Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

In tonight’s thrill-a-minute instalment of life in small-town back gardens!

I joke, but honestly this was stressful. A hedgehog had got itself stuck in the narrow space between our wall and our neighbours’ shed, tangled up immobile in an old football net. Our neighbours were out and plus have so much junk round that shed that there’d be no way in to get it anyway. Which left us, trying to free a hedgehog from a football net through a fence with a pair of kitchen scissors.

We snipped the net carefully and got it free after a while, and it barrel-rolled into an even smaller space, with - just visible - a section of net stuck tight round its neck. Argh. And the thing about upset hedgehogs is that they roll themselves up as tightly as possible into spiky little balls of Piss-Off-And-Leave-Me-Alone-ness, which does not lend itself well to extracting noose-like bits of football net. So I ended up lying on my front squished against a fence, face inches away from a furious hissing hedgehog, trying to roll it sideways far enough to reach the cord round its neck, fighting horrible visions of the hedgehog suffering a slow painful death and it all being my fault for not getting it out of the football net properly.

Anyway: success, in the end! A lot of luck and one last careful snip and it was free.

We left it some (non-fish) cat food and it was last seen unrolled and gobbling the food down.

I knew the best-friends-forever thing was too good to be true.

Things the neighbours are at war about this time around, as far as I can tell:

- cleaning the communal hallway. Again. Which, look, cleaning the communal hallway is a basic duty of communal living, it's stated in everyone's deeds and lease agreements, it's not like it's a new thing. But it was still a touchy enough subject to set off the Great House Meeting of 2011, which will forever live in history for lines such as "it never looked like it needed doing when it was our turn," "don't you tell me when to clean my own home!" and "we couldn't do the cleaning because we didn't understand how the rota worked."

(The rota was really not complicated. We offered to redo the rota to make it 'easier to understand' after that meeting, and then literally couldn't work out any way of doing that - it listed the month of the year next to which flat's turn it was to do the cleaning that month, and that was it. So we reprinted it in a slightly bigger font and underlined 'Rota', and everyone thanked us and said they'd definitely know when to take their turns cleaning now.)

This time around everyone is at least agreeing with the principle of having to take turns cleaning the hall, so that's a big improvement. But there are growing suspicions that people are signing the rota without having done all, or any, of the cleaning. Also one neighbour told another neighbour that they missed living in their last place because there was a woman in her 80s living there who "just loved to clean, so we left it all up to her!" I would love to her the 80-year-old woman's version of that.

- blocking off bits of communal garden nearest your bedroom window for your sole personal use. Or, if you're in the other camp: demanding access to bits of the garden near someone else's bedroom window for weird and nefarious purposes.

- noise levels of 4-year-old. Or inadequate discipline of 4-year-old, if you're in the more extreme wing. Because why bother with the more practical suggestions like the kid not wearing shoes inside, or the parents maybe investing in some carpet for their wall-to-wall laminate floors, when you could turn it into a referendum on someone else's parenting? That's bound to go down well!

- communal garden, upkeep of. This is the new Hallway Cleaning Rota War.

- whether or not it is unfair that Flat A does not have a storage shed on its own plot of land, like Flats B and C do, and like Flat A used to before a previous owner sold it off. I am kind of baffled by this one - I mean, either they bought the flat under the belief that it did own land, in which case take it up with the lawyers, or they bought the flat knowing that it didn't, in which case, what do you think complaining to the neighbours is going to do? Anyway, latest I hear is that Flats A and D both agree this is totally unfair, and Flat B's shed and plot should be reassigned to Flat A since A's occupants own and B's only rent. Yeah, good luck with that.

- whether or not it's reasonable to leave a barbecue in the communal bit of the garden.

- whether or not Flat D's occupants, who both work from home, are actually doing any work at all because it looks very like they're just sitting there all day drinking wine and they could at least put some work in on the garden if they're going to be using it all the time. Corollary: whether Flat D's occupants' careers count as 'proper jobs'.

- everything they have ever fought about in the past, even though it's long since settled and over.

And the frustrating thing is, it is totally possible to sort out something with the garden upkeep, the issue that kicked all this off, in the same way that we eventually got somewhere with the communal hallway cleaning. But we cannot have a conversation about that, because the neighbours are incapable of having a conversation about specific thing X without it turning into a conversation about everything else. 4-year-old neighbour is possibly the most mature of the lot.

