A key begins to turn in the lock.

“Hello!” He calls out expectantly. “I’m back!”

Shaking off the sheet of rain on the back of his coat, he hangs up the drooping umbrella on a stand. A short but not lingering glance into the mirror follows, but he doesn’t like to stand around it for long. If he gets any closer, he will begin to see his reflection baring its teeth, growling and snarling as it scratches to get out. It frightens The Man, he is still so unaccustomed to the terrible stranger sealed in the glass.

The Bad Thing has been so demanding lately. An ever petulant child, The Bad Thing grows increasingly hungry and wants to feast. It became very annoyed a few nights ago when The Man spotted a beautiful blonde waiting at the all night bus stop but ultimately let her go. The Bad Thing does not like it when he lets them go and it will punish The Man accordingly when the time is right. The Bad Thing lives in a perpetually reflective world, beamed back into The Man in a million tiny pinpoints of light, deep into the marrow. He has tried to extract this foreign body on a few occasions throughout his life. When he was fifteen, he took his fathers razor blade and cut elbow to thumb, scooping out tissue and matter in an attempt to finally locate The Bad Thing and bring it to the light. If he could just get some tangible evidence that his terrorist was a living, breathing thing, he would be sanctified. How disappointing then when he woke up in crispy hospital sheets to booming laughter coming from inside him. The Bad Thing survived and so did he, it was gleeful and gloating, it had evaded capture. Now, many years in the future, they are joined together by the awful indignities contained within the walls of this house.

Moving slowly through the gloom, a light switches on, a moth takes its leave and settles precariously on the dusty window. There is somebody here, he can see her sandy blonde curls from the corner of his eyes, she is bolt upright and glowering underneath the lampshade.

“Sorry I’m late, Trace.”

Tracy doesn’t talk anymore. Her cold shoulder is a gale from which he constantly bristles. Tracy is special. She has been special since The Man saw her slamming her boyfriend’s car door a few weekends ago, standing bold and brass in the street, long legs in Saturday night boots. To him, she was lithe and supple, a cheetah in the tall grass. He had to see her again, so see her again he did. Every night for three weeks he sat outside Tracy’s workplace, the grim betting shop, watching her. He especially liked how she tossed her hair when chatting to passers by on her smoke break. He liked how she batted off clumsy attempts at flirtation from the betting shop customers. He didn’t like it when her boyfriend came to pick her up and he was thwarted. The Bad Thing had no time for a stakeout, however. It started to whine and complain on the last day, it had been patient enough, the time was now. Tracy liked to drink at the social club and he finally caught her, she was stumbling slightly in a warm alcohol glow, walking across the car park alone. She never did go back to the betting shop.

His naive belief was that he and Tracy could live like lovers do. Tracy wasn’t keen on the idea. It didn’t work out. The Bad Thing seeks annihilation, it is blood hungry and increasingly out of control, it does not abide by moral codes. The Man closes his eyes and remembers the way Tracy threw her arms out, Christ at Calvary, in the final moments of her short life.

“What have you been doing today?” He asks eagerly, he read somewhere that in order to have a healthy relationship, partners must show enthusiasm when talking about their other half’s interests. Tracy must be annoyed by his late arrival, he reasoned. Maybe she was planning something nice for dinner. He bends like a knight approaching the sword, taking her glacial hand in his. Her nails are painted silver, cosmic silver it’s called, and he rubs her palm tenderly. Her skin is becoming slippery, he notes.

“I’m sorry, Trace. Don’t be like this.”

The Bad Thing is sniggering to itself as though enjoying a private joke. He tries to ignore it, his anxiety is betraying him. The Man hates it when she ignores him.

“Right. I’ll leave you then.” He huffs, standing straight. The light goes off. Tracy doesn’t move.

“Maria!”

The upstairs bedroom door opens with a ceremonious swish, like a handmaid greeting a princess in the morning. Maria’s freshly washed pink duvet is an almost comical contrast to the murky green paint and vomit coloured carpet. Maria can be difficult and sometimes he dreads coming to her, The Man feels useless and inadequate in the face of Maria, who emanates disgust from every pore. He met Maria at the tail end of last summer on a train platform miles from here. She was talking on her phone, giggling at scurrilous gossip and he noticed she had a slim gold chain around one ankle. Maria hadn’t even registered the man staring into the back of her head, and why would she? She was young, good looking and had a thousand friends and acquaintances, Maria was the exact opposite of the pudgy, fidgeting man on the platform. When the train arrived in a gust of stifling heat, The Man made sure to board the same carriage, sitting just two rows behind her. She smelled of oranges and he could imagine her in a vineyard in Tuscany or France, places he had only seen in books, tilting her face to the mid afternoon sun. At this delicious scent, The Bad Thing became engaged. It had lain dormant all afternoon and allowed him to walk along the promenade of the seaside town unbothered, it was almost like it wasn’t there at all. He could hear it yawning lazily, a lion awaking from slumber, on the prowl for its next meal.

The Man was only broken from his trance, practically glaring missiles into the back of Maria’s seat when she began to gather her belongings, she was getting off at the next station. Follow her, follow her, follow her chanted The Bad Thing, a passionate spectator. Follow her now. The Man stood up, this station was a good forty minutes away from his own, and waited for the doors to slide open. She jumped off delicately, him close behind. She couldn’t have known that the unremarkable passenger was about to force himself into her basement flat. Maria fought hard. She kicked and punched so hard that she knocked The Man’s filling loose, so startled was he that he could only sit dumbstruck cradling it pathetically in his palm. He looked over her twisted body, Ikea rug and skirt trussed up underneath her. Maria had done everything right. Ha! Said The Bad Thing. Ha! Ha! Ha!

The Man sat on the edge of Maria’s bed, fussing with the bedspread the way a mother would in her child’s bedroom. That hair is the only thing left of the real Maria now, piled on her skull like the first day he saw her. It has turned copper in parts, he wonders if he should dye it so she will still be Maria. He had no interest in the biological changes that happened to their prone bodies, he could pretend the smell was fresh candyfloss at the fair, he could pretend the putrid liquid seeping into the carpet was simply water. The buzz of the flies could be comforting as this dollhouse was almost unbearably silent.

“Don’t be like this with me, Maria!” He whines petulantly, he can feel his bottom lip trembling. “I’m home now!”

He was speaking to Maria the way a child speaks to its mother when home past their curfew, cajoling and coy. Maria still refused to speak. The milky white of her perfect bones peeking over the duvet, he wants to get in next to her, tender like a lover on a Sunday morning. The Bad Thing is growing impatient now, it wants to pummel Gloria’s bones into dust or set fire to the bed with her precious bones, long from good nutrition, tucked up in it. The Man won out this time, he patted the bedspread and left her to sulk, turning the light off behind him.

He was finding his ladies increasingly unruly, they were actively defying him daily, refusing to join in his attempts at conversation, they didn’t want to know about his day at the hardware shop, they couldn’t care less about his rude customers or his even ruder colleagues. He didn’t want to come home to the hostility he faced in the outside world, where he felt as though he was viewing it from behind Perspex, no real interaction with it, just floating, he was lighter than air. He created this palace, this beacon in the storm, so he could be in paradise. Following the stairs up to the converted loft, a permanent twilight zone where time doesn’t seem to pass at all, he thought about Rachel, sitting in her rocking chair behind the door. Rachel was never angry nor sulking, she was placid and open, a still lake on a warm day. He didn’t want Tracy and Maria to know this, but Rachel was the perfect woman in his eyes. The Bad Thing took exception to his sentimentality, he did not deal in affection, The Bad Thing searched to destroy. Rachel was the first girl, inhabiting her attic sanctuary for five years now. In her previous life, Rachel had been a social worker, kind and generous with her time. He befriended her when she came to live in his apartment building, the same apartment building he had lived in since birth. Rachel was a joy to be around, everyone thought so and outside of this house she is remembered fondly and sorely missed. It was easy to befriend Rachel, not like the others, because she was so giving with her time. She didn’t expect him to be waiting for her on that night five years ago. The Man recalls exactly what she said to him.

“Please, you don’t have to do this.”

But he did. The Bad Thing needed to be satisfied, or there would be untold hell to pay. If only Rachel could have understood that. The Bad Thing made it clear it had no time for sentiments and empty pleading.

“Rach? Rachel!” He calls out when he is three steps from the door. Maybe she has her earphones in and can’t hear him. This happened a lot, she loved music. He closes his eyes and remembers the music coming from her flat all throughout the summers they shared. The music playing when she found him in her living room that night. He opens his eyes again and unlocks the door, a bright yellow beaming through the single window from a lamppost outside gives Rachel’s hollow face a Tungsten shadow that he thinks gives her the look of The Madonna.

“Hi, Rach.”

“Hello, darling.” She says, fixing her hair. He likes this about her, she’s conscious about her appearance when he visits. It shows him she really cares.

“What a day I’ve had. Tipping it down, too.” He replies, closing the window so she doesn’t get cold.

“You’re home now. That’s all that matters.”

He smiles to himself, she’s always so reassuring. That is all that matters.

The Man stays with Rachel until he wakes up with a pressing voice in his head, metallic and raspy, The Bad Thing is awake.

The Man can’t remember a time when The Bad Thing wasn’t there. Their first interaction was in the sandpit in primary school, when he shot across and smashed the school bullies head into the wooden panels. It scared him at first, what little boys of eight have such almighty power? The Bad Thing just laughed. Served him right. The Bad Thing had a formidable sense of right and wrong, right and wrong within the definitions set out by The Bad Thing itself. He used to be able to control The Bad Thing, it was flexible and easily persuaded in those days until it became rigid and stubborn, acting on its own accords. After the incident when he was fifteen, The Bad Thing took on a life of its own.

