Ghosts in the Pantry.

The risk

2011-10-28T21:28:00.004+01:00

I often worry about whether I am making the best of my life.

Looking back, I've lost so much time feeling bad about time I've already wasted.

I've decided I don't plan wasting another second letting my guilt snake eat its own tail.

The Joy of Jams

2011-10-21T12:55:00.005+01:00

There's a French deli in town. I used to find it hard going in there on account of the airborne cheese particles, which like neutrinos seem to reach you before the deli door is even open despite that being physically impossible. But they've contained the stinky cheese behind a glass screen and now I like going in there quite a lot.

I prefer to go in there when I don't have any cash on me, so that when the woman tells me she will charge me fifty pence for any card transaction under a tenner I can economise by making up the difference with jars of peculiar jam and tins of haughty French artichoke hearts. The artichoke hearts are more expensive than the supermarket version, but they also don't have that weird gritty texture around the stem which requires you to exfoliate them like ageing elbows.

Recent jams have included Sour Cherry, Quince ('Coings!'), and Rhubarb. The rhubarb jam is especially helpful because I have developed my second-ever crush on a cake.

My first ever cake crush was the tarte au framboise, ideally in a dark chocolate lined pastry case. But like so many things in life it becomes tainted with the memory of the person with whom you shared it, and now I'd rather eat a toasted slug and sawdust sandwich. But Marks and Spencer have created a swiss roll aka roulade which has a rhubarb and custard filling in it instead of jam and cream.

Rhubarb and custard swiss roll. If that revolts you then you're clearly not of British descent.

I haven't tried it, but ever since I saw it in the shop I've been thinking about it. I use it as something to think about to block out the thoughts I have about
1. That little girl in China who got repeatedly run over and nobody helped her
2. Those kids in Surrey who mutilated a swan with a toy motorised boat
3. Cops going on a big game hunt in Ohio.
4. Everything bad ever which might make me want to cry on the bus

Maybe that's another reason why I'm fat. Because life is so bitter, something has to cleanse the palate.

I don't think I will ever try it. Instead the jam will do. It's never good to eat your idols.

Perseids

2011-08-12T17:29:00.004+01:00

When I was 20 I went on a walking trip along the coastal path from Minehead to Newquay. I soon gave up the walking. The girls who had planned the trip had done Duke of Edinburgh Gold and they were happy to walk 19 mile days. I am not happy to walk 19 mile days. I can walk 10 miles with no problems and possibly even 15 miles but the next day I'll probably just want to have a sit down with a scone. 19 mile days makes your toes bleed and your knees click and makes you cry in a phone box to your mother.

I started getting the bus with the tents. After the initial guilt of having given up the attempt to walk his was great. This was a pre-internet bus navigation mission and I spent lots of time talking to old ladies and eating chips and petting dogs and paddling on the beach and wandering around strange town centres looking for visitor information kiosks.

When we got to our destination we watched a total solar eclipse. It was absolutely amazing. I almost broke my friend's fingers I was squeezing her hand so hard with joy.

The following night there was a meteor shower and the sky was filled with shooting stars. I made possibly a hundred wishes and not a single one came true. I think I was too greedy. Maybe if I had only asked for one...

The perseids are returning tonight. I am going to make one wish, and only one.

Fetch the engine, fetch the engine

2011-08-08T23:56:00.003+01:00

So my city is full of riots right now, and some of it is on fire. People have been made homeless, businesses ruined, journalists attacked. The mood in London for most people is very pissed off and a bit scared and lots and lots of gallows humour and where the hell are the army? Many people feel that they knew something like this was coming, but possibly not on this scale.

I'm okay at the moment. Where I live is very residential and boring and nothing worth robbing.

People are talking a lot about the criminal element and about young men and lack of education and deprivation. I'm sure that this is all relevant. But I am also reminded of the time that I got caught in a small but significant riot at (I kid thee not) Marlow Regatta. No joke - boys in full black tie, 'nice' privileged boys from nice homes lobbing bottles at the police and generally enjoying a punch up. Unfortunately I got stuck between the front line of the riot police and the mob, but luckily was not hit by any of the missiles.

For those who don't know (which will be almost everybody), Marlow Regatta is a posh boat race in a very posh town and there is a field at the back where traditionally local young people go to get incapacitated drunk and eat strawberries. It sadly also is a magnet for super creepy guys. It's not quite Caligula but there are some similarities.

My point? I don't know. I suppose that when we look at this we need to take a both/and approach when thinking about the relative contribution of free will and determinism.

Wait for it... Wait...

2011-08-03T22:02:00.003+01:00

Ever meet someone who might take a bit longer to get the punchline of a joke? That's often me. Also, sometimes it takes me a while to realise where sayings come from.

Today, at the grand old age of thirty-two I realised how the term 'birthday suit' relates to being naked. On account of the being born naked.

It's not like I didn't know how to use the term - I knew it meant naked and not pink, wrinkly and covered in womb yoghurt.

All aboard the pedant express

2011-08-01T23:42:00.004+01:00

At my tube stop there are three platforms. My station is at the end of the line, and so there are often two trains to choose from.

There are a number of electronic signs to tell you which train is next, how long till departure and the exact destination. Today when I got to the station the signs all said one thing.

GET ON ANY TRAIN THE TRAIN DESCRIBER BOARDS ARE BROKEN

I didn't mind playing departure time roulette, but I was really bothered by the idea that the boards are called train describer boards. Maybe train description boards. Maybe departure announcement boards.

I'm going to have to look up their official name. I can't stand it.

Prom pra-prom-prom-prom

2011-07-31T18:09:00.002+01:00

It was the Horrible Histories Prom at the Albert Hall and yesterday they broadcasted some of it on Radio 3. Do you get this programme in your countries? It's a hoot, and incredibly well made. Educational and memorable and willing to tell children the real awfulness of history.

Other gifts

2011-07-28T21:35:00.005+01:00

I have the gift of having not quite perfect-pitch. I have an uncanny ability to hear when a note is almost but not quite right.

Take this. I love this. But something is going wrong with the flute, and maybe somewhere else. Can you hear it?

To make this an extra special gift, I am also not very good at singing, so I get to enjoy in technicolour how off-key I am.

Luckily unlike people with actual perfect-pitch I can happily listen to deliberately off key music, atonal music and those middle eastern half notes.

I wish I had some cool gifts. Like the ability to cook or something.

Edit: Apparently I'm not talking about not quite perfect-pitch, I've got my terms confused. It's actually relative pitch which I don't quite get to have.

Confessions of a less-bad gardener

2011-07-24T08:48:00.002+01:00

It's 8:45am on a Sunday and I am about to take 15 bags of soil to the dump. Bindweed root infested soil, with all the visible roots picked out. Yesterday I began the process of excavating the area where the imaginary summerhouse will soon manifest.

Only thing in my way - The Stump.

There's a tree stump at the edge of the garden. It is quite rotten and I have been attacking it with a chisel and mallet. I do not trust myself with an axe. I know I won't be able to remove it all this way but the man bringing the stump grinder charges by diameter, so if I cap lop off three inches that's pretty good news.

Whilst chiseling away this thing crawled out. This hideous grub with front legs who made my whole body shiver with disgust whenever I looked at it. Still - ugly grubs can turn into beautiful insects, and so I left it be.

Mistake.

I kid you not, this thing is called a cockchafer larvae. Had I known what a damaging little pile of snot it was I would probably have unvegetarianly hit it with the hammer. I don't care if its adult form has cool furry antennae, it's larval form is like OMG totally retch.

Bleargh bleargh bleargh.

*shivers*

Bleargh.

The gift of outfit vision

2011-07-23T09:15:00.002+01:00

I've got this gift. Maybe it's a curse. I'm a fashion psychic.

When people are dressed strangely, or in something ridiculously fashionable that makes them look like a numpty, or in swathes of something or scraps of something ill-fitting, or in a time warp, or have freaky clown makeup I can see what look they were going for. I can see their mental image of what they were meant to look like in it.

Other people gawp and say 'What were they thinking?' or 'What does she think she looks like?'

But I know what they were thinking. I can literally see it as one of those fashion illustration sketches, or as a magazine spread with their model selves posing fabulously. I can see what someone might have seen in their mirror that morning when they decided to leave the house.

It's a bittersweet kind of gift.

Aim sideways and up

2011-07-17T13:26:00.004+01:00

We often describe people as digging themselves into a hole when we mean they are getting themselves into trouble. The next relevant saying is that people are digging themselves into a deeper hole when their efforts to fix their problem are getting them in worse trouble. More of the same is not what's needed. You probably need someone to help you. But what if no one is coming with a rope and Lassie will not be bringing the Sheriff to help you?

You can dig yourself out of a hole, even if the earth around you is too crumbly to make a tunnel. Just dig sideways and a wee bit up, create a lot of mini-landslides, and use the extra earth to fill as much of the hole you are in as you can.

Next week I shall be making a series of mini-landslides.

Uh oh

2011-07-12T19:06:00.003+01:00

Gotta level with you. In queue at Marks and Spencer, totally squiffy off of four amaretto and cherry liquer chocs. Oops! Smell like a bakewell TART.

In my basket, 4 tubs of artichokes and a packet of teeny-tiny mini submarine rolls for picnics, which I plan on individually stuffing with crinkle cut oven chips.

It's not me, it's the Bakelite Pig.

Bakewell Pig. Fill my little grey heart with joy. And the rest of me with Lilliputian chip butties.

The Return of the Pig

2011-07-11T21:44:00.003+01:00

Well, sorta.

Remember The Bakelite Pig?

Well, I bought a replacement pig on the internet. It is called a Stanhope. It has a picture of Killarney in it. It is made of bone. I cannot sleep I am so excited about it.

The whole thing is so laden with layers of symbolism that I cannot even begin to explain it to you. I want you to imagine an Empire State Buildingsworth of hope, crammed into a tiny glass photograph, wrapped inside a tiny pig.

Welcome to Killarney.

Confessions of a bad gardener

2011-07-10T11:19:00.004+01:00

I've been killing a lot of vegetation lately. But not in the right way.

I've needed to be killing
a) Bindweed invasion from hell
b) Stuff growing over from my neighbour's garden which has yellow blossom and dyes my laundry on the line bright yellow.

Instead I've been killing whatever is (was) living in pots, and a ceonothus which made it through a lot of winters and a lot of neglect, and finally met its death at the hands of yours truly doling out some serial killer frenzy level pruning.

I know that some of you are so green fingered that you kill most of your vegetation by eating it, so please inspire me! How do you keep your plants 'held in mind'? How do you work full time jobs and stuff and still not forget to water shit?

I KNOW WHERE THE BODIES ARE HIDDEN

2011-07-08T09:01:00.002+01:00

That's what Rebekah Brooks might as well have written in seven foot high letters over her head. In glitter. And marabou trimming.

She's got to have some pretty terrifying dirt on Murdoch for her to be getting the full star liferaft treatment. It's got to be some serious, serious stuff.

Excitingness

2011-07-06T21:35:00.002+01:00

It's too good. I can't tell you.

Joy!

In France they say it's lucky

2011-07-05T20:50:00.002+01:00

I'll try not to accidentally delete it this time...

Today whilst I was walking down the street a helicopter was flying nearby. I couldn't tell if it was the air ambulance or maybe a police helicopter.

As it flew overhead I noticed that my body tensed up and I was bracing myself for something. I was bracing myself just in case as it went over me it did a big poo. As if it were a giant seagull and I was at risk from droppings.

2D Kangaroo lesson

2011-07-03T17:01:00.003+01:00

Today the cat became transfixed by a documentary on kangaroos.

She sat at the base of the screen watching one of those kangaroo wiggly, translucent, veiny-worm babies making its way it's place of furry safety, chattering away to herself. Then the adults kangaroos were boxing - this was even more interesting to her. Fight! Fight! Fight! At one stage she put out a paw to the screen to try to join in and scratch one, before finding that it was a trick, and you couldn't reach inside.

I keep seeing life going on in front of me, but I've stopped trying to stick my paw in it, because it's turned out to be a trick an embarrassing number of times.

This needs to be different.

Do-gooder-er

2011-06-03T08:05:00.002+01:00

I think I've written before about how people who do Psychology A-level tend to become domestic superheroes, on account of being taught in the Social Psychology module about bystander apathy and Kitty Genovese. Kitty Genovese; the screaming woman whose attacker was able to head off for a bit then come back to kill her in public view whilst nobody called the police, because everyone thought someone else would. Kind of like the parable of the Good Samaritan, except that there was no Samaritan. Everyone else thought someone else was a Samaritan.

