Trick photography

It would be easy to imagine that I have a touch more get up and go than the average girl, but the fact is, my desire to move is far weaker than my Scottish penny-pinching habits. Sure, I want to learn new things. I genuinely want to improve myself and the things I decide to do always sound really appealing. In theory. In practice, I just want to quiche. I'd pretty much always rather go home and eat mini Babybels. Tell me about a new fun activity that's happening in a couple of months and I'll get butterflies of hypothetical excitement. Ring me up at 5pm on a day when I have no plans, and ask me to join you, free of charge, and I'll mutter something about needing to get my eyebrows threaded and totter off home to lounge in front of the TV in Primark velour.

Over the years, I've worked out that the only way I can force myself to do pretty much anything is to pay up front; if I don't book, I don't go. I find a course I want to do, I shell out in full; theatre and gig tickets are bought months in advance; cinema seats are booked asap, even when I know there'll only be about six of us in the screening room. So I reserve my space, and I schlep along grumpily, wondering why the hell I forked out for another STUPID course, and then I turn up, and everyone's really nice and I learn things and I go home and I'm so full of adrenaline and new-found enthusiasm that I can barely sleep.

This totally happened last night. I was sitting on my sofa at 18:15 hours, thinking I would pay £99 not to have to stand up and go on the After Dark photography workshop I'd merrily paid £99 to attend when I booked it six weeks ago. I'd been excited about it for six weeks, but now that I was on my sofa and it was due to start in under two hours, I suddenly wanted to do it about as much as I wanted to drink a mug of someone else's mucous. Actually, that mental image is too far even for me. Apologies.

But because I couldn't bear to waste £99, I stood up and went, and dealt with the vague humiliation/kudos that I'd had the cajones to turn up even though my camera wasn't an SLR and was the cheapest in the room by several hundred pounds, and the tripod that pre-dates me that I'd borrowed from my mum was described within minutes by the course leader as "particularly shit", and everyone else pulled their equipment out of expensive padded bags, whereas I have jettisoned my case as it's too fiddly for quick access, and now store my beloved Canon G11 in an old sock, one of a pair taken from a Virgin Atlantic flight back in the days when I was a pop journalist and used to accrue cool anecdotes about my job that I could impress people with at dinner parties.

And everyone else had amazing lenses, and apparently zoom lenses are rubbish for night photography as all the layers of glass create 'noise' or 'flare', but I did what I could and I am pleased with some of the results. My camera definitely has its limitations, but it fits in my handbag and if I even if I had an SLR I doubt I'd use it because I couldn't be bothered to carry it round. Although I'm not denying it would be fun to try.

This first shot is taken in the deserted Petticoat Lane market, looking towards the City. The brief was to capture the emptiness. I just put my camera down, allowed for a fairly long shutter speed and this was the first picture I took:

Just F everyone's I, if you're interested... On a shorter shutter speed, the same photo came out like this:

Then I moved my tripod to take a different photo. This was the best one I managed. Could have improved on it but the group moved on. The guy in the jeans was our teacher.

Then we went to the Gherkin. It was really hard to get an interesting shot of this in the dark, so he suggested we leave the shutter open and up the exposure as much as we could. The maximum shutter speed my camera allows is 15 seconds, but it's interesting that, whereas in my earlier shots, the sky was totally black, here there is so much light in the London sky that it appears to be almost daytime. (Possible point of interest - our teacher's longest ever night time exposure was seven hours.)


By now it was nearly 11pm, and we walked to London Bridge. Here my camera failed me - shots of the next bridge along, Tower, simply didn't have enough clarity, the lights were blurred and it just didn't work. I'd need a prime lens for that, I think (ie. a lens that has a fixed length and cannot zoom), but like I said, the zoom is inbuilt in my camera and most of the time I'm delighted it's there. You win some, you lose some. Instead, I turned around and took the old favourite: long exposure of traffic as a bus passes. The vehicle moves too fast to be captured, but the lights make an impression and streak. It's cliched and hack, but I bloody love it. That's Southwark Cathedral in the background, and my night was worth it just for that shot.

So yeah. I get home after work and I'm floppy as if I've had a skeletonectomy, and all I want to do is stay draped across the sofa. But I've paid in advance for something, so I have to go, and I do, and it's great and I get home buzzing. It's just the law of my land. My guess is that we're all mad; the challenge of life is to work out the best ways to trick ourselves into behaving like people we respect and with whom we can live. Just call me Debbie McGee.

Six days in April

Rage. I've done it again: left writing my blog for so long that I am now overwhelmed with information and feel as though I should split it up under subheadings. Maybe I will.

