Out of the box.

The old one.

I'm a student again after thirty years and can't believe my luck. I stroll round the campus feeling twenty years younger, half expecting someone to tap me on the shoulder and ask me to leave. But I'm allowed here, incredibly. On my first day I line up in the main building to register and there's an 18-year-old boy behind me not dissimilar to the one I have who is registering at another university in another part of the country. How weird is that? There are three of us in this family at university at the same time. We could start our own Soc. If we weren't hundreds of miles apart.

"What documents do we need?" the boy asks me.

We!

"Well," I say, "I have my degree certificate, but I imagine it's different for you."

At the freshers fair I join three societies including the Samba club and talk to a girl who does burlesque. She shows me her Instagram pictures. 

"So, your breasts, they're, you know, actually... bare?" I ask her. 

"Oh no!" She says. "I'm wearing tit faces. I made them myself." 

Of course.

Sitting in a cafe opposite the main building I watch a girl approach a table outside. She sits, pulls at her sleeves, checks her phone, looks a bit lost and forlorn. I want to go outside and say: it'll be okay, don't worry. But I don't. Instead I watch as a boy approaches. He says something to her, which I imagine is: "is this seat taken?" or, "is it okay if I sit here?" Her mouth moves in reply, which I imagine is: "sure, go ahead," or, "yeah, fine, no worries." He sits. He chats to her. He waves his arms around as he talks and looks away, then back again, then laughs. She also laughs. Her demeanour changes, her shoulders relax, she puts her phone down on the table. Maybe she'll be friends with him for the next thirty years? Maybe she'll marry him?

Version Control.

I re-read And When Did You Last See Your Father? by Blake Morrison. It's an unflinching and at times unflattering portrayal of the author's father, shot through with love. Here's a lovely line from it - 

"What consolation can art be, what comfort are reading and writing, now that grief streams through the trees and this home he made for living in is about to become the house where he will die."

The book makes me think about the responsibility of the writer to his subject matter, about having the power to damn and defame. It makes me think about versions of people and how we never truly know who someone is. Morrison asks: what was my father? A domineering old sod, a loving dad, a loyal husband, in love with a woman who wasn't his wife? Then answers these questions brilliantly. He was all of these things. Of course.

By coincidence that same day I stumble across the furore concerning that book cover of Plath on a beach wearing a white bikini, looking fantastic in my view; although it would have been even better if she'd been wearing tit faces, ones she made for herself. I don't think Cathleen Allyn Conway writing for the Guardian would agree with me about that, though. She thinks it's all wrong, this image of Plath is "...  antithesis to the ambitious, intellectual poet."  Rebecca Rideal in the New Statesman disagrees with her, "we seem fixated" she writes, "on putting [women] into easily identifiable boxes: Blonde Bimbo, Angry Feminist, Downtrodden Mother, Suicidal Writer." While Ella Risbridger, for The Pool, sums it up. Plath is all of these things, she says, "depending on who you're asking." Of course.

I once wrote a damning account of my maternal grandfather. Here's another version of that same story. A bright working class lad meets a pretty factory girl and gets her pregnant. He marries her out of duty and it's not a particularly happy marriage; she's not his soul mate. He reckons he's lifted her out of poverty, put a roof over her head, so he can carry on as before: playing golf, going to pubs. They argue a lot. He's a big success, makes a lot of money, owns a factory. She stays at home, keeps house, looks after him. They have three children. One dies as a newborn and another dies when he's a young teen, which breaks his heart, and hers, and one survives; my mother. 

A little after he married the factory girl he did meet his soul mate, in a pub, but doesn't leave his wife for her, instead he conducts a secret affair with this woman for forty years, until he dies, because he loves her and because, as Morrison says, quoting his mother, it is possible to love two women at the same time. So, that's just a different way of seeing that same story. I imagine it's how he saw it. Of course.

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. Thinking outside the box.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/sep/28/sylvia-plath-bikini-shot-its-time-to-stop-sexualising-a-serious-author-to-sell-books

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2017/10/sylvia-plath-had-depression-and-brain-shes-still-allowed-smile

https://www.the-pool.com/arts-culture/books/2017/40/ella-risbridger-on-sylvia-plath-bikini-controversy