Monthly Archives: November 2010

I think about Gillian McKeith (again)

I doubt that I’m ever going to top yesterday’s post, am I?

The temptation is simply never to blog again.  If I were Emily Bronte I would hitch up my dog, Pilot and take to the moors in my flimsies, making sure to catch virulent consumption along the way.  Then I would die a tragic, early death, coughing and swooning my way to the grave, hanging onto the corner of the CLD (TM) while I make my final utterance for posterity, (probably something rubbish like; ‘Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle’.) before finally expiring in a tragic heap.

I would lie in my coffin, graceful, swanlike neck (topped by a withered, hamster like face) and willowy limbs (ahem) displayed for all to see, while a wake of epic proportions rioted out of control around me.  People would reminisce about the days of yore and sing the songs of old; ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ and ‘Boom Bang A Bang’ followed by a visit from The St. Winifred’s School Choir singing ‘Grandma We Love You’ in close harmony.  Mourners would weep and laugh whilst sipping creme de menthe frappe out of their slingbacks and tossing custard creams from hand to hand.

Later, at the graveside people would sob gently into hankies whilst reminding themselves of that marvellous post I once wrote about decorating your nethers in spangly bits.  I would eschew a headstone, preferring instead to go for a neon, revolving sequin that would light up the town for miles around.

It would be legendary.

Sadly, nearly a month of living in the MOD has given me the constitution of an ox, and I am likely to outlive Ray Mears and the Queen Mother combined at this point.  It is hard to say which has toughened me more, the constant sub-zero temperatures, the lack of hot water or the fact that I seem to spend half my life with my head up the chimney diagnosing some problem with the fire, which delights in sulking and only coming to life just as we are about to take to our beds.

As I am now a toughened old boot I shall just have to shoulder the burden and get on with things.  Nobody feels sorry for toughened old boots.  Just look at Gillian McKeith on I’m a Celebrity.  Not that I watch it, you understand.  I do not watch anything at the moment apart from the wiring, very warily, from a distance.  I was however, stunned to see in the newspaper that Gillian has apparently been trying to flirt with Shaun Ryder. 

I am almost as fascinated by this as I am by the subject of vajazzles.  I once stood near Shaun Ryder at a baggage reclaim at Manchester airport in the wee small hours on our way back from the States.  It was the closest I’ve ever come to standing next to a troll.  Not one of those cutesy ones with hair and pixie faces. No, more like the ones Terry Pratchett writes about in Discworld.  The ones that are hewn from granite and who get wasted on Slab.

He looked like he’d been indulging in a fair amount of slab.

I understand that he is much more clean living these days.  He’d have to be really, or he would be the one resting under a neon sequin, possibly one which shouts: ‘Call the cops!’ and ‘You’re Twisting My Melon Man!’ on every third turn.  Still, anybody less likely to get their thang on with Gillian ‘fecal matter obsessed’ McKeith would be hard to find.

Although Gillian may be obsessed by pooh, it appears that I am slightly obsessed by Mrs McKeith.  I have written about her fondness for pooh here, and in looking at my archives, I realise I have dedicated several posts to her over my long years of blogging.  She is clearly a massive influence on my life, albeit in a running away from, rather than a running towards type way.  I have rarely, if ever, blogged about Shaun Ryder despite his fondness for causing pigeons to explode, and my fondness for Black Grape and the Happy Mondays.

This set me to thinking of the dilemma over whether I would be more likely to snog Gillian if I were trapped with her in a jungle setting, or Shaun? I don’t really want to snog either of them to be honest, but it seems to be the thing you are supposed to do if you spend more than twenty four hours in close proximity to a raddled ex-celebrity in some undergrowth.

You’d probably get more mileage out of Gillian. I expect her teeth are probably a bit cleaner too.  I fear Shaun may be going over to the dark side. I have a vision of the inside of his mouth as something akin to Shane McGowan’s.  I hope I am wrong. I do not want to find out through firsthand experience.

Back to the snog question.

I expect, given the fact that my survivalist skills have been being honed over the last few weeks, I would kiss whoever had won the most bush tucker trials and was likely to give me a Hob Nob.

