Posts (page 2)
I've had an idea. It was just the tiniest germ of an idea, a little speck of a thought, but then I looked at it this way and that, I turned it over in my hands, I held it up to the light, and the more I looked the bigger it grew and the more I liked it.
It would mean taking a year to retrain. It would mean getting my act together pretty damn sharpish in order to get on a course in the first place. And it would mean my life would undergo a drastic, fundamental change. But... but... It would mean I would at last have a purpose. A reason to get out of bed in the morning. And, with luck, I could spend my days covered in glitter and poster paint and glue.
I think it might be time to put aside Mrs Robinson, part-time receptionist and actress-at-large, and to take on a new role: Mrs Robinson, primary school teacher.
(What do you think? Am I mad?)
So, I've been feeling rather low recently, as a result of there being no acting on the horizon and my being stuck in a boring day-job that I've been doing for far too long. Blah blah blah. I am plagued with the nagging sense that I am somehow wasting my life. What to do? Answer: drink wine, eat pizza, go to an Elbow gig, and ignore the problem for a while. Worked like a charm.
The gig was at Porchester Hall, which was opulent in a caryatid-and-red-velvet-curtains sort of way. It's been filed away in my mental folder of "potential places for a wedding reception in London, assuming that I actually get married one day". The bar also served wine by the bottle, which was good, but would only serve it in plastic cups, which was less good. I requested that the barman divide the contents of a bottle between two pint glasses. Ooh, a pint of wine. Sheer class.
Elbow were great, as usual. At one point, Guy Garvey dedicated a song to the late actor and shark-wrangler Roy Schneider. "It's strange," he mused, "we got a copy of 'Jaws' for the tour bus only a few days ago, so we were probably watching it when he died."
"We're going to need a bigger bus!" yelled a wag in the audience, to general hilarity.
My feet were killing me by the end of the night (going to a gig in three-inch heels? Am I insane? At least I got a good view of ol' Loaf-face). On the journey home, all I could think of was getting home and tearing my boots off.
Me: Darling, will you massage my feet when we get home?
Trilby: Will you wash your feet first?
Me: Um, okay. You know, you used to massage my feet all the time. You never do it any more.
Trilby: Sic transit gloria mundi, dear.
I laughed a lot at that.
So today I am feeling a little perkier. But the problem remains: what should I DO with my life? I have the vaguest of vague ideas about training as some sort of art therapist. I like the idea of spending my days covered in glitter and glue and poster paint. However, I haven't got the faintest idea whether this would be practical or achievable or even if I really want to do it at all. Maybe I'm just grasping at straws. But I do know that my life needs to change dramatically, and soon, before I have some sort of catastrophic psychotic episode involving a semi-automatic and a tall building.
Today I decided to eschew my usual mid-afternoon trip to the gym (on account of my limbs feeling like lead thanks to an over-zealous instructor in my Tuesday step class). Unwilling to just sit on my backside browsing Etsy, I elected to go for a walk in the sunshine. And lucky for me that I did, for whilst on my lunchtime perambulation I discovered that the Books Etc on Cowcross Street (by Farringdon Station) is closing down, and they are flogging loads of books for half price. Bargainacious!
So if you're in the Farringdon area, I would suggest you get down there with all speed. You have to trawl through a lot of rubbish (including an alarming number of books about detoxing), but you can pick up some real bargains. I did. Behold!
Also, I appear to have turned into a Stepford wife without noticing.
The Lodger's days really are numbered. They were numbered before, but they're doubly so now. Because last night I made the mistake of looking in his food cupboard.
I wasn't rooting around for food like some hunger-crazed dieter, you understand. I was just perplexed as to why Lodger had elected to store his dried linguini on top of my cookery books. "He must just have forgotten to put it away," thought I. So, being the kind (and tidy) person that I am, I decided to put it away for him.
I opened the door to Lodger's food cupboard.
My first thought was, "He's already got three open, half eaten packets of dried linguini in here. How wasteful."
My second thought was, "Hey, what's that smell?"
My third thought was, "Are those scones supposed to be blue?"
My fourth thought was, alas, unpublishable as I pulled bag after bag of mouldy (and I mean MOULDY) bread out of the cupboard. These loaves weren't just spotted with a bit of blue here and there. They were so mouldy that they'd collapsed in on themselves. I opened one bag to check the contents, and a cloud of blue spores hit me full in the face. At which point I shouted for Lodger to get downstairs and clear it all out because it was FUCKING DISGUSTING. I imagine that I sounded like a sweary version of his mother.
