I’m reading a book at the moment called Game Control, by Lionel Shriver (author of the amazing We Need to Talk About Kevin). It’s about aid workers in Africa and the overpopulation crisis.
I have nothing really to add to what is already a thoroughly exhausted debate about whether or not we are actually experiencing, or about to experience, an overpopulation crisis. However, for your viewing pleasure, I present an alternative take on this planet-wide slow-motion epic fail.
My favourite quotes:
“I don’t give a flying ferdoodle what happens to other species, ’cause humans are IT. There is no overpopulation of people.”
“God will not allow there to be a shortage of anything, that’s the main point here.”
So no worries then.
The guy who made this video is seriously great, and I think you really need to check out his YouTube channel. He’s also debunked the myth that smoking is bad for you, the myth of global warming and the myth of peak oil. He’s sort of a 21st century… debunking… WARRIOR. Fighting the good fight against the damn liberals.
Today’s my last day at the job I’ve been in for the past year and four months. I’m about two parts sad, one part excited and one part panic face. In honour of my imminent departure, here is a list of five things I’m going to miss about my company. And, just to keep the equilibrium, also a list of five things I will not miss at all.
things I will miss
The two funniest, loveliest, meanest, cleverest, annoyingest, coolest boys in London.
Walking out of Piccadilly Circus tube station every morning, looking up and blinking in awe at whatever amazing stroke of good fortune landed me a job in such a place.
The best sushi in London (in my humble, probably misguided and definitely biased opinion): Kulu Kulu.
The intensely hilarious and rampant (but good-natured) cultural insensitivity in the marketing department, which is only allowed to survive because we are oh-so-multicultural and equally insensitive about ourselves as about each other.
Our marketing director’s strange, mildly creepy, unnatural and hysterical relationship with the kangaroo hand puppet I brought back from Australia last year.
(Okay, six things.) Adore Patisserie, the little French place around the corner that makes the most brilliant cup of coffee for £1.50, and the three super friendly and multilingual guys who run it.
Did I mention the boys? Well, I’m mentioning them again.
things I will not miss
The dodginess of our weird Flavia coffee machine.
*Facepalming* due to unavoidable interaction with some of the cretinsDaily Mail readersoxygen thieves people from ad sales.
The seriously unkind lighting in the ladies’ room.
The strangely frequent and often noisy roadworks that always seem to be directly outside our building. What are they building out there?!
The weird alarm test thing in our office that goes off like a heart attack at random points during the day, making everyone jump and taking approximately ten years off each of our lives with every five-second ear-bleeding beep.
I have had just about as much as I can take of all the H1N1 talk.
Henceforth there shall be no more swine flu gags any time someone sneezes, or coughs, or sniffles, or says they feel sick, or says they feel cold, or makes any remark whatsoever about their personal wellbeing.
There shall be no daily London victim tally when I get to work in the morning, and nobody shall speak of the aporkalypse over dinner - especially in public spaces, i.e. restaurants. I do not care that a 22-year-old man in Barnet is currently in hospital with It Which Shall Not Be Named. I do not want to know about the honeymooning couple in Edinburgh either. 12,000 people in England are killed by regular flu every year. Do you see me chalking up those numbers on the office wall every fucking day?
There shall be no recommendations that I wear a facemask, and no reminders to wash my hands. I already have a hand-washing fixation bordering on obsessive compulsive, I don’t need the threat of the Baconic Plague to push me over the antiseptic edge. And let it be known that the first person I see in London wearing a facemask is getting a smack.
The one thing that is still acceptable is, of course, swine flu punning (e.g. if you get a rasher put some oinkment on it, it’s Parmageddon, watch out for hamthrax, etc). In fact, it is an activity that I thoroughly endorse. Best swine flu pun left in the comments wins a prize. I don’t know what that prize is yet, but it will be good. It may also be themed.
My excuse is that I was in Bath with Shezwa for the weekend, I didn’t have time to schedule posts I left, and if I’d taken my laptop with me I would have been a) rude, b) boring and c) in unearthly amounts of back pain due to carrying around a mofo of a machine in a messenger bag.
I feel like I need to make some sort of offering to make up for my epic fail, though. So I’ve thought about it, and this is what I’m giving you: three embarrassing moments from my childhood. Take it or leave it.
Embarrassing tableau #1
I am four. I decide that a fun thing to do will be to sneak a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer, go upstairs to my bedroom and cut my own fringe.
Interestingly, even at four years old, the two defining qualities of my life are already firmly in place - a) I am a perfectionist, and b) I am a bit spazzy. So while I cannot quite get my fringe perfectly even and straight, it’s certainly not for want of trying! I just keep snipping and snipping, straightening and fixing, until… oh, look at that. My fringe is all up in my hairline, SHAZAM.