His mother thought it a phase, a simple teenage problem that would iron itself out as he progressed through puberty. The Bad Thing mocked her naivety, he had plans for her too, he found her shrill and uneducated, no match for its spotless intellectual sophistication. Its superiority was the nucleus of its entire existence, without it The Bad Thing would cease to exist. Its Machiavellian arrogance was feeding its ever growing soul, gorging it with lifeblood, a toxic pumping that ensured its survival. The Bad Thing can not tolerate equality because equality would undermine its superiority, same with autonomy. The Bad Thing can not let these things happen. It is an evil you can not overthrow.

Morning comes mercifully, he stretches languidly, Tracy still in the same spot. His morning routine is efficient and simple, he dresses for work and says goodbye to each of his paramours, careful to spend the same amount of time with each so as not to cause jealousy in the ranks. He wonders if they get together in the dining room over cups of coffee while he’s not there and becomes anxious thinking of them discussing his shortcomings. Is there a certain hierarchy that exists between them? Rachel, his golden girl, seems the perfect candidate for leadership.

Driving down the high street, a normal day in the city, he feels The Bad Thing stir uncomfortably, it often wakes late. It’s quietness is unnatural, it usually begins to speak immediately. He does not poke nor prod the beast, this often creates disastrous consequences. At a pedestrian crossing, a young woman crosses confidently, red hair glinting a million sunrises through the windscreen. The Bad Thing’s attention has been piqued. A horn beeps behind as he is suspended in awe and he is regrettably forced to move, passing her slowly as she continues her journey past the corner shops and miscellaneous fast food restaurants. Now, the overwhelming urge to pull down a side street, park up and exit, catch her up. The Bad Thing is a thrill seeker, above all, an apex predator first and foremost, most of the fun is in the chase. He does as he is told, parking the car at a slightly odd angle in his haste, he sees her crossing at the top of the road. Jogging back onto the main road, he sees her unmistakable red head bouncing just ahead, her gait is alluring. Aware now that he is late for his shift, not that they would miss him anyway, Johnny and Michael, the worst of his colleagues, think he is peculiar and something is off. Right now they are in the staff room flicking through the morning papers and laughing at their private joke wherein The Man is behind the latest in a set of mysterious disappearances of young women.

He follows the woman, who stops off unexpectedly at a pharmacy where he has to hang about outside, pretending to peruse the property ads at the estate agent next door. The Man waits for further instruction from The Bad Thing, who has been narrating this whole excursion fervently. She comes into view again and the chase continues, she hasn’t turned around once, thankfully, a strange woman he thinks, she’s secure in the safety of her neighbourhood. Turning abruptly, she circles into a small residential street and detection is most likely to be here. He hides behind a small shrub whilst The Bad Thing is basically slobbering with ill concealed excitement. Watching as she lets herself into a small terraced house, shutting the yellow door firmly behind her, he wonders if there is another way in. The Bad Thing directs him almost immediately to a small alleyway, with a gate unlocked, an invitation, and finds the tiny backyard that leads to his prize. Another gate unlocked, this really couldn’t go any better, he slips inside with ease. A final obstacle is the backdoor which is gleefully ajar.

A small tabby cat sits proudly on the window ledge eyeing him warily but doesn’t alert our lady to the impending peril just inches away. He can see her now, her back to him, holding a kettle. She doesn’t have time to register as he lurches forward and grabs her tightly breathing in the musk of her perfume. Yes! shouts The Bad Thing. Yes! Yes! Yes!

He leaves the terraced house untouched, exactly as he found it. The tabby stares uncomfortably from the kitchen doorway, a silent witness to atrocity. The redhead now ensconced in thick, viscous liquid pouring from her neck, her foot twitching as the final signs of life drain. He would have to come back for her later. The Bad Thing is pleased, satisfied as though it has eaten a good meal. It could sleep for a thousand years. The Bad Thing says fuck it, leave via the front door, you’ve done it now, who cares who sees you. He pockets her keys and after a quick look around the house, he’s confident nobody will be coming here today. The redhead died as she lived, alone. The Bad Thing takes enormous pleasure in this.

Ignoring the irritating bleating from his colleagues regarding his lateness, The Man takes his position at the cashier’s desk. The day passes by in a flurry of purchases, sheets of MDF, spanners, screwdrivers, nuts and bolts. The Bad Thing is lying dormant, exhausted from the morning’s excursions. Excitement only comes when a convoy of screeching police cars zoom past the shop, heading in the direction he came that morning. His stomach tenses, his eyes grow watery. It couldn’t be, could it? His own isolation was so guaranteed that he had no issue applying it to others, he found it to be a comfort thinking that there were others as isolated as him. The redhead didn’t have any visitors planned, did she? Her frugal home without many furnishings or photos of loved ones was a clue to her solitude, or so he thought. He couldn’t have known about the burgeoning friendship she had struck up with another young woman who lived in the street just weeks prior, a friendship that involved casually popping into each other’s houses on a whim. It had been why the backdoor had been open that morning. A light coating of sweat was slowly expanding over his back, he felt as though he could vomit. The Bad Thing again unusually quiet, weighing up its options in silence. The work day ends and he walks, he was becoming feverish now, a cold settling into his bones as he took the same route back to the house with the yellow door. He couldn’t even get close to the house, tape had been strung up at the start of the street, a whole fleet of police cars and vans taking up residence outside the house. It’s over. He promptly vomited into the same shrub he had stood so comfortably behind, thumping with adrenaline, not eight hours before.

The palace has become grotesque. No longer a place of tranquility and refuge, but one of paranoia and the looming threat of imprisonment. The Bad Thing is so blisteringly angry, a wrath he has never experienced before. Useless! it shrieks in it’s cold whisper, YOU ARE FUCKING USELESS! He takes the stairs by two to get to Rachel. Heavenly Rachel, atop her wooden throne. She would know what to do. He sobs, gripping her sagging clothes, bawling into the polyester.

“What have I done, Rach?”

What you had to do” Comes her silky reply.

“They’re coming. They’ll be here tonight.”

“Then don’t be here tonight.”

He looks up into her empty sockets, a moth fluttering inside. She was right, he could get in his car and drive, drive to Scotland, drive to Wales. Drive until his car fell off the edge of the country. The Bad Thing resists, You are not going anywhere. He huddles into Rachel’s soft blankets, taking temporary solace in the feel of the wool on his cheek. The Bad Thing is guffawing, victorious, recognition is his. The Man doesn’t dare leave until the light bursts through the lace.

He throws the curtains wide. Tracy seems brighter, her blonde hair creamy in winter morning light. Gloria in eternal sleep, prettier now more than ever, pallid and shining. Rachel is regal, a queen in residence. The Bad Thing is fat and sleek with bragging pride. He takes a seat on the kitchen tiles and he waits.

Am I intimidated? Probably. I’m chum about to be eaten by a Great White. My instagram feed is chocka block with fashionable, skinny women and my ankles are too fat to wear those trainer/ballet flat hybrid shoes and I’m too short for baggy jeans so they trail all over the floor and instead of looking artfully dishevelled I look like a massive scruff. I feel like a dickhead asking people to take photos of me and I always wonder how many photos it takes for these women to get the perfect photo. Do they not get embarrassed in case there’s somebody looking down from their office when they’re sitting on the curb getting their photos done? Do they not mind filming with the flash on? I’m envious, because I freak out if I get my photo taken outside in case somebody walks past and thinks “who does this girl think she is?” I do find myself considering what I’m wearing to the corner shop a lot more now, I even take my Vivienne Westwood when I go and buy cheesestrings just incase I run into somebody who stops me and says “oh my god I love your bag” so I can strut off down the road in smug self satisfaction. I hobbled to Morrisons the other day in a pair of boots I haven’t worn in seven years and promptly went skidding across literal spilled milk in the dairy aisle. There is a metaphor in there somewhere.

It’s the city I’ve felt the least inspired in. Despite the abundance of fashionistas and the like, I didn’t write anything properly for the first two years in Manchester. There’s a lot to be inspired by, don’t get me wrong, but I just couldn’t come up with anything worthwhile. To me, it was endless queues outside bakeries, slinking around the corner like a giant millipede in the same pair of New Balance. What’s the psychology behind spending your Saturday in a queue? Do we innately love to queue? It reminds me of the phenomenon in primary school where one child got heelies and suddenly every child got heelies over the course of one summer holiday (very tellingly, I was never allowed them). As a teenager I worked at Next during the sales seasons and I got up close and personal with the Queuees themselves. There are four rules to the professional queuee. They are as follows :

1. Get there early.

2. Size up your queueing competition. I.E - would the woman next to you elbow you in the face over a jumpsuit at 60% off or would she let it go quietly?

3. Remain vigilant

4. Charge the doors as though you are a chorus member in the local community theatre production of Les Misérables that you saw last week.

It really is as simple as that.

I have developed an aversion to people who say “come with me to try this viral….” Or “Come with me to this hidden gem….” It’s so strong an aversion that I can sense it from three Instagram reels away. I also don’t like big sandwiches you can’t get your gob around, influencers who end every sentence like they’re asking a question, every bakery that has to involve a croissant and cookie dough coming together to form a deformed, bastard child named the “crookie”, people discovering the blush and lipliner combo that I have worn faithfully for 10 years and selling it out immediately and finally, people talking really loudly in Chorlton charity shops about skiing. I’m exhausted. The pipe is clogged and they still insist on coming down it. Where does it end? Just yesterday I saw somebody describe Franco Manca as a hidden gem. I become physically aggressive at the sight of a Dubai chocolate. Why am I suddenly terrified of the word “viral”? Am I getting old? Am I finally jaded? I dread to think what would have happened to my burgeoning career as a social media star if it hadn’t ended in disgrace ten years ago. I would most likely have long since become a vitamin flogging, sound bath advocating, Bali health retreat sponsored lunatic.

