Laura Lexx

Sugar Teeth

2012-01-19T22:53:00.000Z

Yesterday I saw a little boy with one hand on a lamp post going round and round in circles around it. He had his coat sleeve pulled down over his hand to stop it hurting and he circled the post for at least 5 minutes as I watched. It looked fun but I decided it wasn't really something I could do any more for fear of looking like I was attempting to be zany.

This evening I am sitting on my sofa having eaten more chocolate eclairs than one should on a Thursday and feeling as though my teeth have slipped on their velvet pyjamas for the night. I literally can't wait to go and clean my teeth. Once my teeth are clean I'm looking forward to getting into bed and having a good night's sleep.

This morning I watched two episodes of Fireman Sam and laughed my head off at how ridiculous certain parts of it were. The dialogue was crass, the accents were dreadful and the plots were identical. It was brilliantly bad and I wondered how difficult it must be to create something for a child when you yourself can only think like an adult.

It must take a certain kind of mind to retain the uninhibited nature of a child through the strains of learning that we struggle through as young adults.

Is the mind a deeper place to disappear into as a child, meaning that swinging round a lamp post can totally absorb your person without needing to evaluate the image you're throwing out? Are you thinking less or more as a child? How much of your day is learning? When do we slowly phase that out and stick with what we know? When does time suddenly seem to be something we can be in control of rather than an entity that swims round us?

Pfft. Check me out being all questiony and philosophical. What I really want to know is, is it still ok for me to swing around a pole without seeming like a total bell end?

There is so much stuff that I love now that I hated as a child, for example:

Courgette
Spaghetti bolognese
Cleaning my teeth
Being in bed
Quizzes
Crusts on sandwiches
The middle of Jacket Potatoes
Going for walks
Hospital dramas
Floral patterns

But it's a lot harder to think of things I used to love doing that I don't still love now. It's just that I've stopped doing them for no reason I can remember. For this reason I am going to have a day next week where I:

Get up at 6am and watch Transworld Sport with my Dad. I will sleep through much of it.
Then I'll watch Gummi Bears and The Raccoons whilst eating chocolatey cereal.
I'll play outside near a tree talking to myself quite loudly.
I'll write a poem where I meet Ronan Keating and we fall in love.
I'll have elevensies.
I'll go swimming.
I'll have lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and crisps and I won't enjoy the sandwich but I'll want an extra packet of crisps.
I'll watch an animated film.
I'll go outside and dig something up and then decide to keep it forever.
I'll be angry about having to stop playing for dinner.
I'll watch some TV shows I hate but I always watch so I can put off going to bed.
I'll go to bed having tried very hard to avoid cleaning my teeth or washing my face. I will wet the flannel and the toothbrush to make it look convincing.
I'll go to bed and read various books for at least 90 minutes, occasionally turning off the light whenever I hear footsteps on the stairs.
I'll fall asleep feeling cheated because "I am not tired".

Standard. x

Day by Day

2012-01-15T19:33:00.001Z

Something weird is happening... by body has become so efficient that, despite the fact I'm ill, my body is refusing to deal with more than one symptom at a time. This has resulted in me having a different flu like symptom every day for the past week. It's like a game of Pokemon except more fun, which is to say it fucking sucks.

I don't get ill very often... I think it's the result of having a father who is fairly unsympathetic to all forms of ailment unless something has actually fallen off your body. With my Dad, you could tell him your leg had come off and he'd ask why that mattered when you had a perfectly good other leg and two arms to carry it with in case you needed it.

He's a lovely man, but he's hardy. My father is a Scot, raised in South Africa... an interesting pedigree that leaves you defiantly stingy about your racism. It's not the cuddliest of breeds though. For that I guess you might want a small Welsh Dad or perhaps a Swiss one. Certainly, I adore mine, but it's best not to cry too often or he looks a bit panicked and turns the television up.

An example of my father's lack of patience for human frailty is a football game he once played. Dad's a keen 5-a-sider and so when he disappeared out one night to play 5 a side football we thought nothing of it.

About 9:30pm we heard quite a lot of laughter and commotion at the front door, were a little confused but when to see what was going on. We were greeted with the sight of my father, being pushed up the garden path in a wheel barrow by 3 of his friends... he seemed merry enough and we asked him what had happened.

"We were playing football and someone ran into me. I've hurt my knee a bit. It's just twisted."

"So, why are you in a wheelbarrow?"

"Er, I can't put any weight on it. I didn't move see when he ran into me so I absorbed a bit of force and it's just pushed my knee out a bit. It's just a bit tight. It'll be alright."

We thanked his friends profusely, put the wheelbarrow in the back garden and moved Dad to the sofa where he said he might have a paracetamol if the pain increased but he'd just have a sit down for while.

When it came to bed time he declared that it had stiffened slightly so he might sleep on the sofa tonight and not push it to get up the stairs. We didn't complain - no one wanted to be on the bottom end of the dead lift.

By the next morning my mother was sufficiently worried enough to have convinced him that maybe two paracetamol and a trip to the hospital might be a good idea. We were all worried when he actually agreed.

The Doctor scanned his twisted knee and came back with the following prognosis:

He has snapped his thigh bone clean in half.

SNAPPED HIS THIGH BONE CLEAN IN HALF.

Did you hear that? The man snapped his thigh bone clean in half and then came home in a wheel chair and decided not to go to hospital for about 16 hours because he assumed he had just twisted his knee.

Do you have any idea what it's like to try and explain to that man you don't really want to do something because you've got tummy ache? Unless someone has disembowelled you and there isn't even a handy carrier bag around to keep the entrails in, chances are you're going to have to get on with whatever it is he wants doing.

For this reason, I have called home to just inform them that I have the weirdest elongated cold in the world because imagine he's already had pneumonia twice today and beaten it off by looking at an apple.

25/6

2012-01-09T20:41:00.002Z

Nobody warns you, when you're 6 and dreaming of your future, that when you're 25 that future will still feel just as far away.

You love your life, but there's another life just out of reach which where you'll be a proper adult. You're always waiting?

I will have a small house with lots of wooden furniture. I will have matching cutlery with a few unaccounted for teaspoons that appear to have been smuggled into the house. We will have to buy twice as many teaspoons as anything else because they always seem to disappear. The bathroom will resolutely not be blue or nautical in any way as a nod to the revolution in my head.

I'll stop alternately growing out and cutting off my hair one day when I am old enough to either not care or finally admit that I am destined for a bob. Mascara will be the one piece of make up I still wear even though no one seems to notice. I'll have a freestanding fridge.

My children will bring home Each Peach Pear Plum and I will surprise them by still knowing all the words. I'll still not make crumble as frequently as I intend to. I'll have enough plug sockets for the number of electrical items in any given room in my house. I'll buy coasters.

My front door will be red and I'll paint it myself when it gets chipped. There'll be somewhere near my house where I go when I want to feel like a Bronte character without anyone noticing and judging me. I might cry there sometimes. I will keep all the first coats of my babies.

I'll tut at American television and pretend to do the crossword while I watch it. I'll phone my mum to tell her about deals in the supermarket that she probably won't buy but it gives me something to talk to her about. My sisters will still think I'm irresponsible and a little tiresome.

I'll write letters to my brother's wife even though I don't like her and will never understand what he sees in her. She'll write back to me and we'll bitch about the way the other one is bringing up their kids. When we're drunk we'll probably get on really well.

I'll do things that I hated my parents doing... like asking, "Who's mean Alice?" when they ask "Can me and Alice go out and play?" I shall rather enjoy feigning ignorance at their frustration at my pedantry. They'll thank me one day... when they're hopeless impatient perfectionists with no grasp on shifting linguistic patterns and a stubbornly, increasingly archaic, vocabulary.

I'll have a garden that I absolutely hate to tend and is therefore full of plant corpses and pots of mud. There will be a sandpit that's continually too wet to play in and a swing that always needs cleaning. The children's jeans will never quite have clean bottoms.

I'll be on a diet even more frequently as I am now, the only thing that will increase is the frequency with which I lie to myself about how much I've actually eaten. Sometimes I'll wonder if I should have married someone who was clean shaven. I'll look at the guitar I got when I was 21 and admit to myself I never intended to learn it. I'll still hate people who play guitars at social gatherings.

I'll visit the sea more. I'll get that teary, beautiful feeling when I hear my children called my Dad, "Grandpa". I'll play with Lego when the children are in bed and then swear blind it wasn't me when they're confused about the architecture in the morning. I'll keep a photo of James Gandolfini in my wallet. I'll know how to make spaghetti bolognese from scratch. I'll make my children finish all the dinner on their plates but tell their guests that they needn't when they visit.

I will still cry at Gordon Lightfoot but I still won't know why. The smell of Givenchy III will still remind me of endless games of Backgammon with my Grandma and I'll still wish I liked Amber jewellery so I could think more kindly on her taste.

I'll have a freestanding mixer for my baking and I'll have cooked at least one successful Christmas dinner for my clan. I will still be buying my brother ridiculous calendars for Christmas. I'll have my own Denby crockery and a really heavy frying pan that my husband has to lift for me when it's really full up. When my son is old enough he'll feel weird that I'm too weak to do it.

I'll still be excited about my future.

Under Where?

2012-01-07T19:24:00.002Z

Today I attempted to do something I don't often do... I tried to go lingerie shopping. I felt quite out of place the second I stepped through the door and decided I vastly preferred the flannel pyjamas to the leopard print basque. However, I was on a mission to try something new and thought I would plough on with the expedition...

I swallowed my usual nervousness towards putting myself out there and admitting to trying to be sexy and started gathering teddies and basques and bras and various lace contraptions.

With 5 enticing garments in each hand I thought I ought to hit the changing room... it was going to be exciting, it was going to be like some kind of excellent parade of fleshy bits resulting in the most perfect "outfit" (?) and self esteem bursting out of the seams. Hurrah!

I tried on the first one... it was interesting in that I hated it as soon as it was on me. It was far too long and not really designed for us curvacious ladies. Never mind, thought I, next one...

I tried the next one on but unfortunately it had a contraption on the front that was designed to choke you on your own mammaries. Within the first 7 seconds I had one boob lodged under my chin like an adam's apple in a serious allergic reaction, the other one was nuzzling my ear and looking slightly preposterous surrounded with fluff and bits of material that I could only imagine would be quite difficult to get past should your suitor be attracted to the idea of boobs strapped around your head. This one wasn't going to work either.

The next in the line made me look like some kind of child trying to be a princess and just looking very wrong and weird in the process. Horrific.

Now, I was all ready to give up at this point... having had several clasps stuck in my hair in the changing process and almost at the point where I couldn't even remember where boobs were supposed to go, I thought I ought to maybe just admit that any future men of mine are going to have to make do with a vest and a vague brushing of the hair before bed.

But...

...but, then I found one of the most miraculous things I have ever found in my life. A dimmer switch in the changing room. Utter genius. The result of an absolute angelic piece of thought... "No woman in her right mind is going to think she actually looks good enough in this stuff to pay these prices... so let's let her see herself in the dark so that it doesn't matter anyway! That way she'll be thrilled about parting with her pay cheque for something she doesn't want to be seen in."

Absolutely incredible marketing device.

I left empty handed and decided instead to pay my rent this month instead of buying pants. It seemed logical to me to just hang on to my original flannels and hope that my future men are content with being allowed to touch a real woman and not be diappointed at the lack of armour keeping various body parts in place.

The shop I was in was La Senza which is obviously on its way down the toilet at the moment - I think it's an interesting industry to be in. I think I believe men couldn't really give a toss about underwear generally speaking, so it's really a shop designed to sell women things they want to wear because they think men want them to... so you need a product that looks like it will appeal to a man so that it will appeal to a woman. Difficult. I think they peaked with the dimmer switch personally.

Two Steps Back?

2012-01-04T22:29:00.001Z

Have you ever had one of those weeks where you sit down and try and review the week and realise it's only Wednesday... and you briefly consider hibernating for the next two days? I'm having one of those weeks.

I've just spent an hour unpacking from my trip home and tidying my room, only to remember that I'm leaving tomorrow to go away until Sunday night and so it was completely pointless. I'd staple my moron badge to my forehead except that I've lost it because I'm a moron. I'm going to blame the tiredness I think.

I feel a little bit like I've taken two steps back in my Life Progress this week - if I had one of those church fundraising thermometers in my front garden then I'd have to paint back over some of the red bit with some white to take it back down. Hopefully it wouldn't go a strange pink colour and confuse people - nobody likes the Savlon on a bloody wound look. Seafood gash sauce is nobody's cup of tea.

Why have I taken two steps back? Two reasons (one reason per step see? Logical), two very good reasons:

1. I have had to take on a part time job to support earnings.
2. I had a panic attack at the weekend.

Now, as a general rule I'm not keen on being miserable about stuff, but, it occurred to me at the weekend that the reason panic attacks suck monkey bollocks is you feel like a proper tosser for having one because they are often irrational or hard to explain. So, I thought if I'm not willing to talk about it and admit I have them and they're no problem, then who is going to?

So. It wasn't fun - I breathed like a shagging hamster for quarter of an hour, I ruined a pillow case with mascara and snot, I screeched like a banshee at various family members who tried to comfort and then I subjected my brother to 2 hours of television with a slightly fragile older sister who was being overly jocular so that he didn't feel awkward. It made it more awkward.

Why?

Oh who even frigging knows? As I understand it, panic attacks are quite different for all people. For me, I get a bit quiet and feel not quite right for a while and then something will make it flip - either someone being nice or something in my surroundings changing very suddenly - and I just want the ground to swallow me up so I can dribble and panic away in the dark somewhere.

The best thing about being a bit older and less patient with myself is that I know how to deal with this better. I know how to settle myself. I know how to be slightly better at this side of myself, but it's still not ideal. Sets my week out of whack.

And the new job? Obviously this feels like a step back in terms of how well the career is going... but it's only to be expected I suppose. January and February are quiet months for comedy and I'm not exactly the shiniest star in the comedy sky so I guess it's cool to need a bit of extra income. Isn't it? Yes. If you disagree then feel free to pass my details on to anyone who'd like to pay me to tell jokes.

There we go. I don't really like to be a downer but sometimes I think it's worth it so that everyone knows that things are a bit pants for everyone sometimes. I mean, not often for me because I'm so cool and successful. But I'm mortal. Kind of. But being mortal is easy when your boobs are as awesome as mine.

Night all x

Resolutely Myself

2011-12-31T14:26:00.000Z

The next person to ask me my New Year's Resolutions is going to get more than they bargained for because it's starting to irritate me quite a lot. I find the whole concept of them really pesky and misguided. I've been thinking about it for around 2 weeks now as I try and decide whether I'm going to make any and, as is my usual pattern, I've now thought about them too much and decided I hate them.

Admitting you've made a New Year's Resolution is like holding up your hand to the fact that you're terribly poorly motivated and don't have the focus and dedication to live your life as you want to all the time. It's like saying you cram all your eggs into January's basket and then rest of the year just go, "Ooh, aren't I awful."

Why?

Why can't you just make the most of your life all the time?

I know I'm not perfect... I'm far from perfect. Not as far as Hitler and Jodie Marsh, but loitering somewhere near the Tess Dalys and the Patrick Kieltys of this world... they don't make you want to hurt them but you can't remember why you've heard of them and why they always seem to be annoying you.

However, having been home for just over a week I have found I am increasingly being called lazy by my dearest mother. If it happens again I'm going to go to great lengths to show her how unlazy I actually am by organising her the best funeral one can despite her obvious protestations about her own alive-ness. I don't mind being called annoying, loud, attention seeking, moody or difficult because they are all outstandingly true (I will also listen to compliments too should they be thrown my way) but I really take umbridge at lazy because I think it's an ugly accusation and it really doesn't suit me.

Anything I really set my heart on being or doing gets done to the best of my ability, sometimes a little bit too anally retentively. Hence my dislike of New Year's Resolutions... I can't think of anything I want to set my mind to that I haven't already done:

Comedy - working on it.
Writing - got a book and a blog on the go.
Becoming more domesticated - baking at a rate of knots and have almost solved the bed sheet conundrum.
Seeing Family & Friends - I am so sociable it almost seems as though I have a paranoia about being alone (also the fact that all my alone time is spent sending blogs out into the wild blue yonder supports that theory).

Those seem to have the basics of most people's plans to achieve their dreams in 2012 covered. Now, I'm not saying that I'm cross about people aspiring to do things - what I'm cross about is that we all seem to have this desire to be and achieve greatness but we let so much crap get in the way of it the whole year round. Then we plough into being who we dream of being for 2 weeks before giving up and sinking back into our slumps again.

Why?

Why is it so freaking difficult to be who you want to be? We must all feel the same or there wouldn't be this hideous tradition of ritual promises to ourselves?

I know I'm small minded about it, not everyone has the confidence or the support to be as gung ho about getting on with things as I am. But, surely, this means that comfort and their existing life is more precious to them than the chance of what they're dreaming of? So... shouldn't that make your New Year's Resolution to evaluate how and why you are where you are? Perhaps, you haven't changed these things about yourself because the chance of attaining what you think you want isn't as good as what you're preserving already?

It's all very well to want to read the works of Charles Dickens in a year but have you considered that you haven't done it because it's boring and you actually prefer Modern Family? Maybe the classics aren't for you or you'd have done it in April.

I don't know... I'm waffling and rambling. But it seems irritating to me when people talk about themselves as though they have diminished responsibility for their actions and life. As though things get in the way or they have these unchangeable traits that make it impossible to be this better person they have in their head. Maybe you're fine the way you are and we'd all be a lot happier if we admitted that we like our lives or we'd seriously want to change them at other times.

Happy New Year.

ps - I will add that some of you are absolute fuckwits and should definitely make as many Resolutions as possible because you're awful and need help.

Just Can't Get You Out of My Head (Woof)

2011-12-30T17:52:00.000Z

I've spent the vast majority of my day thinking about The Dog's Trust. But, not the real Dog's Trust... a sort of weird Dog's Trust that's gotten progressively weirder as my day's continued... it all started with a stupid thought that popped into my head this morning when I went to work with my father. I duly Tweeted the stupid thought and thought that would be the end of it because Twitter has become my very own Pensieve. Here was my stupid Tweet:

The dog's trust never put a healthy dog down. They must have terribly tired arms.

Barely even worth copying and pasting here... it's the sort of joke that my Dad would come out with and I'd groan a bit and be cross with him for being so awful. But then it sort of started an avalanche of thoughts.

Really, you'd think it'd be the sick ones they'd carry wouldn't you?

I now have images of Dog's Trust employees wading through mountains of sick puppies with arms full of perfectly healthy Terriers yelping "Save the others!". Like some sort of scene from the Titanic lifeboats. There are squashed dogs everywhere and the healthy ones are insisting they can be merrily independent but the big bosses are squawking about their "Creed". There's a small person in the corner pointing out that the poster boy for their campaign has the voice of a similarly homeless donkey and so it shouldn't be too upsetting to just pop a healthy Retriever onto the counter for a minute.

How do they get any paperwork done when they're always holding at least one dog? What sort of dog to volunteer ratio do they need? Do they need harnesses to keep the little nippers off the floor? Is it all some kind of canine Off Ground Touch conspiracy?

It makes the people of the Dog's Trust seem crueller than a Fascist regime where the sick and the dying are left scattered around the floor while the healthy ones are paraded around despite their obvious ability to walk unaided. Weird. The healthy dogs are only going to end up getting sick if they never exercise and are always supported in a way they shouldn't really be supported. Unless that's the plan? To carry the dogs until they get sick and then it's all right to hit them with a rock?

I don't think it promotes a good image for The Dog's Trust. They must have a lot of dogs... how on earth are they managing it? Unless they only have very small dogs and are adopting Paris Hilton's handbag technique? I hope they don't have Battery Dogs. I feel very sorry for the intern who ends up on Great Dane duty.

And it has continued in this vein all day... kill me.

Hell Is Other People

2011-12-20T22:49:00.001Z

It's done, it's over, it's finished for another year.

Christmas shopping.

There are not many things on the planet that I sincerely loathe but Christmas shopping is definitely among them. I hate it.

I hate shopping at the best of times and will very rarely do it. If I have to do it, I like to do it alone and with a simple list of things that need buying and where they're most likely to be bought from. If you choose to shop with other people you run the risk of falling into this problem:

"Oh, I'll just pop in to River Island on the way past and try that top on."

And they will throw that down as though it's not going to take any more time than boiling the kettle. Then you have to stand there in a shop that is too hot and pretend you care about whether the top looks any good while you wish you had the balls to suggest you go about your shopping and meet them back at the car.

The other thing you need to avoid is getting completely finished and then someone declares:

"Oh, I just need to pop to Clinton's for Selotape."

and you realise that Clinton's is right down the other end of the high street and you are going to have to venture through the whole slalom of prams, idiots, tourists, morons and slow people before you can pick up some selotape (which will have got itself lost before you get home anyway) and finally get in the car.

The chances are the person you're shopping with will be one of the following 3 types of people:

a) A Clinger. Someone who cannot shop independently and must stay with you while you make all your choices and then insists that you come with them to do all their choosing. It's no good suggesting you all raid WHSmiths separately and meet at the till: they shop communally. Arseholes.

b) A Loser. These people will disappear for anything up to 25 minutes without giving any indication of where they're going. You do as much as you can in the immediate vicinity but then stop to wait for them. They will then reappear and look at you like you're a clinger because they're visited the next 3 shops up the road while you've been standing like a lemon looking for them. Buttplugs.

c) The Creeping Doubt. This is someone who will talk incessantly while you are making all your choices and will make you so nervous that your gifts aren't going to be appropriate/expensive enough that you end up buying nothing while they zip around the stores making it all look super easy. They are usually loaded and full of anecdotes that end with them miraculously pulling Christmas out of their asses and giving it to orphans. Scrotbags.

Of course, the hell of other people being in town is not limited to simply the people you've (semi) chosen to go out with. There are all the other muppets blocking up the pavements. I've long believed that pavements ought to have a lane system similar to roads:

A stopping lane.
A dawdling lane.
A fast people lane.

Anyone caught using the wrong lane gets shot and then laughed at.

Prams get their own lane and those pushing the prams are to receive no special treatment just because they've sprogged up. I do not want to have to give you automatic right of way just because you're a cart horse and I've stayed nimble. You made your choice, you had a kid, you've brought it out in public now deal with the fact you can barely move and everyone else hates you. There are a lot of upsides to children so think really hard about those while it takes you 9 hours to accomplish a small task and I'll be about my merry way without your scowls. Thanks.

Everyone should have to pay by chip and pin card in the week leading up to Christmas. We have no time for cash or for counting out the right amount of change. Go and put your change in your account and then use your card. If you're unable to use chip and pin then please go home, you should have shopped earlier or done it on line. We'll tell your family you tried.

I'm sure there are many more things I can think of that I would like to change about the Christmas shopping experience but I'm beginning to feel like the Grinch and I truly love Christmas so I will leave it there and go back to trying to make my wrapped presents look less like they were decorated by Abu Hamza and an enthusiastic Chihuahua.

Kim Yong The Witch Is Dead

2011-12-19T12:18:00.002Z

Does anyone actually like jokes?

I'm asking this quite seriously, who actually enjoys jokes? Is it the person listening to them or is it all about the kick you get from telling them?

Is a joke the mental linguistic equivalent of putting the last piece in a jigsaw puzzle, where the satisfaction of seeing separate parts come together to form something gives you a burst of pleasure?

This morning I woke up to the news that Kim Yong Il is dead, and, being an avid Twaddict I found out via the medium of 140 tedious characters. Scrolling through the 4 hours worth of tweets in my timeline I came across close to 90billion different Kim Yong Il jokes... here is a selection:

@comedymattdwyer - At least his death has saved millions of unnecessary iPhone key strokes. #kimjongi'll

@JonSnowC4 - Kim Jong, so ill, that he's actually dead...

@StephenCGrant - So, Kim Jong-Il's 28-yr old son will automatically take over. I thought the job would go to a Jong-un.

These all seem to be perfectly adequate jokes. They've taken the subject matter and then thought of something to go with that subject and then it's turned into a joke. Delightful. None of them made me laugh though. The ones that made me at least smile were more along these lines:

@macleanbrendan - We did it Twitter. We made every Kim Jong-Il joke there was to make. I'm sure North Korea will appreciate it once they get the Internet.

@StephenCGrant - So, 28yr old Kim Jong-Un is diabetic, overweight, a fan of NBA and getting the job from his Dad. Surely Americans can relate to this..?

@LettersOfNote - I can't wait until America wakes up; then I can read all the Kim Jong-il puns again.

So, obviously it's the less wordplay based jokes that have amused me. My own personal taste and I'm really not slating the work of the jokers who created the puns. It got me thinking though, with jokes like that, they really are all about the housing and the delivery. Puns very rarely make me laugh, there's something not quite strong enough in their make up to flick the giggle switch. The times that they do make me laugh are when the joke is that the puns themselves are too poor to be told without being the butt of their own joke.

It occurs to me that, actually, the first set of jokes are also very much in the set up for the second set of jokes. Without the light entertainment of the puns there would be no background for the jokes with more gravity - the Twitter feed would seem sanctimonious and preachy with the comedians all seeming to trip over themselves to be sanctimonious and well informed for their jokes.

Do we need the ridiculous to enjoy the intelligent?

I've always thought that the world has to contain the things we disapprove of so that we know what we stand for. For example, I applaud people like Jordan being able to do what she's done and have the career she's had because it gives us a model upon which to base our opinions. Without her I wouldn't know I believe that:

a) I want to be, what I consider to be, better than her in my personal life choices and I would discourage my children from having her as a role model.

b) I admire people who have the business sense to produce a career out of no talent. PR is a business she's played well and I don't see why she shouldn't be who she is rather than another drone in a supermarket on the dole with a load of kids because we don't have the industries to support a mass uneducated workforce.

c) The media is filled with twatriddled fuckerbombs and I'd rather eat my own gangrenous toes than be the kind of writer/journalist who draws red circles around the insecurities of normal bodies and call them disgusting.

So... back to jokes... what do we think? Do you need the softly softly approach to enjoy the harder line? Do you have to have Michael McIntyre for George Carlin to make sense?

Jokes can't exist in a vacuum of context, but is it fair to say they also have to have a specific jocular equilibrium to work? I think it just might be.

Soapy Parts Club

2011-12-18T13:07:00.000Z

This time next week it'll be Christmas, that's right motherbloggers - it'll be present opening, turkey munching, nut cracking Christmas time. I am reasonably excited. Scrap that, I'm the happiest I've been all year and counting down the seconds until I can get on a train and get the ball rolling.

The only teensy weensy fly in the Christmas ointment is that I haven't done any Christmas shopping yet. I loathe shopping. I can't really understand how anyone finds it enjoyable. I hate clothes shopping the most but present shopping is also pretty dire... there's so much uncertainty and worrying that what you're buying is either not good enough, not expensive enough or not suitable for whoever you've bought it for. Then there's present buying etiquette where you're not sure whether you're even meant to be buying a gift for someone or not. You don't want to look cheap but at the same time it's just occurred to you that you're not that keen on them so why do you have to suffer the queues in HMV?

Yesterday I managed to buy 2 gifts. I considered doing more but then I realised it was a Saturday and everyone with a job was shopping, so why didn't I just wait until they're all at work? Smart people, the unemployed.

Also, I was unwell yesterday. I know! There had been no alcohol involved at all and yet I spent the entire day lying on the sofa with various rounds of tea hoping that no bright lights entered the room. I hate to be ill almost as much as I hate to shop so the two people I bought gifts for yesterday should be grateful that I did both at the same time for them.

Thankfully I have a super immune system so today I'm fighting fit... it might also help that I got some sleep last night. I should have known yesterday would be a washout after the activities of Thursday rolling into Friday...

Thursday night I kidnapped my younger yet bigger brother and took him to a gig with me in a tiny town made of Staples and Barns in the West Country. We had lots of laughs and then decided that, seeing as we were already out and it was already late, we would stay and watch the headliner. This was awesome in terms of comedy but a mistake in that I still had to drive to that Bright Town on the South Coast. However, Duncan Oakley (Mr Headliner) made us laugh an awful, awful lot, I particularly found most of the puerile stuff amusing which caused younger yet bigger brother to frown at me a little. I recommend you seek out Duncan and his jokes as they are particularly brilliant.

I dropped the sibling back off at my parents' house and, after stealing copious amounts of chocolate brownie and crisps to keep me going, set off for Brighton. To say the journey was dull would be unfair; I had a hire car with heated seats and steering wheel and a selection of my mother's CDs to keep me amused. It is truly shocking how much of Sam Brown's album I can still sing along with at the top of my voice.

I arrived in Brighton at about 3:30 and then had 2.5 hours sleep before getting up at 6 and continuing my journey along to Hastings. Why Hastings? Well, because my theatre company (Spun Glass Theatre) were doing a Christmas activity day for the pupils of a local primary school.

We were to perform a half hour session for each of the 7 classes... this was my sleep deprived Everest. The infants were a piece of cake (the ones that didn't cry with fear), they listened to a nice story, joined in with the songs and even took quite kindly to my terrible puppeteering of a wolf that is apparently the school mascot.

The juniors were a different kettle of fish... we decided that they probably wouldn't be that interested in a story about a dog weeing on a tree. So, we got hold of the list of children in each class and used it for a cameo performance between Santa and the wolf. Santa would read out the name of the child and the wolf (and the elf pretending to be the wolf) would make up something ridiculous that the child had apparently asked for for Christmas. If ever there was an argument for reducing class sizes, this was it. Have you ever tried to make up 35 crazy Christmas gifts that are neither too rude nor too boring for a class of 10 year olds? We had anything ranging from Weetabix to a date with Justin Bieber to a request for a red velvet dress to do karaoke in. On the arrival of the headmaster, the wolf declared that one child had requested a bite on the bottom for said Captain from the mischievous wolf. It briefly crossed my mind at that point that the chances of getting paid for this job were slowly slipping through my puppet filled fingers...

Finally we had completed all the classes and so we packed up the car and drove all the way back to Brighton. I had done 3 times more driving than I had sleeping in the last 18 hours and it was really starting to show...

Still, it got us firmly in the Christmas mood and the children were all happy so maybe a headache and an inability to do anything yesterday was a small price to pay for such a varied few days. Now, if only someone wanted to do my Christmas shopping for me I'd say it was time to kick off the festivities!

Somebody Threw A Tomato At Him

2011-12-13T11:24:00.000Z

I have a problem: I have applied for a morning job as a sandwich delivery girl but my hair is not yet long enough to wear in pigtails while I make my deliveries. Whilst this might not be the main problem in my life it is certainly something that's giving me some issues. If I'm going to get this job, I sincerely want to be the best at it and being the best at it is going to involve looking like a sandwich delivery girl. Complete with pigtails.

I'm also thinking that, my job as a sandwich delivery girl is far more likely to deliver uproarious Rom Com results if I can make myself as similar as possible to Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors. I don't want to waste a load of mornings delivery crappy sandwiches in the freezing cold if I'm not going get anything resembling John Hannah out of it.

Obviously I'll be looking into hair extensions if they make a formal offer but I'm wondering how to go about suggesting at pigtails for the interview. I think it would be awkward to have to say right out loud, "Hey guys, I'm willing to get pigtails." because sometimes you have to be a little more subtle about these things and sort of say in a roundabout way, "Hey guys, I'm willing to really make myself fit into this position."

