Evening. Or, morning. It’s 12:33am, which is probably supposed to be the time 22 year-olds roll into a club or something, but I’m in bed listening to Radio 4. My mum has her friends round, so intermittent cackling and cursing is floating up the stairs, my room is really effing warm and my neighbours have one of those automatic garden lights that’s so bright I can see my entire bedroom with almost perfect clarity when it’s on, which is ALL THE TIME.
I made the mistake of necking a few gin and tonics earlier, which was fun when I was downstairs before the friends turned up but after they sat down to dinner and the cackling started, I realised that a) gin kind of just makes being alone in your bedroom on a Friday night while your mother entertains more heinously depressing and b) I can’t drive anywhere to alleviate said depression. Also, Avicci is dead and I just heard one of his songs on Radio 4. Nothing about that sentence suggests the existence of a benevolent god with humanity’s best interests at heart.
Thinking about it now, I clipped the Ford Focus on someone’s wing mirror this afternoon and hurt my hands writing this week, so all things considered I absolutely should have gone out tonight. Possibly to Southend Airport and on a flight somewhere far away. I keep waiting for the cackling to subside, but I always forget that these things get louder as they go on, and there was about 12 litres of wine in the kitchen earlier so between that and the garden light from hell I will probably get to sleep sometime next autumn. Even the late-night Facebook lurk has lost its shine: one gin makes it funny but after four all you can really think is ‘why am I associated with these people and their pathological desire to check in to an event no one cares they went to also what the fuck is up with friends tagging other friends in memes but not responding to my message from several days ago?’
Then again, I’m telling you all that I’m sitting in bed at five minutes to one in the morning with a group of post-menopausal women for a soundtrack and the beginnings of a mild hangover, so. HAPPY WEEKEND!
Radio 4 always plays the national anthem at 1am and whenever I hear it I assume the Queen has died. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except one day the Queen will actually have died and I’ll probably assume it’s just time to swap to the Word Service or some shit. For some reason I get really anxious when I think about the Queen dying. I think because literally every human being on earth has heard of the Queen and most of them have access to social media. God, Piers Morgan’s going to be even worse than normal. The Mail is going to actually spontaneously combust. One or more of my mother’s downstairs friends will probably imply that no one born after 1970 has any real understanding of the monarchy and The Donald will be forced to admit that he doesn’t know what the word ‘ascension’ means. Then again, with a bit of luck Her Majesty will outlive him. Or North Korea will change their minds about nuclear disarmament and the world will end before the Queen can.
If the above paragraph doesn’t convey just how much I should go to sleep, nothing will. I think I might make an eye mask out of some pyjamas and ear plugs out of… ear plugs. Night!
Saturday evening update: they left at 1:30am. I got to sleep at about 3am ish and woke up at seven. Today was tough but I recovered by buying a new pair of Doc Martens and some Birkenstocks, necking a milkshake and procuring a chequered blazer. Highly recommended.
Francesca's Thoughts 