Laura Jane Williams /

In which my fragmented sentences become a whole new animal- ironic, considering this is a post about graduating from a writing degree.

2012-01-23T00:55:00.000+01:00

Just before Christmas I Skyped Mama, crying. "What's wrong?" she'd asked me, and I'd replied, "I'm so happy that I'm sad. It's like I've come full-circle or something." Mama said that was a bit weird and maybe I'd want to think about pulling myself together. At the time I thought she was right and so went to buy limone gelato as part of my five-a-day.

Related:

I spent Sunday walking aimlessly around my apartment in an equal state of tears and laughing hysterically, whilst streaming jazz off of the BBC website to try and lift my spirits. Which is a stupid turn of phrase but also a whole other point and I don't have time to get into that right now, Internet. I want to talk about my feelings. Add it to the list: stupid phrases that don't mean things but we like to say them because it reminds us of our mums.

I was like, legit having a bit of a breakdown. Or epiphany. Or crashing demise before brilliance. Or sugar withdrawal because I hadn't eaten yet. I kept crying because things change and it's sad and awesome and happy and crazy and mind-blowing, and then I'd catch myself staring wistfully out of the window as if somebody might secretly be taking my photograph and so I needed to remember to hold my chin at just the right angle, and then I kept bursting out into unstoppable giggles at how dramatic I am, and danced to Etta James in front of my own reflection whilst sniffling and laughing and generally needing adult supervision to function as a human being.

I graduated Friday, and the day after- hours before an overnight JOURNEY OF HELL back to Rome- I lay on the sofa at Mum and Dad's, watching The Food Network. (The Best Thing I Ever Ate: Cake edition.) (A show that may as well be called, Food Porn For Laura.) (I thought my husband was a writer, but actually I think he is a chef.) (A pastry chef.) (I really can't stay on task today.) (I'll stop putting things into parentheses now.)

I groaned, and Mum was all, IF YOU SAY YOU ARE SORE ONE MORE TIME!, and I was like, WELL IF YOU BUSTED MOVES LIKE BEYONCE FOR FOUR HOURS STRAIGHT YOU'D NEED A NECK MASSAGE TOO, and she was like, BUT YOUR HEADACHE ISN'T FROM DANCING IS IT and I was like, FREE! THE DRINK WAS FREE! and she said, HOW DO YOU MANAGE TO HAVE A LIFE FROM THE SCRIPT OF THE HANGOVER and I didn't really know what to say because truly, graduation was the most dramatic 36 hours of my life. But then we both lost interest in the conversation because a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting was on the TV and so I didn't have to think of anything clever to say.

If anyone suggests I must still be watching the show as I write this then. Well. Yeah. SO?

The day basically went like this: Oversleep because mobile phone isn't set to GMT, because you're an idiot. Get ready for the most important day of your life thus far in 30 minutes. Arrive at the ceremony and realise you are the only person in the graduating class that has chosen not to wear a gown. Inwardly groan.

Manage to walk across the stage without falling over. Fail to understand a joke about Anglo-Saxon women before 1066 but laugh anyway because holding a piece of paper that says you are the best is really awesome. Cry a bit. Go out for lunch with your best friend's family and hope your parents can behave themselves. Eat rich French food that is so good that on refusing to attempt finishing a Valrhona chocolate mousse with Grand Marnier and Chantilly cream everyone thinks you are sick or dying. Receive tear-inducing, beautifully written cards saying nice things about you. Look around the table at all the people who want good things for you. Sigh.

Play Scrabble in the pub with a bottle of red wine and your two favourite people. Hit on a gay priest. Make up words in order to win the game. Visit the man who sold you your pic n mix for the past three years. Accept a book from him, and promise to send him yours. Know you never will because he doesn't need to know about your vagina. Eat some yellow-belly snakes.

Transform from suited graduate into pleather-legging wearing, red-headed tramp. Yell at a cocktail waitress. Neck champagne. Witness crying in the street. Cry yourself when you try to get into the graduation ball at 2 a.m. and they refuse you entry. Appeal to the sensitive nature of the male bouncer by saying, "Don't you have a daughter? Wouldn't you want her to celebrate on a night like this?" and then running inside whilst holding the hand of your best friend and laughing outrageously at your Golden Globe-winning performance when his back is turned.

See all the people. Dance with them. Hit the after party. See your best friend get hit by the bouncer. Accept the manager's offer of free sparkling pinot noir and Jagerbombs as an apology. Meet a man who tricks you into kissing him by saying he graduated today too. Realise he just said that to kiss you but arrange to meet him for breakfast anyway because he is dead funny. Sit outside in the cold for hours with people you don't want to say goodbye to because then it really will be the end. Miss the date. Get emotional about the day. Sleep for an hour.

Things I learnt that day:

1. It is impossible not to sound like a dick when in every interaction that you have with old classmates you have to say the words first class honours and I live in Rome, actually.

2. That I did something brilliant, and I give a shit about that.

3. When fed Valrhona chocolate mousse with Grand Marnier and Chantilly cream, try to finish it. Those wet-dreams about it just make it worse when you know it went uneaten.

I feel like I came and conquered and that the thing that I did to get me here is done. And it is done to make room for all the new things but still, when things are done forever it makes one act embarrassingly nostalgic on the Internet. Because by commenting on the pictures on Facebook, and writing blog posts on narcissistic websites, and downloading every memory into a special folder, for just one more day I get to remember things that made me really happy. So I cried, because I was so happy that I was sad.

That is totally a thing.

On my bucket list I am adding, "Punch Ryanair boss in the face really, really hard" because his stupid company makes me really very cross. In other news: kindness.

2012-01-19T09:30:00.000+01:00

Internet, before I even begin this post I just need to get something off of my chest, and that something is that I write this from Mum and Dad's- for reasons I shall explain in a minute (PATIENCE!)- and all I wanted was a tiny little bit of dark-outside, warm-in-my-heat writing time before everybody got up this morning but GODDAMN IT the second anybody hears you MOVE in The Forge it's all, "Put the kettle on", and "Let the dog out", and "Some hot buttered toast would be lovely" and, "Do you want to talk about your anger towards the world this morning, Laura?". I feel like I've already put in a full shift and it's not even 8 a.m.

And now I can't even really concentrate because hell, I really want some hot buttered toast.

Yesterday I flew in from Rome because tomorrow I am finally, seven months (and many years tardy) after completing my university degree, having my graduation ceremony. Never let it be said that the University of Derby doesn't do things quickly and efficiently. Oh. Wait.

During the winter getting back home breaks my balls in every conceivable way because nowhere flies close to home until March. The SHITAIR flight leaves the bumblefucknowhere airport of Rome at 11, which means I have to be there for say 9, which means I have to get up at 6 a.m. for enough time to be beautiful, eat, get a bus to the main train station in town and then hop on the coach that transfers to the airport. I know, boo hoo, a 6 a.m. start. It's like, those 5 year olds who got scalped working in the dark of Victorian cotton mills have got SHIT on me and by ability to shut up and put up. I am surprised by by own wise inner strength.

Well, except I'm not because I hadn't even gotten to bed until 2 a.m. because my friends threw me a surprise Cuban-themed graduation dinner where we drank Mojitos out of jam jars and there was a cake WITH MY NAME ON IT. I have never had a cake with my name on it in all of my 6 a.m. rising-without-complaint LIFE and I wanted to cry and I got all hot in my face and bit blabber-y because it was the loveliest of all the things. Why people care about me here continues, quite often, to be a shock. But care about me they do, as this story will come to prove.

Because no, I'm not done talking yet.

As I crawled into bed at 2 a.m. I checked, for one last OCD time, when my flight was so I could set an alarm accordingly. Getting up on time hasn't been my forte recently and you know, what with it being kind of an important weekend I was vaguely aware that as good a story as fucking-up makes, on this occasion I was all for travel without event.

Except as I checked my email for the flight confirmation I remember that MOTHERCHUCKIN' TITS, ARSE AND THE PRIEST'S BOLLOCKS I'd forgotten to use the printer at work to make a copy of my SHITAIR boarding card and so I was going to have to pay SIXTY QUID for them to print one for me. This, my friends, is what I like to call a Twat Tax. Been a twat? PAY FOR IT.

Before I set off yesterday I made sure I had the extra cash with me and when I got to the desk the woman was all, YOU CAN'T PAY CASH, and I was all, URM. DO I PAY WITH MY BLOOD? and she was like, DEBIT OR CREDIT CARD ONLY and I was like, YEAH, THAT'S REALLY FUNNY. WE ARE IN ITALY. EVERYTHING IS DONE IN CASH BECAUSE NOBODY PAYS TAXES AND THAT'S WHY THE COUNTRY IS DONE IN THE BUM HARDER THAN MY NANNA BEATS THE JUNGLE DRUM and she was all, RULES ARE RULES and I was indignantly all, BUT RULES DON'T APPLY TO ME and the woman shrugged and didn't care anymore.

I deal in cash. I have no money in my English current accounts because I don't live here anymore, and as stated, the reason Italy's economy is milking Europe for all it's worth is because nobody pays tax and everything is done in cash, under the table.* I had no card to pay with, just used Euro notes.

"Maybe somebody will let you use their card," the woman said.
"I don't know anybody here," I replied.
"A stranger, then."
"Uh-huh. Can we do it by phone?"
"I have to see the card, madam."
"Oh, piss off."

I went and sat in a corner and breathed very heavily and let my eyes well with tears as I thought two things over and over again.

1. FUCKING RYANAIR AND THEIR STUPID FUCKING RIP-OFF RULES THAT TAKE YOU FOR ALL YOU ARE WORTH AND THEY DON'T EVEN CARE.

2. Calum is going to kill me if I miss graduation.

It was number two that made me swallow my pride, remember that if I could ask a stranger in an airport for a hug then I could ask them for money, and head to loiter around the check-in desk trying to find somebody who both looked as though they had money to spare and who might actually share it. Finally I spotted an older woman in her fifties with a woman in a wheelchair. Sympathetic-looking types. They were the ones.

Look, this is going to sound crazy- really, really crazy, I said, which- on reflection- when approaching a stranger probably isn't the best opener. Please just hear me out for one second, I promise I'm not trying to con you. I think this translates to most people as I'M GOING TO TAKE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE GOT. I've had a problem with check-in because I forgot my boarding card, and I need to pay for a new one. Automatically I'd be thinking, 'Well I'm not chuffing paying for you!' and walk away. I have the cash, but they need me to pay by card, and I don't have one, and you see I have to get home for graduation and Calum will be really cross if I don't- he's my best friend- and I really just wasn't expecting this today and oh God, I'm sorry, I'm crying now, I just really need to get home and I need help and it sounds ridiculous but I just need somebody to see that truly, I have the cash right here and you can have it in Euro or Sterling or however you want JUST PLEASE DEAR LORD HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME.

I actually cried so hard I couldn't breathe, and the old woman in the wheelchair looked to her friend and said, "Oh Judy, help the poor lass," and so they did, and their kindness made me cry even more and so I brought them some jam in duty free but I never saw them again so I still have the jam in my bag. I wish I could've given them the jam. I'd like to think of them having breakfast and talking about the crazy girl in the neon scarf and fedora who they helped make happy as they spooned fruits of the forest conserve into their smiling mouths.

Because even though I just wanted one day without incident, you know? ONE DAY. They did. They made me really, really, happy.

Thanks Judy.

Also: screw you, Michael O'Leary. You big CUOT.

*my employer assures me that he pays my taxes for me and everything is perfectly legal, though, okay?

The one where the universe totally kicks my arse and at nearly 26 years old I drink Absinthe for both the first and last time. Because Absinthe is evil. Like, Pol Pot and Hiltler kind of evil.

2012-01-16T10:12:00.000+01:00

I think that the thing is, about plans and epiphanies and shit, that when you put stuff out there into the Universe- stuff like, OHMYGOD 2012 IS ALL ABOUT POTENTIAL and I'M GONNA BE SO GOOD THIS YEAR and WOW I TOTALLY WENT ON TWO WHOLE RUNS THIS WEEK- the Universe is a right motherfucker of a bitch and tests you.

Friday night is my case in point.

I wasn't in the best mental place when I finally rocked home from work 9pm Friday night. In fact, the message to my friend who had invited me out (urm, actually, her invitation was more along the lines of 'You know that gig I was supposed to be singing at? Well I'm not singing anymore. But you are still coming to watch the band, aren't you. Don't argue. It wasn't a question. Good girl. Thanks for being an awesome friend.) was VERBATIM this:

I FORGOT THE MAP AT WORK BECAUSE I HAD THE SHITTEST LESSON EVER WITH A GUY WHO NOW WON'T MARRY ME. I HAVE LOST MY PHONE. I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO WORK TOMORROW. ALL THE BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO ME.

Will you hate me if I don't come? Dear god I need carbs.

And the next thing I know my phone rings, it turns out I haven't lost it it was just on top of the fridge next to some Australian candy I had forgotten I had, and the only thing my friend says is THANK GOD YOU ANSWERED THE PHONE I THOUGHT YOU WERE GONNA STAND ME UP and I was all, I GUESS I JUST FOUND MY PHONE and she was like, HUH? and I was like, DOESN'T MATTER. GOD THIS CANDY IS GOOD. DID YOU GET MY FACEBOOK MESSAGE? and she was all, NO. I DON'T HAVE TIME TO GO ONLINE: MEET ME IN AN HOUR and because I was suddenly on a sugar high I sighed and just said FUCK MY LIFE.

Then I put a Euro in the swear jar.

Obviously then, cut to 5.30 am the next morning where I'm making out with some bald-headed, earring-wearing, 39-year-old outside of my apartment because there was a taxi strike (THANKS ROME) and when you're all drunk and hazy and some guy offers to drive you home and the Coliseum is all lit-up and romantic it seems rude not to slip him a little bit of tongue in return for his kindness. As so not my type he was, and despite all the metal in his face.

I remember setting my alarm for 7 a.m. as I slipped into bed, saying to myself over and over again, "An hour and a half to sleep, then time to shower, eat, and be at work for 8.30 so that you can teach at 9." I've totally done that before.

I sat bolt upright in bed at 9.30, when my alarm had been ringing for TWO AND A HALF HOURS and by default I had missed the first two lessons of my day.

You see? Only bad things can come of agreeing to work on a Saturday frickin' morning. It's just not natural.

I couldn't understand how I felt so horrific after drinking only three gin and tonics, but then I did kind of remember that it was more lots of gin and not so much tonic what the the Italian free-pouring. I powered-walked to work, apologised to the receptionist who grunted at me in response for being such a dick, and then realised that I had no idea how I had just gotten into work because most probably I was still drunk.

Water. I needed water.

I also needed a breath mint because the three other teachers who walked into the staff lounge all commented on the weird smell of the place, before the nicest guy in the whole of the place pulled me aside and said something along the lines of, "Urm. Do you want a Tic Tac or something? A shower, maybe?"

I was absolutely beyond mortified, and you'd better recognise that despite sitting in the only windowed classroom FREEZING COLD from the January air beating my hangover to within an inch of my life, Saturday I gave the best goddamn lessons I have ever goddam given.

Again: swear jar.

My friend called me as I was heading home.
"You okay?"
"Worst. Day. Ever."
"Why didn't you tell me you were working today? I heard you were late."
"And then some."
"You hit it pretty hard last night."
"I did?"
"Yeah, at one point you found me, handed me a shot, I wouldn't drink it, and so you took two."
"I did?"
"Yeah. You told me not to leave you because you didn't speak Italian and we were the only English people there, but every time I found you you looked as though you were having a great time."
"I DID?"
"You were hysterically laughing for about six hours straight."
"I WAS?"

And then I remembered: the barman. The free shots. The mixing of drinks. The Baileys and Kaluah drink towers. THE FLAMING ABSINTHE. No wonder I slept through my alarm for two and a half hours: I was dead.

Also: apparently drinking water on absinthe actually makes you more drunk before it makes you sober. So that walk to work I missed? YEAH.

Mental note to self: this cannot ever happen again. Ever.

Mental note to the Universe: you absolute fucker. You got me, and I hate you for it.

Also? GAME. ON.

Laura Gaga rears her arse again, and scaring any potential man far, far away. Also: anal jokes.

2012-01-11T11:23:00.000+01:00

Last night the universe conspired in the most helpful way to help me with this whole "Potential" thing.

Hold on. I shouldn't say "Potential" in inverted commas like that, as if I am patronising myself and the whole sentiment of the word. It's like when somebody says "allegedly" or puts air quotes around words they say out loud. "Yes, he *finger wiggle in the air* 'fixed' the problem with crabs. But I'm still itching, so we'll see about that." For example. Possibly. I don't have crabs. I mean, not anymore. HA! You know that I'm kidding when I say that though, right? Like, as if if I even had an STD I'd joke about it on the Internet. I wouldn't. It's a double bluff. You get that, don't you? Seriously Internet, I just- MOVE ON LAURA. MOVEONMOVEONMOVEONMOVEON.

Sorry.

My point is, I don't mean "potential", I mean Potential. No inverted commas. No alleged-ity. No air quotes. Potential. Just the word, loud and proud and totally pertaining to what I am capable of achieving this year, just like we discussed, Internet.

Potential. One of my objectives this year is to run a half marathon, mainly because I always say I will and instead I sit down and let the moment pass with a cappuccino and a very bad man between my thighs. But this is the first year I have had a keyword tattooed to my forehead. Also, I follow this blog and this past however-many-months she has chronicled her journey of training for the New York Marathon. Even though I am totally smart enough to recognise the difference between the American type-A personalities of internationally renowned media-darling mommybloggers and me, a lazy and chubby singleton from Derby, part of me still thought, 'Yeah. Pushing your body to its POTENTIAL is way in keeping with my 2012 theme.' So it went on the list.

(Plus, I possibly recently maybe ohgoshIjustdon'tknow got wind of the fact that soon I might be seeing the man I would like to marry and I think it would be prudent to show up looking equal to- if not better than- the last time he saw me. After months of partying hard I can shamelessly say that right now my aesthetic value has dropped by about 30%, and that just isn't on.)

I've been meaning to have my first new year run for the past ten days. In fact, at the weekend I even went so far as to put on my running gear and then take a nap in it. Yesterday I finally did it. The Universe helped me.

By Universe I actually mean Facebook.

After a day largely full of ~~gossiping about the love lives of~~ training new teachers and eating copious amounts of Reece's Peanut Buttter Cups and Candy Corn after the Americans donated a stash of sugar to the Teacher's Room at school I had energy. I also had no plans since Calum stood me up for our Skype date, and so as I browsed Facebook-the past-time of the twentysomething- I read a bunch of notifications of a picture of mine that had been on the site for ages.

The photo was of the time I went out on Halloween dressed as Lady GaGa (LAURA GAGA) in only a leotard and some coke cans in my hair. I was able to do this, Internet, because I looked pretty fucking good after accidentally losing some weight. I accidentally lost some weight because I accidentally started working out.

As one person commented 'Nice top Laura, where did you get it from?' I was all, 'It's a leotard actually', and then my brain sort of short-circuited itself as my thought process pretty much went, YOU WERE ABLE TO GO OUT IN PUBLIC WEARING ONLY A LEOTARD, and then, HOW WAS THAT POSSIBLE? and then, BECAUSE YOU WERE RUNNING TWENTY MILES A WEEK AND YOUR ARSE LOOKED REALLY BLOODY GOOD and then, IF YOU RUN THAT MUCH NOW YOU COULD MAYBE LOOK LIKE THAT AGAIN and then, SO MAYBE YOU SHOULD LIKE, DO IT NOW, and then, POTENTIAL LAURA. POTENTIAL.

Also: your future husband, Laura. RUN.

My future husband made my arse really bloody sore, Internet. And not in the good way, either. Ouch.

In which I cover frosting in a tub, British idioms, compare myself to Blair Waldorf (kinda) and don't really have a point. What do you mean "again"? Okay fine. Again.

2012-01-09T01:06:00.000+01:00

The thing about being an expat is that suddenly you are bound to people by extraordinarily bizarre things. Things like the discovery of a store that sells Ribena, or proper Dr Pepper, or Pop Tarts, or chocolate-covered pretzels when it's been four months since you last had a taste and OHMYGOD YOU FOUND BETTY CROCKER FROSTING?

Sometimes it's the passing on of pop-culture references; introducing everyone you work with to your favourite comedy series so that suddenly the only way to communicate is via catchphrases. Or passing lunch break after lunch break trying to establish why the Americans omit vowels from everything as if they are some kind of Eastern European language tyrant, and let's just settle this now: is it a felt-tip, a marker, or a texter?

My favourite is when unexpectedly a conversation with a fellow countryman will hit a note so clear and true you could cry e.g. that somebody just referred to playing with their cat 'on the rug'. ON THE RUG? I squealed excitedly, and he was all, URM YEAH. IN FRONT OF THE FIRE. And I was totally, DUDE. I KNOW WHERE THE RUG IS. THE RUG IS ALWAYS IN FRONT OF THE FIRE. EVERY BRITISH HOUSEHOLD HAS A RUG IN FRONT OF THE FIRE THAT YOU JUST CALL 'THE RUG', and he laughed and said, YES! A SQUARE RUG COVERING THE CARPET BECAUSE GOD FORBID THE CARPET GET WORN OUT and I was just like, MY GOD YOU HAVE TO MEET JANE. For a minute and a half there, it was just like being at home, where everybody talks that way and sometimes it's okay not use the past perfect properly or to say 'Ay up' instead of 'hello'.

Also, there is the sharing. We're all away from home, we're all away from what is mentally comfortable. We're all trying to make a life in a place where we will never really truly belong because no matter how well we master the language or adapt the customs there is forever that element of being oil on water, of being not from here.

So we help each other- we make a network where we share the frosting, watch each others shows, and when we get pregnant we share our amazing wardrobes because we know that our friends only have the two sweaters that the airline luggage allowance would allow them when they moved here.

UH-HUH.

My awesome pregnant friend who has the style of Rachel Zoe, Blair Waldorf and well, ME, started nesting before Christmas and made a humongous pile of stuff she knew I'd love and would be wasted in storage when she had seen me in my belted leather and wool brown cardigan every single workday since temperatures dropped in October. She invited me over to try on some stuff and take what I liked. After, obvs, feeding me Nonna's famous fried aubergine. And giving me two boxes of Pop Tarts. And digging out half a dozen books for me to take home... and over 500 songs from her iTunes library.

Hey- I'd travelled 30 whole minutes to see her, I had to get my time's worth, right?

Also: I'm like, totally a cheeky bitch.

She lay on the bed and watched me pull on leopard print dress after Missoni-print sweater, laughing at my mirror face because I kept pouting at myself without realising it.
"What are you laughing at?"
"Your face."
"What?"
"You look like a twat."
"Oh."
She could've called me the Rat-Tailed Skank of Horseham and I would've let her. SO. MUCH. PRETTYFULNESS.

All that remained on her bed when I was finished was single sailor-top and a dress that she decided- on seeing me try it on- she wanted to keep. Selfish bitch.

I had to catch a ride home with her husband when she finally told me to leave because I couldn't lift my swag onto the train. It took my two hours to find a place for everything in my limited storage space, and most of the things I tried again alone, mirror face and all, just because it was all so frickin' AWESOME.

And that is how being an expat meant the bestest day. And a new wardrobe.

Keywords for 2012, slutty statements, and reminding myself that being this nuts is actually quite on purpose

2012-01-07T21:00:00.000+01:00

2012 comes with a keyword for me, because everyone says that if you want to achieve things you need goals, and those goals need to be framed by a comprehensive and generally encompassing theme- a sort of bow on the gift of life if you will- and the easiest way to give a theme to your life is with a single word, a mantra, a good luck charm. For 2012 my word is Potential. And possibly, punctuation.

I don't mean Potential as in blowing more boys, drinking more Peroni, or consuming more cigarettes, because to be quite frank with you Internet I think I do quite well in my potential as a twentysomething slut.

I mean Potential to do stuff. Big stuff. Awesome stuff. The stuff that changes lives. Maybe not your life, but mine. I'm like, waaaaaay self-obsessed that way. Oh, your car is on fire and your collection of invaluable WWII memorabilia, Lady Gaga's stage costumes, and the last can of Dr Pepper in Rome is in there? And only I can help? Sure. No problem. But first, how's my hair?