I like the idea of delivering sandwiches, it'd be combining two things I'm very, very passionate about:

1. Pleasing people
2. Sandwiches

Also, I'd get a bike with a cart on the back and, if I'm honest, that sounds like an awful lot of fun. I'm not sure whether or not to mention in the interview that I'm a fairly competent baker myself. Sometimes you have to be pretty careful about these things in case you give the impression that you're aiming too high and you'll be shooting for the big jobs within a short space of time. The bakers would be all like, "Hey guys, I don't even care if she is subtly suggesting about pigtail hair extensions, if you hire her now she'll have all our jobs by August because she's so dedicated and great."

So you sort of have to be a little more careful... Maybe throw in a little, "Hey guys, I've had a quick go at baking and I loved it but still have so much to learn! I'd be pretty happy to stay behind and get some tips if that wouldn't be too much of an imposition?" That way, you're being quite humble and making sure they're aware you're not above your station.

Obviously if it was any normal job interview I would go in a suit of some kind, however, I feel like with this kind of role it's best to show off the assets you're going to need to be a success. Therefore I'll be wearing pedal pushers and a smile because those two will accentuate my glowing customer service and my calves. Without strong calves those sandwiches are going to be stale before I've even got my basket into the office. No good. Best to leave them in absolutely no doubt that I'll be the best employee they've ever had.

Finally, now that these people are totally convinced that I would be the most enthusiastic person they've ever had on their staff, I'm going to need to reassure them that I am no danger to their stock levels. At this point I will probably feign either an allergy to bread (a mouth allergy, not a hands allergy) or tell them a very sad story about how I used to be enormous but am now lithe and now danger to a bicycle frame and it's all because I dropped the carbs.

Perfect. Bish bash bosh. Job in the bag! If you need any more advice on this subject please feel free to get in touch.

I'm from Nepal - You're Italy?!

2011-12-12T23:39:00.003Z

Sup blog folk. I'm on the weedy end of a super freak weekend of brilliantness. How the devil are you?

My weekend started on Thursday, technically. Well, I suppose in all honesty it sort of started back in June when I quit my job and became a professional loser but let's not haggle. Thursday night I went out for dinner with a friend of mine. Now, I've recently been trying to prove to this guy that he and I are very different people - he seems to firmly believe that I fit in fine with his crowd... I have been trying to prove to him that, when faced with a house party full of lawyers, I can produce more sweat from a single hand palm than an entire Indian monsoon season.

We were out for dinner and he accidentally challenged me to prove to him that I wouldn't fit in perfectly with a high tea with a Lord and Lady. When the results came in we were asked not to return to the restaurant again unless I was sedated.

Obviously, when someone lays down a challenge like that it's difficult to think creatively at first... so, you have to resort to learned behaviour. In my case my learned behaviour was the film When Harry Met Sally... the trick is, to not only recreate the scene perfectly, but to also hold eye contact with the nearest waiter throughout your rendition to add an extra element to your work. If you can pull it off just right you will be handed your trophy there and then. Unfortunately, I was paired with a worthy adversary.

It's very useful when you're in the middle of something like this, to have as many tools at your disposal as you can. I was lucky; we'd ordered Mezze. This meant I had an entire plate of tiny fish that were just perfectly aerodynamic and discreet. Obviously, it was a little boring to simply hide them places... what was much more fun was to explain to, a different, waiter that, despite your best efforts, the fish was just not savable and could you please have a live one and a new beer because this one now has a useless dead fish in it.

I believe we were brought water after that and the bar staff were told not to supply any more alcohol to table 18.

One of the downsides of Mezze is that there are lots of very spillable foods... this can be turned around to your advantage at this point. I won't take credit for the initial spilling of my Taboule onto my lap and napkin - that was just clumsiness - but, once it was there and I was already being frowned at I sort of thought, in for a penny... and decided the sensible option was to lick the napkin clean. It took a full 90 seconds and a very dry tongue to get the vast majority of that food off. I would have liked to have regained waiter eye contact by this point but he was not playing ball and I had to make do with rounding off this section by biting the offending messy part of the napkin clean off and then smoothing it out on the table by my glass.

The cracks were beginning to show and my dinner date asked for the third course to be put straight into boxes and we would skip straight to pudding. Yummy! Baklava! Who doesn't love baklava? Who doesn't love having their debit card neatly stored in some baklava? My ex-friend... that's who doesn't like having his debit card stored in the baklava. This was a pretty simple manoeuvre but it turned out to have a lovely echo effect on it as I was able to laugh all over again the next day when I received a text message telling the offending debit card was stuck firmly to the inside of his wallet. Brilliant.

However, I still hadn't quite sealed my fate as confined to the trash can of unsuitables. It was time to play hard ball... this required a few separate stages... firstly, the Turkish Delight had to be removed from the bill plate and put into a napkin. A lovely treat for the way home?

Or...

A wonderfully icing sugar coated delight that leaves a fantastic imprint when flung at the windows of a restaurant or passing cars?

Exactly.

I have to admit though that the final scene of the extravaganza was something not even I could have masterminded and was due entirely to that beautiful Mistress fate. Once outside and waiting for our taxi, the scene all of a sudden needed new characters, I was provided with an Extra and the scene went something like this...

Extra: Alright, would you like to buy a line of coke?

Me: No, thank you.

Pause.

Me: Would you like to buy some Turkish Delight?

Extra: No, thank you. I don't like Turkish Delight.

Me: Oh, I don't really like coke.

Extra: Oh. Probably not even worth swapping then.

Me: No. Good luck selling your coke.

Extra: Thanks, love, good luck with your Turkish Delight.

My Friend: For fuck's sake woman stop talking to that drug dealer and get in the taxi.

And, end scene. Point Proven. Game, set, match.

Six Dinner Sid

2011-12-08T13:35:00.001Z

It's almost as though my attention span was bought cheap on eBay, second hand from a goldfish who was getting pissed off with it's lack of reliability. I've spent this morning trying to put a new chapter into the writing I'm doing and I've so far been distracted by the following things:

1. The "It Gets Better" campaign on YouTube
2. Fashioning a Virgin Mary style head dress out of the pink and purple monkey blanket on my bed.
3. Facebook
4. Twitter
5. Twitter again because it's ridiculous.
6. All the Pixar shorts (inspiration from the "It Gets Better" campaign)
7. Trying to make my bed socks stick on my ears.
8. The music of The Baseballs.
9. Seeing how many slices of toast I can toast at one time using a grill and toaster combo
10. Clenching my bum cheeks in time to the music of The Baseballs and the sobbing to the "It Gets Better" campaign.
11. Twitter. Screw you Twitter.

Without deadlines and daily structure I find it literally impossible to make myself do anything without being continually called away by the nearest shiny thing. If Twitter was diamond themed I think I'd be comparable to a meth head, except people would have less sympathy for me and my penchant for hideous puns. Just how much pain can you cram into 140 characters? A fucktonne. That's how much.

Luckily, I've managed to fill my gap in gigs this week with various dinners so that I at least have a cap on the end of the day to make me get on with something before 5pm. Tonight I'm being taken to a Greek restaurant - if there is no plate smashing and rioting I am going to be literally furious. I've written to HMRC to find out if the cost of my meal tonight can be counted as a tax deductable charitable contribution. I'm confident on the outcome of that one.

Last night I disappeared into the depths of South West London for a lovely catch up meal with my best girls from University. Thankfully, I have the sort of group of best girl friends who abhor squealing and hugging as much as I do so we had a very civilised meal. It's very comforting to be in the company of people who already know all of your biggest mistakes, and they can remember the surnames of those mistakes more accurately than you can. There's a lot to be said for old friends. In two weeks I'll be sloping back to the Shire for a good knees up with all the folks I schooled with... I don't care what your religious beliefs are, there has to be a space in the human calendar for this kind of behaviour.

Tuesday night saw me at a Burlesque club with one of my newer friends. Now, anyone who's been bored enough to bother reading this blog with something resembling regularity over the last few years will know that Burlesque seems to be a reoccurring nightmare in my life. I somehow seem to end up in these establishments more than I feel I should, and I have to say it's growing on me. Not that I would ever want to try it out, I'm not sure potato knees and stretch marks are exactly top order when you're bending yourself round a microphone stand, but I have lost my inhibitions in going to watch and admiring it for what it is. I mean, essentially what it is is a lot of tassles and a bit more teasing. With some fire, sometimes there's fire.

The thing that stuck out for me that night was the way they worked the audience. There were only three tables in the audience and our table was the only all girl group. This meant that, when the acts were coming out to talk to the audience, not a single one of them bothered to speak to our group because there were no men to interact with. Despite the fact we were enjoying the show, we felt excluded from the performance because we were not invited in by the acts.

It got me thinking about whether I ever do this subconsciously during stand up comedy performances. There's an inner monologue that kicks off during a gig where you're constantly analysing the way the audience is reacting to you and judging tables for their reactions. It hadn't occurred to me, until Tuesday, that sometimes the audience are just as nervously wanting to be accepted as the act is. Especially in a small room, some audience members are just quiet laughers or introverted but it doesn't necessarily mean they dislike your act and should therefore have less attention. Obviously, if they're throwing things that's another matter.

Now, where was I? See, I try and sit down to write some meaningless babble about getting distracted and I end up on such a tangent that I've actually written an on topic blog. Typical.

Dream Catch Me

2011-12-06T13:04:00.001Z

I dreamt last night that my front tooth fell out. I was really upset and worried that no one would ever love me again because I was a toothless cretin and I looked like a hobo. In my dream I was properly devastated about the loss of my tooth because I am nigh on obsessed with teeth cleaning. I genuinely love to floss, I can't bear not brushing at least twice a day and I really enjoy a good mouthwash. Of course, that's not to say I'm not sitting in my bed right now eating chocolates out of my tuck box, but I will literally get up and brush my teeth straight away when I've finished this blog.

In the dream I had lost my tooth and I needed to go to the dentist but while I was on my way to the dentist the dream changed and we were suddenly in a forest but we had to get off the ground and up into the trees because the werewolves were coming and the bears (who were on our side) had to put the electric magic cables into the ground to kill them. Anything that wasn't in a tree was going to get frazzled and it's a well known fact that werewolves can't climb trees.

The obvious thing to do was to check out what on earth all this nonsense meant, so, here we go:

I've picked this up from www.dreammoods.com and it discusses my toothy part of the dream:

One theory is that dreams about your teeth reflect your anxieties about your appearance and how others perceive you. Your teeth help to convey an image of attractiveness and play an important role in the game of flirtation, whether it is flashing those pearly white, kissing or necking. Thus, such dreams may stem from a fear of rejection, sexual impotence or the consequences of getting old. To support this notion, a dream research found that women in menopause report to have frequent dreams about teeth. This points to teeth dreams as being related to getting older and/or feeling unattractive and less feminine. Teeth are an important feature to your attractiveness and how you are presented to others. Caring about how you look is natural and healthy.

Well, I mean bloody hell! If I wasn't paranoid about my looks before I went to bed, I am now! I actually thought I looked all right yesterday but clearly my subconscious was just doing something else when we made that decision. It's not supremely accurate because I don't fear rejection sexually, I've learnt to deal with sexual rejection by just never approaching anyone with that in mind. I let them come to me, you know? Obviously this is working out so well that I now have nights of the week bed socks and a hot water bottle in the shape of Lord Bath (cuddly but not predatory).

I really like that tagged on "Caring about how you look is natural and healthy" to make people feel better about the fact they are so vain they are literally having night mares about people not wanting to screw them. If I have this dream again tomorrow night I'm just going to embrace menopause and let the hot flushes rule me until I have no more teeth left to induce such panic.

Alarmingly, the onset of menopause isn't the most terrifying thing I have on my horizon:

Werewolf
To see a werewolf in your dream indicates that something in your life is not what it seems. It is symbolic of fear, repressed anger, and uncontrollable violence.

To dream that you are a werewolf suggests that some aspects of your personality are hurtful and even dangerous to your own well-being. You are headed down an undesirable path. Alternatively, a werewolf refers to your repressed instincts.

Well, cushion the blow why don't you Mr Dream Website... I mean damn. Uncontrollable violence? So, there's a chance I knocked my own tooth out and I won't be drying up any time soon? No wonder I'm worried about people rejecting me sexually if I have aspects of my own personality that are even upsetting me let alone everyone else out there.

I'm heading down an undesirable path? Well, yes, I'm well on my way to becoming a stand up comedian where only depression and obesity looms. I knew that, but I promise you if I was still trying out that 9-5 stuff I'd probably be dreaming I was a rabid werewolf with cancerous lumps and bad fashion sense.

There was a little bit of good news when it came to the bear section:

Bear
To see a bear in your dream symbolizes independence, the cycle of life, death and renewal, and resurrection. You are undergoing a period of introspection and thinking. The dream may also be a pun on "bare". Perhaps you need to bare your soul and let everything out into the open.

I really, really enjoy that my unconscious brain might be trying to get in on the joke writing action with its own attempts at poor jokes. I'm totes independent, obvs so perhaps I need to be a little more frank and honest in my preaching. I feel very sorry for the next audience I encounter. Look out Basingstoke, you are going to find out exactly why I cry every time Del Boy gets upset.

Now, looking for "electric trees" didn't get me any results because apparently they are not common enough (thank you brain for having a go at something uniquely barmy). So, we had to break it down a bit, but it didn't seem to fit:

Trees
To see lush green trees in your dream symbolize new hopes, growth, desires, knowledge, and life.

But, unfortunately they weren't lush and green... they were massive and mass planted and built to carry electricity to keep me and the bears away from the werewolves. And we're back to the misery:

To see bare trees in your dream indicate used up energy. You have put your all into some relationship or project and now you are exhausted. Perhaps you are even feeling depressed.

Well, I'm not in a relationship and I sleep until at least midday most days. Also, it's 13:26 now and I'm very much still in bed. What's to be depressed about? I'm arguably one of the happiest people you'll ever meet (except for during certain episodes of Only Fools and Horses). I can only assume it's the energy I've been putting in to my baking lately... those sweet treats have been draining my life essence and making me dream all this crud. This makes a lot of sense, presumably with less cake around my teeth would be more inclined to stay in my head too.

Electricity
To dream of electricity symbolizes vigor and life energy. You need to be revitalized. Alternatively, the dream suggests that you need to conserve your energy.

Well, fuck it, that's pretty conclusive isn't it? Is there nothing you can dream about that just means "lively mind and a penchant for seeking out shiny things" ? How am I going to get more energy into my system if I'm not allowed to bake cakes any more? They are my main source of sugar. This is frankly ridiculous.

To sum up, according to last night's dream I am depressed because I'm a hideous, menopausal wench that can't get laid and so I've become scared of my own personality. It's all going straight down the crapper unless I really start telling people about what's up and stop baking and telling jokes immediately. It's largely because I'm tired so sleeping more than my current 11 hours a night is advisable.

I think I was happier when we blamed this kind of crap on cheese.

As We Know It 2

2011-12-05T15:59:00.001Z

This is an expansion of an ongoing project I've been mulling over... the original post is here: http://lauralexx.blogspot.com/2011/07/as-we-know-it.html . Constructive feedback is ever appreciated.

By Day 6 of the Apocalypse we had pretty much all agreed that the biggest problem was our lack of death. People were starting to get fractious. Even the stalwart Christians were showing signs of noticeable anxiety about the length of time between the end of the world and the appearance of their Lord and Saviour to tell them what to to do and shepherd them to a chaise longue and a few grapes. Mrs Hemell had written a strongly worded letter to the BBC and had been very close to sending it before Mr Baxter pointed out that the BBC probably had little to do with the whereabouts of Christ. No one was really sure whether Points of View was still running as we'd all agreed not to use our televisions in case it turned out we needed the electricity in the future. Stockpiling always seems sensible at a time like this.

The missing Jesus was a cause of some concern at the first meeting of the Apocalypse Committee at the Village Hall. Iris Shoe caused violence to break out by suggesting that perhaps JC was just working his way down the country and that really 6 days was quite reasonable if you considered he was probably going to do the cities first. Mr Arthur (first name also Arthur) asked her if Jesus would be visiting all the towns in size order, Mrs Shoe said she had always assumed so, and Mr Arthur responded that he'd driven a lorry for 38 years and that was the most illogical assumption possible. He said any traveller worth their salt knew you should plan your route geographically. Beryl, who owns the corner shop, slapped him around the face for suggesting Jesus was a gypsy.

Iris pointed out that, if you didn't start with the biggest place, how would you know where to begin the tour? Everyone agreed that the country's extremities were no place to begin a mission of salvation - Scotland was not designed for such prestie. So Iris again asserted that she felt they would be reached in due course once the Good Lord had reached them on his list. Unfortunately, Beryl's hand got away with her again when she worked out that this meant Staplegrove would be visited first, despite the fact we had twice beaten them at the South West Floral Village Awards between 2006 and 2009. At this point Nigel decided he ought to take Beryl home as there were whisperings about Apocalypse Fever. Mr Baxter wrapped his dog's leash firmer around his hand.

With Beryl and Nigel gone it was felt that perhaps we should put the issue of what to do until Jesus got there to one side for a few minutes. Mr Young pointed out that some of us didn't really think he was coming anyway, and even when he did turn up, there was no guarantee we'd want to go with him.

"We'll have to wait and see what he's got to offer first. Might be worth our while to barter a little bit."

Once he and Mrs Dressing had stopped giggling over how much fun they'd had on the group holiday in Morocco with all those "funny stall owners", the vicar stood up and declared that there would be no bartering with Jesus Christ when he arrived and that all their bartering should really have been wrapped up in prayers in Church before the apocalypse had even happened.

"But we didn't know when to expect it." Came Mr Young's sullen reply, "I was still making my mind up."

The vicar said that the power of the Lord should be felt in your heart and soul and you shouldn't need persuading. Mr Young said that it wasn't his fault if Sky had more compelling programming than the pulpit. Suddenly I think we were all beginning to miss Beryl.

The idea was floated that, perhaps we should split the Apocalypse Committee into a further sub-committee entitled, The Welcoming Committee and they could take full responsibility for what we would do when Jesus got there. A buffet seemed like the most logical option and so the vicar agreed to work with Mrs Shoe and Mr Frinton on planning a menu and looking for a suitable venue. If we could give it a lick of paint then the Village Hall would do at a push, but there was a feeling in the room that perhaps Jesus was a little more outdoorsy.

It had taken us a full 90 minutes to agree on this and, as we had eaten that week's ration of Bourbons, we decided to call it a day and reconvene in 36 hours for the next meeting. Mr Baxter made a hasty exit with his dog as the Welcoming Committee's conversation turned to Jesus' morally surprising lack of vegetarian persuasion. No one wanted to be caught with just hummous if Staplegrove had sprung for pigs in blankets...

End the Week For The Love of Mike

2011-12-04T18:14:00.000Z

Today I have made bread, tidied my room, vacuumed, eaten the bread and watched Turner and Hooch... all whilst wearing a lovely woolly hat and a contented little smile. This is one of my most productive days in recent memory and it is due firmly to me not being hung over today. I think the world would be a lot more efficient if we rotated a system of alternating hang overs, because everyone knows that the first day after a hang over you feel so grateful to be better that you will achieve everything impossible in case you are mysteriously struck down the next day. Obviously, it's not a huge mystery because the empty wine bottles are still all over the place, but it's a mystery as to why you drank that much in the first place when you know you are the first to be dancing on a time to Carly Simon when the time comes.

Friday night was an interesting night... I was literally dreading going. Twas a birthday party which was only to be attended by people I didn't know. I knew the birthday celebrator obviously or it would have just been me crashing a party and the last time I did that I was banned from the Charlie Chalk play area for ball pooling with inappropriate footwear. But the night out was fun and bearable and all that stuff. I'm not sure letting someone do a shot of tequila (salt, lime, entire kit and kaboodle) off my chest was a classy highlight of my life but you cannot say I do not know how to make new friends. Fact.

So yesterday I had to eat the obligatory kilo of bacon to try and soak up the residual Sauvignon. I don't know why they don't just add alcohol straight to bacon, or at least glaze it, or at least get the pigs nice and drunk before they kill them... alcohol clearly makes the stuff taste much better than it usually would so why go to the hassle of consuming them separately? If I ruled the country then there would be a lot of caterers out of business because all buffets would be limited to bacon sandwiches in one hand and a glass of something evil in the other. Happy days. Vegetarians and tea total folks are probably going to have to stay in a lot. Or protest. But they're not going to have the energy or drunken creativity to protest in a way that will circumvent our pork induced devil party so we won't even notice.

My woolly hat and I are going to make burgers from scratch now... jealous much? Course you are. It's a great woolly hat.

Fright Night

2011-12-02T20:58:00.000Z

I'm literally minutes away from putting my impossibly high heeled shoes and walking out the front door for a jolly good knees up. I've dutifully painted a different face over my perfectly acceptable usual face. I've squeezed myself into a dress that leaves little room except under the arms for any flesh that you wouldn't find on a Barbie. I've altered the structure of my hair to the point that it's threatening to go and work for Helena Bonham Carter if I come near it with a comb again.

Brilliant.

Why do we insist on doing this again?

Tune in tomorrow for my homage to Katy Perry and the inevitable retelling of exactly how wild my night got. Or watch my Twitter feed around midnight for sounds of pleasure being emitted as I get home, take shoes off, put pyjamas on and eat cake in front of the nearest Bill Pullman film I can find.

Eugh.

The First of Happy

2011-12-01T12:54:00.001Z

1st December eh?

Well, no, I don't have an Advent calendar still. I nearly bought one at a service station on the A1 at 1am this morning but I didn't want to look at it every day in the build up to Christmas and smell Ginsters and misery.

It pretty much has to go straight into Christmas on the 1st December because something has to happen to pick me up after the crushing loss of all those beautiful moustaches. I love a good moustache. Obviously it was a really unsettling day when mine went from being a faint insecurity to a visible intrusion but that's nothing a good dose of bleach, a bottle of wine and an evening of me time can't fix.

There has actually been a slight upset to my 1st December joy. This morning I found out I am being cheated on. It's quite the mood killer when you're trying to get into the Christmas spirit.

I know what you're thinking, "Laura, you're not even in a relationship - I think your hallucinations are getting out of control. Get some rest and come back when you're lucid." But that's where you'd be wrong.

Since October 2010 I've been living with someone and I thought we were really happy together and I thought it was going beautifully. This morning, in a completely unprovoked bubble puncture, I found evidence of playing away on the coffee table. ON THE FREAKING COFFEE TABLE? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Why rub it in my face? Fine. You're not totally satisfied with me. Tell me. I can change it up a bit or maybe we need to talk about some different "recipes" but does it really need to be this cruel when it happens? I don't really understand how the people who are supposed to love you the most can be the ones who always end up fucking you over. On my own bastard coffee table.

I literally feel sick. I haven't even been able to put it in the bin. I'm not sure if it's meant to provocation, whether I'm supposed to be the one to mention it...?

This is what I woke up to this morning:

A fucking muffin. A shitty, shop bought, chocolate chip muffin. In plastic packaging. Not even covered up over night. WOULD IT HAVE BEEN SO HARD TO PUT IT IN THE BREADBIN SO I DIDN'T HAVE TO SEE IT?

If my baking is not enough for you, dearest housemates, then tell me! I can make more! I can branch out with the recipes, I can cook requests, I can take more lessons. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

I'm so hurt. I can't believe they had to go for such cheap sugary delights when I have been bending over backwards to bring tiny sweet delights into this house. This must be exactly how Colleen Rooney felt. I don't know if I'm even going to be able to look people in the eye this evening. The worst feeling is the feeling of inadequacy... what was so wrong with my cakes that it had to come to this? Have I been neglecting? Were they not interesting enough? Was I not experimental enough?

I just don't know. Thank heavens for impending Christmas glory. Between this muffin based infidelity and the lack of tache in my surrounding area I just don't think I could go on without it.

Add My Vent

2011-11-30T13:57:00.000Z

I don't have an advent calendar. I can't see the point carrying on.

This is the one month of the year where you can treat yourself for sleeping well with a small chocolate treat or a pretty picture before you've even started your day... only I don't have one. Advent calendars are like a little Hansel and Gretel trail leading you straight to diabetes central.

As it's nearly 2pm and I'm still sitting in my bed socks, educating myself on the musical back catalogue of Bare Naked Ladies and lamenting my lack of forward planning, it seems unlikely that I'm going to get one today. Unless they're giving them away at the end of tonight's gig as payment. Sweet countdown orientated payment... The average Advent calendar must cost, what, about £3.50? So I could get at least 4 of those in exchange for my "cheque to follow" for this evening's work? Thank you MC rates of pay! Yay! If I wait for my cheque to come in it's going to be way too late for this year's Christmas and I'm going to have to put it towards Easter. I'll phone ahead and see what they say.

*A brief interlude of going to find my phone and slipping down the last 8 stairs because I'm wearing bed socks and my hip isn't working*

OK, so I no longer have a gig tonight. That worked out, er, well. Brilliant. Now I have the time to go to Tesco and get myself an Advent calendar and maybe to find a doctor to find out exactly what's happened to my hip overnight.

I have a crappy hip. It frequently just extricates itself from the rest of my body and just pretends it doesn't know us. It's something most of my limbs have considered doing at some point or other I'm sure, but my hip seems to be the bolshiest part of my body. I can just about walk today if I keep my hand clamped onto my hip socket to stop it grinding painfully.

The issue is that I'm quite scared of doctors and I rarely go unless I'm forced to. In 2010 when I was in Edinburgh and my hip ceased to work at all, unless I was very drunk and couldn't feel it any more, I did go and see a Doctor about the problem and this was the result:

Doctor: Oh yes, wow. No, that's not supposed to do that is it?

Laura: No, it's this bit sticking out here that's the problem.

Doctor: Yes, I'm totally sure that is not supposed to stick out.

Laura: Right.

Doctor: But, it can't be your hip that's sticking out.

Laura: Oh...

Doctor: Yes, you're hip is a very, very strong joint. There's no way it could just pop out like that.

Laura: Right... erm, is there anything else in there that could stick out?

Doctor: No, it should just be your hip.

Laura: Right, but you said...

Doctor: Yes and I stand by it. It just can't be your hip.

Laura: Oh.

Doctor: Would you like some pain killers?

Laura: Yes. And potentially a hip based abortion I guess?

Doctor: Have these and go away now. Thanksloveyoubye.

So I haven't bothered going back since because I've just accepted that whatever is wrong is not my hip but isn't anything else because there's nothing there except my hip.

So all in all it's a silly day because I can't walk, I have a phantom hip and no exciting count down related time piece to keep me sane tomorrow.

Bah Humbug.

My Foot My Foot My Only Foot

2011-11-28T11:12:00.001Z

I am grumpy to the point of almost being upset today. I've got a fairly good grasp on my audience so I won't command you to cease sympathy immediately as it'll be hard without you having started, there is no logical reason to my mood. I could blame it on Monday, but, as I don't have a proper job and I am not even doing my fake job today it seems a little unfair.

Even giving the kitchen floor a ferocious mopping hasn't helped to lift my Eeyore cloud. In fact, being in the kitchen caused me to have a turbulent inner rage at the jar of Basil I bought on Saturday (I bought it because I smashed the old one - so that might have been the residual rage that caused the kick off of my torrent of inner monologue abuse).

The Basil has a notice on the side that says "Suitable For Vegetarians" and before I could stop myself my head (and my mouth, but no one was home to hear it so it doesn't count) had screamed:

"OF COURSE IT FUCKING IS, IT'S FUCKING BASIL"

Short of it being manufactured in a "Pig and Basil" factory or having been made by people who are exceptionally carefree about whether or not the odd shrew got pummelled into the Basil shredder, I just can't see how Basil could not be vegetarian. It's a plant.

Even if it didn't have that "Suitable for Vegetarians" label on it, how much meat could there reasonably be in that jar? Enough to seriously upset a vegetarian? Enough that, without the label, the fear of a hidden trotter falling on their soup would stop them buying it? Unless the worry is that they're actually buying little meat flakes that have been painstakingly covered in Basil to hide the deception. Of course this is ridiculous and would mean that the MeatBasil manufacturers would be:

a) Operating a huge loss
b) Mental

I can't see the point of this stupid freaking label. If you're that paranoid about meat getting into your herbs, then grow your own. I don't like to eat fecal matter as a general rule but I'm quite happy to buy things that don't have a "There's No Poo In This" label. I'm conspiracy free enough to reasonably assume that things which aren't meant to have poo in them, ie things that aren't toilets, nappies and the fingernails of small boys, will not have poo in them and are good for my consumption.

How can you like animals that much that it could put you off Basil unless you are expressly told that no animals were upset by the caging of the basil? Are vegetarians seriously that nice? Because I'm not. What if we discovered that there was a species of Panda that could only eat Basil? Sounds like something Pandas would be dumb enough to do. If we carry on eating Basil all the Pandas are going to strike on Wednesday and China will have to sanction them heavily and there'll be a little Panda civil war... will that make my little Basil label defunct? Pfft. Fucking vegetarians. Maybe if you had a little protein in your system you'd be cheerful enough to stop weeping over the plight of Pandas and realise that:

a) Burgers are great
b) Quorn is a waste of time
c) BASIL DOESN'T NEED A LABEL TO PERSUADE YOU IT IS SUITABLE FOR EATS. IT'S FUCKING BASIL.

Obviously I am being wilfully and horrifically insensitive to the leaf munchers. See my use of leaf munchers there. If you've made your choice to live off plants then who am I to judge. Some of my best friends are ~~idiots~~ vegetarians- for an interesting story on them read this little piece from the archive: http://lauralexx.blogspot.com/2010/08/oblogatory.html

I simply let this rant run on and on to prove how grumpy I am and to encourage as many of you as possible to leave me the fuck alone and stop putting ridiculous labels on my Basil.

Laura Does Delia

2011-11-27T13:03:00.001Z

So... today I've been working very hard on my baking skills... I've got bread proving in the airing cupboard (you're meant to do that I'm not being willfully zany) and I've got the first batch of Rolo cupcakes in the oven now baking. The second batch won't fit just yet so they are still sitting on the side in a cloud of cocoa powder and sugar.

I can assure you that absolutely in the kitchen in incredibly sticky - including my face and people who happened to walk in during the cake making process.

I had a request earlier to post the recipe for my cupcakes in my blog, so I thought I would... here goes...

Ingredients Required:

100g Plain Flour
2.5 tbsps of Cocoa Powder (I spilled a bit extra in and it doesn't seem to have mattered)
140g Caster Sugar
DVD box set of Blue Planet to watch while eating
1.5 tsps Baking Powder (I'm not sure why we can't just use SR Flour but hey ho)
A pinch of salt (It is not a necessary requirement to pinch the salt out of the tub so don't freak out if you have a pouring vessel.)
40g Butter (If you keep it in the cupboard rather than the fridge it works better.)
120 ml Milk
Unending patience.
1 egg (not the shell)
1/4 tsp Vanilla Essence (Personally I find the idea of trying to measure 1/4 tsp of vanilla utterly ridiculous so just a splash is fine in my recipe.)
Tim Minchin's music for the background.

Timings:

Somewhere between 30mins and 2 hours preparation depending on attention span and whether you need to go to Tesco mid baking because you don't actually have all the ingredients.
Baking: Supposedly 25-30 mins but that entirely depends on setting the oven properly. Who knew.

Method:

1. Find the oven instructions or ask the most useful person in the house how to set the oven to 170*C (there is no degree button on my computer - Bug Juice will have to go if I get a book deal for my recipes). Set the oven to 170*C.

