They Tried to Make Him Go to Rehab, he said Yes, Yes, Yes - Reviewing 'Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing' by Matthew Perry

 Forward

People ask me how Matt is. I say I don’t know, because I haven’t seen him for about fifteen years. The nicest thing I can say about him is I’m glad he’s not dead.

Lisa Kudrow

Chapter One

When I was five years old, my mom put me on a plane all by myself to see my dad in LA. I have never forgiven her for abandoning me in this way, like I have never forgiven her for having a career when she should have been looking after me. My life-long fear of abandonment begins at this moment. My dad is very handsome and my mom is very beautiful. But they both abandoned me, so they can go fuck themselves. 

Chapter Two

I have my first drink and I realise that this is the answer to my beautiful, cruel parents abandoning me. I can’t get a boner though. I’ll mention this many times until all you can think about is my flaccid willy flopping about sadly in my Calvins, untouched, despite all the many beautiful chicks that want to touch it.

A talent scout sees me in a local diner and offers me a part in a movie. I guess my natural charm and talent just shines through, even when I’m just grabbing a burger and coke with my homies. I get off with a rockstar’s wife.

Chapter Three

I get a part in a film with River Phoenix. Goddamnit, why is life so cruel that it takes such people as River and Heath, yet that ugly talentless loser Keanu Reeves gets to be alive. I wish Keanu was dead, the ugly stupid talentless loser.

Chapter Four

I fuck over a friend to get a part in the bestest most loved sitcom ever. I basically reinvent comedy and change the way America speaks. Jennifer Aniston still won’t look at me, though, the beautiful bitch. Even though I have lost weight and I am the funniest person on the planet, I am not good enough for her, just like I wasn’t good enough for my mom. You know who I am good enough for, though? Julia Roberts. Yep, beautiful, funny and smart movie star Julia Roberts likes me. Luckily, my erectile dysfunction has been resolved, thanks to an ex-girlfriend who I promptly dumped after she got the old crank shaft working again. I am sure she would know it was all worth it (for me) because I get to bang Julia for 4 months. Things don’t work out with Julia though. I can’t get too close to women, for once I start to realise that they are sentient beings with their own feelings, wants and free-will, and not sex automatons, I go right off them.

Chapter Five

One day Jennifer Aniston tells me we need to talk. Here we go, I think. She’s realised how great I am! Instead, to my surprise, she says that everyone is really worried about my drinking. I don’t know what she’s on about. Then she says, ‘we can smell it on you,’ which is a LIE because everyone knows vodka is odourless!!! It's just a lame excuse not to go out with me.

Chapter Six

I am making a film with Salma Hayek. She dares to have her opinions about how a scene should be filmed, but I know better because I am in the biggest sitcom of all time. Salma doesn’t know anything so I get my way. What do you mean, she’s won an Oscar? So what, she didn’t reinvent comedy like I did! Stupid bitch. When I am making this film, I insist on going on a jet ski, despite everyone telling me it’s far too dangerous. Well, no one tells the inventor of sarcasm what to do, I’ve changed the face of comedy forever. I go on the jetski and I crash it, but it wasn’t really my fault. I believe it may have been a porpoise with a vendetta because my mom abandoned it, too, or something. Thus begins my addiction to painkillers.

 I blame Salma Hayek, in a way. It’s like she forced those pills down my throat. Did you know I used to date Julia Roberts?

Chapter Seven

I used to date Julia Roberts, the world’s most famous and beautiful movie star. I am starring in the world’s most popular sitcom and thanks to David Schwimmer, we are earning a million dollars an episode. Yet I am so, so sad. My life has been so hard. No-one will know the painful struggles of my life, the abandonment, the lack of love. No one wants my poor, diseased brain. I have the curse of addiction. All I can think about is vodka, pills and cigarettes. I’d swap places in a heart-beat with that man that lives in the dumpster behind my favourite A-list hangout and wears tissue boxes instead of shoes. There’s no way his life has been as hard as mine. I bet his mom didn’t put on a plane when he was five years old!

Chapter Eight

I’m in rehab for the tenth time, but they won’t let me smoke in here so I kick off about that. I also fancy one of the nurses, but she’s not interested in the man that once dated Julia Roberts and reinvented comedy. If only she’d agreed to marry me, we’d be living in a beautiful house by now with lots of gorgeous children running around. It’s sort of her fault my colostomy bag keeps exploding. Nothing to do with me not being able to look after myself properly. How am I supposed to do that when both my parents abandoned me? 

Chapter Nine

I see God in my kitchen. The same God who years before I had made a deal with. If he made me famous, he could do anything he wanted to me. And he gave me the curse of addiction. But the warmth of the golden light of his love shows me he has greater plans for me yet. It’s that, or I’m withdrawing pretty hard and have hallucinated this entire divine encounter. My relationship with God is complicated. It’s never occurred to me that trading fame for a rampant drug problem is more like the kind of deal that the Devil makes. Yay God!

Chapter Ten

I am seeing an actress that is fifteen years younger than me. I won’t say her name, but everyone knows who she is. We start off as fuck buddies because I just can’t handle the emotions of someone other than me. She’s wild in bed and we fall in love. But she wants to get married and I don’t, so we break up. Later on, I have a play in London and she phones me and says well done about the play, but I can’t come and see it because I got engaged. This is literally the worst thing that someone has done to me since my mom put me on a plane when I was five years old. How could she do this to me? How could she choose her boyfriend over seeing my play? I got her a painting of us both on our phones done and everything. I gave that woman my heart. I wish her all the best though. I hope she dies horribly.  And Keanu Reeves, he can die horribly too.

Chapter Eleven

I open a rehab centre named after me, because all I have ever wanted to do is help other addicts like myself. Noone can afford to come here, though, so I cut my losses and close it. I spent $500,000 on this venture. Despite me spending double that on my own rehab visits over the years, the cost of this really stings. Turns out not all addicts have the same funds as I do for top-class treatment. You know what, though, I’d still trade places with them in a heartbeat because none of them, none, have been through what I have. They have, like, the Temu version of addiction, and I’ve got the Harrods / Gucci / supernova version of it. 

