Dreams can come true (just hopefully not these ones)

Waking up early on a weekend morning and knowing I can go back to sleep is one of my favourite things in all the world. However, for complex reasons that I'll happily bore you with another time, I believe that when I am a bit stressed in real life, my dreams become more stressful as a result. This morning was a case in point. This is a very brief sample of what was running through my REM-riddled mind at around 10am today: Scene 1 - Meet up with a schoolfriend of yore in some random bed showroom in a suburban town in France, end up going back to a motel and having vivid, graphic, lesbian sex - it is my first time with another girl but not hers and I am rubbish. She gets annoyed, reasonably. Scene 2 - I am with a guy. We're in the back of a pickup truck with rucksacks, I think we've just been to a festival. It is night time and very warm, and I'm wearing very dirty clothes. We are hitching a ride with two huge black men who are playing loud garage music and we are both laughing although I know he is uncomfortable so I have butterflies. We are dropped off in a strange town at a swanky hotel, and taken through to our ground floor rooms which have French windows that open on to a private beach and a huge lake. The boy cuts his hand badly on something and I go out into the town and try to find plasters, but I don't speak the language and I have to ask a policeman. He takes me into a toy shop and then a restaurant where the manager gets some plasters out of a first aid kit. I go back to the hotel, put the plaster on the cut and we leave. We go on, with our rucksacks, to a huge house that I think is a family home of his. Everyone in there knows him, but none of them know me. I feel deeply ill-at-ease. He goes upstairs for some reason and a moment later I hear him wailing like a child. I go up and a kid who is, I think, his cousin has thrown water all over him, and he is in another room crying, really screaming. The young cousin takes the over-reaction in his stride and says he's always like that. I try to comfort my wet friend but he pushes me away. Scene 3 - Cut to south west London and the place where I grew up. I am going for a run in the park and I'm carrying my laptop, for some stupid reason. I see my godparents and I don't want to talk to them because I'm feeling ugly, so I pull my hat down over my forehead and pick up the pace. Eventually I get to my destination, my parents' house, although it's not my parents' house really. I go in, run a bath and get in, still holding my laptop, and I try to get my hair wet and hold my laptop above the water with my feet, but I come up from under the water and I see that I didn't hold my feet high enough and the computer has been submerged. I leave it open in an upside-down V on the bathmat. I hear my parents coming in through the front door. I wake up.

It's little wonder I'm always exhausted, is it? Although going out late and drinking lots of wine probably has something to do with it. I looked in my handbag this morning and found a copy of a book called That's Our Baby! by Pamela Browning, which I stole from the pub I was in last night as I thought it was such a hideous affront to women and fiction that I couldn't bear the idea that anyone else would ever read it. I am going to put it in the recycling bin. The blurb on the back reads as follows:

"Unsuspecting Daddy! Sam Harbeck needed his best friend's widow to give him back what was his - the rights to the deposit he'd made to a sperm bank. He'd come to Alaska to get her signature on the release. But he was too late: Kelly Anderson was already pregnant... with his child!

Sam expected a fight from the ever-wilful Kelly, but he didn't anticipate his own overwhelming desire for her... or the emotions her impending motherhood evoked in him. Being snowbound together only intensified his need for this woman. Could he have arrived just in time to be a father to their baby?"

It's not often that words fail me. But those ones did.

Tube hook-up

Despite being the World's Illest Person, I went out last night, because I thought I might go insane if I didn't. Unexpectedly, however, almost my favourite part of the evening happened before I even reached my destination. I was leaving a packed tube at Angel and even given my svelte, streamlined silhouette, I had to work quite hard to force my way through the carriage. As I stepped down onto the platform, I felt a strange tightening sensation around my neck. I looked down. Brilliantly, a thread of my hot pink, chunky-knit snood had become caught in the zip of a woman's coat who was remaining on board the train. There was a bright loop of wool, approximately two feet in length, connecting the two of us and I can tell you for nothing that she was not at all happy about it. I started giggling compulsively as she tried to unhook me, the doors threatening to shut at any moment. I ran through my options and realised that, in the event of all separation attempts failing, I would have to jettison the snood. The thought of it dangling from the train as it pulled away made me laugh even more. Meanwhile, the coat lady was still having a massive sense of humour failure, huffing to a point where I thought she might combust, so I reached in and took over, and miraculously, just as the doors started beeping, I freed myself. It was a fashion miracle. I skipped down the platform enjoying my emancipation, briefly forgetting that I am going through minor hell at the moment, what with the illness and other assorted trials and tribulations.

Then I spent an hour in my favourite secret cafe, drinking tea and reading Prospect, before schlepping through the driving rain to Le Mercury where I met Sara and Grania, who broke down my aggressively defensive mood, got me drunk and made me laugh. Then we went to the South East heats of the 2010 beatboxing contest and the same motherfucking compere was there as last time, just as fat and unpleasant and wearing some absurd houndstooth checked muu-muu, from what I could determine. After the winner had been announced, he told us all to "go to the bar and get some fucking drinks down you so you won't notice when I feel you up later." Charmed, I'm sure.