I bet it wouldn’t be Gillian.

Hob Nobs are probably the devil’s work as far as Gillian is concerned. Witchetty grubs on the other hand must contain all kinds of delicious, health giving properties.  I suspect she probably sells them in packets in Holland and Barrett with a picture of her on the front, popping one into her open mouth.  Mmmmmm.  ‘As Chewed on T.V.’

Sean at least looks like he knows what to do with a Hob Nob, even if he can’t remember having eaten one in the last fifteen years due to being chemically incapacitated.

That’s alright though, he probably won’t mind if I nick his, and if he does, he won’t remember five minutes afterwards.  Then if he asks me who has had his Hob Nob, I can point at Gillian and run away.

It would be much more interesting seeing them going head to head than tongue to tongue don’t you think?

Vajazzalation, It’s what you need. Or is it?

Let us talk of things other than houses, house prices and weather.  We are all becoming so very British, and it is not attractive at all.  Let us talk instead about the word vajazzle.

Oh yes.  This word entered my lexicon for the first time this weekend.  I read a twitter feed where someone was talking about it, and I wanted to know more.

I have looked on the Urban Dictionary site, and it tells me that it is the act of adorning one’s vagina with swarovski crystals to give it more allure.  If you don’t believe me you can  see it here (the definition, not the vajazzle in action.  It is NOT that kind of site thank you).

It is then, a verb: I vajazzle, you vajazzle, he/she/it vajazzles etc.  Apparently if the procedure has been carried out upon your person you have been vajazzled. 

Maybe if you want an excuse not to go out on a date, and washing your hair seems too lame, you can say: ‘I’m sorry Friedrich, I cannot go to the sausage smorgasbord with you this evening. I will be far too busy vajazzling.’

Who knew?

I thought having jewels stuck to your teeth with Bostik was a bit extreme (and mostly made the person in question look like they had a stubborn bit of spinach trapped in their dentures. Definitely not alluring), but clearly I am so square as to be practically cuboid when it comes to self adhesive body jewellery.

I am somewhat fascinated by this procedure (and repelled in equal parts).  I want to know everything.  For example, I suppose it is only suitable for those ladies who have had a Brazilian, or something near to it.  If one has a full head of lady garden hair I imagine glueing sequins to it is going to be tricky, bordering on impossible. If one wishes to have jewellery style adornments of this nature without waxing, I suspect threading beads through your pubes is the only way to go.  A kind of bejewelled rasta look, only downstairs.

So, first you wax, or epilate or shave.  Whatever.  I say this dismissively as if it were a mere bagatelle. For those lady readers (or men. Who am I to judge?) who attend to such matters I am aware that it is not that easy, and mostly involves crouching in ungainly positions which only Sting and Madonna should know about in the privacy of their own homes, whilst flinging hot wax around or worse, rotivating.  If one is doing it alone it is devilish tricky and requires bendiness and a steady hand. If one is having it done it requires bendiness and a lack of shame that would make a vicar blush.

Once that hurdle is passed we turn to the jewels and the glue which must then be applied.

I have three children.  We do a lot of craft.  I have an intimate working knowledge of types of glue I previously never even knew existed. I am also hot on glitter, sequins, feathers and beads.  Just sticking them to a piece of sugar paper neatly is a living nightmare of epic proportions.  Generally after half an hour of glueing and sticking I emerge smothered in glitter from head to foot with large dollops of scummy, grey, peeling glue adhering to my skin like bedraggled mummy bandages.  I cannot imagine the hell that would ensue were I to be wielding a glue gun near my vagina armed with a packet of swarovski crystals.

How could one sensibly go to Accident and Emergency with one’s labia glued together and covered in baby pink crystals?

The shame.

You would have to be mad to do this on your own. Which means taking your newly depilated vagina to a vajazzling shop near you and asking for professional help.

Now, I don’t know about where you live, but in this neck of the woods, most beauty treatments are carried out by permatanned sixteen year olds who failed GCSE woodwork and decided the only way forward was a career in panel beating or as a beautician.  They only have a vocabulary of about four hundred words and try to use less.  The most frequent sentence which spills from their lips is: ‘Are you goin’ anywhere nice on yer ‘olidays this year?’  They have a GNVQ level two in filing nails and looking gormless.

