my heart is an ashtray

This entry will mainly be about Wimbledon but I will pause to briefly mention a few noteworthy events of this week:

i) Went on mouse-hunt with brave Australian housemate in bedroom. No sign of mouse was found. Much discussion that it may have been a figment of my imagination. I refuse to believe this and am continuing to live in the lounge. 

ii) Two new housemates have been acquired and will be moving in shortly. Both male, so have high hopes that they will take over Kalon's spider-capturing-and-releasing-into-the-wild-duties. Also, one of them has best friend with highly attractive hair.

iii) VICTORY!, of course, in the pub quiz on Wednesday. Our team name is now officially "Paging Dr. Freud", due to the fact that two of our (female) team had dreams about having penises in the past seven days, while the third of our members (male) dreamed that his had dropped off. In case this should mislead any of you into over-estimating my general knowledge, I present a few specimen questions for your edification at the bottom of the page. If any of you want to attempt to answer them without cheating by using Wiki or whatever, I shall be delighted to provide you with the answers.

              a) Name the four vultures from Disney's The Jungle Book
              b) Identify the most southerly point in Cornwall
              c) In which seaside town did Dracula start his depredations in England, in Bram Stoker's novel?
              d) TRUE OR FALSE: Slugs have no noses
              e) TRUE OR FALSE: Most Eskimoes have fridges
              f) In which Charles Dickens novel would you find a character named "Magwich"?
              g) Which famous historical figure opened the 1936 Olympic games?

Now tell me: how hard is it to win a pub quiz where they ask questions like this?! CLUE: I know nothing about anything.

iv) The post-victory lock-in was duly attended. Much Stella and Drambuie was drunk. Much sexy dancing with pool cues was attempted. I now have someone's keys in my handbag, not mine, no idea whose, no idea how they got there. I am somewhat worried they might be the keys to the pub. I hope they have spares ...

v) This bomb in Haymarket. I'm a little shaken - I used to walk down that street every day. I wish London felt safer right now. But then, we've been bombed by the Germans, bombed by the IRA, bombed by religious fundamentalists, and we're all still here. You can't kill the Cockney spirit.

vi) Yesterday I spilled a cup of Chinese tea on the mayor of Chongqing.

vii) I cracked and joined Facebook.

I'm kind of bored with life right now ...

EDIT: Tipsarevic clearly went to Durmstrang ...

 

Yo. Back from Cornwall. Mouse in bedroom. Recurring nightmares involving gallons of blood and/or spunk. Details to follow.

Observe, not so much why David Mitchell is amazing, as David Mitchell's amazingness in action: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20070624a1.html

This entry is centre-formatted because I felt like it.

I had weird dreams last night, and in every single one of them, someone ended up getting stabbed or unexpectedly impaled by a sharp object of some description, a la Wash or Sao Feng. What does this mean?

I was chatting with M just now while eating a box of home-grown cherries (not grown by me, I hasten to add - I grow nothing except for the occasional interesting crop of mould in a coffee mug) and she was getting, as usual, frustrated by my nihilism, and challenged me to make a list of things that I'm glad I've been alive to experience and things I'd rather never have existed than have had to go through. (Awful, awful syntax.) 

I started thinking about this while buying cigarettes, and it soon became clear that almost everything on the Reasons To Live list was a book or a film or a song or a painting, while almost everything on the Reasons To Have Never Been Born list was an incident or experience from my actual, you know, life (with the exceptions of Battlefield Earth and American Pie). 

The interesting question here is do they cancel each other out? Like, was it worth being the first girl at my school to need to wear a bra, because in later life I got to read Hocus Pocus? How about publicly throwing up in Belfast airport because I had food poisoning and then bursting into tears, is that OK now because of Jude? Does XO or Fevers and Mirrors balance out my awful first kiss or the way I lost my virginity? Does art redeem life? 

I'm supposed to have left by now and I haven't even packed. I so don't want to go. I want to stay in bed. What's so good about Cornwall anyway? It's just pretty scenery and inbreds, isn't it? 

But on the plus side, a whole week with no access to the internet. The hell with lj! I'm gonna live!

Victory! Three weeks in a row now. We are the champions. Well, mainly me. 

Then we celebrated with a lock-in. I have not been that drunk in so, so long. It might have been mixing whiskey with wine. It might have been drinking on top of having a stinking head cold. It might even have been those twenty old Prozac capsules I found in my room and took in an attempt to kick start my serotonin reuptake or whatever. But whatever it was, it was fantastic, and now I can't walk.

