Single White Female
March 26, 2010
It is a truth, universally acknowledged that a single man, in possession of good fortune, will lie when describing himself in the singles ads.
In fact, I think all these people are lying. I happened to glance through the singles ads in The Sunday Telegraph at work recently, not my copy, someone left one lying about.
I can’t believe that there are so many attractive single people about.
And wealthy.
Men seeking women, women seeking men, women seeking women, men seeking men, cats seeking dogs, the list is endless, but they all describe themselves as attractive.
And/or sexy.
And/or athletic.
And/or naturally blonde.
If they’re so damn gorgeous, why are they single?
I’m starting to think these ads are little like estate agents blurb, so where a spacious studio apartment is described, which actually turns out to be a garage, a naturally blonde, mature, athletic female, is actually a grey haired shot putter on hormone replacement therapy.
I myself am of course single. Not necessarily looking, but the thought does flit across my mind from time to time. I can’t reply to any of the gentlemen advertising, because they’re all seeking slim, attractive brunettes.
I could place my own, slightly dishonest advert, which would read something along the lines of:
Attractive plus size sexy lady, natural brunette, seeks Matthew Fox look-alike of ample means for fun, friendship, maybe more.
But that wouldn’t be truthful, and any gentleman responding to that would be doomed to disappointment. And I could probably be sued under the Trades Description Act.
I have however quite genuinely, drawn up an advert for the Telegraph, with the correct number of words and without telling any porky pies. I haven’t had the courage to actually submit it yet, but I will. I really will.
This will be submitted under the Women seeking Men section:
Fat and gone to seed 37 yr old fake redhead. Geekish tendencies, likes everything except jazz and fruit. Seeks male with pulse. Wilts.
No This Isn’t Beirut: I Always Live Like This…
March 1, 2010
Way, way back in July of 2008, 2 years after moving into my current house, after the inevitable collapse of my relationship, I posted about my propensity for living in organised chaos. That only a strict housekeeper, preferably of Eastern European descent, could tame my wild and lackadaisical ways, and keep things neat and tidy, in a manner to which I very much wanted to become accustomed.
This is a picture of my living room on the day I moved in:
10:47am Not even a stray cat hair fluttering across the floor...
And this a picture taken 5 minutes later:
10:52am I know I put the car keys down somewhere...
I know it’s subtle, but if you look really hard, there are a few differences between the pictures. Whose abandoned Pepsi can is that for one thing?
You leave one little piece of junk mail unattended whilst you turn your back and next thing you know you’re living in a war-torn wasteland strewn with remote controllers, random Christmas puddings and empty mobile phone boxes, and trying to make chicken curry in an empty shoebox and drinking your martini’s out of an old pickle jar.
I try to defend my right to live like a bag lady (mostly to my mother btw) by pointing out that even within chaos there is order, even if it is way down at a microscopic level…or probably quantum level in the case of my spare room. I stand by the maths, and I know where of I speak – I’ve read Jurassic Park more than 20 times.
You maybe forgiven at this juncture for thinking that I am given to hyperbole. Let me stretch out my right arm, whilst sat here typing on my laptop at the dining table, and tell you what I touch.
An almost empty plastic bottle, half a roll of Christmas wrapping paper, a small book about Champagne, a Lidl flyer, an asthma inhaler, a DVD box set of The X-Files season four and an empty mobile phone box.
And I barely had to stretch for that.
I should be embarrassed. I am embarrassed. I have friends coming around tomorrow afternoon (early tomorrow afternoon), which means, having just finished my night shift, I have to put my bone-bastard-idle arse into gear and tidy.
Cleaning is easy. I can keep things clean. A long micro-fibre duster, a bottle of Flash, a squirt of bleach and a lot of hot water (having wood floors can be a blessing).
I just can’t pick up after myself. Somehow I struggle with the simple task of putting things away.
If this column eventually lies idle for more than 12 months, someone should probably call the emergency services, it’s likely I will have been buried in a landslide of books, magazines and Star Trek memorabilia.
Magda, wo sind sie?
