For no particular reason: some of my favourite songs about love or unrequited love or crappy end-of-love that I really wish I had somehow written

Belle and Sebastian, Too Much Love
One of the few songs on this list that actually makes me happy.


The Smiths, Please please please let me get what I want
It was a choice between this and I Want the One I Can't Have and it's Driving Me Mad but this is so cute, so short and so perfect it won out. Please, you know, it was in Pretty in Pink - John Hughes endorsed.


Nick Drake, Day is Done
I don't think this song is supposed to be about love at all but, for me, it captures perfectly that exhausted "I just don't want to give a fuck anymore" feeling.


Camera Obscura, Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken
Okay so this one also make me happy. Maybe I do actually like happy songs almost as much as maudlin ones. Maybe.


Nick Cave, I Let Love In
What can I say: was there ever an angrier song about love? Well, um, almost certainly but this is right up there.


Honourable mentions go to Joanna Newsom's sublime Does Not Suffice (thanks Mike), Noah and the Whale's Five Years Time and Teddy Thompson's insanely beautiful cover of Leonard Cohen's Tonight Will Be Fine. For some reason almost none of the videos I found for these songs would work and then those that worked wouldn't embed and... you know, it's getting on a bit and I'm tired and can't be bothered. But they're awesome - look 'em up slackers.

Favourite new things

1. The MacBook Air on which I am writing this.
2. The art deco martini glasses I purchased yesterday, even though I really don't even slightly drink martinis. I drank orange juice out of one this morning and I swear it tasted better.

How to get yourself frocked up and out of the house when you really just want to stay on the couch.

1. Turn on music. Ideally as loudly as possible. Nick Cave's "Thirsty Dog" is doing my wonders right now because I'm in sort of an angry mood and it's just a great angry song, even though he spends the whole time apologising. "(I'm sorry about all your friends/I hope they'll speak to me again/I said before I'll pay for all the damages/I'm sorry it's just rotten luck/I'm sorry I've forgotten how to fuck/It's just that I think my heart/ and soul are kind of famished" may be among my all time favourite Cave lyrics).

2. Find wine. Look you don't even have to drink it but a glass of wine in your hand cannot NOT cheer you up. That's not me, that's science speaking.

3. Dress up. UP I say. The shitter you feel the better you should look. Which is why I hope and plan to look pretty fucking good tonight.

4. Get off the couch. Sorry, that should probably have been the first step actually.

This list of the worst things in the world...

... is frighteningly accurate. Or maybe I just feel like that because I have a hangnail and it hurts like a motherfucker.

"Someday you'll find a man, a good man, and you'll love him, and marry him, and live and die for him. And I'll be hanged if I stand by and watch."

This article on love lessons learned from fictional men made me happy and sad: happy because it's amusing and rang true. Sad because one of the examples being talked about is the character of Laurie from Little Women: one of the few literary (and indeed film - a young Christian Bale did his BEST WORK on this film, I tells you and if I'm honest I think I actually prefer the film to the book, I'm sorry) hotties that I mooned over as a younger me and still moon over today. When Jo... well, look, I don't want to ruin it if you haven't read or seen it but Jesus Christ Jo makes me angry with some of her Life Choices. That's all I'm saying. I probably really shouldn't care after all these years. Wait, "probably?" Anyway, read the article, it's super cute.

Web of Lies

It started with a simple lie at the hairdresser where I was having my hair done for a wedding. Technically, yes, it was my "wedding" (read: wedding PARTY) but I had no desire to discuss this fact with my hairdresser and have to endure an hour of chit-chat about whether I was excited/nervous/having second thoughts. So when she asked me why I was having my hair done I said, semi-truthfully, that I was attending "a wedding".

So far, so okay. The problems started when she pressed for details. What kind of wedding was it? What was my dress like? Was it a close friend getting married? She seemed so interested in this wedding I half suspected that she knew the truth and wanted me to crack. I did not crack. Instead I told the (mostly) truth, cunningly vagueing up my answers. For example:

Her: So is it a big wedding, do you know?

Me: Oh, I, uh, think there's going to be about 110... more than 100 people... something like that.

Her: Are you in the wedding party?

Me: Uh... no?

Anyway, the hairdresser finished her job and I left semi-satisfied (the hair was not "Rachel the android from Bladerunner does formal" as I'd hoped but at least it was A Whole Lot of Look). I'd got away with my lie and that should have been the end of the story.

Until I got to said wedding PARTY and a friend revealed the following facts:

1. She had been to the same hairdressing salon as myself.
2. She had seen the same hairdresser.
3. She had told the hairdresser she was attending a wedding and provided sufficient detail that the hairdresser put two and two together.
4. Her response, when the hairdresser mentioned by name, was to immediately exclaim: "She's the BRIDE."

This is the true story of why I can now never go back to a very nice hair salon which happens to be very close to my house and therefore extremely convenient. This makes me sad.

Things I Love #23

When you're feeling a bit dopey or down in the dumps and into your inbox lands an email from one of a handful of people capable of cheering you up. That's nice.

How you know you're getting screwed buying nuts expensive moisturiser:

Woman 1: So you don't need to use much at all. Just one pump and this bottle should last eight months.

Me: Oh yes wow that is impressive.

Woman 2 (walking up): That stuff's great.

Me: Uh Huh.

Woman 2: You only need a couple of pumps and it'll last you three months.

Me: Ah.

I don't what it is but...

... sometimes even after a perfectly delightful four day weekend I want nothing more than a glass of wine, a bowl of pistachios and to feel a little sad listening to Joanna Newsom on the stereo. (A belated thanks to MG for pointing me towards this song which is so so lovely).

Perth: where everybody knows your name

There are a lot of things not to like about my home city. It can be boring. It can be dull. The career opportunities in my field are limited. That much said, it is a wonderful thing to nip down the road on a school night for a quick wine with a chum and immediately run into several more lovely more chums sitting at the bar. That's really awfully nice.

Don't hate me 'cos I'm beautiful

So far as I can remember (and who am I kidding, how would I forget?) the one and only time a total stranger has randomly tried to pick me up was on a London street when, en route to work in this morning, some random dude heading the other way stopped and said in a nice plummy accent: "Excuse me but do you fancy a drink after work?" I didn't really know how to respond. I'm pretty sure he wanted to chop me up into little pieces and store me in his freezer, maybe eat me over the winter.

I recount this story not to brag about how devastatingly attractive I am to would-be murderers around the globe (although...) but to point you towards this blog post from the incomparable Lindsay, writing about a story in the Daily Fail which is... I don't even know how to describe it without resorting to a block quote:

“Throughout my adult life, I’ve regularly had bottles of bubbly or wine sent to my restaurant table by men I don’t know. Once, a well-dressed chap bought my train ticket when I was standing behind him in the queue, while there was another occasion when a charming gentleman paid my fare as I stepped out of a cab in Paris.