I have concluded that the secret to a pub quiz is not knowledge possessed but rather knowledge inferred. For example, the location of Mecca? Worked it out by remembering an episode of West Wing. How many presidents carved on Mount Rushmore? Simpsons. The only U.S. president ever photographed wearing a Nazi uniform? Logical thought. Number of property squares on a Monopoly board? Just visualised my Lord of the Rings board. You get the idea.

I have been listening to "Fond Farewell" all day. I love it when you suddenly rediscover or remember something you love and have forgotten about. I haven't listened to From a Basement on the Hill in forever, but on the bus this morning, "Fond Farewell" suddenly sprung into my head out of nowhere. So ... so .... good.

This is not my life, it's not what I'm like, it's just a fond farewell to a friend.

I think I'm getting the flu. Self-pity to inevitably follow.

Went home. Saw the doctor. Got Prozac. 

To balance out the unusual and disconcerting sense of having taken a step to improve my life, I went to the hairdresser's and had my hair dyed the colour of insanity.

"It'll fade," said the hairdresser comfortingly as he took all my money.

I have that beaten-up-underwater feeling that is the sign of a good weekend.

Friday night: met Cath for some G&Ts, and then her new niece was born while we were in the pub! Abigail Jane, which I think is a lovely name, and in the picture she just looked ... really, really pissed off in that great way that babies can. It was awesome. Watched PotC 3, which managed to be wonderful and terrible, and at times very much like an action comedy version of Un Chien Andalou. Then much blues and gin. I love Soho in summer.

Saturday I spent loafing around in my pyjamas, troubled by an inexplicable and overwhelming sorrow, until it was time to leave for Liz's premiere of her new composition ... WHICH I MISSED. Not only was the Bank branch of the Northern line out as per this summer, but the District and Circle line and sections of the DLR were entirely not running at all. So I cried on the street for a bit after realising I wasn't going to make it, then pulled myself together and had some gin in this totally random Wapping pub. Liz forgave me, being the angel that she is, and we had more gin. 

Walked to Angel to meet Liza et al - had some vodka-and-limes - and then went to the cheesiest club night I have ever encountered. We are talking Chesney Hawkes, Madonna, the Locomotion, Girls Aloud .... I don't know what we were thinking. But it was the guiltiest of guilty pleasures and once there were shots of tequila and pints of snakebite (are we ever going to grow up?) thrown in, it was, really, quite fun, although I think I pulled a jive muscle or two.
 
Slept in Shoreditch and then realised I was supposed to be up in Norbury for my dad's tree-felling party, from which I have just returned. We chopped down five trees and then burnt them all in this massive fucking bonfire, it was awesome. 

My dad and I were chatting after all Claire's kids  / kids-in-law / grandkids had gone - there was some discussion of the fact that my brother hadn't turned up - and Dad suddenly said, "I'm very envious of Claire, having the children that she does". 

I was just ... gobsmacked. Is that not an incredibly insensitive thing to say to your daughter? What was I supposed to do - apologise for existing? 

Plus, Claire's kids might be good at turning up, at having jobs and houses and forming perfect little nuclear Christian families ... but they are so frickin' boring, it's unbelievable. I've never known any of them to have an interesting conversation. Not even an interesting remark. There is just no banter there. So we're a bit off the wall. What's so wrong with that? Jess does a good impression of being normal, but she's got an uncompromising streak of ruthlessness that I love. Tom might be incredibly unreliable, but he's adorable, and funny, and sweet as pie to me whenever I do see him. And I may have turned up late, hungover, and only because I wanted to get my copy of Foucault's Pendulum back, but I had some bloody good stories from the night before, and some actual conversation of significance.

The point is ... 

... I'd rather be troubled and unusual than utterly bland.

I'd rather be like myself than like those people who are like everyone else.

I enjoy the fact that my siblings and I have aspects to us that are utterly fucking nuts.

Not a bad feeling to have, I suppose.   

First things first - memeage ...

Leave a comment and I'll assign you a letter. You are to list your ten favourite songs that begin with that letter in your journal.

G. went mad with power and gave me "P". (They are not ranked in order of preference, because I'm not anal.)

1. Pitseleh - Elliott Smith
2. Pyramid Song - Radiohead
3. Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want - The Smiths
4. Poses - Rufus Wainwright
5. Pavlov's Bell - Aimee Mann
6. Padraic My Prince - Bright Eyes
7. People Ain't No Good - Nick Cave
8. Phantom Punch - Sondre Lerche
9. Plants and Rags - P J Harvey
10. Pure Morning - Placebo

The old angsty standards, I'm afraid.

