Grownups

I have a friend coming to stay on Friday, I haven't seen him in over 10 years. Once past the initial excitement (and I'm looking forward to seeing him a lot - we haven't kept in touch at all, so there's a lot of catching up) I start looking around and wondering what he's going to see. I wonder if I can paint the kitchen before Friday?

And, oh my God, the waterlogged, moldy,damp & depressing bathroom (have been having problems with a leak from the flat upstairs, been on the phone to Hackney council for the past three weeks, with no joy.) Now I used to visit him in his flat in Nottingham, where the bathroom was so arctic you could see your breath, & you had to put your coat on to go in it, but that was way back then, when we were all poor & feckless students, and everybody lived in a dive. Now he has a house, and a wife, and a baby to show for all this time passed. And I've got... um...

In short, he's a grownup. What is he going to think? Maybe I can book him into a hotel.

Really, I can't wait to see him, but it is making me think about what I've been doing all this time - it's sort of like New Year's Eve, renewing your passport and your birthday all rolled into one.

Here is my Simpsons' avatar. You can make yours here.

(It is a bit flattering. Couldn't bring myself to go for the full-on 'fro, which would be more accurate.)

the S word

Bernard: You hated school, you had a miserable time.
Fran: I never said that.
Bernard: No, but I look at your life now and work backwards from that.

What were you like at school?

Stupid things to say to a 5 year old

Number 1:

Shortbus

should convince most men of the benefits of yoga. I'll say no more.

(It is utterly ludicrous, silly, slapstick and proposterous, but a definite thumbs up from me and V. Have not seen so many willies on the silver screen since a double bill of a German movie called 'Taxi zum Klo' and Almodovar's 'Law of Desire' at the Everyman when I was 17 - yeah yeah, call them 'art' movies if you want...

There is a very touching speech which I can't really recall & Google for once has let me down - Justin Bond (of Kiki & Herb) tells Sofia, the sex therapist who's never had an orgasm, that she shouldn't see it as a 'block' but as 'an electrical circuit' - 'everyone is just trying to plug into it & to find the right connection.' )

Shortbus

Please, please, please, let me....

get what I want...

Have just seen a beautiful little Victorian one-bed flat around the corner from the tube.

• It does not have laminate flooring.
• It does not have a million halogen spotlights installed in every room.
• It does not have hotel-style bathroom and matchy-matchy fitted kitchen and neutral paint job.
• It does have proper rooms of a proper size.
• It does have original wooden shutters,big sash windows, wooden floors, and is a blank slate waiting for me to make it mine, all mine.

And it is available to rent (a whole 1 bed flat, all to myself) at the same price I'm paying now to share, through a housing association which lets to key workers. Words cannot express how much I want this.

Unfortunately, there's probably a million people ahead of me on the waiting list. Cross fingers...

Hourglass

this birthday I'll be 36. I don't mind getting older (no no, really I don't - something one of my wise friends said stuck in my head and I can never complain about it again
'I love getting older - because what else can I do about it?') But it is bittersweet, working in the job I do - every year I get a new influx of kids in, and you get attached to them and spend more time with them than their parents, and know their highs and lows, and mediate their battles, and celebrate their wobbly teeth, and teach them to tie their shoelaces and button their shirts and see them learning and growing taller and more articulate and confident - then they go into the next year and forget all about you, and you forget about them. You get a new lot in and the whole thing starts over again...

And I wonder if I'll be the single lady teacher forever, like teachers traditionally were, humble, broke and devoted... Most of the parents are my age (or younger, heavens!) And I look at them and wonder what it's like to be them, all partnered up and taking their kids for granted, as you do... It's not even that I'm sure I want kids - like a lot of my friends, (well the ones that haven't had them yet) I'm ambivalent about the whole thing. It's just that we don't have the luxury of ambivalence, because time's not on our side.

Weeeeeds...

Weeds is one of those TV series that we seem incapable of making in this country, grownup, brilliant writing, confident, intelligent, shocking, funny, irreverent, I could go on...

Excuse me while I bore you with it, but it seemed to have passed under most people's radar.

It's the story of a young widow with two sons, who turns to dope-dealing when her husband unexpectedly dies and she has to maintain her upper-middle-class lifestyle in a conformist suburb of California.