2. Find a bowl with high enough sides that you won't spray mixture everywhere when you put the electric mixer in it.

3. Put the flour, cocoa, sugar, baking powder, salt and butter into the high sided bowl.

4. Try not to let the butter see the recipe or it might get a little nervous about what's in store: http://www.youtube.com/lauralexxcomedy#p/u/6/SAmbBOHgbDM

5. Mix all that stuff together until it doesn't seem like it's going to mix much better. It's meant to look like sand so try for that and if it doesn't seem to be happening after 10 minutes then just move on and hope it sorts itself out at a later stage.

6. Remove the nearby tea towel from the electric mixer:

7. Get another bowl (less fussy on the particulars of this one) and put the milk, egg and vanilla splash into it. Give it a good whisk up. I find it lots of fun to pretend to be Victorian and use a hand whisk. This might also have been entirely necessary because my house mate confiscated the electric whisk after step 6.

8. Add half the whisky wet stuff to the sandy stuff and mix it all up until it's smooth or until you get really bored of having loud whisky stuff going on.

9. When that's all smooth you can start adding the rest of the wet stuff and mixing it inbetween adding little splashes. Get it as smooth as you can.

10. Eat a few spoonfulls because we all know the mix is much better than the cakes anyway so why wait?

11. Put the cupcake cases into the little tin thing for making cupcakes.

12. Put one spoon of mix in the bottom of each one.

13. Put a Rolo on that mixture.

14. Cover up the Rolo with more mixture until it looks like a good amount of mixture. You're meant to be able to make about 12 cakes out of this much stuff so try that but don't worry if it's not right. A good idea is to make 15 smaller ones and then you can eat 3 before anyone sees and no one will know any different.

15. Bake them until they're cooked. You can do that "poking them with something sharp and see if it comes out clean" thing but be careful not to hit the Rolo or you won't be able to tell.

16. Let them cool down.

17. Put whatever icing you want on (I'm not doing all the work for you - the easiest thing to do is to just smash a few more Rolos on the top).

And there you go! I'll be tweeting photos of the finished items later ( @lauralexx ) because they're still in the oven while I'm writing this.

Happy Baking!

Back of the Bed: Sheet Dreams

2011-11-26T12:35:00.001Z

I just celebrated my victorious return to London with a mammoth 11 hours of undisturbed sleep. I realise this won't seem very impressive to most people, but I'm not very good at staying asleep generally. You'd think it would be very simple; it's just being off. However, my brain and I are such massive attention seekers that it's a genuine struggle to just take ourselves out of the loop for enough hours that we're not grouchy.

Just to clarify (in case that last paragraph wasn't stupendously boring enough to have put you into your own coma) it's not that I can't spend an awful lot of time in my bed if I want to. It's just that I am usually awake when this time is ticking you by. You know, because I'm having loads of exciting sex and stuff. Sigh. When I'm not having all the sex I'm just working on emails and appreciating how soft duvets feel against the soles of my feet.

It's hard to feel guilty for still being in bed today when the only thing I really intended to complete today was to go into town and buy some edible glitter. I'm not sure the world is really going to collapse around my ears if the cupcakes I make later are less shiny than planned. It occurs to me that this might be the beginnings of depression: not getting up because you've already decided your plans were meaningless. However, I don't think I've ever been particularly integral to the world and I really quite enjoy both baking and shiny things so I'm confident I'm just staying in bed because I really enjoy being in my bed.

At the moment I'm still in those heady days after a sheets change where it's so good you wonder why you don't change your sheets every day just so you can always feel this comfortable and fresh in the snoozy hours. Of course, the unfathomably difficult task of matching up the duvet to the duvet cover always makes this an impossible dream. Changing the duvet cover looks like it should be much simpler task, because I'm really good at putting gloves on and those arguably much more complicated because of all the fingers. The duvet cover is as simple as just tucking a potato waffle into an envelope. So why is it so difficult?

I guess it must be partly a size issue because it's so big and floppy (permission to giggle). I don't think this is the main reason it's so tricky though - I think it's all the conflicting advice on how to do it. By the time you're 25, approximately 500 million people have imparted their wisdom on their patented way to change the duvet cover. Every conversation begins in the same way:

"Oh it's so easy when you know how..." Thanks, because I'd always assumed that even when I did know I'd continue to do it wrong so that I'd stay grounded. "Just turn the duvet cover inside out and then match the corners up, pick up the corners and then shake it all down! It's so easy!"

"Oh it's so easy when you know how..." Fantastic, and does that logic also apply to non-patronising ways to dispense advice? "Just lay the duvet out on the bed and then put your arms into the duvet cover as though they're gloves and then pick up the duvet. Before you know it it's done!"

"Oh it's so easy when you know how..." Really, is it? What if you know how but you don't have any limbs? Is it still easy if you're matching up corners using an over eager mouth? "What you need to do is climb into the duvet cover and then just bring the duvet in with you until everything matches up on the inside like a jigsaw puzzle."

This leads to a horrendous sight, akin to something in a Saw movie, where all 25 years of advice come crashing forth to your mind at once when you decide to change your sheets. If it's easy when you know how, surely it must be a piece of piss when you know how 500 million people know how? It doesn't work that way and all of a sudden you've managed to cross breed all the advice into one horrible mangle of duck down and flower print. There are poppers up your nose as you climb inside the duvet cover wearing another duvet cover as gloves and trying to do a jigsaw whilst eating a waffle out of an envelope.

Naturally, all the advice you've been given was also suited to a person over 5 foot tall who inhabits a room larger than 2 foot by 4. Concussion follows and you are found by paramedics 8 hours later and filed under "Curiously Inexplicable Masturbatory Practices". Family and friends gather round the hospital bed with faces filled with pain and regret,

"Laura, we just don't understand... Why did it have to come to this?"

"Oh, it's easy when you know how..."

What Does Your Dad Look Like?

2011-11-22T13:30:00.001Z

Welcome to my blog about my incredibly exciting life living in London and being an almost competent stand up comedian.

It's nearly 3pm, I'm still in bed

I'm going to have to get dressed and get up soon because Monica and Richard are about to break up and I've fallen far too deeply in love with the sight of Tom Selleck to deal with the episodes that come after this one.

Is this how you're meant to live out your twenties? Falling deeply in love with moustachioed older male actors until the lack of food and tea in your life forces you to get out of bed and get on with your day?

I was keen to achieve stuff today... new material and other such things that'll help me on my way to conquering the world and curing sudoku addictions. Sadly, we don't have any milk and so there's no good tea and so I haven't achieved anything. Not a deity darned thing.

Potentially there's a direct correlation between amount of milk I have available and the number of my dreams that will come true that day. I can only imagine that if I lived in a dairy Tom Selleck would have turned up on my doorstep by now and been gently humorous in his patient, secure way. I am way less mental than Monica so I see absolutely no reason why he wouldn't have fallen for me like a focussed coyote off a high canyon.

Tom Selleck and I would go and live on a ranch I think. He would enjoy cooking us various meat dishes and smiling wryly at my inability to darn anything properly. We'd have matching rocking chairs (carved by Bill Pullman circa his woodwork years alongside Sandra Bullock in While You Were Sleeping) and generally we wouldn't have a lot to say to each other. But, you know, not in an awkward way... in that comfortable way that people talk about but other people don't actually believe in.

See, the thing is that Monica and Tom Selleck had to split up because of the baby rows. She was all about sprogging and he was like "Nah man, I need my freedom." But I wouldn't have that problem because I would just say to him,

"Hey man, I don't even need babies."

And then I would treat his moustache like it was my very own child so that I didn't feel like I was giving anything up for him. Like a compromise except that I'm still getting everything I want so it doesn't count. I'd bottle feed that moustache until it slept like a hisute baby. He might be all confused and say, like:

"Hey man, why are you patting my moustache?"

And I wouldn't be able to say "Hey man, I'm burping so that the tiddler doesn't cry!" So I would have to say that I was just looking for more ways to be close to him because I was so in love. He'd be really impressed and probably buy me a present made of shiny stuff and leaves.

I'd get Baby Mo a cradle and a sleep suit and I'd teach it to laugh. Perfect.

Now I do believe it's time to get up. Move on with my day. And start stockpiling milk to make this particular dream come hairily true...

Totally Raging

2011-11-18T11:40:00.001Z

Right... it's happened. My rage has bubbled over to the point where I can no longer think clearly.

I hate the man in the Rosetta Stone Totale advert.

I literally hate him.

I haven't felt this away about an advert human since the woman in the fajitas advert. I wouldn't expect you to remember that bitch but I do. She had the worst voice in the world and spent the entire advert telling her poor "friend" (I refuse to believe this woman could have attracted people who would willingly hang out with her) about the meal her boyfriend (SERIOUSLY?) was cooking for her. Then at the end, in a fabulous display of setting up a staring contest with a gift horse's tonsils, she says "I'll ring you tomorrow... if I'm still alive!"

WHAT?

Don't be such an ingracious cow! If you have that nasal a voice you need to be as nice as possible with the words you're shaping to keep anyone around you. Let alone a beautiful man who is willing to cook for you. Granted it's only fajitas but fajitas are yummy so shut your stupid mouth.

I hated her.

But she is gone now. Now I am dealing with my loathing of Dickhead Who Is Learning Japanese.

I started out being irked with the pronunciation of Totale because it just sounded like they were saying Totally wrong for a while, but then I dealt with my small minded fury and I moved on. Then I noticed how much I hate this man.

I hate his smug face, I hate the way he's clearly checking out the Japanese woman who brings him the drink despite the fact that his missus is in the shower. I hate his hair. I hate the way his voice doesn't sink to his stupid face moving. I seriously hate him.

That Rosetta stone stuff is not cheap... what the hell is he doing making such a purchase without running it past his lady first when she clearly doesn't have a lot of money or she'd have better hair?

Why is he learning Japanese anyway? Is he leaving her? If that's the case, why isn't she either strangling him with the cord or helping him pack so she can replace his smug ass with someone who isn't a Grade A muppet?

I hate him.

I hate him so much.

I want to put him in a little shakey box with fajita woman and feed them on fajitas whilst playing them Japanese language tapes on repeat until they lose their minds and die of malnutrition because I wouldn't put anything decent in the fajitas. I would feed them plain tortillas. Plain tortillas and I would repeatedly say "Die you smug fools" in Japanese at them until they died. And I wouldn't even explain to each of them who the other one was. So they would die with dry mouths, havign no idea what they had done and why they were with this smug other advert human.

I hate them both. I hate Rosetta man even more because he has reignited my rage for fajita woman and I thought I had moved on from her. They can both go and choke on the Haribo family ... Oh...so...soft...

Good Hustle

2011-11-17T21:42:00.001Z

Urgh, there's something about sitting at a desk all day with Sky News blaring in the background that just erases all traces of potential funny from your brain. I've started and deleted this blog 3 times now because I just can't think of anything even remotely whimsical and I really don't have the energy to field the grumpy responses that would follow up any post about racism in football or the economic crisis.

Obviously, the angry responses to either of those posts would be very different:

Racism in football: "Hey sheltered white girl, how dare you express any opinion on something that doesn't directly affect you. I deliberately didn't read the bit where you said it was only your opinion and you were happy if people didn't agree."

Economic crisis: "Hey sheltered white girl, it wasn't caused by Charlie Sheen and it couldn't be solved by Scrooge McDuck just being less of an asshole."

So I won't write them. But I have residual grumpiness from the day and being bombarded by the stuff on the shiny box of world news all day. So you should know that... and on the off chance there's a minute joke somewhere in this blog I want you to know it trawled through a whole heap of crapola to get out of my brain. Picture one of those little turtles that gets born up in a whole at the top of the beach and then has to get all the way down through icky gritty sand to the water. My jokes are baby turtles.

In fact let's just consider that, for the purposes of this blog, turtles are dead. If you were here expecting some kind of tide of flippery shelled up minibeasts then just go away now. You are just the next in a long line of people I am disappointing at the moment. You're not special. Neither of us are special and there are no fucking turtles left. What a day.

The ridiculous thing is that I could stop writing this drivel at any point and we could all just end this ridiculous turtle based charade but I appear to be still typing and you are still here. One of us has serious issues. It's one thing to wake up in a funk and have the whole day to get out of it but when you're trying to go sleep and you're grumpy you just have to lie there and hope that sleep is stronger than the negativity. Sleep never beats negativity and you will inevitably end up dreaming about being face stroked by David Cameron's uncannily plasticy ball sack. Sleep is the paper to negativity's scissors.

I blame Thursday. Thursday is a stupid day of the week - there are still 6 days until the next Frozen Planet, I cannot lie in tomorrow morning because I'm off money earning and my room isn't tidy any more. My room isn't tidy any more because I was too grumpy to put my clothes away when I took them off so I've just left them in that little piled up heap that you see a lot on the floors of 6 year olds. Should there be an apostrophe somewhere in that last sentence?

This might be noteworthy: I briefly wondered today whether I could turn it into a quirky "Lauraism" to sleep only wearing a woolly hat. But then I was going to bed and my housemate needed some help with something and I wasn't wearing pyjamas so that was awkward. There's a big difference between a quirky "Lauraism" and a "Lauraism" that keeps you living alone well into your 50s.

Ok, well turns out that wasn't particularly noteworthy so I hereby give up. Night all.

Hello Ham, You Look Like a Cold Puppy

2011-11-16T19:15:00.001Z

So this is my 366th post... I have now fully completed a whole year of blogging. Not even my parents could have predicted I would have that much inane chatter in me. That's just me I guess, proving people wrong at every step.

Today's been an excellent day. First I filled myself up with all kinds of disgusting food. I ate what was described in the menu as "Bacon Chilli Dog with Cheese"... I could not have foreseen what kind of monstrous heap of food would be put in front of me. It was like looking into every heart attack that ever befell a human. Eating it made me want to simultaneously throw it back up and shower at the same time. I felt dirty. I'm now lying on my bed eating copious amounts of fruit to try and balance the internal rotting.

I was a little worried that the powerful burning sensation in my abdominal region would later need explaining to some kind of medic when they rushed me to hospital in a scene akin to Alien. Most of the afternoon has been spent wondering if I should be lying very still so as not to remind the "Bacon Chilli Dog with Cheese" that I had forced it into captivity against its greasy wishes. I was worried that if it noticed its incarceration we would be dealing with some kind of jail break. And not the fun Thin Lizzy kind. A sort of wet, spicy, socially unacceptable kind.

I decided to do a bit of research so that I could be fully informed of the sort of internal cold war I had initiated. I needed to know exactly where and when the concept for this monstrous food replica had been born. Then I needed to get to the source and kill. This was obviously not a simple procedure... this was like the sort of adventure that might occur if Indiana Jones found out that Darth Vader was his father and then they had to work together to raise a baby with the help of Tom Selleck. Intense.

Luckily, I wasn't alone. I had my good buddy Wiernan Shnouieb* with me. He's a trusty side kick if ever there was one. I tell you what, if you ever need a side kick, I heartily recommend this guy and I am NOT MESSING with your mind. No no no. He is compact but beefy so you can put him in a suitcase but if he needs to bust out of there he will do some serious ass whooping damage to any baggage handler trying to scan him for liquids over 150ml. Serious shit. He has a beard. This is excellent for helping him blend into a crowd, it's also great for Fuzzy Felt in the down time. We took a vow together, giddy from the milkshake, and decided it was up to us to find out where and why this tummy torpedo had been invented and pedalled to the masses.

We started with the local library. Wiernan went in first and kicked out the cast of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, who had gathered there to do some stuff that was less important than what we had to achieve. We decided to keep Xander alive because he is now well into his forties and we felt kind of sorry for him for having no discernible career. Wiernan said he would let him stay at his flat and teach him how to play Dominoes. That's the kind of big hearted loon he is. To be honest after that I didn't get much sense out of either of them because they spent the rest of the day exchanging cheese puns and laughing at who could poke their fingers hardest into whose tummy button.

I was just reaching for the dustiest book on the shelf, because we all know dust = knowledge (but only in books, in humans exchange dust for beard and or proximity of breasts to waist), when I saw a shadow behind me. I whipped around just in time to dodge a huge lump of melted cheese as it winged its way past my right ear. I was breathing heavily, scared out of my wits, looking into the eyes of the most foulsome monster I had ever seen. It was huge; a steaming pile of onions (not quite fried to correct softness) and bacon (with the rind cruelly left on) churned together into a roaring beast with hot dog legs and button mushroom eyes (which was weird because Bacon Chilli Dogs with Cheese don't even have mushrooms in. Let alone their buttons).

I flung myself behind the shelf and waited to hear it's next move. It cleared what I can only assume was it's throat and let out a roar:

"Hello?"

It wasn't quite the impressive threat I had been expecting from a beast that seemed hell bent on destroying me and my way of life but I felt I ought to respond.

"Yes?"

I waited, quietly praying that it wasn't a trick and that he wasn't at that very moment creeping around the shelves to attack me with his cholesterol ridden paws.

"Er, which way to the Adult fiction?"

Came his tentative reply.

WHAT??!! My face went purple with rage. So the dirty fiend was here to feast his bucket of demon calories on some porn ridden pages of indecency? Not on my watch. I channelled my inner American spirit and abandoned any intention I may have had to get to the root of the problem and decided this bitch needed teaching a lesson. And fast.

I leapt over the shelves (thank god they weren't the floor to ceiling kind or I'd have had to have ambled round and looked totally lame) and pounced into his fleshy mound of broiled pig and shallot grown ups. He was taken aback, I pummelled my fists into the bubbling mass of meat and depression until I felt it begin to concentrate its power. "Here it comes," I thought to myself, "Here comes the fight back"... a wall of bread and reconstituted hot dog hit me in the face and I was flung back against the DVD rentals free standing carousel.

I was a gonner. I was done for. I was not going to survive. Or was I?

Suddenly Wiernan Shnouieb was standing between me and the filthsome beast. Mayonnaise was dripping off both of them. I don't know where Wiernan had got his mayonnaise from, but it didn't matter to me.

"What are you doing?" I yelled through my bruised ribs.

"Saving you!" Shouted Wiernan.

"But.. but..." I tried, but my lungs were filling up with blood (my blood - be a weird twist if I was suddenly a vampire having dinner eh? Also, I'd have serious problems if drinking filled up my lungs. Not even a vamp could survive that. That's a whole other story.)

"I'm a vegetarian" said Wiernan, never taking his eyes off the rearing beast, "I'm like it's achilles heel - it will be so confused by my pathetic diet that it will combust. I am the only one that can beat it. I'm going in."

"Nooooooooooo!"

But it was too late... Wiernan strode towards the beast, a mushroom in each hand (Xander had popped out to get those and is expensing them through Sarah-M G). He was enveloped in chilli... there was a deep rumbling and suddenly silence. The meaty mess contracted into a central point with an enormous rush of wind. I felt like all the hair was being sucked off my head. And then there was silence. A huge hollow silence. A silence where my friend used to be. And where Wiernan used to be too (Zing! Beyond the grave zing! Ha! But I do seriously miss him).

So, kids. Don't play with your food. Lesson learned. Night all. That's jackanory.

* Names changed to protect identity.

Seven Jumps

2011-11-15T13:09:00.001Z

It's just taken me seven jumps to get the washing basket off the top of the kitchen cupboard. Getting the washing basket down requires me to jump up and try and bat the damn thing until it topples so that the balance is off and it falls down. It is sometimes slightly easier to try and hook a finger into the gaps whilst jumping, but if that goes badly you can cause serious hurties to your fingers as they tear across the slicey plastic. It might take longer, but it's definitely safer to bat it down.

There are lots of things about being short that make life interesting:

1. People quite often turn a simple hug into a terrifying off-ground experience for you. This might be because they are testing how strong they are, but it will implant a small seed in your brain that people often talk about how much you look like you weigh and cannot resist the urge to check so they can feed back information to the others.

2. Feet often don't reach the ground when sitting in chairs. Obviously, when you're young it's easy to select your chosen chair depending on the little coloured stoppers on the legs. Now, once you're an adult it's sort of harder to tell because chair manufacturers don't bother with it, which is stupid really because adults are not magically all the same size all of a sudden. It might be worth starting some kind of social media campaign to bring back little rubber chair leg stoppers.

3. Reaching for things will often lead to midriff showing so you will have a cold tummy more than normal height people. It's been suggested this could lead to more kidney infections than are generally to be expected.

4. In a particularly big room, audience members at the back might struggle to laugh at hilarious body language if you are not on a raised stage. Obviously, this isn't a big deal to short people who aren't comedians but I'm just letting you know that if you've ever sat at the back of a comedy room and laughed at me, I must have been extra good (from the forehead up) to make that happen.

5. People will find you more attractive than people of their own height. This partly depends on you being totally dandruff free as you will not get away with even a single flake, but is pretty much foolproof. There is a mighty good reason why 99% of female student photos are taken on nights out pouting up at the camera; the looking up angle takes away all hints of a double chin and reminds men why they might want to talk to you in the first place.

6. You will be continually bombarded with people at their worst angle - no one can hide a double chin from your miniature view point, you can see all bogeys in the natural environment and any bodily smells are well within nose reach. Arm pits will become a place you are well acquainted with if people try to hug you. Developing a dislike of spontaneous hugs might be your only way out. This will make you seem quite grumpy but just learn to live with it.

Think all this sounds very exciting? Then you're an idiot. Developing a new found level of respect for all the short people you know? Then my work here is done.

DaH ood

2011-11-14T14:32:00.001Z

So I'm finally back in London after a mammoth 2 weeks away looking at various beautiful haunts across the South of England. I've been to Tesco, made a cup of tea and settled down on the sofa to put in some serious working hours when my house mate tells me to be careful because someone on our street got mugged at machete point a few days ago. WELCOME HOME! How much money did they get? Er, nothing actually, they were mugging for the person's shopping they had from Tesco.

I have never been more grateful to only be able to afford value mince and the fake Pringles that make your tongue hurt.

Considering I spent a large portion of my weekend in Cornwall looking at the sea and deciding I loved being a clown more than any other option available to me, this is kind of intense news to return home to. Obviously crimes are still committed out of the city, but they tend to be more of the crazy person being crazy kind of crime. Taking a machete out every night on the off chance someone has been stocking up on Fererro Rocher seems a little intense if you ask me.

I'm pretty glad I did my shopping before I got told this or I probably wouldn't have bought the Radox shower gel. It was on special offer but there's no way the machete man would have known that.

I think this means it might be time to arm myself. Obviously I have no idea where I might be able to get weapons from so I'm going to have to improvise. Possibly with talcum powder and a mini fan. That seems safer and a little more mysterious. I don't really know the difference between a machete and an axe so I think blowing the talcum powder into the eyes and then running away in sensible shoes seems a lot more up my street.

It does worry me that, come the apocalypse, this will be the normal run of things. Obviously, we'll all be fighting each other to go and loot the Tesco, rather than waiting for someone else to do the shop, but I still feel like I'm going to die early on. Unless I can get a small team of looters to elect me the Splinter to their Turtles, then I don't rate my chances of survival being high.

Being slightly on the wrong side of crazy myself means I plan my moves for the post Armageddon years most days. The most important things are that I have some form of map (paper - not requiring batteries) and sensible shoes good enough to walk to Somerset from wherever I am. These are the basics. If possible I need enough food to walk for a few days and hopefully a jumper so I can sleep if I need to. If I don't have a jumper then I'll need the right facial expressions to make friends with an owl so I can sleep in the nest while it's out hunting.

Obviously though that is slightly further away than my current predicament, which is how to protect my pop tarts from a machete wielding maniac. Answers on the back of a post card please...

Nina Simone Style

2011-11-11T14:28:00.001Z

Today's blog is brought to you from a wicker chair in the window of my second hotel room... I am looking at St Michael's Mount and a sea view that ranges from thick grey to a dusty bronze. It is sincerely beautiful. This is definitely the sort of life I would be perfectly happy to live. I have noticed though that there is a common theme of disappearing ginger biscuits in Cornish hotel rooms.

This might be a brief blog (unless I get distracted) as I am going to pop out into Penzance now and do some shopping so that my wee brother will not be disappointed when I roll into town tomorrow. I need to track down the weirdest item in the world (this small town) and find something suitably horrific to wrap it in and then I can present it to the little sucker tomorrow.

Presents between the two of us range from the genuinely useful to the vomit inducingly bizarre... it makes it a nice challenge. The first present he ever bought me when he had his own pocket money to splurge was a small rubber green cow with red printed hearts on it. When you punch the cow it flashes some mental different colours. It's particularly creepy if you step on it in the middle of the night and not only have a heart attack from the acid trip colours that kick off, but you feel the rubber mushing between your toes like a cold stretchy booger from a very sick 4 year old. The kind that they lick off their lip while they look you in the eye.

His most recent gift to me was season two of the Gilmore Girls which shows that he is willing to swallow both his pride and sense of decency in order to please the women in his life. I have never been more proud of him. I have vowed not to stop until he is securely shackled to a woman I can approve of. He may be single forever. My most recent gift to him was digging out one of the more embarrassing tales of him and telling my Falmouth audience last night. It's a wonder the little guy still talks to me.

So my challenge this afternoon is to find something to really show him how much I think he is brilliant. Like, some road kill stuffed with chocolate fingers (in bags so they are still sanitary) so we can enjoy something gross to poke with a stick and have a nice snack. Or, maybe the first parts of a build your own Amish house so we can live together like loser siblings when I spend all my money on ginger biscuits and have to give up stand up because of the diabetes and mounting hotel bills. Intense. What a gift to be able to give!

TO THE TOWN...

Wheatstud

2011-11-10T18:29:00.001Z

Blogging from deepest, darkest Cornwall on an absolutely beautiful bed with a steaming mug of tea and a fairly big grin on my face. Some quick facts about my hotel room:

1. It has ginger biscuits
2. It has a huge TV
3. The man gave me the nicest room because I am the only girl
4. The biscuits have all gone
5. I can make tea whilst in my bed
6. It is only 5 minutes from the gig
7. It has a startling lack of biscuits
8. I am not tall enough to see in the mirror on the wall
9. There is a small tea stain on the bed spread
10. There are no products to remove a small tea stain from the bed spread

I finally liberated myself from the grips of Brighton and wended my way down to the Cornish coast where it smells like damp and clean and I have two (hopefully) lovely gigs ahead of me. I've never stayed in a hotel for a gig before so I guess we can chalk this up for a career moment. I paused to appreciate in that little space bar gap there but I completely understand if it is not as cool for you and therefore you haven't.

After two weeks of sleep deprivation and serious laughter in Brighton I'm quite enjoying lying in a quiet room and chilling out for a few minutes. This week I started rehearsals for a new production I'm acting in for Spun Glass Theatre Company... it's pretty intense work. My character is an alcoholic repressive with zero social skills and a desperate secret love for a man she works with. It's not exactly light work trying to bend myself into her head and squeeze out some words. It's intense work and I love it, but combined with the sleep deprivation my head is a little melted today.

The 6 hour drive down to Cornwall obviously quite helped to transport me to another world of reality... having to do such long car journeys with relative strangers the way you do with stand up comedy leads to some situations which are pretty interesting. We left London at 12, headed to the hotel, will gig together tonight, then get back in the car tomorrow to go to the next hotel and gig in Falmouth... had we got into a row in the first 10 minutes this would have been close on to hellish. Therefore, despite having covered issues ranging from sexual preferences to Deadliest Catch to how to disable a mugger... we are all feeling pretty chipper. Ready to go and rock the good people of the Cornish coast. Rock and freaking roll. But first, a nap...

On Vacation With Ritual Humiliation

2011-11-09T20:04:00.002Z

Over 10 days ago I packed a small suitcase and headed down to Brighton for a few days. I am still there... no don't fear, I haven't been kidnapped by pirates off the South Eastern coast - I have been kidnapped by good friends and a continually changing diary that's seen my trip continually extend to the point where I had to do an emergency pants wash today in order to avoid eternal emancipation of the cheeks.

Tomorrow I am finally leaving Brighton, but I'm sadly not heading home... not quite. Tomorrow I embark on a mini trip to Cornwall to delight the people of the West Country with my whimsical not-quite-award-winning brand of hilarity.

After Cornwall my tour moves on to Taunton where I will settle for a night in order to wish my father and brother merry birthdays. Then, and only then, will I return to London.

Today is my brother's 16th birthday. I'm really sad that I'm not there to see the actual day... I know it's not the biggest deal in the world as I will see him on Saturday when he will still be 16. But, 16 is a big day to see your brother be.

Having siblings who are much younger than you is like a little opportunity do all the things that you'd ideally like to do to your kids one day but you can't. I truly believe it's the opportunity to get most of it out of your system so that your own children won't be forced to scoop porridge out of their pillow cases while you cackle maniacally in the wardrobe. I've traditionally been very dedicated to any pranks I embark on. I have filled my sister's bed with nuts before - carefully putting them between the sheet and the mattress so that they would only be discovered once she was in the bed. The same sister also very nearly pooped in the bed when I hid under it a full 15 minutes before she went to bed, then waited a good 5 after she'd got in before commencing my shouting and banging from beneath. Excellent.

My brother has been on the receiving end of a fair bit... especially since he developed the most placid personality you could come across. A few weeks ago I almost reduced him to tears whilst he was filling the dishwasher and I was quietly removing everything and stacking it back on the work top. It was only after he'd been continually loading the dish washer for 15 minutes that he turned round with tears in his eyes and asked "Why do you have to be so difficult?".

There was also the time he took a shower and returned to his bedroom and found I'd removed all the components of his bed. I say this proves he spends twice as long in the shower as the average teenage boy.

In honour of his birthday, we ought to talk about the time I knew I would love him until I died. The day, many many moons ago, when the little critter wasn't feeling so good. He took his churning tummy to the toilet and was gone for some time... we all exchanged worried glances. Then, upon returning to the living room, he waddle over to my older sister and whispered some into her ear...

"...My bum's been sick..."

No scriptwriter in the land could capture the innocence and diarrhoea based naivety of this simple phrase. Every maternal instinct in my body, both of them, leapt into action and built up a dry stone wall of adoration for my Gollumesque nerdling of a brother, which has remained intact to this day. We've bonded over many, many poo based anecdotes (I have to say that I have been responsible for quite a few of them), crocodiles called Roy and a good few comedians that I probably shouldn't have been allowing him to watch.

What can I say, Happy Birthday Bro, look forward to being grown ups together when I catch up.

If You Squint Hard There Are Still No Jokes Here

2011-10-24T00:42:00.003+01:00

Before I start, I know this is a contentious issue and I'm well aware that come the morning I'll have an inbox full of angry messages telling me to "stick the jokes" and asking me if I know what it feels like to lose someone when you're very young. It's inevitable people will be angry with the following opinions and I have no doubt that, having been cast a different lot in life, I'd be one of those very people. The truth is that close proximity to an issue makes you an awful judge of the situation... and it's the very reason I shouldn't be writing this blog when I'm a little riled up. However it's equally true that close proximity to a situation breeds passion for it, and without passion we would get barely anything done that didn't line our pockets generously.

I just sat at a train station with an old man next to me. He had smart shoes on - brown and polished - and navy trousers that looked fairly reputable and expensive. He was wearing a North Face jacket and had an averagely well kept beard. He had open cuts on his face, some starting to scab but others still fleshy pink where scarring was sure to occur. He was sitting on the bench beside me. He got up, walked over to the toilet doors and pushed gently against them. Finding them locked he turned around and gently wet himself. It was audible from where I sat on the bench. You could hear it pattering against his leather shoes, the dark stain creeping out around his groin. When I looked towards the noise, he turned away towards the toilet door.

When the train arrived it was one where minding the gap was a necessity rather than a tourist attraction. The old man leaned at a precarious angle and clutched the open doors whilst trying to get the momentum up to swing his leg on to the train. I asked if he would like some help.

