Confessions of a first time reader of Gone With the Wind

1. I didn't find the book's racism distractingly offensive. I know I'm supposed to be offended or at least mention how off-putting it is to have the book's white characters constantly talking shit about "the darkies" but, eh, the book's treatment of black people is so completely ridiculous to a 2012 reader that it sort of... didn't even register enough to be have an impact on my enjoyment on the book. I choose to believe that I'm not a secretly racist monster but was merely distracted because I did most of my reading on a plane, on which I also watched a few episodes of the sitcom 2 Broke Girls which, um, kind of really does seem quite racist. I'm just saying.

2. I skim-read most of the stuff about the civil war. This is supposed to be A War Book as much as it's A Romance Book but, eh, I really couldn't give two shits about the war when a) it's not really a secret how that ended and b) there are Scarlett schemes to be hatched, dresses to wear and parties to attend. Same thing happened when I read Lion of Macedon, the charming David Gemmell novel that got me into the fantasy genre as a teenager. That book contains a fair amount of ancient military strategy stuff that I suppose is really very interesting if you like that kind of thing but even on re-reads I breeze through all that crap in favour of the juicy 'will Parmenion ever be happy and when is Alexander the Great going to turn up?' gloop.

3. I... really liked Scarlett O'Hara. I mean I didn't even realise that was an even slightly contentious position until I read this most amusing article, which sums up her character thusly:

"Which leads us into this: are we supposed to like Scarlett?... What's to like, when you think about it? She's a terrible friend, she's borderline illiterate, she's racist, she's violent, she's ungrateful, she wallows in minor bouts of regret for being such a shitty person once she's achieved her next aim, and she accepts expensive gifts from gentlemen without thinking of the consequences. (Just candy and flowers, darlings! Keep your virtue with you at all times!) And, not to be all "I have a chiiiiiild now" about the whole thing, but WHAT ABOUT WADE AND ELLA? CHRIST ON A FUCKING CROSS. We all remember Bonnie, because she broke her neck, and had a bit of a personality (Margaret Mitchell did not seem like a kid-friendly individual, no?), but those sad, bland, dull children with dead fathers, dragged along behind her curtain-dresses and treated slightly less well than her ill-treated friends and acquaintances are far more tragic figures than smokin' hot twenty-eight year olds who went from being rich to very briefly poor to substantially richer over the course of a thousand pages. (I know, I know, her parents kicked it, which was very sad, and she had to wear black, which was uncomfortably hot, etc.)."

And, well, yes and no. Yes Scarlett is king of, um, a sociopath but she's also feisty and brave and honestly who among us can't identify a little with her 'I want what I don't have at least in part because I don't have it' mentality? Plus the bit about her being a terrible friend is true but, in fairness to Scarlett, the other girls in the book are all kind of twits, either dull and dumb like that stupid bitch who wanted to marry Charles or fucking Melanie The Martyr who is supposedly beloved by all for her goodness and generous nature but would be INSUFFERABLE if you actually had to put up with her shit for five minutes. I like to think the author, Margaret Mitchell, hated Melanie and based her character on someone in her own life because, really, the way Scarlett bitches about Melanie being Melanie is simply too funny.

4. If I had read this book 10 years ago I would seriously have considered writing some serious fanfic involving the Tartleton twins. Because, shit, those boys were sort of the business.

Things I have done and not done lately

Done: Read a delightful and fascinating David Foster Wallace review/essay (I mean he calls it a review but comethefuckon) of a Dostoevsky biography.

Not done: Read a word of Dostoevsky since limping through Crime and Punishment years and years ago, only realising embarrassingly late in the business that I had sort of totally confused two guys whose names were really really similar and, you know, really really Russian.

Sentences I didn't imagine I'd ever get to say #13

"Yeah I broke the heel of my brogue while hiking a closed trail in Italy."

Things that worry me about the trailer for the new The Great Gatsby film:

1. Basically everything. Oh fuuuuck.

It's a snip

The last time I had my hair cut short short it was a couple of days before I had to have my photo taken for a magazine (tragically the first and last time my face I ever appeared in a woman's glossy and, yes, I believe the world is still in mourning the loss).  This was years ago when I was living in London, still quite fresh out of uni and wondering what the hell I was going to do with an English honours degree and a thesis on the short stories of Philip K Dick. In hindsight this was, perhaps an unwise time in my life to be making bold hair decisions but at the time it felt right. This shoot – and the magazine gig that came with it – would, I felt sure, the start of something and so it seemed appropriate to have a New Kate to present to the world, as if the world actually gave two shits.