A Little Perspect(ive)

Last night, I was watching American Idol instead of going to the Fionn Regan gig, because I am still the illest person ever, and not in the Beastie Boys sense, annoyingly, although possibly I am both. Anyway, it was the end of Hollywood Week and the remaining 46 hopefuls were being whittled down to a final 24, painful interview by painful interview. And they'd walk into the room where the four judges were sitting, and Ryan Seacrest would do some absurdly hyperbolic voiceover about how this was the biggest day... of their lives... ever... in the history... of American television... and possibly Western civilization, and they would sit down and the judges would say something banal(e?) like, "So dawg, how you holdin' up?" and the contestant would start to cry, and say, "You know, it's really tough," and the judges would nod and say, "I know, it is really tough. It's been a tough year," and the contestant would nod and sniff and say, "I mean, the competition is so strong, and I felt like -" sniff "-I gave it my best shot, but... you know, it's just so hard. The pressure... This is, like, the hardest thing I've ever done." And I'm hoarse and grumpy and shouting at the TV saying, "RAGE! You are skinny and privileged, your hair is glossy, you have no visible spots, and you are down to the final 40 in American Idol Season 9, so I'm guessing you can carry a tune. If you think THIS is hard, try... ALMOST ANYTHING ELSE." I mean, obviously the Johannesburg slums or rural China would be a bit of a shock, or living with a physical disability, or a criminal record, or a family member with a heroin addiction... Or confronting a genuine phobia, or dealing with constant racial abuse or bullying.... You get the point. What was so frustrating was the judges' complicity in all this, as they nodded sagely in their black leather swivel chairs while the youngsters boo-hooed in front of them, wearing Abercrombie and carrying shiny guitars and 160 Gb iPods. Grumble grumble. Then today I woke up and I knew that I had to go to work, even though I'm still, like, so ill, and I'm not joking when I say that it was, literally, the hardest thing that anyone's ever done. Sniff.

Hurt Lacking

Yeah, so I'm still mental. On top of which, I'm still properly ill. Like: sweating, unable to breathe, coughing, sneezing, sleeping for fourteen hours at a time, terrifyingly beautiful in a pallid, sunken, dull-eyed type of way. On the upside, I don't think I've eaten more than about seventeen calories since Sunday so am in with a shot of finally seeing what it's like to be heroin chic. Thrilled.

I was meant to go to a very fun conversation dinner at a swanky restaurant last night and meet lots of strangers, but it's amazing what a temperature and a massive emotional kick in the kidneys will do to your desire to fraternize. Instead I stayed in and watched The Hurt Locker, recent winner of all the big BAFTAs and likely future winner of lots of Oscars. I had heard it was good, set in Iraq, and that Guy Pearce was in it. Other than that, I was going in blind.

I am more than happy to admit that it was an absolutely brilliant suspense thriller. Edge of the sofa stuff, in a metaphorical sense (in reality I was completely slumped down under my blanket at all times and could probably have passed for dead). The guy who had the most screentime, an actor new to me, was really excellent, and the long set-piece scenes were cleverly weighted - the narrative arc more than sustained my frazzled attention over the 130-odd minutes.

But the Iraq setting felt cursory, more as a topical gambit than a genuine need to say anything unique about the country. The film's stated aim was to show what it is like to be a US soldier in these bomb disposal units, and maybe it was successful in that, but why exacerbate the huge gulf between the US military and Iraq by making films where all Iraqis are portrayed as terrifying threats, planting bombs and detonating them from old Nokias? It wasn't particularly illuminating and surely contributes to the continued problem. Add to that a few major plot hilarities, where these commandos go off on their own private vendettas and then face no punishment as a result, and you've got a good action flick, but not one that can really be taken seriously. There are certainly many soldiers who are highly critical of the film, as well as those who thought it was fantastic. I was left feeling like it was a slightly more erudite Top Gun, hugely enjoyable but not ground-breaking. And then the credits rolled and the director was revealed to me as Kathryn Bigelow. 'Name rings a bell...' I thought to myself. I scrolled through IMdB, trying to see why I recognised her. And then I saw her last hit: Point Break. Suddenly everything became clear.

My laugh-out-loud moment came when the three teammates were about thirty days into their time together, and were relaxing after a mission by swigging whiskey out of the bottle and having a brawl. Puffed, they lay down and it was only then that they revealed to each other that one had a son and another had a girlfriend. Much as I hate to further male/female cliches, it did make me giggle to imagine how long it would take girls in a similar situation to find out that one had a child and the other was in an unsatisfactory relationship. I'm guessing under an hour, although I'm prepared to concede that military life is probably not my ideal milieu.

Never forgotten

Today's LLFF is brought to you by escapism. I have spent the past 36 hours in a slight haze, but managed to get through yesterday thanks to a backlog of episodes of American Idol, including a gripping Hollywood Week four-part bonanza. And today, despite mental and physical illness, I battled in to work and found my Amazon order had arrived, containing several exciting books (including our next Book Club book and these letters which I can't WAIT to devour) and a new yoga DVD. But the undoubted highlight was volumes 1 and 2 of the Take That hardbacks.

Take That formed in 1990, but I wouldn't have called myself a fan until 1991, when I was 14. It was a slightly tricky time for me: I wasn't doing that well at school, I didn't feel like I had any talent at sport, I was OK at singing and acting but definitely in the B team... I had minimal identity and, as an only child used to walking around my home with a metaphorical spotlight following me, this lack of Ready Brek glow did not sit comfortably. Pop music and American TV gave me something to obsess over - my unbending love of these unknown purveyors of bad songs and bad acting made me feel different. Of course, I didn't think that Take That would find me special. But at school and back in the pub at home, the level of my obsession did make me stand out. Entire friendships were formed on the basis of love for pop culture, friendships with people I still dearly love today (hi Alex!). Good times.