I'm a bit of a wader-inner. I can't quite help it. It gets me into trouble. Sometimes I offer detailed advice where even the vaguest of advice is not wanted or needed. I get excitable about half baked projects and ideas and rattle off disturbingly long emails to people. I used to be the kind of girl who let people know she fancied them by love letter. Then email. I'm no longer allowed to email when I'm drunk. Some of these impulses I've knocked on the head, but still the instinct to do good is just below my fingertips. Another of my habits is that I read every missing pet sign I see, and then make a concerted effort to look for that pet. I'm always vigilant for Killa the cat, two budgies and a three legged diabetic yorkie.

A few weeks ago I saw a business woman fainting on the tube platform, and I didn't do anything to help her. I felt terrible about this as soon as I realised what I'd not done. I should clarify that she had four other people helping her at the time and I didn't want to cause more drama. But to be frank they weren't looking very good at it. I'm no Dr Kerry Weaver but I do know that when someone is fainting you just want to guide them safely to the ground as quickly as possible to stabilise their blood pressure and put something soft under their head so their skull doesn't go clunk, not hold them by the arms and try to frogmarch them to a bench so their skirt doesn't get dirty.

That one got by me. Next time I'll just wade in anyway.

MAGAZINE Perfect - 2

2011-06-02T23:04:00.002+01:00

I'm on the second rung of becoming one of those people in magazines that remind you what a failure you are.

That's right. Brushing my hair every day before I leave the house. Oh yeah. Smell the competency, bitches.

Like I said, I'm on the second rung. It just happens to be an extremely long ladder.

Other things which I'm keeping on track include using getting out of bed before 7am, and not absent-mindedly picking an escape pod in my scalp with bloody fingernails whilst watching TV.

MAGAZINE perfect - 1

2011-05-30T08:44:00.002+01:00

It occurred to me this week whilst I was throwing myself an excellent impromptu pity party ("Surprise!") that all my hopes and dreams are so pedestrian that there really is no excuse for not achieving them. I've dedicated my bank holiday weekend to getting where I want to be.

Here is where I don't want to be:
In state of semi-consciousness press snooze on alarm I set optimistically early the night before.
Awake twenty minutes before I have to get on the train to the sound of the cat ripping the decals off my bedroom wall*.
Shower with shampoo because I'm out of shower gel.
Panic! Where's my keys? Where's my phone?
Eat breakfast and remember my Metformin fifteen minutes afterwards.
Little animal nipping my achilles tendon reminds me that the cats need fed. No clean catbowls so take margarine tub lid out of the recycling.
Brush teeth with cheap crappy toothbrush because I haven't charged my electric toothbrush.
First trip from the street back to my flat to check windows and doors.
Second trip back from the street to my flat to collect security pass. Can't find. Give up.
Get to station to see my train pull away.
Can't recall where on the platform the train doors will line up, even though it's the same place every day. Am last on to train. Squished against unbrushed mouth breather and noisy gum chewer. Spend twenty minuted repressing my gag reflex by attempts to dissociate.
Unable to even fit in a cheeky game of Angry Birds because I've forgotten to charge my iPhone.
Arrive at work slightly but detectably late sporting a crushed smock with a jus of mint and calcium drizzled off one boob.
Make tense jokes with receptionist about my lack of security fob.
Go straight into meeting without having read emails.
Lunchtime - remember my pre-prepared healthy lunch is on the kitchen table where I took it out of the fridge this morning, accruing bacteria. Eat rice cakes and a samosa because it's the least bad thing in the corner shop.
Go home. Watch TV. Eat oven chips and a poached egg and a carrot.
Remember today was the day I was going to go back to the gym. Guffaw.
Bedroom is too messy to contemplate tidying. Have exactly zero thoughts about finding my security pass.
Get into bed, strewn with books, boxes, cats and empty diet coke bottles.
Have mini-nightmare centred around my inability to be organised.
Etc.

So, that's a pretty comprehensive plan. If I could successfully eliminate even one of those links in the chain then I'm sure I'd be on my way.

*The Catling and me are locked in an eternal battle of operant conditioning. Having resisted her attempts to train me by using ripping up the carpet as the antecendent for getting out of bed and feeding her she switched to biting the back of my knees. This too failed but ripping the decal off the wall is a new strategy which really annoys me and she is hopeful of success.

Words

2011-03-27T22:28:00.006+01:00

I just need to write words here. They don't need to be good words, they just need to happen.

Alan the chimp

2011-02-20T10:00:00.004Z

Somehow last night I began to dream that I was introduced to a chimp who was living at an amusement park. I was to take on a volunteering role looking after Alan the chimp. His current keeper was showing me how to communicate with Alan, who had been trained to recognise particular vocal signals.

First you would make two noises which were a greeting sign to Alan, who would repeat them in turn to greet you. Then you would make some noises which indicated that you were in charge. Next the trainer was showing me the two noises you made in order to ask Alan if he wanted a banana, but I had some difficulty with these and she left me to it. After my making several attempts at this signal, Alan suddenly said (in crystal 1940s BBC received pronunciation with a hefty dose of derision) 'Oh for God's sake. Give me the damn banana.'

'Alan, you can talk! Doesn't your trainer know?' I exclaimed.
'No, she likes to use those signals although I find them somewhat inconvenient,' he said.
'Would you like to come to a tea party?' I asked Alan. (Of course).
'Yes, that would be nice.'

So Alan came to my tea party. I had invited an eminent chimpologist I was inexplicably friends with and my imaginary husband. (No, never saw the face. Bit pissed off about that).

'Alan, do you know that you may be a genius?' I asked him, over tea and sandwiches.
'Well, hardly,' he said. 'What would make me a genius?'
'Other chimps don't speak Alan. They don't know how.'
'Really? I wouldn't know,' said Alan sadly. 'I've never met another chimp. I was taken from my mother when I was young and hand reared by humans.'

We spoke long into the evening. Professor Chimpologist began to posit that Alan's amazing RP had been the result of a constellation of genetic mutations which left him with the vocal and cognitive capacities to develop speech. Why he spoke like David Niven was a mystery though, but he made a witty and charming guest despite the butt scratching and nit picking.

The Professor was keen to establish a breeding programme. Alan became confused about this, thinking that the Prof was planning to find him a wife which he felt ambivalent about because he had suddenly come to realise no other chimp would ever be able to speak to him. He did long to be a part of his community. He also felt conflicted about sperm donation, and asked for more time to think it over.

I woke up at this point, feeling great sympathy for Alan, who was destined to remain alone in many ways.

Things

2011-02-11T12:29:00.003Z

I have too many things. Too many material possessions - so many that I can't enjoy my favourite things - books, clothes, pictures, movies, jewellery, because they are cluttered up amongst the mundane.

Then I have too many thoughts and too many regrets, and these are less easy to stop hoarding. I wish I could get a skip and chuck some of them in. Perhaps all that can be done is to adopt towards a position of non-bitterness.

I used to think that it was a serious design flaw that your brain began to lose its cells from your 20s. But now I think it may have not been an oversight.

Reprieve

2011-02-09T12:06:00.002Z

I'm still ill. After some extremely comprehensive coughing and nose blowing my capillaries have given up and I'm now ever so slightly bleeding from the nose and throat. Classy! But it is these sorts of symptoms which help me to feel less guilty about being off work.

Something happened on Saturday which bears some thinking about. I had my last glass of Diet Coke. Well, my last since Saturday.

www.nataliedee.com

Normally I do not go more than 12 hours without a DC. I basically can't. I'm like a DC homing device, or a machine that runs on DC. I am Rome, and it is my Trevi Fountain. But it has a pH of about 3, and I have a bleeding throat, and the last time I tried to drink some it was like trying to drink paint stripper. Normally if I haven't had a DC in 24 hours I get a skull crushing headache, but the headaches are just one of my many aches this week, and I've been heavily self medicating, so somehow I've been through the physical side of withdrawal without trying.

It would be mad not to carry it on, right? Really mad. But my DC addiction has become such a part of me, I can't imagine me without it.

I figure one day at a time, and let's just see how far it goes.

Informercy

2011-02-06T05:27:00.003Z

I've picked up an upper-respiratory tract infection. It might actually by now also be a lower respiratory tract infection, but I don't have a stethoscope so I can't say. That and I'd have no idea what I'd be listening for if I had a stethoscope, given that my greatest familiarity with stethoscope use was via the early 1980s Fisher Price model.

I can't sleep because I'm drowning in my own pestilence, and breathing and swallowing hurts and painkillers don't touch it. And I found out that any time you are emitting 'autumnal' slime you're not supposed to use cough sweets because it traps it inside your innards like a snot genie in a bottle.

I know it's just temporary and I ought not to be throwing myself a pity party, but I'm just so sleep deprived. How do people with babies function? How do people with chronic pain function? I'm so emotionally wobbly I cried watching a clearly ridiculous and manipulative Katy Perry video.

I have found the only way to catch 45minutes of uninterrupted sleep is to fashion my sofa into a slope and lie there at 45 degrees watching informercials with the sound down low.

Some infomercials are better for sending you sleep than others. I have begun to wonder whether I might wake up from my sleep suddenly feeling the need to buy any of the crap they are selling, but so far so good.

Hiatus hermita

2011-02-02T09:30:00.002Z

That was a long break, without my meaning it to be. For all the best reasons.

Things are changing in my life, because I am making them change. This year is all about leaving the house, shrinking, wearing nice frocks and tending to the friendships which I have not inadvertently killed. There may even be deeply unfeminist acts like fake laughing at the unfunny jokes of hot men.

This year, I am not allowed to spend ANY Saturday nights in the vicious circle of feeling too awful to go out, watching reality TV talent shows, eating pizza and getting obese.

There is nothing inherently wrong about being zaftig, but if it is getting in the way of living the life you want, then something has to give.

Recently Dodai at Jezebel wrote an irreverent article about 'fake it till you make it', a means of continuing to get nicely dressed however terrible you feel in order to stay afloat. Akin to a Cosmo article of what you might wear to a work thing/evening event she actually put in the collage. You can see it by cut'n'pasting this link: http://jezebel.com/5739317/dressing-for-depression

Some of the reactions were akin to 'I have the proper depression and I consider it a personal affront that you would consider it possible for me to get dressed when I am in a trough and that it will have any significance if I do. How very dare you, these ideas are deeply damaging. Piss off.' But I think cultivating a healthy irreverence for your misery is a good thing, and getting nicely dressed (whatever that means to you) is a very, very good thing. Accepting the possibility of small but relevant change in the sphere of your control is a good thing. And whatever your epistemological stance, doing shit has an excellent evidence base when compared to doing the same old thing, when the same old thing is curtains closed, wearing crusty joggers and simultaneously feeling several co-existing yet contradictory kinds of terrible.

Putting a frock on will not fix your existential pain. But baby, neither will pizza.

www.nataliedee.com

Deliberate hypocrisy 2011? Darling, yes please.

2011-01-08T08:59:00.003Z

There's been a re-think on the flirting policy. I've decided that outrageous flirting is okay, on account of its enormousness of gesture which is akin to panto and clearly disingenuous. Flirting which is thigh-slapping and 'what do you think of that now boys and girls?' in intensity is okay, and makes the day a bit less boring. Winking is okay. The Joan walk is okay.

However, I still hold dear the idea that in everyday life strangers ought not to assume they are entitled to touch you. Recently at a dinner with a family my father very slightly knows, the patriarch of the other family poked me in the navel as he was emphasising a point about the depth to which one might feel something. Just no. No. Pat me on the arm, hug me, or bisous bisous, but navel poking is not a normal form of non-intimate interaction in any culture that I've heard of.

But when I think of the times I've been scunnered by flirts and have gone away feeling aggrieved that they gave such a confusing message about whether they liked me, it's always been the more subtle ones. The more ambiguous ones. The guy whom I would drive home and just before he would drunkenly clamber out of the car, would stare at me for a full ten seconds whilst exhaling mournfully before sadly saying 'goodnight'? Turned out didn't give a shit. Probably deciding which of my three heads to address and trying not puke. The guy who wiped a rainy chair for me with his suede coat so that I might sit next to him and who spent all night telling me how crucial it was for humans to connect? Later described the girls whom he never fancies in great detail, and basically described me. Turns out he just talks his deepest most innermost thoughts to anyone who will listen. I call this kind of talk deep and meaningless. You look like a confidant, but you're just an audience.

I continue to believe that flirting is at its core a narcissistic form of interaction that pretends to be about the other person and making them feel good, but it really about you wanting to be admired and adored. But this year I'm sticking humility out the window and embracing narcissism as my new years resolution. I might be ready to admit that I want to be admired and adored.

