Feed Yourself

One of my problems with regular blog writing is that I’ve always seen myself as someone who doesn’t have ideas. I want to be one of those people with a flower garden for a mind, who just reaches in and plucks you a bloom, but instead of fertile earth my head is always filled with dust. Call me purple fingered but I’ve only just found out you’re supposed to feed plants…. So having spent a few weeks burning the image of my own belly button onto my retina, I decide to go into the outside world again and eat.

In Brighton during May, there is an open house trail. All kinds of people put up exhibitions in their homes. It helps if you can at least pretend to be interested in their artwork so you feel less guilty about your nosiness. You can tell so much about someone by poking around in their bookcase whilst pretending to look at a painting. Sometimes you get to hang out on their sofas. Some of them live in buildings you have before only dreamed of going into. Some act like guards at a museum, some like friends are coming round for tea.

At embassy court it was difficult to pretend I was there for the holiday snaps. I ended up buying a postcard out of guilt because I had drunk in so much of their sea view I felt like there wouldn’t be enough to go around. I felt like a flighty lover just using them, entranced by their bay window and their curvy door but turning over at the end and falling asleep.

Some people squeeze the artwork in amongst their own possessions. At one house I found myself gazing at a melamine tray in the kitchen, absorbing it, trying to take in the deeper meaning. Some clear the whole place out and paint the walls white – I wondered how they lived for the rest of the week, where they kept their possessions. My favourite houses sat us down and fed us tea and let us pretend that we were well connected, our phone books bulging with names

For a while it’s as if the whole town belongs to you and you are welcome everywhere. You get annoyed with the closed houses. You want to knock on strangers’ doors and ask them about the plants in their garden, and what its like to live in a tic tac box. – Little white houses jumbled into every spare inch, facing in every direction as if they are way too cool to look out to sea.