Real-life chicklit
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Well, it's 4am and I have a horrible case of insomnia brought on by a massive coughing fit (having recovered from last week's flu almost entirely, I am now suffering from the combined effects of severe hayfever and a cold that I caught watching Orbital in the rain wearing a damp coat, see below) that woke me up so thoroughly that I am now looking at the first fingers of dawn wiggling their way through the leaves on the tree outside my window. I haven't had insomnia for a while although I used to suffer quite badly in my wild youth, so I thought I might as well fill the time with a post-Glastonbury blog.
We arose quite hideously early on Thursday morning but it was worth it as we managed to get the last good camping spot in the Green Fields. Then the boyf went to sleep while Bessie and I mooched around the shops and I bought a fabulous prom dress and hat from a dress-up stall. Then, when lots of people went to watch the footie, we thought we'd venture into the bit of the festival that we don't normally go to - near the main stage - and see what it was like, and it was remarkably dull and very much like Camden Market. The boyf, meanwhile, got hammered on pear cider.
Friday dawned sunny and psychedelic, and I spent most of it up at the stone circle with Phoebe, Supermum and Spiderboy. There was an astounding amount of laughing gas going around but we chickened out of trying it even though Supermum said she'd had it when she was in labour and it was good. We must be getting old. Anyway I can report that poi has become totally last year; the latest hippy time-wasting craze is the surprisingly appropriately named Sockball, which is twirling a pair of long socks with tennis balls in the end. It's amazing the stunts people were pulling off with them.
The boyf, meanwhile, got hammered on pear cider.
I spent most of Saturday in my warm dry bed avoiding the rain (the only bad thing about taking an inflatable mattress and a cosy duvet to a festival is that sometimes it's just too tempting to stay in your tent). In the evening, though, I ventured out and actually saw some bands, which is unusual for me at festivals. Joss Stone, whom I didn't mean to see but got stuck with, was pants; Jamie "Radio 2" Cullum, whom I also didn't mean to see, was surprisingly fun - Chipmunk and I kept trying to stop dancing and sit down but found that we couldn't, so clearly we are getting old.
I can't remember whether it was this night or Friday night that I saw Goldfrapp, but they were OK, although a bit too urban for a gig in a field, I thought. But Saturday was definitely Basement Jaxx night, and they were great as per usual, although it's a shame they don't have the Brazilian dancers any more. The lights were brilliant obviously.
And guess what the boyf was doing while all this was on? Well, I eventually met up with him in the casino (having donned my party frock and hat especially) and he was quite drunk on pear cider and once again incapable of having a conversation. So I amused myself by losing a tenner on the roulette wheel (I love to gamble, but I prefer Blackjack to roulette which I find has too great a difference between the short odds and the long odds; you either play it boringly safe or are pretty much guaranteed to lose all the time).
Then I had to hold up the boyf to stop him slipping over in the mud and hurting himself (on the one occasion when I let go and trusted him to stay upright, he promptly pitched headfirst into a patch of nettles, and I can't say I was as sympathetic as I might have been, seeing as I was by now very sober indeed) until we met up with the others and watched the sun come up while drinking the best brandy hot chocolate in the world ever.
Following a brief snooze on Sunday morning I was woken up by the boyf who was feeling violently ill. I wonder why? So I spent most of the day nursing him but eventually tucked him up in his tent while I went on a much-deserved razz.
I decided to reach a state in which the boyf would be forced to take care of me for once, rather than the other way round (revenge partying, if you will - well, he did go to sleep on Sunday morning without doing the tent up properly, which is why my coat got damp on the inside, which is why I caught a cold) we began with James Brown on the Pyramid stage. We had a funky good time, obviously, and I got to use the she-pee, which did work, but was very tricky to use while wearing a long coat, ballgown, waterproof trousers and wellies. In a pair of fly-front trousers with no pants underneath, it could be fairly straightforward, but who wants to go commando at a grubby festival? Ick.
