My imaginary friends

My baby's got the bends

We don't have any real friends

Every time I scream this (it can be quiet, but it's always a scream), I wonder if Thom Yorke was thinking well, but there's always the imaginary ones. You know where you are with them.

My first two lived about my person when I was a child: in the creases in my belly, to be exact. I mostly talked to them in the bath. They were Maledores (F8) and Jongomes (M7). They lived in pyjamas (sensible). We would just chat, we didn't argue. They were good company. They understood me, basically, and, like many slightly geeky kids, I felt that nobody else really did. I think they probably disappeared around the time we got a shower and I didn't have so many baths. But I have a bath pretty much every day now and although my creases are in different places these days, I remember them fondly.

My adult imaginary friends are very different beasts. There are currently three of them. The two that have been around longest kind of sit on my shoulders, like angels (or devils), whispering things in my ear. I take their advice seriously, but I don't always follow it. They don't talk to each other. In fact, I don't think they've ever met, and they would for sure get right on each other's nerves if they did.

Ginny has been around the longest. Her full name is Ginny St Clements, like something you might drink on a punt. She's been there in some form ever since I moved to Oxford... maybe even earlier, since Cambridge, when I first encountered the kind of people whose parents held garden parties in the summer, because that's the kind of gardens they had, what else are you going to do with them?

She's gorgeous, is Ginny. She has long curly auburn hair and golden skin. She has lots of freckles and in late summer they kind of join up across the bridge of her nose. She can play tennis well enough to make up a mixed doubles if you need her to, and her French is sufficiently fluent to deal with platform changes and dietary requirements. Not her own though, she eats everything, there's not a single thing she doesn't like, though if pushed she's a bit squeamish about lobster, because she's read David Foster Wallace. She's a handy kind of woman to have around generally: good with kids, can handle the business end of a barbecue, always has a spare tampon. I want to hate Ginny, because she's so damn nice and because she would run a 10k just to keep you (not me, obvs) company, but I can't.

You see, Ginny is the person we could all be, if life didn't regularly cut us off at the knees. She's optimistic, she's at ease, she's pretty much always her best self. I dream of a world where we all get to be our version of Ginny. She's not perfect, that would be weird. She can be pretty moody sometimes, and she had a verruca once and didn't wear a swim sock. But she has every chance of fulfilling her potential without fucking anyone else over in the process, and I love her for that. As Randy Crawford once said about Almaz*, she was born in a world where love survives.

But woman cannot survive on the counsel of Ginny alone, so there's also Tits. Tits McGovern. Before you ask, Tits has no time for your bullshit. She doesn't often even have time for mine. Tits is Scottish, fairly obviously, but looks a lot like 00s Jeanette Winterson. She's short, dark, fierce and butch, and she has been wearing the same biker's jacket since, I'm guessing, the late 80s, though I didn't meet her till well into the 21st century. Life has not been kind to Tits, but she's made from tough stuff and she has read a lot of political theory. She eats structural inequality for breakfast, with a side of black pudding, and your balls for afters. You take her seriously, or... well there isn't really an or. I do really like Tits, but she's hard work. You have to explain yourself A Lot, but that can be a real help when you're not sure why you're doing something, or whether you should be. If Tits is ok with it, it's ok, is my basic strategy. Her bar is very high, and she has the humanitarian rigour I sometimes lack. She's the reason I have stopped buying Italian wine, for example. Tits doesn't drink wine, though. Her poison is single malt. You possibly already knew that**.

And then there's Alice. Alice is the new girl in all of this. There we were, me and Ginny and Tits, getting by, and then something happened that threw both of them. I've written about this already and won't repeat the long version, but there I was, sleepless in Yangon, and something had to happen.

M and I have a jetlag / insomnia strategy that isn't remotely original but works pretty well when there are two of you, which is that you choose a category (eg model of car, country of the world, type of fruit or vegetable) and then try and think of an example beginning with each letter of the alphabet - Astra, Beetle, Capri... Albania, Belgium, Canada... Apple, Beetroot, Carrot etc. It's less effective on your own, but I was desperate, I'd had a full sleepless night and was well on my way to a second. So I popped a Valium, and I worked my way through a few categories, sticking as usual on the N and the X (N is a common letter but not one a lot of words begin with, though I could just have an N block). Then I thought, oh, let's try girls' names. A? Alice.

And suddenly, there was Alice. She looks like she could have been drawn by Tove Jansson, she is as ageless as a Moomin. She has a black bob with a perfectly straight fringe, and wears a pinafore dress with a stripy top. She looked at me, and she said 'sleep, please', and pushed everything else straight out of my head. I slept. I thought her manifestation was a one-off, but interestingly she has joined the gang. She only turns up when I really need to sleep, but while she may have needed a benzodiazepine to emerge, she can come back quite happily by herself. And what she does, she does well. Ginny and Tits give her space. There is a lot of mutual respect in this sisterhood.

joella

*Not recommending this as a life manual or anything, I should absolutely emphasise. 

** Before I published this, M asked what Tits's song was. It's this.