It seems rare in that it portrays black and white characters pretty even-handedly, and doesn't skirt around the tensions. The characters are absolutely briliant - the stoner governor, the weed-dealing black matriarch, Elizabeth Perkins as a bitch-on-wheels PTA mom, the widow's waster brother-in-law who joins a Yeshiva in order to dodge the draft, and Mary-Louise Parker who is the sexiest, coolest character ever, and my heroine.

It also has great plot twists - I'm not giving too much away when I tell you that at the end of the first series, Mary-Louise gets out of her new lover's bed in the middle of the night and throws on his shirt, only to see in the bathroom mirror that it has 'DEA' written across it.

Just been watching the first two series on TV links (and the third series coming out soon on TV, so catch up while you can.) I'm watching TV less and less - we were very excited when we first got satellite, and called it The Shiny Friend - now we've come to realise there's a gazillion channels on it, most of them showing rubbish, so this discovery is a diamond.


PS - Sign of the times - in ICT on Wednesday one of my little boys turns from his computer to say 'Miss, can we watch Spiderman 3? I know where to find it - on TV links.)

Conversation

There goes the front door. Crash! What time is it? I fumble for the alarm. 2.00 am. Drunk people pour into my house. The stereo goes on. People thump up and down the stairs, slamming doors. Lights go on. My bedroom door flies open.

'Annie! Annie! People have come back... Sorry! Is it okay? We'll be quiet.'

I stuff earplugs in my ears (learned the value of them when living in Spain amongst the noisiest bastards on the planet) and try to go back to sleep but the hideous music and loud joyful drunk voices float effortlessly through the bedroom floor.

Dr Slaminsky: It's okay, it's okay. It's Saturday night, they're entitled to a party.

Ms Hyde: They interrupted my sleep! For the third time in a month! No one does that without paying!

Dr Slaminsky: You should be out anyway, doing coke off the rock-hard six-pack of a hot young man in a club or something, not tucked up in bed dreaming chastely about literacy planning and activities for Sports Day. You sad bastard.

Ms Hyde: Oh no, not fucking Trance Nation. I fucking hate that. Kill! Kill! Kill!

Dr Slaminsky: Oh shut up and put your ear plugs back in. You can sleep in tomorrow. Zzzzzz...

(5 minutes later) Annie! Psst, Annie! Sorry! Can I borrow your charger?

Ms Hyde: Hang draw and quarter them! Shave them bald when they're asleep!

Next morning. The house looks like a bombsite - and someone has smoked all my cigarettes which I stupidly left in the living room (okay okay I know I gave up - for the purpose of this blog, just take it as read that I give up and start again, over and over, until I die from lung cancer.)

Dr Slaminsky and Ms Hyde: Okay, now where are the clippers?

Red Slaminsky *

Mr Johnson says salaries for core public-sector workers, including teachers, nurses, police and the armed forces, cost £50 billion a year, which has a significant impact on the economy.

Those greedy, grasping public sector workers - looking after the sick, teaching the children, protecting the general public and risking life and limb - & expecting a living wage for it! The cheek of it. It's their fault the rate of inflation is rising, you know! All they're interested in is money, money, money... Everyone knows that nurses and teachers go into it just for the fat paycheck.

The Government is willing to increase teacher numbers to pay for more personalised learning, but only if pay rises remain at no more than 2 per cent.

"A settlement of 0.5 per cent above this level would equate to an additional £250 million cost pressure by 2010-11 - equivalent to one-to-one support for around 500,000 pupils," he said.

So, forget about keeping your heads above the water, teachers, you moaning, griping, kvetching whingers - you want to deprive the kids of their Tailored, Individual, One to One Personalised tuition that New Labour holds so dear. Selfish bastards.

An extra 0.5 per cent would equate to £100 a year, or £2 a week, before tax is deducted for a newly qualified teacher.

But Mr Johnson said: "It is essential that today's pay awards do not jeopardise tomorrow's jobs in the public sector and the general economy."

Teachers' pay, he said, has risen more than that of most other public sector workers under the Labour government.

So just be grateful you're not on the breadline like the below-minimum-wage postal workers or out of work altogether, hey?

Striiiiiiike....

* was going to call it 'Mr Johnson, you're a Johnson' but that would be childish.