"Another time, as I was walking through London’s Portobello Road market, I was tapped on the shoulder and presented with a beautiful bunch of flowers. Even bar tenders frequently shoo my credit card away when I try to settle my bill."

To quote Arrested Development... her?

Anyway it's brilliant/awful but it's also the first thing that made me laugh all day today and you can read it in all its, um, glory here.

It deepens like a coastal shelf

One of the increasingly big, increasingly headache-inducing problems in my life is the problem of children. I don't want them, have never wanted them and can see only one advantage having kids: to prevent future boredom and loneliness. Hmm. My partner, on the other hand, does want kids, is great with kids and will generally probably be miserable if he can't have them. This, clearly, is a conundrum and one that, as I tiptoe up towards 30, has a time limit. The assumption I have made is that if one of us doesn't change our mind in the next five years or so we'll presumably break up. Yeah, it's not really much of a plan.

Anyway, I didn't start this blog to talk about my personal life but to point out this rather interesting article in The New Yorker looking at ethical issues around having kids.

There's plenty of interest in here, not least of which is this bit:

"Finally, lots of people offer the notion that parenthood will make them happy. Here the evidence is, sadly, against them. Research shows that people who have children are no more satisfied with their lives than people who don’t. If anything, the balance tips the other way: parents are less happy. In an instantly famous study, published in Science in 2004, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman asked nine hundred working women to assess their experiences during the preceding day. The women rated the time they’d spent taking care of their kids as less enjoyable than the time spent shopping, eating, exercising, watching TV, preparing food, and talking on the phone. One of the few activities these women found less enjoyable than caring for their children was doing housework, which is to say cleaning up after them."

But the part I found most interesting was the part that - to my surprise - more or less summed up my main inner argument against having kids, the reason I keep coming back to regardless of how many times I try and tell myself "maybe I'll feel differently when...". To say, this (and apologies for the length of the quote):

"David Benatar, a professor at the University of Cape Town, also turns to philosophy to determine the ideal family size. He gives away his answer in the title of his book, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence... Benatar’s case rests on a critical but, in his view, unappreciated asymmetry. Consider two couples, the A’s and the B’s. The A’s are young, healthy, and rich. If they had children, they could give them the best of everything—schools, clothes, electronic gaming devices. Even so, we would not say that the A’s have a moral obligation to reproduce. The B’s are just as young and rich. But both have a genetic disease, and, were they to have a child together, that child would suffer terribly. We would say, using Benatar’s logic, that the B’s have an ethical obligation not to procreate.

"The case of the A’s and the B’s shows that we regard pleasure and pain differently. Pleasure missed out on by the nonexistent doesn’t count as a harm. Yet suffering avoided counts as a good, even when the recipient is a nonexistent one. And what holds for the A’s and the B’s is basically true for everyone. Even the best of all possible lives consists of a mixture of pleasure and pain. Had the pleasure been forgone—that is, had the life never been created—no one would have been the worse for it. But the world is worse off because of the suffering brought needlessly into it.

“One of the implications of my argument is that a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad—a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pin-prick—is worse than no life at all,” Benatar writes.

"He acknowledges that many readers will have difficulty accepting such a “deeply unsettling claim.” They will say that they consider their own existence to be a blessing, and that the same goes for their children’s. But they’re only kidding themselves. And no wonder. Everyone alive today is descended from a long line of people who did reproduce themselves. Evolution thus favors a kind of genetically encoded Pollyannaism. “Those with reproduction-enhancing beliefs are more likely to breed and pass on whatever attributes incline one to such beliefs,” Benatar notes."

It goes on and on and the whole thing is well worth a read if you have any interest in the subject. Of course the New Yorker article is fairly long and involved. If you're feeling a bit lazy and/or short of time you could do worse than consult Philip Larkin on the subject:

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

I mean I think he had a point too.

Dear Lady at the gym...

... if you need to bring two - TWO! - plastic containers full of cosmetics to the gym every morning, you are wearing too much make-up and you need to re-evaluate your life choices.

This is probably just for the journos...

... but it made me laugh. A few months ago I met a just-starting-out journo and we got to talking. When I asked her where she wanted to work she said she wanted to work at my paper or at the ABC. When I asked her what she thought of some recent changes to the paper she said she didn't actually READ the paper most of the time. At the time I bit down on my tongue and said calmly: "You should read the paper". Now I wish I could have just sent her this instead. Thanks McPhee for the heads up.

To the two dudes who pushed in front of me at the bar on Friday night,

So maybe you'd argue you didn't "push in front of me" but Come ON, when the person beside you at a bar was there first courtesy dictates that when the bar wench asks you what you want you gesture politely to the other person and say "s/he was here first".

So number one: fuck you. I hate people who do this.

Number two: don't you know what this kind of behaviour says to the world about what kind of person you are? Not only that you're rude and inconsiderate, although you are, but that you're greedy (really, you can't bear to wait the 2 minutes it would take for me to get a glass of wine?), impatient and have no self control.

Number three: if you're going to push in front of someone at a bar please don't try and MAKE CONVERSATION with them after you do it. That's just stupid.

"There are people talking in sentences that have no punchline and they don't even care"

In the brilliantly awesome UK TV series Queer as Folk there's a wonderful scene where Vince, a charming Dr Who fan in love with his best friend Stuart, realises he'd rather continue to be lovesick and hang out with Stuart than stay in a relationship with his nice (read: boring), well-adjusted (boring), reliable (boring) boyfriend, who's so boring I've forgotten his name.

He has this epiphany and after ditching the boyfriend over the phone ("I'm breaking up... we're breaking up") says this:

"Unrequited love. It's fantastic, 'cause it never has to change, it never has to grow up and it never has to die."

Then runs off to find Stuart and, if I have the right scene in my head, the most amazing/fucking terrible dancing scene you've ever scene ensues. Seriously, if you haven't watched the series go and do so right now, although for fucks sake please don't bother with the US version. No. Just no no no no no.

Anyway, I was thinking about this tonight because I was reading this charming article by David Sedaris and I started trying to recall how I'd got into Sedaris, who is an absolute delight, in the first place. Then it came to me: I'd started reading him because the boy on whom I had a mad, utterly unrequited crush was reading him and in my stupidity I assumed that all I had to do to overcome his indifference was show him how much we had in common. "You like Me Talk Pretty One Day? I like Me Talk Pretty One Day - let's go to bed." The boy didn't work out but I got to keep Sedaris (literally, I actually still have his copy) and as it turns out I really DO love him.

Unrequited love gets kind of a bad rap but it's taken me this long to realise it's also a pretty good motivating force. When you desperately want something you can't have you have to try and think of ways to have it, whether that means completely remaking your personality, losing 10kgs or locking him in the basement until Stockholm Syndrome sets in.

In my short(ish) 29 years here's just a SPRINKLING, just a HINT of the things that I have done or achieved as the result of a big fat unrequited crush.