Cocksuckgate
Last Thursday morning I phoned my mother just before I got to the airport, to say goodbye and reassure her that I had not yet died, an almost-daily ritual for which she seems to be grateful.
"Oh, Jane, I'm glad you called," she said, solemnly. "I was just about to email you." She sounded close to tears.
"What's wrong?" I asked in a high-pitched voice that indicated my panic.
"Your... your blog, Jane..." she said. I wasn't much the wiser.
"What about it?"
"Dad and I... we're both... shocked."
"What about?"
"I can hardly say it... You used the word..." (I tried to scan my memory of what the offensive item could possibly be) "...cocksucker."
I roared with laughter.
"So?!" I asked. Mum was not reassured.
"It's awful, Jane," she said. "So vulgar. So... unfeminine."
"Really? Worse than fucking?" I asked.
"Oh god, yes," she said, emphatically. "So much worse than fucking."
I told her that I believe this is a generational difference, but she seemed so gobsmacked by my labelling the volcanic ash as something that fellates that I felt it necessary to do a straw poll on arriving in France. I asked around twenty people in their early thirties, none of whom felt that a cocksucking volcano is any worse than a fucking volcano. Of course, we all agreed that fucking and cocksucking are both vulgar and unfeminine, so mother, you are indeed correct on that point. But for any of my mother's friends, or indeed any others, who read this blog and feel that she has failed in her parenting duties as a result of my free use of profanities, I apologise. Only the good bits of me are a reflection of her, i.e. my skin that tans, my love of birds and my US citizenship. Everything else is my dad's fault.

France
So I went to France for Emily's wedding and it was one of those cominglings of beautiful people and beautiful surroundings and beautiful emotions and beautiful food that made me simultaneously joyous and painfully and continually aware that, of the youth contingent, and as a fairly normal size 14 gal, I was the fattest female there by about nine stone. I kid you not. I genuinely reckon I could have got three of the other wedding guests into each leg of my jeans. There were literally miles of smooth, slim, tanned thighs on show, and the men's eyes were, naturally, out on stalks. I could have collected the drool and irrigated southern Africa for a month.

To distract myself, I forwent my wheat ban and ate baguette, and I sunbathed and met tiny ponies. It was all going rather well until I got dressed up on Saturday afternoon for the wedding, and had one of those rare moments when I looked in the mirror and thought I had managed to make myself look momentarily bearable. To celebrate, I asked Kate to take some photographs of me outside for posterity. She snapped away for a minute or so and said she'd got some good ones. I retrieved my camera and looked at the screen. In the (approx.) six minutes since I'd put on my make-up in the bathroom mirror, the circumference of my face appeared to have inflated by around an inch. I briefly became convinced that I was the victim of a cruel pre-wedding allergic reaction but then I double-checked with Kate, who assured me that the photo was, in fact, normal and that I was looking at a picture of What I Look Like. This could not be true. Desperate for a second opinion, I showed Christianne the mutant image and was sorely disappointed at her distinct lack of horrified gasps or attempts to shield my eyes from the appalling aberration. On the contrary: it appeared that the grotesque image before me was not only fairly representative but actually flattering. Shortly afterwards, we got in the car and drove to the wedding, the other three girls chattering happily as I tried to come to terms with the realisation that I look utterly, utterly different to what I thought and that my fictional version was much prettier.

Of course, the weekend was not all about me. We had a fantastic few days in and around Mirmande, made all the more precious as the volcano had done its best to keep us away, and I made new friends and passionately loved my old ones. The bride was stunning, the groom's speech was excellent, the venue was magical, I didn't fall over on the dancefloor, the lunch the day afterwards was dreamy, my skirt didn't blow up in the wind and reveal my pants, the band were crush-worthy and best of all, I managed to get a mild tan which, as Kate continually stated, will "set us up" for the summer. Here's hoping.

Election 2010
What is weird is that I have voted. I posted it yesterday. Fortunately I haven't yet regretted my decision although I'm not denying that might happen between now and 6th May. I almost regretted my entire existence last night, however, when Sara, Rog, Grania and I sat through the most excruciating event ever at the Union Chapel. Instigate Debate was meant to be a cutting edge two-fingers-up at the mass media approaches to politics; the NME called it "the most important underground movement," which, if true, is enough to finish me off once and for all.

Invited speakers were Dame Vivienne Westwood; Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman; ex-Labour MP and current Green candidate, Peter Tatchell; ex-Mayoral candidate and LibDem hotshot, Simon Hughes; and Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt. Music was to be from the Magic Numbers, Shlomo and Rose Elinor Dougall, and we were promised comedy from The Amazing Tommy and the Weeks.

In reality, Dame Viv didn't turn up and nor did Jeremy Hunt - in their place we got the Tory candidate for Putney, a dumpy young thickie who tried admirably to compete with Tatchell, Harman and Hughes and got absolutely nowhere. The Magic Numbers turned out to be one-of-the-Magic-Numbers, which is a bit different, while Tommy and the Weeks were about as Amazing as a pavement. The host, John O'Sullivan, was a self-satisfied, shambolic, patronising blunderbus who encouraged the audience to ask questions and then ignored what they said and asked his own. He sneered at an intern who passed him a note during the evening, consistently called 'his hero' Peter Tatchell 'Thatchell', and introduced beatboxer Shlomo as 'one of the best rappers in the world'. The evening had an absurdly obvious LibDem bias which shat all over any concept that we were watching a genuine 'debate' and I was fully embarrassed to witness the politicians going through such a risible two hours. It was an unmitigated disaster. On the upside, Shlomo was great, but watching him work his magic in front of a stifled smattering of uptight politicos sitting in church pews was painful. £5 I would rather have spent on something useful, like Compeed or stamps. Meh. You win some, you lose some.

