.
• Your cock is too small. Not just small, far too small.
• You have nothing to talk to me about.
• You never compliment me how I look.
• You don't get my jokes but you laugh at everyone else's.
• Your constant flattery absolutely mortifies me.
• You make me feel stupid, and you do it on purpose.
• You make me feel bad about being smart.
• You're too short.
• You're not interested in listening to me, just in having someone to listen to you.
• You tell the same stories all the fucking time.
• You're too lazy.
• Your libido disappoints me and you make me feel guilty for it.
• You start every text message with "ha ha" and finish most with a smiley face.
• You put me in a headlock while you sleep. Always.
  

I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad habit, to be honest.

The Road To Mental

This time last year I was sat right where I am now (at the dining table in the flat, surrounded if not yet swamped by study notes, dictionaries and half drunk cups of Earl Grey). I was dressed in scruffy pyjamas, hair like a madwoman's fanny, my outward appearance generally indicative of my mental health. I'm studying for a HDip, having already got my BA and MA behind me, and for the first time in my life I was worried to the point of distraction about how I would fare in my exams. I had been more conscientious in my study than I ever had when I was in full-time education (when I had attended lectures on a rota basis, left exams before I'd finished because I couldn't wait to get to the HorseShow House and generally regarded anything above 40% to be an indication that I wasn't having as much fun as I should). I don't know if being an almost-adult with a semi-serious job has made me feel like I should try a little harder, but something has changed and success in my exams is now a matter of diligence and pride rather than blind luck.

So with all of this weighing on my mind as I sat here last year, I had a panic attack. I knew what it was (a friend having described the feeling in frightening detail before) but that didn't mean that I thought I was having anything less than a heart attack, followed swiftly by a complete nervous breakdown (I had a similar reaction the one and only time I ever got heartburn - I thought I was going into cardiac arrest). I got over it (though it took all day) and spent the rest of the week before my exams (and the occasional moment since, truth be told) panicking quietly about having another one.

So here I am again, at home on study leave, a week before my exams. As prepared as I was last year and with the benefit of another year's learning behind me, more mature and more worldly-wise (stop sniggering). Determined not to have a panic attack. I am once again sat here at the dining table surrounded by the tools of my trade, but this time I'm sat here with blow-dried hair (my going-out hair, as GingerBeard calls it) in my prettiest summer dress, with a cup of tea and a bowl of fresh cherries. I'm pouring my heart out to my pretend friends (my blog is not yet a year old, so that's a comfort I didn't have then) and I'm going to put some music with words on (apparently if you feel you're edging towards panic, singing helps).

I'll let you know how it goes.