The hurt in his eyes as I asked was excruciating. He politely declined and winced as he moved his limbs into the carriage. He stood proudly the entire journey.

I sat in my seat watching him. Praying that this would never be my father or brother. Wondering when it is that we stop seeing people as men and women, but as old people. Why does no one ever really believe that they will be like this one day? What do you have to do in a life to be this alone when you most need a hand at your elbow?

I can't help but feel the human race has been a little like the irresponsible parents at Christmas when it comes to life extension. Buying the puppy before we've quite considered how much maintenance it will require. The average life expectancy 100 years ago was 54 for women and 50 for men... this year it will 82 for women and 74 for men. Whilst this is INCREDIBLE... it feels a little weird. Like no one has realised that this extra 30 years isn't going to magically appear in between 20 and 21... it's going to be a 30 years at the end where we have different requirements and need a whole load of looking after. Living an extra 30 years is insanely brilliant... most people will have an extra 30 years with their Grandparents to learn lessons, with their parents to fall back on. Utterly amazing. But at the same time truly terrifying. We're all so scared of death and of grief that we've postponed the problem for as long as possible, like the ultimate DFS sofa payment deal, but without considering that death will come anyway and that the life we substituted it for over such a long period may not have been a better deal anyway.

It's got to be money that's the problem. It always is - money is the biggest fucking problem on this planet and it's a completely made up concept anyway, which makes perfect sense given our shambolic hijack of this planet. If we're too expensive to be comfortably old then maybe we need to weigh up whether we're prepared to care, potentially full time, for our elders for the first half of our lives, or whether we're prepared to meet with tragedy a little earlier. It's our call but we can't have it both ways.

I don't want anyone to die before we have to let them. But if we're going to keep ourselves alive, can we at least make sure it's a life? Not just a slow slide into complete degradation without the physical means to maintain a sense of identity. If we're too selfish to live with death then give us the social responsibility to understand that we're all the premature elderly and that it isn't a condition we'll be able to side step. No matter what. Whatever money, whatever race, whatever job role you used to have. One day you'll be watching people disregard your worthy experience because you're too old to have died young. Caring for our elderly isn't the job of an NHS care nurse with 4 hours a week to dedicate to each person, there's no room to complain that we've paid our taxes duly and so someone else should have been spooning shepherd's pie. It's down to us and we should be tripping ourselves to do it or we should be willing to let go.

A Cute Frustration

2011-10-21T12:00:00.000+01:00

Two very annoying things have happened to me this morning... and this is following on from last night which was also a pretty bad evening. Let's start with last night:

1. I had to collect my brother and his best friend from Charing Cross Road and take them to Heathrow to meet up with my parents who are taking them to Greece on holiday. I could have been going on that holiday had I not had a few gigs booked that I didn't want to cancel. I make no secret of the fact that I love my family - I'm lucky, they're good people. Some folks' families are dickheads so I figure I'll fly the flag loudly for people who like their siblings. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those "My mum's my best friend" people - she's not, she's my mum. I need a mum more than a best friend so we've come to this useful arrangement.
Leaving them all at the airport and knowing that they were about to go and make more of the memories that I really treasure was a bit pants. Never mind, I was heading to what was sure to be a lovely gig in Islington.

2. I DIED ON MY ARSE IN ISLINGTON. You are quite welcome to smack me over the head with a rusty shovel that's got a half assed raccoon attached to the end of it if that wasn't one of my worst performances in the history of my meagre "career". Jesus, Mary, the lowing cattle and Joseph. An audience haven't hated a comedian that much since Germaine Greer did that open spot at Portsmouth Jongleurs.
I can't even really shed much light on what that hell I did wrong... I suppose I had less energy than usual and I started with some chatty stuff rather than a big BOOM joke but fooking hell I didn't expect that reaction. Each joke was met with either uncomfortable silence or a reluctant single laugh when I caught them off guard and they had to begrudgingly give something back.
The back row began a stealth heckling campaign where they would say something too quiet for me to catch properly and then go silent when I asked them what had been said. The front row mistook my attempted bonding for blind hostility and it all spiralled into a clammy heap from there... abysmal.

So all in all I was glad to get into bed and finish season one of the adventures of Lorelai and Rory (The Gilmore Girls for you uncultured cretins).

Then, this morning has been lame for a few reasons:

1. I lost my joke book. If the panic at losing that is anything like the panic of misplacing your child then it's a good job I'm a barren harpie. I imagine it's a very similar worry:

You're not actually too fussed about getting it back because you're sure you can do another one, but you're petrified someone's going to find out and see what you've created before it's finished.

I've now found my joke book - it was hiding in a nook under my bed where I'd been scribbling something truly unfunny in the middle of the night and hadn't managed to put it away.

2. I tried to Google the whereabouts of my nearest post office. I need to offload some parcels... I know where my nearest sorting office is but I'm confused as to whether I can send things away from there. I'm suspecting you can't.

You'd think this would be simple, I went to the website, found the "Find your nearest branch" bit and look in the "What service do you need" drop down box and then select... oh hang on a minute, despite the fact that it's the frigging postal service there is no option to search for branches that have a postal service. Brilliant. Now, don't start assuming this must be because all branches have a postal service, because this beauty of a search device also lists all ATMs that it has a connection to. So there's a good chance if I take my 6 parcels to what is technically listed as my local branch, I'm just going to end up jamming them into the debit card slot whilst freaking out that I don't have a pin.

Ridiculous. I might write to the Daily Mail. Clearly not having a job is the main cause of Whiny Bitch Syndrome. Joy.

Late Night Letter

2011-10-20T00:39:00.004+01:00

Dear People Who Didn't Think I Could Sink Any Lower,

I am watching "Bonus Material: Gilmoreisms - Many of the memorable witty encounters from the show." (Disc 6, Season 1).

This is a time of day when normal girls are screwing or cuddling their boyfriends.

Successful girls are asleep preparing for a day ahead at their brilliant, highly paid jobs.

I just needed to people to know because now it looks like I purposely do this sort of thing for comic effect. If I was embarrassed at all I wouldn't tell people so this is all just helping to establish my comic persona.

Thanks for your time,

Good Night,
Lx

T-Minus

2011-10-19T11:46:00.001+01:00

This morning hasn't exactly got off to the best start...

As I lay in bed last night, awkwardly trying to fall asleep through the thick buzz of a good gig adrenaline kick, I was worrying to myself that there was no bread in the cupboard. I'd failed to have dinner, had nothing to look forward to for breakfast and sleep was avoiding me. I love breakfast... I literally look forward to it the second I get into bed at night - dinner is optional, lunch has great potential, but those first mouthfuls of sugary cereal or well cooked toast in the morning are heaven. Any man who has the foresight to woo me using fried tomatoes and crispy bacon on a platter meant for a rugby team is likely to have his wildest fantasies fulfilled. So long as those wild fantasies include an enthusiastic midget getting jiggy with a a few baked beans in her hair.

As it turns out I needn't have worried about my woeful cupboard filling... I woke up this morning, rolled over, looked at the clock and it said 08:06... normally this would be cue for smiling a bit to myself, rolling back over and wasting an extra 3 hours. However, today I had to be at an office for 9am.

For a second I thought my heart and lungs were going to try and propel us out of bed ont heir own steam by just launching through my rib cage and heading for the shower by themselves. If I'd thought the post gig buzz was hard to deal with the sheer panic of having a head of hair that looked like I'd styled it with Golden Syrup and only 55 minutes to wash it and arrive at my place of work for the day nearly blew my mind.

I just about had time to clothe myself and apply shampoo to various portions of my head. Not necessarily in that order.

I'm currently sitting at my desk for the day with hair that resembles one of those birds you see looking miserable after someone crashes an oil tanker. It's fluffy in all the wrong places. I've also discovered that when you're grabbing an outfit through half clothed eyes whilst already walking out the front door, what might seem like it screams "powerhouse" may actually be whispering 80s lesbian by the time you reach the office.

I feel like everyone knows I'm not firing on full cylinders. I think I might be firing on one cylinder and even that one is a bit dusty. On my way to work it occurred to me that I might start eating the bottom end of the loaf of bread first because that always seems to be the bit that goes mouldy. This, is the type of thought I like to label #idiotgenius - it goes in a box with other ideas I've had like:

If I walk to the gym then I won't even need to go to the gym. Then I won't have to walk there in the first place.

I implore you to get in touch with your own examples of #idiotgenius so that I stop feeling like a complete moron.

I think it's going to be a very long day...

Busy Wasp

2011-10-16T22:59:00.000+01:00

Busy day! Barely had time to breathe it's been so crazy.

I was on my way into town and I bumped into John Lewis, not a man called John Lewis, but literally the corner of a massive shop. I knocked myself out for a good few hours and when I came to I was sitting in a bath of yoghurt while Martine McCutcheon sang Perfect Moment to me in a series of accents. I asked her why this was happening and she said it was karma because Perfect Moment was the first single I ever owned on a CD. She's got a long memory.

When she let me go I had to promise that the first thing I would do would be to become a life long member of the One Direction fan club... this I have been working on for the rest of the afternoon. I've tied photos of them to each of my toes so that we can chat whenever I feel like I miss them. I have no idea how many of them there are or what they look like but they look good on my feet and so I'm keeping them there until shaving day.

Some people might think I've not done much with my day but to you I say, SILENCE. I am a Queen among procrastinators so just keep your opinions to yourself.

Love and hugs,
Laura
xxx

Internet Dating For Dummies

2011-10-15T20:36:00.001+01:00

I've had a phenomenally unproductive day today... as a direct consequence of an innocent tweet and a conversation with a friend last night, today I have tried my hand at internet dating. If you have access to a computer, a picture of a human with breasts, and a lot of time to kill then I cannot recommend this enough as a way to pass the time.

I have been constructing my profile as a piece of living art throughout the day, every time I receive a mail from a would-be suitor that amuses me enough, I update my profile to reflect their advances. At the moment (about 6 hours in to my adventure) my profile is drafted like this:

Cute Name to Attract Mate: OfficialBarrelScraper
Tag Line: Must Have Life Insurance

About Me:
If you own Dark Side of the Moon I'm willing to over look even serious flatulence and excess hair.

I used to spend entire days rocking back and forwards because I could only be reached by a small number of sex pests in a day, but since I discovered internet dating things have really turned around and now I can browse any number of vowel free messages. It's bliss.

I cannot stress enough how much I adore profile pictures where you can clearly see the "ex" having been edited out. This sort of phenomenal approach to moving on deserves a medal. I've put my Dad as my profile picture so you can seek him out and ask for permission to date me should you want to - I don't want to make this shallow by including some picture of my luscious blonde mane of back hair.

Please don't message me to ask what:
a) Dark Side of the Moon is
b) Barrel Scraping is

I'm not genuine and I am solely interested in playing games so please, no time wasters.

My favourite word is "gawjus", please use it with gay abandon and if you can construct a message that's suitable for copying and pasting to everyone/thing on here that has included cleavage in their picture, please can you forward me a copy? You're a gem.

If anything I think language is just overcomplicated these days so if we can just agree that the difference between your and you're is inconsequential and replace either with ROFL then it'll be much more efficient for our long term mating compatibility.

If I don't reply to your message please don't take it personally, I'm just very shallow and have already judged I will never want to merge gene pools.

Thanks,

First Date Preferences:

Ideally something with wool and some passive aggressive sarcasm over dinner.

I'm not great at first dates so in a perfect world we could skip this altogether and just move straight on to separate beds, affairs with our colleagues and arguing over why I can't seem to distinguish between rare and medium rare when cooking.

I like short walks in the city and gender stereotyping.

---

So far, it's been a complete blast. I've yielded responses that have gone from:

"Hey boo boo, u look cute. Wanna chat?"

" :-D xxx "

"Girls like you make me sick, what makes you think anyone on here would be that desperate to message you anyway? Why don't you do us all a favour and go choke yourself to death with your sarcasm."

All in all it's been an awesome experience. I've learnt that the vast majority of the men who speed date can be divided into two groups:

Men who have muscles and biceps and have no photos where they are not in plain view.

Men who do not exist in any photos not taken on their webcam.

I'm sure the fully paid up "I want to meet a wife" kind of sites are a totally different experience, but so far I have not been convinced that internet dating is going to do anything to help me find the man of my dreams. Tomorrow I'm going to borrow the profile picture of one of my housemates and find out what internet dating is like for men.

The trouble is, it's very difficult to write down anything that really comes across as genuine. On paper, people are really very similar in their likes and dislikes (or the likes and dislikes we want other people to judge us on) and its not until you get to talking to someone that you can judge whether there is even the remotest chance of compatibility. I don't think internet dating is any worse than trying to meet people on a night out (having spent last night boogying in KoKo in Camden with rather mixed results) but it does have a sort of seedy quality to it where you hope no one you know finds out you sunk this low.

I will, of course, keep you posted as to whether or not my knight in shining armour turns up but for now, let's assume that the profile will just continue to grow until I become bored and try Speed Dating as my next challenge.

Hey Zumba, Not In Front of the Kids

2011-10-13T13:07:00.000+01:00

A lot of people have said to me they can't imagine anything more terrifying than doing stand-up; that having to think quickly and be funny in front of a room full of people is close to nightmare territory. Yesterday, I discovered my equivalent... Zumba.

I have about as much faith in my body as I have in people with guns. I've carefully trained it to walk to places in a pair of jeans and then to just do as little as possible so it doesn't give us away as being little better than a toddler when it comes to coordination. Maybe it was too much Ninja Turtles as a child, but I often wish I could just be a brain... my brain and I get on so well (on a good day). I've cultivated a happy little nook in the world where I don't really need to be able to do much other than type, learn and then emit witticisms as and where appropriate.

So yesterday I thought I'd take myself out of my comfort zone and try out a Zumba class... Zumba translates into English as: "Dance workshop designed to make middle class people look panicked".

I think the real pit of the stomach panic appeared when the instructor bounded into the room, he was made entirely of dread locks and limbs and if he had body fat, he was keeping it in his locker. I'm not even 50% limbs, I'm a healthy mix of puffy head, boobs and a stomach bump that cannot be blamed on bad posture or pregnancy. My gene pool conveniently combined to give me the additional facial hair of my father and the jacket potato knees of my mother. This isn't usually a problem when I have foundation and jeans to combat the problem; but in a pair of shorts and an already sweaty green t shirt I was starting to regret even entering a mirrored room.

Without introducing himself Dreadlimbs kicked off the first track and started to move... this immediately caused a problem for me because he was doing everything four times and then changing the move to a new one. Four times is not enough to learn, copy and repeat! The first time he did it I was still doing the last thing, the second time I had noticed and was watching whilst trying to still look busy, the third time I was moving in the right direction but with absolutely no clarity and the fourth time I was just about starting to feel camouflaged by everyone else before he'd moved on to something else. I distinctly heard the woman behind me ask the woman next to her if she thought I might be fighting a bee.

I can only hope that the feeling of burning shame also tosses a few calories into the furnace at the same time. By the end of the third song my instructor told me that if I was going to have to leave if I insisted on remaining in the foetal position.

I was determined to try and make it through the entire class; physically it wasn't a problem to keep up but recreating the same shapes as Dreadlimbs was actually impossible. My arms and legs just wouldn't continue doing the same thing if I shifted my attention to another part of my body.

If I'd thought it was bad when the music was still on, the worst was very much still to come... old Dreadlimbs paused the music and asked us to find a position in the room where we were near something we could bang. If we couldn't find wallspace then it was fine to use the floor. I shuffled nervously to the back and stood, my back felt like someone had left a 99 ice cream on my neck and just let it meander down to my waist, my hair was sticking out at odd angles like I'd just had 1950s cartoon sex and I think I might have been crying.

"We've got a 30 second intro on this next song" says Dreadlimbs,

"Biscuit time?" my brain chirrups.

"So, what I want you to do is really let loose! I want you to spank that wall or floor with all the attitude you've got! I want your ass shaking, I want to see booty moving!! I want to see you really do this! Let me hear noises, I want attitude faces! Are you ready?"

"No biscuits?"

"I SAID ARE YOU READY?!"

"Not at all! Is my booty my ass or my hips? I'm much more breasticularly enhanced, please may I shake those? I don't want to spank the floor... I'm quite flaily, I think it's going to look more like a cockroach infestation than foreplay."

"I SAID ARE YOU READY??!!"

"Too late..."

And then all of a sudden everyone went mental. People started rhythmically whipping the floor and saying "Oh yeah!", I learnt that booty means everything in your body that is wobblier than bone, people started crawling across the floor like some kind of slinky Rihanna cat with ricket hips. I stood at the back nervously apologising to my wall space and reassuring it that I was only acting under orders and that it hadn't really done anything wrong.

If it hadn't been for Alesha Dixon and her search for a new drummer boy (I can only assume she's putting together a Christmas Fayre) then I would probably have sworn of movement for life. But suddenly, Dreadlimbs was encouraging us to march. Yes, marching! Now, this is how the British conquered the world: simple repetitive movements with no sway, no sass, no creativity... just right leg, left leg, make a right angle with your leg - angles I understood. I was in my element.

I'm going to stick to my cardio machines today... maybe a little bit of machine weights if I'm feeling saucy. Organised movement is not for me. I'll be going to the gym later this afternoon, if I can just get through this list of apology letteres to anyone who has ever gone clubbing with me.

Gymming By Numbers

2011-10-12T14:35:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I went to the gym for the first time since I left University in 2009. I honestly had no idea I could sweat so much. I've always seen sweating as something other people do because they are either gross or impressive. My body doesn't sweat an awful lot, I go bright red and it looks like all the sweat might be gathering underneath to peer out, but then it inevitably decides to hang about and just make me look uncomfortably puffy instead of escaping and cooling me down.

Yesterday was a different story. I'm sure other people in the gym were looking at me like some kind of mentalist as I examined the droplets of sweat collecting on my wrists as though they were jewels. It was amazing! My hair was sticking to my forehead like a Playmobil character who's recently escaped the mouth of a toddler, my t shirt had reassuring dark patches like I was in a sitcom playing basketball. I was completely thrilled with myself.

I did about 55 minutes of running, bike and cross trainer and then I thought I'd round off my cardio session with about 10 minutes on the stepping machine. I climbed on and thought I would programme it to help me "fat burn" for a few minutes.

It asked for my age: 25.
It asked how long I wanted to step for: 10 minutes, please.
It asked how much I weighed in KGs...

... now, for starters I didn't know exactly how much I weighed. I'd forgotten to check before I started. I thought it wouldn't hurt if I guessed though. However, I have also never really known how KGs worked so I also had to guess that... I guessed I must be somewhere around 122 KGs - it seemed reasonable in my head. So I punched in all the numbers and the workout began.

Sweet. Jesus.

After 30 seconds my legs were pleading with the rest of my body to find the gym machine equivalent of an elevator and just put us all out of our misery. It hurt. It didn't just hurt, it was miserable... it made my bones bend, I could barely squash the stairs down, I was in agony. What the hell could have gone wrong?

Having showered and left the changing room on a bit of a downer having been so cruelly thwarted at the end of session, I thought I'd quickly check and see how much I do weigh, just so I'd know for the next session. Turns out KGs are a lot bigger than I'd envisaged and I weigh only 55 of them. I'm worried that when I go back to the stepping machine tomorrow and explain the situation it's going to think I've been crash dieting and tell me off for not being sensible. Do I really want to admit to it that I'm that stupid?

So, gym by numbers =

55 minutes of cardio
An overestimation of 67KGs
At least 1 litre of sweat
Oh, and 2 breasts of at least 45 cms in length.

I may not be good at calculating kilogrammes but I know a lengthy breast when I see one and yesterday I saw two and they were taunting me.

See, I decided to use the steam room after my workout so I wouldn't spend all day today aching in the wrong places, I swung the door open and there, lying outstretched on the bench was a quite naked woman with the longest breasts I've ever seen in my life. I looked at her and was immediately uncomfortable. It took me all my strength not to point out the sign that clearly said "No nudity" and ask her to put her wibblers in a sling. But, once I'd opened the door, I felt really rude clocking her and then turning around and leaving straight away so I thought I ought to spend a cursory five minutes in there with Nudey No Pants so she didn't get offended.

It was the most British 5 minutes I have ever endured. She lay like a Greek statue all stretched across the bench while I sat in my swimming costume with arms and legs crossed with my eyes closed hoping that no bum hole vapours were getting into the steam I was breathing in. Then, just as I thought I had done my time and went to get out, she put on some scratchy gloves and started exfoliating. RIGHT THERE IN THE COMMUNAL (tiny) STEAM ROOM. So all her skin particles were suddenly wooshing around the room into my leaving space and I had to stay. Then, when she'd finished, she got up and left. This made me think I should probably stay so she didn't think I was following her. I was hot, flustered, covered in bum hole skin vapours and generally quite cranky with her.

Muscle pain be damned, I am going straight home tonight.

Occupy Small Street

2011-10-11T10:12:00.000+01:00

Two blogs in two days? Could it be that I have my mojo back? Or, could it be that I'm bored out my skull sitting and hoping there will be some work for me to do this week? Wisdom tells me that it's the latter but I shan't give up hope that boredom breeds mojo.

I'm currently sitting at a temping office where I have been since 8:30am. The theory here is that I come dressed up for work and then if they get any calls in or have any success pimping me out on the phone then I can go off straight to work. If they don't get any work in, I can go home at 10:30am. But, because I showed dedication by coming in here to sit, I am priority worker for this week. Huzzah for me or some such nonsense.

The brilliant thing about this is that as soon as I stepped through the door I was immediately told I probably wouldn't get any work, so I've been able to sit here and plan the most amusing way of getting myself home... seeing as I'm already suited and booted and will be on the 10:35 bus home, I'm going to steal a potted plant and a lot of pens and sit sadly on the bus pretending I've just been fired.

There will crying, gnashing of teeth and maybe some silent mouthing of children's names and the words "Christmas presents".

I'm supremely bored... it's at times like these you discover the incredibly low expectations on our generation when people suggest you can happily spend 2 hours on Facebook and see it as a positive way to spend a morning. Facebook is fine, but what are you supposed to do for 2 hours?

Checking whether previous conquests have toned up enough to consider getting back in touch - Between 8 and 17 minutes depending on results and photo evidence.
Examining the off spring of ex schoolmates to see if they are "mummys lil Princess" or a cross eyed ball of fat - 6 minutes (inc time spent to forward pictures to other friends).
Updating status with something witty - 3 minutes (on a good day)
Refreshing witty status to see if anyone has noticed - If you continue after 5 minutes you have issues.
Scouring your photos for one without a double chin that can be used as a profile pic - 15 minutes.

So... even with all that I can just about get through 45 minutes before absolute despair sets in and I am trying to think of new films I like to update my profile. However, if I log out of Facebook it leaves me in very dangerous territory where I'm staring at Google wondering what on earth I could search for that might make for some interesting research... I've already exhausted the life and times of D. Attenborough, the early acting career of Messrs Jason and DeVito, and the life expectancy of a naked mole rat when clothed.

Where do you go from there?

Of course the logical conclusion was to Google Facebook itself and have a gander about the precious "Previous Facebook" layouts that people get very uppity about once they've been updated. There is more uproar in this country about Facebook changing the homepage than there is about the dismantling of the NHS. Presumably because changing your Facebook status to "My leg fell off" will be the future equivalent to dialing 999 and you'll just sit and wait for Legs4U to get in touch with a quote.

However, despair I will not, because when you really fall on hard times there is always your spam box and the Daily Mash to keep you amused. Thank heavens you people have me and my hilarious musings to keep you occupied. You can thank me by a small round of applause by yourself in front of your monitor. Or just by not commenting *idiot* underneath this. BYE.

One Night in Heaven

2011-10-10T16:37:00.000+01:00

I crashed back down to earth from my holidaying last night courtesy of an 8 hour night shift in a glossy mall of doom.

Never having done a night shift before, I had no idea how to prepare for being awake and not drunk past 3am. Call me what you like, but I spent most of yesterday trying to work out what the results were going to be when someone asked me to fold a knitted sweater better whilst I was off my tits on red bull and trying to stop poking myself in the eyes with a coat hanger to keep them open. My preparation involved baking for the major part of the evening. The results of which are below:

Having managed to get 22 cakes out of the mixture that was only meant to make 12, I contemplated eating the spare 10 and just never telling anyone and then thought it was safest to take myself off to bed before I didn't argue with myself and Dawn Frenchdom edged ever closer to my already less than svelte physique.

I'm a bad sleeper at the best of times, I punch (ask my friend Marie) I kick (ask my sister) I talk (ask my friend Jamie) and I'm quite capable of waking up very distressed about whatever I dreamt about and then holding a grudge against whoever was involved in the dream (ask several ex boyfriends). So, trying to sleep in the middle of the day when I'm hopped up on sugar and raspberries and dreading my impending incarceration was not easy.

I decided to catch up on my guilty trash TV pleasure: Made In Chelsea. Now, I know it's not good TV, and no, I can't enlighten you at all as to what the hell mongrel genre the programme even is. But, for some reason I like to watch it. Enjoy it/give a crap about it is stretching it, but I do quite like to have it on. While I was lying there I kind of wished I had a boyfriend. Now, this is the first time I've felt like this for a couple of years so it was quite exciting to admit. Obviously, I was watching Made in Chelsea in the middle of a Sunday afternoon so I was probably going to need a closet gay boyfriend, but then that's the beauty of MIC - it shows you that even super rich women with the world at their feet will also go for the same option.

I dragged myself out of my pit of Sloaney indulgence and headed in to work. In fairness, it wasn't quite as bad as I thought it was going to be. There were definitely some negatives:

1. No air conditioning
2. Rails built for normal people not stump limbed dwarf creatures
3. Clothes designed by people who understand the concept of trends
4. Clothes designed for normal people not stump limbed dwarf creatures
5. People who see retail as a healthy career choice

Now, I don't mean to be scathing and derogatory. Actually, yes I do, but in a more informed way than you might think... you see, everyone has their mental blocks. Some people are racist, some people are homophobic, some people are sexist and some people are just morons to everyone. I have a complete lack of understanding as to how to make working on a shop floor a fulfilling job. People who profess to have "always wanted to work in Topshop" leave me doing my best impression of anyone on TV who's just foud out they've been cheated on... I just stand muttering "Why" over and over again with my eyes watering and my feet shuffling backwards. The years I spent in retail were some of the dullest of my life, of all the areas I've worked in (building, plumbing, waitressing, office, acting, elfing) I can honestly say retail was the worst.

Last night I was asked to sort out all the knitwear. After someone had shown me what constituted knitwear (I was caught suggesting a jersey was knitwear) I was told to collect all the knitwear together and sort it out. I was allowed to sort it out into whatever I thought was appropriate. After my initial suggestion that we grade it all from "Kill it with fire" to "Which limb is this for?" to "I pity the sheep this came from" was greeted with a stony glare and a mildly alarming grip on a coat hanger, I got on with sorting it into these categories:

1. Buttony things
2. Fluffy things
3. Massive things
4. Normal clothes

This seemed to go down better and the hours passed like a kidney stone through a eunuch.

Today my body is extremely confused as to the time and the feeling of degradation that surrounds us. I've showered a few times but I still can't get rid of this burning desire to own something in dalmation print. I fear I have been through something akin to Hugh Jackman's experience prior to having adamantium bones... only I'm destined to fight crime dressed as RumpleDeVille. Oh joy.

Serious Blog for Serious People

2011-10-04T15:26:00.000+01:00

Oh hello and welcome to my new blog now that I am 25 years old and a proper grown up with a quarter of a century's experience at being a female human. I've read through all the old posts that were here and realised they are terribly silly. Some of the silliest blog entries that can be found anywhere on the internet. The founder of the internet even wrote to me and said: "Hello to you, please grow up and stop polluting our fine internet with your nonsense. It is nonsensical. Thank you, love Tony x". I found it weird that the internet founder would write to someone rather than email them but I decided not to let this bother me and pinned it all down to his own special brand of whimsy.

So, as of now this will be a place for absolute, straight down the line serious business for serious people. If you don't like it then just paint a new websical page on the screen of your device and look at that instead. Don't navigate off this blog because I'll get furious and start pounding my fists onto things. You won't like that and neither will the things in my nearby vicinity that are getting pounded. Think of the children.

The new blog is going to include subjects like:

Metallurgy
14th Century crimes that involved paper clips and/or scissors.
Pixels
Nomadic people
The habits of limbless creatures

I suggest that if you're not a fan of these kinds of subjects you immediately cease and desist following this blog in any way because you won't like it and then you might pound stuff and I don't want to be responsible for things getting pounded if I'm not getting the pleasure from pounding them myself.

So, you've been warned. Now, it's your responsibility to make sure you think about your actions and behave accordingly. I'll see you tomorrow.

Gaga Din

2011-09-21T20:26:00.001+01:00

Well, I just finished my third plate of spaghetti bolognese in three days... when will a complete lack of money ever stop being fun eh? Huh! Brilliant. Ho hum. I'm starting to think if I ever have to eat it again then I'll just start rocking backwards and forwards and exclaiming that my chicken money will be worth it when we've got 8 gold medals per athlete.

The thing is, something seems to have gone wrong (at least, I think it has because I can't see how it's right) but I'm being taxed about 33% of my wages... and, given that I'm only really working 2 weeks out of the month... it's quite a large chunk to kiss goodbye to. If anyone knowledgeable on this subject would like to get in touch then I'll actually listen and not roll my eyes and pretend to listen when in actual fact I'm very bored.

I've still got about 3,000 emails to respond to and then I need to pack to go away tomorrow and yet my brain is refusing to deal with any of these pressing issues. Instead, we're just sitting in a chair marvelling at how much we enjoy being in a chair. Huzzah for chairs and comfy bums that sit in them very comfortably. Despite my best efforts to shed some pounds, my bum is still in comfy mode post Edinburgh. I've been trying to shape up recently so that when I go home with the two gorgeous sisters, we can attend out night out and I won't feel like frumpy frumperson.

Heading back to the West Country is always great... I had a reminder this week of how much life can change when you take your mind off the direction. This week I heard the most amazing news; my best friend from my school days has set the date for her wedding and is set to marry the guy she has been dating since we were on a year nine school trip. I've not spoken to her for a few years now - not through design, just through a change of lives which has meant we've not really crossed paths. Now, I'm not invited to the wedding - which is quite normal given that you don't normally invite people you never talk to to important events - and this isn't a whiny piece about how I wish I was etc etc... it's just, it got me thinking about how sometimes you should be grateful for the relationships you have held on to because it hasn't happened naturally.

I take the fact that I have such a great relationship with my sisters for granted when, really, I should be glad every day that we all decided to put the effort in and hold on to what we have. You can't lament a relationship that fell away a little bit through life changes as though you did something wrong; it was just that you can't hold on to everyone and sometimes your life and the individual days make the choices for you.

I'm thrilled for my friend... even more thrilled that due to the miracles of Facebook (even with an updated version currently being berated) I will still get to see the photos!

Sweet Child of Mine - Some Thoughts on our Nation's Capital (With No Idea How to Use Capitalisation Appropriately in a Title)

2011-09-17T12:06:00.000+01:00

I'm beginning to think living in London is a bit like having a child. I have (naturally) not fully thought this through and so will be experimenting with doing just that below. If you want to see whether this survives beyond the bloggosphere and onto a stage you'll have to come and see me gig (or ask me - I'm a pushover).

Also - my skin itches a bit today and I think I like Kasabian. So far the two seem unrelated.

