It's been a long time since I got onto my own blog, alas have since become one of the people succumbed to the charm and ease of facebook, friends who I thought that I had lost were found again, or they found me... And almost everyday when I log in, there is someone from the long ago past sending me a friend's request.
Then I remember...
The wind-swept cliff top, where the school was set, all 100+ years ago, right on top of the cliff by the sea, in winter, the wind could at times, feel like it was going to pick you up off the ground, especially when you ran. The whispering in the wood panelled corridors and the stern, dark portraits in the main school library, though I never thought of finding out who they all were...
Easiest 4 years that I have ever had, I know that people tend to look to the past with rose-tinted glasses, but I know for sure that that is indeed the case. Everything was set up just so, so that we can succeed in what we chose to do, and it's taken soooo many years since leaving it to realise just how much I miss it, and how easy it actually was, and how... very humane. It has its scandals, but in my time with a different headmistress, all was as it should be.
Funny really, we didn't have homework, we had prep, we didn't just have weekends, we had exeat, and I don't even know if I spell that right now. 4 weeks for Christmas, 4 weeks for Easter, something up to 3 months for summer holidays... Oxbridge entrances, dances with Harrow, Eton, Lancing...etc. What a bunch of la de da bullshit, yet all that aside, I learned almost everything I know about myself and about life there, among the other girls, who have since been found by me on facebook or who have since found me via the same channel. Listless days when I roamed the corridors in my floor-length sarongs and dreamed my dreams, with arms weighed down by numerous large folders and books and papers, or even longer ago, when I trotted around in the ungainly school uniform with puffed up pleated skirt, blue and white strip shirt and a pair of dark brown shoes, their soles worn right through from 2 years of daily wear.
walking along the seafront on sunny days fighting the crowds, not understanding why they were all there, 
looking for the next restaurants to go to with my friends, looking for him in the cafe that we frequented, looking for that dress that I saw last weekend when i was out, a bright red, Coco dress with its own scarf, that pair of shoes, that book, that note book, that new diary, that new shop, that new face, that new event, that new club, that new pub, that new bar, that new... something.
I have been back a few times since, and Brighton has now taken on another significance, a place that I know but don't know anymore, North Lanes is finally beginning to get sucked into chain stores and cafes, with its menacing-looking pubs and clubs and bars shutting their doors, at night it resembles a quiet little side street, just like any other quiet little side street, when before there used to be bars that seemed forbidding yet irresistible. I tried showing you what that was like, but I was simply greeted by the silence of the street, when all the world out there on North Street and Lanes was in party mode...
chain smoking in the garage allocated for just such a thing, got blinding drunk, did some drugs, and mused about life in general and thought about where I would be and where it would all lead to and how I would be, as I curled up on the narrow bed with a duvet I picked out myself, pillows that were simply not fluffy anymore from endless use, with a genuine victorian skeleton sitting in quiet companion next to me on a chair, as I stared at it in wonder, thinking how yellow and earthy the colour of the skeleton was really, with the skull by its side and my sketch books and loose papers and paint and paint brushes all over the desk, I looked out the window with its chipped wooden frame (not double-glazed, of course) and wrapped the duvet tightly around me as the radiator never seemed to be working, I heard the sea, and remembered that there was indeed, a whole world out there, and I a mere human.
All's well and though the end is still a long way off, I am home when I keep it in my mind, it was the best I could get at the time, and it was the best England offered me, at the time. I finally got my first British passport today, and for me, it was the equivalent of finally gaining a pair of wings, no more visa applications, no more hassle, just pick up and... go... I take my first step in faith, I don't need to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.