Belle and Sebastian: My favourite band in the world and the only walk-in on my Desert Island Discs. So it's a bit embarassing to admit I only threw myself into him because someone I adored asked me if I'd heard of them.

The Virgin Suicides: One of my favourite books and I seem to recall I only borrowed it from an *ahem* certain crush so I would have a reason to return it. Which I didn't (but, hey, he moved away, no jury in the land would convict me).

A shitty novel. This one is not so exciting but the first complete 'novel' I ever got around to finishing was 100 per cent inspired by trying to make someone fall in love with me. This particular, er, person, was so far out of my league intellectually that the only way to even the scales was to write an amazing first novel that would blow his mind. Unfortunately it was shit but, hey, I finished the fucker.

I learned how to drink. Sure in hindsight I realise the fact this boy and I almost only ever met at pubs and bars was a red flag to his (mild) problem drinking. At the time it seemed reasonable and I, until then not really that much of a drinker, learned the beauty of getting tipsy drunk for no reason. This one barely counts as unrequited love because we did end up going out for a time. But I like to think our best times came before I realised he liked me too. After that it was all downhill.

I could go on but if I even start to think about all the wonderful/terribly sad music unrequited love has driven me to I might never get to sleep.

UPDATE: So something went wrong the first time I tried to post this and... I don't even know. Should be fixed now.

What is...

... UP with these cute wee ecards popping up all over the place? It started with a trickle - I spotted one on someone else's blog - and is now an official torrent - I had five, yes FIVE, emailed to me today. Madness. Anyway, because I have nothing of interest to say here are some I found kinda goofy.

On the one hand...

... this is an admirable idea. On the other hand, if I looked like Cate Blanchett I would be fucking CARPET-BOMBING the world with photos of myself, photoshopped or not photoshopped.

Happy wine o'clock, internet

“I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that's wonderful.”
(Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye)

In which I gush

Sometimes I hate my job. I guess/assume/hope most people feel like that sometimes. At other times I love that my job gives me access to and forces me to interact with people I would likely never have the opportunity to meet in a different profession.

This was driven home to me yesterday after a particularly delightful lunch with someone I guess I would describe as a well-regarded member of the business community. This guy has 30 years on me, is an engineer by training, runs a hugely successful ASX 100 company and is, as a result, loaded. But he's also awesome and I'd never realised it. Having intended to ask him lots of probing work-related questions we ended up spending most of the lunch talking about books and writing and freaking art. And I... how do I put this... do not know anything about art.

It's a hard thing to articulate but I came away thinking that, wow, it was really great to meet someone with money and power and influence and discover they're awesome. Too often - way, way too often - the opposite is true and it's so easy to be assume money and power will turn everyone into a dick. This guy was the kind of person I'd like to be at 60: smart, funny and in possession of what sounds like the most amazing library I've never seen.

He even convinced me I'm wrong about Charles Dickens and should be reading David Copperfield right now.

Anyway, mash note over for the day. Original bitchy programming to resume in 3... 2... 1...

Otters that look (kinda) like Benedict Cumberbatch

In trying to decide what to say about this I could, as is so often the case, do no better than quote Lindsay: I'm glad I live in a world where this exists. Truly these are halcyon days.

"Sometimes I find I get to thinking of the past..."

For various reasons I've been trawling back through my music collection lately and one of the thing that surprised me is how many of my favourite bands or singers are the same people I was listening to 10 years ago.

I shouldn't be surprised. My friend Nick once told me that you'll never feel the way about the bands you discover after you're 25 as you do about the ones you discover before you're 25 and I think he had a point. The reason I still regard Belle and Sebastian as my "favourite" band has a lot less to do with their recent output (charming though some of it is) and a lot more to do with the role they played in my formative years when I was madly in love with P and couldn't imagine a world in which we wouldn't ultimately wind up together (great news to hear about baby number 2 by the way).

Maybe this helps explain why I've been in such a moony kind of a mood all week, stalking around the house like a moody teenager, falling asleep listening to that one Sigur Ros album everyone was really into at some point in time and daydreaming about a time in my life when it felt like there were still possibilities in front of me. I discussed this with my friend Mike, who was absolutely no help because he's as bad as me when it comes to romanticising the past and forgetting how crappy those late teen years and early 20s were.

So I've done it myself damnit. May I present: my list of THINGS THAT WERE AWFUL ABOUT MY LATE TEENS/EARLY 20s THAT I HAVE AT TIMES MANAGED TO FORGET.

1. No boobs. This wasn't a tragedy - I think small boobs are nice - but having bigger-than-small boobs can also be a true blessing when it comes to getting served at a bar or distracting people in a meeting from realising the fact you have no idea what you're talking about. For some reason mine didn't appear until my early twenties. I still remember going to the Subi Pub and hearing my friend A asked my boyfriend, um, also A: "Have her boobs got bigger?"

2. Clothes. It's not that I was a terrible dresser 10 years ago, it's just... no wait, 90 per cent of my clothes should have been burned in a bonfire. Why I thought the Tomboy Look was a good idea I'll never know and the less said about that weird woollen HAT I briefly sported the better.

3. Total lack of self confidence. This hardly needs an explanation but, seriously, if I'd realised at the time that actually I was kinda cute and had a perfectly decent personality, I would have had a lot more fun.

4. Unrequited Love. Again this hardly needs an explanation but in my advanced years I've managed to forget how absolutely wretched some of my crushes made me. And I had a lot of them (P, obviously, which lasted about 5 years too long; J, which ended so very badly; the other J, which, pity about the personality; I, which never even got off the ground THANK FUCK; M, which was always doomed; the other M, who I managed to treat awfully; K, who had that weird thing with the wolves.... I'd better stop now). Only going back to read my old diaries reminds me how miserable and waily I was for much of the time. Love angst is seductive in books and movies and music but sometimes it's actually rather nice being reasonably sure your boyfriend is fond of you.

5. Living with my parents. The thing is, my parents are good parents and lovely people and by the time I came along my older siblings had broken down enough barriers that my parents weren't overly concerned with my day-to-day welfare, which was a good thing. That much said, moving out of home is like recovering from a bad headache: suddenly even doing ordinary, everyday shit feels amazing. (Sorry Mum and Dad).

Look, I could go on. I could also go on to point out that the list of AWESOME THINGS ABOUT MY LATE TEENS/EARLY 20S THAT WILL NEVER COME AROUND AGAIN might be longer than the above list (I mean, come on: remember going out on a Saturday night, all dressed up and thinking this could be the night?) but what are you going to do - go back in time, do it all differently and this time really appreciate it?

No, I'm seriously asking: is that shit... doable yet? Please at least tell me someone is looking into it.

Only a little bit

Sometimes I feel terribly shallow for caring about clothes as I do, for giving a shit if I have a pretty dress to wear or nice shoes or if my hair looks okay. Then I see a photo like this, courtesy of The Sartorialist (here's where I point out I have no legal right to the image, am basically stealing it although only with the best intentions and as a long-time fan etc), and am reminded of the power of clothes to make you think things about a person. In this case I just want to invite him over to unironically watch The Bachelor, get cider drunk and maybe just maybe let me put my hands under that amazing coat.

