A Christmas poem

Some friends of mine recently put on a fabulous cabaret. Of course, I could not resist the chance to get on stage and show off for the masses, so, in the style of Phoebe and her great Christmas song (you all know it, right? 'Monica, Monica, have a happy chanuka' etc), I wrote this poem for my friends and read it out. Here it is for everyone to see. Enjoy. And happy, happy Christmas to my lovely friends!

For my friends at Christmas (Dec. 2010)

Why do I love Christmas so?

Because it gleams, and sheens and sparkles.

The tinsel glints, the polished snow,

The golden foil covered marvels.

Deep green, rich red of spiky holly –

Happy Christmas, Kaye and Olly!

Why does Christmas fill my heart?

Because it sounds like peals of laughter.

The bang of crackers ripped apart,

The promise of happy ever after.

Nostalgic songs set in cosy stables –

Happy Christmas, Elaine and Rachel!

Why does Christmas make me grin?

It feels like woolly hats and a bright pink nose,

Like tummies so full that it’s a sin,

Roaring fires warming frosty toes.

Tables that buckle beneath the posh nosh –

Happy Christmas, James and Rosch!

Why do I give Christmas props?

Because it tastes like roast potatoes

And gin, and wine, and chocolate drops

Like a contented, dreamy, full-up doze.

All of this washed down with a hot toddy –

Happy Christmas, Jen and Roddy!

Why do I think Christmas is fantastic?

Because it smells like sharp satsumas,

The addictive twang of brand new plastic,

Excitement that lingers like a thrilling rumour.

I think the scent of Christmas is something primal –

Happy Christmas, Len and Michael!

Why do I love Christmas so?

Is it the snowy moon shaped in a crescent?

Is it Santa’s red and ruddy glow?

Or could it just be all the presents?

No – the thing that’s best about Christmas, you’ll see –

Is celebrating it with BBB!

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

As that well-known beat combo the Dizzies Rascals once said, ‘everybody wants to be famous, nobody wants to be nameless’ – and I have always believed them. However, I’m now realising that this isn’t necessarily the case. Apparently, I want to be famous, but not everyone else does, as when I tell them about my fame-hungry exploits, many people look at me like I’ve suggested a David Cameron support rally. I wonder if it’s partly this unexplained urge for fame that makes me write this blog? I mean, I love writing it, and I think it’s good for me to do something at least somewhat creative with my spare time, but is it not mostly a form of showing off? Which is, after all, something that I so love to do. In fact, I love to show off more than I even realised.

My best friend and DJ life partner recently organised my surprise birthday party. The evening kicked off with a night at a karaoke bar. “Oh, no, no, no,” I protested, “I won’t sing, I can’t sing, I’d be mortified, I’d need 8,000 gins before I could even contemplate it.” Turns out, this wasn’t quite accurate. All I actually needed was about two seconds of watching another friend sing a Madonna song and I was joining in like the little limelight-hog I am. I then sang Queen and Britney and more Madonna and even attempted Steam by East 17. The rap defeated me. I’ll never make an ill-spittin MC, I am sad to tell you all. I must congratulate my DJ life partner – she knows me better than I know myself. I can never, ever resist the opportunity to show off. I fear talking to people I don’t know and get panicky at the thought of going to parties that aren’t made up entirely of my best friends… but put me in a dance class and I’ll sharpen my elbows with a penknife so I can better poke people in the eye to get them out of my way in my mad dash to the front of the formation.

Showing off is all very well and good, but we all know that nothing in this life counts for anything unless it’s on the television, and this is, I think, where my hunger for fame comes in. It’s all very closely tied in with my no longer-with-us (and not just cos it ended) obsession with Big Brother. For six or seven years (I lost interest the year of Brian and the twins, which one was that?) I love, love, LOVED that show. And I will still defend it to the death, despite the fact I went off it – although I do have an equally convincing bunch of arguments for why I stopped watching it, oh the confusion! – but perhaps in another blog some time, because defending Big Brother is something I can waffle on about for hours.

I applied to be on the show not once, not twice but three whole times. The third time was one of the open auditions, where 10,000 annoying screamy teenagers and some so-called eccentric (their word; I could think of others) adults stood in a cold warehouse brimming over with their own egos for hours on end before talking to a camera for thirty seconds and being told to go home. I actually got through to the second stage that time, but no further than that. And I know, really, that that’s a good thing – I’d be bored and horrified and tearful beyond belief in the Big Brother house, but I still wanted to do it. Why? I couldn’t really tell you. At least partly cos it looked like fun. But also, I guess, because I apparently want to be famous and don’t have enough genuine talents to do it any other way.

Having failed to get onto Big Brother proper, I applied myself to those smaller challenges within the same realm – Big Brother’s Little Brother and Big Brother’s Big Mouth. The DJ life partner and myself started out by answering an ad in Heat magazine to be in the audience for BBLB, mostly because we both had monster crushes on Dermot O’Leary (something that seems a bit unfeasible now) and wanted to stand close to him. As I remember, he waved at us, and I went home happy, probably figuring that was the closest to Big Brother fame I would get.

However, I had much more success with Big Brother’s Big Mouth. Once again, I answered an ad in Heat asking for fans of the show to come and speak their brains in the audience of Russell Brand’s companion series. A producer rang me and I had to do a quiz about Big Brother to show that I was a genuine fan and not some fame-crazed nutter who was just pretending in order to get on telly. You know, like one of the people we were all so avidly watching. I did very, very well in the quiz. I believe I got every obscure answer right. The only question I remember now (and this would have been around series 5, I think, so it harked back quite a way) was ‘who were the first people to kiss on Big Brother?’ The answer, fact fans, is Mel and Tom. Remember Tom, and his red shorts? I sure do.

As a result of the scholarly attention paid to my reading of the show (ahem) I was offered the chance to sit on the panel rather than in with the plebs and be given the title of ‘obsessive fan.’ I said no at first, believe it or not, cos I wanted to sit with my DJ life partner in with everyone else. But having spoken to her, I changed my mind and was on TV for all to see.

