I took my insomnia down the white hot heat of a two-mile strip of kebabists, ice-cream parlours, waffles, New Balance shoes and gypsy dancing. We got to spend the time together we didn’t usually get. We had a waffle and cream and insomnia told me about its plans for the future, its dreams.
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Sugar
Some call me fudge, others monster cone. Others launch right in with doughnut or pouring syrup. Others are more creative with their hot stream of sugar sugar puff puff. Yeah, yeah – I get Swiss roll, too. And all of this even though I’d rather just stay at home with my feet up and a nice quiet cup of tea.
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Netball
It didn’t matter that my mother thought I was like something grown in a dark room or that without my glasses I looked like a baby bird with skewed dots for eyes that had fallen out the nest. There was all this but it didn’t matter one bit because I found netball, and then it was the mad white blur of fourteen pairs of white socks, ten ponytails, an electric buzz that is team play and makes a dark room a white one with no roof, no ceiling and no walls and two hoops hovering like giant quivering oms.
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Rain
There was no official name for rain for a long time – it just started falling and folk let it get on with the job. It possibly was named when kids said for the first time ever, ‘tell us the story about Chicken Licken and his bad leg’. This happened and the rain kept falling. Someone tried to describe it, saying, part melon, part cockroach, part soup tureen. But it was no use and the rain just kept on coming and still does till this day.
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Hormones
Hormones are best kept in glass jars, or vials – keeping them straight and upright like soldiers on a battlefield, or maybe even more like the tall thin reeds at the side of a battlefield. While everyone scrabbles for rations and horses’ heads get blown off – and the whole world is generally turned to grey chopped slop – hormones are kept high, thin and proud, the last things standing.