(Love) doesn't feel like Puccini...

"To me it feels more like this:

Jeremy Irons says I've been waiting for you and Patricia Hodge says What do you mean? They're in a bedroom upstairs in a smart house; music is thudding below. I knew you'd come he says, and she says I've just come in to comb my hair. He says I knew you'd have to comb your hair. I knew you'd have to get away from the party.

He's drunk but he looks like he means it. She laughs - he's her husband's best friend and there is absolutely nothing whatsoever about her which suggests that flirtation or infidelity has ever crossed her mind. So when she asks Aren't you enjoying the party? and walks amusedly to the dressing table to pick up her hairbrush, she is just humouring an old friend, no more, no less. He just comes out with it. You're beautiful. Listen. I've been watching you all night. I must tell you, I want to tell you. You're incredible.

You're drunk.

Nevertheless. Irons delivers this word beautifully. It is a beautiful word to say, after all. I was best man at your wedding. I saw you in white. I watched you glide by in white.

I wasn't in white.

I should have had you in your white before the wedding. I should have blackened you in your bridal dress before ushering you into your wedding as your best man...

She looks headmistressily unbothered by the situation. My husband's best man, your best friend's best man.

Irons ignores this. You're lovely! I'm crazy about you. All these words I'm saying - don't you see they've never been said before? Can't you see? I'm crazy about you. It's a whirlwind. Have you ever been to the Sahara Desert? Listen to me. It's true. Listen. You overwhelm me, you're so lovely.

I'm not!

You're so beautiful - look at the way you look at me!

Patricia Hodge gives us this woman's easy talent for coping with such situations. Fending off this kind of approach, we see, has always been one of her more instinctive accomplishments. I'm not looking at you! She is kind but stern.

Look at the way you're looking at me! I can't wait for you. I'm bowled over. I'm totally knocked out. My jewel. He puts his hand near her hair as though it's radiating heat. This isn't a pitch or a line, although I have seen several actors play this speech of Pinter's as just that. Nor is it a drunken error, as Douglas Hodge had it at the National Theatre in 1998: Hodge is supposed to be good in Pinter but he never plays against Pinter, which is what Irons is doing, rather than nudging us in the ribs to tip us off to what the author really thinks of these avowals. You could do this scene so many ways. But for Jeremy Irons, no editorialising, no standing apart. This is actually happening. The actual magic. It's magic.

I can't ever sleep again. Now, listen! It's the truth! I won't walk! I'll be a cripple, I'll descend - I'll diminish into total paralysis. My life is in your hands, that's what you're banishing me to - a state of catatonia. Do you know the state of catatonia? Do you? A state where the reigning prince is the prince of emptiness, the prince of absence, the price of desolation. I love you. She makes some footling objection, looking as pale as Patricia Hodge has ever looked. You want to reach into the scene and pinch her cheek, raise the blood to the surface. I adore you. I'm madly in love with you. I can't believe that what anyone at this moment is saying has ever happened. HAS EVER HAPPENED. Nothing has ever happened. NOTHING. This is the ONLY thing that has ever happened. Your eyes kill me. I'm lost. You're lost.

No she says. But her brain is beginning to register depths of feeling which have been slumbering under her marriage for years, for fifteen years, which this man has disinterred for her.

Yes.

Well, that's Pinter. The film is the backwards-running Betrayal (1982) and this, the final scene, is the start of the story, a trick which the last decade has become rather addicted to copying. It's one of the greatest love scenes ever filmed because it does something which you almost never see. This is where, if you don't have a script like Pinter's, you have to cut away (to bedroom or breakfast) but here we actually witness the woman falling in love with the man, and you can see it because you can see Irons hypnotising himself, enchanting himself. You can see the actual magic.

Of course Irons has this quality of doomed romanticism - there is in his face something tending towards sickness and his teeth look a little brown - which makes him perfect for old-fashioned romantic parts. His best bit in Brideshead Revisited was being dumped by Julia Flyte, sitting on the stairs, embodying the pain of love: I don't want to make it easier for you. I hope your heart may break."

(Apologies for the extended quote but this is one of my favourite chapters from one of my favourite books, Antonia Quirke's gloriously uneven Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - a book that was recommended to me by the lovely Nick Lezard with the words "you'll either love this or hate it because it's what you should be writing". He flattered me, the smooth fucker, but the book has stuck with me. Lo-ve-ly).

Reading into things

This blog comes courtesy of Lindsay, who both blogs more often than I do and is almost certainly going to become the next E.L James, what with her (I assume) borderline filthy historical romance skills. I hope to one day ride her coattails.

The term is Literary Speed Dating and according to this article in The Independent it's inspired by both a love of books and a love of, uh, what I guess can only be termed public transport eye-fucking:

"You are sitting on a train, and across the aisle someone is reading one of your favourite books. This person (clearly of taste) happens to be a tall, handsome man. As you stare he looks up, catches your eye and smiles – he asks for your number... Browsing in a bookshop you reach out to pick up a book; so does the person standing next to you. The person happens to be a tall, handsome man. He catches your eye and smiles – he asks if you would like to go for coffee... So run the fantasies of many a book-lover."

The idea is a neat one: speed-dating but where everyone brings his or her favourite books. The problem, as Lindsay has already pointed, out, is what fucking book to bring. Of my Probably Top Five Books (The Great Gatsby, The End of the Affair, The Virgin Suicides, The Long Goodbye and Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers) the first two options make me seem like the pretentious douche I am and the third like I maybe possibly sometimes cut myself. Chandler is a possibility but seems just a bit too obvious, while the Quirke will reveal me as a sad, sad case right about the point at which I have to explain what it's about: "The author... she crushes on movie stars and... writes about them".

Worse than that, I've been sitting here for 10 minutes trying to think of the perfect book a guy could bring to make me go weak at the knees and I've come up with nothing. Okay, well actually I came up with Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty but then I decided that would probably make me worry he was deeply closeted and hoped to use me as his beard. Although, don't get me wrong, that is a great book. Far longer is the list of Books I Would Consider A Massive Turn Off, which goes something like this:

Anything by Marcel Proust
Massive wanker, even if Swann's Way is genuinely his favourite book. Especially if that's genuinely his favourite book.

Anything by James Joyce
See above.

Anything by Jodi Picoult.
Bring Proust and JJ and you're trying too hard. Bring Picoult and you're not trying hard enough. Seriously.

Tess of the D'urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
I don't mind a bit of Thomas Hardy, by which I mean I thought The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure were both rather good. But Tess. I mean Tess! I fucking hate Tess, both the book and the character. Accordingly I am deeply suspicious about what a love of this book says about a man's attitudes towards women.