Two things stand out to me about that first time on Big Mouth. The first was that, at the time, I only knew Russell Brand from Dancefloor Chart and thought he was intensely annoying. Oh, how quickly that changed when I met him and looked into his smouldering eyes and fell to pieces inside my little beating heart! It was only after deciding that he was devastatingly handsome that I found that he is also one of the most intelligent, funny and kind people on the planet – it seems unfair that he has all of those things! What’s left for the rest of us, I ask? Admittedly, I only know this from reading his books, watching him on TV and seeing his standup, but I don’t think he’s faking. He’s so genuine and so right about so much. Anyway, enough babbling about Russell, let’s get back to **ME!!**

The other thing about that day which was noteworthy and so incredibly funny was that one of the celebrity guests on the panel was Timmy Mallet (the other was obscure comedian Paul Foot). Bless Timmy Mallet. I swear to god, he was more excited than I was. If you look on his website you can, to this day, see pictures of me and him together on our way to the studio as he was taking photos of EVERYTHING, like this was the grandest day out he’d ever had. I can also exclusively reveal that his ring tone is ‘Itsy Witsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.’ No word of a lie.

I went back on Big Mouth once more as an obsessive fan, and I now have an imdb page as a result of these two ventures into the silver-plated screen, something an ex stumbled on accidentally some years ago. Oh yeah, suck it, losers! That second time one of the celebrity guests was former youth icon and current day BangFace TV presenter Normski, who said – and he was right – that my DJ life partner has magic powers. I forget now what she’d done to elicit this response.

Then, to my eternal sadness, they dropped the obsessive fan from the show’s format, but, undeterred, I was an audience member enough times that Russell and I got to be on saying hello terms. Well, I said hello, he asked me if I was a lesbian and said I had nice boobs, something I hope will be written on my gravestone (a wee joke). I could tell you my brilliant Russell Brand story, but it’s too off tangent and I have an idea for a future blog which it will better fit into, so I’ll stop wittering about Russell and move on.

My attempts to appear on the front of the Daily Mail (dressed in my mother’s bridal veil) have not been limited to Big Brother. Keen followers of my blog will know that if there’s one person I’m more obsessed with than Russell, it’s Shaun Keaveny, the marvelous and erudite presenter of the 6 Music breakfast show. I’ve been actually on his show twice now and had about a million texts read out. My most recent mention came when he had been joking about people fancying him and I sent him a love poem. It went ‘Shaun, Shaun, I know you love Lucy, but I fancy you and that is the truth, see, you fill up my mornings with music and jokes – run away with me and be my bloke!’ (Genius, I think we can all agree.) (NB – Lucy is his wife. She is a lucky lady.)

Sadly, Shaun didn’t read it out, but he did play about 3 seconds of ‘J’taime’ (is that what it’s called?) and dedicate it to me. I was happy all day long. (Well, for about five minutes anyway, which is roughly the same thing, right?)

Other highlights of me + fame include an actual live performance as a robin in the horse of the year’s Pony Club show when I was 11, something that involved staying backstage for a week at Olympia, meeting all the famous horses and nearly dying of excitement (although also fear – the posh Pony Club girls did not like me and my charity shop clothes, oh no, not one little bit), and a recent blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance DJing in an episode of Party Wars. It’s on Living, you must have seen it… right? No?

My most recent attempt at getting into your telly box (all the better to control your brain) would have, if it had succeeded, been my best effort yet. I nearly, nearly, oh-so-nearly got onto Come Dine With Me. I got down to the last 10, of which five would have been picked, but sadly, I am not mouthy enough. I made it through two phone interviews and a home visit from two producers before being turned down. And now for this blog’s second exclusive revelation – I can now tell you, blog fans, why the contestants on CDWM never seem to have prepared or know what they’re doing; it’s because you only find out you’re on the show five days before they start filming! I had to break all my superstitions and act as though I was going to get on – cleaning the house, practicing my menu etc – before I knew one way or the other, cos there was no way I was going to get caught on the hop if I DID get on.

I was disappointed not to make it, for sure. But a part of me was also pretty relieved as there is no way in hell I would have NOT got drunk and made a show of myself on at least one of the evenings, probably all five. I’m a great one for taking things personally and crying like a child, especially if there’s been a drop taken, and even I’m not crazy enough to think I’d want to be recognised by strangers as being ‘that blubbery Hello Kitty weirdo off Come Dine with Me.’

I am still no closer to knowing that it is that drives me to want to be on telly. Is it cos when I was a kid I thought for a while I might be an actor, or a show jumper – or both, for preference – and so be on your telly all the time? Is it cos I want to do new and fun things, and some of those things involve being on TV? Is it cos I love telly and think it somehow holds the answers to the mystery of life? Or is it just cos I’m a big, fat, self-obsessed show off who thinks that everyone is surely as fascinated by me as I am? You’ll have to wait until my biopic comes out to learn the answer to that one, I’m afraid.

My love affair with the internet

Of all the drugs I've ever taken (and you, oh constant reader, will realise that's a few, although not any more... six months and counting, she says, taking a big old swig of white wine), I think the internet is the most potent, the most appealing, the most unputdownable. It's the first thing I do in the morning, the last thing I do at night. If I were ever to tally up the amount of time I spend in my office working vs the amount of time I spend on the internet, I think I would be in for a very nasty surprise. I'll probably be doing my PhD for a year longer than I need to because of the internet. I hope to god I never get a real job (something that seems increasingly less likely I'll ever need to worry about, as the ConDems set about tearing the universities to shreds and then gnawing on the carcasses), because if I do, I'll be sacked for excessive internet use more quickly than a goth would rush to the dancefloor when "This Corrosion" came on.

From the moment I saw my first email, I was hooked. It seems hard to believe, now, that I somehow lived until I had started my first job without really having the internet. I first heard of the internet in my first year at university, as a wet-behind-the-ears 18 year old in a Morrissey t-shirt, and, at that point, I only got the vaguest grasp on what it was. I heard about it from this emo-looking third year who liked Sheep on Drugs and who I thought was the greatest thing since sliced forearms. In my first degree, a sorry affair called 'Creative Arts' which I went to for the writing but had to stick around on for the conceptual art wank, the third years had to do arty farty 'honours projects,' which the first years were obliged to help with. Obviously, I volunteered to help the skinny goth boy with the mohawk. He was going to make an installation that was somehow a representation of cyberspace. I had never heard of cyberspace before and really had no notion of what he was talking about, but nodded keenly with my tongue hanging out and drool dribbling oh-so-attractively down my chin anyway. Sadly, he dropped out and it never happened... but that was my first introduction to the internet.