Chapter Twelve

I nearly die and have a colostomy bag fitted, which keeps exploding shit all over me. I probably mentioned this a few times before, but the timeline of my tale of woe is all over the place and I refused to have an editor, because the world’s most well-known and beloved comedian who once dated Julia Roberts for 4 months almost thirty years ago doesn’t need an editor. I get a part in a movie, but through no fault of my own, I often don’t make it to set in time and when I do I’m often too tired to work. This has nothing to do with my vodka consumption, I am a professional and have never let my addiction get in the way of work. When filming has to pause through no fault of my own, because I have  HEALTH issues, I’m very upset that I have to pay the production company for lost hours. Noone understands how hard it is to get up and go to work after you’ve been caning vodka and cocaine until dawn.

Chapter Thirteen

I have never tried heroin, I have my limit you know. Sure, I’ll take a lot of things that are like heroin, but not the actual stuff because I’m not a dirty smackhead.  I will not acknowledge the fact that OxyContin is very definitely heroin adjacent, because it comes in pills and I don’t have to inject it in between my toes. 

Chapter Fourteen

I mistake a waiter for M Night Shyamalan and talk to him about doing a project together. Look, it’s not my fault those Indian dudes all look alike. He really should have said something earlier. My friend said later he saw M Night climbing out of the toilet window. I wonder where he was going?!

Chapter Fifteen

I’m sober and this makes me really charming to chicks. I’d have fucked mud at this point, and Canadian mud at that, which everyone knows is the worst kind of mud. I have this line that I use on all of them, which is that it ain’t me babe. This really works and I fuck a whole lot of mud. I see nothing wrong with referring to women as ‘mud’, because really, when you think about it, they’re not really human are they? Not in the way I am.

Chapter Sixteen

I go to rehab, I get sober, I go to rehab, I get sober. I get a part in a TV show but because I’m not allowed to control everything about it, it flops. I write a TV series which is about a man who is put on a plane by his mom when he’s five years old and can’t form proper adult relationships as a result. I also write a play, the one that my horrible ex wouldn’t come to. It does very well in London where Brits who have zero taste in anything other than dark comedy love, but which New York hates. I fuck some more women and quickly lose interest in them. After one break-up, when the ex tells me she’s got married and had a baby, I pull my car over and weep. That should have been MY baby!  All the women in my life have been HORRIBLE just like my mother. Everyone leaves me. I can’t remember her name. It wasn’t Julia Roberts though. 

Chapter Seventeen

I am all alone in the world, again. I sit in my big house, alone, apart from my lesbian sober sponsor who is the only woman I’ll ever have a modicum of respect for because there’s no chance we’ll ever fuck. I dated Julia Roberts, invented sarcasm, changed the way America speaks and ad-libbed some of the funniest lines in comedy history. But I am alone, with no wife and no kids. Yet for all my 53 years on the planet, I have not learned one single thing about myself or developed any self - awareness. The disconnect between me and my actions could not be any more obvious. It’s like they are two separate entities and never the twain shall meet. Even the process of writing this book didn’t grant me any real introspection. I am the best person in the world, and the worst, but all the bad bits of me come from that day long, long ago when my mother put me on that plane. The day the innocence died, the day I realised I was always destined to be alone.

I’d like to thank Matt Le Blanc, for turning a one dimensional character into a not one dimensional character, Courteney Cox, for convincing the world that someone as beautiful as her would go out with a schmuck like me, David Schwimmer for all the money, Lisa Kudrow for being almost as funny as me, and Jennifer Aniston for letting me look at her face for a few seconds. GOD she’s so up herself. 

You too, dear reader, may one day be called upon to do something great and then do whatever that great thing is, like I did. 

Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing is published by Headline and is available from all good book retailers. And Amazon.

They're Coming to Get You, Barbara (aka, back once again like the renegade disaster)

 

I’ve led a peaceful existence these dating app-free last 13 months or so. There have been no random messages at midnight asking if I’m still awake, no more dick pics, no more little September boys.

Or so I thought. Like some weird 2021 Reboot, two ghosts crawled out of their stinking holes in the ground to return in my life as zombies. Two. In as many weeks. One of them I’d never even gone on a date with, he’d just stopped replying in the middle of messaging, like he’d raptured or something. I didn’t even know who he was when he’d messaged. His number had been long deleted, and I didn’t recognise the WhatsApp profile photo. He didn’t bother asking what I’d been up to the last three years, apologise for vanishing, just asked if I was down to hook up.

 The second zombie was someone I’d been semi-seeing. As I said before if you count ‘watching’ a movie as ‘seeing someone’ (I don’t). He disappeared around Easter 2019, unliking my Instagram posts and blocking me. He messaged on a Friday just before midnight. I had gone to bed early, in readiness for the Horror-on-Sea film festival and didn’t get the message until the next morning. It took me a while to figure out who he was, too. ‘Hey, long time,’ his message said. ‘how have you been?’

I did a quick social media stalk and in the last 3 years, he’d met someone and had a baby. I guess either that had gone South, or he was bored, or needed an ego boost, or wanted to get his dick wet. Probably all of those things.

The lion, the witch and the audacity of this bitch.

Did they think I have been waiting for them to message me? That while their lives carried on, mine had stopped because I no longer had their scanty attention? Am I supposed to be flattered that I was probably one of a few women they tried to hit up that night? Oh Jeebus, grant me the confidence of an average white man and watch me rule the world. I didn’t reply to zombie number 2, just left his message hanging in the air like the fart in a car it was. I doubt he’s even noticed I haven’t replied as he's probably too busy smashing his head against the closed door of a shopping centre to get the shiny things inside.

I did actually go on three dates at the end of 2021, and I did write about them. I didn’t post the blog for a few reasons. I’m trying to write more in 2023, and I know some people miss my adventures in the dating hellscape. So here you go, a previously unpublished post from the end of 2021.

A couple of weeks ago, I went out with friends Edie and Fleur. We ended up in what should be referred to as The Pub at The End of The World, or as it has been known a previous incarnation, ‘the Last Resort’. The kind of dead-end dive with a sticky carpet and £2.50 shots, Curry Thursdays and Fizz Fridays. The toilets have the odour of spunk and bleach. 