Lance Armstrong, It's Not About the Bike
This isn't a half bad book really but the kind of person who loves sports biographies is the kind of person who, at some point in your life together, will try to make you watch sport. Which... no.

Anything from Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant Series
This is unfair because SD is very good and TC a very cool and original creation. That much said, it's still a series of books about a rapist leper so... you know.

I could go on - you really want to hear me explain why Paolo Maurensig's The Luneberg Variation is a superior choice to Nabokov's The Defence (if you MUST bring a chess book) but it's Saturday night, I have the house to myself and I have a very trashy book to be reading. The sort of thing, clearly, that would see me harshly judged if I dared to drag it along to a bout of literary speed dating. That much said, the kind of man who would appreciate said book would be, phew, a fucking keeper.

UPDATED: Because apparently I can't tell Lance Armstrong and Cadel Evans apart. Even though one is an Aussie and the other only has one ball.

I couldn't possibly comment

So for obvious reasons (hey Mum, hey Dad) I don't use this blog to write about sex. That much said, this is kinda interesting. And yes *ahem* I may own the book.

Charlie Brown does it best

No comment

Things I learned about myself in Thailand

1. I do not cope well with the heat.
2. I do not cope well with the humidity.
3. Mocktails make me sad.

Things that are probably more embarassing than crying like a baby in the toilets at work and then having to return to your desk with bloodshot eyes

1. Doing a sh*t on the office carpet.
2. Forgetting to wear pants.
3. Admitting that you were really excited and optimistic when Kevin Rudd got in.

I'm sorry I didn't acknowledge your hello in the office today but...

1. You make my skin crawl.
2. I mean I find you creepy at the best of times but it grossed me out that you kinda... whispered your hello.
3. You're really bad at your job, which would be fine if you didn't think exactly the opposite.
4. You take all your personal calls in the corridor by my desk and, uh, let me just say that being forced to listen to your personal calls does not endear you to me.
5. I just... really don't like you, don't want to be friends with you and don't even want to encourage the nod-and-hello relationship you seem to believe we currently have.

An actual SMS I received today on my work phone (which until very recently belonged to someone else in the office):

Mate what is that procedure called when they stick a tube up your ask [sic] and pump your bowels full of water to flush it out?

In lieu of me having anything interesting to say...

... this is a wonderful (if now a year old) set of links to some truly great bits of (US-centric) journalism for some great Sunday afternoon reading.

Things that disturbed me about tonight's episode of the (really quite fucking terribly trashy ) show Pretty Little Liars

1. The fact Belle and Sebastian's "Boy With the Arab Strap" was playing in the bar scene.

2. The fact I was more disturbed by point 1 than by the still-incredibly-creepy relationship between a 15 (uh maybe 16 at MOST) year old girl and her 30 (late twenties at BEST) teacher - the creepy part being that the show completely endorses this romance as some sort of beautiful love story, as opposed to a tale of two hormone-fuelled morons who make Bad Life Choices. That much said, her teacher IS pretty hot and if the show hadn't made him into such a neutered stick-in-the-mud (they haven't had sex? Oh please) I might be more invested in this creepy shit. Smut I understand but True Wuv? Vomit.

Things I have tried over the past to get my sleep cycle back on track:

1. Going to bed early.
2. Going to bed at a reasonable hour.
3. Staying up as late as I can until my eyelids are practically crawling down my cheeks.
4. Taking pills designed to make me sleep.
5. Taking pills that aren't designed to make me sleep but do list 'drowsiness' as a side effect.
6. Taking no pills at all.
7. Drinking wine.
8. Drinking no wine.
9. Reading in bed.
10. Not reading in bed.
11. Reading books in bed that are so boring I FEEL like I'm already asleep.
12. Staring at the ceiling, wondering if it's early enough to qualify as morning. Repeat for 5 hours.

What has happened to me...

... that I KNOW I'm going to go and see this schmalzy bit of schmalz, possibly on a Sunday afternoon and possibly on my lonesome? Also I might cry. Yes, sometimes I like to see sentimental crap and weep. It's Bridges of Madison County all over abloodygain.

Things I did not expect to learn about via email from a casual work contact and, in fact, would probably be happier not knowing:

1. His wife's traumatic sexual assault four years ago. Way to just... drop that in there.

Questions that plague me at 3 in the morning

1. Is it possible my temazepam has expired or have I grown freakishly immune to its wonderfulness?

2. Is 'wonderfulness' a real word and, if not, can I please make it one?

Dumbogedden

My one-time favourite columnist Charlie Brooker has been a bit hit or miss lately. Perhaps it's that he's got a lot more projects on the go these days, or maybe I've just grown accustomed to his ways (as Henry Higgins didn't sing) but in the past six months or so I've found some of his columns have failed to land for me. What a pleasure, then, to see this brilliant return to form, which is worth reading for this line -

"Many leapt from the tyres they were swinging in to furrow their brows and howl in anger. Others, tragically, began tapping rudimentary responses..."

- alone.

Five Days in Cape Town

The first thing everyone in Cape Town wants to tell you is how friendly everyone in Cape Town is. They’re a bit obsessed with friendliness, these Capetonians, and although they tell you this thing about everyone being friendly in a very friendly kind of a way you get the sense it could start to become tiring or feel a little bit aggressive if you had to spend more than five days in the city, which I haven’t.

I say “these Capetonians” like someone who has recently completed a census but in my five day stay a good 70 per cent of the locals I dealt with were the taxi drivers who ferried me from hotel to conference centre, conference centre to drinks, drinks to dinner, dinner to more drinks, drinks back to my hotel. It doesn’t seem fair to judge a city on its taxi drivers and in the case of Cape Town it would be more or less impossible: those I encountered didn’t seem to fall into any one category or share any particular characteristic, apart from the aggressive friendliness I mentioned before. There was the driver who listened to rap music very loudly, singing along and using the steering wheel like a drum when we stopped at the traffic lights; the driver who couldn’t write a receipt and seemed dozy as fuck in a dozen other tiny ways that made me slightly nervous in the back seat where I was pretending to read my Kindle, the driver who watched me walk into a pole but was too polite to laugh; the driver who didn’t say anything except for the number on the meter at the end of the trip and the driver who told me the story about American tourists asking him if they had computers in South Africa. He was my favourite.

My least favourite was the driver who picked me up outside the Cullinan Hotel – one of the many quite posh CBD-adjacent hotels in South Africa, where I’d been having drinks with finance-types, including one I’d supposedly met in a bar a month or three earlier and who had attended my school but who I did not remember and could not have picked out of a line-up (which gave me some pleasure because 1)he was super dreamy and successful in a way that made me feel unreasonably irritated by him and 2)I later met a friend of his who told me Dreamy Stranger was a massive player, thus semi-justifying, I felt, my unreasonable irritation.)

