It seems that
the Blogger platform is not the easiest for readers to navigate around. Posts
appear in chronological order and it seems there’s not an option to change
that, so the newest posts will always appear first.
If you’re new to
the blog and want to read, say, the posts about Elisa Lam, in the right order, just
click on the ‘Elisa’ tab. The most recent post will appear first, the oldest
last. To get to the older posts, just scroll down the page.
Posts in the ‘archived’
section of the blog will appear in monthly order, again most recent first.
In the meantime,
I’m off to see if I can outwit the template and get things in more accessible
order….
Thank you to
everyone that’s commented, liked and shared so far. You are my cockadoodie brats
and I promise not to hobble any of you.
Once upon a time, two sisters travelled
many miles to buy food. Gretel and Beatrice Gooseberry often went to Rosewait,
the market with the green stripes, to buy things like apples, French cheeses
and cakes. The day was fine, and the sisters were in
a good mood. Along the journey, Gretel turned to Beatrice and asked, ‘sister,
what happened to that pretty blouse you used to have?’ ‘Of which blouse do you speak, Gretel?’
asked Beatrice, for Beatrice had many blouses. ‘’Twas a silky blouse, a purpley colour,
and it has a big bow on the neck line,’ said Gretel. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a blouse
like that,’ said Beatrice. She may have had many blouses, but she fondly
remembered most of them. ‘Yes, yes you did,’ insisted Gretel. ‘It
was your favourite. You used to wear it all the time,’ They had reached Rosewait, and they
parked their carriage and hurried to find a small cart in which to put the good
while they walked around, seeking organic extra virgin olive oil and luxury
Swiss chocolates. ‘I am sure I didn’t, Gretel,’ said
Beatrice, inspecting a punnet of strawberries. ‘You did! You bought it in that manky
charity shop that smelled of wet dog,’ ‘They all smell of wet dog,’ said
Beatrice. ‘You paid 50p for it, and said it was a
bargain! How can you not remember that?’ ‘Because I have never bought a 50p purple
blouse from a charity shop,’ said Beatrice. ‘It was a Biba blouse, from the '70s, and
you said, ‘they don’t know what this is!’ and you snatched it up and ran to the
till because you were afraid someone would take it from your hands!’ ‘No, no,’ said Beatrice. ‘I have never
done such a thing, not for a purple blouse!’ ‘You used to wear it all the time! You
wore it every time we went to the ale house!’ Gretel was now getting annoyed that her
sister could not remember the beautiful purple blouse she had once loved so
much. They finished their shopping, and returned to the carriage. As they queueing to leave carriage park, Gretel
tried one more time to nudge Beatrice’s memory. ‘You used to call it your ‘Maggie
Thatcher’ blouse,’ she said. ‘I did not, Gretel,’ said Beatrice. ‘You did! You did!’ shouted Gretel. ‘what
happened to the purple pussy bow blouse?’ she then went very quiet, lost in
thought. Eventually she said… ‘Oh, yeah. It wasn’t you that had that
blouse. It was my friend Katie.’ ‘
I’ve been back in the UK a week already,
and it’s starting to feel like I was never away.
The leaf-less trees, the cold weather
and the relatively rubbish-free streets still feel a little odd, but sleep
patterns are pretty much back to normal (apart from not being able to stay
awake past 9pm.)
I started job hunting this week, and had
an idea that I would maybe get a bar job for a few days a week, just to get a
bit of money back in the bank until I’ve decided what I’m actually going to do
with my life.
I was greeted by a smiley girl, who said
I needed to speak to the manager.
The manager was sitting behind the bar,
tip-tapping away at a lap top, his back to me.
For ten minutes I stood there and looked
at the back of his shiny head and the little sausage-like rolls of fat on the
back of his neck, while he continued to pretend to be very BUSY and IMPORTANT (I nearly typed 'impotent' there) and ignored me. He didn't even turn around for a second to say, 'I'll be with you in a sec,'.
I was thinking about leaving when the bar girl went to remind him that I
was there.
‘Hello!’ I said, because his gaze was floating everywhere except where I was (I have no idea if this was deliberate or not.) ‘I see that you are
advertising for bar staff,’ I added, in case he thought I was there for a muffin and a cup of terrible coffee.
‘Yeah,’ he said ‘Pulling pints, wiping
tables, serving food. Your basic pub job really,’ he gave me the hours, which
unsurprising involved evenings and weekends, but he felt the need to add was because:
‘this is a pub,’ (really? I thought it was a crèche. I mean, you DO look like a
large baby….)