I am crankiness personified today. I woke up with a headache, I was late for work, I left my phone buried somewhere in my bed ... Having one of those days where you feel like you might scratch all your skin off if you don't get distracted from your own bad mood.

But hey, it's Friday! Cue Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (potentially), blues (certainly), and gin (most definitely).

Last night I discovered Arrested Development. This is significant. I think I might be in love with Jason Bateman.

And a belated happy birthday to Jason Isaacs! (http://filmexperience.blogspot.com/2007/06/hump-day-hottie-jason-isaacs.html). Loved you as Lucius, hot for you as Hook, was mildly annoyed by your performance in the West Wing, sort of wished you didn't do The State Within because you were upstaged by Ben Daniels (that man can generate sizzling sexual tension with inanimate objects, for god's sake) ... but whatever. You will always be on my Top Ten. Happy birthday.

Victory once again in the Paxton Arms, this time over the reigning pub-quiz champion. It's not just an anomaly now. It's a fucking streak.

I enjoyed this one particularly as victory depended upon my knowledge of the answers to some particularly geeky questions, such as Charles de Gaulle's last words ("It hurts"), the last James Bond movie to star Roger Moore (A View To a Kill), and the identity of the person who had a hit in 1984 with "99 Red Balloons" (thank you, inhabitants of Granby Gardens). 

Afterwards, TK & I argued with Jamie about whether our skills would translate into copywriting and I coined my first slogan: "Tampax - put something inside you that actually serves a useful purpose."

I should do this for a living.

I was also informed that the word "plinth" is apparently one of the sexiest words in the English language. I'm fairly sure this isn't so. Tell me I'm wrong?

Happy birthday, biggster. 

You are my sunshine.

Even if you do have a stupid username.

Walking up Whitehall into Parliament Square this morning, who should walk past me but David Cameron.

Man wears a lot of makeup.

As requested, my 10 Books That Changed My Life again with reasons. This is kind of tricky as I was rather drunk when I made these selections (not on creme de menthe, unfortunately). But there must have been a reason why I said them, and every one is valid.


On another note, summer can fuck off.

Oh, and this cracked me up something rotten (http://www.bruce-campbell.com/blogs/advice/questionnaire-hollywood.htm). Didn't Bruce Campbell used to be on Xena back in the day ...? By 'the day', I mean a day I watched Xena on, c. 1997.

And please for the love of god would someone tell me how to do a link properly so you don't see the whole bloody thing? I've read the faq thing like a million times and I still don't get it. I understand all the words individually, but put them together and it makes no sense. I'm technologically incompetent. HELP ME. 

There came a thunderous knocking on my door a mere matter of minutes before. It was a member of the Metropolitan Police, looking for two Danish fugitives from justice with names like Abba members who apparently live at this address.

I am simultaneously amused and a little bit frightened. The thing is, it does seem entirely too plausible that there are two Danish criminals living in this house with me being completely oblivious.

Maybe in the understairs cupboard with the weird smell. We never look in there.

Or maybe in the walls ...  

... I to my friends, I to my own heart, to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken, I to whom there is not enough beauty in moon or tree, to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely."

That might be wrong. I'm pretty drunk.

GIN. God, I've missed you. Let's never fight again. I mean, yes, you are a fairweather friend; apt when we go out together to leave me face-down and crying on the pavement, prone to causing me to light the filter ends of cigarettes in front of large groups of people, and occasionally egging me on to engage in tenacious argument on subjects I know little or nothing about. And it's true that, when I find myself somewhat financially embarrassed and unable to provide the lavish funds you seem to feel necessary in order to spend time with me, you will abandon me for months at a time. But we always seem to end up coming back together, and when we do, it's like we've never been apart. You make me feel so good. Just don't abandon me again, you blue-bottled tart.

My day went like this: woke up at 12 > Bedford Arms > Clarence > mojitos at Firefly > Holy Drinker > TK's flat > singing to myself on the bus > home

A stray comment from Andy made me resurrect the long-dead 'name 10 books that changed your life' question. I don't mean your favourite books, or the books that you think are the best. I mean simply the books that, if you hadn't read them at the time and place you did, you wouldn't be the person you are now.

Mine change every time I answer, but tonight they went (philosophy excluded):

1. Paradise Lost
2. Jane Eyre
3. Catch-22 (what a fucking cliche. But true.)
4. Good Morning, Midnight
5. Life After God
6. Foucault's Pendulum
7. King Lear
8. The Waves
9. The Bloody Chamber
10. The Turn of the Screw

I'd write up everybody else's, but I've already forgotten them. Oh well, they weren't as good as mine.