My mum, slightly distressed, takes me to the hairdresser who decides in her infinite 80s wisdom that the best way to fix my hair (which, to quote Karen Walker, is such a disaster the Red Cross won’t give it coffee) would be to chop it into a mullet. A flat-top mullet.
Oh yes. I once had a flat-top mullet**. And somewhere in the world there is photographic evidence. BOOYA! Beat THAT if you can.
Embarrassing tableau #2
When I was seven my cousin Lisa got married and my sister and I were both flowergirls. I had just started singing that year, so Lisa asked me to sing a song (it was The Greatest Love of All by Whitney Houston - and no, that’s not the embarrassing fact***).
On the day of the wedding, I developed an immediate crush on one of the groomsmen. I’ve always liked older men, but as he was probably about 30, in hindsight this seems somewhat inappropriate. I don’t remember his name or what he looked like, but when I try to picture him now my brain turns up an image of Slater from Saved By The Bell.
When I was little I wasn’t very good at playing hard to get. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I was all over the poor guy like white on rice, and this retrospectively mortifying display culminated in me belting out my final note, bowing, running off the stage towards the bridal party table… you would think to do something sweet, cute and cousinly like give the bride a hug or something. Er, no. Off I skulked like a little flower-garlanded hussy, straight into the arms of Dreamy Groomsman, to plant giant flirtatious smooch on his cheek.
This happened 16 years ago and the memory of it still makes me cringe. Also, there is video evidence.
Embarrassing tableau #3
I was in a dance school for about nine years as a kid, and I used to compete in the Sunshine Coast Dance Eisteddfod every year. Mostly in groups, but I always did a song and dance solo and even though I wasn’t a brilliant dancer, I managed to perform some kind of crazy voodoo on the adjudicators that made them lose all sense of themselves and their surroundings and stupidly award me first place every year (plus I had a geeky love of show tunes that somehow rendered me shiztastic in their eyes… ohhhh yeah).
So this one year I’m doing my song and dance solo**** in a rather large auditorium, in front of an admittedly not gigantic but also not tiny audience of a couple of hundred people. I finished the song, and then about halfway through the dance part of it, my brain just froze. I wasn’t nervous or anything, because I’d done this sort of thing a thousand times and it didn’t really faze me… I just forgot what I was doing. I stopped dancing. Stood there frowning for a couple of seconds. Then walked off the stage.
Gasp.
Okay, it may not sound very dramatic to you, but at the time it was a scandal. Especially since after I walked off, I stood in the wings blinking stupidly for several moments, and then burst into slightly hysterical laughter, like some sort of evil overlord maniac in the second-to-last scene of a Bond film, like I should have been holding a bomb detonator in one hand while stroking a white cat wit the other.
** To be fair, this isn’t so much embarrassing as one of the proudest moments of my life. It was the EIGHTIES, man! I thought I was the shizzle!
*** It’s an embarrassing fact, though, obviously.
**** It was Leaning on a Lamppost from Me & My Girl that year, if you were wondering. Yes, I chose it. Yes, I was wearing a flatcap, shirt, trousers and suspenders. Jealous?
***** But… I did get to go back on and do it again. Properly. And got first place anyway, awwwyeeeahbizatches!
Inspired partly by one of those Facebook note things that make the rounds every so often and that I never get around to doing (think it was DJ who tagged me - thanks!), and partly by the fact that I just saw The Boat That Rocked and I’m feeling in a very musicky mood, and partly by the fact that it’s 29 minutes to midnight on day three of Blog Every Day April and I still haven’t blogged for today… I give you, in no particular order, ten albums that helped make me.
1. String of Pearls by Deborah Conway
First CD I ever bought. I had just won some random singing competition and the prize was voucher for a music store. I was seven. I bought String of Pearls, probably because it was the only album I really knew of at the time, excluding perhaps the Dirty Dancing soundtrack (but I already had that on an extremely well worn cassette), because my eldest sister already owned it (yes, I was unoriginal, but I was SEVEN). I loved it, and still rate it in my top five of all time. Best tracks: Deborah Conway’s Nightmare #347, String of Pearls, Buried Treasure, Someday, Release Me, It’s Only the Beginning.
2. Use Your Illusion II by Guns’n'Roses
Was my brother Josh’s album actually, he used to play it all the time when I was about seven or eight, which would have made him about twelve or thirteen. I think I started liking it to be cool, but then really loved it… and eventually stole it from him and pretended I didn’t have it so I could keep it forever. It’s still in my collection, and the liner notes are in pretty bad shape. Best tracks: Civil War, Don’t Cry, Yesterdays.
