9th July: Something's gotta give



            I awake, after my first night with Lauren as my home, under the Daresbury Tower and decide to shower and clean my teeth in the Laboratory rather than learning how to heat, then use, my precious onboard water.  After showering I put toothpaste on my toothbrush, only to discover that the combination of declining eyesight and increasing vaginal dryness means that I’ve squirted my toothbrush with Boots lubricating jelly.   (Picture) I rub my teeth on a paper towel and make a mental note not to give anyone a slippery snog today.  Maybe tomorrow I will swap products and enjoy a fresh and minty, cavity-free, extra white vagina.

            The day’s surrealism continues as I spend it explaining how the Large Hadron Collider works.  Or rather, how and why I made a model of one.  I’ve bought with me about fifty quid’s worth of collage materials so that visiting children can make a new collage, this time of the Daresbury Tower.   It’s a festival of PVA, particle physics and dubious breath and it all goes surprisingly well.  (Pictures). At six I dismantle my artwork and, along with the Blue Peter paraphernalia, stagger back and forth to the van.  I also carry £44 in cash and twenty-two less cards than I walked in with.  Next to me is a marquee bustling with a thousand excited and exhausted employees celebrating a very productive Open Day.  I glimpse full trays of beer and hear raucous laughter.  If I wasn’t so tired I’d have the articulacy to express my feelings of being alone, washed-up and dismissed; instead I’m just knackered.  I phone mum and ask, with glassy eyes, if I can stay with her tonight.  It means driving down the xx, M62 and A1, which, in Lauren, without sleep breaks, will take two and half hours but after the upheaval of the last few days I need to return to the maternal nest.

            Over a large glass of decent wine I tell my folks that I’m going to look for a permanent job. I can’t handle the disempowerment of no partner, no house, no job.  One of them needs to be fixed and the job route is the most achievable.

Janis Joplin once said that freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose – I’m with you there Janis.

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