Day 258: I Am Offered Another Fifteen Minutes

I am no stranger to fame! Incidences include:

1. Television film for Channel Four in 1983, in which I wear a school uniform and pretend to be a twelve year old Mason, accompanied by my oldest friend as Main Lead;

2. Frightful lunchtime fashion programme hosted by Paula Hamilton, in which I wear trousers, c. 1994;

3. Something ghastly to do with the Clothes Show, c. 1992;

4. Her Ladyship in The Dresser, 1989;

5. Model"* in 'charity fashion show' at Loughborough University, at which I find a Post-It note stuck to the wall with the words "Non-workingmonkey. Bad hair", c. 1993

6. Prostitute in red velvet riding habit in weird Czech play directed by halfwit, 1989;

7. Rolf Harris impersonator, After Magritte, 1990;

8. Spied on by bloodsucking Guardian journalist, c. 1995.

It therefore came as no surprise to find an electronic mail earlier today from a man asking me to be in a television programme. (Well, a live stream on ITV.com, to be more accurate.) I have no doubt that many others have been sent the same email, and I am sure that they will agree that it was very nice, and that they too were informed that the "project is long form, and aims to show (over the course of a few months) exactly how a blogger’s day-to-day life informs their blog and vice versa."

I imagine the author is bespectacled, in his mid-twenties and occasionally sent out to buy coffee for everyone. (Either that, or he is a BAFTA-award winning documentary maker whose work I have missed because I have been watching endless episodes of Arrested Development and cracking pistachio nuts in my teeth). But he is obviously not an idiot: "I’m not sure if you actually genuinely ARE unemployed", and I like the sound of him very much. (I did not like the sound of Knobby The Knob from London Lite. Some of you Will Know To Whom I Refer.)

I don't think** I'm going to do it, mind you. I'm not that interesting, I talk too fast and I dislike the thought of myself full screen at a three-quarters angle squeaking "Well, nothing much happens, really", whilst scratching my elbow and chewing on a small clay pipe. But my real reluctance comes from something altogether more simple: I'm vain and I'm a snob, and I don't want to be thought of as the sort of person who wants to be on television.


* I use the term loosely.

** In my country, we call this "keeping our options open". I might do it if people who aren't knobs do it. For e.g, if it is me, someone who writes about their therapy, someone who writes about their children a lot, someone who describes their every act of self-love (with pics), someone under the age of eighteen!!! who loves smileys!! :-) and her friends!!!!, and someone whose every word is clenched full with a cascade of burnished confused metaphor (like a butterfly emerging hummingbird-like from the rotting corpse of a bison), and compressedly over-wrought language in which the dripping pearls of pain creep down the dessicated pages of their self-realisation, I'm DEFINITELY in.

Day 256: I Do Not Like The Beatle

I am in the middle of an aggressive and tiresome fight with a pathologist that involves trying to identify The Most Embarrassing Song In The World. We have been at it for weeks and will continue for months, but in the meantime I have made two discoveries:

1. Lionel Richie likes to act at the beginning of his videos;
2. Paul McCartney is embarrassing.

I am already looking forward to many comments about the White Album and Sgt Pepper. I am almost certain that they will include words and expressions like "seminal", "Cilla Black", "Liverpool", "changed the face of music" , "his children had a normal upbringing" and "no-one deserves Heather Mills". I do not necessarily disagree, but the fact remains that McCartney is a bit of a knob. He's not a bad person, I don't think, but he does embarrassing things like set up schools for the performing arts (in and of themselves embarrassing), do "V for victory" signs, write songs about frogs and do duets with Michael Jackson. And he, like Richie, likes to act in the beginning of his videos.

It only remains for me to suggest that you watch these videos. I then guarantee that you will be unable to look me in the eyes with your eyes and tell me that I am wrong. (Even if you do as we do and listen to the songs without watching the videos, you will be on the floor sobbing before the hour is out. It's the lyrics, you see.)

A gentle start, involving amusing facial hair:



I particularly enjoyed Paul and Linda's acting in this. Please look out for Jackson's line "I'll try one!".



