Saying Goodbye to the Coke Dealer's Mirror
I’ve moved flat, again. It’s happened so frequently it’s become a red flag for some letting agents. I stressed to them, I want nothing more than to settle but moving across three cities in three years hasn’t given me the luxury.
That the landlord upped the rent on my flat became a welcomed push. I kept deferring the search for a new home to an unspecified time. There is also the matter of having inherited a coke dealer’s mirror.
I call it a coke dealer’s mirror. It’s just… An obnoxiously big bathroom mirror that came with the flat.
This makes me look like I’m humorously taking a photo, but I’m filled with nothing but rage. Everything about this mirror annoys me: the clean noughties aesthetic with built-in clock; the wrong time I can’t change because the buttons don’t work; the bullshit little animated graphic on the right of the display… But, most of all, I hate “C’est La Vie” by the short lived (yet briefly revived) late 90s Irish girl group B*Witched.
In the coke dealer’s mirror’s past, someone set it to play music. Loudly. When they left it behind, it continued to play music. Loudly. Without a schedule. One of these songs was “C’est La Vie” by B*Witched.
I didn’t want to remember “C’est La Vie” by B*Witched. It has a tin whistle solo. I like tin whistle solos - The Pouges, et al. - but I didn’t want to be reminded of the structural details of “C’est La Vie” by B*Witched. I didn’t want to have to Spotify it to ensure I’m remembering the tin whistle solo correctly. It verges on parody to the point of anti-Irish sentiment. It’s the sound British government would use to advertise bringing Ireland into the UK.
I’m not even 100% sure it is a tin whistle. In any case, the only way the coke dealer’s mirror stops playing music - again, the buttons don’t work - is to turn it off at the fuse box, except it doesn’t run off any single line. It will still play music if I turn the fuse off for the bathroom. This means I have to flick the main switch, turning off the power to the entire flat.
Realistically, this happened five, maybe six, times in seven months. I began that sentence thinking it wouldn’t sound like a lot but it does, in fairness. I told myself it was a minor thing to happen when I have a roof over my head. It not being the worse thing that could happen doesn’t mean I should have put up with it.
This is obliquely linked to “C’est La Vie”, released when I was 12 or 13 when I felt so perpetually alone. It was the type of loneliness that raises the threshold on what a person can handle. This is where B*Witched’s late-capitalist facsimile of friendship and cultural identity takes me. It even triggered memories of my hardline Christian upbringing. Religious folk contorting their faces into smiles as if they heard about joy in passing, once, and thought it would be a nice idea.
This is all to say: I’ve put the coke dealer’s mirror as joint-first reason, alongside the rise in rent, for why I’ve moved flat.
On the plus side, I’m now in Mount Florida and closer to people I know. This has been a little too successful, as I’ve ended up five minutes away from someone I briefly dated. (I have let her know, and she’s fine with it on account of her not being an arsehole.) I have a big old park to walk around and local shops. All things that make my head happy. Perhaps even healed.
I’m sure a Creative Writing MFA student could tie these themes of sincere community and capitalist alienation together in a cute final paragraph, but that’s not me. Just, whoever you are, go outside and buy bread and be kind to animals and children and homeless people. Experience touching and being touched. Have sex. And listen to whatever music you want. I don’t care.