Tired of London

I saw this great rant by Anonymous on a post of Betty's and it got me thinking - there are times when I love it, and times when I don't love it very much at all...

It is often Londoners (you know, the detritus from everywhere else in Britain who moved to that shithole so that they could phone their friends back home on a nightly basis and say "It's great, I can get a Venezualan meal at 2 in the morning if I want"?) who refer to anyone from outside that anal sphincter of a city as "inbreds" ... Dr Johnson said that anyone tired of London was tired of life. Wonder if he'd have been so fucking chipper if you'd told him that one day he would have to pay to park outside his own house, to pay to travel into the city, to earn about £1 million-a-year to afford a two-up, two-down former squat, to pay £3 for a shit pint, to live in a place where one, drab, dreary, grey suburb stretches into another drab, dreary, grey suburb without you even noticing and to risk being blown up by terrorists or stabbed to death by young gang members on a daily basis?

Do you love it? If so, why? Or maybe you hate it? Are you from somewhere else? Why did you move here, if you come from somewhere else? Or did you leave it because you'd had enough? What do you miss about it, if anything? Londoners, defend yourselves... or tear it to pieces, the choice is yours. Leave your message after the beep...

Lovebox

Yes, it's that time of year again - my birthday, when they throw a huge festival next door to my house in my honour. Let me just check out who is playing on the Saturday...

Sly and the Family Stone!! *faints*

Okay, who else?

Blondie!!! *faints again*











I truly can't believe that Sly Stone (I didn't even know he was still alive) and Deborah Harry, two of my absolute musical heroes, are going to be playing on the same day, a mere stone's throw from my house, and on my birthday - it is surely just some cruel hoax on the part of the universe?

Re-ification

Thanks to beautiful Lees, we got to go where not many people go - to the bar at the very top of the Swiss Re building (the Gherkin) - I didn't even know there was a bar up there, did you?

It is phenomenally gorgeous, and you get a 360 degree view of London under this amazing glass dome. We totally blew our cool amongst the high class city folk by whipping out cameras and snapping away - you can see the results here, but they don't really do it justice. This was a once-in-a-lifetime, unforgettable experience. Thanks, Lees...

Written by blog

Psst, wanna write a novel? Too nervous to do it alone? We can help...

Details here and here. You know it makes sense...

PS: When they say 'we', this idea was discussed when I was in the toilet and I'm a bit nervous myself, having a fatal lack of imagination... The last time I attempted to write fiction I was about 7 and wrote a book - well to be honest more of a comic strip - about a mermaid and her underwater friends like the crabs, the starfish and the seahorses. I think it was more about a fascination with boobs and long blond hair, and the license given by having a mermaid as your main character to draw them, than any precocious talent for fiction... Anyway, I'm sure it'll be fine. Gulp.

Rantage

Graham keeps ringing me, dangling expensive 1 bed flats under my nose, and blithely ignoring my budget.

I just decided to find somewhere in one of the most expensive parts * of the most expensive city in the UK, at a time when people are asking insanely mental prices - so it's my own fault - but I refuse, REFUSE to buy a 'studio' which is basically a room and a bathroom so small you could not swing a hamster in it, let alone a cat.

I could live in Dagenham I guess... but then again...

Getting yourself into monstrous debt for the rest of your life in order to have your own place (and having an ulcer every time interest rates go up and never being able to afford to go out or have holidays ever ever again) when you can share and rent somewhere bigger is a cruel dilemma.

Meanwhile, Foxtons' Area magazine informs me that the rise in corporate lettings in London has more than doubled in the last two years, meaning that all the property investors have been snapping up buy-to-lets, so that's nice. For them.

Still, society has decreed that generating money in the City is worth more than teaching children to read and write, so I'm stuck with a piss-poor wage, rentals and sharing for the time being... Bah...

*I'm not looking in Knightsbridge, though I might as well be.


UPDATE: Great to see these lovely ladies yesterday though - ladies, think of me today with 30 small children and a red wine hangover.

Warning: don't click

Waste hours of your life here...

1. Draw a doodle

2. Watch it come to life and participate in a dance-off with other animated little doodles to a strangely hypnotic electro track.

(mine is unimaginatively called 'dancer' - you can see why I never got to go to art school. *Sob*)