I hate this song more than almost anything else in the world, apart from "The Story of the Blues" by The Mighty Wah. But hey - there's good and bad in everyone, kids!



In this ever changing world in which we live in, the characterful bouncy keyboard bit will be making me retch for the rest of eternity.



Regular readers may also be interested to know that the photograph of McCartney used above is from a site that calls on people to "boycott Canada". I am not sure how one boycotts Canada (refuse to listen to Joni Mitchell? Never watch The man with two brains again? Stop making jokes about beavers?), but I for one will not be boycotting Canada. If I did, I would have no-one to watch Lionel Richie videos for.

Day 255: I Go To A Two Year Old's Birthday Party

I have just looked at this photograph, taken earlier today, and noticed something strange. Can you see it too? Something that shouldn't be on a table with sugar- and potato-based traditional birthday party comestibles?

As ever, no prizes, but I will tell you if you guess correctly. And no, it's not the cow.

Day 252: I Receive A Mysterious Note

I like being non-working. I don't mean literally not employed, or drawing on the dole with a crayon, or sponging off kind benefactors; non-working (as regular readers will be aware) is a state of mind; a state of mind in which one is constantly aware that everything else is more important than what happens in the office.

In fact, it is often more than OK (and usually necessary) to go to work to earn money, or to keep your mind lively, or (in the very best of circumstances) to do something you enjoy with people you enjoy working with. But work is fraught with danger, and in the choppy seas of happy working relationships lurk the sharp fins of psychotic cunt-dom, ready to slice off the limbs of decency and disable the flippers of reason.

I have worked with people who have shades of cunt about them; a tint, perhaps, about the sideburns. I have met those who leave a waft of cockmonkey behind when they leave the room. I have seen people behave like cunts whilst knowing that really, they are not cunts at all. I have seen people get away with being cunts because they are very good at what they do, or spectacularly bright, or extremely funny (and sometimes, all three at once). But to come across someone who is a cunt for the sake of it is like finding a Dodo in your dry cleaning.

The story isn't interesting, so I won't tell it*. I had to go for a walk. I whistled a bit (for, as everyone knows, it is impossible to cry if you are whistling), remembered that I was "a freelancer", looked at the canal for a bit and wondered if my new suitcase would fit in the overhead locker.

And then I went back to my desk and I found a mysterious yellow Post-It note written in an unfamiliar hand. And the Post-It note said this:

THIS IS SPORT
NOT WORK

REMEMBER.

UR A NON WORKING
MONKEY.

X.

A rare combination of amusing, kind and heartening! It is difficult to find this combination in the life, let alone in the workplace, left anonymously and with no signature. I do not think it was the cleaner (who wipes our desks with an oily rag and refuses to load the dishwasher); it would not have been the 25-year-old French Nick Drake lover; it was not, I know, the Roman with the broken printer, for his hand loops and swirls in a rococo style and the anonymous writing was more straightforward.

Perhaps the leaver of the note will make themselves known; perhaps they will not. In the meantime, I will keep the Mysterious Note about my person at all times, and refer to it when I forget to be essentially non-working in my heart.



* "Why start now?", I hear you squeak.

Day 251: I Receive Some Happy News From The Colonies

Regular readers will be aware that I find myself (through circumstances too strange to relate) entangled with a French Canadian pathologist who cuts his own hair and claims to have appeared in (and won) four episodes of Jeopardy. (The French Canadian version; he didn't manage to qualify for the US version, despite auditioning in L.A. in a special tie.)

He is also a very talented Veterinarinianary Scientist Doctor! And it is for this reason, and this reason alone, that he was able to save the life of a squirrel only recently salvaged from the hold of an Air Canada Jumbo Jet, crushed in transit by tumbling snowshoes. Recent photographic evidence suggests that the squirrel is making excellent progress; as you can see, he is still holding on firmly to his nut; his tail is upstanding; his eyes beady and bright.



I am the luckiest girl in all the world!