Day 71: Judgemental Prick

Seventy days of blogging.  It suddenly occurs to me that if I keep this up, my post titles will get bloatier and bloatier (Day One Thousand, Two Hundred and Sixty-Four: Exhausted by Numbers).  May have to rethink the counting business after I get to one hundred - otherwise it just sounds like a prisoner's journal.  Will keep on writing - for as long as I continue to enjoy it as much as I currently do.  I have no idea if anyone actually reads this blog (apart from my friend Jude), but I still like the thought of it being out there, and someone - a completely random stranger (yes, you - no, not you, Jude) stumbling on it by accident.

Today is Saturday - sharply cold, bright and frosty.  The big lake in Verulamium park is frozen - not enough to stand on, but a couple of centimetres thick.  A group of kids have chipped some bits out and are skiffing them across the ice.  The noise is extraordinary.  A dynamo whirr as they skim, but as they slow to a halt, musical tinkling like chandelier pendants.  Such tangible stuff that it seems impossible it will disappear with only a little warmth. 

I poke around the Roman museum.  There are a great deal of terracotta pots, as there are in most museums.  I get pot ennui very quickly.  I'm far more interested in the very personal artefacts -tweezers, seals, salve spoons, and especially the jewellery.  All the rings look tiny.  For teeny Roman hands.  And a child's brooch, shaped like a mouse - only a centimetre long.  Dark with age, and bent out of shape, a static relic in a glass case.  Impossible not to imagine it new and shiny, pinned to clothes, run with, shown off, lost.  So random - the things that survive and the things that don't.  Incredibly intact mosaic floors - that have been walked on, skidded on, by ACTUAL Romans.  Terracotta pots dropped and smashed - wine spilled and Roman swearing (Mentula et testes!  Cunnus!).  I also discover that I live on top of the burial site of an Iron Age chieftain, cremated and interred complete with his chariot and armour.  AD55 - five years before Boudicca's rampage.

This is almost too exciting to take.  I'm in time-travel meltdown.  Go to the bookshop to recover (they have big sofas).  I'm stacking up a browsing pile, when I'm interrupted by a woman, who asks if she can talk to me about her book.  She's just published her first novel, and is doing a signing.  I see a trestle table, with two helium balloons, a glass of wine and a stack of paperbacks.  Nobody seems to want a book or a signature.  The balloons bob listlessly.  She has me pegged as a potential reader and starts enthusing about how she's always wanted to write 'something girly'.  Somewhere in the recesses of my head a door clangs shut.  But I empathise with her situation, and applaud that she's actually trying to flog her book, rather than sitting forlorn at her trestle.  So I smile encouragingly.  I disover that the book's heroine - Crystal aka 'The Party Girl' (clang) - swaps her glitzy corporate London life for rural Wiltshire (clang), where 'Mr Right' is delivered into 'her wretchedly barren life' (clang, snick, snick - them's deadbolts, btw).  It's embarrassing to extricate myself without buying the book, but I honestly CAN'T bring myself to.  I hide upstairs for half an hour, then sneak past the display without making eye contact.                   

I'm thinking about this, and feeling guilty and judgemental.  Why did I turn up my nose?  Because that's exactly what I did.  Maybe I'd have loved the book.  Maybe it's brilliantly written.  What's wrong about someone finding love?  Isn't that what everyone wants?  Isn't that the basis of many of the best stories in the world?  (Nothing.  Yes.  And yes.)  Try as I might, I still can't shake my response.  Even the cover image - two glasses of champagne, and an invitation, all in pastels, and friendly loopy fonts - makes my spine stiffen. 

Can't quite sort this out with myself.  Suspect there are several different threads - all underpinned by a sense of superiority.  Intellectual, political, aesthetic.  Sometimes I am a total prick. 

However, I am a prick with a sweet potato baking in the oven. 

A lucky prick.