After James Brown, things get a bit hazy. I know we spent quite a long time in the Glade, and we saw Eat Static and Tristan who were fantastic as always, although I spent much of the time looking at leaves. Then 'twas a mass exodus over to the Other Stage to see Orbital's final gig. It was the best gig I've ever been to and I cried (well, they are/were my favourite contemporary band and I was in a rather emotional state). After that, there was nothing left but to go "ooh" and "aah" at the closing fireworks (at least I could still stand up by this point, not like last year when my back was aching so badly I practically had to be stretchered to my tent) and so to bed.
So to sum up, I saw lots of great bands, hardly saw the boyf and spent lots of time at the stone circle, which is something I didn't do enough of last year, and I can't wait for the Glade festival next month. Woo hoo!
Right. Time to go back to bed. It looks like being another rainy day.
Monday, June 21, 2004
I'm on holiday and I've got flu. I hate that. Why can't I be ill on work time? So I have been in bed all day trying to get better in time for Wednesday. Bless my lovely boyfriend, he came home from work early and bought me loads of lovely ice cream, and a DVD of Lord of the Rings, and Beechams and Echinacea and magazines and stuff, so I feel very loved and looked after even if I also feel thick-headed and achey.
The forecast for Glastonbury is getting better and better, although the boyf is convinced it's going to shit it down 1997-style but I don't think it will be a mud bath. Lord Benthal says the thing about 1997 was that it had rained and rained and rained for weeks beforehand, which is true, and also let's not forget that there were a lot more people churning up the ground in the 90s; hopefully one of the many benefits of the superfence will be that less people on site means less feet turning the ground into a swamp.
Anyway, everyone was full of doom and gloom about the weather beforehand last year, and we all nearly died of sunstroke, so I remain optimistic.
As I said, I'm poorly, I only popped on to do a quick You Still Would: today's Older God is Bruce Willis, as mentioned by Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters in Q magazine this month. Jake said Bruce is "still a hottie" and by golly, he's not lying.
Friday, June 18, 2004
Dashing around today getting birhtday stuff for Bessie, but just thought I'd drop in for a quick Older God: it's Jeremy Irons, as requested by Hypatia. I totally still would, although I was a bit put off by that Cronenberg film where he played those really creepy gynaecologist twins.
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
As a PS to the Older Goddesses series, check out this extensive study of celebrities not ageing gracefully (the homepage is quite dull but the series of links down the right hand side is fascinating).
I don't agree, though, that Christina Aguilera has had a boob job. Her tits look quite natural to me because they are so low slung - I think she has just grown up and grown the corresponding boobs - or possibly gone on the Pill. If they are fake, I hope she got a refund.
Also I don't think Catherine Zeta Jones has had much, if any, work done - she does look different in these before and after shots, but to me it just looks like the difference in someone who's lost weight on their face and obviously she lost long ago all the weight she put on to play the "voluptuous" daughter in the Darlings Buds of May.
I too have recently lost weight (yay!! 19 pounds and still falling... I'll be under 11 stone before you know it) and people keep saying they notice it on my face so I'll give CZJ the benefit of the doubt. Anyway I think she is very beautiful and has the kind of face that will age very well, so I hope she stays away from more than the odd eye tuck.
Courtney Love though - oh dear. I really like old Courtters generally as regular readers will know, but she has had some ill-advised collagen and boob implants. She used to be so pretty.
As for Leslie Ash - everyone reckons she's had collagen lip implants, but maybe it's just coz all the men in her life seem to smack her about so much that she's got a constantly bruised mouth?
Yay! I am Woodstock!
You are Woodstock!
Which Peanuts character are you? This personality quiz thing is getting out of hand, but still I find it entertaining.
Please. Everyone. Help me get this highly irritating woman off our TV screens by calling 09011 214411. Try doing it from work and then your employer has to pay the 25p call charge - it took my company four years to get round to blocking the peak-rate number.
