Douglas Adams would love this.
On a completely random note, I was watching Project Runway for the umpteenth time and I have decided to give up atheism and adhere to the church of the living and breathing god that is Tim Gunn. I will follow your wisdom blindly, Tim. I will make it work.
Yesterday I went to Aldi with my mother. I hadn’t been to an Aldi since I was eleven and still harboured a love for their breakfast cereal and ice tea. To be honest, I still love all the shit they sell. There is nothing like a Leo bar that goes by the name of Olé and thus saving you as much as Tadjikistan’s GNP of the last century. You can get two pounds of potato croquettes for 50p there for Pete’s sake, that is cheap even by Zimbabwean inflation – which, by the way, is over 250 million percent; it is even estimated at eight quintillion by a man named John Robertson. That is 8 000 000 000 000 000 000. Damn.
Anyway, mum wanted to get a product that was on offer, and consequently, that product wasn’t there. They had most likely made it so cheap it went into negative price, so you would get money for taking it home with you. Queue up society’s Harpagons and Rab C. Nesbitts. So we are standing there, in the middle of an extremely busy Aldi, when we spot a shoddy pile of cardboard boxes. “Ugh. How very Aldi.” All you see is a yellow tile floor bathed in a sickly brown fluorescent light, littered with shit Aldi sells. Shit that is arranged into artful piles according to the main ingredient: sugar, milk or alcohol. Your gaze roams over the boxes and you wonder if this is what hobo heaven looks like. Probably not, as the boxes are filled. A main requisite in the elyseum of homelessness would be that they are empty. If the boxes are full, were would hobos sleep? A full-box afterlife would probably be hobo hell.
Probably the only Aldi with shelving.
But hark! What does my roaming eye spy? Wine! There are litres and litres of a certain very good Italian wine on sale. Wine that would cost you well over twenty-five quid at Oddbins. We go straight for the wine, pick up a bottle and head for the check-out. A route that takes us past the bargain bin, and what do we find there? Matches! A hundred for 10p! *Swipe* goes mum. Now we are close to the check-out, and to the flower stand. God, is there anything more pathetic and forlorn than supermarket flowers? Apart from having bought them for cheering yourself up while spending your Christmas with a Bernard Matthews meal and a christmas cake for one? No. Ok, maybe Gordon Brown on a down day. He just looks so sad, like a big St. Bernard behind a fogged-up, slobbered-over car window.
But back to the flowers. Mum decided to buy a bouquet. Now we had a shopping trolley that contained: one bottle of wine, a box of matches and red roses. Just conjure up that mental image for a minute. It is terribly heartwrenching.
When we left and I got the purchases out of the trolley, I felt like I was a bloke that had just shopped in preparation of a cheap date. Nothing like “I am only really hoping to get laid, you can forget expensive gifts, so have these slightly wilted supermarket flowers and a bottle of wine. No, it’s not from Waitrose. And oh, some matches. It was an afterthought. What do you mean, chocolates? That’s hardly original. I am original. Now, couch or bed?” It was a bit like that time I went to the supermarket for a courgette and a bottle of vodka at 4pm.
So I was standing there in the dim glow of a streetlight, waiting for mum to bring around the car, clutching that bottle of wine, and I felt a bit like Ricky Gervais as David Brent at the Office’s christmas party. So very sad. Later I watched Dara O’Briain: Live at the Apollo and the world was alright again. But now I know that if I were a man without hope, I would probably shop at Aldi.
I got out the Olympus again this month, and so far this is what I have come up with (not very hi-res due to resizing):
I am being haunted by Van Morrison and Led Zeppelin. In the last three days, I have been ‘skipping the light fandango’ in the cinema, in front of the tv and to my brother’s iTunes. I have bought at least four stairways to heaven.
Is it just me or does the snow make people melancholy, burrowing themselves in comfy cinema seats or worn sofas, absentmindedly munching popcorn and floating away on the soaring bars of ‘and so it was that later…’ ? ‘Tis the season to be merry? Nay, ’tis the season to be cocooning with a whole box of Cadbury Cream Eggs. ‘Tis also the season to wrap those classic songs around you like a soothing winter blanket, it seems. Or that is what the radio stations seem to think, at least. I agree.
