A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS BY
* This year when March rolled around, I was determined to throw myself a most excellent birthday. It has always been in my nature – basically I just really love presents – to enjoy my birthday, and that’s just another reason why the year before had felt so plainly sad. I’ve never understood people who don’t like birthdays: getting older is no fun, granted, but I also just see birthdays as days where you can do literally whatever you want, and whether that’s wanking for the duration of a working day and eating three pizzas or going to a prosecco brunch with fifteen of your closest and most Instagrammable friends, I feel like it’s indulgence of these kinds of whims – within the necessary constraint of budget, but never of taste – that is exactly what any self-respecting birthday should cater to.
By the time 23 loomed on my horizon, I was no longer in contact with the man who had wrought war on my life, and hadn’t been for about nine months. And though I still struggled daily with what he’d done and the sprawl of mental illness it had brought on, I had friends who made me rosier and more myself on a daily basis than he had ever done, a job I loved, and a new flat. Bizarrely, I was happy. I went about making things happen for myself, and planned two separate birthday parties, where I’d be surrounded by the friends I felt as lucky as a lottery-winner to finally have. And on the day, I ate a cupcake for breakfast, savouring the thick icing and thinking about how good it felt to be here, alive, 23, eating cake for my first meal of the day. Later, I had a scorpion tattooed on my leg, because they’re small and tough, like me. I got a fresh set of acrylic nails, and then I bought pizza for my friends and we watched clips from Cry Baby and drank horrible wine. It was then that I received the bin cake, in all its disgusting glory, and yeah, maybe it was the wine, but a year’s worth of sadness and achievement and everything else felt like it was pouring out of me, and it was a turning point.
When, the year before, I’d sat alone watching but not-really-watching Hell’s Kitchen (very good go-to depression binge-watch, by the way, if anyone’s in the market) I was, in that moment, a year later, amongst people – amongst women – who cared for and understood me enough to create something cute and weird and thoughtful just for me. Maybe I didn’t quite know it consciously at the time, pizza-drunk and overwhelmed, but I think right then I realised that my life really was getting better. It had finally clicked: with the right kind of love, from others, from yourself, you can build your life from the ground up; and sometimes, yeah, that love comes in the shape of new nails, cheap wine, and a bright pink bin cake.
For my 21st birthday, back in 2010, my sister and brother bought me some art. It’s a black framed photographic piece by Anne Collier, entitled My Goals for Six Months. I don’t know too much about Anne, other than that she works with “appropriated images” that often contain or allude to women. I’d never had “art” before. The image in the black frame is of a spread from a diary – one of those sort of old fashioned journals where you fill in a questionnaire about your life and pets and home. It read:
My Goals for Six Months: 1. Career or job position 2. Salary or earnings 3. Personal relationships 4. Family relationships 5. Health and weight 6. Education, specific skills and knowledge 7. Free time or play 8. Travel 9. Financial assets or material possessions 10. Home or apartment 11. Transportation 12. Spirituality Back then when they gave it to me I was living in a shared student house in Kingston. The house was a rickety semi, with ragged brown carpet leading up a tiny creaking stairway that snaked up three floors. The small bunker of a kitchen was decked out in pine, giving it a sort of depressing nautical vibe. There was one mouldy toilet. We’d all smoke inside: while we cooked, while we cleaned, when we all traipsed back for a cheap soup lunch, when we got home and started drinking. It was always a little bit foggy. My family and I collectively decided that it would not be appropriate to keep the Anne Collier’s My Goals for Six Months in
By Liv Siddall
this house. It would have looked ridiculous anyway, to have real art up in my bedroom which was filled with junk from car boot sales and sunlight penetrating clouds of cigarette smoke. I didn’t mind, I said they could hang on to the art until I found somewhere else more appropriate to live. My sister took it back to her place. I left that house when I was offered work in London. With nowhere to stay, my best friends offered me a single bed in their living room in Manor House in north London. I became Liv Who Lives in the Living Room, and would fall asleep at night to the sights and sounds of a handful of people playing Call of Duty or watching films. It wasn’t really appropriate to bring the Anne Collier piece there either, so it remained at my sister’s place in safety. The next house was in Streatham – a cavernous, echoing seven-bedroomed, laminate-floored mansion up the hill by the Odeon. My room was nicer there; we didn’t smoke inside and I began being aware of how to decorate a place. I’d toss a throw over my bed when I made it each morning, looking back on how nice and tidy it was with a smile as I exited for work. I’d look at cool blogs and take inspiration from other people’s bedrooms. I started dating a guy who was really into how things looked. So it was better, but still not quite the right place for the Anne Collier. My next home around a year later was a