Where the hell have you been?

And by "you", I mean "me". Where the hell has me been? It's been a long time twixt posts.

Well, thanks for your concern.

As it happens, while most of you probably believe that I was born fully-formed around a month ago when this blog started, and think of me as a small and womanly but flat and two-dimensional sprite in the manner of a Cottingley fairy,* I am in truth old lady age of nearly 40, and have real-life events in the "proper" world.

So anyway, I have had one recently — a real-life event, that is — a sad one for both Wilcox and moi, and so we've just been laying low and dealing with that. Srsly, I have been going a bit potty — for example if someone who knew me had to point me out to someone who didn't know me, they'd probably say, "That's her in the corner. That's her in the spot. light. loo-zing her religion." My doctor, trying to stem the dam of tears that busted in her office, prescribed Valium.

"Isn't Valium rather old-fashioned?" I said.

"It's old, but it's not old-fashioned," she said.

"I'm pretty cut up." I said, peering over the table as she wrote the script. "Are you sure that's enough?"

"Quite enough," she said, cunningly, because she knows I have addiction issues. She knows about my addiction issues because I'd just finished telling her all about them through tears and hiccups, and because she was in part prescribing me the Valium to stop me from guzzling various cocktails of over-the-counter drugs, Heath Ledger-style. (Except not to that degree, obviously.)

Please note that it's probably best not to read the below if you are related to me.

I used to buy Valium when I lived in Wales years ago. On the street, I mean. This was a period when I took drugs. We used to call them Aunties, as in Aunty Val. Perhaps everyone calls them Auntys — I dunno. We did.

When I said I used to buy them, actually my flatmate would buy them and I would buy them off him. All through my drug taking history I was the least cool purchaser of drugs imaginable. I fumbled, I let the corners of folded notes peak out between my fingers, I pulled off the whole look-like-we're-shaking-hands-but-really-we're-swapping-money-for-drugs thing beautifully, then immediately drop the bag of white powder on the footpath between the dealer and me, usually just before the sudden, coincidental appearance of a wandering police officer. I sniffed very obviously after snorting drugs and I nodded off too conspicuously. I always forgot the street names for drugs and would ask for clarification then say, "Oh, I remember, it's COCAINE, isn't it?" I was tall and conspicuous and posh and nerdy. I once had a dealer who refused to sell to me because he was so worried my Keystone Cops routine would get him caught. True. A friend of mine had to buy the drugs for me.

So, I started this blog as an anonymous type so I could write about very personal stuff, and in talking about my drug history that's clearly exactly what I'm doing. But, as it happens, while I can do the drug stories, I am not ready to write about the aforementioned personal event that has prevented me from posting these past weeks. That I need to sit with a bit longer.

The point is, I have been away. But now I return, like your dad after a business trip, feeling a bit guilty that I shagged a colleague in the bathroom of my hotel room after a drunken company dinner, feeling a bit confused because I don't actually work with any women, but now happy to see you and maybe get outside and kick a footy around together. In other words, I hope we can resume our blogger/reader relationship and I'm sorry it took a while.


* Do you know about the Cottingley fairies? British readers will, no doubt. Australians may not. It's a good story. Please to be sitting down.

Two young cousins — Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. Elsie was sixteen and very pretty, as you can see. She was the grown-up one — little Frances was only ten. Frances said later that Elsie made the whole thing real for her. It seems like she was always a bit confused about whether what they said happened really happened.

In 1917, Elsie and Francis took Elsie's father camera to Cottingley Beck, behind the back of Elsie's house. I don't exactly know what a beck is, but it seems to involve a small waterfall and a little stream. When the photos were developed, they were of the girls playing with fairies.


Elsie's father did not believe the fairies were real. But — incredibly — everyone else did. In 1919, the spiritualists got hold of it, and turned the photos into a cause célèbre. Spirits and such were very fashionable at the time. I can't remember the name of it, but when I was about 20 I read Rebecca West's autobiography and her commitment to spiritual matters astounded me. She had an affair with H G Wells, of course. Anyway, the biggest celebrity supporter of the Elsie and Frances and the Cottingley fairies was Arthur Conan Doyle, who bought it hook, line and sinker, despite the fact that, to our eyes, the deception seems, well, elementary.

Sorry.

Incredibly, the girls insisted the fairies were real until 1981, when Frances admitted: "I never even thought of it as being a fraud — it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can't understand to this day why they were taken in — they wanted to be taken in."

Ain't it always the way.