Right. Must go hang out my whites wash.

Ash decisions

Ohgodohgodohgod, I love blogging, you know I do, but every now and then it feels like homework and I wish I could just employ some hilarious and articulate minion to write it for me so that I could get on with vital things like packing and watching American Idol, and now is definitely one of those times.

So the last you heard, I was rambling on about politics and then this FREAKING volcano started erupting, but obviously I thought it was just quite funny and cool and different, and then I realised that it might actually affect ME and suddenly it became completely unfunny and highly irritating, because I was meant to be flying to the south of France this very day to stay in the Pyrenees for two nights and then on to somewhere else to stay for two nights for Emily's wedding, and it was all going to be brilliant and a magical adventure and then the cocksucking ash started spewing and our flights were cancelled and then we had to start thinking about ferry trips and hire cars and overlong minibus journeys with strangers including other people's mothers and possibly attractive band members, and then the flights were uncancelled and the airports reopened but it was impossible to know whether the volcano was going to carry on slowing down or suddenly speed up again and we STILL DON'T KNOW and the uncertainty is GRADUALLY KILLING ME. However, I am determined to be optimistic and if I don't get on my Sleazyjet flight tomorrow morning I will laugh and be calm and everyone in the airport will be drawn to my relaxed good humour and incredible laissez-faire joie-de-vivre.

Anyway, other than that, since last Friday I have been doing billions of unparalleledly brilliant and uniquely quirky things, including taking incredible photos of London in the sun (admittedly I was poss. not the only person doing this on Saturday) and going on the fourth link of the Capital Ring walk with Kate on Sunday, where we managed to cover twelve miles from Falconwood, via Eltham Palace and... some other AMAZING places that I've completely forgotten, ending up at Crystal Palace, taking in a delicious pub lunch on the way and, critically, getting sunburned shoulders that have basically ruined my look for the wedding this weekend, as I am wearing a halterneck dress but my body clearly states I should wear something that covers my white strap marks. Once again, I live on the edge of the fashion grain and it is perilous up here, I can tell you.

I went to see Rufus Wainwright's opera, Prima Donna, at Sadler's Wells with Grania last Friday - a great evening out but not, perhaps, the best opera I've ever seen. A fantastic effort for a first go, however, and shedloads better than I could ever manage in my wildest dreams, so I am really not criticising. I'm glad I went but I'm also glad I didn't spend more than £10 on my ticket. After the show, we went to Dollar Grills in Exmouth Market, which was a cool venue and recommended, and at the table next to us was a very attractive girl in her mid-twenties, curvy, dark and sensual. I didn't have a clear view of the guy she was with and asked Grania if he was worthy of her. She nodded her assent. They were clearly a glamorous pairing. Then, about thirty minutes later, with her burger unbitten and his frankly terrifying rack of ribs undented, he grabbed his duffle coat and his rucksack and stropped out. We looked at Curvy McBuxom with sympathy. "Nightmare," I said to her, and smiled in what I hoped was a kind, unpatronising fashion. She nodded, and said, "I'm getting a bit bored of it now, though." Apparently this particular argument had been caused because he'd bought her tickets to Prima Donna and she hadn't liked it - the opera, not the gift. He, however, had taken her rejection of the opera as a personal affront. It was the kind of exhausting, pointless row I've had hundreds of times in my life, indicative of absolutely nothing on the surface and, underneath, firm evidence that the relationship is simply not meant to be. After the boy returned, tight-jawed, he sat in virtual silence, wiggling the rack of ribs disconsolately for a few minutes until the girl eventually caved and they got their food to go and stood up. We wished them luck as they left the restaurant and they laughed ruefully, and then I drunkenly told Grania how ecstatic I was to be there in Dollar Grills with her rather than stuck in the wrong relationship, and she agreed and it was lovely.

Monday I had my haircut in my usual imperceptible way, and then last night was Tuesday and Lucy came down to the smoke from t'country, and we went to Camden for a delicious dinner in a Turkish restaurant near Koko, and then to watch the Fuck Buttons (they're a band of sorts, mother. No actual fucking involved.) who were good enough for an hour or so, but we were a bit drunk from dinner, I was spinning out about something unrelated and distracted by trying to coordinate ferry bookings with very kind, very posh man who was being lovely and offering Kate and I a lift to the wedding, and it was all a bit confusing what with the fact that they were playing ridiculously loud dance music but no one was dancing, so we left after an hour and returned back to my flat to safety, cereal, mini Magnums and a last, absurdly unnecessary glass of wine. Today I thought I was leaving for France and then I wasn't, so I spent a long time in bed, threw a few unrelated items into my suitcase and passed a very pleasant two hours bathing in the wonderfully me-sized rectangle of sun that falls bang in the middle of my living room floor for about three hours every bright afternoon. I heave up the venetian blind, open the gigantic window and lie on my carpet, spreadeagled, often starkers as no one can see me but the birds and any particularly fortunate plane passengers looking down with binoculars. Tomorrow I have every hope that I'll be up there myself. A bientot et honh-he-honh.