But no navel poking.

New Yeargh

2011-01-01T03:41:00.004Z

The highlight of the New Year's Eve was meeting my my friends' partners and liking them. How wonderful it is to actually like your friends' special others, and not just bear them out of necessity. And how wonderful that my friends are loved by such great people - I love it when the world looks almost fair.

The middlelight of my New Year's Eve night was finding that having hung my hand knitted scarf on the back of my chair, (a scarf which it took me an actual year to finish), it had been christened with some kind person's vodka jelly vomit. It's washable - c'est la vie. And at least it made me feel glad I paid for the coat check.

The lowlight of my New Year's Eve was being flirted with. As I've previously ranted about at length, I consider flirting with people when you know they like you but you don't reciprocate to be an inadvertent but significant form of unkindness, however well meant. I'm working so hard on believing the nice things people say to me that I just don't have the mental energy to remind myself that those sorts of people don't mean it. Well-meaning meaningless bastards.

The antilight of my New Year's Eve was deliberately engaging in some emotional cauterisation. I want it to have worked, but I won't know for a while, till the scabs drop off.

Happy New Year. Hope all your dreams come true and your scabs drop off.
x

Merry Pokemas and a Happy New Poke

2010-12-28T09:40:00.004Z

I was looking after a little cat with epilepsy over the Christmas period. It was the first time in a long while that the owner had been able to spend a few days with family over Christmas and actually the first time they'd met me, having come across me and my cat feeding skills via a mutual acquaintance.

My job was to visit the cat twice a day, feed him and give him his meds, and let him go outside for a bit.

See, you can tell that something bad is about to happen, can't you? Some kind of cat related disaster. But I bet you'll never guess. You're thinking it ran away, or I trod on it, or I forgot to give it the tablets or it did poos all over the flat.

No. I poked the poor little blighter in the eye, or at least in the vicinity of his eye. How? Well, that's hard to say. But on Christmas night, I was giving him a hearty skritch behind the ear with my index finger, and he suddenly moved his face, and *poke*. There you go.

He didn't cry out, but his eye became a bit watery. I waited to check he seemed okay before heading home, feeling slightly anxious about it all.

The next morning he was looking very sorry for himself, all puffy on one side. Although his eye was open he was winking, and little cat tears were saturating his little cat nose. It wasn't clear whether I had poked him in the eye, or around the eye, but his eye hadn't appreciated it. You have to be very careful with eyes. They can quickly become infected or develop ulcers if the cornea is scratched, and my own cat has a lazy eye and saucy sailor wink from scarring from cat flu as a tiny kitten.

One of the good qualities my parents imparted to me is a strong belief that if you break it, you own up and apologise and things will work themselves out, and this will not only be the right thing to do but the pain of doing this will be far less than the worry of not owning up and taking responsibility. And so it came to pass that on Boxing Day I phoned the owner to alert her that I had poked her cat in the eye, and then paid to take it to the emergency vets to get an eye exam and antibiotic eyedrops.

Whilst at the vets I had to explain that it was not my cat and what happened. In the 'reason for injury' section of the form, they correctly wrote 'carer poked cat in eye'. It's hard to communicate exactly how mortified I was, and unfortunately my embarassment materialised in the form of me involuntarily emitting nervous laughter whilst speaking, so you can imagine how well that came across.

When the vet and I discussed about payment I said 'Well, of course [giggle] I'll be paying because it was my fault. [giggle] I mean, if it had been an accidental injury. No - Wait - Oh God, it was an accidental injury, I mean I obviously didn't poke him in the eye on purpose... er, you know [giggle].'

Fortunately the cost of the vets trip was only 70% of the worst-case scenario figure I had convinced myself it might be, and precisely as much money as I had acquired over Christmas and planned on spending during the sales to buy myself stuff. So if my relatives ask what I got for Christmas I might tell them that I made a charity donation to save the sight of an ill cat. I just might not tell them how the whole thing came to pass...

A slight confusion over human rights

2010-12-27T07:46:00.004Z

Human rights are an idea - a jolly good idea I hope you agree. In the UK we are under the European convention, as below.

Your human rights, if you are privileged to live in the UK are theroretically:

The right to life
Freedom from torture and degrading treatment
Freedom from slavery and forced labour
The right to liberty
The right to a fair trial
The right not to be punished for something that wasn't a crime when you did it
The right to respect for private and family life
Freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and freedom to express your beliefs
Freedom of expression
Freedom of assembly and association
The right to marry and to start a family
The right not to be discriminated against in respect of these rights and freedoms
The right to peaceful enjoyment of your property
The right to an education
The right to participate in free elections
The right not to be subjected to the death penalty

Lately, there's been a lot of press about Christians feeling they are discriminated against. In particular being made to do their job for people they object to on homophobic grounds, because they feel they cannot collude with gay people having families and relationships. But article 9 (Freedom of thought, conscience and religion) is actually more complicated, as below.

Article 9: Freedom of conscience

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.

(2) Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

What that means is that yes, if you take a job where you have to treat all people equally including gay people, then yes, you have to treat all people equally on account of gay people actually being people. And no, it is not a right to deny other people their law-given rights.

In my job I have to give help to people who sometimes turn out to be misogynists, women-who-hate-other-women, racists, sex offenders, people who treat their children, loved-ones and pets poorly, or people who eat shitloads of factory farmed meat. And no, I do not consider it my right to not give help to these people if they need it and it's professionally my role, whatever my beliefs. This is a core value. It's what puts the profession into professional.

I admit I am fairly irreverant and critical of Christianity, not because I see it as a soft option, but because it's the religious context I have lived experience of escaping. And perhaps that's something I would benefit from addressing. But I would fear for a world where irreverance and criticism of religion is outlawed. Because if you look internationally and historically for examples of places where that has been the case, it usually comes at the expense of many of the rights up on that list.

The irreligious - we have beliefs. We're often quite shouty about them. But generally the more Humanist of us will be sticking up for the rights of Christians, or Muslims or Jews or any other people where we see their human rights being eroded. If people want to use prayer spaces at work, and make a plan such that they still work their hours, I really don't care, so long as if I wanted to start up a 70s throwback feminist consciousness raising group I can do that too, (although I doubt we'll be getting out the hand mirrors for hygiene reasons). If it doesn't cause a health and safety problem and people wear a hijab or a turban or a crucifix or a pentagram, then it's up to them to deal with the effects of difference it may cause people to perceive on first meeting them. I dye my hair ginger and until recently had a facial piercing and am also a fat person, and no doubt that has some effects on engagement too.

Better is how it gets

2010-12-21T21:43:00.002Z

Today is the Winter Solstice, and the darkest day of the year.

I celebrated with Yorkshire Salad (chips) and something similar to a prayer but not quite.

I've been in a dark place the past few months. If a partner dumps you then you may have got boring or fat. But if your best friend of 18 years dumps you then maybe you're just awful. And if they're dumping you because they're bored of you thinking you are awful then there is no way of painting it nicely and no way out other than pretending until hopefully something real emerges.

Revolting

2010-12-12T09:55:00.003Z

In England the Students finally are revolting. The government have agreed to scrap a limit on tuition fees, and university will now be out of the grasp of most, despite what the Tories say. Fees have tripled for most. Education for educations sake is now the preserve of only the very rich, and everyone else must take vocational courses - it's like we're back to the bad old days of Unis and Polytechnics. People say the ladder has well and truly been drawn up behind people like me, the final year to not pay fees, but I'm wondering how I'm going to support my future kids through this.

On the news I see footage of angry young people throwing paint bombs and missiles and slightly startling Royals. From the safety of my living room I find it exciting. I was a political young person and I feel pleased to see young people giving a shit about really important stuff.

On the news when we see small mobs creating chaos and destruction they tell us that it is a small band of people who came to the protests determined to cause trouble and may not even be as interested in the issues as they pretend to be. Of course. I knew lots of people like that growing up - misguided anarchists and rebels without a clue and people who just wanted to dance on top of a bus stop. They 'ruined' many peaceful protests I attended. But hasn't there been people like that at every protest in time? Outside, rattling the gates of Versailles and the Winter Palace I daresay there were more than a few who weren't actually that bothered or personally effected by the specific issues, but just fancied a bit of a riot. Possibly it's actually those people who make regime change happen, given their unthinking enthusiasm for things like charging gates and defenestration.

'What do we want?'
BLARGH!
When do we want it?
NOW!'

Mostly I am excited by seeing people use their right to protest in a free-formed way. Labour used the cover of anti-terrorism and health and safety to reduce the rights of the populace to protest to that of a well-organised ambulant Church fete.

Obento, where art thou?

2010-11-11T07:17:00.003Z

I've been economising through the medium of packed lunch. There's a weird reverse tupperware tardis thing going on where the portions in the clip'n'lock look pretty tiny in the tub, but when you tip them out on to a plate you've got food for the 5000.

In the complete opposite of economising and a clear case of cultural appropriation, I've bought a cute bento box which someone is shipping to me from Japan (Ha! HK). I'm very excited about my new lunch box. Only wonderful, healthy things will be allowed to step inside.

I consider it unlikely I will be getting into charaben. I'm too lazy, and I have trouble eating cute things.

Isn't it a modern treat to be waiting for the post?

Bear with me...

2010-11-07T08:11:00.004Z

This is going to get horrible. I'm going to tell you a horrible story.

I spend a large part of my working life listening to stories from survivors of sadism, from the small episodes of barely perceptible bullying which cumulatively sap a persons will to live to the episodes of larger scale out-and-out sadism. I know that inside every human is the capacity to do some horrific things. It's fascinating that more of us don't, and it's amazing that humans can live through the things they do and still love at the end of it.

I always remind myself that my listening to stories is perhaps a thousandth as hard as the person had it surviving the story. I am well supported, and able to leave most things 'at the door'. You're no good to anyone if you can't.

When child abuse cases come on the news I'm often listening with my public sector services-ear. What could have been different? What ought to have been done? How can I change my practice personally to make children safer? I think that makes it less difficult to hear, but also makes you feel more responsible. It definitely stops you for collapsing into seeing the professionals involved as terrible beasts who never cared.

For some reason deliberate cruelty to animals really gets to me. It's not a vegetarian thing. I mean kids throwing dogs and cats off the top of high rise estates, dog fighting, and harming animals for satisfaction. It's often said that the English treat the animals better than their family, but it's not really true. We might not go in for bull-fighting and we let our pets in the house, but our shelters are over-run with healthy abandoned animals and many people are too selfish to neuter. But still, we have people who do terrible things to the beasts on purpose. Don't let our tendency to run donkey sanctuaries fool you. And in our midst we have people who in some kind of moral yoga will decide to threaten to kill you if you become known to them as an animal abuser, although as yet I don't think anyone has been killed.

Just recently in the UK we have had a case of horrific sadism towards a pet which made Mary Bale the cat-binner look like St Francis of Assisi.

A man named Sherlock put his 7 year old nephew's kitten in a microwave, in a tumble drier, and then a freezer (all 3 were switched on) and then submerged it into a bowl of washing up water, whilst it was filmed on a mobile phone. He went to prison for not a very long time (126 days but may only serve half), and has been banned from keeping animals for 10 years. In his defence he said that he had been drinking and was egged on by the youngsters who filmed it. The footage was to prove his undoing, as someone recognised him and reported him to the police.

I'm glad he went to prison. As the young people who filmed it were under 18 their right to anonymity is protected but they will be charged with causing unnecessary suffering and mental and physical torture to an animal in January 2011. I really hope that services are taking a long hard look at these young people and what the fuck is going on in their lives for them to think this is a thing that's okay to do. Letting kids get away with stuff like this would be a kind of neglect by the state.

It's never 'just a cat'. People who like to harm the vulnerable don't often stick to one kind of harm. Spouse-batterers and child abusers frequently use threaten or harm beloved pets to further manipulate and hurt their victims. There are lines which most people know they ought not to cross, and once one boundary is violated all the others can begin to look a bit less secure.

Thankfully the kitten which was tortured somehow lived through its ordeal. However the RSPCA have said she is too traumatised to be re-homed.

In another striking news story, in the past few weeks a group of UK based animal rights activists who made it their business to torture humans for their alleged relationship to animals testing have been sentenced. If we still have compassion in our hearts, let's hope for Sherlock's sake they don't cross paths.

Three pleas

2010-11-03T00:20:00.002Z

1) Dear America,

Please don't cut your nose off to spite your face. If you think McCain could have magically undone a global recession you are a funny sort of people.