I’m starting to wonder if I might have criminal potential as a serial arsonist. I’m quite fond of the US television show, Criminal Minds, which for those of you not in the know if about the Behavioural Analysis unit of the Eff Bee Eye. One of things the things seem to look for, when checking the histories of potential serial arsonist/serial killer profiles, are series of small unexplained fires occurring around the alleged offender, and recently I seem to have been at the scene of several.
There was the candle on the sideboard, which somehow inadvertently shifted position and ended up directly underneath the wooden blind, which of course began to heat up and smoke. Thanks to a swift intervention disaster was averted.
Which also leads to wonder if I have a hero complex well…
Then there was the car…’hmm this engine smells hot…’
‘hmm there’s a warning light on the dashboard…’
‘hmm there’s smoke from coming under the bonnet…’
‘argh! Flames!’
That didn’t end well, hence why I no longer drive a Toyota.
And then there was the shower incident.
‘Gosh’ I thought, ‘This shower is getting very steamy’ as I lathered my hair, and then turned around to be greeted by smoke and melting plastic emanating from my electric shower.
A ruined shower was by no means the worst that that day had to throw at me. In order to finish my ablutions, I drew a bath and tried to lower myself gently into it.
It was like trying to stuff a haggis into a loaf tin. It was never going to end well. A tsunami swelled at both ends of the tub and cascaded over the sides.
Still, I rinsed my hair and threw down a few towels.
I then dried my hair, pulled on a shirt and headed downstairs. Yeah, funny thing about water how it can trickle downwards and all that.
I hit the third step from the bottom, which was wet, and did a dramatic somersault and landed face down in a puddle with my left ar twisted out at a mosst unusual angle whilst chunks of artex from the ceiling landed on my head.
Fires, floods…I’m just waiting for plagues and famines next…
Of all the men in all the world…I’ve never had one from Swindon…
January 22, 2010
”Your Heathcliff quality cannot be found
In places where I’ve looked around,
Like Swindon.”
~Excerpt from ‘To Her Coy Master’ by Carole Bound 1972
There are no James May’s in Swindon. I found one similar (sans shaggy long hair) a couple of years ago from Reading (or was it Cheltenham?). Long before I knew who James May was but when I was well into my middle-aged men period. Sadly he had the personality of a piece of MDF and was about as interesting. Looks indeed are not everything, but he did wear a jumper well.
There are no Matthew Fox’s in Swindon either for that matter. There are plenty of urban foxes, but I’ve yet to meet a native Swindoo male who uses moisturiser simply because he’s ‘worth it’. Or who cultivates the fine art of facial hair so that it doesn’t just look unshaven and rough but manages to achieve just the right level of sexy*.
*for further studies see also Holloway, Josh
Maybe my standards are just set too high, after all if all the men out there are looking for Angelina Jolie or Scarlett Johansson, I’m screwed since I have more of a Dawn French thing going on. I’ve dated plenty of men and boys in my 36 years…but it just dawned on me today, that I’ve never dated a man from Swindon. Lived in Swindon? Yes. But Swindon born and bred? Never.
What is wrong with Swindon men?
“I can’t read and I can’t write
But that don’t even matter
Coz I comes from Wiltshire
And I can drives a tractor”
~Local proverb circa 1975 best spoken with a thick West Country accent
I was born in 1972 in the Princess Margaret Hospital in Swindon (don’t go looking for it, they’ve pulled it down*), but I was raised in a small town west of Swindon called Wootton Bassett by parents who had emigrated from even further south, Cornwall. Therefore whilst I fulfil the criteria for a Swindonian from the circumstances of my birth, one is not a native Swindoo, by virtue of not having generations of relatives in Swindon and never having lived there for the first 20 years of my life.
Of course the fact that you can stand on the Wootton Bassett side of the M4 motorway junction 16 and lob a tennis ball across it quite easily and have it land in Swindon on the opposite side is neither here nor there. As long as the junction remains, Wootton Bassett will never be a part of Swindon.
Thus my exposure to the Swindon male was exceedingly limited until I turned 16. Although I was to deny myself the opportunity to investigate these strange and mysterious creatures close up in their native habitat by opting to stay at my comprehensive school’s sixth form (don’t go looking for it, they’ve pulled it down*) to complete my A levels rather than go with several friends to Swindon College. A move I was to regret much later in life when I attended the Regent’s Circus College (don’t go looking for it, they’re going to pull it down*) as a mature student.
