Yoga, Marx and a Bit Too Much Jewellery

It was a lovely summer morning – very early, when everything is still wonderfully cool but you know it’s going to be really hot later, so I’d wound the bus window right down the minute I’d climbed the stairs – before even taking my seat.

The journey took forever, much, much longer than the tube, but I was giving that a miss for a while after the bomb scare – it had been a little scary and I thought if I was going to be blown up I’d rather it didn’t happen in a tunnel or anything.

Sitting up on the top deck, right at the front, with my feet against the window, watching London waking up down below, made me feel as if everything there belonged to me. I breathed in deeply – the air was an exciting mix of traffic fumes and horse manure, and I could see the soldiers practising for something or other along Rotten Row. I loved the sound they made as they trotted their horses up and down the dusty edge of Hyde Park – you could hear them quite distinctly, even above the car noises.

I closed my eyes, imagining it wasn’t actually the 1970s, but a hundred, maybe two hundred years before. Then, because we were getting near the top of Victoria Street, I opened them again and scrabbled around in my bag for the French précis I had to finish. I made a point of never doing homework until the last possible minute. I scanned it for a bit, and then it was such a lovely morning, I thought I’d give it a miss for once. I could do it in break instead – nothing was ever so hard that you couldn’t finish it in fifteen minutes.

I took another look in my bag since we still had some way to go. There was a translation of Das Kapital, which I was slowly ploughing my way through because I felt I ought to, and a copy of Our Bodies Ourselves, which would be slightly easier on the brain. I was on the chapter about exercise; Miranda and I had thought we might give yoga a go soon since it seemed to be quite a healthy kind of thing to do.

It turned out to be very disappointing though. I hadn’t got further than the second sentence, when it recommended that you give up smoking and caffeine before you started – and I certainly wasn’t going to do that, so I put the book back in my bag and stared out of the window again, remembering the weekend.

It had been so brilliant! Just thinking about it made me smile; Miranda and I had gone to the Roundhouse. She’d been before, but I never had and it was wonderful. Everything about it had been exciting – even the getting all dressed up first. We’d hennaed our hair especially, the night before; in fact – I ran my fingers through it – yes, there were still some little gritty bits left – and the lingering earthy smell of it.

Miranda had mixed hers with half a bottle of Bordeaux to make a lovely dark red colour - we had drunk the rest to use it up, and mine had turned my bleached hair really a very startling and interesting shade of vivid orange. I was quite pleased at the amount of people who’d stared at me afterwards. My father hadn’t said anything, but you could tell he thought it looked awful, so that too was a good result.

Then the makeup – thick black lines around the insides of our eyes of course, and dark smoky eye shadow. We’d worn second hand jeans from Camden Lock - they had a few holes but they were just the right colour, and boots with very high heels, and a bit too much jewellery.

When we got there I was very glad we’d gone to so much trouble, because the whole queue on the stairs outside had been more like a fashion parade, everyone eyeing everyone else up and down as they arrived. While we were waiting, Miranda had dragged me through the crowd to a group of people in black leather, and we’d scored some blues off a very thin man who had long black hair - he was definitely wearing mascara too, and then the doors had opened and everyone had shuffled in, including us.

Honestly, it was so much nicer there than the squat. Happier for a start, and more exciting. I was getting a bit bored of downers all the time, watching people shooting up in corners and then nodding out the way they did. Also, it was summertime and I didn’t really want to spend it like that. Camden seemed like a much better idea all round.