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I had to leave work early today because of killer cramps. I hate that. I feel really silly for letting stupid cramps interfere with work. But here’s the thing, I get seriously bad cramps. OK, they’re not literally killer cramps – they are not actually fatal – but they make me feel way sicker than I ever felt with a cold, or tonsillitis, or that chest infection I had a few years back.
It’s not just cramps either. Oh no, I get whole body symptoms – I lose feeling in my arms and legs, vomit, sweat, get dizzy and, on a few memorable occasions, actually pass out. These cramps are HARD CORE. And there’s no way I can be a productive member of society, or do anything, really, except lie on the floor and moan quietly to myself, when I’m in their thrall.
So, this morning I was sitting at my desk gazing uncomprehendingly at my computer screen and I could feel it coming. I just knew. And I knew I had to get home before the vomiting and the dizziness stage really got underway, or my colleagues would insist on putting me in a cab to hospital instead of home to bed. And bed was where I really wanted to be.
So, no problem, right? Just tell your boss you’re sick and go home to bed. Except I don’t have the kind of relationship with my (male) boss where I can just say ‘you know what, I have cramps so bad I’m about to lose the ability to stand upright, do you mind if I go home?’ because the merest suggestion of ‘women’s problems’ would embarrass him so much that he’d probably never be able to look me in the eye again. So instead I just had to say, ‘I feel really ill, can I leave?’ And I knew he was thinking, ‘well, what the heck is wrong with her? She looks OK. Probably faking.’
And this is why I hate taking time off work for cramps. Because a) I really should be able to cope better with something that happens every damn month, especially when every other woman in the office is able to, and b) people think I’m exaggerating anyway. It is annoying, and I would like it very much if my stupid body could manage its menstrual cycle more efficiently and with less collateral damage.
But, I guess, I’ve got naturally blonde hair, a speedy metabolism and a killer rack, so I had to lose out somewhere in the body lottery, right? And at least the cramps don’t last that long. I slept it off this afternoon in bed and woke up feeling fresh as a daisy and wondering if I hadn’t imagined it all. And my hair’s still blonde.
On spotting this abomination of a personalised plate, in the Tesco car park this afternoon, several thoughts occurred. The main one being – what a tool.
That’s right ladies, it’s Mr Hot 5in.
Notice, by the way, Mr 5in, that the guys you paid to wash your 5inmobile while you were in Tesco doing your weekly grocery shopping (extra large condoms and champagne, right?) think you’re an idiot too. They’re happily posing, while we take a photo of your ludicrous number plate in order to ridicule you on the internet.
Honestly, who thinks this is cool? Really? Does he take his mum out in that car? Is she proud? And what about women he’s hitting on? If I were out on a date with the guy, no matter how well things were going, when I saw that car I’d a) burst out laughing and then b) get a cab home. By myself. Hot sin indeed.
Does he really think women are going to look at his car and think ‘huh, clearly this is a man with class, I must have sex with him immediately’? Is that the plan? Because I’ve got to tell you, Mr Hot 5in, on behalf of all the women in the world – No. Just, nope.
The only personalised plate I’ve ever seen more ludicrous than this one was a few years ago, and I have lamented the fact that I didn’t have my camera on me ever since. There is actually a guy, believe it or not, driving around London in an otherwise beautiful Porsche, with a plate that reads ‘HOT 4 5EX’.
Oh yes. See that Mr Hot Sin? You may have a ridiculous personal plate, but it’s not the most ridiculous one out there. You’ve still got something to aim for. There’s something to think about on all those lonely nights of not-so-hot, not-so-sinful action with your own right hand.
Incidentally, J did point out that maybe the owner of the car has a Chinese restaurant, and it’s supposed to say Hoi Sin. I refuse to grant benefit of the doubt. Tool.
Last night, Teabelly and I were talking about the hymns we used to sing in school. I’m not sure how we got onto this, really. We were at the theatre to see Jersey Boys, so we were in a song frame of mind, I guess, but how we got from Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons to All Things Bright and Beautiful is slightly beyond me.