I’m not totally sworn off though, I accosted a well known Scouse influencer in The Lisbon a few months back to tell them I loved one of their videos and they looked at me like I was going to bite them, I think they genuinely clutched their companion in horror. I got snarled in Piccadilly Station by an influencer who took a shine to my ex-boyfriend. I told another one that I liked her dress and she laughed in my face. A few years back I opened my camera on TikTok with dreams of being the next fashionista du jour, all dressed up with nowhere to go, rehearsing what I was going to say. My phone crashed immediately and sent my iPhone to the Apple start up screen of death.

It was a sign, but I don’t know what of.

My life is weirdly good. I keep waiting to get pounced on by misfortune, it waits in the corner like the spider you spotted on the wall that’s edging ever closer. I do find that when my life is going well I have nothing to write about because I’m so used to only writing about misery, my own misery. I am not going to sit here and give you a play by play of the time me and my boyfriend went to Morrisons the other week. I am so unaccustomed to what I’m sure is a normal life to others that I’m finding being truly happy to be an alien world. What I’m used to is hedonism and daft knobheadism. I don’t go to house parties anymore, neither do I throw them (what happened to house parties, by the way?) I barely go out on the weekend and I very occasionally stay out past three on a weeknight. I sometimes feel like Henry Hill at the end of Goodfellas when he goes into witness protection. I spend most of my weekend in bed. I spend more time in Leeds than I do anywhere else and the idea of staying up for days sends a shiver down my spine. It’s supposed to be my Saturn return this year, I’m 28 in three weeks, and I’m starting to think it might all be past me. I can barely remember past incarnations of myself but I know they were embarrassing. Maybe I’m finally growing up!

It seems deeply superficial (hah!) to think that anyone would be interested in my life or what I’m doing with it. Now that I’m no longer humiliating myself on dating apps and sharing it to the world I briefly felt like there was nothing else to write about. It was so central to my existence, shamefully, that I thought “oh my god what else is there to write about?”

It turns out a great many things.

I’ve been watching Sex and The City once again, the 9000th run, and I thought to myself if Carrie Bradshaw could somehow pull a column out of her ass every week whilst essentially doing a whole load of nothing then so can I. I will write about my two new Vivienne Westwood bags if I have to. I will not lose my ability, one of my only talents apart from being able to fit thirteen Pringles in my mouth, from a lack of trying or a lack of interest. I am still writing various bits and pieces, they are all languishing in Google Docs waiting to come alive as we speak. Perhaps one day I’ll get round to it.

Welcome to Deeply Superficial.

I’ll see you next week x

I am lying on my boyfriend’s bathroom floor doing the meningitis neck test for the fifteenth time that afternoon when suddenly, like a rat up a drainpipe, a thought hits me. Maybe this isn’t real. Maybe I am in a coma. Maybe I never left the hospital after I went in a few days ago about a rash that I was so sure was the warning signs of sepsis. I’m doing the meningitis neck test as I’m writing this. Ten minutes later, halfway through a meal, I’m staring at a fucking bolognese like it’s been laced by a KGB style poison, I start having visions of suddenly developing an extreme cancer, Alexander Litvinenko, somehow the Russians have come to Leeds to administer the dose in a case of mistaken identity. I’m living in a trancelike dream state, I am sitting in a room that’s become a movie set, the walls are plywood and everything inside is just a prop. I am the reluctant actress and I can’t remember my fucking lines, I’m panicking, I’m writhing about like a stuck pig and I can’t get my words out properly, I’m garbling and I’m barely making sense. I can feel it creeping up my neck like ivy, this thick mist engulfs me and I want to smack my head off the walls in this beige abyss, but I feel I might go clean through and into another soundstage.

I checked my temperature sixty two times in two days last week. I went to Argos looking bugged and struggled to work the self service kiosks. Had I developed a new mental illness so strange and rare where one of the symptoms is an aversion to the Argos self service kiosks? I can hear my heart in my feet, for fucks sake. I’m wearing a coat that makes me look like a cartoon villain. My jeans are dirty. My fringe dried the wrong way last night. I am clearly in turmoil. I came away from Argos with a £10 Braun body thermometer which I took to holding like sceptre, clinging to it the way a baby does to a rattle. It has been in my mouth so many times in 48 hours that my gums start to bleed. I walk around Sainsbury’s in a state of heightened distress, not at the fact that there are no hot sausage rolls left but rather by something unquantifiable, something just beyond reach in the engulfing fog. I buy a £5 smoothie for absolutely no reason. I am not going to drink it, I am going to stare at it until it becomes abstract and then putrefies on my bedside table. I take the lid off when I am sitting in the room again and the cloying stench of spinach crawls out, making me gag and I go to be sick but remember there’s bleach down the toilet and go into another spiral about potential bleach poisoning, mustard gas, the trenches, I am being hunted for sport. I have to go before it takes hold so I am stomping down the garden path in my big shoes, I have to keep moving, I can feel it’s mustard gas grip coming out the walls like that bit in Repulsion with Catherine Deneuve. It does cross my mind that I might come back and find everybody dead from mustard gas poisoning but I decide that really is a problem for later Johanna. I notice that people are not meeting my eyes when I walk past them in the street. I am probably alarming to look at, my cartoon villain coat is streaming out behind me as I’m stomping around Chorlton, I’m the child catcher come to life, the bogeyman under the bed. Unmoored, unequipped, unstable. If I was a parent I would not let my child wave or smile at me either. When I am sitting in a room again sometime later, I will think of myself as ogreish, the pantomime villain, I AM behind you. I feel like Nosferatu in the doorway, I am a giant raw nerve, my body is exposed like I’m without skin and you can see every pulsation going on inside. My brain needs a wash. It needs a spin on 40 degrees. It’s like it’s coated in some thick black tar-esque matter, the consistency of treacle, my thoughts are getting stuck in it like sticks in mud, it needs a good scrub before it can slot back into my skull again. I’m monstrous, I’m larger than life, I’m a hammer horror Dracula in a nylon cape and stick on teeth. The situation is becoming more and more absurd. A man with no teeth winks at me in Chorlton Morrisons. I will check my temperature again.

I went on a juice diet because I am fucking crazy, and that is what fucking crazy people do isn’t it? They cling. I am clinging to extortionately priced pressed juices and I may become physically aggressive in the aisles of M&S. Granted, I’m not crazy enough to turn to Jesus. I feel like I have always known that if I were to go completely off the deep end I would never be a Jesus crazy. Do you ever feel that? I have not shaved my head, are you mad? It took me two years to grow my hair. I am drinking ginger shots like I am drinking communion wine and yesterday I only ate three crackers. When I look at food I feel nothing. I imagine it like worms wriggling in the acid of my stomach, splashing about like they’re in their own private leisure centre swimming pool. I am staring at it as if it’s going to stand up and start talking. I am sitting in a room in a Dirty Harry style stand off with a tub of red pepper hummus. It is clear who is going to break first.

I am sitting in a room not unlike many others up and down the country. Sometimes it is dark, sometimes it is light. Sometimes there are others in this room, sometimes it is night. You can feel my flesh under yours, maybe even my heart beat in the palm of my hand. If I touch you, I will feel the bones of your shoulders, though I feel like I can put my hand straight through you and you can do the same to me, I’m made of corrosive substance and I have the ability to rot and destroy. I am sitting in a room, I am sitting in a room, I am sitting in a room.

I had one aim. I wanted to be Marianne Faithfull.

I have always felt a kinship to Marianne. Of course, I’ve never had a number one record at the age of 17 and I’ve never been famous outside of that amusing period on instagram ten years ago, neither have I dated anyone famous but it’s the same misogynistic bullshit that has dogged us both. If you act like the boys, having sex and doing drugs on your own terms then they hate you for it. It’s the same old trope, older people pick you up and promise you things, put you on a pedestal and then act really surprised when you fall off. They can barely contain themselves when you fall off, the rumour mill goes into overdrive. For Marianne it was the fur rug and the Mars bar, for myself it was the completely salacious tale that I had somehow fucked all five members of one band in one hour. I’d say it’s more telling of their sexual prowess than me and mine! Your life gets reduced to this one totally insignificant period of time. When she passed most of the coverage was about how she was Mick Jagger’s girlfriend almost sixty years ago, which only accounted for three years of her life. I didn’t even want to mention him by name here, but such is his monolithic presence in pop culture that her name will unfortunately always be linked to his.