 Last night, someone threw themselves out of a window a few streets away. High window. Not good. I heard about this in a queue at the hardware shop this afternoon (and incidentally, hardware shop, is it really necessary to have a Valentine's day theme set up over the nails? really? I'm there to buy enamel paint, draught excluders and a teapot; if I wanted pink fluffy hearts, I would be elsewhere), from someone who Was There. Not right there at the time, but there afterwards when they closed off the road and there were police milling about. And when this happened:

Passer-by: Are you guys filming Taggart?
Policeman: NO, this is REAL.

The crack in my bedroom ceiling had spread this morning. Most of the way across the room, then a sharp right turn, then into the outside wall. I'm too high up to be able to see whether it's showing up in the brickwork or not, but I'm not sure I'd look even if I wasn't. So I slept on the sofa last night, and I'll keep sleeping on the sofa, where I was lying awake in the dark, laughing about it. I've held on to my singleness with a talon-like grip, I get jittery weird if I even share a bed on a regular enough basis to have my own side, I'm in my own place all by myself, and... here I am, sleeping on the sofa anyway. Yes, I can indeed start a fight in an empty room! Cower before my, er, skill.

And it's occurred to me since then that if I was nineteen I would be writing a poem about this. Two or three places in ten years? Well, people move. Four or five? That's bad luck, maybe, but these things happen. But eleven, as I've had? Much though I might bitch and whine about moving, and much though I could give you a good reason for every single one of those moves, I can't even try to pretend that hitting eleven doesn't have something to do with me, for better or worse.

So if I was nineteen, I'd be writing a poem about watching the crack in my bedroom ceiling. And about how my landlord, who should be far more worried than he is, never wanted to investigate properly because then he'd have to  put all his energies into shoring things up and warning future buyers. And about how the whole thing is going to fall down at some point, in some huge shower of plaster and rafters, and about how it doesn't have to be my crisis, because it isn't my house. I'm just living here; I'll shake off the plaster dust when I go. And yet, the cracks in the ceiling come from the same roots as the warped, uneven floors, the same ones I'd have seen as a warning if I wanted to buy, but saw as a feature I loved because I didn't. So that would have been the poem I wrote, back when I didn't think metaphors needed to be subtle.

I was going to cry off Christmas Party #1, the one hosted by the friend I'm recently back in contact with, because I'd had five hours sleep over two nights anyway and none of those involved a situation that potentially ranked 8.5 on the Awkwardness Scale. But then I drank some coffee, and felt better, and decided to go along for a couple of hours anyway, since the last train home gave me an easy out.

And then my no-longer-former friend called me to say, um, yes, by the way, you know how I said your ex-fiance wasn't coming? Well, er, he's turned up, along with his new girlfriend, so I fully understand if you don't want to come, but we've really missed you and we'd love to see you, so...

And then I waved my arms around a bit.

And then my excellent young friend, who lives in the same city as the party, called me to ask if there was any chance of us going out for a drink before he went back to see his family for Christmas, and, um, was I doing anything that night?

And I thought: my life is a sitcom.

And so it was that I turned up to the party with my young friend in tow, and all my old friends hugged me and told me how much they'd missed me, and my ex did this big Look I Have A New Girlfriend thing which, I am told, was largely wasted on me and provided much amusement for other guests as a result, and the girlfriend glared at me and all the other guests kept sidling over to say "...what is it with him?", all of which was quite funny, and then they left early anyway, and then I decided I didn't want to get the last train back after all, and waved off my young friend back home and went out drinking until the early hours of the morning, and then slept on a friend's sofa, and then got back here after three hours' sleep all bright and early for work. All in all: a grand success.

 I have a new place to live! And it's extortionately expensive, as is everything else on the rental market round here at the moment, so I'm going to have to put some pretty solid hours in at Job #2 to cover the rent, which will hopefully not be a problem although Job #2 is a zero-hours contract and the flexibility works both ways in terms of how much work I get and how much work there is, but my boss is snowed under so here's hoping, and oh yeah council tax and stuff -  but oh, friendslist, you should see this place. A gas cooker! A sofa in the kitchen! A double bed! A view, which is even better than the Best View In The World I had at the old place! There will be pictures, I promise you.