2) Dear Coalition,

Is there any decision in the NHS you don't want GP consortiums to make? When GPs have the decision whether or not to deliver highly expensive drugs which have no well-proven track record, and given that those living in socially deprived communities tend to have the worst health problems and be the least empowered to make informed decisions about healthcare providers, what do you foresee happening? At least NICE invite stakeholders to help them make decisions.

3) Dear Nigel Havers,

If you must go on popular jungle-based celebrity reality TV show I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, please be all David Niven about it. No squealing, no retching on iguana ballsack blinis.

Yours sincerely,

von Hathor

On Kylie

2010-10-24T09:47:00.003+01:00

I love Kylie Minogue. I never liked her during the first flush of Kylie and Jason fever, it happened because of a mixtape with What Do I Have to Do on it, and I've loved her ever since.

There are three myths about Kylie which piss me off.

Myth 1. Kylie's career was resurrected by her getting her arse out for the lads.
Fact: Kylie's arse has been on show since Better the Devil/Step Back in Time. There was always arse, and sometimes a bit more. That the press suddenly became captivated by her bum is neither here nor there. The woman always wore hot pants.

Myth 2. Kylie is not complex.
Fact: Kylie began as a bit of a musical puppet, and her fight for control over her musical and public identity was hard won. She worked tirelessly. She was feted and then cast aside, a poster-girl for a time and place which others wanted to pretend they'd never been a part of. During the period of greatest rejection by the public and music industry Kylie skinned her head and went on a road trip round the USA. From this point of near-universal derision, Kylie made an amazing step. She saw the problems, she saw what others were doing, she reviewed her past and she accepted it all. If you go in for that sort of thing, you could say that she reached a point of self-actualization. Kylie is in fact a person who thinks and think and thinks, and is aware of how her self-awareness becomes problematic for her.

In the video for Did It Again Kylie's different incarnations have a bust-up, as she tells herself off for over-thinking. For me, this was the point where Kylie's historical debts to Madonna (Myth 3) became meaningless and the student could beat the master. Because Madonna can't do humour. She makes a good straight man and can afford the best comedy, but funny and charmingly goofy are not qualities she exudes.

My final praise of Kylie is that everyone says she is a true professional and not a cow, and she inspired young women to check their breasts.

The end.

Oh yeah! Not the end. My anecdote. I forgot the anecdote. Anyway, I listed a Kylie poster on a recycling site and some guy got there first and having got off the phone I decided he didn't seem to want the poster enough given that other people were really disappointed, so I phoned him back to question whether my Kylie poster was going to get a good enough home, but it turned out it's not for him it's for someone who really loves Kylie, even more than I do, so I'm really pleased.

Black fungus

2010-10-20T09:46:00.004+01:00

If you are anything like me, the phrase black fungus evokes two sensory responses; one the visual representation of an extremely unwell foot, and the other an auditory memory which goes like this. And if you are even more of a twisted sicko like me, you will then experience the image of an extremely unwell foot bounding full pelt through a field.

But that it not what black fungus is. Black fungus is a foodstuff. You rehydrate it like dried porcini mushrooms. You put it in Lo Han Jai.

I'm messy but not dirty, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, that it a good introduction to something that has cheered me up all week. It cheers me up so effectively that it has just been put up on the fridge. It is possibly the most literally interpreted Chinese food menu in the world. Care for some blood curd?

And this... is where the midden-magic happens...

2010-10-18T21:49:00.004+01:00

I feel a strange sort of joy when I write a list or begin a new project. I've never been one for buying self-help books but I imagine that there's a similar thrill in buying them. The sense of something between hope and certainty that your crappy life is about to become the life you always imagined you would have.

I like to read apartment therapy. I like to chuckle at the sudden fawning over 'mid-century' crap which would have failed to raise an eyebrow at a car boot sale five years ago. I especially like re-nest which is their less environmentally harmful sister-site.

They're doing a feature cum advert promotion thingymajig at the moment, in which using only 20 minutes a day you make your life unshit. Or at least your living environment.

Oh, if you could see my bedroom right now. There's actually black fungus in my bed. Which sound worse than it is. The black fungus is in my dinner bowl. It's cold. I have a cold. I'm in bed. I went to the Chinese Supermarket yesterday and bought most of the ingredients for Lo Han Jai, but made it really badly and overdid it with the Auricularia auricula-judae.

But my bedroom is a tip. A midden. A mere 40% of my floor is free from clothes of unverified hygiene-status, receipts, 95% empty DC bottles, paperwork and cats and paperwork the cats killed. Possibly, horrifically somewhere in my flat, garden or in the cat is the other half of the mouse I was gifted with this evening. But in 20 minutes it can be magically cured! For a bit.

It is 22:20. I shall be back in 20 minutes, and I hope not to have news of face-end of the mouse...

_________________________________________

23:13. Oh dear. Floor is clear, but only because everything has been shoved into boxes. Apart from the fungus and semi-rodent.

Tree Medicine

2010-10-17T17:21:00.004+01:00

Better for my sanity than any SSRI or any hug or any cheesecake are the following:

A walk alone in the woods.

A walk alone in a graveyard.

Climbing a hill.

Today I did all three. My heart is full of gold and red leafy joy.

Antony Elvin

2010-10-15T07:15:00.002+01:00

Antony Elvin is a sort of hirsute troubadour. A kind of lady-liking Noel Coward bard from the Medieval Court of Brideshead. A man who had a 'kimono phase'. One of Antony's best ditties is The Cheese Song, and I was having trouble posting it yesterday. Luckily some fine person has used it as the accompaniment to photographs of some fine cheeses. Do check it out, perhaps because you like ditties, or you like cheese, or you like the word floppity-do.

If you frequent certain corners of London there's a level of inevitability that your paths may cross with Antony Elvin, and lucky for you if you do. He will typically be in the company of a floppy haired man who never seems to get any older, a woman who is a bit like a small British Joan Holloway or a man in a tunic playing the Crum Horn. His latest exploits include playing Crispin Wheatflake to Alice Lowe's Oona Wheatflake in the NSFW duo Hot Brew, which you may or may not get. They're great to watch live, but there is a lot of grated radish to clear up afterwards.

Psychedelic Pixie Folk Tuesday

2010-10-12T08:18:00.001+01:00

This is Circulus. An English treat for you.

Tomorrow, Antony Elvin.

La vie économe

2010-10-11T12:21:00.004+01:00

Pity Sarah Hall. She wrote a very earnest article about how the cuts of child benefit to couples where one one parent is a stay at home parent and the other earns quite a bit will effect her and her family. Probably she offered or was asked to provide a first-person account of how those who appear quite well-off might feel a little pinch.

Unfortunately for Sarah, her account of what it is like giving up life's little luxuries has made most commenters* roar 'Luxuries? Good god woman! How very dare you expect gratification of any kind.' But I have a little admiration for a woman who has the balls or naivety to admit there is a baby pinch of suffering in giving up Waitrose. Waitrose is AMAZING.

~~If you take a look you'll see that~~ everyone has a sneer to spare or view on what she ought to be doing differently , and quite a few people are furious that her daughter is still getting ballet lessons (although not jazz).

I'm of the view that ballet lessons for children (or other dance classes) are excellent and should be considered an investment. Provided the kid wants to go, but gives up before they get to the pricier foot-mushing, cotton-wool eating stage. You can easily detect those who had ballet classes as a child from their excellent posture, no matter how un-ballerina like their appearance as adults. Dance requires discipline, stillness and an ability to tolerate off-key piano and humour old people with delusions of grandeur, all of which are fantastic stand-alone skills but priceless as a package. I can't say that I agree with the 'good toes/naughty toes' binary, but you can't have everything in life.

Like Sarah, I'm in that place of having to reign in my spending by trimming the fat off my life. It's not as if I have a massively aspirational lifestyle; I haven't been abroad in five years and I let a room in my home to people who begin as barely more than strangers. I'm not an 100% devotee that stuff can't buy you happiness, more a person who thinks that if you select the stuff judiciously and delay gratification by saving up for it there is a temporary but significant increase in mood associated.

I've been thinking about very cheap things I can do which make me feel rich. One of which has been having flowers in my kitchen. Now the rambling roses have all gone the Co-operative has some cheap but ethical posies which seem to go for at least a fortnight. I've painted my nails. But the real treat is that I've begun to learn French, on the internet, for free. Oui!

*Looks like it's been edited on the site to disallow comments. Probably not a bad thing.

The week in which I failed to pin down my culture

2010-10-10T20:40:00.002+01:00

I had my eyes open to spot instances of 'performing' my culture this week. It was hard to do. I did overhear the following walking to the station by two girls walking behind me.

"Yeah, so are you coming with me? I need help."
"So what's the dream scenario?"
"Well, a dress obviously, one that I can use for going out on a night out afterwards. Like, nice, but also smart."
"Sure, you want to be able to wear it again. So something that comes up to the knee?"
"Yeah, and won't ride up above my waist when I do the splits at the end of the night."

I spotted my values in action when I was in the supermarket queue and saw a man in front of me buying factory farmed chicken. Immediately my attention was drawn to the rest of the basket to check for what other shopping items he could have compromised on in order to spend the extra to buy some chicken that didn't live in a cramped hell, trampling over the bodies of its fallen comrades, it's feet burning from the ammonia of standing constantly in its own shit. All I saw was croissants.

I was reminded of my Sassenachitude whilst not knowing the words to Scottish folk songs which an English woman was singing to a group of confused Bengali women.

I went for coffee with some engaged colleagues. I don't understand why women are so willing to change their names when they get married. I find it bizarre. People sometimes say that the first thing a single woman does when she meets a guy she likes is try out his surname. Categorically - no. I've always seen the first and only point of marriage to be saying 'I'm in it for the long haul'. That and getting a dog. But each to their own - humans love a good ritual, and it's the meaning we invest which is meaningful. Married readers - tell me about your marriage stuff...

Irony

2010-10-04T07:18:00.002+01:00

I accidentally burned myself with the iron last night. I was trying to multitask; iron all my freshly washed bedding for hotel-like smoothness, and to watch The televisual Period Drama.

Most Britons love a good period drama. It's in our culture. In our bones.

I've been trying to think about what's in my culture lately. Britain is getting more xenophobic by the day, or at least it seems if you consider the red tops to be a good barometer of how racist one can be in public.

The thing is, that whenever I say to myself 'In my culture...' the more I am convinced of the arbitrariness of culture. Which is not to say that I think it's all bollocks. Culture itself is very important to people, but the ins and outs of it are generally secondary. If for some reason half a millenium ago the fabric and techniques of skort making rather than kilt making had been advantageous and available to the Celts then you'd see lots of Americans who have never been to Scotchland wearing skorts at their weddings. It would probably be called a skilt. And get this - nobody would care any different, although you'd have to go to more extreme lengths to see what a Scotsman wears under his skilt.

Humans love ritual. If you or I and someone to breed with were parachuted on to an island with a pair of oven gloves and a jar of Marmite I suspect within a hundred years there would be a correct protocol for the donning of the oven gloves and ceremonial consumption of yeast extract. Then - because humans are secretly scientists, there would come some humans who would challenge the way things are always done. Probably they'd get persecuted, maybe to death, but eventually my or your descendants would come to accept it. Unless - and this is a big one - people have got it in for us. Irreverance is fine so long as there's no widespread and co-ordinated attack upon your very existence.

This article from the BBC is very interesting. I forget that until relatively recently Britain was a very unsafe place for nobles and serfs alike.

This week I'll be blogging about my culture and rituals living in multicultural London as a feminist Sassenach in 2010. I'm sure it will educational (for me).

Blessed are the crap delivery boys, for they shall still inherit 30p

2010-10-02T10:01:00.006+01:00

Yet again I'm going through a run-down, feeling crappy snot-nosed phase where my throat intermittently swells up. Yesterday I made the bold decision to call in sick to work and go to see my GP.

My working hypothesis was fat/unfit/poor immune system and picking up every bug going AND/OR some kind of allergy, perhaps mould or perfume. If it's cat hair then I'll live with it, but if it's something I can exclude then I probably ought to try.

(Of course I had my third secret hypothesis, which was some rare and chemo-resistant cancer of the jowls. But we silently acknowledge then dismiss those sorts of hypotheses.)

The GP and I spoke, and we agreed a referral to the allergy clinic would be beneficial. Not long ago I discovered I could upgrade my allergic response to some foods from urticaria to angioedema, which I fondly refer to as Janice from the Muppets Syndrome. Run that baby through google images and you'll soon realise why.

The GP also began poking my in the throat and decided to send me for a thyroid check in case I have a goitre. For the record - if I have to develop a goitre then I'm 100% going to be telling children it's a spider's nest, or the result of not sharing my sweets.

