The Capital Lettters Are BACK

The bandages are off and what you can see if you look at the photo is the inch-long wound that's been left behind following my ganglion and metacarpal boss extraction/planing just under a fortnight ago. It is minging enough, but when you add in the fact that 1) the gash itself is slightly blackened with the remnants of the indelible marker line, drawn on by the surgeon to show him where to make the incision; 2) either side of the cut, there are weird, corpse-like, wrinkled splits of skin caused by the adhesive sutures that I've been wearing for two weeks, and 3) the clear lesson I think we've all learned about not sunbathing while wearing a rectangular bandage... well, I am sure you can agree that it is not a pretty sight. Still, it's done now and is unarguably a MASSIVE improvement on a bean-sized, mostly-painless lump that no one but my dad ever noticed. Definitely worth it.

During my recuperation, several things have happened to me, the most life-altering of which is that I have accepted a place on an MA course in Creative Nonfiction (think true stuff written in a narrative, story-like way: Bill Bryson, Jon Ronson, Lost Looking For Fish), starting in September. This will involve lectures on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings from 6-9pm, plus reading approx. one book a week, plus writing a full, long-form work of non-fiction, at least 60,000 words long, to be submitted in two years - or else I fail. I was offered the place a while ago and went through a fairly gut-wrenching process as I decided whether or not I could or should do it, the world doesn't need any more books, what right do I have to write etc. etc., but in the end, lack of a better idea pushed me over the edge and I paid my deposit on Monday. I'm now skint as all my savings are locked into a special account until next February, so I am getting a lodger. The one I want is a 44 year old man who lives in Yorkshire with his wife and three daughters, and only needs the room on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It's all go.

In the meantime, I have been wincing over the government's climbdown over the NHS (although OBVIOUSLY I'm glad that they've realised what a lot of mistakes they were making, the whole process has still been a sad waste of everyone's time and money); crying at Terry Pratchett's assisted dying documentary (Monday night - watch it on iPlayer if you missed it - I wasn't crying because I didn't think they should die with assistance, I was just crying because nice people dying before they want to is sad); eating doughnuts but not gaining weight (I appear to be in that cruel, all-too-brief, magic metabolism zone); spending many pounds having my hair cut and dyed to the point where absolutely no one has noticed; going to my favourite London night out of the year, the UK Beatboxing Championships finals, where the crowd is more genuinely diverse than at anything else I attend, a broad sweep of audience by gender, race, age and social group. Plus it's purely about talent - no interviews with the finalists, no sob stories, no Dead Wife Daniels, just young lads - still no girls on stage :( - who practice hard and are very very good at what they do. Tickets £11. Amazing. Oh, and I saw the ridiculously sad Senna, and was a bit ashamed when I admitted to myself that I wouldn't have been quite as sad if he hadn't have been pretty much one of the most attractive men I have ever stared at. Because apparently, in the appalling world of my head, ugly people dying in Formula One accidents isn't as tragic. Seriously, I don't deserve to say things out loud.

Apple grumble

Grumble grumble grumble iPhone stolen on Saturday night grumble it's still on, ringing and ringing, then goes through to voicemail grumble but my service provider says that even though I locked the handset with a four digit PIN, £9-worth of international calls were made on it yesterday, which could absolutely have been WAY worse but it is still annoying that it has definitely fallen into the hands of thieves - I am insured but I have a £100 excess to pay, so I had to fork out for that this morning grumble. ALSO, it turns out that the damp smell in my 'utility area' (American accent there please) wasn't a figment of my imagination, but was in fact due to the fact that my washing machine has been leaking for several weeks during the rinse cycle, and I finally had to confront the problem after water appeared in front of the machine on Friday night, and I got down on my hands and knees and looked at the area under the machine that I'd been avoiding for approx. six weeks as I was scared that the rotting smell was a dead mouse or similar and I couldn't bear to be on my hands and knees, peering into a dark area and be faced with a dead mouse, so I didn't. But then on Friday I realised it was definitely water and not a mouse, so I moved all the stuff out from the nook under the machine and all the carpet has rotted away and I had a really complex operation involving hoovers and towels and rotten washing powder boxes and coat hangers but my efforts were unsuccessful grumble and I have to get lovely Rob the plumber over which will be more money grumble grumble grumble. And ALSO I have really bad period pains and am sitting here at work with a hot water bottle clutched to my stomach grumble and my back hurts too and I feel revoltingly bloated like I've been injected all over with plutonium botox grumble and I'm really not even making up the feeling fat part, I really have gained weight, even though I was watching my eating last week I'm two pounds heavier grumble, which They Say is definitely to do with monthly water retention etc. etc. but it's still a bummer because it's not easy being careful with eating and if you do it for seven days and then gain weight at the end of it, that doesn't feel parTICularly hilarious, especially if you're already grumpy about your phone and your washing machine. AND when I was out on Saturday night, I was with a group of people, a reunion, and one of them was taking a photo of a few of us and she asked me to take off my glasses. Is this acceptable?! I was in shock. Can I say, "I don't like your jumper, it's clashing with the rest of the set-up, can you put your coat back on?" Or how about, "I really think we need to cover up that double chin, how about letting your hair down and wrapping it round your wattle as a scarf, you flabby-faced monster?" I paid extra for non-relective lenses, before you ask, so it wasn't that. And the woman who asked me is in her seventies and wears her hair in a bob, and the arms of her glasses go through the sides of the bob about an inch back from the front of her hair but I WOULDN'T ASK HER TO TAKE THEM OFF FOR MY PHOTO. What is the world coming to? Grumble.