Tell me yours?

Because we won the fucking pub quiz! AHAHAHAHHAA. I have never won a pub quiz in my life, but tonight in the Paxton Arms, we laid the smackdown, opened a can of whoop-ass, and took those bitches to school, good and proper.

Seriously, the dream team of me and Drew = responsible for victory. He might be the only person I have ever met who has the geek credentials to match mine. 

... I think I fell in love a little bit.

But mainly ... £35 winnings!

God, I'm drunk.

Started my new temp job today, covering for someone on compassionate leave again (I follow death around the city, yes indeed) and there was a little tiny bell jar on the desk. I think it's a sign. But then I think everything is a sign.

Saw In Extremis at the Globe this weekend. Very weak in places, wonderful in others. At the end they threw little bits of gold paper over all the groundlings. Theology as the rock'n'roll of fourteenth century Paris, yes indeed, and the most heartbreaking and adorable performance by the guy playing Bernard of Clairveaux. It also had the best line of dialogue I've experienced in quite some time:

Mother Superior: The time for fucking in trees is over.
Heloise: (soulfully) Is it? ... Is it?

TK and I invented the best game. It's a mixture of poker, trivial pursuit, and truth-or-dare, with a hefty measure of various drinking games mixed in. I did Lady Macbeth's entire "unsex me here" speech on TK's balcony in my bra and knickers, as dared. Probably the first time that's ever been done in Crystal Palace.

In celebration of the anniversary of Star Wars, I watched the entire trilogy over the weekend. Not under the best of circumstances, admittedly, as I took it in in half-hour chunks while grabbing food or booze or putting on makeup or while waiting to pass out. Still, I rejoiced in some unashamed, pure love. Return of the Jedi really got me this time, tho' it's usually my least favourite. It does have some of the weakest sequences in the trilogy - Jabba's palace, and the Ewoks? a magnum, please - but once the space battle and the throne room stuff kicked in I was sucked in, gripped, fucked in the heart. And it has my All Time Favourite Star Wars Moment - when Luke backs off from Darth Vader, and throws away his lightsaber. "Never. I'll never turn to the Dark Side. You've failed, your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me." "So be it ... Jedi."
 
Still hate the revamped ending, but what can you do? I honestly do forgive George Lucas everything for Revenge of the Sith ("You were my brother! I loved you!"). So be it ... you megalomaniac bastard.

I have fangirl feelings for Wedge Antilles. King of the X-wings ...

On reading over this entry, I see it contains nothing substantive. I swear it was going to when I started to write. Ah well.   

I simultaneously dread and really look forward to becoming Marsha.

It's going to be one of those days today. All the signs point to it:

1. The weather. After utter gorgeousness throughout the week when we were all stuck in offices ... now look at it. Grey, rainy and cold. Back to the British classics.

2. I woke up this morning and couldn't figure out where I was. Literally. I didn't recognise my room.

3. I had a mad crazy dream last night where I was trying to inspire a revolt of the horrifically-scarred and disfigured against their persecutors in an abandoned tube station, and it's left me with that feeling - you know, where nothing that happens in your waking life for the rest of the day is going to be as exciting as your dream? (And every morning she wakes up, disappointed, / At not finding one hot thing / To match the ferocity of her dreams ...)

4. After waking up at the unprecedentedly early time of ten to ten on a Saturday when I don't have to go anywhere, I was pounced on by Anal Housemate demanding I wash up a pan. I mean, OK, it has been there for two days or whatever. But it was the shrill tone in her voice, like I'd committed some grave sin against humanity. It's a pan. Get a grip. So, in what I feel was a masterfully passive-agressive response, I washed up everything in the kitchen (none of which was mine), to demonstrate what a trivial matter washing-up is and how she should, therefore, chill the fuck out.

5. After declining all manner of, frankly, very glamorous and exciting offers last night because I wasn't in the mood to go out, I have woken up in the mood, filled with energy, ready and raring to go, go, go and do stuff all day ... and everyone's busy. Cocknobs.

Well, I'm not going to let a bunch of signs portending that this is a good day to stay in your room and pull your duvet over your head stop me. I'm going to wring some measure of worthwhile experience from this day or die trying ...

Maybe just one episode of Spaced first.

I AM SO BORED.

Just ... entertain me, please! Ask me a question, any question, or give me an interesting link to look at, or exhibit a shocking opinion, or ... 

Just something. ANYTHING. Please. I'll repay you threefold or even more.

