The 5 women you meet at every wedding

1. The really, REALLY drunk one who staggers up to you, lightly snogs your cheek and tries to talk about how sad it is that the two of us don't hang out anymore, regardless of whether you've met her before tonight or not.

2. The one who thinks her boyfriend is dancing with too many other girls and ends up crying in the bathroom at 11pm.

3. The one who has tickets on herself because she looks good in lycra, drinks too much, eats nothing and winds up faux-lesbian dancing on the the dance floor under the shocked gaze of aged relatives.

4. The one who is also getting married in a few months time and won't stop telling you All About It, even when you try to pretend you've passed out in your soup.

5. The one who arrives with a shocking case of hayfever and spends the entire ceremony snuffling her way through a packet of Kleenex while her right eye slowly turns red and balloons to twice its usual size, ultimately losing her sense of taste altogether and overcompensating by self medicating from the bar. Oh no, wait, that was just me at a wedding on Sunday night. That's a once off.

Calm down, the flashlight's legal...

I'm sorry Guardian: I'm a big fan of the paper. But this necklace, which appears unde the headline "The easy way to make jewellery" on the paper's Life & Style pages is the ugliest motherfucking thing I have ever seen. Who would ever want to see it, or wear it, let alone learn how to MAKE it??

Coming up next in the Guardian's exciting installement of Things I Never Ever Ever Wanted to Know: "How to get buggered by a flashlight"...

Recent examples of how I failed to stick to my one-week crash diet in order to slink into a very snug dress this weekend:

1. Adding that second load of (awesomely fresh and crazily tasty) butter onto my bread at lunch today.
2. Eating bread at lunch today.
3. Eating pasta along with that bread.
4. Secretly adding a little butter to the pasta.
5. Ordering wine.
6. Ordering more wine.
7. Conceding there really was very little point in leaving such a small amount in the wine bottle.
8. hjfh&$(234935jf&$*$*$*zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

An open letter to the douchebag who insisted on using electronic devices on yesterday's plane trip, even during the bit where they tell you not to,

If this plane crashes I am wearing your fucking skull as a crash helmet.

Yours etc.

My Sunday apology goes out to...

The cheese souffle I ate on Friday night. I'm so sorry, my little ramekin of joy: truly I did defile you in about 5 minutes but I think you have to take some of the blame for being so goddamn delicious. Saucy bitch.

Grand slam

Mothers, eh? Will they EVER shut up?

Oops, sorry Mum. And sorry too to my sister, who has recently been saddled - sorry blessed - with child. But to everyone else: just shut it.

I'm over it. I'm over hearing about how hard it is being pregnant, how painful it felt to have that 9 pound bundle of blood and flesh ripping your pink bits to shreds and, above all, I'm over hearing about the difficulties involved in raising a child.

Admittedly, as a childless spinster, I have absolutely no leg to stand on. AND YET. The thing is, mothers, you can talk about how tough it is, how exhausting, mentally and physically training etc until you're blue in the face and in need of a lie-down. But at a certain point in the argument I think we all have to sit down and acknowledge one simple fact: that billions, no trillions, no maybe even trillions of trillions of people do it. All the time. Smart women do it, stupid women do it, poor women do it, rich women do it. Even poor old bloody Jade Goody did it, and while I hesitate to speak ill of the dead, my instinct is to suggest that there's nothing Jade Goody did that couldn't be achieved by, say, a well trained monkey.

The trigger for this very unkind rant is the media coverage surrounding tennis star, Kim Clijsters, who last week capped off a stellar professional comeback by storming to victory in the US Open. Clijsters has also - if you haven't heard - managed to achieve said victory while being a Mum at the same time. Yawn. That yawn is not directed at Clijsters' blistering performance but at the increasingly hysterical coverage surrounding her achievement. The gist of which appears to be shock that a 26-year-old mother could achieve anything more difficult than putting oneleg in front of the other. Yes, we get it: she got knocked up and succeeded in not preventing the thing, 9 months later, from slipping out. It's a worthy achievement but can we get back to talking about tennis?

This hysteria culminated in a piece in the UK paper The Times (apologies, I've mislaid the link) which somewhere along the line delivered this pearler: "Winning a tennis match is a doddle compared with childbirth."

As the brilliant David Mitchell put it in his column over at The Guardian: "I'd say it very much depends on whom you're playing... while bringing up a baby and winning a Grand Slam may feel equally impossible, intellectually I know which I'm most likely to succeed at. I mean, I've got friends with kids and some of them used to try to light fags off an electric hob."