Puss in plaster

Aw, look at the tiny kitten with the broken paw in a cast! This is shorthand for saying that I don't have much to write about today. That's what happens when I spend three consecutive nights in my flat watching Celebrity Big Brother. I was meant to be going to the first class of my six week Beginner's Ukulele course in Soho, but it was snowed off. Tonight I'm going out on the Southbank and to a new restaurant, so I'll be able to report back tomorrow. But for now, I'm afraid Limpy the Kitten is going to have to suffice.

And I'm back

Given that I am the world's most efficient person, it should come as little surprise to anyone that I decided to organise a New Year party on 2nd January, to start five hours after my plane was due to land. I'd had a delivery of food and Cava before I left for Prague, and miraculously, everything happened on time - the pate was made to schedule, the olives were baked, the chorizo was chopped, the wine was cooled - the only thing I had neglected to factor in was people being absolute wusses and deciding they were too tired to come. My eventual stats for the evening were something like:

Invited: 79
Expected to attend: around 15-20
Responded: 68
Ignored altogether: 11
Refused point blank: 47
Accepted: 12
Maybes: 8
Cancelled on the day: 6
Gatecrashed: 4
Attended: 14
Bedtime: 4am

It was really fun. Really, really fun. Possibly too much fun for Leo, who I had to send home with a bottle of mostly-drunk whiskey as he had disgraced himself somewhat. But everyone else was excellent, the pub quiz went well, the charades were raucous, I LOVE the addition of the sabotage option, only one drop of red wine was spilled and was hastily removed with my beloved power laser carpet shampoo miracle product (thank you OxyKIC), my flat looked lovely and candlelit and I had a groovy time.

On Sunday I got butterflies when I realised I was going to buy a new camera, and I went to Jessops and did, and it's amazing amazing. And then I went to see Tokyo Story at the BFI, which I absolutely loved. God I want to go to Japan. I am drawn there like a freezing cold moth on a icy night to a roaring log fire surrounded by halogen lamps. Blame Murakami. And Hello Kitty. And my conviction that I'll take, like, the best photos ever. And write brilliant things that have never been thought before, let alone written out loud.

On Sunday evening I met up with Em at the BFI bar and we caught up after weeks apart - she'd been at my party the night before but we hadn't really spoken - and we giggled helplessly over my favourites on Texts From Last Night (still funny, not a passing fad).

Monday was my first day back and I felt so rank and exhausted but I dragged myself to the gym and then went at 5pm and Kazu, a gorgeous Japanese man at the hairdresser next door to my office, gave me the best haircut, not just of my life, but of anyone's life, and I literally can't stop looking at myself in the mirror. It couldn't be cooler. I look like I should be wearing a Seventies ski suit with a white polo-neck jumper. Best of all, even BEFORE he'd cut my hair, Kazu asked me if I'd ever MODELLED! Can you imagine?! I laughed in his face. Too hilarious. But then after he cut it, I suddenly thought maybe I might be in line for Kate Moss' throne. Maybe if I swap fun size Crunchies for heroin, it'll work out. I'll keep you posted.

Yesterday was Tuesday and, even after one trip to the gym, I felt like a new woman, convinced I could see the beginnings of a six pack. It's absurd how quickly I expect to see results. Enthused, I went again in the afternoon, and panted my way through a forty minute stint on the treadmill. And I will go again shortly. I would be feeling absurdly pleased with myself were it not for the fact that I ate approx. three times my own bodyweight in leftover Christmas/party chocolate last night, including, in fact, an entire bag of M&S chocolate-covered raisins that I'd bought yesterday evening because they were reduced to 50p, even though I knew full well that, back at my flat, there was enough chocolate to fill a large skip. I'm putting it down to hormones.

Now I'm grumpy because, although it is snowing heavily, I live and work in a frustratingly warm microclimate, and while many of my colleagues have been unable to get to work due to thick snowfall, I woke up to a feint dusting of white, like a meagre sprinkling of icing sugar on a cake, and was able to travel into work on the underground without incident. I had been dreaming of a snow day, snuggled under a blanket with the heating on Permanent, watching bad movies and live Celebrity Big Brother, and possibly having a little snooze around now. Instead, I am drinking green tea, struggling to stay awake and delaying my gym trip. Nothing more motivating than the idea of me in too-tight salopettes, though. Ick.

Rage

A couple of weeks ago, I received a notification that I had been tagged in someone else's photo on Facebook. The guy is in my choir and he'd been on our tour to the south of France, so I thought maybe there were some hilarious new pics of us online, cavorting around in hotel car parks and/or straightening unwilling people's very curly hair. Excitedly, I clicked the link in my email to view the photo. Seconds later, the Facebook window opened and there, in front of me, was this:

And I was tagged. As were two other girls from choir.

To say I went fucking ballistic is a gargantuan understatement. Obviously, from the outside, I did nothing. A tear may have pricked my eye. But in my head, I was sitting astride an H-bomb aimed at his house and whooping as I went down.

