Album: Reason to Smile by Kojey Radical
Food: Fried gnocchi with red pesto and chilli
In an edgy coffee shop with mismatched furniture and only takeaway cups. Teenagers leaving school are pushing each other about in a shopping trolley outside. When I ask if there’s any china mugs the barista - clad in thick eyeliner and a vintage dress - looks at me as if she might kill me then returns to staring at her phone. Fair enough. I spent this morning dozing under an open velux window, sweating away a two day comedown and listening to a podcast on gentrification. I’m aware of the irony of where I’ve ended up this afternoon. I’m trying to write something funny but I don’t feel very funny. It could be on account of the displacement of two million people and the way my phone keeps flicking between pictures of people I was jealous of at school skiing and videos of apartment blocks being blown up but it’s more likely to do with the fact I write best when I’m angry or horny and I’ve spent the last week feeling sad about getting rid of the thing that made me both - my horrible hot boyfriend. I receive an email beginning: Dear Ella, despite the horrific situation in Ukraine, I hope you are well. Is it bizarrely and distastefully performative or am I jealous that other people manage to be less shallow and self involved than me? 2012 tumblr barista has been replaced by a man in his early 20s with a ponytail. What a cliche. He smiles at me. Maybe I look quite cute. Yeah I’m just writing. In my head I practise the tone I’d say it in. Yeah, I’m just writing. I’m a writer. He’s still smiling at me! He 100% wants to fuck me. I’ll write my number on a napkin and leave it on the table like in a film. It takes me about five minutes to remember that I have dried sudocrem on my chin. I’m having a horrible bout of acne because I’m being irresponsibly lax about taking my birth control. Playing russian roulette with bringing an infant into the world, mamma mia guess-your-daddy style.
As Mondays go, today hasn’t been that bad. At lunch I heated up curry, then left the rice to burn irreversibly to the bottom of the pan whilst I convinced Amber to write the day off and hang out with me. We went to Urban Outfitters to return an outfit I bought on the overground because I fancied the woman opposite me wearing it. On our way we stop in little shops full of useless crap, taking turns to languidly hold up candleholders and run our fingers along notebooks, taking comfort in not really saying anything to each other. In Urban Outfitters I try on two £50 dresses made for someone with a different body, lifestyle and climate than me. We bitch loudly about the cultural appropriation of a metal henna hand incense holder and a ying-yang decorative cushion then each choose items without tags to shoplift. I walk through the doors whilst Amber chats at the checkout and nearly throw up on the spot as around me, the alarm rings. Not a single shop assistant even looks up as I leg it through Spitalfields. We saunter in the sun for an hour or so longer, giddy from our criminal silliness and unwilling to return home, where the light won’t angle itself into the living room anymore and the jobs we’re avoiding will once again become concrete.
This coffee shop really is dreadful. I need to start being a better community member. Maybe it will help me resent less the small fortune I pay to an arsehole landlord whilst I share my kitchen with a small mouse. He would be very sweet if he contributed a tenancy share, but he does not, so, in a policy inconsistent with my general view on squatters I am earnestly trying to kill him. I wonder why Tom Holland stopped being hot. He really was and then all of a sudden he really wasn’t. Scary. I hope that doesn’t happen to me.
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