Monday 31 March 2008

The spring is sprung, the grass is riz

And here we are on another fine Monday morning. Rather like the Red Queen, I find myself with six impossible things to do before breakfast. Fantastic.

Unfortunately my focus is quite distracted by the woman on the bus opposite me with the horrible shoes. By now my postion on Ugg boots should be clear (Just Say No) but I'd like to add to that forbidden list all shoes with turned up toes. It may have worked on the Sultan's Grand Vizier, honey, but it does nothing whatsoever for you.

You know, I sometimes think I should give up the day job and just concentrate my efforts on Improving Other People's Lives. It's important to play to one's strengths after all.

Friday 28 March 2008

Jailhouse rock

I blame Elvis.

No no, I do. It's perfectly reasonable. If not for him, "one quick drink" wouldn't have turned into three bottles of wine and a pizza the size of my head. (And me with a bridesmaid's dress to zip up in less than a month...)

Whose idea it was to capture the midnight boogy on video we may never know. Oh hang on... yes we do.

The good news is that I haven't yet hit the hangover. I'm riding high on the tails of the third bottle and with a bit of luck that and a large coffee will see me through the day.

However. Sometime around bottle two (and well into the booze texting zone) I came upon a terrible thought. Once the Boy and I are cohabiting, who will I text at random times of night with my pearls of alcoholic wisdom? Who will reap the benefit of my 4am insights into the meaning of life? (I like to share these moments when they come upon me.)

I'm going to have to give it some serious thought.

Thursday 27 March 2008

A boy? a Boy??

Oh my god, I have to share my flat with a BOY. A BOY! You know, the ones that aren't girls! The ones with the big feet and the beer and the strange music and the hairgel and the general BOYness! What about all my lovely girl things? What if they catch Boyism?? What if I do???

Oh my god! Where will I put on my facemasks? Where will I keep the Secret Boxes full of memorabilia of Boyfriends Past? What if he finds the bodies under the patio? What on earth will he say when he discovers that not all of my underwear is boyfriend friendly??

Oh my GOD, what if he has Secret Memorabilia too? (... if it's in my flat, it's fair game, right?)

A short history of blogs

So I've been blogging for … err… about five years now. For the last couple of years it's been restricted access only, locking specific bits of my life to specific audiences. Funny what blogging does to the way you think.

As time went on it's become a useful way to decant the singsong of random throughts from my head into the ether, and under pressure from friends (you know who you are) I recently moved across to Blogger, where I could feed my idle thoughts out into the uncaring void. Hello, uncaring void.

Despite my best intentions I've never shut down either of my previous blogs. One of them I still use occasionally to peer into other people's lives (you know you would) and the other has too much history to be easily disposable. I keep meaning to download it, but it just seems a bit much like hard work. You see, those are my memoirs. The adventures, the scandal, the trauma - the blood and sweat (mine) and the tears (others'). The sordid details (and aren't you glad I don't feel the need to share those anymore?). Give me a few more years and you'll see them on a bookshelf somewhere. The names will be changed... but you'll know who I am.

If you're really lucky, you may even be one of the people who receives the discreet little note asking exactly how much it's worth to have your escapades left out...

Wednesday 26 March 2008

Rules for life

This post is the first in an occasional series introducing you to my Rules for Life.

It crossed my mind while talking to the Boy last night that I live my life according to a set of very clear but hitherto unwritten rules. I'm going to ease you in gently with a few of the most crucial, and over the next few weeks I'll introduce the others as the occasion demands. Some of them will seem obvious and some more obscure, but trust me: they're all there for a good reason.

Almost a Lady's rules for life (part the first)

  1. Always keep at least one bottle of emergency champagne in the fridge. When the emergency comes, a single bottle is unlikely to resolve it without moral support.
  2. Try to maintain the semblance of good manners at all times: rude people are appallingly dull. If forced into close quarters with one, don't panic. Restrain yourself to a frosty smile, be unfailingly polite, and leave them with the impression that you were faintly bored with everything they said.
  3. If you're over 25 think very, very carefully before you put on that miniskirt. It's not just about whether you can wear it; it's whether you should. You're an adult now and you have a responsibility to the public welfare.
  4. If you must lie, lie outrageously. It's more fun for everyone that way.
There are plenty more; after all, it's a complicated world, and there are lots of traps for the unwary 20something to fall into. Armed with these four starter rules you are at least prepared for most of the dramas the week may bring - and if it all goes t*ts up there's always the Veuve to fall back on.