Now. I may or may not be fat. I happen to think I am not. In comparison to some people, I am a bit larger; I am definitely thinner than others. However, although I am not fat, I will freely admit that I am not 'thin'. No one would point at me and go, 'God, look at that thin girl.' The other two girls weigh less than I do. But even so, and I hope that neither of them would mind me saying this, they are probably not those foal-like girls who can gorge on pizza and beer for three weeks and not gain a gram either.

So what mind-bending drugs had this boy ingested to think that tagging the three of us on this photos was a good idea? To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single person alive in the Western Hemisphere who is not aware that it is absolutely, categorically UNACCEPTABLE to hint, to insinuate, to even BREATHE the idea that a girl is fat. OK, maybe, just maybe, it might be OK to call a girl fat when the girl in question is a) your best friend and b) so laughably skinny that to suggest that she is porky would be both ironic and hilarious. But, as I have made abundantly clear, and as is no doubt obvious to the 'wacky' individual who posted this picture and tagged our names to it, none of the three of us are in the category one might call 'laughably skinny'. And the guy certainly does not know us well enough to make a risky gag like that. He's eight years younger than me, approximately. What could he get out of this? It wasn't in a run of 'paintings that look amusingly absolutely nothing like people I vaguely know'. This was one lone painting in a series of otherwise completely run-of-the-mill, smug-rich-person-touring-South-America photographs. Just goes to show that you can have the most expensive education in the world and still be emotional pondlife. And yes, it'll be awkward if he's read this the next time I see him. But I am still gobsmacked at his lunacy and I had to vent. What. A. Dick.

Something for the weekend

Now this is the kind of thrush I like. Look at them, nesting in a traffic light in Leeds. Aw.

Time wasting

Aw. Look at the little catcow. I could so have one of these. More hybrid animals can be seen here for as long as the link stays active.

Alive - and 50% thicker?

Goodness. I think I am possibly a bit of a brave bunny. Went off to the hospital on my own early yesterday morning, and, shortly after arriving, got changed into a breezy gown and a delicious pair of thick, white DVT tights. It's fair to say I didn't look my best. Was desperate to take a self-portrait but surprisingly, my camera hadn't been on my packing list. Lesson learned, should there be next time...

Then I went and sat on a comfortable chair in a new waiting room with two other similarly-attired individuals, although they clearly had more petite feet than me and thus were able to wear the size medium throwaway slippers in cute turquoise, whereas I had to don the less attractive beige numbers for the pedally challenged. Obviously people with the larger foot don't like interesting colours. Hmmm. No time to get too caught up in high fashion, however, as I was then called up to the anaesthetist's room. Nice chat with his assistant who had worked in banking before retraining, aged 30. His advice: 'Don't go into nursing.' Needle in hand was fine and I was so stressed after the anticipation of it all that I think I went under before I'd even been given the meds.

Next thing I knew, I was in a new room and a nice lady was asking me if I was in pain. I think I nodded. I may have groaned. She gave me something and waited for five groggy minutes. She asked me if I was still in pain. I nodded again. She gave me more - the maximum allowed, apparently. It still hurt. I was wheeled into a cubicle. Expecting to sleep, I was surprised when I just lolled around in a daze as the painkillers slowly kicked in. I tried to start snoozing by playing an old favourite variation on counting sheep, my patented OCD Alphabet Categories Game. Post-wisdom-tooth-extraction, the subject was Things That Annoy Me. A: Alpha, B: Bad Drivers, C: Coriander, D: Dolly Mixture, E: Eels, F: Flatulence, G: God, H: Heart Attacks, I: Ignorance, J: Jihad, K: Klu Klux Clan, L... can't remember. Odd cookie, aren't I?

Then they brought me a cup of water with a straw, and a pot of vanilla ice cream. I surprised myself by rejecting the latter. The water crept down slowly. An hour or two later I was rescued by my knight in muddy armour, and ferried home. Then the nausea began. Horrible. Really horrible. I wasn't expecting it at all (stupidly in retrospect since it seems to be massively common) which made it worse. But on the upside, the numbness of the anaesthetic hadn't worn off, so the anticipated tooth pain was the least of my worries.

Now, 24 hours later, my situation is remarkably similar - my chin and cheek are numb and tingling, the hole left by the top tooth is nothing short of monstrous, the stitches in the bottom left gum are gruesome and trailing, the nausea is coming and going - it's all very exciting. I can eat with my head tilted to the right, like an inquisitive cocker spaniel, but it hurts to open my mouth wide, and what with the dead lip, drooling is alwyas a distinct possibility. I was feeling extremely sick after taking an antibiotic, two prescription painkillers, two nurofen and my happy pill having eaten only a mashed banana, so I guzzled a carton of Covent Garden chicken soup and followed it with some Ben & Jerry's. And sadly, I've been going through a Masterchef catch-up marathon this afternoon, so the anticipated weight-loss may have to be shelved.