But on the upside I had a really fun weekend. On Saturday afternoon I saw the extraordinary Black Swan, which was unquestionably weird and unexpected and laughable at times, but afterwards I realised that if you took out all the weird bits and made it more conventional, it would lose almost everything that made it so captivating. Natalie Portman, who I've been in love with since Leon and obsessed with since the double whammy of Everyone Says I Love You and Mars Attacks!, is exceptional. As I'm sure everyone else has said, it's the performance of her career and she deserves every accolade in the Bumper Book of Accolades - there's not a scene she's not in, she's utterly spell-binding throughout, managing to make a obsessive, ruthless, miserable and ambitious character seem sympathetic and pitiable, and if she doesn't have an Oscar-shaped doorstop in a few months it'll be an outrage. The movie-going experience was additionally memorable as it was the first time I have ever been shushed during a film. Kate and I were next to two French ladies, and at one point I struggled to understand something Vincent Cassel's character had said. "What was that?" I whispered to Kate, who was sitting on my right. "SHHHH!" responded the woman on my left. I was agog. If I'd been talking throughout, that would be one thing, but I'd been sitting like a Henry Moore, and had even shushed Kate when she'd been crackling her packet of Love Hearts during the opening scenes. I almost lost track of the plot, such was my confusion. Maybe Intolerant French Woman had thought I was to blame for the sweets and the whispered question. It is the only possible explanation. Being shushed for a primary offence is too vexing.

Now I am back at work feeling confused as I was up til 4am on Saturday night and then asleep on my sofa by 7.30pm yesterday, so today I feel like I'm on GMT -5 and GMT +8 at the same time. All terribly confusing. Maybe I have slipped into The Matrix without realising it. I am certainly a bit wobbly of foot today as moments ago I accidentally fell onto a Giant Quality Street Caramel Swirl and ate it before I could realise what was happening. I am putting Inadvertent Ingestion down on my Food Log. Tonight I have a 90 minute Introduction to Climbing session in Swiss Cottage and feel like going about as much as I feel like taking off all my clothes and walking onto the trading floor to sing Ooh! Ah! Just A Little Bit. The thought of even putting on sports kit makes me feel a bit wrong, let alone hanging from a rubberised nook while a group of strangers get to enjoy that uniquely sexy view of me - My Bum From Below. There's a gag about menstrual cramp(on)s somewhere but I'm too weak to spot it. Wish me luck.

In which I go to the cinema

Last night I saw a film called Slackistan at the ICA. I'd read a couple glowing reviews about this movie, made last year about the lives of a clique of young trustafarians in the years following their graduation from university - Reality Bites set in Islamabad. If it had been set in Detroit or Manchester, I'd be laying into it: the script is more dire than Knopfler, wincingly bad; the camera work suggests a work experience project; the sound and lighting are awful. The soundtrack is hideously clunky too - songs about love at moments about love, songs about heartbreak at moments about heartbreak - and even though I was briefly distracted by the breathtakingly handsome leading man, no one is gorgeous enough to hide the fact that the cast's acting makes Bennie Hill look like Marlon Brando.

But this wasn't made in Detroit or Manchester, it was made in Islamabad, and with as little patronising generosity as possible, I'd say that makes it a bit different. Despite all the crappiness, I still enjoyed it and certainly learned a lot from story, which showed a far more liberal, Westernised portrait of the city than I'd imagined - not necessarily a positive picture at all, but very different to my preconceptions, and lord knows it's important we challenge those as much as possible.

The sold-out central London cinema was full of youngish Asians and what interested me was that the environment in the auditorium was WAY more like seeing a film in Mumbai than just off Pall Mall. Girls were gasping and giggling at crucial plot points, bad jokes received huge belly laughs, people wandered in and out frequently and mobile phones were checked every few minutes. There was definitely the frisson of a special communal event and it served as a stark reminder to me that the young, westernised, Pakistani community in London rarely, if ever, see films about their Pakistani peers. It must be seriously odd to be so under-represented by the culture of the country in which you were born and have grown up. My parents are immigrants too, but with American and Scottish roots, I don't feel like my cultural past is particularly elusive.

Anyway. I'm glad I saw it.

I'm not doing anything tonight which is lucky, as my hair is so dirty that if I took out the four pins holding it off my face, it would stay put - except if I stood with the wind blowing on my back, in which case the whole structure would flip inside out and my face would be stuck in a tunnel of my own lank barnet. Sometimes I think it is extraordinary that I am not pursued down the street by hoardes of gift-carrying wooers. Today is not one of those days.

Taken

It is earlier this year. Robbie Williams, Gary Barlow and Mark Owen are in a New York recording studio, tentatively laying down some demos for a new project that could possibly see Take That reuniting as a five piece after nearly twenty years apart. Following a successful morning's work, the band's remaining two members, Jason Orange and Howard Donald, arrive at the studio from London. They shake hands with their old bandmate. Robbie is keen to play them what they've achieved that morning.
"Actually, if it's alright, Rob, I'd just like to relax a bit first and wind down before listening to anything," Jason says, smiling thinly, looking around at the rest of the group. Robbie nods. An innocuous enough statement, but if you'd seen me and Lucy watching the footage last night at the IMAX, you'd have thought we were being faced with a scene so horrific that it threatened to bring up our dinner. Jason, Take That's Minister Without Portfolio, felt so threatened by the return of the uber-talented but uber-volatile Robbie that he kicked his old friend's eager exuberance with steel-toed boots. Robbie seemed to shrink in size. My hands were clutching my jumper, my stomach was tense, my neck so tight that my head had gone off at a weird angle. Lucy was wincing as if in excruciating pain and had reached across to grab my arm in a pincer grip.

