A Roof of One's Own

What a satisfying and triumphant feeling it is to be able to hustle my meddling parents out the door, with a variation of the line held over my undeniably defeated head for almost two entire decades: "This is my house, thanks very much." Brilliant.

I have officially become a woman. I didn't know when the day would come and what seemingly momentous occasion the feeling would follow but now I know. It is moving into your own house. In the last few days, I have shamelessly ravaged the wifi of Portswood's Trago Lounge (it being literally 30 seconds from my front door) to organise banking, bills, broadband... blah blah blah. But now I am all growned upped, I mustn't complain, as this is what womanhood contains: the organising of things. How very 1950. Luckily, this actually has nothing to do with my gender; closer to the case would be to say that I'm a massive control freak and I don't want others to do such things that could be so catastrophically ballsed up. But for the sake of my revelation, we'll ignore this. So now not only can I say that I am a woman, but perhaps I'd even go so far as to say a competent woman. Ironically, I just put an 'a' in 'competent' on first attempt, but I know plenty of women who cannot spell, so again, we'll ignore that blip.

I am just the type of woman I thought I would be. Highly strung with an exceptionally expressive face. So not much has changed from my girlhood days (which, for the record, is any time before Thursday). What also remains is my rate of reading literature. I thought, as a woman, I would have to cut down on my time spent reclusively languishing in my bedroom, head firmly in fiction, due to other mature responsibilities and exciting prospects but alas, I read almost all of Michael Cunningham's The Hours in a mere single sitting. And what a book it was. I loved it: Virginia Woolf astounds and absorbs me. Girlish awe or womanly admiration? Perhaps a bit of both. I moved swiftly on to Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and have got 50 pages in already. There's nothing better than a good read. But I digress.

Just one more week of shire living and earning before the fun and frollics of the Edinburgh experience begins. Until then, I am back under their roof, playing the role of daughter/child/'stroppy teenager'/baby. Not my favourite part but I can't play the woman all the time.