It is they then, who should be let loose near your naked and now trembling vagina with their glue gun at the ready.

This is a terrifying thought.

And what do you say to them?  What happens when they ask you what style you were thinking of?

Is it like a tattoo parlour where they show you a book containing ‘here’s some I inked earlier’? Will there be photographs of balding lady gardens adorned with the face of the Virgin Mary or a foxes brush disappearing into the pudenda?

How do you choose? What happens if they are artistically leprous and you ask for Elvis looking come hither, and get Mrs. Overall, or worse, someone who looks like your dad?

Is that erotic? I think not.

Plus, is it erotic full stop? I do not know much about men, and what I do know is baffling and largely contradictory, but I think it unlikely that many men care if your vagina is embossed with sequins. I think the fact that you are letting them get within spitting distance of it in the first place should be enough to make them grateful and horny, without having to be blinded by the sight of a dolphin leaping through crystal waters when you pull your undercrackers down.  Isn’t it more likely to put them off stride completely? I know it would me if it were the other way around.  If Jason pulled down his boxers to reveal the blinging face of Jeremy Clarkson for example, I would probably expire on the spot.

And how long do they last? Even with a Brazilian, you get regrowth. I do not think a sparkling butterfly created out of cut glass sequins is going to look quite so hot with three week old stubble poking through its wings.

Maybe you deal with this by having the whole vaginal area done, and having the gaps in between lightly grouted, in a kind of vajazzle style crazy paving. It would have to be fairly adhesive wouldn’t it? That’s going to be heavy, and you don’t want to cough and have it drop off onto someone’s shoe at work for example.

It would also be fairly dazzling. If you are going to get up close and frisky with someone after such extensive vajazzling you may want to issue a health and safety warning, or possibly dark glasses. It’s no good blinding someone when you finally do reveal the lady garden of desire, or making them think you have inadvertently caused the second coming,  with the face of Jesus and a lot of excess shininess.

On a more practical note, do the crystals drop off in the bath and get stuck in your u-bend? Do they drop off anywhere else? What if you are in Topshop changing room, pulling your tights down in order to try that body con dress without vpl, only to find that the Sistine chapel in crystals has fallen down round your ankles, and has to be hoovered up by a fifteen year old shop assistant with the giggles?  What if you are involved in the very act of lurve with a man who is in fact turned on by a blinging vaj, only to have him attend to matters down there orally and come up looking like Jaws from James Bond?  That would never do.  What if he gets them stuck on his truncheon of love, or worse, inside you?  Again with the whole A&E shame thing.

On balance I have decided against it.  The most erotic Jason and I get in this freezing cold house is to go to bed without our socks on.  I cannot imagine having to strip down to show him the Charge of the Light Brigade.  Blue goose bumps would add nothing to the final effect.  Plus I would only sulk when he fell about laughing, and have to divorce him when I a) bung up the already knackered bathroom pipes and b) tell him how much it costs.

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More Celebrity Lookie Liking

It’s been a confusing day so far, and I’ve only been awake for about an hour.  I blame it on the glass of wine I had last night before bed.  That’s my rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle for ya.

I woke up at 7.36 this morning needing a pee. I know it was 7.36 because I prized my eyes open and groped for my watch, still half asleep.  Then I saw the time.

Then I was WIDE AWAKE.

I said: ‘OH MY GOD!’

Jason mumbled: ‘What?What?What?’ With that rising inflection that means: ‘You are a bloody nuisance woman. What was I thinking when I married you? I was just having a lovely dream about winning a Porsche 911 in a game of poker, and now I am awake in the Mansion of Doom with a crazy, shouty lady blithering on in my ear.’

I said: ‘It is 7.36, and I forgot to set the alarm, and Tilly needs to go out and catch a bus in ten minutes time. OH MY GOD!’

Jason said: ‘It is Saturday, you dozy mare.’

I said: ‘Oh!’

That was a horrible moment.

I lay snoozing for some time after that, then crawled out of bed and went to perform my ablutions.