I digress. I was leaving that party and en route to another when this crappy driver picked me up outside the hotel. His maxi taxi was already mostly full of passengers, one of whom leaned out the window to ask if I was heading towards the Waterfront and wanted a lift. Writing this on the plane home from Cape Town (ten hours to Dubai, an hour stopover, another ten hours back to Perth next to a women who won’t stop sniffing – use a tissue) it seems like a really stupid thing to have got into a taxi with these strangers who turned out to be part of a Virgin crew in town for a few days (“We’re Virgins” they told me within 30 seconds of my getting into the front seat) but could just as easily have been murders and/or rapists. But at the time they looked too fresh-faced and wholesome and young to be white-slavers. And they were lovely, these Virgins, so if the taxi driver hadn’t turned out to be a total dick by double billing us in a really gross and duplicitous way, I would have had fond memories of our little 15 minute drive together. Instead the experience left a bad taste in my mouth so that the next time a taxi driver told me, over his shoulder while changing lanes, how friendly South Africans were in general and Capetonians in particular, I only smiled and didn’t say a word.

The other thing about Cape Town everyone wants to tell you is how beautiful it is and they’re right. So long as you have money in Cape Town everything you see is liable to be beautiful: hotels and apartments are stacked up around the water like South Africa’s answer to the Amalfi Coast and the view of Table Mountain from my hotel bed every morning is one of the better things I’ve ever seen, including the two days I spent working on Company magazine’s Bachelor of the Year photoshoot. (You can get little hints of how it might not be so beautiful in Cape Town without money only on the ride to and from the airport because the drive takes you close to the slums, which look exactly like you’d expect slums to look. It is possible to go on tours of the slums, which I was assured are nowhere near as gross and exploitative as they sound but I opted not to because, you know, it sounded gross and exploitative.)

The seals outside my hotel window were my favourite thing about my view of Cape Town’s harbour, although I never really figured out if it was the same two seals there every day - alternately swimming around and sleeping on a low-lying wooden structure I guess is probably not a jetty but which I’ll call a jetty because I don’t know how else to describe it - or a whole lot of seals that only ever appeared two at a time. I tried not to anthropomorphise the seals and make them into Mr and Mrs Seal but it was hard because they looked pretty comfortable snoozing together in the sun. When they weren’t sleeping they’d be doing somersaults in the water and waving their flippers around like the world’s laziest semaphore practioners. What I’m trying to say is: they were freaking adorable and if I could have found a way to slip them into my luggage and bring them back to Perth with me I would be rubbing Mrs Seal’s belly right about now.

Drive an hour out of Cape Town and it gets more beautiful very quickly. South Africans are proud of their Stellenbosch wine region, which looks incredibly beautiful unless you’ve spent much time in Margaret River or the Yarra Valley and then it just looks very pretty.

Wine tasting and lunch had sounded like a pretty cruisey way to spend the day right up until the point where I realised it was me and 49-odd dudes, including exactly two I’d met before.. On the drive up I talked to Trent in the seat in front of me, who was expecting his first grandchild and… Ben?... across the aisle, who had been cage diving with great white sharks off the coast of the South African coast. At the first winery I talked to two analysts from BCF whose names I’ve forgotten about Cape Town generally and the Mining Indaba conference in particular, including some semi-disturbing stories from last year’s conference that I won’t forget in a hurry. At the second winery, where we stopped for lunch I wound up next to a Canadian geologist who gave me the best explanation of the US housing crisis I’ve ever heard and I think we got along pretty well generally right up until the point I realised I’d completely forgotten to take the photos intended to accompany an article and had to snap them all in two minutes, half cut, before we all got back on the bus.

On the way home I slept for an hour, oblivious to the fact I was being whisked past some of South Africa's most expensive real estate. Back in Cape Town, with the bus parked a five minute walk from my hotel I woke up groggy and disoriented, along with the rest of the bus, wishing I was at home in Perth where it was possible to hang out with people with whom I didn’t have to make small talk.

The stages of starting a new writing project

1. Excitement. This is going to be the one, you just know it. Forget about those fucking awful two 'novels' lying in the bottom of your desk drawer: this time it will all be different.

2. Disbelief. It's coming so easily, you never knew it could be so easy. Who said writing was hard? Liars, all of them. Or maybe I'm just a genius and never knew it? Fuck I AM a genius, I know it.

3. Niggling Doubt. Okay so it's slowing down but you're still writing, you still think what you wrote yesterday and the day before and the day before that is pretty good. Time to put your head down and Get It Done.

4. Boredom. I really thought sitting at my desk every day would be more fun than this.

5. Despair. I hate this story, I hate these fucking characters, I hate every word I've ever written.

6. Excitement. This is going to be the one, you just know it. Forget about those fucking awful three 'novels' lying in the bottom of your desk drawer: this time it will all be different.

Shame

Him: "We've actually met before. Like, 3 months ago."
Me: "Oh shit sorry, I'm awful with faces."
Him: "We talked for an hour."

Am I crazy or...

... does Daniel Radcliffe seem like he's turned into kind of a nice, funny young guy? I don't fancy him - Dear Lord No - but I saw a quote from him somewhere the other day saying it freaks him out a bit when girls are entirely bereft of pubic hair, which made me smile. Now here he is being positively cute about my beloved Ryan Gosling. This quote via The Superficial:

“This year I have a talent crush on Ryan Gosling. I think he’s fantastic and… (ahem) you know he’d be nice afterwards. He seems smart. If I was gay, I would go for a smart man.”

Nice work DR: I thought the kid who plays Ron Weasley would turn out to be the charming, well-adjusted one.

An open letter to a certain unnamed online bottle shop -

Please stop sending me emails suggesting I might like to stock up on booze ahead of Valentine's Day. I'm not sure what's creepier: the idea that I might like to get blackout drink on a box of cheap white wine (although Lord knows I love a box of cheap white wine) come February 14 or that I might like to express my love for the object of my affection through the distribution of discounted liquor. Valentine's Day is already a bullshit, completely bogus holiday and should I ever decide to start celebrating it, it won't be with you.

Must Love Glass

I was going to write about this week's Savage Love podcast because it featured the charming Ira Glass but, wouldn't you know it, that hussy Lindsay has beaten me to it. I think this is why she is one of my favourite people in the world.

Anyway, if you own an iPhone (and I assume you can download it on other phones, I just don't know how) you should SERIOUSLY be downloading the (free) Savage Love podcast from iTunes every Tuesday. It's so good. Why aren't you downloading this week's episode right now? Don't you WANT to hear Ira Glass - Ira freaking Glass! - give advice to a woman who throws up every time she gives her boyfriend a blowjob? You do, don't you, you know you do so why are you pretending you don't?

In related news I am now crushing pretty hard on Ira Glass. I mean, more so than usual. Tragically I was supposed to interview him when he was in town last month with David Sedaris but, for boring reasons, it didn't happen. I was sad at the time but now I'm just plain GUTTED.