As it turned out I was both right and wrong. The gig DID prove to be the start of my journalism career and I’m forever grateful to the mag in question. As for the New Kate Haircut it was... well, okay, so again with the benefit of hindsight I have no idea why I chose to go to the random hairdressing salon whose sole virtue was its proximity to my East Sheen home - about 10 metres from the front door - and absolutely nothing else. I never saw another customer going in or out of that place during the year I lived there. But in fairness to my hairdresser I didn't half mind the cut until I got to the photo shoot and met my hair and make-up lady. Slapping on more make-up than seemed feasibly able to fit on my face and enough mascara to hold up a bridge she didn't say an awful lot until it got to my hair.

"This is... not a good haircut," she said. "It's uneven." And she pulled on different parts of my hair to... I don't know, presumably show me how uneven it was. I said nothing. I was embarrassed. I didn't know what to say except maybe "fuck you, Lady" which didn't occur to me until much later. In case I had missed the salient point she offered me a summary: "You're a pretty girl and this haircut does nothing for you." If she hadn't softened it up with the "pretty girl" bit I might have burst into tears right then. Instead I smiled for the camera, buried the photo deep in a desk drawer somewhere and never cut my hair short again.

Until this weekend when I finally lopped it all off. Tempting fate I thought it would be greeeeat fun to get it cut in Milan, bearing in mind that my Italian vocabulary is limited to asking for a table for two and/or a hot chocolate with cream please and sometimes I can't even handle that much and forget to ask for the cream (repeat after me: "con panna").

I had nothing to worry about, at least not on the language front. My hairdresser, Valentina, was both a peach and spoke extremely good English. More importantly she looked cute and tough, which is exactly the kind of person I want to cut my hair in the hope that a bit of that will rub off on me and somehow translate into my haircut. I told Valentina I didn't really know what I wanted, she assured me that she knew exactly what I wanted, gave me a pretty stellar head massage and we were off. I couldn't understand any of the Italian magazines available for reading, which was a bummer, but I amused myself by watching in the mirror as one handsome dude gave another handsome dude a haircut and, you know, day dreaming just a little bit about said handsome dudes. Valentina did a pretty good job, I think, and I was very happy right up until this bit that happened at the end.


Valentina: How do you want it blow-dried? Straight or wavy?

Me: Hmm, uh, what do you think?

Valentina: I like your natural wave, I think is great.

Me: Okay, that sounds fine.

Valentina: We'll make you look like... Betty Boop!

Me: Uh....

Have you ever seen Betty Boop after she's stuck her finger in an electrical outlet? I have. I saw her in the mirror that day. When Valentina turned me around in the chair to face the mirror (having held my head upside for the past ten minutes so she could blow-dry ten types of crap out of it) I actually laughed, which seems rude now but at the time I thought she can't be serious. This is just Step One in a series of steps to have me looking nice - it has to be. There was no Step Two and she was serious, a point she underlined by saying very sweetly and untruthfully "you look greeeeeat". 


Another person might have asked very nicely, if perhaps my hair could be styled a little less nuts so that I might walk on the streets of Milan without fear of ridicule. A more, confident, functioning member of society might have suggested that the fact my hair felt crispy to the touch may mean she'd applied a smidgen too much hairspray. It will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody who knows me to learn I am not that person. I am a wimp. I am a pussy. I have never even come close to sending back food at a restaurant and I once found a hair on my muffin in one of my favourite cafes. So I smiled, determinedly avoiding my own reflection in the mirror, nodded and said "I really like it" several times in a weird high voice that wasn't entirely mine but felt like it maybe suited the girl in the mirror with her weird high hair and fast-reddening cheeks. Then I paid up, got out of there, put on my Persols and tried to get lost in the Milanese crowds.

Today...

... I saw a woman bring her own spittoon to a wine tasting. I... just... so many questions.

Desire

Forever ago my chum, Johnsy, and I were discussing what we would be prepared to give up at gunpoint: music or books. For me it was easy - much as I would miss music like a bitch, life wouldn't be worth living without books - and for him it was equally easy, albeit the opposite answer. Most of the time I'm a hundred per cent sure I made the right call but sometimes I wonder. Take these lovely lines, some of my favourites, from the wonderful Geoffrey Hill on desire.

