Awkward Hugs

Just had my first hug of my ‘leaving the company for ever’ goodbyes period…


I swear I gave one of those hideous barely touching creepy hugs where you just kind of hover at them with your arms hanging in the air like an uneccessarily amorous ghost

plus like chewed gum in her ear, stabbed her with my headset, sniffed her hair up into my nose, laughed at nothing and nearly fell over trying to get away.

*FACEPALM*

its going to be a loooooooong few days.

Sweater-puppies

I have recently decided to absolve all my bras with padding / underwiring of their duties, and be happy with what my mama gave me,


I feel like why should i cage my boobs into uncomfortable constructions and stuff my tops full of crap just to achieve the optimum size and shape society wants my boobs to be?

Boobs are all shapes and sizes,

and as Men Behaving Badly taught me there are many benefits to be found in both “big roundy boobs and small pointy boobs”.

My sweater puppies are the latter, and I am OK with it.

The only problem is that new found boob-pride and comfy (flimsy) undergarments + air conditioning fridge-ified office

= ahoy therrre peanut smuggler!

My homeboi and I are preparing to do the Cardiff 10k

B

I will be scrapping.

Its like the days following the Take That split in my heart ever since Dev Hynes announced Lightspeed Champion is Fin.

He told the guardian he's shedding the skin of Lightspeed Champion, having achieved all he wants to experimenting-wise. The project was more of a 'dorky' (his words) chance to play

with sound, and see what it was possible to do.

I can kind of see this in the music. 

To me the sound begs a  picture of petulant boyish words, scribbled across pages of dog-eared exercise books - but sewn with ragged stitches into swooping, cosmic rhythms, soaring melodies and piano which swoops effortlessly between furious pounding and delicate trills.

It doesn't make sense that it would entertwine in the entirely breathtaking way that it does.

What i personally love most about Lighspeed Champion music is the inimitable honesty. He broke up with his girlfriend, and it's written all over his album.

From the explicit mention of her name in a song title to the lines he flings at her

"Just let me meet this guy soon, he don't appreciate you... I know you'll realise that soon"



But its perfect in the way that its not too personal. Not so personal that it's icky, or pathetic- the kind of personal you kind of want to shrink away from like it might be something that would infect you.

Its little touches like the male vocal group singing the lines that beg her to stay, that distances the song from just the words of a boy, in a bedroom, and makes it a song.

I think soon I will have allowed myself the appropriate mourning time, and I can dive into Blood Orange.

But until then  -

auf wiedersehen Lightspeed - Ich werde dich vermissen.

Reasons to be... Italian.

This week I had pizza two nights in a row. And to be honest I was all for continuing in a similar vein for the rest of life.

What's not to love about italian food?
Pizza = bread smothered with delicious foodular morsels and topped with romantically cascading cheese. Easily portable. Delicious hot and cold and acceptable for any meal. There is a place in my heart which will always be reserved for BIG LOVE for breakfast pizza.

Garlic bread = bread. smothered in glistening garlic-y butter. Cheese optional. But never optional in my life.
Pasta = hot, wet, dough. Sounds sexy. Tastes sexy. Lots of phallic and vaginal shapes to slurp up. A vehicle for a magnitude of mindblowing sauces. And - obviously - cheese.

Lasagne = wet pasta sheets, snuggled in between layers of bubbling creamy cheesy sauce, and hot herby tomatoe and vegetables. Lasagne is the food version of porn.
Basically, Italian food is an irrepressible, unrelenting and ruthless CARB-ATTACK.

I'm not a girl that is so much with desserts. I expect to that after the aforementioned carb-attack i will be in a sort of post-coital food coma, and my interest in feeding the beast will have waned.
Despite this I feel a quick hat-tip to gelato (ice-cream to you and me) and tiramisu is in order.

SO. These are the reasons why I must now become Italian.
There are various ways to achieve this, or a decent enough approximation of it - for example moving to italy. But this sounds kind of tiring - i.e. finding a job / friends / somewhere to live / learning Italian...
and why put yourself through such banalities when you could just as easily marry (read: fuck. I don't believe in marriage) into the noble tradition that is= being an Italian.

Here are some options I have been looking into.

Claudio Marchisio

Skinny, tattooed, kind of druggy-eyed and sick looking, plus amazing cheekbone accentuation.

Appaz he's a footballer of some kind, but whatev - we all have our little faults. I am willing to overlook based on the (potential- must test these before forming emotional attachment) strength of his pizza / dough-stretching skills.

