...and oh my, what a book. Finished Dan Brown's latest? Desperate for something of similar calibre? Then you're going to LOVE The Mistress by Martine McCutcheon, aka Tiffany out of EastEnders, who seems to have foolishly forgotten to employ a ghost-writer for her debut novel. Her website describes it as "warm, sexy and heart-wrenchingly moving" although "tepid, predictable and ball-achingly dreadful" might be better, going by the first chapter at least. You can read the opening here but here are some of the best bits should you not wish to taint your brain with it:
He was a sweet, cheeky chappie in his thirties with cute dimples – a typical black-cab driver
‘Happy birthday, dharrling,’ purred her Russian friend Assia. ‘The fur jacket and dress are both divine.’
... with a misty air of spirituality she looked Mandy straight in the face and whispered loudly, ‘This is a rose quartz. I got it from the tree festival. It will bring you love.’
His eyes were beautiful, and despite being tired they sizzled, full of knowledge, some sadness but most of all, kindness.
and my favourite:
If you went for it, truly went for it, you could get the life you wanted here, and that was Mandy’s aim – to have it all. And why not? She’d read a greeting on a card once in Paperchase on the King’s Road that had truly stuck with her:
Reach for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.
It's like she's torn up her Marian Keyes, Sophie Kinsella and Louise Fielding novels, covered herself in glue, rolled around on the floor and handed in whatever stuck to her publishers.
Dear internet,
My weekend was so action-packed (note: this may not conform to other people’s definitions of the term) that I’m going to tell you all about it.
On Friday night, my volunteering shift was interrupted by a bumblebee as a big as a mouse. Honestly. Massive. I had to send three men out to deal with it – who reported back that it was actually the size of a poussin – and then it kept coming back in. Maybe it just wanted to talk. It was eventually banished with a flapping copy of Grazia.
Saturday night saw me sitting in the dark in a scout hut, clutching a plastic cup of wine, waiting to shout “SURPRISE!” at one of Jef’s friends who had been thrown a surprise birthday party. He didn’t cry/faint/fall over/run away/wet himself when the lights were turned on and all his family and friends were revealed, crouched under a peeling ‘Jesus Loves You’ poster. I would probably have done all five, and been sent home in disgrace.
The DJs looked like they were straight out of Phoenix Nights, talked all over the records, and over ENUNciated EVerything in exciting DYNAMIC voices, i.e. they were amazing. They took requests but had a “no Fleet Foxes” rule. They foolishly played a ska-punk version of Take On Me instead of the superior A-ha original, and I raged about not being able to do my special Take On Me dance. It involves whirling arms and no shame. Talking of dancing, I’ve noticed recently that most women have a sedate way of dancing, which involves polite sidesteps, swaying hips and shoulder rolling. I have perfected a dancing style that is probably best described with the euphemism “enthusiastic”. I am messy and awkward and not terribly aware of the shapes I am making. I dance for myself and not for the crowd. It is not pretty. This is possibly why I’ve had more teeth removed than I’ve had boyfriends.
Towards the end of the night, Jef decided that he wants to throw a Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men party for his 30th. He will be Danny Dyer, and the guests will be required to dress as dangerous men, who will duke it out over the course of the evening to determine once and for all who is the deadliest. I predict a Hitler vs. Harold Shipman final.
Fast-forward to Sunday: last night I was woken several times by Jef’s housemate slamming doors and stomping around. I’d usually have been propelled out of the bedroom by the force of my own rage, but Jef’s housemate is going to war today, to Afghanistan, and I thought that if you’re going to cut a man some slack, it’s surely on the eve of his enlisting. So I lay there and fumed and tried not to think dark thoughts like “fuck off and die” because maybe he will.
I’ll leave you on that note. I hope you all had super-fantastical weekends.
As a relative novice to karaoke (although I might have been three times in the last two weeks), I have noticed there are several rules that, if followed, can only enhance your enjoyment. Here they are, for your future singing pleasure:
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Drinking vodka from a hip flask in the street before your performance can only help matters. As I noted at the time, perhaps if my mum and dad had been a bit more laissez-faire in their parenting, I would have got all that out of my system when I was 15.
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Find a signature tune. You may wish to rethink it if, say, you have chosen Ignition by R Kelly and realise you don’t know most of the tune. Or if “your song” is a mood-killer like Where The Wild Roses Grow. You are mistaken in thinking nothing says “party!” like a duet where Nick Cave murders Kylie Minogue.
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The gap between saying “oh no, I can’t possibly do this” and launching into “Heathcliff, it’s meeee, it’s Catheee, I’ve come ho-o-oooome” decreases in direct proportion to the number of cocktails imbibed.
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Interpretive dance will always improve a song. Especially if that song is Like A Prayer and you are posing as the black Jesus, helpfully yelping “I’m the black Jesus! Look! Look at me!”