Staring out at the yellow-grey air I frankly don’t want to do anything other than skipping the light fandango and turning cartwheels across the floor. I want to have Van Morrison making me just a tad bit sad and wistful, and I want to buy a stairway to heaven when I walk outside in the crisp snow, with ink-black sky above me and puffs of breath swirling around me. I also want to sink to the ground amidst the downy white covering and listen to the stillness of a late cold night while staring up at the streetlights.
Even though I want all of this, you will still find me inside, cradling my coffee infused with fabulous Orkney whisky, staring up at the snow flakes falling down until they seem to be falling up. And then I get melancholy. And then all I want is to watch her face turn a whiter shade of pale.
I think alcohol doesn’t exactly kill brain cells. It renders them temporarily inactive through a vodka-induced stupor, and it isn’t until you get embarrassing flashbacks of the night before that you realize alcoholic dementia doesn’t last and the bloody brain buggers are still alive. Damn you, vodka shots, you promised me oblivion and all I got was severe dehydration and a sudden craving for chicken tikka masala five hours later. And yet, I seem to be the worst recalcitrant. How I look forward to an English fry-up at three in the afternoon! How my body craves caffeine to the point that I end up shaking on my feet and being directed towards the coffee machine by pure muscle memory lest I forgo my daily dose!
A drunk student’s resolutions go straight down the nearest gutter with his lamb korma. Many a hard-working office employee have I seen losing his dignity along with five pints of lager, two bitters, a packet of crisps and some roasted peanuts. What drives one to involuntarily showing the contents of his stomach, his genitals and/or his middle finger to all passers-by? Why does it seem like such a good idea to tell the police to kiss yer arse, ye bunch of fookin’ tossers?
Deserted streets – the only way home.
What feels like a medal of honour at two a.m. is a dunce hat and a badge of shame in your eleven a.m. morning class or your two o’clock business meeting. Bessie mates from the night before only vaguely remember having shared a spontaneous acapella performance of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, and to be quite frank, don’t want to be reminded. There goes the only moment of chummy nostalgia.
When backpacks or neat ties replace the conspicuous stains on your clothes, tales will already have spread far and wide and no respectable average or recommendation can stop them. Only one solution then: begrudgingly admit to shameful behaviour and exploits of the night past, or look for people that revel in the praise and glory nights on the town earn them. You won’t feel at home in either group of people. You feel like a pariah in the first, and like an IQ-divested primate in the second. Maybe there is another solution: laying off the drink. But will a fry-up ever taste so good again?
Flickr is an amazing thing. For some reason or other I didn’t have an account until today, even though I do take a lot of pictures and it’s a great back-up for when your computer crashes. Like mine did last week. I ran around like a headless chicken for approximately two minutes and sixteen seconds, uttering the f- and c-words in an intermittent stream of cursing El Gran Hombre so many times my soul is now definitely damned. I carried my laptop off to the nearest computer shop and waited in agony for two days. All my pictures, documents, films, series…could have been lost! What was I supposed to do now instead of reading through all my old Words documents I made in secondary school? Where was I to find nostalgia now?
Lucky as I was, they were able to retrieve all my data, so I could expand my vocabulary from ‘fuck’ to a whole host of other words, and I have started uploading quite a few pictures to Flickr. So I present thee: Kate’s photo stream! There aren’t a great deal of pictures on there yet, but there will be more to come over the months. Yay!
Jetlagged and suffering from a ludicrously bad head cold, I have uploaded the pictures I took during my travels on the US East Coast. I will update my blog with more read-worthy stuff later, but for now, this is all I can manage. I need a bed. Or a doctor. Or maybe both.
I just got back from Salzburg, where among many other things, I had the chance to try out my new camera. It doesn’t have numerical reflex and it is really only good for taking lovely holiday snaps, but I did manage to take some pretty good pictures with it. (For information on Salzburg, visit Pack Your Bags)
Boredom can lead to the most exciting things. More often than not, though, it leads to more boredom. Yesterday, of a kind that caused me for reasons beyond myself to trot down in heels to the shopping street in the moderate Western European heat, through throngs of tourists, fat people gobbling down burgers and slopping ketchup on the pavement, and fans of our version of ITV, who swamped the city centre to participate in an Ugly Betty look-alike contest. I am convinced that half of them didn’t even have to dress up. A perfect day. I decided to pass the time holed-up reading on my roof. Logically, I had to procure some reading material, but the 2006 Chinese calendar on our loo door had gotten a bit repetitive.