One reviewer of this blog once said,

Laura Jane Williams is not really who she appears to be at first. She appears to be putting her worst foot forward on purpose. Like a little sort of performance art.

and do you know what? That's kinda how I live my life. And for a long time, I've laughed about it. But then I was told, via the very wise quote generator known as Google, that "It's not who you are that holds you back, it's who you think you are not." By thinking of myself as crazy, ill-equipped, spontaneous and vagina-led I tend to embrace life- nay, grab it by the very crux of its bollocks!- and have a really good time. I'm proud of myself because I do what so few people do, and that is live my life instead of merely enduring it. I'm looking at you, Liz Jones.

But.

If I continue to think of myself as somebody who doesn't plan, somebody who makes hilarious mistake after hilarious mistake; the girl who goes straight from the walk of shame to the kid's classroom, or the chubby one whose thighs will forever chafe when she jogs, then I will never be who I know I am because I won't ever think of myself as not that way. Case in point: I'm not even sure that sentence makes sense, but I don't expect you to think of me as bright and intelligent and capable so it won't surprise any of us if it doesn't. HELLO? Self-sabotage much? How exhausting.

Anyway, my point is totally that I'm majorly excited about 2012 because it's the year I get my shit together and embrace that I don't have plan, and I live my life from one adventure to the next, and that's okay because the plan is to *not* have a plan. You know?

Over Christmas Dad sat me down for A Chat and was all, "How's everything then?" and I was all, "Yup. Great." And he was like, "Uh-huh, but really? Even the job?" and I replied all yawning and looking at my watch, "Even the job." "Anybody special?" he asked, to which I replied, "A bunch of nobody specials," and Dad was all, "You don't want to talk to me, do you?" and I was just like, "Do you know what? Ain't nowt to tell, mate. I'm dead happy, so I don't really wanna tear that happiness to bits examining it with you just so we have something to talk about." He looked hurt for a hot second, but then totes got what I meant. I think what I mean was, just let me feel it. Please.

So in 2012 I will continue to have a great time and read new books and learn new languages and meet new best friends and see the world and make mistakes and sometimes be sad, but then know things about the insides of my head a bit more. But it isn't an accident, Internet. I'm doing it on purpose. It's the only way I know how to be myself, and be better at being me.

POTENTIAL.

I'll just keep saying it. Potential.

A punctuationless rant on how right now this very second I am totally over my life, and would like to be asleep now please. Kthxbye.

2012-01-04T17:04:00.002+01:00

Firstly, let's address just how Christmas Miracle-y it is that I am writing this post from somewhere other than my parent's sofa. Seriously? The only time I got up from that woven-fabric-ed, overly-stuffed, ARE YOU KIDDING ME I HAVE TO SLEEP HERE TOO BECAUSE YOU MOVED HOUSE AND NOW I DON'T HAVE A BEDROOM MUMANDDAD! couch over Christmas was on New Year's Day when my aunt stormed through the front-door with half of her hand missing and an incredible amount of blood. She was whimpering like a scolded child, and it turned out that in renovating her property next door she'd like, totally lost a limb.

That isn't when I got off the couch.

I got off the coach when Mama grabbed the car keys to head off to hospital with her, put on her fancy winter coat and then was all, "Laura. Go upstairs and find me the grey scarf I wear with this. Now. If you look behind the door in the office, right beside where we keep the thing..." by which time her sister had legit bled out and now her handless ghost haunts what I have affectionately come to call The Forge because most of Dad's time is occupied by fuelling the real-coal fire they use to heat the house in lieu of actual central heating.

Bitches be crazy. And largely void of empathy for others.

Anyway, this totally comes to you from Rome because yes. After two weeks at The Forge I had to like, resume real life and shit. But the thing is, I'm locked out of my new apartment because my housemate didn't leave me a key at the local garage like she was supposed to, so I'm cold and tired and in a cafe my friends all refer to as Bruce's even though the owner's name is Chris, eating an iced doughnut even though last night when I passed normal-person's sleeptime at the airport because of a stupid-o-clock departure I ended up eating THREE iced doughnuts in a row as I had an impromptu sleepover with a 55 year-old nurse called Patricia from Tyneside who I met on the train and bedded down with in the arrivals hall. It was way comfier there.

And Internet, did I even tell you I have a new apartment? PROBABLY NOT. Because of the lack of moderation in my life makes me unable to successfully communicate large life events and changes in circumstance when I have a drink in my hand and I haven't slept in a gazillion and three hours and I've eaten too much sugar and I had to leave the sofa. THAT BEAUTIFUL SOFA.

There is SO not enough punctuation in my world. Or vodka. I need more vodka.

I know an end-of-year post is cliche, but it's also like, totally important to be all self-aware and that, innit?

2011-12-31T18:30:00.000+01:00

On unavoidable reflection, 2011 seems to me to have been somewhat thematic. I got propositioned as a prostitute, won an award for my vagina, graduated with a first-class honours for writing about my vagina, wrote on the Internet about my vagina, moved my vagina to Rome, stopped blogging about my vagina, started blogging about my vagina again, wrote a book about my vagina and then took my vagina out on a particularly shit date. To me this raises an very pertinent issue: should I have my fish grilled or oven-baked for supper?

Whilst reviewing the photographic evidence of the year, what struck me was the three very definite stages 2011 had for me. The first four months clearly highlight being obscenely drunk with Calum, and then working incredibly hard for many, many hours with his alter-ego to truly give weight to the mantra work-hard, play-hard. He got me so drunk that I threw up glitter after we met an American man who worked for Alexander McQueen and inexplicably could only refer to as Chicago, and also kicked my arse so hard that when I was sick beyond all comprehension but still had a coursework deadline he looked me right in the eye and explained to me that NO. THAT PIECE OF SHIT I WROTE WHILST SELF-MEDICATING ON PILLS STOLEN FROM MY NANNA'S BEDSIDE TABLE WOULD NOT SUFFICE AS A FINAL DRAFT and I was all like, YES, BUT I THINK I MIGHT ALREADY BE DEAD SO IT DOESN'T REALLY MATTER and he got totally, LAURA. I OWE YOU THIS. I CANNOT LET YOU JEOPARDISE YOUR ENTIRE DEGREE COURSE BECAUSE YOU CRIED IN THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY AND ASKED ME TO TELL YOU IT WAS OKAY and I was like, SO IT ISN'T OKAY? and he was all, SWEETIE. HERE ARE SOME MORE OF YOUR NANNA'S PILLS. I'LL STAY WITH YOU UNTIL THIS IS AN A+.

I got that first class honours.

Then I flew to Italy to meet up with many old friends, make lots of new ones, and essentially get all of that academic-angst out of my system by doing very little work and much, much play, particularly in bathroom stalls with sticks to pee on. All of the shots where I am wearing a red tee-shirt? Best summer of my life. Turns out, I'm a pretty rockin' teacher.

And then I moved to Rome, and told you all how shit it was. So shit, that one morning in October I woke up in my shared room in the arse-end of town, wearing every piece of the 20 kilos of luggage that I had brought with me, freezing to fuck and penniless to buy proper bedding, and I cried because it was raining outside and my only pair of shoes had holes in. I probably made a joke out of it, but really, I had already decided to say BOLLOCKS, I WANT MY MUM and to return to the U.K. But then things turned around, literally on that day, and that's probably why I haven't written lately. I got paid, I moved into my own place, I met some of the bestest people, realised I had written 70,000 words of a book and work actually became pretty fucking awesome.

VAGINA.

Sorry, I was getting a little too sentimental.

Anyway. As every year, (well, 2009 and 2010) I did a video. It's not really for you, it's for me, but hell: it's set to Danza Kuduro so I thought, well. Best share the Italian pop music love. OH THE MEMORIES.

Happy new year!

I told this story to my mum and her only question was, "Yes, but was your bum clean?"

2011-11-28T10:00:00.000+01:00

Look. This is gross, and I know it, and I’m sorry I even told you already BUT do you know what? Once you get past the gross, it’s actually kinda funny. BUT yes, I am still single and no, I no longer question myself why that might be so. BUT I will continue to say poop and vagina on the daily. I'm kinda built that way.

There was a boy. Well, a man actually. DETAILS. We made plans. Drinks were to be had, conversation to be made, flirting to be undertaken. Totally normal.

BUT. BUT. BUT.

The day before our date I found out that Rome was staging another transport strike. The metro and bus was to run between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. only. I needed the bus to get home. It would take three days to walk. OH NO! I thought, when I found out, I’LL HAVE TO CANCEL. And my friend was all, JUST STAY AT HIS and I was like, WELL I KIND OF GUESSED IT WOULD GO THAT WAY BUT I CAN’T RELY ON IT and she was all YOU’VE FAILED IF YOU DON’T SCREW HIM and I was all IT’S A SCHOOL NIGHT and in the end I decided that taxis exist and so I’d just fork out for a cab if I didn’t end up at his house and I wouldn’t tell my friend that my date-story had failed to get me mine.

THING IS the transport strike also meant that I had to leave the house that morning at 8 a.m. because the buses stop at 8.30 am. Romans strike all the time, but make sure there is still transport for the commuter traffic. That’s why the times are all weird.

ANYWAAAAAAAAY I had to get up really early to do the girly stuff so that I was cute for the meet: blow-dry my hair, sort out my lady garden YOU KNOW THE SORT. I chose a smart/casual outfit with an air of ‘This? I just came from school…’ about it but still kinda cute. I ended up covered in paint that day anyway, but the effort was there.

HERE’S THE GROSS PART.

I don’t start work until 2p.m. so I had to hang out in central Rome until my shift started. That’s okay. I wrote about my vagina in a café for a bit. No problem.

Except I went to the bathroom. And because I drank beer the night before and my friend had cooked me RISOTTO AND MASHED POTATO I had sloppy poop.

Yes.

Sloppy. Poop.

The fact that I ate both risotto and mashed potato as part of the same meal is like, a way different story, but I'll address that in the short term with hey! YOU TEACH KIDS ALL DAY AND THEN TELL ME THAT CARBS AREN'T YOUR ONLY FRIEND.

I wiped, I flushed, I pulled up my pants. OH. I realised I needed to use the toilet brush on the loo because sloppy poop leaves a mess behind.

I SLIPPED AS I DIPPED IN THE BRUSH AND THE DIRTY WATER AND THE POOP WENT EVERYWHERE. Including on my trousers. I am sat back at the table in the café, and when I looked down I was all FUCK DID I GET CHOCOLATE FROM MY CROISSANT ON MY PANTS and then I thought NOOOOOO THAT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE CHOCOLATE and then I was all SHIT. I HAVE ACTUAL SHIT ON MYSELF and then I tried to use a napkin and water to wipe it off which meant going to meet a man with smeared SHIT all over my crotch.

My thought process was pretty much:

I have Shit. On. My. Crotch.

HOWEVER: chances of getting laid are high.

HOWEVER: chances of getting laid diminish enormously if I have shit on myself.

HOWEVER: Vagina.

Internet? VAGINA WON.

Possibly, I am drunk. Or horny. Or both.

2011-11-16T10:54:00.001+01:00

There was a moment yesterday day when I had the most pertinent realisation.

I was in a classroom playing a verb game with an eight-year-old, whereby he yelled out doing words and I actioned them. As I jumped and I rolled and I lay and I sneezed, I suddenly grabbed on to my chest, took a deep breath and thought, wow. My tits are throbbing.

Thing is, if you google 'Why are my boobs sore?' (You know. IN THEORY. I most certainly have not spent the past twenty minutes doing such a thing.) the answers are menopause, pregnancy, or chat room dialogue after chat room dialogue of many other women with the same problem who don't have any answers, they just need to talk about their feelings.

Isn't that what blogging is for?

After the lesson, even the slightest wobble or jiggle was troublesome, and as I navigated the steps between the two levels of the building where I work I had to hold the puppies just to ease the aching. Which is great when the attractive 28 year-old student who executes male knitwear in a way never before seen on the masculine form exits his classroom and sees you touching yourself.

6.30 p.m. on a chilly November Tuesday in the children's department is not the time to make that move.

Although: any progress is good progress. Right?

RIGHT?

Okay, now I'm just distracted by cardigans and boobies and wait? WHAT? Children.

This just got awkward.

You can go now.

Seriously, I'll call you.

Just go.

I'm sorry.

I'd have Eric Northman's babies and still go back for more

2011-11-14T10:19:00.001+01:00

The whole blogging everyday thing sort of fell by the wayside since I got paid. I'm not sorry. I drank my wages, and have spent the past three days in a gutter someplace rising only to indulge in more terrible behaviour that I can't write about here.

Look. What I do with a llama and a fine-tooth comb is my business, OKAY INTERNET?

What I can tell you is that any recent debauched experiences probably come from watching most of the most recent season of True Blood this week. To my roommate I was all like BUT ALL OF THAT VAMPIRE SEX MAKES ME TOTALLY HARD and he was like, UH-HUH and I was all, SO I MIGHT NEED YOU TO GIVE ME SOME ALONE TIME FOR LIKE, A MINUTE AND HALF WHEN I'M DONE and he was all EWWW LAURA YOU ARE SO GROSS and I just thought WHAT? I'M A WOMAN. I HAVE NEEDS.

Also: if there was ever a sexier effin' opening credit song written in the whole entire universe then I must know it and I must know it right now.

Related: I once told somebody I was seeing that I adored the hot, dirty, AWESOMENESS of vampires and shape-shifters and other True Blood things and before I knew it I was accosted by some glow--in-the-dark neon plastic fangs. That was awkward.

AND NOW I'M OVER-SHARING.

Again.

My favourite realisation of the weekend is that American exchange students seldom have a sense of humour. Especially if they are male. And from Arkansas. And have bloody knuckles. It's always the bloody knuckles that give this kind of stuff away. And the accent. And the male-ness.

"Yeah, man, we totally got done over," said one, as he swayed back and forth. Except he probably didn't actually say 'done over' because that sounds quintessentially British and they, Internet, were anything but.
"Those fucking carabinieri," said another.
My friend rose to the challenge and begrudgingly asked, "Why? What happened?"
"They stung us man! Made out like they were gonna sell us some weed, took our money, then told us they were under cover and that they wouldn't arrest us but that they were keeping our money."
"It was fifty Euro!" the other yelled.

I looked at the ugly one.

"I hate it when my drug deals get busted by the carabinieri," I said.

He stared back at me.

And then he just walked off.

At least vampires have personality.

Look, writing a blog post everyday is like, totally challenging MAN.

2011-11-10T11:17:00.000+01:00

My pregnant friend just text me:

"This is random, but I have two packets of Gorgonzola that don't expire until December, do you want them? I'm not allowed to eat them and I hate wasting food."

I mean really, what is the question? Blue cheese gnocchi for dinner, Internet! AND yesterday I got paid a whole day early. As much fun as making a euro last 7 days was YOU'D BEST BELIEVE I'M HEADING OUT THE DOOR EARLY TODAY because I've got me some chocolate brownies to buy. Today falls under the category of AMAZEBALLS and I'm not even dressed yet. I love it when that happens.

Also: this whole food obsession thing is clearly getting ridiculous now.

I think it is because my diet is the same EVERY SINGLE DAY, because I don't like to think too hard, because my creativity is mostly limited to the application of the word fuck as noun, adjective, verb, adverb, possessive adjective, agent noun, noun phrase... etcetera. And yes, that's a skill I list on LinkedIn. No, my father does not approve. Yes, I am somewhat mildly sorry depending on what mood he catches me in.

Related: the worse my language becomes, the harder it is to define What Is Appropriate. Presuming, obviously, that the words cock-sucking whore-faced twunt can ever be appropriate.

What? You've never had your ex marry your best friend? THEN YOU JUST WON'T GET IT.

To express anger and frustration and confusion on a daily basis in a more professional environment it has become entirely necessary to sing it out. TRY IT. Can't find the book you are looking for? Make it into a tune! "And I still, haven't found, what I'm looking foooorrrrr....." A child just worriedly approached you in class to explain that he really needs to make a poop but normally, when there isn't a bidet, his mum wipes for him and so what should he do? You can tell you colleagues through the medium of melody: "Aaaaaannd he-he-he-he just asked meeeee, to do! Things! I! Wouldn't! Even! Do! For! My! Dying! Motherrrrrrrrr!"

Warning: extreme song-interpretation can become addictive. Use in moderation.

HEY! INTERNET! Quick question: Do you ever feel like somebody is sat at home in pajamas in their freezing Roman apartment, crackpot-head high on the thought of a chilled San Pelligrino with lunch and so writing run-on sentences as long as full paragraphs as a way to express said excitement in their pathetic, ill-prioritised life whereby pooping kids and naughty words are paramount and they must narcissistically express this to everyone with WiFi?

I mean, totally hypothetically. Of course.

Ahem.

Yeah.

I'm a little excited about lunch.

I'm sorry.

AS YOU WERE.

Food + Bitching about Rome + More Food = I probably need to get a hobby

2011-11-09T09:57:00.001+01:00

So of course the major thing on the list A Gazillion Reasons Why Rome Can Suck A Bag Of Dicks is that although all of the gnocchi and sauces and Nutella and arancini OHMYGOD THE ARANCINI are all well and good, a girl struggles to find the necessary to make a simple jacket potato.

Or treacle sponge and custard.

Or fish pie.

Or nachos with sour cream and refried beans and guacamole.

I'm just going to go on ahead and change the name of this website to fatbitch.com (TIP: don't type that into your web browser at work.)

When I lived in the States I didn't have this overwhelming desire to cross oceans and rivers and mountains and cities to return home for a weekend just to eat stuff I miss. And I absolutely did not write lists of Eating Stuff I Miss on the bus. But then again, I was probably too busy getting confused over the nickels and dimes and quarters. I'd pay for everything with bills and save the shrapnel for the self-service checkout at Walmart where periodically I'd go and buy a box of Krispy Kremes. It's hard to miss anything when you have a box of doughnuts ~~to eat in one sitting.~~

Also: you do the same, right? RIGHT? The lists? The doughnuts? THE OBSESSIVE HATEFUL BEHAVIOUR TOWARDS MOST THINGS?

On Monday Rome had one of her bi-weekly transport strikes, which sees the bus and metro run only between the commuting hours of 6 and 8.30 a.m. and between 5 and 8 p.m. so people can get to and from work. Which, by the way ROME, is really useful when I finish at 8. REALLY FUCKING USEFUL.

My friend from work also had to be in town half a day before her shift started since neither of us is within walking distance from our job, so we met for lunch in the park except that by park I mean Dog Park and that means we spent a lot of time watching canines poop.

When she asked if I wanted to move on and pop to the store with her, I said yes.

YOU GUYS.

She took me to like, THE BEST STORE EVER and it was huge and dark wood and stacks and stacks of food everywhere BUT REALLY GOOD IMPORTED FOOD. Dairy Milk! Old El Paso! Twinnings! BETTY CROCKER FROSTING IN A TUB!

I loves me some Betty Crocker frosting in a tub.

I asked my friend if she thought anyone would mind if I sat in the corner and had a wank. She laughed. I wasn't kidding. Then I saw Ribena and had a little mini food-gasm right there on the floor. This is so close to my work that I could eat Heinz Baked Beans and salad cream ALL OF THE DAYS.

And that is the story of The Best Day. The absolute Best Fucking Day.

The picture has nothing to do with the post, I just liked it.

2011-11-08T10:10:00.000+01:00

Last night I threw an empty water bottle at my roommate's head. I'm not proud.

Also: I just asked if he was still here, and he was all BITCH I PAYS HALF THE RENT, I IS GONNA TAKE MY TIME and I was all like uh-huh, but could you take your time QUICKER and he's like, do you know what? fuck you, and now he is cross at me for all the things. As I sit here at my desk in my cable-knit cardigan looking out over a Roman street, and he bugs me to check his shirt collar for a day at the law office, this must totally be what suburban married hell feels like.

Memo to self: avoid suburban married hell.

Also: Can we address the fact that I just asked him to take the rubbish with him on his way out and he replied that he wasn't allowed and I said HUH?And he told me that last time he tried to take out trash in the day our housemate stopped him because it isn't allowed in Rome to which I say REALLY. REALLY ROME. It might fester, they worry. BEST KEEP IT GOING ROTTEN IN MY APARTMENT THEN.

Dicks.

Also: This weekend The Roommate offered to make a cup of tea. I replied in the affirmative because I am, after all, British. And then I turned into my mother and told him to make sure he used the old milk, not the new stuff I had just bought. Then he picked up the REALLY old milk, and I yelled NOT THAT ONE THAT IS TWO WEEKS OLD YOU DISGUSTING PIG I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU TO THROW IT OUT. And he said, but Laura. This is your milk.

We were in a curdled milk standoff and it was mine all along.

When I got in from work last night he was working at the one desk we have. We had moved the desk at the weekend, in between making cups of tea, so that it is now by the window so that I can See All the Things. In turn it is also by my bed. I sat on my bed, told him he was breathing all of my air, and so as agreed in our Terms and Conditions he occupied His Sofa so that I could take My Desk. Only there was shit everywhere, and I got cross again, and he didn't hear me when I asked him to move some stuff so, to conclude: I threw the empty water bottle at his head.

I'd forgotten that the water bottle was actually mine.

In closing, I'd like to say: I suspect that possibly I might not be the easiest person to live with.

Also: No shit.

Perving on Innocent Strangers

2011-11-07T12:26:00.000+01:00

Dear The Fit Grey-Haired Man I See in la Feltrinelli Most Days,

Hey! Wassup? So urm, like, I was totally wondering if you were, you know, urm, checking me out the other day? Because it totes felt like you were. And you see, goshthisissoembarrassing, if you were, I just wanted to say that, well, HAHAHAHA! I’ve been checking you out too.

Well. That and those warm croissants they serve up really do make my mouth water like that. Fat bitch.

I wanted to tell you that I really like your hair. It kinda looks like you dye it grey on purpose. If you do then that’s really cool. If you don’t then I totes don’t mind- grey hair on younger men is attractive. Makes you look distinguished. You don’t look like, you know, OLD or anything. Because you must be like what, 34? 35? That’s a great age. Let me just tell you that I really like your age.

And your shoes. Are they new?

Last week when I was here that old couple who I spoke Italian to replied back to me in English. I could tell that you were watching and that you were a bit confused. That’s because I AM English. I just make my Italian up. Like, if I’m not just a tourist and apparently I live here why don’t I speak Italian? I heard you think. (If I translated properly, anyway.) I KNOW, RIGHT?

And that kinda brings me on to my next question: parla Inglesi? No problem if not. I can just continue to add vowels to normal words in order to communicate with you. Or we can just have sex and not talk at all. Whatever.

At lunch that day my colleague and I wrote a letter to the universe out loud and we were all, HEY UNIVERSE, HAVE THE GREY-HAIRED MAN IN LA FELTRINELLI TALK TO LAURA and the Universe was like, TOTALLY. SURE. NO PROBLEM. HERE YOU GO and I was all, UNIVERSE! THAT WAS THE WRONG GREY-HAIRED MAN! and The Universe was all like I’M DOING MY BEST! BE MORE SPECIFIC NEXT TIME! THERE’S LIKE A BILLION PEOPLE I TEND TO DAILY YOU KNOW.

Because The Universe didn’t get the memo about the world revolving around me.

You had your friends join you yesterday, and you guys sat on the table next to me and you were talking about film and awards and intellectual stuff that I didn’t quite catch but you got all excited and passionate and it made me hot and when I said permesso to get by your table what I really meant was Talk to me. Seduce me. Educate me about all the things you naughty little grey-haired thirtysomething with the eyes that twinkle with naughty.

Fit Grey-Haired Man I See in la Feltrinelli Most Days: if you get this and want to maybe have like, you know, a conversation or a dinner date or a mud-wrestle one day, just let me know. I pretend to look busy at my computer but really I’m just Googling naked celebrities and making calendars on Excel called How Many Days Til I Go To England And Eat Hobnobs. I really like biscuits. And your face.