Anyway, we were having a good old reminisce about our favourite school hymns. I have to say, lifelong atheist I may be, but those Christians could write a good song. And when you spent every weekday morning of your school years, from age three to eighteen, standing up and singing those songs, they tend to stay with you. We could comfortably get through All Things Bright and Beautiful and Make me a Channel of your Peace, and between us we could remember most of Give me Oil for my Lamp.
However, we both agreed that our all time favourite hymn ever is When a Knight Won His Spurs. I’m going to quote the whole thing here because it is so lovely:
When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old
He was gentle and brave, he was gallant and bold
With a shield on his arm and a lance in his hand
For God and for valour he rode through the land
No charger have I and no sword by my side
Yet still to adventure and battle I ride
Though back into storyland giants have fled
And the knights are no more and the dragons are dead
So let faith be my shield and let hope be my steed
Against the dragons of anger the ogres of greed
And let me set free with the sword of my youth
From the castle of darkness the power of the truth
Isn’t that brilliant? That line – ‘the knights are no more and the dragons are dead’ – it’s chilling! And notice how there is hardly any mention of God in there at all. Perhaps this is why I love it so much, dragons are way more fun than God. I am in fact kind of gutted that you are strictly not allowed any religious music or readings in civil wedding ceremonies, because I would rather like to walk up the aisle to When a Knight Won His Spurs. I like the idea of entering marriage on my steed of hope, wielding the sword of my youth…
Anyway, the point of this post, internet, as well as taking you for a wander down memory lane, is to ask you to help keep Teabelly and I from losing our damn minds. We can both vaguely remember another hymn, but we can’t remember any specific lines from it, our Google Fu is failing us, and it is driving us batshit crazy.
Here is everything we remember: It was something to do with a lamp, possibly a lamp on a windowsill, and a fire in a hearth, and ashes, maybe? And mention of a house or a home that may or may not have been humble. And it had a really stonking chorus. Is this ringing any bells? Please please put us out of our misery!
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can still tell me about your favourite school hymn, and we’ll have a good old reminisce together.
It occurs to me that I’ve been waxing lyrical here about the myriad wonders of American snack foods, and don’t get me wrong, my love of the Goldfish Cracker and the Double Stuff Oreo is undiminished. But I thought I should recognise the not-insignificant contribution to the art of snacking made by my own fair country. Because, let me tell you, this small island is responsible for some true works of snacking genius.
My Top Five (British) Snack Foods
Crunchies
Crunchies are definitely my favourite British chocolate bar. The secret is in the simplicity – they are delicious cinder toffee covered in delicious milk chocolate. They are sweet but not too sweet, chocolatey but not too chocolatey, and I could quite happily eat a dozen of them in one sitting. I do try not to do that too often though.
Chipsticks
Ah, Chipsticks, with your delicious, maizey, salty, vinegariness. (Shut up, vinegariness is totally a word.) I have loved Chipsticks since junior school when they made regular appearances in my lunchbox. And it pleases me enormously that the packaging has remained utterly unchanged in all the years since. The only problem with Chipsticks is that Molly the cat loves them beyond all reasoning. The only way to eat them in our flat, without a small greedy tabby shoving her whole head into your mouth, is to sacrifice a few broken-up Chipsticks to appease her. What can I say? My cat has taste.
Goats’ Cheese Babybels
I love me some goats’ cheese. In fact, I’m contractually obliged to always order the goats’ cheese starter in restaurants. Honestly! If I don’t, goats will come for me in the night. Babybels are perfectly-formed little bites of lovely cheese in intriguing individual wax cases. When I was in school kids used to use the wax from their Babybels to make little models and stain their fingers strange colours. So the Babybel is both a delicious snack and an educational and creative toy! You can get various flavours, and I am partial to both the original and cheddar varieties, but the goats’ cheese one is the best one. Trust me.