"One cannot lose what one has not possessed.

So much for that abrasive gem.

I can lose what I want. I want you."

(Geoffrey Hill)

Beautiful, of course, and still heartbreaking to me, years and years after I first read them. But are they definitely MORE beautiful and MORE heartbreaking than Anna Calvi on the same subject? Tomorrow I'll be back in my corner, willing to back the written word against the one that's sung every time. But tonight I just... can't... decide who said it best.

The Schlecks make it look easy.

The worst part of the bike ride was the realisation that the descents weren't going to be the cruisey parts where I could relax and save my flagging energy: they were going to be the terrifying bits where I held onto my handlebars, ignored the sweat sliding down my back and arms and face and tried not to die.

No, wait, I tell a lie: that first terrifying descent down the hill, on shitty bitumen, my bike vibrating beneath my hands, was probably only the second worst bit - the really worst bit came 33km in.

A bike ride through Tuscany accompanied by a guide to direct us towards some local sites of interest, had sounded like it could be a nice idea. Briefly I pictured an old school bike with a wicker basket on the front, floppy hats for all and a nice plinky soundtrack. Maybe some flower picking would be on the cards. I don't know. It could happen.

Then it came to the day of the ride and despite my delusions expectations I started to get nervous.

"You've told them that I'm completely inexperienced, right?" I asked Andy for about the tenth time.

"I told him you weren't very experienced."

"VERY experienced - that makes it sound like I have ANY experience."

"No, wait, I didn't say 'very'," Andy said rather hastily proving that in life, as on the bike, he can backpedal with the best of them.

I had a reason to care. It wasn't just that I hadn't been on a bike for a good decade (ok minus a trip to Rottnest where the biggest hill I had to get up was that gentle slope that leads to the Basin and is routinely bested by five-year-olds on trikes) it's that I was becoming increasingly concerned my ideas about wicker baskets and floppy hats may be... misplaced and our guide, Marco, was going to expect us to rock up in matching Lycra onesies. I did not own a Lycra onesie.

Before leaving for Italy I'd gone shopping for bike-appropriate shorts, knowing Andy would try to coax me onto one of the fuckers. I like shopping but this trip was not a fun experience because... well, the thing is, I fucking HATE shorts. I think shorts look fucking terrible on almost all women with few exceptions, generally of the long-legged and super lithe variety. Shorts turn sumptuous arses into puffy thrown cushions, perfectly regular, uh, front-bottoms into camel toe nightmares and make the owners of already stumpy legs look like front-running candidates for the Mayor of Stumpington. Even when women look good in shorts - and I see them every now and again, I really do - I feel like they look good DESPITE the shorts not BECAUSE OF the shorts. Nor did it help that the two options available in the shops when I was looking fell into one of two categories: 1) Shorts anyone can wear if they don't mind looking like their Mum does while weeding the garden, and 2) Shorts that will suit a long-legged 18-year-old who believes a half-glimpsed vagina makes the best fashion accessory.

I digress. What I'm trying to say is that I didn't buy shorts and thus really had no cycle appropriate clothes. What I had was a pair of black leggings that - much as I'm really not onboard the whole leggings thing either (and GOD when did I become so crotchety about What The Kids Are Wearing Today?) - I figured I could pop on under one of my many wee dresses to avoid displaying the Good China to passerbys. Do I even need to mention that I also didn't have a pair of sneakers with me? No? Good. Because I know you, reader, agree with me that a simple black brogue is the perfect cycling shoe.

That was all before I got on the bike and realised that I should have worried less about my kinda ridiculous outfit and more about these kinda ridiculous hills. Watching riders do descents in the Tour de France has always terrified me because they're going SO GODDAMN FAST but at least I figure they, unlike me, know what they're doing. You know what else terrified me? Marco's advice to me before we set off, which went something like: "When you go downhill don't brake on the corners because that is the dangerous time to brake and your bike-" Here he abandoned words to use a hand gesture that I assumed was intended to signify my bike sliding sideways, sending me and it down a ravine to certain death. I nodded politely, wishing he'd mentioned this before I'd put on my helmet and straddled the bike. The upshot was that, too terrified to brake, on our very first (and, as it turned out, the steepest) descent I was all over the road, trying to avoid pedestrians (oh yeah there were pedestrians) and not even trying to stay out of the way of potentially oncoming cars because staying out of the middle of the road was not an option if I wanted to stay on the road at all. At one point Marco materialised beside me but the only words I could understand were: "slow down".

