Song Sung Blue

Now.  Am I being unreasonable?  Am I, in your opinion, an unreasonable person? 

That's not a leading question, by the way.  I mean, I may be unreasonable; I hold my hands up that on some occasions I'm quite the SuBo, but generally speaking, on an every day kind of basis, I consider myself to be within the 'normal' range of mental functioning. 

So no, actually, I don't think my expectations were too high.  I don't think my demands were particularly trying or overly specific.

Perhaps I should have smiled, allowing that the

in the room was a figment of my imagination.  But the damn thing was wearing a tutu while balanced on a beach ball juggling flaming torches and trumpeting 'Nelly the Elephant' simultaneously breaking wind.  It was glaring.  Distracting.  A fact so solid in its existence that it attracted matter and bent light around it.  A phenomenon for which many baffling explanations were offered except, well...   The simplest conclusion was there for all to see but somehow...  I don't know.  It was if Occam's Razor had been shoved down the back of the settee for the evening with a cushion jammed on top for good measure.    No-one was willing to say out loud the forehead-smackingly evident. 

Until now... 

In the Duns & District Amateur Operatic Society's production of Cinderella, nobody could sing. 

Literally.  There was an absence of tune;  a deficiency of harmonics.  It was the vocal equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.  Melodies flew overhead only to mysteriously disappear and re-emerge several bars later shaken, confused and having inexplicably lost time.

Oh, look, I know what it's like putting on a panto.  You've got lines to learn, props to find, then dwarves go missing, Prince Charming isn't, yadda-yadda...  But Duns & District Amateur Operatic Society  — the name is kinda suggestive.  There's no denying the whiff of musicality about it.  I know, I know!  I should take the view that the production was by The Duns & District Amateur Operatic Society.  A tiny shift of emphasis to the left, and normality is restored. 

Only the rest of the production wasn't at all amateur; it shouldn't have needed to wave the term around like a pre-emptive apology.  The acting was good, the costumes pleasingly fresh and glittery, the Ugly Sisters professionally, er, unfortunate of face, the musicians clearly talented; plus there were plenty of opportunities for the kiddies to shriek themselves unconscious.

Yet, dear God, every time the cast broke into song, I broke into hives.  Greatest condolences must surely go to Cinderella whose voice, even with a compressor and all the puncture repair kits in the world, has been condemned forever as flat as a

on

Keira Knightley's chest 

And to make matters worse, Cinderella's voice carried like a contagion.  She passed it on to the girl playing Prince Charming — and you could see it, the look of surprise on her face when she opened her mouth to sing and a dirge came out — then Cinders coughed at Buttons and he went down with it too...  One by one, they all fell to her airborne vocal mutation like a scene from Outbreak. 

It was 'orrible.   The only panto I've ever been to where the audience didn't need any encouragement to sing as long as they could drown out the noise drifting out from the stage.

Still, we're only just at the beginning of panto season and I mustn't be put off.  I'll try to put the whole thing BEHIND ME! 

Oh yes.  I bloody-well will.

La Belle de Jour Sans Merci

This is CLEARLY the way forward! I'm leaning over my desk and spanking myself with a shatterproof ruler as we speak for not coming up with the idea sooner!

You see, now that Dr Brooke Magnanti, aka the entrepreneurial Belle de Jour, has unmasked herself, I spy a gap in the market.

"What!" I hear you cry. "Isn't the Web already awash with eager young strumpets spilling the

on every last grunt, groan and thrust with older, often incompetent, sometimes physically deformed MEN?!!"

And you would be right, of course. You can't turn for tripping over shagographies in three volumes; for stubbing your big toe on racy, fully illustrated confessions of hookers with PhDs quoting Sartre while turning tricks with the knowing chirpiness of 

Paul Daniels.

But still, it could be the start of something big — first a blog, then a book followed by the television adaptation  (Kate Moss has a pleasingly schemie look about her that could play out quite well on the small screen...

... if EastEnders don't want her).

Then after the telly, the film.  A Homeric bonk saga, wherein "rosy fingered dawn" becomes the title of a Sapphic sequel to 'Rita, Sue and Bob Too'.

And, finally, the ultimate prize.  A bi-weekly magazine serial published by DeAgostini.  Each issue will come with a component and a step-by-step guide to building your very own classic sex toy (final cost: £756.58 and that's excluding batteries).

With stakes this high, I need a hook — an edge, a USP — to set me apart from all the other eager young skanks.  

How about (drumroll) the sex diary of a married woman!  From the soft porn connoisseur to the prurient religious fundamentalist, there'll be something for everyone.

samedi, le 9 mai

I woke slowly, the milky light of dawn spilling

through the crack in the curtains.  Something had woken me, 

something urgent.   What was it?  It danced tantalizingly out of reach,

tapping lightly yet insistently to be let inside,

to be recognised and acknowledged.

Then I remembered.  It was the same thing that had woken

me every morning for the last 15 years, the same

six and a half inches of hope triumphing over experience.

It could work, it really really could!  And, thinking about it, how many blog entries would I actually have to write?  I mean, with a hooker they, like, have LOADS of sex.  Imagine all that writing up at the end of a long, exhausting night faking orgasms in inappropriate underwear?   Poor cows.  They can't even leave it 'til morning, what with theses to deliver and lectures to attend and stuff.

Me, I'm married — a whole other ball game with the added bonus of no tea-bagging.   As it stands, I reckon I could easily manage to have sex once a month, leaving roughly twenty-nine days in which to draft, write, edit and proof a blog-post.  

Bubbling with excitement, I divulge my audacious plan to conquer the marital-sex-blog-diary-world to El Hombre.  He looks pensive.  To be honest, he looks a bit grey.

"Once a month?"
"Well, only if you're up to it,"  I soothe.  I need him on board for this.  Literally.
"Once a month?"
"Er, yes?"
"And again, once?"
"Yes, yes," me, getting impatient. "Once.  As in only one time."
"Sex is to become a once-a-month occurrence?"
"Oh, don't look at it like that.  'For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.'  Jean-Paul Sartre.  Now there was a man ahead of his time..."



Acknowledgments: This post could not have been written without the tireless determination and unwavering stamina of Twitter's finest: @A_M_Tweedsmuir, @sallonoroff and @TomMcLaughlin76.  Have one for me!

A Pandemic of ARSES

Yet again the two-headed beast that is

has postponed its appointment with obscurity, and yet again I despair of the creeping sickness infecting the population at an alarming rate.

Oh, I don't mean the Jedward 'phenomenon':

 n.(pl. phenomena) — a fact or situation that is observed
 to exist or happen, especially
 one whose cause is in question. 

Voting for talentless never-will-bes is a national pastime, like wearing polyester and saying "at the end of the day I was on a rollercoaster of emotions".  

No, I'm talking about our growing inability to lose badly, when circumstance demands.

The British have always had a reputation for good sportsmanship, fair play and losing gracefully.  If we're good at anything, it's losing; if we're top of a premier league — yup, it's in failure; if we're hoisting a cup bedecked with ribbons high over our heads, then it's for our expertise and ferocious commitment to coming last. 

We lose properly.  We sigh, give a wry smile, manfully shake our competitor's hand, and give credit where credit is due.  After all, we know that when push came to shove, we were probably just a little bit crap.  On the day the best person won.

But this sporting response is inextricably coupled with fair play.  You can't have one without the other.  If fair play is missing, then it's absolutely fine to express disappointment, dismay and anger — a stamped foot here, a few swear words there — before moving on.

However, the latest import from America — besides True Blood, the compensation culture, and the nutritionally deficient convenience of Pop Tarts — threatens this national notion of sportsmanship.  In the face of unfairness and injustice, Phase I of the retroviral ARSES (Auto-Repressed and Stunted Expression Syndrome) presents as a tight, rictus grin accompanied with a glassy-eyed stare; during Phase II, the victim will vomit large gobbets of  meaningless platitudes.  The third and final stage manifests as a suppression of all naturally arising emotions, the victim's formerly colourful inner-landscape now carefully blocked in with beige, taupe and, terminally, fawn.

That ARSES is highly contagious, a pandemic only a matter of time, is obvious.   Some folk are more vulnerable than others, namely social workers, politicians, and those in the media.  The elderly, under-fives and those with underlying health problems remain largely unaffected, and scientists speculate this is due to them not giving a stuff about their self-image. 

Competitors on The X Factor who have lost out to Jedward have clearly contracted ARSES.  That tight, polite smile, the blank-eyed stare?  Phase I, for sure. 

A healthy person would have responded with a tantrum.  Losing to Jedward should have ignited a flame of indignation, quickly spreading and growing into a conflagration of incandescent rage at the inequity of it all.  Dreams lie in tatters, careers collapse, all because two smurfs with a hair gel habit large enough to rival that of Gary Rhodes in his heyday have managed the impossible and alchemized loose stools into polished turds.

If I had lost to Jedward I would have seized a mic stand and beaten them over the head with it until they could dance in time, all the while screaming,

"You want fame?  Well, fame costs and this is where you start payin!"

I would have held them under the dry ice until they stopped moving.  I might even have used them as human javelins, hurling them at each other until they became impaled on the points of their own Shockwaves Ultra Strong.

Every fibre of my being would have strained against the injustice, the lack of fair play.  I would be looking for bunnies to boil.

And that would be okay.  Because anger, frustration, disappointment, sadness — these are all human emotions, and to deny them is to become essentially automative.  Beige. Taupe.  Yes, even fawn. 

Since when has identity-management become more important than identity itself?

Though seemingly a recent occurrence, I suspect it all began years back, when the ARSES virus first stowed away on imports of 'The Waltons'.

The Professional Amateur?

Flyte-Tipping has been reliably informed that second-week rehearsals for Keith Waterhouse's 'Celebration' by The Duns Players show some worrying signs:

1. There is almost a full cast.  In the world of am-dram, this state of affairs is as unlikely as Richard Hammond's hair.  Only two characters remain uncast and Flyte-Tipping understands that the director plans to poach actors from another society's production of Cinderella.  We're not entirely sure how he's going to achieve this without first getting his hands on quantities of Rohypnol and WKD just not readily available at The Co-Op (which in any event could leave The Duns Players facing repercussions ranging from an outright declaration of am-dram war, to vague post-performance feelings of dirtiness).
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. There is a rehearsal schedule — repeat — schedule.  It seems that turning up is no longer good enough, you now have to turn up knowing, bizarrely, what page of the script you're on.  A couple of die-hard seat-of-your-panters feel this to be a step too far along the professional road.   Flyte-Tipping's only concern is that such professionalism misses the point of am-dram — a bit like safe sex and going on the game.
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. A member of the cast is a paid actor.  Seriously.  He gets paid for acting.  As in a living.  A career.  Yet, here he is, walking beatifically amongst The Duns Players like Gok Wan through British Home Stores.  In this week's rehearsal he managed to elevate the character of Stan, a lad with learning difficulties, to Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal of Christy Brown.  Laudably inspirational, this has spurred on the rest of the cast to find new and inventive ways to give their character some sort of oscar-winning congenital disadvantage. 

Next week The Dun's Players move to rehearsing TWICE a week.  Normally news such as this would set our hearts a-thrilling, our mouths flooding in anticipatory pleasure.  Now we're not so sure.  The whole point of am-dram — surely? — is that it's crap;  well-crafted, well-rehearsed and well-meaning, but essentially crap all the same.

All this recent professionalism... I mean, who would want to go and watch it? 

Death Becomes Her

Now, I don't know about you, but at this time of year — what with mists wreathing the fields, crackling trees setting light to the horizon, pumpkins casting out their cosy glow into filigreed nights — my thoughts naturally turn to

death.

Yes, you heard right, death.  And this makes me unusual, according to a recent survey which decreed that we don't think enough about snuffing it.  Well, it's hard isn't it, what with the school run and inflexible working hours.  Maybe kicking the bucket should be put on the national curriculum along with sex, drugs and internet grooming, just to make sure our kids are properly scared when someone walks behind them, not just a little bit jittery.

Most Beautiful cuddled up beside me in bed yesterday, Sunday mornings designated for Good Conversations.  She gleefully reported that her Halloween pumpkin had developed a nasty flesh-eating disease and was smelling worse than Spider's litter tray that time we left it by the radiator.  Running with the corruption theme, I saw an opportunity to open her mind to contemplations of death outside the stifling scientific restrictions of Silent Witness and CSI.

"Isn't it amazing," I enthused,  "how at the precise moment that spark of life — spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it — leaves our body, the process of putrefaction swings into action?  Our body immediately, without pause for thought, starts decomposing, liquefying into a cellular slurry and a few bits of glistening bone."
Most Beautiful considered this. "And jewellery.  Because that wouldn't rot down.  If you died wearing jewellery.  If say, you collapsed phoning for help and didn't have time to take it off."
"True,"  I concede.
"Pacemakers.  They don't rot down either.  I heard from Emily's dad that some of them are radioactive and could last for centuries, which I don't think very environmentally friendly."  (The thing with Most Beautiful, is that she's nigh on impossible to derail until she reaches what she considers to be her conversational destination.  It can take WEEKS, even without involving National Express.) 

Mark Vernon  (priest, then atheist, then agnostic, now probably Lib-Dem), is quoted in The Times exhorting us to make death our friend and encourage our children to do likewise.  Here is his suggestion on how to achieve this:

"If you have children, get a pet..."

As if it's only a matter of wearying inevitability, that as sure as night follows day the Grim Reaper will come a-calling with his specially adapted hamster-scythe:

With their wavering attention spans children will be BFF with Death in a matter of weeks, bonding over an accident involving stairs and insinuations of hamster-ball tampering.

"I don't believe we've got a spirit, anyway," Most Beautiful continued.
"No?"
"No.  It's just your heart stopping, then the rest of your body can't get oxygen and you die."

Curse you, Gil Grissom, curse you!  *shakes fist at sky*

Most Beautiful, warming to her theme, went on.  "Your heart is like a pumpkin, see?  It reaches its sell-by date and that's it, it stops beating and starts smelling.  The end."

As I say, she's quite difficult to derail...

Cold Comfort

My heart leapt like a lamb in spring when I first read it.  There, in earnest black and white, in the style section of The Guardian of all places, so it must be true:

"Tracksuit bottoms are coming out the closet"

I sighed in relief, an action made easier by my elasticated waistband.  At last, fleecy grey marl was in the ascendancy, soon to take up its rightful place beside big knickers and thermal vests in the pantheon of Female Indispensables.  Finally, I thought, fashion has seen sense, comfort has indeed triumphed over style; fashionistas have recognised the error of their ways in creating clothes unwearable by anything other than pert-nippled mannequins or prepubescent girls who have yet to develop taste, nevermind pertness.

Up here in Boudicca Country, we deem it unwise to sashay down the street with one boob hanging out like a sock left forgotten on a wall.  We don't have the weather for a start.

The feminist movement up here, while applauded, is ring-fenced with a chapped-faced practicality.  Burn your bra?  Not bloody likely.  It's one more layer between you and a slow death from hypothermia.  Anything keeping your blood from freezing in your veins gets a big thumbs up in these parts, frostbite permitting. 

Jogging bottoms are as an essential part of northern life as childhood obesity and S.A.D.  Jogging bottoms understand what it's like to live up here — the cold, the mud, the pies — they know all about plunging temperatures and bulging waistlines.  They cater for both cause and effect.

"Does my bum look big in this?"

The fact of the matter is, in tracksuit bottoms everyone's bum takes on the size and scale of a house that has somehow bypassed planning restrictions and now overlooks the neighbours.  They are the greatest egalitarian arse-levellers since dropped waists and jodhpurs.

Already, my mind's eye has me schlumping around Tesco with a spring in my step and a double waistband as high as my armpits.   Whenever I catch an envious gaze (and rest assured, I will), I shall reply with a cocked finger and a cheerfully smug "Yep, that's right — 65% pure polyester, 35% cotton", before breezing on to Cold Meats.

Happy, shiny thoughts come to an abrupt halt.  Reading on, Jess Cartner-Morley informs me that the only joggers counting as 'fashion' are the ones with, gulp, ELASTICATED cuffs.  What kind of wilful, arse-magnifying MADNESS is this?   Only the loose of bowel sport elasticated ankle cuffs, for crying out loud!  That's why you only EVER see them on toddlers and old guys.

Still reeling from the whole snug-at-the-ankle jogging bottoms sucker-punch, Cartner-Morley delivers the crushing death blow:

"...that you can only wear them with heels."

WTF?

With HEELS?!  As in stilettos?!

Supposing just for a moment that I did want to look like a toddler clopping my way down to the corner shop in my mum's shoes to ask for two ounces of sherbert pips, the aforementioned inclemency of Scottish Borders weather would make this outfit viable on precisely three days of the year.  Otherwise I'd either slip on the ice and break my neck, or have to be hauled out of the mud with a rope and a 4x4.  I mean, one look at my marl-swaddled arse and I'd be confused with livestock.

Grrrr, fashion.  Gives with one hand, takes with the other.