God bless the Widow.

Thursday 20 March 2008

Rubbish

I feel a bit rubbish today. There's no real reason for it... it's just a bit of a grump that I don't seem to be able to shake.

It's not helped by the fact that someone has replaced all of my clothes with horrible unflattering rags, which was more than a bit provoking when I eventually dragged myself out of bed this morning. And as for my hair - alas, if only "dragged through a hedge backwards" was the look I'd set my heart on.

I can only assume that the world is conspiring against me.

Monday 17 March 2008

And then there were two

I have news.

On Saturday night, as we sipped champagne and snorted Bolivian cocaine from the naked body of a dusky exotic beauty, the Boy du Jour asked me to move in with him. I laughed casually, flicked my long golden hair back out of my face and told him that I supposed it might be quite fun.

Well... some of the above is not strictly speaking true. In fact it happened over Sunday lunch at La Tasca in Angel, and I was so surprised/excited/scared/happy that I pretty much burst into tears on the spot. (And I'm brunette.)

Luckily the Boy knows me well enough to understand that the floods of tears meant yes, and as a result from the middle of April my shiny new bachelorette pad will be acquiring a second resident. At first it's just a four week trial to see how it goes; it may turn out that we can't stand that much of each other, in which case he'll still have his house in Croydon to retreat to and we can cut our losses before it spoils the rest of the relationship. And if it does work... well, that's a kettle of fish which we'll deal with when we get there.

I've only told a small handful of people so far. I like having it as my secret; it's like installing insulation against the rest of the week and the rest of the world. Me and the Boy, sharing the flat! How cool is that?

I think I'm going to be sick.

Thursday 13 March 2008

90% angel, 10% paint

I swear I had no idea this painting lark could be so hard. It's exhausting! And getting the paint to go where you want is surprisingly challenging. Last night I'm pretty sure that more paint ended up on me than on the actual wall. Or on the carpet, despite it being covered in plastic sheets. Or on the skirting board. Or in the next room, lord only knows how that happened.

It's also possibly the most fun I've ever had on my own, except for that time I tried to barricade my ex-flatmate into her room using only frozen chips and fishfingers. Heh heh. Yeah, that was pretty cool too.

Tuesday 11 March 2008

Jumping mad

I saw Jumper last night with Boy du Jour. And ooh, it annoyed me something chronic.

I don't demand a lot from my movies - my all-time faves are Deep Blue Sea and Lake Placid, for heaven's sake - and as long as something blows up I'm generally pretty happy. But this film has managed to piss me off on a lot of levels and if I don't rant about it my head may just explode.

The basic premise is the classic tale of the school geek who discovers he has An Amazing Power. He gets a bit carried away with the excitement and becomes a selfish, arrogant tosser who lives the high life by breaking into banks and generally behaving like someone who needs a good slapping. So far so good - a time-honoured set up enabling him to learn An Important Lesson, start to Use his Power For Good and ultimately to Win The Girl who had been Too Cool for him at school.

But that's too much like hard work for this particular piece of movie magic. Instead, he simply walks into the bar where she's working and says "hey, it's me, I'm no longer geeky and I've got loads of money. Want to go to Rome?"

She hesitates for - actually, no, she doesn't even hesitate. Next thing we know they're on a plane to Rome, where she falls onto the bed with squeals of glee and her legs in the air. No, it's not an exaggeration; that's exactly what she does.

So let's recap. We've ascertained that he's an arrogant tosser and she's just a straightforward marketable commodity. Nice. I'm starting to suspect that he's not meant to be a classic "save the world" kind of hero - perhaps he's a Loveable Rogue, a Dashing Antihero in the mould of James Bond (who, let's face it, is a sexist pig - but a sexist pig who you can't help loving). A hero who you suspect isn't actually that "nice" a person, but you really want him to win anyway... like Professor Snape. (... or is that just me?)


On that premise, what Our Hero needs now is a Real Baddy to allow him to show his True Colours and prove that he's more than just some jumped up little clot. But instead, it turns out that he's being chased by people who also think he's behaving like a selfish twat and would really quite like him to stop. (I think that's pretty fair; hell, I'd have shot him too, and I didn't have nearly as much provocation as they did.)

