It seems these are a litany of relationships gone wrong, choices made to do with men and not to do with me. That’s what happens when you write a memoir. A thirty-thousand-foot view, you get to see the pattern of the streets. That summer of 1994 I was supposed to be starting an artist’s collective with the girl I’d meant at the Chelsea Town Hall. We’d had it all mapped out. There was a building off Portobello that we were about to sign the lease on, we’d had meetings with financial advisors, we were going to be the answer to artistic poverty. Then the man with pigtails happened. Glastonbury was a detour, a final stop on a beautiful summer before returning to London to get on with it, but no one had told me about the Tor. As I drove towards town it came up on my right, this outrageous Somerset monument, a marker on the land. I veered right up the narrow street past the Chalice Well, parked at the bottom of the hill amongst the other camper vans. At the top of the Tor I met a girl who said she had a friend in town, we should go, he’d give us tea. She led me to the courtyard on the high street, up the steps to a pottery; he was tall, thin, angular, his hands patterned with dust, blond hair to his waist plaited into two long pigtails. Leftfield boomed from the cd player. He smiled and offered me a lump of clay. In those days I didn’t know the difference between connection and boundaries. I thought if the feeling was there I must make myself available, this was destiny calling, who was I to get in the way. We made chai pots, he invited me to dinner. I followed him to his farmhouse on the Somerset Levels; a ragged kitchen, low doorways, a fireplace you could sit in, a yellow Labrador. We stayed up for three nights talking. I rang my friend in London, told her the artist’s collective was off. She was furious and took twenty-five years to forgive me. I made one trip in my camper van to collect all my stuff from the happy house in west London. I moved in with this man who I didn’t know but thought I did, into his life, his farmhouse in Avalon, this king of Glastonbury who had a finger in every pie. I thought, this is it.
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We were taught to look out for princes and often lost / lose ourselves in their finding.
I just understood this: "I thought if the feeling was there I must make myself available." It's what we women do, did. I don't know if young women do that now. But I do know that if a boy/man looked at me, I suddenly was there for it. Is this common? It feels pathological.