The list of hugely successful male tennis stars who have kids is massive (among them Pete Sampras and Borris Becker) but I've never seen a headline reading "SUPER DAD" above a photo of Sampras' grinning, victorious head. I know it's a bit different, given the effect of childbirth on a woman's body, but still... really? I'm prepared to be truly dazzled by anyone who can reach the peak of his or her professional career, even in a sport I find as meh as tennis, but am I prepared to heap praise on someone for achieving exactly what a heifer in a field can do? Not yet.

Token Smokin' Hottie: Joseph Gordon-Levitt

There's something a little bit filthy about fancying Joseph Gordon-Levitt that stems from having watched him grow up on 3rd Rock From the Sun.

It's been 8 years since he played that role as a long-haired smart-mouthed teenager but I still think of him as a little kid, despite the fact he's popped up in a handful of alternately cute and rather good indie movies since, such as the underrated school noir movie Brick and 2004's Mysterious Skin. (And yes for the purpose of this argument I am overlooking the fact he plays the Cobra Commander in the film GI Joe: The Rise of the Cobra. Oh dear). He's also got some pretty impressive genes, based on the fact that he does not appear to have aged a single day in the past five years. Seriously, where is this dude sleeping - in a freaking cryogenics chamber?

All of which probably goes to explain why it feels a bit wrong to find myself a) oggling him in his latest movie, the cute-but-flawed 500 Days of Summer, and b)tapping him as my latest token smokin' hottie. Nevertheless, I could not resist because here's the shocking thing about Joseph Gordon-Levitt: he's a bloody year older than me.

What an outrage.

Far from being a cute little scrap of jail bait, JGL is practically An Older Man. Forget thinking about him as your best friends cute little brother who you secretly fancy like mad even though you pretend to agree with your friend that he's really annoying. No, JGL is more like your older brother's best friend, who you have fancied for years and for whose benefit you pretend to be acquainted with a vast variety of bands and books you have never heard of, let along heard/read.

I feel I've diverged from my point ever so slightly but I think you get where I'm coming from: he's talented, he's cute and he's definitely legal.

Sorry

I've been snowed under and have been a very slack blogger lately. Normal service shall be resumed shortly.

Heh

I’ve posted about this website before but it’s so charming I can’t resist. The challenge is to summarise a novel in 25 words or less. There is some utter shit but also some gold. Some of my favourites:

1. Don't let a borderline alcoholic psycho run a hotel built on an Indian graveyard. It's just asking for trouble. (The Shining, Stephen King)

2. Little guys go to a lot of trouble to get rid of stolen jewellery. (The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkein)

3. Don’t fear the reaper (The Outsider, Albert Camus)

4. Man goes OTT concocting story as to why he was late home from the pub (Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift)

5. Giant walking deadly poisonous plants are a disaster, don’t you know! (Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham)

6. Bloke having mid life crisis discovers politics and shagging; but then learns to settle down and become a normal, respectable, member of society (1984, George Orwell)

To the cunning bitch working at a certain clothing store in Subiaco,

I know what you're doing, don't think I don't. Don't you believe for one second I don't understand what you're playing at with your big friendly eyes and your "I think you need a smaller size" malarky. You think I need a smaller size? Balls you do: you think that just because you flatter me into squeezing my plump, juicy buttocks into a smaller-than-usual skirt size, I'll go ahead and buy that skirt despite the fact that a)I don't need it, b)I can't afford it.

I just want you to know that the fact I went ahead and bought said skirt had nothing whatsoever to do with your shameless and utterly transparent sales(wo)manship and everything to do with how excellent my arse looked it in. You lose!

Faithfully,
Kate.

One for the journos

"THERE’s one thing political journalists become experts on, it’s lying."

You can read the rest here.

Question time

1. Having complained all week that I have taken on too much why am I such a suckhole I had to put my hand up for another work assignment, thus dooming myself to failure and a healthy bout of hiding under my desk?

2. Why has my car started making a weird rattle that means I have to alternately poke the ashtray and/or tap the gearstick while driving in order to escape the audible illusion that my shitty 1988 hatchback is filled with wasps?

3. How the fuck do I put my sim card into my new iphone?

Reasons I should not get a super short delicious French bob

1. My face is as round as a beach ball.
2. My hair is neither sleek nor straight but prone do doing a curious impression of an angry cat when roused.

Um, that's all I got.

Today's revelation:

I THINK I can get an iphone and continue paying exactly what I'm currently paying to run my amazing Nokia 3210. Today is a good day.

Overheard in my house

ME: Your new haircut looks awesome, I love it.
ANDY: Yeah my little gay boy did a great job, didn't he?
ME: Your...?
ANDY: He's a little guy and he's young and he''s gay!
ME: (Uncontrollable laugher)

It's funny 'cos it's true

Going up and going down

You know those little 'what's hot, what's not' lists that glossy magazines and weekend liftouts alike are so fond of running? You know how, every time you read it, at least one item and possibly all 5, 10, 15 items on there are guaranteed to make you blow up, start spouting obscenities at said magazine and demand to know what sort of authority its author has anyway? Yeah this is one of those lists, strictly limited to my own world, of course. I'm sorry.