We were at the premiere of Look Back, Don't Stare, the new Take That documentary, a 100 minute feature that will be shown in a slightly shortened version on iTV this Saturday. Told through face-to-face interviews with the five band members, the black and white film tells the story of the band's rise, fall and rise again, with particular emphasis on the past 18 months since the idea of Robbie rejoining became a serious possibility. Pretty much anyone with a passing interest in music and celebrity culture would enjoy the film, but for two people whose lives revolved around Take That for far longer than it's cool to admit (i.e. more than six seconds), watching this was an exhausting and intense trip. It was a bit like we'd spent our teens going out with five boys, who we thought about all day every day, who infiltrated our entire lives, who we dreamed about, whose radio interviews we recorded and listened to over, and over, and over again, who we occasionally cried over, for heaven's sake. And now, having not seen them together for nearly two decades, here they were all again, hanging out together. We were seeing how our childhood loves had grown up. And it was fascinating.

Having been five very average teenagers, the five of them have grown into pretty exceptional adults - all around their early forties now, they're articulate, thoughtful, philosophical, scarred, honest, and still very funny. There were many huge waves of laughter that blasted through the cinema last night, as well as gulps of pain when we saw what they'd suffered. And yeah, I know, suffering schmuffering, poor them with their millions, my heart bleeds - but these are five men who have gone from the bottom to the top to the bottom to the top again - a more extreme existence than any of us would surely wish for. Alongside the money and the adulation, there's been addiction, adultery, rejection, failure, agoraphobia and clinical depression. They've suffered public ridicule and private shame, and they've dealt with it all admirably. It was an exceptionally entertaining, humbling and thought-provoking film and I recommend it unreservedly. Maybe not to you, Dad. But I'd be staggered if most normal people didn't find it an extremely gripping and raw account of an extraordinarily turbulent time in the lives of five average British men.

What I found most affecting about the film was a) the lads' palpable closeness, the fact that they feel complete when they're together in a way they didn't before. And b) their awareness that, in spite of this connection, they remain completely on their own. They have the most special and unique of bonds, but that still has not been able to prevent them from spinning out, overloading and breaking down through the years. And, exhibiting a remarkable ability to relate absolutely everything back to myself, their experiences cemented a lot of what I've been thinking and feeling of late. We are always alone. We can love, we can parent, we can succeed, but we are the only people living our lives, we are the only people in the world who know what it's like to be us. We live - and die - on our own. That might sound horribly depressing, but I don't think it has to be. I reckon that those facts must be faced up to and accepted before one can be truly let go of one's crutches and be happy. Last night in therapy, I discussed a void that I feel is within me, a huge metaphorical space that I have had for as long as I can remember - a space that needs to be filled, that craves. And through my life, I've tried to fill it with a variety of things: food, friends, Take That, lovers, jobs, celebrities, clothes and hobbies. But no matter what I've consumed, the space has always remained. And now I'm learning to accept that it's there. I'm not trying to fight it or fill it any more. It's a strange kind of passive respect for reality and we'll see what comes of it.

In the meantime, if you're still awake, you can enjoy the fact that you are spinning around the earth's axis at somewhere between 700 and 1000 miles per hour, depending on your distance from the equator, and that in addition, the earth is moving around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. We're going at a fair lick. Totes amaze.

Tired Film Waitress Hen Complaint

So it's Monday afternoon, so of course I am doing my customary, weekly on a Monday-afternoon thing, where I sit and think 'I am so tired that I cannot possibly go on. How is it that I yearn, week after week, for a week when I look in my diary and find that I have not much on, but then look in my diary in real life, and find that every night this week is busy, and then I complain about it to myself, but then spend my working life making plans for future engagements, ensuring that my future is then filled up with engagements? Why would I be so silly?' but then I remember that I do enjoy the engagements. It's a hard knock life although I don't get kisses *or* kicks which I suppose makes my life a smidgen better than Miss Hannigan's orphans but fractionally worse than the average girl's.

So on Friday, I met up with Sara and we went to see In Our Name, a film showing as part of the London Film Festival. I'd read up about it in advance and thought it sounded interesting - the psychological impact of being on the front line for a woman who, after 18 months in Iraq, returns to her family in Middlesbrough. Annoyingly, though, the plot went a lot further - her husband was a horrible, violent, racist fuck-up, and what could have been an enlightening insight into the PTSD suffered by thousands of ex-servicemen was instead a very bleak, unpleasant look at one extreme, and extremely unpleasant, situation. I didn't like it. Superb acting though. The husband and wife came on for a Q&A at the end and I just couldn't imagine how his real-life girlfriend/wife, if he has one, would be able to separate the real him from what she'd seen on screen.

Then we went to Pizza Express in Soho, where we encountered the world's oddest waitress. She was tiny, around five foot tall, with thin, black, chin-length hair parted on the side and held back with a hairgrip. Her eyes were terrified, and on the corner of her alabaster forehead was a dark, shining bruise that looked both recent and painful. As we gave her our order, she gave a series of approx. 1000 tiny nods of her head, as though being charged with the most important mission of her life to date. There was an issue with one of our requests and she said she had to ask her manager. Several billion years later, she returned saying she was so sorry but she hadn't managed to find out the answer to our question because her manager had been talking to someone and she'd felt it would have been very tactless to interrupt. We said we understood, and asked if, while we were waiting, she would mind if we gave her the five branded Pizza Express advertisements that had been on our table - pizza of the month, special wines, another notice around the flower vase etc. etc. Her eyes became even wider, giving her the impression of one of the girls in Soundgarden's video for Black Hole Sun, and she nodded sympathetically, before explaining at some length (and we're talking several minutes here) that she was from Slovenia and felt like the amount of corporate branding and advertising in the west was a real problem and that she thought there should be strict controls on what, where, and how much. You can take the girl out of the former Communist bloc...