This was the first time since Jimmy the Flip that I had met a man in real life. OK, so he was young, and OK, so he was super keen, and OK, so he licked my face as we said farewell at the taxi rank, and said breathily, ‘There’s more where that came from!’

He texted me mere minutes later, saying he was sorry he was so keen but I ‘caught his eye,’. We messaged the next morning, and then he stopped replying, mid-conversation, as if he’d just dropped dead. Left me on the two grey ticks and everything.

Despite this time last year swearing I was off the apps for good, I signed up again. I knew full well the same old faces, the unchanged profile photos from 2017, the ‘No Drama’ and ‘good vibes only!’ dudes would still be there. And they were, along with the sex pests and the ghosts and the zombies and the liars. Here were the men obviously hitting 60 claiming they were ’45 but feel 35,’ the embittered and embattled and I was re-joining their ranks. At least I had a few new photos (sparse opportunities for photos in 2021).

If my match rate was down when I was 42, 43 seems to have sent me down to the bargain basement and into a basket labelled, ‘last chance to buy’.  As a Reddit user cheerfully commented, ‘no-one wants old women!’

Anyway, I had a few dates and here’s how they went…

42 & 43 – Macavity the Mystery Twat

(Or, ‘I am sorry, TS Elliott’)

Macavity’s a mystery twat, he’s called the Hidden Fist

For he’s the master dater (tee hee) with the deadly kiss

He’s the bafflement of women, the swiper’s despair

For when they reach the day of the date – Macavity’s not there!

 

Macavity, Macavity, there’s hundreds more like Macavity

He’s the basic average white man, lacking common decency

His powers of evanescence would make a bath bomb stare

And when you reach the day of the date -– Macavity’s not there!

You may seek him in the basement – you may look up in the air

But I tell you once, and once again, Macavity’s not there!

 

Macavity’s a husky cat, he’s very tall and wide

You would know him if you saw him, for he’s dead behind the eyes

His beard is big and bushy, uncombed and streaked with grey

He thinks he’s a hipster but I’d say he’s more bou-jay

He says he’s a dapper dresser with innate confidence and style

I would say it’s more a case arrogance and living in denial

 

Macavity, Macavity, there’s thousands like Macavity,

He’s a milky tea in human form, a prime example of blandidity

You may meet him the High Street, you may see him Market Square,

But when a date is coming up, Macavity’s not there!

 

He’s outwardly respectable (they say he cheats at Scrabble)

Like all the others, he says he likes to travel

And when the hair is done and the eye-liner is applied,

When the perfume is sprayed, it’s clear that he lied

When you spent an hour choosing what to wear

Ay, there’s the dismay of the thing! Macavity’s not there!

 

And when another hopeful dater finds her plans have gone astray,

Or the drinks at 7pm are cancelled by midday

There will be radio silence, a grey ticked message unread

You would be forgiven for thinking that Macavity is dead

When you’re thinking that his number you should block

There he is again, making innuendos about his cock.

 

Macavity, Macavity, there’s many more like Macavity

Let’s throw them off a cliff and see them reach terminal velocity

He always has an alibi, and one of two to spare

At whatever time the date was for, MACAVITY WASN’T THERE!

This is a gentle warning, about all the matches whose wicked deeds are as yet unknown

(I’ve mentioned them before, I’m weary to the bone)

That dating apps are nothing more than agents for twats who are all alone,

They don’t care much about who they match with as long as they get to bone!

 

 

44 –  Jerry

Friends will tell you I have a terrible habit of swiping right on, and matching with, men in their 20s. While this is an obvious ego boost when a match happens, the reality is most men of this age will only ever see a woman in her 40s as a tick on the sex bucket list.

So when Jerry, a 64 year old, commented on of my profile photos (this is Hinge, where you don’t have to match to send an initial message) I thought, ‘maybe I should give this ago!’.

There’s a distinct absence of men in their 40s on the apps (I’m not counting in the men in their 50s and 60s that are putting their ages as 45), men in their 20s are fun but essentially of no use to me, men in their 30s aren’t interested.

Jerry was able to hold a decent conversation, and at no point tried to bring the topic round to sexting which happens so often. Most of his photos were ones from a slight distance, apart from one that was a close up of his tanned, smiley face.

So off I went to meet him for a weekend morning coffee, and it was…OK.  He was much smaller, slighter and greyer than his photos had suggested. He wore small wire-rimmed glasses and all his clothes (he cheerfully admitted) where logo’d freebies from his work. That was kind of cool, because how many people have a Men in Black gilet, or a Life fleece? He’d met Ryan Reynolds and pronounced him ‘An okay chap’!

 He’d been divorced 20 years after his wife ‘totally changed when she started taking anti -depressants,’ which made me wonder if this was his version of the crazy ex. In my experiences, crazy ex wives and girlfriends have simply had normal reactions to intolerable behaviour but eh, who am I to judge one man on the behaviour of many others?

He was engaging, interesting and interested…well, moderately interested. At least he asked me a couple of questions about myself and didn’t spend the entire time talking about his own hobbies and achievements.

The age difference felt quite pronounced – he wouldn’t be far off retiring and was busy doing up his house. I tried to imagine him staying up until dawn caterwauling along to Leave a Light On, or drinking a pre-loading tinnie on the tube, or meeting my raucous, argumentative family and I couldn’t.

I thanked him for a lovely time and wished him luck. And like the gracious, mature man he seemed to be, he responded in kind.

 

45 – Nick

By the time Nick messaged me, my match rate was so depressingly low I responded, even though he wasn’t my type. He didn’t use any punctuation in his messages, (When I told Edie about this, she said, ‘you’re always going on about how much you hate commas – you once told me they’re pointless,’ which is entirely untrue. If anything, I use them too much) so it took me a while to decipher some of his messages.

Nick warned me he’d put on weight. Who hasn’t, over the last couple of years? I asked if his photos were recent, and he said they were. In that case, it was OK, I knew what he looked like. I messaged Lulu after a date had been set, and said, ‘He’ll probably be much heavier than he is and at least 2 inches shorter,’ she told me I was over-thinking it, like I always do.