Yours hopefully,

Laura Jane Williams x

If you are sensitive to Very Bad Words just go on ahead and skip this one

2011-11-06T12:27:00.000+01:00

My pet name for Mama is FAT BITCH. It's funny because she is half my size, forever aware of her food intake, and bullying people for being skinny is total LOLs. OHMYGODI'MKIDDING. And so one evening in front of the TV, when she asked Dad to get her half a glass of water and an ibroprofen, I turned to her and christened her Fat Bitch because I mean, gluttonous much? The calories on those headache pills are a lifetime on the hips Ms. One-Way Ticket to The Third Circle Of Hell.

In other news: anorexic jokes aren't funny.

Also: this is not to be confused with Fat Pat, under which she is saved in my phone. It's an EastEnders thing.

Mama laughed down the Skype-cam. You know how we use Fat Bitch? she said and I was all, remember when you gave me my graduation card and actually called me 1st Class Bitch? And she was like, uh-huh yeah but that doesn't help my story right now LAURA.

Sorry, Mama. Where were we? Fat Bitch. Okay. Go.

Well, they use the naughty NAUGHTY word with each other, she said. You know. THE REALLY BAD ONE. I was all like, huh? and Mama was all WINK-WINK theonethatstartswiththeletterc and then I got it. Mama was all, but they've made up a code for it now and I was all like, well okay that seems a bit less funny and Mama was like, yeah instead of the word now they just say to each other I'LL SEE YOU ON TUESDAY because that's the letters for it.

No, I said. That's the letters for CUOT.

Oh, she said. I must've got it wrong.

And that's the story of the inappropriate relationship I have with my mother.

Food, the Fat Girl, and a reverie about a Turkey

2011-11-05T17:55:00.001+01:00

You know that I'm all about breakfast, lunch, dinner, elevenses, supper, and midnight snacks, right? Like, to the point where today I didn't actually rise to my hangover until gone noon, and that reduces my time to eat today by approximately five hours so I'm pretty much going to be chain-eating right up until I go back to bed so I can catch up with myself. I'm totally taking one for the team. If by the team we mean MY THIGHS THAT CHAFE WHEN I JOG.

But at least I'm jogging.

I actually have palpable, tangible, FITS of excitement complete with singing out-loud and skipping and kissing-strangers-on-the-mouth-but-without-tongues-because-that's-just-weird when I get to go to the supermarket. You want to spend Saturday afternoon on Via Del Corso window-shopping in Zara? I want to stand in the aisles of M.A. Supermercarti comparing pasta sauce.

I came to the (alleged) cultural capital of the world to stand beneath tube lighting in my free time.

The supermarket is an experience I have come to embrace with increased intensity over the past months because I'm broke. It's pretty safe to say the pot of money I had when I arrived three months ago now only serves as somewhere to piss. I'd like it to be payday now please.

I knew things were starting to get really tight about mid-October and so my weekly food budget has been whittled down to twenty Euro this past few weeks. For seven days. 21 meals. TWENTY EURO. I'm no Einstein but surely that's less than a euro a meal. OHMYGODIJUSTDIDTHEMATHANDWTF.

It is just like Challenge Anneka except that I'm not Anneka and nobody else cares about my challenge. The challenge that sees me go a half mile further up the road than I have to because the supermarket furthest away is cheaper than the one by my house. And telling you that almost makes it seem like I don't have anything better to do than spend my time reducing expenditure by 20 cents a meal. Hahaha! Well... urm... YEAH.

Imagine, then, when I accidentally overspent to the point where I have four Euro in my purse until payday. FOUR EURO. When the cashier told me the total I was all BUT I DON'T KNOW HOW TO TELL YOU IN ITALIAN THAT I HAVE TO GO PUT SOME STUFF BACK and she was all I'M SORRY, WHY ARE YOU STARING AT ME LIKE YOU MIGHT LICK MY CHEEK and I was all, SHIT WHAT SHALL I DO and she was like HOLD ON WAIT- I FORGOT TO CHARGE YOU FOR THE BAGS.

Three Euro and eighty cents left.

I have never left a supermarket so disheartened and raped of joy. It reminded me of stories Mama tells about when my dad and she had just gotten married and they Lived off of twenty quid a week, Laura. I'll tell you this: if I spent a pound over one week you better believe I'd be a pound under the next.

Only, one Christmas she ordered a turkey from the butcher and got all the weights and conversions and measurements wrong and so when she went to collect it the butcher was all Eighty pounds please and she was all But I don't need a turkey that big and anyway I don't have eighty pounds and he was like Well this is what you ordered so you have to pay me and Mama was like I'm so gonna cry when I walk up the big hill home with this overpriced turkey priced at four weeks of my budget slung over my shoulder and pockets empty of anything but hate for the bird and the butcher was all Uh-huh. Merry Christmas!

So basically what I'm telling you is that this bag of potato chips I'm eating as I write about the turkey Mama bought at Christmas one time like three hundred and six years ago before I was even born?

They'd better last me a really long fucking time.

Teaching, learning, and how the Universe is so awesome that she wants me to learn the difference between the two.

2011-11-04T10:47:00.001+01:00

Right now I'm dating as many women as I am men. If by dating you understand I mean not really, because being paid to sit in a room with a stranger to correct their pronunciation of the 'th' sound isn't an actual date. Also, remember THE WELTS! THE UGLY RED WELTS!

My job is to date. Kind of. This is the bit where I explain the awesomeness of my work through its variedness. Oh! There I go again, making up words like I'm godamn Billy Shaksepeare. Except I can't spell Shakepseare. Shakspear. SHAKESPEARE.

There we go.

I fanny about with registers and lesson plans and student books and AMIN-Y STUFF for two hours of my day, teach a couple of classes of kids for a couple more because that is, after all, what I'm actually employed to do, and then normally I have a kiddie conversation class one-on-one and finish my (six hour! SIX. AND THIS IS A FULL-TIME CONTRACT!) day off by heading upstairs to the grown-up department for a Big Person Class.

People that have enough money- either by extreme good fortune or sheer determination to save up- to pay nearly two grand to learn another language are by nature very interesting people. Before I go into the lesson I read the bio in their course book: "Flaminia is 49, was born in Rome, and has 87 parrots as well as a love of wartime opera." "Giovanni is a physicist who has worked for NASA and Interpol, has three children, a wooden leg, and speaks Hebrew, Welsh, Catalan Spanish and some Turkish." "If Laura sees this student she will cream her pants at his beauty and be unable to effectively demonstrate the use of possessive pronouns because she will be distracted by the curve of his lip when he concentrates on a particularly hard grammar point."

Or something.

Because I work these adult conversation classes only once or twice a day, whereas my colleagues know most of the students on a personal level I frequently teach strangers whom I have never met before. Hence, then, the dating. I introduce myself, we do a vocabulary quiz, I check some homework, teach a grammar point (urm. That isn't how my dates normally go. Except the grammar bit.) and then spend 20 minutes finding out about this persons life in a way not dissimilar to speed-dating. And herein lies my point.

I have one. I promise.

Because the time goes by so much more enjoyably when there is common ground to be found I HAVE TO FIND THE COMMON GROUND. This is a skill, I am coming to learn, and it isn't easy. The skill of getting people to divulge personal information until you find something appealing enough to say THAT. Let's talk about THAT. No, I don't want to know about your lice collection or the specifics of lacrosse or about your toupee-making class. Oh, it's your passion? Well your passion sucks.

Yeah. I went there. But that isn't my point.

LAURA. CONCENTRATE.

I absolutely believe in the universe sending me 'dates' that help me to figure out my own life. Had a week deliberating over whether to apply for graduate school or a real job? Here is a man whose son is moving from his job in a non-profit in Uganda to pursue his PhD in Brighton! TALK. FIND OUT THINGS. Been telling your mother that you want to adopt children as soon as the government will let you because you feel like you were born to be a mother yourself? This woman works for the Rome adoption agency and will happily talk statistics and strategies to becoming the most eligible candidate! DISCUSS. Concerned that in lieu of actual romance you are treating your job as your love life? Here! Discuss how Ryan Gosling is the new feminist icon for an hour! OR BE SENT TO THE COMPUTER ROOM TO USE THE NEW PROGRAM THAT ALLOWS YOU TO TALK ABOUT OPRAH WINFREY BECAUSE WHEN ISN'T OPRAH APPLICABLE TO LIFE.

It's like the universe hears what I need and provides it for me so that I can figure my own shit out. And in my experience, those are the best dates. The ones where you walk away feeling like a robust exchange of views and opinions has genuinely contributed to a paradigm shift about your relationship with the world. The universe like, totally wants me to be happy. THANKS UNIVERSE.

Or my sub-conscious is absolutely driving these classes to be all about me. Which is equally as probable.

This is all largely irrelevant to anyone or anything other than that directly pertaining to me

2011-11-03T10:37:00.001+01:00

The first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning was lunch. That's a pretty normal thing for me. Got nothing in? GO BACK TO SLEEP. Know that you got paid yesterday and so can buy a vitamin sandwich with a side of awesome from the health food store just around the corner from work? I probably slept there, and I probably enjoyed that sandwich with morning breath and wearing yesterday's underwear because I wanted to make sure I was early enough for the bread to still be warm and I'm probably dribbling aubergine juice down my chin as I type this and NOMNOMNOM.

This morning my first thought was, THE PASTA! Legit panic. It suddenly occurred to me that I had totally forgotten to prepare lunch for myself last night, and right now I totally have to make my own lunch EVERY. SODDING. DAY. for the sake of my face.

October was pretty horrific in terms of learning not to take Work Shit home with me and thus making it into Can't-Sleep-For-Thinking-About-It Shit, or If-I-Close-My-Eyes-Tightly-Enough-Perhaps-I'll-Realise-That-Actually-I-Have-A-Three-Book-Deal-With-Penguin-and-Am-Really-In-The-Middle-Of-My-Own-Manuscript-Farce Shit, to Why-Has-My-Face-Suddenly-Developed-These-Horrible-Red-Welts Shit.

Side note: I always joked that when I graduated, I wasn't worried about finding work because Penguin would totally call and offer me a book deal. The kicker? Bitch has gotsta write a book before somebody can buy it. FLAW IN THE PLAN.

So October was ugly. I'm a WE GOT THIS kind of control-freak personality and so now, everyday, I have assigned myself a certain diet I must follow that incorporates twenty different types of fruit and veg and so much water that for every hour-long conversation class I hold I have to excuse myself to go to the bathroom twelve-hundred and twenty-three times. Sweet stuff has been reduced because I realised that the one time I went all day without a Coke I wanted to decapitate the bus driver when he missed my stop and I was probably a little too dependent on the sugary goodness to be fully in control of my own body.

Also: If I wanted to decapitate an Italian every time they screwed me over, there'd be a lot of headless Romans.

These red WELTS! DEAR GOD THE UGLY WELTS! on my chin and neck were, I discovered through much research via a homeopath, an aromatherapist, and Web MD, absolutely stress-related and so ORDER and CONTROL needed to be regained over my self and my emotions in order to be hot again.

Except this weekend was Halloween and the party my friend threw had so much candy and sweet stuff and OHMYGOD IS THAT ACTUAL RANCH DRESSING that I pigged out against all self-control, figured in for a penny in for a pound and threw in a lot of beer, way too many cigarettes for somebody who slavishly gave up for the sake of THE FACE and then took more treats home with me than what I had actually taken in the first place and thus the gorging and self-loathing continued for three days whilst I designed a website for my father in my pajamas. Wow. That was an exhaustingly long sentence.

It's a very slippery hill, folks, and now my body is so off-kilter that these WELTS! are creeping back which, let's be honest, is hugely stressful. And so in a sort of vicious cycle whereby the universe punishes my promiscuity by making me ugly for a while which is like, TOTALLY STRESSFUL, I am becoming ugly again and so when I forget to make the pasta for lunch I wake up all THE PASTA! THE PASTA! only WebMD recommended sleep and lots of it so then I was all SLEEP! NO! THE PASTA! SLEEP! PASTA! SLEEP! PASTA!

And that's how my life goes.

Internet. That was some pretty intense make-up sex. I think part of that was illegal in everywhere but Wales.

2011-11-02T11:09:00.003+01:00

I'm glad we agreed to give this another try, Internet. Shall we celebrate by making out with tongues like, everyday? I'm all about forgiveness, you see. And especially because if I'm honest, many of the most important relationships in my life aren't really working out right now, so it's essential to me that I have you. That bitch Rome? My relationship with her is total balls.

And look, I KNOW. Skyping Calum the other day I made a comment about (SH)Italy and he screamed BUT WHO SAYS THAT ABOUT ROME? and I was like IT'S A THIRD-WORLD COUNTRY PARADING AS A CULTURAL MECCA AND THAT IS TOTALLY FALSE ADVERTISING and he was all BUT YOU SAID YOU SEE THE COLLOSSEUM EVERYDAY and I was all THE COLLOSSEUM CAN SUCK A BAG OF DICKS.

It's exhausting.

My second manuscript is going to be called 'Dear Rome: Screw You' and feature essays on the nature of its backward technologies and refusal to join the 21st century with working washing machines, dryers, wifi and public transport systems that grind the entire city to a halt just because it rained.

Last week, I had to leave for work three hours early because of a storm. THREE HOURS. I only work a six-hour day in the first place. This comes to you from a computer using an actual ethernet cable, like, FROM A MUSEUM, from an apartment that can't have the heating on at the same time as the washing machine otherwise we blow a fuse to the whole apartment block and then it's suddenly like living in Beruit in the 90's except for there I bet you could still get to work on time.

Italians ({SH}Italians?) have a total disregard for queuing, the correct use of the car horn, and proper bedding. There isn't a goose-down duvet to be found, and so I sleep in a sheet that I get all tangled up in and wake up three times a night to smooth out again before the knot ends up around my neck and I asphyxiate WHICH WOULD SUCK BECAUSE THERE'S NO WAY I WANT TO DIE IN THIS PLACE. Similarly, I also refuse to pass my 26th birthday in this place, either. I want to get my Grad School money and then run. Or waddle, what with the fact that with a gelateria on every corner a cone of Nutella ice-cream has become a diet staple. As has a croissant for breakfast. With Nutella. And Nutella hot chocolate. Do you know what (SH)Italy? FUCK YOU.

(SH)Italy has raised a nation of namby-pamby children that directly correlates to the number of namby-pamby adults I interactive with on the daily. Also, the Italian Male eyebrow? I blame mother. I get mine threaded and still don't achieve an arch like that. Oh- except that I don't get them threaded in Rome because I've been advised against that by every expat I know. And haircuts. Don't get your hair cut in (SH)Italy they said. Or see the dentist here. Or get hospitalised.

(Don't consider foul-play with your roommate, either. I watched every second of the televised verdict in the Foxy Knoxy case screaming at my computer 'FREE HER! FREEEEEEE HEEEEER!' because do you know how much faith I had in the Italian police having done a good job with her? ZILCH. Less than zilch.)

Basically, it's no wonder Italy have never invaded anywhere for very long. They need to sit down for an overly-gesticulated chat with a cappuccino (but not if it's after noon- what are you, a coffee brute?) before anything gets achieved ever. And I'm a lot of things, from bitchy of mouth to cold of heart, but paramount? I'm a do-er. And this is a country of talkers-and-let's-sit-down-and-let-the-feeling-pass-ers.

But then.

It's a dysfunctional relationship. When Rome is kind to me, I want to marry her. The food, the autumn light, the uniforms of the carabinieri. And then she does something wrong and I abuse her and tell her that she is worthless and then write bad things about her on the Internet but she wants me to tell her I love her and so whenever we have moments of pure joy she pushes me away as quickly as she grabbed me in because she is testing me. She is testing my appreciation for her. See: Megan Fox in the video for Love the Way You Lie.

This is totally the same thing.

Dipping a toe in the pool of modern existentialism and other ways to say 'Will you take me back?'

2011-11-01T12:42:00.000+01:00

'I said no to a party,' I bemoaned.
'You said no to a party?' she replied.
'Uh-huh. Straight out said no. Who says no to a party?
'You do.'
'Well I know. But I don't want to be the person that says no to a party.'
'That's a bit of a condundrum then.'

And you see, the thing is this. I'm 25. I just graduated. I have two student overdrafts yet to be paid off and so my pay check isn't my own. I work as a conversation teacher and move classrooms on an hourly basis. I SHARE A BEDROOM. I didn't want a party because the apartment is structured so that our room would once have been the main living space. So it's huge. Party huge. Thing is, if we opened up our apartment for a party we'd have to use our room, and ultimately there would then be people in my bedroom which means in just a short hop, skip and jump there'd be people on my bed. And that bed? IT IS THE ONLY THING IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE UNIVERSE THAT BELONGS ONLY TO ME.

Except that it doesn't, because I rent and I borrowed the bedding off of a work colleague. So I don't even own that.

And then I remembered.

This small space on the internet, right here where you are reading? I own this. And so, maybe leaving in such haste was a mistake. Because this is my kingdom. This is where I belong. This is mine.

So errrrm, what I'm saying is... can we have a do-over?

Bye For Now

2011-10-04T22:18:00.000+02:00

So, I'm leaving the Blogsphere for a while. Mainly, I think, because I've been here three years and in doing so have started to say things like. Well. Blogsphere.

But it's also because I work with children, and writing about my va-jay-jay isn't really conducive to a promotion. And I don't want this to become an 'I Live in Rome' website. Plus, I'm working really hard on my manuscript for My Heart Beats Only For You (And A Few Dozen Other People) and it's really important to me to save the best stories and the best energy for that. Incidentally, if you're the person from Random House US who reads me- Hi! My book is nearly ready! I might write the odd post on Facebook over the next few months, because when you itch you should totally scratch, right? Follow me here. I'd love it if you did.

Don't forget to stay in touch on Twitter here, or Flickr here. In case I blog and you miss it, you can register here, but I don't think that'll be happening in a while.

Until I'm back know that I am taking Rome head-on, using my vagina so that you don't have to. I'm dead generous like that.

And thanks, Internet. For everything.

I possibly come across as particularly anti-Catholic in this, but that totally isn't what I mean. I love everybody! Even the Pope!

2011-09-26T11:14:00.000+02:00

Let's talk religion.

For me, the closest I have ever come to an elightening and life-altering religious experience is chanting with gusto ohmygod, ohmygod... oh.my.god as a cute American pinned me up against the wall outside an Italian coffee shop with his hand in my pants one time.

And as I wandered around the Basilica Di San Pietro yesterday (You know. The big church thing that marks the entrance to The Vatican) this is what I kept thinking to myself. Because like, God and shit... it's not real, is it?

Benny's Balcony

And actually, not long after I had this inappropriately sexual thought for the two-two thousandth time (are there any sexual thoughts that are appropriate?) I knelt on the floor of the building to take a photograph of the light coming through the duomo and a security guard in a suit tapped me on the shoulder.

'You cannot be on your knees in the Basilica,' he told me.

'Figures,' I replied.

Although I bet that isn't what the bishop said to the priest.

Sometimes, stuff it so beautiful it is enough to make you believe.

(Sidenote: I work right beside the Vatican, in a building owned by the church. Not so long ago everyone in the building was subject to what was essentially a CRB check to check they weren't kiddie-fiddlers. To the Pope I say this: GET YOUR OWN HOUSE IN ORDER FIRST, MATE.)

For a very long time, whenever I entered a church I would cry. I was once told that my guardian angel is my Nanna's mother. I would light a candle for her in any place of worship, thank her for watching over me, reflect on if what I was doing- how I was living- was okay. I like to think Nanna's mum was a saucy old minx, and she'd be saluting me from the skies with my daily endeavours. I'd hate for her to be upset about my making blowjob jokes on the internet.

But then, as I had trawled around Rome's more famous sites for free this weekend (thanks European Heritage Weekend, for making everything gratis!) it became increasingly hard to take these religious buildings seriously. Half of Rome was once dedicated to something else before the Christians claimed anything pretty for their own. That seems a bit mean, in a reductionist, I'm-not-sure-what-I-believe sort of a way.

Walking on the stars

But then, you see, I started to people watch. And not just the people in the funny outfits:

Behold! Marco, the Guard of the Portaloo!

For a full ten minutes, I watched a woman lean against a wall where a huge crucifix hung. She had to raise her arm above her head to reach the bottom of the cross, and she stood in a perfect line with her hand outstretched on the wood as if she were a continuum of what she was holding. She pressed her forehead against the wall and stood very still.

Whatever she was saying in those ten minutes, and whoever she was saying it to, she meant it more than I did outside that cafe that one time. When she said ohmygod it was special.

That woman gave me a different kind of goosebump. It made me understand a little bit more, I think.

Obviously, all future mail will be sent from here. Probably with a Jesus stamp.

And then I got distracted, because another security man in a suit siddled up to me and said gently in my ear,

'You must move over there for a few minutes.'

I noticed all the other tourists had edged off to the sides, and then saw that the service at the front of the church was ending, so I did as I was told.

It was amazing to watch. Suddenly, all the cute men in suits- who, to be honest, I had presumed were genuinely there just to look pretty and stop people kneeling on the tied floor when occasion called- were practically talking into their sleeves and making army watch me, move forward, go! go! go! actions with their eyes.

Magical.

Then, up the alter came some dude in long white robes, flanked by half a dozen other dudes in Irish green robes, finished with a final guy in a funny red hat, and these extras out of 24 started blocking everyone off from being near them, switching and changing positions as if in some sort of ballet, closing in on the procession OF A BUNCH OF GUYS WALKING SOMEPLACE by closing in on the them and bringing up the rear. All the while looking at each other, and at us, and at the building, just to check that...

That what?

That no crazy Jesus fan was going to rugby tackle Pious Jo to the ground to ask for his autograph in a sort of Bible Idol frenzy?

I didn't really get it.

The army of religion filed through a tiny wooden door that promptly got blocked off by two more suited cutie-patooties and then everything went back to normal again.

And then the sun set on Rome, and I went for beer.

Soon after that I got bored and left, with my friend declaring that he'd 'Had enough religious stuff for the day.' He then went out and brought a calender of all of the important monuments of Rome with cats sat on them, so generally it's hard to take somebody like that seriously, but I agreed.

On the way out, we saw signs for the toilets. I couldn't not take a leak in the Vatican, even though I didn't really need to go. Right after I bullied my bladder into relieving itself, I knew that the trip had been worthwhile.

I TOOK A PISS WHERE THE POPE PEES!

This was supposed to be about my New Life in Rome, but quickly descended into a reverie about the sexuality of Italian men. I don’t think I’m surprised.

2011-09-18T17:42:00.000+02:00

And then suddenly, I had a new life in Rome.

The church in Piazza Navona by night

All at once this is both utterly amazing and surreal and bizarre, and absolutely No Big Deal. If, Internet, you so desire to continue the illusion that I am my own heroine in a shitty B-list Hollywood chick-flick (I DO) I think this is the point at which the first act has seen its close. The pavement-pounding, frustratingly un-concrete, misunderstanding-fuelled scenes of the first 30 minutes where I had no home, no money, and no prospects have given way to the bit where I just Get My Head Down And Get On With It.

Because I am so good at that.

Getting On With It has seen me walking around my new (FUCKING FLOODED) apartment in my underwear for the past two weeks, thinking all four of the men I live with are gay.

(And actually, let’s just tidy-up the flooded apartment story whilst we are here: the flat downstairs were on holiday when it happened and just got back two days ago. Their ceiling was ruined. We have to pay for it. THIS IS SO PAINFUL THAT I CAN’T EVEN MAKE A JOKE ABOUT IT.)

Turns out that I really need to hone up on my Gay or European skill set because nope. Not gay. They’ve been getting a free-ass peep show of all my best and worst bits, and haven’t even brought me a drink yet. The truly devastating bit is that if I were honestly trying to woo a straight man, I wouldn’t do it in my underwear. I’m a ‘personality’ girl- Rosie Huntington-Whiteley I ain’t. Even if I am splashing around the paddling-pool of my flooded bedroom as if in my own version of Flashdance.

When the floor was underwater it looked like the sea

I have been trying to make Italian friends fully-clothed, in general. I am too broke/lazy/cheap to pay for formal Italian lessons just now- and, not to mention, considering I spent the morning Googling ‘jobs in Istanbul’ probably not going to be here longer than my contract anyway- so signed up for a conversation exchange program. This is not unakin to online dating. The difference is, with an online conversation exchange profile you don’t get to see anyone’s photograph before you meet them. Awkward.