Saturday was another big day - my friend Emily's hen, where I and a few others were entrusted to spend the hard-earned cash of Emily's 14 closest friends on their behalf, an endeavour that I found challenging and enjoyable. I think that, in the end, we struck a good balance between boat rides, ritual humiliation, drunkenness, new skills, old photos, gifts and bad music. Or, at least, the balance was there. I did not strike the balance quite so well on a personal level, as I awoke on Sunday morning feeling as though I possibly had food poisoning and remain nauseous and exhausted to this moment. I managed to go to a three hour singing rehearsal, which showed a level of dedication I wasn't aware I possessed. And I watched a lot of The X Factor. And I ate. Good lord, did I eat.

As a public service, however, I do feel that I should mention the hen activity we did on Saturday afternoon: a cookery class with a company I'd found online called The Urban Kitchen. I wouldn't suggest you use them, should you be in the market for a relaxing, fun group activity. To save me typing it all out again, below is the email that I sent the boss this morning. On the upside, in comparison to her, I seemed carefree and even laissez-faire, which was excellent for my ego.

I've now transferred the £11.00 to you for the extra wine on Saturday night. Everyone agreed the food was delicious.

Having received a few questionable emails from you prior to the event, including one where you seemed to accuse Joanna of deliberately ignoring or losing the forms you'd sent through, and being more than terse that all 12 hens had not filled in the dietary requirements form only a couple of days after you'd provided us with the link - oh, and the one where you asked us to start late and then said actually no, let's start on time, but it might be difficult as there's another group directly before us (not the best way to make us feel special) - we were hoping that our issues were only in print, and that in person it would be a more pleasant experience.

However, I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that we won't be recommending The Urban Kitchen - several people overheard you making sarcastic remarks about us to your team, and the way you publically reprimanded people for accidental cooking errors was a long way from good client management. I had many comments from the group saying that they were terrified of you and that they'd been"told off" - it should surely go without saying that people don't pay nearly £70 to feel uncomfortable.

I wasn't sure whether or not to say anything, but I know repeat business is important for a small enterprise such as yours, and I felt it was important that you should hear that, at times, we found your manner very aggressive and unfriendly.

I am sure you can catalogue ways in which you didn't like me/us, but I'm afraid in this scenario, the customer should always be right!

I hope you can use this feedback to your advantage.

Between you and me, the above isn't the whole story. We did actually have a lot of fun - but it was no thanks to her. I've always agreed with Napoleon that it is important for group morale to have a common enemy (or was it Nelson? Isn't that where scapegoat came from...? OK... That was fascinating. Scapegoat comes from a mistranslation in the Septuagint, the early Greek version of the Bible. And I can't find anything on Google re. what I was talking about with common enemies. I remember reading somewhere that there was a captain at sea who, as a management tactic, deliberately made himself unpopular so that his crew would unite and work well together. Anyone know who or what I'm talking about? I clearly will never remember). Anyway, we all giggled a lot. It was a bit like being back at school: the more stressed the boss got, the more naughty and careless we became. We also ate extremely well (having cooked the food ourselves), so in many respects the event was excellent, but basically the woman in charge needs to sort her management skills out. That's all. I am now preparing myself for some sort of defamation case (which is not in any sense to imply that the above is inaccurate), so enjoy this blog entry while you can, I suspect it may not be here for long.

'Sup

Hmmm, odd. Don't know what happened there. One minute you couldn't shut me up, the next I totally lose interest. Not that my life's dried up, by any means. Edited highlights of the last few days include:

• Saturday's trip to the ukulele hootenanny, including a run-in with mad Paul who muttered something under his breath about me and, when I asked him to clarify, said, "Nothing, nothing," in a way that meant, "I dream of your death."
• My first ever collection from Freecycle - I have donated many items in the past but never gained anything. What was the object that was so desirable for me that I got up and left my house especially to pick it up from a house under five minutes' walk away? A pair of bowling shoes. Yup. I have enough cupboard space to squeeze in another couple of matchboxes, and I collect free bowling shoes, despite the fact that a) every bowling lane offers shoe hire included in the price; b) that I bowl less than once every two years on average; and c) I am literally crap at it so turning up with my own shoes will be a bit like taking driving lessons in a Mercedes Gullwing. Madness.
• With meditation becoming ever trickier at work, I discovered our office prayer room and have tentatively walked back and forth to it, past the HR department, hating the fact that they all think I am now a Christian or something. Urgh. The prayer room itself is said to be 'laid out in an appropriate way'. I had imagined perhaps some chairs, a little altar, and space for prayer mats. Instead it's just an empty room with a whiteboard on one wall, upon which an arrow, drawn in green pen, indicates the direction of Mecca. In a corner are three or four prayer mats folded into quarters, but they haven't moved since I've been in there. It's definitely a Muslim prayer room, not a multi-faith area. And I'd definitely feel like quite a dick if anyone walked in and caught me sitting on the carpet concentrating on relaxing my neck and shoulders. Beats trying to get zen while sitting next to a shrapnel pooer, though.
• I've read two brilliant books: And When Did You Last See Your Father? and George Orwell's essay collection, Books vs. Cigarettes, a small but immaculate selection of thoughts, ranging from reading to press freedom to school recollections and the snobbishness inherent in children. Both highly recommended.
• I saw a film, Sweet Smell of Success, which was good but not brilliant. I don't get why people fancied Tony Curtis. I think he looks like a waxwork.