He then said, ‘so, send us your CV. If we
like you, you’ll come to an interview. If we like you in that one, you’ll come
to a second. If you get through that, you’ll do a trial shift and we’ll decide
if you’re suitable from there,’
FUCKIN. HELL.
The last time I worked in a pub (granted,
it was about 15 years ago, but still) I did one shift, and after that, the land
lord said, ‘Well, seems like you can count money and pour drinks, these are the
hours if you want them,’
Just what was I potentially applying for
here? NASA? MI5? Since when did applying for basic jobs become this hard?
There’s another pub in the same town.
Here works The Most Miserable Man In a Pub. He ignores you. He rolls his eyes
when you finally get his attention. He slams your drink down on the bar, slopping
it all over the place. He throws your change at you. He’s been working there
about 5 years, so HIS manager’s expectations of staff must be super low (unless
he is the manager of course, which
explains a lot.)
By comparison, there’s a country pub a
few miles away. (Well, it’s technically not actually there at the moment, there
was a fire involving hot tea towels, or something, and it burnt down.)
OK, so it IS a sort of pretentious place,
where 90% of the clientele are wearing Boden, Hunter wellies and corduroy. And they don’t sell crisps, but they do serve
chili peanuts in a little bowl. BUT the service in that place couldn’t be more
different (apart from the one Sunday afternoon when it seemed like a load of
top-knotted teenage girls in jodhpurs
and over-sized Aran jumpers had been left
in charge, and they just spent the whole
time gazing at somewhere just beyond your left shoulder.)
You ask what dry white wines they do, and
they’ll pour you a little taster selection and tell you about each one. They
acknowledge you when you walk in. They don’t act like it’s a chore to serve
you, even when they are really busy, which is every time I’ve been in there.
I have a feeling if I applied for that
job (which I won’t now, mostly because I’m about to make some sweeping
statements about what I think the management style is probably like), I would
spend a lot of time muttering, ‘dick,’
under my breath.
I think you can tell a lot about a person
from observing the way that they treat the people that work for them.
To sit there and ignore someone for 10 minutes, I suspect that this
man probably doesn’t value his staff. And if he doesn’t value them, he probably doesn’t
value his customers very much, either. And I don’t want to work for someone
like that. Add me to the list of fussy, workshy Brits that claim they’ll do any
job, but won’t really, because, ‘reasons.’
Though it would be fun to quit his tyrannical
employ in this manner:
The strangeness
of England doesn’t hit me until we reach a familiar road on the way home.
Everything is so neat and clean. There’s no rubbish piled at the sides of the
road, no half-built, falling down houses being choked with climbing plants. The
pavements don’t have steep curbs with huge trees growing out of them. You can’t
hear the constant sounds of chanting, temple bells, drums, motorbikes. Children
don’t follow you around, doing peace signs and asking what your name is. There’s no tail-less, teeny cats looking for
food. Worst of all, there’s no almond Snickers.
The
English sky is the colour of the roads, and it’s cold, cold, cold. The trees
are still bare and it still feels like winter, even though the daffs are out.
Coming
back, it feels like everything’s changed and it’s all stayed the same.
The
flight home was easy; I managed to sleep on the 6 hour Phuket – Dubai leg of
the flight, which made the bright light craziness of Dubai airport at 5am
bearable, though paying £5 for a Starbucks coffee was painful.
Watched
3 films on the Dubai-London leg, and was surprised at the number of passengers
that remained in their seats for the entire 6 hour plus flight, not even
getting up to go to the loo. I am sure they thought I was crazy, getting up
every half an hour or so to pace up and down the aisle in between trips to the
loo. There was one other woman who had a
good half an hour wander up and down the aisles, looping one way and then the
other, up and down, over and over again.
When
you get to Heathrow after coming from Phuket airport, you realise how well
ordered and clean things are here. Everything is so shiny and new looking and
not covered in a fine layer of reddish dust or held together with tape. It adds
to the sense of disorientation and ‘otherness’.
I
suppose tiredness contributes to the sense of feeling at odds with your home
country, and thinking that you had expected things to be changed in some way,
but they’re not.
During
my last week in Cambodia, I was ready to come home. There were things I was
missing about England; the order, the green, being able to have the bedroom
windows open at night, cheese, BBC programming, hot showers, being able to
flush loo paper away, the normality and cosiness of ‘home’.
Now I’m
back, I’m missing Cambodia. The sun, being able to cycle around without
worrying about car drivers mowing you down, the Asana bar cocktails, the
Touiche Restaurant veggie Khmer curry, the temple bells and chanting, the kids
that follow you down the street and ask what your name is, not feeling guilty
at not having anything to do other than whatever you want…..