Next on my hitlist:

Simone Bredariol
He loses points for being a model due to
1- more attractive than me
2- skinnier than me
3- probably not allowed to eat pizza. or pasta. or anything vaguely delicious in any way.

But maybe he has an italian mama that will feed me gnocci and teach me to be fierce.
I have googled quite intensively in search of anything to do with his elusive *actual personality*...
- zilch.
thus i will conclude that he doesnt have one, and is just a soulless modeloid robotron. This is good, e.g. always letting me do what i want, never chatting back, no rediculous demands (sexual or otherwise) - I can go out with other guys if i can just find his 'off' button, then power him back up and wheel him out for impressiveness at family/ social occassions.

Fab Moretti

"Moretti was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to an Italian father and a Brazilian mother."
This totally counts. Plus i have found through endless internot trolling of male models that Brazillians are OBSCENELY hot. like the hottest race of humanoids to stalk the earth in tiny pants.
so half and half works. Worry not Fabrizio, my pants (and entry thereof) do not discriminate!



In my quest to become a signore Italiano I have also investigated customs and traditions to see how easily I will emporphosise into my new cultural persona:

- "Italians enjoy their meals and take their time to eat, they don't shove their food down their throats in 35 - 45 minutes. I still enjoy going to a restaurant in Italy and being able to sit 3 or 4 hours"
This is a good sign! i could eat forever if the opportunity arose.

- Can gossip a lot and force feed you even when you are not hungry.
Excellent! Forced comfort eating is never a bad thing in my eyes.

- Food is at the center of everything and Italy customs, traditions and lifestyle revolve around food. Doctor appointments, important company meetings, conferences revolve around food. You just do not make appointments anywhere near the time of a meal. You just do not.
You just do not. Here Here!

- At weddings the bride and groom sometimes smash a glass, the number of pieces it shatters into symbolise the number of happy years they wil spend together.
Gosh darn I do love a bit of drunken destruction.

- On new years eve you throw things out of the windows to symbolise.... something.

When I was in halls at uni me and my friend Bex spent a whole evening throwing a boot out the window at people walking past.

At the time I thought it was just an act of repetative inane immaturity... but now I see it was fraught with symbolism and deep cultural significance. I have been an italian all this time... and I never even realised.

Viva Italia!

Welcome to my 8 hour shift! finishing at 10pm tonight.


In my head I was already singing that in a West End show stylee and possibly tapdancing (definate jazzhands anyway…)

So i think already the cracks are beginning to show.

Here is the news:

I do not want to be -on a beautiful, breezy, sunny, blissful Sunday afternoon- sitting in a beige office, answering a beige phone, speaking to beige people, dressed in beige to match their beige hopes and dreams.

Not even a little bit.

Not even at all.

So I am going to spend my time posting each hour to chart my descent into grim madness and horror.
If only so that I have something to present to a tribunal of some kind as an argument for why I must never work weekends again for the sake of my own mental health.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Well then i’ll begin

What can I write that hasn't been written...

I’m nearly in tears reading about the riots in London.
How can groups of people unite into something that just makes no sense at all.

“the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country—the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice.”

Abraham Lincoln


Even over years and years and years, humans don't seem to get better.

Its incredible to me that the furious passion of a mob of people blocks out all thought of the human aspect of what they are doing. And all thoughts of who will be hurt when that petrol bomb leaves their hand.

The guardian wrote:-
Residents, driven from their burning homes, had lost everything. Stuart Radose had to flee his flat above a Carpetright shop in Tottenham High Road as fire ravaged the building. “We’ve gone back this morning and it’s a complete shell,” he told Sky News. “Everything we had is gone. It’s just mad. So many people have lost everything. It’s just crazy. It looks like it’s the second world war. It looks like the Blitz where we were living.”

It looks like the blitz.
what happened to progress?

People are looking for someone to blame, and police have been criticised for their lack of proactivity,
People describe seeing them 'just standing there'. Wondering why aren't they helping us?
an article examines the tactics,

an expert explained that there is a difficult and uncertain decision to be made between attempting to contain the mob in a stand-off situation, or dispersing the perpetrators- and face the possibility that they will simply spread their rampage of destruction over a wider area.
If police engage with specific participants or incidents their attention is drawn away from wider purveyal of the scene- and particularly volatile arrestees can engage the attention of several officers at once.

This has been blamed as a potential factor in the fatal stabbing of Constable Keith Blakelock in the 1985 riots at Broadwater Farm. With officers attention pulled off in different directions Blakelock was left vulnerable to the mob.
 