By the time I was in the third year, the library had two or three (count em!) computers that were connected to the internet, and the then boyfriend showed me how to look up pictures of Hello Kitty, and so I passed a good few hours doing that, but then basically decided that was all the internet was really good for and that it was probably a passing fad, and went back to making compilation tapes, getting fivers out of cashpoints, making VHS copies of Dawson's Creek and doing all those other things that now age me so.

As I started to say before, it was when I got my First Proper Job, aged 21, I guess, that I suddenly got the point of the internet. Emails... oh, emails! That job, as with pretty much every job I've had since, was mostly characterised by being very very quiet and leaving me with Nothing To Do. (NB - a question - is everyone on earth just pretending to be busy at work, like, all the time? Or have I just got really unlucky? I know it must seem, if you've never done it, that being paid to do nothing is the ultimate dream, but it is a) soul detroying and b) makes the nano-seconds feel like millenia, in the way even the dullest physics lesson never did, so it's really not that great. And seriously... it seems to happen to me in EVERY JOB I EVER DO. I'd love to imagine that it's because I'm some kind of Rain Man style genius and that I just finish work super quickly, but this is not the case. I don't get it! Anyway, ahem, back to The Point...)

So I'm at this job with nothing to do, and, fortunately for me, I make a couple of friends. A friend called Lucy and a friend called Jenny. And we spend our time emailing each other on the very primitive internal email system (this is just how primitive - if you wanted to send an external email, you had to write something different at the beginning of the address, like pressing 9 for an outside line. Can you IMAGINE?). This email system used to warn you when something was coming - the top right hand of the screen would say something like 'collecting message number 1... 2... 3...' and so on and on, maybe even up to 7 or 8 if it was a really lucky day.

Never so quickly did a person take to the medium of spelling out every tiny, dull detail of their day in the dim-witted belief that others out there were reading and interested, rather than just skimming and responding with their own mealy minutae (surely the basis of all internet forums everywhere, no?) than I did. I was a woman possessed. The days when the email broke down - and they were all too frequent - were days when I genuinely felt I may as well have stayed in bed. The crushing disappointment when I saw I had a new email, dropped everything, rushed to greet it and discovered it was something actually do it with work is impossible to convey.

The joy of email continued to punctuate my life through my first and my second jobs. At some point during this time, I got my first internet-at-home... if you could call it that. My brother, who I lived with at the time, bought this contraption that somehow gave us the slowest, most basic black and white internet through the TV. Did anyone else ever have this? When I think back on it now, it seems like a remote control on a wire - impossible that such a thing was ever not laughed at, and yet it seemed like a revolution at the time. We both set up Talk 21 accounts, but mostly used the internet for reading Daniel Drennan's superbly funny wrap-ups of 90210 and then watching the show again with eyes that the scales were freshly fallen from.

(An aside - if you've ever watched any 90210, I beg you to visit this site and read some of what you find there... it's just the funniest thing you'll ever come across.

http://www.inquisitor.com/90210/)

I was excited enough by the internet already at this point, but when I got my third job and we all actually had the internet on our own computers, rather than having to go to the library to use it (job number one) or there being one computer in the office online that we had to share (job number two), I could not believe my luck. I was like a kid in a candy store - or at least, I would have been, if I had any ideas about where to look.

See, to me, the internet has always been about communication. MTV child that I am, I have neither the patience nor the interest for long pages of text that can teach me this or that (unless it's hilarious things about 90210, clearly). But there was, for me - and, let's face it, there still is - something intoxicating about writing something down, pressing send, and then (in theory) the whole world and her husband being able to see it and respond. So I mostly spent my time on the guestbook of the website of a club I went to a lot, responding to everything anyone said, no matter how trite or tiny. (Remember - all my jobs ever have filled up about 20% of the time I have to be in the office... I had a lot of time to kill back then.)

This got pretty old pretty quick, but there was nothing else for me to do. This was some time before I discovered Ebay... a very dangerous discovery when I did finally make it, as I would literally, whenever bored - and that happened A LOT, type 'hello kitty' into it and buy pretty much whatever I saw, being fooled on some primal level by those clever clogs in charge who tell you that you've WON. Not that you've purchased - you've WON! Aren't you clever? Haven't you done well? Let's slip that cash out your back pocket while you're not looking, check you OUT for beating all the competition!

Salvation soon became mine, though, when a friend of mine started a Yahoo group for the people posting on the previously mentioned club message board. All of a sudden, my working life had a purpose - talking to these mysterious people with made up names about anything and everything under the sun, and keenly waiting to see if they'd commented on the brilliance and beauty that I was spouting forth. Mostly about what sandwich I'd had that day.

An aside - sort of - on the topic of made-up names, or internet handles, or whatever you want to call them. My own - mangakitten - came about because when joining another Yahoo group about the TV show Once and Again all the names I originally wanted to use - variations on Hello Kitty, mostly - had been used up. Mangakitten felt very much like a poor cousin by the time I got to it. And yet, now, somehow, it seems like a persona I have created, like the bigger half of me, like a role that I play up to which I think was always there but somehow, by naming it, it's taken over. Johanna is shy and awkward and humdrum. Mangakitten is extrovert and confident and melodramatic. Johanna hangs around in the corners and looks at her feet. Mangakitten takes over and won't let anyone else get a word in edgeways. I'm not sure which, out of Johanna's ridiculous reticence or Mangakitten's brassy brashness, I loathe more.

So anyway, I finally got the internet proper at home, in my room (gasp!) around the time this Yahoo group came into existence, and very quickly, it seemed to become, along with shoes and American television, one of the driving forces in my life. And, I must say, with very good reason. I am blessed with many gorgeous, wonderful, clever, generous and amazing friends, and the ones that *haven't* come from the internet I can count on 4 fingers.

The Yahoo group became a PHBB (or whatever the hell it's called - I live my life on the internet, but its workings are a mystery to me and frankly, I like it that way, I don't want the magic to die) bulletin board, and I am the highest poster on there by some million miles and I love, love, LOVE it.

I had a brief dalliance with a different board when my home board pissed me off for a while - we all know what rows on the internet are like, how incredibly personal they seem and how ridiculous they really are - but I soon came home to roost. It's my happy place and I cannot imagine life without it.

For years, that board and email were enough to sustain me... but then, unbelievably, given how it now dominates everything, just three-ish years ago I heard the words 'Face Book' strung together for the first time.