Things improved, of course they did. My best move was ignoring Marco's advice and braking like a motherfucker more or less the whole way down all subsequent hills, which cramped my hands into weird claws for awhile there but also slowed me down just enough so I could steer/stay on the road/avoid cars/stay alive. And because the scenery really was very very picturesque the flats parts of the ride were rather enjoyable. Of the ascents, the worst of which I survived only by putting my bike on the very lowest of low gears, I shall not speak.

Then came the actual worst bit, a little after our bike computers ticked over the 30km mark. I was feeling pretty good. Before we'd set out Andy had asked Marco how far the ride would be and I remembered his answer: 33km. At the time it sounded like a long way. Now, just 3km from our destination, I was stoked. I'd survived! I didn't even feel that bad. I mean, yeah, my arse hurt rather a lot, my hands were cramped and a river of sweat was snaking down my back but I had survived without getting off my bike or bursting into tears. Soon enough we hit the 33km mark and stopped at a little cafe near some picturesque hot springs where locals came to bathe.

It was then, quaffing down a croissant and waiting for my face to turn back to its normal colour, that I realised the obvious: we were not back where we had started from. Marco's words before we set off hadn't meant that the entire ride was 33km: he'd meant our destination - the hot springs - was 33km away. We still had to make it home. Shaky on my feet I brushed the croissant crumbs from my mouth and quietly expressed my concerns: it wasn't going to be another 33km ride home... was it? Marco was quick to hose down my fears in his reassuring Italian way: no, no, of course it wouldn't be another 33km, it was more like... well let's say 27km.

I neither broke down and wept nor gnashed my teeth but Andy saw my face and sensed all was not well in my world.

I won't go on to describe the ride home and the many times I wished for death, nor Andy's cunning plan, bless him, that saw me avoid climbing the last brutal hill which, I'm moderately sure, may actually have killed me or at least resulted in a very unpleasant and immature extended crying jag by the side of the road. All I will say is this: I rode 53km without shedding any visible tears, giving up or screaming obscenities and this feat is only partly diminished by the fact that I literally spent the rest of the day tucked up in bed, having consumed a giant Nutella crepe. The crepe was delicious and I will likely never ride again.

Me... want

French brainbox Andre Breton said of love: "All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name."

I think it's fair to say this is exactly the thing he could not name.

People I have met and loved in Italy

The waitress at the Montepulciano wine bar we went to several nights ago who, this evening, drove out to our B&B (a good, I don't know, 15 minute drive to the middle of nowhere) to return my beautiful Persols, which I had left behind on the table. Impressive.

People I have met and hated in Italy

The woman at one of the Montepulciano-adjacent wineries we went to today. It was not that she wasn't nice (she was), polite (fine) and interesting (sure). It was the fact that she moved to Italy three years ago to write a book and is having said book published in the summer. Therefore, clearly, my hatred is fuelled solely by bone-crushing envy and it goes without saying that I barely CHOKED out my insincere "I'll look out for your bo-ok!" goodbye. If she hadn't been a sincerely unattractive woman (sorry, lady) I would seriously be considering Single White Femaling her arse.

Things I have learned in Italy: How to be zen in the face of road terrors

This will likely surprise absolutely nobody who has had me as a (perpetually nervous) passenger in his or her car but I am a terrible passenger. I worry about whether the driver has seen that cyclist up ahead. I fret that the driver seems too preoccupied with changing CDs to notice the car up ahead that is about to attempt an ill-advised u-turn. I eye the speedo and decry the existence of this "parallax error" my Dad keeps trying to tell me about.

I trace my backseat driver wussiness way back to when I was a very little kid and my Mum rolled our Toyota en route to swimming lessons. It wasn't Mum's fault and it all happened so quickly that Dad probably got the biggest scare (by a freakish coincidence the van rolled right outside my parents' doctors surgery, where Dad was sitting in the front room with a patient) but it scared ten types of shit out of me and for months after I couldn't be driven anywhere without asking Mum or Dad to "please slow down" approximately every two minutes.