That's all for now.

Not remotely free wheelin'

Well, that was exciting. The sun came out, the clock struck twelve and I left my office, crossed the road, stuck my new navy key thing in the terminal, extracted the brand new bike (with assistance) and cycled off round the City for ten minutes of fully exhilarating liberation. The brakes worked, the tyres were bouncy, the three gears were efficient and it was a bit like being Kylie as everyone is transfixed by the turquoise and watched agog as I glided by. Or maybe it was my cleavage that they found distracting. Either way, it was fun. It's been three years since I was a regular cyclist - living on the second floor of a building that's a drunken stumble from the nearest tube station doesn't encourage one to buy a bike - and I'd clean forgotten what a fantastic feeling it is. It's not cheap - £45 for a year's access, plus charges every time you use a bike for more than 30 minutes - but if I keep all my journeys under half an hour, the £45 is all I'll pay, and if you compare that with the inflexibility of bike ownership, plus the chances of them being stolen, it's a veritable bargain. As long as it works.

Now we just need to settle on a name. Barclays Cycle Hire is a) too long and b) features the Evil Corporate Sponsor. Thus I also discount Barcycle. Montreal's scheme is called the Bixi, a (what's that word that means when two words are smooshed together? Not enjambment is it. Grrrr.) smooshing of bicycle and taxi. Paris has the Velib (velo plus libre or liberte, not sure, either way: free bikes, or bikes plus liberty. Ca marche.). Some people are suggesting Borisbike, or Borike, but that seems to give Bojo too much credit for an idea that's been in the pipeline since way before he became London mayor. Equally, fan though I am of Mr Livingstone and happy as I am to admit the idea started in his tenancy, he didn't bring it to fruition so I think the Kencycle is a bit more than he deserves. I think something to do with the city will work best. Capcycle (capital bike)? Or does that sound like an ice cream? Londike sounds a bit lesbian but maybe we should grow up. OK, maybe I should grow up.

In unrelated news, last night I saw Toy Story 3 in 3D and didn't cry. Apparently this means I am technically dead. Am enjoying the novelty of being the one who's not emoting for once.

Eruption imminent

A brilliant weekend but my mood is probably an additional six-or-seven-points-out-of-a-possible-ten more buoyant than usual because I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT GLASTONBURY I MIGHT ACTUALLY BURST which would of course be a crying shame given how much time and money I have spent on the ticket and preparations etc. That aside, Friday night was fun - Grania and I went to Secret Cinema, which (I can now safely reveal without damaging the secret element for anyone else) was Blade Runner. We wore cyberpunk wigs and accessories, and goggles, and arrived at Canary Wharf at the correct time, got on one of the coaches that was then 'hijacked' by a man with a bad American accent wearing an overcoat, and taken to a dodgy warehouse/container area near Canary Wharf, where there was Chinese food and massages and amdram antics and loud music and beer and wine and snakes. And there was also, of course, the film itself, which I'd annoyingly just seen for the first time a couple of months ago, but this was, I believe, not the director's cut, and was thus a lot shorter. Which was a good thing, because really I was preferring galivanting around drunkenly in 'Chinatown' with 1000 other revellers than watching an eighties film, seminal though it clearly was.

Saturday was good too, brunch and lunch with two separate friends in the same venue, and then ironing and much ukulele practice. Yesterday I met up with my parents at 11:30 and we took the Thames Clipper from Embankment to Canary Wharf, where we walked to a gastropub and had a wonderful time and lots of booze to celebrate my dad's birthday, and then walked back to Canary Wharf, stopping at an All Bar One en route, then took the boat back to Embankment. I staggered home full of good intentions to pack for Glasto and organise my admin, sat down on the sofa at 7pm, started dozing about five minutes later, slithered off the sofa onto the floor by 7.30pm, woke up at 10pm, went to bed, and slept through until 8am. So a good 13 hours, punctuated by a selection of vivid dreams where I was fancied by three men, one of whom is almost certainly gay and definitely does not fancy me in real life, one of whom is famous and so hasn't yet had the chance to fancy me, and another of whom is far too young for me and may or may not fancy me. Woke up feeling confused and on heat. Have calmed down now but still panicking about headtorches and earplugs. So much to do so much to dooooooooooo.

Still not dead - but definitely closer

Sometimes I lie. Most of the time I don't plan it in advance. They just slip out, like newborn calves, all shiny and wet. Last night I was on a date, and for some reason I told the guy that I don't get hangovers. I have no idea why I would suggest such an absurd thing; it is about as rooted in the truth as Scientology and the idea that the fashion world's labelling of beige as 'nude' isn't inherently a bit racist. I think I wanted to emphasise my youthful resilience to such a curmudgeonly problem. Weird lie to tell though, and I think today's aftermath has been markedly worse as a result. The Lie Detector karmic fairy saw me coming and made sure I suffered. I have debilitating cramp in my frontal lobe and my amygdala is weeping softly. It has not been a good day for my (let's face it, never particularly impressive) productivity levels. Yesterday's nine hour date began at a pub in Mile End and ended with a brief kiss at Old Street tube station, the brevity due not to either of us wanting to cut things short, but to the fact that I was slightly inebriated, up on tiptoes with my eyes shut and lost my balance, veering off to the right and very nearly staggering barefoot into a tramp. Not my finest hour.