GOING UP

Perth's skinny indie boy population. Clearly I just don't get out much because heading to Capitol for The Doves last week? I have never seen so much hot indie boy meat on display. A roomfull of skinny boys who look like they've been raised in a dark room? Colour me delighted.

Wine. Remember that period in my life where I thought about cutting down on this most delicious of vices? Yeah, that's out.

True Blood. Oh what's that you say? I never shut up about this bloody TV series? That's because it's awesome. This is the series that takes vampires + porn + cheese and stirs until it tastes motherflipping delicious. Oh yeah and each new male character is hotter than the last. Can we talk about Godric? Can we please??

GOING DOWN

Jumpsuits. Just say no, no, no, no. Did I once own a black ra-ra skirt? I cannot deny it. Was I fond, for a time, of wearing a certain denim skirt/black leggings combination out in public? Yes, yes I was. But none of this justifies the (re)emergence of jumpsuits as a fashion trend. Unless we're going to go full[on Star Trek and co-ordinate the entire flipping WORLD'S outfits (under which circumstances jumpsuits would be permissible), I just don't want to know about it.

Food from the work cafeteria. Say it after me: Don't. Eat. The. Creamy. Pasta. Ever.

The 7pm Project. Not bad enough to be good. Not good enough to NOT be circling the drain right now.

Misery-chasing: For all the times I have used the phrase “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results”, I am incapable of recalling who said it first, or following their advice.

Hello... operator?

Believe it or not I do try not to wank on too much about my day-to-day personal life on here. Not really because I am shy about discussing such things in a semi-public forum but because my personal life is generally pretty dull. Last night, for instance, I lay on the couch and watched Weekend at Bernies. Don't get me wrong, it's a great movie, but an interesting anecdote that does not make.

But the phone call I have just had is too good/disturbing/weird not to pass on.

ME: (Answering my mobile) Hello Kate speaking.
MAN: (Mumble mumble mumble)
ME: Sorry, could you speak up I can’t hear you.
MAN: (Mumble mumble) Is Katherine there?
ME: Uh yeah speaking.
MAN: I was just wondering if you’re still single.
ME: (Sure I've misheard) Um… what?
MAN: (Very politely) I was just wondering if you’re still single.
ME: (Kinda laughing) Who is this?
MAN: I’d rather not say unless I know what your answer is.
ME: Oookay. Well no, no I am not.
MAN: So you’ve found someone then?
ME: (Now properly laughing) I have. Who IS this?
MAN: Well I’d rather not say now.

Well played, random anonymous man who somehow has my mobile number.

Mental note: good luck with that

“The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.”
(Carl Sandburg)

Still token, still smokin', still a hottie in my book: Pete Doherty

I don’t want to like Pete Doherty. It’s not my fault.

I didn’t mind liking him five(ish?) ago. Back then, people had only just heard about a lovable new band called The Libertines and this singer/songwriter Pete Doherty who looked a bit like a friendly rag-doll. Back then Doherty’s cherubic face looked soft, sweet and deliciously edible; his obsession with Oscar Wilde and the works of Siegfriend Sassoon charming; his commitment to shameless displays of ho-yay with band-mate Carl Barat frankly delightful. Back then he hadn’t dated Kate Moss.

Obviously things changed. The Libertines got big, Doherty got bigger (though, actually, physically much smaller once the smack train well and truly left the station). Then he was tossed out of the band. Then they said they wanted him back if he gave up the drugs. Then he came back. Then he left again. Somewhere in there he burgled Carl’s flat. Finally he was out and formed his own band, which played songs and released albums with varying degrees of success. His wanking on about Wilde and Sassoon and bloody De Quincey started to seem, well, kinda wanky. Somewhere in there he shagged, and was subsequently dumped by, Kate Moss.

I’m not sure when it was exactly that I fell for Doherty all over again. It’s been sneaking up on me. Maybe it’s just that he’s been working with another indie favourite of mine, Graham “wouldn’t you love to see my Elvis Costello glasses on your bedroom floor” Coxon and that the result – Babyshambles’ Grace/Wastelands album – was actually good. Maybe it’s the fact that I never really stopped fancying him, even when he got kinda gross and covered in weird creepy sores that seemed like they might be thinking about giving you an STD if you looked at them sideways. Lindsay, no doubt, would suggest it’s because I’m a sucker for birds with broken wings.

Either way, just to let you know, Pete: I’d still go there.