Team Haymitch

A week dog-sitting in Brighton

I’m dog-sitting for Erin in Brighton this week. I haven’t spent this long here since leaving uni, which was (horrifyingly) almost four years ago. Since then, I’ve come back various times, for a night or two, but this will be the longest I’ve spent here in years, especially on my own.

I’d say one of my defining characteristics is my bad sense of direction. I’m always lost. I’m always confused about where I am. I’m always connecting the dots weirdly late, recognising some place I’ve been to a hundred times and being like “oh I know where we are!”. But, in Brighton, I know my way around. It’s one of the only places that I feel myself walking around without thinking, knowing automatically which shortcuts to take.

Whilst I’ve been walking around Brighton, browsing through the shops looking at overpriced candles and crystals, memories from my time at uni reveal themselves to me like hazy black and white photographs amongst the colourful streets. As I turn a corner towards a cafe I used to sit at with my friends, a half-forgotten conversation unfurls itself from around a lamppost. Memories burst from a peeling sticker on a mossy wall. I see the things I never quite noticed at the time but were always there. As I sit in an old café where I used to order a pot of tea, I now order a coffee, as if telling the city: that’s right, I’m a proper adult now.

Looking from my seat in the window at the busy street below, I watch women sip samples of sugary tea from tiny paper cups and inhale the steam of incense smoke that’s burning outside a shop. There’s a poster blu-tacked to the wall that says ‘Tarot Readings £30”. I might get one. As I sit and watch the street below, the whole city unfolds like origami. Memories ripple outwards from everything like pebbles skimming across the foamy sea.

At times here it can feel like I’m watching some kind of rerun of my university best bits, like I’m looking back at the set of ‘Season 2’ of my life with a fond but vague hindsight. I’m Courtney Cox or Jennifer Anniston at the Friends Reunion, wandering around Monica’s apartment, touching various objects and telling little stories about things I half-remember with funny little quips. Brighton can feel a bit like that. Like the set is still here, but most of the cast have left. Like I’m walking around my own immersive experience of my old, cancelled sitcom, Sephy’s Life: The University Special. I can see the costume designer’s best work: pleated culottes, puffer jackets, and leopard print midi skirts. I also wore a lot of jumpsuits back then. I can still hear the soundtrack of 2017 playing:

Last night, Ozzy (Erin’s dog) slept curled up right next to me all night, only growling at me once when I tried to roll over. He’s been staying up late with me, curling into a ball on my feet whilst I stay up reading The Hunger Games. Despite being highly identified with this story and the characters, I’d never actually read it before. In the past few years, I’ve been particularly into reading books that shaped the films that shaped my childhood, and finding out that I never really knew anything about those stories. I’ve been slowly working my way through the Harry Potter books and even more slowly reading The Lord of the Rings. So, last night, with Ozzy nuzzled right beside me, I finished reading the first Hunger Games book. As I wiped the tears from my eyes as I switched off my Kindle, my suspicions were confirmed: I am so overwhelmingly, mortifyingly Team Peeta. I’m aware that’s a pretty irrelevant announcement, but at the time when the Team Peeta / Team Gale rhetoric was at its heights in 2012, I was too busy being Team Edward to fully contemplate my stance on Katniss’ love interests. I know I’m late, but allow me to indulge, seeing as I’ve only just read the book everyone else read over 10 years ago.

I ended up studying English Literature and Film at university here in Brighton (at Sussex Uni), and perhaps one of my most defining cinematic experiences growing up was seeing ‘Catching Fire’ (the best Hunger Games film, in my opinion) at my local Cineworld. It was the first time I viscerally remember thinking: I hope this film never ends. That moment when, encompassed in total darkness, surrounded by silent strangers, you are both individually and collectively lost in something. When I came home from the cinema that night, I went to bed early (it was a school night) and replayed the film in my mind, picking apart the structure. It seemed structurally different to most films I’d seen. At so many points I thought to myself… oh no, the film is probably nearly over, and that was before they even went into the games. I thought the film was so generous with its time. I have the same feeling about ‘The Simpsons Movie’. So much happens and they go on such an insane journey that by the time the credits roll you’re left thinking: Wait, this all started with Spider Pig???

I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but in a way Brighton and The Hunger Games have an intrinsic connection for me. I wrote my film dissertation on The Hunger Games, which was titled ‘‘You Call That a Kiss: Performing Femininity in The Hunger Games and Divergent’. I was so proud of that name, and still kind of love it. I knew I wanted my dissertation to be about Katniss, Tris and the other teen girl protagonists of dystopian films in the 2010s, but I didn’t really have my hook yet. When I was rewatching The Hunger Games in third year, taking notes of the important parts, I got to the bit where Katniss gets that note from Haymitch saying ‘you call that a kiss?’ and instantly knew that was my dissertation’s title. That little parachute note exemplified everything in one simple question, showing the ways that Katniss and the other teen dystopian heroines have to play into their own objectification to survive. That line seems so crucial to me, but I’ve just discovered it’s not even in the book. I’ve been thinking about that all day.

One of my favourite memories from university also revolves around The Hunger Games. It was in third year, when one day (probably, admittedly, at my suggestion) we decided to watch all the Hunger Games movies in one night. There were 5 of us, but we settled into our literally tiny living room, with three of us perching on our miniscule sofa, one of us on a chair, and one on a beanbag on the floor. By the end of Mockingjay Part 1, the room was boiling hot. We started out wearing jumpers and wrapped in blankets, but by then the air was stale and the atmosphere was chaotic. We are the type of people who like to make comments throughout films and I’m quite a pauser, myself. By the time the opening sequence of Mockingjay Part 2 was playing, one of my housemates decided she’d had enough and wanted to go to bed. As she started to leave I probably protested, trying to convince her to see it through, but she was done. Sighing, she walked out of the room, proclaiming “this has gone too far”. Whether she was referring to the increasingly absurd plot of the films, or the five of us, covered in crumbs, crammed onto a tiny red sofa, powering through a film we were all sick of for no reason at all, is still unknown.

I can feel the energy of that night all around Brighton. The energy of five girls, with nothing much to do and all the time in the world, staying up all night, for no reason at all, to watch all the Hunger Games movies. But this week it’s just me and Ozzy, and I might try to persuade him to do the same thing tonight.