I looked in the mirror to find the next shock of the day.  It seems that somehow, overnight I accidentally slept on top of my head and possibly even performed a small amount of break dancing.  It is the only way I can explain the fact that my hair now makes me look like a cross between:

Pete Burns (the old style Pete Burns), and:

Ronnie Woods.

I must dig out the hair straighteners as a matter of extreme urgency.

If this were not perturbing enough on its own, yesterday I spent quite a while catching glimpses of myself as I was out bleeding money out of my ears, doing some frantic Christmas shopping.  I was puzzled.  I reminded myself of someone, but who?

Nope, not Yvette Fielding this time (thank goodness.  Not that she isn’t lovely).  It finally came to me.  I look like Vince Noir from The Mighty Boosh:

I really need to get to grips with this new hairstyle.  I am appreciative of the fact that one cannot know how it feels to be someone else until you have walked a mile in their shoes, but I do not think that the same thing applies to hairstyles.  I don’t feel more like Ronnie Wood this morning, despite the glass of wine last night, and I pray to all the gods that I never know what it feels like to be Pete Burns.

I’d quite like to know what it feels like to be Noel Fielding, so I shall stick with the Vince look for now, and should my attempts at finding that Anglo Saxon treasure and making my fortune come to naught I can always get a job as a celebrity lookie likie and become rich beyond my wildest dreams that way.

I could so do the Ice Flow Song:

Which is good news, because the next shock was waking up to find it had snowed this morning.

I’m off to practice my shrew dance without falling into the pond.

Oscar puts me in my place

Oscar and I were driving home from the supermarket.  I was stuck behind some idiot who was driving like a blind leper with no hands.  I was shouting loudly and vituperatively at this person as we drove.  I know they can’t hear me, but it makes me feel better.

There was a lull in my stream of invectives as I paused to change gear.

Oscar leaned forward, stared penetratingly through the windscreen and shouted:

‘Yeah, lady! Don’t you know that it is  mama who is supposed to be the rubbish driver?’

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I get weirdly excited by another book list

I have photos of the rest of the house to show you, but I have been distracted this morning by a book list.  I cannot resist a good book list, particularly when it makes dubious claims about the nation’s literacy. 

This is a list by the BBC of  100 books they have randomly pulled out of their arse.  They claim that most people in the UK will have only read six of them. 

I have read eighty five of them, which probably means that people in all the streets round my house have been sucked of all desire to read thanks to my voracious habits, and have only read cornflake packets for the last twenty years as I have gradually and parasitically leeched their share of books on the list and made it my own.

Mwahahahahahahaha

(rendered in a mad librarian’s voice.  This is rather like the voice of a mad scientist but quieter).

I have published the list for your delectation, and so that you can surprise yourself by how literate you are.  It really is not at all clear what criteria the Beeb used when picking this list, and why they put things like the whole of the C.S. Lewis Narnia Chronicles as one entry, and then The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as another, nor why they have made Hamlet separate from The Complete Works of Shakespeare.  It was probably the pulling names out of a hat method.

If you are as nerdy as me, the idea is that you mark in bold the books you have read in their entirety.  You italicise things you have only partially read, and you asterisk everything you have seen on television or via the medium of cinematic images.

Enjoy:

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen *

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien*

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte*

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling *

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee *

 6 The Bible

 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte*

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell*

 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman*

 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens*

11 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott*

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy*

 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller *

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger 

 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot *

 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell*

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald*

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens  *

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams*

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh*

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath –  John Steinbeck

 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll*

 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame *

 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens *

 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis *

34 Emma – Jane Austen*

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen *

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis *

 37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini 

 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere *

 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – William Golden*

 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne *

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown *

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabrial Garcia Marquez

 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins  *

 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery *

47 Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaids Tale – Margaret Atwood*

 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding *

 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan *

 51 Life of Pi – Yann Martell

 52 Dune – Frank Herbert

 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons*

 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen*

 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens *

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love in the time of Cholera – Gabriel garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck *

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

 64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

 66 On the Road – Jack Kerouac

 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy *

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding *

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens *

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker *

 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson-Burnett*

 74 Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

 77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome*

 78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray *

 80 Possession – AS Byatt*

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens *

82 Cloud Atlas – Charles Mitchell

 83 The Colour Purple – Alice Walker *

 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro  *

 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White *

 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree collection – Enid Blyton

 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad*

92 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint Exupery

 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas *

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare *

 99 Charlie & the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl *

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Where is my minion?