Off I went, on a chilly Sunday evening to meet him. He was waiting outside the pub, walking around in circles.  ‘Hello!’ I shouted, in the manner of a jodhpur clad duchess striding across a field.

‘I was always told that a gentleman should bring a lady some flowers on a first date,’ he said, and whipped out a packet of Sainsbury’s crusty bread mix from his coat pocket. As he did this, a waft of stale body odour floated out into the chilly air.

 Inside the pub and waiting at the bar, I saw that I had been right about the height, he’d added about 3 inches. I don’t mind short men – some of the men I’ve been most attracted to in my life were short. I don’t like them lying about it though, as if I am not going to notice when you say you’re 5’9 and show up looking more like 5’6. The weight gain was significant, and he looked much heavier than his photos. He did talk about his weight loss plan – a friend was helping him with his diet and fitness – and his goal to be able to wear a size large t-shirt.  He had a nice face with friendly eyes and would be handsome if he lost the weight.

Then he started talking; about not being vaccinated because his body could handle the virus (I felt like saying, ‘your body doesn’t look like it can handle stairs,’ but I kept that snide body-shaming opinion for here). He talked about the 2 major accidents he’d had in the last year because of his Jackass-ery type behaviour, and his cheating ex. He rattled off questions like Paxman, and after a while I realised that he was only asking me questions so he could regale me with his own tales of worst holidays and dates. I put this down to nerves and an insatiable need to appear entertaining and high-spirited.

My eyes kept being drawn to his dirty hands, the grime engraved into the lines of his palms, the black crescent moons of his nails; borderline fascinated by the way his hands melted into his wrists which melted into his arms, as plump as a baby’s and as thickly haired as a silverback’s.

The pub closed early, and neither of us suggested finding another one. When I got home, I did the usual ‘thanks for a good night,’ and left it there. He did message back saying, ‘you’ll have to let me know if you want to see me again,’

I thought that the flour was actually sort of funny, and cute, but did the overthinking thing and imagined a lifetime of packets of flour as birthday gifts, ‘cause it’s our special joke!’ and the thought made me want to cry. I didn’t want another partner who was casually cruel or lazy under the guise of ‘just a joke! Don’t be so sensitive!’

 I couldn’t get past the not getting vaccinated thing, and the smell of body odour made me think he hadn’t cared enough about the date to have a shower before he came to meet me. Seeing the apron of his belly as his t-shirt rose up when he put his coat on cemented my preference for physical fitness in a partner. Not the Hollywood male standard of desirability, but proof of caring about how their body feels and looks. Yeah. I’m shallow and too fussy.

I had been realistic this time round, knowing it was unlikely I’d meet someone this way. Again, I was right. Macavity, Jerry and Nick were like most of the other dates I’ve been on since 2017. A perfectly pleasant way to spend a few hours, but in essence a drink with a stranger with whom you actually have very little in common with.

I had heard that the apps are a wasteland around the festive period, and then pick up again the New Year. The first Sunday after New Year’s Day is apparently the busiest day for new sign-ups to dating apps. Did this mean I have re-installed the apps this week? No. I was tempted, but to go back a third time in as many months felt futile. Trapped in a cycle of install, delete, install, delete, install, delete until I die or actually meet someone whichever comes first. It feels like the Greek myth of Sisyphus who is doomed to spend eternity rolling a boulder to the top of a hill where it immediately rolls back down to the bottom again.

Part of me doesn’t want to give up. After all, the idea of this was to stick it out one hundred dates and then give up. I don’t think my spirit can take a further 55 just OK dates, or another 3 years of apps. Each time I reinstall them, the brief flame of excitement that this might be the time is quickly extinguished.  I feel much more at peace when I am not on the apps. In the words of the late, great Amy Winehouse, ‘I don’t understand / why do I stress the man / when there’s so many bigger things at hand?...I cannot play myself again /I just be my own best friend / Not fuck myself in the head with stupid men,’ Amen, sister. Amen.

This week’s crush

Noel Gallagher has apparently split from his wife, Sara. While he’s not my favourite Gallagher brother (he seems salty and is apparently a Tory now), I could put that aside. He has an excellent head of hair for a 56-year-old man, (it’s as thick as a thatched cottage) he looks pretty trim and he could write a song about me. Plus 17 year old me would be really happy. 

I'm moody but I'm rich

100 Dates -

 

I didn’t write about them, but just before Christmas 2020 I went on 2 dates with a man I’ll call Gavin. Gavin in his early 30’s, and sweet in a shy, derpy way. He was slightly goofy and looked a little bit like a cross between a Quentin Blake drawing and The Fast Show and Harry Potter actor Mark Williams. He was very softly spoken. When he was answering a question, he would roll his eyes upward and flutter his eyelashes rapidly.  I waited for him outside of the coffee shop we had arranged to meet on a chilly Saturday afternoon, and the minute he loped round the corner, I knew this wasn’t going to be a thing.

There was nothing wrong with Gavin. He just wasn’t what I am looking for at this stage of my life. Since being made redundant from a large shopping chain the previous Christmas, (just a few short months before the pandemic hit) he had been working a casual job with odd, ad-hoc hours. He wasn’t too worried about finding something more permanent – he lived with his parents, so he didn’t have rent /mortgage or bills to worry about. He said he’d never had a serious girlfriend, and it occurred to me that he might have never had any type of girlfriend at all.

It’s been 8 months since I deleted my profile and the apps. We are not on a break. This toxic relationship is over for good.  I agree that they work for some people, who manage to find each other in the haunted cesspit. I think most of this is down to luck rather than the apps doing what they are supposed to and find a good matches for their users. It would be a bad business model if the apps actually worked, because they rely on people returning to them again and again, getting desperate and paying for gold services to increase their chances of matches.

I know this because of my very brief time on Match. I had set up an account - hoping that like everyone said - a paid site would have more potential. More men that seriously wanted to meet someone. I quickly learned that men will pay if there’s a smidgeon of a chance it will get them laid.