Things I wish I'd said to my dwarf lemon tree before it was (I'm really pretty sure it is) dead

1. I love you, lemon tree.
2. Why haven't you ever grown me any lemons?
3. What am I doing wrong? Am I giving you too much water or not enough? Why are you not responding appropriately to these expensive citrus fertiliser pellets I got from Bunnings? Is it because I accidentally got them wet and they all stuck together in one giant clump that I can no longer scoop out of the box?
4. Why do you hate me?

Revelations

I don't often link to the lovely Nick Lezard's "Down and Out in London" column for the New Statesman. The link is permanently down there on the right so I figure you can click it whenever you like if you have the urge. However, I make an exception for this week's column, which served as a fresh, almost profound, reminder that it is possible to meander through 29 years without ever having realised a simple truth about yourself. In this case I find myself shocked to realise: I have never in my life defrosted a freezer.

It's true I've been awake for 3 hours...

... and it's only 6.30am. (I don't know what's up with that - insomnia is a bitch and I have a theory, which I'll expand on another time if you're very unlucky, that lying awake in the wee hours for hours at a stretch changes a person.)

But trust me when I say it is not just my sleep-deprived brain telling me I must have these shoes.

People who make me roll my eyes and die a little inside #34

People who say they "like black and white movies". I know I'm not being fair. There are, of course, loads of great black and white movies and His Girl Friday, Sunset Boulevard and Manhattan (oh God, I wish I was watching Manhattan right now) would all be near the top of my list. But there are also loads of shit ones (the b&w classics that are still so popular today survived because they were, you know, classics) just like there are plenty of great colour movies and loads of shit ones. So when I hear people saying they just loooove black and white movies, you know, just generally, all I hear is the wanky film snob equivalent of a dude I once knew who turned me off forever with the immortal line: "I don't watch TV, I really only watch documentaries". I die, I die.

Things I hate about my downstairs neighbours having a domestic late at night...

1. It's really, really, really hard to hear what they're arguing about.

Women Be Shopping

News out this month to surprise absolutely no one who has ever met another human being: men and women are not the same.

Yes, apparently it’s taken science to confirm what every sub-par stand-up comedian appears to have been onto for a while now.

The source of this astonishing claim is a study published on the Public Library of Science website and called “The distance between Mars and Venus: measuring global sex differences in personality”.

The boffins behind this study crunched the numbers on personality tests taken by 10,000 people. And in a break from past research – which suggested the personality differences between men and women were minimal – found men and women have firmly entrenched characteristics.

Living up to stereotypes women scored higher than man on sensitivity, warmth and apprehension, meaning they’re more likely be sentimental, deferential, attentive to others and worry more. On the flipside men scored higher on dominance, aggression and - though I can scarcely believe it - emotional stability.

The two sexes were roughly the same when it came to perfectionism, liveliness and abstract versus practical thinking.

Obviously it’s worth pointing out that the findings do not, of course, apply to everyone. There are plenty of aggressive and dominant women out there who don’t give a fuck about anyone just as there are sentimental men I could mention who go to pieces while watching Beaches. I won’t name names.

Nor are the findings uncontested, particularly by the scientists behind past research, who have criticised the methodology behind the latest study.

Not being a scientist (I know - I surprise you) I won’t make any claim for the veracity of this latest study’s findings.

What I DO wonder is who, exactly, is funding this kind of research? And, more importantly, why?

Probably I'm being too cynical and this kind of research is making a valid contribution to society's collective knowledge.

But it seems to me the only people who benefit from this kind of bogus pseudoscience are the journalists, who use these kind of studies to write harmlessly inane dross like this, this and this. (As my favourite character from my new guilty pleasure TV show Happy Endings might say "Women Be Shopping".)

Of course now I've written about it on this bloody blog, thus adding to the collective inanity. Sometimes I hate myself.

Question:

Does this "Fuckin' Sale" (courtesy of a Japanese store, apparently) just mean a really big fucking sale or are they actually selling fucks? Enquiring minds want to know.

That's a dealbreaker

The second time I broke up with someone I had to do it twice.

The relationship was pretty serious - he was seriously into The Smiths and I seriously considered ending it all via a note slipped under the door, like an early Martin Amis hero ("It's just not on, is it? It's nearly on but not quite"). I did it in person, in the end, but - for reasons I really won't go into - the first time didn't take and so I had to do it again at a party. The worst part? Driving him home afterwards.

I wish I could say that was my least well-executed break-up but I'd be lying. Tragically it was actually a step up from the first time when I had to... and then I.... and later played "Walking on... well, no, perhaps I won't go into it.

I'm terrible at breaking up with people is what I guess I'm trying to say. And I hate it. Obviously. (Although I guess only sociopaths actually enjoy breaking up with anyone.)

Perhaps that's why I so greatly enjoy reading this awesome Dealbreakers series in which people explain why they broke up with exes, albeit usually in kind of shitty and/or pretentious prose. And the reasons for the 'break-ups' are... well, okay I can honestly they make my reasons for my (very teeny tiny handful of) past-breakups (I hate him, he only ever wants to go to the fucking pub, he's way too into Suede in a way that sometimes makes me think he might be secretly into dudes) look incredibly sane.

Damn you, sun...

I understand that sometimes journalists have to write things they don't necessarily agree with. I understand that in quite news time of the year, like January, sometimes it becomes necessary to engage in some shameless beat-ups. I understand that getting angry at the Daily Mail for incredibly poor journalism is like getting angry at the sun for being hot.

But the DM has outdone itself this time with this shocking (no, seriously) expose on how kids cartoon Peppa Pig is corrupting the nation's children. Or something.

I mean, come on, either this is a massive pisstake -

"One father spoke of his despair at how his four-year-old son had taken to splashing in what he gleefully called ‘muddy puddles’ on his way to school – copying Peppa’s favourite pastime.

"Others reported that their children had started shouting ‘chocolate cake’ whenever they were asked what they would like for breakfast – just like George Pig. ‘The more I see, the more alarmed I am at the choice of behaviour put into this “cartoon”,’ one mother wrote on parenting website Mumsnet.
‘George Pig, who my son loves, says “yuck” at vegetables and only wants to eat chocolate cake."

- or it's one of the signs of the coming apocalypse. Best stock up on some canned beans to be on the safe side.

I am not worthy

Sometimes one is so struck by something so simply amazing that all one can do is marvel in silence. It happened to me the first time I saw Cillian Murphy's cheekbones and the first time I read The Great Gatsby. It's happened again now I've read this, which is just... I'm speechless. I am... without speech.

Things I am looking forward to more than seeing the new Michael Fassbender movie "Shame".

1. Absolutely nothing.

UPDATED: With a pic of Fassy that came across my desk. Because... well, why wouldn't you?

Token Smokin' Hottie: "Malcolm Tucker"

What is it about a man swearing that is so hot? I have no fucking idea, just as I have no idea why exactly it is I fancy the hell out of Malcolm Tucker, the sweary, craggy-faced Scotsman who gets all the best lines in the brilliant TV series The Thick Of It but could not enthusiastically be deemed "conventionally attractive" by any known measure.