1. When you go out in London it's always in the back of my mind that you have to be back at either a sensible hour, or make arrangements to stay out all night. The transport system becomes very much like sorting out a babysitter...

"I could go home at 11pm on a normal tube" = "I can get my usual babysitter who is happy to stay out that late."

"I could stay out all night and just sort myself out in the bright 10am sunshine where the tourists will think I am ultra cool" = "I'll leave the kids with my parents and they will judge me the next day for being a poor parent."

"I could stay out until 3am and get the night bus home" = "I'm going to have to get that babysitter with the club foot and 3 unspent convictions."

(It's just occurred to me that in my hypothetical world of having kids I am a single parent. I'm really shocked, and also worried about what this says about my self esteem/safe sex practices.)

2. By the end of a day with either you need wine.

3. Just waking up in the morning and deciding to leave your front door is going to cost you at least £10. With a child you need to carry a suitcase of Sudocrem and nappies and bottles and the kind of cloth that must spontaneously combust when your child reaches three because you never see it again until you have the next one. When you're a Londoner you only have to look out the window and your Oyster card has been charged £1.30 (unless it's January 2012 and it's risen again by 8% to fund the Olympic celebrations that you aren't attending because you'll be in Edinburgh bleeding money into another city instead). Once you've paid for your trip wherever you're going it's almost expected that you buy some sort of frothy, milky coffee with something interesting added. It doesn't matter whether or not you drink it, you just have to be seen walking (very quickly) down a high street with it and scowling at people who stop on the streets. I'm 90% sure that in Ye Olde English "tourist" was a direct translation for "Ass hole" and it's just a prank we've been playing on people for centuries.

4. When you tell other people that aren't in the same boat as you they always say the same polar opinion:

"I like kids when you can give them back!" - - - "Ooh, I like it for a day but I couldn't live there!"

Then they look at you strangely as though you're a slightly different breed for doing something they aren't doing. When this happens, it doesn't matter whether you've spent the entire morning berating your child/Boris Johnson and swearing that you're never having another one/moving to Oxfordshire as soon as you get a pay rise, you immediately start defending your chosen position.

Of course, the second you mention kids and London in the same sentence and you immediately invoke a barrage of "opinions" on why doing anything that brings the two together or separates them is utterly wrong.

"Oh, I couldn't possibly raise my kids in the country - what would they do? Where would they go to school? They'd only have about 4 kids to be friends with!"

"Oh, I couldn't raise my kids in the city - too many cars and people and asthma."

As though children raised in either environment have been total fuck ups for years and it's just an epidemic that has thus far failed to hit the news. Unless you read the Daily Mail, in which all people under 18 are morons who will eat your skin if you don't give them a Nintendo DS.

5. At some point in the first two years of both you will get another human's vomit on you.

(S)He's Not There

2011-09-15T19:04:00.001+01:00

He wasn't waiting on the door step. He hasn't even called to apologise for being woefully late.

Also, all the interesting things in the world did not happen the moment I stepped out of my front door to go and gig in Essex. In a way this was useful because, had that happened, the rest of my life might be somewhat anticlimactic. What did happen was that I drove to Essex with a nice man, arrived at the venue to discover it was Fresher's Week and there were roaming hordes of Freshers out trying to hook up and start a merry chain of sweaty regrets. They came in waves - ordering a shot each and then leaving.

It was a pretty depressing experience to be in the queue for the ladies with 14 other girls who were all wearing smaller skirts that were less "Seductive" more "I've Only Worn This Much Because I Have To". The three girls behind me were having an animated conversation and bonding over the fact they all really needed a wee.

"I need a wee!"
"Oh my God me too!"
"I know - I really need a wee!"
"How funny!" - Back to first girl.

Not even the tiniest bit of irony from any of them. I desperately wanted to express my regret at not being able to join their conversation but I was actually queueing up to take a massive shit. I refrained and continued to shake my head inside and wonder when I made the complete transformation into an old woman. I was standing in the queue with my cropped jeans, hoodie and flip flops on feeling about 39... have I really got that old that quickly?

I suppose I must have been the same when I was their age? I have certainly never been one to dress as a bit of meat - in the early days it was a total lack of faith in the hocks that the good system of evolution has bestowed upon my family as "progress". What the hell did we start with if a cylinder of cottage cheese with a baked potato in the middle is where we are now? My ancestors must have been stumping around on legs made of spit, corned beef and a few sticks lashed together - I doubt knees were any more than a luxury for my gene pool until at least the 1950s.

Nowadays I still have very little faith in my body being a display item but I like to chalk it up to moral beliefs about the female body being all to readily displayed and therefore diminishing its value. Supply and demand - ladies, if we flood the market then who's going to want to work for it?

I've never been particularly comfortable being a dolled up girl - every now and again I find the perfect outfit that makes me feel great. If it's a little skimpy (and by some miracle I've enjoyed wearing it) then I'll wear it with pride. Generally, however, I prefer jeans and a t shirt. It doesn't mean that I don't get inexplicably jealous of girls who can dress up and carry off the "My Body is Designer" look that people drool over. I say 'inexplicably' jealous because I clearly don't want to do it, or I would have done - but I for some reason still look at girls like this and feel totally intimidated by them. Perhaps it's conditioning.

Right now though I'm wearing track suit bottoms and my old University of Kent Cricket Club hoody... so I suppose Glamour Magazine is going to have to wait until tomorrow - or until I find my hair brush (4 days and counting),

Zip Squeak

2011-09-14T18:51:00.002+01:00

There's a gap in my mind where my blog for today should be... I've tried eating a bagel, watching a milisecond of Two and a Half Men to inspire me to better things, smashing the most useful bowl in the kitchen... none of it has worked. I'm now reduced to using time pressure because I have 18 minutes to finish this blog and publish it before I have to leave for my gig. We're going to have to pray that inspiration comes winging in through the bedroom window quite soon.

The only thing I can really envisage coming in through the window (which is closed) is some kind of drilling pigeon. The sheer amount of time it would take said winged adversary to get through the glass would give me sufficient time to either:

a) abandon my post at the desk and run for some hills
b) get my phone out and prepare to become a YouTube sensation

My brain is totally fried from an entire day spent sifting through stuff that makes me want to beat my fists against either people or my own chest. The most irritating things I've encountered today are:

The CV of a woman who is only 6 months older than me, has the same degree, and is earning nearly 50k a year. No amount of being consoled about how dismal her life must be makes me feel any better on my life choices.

The CV of a woman who had kindly thought to include a photo of herself on a night out with a large glass of wine in her hand. I suppose if nothing else she gave me faith that I am nearer the first woman on the scale of career success.

We've now got 12 minutes left to think of some comedy gold. I feel like I'm going to go to all this effort to produce something resembling sentences and then, the second I step out of my front door to go to my gig tonight, everything interesting in the whole will happen and I'll wish I hadn't bothered. I'm really hoping that my interesting thing will somehow involve Will Young. I really cannot explain quite how much I adore him. It'd be quite pleasant if he'd just be waiting on my doorstep looking a little awkward with all the seasons of Gilmore Girls (except season one because he's read my blogs and follows me on Twitter under a pseudonym and knows I already own it) and a bottle of sparkling wine and he wants to just hang out. He'll explain that this is really embarrassing and he doesn't usually do things like this but he just can't help himself because he just knows we'll be best friends if I give him the chance.

We've now got 8 minutes left because I had to just go down and check the front door (got myself a little over excited) - he was not there. Which, if nothing else, shows that if he is there when I go down and check again when I've finished this then he has excellent timing. Praise be to Mr Will Young for being brilliant in every single way imaginable. Hell. If he's not there then tomorrow's blog might be more tears than letters.

I'll keep you posted.

Pants Party

2011-09-13T20:40:00.000+01:00

Today I learnt that my infant nephew could climb higher in my esteem, considerably higher. He recently became potty trained and, my sources tell me, since making the change to grown up pants he now refuses to wear trousers.

This is mind numbingly excellent in my opinion. The thought process makes my knees a little weak when I consider its brilliance -

"These are a whole new item around my bum. I really like them. To hell with covering them up. People need to see how brilliant I am to be wearing these. I am brilliant... in my pants."

I really thought this child couldn't please me any more with his renegade approach to life - and then he goes and throws this curve ball and I have to take a long hard look at my graph tracking how and when my opinion of him shifts.

I mean, I also learnt today that, despite being about 92% potty trained, he took a massive dump on his car mat. There are good arguments for whether this should be impressive or disgusting:

Disgusting - he was so engrossed in the TV/cars/lego he just decided to poop where he was.

Impressive - he was so engrossed in the TV/cars/lego he just decided to poop where he was.

Disgusting - he may well have ruined a pair of his brilliant tiny pants.

Impressive - he didn't play with the poop once he'd produced it.

Disgusting - the living room now smells a little funky and Rusky.

Impressive - he may well have been imitating the common Somerset road experience of muck spreading. Clever, clever boy.

Either way it's only 10 days until I see the little lad and we can really sort the world out. I have already been told in no uncertain terms that I am not allowed to hang out in my pants with him for the 10 days I'm back home. I'm mildly devastated but I think I'll find ways to get around the strictness of my sister's ruling. She can't be everywhere at once, and, if we can just show her how much fun it is to be in your pants she might give in and join the party.

This is pretty much the light at the end of my HR tunnel at the moment. I knew I wasn't built for an office when I had a proper job, however, at least then I had tasks which took a modicum of intelligence to accomplish. My temp positions are so far proving impossible to undertake without having to really moderate the level of eye rolling I'm prone to. Obviously, this is the point of a temp job - it's to be expected. What I wasn't expecting was how surprised people would be when I was capable of doing the "jobs" set out before me. So far I have been given a bottle of wine for putting 300 letters into envelopes and a £10 HMV voucher simply for turning up to work. I mean wow. If I continue in this vein I could be the Queen of the Temps before too long. In my pants.

Why Lumiere!

2011-09-12T23:59:00.000+01:00

I had guests!

I had guests round tonight for a meal (that I cooked all by myself) and they all (said they) enjoyed it. The warmth that this brings to my little heart is immeasurable. The meal - which I cooked, did I mention that? - had at least 3 ingredients and even offered a carnivore option for those who were not on the herbivore path through life. How terribly cosmopolitan of me. Incidentally, I have no real idea of whether or not this is cosmopolitan having only ever seen 3 episodes of Sex and The City. Should Sarah Jessica Parker, or indeed Kim Cattrall, wish to get in touch to enlighten me they may do so through the usual channels.

There's something quite satisfying about cooking if you let yourself give in to it. Chopping an onion in silence with some music on in the background could rival skiing so long as you're using a very sharp knife. Tonight was the first time I've cooked in 3 weeks and I have to say that the alchemy that ensued my trip to Tesco was pretty thrilling.

Tesco was also brilliant because the woman in front of me only bought Shredded Wheat and Southern Comfort. She's everything I presume I'm going to be in about 15 years when this whole comedy endeavour has definitely not worked out as I had hoped. In hindsight I should have asked her if we could swap numbers so that she can pass on any tips for how to keep the Shredded Wheat crunchy without losing any of the warmth of the Comfort. Respect your elders.

I suppose today was a taster for what my life could be if I gave up on all my dreams of future careers; it wouldn't be that bad. It would be today on a loop. It would be a boring verging on bad day, followed by excellent company to make up for 8 hours of tedium and disappointment. I'm not sure if I'm terrified or relieved that, given a few years to acclimatise, I probably wouldn't mind too much on a day to day basis. It would just be the day I woke up at 50 and realised I'd never pictured myself working without passion that would kill me.

Pudding was sadly amazing this evening. What with my placement at Shoe Headquarters I didn't have time to bake as well and so pudding was provided via The Hummingbird Bakery... it undid every good intention that Monday brings in terms of behaving oneself re: calories. The apple and marmite sandwich (separate entries into the lunchbox) I had for lunch just laughed hysterically in my tummy as I layered them with risotto and cheesecake cup cake. More fool me for actually believing I could stick to a normal diet!

Now to bed, in time to experience the next delight of the 9-5 routine; the Tuesday pain when you realise Monday was not a one off and, yes, you are expected to repeat this pattern until Saturday. Even on Saturday your body will wake you up at some unGodly hour so as not to "waste the day" by being asleep. Someone needs to tell bodies that on many an occasion it's actually been consciousness that has wasted a day when sleep would have been a much more satisfactory answer.

Of Course I Adore You (A Bad Day)

2011-09-12T23:35:00.000+01:00

My day started with a constipated homeless man. As I crossed the road to the bus stop on my way to work I saw two men in dirty tracksuits talking next to a wheelie bin. Then, one of the men pulled down his track suit bottoms and his underwear and squatted down on the pavement. Immediately, the school girls around me erupted in a chorus of "Oh my days!" (potentially the mating call for South East London) and squealed with repulsed delight at the morning's festivities.

I couldn't tear my eyes away from his backside, his hands clutching at the cheeks as the 8am sun displayed his flabby derriere for all the world/The Old Kent Road to see. His skin was marked and scarred and dirty and of a sickly tone. He hovered inches above the pavement.

His friend casually waved the passers by on, I momentarily shared his frustration with the interest of the passers until I realised I was staring with a more intense fixation than anyone else. I could not stop watching. His friend was telling people to keep walking, telling them to stop looking. He just hung there - suspended above the paving slabs with his body forcing downwards with all his might.

The school girls were in their element; "Who would take a shit right there on the pavement?! What is he doing?! Why don't he go down an alley way?! I can see his ass! I need new eye balls! Oh my days!".

I wanted to cry. It's not escaped me that this is two days in a row I've failed miserably at producing anything remotely funny; perhaps I should be in a different line of work - if you're beginning to wonder if this is the "difficult third series" era of my blogging, then you may be right... (but hopefully not, I despair at seriousness - it might just be a nervous breakdown). This bothered me. This bothered me an awful lot.

Who would take a shit right there on the pavement? Someone who has absolutely no where else to go.

More to the point, how has a body become so physically disorientated that the desire to shit is overwhelming enough to resort to that, and yet there is nothing coming out?

My own hypocrisy with regards to homeless people has become somewhat of a civil war within myself. I judge them for smoking, for the state of their pets, for not having pets, for the coffee cup used for money collection, for the place they've settled themselves in - whether it's too windy or non-profitable... I walk past and apply measured logic and sheltered evaluation to a situation which is far beyond the comprehension of my mind. As with most of the world's issues, it's too big for one person to tackle... but by doing what you can, the overthinker can overthink themselves into a black hole of inadequacy which completely eradicates the initial good that was done.

What I saw this morning was wrong for a society which is what ours is. The fact that it could stop so, so unblinkingly easily is a horrible indication that we are a species evolved for our own survival and not a race designed for better things. It bothered me a lot.

The Wrong Word For Today

2011-09-11T21:14:00.000+01:00

It's the anniversary of 9/11 today; if you own a media device then it's an almost inescapable event. Even popping to the pub this afternoon brought waves of coverage into my world. It's been 10 years. As ever, here's my disclaimer; I don't know what I am about to explore but I know I feel something complicated so here goes...

I feel like anniversary is an inappropriate word; I feel like we need a word which means a negative anniversary. Dress it up how you like, but we're not celebrating anything. You can try and celebrate the lives that were loved but I see this as positive mourning - it's to be applauded but it's not celebrating. An anniversary should be to celebrate a life that still exists; we need a new word.

I dislike days like this because I don't know how to be. As a general statement I can't bear Facebook statuses with "RIP" in them; they seem a tad crass to me no matter how well intentioned the person was. I struggle with forging a connection to something that was so powerful, so life changing for so many people... but was fairly remote for me. I feel a disconnection towards trying to emit sympathy because thousands of people lost their lives. Individuals lost individuals - that was the reality of it, trying to consider those individuals en masse and amalgamate their loss into something big enough for me to emote on feels shallower than ignoring it.

I watched parts of the coverage in the pub this afternoon and felt quite confused. There's a lot going on for me:

I should be watching it; it's respectful, it's historic, it's something we should all be banding together on.

I shouldn't be watching this; I have no emotive connection to it, it's rude to feed my emotional conscience on the grieving of others.

I don't want to watch this; I cannot for one second conceive of the pain anyone with a connection to those events is going through. And I don't want to.

I was 14 when the twin towers happened. I was doing a school project at my friend Emma's house and my mother phoned to check I was OK. Of course I was OK, I remember thinking, I'm in a tiny village in rural England and this is happening in New York. I didn't really understand the way things like this shook adults; because I was a child and so it seemed like yet another film happening on the TV. We watched the coverage while doing our project, because deadlines weren't going to stop for us whatever happened in America, we had our priorities. We were children.

The media makes me feel I should be including myself in the coverage. Its asking me to be a part of it. I can't shake the feeling though... and I have no idea whether this is an acceptable way to feel... but, I can't shake the feeling, that it's really nothing to do with me. Yes, it was an atrocity that was aimed at people just like me, because of things that my society, and I, did and do. For all the things that 9/11 has stood for, my life has been impacted accordingly. I've lived with my country being war, I've had family members fighting over there, I've seen security and racial tensions tighten as a result.

But, for the memorial of the actual day; this is no place for me. I was a 14 year old cutting out shiny paper; I did not, and do not, grieve. I'm not meaning to speak cruelly; I don't not regret the loss of life, I wish it could have not happened, I think the world would be a better place had all those lives been saved. But, I can't grieve for people I didn't know and things that I didn't experience. I don't grieve for 9/11 any more than I am currently grieving for the starvation in Somalia. I can stop and consider the impact it has had on my life and on the world I live in, but that's all.

The media has done a curious thing to our reactions to death, in my opinion, we feel like we should be huddled together around a television watching the memorial services. Because we remember the day and because it was about something bigger. To me, and I may be in the minority, I think this is wrong. I think grieving is for the people who lost. The rest of us should be respectful enough to recognise that we are not grieving; what we have to deal with is something else. Ownership of an event is for the people in the eye of the storm and I dislike living in a world where it becomes something so strangely magnified via an external hand.

Some Sort of Someone

2011-09-10T18:46:00.000+01:00

Today I did more housework than any human should be capable of doing before midday. I scrubbed, cleaned, washed, rinsed, scoured and hoovered. I hoovered until there was very little dust left in my room. You could staple an asthmatic to my bedroom floor and they would be absolutely fine. Then I realised that my new house mate went out for his birthday last night and was probably less than impressed with his anally retentive housemate sucking the living life out of the house. I'm frankly surprised the house is still standing given how much strategic dirt I've removed.

This afternoon I had an audition... to play an imaginary 8 year old boy. Now, I can't decide at the moment whether I'll be gutted if I get it because it means I'm a convincing 8 year old boy... or whether I'll be gutted if I don't get it because I (depressingly) know I'm perfect for the role and the Director obviously didn't realise my potential.

It's pretty much been a day of two halves; first half Cinderella, second much more Pinnocchio. What an identity crisis to have on a Saturday.

This evening I'm going to go and sample the delights of a sunset in St Albans. Let's just hope there's something in the air up there that helps me behave like a normal 24 year old. Pray for me.

There Goes My Face For The Winter

2011-09-09T12:41:00.000+01:00

Right.

Today is either going to go down in history as the day people realised I had a thus far unforeseen talent for hair dressing, or, the day people finally woke up to the fact that, left to my own devices, I am dangerous.

I've only said four words today: "Happy Birthday" and "Oh, bye". These were to my house mate who left the house when I got up. Other than that I've been very alone. I don't like to be alone; I need company.

So, I was looking at the mirror after my shower and I thought, "Hey, that's a long fringe I've got there." Then I thought I should carry on getting dressed so I can go to the library and work on my play. I would work at home but I'm worried I'll start drafting it in bodily fluids if I don't surround myself with people soon.

Then I thought, "Maybe I should go to the hair dressers on my way to the library." But then the part of my brain that most closely resembles an X Factor auditionee who's gone there for Louis said, "We've got scissors here..." and then I cut my own fringe.

The amount you'll enjoy my new feature will strongly correlate to your opinion on triangles. If you're in the isosceles camp then you and I should probably hang out a lot over the next few weeks. If you're a fan of the film About A Boy starring Hugh Grant and an ugly child, get over here and we'll party. If you're a fan of the game, "Let's list worse things that could be on your forehead" then the Old Kent Road is the place for you today.

Obviously I've tweeted a picture to Lady Gaga so we can find out whether this is self harm or social trend setting. I've not heard back yet but someone on a withheld number did phone me up and laugh for 14 minutes earlier so there's good potential she's delivered a verdict.

I think the only solution is going to be to shave all of the hair off one side of my head so that everyone is very aware that I am making a statement. Then I'll need to think up a good statement or buy so much eye liner that no one bothers to ask me the statement because it's implied that the statement is so obvious that if they don't immediately get it then they are stupid.

Cardigans and skinny jeans are going to be essential for my new look. Unless sellotaping my fringe back on works, in which case I'm fine and I'll be in the library in an hour. If not, I'll be stopping at all charity shops between here and a cliff to try and remedy the situation. It's essential that there is a balaclava somewhere in my house though or I'm just going to slowly starve to death listening to the Jeremy Vine show.

I'm not sure this counts as Super September.

Bothering Teabags

2011-09-08T23:38:00.000+01:00

The majority of my day has involved stuffing some kind of inappropriate food into my mouth and hoping the consequences only add to the artery traffic rather than pushing it over the edge. If you've never eaten liquid cheese, that's right; not melted cheese, but liquid cheese, then I suggest you never do. However, if you do somehow manage to abstain from pumping this catastrophic substance past your canines then you will never experience what is now known as the "Liquid Cheese Highs and Body Palpitations".

I'm happy to be daft in public; in fact, if I'm out with someone who doesn't like to draw attention to themselves, it is almost my favourite way to spend a day. I quite enjoy singing to myself on pavements, making things in restaurants or just generally letting loose a little bit as and when. If I'm alone, I do it purely because I want to; I like exploring urges to do things in the same way children do. I dislike the thought that I do it for attention. However, if I'm out and about with someone shy, then their sheer embarrassment at someone having a little giggly playtime while people stare in horror is worth more money to me than you could stuff into a ten gallon hat.

Today I experienced the sort of Liquid Cheese High that had me singing to the waiter, stuffing napkins into crevices throughout Soho and incapable of using my own accent and voice. Glorious.

Unfortunately this was quickly followed up by a Liquid Cheese Body Palpitation in the form of a nose bleed. Yikes and cripes. Jings even. This rather irritating addition to my day could not have been timed better. There I am in a shop in Soho when all of a sudden my life source decides to go on an outing via my smell holes (the upper decks) - this doesn't particularly worry me, I get them all the time. I calmly go and sit in a chair and stuff a few errant napkins up my nose. All of a sudden I see an ex boyfriend of mine, he's wearing a t shirt which suggests he works in the store. He's coming towards me. Now, I have no ill feelings towards this guy at all... fine fellow, relationship ended fine... but I still don't particularly want to bump into him after 2 years whilst I have some recycled tree slowly being pumped with vein juice piped into my coke cavity.

As he approaches I try very hard to look casually at my shoes but somehow, heavens knows how, he manages to recognise the pig tailed napkin junkie in the corner with a rouge nose and pale face. What follows is one of the world's worst casual conversations (it's quite hard to be suave when you're snorting snot rags) and a promise of a coffee date that I think both parties hope to God will never come to fruition. Ah the trials of the Liquid Cheese diet.

This evening, after moving on to another restaurant where I couldn't decide on a pudding and so ordered three, I attended a screening and Q&A session about Neil Innes. Fascinating stuff. I only include this because I would like to seem cultured and less like a calorie guzzling bleeder who squanders her days being an attention seeking moron. Hooray for me.

Shine Up Your Old Brown Shoes

2011-09-07T20:17:00.001+01:00

I visited Harrods today... Harrods is an incredible shop with a history that is absolutely fascinating.

Not very many people know that it was actually set up by Queen Elizabeth I during a period of her reign known as the Sassy Decade by historians who documented her years. Queen Elizabeth I (QEI) was famous in Elizabethan England for being, well, the Queen, but also for being a huge fan of dressing up in fancy pants and painting her face whiter than a fresh sheet of the old A4.

Being the Queen, she struggled a lot to go shopping - portrait artists for Ye Olde Heat Scroll were always out and about in the markets she tried to frequent. They would scribble nonsense rubbish about her and the men who were oft by her side for protection. She soon grew tired of it, because her management had made it very clear that if the gloss were to come off her "Virgin Queen" routine then she would be finished and would have no chance of cracking America. The Americans are very pious, see.

So, QEI decided to set up an emporium where she could shop in peace. Also, she was an enormous fan of escalators and had some big ideas for designing the fanciest escalators you could ever lay foot on. There were blue prints for all kinds of escalators... now, obviously in those days there was no electricity. QEI had to employ (we say employ... there are no pay records to prove it was consensual work) thousands of Spaniards to run beneath the escalators and keep them moving. In the director's cut off the film Labyrinth, they reveal that the idea for the final stairs scene was actually inspired by QEI and her dangerous obsession with tricky stair designs.

In the early days, there was no such thing as the Toy Room or the Designer Wear section - it was simply:

Things To Make Lizzy Smell Good (Rough translation from Olde English)

Things To Make Lizzy Look Good

Things To Make Lizzy Cook Good

Things To Make Lizzy Make Other People Jealous

After QEI passed away the shop space was handed down to her faithful court Jester - Jonathon Al Fayed - and it stayed in his family for generations until it became the gilded money hoarder haven that we know today. That's a lot of information to obtain on a Wednesday, I can only hope I've done it justice.

This Beast

2011-09-07T00:34:00.001+01:00

I sat in the audience of a gig tonight and watched a comedian. Nothing special; I was literally just fulfilling about 30% of my duties as an audience member. The other 70% I sadly wasn't fulfilling (listening and laughing), the direction of causality here has yet to be determined. Personally, I think I stopped listening because I wasn't laughing but I'm willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and assume I couldn't have been laughing because I couldn't hear him.

I was literally just watching him. I was totally spellbound watching him pace back and forwards, stepping from side to side, lifting his feet awkwardly and then putting them down in strange shapes. Turning, twisting the microphone in his hand and then stepping backwards again as he delivered his new material to an eager crowd. He reminded me of a zoo animal in an advert to get you to give 50p a month to a talking dog, or a polar bear in a cage that was too small. I stopped listening completely as I tried to work out whether he was even particularly aware of the way he was moving and pacing. I didn't feel like he was.

It suddenly struck me, that sometimes performing live comedy is such an uncomfortable and "wrong" experience that you are literally trying to fight yourself to continue to do it. It was like, in the struggle to get all the words out in the right order, and calculate their effectiveness, he'd completely lost track of his limbs. I've been known to do this when Safety Dance gets too much for me, but watching it with detachment was very interesting.

Comedy is a barmy game; tonight I tried out some new material that has potential but needs a point, some more punchlines and then a rhythm before it's really going to work itself into a set. I find the idea of this so fascinating; I write my material fairly meticulously, word for word, a few times in my note book. I prepare exactly what I'm going to say and then I make a list of topics to cover, I step onto the stage and, when faced with the audience, instantly start chopping and changing it around and editing on the fly. It's like you get given a tiny insight into what is and what isn't going to work; just right there. Sometimes you can reshuffle a gag; sometimes it's too late and you bomb. But, what I find interesting is that, I at least, cannot seem to do the final editing on paper - it needs to have the "in the moment" mind melt and energy exchange of the audience.

Apologies if all of the above is rambling nonsense - it was interesting when I was thinking about it. Sometimes putting things in to words other people will understand is a lot harder than I think it's going to be... I may need to buy myself a paint brush and/or a harmonica with a laser....

The Universe Via The Bowl

2011-09-05T12:13:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time there will have been a person who ate something, like a piece of bacon, and that bacon went into their tummy and gave them a load of energy. Then, a bit later they went to the toilet and sat on the seat and some of the bacon energy came out through their thighs. This energy hung around in the toilet seat for a while until you came along and sat down and then the little squiggly bacon energy climbed out of the toilet seats and into your own thighs.

Now, even though you didn't eat the bacon, you've got some of the bacon energy hanging around in your thighs until you pass it on to someone else. You can't destroy it, see, because it's energy. The energy didn't even start with the bacon; it started with the pig (or the mushroom if it's Quorn bacon/Fakeon) who must have eaten some swill and then had all the energy in him until the first toilet person ate it.

So your thighs are made of potato peelings and weird mushy food, which have been through a pig, which have been through someone else, out through their thighs, into a toilet seat, and out again into your thighs.

I'm not sure what this means but I'm sure it's very important so have a think and we'll reconvene tomorrow.

The Neighbours Everybody Needs

2011-09-04T13:35:00.000+01:00

I got home yesterday to find the people with the house opposite my room were having a party. Not just any party - this was the sort of party where they made their own music; loudly. Music that, had I not seen a guitar, was not necessarily distinguishable as music. This was the kind of singing and strumming that you would expect if someone grabbed any member of Girls Aloud, put a gun to their head and said "PLAY ME MR TAMBOURINE MAN NOW BITCH OR YOU WILL DIE".

I imagine the individuals at this gathering had imbibed a fair amount of alcohol and then decided to express their pleasure via the magic of noise. It was guttural, it was pure, it was painful. Had I not opened the blinds I'd have been fairly convinced that I was listening to the back catalogue of Israel's entries to the Eurovision song contest. Obviously I'm a big Eurovision fan and so this wasn't a problem based on any kind of moral or taste factors - it was just an issue of it being supremely late, me wanting to watch West Wing in peace after an amazing day (Twickenham double header followed by one of the best comedy line ups I could have dreamed).

Once, when I was in Bradford, a particularly forthright taxi driver told me that he would never even consider moving to London because it was a horrible place. I hesitated to ask him to take a quick peek out the window and explain why he had settled here instead. He said to me, "I bet you don't even know your neighbours" and I thought - "Of course I don't! I only know my house mates because we share a kettle." I didn't think this was particularly weird. I lived in a tiny village in Somerset for the first 18 years of my life and I didn't know most of my neighbours then either... am I a deeply unsociable person or is this just standard practise for the modern world?

It would worry me that if I sought out these people and attempted friendship based purely on geography, it would be blindingly obvious that we hadn't hit it off when we suddenly stopped talking after the initial chit chat. Surely you can only begin to become friends with the people around you if you naturally find some reason to interact?

Isn't this why the good lord invented postmen with their little red slips that tell you number 82 have your parcel? My new winter coat last year is the only reason I have ever spoken to any of the people who live in my street. Surely even in Bradford people don't just bake up enough cookies for everyone and then hope that only the good folks open their front door to your welcoming knock?

Should I have grabbed a few cans and a grass skirt last night and hopped over the fence to play strumalong, instead of lying in my bed scowling and wishing Sam Seaborn hadn't departed so early? Perhaps I would have done if I lived in Bradford... but had I been murdered last night, I really can't see the police thinking "Poor girl, just trying to help out with the Big Society and she was hacked to death by an ex-Israeli popstrel with a badly tuned guitar". They would have thought - "Why on earth, in this day, age and post code would you a) leave your house after dark, and b) willingly go into a house that is emitting torture noises?"

It's not that it wouldn't be nice to meet all your neighbours; after all, how else do you get ideas for sitcoms and ways to start affairs, I just don't think it's a realistic aim when, for financial reasons, you're living on the sort of road Sesame Street warned would happen if you didn't listen in school. Perhaps at my next residence I will aim to be the hostess with the mostess and have people dropping by for high tea all the time... but after last night I think it might be purely recorded music.

