Rubbing one's hands together...

[raven]

I haven’t gone away, or lost access, or anything; I have been reading my friends page, believe it or not. I just haven’t been updating. Once you get in the habit of staying in bed… I don’t know.

Anyway, Mani came round the day after Boxing Day. Mani is my oldest friend, bar none; her mother is my mother’s best friend, and she and her family descended on Saturday afternoon. There were four of them, Mani, her mum (Mita), her mum’s sister (Rita), her brother (Kartik), and the goldfish, Jasmine and Aladdin (Mani wanted to call them Sirius and Remus, but no-one else agreed and besides they might start sprouting fur at monthly intervals). Apparently they hadn’t found anyone to feed them on their trip round the country and so had thrown the hapless creatures into a plastic box full of water and bunged them in the car. They’re doing quite well with these two goldfish. They were acquired in July and are still not dead.

They had all come up from Bishop’s Stortford, which is near Chelmsford in Essex. I ought to mention that I’m only just getting used to this fact; it is quite possible this is the longest they have ever stayed in one place. I was born at Oxford Street, Liverpool; so was Mani. Three years after that, we moved to Heswall (very near where osiris13 lives now), and they moved to Spital, which is also on the Wirral. But we didn’t move again, and they moved to Coventry, then to Walsall, then somewhere near London, then Rochester, New York. I still have the letters Mani sent me at that time – curly pencil writing with lots of airmail stickers. They were in America for three years, and then Mani came over here one summer, took the eleven-plus, and they moved that year to Essex. They haven’t moved again since (and we have! From Heswall to Formby). Fingers crossed. Although Mani does say that there is nowhere, out of all these places, that is quite like Liverpool. Her ambition is to go to university, then move “up north” again. I asked her what it is she likes so much about it, and she said, “The people! The Christmas lights! The trees! You have better trees!”

One of the things I love about the girl is the fact she has known me for fifteen years and ten months (would be more, but she is only fifteen years and ten months old), and cinsequently knows exactly how to make me laugh. On Saturday night, we were watching Galaxy Quest (I loved it, incidentally – complete B-movie spoof, absolutely hysterical, and pokes gentle fun at we obsessives) and then we went downstairs for no particular reason and she started telling me about something she saw on The Weakest Link, again for no particular reason except she remembered it was the sort of thing that would have me in hysterics.

Apparently, Anne Robinson asked one contestant the question: “What parts of one’s anatomy would one rub together with glee?”

And what did the contestant say? Suffice it to say, we spent the next five minutes on the the floor, trying to demonstrate how one would rub one’s legs together with glee. “Glee!”

Some time later, purplerainbow texted me. She wanted to know why I wasn’t updating, and had I eloped with Patrick? The answer was no, on that count – although, Patrick did text me, so I replied and I haven’t heard anything from him since. I am much too much of a scaredy-cat to actually ring him, but I digress. Hannah and I exchanged a few texts, then bowed to the inevitable and she rang me. We discussed several things, including The Great Escape, as Mani and I had both finally watched it that evening. Such a depressing film. Interestingly, two hours after it started, Kartik said, “I really want to watch The Great Escape. All my friends have seen it.”

What he thought he was watching up until that point, I don’t know. So Hannah and I talked for a while, then we all managed to go to sleep at one-thirty in the morning. Before that, Mani and I stayed awake talking as we always do, and suddenly, apropos of nothing, she asked, “Do you read fanfiction on the internet?”
“Um,” I said. “Yes.”
“Have you read After The End?”
“By Arabella and Zsenya?” I asked. I haven’t in fact read it; it’s one of the ones I have always meant to read, but never have. It turns out that Mani has discovered fandom. She was always a keen believer in Sirius/Remus, but I never knew she actually read fic. Well, she does – on the Sugar Quill – and I directed her to FictionAlley. Achievement.

Even more of an achievement, we all managed to get out of bed the following morning. Mita had decided we should all go to the Trafford Centre. She is very, very good at making plans to go to places and do things; the exact opposite of my mother, in fact. I’ve no idea how they came to be best friends – I suppose it’s a genuine case of opposites attracting. Anyway, we all piled into the car and off we went.