My mother has only one working hypothesis for everything that is wrong in my life.

'D'you think it's all that Diet Coke you drink?'

No.

So feeling sorry for myself I decided to order a cheap chinese food delivery, the lowest-fat and lowest-cost stuff on the menu. Vegetables and noodles and tofu and a 'share-sized' (ho-ho) bottle of DC. Forty five minutes later the restaurant phone me to offer their apologies for the delay, they've just heard that one of their delivery men was in an accident. And the police are involved. So I wait for another half hour and a boy arrives at the door. I can tell he's new to delivery because he looks bewildered when I give him fifty pence as a tip, and not in a 'this tip is an insult to my humanity' way. After I close the door I realise he's given me a bag with soup in it, and no bottle of DC. I call up the road to him 'Hey wait! There was meant to be a bottle of cola! Coke! Diet Coke! And are you sure order this is mine?'

The boy tells me it is definitely, definitely mine and he'll be back with my drink. I go inside and check the food. It is definitely, definitely not mine. Beef ho-fun and battered chicken in garlic. I phone the restaurant and tell them he's given me the wrong food, so can you get him to check the order when he comes to get the DC. He arrives back fifteen minutes later with my food and glowing with the pride of fulfilled responsibilities presents me with a bottle of accursed full fat cola, in its smug red jacket.

We then have an awkward conversation on the threshold about why I can't accept the Red Baron. He's tugging his forelock and telling me he'll come back with the proper DC, although he's a bit confused about why I don't want the cola. I understand in principle that if I do not accept this cola it will be another fifteen minutes but I just cannot drink wrongy cola. I'm trying to get him to just give me a refund. Eventually I persuade him to give me the £1.80 back and tell him I will just walk up to the shops. Quicker for me and he won't have to come back a third time. As he reaches into his pocket he makes a decision to give me £2.00. I realise he considers this compensation.

So I walked up to the shop in the dark and the rain at almost ten at night to get myself my DC, because I could not possibly eat chinese food without it. I would rather eat cold chinese food than chinese food without DC.

I think I have a problem.

(The above clip is from Mitchell and Webb and if you enjoy this stolen humour you should buy their box set so you can sleep soundly at night.)

Behold me as I enact scientismness

2010-10-01T20:32:00.005+01:00

I know that people treat mental health science as not proper science. But you have to admit that there is at least in psychiatry and psychology not just the eternal why and what helps but an attempt to create an evidence base through empirical means. Kinda.

This week I took a wrong turning on the way to my friend's house. It was a happy accident indeed because I walked past a place called The Academy of the Science of Acting and Directing.

Yeah. Initially I chortled. And chortled. I was still chortling about it a few days later, picturing an entry for a peer reviewed journal named The British Journal of Advancements in Applied Drama where aspiring researchers might submit articles using a double-blind randomised control trial method - neither actors not audience know what play they are watching or performing. At the end someone throws the results into the Statistical Package for Acting and Directing Sciences (SPADS) and if things go very wrong and some of the audience kill themselves Big Hollywood sends some memos wondering whether there is a way to manage the data so as not to cause distress to their shareholders. Later the whole mess is investigated by a thespian version of Dr David Healy, possibly played by Daniel Day Lewis.

Then my curiosity got the better of me and it turns out there is an actual attempt to apply scientific endeavours to performance. And there's going to be a journal based upon research inspired by a Russian named Stanislavski, a man with a great moustache and legacy, using theory-practice linking. He even advocated paradigm-shift.

Science is not the white coat, after all. Science is about searching for the best answer. Or any answer.

The question which has been troubling me this week connects to the question of pickled onion flavoured crisps. I'm sure that there is an excellent word in most languages which sums up tart+vaguely repellent+interesting+mouthwatering, but English doesn't do the trick. It's the wonderful and slightly punishing sensation which leads me to eat one or two pickled capers straight off the teaspoon from the jar in my fridge. On the packet of pickled onion Monster Munch one of the constituents of the flavouring is celery seed oil, which seems pretty innocuous. But nowhere in there is actual pickled onion.

What I'd like to so is freeze-dry some pickled onions and use the powder as a garnish. I have no idea how to make this happen. I think that I should write to Heston Blumenthal and ask him to help me.

Panini

2010-09-29T20:07:00.007+01:00

I do not understand why panini (plural?) are meant to be so great. I don't know if you've read 'Is it just me or is everything shit' but it does bemoan the rise of overpriced toast. Panini is quite definitely the emperor's new toast.

If you ordered any meal in a restaurant - let's say a moussaka or a cheesecake or a caesar salad, with beautiful fresh ingredients and combinations of flavours and textures, and they brought it to you smooshed to a depth of 4mm with 240 degree centrigrade oil dripping out the sides you'd rightly have a little tantrum. You'd say something to the effect of 'Garcon! Noooo! What the flump did you do to my food?' And the correct answer would be 'We killed it for you.'

In the UK we like to buy slices of the that super soft white bread with no discernible nutrients. Nimbostratus like our Summer. As a girl I loved to roll a slice into a tiny ball in my hand. But I was told off for that, as well I ought to have been. Bread should not be smooshed. It is a crime against bakery.

Anew

2010-09-28T21:33:00.002+01:00

I was feeling sad this weekend, but it turns out that something weirdly exciting happens when the ties to the past are lost.

Previously I had more anchors, but felt more adrift. You is only partly who you are as an individual, and a whole lotta other whom other people see you as and whom you become in the spaces between yourself and and others.

I feel strangely like myself again, and strangely like there's hope for me to really be the person I hope can be. Starting now. Or tomorrow.

Warning - contains flashing lights and Bjork noises.

Thank you, inform-ed readers for the reading list

2010-09-28T20:49:00.001+01:00

Good news

2010-09-26T06:56:00.004+01:00

You may or may not have an accessible run-down of your worst fears about yourself ever. Your worst, darkest fears which you either fend off with a mental chair like a lion tamer, or stick in a shoebox under the bed. Your Gmorky bits. Those things that haunt you at 2am on a Sunday night.

Often it's better that you don't have a fine working knowledge of that stuff. But if you do have couple pencilled in your consciousness, I have some good news.

I've just had most of mine confirmed, but it's all survivable. It turns out there are parts of who I am which are fundamentally unbearable to other people, and exposing them to it will make them reject me. There are no exceptions. No distinction between people who only need to know sides of you and people who can know the whole of you and still accept you, bad and good and all. There's only people who only need to know sides of you.

I am either going to have to go through life judiciously self-censoring and feeling vaguely alone as if no one ever really knows me, or being alone in the more literal sense. But you know what, that's okay. I can give the former a bash. That's liveable. There a place on the horizon where faking it and functioning meet. I'll meet you there - we'll drink vermouth and have a ball dancing to Peggy Lee.

What I should have said Three - sorta

2010-09-25T13:45:00.007+01:00

In this space I express extremely hurtful things about people who will never read this post. But I don't express them in words, I just tell you that I'm meaning to, and that does the trick.

Efficiency Tip Number 5

2010-09-24T18:15:00.003+01:00

Slowly and without meaning to alienate most of your closest friends until your social life withers on the vine.

Think of all the money you'll save on presents and those pesky 'leaving the house' expenses.

On a lighter note, got any recommendations for books on how the universe works? Particle/astro physics etc. Suitable for person without physics degree. Ta

Fudge-it Budget.

2010-09-21T00:17:00.003+01:00

It's my first week of back to student-style budgeting, and this time I am not allowed to live on ramen and toast and pickled onion flavour space invader corn snacks and my flatmate's giant bars of Galaxy.

I've allowed myself a fairly generous £50 to see how that goes. The money went in cash into my purse, and I'm not using my debit cards. In the US that's $77, and I know that many people feed a family of 12 and a team of circus ponies on half that amount but remember I live in London and it is very expensive, and I have to keep my cholesterol down, and last time I tried to buy fruit and veg at the market I got ripped off.

I don't understand market-thief-dude's logic. Rip someone off for twelve pence and lose their custom for good, or be honest and gain a loyal customer. Still, I could change markets but it played into my middle class narcissistic and classist insecurities that people who don't work in offices hate me and their sole aim in life is to shtup me for whatever is just enough to make me feel too stupid to complain about it. Still, after a few days of green lentils and brown rice I'm sure I'll be driven to find other vendors who can hit me up with a dose of anthocyanins.

This being 2010 the first thing which I deducted from my all new £50 a week budget was the cost of the electronic phone application I bought to track my expenses. Super wanky. Thus far and software notwithstanding it appears that for every pound, 30 pence goes on catfood and 30 pence on diet cola.

Of an age

2010-09-19T04:59:00.005+01:00

I fell asleep watching an Agatha Christie marathon on ITV3 and woke up to abs related infomercials and the sound of all the planes in the stack above my house descending in preparation for 5am. Suddenly I remembered that last night one plane came so low and so loud that I genuinely thought it was crashing. I only notice them at night.

I was watching Miss Marple. I do love the idea of the spinster lady detective. Poirot I find kind of pompous, but Marple and Fletcher meet with my approval. Perhaps I love the idea of women of a certain age being the star, not as beneficent grandmaman but as a mind to be reckoned with.

My Great Aunt was a maths teacher. A great, portly woman with bosom like a shelf that she rested her cup of tea upon. Until the day she died she did the Times cryptic crossword. She was fond of quizzing me on times tables, which is still my maths weakness and she once traumatised me by telling me that I had a fat arse (aged 11). She had a house in the bend of a country road near the village my mother grew up in. I remember the green painted woodwork of her home and the smell I now suppose was excessive talcum and mothballs. She was obsessively generous with spoons and jewellery, and you never left after a visit without something in a blue velvet box with a white label saying Sterling Silver on it.

There was a burglary. There might have been two. Suddenly she felt unsafe there and in combination with some health issues she somehow decided to move to a retirement home. Can you imagine to have a mind sharper than the staff, and stuck in a retirement home, with its wing-backed chairs around the edge of the 'lounge' and little to do but let the nurses know that Mrs Smith is trying to escape again?

I'm sure of there had been a Harold Shipman at her retirement home she'd have found him out.

In sh-it-ock.

2010-09-18T09:28:00.003+01:00

I've finally begun to look into what extending my lease and renegotiating my mortgage will involve.

It certainly involves an extra zero on the end of what I was picturing. It will involve a chartered surveyor and a solicitor and possible an appeals tribunal. I had hoped I could extend the mortgage loan, but there's a little catch 22 around the lease extension.

And dear readers I have precisely NO savings.

The von Hathor empire is about to entire a period of extreme austerity. Cuts! Cuts! Cuts! Sell everything you can! Peanut butter sandwiches packed lunch! And rationing of diet coke. Lentils and beans and vegetables for tea, forever.

How am I ever going to be able to afford having a family?

Efficiency Tip Number 4

2010-09-16T23:15:00.004+01:00

Never brush your hair before your daily commute. Better still, get on the train full of freshly pressed city workers with sopping wet, rats nestified unbrushed hair that makes you look like you had a bitch fight with Alexis Carrington in a pond.

Not only will you save time getting ready in the morning, but you'll soon find it has the effect of giving second thoughts to members of that species of freshly pressed city workers who will leapfrog three quarters of a carriage to steal that seat you are clearly about to park your arse in.

Crispnundrum

2010-09-15T08:02:00.003+01:00

Ladies and Gentleman, Boys and Girls, and those who are a little in-between, gather round for the greatest conundrum ever known. Or should I say the greatest conundrum which relates to crisps (chips).

Vegetable crisps are the tastiest and most posh and nutrient blessed of all crisps.

Crisps are best appreciated in a sandwich.

Yet vegetable crisps make rubbish sandwiches.

I KNOW!

veg crisps > crisps
crisps in sandwich > crisps out of sandwich
veg crisps in sandwich < crisps in sandwich
AND
veg crisps in sandwich < any old shit crisps full stop

Catmouflage

2010-09-13T20:42:00.007+01:00

Maybe Granny was right

2010-09-10T20:29:00.004+01:00

...just not geographically.

My grandmother died about half my lifetime ago. She was one of those people who was wonderful with small children but struggled with grown ups and was never quite able to forgive them for not turning out to be the person she wanted them to be. But I'll never forget making scottish pancakes with her (drop scones), standing on a stool to reach the stove under her supervision, the My Little Pony jumper she hand-knitted for me, or her floating a 'pooched egg' in my cousin's tomato soup as we played with our Smurfs.