Who remembers FaceBook back then? Remember how every time you wanted to post anything, you had to fill in one of those annoying 'what does this box say?' BrSO!&*CB with a line through it, and you couldn't read it properly half the time, so it would take approx 5.7 hours to post anything... your status had to start with 'is' (making it oh so much more of a challenge to get song lyrics in there, my favourite game ever)... you couldn't 'like' posts... uploading a photo took a week... and yet we all stuck with it, didn't we? And who among us can imagine a life without FaceAche now? I know I can't!

There are other things I quite like on the internet. Lolcats are very funny, although I loathe the way people talk as though they are lolcats... it's only funny when it's the CATS, goddamn it! I've recently been introduced to Hyperbole and a Half, which makes me sick with envy because it so puts my own blog to shame, and yet I still have to like it because it's so funny... I couldn't live without imdb to check that I'm right about knowing which obscure Yank TV show I know the minor character in the film I'm watching from... Wikipedia will of course be the most cited reference in my PhD... and yet it's the 'social networking' (yuck) sites that have my heart. Apart from Twitter. I can't get on with that, for some reason. Maybe one day. (NB - actually, I say 'for some reason,' but I do in fact know why. I'm not that interested in communicating with celebrities, or faux celebrities, or wannabe celebrities online. I'm only interested in talking to friends or potential friends. Given my lifelong thrall to celebrity, I have literally no idea why this is but... I just can't bring myself to care about what even the celebrities I like have to say about their lives in 25 words or less, or whatever it is, and all my friends that are on Twitter can express themselves more fully on FB or the aforementioned board. So yes. That's why.)

I wonder what it is that makes it so much easier for me to spill my guts online than in person. (Not that I'm backwards about coming forwards in person either... I'm not really one for hiding my emotions, you'll be shocked to learn.) I guess it must be the anonymity. Maybe it's the fact that if you don't like the answer, you can just skim it and move on. Maybe it's the fact that I can talk for as long as I like and kid myself people are still listening. I'm really not quite sure. Whatever it is, though, I really can't imagine that even crack is as good as it still feels for me now to see that I've got 4 new emails or 6 new FB notifications or that 8 people have replied to a thread I started on my board. My love affair with the internet has lasted longer than any other love affair in my life. And I can't see it ever ending.

The Drug of the Nation

(Am I the only person to have noticed that the Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy were better at naming things than they were at anything else? I mean, that name... it's the best name for a band in the history of bands, surely! And the song of theirs that everyone knows, and from which this blog title comes - Television, the Drug of the Nation - that sounds like the toppest of all top tunes! However, then the music... it's ok. Not very exciting. And yeah, I realise it's probably 20 years old now or something depressing like that, but even at the time I remember thinking it was a bit boring. In fact, I got all excited about the idea of hearing that tune again, a couple of years ago, as I thought it would have to be one of those things that I hadn't been that bothered about at the time, but realised I LOVED now, like Take That or... well, I can't think of another, hipper example right now, but maybe it will come to me. Instead, I still found myself fairly non-plussed. It's pretty good. But the name is so much better, and that's why I've nicked it to spout some of my own nonsense underneath.

It's just a bit worthy. Not as bad as (shudder) Arrested Development, the hippiest of hippie hop this world has ever seen (it makes me so sad that one of the worst hip hop acts in the history of hip hop shares its name with one of the best TV shows in the history of TV), nowhere near that bad. But still. They're no Public Enemy or Missy Elliot or Eric B and Rakim.

Shall I stop wittering and get on with it?)

So... TV. My relationship with television has been long and involved. It goes back deeper and longer than most of my real life relationships. I've been pals with Carrie Bradshaw for longer than I've been pals with my DJ life partner. I have only one friend I've known for longer than Rachel Green. (Or should that be Rachel Greene? It differs in different episodes, you know. Outraged? Yes, I was too!) It's only family that go back further with me than Dylan MacKay or Kelly Taylor.

This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but I care more about the people on my television than about many of the people I know in real life. I cry at their dramas and laugh at their joys on a much more frequent basis. Their thoughts inform my philosophies and their actions drive mine in almost every thread of everything I do. My morals are shaped by scriptwriters and executive producers, not religious tomes. My expectations of life are sketched out by glossy haired actors, not by opening my eyes to reality. My dreams are inhabited by fictional people more than the ones I spend my day to day life with. And I'm beginning to wonder if this is a problem.

some tv shows i have loved

Beverly Hills 90210 was probably the show that started my obsessive love of television. I would love to pretend that I'm now hard pressed to say why, but this is not the case. Who could not love Dylan MacKay's slanting eyebrows and recovering alcoholic posturing? Who didn't find themselves identifying with either Brenda or Kelly (or both) as they fought for Dylan's hand and watched their friendship dashed to death on the rocks of teenage angst? Kelly joined a cult! And got addicted to coke! Brenda got engaged! Then broke it off over a pre-nup! Brandon got a gambling problem! The actors playing Steve and Andrea were way too old! Donna Martin graduated! Now there was a TV show, and no mistake. Will you, blog fans, lose all respect for me if I tell you that the new 90210 is the only thing currently being made that I really care about? I fear you will. So pretend you didn't see that.

If I now talk about acclaimed indie hit My So-Called Life will I regain some street cred? Depends who you are, I guess. Jordan Catalano came straight out of the Dylan McKay school of heroes - brooding, moody, gorgeous... as tempting as siren songs for teenage girls. I wanted so desperately to have Rayanne Graff as my best friend, to be as beautiful-without-realising-it as Angela Chase, to be able to go to Ricky with my problems and have him smooth them all out. It is such a crime against television - no, art! - that that show got canned after one series and we will never find out if Rayanne and Angela made it up or not.

Moonlighting also deserves a special mention. I love Bruce Willis and always will, and it's in no small part because of David Addison, a role I think he has never bettered. I think Bruce's slick-talking, commitment shy, thinking woman's crumpet must have been the template for the equally swoonsome Larry, played to such perfection by Robert Downey Jnr in Ally McBeal, and if the two were to have a fist fight over me (hell, it's my blog, I'm allowed to daydream), I'm not honestly sure who I would want to win. But Moonlighting wasn't just great because of Bruce/David - this, for me, was the original will-they-won't-they story (repeated to great effect by Dean Cain and Terri Hatcher's Clark and Lois, by Daphne and Niles, by Ross and Rachel, ad infinitum)... and, since the original, also the best. Throw in all the crazy dream sequences and surreal plot twists, and this show should've won a Nobel prize.