Almond Fingers
Almond fingers are the only non-branded snack in my top five. You buy them in slightly strange-smelling corner shops and newsagents – the sort of places that exclusively sell cigarettes, magazines and snack foods of which your mother would disapprove. They are almost always manufactured by an unlikely-sounding bakery, like ‘Grandmother’s Pantry’, which is actually based in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Birmingham. But, none of these things matters, because almond fingers are delicious. They are cakey and stodgy and satisfying, with a strong, almost chemically, almond flavour. (Mmmmm…. chemicals.) And they are so moreish that if I buy a pack of five, I’m eating five, which is why I try to save them for special occasions. Like Tuesdays.
Milk Chocolate Hob Nobs
Hob Nobs are the perfect blend of savoury and sweet. They consist of an oaty, slightly salty biscuit (colonials – this means cookie) covered in a thick, sweet milk chocolate. And let me tell you, they are the Platonic Ideal of a snack food. They are great dunked in tea, they are great eaten by the packet in front of the telly, and they are always the first biscuits to disappear from the plate at corporate events.
Stupid, crazy people may try to tell you that the Milk Chocolate Digestive is a superior biscuit, but don’t listen to them. They will be dealt with in due course by the biscuit thought-crime patrol, as is only right and proper. If I could only eat one biscuit for the rest of my life (although, what an appalling scenario that would be), the Milk Chocolate Hob Nob would be my sole biscuit of choice, no contest.
If you’ve never had a Hob Nob (and I’m speaking to the non-Brits here – all British people have eaten Hob Nobs; they are the pride of the nation) then go to your nearest World Foods aisle and procure some immediately. You can thank me later.
So, we had a wonderful time in Las Vegas. I got freckled, we walked a lot, we ate some really great steak, I indulged my penchant for Goldfish crackers, and we both proved to be lamentably unlucky at Roulette, tried and failed to understand Blackjack and Craps, and ultimately decided we were going to have to make our fortunes by means other than gambling. Oh yeah, and we got engaged.
Which means that now we are home I have launched myself into wedding planning mode. J is quite surprised by this, as I think he thought that being engaged would be enough, for a while, and the actual idea that engagement leads to wedding and then marriage doesn’t seem to have sped through his synapses quite as quickly as it has mine. So while I am looking at wedding cake websites and buying bridal magazines he is gazing at me in a startled manner and asking irritating and unnecessary questions, like ‘how much is all this going to cost?’
Heh, we’ll get there. I have employed the subtle tactic of leaving wedding-related reading matter around the flat in the hopes that he will glance at it in a bored moment and get sucked in. It seems to be working, since I found him rifling through a book of London wedding venues yesterday evening without being prompted. Actually the venue is the trickiest thing. London has a lot, a lot, of wedding venues, many of them are beautiful and well-staffed and within our budget, and actually picking one is getting harder and harder because I keep discovering more possible contenders.
And we don’t even have the convenience of a religious restriction on where we can do it, since I am an atheist and J is one of those sitting on the fence types, so really the only places definitely not in the running for our wedding venue are churches. We could get married at London Zoo! No really! Or on board the HMS Belfast! Or in about thirty other lovely and slightly less bizarre places.
I promise I will try not to turn this blog into a non-stop gush about bridesmaids’ dresses and table centrepieces, and no doubt J will help me enormously in this since every time I mention something remotely weddingy he looks at me like I’m a crazy person. But I am very excited, and no amount of eye-rolling from my fiancé (eep!) is going to deter me from my enthusiasm. So there.
The Mutual Exchange of Stereotypes…
Taxi Driver: Oh you’re European – you guys are afraid of guns, right?
Us: Um, well, it’s not that we’re afraid of them, we just have very tight gun control.
Taxi Driver: I love guns. I love going out into the desert and shooting shit.
Us: …
Taxi Driver: You Europeans all pay really high taxes don’t you?
The Love-In
Taxi Driver: I love you British people! You don’t take yourselves seriously. And you guys are crazy about soccer! And that Ricky Hatton? He was a great guy. We loved him!