On Friday I had birthday massages and fun with Em, who is now 33. For dinner we went to Fakharldine or something spelled a bit like that - it's a swanky Lebanese place on Piccadilly and it was delicious but overpriced. On Saturday I went out to Colchester where my tour guide, Oliver, showed me around his neck of the woods. We went to Frinton and paddled in the sea, before we got annoyed by all the ball games so stropped off to Walton on the Naze where he found me a shark's tooth that is between 40 and 60 million years old. It's now wrapped in a New Look receipt in my wallet. Not really sure what to do with it but it's freaking cool. On Saturday night I went to see The Prophet in Bermondsey. Like Audiard's A Bout de Souffle, this was hard going. I watched about 40% of it with my hands over my eyes and was tempted to walk out at one point as it was all so stressful and razor blades and not what I felt like after my day by the seaside. But I'm glad I stayed - an amazingly dark portrait of youth and guts. Impressive how he manages to make one root for such unsavoury characters. On Sunday Kate and I did the next segment of our Capital Ring walk - Crystal Palace to Streatham and slightly too hilly for my liking. Then I went home, had a bath, went on the tube, got impossibly painful blisters from my shoes the INSTANT I reached Mile End, and shortly afterwards began my steady descent into my definitely-very-present hungover state today. I am dying. Perhaps a Kit Kat will help.

The Final Countdown

Hmmm. No idea what's going on at the moment but I appear to have lost my blogging mojo. I'll tell you what it is, though - it's that I keep not writing it. Like exercise, the less you do it, the more you hate it. And, at this time in particular, I should be writing.

Because - deep breath - I really do believe that this is an extraordinary time for British politics. I'm sorry. I know you want to hear about my dating mishaps and the spots that mysteriously appeared on my left buttock last week. But this is urgent. I am greatly fearful that there will be a Tory government in a day or two - not only fearful because I don't think they are the best party to run the UK in the short term (although I really don't think they are) but because I am convinced that this election presents an opportunity to change the political system to something representative, and alter things for the better in the long term. Even if I were a potential Tory voter, I wouldn't want them to win tomorrow.

Just think of all the benefits a truly engaged electorate could bring to Britain. How different things would be if everyone cared about their society, everyone believed they had a voice and everyone believed their vote would matter and their opinion would be heard. I'm not saying that some form of proportional representation would create that society overnight. But I am saying that a continuation of this deeply-flawed FPTP system will guarantee that the vast majority of the electorate remain distant, unengaged and resentful for the forseeable future.

I live in an 'ultra safe' Labour constituency, which means that, according to the Voter Power Index, my vote is actually worth 0.6 of an actual vote. And that's true for the vast majority of us. Since less than 20% of constituencies are marginal, eight out of ten votes cast tomorrow are pretty much irrelevant. Eight out of ten people in Britain aren't being heard.

Depressed? You're right. It's a disgrace. And this is the only way I can think of for us to make it change. Please - if you can, vote to make a difference. Keep the Tories below the 300-odd seats they need to form a government and let's not miss the best chance our generation has ever had to make a better, fairer system for the whole of the UK.

Yes, you're right, the economy's fucked. Labour made some bad choices, George Osborne is still midway through puberty and the LibDems are very new to this game (although Cable isn't). The economy is going to be fucked whoever comes out on top tomorrow night. Analysts today announced that the UK is going to be in a worse financial state than Greece by the end of this year. The short term is going to be bad. So let's at least do what we can for the long term.

Go on. Do the right thing. Vote tactically and keep the Tories out. And tell everyone else to do the same thing. 40% of the electorate are apparently still wobbling. I know it's much more fun when I write about walking round without realising there's a penis drawn on my face in indelible marker (NB this has not yet happened) but this is a huge opportunity and I feel like I have to do my best.

Right. Best done. Rant over.

What have I been up to... Friday night I went to the ICA with Emily to see Vote Afghanistan!, a documentary about last year's rigged elections, which made me feel simultaneously hopeless and
buoyed, since at least we're not the only deeply misguided country out there. Brothers and sisters of Kabul - big shout out from London town! We'll all be ignored together!

Oh, sorry, I was meant to stop ranting.

Saturday night was excellent - Grania and I went to Islington to see beatboxer-extraordinaire, Beardyman, whose brilliance cannot be overstated. He was funny, politically engaged and supremely good at his job: what more can one ask? I stood there agog, playing my favourite 'identify the sample and cheer knowingly to impress other concert-goers at the speed at which you recognised it' game and trying not to stare too much at the pneumatic drill dance that the young couple were doing to my right, the boy spooning the girl and jacking up and down as if on a miniature and diesel-powered tandem pogo stick. It was a bit rank.

Sunday I took it easy with my parents and chewed the fat (and delicious flapjacks) at Alex and Ben's before trying to get an early night and failing. Monday I was fed and wined to perfection at Sara's. Yesterday I went to see Counted?, which tried its best but didn't manage to elevate itself above an educational schools play. I wish everyone in schools were shown it - it would be brilliant. But as it is, the half-full audience were mostly converted anyway and I felt like they were wasting their breath. And, possibly, our £22. The intellectual zenith for me occured when the main character asked another what his vote was worth, on a scale of one to ten. The guy said it was worth about seven. The main guy asked what was worth more? And I thought about it, and really, democracy - if you can get it - is so important, isn't it? Almost more than anything else in life. It hit home. And then I realised I was a bit sleepy after my Wagamama's dinner so I had a bit of a snooze.

I'm off shortly for uke fun and must go smother my currently-annoyingly-sensitive-and-slightly-stingy-for-no-clear-reason face in make-up, so I'll have to leave you with love. Vote well, my British amigos. The moment has come. And yeah, obviously we're going to have five years of shit Tory rule come Friday morning - make sure you can live with yourself for the next half decade.

OK. I really will shut up now.

