Bella’ got a web cam. I just took this photo and sent it over ICQ to the girls. They said I look sad. I said “I’m not”. Not really.

21 August 1998

Continued…
I spent the last few days walking around trying to familiarize myself with everything in the broad day. The other night on my way back from Eliza and The Phoenix I got lost. Every street looks the same and my ‘remember the roundabout’ theory didn’t work. There are roundabouts everywhere.

I’ve found a grocery store, a liquor store and several little convenience stores and I know the number of streets I have to turn down to get to them all. I keep twenty pounds – about thirty five dollars – in my pocket at all times just in case I get lost. I can get a cab even if it’s just around the corner. Bella said only use Black Cabs because otherwise it could be any ole sex offender with a neon sign. Paul (the housemate) told me to ignore Bella and that if I wanted my money to last I better start shopping at the Co-op or Somerfield, “Tesco will kill you.” Tesco’s a grocery store in the city center. They have loads of French and Indian food but no buttermilk.

The convenience stores around here are all pretty small. The aisles are narrow and gritty and they sell some kind of beer in two-liter plastic containers to kids who look twelve. I’ve not managed to do a proper shop yet. I’m afraid my money will run out. I buy a Twix Bar and a Sunny D every day and that’s all. I eat nothing else. I’ve lost six pounds. Bella’s fixing dinner tonight. She said “I love to cook for people. Everybody calls me Monica.” Like, from Friends.

20 August 1998

Continued…

Continued…
I agreed to meet Eliza at something called Mancunian Way. She said “Tell the bus driver and he’ll let you know when to get off” and that’s exactly what I did. I had to pretend like someone had a gun to my head though. Like I was James Bond and a baddie with an automatic was saying step this way.

I’m sure it’s not healthy but I don’t care. We all have defense mechanisms. Mine use to be my hair. Now it’s Bond because, you know, I can totally pretend to be a man. I have no problem with that. The spy thing either. The whole ‘imagine everyone else naked’ has never worked for me. Bond. James Bond. Does. It got me on the bus … a double decker.

I sat upstairs and upfront and it was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my life. I know. Sad, huh. There was some light left and I could see EVERYTHING. The perfect square houses and the perfect square yards. The traffic lights on traffic poles and the little tiny cars. I could feel my throat close up and I just wanted to laugh because…I’m here! I’m doing it. Me. Buffy. The girl who got too homesick to go away to school…is now away to school.

I’ve never loved being by myself like this. But I do now, tonight. I love being alone. Being in another country. On my own. For good and for ever. I can do anything. If I just act like Bond.

19 August 1998

Continued…

“There is no cure for cancer. This is why we walk….”
-Carolynn Johnson

Carolynn Johnson had just turned 37 years old when she found out she was pregnant. Within a two week period, she was also diagnosed with breast cancer. A radical mastectomy was recommended. She agreed. To protect her unborn child and in spite of risks to herself she ignored the request by her physician to have an abortion and waited until her second trimester to begin therapy. It would take eight rounds of chemo before Carolynn was able to begin her new life as a mother…and a survivor. She has walked for seven years.

My sister called me this morning and asked me to read her friend’s story. “She’s got a blog. Please look at it.” Now I’m asking you to do the same. If you don’t think you have the time, make it. Without a cure, over 10 million women will die from breast cancer in the next 25 years. If you don’t think it concerns you, you’re wrong: If you are a woman you’re at risk. If you have a wife, mother, daughter or sister. They’re at risk. It concerns us all.

This year Carolynn and her Crew will participate in the American Cancer Society’s RELAY FOR LIFE. A veteran of both the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer and the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, Carolynn has helped raise over $150,000 for breast cancer research. She walks again on June 30.

The RELAY FOR LIFE is an overnight event led by the American Cancer Society to help raise money for the fight against breast cancer. Please help by sponsoring Carolynn and her Crew.

If personal cheques and paypal aren’t your thing you can also donate direct to the Susan G. Komen foundation or the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.

Please spread the word by linking to or digging this link.

Continued…
To listen to my grandmother, meeting people online is scandalous. “Your cousin X went on one of them computers and her husband almost left her.” Good thing I don’t have a husband. My Pa wont let her have a computer. She thinks it’s because he’s jealous. I think it’s because she likes to rent chickens from Missouri.

She doesn’t buy them. She just rents them. Like through this Sally Struthers thing only they send her pictures of the birds instead of kids from Ethiopia. Instead of drawings she gets eggs. Once a month her chickens will lay her a few. She’s a sucker for anything you can get in the mail. Can you imagine her loose on the internet? Pa can. That’s why she doesn’t have a computer.

I thought I’d calm her down some before I left. “It’s not a guy, grams. It’s a girl I’m meeting,” and boy that just about did it. I’m 21 and have never – NEVER – brought a guy home. There are reasons for that. If you know my family, you know what those reasons are. But Grams doesn’t understand. She was married with children at my age and thinks I’ve gone the way-of-the-world.

She doesn’t say it but she thinks it. She worries over it. Like this. “You know, I heard a preacher say the other day that there was this new thing where women like women and their husbands let them. I did too hear it now!” She said the last bit like I didn’t believe it. Like a thing like that couldn’t possibly be true. And then, “Things like that’ll happen at the end of time.”

So anyway, the girl’s name’s Eliza and she’s from Germany. She moved to England last month. Is just settling in. Like me. Only not like me because she’s not afraid of anything and I’m afraid of everything. I met her on an expats forum back in June and I”m meeting her at The Phoenix tonight. For beer. I’ve never drank a beer in my life. And I have no idea how to get to this Phoenix place. I’ll probably have to ride a bus. Damn.