Once I reached the 6th form I was to begin my dating adventures in earnest. But not one boy that I was to date hailed from Swindon. A couple of them lived in Swindon (a place as exotic to me as Kazakhstan) and many forays were made into ‘town’ to the night clubs or to hang out at Steve’s comic book shop above Harry’s video shack. But the ones I dated who lived in Swindon came from distant places like Oxford and Dundee.
Somehow, during my formative years, I never met a Swindoo male who asked me out on a date. I lived in the country and they were in the town and n’er the twain should meet. Plus I had an instinctive hatred of nightclubs.
I have always hated dancing (from the years of forced ballroom dancing to the clinging slow dances of my early adulthood) and believe Mr Darcy said it best when he claimed that “every savage can dance”.
Plus one tended to stick to the floors of the nightclubs (of which there were three – Brunel Rooms, Hardings and Level 3. The names have changed over the years but the floors still haven’t been cleaned apparently). And the drinks were over priced, the music loud and the women paraded and the men trawled as if it were a cattle market.
Wootton Bassett had a night club, called Charlies, which was over the shopping arcade (200 yards of bakers, cobblers and haberdasheries). Charlies was a room of approximately twenty square feet. I went there once. I didn’t dance. And I didn’t pull.
Then there was the year of self-imposed exile where I went to live in Bath (and didn’t date at all) to be followed by the bright lights of the Wiltshire Constabulary (Swindon Central to be precise, although don’t go looking for it, they’ve pulled it down*) beckoning to me.
I was young, I was fit, and I had hair down to my bum. I was fending off the advances with an exemplary knowledge of Star Trek: The Next Generation and a two-tone Austin Metro, enough to disturb even the most persistent of admirers.
Still, nights out with the girls (and the boys) were spent in the desperate nightclubs of Swindon. I remember one night chatting with a really cute guy, short dark hair, and blue eyes. And I thought, finally, a Swindoo male I am attracted to. And then he told me to come by the McDonalds drive-thru anytime and he’d give me a free burger.
I was never going to meet my ideal mate at a nightclub in Swindon (or anywhere else for that matter), so I stopped going.
From that point on I exclusively dated police officers (from varying departments and of various ranks). Not one of them had been born in Swindon. And they all, in one way or another, turned out to be bastards of the highest order.
I really wanted to just find a nice local guy but now I was in a position to clearly see what nature had brought forth with her native sons.
Bad hygiene, bad posture, bad teeth, and a serious lack of brain matter. I once remember a lad trying to chat me up by proudly exclaiming that he had ‘only ever read one book’ and it was ‘quite good. A bit like a film with words.’
But the voice, the voice was the most annoying thing…every statement was followed with the word ‘right’.
“You listening to me, right?”
“Do you want a drink, right?”
All in a light west country accent that invariably meant dropped h’s, t’s and a yokel twang redolent of those native to Bristol (yes I know James May is from Bristol but he no more has a Bristol accent, than I have a Swindon one).
And then my days of dating were no more. I settled down in Swindon itself with the man who was to be my partner for 12 years. He came from Oxford. I moved to the West Swindon Police Station (don’t go looking for it, they’ve pulled it down*) and decided to go back to college part time as a mature student to do A levels in film and media studies.
At last, complete exposure to the boys I had missed out on in my youth. There was I, an early thirty something, in a classroom of 17 and 18 year olds. Fabulous. Here were boys who knew how to moisturise, what hair product was for and had gleaming white smiles even Richard Hammond would be envious of.
As I got to know them, I was to learn that these Greek beauties (as Oscar Wilde would have considered them) were not native to the town that was now my home. In fact the ‘local’ students, and there were two of them (this was a very small class) had distinct body odours and wore anoraks with a fur trim, a style which I had not seen since the late seventies.
Time had not improved the Swindoo male. Two generations on and the town was still producing either Adrian Mole or lager swilling football hooligans.
Circa 2005 I was suddenly single again. Rather stupidly I rushed into dating at the earliest opportunity and had two very unsuccessful dates, which included Mr MDF from Cheltenham (through a dating agency *hangs head in shame*) and a friend of a friend from somewhere exotic like Chichester.