I won't deny that I was a bit mental though. In October 1991, there was a day trip from our boarding school up to Birmingham for the Clothes Show Live! experience. The idea was, we look around, get free makeovers, watch a live catwalk, and then get back in the minibus and return to Wiltshire. Upon arrival at the NEC, my friend Tina and I noticed that Radio One had a roadshow van there. Far more interested in music than clothes, I stuck around, and was soon gobsmacked to find out that Take That would be performing. Forget the models and Jeff Banks in the main arena - here was someone I'd actually heard of. Best of all, when they came on stage, no one else had a clue who these boys were - so when Tina and I were shouting at Jason and Robbie, they could actually hear us and waved. Buoyed, we ran over the edge of the stage when they'd finished performing, and screamed as they ran by. I wasn't sure what I wanted to happen, but it was unexpected to say the least when Robbie, and then Jason, gave me a wet kiss, with tongues, as they ran off towards their changing room. Extraordinary. Even funnier was that Robbie looked at Tina, who, wanting an autograph more than a snog, uttered the immortal line, 'Do you have a pen?' Strangely, he hadn't gone on stage with a biro.

Buoyed further, Tina and I followed 'the lads' to the lifts, where they went up and started shouting at us over a balcony for us to follow. We weren't allowed up in that lift, but managed to sneak up in another one with a cleaner and then spent 45 minutes with the five of them, sitting on the floor and chatting while they gave us their autographs and Howard admired the red bandana I had tied round my wrist (and consequently didn't remove for approx. the next four years). I'll never forget climbing back into the minibus at the end of the day - the other girls looked at Tina and I with shock, disbelief and scorn oozing from every pore. "You missed the CATWALK to meet TAKE THAT?!" they chorused, gobsmacked. "Yup," I said, without a trace of regret.

Five years later, I was at university when the band broke up, and I remember being late for a lecture as a result - urgent conference calls with Eva had been necessary to discuss the announcement and plan for a Take That-free future. I had seen them live five times, waited outside Capital Radio to photograph them when I should have been revising for my GCSEs, and written them countless letters (unsent) explaining why and how they should come to our school to give a unique performance and allow Howard the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fall for me, the most wonderful, lank-haired, pasty-faced, overly-eyebrowed, awkwardly-curvy, posh-speaking girl he'd never love.

Years after that, in fact, I did finally interview Howard, in a pub in Shepherd's Bush, while he was promoting his DJ career. He was a lovely man, but intensely shy and clearly a lost soul. It's safe to say that we never were, and never will be, a match made in heaven. Still think he's fit though. Funny how life turns out.

Since they reunited, my TT obsession has been more muted. To be honest, I don't like much of their music - although I think Shine is a great track. But I do have a fondness for them that might seem absurd to someone who spent their teenage years grounded in reality. Those boys were, for me, an escape from my life. I wasn't depressed back then, but I wasn't really very happy either, and they gave me a focus and a sense of belonging to something, much as following football has given definition and community to generations of men. I don't need that now, my life is full enough and for that I'm grateful, but I spent a happy hour or two reading those books this afternoon and thinking back to those days when five men in terrible outfits could reduce me to a screaming pulp, and if my Dad forgot to video them on Top of the Pops while I was out at the pub, all hell would break loose. God I was a nightmare.

Extreme living

What a weekend. Friday night I went to a fantastic party with some wonderful people and it was joyous. Saturday day I was hungover and Grania and I went to King's Cross to take photos for a competition thing and I could write reams about it. Saturday night I slept. Sunday morning, Kate and I braved the rain and did the second part of the Capital Ring walk, from Hackney Wick to... I dunno. Somewhere five miles further south east. And then yesterday afternoon I went to Waterloo to meet a boy, a boy I've not really mentioned on here because I truly, properly like him and I didn't want to jinx it. Turns out that mentioning it on here isn't the only way to jinx something.

Nothing is wasted

It is with some trepidation that I start a blog post when I know I must be unrelentingly positive about something. It is soooo much easier to bitch and whinge than praise. But praise I must, in the most emphatic fashion. Last night, Kate and I went to Pure Groove Records opposite Smithfields market, and, for the price of zero pence, watched a screening of the Blur movie, No Distance Left To Run. In the middle of this unendingly cool city, in the middle of a room full of interesting people crowded together on wooden chairs and mismatched sofas, without spending a single penny (except on wine), we were able to see a movie I've desperately wanted to see since I heard it was being made a year ago. And my god it lived up to my expectations.

I think it may have been a perfect film. I laughed out loud. I had goosebumps almost constantly. I felt shocked. I was educated. My prejudices were challenged. There was a narrative arc but it was firmly wedged in real life. There was - of course - seminal music throughout: Blur's hits played at gigs over the course of the past two decades - and then, gorgeously, Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending accompanied the reunion talks, fresh, clear, soaring into the future. The camerawork was truly fantastic throughout. Journalists, pleasingly, came across as dicks. The four men were touchingly honest and managed to love each other without seeming cheesy. I felt proud of having been their fan in the nineties, proud of buying three copies of Country House to ensure they went to number one and beat Oasis, proud to live in London, proud to have been at their gig at Glasto last summer, yelling Tender with the other thousands, feeling part of something both simultaneously fleeting and beautifully timeless. I didn't want it to end, not last June, nor last night. The last time I felt that, oddly, was while watching The September Issue. And the time before that, it was Anvil. And suddenly it seems clear that, for me, truth blows fiction out of the water every time. Reality rocks.