You know the small icon with the two computers flashing that shows you’re online? Clicking on that, then ‘Status’, shows how many kilobytes are being sent and receieved. Whenever I travel anywhere with Mani and Mita, the figure for “Kilobytes received” goes through the roof. They are both experts at making their own entertainment. So, I found myself with the music from Moulin Rouge in one ear (Mani was borrowing my headphones, but we were sharing her CD player) and listening to gentle conversation, the radio, and Kartik’s Gameboy Advance making beep noises. I was also reading Jingo, which both Mani and Kartik were reading over my shoulder, and they both found the following amusing:

“It’s der heat. Troll brains don’t work in der heat. If I was to go to Klatch,” said Detritus, “I’d be really stoopid.”
“Detritus?”
“Yessir?”
“Never go to Klatch.”
“Nossir.”

We arrived at the Trafford Centre without running anyone over, and Mani and I gently took ourselves off to go round on our own. I was on a mission to actually buy things. That’s the thing I don’t like about the Trafford Centre. It resembles an American shopping mall, which implies I would find stuff to buy, but it’s all rather impersonal. There’s no small shops – nothing like the Quiggins shops, nothing like Forbidden Planet or Past Times or whatever – and I never seem to find anything I like. That’s excluding jelly beans. We got them from Selfridges.

I found a Pucca bag. Another one. In the Discovery Channel place, of all places, and I really wasn’t going to buy it, but in the end Mani did and I couldn’t resist. So I’m now the proud owner of yet another one. I’m also the proud owner of a pair of cords, so I did in fact buy things in the end. And I ate pizza. Always a good combination. Mani found me very amusing. Kartik dropped olives in his drink, so I don’t know why I was the amusing one.

We left at four thirty, aiming to be home at five thirty. A perfectly reasonable aim. But somehow – somehow! – we took a wrong turning on the motorway. Instead of going towards Liverpool and Southport, we seemed to be heading towards somewhere else entirely. We went through Preston and then somehow ended up in Leigh.

“What a strange name for a place,” Mani said.
“Leigh?” I said. “I have a friend called Leigh.”
“How is that spelt?”
I spelled it.
“I thought that was pronounced ‘lay.’”
“Why?”
“Like ‘sleigh.’”
“Sleigh?”
“It’s ‘Leigh’ with an S on the front.”
“That’s different.”
“Hmm. Dashing through the snow, on a one-horse open slee…”
“Rubbing one’s legs together with glee…”

Because of our impromptu tour of West Lancashire, we didn’t in fact get home until six thirty, and that was not a good thing, because we had to go out again. This time, it was because we had to go and have dinner with another family friend. Her name is Indira, and while she is basically all right, she’s very annoying. She never fails to tell me and Mani how much we’ve grown, and what are we doing in school now? It was worse this time, I said, because Mani has GCSEs to talk about and I have AS modules. She (Indira, or Indira auntie as she prefers) is solely responsible for the fact I went to Birkenhead. She suggested it, her daughter was in sixth form when I was in kindergarten, and the rest is all history.

Mani and I were bored. We watched television. When I eventually got caught up in the conversation, it was about university applications. It was depressing. It was very, very depressing. They all thought I wanted to to do medicine, and when I said maybe not, they thought everything else was racist and I won’t get a job. And it’s not as if they don’t know what they’re talking about. It depressed me so much I couldn’t be bothered to do anything, including update.

The next day, Mani and her family left. This was after we had all slept in until midday – in my case, it was because I was still thinking about the night before, and consequently didn’t see the point in getting out of bed.

After they’d left, I got a call from Pritchard’s. “Come in and be interviewed,” they said. So I went, and it wasn’t too bad, but I have wanted a job there for years and it turns out I am one of eight people who could possibly get it. I won’t get it. In any case, they’re ringing me up later this afternoon.

And that’s all. Apart from the fact I got a card from apestaartje today!

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