Both were disasters. I wasn’t interested and they were duller than the toes of my work shoes. I had to accept that the single life was the way forward.
So is there a conclusion that can be reached from this self-indulgent and overly dramatic rendition of my dating days?
Should it be that I should give Swindon men a chance? That having dated from a gene pool that covers the length of Britain, I should be looking closer to home?
I’ve skimmed the dating sites, I’ve looked at the police profiles, I’ve even eyed a barista or two in Starbucks, but invariably the native Swindon son is found wanting. Right?
Wrong. I am not afraid to put my hand up and admit that clearly the fault lies with me. An exemplary knowledge of Star Trek, a legacy of crappy cars and an arse that clearly indicated (even at my thinnest) that it was only a matter of years before it would begin spreading.
There are great guys in Swindon, heck I’m certain there are great guys in virtually every town. If we haven’t found one girls, it’s probably because they’re smart enough to avoid us!
*One wonders where they will put my memorial plaque in 2172a.d
Alone In A Godless Universe And Out Of Viognier
January 10, 2010
So it’s been a while. No excuses, no apologies…I come at you this new year with a new attitude and outlook. No more false starts and promises. When it happens, I will blog it, when it doesn’t, I will make it up.
Having been bed-ridden and snow-bound for best part of week it’s nice to finally come at the day feeling alive and revitalised. No more hacking cough and watching a lung bungee up from the depths of my chest to twack the cat on the nose and dive back down again. Hands down the best thing about living in a mid-terrace when you’re sick is being able to keep all the neighbours awake at night. That’s payback for all those 3 o’clock in the morning domestics you keep having.
I wouldn’t mind having been ill except for the fact that I had two flu jabs this year and I still ended up flat on my back in a fevered ennui thinking that the cat was Donald Duck and viewing everything in shades of blue and yellow.
Anyway the fever broke and I ventured outside yesterday for the first time in a week. After brushing the snow from my car, where some wag had amusingly attempted to carve the word “TIT” across my windscreen in the ice (do they teach children nothing these days? You pee on snow if you want to leave a message surely?) I sallied forth across the crunching ice to the local supermarket for a few supplies.
At this point I will mention that having climbed from the death bed I discovered that my internet connection had died and was therefore cut off from such essential suppliers as wine merchants and delivered groceries, otherwise I would’ve burrowed back into my duvet like a tick in a bear’s ear and you wouldn’t seen me again until April.
I digress.
On arriving at aforementioned supermarche I discovered that I had inadvertently travelled back through time and space and was trying to shop in cold war Russia.
Carole makes another inspired purchase from the Sainsburys "Be Good To Yourself Because No Other Bugger Gives A Shit" range.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I had to beat an old woman and a cute gay couple to death with my recycled carrier bag in order to aquire the last 2l bottle of Cravendale semi.
I worry that should the weather get any worse I may have to fall back on Ray Mears survival skills and fashion a casserole made from my £3 artificial Asda Christmas tree, some silk flowers and roasted haunch of Siamese.
I may have inadvertently shut Lily outside in the snow for a little too long...
A Siamese who, I should point out, has scarcely poked her nose out of the door in the past fortnight and instead spends her day pressed firmly up against the bedroom radiator, the heat from which wafts the occasional furry fart out into the room and thereon unto the rest of the house. A delightfully beefy bouquet replacing my cinnamon scented candles. Mmm piquant!
I am firmly of the opinion today that the snow has done it’s worst, that I shall soon be able to dig out my recycling box and walk down my garden path without breaking my neck.
Of course this will not stop me from following the sound advice often given to motorists at this time of year, therefore stop me in my motor vehicle at anytime and you will find me armed with torch, blanket and flask of soup…gazpacho anyone?
“It’s a large black cat which roams the cemetery at night and in the early hours. It is the Loch Ness monster of Swindon. People have seen it, glimpsed it through the cemetery trees but nobody can say it definitely exists. It has never been outside of the cemetery. Perhaps it is a ghost; perhaps it is a Swindon Hound of the Baskervilles.
