too nice, too stupid or both ?

when i first left the warm embrace of cornwall and moved to london at age nineteen i was nice to everyone – utter strangers, unconscious drunks in gutters (he hated me for it, admittedly), numerous belligerent strays - until one day, on the quiet top deck of the seventy-three a man wanked into my hair from the seat behind me.
i only discovered this when i ran my hands through the wet ends.
on friday, when i went to the v&a for the surrealist’s ball (question, how was it ? answer, really really weird.) a man approached me with what i at first thought was his cock in his hand but which in fact turned out to be a carrot held at groin height.
still, even when i thought he was holding his erect penis i smiled genially.
am i too nice, or too stupid, or both ?
you were right odge, i never learn.

world's worst liar

ahhhhh, my idiocy knows no bounds. i am a bunglehead.
just meant to send the following text to my friend the mitton;
“what time do you want to meet at the v&a ? about seven, maybe ? i have told my boss i need to leave at three for an ‘important appointment’…har har har i am a terrific liar*.”
yes. i have sent it to my bloody boss by accident. he hasn’t noticed yet – with any luck he won’t look at his phone till three. i can see him from where i’m sitting.
this is not very good. i am looking at going on eternity leave.

* this is a joke. i am the world’s worst liar. i blush, stammer, look wildly around and generally cock it up.

**update attack: my boss has just walked past me three times. on the third he looked at me. suspiciously. more bulletins as events warrant.

rn’b rubs me up the wrong way

i’m suffering through the worst radio station in the world – i say suffering, not silently you understand – and have now earnt myself the nicknames ‘grumpybones’, ‘miserablist’ and ‘old granny shitflaps’ by my colleagues.
“cheer up,” they’re saying, “it’s only a bit of music.”
wrong.
i don’t often get angry and almost never in situations when it’s justified – cheat on me and break my heart and you’ll be forgiven after a couple of hours and an earnest apology. borrow a tenner and with enough protracted assurances, i’ll never ask for it back.
but in this instance i’m making an exception. rn’b is the lowest denominator, the worst type of soulless dirge generated by idiots for drones. each song a repetitive mirror of it’s predecessor.
if i have to listen to much more of dj totally dangerous and mc utterly streetwise’s* toothless, threatless, unhazardous bile, their very blandness covering up the fact that they are musical charlatans, then my friends, i may contract distemper. i’m on the verge.

*i made these names up.
** now playing ? it’s the fucking black eyed peas.

all back to myspace

officially i am now a myspace geek. i said it would never happen, and looking at my dismal friends list (five, including the statutory 'friend' who is sent to everyone on joining. five, and two of them are the same person.) it's hardly likely to develop into the dizzy orgy of friendship i've been led to believe it is.



Check me out!

do what you want with it....

pauline quirke has stigmata

i am a child. certainly in terms of juvenile humour. i’ve recently started telling people that the diabolic gwen stefani single 'the great escape' is a new single by carol vorderman called ‘3 from the top and 4 from the bottom’. you’ll be surprised - if you can maintain an air of contrived insouciance long enough – how many people believe this. especially if you crudely cut and paste a cover together and send it to people attached to an email as proof.
i mention this because a friend has just rung to tell me that not only did hmv not stock the carol vorderman album ‘another consonant please carol,’ but they’d never heard about it. i told him it was out on geffen and that he should contact the record label in case they have delayed it’s release – i can’t tell which concerns me more, the fact that a friend of mine believes this or that he’d be prepared to part with money for the wretched thing.
now i’ve begun telling people that pauline quirke has stigmata. no reason except it amuses me. unfortunately i can’t seem to muster the requisite expression to deliver this with the required impact and as a result have succeeded only in looking faintly puzzled as i tell people – more conviction is required but it’s very difficult... try it, and if only one person believes you, you win.

taking a leaf from the book of mitton

i confess. i’ve let myself get sucked into all manner of things in my time – lame relationships, worlds of survival horror, meerkat manor (i blame bill nighy) – but it’s been a long time since anything grabbed my attention quite like My New Favourite Thing™…
…visiting museums.
yes. not for me the blurred, giddy world of high profile parties and waking up in a sticky pool of something on sunday afternoon with one shoe off and my ears ringing.
no sir.
saturday afternoon i was at the brighton museum, primarily because they had a gypsy fortune telling machine* almost identical to the one in ‘big’ and i’m a sucker for all the hoodoo nonsense. week or so before i was hawking round the v&a like it was going out of style and now i’m genuinely excited because i’m
off to the natural history museum next weekend. perhaps it’s my age, but i prefer to think it’s the exquisite thrill (thrill possibly too strong a word, there) of looking at something of great beauty, or sheer hideosity and coming away feeling like i’ve actually been informed about something.
it’s a way i wish i’d felt more as a kid instead of discovering smoking, cider and french kissing round the back of the cathedral.

