Me: So what did your mum get for Christmas?
Small child: Perfume
Me: And how about your dad?
Small child: Oh, he got bum cream
Me: ………. bun cream?
Small child: No! Bum cream!
Me: ……….
Small child: He puts it on his bum when he rides his bike so it doesn’t hurt
1. What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?
Lived alone, turned thirty, lost two and a half stone.
2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Well, last year was declared the Year of Decisiveness because I has gotten into a cycle of spending endless, torturous hours debating every decision I ever had to make. It didn’t matter whether it was as small and inconsequential as where to go out for dinner, or as huge as ending relationship. I would mull over all conceivable consequences and then, well, freak the fuck out over not knowing which option was best.
I wasn’t always like that. I used to be a risk taker and get accused of never thinking things through. I’ve made some mistakes along the way which resulted in me swinging to the other extreme. So this year was all about finding the middle ground and trusting myself to make the best decisions I can. It took till about August to get into the swing of things but right now if you were to ask me what I wanted to eat I’d say Chinese. Definitely Chinese. Or Pizza. Or maybe a curry. Fuck it, lets toss a coin. A three sided coin.
I have declared 2010 the Year of Driving. So I’d better start by learning to, er, drive.
Other things I’d like to do:
- Achieve a better work/life balance
- Complete the national SENCO accreditation course
- Get to a healthy BMI
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Amy and Mike gave birth to the beautiful Sophia. Congratulations again.
4. Did anyone close to you die?
Luckily, no
5. What countries did you visit?
I went France in April and The Czech Republic and Hungary in the summer. All thanks to some great friends who arranged for me to be put up so that I could get away, despite being poverty stricken. A thousand thank yous xx
6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
More visits with family and friends who are scattered all around the country.
7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
I can’t even remember my phone number so there is no way I can remember specific dates.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
This question makes me feel like a massive underachiever. Hmmmm. I officially completed my NQT year in January. Survived Jan to Aug and …errrr…. became a brunette. Wow. That is totally shameful.
9. What was your biggest failure?
Ha ha. Do you want to start with the relationship (although technically that ended in 2008) bank account or the being a real grown up and living alone?
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Whilst on holiday in Budapest I was struck down by some horrible bug. Some people have suggested it was swine flu but I’m not sure about that. What I am sure of is that it resulted on me lying face down in a stranger’s hallway, trying to press my eyeballs into a cold marble floor in an effort to soothe the worst headache I have ever had in my life. Not sure I’ll be getting an invite back to Budapest in a hurry. On the plus side I also lost more than half a stone from other side effects.
11. What was the best thing you bought?
A plain ticket to Prague.
12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
I don’t remember his name but that young student who donated his sizable reward for giving evidence in a rape case to the victim.
13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Hmmm. I’ve indulged in some regrettable drunken behaviour. But then that happens every year
14. Where did most of your money go?
For most of the year it went on rent, council tax and bills so that I could live in a damp, mouse infested, noise polluted, one bedroom flat. In fact so much money went on it that at several points I ate nothing but pasta and tinned tomatoes for almost 2 weeks (at least I could pretend I was an 18 year old student again. A student with crow’s feet)
15. What did you get really excited about?
Oh gosh lots of things.
-The two trips I took abroad because travelling is still my absolute favourite thing to do.
-Seeing my nephew grow from baby to a toddler and develop an absolutely corking personality.
-Hearing the gossip as Lauren and Lucy fell in love (with two boys, not each other. Which is shame because now I now I might have to buy two wedding presents)
16. What song will always remind you of 2009?
Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap. It seems to have been EVERYWHERE this year yet, somehow, I still like it
And Death by White Lies. I used to walk home to this and imagine I was in the closing credits of a John Hughes movie because, well, it sounded like something that would be at the end of a John Hughes movie. Then John Hughes died and I was sad. The end.
And this has not been off my iPod for the last few months. Beyoootiful.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
– happier or sadder? way happier
– thinner or fatter? way thinner
– richer or poorer? way richer (well, not richer but definitely financially sorted)
This time last year I was absolutely miserable, living in a flat with a very recent ex and wondering how the hell I was going to afford to move out. Apparently I tried to make myself feel better by eating 2 stones worth of chocolate (it didn’t work). What a difference a year makes.
18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Dancing
19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Worrying. It never solves anything.
20. How did you spend Christmas?
I spent a great week and a half in London with my sister, her husband Lee and my very cute nineteen month old nephew Jed.
21. Did you fall in love in 2009?
No. And that is most definitely a good thing.
22. What was your favorite TV program?
From January to August I didn’t have a TV. I would like to claim that this is because I am all intellectual and high brow and that but really it was really because I couldn’t get reception in my shitty flat.