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Are there people in your group who can carry a tune? Instruct them that this simply isn’t on and that it’s rubbish singing or nothing. If they persist on acting like they want to get through to boot camp, simply turn their microphone down and sing over them.
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Don’t bother pausing the song when the drinks lady comes in with your order. She’s been giggling outside the door for the last two minutes, listening to you caterwauling through Islands In The Stream. She’s probably surreptitiously uploaded it to YouTube already, in the Comedy category, tagged with “MEGALOLZ!!!”
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Are you part of an all female group? Then you will end with I Will Survive. Don’t fight it.
1) I booked two karaoke evenings today. TWO. A karaoke bar in town offers free singing fun to charity workers on Monday nights. Finally, my job is good for something. On my first outing, a mere week ago, I discovered how hard it was to relinquish the microphone once it was in my grasp. I sang everything. "Highlights" included Boom! Shake The Room (complete with actions), Ask Me by The Smiths, and Ignition by R. Kelly. The latter is now my signature song. My version was pretty special, and will be even better next week now I know how the tune goes.
2) I made this for Jef at the weekend:
I posted it on Twitter saying it was inspired by Josie Long, who is a wonderful comedian who recently appeared in a home-made KURT VONNEGUT t-shirt. And she replied to me! She liked it! She retweeted my photo! Twitter has levelled the playing field between us and our heroes. If you don't know Josie Long, you should check her out. Her last tour was called Trying Is Good, which might be my life motto: just have a lovely go at things, and if you make a mess, at least it's your mess. There is a beautiful charm in the amateurish (see above).
3) Don't Tell The Bride is back on BBC3 tonight. I have a terrible
weakness for dreadful BBC3 shows, and don't even know what button to
press for BBC4. My tear-stained 19-year-old self is shaking her head at
me and ostentatiously reading The Bell Jar.
Do you all watch Come Dine With Me? Are you familiar with how awesome it is? It is quite probably the best thing on telly. An overview, for those of you foolish enough to have missed it: four strangers take it in turns to host a dinner party for each other. Each night, the three guests mark their host out of ten. The winner at the end of the week get £1000.
I think I may have directly quoted the wonderfully sarcastic voiceover man Dave Lamb verbatim there, thus proving my love. Some people can quote the Star Wars opening crawl; my heart lies with a simpler, more low-budget and parochial pleasure. There is nothing more comforting on a lazy Sunday afternoon than watching hours of CDWM on More4, shouting at the more outlandish guests (such as Dawn, who cried and fell asleep and left the guests to make their own dinner) and recompiling my list of top contestants (new entry: Margaret, the royalist who made castles out of bread).
Such is our commitment to the show that badmissk, Jef and I are going to recreate it in one another’s homes over the coming weeks. We’ll take it in turns to prepare three courses while the others poke around our homes, judging our furniture and rifling through our drawers, before making catty remarks and marking us. Kate has hinted that the Liberace cook book may be brought into play; specifically, the meat bouquet. The stakes are high.
While we don’t kick off for a few weeks yet, I will be testing the waters on Saturday by making this for Jef and Kate. I look forward to them rummaging through my glitter collection while I’m frantically chopping onions, and making disparaging remarks about the garden. We’ll miss the witty voiceover but I might ask my housemate to rig up some microphones so her disembodied voice can shout at me while I’m in the kitchen.
Let the cooking commence…
Good morning internet kittens,
There's been such an outburst of good news lately that I thought it merited a blog party. It might be drab and miserable outside, there might be no milk in the kitchen, we might have forgotten what the sun looks like: but my god, we have things to celebrate:
- Minks passed her first year and is officially clever and brilliant.
- Moobs is approved to adopt. Hurrah!
- NewMalden has been married for one month and three days. Woo hoo!
- Jef and I found a flat - a wonky-shaped, low-ceiling flat in a house that feels like a haunted hotel. It had me from its spooky reception area with stained glass windows and multiple staircases.
Congratulations on being awesome, everyone. I've got vanilla vodka and mini pretzels (i.e. my diet for two weeks in America) that you're all welcome to. Any more good news - no matter how small - then leave a comment so you can be included in the celebrations. Let the drinking commence; it's 5 o'clock in Hong Kong after all, so that makes it acceptable to start on your beverage of choice right about.....now.
This news story, Death of the people's fish, reminded me that our fish - Mr Fish - died last week after a lengthy battle against boredom. He was eight, which is frankly ludicrous - aren't fish meant to die within a matter of months? - and I suspect that my housemate's ex-girlfriend may have quietly replaced Fish 1.0 with Fish 2.0 and possibly even 3.0. Still, this would have made the incumbent Mr Fish at least three years old, which is as long as I've been indifferently living alongside him. Some ways you may like to remember Mr Fish today: - accidentally not having any food for two weeks; not even appearing to notice this - not having a name for over half your life; receiving one that refers merely to your title and genus - wishing you lived further from the washing machine so your living space wasn't regularly shaken - occasionally living in a margarine tub while your home is being cleaned - lolling around on your back, being threatened with being flushed, making a miraculous recovery. Mr Fish's place in the kitchen has now been replaced with a toaster, which I have named Mr Toaster in his memory. WE WILL NOT FORGET.