His response? "Yeah, I know, I thought it was getting a bit gross in there."
"Then clear it out, you retard! Sweet Jesus on a pushbike, you're TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OF AGE! You're training to be a SOLICITOR! Stop acting like a fucking teenager!" (Is what I didn't say, thanks to immense self-control).
I can't tell you how much I want this guy out of our house. If I get ill as a result of inhaling spores, he's paying my bloody medical bill.
Oh, I'm so whimsical.
I feel rancid today. For one worrying moment last night I thought I might have contracted the norovirus but no, I'm just generally nauseous. I feel strangely disappointed. As I have also been dropping things and knocking glasses of water all over the place and eating PIZZA for dinner last night, I expect it's all down to PMS. Oh, how I love being a woman.
And I just used capital letters. Damn, damn.
The pizza was very, very nice, though. And I had delicious boozeahol at the weekend. It's all a little self-destructive, as I'd been extremely virtuous up to that point and had managed to shift a whopping six pounds of Christmas blubber in just over a week. Still, the nausea means I'm not really up for eating today so swings and roundabouts, I guess.
Talking of pizza, I haven't told you folks about our lodger. He's been given his marching orders (very politely, of course) because Trilby and I want to have the house to ourselves so we can make love on every available surface. So before he leaves I have to tell you about him, because he boggles my mind for the following reasons:
(1) He only knows how to cook one meal: spaghetti bolognaise. He has this twice a week, on average. Occasionally, he will ring the changes by having a microwave lasagne, with potatoes on the side. He really, really likes carbohydrates.
(2) Every other night, he will have a takeaway pizza. Sometimes, he will have a takeaway pizza after his spag-bol/lasagne. He has a separate pizza stomach.
(3) Regardless of what his main course will be, he always follows it up with a humungous slice of chocolate fudge cake, slathered in custard. Always.
(4) Despite all of the above, he is skinny as a rake. A fact that enrages me more than I thought possible.
Having this man in my house is making it very, very difficult to stick to a diet. It is hard to look kindly on a meal of lentil soup followed by a low-fat yoghurt when next to you at the dinner table is a man troughing his way through a pile of pizza and cake.
Okay, before you start reading this, a warning. If you are a parent, or are pregnant, then you might find it upsetting. I am neither, but it upsets the hell out of me. So maybe don't read it. (I'm mainly thinking of Slowloris here.)
I got a package from my Mum today, and when I opened it up I found that it was a big wad of photocopied letters from various doctors. On the back was written, "Think you should have a copy of all my records, love Mum x".
I started reading, then had to stop and go to the ladies' loos and continue reading there because I was crying so much. You see, back in the 70s my parents had trouble conceiving. I knew that they lost three babies because of spina bifida, two before me and one between me and my sister. (For those who don't know, spina bifida is a birth defect - it literally means "cleft spine". It is not nice). These letters were the record of those lost babies, and also of my parents' pain. 1970: "inter-uterine death". 1972: "anencephalic infant". 1979: "large defect in the lumbar spine and hydrocephalus". My little sisters. My little brother.
The technology in the 1970s was such that these defects could only be discovered relatively late in the day. So my mum had to give birth to all of these babies, knowing that they were dead. And there wasn't any bereavement counselling or anything like that. You were just expected to get on with things. There were the most outrageous examples of callousness. After one of the deliveries she was put in a maternity ward, surrounded by happy mothers with their babies. Can you imagine? The torture. And when she was pregnant with her first baby, when she went in for her check-up and the doctor had examined her and noted that her uterus had shrunk and the foetus wasn't moving, my mum asked if the baby was all right. "Oh no, dear," said the doctor, "it's dead." Just like that. She was twenty-four.
And yet she coped. And, god knows how, my parents kept trying to have a child, despite being told that there was a one in four chance that any future baby would have spina bifida. One in four. Could I have kept going, in the face of those sort of statistics, in the face of all that pain? I really don't know if I could. But the thing that really made me cry, the thing that shows how brave and wonderful my mum is, was this paragraph, written from one doctor to another in 1972 and never intended for anyone else's eyes:
"I saw this patient today for post-natal examination and I must say that I think she is a marvellous girl. I think she has done extremely well considering the very tragic history she has had."
