three men and an idiot watching this rubbish

Over the festive period - a time when some of the worst films ever made get dragged out to clog up the schedules, usually late at night - I've found I have at least one more guilty pleasure than I first thought. I adore shit movies. Any old guff starring Jennifer Love Hewitt or - God forgive me - Steve Guttenburg and I'll be there poised for the opening credits on the couch like an especially predatory widow.
Especially if I'm hungover. Then I really will watch any old toss. I've sat through more Channel Five Family Movies than I am prepared to admit, lest I spontaneously combust with shame. On New Years Day I caught myself watching Three Men and a Little Lady with a twinge of pleasure, because there is nothing better than a bad sequel. My Girl 2, Piranhas 2 (they can fly), Dr Doolittle goes Apeshit or whatever it was called, The Exorcist: The Beginning - described in the Guardian Guide as 'an unnecessary prequel' - sounds aces, as does Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo ('a misfiring comedy'). However, in watching Chan flip about the screen as though he is made of rubber I miss 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid', the multiple award winning, critically acclaimed western most often described as 'unmissable'. Unmissable perhaps, unless Chan happens to be on the other side.

The slowly dawning realisation that I would walk half a mile for a bad horror with lousy effects and a laughable plot but wouldn't lift the remote to watch 'a powerful and compelling drama' on the other side is something I'm only really half aware of.
There is more to it obviously - I have the attention span of a foetus and would only ever be described as 'highbrow' in an antonyms competition - but if I start telling you about that I miss watching 'I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.'
Seriously, it's set on an island and everything.

for me ? how kind.....

Winter. The Arctic tundra of the outside world, the creeping darkness which awaits you in the morning and tails you home like a lost dog in the evenings, haemorrhaging money on Christmas presents, the limbo of the winter rains, 'variety' festive specials on the television.
Winter is the most dour of the seasons, the unwelcome drunk at a party who is sick with self pity.
I thought all was lost to the frost until I got home from the pub last night and entered the living room, which was cosy and warm, and all my flatmates and comrades were there under duvets, eating a takeaway and watching Watership Down with the fairylights on.
Mitton turned to me and said,
"Lenny popped round earlier and dropped some presents off for you, they're in my room."
"Presents ?" Suddenly, the chill of December melted away, even as I put the kettle on and prepared a brew.
Cartoons and curry and warmth and presents and tea and lowlights and friends*. It suddenly feels like Christmas to me.


*who eat all the chocolates out of your calendar because they don't know the difference between five and nineteen.

hit me baby, one more time

To say I have an addictive personality would be a trite and reckless statement, borne of one or two examples which amount to little more than a current obsession. However, I am easily sucked in - usually to the most benign and habitual of pastimes - and once I'm there, I'm a bit of a goner.
It started with those ten-pence-pushing-machines - you know the ones, haunted by desperate, sad eyed cadavers with pocketfuls of change and a loose ambition - and perhaps it was the gaudy, flashing lights or slow, sultry way the drawers moved backward and forward over the scattered ocean of silver treasure, but I was hooked. It started when I was seven, and I've never forgotten the chink of coins hitting that small steel tray -which looks almost surgical - when the overspill is knocked forward. I won fifteen pounds in a 'jackpot' in St Ives once and had to carry the lot in the pockets of my coat for the rest of the night because the cashier, sullen in his plexi-glass casing, refused to change it for me. Fifteen ponds in ten pees is heavy, I warn you.
It lost its glitz for me in the arcade at Brighton, after I'd 'found my machine' - one which looked likely to pay something out - and had stood there with Ben for the best of five minutes.
Chinkchinkchink.
"Oooooh ! Look ! I won !"
"Yeah, seventy pee. Nice one, and you only fed three pounds in. This is a right laugh."

I needed to move onto higher stakes. I'm addicted to smoking, which is something I'm hoping to crush in the new year, and booze, and caffeine, but ultimately, I like to profit, and unless you count heart disease, hangovers and the jitters as a profit, I needed to find something more. Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to trivialise addiction, which, in it's worst forms, swallows lives and stability and rationalisation - but I can see it is in me, at least in the smallest dose. The thing is I never see it unless it's pointed out to me.

Two years ago I played poker with my family on Christmas evening. I'm a reckless gambler - anyone who has betted against me in Pontoon knows this; "Hit Me!" - but for me that just adds to the thrill. So it was I found myself low on chips and high of hand at about half past twelve that evening, desperate to win something.
I lent over.
"Mum. Mum, lend me some of your chips."
My mum, who had been WINNING ALL NIGHT refused politely, citing the rules of the game.
"Fuck the rules mum, come on, seriously. I have a definite winning hand here."
"No."
"You won't do this for your only daughter ?"
My sister looked flatly across the table at me, saying nothing.
"Alright, look. You lend me the chips, I'll win, I'll pay you back double. Double."
"No, Daise."
"Alright, cash then, I've got the cash right here, it's in my purse. No ? No ? Alright look, these car keys, I have these car keys against this hand, if I lose, you get the car."
"Those are my keys, and that's my car." Steve said, at which point I gave up, protesting, and went outside to worship the god of nicotine.

It's the same with the Playstation - oh Playstation, you beautiful device you - which I played so obsessively and relentlessly that I actually had to ban myself from owning one lest I lose another job because of it, not to mention the boyfriend who left me because I was playing with Leon more than I was him.

A while ago, Lenny and I were in the pub when he mentioned a game they had called Shut the Box. The premise is so simple it's almost insulting - it's a dice game, so no skill is involved, just the subtraction of numbers between one and nine. I'd never heard of it, so was clapping my hands with glee when Lenny brought it over.
"Shall we make this interesting by putting some money on it, say a pound a game ?" he'd asked, and I'd said yes.
Five pounds down and Lenny said he had to stop,
"I don't want to lose any more money," he'd said.
This struck me as odd - not that I was winning, I occasionally get lucky streaks, you should see me play pool - but because he'd stopped, entirely of his own accord, whereas I would have started scribbling IOU's and making empty promise for JUST ONE MORE GAME.

This came to a head last night in the Fortune of War in Brighton, where I was with some friends. There is a quiz machine in the corner, but I never really play those things, and hadn't really noticed it until Billy pointed it out.
"Ah, I really wish you'd been here the other night, Daise. I was playing that and one of the categories was 'Stephen King Books'. I got them all wrong."
I smiled.
"I'd have aced that."
"Yeah." Odge agreed, "You would."
"Might have a go myself." I murmured, and ten minutes later, was being manhandled away by Odge and Billy.
"Billy, give me some change, I need some change." I'd demanded.
"I can't Daisy -"
"Why ? You work here don't you ?"
"Yeah. It's just that you've put quite a lot of money into it already and I think anymore would be a waste."
"Oh come on! No-one knows the capital of Kenya." I implored.
"Nairobi." everyone answered.
Bastards.

hanks in pants

Three, maybe four years ago my friends and I - our name was legion and we are many, if you like - decided to spend Christmas in our flat, and aim out going to see our families. There were fifteen of us on Christmas day, all chipping in money for drinks and food, which were both bountiful, and with one of us - thank you Meade - doing the cooking.
Over the seasonal period our over indulgence led to most of us sat on our collective arses eating and drinking our way towards cardiac arrests and watching ALL the Christmas fayre tee-vee had to offer, which mainly consisted of old Tom Hanks movies designed for the young, or the female or the stupid, or in some cases all three.
It would appear that Tom Hanks has it written into some draconian contract somewhere that every single one of his movies has to feature at least one scene of him in pants. So it was that in Turner and Hooch Hanks wrestles with a dog in pants. (Hanks, not the dog, that would be weird). In Big, he is seen strolling around in nothing but pants. Ever watched Castaway ? End to end loincloth. I've never watched it all the way through but I'll bet money Sleepless in Seattle features a 'heartwarming' scene whereby Hanks vacuously reprimands his young son while one or the other are in pants. Saving Private Ryan only ever led to the phrase 'Hanks in Pants with Tanks' and as for Apollo 13, I really can't comment, mainly because we got bored and put on some music.
It's a hell of a game, look out for it, and every time Hanks strolls onto the screen in his pants for seemingly no apparent reason - The Burbs - please do award yourself a point. Go on, you deserve it.

"you, madam, need some discipline"

I have things to do, but being a procrastinator of almost epic magnificence I'm finding excuses to put off doing them all.
Like writing this piffle for example.
My apathy always reaches new dizzy lows in the winter, as the darkness begins to surround us a little more tightly in the mornings and the evenings and the weather mutates into one long wet, bone numbing day. At least that's the excuse I'm giving, that's what I'm telling myself as I flick through endless channels of even more endless vapidity without lifting my head from the arm of the sofa. Free Willy ? Yeah, I'll watch ten minutes of that until the One Hundred Greatest Pop Songs starts on TMF. Reckon I can get a good hour of that in before it's time for the Antiques Roadshow. And I'll eat at some point. I guess.
Meanwhile, here are the things I ought to be doing;
(a) Cleaning out the goldfish. They have taken to swimming against the glass of their bowl and occasionally flicking the surface with their tails trying to alert me to the squalor of their faintly orange tinted water. I know it's cruel. I know that the edges of that tank should not be furred up with algae. I know I should be able to see them through the glass and the murk. I know all this and I will do it.
Later.
Once I've done this.
(b) Get dressed. It's four thirty in the afternoon. I'm still in my night attire and while on someone else that phrase may sound sexy and alluring - "I'm only wearing a very thin, very short nightdress," - that, I can assure you, is not the case with me. Until someone makes a fetish film called 'Chicks in Oversized Tee-shirts and Knee High Socks with Bad Hair' that is. Then I'm your girl.
(c) Eat. Unless I can reach it from a prone position on the sofa, it's not going in my mouth. I've discovered I can slide a bowl of Maltesers towards my groping hand using my foot - thank you, dance classes, I knew you weren't in vain - and I can look pitifully at whoever comes into the room.
"Are you going to the kitchen ?" I ask in a lost little girl voice, "if you are can you please bring me in an apple/sandwich/full roast dinner with all the trimmings ?"
(d) Finish the short story I started a week ago. Deadlines are my nemesis. They come steaming towards you, blundering past everything else you've put off doing for weeks, announcing themselves in a thunderous voice that you were meant to have taken notice of five weeks previously. If a deadline had a voice it would sound like Brian Blessed. This is true.

A high achieving friend told me once that procrastination was just another word for laziness. I don't agree, and the moment I'm out of my vegetative state of inertia I'll argue the point with her, but not just yet. Five more minutes.

Committing Piscine Genocide

I know, I know, I'm unstoppable. But you know how it is when you have an uneventful Sunday night of doing very little in a warm place, wrapped up snug and womblike in front of a movie until you think, I'll just chip off to bed with Catch bastard 22, the book which never ends, and in doing so you take off your clothes and hang them on a clothes rail which lurches unexpectedly and fatally to the left, tilting over in horrific slow motion and smashing into your goldfish bowl which splinters open like a cracked nut with a terrific smash, spilling out a cascade of water and the audible fleshy thump of two piscine bodies hitting the floor where they flop about for a bit and then lie still while all around them is water, water everywhere and you, frozen barefoot in just your underwear can't move for the broken glass and can only watch them flail while water spreads out towards you like slow moving lava in a dark shadow and by the time, five minutes later you get round to picking them up by their tails and the bloody things are still alive and squirm in your hand so you squeal like a girl and shove them in a bucket of water while for the next three quarters of a cocking hour you are on your hands and knees for all the wrong reasons mopping up stale water and then you think to yourself 'Bollocks to this it's half past twelve, I'm going to get a beer.'

You know those kinds of nights ?

I fucking do.

small town blues

A little while back Philip J and I were discussing Small Town Mentality Syndrome. Having grown up in a city the size of a monopoly board I am well versed in the mechanics of gossip and rumour and the constant vigilance of the small townee. On more than one occasion as a teenager I'd arrive home to find that my parents knew more about what I'd been up to that night than was entirely comfortable, particularly as my good times revolved around spar cider, poppers and french kissing the local youth round the back of the cathedral.
Don't get me wrong, I like to gossip as much as the next lass, but there is something sinister and almost bleak about being the subject of the bitchery and snipery that sustains the Small Town Mentality.I'm known for my terrible judgement of both people and situations and therefore found myself against the better judgement of every single person I knew, on a flight to Asia to marry a total idiot. My friends tried to stop me. The regulars in the pub I was running tried to stop me. My own mother offered me money to not go. But I knew what I was doing, I was in love.

So when, four weeks and many tears later I arrived unwed back in Brighton, tanned and skinnier than when I'd left but feeling like a catastrophic failure and abysmally alone, it came as no surprise at all to find that everyone knew. Everyone. Even complete strangers came up to me in the pub;
"Ah, we knew it wouldn't work out. He was no good for you. We all thought so. Boys a fool if he doesn't want you etc"
"Who are you ?"
"Ah. We saw your picture in the shop there."

"What ?"
Turns out my flatmate Simon had put a poster up of me in the town centre with the words;
'LOST. A friend and a flatmate, last seen running away to Thailand with her head in the clouds'
because he knew, like everyone else it seemed, that it was never going to work out. Just like everyone had said. A few people had joked about taking bets on how long it would be before I came home - at least I think they were joking. The point being that the fact that it hadn't worked out made for very good story indeed, especially when you consider that the boy involved flew back to England before me threatening to kill a man I'd once had a fling with. Oh, how that paid off in gossip gold. It's all there, broken hearts, shotgun weddings, bikinis, threats to kill, if it didn't sound so fictional I'd write a book about it.

Back to the conversation. Philip had made a good point in that when you live in a small town with not much happening except the events of other people's lives you tend to get 'a running commentary' on your activities from others.
In this case I was meeting a friend who had moved away from Brighton recently and was only in town for the afternoon. We had about an hour and a half together before she had to go, which was time enough for a pint. Sitting in the beer garden I hadn't even taken my jacket off when I was hit with the question bullets flying out of her face.
" You're not going to tell about this man you've met than?"