I've just been trying to find a picture of Robert Plant to put as the background on my computer (I currently have the poster for the movie Troy but I'm getting bored of it). And what with 1968-72-era Robert Plant being pretty much my idea of God Made Man, off I trekked to Google images to find one. I ended up being unable to choose between this and this ...they're both a bit small but... humuna humuna!!
While looking, though, I obviously had to wade through an awful lot of pictures from later in his career and it made me realise that it's time to leave behind the Older Goddesses and move onto a feature that Sundried has been requesting for ages.
It's called You Still Would, and I'd like to kick off with the king of I SO Still Woulds, the one and only Sting. Coz, you know, you still TOTALLY would, wouldn't you? And I hear Trudi lets him, too, what with them being into all that Tantric doo-dah. I once spoke to her on the phone and I should have asked her then, but you know, these things never come into your mind at the right time, do they.
Anyhoo, suggestions gratefully received.
Robert Plant, however, I would not. I would have done in the later 1970s although he was getting a bit up himself by then and often a little chubby round the tum (although I appreciate that this was in the days before a man had to have a six pack to be considered sexy) and in the 80s, mainly because he was Robert Plant, not because he was attractive any more, but now he's just an ageing hippy who looks like he's done a lot of yoga and therefore thinks he's a god of sex.
Jimmy Page, ditto. Actually, although he does play guitar like an angel, I wouldn't even have shagged him in the early days coz he was always a bit funny looking with hair like a bog brush - and all that black magic shit gives me the willies even though I know it's bollocks, and according to the fabulous Pamela Des Barres he was into some heavy S&M shit. Now, though, he's just one of those creepy fat middle-aged blokes with jowls who always look like they've got podgy sweaty hands (although being a guitarist, he's more likely to have calloused hands than over-soft pink ones, but he just looks like he would). Also, he's got appalling taste in clothes.
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Uh-oh. The forecast for Glastonbury isn't looking so good now. Although "the southwest will probably cling on to the best of the sunshine" apparently, so that could be OK.
Still, they make it all up anyway I reckon, even their website admits that no one can really predict the weather more than a few days ahead.
At least the sun's going to shine on Saturday for Tone and Bird's wedding.
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
You're a Spirograph!! You're pretty tripped out,
even though you've been known to be a bit
boring at times. You manage to serve your
purpose in life while expending hardly any
effort (and are probably stoned to the gills
all the while).
What 1980s childhood toy are you?
I'm so excited about being Spirograph as I absolutely loved mine when I as a kid and spent hours making abstract thingummy-jigs with it (never quite understood why anyone would use it to make pictures of bunnies and things like on the packet). Have now resolved to dig out my old kit next time I'm at my dad's house.
Dad's always complaining that there is some stuff of mine still in his house even though I moved out 12 years ago. He's talking about two boxes of books and a CD rack that are in the loft. Oddly, though, he doesn't seem to have a problem with there being an entire cupboard full of 70s and 80s kids toys in his living room. Hmmmn.
If I find out he's the reigning Mastermind champion (the game where you put pegs in holes, not the TV quiz), I shall know why.
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Hooray for Boots which I discovered this morning is now selling packs of 10 sannies for 26p. Good news for the ladies. They're the old-fashioned brick-of-cotton-wool type but you know, it's a start.
I generally wear washable ones at home (yes, i too thought it would be all yucky before I tried them, but it's really not) and organic unbleached ones for work (because however much I might be At One With My Womanly Cycle in my own home and laundry cycle, I can't bring myself to be carrying blood-stained rags around in my handbag all day. I also draw the line at this thing). But today I dashed into Boots on the way to work and got some Bodyform and blimey, the design of the things! People sometimes talk about the toothbrush as an example of how space-age design now affects the most everyday of items, but they obviously haven't seen what's been going on with STs.