I don’t know the history of the cemetery but perhaps it is built on the sight of an old gallows and the big cat is in fact a panther which was brought to England by an Indian Prince who came in search of the family diamond. The diamond had been stolen by a group of British army deserters and the Prince had come to avenge the theft…
He tracked down each of the deserters in turn and then set the panther on each of them, resulting in horribly grisly deaths. The prince was eventually tracked down and hanged on the site of the current cemetery…
Nobody knew what became of the panther…”
~ My colleague Jim, on the subject of the Clifton Street Cemetery cat
I always thought it would monumentally cool to live in a haunted house. Not that I have ever really believed in ghosts. I’ve only ever really had one experience (two incidents, one location, on consecutive nights) that I can’t explain and that took place in a converted barn in the darkest depths of Devon when I was 16.
My ex-partner tells me his house is haunted. He even had a medium visit who told him one of the ‘spirits’ intended harm towards him and she apparently moved it towards the light, and that the other is benign and means no harm. His resident ghost walks around on the landing, opens doors and generally acts as one would expect from a household spectre.
I have another friend who lives in a 200 year old cottage. That’s haunted too. Opening doors are a theme here too. I’m almost jealous. Well actually I am jealous. I have to admit, somewhat reluctantly, that I too have ghost. But whereas my friends have traditional type spectres, I apparently have someone else’s dead cat.
Ghost cat, as he is known, jumps heavily on the bed and walks around while I, assuming it’s one of my own cats, reach out to stroke them and complain that they’re putting on weight, only to find myself groping into thin air. I will hear one of my cats walking down the stairs, the tell-tale tip tap of their claws on my wooden stairs giving them away, and glance over to speak to them, only to discover that they’re sound asleep up on the bed and ghost cat is on the march.
Lily and Beanie will be curled up with me in the living room and we will hear, from the kitchen, the sound of things on the kitchen bench being moved, or even knocked off, as if a cat has jumped up there and pushed them off with its hairy butt. About two weeks ago all three of us were startled by the sound of the microwave rice cooker crashing to floor from its position in the middle of the kitchen counter.
My sister has heard ghost cat jumping off the bed and tramping heavily across the landing. Friends have heard the tip tap on the stairs and a few weeks ago ghost cat performed his first truly spectral spectacular…he opened a closed door. Handle turned, door fully opened and everything. I only keep one internal door in my house closed, and it’s never opened of its own free will before. Sadly only I witnessed this phenomena and the fact that I was well into my second glass of Viognier will probably count against my credibility as a witness.
Ghost cat is however the most annoying ghost in the world. He stays quiet for days on end and then, in a phantom frenzy, he starts acting up. Noises in the kitchen, continuous tapping down the stairs, and there was one particular afternoon when I was trying to take a nap before starting a night shift, when he repeatedly kept marching up and down the side of the bed.
It wasn’t like I could trace the sound to any other source. It was there, at the side of the bed, and every single time I heard it, I thought it was Beanie coming to say hello and so put my hand down for her to give it a cursory sniff and then rub her snotty little Beanie bogies all over my finger.
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
Funny then that I still claim not to believe in ghosts, after all even in my own house, where’s the proof? How do I capture evidence of something that’s not even tangible? My own, very much of the living cats are completely oblivious to ghost cat’s presence. Even the other afternoon, when I was on the sofa with one cat next to me and the other in the chair, they didn’t so much as lift their heads as my television viewing was continuously interrupted by a rustling sound.
I would hear a rustle, lower the sound on the TV and the rustle would stop. This went on for 20 minutes until I realised that the rustling was coming from a carrier bag containing a cushion on the stairs. I told ghost cat to “Shut the **** up” and up he did indeed up shut.
So how do I get rid of my unwanted guest? Someone suggested an exorcism but last I heard cats don’t believe in God, or Catholicism or even pretend to understand words much past “no” and “prawns” or is that just my cats?
I’m guessing an Ouija board is right out.
And besides, how do you tell a ghost cat to go towards the light? Surely I require a deceased person on the ‘other side’ with a can of tuna and calling “Here kitty kitty.”