That's my mum. She really is a marvellous girl. And I am a lucky girl. Lucky to live in a time where we have amniocentesis tests and know about the benefits of folic acid. Lucky to be here at all.
...into the sparkling new year that is 2008, and time to see how those resolutions are shaping up.
First, the ones that I'm sticking to:
- Today I am wearing both red lipstick and high heels, so there's two resolutions adhered to right there. (I am wearing other things as well as lipstick and heels. The dress code at Clerkenwell Towers is relaxed, but not that relaxed)
- Project Get Good At Knitting continues apace. I've finished a stripy scarf (with fringe!) and am now fumbling my way through a beanie hat in two shades of sea green. It will have a bobble on the top, oh yes.
- No ready-meals yet. Instead, we have dined on lentil soup, blind scouse with red cabbage and kohlrabi, parsnip and carrot mash. I am expecting to sprout feelers any day now.
- No booze. I did have a sip of Trilby's red wine last night, but that was only to see what it tasted like (answer: upsettingly delicious).
- Can you see any capital letters in this post, apart from the ones at the beginning of a sentence? No! In your face, CapsLock key!
Now, the "must do betters":
- Dressmaking. Though I've done some research and there's a course in the Spring I could possibly do. Hmmm. Need to do more thinking about this.
- Moisturising. I'm okay on the ol' face (in fact one might even accuse me of overkill on that score - do I really need Protect and Perfect serum, moisturiser and Beauty Flash Balm? Really?) but have yet to tackle my body. This is because Trilby used up all my Intensive Care moisturiser during his recent eczema outbreak. At least, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
And now the abject failures:
- I haven't picked up my ukelele or my accordion yet. But I have ordered a "how to play the accordion" book off Amazon... Which leads me to:
- Internet shopping. Help me! I can't stop! Especially with all the great sale deals that are about on Amazon. Maybe the six books I have coming will keep me warm when I can't afford the gas bill.
Oh lordy. It appears that one of the managers has bought a Wii and installed it in the office for everybody to use - presumably as some sort of morale-boosting alternative to staring at our P.C. screens in quiet despair. Or, in my case, knitting.
I know the aforementioned manager will be kicking himself before January is out. The Wii is a black hole of time, a Scylla and Charybdis for unmotivated office workers. I just spent 45 minutes on it, playing baseball. I don't even like baseball. It wasn't even my lunch break. I just happened to pass it en route to the water cooler and it just sucked me in.
I envisage my productivity will plumb new depths in 2008. But at least my batting arm will get nice and strong.
Holy cow, I'm tired today. My eyes feel like the council has sent the gritters in. This is probably because I haven't got out of bed before noon for the past week and a half. I am part-woman, part-sloth.
Still, it was a nice, long holiday, wasn't it? I mainly spent mine eating and drinking to excess (I am a traditionalist). I got on the scales this morning and was pleased to see that my efforts had not gone to waste. There's an obvious waste/waist pun there, but one of my New Year's resolutions is to avoid weak puns when there's an 'r' in the month. Here is a handy checklist of my other resolutions:
- Learn to play two instruments: my white ukelele, Enid, and my NEW, PURPLE BABY ACCORDION (which I received this Christmas, courtesy of Trilby. Best. Present. Ever).
- Have more sex. Because enough is not and never will be as good as a feast.
- Wear high heels more often. I have more tottery shoes than Imelda Marcos, and they deserve to be worn. I owe it to my feet.
- Wear my new bright red lipstick as often as possible. After a decade of naysaying, I have finally come round to my mum's way of thinking: wearing lipstick really does brighten up my face.
- Learn to make clothes. Not really sure how I'm going to do this. Can anyone recommend an evening class in London that doesn't cost the earth?
- Keep up my knitting until I can go fast enough for my needles to make that clackety-clack sound.
- Lay off the boozeahol until April (when I have a family wedding. Attending in a state of sobriety is just too appalling to contemplate).
- Cook from scratch and reject the siren call of the ready-made meal. And buy organic whenever possible.
- Stop spunking so much money on internet shopping and learn to live within my means.
- Moisturise more. My elbows are SHOCKING.
- STOP USING CAPITAL LETTERS SO MUCH. The CapsLock key is not my friend.
There. All eminently do-able, I'm sure you'll agree. Happy New Year, folks.