To me, Marianne’s defining quality was her unwavering authenticity. She didn’t shy away from it, it’s all laid bare for you to see. While her old friends were in great mansions in San Tropez she was, by her own account, shooting up on a wall in Soho. Her brutally honest 1994 biography details this warts and all, from her ex communication from the upper echelons of 1960s London society to her ill fated 1979 marriage to Ben Brierly. All the media after her death just regurgitated the “survivor” narrative which Marianne herself hated with a passion. It’s the same narrative they push on any woman who has been through some hard times and come back to the public sphere with a new perspective and something new to say. When I first started writing poetry a few years ago and sharing it, all I was faced with was pity, a litany of “aren’t you brave.” and “you’ve been through so much.” I always wonder if they say that to men. I think Marianne and I had similar philosophies on the subject, we very much wanted to share our experience being put through the blender by people who just saw us as pretty young girls. Before I got the confidence to go off on my own with my band I was always just some musician’s girlfriend, confined to the margins. Women like Marianne gave me the courage to strike out and be as blisteringly confessional as I could be. I particularly enjoy the fact that she embraced getting older with elegance, her performances from the 1990s and 2000s hammer this home, she was so acutely aware that there would be an entire generation of people who only knew her as the angelic 1960s pop icon, forever frozen in time. She presented herself as she was, an older, wiser, deliciously nicotine stained version of the one who came before. If you didn’t like it, you could fuck off back to 1964! That’s what it’s all about to me, the acceptance and ownership that you will never be the person you were but only the person you are now. She was a master of that, she wore all of her experience on her person, nothing was veiled. It was like she was daring everyone to keep her inside that box she had spent most of her life breaking out of.

1979 brought the arrival of the post-punk masterpiece Broken English, a startlingly innovative and pulsating album that earned her a place in the new world, a world that made her old friends from the 60s look embarrassingly prehistoric. Marianne belonged there more than she ever did within the Ready, Steady, Go pop brigade fifteen years previously. Her cracked, abrasive voice on songs such as the delightfully vulgar “Why’d ya do it” the scorned woman’s cruise missile written by Heathcote Williams captivated a new audience hot on the heels of punk. It came along at a time when it was more apparent than ever that the 60s free love dream was over, and who better to herald in the new era of Thatcherism than the jaded poster girl from forever ago? The circumstances that lead Marianne to making Broken English are vital to its creation, the years of homelessness and exile, the failed attempts at rebooting her career in the early 70s, her son Nicholas becoming estranged from her, it’s all there within the grooves. If you do anything after reading this, listen to Broken English. Start to finish, no skips, just listen to it for what it is, a woman triumphantly back from the brink.

Marianne’s indelible presence can be felt in every single piece of writing or music I’ve ever created. When I was recording the song BAG! with my old band Polexia she was right there in my mind, I was trying to channel that berserk, animalistic ferocity on Broken English. Our life trajectories have been quite similar, whether consciously on my part or not, I too have gone from the darling to the completely disregarded and then been reincarnated as something else, the only difference is mine wasn’t in the public eye and none of the people involved were in any way famous (thank fuck!) but it goes to show that it never really ends, that cycle of misogyny that puts women in categories and has them written off as unstable if they stray out of line even once.

Next week it will be one year since her passing and Broken English has been on heavy rotation in my house for the last few weeks as I’m writing new things. I always go back to her when I’m writing, I feel as though her voice coaxes my honest self out of me, although as she herself once said, “truth is terribly relative.”

I could end this with a gushing aside about how much she meant to me, but all I truly want to say, from the bottom of my heart and from one bad girl to another is thank you, Marianne, for a life well lived.

Recently I was reading the Thomas Harris novel “Hannibal”, the third in the Dr Lecter series, where he describes Dr Lecter as having a “memory palace” a mental archive he visits with a closing of the eyes, a place where he can keep his most treasured memories and emotions safe in a place nobody can reach. I found it interesting because I subconsciously have one of those too, I just never gave it a name. I have a photographic memory, detrimental at times, where I’m able to perfectly recall conversations, situations, people and places that I haven’t had any contact with in over twenty years. A notable aspect of this obvious quirk of my brain is that I can remember the birthday of every single person I have ever met, no matter their significance in my life, they tell me once and it is in there forever, like a tenner stuffed in a book then forgotten. During this incredibly intense period of writing I have encountered doors within this mental fortress that I thought I had long since lost the keys to, vast expanses of empty room where I stand knowing something terrible has happened there. It’s been unfathomably useful because I am attempting to write something entirely truthful and accurate, no matter how bleak that truth may get, but after that I have no idea where I’m going next. A few days ago I suddenly had this idea to sell all my belongings and just go off on my own for a while, I don’t know what I will do with myself once I’ve finally rinsed myself clean of what’s been attached to the fabric of my being for as long as I can remember, like a grain in wood. I have this strange feeling indescribable, I’m looking at myself in the mirror differently. A sense of completion, the feeling I have finally come full circle.

In June I will be 28. I can’t even remember myself at 18, the age I was when I left home and went off into the wilderness, never to go home again. I know I had bleached blonde hair and I was aloof because I thought that’s how you had to act if anybody was ever going to see you as an adult and not a child out of their depth. I looked old for 18, I dated a man who was 24. I was very much taken advantage of as a teenager, in various ways and to varying degrees of severity and I hate thinking about that person, I hate the way that person was. Lots of things have changed, there was a time in my life where nobody was really sure that I would make 25. My mothers favourite thing to say to me, repeated back like a demented parrot, was that she was always wary of answering the phone just incase it was somebody calling to tell her I was dead. I used to laugh at that and it’s blatant melodramatics, what a morbid and self indulgent thing to say to your child, I thought. It’s true that people behave according to their nature and therefore we don’t see immediately that how we have behaved is unpleasant or cruel, I never thought there was anything cruel or unpleasant about the way I behaved in my late teens and early twenties whether that was childish arrogance or complete denial at play, I never gave it any thought. I am aware now, startlingly aware, that I was both cruel and unpleasant in the extreme.

I’m enjoying the novelty of seeing myself and the people I’ve known since I was a teenager getting older, I’m actually looking forward to the next half of my life. I can see myself aging, I have a patch of grey hair at the back of my neck and every few months or so there is a new line or a new wrinkle near my eyes and it’s all just proof that I’m alive! What a privilege it is to see that in yourself and be comfortable with it. In Paris recently I saw so many elegant people just comfortable in their skin, laughing, talking, eating, smoking and just living the way you are supposed to, without the past hanging over you like the spectre at the feast, ruining everything. I want that freedom for myself.

Getting clean is top of my list for 2026. I had a very worrying realisation a few days ago when drinking a bottle of champagne in St James’s Graveyard at 4am with an old friend (drugs make you do stuff like this) that nobody has ever met me when I’ve been sober. I don’t even know myself sober. For eleven years I’ve been chemically altered in one way or another, illegally and legally, I was scared that I would be boring or I would lose sight of myself if I stopped. What are you supposed to do? Join a running club and go to bed at 9? Get really into Joe Wicks? Spend your Sundays on dog walks followed by a roast? What do you do then? I think thoughts like that have stopped a lot of us from going straight. I don’t know where this irrepressible urge to move on has come from, I have always been quite comfortable clinging to the past until the branch snaps and sends me plummeting but I woke up one morning desperate to shed my skin and every party has to end somewhere. This party has ended at what I think is a very natural point, it’s like I’ve reached a fork in the road and there is one way or the other, sink or swim, time to fucking grow up. The birds have been tweeting outside and the dawn has been coming on for a long time.

All I have ever been truly interested in all of my life is writing. All the different versions of me that have existed like increasingly mutilated and battered Barbie dolls have been misguided exercises in trying to get to the right place. I didn’t want to be a musician, I did it anyway. I didn’t want to model for old perverts when I was seventeen, I did it anyway. I didn’t particularly want to involve myself as deeply as I did in quite a lot of situations, but I did it anyway. There have been rudimentary attempts, the songs I wrote for my old band and the poetry, crude prototypes of the writing I’m doing now but nothing that was truly in my voice, just one of the voices of one of the characters I was playing. I think I have been overlooked fairly and unfairly over the years. They see what you look like and then you can’t possibly be truly interested in your interests because you’re a good looking woman. To some people, you have always been just a girl with nice tits and always will be. You take one topless photograph in your early twenties and suddenly your tits become your face and nobody can see anything else. In terms of my substance abuse and the shite that came with it, I have always said if I was a man they would be calling me a “legend” and patting me on the back. Becoming comfortable with this unfortunate truth will set you free. One of the best things about this year was how I was able to go to different towns and just observe walks of life that I otherwise never would have done, to escape the tribalism of the “creative” (I use the term very loosely) communities I exist within and get back to real life, provincial life. I love to know how people live, it’s the backbone of all of my writing, observing and learning from others and then running it through my own scope. My greatest joy, apart from my friends, is learning. I am writing from a new place, perhaps a new room in the memory palace, I’m starting to understand myself. A few days ago I was thinking to myself that if I don’t want to do something, I don’t have to do it! It had never occurred to me before that it really is that simple. I have lost a lot and gained a lot but I am so many light years away from the girl who used to leave all her belongings in Lime Street Station left luggage while she worked out where she was going to stay that night. You would not believe the scrapes I have gotten into during the last ten years, maybe I will write about them some more in the future. Lou Reed put it better than I ever could, “what comes is better than what came before.” I happen to believe he was right.

I would like to thank everybody who has read my stories or essays this year. The messages of encouragement and kind words have been very uplifting in an otherwise peculiar year. I love sharing my world or at least the world as I see it and I am forever grateful for even one view, let alone the hundreds I have had. All the best for a wonderful 2026 and beyond.

Stay tuned.

