Who Are You?: kathryn.

Where Are You?: In front of a computer, in an english seaside town. It is may, yet the light has that english grey quality that means it could as well be october or january.

What Are You?: hopelessly in love. with anyone and everyone. way too plain to be interesting.

What do you make?: a fool of myself. Lemon cake. and sometimes biscuits. My scrap book. Embarrassing remarks.

What do you love?: books books and more books. with pictures. marlene dietrich. someone to love. books books and more books. with pictures. emails, letters, and most especially, mysterious parcels with a hand-written address. People, who thankfully don't often find out.

What do you hate?: Stuff that I can't understand. Winter, but especially the bit just before winter. Um, autumn, i suppose it's more commonly known as. Lots and lots of people, irrationally.

What do you listen to?: Ella fitzgerald, first and foremost. Subway sect, martha reeves and the vandellas, the donnas, leonard bernstein (especially, but not only the chichester psalms and west side story.) john coltrane and thelonius monk. the VU. That nice humming noise that fridges make when it's quiet. people turning pages in the library. I listen for the thump onto the doormat of letters that don't actually come. I live in hope.

What do you watch?: way too much television. quality is no issue. other people. musicals, passionately, as if they were a substitute for actual life. Films with marilyn monroe in.

What do you drink?: In pubs, vodka and cranberry, bitter lemon and diet coke with a straw. anywhere else, pineapple juice. cups and cups of english breakfast tea.

What do you smoke?: Nothing. My friend used to smoke cinnamon tea bags and I have considered this, but ultimately I think it would be a mistake.

What do you take?: Soluble aspirin.

What do you believe in?: Hope. That i am misguided in including my email address here (kate1200@email.com), as no-one will write to me and I shall feel slightly silly.

When We Were 16

Where were you?: School, most of the time, in yet another english seaside town.

What were you?: Strange, persistent and ugly.

What did you wear?: Uncoordinated outfits that made a lot more sense in my head than out of it. A hell of a lot of hair dye. a palpable air of envy.

What did you listen to?: The crystals, the shangri-las, the supremes. Thelonius Monk and the carpenters. pulp.

What did you watch?: other people and eastenders. dirty dancing over and over and over again. my formative experiences of romance were all formed by this film. This explains a lot. Trees, so I could work out how to draw them.

What did you love?: Edie, edie, edie. fake-looking silver bleached hair. Books, more books. My friend jon who had a to die for haircut and suede shoes. My carefully selected canon of famous people.

What did you hate?: Everyone prettier, cleverer, nicer, more talented, and more stylish than me. Pretty much everyone, then.

What did you drink?: Just about anything I could get my hands on, although cheap horrible vodka featured highly.

What did you smoke?: I really wanted to smoke cigarettes properly so I could have a silver cigarette case with my initials on, but sadly they made me choke. So nothing. I looked down on the idea of weed as being for people with dreadlocks.

What did you take?: I took the piss, regularly and with quiet joy, out of everyone I met. This is not a strategy i would recommend for making friends and influencing people. I also took a copy of The Female Eunuch from someone's house because I was so desperate to read it. I didn't consider this as stealing at the time, but if you are reading I would like to apologise.

What did you want to be?: Just someone. Not sure who. Preferrably someone with a damn fine haircut and good legs, such as sally bowles, or perhaps edie again.

Who did you fight?: I fought with everyone who dared to express an opinion which I thought was wrong. Physically, I fought no-one because I had a strange aversion to getting my head kicked in.

Who/What did you believe in?: I believed religiously in Andy Warhol and Richey Manic. I truly believed that if you thought about it hard enough, you could transform yourself into someone else who was cooler and had a better wardrobe. I believed that one day I would find true love.

Where did you go?: I went to the library. I went home. I went to school. I went to horrible pubs and wished I had stayed at home and watched eastenders.

What did you learn?: Trees are actually quite hard to draw. to get your hair _really_ silver you'll need a toner. it's not the end of the world if he doesn't like you back, except that you'll probably never get that compilation tape made for you. Many ideas that sound really trite, but most especially - things do get better

Tangents Front Page

email