Us: We love America! It is hot here, and you have Buffalo wings and good hamburgers and free refills! And Vegas is so much fun! We don’t want to go home!
Taxi Driver: I love you guys!
Us: And we love you Mr Taxi Driver!
The Crazy
Taxi Driver: British? You like BBC?
Us: Sure
Taxi Driver: *switches radio to BBC World Service*
BBC World Service: *news report about somewhere in India with sewage problems*
Taxi Driver: Sewage! Ha ha ha ha ha! That’s funny.
Us: Um…
BBC World Service: *news report about something else bad happening somewhere else in the world*
Taxi Driver: Ha! Hahahahahahaa!
Us: We’ll just… this is us! We’ll just get out right here! No really, STOP THE CAR. OK thankyou.
Hello internet! I am back in London! I am extremely jet-lagged and feel all floaty and weird, but am trying to stay awake for the rest of the day because I have to go to work tomorrow and I think they’re going to expect me to do more than just stare into space and drool for 8 hours. My life is HARD.
More stories about our lovely holiday to follow when my brain feels slightly more connected to my fingers. In the meantime, here is the story of the lovely J’s lovely proposal. Aw.
It was not actually a very choreographed one – no getting down on one knee or hiding it in the cake or anything. J had mentioned a while ago that he had a present he wanted to give me when we were on holiday, and I had vaguely responded that he was a sweetheart and I looked forward to it, but not thought anything more of it. So on Friday evening we were getting ready to go out (for what was a delicious steak dinner at the Four Seasons) and J asked me if I wanted my present. I was in the vestibule of the hotel room checking the mirror and I said ’sure’, and he came over to me, put his hand in his pocket, and brought out a ring box. At which point I promptly screamed, hugged him, and then said ‘I can’t believe you’re proposing to me in a hotel room vestibule’.
So it’s a good thing there was a ring in the box, and he was proposing, or I’d have looked a bit foolish. Luckily I had assumed correctly. We went back into the main bit of the hotel room, and he actually got to open the box, and he asked me if I’d marry him, and I said ‘well of course I will’. And that was that really. I kissed him a lot, and then we both sat down on the end of the bed and looked at each other in a sort of ‘huh, this is new’ kind of fashion. And then we pulled ourselves together and went and had dinner.
The ring is beautiful, and exactly what I had hoped for. Although this is because I have been dropping very specific hints about it for ages. Actually not even hints. I’ve basically said, verbatim, ‘I would like an engagement ring that is three round-cut diamonds on a yellow gold band’ and J, sensibly, didn’t try to stray from this. I never expected it to be quite so big though, or so sparkly.
So that’s how he did it. It was lovely, and I’m delighted he did it in America because mutual love of the States has always been a feature of our relationship. We’ll be getting hitched in the UK though, at a date and location to be determined. Man, I have to plan a wedding. This is just beginning to dawn on me…
You wouldn’t think it would be possible to drive around the environs of a major US city for several hours and not stumble across a single Old Navy. Honestly, if you set out to try and do this you would almost certainly fail. And yet, J and I accomplished it today. We set out to visit the trifecta of North American retail glory – Target, Old Navy, and Chili’s for lunch. We found a Target within about five minutes, a Chili’s not long after that, and then drove around for hours looking for an Old Navy and failing utterly.
We gave up in the end and shambled back to the hotel, whereupon I got on the internet and discovered that we had been within blocks of several Old Navys but had somehow managed to avoid each and every one of them. That’s got to be some kind of skill. We’ll go tomorrow instead. I have to go because I deliberately didn’t bring enough pairs of pyjama pants with me on this trip, in order to allow myself to buy more in Old Navy with impunity. Old Navy pyjama pants are my own strange addiction.