His widow Elizabeth Johnson expresses in the best way I have yet heard the human aspect involved in the current riots,
 

"I know it was the uniform that they were attacking that night, but there was a father and a husband inside that uniform and they killed him."

 

A husband and a father inside a uniform.

Three people, inside human bodies, hit by a car on purpose.

People's entire lives inside the houses you are burning down with your unchecked passion and agression.

 

There are really no words to console the people who's lives have been ripped apart. And no guarrantee there will be justice against the people who did it with their own hands.

 

I've never lived through anything like this before. But already people are taking their city back, Groups formed on twitter to begin the clearup, and our beloved english cups of tea handed out to those out there doing it.

We've cleaned up these burnt buildings before. and we'll do it again.

hate will not prevail.

"You know that song that goes

And you want to call your mother, and say 'Mother, I can never come home again because I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere in a field in Hampshire' ?

Well. Pretty much... that."

[Sunday morning conversation between my friend and I, lying on a smelly bit of carpet somewhere in a field in Sussex.]

 

Playgroup Festival
stole my sanity.

I managed to find it again at around 8pm on Sunday night, whilst watching the Correspondants, clutching a piece of white furry fabric and a big cup of dirty red wine poured for me from a plastic bottle by a stranger dressed as a magical toad. (green facepaint and glitter)
I didn't want to ever come home again.

Now i'm sitting in my office wondering what this all even means.
I look like in films like Britters Murphy in Don't Say a Word where people are insane and they demonstrate this fact by having them be really pale and unusual with big starey eyes.

My body wants to be sleeping, ideally under a warm shower with a blanket made of radox,
and my mind still wants to be wandering round a field full of empty cans and people in furry ears and tails.

The words to Es and Whizz won't stop buzzing round my head. and i can't work out if i'm hungry or not........
In the face of this difficult time for all involved (i.e. me) I am going to focus on all the positive things I have learnt from this special, special time.

We arrived at 8:30 after chinese takeaway eaten in the van in the carpark at my work, and tracked down our friend, he was wearing a trilby with fox ears attached and staggering over a grassy knoll beer in hand.
We pitched our tent in the almost dark -

Lesson #1- When pitching your tent on a slope, the best idea is to to aim the small end (designed to house feet) DOWNWARDS.
Spending the night fighting a one-woman war against gravity by continually scurrying back up the hill away from the tent door is NOT The Thing.

After this we bopped down to the arena, through a Finding Nemo jellyfish style maze of guyropes.

In the arena we found a big adult playpen and playhouse, a moroccan style tent with big cushioned sofas, a ring of haybales, disco tents, and tiny tents crammed with weird freaky things hanging from strings EVERYWHERE. but most of all we found the beer tent.

Lesson #2: queuing in the beer tent is BORING and lame. Buying in bulk is a necessity. it is also brilliant for getting you absolutely trollied.

I started gently with 2 ciders and a tequila shot. After this my memory of the evening becomes hazy. The next thing i remember with any real clarity is waking up in my mouse costume feeling like i'd been punched in the brain.

The morning was a morning of self medication, fried, with a sprinkle of self pity. We ate fried egg rolls and I devoured most of an entire pack of cheeseballs. Vodka mixed with juice kept it foolish.
Spirits were at a low after the Spanish Mafia took up residence at the fire by our campsite and took up drumming and Scat singing at SEVEN THIRTY IN THE MORNING.
At a festival. They were still going four hours later.
Why nobody punched them is totally beyond me, but probably testiment to the morning after effects of festival substances.

We sat on the vile smelling outdoor carpet and waited for our friend to join us as a late arrival.

and by late..... Dunphy is a man who is late for absolutely EVERYTHING.

he was so late for his own birthday celebration we actually considered leaving a note on his cake and balloon and just calling it a night. But this time he really outdid himself.

He finally materialised at 2 in the afternoon. By the evening we were recovered and ready to blow the previous night out of the water. We dined on Mandy and proceeded to go entirely insane.
I began by convincing myself they were actually dog-worming tablets,
i.e. "I feel like these tablets are really working, I think the reason i feel so fucking good is because i'm JUST so worm free!"
then became unhealthily obsessed with bunting, and my eyes turned into giant marbles in my head.

We generally rampaged around for the rest of the evening. My partner had painted his face like a wasp with acrylic paints which were all cracking. I told him he was a crackly wasp and that I love him. About three of four times an hour. All of our lives.

The next day was mellow. We floated around drinking vodka and juice, and watching bands.
When it came to pack our tent down my neighbours taught me the following life lesson

#3 - Tents are NOT the same as walls. This is a simple fact... which people just do not seem to be able to latch onto...