So faced with the prospect of being driven around Italy for nearly a month (there's some confusion about whether I'm listed as a driver under the insurance so, to date, I've not got behind the wheel although this may actually be because Partner Andy thinks I'm a terrible driver doomed to kill us both) should leave me in a state of unrelenting terror. Well... it has and it hasn't. Because the thing is that Italian drivers are nuts. Yes, all the stereotypes are true. I mean: what the FUCK Italy? Indicators? You have them. Staying in your lane? Look into it. Also, the weird intersections where all the traffic lights are flashing orange and everybody is just going all over the place? I genuinely don't know if it's just the lights indicating (as they would at home in Australia) that they're out of order or if that's just a thing that Italy does sometimes. Because the latter seems very very possible.

In the face of all this madness, and a handful of rather long drives, it's useless to remain hypervigilant and try to point out to the driver that the car coming towards you is in the wrong lane, doesn't have his lights on and may or may not be driven by a 12-year-old child with a dog on his lap. At a certain point all one can do is sit quietly in the seat, turn one's head to admire the beautiful rolling hills and thank fuck for a day's worth of wine tastings, which have put you into a near coma so that, should death come at a particularly hazardous intersection, at the least you'll go peacefully.

Savage by name

I'm on holidays for most of this month so my posting is likely to be a bit stop-starty because I'm pretty sure nobody wants to read me wanking on about how lovely Montepulciano is this time of year. Instead, to say thanks for stopping by allow me to direct you towards Dan Savage's latest column, if only for this truly terrific phrase which I intend to drop into as many conversations as is humanely possible. Which, realistically, is probably zero:

What you're doing is handing me a dog with a bloody, torn-up ass and saying, "Hey, Dan, I totally screwed the pooch. Unscrew it for me, wouldya?

See? Charming. You can read the rest here.

Signs I am getting old.

1. These slippers look genuinely more awesome than any of the heels I've seen in shops lately. (Photo obviously not mine but courtesy of The (wonderful) Sartorialist).

2. I'm finally come around to the fact that I would rather buy a handful of pairs of semi-expensive stockings than the cheap shitty one because my LORD do they ever last longer. Also they just feel better and, you know, my legs have been good to me and they deserve it damnit.

3. It's a little after 9pm, I'm on holidays and I'm curled up in my giant bed awaiting room service. Tie me doooown.

Things that scare me about my super posh hotel

1. There is a library. Not like a room where everyone dumps his or her battered Jodi Picoult novels but a proper library with books I am too scared to take down off the shelf. I'm not even sure you're ALLOWED to take them off the shelf. Look, there are a pair of Chesterfields in there - you know what I'm talking about.

2. On the walk from the car to our room I passed maybe seven employees and, mysteriously, no other guests.

3. One wall is a mirror that is also a television and a computer. Needless to say I cannot, for my life, figure out how to control the fucker.

4. I just ate five euros worth of nuts without realising it. They were on my bedside table! The wee jar was so little! They were kinda tasty!

To the Douchebags who stole my car

1. Thanks for not crashing it... I guess. You could have fucked shit up in the Yaris so I guess I'm grateful for the fact the only damage is a bit of weird scuffing on the back bumper I assume you incurred running over old ladies for kicks.

2. Thanks also for spilling an INSANE amount of crisp crumbs throughout the back seats. I mean, really? You had to really make sure those crumbs have made their way into every conceivable crevice? You couldn't have just... EATEN the fucking chips? Oh, that's not how they do things in Gosnells?

3. Thanks also for making sure you smashed up the beautiful china tiered tray that I had (stupidly) left in the backseat after using it for a party. I mean, you probably had to go out of your way to really smash that up so good work, guys, hope you're feeling good about that. Real classy fucking move.

4. Look, I COULD explain why there was a pair of knickers in my glove box but... I won't. Yeah I hope it's fucking EATING YOU UP INSIDE wondering what a pair of bonds briefs was doing in there along with the car manual and my spare pair of sunnies.

5. You are a blight on society and I hope one day I get to, I don't know, cut you off in traffic or bump you really rudely in the street and not apologise. Hey, maybe I'll even get to the bar at a pub after you and not tell the barman you were there first when he tries to take my order. That's right: I WILL SAY GOOD DAY TO YOU SIRS.

Dear Roman Girls

Please, PLEASE stop rocking those amazingly cute bob hairstyles AND that whole thing with the short skirts and the Dunlop Volley-style sneakers. You're killing me. Not only do you look super cute and make me jealous but you're starting to delude me into thinking that I too could pull of said look. Which I could not. That is all.