Conversation exchange saw me receive 22 emails in the evening following my joining. All of these were from men. Some seemed very lovely and genuine: “I be pleased to be your Italian teacher and make good talking for you”. Some were a little more, how should I say this? Italian: “If you are open-minded, and I think you are (*insert wink-y emoticon*) this is my Facebook…” Obvs I clicked on the link, and yeah he was cute, but even me and my sexually dubious moral compass thought it was perhaps just a little forward.

Although, at this point in my narrative, it is worth mentioning that any Italian man one meets will have no qualms asking if you have a boyfriend as their way of introduction. Otherwise, I suppose, they might be in danger of wasting their time. Maybe I should go out wearing less, after all. You know- just to be clear about things.

Aaaaaand since we’re playing Gay or European, I’d also like to take this opportunity to point out that often, the men in question are just as confused themselves. Last week my ex-pat friend told me that he was given a Vespa-ride around the city by his new male-friend-with-a-girlfriend, and when they parked up and went into some nearby bushes, my ex-pat friend blew him. But, of course, this doesn’t make the male-friend-with-the-girlfriend gay. Of course not. Nor is it cheating.

Similarly, I have an actor friend who tours Italy and his favourite story involves a man in front of him, holding his own ankles in preparation for pleasure, and as my friend bonked him from behind, looking around and enjoying the view, he realised that he was surrounded by photographs of this man’s wife and three kids. Who lived there. And were probably upstairs.

Conversation Exchange has proved fruitful thus far, with a 32 year-old theatre worker and an Investment Banker proving in particular to be wonderful partners.

It did occur to me though, as I waited to meet the banker for the first time, that even though I sat on the steps of a landmark Roman building silently saying to myself over and over again Please don’t be a weirdo, Please don’t be a weirdo, Please don’t be a weirdo it was highly plausible that my language partners could be absolutely normal, wishing the exact same thing (although, in their head, they would be making this wish in Italian, and I don’t know the vocab to translate that. I can, however, ask where the bathroom is) and HOLD ON. What if I AM a weirdo?

I make friends wherever I go...

Essentially, I’m taking a sort of be my friend attitude to all of this, and who goes online to make friends? A certain type of person, right? The type of person often one doesn’t want to meet? And they could be all ‘Let’s exchange language points’ and I’m all ‘Yeah, but can we just hang out in this pub and talk in English so I don’t feel lonely?’ Add this to the fact that I consider this an entirely permissible way to make friends because my horoscope for October says that I will make fruitful relationships via the online world, and November is a good month for marriage (FUCK YOU, ASTROLOGY BOOK) and really, I’m just a recipe for fruit-and-nut-soup that means clothing or no, maybe I shouldn’t be ‘making friends’ because I don’t wear enough in the house and take advice from reduced-price Gemini guides I got at a petrol station.

£2.99 for a 15-month forecast? BARGAIN. And it's all true.

I’m not sure I’d want to meet me. Would you?*

*Internet, please note the rhetorical nature of this question. Kthxby.

Look, this isn't woe is freakin' me what with the whole Moving to Italy thing but SERIOUSLY. I'm starting to get a little pissed.

2011-09-07T21:58:00.000+02:00

Internet, where do I even begin?

The Roomie arrived back to the Bumble-Fuck-Nowhere B&B late on Monday night, as I was tucked up in bed writing about 18 year old boys.

"Any danger of a smile?" I asked him, noting his dour expression.

"We can't have that room," he said, by way of reply.

I frowned. "The room we have already been told we're moving into tomorrow morning?"

"One and the same. He changed his mind. The room is only available from November now."

I turned on the gas and went to stick my head in the oven.

"Of course he changed his mind," I reasoned. "He's Italian."

The Roomie and I had to think fast. In a blind act of faith we had already settled our bill with the owner of the Bed and Breakfast, promising to be out by morning. We thought we had that room. The room that was my favourite. The room that had the great location. The room that was in the apartment with two of the cutest specimen of the male gender ever to have lived and breathed, a point totally unrelated to this being my favourite OBVIOUSLY. It was the room we were counting on.

"We have an option," The Roomie slowly suggested, eying me carefully.

"I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY THE UNIVERSE HATES ME," I yelled into my pillow.

"We could see if my favourite is still free..."

The Roomie's favourite was not even on the table for me. I didn't like the landlord, I didn't like the space, and I didn't like that he liked it because as far as I was concerned that made him an idiot.

"Okay," I said.

Within hours we were back at the apartment I had absolutely refused to even consider, The Roomie making deals with the southern landlord and me out on the balcony smoking a pilfered cigarette with a guy who didn't even live there. In fact, I don't know who he was.

That same guy is currently stood in my kitchen making pasta, though.

We agreed a price and a rental period, and I admitted to The Roomie with some benevolence, "Okay. You were right all along. This is actually a pretty sweet place."

"My love?" he replied. "I'm hardly ever wrong."

Uh-HUH.

We allowed ourselves the celebration of a bottled coke as we practically ran back to the train station. We rode back to BFN, threw every single belonging we had into boxes, suitcases and bags- not forgetting to steal the odd towel and coat hanger- and within the hour we were in the back of the B&B owner's car on our way to spend our first night in My First Roman Apartment! full of space, 5 minutes from the metro stop, and with not a tourist or over-priced panino in sight.

That was yesterday. Last night I slept on top of an old Sri Lankan pashmina in The Roomie's old work tee shirt with a satisfied smile upon my lips. This morning I left My Roman Apartment! and hopped on the bus to my first day of training for work. On the way home I found bed sheets for ten Euro and skipped home in a Disney-style, all kinds of sprightly readiness in my bones to go forth and nest.

Of course, then, the whole fucking room had flooded- two inches of radiator water across the whole sodding place.

I mean, it's MY ROMAN APARTMENT! which is like, a gazillion times more fortunate than say, MY BOGNOR REGIS APARTMENT! But still. A flood is a flood and with all great respect to God, Shiva, Allah, Jesus, Buddha and Lady Gaga...

GIVE. ME. A. FUCKING. BREAK.

Unless you are familiar with the many chick-flick rom-coms that iTunes frequently reduce to 99p, you might be lost with this one. I’m not sorry.

2011-09-05T14:39:00.000+02:00

As it stands now, I feel like the heroine in a C-rate Hollywood movie about a small town girl who leaves the familiarity and comforts of everything she knows to Make It Big in the city. See: the blonde girl in that film with all the dancing on the bar.

Cue several montage scenes, to the music of Leann Rimes or similar, as the heroine (ME) pounds the pavement of block after block of city street, each bearing an increased resemblance to Stab Alley, newspaper in hand with all of its red-penned circles of ‘Maybe this will be the perfect place to live!’ hopeful glory. Every time the heroine reaches the 10^th floor of the next dull, unlit broom cupboard in her limited budget, the smile she has grown in a naïve attempt to Stay Positive drops to the floor and she realises that Nothing Comes Easy. See: Christina Aguilera in that movie she did with Cher.

Overweight southern landlords and skinny geeks with glasses and bad breath fire words as if from a shotgun in staccato-ed Italian, and she catches maybe 10 per cent of what is being impatiently explained to her. See: Under the Tuscan Sun. Dejected, despondent, and a little bit sad, she shakes her head and leaves into darkness to travel the hour it will take her to get to where she has a temporary bed in a motel near the airport. For the first act of the movie, it seems like she might just give up because Nothing Is Going Her Way.

She has a side-kick though, a friend who is on her side. Her relationship with him is what is known as the Comic Relief. He is introduced by way of his lumbering, tanned frame entering the bathroom half-dressed and crying out,

“Laura! The bathroom door is stuck again!” The heroine cranes her neck around the corner of the kitchenette where she is making white pasta with oil for a midnight supper, as there is no money for anything else. “I’m just gonna pee with it open, okay?” he concludes.

She rushes to the bathroom. “No you’re bloody not,” she says. “Before you know it you’ll be pooping whilst I shower and I’ll be changing tampons as you clean your teeth.” She tugs at the door and it closes. “Understood?”

She is sassy, this heroine.

They will snuggle together on one of the tiny single beds that night, after breaking the budget for a lime Bacardi Breezer to forget their troubles. Earlier, she blew the smoke of a scrounged cigarette into the stars outside, whispering an open letter to the universe as he listened, and she asked for all of the magical things she’ll need to fulfil her dream of belonging here.

The next day, on another continued jaunt around the city in an attempt to find a home, they have their first fight.

“Can you tell me where we are going?” she asks, as she struggles to keep up with where he is leading her.

“This way,” he says.

“Yes, I can see that, but WHERE?”

They get on a bus together, he tells her where to sit, and the question goes unanswered. She takes a huge breath.

“I need to say something, and I need you not to say anything back until I am done, okay?”

This gets his attention.

“You just need to remember,” she begins, as the bus hurtles past the famous Spanish Steps, an open Piazza, marble statues, Fascist buildings and everything else Julia Roberts marvelled at in Eat, Pray, Love. “I’m not one of your American college hags. I am 25 years old, and have travelled half way around the world and back again several times, alone. I don’t have anybody tell me what to do and I don’t need a hero to navigate me around my life, or around a city that neither of us know. Okay? I need you to be my partner in this, not my saviour, okay?”

Half an hour later, as she furiously grapples with a street guide, the bus timetable, and her own flustered ego, she has something to admit.

“I took us the wrong way,” she says through gritted teeth. “I don’t know where we are.”

He turns on his heel. “Not saying a word…” he replies, as he begins to walk in the opposite direction- slower this time, but still leading. She is visibly annoyed at needing his help, but grateful. It is the message at the heart of the film: Sometimes You Can’t Do It All Alone.

By my reckoning, it is around about this point in the script that the heroine gets a break, a nod from the universe that It Will All Work Out because she has Accepted The Help Of Others.

Last night, the Roomie and I shook hands on a room in an apartment with a promise of, “Okay then! See you Tuesday when we move in!”

The landlord replied, “Yes, I will call you tomorrow to confirm- when I have spoken with the other guys.”

“But we have got the room?” we asked, nervously.

“Yes, yes, of course,” he says, “I will confirm tomorrow.”

“That we can move in?”

“Yes. Tuesday. You can move in Tuesday. I will call you tomorrow.”

I don’t know if I have somewhere to live or not. I’ll believe it once I have a key. Then I’ll be ready for the second act of the movie, where the heroine works day and night to Fulfil Her Potential. This is the act that I am particularly looking forward to, because often it involves a cute man who will firstly irritate the bejesus out of said heroine as she tries to Realise Her Dream, and will culminate in a cleverly shot Hot Sex Scene that will actually only be rated PG because in these sorts of films, the target market is teenagers. Anybody older than a sixth-former knows that stories like this don’t happen in real life.

Except that apparently, they do.

If I haven’t already mentioned it, Yeah. I’ve moved to Italy. No biggie… EXCEPT THAT IT IS.

2011-09-03T09:56:00.000+02:00

“Ready for the big move to Rome, then?” my friend asked me by way of email.

“Absolutely,” I wrote back. “I’ve got a couple of hundred Euro and a single packed suitcase. Let the adventure begin.”

I didn’t add that I am shitting bricks the size of baby elephants in anticipation of it all. I can say all the right things to the right people in order to make it seem like moving to another country to start a life for myself it like, totally chill, but well. You know. Moving to another country to start a life for myself is actually a pretty big deal according to my mother. And my bowels.

I got as far as the check-in desk of East Midlands Airport when the Ryanair official told me my bag was over the weight limit and I had to compensate by way of a fistful of cash that I don’t have. Fucking adventure my arse.

“I’ve already paid for an extra 5 kilos,” I explained to her.

“I see that,” she replied, “But you are over still. Do you want to take something out?”

“Can I do that here?” I asked, noting the winding line of hundreds behind me.

“If you are quick,” she told me, and so I manoeuvred my way through the straps and zips of the suitcase I stole from my parents and pulled out the first thing I touched.

“How’s that?” I said.

“Perfect!” she told me.

I went to put my treasure into my hand luggage. It was a bag of condoms, the weight of which had apparently been enough to take me a kilo over my luggage limit.

According to my vagina, I am anticipating this new life to be very fruitful indeed.

And all those people in the queue behind me? As my bounty was sealed in a see-through sandwich bag, they know it too. Behold, the power of my pussy! Grown men of war have weept at less. Airport staff tend not to give a shit, though. I was asked to move on quickly as there were, after all, many people waiting.

Two days, a gazillion apartments and MANY kilometres later, the decision on where to live all rests on my vagina. Shocker, I know. To live with the cute landlord, or the less cute landlord who charges less? DECISIONS. Also to be taken into consideration is the pecker of my roomie, too; a gay American who I met through work one evening in June. We both had wine in our veins and cigarette in hand as our idle conversation led us to screeching, “You’re moving to Rome? I’m moving to Rome! Do you want to be friends?!”

That quickly developed into becoming roomies, because we are both broke and every penny counts. Add to this a shared love for filthy American rap artists, perving on anything with a penis as long as it has its own teeth and a tan (urm, the owner of said penis, not the member itself. Obviously.) and a refusal to settle for anything less that absolute dry sarcasm at all times, and it’s kinda nice to have a partner in crime.

“But, what if one of us pulls?” I asked him, trying to figure out how sleeping in the same room might work.

“Then you get sexiled,” he replied. “Which means that if you need to get your rocks off, I’ll go drink a bottle of wine on the steps outside until you’re done.”

“What if it takes all night?” I asked.

“I’ll be too drunk to care,” he replied.

“Should we have a wanking schedule for the bathroom too?” I enquired.

He winked at me. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

In short, I think I’m gonna be just fine. If we ever do actually find a fucking place, that is.

I realise that this is more information about my vagina then you ever knew you needed to know, Internet

2011-08-28T00:00:00.000+02:00

The letter came the day after my 25^th birthday, right before I flew out to Italy. I laughed about it when it came, showing Calum and giggling. “It surprises me just how many requests I have for a look at my cervix,” I told him. “Slag,” he replied.

And that’s how I learned about my first smear test.

On my return to the (Y)UK this week, right after a session with my hair stylist (“Wow,” she said to me as she pulled dreaded, matted hair from my head. “You’re really ready for this aren’t you?”) I set off to the doctor’s surgery.

For the days leading up to it, Mama was telling everyone where I was headed. “Her first smear!” she’d say, and whichever auntie/family friend/stranger waiting for the bus was being addressed would look at me, inhale a breath between their teeth, and then shake their head solemnly.

Reassuring, no? I’ve had coils fitted, sexual health tests pursued, Hollywood waxes galore- not to mention that one guy who was so big it was like having sex with a coke can- and it was this rite of passage that got me sweating.

Waiting for my Aunt in Specsavers Mum really pushed the fear home, asking me, “Do you know what they do?”

“Not really,” I replied.

“It’s like a vice that they put up there,” she said. “Really far up…”

I grimaced. “I’m happy in my ignorance,” I told her.

“No, hold on. Not so much a vice, it’s more like a clamp that they use. And a funnel.”

“Mum?” I said. “Shut up.”

“And you’ll be well lubricated. It’s a bloody buggar otherwise,” she said. I sat silently. “It’s a temporary pain, and you’ll probably bleed afterwards.” I said nothing. “Oh. She’s going to talk to you about The Pill as well,” she said. “You’ve run out haven’t you?”

I sighed. That’s the thing about leading a nomadic lifestyle- sometimes you need your mum to register you at a doctors because you don’t live here anymore, and sometimes you have to ask her to make appointments for you because she lives next door to the surgery. Sometimes that also means owning up to the fact that you came off The Pill because you ran out and didn’t realise. Which sometimes means having conversations like this in the middle of God’s Waiting Room.

“Yes mum. I would like my blood pressure checking anyway.”

“But what worries me is, Laura, what you’ve been doing all summer then. When I was your age I was on The Pill AND double-bagging to boot.”

I smiled apologetically at the balding women beside us. “Pull-out method,” I shrugged.

“LAURA! THAT DOESN’T WORK YOU KNOW!”

As I entered the nurse’s room she smiled at me and said brightly, “So! Your first smear then!” I replied in the affirmative and she inhaled the air between her teeth and shook her head solemnly.

“Let’s deal with your pill first, shall we?” she said.

“Ok,” I replied, in no hurry to begin The Procedure Which Would Apparently Scar Me For Life.

“Firstly, are you a smoker?” she said.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Would you like to stop?” she said.

“Nope,” I replied.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Yup.”

“I’m obliged to ask you that,” she explained.

“Are you interested in an alternative form of contraception?” she said.

“Nope,” I replied.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Yup,” I replied.

“I’m obliged to ask you that,” she explained.

“Would you like me to weigh you?” she said.

“Nope,” I replied.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Yup,” I replied.

“I’m obliged to ask you that.”

I asked her if we could get started, as I had an appointment to Google naked celebrities with Calum, and so she pulled out a pen and a piece of paper to draw me a diagram.

“So this is the vagina,” she explained, “And this tube here leads up to the bit at the top where you cervix is. That is where we will be taking a sample from today.” I sort of knew that much, so began to stand in anticipation of moving on. She wasn’t finished. “This leads up to where your womb is, a baby would position itself like this, and this bit here-” She pointed at something. “This bit here stretches to up to 10 centimetres during the birthing process!”

WOAH! We went from entrance only pussy talk to the frickin’ BIRTHING CANAL and I wasn’t even warned.

“This is normally how the baby would form, and what we are looking for today is…”

I put my hand up to stop her. “I’m really not emotionally mature enough for this conversation,” I explained. “Can we just cut to the chase?”

The nurse looked mildly shocked. “Have you got any questions?” she said.

“Nope!” I happily replied.

“Okay then, please take off everything on your bottom half, put your knees up by your ears, and we’ll get started.”

“Now you’re talking in words I understand,” I replied.

The nurse didn’t respond.

So there I was, chocolate starfish for the world to see, gripping the sides of the hospital bed ready for the searing pain, and the nurse’s last words to me were, “Just breathe deep.”

So I breathed.

And breathed.

And breathed some more.

I waited.

“… Okay then! That’s it! All done,” she said after two minutes of Breath Holding and Being Brave and Thinking Positive Thoughts.

“We’re done already?” I said, getting flashbacks to last Friday night. “Oh.”

I was relived she didn’t ask to take my number afterwards, as I would have had to have lied.

I walked out of the surgery and Mama inhaled through her teeth and shook her head solemnly. “How was it?” she said.

“I didn’t feel a thing,” I replied.

Mama looked at me.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Lesson 101: Love and Shit. Brought to you by an English teacher who should know better, and her students who aren't expected to care

2011-08-25T17:37:00.001+02:00

I noticed their chemistry right from the start. 18- and 19-year-olds don’t need explicitly teaching English per se, so essentially means that my job is ‘spontaneous language acquisition’ i.e. I get paid to hang out and play drinking games adapted for the classroom. We get through a hell of a lot of vodka, and they learn how to inflect questions so as to successfully fit in with passive-aggressive Brits when they go on holiday. In that kind of non-typical classroom environment, love will always blossom. Laughter is horny.

They always seemed to end up sat next to one another, no matter what the activity. No big deal, no HEY YOU! COME ‘ERE! Just a quiet magnetism. During drama games she would look to him from the audience as he took the floor, and a smile from her sent his performance into comedic overdrive, as if the only pleasure he could ever expect to derive from the rest of all eternity was to hear her laugh. He’d return to his seat looking at her, and she at him, and nobody else existed.

I know, right? Like ewwwww. Love and shit.

(Annnnnd I just got the title for this post. Brilliant.)

But when I suggested, one lunchtime, that I could see the magic, she was horrified. “No, no! English camp is only for two weeks, and after that I return to Milan and he to Rome.” I told her I didn’t understand the problem. “I’m not the kind of girl,” she implored. In my head I thought, Well you should be.

When one evening I said to him, “Well? What are you going to do?” he shrugged and said, “Oh no, nothing. She told me that she hates it when boys are her friend and then get angry that she hasn’t fallen in love with them.” “Are you sure she didn’t just tell you that because she loves you?” I replied. And then I added the single most important thing I have ever learned about FEELINGS! “And anyway, in situations like this there is only one way to deal with it. Pay attention to what she does, not what she says.” I can hear you being surprised at my wisdom, INTERNET. Me too.

The days passed and the emotions visibly grew. In their part for the final show the pair of them were to get married, and so I choreographed a sort of 1950’s moment where she hooked her arm around his neck, and he could gently tip her back. Every time we practiced the build up to that moment had palpable energy- not least from the hoards of his friends and her friends observing something so very pure unfolding. “Take a picture!” one told me as the couple rehearsed the wedding scene. “I don’t need to,” I replied. “I will always remember this loveliness.” Because yes, my heart is a cold piece of hardened coal. But it really was delicious to watch.

On the final day we did a dress rehearsal for the show, including a rousing rendition of David Bowie’s Heroes to introduce our concept of Superheroes and Villains. As the scene of the couple approached there was laughter and sadness and giggling and serious bits, and then came The Dip. Only instead of her placing her hand over her mouth to sanitise the kiss and block his lips, she let her hand fall. And he bent down to her in his arms and in front of everybody they kissed, and we cheered.

That evening somebody had left out company tee-shirts for the students to sign. On my tee-shirt, underneath their two names, they had written the Heroes lyrics, “We can steal time, just for one day…”

I just about freaking CRIED, and when she came to say goodbye to me after the final performance, she actually was. “Thank you,” she told me over and over before being engulfed in a sob so big that I cried too. I couldn't not. “Everything… perfect… thank you,” she said, and then she left. They stole time, just for one day, in a way that I have never quite been able to master. Bastards.

I knew he wasn’t leaving until the next morning so after meeting parents and air-kissing strangers, stealing some cake and nipping off for a crafty cigarette, I knocked on the door to his room.

There was no answer.

Two of his friends passing stopped, and when I told them who I was looking for they too knocked on his door, only instead of waiting for a response went right on ahead and entered. He appeared from the bathroom and looked a little dazed and confused.

“Hi,” I said, “I just wanted to check that you were alright.”

He looked as though he had been locked away in the dark, head in his hands and woe in his heart. It was heartbreaking. At 18, I remember feeling so strongly for my boyfriend that I cried to an Aerosmith song. In public. Loudly.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he replied.

“Are you sure?” I said. “She was pretty upset…”

“I know.”

“Do you need anything?”

“Nothing. I’m just… tired. I am leaving tomorrow, so I am not too sad. You can go."

I told him okay, and bid him goodnight. I had somehow expected him to be a little more, I don’t know, devastated. But he made it very clear he wasn't interested in my sympathies. I think out of it all, that was what was most upsetting to me. The stolen glances, the mystery, the newness of it all made me emotional by proxy. But for him not to care afterwards? For him to be so male about it? I WAS COUNTING ON THIS TEENAGE BOY TO RESTORE MY FAITH IN THE MALE SPECIES AS A WHOLE. And in those moments of rudeness, he did nothing but fuel my despondency.

Some time later I was hugged from behind. “I thought you had left!” I said, when I spun on my heel to face her. “You are still here!”

“Yes,” she replied. “And he told me what you did.”

“Oh,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure he was okay. Goodbyes are hard. He said to me…”

She leaned in to interrupt me. "He told me. You are wonderful. Thank you."
I smiled and we stood in silence for a moment. She eventually put her hands on my shoulders and pulled me close. “Actually, I was there,” she confided. "I was in the bathroom."
And then I laughed, hard and all the way from my belly, because OF COURSE SHE HAD BEEN THERE.

We laughed together a little more, and I apologised for the interruption, in a sort of I-don't-teach-you-anymore-but-still-can't-really-condone-your-actions kind of a way. “No, no- thank you,” she said for the last time. "Thank you."

IT WAS YOUR PLEASURE, I thought. Bloody kids.

Inappropriate rap-a-longs and the astounding insights of minors.