But it's been a stunning day, the sun has been streaming through my Venetian blinds, my adorable holidaying parents sent me some gorgeous flowers, and it's impossible to complain when photographs like this exist:

Shiny happy person

When I mounted the downward escalator (not sure about mounted, but bear with me) this morning and prepared to continue my brisk descent to the tube, the man in front of me stopped abruptly and, in an unusual move, turned to face the moving handrail on the right hand side. I paused to look at him more closely and saw that he had extended his leg and was holding his battered, black, leather lace-up underneath the coarse bristles at the edge of the step, giving himself a free shoeshine. The seamlessness of his actions suggested this was a well-rehearsed routine. As a fellow follower of precision rituals, I rather admired his panache. Pleasing.

I found this photograph in the Guardian this morning and emailed it to Laura. We both agreed that our working lives would be significantly improved with the addition of a baby lemur, especially one who uses a wide-eyed teddy bear as a surrogate mother. I have read that pet cafes are becoming increasingly popular in urban areas of Asia - they are full of cats and other furry friends, and you pay somewhere between £5 and £10 per hour to sit and mingle with the various animals. Sounds like a bargain to me. And if the cafe could supply a few kittens and puppies, rather than cats and dogs, I think they could up their rates rather dramatically. Hmmm. I feel a career move coming on...

Momentary culture vulture

Mmmm, how delicious is this little fella? The accompanying caption from The Guardian website reads: "Yongin, South Korea: A lion cub warms himself with an electric heater at the Everland zoo, as temperatures dropped to this year's lowest level." Oooh, I'd love to be snuggled up with him, warming myself on his sun lamp. As it is, I'm at work, looking forward to this evening and the start of another weekend.

Last night was a pretty darn lovely Thursday evening, though - I met my mother on the South Bank and we looked round the fantastic World Press Photo exhibition (catch it if you can, it's free in the Royal Festival Hall foyer for another few weeks). I loved the pictures of the splash of sea water that had been magnified fifteen times and revealed some extraordinary, Henson Workshop-esque microscopic sea creatures - mostly translucent and fish-shaped but with huge bulging eyes and unexpected tentacles. It was like Finding Nemo but... well, real. There were also some wonderful shots of people finishing the Copenhagen marathon, looking like they were moments from death. And both Mum and I loved the set of pictures showing Turkish girls who are off to school for the first time in their lives, having been forbidden education up to now. The exhibition is always such a treat - a massive cross section of fantastic shots covering international issues, sport, nature, portraits, entertainment - a real eye-opener.

Then we walked along to the National Theatre and, after months of saying we wanted to go, finally picked up our tickets for War Horse. Bloody hell, there's a production and a half. Based on a Michael Morpurgo novel, the play is ostensibly for children, but it is equally (if not more) popular with adults and has had sell-out runs since it opened last year. And it really is truly amazing. Even though I was excited, even though I had heard wonderful things, even though Mum said to me in the interval, "I don't know if I'm going to cry at the end," (which we'd heard was a tear-jerker) and I'd agreed - by the end, the entire audience seemed to be blubbing. I remember being quite panicked that I was actually going to be unable to prevent myself from sobbing loudly, from the belly, such was the force of emotion within me. It's a First World War story but the animal perspective adds resonance and well, a new angle on an old subject. I challenge anyone not to be moved. And - if I can't have that sausage dog puppy from a few posts ago, I'd be happy to be followed round by the War Horse foal for the rest of time. Its little ears! Like the photography exhibition, if you can see it, do.

Tonight I'm off for more entertainment - a comedian this time, and I'm very much looking forward to a few belly laughs. I'll report back soon. Oh - just quickly - I forgot to detail a gem from my date on Wednesday night. Towards 10pm, when we'd nearly finished our bottle of wine, my companion went unusually (blissfully) quiet for a few moments. He then leaned in, and in an abrupt newsreader fashion said,
"All right. Your bladder wins. Will you excuse me." He then stood up and went to visit the facilities. Strange man.

Monday round-up

A very sweet anonymous poster commented that I am 'like Carrie from Sex and the City' and that I should continue writing about dating. Now, flattery will get you almost anywhere with me - but I think on this matter, it might be better to wait. I'll reminisce in a while once the dust has settled, I promise. But for now: things seem to be good.

Exciting news for me is that my parents are taking me to Paris at the beginning of December. I haven't been for five years and I can't wait. Last time I went I bought a green short sleeved jumper featuring an embroidered pair of sunglasses, and a V-neck sweater vest with knitted penguins all over it - vintage purchases I still wear and love - so hopefully this trip will be equally fruitful. I suppose we'll have to do something cultural as well, between the eating and the shopping. Things must've changed over there in the past five years though - if any loyal Faithful have any tips of Must Do tourist things, please leave a comment, bearing in mind that my parents will be present, so fetish nights and/or Full Moon party type events possibly not suitable.

Having kicked off with a rather lovely Friday night, my weekend was really quite ace. Saturday was spent mooching, hungover, with Emily, before I went to meet Joanna in Westbourne Park and talked non-stop about Friday night for about 25 minutes. Then we went to Dan and Clare's engagement party, celebrating a couple who were just destined to be together. I am extremely and genuinely delighted for them. Selfishly, I was also really glad that they had an excuse to throw a party, because it was the first time I'd seen a lot of that posse for months, and I was like a butterfly on coke, chatting to as many people as I possibly could, laughing far too loudly and struggling to check my emails on my iPhone using Fuller's wifi. Pah. Then Vanessa and I took the tube home and, during a nine minute wait on the platform at Elephant and Castle, took photographs of ourselves reflected in the perspex covering of the tube map so that we looked like a) Cabbage Patch Kids and then b) Cyclops. Our silent, hiccupping hysteria was possibly incredibly annoying for the three other people waiting forlornly on the platform.