Since then, in celebration of being able to stare at a magic box with moving people in it, I have watched a lot of crap. There has been nothing that’s made me refuse a night out but have to admit to getting sucked into X-factor again.
23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No. Peace and luuuuuuuuurve to all.
24. What was the best book you read?
The Vagrants by Yiyun Li. Just gorgeously written
25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Danielle Ate the Sandwich. She is a thousand shades of amazing. See! You can download her stuff from itunes.
26. What did you want and get?
To spend some time with Jed.
27. What did you want and not get?
Can’t think of anything. Rich beyond my wildest dreams would have been nice.
28. What was your favorite film of this year?
500 days of Summer. Great dialogue, great soundtrack, truthful, funny and has Joseph Gordon Levitt in it.
29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
Oh dear. I turned 30 in April and have to say I didn’t handle it well. My best friends did an incredible job of making it great. They got me 30 really thoughtful presents and took me to the Body Worlds exhibition. But on the eve of the big day I ungratefully face planted into the sofa, bum in the air, face in cushion and cried (and I NEVER cry in front of people). So instead of going indie dancing in Camden we stayed in and sang Karaoke. Luckily by the next day I had come to my senses and we went out and got drunk on cocktails.
30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Ummmm. Bread.
31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
I have worn a lot more dresses and fewer pairs of jeans. This is less to do with me developing any sense of style and more to do with the fact that as I lost weight my trousers fell down to my ankles. The dresses still fit if I belt them in the right place.
32. What kept you sane?
My iPod
33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Keanu Reeves of course. I am nothing if not loyal. Some would say predictable but I prefer loyal.
34. What political issue stirred you the most?
Probably the criticism of the NHS, drummed up during the debates about American health care reform. I strongly believe that one of the best things about the UK is that everyone can access good quality health care regardless of income.
35. Who did you miss?
My friends and family. Very few of whom live in Hull.
36. Who was the best new person you met?
I’ve been really lucky to work with some fab people this year. Emma and Sue have made this year at work so much fun! Thank you so much.
I’ve also got some new housemates, Ben and Kelly, who I hope to get to know better this year,
37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009.
One that I have learned before but always seem to forget in the middle of a crisis. The bad times don’t last forever, you just need to get your head down and fight your way through them.
38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
There are lots of lyrics that I’ve loved but none I can think of that sum up my whole year. This comes fairly close.
“It’s true I have my regrets, we never danced on rooftops
And I have found some fake words to say when a stranger asks about our death
It won’t be long before I
Forget just what it felt like
To know that I did not know anything”
I’m alive! Barely. I just got back from a holiday in the Czech Republic, which I can tell you much about, and Hungary, which I can’t. This is due to a chicken sandwich eaten on the journey between the two countries. Or it could be because of picking up a bug on a visit to the bathroom on the very same journey. (Eastern European, long-haul train toilets are not well known for their hygeine levels.) Anyway, I spent the Hungary portion of my trip staring at ceilings and the inside of bathrooms.
It is Tuesday night and I have just managed to eat some proper food for the first time since Friday morning – a tomato!! Bless the tomato.
I will write more when I begin to function like a normal human being again.
Lucy in particular won’t like this post because I am going to come down hard on the Hippity Hop. Not all Hippity Hop, just the gangsta rap. Because it is ruining my life.
You want reasons? I’ll give you 10 of them.
1) Sometimes I have to see pictures of Snoop Dogg, which means I have to see Snoop Dogg’s hair.
2) Tim Westwood almost made me lose my suitcase when I was on the way to Paris. This really happened I swear, ask Claire.
3) Nelly lied to me. No Nelly, it is not Hot in Herre. Or ‘here’ either. It never even approaches slightly balmy in this damn flat despite me turning the heating on full blast. Have you not seen my gas bill? And also, shove that pole in the basement up your arse. I am NOT going to do it.
4) I once accidentally went on a date with a French chef who thought he was channelling the spirit of Tupac. This is the only way to explain the bandana and the 2 hours of my life wasted watching Poetic Justice
5) Jay Z has 99 problems. I have 101 problems and a bitch is involved in several of them.
6) 50Cent, Fiddy Sent, whatever your name is? If I am in da club and you try and make me sip Bacardi (like it’s my birthday) I will tell you where to go. I am a vodka drinker. VODKA. Got it!
7) Dr Dre does not know how to perform CPR which is surely an offence under The Trade Descriptions Act (1968).
8 ) Proceeds from gangsta rap support Kanye West’s unfortunate taste in eyewear.
9) Puff Daddy.