2011-08-08T17:37:00.000+02:00

I surveyed the circle of teenagers suspiciously, looking each 17-year-old in the eye as they stood waiting for me to launch into the daily warm-up ritual of Baby Got Back. You might remember that I don't put much weight on traditional teaching methods; I don't know how much good the third conditional is if you can't even use the words booty and brothers with any semblance of authority. Also, I find it hilarious.

"I have a feeling," I told them. "My intuition is telling me something."

Everybody looked guiltily to the floor, and then sideways at each other. I might not speak Italian, but you bet your ass I'm fluent in spin-the-bottle teenager.

"The energy is different this morning," I continued. "There are secrets."

Nobody said anything, as well they mightn't at a residential camp in a convent, about what I might mean. But two days ago when I tried to throw away the plastic bottle in the corner of my classroom there was unadulterated uproar, which tells me only one thing: my students have discovered the fun to be had in classrooms after dark. Oh! I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT I MEANT BY THAT.

"Secrets are my speciality, and I WILL discover them all..." I drawled. "Secrets, secrets, secrets."

One of the kids shyly raised his hand. "Laura?" he said, in perfect English. And I don't say that lightly: anytime someone apologises to me for their "terrr-ib-ile iiinglish" I always admonish that my own English is probably only eight-and-a-half out of ten. Including my love of the semi-colon.

I smiled at him reassuringly. It was my, I'm only here to teach you two hours a day so I'm not really a proper authority figure smile. My give-me-the-gossip smile. My I-live-vicariously-through-the-underaged smile. "Yes?" I replied sweetly.

"My intuition is telling me something."

"Oh really?"I raised my eyebrows to encourage him to continue.

"Yes. My intuition is telling me that you are just wasting time before we start so that you can finish your coffee."

BUSTED.

I suppose that is a round-about way of saying here. Have a spoken word video.

Knowing the Detective from Laura Jane Williams on Vimeo.

One of those ones where I don't even really get to the point because I saw something shiny and got distracted

2011-08-03T23:38:00.000+02:00

I knew I'd get into trouble for it sooner or later.

I noticed how many of the Italian commuters religiously stamped a ticket as they alighted the bus, and just how many times I stood in line waiting to buy my Vogue Menthols at the Tabacchi as some guy scurried in his man-bag for change to get his white slip of card. There was even a note on the notice board to the staff flat: BUY A BUS TICKET. YOU ARE STUPID NOT TO.

Thing is, my dad is Mr. Williams, and by virtue of that I have a sloping chin and an innate problem with authority.

I also had more knowledge at 16 about Who Moved My Cheese, The 16 Personalities Types You Need To Know, and The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People than is strictly necessary for somebody not yet able to distinguish between healthy glow and you’ve-been-tangoed but that is by-the-by.

Actually, no it isn’t. Did I ever tell you about the time as a teenager when I saved up all of my wages from waitressing so that I could take Mama Janie to London and we could have tea at the Dorchester and go see a live broadcast of Loose Women? Well I did, and do you know what she told my brother after the fact? She told him, “Dear God, Laura was wearing so much blusher that day that quite frankly, I was embarrassed.”

Point is, I knew I shouldn’t travel the Rome bus system without a ticket and I did it anyway. Because I think I know better than everyone else, and I figured that on a sliding scale of morality I wasn’t doing so badly compared to say, David Cameron and his insistence on raping everyone from single parent families claiming benefits to the working classes just trying to get an education.

AND THAT’S ANOTHER THING. I called home a few days ago, and got the low down on my parent’s recent trip to Brighton. They went to a comedy club. The guy made a joke about the Tories. Dad, all up in the front row, didn’t laugh. The comedian spotted him and made an example. Mum didn’t speak to him for the rest of the night, apparently. “Bloody hell Laura,” she told me. “As if you go to a comedy club to make a bloody political statement. You go to have a laugh! He’s a bloody twat, sometimes, your dad.”

I miss them both, my mum and my dad, very much.

My eyes adjusted as the bus approached a stop. I realised the uniformed chaps on the pavement were incredibly hot- if you go for that oiled, toned, Adonis sort of a vibe, and that they were also ticket inspectors. I searched amongst the crowd for my friend, ready to tell her to grab her bag and get off. She looked at me, all confused and a bit cross that I had interrupted her reading, and as I spun on my heel I hit the ticket inspector who had slipped aboard via the back door. NOTICE HOW I DIDN’T EVEN PUT IN A SEX JOKE THERE.

We didn’t get the cute one with the tight pants and glint in his twenty-something eye. Nuh-uh. The old guy with his gut overhanging his waistband and thirty years of young foreign tourists trying to bat their eyelashes out of a fine and a bad reputation made us hand over our ID and practically dragged us to his office by the ear when we got to the end of the line. I had considered just running for it, but I was wearing my favourite leather sandals and I was unsure as to if they would take the chase.

There were half a dozen non-English speaking officers surrounding us and we begged and pleased that we had no idea, sir, and said over and over again, Inglesi! Inglesi! But he was having none of it: we were to pay a fifty euro fine now, or be issued a ticket for a hundred big ones, to be paid at a post office IN ITALIE! IN ITALIE! before the month was out.

I was just happy to give 'em some fake details and get on with my life but my friend seemed kind of upset. "You’re the trained frickin’ actress,” I side whispered to her, “YOU DO SOMETHING."

And so was born the best dramatic performance of the decade. "This is an outrage!" she screamed suddenly and enthusiastically. "An absolute outrage! I can't believe we are being treated like this, it is absolutely diabolical. What is your name, Mr.? WHAT IS YOUR NAME? I'm going to write a letter about you. A LETTER."

This guy did. Not. Know. What. To. Do. Suddenly, SHE was in charge.

And then she burst into hysteric sobs that had me almost crying too. We'd been playing dumb on the old speaking Italian front but I understood the old guy as he said to his colleagues, "This chick totally saw me coming and tried to get off the bus when she saw me. She isn't even sorry." Which, you know. I wasn't.

My friend flung herself against the railing nearby and continued to scream and to yell. "I just want to have a nice holiday!" she carried on, "And we were just about to buy a ticket in the metro. A full day pass! And look! This ticket yesterday says 24 hours! It's just a farce, picking on us like this. A FARCE THAT I REALLY AM GOING TO WRITE A LETTER ABOUT."

Because that's what we Brits abroad do. Writer strongly-worded letters.

Ten minutes, a handful of letter-threats, and many false tears later, we walked away from the men without paying a penny. It was as if everybody had sort of... given up. I said to her. "You do know that we should have had tickets don't you? It was totally my fault that we didn't."

She looked back at me. "Of course I know that. But it doesn't matter that we were wrong." My friend sounded very sure of herself. "He was a very rude man."

We walked to the gelateria in companionable silence.

A self-indulgent reflection on the hows and whys of Laura Jane Williams, in several parts.

2011-07-19T07:00:00.002+02:00

Part Three (part one is here, and part two here):

I guess Calum might have had a point when I imagined him rolling his eyes at the blasé nature of my job application. Which is irritating. But I promptly totally forgot about it, until the week before I was due to finish my degree.

I got an email from an address I didn’t recognise, and had to read it twice before I understood what was happening. Not because I’m stupid, you understand. Nuh-huh. The recruitment guy for the school had so lovingly constructed his email with superfluous, underused words like ‘stellar’ and ‘dashing’, and correctly used a semi-colon, and signed off hoping ‘most desperately to hear’ that I was still interested, that I needed to stare at its spell-binding beauty for a minute. And then I quickly fired off, “Okay.”

I’m kinda well-known for creaming my pants over awesome grammar.

My first words to my mother were, “But I don’t want to move to Rome!” because I was tired and cranky and in the library for the thirteenth hour of the day for the two-hundredth day running, and hadn’t really thought my response through. To keep my options open I agreed to a Skype interview. You know. Just to see. I wasn’t really thinking at all. I just kept saying, “Alright then. Why not?”

On the day I handed in my final piece of coursework I informally interviewed online. I rang off feeling like I had essentially gotten the job from the way my Facebook friend had been talking. I was kind of excitable about the fact that I had just ended a three-year chapter of my life by finishing university and so shot off an email to the recruiter saying, “I’ll take it!” He replied by sending me an actual offer. Maybe he felt like he had no choice.

What I thought I had accepted was a general teaching job, though. It wasn’t until a week ago that I got a ‘round-robin’ confirmation of my training dates that had gone to a couple of other new starters too, and then underneath a note saying, “And Laura, in addition we’ll add in extra hours to confirm your extra responsibilities.”

EXTRA RESPONSIBILITIES.

At my training I actually had to ask the question, “I’m sorry, what exactly is my job title, then?” which, I think, should revoke any privileges otherwise awarded. This was then followed up with questions such as, “And I can delegate that?” and “What is that building there?” as I pointed to Vatican out of the window.

And then, on the final day of training, my friend- the one who advertised her job on Facebook, and had been teaching me how to do what she has done- began to say goodbye to her colleagues.

“Wait,” I said. “Your final day of training me is also your last day of work?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I’m now unemployed.”

I looked at her. “And I walked in here unemployed, and am leaving as the Director of Studies for Young Learners?”

The answer was yes.

“I’ve really enjoyed watching all of this unfold,” she told me as we said goodbye over drinks. “Everything is so new and amazing to you.”

Which of course it is. Because all I did was say yes. Now I have to figure out all what I’ve said yes to.

I thanked her for being my fairy godmother and getting me to where I am.

“Just look after my kids,” she replied, tears in her eyes. And then I realised just how lucky I am. She is giving up a department she has worked for two years to grow from nothing. I felt embarrassed that I was waltzing in without a clue, picking up so easily from where she was leaving off, laughing about my good fortune and Peter-Pan desires of forever flitting from one adventure to another. I was treating her job like a game, and it isn’t. For some people, this is Real Life, and Real Life is serious.

I’ve never considered teaching as a possible career path for me, not least because of this blog. It was just something I did to mend my broken heart, to finance my travel. It was an accident. But it doesn’t have to be the end, a Proper Job; quite obviously this is just the beginning. This could take me anywhere. Maybe.

And that was when I decided, as I walked away from my friend with her job title in my pocket. I might see how this grown-up thing pans out.

For now.

A self-indulgent reflection on the hows and whys of Laura Jane Williams, in several parts.

2011-07-18T07:00:00.003+02:00

Part Two (part one is here):

The months of teaching in Italy and living in the States changed me. And I don’t just mean my hair colour or my accent. Which, incidentally, changes when it wants. My brother calls me a twat when I call him and my intonation is off, Italians ask me if I am Eastern European, and I once spent an entire evening with a chap who asked me, right before he took off his trousers, “So what part of Australia are you from?”

No. I don’t mean those changes. I mean the changes to the insides of my head.

I went right from America back to Italy, desperate for more adventure, and by the time I had to return to the UK for my final year of school, I was devastated.

I’d essentially been AWOL for eighteen months. I tried making the best of living in *gulp* DERBY, but it just didn’t do it for me. I’m not bigger or better than the place, but it just didn’t fit for me. By Christmas I was on the floor of my parents living room, curled in a ball, saying over and over again, “I just don’t want to be here. I just don’t want to be here.” I was bored.

The boredom paid off I suppose, because I just graduated with a first-class honours in Creative Writing. WINNING.

I didn’t want a Career, that much I knew. I wanted to go and study in the States again to get my Master’s. I was going to fund it with a ridiculously well paid university job in Japan. Then the earthquake and tsunami happened, and it seemed kind of insensitive to call and ask if I still had a university to teach in. So I refused to make any sort of plan at all for a bit, and just see.

I really don’t know what I was waiting for.

I remember getting a message alert on Facebook one day, saying something about the news feed settings. Apparently, you can set your Facebook homepage to give you the news on the people you interact with most, or from everybody on your ‘friends’ list.

Like, d’uh. If I wanted to know what my next-door neighbour was doing I’d just yell over the garden wall. I don’t have Facebook to chronicle the daily adventures of my flatmates. I have Facebook to stalk the shit out of ex-lovers, potential lovers, enemies, frenemies and anyone who pisses off my best friend. OF COURSE I ALTERED MY SETTING.

That very same day, a girl I had crossed paths with for four days that first summer in Italy advertised her job in her status. “I’ve been in Rome for two years,” it said, “And now it’s time to go home. Anybody looking for a teaching job?”

I wouldn’t have seen it if it weren’t for the setting change. THANKS FACEBOOK.

I sent her the CV I had worked on for the Japan job. High self-esteem aside, it was pretty impressive. By saying yes to every opportunity that had come my way the previous two years, I had amassed thousands of hours in the classroom, run workshops in writing and drama, developed special skill sets and experience with a gazillion different organisations, and without a full-time bloke distracting me from studying was also in the top one percentile of my class. None of this crossed my mind as I hit send though. I did it mindlessly.

Calum, I totally just heard you add to the end of that sentence, as with everything LAURA.

I do some things consciously. Like eat cake. And play Scrabble. And hunt boys.

That totally counts.

Right?

A self-indulgent reflection on the hows and whys of Laura Jane Williams, in several parts.*

2011-07-16T23:18:00.000+02:00

*Yes. I did just write about myself in the third person.

Part One:

Internet, I don’t think I ever told you just how exactly I ended up with this job in Rome.

Having just spent a week there figuring out where I want to live (centrally, please) and what exactly my job entails (RESPONSIBILITY), it’s been a bit of a reflective process when I’ve had a minute alone. Like, for example, these nine hours worth of minutes that make up the train ride I’m currently on. There was a three-hour alternative, but it cost three times as much. I need those Euros for apperitivi, so it’s just my thoughts and me right now.

Why do they call ‘em chilli if they are actually so hot…?

Ha. Just kidding.

I like to think of this next part of my journey as a twist of fate and a coming together of higher powers than I. Powers with grand plans and big designs, and perhaps also long white beards. In actual fact it was Facebook.

Two years ago, I had a broken heart. And so I said sod it, packed up a bag, and came to Italy for a summer to teach. Well. That isn’t strictly true. I’m skimming over the sleepless nights, comfort eating, vomiting, desperate phone calls and debilitating hysteria because that six years of my life had ended. It wasn’t a simple decision. But just in case my ex reads this, I won’t go there. Let’s pretend I was all onwards and upwards and I never looked back, not even when he got engaged to my best friend from school.

Oh! Who said that!

I nearly didn’t last the training period. Sure, a crash-course in teaching on the Riviera sounded great. BUT. Thing is, I was the only British chick there. There were two British guys- one chap who had forgotten to pack his personality, and a flamboyant PhD student from Nottingham who had bigger fish to fry than little old me- and everybody else was FOREIGN.

I remember my first morning there. It felt like one hundred American cheerleaders were all, “Right, and then, like, totally, and I was like, whatever!” and I thought to myself, I can’t do this. I can’t work with these people all summer and live to tell the tale. I will either slice the wrists of myself or of them, and I won’t even say sorry for it.

Ten months later, I didn’t realise that I would be sat on the porch of my American flatmate’s family home just outside of Detroit, low spring sunshine setting the sky alight in pink flames, the smell of grass in the air, listening to her Poppa say in smooth, dulcet tone, “Most people are nice, you know, given the chance.”

TRUSIES.

So I fell in love with the bright eyed, enthusiastic charm of my American colleagues that summer, and I think they loved me back. I hope they didn’t just say that so that I would sleep with them on that final night. Then I’d just feel cheap.

I didn’t really realise HOW MUCH I loved them, and their positivity, and their can-do attitude and perky smiles and general AWESOMENESS, though, until I was back at home, about to enter into another year of academia at university. I was waiting for counselling (not the sort where you talk about your feelings. The sort where you figure out if your schedule works out or not. It involves less tissues that way) idly flicking through the program handbook and half-listening to two guys talking shit behind me.

These chaps were your typical undergraduate DICKS. They didn’t want to be in education, where they might actually have to apply themselves, and so they complained about the school. And about the weather. And about the girls they were seeing. And about the sound of the overhead fan. I swear to God these guys were so depressing that I was one more complaint away from asking them if they wanted to borrow my glass of razorblades and fifth of vodka when BOOM. The handbook asked me, “WANT TO SPEND A SEMESTER IN THE USA?”

Errrr, yes please.

So that day I got the forms and hounded the various people involved in the program for their signatures. No wasn’t an option. I was going to America. God help anyone who tried to stop me. Those guys were lucky I got so distracted- I was about to blow, and not in the good way.

Twelve weeks later I was headed for the city Lonely Planet voted the worst in the world. And I couldn’t have been happier. By the time I came home again, I realised what good could come of being single, and of saying yes, and of LIVING instead of just existing.

So I got a tattoo, and began sleeping with strangers. Ha! Just kidding dad. Probably.

(Part two will be posted on Monday. Stay tuned, kids!)

Writing books about rude things, being mean about children, making hasty decisions that alter the course of an entire destiny, and other extremely important Rites of Passage.

2011-07-12T18:22:00.004+02:00

So there was this one time at English Camp, whereby I had a class of little ones for the week. And I know the last thing y'all want is another story about children- this is so far removed from one of those blogs, and with kiddyblogging you can’t write five-year-old and erectile dysfunction in the same sentence- but stay with me on this. I've got a point about my development as an actual human being worthy of the oxygen it takes me to tell these stories.

(Probably.)

For their final show- whereby they speak in English, in public, for the benefit of mum and dad who have paid hundreds of Euros for their offspring to play all week with the pretense of learning another language-all of the classes came together to put on a makeshift version of The Lion King. Because d'uh, that's way easier than having them dress as their favourite food and tell the audience what their name is. I have under-developed notions of performing for vast adoring crowds which remain unlived. I make my kids do it instead. This is called transference.

My class opened, and I invite you to imagine the scene: There is a huge park, with trees and bushes and a giant hill that leads down to the 'stage'. Sort of like an ampitheatre, but not. And there are 200 parents sat on blankets and benches all around. The lights dim and in the darkness the theme tune to the show begins. You get goose pimples. It is magical. Over the brow of the hill come a dozen prima elementare dressed as flamingoes in strips of pink crepe paper, and elephants with cardboard boxes for heads, and as giraffes with one arm painted orange and fingers as a mouth.

Do I need to tell you that this was ADORABLE? Even my cold black lump of coal for a heart warmed slightly. We made an entrance Lady GaGa would have approved of.

Except, when we all finally arrived on stage, the kids freaked out. There were microphones! And parents! And the perfect opportunity to scream Italian profanities THAT THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN KNOW into said microphones. Fuck what Laura told us to do guys!

I couldn't control them. As I grabbed one ginger Italian under one arm (they exist) and a monkey under the other, as well as steering a crocodile with my bum and two tigers with my knees, an antelope and Simba dove forward to continue where their friends had left off. It was a losing battle. I'd lunge forward for the escapees and the others would writhe free from my grasp to scream anything but their assigned lines into the mics until they tired and tagged each other back into the game. It went on, and on, and on and on, until in the end, everyone laughed and I made them bow and the audience cheer, and then I took them offstage so that I could cry and possibly kick their shins for wasting a whole week of rehearsals BECAUSE I AM THAT GIRL. I tell children that fame costs, and in my practice space they pay with sweat.

Do you think I could list patience on my CV under 'special skills'?

My point. I am in Rome. I am currently taking a week out of English Camps to train for a job I didn't even know I had. I thought I had signed up to make some part-time cash to fund the completion of My Heart Beats Only For You (And A Few Other Dozen People) drinking cappuccini and riding on Vespas. In fact, with any luck, I thought I had come to undertake further research for the book. Nope.

Apparently, I came to undertake a position as Director of Studies for Young Learners. A chap commented recently that I am probably very mature, but that for some reason I try very hard not to be. I told him I wasn’t trying at all. I feel like I was dressed as Nahla and Rome was my Pride Rock. But instead of following the script, now there are microphones of responsibility that make me forget what is supposed to be happening and instead just scream to the audience, over and over again,

Do I have to be a grown-up now?

Well? Do I?

A month of boys who are so awesome they have two names, being overly-sensitive to the judgement of others, and writing a whole post without the word Vagina. Sort of.

2011-07-03T21:30:00.001+02:00

His name was Gianluca, and he was exactly the type you aren't supposed to like: bolshy, demanding, and uncompromising.

He was the kind to push you to your absolute limits; he'd have you questioning your own self, experimenting with the ways he could disarm you with his blistering blue eyes and cheeky wink, juxtaposed against his quick-wit and debilitating honesty. Just as you thought you couldn't possibly take anymore of his tricks of the mind he’d have a habit of catching you as you are about to metaphorically fall, gently slipping his hand into yours as you walk in the garden. You’d meander in contented silence, the dynamic redefined by this new intimacy, until the games began again and you are more perplexed than you were before this small gesture of togetherness.

He was exhausting, and confusing, and six years old.

Six.

Six year olds are my thing. I've run workshops on teaching six year olds. I have a job teaching six years olds come the autumn. I've done it before. Many, many times. So much so that before this week’s English camp began I sat in the meeting with the director and declared, "The biggest class in the camp? The youngest class in the camp? I'll do it." Because I didn’t trust anybody else, and because, of course, I suffer from high self-esteem telling me that I’m invincible enough to take on a job bigger than I am.

Is it inappropriate to suggest that this six year old child pulled my pants around my ankles and told me to bend over? Oh. It is? Sorry about that.

I was so, so eager to begin with. Spending a month telling other people how to teach kids isn't the same as actually being there, in the classroom, suffering mental abuse by Gianluca as he hangs out the window with his tee shirt over his head screaming how are you?how are you?how are yooooooou? But rolling his r’s funny so that he sounds like an extra in Faulty Towers, and is only saying what you have been teaching him all morning anyway so how do you shut him up FOR FUCK’S SAKE?

One week this past month my work colleagues all went out to teach whilst I stayed behind and continued to run workshops (which, incidentally, one attendee liken more to a one-woman sketch-show than a learning experience. I'M NOT SORRY.) and it was as if they had all gone out to the front line in France and I had stayed behind in Bognor Regis, probably held back by short-sightedness or a gammy leg, to build the bombs that they were using to improve pronunciation and grammar structure across the land, except that it wasn't the front line it was English camp, and it wasn't bombs but The Penguin Song.

And whilst building these educational bombs I've had on my happy face. Seventeen hours a day. I've taught songs and games and laughed and made inappropriate jokes about blowjobs and pedophilia and accidentally outed the most amazing American I’ve ever known in front of 120 of his peers and do you know what? One of the post-training feedback forms said I didn't make enough effort to get to know people outside of the training hours, and that I had favourites. Out of 600 feedback forms of AWESOMENESS (guess they didn’t mind the anal joke after all) and several hugs of thanks, cards that made me cry with their loveliness, and emails that made me laugh out loud, guess which one I’ve been thinking about most? So I'd like to address that with, I'm not paid to be your friend.

Also:

Of course I have favourites. THAT'S CALLED REAL LIFE. I always wanted to Mrs Higgingbottom's favourite when I was in fifth grade but she always chose the blonde girl with the lovely eyelashes instead of me but do you know what? I guess it just means that sometimes it sucks to be you, and that I need to wear mascara everyday.

Gianluca was my favourite.

There, I said it.

Our student-teacher relationship is exactly like every successful relationship I’ve ever had: he gave me shit, I gave him shit, and together we developed an understanding that giving each other shit was nothing compared to the shit we could give united.

And I didn’t have to humour him over dinner and pretend to really-not-mind-at-all telling the same story about how I got into this job, how long I’ve done it, or faux-laugh at the funny story about when he was at summer camp THAT REALLY WASN’T THAT FUNNY BLAHBLAHBLAH BORINGBORINGBORING. Gianluca kept it interesting, man. I mean, he was upside down from the ceiling and swearing in his mother tongue but he had a personality, you know?

And I rather suspect that he has officially marked the beginning to my summer with his arse kicking and mind-games. And I really don’t mind at all- regardless to what his feedback form says.

In which I suffer enormously, have sex, and anticipate a very angry phone call from my mother.

2011-06-11T14:25:00.001+02:00

One of the most obviously scary things about being a sexually-active 25-year-old woman is what happens when you leave the comfort of your current home- the four-star hotel- every morning, get to work, and throw up.

Yup. Every morning.