Standing inches away from you, listening to your disturbing sex-noises, separated only by a thin piece of material is TRAUMATIZING. you are a bad person for making me do this.

On the way home (waaaaa :,-( )we got a takeaway curry to cheer us up,
it is the first time in my entire curry-buying career that the server at the takeaway [who- by the way- its in his interests for us to spend more money and buy more food] told us that we were buying WAY too much food for just three people.

But we are a proud people, so we stood by our decision!

I ate myself into a coma and watched Vic and Bob on Shooting Stars. The End. Goodnight!

B$B

There's Nothing DOing at work today.
So i have taken the time to create this picture. I hope it will help the world.

W4lk w1Th th£ ANim@Ls, T@lK w1tH th£ AniM4Ls

BTW- spookily I checked my diary the other day and found a mystical entry had appeared for this weekend, covering both days, written in diagnal - in straaangely mysterious handwriting (my own- but the drunk version),
And all it said was "Walk with the Animals, Talk with the Animals"

This is freakily predictive - seeing as this weekend it turns out I'm going to be going to the Playgroup Festival in Tunbridge Wells.

The reason for this pleasant surprise is that two of my most whiskey soaked associates turned up at my house last night after pub closing - stinking of whiskey: natch - and demanded agressively suggested that we get tickets immediately.

At first I was like, ahhhh but I have work til 7... slash, how am I going to get down there... slash, you guys are DRUNK and at the best of times untrustable - we need some LOGISTICS here people!!

But then I re-evaluated and remembered that logistics are for idiot holes! and what would Dean Moriarty do (we have all recently read On the Road and become wildly obsessed by the idea of just jacking everything in, running off and LIVING with only our burning madness to keep us warm at night),

and long story short I was like Fuck it Dude, Lets Go Bowling.

So £300 later (i am hoping my lunatic friends will still be as keen for prompt repayment in the sobering light of morning...) and we are doing it!

The side of me that I wish existed is like yeah, groovy. I'll just chuck some moonshine in a napsack and scurry on down!

But The Real Me [constant panicker / obsessive compulsive list-maker / worrier / fun-ruiner / embarrassment ] is thinking HOLYFUCKineedtomakelists, insane lists! + procure gallons of dry shampoo... (but the brown one-not that fucking grey elderly spinster-spray i had before + what am I going to DRINK? / how am i going to look sexy for three days running with no washing or mirrors.... this is going to require a fuck of a lot of babywipes... wonder if I will be able to apply makeup using my reflection in a puddle on the campsite floor...? / but puddles = RAIN! and rain will undo all of said makeup construction work.............. before it has even taken place

Leeds at Speed

So. I survived the Myximatosis event!
I am wondering what the best way to blog the happenings is... my brain is like a giant fruit winder and once it starts unwinding i just end up wordvomiting everything in the wrong order and making no sense!!

07:30 - I wake up in my friend James' house. He is a beautiful, genuine, kind, fusty old academic type whose soul is about a hundred years older than his 24 years. I slept in his housemate's room, in a bed surrounded by bits of wood and bits of dismantled bed. His landlord decided to rip out the inside of most of one room and put it in another over the holidays, so I have an obstacle course to conquer before I can get to the shower.

08:30 - we arrive at the uni and wonder round looking at the different buildings, James shows me his office in the paleantology department - everyone has their favourite rocks decorating their desks! It's like Welcome to Nerdville, in the most awesome way. Everybody unashameably geeks out over their passion for fossils and thats how they spend their days.

This totally means nothing to me. I gather its something to do with.... rocks?

09:30 - I arrive at the mixing event and devour two cups of coffee. I listen conscienciously to the talks on landlords / deposit protection / things to look for in a potential house ... (all of which sensible indicators I will later disregard in a debonair manner, basing my choice instead on general 'vibe'... but whatev)

After this everything turns into a weird blur of sweaty palms and that weird headrush feeling you get when you're totally nervous and trying to be totally cool.

Good factors included:
getting to sit at the back of a minibus, snooping round empty houses and driving round to check out all the student areas, getting to chat to attractive guys (for two minutes each-  which is a winner as it turns out this is precisely the ammount of time I can talk for before I start saying insane / sexually inappropriate things / laughing at things that aren't funny / generally revealing my actual personality *shudder*),
um..... coffee?