Then on Sunday, Emily, Joanna, Kate, Ses and I went to the Robert Capa exhibition at the Barbican, which was fascinating - or at least, in the spirit of true self-obsession, I found my reaction to it fascinating, in that the exhibition of Capa's famous photographs was teamed with photographs from modern warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, and unexpectedly, I found the recent pictures infinitely more affecting. And I much preferred the photos taken by Capa's girlfriend, which seemed to have a more personal, studied focus - not like warfare then. I did understand why Capa went for the blurred action shots, and his images of the D-Day landings were amazing - what these journalists go through is incredible - but one of the modern collections featured a wall of photos with subjects ranging from Iraqi families wearing Santa hats to brutal attacks by American soldiers - now that I write it, the contrast is possibly a bit schmaltzy but in situ it was very striking.

Despite gallery flop, Em and I somehow found the energy to schlep over to Cheshire St for a quick trip to Beyond Retro where I found some amazing new items among the warehouse's heaving rails. Very smug. I went home, collapsed onto the sofa, watched Saturday's X Factor (gripping) and then realised that my flat was a tip and that it was being seen by someone who's never seen it before on Tuesday. Consequently, my shoe pile had to be confronted. I laid them all out for the first time and I'm ashamed to say that, in a display worthy of a modern day Imelda, the pairs covered the floor around three sides of my bed. It was extraordinary. I did a cull, and then counted what was left. And... I don't know if I can just come out and admit how many are left... but if you take the number 200 and then times it by six and then divide it by the square root of 25, and then minus the sum of 170 and 36, and then add the amount you get when you multiply 3 and 5, that's how many pairs of shoes and boots I now possess. In my defence, I suffer from an unnamed but special condition due to having size 10 feet - due to an almost total shortage of shoes in my size during my younger years, I now compulsively fall upon any footwear I find that fits me today, panicking that if I don't buy it immediately, I'll never find anything like it again. It's an addiction - don't criticise me: pity me.

Hello, is that The Priory?

I think I may be the opposite of anorexic. I don't know the word for that. It's not 'fat', it's something else. I shall call the condition 'Denialemia'. I know I'm not the world's slimmest girl and I'm pretty sure I don't need to have my stomach stapled - I think I'm somewhere in the middle: when I look in the mirror I normally think something like, 'Yeah, I could lose a few pounds, but I still look fairly OK.'

So it was a shock and a severe disappointment when I went online today to look at the newly-uploaded professional photographs that were taken at the Finsbury Park run on Sunday. I was by no means imagining some Anneka-Rice-in-Treasure-Hunt-catsuit stunner to appear wearing my running number, but I did think that it would require some slimness of thigh and firmness of calf to pound 10 kilometers of a September morn. How wrong I was.

Here, for your amusement, is the better of the two photos. I haven't spent £7 on the professional version, because I would consider that an appalling use of my wages. So it's bad quality and has PREVIEW written over it. Naughty me. I have blurred my face and cropped me at the waist to hide my legs and feet - but just to help you envisage, my legs, normally about half the length of my 5 feet and 8 and a half inches, appear to have been crushed by the impact of the run. In the photograph, they seem to be approximately the length of my head, but several times as wide. They are encased in shiny black lycra running trousers that I thought made me look sporty but, I now realise, make me look like a SlimFast 'Before' picture. Livid.

Sadly, the other photo was far worse. You know those breeches that the men wear in Jane Austen costume dramas, which are pretty skintight from the ankle up, but at about mid-thigh level, suddenly flare out, nipping in at the waist, leaving a strange pocket of unfilled fabric? I looked like I was wearing a black pair of those - but the strange pockets on both sides were filled with my fat. I genuinely appear deformed. I showed Laura and after she'd stopped laughing, she admitted that there was something odd about it - her assurances that I don't normally look like that weren't much comfort.

How much of what we see in the mirror is self-imposed rubbish, I wonder? I heard recently that people make their opinions about your appearance in the first ten seconds that they meet you, and from that point on they never reevaluate them, i.e., if they thought you were beautiful on first glance, you could look like a mangey tramp and they'd still see the good points. I think I may have decided a while ago that I'm a six out of ten - and while I have some excellent days where my score skyrockets up to a 6.5, there are also days when I should probably stay indoors to protect the innocents outside from a shock. I need to know the truth. But either way, I'm burning the lycra.

Cusp of news

Having been on the verge of bursting yesterday with so many things to write about, it appears my creative juices have evaporated. I took Monday to Wednesday off work this week to look for flats and clearly, when I'm not going to the City and back on public transport every day, my pool of ideas becomes shallow and filled with leaves.

