Over the sea to Skye; living the biopolar dream

Rather like the aforementioned Mr Hulk (he’s only Incredible to his friends and don’t you forget it!), I have, for years now, been leading a curious double life. I don’t mean that latent anger issues turn me into a bulging green monster or anything (at least not more than once a month anyway), it’s more of a lifestyle schizophrenia really. Shall I explain? Oh, OK then, if you insist…

By day, I’m an ever so slightly shambolic freelance writer mixing with all sorts of creative types, sitting in funky warehouses listening to loud music with, frankly, mostly homosexuals. Dark rimmed spectacles, ironic t-shirts and converse trainers are the order of the day and no one would even blink an acute eye for detail at you if you came into work sporting a re-constituted welly-boot as a handbag (http://www.joey-d.co.uk). I take the bus, I get excited about fonts (the typographical kind, not the old stone things with water trickling out of them, although they are nice too, in their way), I have several aborted scripts for stage and screenplays strewn across my kitchen table and I watch subtitled films with ‘breathtaking cinematography’.

But by night, or rather by weekend, it’s a very different story. I am a tweeded ex-public schoolgirl with a puffa jacket and a pony. A huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ ruddy-faced pushy pony-club mother in the making – an alter-ego that a good friend of mine once kindly dubbed “the cat-piss lesbian”. Too kind RK, too kind.

I can talk reasonably knowledgeably about equine management, hedgerow plants and shotgun cartridges. I can pluck a pheasant, gut a fish and, on one notable occasion, bury a rather mangled looking fox (it was actually dead I hasten to add). In short, I am two people.

We’ll call the first girl oh, I don’t know, something with a Z - Zanna? Cool old Zanna with her converse trainers and her apple mac. We’ll call the second girl Bunty (school nickname obviously). Good old, slightly alcoholic, Bunty with her 12-bore and quivering regiment of gundogs. Zanna lives in a loft in North London above a tattoo parlor and a shop that specializes in vintage buttons. She has a boyfriend who is in a band. Bunty lives in a shared house in Fulham (when she’s not at Mummy and Daddy’s big pile in Surrey that is). She has a whippet.

You see the problem with such stark duality in ones psychological makeup is that you never quite know who or what you are, and you do tend to get yourself into some rather odd situations. Take the hippy outside the David Hume Tower circa 1998 par example. I shamble up in my holey jumper and converse trainers with a strand of hair in my fringe that I have dyed very pink and very badly, in the vane hope that I will look creative and interesting, even a little bit exotic perhaps. I don’t need to tell you that, in reality, the effect is just a bit alarming and not at all enigmatic. He thinks I’m Zanna (or a less cool approximation of her anyway). He is running a stall for the League Against Cruel Sports. He eyes me with the look of one who knows he has found a kindred spirit. I listen to him patiently and then, when he has finished his grizzly and somewhat fanciful sales pitch, I try to put him right on a few points. Now don’t get me wrong, I think everyone is entitled to an opinion and I was in no way confrontational with Swampy, but he is quite quickly thrown into an irrational and uncontrollable rage. He thought he was speaking to Zanna and he got Bunty. It’s a disaster. He actually, when asked exactly what his feelings were about foxhunting, said to me, and this is entirely true,

“Pretty much the same feelings I would have if you came into my house and raped and murdered my Mother.”

Interesting. Somehow I can’t help thinking that’s overstating the case, just a little.

He then started screaming (on the busy steps of the University Library),

“Rapist! Rapist! You’re a fucking rapist!!!!”

Quite punchy behavior for a peace-loving hippy you’d think. This is though, a classic example of someone misjudging their audience. But can Swampy really be blamed? I mean he was clearly already a bit mentally unstable and then I come along with my tricky dual personality and get him all confused. “Quite right too, these people need telling”, says Bunty. “That was like, a bit bloody unfair of you”, says Zanna.



Never have I felt this contrast more than last week though, and this is really the point of my ramble today. I have had the post holiday blues now for quite some time – and it’s all Bunty’s bloody fault. I’d been looking forward to my week on the Isle of Skye for months. A few close friends in a lovely house on the beach. Great seafood, fishing, boats, lobster-potting, walking (although not something I usually hold with, it was great fun, even when we had to ford a couple of rivers and very nearly lost one of our party). Just being up there, that far north, is great. No mobile phone reception, not even any electricity in the remote fishing lodge we trek out to (see piccy). You are outside every day and every night you are in front of a cozy fire getting quietly comatose on industrial-sized gin and tonics. Life doesn’t get much simpler or much better. You start to remember what it’s like to be alive again. Your legs ache from actual use, your skin glows, your lethargy disappears. Bunty is in her bloody element – she practices her fly-fishing, nearly dies in the ‘the perfect storm’ in a bathtub boat and chops down a bloody great tree with a chain saw. Zanna just sits inside and reads her book on ‘How to plot the perfect novel’. Loser.

But then the inevitable. I have to break the news to Bunty that the holiday is over and we must return to Edinburgh and then to London. She doesn’t take it well. Even when we time our trip back south to perfection and the city of Edinburgh lays on our very own pyrotechnical extravaganza (it WAS in honor of all our fishy, nautical triumphs, nothing to do with the end of the festival), Bunty feels the grey Sunday clouds roll in and Zanna takes over. Monday morning and before you know it Zanna has plugged in her ipod for the train down south and coolly negotiates the tube at the other end. There’s a wicked gig she’s going to catch in Hoxton tomorrow. She’s looking forward to it.

But what, in the end, does all this schizophrenia mean? Is it a good or a bad thing that someone can be two people at the same time? Am I playing this urban/rural game at my own personal cost? Will I turn round in years to come and realize that I have damaged myself and no longer have a unified sense of identity?

Nar. Don’t be ridiculous. Way I see it, I get the best of both worlds. I get to be both characters, as and when it suits me, and surely this type of varied and adaptable behavior is not the denial of something, but in fact a new modern life-skill. These days we all have busier, more city-centric lives and I think if I can slip into my Bunty persona every now and then and get away with playing for both teams (so to speak) then what’s wrong with that?

So here’s to the fond memories of my recent jaunt over the sea to Skye (thanks to all that were there and my kind hosts – both Bunty and Zanna had a great time). NO matter that I am back in the big smoke. Zanna is quite happy and Bunty will get a chance to come out to play this weekend when my countrified, moleskinned pal A comes to visit.

On the Skye theme though, I will say this. I now know how Bonnie Prince Charlie felt when the Jacobites smuggled him over to Skye dressed as a woman. He was a fleeing monarch, oh yes, but he was also a big old maid with a skirt and girly slippers and, just for a moment I fancy, he enjoyed the perversity of being both!