Coasting through life

It’s interesting when you get a glimpse of how other people subconsciously see you. My boss gave me coasters for Christmas: very pretty blue ones, with 50s pin-up girls on them. In the past year or so, I’ve received three sets of coasters. When I told Steve last night that Jean sent me coasters, he got all cross. Turns out he got me some this year, too. I can read many things into this coaster-buying: that I am the kind of person who does not tolerate rings on her 1960s coffee table or kidney-shaped dressing table, that I am a hip, urban, swingin’ chick who drinks a lot and entertains every night. The negative spin on these is that a) I am anal and b) I am a lush.

But who the hell cares, cuz I just got promoted! Aw yeah. A nice pay rise, too, which I will celebrate by taking my boy for baby back ribs and beer, and buying a new pair of shoes. (Probably black cons – it’s not that big a rise.) My friend Jon has a theory about pay rises, which is that it takes exactly two months to adjust your standard of living to your new income before you start to feel poor again. For the first two months you feel like Rockerfeller: there you are in the pub, buying your third round of the night. A glimpse of you through the window of Poste Mistress, paying for a pair of designer shoes you can’t afford and will wear twice. Then your ‘needs’ grow to meet your increased salary, and there’s no way you can survive on the money…

I realised today that I’ve been lying to you all these months. The bit at the top of my blog says that it’s about “diary, books, recipes, crafting on the cheap”. Have I given you any recipes? (One. Back in June or something.) Have I provided a single useful piece of crafting advice? Have I fuck. Thing is, there are plenty of excellent crafting sites, and I could never compete with them for quantity and quality of information. So, like a true defeatist, I am not even going to try.

Winter is really here and my hibernation instincts are kicking in. Feel run-down and coldy and am convinced that the only cure is three days spent in bed reading and watching TV. Tried to do this over the weekend, but kept getting restless and going out. Plus have had hideous nightmares for the past two nights: last night I dreamed that I witnessed a giant lorry mounting the pavement and crashing through the wall of a church, interrupting a christening. The baby being christened was killed: I walked past the church and there was blood on the ground. The night before, I dreamed I was kissing a man I know, and it was really weird because I felt like I was cheating on Steve. Also, to convey that this man had a weird attitude to the ladies, my subconscious showed me a present his mum gave him on his 21st birthday: a beautifully cross-stitched sampler, spelling out “to my eunuch”. Huh?

Also, as if dreaming of babies being murdered were not bad enough, today I am a walking, talking fashion “don’t”. I should have a black bar over my eyes to protect my identity, like the real-life “don’t”s in fashion magazines each month. Wearing purple sort-of fishnet tights, winter coat with summer bag, hat that makes me look dead, and my mum’s 80s boots. I feel like I have taken fashion advice from Steve. (If I have a job interview and am stressing, I’ll ask Steve what I should wear. Invariably the reply I get is along the lines of “Antlers – your good ones – and a sou’wester. Also, galoshes and a thong.”)

What a weekend. I am fast learning that the world of publishing is not a very nice one, and underhand tactics haven’t been put to rest. In the bad old days, it was customary for editors to steal each others’ ideas and pass them off, and short of cursing and plotting revenge, there was nothing that could be done about it. On Friday night I was out drinking with the lovely Mr Saha, he of Finlay fame, when he happened to mention that a web diary we’re both hooked on is to be published as a book. When I heard this, my blood ran cold, as I’d proposed this idea to four editors at my company in January. None of them expressed an interest. Shortly after, one of the editors, head of the media list and 2002 Editor of the Year, left to take up a post with one of our Big Rivals. Now the book is being published by them in the new year. After speaking to several people at work, I’ve pieced together what happened. A woman who works here, who used to work at The Big Rival, remembers the (my?) book being brought up in acquisition meetings. Her friend is editing it, and she believes that the man I showed it to immediately passed it to The Big Rival. I didn’t think there was any legal recourse, but apparently a ‘no competition’ agreement was signed, and has now been broken. So that’s my news. I’m alternating between happy, sad and furious. Happy cos the author of the web diary is a wonderful, hilarious writer who ought to be read, and happy because my idea clearly wasn’t a bad one. Furious at Trevor Dolby (oops. slipped out) for stealing my idea and passing it off as his own. And sad because it would have been my dream book to work on, and I really believed it could be a success.