I realised how much this sucks when I failed to make it into the building and so was crouched by a trash can at 7.45a.m. one day this week, gripping my stomach and hurling up my croissant and cappuccino as I wished for somebody- a passerby, God re-incarnated, a Pokemon, ANYBODY- to swoop in a save me from my absolute humiliation of being a British tourist under the judgement of the well-dressed Italian posse of the Riviera.

And MY LORD their judgement really is harsh. I even got bollocked by Antonella, the cleaner, this week.

“Do you need your washing doing?” she asked me one morning.

“Nah, I’m good,” I told her, in the made up Italian I use whereby adding vowels to the ends of words and shouting a lot normally gets my point across.

She looked me up and down in disgust. “Well then maybe if I give you a sacettino you’ll stop leaving your garish and dirty neon underwear all over the floor then?”

Ouch.

I now have nerves over whether she thinks I change my towels often enough, or too often, or judgements on just how many red work tee-shirts I have hanging in my closet, or how much loo roll I tend to get through in a day. Judgment is MY favourite pastime. Oh how the tables have turned. Fuck you, Italy. FUCK. YOU.

Of course my colleagues think the sickness is hilarious, and after three days they started patting my belly. “Although bloody hell,” commented one. “Another Laura?”

I’m quite sure I have no idea what they meant.

For those first two days I laughed too, though. Then suddenly, it wasn’t funny anymore. I was running to the bathroom every morning, same time, same place, same churning and gurgles in my throat, and then after avoiding my own vomit-splashback was ABSOLUTELY FINE for the rest of the day.

This is the point at which you could hear me audibly gulp.

Mentally I did the maths. It didn’t make sense- I calculated dates and times and places and encounters, and I’d even had a period which was so intense that after threatening to biff an Italian lady on the hooter for cutting in line at the Frutta e Vedura I was made to lie down in a darkened room until the bleeding stopped. A baby Laura was inconceivable.

(Pun intended.)

(Sorry.)

And then I remembered that OHMYGOD WHAT ABOUT THAT TIME IN EASTENDERS WHEN NATALIE CASSADY HAD JAIMIE’S BABY BUT DIDN’T EVEN KNOW SHE HAD BEEN PREGNANT BECAUSE SHE HAD GOTTEN HER PERIOD THE WHOLE TIME? This could totally have been like, the exact same thing.

So I did a test.

One Friday morning, as the group of new English tutors I had been working with culminated their training by performing a short English language show dressed as green frogs and blue cows and Lady Gaga, I nipped into the loo. I hovered over the cistern, which was annoyingly about six inches too high off the ground for me to avoid peeing on my own inner thigh. Less than a hundred feet away the group of twenty-somethings stapled into crepe paper and covered in face paint jumped up and down to a song designed for 5 year-olds about accidentally eating a bumblebee and throwing it up again, and I peed onto the stick. And myself.

“One little bumblebee, smush, smush, smush…”

Dear God, please don’t be a bumblebee, I thought.

“Two little bumblebee, smush, smush, smush…”

PLEASE DON’T BE A BUMBLEBEE.

“Three little bumblebee, smush, smush, smusssssssh….”

PLEASE.

A line appeared in the window. The song outside the door culminated in vomiting sounds. I wanted to vomit too.

One line.

ONE LINE.

I needed two lines for my own bumblebee.

“Any comments you want to feed back on the performance?” I was asked, as I re-entered the room from the worst three minutes of my life. (Well. The worst three minutes of my life after the blonde German guy. But this story isn’t about him.)

I smiled broadly. “Bloody brilliant,” I announced to the room. “All was exactly as it should have been.” Because god knows what I would have done if I’d have to deal any sort of consequence to promiscuity in a public forum.

By the next morning the used test and two dirty condoms were in the trash can of my bathroom. But I was so relived that I didn’t even care what Antoinella thought.

It’s the small victories that count.

In which I contemplate why I said I’d never come back, have a child berate me, and make a very pertinent realisation

2011-05-26T10:10:00.000+02:00

Two things happened to me today. Firstly, a nine year old Italian girl handed me a Kleenex after we had hiked a hill, up to where I would be teaching her that day. She (essentially) said, in Italian, “You’re a hot mess. Wipe your dirty, sweating forehead you disgustingly unfit English woman.” Being reprimanded by a kid who doesn’t even have grown-up teeth yet is pretty hard going before 10 am. And I’m quite sure she snapped her fingers at me after she had said it. Like, bitch please.

Secondly, Mama text. “Stop using the word vagina on internet. Potty mouth.” So this next sentence is for you, Jane. VAGINA.

And thus Italian life has begun. I’m not in Rome yet- that’s all happening in September. For now I’m back in northern Italy, both losing my own dignity by shaking my arse at a bunch of pre-pubescent attitude-fuelled primadonnas (and that is just the boys) at English camps in various locations, and teaching others how to lose their dignity by shaking their arse at a bunch of pre-pubescent attitude-fuelled primadonnas at various locations.

I swore I’d never return after last summer. Mainly because Italians are fucking weird. Case in point: today. 50 kids were entertained and sung to and high-fived and generally everything but blown and arse wiped by me and the team of English tutors I’m working with, and not ONE of the 10 Italian teachers ‘supervising’ got up and joined in. They all sat outside, smoked, and finished off a bottle of red wine with lunch. Most didn’t even watch. RUDE.

Oh- hold on. That’s actually pretty smart. If I had to deal with kids all day, everyday, FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE (shit. That’s called parenthood, right?) (SIDENOTE: right before I flew out to come home I nipped to Mama’s. My aunt was there. “Come home, have you?” she said (SECOND SIDENOTE: Obviously.) “Yes,” I replied. “I’m like a little lost sheep in need of her shepherd.” “You don’t get a bloody shepherd at your age,” she told me. “You’re out on your own now!” Errrr….no, thanks. Nobody gets ride of me that easy. I’m like herpes complex.)

Okay, so where were we? Oh yeah. Having a bunch of sunburned, energetic, jazz-hands English tutors take your class off you so that basically you have a day off? I’d be smoking and drinking too. Also, one teacher refused to walk up the hill to our location until she had sat and had a cappuccino. Her class had to watch her. WHAT POWER.

So I swore I’d never do this job again because so many Italian attitudes are polar from my own (Catholicism/no drunk women/men who order at dinner for you) that working here can be SO HARD. For a people that live in the sun they don’t half complain about the heat; for a people that invented Mussolini they don’t half piss around getting organised; for a people who want to improve their English in order to effectively communicate with the rest of the business-trading world, they don’t even act like they CARE. They are just… crazy.

But halfway through a rousing rendition of Boom Chicka Boom, as I wore a kids baseball cap backwards, dropped to the floor in the dirt to emphasise a point, and actually bowed down in admiration of a co-worker who threw a bottle of water over the annoying ones, I remembered why I do this: I’m crazier than they are.

That’s why I came back.

In which I win awards for my vagina and accidentally agree to move to Rome.

2011-05-24T01:26:00.000+02:00

This year has been characterised so far mainly by an impending sense of doom about Beginning the Rest of My Life After My Degree. Oh! I’m sorry. Didn’t you want another graduation story? Tough shit.

I won an award from my university as I finished, for my contributions to the student magazine. As these contributions have mainly centred on my vagina, and thus I have been awarded for writing about my vagina, of course by extension I think this qualifies me to write on my CV, “Award-Winning Vagina.”

And yet despite this, I have still had some angst about What Comes Next. Perhaps it is because I fear that now the old va-jay-jay has been an accolade there is nothing left to achieve. Because let’s face it, what else is there?

During these past four months, my standard response to any question not directly pertaining to designing a 2,000 word process analysis on my third-year journey as a student of the craft of writing; what time the library opens; or whether or not I fancy a friendly poke; has been, “ASK ME AFTER THE 13^TH OF MAY,” as even with my pussy’s credentials I am horrifically afraid of becoming a Failure of Life.

(Side note: I was discussing with a friend yesterday how the top rating-fear of a large proportion of Americans is public speaking. Really? Give me an audience, no matter what the situation, and I’m all jazz hands and funny voices. Speaking in public isn’t scary. Speaking in public feeds the ego like cake feeds a fat woman. Being found dead, alone in a pool of my own Krispy Kreme dribble with a vibrator in-hand and one of my twelve cats sat atop my head is my top-rating fear. Or worse, what if nobody even noticed? WHAT IF NOBODY CARED? WHAT IF MY VAGINA-AWARD DOESN’T REALLY COUNT FOR ANYTHING?)

And then the 13^th came, and the deadlines passed, and suddenly I had to sit down and decide What To Do Next. So in the hour I had free in my schedule that was highlighted as being designated for Life Planning I somehow interviewed for a job in Rome. And then said yes. Which, of course, the House of Pastelle found hilarious because who sets aside 60 minutes to get a job and then actually gets a job? IN ROME?

But then life got its own back because MOTHERFUCKER I got sicker then I have ever been in my life. First it was tonsillitis, then my insides went funny, and then I got a cold just as a glimmer of normality was in sight. I celebrated my 25^th birthday yesterday, with a friend I haven’t seen in two years. You know what I thought would be fun? To rock up so doped up on antibiotics that I couldn’t even take a sip of the selection of majorly impressive fine wines she had gotten in especially for me, and then spend the duration of her company with one finger up my nose as I smeared it with Vaseline to stop the drying, itching PAIN, and the other in the medicine cabinet searching for whatever was legal and most importantly free.

Yeah, I found your swings-and-roundabouts attitude to my life hilarious too, Universe.

So in short. I finished school. My vagina rocks. I’m older. I moved out of the House of Pastelle. I’m writing this from Italy. I just sneezed and an actual lump of green snot hit my hand.

And now you know.

Darby and Joan: May 2011

2011-05-22T12:16:00.000+02:00

Darby and Joan are the quintessential middle-aged British couple, characterised by knitwear, hours of scrabble, and a penchant for staying in on Saturday nights. Darby and Joan are, in fact, Calum and me.

Once a month I'll be posting an open letter to ~~Darby~~ Cal to keep him up to date on a life that now we've graduated, won't involve flashing him my boobs every day. At least not in person, anyway. Sometimes, he might do the same here. I miss him already.

Dear Darby

Well. That’s it now. It’s all changing. It’s all changing and GODDAMIT we might just have to go on ahead and lead separate lives now. I believe it was you who coined the term sad koala face. This is totally a sad koala face moment. It might be what sad koala face was coined for, in fact. This is the sad koala face PINNACLE.

In the space of a single week we’ve finished university, won awards, been sick to high hell, performed our work in public, had our birthdays, and gotten engaged. AND OHMYGOD I CAN’T BELIEVE I NEARLY FORGOT- we have awesome new blazers too. I’m so pleased that I bullied you into that navy TopMan number- seriously, it was pricey but TRUST ME. In terms of price per wear? Pennies.

Hey! Are you still listening to me? Oh, right. I guess you deciding to spend the rest of your life with one single man is kinda a bigger deal than the blazer. If you insist. But it was a great blazer.

Know that even though I hate ceremonies and brides and grooms and BULLSHIT WEDDING STUFF I’m totally stoked about you getting hitched because BITCHES, RECOGNISE. You had better believe that your stag party is gonna be all pink glitter and black cock. And that’s so worth making this life-altering commitment that will change the course of your entire destiny. You know- so that I can get drunk and laid. So thanks.

But that’s the future. Right now I’m kinda bummed about our present becoming our past. Since our very first day at university when I smelt your gay and so you sat next to me out of everyone because I smiled at you like Heath Ledger in Batman, you’ve been my wingman. You and Lee have come to be my family, in fact. You guys make me feel safe. But I won’t be seeing you everyday anymore.

This year has been my favourite, if I had to pick. For four long months you’ve rung my bell at 9 a.m. every morning, and I have answered in pretend Italian, and you have bollocked me for not being ready on time. Again. And then you’ve asked me if your hair looks okay this morning and EVERYTIME I’ve been like, huh? What do you mean it’s different?

Every morning we’ve said hi to our favourite ladies in Sainsbury’s, patting Emma-The-Dog-With-No-Teeth who was nearly always sat outside with her owner (Well. You know. The owner wasn’t sat- that’d just be stupid.) and then taken it in turns to get the Raspberry and Peach flavoured sparkling water that they have on special: 2 bottles for 70p. MADNESS! They should just give it away!

Dad asked me who the last one to buy the water was- did it all work out fair? I couldn’t answer him. I’ve done such a good job about not being an emotional GIRL about all this change that it took a question about bottled water to tip me over the edge. So I just cried instead. Dad didn’t understand.

We’ve sat at the same desk, in the same place, day-in and day-out as we have finished those all-important last bits of coursework that count for 80% of our degree and thus were a pre-cursor on how we can expect to measure the success we have FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES. Totally no big deal. And you have pushed me on every single one of those days, harder and harder and harder so that I didn’t once leave that place without knowing I had done my very best. But it made the walk home a bit hard. All the bruises from where you have kicked my arse slowed me down.

You wrote a story about fictional friends who leave university and agree to meet on the Italian Riviera some time later. But the chick doesn’t show, and the guy in your story just sits there, heartbroken. Thing is, it’s not fiction, is it? Because in a week I am meeting YOU on the Italian Riviera, for another part of our adventure. I’m actually writing this from the airport as I fly out ahead of you. Only, I’ve got a good mind not to turn up on Friday. Art imitating life and all that. See You In San Remo you called it. Well- maybe you won’t.

Just kidding. My being a dick is the only way I know how to deal with all the emotion of change. And I’m lucky that you’re the one person who let’s me get away with that. YOU KNOW. Often we demand of one another, “UNDERSTAND ME!” when we can’t be bothered to explain something. I don’t have to make demands now. You do understand me.

Okay, well my plane it almost here. Before I go I’d like to thank you for my birthday present. A book called The Art of Cheating is exactly like you said in yours and Lee’s inscription: something I already know a lot about. You told me that as I have faked orgasms, cried to get a better grade, and successfully avoided the world of work for 25 years, it was probably written by me anyway. THANKS. That’s why we are friends. Because of all the love and mutual respect.

See You In San Remo (probably),

Joan x

Because Looming Deadlines Give You Wings. And Diarrhea.

2011-05-04T23:13:00.000+02:00

This story is a warning, which you can file in these stressful end-of-year-coursework-deadline-times as LEST YE NOT BE AS STUPID.

I know, the parental guidance note for my entire life, right?

It seemed like a good idea to try one of those little energy drinks- the ones that come in shot form. Why waste time drinking half a litre of Relentless when the bang for my buck was right there in miniature form, you know?

(OH! Rude! Normally I prefer king-sized.)

(PENIS.)

I know the little buggars are lethal. A bit like the Thai Buckets that have the Red Bull so strong that it’s illegal in most of the developed world i.e. not sensible but quite a lot of fun. But then, this is the girl that once drank three Red Bulls in a row because somebody once said it was like dropping Acid but legal. Three Red Bulls? I tried to snog a tree and then threw up. Not even Charlie Sheen would call that winning.

But half an hour after my energy shot and nope. Nada. Nothin’. No buzz, no wings, no super-essay-writing powers. Lethal my arse, I thought. I wanted a pumping heart, x-ray vision, and fingers that typed faster than something really fast. I walked around the library for a bit with blurred vision thinking my high was about to kick in, but then I realised I’d just had forgotten my glasses.

So I went and bought another.

On reflection, that is exactly like when I went to Cambodia and took a pack of laxatives because one wasn’t enough. Kinda like how only the one bloke is never really enough. Or one MaltEaster.

I’m leading into a poop story here, because poo jokes are dead funny. This is especially true if your surname is Williams and you grew up with a dad who didn’t drop twins off at the pool daily, but sextuplets. Hi, Dad!

My constitution is a bloody good one. You’re reading the only person in the history of the planet to have gone to New Delhi and gotten CONSTIPATION. I was hoping to lose 5 pounds through Delhi-Belly but instead I didn’t shit for ten days.

Then it happened again in a border town near where they filmed Tomb Raider. Blocked. Up. Not even Angelina would have been able to fight the terrorist in my bowels, holed up in there like it was paying rent or something.

TEN DAYS. Do you know what happens to your gut if you store nowt but lentils inside you until you can’t even sit down because it’s so painful? I’LL TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENS: a pack of laxatives.

Nothing happened after the first couple of pills. So I took a few more. And then more, and then had this DEAD CLEVER epiphany whereby I figured I’d just take ‘em all because like, what harm could it do.

I even went to sleep as I waited for my- ahem- movement. And boy did it hit me when it came. BAM. I was up out of bed and hovering over the squat-and-drop quicker than you can say EYE OF A NEEDLE.

I really hadn’t thought it through. Suddenly, in that little hut room in a third world country, with the onions I’d had with lunch rising in my throat and my (since-revealed-as-a-bit-of-a-plonker) boyfriend just the other side of the paper-thin wall I realised I was about to spend four hours squatting over a hole in the ground as I tried not to poop up my own calves.

I failed.

If it is indeed on your list of things to do before you die, take it off. Vomiting from one end, pooping from the other, and trying to act like everything is FINE! JUST FINE! when said boyfriend tries to come and help out is just not fun.

Understatement.

And after two shots of Red Bull I remembered this lesson, because it happened again. And do you know what I just realised? If writing about my vagina has gotten me laid (BELIEVE IT) then writing about my ablutions is so gonna get my (shitted-up) ass dumped. Woospies.

Essay done, and energy drink high never found, I went home and said hi to my Sweet Potato Risotto again. For a really long time. I was 24 when I went in that bathroom, and had three kids, a mortgage and two ex-husbands by the time I came out. As well as green poo.

This Post Is So Long It Might Hit Your Cervix

2011-04-13T17:15:00.011+02:00

I recently sat opposite ~~a very lovely boy~~ someone over dinner who told me quite charmingly that I was interesting. He'd never eaten so slowly, he told me, as he did sat opposite me. I made him talk, he said, and think, and he wanted to hear me talk about what I had been thinking. And even though it was a big old plate of chicken in front of him that he was neglecting- and chicken is his favourite- HE DIDN'T CARE.

I laughed right in his face. "Yes," I replied. "Many a man thinks me amusing for the one meal, but pretty much by dessert they decide I'm just plain hard work."

Calum has told me this before. We have a grand old time together, but he told me once that after he has been with me- no matter for what length of time- he always needs a lie down. I told him I didn't know what he was talking about, but then I am writing this in the library where I am supposed to be writing some Spoken Word poetry, but instead I keep making him watch YouTube videos of my favourite artists. After a particularly good one, we got talking about the fine line between sadness and hilarity, and so whilst he held a book about the Holocaust in his hand, and I referenced a comedy I wrote about abortion, we joked that we'd never be any good at invading Poland because we'd stop en route for lunch at a nice country pub and then get involved in a game of scrabble before somebody in big black boots with an SS armband tapped one of us on the shoulder lightly to say, "I'm sorry, I think you might be forgetting something," and we'd both laugh at our forgetfulness and ask to see the dessert menu.

OR SOMETHING.

He finally did draw the line when I ended up watching the scene from Coronation Street where Jack Duckworth dies, and I started to hold my breath so that I didn't sob out loud, which made Calum watch me in disgust, which made me choke on my tears, and then turn purple, and then I was laughing and crying and snotting everywhere and Calum just looked around embarrassed and told me to pull myself together. "Do I have mascara under my eyes?" I finally asked, when the reactions had stopped. "You look a mess," he told me. "And I can't cope with this. I'm going to go hit on that fittie over there. He seems like less hard work."

And both of our essays remain unfinished.

Having spent this past weekend at Mum and Dad's, I've received confirmation of my exhaustive tendencies. My hard work nature. I mean, when even your parents tell you...

You might wonder why I profess to have high self-esteem. It boils down to self-preservation; with Jane and Rick it's laugh or cry. "Isn't your head a funny shape for your body?" Mama has been heard to say. "I've got you some of that shampoo for lank and greasy hair," is another. "BREATH MINT LAURA" is frequent. My response rhymes with book toff.

We enjoyed lunch out in the garden when the sun was shining. Mama has a collection of silk cushions, and glass candle holders, and ceramic decorations, and that means there's no room on the table for plates but that everything certainly looks very pretty. Dad kept saying over and over again that there's nowhere else he'd rather have been. I was tempted to agree.

I idly flicked through the Sunday papers before tossing The Times Style mag on the floor. "It's all pissing weddings!" I said in disgust. "BORING."

"You wait," I was told. No, I thought. YOU wait. But then the sun was affecting my mood in all sorts of unusual ways. I felt quite calmed and charitable and, just for the record, I'm absolutely positive that these emotions are totally unrelated to said previous meal with ~~the boy~~ somebody, no matter what you or he might think, so don't even mention it.

"Well. I might be a chronically single unmarriable feminist, for which I apologise," I said. "But you've done a good job with me haven't you?"

"Do you think so?" Mama said. "Really? Because I'm not like other mum's am I?"

I looked her in the eye. "Well, no. You're not. You never made me practice the violin for three hours a day, or make a rule that I had to do homework before I put the telly on, or even really stop me from getting drunk in bus stops at 14," I mused. "You didn't do any of that."

She nodded in agreement.

"I suppose some mums drive their children to ballet, or to a language tutor, and some mums get so drunk on holiday cocktails that their children have to lift their heads on to the pillow at bedtime, and that will be their overriding childhood memory."

"That was just once," she said defensively.

"Twice." I replied.

"Oh."

Dad sighed at me and I ignored him.

I caught them both up on what is happening in my life right now, and how excited I am for my summer travel plans. I'll be teaching in Italy for a few weeks before hopping on a train to explore Eastern Europe. I'm not sure why I'm so desperate to do that, but Serbia and Bosnia and Hungary and Turkey have my name on them this July. "God," said Mama. "I couldn't think of anything worse." A bit like when I told them I really wanted to do Bali, and Dad screwed up his nose and just said, "Bali? SHIT." He's never been.

Dad piped up, "But your friend, the one you're going with, doesn't she have a boyfriend?"

BITCH, PLEASE. Because a woman in a relationship can't ever travel alone? I jumped right on that one.

"I mean, GOD FORBID that she go off and do something ON HER OWN, without a man, OF HER OWN CHOICE, hey dad?" I began. "I know she shouldn't be making decisions of her own, should be willingly holding out her ankles for attachment to the kitchen the sink, and her arms up so that a full burka can be slipped over her shoulders to cover her body."

Dad once told mum that in the general election there was no sense in them both voting different parties, as it would cancel out each other's vote. So mum voted how she was told. He calls it traditionalist. I call it stupid. A bit like forcing the woman in your life to wear head-to-toe black so that other men won't desire her and if she happens to get raped by her cousin then she shouldn't have shown him her ankle in the first place.

"He MIGHT just miss her. She MIGHT just come back to him full of stories and adventures that mean their relationship stays alive instead of dying under the weighty boredom of monotonous daily drudgery where nothing changes and everything stays how it has always been because that is how it has always been done. They MIGHT miss each other but actually survive it, and he MIGHT just discover things he never knew about himself in her absence. MIGHTN'T HE?"

Dad sighed once again.

We sat in silence. I was just saying. You know?

"Dad?" I finally said.

He didn't even look up.

"Dad, do I exhaust you?" I finally asked, in a small voice, suddenly aware how he'd gone from not wanting to be anywhere else to seemingly looking around the garden for a rabbit hold to suffocate himself in.

"Laura," he replied. "Exhausting isn't the word. Try: debilitating."

TOLD YOU.

Well March Just Went Right On Ahead And Passed Me By

2011-03-24T23:25:00.001+01:00

So I am about to become a 25 year old graduate. A Creating Writing graduate, no less. That essentially means that my career advisor on campus suggested that I practice looking in the mirror and smiling as I say, "And would you like fries with that?"

I've struggled to figure out exactly what I might do once the safety net of a university campus gets taken from me. On the one hand, I spend an awful lot of time listening to 18 year-olds in the library talking about just how wasted they got last night and how they only need to pass this module anyway. What's a first-class honours again? I hear them over the top of Bruch's Scottish Fantasy and pretend that my perusal of people.com is like, way more academic than they could ever hope to be. I'm so over it.

On the other hand, I look at friends from school, already out there in the field, all careers and babies and engagement rings, and I think, is that it? Is that what is next? Because I'm just fine with having to go get drunk with the rugby team if it is. I DON'T CARE WHAT KIND OF CARD THEY USE ON THE INVITATIONS. Or if the napkins match the tablecloth stitching. So sambuca or rum, fellas?