JC

X

So I did it. My first venture into the mysterious world of the Etsy witch was back in August, when I paid the economical sum of £2.76 to a user based in Turkey named MysticTarotGuide. Just how much sacred information can MTG divulge for less than the price of a meal deal, you might well ask. There is a fair chance that MysticTarotGuide is not a mystic from Istanbul, but rather ChatGPT in one of its many guises. It seems to be a common thing within the Etsy witch community, some of them are laughing all the way to the bank while they type your details into that app and hit copy and paste. I decided to put my faith into MTG though, and within a few hours an “in depth” reading of my birth chart was delivered to my Etsy inbox. According to her and my planetary placements, I have a serious, self directed presence and my destiny involves deep ties to my family lineage. Most surprisingly, I am apparently going to achieve this through writing and storytelling. Of course I fucking fell for it, wouldn’t you? MTG went on to say that I naturally attract complex and dependent partners and I begin to think, does MysticTarotGuide actually know the secrets of my soul? Is MysticTarotGuide the real deal and all other Etsy witches are charlatans? Are MysticTarotGuide and I intrinsically soul bonded just from a birth chart reading?! Should I spend another fiver and get the fucking deluxe edition?! If MysticTarotGuide was guessing, she did a pretty good job. The signs of my past spiritual psychosis briefly reared their ugly heads again and I had to pack it in before I truly did go down the rabbit hole, I would have flown to the far reaches of Turkey to get the full palm reading and clairvoyant experience. I started to understand why people become so dependent on it. It’s a primitive thing after all, different cultures have been studying the horoscope for centuries. Ancient river civilisations were consulting psychics and healers long before the invention of computers and Etsy. I always wonder whether Mesopotamian women visited the local cunning folk to ask when the local dickhead will stop leaving their smoke signals unanswered. Was there a rudimentary version of the Etsy witch out in Salem?

The introduction of the online witches into the mainstream is a fairly recent thing. In September, shortly after the shooting of Charlie Kirk, an article appeared on the website Jezebel.com claiming that its staff had actually paid an Etsy witch to curse him. Again, bizarre coincidence or divine timing? Since the publication of the article sales have soared for Etsy witches, with hopefuls purchasing anything from spells to further their careers or a good old classic Hex Your Ex spell (for my next trick….). It’s en vogue to be a “Witch” now. Since the discovery of Stevie Nicks by the TikTok brigade it’s been all silver springs and velvet shawls, video edits of the girls from The Craft, even my favourite witch of all time, The Blair Witch, is getting her own prequel miniseries. It’s even become all out war in the charity shops, you can’t even get close to velvet Per Una skirt without five other people elbowing you for it, such is the resurgence in witchy aesthetics. You don’t even actually have to do any spells apparently, owning a lace shawl and being really into jewel tones will suffice these days. In the days after the Jezebel.com article searches for “Etsy witch” increased by 600%. Persecution has become commodification. I’m not in any way exempt, ever since I was a little girl I have wanted to be a witch. My favourite character in the cinematic masterpiece Barbie Swan Lake was Odile, The Black Swan. I have a strong affinity for the legend of the Welsh witch Ceridwen and I have been bitter all my life that I wasn’t named Morgane (which was a strong contender) like Morgane Le Fay from the Arthur stories. My all time favourite episode of Most Haunted is their 2004 live Halloween edition on Pendle Hill. I fucking love Charmed. I’ve always felt a connection to these outcasts and pariahs, who weren’t witches at all, their only crime most of the time was being a woman in small, pious communities who lived in fear of eternal damnation where your perceived wrong doings could land you and your entire family on the scaffold. It’s not lost on me that what was once punishable by death is now available in two clicks on a website.

In the spirit of true research, I forked out another £2.82 (you know what inflation is like these days) and booked a reading with a lady/ potential AI bot named LadyHelin. I must have finally lost the plot. I am briefly tempted to purchase the afore mentioned Hex Your Ex spell which is on offer (50% off until 13th December for those on the warpath!) but I decide against it, the karmic retributions may be too strong. That’s another element of all this sorcery, it could reverse and come back to you in spades. I’ve already got a karmic debt that could rival the GDP of a small European country. I anxiously awaited LadyHelin’s message, and what with her being a witch, it arrived amusingly at 3am on the dot. When LadyHelin begins to describe a man who will enter my life in February 2026, a man who unfortunately sounds like he shares most of his personality traits with a golden retriever, I’m skeptical. I have also been advised to approach my love life with “the curiosity of a child”. If that’s so, then I am one pissed off child. I must admit that quite a big portion of the intrigue is lost when you’re reading it through a Macbook screen. If I was one on one with LadyHelin, I would probably feel different. It pains me to say it, but I did not resonate with one part of her reading, massively disappointing when you’re as worryingly deluded as I am. It really is just generalised, edited slightly to fit different people who part with their £2.82. You’re probably thinking well duh? You paid £2.82 to have a one sided conversation with chatGPT and you are probably right. I close my laptop in defeat.

So, did Etsy witches kill Charlie Kirk? Probably not. Will they resurrect my stagnant love life and save me from another year of spinsterhood and one night stands? Probably not. The portrayal of witchcraft in our era is one of online transactions and witchtok, the mystique has been lost to commodity and commerce. Who knows what the future has in store, maybe I will have to send MysticTarotGuide and LadyHelin two very extensive apologies when it all comes true. Connecting people from all across the world via a medium that has been taboo for centuries is a deeply admirable thing and with the current state of our world at present, any small comforts people can get are always welcomed. Was it all bullshit? I’ll let you know! Long Live The Etsy Witches!

A spurt of misguided confidence sends me inside to the stench of starch and a kind of medicinal fluid, acrid in my nostrils. I am caged within four custard colour walls while a fruit machine screeches nonsensically behind me. I could wade out into the tide of Christmas shoppers, block your number, and I hope I never see you again, but I would, wouldn’t I? I would see you in places you have never been before, like the post office in my hometown or an isolated country train station miles from anywhere, because that is the nature of it. A knock, knock, knocking is occurring on the underside of my skull, a sign of alarm and a dissonance that is unique to me. You are close. So close that I can see you in my peripheries to the left, new creases in your leather jacket. You are chewing gum conspiratorially and it appears to me that you think you look like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western, riding his horse into burnt orange and amber. I sit, the talking begins, that incessant patter like rain on a windowsill. The disinterested teenage glass collectors regard you with the same wariness that I do, the same way an advancing vet approaches a snarling tiger, ready to administer the dose.

I am now looking at you in broad daylight, the first time in a while, we are looking at each other like we have just simultaneously gained the power of vision after temporary blindness. The imposter vignettes threaten to begin their voyage through the coils and I have to look away before they embark, sending them sinking into the void. It is November now and all the old sentiments are dead. I look down into my drink and say, “sorry what were you saying?” You say it doesn’t matter, but it clearly does, because you are doing that thing you do where you look past my shoulder as if there is a more attentive, more alert version of me standing just behind. I tell you I am writing again and you couldn’t care less, you have turned your head to one side and you are gazing at something out of the window and I allow myself the indulgence of speaking uninterrupted until I notice the focus of your gaze, a beautiful blonde woman across the street talking on her phone. I laugh to myself then, it threatens to come out in great peals, I feel like laughing myself under the table until I am taken away by psychiatric officials. I am praying for my own beautiful blonde, beautiful fucking anything, to appear so that I can do to you what you have done to me, because that is our currency, the only thing we know how to trade. I say I have just got back from Berlin and it is your turn to laugh, you say I am so pretentious so I would probably fit in there. There is silence for a few moments while I think of something nice to say.

The silence, the loudest silence on record, is finally broken when you begin to tell me about people I have never heard of before, what a wonderful time you all have together, like teenagers in the white heat of the summer holidays and your provinciality is so overwhelmingly endearing that my eyes involuntarily glaze over, as though I am about to cry. I can’t tell you about any new people because I don’t know any new people, something that at this moment I’m so ashamed of. I am the same person I was in the summer and I spend my evenings so often alone. I would ask you what you’re reading but by your own admission the only book you have ever read is One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest when you were seventeen. I will go on to tell you about the incident in September when a guy I went on a date with bought me a copy of that book and then I never saw him again. I’ve become so painfully aware of how shrill I have become at the end of my sentences and you are looking at me like I have just told you I have six months to live. You take this pathetic anecdote as your cue to tell me about dates with “cool girls”, a secret code for “girls who are nothing like you”, and my teeth feel like they may bend and snap under the pressure of my maniacal smile. Your face momentarily changes colour when you speak about one cool girl in particular and I know I have outstayed my welcome.

I leave our conversations suspended in the air inside, for somebody else to collect with the glasses. You ask me if I have heard this song by this band that you don’t like but everybody else loves and I balk and call you John Peel, then immediately shut myself up because I do not know you like that anymore. It is November and all the old sentiments are dead. I say I have to get going because I need to catch my train, though we both know I’m lying, we walk against the Pennine wind and you light your cigarette with your hands covering the flame. How does this end? You walk back to your bike and I walk back to the train station and you jump into bed with another woman and I jump into bed with another man over and over again until retirement age? How many beds can you get in and out of in a lifetime? I quietly wonder how long it will take for us to bed hop back to each other. I let you walk a little in front of me and I hang back to watch you in full frame, the back of your head while I’m picturing the skull under it. You are spending the weekend with your new friends and I say I hope you have a nice time. I am praying for salvation, I’m praying for Spring and the chance to burst into tiny pink new flowers. I never want to see your side profile at a gig we are both attending. I never want to feel the all encompassing dread of hearing your laughter in a smoking area. I never want to hear a song you have written and spend an inordinate amount of time wondering if it’s about me.

We reach our destination and you hug me half heartedly, the way somebody would a frail grandparent. There is more passion in the pump of blood. We say goodbye, I turn left, you turn right and it is done. My eyes are half closed against the dusk, a thin sheet of hail is starting to come down whilst the amber of the electronic timetable stings my eyes as I face it. A man in a suit smiles at me knowingly. I hear my name being called half way down the street.