10) I am the only person on earth (apart from Ja Rule) who knows how to pronounce Ja Rule’s name properly. It’s ‘Ya Rule’. He’s Swedish.
Despite the misogyny and homophobia inherent in the genre I find it hard to get very annoyed by gangsta rap. The lyrics and the videos are horrible but they are also so ridiculously, over the top, absurd that they make me laugh. They seem only one step removed from those old Benny Hill sketches where he chased bikini clad women round in circles so it’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t either Snoop Dogg himself or a 13 year old boy taking them seriously. (I know, I know – I’m bad, bad, bad at being a feminist.)
I’m not articulating this very well at all, so instead I’ll hand you over to Jon LaJoie who is a French-Canadian comedian. He has done a few rap parodies but this one is very funny (and also happens to illustrate just what I mean about the ridiculousness). I just need to stop singing the chorus out loud before I’m surrounded by small children in September.
Show me your genitals … genitalia! (This is NSFW by the way)
I don’t think I could I even begin to add up the hours I spent, as an adolescent, watching the films of John Hughes. I know there was a whole summer where I watched Ferris Bueller every day. And the next summer there was The Breakfast Club and the summer after that Some Kind of Wonderful. Even now I can quote them word for word. I have a memory of lying on my belly, in front of a VHS player with a friend. It was hot and sticky and we sucked on homemade icepops as one of us pressed play and rewind over and over again and the other wrote down every sentence uttered by John Bender and gang. It took us a whole day. This was a time before the internet, where getting hold of words you fell in love with was not as easy as typing keywords into Google. If you wanted them you had to work for them. I did the same thing many times with song lyrics but only once with a whole film.
I don’t think I was the demographic that John Hughes was aiming for. I was a Yorkshire girl, attending a single sex school in the early to mid nineties. Yet his films struck a chord with me and, so it seems from the comments on the internet this week, with millions of others. People in different countries, who became teenagers in different decades, watched these films and found something they could relate to. As an adult it is somehow easier to remember what it feels like to be a child rather than a teenager. The highs and lows of childhood are so much simpler than the tangled emotions of the teenage years. This makes it all the more remarkable that John Hughes was in his mid-thirties when he wrote these films dealing with the formation of identity. He managed to encapsulate so perfectly the simultaneous anxiety and exhilaration of growing up.
As I entered my late teens and early twenties I became quite the film snob. I became as obsessed with the films of Francois Truffaut as I had once been with the films of John Hughes. I almost accepted an offer to a university course with a minor in film studies and when I chose a different university I joined it’s Film Society and wrote mediocre reviews for it’s newsletter. Since then, my interest in film has slackened considerably. Every now and then I see a film that excites me but more often than not going to the cinema has become more of a social occasion than anything else. Fairly recently I have been lucky enough to be part of a group of girls who have set up their own kind of informal film society. We catch up with each others news, eat stupid amounts of junk food and watch several themed DVDs in a row chosen by whoever is hosting that month. Despite the fact that I’m now thirty years old, you don’t need to be a genius to work out what I chose for my theme. Hint: It wasn’t Francois Truffaut.
I’ve read somewhere (I can’t remember where or I’d link) that The Breakfast Club is a our generations version of The Wizard of Oz. Everyone one of us is a little bit like the heartless Tinman and a little bit like the cowardly Lion. And a little bit like misfit Allison and a little bit like highly driven Andrew. I don’t know about that but I do know John Hughes made some films that I’ll still enjoy watching when I’m forty, fifty, eighty. And maybe, just maybe our teenage grandchildren will enjoy them too.
“Nah man. I can’t come tonight. It’s a Fred West.”
I’m really hoping this is a bizarre example of rhyming slang, otherwise the women of East Yorkshire are in trouble.
So the pest control man from the council came to my house today to address the previously mentioned mouse problem. He was a man of about fifty, with a stained t-shirt, protruding belly and a disturbing amount of bum cleavage on show. One of those middle aged men who don’t speak to women directly but instead address all communication to their boobs. He stamped around my flat, looking in all the nooks and crannies with a gigantic torch and picking up mouse poo with his BARE HANDS and sniffing it. Then he sat down to do some paperwork.
“Do you have children?” he asked.
“No” I replied, thinking he’d forgotten that he’d already asked this question whilst going through the tick boxes on his form. He’d asked it right after “Who will be paying the bill? and just before “Do you have any pets?” This time he followed it up with a different question. He raised his eyebrows, looked me up and down and said “Do you want any?”
Because I am kick-arse, feminista of the 21st century, I kneed him the gangoolies and demanded that he immediately leave my flat. No, no I didn’t. Instead I laughed nervously, turned slightly pink and quickly changed the subject. Surprisingly, this did not scare him enough to stop him enquiring whether I had a boyfriend or asking for my phone number.