Here they all were again – a line-up of the same men that had been using Tinder, Bumble OKC and Hinge, using the same profiles. After I’d filtered those out, I was left about 7 matches in my age and area preferences. I wasn’t interested in contacting any of these men, and I am sure they felt the same way about me. Still, I had paid for this, so I struck up a conversation with one man. After a while I had a niggling feeling he was unhappily married because he’d message me at odd times and say nothing remotely interesting at all. The chat soon fizzled out, and I wasn’t bothered.

After about 2 weeks, I asked Match for my money back – they took the first month and refunded me the remaining two. As soon as I had closed my account, I was bombarded with emails saying that messages were waiting for me, and thumbnail photos showed the kinds of men that 100% aren’t using the app, because if you look like Richard Madden or Margot Robbie you probably don’t need to. 

I thought this sudden influx of attractive men who wanted to meet me was a bit weird, so I did what anyone else would do in the same situation and Googled it. Sure enough, this is Match’s scammy way of getting you to sign back up so you can see those ‘messages’.

 To add to this shadiness, Match (who also own Tinder and OKCupid) keep dead profiles on the site so it looks as though they have a much bigger user base than they actually do. Another quick search and you’ll find the testimonies of users who left the site and later found out their profiles hadn’t been deleted and they were still coming up as active users.

It was knowing people that the apps worked for that kept me going back. I tried to change my attitude towards them, treating them as all the men seemed to do, like a virtual game of Snap!. When matches sent me crude or low-effort messages I’d reply with Peep Show or The Office quotes (still, deep down, a Pickmeisha desperate for attention). I’d tell my funniest stories. I’d persist with trying to keep conversations going. I got ruthless and unmatched anyone that didn’t reply within 48 hours. I’d immediately un-match if their opening message was a single emoji or a single word. Heart-eye face, ‘gorgeous’ ‘hi’.

I’d also immediately un-match if they sent me a copy n paste: Hi you profile looks interesting, would you like to meet one evening for dinner and drinks?

The apps weren’t working for me in the way they’d worked for my friends. No-one else seemed to have to give it this much time before they met someone. Why was I struggling so much? It becomes very easy to put all the lack of success on your own shoulders – not attractive enough, too old, profile is boring, I’m swiping right on and messaging the wrong type of men…

With not much else to do, I spent most of 2020 on the apps, the worst year in history to be using them. This run had lasted 7 uninterrupted months, the longest I had kept a live account going over the 3 years I had been using them.  As 2020 wound down, I was exhausted. I couldn’t take anymore feeling like I was ugly, or only useful as a free sex-chat service. My soul and spirit felt dirty and tired.  Really, it’s such an unnatural way to meet someone I am sure that it’s pure, dumb luck when it does work and that’s all there is to it.

As I am now over forty, I thought that people would stop asking me if I’d met someone and that I wouldn’t have to see the well-meaning, sympathetic head-tilt, sometimes accompanied by an arm-squeeze again and hear the words: ‘ahh, I am sure it will happen. Probably when you least expect it! You just need to stop looking!’

‘I have stopped looking,’

‘Well, don’t give up, join a club or something, you’re bound to meet someone doing something you enjoy!’

 This exchange is somehow more insulting when it’s with a stranger. The most recent occasion this happened was on a crowed Chiltern Line train on a Sunday afternoon.

I plonked myself in a window seat, opposite an elderly man. He was very, very tall, and looked like the BFG dressed for a summer afternoon tea party. He had been to his grandchild’s Christening, which explained the dapper outfit.

He missed his stop – the smaller doors at the end of the carriage didn’t open. Instead of finding another now empty seat closer to the door, he came and sat right next to me, in the space my sister had recently vacated. He saw a photo of my 9-month-old niece on my phone, and the conversation that followed went something like this: (I have edited it because he asked the same questions a few times)

Old man: Is that your granddaughter?

Me: No, it’s my niece

Old man: do you have any children of your own?

Me: Er, nope.

Old man: why not?

Me: I never really wanted any

Old man: do you have a husband?

Me: No

Old man (looks a bit shocked) a boyfriend?

Me: No, not one of those either.

Old man: Oh. So what does a single girl like you do with her time?

Me: What do you mean….like, socially…or…?

Old man: Work, what do you do for work?

Me: (explains my job which he didn’t understand and just looked baffled by. My dad joined in from across the way, yelling at him what I do which isn’t what I wanted on a packed train, because the description made me sound like one of those bailiff guys on Can’t Pay We’ll Take It Away)

Old man: do you want children?

Me: No.

Old man: (in a jolly tone) Oh well! It’s not too late for you to change your mind!

A minute ago, he had thought I was a grandmother, now he thinks I still have time to find a husband and have some kids! This man is obviously infirm in his old age!

Anyway, he reaches the next stop he can get off at to take the train back to the one he missed, shakes my hand and wishes me luck.

I feel like I often miss real-life opportunities to meet people, due to a combination of mild social anxiety, laziness and feeling ‘fat’, so when my friend Lulu suggested a last minute night out, I agreed (after already having a few drinks and getting my arm twisted a bit).

He was wearing shorts and flip-flops. I can’t remember much else about him, except that I thought he had a nice smiley face. He may or may not have been the same height as me or only a little bit taller. I liked that he didn’t have spaghetti strand legs. I got his number. Goddammit, I’m still such a Pickmeisha it makes me sick.

For 3 days I uhmed and aaahed about messaging him. Every time I went to, I’d feel this very strong urge not to. But I didn’t know if that was fear, or ridiculous over-thinking. Anyway, I did message him, and he replied pretty fast for the first few messages.

Since the first few messages, he takes much longer to reply. Days. He hasn’t replied at all to my message sent at the weekend. Flip-flop isn’t going to be date number 42.  

   

If I start dressing like this, maybe people will stop asking me if I'm still single

 

 

 

The Crappest Thing - a film review

 First up, apologies for any spelling errors etc. I wrote this in a fit of mild fury and then couldn't be bothered to edit it because I am hungry and Louis Theroux is on the telly in a bit...