(By the way, I know it might not seem like it right now, but I do love television for more reasons than just drooling over fit blokes playing cool characters. I love it for the sake of writing and drama and stories and, goddamn it, ART! Not just because of hot men! Or at least, I always thought I did... maybe I was wrong?)

If we're going down the route of older, surreal shows, I naturally have to mention Twin Peaks, which was a spectacular feast of strange characters (the Log Lady, anyone?), stranger plots, freaky music, scary villains (I still get a bit freaked out to this day if I see someone in the street who looks a bit like Bob... which happens more than you'd think... in fact, there's a photo of me on FB which I took myself where I think *I* look a bit like Bob, which is really quite unnerving!) and... yeah, yet more hot boys. Although the whole thing had a pretty disappointing ending, if I remember right.

Coming slightly more into the current day... did anyone apart from me, an ex-boyfriend of mine and my brother watch the tour de force that was Popular, the first show made by Ryan Murphy (him of Nip/Tuck and Glee fame)? If you didn't, I implore you... watch it. Watch it NOW! At first glance, this show seems a bit like 90210, which I realise may not interest many of you. But it's actually packed with such deliciously bizarre characters and strangely satirical plots that every episode is as naughty and as mouth-watering as a cracker laden with brie and topped with chutney, washed down with a glass of red. The social commentary is second only to the hairstyles in this series. And again - packed to the rafters with hotties, of the male and female variety.

Is it very tired and passé of me to love Sex and the City? To be honest, I don't care if it is. I really can't understand why anyone doesn't like this show. People say it's girlie, and yeah, it's got shoes and smooching in it... but the characters, the writing, the wit, the tragedy, the relationships (between the women and their men) and, yes, the outfits... I think the final season is a near perfect example of television writing. And it seems no coincidence to me AT ALL that SATC was dreamed up behind Darren Star, one of the major players behind 90210. What a god that man must be! I dream of being Carrie, and I dream of this blog making that dream more of a possibility. I too, unlike most of my friends, would have picked Big over Aiden. Although I actually think Smith was the pick of the men on that show. Come on, boys... be confident enough in your masculinity to watch it without getting scared you'll be labelled a girl and I defy you not to end up loving it.

As I mentioned at the start of this blog, one of the worst hip hop acts in the world shares a name with what, objectively speaking, I believe I must call the best show in the world: Arrested Development. There is actually nothing else in the world like this series, and I don't just mean in the realms of TV. The characters are all so weird and so nasty but somehow still so appealing. The plotlines are so twisted and convoluted, and every time you think something is going to resolve with the chance of a happy ending, some new and yet still hilarious disaster strikes. It is so dark and so sweet all at once. Again, cut tragically short by the idiots who run American TV, although there keep being rumours of a film. I can't see it happening though, now that Michael Cera is the teen film sensation that he is. And actually, these days, Nurse Jackie is doing a very, very good job as a replacement in the weird/funny/oh-my-god-did-they-just-DO-that!! stakes.

So, objectively speaking, I know that Arrested Development is the best show ever made. But subjectively speaking... I know it's unoriginal... but I'm a Friends girl all the way. Friends is like the desktop wallpaper of my life. It's my comfort blanket, my cuddle trousers. I've probably seen every episode (and there are a lot of episodes) an average of 20 times, I'd guess. I can relate almost anything that happens, either to me or to someone I know, to an episode of Friends. I realise this is nothing to be proud of and yet, somehow, I still am. I watch it constantly and talk along to it, as if it's a Morrissey song that I'm singing all the words to.

(Two of my favourite Friends dialogues - please excuse the copying and pasting, it's late and I'm tired...

Rachel: See? Unisex.
Joey: Maybe *you* need sex. I just had sex a few days ago.
Rachel: No, Joey, U-N-I-sex.
Joey: I wouldn't say no to that.

Joey:		... it's a moo point ...
Rachel:		... you mean a moot point ...
Joey:		... no no, a moo point ... like a cows opinion, doesn't matter ... it's moo ...)

My life has recently been revolutionised by the new boxset which contains uncut footage and hence NEW JOKES!!! (One of my favourites being about Paul the Wine Guy from episode one - 'does he drink it, sell it, or just complain a lot?') This means more to my pitiful little life than I could ever hope to convey.

(These are my favourite TV shows. But I cannot finish this blog without also mentioning Teachers, Black Books, Frasier, Desperate Housewives, ER, Once and Again, Gilmore Girls and the L Word. Yeah, most of the TV I like is American. So sue me.)

I seem to have got a little sidetracked. The point of this blog wasn't to wax lyrical about all these television behemoths which have so filled my life with joy. The point is, in fact, the exact opposite.

Two recent things in my life - the last blog before this one, and a post made by a friend on the internet forum I spend all my time on when I'm not on FaceBook or propped up in front of Friends - have made me realise that the constant stream of television that is being fed into my brainbox whenever I'm alone is actually making me really quite miserable. To me, this is a revelation on a par with the splitting of the atom. And I'm doing a PhD... scary, isn't it? ;-) The thing is... I work what I consider to be quite hard most days, and so when I get home, I feel I have somehow earned the right to relax and do nothing else. So I turn the TV on and then forget to turn it off, even when I fall asleep, with the TV still on, some five or six hours later. And all the while, the fact that I only have the TV for company gradually making me feel more and more like a lonely loser with no friends and no future. It's as if someone has put a valve in my brain and is slowly leaking out all the hope and happiness I might have ever felt. Almost as if it is, after all, the opiate of the masses.

I do not intend to become one of those born-again anti-TV people that I always want to shoot on sight. I would hate to want to shoot myself. But I have turned over yet another new leaf (since my last one is now, five months on, still going so strong) and I now plan to only watch TV a little bit. (That's good and specific, eh?) And see if that will maybe make me a bit happier.

It seems to be working so far. I had quite the crappy day at work today, but instead of sobbing my heart out over the TV as I usually would, I have worked on some playlists for a wedding Twisted Kitten are playing at over the weekend and written this blog. And there's something that might be a smile playing around my heart.

Loneliness

There is a quote from Ally McBeal which some extensive research (well, five minutes on Google) won't reveal to me, but which, if I remember correctly, goes something like, 'I've tried my whole life to avoid being lonely. But when I think about it, the times when I've felt most lonely have been when I'm sitting right next to someone.' That's not quite right, she says it better. (And yes, I know she's not real, thank you very much.) I did think about going to get the DVDs to try to find it properly (I'm fairly sure it's the first one of a series - maybe series four - near the end of the episode, so it probably wouldn't take too long), but I suspect that way madness (in the form of lying on my bed doing nothing but watching Ally McBeal for the next 48 hours) lies. (Is that enough sets of brackets for an opening paragraph?) (No?) (Ok, we'll have some more.)