When I was thirteen I had my first and only fight with my grandmother. She was telling an elaborate story about a woman on the train on the way to England who ate her lunch like a snotty princess and was clearly a terrible human being. I think all it took was for me to proclaim in the grumpy fashion of a 13 year old that it wasn't enough to see a woman eat her lunch to know what kind of person she was. And in that moment my relationship with my grandmother was spoiled. We disagreed, she raised her voice, then she went upstairs and waited on the edge of her bed, shaking and gripping a bottle of tablets.

When my mother sent me up to fix things, my grandmother said to me 'When I die I know I will not go to hell, because hell is this Earth where I live now.'

My grandmother did live through some tough times. She said that she saw the lifeless body of her little sister laid out on the kitchen table. But I don't think it was that which made her life a living hell. It was her hypersensitivity to anything other than the total acceptance and unquestioning love of children.

And I'm coming to the opinion that there is a hell on Earth, but it is mostly located in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It may not even have been my own cat

2010-09-09T21:45:00.003+01:00

The toons, they are a changing.

2010-09-08T22:09:00.004+01:00

My scanner/printer died just after THETHESISFROMHELL. New lappy has all manner of illustrating packages I can barely use. But I'm hoping to have more cartoons and pictures up from now on.

This is my first effort. It is a direct impression of the face that appeared from my dinner bowl after I shouted 'Bad Catling! No!' I went overboard on the brush effects and she seems to have a sty - rest assured that is not the case.

Efficiency Tip Number 3

2010-09-07T17:16:00.005+01:00

Buy the expensive designer 2-bowl cat feeder which you've had your eye on for a year.

Question 1.
Mollycat and Catling are cats. The cats need a bowl of fresh water and a bowl of biscuits daily. Furthermore, each cat requires jelly-encased animal derivatives at a rate of three times per day or they will cut you and leave you to die. Due to the eternal fight for supremacy between Mollycat and Catling, it is not possible for the cats to share a bowl of wet food. Bowls cannot be re-used without washing because it might give the cats the shits and nobody wants that. Calculate the number of bowls which are used per day.

Question 2.
Cat washing up may never be completed before human washing up, because cats clean their bums with the same tongue they use to clean their bowl. An average human washing up load requires the entire dish drainer, leaving room for only three cat bowls to safely dry perched on the edge of the draining board. How many washing up loads will it take to finish a day's worth of cat bowls?

Question 3.
Are you the kind of lazy bitch who owns twelve porcelain cat bowls so that for 24 hours you can just keep putting out a fresh bowl without bothering to wash up the old one, until there's a giant stack of them which intimidates you from doing the washing up at all?

Question 4.
How much do those cat bowls smell when you leave them for a whole day?

Answer 1: Buy the damn fancy cat bowls.
Answer 2: It's discounted online.
Answer 3: It has a handle to make it easy to pick up and therefore clean.
Answer 4: Get on with it before environmental health come round.

What I should have said Two

2010-09-05T08:49:00.005+01:00

I moved school when I was nine, to the home counties. I found myself in a new school full of sophisticated kids who didn't eat crisp sandwiches or spear their grapes with their Ribena Carton straw to make a grape kebab. They all had posh English parents, and mine were Scottish. On holidays they went to Europe, and although I did get chances to go to Europe my holidays often began by spending 8 hours being driven to Scotland, ensconced in the itchiest kilt known to humanity.

Forgive me if I've told this one before.

I was a prettyish child with a blonde Rapunzel plait and many weird habits and so an excellent target for boys to bully. One day the boys were asking me insulting questions.

What Was Said:

Boy 1: "Are you a prostitute?"
GvH: "A what?"
Boy 2: "A prossy. A prostitute."
GvH: "I don't know."
Boy 1: "Oh my God, you're a prostitute."
GvH: "I didn't say that. I'm not sure. I know we're not Catholic, but we go to the Baptist Church on the hill."
Boys: Pause. "Waaahahahahahahahahahhaha!"

What ought to have been said:

Boy 1: "Are you a prostitute?"
GvH: "A what?"
Boy 2: "A prossy. A prostitute."
GvH: "Define prostitute."
Boy 1: "Women who Do It with men for money."
GvH: "Oh, you mean a hoor. For a minute there I thought you meant protestant."

Lappy days are here again

2010-09-02T10:24:00.003+01:00

Tonight I am picking up my new laptop. I am overjoyed. I have been saving up for months. It has been too hard to blog when you cannot read a full sentence on your screen, but tomorrow I shall be blogging with a vengeance. Blogging for Britain. Blogging for my supper. Etc.

But more importantly I will be able to follow your blogs again - I have missed your stories of consonant-monikered infants, and labs and mist and cakes and veg and dust and wonderful, horrible faux pas.

Ironically, this week at work IT came to 're-image' my computer. My monitor now has better graphics but the side effect was that all the type is tiny. What was my usual document view in word makes 12pt font look like it should be hung on a pendant, in a vial, on a grain of rice, on holiday in Tenerife in 1987. The only suggestion IT had was to dumb down the resolution on my screen. This has returned most of the words on my monitor to a readable size, but in a strange pixellated blur as if the letters are appearing anonymously on a documentary with their voice narrated by an actor.

I guess progress isn't what it used to be.

Trainy tid-bits

2010-08-10T08:14:00.003+01:00

During yesterday's commute the only man speaking in the carriage was bragging to his friend about what a good bloke he was, through the miracle of mobile telecommunication.

"When I knock a girl up..." he said in the serious voice of a big pronouncement.

"...I always visit my kids on time."

Has any of us known a nobler sentiment? Hard to say.

No.

2010-08-07T12:06:00.002+01:00

No no no no no no no no noooo.

No.

Nuh-huh.

Non.

No.

Unacceptable. Unagreeable.

No. No. A thousand fucking times no.

My life has become a cliche in an unwritten Smiths song.

Things have got to change. In the battle of free will versus determinism I choose free will. Bing!

Star-ting-froooom-NOW.

It broke my fat little heart, in decreasing order of self-centredness

2010-08-02T21:07:00.006+01:00

I gave away my thin clothes on Saturday. The most beautiful clothes now belong to my svelte flatmate, and the rest to the British Heart Foundation.

Then the last of my friends who like me is not in receipt of a baby or a paid-for fancy course to compensate for the troubles of being on entry-level salary (after two years work) got a promotional post. I'm so chuffed for him, yet I feel rubbish. I feel like a mug.

The world is going through a racist patch. A more than usually vocal in its hate of foreigners patch. In the past fortnight I've read about Mongolian and Indian Neo-Nazis. It's like a Brass-Eye sketch, except it's real. In the UK all reference to helping refugees is flavoured with implicit or explicit resentment. The response to the floods in Pakistan have been distinctly underwhelming.

White Britain has a selectively short memory. It does not see that the countries it controlled under the Empire or Commonwealth, those whose riches it siphoned or whose citizens it made salute our royalty or bear its illegitimate children or whose boundaries it divvied up as was its wont have anything to do with it now, especially should it be in some kind of mess.

What I should have said Number One

2010-08-01T16:30:00.002+01:00

Dinner party about eight years ago. I made some joke about how I'm so frugal I buy my Christmas cards for the following year in the January sales.

Friend: 'Ergh, God you really are cheap.'

What I should have said: 'well, when you have to earn money to pay rent rather than living with your mum and dad in their London townhouse, and the food only gets in the fridge because you bought it, you find yourself making strange economies. But rest assured next Christmas I won't offend you by sending you one of my cheap, cheap cards.'

What I really should think: 'Why do you still ruminate about this crap? It's been eight years. You never fitted in with those posh girls from Grammar school and that's why you don't see any of them anymore. End of story. Now go finish sorting your paperwork.'

Scabscess

2010-07-31T19:09:00.004+01:00

Catface went to the vets yesterday. A lump appeared on her jaw and by the time the vets opened the following morning it had trebled in size and she looked like Buzz Lightyear. Poor Scabface, she coped very well with the process up to the point where she's locked inside the house and meant to be using a tray, which she's about as keen on that idea as you or I might be about a bedpan.

She's been holding her pee for 44 hours now, and I might have to start running the taps, or placing her paw in a glass of lukewarm water whilst she sleeps.

Phantom bun

2010-07-26T23:36:00.003+01:00

The public have gone mad. They are having a hysterical pregnancy, and they are projecting it into MY tum. My cake enhanced tum. It's getting worse - some deluded person assures me I'm pregnant every week now.

I am worried about them. They all need sectioned. I might start screwing with them - swig water from a gin bottle and eat soft cheeses on my morning commute. That will teach them.

Reader Dearests, I stopped blogging because I was afraid I was getting dependent, and also because like one of those moments when you catch yourself in a meeting absent mindedly cleaning your thumbnail with a pen lid and pray that nobody else saw it too I had a horrible moment of reading back my blogs with self-conscious disgust, and also because I had no computer, and also because my troubles are borge-wah, which I cannot spell and shan't try.

I stopped blogging because all I had to say was FatFatFatFatFatFattyFattyFatFatFatFat FatFatFatFatFatFattyFattyFatFatFatFat FatFatFatFatFatFattyFattyFatFatFatFat FatFatFatFatFatFattyFattyFatFatFatFat FatFatFatFatFatFattyFattyFatFatFatFat FatFatFatFatFatFattyFattyFatFatFatFat FatFatFatFatFatFattyFattyFatFatFatFat which rages in my head like the chorus of a long-forgotten, best-forgotten Chas n Dave number, with Cockney piana accompaniment and the stench of pie and chips twice.

Boring.

Fight Schlub

2010-07-24T11:32:00.002+01:00

I was watching Fight Club on telly last night. I can't believe it was eleven years ago that it came out.

The line in that movie which always gets me is that The things that you own end up owning you. I'm sure you have your own example.
I am at the point in my life where I am earning more than I ever have, but even as a woman with no 'dependents' (or at least human ones) I've never had so little disposible income. More importantly I have less enthusiasm for living than I ever have, despite being more theoretically autonomous than ever. At the same time I can't read too much about the pop-astronomy and astrophysics increasingly in the news. Giant carbon atoms are 200 earth-type planets were stories in close succession this week. My little mind becomes like a washing machine with too much dirty laundry in it to go round. I can only empty it by listening to music or watching shit telly. I'm sure that evolution didn't have in mind that when we became the overlords of the planet we'd clutter it up with plastic and procrastination.

Basically humans are a bit rubbish at being animals. We're all King Canute or Icarus or something.

un-Sabbatical

2010-07-23T20:49:00.002+01:00

I've made a bargain. Blogging is back whilst I've given up some other website we need not mention. Basically there was a BCD incident which I've put too much effort into forgetting to rehash here.

But I don't have a computer anymore. This is why I have not been following your excellent blogs, Reader Dearests. The laptop died and took with it to hell all my music and photos. These words on your big screen come from my one-finger tapping at a phone screen, and I cannot even see a full sentence as I write it.

But without my blog I have thoughts which stay in my own head. What a tragedy! (For me, not you.) Who else will listen to me when I need to let it be known that I've just discovered that the annoying miaowing the cat does by the back door when she is perfectly capable of going out the catflap is actually her asking me to come outside to play?

I watched Grey Gardens this week. My Inner Little Edie needs your film crew.

Thank you.

Move along, nothing to see here

2010-06-01T21:18:00.001+01:00

Ghosts in the Pantry will be on hold for the foreseeable future.

As you were.

The Red Shoooooes

2010-05-31T11:02:00.004+01:00

The Red Shoes was on telly yesterday. It is one of my alltimefavouritemovies, and like Black Narcissus is a Powell and Pressburger masterpiece. (Can we just take a moment to enjoy saying the name Emeric Pressburger a few times over in our heads? Emericpressburger. Emericpressburger. Thank you.)

Moira Shearer is just gorgeous. Everything about the film is dramatic and rich and warm and grand.

I never understood why Vicky didn't fall madly in love with Anton Walbrook and his marvellous moustache.

Anton Walbrook was of Austrian origin and half-Jewish. He changed his name from Adolf to Anton for obvious reasons after WWII commenced. Anton was also gay. Like many artists, he fought against the Nazis indirectly, but not insignificantly.

It's Bank Holiday, and I don't have any plans. Perhaps I'll go to Hampstead and leave him a floral offering of thanks.

Smile!

2010-05-30T11:10:00.003+01:00

Why do I read the Daily Mail? Do I need my two minutes hate each morning?

Today in the Fail a fat woman about my fatness referred to her upper arms as 'danger zones'. Initially my reaction was a jolly Pshaw. Fellow fatgirl, Helmand is a danger zone. The Ituri District of the DRC is a danger zone within a wider danger zone. Certain hours outside Wetherspoons across the British Isles could subjectively be described as danger zones. Your chubby upper arms are safe, normal and just a bit fat. Do not fear their discovery - other people can already tell you are a bit fat, and it would be reasonable for them to suppose your lower arms are attached to your body in some way, and if seeing your arms traumatises them then they probably deserved to be traumatised.