Pretty Frank

2011-09-03T10:20:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, my good friend had a wicked time convincing me I was going to die alone because I don't necessarily link sex and affection. Incidentally if we're related you might be more comfortable looking away now. I'm not going to do any sketches, don't worry - not least because that would most likely just be me drawing on the computer screen as I have no idea how to get a picture into the computer - but I would like to explain why I'm not mental for having this opinion.

It's not that I don't enjoy affection - affection is absolutely lovely - I just think it's quite a different thing from getting it on with someone. This doesn't mean I don't have feelings for the men I've ever slept with, I just don't really enjoy dusting them off and singing about rain drops while I'm getting PHYSICAL.

Now, last night my wind up merchant of a friend had a wonderful time telling my disinterest in cuddling and or eye contact made me an automaton who would one day bark at small children. I'm not that adverse to the concept of barking at small children, but I refuse to admit it's because I like my sex with a backbone.

And, yes, obviously his winding up of yours truly has worked to the point where I'm still thinking about it this morning - but - well, I have no defence of this. I just want to check that I'm perfectly normal for thinking you can switch off the more sensitive side of yourself when you want to have a more industrious evening? Do the affection after! Cook a lasagne whilst singing along to Tony Bennett and brushing various people's hair - just keep your feelings out of my sex please.

Incidentally, I'm not a terrible bed hopping slut - I have made it my life's ambition to try and limit the number of people who might be able to do a startlingly accurate representation of where my body deviates from the normal shapes of humans. That way, when the internet suddenly springs up a page called "Shapes No Man Should Ever Have To Deal With", I will have a decent starting point as to who is responsible.

I don't think sex has to necessarily ruin friendships either; I'll never quite understand people who have an awkward fumble and then find it impossible to look each other in the eye afterwards; get over it. I'm not sure why some people think sex has mystical properties. Of course it's great - why do you think we consciously and sub consciously spend the vast majority of our days trying to make other people want to sleep with us - but it just a thing. It's not like once someone's had sex with you they all of a sudden hold the key to all your inner secrets and can use them against you whenever they see fit.

I'd feel far weirder with someone if I woke up next to them with a banging hangover having just sung along to an entire Celine Dion album and told them about every argument I've ever had with my mother whilst showing them my scrap book entitled "Smells I Shouldn't Have Been Able To Make", than if I woke up to find we'd had some sex but he knew nothing more about me than he did 12 hours ago.

I'm not sure if I've gone wrong somewhere in my opinions on this... it seems quite logical to me: sure, you have to be very careful with sex and I certainly don't advocate sleeping with everyone you meet. But, if you want to, and you do it safely (and brilliantly) why be embarrassed about it? Why have to pretend it really meant something? It did mean something - it meant you felt great... don't feel you've got to ladle on some deep and meaningful to go with it.

So there we go. There were some thoughts on that. Family members can resume normal scanning of my daily life to check I'm alive/not in a cult/still got 4 limbs. Consider me successfully wound up.

Super September is Underway!

2011-09-02T12:23:00.003+01:00

Super September got off to a banging start with an excellent gig at Downstairs at the King's Head - I sucked up my usual nerves and ploughed through 5 minutes of brand new material which was mostly received very well. An excellent start. It then took me about 2 hours and what felt like £5,000 on my Oyster card to get back from Crouch End to Old Kent Road. I just don't think buses in the dark will ever make a lot of sense to me... it's like all logic suddenly vanishes from my consciousness and every decision I make is the wrong one. In the future I will only live in cities where bus drivers are:

a) friendly
b) wearing green jumpers if they are driving a bus that will get me home

Obviously I am now home though (have been for a few hours), sitting in a towel listening to Will Young's new album (because my social experiment to see if I'll still worship him when I'm well into my twenties is going excellently well) and looking forward to being brilliant for the rest of the month.

Now, while most people wouldn't see sitting on their bed in a towel with absolutely no plans as being a particularly successful day - but they are wrong. There are tonnes of things that could be less successful than today, and most of those I've done this week already (in the bit that was still August so it doesn't count).

One thing I have been working incredibly hard on is not contacting the dreaded ex... now, before you kick off and exclaim to me that I should definitely be totally over him by now, save your breath - I've given myself that stern lecture, I half listened and then I gave myself a mouthful back about how I am over him but I am just naturally a hoarder - whether it is old receipts, greetings cards from people I no longer speak to, or meaningful relationships; I am a clinger.

He contacted me at the beginning of the week and, whilst this is usually enough to send me into a tail spin, this time it felt different - I felt a bit detached, but nonetheless curious... is this good progress? Having never really had any other significant liaisons, I don't really have a template for knowing whether this is a good state of affairs. I'm going to say that it is.

Having satisfied my curiosity and found out he is well, I realised that contact with a long finished ex is a bit like watching Nickleodeon as an adult; you sort of smile fondly and realise that, as an adult, you just don't understand why there are so many talented twins in America, can very clearly see all the reasons Ray and Lisa aren't together, but you still wish your best friend came in through the window with his own ladder. As a child you just hummed the theme tune and frequently forgot to flick back after the music channels in the ad break - now that you're grown you're starting to question the lyricism of "sibling synchronicity".

Of course, it helps that this particular instalment of "Laura being a dickhead because a long forgotten man friend gets in touch" fell straight after the delights of Edinburgh - if nothing else Edinburgh is very good for making it supremely easy to swear at people whether they have wronged you or not. Edinburgh 2011 saw me call a lady (approximately 72) an asshole. This is obviously not something I would do in the real world (I won't say I'm not proud though), but she thoroughly deserved it. I like to think she will change her way of dealing with people in the streets having been dressed down and told to learn some manners by a ludicrously over tired midget wearing a sandwich board.

So, all in all super September is thus far certainly super. It will get entirely more super tomorrow when there's rugby and a trip to Twickenham to get busy with. Chin up folks, I get the feeling we might actually be able to cure something big this month...

Make It A Good One

2011-09-01T13:51:00.000+01:00

Woohoo!

It's September - I love September. I love the smell, the weather, the trees, the colours, the stuff that happens. Everything about this month is going to be great - I have officially decided. Here is a list of stuff that's going to happen to me this month;

1. I'm going to learn how to paint my toe nails without getting lots of paint all over my toes and then washing it all off. This will mean that by the time summer comes round next year I will be one of those glam people at the beach who looks effortlessly great and has vibrant toe nails. I feel like vibrant toe nails will help to give the impression I am incredibly chic and have everything under control.

2. I will once again consider learning French fluently so that I can happily just up sticks and move there should exactly the right cottage become available. That way, me and my perfect toe nails can go and operate the lock and grow peonies and I will be the mysterious British woman who never talks about her past. The only reason I won't talk about my past is that it's very dull and if the French people knew the truth then the local children would stop thinking I was magic and I would be bored.

3. I'll turn 25. Once I'm 25 I'll start toying with the idea that I'm genuinely going to live past 30. It's occurred to me recently that (very subconsciously) I don't really consider myself living past 30. Not in a morbid sense, I just struggle to cope with the concept of not having completed everything by the time I'm a thirty something. I am officially going to chill out around 25 and start enjoying myself rather than being a little on the irritating side of uptight. Wish me luck with this because it sure as fuck is not going to come naturally.

4. I'm going to write to the people who have made the latest JML hair trimmer advert and tell them that no one sitting on the sofa during the day wants to watch a man go from shaving his nasal hair to his back hair in one easy step. Trimming hair off a man is something only people being paid in cold hard cash should have to do. Removing hair from hard to reach places very nearly caused the premature end to a relationship I was once in; my boyfriend at the time asked me to pluck (yes, that's right, pluck) the stray hairs from his shoulders and back for him. I, like any sane woman, refused point blank and then yakked up a large amount of stomach acid at the thought. He countered by telling me his ex used to do it happily for him... it's not that he was surprised at how quickly I packed up his stuff, called his ex to warn her he was coming and then smacked the tweezers out of his clammy hand... but he didn't ask me to pluck anything again. Gross.

I think that's a fair amount to set myself to achieve in a month - obviously I could start with the big things like getting some money in or achieving something great, but I feel like September is a good month for being manageable.

Olfactory Nemesis

2011-08-31T14:50:00.000+01:00

One of the eternal joys of living where I do are the myriad smells that waft through my window... I have spent all of today sitting on my bed working and being alternately assaulted with either pot or fried chicken. If anyone were to come in to say hello to me today they'd probably want to sit me down and give me a stern talking to about not abusing my body with such gay abandon. The constancy of the smells means I'm pretty immune to both - or that I'm already so stoned that there isn't even a chicken smell at all, it's just that I've now got perma-munchies. One would assume that owning your own fast food outlet and being a bit of a pot head would be a vicious cycle leading to very little profit and an ever expanding waist line.

God bless the Old Kent Road for letting a straight laced obsessive from Somerset experience both weed and food addiction without ever needing to leave her bed. Huzzah.

The last day of August eh? Who saw that coming - obviously except for calendar makers and people who haven't just spent the last month with their head rammed firmly up their netherchute - eh? Tomorrow will be September which is traditionally my favourite month of the year. I love September for a lot of reasons:

1) I like autumn weather - it is always what it's meant to be. British summer is never right, British winter is rarely snowy picture book style. But Autumn... Autumn we get bloody right. We ship in just the right number of leaves, we know how to have windy chill without being too pissy rainy... it's just bliss.

2) My birthday falls in September and I've got big plans for being 25 this year. This year is going to blow people's minds. Oh yeah.

3) September is stationary month. September is the month where you can go to WHSmith and happily pile all kinds of books, files, rulers, calculators and erasers into your basket and not feel bad about it one bit. Obviously, if you're no longer in some form of education then you're going to need a pretty good reason and this year I have one;

My latest comedy notebook is full. I need a new one. I am very fussy about which book I have for my comedy. The last one I've had has not been as productive as I would have liked so I'm going to have to think long and hard about which one I go with this time... and tomorrow I get to go and scour the shelves and find my perfect match. I might even treat myself to a new pen to match it. Obviously, gone are the days when I can justify a 101 Dalmations pencil case and sit worrying about whether tins or zip ups are going to be in fashion this year, but I can still have some fun...

I love stationary. I can think of no better way to start the month than by buying some excellently ruled paper and maybe a new slot in for my filofax. Think big people. We're on our way.

In All Your Wisdom

2011-08-30T22:35:00.000+01:00

Today has been a day for sleeping and not really a lot else... sleep all morning, wake briefly to have an ill advised pint, sleep some more... watch a bizarre TV show about a sad dwarf who is honing his drag act, and now back to bed to probably sleep again. This is surely not the life an intelligent being is supposed to lead. Tomorrow will be for accomplishing things... tomorrow will see much achievement. The sort of achievements that people write about in books using gold pens.

Before I go to sleep I am going to rearrange some of my bedroom furniture however... I always do my rearranging at night (not a euphemism), I don't think I've ever hefted furniture in daylight. I'm not sure why I do it... this time it's a boredom thing - I like change, I need things to be different every once in a while or I start getting itchy feet. Moving a book case might just keep me from leaving the country on a whim. Perhaps.

Having slept all day, this feels like the perfect night for an adventure to begin in... if some sort of demon climbed in through my window right now and told me I was the key to a big mystery that held the fate of a kingdom of people in it's grasp, I would be downright thrilled. I'm wearing skinny jeans though which is an issue, as I don't really feel they're appropriate for an adventure - leggings, yes... some kind of innapropriate night dress that will tear on things and make me look wild, yes... but skinny jeans, stripey slippers and a jumper? Not so much. David Bowie would take one look and wander off for a better heroine.

What with it being only 117 sleeps until Christmas (yes, that's right - in the absence of Edinburgh to think about I'm planning Christmas instead), now would be about the right time to travel to a distant land and do something epic only to return on Christmas Eve and find my stocking has still been laid out as per usual. Then I will have the sort of magical shower that heroines have in films - you know, the kind that not only washes you but also applies eyeliner and lip gloss and buys you a great outift - and come down for Christmas dinner in time for the first snow fall of the day. Perhaps a baby will be born too. Maybe my baby? My baby as I'm obviously pregnant by some Prince I met on my travel. Only the baby will be a little bit cursed and so we're leaving the door open for a sequel.

I must say I'm excited. I'm probably (genuinely/embarassingly) going to change my clothes now before I start moving furniture just in case I need to be ready for my silhouette shot against some New Zealand mountain as I turn and mourn the home I left behind. It'll be about the same point that I start learning a poignant lesson. If any of you want to come along, I strongly advise you get down to the Old Kent Road now because I won't be asking the owl to wait when it turns up with my message.

Have a Drumstick

2011-08-29T09:53:00.000+01:00

I'm sitting with real internet access for the first time in a month, listening to The Byrds, working out how soon I can realistically move out of London and hoping this second cup of tea doesn't mean we have to make a pit stop in the first 5 minutes of the impending journey back down home.

The Edinburgh Fringe is over (for me at least) and to be honest I'm pretty pleased. I am utterly exhausted - I really don't think I could have dealt with much more in this 4 weeks without just tearing off all my clothes and screaming at the rain "WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!" - if you've never been to the Fringe before, this doesn't mean I've had a horrendously eventful Fringe, this is just how everyone feels at the end. It's the amalgamation of highly strung people, caustic reviewers and expensive food in a very wet but beautiful city.

Ok, after a brief pause (which you didn't even notice because of my subtle use of the return key) I have now spilt most of my tea down my front which means I am confident I won't need to stop excruciatingly frequently (unless I want to wring out my jumper). The Byrds have also finished so I do need to find myself some different music to listen to. Hold on. Ok, Crosby Stills and Nash have stepped up to the plate for a wee while.

I think the rest of this week will be largely made up of my duvet and a West Wing box set until I feel like I have a firm enough hold on myself to leave the house and work out what I'm going to do with the next few months... it feels like everything has been building up to the festival and now that it's been and gone I have to sort of start a new plan. This new plan is probably going to begin with finding a new way to get money into the bank. That's probably essential if I want to live anywhere and eat some stuff.

Of course, I might abandon that plan almost instantly. A much nicer plan would be to just start singing to people in the street and making statues out of clay. Or discovering something very important so that people are pleased with me and tell me I've done enough for this life time and can have a break now. That'd be pretty cool too. However, of all the things I definitely know about myself, I certainly know I am not someone who will discover something important. I'll trip over something important and swear at it for a while before kicking it and walking away, then a week later my friend will turn up in lovely clothes and I'll say "Where did you get those clothes from?" and they'll say, "Oh, see that thing over there? With the dent in it from being kicked? It's really important. I got loads of money for it." and then I'll feel like an idiot.

So. That's what's happening? Feel informed? No, me neither.

When There's Silence

2011-08-22T11:22:00.002+01:00

So... I didn't blog for the last two days - I know this doesn't matter to anyone else but it kind of matters to me because this was supposed to be a little challenge I set myself and when I don't get it done I feel annoyed. The last two days I've just been too fuzzy headed and distracted with Fringe issues to get it done. Today I've got a two and a half hour rehearsal to reshape the play and fix some of the problems that have crept in to Ink over last two weeks. I'm hoping after today I'll be a lot more my old self. Whiny Laura is not something people should have to deal with for 24 hours a day. This morning I managed to be rude to two people before I was even conscious (I feel this is an achievement - they may not) - this probably needs to change.

It's the last week of the Fringe and I'm ready to let my hair down. Bring the noise. Bring it loudly.

I've actually been thinking about my birthday today - I went to see Craig Campbell at The Stand (definitely heavily recommended) the other day and whilst watching him I suddenly noticed that I knew exactly what I wanted for my birthday next month. He was wearing a pair of shoes that were like little rubber gloves for your feet, made from wet suit material with flexibility and awesome toe pockets. I want a pair so badly you can't even imagine it.

I hate shoes - I loathe wearing shoes - I severely detest wearing any form of shoe. I tend to wear flip flops so I feel less like I'm wearing shoes... sadly, these are cream crackering my knees and hips because they make you walk weirdly. So! I think Mr Campbell's foot apparallel might just be the answer to my problems. I might even thank him when I get them - unless that would just be confusing and he'll then think that I think he's bought me a birthday present and then I'll look a bit mental.

However, if he was pleased about me liking his shoes and having got a pair of my own then we might be able to hang out together after that. I will admit he's a tad more outdoorsy than I am so I might have to get into slightly better shape to be able to keep up. A little. (Note: this is a lot funnier if you know who he is).

This evening I'm going out to party a little bit (read, a lot) and the rest of the week will flow by in a happy haze of "nearly over-ness" in which I will have no worries. Huzzah!

Sometimes You've Got To Please

2011-08-20T00:39:00.002+01:00

Sitting there with her pony tail high,
Wonder how she'd look with my fork in her eye.
Glossy brown mane, laid over her shoulder
Wonder how she'd look lying under a boulder.

Sexy kitten heels and legs that go for miles,
She's giving them the look and the cute little smiles,
I'm trying to play along, but all the while,
I'm thinking of a rumour that begins with piles....

It's not that I'm jealous, I just I want to kill her,
Trying to decide between flambee or grill her,
Or bathe her in acid, or drop her on her head,
I'm really not choosy, so long as she's dead.

Sitting there with her bright baby blues,
I'm sidling up to add a sweet purple bruise,
Even when she laughs, her stomach stays flat,
There's a strong chance my left foot is aiming for her...

It's not that I'm jealous, I just want to kill her,
Choking someone on their own breasts is really quite a skill, a
Quick death or slow; I'm really not fussy
Just help me get rid of this faux fur skank hussy.

Weird Things That Have Happened Today

2011-08-18T20:51:00.002+01:00

Weird things that have happened/ I have done today:

1. Got a bad review and laughed instead of cried (it's difficult to explain this without sounding like a bitter shrew why I was so amused but one day I promise I went. Let's just say being described as an "adept bimbo" has probably been the highlight of my Fringe thus far.)

2. Been praised by a strange man on the mile for being brave enough to move out of my parents house. He held my hand whilst stroking my wrist and told me I was very small 6 times and then started stopping passers by to show them how small I was. Then he asked where I was from and when I said Somerset he said I was very brave for being in Edinburgh and away from my home. I'd forgotten quite how severely I can attract a crazy person during the Fringe. Sigh.

3. I've licked half an orange that fell on the floor. My friend (the Welsh one) is having a bad day and then he dropped his orange on the floor so I very quickly licked all the dirt off it and then he could still eat it. I'm not sure whether I got more germs from #2 or #3 but it's safe to say I should get some jabs.

4. An old man offered me a ticket to see the Tattoo with him because his girlfriend has had to go into hospital for an emergency hip operation. I find this idea funny enough that I don't need to embellish it.

So, there you go. That is one day. One day of this shit. I just wanted to give a quick idea of how sometimes I just wonder what it would be like to have a normal life.

Laura Lexx on Men

2011-08-17T21:06:00.000+01:00

At this point I feel it's only fair to point out I'm not sure if I really will be talking about men in this blog but I was in the kitchen trying to work out what to write about and I thought of this title and then thought I would like to turn it into a picture book. I find the idea of just touring the world and finding different men to stand on and then taking a picture very funny. Some could find inventive ways of letting me stand on them, some could not know until the second we took the picture and some people could be blissfully unaware I was even standing on them. Obviously, if there's a famous landmark in the vicinity I'm happy to get that in the picture too so that there's some context but actually it's not very important.

So men, eh? Don't they taste like shit and never fill you up? Eh?

Oh, wait no I think that's aeroplane food actually. Men must be something else. Who cares.

I don't have a problem with men which might turn out to be a massive flaw in this post somewhere along the line. I mean, I have a problem with some men; they're dickheads. But then, equally, I also find a lot of women really twatty. If it makes either gender feel better I dislike children a whole heap more than either of them. With the exception of my nephew Bobber. I feel like children remain quite genderless until teenage years... before that crappy pants can have a peepee stick or a half chewed drumstick in them and they're still awful and not something I want to deal with.

Grown up men I quite like. Especially ones with beards; I'm a grand fan of a good beard. It's my dream to get engaged to a man with a beard so thick he can hide my ring in it and I'll have to forage around in there first before he can propose. He'll turn to me across the dinner table and say;

"Have I got some corn beef in my beard?"

And then I'll have a look and all of a sudden I'll pull out this amazing ring and we'll get married and live happily ever after. Instead of wearing his ring on his finger he might use it to put his beard in a pony tail. That would amuse me greatly and our children would always ask if they could hang off the pony tail. They'd get a beating for that and taught to respect other people's follicles.

I'm in a good place with men at the moment; it's just me and a collective of men all hanging out at Disney land together having an absolute blast. I wish the collective term for a group of men was a beard of men. I think it just sounds right... it sounds like they would all be log cutters and hang out with beer glasses with handles on them smoking cigars. Incidentally, I also love cigar smoke... I think perhaps what I need to do is go and look for a husband in 18th Century Russia. I don't speak Russian so it would be even more likely they'd marry me because I wouldn't have something "smart" to say every time they spoke.

I don't see that there's anything particularly wrong with enjoying being single. It's not like I have the sort of lifestyle that sees me bringing a different man home every night - one of the best outcomes of body dysmorphia is that it can seriously inhibit your slaggishness. I don't like being single because I like sleeping around; I like being single because I like having great relationships with guys that don't get all messed up with emotions.

It has been a severely long time since I met a bloke that made me want all the crap that comes with a relationship; all the bits that I want, I can get without needing to be nice to them on a regular basis. Relationships are like eating pic n mix without a bag; they're hard to hold on to, you don't enjoy the sweets as much and you get half way through and wish you hadn't bothered. Just use a bag! Then, you can close the bag when you've had enough for one day and stop before you're sick. Also, there's a good chance you'll put the bag down somewhere and find it again a few weeks later and be really pleased with yourself because you'd totally forgotten you bought them.

Obviously, if you get the chance to eat pic n mix out of a beard you should never turn it down. That is very important.

The King You Want To Meet

2011-08-16T14:09:00.002+01:00

This afternoon I'm doing Comedy Club 4 Kids at the Edinburgh Fringe... I began my day by watching Despicable Me to get myself into the right frame of mind and now I'm staring out the window at a sea gull on the lamp post who is staring right back - the sea gull, not the lamp post. The sea gull isn't really helping me work out exactly how to whip these children into a comedic frenzy but I do appreciate his efforts.

Had an absolutely amazing night watching The Wrestling last night - it was probably the best thing I've ever seen. I'm 100% certain I watched Fringe History last night. Comedians vs Wrestlers in a 90 minute bout of energy, sweat and hilarity. Andrew Maxwell absolutely stole the show as the commentator for the Goodies - he had the 800 seater venue all chanting "Fair Play! Decency!" for the vast majority of the show while he layered joke after joke about the importance of rule abiding. Sounds weird - was weird. Absolutely brilliant.

After the show, we all hit the pavement and tried to work out where to go next. After a bit of chattering and some strenuous attempts by Pleasance Staff to stop us disturbing the residents, we were joined by a few of the celebs from the wrestling and decided to go off to Brooke's bar, which houses all the cool people you could want to meet. I say "we", I'm not telling the whole truth... I went home to bed.

The Fringe is my annual reminder that I just cannot handle the schmoozing side of comedy and "show business". Not that I really believe my life even vaguely resembles show business. But, then perhaps that's because I go home to bed instead of trying to make friends with people I think will be useful.

The Swede (see blog - "Our House") and I decided that there was nothing we would enjoy less than standing awkwardly in a bar attempting to find things to say to people off the telly. I fear this may be the downfall of my career... I just quite like the friends I've already got. In that situation, you're one of two types of people;

Someone people want to talk to.
Someone no one wants to talk to.

I would most definitely have been in the latter category last night. I expect if you're brimming with confidence and can find a smooth way to strike up a chat with anybody then it wouldn't matter. But I'm not sure I'd ever be very good at that; I'd probably wind up standing by a wall all evening trying to smile at people and hoping no one asked who had let me in.

Self promotion and publicity is rubbish; if you don't do it, you get no where. But if you do do it, everyone thinks you're a prick for how you got somewhere. How on earth do you win? Clearly, I can't answer that question as I'm sitting in my pyjamas trying to work out if there's a way to get sellotape into a house without leaving to go and buy it. There is not much evidence of the word winner stamped anywhere on this person. Hell, I struggle to even say what I want to say to people I do know, let alone complete strangers who experience the fanzone version of speed dating every time they leave the house. I think this is why I spend so much of my time constructing chatter for people who won't really talk back; blogs, plays, stand-up... it saves having to keep putting in those awkward pauses where people notice conversation is not exactly 'flowing'. My conversation leaks. I think that's fair to say.

If you're worrying that the point to this blog is that I think I'm better than people who tag along to things and try and make friends with famous people, it isn't. I don't look down on them at all; I'm jealous to the max. Not jealous of the nights out they must have, but just jealous of the stories they can return home with. Stories where they accidentally got chatting to Jimmy McHellafunny and he took an instant liking to them so they all went and bought donkeys and fed them popping candy while smoking sparklers. These are always great stories... these are stories about proper comedians who will be excellent 60 years olds reminiscing about the golden years. Not stories start with "So, I went home and watched a film with Bill Pullman in it..." and those stories that do are narrated by someone you've never heard of.

Starting tomorrow I might make a conscious effort to be incredibly cool and rock and roll. I'll wear even more eyeliner, invest in some hair spray and I'll go out drinking alone and meet the clown Rolling Stones of my generation. I'll build an encyclopaedia of anecdotes about drinking cider through my eyes while someone with 5* reviews brushes my hair and invites me to go to Morocco. I will be great. I will be incredible. You just wait.

Note: You might be waiting a while. Sorry.

High Apple Pie

2011-08-14T10:07:00.002+01:00

I feel very mellow this morning; it's possibly the effects of having replaced tea with honey and lemon in hot water... where all the caffeine used to be raging around my system I know have a very gentle bee-juice induced cosy feeling. It's not doing anything for my throat sadly and I still sound like an angry male football fan whenever I speak. I just opened the curtains and it's an almost beautiful day outside. I'm qualifying this statement because, in Edinburgh, a beautiful day is where you can see a small amount of blue sky behind the clouds and you're not going to get thoroughly soaked by the day - just a little bit, so it's OK.

It might sound a little mad, but I'm beginning to get a good idea into my head of what next year's Edinburgh shows will be... we're only 1/3 of the way through this year and yet there's a little nugget of an idea that's taken hold in my mind and the more people I tell about it the more they think it would be lovely. I'm thinking it might just be time to branch out into some children's theatre... it's the natural progression from topical drama about the British Media I believe.

Yesterday I had three very different shows to deal with and I realised that marketing is a trick that, if mastered, can set you up for the rest of your life... and if you can't quite get it right you feel like you're going slightly crazy. Ink yesterday happened in front of the strangest audience of the run so far; a moderate number of absolutely silent, stock still people sat before us and just stared at the events as they unfolded. No laughs, no nods, no sign of human interaction at all... and then I disappeared off to do Quiz In My Pants and performed to 80 people with an absolutely electric atmosphere. We'd got Tom Green as one of our guests on the show and once the audience found this out, the level of energy was insane. Later on that night I played to about 8 people in a roughly 100 seater, at midnight in a room above a nightclub... the ups and downs of this career could quite easily send you round the bend I swear.

I'm sure when Einstein said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results he had no idea how much the Edinburgh Fringe would undermine his assertions. Stay here for just 4 days and you will see how the slightest fickle trick of fate will determine how many bums on seats you have seated in front of your masterpiece... was it flyering in a specific spot that worked? Was it my elevator pitch that put them off? Should I keep my hair down when I'm telling people about it? Is it more serious if I've got black trousers on? So many questions... not an answer in sight.

Ah well, I'm off out for Round 9... bonkers.

You Were Onion On My Mind

2011-08-13T10:20:00.002+01:00

Huh, well... it's 6 hours later than I went to bed and I am awake again with breath that smells a lot like an onion and a fierce desire to be full of tea. Happily I have tea.

The thing is, I'm left with the nagging feeling that I eloped with an onion last night. I'm almost certain I remember meeting one at the bar when I left the gig I watched; he had a great tan and a pearl necklace around his middle. I thought the pearl necklace was kind of weird for an onion but he didn't seem to think so - it was a present from his Grandfather who used to be an oyster.

We got chatting and things seemed to be going pretty well. He was quite amusing - I've only ever seen onions make people cry before but this one really had us all in fits of laughter. He explained to me that onions only ever make people cry because of an ancient oniony curse that has existed for centuries on onions of the world - if you harm an onion in any way you will be reduced to tears instantly as you imagine all the onion babies they will never have now because of your actions. It's not very effective though obviously and I told my onion beau this.

I said it didn't work because they were too delicious, he took this as a compliment and we progressed our relationship from there. It was pretty much a perfect evening until we bumped into a red onion as we were heading outside for some fresh air (hanging out with an onion means things get fausty quite quickly). It turns out onions are incredibly racist towards each other and cannot bear to be in the same places. I thought this was quite interesting but I didn't have time to ask whether spring onions were just as bad because they had kicked off into a massive fight.

Thankfully my guy won and I didn't have to witness the horror of his peel being strewn across the street. We headed off to Gretna Green after that and now we are onion and wife forever more. The moral of the story? If you wake up and all you can taste is onion, try and remember what the hell happened so you can write about that instead.

Mr Sand's The Man

2011-08-12T09:37:00.002+01:00

It's pretty easy to forget how good not being tired is until you've had a good night's sleep... when you wake up after a solid 9 hours and you've got out of bed before it's occurred to you to be angry about it. More than sleep I prefer not being tired any more but still being in bed - not in a gross, "I'm touching other people" kind of a way - but the sort of awake where you're marvelling at how soft a pillow case can feel against your cheek. I often lie there wondering whether it's down to the cotton, fabric softener or indeed, my cheek. If it is my cheek then I'm going to start hiring myself out to bedding manufacturers so that they can use me to showcase how soft a pillowcase can feel.

Today is a day that's largely going to feature handing damp pieces of paper to people in the streets and hoping they like it enough to come and see my shows over the 700 others that are available to them. Some would call this demoralising - these people have rough cheeks, I am excited. What better way to gauge the success of your flyer and premise than by listening to the apathy and/or snide remarks from people as they casually fold up your flyer and put it into a pocket. Or even worse, just drop it straight onto the floor. The first time you see one of your fliers lying face down in the rain is a pretty brutal moment for any young flyerer. It's like seeing someone sniff something you've given them to eat and then push the plate away whilst smiling at you and sighing.

People react very strangely to flyerers as though it's a pest to be given flyers... you sort of have to wonder why they're at the Fringe if they're not interested in finding out what shows are on. If you've that meticulously planned your day that no amount of flyering can affect your day, can I suggest you get the fuck off the Royal Mile and go and sit in the dark in case you hurt yourself with spontaneity?

If you've never been to the Fringe, the Royal Mile is like running a gauntlet of GCSE Drama students. There are a few stock features that are here every year as different theatre groups try their hand at attracting the masses:

1. Girls in corsets doing a raunchy/transgender version of a traditional play.
2. A lot of people in white face paint standing very still and glumly offering flyers without saying anything.
3. Some blonde people and a violin player trekking up and down playing something with a harmony.
4. Someone pretending to be dead but surrounded by, you've guessed it, flyers...
5. A puppet with a flyer in it's mouth who is now struggling to do anything except cock it's head to one side.

Please don't let yourself think that I'm disparaging in any way about these features; they're as constant and essential as the rain; you start to believe the city couldn't handle the pressure if any of them decided not to come. It's just that once you've seen them a few times it's a bit like watching the same F.R.I.E.N.D.S. episode for the 9th time that week; you're laughing like a Pavlovian dog every time Chandler opens his mouth, and similarly on the mile, you're kicking them in the shins before you've even stopped to consider that they're real people too. It's a vicious cycle; the sort of vicious cycle that's a total highlight to your day.