Loneliness is a funny old beast, isn't it? I always feel an affinity to that line from Ally, hence looking for it and thinking I would start this blog entry with it. And yet, now I think about it, I realise I'm almost the exact opposite to her. I spend a large portion of my life wishing I was on my own, away from all these rabbiting people ruffling up my view... and yet as soon as I am alone, I sink as fast into misery and loneliness as a lump of rock sinks into a murky pond.

I'm not quite sure what it is I'm looking for, or what exactly I think it is that's going to make me happy. A slap round the face is probably the most pertinent suggestion. I mean, really... what happened to the less boys, less whining I promised you all a while ago? Will I ever really stop moaning? Very likely not, I wouldn't hold your breath.

I had a weekend recently that was crammed full of people. People everywhere, falling out of doorways and tripping over each others' shoes. A quote from the fabulous Charlie Brooker occurs to me here, and this one I actually could find: "I don't get people. What's their appeal, precisely? They waddle around with their haircuts on, cluttering the pavement like gormless, farting skittles. They're awful." I spent a large portion of the weekend longing to be back at home and away from all the noise and clamour, and when I did get home, back to sanity and peace and quiet, what happened? I was so depressed for 24 hours I could scarcely get out of bed.

I'm not sure what I'm looking for. Is it to live on my own, with a high wire fence around my house, with only some guard dogs and all the Lost boxsets for company? Or is it to be married and have a house full of friends coming round at all hours of the day and night? I suppose I must grudgingly admit it's something in the middle, but where's the fun in that?

I think I should probably take some of my own advice and do some more 'flow' type things when I am on my own (see the DJing blog) rather than dying slow degree by slow degree in front of the television with my gameboy clutched in one hand and an endless stack of toast in the other. I should be doing things that will satisfy me, not things that will gratify me... taking more photos, writing more poetry, going swimming, practicing DJing, making clothes. But it's just so much effort. Can't I spend my life being miserable and finding new ways to articulate it on the internet instead? Oh, I can? Great... then everyone's a winner.

Work is a four-letter word

Work is a peculiar beast, isn't it? I don't like working, I never really have. I've always been first out the door as soon as I'm allowed, never really offered to do any extra, never volunteered to work at the club where so many of my friends work. Most of my jobs have bored the pants off of me... and yet probably the most damaging thing that's ever really happened to me (yeah, I've lead a pretty charmed life) has been being unemployed (aside from freelancing, which doesn't count) for the best part of seven years. I'm not used to failure, and so such a prolonged period of it really did me in. Admitedly, I found other things to distract myself, and didn't spend that whole time job hunting, but I still applied for a lot of jobs that I really felt I should have got, and, while it might not have stung so much at the time, the continuing lack of calls back, total dearth of second interviews, the pitiful sprinkling even of first interviews - I think all of these things actually added up to do me more damage than any careless boy or amount of bullying ever did.

My employment history began, as I imagine it did for so many girls, by babysitting for some of the neighbours' kids. My outstanding memory of this period of my life is one occasion when I was driven home by one of the mothers, and she got all the way to my door before I plucked up the courage to tell her she hadn't actually paid me and to ask for my money. She had to drive me back to her house to get my £3.50. It was touch and go whether I'd even have the balls at that point, but I imagine my hunger for Pony magazine and penny sweets overcame my cowardice.

My first regular paycheque came from a paper round. The low points of having a paper round include 7am being the longest lie-in you EVER get (which actually correlates fairly well with my insomnia ridden current life, but which was horrendous as a sleep-ravenous teenager); lugging a massive bag of papers around with me; insulting pay; big dogs. The high point of having a paper round was getting to listen to my walkman really loud every day, at just the point where I was really, truly falling in love with music. I made myself so many compilation tapes for those early mornings - the Smiths, the Cure, the Wonder Stuff, James, Guns n Roses, EMF, Queen - such were the soundtracks of those dusky mornings as I made tracks from one house to the next, my shortcuts and my wall jumps growing more confident day after day. I'm suprised to find that I'm looking back on my paper round with what is no doubt nostalgia... but then, maybe it's not so surprising after all. The only other job I've had where I'm paid to listen to music and move around is DJing, and that works fairly well for me.

When the early mornings got too much for me, I jacked in the paper round and worked for a while in a launderette. I remember, spoiled child that I was, being amazed by how many people in the world didn't have washing machines, and I remember having to wash some really nasty, bogey-covered hankerchiefs. I can smell that job more clearly than I can remember it; it smelt hot, damp and intensely, itchiningly clean.

Throughout my sixth form, I worked in Bowes Road library on Tuesday nights and Saturdays. I got £30 a week for that, paid into my bank account, and I remember thinking that was the most princely sum a person could ever wish for. My boss was a lovely woman called Sue who had beautifully painted nails and soft hair and big glasses. She smoked cigarettes, gave me a lift home every Saturday, told me about the Anne Rice books and talked to me like I was a grown-up. Working for someone I liked was a novelty, and my geeky little soul thrilled at the neatness of strict ordering, as we called it (I have no idea if that's a common library term, or just one we used) - going around the shelves and making sure every book was in exactly the right place in the Dewey Decimal System. I used to test myself, when I was bored at school, to see if I could remember exactly where a certain strain of chemistry would be, or where I might tell someone they could find the books on economics.

Mending the books was another favourite job of mine from then. Cutting away old, stained, ripped and sticky plastic coverings and replacing them with fresh, see-through, smooth new ones, I could pretend I was a doctor performing surgery, or a designer dressing a model. I remember a man who sat on his own for long periods of time once gave me a badly spelt letter telling me he loved me and wanted to go out on a date with me. I was 17, he was probably in his 40s. I was too scared to ever tell anyone.

I returned to work in that library and another one throughout the summer holidays of my first degree, but they wanted me to take my piercings out, meaning I nearly lost my Madonna piercing. I had reached the point where that was unacceptable, so I stopped working in the library and got (after a brief but disastrous stint as a waitress in a local pub, where my main memory is of the sad little manager informing me gravely at my induction that 'The Wacky has let us down,' referring to the fact that the poor exploited youths working in the appalling named 'Wacky Warehouse' hadn't signed enough unsuspecting families up for a loyalty card or some such) a summer job working at New Wave Tattoos in Muswell Hill.