Decisions, decisions.

In the meantime, have a video. You're welcome. When I performed this at a spoken word workshop, I worried that I was trivialising myself, cheapening what I write by lowering the tone to that of basic genitalia. There are wars, and tsunamis and dictatorships happening, and all I do is reference minge. Then I remembered this website.

A quiet chap at the back of the room coyly raised his hand after I mused aloud about my misgivings, and then he said the wisest words I think any of us might ever hope to hear.

"Laura," he said. "Don't worry yourself about things like that. Know that wars, tsunamis and dictatorships come and go, but minge? Minge is eternal."

Then somebody commented about my job as a writer being to get under the foreskin of people. Watch the video to get that joke, because I think I might get it as my next tattoo.

This Isn't The Version I Told You Before from Laura Jane Williams on Vimeo.

Ping, Pang, (Pat) Pong

2011-02-28T08:50:00.001+01:00

It started a few days after I moved into the House of Pastelle.

There was rice on the floor. Like, everywhere. And no matter how many times I shrugged my shoulders, smiled inwardly and chuckled-off the irritation I HAD JUST MOVED IN TO THE MOST CANDY-COLOURED HOUSE IN THE WORLD so really, I wasn't prepared to get cross.

I have to keep my kitchen-tidiness in check around other people, anyway. Not everyone was brought up with Mama Janie, who essentially washes up before she sits down to eat. I didn't even know what a hot meal tasted like until I was 19 and able to live in my own squalor where washing the pans after your belly was full was not only encouraged but expected.

So I tried not to let my bizarrely high standards of kitchen cleanliness bother me when confronted with the rice. Every time I went into the kitchen. For 4 days in a row. EVERYWHERE.

Nu-uh. Didn't bother me ONE LITTLE BIT. I'd just get the dustpan and brush, get to sweeping, and slightly wonder to myself who the FUCK had been chucking around uncooked rice in the FUCKING pastel-coloured FUCKING KITCHEN of MY HOUSE WHERE THERE SHOULD AT LEAST BE SOME BASIC LEVELS OF HYGIENE.

Yeah, I was fine. And, a bit confused. I knew it wasn't the girl in the room at the bottom of the hall. No, she only made microwave Uncle Ben's rice. And I knew the best musician in the world hadn't done it, because I was pretty sure she hadn't been at home for a week. One room was still unoccupied and we knew room 3 wasn't being moved in to til the weekend. It was a bonafide rice mystery. Unless I was coming over all Pippa Lee and it was me spreading the rice love in my sleep, when nobody was watching.

I sat having a welcome cuppa with a housemate one afternoon, forgetting all about the rice as I saw somebody scuttle through the corridor into the bathroom through the glass of the kitchen door. "There's somebody in the flat!" I squealed, as I moved to open the door for a better look. I pinned it open and sat back down, knowing that whatever stranger was in the loo had to come back out again sometime. It was just a matter of waiting, and hoping it wasn't the weird guy that runs the front desk sometimes, the one who spits when he talks and stares at all the Fresher students. But being University-owned accommodation I supposed that anybody could have a key. It could have been Chuck Norris in my bathroom for all I knew, as I made a mental note to myself to always sleep with my bedroom door locked.

And then I heard the door. This was it.

"Urm, hello!" I said, as the figure ignored us and made for a room down the corridor. "Do you, like, live here or something?"

The figure backed up down the corridor. It was a Chinese woman in her thirties, small as a teenage boy, smile wider than the moon.

"Ahhhh, yes! I live here! Yes!" she said in accented English, and my friend and I welcomed her. She was busy though, she explained. She had to go now but would see us soon, she said.

"Awwww, she seems lovely!" my friend said.

I closed the kitchen door and hissed in hushed tones, "Lovely?! No! That's bloody it then, isn't it? We've got a bloody Chinawoman in our house, a Chinky, and suddenly there's sodding rice all over the bloody flat? IT'S HER!" As I worked myself into the conclusion, I got a little bit louder and louder.

"What did she do when she got here? Open up a bag of China's finest and sprinkle it lovingly on the floor to remind her of home? Was it a Chinese welcome dance? A CHINESE RICE FUCKING WELCOMING DANCE?"

I was stood up and suddenly dancing around the kitchen, moving my feet quickly and spreading my arms out from side-to-side, as if sowing the wild oats of carbohydrates.

"I BET SHE CAME IN THROWING HER ARMS AROUND, FULL OF RICE, SPRINKLE! SPRINKLE! SPRINKLE! Look! It even goes under the door and out on the carpet outside!" I pulled open the door to show my tea-drinking accomplice. "LOOOOOOK! SPRIIIIINNNNNKKKKLLLLEEEEEE!"

I'm not normally so overtly racist, or xenophobic, or hostile to total strangers that I was apparently due to live with for the next six months. But something in me snapped, I don't know what. There was rice. There was a woman from Hong Kong. The two, it seemed to me, must be related.

There was no other explanation.

The story soon took on a life of it's own. I was telling anybody who would listen that the kitchen in the House of Pastelle was being replenished in stocks of floor-rice at every opportunity. One night, whilst performing the Welcome Rice Dance in front of an audience at Calum's place, I literally had people crying with laughter. I was so upset that I wouldn't shut up about it. How DARE this woman move it and be so DAMNED MESSY? So when I saw a flyer for Mr Pang's Chinese Restaurant on Calum's fridge, suddenly the dance became The Welcome Rice Dance of Dr Pang and All Her Friends.

"How am I going to stop it?" I questioned them all. "I can't live like I run a backstreet Chinese restaurant, dried rice and rat shit underfoot for the rest of my life!" I don't know where the rat shit bit came from. I was crossing the line into just-plain-rude, I think. It was the Mama Janie in me that did it.

I was going to have to talk to her. We obviously couldn't live like this, and it was best to nip it all in the bud before I got really upset and starting doing accents to accompany the legendary dance.

I sat telling Charlotte, the best musician in the world, all about it one evening a few days later. I say sat. I was actually hopping around on one leg, such was the evolution of The Welcome Rice Dance of Dr Pang and All Her Friends, throwing around my arms to imitate the rice-throwing, barely seconds from pulling out my own bag of rice to really emphasise my point. "Riiiiice dance!" I was squealing. "Welcome!"

Mid lunge Charlotte looked at me horrified. She wasn't laughing like everybody else had done.

I sensed a problem.

"What?" I said to her finally, worried that maybe she had a Chinese aunt or something, and was mistaking my anger over the rice as actual prejudice against one the most spiritual, friendly and accomplished countries on the planet.

"Laura- I need to tell you something."

Please don't let her be part Chinese, I whispered to myself. Please don't let her be part Chinese. PLEASE. Please don't be part Chinese.

She took a breath.

"The rice. That was..."

Yes?

"Well..."

YES?

"It was me."

Oh. My. God.

Can I Have Your Number? Can I? Can I? Can I have It?

2011-02-24T19:09:00.001+01:00

Apparently, life imitates art. Or, at least, my life imitates this art.

It's well documented that I ain't all that and a bag of chips, sister girl. Yes, I've been propositioned as a prostitute, and sometimes, when I go out wearing nothing but a leotard and some coke cans in my hair, I get some attention. But that's only because I'm dressed like a slag and boys like girls who are easy. I am categorically NOT easy (in so much as if you can't successfully complete the Guardian's crossword in under 30 minutes then I won't get down on my knees for you) (Word) and am not only writing this in my pajamas but have also failed to brush my teeth yet, either. It's nearly time for bed again, anyways.

So I might not be all that and a bag of chips, but you'd better believe that on the way home from Sainsbury's, carrying all that and a bag of loo paper and olive oil, some guy comes over all 8-Mile on my burly, dimpled ass, when I'm just a nice, British, middle-class, white girl who happened to be wearing a lot of leather. It was like being back in Detroit or something. This guy was BANANAS.

(Actually, do you know what? I can't go any further without being really truthful with you Internet. I didn't just buy the loo paper and olive oil. In fact, I should have brought loo paper and olive last night, when I was pissed as a fart on an accidental consumption of Chocolate Orange cocktails and dragged my drinking partners around Tesco, even though we all needed to make a pee-pee and were probably just going to spend cash on satiating our munchies with Creme Eggs anyway. No, I had purchased more than the bare necessities. I also had Sainsbury's brand Angel Cakes in my bag, which I can wholeheartedly and proudly declare that yup. I had every intention of eating all six slices of heaven in one big fat watch-my-weight-get-higher-and-higher-because-I'm-not-even-running-at-the-moment splurge. Which I would love to tell you would have been a one-off indulgence but my increasing waistline and I can't tell fibs. What with our mouths being too full up with cake to spew out anything else, anyway.)

(As a further sidenote, the cocktails were on the drinks list as Choc a l'orange, thus perfectly fuelling my pretentious nature when I'm supping from a martini glass by having me flinging around my arms and saying it in a altogether unconvincing style français. The girl at the bar pretending to talk another language? That was me.)

So I clocked this guy as I was walking towards him. Bandanna on, swinging his arms like he was trying to get his knuckles to kiss to the road, limping like he had a busted knee-cap or something. I clocked him and looked down again, smiling to the pavement that somebody would actually go to the effort of conducting themselves in public like that. Like dude seriously. Pull up your trousers.

I heard a, "Hey! Heeeeey, hey!" and looked up to see him dragging his blindingly white trainers toward me. "Hey," he said again.

It was one of those weird moments where you don't really realise that somebody is talking to you until they are literally in your face saying words that you don't understand. As this "homie" stood in front of me, moving his body from the left to the right like he was auditioning for Save the Last Dance I had to really concentrate on his mouth to hear what he was saying.

It was something along the lines of, "Are you from around here?" but interspersed with a lot of "Ummmms," and "Errrrrs" which in the first instance made me feel like I should make no sudden movements and possibly avoid direct eye-contact in case. Well. You know. In case he was a loon.

"I don't live here but I know the area," I lied, as I felt in my pocket for my house keys. I once read in a Patricia Cornwall novel that in cases like this jamming two keys into the eyes of your attacker is the best defense.

"Ahhhh, is that right?" he said, only I have written that sentence down in ACTUAL ENGLISH. What he said was something more like, "Aye, iz dat reet innit?"

I was laughably middle-class about his accent, responding with a manufactured accent that I haven't heard since I was trying to seduce a barman when I was actually in Detroit as I enquired, "Do you need directions?"

"Pfffft," he replied in mangled tenses, "I has just moved here and is looking for some pretty gals and dat, innit?"

In my head I thought, "And you're talking at me why? Exactly?"

"Good luck with that," I replied, "But I've got to go. My boyfriend is waiting for me." Obviously that had me cracking up on the inside, what with the stash of cake I was hiding to go and consume in front of a chick flick and a box of tissues. All I needed was a cat under my arm and he would have known to stay well clear of me, oh chronically single one.

"Pfffffft, iz dat reet?" He said to me. "Well I tell ya what, next time I see ya, I'm gonna go give you me number, innit?" he told me, to which I laughed. In his face. And then walked away. Because if you were gonna give me your number, you would just do it. You don't make an appointment to give out your digits. Damn fool. Tell me I'm wrong.

And it's not that I wasn't flattered by the attention- because even though the insult of this uneducated and inarticulate oaf thinking that we might actually be playing ball in the same league stung my ego like a bee up a shirt sleeve- I was. I know it takes guts to approach a girl cold; to say, "Hey, I like the look of you. How about taking your chances?" I get that that's a big deal. I do.

I just want to know why I don't ever get the guys who might actually open with the words, "Hey- you look like a girl with a lot on her mind and the intelligence to seduce me with intellectual intercourse. I bet you laugh like an Irish sailor after six Guinness and bend like a pretzel in bed, too."

THEN I would take my chances. If that ever happened. You know?

The moral of this story? I'm going to die alone, surrounded by cats and angel cake, or else I'm just gonna have to take my chances with a homie next time.

These are my options. Brilliant.

High Self-Esteem: A Manifesto

2011-02-17T19:22:00.002+01:00

I miss America. This time last year, I was living there. And you know, it really is true what they say (when I say ‘they’, I mean the rest of the world). Americans suffer from high self-esteem. They just have this kind of, “Well, what do I have to lose?” attitude. AND I LIKE IT.

With that in mind, this is what is about to happen. I am going to tell you that I suffer from high self-esteem. It’s why I fit in there so well. Then, you are going to judge me as an arrogant, self-righteous nobody and probably think to yourself, “And she isn’t even all that and a bag of potato chips ANYWAY. I’ve seen her picture on the top of her profile. Laura Gaga, Lady Blah Blah.”

This is how it will work.

Ready?

Okay.

Hi, my name is Laura Jane Williams and I suffer from high self-esteem.

SEE! I told you. JUDGED.

Look. There are two things I adamantly and fervently live my life by: never will it matter to me if my gravestone reads either, SHE DIED THIN, or, SHE PAID OFF THE MORTGAGE. I just don’t care. In short? I live my life without seeking perfection. It is SEVRELY overrated. And that takes confidence.

Examples.

I always thought that one day I might have abs like Britney Spears. Then the 2007 VMA’s happened and Flabby Spears made my wish come true. I truly believe that my high self-esteem meant that if Mohammad couldn’t (wouldn’t) go to the mountain, then the mountain must go to Mohammad. My proof? BAM! The muffin top look was back in business. I could have wasted valuable eating frosting-right-out-of-the-tub time on the treadmill when my look was waiting for it’s ‘Vogue’ moment all along. THANKS BRITNEY...

(to read more click here)

Busy Is As Bitchy Does

2011-01-31T17:45:00.001+01:00

So one of the interesting things about this full diary I seem to have developed is that I've become this sort of of super-organised, highly-motivated worker that like, totally DOES STUFF.

This morning alone I was up bright and early, shunned the bus for a brisk walk to wake me up and get me going (I KNOW. THERE ARE BETTER WAYS TO DO THAT THAN POWER-WALKING TO ADELE. But work with me here.) to write an original piece of work and redrafted another, go to work, do some journalism-type stuff, research a job opportunity, take out 5 minutes to poop (because DEAR GOD performance anxiety in a public loo is crippling) and text my bestie about the merits of Resident Evil and how we quote my mother too much. Because we do. Every conversation we have is laced with what Jane says. We're mad for it.

I went the whole week just gone without seeing Calum. Our schedules just didn't match. Yeah. I said schedules. I'm a dick. He even texted me to say, I know that you are working very hard, and I'm very proud of you. He spoilt it ever so slightly by following that up with, Unless you're at home watching ER or masturbating with a big black dildo again.

I've missed him, but part of this busybusybusy stuff means planning time in my diary to chill the bejesus out, too. In fact, I felt that I had successfully accomplished so much last week that when I felt sick with hunger when popping to the bank I decided to randomly treat myself.

TO A THREE-COURSE MEAL.

Alone.

Which to me is not bizarre at all- you get to enjoy gorgeous food without it going cold as you make small talk about the weather or the UTI you have that just won't clear up. As I asked the waitress for a table for one, and then requested a corner table, she frowned and said, "Are you in hiding from somebody?" Then she seemed to take pity on me and tried to converse throughout the delivery of said three courses. That was reason enough not to tip. Can't a girl be left alone? That's code for I DON'T CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE SAYING.

So Saturday night Calum and I had our standing appointment for Saturday Night Bollocks i.e. two-for-one on Dominoes delivery and the crappest TV we can find. We even had the added bonus of his sick boyfriend with us too. We thought that after X-Factor had finished that we might struggle with something equally as brain-dead to pass our eves BUT NO. Take Me Out? TELEVISION GENIUS.

Okay, if you haven't seen this sort out your life. Thirty women all have lights and a single man comes onstage to try to impress them. It's a case of, "No likey, no lighty," as the girls pull the plug on any suitor not deemed... well. Suitable. They're all desperate to get taken out, and then never like the chap that chose them after the date. I bet they have a cheeky slap and tickle anyway. That's the kind of show it is.

It's the most horrendous piece of television you're ever likely to see. "Paula," the presenter says, "Why did you turn your light off when Derek said he was a gentleman? Isn't that what all ladies are after?" Paula is inevitably dressed in something discounted from Topshop and is the colour of an MFI fibreboard desk. "Well, you see- I like a tough man really," Paula replies, which is essentially code for a man who treats her like shit so that her self-esteem is so low that she is an easy shag, meaning she never has to go to bed on a Saturday night alone. Gentlemen don't bed ladies that quickly, so she'd become dejected and disheartened fast. It'd be a waste of the dress.

It's brilliant.

So brilliant, in fact, that even when Cal and I broke tradition and actually WENT OUT one Saturday, we spent the whole evening parked with a soft drink equidistant from the bar and the door so as best situated to pass comment on the clientele of the evening as if they too were the girls on Take Me Out.

"Slag," we said, as a man in a bright pink shirt passed.

"Urgh. Know when to say no to tiger print," we said about a fat girl with toe cleavage.

Internet, we've met, right? You KNOW that I'm a bitch. No surprises.

"Calum," I said, basking in the glory of his company. "I think my wedding night will be like this you know." He looked at me. "Honey, I'm a gay," he replied. "We're not getting married."

I laughed. "I didn't mean that. I feel like all my wedding guests will be drinking and laughing and having a good time, and the groom will just get in the way of you and me sat at a corner table saying nasty things about what he is wearing and I'll be pissed off that I'm not at home watching telly instead."

Calum smiled. "I think you're wedding night will be like that too."

I hope it is, you know. And the wedding breakfast will be stuffed-crust pizza, and my wedding dress will have an elasticated waist. I'm dead classy like that. When I'm not too busy.

Did I Ever Tell You About The Time I Got Offered Money For Sex? No?

2011-01-24T17:20:00.000+01:00

*rude disclaimer: I talk about cats in this post quite a lot, if you know what I mean. Hi, mum!

I've been a right proper pissy cow lately. No, Internet, you don't have to be nice to be about it- I know I have. But do you know what I think it was? TOO MUCH FREE TIME ON MY HANDS.

There is, after all, only so many times a girl can wank herself off to pass the afternoon.

And it wasn't until I got dead busy these past few weeks (NOT BUSY ENOUGH TO STOP ME TWEETING ABOUT BEING BUSY, OBVI) that I realised how much I get from a full diary. What do they say? If you need something doing ask a busy woman? Well, hey there! Over here!

And look. I happen to know that there are people out there who actually work for a living over this student malarky. All I have to do is look at my dear old dad- he doesn't see daylight Monday through Friday for the six months of the year that the sun goes into hiding. And no, I don't have kids or a mortgage or a husband to support. I don't even own a basil plant because I killed the one I did once have. But indulge my new status as a do-er. I do. In fact, I don't even bother to make friends with people who don't indulge me as a rule. Be my adoring audience or FUCK OFF.

Anyway. I'm within spitting distance of graduating. I'm on the home run. So with 80% of my undergraduate degree riding on the next 12 weeks of study OF COURSE I took on a fancy copyediting job writing the promotional brochures for the university. A job that I thought would be great experience but has only served to teach me that the experience of writing copy for other people for the rest of my life 'aint one I'm interested in.

I KNOW. HOW NICE TO HAVE THE CHOICE. I get it. Anyone with actual responsibility can indeed tell me to go suck eggs. Or something.

My point is this: excited at finally finding status as something other than a student bum, plus many hours of writing words for other people, plus my regular job, equals a Laura Jane Williams who has felt more herself since getting January out of her system than since all that time ago when I got to sleep with college boys in America. URM. I mean indulge in a cultural exchange with one of the greatest nations on the planet.

Obviously.

Not that feeling myself was in lieu of feeling somebody else, though. I could have felt somebody this past Saturday night. AND been paid. Because uh-huh. I got propositioned as a prostitute.

I swear, if the next thing you say is "For how much?" I'll have to dump you for your best friend.

I went out gay clubbing, and was hanging out in the unisex loo (otherwise known as THE COTTAGE. I love it.) as you do when in a space with that many homosexuals and mirrors. I've always hated having to leave the fag to my hag outside the ladies loo, and it was dead novel to me that we could all take a pee together. And when I couldn't quite wrangle myself out of my playsuit, we did.

...

...

... And I'm back.

Internet, you know me. I'll talk to anyone. Especially when I've had a few cheeky drinks.

(SIDENOTE: And let me tell you, gay drinks are potent. I got home at 6 a.m. and lay in bed with the room spinning. "Bloody hell," I thought to myself. "I cannot be this drunk. I've got twelve hours before I have to get ready to go to that really fancy ball I spent a small fortune on a ticket for. My friend is driving down from Leeds and everything. I can't cancel. I need to be sober. This is really going to hurt in the morn- OH WAIT IT IS THE MORNING." I tried watching some ER and drinking loads of water, talking to myself in the mirror. "You're okay, you're okay, you're okay." I was not okay. So I made a decision. I was to go to the bathroom and in the style of an Olsen twin chuck up what I could. And do you know what? It was pink. It was red. It was blue. It was purple. I swear to god the only thing missing was a bit of glitter and I could have thrown my own chuffing gay pride breakfast.)

(Binge drinking is bad, kids.)

(Especially when you've paid all that money just to see it in the toilet.)

(Sooooo: binge drinking is bad if you can't keep it down. Talk about a poor return on investment.)

So as I ~~sway~~ stand in front of the basin washing my hands, a man at the side of me leans in and says, "Is you a lesbian, like?"

Now I don't know about you but when somebody can't even use grammar properly in their speech, I know for sure they 'aint a candidate for the semi-colon test. And if you can't pass that test then we just can't be cool. So I smile politely and reply, "No, no, despite the poster of a naked woman on my wall that my dad thinks makes me a gay, I'm just here with friends." And I left it at that.

The same man sidled up to me when I was at the bar. "So you isn't a lesbian and that then?" I looked at him. "No, no," I said, and placed my order. "I can get it for you like, innit?" he said, "Cuz you is not a lesbian? Innit?" It took me a minute to understand him. "I've got it, thanks." I said, and he pulled out a wad of twenty pound notes from his pocket. "I mean, you is looking for a bloke and that, innit? You's take the pussy, you dunna lick the pussy?"

WAIT. ONE. MINUTE.

Take the pussy, not lick the pussy? Isn't that the same thing? And why are you showing me your rolls of purple cash when you say that? AND SAYING PUSSY TO A STRANGER?

I looked him right in the eye. He nodded at me. He nodded at his cash. He nodded at me again. I continued to look him right in the eye. In that ten seconds, I have absolutely no doubt in my drunken mind that I was absolutely, CATEGORICALLY, being offered money by this man to sleep with him and his poor use of the English language.

I. Have. Not. A. Single. Doubt.

"I'm a lesbian," I replied, and he shouted after me, "So you's like the pussy then!" and I turned magenta and laughed in his face.

"I think I just got offered sex for money," I reported back to my gays. "Really, that's terrib- OHMYGOD KYLIE IS ON!" they replied. And I didn't think much more of it until I went back into the Cottage and there he was.

THAT WAS THE GUY I mouthed at Calum, so he put on his straight voice and said to the chap, "Alright mate."

"Is you with her is it?" the guy replied, nodding toward me.

"Nah," said Cal. "Can't afford it."

"Ah, is she not a lesbian and that then? She take the pussy not lick the pussy?" My eyes shot to the floor.

I heard our friend join us and explain that I hadn't had a wax in ages, and that I was on my period, and that I wasn't worth the money as this guy, I SWEAR TO FREAKING GOD, just listened to them as if weighing up whether an investment might be worth it. And I was that paralysed by... well. I don't know by what. BY THE FACT THAT I WAS BEING OFFERED MONEY FOR SEX AND A STRANGER WAS ESSENTIALLY BARTERING FOR ME PROBABLY.

So I just stood there whispering, "I'm a lesbian, I'm a lesbian, I'm a lesbian," and nodding whenever Calum knocked me in the ribs as we tried to navigate past this guy and out of The Cottage so that we never had to see him ever again.

And that part of my Life List? That bit that says, "Have sex with a man for money"?

It will forever go unchecked.