‘I’ve basically been bored ever since 9/11’ – Jeremy, Peep Show

2001 - 2002. I was working in a pub, trying to write a novel that like the rest of the other attempts have been filed under, ‘Fucking Awful, You Suck, Give Up’. My boyfriend had dumped me almost a year before and I still wasn’t over it. I watched a lot of movies, mostly American teen high school comedies like She’s All That, Get Over it, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Cruel Intentions.

At some point, I must have watched The Sweetest Thing. I am pretty sure I did, but I didn’t keep the affection for it that I felt about all those other movies I have watched since. Though problematic (I recommend listening to Bechdel Cast’s episode on She’s All That) they were…OK right? They weren’t great, life-changing films, but they also weren’t terrible films.

The Sweetest Thing popped up on Netflix this weekend, and instead of watching something else, or poking my own eyes out with cotton buds, I waste an hour and a half of my life watching it, and a further 2 hours writing about how flippin’ awful it is. It stars Cameron Diaz (Christina) Selma Blair (Jane) and Christina Applegate (Courtney) as three friends, just a livin’ and a lovin’ their best lives in San Francisco.

What’s it about? It’s about the eternally single Christina finally getting her head turned into coupledom by a man (Peter, played by Thomas Jane. No, me neither) that she’s met once, for a few minutes. While he’s on his stag-do (though to be fair, Christina doesn’t know it’s his stag-do). 

This film is every bad 00’s gross-out, Pick- Me-Cool -Girl trope summed up in a messy, seemingly endless 90 minutes. It’s the whitest, most heteronormative, unfunny film ever. Gayness is a joke. There’s a way too long scene where it looks like Christina is going down in Courtney in the car. There’s a random snog between 2 butch biker guys, a singing camp cop and a joke about bathroom glory holes, and Christina Applegate getting her fake boobs aggressively felt up by multiple women in a club toilet. (I know that this could be making a joke about women doing this in club loos on nights out, but then…there’s a load of men watching them do it, and…yuck).

 There’s random musical interludes which includes a song about a dick being too big, and Jane gets her tonsils caught on a genital piercing. Christina and Courtney get soaking wet in one of those weird ‘car wash/ burst pipe’ scenes that always seem to pop up in pre-2010 films. There’s a joke about a semen stain on a dress that goes for about 5 minutes longer than it should have done.

 Only Jane seems to have a job, and the only reason we see her there is because she has sex with a man in an elephant costume while she’s supposed to be working. Christina is apparently an interior designer, the most chick-lit job ever, along side ‘works at a publisher’.

 In the end credits bloopers, Applegate and Diaz stick their stomachs out and make jokes about being fat. All three of the leading female cast are so unrealistically, painfully thin (though this seems to be Diaz’s natural body type, so I am not going to hate on her too much) another 00’s thing, the requirement that women’s bodies should be as small as possible, razor-blade hipbones poking above the low-rise jeans, arms that look like they couldn’t lift a can of beans.

This tells you everything you need to know about the level of humour we're dealing with here

The only thing I truly enjoyed about the film was its wardrobe, which then was VERY fashionable – I would have worn a lot of things like that. The skinny bootcuts, pointy- toed, stiletto heeled boots, cropped handkerchief tops, one-shoulder tops, sparkly make-up…ugh, I get the Gen Z hate for the hairstyles. Jane’s how do you get a short, straight bob to flip up at the ends? Why does Christina have the Super Noodles perm at the end of the film?

 Oh, and the film starts by someone randomly interviewing all the men that Christina has rejected. WHY? It’s never explained, and crops up again at the end when all 3 women are coupled up and Courtney seems to be interviewing Peter about… Christina. Then they all break the fourth wall and ask why you’re watching the credit bloopers.

 A woman wrote this film. Does she hate women? It feels like she hates women. And gay people. Possibly Chinese people too. I’m going to assume that her reason for having zero black people in the cast is because film was apparently based on her and her real-life friends, and they didn’t know any.

 This film would 100% not get made today, and for that we should be grateful. Films like this, and the others I mentioned formed much of my romantic expectations in life, because I was in my early 20s when I first saw them, and I was dumb.

 Ugh, I feel so old saying ‘these days’, but…these days…we have films like I Am Not OK With This, Booksmart, Assassination Nation, and Lady Bird, which are telling different stories, different kinds of love, different kinds of bodies. I wish they’d been around 20 years ago. What different messages would I have got, about romance, relationships with men, with friends, with myself?

 That’s enough deepness for a Bank Holiday Monday.

 What I am saying is, don’t watch The Sweetest Thing. Watch of the four films mentioned above instead. Start with Booksmart, it’s great.

 

 

Lady Bird

I Am Not OK With This

Booksmart

Assassination Nation

 

 

He's a Rotten Peach - Fuck You, Armie Hammer

 

Chalamet and Hammer in Call Me by Your Name, (2017)

This is a post I started in Autumn of last year, and never finished. I seemed to have swathes of free time on my hands as the UK went into a third lockdown, but I couldn’t bring myself to keep logged in and staring at a screen. Work was intensely, insanely busy – it seems people could cope OK with the first and second lockdowns, but completely lost their minds during the third.

I still can’t finish the post, at least not as I had originally intended to, and that’s because of you, Armie Hammer.

Last summer I read André Aciman's novel Call Me by Your Name, on which the 2017 film of the same name is based. Precocious 17-year-old Elio (played by Timothée Chalamet in the film version) is spending the summer at the family home on the Italian coast, being a typical teenager, mooching around, being moody and slightly awkward in his own skin.

When his father’s graduate student assistant, 24-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer) shows up, Elio falls in love with him. Oliver is everything Elio is not – older, worldlier, more at ease with himself.   A summer romance follows, ending when Oliver returns to the US and breaks Elio’s heart.

I loved the film. What could be a more perfect film to watch on a freezing cold, dark January night than a love story set in sun-soaked Italy? I wanted to be there, under the apricot trees and by the pool and in the piazza eating gelato and drinking wine and smoking strong cigarettes in the sun.  Both the film and the book sparked a nostalgia in me, for the intenseness of teenage crushes, the pain of unrequited love (Oliver is so off-hand and cool with his treatment of Elio) and for the heat of endless summer holidays.