18 August 1998

Continued…

Continued…
I called home today from a pay phone down the street. We have no land line yet. Everyone uses their mobile=cell phone.

I had to go in to Royal Bank of Scotland to break a travellers cheque=check. They gave me a glass of champagne and said they’d throw in a cd player and 50 pounds if I’d bank with them.

Chris and Earl were gone so I spoke to Steph who started crying uncontrollably. She’s way too emotional for me right now. She said she loved me and she missed me. Lee just said “Hey girl what’s up” and Mal said “You promise you’ll be back in a year. If you’re not I’m never speaking to you again. Ever.” She means it.

Steph said she’s sending me a photo through ICQ. “Put it up on your wall and kiss it every morning before class.” She asked if I’ve seen Peter yet and if he liked the scarf.

Here’s the pic she sent.

16 August 1998

Continued…

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious – i.e. seriously intended – writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ – a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake’s ‘Tiger, Tiger.’ At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d’occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed – at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week – and helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf,’ etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost –

So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in – at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

1. Sheer egoism.
Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

3. Historical impulse.
Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose.
– Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature – taking your ‘nature’ to be the state you have attained when you are first adult – I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma:

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl’s bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. ‘Why did you put in all that stuff?’ he said. ‘You’ve turned what might have been a good book into journalism.’ What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write. Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

Continued…
Bella’s the girl. The one who arranged the house. She has a lisp and looks ten but says she’s 19. She’s from Gloustershire and says “It’s ‘-sure‘ not ‘-shire,” and “I think you’ll need elocution lessons.” I get it. She’s posh. Like the Spice Girl. “No. Most definitely NOT like the Spice Girl”. She watches Prince William play polo. Her friend even snogged him once. Snogged = Kiss.

Paul’s the guy down the hall from me, by the loo=bathroom. But for a small orange tuft that sticks straight from his forehead, he has no hair. His teeth and eyes look lonely without anything to accompany them. His dad’s a minister of some sort. And he eats Wheetabix. Paul, not his dad. Last night we watched Toy Story – the pretty colors helped calm my nerves. So did the amitriptyline. He’s Bella’s age. I think.

Martin’s 21 and a stage actor. Apparently. When he’s not into social reform. His dad was in A Fish Called Wanda and Superman. Martin moves very deliberately. Meticulously really. And looks like he thinks alot. He’s graceful. Like a girl. And has an obvious arrogance to him. Like James Spader’s character in Pretty in Pink – if he were British. Martin looks like David Bowie. Youngish.

15 August 1998

Continued…

Continued…
I live on St XXX Street. In a two story brick house on a littered up street at the front of a cul-de-sac just down an alley and off the main Road.

The girl who told me she’d pick me up at the airport didn’t. She’s not even in the city yet. She sent Martin instead. He got there and couldn’t find me and came home and then had to come back out again. It was five hours before we got together. It was good of him to do it. He didn’t have to.

We took a bus from the airport. The last time I was in a foreign country I took taxis everywhere because I was afraid to get on a bus or a train. I’ve never told anyone that. I spent like $500 on taxis because I was too scared to ride anything else. Geesh. Today was my first proper bus ride. Martin Paid. I didn’t know how.

He’s one of my housemates and seems ok. I mean, I can’t look at him because when I do I want to look some more. He’s one of those people other people like to look at. You know. The kind who always reminds you of someone else but you’re not sure who so you have to stare just a little bit longer than you probably should just to figure it out.

He said he use to work for an MP. Which doesn’t mean Military Police but Member of Parliament. I said something about Ronald Reagan and he laughed at me. I think. Back home I had posters of Mel Gibson and Dan Marino on my wall. Chris had a photo of Reagan and a Newsweek article. Chris is pretty laid back but she loves Reagan like she hates Canadians. And no. I don’t get the whole Canadian thing. I think one called her ugly when she was a kid. Chris doesn’t like people who call her ugly.

Martin laughed and said he was one of Reagan’s communists. I didn’t say a thing but thought “I dated one once. And never told a soul.”

14 August 1998

Continued…

Continued…
I’m sitting at Gatwick in a wheelchair. I have enough money to last two weeks. Two weeks. Then I need a job. I need a job now. I also need to figure out how to use the public transportation system, how to get a dial up connection and how to not get raped in an alley. These are all things my sister says are important.

I got sick on the plane. This psychiatrist they sent me to see once, said that if I can talk myself into it, it’s probably not a seizure. The neurologist who was in the same room said, if it hurts, it is.

You may as well be in outer space. You may as well be in another world. Big deal you’ve been here before. Who do you know? Who do you have? Nobody. And what do you have? A life compacted. In a blue American Tourist and an over sized Adidas bag. And forget about school. School is something else all together. You have to find out if you really have a roof over your head first. And if your room mates are serial killers. And if you can actually afford to be here to begin with.

I was thinking all this when I blacked out. It hurt. I may have thrashed about some, I dunno. But the guy sitting beside me wasn’t sitting beside me when I came to. A crew member was. She got me a wheelchair because they didn’t trust my legs to carry me. I didn’t tell them my legs probably wouldn’t have carried me anyway.

One of the people I’m suppose to be living with – I’ll believe it when I see it – gave me her number. I talked to her last week. She told me to call when I got in. She’d pick me up. I hope she hasn’t changed her mind.

My connection’s here. I think I’m gonna throw up.

14 August 1998