Quote, End Quote

2011-01-18T11:33:00.000+01:00

My baby brother Jack has just moved to LONDON! to forge out a career for himself in television. It has to be written as LONDON! because for anybody who has to declare that they were born in Derby on their passport application, LONDON! is like a diabetic that dreams of chocolate factories and isn't even bothered about where Willy has put his Wonka.

i.e. it's a really big deal, even if the reality doesn't quite live up to the dream. Too much chocolate does indeed make you nauseous.

Jack Skyped Mama today, whilst I happened to be around.

"I've got a job on Friday," he said, all excited for his first LONDON! job. "As a runner on a music video being filmed in East Sussex."

"That's great news!" exclaimed Mama. "Well done! Brilliant!" she said.

And then we carried on discussing LONDON! and how the streets really are paved with gold.

As my brother was ringing off, Mum said to him, "So have they told you what to wear on Friday then?"

Jack stared at her through the webcam. "What to wear?"

"Yeah. For your run."

"Mum, do you know what I'm doing on Friday?" asked Jack.

"Yes, don't talk to me like I'm an idiot. You're running on a beach in a music video, like Brideshead Revisited. You never know where it might take you- somebody might see how handsome you are and ask you to run in their video!"

And that is the best reason I can think of to get out of Derby.

A Quarter-Life Crisis in Shades of Blue

2011-01-17T22:27:00.003+01:00

I sodding hate January.

I hate that I'm fat in January. I hate the grey in January. I hate that for about ten minutes on the first day of January there seems to be an overarching sense of can-do and positivity that one can only mourn for the rest of of the month, like Liz Jones over her career or the fact that anybody ever let ER get cancelled.

I hate that January makes me so dreary. I'm just not fun in January.

January is like that boyfriend who never did really appreciate your dry wit and ageless charm, but whom you always just have that one last tryst with. It happens when you get a bit squiffy every New Year's Eve, and you can spend the three weeks afterward wondering why he hasn't called and checking the size of the pores in your nose because maybe that was what turned him off. You can pass hours standing in front of the mirror contorting yourself into any number of positions he might have seen you in (WE'VE ALL DONE IT) and possibly refusing to shave any body hair from your self as a punishment for the stupidity of falling for his charms AGAIN.

It's a pit of self-loathing, and that pit of self-loathing is called JANUARY.

And it needs a wax.

January is wet. January complains too much. January makes you reassess everything you previously knew to be true and real and definite in this life in such depth of self-loathing that your belly button becomes your elbow. It makes you go a little bit mad.

I went to Mama to seek a little solace and familial advice. "Oh bloody hell, don't come to me for cheering up. I've my own shit to deal with," she said. And then laughed. "I don't know. Just. Don't ever get your hopes up about anything, and that way you can't get disappointed can you?"

And the Inspirational Motivator of the Year Award goes to...!

I'm not depressed in January. I'm just a little blue. It's Blue Monday after all, the most depressing day of the year. Things can only get better, right? I really bloody hope so. Because January also makes me a bit crazy.

And I don't even want to tell you that I did this next thing.

It took me three hours, two cups of tea and six cigarettes to admit to Calum and Lee that I had done something really embarrassing in my desperate attempt to get over January. Like, not only had I slept with that boyfriend who never appreciated me anyway, but that I was now stalking him at work and had added his new girlfriend on Facebook. But worse.

Look. I'm not proud of this, but... I bought a book. This book.

I'm all for self-improvement but somehow, I have become the girl that identifies with the promise, "Rather than feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, readers can turn questions into maps that lead toward creating a career, a relationship and a life that fits just like a favorite pair of jeans."

Firstly, JEANS NEVER FIT ANYBODY PROPERLY.

Secondly, I DON'T NEED A SECOND POINT.

And now every time I speak to either of them they calmer mutter, "But you're a twenty-everything." And I less calmly tell them to fuck off. I'm sure there must be an anger management guide included in the "twenties traiangle" of who am I? What do I want? How do I get it?

Well. I am Laura Jane Williams. I want January to be over, and if I wait another 14 days under my duvet voila! I'll have everything I ever wanted. A refund on the £7 I spent on this book during a January trawl on Amazon would be great, too. In the meantime, I'll make podcasts instead. I hate January in this, too.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

As If We Needed Any Evidence That I'm So Not Even Close To Being A Mother. Or A Grown-Up.

2011-01-03T21:00:00.002+01:00

The day after I got to Mum and Dad's for Christmas I got woken up quite unceremoniously. "Come on," Mama Jane yelled in my sleeping face, "Cilla next door is having a coffee morning for charity. She's made some dolls out of twigs that we've got to go and buy."

It wasn't a request.

I pulled on my super-skinnies, because this was- after all- before the fifteen pounds of Christmas food I was to consume over the final days of 2010, and smeared on the lippy. I'm normally just a lip balm kinda of a girl, but as much as attending a charity coffee morning for the middle-aged wasn't a request neither was, "Looking all pasty. You come over all washed out when you don't have colour on your lips." That was Mama Jane too.

(SIDE-NOTE: To save time and energy on my hair in the mornings, I regularly sleep with a braid in my wet hair so that with a bit of body mousse when I wake up I can rock a sort of Russell Brand-come-Tina Turner 'do that makes me feel surprisingly sassy-pants for how little effort I put into it. The one morning I spent thirty minutes blowing out and using GHD's on my hair to get it silky-smooth Mama Jane greeted me with, "I do like your hair... with some volume." Needless to say, I've spent the holiday season rocking the curls.)

(ABSOLUTE evidence that despite Mama Jane claiming that we've monopolised the telly for the holidays, SHE MONOPOLISES OUR LIVES. If Jane 'aint happy, then 'aint nobody happy.)

Anyway, long story short? At this coffee morning that I didn't even want to go to except for the fact that I might be able to laugh at the twig dolls, Mama's neighbour mentioned she was looking for a babysitter on New Year's Eve. You know, if we knew anybody, or anything. I looked right at her. "I'll do it," I said, knowing that the difference to my New Year plans would be the difference between her couch and mine.

"I'm sorry. What?" she replied.

"I'll do it," I said.

I couldn't figure out if the look on the woman's face was sheer horror at the thought of this manically-hair-styled, Heath Ledger as the Joker lipsticked alleged 24 year old was threatening to be near her eighteen-month old kid, or relief that the search was over. Maybe it was just worry for my social life.

"If you're sure?" she said. I reasoned that I had no plans, and that if I could help out a woman in need then I would. Why wouldn't I? The kid would be in bed, I wouldn't have to actually DO anything. Even on the day when I banged on the door of her house with a gusto I thought reflected my enthusiasm for the event she seemed unnerved by me. Like, why wasn't I planning to roll around in a gutter covered in my own vomit?

I know, lady. Even my own mother is disappointed in me.

So come the 31st of December and I had my bag packed for the long walk across the road. Party food? CHECK. Fancy pen and paper to write out highlights of 2010? CHECK. Laptop to watch ER on when suitable amount of reflection accomplished? CHECK. I was good to go. WHAT A PIECE OF CAKE, I thought.

I echoed this sentiment to the group of people who were doing the middle-aged version of pre-gaming at my destination. They seemed concerned as to why I wasn't pushed up against a local in the pub- a pub I went into for the first time this Christmas and had two hours of old men grabbing my bum and waist as they passed as if the place was packed and they could only navigate around my curves if they grabbed on to them. The jig was up when I finally turned around and saw the fifteen feet of space between my back and the bar. Excuse me indeed.

But instead of trying to infer their pot-bellied mates had groped me I went for the fail-safe line. "I just really believe that whatever you are doing when the clock strikes midnight is what you'll be doing all year," I said. "So I want to be writing."

One of them laughed. "Well let's just hope you aren't nursing a crying baby then!"

I smiled politely.

Mum and Dad gave me their assurances that baby probably wouldn't wake, that if she did I probably didn't need to go up, and if I decided to go and comfort her then all I had to do was wrap her in the duvet of the bed next to the cot and let her sleep there instead. Apparently, that calms her right down.

Hands up if you can see where I am going with this.

Ten minutes after the door closed for the night, baby started crying. "Oh," I thought, "She's self-soothing. She just likes the sound of her own voice." I mean, I can totally relate to THAT.

But as I stood in the open-plan kitchen listening to this kid get louder and louder through the baby monitor I suddenly thought, "Well they've only been gone a little while. What if they need to pop back for something and this kid is screaming because something is wrong and all I've done is turn up the telly to drown her out?" So I went to go and check. I wasn't being paid for my services but I didn't want social services on my ass. Not unless social services happens to be cute, tall, artistic, emotionally capable and with a higher IQ than me.

This kid FREAKED OUT when she saw me. Screamed. Got EVEN LOUDER. I put on my happy face and silly face and reassuring face, scooping her up and sticking out my tongue and showing her her reflection and pulling off her sleep suit and putting it on again and wrapping the duvet around her then moving the cushions and as I got hotter and hotter and more and more frustrated and then I realised I was making too much of a fuss and was probably making things worse. So I sang.

I'll give you a hot second to get the chuckles out of your system.

I panicked!

I sang, and simultaneously hoped that nobody did indeed pop back for a forgotten something because then they'd hear me repeating the first verse to Hit Me Baby One More Time over and over because my mind went a bit blank and I didn't know what else to do.

The punchline: it shouldn't have been singing.

This kid screamed and screamed again until I had another epiphany: THE NAPPY. IT HAD TO BE HER NAPPY, RIGHT?

Now, I have never changed a nappy before. And all I could think was to call my own mother for guidance but I figured a whole year of mockery ("AND SHE COULDN'T EVEN CHANGE THE NAPPY!") wasn't worth it. I could figure this out. No problem. Easy. I undid the poppers to the sleep suit and held up the baby by her underarms. She didn't smell bad. Well, I didn't think so. I asked her if she wanted changing. I'm pretty sure she said yes. Seemed to me that as long as I ended up with the blue tags at the front, no-one would ever be able to tell that I had done anything, even if I was doing it in vain.

I COULD NOT get those bastard blue tags to the front of the bastard nappy.

Hot, red-faced, and tears in eyes- and that was just me- I took the baby downstairs with me, nappy hanging half-way off. The movement seemed to settle her for a little while. By this time a good hour and half had passed and it was etching closer to midnight. I hadn't even written a letter to the universe yet OR ANYTHING.

As soon as I sat down with her on my lap she started crying again and as I leaned my head back on the sofa I thought to myself, "Yes. This is why I always said I would adopt 7 year olds." I tried giving her chocolate, did some more Britney, jostled her about a bit. Nothing. I wanted to scream.

Sod this for a bag of nuts, I decided. I'm putting bloody ER on.

Well I'll say this for the kid- she likes drama. Anytime there was a blunt-force trauma or a GSW to the left chest or an amputation by a resident in the field she shut right up. The emotional stuff- the Season 7 glory of Greene and Courday or Abbey and Luca- she continued to ball. But GODDAMN you'd better believed that I treasured those four minute bouts of silence when they came.

Bliss.

As the clock crept closer and closer to midnight I became increasingly anxious that I was in danger of seeing in my new year with a kid on my hip. Which, in case you are new to this blog, IS SO NOT IN THE PLAN. It isn't even in the ten year plan. Definitely not in the five year plan. FUCK ME IN THE ASS WITH A COURGETTE IT MOST CERTAINLY IS NOT PART OF THE 2011 PLAN.

And as soon as the toddler sensed my clock-watching the tears went up a notch. Like that was possible. It was HORRIBLE. I swung her around some. I showed her the kitchen set her dad said always made her smile. I danced a bit. I guided her hand to pet the dog. I talked in whispers and did big smiles and panicked and panicked and panicked and willed her with every part of my being to SHUT THE BLOODY HELL UP so that I could bed her down and pick up a pen for when the ball dropped. She had been crying for three hours. Save for the intrigue into emergency medicine. I WAS OFFICIALLY PISSED OFF WITH HER and totally out of ideas.

And then somehow, I accidentally did a peek-a-boo.

She shut up.

I froze.

"Peek-a-boo!" I slowly repeated.

The little shit giggled.

"Peek-a-boo!"

Giggle.

"PEEK-A-BOO-PEEK-A-BOO-PEEK-A-BOO!" I cried AND SHE PRACTICALLY WET HERSELF WITH EXCITEMENT.

"That's it?" I asked her? "Peek-a-boo?"

Giggles.

Internet. I could have weeped with ten-to-midnight JOY and then blown you just for fun.

Peek-a-fucking-boo. Three hours of crying for a bollocksing peek-a-sodding-boo.

It seemed a little late to be picking up a pen now, so naff it I thought, she stayed up with me. We put on the telly and watched the fireworks crackle and we peek-a-booed for another twenty minutes, all around the living room. This kid had a personality transplant- literally it was as if she had turned to me and gone, "It took you long enough to figure that one out, huh? Can we go get a beer now? It's 2011, baby!"

2011. Wow. The Year I Keep My Legs Together In Case I End Up With One Of These Of My Own. I can't see in another New Year like that.

Ever.

And Then It Was All Over, And We Started All Over Again

2010-12-30T23:45:00.000+01:00

So I'm not so much typing this blog entry as much as I'm mashing the keys to my MacBook with pudgy, mincemeat-filled shovels of fingers and hoping for the best. I can't even cross the fat sausages for good luck. Not unaided.

The whole snow-on-the-ground thing meant December was officially a No Running Month, and I have successfully eaten the cupboards bare here at mum and dad's- and I've only been here ten days. In fact, not long after I arrived Mama asked Dad to pick up a few bits on his way back from ~~the pub~~ ~~the golf course~~ ~~giving mincemeat penis' to strangers~~ wherever he was going. "But we've got loads in," said Dad. Mama looked at him. "That was before Laura had breakfast," she replied.

It's alright for her. She's so bloody skinny that she barely has one chin, let alone my six. I've taken to calling her a fat bitch as a sort of passive-aggressive coping mechanism. As in, "Could you get me a glass of water and a couple of ibuprofen please Laura-Loo?" "Sure- FAT BITCH."

It's almost a relief that the holidays are over. Then I can at least take off New Year's Day from consuming my own body weight in Malteesers. Probably.

Oh, 2011, what fun we shall have! Quite like 2010 and I had. I've sort of been a downmarket version of Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love this year. Except for she did Italy, India and finished her year of self-discovery in the arms of a fit Brazilian in Bali. I did America, Italy and then finished my year of self-discovery fat and alone in Derby. My book would be called Eat, Eat, Eat. She wins.

2010 has most visibly been marked by the self-mutilation I inflicted on myself: a tattoo to punctuate how heartbreak and pain led me to foreign lands and altered the course of my life FOR THE REST OF ALL ETERNITY, and a nose piercing that Dad claimed had not only ostracized me from a large proportion of the job market but from society as a whole as well. Who knew a simple stud could achieve so much? Or that a grown woman could still be crushed to think she had somehow disappointed Daddy. Don't tell him I said that.

Oh America- you captured my heart this year. January through April you reminded me of the kindness of strangers, and how much I love to perform, and just how damned cute your boys are. I might not always have been understood over there but hell- cute is a universal language. AM I RIGHT?

And Italy. All summer you busted my balls with your predilection for machiato before ANYTHING productive because coffee is productive in itself, apparently, and you led me to meet some of the most amazingly influential people who probably will never realise the impact they have had on my life, and then you impressed me with just how cute your boys are. And I might not always have been understood over there, either, but HELL. CUTE IS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE. And I KNOW I'm right there.

Then finally, after eight months of planes and trains and Skype calls and travel budgets and a wardrobe limited to only what I could pack in a suitcase, there was an autumn return to Derby. The House of Pastelle, too much cider, entire months written off to nothing but shame and debauchery and the boys? Well. To be honest, not so cute. I kinda can't wait to blow this popsicle joint. Can I get an a-men?

Or maybe just a-mAn?

No?

This year I had a book published. I launched a 'zine. I became News and Politics editor of my university's magazine. I learnt things about myself by being pushed to my limits, by both myself and mostly by others. Pricks. I made more new friends than a lot of people make in a decade and I've learnt that wherever I lay my hat, that is my home. (AT LEAST FOR THAT NIGHT, ANYWAY. WAY-OH!)

I'll be seeing in the New Year alone, with a pen and paper and my thoughts. I've never had a good new year's, what with all of the expectation and hype and inability to get served at the bar so now I've learnt that the best way for me to have fun is by buying in party food for one, snuggling down in front of the fire for the evening, and writing. Seeing in the coming year as I mean to continue with it: creating. I know that makes me a loser, but I'm a loser with a bloody brilliant year behind her.

See?

2010 in Photos from Laura Jane Williams on Vimeo.

Happy New Year, Internet. May 2011 be just as fabulous, and here's hoping the queue for the bar ain't too bad.

YOU KNOW YOU CAN'T DO THAT WHEN CHELSEA IS HERE, DON'T YOU?

2010-12-23T00:46:00.002+01:00

If I have said this once over the past five days then I've said it 22,067 times. Oh! Hold on! Dad just farted as he opened the back door to let out the dog. He thinks that means we haven't heard. 22,068.

And counting.

I was absolutely, categorically, 100% intending to have the month of December sort of trickle off into a quiet Christmas, proudly without angst or worry about the apparent lack of direction I currently seem to have in my life AT ALL.

I've had no deadlines and no obligations to end the year, not really, and so I was absolutely, categorically, 100% going to buckle down, stay out of the cold, and try and get a head start on 2011.

I was absolutely, categorically, 100% not just going to lay in bed and rent movies from iTunes (IT'S JUST TOO EASY) and I was absolutely, categorically, 100% not just going to piss off to mum and dad's and start the Christmas holiday ten days early.

Absolutely.

But you see, The House of Pastelle just got so quiet. And it has been so cold. And Dad might have mentioned after my last visit home that what with actually only living half an hour away and fixing plans to move back to America quite soon, I might want to think about coming home more now. You know. Whilst I can. I don't think he expected to find me kerb-side two days later with four suitcases, my slippers, and dirty laundry.

What's the betting I get a plane ticket from Santa?

So I've been hanging Chez Williams for nearly a week already and boy-oh-boy, has something hit me slap-bang in the face. NEWSFLASH. We fart a lot. And then laugh.

Mum often trumps and then looks surprised. Dad does it as he walks, to keep the air moving. The dog lets it build up for hours and gasses us slowly. I'm loud, proud, and entirely unapologetic. My brother just goes to the loo.

My American friend Chelsea (She's American. Of course she is called Chelsea.) is coming to spend Christmas with us. I met her when I was in Detroit earlier this year and she is studying here in the YUK with no family to call her own over the holidays. So she gets mine for four days.

I hope she sees the funny side.

And doesn't inhale.

Texting me today she asked, "Is there anything I need to bring?" I had already briefed her on the itinerary of the break- Christmas Eve lunch at a cosy pub, locking ourselves in the house for 24 hours thereafter, possible baking of mince-pies, lots of soap operas, most definitely some in-family bickering, selection boxes for breakfast, and a Boxing Day walk somewhere pretty where we let our thighs rub together to keep warm.

"A walk?" she had asked me.
"Yes, a walk," I had replied, "so bring some sensible shoes."
"What? No pumps?" she had said.
"No, no pumps," I had replied.
"What about these?" she asked, pointing to her heeled boots.
"Urm, not really what I had in mind," I replied.
"Oh" she said.
"Just... don't worry." I decided. "We'll find you something."

Pumps, indeed.

So when she texted finalising the arrangements I thought long and hard about if she should bring anything. I went with, "Yeah- a sense of humour. Farting and toilet jokes come as standard here."

She replied with that horrendous, "LOL" and I thought to myself, "Hmmmm. Perhaps she won't be so much laughing out loud as out-and-out choking." I hope we don't ruin her illusion of how we refined English celebrate en famille.

Or even worse: join in.

(And before I go- Merry Christmas, Internet! May all your holiday wishes come true and remain scentless. Ho, ho, ho.)

Laura Jane Williams /

In which my fragmented sentences become a whole new animal- ironic, considering this is a post about graduating from a writing degree.

On my bucket list I am adding, "Punch Ryanair boss in the face really, really hard" because his stupid company makes me really very cross. In other news: kindness.

The one where the universe totally kicks my arse and at nearly 26 years old I drink Absinthe for both the first and last time. Because Absinthe is evil. Like, Pol Pot and Hiltler kind of evil.

Laura Gaga rears her arse again, and scaring any potential man far, far away. Also: anal jokes.

In which I cover frosting in a tub, British idioms, compare myself to Blair Waldorf (kinda) and don't really have a point. What do you mean "again"? Okay fine. Again.

Keywords for 2012, slutty statements, and reminding myself that being this nuts is actually quite on purpose

A punctuationless rant on how right now this very second I am totally over my life, and would like to be asleep now please. Kthxbye.

I know an end-of-year post is cliche, but it's also like, totally important to be all self-aware and that, innit?

I told this story to my mum and her only question was, "Yes, but was your bum clean?"

Possibly, I am drunk. Or horny. Or both.

I'd have Eric Northman's babies and still go back for more

Look, writing a blog post everyday is like, totally challenging MAN.

Food + Bitching about Rome + More Food = I probably need to get a hobby

The picture has nothing to do with the post, I just liked it.

Perving on Innocent Strangers

If you are sensitive to Very Bad Words just go on ahead and skip this one

Food, the Fat Girl, and a reverie about a Turkey

Teaching, learning, and how the Universe is so awesome that she wants me to learn the difference between the two.

This is all largely irrelevant to anyone or anything other than that directly pertaining to me

Internet. That was some pretty intense make-up sex. I think part of that was illegal in everywhere but Wales.

Dipping a toe in the pool of modern existentialism and other ways to say 'Will you take me back?'

Bye For Now

I possibly come across as particularly anti-Catholic in this, but that totally isn't what I mean. I love everybody! Even the Pope!

This was supposed to be about my New Life in Rome, but quickly descended into a reverie about the sexuality of Italian men. I don’t think I’m surprised.

Look, this isn't woe is freakin' me what with the whole Moving to Italy thing but SERIOUSLY. I'm starting to get a little pissed.

Unless you are familiar with the many chick-flick rom-coms that iTunes frequently reduce to 99p, you might be lost with this one. I’m not sorry.

If I haven’t already mentioned it, Yeah. I’ve moved to Italy. No biggie… EXCEPT THAT IT IS.

I realise that this is more information about my vagina then you ever knew you needed to know, Internet

Lesson 101: Love and Shit. Brought to you by an English teacher who should know better, and her students who aren't expected to care

Inappropriate rap-a-longs and the astounding insights of minors.

One of those ones where I don't even really *get* to the point because I saw something shiny and got distracted

A self-indulgent reflection on the hows and whys of Laura Jane Williams, in several parts.

A self-indulgent reflection on the hows and whys of Laura Jane Williams, in several parts.

A self-indulgent reflection on the hows and whys of Laura Jane Williams, in several parts.*

Writing books about rude things, being mean about children, making hasty decisions that alter the course of an entire destiny, and other extremely important Rites of Passage.

A month of boys who are so awesome they have two names, being overly-sensitive to the judgement of others, and writing a whole post without the word Vagina. Sort of.

In which I suffer enormously, have sex, and anticipate a very angry phone call from my mother.

In which I contemplate why I said I’d never come back, have a child berate me, and make a very pertinent realisation

In which I win awards for my vagina and accidentally agree to move to Rome.

Darby and Joan: May 2011

Because Looming Deadlines Give You Wings. And Diarrhea.

This Post Is So Long It Might Hit Your Cervix

Well March Just Went Right On Ahead And Passed Me By

Ping, Pang, (Pat) Pong

Can I Have Your Number? Can I? Can I? Can I have It?

High Self-Esteem: A Manifesto

Busy Is As Bitchy Does

Did I Ever Tell You About The Time I Got Offered Money For Sex? No?

Quote, End Quote

A Quarter-Life Crisis in Shades of Blue

As If We Needed Any Evidence That I'm So Not Even Close To Being A Mother. Or A Grown-Up.

And Then It Was All Over, And We Started All Over Again

YOU KNOW YOU CAN'T DO THAT WHEN CHELSEA IS HERE, DON'T YOU?

One of those ones where I don't even really get to the point because I saw something shiny and got distracted