I spent the rest of his visit alluding to a mythical boyfriend. I didn’t make him up, the rat catcher did. He kept asking if my boyfriend would go out and buy some poison, or remove dead mouse carcasses, or call up the number for pest control that he’d given me on the form. I nodded non-commitally and said “uh huh” in all the appropriate places. If I have to have a mythical boyfriend he is going to be the best mythical boyfriend in the whole world. I will name him Hans and he is a sensitive, poetic type who can also wrestle bears to the ground without breaking a sweat (because there are a lot of wild bears in Hull. And men named Hans.)
It should be noted that in the past nine months of singledom I have now been asked out precisely twice. Once by the rat catcher and once by an elderly, Lithuanian bus driver whilst I was trapped on his bus during a snowstorm. I am going to be alone forever aren’t I? Oh well, at least I’ve got Hans.
1. This afternoon I went to the shop and bought a cucumber. In fact I splashed out and bought a whole one instead of a half. What can I say? I was feeling flush. I saweth with mine own eyes the checkout lady put it in my bag. When I got home … dun, dun dun duh…(that is the literary representation of tension building music by the way) … there was no cucumber. Either my bag harbours a hole in the space-time continuum or I am so dopey that I didn’t notice when a 40cm long vegetable made a leap for freedom out my bag and onto the floor.
2. This man.
Scary isn’t he? His name is Gareth and he is taking great pains to torture me on a regular basis. He wants me to look like the lady on the right here.
I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen. Mainly because I have no idea how I would make myself that particular effervescent shade of orange. I’m also not sure what possessed me to rent a Ministry of Sound keep fit video. I HATE dance music! It’s as if I thought trying to keep up with complicated footwork whilst sweating the equivalent of Bangladesh’s annual rainfall would not be torture enough. Oh no, I up the pain by doing it to a Euro-trance re-mix of Katy Perry’s latest single.
3. In order to get through the above workout I have to scrape my hair into an unflattering ponytail/quiff combination and HOLY CRAP!! I think my forehead has doubled in size since I had my fringe cut.
It wasn’t the size of a small child before was it? Was it?
4. (Deep breath here) THERE IS A MOUSE IN MY FLAT (and exhale)
I have kind of known this for about week, when strange nibbling noises started emanating from under the floorboards, but I chose to live in denial. I told myself it was probably tap dancing fairies. Today brought the discovery of a chewed through bag of rice and several presents of mouse poo. I am now too scared to eat anything or eat from anything that has been in my kitchen. (I am not dirty. I am not dirty I am not dirty. Repeat ad nauseum until the nauseous feeling passes)
This means that I find this …
more terrifying than this…
Gareth may make me jump around like a lunatic but even he can’t make me throw away a half eaten packet of chocolate digestives.
Beautiful song is Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear. Beautiful images taken from Albert Lamorisse’s “La Balloon Rouge”.
Beautiful song + Beautiful video = Perfect start to a Sunday afternoon
I first saw this on the blog Rock Star Diaries (see blogroll on the right). You should go and have a look. It’s cooooooool – and makes me wonder whatever happened to my polaroid camera.
Nope, not Keanu.
No, not Krishnan Guru-Murthy.
And no not Jeremy Clarkson . Now you’re just being stupid. As if I would allow a right-wing, petrol headed numpty access to my inner sanctum.
This little man!
Please note the unprompted tilt of the head, propped up by an oh-so-professional casual lean on the hand. All at 14 months of age. This is a Derek Zoolander of the future I think we can all agree, but being fortune enough to share some of my genes, far more intelligent obviously.
My sister kindly lent me her baby so that I could see what it is like to wake up every hour throughout the night and shove a bottle of milk into a small human’s mouth. Co-incidentally this meant that my sister and brother-in-law got to experience a full nights sleep for the first time in – ooooh – about 14 months.
Despite the broken sleep me and Jed had a great time. In a bid to be crowned Super Aunty I took him for a walk and picnic in the park. It turns out I really needn’t have bothered as the thing that made him squeal with excitement was not the rolling in the grass, having a go on the swings or seeing a giant iguana in the small animal enclosure. Oh no, what seemed to have been the highlight of his stay was this…
The washing machine! He would have sat and watched it for hours if I hadn’t have made him go outside and do ‘fun’ things. Perhaps I could have used his fascination with watching the drum go round and round to hypnotise him into pretending to be a chicken. But I wanted to see reptiles more than I wanted to watch him peck the ground with a make-believe beak.
However, now I know he’s into domestic pursuits I’ll be sure to have the chimney brushes ready next time he visits. He’s well up for it. See!