*it was out of order

story 6# the vaininator

take the case of micheal laftley. i put a ‘drink me’ label on a bottle of hair tonic and he did – now he has a lustrous mane of thick brown hair lining the silken column of his throat and can’t breathe without sounding like a blocked hoover. food gets caught in the bristles on his pink trachea and remains there trapped, fragments of omelette and sandwich.
amanda was nineteen and convinced her thin lips crippled her otherwise extraordinary features. when she found out she was allergic to cats she wiped her wizened chops across a tabby, feline back. Her lips mushroomed into bloated pink.
amanda suffocated on a furball when she was twenty-five. sad day.
garth was a being of almost unbearable physical beauty – a tight cheeked Adonis almost biblical in his sculpture, he would regularly leave his bedroom door open so that the russian housemaid could let her gaze linger on his chiselled, taut buttocks as he dressed. vanya would peer with her furtive, thrusting glance through the doorway, and garth would see her slavic gluttony and it would please him.
over the years she siphoned over forty thousand pounds from his various accounts and, when his buttocks were slapping fatly at the upper reaches of his thighs, deflated cheeks gouged with deep creases, vanya raised a glass many miles away and toasted his wealth.
vanity makes fools of us all.

just do it

anyone else think that in the new nike adverts where the exercise junkie repeats the words "i'm addicted' they should have just left the '-ted' off the end ?
honesty in advertising people.

stay awake

holy toast. i'm not well, and like all unwell people i'm lying around on the sofa under a blanket, griping and moaning and watching dvds. until this afternoon when i watched a horror film so bland and shockless i found myself doing all of the following things during it;
~watered the plants.
~watched a carrier bag flutter on the railings outside my house for ten solid minutes.
~read the payment instructions on the back of the gas bill.
a few years ago, when i lived in a flat known as greyskull, tina and i made the fundamental mistake of renting a dvd based purely on it's cover. i thought nothing could match the insult on my intelligence that was th13teen ghosts but somehow stay alive managed to simultaneously insult my intelligence and waggle it's tongue in my face.
a third of the way through the film i was practically screaming at the telly - 'how did this get green lighted ? how ?' what was the pitch for god's sake ?
"yeah, it's like, a cross between resident evil, hollyoaks and like, final destination, the trilogy, yeah ?"
actually, that at least makes it sound interesting. what it was, as far as i could tell though i did have a fever, was a gcse drama with high production values.
the gang's all here - gawky teen, goth girl called october, kooky chick, snoopy, charlie brown and linus, all struggling under the weight of the towering cliches hurtling form their purty lil mouths. adam buxton once wrote a very funny guide to dialogue (as director ken korda) and i swear, it was as though the hormonal scriptwriters had lifted it straight from him;
"something bad's happening. something really, really bad"
"what the HELL is going on here ?"
"we're in the bitch's back yard, man"
"he was run over by a horse drawn carriage!" (honestly, i am not making this up)

now i love computer games. and i love horror films, even shit ones. but the two should never merge because the terrifying, mewling afterbirth it creates is so god-awful i found myself pleading aloud for even the most likeable character to hurry up and die. the point of the film is that they start playing a game, which releases an evil spirit, which then starts killing them off in the game, and then in real life exactly as they did in the game, except they stop playing, but then the killing continues and...you get the picture. at this rate i can look forward to being eaten by zombies, killed by a pig-masked maniac with a chain saw or tumbling off a cloud if stay alive knows something we don't.
...what really made my tongue unroll in awe was that at the end of the film (i'm not ruining the ending for you, the film ruins the ending for you by existing in the first place) the killer computer game hits the shelves of department stores all over america, so next time...it could be you (provided you part with the forty quid to buy the game in the first place). the marketing executives must have been fisting each other with cheques at the thought of this franchise tsunami - watch the film, buy the game - what's that noise ? why, it's bill hicks spinning in his grave.
words alone cannot describe the body-popping, traffic-stopping awfulness of this film. watching it can. i now have a copy of this film, given to me by a - now i think about it - relieved looking and smirking friend. you can have it. anyone. anyone at all. give me your address, i'll pay the postage.

story five# privet, no peking

we ate roast chicken and drank red wine in bed. the meat pale and slippery, steaming hot, grease staining the duvet in irregular little islands. he wrote his name, drunk, on my arm and fashioned a nervous plait in my hair as i lay back on all the pillows, stacked beneath me imperiously. earlier, he’d claimed he didn’t need one and lay curled on the swell of my breasts instead. i taught him how to curse in spanish and he’d told me not to show off, then smiled, teeth stained claret.
as the night faded and the empty bottles rolled off the end of the bed whenever we’d moved our feet i’d asked him why he’d done it.
silent, for a moment, but he didn’t sigh as i’d expected.
he told me because he’d needed the money, that he’d been desperate.
my fingers smelt of roast chicken and his chest hair. i told him i’d have lent him the money if he’d been that desperate, that he’d just had to ask.
then he did sigh, and rolled over, snagging the covers.
in the morning his name had blurred and bled on my skin.