Waiting Waiting Waiting...

Another day and no visa-post. This shouldn't surprise me. On Friday I succumbed to the make-as-much-money-out-of-the-visa-suckers-as-possible system and paid out the extortionate £1.20 per minute charge to call the US embassy (or rather, a call centre in Glasgow representing the US embassy) and they informed me that while I have qualified for an interview (which must mean I'm HIV / TB free, which is good to know), I wont hear for another 2 to 4 weeks when that interview is. But, like a half starved pigeon that gets fed sporadically, I check constantly just in case.

The waiting is wearing thin. It was never supposed to have lasted this long. Originally, I came back to England (in 2007) with the plan that Jeremy would join me within 6 months. Visas and jobs and life got in the way and, well, that didn’t happen. Then we got engaged in February this year and I made over-optimistic plans to move over within 6 months, and errrr that didn’t work out either. Now I’m not making plans (I’m a big fat liar). I have surrendered to the 'Great We’ll See’ (bollocks I have) and am sitting on my hands and waiting for the visa-gods to anoint me (I’m jumping up and down and waving my hands around trying to get their attention).

It’s driving me insane.

I am not a patient person. Stubborn? Yes. Patient? No. Which makes for an interesting combination. Waiting becomes not an act of passive patience but one of persistent stubborn endurance. I rant and I rail and I stamp my feet like Veruca Salt on the inside, all the while maintaining a look of benign calm on the outside (well, a lot of the time…I have been known to stamp my feet in frustration, but normally only in front of Jeremy and my family).

At times it’s had the feeling of waiting in the rain for a bus, when you know it might be quicker to walk but you’ve waited too long to give up because the bus might be right around the corner. Although that’s not the best analogy because walking isn’t really an option – sitting down and crying is about the only option I can see and that’s not particularly constructive. Anyway, the bus is around the corner. I can see it (by standing in the middle of oncoming traffic and peeking around the corner). It’s sat there, with its driver, watching me in the rain and having a sneaky fag (Cigarette! That means Cigarette!) whilst obstinately waiting until it’s exactly the right time to move the 5 foot to the bus stop and open up the doors and take all my money.

I’m slightly concerned that by the time the bus doors open I’ll have gone completely loopy. The pressure is mounting. As usual, I’ve overestimated my mouth capacity and bitten off more than I can chew. The living out of suitcases and wedding planning and emigration and job searching and goodbyes and homelessness and missing Jeremy and hair-care are all mounting up and I wouldn’t be surprised if steam started coming out of my ears.

The problem is there’s no solution other than to suck it up and wait and hope that at the end of it all my mental faculties will still be intact. Oh and tell Jeremy every 5 minutes how fed up I am of waiting. That helps a little.

Leaving (part 3): My Sister

Yesterday my sister came to town. Not to visit me you understand - she had a Camp America (organisation which recruits hapless English young-adults and ships them off to the states to be camp counsellors, supervising American youths for a summer...aka my worst nightmare) Reunion and needed to kill time before meeting up with her real friends. But regardless of being an afterthought to her weekend's plans, I was happy to see her.

I was five and a half when Jess was born. She came as a bit of a shock (to me, I'm pretty sure my parents planned her) - my quiet world was interrupted by this screaming mass of curly attitude - I had to move out of my newly-flowery-papered bedroom (my mum swears she told me I was choosing the paper for the new baby - I do not recall this) to accommodate the wailing monster and I decided the only remedy to this new noisy presence was to ignore it.

Only Jess isn't particularly easy to ignore.

We're not particularly similar, Jess and I. Apart from the curls, (any argument between the two of us is referred to as curly warfare by my friends) we couldn't be more different. While I intently read book after book as a child, with near religious zeal (my mum once hid my books because she was worried I wasn't playing enough. I found them), Jess was busy causing havoc and demanding the world's attention. Even now, everything she does / says is done at warp speed and the rest of us are left out of breath just trying to follow the conversation / her progress across the room.

So I wouldn't say she's mellowed with age. But our relationship has changed. While curly warfare certainly still takes place, we have grown to value and respect each other. I've given up ignoring her presence in my life and come to welcome it. The older sister reflex has kicked in and I feel a strangely fierce sense of protectiveness over her.

There is an element of irony here. Growing up, Jess was the confident one - on French family holidays, when mum and dad asked us to go get the bread (in my memory we went running off unsupervised into town and came back laden with loaves. I'm guessing I've edited this memory somewhat because this doesn't sound like a my-mum thing to permit), it was Jess who would march without fear into the boulangerie and request 'pain-au-chocolat' while I looked awkwardly at my ten-year-old feet in fear that someone would realise I couldn't actually speak french fluently.

Unsurprisingly, Jess was far cooler than me in school. Thankfully I left the year she started or she would only have further highlighted my cool-deficiency. She learnt to drive as soon as she turned 17 (I, if you recall, am still summoning the courage to book lessons) and is now studying a degree that will actually qualify her for an actual profession - none of your fluffy English Lit / International Relations crap for Jess. My little sister is far better equipped to tackle life than I will ever be, and yet I want to wrap her up in cotton wool and keep the big bad world away from her.

But, as she reminded me yesterday, I'm buggering off to America. And while my powers of protectiveness aren't particularly strong in the UK, at least I can check in on her, buy her lunch and quiz her on the various marauding men interested in her. From January I'll be limited to phone interrogations, and neither of us is particularly good on the phone.

Then I remember an episode in yesterday's visit which should serve as a reminder to me of her capable-ness and my ineptitude.

We'd stopped into the Tate Modern to check out the Turbine Hall and do a whistle stop tour of Surrealism. The current installation in the turbine hall is a great big black box, which visitors can walk into and experience something 'personal and collective, putting considerable trust in the organisation' and other such rubbish. Jess and I entered the darkness, clutching each other's arm and our handbags, for fear of art-loving pick-pockets. Giggling we stumbled through, gaining confidence as our eyes adjusted, walking into the gloom until... I smacked my face right into the back wall, while Jess laughed her head off.

Jess of course, like any other thinking person, had had her hand in front of her face as she walked, so stopped before slamming into the wall. Jess was sensible and prepared. I however was not.

Thinking about it, I don't think I need to worry about Jess at all. While she runs rather than walks through life, at least she's doing so with her hand out in front of her. I do however think she should maybe be worrying about me. If we were to think of the big black box as a life-metaphor, I've gone walking into the unknown and ended up with a sore forehead. Hmmmm. Let's hope this isn't an omen.

Talking to hairdressers

I had my hair cut today. Not that anyone will notice - it has pretty much looked exactly the same since I was 15. Apart from the time I decided to attempt cutting it myself (I know that's what you do aged 2, I did it when I was 22) and even then it looked the same when it was curly - you only saw the damage when I straightened it.

