little blue cups

The other day, my friend Y came round for dinner. I don't see him so often, we live in different cities. But he was staying with P, a mutual friend, so they both came by.

I think very highly of Y. He lives a good life, his critical faculties are well developed, as is his sense of the absurd. He's smart, funny, politically engaged. He likes dancing as much as he likes books, food as much as art, people more than politics. He's got a sure grip on life though not such a strong one on the crockery when he's washing up. Somehow, though, I never think of Y as clumsy. I think of him as innately graceful. Even though I've seen him dancing.

P's the clumsy one.

My blue teaset sustained a high number of casualties when Y and his wife S, another good friend, were staying with me for a while. But it was always P's smashes that I noticed. P, who claims he is only ever clumsy in my presence (why, I don't know - I'm always warning him not to drop/trip over/spill things).

P had always promised to replace what he'd broken. It proved difficult as the set was a second-hand find but the other day, he presented me with six dear little coffee-cups the same shade of duck-egg blue. He'd found them in a charity shop. I thought I'd leave them at his until I could bring them home safely but when I got to mine and opened my bag, I'd found he'd put the cups in there. One of them had smashed.

I don't know who's responsible. I felt inexplicably sad when I saw that cup in pieces. P has said he will glue it together for me. But it won't be the same.

tattooing pretty girls

My boyfriend is training to be a tattoo artist.

I don't have any tattoos. I've thought about having one but realise they are not for the indecisive. I try not to think of him tattooing pretty girls but he tells me most of his customers will be hairy-arsed bikers, mostly male.

Here's a story I wrote about tattoos a while back:

I have always been fascinated with tattoos, other people’s tattoos, the tattoos you find on a new lover the next morning when you have the time to explore, for example. I have considered getting one myself but find their permanence daunting. A tattoo is a personal logo, something unique to you, which expresses how you see yourself, all the values you stand for. Perhaps for some people these values will never change and a tattoo is a testament to this, like the man I once saw on the tube with a spider’s web tattooed across his face, his features forever enmeshed in the conviction of his youth. Or like Lily and her unfinished tattoo.

I worked with Lily when I was 18. She was a beautiful young woman, passionate about piercing and tattooing herself long before these were considered mainstream activities. These days, the desire to tattoo ourselves is not considered threatening or bizarre, but instead is an acceptable form of self-expression, the same customising impulse that drives us to personalise our ring-tones or our desktops. At the age of twenty Lily’s upper arms, her wrists and neck, were already encircled with delicate filigreed tattoos. But she was not going to stop there: Lily had ambitious plans for the stretch of milk-white canvas which extended from just below her right breast down to the top of her right thigh. She was going to get it tattooed with a design she had created herself.

After much searching she found someone willing to undertake the project. It was a complex design and would take several weeks to complete. On her first visit to the tattooist he drew onto her body in black felt-tip pen and took Polaroids so she could approve his execution of the design. Lily brought the Polaroids into work and showed them to us at lunchtime, headless shots of her in her underwear, the tattooist’s drawing snaking across the right side of her body, licking her midriff like black inky flames. After each visit to the tattoist Lily would come into work and give us sneak previews of the tattoo’s progress. And then, one day, five weeks into the project, she announced that she was looking for another tattooist. When asked why, she pulled out some papers and began to read aloud: ‘Oh my darling child…’ It seemed the tattoist, like most men who met her, thought he had fallen in love with Lily. She cried with laughter as she read us every word of the letter he had written declaring his feelings for her. I sometimes think about Lily’s tattoo and if she ever found anyone to finish it.