So, yes, we have wheels now. As well as indulging our yen for Secret Deodorant (me) and Fruit of the Loom underpants (J – TMI? Sorry) in Target, we also drove out to Death Valley just for the heck of it. We found a brilliant classic rock radio station and headed out into the desert, munching Wild Cherry flavour M&Ms (I do like to get caught up on trends in novelty candy) to the strains of ZZ Top and Credence Clearwater Revival. Death Valley is very hot and very deserty. It looks a lot like I imagine the surface of the moon must look, except redder and with slightly more tumbleweed. We freaked out a bit when we realised we had no phone reception and there wasn’t another human being in sight, so we got back in the car and drove back to civilisation as quickly as we could, and then felt a bit silly.
Tomorrow we’re setting off early for the Grand Canyon. It’s about a three and a half hour drive each way. I’ve been before (and hiked to the bottom of it, and then back up again, in fact – never again) but J hasn’t, and it’s a shame to be so near and not go and check it out.
Hello internet! I’m interrupting radio silence to tell you that J proposed! Hurrah! I am getting married! The cats won’t have to be bastards anymore…
More when I get back from Vegas. We are having a fabulous time, although jetlag is a bitch, which is why I am wide awake at 5am. Wide awake, and engaged. Must stop gazing at ring and go to sleep.
I am going on my holidays tomorrow! Hurrah! We are going to Las Vegas! It will be brilliant!
OK, enough with the exclamation marks. That was fun though.
Someone asked me the other day how come J and I always go on holiday to America. My initial reaction was to get all huffy and say that, well, of course we don’t always go to America. We went to Canada last year! That’s a whole different country! But, I guess we do have a preference for the United States, and it got me thinking about why that is.
J and I both lived in America for a short period of time, before we knew each other. I did a study abroad year in Illinois, and he worked in New York and then Chicago for a year. We had very different experiences of the same country - I was a student on a budget, and ate a lot of Ramen noodles. He was a business man with a large expense account, and ate a lot of steak. So when we travelled in the States together for the first time, I was the one dragging him into Old Navy and saying ‘Look! Jeans for $30! That’s like, practically nothing!’ and he was the one taking cabs everywhere despite my horrified protests that ‘the buses have air conditioning! Air conditioning! Have you ever known anything so civilised?’
Look at that – the exclamation marks have come back. Anyway, so, we both fell in love with the country, even though we had very different experiences of it. But it turned out, the things we love about it are largely the same things. We love the size of everything, and I’m not just talking about the buckets of soda you get at 7-11s. Everything is bigger than it is in Europe - the cars, the buildings, the roads, the seats, the parks, the houses – it’s all on such a grand scale, so gleefully done to excess, and it’s kind of thrilling. Coming back to the UK after extended time in the States makes you feel cramped – like you’ve been walking around with your shoulders back and your head held high and now all of a sudden you’ve adopted your old familiar stoop. And I say this, by the way, as a proud Brit. I love my country, there are many things about it that are unparalleled, but there’s no denying, it feels, well, poky, in comparison to America.
The other thing we both adore, and it kind of goes along with the ‘bigness’ I already mentioned, is the great American love of all things a bit cheesy and over-the-top. Where else in the world would you get a Las Vegas? Nowhere. No other country would have the self-confidence, the brashness, the complete lack of shame, to pull off a Vegas, with its drive-through (sorry, thru) wedding chapel and its lions in Plexiglas and its imitation Eiffel tower. And I think it’s wonderful. In the UK our nearest equivalent is Blackpool, a tired and run-down seaside resort which is barely clinging to the last vestiges of the domestic tourist trade. We can’t do Vegas here. We can’t do the mad hedonistic rush of show-girls covered in rhinestones, and dancing fountains. It’s not in our nature. But we love to go over to the States and see it done properly.
So, yes, we’re off to America for ten days, to indulge in some over-the-top Americana; lots of drinks with umbrellas in them; an up-close-and-personal look at the Presidential campaigning; the sort of food my mother would disapprove of; and possibly, if we get the nerve up, some low-stakes gambling. See you on the other side, lovelies!