Probably this crush of mine hints at something disturbing, like a secret desire to be shouted at and knocked into the kitchen cabinets. Maybe I should be seeing a therapist.

Things I think but do not say to the woman who sits across the aisle from me #34

I KNOW THIS TIME OF YEAR IS REALLY BUSY AND CRAZY FOR EVERYONE BUT SERIOUSLY IF I HAVE TO LISTEN TO YOU DISCUSS THE PROGRESS OF YOUR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING FOR ANOTHER 5 FUCKING SECONDS I AM GOING TO EXPLODE. OR IMPLODE. DEFINITELY ONE OF THE TWO AND EITHER WAY IT'S GOING TO BE MESSY. I'M NOT TRYING TO BE A BITCH BUT SERIOUSLY HOW IS IT THAT I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE BUYING EACH OF YOUR NEPHEWS? THAT'S INSANE: I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT I'M BUYING MY OWN NEPHEWS AND, FRANKLY, A) THE PERSONAL DEODERANT PREFERENCES OF YOUR VARIOUS RELATIVES IS INFORMATION I COULD REALLY REALLY DO WITHOUT AND B) A LYNX MULTI-PACK IS KIND OF A BULLSHIT GIFT TO BEGIN WITH.

Sweet Valley... Cry?

You can’t go home again. But that doesn’t stop us trying.

Earlier this year bookstores across the world took delivery of a slim novel called Sweet Valley Confidential — a title that may mean little to many but means a great deal to women of a certain age and disposition who had the date March 29 circled on their calendars for months beforehand.

The novel in question was the long-awaited (uh, by someone I assume) follow-up to the insanely successful Sweet Valley High series of books that shaped the teenage lives of millions growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.

The series should never have worked, focused as it was on the lives of nauseatingly beautiful and irritatingly popular twin sisters growing up in California. With one twin a boring goody two-shoes (Elizabeth) and the other a thrill-seeking tramp (Jessica) many of the books culminated in preachy conclusions that had readers believing girls who rode motorbikes were doomed to wind up — at best — in a coma and — at worst — suffer an identity crisis that would have them believing they were their own twin sister. Seriously, that actually happened.

But the series was hugely successful, running to more than 150 books, spawning a TV series (god that was bad), a slew of spin-off books and leaving in its wake a generation of fans whose formative teenage years would be forever entwined with that of the Wakefield Twins.

So perhaps we should be thoroughly unsurprised that publishers wanted to cash in on the nostalgia of those fans with the release of SVC, which picks up ten years from the end of the series.

The assumption at the heart of that decision — that the girls who once gasped over Jessica’s selfishness or swooned over Elizabeth’s weirdly sexless relationship with her beige boyfriend Todd will want to know what happened next — was probably not entirely correct. But even if the book does make squillions (and, er, the jury's still out on that one) there's something a little bit gross about dipping so thoroughly into the nostalgia well.

Nostalgia itself is a positive thing — even science says so.

After a brief stint in the 17th and 18th century where nostalgia — the term comes from the Greek words for return (‘nostos’) and pain (‘algos’) — was viewed as a serious illness modern science has gone in the other direction and decided that it’s good for us. Studies have shown that reminiscing about happy times past can give us a sense of belonging, increase self esteem and boost our happiness. According to a recent study daydreaming about happy past memories can even help us deal with fears about our own mortality, imbuing our empty, pointless lives with something resembling meaning.

But — and it is a big but — there is a difference between indulging in nostalgia and trying to recreate the success of a past phenomenon whose time has come and gone.
Even the most devoted fan of the original SVH series would have to concede that the material has not aged well. Attempting to drag the Sweet Valley universe into modern times is only going to expose all the flaws that fans failed to notice as innocent teenagers: that the Wakefields were vapid brats, that Jessica might have been a sociopath and that having one sip of alcohol in the front seat of your boyfriend’s convertible will not necessarily turn you into a drunk slut who is throwing her life away.

Though it shames me to admit it, last night I finished reading SVC and it was... one of the weirder books I've ever read. I genuinely couldn't work out whether it was deadly serious (Liz cries after she orgasms? Really?) or taking the piss (I'll admit it, I laughed when the Wakefield's insufferable mother, Alice, screamed at her husband to "bring out the fucking cake, Ned" after her mother's 80th birthday party goes off the rails).

So the book didn't make me want to kill myself. But neither did it fill me with a warm glow of love for the original material. Instead it made me faintly embarassed to have SVC sitting in my bookcase alongside the likes of War and Peace. Doubly so as I've never, er, got around to reading War and Peace.

If we have learnt nothing from the travesty that was the last three Star Wars movies it is that some things are better left alone.

We need to preserve our happy memories where they belong — in the past — and where we can enjoy them through rose-tinted glasses, not try to cash in on those memories, fail, and ruin them for good.

Token Smokin' Hottie: Ryan Gosling

I know what you're thinking: I'm surprised it's taken me this long too.

How is it that I've not yet tapped Ryan Gosling as a token smokin' hottie, given the extreme depth of my crush? I blame the fact that I'm quite a slow developer, having only stumbled onto Gosling in 2006 in the movie Half Nelson, a couple of years after everyone else had already fallen in love with him for his turn in the guiltiest of pleasures that was The Notebook.

Since then my crush, initially simmering on the back burner over a medium flame, has exploded into some kind of, uh, fireball? I'm going to say fireball. The reason for this is simple: suddenly Gosling is motherfucking EVERYWHERE.

He's schmoozing it up as an insanely well-dressed charmer in Crazy, Stupid, Love - the romantic comedy I loved to pieces until the last half hour. He's cruising behind the wheel in Drive, definitely one of my favourite movies of the year and the turning point at which my Gosling Love morphed into Gosling Mania. He's even storming down the halls, West Wing-style, in The Ides of March, the film I finally got around to seeing tonight and thoroughly enjoyed, not least because it poured Gosling into a delightful black winter coat I can't stop thinking about.

The thing is, in some respects Gosling is not spectacular looking: he's got nice facial symmetry, yes, and a cute smile (definitely my achilles heel when it comes to the boys) but if you look at a still photo of him you can start to see that there's nothing so spectacular about his looks. His jaw could definitely be stronger. His eyes tend towards the squinty. He even, although it pains me to say it, looks pretty fucking creepy with a goatee. Then again, doesn't everyone?

What makes Gosling work is that he has charm, oodles of it, so much charm it probably drips into his bed sheets at night and he wakes up in a puddle of it, so much charm he can afford to put it all up there on the screen and still walk away with charm to spare, so much charm that he manages to make George Clooney - George Clooney - look unappealing just by virtue of that fact that Gosling is standing next to him onscreen.

That right there is quite an achievement, in itself making him easily one of the most worthy holders of the TSH crown.

UPDATE: As Bec points out in the comments, I totally should have pointed to this.