Badly planned

I went out to the Red Grouse for a drink with Deborah, Lee, and Jeremy and I spent a fairly innocuous and pleasant hour being told I “hadn’t changed.” Deborah forecast our futures for us: Jeremy’s destiny will be one of eventual fulfillment and happiness after the usual traumas, but she felt that ultimate satisfaction and contentment would elude me. I will, she says, go on to be “quite successful” but I’ll “never be really happy.” She’s undecided about going on to college because at the moment she’s enjoying life and transplanting herself to a campus seems too much of a gamble. We said goodbye to Deborah after an hour. She was quite genuinely shocked at some of the things L. and I confessed to I think. We have become so blasé about it.

Lee and I are hitching back to Watermouth tomorrow. The return leg should be quicker than the trek north, and we should be in London quite quickly. Dad doesn’t seem to understand how I can set out to travel such long distances without being anxious about not getting a lift, but for that very reason hitching is an interesting way to travel.

The immediate plan is for Lee and I to sleep on Ian’s floor, a plan he’s unaware of, although I don’t think he’ll mind. Everything is very badly planned. I think Barry and Pete are intending paying their next installment of rent which Crown Racing promises to refund as soon as some unfortunate responds to the ad on the housing lists. I hope to move my boxes out sooner than that vague plan promises, although where I’ll put them exactly I don’t yet know. If I allowed myself to dwell on my financial plight I’d get very worried by it. I still have a £240 + overdraft to clear, plus a share of a £46 gas bill to pay and whatever the (no doubt enormous) electric bill will be. I’m going to have no money left to put as a deposit on a place, or to pay rent . . . Quite a hopeless situation in fact.

Despite all this I do feel quite optimistic about the future.

Well, I'm near the end of this particular entry. The decorations are down and packed away for another year. Tomorrow is a new day, and what I hope to be a new way, a new life even—inside, if not on the surface.

Will all my ‘symbolic’ gestures be proved hollow, and just ‘empty rituals’?