There's dry-weave covers, super-absorbent cores (probably with that horrible gel in that they put in nappies, the stuff that takes 900 years to decompose), wings, flexiform this, ultra-thin that, go-faster stripes, spoilers... the Bodyform ones that I bought have this bizarre swallow-tail design at the back and I can't for the life of me work out what that's about. Anyway, they're still a lot less pleasant to wear than a nice fluffy piece of freshly boil-washed cotton.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Friday, June 04, 2004
"The End" by Blur is on the radio. I remember it being a lot better; when the album came out I was either a student or just finishing school, and I listened to it incessantly, particularly this song, which I thought very moving. Still, I was stoned most of the time. Now it just seems like slight, self-indulgent dross and Damon Albarn's "lor luvvaduck" singing really grates - and what's that French stuff going on in the background? Yikes.
I was never on enough drugs to think Elastica were any good, though.
Oh, thank God - it's changed to "Been Caught Stealing" by Jane's Addiction. What a glorious relief. Ah, that takes me back to Reading 1994 ... I'm not sure why, as I don't think Jane's Addiction played at Reading 1994, but you know, I'm just going to go with it.
It's weekend o'clock, so why not celebrate with this wicked hamster game?
I'm still angry about that woman wittering on about Bridget Jones. "navigated the perilous terrain of the modern woman's pysche with sassy aplomb"??!!!??!! A) Any first-year Women's Studies student will tell you that generalisations like "the modern woman's psyche" went out of fashion round about 1954 and I find it deeply annoying that she insinuates that all "modern women", (by which she must, I suppose, mean women living in the developed world, as even she can't possibly be suggesting that my life experience is the same as a woman living in, say, east Timor) have the same "psyche", by which I guess she means life experience and world view, which is also complete rubbish as I wouldn't say Lady Benthal's was the same as Bessie's, even though they are the same age and live in the same culture. Argh! Look, I'm so ticked off I'm writing in really long sentences. But at least I'm not using sexist words like "sassy".
B) I can't stress this enough:
You. Can't. Put. An. Objective. Value. Like. "Good". Or. "Bad". On. Art.
I hate it when people say "restror" in a cod French accent when they mean "restaurant" which as we all know is really pronounced "resstront".
But I like it when people say "St Pancreas" instead of "St Pancras". Don't know why, I just do.
Thursday, June 03, 2004
""Many of these [chick-lit] titles really are trash: trash that imitates other, better books that could have ushered in a new wave of smart, postfeminist writing, and trash that threatens to flood the market in women's reading," writes Anna Weinberg in recently defunct Book magazine. Weinberg, who contends that early chick lit, like Bridget Jones's Diary, "navigated the perilous terrain of the modern woman's psyche with sassy aplomb," is not fond of the lesser books that chick lit's popularity has bred. More significantly, she worries that anything "written by, read by, and marketed to young women" will be dismissed as mere chick lit. "
No prizes for guessing why Book magazine is "recently defunct" then, eh. That Anna Weinberg sounds like a super-fun dinner guest. If only those silly girls on the Tube could be persuaded to read "other, better books" of "smart, post-feminist writing" because God knows, after a hard day at work there's nothing like losing yourself in a few hundred pages of Julia Kristeva.
Jeez. If people want to read crap, let them. Why the hell not? All these people who reckon that Real Literature is getting buried under mass-market tripe these days are ignoring the fact that there has always been shite published, it's just that none of it has lasted. And in the same way that kids in school today read Charlotte Bronte and not the penny thrillers or whatever equivalent mass-market fiction was around at the time, girls in future will probably read Bridget Jones rather than Lisa Jewell - and meanwhile, outside school, they will entertain themselves with whatever the equivalent of Lisa Jewell's work is at the time.
People still frequently stereotype intelligent feminist women as sour-faced kill-joys. I wish less of us would act that way and then maybe we'd really have some postfeminism in the sense of "feminism" being finally unecessary.
"You are professor Fizzwhizz, who is extremely clever" - hmmmn, maybe those Christians are onto something after all. This lot certainly seem to be uncannily astute judges of personality.
