My amazing friends

In the four and a half months I've been living in London, one of the things that tend to overcome me is a feeling of isolation. When I came, I believed that I wouldn't find it too hard to make friends. I knew that it would take a particular sort of person to want to hang out with me because there are very few people who share my eccentricities about life. There are a lot of people who just seem to be too sane* to be friends with me for whatever reason, I don't know but it's simply a fact of my life. Whenever I slyly mention it to someone they'll go "Well, I've not talked to anyone who has a problem with you" which is basically the story of my social life. Everyone has this sort of pleasant indifference to me. Pfft, Whatever. However, I believed that there would exist these sort of people who i would naturally click with  Didn't quite work the way I planned though. 2011 has been better and I'm starting to actually gasp talk to people and am getting closer to a few people which is awesome. On the rare occasion, I may even sit next to someone at dinnetime (a very notable situation in catered accommodation). Despite this, I still mark myself as someone who is not very good at socialising... with anyone. If anyone has any ideas why, I'm desparate to hear them.

This blog isn't about my lack of finding erstwhile companion though. It's about the people who by some means or another, I am friends with.  I am constantly being shocked and amazed at how fantastic my friends are to me and I love them so much for this. There are a lot of people close to me who don't know most of the important drama in my life but when they are really supportive of me based on the little rubbish things that get to me, I just feel so loved. I have to admit, recently a lot of it has been about lending me little bits (or big bits!!) of money here and there while I struggle to get my student loan through and a job. I know I shouldn't revolve my life around money but what people have done for for me in this sense has been so overwhelming that I genuinely had to stop myself from crying last time it happened. And everyone else has just shown me a lot of friendlove in a way that makes me feel so happy and fuzzy inside. Don't get me wrong, there are still people who would be happy to be friends with me just so they can talk about themselves/get in my pants but usually I don't pay them much bother. In the same guise, someone who you put a lot of effort into talking to/being friends with who doesn't reciprocate also isn't worth it. That one happens a lot more. But I like to think I've chosen the good'uns and if you're reading this and wondering you are one, you probably are. Which makes me feel that anyone who talks to me one day and then fails to acknowledge me the next day at college isn't really worth it.


There are some people in my life who I really truly love and I really owe them everything. There are people who I'm desparately scared of falling out of contact with now that we've all separated off into our different Unilands. I can't wait to get back to LARP as well. Larpers are such a supportive bunch and there are very good reasons that I see a lot of them as my surrogate family. I've been a bit absent from it recently and so I hope when I get back into it, I will be talking to more people and will be back with this lovely bunch once again becuase so many of them come under the love addressed in the previous paragraph. The people who I've known and saw practically every day for 2/5/7 years are extremely important and stand by me like conjoined twins with their shoelaces tied together and I would fall apart without them.


Love you all <3

The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl

This is a repost of an article that was published in The Heythrop Lion - I have to confess that I'm not desparately keen on the finished article but here it is) 

Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour. 

I’m going to make a speculation here. A large number of us know very little about prostitution. Many of you have probably never been or hired a prostitute. I certainly haven’t. In fact, my first and most meaningful experience of prostitution to date came in Fresher’s Week. Not having a laptop or enough money to go to all the Fresher’s events, I sat in my room and read The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour. The book consists of various blog posts published on the “Belle de Jour” weblog between 2003 and 2004. At this early point in the article, I want to discourage you from believing that this is the book of ITV2’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl because, although the events are ever-so-loosely based on the blog, it is also largely dissimilar. 

The book contains exactly what it says on the cover. However, this would probably be even more accurate if the book was entitled The Intimate, Explicit and sometimes just plain Icky Adventures of a Perfectly Normal Londoner. As you can probably guess, it’s mainly focused around Belle’s exploits as a £300/hour call girl but it also looks at her general “normal” life too. It’s not beautifully written. Perhaps that’s all we can expect of someone who’s a blogger and not a novelist. It certainly doesn’t make for great novel-reading and is hardly a page-turner unless what makes you turn pages is trying to find out how someone is going to be anally penetrated today. 

I think one of the reasons people tend to find this book annoying is that Belle de Jour’s life is just too gosh-darned normal. There are no scenes of her injecting heroin into her arms while her 8 illegitimate children Sesame Street. She texts her boyfriend, gets annoyed at the Underground, visits her Mum, has break-ups and buys lightbulbs. Sure, somewhere in the middle of that you’ll read about a guy peeing on her in the bath while she cries for erotic purposes but unfortunately she generally has quite a normal life. And to add to the sheer mundanity of it all, you then find out that she was using her money to fund a PhD in informatics, epistemiology and forensic science. She also used the money to buy lots of underwear but that probably goes with the territory.  

It’s probably time we sat down and accepted that sex doesn’t need to be something sensationalised. I have little doubt that the main reason that people are buying this book and subsequent others that Belle has published is because they feel that they are missing out on something and, rather than try it out themselves, want to read about someone else doing it. 

I should probably add some sort of public warning here saying that although being a high-paid prostitute may seem like a good way to pay off your student loan at the time, it may lead to, amongst other things, nuns being displeased in you. 

So, if you see yourself as the sort of person who might enjoy reading about fisting over a light lunch at Pret, then Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl is the book for you.