I am
sure after a few days, getting back into the routine of normal things, finding
a job and catching up with friends, it will be like I was never away. It
already feels like the last three months belong to another life, or happened to
someone else.
There
was a Friends reunion on TV recently.
Not the kind that fans of the show had hoped for, where we would find out what
had happened to the 6 now forty-something New Yorkers that took over Friday
night TV between 1994 and 2004.
Instead,
5 of the friends (Matthew Perry was in London, where he’s written and is starring in a West End play), sat on a sofa and had an awkward conversation
about what good friends they are in real life.
To
quote Carrie Bradshaw, (more on her later) it got me thinking.
I am a terrible friend.
About a
year ago, having a clear out, I found some letters from a girl I used to work
with.I’ll call her B. B moved back to
her home country in early 2000, and for a while we kept in touch via letters
and postcards. We spoke on the phone a few times and she visited the UK.
I don’t
know who stopped writing first – it may have been me. It was probably me, but I had thought about her on and off over the years.
When I
read over her letters, I decided I’d see if I could get in touch with her
again. Of course, Facebook, Twitter, etc has made this much easier, and I found her pretty much right away. I sent B an email I hoped was friendly, but not
too stalky, and waited. And waited. And waited. I'm still waiting - she’s never replied.
Part of
me felt the same rejection I would have felt as a child, not being invited to
the party or being picked last for PE teams. I had stupidly thought that
despite the passing years, B would be pleased to hear from me and that she
would respond.
Then I
thought about all the other friendships I’ve had, and all the friendships that
I’ve fucked up.
The
ex-school mate who contacted me via Facebook and I actually asked him if he was
in my year when I knew full well he was.
The
girl who I used to work with, and with who I used to go to a once weekly
aerobics class.
The two
friends I lost total contact with, apart from having them on my FB friends
list, after they moved away.
I have
to think about why I am a terrible friend.
I don’t
remember things, for a start. I forget important events, birthdays and
anniversaries. I forget when people have been through terrible times and say
incredibly insensitive things.
I
always thought I was pretty good at keeping in touch. A halfhearted text or
email every now and again is not a good enough effort. At the same time, do I
know when to let it go? Have I persisted with a friendship when the friend
clearly didn’t want to keep in touch?
I am
incredibly self- absorbed. A friend can
come to me with a crisis, and I’ll manage to steer conversation away from their
problems and get them to talk about my petty miseries.
One
example I can give (the other one that sticks out in my mind is way too shameful
for me to even put into words) was the time I had a bad haircut. It was the day
before a friend’s wedding. I went round to her house after the haircut to help
her with some last minute preparations. And all I could go on about was my
hair. On and on and on I went, about my stupid fucking hair.
I inadvertently
make people feel bad. This is because I frequently say things without thinking,
and then spend the next 3 weeks apologising. This means people think of me as
an oversensitive worrier and probably feel like they can't say anything, lest it cause me to obsessively fret.
I’d
rather let someone down then face my fears. (another example I’m too ashamed to
put in words.)
The
worst thing, the thing that makes me cringe, makes me feel sick, is the
bitching. The thing with bitching is:
1) It’s fun (well, fun in the way that doing
something that later makes you feel terrible is fun, like getting drunk and
smoking 15 cigarettes.)
2) You
feel like you’re part of a group.
3) At the time, you don’t stop and think, ‘wait,
if we’re bitching about this person, does it mean that you bitch about me when I’m not there?
Bitching
has got me in trouble in the past. Did I learn my lesson? No. Have I stopped my
bitchy ways now? I hope so. When I catch myself about to indulge, I have a quiet
word with myself.
If I am
self-aware enough to stop bitching, surely I can remember people’s birthdays,
listen a little harder, absorb a little more, pay the speaker the full
attention they deserve and not off-load all of my tiny worries onto my friends?
So, I
would like to say:
Sorry
to all the friends I’ve let down, lost touch with and been a dick to. Sorry to
all the friends that came to me with problems and got an earful of mine
instead. Sorry to anyone I ever hurt with my thoughtless behaviour. I'm sorry.
Thank
you to the friends that have put up with and continue to put up with me, and
weirdly, still seem to like me. Thank you for infinite patience when I have worried and worried and worried incessantly about a trivial thing. Thank you for taking it as part of who I am and just accepting it. Thank you.
I
promise I’ll try and be a better friend.