But then I know the danger she is most afraid of is the danger of seeing herself in the photos. The danger of traumatising herself and feeling ashamed she left the house, and reticent to make that mistake again.

There are almost no social photos of me over the past five years. I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's a bit pathetic. It's a bit of an achievement, given that most of my friends can't enjoy a night out without evidencing their enjoyment with photographic documentation.

I went to an arts event recently and had my photo taken unawares. When I saw the photo I thought 'I've got the same coat as that pregnant woman.'

Remember that I'm not allowed to complain about things until I've tried at least two ways to fix them? Well, the pincer approach on this one is eat well/exercise and forcing myself to take photos of myself and show them to my friends.

One photo a day.

If anything, this will at least encourage me to brush my hair.

The Evil I

2010-05-29T17:40:00.003+01:00

In 2004 my then-flatmate drunkenly harassed me over an episode whereby I had been rude to him in front of a girl. And indeed I had been rude, because he had interrupted my conversation with another of our flatmates to squeal that Jesus WAS white!

After the conversation had finished and the others gone to bed he came back in his underpants and erected the ironing board between me and the TV, before launching into a twenty minute screaming fit in which he declared me The Most Evil Bitch In The World.

Underneath all this was the issue that on my first night at the flat I had drunkenly flirted with him, although I didn't fancy him.

I don't flirt anymore. Partly because I don't really drink anymore. Partly because I'm a fat woman in my thirties and I might not get a great reaction. But I never got a great reaction even when I was younger and theoretically lovelier.

A few months before the JESUS WAS WHITE incident, a man I didn't know called me an evil bitch and a cocktease at a party, where I had done some drunken flirting, with pretty much everyone but him. Perhaps he felt left out...

So partly I stopped flirting because it seemed to be a causative factor in getting called an evil bitch. But mostly I stopped flirting because psychology ruins everything.

What is flirting after all? Sometimes it's a genuine, tentative social dance where you like-like someone and are trying to establish if they like-like you too. But mostly it's a form of getting other people to like and admire you by pretending to like and admire them, because other people finding you attractive is that important to your sense of self worth. Flirting is an entirely ego-driven social activity which masquerades as interest in the other. A psuedo-seduction. The trouble is that people have all kinds of existential pains, and cultivating hope that they may not die alone is a dangerous business.

In the past few years I've had a couple of heartbreaks regarding men who are habitual flirts. I feel now that habitual flirts should be forced to wear some kind of badge on their lapel, so that people know not to pay any attention. The benefit of a badge system would be that habitual flirts could easily recognise each other and spend hours in a verbal version of monkeys eating each others ticks and fleas.

Mmmmmr

2010-05-25T06:56:00.003+01:00

Dr Andrew Wakefield is quite a hit with conspiracy theorists. Wakefield recently became a martyr for the cause of anti-MMR. Valiantly he risked his career in order to fight the might of big pharma.

Wakefield responded to being struck off by saying "Efforts to discredit and silence me through the GMC process have provided a screen to shield the government from exposure on the MMR vaccine scandal."

Conveniently for big farmer he wantonly broke every research ethics rule in the book short of sleeping with all the mothers of the children in his original study and gathering his data from the casting of runes. And whilst much has been made of the £5 for blood tests at the kiddies party (sounds like a good deal to me...) let's remember the children at the hospital where he worked subjected to lumbar punctures and colonoscopies which were not indicated as part of their treatment.

I won't ask whether or not you'd like a colonoscopy for no medical reason, but would you like me to stick a big needle in your spine and draw out your cerebrospinal fluid? Probably not.

There's something about conspiracies which seem either to attract or follow from maverick narcissists. But there is no room in the NHS for the Beverly Hills Cop approach.

Sadly, self-promoting types who sell a pretty satisfying idea in which it's us against the world are far more attractive to the public than diligent researchers who try to replicate findings, by the book, using informed consent over a drawn out period of time which allows for the transition from pilot study to a large sample and careful consideration of the results.

But that's the way the research cookie crumbles.

You are cordially invited...

2010-05-23T14:11:00.003+01:00

Remember the PhDogpoo which I whined incessantly about? Well, it turns out that it has enabled me to join the Royal Society for Medicine as an 'associate member'. Oh, lucky lucky me.

In the post I received an invitation, application form and all manner of hilariously silly propaganda. The RSM is a registered charity apparently, but one with a grand hotel, which as an associate member 'you'll pay less than you would expect to pay for accommodation in the West End, from just £130 per night...' Why, it's a veritable steal!

I shall unleash some unfettered snobbishness now: The West End is 90% a horrid place full of horrible drunk tourists wearing union jack paraphrenalia, who have mortgaged their soul to see some ploppiness by Andrew Lloyd Webber. If this is what doctors are blowing their money on, then the NHS needs to review its payscales.

The RSM also has a members' buttery. Do you know what that is? I don't. But I imagine it to be a bit like a carvery for butter, which seems very irresponsible cholesterol-wise and more than a little revolting. Would you like a rare or medium rare slice of butter? Why thank you, I shall have mine rare.

The New Childhood

2010-05-21T19:36:00.003+01:00

I ate an icelolly earlier this week. One with three flavours and hundreds and thousands, but almost no saturated fat. These are allowed during Lent II, as are copious quantities of oven chips.

When I finished the lolly I had a good chew on the wooden stick, then went to read the joke before throwing it away.

I like a good lollystick joke. They tend to be a little classier than cracker jokes, however unfunny.

Except there was no joke. There was a web address, for kids to look up online games, and long since expired competitions, and generally participate in amassing online revenue.

Poor kids.

Schopenhaurian - are you out there?

2010-05-16T10:36:00.002+01:00

By 'it's time for you to get your own blog', I didn't mean 'get your own damn blog, and get off my lawn'.

I meant 'there's a blog in you. Set it freeeeee!'

(Curse you BCD. Curse you to the bone).

un-Familiar

2010-05-15T13:29:00.003+01:00

A little girl poked me in the cultural intolerance today by telling me that cats were dirty but it was okay to be nice to them apart from black cats which work for the devil.

I made a brief attempt at enquiring whether she thought that this was a religious belief, as she had presented, or a cultural belief. Then I remembered she was six, and told her that in my culture black cats are good luck.

Hatred of black cats is pan-cultural, with hatred of all cats a close second. In Metz, of Northern France I don't think you need me to tell you what used to happened on Cat Wednesday. The great irony was of course that cats were our greatest allies during the Plague and in protecting grain stores.

Given the incalculable number of innocent women (and to a lesser but still staggering extent men and children too) that were burned alive on suspicion of witchcraft it might seem silly to remember the plight of the cats. But there's room in our memories for more than one suffering a time, I think. It's one of our better attributes, as a species.

Lentish Town

2010-05-13T20:43:00.002+01:00

I'm having another Lent. Lent-II. And why not? Last time it was lent I lost a stone and but more importantly managed to drag my cholesterol back into slightly above the normal range. That and the metformin. And the pill. It was a team effort.

Positivism excels in many areas of science, but if there is one area more fickle and more given to paradigm shifts than Madonna's wardrobe it is the area of food science. More people agree about global warming than about what not to eat. And any time you think the truth is discoverable... Bam. The rules change.

What helped me during Lent-I was realising that sections of the food industry have no more ethics than the cigarette industry. And that gooey stuff in the chocolate bars they do literally lab test until they find a formula as much like crack as they can, because they want your money and diabetes is your problem.

Lent-II is going well so far. I'm three days in and mad about blueberries, which I like to refer to as nature's Skittles.

Tories are running my country, and more importantly my NHS

2010-05-12T07:40:00.003+01:00

I am not happy.

I'll just have to keep reminding myself about civil liberties maybe improving a little, and about no expansion of Heathrow.

But how can I, when the Tories were the ones who pushed through the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to increase powers of stop and search and to stop more than five people listening to repetitive beats in a field. Does that sound like they care much for civil liberties when you can't listen to music in a field without a licence? At least Labour introduced draconian laws to stop terrorists, and not fun.

I just don't believe that the Tories, who seem to live in a state of moral panic that we do not live in an imaginary 1950s (one that never included The Krays) are really going to roll back intrusion. It'll just be another form of nagging.

I do believe the Gordon Brown is looking forward to going back to being a husband and dad. Most of the time when Gordon tries to smile it's like he wants the media to check for spinach in his front teeth. But when you see photos - which aren't common - of Gordon looking at his kids, you see him beaming. His whole face lights up with joy.

The von Hathor is back

2010-05-08T20:58:00.002+01:00

I went away to do my week of voluntary work looking after broken birds and stuff.

I really enjoyed the animals part of it, and was not bothered about the poo cleaning part of it, but the remainder of it was mostly strange and uncomfortable on account of a big chunk of the human interaction aspect. I shan't go into detail because I'm so very glad it's over. I mean, it wasn't 'Nam, but I did cry actual tears of joy once I began my drive home. It felt like being released from HMP Countryside.

I came back to my dirty city life and was moved by how cute my flat was and all my things and my happy cats and my nice colleagues and my lovely family and my non-judgmental friends.

I reminded myself that when people sneer at you it says more about the state of them than you.

I reminded myself who I am, without hiding the atypical bits that might make people roll their eyes.

I like this. I like it a lot. I haven't a clue why Deanna is in jail, or how she's ended up with Met star Jan Peerce as a guard, but she's got style.

Forget everything I said fishy fishy

2010-04-28T01:15:00.003+01:00

I ate the seafood okay with no freak-outs, but a few hours later was uncontrollably sick.

I think my body won't tolerate corpse protein anymore, regardless of how stupid the animal it came from. I think I'm just going to have to get really good at cooking tofu and eating un-salted, non-caramelised nuts.

On the plus side, I don't have to be buried at sea anymore.

Here fishy fishy

2010-04-27T20:03:00.003+01:00

I'm about to eat a dead animal!

I know!

They killed a living animal and I'm planning on eating it. For the first time in sixteen years (although there was that 'vegetarian' pizza in Rijeka which had ham under the cheese in 2002...)

I've been thinking a lot about the nature of suffering recently, and about catfood and about dairy and eggs. And a lot of the choices I make as a traditional 'proper' vegetarian don't quite add up. For instance if you eat eggs, then you are perpetuating the killing of male chicks. Often they get chucked into a big blender. Likewise male calves if you drink milk. Off they pop to the veal market.

I've come to accept that part of being a living thing is being complicit with the suffering and killing of other living things. And a large extent of this is morally neural. When a wolf picks on the youngest and weakest of its prey, that's just how it works.

I'm pretending to take an all-or nothing approach to killing but I already do quite a lot of killing, and did even when I was vegan. For instance I have no qualms about killing parasites or viruses or silverfish or the little papermites that blight my cupboards. And in the process of the vegetables and grains that get to my table there's got to be some baby field mice getting squished in that thresher. But I'm not in a position to grow my own wheat in the back yard. And plants - well, they're beginning to discover that plants communicate or a very basic level with each other.

Humans aren't like other animals - with knowledge and choice comes responsibility. So as eugenicsy as it may sound, I've decided to go back and re-evaluate which animals deserve to die less than others based upon their capacity to understand, to relate, and to suffer. Because it isn't sentimentality which stops us from eating cats and dogs, it's insight that they deserve to live and to live well. But did you know pigs are about as intelligent as dogs? Obviously not as intelligent as Border Collies, which are the Stephen Hawking of dogs.

So, sea dwelling insects, you are going to be first. The only problem is you stink like fish. And as I always say 'the thing about fish is that it stinks of fish, which is generally a sign not go near something, never mind eat it.

But fair's fair. If sea dwellers are going to make it into my food chain then I'm going to make it into theirs.

Do you have to do something special to get a burial at sea?

coughcoughcough

2010-04-25T07:14:00.004+01:00

I seem to have a cold or respiratory infection of some kind. The kind that gives you a hacking cough. A diaphragm quaking cough. And eyelid blood vessel rupturing sort of cough. An 'if I'd had a baby by now I would totes be pissing myself' cough.

If I am lucky, when the cough comes I just get two in a row. Because if I get three or more I involuntarily heave. Yesterday all I had to do was make it it to the chemist to buy vaporub and guaifenesin syrup. I had to have a few rest stops along the way, and a lot of work went into not being sick in the street.

One of the best tricks I ever learned about coping with cold or flu is that no matter how achy you are, you must get yourself into the shower as soon as practicable each morning, even if what then happens is that you climb back into your pyjamas and back into bed. The steam is brilliant for clearing the lungs, and if for any reason you have to answer the door, without your bra on and with birdsnest hair, at least you know you don't smell like rotting hamsters.