I've been in bed a lot, which has been lovely but uninspiring. Today I went for a bike ride and took a nice picture of some deer, look:


Other than that, I bought a flat at 09:04am. But there are so many nightmare survey / mortgage / solicitor hurdles ahead that no one is allowed to get excited. Believe me, when the time comes, you'll know about it.

Natural beauty

I'll be leaving the leafy suburbs in a few months and am most likely going to live in a grotty ex-council flat and I'm extremely happy about it. However, I just downloaded two pics from my camera that reminded me how lovely it is round here. The first is the sunrise a couple of weeks ago, taken from my bedroom window. Glorious.


And the second is a tiny snail that I found on the gatepost when I was coming home from a night out last weekend. I took several shots of it and was coaxing it to behave itself when my dad peered out of the window and caught me. I must have looked completely mental. I like the streetlight in the background of this one.


Right. I'm off to the fireworks. Hooray.

Chair today, gone tomorrow?

Sigh. Back again for another Monday. Goodness this cycle feels repetitive. Note to self: book some time in the sun as a matter of some urgency. And start house hunting.

After work on Friday I went out for a couple of drinks with Laura and some oxymoronic nice bankers. One of them casually mentioned that someone might be quitting our office and I seized this opportunity to enquire about stealing the leaver’s Aeron chair. Aeron chairs are debatably the most comfortable office seat on earth. I first became aware of them when I read about their evolution in The Wisdom of Crowds (recommended) and first saw one in the flesh/webbing when I started working here in March. There are a few Aerons smattered around the trading floor but supply is limited to around 50%. The rest of us are forced to make do with Eighties chairs with limited lumbar support that cause me to slouch down into a semi-reclined state, making me look both permanently hungover and fat. Not a look I want to cultivate.

There followed a lengthy discussion about the best procedure for bagging oneself an Aeron. Naturally, the simplest method would be to order one from the catalogue but things are never simple and due to current internal cost-cutting attempts, such profligacy is inadvisable. The only solution is to keep one’s ear to the ground and, the moment someone quits or is forced to leave, politely pounce upon their chair before their buttock indentations have faded.

Complex Aeron-related sagas are the cause of much office bitterness. My companions had a wealth of stories to tell about their own Aeron grabs – in one case, precise dates and times from 2005 were provided when someone went on three months’ leave and their chair was stolen while they were away. Another gentleman on his way out was packing a few belongings into a box when a colleague brazenly wheeled away his chair and then returned a few moments later to drag out the five foot pot plant that had been sitting in the corner by his desk. With such hard-nosed tacticians surrounding me, something tells me my wait for an Aeron may be a long one.

Following post-work drinks on Friday I met my friend, Nick, at the National Portrait Gallery, where we felt uncomfortable among those enjoying brightly-lit end-of-week jazz in the ticket foyer and then improved our minds in an exhibition of twentieth century British press photography (also recommended).

Over dinner later on, Nick reminded me that I had once interviewed the ex-pop group, A1, and had asked the band’s alleged hunk, Ben, whether he would genetically modify kittens and puppies to stay baby sized if he could. I had completely forgotten ever writing or asking this insightful question but I wasn’t surprised: it is clearly a recurring theme for me as it’s an issue that still troubles me today.

Of course, on a practical level, I would go mental if someone tampered with nature in that way, but I do feel strongly that, given that around 98% of the motivation for acquiring a cat or dog is that they start off as a kitten or a puppy, and given also that the ratio of kitten/puppyhood to grown cat/doghood, over the course of a lifetime, is approximately 1:16 in cats and about 1:18 in dogs, it would arguably be for the greater good if they could stay small and fluffy for a bit longer. Surely this isn’t beyond the reaches of modern science? It would certainly slow the incidences of pets abandoned after a few months. The slogan isn’t ‘A puppy’s for life, not just for Christmas’ because no sane person abandons puppies. But the moment their legs lengthen, the little tail wags less, the head to body ratio shrinks and the skin fits the body, we lose interest. Which is sad – yet maybe it will be the catalyst for something really wonderful. Perhaps those scientists could use their knowledge for good, just this once. Forget working on disease cures that are clearly pipe dreams and put their time to the modification of domestic pets into a permanently juvenile state. Now that would be time well spent – and, in a major PR coup, I already have the backing of Ben from A1. Who’s with us?

Back and blue

Feeling very miserable and unfun today and am unwilling to inflict such self-pity and negativity upon those I know and love or upon those I’ve never met.

I’m trying to be positive, really I am, but I feel as though someone is pushing down on me with a stack of encyclopaedia and other reference tomes. I am cold, bored, tired, isolated and fed up with life’s vissicitudes.

But to entertain you during my online almost-absence, here is photographic proof that some Americans have a sense of humour about the god thing:

Not so chipper...

I’m a bit sad today but I have lots to look forward to and am, in almost every way, a very lucky young lady so I won’t complain. However, I will use it as an excuse not to write an acerbic, hilarious and cynical blog entry.

All being well, I’ll be back with more tomorrow. For now, you’ll have to content yourself with this beautiful picture called ‘Lapsana apogonoides’ – wish I’d taken it: