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We did, in the end, drive up to Yorkshire. J got a courtesy car from the garage – a big old family car instead of his own sporty little number – and we left London on Friday night at around 8, our fancy clothes hanging in the back seat, and J’s friend Jonny along for the ride. Jonny sat up front with J, talking about boy things – stereo equipment and loose women – and I sat in the back, contentedly munching sports mixture and listening to sad songs on the Plattie Pod.
You don’t sit in the backs of cars that often as an adult, and I think it’s a shame. It was dark and raining as we drove north, and I sat cocooned in car-heater warmth and gazed out of the windows at darkened fields and bare trees, as the rain slanted by the car and the wind rippled the puddles on the hard shoulder. It felt like the security of childhood again – parents up in the distant front of the car taking responsibility for getting you where you’re going, and all you have to do is sit, and look out of the window, and not ask if we’re nearly there yet.
It was a lovely wedding, and I got to have both a shower and a bath, which was nothing short of glorious. And then we drove home again, through the night on Saturday, and I stretched out on the back seat and dozed while J and Jonny listened to folk music and debated how to get the cruise control to work, and the logistics of threesomes.
We arrived back in London after 1am, to rain-slicked streets and damp drunk people, two sleepy cats and an un-made bed.
Argh, this week has been one of those weeks when you just want to hide under your desk and stick your fingers in your ears until it all goes away. Thing #323 about being a grownup that sucks? Hiding under your desk and sticking your fingers in your ears is not considered acceptable behaviour.
So, the bathroom? Still not done. Not even close. We do, as of Wednesday, have a flushing toilet, and I swear I will never take functional plumbing for granted again after over a week of flushing the loo with a mop bucket. But we still have no bath, shower or sink, and the bathroom remains a bare plaster shell with lots of confusing-looking pipework. I am getting quite adept at washing my hair in the kitchen sink, but honestly this was never a skill I especially wanted to cultivate.
All was looking up though, because we are going away this weekend to a wedding in Yorkshire. I was thrilled and excited because, well, the wedding and everything will be lovely, I’m sure, but more importantly we will be staying in a hotel! WHICH WILL HAVE A SHOWER! I was looking forward to it almost as much as Christmas. But then yesterday J took his car into the garage for an MOT test, which is fairly routine and normal and not something you really think about. Except last night the garage called him and told him his car had failed (FAIL!) which means that it legally can’t be driven.
Gah! So, today the garage is doing a rush job to fix the problem (tires too bald apparently), but then it has to be retested before it can be declared roadworthy, and all this may or may not get done by 5pm this afternoon, at which point the garage will close for the weekend. So, we may or may not be driving to Yorkshire this evening. And I may or may not get to shower in the foreseeable future. Sob! I was going to shave my legs and everything! I am so upset!
Add to this a week of pain and anguish at work; the fact that our entire flat is a pigsty and I keep bashing my legs on boxes of tiles (which, by the way, are not soft); and our old toilet seems to have become a permanent hallway ornament, and you begin to see why the area underneath my desk looks so welcoming. Oh for next Thursday, when we will be flying to Vegas and leaving all our bathroom woes behind.
Yesterday evening J came home with a present for me – a teeny tiny iPod! I have finally, after many years of resistance, joined the iPod masses, and in the cutest way possible. I already love my little red Shuffle. It’s the size of a postage stamp! I have a total soft spot for unexpectedly small things.
And look, he even got it engraved!
That’s right! This is Plattie’s Pod! Representin’!
J told me when he’d ordered it he had a sudden crisis of confidence and wondered whether he’d remembered to put the apostrophe in. I shrieked at the very idea. I absolutely would not have been able to use it – no matter how cute – if it was incorrectly punctuated. But panic over, the apostrophe is there! Along with the adorableness.
So, song recommendations? I won’t ask for your favourite song, because as we’ve already established, that’s an obnoxious thing to do. But since I have a Shuffle, and therefore no control over what pops into my ears at any given time, recommend me a song that you’re always happy to hear, no matter what mood you’re in. Here, I’ll go first – mine is One by U2.
One of the very best things about being British, aside from the good chocolate and the unshakable sense of superiority, is the fact that we get a four day weekend for Easter. That’s right my lovelies, it’s Monday evening, and I’ve been off work since last Friday, without even having to fake an illness.
J and I made precisely no plans for this Easter break. We have instead indulged ourselves in four days of relentless sloth and chocolate eggs. The most strenuous thing we’ve done is start making some plans for when we’re in Vegas at the beginning of April. We’ve booked some show tickets (Penn and Teller, Love, and – J’s choice Mum I swear - Crazy Girls) and made plans for a day trip to the Grand Canyon.
Also, we bought a Wii. Neither one of us is sure exactly why we bought a Wii, it wasn’t particularly premeditated. But now we have it we’re hooked. Also, it is totally a good workout, right? I mean, well, it’s a better workout to play tennis on the Wii than to sit on your arse on the sofa all day. And round our flat, those are the only two available options.
A photo of our coffee table, taken mere moments ago, pretty much sums up the activities for the weekend:
Lots of TV, lots of junk food, lots of diet coke, and a new toy. It’s all good.
Back to work tomorrow – BOO!
So, yeah. The bathroom was supposed to be pretty much finished by now. But owing to a miscommunication between us, the plumber, and the builder (incidentally, I am blaming J for this) we have actually been stuck entirely without a bathroom since last week, and little progress has been made. The plumbers are coming back tomorrow, and I am led to believe that they will actually be taking steps to restore our washing facilities. But then Friday and Monday are bank holidays (thankyou Easter – you may be filled with chocolate eggs and resurrections and all that good stuff, but you are standing between me and a bubble bath you bastard) so after tomorrow there will be no further work until next Tuesday.
Want to know how bad it is?
This is how bad! By the way, see that red bucket down by the toilet? That’s what we have to use to flush the loo since the plumbers took the cistern away. My life is so classy.
And this is the sum total of our current bathroom facilities: the kitchen sink. Oh, and that window? Yeah, that looks out onto a back yard which all the people in our building have access to, and we’re on the ground floor. So stand-up washing, if it wasn’t unpleasant enough anyway, is enhanced by the piquant thrill of knowing that one of your neighbours could walk past and see you standing there in all your glory, scrubbing your pits, at any time. What did I tell you? Classy.
And this is the new bathroom, currently piled up in J’s study. Lovely bath and shower and sink, and a toilet which doesn’t require a supplementary bucket to flush. Sigh. One day they will be plumbed in. One day!
So, it’s another week of washing my hair in the sink and flashing the neighbours. But if all goes to plan (knocks furiously on wood) we should have a functioning bathroom by this time next week. I am going to take baths. LOTS OF THEM.
Spam E-mail Entitled – Free Ticket To See Torvill & Dean, And Other Top Celebrities
Hee! Torvill and Dean are top celebrities now? Really? And there I was thinking they were washed up 1980s figure skaters. Who else will they be appearing with, exactly? The Chuckle Brothers? That guy from the Halifax Building Society adverts?
The Audience At The Pirates of Penzance
The other night J and I went to see The Pirates of Penzance, and since J is one of those people who has to pee before any activity, I had a few minutes while waiting for him in the lobby to observe the Gilbert and Sullivan fans at play. And, well, they are rather ‘of a type’. And that type is white-haired gentleman down from the country with his lady wife for a night of good old British entertainment. They weren’t all like this of course. I mean, J and I were there, and if anybody refers to me as J’s ‘lady wife’ I’m likely to tell them to fuck off. But a great deal of the audience definitely fit into that description. I observed one of them telling an usher that he was wearing ‘a jolly little uniform’. Enough said.
The Pirates of Penzance
For all my scathe about the audience, I do love a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan. I have been hoping The Pirates of Penzance would come to London for years, pretty much ever since I saw it last. This is largely because J has never forgiven me for going to see it without him, even though a) we weren’t together then, b) I was invited by my friend’s parents, and c) I didn’t even know he liked Gilbert and Sullivan. According to J, none of these is a valid excuse. So when I read that Pirates was coming back to London we booked tickets immediately. It is so brilliantly funny, with useless pirates and silly girls and beleaguered policemen, and a wide variety of amusing songs about the weather and duty and Queen Victoria. Actually the white-haired country set may have a point – it is a night of good old British entertainment.
Graffiti On A Toilet Door In a Motorway Service Station
I didn’t take a photo, but this is pretty much what it said:
Clean man – very well endowed. Hoping to meet lady to exchange pictures and for discrete liaisons. Call Andy on xxxx xxxxxx
Heee! In a way you have to admire his optimism, as if some ‘lady’ is going to read this and think, ‘well, he’s clean – I may as well give him a call’. Also somebody had come along afterwards, scribbled out the phone number, and written ‘don’t bother, he’s not that well endowed’. Which leads me to wonder – was she just being mean? Or, did she call him, arrange a ‘discrete liaision’, find out the goods weren’t as advertised, and then come back to the toilet door in order to warn others against making the same mistake? It’s like a primitive consumer advice message board!
It’s possible I’m reading entirely too much into this.
An hour or so ago we got home from a weekend away to find Molly the cat missing. She wasn’t under the bed, she wasn’t anywhere in the flat, and enticingly rustling the treat bag garnered no response, apart from intriguing Milly (the other cat) who is, frankly, fat enough already without treats.
This absence of Molly worried me hugely. I should explain, the cats have a cat-flap, and freedom to come and go as they please. In fact, they are obliged to come and go as they please, since we no longer provide a litter tray so outdoors is their only option for lavatory facilities. So Molly’s not being in the flat wasn’t inexplicable, but it was perplexing, since Molly is a) a coward and b) greedy, so for her to be outside for any amount of time longer than is necessary for a quick crap, especially around dinnertime, was unprecedented.
I tried distracting myself by unpacking, which worked for about forty-five minutes, after which Molly still hadn’t appeared. By this point I was beginning to imagine all sorts of horrific scenarios, all of which involved my little furry baby coming to a sticky end in a variety of gory circumstances. I began to get a bit frantic, and also to seriously annoy J, who is much more sanguine about these things. On the rare occasions when Molly has gone wandering outside before, J has always pointed out that she’s bound to be fine, because ’she’s not stupid’ which I think is a foolish argument to make, since we are talking about a cat who once licked bleach because it smelled interesting (resulting in an emergency dash to the vet and a bill that would bring tears to your eyes), so it is fairly obvious that Molly is, in fact, very stupid, and utterly lacking in any sort of survival instinct.
Realising this, I went and got a torch, put my coat on, and went outside on a Molly hunt. I walked all around our neighbourhood calling ‘Molly!’ as loudly as I dared – it’s a difficult balance to strike, trying to be loud enough for a cat to hear but not so loud that humans hear you and assume you’re a crazy person. After about thirty minutes of this, I spied Molly, sitting outside a building that looks pretty much identical to ours, miaowing plaintively outside their equivalent window to the window in our flat that has the cat-flap in it. In other words, the stupid beast had got lost and ended up at the wrong building, and then been too dense to realise that the cat-flap hadn’t been removed just to piss her off.
I called her over to me and she came trotting over indignantly, all ‘what the hell did you do with my cat-flap, bitchface?’ I scooped her up and carried her home, even though she miaowed her head off all the way. I’m sure she was screaming ‘Help! Abduction! Cat napping underway!’ Luckily nobody paid her any attention. And now she is safely home, pacing round the flat, talking trash and terrorising her sister - so the same old Molly we know and love then. I’m so glad she’s OK.
British politics is enormously entertaining sometimes. For the last month or so a scandal has been rocking the houses of parliament, and our tabloid press have been falling over themselves to express their shock and disgust and outrage at the appalling behaviour of the members of parliament involved.
You know what it’s all about? Prepare to be shocked and appalled: one MP, get this, paid his son £40,000 to work as a political researcher. I KNOW! And then this other guy, right, the Speaker of the House, actually, who just so happens to be running an investigation into MPs’ expenses at the moment (so, is there egg on his face or what?) used some air miles, accrued while doing official government business, for his own family! He upgraded them to business class, at a saving of £360 a head! HOW DARE HE?
On the one hand, I love that I live in a country where this sort of small potatoes counts as headline-grabbing scandal. It’s a comfort to know that this is the worst they can come up with. But on the other hand, you do just wish that our media could get a little bit of a grip. OK, the nepotism isn’t great, and that MP’s son sure was a well-paid political researcher. But was it really necessary for the guy to step down? He has paid the money back and said he’s sorry, after all.
And as for the air miles. I mean, really? I use air miles that I accrue through work for my own personal use. Everybody does it! I know that, technically, it’s a benefit in kind and not strictly by the book. But should we really be calling for the guy’s resignation? Is that not just a little bit hysterical?
You wonder how our press would cope in the event of an actual legitimately dreadful political scandal. Faced with a Scooter Libby or a Jack Abramoff, I suspect our tabloid press would hyperventilate and pass out. They’re already at maximum shriek over air miles, for heaven’s sake.
But, while our media do enjoy getting their knickers in a twist over political “corruption”, I reckon that Eliot Spitzer would get a warmer reception over here than he’s getting in the States. We seem to reserve a special sort of ‘oh, you naughty boy!’ attitude for our politicians caught in sex scandals. They get lambasted in the press, sure, and they’re never allowed to forget about it (over a decade later, David Mellor is still remembered for his toe-sucking proclivities), but it’s rare for a politician to be forced to resign over extra-marital shenanigans.
I guess this says something about British morals: toe sucking is forgivable, as long as you come across as suitably pathetic and foolish as a result. But don’t go getting above yourself by upgrading to business class with undeserved airmiles. THAT will not be overlooked.
One of the things I love about London, or really any big city, is that there are all these little things to notice, just lying about the place, and you’ll walk past one every day, for months, until one day you just happen to glance in the right direction at the right time and there it is, a fascinating little glimpse into the city’s history.
I walk past this memorial stone every day on my way from our flat to the tube station, and although I’ve noticed it a couple of times, I’ve never bothered to stop and read it before.
But the other day, for no particular reason, I stopped and read it. In case you can’t make out the words, the memorial says ‘Here Fell PC Stephen Tibble, 26th February 1975.’ I was quite surprised to discover that a policeman had been killed in my neighbourhood – we live in West London, and it’s pretty quiet and sedate. As far as I know, it has always been pretty quite and sedate. London has had its fair share of civil unrest, but not round our way, and not in the mid-’70s.
So, I went a-googling, and it turns out that PC Stephen Tibble was shot, while off-duty, trying to stop a man running away from policemen who had just discovered an IRA bomb factory in one of the nearby houses. An IRA bomb factory! In my ‘hood! I know it was over thirty years ago, but still, I am taken aback.
I grew up in the age of the IRA. I remember seeing bombings on the news. It was never a particularly real threat to me, since I lived in a tiny town in rural West Yorkshire, and the idea of the IRA bothering to waste the necessary fertiliser to bomb us was laughable – they concentrated on big cities, places where they could have an impact. But I remember the Manchester bomb, in 1996, which wasn’t that far away from us. And even now, years after the cease-fire, I challenge you to find a public garbage can in any major UK city. There aren’t any; we take our rubbish home with us. It’s preferable to leaving handy bomb-concealing receptacles out on city streets.
So I don’t know why I was particularly shocked to discover that there was an IRA bomb factory in my neighbourhood in the 1970s. I mean, it’s a quiet, sedate neighbourhood, but it’s still London. There are all these little historical reminders scattered around this city, testament to so many past events, and it’s easy to forget, when you’re just trying to go about your daily business, that you’re walking streets full of memories and ghosts. Until one day you happen to glance in the right direction, at the right time, and there it is – a little piece of history waiting for you to notice it.
The full story of PC Stephen Tibble is here.
I was in Carbondale, Illinois, for CATS – the Campus Traffic Safety conference. I was working in peer education during my study abroad year in Illinois, mainly because the terms of my visa only allowed me to work on campus, and also because I liked standing up in front of a room full of frat boys and telling them, in a British accent much more clipped than my natural voice, how to use a condom. So, at a staff meeting one week somebody mentioned a trip to CATS, and I wasn’t really listening and thought they were talking about a trip to Chicago to see the musical Cats, so I signed up. And by the time I figured out I’d just volunteered to represent the University of Illinois at a conference on traffic safety, it was too late.
Actually, from my vague memories, it was quite a fun conference. I got a water bottle from the peer education team at Oregon State, advertising the merits of wearing a seat-belt, which I still have. I made friends with a few other student representatives (making friends was ridiculously easy then because in central Illinois, with a British accent, you are the most exotic person most people have ever met) and a bunch of us went out for dinner one evening. We weren’t drinking, because we were all goody-two-shoes peer educators, under 21, and attending a conference on traffic safety, but for some reason by the time we piled into the car to drive back to the hotel we were all extremely giddy.
I don’t know how it started, but we ended up playing Perdiddle, which is this bizarre, possibly exclusively Midwestern game, which involves yelling ‘Perdiddle!’ and punching the roof of the car whenever you see a vehicle with one of its headlights burnt-out. Curiously, cars with burnt-out headlights are not that uncommon in Illinois. Anyway, Perdiddle rapidly escalated to Strip Perdiddle – we were a mixed-sex group, if memory serves, three girls and two guys – and before too long I found myself in a mini-van driving round the back streets of Carbondale, with a bunch of kids I’d only met that morning, wearing only my jeans and my bra.
It could have all gone very badly wrong from there but it was actually entirely innocent. We got back to the hotel before anybody got too naked, hastily got dressed, went to our respective hotel rooms, and none of us ever mentioned it again. A couple of days later I headed back up to Champaign Urbana, and never heard from any of the other people in the car again. But nevertheless, the memory remains in my mind as a curiously shameful one. I think because getting semi-naked in a car full of strangers is, let me assure you, entirely out of character for me. I mean, even if I was drunk off my ass I wouldn’t do that, but on this occasion I was stoney sober.
It was one of those nights, when you do things you wouldn’t ordinarily do, just because other people are doing it too, and you want to find out what will happen if just one time, you take the irresponsible, unsafe option. And because that was all it was, I wish I could look back on it and smile fondly at the silliness of it all. But instead, on the rare occasions when I hear Carbondale mentioned, I feel a shiver of shame and awkwardness. I guess I just really am that sensible and responsible. How boring of me.