Lost Looking For Energy

Ohgodohgod, so much to cover, so little desire to write about any of it, but so little desire to go to the gym, such dirty hair that should be washed, in the shower, after the gym, but which clearly could continue hiding under my attractive metallic blue hairband for the rest of the day and evening, but then I'm going to a swanky restaurant for dinner and it would be nice to feel glossy of barnet and facially pretty. Gah.

So it was the Oscars last night and the Stupid Hurt Locker won over Much More Stupid Avatar, so that was good, even though it wasn't NEARLY the best film, nor the best directed film. I can't work out whether I should be pleased a woman won or outraged that it's even an issue. I think I'm the latter. More importantly, no one wore an exciting dress at all, and SANDRA BULLOCK won an Oscar for some cheesy, vom-inducing role as some soccer mom or something FFS. Anyway. I slept through the whole thing and, in retrospect, I think that was the right choice.

Before that, I watched five hours of American Idol over the course of the weekend, which was brrrrrrrrilliant. This stage is gripping, when the final 24 get whittled down to 12, all 24 performing in a small studio every week. Their performances are really, really inconsistent and the judges' feedback is a lot more constructive in these early stages. It is genuinely fascinating. For me.

What else, what else? I saw Olivia and adorable Isla on Friday, and my parents, and there was An Incident at home at 1am on Saturday morning which I'm not allowed to discuss but which still makes me laugh so much that I get tears in my eyes. Later on Saturday we went, en famille, to B&Q in Wandsworth. I know. Could I be any more cutting edge? I bought storage boxes. Then we went to a couple of furniture shops and I bought a black ceramic swan. Then I went back to my flat and put all my stuff into my new storage boxes and rearranged my kitchen cupboards. On a Saturday night. I am old. On Sunday I went to Beckton Park to meet Kate who was FIFTY SIX MINUTES LATE and I sat in the freezing cold sun and read Prospect and then we walked nine miles, through Woolwich, under the Thames foot-tunnel (v. exciting), through Charlton and Eltham and then jumped on (read: waited for ages and then trudged aboard) a rail replacement bus back to New Cross, then London Bridge, then home for Ricicles. Yum. Still no sign of the snake but I can hear him hissing sometimes. It's definitely male.

Avatarrible (eek soz)

On Friday night, before my self-imposed incarceration began, I went to see Avatar. It seems like an extremely long time ago that I was seated in the Imax, but I feel as though I must dredge up my memories as a public service, in the hope that they might dissuade any of you yet to sit through it from making a similar mistake.

I was at university in Bristol the last time I saw a James Cameron film, and I walked out of Titanic before it finished. I did not expect Avatar to be good. But I didn't expect it to be terrible. I had thought, since it has been nominated for so many awards, including nine Oscars, that there may be some elements of positivity therein. Sadly, I was uncharacteristically mistaken. It was abysmal. And I know there are people out there, friends of mine, who enjoyed it. I tell you this: I'm sorry, but you were wrong. You need to go home, sit on your own, and think about your powers of judgment. You are allowed to say you enjoyed it 'in spite of yourself'. You are allowed to have been briefly diverted by it. But you are not allowed to think it was genuinely good.

For it was not. Not even the much-hyped 3D, which was ok, but not flawless - and there's still a part of me that feels like it's cheating. If a film needs 3D to work on the most basic level, it's not good enough, and Avatar needs 3D. Obviously, the movie works. It is the most successful film of all time, and even I will concede that, given our currently capitalist society, that's undeniably pretty successful. I'd happily argue that Shakespeare is overrated and/or that crumpets are slimming, but I won't try to deny Cameron's box office success. Of course, we all know that a film's success doesn't equate to its worth.

Avatar works, but it's crap. Why? My first major complaint is the script, which was a by-numbers rubbish Hollywood action flick script. If I'd had to write a spoof, I'd have used many of the same lines - at one point, the baddie is shooting at a monster, snarling, "Come to poppa." It is absurdly lazy and heaving with clichés. Yes, the audience loved it, so it worked. But it was crap. Secondly, there was the plot, also astoundingly lazy and heaving with clichés, from the disabled hero who finds his feet in the new world to the gruff and tough female boss who softens over time; from the daughter who loses a father and finds a father-figure to the arrogant sidekick who gains a new respect for his co-worker's intuitive abilities and realises that science isn't everything. Yawn. And don't get me started on the portrayal of the relationships between men and women in the movie, or between humans and the benign, nature-loving aliens. It's meant to be so fuzzy and equal, but male humans come out as supreme overall, with the major females either kowtowing or dying. The king alien's death elicits a momentary howl of sadness from his daughter, but the sickness of a human causes hundreds of aliens to drop everything and enter a powerful vigil state. Growl.

Thirdly, there are the themes: humanity's disrespect for the environment, the privileging of money over nature, of greed and selfishness over instinctive generosity, of science over creativity, of the appeal of short term gain over the threat long term destruction, of having to possess rather than appreciate something in situ - not terrible themes when taken individually, sure, but not necessary all in the same movie. Due to this absurdly epic sweep, or, rather, the director's complete inability to leave any stone unturned, all this was hammered home with the subtlety of a hammer to the temple over the course of 162 minutes. And yes, you read that correctly. Two hours and forty two minutes, during which time the four teenagers sitting approximately seven rows behind me did not stop talking once. Not once. Not when Jake Sully was being covered in tiny white jellyfish spores, not when the two avatars were mating under the magic tree, not when the forest was being destroyed by the big mean bulldozers. It was relentless. But no one else shushed them and I was scared in case they pelted me with sweets.