Up To My Old Tricks

2011-08-11T21:27:00.000+01:00

Absolute vocal wreckage has forced me indoors this evening to ponder the monsoon we're currently living in up in Edinburgh. It's quite difficult to describe exactly how much rain there is here... as soon as you step out of the house you can shampoo your hair and wring out your underwear right there in the street. It's not so much that your hair will frizz with the rain, it's that you become so sodden you worry the weight of the water will pull the hair straight out of your head. I'm starting to think that baldness might even be an advantage as it would stop the ends of your soaking hair giving you breast region damp patches where it hangs over your shoulder. These damp patches are often very difficult to explain.

I hate staying in during the Fringe... I find it very, very difficult to not feel like I'm missing out on the best party in the world because I've decided to stay inside instead. However, tonight I have Honey, Lemon and a projector with which to seriously enjoy some David Attenbrough. Oh yeah! Kicking back with a Lemsip... watch out Eminem I'm hot on your coat tails. That would be a much more convincing phrase there if I hadn't used the phrase coat tails and referenced a rapper who hasn't done anything remarkable for... well, a long time.

The trouble is I think I'm finally edging closer to a point where I might slightly know my limitations and I am gearing up for an enormous weekend... my sparring partner from last year's Edinburgh jaunt is coming to town for two nights and I have to bring to my A Game. It's not that I have to bring my A Game, it's that I have to send my A Game away to be polished and then get it back, keep it in bubble wrap and brand new socks under the bed and then keep it out of strong sunlight all weekend. I have to recharge the batteries in my A Game every time I blink. My A Game ought to be renamed my iGame it's that fucking good... I've got serious prep to do. I'm not scared... I know I can handle it. Hell, I can beat this weekend hands down as long as my tongue's sharp enough and I never had a hand without a pint in it. How badly wrong could it go?

I'm always a fan of people who can handle their banter and the Fringe is a great place to find a collection of them ready to play. Perhaps that's what's so difficult about staying in; you're sure you're missing out on someone who would have had a good 10 minute exchange in them. Perhaps we should have all got together before the Fringe and prepared which nights we were all in and out. That way no one would miss out. Perhaps I'll begin now; here is my call people, this weekend I shall be bringing the noise; feel free to clap along.

Wash Away The Sun

2011-08-10T13:16:00.000+01:00

I'd like to say that I woke up to the rain this morning, unfortunately, I walked home in the rain at about 6:30 this morning and now appear to be suffering from some sort of white wine induced jet lag where my mind is insisting we be awake while my body tries to find inventive new ways to be horizontal.

There's a beetle on the living room floor that is stuck on his back, I should go and help him out. It seems sort of right that he's there though... I've got David Bowie playing in the background and outside the window the rain is lashing down while I sit on the sofa and wait for the flyers that should have arrived on Monday morning. What with it being Wednesday afternoon, I'm a little peeved that we've still not seen them.

The beetle and I are very frustrated.

I am frustrated because I have a beautiful show that I badly want people to see, and I've paid for 10,000 invitations to see this show which just aren't materialising. The beetle is frustrated because he hasn't even had that much to drink and this all seems a little embarrassing quite frankly. We're both frustrated because we know that realistically neither of our problems are that bad in the grand scheme of things.

There; I've flipped the beetle now. He's very still. It took a few attempts and I really hope I haven't killed him in my attempts to help him out. Most people with a vague sense of appropriate domesticity would have shooed him out of a window - I've just helped him to help me lose my deposit on the flat.

He's wandered off to the fireplace now... if he comes back with 10,000 flyers I think I'll marry him.

I'm so frustrated at being helpless; it's thoroughly depressing to be completely surrounded by people letting each other down and causing wholly avoidable problems. Can't people just start being better? It'd be quite a simple process... well have a little party where we all get together and say we'll stop giving in to the retarded side of our personalities. Personally I'm willing to stop getting drunk and climbing in things, and I'll do my best to start buying birthday presents on time which is something I've always failed miserably at.

Can the rest of the world just make a quick list of ways to be better and then we'll all sort of have a new year's resolution pact together even though it's August? Thanks. I'd feel a lot better after that. It might be an idea if we all start with promising not to buy any electrical goods on eBay for the foreseeable future? Just let the opportunistic tools have to use their 46 iPhone 4's as coasters for a few years.

Send Me A Postcard

2011-08-09T12:43:00.004+01:00

It's a little strange being away at a very jolly festival while back home the city I live in is in complete turmoil. We have no internet in our flat and no television which means it's quite difficult to keep up with everything that's going on and read all the blogs from youth workers and people who understand the real underlying causes behind the riots.

Yesterday I got in touch with my house-mate to find out what was going on in our area (I live in a fairly unpleasant area of South East London) and she replied saying "They're looting the Argos and the Curry's" (both about 100 yards from my front door) "We've brought the recycle bins in."

I'll be honest, I laughed... my amusement was at such a middle class reaction to serious rioting and arson - of course, it's a perfectly sensible course of action and I'd have done the same. But, it gets you thinking that we're thankfully so unused to things like this happening that we have no real idea how to react. Bringing the recycling bin in so that it can't be thrown through your living room window feels a little bit like the height of our powers.

We're not a nation of people who would really know how to start defending ourselves. We've gotten very used to living in a peaceful society and letting the people above us take care of all the nasty bits we're not strong or brave enough to deal with. So, what happens when we question our faith in the police? How do you voice a serious complaint in the law enforcers that will get heard but still sits within the law we want to protect? Do you need to break the law in order to evaluate how well it's being upheld?

Being at a festival surrounded by comedians there's a real mix of left-wing outrage and a desperate scrabble to tweet the funniest joke about it all first. No one seems to know whether we're going to band together on this and say we're all in it together, or pick sides and blame the rioters/police depending on which Chinese whisper we've heard about what. Lots of the more politically active comedians up here are wondering what parts of their shows to redraft... hopefully it'll be the part that they take home and perform for free in the now unfunded youth clubs.

Personally, I'm really glad I'm not there. It seems desperately embarrassing and shameful to me that a large portion of our country's youth has so little identity with the brilliance associated in living here that they can destroy it without even recognising their possession of it.

I'm 24 and have grown up in an incredibly safe Britain in my opinion; I can't recall any civil unrest that's been devastating enough to really alarm me. It's scary though that in the latest year there's suddenly been a spike in the amount of public demonstration and it seems to be escalating... I truly worry this is only the beginning. This is only the announcement of cuts to vital public money, this isn't the evidence of what the cuts will do over the next 5 years when we have yet another generation of people living in communities too poor to include them. I have no answer for the economic situation, but perhaps we should be looking around rather than up for help?

If there's no money around for public services and community support youth clubs then perhaps we should stop trying to purchase convenient solutions to sections of society that have been labelled 'undesirable'. Perhaps now's the time to form community groups because we want to and because we want societies. A community isn't an elite; it's everyone. This just seems to be something we've forgotten in wealthier years when there've been convenient places to sweep people and give them volunteers to motivate them.

Now, if all this seems a little terrifying just remember people aren't born bad. So, make friends with babies.

Funny Tunes

2011-08-08T10:52:00.002+01:00

I saw a musical comedy band last night called Dead Cat Bounce, they were brilliant - when they were playing - they had everything; charm, rhythm, the right notes, good jokes, lust inciting moves... when they were playing. As soon as they stopped playing and started to conjure banter from deep within their leopard print trousers my skin started to crawl and I just wanted to dash on stage and start plucking strings for them so they'd have to do another song to shut me up.

Oddly enough, it was only earlier on in the day I'd been chatting with another comedian about people who don't see musical comedy as a legitimate genre. The argument is that when you finish playing a song people naturally clap which means the comedian hasn't earned their rapturous adoration through comedy skills but more through their ability to play music. In my eyes this is ridiculous; even the absolute worst comedian in the world will walk on and off to a half decent applause in any club worth playing. Personally, I don't see any difference between this and a musical comedian who gets a clap at the end of the song.

I've seen two musical comedians this week; the aforementioned feline springers and a musical comedian called Vikki Stone who is playing a solo hour with a backing band. With both shows I was perfectly content to sit and listen to the music and admire the intelligence, structure and the jokes that went into them but I entirely switched off as soon as the performer began talking to me.

Personally, I prefer a very natural style of comedy. I like people who can convince me that this is the only time they're ever saying this and that they really could just be having a one on one chat with me. I like my stand up very conversational; Carl Donnelly is a master of this for example. When someone's delivery is very performative it switches me off because all of a sudden I can see the strings holding the joke together and drawing you to the punch line.

The thing with stand up is that you have to really work it through to find out where the pauses need to go and how the rhythm of the speech is going to come together... I can't even begin to imagine how you would go about shuffling those pauses around in a song that's fully constructed already. It's not just a case of working out the best rhyme for cock; it's about knowing what chord is going to work best for a joke... choosing eloquence and clarity over standard musical choices... choosing the right instrument for the song in the first place (let alone carting it to each gig)... there's a hell of a lot more than meets the eye.

Music and character comedy scares the crap out of me. Once you've started a song or a piece of scripted character bit, you can't really stop if it's not working... you just have to plough on regardless and suffer the horror - perhaps just picking out a few kind faces in the crowd who are smiling and using them as emotional lifeboats. When I do my normal stand up, if all goes badly then I just have to tell the audience it's going badly, admit that they're not loving me and then do something else - I can't imagine not having that as a get out clause.

Musical comedy can certainly stay; and with as much kudos as any other genre of comedy deserves, but can we please sort out all the bits in between?

One of My Wetter Days

2011-08-07T10:28:00.000+01:00

So, all in all things could have been a lot worse yesterday... both shows happened and the first audience of Ink got treated to a very pacey rendition of the piece. Actually quite excellent. I mean, it's not that there weren't a few hiccoughs... the lights going down before the last two lines of the play probably wasn't exactly what I'd foreseen... but, you know what? We coped. Hells yes.

After that, my body jumped the Fringe schedule ever so slightly and had it's first breakdown at the beginning of week one instead of the start of week two. One minute I was eating a slightly dry sandwich in a restaurant, the next minute I was sobbing into the staler chips. It's not that the people I was having dinner with were uncomfortable, I think it genuinely was that they all suddenly realised they'd needed to go to the loo since we got there. Either way, a bottle of wine and some strawberry laces later and I was feeling like a prize moron. What kind of coping strategy for pressure and fear is weeping?

"Hello Creator of all things, I'm ready for my fight or flight instinct now."

"Ah, yes, Laura... now, we've got something special or you... you're kind of like a test pilot."

"Exciting! What am I getting? Am I getting claws so that I can gouge out the eyes of my attacker? Am I going to have a fearsome roar to scare off everything in a 2 mile radius? Will I be 9 feet tall when provoked, with muscles that bulge fearsomely through the cotton of my feminine sweater?"

"Right, not exactly... what's going to happen is, whenever you're scared - or tired, grumpy, angry, hungry, surprised, disappointed, in love, happy, excited, frustrated - your eyes are going to fill up with water!"

"Oh... cool, can I shoot the water out of eyes and dissolve whatever is annoying me?"

"No, what it's going to do is leak down your face and make everything a bit puffy. You won't be able to speak while this is happening - by all means try but it'll come out like a series of honks. Is that OK?"

"Well, I don't really feel in a position to argue... so is this fight or flight then? Can I run away while this is happening?"

"No, you're going to want to put your head on someone's lap when this happens. It's not really fight or flight - it's more, sort of, try and induce sympathy using dampness."

So, all in all I'm not very impressed with myself today. It helps a bit that Edinburgh is soaked through today so everyone looks like they've been voluntarily waterboarded by a member of Footlights - I don't stand out very much. I'm solving my issue by going for breakfast with Yoda.

Yoda is my comedy chum who is much more successful and funny than I am and so he is very pleasant about patting me on the head a lot and telling me it'll all be fine. For all I know he's just a total sadist who's just enjoying watching the comedy career swallow another naive young soul... but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the basis that he is a master of punning. Who can stay mad at someone with a one-liner about cheese greeting habits?

I hope today's lesson involves something about how to market the ability to spontaneously dissolve into orifice leaking in any given situation.

(In which I am bored of listing Fringe Days) Our House

2011-08-06T11:44:00.002+01:00

Well... this is it. There is absolutely no turning back now - I am out the door to do the first show of Ink. Blimey guv'nor it is nerve racking let me tell 'e. To hell with what people think of the show - it's my show, I didn't ask people to see it (well, that's not strictly true if they're somebody I flyered, but I certainly didn't force people to see it). Quite frankly they can all bog off if they don't like it. They can go and see some truly searching physical theatre if they have a problem with our fast paced dialogue and focus on people without melodrama.

Our house is slowly beginning to take shape as a house now which is a lovely feeling - I think we owe it to the plug in air freshener we just bought which is covering the slightly fausty reek of something that may or may not be dead or dying behind the washing machine. Our house consists of 4 of the cast of Ink;

Me (slightly tetchy so far and trying desperately to throw away people's flyers before we end up with a flat that is difficult to walk in without paper cutting your toes off).

The Swede (a beautiful young lady who claims to be Swedish but has olive skin, deep brown eyes and a bushy mane of brunette hair - I am currently sharing a room with her which is not helping with feeling secure about my body being a proper shape. I've taken to putting my pyjamas on in the wardrobe so I don't have to stare wildly at her legs while I'm folding my knee skin into some skinny jeans).

Birdie (a man who is marching us all down to see some swans very early on Wednesday morning. The Swede and I are quite petrified of swans so we're not being as nice to Birdie as we could be. Enough about him until we've survived the dawn swan raid and then I'll give him a proper character assassination).

Music Man (this is our final housemate who knows the words, guitar part and trumpet solo (even if there isn't one) to any song recorded pre 1995. He can sing in the morning, in the evening, walking around - he can even sing one song whilst listening to another. He's delightful. Turns out he also sings in the shower which makes sitting in the lounge for the morning cup of tea rather brilliant).

Having had a lot of responsibility thus far into the Fringe, I have barely been drunk at all - obviously quite different from last year where by this point I had yet to be sober. Last night I got well on my way to merry town for the first time and all of a sudden things started sliding into place and feeling a lot more like we were in Edinburgh... it's honestly not that I have a drinking problem; it's that Edinburgh has a sobriety problem and I strongly believe that "When in Rome..."

Absolutely anything could be happening in the rest of the world at the moment and I wouldn't have a clue... I've not looked at the papers (except the ones I've been hastily gluing together on our living room floor, meaning my fingers are now a slightly grey, gluey colour) and I've not seen hide nor hair of a television since last week... I really hope things are going alright for everybody that's not living knee deep in narcissism and ego stroking. I wonder if, actually, the world progresses at a much faster rate during August when everybody who doesn't really have a proper joke has wandered off and stopped distracting everybody else. A bit like doing the vaccuuming when your housemates have gone to the pub.

"The comedians have gone."
"Finally."
"Shall we sort the recession before they get back?"
"Yeah, could do. We've got 3 weeks."
"Cool, well I'll just finish this cup of tea and then we'll get on."

I think this is a wild overestimation of how much our hilarity distracts the rest of the public but I think just for today I'm allowed to live firmly placed in my own rectum. My ongoing nightmare for the past 3 months is that someone will come and review the show and give me my very own Bridget Jones scenario and say;

"This play is ridiculous. The whole idea is bananas. What on earth were you thinking?"

As long as one audience comes to see it and doesn't do that then I'll know that it's just down to personal taste... there's a lot riding on today. Hell, if all goes to pot at least we have an air freshener and a house that can simultaneously sing, seduce and wow a pile of swans.

Edinburgh Fringe Day 4 - In The Jingle Jangle Morning

2011-08-05T18:20:00.002+01:00

It feels like Christmas Eve... like the original Christmas Eve, where it was less about opening presents and more about trying to squeeze a doomed child out of a donkey battered vagina and then keep it safe from a maniacal tyrant.

That's a fairly good summation of how I'm feeling on the day before the shows kick off.

It's like I have twins; I have QimP - thd golden child with no worries, no panic about his future, absolute confidence in his temperament... and then I have Ink; Ink has colic, has the aura of the beautiful about her but needs taming and likes to sneak out of her bedroom window and then return a few hours later smiling coyly and refusing to accept grounding as anything that might faze her. I love Ink; she is going to be the jewel in the crown of my life to date... once I've beaten the crap out of her and made her sit still for 3 weeks so people can get to know her.

The weather in Edinburgh seems to be playing some sort of "take it in turns game" of being solidly pissy for 12 hours and then blazing us with sunshine and wind so that we have no idea whether it's safe to leave the house in our clothes. I've found it's best to dress like a confused, layered eskimo who desperately needs a wife.

To make matters intensely more frustrating my delightful digestive system has just entirely ceased to work. It's less than ideal... I haven't been hungry for about 36 hours now and am occasionally throwing a rice cake in only for my stomach to look at me ambivalently and then make a mental note not to return it for at least a week. I'm not even sure what to begin doing about it now... do I take an old woman approach and swallow a series of weird animals in the hope of something kicking into life? Or do I just pretend it's all fine and watch myself begin to expand like some sort of asp? Of course, the third option is to just be as stubborn as my tummy and tell it that if it won't be hungry then I won't eat... unfortunately, as much as I anthropomorphise my body parts I occasionally have to concede that we're all connected and that it'll bite me on the ass eventually - flexible.

So am I going to get a really good night's sleep tonight in preparation for the realisation of the last 20 years' dreams? Am I heck. We're off out for a cast meal out and I've decided (in the last 9 seconds) to find out if red wine will do anything to induce labour on my rice cake baby (I am fully gross I realise but at this point I'm more concerned with health and brilliance than a future husband so just avert your eyes if you are offended). Then I am off to see a friend's show at The Gilded Balloon at 11pm, after which I will return home and continue gluing pieces of newspaper together... what a life! Wouldn't have it any other way.

Edinburgh Fringe Day 3 - Comedian Goes Camping!

2011-08-04T22:50:00.001+01:00

Today I have been to Glasgow, more specifically to Loch Lomond, because I am going to be on the cover of a magazine. Don’t worry I haven’t sold out and gone all Vogue on you dear readers… I am to be the cover girl of the November issue (naturally, printed in September) of… Practical Caravan Magazine.

Oh yeah!

Do you need a cara that is both a van and practical? To you need a van with some pre cara that is practical? Are you practical but homeless? Because, as of today… I can help you.

It turns out being a model is slightly less glamorous than being a comedian if I’m honest. I spent a large portion of my day sitting with my faux husband pretending to eat breakfast with him. We ate a lot of breakfast. Dry breakfast because the milk bottle was too big for the picture and looked weird apparently… this worries me that caravan users might get a little bunged up due to eating large amounts of dry cereal. We also poured much coffee from an empty caffetiere and looked entirely happy about it.

It has been entirely important to look happy all day. Even when just staring into the distance I had to smile as though this was the happiest I’d ever been. For me, this is the most basic flaw in the Practical Caravan approach to photography. I’ve seen a lot of campers and caravanners in my life and they rarely, if ever, beam at you incessantly as though there was nowhere else they would like to be. In fact, they often look a little glum. And damp. Today, we were all damp.

In case I had any aspirations to be the next Kidd sister, it turns out I probably don’t have the stature to be a proper model. I can hear the shocked tone in which you are reading. My fake husband was so much taller than me that we actually had to cart the steps to the caravan around with me to stand on so that I didn’t look like a midget that had been kidnapped and taken to Scotland. It was rather embarrassing to have to keep climbing off and moving my little steps every time the camera man asked us to shuffle a little to the left or the right.

I love the ethos of camping… it’s like a little two fingers up to the rest of civilisation. “I like shit.” That’s basically what you’re saying if you go camping… you’re saying, “Yes, we can have all the mod cons and whistles and bells and etcs etcs but I would rather sit under a large coat in the rain with my loved ones.”

Camping forces you to interact, it forces people to make do with each other and the world badly needs this. No problem couldn’t be solved by putting the instigators into a tent and leaving them next to a lake for 2 weeks with a camping stove and no tin opener for the ravioli. I know for a fact Paul Gascoigne agrees with me on this point.

Back in Edinburgh, the forces of the Fringe have been rumbling on without me… we are no only 36 hours away (ish) from our first show of Ink. It’s all coming together nicely and I am insanely excited. In fact, I’m so excited that I’m off to sew some crosswords into a jacket. Intrigued? You should be…

Edinburgh Fringe Day 2 - Of Mice and Friends

2011-08-03T20:23:00.000+01:00

So... the sun is out, I've been incredibly productive and up until about 30 minutes ago I had no alcohol in my system. I'll be honest, it's not been the most obvious start to the Fringe... I suppose this is what happens when you grow up a bit and have responsibilities to some people who have gathered to re enact the script you have written at 3am.

Would you Adam and Eve it, there is also another show on the Fringe this year called Ink... of all the options for a play you could write why on earth would you steal mine? I mean, what's wrong with re enacting Macbeth in more face paint than any before? Could you not have done a retelling of The Clockwork Orange doing something monumental like using a woman? What ever happened to doing Berkoff productions in white sheets with a message about the Afghanistan war? Why did you have to do a piece of new writing and steal the name of my play?

I'm not saying you're selfish, but, I will just put it out there that I wrote my play about 3 years ago and you should have done your research... this is now officially a turf war. I've laid down the gauntlet now feel free to do some mime on it while I slice you up using fliers.

I think I've done a complete marathon on the streets of Edinburgh today; if I'd had the foresight to ask people to give me a few quid prior today then I could have seriously made some dosh for some hungry folk. Unfortunately, today has mainly been sponsored by me tripping over loose paving stones and swearing at slow tourists. Yet again I have been forced into my rant about how pavements should have lanes:

Stopping lane.
Pushchairs and people who are limping.
People who have nowhere in particular to be.
People who dislike other people and just need to be somewhere without having to weave around bumbags, window shoppers and people who don't know where they're going. Oh, and people who are texting.

This rant can also be exchanged for my rant about needing a "locals" lane on roads where a lot of tourists congregate. I can often be heard giving this rant if I've just had to drive to Somerset from London and have had an hour added to my journey by people who want to look at a loosely organised bunch of upright rocks. Stonehenge is just not that interesting folks, keep moving...

But! Back to the present, here we all are (well, possibly not you and I am truly sorry about that) at the Edinburgh Fringe. The flat has been moved into... it smells a little bit and doesn't really have any interesting features except the cast of Ink but it will be home for the next month. We're going to go out for a small beverage tonight but not too many because I am leaving for Glasgow in the morning for a highly amusing mission of which we will speak tomorrow... I promise ;)

North of The Border

2011-08-02T17:16:00.000+01:00

Now THAT was a long drive... someone ought to give J.R.R. Tolkien a ring and tell him that if he wants to write about an epic journey just narrate the arrival of any comedian with spirit on their journey to the Fringe. We left at 6:38am and I've just sat down on the sofa to try and keep myself awake until a decent hour so I don't end up getting myself some kind of jetlag in wimpy comedian form.

The trip up to Scotland is beautiful and a lot of fun... I rather enjoyed marking the change of County at each point. It was like playing one of the simpler versions of Mario Kart and being very disappointed with the level upgrades.

Service stations are quite disconcerting for the weary traveller on a long trip - you feel like you've been driving for hours but every time you stop and look around you, you're at exactly the same Costa Coffee. It's occurred to me that English Service Stations also give a very false impression of how seriously English people take methods of relieving themselves. I've never before experienced so many different infra red flushes and taps, so many Twister force hand dryers, so many competitions to see how frequently the toilets are checked.

These toilets are checked every 60 minutes - if these toilets are not in the condition you expect them to be in please contact management.

These toilets are checked every 30 minutes - if these toilets are not in the condition you expect them to be in please contact management.

These toilets are checked constantly. If there isn't a small woman in ugly shoes squatting behind the door of your cubicle please contact the manager so we can monitor her ankle tag and find the snivelling bitch and give her back her J Cloth.

Is there really any need for these toilets to be checked quite so regularly? The rest of the service station is quite frankly a dumping ground for common children and baked bean infested trays, why do the toilets need to have a Duchess of Cambridge level of hygiene?

But anywho, arrived in Edinburgh courtesy of a few rounds of "Donald, Where's Your Troosers?" and "On Top of Spaghetti" and now the excitement is fizzing away in my tummy like a drunk rattle snake. How brilliant. It's hard to describe Edinburgh if you've never been here but it's like someone has created a city that's perfect to write about. You imagine it would always look wet, even if you upped it to Saudi Arabia the walls of the buildings would some how cling to their darkened bricks and mossy outcrops. Arthur's seat looms over one end of the city; proudly displaying people who already have the stamina and thighs to have conquered it. The castle sits in the middle and the winding streets around it with small shops and exciting cafes just don't disappoint... this city was built to make you feel something. Well done Scotland - I'm going to feel you for a month. Now please, be gentle when you're giving something back...

Where Are You John Denver?

2011-08-01T12:51:00.000+01:00

So here it is... here is that sweeping feeling of panic and desperation. I was wondering when it would turn up and now here it is... I am leaving for the Fringe today.

So far today I've managed to finish packing, unpack, sort my clothes into 4 piles:

Packing
Not Packing
Don't Know Why I Own
Don't Know Why Anyone Would Own

And repack without most of the stuff that I probably need.

Now I'm staring at an overly large suitcase and an enormous pile of newspapers that don't look like they'd fit into any car - let alone the one I'm getting in to go all the way to Scotland. I'm drinking herbal tea in an attempt to rescue my mental state from it's current perch somewhere akin to Kerry Katona. When I was writing a play about a mentalist who obsessively collects newspapers, it certainly didn't occur to me that I'd also have to collect them and then take them on holiday and then show what I had written to a hundred people.

It's not that I'm scared; it's my body that's scared. It sort of sees a suitcase and assumes we're off to Somerset. I'm trying to explain that there won't be an adorable 2 year old there - more like a drunken rabble of harassed comedians and truly irritating street performers.

My body is the one that's wimping out. Last night it tried to kill us so we wouldn't have to go. I had to get up and go and get a drink at about 3am and as I was sipping the water I noticed I couldn't see anything. Which was strange because the lights were on... then I noticed it was because my eyes had stopped walking and we were having to lie on the floor because we weren't upright any more. Now this isn't ideal in any way, we were obviously fine once we'd cooled down on the kitchen floor for half an hour but to be honest I'd just rather my body pulled itself together.

I'm sure Edinburgh will be amazing and there's the outside chance that my parents will spring a surprise visit and come and see all this nonsense I've been faffing about with and then my body will have at least been half right in why we were packing. I'm listening to Eric Clapton's back catalogue in an effort to steady myself for a month of complete nonsense. Eric is renowned for his relaxing tones... I'll hold on to the big guns (Mr Denver) for the drive just in case I start sticking my head out of the window in a blind panic.

The thing is, there's still quite a lot to get done before the show begin... only little things like sorting out the set, lighting, lines etc... but these are all things that I think we perhaps need to think about. If I ever, EVER suggest single handedly directing, producing, writing and performing in a show ever again please just give me a fairly might crack around the head and push me down some stairs. I think it'd be safer for all of us involved.

Packing Heat

2011-07-31T14:01:00.000+01:00

I am supposed to be packing... the trouble with packing for a month is that it feels a lot like trying to take everything you own and put it into a suitcase that is not big enough for everything you own. In a month, I think it is entirely plausible that I will wear at least 9 pairs of trousers... but I have been conditioned to believe that I should pack light. Pack light! People will say, as though any refusal to pack light is merely your inability to be at one with the world. We laugh at people who bring everything... what were you worried might happen? We say to them.

Whatever happened to the old Scout motto? Be prepared! Being prepared surely means packing 9 pairs of trousers just in case. I am going to Edinburgh - packing 9 pairs of trousers just seems sensible. If I didn't truly hope that going to this Edinburgh Fringe was going to:
a) Be lots of fun
b) Have an impact on some kind of career dream

then quite frankly I should not be going. How are you supposed to have a large effect on your future aspirations to be thought funny and brilliant in equal measures if you only have 8 pairs of trousers with you? Obviously this is ridiculous waffle. I'm actually very good at packing light. Too good in fact. Once when I went to Magaluf (not a holiday I'm proud of but it was an experience - 13 hours total sleep in 4 days is something every human being should experience) I packed so light that people started to wonder if I'd lost my luggage somewhere and was being forced to wear the same shorts every day. Other holiday makers started offering me clothes as though I was some sort of backwater moron who had never heard of Primark. "You can buy clothes so cheap nowadays!" they would tell me, "I know!!" says I... "Trust me, I have lots of clothes... but suddenly when packing it's like we're in reverso land all of a sudden it's not cool to have brought loads of stuff with you. Much better to be blase about the whole thing - whatever I haven't brought with me, I'll just buy when I get there!"

Ridiculous - I barely have the money to go there let alone buy a new kitchen sink when I arrive because I've purposely not packed the perfectly good one I have back at home.

Today has been wholly set aside to pack. It's now 2pm and my suitcase is still under my bed but I ahve made 3 pots of loose leaf tea and drunk them whilst reading Caitling Moran and glaring at the utter tedium of the Grand Prix. This is an awful start to the day and it's going to change right now... I am going to pack the living crap out of my room. It is going to be packed like nothing has ever been packed before. If you have a fear of packers you'd better get out of my way because I am a pack horse. A pack of wolves. A pack of cards... I am the Queen of Packing. I am packing up...

As We Know It

2011-07-31T00:25:00.000+01:00

I suspect the apocalypse might have felt very different had you been in London when it happened... but for the residents of Norton Fitzwarren it was a fairly unremarkable event at first. People didn't really know what to do... we thought about looting but agreed as a village that it seemed pretty unreasonable. There's only really one shop in Norton Fitzwarren and the general consensus was that the apocalypse was probably not Nigel and Beryl's fault.

People carried on watering their lawns and walking their dogs. Nobody really knew what to do. In fact, if it hadn't been for the fact that there were no cars or electricity, you'd barely have known it was the apocalypse. It seemed more like a village on a health kick who had been instructed to play a lot more board games and look worried whenever they passed the fridge.

It wasn't until the 3rd day that people started to get noticeably shifty. Food was running a bit low and people like Mr Baxter were nervously hurrying their Yorkshire Terrier around the block looking suspiciously at anyone who was complaining of hunger. I'd never thought the residents of Norton Fitzwarren capable of eating a dog, but all of a sudden you had to really feel for pet owners.

No one at all knew what to do come Friday. A lot of people had already bought their tickets for the Line Dancing night at the Village Hall. Should we still go? Was there any point to a refund? Would there be any loose dogs...?

We all suspected in London there must have been lots of fighting and scrapping for food... it was hard to tell without any form of media. I think we were all pleased that so far no one here had felt like doing any murdering. I'm not sure 40% of the village really had the upper body strength. After the 4th day I think people started to realise that we weren't likely to get some sort of village messenger/town crier type figure coming over the horizon with instructions. We thought perhaps we ought to start thinking about getting organised.

We had a meeting and decided to form an Apocalypse Committee. These folk would be in charge of working out how we were going to feed everyone and keep us all warm during winter. We thought perhaps it might be prudent to bunch together a bit more and use some houses as storage. A few people really weren't keen; Mrs Shoe has just had new carpets, so we let her off.