Immaculate Recollection

So this morning in a typical moment of time-wastery, I went on this website full of psychological tests that Kate had sent me. And one of them posed a question. Imagine, it said, that you have the opportunity to take a week's holiday. You can go wherever you like, with whomever you like, and have a wonderful time. In dollars, it asked, what value would you put on that holiday? Feeling quite flush, and imagining the most insanely brilliant holiday of my life, I said $2000 and clicked enter. Another page opened. Imagine, it said, that you can go on the same wonderful holiday, but you will have absolutely no memory of it once it's over. What value would you put on it then? Ick. I said $0. Nought dollars. I tried and tried to want to go on an experience that would vanish as soon as it had happened, but I couldn't. I know it's wrong. I know that Fromm would tell me off for being stuck in the having mode, not the being mode. But he'd also know that my desire to have is due to my society, where having is always preferenced over being, where ownership is all.

Still, it's awful. I remember a few years ago, in therapy, I said that if I couldn't tell someone about an experience I'd had, the experience itself wouldn't count, wouldn't have value. And of course, the outpouring of my life's inanities on LLFF smacks of someone with a need to share, for whom existence is heightened by interaction with third parties (albeit completely selfish and one-way). Thankfully, whereas my core used to be external, it's now where it should be, in the pit of my abdomen (these are all visual metaphors I worked out at £50 an hour). But I still wouldn't want to go on a holiday if I couldn't remember it afterwards. Or, at least, I'd go, but I wouldn't pay for it. That's stupid though. Am I saying it's better to stay at home and not have fun than to go away, have a brilliant time and forget about it? Well, yes and no. I just think - it's a lost week. I'd rather stay home and have a good time here and remember it. And of course, as I wrote in the box provided on the psychological test website, if I ever developed Alzheimer's or similar, if I followed my thinking now that nothing is worth experiencing unless you remember it afterwards, I'd have no motivation for doing anything and may as well kill myself. So that's a happy thought for a Thursday.

Once again, you may have noticed from my incoherence that I am hungover for a second day. Unless you're my boss, in which case I think I might be coming down with something but will be fine by Monday. It was the final night of our six-week ukulele beginners' course yesterday, and it's fair to say there was an awful lot of love in the room at the Wednesday Jam, or wizzle jizzle. God it's fun. Long may it continue. Now I'm sitting at my desk, waiting for my lunch to digest so that I can go to the gym. In the meantime, I will read the paper online, reply to some emails and continue the epic poem I'm writing about what's really going on in my head. You'll love it.

Talking shop

God I love clothes. I know, I know, appearances can be deceiving, beauty is only skin deep, it's not what's on the outside that matters yadda yadda. But let's face it, all those yawnsome platitudes were just made up so that mothers would have something to say to their fat teenage daughters. The truth is, we are judged on our appearance, and we judge others on theirs - and we make those judgements because, nine times out of ten, they're accurate. If we were consistently wrong, we'd soon learn, and adjust our prejudices accordingly.

Looks matter. Maybe they shouldn't, but they do. Last night I went to Westfield and watched a selection of the most boringly, uniformly dressed teenage girls traipse around Topshop and H&M, buying armfuls of clothes that looked identical to the ones that they were already wearing. There is a scene in the film Clueless where Cher is walking along the corridor talking to Dionne on her mobile phone, and after about ten seconds, Dionne joins her, walking in the same direction, and they hang up without drawing breath, and I remember watching that, slack-jawed, in the nineties, thinking how fun it looked to be that connected, that technologically savvy. Yesterday in Westfield, the teenagers didn't even appear to hang up when they were together. It's as though mobile phones are a cooler way of communicating than actual face-to-face, so they just never hang up. The benefit for the outsider is that they talk much more loudly into their phones than they would to each other, so the full inanity of their babble is revealed. And I suddenly realised that the horror of having children isn't the sleepless nights or the terrible twos, or the toddler tantrums or panicking about primary schools. It's the fact that, without fail, every single teenager in the world is an Absolute, Unmitigating Dick. I definitely was. How do parents humour these morons, who can't speak without splattering their sentences with 'like' and 'y'know', and who couldn't formulate an interesting or unusual phrase if you offered them VIP passes to Glastonbury, unsupervised? I can't imagine not killing them. Matricide beckons. And that's when pregnancy's still a far-off semi-thought. God I hope I never need to adopt - the agency would have a field day. For their reference: that was a joke. I promise I will never murder my children, adopted or otherwise. Although that whole euthanasia thing is interesting, with that BBC presenter killing his lover back in the day. I'm with The Graun on that one - it's all well and good supporting Right To Die etc., but not helpful doing it without proper legal strictures in place.

Aaaaaaaaaanyway. So then I stood, jaw still slack, outside Abercrombie, where there was a cordoned-off queue and a doorman, operating a one-in-one-out policy. I assumed there must be some sort of special event on. But no. These people were queuing to get into the shop. That's it. Queuing to shop. Even for a born consumer such as myself, this was shocking, and I felt a sudden urge to get all revolutionary on their asses, knock down the barricade and drag them all into M&S shouting 'There are ALTERNATIVES! And in other shops, the sizing isn't so OUTRAGEOUS that a NORMAL PERSON has to wear an XXXL!' But I didn't.

Then I went to dinner at Grania's for seriously delicious chicken stew and buttery cabbage and then pancakes, and the clothes discussion continued. I think I slightly freaked out this guy called Jim with the extent of my self-imposed rules for shopping, in that, when considering a new purchase, I will break down the item's price by estimated number of times it will be worn, and thus calculate if it's worth it. For example, I find a new belt that costs £15. I decide I will wear it approximately ten times in the next year. Thus I will be paying £1.50 a time to wear it. For £1.50, I would hope the belt would add a fair bit of value to my outfit - it wouldn't have to be the feature piece, but it certainly couldn't go unnoticed. If I decide that £1.50 is a fair price for each of the belt's outings, I will buy it. Jim's rules were different, as he doesn't buy clothes unless he has run out of something, which is a concept of purchasing that is laughably distant for me. Running out of anything... Nope. Not going to happen. Possibly tights, but that's it. I explained that my tenuous defence for my clothes addiction comes from the fact that, in my early twenties, I was really quite overweight, and the novelty of being able to fit into something, let alone actually look good, is still so fresh that whenever I try something and like it, a panic overwhelms me and I worry that, if I don't buy this garment, right here, right now, I'll regret it forever. Admittedly, I have been fitting in to high street stores for several years now, and I'll be the first to agree that argument doesn't quite stand up any longer, but it's my story and I'm sticking to it.

God I'm hungover. Can you tell? I can't seem to shut up, and nothing I write is of any real interest. Ukulele tonight. Hair of the dog may be necessary.

No mention of Valentine's

It's one of those times when the combination of what is going on in my life and what is going on in my head is all too much, and the thought of attempting to hack away at the Everest becomes overwhelming. For now, I'll summarise by saying that my weekend at Nicole's was wonderful, and my prejudices were both confirmed and challenged, particularly in a heated dinner party debate about whether one's nanny should be instructed to use 'loo' not 'toilet' in front of one's children. As usual, I stepped aboard the train to London Paddington feeling a genuine wrench at leaving such an admirable family unit (especially the three small people who are truly entertaining and amazing on a trampoline) and utterly thrilled that I am able to return to my flat toute seule.

Yesterday I was a tad mental but hey, these things happen. Back to 'normal' today thanks in part to a good night's sleep last night, which in turn was thanks to a) a fast run around the South Bank with Laura at lunch and b) half a bottle of wine at the BFI over a delicious dinner with Em yesterday evening. Now I'm feeling chipper at the prospect of a perfect evening's combo: Westfield, pancakes and possibilities. Shrove Tuesday: now there's a religious bandwagon upon which I am more than happy to jump.

Needy much?

So there I was, enjoying a second consecutive pretty good Thursday night, when a girl sat down at our table. She had been at an adjacent one up to this point, being a bit raucous with some guys that she clearly hadn't known until that evening. We chatted to her for a minute or two, she was Australian and quite funny although possibly mental. Then later, when I was left on my own for a few minutes, she came back and started talking really fast.
"I know this seems weird, but I'm 35, right? And my two friends here are so lovely, but they're in their early twenties, and you might wonder why I'm not here with people my own age [not so much, no] but they're all MARRIED WITH BABIES, and I know it sounds desperate, but here's my card, and that's my mobile number, and if you ever want to, you know, hang out or whatever, I'm not a lesbian, I swear, I'm not gay, I'm not a psycho, I just want to be friends, you know?" I was a bit tipsy by this point, and I said,
"I hear you, and believe me, I've been there with the friends getting married and reproducing thing. But trust me, handing out your card to complete strangers in bars is not the way to forge lasting friendships. Can't you take up a hobby? Meet new people that way? Sing? Play the ukulele?"
"HA HA!" she said. "The ukulele!"
I glowered.
"Well, whatever floats your boat. Just... this [gesturing at the business card] isn't going to work."
She slunk off eventually and we didn't hear anything more from her 'til she started saying her earmuffs were the coolest thing ever to anyone who'd listen, and my competitive streak came out and I had to put mine on too, and she insisted that hers were cooler because they were stripy, which, if stripy earmuffs with matching mittens are your thing, then maybe she was on to something - but if you want an earmuff which will keep them toasty but not dominate an outfit too much, and you want to avoid looking like A PLAYSCHOOL PRESENTER, then I think a beige faux fur is the way to go. We both preferred our own. Nice when the world works out like that, isn't it.

I hope the young lady, Angelique I think she was called, is now sitting at work booking onto beginners' classes in two or three different disciplines, but I think she's probably feeling very hungover, refreshing her email every six seconds, and staring out at the miserable London greyness, wondering what people are getting up to 12,000 miles away.

Doesn't matter what the question is, wine is always the answer

So it turns out that when I drink, I am absolutely BRILLIANT at the ukulele. Without prior warning, we bought bottles of red wine at our class last night, rather than our usual glasses, and within moments, I was transformed from tentative to tenacious. My plans to get an early night for maximum beauty sleep were scuppered as I went on to the jam after the lesson, and ended up shouting along to the half-remembered lines I could recall from Where Do You Go To My Lovely. It was an extremely fun night and we have been having a lot of morning-after tomfoolery via email involving hilarious gags about metronomes.

I am clock-watching and doing the Guardian crossword online, unless you are my boss, in which case I am developing cutting edge solutions and pushing ahead on the most recent initiatives for growth.

Six degrees of inadequacy

Last night I went to the theatre to see Six Degrees of Separation. Worried that I always hate everything I see at The Old Vic, I had bought £10 restricted view bench seats in the gods, and was thrilled on arrival to hear the best words in the world, 'Madam, you've been upgraded', and was presented with two seats in the middle of the stalls, simultaneously a joy and a sure sign of a struggling production. The play's concept is well-known (especially to those of us who've already seen the film) but I can't really see the justification for putting on a new version. Despite the interesting premise, it's not saying anything new, the concepts are either cliched or dated, and the acting wasn't as good as it could have been. I actually missed Will Smith. That said, for £10 I'm not complaining. Well, I am, but not to the extent that I regret going. I'd only have done something else and then moaned about that. And going to see a bad play is still a fun night out for me, perverse though that may be.

I just phoned my parents. One of them picked up, fumbled with the receiver for, I'm not joking, about 25 seconds, like some sort of feeble geriatric, which would be OK if they were seriously old but they're not. In the background I could hear the lunchtime news talking about Afghanistan. "Morons?" I was barking into the receiver. They couldn't hear me. I hung up. Now their line is engaged. I think this is the shape of things to come. I phoned my mum's mobile to tell her, but obviously, being over 60, she only has a mobile for emergencies and it is thus COMPLETELY USELESS to anyone else. I got her voicemail but didn't leave a message as I know from past experience that she doesn't know how to pick them up. I've now emailed her. She may find the message in a few hours. Not that it's really that much of a disaster that I can't speak to my parents this second, but I am bored and want to complain about that to someone who will give me sympathy. Thinking about it, my mum is probably not the best person to try. Leave the phone off the hook, you cavemen. See if I care.

Near miss

Nothing like narrowly avoided humiliation to make you feel grateful for mere existence, is there? I went to the loo at work this morning, came out of the cubicle, washed my hands, pouted at myself in the mirror, mentally criticised about thirty six elements of my appearance and admired about nine, and then turned to walk out the door. As I turned, from the corner of my eye, I spotted a potential thirty seventh criticism, and reversed to look again in the mirror. And thank goodness I did. For the first time in (my) living memory, my dress was tucked into my tights. This is probably every woman's worst nightmare. Forget the Special K bitch prancing around in her boyfriend's oversized shirt, her eyes saying 'Look at me, all toned legs, unreasonably white teeth and glossy mane'; in Real Life, there is very little that is less sexy than normal woman's bare buttocks and backs of thighs below a shirt. A fully naked rear view is one thing, but like a starkers man in socks, female nudity appears to be a kind of all or nothing deal. Cover those same buttocks and thighs in tights, and tuck the shirt into the waistband, and I don't know about you, but it's not my idea of an erotic masterpiece. So you can appreciate my joy that I had managed not to stride between the ladies' loo door, the water bubbler and back to my desk with this most sensitive of areas revealed to the assembled masses. It was, in short, an excellent start to the day.

Since then, I've been running in the snow and. That's it. Last night I went to choir practice where we were being filmed by the BBC for some reason that will never be aired, and we were all a bit hysterical as a result. At one point, someone was making an announcement saying that if people were running late, they should phone someone in the choir, and that if they didn't have anyone in choir's number they... "were a total loser" I finished off, in a Green Day / surfer dude accent, to slightly lower than my usual hit rate of around 76% laughter and 24% awkward silence. Feel bad now. Then again, merely being in a choir is normally considered a fairly loserish thing to do so I guess we all need to come to terms with that at some point. Plus I'm sure they'd miss me if I never said anything at all - can't win 'em all...

Am also grumpy because I spent all morning trying to get tickets for Traviata or Aida at the opera house, except if my boss is reading, in which case I spent the morning streamlining office efficiency and upping revenue. Anyway, I couldn't get onto the ROH webpage or through to their phone line as today is the first day of booking, but a few minutes ago I finally managed to access the website and all seats under £170 are sold out on all dates. Gah. I haven't been to the opera for months and was really in the mood. But hey. I've got a fun night lined up for tonight, a fun few days ahead, I'm off to see Nic at the weekend and my skirt isn't tucked into my pants. [Double checks]. Nope. My skirt isn't tucked into my pants. Things could be worse.

Weird weekend

It started off surreal, then went disorganised, then was brilliant and extravagant, then my dreams were complicated, I played the uke, and now I'm back at work. After a pretty good Thursday night, my expectations were for a full-on anticlimax on Friday, when Grania and I went to see Shunt's production of Money in a warehouse in Bermondsey. Control-freak that I try not to be, I'm not that good with surreal. I generally prefer to know exactly what is going on, and be able to change the course of things if necessary. I do, however, know that it is important for me to face up to the fact that I understand nothing and any concept I may have of controlling anything is an absurdist fantasy in itself. Thus, in the spirit of facing one's fears, I try to put myself in situations where I'm out of control as often as possible. Going to see Money would certainly count as one of those situations. Fortunately, when I admitted later to Grania that I spent most of the time thinking 'What the FUCK is going on?', she conceded that she'd had a similar reaction. And what was good was that it was really fun. At one point, we were clutching on to each other in the dark, wondering if we were going to be frisked by a terrifying actor dressed up as The Stig; a few minutes later, we were drinking free champagne and throwing plastic balls at other audience members across a giant perspex platform. The set, lighting and sound were absolutely phenomenal; the acting was fine; the plot was... absurd - but it was an interesting experience and I'd definitely head along to their next production with a spring in my step. Then we went to dinner at Village East which was perfect and not surreal in the least. Actually, I lie - the illustration to indicate the route the ladies' facilities was of an owl with a woman's head. That was a bit odd.

Saturday I slept a lot and spent an intense hour with Rodney Yee (via the medium of DVD) - the man really is a wonderful aberration and I still ache now. In the late afternoon, I headed into Covent Garden and met up with Luke for a New Year drink/dinner/more drink. We talked mostly about him, which is how he likes it, and it was really fun. I got home feeling very giggly and bought a new bed.

Then Sunday morning hit. I had set my alarm for 10am, and then woke up all perky at about 8am. Brilliant, I thought - what shall I do with my spare two hours? I had high hopes for organising my bathroom cabinets or something equally useful, but before the plan had solidified I had fallen back to sleep in a quasi-narcoleptic fashion, my brain desperate to avoid the task I'd identified. And, as so often happens when I'm asleep but semi-awake, I had vivid dreams, where a boy I liked was being horrible to me, and then I agreed to have all these random people back to my house for dinner, and they were all there and I was in the kitchen and Emily and Lucy were trying to help by preparing the starter but I got really really angry with them for stealing my thunder by handing out all the food, and I woke up feeling a mixture of sad about the boy, guilty about Emily and Lucy, and stressed about not having defrosted the lamb in time for the fictional dinner party. Honestly. Then I was running late for my ukulele workshop, so I went to that for two hours which was good as I learned to play Take Me Home, Country Road and Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life including the key change in the last chorus, which makes me sound so professional that perhaps my audience may forget about the fact that I can't get one of the intervals at all and have to sing extra-loudly to cover up that bit. Then I went back home and faffed, got excited about my new bed, got excited about my holiday, chatted on the phone to girls about boys and then went to bed and couldn't sleep. Now it's Monday, I'm back at work, the week stretches ahead, the weather is minging, it's too cold to go for a run and the prospect of the treadmill is not filling me with joy. Grumble grumble.

500

Well knock me down with a post-it note. The clever stats on my Blogger dashboard tell me that this here is my 500th entry on Lost Looking For Fish. Since November 2006, thousands of words have been strung into sentences full of self-obsession, self-regard, self-derision and self-doubt. My teenage diaries catalogue, in fine-ruled page after fine-ruled page, my love for boys, the objects of my affection changing so frequently that I now find it very difficult to understand who is who. At several points I genuinely believed I was in love with two or three different people at once, in many cases having talked to them for less than two or three minutes and certainly never having been alone in a room with them. The extent of my own fickleness is breathtaking. These days I worry about crows' feet, debilitating illness, early menopause and getting behind with Desperate Housewives. I don't know which is worse. Anyway, sincere thanks for being here for the last 500 chapters. This blog is one of my most favourite things in the world and your virtual presence is much valued.

Last night I went to my ukulele class and we learned to play Delilah by Tom Jones. It's all fine except the transition from B7 to E at the beginning of the third line of the verse, when all of us needed to pause for about six seconds to get the next chord. I think it'll be a while before we're ready to lay down our first tracks. Then I went home and watched Three Colours: Blue, the first film in the 1990s trilogy that I must have lied to about seventy people and told them I'd watched before, but I haven't. Apologies if you were fooled. It was excellent: Juliette Binoche was astonishingly good in quite a brutal role. If her nostrils were fractionally smaller, she'd be perfect. Looking forward to the next two instalments.

This morning I was on the tube and miraculously got a seat around London Bridge somewhere. The man next to me was about my age, meticulously dressed in a very dapper grey suit with a bright shirt, and had a neatly-trimmed goatee/moustache combo going on. I felt like he should be a stereotypical gay tailor in the 1980s. In his hand was a large paperback book, about the size of a weighty school textbook. It looked like a textbook too - thick white paper, heavily illustrated with line drawings and colour pictures, and large chunks of text explaining things. Always keen to learn, I looked closer. The pictures were of fantasy creatures. The words were discussing a place called Hive City. I have since looked it up on Wikipedia, and found that Hive City is the capital of a computer game land called Necromunda. And then I found this adorable geek's account of his obsession. And then I found all this fan fiction that people have written, that is published and available on Amazon. And really, isn't humanity amazing? You think you're getting your head round it, I'm just about coming to terms with World of Warcraft and Second Life and accepting them as part of the modern world, but then you realise how many games there are, how much of a contribution they've made to people's lives, formed friendships, started real life romances, ended marriages, caused real life deaths and bankruptcies... It's strange, and I don't have the time or the inclination to get involved, but I love that it exists. Variety FTW.

Doing it for the kids

Last night I went to an event in Borough that was conceptually brilliant, fascinating in reality, but still deep down a bit annoying. Based on an inspired Japanese concept called a Pecha Kucha, there were fifteen speakers, each of whom were allowed to present twenty Powerpoint slides which scrolled automatically after twenty seconds. So, fifteen talks, each lasting six minutes and twenty seconds. What could be better for the MTV/ADD generation? Our fifteen speakers were all adventurers, and the night was in aid of a charity called Hope & Homes for Children. We heard some incredible stories: a male/female team who narrowly survived icy conditions in Patagonia; a man who was paralysed while climbing in Wales and went on to ascend Kilimanjaro in a specially designed wheelchair; a man who lived in a tree-house for a year to experiment with sustainability; a girl who rowed single handedly across the Indian Ocean. At one point, one of the speakers asked how many people in the room had climbed Everest, and several people put up their hands. It was quite a unique gathering.