And by now you’re all thinking, well what does this have to do with the tale of the Clifton Street Cemetery Cat, well the answer is absolutely nothing, except for the fact that I’d like to think that maybe ghost cat has a similar colourful history.
And seriously, if anyone does know how to get rid of a ghost cat, please let me know.
Oh and no, this isn’t another April fool. I’m a regular fool, it just happens to be April.
“If I could work my will.” Said Scrooge, indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly though his heart. He should!”
~A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
It’s fashionable, lets be honest, to be all bah humbuggy at this time of year. It’s trendy to be grumpy and cross about the Christmas festivities, after all everybody loves a Scrooge. We all like to chuckle at the office miser who grumbles into his beard about queues and fairy lights and how it’s all so commercial. We accept and applaud the people who don’t want to pollute the environment by sending Christmas cards, and instead buy a three-legged goat for some poor people in Rotherham that they’ve never met.
Well sorry to buck the trend.
I love Christmas.
I do. And no, I’m not a practising Christian, or any religion of note. And I’m not going to try and covert you Ebenezer thinkers by droning piously on about Pagan Yuletide and the winter solstice. I’m not going to drag religion into it at all.
I’m celebrating the end of the year and the fantasticness of the season that is winter. With it’s dark evenings and foggy frozen nights. The persistent salt-laden spray, that is kicked up from the road and clings resolutely to your windscreen. A season of flu jabs and runny noses and harassed shoppers wrapped up like Eskimos as they race from shop to shop, buying up mince pies, pieces of gammon and huge truckles of Stilton for fear that the shops will run dry and they will be left stranded over the brief holiday season with nary a clove-studded Satsuma to cleave unto.
I love sparkling fairy lights and cold noses. I like seeing my friends and family over the holidays and giving them stuff. Stuff they want, stuff they don’t. All of it wrapped and ribboned to within an inch of its life. I spend all year looking forward to my Christmas dinner and listening to my father say “Turkey? How fowl.” five times before someone acknowledges his witty epithet. I salivate at the thought of sprouts that have been boiling on the hob since August and look forward to liberally lacing the bread sauce, the gravy, in fact anything that’s in a serving bowl or dish, with alcohol.
Yule regret putting your spouts on in August
I dream of shovelling nuts into my face like a starving squirrel and knocking back the Croft Original whilst my mother says “Could you at least try sipping the next one.” I embrace the reading of the cracker jokes with gusto, usually replacing it with an inappropriate or, worse still, an even less funny joke of my own devising, par example, what’s green and sings?*
I like curling up in an armchair and watching the Dr Who Christmas special, whilst scoffing Christmas pudding or sherry trifle piled high with cream that is liberally laced with, yes you guessed it, more alcohol. I giggle, not unlike someone who is slightly tipsy, when I hear the distinctive rustle of the tin foil as one of the family cats launches a stealth attack on the turkey carcass. And I whole-heartedly embrace the ritual of helping my mother wash the dishes after dinner, singing carols and waiting for the moment when father emerges from his post-dinner nap muttering “I was going to help your mother with those.” Thirty-six years Dad, and I’m still drying the Christmas dinner dishes.
And yes, I’m not going to deny it, I like getting presents. I still believe in Father Christmas. He fills my stocking every year and eats the mince pie and drinks the glass of milk that’s been left out. I’ve sent him my letter with this year’s list of demands requests and I’m optimistic that this will be year I get the Lamborghini Gallardo and Matthew Fox, draped in ribbons and carefully placed under a tree that looks like Christmas threw up on it.
If I don’t, I’m happy to settle for the second best thing any girl could get from Father Christmas…his list of the boys who were naughty.
*Elvis Parsley
OUTBREAK 2: THE WILTSHIRE PANDEMIC
December 16, 2008
“Coughs and sneezes spread diseases:
Catch them in your handkerchief.”
This week’s epistle was originally to be the wittily entitled “When Good Fruit Goes Bad” however such is the state of the nation that I feel the need to discuss a different, but no less prevalent, menace.
For the past two weeks my place of work has become a Hot Zone. From the hacking cough of the terminally bubonic to the body fluid expulsions of the Ebola-addled, it’s been like working at the bottom of the plague pit, only less sanitary.