The bottom line is that nothing changes over the entire course of the film. He behaves like a twat from start to finish. He finds a fellow-jumper who he treats phenomenally badly and leaves tied to an electricity pylon (and that's the last we see of the friend - for all we know he's still there). He stops the baddies in a rather improbable fashion and goes back to the lifestyle he had at the start (albeit now with the girl in tow), all the while protesting "but I'm not hurting anyone, why do they want to kill poor misunderstood little me?"

I'm not going to go into the bad plotting or the ridiculous ending (but can someone explain WHY it's better to leave his nemesis to dehydrate and starve to death in a tiny cave in the middle of the Grand Canyon than to drop him into the sea? And if he does survive, what was the point of doing it in the first place? He's just going to keep coming after you!). Instead I'm mostly focused on the portrayal of women, and particularly of the heroine, which I think was shoddy and degrading. He bought her for the price of a trip to Rome and yet we're still supposed to believe that she'd hang around being shot at and kidnapped (she's a singularly useless girl who seems incapable of doing anything other than occasionally look soulfully at the camera) because she "really cares for him". Ah yes, that old chestnut: money can indeed buy you the genuine and honest love of beautiful women who wouldn't look twice at you in your schooldays.

Honestly, what a sexist piece of claptrap! Someone else obviously thought so too - and gave us the ham-fisted addition of his mother as a token "strong female character", which I darkly suspect is what she was intended to be. That little plan was a total failure, by the way; she's as useless as the heroine, and appears so fleetingly (and with so little conviction) that she's barely worth mentioning at all.

Rachel Bilson, you're better than this.

That's two hours of my life I'm never going to get back.



Monday 10 March 2008

It's alive!

Despite frizzing my hair, blowing my umbrella to shreds and melting my makeup, the London storm has found favour by stranding Boy du Jour at my house for the day.

He rocked up around lunchtime yesterday (not-so-fresh from a friend's wedding) to help me start the Great Paintworks in the flat and then stayed the night, intending to head back to the deep dark South at first light. But when first light broke it came with claps of thunder, pouring rain and a thoroughly buggered transport system. So instead of kicking him out into the wilderness (as tempting as it was) I've hooked him up to the internet and left him snugly ensconsed on the sofa under the guise of "working from home".

I can't help thinking the lightning may have struck a bit too close to home though since the last messages we exchanged suggested that instead of doing work he was actually cleaning my kitchen and scraping yesterday's paint off the paint brushes.

What kind of crazy domestic world have we slipped into?

Friday 7 March 2008

Cultural what now?

Banksy has picked the side of my development to create his latest masterpiece. I say "masterpiece" with a certain amount of irony, since leaving the house that morning with a friend I'd turned to her with a certain amount of snarkiness and said "what the effing blank is that meant to be then?"

"I think it's probably a Banksy," she said wisely.


Only hours later she was proved right, and by the time the day ended I found myself clearing a path to the side gate through a crowd of muppets with cameraphones.

To you it may be art but to me it's home, damnit! ... it's not bad for a bit of cultural one-upmanship, though ;)

Tuesday 4 March 2008

Of paint and parties

I spent a chunk of this weekend throwing paint around my flat. The walls have ended up splattered with about sixteen different colours, or more strictly speaking sixteen different shades of the same colour. Who knew decorating would be such a challenge?

By the end I did at least have some kind of resolution. I have two rather chic modern/neutral bedrooms and a phenomenally tasteless living room which I darkly suspect will become my pride and joy. The only question now is who's going to do the painting and when they're going to find time to do it - what, you didn't think I was going to do it myself, did you??

In a little over a month I'm due to be maid of honour (or rather Best Wench, thankyouverymuch) at a friend's wedding. As if walking down the aisle without tripping over my own feet wasn't hard enough, it turns out I can't currently do up the zip on my bridesmaid's dress. And so we enter a month of dieting to try and rectify the situation. My diets have in the past met with mixed success, but hopefully the thought of waddling along behind my friend with safety pins holding my dress together will prove sufficient motivation.

Before then, of course, I have to finish organising the hen night. Of which, O Best Beloved, more later...