What's one thing a houseguest should always do?
Leave. And leave before I’ve had to do any or all of the following:
Comment on how I must get ready for work tomorrow.
Stand up, stretch and say “well, it’s been lovely to see you. Do you want some cake to take home?”
Turn the tv or stereo off.
Thrust cake into your welcome-outstaying hands.
Text my housemate, asking her to go to bed and loudly shout “good night!”
Stop speaking to you. Just flat-out ignore anything you say, save for non-committal grunts with an undertone of “LEAVE. NOW.”
Turn all the lights off, sit there in the dark, in the now-silent room with an atmosphere so heavy the downstairs neighbour is probably about to complain that it is sinking through his ceiling and threatening to drown him in a sea of passive-aggression.
Aaaaand that’s why I only meet certain friends in public places.
As we leave the airport, the lights we saw from the plane loom before us and I see how terrifyingly synthetic and bright and overwhelming it is. Giant billboards give us a number to call to have a girl sent to our room in twenty minutes or less. It is 102C - at 10 o'clock at night. Donny and Marie Osmond are performing nightly at our hotel. There is only one way to combat this unreal city: more glitter. We trowel it on and venture out to play virtual poker. I manage to end the night 25 cents up, while Kate is a whole $5 down.
The next day, we get the monorail which connects all the casinos on the Strip and travel up and down, having breakfast in "Paris" and lunch in "New York". There are lots of inverted commas in Las Vegas, because nothing is real. We discover our favourite slot machine: THE EGYPTAGON:
Before all that, however, the dozen or so Brits who'd made the trip over found time for Biblical mini golf. I doubt there have ever been so many English accents or non-believers on the course before. Note the terrifying bondage doll at Hole 18, Love In Any Language:
I also discovered just how impossible it is to navigate small towns in America without a car. From our hotel, Kate and I could see a Waffle House and decided to go to avoid another hotel room breakfast of mini-pretzels and coffee with non-dairy creamer. It was only a short distance over the road so it looked like an easy five minute stroll. However, we had forgotten that America isn't built for pedestrians and so hadn't bothered to put anything as useful as a crossing and/or pavements in place. After half an hour of tottering across car-parks and hurling ourselves down grass verges, we were seriously considering asking a stranger for a lift because there was literally no way to get to it. Instead we went to Starbucks where the delightful staff, on learning we were English, asked if we knew Pete? Pete from Liverpool? No?
So, the wedding itself on 4 July, which was even more awesome than I had imagined. It was outdoors and it rained but that didn't matter; it just meant the British contingent was highly visible:
We are always ready for rain.
The ceremony itself was beautiful - highlights included a harpist playing Belle and Sebastian, the line "above all, be excellent to one another", and the bride's sister's cat wandering around the couple as they took their vows, prompting the flowergirl to loudly ask if the cat was married now.
After that, the Americans sensibly went into the house while the Brits stoically sheltered under trees while Southern ladies offered us meat and cake and called us honey. I don't know who they were, or where they came from, but they were constantly on hand with second and third helpings. I love them.
Following a barbecue, a kickabout in the drizzle, the flowergirl asking if I'd take her bear-hunting, sparklers, Morgan's brother-in-law shooting a gun in the air, and hanging out with fantastic Americans, we had an indie disco. It was essentially London Loves relocated beside a pool in Kentucky, thus symbolising the union of England and America. It was wonderfully surreal, especially standing in a circle bellowing Don't Look Back In Anger at each other. By a pool. We told American boys that this is traditional at English weddings, as is getting drunk and starting a fight. They ignored us and jumped in the pool instead.
After that we went to a sketchy hotel for an after-party where I drank flavoured vodka and wandered barefoot down the street in search of Coke and talked to Americans about living on the other side of the Atlantic. Yes, socialised healthcare is brilliant, gay people can get married, we have Jewish people here and Wales isn't a mythical country. Move to England, y'all.
And that's all, apart from a big thank you to Morgan's friends who were unspeakably generous with their time, cars and vodka. Kate and I had resigned ourselves to staying in the hotel room watching the infomercial channel until we got swept up in a wave of Southern hospitality. So thanks Will, for driving us around and taking me to somewhere that did vegetarian food, and thanks Kurt for letting us touch your face and for being Car Two in our convoy. In return, Kate and I made a list of Relationship Lessons for them which I will reproduce here so that you may all learn something:
