Where would we be without it?

I should have mentioned it earlier but...

... I'm in the Middle East for work. No, no not war reporting and flak jackets: this is travel writing of the cruise ship variety which, I think we can all agree, is just as worthwhile and important.

I've never actually seen Brit show Strictly Come Dancing...

... but if this story that Jarvis Cocker wants to take part is true I swear I will download every mothercussing episode there is.

Sorry for the lack of posts...

... I have been spending my time spending money I don't have by buying a freaking apartment. Um, yeah, so THAT happened.

Addiction's a bitch

At first it was just a recreational thing: I definitely only used it on special occasions when I was going somewhere fancy.

Later on, I started using when I was feeling flat and needed a little pick-me-up. Nothing serious: just once a week, mostly on the weekends. It made me feel great.

Within a year I was hooked and using it most mornings before work because, well, I just felt better.

Yes, dear, reader, at the fag end of 2009 I regret to inform you that I am hooked on my bloody hair dryer.

UPDATE: I must have tempted fate because I've broken the fucking hair dryer. Broken-into-three-pieces broken. Balls!

Uncomfortable realisations during a recent phone call:

1. The caller believes his wife is trying to kill his 6-year-old son.
2. He has chosen, for reasons unknown, to share this information with me.
3. He shares the (moderately unusual) name of a man who was sent to Graylands Hospital in the late 1990s for blugeoning and stabbing two men to death.
4. He knows my name and where I work.

Concerns I have about wearing my newly acquired bathing suit on my completely awesome and swanky Dubai cruise next month:

1. Seafolly cites the standard boob cup size for its bathers as a B/C.
2. You can't actually see my nipples but, um, if I move too suddenly you might.
3. Strange men may start tucking $1 bills into my arse if I do.

Christmas: a seasonal tally.

PRO: The tree. God knows I do my best to kill any living thing passed into my possession but there is nothing like a proper Christmas tree, lit with Christmas lights and glowing in the corner of your living room.

CON: Having so many parties/dinners/drinks on that you have to miss catching up with several of your favourite people in the world because you are too drunk/sunburnt/close to lapsing into an coma to make it.

PRO: Gluttony. More cream with your pudding, sir? A little lard spooned gently onto your buttered bread? Why, don't mind if I do...

CON: The two-week hangover that extends from the first office Christmas party to the pain of waking up on the first day of the new year.

PRO: Buying presents. Receiving presents. Spending money I don't have! Debt! Consumerism! Capitalism! No, that's not irony: I just fucking love presents.

CON: Post-Christmas blues. Or what in my house we call 'discovering you have killed the Christmas tree'.

PRO: The way it legitimises alcoholism. No hour is too early for a champagne at Christmas time, no table too well-covered for another bottle of wine to be set down upon it.

The verdict: Christmas wins.

Call me a bleeding heart pussy...

...but for some reason the fact that the fucking BBC is seriously asking its readers Whether Gay People Should Be Executed strikes me as fairly fucked.

How is it that as a 27-year-old "professional" my fridge contains the following...

- jar of crushed garlic x1
- bottle of wine x2 (white)
- bottle of beer x3 (random leftovers from an old party I think)
- butter
- tomato x1 (I'm quite proud of that, though it is wrinkly)
- tupperware container of old, long-deceased pasta sauce x1
- thyroxine pills container x1
- salad dressing bottle x5 (!)
- hollandaise sauce jar x1

I mean, that's pretty sad, right?

Strictly for Gossip Girl fans...

... this is quite hilarious.

No, no, no, no, no. I am sticking my head in the sand...

... and refusing to believe any evidence that the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie may blow. I mean, can a movie that looks like it satisfies so many of my secret fantasies (Robert Downey Junior in shirtless bare knuckle boxing, Sherlock Holmes!, Robert Downey Junior in shirtless bare knuckle boxing, opium!, Robert Downey Junior in shirtless bare knuckle boxing) REALLY be shit? Computer says no.

my island home

I've been on holiday for the past week and a half. Not a proper holiday - I mean, I'm not tapping this out at the edge of a deep blue pool, sipping mojitos with my spare hand while a pool attendant named Juan offers to re-tie my bikini bottoms. I'm on a Kate holiday, which means a lot of long lunches, sprawling on the back lawn with a book and Buffy marathons, interspersed with bouts of crippling anxiety that I'm wasting my life.

It's been fun, though, if only because it has reinforced my growing awareness that I'm not cut out for office life. It's not that I dislike taking orders (I don't) or thing I possess enough Get Up and Go to work for myself (I definitely don't): I have just come to regard the daily grind as all a bit much, actually. Why, it occurred to me the other day as I lay on the couch, wondering just how and why Buffy went so very much to shit towards the end of its run. does anyone have to work? Can't we all just, you know, Get Along?

I mentioned this theory to Boyfriend Andy who, as usual, was all too ready to prick my new-found sense of joy and excitement. Because he is kind he refrained from observing that I was talking out of my arse and that, without work, not only would there be no couch to lie on, no house to live in and no wine to consume but also no Buffy to watch while I did all of these things. No, instead, he asked me, quite nicely, if I planned to collect corn.

"Someone has to collect the corn, Kate," he said. His words were slightly opaque but he made, I felt, a fairly good point. Someone did have to collect the bloody corn. And my rubbish. And make that beautiful Alannah Hill hat, quite possibly under undesirable conditions in a foreign country somewhere.

Still, call me an old optimist but I can't help believing there lies a middle ground somewhere between Extreme and Profound Despair at The Need to Get Up Every Morning and scrabbling for corn in a field somewhere. Today, for instance, I went to The Queens for lunch. Sitting in the sun, my book propped up beside my salad and wine, it occurred to me that the place was PACKED. It was positively heaving, albeit with the kind of cretins with whom I wouldn't want to share a city, let alone a pub: boofheads with their collars up, slappers who wouldn't shut up about ohmigodhowmuchidranklastnight and some dick whose tendency to laugh uproariously in my ear may have rendered me slightly deaf.

And yet it was 1pm on a Thursday: don't these people have jobs to go to? Money to make and spend? Very possibly they are all on very long lunch breaks, have started their Christmas holidays early or work nights.

And yet. Was it not also possible that they had, instead, discovered an alternative - a way to skirt that whole 'need money to buy food/shelter etc' thing? Could they have found a way to, in short, fuck the fucking corn? I have reason to believe to and, damnit, I'm not leaving my long boozy Queens lunch until I get to the bottom of it.

Lies told by the saleswoman at Country Road today

1. I'm a very private person...
2. ... but I give great advice.
3. The thing about that is you can just wear it anywhere.

Big boobs

Pros: The obvious ones.

Cons: Slogan t-shirts tend to be a tricky area. Wearing my newly-acquired Worst of Perth Perth: the Bunbury of the North shirt to the getting-harder-every-week Paddy Maguires quiz night the other day, for instance, it occured to me that you would pretty much have to crawl into my belly button to be able to read the punchline. Plus whenever someone says "nice shirt" you immediately suspect them of leering at your tits, despite the fact you are wearing an item of clothing more or less imploring them to do just that.

An open letter:

To the girl walking down The Terrace today wearing hotpants, a beret and a giant Nikon camera slung around her neck like she thinks she's fucking Henri Cartier-Bresson,

Honey, no.

Best Regards

Question

Is 27 too old to be:

a)allowing your car to run out of petrol
b)calling your Dad to help you deal with situation a)?

Oh dear

The older one gets the older everything else in general feels and the harder it becomes to believe that one is learning anything or is capable of being surprised by anything anymore.

So I was heartwarmed (and, obviously, slightly flummoxed) by news from a very close 30-something friend that she had just learned how to use Eftpos cards. This week. Yes, this very smart and well-educated friend found herself in the supermarket line when she realised she'd forgotten her credit card. Recalling that she had left it at home, she called her husband and asked him to bring it down. He, sensibly, asked why she didn't just put it on her bank card. It was then (over his hysterical laughter I assume) that said friend learned one's bank card cannot be used simply at ATM machines but to pay for goods and services at a wide variety of locations.

One can only dream that such a delightful surprise lurks around the corner for all of us.

Question

If a colleague is in danger of driving me to insanity could it be termed self defence if I repeatedly stapled him or her in the head?

Theoretically

On Saturday I bought what I believe to be the single most expensive item of clothing I have ever bought: a beautiful red Alannah Hill dress that I cannot find a picture of (ie: it is neither of the AH dresses pictured above, which are also very cute)

It was more expensive than any pair of shoes I own, more expensive than the handful of very pretty silk dresses hanging in my closet and more expensive even than the so-ridiculously-expensive-I-won't-even-tell-you-how-much-but-it-was-worth-it seamed silk stockings I acquired back when I decided to turn myself into a 1950s-style floozy.

Before I made this latest and greatest of acquisitions I sat down with The Boyfriend to discuss over lunch at the Belgian Beer Cafe, as a sensible Girlfriend sometimes does when she wants to pre-emptively ease her guilt. I showed him change room photos of me in the dress, discussed the NUMEROUS places I could wear it and whined for a bit about how it had been aaaages since I bought anything (grateful he hadn't been home when the amazon.com boxes arrived). Andy, being equal parts charming and disinterested shrugged his shoulders, said I could do what I wanted with my own money and then sweetly asked if I could go and order him some hot chips from the bar.

The only bit Andy didn't get, as he explained to me while dunking chips into aoli (god they do it well at the BBC), is why I was so excited about my impending acquisition. To Andy, clothes are just clothes: some of them look better than others but they are still just clothes. To me, as I explained while stuffing my gob with chips, every new outfit - particularly a radically new outfit unlike anything you already own - is a new chance to reinvent yourself.

This is not a new realisation of mine.

Many years ago a (now ex) boyfriend convinced me to buy an adorable 1920s-style bucket hat. The hat was beautiful but not, strictly speaking, very practical. I was not, I told the boyfriend apologetically, really A Hat Person. Wisely he responded with the observation that if I bought the hat I would become a hat person. In essence, if I bought it (the hat), it (the hat-implied lifestyle) would come.

He was right and he was wrong but the thought has stuck with me ever since.

This dress, for instance, gives me a little glimmer of hope that I could yet become one of the Alannah Hill girls depicted in the ads: hair bouffed, lipsticked smile genuine, spending my days faffing about on a garden swing or looking like I'm about to have tea with the Mad Hatter. Instead of, say, spending 10 hours in front of a computer five to six days a week, typing until my eyes glaze and my wrists start to throb.