I grew up in the UK, and we only went on holiday in the UK, so summer holidays definitely did not involve swims in the pool, siestas and endless sunny days. They involved rain-lashed caravans, walks and picnics, arguing about to watch on the telly and my little brother doing things like getting lost on Bodmin Moor.

That is where the first part of the original post ends. I had wanted to write about my crushes on both Elio and Oliver, how their sweet romance had stayed with me long after the film had ended and the final page of the book was turned. I’d have to delete it now, anyway, if I had finished it.

Someone asks you who Armie Hammer is, and you say, ‘He was in Call Me by Your Name,’ and they’ll say, ‘that gawky kid with the curly dark hair?’ and you’ll say, ‘no, the other one,’ and they’ll go, ‘oh, is that his name! What else has he been in?’ and you’ll think and think and think but you can’t remember anything else.

You will have seen him in something else. You will have seen him in loads of things, and not realised or have immediately forgotten. Credits include Netflix’s Godawful Rebecca remake, Sorry to Bother You, (a film that I would describe as a social satire body horror, where he plays a coke-addled, power-hungry, nightmare...so,.. himself, then) Nocturnal Animals (I have seen that film twice and have absolutely no idea who he is in it) Mirror Mirror, Wounds (Netflix original horror, I had no idea what was going on 90% of the time, and I don’t think the film did either)  He was in The Man from U.N.C.L.E , J. Edgar and The Lone Ranger. Most notable is probably The Social Network where he played the Winklevoss twins, and then voiced them again in an episode of The Simpsons. While The Simpsons is now far from what it was in terms of cultural reach and popularity, I feel that if an actor guests on there and people still don’t know who they are, something has gone terribly awry.

In a 2017 Buzzfeed article entitled 10 Long Years of Trying to Make Armie Hammer happen, Anne Helen Petersen writes in-depth about his failure to make it into the kind of Hollywood stardom other actors seemed to have achieved so effortlessly. It should have been easy for him, after all. He’s 6’5. He's blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and handsome in the way of an old Hollywood era leading man like Marlon Brando or Paul Newman. He has a distinctive voice that’s sexy, hypnotic in a ‘could read the phone book to me and it would be fascinating’ kind of way. As has been previously quoted, if you were going to cast someone as a fairy-tale prince, you’d pick him. Would have picked him.

But then he says stuff, unthinking, cringey over-sharing stuff, like how he had ‘certain interests’ he had ‘smothered down’ (I paraphrase) because it’s not respectful to pull your wife’s hair during sex, which seems to indicate he does the old Madonna/Whore trope thing, where he separates women into the categories of the women you fuck and the women you marry, and never the twain shall meet. Or that he allegedly liked a bunch of BDSM tweets and follows young girls on his PUBLIC Instagram, like some kind of digital-age Jimmy Savile. He even has the Jimmy Savile attire down, being fond of a matching tracksuit combo, like he grew up on 1990s Liverpool housing estate instead of the Cayman Islands. Except he doesn't even know how to wear one properly.

Also…no-one wants a prince who allegedly declared, ‘I am 100% a cannibal’ and ‘I want to chop off your toe and carry it around with me,’ as if a toe is not demented trophy hand-selected from Jeffrey Dahmer’s box of Precious Things, but some some kind of cute lucky charm

January 2021. Armie Hammer tweets that he’s ready kick the shit out of this year, and demands that you kneel before him. Presumably so that he can kick you in the face and trample over you while he’s on his way out to join Pinky and the Brain in trying to take over the world. 2020 had been tough on him. He had spilt up with his wife Elizabeth in the middle of the pandemic. Isolation with Elizabeth and their two young children on a beautiful island was too much for him. Or maybe it was because she had allegedly discovered he was allegedly cheating on her. While she was pregnant. At least we didn’t have to hear them tunelessly screech a line from Imagine in their fuck-off massive garden. Unless I have forgotten that he did that as well, in which a double fuck you for that Armie Hammer.

He talks about this time in depth in a video interview with Jonathan Heaf from British GQ. He talks about his depression and how he’s having therapy and how he’s trying to get in a healthier mind space (while drinking a martini at 10am, always the sign of someone with a healthy approach to life. But I guess that kind of thing is OK if you’re a movie star, and not, say, an unemployed heroin addict living in a tower block and it’s a can of industrial strength cider instead of posh vodka).

There’s something performative about his interview, something that feels disingenuous and off.  I went back and watched others, they are kind of the same. He’s charming, often funny, and he can make an otherwise boring story sound like a great adventure. It just seems like he’s doing a ‘bit’, like it’s another role for him. Armie Hammer in the Armie Hammer Story. Staring Armie D Hammer as himself. Written and directed by…eh, you get the idea.  He has a bit of a boys will be boys vibe, the hapless fool who gets himself into drunken scraps, wearing his charm like an asbestos coated scandal shield.

In the same GQ video interview Hammer and Heaf, (who, by the way, looks like what you'd get if you ordered Ross Geller from Wish)  recount a night out in the manner of some terrible douche-bag double act. It's this night out I think Heaf is talking about in the article linked below, where he wangs on about a mysterious photo which will NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY. What goes on tour stays on tour, eh lads? Waaayyyheeeey! Calm down, dickheads, you're hardly on tour with Mötley Crüe.

Hmmm princely!

I urge you to read Jonathan Heaf’s GQ lickarse piece on Hammer, which basically makes it sound like he’s obsessed with him and will do anything to impress him and be his friend. Half the article is about how drunk they got and how ferocious Heaf's hangover is. It's a bit like the last minute A-level essays I used to turn in when I hadn't done the reading I was supposed to, and thought, 'Ah, fuck it, I'll wing it. They'll never be able to tell.' Heaf seems very pleased with himself so getting so drunk that he can't really remember the night before, which puts him at maturity level: 18 years old. He can't stop going on about it. Here’s a now deleted Heaf tweet about his buddy Armie:

, 

You can decide for yourself if Heaf genuinely likes Hammer, or if Hammer has something on him so bad it would make AC-12 blush, and Heaf is tweeting as some kind of desperate damage control. The kind of damage control that eventually blows up in your stupid, stupid face because you should have listened to your mother and left well enough alone.