Anyway. It was derivative, sloppy, lazy, blundering nonsense that made The Hurt Locker look like On The Waterfront. I thought I'd panic if Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar, but if James Cameron gets it, I swear I'll never give a shit about the Academy Awards again, and in future will treat them as a gripping red carpet fashion show that ends the moment people go inside the Kodak theatre. Bet he's quaking in his boots.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Road: The Verdict

As the Faithful will know, towards the end of last year I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and was left shell-shocked. So when I heard it was being made into a film starring Viggo Mortensen, I was apprehensive and excited - he's good, I thought, and certainly well-cast - but... what could a film add to the bleak perfection of the book? Last night I went to find out, and the answer is: precisely nothing. It's a worthwhile film, but not nearly as good as the book, not even close - it adds rien and takes away beaucoup. I'm glad I saw it but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

That's not to say that I didn't get emotionally involved, however. Of course, I was sitting there being superior, thinking how it wasn't a patch on Cormac's version, that film is probably the most complete medium there is, but that there is something about truly magical books that can't be replicated on celluloid, scoffing at slightly clunky bits in the screenplay that interrupted the story's natural flow, and moments later I was aggressively strangled by the force of my tears, paralysed by the lengths to which the father and son are driven by their need to survive, and grief-stricken by the tale's lowest point right before its end. To the best of my recollection, I haven't cried in quite some time, and the force with which the hot saltwater coursed down my face left me concerned that it might erode pathways in my cheeks. After two minutes of stifling my sobs, I had to look away from the screen for fear that, if the adorable son made one more heart-rending plea to his father, I would start making noises like some sort of birthing walrus. Fortunately, I wasn't the only one snivveling away like a hormonal idiot - it seemed like the entire cinema was having similar issues. It's sad alright. But no sadder than the book - and certainly less powerful overall. Read it, my pretties, read it.

In AOB, today I am starting to face up to my denial about a rather large financial issue. Grania and I are booked to go skiing in March. We've paid for our flights, and we've paid for our accommodation. But on Monday I received an email saying (parents, brace yourselves) that the chalet we'd booked has gone bust. They are allegedly returning our money, but who knows. Of course, we still want to ski, and if they return the money, then great, we can book somewhere else (I've already found an alternative). But if they don't return our cash, we can't afford to go elsewhere and pay two lots of chalet fees, so we'll have to call it quits. It's a bit of a nightmare, really, but the one positive that has emerged from this is that I am ridiculously calm. My parents would have steam coming out of their ears and I know it's a bad thing, but there is literally absolutely nothing I can do about it. I'm firmly in the camp that doesn't see much point shedding tears over spilled milk (although copious weeping over a fictional movie apocalypse is of course fine) - if you can fix it, go ahead, if you can't, shut up and don't whinge - so it's reassuring to know that, in the face of quite an expensive situation, I'm not losing my cool. Go me. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to buy me a week's chalet hire, I'd be very grateful. Email address is in my profile, underneath the photo of the lost baby whale.

Just briefly...

...anyone interested in movies might find this list, as I did, a delicious combination of daunting and thrilling. The rest of the blog is brilliant too, BTW.

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.

I went to the cinema

I'm still cold and still grumpy, so it is rather fitting that last night I went to see a film called Rage. I've done the stupid thing of reading other people's reviews about it, so I doubt that anything I write here will be particularly original or insightful, but for what it's worth, I really recommend it. The premise is straightforward - a young student is using his mobile phone to video interviews with people in the fashion world. You never see or hear the interviewer - but you see the people he's interviewing in glorious block colour, the heads of Judi Dench, Lily Cole, Jude Law, Eddie Izzard, Steve Buscemi and others filling the screen as they confide (suspiciously quickly) in their young protege. So that's it: one hundred minutes of talking celebrity heads. Along the way, someone gets killed (off screen) and the plot thickens a touch.

The issues covered read like a liberal schoolkid's Things To Discuss list: immigration, hypocrisy in the fashion world, celebrity, the media, power, inequality, gender, sexuality, eating disorders, racial stereotypes, literature, crime, ageing... and while none of the topics is explored in enough detail to be in any way fresh or enlightening, there is weight in numbers, and the overall sense is of someone trying to make a deeply political film who can't decide which messy situation to confront, so ends up sticking them all in the pot. It's a bit of a shame, as any of the messages would have been argued more powerfully had they been more in the spotlight. Consequently, Rage can be cliched at times - the fashion designer, Merlin, was an absurd caricature, and in other gripes, Judi Dench's 10% US accent was 85% distracting, and even she appears to lose the will to maintain it at several points. But what irritated me most was the fact that the characters on screen were replying to questions asked by the interviewer - but you couldn't hear him. If he's meant to be taping the whole thing on a mobile phone, both voices would be clearly audible. A petty issue, but one that continued to grate throughout.

Still, there is no denying that Rage breaks visual and structural barriers. The director flew around the world to shoot each actor individually over two days, and the HD results look fantastic, even if the scenes on their own aren't ground-breaking in content. The script was excellent in places, as are the introductions to each segment, where the student appears to type out, in real time, what we're about to witness: his self-edits are pleasantly revealing. And, of course, there's Jude Law, who was annoyingly brilliant as a beautiful Russian cross-dresser called Minx. Like Dame Judi, he was distracting - but for different reasons. I tried to memorise his incredible eye make-up for my own future reference but I don't think I'll ever be as beautiful as he was. Sigh.

Anyway, this isn't Time Out, you'll make up your own minds - but if you're interested, it's on at the BFI at the mo. Get your asses down there. Or don't. Makes no odds to me what you do with your life. Wasters, the lot of you. I'm off to get some Minstrels.