With my upcoming nuptials, the only concession I'm making to the traditional bridal-preparation-regimen is getting my hair cut regularly to ensure its bouncy happy healthiness. I've ditched the straighteners, forbidden myself from going near it with scissors, and promised the Goddess of Weddings to get it cut on a regular basis.

I hate having my hair cut.

I hate having to verbalise what I want, having someone see quite how split-ended my hair is, having to look at myself in the mirror for an hour. But most of all I HATE SMALL TALK. I'm crap at it. I find it so difficult answering the prescription hair-dresser questions, because all the while I'm thinking in my head 'this is boring, why would she ever want to know this?'. However I have discovered the fail-safe, keep-banal-conversation-ticking-over-for-an-entire-haircut conversation topic: yup, you've guessed it, getting married and moving to America.

It's like a hairdresser charm - you can literally hear them breathe a sigh of relief as they realise the conversation is all set for the rest of the hair-cut. And while I may tire of recounting where we met / got engaged / are getting married and how I'm feeling about moving countries etc etc, it's a darn sight better than having to think of what to say about my next holiday (I'm moving countries - I don't get to plan holidays) or my plans for the weekend (sleeping doesn't feel cool enough to tell a hairdresser).

I'm wondering what I'll talk about when all this is over - not only to hairdressers but to all fleeting small-talk-necessitating acquaintances. But then I remember. I'll be in America, with an accent - the ultimate small-talk-tool that immediately distinguishes me as somebody where infinite why/what/how questions can be asked. I'm not too sure how I feel about being immediately singled out by my accent for the rest of time, but being able to have a hairdresser-worthy-topic should help ease the blow. And maybe it'll mean I have healthy happy hair for once.

The Day of Food...

...Is tomorrow.

Of course Americans know it as "Thanksgiving", but since the original thanks-givers were doing so having deserted with disdain my beloved land, I'm boycotting the name and re-christening it The Day of Food (TDoF).

I'm a big fan of TDoF, if you skirt over its traitorous provenance. It is exactly what it says on the (rechristened) tin: THE Day of Food. All people do all day is eat. And they spend about a week preparing to eat. Everyone together eating - no presents or trees or other distractions - just family and food. And it's a pretty ecumenical Day at that - while the original apostates were Christian, nowadays anyone can get in on the act - all they have to do is like food, family and be nice and appreciative for a day.

So I think we English should reclaim TDof (since its originators, treasonous though they were, were English after all). In fact I think we have more entitlement to this particular day than Americans.

Here's why:

1. Our commitment to Roast Dinner. We've even given it its own dedicated weekday - and all across the country, 100,000s of people cook it religiously every Sunday. So you see, we have experience in cooking such things.

2. Our lack of Sweet Potato pie. I actually like sweet potato pie. As a dessert. That much sugar and marshmallows does not belong with gravy. Sweet potato pie with gravy is the equivalent of eating ummm any dessert with gravy. In fact, I think the fact that Americans do this is reason enough to transfer Thanksgiving TDoF rights over to the UK.

3. The Roast Potato. The best ever way to cook potatoes and you don't even know what I'm talking about. Find out and maybe we can negotiate.

4. I just remembered the existence of chicken salad (for the English people reading this, it's not chicken-with-salad, it's chicken all mushed up with mayonnaise like tuna-mayo. Nasty.) I know you don't have this for TDoF, but its mere conception is sufficient to eliminate all rights to all things for all time.

OK I've only got 4 reasons, poor effort I know, but I still really like Thanksgiving (TDoF isn't really working for me - I'll just conveniently forget that the Treasonous Ones came up with the name). I've celebrated it every year for the past 7 years now (with and without Americans present), and that takes effort because we don't get the day off work so it means coming home after a full day and cooking Thanksgiving dinner (I tend to skip the turkey tho - I prefer chicken). I've hosted Thanksgivings for upwards of 30 people and over the years I've converted 10s of Englanders to the day. I am a Thanksgiving pioneer and deserve much acclaim.

So I think you Americans should let me keep it. I'll let you celebrate it too, provided you accept it wouldn't be here if it wasn't for England driving out the pilgrims in the first place.

Language Etiquette 101

Today, after I'd told him how much I missed him, how much I love him, how I can't wait to move countries for him and be his wife, Jeremy called me cute. CUTE! The cheek of it.

I'm guessing there's a wealth of Americans out there bemused at my outrage and wondering what 'cheek' is.

Well I'll tell you.

Cute is outrageous because over here it is what you call baby rabbits, kittens - everything diminutive and juvenile. It trivialises, belittles and essentially makes me feel like a child with dimples (got that Jeremy? Cute is out of the Love vocab). Basically, if anyone calls me cute when in my wedding dress they run the risk of getting punched in the face.

Cheek is what Jeremy had to call me cute. That's the best explanation I've got. Sorry.

So I thought I'd take this opportunity to communicate a few more words / phrases that translate badly. Think of it as damage limitation so at the wedding all the guests don't start offending each other.


"What's up?" OK so we are fairly familiar with this customary greeting. Primarily because of the highly irritating Budweiser advert of the 90s where frogs imitated frat boys (just realised in some post-posting hyperlink searching that the frog one was a different irritating ad, and actually it was frat boys imitating frat boys). And yet when asked the question 'what's up?' most English people (note I'm not saying British here. We do not call ourselves British.) will give a look of bewilderment. It denotes something should be up. And before we compute that it's just Americans asking us how we are, we first think 'am I being asked if there's something wrong?' and then, when do we catch up and answer the inevitable "nothing (is up)", there's a sense of anti-climax, as if we should be able to have something be up and yet there is nothing of note. In England, instead, we say 'Alright?', which I'll accept is equally puzzling for Americans, but at least the end answer is 'yes thanks' and so ends on a polite affirmative.

"Sure" Now this one drives my mum (mUm) crazy. When asked 'would you like a cup of tea?' or 'can I get you a crumpet', or other such offers of food / assistance, Americans (Jeremy) often reply 'sure'. This is not acceptable. In fact, you're likely to cause serious and long lasting offence. Why? Because we British (I'm pretty sure the Welsh, Irish and Scottish are with me on this one) are a polite species and have had it drilled into us from an early age that when offered something, 'yes' is followed by 'thank you'. 'Sure' is a) bad grammar and b) rude.

"Biscuit" I feel the need to educate Americans and English alike on this one. Mainly because if English people were unfortunate enough to order Tea and Biscuits in the states, they'd be met with a nasty surprise. Biscuits in 'American', are basically bread-rolls. I find this staggering. Even the word 'biscuit' is onomatopoeically bound to be crunchy, and yet you Americans think of them as soft dough balls to be eaten with gravy. If you ever came face to face with a chocolate digestive you'd be ashamed of yourselves. Biscuits are actually essentially cookies, except for when they're not cookies, because we also have differing definitions of what constitutes a 'cookie'. I know I'm not explaining this particularly well. But basically you need to stop calling biscuits biscuits and start calling them lumps-of-bread. OK?

"Jumper" This is NOT, not matter what my future mother-in-law tells me, a dress worn by school-girls, it is a sweater - apart from when said sweater is made from the sort of fabric they make hoodies out of, then the sweater is a sweater. Got it? Good.

"College" / "School" Without going into the English school system at length, suffice to say that college and school are not synonymous with university. They are completely different stages in a person's education and if you ask an English person where they went to school, you'll get the same look of confusion as for 'what's up?' before they remember hearing it used differently on Friends once and catch up.

I hope this irons out some problems. These are the words that trouble me most of all - I'm not going near pronunciation, because, well, we're right, you're wrong and that's all there is to it.

Misanthropy and Hope

Today, like a snail or a tortoise or ummm a hermit crab, or any other creature that carries its home with them, I lifted my bags and my trusty laptop and went on my way (only far less gracefully...yes, you heard me, I'm less graceful than a snail). My end goal was a borrowed bedroom in Kent (I'm currently typing this in a princess bed, having ousted my friend's 3 year old from her room), but first I had to go via work.

Getting to work from Sian and Marc's is usually a breeze. I roll out of couch, hop across the river and I'm there before you can say skinny-vanilla-latte. This morning however the world and its weather was against me. The wind threatened to throw me off Tower Bridge, I nearly got stabbed by more than one ridiculously enormous I'm-a-smug-sod-and-therefore-can-take-up-the-entire-pavement umbrella and the puddles left tide marks on my new boots.

It was grim, but at least everybody around me had the courtesy to look equally miserable. Everything was grey and correctly adhering to pathetic fallacy (although I don't know if it's real pathetic fallacy when you're miserable because of the weather and then the weather mirrors your misery?), and then I saw her. A merry optimist that had no business being in London at rush hour, with an umbrella that read 'Rain Makes the World Grow'. Ugh. I grabbed her umbrella and started bashing her over the head with it. Well, in my head I did anyway.

So it was with such thoughts of peace and goodwill that I finally waded into work.

Two coffees and an onion bagel in and my misanthropy was fading. The world always looks better with an onion bagel. A friend sent me a link to the BBC Personality Test which, being something of a wannabe psycho-analyst, I happily completed. In retrospect I'm not entirely certain it's not a government sponsored spying tool since it asks questions such as 'how much alcohol do you drink' and 'how many sexual partners have you had'? But either way I disregarded any Big Brother misgivings and filled it out like the rest of the sheep.

The test results give you a percentage of various personality traits and tell you (if you didn't already know) how satisfied you are with your life, what your life goals are and other useless-if-you-know-yourself bits of information. Having said that, my scores actually came as quite a surprise - especially when you consider that I nearly assaulted someone with an umbrella this morning for being a bit too positive - it turns out I'm officially (according to the BBC, and we all know you can trust the BBC) pretty happy. Apparently I have 94% Life Satisfaction, scored 82.5% Health and Wellbeing and I prioritise relationships (ok that wasn't surprising - I'm moving countries for one afterall).

While it surprised me on the basis of my exaggerated anger at miss rain-is-food this morning, I realised that when I cut through the crap - when I look past trudging through London in the rain, sleeping on couches and living out of suitcases, not being able to speak to Jeremy properly and stressing about visa post - there's actually a pretty calm, pretty happy Hannah inside.

That's not to say the outer crustiness of Hannah is going to become a little-miss-perky-pants any time soon (rain sucks, whether it makes the world grow or not), but it's good to know that there's an inner smile in there somewhere.

The World According to Americans

Somewhere out there there’s a woman who thinks her email address is my email address. She must do, because I’ve received flight confirmations, parent-teacher evening requests and random people contacting her because their pastor recommended her as a one fine lady. We shall call her Holly (largely because that’s her name).

Through receiving her emails, I actually know quite a lot about this woman. Other than her being one fine lady, I know she has a son called Noah; that she has a piano which gets tuned by a man called Bob; that she travelled to Chicago with 2 family members on the 24th April; that she is very involved in her church and that her husband is the president of a local Christian college. I also know her phone number, her frequent flyer number, which Tiger pack her son is in (I’m assuming it’s like scouts, otherwise it all sounds a little jungle-book) and I have a sneaking suspicion that the number 8 doesn’t work on her computer. I actually think I probably have enough information to steal her identity. Not that I know how to go about that, but were I the sort…

If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m a Nice person. At least, I’m able to suppress the Nasty most of the time and let the Nice triumph, even if it is through gritted teeth and glares when waiting for tourists to finish taking photos of themselves in the middle of the pavement (trans. Sidewalk). So not only have I not stolen her identity, I’ve also been replying to all of these misguided emails, telling the sender that I am not Holly. Until recently I didn’t know her actual email otherwise I could have signposted them, or at least emailed her and let her know that the reason she’s never heard from all these people is that she doesn’t know her email address.

A couple of the people I’ve replied to have replied back. Some apologising, some checking I’m 100% sure I don’t have a son called Noah, and one actually letting me know Holly’s real email address (my email address but with the number 8 at the end) . In one of these exchanges the woman replying to me asked me, oh so naively, if I lived in Clearwater Florida too.

I’ve done some research. Clearwater Florida has a population of around 100,000. I don’t think this woman really has much of a handle on how the internet works. Never mind that the USA has a population of 304,059,724 so the chances of me being in the 100,000 strong population of Clearwater are pretty damn small, there’s a whole world out there in which a quarter of its population speak English. I chuckled to myself and thought what an adorable example of Americans living up to their stereotype it is.

I know it is a stereotype, and in all likelihood this poor woman is fairly new to cyberspace, but the fact is the majority of Americans do have a pretty sketchy appreciation of geography. I’m not saying they all think that Australia is Iran but I have taken to just saying I’m from London to avoid the blank stares that mention of any other city brings.

(I should probably say here that Jeremy is a major exception to the rule. One of his favourite games is for me to name a country and him to tell me what the capital is. He’s pretty good. )

Another endearing America trait is their ability to be entirely un-phased by distance. This comes from living in the third largest country in the world. Contrast that with living in the UK, which can fit into the US 40 times over and you’ve got some very different ideas on how many miles equal ‘far’.

It doesn’t help that England’s roads basically originated from sheep paths and are therefore the windiest, narrowest, slowest roads known to (wo)man, so getting places takes a long time. My to-be mother-in-law once asked me if she could do London, Cornwall and the Lake District in one weekend. Technically she could, but she’d spend about 2 hours not in the car.

With Jeremy and I, our different nationalities (and therefore relative-distance-appreciation), make for interesting navigating at times. That and I’m pretty lazy and don’t like walking long distances. He generally resorts to lies and trickery. Jeremy has a habit of telling me how far places are according to his GPS watch (he also likes to tell me how fast we’re going when on trains / planes and likes to ask me every 2 minutes how far I think we’ve walked to highlight my poor grasp of all things measurement-ish). In Spain last month it took me quite a few hours of walking towards locations allegedly close by for me to realise that this is as-the-crow-flies and I am not a crow. In America though, this navigational system works ok because they’re basically all crows. Or at least their roads go in straight lines rather than respecting the rights of hedgerows.

Mock it as I may, I quite like the American vision of the world (ignoring the dangerous implications of isolationism of course). Mostly because it makes the Atlantic seem a heck of a lot smaller and the issue of my family being 3000 miles away a minor inconvenience.

Vaccinating America against me and why Caster Semenya and I have more in common than you might at first think.

Yesterday I had my long-awaited, greatly-dreaded Visa-Medical (cue eerie and ominous music).

You might be thinking this is one of your run-of-the-mill medicals where you can waltz along to your GP (Trans. primary care giver), have your blood pressure taken and be declared healthy.

You would be wrong.

The US immigration Deity, in his/her infinite suspiciousness only trusts 2 Doctors Surgeries (Trans. not actually sure - practice? Place where primary-care-givers work. Yes I know it's weird to call them surgeries when there's no actual surgery taking place. Whatever.) in the whole of the U.K. to carry these health inspections out. In fact, these '2' surgeries are really just one in two locations. Does this smell a little monopoly-ish to you? And it was in Mayfair (trans. whatever the purple most-expensive square is on the monopoly board). Fishy.

The whole thing was so surreal I feel the need to recount it in detail. Bear with me.

So I woke up early, having rooted around in my suitcase-in-the-corner in a panic for my last very-expensive-US-specification-passport-photo, and made my way along to Bentinck Mansions, home of Knightsbridge Doctors. It was like walking into a stately home. I was ushered into the waiting room, whereupon my passport, happily-found photo, medical questionnaire and vaccination history were handed over. Then I sat nervously, went to the loo (trans. toilet) a few times more than necessary (I'm an anxious pee-er) and glanced at the other visa-victims waiting for their cavity search. (That's NOT an exaggeration. OK it's a slight exaggeration, but keep reading)

First stop was the nurse with the needles. She was actually pretty nice and commiserated with me at the pointlessness of my having to have the HPV vaccination (which were I just 9 months older would have been deemed unnecessary). That was until she told me that there were 3 instalments of this pointless exercise, each costing £120, to be had over the next 6 months. I swallowed hard and chanted 'Jeremy, Bookcase, Chair'.

I was also given a tetanus injection, which I have less of a problem with since it might actually come in handy next time I get bitten by a dog or stabbed by a cat with a rusty nail. I was less impressed by the £30 they charged me for it though as, had I done my homework, I could have got it for free on the NHS (trans. glorious system of free health care and happiness which isn't quite as glorious in reality but is a darn sight better than the American system). I didn't need any other vaccinations as thankfully I've been pretty well immunised by the wonderful NHS and I had chickenpox when I was 7 (yes, chickenpox is a required vaccine. Woe betide anyone who takes chickenpox to the USA).

After the needles I was ushered into a holding bay (that's what they called it, no joke) where I swapped visa stories with other suckers. Then I was escorted to the X-Ray Chamber where I had to take my top-half of clothing off (wearing a dress wasn't the best plan), put on a rather glamorous robe and press my chest up against a board while she whipped me with a cat-o-nine-tails. Oops, there I go exaggerating again. The rest is true. Honest.

I then had to return, wearing robe and carrying clothes, to the holding bay before being summoned by a rather manic doctor who quizzed me on my medical history (I just said 'no' a lot).

I promise I'm not exaggerating this next bit. Talk about the girl who cried wolf. This is true. Really.

The manic doctor, having interrogated me, then told me to go and lie down on the bed-covered-in-tissue-thing and then came over and, opening the robe , squeezed both of my boobs and took a peek down my knickers to "check I was a girl".

THAT REALLY HAPPENED.

While I'm still a little perplexed by the boob-squeezing, since as far as I'm aware that's not the technique for lump-checking, the needle nurse had warned me about the girl-checking bit. Apparently in the past a man attempted to pass as a woman. Maybe the boob-squeezing is to check they're real? Although if I was a man pretending to be a woman I'd get myself some more convincing boobs than mine. That on its own should have been enough to prove my female-ness.

So after molesting me (I'm not particularly disturbed by this by the way - no need for worried messages - I mostly find it amusing) she then listened to my heart (it was beating pretty fast at this point, probably not helped by the skinny latte I'd had beforehand, certainly not helped by the molestation) / breath sounds (breathing smoothly was also pretty difficult) and took my blood to be tested for HIV. No one who has HIV is permitted entry to the US. It's the only communicable disease that they expressly specify. You'd be in with a better chance if you had the Bubonic Plague. Thankfully I'm pretty certain I don't have it, so this shouldn't be a major hurdle for me, beyond the bruise from the blood test on my inner right elbow. I'm just incredulous that it's the only thing they specifically say will prevent US entry.

I then gathered myself and reclothed and proceeded to the waiting room to pay £340 (about $560) for the privilege of the whole ordeal.

So there you have it. Finally something has actually happened to push me along the road towards Jeremy and Bookcases. I didn't expect female verification to be a part of it, but that just makes the story all the more tellable, and while I'm a bit miffed about paying out hundreds for pointless vaccines, if that's what it takes to convince America that I'm not going to become a burden to their (private) health care system or infect their citizens then so be it.

Wedding planning and sticking it to tradition.

I am not a fan of weddings. I have been a bridesmaid six times and, coming from small town Somerset, most of my friends were married before they reached puberty. OK that’s an exaggeration, but it certainly felt that way.

As a veteran bridesmaid, I have been the person holding the beautiful but enormous and impractical dress above the bride’s head as she pees, I’ve set up and cleaned up countless reception halls (well, not countless, but quite a few). I’ve stood in strapless dresses in mid-December in unheated churches trying not to turn blue, stood at the head of aisles in front of entire congregations trying to suppress giggles for less than conventional entrances and been caught on camera with a grimace of disgust at the use of ‘Wives submit to your husbands’ (yes, I know it goes on to say love your wives as you love yourself and that therefore it’s not grossly sexist blah blah blah. It’s still an unacceptable sentence.).

I’ve scaled mountains, ventured north of Birmingham, eaten sheep-head pâté and barn-danced until the world spun – all in loving support of my friends nuptials. But all the while I was thinking ‘I’d do this differently’. [I should here insert the caveat that prevents all my bridefriends from revoking my former bridesmaid status – your wedding was different. I’m talking about all the other weddings. (Seriously though, your weddings were unique to you and I loved them for you, but not for me…have I saved my traitorous bridesmaid butt?)]

For someone who isn’t a fan of weddings I’ve spent a lot of time planning my own. Since I was 5 and first put that lace curtain over my head, I’ve been crafting and preparing the perfect wedding. My number one aim is to avoid all unnecessary stress. I’ve already partially failed in this – wedding politics seem to lurk in every lacy corner – but I’m determined to get through without compromising on core values. These are:
- Never sticking bits of ribbon onto bits of lace onto bits of card
- Not spending obscene amounts of money because tradition says I have to
- Prioritising fun
- Not being a hypocrite

To that end, I may as well warn you all (those of you who know me that is – the rest of you won’t be invited) of the upcoming tradition-busting, convention-rocking, sanity-keeping decisions:

- We are emailing (yes, I said emailing) our invites. I have enough bits of paper to manage with the EVA (Everlasting Visa Application, remember?) without having to get all sticky and stressed about handmade invites. Also it’s environmentally friendly so we will gain Carbon-guilt-points (which will promptly be used 1000000 times over by the flights people will make to come to the wedding) and it’s cheap and therefore not wasting money on unnecessary traditions. Oh and you can RSVP online and it keeps track of them all. Genius idea. Add paperlesspost@paperlesspost.com to your address book now to ensure it doesn’t get gobbled up by spam. And don’t go expecting a save-the-date, there’s not going to be one. Silly American idea which duplicates work.

- We are getting married in a church. OK that doesn’t sound particularly tradition-busting, but in order to combat the not-being-a-hypocrite value, I had to have a squirm-worthy conversation with the Vicar where I explained I was a Christian but Jeremy wasn’t so would it be ok if we tweaked some of the words a little? Answer: you’ll already be legally married so you can do what you want and well done for not compromising your integrity. He’s a very cool vicar.

- There will not be hymns in the church. My parents virtually fell over when I told them this. It’s OK. There will be music (no we’re not going to all start singing pop-songs, I just meant down the aisle and back), I just don’t want that awkward half-the-guests-don’t-know-the-words moment(s).

- I’m not having a colour scheme. I can’t be bothered. Hydrangeas come in all colours, as will my wedding. Just wait until you see the bridesmaid dresses. No, Ali, they’re not tie-dyed.

- We’re having cupcakes, not cake-cake. Because cupcakes are awesome.

- We’re not having a band. I know this isn’t that unusual but it allows me to tell my favourite-so-far wedding conversation:
Dad: so are you having a band?
Hannah: no, we don’t really want one
Dad: but bands are nice
Hannah: I know, but Jeremy and I aren’t that bothered – we just don’t really want one
Dad: Well it’s not about what you want Hannah
Hannah: (in fits of laughter) ummmmm yes Dad I think it is

Dad has since seen the funny side of this exchange and has accepted the error of his wedding-ways. I just find it funny.

Oh and we’ll already have been legally married for about 7 months by the time people watch me walk down the aisle. I just hope I still like him. Kidding.

So prepare yourselves for untraditional brilliance. I hope. At the very least it’ll be fun. The formula of good food, friends, wine / beer / local ciders and Beyonce hasn’t failed me yet.

Waiting for the phone to ring.

I'm waiting for Jeremy to call. This isn't unusual - Time Difference, being decidedly against me, means phone calls have to be pre-arranged and I have to be finger-poised, ready to answer less the ringing awakens some poor housemate / long-suffering couch-lender.

Relationships via phones are not much fun. The majority of the time, we talk about 7pm EST (12am GMT), when Jeremy is cooking & eating and I'm half asleep.

This is an average Hannah-Jeremy conversation:

Jeremy: "What's up"

Hannah: "Nothing"

----- Silence -----

Hannah: "What's up with you?"

Jeremy: "Nothing"

------Whizzing / whirring / crackling noise ------

Hannah: "What's that noise?"

Jeremy: "Oh I'm just making some pasta / baking bread / making mozzarella / [insert obscure and complicated food making process]"

Hannah: "Cool"

----- More whizzing / whirring / crackling -----

Hannah: "So what happened today?"

Jeremy: "Nothing - was at work"

Hannah: "Yea, me too - pretty dull - don't have much to say really"

Jeremy: "Sweet"

Hannah: "Huh?"

Jeremy: "What?"

Hannah: "I said I didn't have much to say and you said sweet. You're not listening are you?"

Jeremy: "Sure I am"

Hannah: Hmmmm

------ Sound of Jeremy's jaw clicking as he chews -----

Hannah: So ummm I'm pretty tired. Think I might go to bed now

Jeremy: Ok cool

Hannah: Night then

Jeremy: Yup. Love you.

Hannah: Love you too.

The problem with phone relationships is there's no room for coming home exhausted, kissing hello and crashing on the couch in amicable silence. There's no room for silence. So on the frequent occasions that neither of us feel like talking, the relationship has a feeling of emptiness, and as I put down the phone I worry we'll have a marriage of silence with nothing to say to each other. I know it's not true, but no matter how sternly I talk to myself, the feeling I have when I put down the phone feels like a status declaration of the relationship.

Of course we do have good conversations. There are times when one or both of us is feeling talkative and we can happily chatter away for hours (always at the expense of my under-eye shadows). But on the whole, the phone is a necessary evil and I don't think either of us will be sad to say goodbye to it. In fact, I may refuse to speak to Jeremy on the phone ever again - I'll certainly forbid him from talking and eating / cooking on the phone for all eternity.

I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to coming home to Jeremy cooking me dinner (!), being able to kiss him hello and demand hugs at awkward times during the meal preparation (an endearing trait of mine) and just knowing from looking how each other's day has been. We'll talk of course, but only when we want to and not during food processing. I. Can't. Wait. And thank goodness I can't wait, because if I wasn't feeling so top-of-the-moon excited about sharing my life with Jeremy in the same time-zone / continent / house, I'd be sat in a corner crying my heart out about saying goodbye to my friends and family. Buzz kill? Thankfully not - that's how excited I am. Good thing. Phew.

Moving on to...

In approximately 912 hours, or 3,283,200 seconds (no I didn't just sit and work that out, my cousin sent me a site which will help me in my Grim Reaper of Time ways) I will be leaving TimeBank. In fact, I'll probably already have left and be sat by a devonshire fire with mince-pies and mulled wine (my staple Christmas diet) as I'm taking TOIL (trans. awesome system where I get time off for hours worked over contracted hours.) for my final day, since no one was going to be in the office anyway and I've no handover to do so I'd have been twiddling my soon-to-be-unemployed thumbs all day long.

I'll admit, I'm looking forward to unemployment. I'll rephrase. I'm looking forward to temporary unemployment. From January until whenever my Employment Authorisation Document comes through I'm going to be living guilt free off my supportive, loving husband (is it ok that my heart misses a beat when I say husband and January in the same sentence? I don't mean misses a beat in a swooning I-Love-Him-So-Much way, I mean in a using all the $%&@! on the keyboard sort of way... which no, mother, if you're reading this, does not mean I don't want to marry him, it's just £$%!&ing terrifying. And no I didn't swear, I said £$%&!). I get to sleep, eat late breakfasts with mugs of coffee and read War and Peace, because if I don't read it when I've nothing else to do, let's face it, I'm never going to read it.

But from the moment that EAD comes in, I'm officially given back rights to independence and supposed to be fully emancipated, futhering my career and not living off my husband (Husband!). Which begs the question, what the $%&@! am I going to do?

Last night I helped run a big event for TimeBank. It was fun - in the lead up to the event I don't think I clock-watched my days once, except to remark on how on earth it went from morning to night in the space of a second. I learnt some things about myself - such as when I'm busy I have more energy and need less sleep and that I like wearing electric blue (thanks for the dress Siany) and that holding a clipboard gives me a sense of power. So maybe I'll become an events planner. Or maybe I'll follow up on a jokey remark where I asked a complete stranger (who is opening a venue in Boston) to hire me and he didn't look horrified by the suggestion.

I could do anything. Anything, that is, that doesn't require formal qualifications (International relations and english lit don't really lend themselves to many vocations).

I'm trying to embrace this possibility for change rather than feel overwhelmed by it. I have time to figure it all out - the US Immigration Services have kindly prohibited me from working for my first 3 months in the states, which gives me some thinking space. I can volunteer. Goodness knows since I've spent the last 2.5 years telling other people to volunteer, it's probably about time I did. I may have to put off reading War and Peace, in favour of determining my life's path, but who was I kidding about that anyway?

What I absolutely will not do is watch re-runs of The Hills / Miami Social / Wives of Orange County (if I say I won't do it enough maybe resolve will translate into reality). I will take control. I will think and weigh and consider. I will not become a sloth. I will find the promised path to career fulfilment. And in the meantime, I might start carrying around a clipboard to make me feel more in control.

The power of a story.

My cousin told me a few days ago that her relationship with her American boyfriend has remained in existence because of me and Jeremy. The fact that we stuck it out gave her hope and so they persevered. Boo (my cousin, hers is a family full of quirky nicknames) is a bit of an evangelist for our relationship. Something about our story struck a chord with her fantastical sense of romance / the absurd and she has mythologised us so that we have become some sort of paradigm of Love Prevailing. Apparently Jeremy and I are even unwittingly responsible for inspiring the continuing romance of at least one other couple. Quite how we've achieved this I'm not entirely sure - it's a good job they never asked my long-distance relationship oracle-esque advice, because I'd have told them to run a mile.

In truth, Boo and her boyfriend Brandon (they're very alliterative) managed the whole thing a lot better than Jeremy and I. Brandon moved over to England in the 2nd year of their relationship, he studied here and then managed to get a job in London where they've lived together for the past 2 years. That's how you're supposed to do it.

But I like the way Boo sees us - the rose-tinted glow is alluring and makes me think fondly of that emergent 'Us'.

So I thought I'd briefly tell our story. The rosy one, without my cynical commentary of 'little did we know' (mostly without it - sometimes I can't resist). Because it was the Story that first intoxicated me. I fell in love with the Story of us, the idea of recounting our Story at future dinner-parties, wedding speeches, grandchildren's bedtimes (yes, I think that far ahead, although in my imaginings I'm not wrinkly, only wiser). And as the Story took shape in my imagination, it began to wind its spell around us - Jeremy became the man I had to know, because the Story said so, and it would be a crime to ruin a perfect tale of Love just by being a little weak-hearted about the idea of something so trifling as a Long Distance relationship (trifiling, you understand, in the face of such heroic, unprecedented, hyperbolic LOVE.)

Here's the Story:

Once, outside a Pizza place, in Sorrento, in Italy, a young English girl sat laughing with her friends in the balmy summer's evening. An American boy happened upon the girl and her friends (Oliver, if you're reading this, you've been edited out of the Story - makes it tidier this way, sorry). His heart sank as he saw her (Jeremy's own words - I think he meant his heart 'sang', but who knows) and he knew in that moment that here was a girl who could change everything for always. The girl barely noticed him, but her friends welcomed him to sit and partake in some victuals of pizza and cheap italian wine.

That evening, inspired by more wine and pistachio and bacon flavoured Gelato (that actually exists - it's gross but amusing), the girl and boy began to talk. They found they could talk about anything. The next few days they became more and more intrigued with each-other. There were waterfights and coastal hikes and boats around islands...

On the third day, he kissed her, on the beach, under the stars. On the fourth day, they realised that soon the boy would have to fly back to his own land. They promised to write to eachother and on the fifth day, the girl tearfully waved him goodbye at the train station.

The girl assumed that the boy would forget her, and at the very least expected him to be practical and to suggest they stay 'just-friends', but the boy said that he 'never ruled anything out in matters of the heart' (again, a direct quotation). This sealed their fate, because the girl was far too romantic and impractical to suggest anything different.

Two months later, having missed him more than she thought she could bear, she flew to visit him. There they declared their Love and there the Story of their beginnings took root - determined to sustain them through all the hardships they would face...

So there you have it - our Story, as mythologised originally by me and propagated by my earnest cousin. I'm happy it's made other people fight for Love rather than giving up. Although if anyone wants to know my advice if contemplating a long distance relationship, I'd say categorically run away. Run away now. And if you can't run away, then you've already been sucked in so you may as well take a deep breath and get on with it.

Homelessness and homage to good friends.

Today I became officially homeless. For the past few months I've been wavering around homelessness - surfing kind couches, travelling the 4 hours down to Devon to make use of my parents' house and comfy beds...but I've had my Dad's flat in Richmond as home to my suitcases, even if I wasn't always able to stay there. On Monday, Dad gets outmustered (that's navyspeak for getting the flat and inventory checked off and okayed) and today I moved my stuff and dragged it across London to my Good and long-suffering friends, Sian and Marc.

Pulling a massive suitcase across London is not my favourite activity, although I seem to have done my fair share of that of late. The going up stairs is the hardest - at one point I teetered on a top step, in danger of falling all the way back down when I felt an almighty shove - a woman had taken it upon herself to push me up the stairs (for fear I fall and squidge her I imagine). Going down stairs is pretty hard too, since the weight of the bag threatens to bump my weakling butt all the way down. My biggest fear though is that someone might offer to help, because if they did I'd have to split-second-weigh the likelihood of them stealing my bag and running off with all my worldly goods, which wouldn't do them much good but would leave me very cold. No one offered to help (other than shoving me up the stairs). This is what London does to people - they either don't want to help or they assume I'll suspect them of thievery and don't offer.

Anyway - I was talking about homelessness. So when I arrived at Sian and Marcs, I rang the buzzer and failed to open the door and Marc had to come down to let me in and gallantly struggle with my bag up to their flat. Bad enough that I'm taking up precious Wapping square footage, he has to lug my suitcase up and in. Of course Marc was generous and kind and didn't care, but in that moment, I could have cried. I felt so dependent, so un-independent and a major sponge.

As I walked to Waitrose (trans. super posh supermarket and only supermarket in Wapping) to buy ingredients for yummy please-don't-hate-me-for-invading- your-space food, I realised that this is the beginning of the next 6 months. I thought it had begun already with the EVA, but up until now it had all just been in my head. Now it's in a corner of Sian and Marc's flat and I don't know how long it's going to be until I have a home again (don't worry Marc - I'm out by Christmas - I meant till I move to the states).

I could let it all well up and overwhelm me. Goodness knows, I'm an expert panicker. But my mantra is this: Jeremy and a bookcase, Jeremy and a bookcase...and maybe a rocking chair...Jeremy, bookcase, chair... If I chant that in my head whenever I feel the panic rising, I think I should make it through. Sian and Marc, you can chant 'she'll be gone by Christmas'. And in the meantime, I'll make lots of yummy dinners and will dust the transformers and try not to moan about the preponderance of sport on the TV. Love you guys. You have made me feel nothing but most welcome - I just hope you don't end up dancing with glee when my suitcase and I are on our way again.

Life Plotting and The Bad Feminist.

A few weeks ago, I was filling out yet another form for the Endless Visa Application (EVA), which asked me to list all countries I have visited in the past 10 years and in which year. This form is usually reserved for men aged 25 - 40 (prime terrorist age, methinks theythink) but the London US embassy apparently thinks all London applicants are potential terrorists, and asks everyone to complete it.

At first I panicked. While I could easily list all countries I have visited since I was 16, how could I remember when I'd visited them? I travel to Europe more frequently than I go to the North of England (Europe being far prettier, with more intelligible accents and the nearest Greggs at least a Channel's length away) and being a fully-paid member of the E.U. , I don't get reminder-stamps in my passport.

So there I was busy panicking, emailing family and friends to see whether they could help me remember how old I was that time we went to France and found a mouse in the cupboard or the time we drove to Italy and Dad drove on the wrong side of the road on the dual carriage way...and then I realised an infallible way of remembering. All I had to do was envisage the holiday and recall which boyfriend / love-interest I was missing at the time. In Germany summer of 2000 I was exchanging music lyrics with the first...by France October 2000 we'd just got together. Germany 2001 we'd been dating for a year and I was writing lakeside love-postcards. 2002 he was collecting my A-level results for me while I sat pool-side in Italy. Then there was university, a tearful breakup and then we're on to meeting Jeremy in Italy, travelling with Jeremy to Germany, to Ireland, missing Jeremy in Lanzarote... you get the picture? Basically the whole of my adult life can be plotted according to which man I was dating / in love / obsessed with at the time.

Is that worrying? Throw into the mix that I'm moving countries (for the second time) because of a man and one might be forgiven for concluding that my life is dictated by men. Is there a problem...maybe I should rethink the whole thing, give back the diamond ring and spend some time 'finding' myself.... Nah.

I like my ring too much.

Also, there is actually a positive to long distance relationships. Not all long distance relationships, I hasten to add - if you're considering one, run away, run away now - but for Jeremy and I, the distance provided me the space I needed to grow and develop as a person. We got together when I was just 19 and had I gone directly from university to living together to marriage, I fear I'd never have had the courage to declare Myself.

In moving back to the U.K. I was able to experience self sufficiency (I wasn't very good at it - I've only just emerged from my overdraft, and that's because of my magnanimous friends and their couches), find my feet in my chosen profession and experiment with cooking away from Jeremy's critical assistance (he has a habit of standing by me as I cook, asking 'helpful' questions such as 'do you need the gas up that high?' 'are you going to rinse that?' 'does that need to be chopped finer?'). So that now when we move in together, I have my own way of doing things. It might make the transition slightly bumpier - we're both going to be fighting to do the cooking - but it will make it more interesting and we'll be able to form a partnership of equals, rather than Jeremy leading the way and me acquiescing.

Ultimately, while it's a bit annoying that my whole adult history can be plotted according to men, it's a very useful tracking device and without it I'd never have been able to fill in form DS-157 Supplemental Nonimmigrant Visa Application. So yes, I'll admit I'm a pitiful example of the 'modern' woman. I'm not about to burn my bra (although if I did no one would notice)and I doubt Grazia's about to issue me with any independence awards. But I'm ok with that. All I need now is for Jeremy to stop being such a good feminist and to start assuming my weakness when I'm carrying heavy bags / approaching doors / walking home in the rain when he has a perfectly good car just waiting to pick me up...

Neurotic Blogger? Me?

Today a friend of mine, thinking she was being hilarious, sent me a link to a news story, reporting that neurotic women are more likely to blog. Apparently this is because they blog to “assuage loneliness or in an attempt to reach out and form social connections with others.”

Presumably my hilarious friend thought that as I’m a woman and I blog, I must be neurotic. Actually I think she was probably basing it on more solid evidence, such as my tendency to phone her to check whether she thinks it’s ‘normal’ for me to need to pee whenever I get anxious about anything (answer, no, but it’s not the end of the world so don’t stress about it), or whether the pain in my wrist might be early onset arthritis (answer, shut up, don’t be an idiot) or the itching on my legs is a sign of bed-bugs (answer, don't you dare bring them to our house).

Ok, so I’ll admit it, I’m a little neurotic (see various Ally McBeal references) but if I’m neurotic and female and I blog, does that mean the reason I blog is neuroticism?

I don’t think so. I know I’m not doing this because of loneliness – I have lots of friends and I’m soon going to be living in very close quarters with the hilarious friend and her boyfriend (they’ve loaned me their couch for the remainder of my time in London), which, granted may result in all three of us wishing we were lonely. And I’m pretty sure I’m not trying to reach out for social connections – I get enough of those via facebook… So why am I doing this?

Firstly, I’m enjoying it. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything other than emails and reports, longer still since I’ve written anything that wasn't about someone else's creativity (English Lit. Degree).

When I was young I used to write down pretty much every thought that came into my head – poems, short stories, detailed explanations of exactly why I fancied X, Y and/or Z. Then a few months or years later I'd go back and read these various confessions / odes to youth and I was invariably embarrassed and appalled by this younger uncooler self, and generally destroyed the evidence. So for a while I stopped writing for fear of embarrassing some older, wiser version of me (I don't think I'm getting any cooler - if anything it's all downhill from here). But now, while I know that in 5 years time I might be horrified at the sound of my 26 year old voice, I don’t care. 31 year old self, back off, I say.

I’m also finding the whole process quite therapeutic (have I just contradicted myself and proven I’m doing this because I’m neurotic?). It’s proving a great way to think through the larger issues at hand and to take a step back from the nitty-gritty-visa-moving-generalhannah-crap. No one wants to know the smaller details of what’s going through my brain the majority of the time, because it sounds a little like this: ||: “has the [insert name of various long-awaited forms] arrived? I hope it’s arrived. What if it hasn’t arrived? What if I don’t get the visa in time? What if I don’t get permission to leave the country and can’t come back for my wedding?”:|| See? Boring.

Last time when I moved for my masters, all I thought about before I moved was visas and degrees (finishing mine and applying for the next) and GRE numeracy exams (world confession - I scored in the 20th percentile for maths and 90th for verbal [UK people, that means 80% of test-takers were better than me at maths and 10% were better than me at English]... if they'd just have asked me I'd have told them as much.) So when I finally got over there, I'd prepared for the immediate but not the long-term. I hadn't given a thought to missing family or friends or baked beans. But, in blogging I have to not think on insignificant-repeat for a few moments and actually think about getting married, moving countries and its implications.

So really, one might argue that by blogging I am giving voice to my saner, less-neurotic self, and in fact it's the stable person within me who wants to blog. Have I convinced anyone? I didn't think so.

love counting and jean paul satre

Since Jeremy and I first met I've been counting. The months until I see him; the days until we say goodbye; the hours of sleep lost waiting until his day overlaps with my day and we're both home and awake(ish) at the same time and he can call...

There's a trick to the counting - when I'm waiting to see him, I skip the day I'm on and the day he arrives, but reverse the rule when we're saying goodbye - I've named this Love Counting, or artless delusion to the less romantically minded amongst you.

Today, I sat on the tube amid the crush and clamour of London, returning to work with a bump after the peace and warmth of Spain, and counted the days left at TimeBank (38 - not including the weekends. That's called Lie-In Counting).

As I sat there, trying not to breathe in swine-flu germs, I considered all the time I had counted away. An ex-boyfriend who was trying to impress me with his philosophical lyricism and grasp of existentialism once told me I could never kill time. At the time, I found it flattering and enigmatic. Now looking back it seems like cringeworthy claptrappery and somewhat ironic. Because as time-killers go, I have to be the grim reaper. Always looking to the next challenge, the miracle around the corner that's going to make things brighter, easier, shinier.

If I'm the Grim Reaper, Jeremy is the Angel of Life (ok, maybe I'm sounding like the cringey ex, but bear with me) - no one lives in the moment as much as he does. Often I find it intensely irritating because he doesn't worry about anything - he like IS the lilly in the field, not worrying or spinning and yet coasting through life as if he were a ordained by Satre himself with the art of living in the now. I on the other hand see worrying as a way of warding off bad luck, like if I don't stay alert then bad things will happen - I refuse to sleep on airplanes in case they crash while I'm not looking. I worry and I anticipate and I kill time like all there is is tomorrow.

But that has to stop. Firstly because I'm not getting younger and I don't want to wish time away while all the while wrinkles are encroaching. Secondly because it's bloody tiring and I'm pretty sure it makes me, on occasion, very annoying. There's only limited time left living in London, (which for all its fumes and commuter germs is full of people I love and will miss) and I can't will that time away by missing Jeremy. And then once I'm in America we have a marriage to grow and a life to build and something tells me I'll be doing us a disservice if I'm waiting for the next trip to England or visit from friends.

I have to start Love Counting as if every day were a day with Jeremy (be assured that I'm not always on clouds when around him, we've been together over 6 years afterall - I'm just sticking with the theme), where days aren't skipped but celebrated. In short, I have to become worthy of the cringeworthy claptrappery bestowed upon me all those years ago. And maybe in the process I'll start to understand the inner workings of my beloved's (Jeremy, not the philosophising ex) mind in all its momentary brilliance.

From Major to Minor...

99.9% of the time I enter an airport with Jeremy it's to say goodbye, and almost always I have Ella Fitzgerald in my head - singing about dying / crying / wondering why-ing a little.

While the dying bit is melodramatic, even for me, the song has become something of a theme tune for these goodbyes, with snippets of it weaving their way into the final days of every visit. (I'm aware that theme tunes are all a bit too Ally McBeal circa 1998 but we've already established that Ally and I have an affinity, although I would like to claim the edge on sanity and I don't plan to stay with the show until it becomes embarrassingly unwatchable.) And with the song comes the anticipatory sadness - about a day before the Goodbye (I'm getting better at it - in the early days of our relationship I got sad before we'd ever said hello)- every joke, smile, touch of hand, underlines the knowledge that tomorrow we'll be 3000 miles apart again.

Today I said Goodbye to Jeremy for what is quite probably the last time. All the usual feelings were there right on cue - the aching at the back of my throat, the tingling up my nose and stinging in my eyes, clinging to him like a limpet and then when it really is time to peel myself away, crying unashamedly in public until I finally pull myself together right before sitting down on the plane next to some poor soul who has probably witnessed the whole spectacle and is probably terrified I'm going to spend the whole journey snivelling into my sleeve.

However today when I walked away, Ella wasn't singing, The Rolling Stones were (I just had to google it as actually had no idea who the song was by), with 'This could be the Last Time' (also in my googling I read the rest of the lyrics - the only applicable ones are in the chorus and the general gist of the song is opposite to what I'm talking about...not a particularly good theme tune choice, but it was in my head all the same). And through the tears and snot and spectacle, I smiled to myself and started bopping my head in time to the imaginary music as I walked down the travelator, past some slow moving bemused spaniards whilst Vonda Shepherd took over the song.