For now, I'm still camped out at my friend Dr K's, home of a huge widescreen TV and the World's Most Comfortable Sofa. Also, of a flatmate who says things like "You look knackered. Sit down and watch CSI, and I'll make you some pasta." Not that I needed the encouragement, you understand. My supervisor wants me to work work work on those publications, so I have an article to polish up, and a book proposal to write (for a monograph), and another book proposal to write (for a new edition of a long-out-of-print novel), and a bunch of lectures to write and classes to plan and Milton to read, but do you know how long it's been since I got to curl up on a sofa and watch CSI?

(Not that I'm doing that now. Now I'm at work, where I have been for the past eleven hours. But soon! Soon!)

The first day after the clocks change, when it's light enough to go running in the evenings after work, and I... fall over the dog and twist my ankle. It's swollen up impressively, and now I'm limping about like one of the Ringwraiths in the Bakshi-animated Lord of the Rings. (If you haven't seen the Bakshi-animated Lord of the Rings, then neither do you want to.)

I can't afford to phone in injured to work, so I'm hoping my boss will take pity on the lame and let me spend most of my shift sitting on the floor sorting out the Anthropology journals. Teaching will be easier, since I can sit down through the whole class, and simultaneously more frustrating, since I usually don't sit down through the whole class. Tomorrow's tutorials will be conducted without any kneeling on tables or pacing about between the class and the whiteboard. Bah.

But, mostly: the dog. How did I not see the dog? And more importantly, how many of my colleagues and students will believe me if I make up a story in which I twisted my ankle doing something world-changing and heroic?

To people I know and people I haven't forgotten (non-lj, all of them):

- There is a world without her in it, and it's always going to shine brighter for you than for anyone else I've ever met.

- I'd like to tell you that one day, after the fifth or tenth or thirtieth time you drop all of your friends in the dust and leave us licking our wounds, we won't be there when you come running back home - but the truth is, we will.

- I kissed your boyfriend when we were seventeen. I still feel bad.

- If you stopped structuring your every word and thought towards making people believe you were academically brilliant, then maybe you'd realise you already are.

- You always watched me when you thought I wasn't looking, but I always, always knew.

- Just because he can't remember doesn't mean it didn't happen (and everyone who knows you knows it did).

- You need to find a pretty, intelligent and interesting nineteen-year-old, and fast. I would be bad for you; please don't make me prove it.

- It's not that I don't believe you're broken. It's just that broken or not, you really need to stop fucking up.

- You're the only person who ever broke my heart, and now we're grown up I don't even know what you look like.

The very happy, very drunk, very glad-to-be-home man singing "You Are My Falkirk" to the tune of "You Are My Sunshine".

I need(1) two new dresses for miscellaneous university-related events. I've bought one of them already, which is probably a waste of money even for a big shiny party thing(2) and at any rate cost more than I'd usually spend(3) but, hey, it's pretty. I'm still looking for Dress B.

So, here's my question, in re: Fifties-style strapless dresses like this one:
a) How the hell do they stay up?
b) Does the answer to a) still apply if you're dancing?

Since the mannequin in the picture presumably doesn't move very much(4), it's difficult to tell how those things work. And this is for a ceilidh, and ceilidh dancing is fast. I could always sew straps on it (or try to pass off duct tape as a very trendy accessory), but maybe there's some anti-gravity system at work there. People walk about in those dresses, don't they?

(1) For 'need' here, read 'am required to' for Dress A and 'am not required to, but this is a Big Fancy Event in a Big Fancy Place and I don't own anything that fancy and it'll just be wrong if the event and the setting and the boy on my arm are all looking prettier than me' for Dress B.

(2) Having discussed this with my dear friend J, who went to the kind of school where they throw actual balls with actual ballgowns every year, I am partly reassured on this. My dress probably cost about half a sleeve's worth of ballgown. And, yes, I got it cheaper because the stitching's coming away at the back, and it doesn't look quite as shiny nor as expensive nor as new as a ballgown, but AT LEAST MY DRESS NEVER TOOK PART IN A SOCIALLY EXCLUSIVE EDUCATION SYSTEM, SO THERE.

(3) Well, sort of. I'd usually spend nothing - I don't find myself at many occasions that warrant fancy clothes. The last time I bought a dress for a big event like this was when I was 17 and in my last year of school, and a bunch of us clubbed together to hire the function room above the pub down the road, which let's just say didn't involve ballgowns. My dress cost £13.99 from Mackays. And I still have it. And it still fits me.

(4) At least not until after dark when the shop's quiet.