And yet, and yet... I'm afraid my Guardian-reading side found it difficult to feel genuinely elated by these people's achievements. Sure, they are fantastic, and some of them have raised tens of thousands for charity. But some... haven't. And out of fifteen speakers, I'd estimate that at least twelve of them spoke with the plummy tones of someone who'd inherited more than just a few scratched CDs and a dirty Breville. I'm not saying their adventures weren't awesome and impressive. These people unquestionably pushed themselves to the limits of their ability and it was very interesting to hear what they'd seen. But who's to say what I would do if I'd grown up with enough money in the bank that meant getting a steady job wasn't a concern? If I'd had millions, maybe I would be cycling the globe or taking photographs while following Shackleton's route to the South Pole. OK, it's massively unlikely given that I'm fundamentally quite panicked if I know I'll be away from my sofa for more than 24 hours. But there was something that made me bristle about the guy who'd lived in a tree house telling us it had only cost £300 and that we can all have a life-changing adventure if we put our minds to it. Where did he build the tree house? Where did he get the land? Was it free? I doubt it. Another of the speakers decided to walk from London to Istanbul and set off three days later. Not the kind of option you can take if you've got a mortgage to pay or any other of the myriad commitments or responsibilities that come with normal existence. Adventures are one thing - the practicalities are another, and I'd have liked to have heard about them. There was a slightly patronising sense that a normal life was an inadequate life, and that put me on the defensive.

I was sitting next to a guy who laughingly understood my gripe, and told me about a bicycle courier who'd decided to stick two fingers up at the 'adventure capitalists'. The final post of his blog, following his cycle round the world, is here in all its vitriolic glory. I think he could have made his point just as effectively without villifying one individual in the way he does - but it (and the comments underneath) still make interesting reading, IMHO.

What was unequivocally good was the evening's main charity, Hopes and Homes. The main man explained the work they do in Central & Eastern Europe, and in Africa. One of the examples he gave was of two young brothers whose dad had died of AIDS when they were babies. When their mother also died of AIDS, the neighbours were too scared of the disease in her body and wouldn't remove the corpse. These two tiny boys had to live, alone, in a crappy house, with the corpse of their mother, for five weeks. I had had two glasses of wine by this point and the tears were streaming down my face. I don't know what's going on with my hormones at the moment but I'm very emotional. Anyway - it seems like an absolutely incredible charity, and if anyone can spare anything after Haiti, please click here.

In other news, my friend met a guy on Saturday night who took a fancy to her. Sadly the feeling wasn't mutual. Yesterday she received an email that included the following: "Since you haven't become my friend on Facebook, I am now emailing you. (I'm impatient)." No shit. And he ended by giving her his mobile number, "in case you are impatient like me and you want to text or call. If you're not, I'll be fine. After a couple of months in therapy." Goodness. No pressure.

BFI, Blitz, Big Walk.

Apologies for yesterday, that was rubbish. I have a good excuse but you don't want to hear it, trust me. Let's just get on with the show.

I had a great weekend. Friday night, after work, I met up with Em at the BFI and we went to see Late Autumn, one of Japanese directer Ozu's last works. I can't claim to be a true Ozu fan, having only seen two of his films, but it's amazing how calming I find them. Interesting, funny, touching - and peaceful. I was saying in my gimpy film reviews book that I keep that I wonder if it's the rigidity of the social structure that I find relaxing - the behavioural rules are so embedded in the culture that there is barely any risk of anything scandalous, awkward or inappropriate happening. Not that I dream of living in a repressive society - just... it's different to real life. Escapism. Apparently even Ozu's contemporaries didn't recognise the Japan he portrays though, so I guess it was escapism even at the time it was made. Intelligent escapism. Recommended. After the film, Em and I went back home for delicious lamb kebabs and rice and homemade raita and oven-roasted cherry tomatoes and spinach and god it was delicious.

Saturday was all about lying around and getting dolled up for the Blitz party in Shoreditch on Saturday night. I did my hair in curlers and put on red lipstick and drew on a beauty spot, and knew full well that there was no way that the party would be as much fun as the getting ready. So often the case. Love being a girl at times like those. Unfortunately, by the time I got to the venue my curls had kind of spread out and I was slightly less Blitz Belle and more Queen Mum. Ah well. It was a great night, full of beautiful people in cool clothes, esp. dapper mustachioed men in uniform, and we had a lovely time drinking, looking at everyone and passing judgment. Then we went to Diner for a midnight feast and had pancakes. Yum.

Sunday was great too - I met Kate at Highgate tube and we completed the first two sections of The Capital Ring with a stop at The Three Crowns (thanks Thom) in Stoke Newington for roast beef. It was fascinating. We went along the Parkland Walk (a disused rail line), through Finsbury Park, along a beautiful canal running next to Britain's largest council estate, past a reservoir, through Clissold Park and Abney Cemetery, into Stokey, crossed over East into Walthamstow Marsh Nature Reserve, along the River Lee/Lea, down into Hackney Wick, past the Olympic site - and then hopped on a bus to Stratford and came home. The walk is brilliantly clear and easy-to-follow, and 'discovering' these near-silent green spaces hidden away makes you feel special. Plus we saw not one, but two men, within about twenty minutes of each other but clearly not connected in any way, jogging in their normal daywear - coat, jeans, leather shoes. It was absolutely extraordinary.

Now we're on day two of February and it's cold and grey outside. Laura and I were going to go to the gym but we've decided to have lunch at the pub instead. I need deep fried nourishment. Later dudes.

Post-run slump

Sooooooooooo muuuuuuuuuuccccccchhhhhhh to saaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy. And no energy to write it. I can't. It would be waste of good material. I'll return soon with a bumper crop of hilarious anecdotes, feisty banter and winning humility. Til then.