Ok, other than that, I drank a lot. Friday with the Open Democracy crew, Saturday with my sister and her boyfriend at his 30th birthday, then with Tim and Kyle, who is just ridiculously gorgeous and I don’t even want to be in the same room as her. This was at Mentasm, an irregular club help in someone’s flat in Stoke Newington. Going to Mentasm feels like entering an Austin Powers film, or, I imagine, Andy Warhol’s Factory. The kitchen is a bar (drinks tokens are bought from the coat check girl), the bathrooms are, um, the bathrooms, and the sleeping areas are cordoned off. Just a big, sparsely furnished space, then, with lots of drunk dancing folks. I had a beer, leered at Gruff from the Super Furry Animals (Jodie will be jealous… but he was there with his girlfriend), and laughed at skater boys wetting themselves cos Tony Alva was there… I wouldn’t know him if he bit me: I just saw a guy who looked like Craig Charles, and had an entourage.

Band names and bands they suit

Bolus – crappy heavy metal/rock band like Primus, and all those inexplicably popular bands like Good Charlotte and Blink-182.

Behemoth of Love – sorry kids, this one’s taken. Mine and Therese’s girly rock band, with jingle-jangle sounds and handclaps (like Heavenly meets the Posies). Formed (I think) in a bar one drunken morning, the band hasn’t progressed past naming. The obvious next step is designing T-shirts, bags and badges, and then drawing album covers. What instruments can we play? Don’t be so ridiculous.

Lord Huggington – this would be a faux-pompous Guided by Voices/Buff Medways affair, with all band members wearing red jackets with epaulets and brass buttons. Despite looking faintly silly, they would blow your socks off with the power and skill of their Rock.

Tasty Veil – three Japanese women dressed in very expensive, understated skate labels, singing about chocolate cake and hating their jobs.

Today I am sitting around eating carbohydrates, and that’s about all. Tesco almond fingers (currently buy one get one free!) are bloody delicious, and highly addictive. Plus I woke up at 4am cos Steve has flu and was having an attack of the shivers, so I got him some water and paracetamol and covered him in layers of clothing. Poor lamb.

For some reason the thought of updating my blog this week is like eating liver: I know I should do it, but I just really don’t want to, and keep putting it off. (Ok, not really like eating liver. I don’t put that off, I just don’t ever do it.) Here are some little odds and ends I wrote this week, very outdated, so what.

Last night I put away all my summer clothing and sorted my closet out according to these rules. I tell you, it felt so good.

Wore a beret to work, cos my hair was wet. Think I looked like a Chelsea Pensioner rather than Amelie, though.

He didn’t make us feel like dancing . . .
Steve and I saw Leo Sayer today. He had the trademark halo of curls, but light brown and not black as I remembered. Speaking of hair, today I am sporting a Jesus Christ ’do.

Wow, did you see that? So good I posted it twice... duh.

I’ve eaten at this place twice in the last two days. But it’s so damn good, as cheap as McDonald’s, and a lot nicer. Last night Tim bought me dinner there: we had a salad, two giant plates of pasta and a bottle of highly drinkable house red for £18. As Jodie once said, you can’t beat that with a big stick. Today I had lunch there with Steve, cos he is a sad puppy at the moment, and I wanted to cheer him up. We had pudding, too: how can you turn down the dessert menu when one of the options is called Funky Pie? Steve had the pie, which was, sadly, not as funky as I’d hoped, but tasty nonetheless. And I could sing ‘Funky Town’ while he ate it, too, as if I needed a reason. I had a fudge bombe (stop sniggering at the back!), and it was most fine.

Oh and Steve and I have decided that Mark Ruffalo and Janeane Garofalo have to get it together, just so they can have a baby called Griff Ruffalo Garofalo. Say it five times really fast.

Also, here’s the best thing in the world. Adam Ant has apparently recorded a charity version of Stand and Deliver. All proceeds will go to the Diane Fossey Fund. The song title? Save a Gorilla…

Oh and Steve and I have decided that Mark Ruffalo and Janeane Garofalo have to get it together, just so they can have a baby called Griff Ruffalo Garofalo. Say it five times really fast.

Also, here’s the best thing in the world. Adam Ant has apparently re-recorded a charity version of Stand and Deliver. All proceeds will go to the Diane Fossey Fund. The song title? Save a Gorilla…

Last night Steve and I were forced to shop at the Sainsbury’s of Despair: it's laid out all weird, so you spend 10 minutes looking for the milk, and everyone is wandering about in a similarly aimless, desperate manner, looking like they’re about to cry. It’s the one on Clapham High Street, and I was getting very bad vibes from it. Bought ingredients for fajitas and got the hell out. Made dinner, drank a Miller Lite (the Champagne of Beers! Or is that High Life?), which Steve had brought all the way from Chicago!

Now I am at work eating a crayfish salad (one of the saucy buggers has a bit of crayfish poo on it. I took it off, but what if I missed some? Will I live? Check back tomorrow if you care) from atop a pile of page proofs (I like to live dangerously) and looking at my Hotmail to see if I’ve somehow missed an email from a major publishing house saying ‘Yes, we’d love to employ you.’ Where could it be?