(... by the way, look at my new mood theme. Isn't it awesome? I anticipate having many more moods from now on, although, on Elliott, they all look the same ...)

Back on topic: AMUSE ME. Please.

EDIT: Just in case you were wondering, I'm still bored and will be for the next twenty four hours approximately, so ... keep it coming.

There will be rewards like you cannot believe ...

Tonight I have re-read Le Grand Meaulnes for the fourth time (in translation, obviously and sadly - why can't I read French? Is it too late to learn). Once again, I was astonished by it.

The two people I have talked to about LGM tonight on MSN both didn't know what it was or what it was about, so have a small synopsis (apologies to those who have read it for the inadequacy of this summary).

Le Grand Meaulnes is the only novel ever written by Alain-Fournier. It was published in 1912, but is set in 1890s France. The narrator of the story, Francois Seurel, is a schoolboy with a crippled knee whose peaceful life is disturbed by the advent of Augustin Meaulnes, who joins his father's school as a boarder. Swiftly nicknamed Le Grand Meaulnes, Augustin sets off on a schoolboy adventure with a borrowed horse and cart. Lost in the countryside, he finds his way to a mysterious chateau where a fete (sorry, don't know how to do accents on lj) is being held to celebrate the imminent return of the son and heir Frantz with his fiance. While at the chateau, Meaulnes meets a young woman with a 'pure profile', with whom he falls instantly and utterly in love. The fete, however, is interrupted by tragic news, and Meaulnes returns to school. He confides in Seurel and they both become committed to Meaulnes' quest to return to the mysterious house and the beautiful girl, a quest seemingly impossible to fulfill and which, as they grow through adolescence into adulthood, continues to consume their lives.

Two years after he published Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier was killed in the trenches of the First World War.


It's making me think too of this one image I can't get out of my head at the moment - from Tamsin's birthday picnic a few weeks ago, when the weather was amazing. S (who is a poet, a pagan, and on slight acquaintance, a bit of a twat, but very handsome) and A (who is none of those things, except the last) were arguing about something, but in a banter way, and S, who was topless at the time, crawled up behind A, who was fully clothed, and wrapped his arms around him from behind. Just in a boy way ... or a man way. No, definitely a boy way. And it was just this one brief moment in the sunshine, but for some reason it was one of the most intense and beautiful things I've seen for months. And I can't stop thinking about it.

I may have made a tactical error with my mother.  

On a lighter note, this MSN conversation with biggster cracked me up, so I thought I would share it:

gauloise_girl: are you OK? i worry about you
biggster: Yeah. I'm fine. Nothing to worry about, at any rate.
gauloise_girl: still. i hate thinking of you being all depressed and apathetic.
gauloise_girl: that's MY territory.
biggster: We can fight for it.
biggster: If we can be bothered.
gauloise_girl: we should probably just wait and see which one of us wastes away first
biggster: I like your plan.
biggster: I'll totally win.
gauloise_girl: you do have a head start
biggster: a head start?
gauloise_girl: you're quite a bit thinner than me, g., i don't know if you've noticed
biggster: surely that would count against me?
biggster: By 'win' I meant that I'll stay alive longer.
gauloise_girl: oh. i was assuming 'win' meant dying.
gauloise_girl: ... i think i've just conclusively proved that i'm the most depressed.
biggster: i think you may have

4th November 2003:

"Another artist who was a favourite of mine back in the day, five years ago - just before I was getting together my writing - is Elliott Smith. Or was, I am sad and shocked to say. Elliott Smith passed away a couple of weeks ago. To our luck his few but fantastic records all remain as special as they were when he was still here.

Elliott Smith once said, if I remember correctly, that he wished to release records as spontanous and often as Elvis Costello did way back when in the early eighties; every half year. One can only wonder what music we would know if Elliott Smith was allowed to follow Costello's pattern and pace."

TV  does not get better than Tim's falling-out-of-love-is-like-masturbation speech.

"I just had a moment of clarity, you know? I woke up. It's like - you know when you're having an orgasm on your own, and you're lying on the sofa watching some porn movie you bought on a drunken lonely night in Soho, and you're lying there, and everything is really great. You're getting totally turned on by these absurdly graphic images, everything seems so right, and suddenly pfft! Bingo. You know, you wake up. And you're lying there, sweating, looking for the tissue which you just know is still in your pocket and the remote control which is somewhere on the floor, and it's like ... walking in on yourself. What are you doing? ... That's how I felt tonight, sitting here feeling my heart skip a beat every time the door opened, you know. Just, what are you doing."