Status Updates From Heligoland

It seems to her that Rowena has missed out on three vital stages of building a life and lasting friendships; family, a proper school and university.

Nobody can sparkle in a vacuum.

She wonders how many of those present, sitting in rows of dandelion clocks waiting for the last puff of time, had once loved each other?

She thinks about that staple plot of soap opera, where a young man turns up claiming to be somebody’s son. If only. But that could never happen to her; it is impossible for a woman to have mothered a child and not know about it. It is so hideously unfair.

Rowena, staring at her reflection in the glass, loops the pink tie round her neck. How easy it is for a man. If she had been born male, things would have been so different. But she would have been an ineffective little man, elbowed out of the way at bars, a duffer at games, a seven-stone weakling who gets sand kicked in his face, a failure with women.

(…) Rowena has continued her education by reading novels, learning from fictional characters' mistakes and faux pas. Thus she was taught to hold a wine glass by its stem, always to wear stockings in town, to cut flowers under running water, never to smoke in the street or apply make-up in restaurants, nor to eat the rinds of soft cheeses, in public anyway.

Over the years she has amassed a cache of treasures, memorising poems with the thought that should she ever be placed in solitary confinement, she will not be quite alone.

[…] Of course, the gods had always had it in for poets, but in Francis’s observation the majority of old men go mad without divine intervention.

Quem Jupiter vult perdere dementat prius. [Whom Jupiter would destroy, he first makes mad]