I am lying on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, feeling pitiful.

I was feeling so pitiful I wasn’t going to blog, but then, you know it’s an addiction, and the more I thought I wouldn’t, the more I needed to, and now, here I am, peering woefully over the top of the blanket as I type.

I do not know if I am just tired (almost certainly), or whether I am coming down with something (very possibly), or both (entirely feasible).  My throat is beginning to ache, I feel slightly sick and my head is rather pounding and tight feeling around the gills.

Pooh.

I will probably be fine by tomorrow.

I expect it is a reaction to too much driving.  I drove to Oxford today to visit with the ever lovely Hairy Farmer Family, the delightful Bumbling Along and her absolutely edible daughter, Moo, and a new (to me) and lovely blogger, Nuts in May and her equally lovely husband, ‘H’.  Not H from Steps.  That would have been extremely surreal, although hugely entertaining.

You know we would have had to get him to teach us all the moves for Tragedy.

Ha.

Despite ‘H’ not being H from Steps, which was genuinely not a disappointment, we did see  Jimmy Carr eating his tea in Jamie Oliver’s Italian bistro on George Street, where we were having a long, long, leisurely lunch.  He looked tired and pissed off.  I did not go up to him and ask him to crack a joke.  He probably would have punched me in the eye.  I was just impressed that I recognised him.  I am not good with people from the telly unless they’re Sarah Beeny, Kevin McCloud or Kirstie Allsop.  How middle aged am I?  I’m surprised I managed to take my tartan slippers off long enough to leave the house and meet people with a pulse and hair of their own, I’m getting to be so bloody old.

I took Andrea with me as my wingwoman, and as I didn’t want her to think I had invited her along just so that she could do the driving, I drove.  It is not a bad journey from where we live, and I know the road reasonably well, having lived in Oxford for five years way back in the olden days, but you know I hate driving no matter how familiar it is.  It shrinks my head and makes me grind my teeth.  I also get sore hands where I grip the steering wheel too tightly, just in case.  I do not know why I grip it so hard.  I have never known a firm grip on a steering wheel avert imminent vehicular disaster, but my hands are definitely convinced they are helping things, even if my brain is not.

I got home, after a splendid day of sitting around filling our faces, talking nineteen to the dozen, and in my case, a short detour to Waterstones to buy books that I don’t need, don’t have time to read but cannot resist anyway, and have crashed and burned spectacularly.

Actually before the crashing and burning I did pick up the kids from granny’s on the way home, not forgetting to pick up some jars for Matilda’s latest culinary project, which I can’t really talk about here, as she is making Christmas presents, and some of the people the presents are intended for read this blog.  I got the kids home, did the bedtime routine, sorted laundry, put the washing machine on, put the dishwasher on, hoovered the floor where unspeakable things were lying about waiting to be trodden around the house, wiped down the kitchen which still had breakfast festooned all over it, sorted out everything the girls need for school tomorrow, built up the fire, helped Tilly with the next phase of her culinary project, and answered several pressing e-mails, text messages and phone calls.

No wonder I am feeling rather spent.

There is no running away from domesticity.  As a child you don’t really understand this fully, but once you start on the hamster wheel of domestic life it can only really be postponed, it cannot be avoided entirely.  Well, unless you become a millionaire or go and live on a desert island maybe.

It’s probably why Richard Branson looks so relentlessly cheerful all the while. He is a millionaire and has a desert island.  I bet he doesn’t have to worry about a broken bob chopper and nasty things lurking in the carpets.  He pays minions in shiny red jackets to do that sort of thing for him.

Well, that’s solved what I am asking Santa for on my Christmas list this year.  I shall have a minion in a shiny red jacket please.