I carry on walking.

Since the breakdown of my last serious relationship in June last year I have re-entered a world that can only be described as a combination of Dante’s second circle of hell and Lord Of The Flies. For almost eighteen months, I have traipsed the lengths and breadths of the North West, in search of I don’t know what, I’ve been put into some downright comical situations, One man took me on a tour of all the Yorkshire Ripper’s murder spots. Another bought me a copy of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest for absolutely no reason whilst we were on a date and then ghosted me forty eight hours later. I had a one night stand with an aspiring soundcloud rapper. I dated one guy for three months only for him to get cold feet and unceremoniously dump me on the corner of Stevenson Square and Oldham Street. Even more disturbingly, there was one guy who showed everybody in his band’s touring party a picture of my tits. The only thing I am sure of, after these exploits, is that this generation of men are genuinely insane people. Just last week I was bombarded by messages from an overzealous American who really wanted to let me know that it was his belief that sex work has no place in our society as it is a product of a patriarchal system. He also steadfastly described himself as an “angel”. I unmatched so fast, I almost broke my finger.

Is there some kind of enigma code to dating that I don’t know about? Are there women out there in a Bletchley Park esque secret location, punching in numbers and cracking these elusive codes? We have veered into the absurd, the worrying and the irrefutably psychedelic. I will admit I have been driven to despair by these lunatics on more than one occasion. I have started this weird little ritual for whenever I come back from these dates, I stand in the mirror and say “I am a cool person. I am an interesting person with a lot to give. I am above all of this.” repeatedly, sometimes for a good five minutes, until I start to believe it. The thing is, I do fundamentally believe it, I am cooler than these people. It’s just a fact. I’m that cool that there are men walking around with aspects of my personality that they have chipped off for themselves, in that infuriating way that men do because they’re so devoid of their own. In August I made a playlist for a guy, two weeks later he didn’t text back but my playlist magically reappears copied and pasted into a new one with another girl’s name as the title. These women don’t fancy these men, they fancy US, the cool girls who came before. It is so easy to lose sight of yourself in a sea of insecure men who love nothing more than to confuse and humiliate to feel better about themselves, because every other aspect of their life is out of their control. I have cried more times than I would like to admit about being ghosted or ignored, or even worse, shagged then ignored and I have spent many hours under the covers wondering if I, at 27, am destined to a life of bad dates, bad sex and bad luck.

I have an exceptionally bad dating history. It would be funny if it wasn’t so alarmingly bad. All three of my serious relationships have been a lesson in chaos and dysfunction. I take responsibility for at least some of it, I was unmedicated and wild beyond belief until I was 25. My rage, my all consuming rage, was pointed at the men in my life because, ultimately, all three were totally useless for different reasons. Boyfriend One was abusive. Boyfriend Two didn’t know if he was coming or going or if he wanted to fuck me or be me. Boyfriend Three was 30 years old and so badly stunted that I do genuinely believe he was suffering from a form of psychosis that made him think he was actually a 19 year old student with the lifestyle to match. I would love to say that I at least learned something deep and meaningful from my relationships with these three men, but ultimately all I came out with was encyclopaedic knowledge of Japanese noise rock and the ever useful technique of putting a ring pull from a can around a tenner so that it doesn’t unravel when you’re sniffing drugs.

The men in between have been mere footnotes, there was a guy who looked like David Bowie, but to be honest I only ever saw him after I’d perilously mixed drinks so that could be bullshit, who liked fucking on his couch and once invited me round to “watch films on mubi”. Another honourable mention in this dubious hall of fame is the guy who asked me to bite him and draw blood during sex because I “look like a vampire”. I could go on, the list reads like a who’s who of assorted creeps and weirdos, but it is genuinely quite depressing. I have blocked more numbers and instagram accounts than I care to remember, unmatched and been unmatched, it’s borderline masochistic, there is definitely a karmic debt to pay with all this. I read a tweet that said Hinge puts people in our lives that we most likely weren’t supposed to meet, I think that’s correct. There’s something so unnatural about being skipped past because your photo, a version of yourself that is not quite reality, isn’t attractive enough to somebody on the other side of a phone. I wish I could say I didn’t feel the pangs of insecurity when somebody hot doesn’t match with me, but I do, sometimes it’s enough to send me back to my mirror to do my ritual. What is this compulsion to be humiliated? My need, my urge, to wind myself up has led me to places I wouldn’t go with a gun. I am in a hell of my own making, as my hinge profile would suggest, I’m weirdly attracted to losers and miscreants.

Undeterred, and a prolific self harmer, I was back like a bad smell on the apps. I spent the whole of this summer jumping in and out of beds across Manchester, before I had a final crisis of faith in a basement bedroom in Didsbury on a Sunday afternoon in late July. I spun out of this house, after yet another unsatisfactory one night stand. Into the path of children and their parents who were making their way down the streets in great bunches, pushing us unfortunates into the path of cars and bikes, dodging clouds of candy floss and small, flailing, sticky hands. I decided it was enough. I was surrounded by visions of multiple strains of life I could never have, and until then didn’t think I wanted. I was so bitterly jealous, I almost wretched. I passed couples on terraces and felt like kicking their table over. I don’t know what came over me, I felt like I was being reminded, all at once, at how much I had fucked up. There is nothing like a one night stand and fumbling, perfunctory sex to make you feel unclean, so deeply unclean, that you feel like you might scrub your skin with bleach when you get home. I felt like a dark stain on a white sheet, the contrast between me, in last nights clothes with 10% phone battery and a blinding headache and these white teethed young professionals with their boyfriends they met at running clubs or through their equally gleaming friends, who host dinner parties with chequered crockery in their high rise apartments is unfairly glaring that I feel like I could scream. I have watched the dating pool suffer through a climate change of its own, reduced to a small puddle heinously overpopulated by alcoholics, drug addicts and people from Surrey. The ghosts of my past pop up intermittently on this long walk back to Burton Road tram stop, the three men I have been, at different times defined by, make their reappearance, as though they are rising out of the pavement to confront me. Breakup one, 19 years old and quite literally out to lunch, unable to understand the severity of the abuse I had experienced, somehow made me into the villain of my own story. Breakup two, disastrous, cataclysmic, shaped the person I am today, almost drove me to suicide out of the desperation I felt. Breakup three, more of a realigning, not as melodramatic as two, so anticlimactic that I forgot we were in a relationship for a year. The three lessons in chaos and dysfunction, back to get me. I didn’t look behind me all the way home just in case they were really there.

I wish I could give you a redemption arc. I wish I could tell you I have met somebody amazing but I haven’t. They are, unfortunately, as tedious as the last. I have been ghosted, spat on (literally), ignored and even mistaken for somebody else when approached by a one night stand as I stood at the Tesco self checkouts. I have been humiliated beyond measure, in a sick way I kind of enjoyed some of it, but enough is enough. A recent reprieve has been the Vogue article questioning whether having a boyfriend is embarrassing, I would argue it is. After my Didsbury dilemma (how Carrie Bradshaw of me!) where I almost threw myself under a tram because I felt so unwanted, I realised there is not one man in the Johanna Connolly canon that was worth any of the upset during their brief time in my life. My mum used to say to me “the only place you can go now is up” which is a nice sentiment but she clearly never had to endure musicians, dj’s, creative directors, fans of the band Geese and moustached men. All of the men mentioned above have caused me more damage than eleven years of substance abuse. I used to sniff industrial glue recreationally when I was a teenager and I’m convinced my brain hasn’t been fried by that nearly as much as it has by a man in a vintage trench coat.

Where do we go from here? Is the “single girl” having a reprise? Will we swipe right into oblivion, or at least until we find someone we can essentially rent out on a short term basis? Are we all destined to have our fifteen minutes as hingelebrities? In an Uber on the way home from yet another lacklustre date last week I deleted the app in a moment of frustration. By the time I was on the tram home from work the next afternoon, it was redownloaded and I was talking about Wim Wenders with a man from Macclesfield. It never ends. It’s like the Hotel California for really annoying people. Are we all just addicted to instant gratification and one night stands? I don’t think I want to know the answer. At the time of writing, I have once again deleted the app from my phone and banished it to the ether, a neverworld of offloaded apps where it will lay dormant until I’m feeling like I need somebody to tell me I look like Morticia Addams or ask me if I’m a goth.

My name is Johanna Connolly, and I’m a hingelebrity.

This is who we are asking to create, by the way. Ten minute psychedelic freak outs and a shake of dishevelled curls does now an idol make. This is who we are asking to create, pouting 21-year-old boys sitting alone in the recesses of house parties, coming up with names like “Chipped Tooth” or “Hypnic Jerks” moodily peering up from long fringes to ask somebody to put on Just Like Honey by Jesus And Mary Chain in a voice slightly louder than usual so that fellow revellers just know they are in the presence of a really fucking cool guy. I am sick with it. I feel like I am having my mouth filled with some kind of feathery matter, down and down until I choke, this is who you are asking to create! I keep having increasingly violent visions of committing acts of atrocity against local bands, of taking them hostage and asking The Jacaranda to pay the ransom. Of burning down HBGB’s with them all inside. Of climbing on top of Kazimier Stockroom and threatening to jump should they play another note. They would laugh. It would become anecdotal in afters just like this one. “Heavy that” they would say before the ten pound note goes up again. I am bored, so fucking bored that I can feel myself on the wind up. I want to deliberately misquote John Lennon. I want to gaslight the boy who’s dad was in a famous band into thinking his dad wasn’t in a famous band but rather a very accomplished fantasist and his life is a lie. I want to loudly proclaim The Stone Roses as a shit band. I want to make them hate me, because I hate them. We are temporarily in solidarity because of the poorly bashed pharmaceuticals and the kind of camaraderie it creates, tomorrow I will walk past these boys in the street as though we have never met.