Ready for some excitement, I may have subconsciously embarked on a suicide mission going through the city centre on a Saturday, with more chance of success than actually strapping on a couple of pounds of Semtex, and giving the detonator to a Parkinson patient racing down a Polish secondary road in a ruddy wheelchair held together by the elastic of your ninety-four-year old neighbour’s panties.
I found myself in the English Literature department of a well-known retailer that sells anything from MacBooks to maps of Anantanarivo and Bin Laden’s hide-out. The place was crowded, the air was stuffy and whenever I turned myself in a particular direction I got a whiff of bad breath coming from a man perusing a Chuck Palahniuk book.
The world being quite discontent that it hadn’t yet peeved me off sufficiently so I would whack Guanobreath in the face with a tome of the collected works of William Shakespeare, it decided to make me realize that every single person in the English Literature department, apart from me, was male. And all men were sporting proud paunches from indulging in too much foie gras and Merlot, with puffy red faces and sweat stains that would have a pregnant woman stare in astonishment. It made the ‘chick-lit’ section completely redundant. Not that naming the section ‘chick-lit’ hadn’t already done so. Or the fact that the books on the shelf looked like a giant My Little Pony advertisement smattered with an extra dose of glitter and curly writing for good measure.
But back to the males inducing asexuality in an otherwise perfectly functioning young woman. I felt rather out of place, especially when two of them caught me looking at the Lee Child ‘Jack Reacher’ series. I felt like I was to be dragged out onto the town square after having my birth marks prodded with a hot needle and being declared a witch, to be burned at the stake for overstepping the boundaries of the flailing-testosterone section that English Literature seems to be. For God’s sake, it is a blooming thriller series, not a copy of Martin Luther’s manifesto.
His image is forever linked with the word ‘smorgasbord’.
Then I picked up the sequel to Jeremy Clarkson’s “The World According to Clarkson”. Guanobreath had noticed I was looking at the sequel, thus rightly deducing I had read the first one, his eyes going more bloodshot in wonderment, a trickle of sweat dangling from his nose. This had more men hearding around the Clarkson books. Maybe a collective “don’t let the woman near it” reaction. Just as we are not to go near cars, lawnmowers, barbecues and camping gas bottles. For fear we might set them afire with our oestrogen levels.
Or maybe I am seeing this all wrong and I had just barged in on “The Middle-class Gascony Lovers’ Secret and Inconspicuous Bi-weekly Meeting around the Clarkson Books”. It would be like crashing a Freemason’s lodge in nineteenth-century Belgium wearing nothing but a shawl emblazoned with ‘Capitalisme, Dieu et Roi’. Rather out of place.
I think I might have redeemed myself a little with picking up ‘On Chesil Beach’ – did you know that you are more likely to get ostracized for not reading anything by Ian McEwan than if you were a guest at a WI garden party in Somerset and mistook guava chutney for mango? I once accidentally did so, and I must say, Royal Doulton makes for bloody nice ostraca. That said, I do much prefer the Clarice Cliff; more practical and I would feel like I had actually contributed something to society – I would instantly have cured half of the UK’s pensioners of cataract caused by staring at ugly lumps of moulded, glazed and overpriced clay. It would also blow most bingo hall frequenters’ pension plan to smithereens, but I’d say you would be better off to keep going at bingo. You might not win enough money to pay for your plastic hip and Eau de Formaldehyde, but you will have fun dying at Harborne’s Gala Bingo.
But I digress. After another bad-breath dousing hitting me with the full force of a Cape Good Hope gale, I scurried past the guts of men ogling Will Self’s “The Butt” towards the check-outs – where I had to queue behind a bloke who most likely went by the name of Gazza, his chip shop smell somewhat covered by Jean-Paul Gaultier’s “Le Male”, buying a book on sex. Look here, mate, if you smell like fish fingers – and look like them, too – you are going to need more than a book. I’d say start with some kitchen roll to mop up the excess grease.
I did end up buying afore-mentioned Clarkson sequel, and I have just finished reading it. Now, if you would excuse me, I feel the sudden need to piss off some environmentalists and shoot up some wily foxes, preferably in Surrey.
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