Heaf seems to be like that kid at school who does things like drink tip-ex to get in with the ‘cool kids’.  I have a theory that ‘that photo’ is not of Hammer, but of Heaf wrapped from head to foot in cling-film with some strategic hole placement and Hammer’s balls in his mouth (IT’S A JOKE, please don’t sue me. Wait, can you sue someone who has no money?)

I'll get off the topic of Jonathan Heaf in a moment, but I think it's this (and referring back to Anne Helen Petersen's Buzzfeed piece) that riles me so much. It seems you can get away with pretty much anything if you're male, white, good-looking and rich. 

Not long after that Hammer sent his January 2021 tweet, a woman, who I'll call 'A'  (her name is public if you want to look it up) came forward, alleging that she had been in a relationship with him since 2016, and over that time he was sexually violent, emotionally abusive and a rapist. What had apparently started off as a consensual BDSM relationship had turned into something very much not consensual.  Things had escalated quickly with Hammer. A says that she ‘met’ the actor in 2016, when they exchanged social media messages. She was then 20, he was 30 and had already been married for a few years to Elizabeth.

Before I proceed, just assume that I am saying, ‘allegedly’ before any of these statements from now on, because Hammer of course is denying any of this took place, at least, not in the way Woman A frames it did.

While most of their ‘relationship’ seems to have been conducted on-line, they apparently did meet and there was a night where A claims Hammer raped her for 4 hours and wouldn’t let her leave. This is an allegation that the LAPD (who I have zero faith in) say they are now investigating. In messages between them, Hammer seems to brush off the seriousness of her claim, saying that neither of them thought to decide on a safe-word beforehand, and he didn’t realise she wasn’t into it. This in some extreme cases becomes known as 'The Rough Sex Defence' - when men kill their female partner in bed and say it was 'by accident during rough sex'.

To some Hammer supporters, Woman A’s claims aren’t helped by further leaked messages that seem to show she in was in touch with him years after this incident took place, but this of course, is an extremely reductive view of the relationship between abuser and the abused. I am sure there are people who have stories of how they repeatedly sought out, and went back to, an abusive partner, for many reasons that are often very complex. Just like the messages that Woman A released herself, there’s no evidence that the messages are actually between them. You could say that Hammer leaked the explicit messages Woman A sent him 3 years after the alleged rape took place in an effort to discredit her version of events… no-one knows for sure at the moment. 

An added complication has been Woman A's attitude towards other survivors that have come forward, including racism. Woman A seems to say that this other woman is lying because she isn't Hammer's usual type (I believe she is Black) Let me be clear; you can be both a survivor and not a very nice person at the same time. I think it may also be possible that Woman A is struggling to come to terms with the fact she wasn't the only one, and therefore, she isn't special.  Reading Hammer's alleged messages to the woman, and his MO becomes clear. It's the same thing over and over again; he can't control himself around them, they are the only ones that make him feel this way. To quote Dorothy Parker:

Lady, lady, should you meet
One whose ways are all discreet,
One who murmurs that his wife
Is the lodestar of his life,
One who keeps assuring you
That he never was untrue,
Never loved another one . . .

Lady, lady, better run! 

Then other women came forward; 2 ex -girlfriends, B, and C  (again their names are public if you want to look them up) who made remarkably similar allegations. That he would contact them on social media, tell a story about a sad rich boy whose dad didn’t seem to love him very much and whose mother was a Cayman Island Margaret White, waking him in the night to sprinkle oil over him, shouting ‘the power of Christ compels you!’  This is how it goes down in my head, anyway, and it's not a secret that his mother is very religious. Hammer has talked about that’s why she has never seen Call Me by Your Name.

From what I can gather, there’s now at least 7 women telling this same story – B and C, D who have made their names public and E, F and G who haven’t. He allegedly called all these women ‘kittens’ (which I assume was so he didn’t have to remember their all names, as there seems to be cross over between them), and demanded that they call him ‘Daddy’. I know ‘Daddy’ is a thing, but just no. No thank-you.

Then there was a theory floating around that Hammer might be a serial killer after remains were found in the Joshua Tree National Park, not far from where, at the time, he was helping his friend build a hotel.  As a side note, I cannot imagine Hammer being any use at building or DIY, and have a vision of him begging to be allowed to use the tile cutter, and his mate saying, ‘no, you can’t use the tile cutter, you know what happens when you use the tile cutter…but you can screw in the light bulbs if you want, though, yeah?’

Aside from the fact that the remains were of a woman missing since 2019 (so, before Hammer was working on the hotel), the serial killer theory seems to stem from the extremely violent and graphic messages that Hammer has allegedly sent women. They include choking them to blackout; wanting them to cut off pieces of themselves and cooking it for him; opening their skulls and fucking their brains; smashing their bones, drinking their blood and violating them in another thousand revolting, stomach churning ways that would even freak Patrick Bateman out. 

 He hits some of the markers on the now discredited serial killer profile checklist:

        Over-bearing, religious zealot mum (if it's not one thing it's...)

        Cold, unloving or absent father 

    A history of setting fires and animal abuse. He apparently set fires at school and there's a message exchange with him and Woman A where he says he almost choked his dog to death because he was thinking about her and went into some kind of trance.

 I don't think Hammer is a serial killer,  (if he is, he's late to the game as most of them start before they're in their 30s)  but I’d love him to take the Bob Hare psychopath test and see what that throws back.

What this all amounts to, is, fuck you Armie Hammer. Fuck you for ruining one of my favourite ‘escape for a few hours’ films. Fuck you for ruining the book on which it’s based. Fuck you for getting so many undeserved chances that you repeatedly fuck up. Fuck you because you’ll probably get away with this and we’ll have to watch you play some version of yourself yet again.  Fuck you for being an abusive, violent, manipulative arsehole who won't take any accountability for anything you have done.  Even if you did apologise, I wouldn’t believe you. It would be as sincere as Ted Bundy blaming porn for the reason he murdered so many women, as hollow as a chocolate Easter egg, as empty as bucket with a hole in it.

Also, I hate the fact you like some of the same music I do, so thanks for ruining those songs  for me too. 

Also. You have a fucking stupid name.