ID Hole

Are my thoughts my identity, or my appearance, or my street where I was born? Or my current bedtime book, hairdo or address? 

      In my head my identity switches from saviour of the world to melting slug. Sometimes I want to be a cat – when I was a kid I’d totally be a cat. Pick any moment and I might want to be a roller disco goddess, or a tree, or a sorceress.

      Once I genuinely believed I was a sheep for three peaceful minutes – I swapped identities through the train window.  *Ping* I was me again. I didn’t think ahh here I am again a cis white lapsed Catholic student menstruator – no I thought fuck my brain’s mad, where’s my sandwich… My identity was: hungry. 

      No – that wasn’t my identity, that was my digestive state in charge of my thinking – I didn’t identify with the world’s starving. No, my identity was: person with a sandwich. 

      And I can’t have been a sheep for three minutes, more like three seconds – the lengthiness was my perception. It was peaceful – time seemed slower. If anyone was watching me their perception would have been: girl. White girl with a sandwich, a train ticket and a small tartan case. 

      Would a woman have wondered how much she could fit in that case? Would a man have been ranking me out of ten? Would that be their identities? No. That would be my presumption. Woolly thinking. 

      Once I’d stopped being a sheep, did being a human feel more humany? It felt being-on-a-trainy, it felt fast, it felt packaged. If I had been leaning on a gate out there, I may have felt relaxed, bipedal. At one, at odds. I may have felt I had power over the gate lock or my direction. How much of that is humany? (Hmnn, there's a teaser.) Which of us would believe they were Observer-in-Chief? I have felt harshly judged by a sheep through a fence before. 

      If I was in a carriage surrounded by men would I have felt more conscious of being female? Definitely. Would I have felt more humany or less?

      Is your identity what you contrast with, project, or believe in or side with? Or what someone else sees, hears or translates into their own programmed belief system? Is it our unconscious bias or our sandwich board? 

      Sandwiches again. I identify as a sandwich. I think I always have. I’ve always felt sandwiched. But really, am I not just a silly privileged girlie who doesn’t understand anything prattling away out of turn?

      Oooh. Maybe ouch.

      I definitely was a sheep though. Watching a girl on a train. I wonder what the sheep was thinking when we pinged back into being ourselves again. Maybe 'Why do I fancy a peanut butter sandwich? What the fuck is a peanut butter sandwich?' 

Wotsit All About?

Writing a blurb about a book wot you wrote is harder than writing the flipping book.

Wot have you dunned today? That's harder than wot have you dunned over the last eight years.

For the last eight years I have been writing a book. Amongst other things, such as not writing. Such as eating a lot of savoury nibbles. 

Today, I tweaked a : and two ;s into 'is' and a ,. 

A day's work. 

But I think I have dunned the blurb. 

So wotsit all about? I've been asked this repeatedly and still it was excruciating squeezing out a coherent description without being cheesy. 

It's about the details. 

And now, I squint my brain at wot to put on the back of the book. This could take another two months. I want something original... I need more savouries to get the cogs working. 

I wish I had some Wotsits. They remind me of Saturday afternoon swimming. Specifically, the vending machine afterwards. Wotsits and a searingly hot hot chocolate in a criminally fragile plastic cup. Preparation for a wet walk home and an evening of still stinging eyes.

Now, Frazzles. They are a pub family room in Devon in which to spend the summer evenings with a pool table for my brothers and Don't Go Breaking My Heart on the juke box. 

Fangs were a free transfer of a funny vampire face I sent away for with tokens from the back of the packet and Mum ironed the image on a yellow flowery top for me. A funny combo, but it was a funny top - sleeveless but with a polo neck. Best accompanied by roller skates. 

Monster Munch, pickled onion flavour, were gaspilicious and to be devoured out of doors in raucous company, almost like an initiation trial. 

Hula Hoops tasted better bitten off fingertips. Getting ones to fit thumbs were trickier, but not impossible. 

Chicken Wickers tasted disturbing, like crusted burnt fat, but you'd keep eating them to confirm how inedible they were coz you could imprison your tongue in the structure before it disintegrated which was fun, like a mini jail break. The jingle still lives in my head. I'm liable to squeal 'They're terribly tongue-tickling' at inappropriate moments. 

Crisps, or maizey foodstuffs, seem to be important to me.  

While writing the book I ate my bodyweight in peanuts a thousand times over.

No wonder I'm so salty. 

Perhaps, instead of words on the back cover, I could infuse it with salt. Like a salt lick. Bet that's not been done before. 

So am I ready to publish? 

First edition, original flavour: ready salted.