My boss at the tattoo shop couldn't have been much more different than lovely library lady Sue. The boss of New Wave tattoos has an ego the size of Alaska and was constantly trying to con myself and Sarah, the other girl who worked there, out of money. My job consisted of booking rude, shouty and just plain weird people in for tattoos, what basically amounted to crowd control as the masses turned up on Saturdays, which was first-come-first-served day, taking cash, cleaning needles, and getting whatever discount ink I could beg. Although, now I think back on it, I only had two pieces there and he charged me full price for both of them, the mean fucker. It was a horrible job, but it made me think I was the last word in cool, and meant I met a girl (the aforementioned Sarah) who became my best friend for the next five or six years, so it wasn't a total loss.

While I was at university in Stoke, I did more babysitting and also had a spell as a life model, something I never thought I would have had the guts to do until I heard it paid £16 an hour and they'd basically give anyone a job. Like so many things in this world, life modelling is a much scarier thought than it is a reality. I remember getting changed in the little changing room (which is a strange vanity - why get changed in a changing room when you're about to display everything to everyone on the other side of the door for the next two hours anyway?) on the first day and feeling a spurt of panic more intense than I'd ever felt before - surely this was a bad dream, getting to work and discovering I'd forgotten all my clothes - rather than something I'd actually elected to do? But once I was out there and I'd taken a few deep breaths, taken the robe off and sat down, it was almost an anti-climax. No-one cared. They just saw shapes: circles and cones and swirls - not a person at all.

I did an all-day pottery class once and got pins and needles down one leg that lasted for a week afterwards. You earn your money as a life model. It's bizarre how painful sitting still can be, especially for someone who, if it were possible, would spend her whole life in front of the TV.

My first job out of university was back in another tattoo shop - Sacred Art in Tottenham. I worked there on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays for I think about £90 a week. The people at this shop were much kinder to me than the boss at New Wave had been. I got free ink, I didn't need to be in work until 11, I flirted with cute tattooed boys, I made friends - it was good. I wanted to be in that world on a full time basis and spent quite a while trying to find someone who would take me on as a body piercing apprentice. I wonder how my life would have gone if I'd been successful in that enterprise?

However, I wasn't... and sooner or later I realised that I needed some real money, and so, armed with my oh-so-useful creative writing degree, I bought the Guardian every Monday, wrote letters to publishing houses and rang agencies, all the while also trying to get my hopelessly pretentious novel about chess and God and the Devil and the end of the world published; another venture which (thank the Lord) wasn't successful. And I eventually wound up with my first grown-up job; working as an editorial assistant at a children's publishing house.

That was undoubtedly the most horrible job I've ever had, and hopefully the most horrible I ever will have. My boss was cursed with crazy mood swings so that I could never tell if she was going to give me a present or scream at me. She was the queen of vague instructions and of changing her mind about what she wanted done halfway through me doing it, and then blaming me for getting it wrong. One of my tasks at that miserable job was fact checking. This was in the days before the internet, and so I was frequently given a soon-to-be-published book about, say, fire engines and told to ring some unsuspecting fire station and harrass the people who worked there with questions about how their jobs and their vehicles operated while they were literally trying to put out fires and really, really not wanting to talk to me. That job frequently made me want to jump out of the window rather than continue. I remember having an almost full-blown panic attack on the first weekend that I had that job, thinking that this was it for the rest of my life and that things would never get better.

Fortunately, they did. About a year later, I got a job at a place called Intelfax as another editorial assistant, this time checking TV listings for a load of teletext channels. This job wasn't perfect either - the boss was a lechy creep, and there was very little to do, so I was often bored enough to want to claw my eyeballs out - but I had a TV on my desk as well as a computer, I was paid a fraction more than I had been and, after a few months, I got promoted to teletext journalist and I got to write features for Trouble, Animal Planet and Living. That was a lot of fun. I could basically choose to write about whatever I wanted, and what I wanted was mostly hamsters, Morrissey, Dawson's Creek and feminism. I got promoted again, to be head of creative ideas for our team, and so ended up being the sort of boss of some people I had begun assisting. Never have I had such a glittering career before or since.

It was abundantly clear that teletext wasn't a viable medium for reliable future employment, and so I looked around and got a job as a sub-editor on TV and Satellite Week; a job which paid bundles and started off as busy and interesting and eventually got snipped back and snipped back and snipped back by budget cuts, until it was the bare bones of its former self, until there was so little to do that I once calculated I spent half of my week gazing out the window or posting on the internet. It got hacked away so much that it really shouldn't have been a surprise when we all got made redundant in 2003 (irony of ironies, probably before some time before the same thing would have happened to me if I'd stuck with the teletext job).

I've told the story many times before in this blog, I'm sure, of my redundancy and turn to psychology, and I know I've talked about freelancing and how much I loathed it, so I won't go on and on again here. Suffice it to say that I supported myself through my second degree by freelancing on lots of different magazines and papers and constantly felt as though I was nuturing a very large and very tender stomach ulcer with the gut-wrenching stress of it all.

Since I started my PhD almost a year ago, I've had quite the motley crew of jobs: teaching people how to do basic stats, transcribing interviews, editing essays. My most recent paid job has been taking part in a Clockwork Orange-esque experiment where I have been shut in a tiny, airless room, faced with a screen that flashes up faces which I'm not permitted to look at properly, and pressing buttons to say what mood the face is displaying for hours at a time. I'm quite glad that particular job is over.

However, after seven years without a contract, without a monthly wage, I've finally got a real job. A part time one, to be sure, as otherwise I couldn't keep on with my PhD, which I love, but still a real job. I'm going to be counselling at ChildLine (something I've done on a voluntary basis on Thursday mornings for around three years) for three shifts a week. I love it at ChildLine and I can't wait to start and, more so, start getting paid... but I am slightly worried that I'm going to make myself really miserable with trying to juggle work and studying, just as I was really miserable both working and studing throughout my psychology degree. I am hoping not, as I enjoy being at ChildLine a hell of a lot more than I ever enjoyed sub-editing (not hard); but it's a possibility. I guess I can't know until I start. I will report back. Wish me luck.

Girl, put your records on

For the first weekend in a while, I'm not meant to be doing any deeJAYing as my mum, god bless her, always calls it. I am quite sad about this. As I mentioned in my last blog, DJing is the most fun thing I do and I love it with a passion.

I started DJing completely by accident - an accident for which I am now very grateful. Some friends of mine were organising the music for a party for the forum we all post on. I was joking with them about how I'd like to put some of the music I like on (it's a very dance music orientated forum, and I don't really give that much of a crap about most dance music - there's some I like, and there's a little bit I love, but generally it says nothing to me about my life as dear old Morrissey would say) and see what everyone made of it. It was going to be a goth-hop set; a mixture of the Sisters of Mercy and Missy Elliot. Somehow the joke got carried on and carried on, and before I knew it, I was being told that I was doing a back to back with a girl called Elaine who I knew a little bit and who could teach me how it was done.

Those same friends decided that we should be the headliners, for reasons I'm sure were logical at the time but which no longer seemed that sensible when several of our other so-called friends were demanding their money back if they were really going to have to sully their pure euphoric trance (yes, I know, try not to giggle, it's rude) ears with dirty, dirty pop music at the end of the night, and those reasons became even less clear when the two of us were sitting through the rest of that party, clutching each others' hands with fear and practically vomiting with the nerves as we waited for our turn to begin.

We came up with the formula that I would play two tunes and then she would play two tunes. I put on Railing by Roni Size followed by Renegade Master by whoever-its-by, and then she put on Planet Rock by Leftfield and then Music by Madonna. It took us four tunes to get to the pop, but then we stayed there for a while. We called ourselves the Queens of Mean and our set list (which I keep in the draw of my bedside table) includes such tips and gems as 'wibbly - FAST MIX!' and 'respec'ful silence.'

We finally went on at about 4.30 in the morning, I think, and a friend related to me later that he saw my face turn from sheer terror to sheer joy as I pushed the crossfader across from my first tune to my second tune and realised that playing people the music you love and them thinking you're brilliant because of it is the greatest feeling in the world.

We made so many technical errors its not even funny (one deck got switched to phono at one point and we couldn't work out why it didn't work - we had no notions at all about how to control volumes on a mixer - we tried to mix DnB with pop with no seeming musical links at all) but Oh My God did it go well. As soon as we finished, I turned to Elaine and said to her, 'we're doing that AGAIN!' The bouncer asked us for a demo CD and we were booked for our second gig (a birthday party) before we'd left the decks.

Fast forward six years and Elaine is my best friend and DJ life partner, and what started out as a bad joke intended to annoy some of our friends has resulted in us getting real gigs at actual festivals and clubs and weddings and people actually paying us occasionally and appearing to take us seriously. I'm sure it also annoys a lot of our friends as well, though, so it's not a complete dead loss. ;-)

We decided that Queens of Mean was too similar to Queens of Noiz and became Twisted Kitten about two or three gigs in, I think. We got the name by looking in a hip hop slang book that Elaine had - Twisted means drunk, wrong or on drugs, if I remember correctly - and by nicking a word from Hello Kitty and messing with it a bit. We still get nervous enough to vomit before most gigs, even though we've been doing it for six years now, but as soon as the first record is on, the world falls away and all that matters is the music and each other and the crowd (I say that word with my tongue firmly in the cheek, as the average Twisted Kitten audience is around 5 or 6 people strong).

I have been recently reading about a concept called Flow, which was dreamt up by a fella called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheeks-sent-me-high). If I've understood and remembered it correctly, being in a state of flow is when you're engaged in an activity that you have to work at, but that which makes time stop and everything else stop mattering. It doesn't, in itself, make you happy at that moment, as you're lost in it and working, but the more flow-like activities you have in your life, the happier you generally will be. If you have no flow activities, but just try to make yourself happy with gratifications, it ain't gonna work and you're going to be a sad panda. Doing sport is a flow activity... watching TV is a gratification. Making clothes is flow... buying them is gratification. There's nothing wrong with gratifications, but you need to spread them out and you can't entirely rely on them for happiness, cos essentially, they're empty. Yoga for me is a flow activity - doing it at the time doesn't necessarily fill me with joy as it hurts, but it definitely improves my life and makes me happier overall.

DJing, I think, needs a new category all of its own. It has all the plus points that flow has - it makes time stop, I have to work at it, nothing else matters when I'm playing records and people are dancing and my best girl is by my side... but it's also a gratification, cos it brings me SO MUCH JOY right at that moment. What is it about being able to put on loud music that you love and seeing other people love it too that is so incredibly enjoyable? On the one hand, I don't think I could ever explain it... but then on the other hand, I'm not sure it needs any more explanation than what I've just said. Loud music that you've picked and that other people love - what could be better than that?

I watch friends of mine who are in bands and I take my hats off to them - there's clearly more talent in what they all do than I have in my littlest headphone jack - but it looks like so much WORK. All that lugging equipment about and practicing and writing songs and sound checks and band meetings... I could never! DJing (at least, the easy-peasy, who-needs-to-beatmatch-when-the-tunes-are-this-good DJing that I do) is the cheaters' way to celebrity, the easy peasy route to being a legend in your own lunchtime, and I think that's part of what makes it a flow activity (cos you have to work at it to an extent) and a gratification activity (cos you can stop and listen to the music and JUST HAVE FUN) all at once.

Keen followers of my blog, and what a terrific audience you are, ;-) will recall that I have a bit of tinnitus. Nothing too awful, but I can hear it when I wake up and when I'm trying to get to sleep. As as result, I've had to stop using my iPod, which has been a very sad and heartbreaking process... there was very little I loved more than a long walk and a loud iPod. But after about four months without it, I've managed to train myself to the point where I don't really miss it that much any more... not unless I think about it for about ten minutes. When I started to realise that the tinnitus was becoming an issue I couldn't ignore any more, I had to make a choice between my iPod and DJing, and DJing won. Life without DJing would be really quite bleak.

We're playing at a punk and ska festival the weekend after next, which is going to be quite hilarious. We're being punk by refusing to confirm and putting Beyonce on. They're going to bottle us. I shall report back.

In other news, life on the straight and narrow is still going well. Another festival is under my belt and I didn't even get a twinge this time. I think this is now the second longest I've gone without any of mother's little helpers since I was 15 (a frightening 18 years ago), and the first longest was an enforced break that, while I got through without too much difficulty, I definitely counted the days through until I could resume my old lifestyle. Something in my brain has turned over... a friend was getting a bit worried the other week cos she couldn't get what she wanted for the weekend, and I really couldn't comprehend why she even cared. Smugness is surely only a stone's throw away.