Thing is, I do all my best catastrophising in the shower. Rarely a day goes by when by the end of my shower I haven't been diagnosed with a life threatening illness, lost my job or died alone and the cats have eaten my body. It's more functional than it sounds. By the time I'm up and dressed I'm ready to face whatever life throws at me.

Yesterday I was troubled by the question of who would look after me if I got really sick. Because I love my family but if I were going through chemo or something I probably wouldn't tell them until afterwards, purely because the collective concern of my family would probably make my hair drop out before the chemo did. So would my best friend come stay with me? She's got debts to pay off, so I'd probably have to get her to take unpaid leave and pay her wages for the month. But if I was going to do that I might as well hire someone. Which might sound sad and spinstery, but a far more appealing prospect than the lot of a sick wife and mother, who also has to look after their kids and husband at the same time.

I went on facebook and made a shout out to the spinsterverse asking if anyone wanted to make a pact that we'd cover each other in case of chemotherapy or broken leg or something, assuming we could wipe our own arses.

No response.

When I was at university I once wanted a boyfriend to look after me when I had a chest infection. I had seriously misunderstood the nature of our relationship (it emerged that he was too scared and too stoned to break up with me) and instead of being cared for what I experienced was how revolting people find you when mucus is trying to escape from your body. I don't think about that relationship often, but in hindsight it was it was both the last time I asked someone to look after me and the last time I asked someone to love me. Because it turns out if you ask those things out loud, you don't get them. They will try to escape you faster than mucus.

So I've been a good sick nurse to myself this weekend. I ate crisp sandwiches, drank copious amounts of Ribena, did a lot of Hanjie and downloaded some computer games. Because if you want a job done well, sometimes you have to do it yourself.

This week we established

2010-04-23T18:11:00.004+01:00

1. The BNP think global warming is 'unproved science'. I suppose it was too much to hope that people who don't understand not all Muslims are terrorists and not all British people are white would appreciate Popper's falsifiability concept, but one can dream.

2. If there is one thing worse than getting a cold in the wintertime, it's getting a cold in the height of hayfever season when volcano ash is doing its thing. I never needed to know what my nostrils felt like with all the skin temporarily removed, but it has been brought to my attention what being subtly flayed by kleenex feels like.

3. If you are about to hop in the shower, and have nothing to tie your waist length hair up with on 'non-hair-washing-day' and you decide you will use the pair of (gigantic) clean knickers which you have brought with you into the bathroom, ensure to remove them before you leave the house.

Inside outside inside on

2010-04-18T15:20:00.002+01:00

A new season of Doctor Who is upon us, and with it a new Doctor and companion.

All around me are adults over-thinking and over-analysing it. I won't link to any of the more hilarious comments sections on account of the risk of spoilers but the Guardian hosts a fine example of people extremely upset by the revised aesthetics of a Dalek.

Some people enjoy complaining more than they enjoy enjoying.

I've been over-thinking life too much lately. Sometimes it's good to just decide on your destination, get out your compass and head there as the crow flies. Worry about the river when you get to it.

Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday

Squish the crush

2010-04-17T19:47:00.003+01:00

It's all gone now. And my brain temporarily resumed service until a childish sort of self-pity overtook it.

I wasn't ready to fully squish it yet, because I was enjoying the oxytocin, but a friend did it for me. I was giving a little soliloquy about said pointless crush and it's pointlessness on account of said pointless crush object repeatedly failing to even learn my name, and my friend piped up 'Yes, well. That's because he doesn't care.'

Smoosh.

Efficiency Tip Number 2

2010-04-12T17:15:00.002+01:00

Stay away from love, or its poor cousin infatuation.

I seem to have embarked upon another of my ill-advised infatuations, and it's like someone stole my brain and replaced with that of a chimp on MDMA. And not even a bonobo chimp - a less exciting and over-sexed type of chimp.

There is no rational thought to be had, because there are no thoughts, other than La, La La. A functional MRI of my brain would reveal an excess of activity in the La La La region of the amygdalalala, and very little else. I'm too strung out on oxytocin to care about anything, including the fact that this ill-advised infatuation is going nowhere.

Probably I shouldn't be allowed to drive or operate heavy machinery right now. There's no shopping in the house and I don't even care.

In summary: If you want to get things done in life, stay off the chimp smack.

Efficiency Tip Number 1

2010-04-10T09:57:00.003+01:00

Reduce your portion size of muesli/porridge/oatmeal/weetabix/cereal in the morning. Enough to make you want to eat every last scrap.

1. The emptied bowl no longer becomes the vessel for some kind of milk-bonded compound to rival Kevlar, requiring washing up within a critical time period of thirty seconds, or a ten hour soak.

2. You never have to deal again with that whole too wet for the bin, too solid for the sink dilemma. (In the past I've chucked it in the loo, but those Cheerios float for days, and it's weird to pee on them).

3. Blah blah planet blah.

Make do and mend with a side order of bin it bin it bin it

2010-04-09T11:18:00.004+01:00

I think most of you lot are like me. Some of the furniture in your house came from the street or a skip. You have cups and plates of many different families, and you dutifully sew back on stray buttons and do a bit of iron-on-hemming, then when the days comes anything too threadbare to go to the charity shop can become a duster or 'painting clothes'.

I've decided to take a hard line on scrappy and ill-fitting knickers. Forget ill-fitting bras, ill-fitting knickers are the horrors that lurk beneath for most women. Yesterday I bought 20 pairs and all the old ones have gone in the bin.

This is not to say I've filled the drawer up again with frilly drawers. Straight men who haven't lived with women like to imagine women wear matching lingerie everyday. And I daresay some women do (Carla Bruni, I'm thinking about you. In your underwear. You look great but LAY OFF THE BOTOX PRETTY LADY).

I favour cotton knickers from Tesco. Thongs pretend to by sexy, but what they really do is facilitate the transfer of faecal bacteria from your anus to your Sheela-na-gig. And some people with a microbial fetish might find that idea sexy but just because we get furniture out of skips doesn't mean that we have no respect for hygiene, right? And don't even get me started on 'magic-knickers'. Underwear should not give you reflux.

Due to my rapidly oscillating dress size (like Hummingbird) which is actually between dress sizes but goes to the upper and lower limits depending on lunch, I've got several dress sizes of knickerage in my underwear drawer. I've decided to knock that on the head though, and all will be slightly too big rather than slightly too small. Wearing slightly too big knickers has done something amazing though, which is to remind me what it's like to be slightly smaller than your clothes are.

And what it is like, is like drugs. All those women who fear going up a size are missing a trick. It's really motivating to feel like you are swimming a little in your clothes.

So long as they don't (like the over-sized hand-me-downs of wee Gemma, the snot-encrusted youngest child of my neighbours army of kids I grew up with) fall down when you run...

Woe is meh

2010-04-07T17:52:00.002+01:00

New rule:

I am only allowed to moan about something at the point at which I have attempted a minimum of two different strategies to fix it.

I anticipate this will bring big changes.

In your gravy

2010-04-04T11:19:00.000+01:00

Things to be glad about

2010-04-03T21:18:00.002+01:00

Know what is a wonderful gift in my life? Not wanting to be famous or rich or get special treatment.

Seriously, it's a gift that money can't buy and that some people will never get to experience the joy of. And I can't help but feel sad for people who lack this magic secret to life. It's not quite as basic as being easily pleased, but it sure does make life more satisfying.

Like most youngsters I had vague notions of wanting to be famous. An actress or a singer or something. But fortunately I was able to know the difference between a hobby and a calling, and quickly came to see that celebrity was a specific type of hell.

I won't begin name-dropping, but I know people who know famous people. Probably so do you - the world is small like that. But for the most part, people who make a habit of knowing people who are famous for non-work purposes tend to collect them like talking pieces, and it's very dull indeed. What's more, famous people are not inherently more interesting than non-famous people. Talented people can be captivating when they are practicing their art, but this does not necessarily make them a better dinner party guest than your Uncle Bob or that girl with all the guinea pigs.

And money sure can make the difference between a good enough life and a life of struggles. I worry a lot about my non-existent kids' futures. But I don't think I actually enjoyed holidays abroad more than holidays with my cousins at their house, and if children don't learn to endure not getting everything they want when they're young then God help you when they become teenagers.

The wisdom of the maxillofacial surgery survivors

2010-04-02T20:52:00.003+01:00

I got chatting to a woman at work. I'm changing jobs and we'd all gone for a drink. She's more of a girl really - not far from 20 but has a really relaxed, mature outlook on life. A real 'worse things happen at sea' type of gal, when everyone else is moaning and tearing their hair because systems don't do what people want them to. Nothing is going to make her have a crappy day if she can help it.

She does have a small scar on her nose, and we were chatting about our lives, and the story of the scar came out. I like a good scar, and a good scar story. I have an excellent and increasingly noticeable long and fine scar running down my left cheek which is from scraping a line down my face with a stray piece of fence wire whilst jumping to get at better view of a stained glass window at age 6. Which is totally how most of us got our childhood scars, no? And as the collagen in my ageing skin slowly deteriorates my scar is reappearing. But I quite like it.

So Miss Don't-sweat-the-small-stuff begins telling us about her scar, which she got at the age of 13 after an accident in which she smooshed her entire face. And by smooshed, I mean catfooded. Her nose was crushed and forced under her skin till it was closer to her ear than its original resting point, and her skin was for the most part not stuck to her face.

Apparently when she was taken to the emergency room the first nurse to attend to her spontaneously vomited, and someone else had to take over. I'm talking so bad that her own mother couldn't look at her. For a very long time.

Anyway, there were months of reconstructive surgery and she was stuck in hospital wearing a mask to keep her face on at the same age in my life when I couldn't go to a party because I thought the boys might laugh at my golden moustache.

Now she has a lovely face. Symmetrical, with nice high cheek bones. There were even some teeth to re-install, but you cannot tell. I would never ever have known this was a young woman whose face had been smooshed, spliced and re-jigged.

I think I'm never going to complain about my face again.

It's not really real; it's a test.

2010-04-02T00:36:00.002+01:00

Apologies to anyone Catholic in advance. As you may have noticed I've been following the old Catholic Priest Hush 'em up and move 'em on scandal. I would like to point out that I am fully aware that child abusers come in all shapes and sizes (and as we're increasingly recognising, all permutations of gender). There have been child abusing Rabbis, Vicars, Imams, Gurus and the like. And this is because serial child abusers are motivated to get into positions of authority in the community, with unsupervised access to children.

That said, the brazen narcissism of the Pope and all his ilk who construed the crimes of the church and the reactions of the horrified populace as a divine 'test' for the church need a hefty divine slap round the chops.

'Tests' in life do happen. They happen at the point at which we perceive the events in our life to be a test. Find a fiver on the floor? It's only a test at the point at which you think it might be. Cheerios or Pop Tarts? Veal or beef?

Omniscient Gods do not test. They do not need to test. They do not need to check what colour underwear you are wearing to know, because they are God. They do not need to ask whether you'd mind murdering your child in their name.

So is God a glorified empiricist? Ah, you might say. There are no limits to God's knowledge - the tests are for our own development. But the idea that God does experimenting on humans not for his/her own sake but to put them through funny trials of which he/she already knows the outcome in order prove their worthiness makes God seem at best petty, and at worst a bit of a sadist.

A good friend of mine once told me about a coke head girl she knew whom we shall refer to as 'Carmen'. Carmen had recently found God at a well-connected dinner party and had switched from buckets of ego-boosting cocaine as her drug of choice to being one of God's special chosen special important people. Of an old friend's unplanned pregnancy, Carmen remarked how irresponsible her friend had been - for this friend had no money, whereas Carmen had lots. 'With this girl getting pregnant, I think God may be testing me...' spake Carmen. Out loud.

And if it seems horrible to imagine God sending an actual baby to an un-wed mother to test the faith of some girl she happened to go to school with, consider the implications of a God who sends Billy the altar boy off to his shameful doom (times several thousand) just so that later on the press and the community can be upset and the Vatican can find it difficult.

If Jesus does plan on coming back, I hope he does it soon so I can see him wipe the floor with these muppets.

Schmelancholy

2010-03-28T21:44:00.002+01:00

I can put all the stuff in my head into words. I just can't make the words not sound like they're out of Dawson's Creek.

'Life blah blah blah crossroads blah blah blah identity blah blah blah know what I want now blah blah endings beginnings blah blah."

Words words words. But it all looks the same. All from a person nearer to middle age than their teens.