"Which one ?"

"I hear you haven't written anything for a while because you've been drinking too much."

"Pardon ?"

"Is it true that you're getting dressed up as Led Zeppelin on the night of the tribute concert and performing the entirety of 'Physical Graffiti' in your kitchen and that you and Lisa have fallen out because you both wanted to be Jimmy Page?"
"That's not strictly true, no -"

"You still not sleeping I hear ?"
"Jesus - "

"Someone told me you were some kind of ultra vixen with a torture dungeon in your basement and a cache of weapons in the loft."
"Yeah, I suppose."

Turns out she was being fed this information through the many and various mouths of my acquaintances, and as she no longer lived in town she had specifically asked that any news was reported back to her with the speed and inaccuracy of a tabloid reporter. Which I could have been annoyed about. I could have pulled her up and told her that if she wanted to know about what I was doing all she had to do was ask and I'd tell her. But after years of living in a tiny, snub-nosed town I have developed the ability to shrug off all my gossip and laugh in the face of all the scandalous rumours. Particularly the one currently doing the rounds about me at the moment. I'm sure you'll hear about it soon. Just not from me.

that van stank to high heaven though.

I have a wonderful image in my head, a static slice of frozen time.
Cornwall, a few years ago. Nine of us had miraculously managed to get a weekend off our various bar jobs and hired a mini-bus to drive down there for an experimental exodus out of Brighton. It was, and remains still, one of the happiest journeys I've taken so far - 'the devil fools with the best laid plans' Neil Young once sang but we were safe because we hadn't made any. Not one. Hence the first night was spent with nine of us sleeping upright and drunk in the van parked on Perranporth beach. The image in my head is that of us, windswept and tired, on the seafront down at St Ives on a brisk May morning the day we were due to leave. Alex John is looking pale and unhappy because a seagull had stolen her ice-cream and she had a bilious hangover from the local scrumpy. Tina is still drunk, and wrapped up in a bright pink blanket. Jon and Odge are to my left, discussing Fifty Cent with Gordon, who looks stilted and worn because he cricked his neck sleeping in the van on the first night. From here, stood on the beach I can see Amy and Burg writing their names in the sand. Finch is to my right, with a pasty, ignoring the fact that the temperature within it is close to that of molten lava.
It was here that I can remember feeling happy - happy in that content, this is bliss way - and hoping it was a moment I would never forget. We've banned ourselves from discussing that holiday now - particularly in the presence of anyone who wasn't there - because the stories and anecdotes are numerous and the in-jokes so inverted that they may as well be mythical, and anyone listening to us ramble on about it generally starts shifting in their seat, then their eyes develop a glassy sheen, then their jaws slacken and a runner of drool swings from their lower lip as they enter an advanced catatonic state.
Alright, it's not that boring. But like all the best things, you had to be there.

aka 'big stupid nobchops'

If you're going to give yourself an alias - the sort of cool, razor-edged, law-breaking moniker used mainly by rappers and hustlers, always, always choose something which makes you sound, well, cool, razor-edged and law-breaking.
For instance, no-one is going to question the credentials of the Grym Reaper, Dr Doom or Ol' Dirty Bastard.
And you'd have to be an maniac to pick a fight with someone calling themselves Ghost Face Killah.
So in my childish way, it really made me laugh when, on Saturday afternoon as I headed off to the pub I saw that someone calling themselves Big Daddy G had tagged themselves all over the walls of one of Brighton's junctions. What made it funny, at least to me in some puerile way, was that someone had added '-ay' at the end of ‘ Big Daddy G’.
Ah, the comedy.

such a load of old bono, all of it.

The other night Alan and I were having late drinks in the pub and we overhead a table having a ‘Ten Bands we Must see before we Die’ conversation, which led us, in our meandering, drunken way, on to a conversation of ‘Ten Bands we’d rather Die then See’.
I’d forgotten all about it until last week when I received this message from Al;

Alan - Oasis, Hard-Fi, Fatboy Slim, The Kooks, Arctic Monkeys, U2, Calvin Harris, Maroon 5, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Hard-Fi again (Cos I hate them so much)...

Which led me to respond;

Daisy - u2, sting, sting and u2 in concert , sting, bono and simply red live with jamie cullum, genesis, phil collins, mike and mechanics, razorlight, steely dan, ub40, fallout boy, my chemical romance, ub40 guest appearing at a lenny kravitz concert.
*deep breath*
akkon the ringtone menace, jack penate, sean kingston, katie melua, dave stewart solo with jamie cullum on the pia-pia-pia-no, collins on drums, and bono on vocals. it’s a super group.super shit that is.

and m-people, which I have just thought of. Bunch of insipid, lukewarm arse.

(thanks to Alan for making me laugh so much about it though.)