Cherry-flavour fags? Nnnnnnnyyyyyyyeeeeeeeuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrhurhurhurhurhurk!
The most worrying thing is that aparently, "some of these flavours are already used in cigarettes". No wonder they taste so different to real tobacco. But who the hell smokes fags these days anyway (apart from the dogs in the testing labs)? I mean, everyone I know is on the rollies - even, in some particularly perverted cases, the herbal stuff that smells like bad fish - and if anyone turns up with a pack of real ciggies, suddenly they're everyone's best mate. Not least because they clearly must be made of money, what with the price of the things these days.
I wish they wouldn't put pictures next to stories about the dangers of smoking, though, coz it just makes me really want a tab. When me, Sundried, Taxloss and Hyp watched Ghostbusters the other month, we were astounded by all the smoking in the film, which of course you never see anyone but the real bad guys or Fallen Women doing nowadays. It's a good thing they stopped showing it though, coz we all came out gasping for a fag, even Sundried who doesn't smoke.
Mmmmmnnnnn..... lovely fags.
Tasty vegetarian nosh of the day: Cauldron Foods' golden marinated tofu pieces. They're pretty hard to find in the supermarket, as for some reason Tesco seems to assume that what vegetarians really want to eat is tastless white jelly tofu, rather than yummy savoury stuff, but they're worth the effort. I could eat about six packs at one go. No, seven. Really.
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
It may be a shitty, foggy day today in London today but the outlook for Glasters is warm and sunny, according to the BBC anyway. Check it out: "Monday 14 June to 27 June 2004 - With high pressure still close by, it will be a largely fine end to the month. There may be rather more cloud flirting with the northwest but most places should remain predominantly dry. The southern half of the UK is likely to cling on to the best of the warm sunshine."
Bring!
It!
On!
Apparently women still earn up to 30% less than men. Well, a jolly good thing too, because of course there is one week every month when we just can't function properly, although as a lady I can't say any more about it, so it's only fair that we should only get paid for three weeks out of four. Besides, think of all the time we spend gossiping and doing our hair in the toilets!
Actually, I think we should pay companies to let us come and sit in their offices and use up their electricity bills drying our nail polish under the hand-dryers in the loos.
Me, I'm going to ask the boyf tonight if he minds me being a lady of leisure - I think it's only fair that, as the lowest-earning member of the family, he should be the breadwinner while I stay at home with curlers in so I can look gorgeous when he gets home. If he fancied knocking me up so I had something to occupy myself with, that'd be nice too, but generally I see my role as whore in the bedroom, cook in the kitchen, nagging bitch in the lounge.
Obviously, I'd have a few ladies over for coffee mornings and the like, but most of the time I'd swan around in a floral house-jacket washing Qaaludes down with gin, only after 11am though, of course.
I finally got round to opening my postal ballot form this morning - it did come a few days ago but I haven't got round to it yet. Anyway I was surprised and not a little concerned to find that the days of the secret ballot appear to be over: the papers are numbered with a code that corresponds to the one on the ID verification form (a witness has to sign a thing saying that they know the person whose ballot paper is numbered 006887 or whatever.
I'm going to vote Ken for mayor (although I am bit ticked off with him for re-joining the Labour party, I thought he was much better as an independent)and Greens for everything else, and I don't care who knows it, but if I wanted to exercise my democratic right to vote for the BNP, the Communist Party or one of the other more controversial options, I might be rather concerned about the possibility of people involved in the count being able to find out my name and address and the name and address of my witness.
When we used to go to polling stations, they used to tick your name off on the electoral register so you didn't vote twice but as far as I'm aware there was no way of connecting that to the bit of paper where you marked your X.
Also, I can't believe the faff with this postal voting stuff. "Put your voting slips in envelope B with the witness slip in envelope A in the envelope addressed to whoever..." Pretty tough if English isn't your first language, or if you are a bit old and easily confused.
