on growing up

I’ve lost my voice. I had it when I went to bed last night. Ask The Euro. He was getting an earful of something – I can’t remember what.

It’s terrible. Like one of those really bad dreams. Where you want to scream, but can’t; and then decide well, just throw a jar of peanut butter at it. (My nightdemon is a critter of some marsupian variety with overlarge eyes and a pathological fear of Jif.)

It’s also terrible because I can’t call my sister – the only person who can make me laugh by poking fun at my childhood abandonment issues – and say ‘I got that tax thing waaaaay wrong’, and ‘Time to channel Fey and Poehler and write that thing’.

The only question: Do we do it as a memoir or under guise of ‘this may or may not have happened’?

couleur locale

I’ve a friend who just invited me to go with her on a cooking holiday in Paris. How fabulous is that? That I have friends who know me well enough to know that even if I can’t boil an egg – at all – this is still the very sort of thing I’d love.

This particular friend also sends me wonderful emails that read:

“Couleur locale has been responsible for many hasty appreciations,” Nabokov once wrote, “and local colour is not a fast colour.” What did he mean?

I think it’s rather like watching The Full Monty from your sofa in West Virginia and thinking ‘That’s just so awesome.’ Then visiting a Job Centre in Sheffield, England for the first time and realising maybe it isn’t.

Or, like meeting cousin Dusty – the most colourful character in the world – and thinking ‘He’s pretty awesome too’. Then spending a lot of time with him, or somehow being related to him, and realising Yeah, he may be all Couleur and all, but there’s a thin line between awesome and…uhm….

You know. That sort of thing.

(*Posted with caveat: Author knows bunk about literary criticism.)