Case Study: Why Carrie Bradshaw is a
Terrible Friend
Watching
the SATC boxset, over ten years after the final episode, I’ve realised
something. I am surprised when girls
say they are ‘a Carrie’, because Carrie is actually kind of a douche. And here’s
why:
1)She’s
always letting people down
The Bullshit Bagels: When
Miranda hurts her neck and calls Carrie for help, Carrie sends round her
boyfriend Aidan to help Miranda (who has thrown her neck out taking a shower,
and is thus lying naked on the bathroom floor.) Carrie then later goes round ‘to
apologise’ to Miranda for sending Aidan, but actually just wants an excuse to
bitch about Aidan. Aidan that went to pick her friend up off the floor, and
take her to hospital.
2)She’s
totally self –absorbed and selfish
‘Paper covers rock’: When Carrie is
dumped by Post-it, by a man she has been seeing about five minutes and is
having terrible sex with, she seems to think this is far more important than Charlotte’s making it up with her long
term boyfriend and getting engaged. Carrie slaps the aforementioned Post-It
note across Charlotte's engagement ring and says, ‘yeah? Well paper covers rock!’
Chemo: Samantha is having
chemo, so Carrie naturally thinks this is the perfect time to bang on about her
sexy new boyfriend.
Hotel: She makes Samantha take
a terrible sleeper train journey across the county. When they finally get to
their hotel, Samantha naturally wants to take a nice hot bath. No such luck,
Sam! Carrie wants to bang Big in the room. Off you fuck!
Talking about Samantha….Carrie
constantly slut shames her, even though Samantha remains completely judgement
free about Carrie’s questionable choices.
3)She
messes with people’s feelings
Aidan: I am not sure that
Carrie ever really liked furniture maker Aidan (until she couldn’t have him)
After all, you don’t tell someone that you’re mad keen on that you should ‘see
each other less so you can miss each other more,’ do you?
She cheats
on Aidan (with a married Mr Big) then decides she wants Aidan back (probably
because he’s lost weight, has cut his hair and has stopped wearing turquoise
rings and because Carrie has all the depth of a toilet bowl.)
She
invites a broken-hearted Big to come and stay at Aidan’s country house and then
is shocked when they have a fight.
She won’t
wear Aidan’s engagement ring on her finger, but on a chain around her neck, because 'it's closer to my heart this way,' (not because she doesn't actually want to marry Aidan and can't admit it.)
Natasha: Big’s wife, finds out
that Carrie is banging her husband when she catches her semi-naked in her
kitchen. Natasha chases Carrie (who does what all big girls do, and that’s run
away,) until Natasha slips on steps and knocks a tooth out.
When
Natasha refuses to take Carrie’s calls, Carrie stalks her to the restaurant
where she’s having lunch. She then gets annoyed that Natasha won’t forgive her.
I suspect that Carrie apologises not because she is genuinely sorry, but to
have the feelings of guilt lifted by being forgiven.
AND
THEN the only thing she has to say about the whole thing is that she is
responsible for Natasha being single again!
4)She’s a
bit of a bunny boiler
Carrie
has been seeing Big for about six months. She dumps him when he won’t say ‘you’re
the one,’ and then spends the next few weeks walking around crying and wearing
sun glasses because she’s soooo
heartbroken.
5)She
says she’s a writer but:
There
are no books in her house, you never see her read a book and she never talks
about books. Only Vogue.
6)She’s
just a dick
When she
gets annoyed with Charlotte for not immediately offering to bail her out of her
financial troubles; when Miranda gets pregnant and is trying to decide if she
should keep the baby or not, Carrie brings it back to the abortion she had 13
years ago; when she goes out until 4am and gets trashed the night before she has
a magazine photo shoot; when she bumps into Aidan with his new baby, all she
says is ‘I have a date!’; when Aidan bought her a new computer after hers
fucked up and she wasn’t grateful; when she invited Miranda on a double date
with Aidan and Steve and then told Miranda to go and take Steve with her as she wanted to be alone with Aidan….
Over
the course of the six season run of SATC, the three other women grow and
change. Carrie remains the same; selfish, self-absorbed and childish.
Back in
1998, I may have said I was most like Carrie. In 2016, I really, really, hope I’m
not. I hope I’ve grown. I hope I’ve changed.
After a terrible
night’s sleep (too hot, air-con not working properly, the world’s worst guard
dogs barking at absolutely nothing for HOURS) the motivation to work today is
zero. I got stuck in of those YouTube loops, where you start of looking for one
thing and 3 hours later you’re watching list videos and wishing you had
popcorn.
I watched a few
clips from British films. My days, they’re bleak, aren’t they? Gritty. Grey.
Violent. Council estates. Chips. Rain sodden bus stops. Lots of cigarettes. Where
are all those thatched cottages and village greens, red phone boxes and country
pubs? In American films about Britain, that’s where.