The Limitations of Books

Things The Talented Mr Ripley Taught Me About Positano

1. How to hire a boat.
2. How to kill a man on said boat, assume his identity and get away with it.


Things The Talented Mr Ripley Did Not Teach Me About Positano

1. Whether it is possible to have large quantities of food delivered to my frankly amazing balcony so I never have to leave it.
2. Whether any of these precarious cliff-side buildings have ever just fallen off into the sea.
3. How to rearrange my life so I can move here and never leave.

Avenge THIS (no I don't know what I meant by that)

You know how people in emotionally or physically abusive relationships can get so fucked up that they wind up thinking they're the one with the problem, even as their Significant Other uses his or her chest as an ashtray? Yeah that's basically how I feel about The Avengers. I mean, I love a good superhero movie and I have a deep and abiding love for Joss Whedon but this movie... left me cold. I was bored. BORED. Which is, to my mind, the one thing you shouldn't be while watching a rompy action film. And yet the positive, glowing reviews keep coming and each day I ask myself again: am I the one with the problem?

It really sucks that

My Uncle Jack has to die and yet so many useless pricks get to live on. I know this is kind of an obvious, fundamental life truth most people grasp at the age of about 10 but STILL.

Question

Are Roman boys actually super cute from birth or is it just that they know how to dress and they're not afraid to spend time on their hair?

Chatting up, going down

So further to this rant the other day I can do no better than point you towards a much better read at The Sabotage Times, "5 Ways To Approach Women Without Coming Across Like A Perv", which comes via Lindsay.

Look, I don't want to give you the impression, with all these posts, that I'm constantly being badgered by men everywhere I go and oh Lord it's just so exhausting and if only I weren't so devastatingly beautiful maybe life would be easier because that... does not happen. But I also think some men just don't realise that there's a big difference between being trying your hand in an appropriate setting (this = good. We like this!) and unrolling that same behaviour in inappropriate setting (this = bad. We don't like this!). For example, Random Street Dude, I'm not being an uptight bitch for keeping my eyes on the ground when you say somethng to me as I walk past at night en route to the pub or the taxi line: I'm trying not to engage with you, as a random, stronger-than-me stranger, because I'm scared there is, on some level, a chance you might rape and murder me.

But why am I still talking? TST says it better than I can:

"If a man were to smile at me across a crowded bar, start a conversation and/or offer me a drink, I’d think “how charming!” If that same man were to try and start the same conversation by tapping me on the shoulder as we walked along a quiet road I’d be rummaging for my rape alarm. Being chatted up is lovely when you’re expecting it, but when you feel like you’ve been ambushed it’s not flattering, it’s frightening."

Yes. This.

Again I feel a bit odd writing about this here because my blog readership, such as it is, consists mostly of friends and family, plus a few of Lindsay's readers she has bullied into coming here occassionally (keep it up, L, you're doing God's Work) and the lovely boys/men in my life are, you know, IN my life because they're Already Good People.

Still I've posted it for two reasons: one, in case someone who really could benefit from the advice stumbles across this blog. And two: because the article itself is pretty amusing and entertaining. To that end, I'll finish this Rant #2 with the bit that made me laugh out loud (or LOL, as the kids were only too recently saying):

"I know that everyone from 50 Cent to JLS has sung about the interesting stuff that goes down at “the club” but as far as I know, Fiddy didn’t say “she hit the floor, she’s looking fly / so normal assault laws don’t apply.”

Actual magazines sitting on the waiting room table of the waxer who looks after my Good China

1. Box Magazine.
2. Oyster Magazine.

I mean, she HAS to be taking the piss, no?

Bunny Friday!

That is all.

So...

... according to Blogspot these are (in order of importance) the most common search terms that bring people to this blog. I... don't really know how to feel about that exept to observe that I really can't imagine what someone who googles the phrase "concave chest before and after" is looking for but I'm fairly sure this blog isn't it.

solitude
charlie fink
ryan gosling
riccardo scamarcio
michael c hall hair transplant
alexander skarsgård height
black and white movies
concave chest before after
crush on prince zuko
fink band

Look away

I have to start this post by saying I'm a massive hypocrite on a number of levels. I did, after all, once write about - and not entirely in jest - how depressing it was to walk past a construction site or a road crew when you're dressed up to the nines and get... absolutely no reaction. If pushed I would further have to confess that I also routinely ogle random boys that I find attractive - I try to do it discretely but very likely I fail. And finally I thoroughly enjoy those (sadly rare) times I catch someone I fancy kinda checking me out (a flirty little smile with a skinny hipster type on the street really is enough to lift my mood for the day). So there's that.