Have also had my hopes dashed (again). Was hoping to win the Green Card Lottery, move to Chicago, and live happily ever after. Steve was gonna hitch a ride on my coat-tails, too, so he’s bummed. We had a whole marriage deal worked out! Damn you, Immigration Services and your unreasonably strict guidelines! See, although UK nationals aren’t eligible for the lottery, if either of your parents were not born in the UK you can apply. As soon as I read this the tape loop of me sucking down beers at Ten Cat, hi-fiveing jazz musicians at Green Mill*, buying coffee and cheap organic ready meals at Trader Joe’s, all accompanied by Therese, started to play. Then when I read it again a few weeks later, it became apparent that what the clause actually says is that if one of your parents were not resident in the UK at the time of your birth, and if the country they resided in was eligible, then you could apply.

Back to the drawing board.


* This has never happened. It just suddenly sounded good to me.

A woman got on my bus this morning, at the Cabinet War Rooms, wanting to go to Trafalgar Square. Now, if you live in London you probably know that this is, literally, two stops, or a five-minute stroll. But she was all agitated and asking the driver “I have a ten pound note which the ticket machine won’t take, and thirty pence, how am I supposed to get to Trafalgar Square?” Um, walk? Using the perfectly serviceable pair of legs God gave you? I sneaked a look at her, to see if maybe she was afflicted with a peg leg or something, but she looked capable of walking as well as anyone. In the end she threw a strop at the driver (who, in a feat of patience and restraint, never stated the obvious and told her that if she got going now she’s see him pulling up at the lights as she got to the National Gallery) and got off the bus.

Seeing as today is turning into a right old bitch-fest for me, other things I am annoyed about include:

Lack of sleep. I got up at 6.30, and I’m really not happy about it.

Flickering light above my desk. Like Chinese Water Torture, but with lights. Sort of.

Too many children! Everywhere! When did half-term start to occur every six weeks?!

The fact that there was a musty smell on the train this morning, and I realised it was me. I was wearing the tweed Pendleton jacket I got in a Chicago thrift store (which, as Steve so kindly pointed out, is “a dead woman’s coat”), and today I found out that when it rains the jacket smells of wet dog and wee. May need to splash out on some dry cleaning.

Now I’m done. And happy belated birthday to Marcus Oakley for last Monday. I think he turned 18 or something, but still doesn’t look old enough to buy a drink.

I do not want to eat my soup with a teaspoon

I am sure there is a diet which centres around the eating of meals using child-sized cutlery and/or dishes, and I think Liz Hurley was banging on about it once (but then I think she did the “eat naked in front of a mirror” diet too, and is therefore a poor judge of healthy eating practices/body image/sanity), but I don’t wish to be on it. The premise is probably that you’ll get so flippin’ bored putting a tiny forkful of food to your mouth that by the time you’ve eaten half your meal you give up the monumental task of finishing it. Anyway, at my office there are no proper soup spoons, so I just polished off a lake of leek & potato with a teaspoon. Didn’t make me eat any slower, though.

Am bored today. It's raining, all the coffee pots in the kitchen are in use so I am drinking yuk Nescafe which always makes my stomach hurt.

Check back in a couple of hours, I'll probably have found some new things to complain about by then.

This jetlag thing is getting ridiculous. Last night I was feeling drowsy at 9pm, so decided to take a couple of Kalms so that I’d fall asleep as soon as I got in bed. But no, the ‘all-natural’ (sadly this usually means ‘utterly useless) sleep aid acted like speed on me, and 12am found me sitting up in bed making long lists of everything I had to do the next day. So I thought, ‘what is the best thing to send a person to sleep?’. That’s right: vodka. Got up, poured myself a couple of fingers, added some undiluted lemon squash (surprisingly tasty: a poor woman’s Lemon Drop), and downed it. Half an hour later I was calling Steve and having a long chat, and then – finally – I fell asleep.

DAMN YOU, RUBBER SOLED SHOES!

Everything I touch is giving me an electric shock. The drawers on the filing cabinet, my computer (!!!), even the foil around my sandwich.