Bad factors included:
Having to drag round houses in a group of 20, which meant having to keep queueing to go and stand in a tiny bedroom / bathroom - seemingly the only purpose of which to verify, "yep... that's um.. a bathroom alright...",
having to talk to some weird girl with reactive lense glasses and horrifying sandals who kept getting right up in my grill and staring at my breasts / asking if i wanted to borrow her pen,
PEER PRESSURE! (sung to the tune of Under Pressure)

I ended up in a group of four other girls who all totally seemed ok, but whom i was not entirely convinced about living with for the following reasons:
- one of them looked like a bird, had perfect blond hair, expensive looking clothes, immaculate bejewelled pumps [honestly.... what kind of android wears pumps and actually keeps them clean beyond the first ten seconds outdoors??], and professed to being 'a little bit OCD about cleaning'
I decided she was a Stepford Wife style robot and not to be trusted.
- In my experience 'A little bit OCD about cleaning' translates to 'I do not tolerate matter of any kind anywhere in my life, and if you even think about putting that dirty spoon down on the worktop I will try to make you spontaneously combust using the power of my mind and when you are out I will snip holes in your clothes.'
- GIRLS. freak me out.
When there are no guys around to level out the mood a whole house full of girls can become like a hermetically sealed chamber of fear and evil. This happened to me in second year of undergrad. I still dream about feeding them Calteen bars and making their faces smell like a foot.

So after the event was over I went to visit a house I had seen an advert for, with one individual room going.
The guy who's room I was taking greeted me, from his texts I assumed he was Scottish (due to the fact that he had said Scottish things such as 'lass' and 'nee bother'). Turns out he's not Scottish in the slightest, he's basically just a loon. So far so good.

he showed me the living room, with guitars and a lifesized full lenth portrait of the queen. And the recording studio in their basement. (standard set-up, obvs).
The kitchen is small and messy, and all washing power, cooking oil and spices are shared,
This is a whole new world to me after my experience of angry notes and cleaning rotas left me terrified to even breathe too near the 'communal' kitchen.
My room is on the second floor, its big, with lots of storage and an utterly revolting green patterned carpet.

It's all set up, as the current tennants have been there three years now, so as long as i can handle a bit of chaos and chuck a tenner someone's way every few weeks for bills, the room is MINE if i want it!

So i'm ever so slightly shitting myself about jumping straight in to 6 new housemates and a whole new life... but armed with rugs - so very many rugs - I think it will all be ok.

And now we're living in the sky, I never thought we'd live so high, just like heaven... if it didn't look like hell.

So tonight we [me and my dearest motherbird] catch the snorient express for four hours from home - between the bright lights of London and the whitenoise nights of Brighton, to Leeds.

Which is to be my new home and principality for the next year. While i work my way towards three hours in a breezy hall wearing a giant crow costume and round muffin-shaped hat, the high point of which is walking down a tiny length of carpet - suddenly becoming aware of your own extremities while an entire hall of people watches you .... panicking, sweating... wondering what you usually do with your arms and if you're walking weird.... trying to remember what normal walking is like - shaking an old man's hand and sitting down again. To watch other people repeat aforementioned process until boredom begins to take its irreversible toll and you finally snap and start chewing on your rented mortar board.

Plus learning obvs. as in the words of the [unofficial but infinately more glam] bard;
"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."

— Oscar Wilde
I could never be accused of being the former so may as well focus on the latter.

So anyway, the purpose for this visit is that I have to find somewhere to live while I do so.
I am attending a Unipol Postgrad Mixing Day !!! woo coloured exclamation marks to mask sense of impending doom and terror.

The itinery is as follows:
Agenda:
9.30am
Arrive and Coffee.
COFFEE. Looking good so far!

10.00am - 10.05am
Welcome and introduction
ok. yep. I'll probably focus and listen to this

10.10am - 10.30am
Presentation by Unipol about House Hunting
This bit seems like a good op for a little sleepy / maybe have a think about what outfits I might wear to my first lectures in leeds

10.30am - 11.30pm
Mixing Event for students
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGH.
Mixing event.
Mixing event.
MIXING EVENT???
As I understand it this involves some kind of speed dating horror / torture where we all hop round in circles and have 2 minutes a pop to SELL ourselves to potential future housemates. The very thought of this makes me want to chew through my own leg like a fox stuck in a trap and FLEE, flee to the nearest public house!
but seeing as the day begins at 09:30... and I don't know Leeds well enough to know if there are any establishments open at 08:30 in the morning (believe you me, I will sleuth out this crucial information before my first week is out!)
It's looking like coffee may be my only salvation. Is it frowned upon to dispense with this all water and milk shit and just snort the grains up into my nasal membranes??

11.30am - 5.00pm
House Hunting and viewing properties