That much said: it can be really really exhausting being a girl sometimes and I think a lot of guys don't realise or understand sometimes how it feels to have men LOOK at you wherever you go. This is on my mind because yesterday, for boring reasons, I had to (unexpectedly) walk a fair distance. On this walk I passed a bunch of guys doing some work in someone's front garden, another bunch of fluro vest-wearing workers fixing a footpath and a couple of tables of guys having coffee outside coffee shops. The more I walked the more hyper-aware I became of the fact these various bunches of guys were looking at me. I'm not quite sure how to explain it. It wasn't so much that they were ogling, per se, not staring, exactly but just... taking me in.

I don't for a moment believe this has anything to do with the way I look or the way I was dressed (pretty boring work clothes). As far as these guys were concerned I was just a pair of tits out and about and so they looked and didn't even try to pretend they weren't looking (in the interest of perpetuating stereotypes I will mention that the guys drinking coffee were a lot more classy about it than the vest-wearing guys or the gardening boys). I felt weirdly like a bit of public property and soon enough I had my gaze fixed on the footpath, my sunglasses on and my earphone stuffed into my ears.

It was the middle of the day and there were other people around so I had no reason to feel unsafe but by the end of the walk I felt distinctly uneasy without really knowing why.

I feel a bit unfair writing this because I really love boys (or men or whatever you want to call them) and the vast majority of my male friends are lovely and respectful and not even remotely sleazy or intimidating. Maybe I was just having a bad day and being oversensitive. Still, the whole thing reminded me of a very good series of articles from Sydney Morning Herald columnist Sam de Brito from a few years ago. De Brito, not the most feminine looking guy in the world, spent a few days dressed as a woman and wrote about it. Obviously his experience differed from the average woman's but some of his comments really struck home, including that sense of being watched.

"As I click-clacked toward the women's, a group of young guys in loud dress shirts sized me up and I steadfastly refused to look at any of them.

"After doing that a dozen more times on the weekend, it dawned on me why so many women don't meet men's gazes on the street. It's safer not to engage. You hope they'll just ignore you.

"I thought also about the instant judgements I'd seen in people's eyes as I walked through the city. It forced me to recall my own judgements and for some reason my mind wandered to young women and all the times I'd been less than discrete perving.

"I thought of the looks of confusion on the faces of playful, childish females when they realised there was no going back, that those budding breasts they were sporting were dragging them into a new world, like it or not.

"I don't think men ever experience that shock of sexualisation like young girls do but it must be both terrifying and empowering, when childhood is stripped away and you're suddenly seen as an object for sex.

"The more I thought about it, the more disturbed I became by my own ingrained lusts, by the countless times I'd seen women as little more than holes and lumps to squeeze or poke, lick or leer at."

What came across really nicely in these articles was how quickly Sam (as "Samantha") got worn down by these male stares. He starts out full of excitement about the experiment and winds up tired and too intimidated to go to some of the more aggressively male places he'd planned to. That's a more extreme version of how I wound up feeling at the end of the stupid walk: tired, weirded out and surprisingly angry. When some random dude with a beard straightened up from his work to seriously stare at me for a good 20 seconds I wanted to tell him to Fuck Off and leave me alone: I just wanted to get home.

I wish I had a snappy conclusion or a real point to make but I really don't, except to observe that I'll never walk the particular route I did yesterday again if I can help it and if I do I'll put on a burlap sack before I start.

Okay. Phew. Rant over. Sorry about that, especially to any male readers/friends who think I'm having a crack at them. Next post: some jokes!

First World Problem #54

My beautiful new green backseam stockings can only be worn with exactly one pair of shoes I own. This makes me think I may need to buy more shoes.

Questions for the douchebags who stole my car last night:

1. Why would you steal MY car? I mean, sure, the three-door Toyota Yaris IS kind of a sweet ride but it's easily the least cool car on the street or at least bottom three. My neighbour drives an Alpha Romeo for Christ's sake. Take hers!

2. Did you notice the flat tyre before you stole the car? I hope you cried like a bitch when you finally noticed that.

3. Was it the pile of X-Men comics on the back seat that convinced you to steal my car? Because I'd hate to think comic book nerds are stealing cars these days - that would be a real downer.

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

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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.