Got back to work yesterday after a two-week absence, to find 250 emails, plus stacks of covers, page proofs and contracts littering my desk in no recognisable order. But why dwell in horrible crap like work, when I could be telling you all about my trip to the Big Windy? First off, we were blessed with the most amazing weather. The leaves were turning, and the colours were beautiful, but it was over 20 degrees every day, so you could wear a T-shirt. Therese’s wedding was lovely (she’d tell you different, tho): she looked beautiful, and the church was an amazing cathedral-like behemoth in Old Town. We stayed in a swanky hotel the night before and in the morning drove to church in a limo with a free, fully stocked bar. Is it sad/worrying that this stands out for me as one of the best parts of the day? After the wedding, more limo action to the reception, which took place at a restaurant called La Luce. The open bar turned some guests into obnoxious, drunken pains-in-the-ass within an hour, but for the most part it was fab. Other highlights of the trip were:

Therese’s hen night, where we took her to a posh South American restaurant, a café which serves only desserts, the Martini Ranch, and finally to Simon’s for pitchers of beer. Despite wearing furry kitten ears and a BRIDE TO BE sash, she didn’t get bought a single drink. Bastards!

Going to Target and finding red patent Isaac Mizrahi pointy flats for $27.

Trip to Bloomington, IN, to see Rachel and Jason. We went hiking in the State Park, ate at great, cheap ethnic restaurants, found the best and cheapest antique store in the state, and listened to R & J’s bird whistling the Muppets theme.

General girl-time with Therese, doing stuff like going for sushi, driving around, thrifting, shopping at Filene’s etc.

I miss it.

It’s my last day at work before I go away for two weeks, but I really don’t feel like doing anything. Want to look on Amazon, search for denim jackets on eBay, go for a walk. Have checked all the new clothes on Bluefly, looked at some hideous prairie-print shirts on Target.com, drunk a giant glass of wine, eaten some noodles, and the only thing that will make me happy now is a long nap.

Weekend was lots of bending down. Went to Wimbledon and packed up more of the house. Over twenty bags full of Polish books were designated for the skip or the Polish Parish hall. Another twenty bags of English books were set aside for some unsuspecting charity shop. On Sunday my sister, her husband and their twin daughters drove over. The girls are the cutest little monkeys alive. They are two this week, and their vocabulary now extends to ‘ello!’ ‘dada!’, ‘mammy’, and ‘fleeuughhghrrrr’, which means flower. Sabby, the more even-tempered and impish of the two, spent a good five minutes trying to tear off Steve’s beard, which she is convinced is false. Well how was she to know? Every man she has any contact with is clean-shaven! She must’ve thought he had a little something on his chin.

I realised a few months ago that I haven’t had a holiday this year, and this could explain my urges to send a global email to my company saying FUCK THE LOT OF YOU, blow a giant raspberry and wave two fingers at the board of directors, and skip out onto St Martin’s Lane with the wind in my hair and a weight off my shoulders. This scenario is becoming a regular fantasy of mine; hopefully this weekend’s trip to Chicago for two whole SF-free weeks will cure me – for a little while, at least.

Things I can’t wait to do when I get to Chicago

Ok, so at first glance none of these beat standing above the clouds in Africa, but for me they’re as good as that…

Pancake breakfast at the Lakefront Diner

Wake up for five mornings in a row without having to rush anywhere

Drink cocktails at Simon’s

Walk to the lake from the Belmont El stop. Past fine vintage clothing shops, a playground, Belmont Harbour and the boats

Record shop (I think that can be a verb) in Wicker Park, then go to Earwax or Aion for tea

See a film at the Music Box

Last night I was supposed to go to Sydenham and check on my big sister’s house, as she’s away for a week. But did I? Did I nuts! Me and Steve got wine and a mushroom garlic pizza, and lay on the couch. Is this a sign that I am getting old? That all I want to do after a long day at the office (sitting on my ass) is go home and sit on my couch? I know that fatigue breeds fatigue and that if you exercise you have more energy, but I just don’t have the energy to start… and thus the circle of sloth is complete.

This morning the alarm went off at the ungodly hours of 6am, cos someone (okay, me) had accidentally set it an hour early. I went back to sleep and dreamed of Gwyneth Paltrow having a psycho killer boyfriend who was trying to kill her. Also dreamed about taking something to be dry cleaned, and getting it back and being convinced they’d just put it in the washing machine on a very hot cycle. Got up, showered, and woke Steve with some fruity cursing. The reason for my potty mouth? My clean underwear for the day ahead were warming on the towel rail (well, who doesn’t like warm knickers?) and dared to slide off, onto the damp and, I admit, none-too-clean floor. Calling them ‘motherfucker’ and telling them in no uncertain terms to ‘stay on the fucking towel rail’ awoke my beloved. Alas, he is used to this sort of thing.

Went to Tim’s house on Sunday night for dinner and talk, and to pick up the painting of Richard Hell that Marcus Oakley did for me, as a wedding present to the fragrant and soon-to-be-wed Therese. It’s not traditional portraiture, let’s say, but that’s what you get when you ask a creative type to stick to a brief. And besides, it’s growing on me.