Casual cocaine consumption dressed up in bell bottoms has put us all one rung above your garden variety street addicts, because that’s all that separates us isn’t it? Our knowledge of Lou Reed and where to get a good quality leather jacket is all that can save us now. It’s like I’m in a fucking mausoleum, a memorial service, the living end. We’re halfway through another decade and the boys still think they’re in the fucking Sex Pistols and the fucking girls are sick to bastard death of the fucking boys but still we are populating practice rooms the country over, listening to what they have to say, which ultimately, universally, is a fucking load of nothing. I’m bored to tears, MAN. I’m going to start personally sending poison pen letters to the keepers of the nuclear codes to trigger a detonation that might finally put us out of our collective misery. The only thing these fuckers believe in is robbing Aldi to feel working class or how their hair looks when they’re telling someone that like, nobody can write a song like John Lennon. I’m an observer. I can hear somebody saying they want to try heroin because Lou Reed did heroin and he’s fucking boss isn’t he?! I’m sick with it. Suede Jacket #5 is asking us if we knew that “the banana album” only sold 30,000 copies when it came out. Suede Jacket #4 has just asked for Tomorrow Never Knows to be played. Suede Jacket, Dangly Earring #2 has just asked me if I like Television. I am sick with it.

A quick moment of solitary reflection in a bathroom with a door that doesn’t lock ensues and I’m wondering which suede’s house this is. There is a picture of Bob Marley smoking a joint above the toilet. There is one towel, on the floor, XL rolling papers are creating a makeshift rug beneath my feet. It’s time to admit that I am in no way exempt from any of this carrying on. I am a collaborator, and they used to hang collaborators. My own past is chequered. I was in a noise band, for fucks sake. I went on a livestream to be wrapped in plastic and waterboarded, in the name of “subversion”.I had a song called Machine where I just kept saying “I am stuck in your machine.” Whatever the fuck that means. I ask boys on dating apps if they like Einsturzende Neubauten and then get pangs of superiority when they say they don’t know who that is. I am a knobhead. Familiarity breeds contempt. What makes me so different from Suede Jacket 1,2,3 and 4? Absolutely fucking nothing. Do I go back into purple purgatory and truly immerse myself? I’m 27 now. The coolest thing I can do is die.

Fate accepted, purple purgatory has taken on a sombre mood, coinciding with the last line reaching receptors. Suede Jacket #8 self consciously flicks a crumb of cocaine off his corduroy knee and embarks on a soliloquy about how the Tories are shit. A fine future in politics, this one. Suede Jacket #9 is taking us through his songwriting process and isn’t he masterful? The suedes are looking up at him, this vision of Jesus Christ from Bootle, with unwavering devotion and the idea that one day, any day now, they can be just like him. I am sick with it. I am defeated, and sick with it. The tweeting of birds as the black makes way to blue makes me even more aware of my complicity. The nauseating idea that the events of this evening might make it into their next song is making me feel even worse. I populate the margin. None of these people know my name, and I don’t know theirs. Cultural fatigue. The pipe is clogged and still they all insist on coming down it. They’ve all started buying drum machines, it’s serious. Five more years until 2030. In their departure, they gather up guitar cases and pouches of amber leaf like spoils of war, giggling to themselves about staying up until the approaching daylight. Promises of mid week pints are shouted over shoulders as they all begin to file out, like factory workers after a long shift. I am left standing in the purple, even more grotesque now that I can see the overflowing ashtrays occupying the coffee table, face to face with the enemy. The camaraderie is now completely shattered, we half heartedly hug, absolutely no affection, he does not ask what my name is and I don’t ask him. I’m halfway down the path, still half expecting John Lennon to be looming over Allerton Road like the statue of Christ The Redeemer when I hear a shout from the door.

“Message us in the week and I’ll put you on cheaplist.”

I am sick with it.

The harsh whisper from behind the red brick breaks my focus. I am lying face down in a gutter in a slurry of silt and ciggie ends, face to one side, peering into a basement window. I haven’t got my glasses on, I am practically blind and I can barely make out the used plaster bobbing dangerously close to my face as it passes into Liverpool sewer system oblivion.

“No!”

“He is definitely in there with someone.”

She, the prototypical woman scorned, tuts as if it’s my fault he’s definitely in there with someone. I, long suffering and fucking freezing, have almost forgotten what we’re here for. The skin of my face is pockmarked with gravel and I can feel murky water creeping up my shins, I’m distracted from the mission at hand. In front of me, a window, peeling white dulux, beyond that the incandescent orange of a lamp, the single sign of life on this solitary street. A series of rash, hysterical decisions has led us here, to the plush genteel of the Georgian Quarter, giggling rabidly on the back of the bus bringing us closer to Our Most Dastardly Plan Yet. Together, we are purveyors of espionage, of Hollywood blockbuster style wall scaling, of antisocial behaviour in the name of friendship and quite possibly, unfounded paranoia. Our objective? Catch a treacherous man in The Act.

How great it would be for us, how triumphant, to be correct in our suspicions, suspicions that have been rumbling under the surface for quite some time, to be vindicated and able to tell everyone in the pub afterwards. I am expecting a call from special branch with offers of employment once they realise there is a 19-year-old master of espionage living anonymously in Liverpool. Almost scripted and with no room to fail, we struggled to understand what could possibly go wrong, our faith and shared bravado was a powerful thing but as we turned the corner onto a street identical to the last, I’m started to realise that if he threw open the lace curtains, in flagrante or otherwise, we would be eye to eye, like patron and animal on two sides of the glass at a zoo. Restraining orders and court dates ensue, and we become the subject of wildly exaggerated graffiti in every toilet in the Merseyside area. The idea of unflattering paparazzi photos taken as we are whisked away from court appearing in The Echo is almost enough to send me back to the bus stop. Taking to the gutter, I inch closer, closer to the small gap between the window sill and the curtain, closer to the bluebottle burial ground that occupies the ledge, closer to thin, foggy glass, now merely a film that separates us and an irreversible act of voyeurism, closer to finally getting a straight answer. I hadn’t thought of what I would do if I did see anything, I am closer than ever to being faced, if rumours are to be believed, with a highly inadequate penis in a HD unutilised by any of the four main satellite TV channels. Our Most Dastardly Plan Yet is fast morphing into Our Most Stupid Plan Yet, and I’m now more aware than ever that there is a man oblivious to the fact there are two lunatics mere inches away from him.

“I’m getting up.”

The dead silence is punctuated, like a balloon popping suddenly, by a man and his dog eyeing us suspiciously as they walk past. The poodle is looking at me like I’m pathetic.

“Lost her earring!” She shrills, not entirely convincingly. Factoring in potential run-ins with members of the public was not something that we had even considered. It was like we had created a world where it was just us, him, and Roscoe Street. The dog-walker glances back at us as he turns the corner and I am expecting the imminent arrival of a pack of action hungry PCSO’s who I’m sure would have a field day regaling this to all back at Wavertree Road Police Station.

This ghoulish pantomime, the act of trespassing, the viral diseases I have probably contracted in the last fifteen minutes, has all meant nothing. We have been snaked by the enemy, outwitted and double crossed. I am so close to the glass now that I am convinced I have taken on the appearance of a shadow puppet and am completely visible on the other side. Finally, with my face pressed up to the glass in a gruesomely comical caricature, I am able to see into the room. It is empty. Spartan in appearance, the only signs of life being a cigarette in the I heart NY ashtray and a box television burbling with ITV Granada. In a feverish moment I almost want to be caught, so I won’t feel as daft as I do now, staring into the window of the man who once came up to me at a party and asked if I had ever heard Blue Monday. She appears next to me, having deigned to lower herself, both figuratively and quite literally, into the gutter to see for herself.

“Oh.”

That one word sums it up really. It’s like ice cream falling off the cone. Disturbing though it is to admit that your borderline criminal behaviour has turned up fruitless, the disappointment radiating next to me is tangible. Even worse, everything is pointing towards the unimaginable possibility of us being wrong, maybe he wasn’t cheating at all. Maybe his sneaky demeanour and 48 hour vanishing acts are simply quirks of personality and not an indication of a tendency to deceive? Could it be that our paranoia and suspicion has eaten away at our brains so much that we have developed some kind of joint psychosis and we are destined for a life of deviance? Our Most Dastardly Plan Yet has evolved to its final form : A Very Serious Psychiatric Condition.

Our defeated silence only means we are both thinking the same thing. We spend a few moments staring wistfully at the interior, what we can see of it, walls painted warm yellow, African statuettes probably gifted by his mother or collected from Gambia on gap year exploits. The mutual dissociation that exists between us means we do not immediately react to the sound of approaching voices, coming through like static on radio. We are seconds away from being apprehended, seconds away from complete social excommunication, seconds away from Liverpool Echo fame, seconds away from being the ones caught in The Act. Eyes widening in horror, we roll to either side of the window, casting no shadow, undetected for now. A light switches on in a room further back from the one we are peering into, sending light streaming under the door. She is kicking me maniacally, as if to ask if I am also seeing this, this irrefutable evidence of a horrible truth. Confirmation of our suspicions! We are not dangerously unwell! We are justified in our completely inappropriate and insane actions and should we be arrested we could have an argument that would stand up in court! Justification, he is a cheat! We hear the living room door swing open, the voices coming ever closer to our vantage point, she is craning her neck to see what could possibly be going on, clapping a hand over her mouth when what she is seeing finally registers. I myself am taken by curiosity and peek into the window. There he is, caught in the act, embracing a blonde headed young woman who looks like she smells of Redken shampoo and one of the Gucci perfumes in the pink bottle. I am suddenly aware of my own shabbiness, and next to me she is too, self consciously running her hands through her hair. The inside girl is fair, probably has a savings account and most likely works for a women's charity or whatever it is that lovely girls in their twenties do. It is totally impossible now to not see the gaping holes in our plan, in our psyche, in us. We both hear it, her soft vowels, an accent so far away from our searing Scouse that we almost wince. This is enough.