beautiful crumbling old house with a stoop on a tree-lined street in Brixton. My bedroom had chronic, creeping, stinking damp, so I certainly wasn’t bringing the art there. It was during my time in that house when I was invited to go and live with a boyfriend. He lived in a converted pub in Peckham owned by his parents and shared with his sister, and they kept an incredibly tidy and beautiful home. I said goodbye to the Brixton gang and took my things over to his place in a van. My clothes were put in drawers, my records and books added to his collection, and a few bits of my junk were placed thoughtfully out on display if they were nice enough. The rest of my stuff went in the cellar. I remember thinking how his bedroom had somehow remained exactly the same as before I had moved in, with not much trace of me, but that maybe this is just what it’s like to move in with someone. Soon after that, we were having dinner with my family and they suggested maybe it was time I took the Anne Collier back and re-homed it in the clean, lovely Peckham flat. We brought it over and hung it in the bedroom. My boyfriend was very pleased about that. It looked fantastic in
his room, with his beautiful lamp and lovely plants and his tidy desk. I remember feeling a protective, Gollum-like ownership over it, this bold, black frame hanging on the white wall above his crisp sheets. A year later I was moving again. The boyfriend and I had broken up and a friend had conveniently just given up an enormous, wood-floored room overlooking Peckham Rye Common. Sobbing, I wrapped up all my stuff in bubble wrap – including the Anne Collier – and hopped in an Uber over to the new place. When I got there I sort of broke down. The lights didn’t work, the blinds didn’t shut, I was scared of my new housemate, it was kind of dirty. Nothing was mine. I cried as I put my sheets on my new bed – why is putting sheets on a new bed so emotional? – and didn’t even unpack. I escaped to the pub, then returned and passed out in the creaking IKEA bed. The next day waking up was pretty harrowing. The four-year relationship break up had culminated in me being totally alone in a new place, vulnerable and pathetic. I looked at my dirty shoes. My cardboard boxes with my annoying handwriting on them announcing what frustratingly mundane things were inside. I had smoked indoors the night before so there was a mustiness to the room. I looked at the cobwebs, the cracked paint. The anonymous grey smudges on the white walls. I got up and walked barefoot across the huge expanse of wooden floor in my new bedroom to my little pile of possessions. The sunlight poured in and I glanced out of the huge windows, my face lazily screwed up with hangover. Outside the Rye glittered emerald green – so big that I couldn’t even see the end of it. Dotted over it were ancient trees and happy, hat-wearing dog walkers. Is this the view I was I looked at the wall in front of me and saw a sturdy nail protruding from it. I gave it a wiggle and it didn’t budge. I walked over to a stack of wrapped items and picked out the black-framed Anne Collier, unwrapped it, and hung it proudly on my wall and read it. I’d read it before. But this time I properly read it. It went in. The words affected me. The image and I had a moment. The art began to work. I was finally ready for it. Since I let the art in to my life, I now read it a lot and think about what it says, what it politely invites me to think about from the wall. It’s going to be in every bedroom I ever live in now. It’s what will make the room mine.
a qla For better or for worse, we all experience birthdays. Every 365 days, come rain, shine, or disaster — each one of us turns one year older. Irregardless of if you’re the type of person who makes a Facebook event three months before their birthday and counts down the days from 364 to 0 in anticipation of being showered with gifts and attention, or the type of person who hopes the big day will pass without anyone remembering: birthdays are far from stress free for best of us. Just because we’re told we should enjoy the occasion each year, the reality isn’t always all victoria sponges and surprise parties. Whether you spend each year pretending to love a present from a distant relative, bickering with family across a restaurant table, downing copious amount of cut price cocktails in an attempt to forget your own mortality or obsessively checking social media to ensure everyone who should has wished you well — it’s just as easy to dread our big day as it is to appreciate it. It’s not all doom and gloom though. Birthdays are an opportunity to turn an otherwise meaningless day in the calendar into a chance for self reflection, celebration, and most importantly: making everything about yourself. There’s no other time you can force a group of people who otherwise would never interact with each other together in the name of your happiness, or expect the most self indulgent of requests to be fulfilled without questioning. From mothers with two official birth dates and professional funeral mourners, to how to celebrate the big day in 12 short steps and receiving a bright pink cake in the shape of a bin — we’ve invited 16 Polyester contributors to share a piece of writing touching upon what Birthdays mean to them. Across the pages of this zine you’ll find stories of baking, growing older, quarter life crisis’, as well as odes to why birthdays are overrated, our mothers, astrological musings and much more.
Edited by Ione Gamble. Assistant to the editor: Cady Siregar. Photography by Chloe Sheppard. Cake by Hebe Konditori at Palm Vaults. Set design by Lucy Cooper.