What started out as a simple cold has mutated into leprosy for my colleague Jim. We car share for our journey to work, but every day I find myself checking my vehicle for any appendages that he may have inadvertently dropped after I’ve taken another tight corner too fast.
Jim says the antibiotics aren't working
Ed’s flu virus has developed into a low sexy throaty growl, matched only by Barry White and Bluto, and the rest of my colleagues have been carried off in stain-resistant body bags to the local pyres.
After one shift of working at germ central, I quickly realised that my surgical mask would not offer adequate protection against the pox that was being circulated by the building’s air-conditioning and switched to a HAZMAT suit.
I am a delicate creature. Much like a thorough-bred race horse, so much as a glimpse of a snotty nose and I collapse in a feverish wheezing heap, doomed to die slowly in front of endless Top Gear repeats on Dave, weighed down by blankets and cats and choking noisily on my own mucus.
Which is a shame really, considering that I always had a more romantic death knell in mind.
Formed from years of watching black and white movies, I imagine myself in sepia tones, lying in a consumptive fever on a chaise longe and delicately coughing spots of blood into a lace hankie. And all the while a handsome man with a pencil moustache stands over me begging “Don’t die darling, darling don’t die.” In wonderfully clipped posh English tones.
Apparently though, no one in the United Kingdom dies of consumption anymore, or bubonic plague, or even leprosy. And yet all these antiquated diseases are to be found within the walls of my place of employment.
I sit surrounded by people who look like Norman Bates’ mother, and whose efforts to clear the crackling catarrh from their asthmatic chests sound like heavy goods vehicles shifting down a gear whilst stuck in the traffic outside.
Unfortunately the author of this column was unable to finish this piece after tragically choking to death whilst sucking on a preventative strawberry-flavour Strepsil.
Celebrity Cat Crushes
November 12, 2008
Don’t be fooled by the title. I don’t have a celebrity cat. Neither does a celebrity have a crush on my cat. Well not that I know about. What I do have is a cat with a celebrity crush.
Actually I have two. Cats with crushes on celebs that is.
I wonder if this is something that they’ve inherited from me. That the constantly changing pictures on the refrigerator door and calendars adorning the kitchen wall have given them some kind of notion to follow me in my admiration of numerous famous masculine forms.
Beanie was the first. When she was young she had a thing for Geraldo Rivera. I think it was the facial hair. And bless her she’s always been a bit short-sighted and, well, we’ve always considered Beanie to be a bit touched, in the nicest possible way.
I suspect she just thought he was a very big tom cat with nice long whiskers. When Geraldo was on (not that I was going through a faze of watching bad day time American talk shows or anything at the time) she would sit on the couch and gaze at the TV.
Of course she could’ve just been gazing into space, but it seemed a little too coincidental. And there was purring.
My stint of watching such shows did not last long and Beanie retreated back under the radiator behind the curtains, her Geraldo moment all but forgotten.
Lily likes Lost. Actually I think she likes Sawyer which is something of a contentious point between us since I am decidedly on Team Jack. Hell I’ll be on any team Matthew Fox is on.
The Josh Holloway thing started with the Davidoff advertisement I think, and grew from there. It became particularly annoying when she would gaze smugly at me with those slightly crossed blue eyes whenever Matthew Fox would appear for L’Oreal, telling us how he was worth it.
“Look at Josh,” her loud vocalisations seemed to say “He strips off his clothes and dives into cold water. Your man moisturises.”
I think, once again, it comes down to the hair. Or possibly the sarcasm. Lily is the kind of cat that would find Sawyer’s witticisms amusing.
I have been worried of late however, since Lost has been off the air, that both of my girls have acquired a new and some what questionable taste. I can only put it like this: Jeremy Clarkson has a peculiar affect on my pussies.
I don’t know if it’s the curly hair, the middle-aged paunch, or the constant blue jeans. Whether it’s the pathological hatred of anyone not British, the shouting or just the sheer fact he is a colossus. There is something about him that Lily and Beanie find fascinating.
All I know is, when I’m trying to watch Top Gear, there’s usually a cat butt or two waving in the direction of the TV screen: tails up, purrs at high revs and a worrying number of un-neutered tom cats lining up on the back fence.