We run. We run fast. Passing more bewildered dog walkers and smokers outside bars, run until we make it clear of the area, no trace. We are desperately lighting JPS Players against the bus shelter and I’m shaking out rancid water out of my trouser legs, which hang limply around me while she takes deep drags of her cigarette, absentmindedly flicking a leaf from the fur of her coat. I am scared of what comes next. Walking now, in the shadow of the cathedral, deflated beyond reinflation, how do we proceed? We could go back there, kick the door down and have our long dreamed of wild west style showdown, to the horror of the blonde girl and the well respected residents of the Georgian Quarter. We could tell everyone, we do, after all, live in a city of committed gossipers and shit stirrers, each one more eager than the next for salacious gossip, and nothing gets more salacious than the story of a cheat and the stake out that caught him. We could slip further into madness! Come up with more brilliant acts of psychological warfare! Go back to the drawing board and come up with The Most Dastardly Plan Yet 2. The possibilities seem endless, but the creep of defeat is never far behind as we walk back to our side of town through the rain, which has probably been commissioned to appear by that knobhead and Blondie to make us feel even worse while they’re doing that annoying thing couples do where they lay in bed listening to the rain. It feels that way anyway.

Climbing the stairs to her flat, finally back on familiar ground and with slightly higher morale, she turns to me, her face a mask of unhinged delight, her teeth about to snap under the pressure of the clownish smile she now has while she’s laughing strangely. I can’t tell if it is genuine laughter or laughter teetering precariously into sobbing. Grabbing my shoulders with sharp fingernails, she is shaking me gently and I start to wonder if we really are in the midst of some kind of mental health crisis, I grip her hands under mine.

“At least we weren’t wrong!”

She is now shrieking loudly, smacking her hand against the wall in glee. She continues up the stairs until finally she disappears through the front door. I am left outside, like a gatecrasher at a house party, in the spangled ruins of Our Most Dastardly Plan Yet.

Strange then, that I would choose a £32 Ryanair return to Paris to try and get me out of my creative slump, more of a full decline, and I had plans to return triumphant, having written my way back to normality. With my predispositions tucked firmly away in hand luggage I made the early hour slog to Manchester Airports most raucous terminal, T3, and boarded the budget airline straight into the lion's den. Paris.

I have been to Paris twice, once as a child and once as a 17-year-old where a man unceremoniously stuck his hand up my skirt in what I think was a perverse welcome ritual, strike one on the tally, and I vowed never to return, but soon I found myself at Paris Beauvais Airport, which funnily enough, isn't in Paris and simply name drops the place like a nightclub reveller who insists he's on guestlist. Paris Beauvais Airport looks exactly like what would happen if the council suddenly decided that one of England's numerous B&Q garden centres would make a brilliant terminal, it is a monument to greenhouse style glass windows, plonked in the middle of an unassuming field. Fifteen euro vogue cigarettes (Eastern Europe wouldn't have the gall, literally, to charge this much) secured and I am overheating on an airport shuffle, bound for the arrondissements.

Monday night is spent trawling the Boulevard St-Michel searching for a Tabac (that's ciggie shop to you and me) that doesnt want me to embark on a crusade to find the only working ATM in Paris and will let me exert my modernity by using card, in the end I give up and spend thirty euros on cigarettes, which are moodily smoked in accompaniment to a fifteen euro cosmopolitan at Au Pére Louis, a wine bar decorated in so many shades of red that it is like being seated for dinner inside a New York fire hydrant. Next is “Le Pantalon” which reminds me very much of The Peer Hat (could there ever be another?) and after three pints I am taking great pleasure in texting my friends “I am in a pub called Le Pantalon, it basically means The Trouser” as if the basic compulsory French they learned in high school has failed them. Le Pantalon is ragged,has definitely seen better days, but is charming and exactly what you would expect from a Parisian backstreet pub, smeared mirrors and a toilet door that doesn't lock complete the laissez faire attitude. A scandalously priced Bolt ferries me back and my only thoughts on driving past the Arc De Triomphe, a landmark recognisable pole to pole, is that it's quite big. We’re off to a great start.

Tuesday begins slowly and I am emerging from the Pont D'Alma metro station into the shadow of The Eiffel Tower. I wonder what everyone walking towards me on the Pont D’Alma bridge is staring at behind my head, and in true panto style, it seems to be behind me. Not wanting to get caught in the torrential downpour that has turned The Seine beneath me the colour of chopped liver, I turn very briefly to look at the cast iron monolith, the backs of my shoes being stepped on tenfold by eager tourists, then turn my shoulder back into the rain. We will deal with Tour Eiffel later. My aimless walking leads me to MAM, the museum of modern art in Paris, chock full of works by Léger, Soutine, Picasso, Degas and Ernst. My trousers are quite literally dripping onto the slick marble floors from the opening of the heavens outside, my bag is checked by security and soon I am in a room of palatial geometric wonder, huge murals of shapes and colour adorn the walls, mystifying the patrons. I am a huge fan of Léger so I am very pleased to see his 1918 painting Les Disques hanging in the next room, stashed on the back wall. Upon finding the lift to the rest of the museum I find there is an entire floor dedicated to Henri Matisse. I used to be a fan of Matisse until I went to art school and summarily had it beaten out of me in the form of writing seemingly endless essays about his approach to form and colour. The mere mention of Matisse up until this point had me breaking into spontaneous sweat, but I thought I would make a visit anyway, and I am so glad I did. In Salle Matisse, the triptychs The Unfinished Dance (1931) and The Dance Of Paris (1931-1933) cover the walls, it is a sight to behold, even if they are the very triptychs that sent you into frenzied panic as a harried art student. I stand underneath their gaze for ten minutes and finally, ten years later, I feel like I finally understand Matisse’s approach to form and colour - I must see if I can get a redo on that paper.

Exiting via the gift shop and four euros twenty cents lighter from the purchase of Soutine postcards, I am back into the murk of the afternoon, torrential downpour now calmed and with Paris stretching out before me, I cross the unremarkable Passerelle Debilly, a footbridge connecting to the base of the Eiffel Tower, who I can now see more clearly, I am once again fighting the urge to be funny on the internet (aka, not very funny at all) and make the Blackpool / Eiffel Tower joke that I'm sure my Instagram followers would absolutely love and appreciate but I ultimately decide against it and carry on strolling anonymously into the seventh arrondissement, chuckling to myself.

I can be very naive, despite myself, and I thought I would be immediately struck with inspiration, scribbling furiously in café after café, so how downtrodden I was by the time Thursday came around and I had not written one single word. The only thoughts I really had had in four days were “god that bakery smells nice”, “I hate Americans”, “all the boys in Paris are hot” and “I like her shoes” so I took myself to Musee D’Orsay, to see the hallowed L’Absinthe (or Dans Un Café, if you are calling it by it's Christian name) an oil painting by ballerina enthusiast Edgar Degas, depicting two of Paris’s artistes, seated at La Nouvelles Athènes, a café that was once situated in Pigalle, one of the city's numerous Bohemian districts. Now, I have long wanted to be a writer in the vain of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine and I spent hours as a very lonely teenager in my box room reading haphazard translations of all three, so as I was walking through the gallery I positively praying that some kind of emotion, a glint of inspiration, would flare up and I could run, biro aloft, to the nearest café to begin my work. Standing for a good twenty minutes in front of the painting, as I had two days previously in front of Matisse, brought nothing. A dash around the museum at large also brought nothing, but an honourable mention to bal du moulin de la Galette by Auguste Renoir, a beautiful wash of blue that should have inspired even the most disillusioned. I wish I could tell you that I indeed run biro aloft to Café Flore but I didn't. I went to Carrefour City, bought a croissant, and sat on the banks of the Seine, in a state of complete and utter malaise, a true wretch in Paris.

My last day in Paris came around swiftly, I took one last ramble around the Champs Elysees where the vocal fried chatter of the American elite hangs in the air like the eternal hum of the wasps nest. They are very unimpressed by the Louis Vuitton store, you see. Have I changed my mind on France, at all? Well, they're not as rude as everyone says they are, that's for sure. I'm shocked to have turned my coat so quickly, but I find them pleasant, and despite my lack of creativity in a city that has sparked a million ideas, I enjoyed my time there. It smells, there's quite a lot of rats, not as many as there are in Manchester (ha!), and you will get lost in the big Carrefour at least once and I would like to take the opportunity to apologise to the French for my aversion over the past few years, you have now made a believer out of me and I no longer think you should be nuked.

Coming down into the subway, I am passed by two British tourists who are wondering aloud how to get out of the warren that is Invalides. They collide with an older gentleman, who sends their backpacks flying, and they are instantly in Brit Abroad mode, practically screeching apologies and overtures. French man steps back, with the look of a scorned cat, gesticulates wildly and utters two fabulous words.

“FUCKING BRITISH!”

I'm inclined to agree.

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