A far as apocalypses go it really wasn't bad. Once you'd got over the shock of killing your first cow or tilling a field it really wasn't too bad. And we'd all seen Friends so many times that really it was just as fun to recite them round the fire without watching. Mr Baxter does a mean How You Doin'. We strongly suspected things might be about to get a lot worse just around the corner... but for now, things were going alright. And we'd formed our Apocalypse Committee an awful lot quicker than the residents of nearby Staplegrove so we were awfully pleased about that too...

Above is just a short bit of a new story/thingy/idea I'm working on about the end of the world in a small village. Just playing for the minute but any feedback is appreciated.

Bag For Life

2011-07-29T11:51:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I weighed myself in a toilet in Windsor, immediately burst into tears and jumped off the scales as though they were pumping a ferocious electric current through my jacksy.

How on earth could I weigh that much? How could I have added such a monumental amount to my body weight and not really have noticed? How were my clothes not fitting? How was I not wandering around the beautiful streets of Windsor in an Incredible Hulk style outfit with a doughnut in one hand and a Bratwurst in the other... and why was I weighing myself in a toilet in Windsor in the first place?

Well, the answer to that simply is that Windsor is an excellent place and the scales were one of those old school type ones that make you feel that you really ought to be wearing bloomers and a bonnet if you're going to hop on board.

I sank down the wall in this cubicle of doom and wondered how I could have been so blind in my stumble into obesity. Cold horror washed over me as I realised people must have been mocking me for weeks... were people appearing in the night and letting out my clothes so I didn't feel embarrassed? Were people watching me eating ice cream after ice cream and just praying for my health?

Then, I realised I had still been holding my hand bag when I got onto the scales. A small ray of hope appeared through the cholesterol heavy smog coating my brain... maybe I should just weigh myself again without my handbag? No. That would be stupid. Would it be? We ought to be accurate about how much despair we're feeling. Fine. We'll try it again sans sac-a-main.

A stone and a half lighter.

What?

How on earth does my hand bag weigh a stone and half? Now, obviously on the one hand I was thrilled that my body weight was now back down in a more manageable stratosphere (I should probably still avoid eating entire cows when I enter a restaurant but it'll be ok to have mayo). On the other hand, how have I reached a point where I am carrying around a bag that weighs the same as a toddler?!

I looked in the bag - purse, phone, keys, make up, filofax, two paperbacks, a drink, my comedy notebook, 3 newspapers, glasses, mp3 player, hairbrush... where did all this stuff come from? Why is there no suited man at my front door who inspects the contents of my bag as though I am going to get on a plane or go to a nightclub?

No shining light of common sense reminding me that no matter how quick a reader I am, I am never going to read the entirety of How To Be a Woman and the History of MI6 in one trip to Windsor... also, he might want to point out that if I get murdered this evening the contents of my bag are going to strongly suggest I was attempting to be the next Mata Hari.

I fled those toilets thoroughly ashamed of myself for;
a) panicking
b) having such a ridiculous imagination
c) carrying around so much crap all day
d) having weighed myself in a toilet in Windsor in the first place... when will I learn...

Today I'm going to try and leave the house with just the keys to get back in to it. And my purse and oyster card so I can get to where I need to go and buy what I need when I get there. And my phone in case of an emergency... and... oh bugger it. Sometimes a girl just needs her stuff. Spinal damage be damned.

We're all going on a...

2011-07-28T13:04:00.000+01:00

I really miss going on great family holidays... I am aching to be able to be in my living room with the rest of my family, while the mountain of crap by the front door piles higher and higher as we prepare to leave.

There's always that beautiful moment where you wonder whether Dad will ever be able to stop doing shuttle runs from the door to the car as mum continues to find things we've never used before but couldn't live without for 2 weeks in France. Mothers have an incredible capacity at times like these to both produce and secrete things that you had no idea were even on the cards for such an occasion. Be impressed with Blaine all you want, but watch my mother somehow manage to get 4 tubes of Pringles into a car that's being packed by the very people she's hiding them from, and you will be gasping in delight.

Family holidays are always brilliant with lots of siblings. There was always one sibling who inexplicably didn't want to go (for some unknown reason) and would sulk merrily away whilst declaring "I don't see why I should have to do this..." while everybody else declared either loudly or swearily "Because you're going on a free holiday you bellend".

There's that point where you think you'll never actually get in the car and then suddenly you are... all of you packed into a tiny tin box that contains half the house and more necklaces than one fourteen year old can possibly wear in two weeks. We'd get halfway to the ferry point and my brother would realise he'd forgotten something vital like his swimming trunks or his legs. Not even a debate as to whether we'll go back for it, we'll just let him figure it out when he gets there - it's dog eat dog.

The car arrives in the ferry and everybody wonders whether the car deck will smell like cheese, sick, dog poop and petrol - a quick assessment by whoever is first heaved out clarifies that it does. Everybody spends a minute sniffing it and deciding it's awful and then sniffing it again. Then you're ploughing your way to the deck... hopefully it's a night ferry and you can let Dad point out all the same features on the Portsmouth skyline that he's been doing for years and you've still not committed any of them to memory. Mental note - I'm going to need to do that before I start tagging along with the nephew's holidays.

The ferry journey is one of the best bits of any holiday - never, ever fly your children anywhere. Put them on an enormous boat filled with excited children and games and the first opportunity to use the different money that's been burning a confused hole in their pockets. The ferry is the time to decide that you know you shouldn't have a croissant because it'll be crap and you really would like your first croissant of the season to be great, but damn it you want a croissant...

The holiday will run it's course after that. I used to get burnt, get deliriously happy, have some kind of eating competition, go on a day trip that only Mum wanted to be on, swim for so much of the day that Mum wondered why she hadn't raised children with slightly higher aspirations... One of my favourite memories was a holiday where we camped in the Dordogne region in France. Did it rain much Laura? I practically grew gills. It was a little bit wet... So one day we decided to go kayaking... how on earth do you spell kayaaking? Kayakking? It now sounds like I have phlegm issues... Anywho...

It was Dad, little sister, brother in kayak number 1. It was Mum, older sister and me in kayak number 2. Theory says that the considerably older people should have been far better at keeping a kayak upright and going straight... theory can go suck something sour. The afternoon ended with three very grumpy women in a wet kayak going about 1 metre an hour down a river while a kayak with two infants and a hysterically laughing man did loop the loops around the grumpy kayak, whilst all the time singing their new kayaking song which had been penned to irritate the grumpy women.

That holiday remains the only time in my living memory that my mother has expressly asked us to swear as loudly as we could at the disappearing back of my father.

Bloody brilliant.

The Winds of Change

2011-07-27T12:56:00.001+01:00

Yesterday as I walked into town for a gig, two separate things happened to me:

1. A man on the street tried to hit on me. It was a weird and uncomfortable experience and kind of started with him just walking inexplicably close to me while I pretended that my headphones were also obscuring my sight. Eventually this got too difficult as he was having to do a walking backwards trippy uppy type walk to try and meander casually in front of me but maintain some very bloodshot eye contact. I took my headphone out of one ear and he said,

"Hi, so what... are you on your way home from school?"

Now, I don't really know where to start on things wrong with that sentence. For a start, no - I'm 24 - it's been at least 8 years since I was walking home from school. But, also... if you suspect strongly enough to ask that I am walking home from school, should you really be trying it on at all?!

The answer is inevitably going to be no because you clearly don't even own a calendar - school broke up last week dickhead! Unless you think I'm in summer school? By which you must think I am so remedial that despite having been held back for 8 years I am still needing catch up classes? This relationship is never going to work out.

I had to hastily stuff my head phone back in my ear and continue along my merry way. It was then that I walked past a group of people who had newly graduated. You could tell they were newly graduated because they were all dressed like Severus Snape and looking a little bit smug.

What this means is that it's 2 years since my own graduation which means I am supposed to be all evaluative of how my own life has gone since I stopped being a student.

My own graduation was quite a soggy affair - not because it rained all day, I graduated in Canterbury which was a city designed to be picturesque at all opportunities. No, twas soggy because my boyfriend at the time chose 1am the morning of my graduation to end our relationship. This wouldn't have been so bad had we not been living together at the time... I therefore turned up at my ceremony carrying almost everything I owned, wearing shorts and flip flops and looking like someone had inflated my face with saline solution.

My mother's reaction to this mess of a child was to ask why on earth I thought it was appropriate to wear shorts and flip flops to my graduation ceremony. I've always blamed it on the immense heart ache - it's never felt right to tell her that I'd have worn them anyway. I really enjoy flip flops and shorts. The ceremony itself is a bit of a blur. I have the good fortune to have a surname that put me next to one of my closest friends for the service and so he and I spent a merry hour making sarcastic comments and wishing we were less pessimistic.

The highlight was going up to actually collect my scroll (which I have since lost) and to receive my handshake from the man with the shaky hands. Now, if you received a certain grade for your degree, the shaky handed man would ask you what you were going to do with your degree... bearing in mind I was not thinking straight and was fairly certain my life had ended at 1am that morning, I gave the obvious answer -

"So, Laura, what are you going to do after your degree?"

"I'm going to be an elf in Lapland."

See, I was about 4 months off disappearing to the snowy wilds at that point and having the time of my life. It all seems like so much more than 2 years ago... and with new massive changes on the horizon (a third Edinburgh festival next week and a possible move back to Somerset after Christmas) it seems like an exciting time to wonder what on earth the next two years is going to hold... hell, as long as I come out of it still looking like I could be on my way home from double Science class I suppose I've got nothing to worry about. Who needs Oil of Olay? Just get yourself some adventure...!

It's A Kind of Magic

2011-07-26T13:31:00.000+01:00

Fictional magic has been bothering me for some time now, more accurately; the lack of imagination of fictional magic writers.

This has all started with Harry Potter. Some things have bothered me about Harry Potter... my issue here is not with the films (I have a full separate bag of issues with the films...) but with the way magic is constructed in the originals. Why do we have to create magic within these books but always give it these lame limitations so that things are still shit?

"Yer a wizard 'arry!"
"Brilliant, can I cure cancer?"
"Er... well, this is awkward. No. But, Dumbledore's got this cracking mirror where you can see all the dead folk you couldn't save?"
"Great..."
"Yeah, and you can hang it without any nails! Magically! On the wall!"
"Erm, humans have that too... It's called, No More Nails."
"Oh. Awkward."

Why are the Weasley's poor? They're magic!

"We don't have much wizard gold..." (Incidentally, I do not see why putting the word 'wizard' in front of anything makes it special. Poor is poor whether you're collecting wizard dole or standard...)
"Why don't you just magic some wizard gold then?"
"Er..."
"Or better yet, why do you even need gold? Just magic the shit you want?"
"Oh yeah... we didn't think of that."
"While you're at it, hair dye can be bought from muggle shops to sort out your family's bullying problem - you don't even need magic for that..."

How can you even end up poor when you're magic? What's the exchange rate like on Sterling to WG (Wizard Gold) - surely you should be able to hold down about 9 muggle jobs and be raking it in? The only excuse for being wizard poor is wizard laziness in my wizard book.

It's the same in all magical books... it's like the author freaks out at the concept of being able to make magic really good in case people flip out reading it that they want magic so badly. Maybe it's just too hard to construct a story in a human brain when all the normal boundaries of our existence have been removed? If I wrote a magic book it would be about 2 pages long and go something like this:

Wizard 1: Oh, hello. What did you wizard do today?
Wizard 2: I had a wizard wank and some wizard lunch. It was tremendous. I feel no need to wizard do anything else today because I am a wizard.
Wizard 1: Isn't being a wizard so easy?
Wizard 2: Yes, because magic is magical.
Wizard 1: You're not wizard wrong.

And that would be the end of the book. Because there are no problems if you're magic.

Also, when people write magical books where wizards co-exist with non-wizards. Where the hell did the wizards mooch off to when we were really struggling with stuff?

Were wizards just tired around Ethiopia in the 80s?
Are we suggesting that actually the wizards were fully in support of the Third Reich or that they just take an American approach to intervening?
Please don't insinuate that a wizard with an afternoon off and a 6 3/4 inch willow wand couldn't do more for heart disease than my £2 a month because I frankly won't believe you.

That's the bloody reason wizards need to keep their identity a secret - because they're selfish ass holes who prefer using their cosmic power to do menial tasks like potato peeling. They'd have a queue of normal people outside the door asking why it's still possible to lock your car keys in the car when people with the capacity to bend the laws of physics and nature are wandering around everywhere.

Let's just pop back in time and fix all these instances where magic could have been used to just make the whole story simpler and much more mighty magic...

Lord of The Rings - either use Gandalf like a steroid pump and give the mincy little Hobbits a fighting chance, or, I don't know... train the damn birds that turn up at the end to just do the outward bound journey as well?

Harry Potter - pop Harry's cherry using a wizard hooker in the first book so that even if the next 6 are still full of ridiculous uses of magic, it won't have a backdrop of anxiety and wizard moping.

Sabrina The Teenage Witch - don't mend what's not broken.

The lack of faith in the wizarding community is so bad that these are all entries in the list of the top ten wizards of all time according to www.time.com:

1. Albus Dumbledore - he dies. He is such a great wizard that he dies. He just dies. This, by my reckoning, instantly makes Voldemort a much better wizard. He can be number one in the "Most moral knobheads" list of all time or "Guys who went down trying to teach a valuable lesson to an orphan" but he is clearly not that great a wizard. Unless, he's cottoned on to the fact that in the world of Harry Potter you can never really die as long as someone's previously done a fairly accurate oil painting of you. Are you trying to tell me someone painted a fat lady to go on a door but no one thought to just sketch out the whiskery old fool in case he got snuffed out on some drugs binge with Dobby? Ridiculous.

4. Mickey Mouse. He is a mouse. He is also only ever really a wizard once. And in his time as a wizard he makes an enormous mess whilst trying to wash a floor. He is, therefore, such a poor wizard that his life would have been immensely more straightforward had he not even had magic. And he is at number 4. What are we learning here?

8. The Pinball Wizard... ie - from The Who song. I'm not making this up... people must have literally just started Googling the word wizard at this point in a desperate attempt to know more than Merlin, Gandalf and Mr Majeika. This could only be an impressive entry if number 9 was the band Wizzard and we discovered that this was in actual fact just a run down of words that will score you a lot on Scrabble.

Brilliant. In all our collective consciousness... we've dreamed up the concept of magic and this is all we've managed to do with it? Create a fairly implausible opportunity for a severely disabled man to shine in pub based games and applaud a mouse in a frock who can't mop a floor? You're letting yourselves down humans... makes me see the Bible in a whole new light...

Poison on the Box

2011-07-25T15:14:00.000+01:00

So far this morning I've only left the house to go and get pop tarts and some bread. I've eaten all the bread but have yet to start on the pop tarts. I'm unreasonably proud of myself. However, I can't help but think the longer I sit on this sofa the more people are going to ask me if anyone I know has had an accident or if I'm struggling to make ends meet.

The solution seems to be getting a payday loan to buy new limbs for my clumsy ass friends from what I can work out. This doesn't seem very practical but I can't really work out what else the television has been trying to tell me. I'm looking forward to the day television ads are biased towards other things you've looked at recently; like they are on the internet. Let's play a game shall we? I will write some imaginary adverts and you will work out what I'm watching that has spawned these devil products...

1. "Have you recently burned your mouth on hot breakfast?" or "Has someone you know recently been sent down for a crime they may not have committed?"

2. "Need to put a collar on a goat in a hurry? Try this new product from JML..." or "Impress your neighbours with this brand new rhinestone hoe... only £4,99 in 18 separate payments."

3. "Run out of people to sleep with in your immediate vicinity? Why not cut your ties and jet off with our half price deals to Spain and/or South Africa?"

4. "OAP spandex available in sizes 16-32 for your heros." or "Worn out segments of your staircase? Try the new Step-Patch today!"

5. "Hate everyone around you so much that you have had to resort to watching egotistical squabbling tools vying for the attention of the sort of power/money hungry megalomaniac that people would despise if he wasn't involved in light entertainment? Then please, switch off your television and reassess the purpose of your existence."

I guess at the moment television advertisements are designed around what you're watching and who they assume you are. I must be giving off the sort of vibe that hints at an inability not to wet myself and total infatuation with my own period. Clearly no one expects men or sane women to be home at this time of day. This means one of three things:

1. I am a man.
2. I am not sane.
3. I should be doing something more productive with my life.

Upon further inspection I have no visible penis so I must be a woman, unless I'm just quite an unfortunate man. And anyway, I'm wearing a skirt today so I can't be man unless I'm a transvestite. So things aren't conclusive as to whether I'm a man or not. But let's go with not.

I think I'm sane... I've done some sane things this morning. Insane people really can't cook pop tarts at the same time as looking at decent rental places. Insane people would be thinking about licking a rental place and moving into a pop tart box. So I'm sane.

Which sadly means I should be doing something more productive with myself... something like dancing or exercising or meeting new people or choosing a hairstyle to take to this year's Fringe... I will get right on all that...

7 Reasons Not To See Any Free Fringe Shows In Edinburgh

2011-07-24T15:08:00.000+01:00

1. The free fringe has been organised by a team of people who have all worked together. Do you know who else works together? Communists. Do you know what Communists do? No. Neither do I. For a good reason. If you want to keep blissful ignorance re Communism and anger at people capable of working in teams alive, then for goodness sake don't go and see these shows.

2. You will not have to get tickets for these shows. No one will print you a ticket. Do you know what else you don't have to have tickets for? Funerals. Nothing good ever comes from funerals and nothing good will come from seeing a free fringe show. You will be actively supporting the concept of rainforest saving. Do you know how many lives are lost in rainforests every year? Neither do I. But the Communists do.

3. People on the Free Fringe have arranged to do these shows for little to no profit. This is bad. It's not bad because they've given up profits - hardly any performers on the paid fringe make profits either - but they've also not given any money to anyone else to make a profit either. The venue owners aren't getting cash, the performers aren't getting cash, there's no one organising the fringe that's making cash... everyone is just doing it together because they want to. Did you hear that? No one is making a tonne of cash. Do you know who else doesn't make a tonne of cash? Communists. Do you know why they don't make a tonne of cash? Neither do I. But it must be bad, because I've used a capital C for Communists. Making sense?

4. None of the people you see on the Free Fringe will be "off the telly". The television is like a sniffer dog for comedic talent. If it hasn't sniffed out a comedian yet then they are not funny and never will be so don't bother going to see them. There's no such thing as a hidden gem. There is only someone who has not made it because they are not the television.*

5. At the end of each Free Fringe show you'll get shown a bucket into which you can drop some money depending on how much you liked the show. This can only lead to people being aware that they should have some say on how much they pay for things. People's opinions are dangerous and get out of control... what if people start to think that cinema tickets are too expensive and big production houses shouldn't get so much money? What if they begin to think Hollywood stars are vastly overpaid? Seeing actors who aren't getting paid so much and are equally as good can only upset the status quo.**

6. At the end of each Free Fringe show you'll get shown a bucket into which you can drop some money depending on how much you liked the show. This is a role traditionally played by the humble hat. Buckets are like the grey squirrels in this scenario, systematically wiping out hats. Do you want to wear a bucket on your head? No. Then don't go and see a Free Fringe show. Please.

7. Supporting the Free Fringe means supporting alliteration. If you can't see an issue there then you are sick.***

Thanks for having a good look at this page and supporting a worthy cause. It's best that you don't bother going to the Fringe at all, just let television do the scouting for you. Thanks.

* You see relatively few Communists on television too.
** Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt are huge campaigners for Hollywood stars' rights.
*** Comfortable Communists will be inclined to disagree here.

Familiar Fail

2011-07-24T11:03:00.000+01:00

What a brilliant day yesterday was! Absolutely no time for blogging because I was far too busy being busy... personally I think this is a much better day than were I to sit around doing nothing and being bored and trying to manufacture stupid things to blog about... this often results in ridiculous blogs... like this one.

Friday night was the launch pad into Saturday... I found myself gigging in Ramsgate in Kent to a crazy bunch of people who were fairly keen on inflicting pain on their compere (me). In the front row sat an angry ginger man with eyes that looked like they could freeze blood in the veins... unfortunately, this only got worse once I'd pointed out that he looked like an angry ginger man. In fact, he offered to remove a few of my limbs. I mean, come on... why sit in the front row if you're going to be angry and ginger and not find it funny? His friends found it very funny and I think this is when he started insisting on hospitalising people. Not the best start to an evening. I made it markedly worse when I suggested that if he didn't want to be angry and ginger then he stop drinking pink drinks. He suggested smashing his snakebite into my face. In hindsight, taking away his deck shoes as punishment was not the best thing I could have done next but what's done is done and I just about survived. I've made a note in my diary not to get into an aggressive bantering session with people who look like they eat tongues.

Saturday morning saw us (me and a friend, not me and the angry ginger man) jetting down to Hastings to collect some stuff for Ink. What with stuff collected and a few hours to spare we decided to enjoy the sea front delights... this included the chocolatiest ice cream in the land, fish and chips with curry sauce and a ride on the whirliest ride since whirling was invented! Thankfully the ice cream came after the whirling so sickness was no induced. The ride was whirlingly brilliant... the only trouble was that when they brought the bars down to keep me in my seat, I'd forgotten I had the car keys in my pocket. All of a sudden a small bundle of sharp metal was being scrambled into my leg, threatening to cut off the blood circulation to my stumpy little limb.

As much fun as the ride was, most of the exhilaration came from wondering whether my leg would just fall off and go and knock out a Hastingsite. As dizzy as my head got it was quite difficult to ignore the purpling of my leg as the blood tried frantically to get through this bizarre new immigration.

Last night was a gig and a boozing session at The Canal Cafe theatre... as much as I adore that place, living there would just mean I spent an eternity singing bad Duffy and wondering why no one wanted to hang out with me. Bad State of Affairs. And now we're on to today - a gig in Colchester this evening and finally addressing my inbox which needs some attention. How exciting. Anyone got a whirler I can borrow for a few hours?

Travelling Shoes

2011-07-22T11:14:00.000+01:00

About to embark on a weekend of travelling and gigging and generally feeling like a bamboozled hobo... ah the life of the wannabe performer.

First things first though... lunch with the little sister's new beau. She will be there too - I'm not conducting some kind of weird tete a tete to suss him out without her knowing - I'm flattered to have actually been asked to meet him. Now, the thing with my little sister is that she's extremely stunning. When you try and picture her you sort of have to play a game called "What Is Laura Not" and then you build up an idea. Where I have flesh covered pegs, she has the lower half of Elle MacPherson, where I have three strands of brown "hair" that I carefully wrap round my head, she has a bushy blonde mane... where I have the sort of happy playful tummy that small children like to push and ask how it got like that, she has some sort of flat area which clothes mould to.

Her taste in men is interesting. The only common theme in the kind of guy she goes for seems to be that they have the physique of a limby surf board, complete with rudder. She loves the schnozzer. You show her a beak and she will pin a picture up on her wall and worship it. She's the kind of lass that thought the Weasley twins were attractive. I don't really understand. I'm curious to meet this new contender for her company and see if he can hold it together under intense scrutiny and a tad of nonsense. If I'm not keen then I might turn the meal into an "Audition for Will Ferrell Movies" exercise and start flinging pasta against the walls.

Straight after lunch I'm off on a train, and then into a car for a dash across the country to Ramsgate to do some gigging. You should come. Then it's back to London for some shut eye - you should not come - and then off to Hastings tomorrow to collect a projector for Ink - again, it might be weird if you turned up. Then tomorrow evening it's back to London for some gigging - more than welcome - before Sunday is a dash to Colchester for extra gigging - by all means if you're in the area - as well as some costume shopping for the aforementioned show.

This kind of an exciting weekend is great... it takes a while to get used to this travelling all over the shop and not being intimidated by it lark - I'm not sure I'm totally there yet but it's certainly getting easier. During the trip to Hastings tomorrow there will be a very excellent video chat with the Artistic Director of Spun Glass Theatre (the company that Ink is being produced by) who is in Thailand at the moment being very cool. Perhaps when the chaos of Edinburgh has calmed down and all is well with the world again, I will start sketching out plans for a similar trip of my own... or if the lunch goes spectacularly badly today I will just run for the hills before my sister kills me or finds out what I've written here...

Splish Splash I Was Taking a Bath

2011-07-21T22:18:00.000+01:00

When I'm bored one day in heaven (run by Pill Pullman and involving an awful lot of cookies) and I'm listing my days in the order of how brilliant they were - today will come pretty high. I have been swimming, played in a sand pit, watered flowers, bathed someone and then won two quizzes.

These might not seem like very exciting activities all in all, but when you do them with a two year old who thinks you are brilliant then your life just increases in brilliant levels. The nephew liked his Beastie Clubhouse birthday present so much that he decided to sleep in it last night - his parents are thrilled that he went to sleep, they cared not where. This evening when I tried to tuck him in I tried to tuck him in nicely and ended up tucking him so closely into the corner of the tent that every time he moved his head he banged it on the radiator. I'm pleased to say he seems to have a little in common with with me because rather than shifting himself he kept turning his head back to try and see what he was banging it on. I watched him do it three times and then thought I ought to intervene. He then lay listening to the rest of the hungry caterpillar rubbing his head and giving my the ole stink eye as though I should have known better. I probably should have.

There's so much about children that's hilarious. It didn't matter how many times I swam under the water and popped back out again this morning; it was the funniest and most surprising thing that had ever happened. It also didn't matter that he couldn't do it all... swallowing a little bit of water and then spitting it back out again seemed to equate to the same thing in his eyes and so we all clapped and cheered. So easy to please. In all honesty though, his parents are just as amusing. During our quiz today one question was, what item comes in sizes A2, A3 and A4... my brother-in-law answered "Bras". I think a small part of my sister died inside.

Sandpit games are just as fun - I was given my own rake today. Have you ever tried to convince a two year old that the reason he keeps getting sand in his eye is because he keeps looking at the spadeful of sand while it's above his head. He's a fastidious creature though and it did take me a good half hour to convince him that some dirt was allowed in the sandpit and that we could still play in it without needing to remove every tiny piece of brown... mainly because the tiny pieces of brown were sand not dirt.

Tomorrow I'm off back to the land of the real world... I've not checked my emails for two days while I sink back into familyville... I'm hoping nothing's exploded in my absence from the internet. I highly doubt it has. Of all the people that are holding integral things together, I think I'm one that can probably be missed for a while without the Pentagon getting a bit squeaky bum. In fact, I think if there's one bonus to being smei-useless it's that no one really misses you when you want a holiday. I may well emigrate...

The Birthday Party

2011-07-20T20:12:00.000+01:00

After a 5am start, a train journey which began before the dawn chorus (well, before Twitter anyway), a planning meeting, a birthday dinner, a lot of cake and a multitude of stories... I am well and truly happy and relaxed.

Just recently I've found that being unemployed and poor gives you a lot of time to think about things. Largely because you have a lot of time on your hands and not enough money for bus fare and so you end up walking to a lot of places. Yesterday, as I was walking to The Glassblower, I started thinking about my current living situation and whether or not I wanted to remain living in a house share situation.

It occurred to me that if you stay single and don't pair off with a mate (or boyfriend as more well adjusted people call them) then you necessarily have to be more successful to be able to afford solitary living. You can't move out and share the burden of everything with someone else and so you kind of need your career to work out well to avoid poverty.

At what age do you necessarily have to stop living with other people? Will I wake up one day to find I'm 45 and living with a load of students who secretly judge me? Will I even know they're students or will I just see them and assume they are my cats because I am such a loony spinster?

Is there some kind of forum for the celibate amongst us to meet up and form care homes of willing 25-50 year olds who can't really afford housing but aren't old enough to just go straight into care? Do I need to pop out a couple of sprogs so that we can have council housing or should I just hold out and hope that I either find a continual stream of people my own age who are equally averse to co-habitable relationships or that I die young?

The birthday party again today really got me thinking... at what point will life start to feel like it's how things were meant to go or will it all always feel like you're working towards something you've not quite attained yet? Don't get me wrong, this isn't whiny at all - I love my life - but I don't quite feel like I've got to the point where I can sit back and look at it and think "Yep, this is what I pictured." Reasonably, I'm not sure there'll ever be a point where David Attenborough is reading me leather bound books and I'm spraying lavender oil on his feet, but I hope I get somewhere a bit close.

Or would that be very dull? Are those the sorts of lives where people freak out because they got somewhere comfortable too early and now don't know what to do? Will a permanent attempt to get somewhere unattainable be much more interesting some day when my nephew is writing my memoirs and living off the proceeds?

I watch the rest of my family living in this little bundle of people who adore each other and see each other all the time and you can really tell that they live for each other. I drop in and out and very much love them from a distance but we all know I have to do something else or I'll go a little nuts - is that how it will always be?

Does putting career above family and above desire to have ones own family make you very sad or selfish? Would it be a bad thing to be the next George Clooney (plus boobs and IBS) and to never make a lifelong commitment because ultimately you know you can't stick to it... I have no idea.

I'm aware that this blog is a little more Carrie Bradshaw than my usual style and I've fought every instinct to write - "I couldn't help but wonder..." and then start reminiscing about my promiscuous friends, but I don't really have many and you can't see my imaginations so this is the best I could do. I do imagine tomorrow's blog will be the blueprint designs for a housing plan for people between 25 and 50 who would like to live in singleton villages - why does every other age group get to live amongst its peers in communities but for the long stretch in the middle you're just supposed to go it alone? It doesn't make any sense. Don't you worry though, I'll fix it.

Things I'm Willing To Do To Not Tidy My Room

2011-07-19T12:35:00.000+01:00

Well, this is exciting... my productive day is going badly so I am live tweeting all the things it turns out I would rather do that tidy my room...

1. Write a second blog today (obvious but necessary so getting it out of the way first).

2. Research a mushroom recipe that I might actually like (just in case there's one that doesn't make me vom).

3. Learn all the words to the Sister Sister theme tune.

4. Watch Show Me The Funny on iPlayer despite being warned it's a bad format.

5. Actually answer my phone to a number I don't recognise.

6. Attempt French plaiting of my hair. If you want to see a beehive pop round to the Old Kent Road about now...

7. Contemplate a visit to the doctor to see why I can't move the toes on my right foot any more... this is unlikely to happen as I'm petrified of doctors but it has crossed my mind so it's going on the list.

8. Acknowledge the fact that when I was young I owned a multitude of desk tidies, now that I'm old enough to have a desk there are just pens everywhere with no form of organisation at all. Chaos.

9. Draft a letter to the Black Keys asking if they need a tambourine player for their next tour.

10. Draft a letter to the Harlem Globetrotters asking about their summer camp opportunities.

11. Draft a letter to the Equal Opportunities and Ethics committee explaining that the Harlem Globetrotters are bullying me.

12. Iron shit.

13. Watch Two and a Half Men on the basis that "I must have missed something".

14. Realise I hadn't missed anything.

15. Try and cut Charlie Sheen out of my retinas.

16. Read the ingredients of furniture polish and wonder if ingredients is the right word? Any help here?

17. I'm so bored.

18. Draft a letter to my mum telling her that, although she often thought she had no authority over us when we were supposed to be tidying our rooms as children, I actually get even less done nowadays when she's not here. I also don't hoover. I will explain I am sorry.

19. Congratulate myself on choosing lavender washing powder.

20. Make list of reasons as to why Bill Pullman is better than all previous lovers. Draft screenplay where David Attenborough and Bill Pullman rescue me from a Stockholm Syndrome situation where David Jason is my captor.

21. Promise myself an ice cream if I tidy my room.

22. Tell myself lists are fun and so it logically follows I should watch High Fidelity immediately.

23. Cry a little bit and tell myself to pull my finger out and get on with tidying my room... sigh.