3. James Taylor Greatest Hits
Anyone who doubts this man’s brilliance deserves a disapproving frown and a haughty tut. Best tracks: All killer, no filler. But if I must choose just a few… Fire and Rain, Sweet Baby James, Something in the Way She Moves, You’ve Got A Friend (though obviously this is Carole King’s genius on loan), Mexico, Carolina In My Mind, Only a Dream in Rio… oh, I see what I’m doing here. Okay, ALL OF THEM, alright?
4. Whatever and Ever Amen by Ben Folds Five
My third favourite band of all time. I listened to this album over and over and over and over (like every other album on this list I guess). Ben Folds is so very clever and funny as a songwriter, and that he manages to pull off a song like Brick alongside a song like Song For the Dumped says a lot about him and the band as performers. This album is close to perfection, IMO. Best tracks: Again, I have to say all of them. Major stand-outs, though: Steven’s Last Night in Town, Smoke, Battle of Who Could Care Less, Evaporated.
5. Queen Greatest Hits
I don’t think you need me to explain this. I don’t think anyone, ever, needs to explain this. Best tracks: Oh, come off it.
6. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Lauryn Hill
Has this brilliant woman put out another album since Miseducation? Can I request that she does? Best tracks: To Zion, Doo Wop (That Thing), I Used to Love Him.
7. The Sweetheart Break-In by Supreme Music Program
Did you ever watch Will & Grace? Do you know Megan Mullally, the chick who played Karen Walker? Do you realise she’s a fabulous singer? And really, achingly cool? The Sweetheart Break-In is a bit of a rarity and absolutely rocked my world when I was about fifteen. All quirky, superbly chosen covers, performed live. Best tracks: Ruby’s Arms (Tom Waits cover), Surabaya Johnny, Scarlet Ribbons, I Remember.
8. Recurring Dream, The Very Best of Crowded House
My absolute favourite band of all time. Best tracks: Distant Sun, Into Temptation, Private Universe, Mean to Me, I Feel Possessed.
9. Song Review by Stevie Wonder
Controversially, I think there are as many misses as there are hits on this two-disc collection. But I love him, and the hits well and truly make up for the misses. Let the lynching begin. Best tracks: the usual suspects I guess… For Once In My Life, Signed Sealed Delivered, Lately, I Wish, Superstition.
10. Pieces of You by Jewel
I know it’s not really fashionable to love Jewel, but I do. I actually liked her second album, Spirit, a lot more than this. But I got Pieces of You when I was about 13, so around the age that I started writing songs, and here was this girl who lived in a caravan and wrote all her own tunes, and was effortlessly cool and seemed to have a lot to say. I think she might have influenced my lyrics a lot back then. Best tracks: Who Will Save Your Soul, Foolish Games, Painters, Little Sister.
1. At Easter, why do we give out bunnies and eggs made of chocolate, and not little crucified men made out of chocolate?
2. Am I allowed to buy awesome reading glasses only for the purpose of looking awesome? I mean, they would just have glass in them, not prescription lenses. Is that lame? Is it against the rules? I always thought it probably was, but I was wandering Camden Markets with my Tinkerbell-like friend recently and she had no such qualms. And now she has a magnificent pair of tortoiseshell eighties-style fake glasses. And I don’t. And I’m sad. So sad. Damn my 20-20 vision.
3. I’m taking one last trip around Europe for a couple of weeks at the end of May before I fly home. What’s your favourite European city and what are your top three reasons why I should go there? (Sell it, baby.)
4. How many weird rodeo people does it take to catch a miniature horse?
5. Who do ITV think they’re fooling? I can’t take another exploitative, borderline sanctimonious, nonsense “documentary” about obese toddlers, body hair, teenagers watching porn, polygamous relationships or people getting naked in public (because OMG don’t you know it’s about liberating women and educating teens and feeling good about yourself and being fabulous and doing whatever you want and NOT AT ALL about catering to the lowest common denominator by showing a bunch of exhibitionists getting their tits out on an open-top bus in central London during rush hour?!). Twats.
I’m starting off Blog Every Day April with the official announcement of some rather sad news (well, it’s sad for me).
Sigh. I’m leaving London.
I mean, I don’t want to be all dramatic about it, because it’s not like it’s some crazy sudden shock. I’ve known it’s been coming for a very long time. Actually, I was only meant to be in the UK for six months… then it became nine months… then I stretched it to a year… and then I really HAD to stay until the end of the summer… and then my second London Christmas was only JUST around the corner… and well, you see how two years happened. I just found that I couldn’t leave. Not yet.
But actually, I can’t put it off any longer, because I have commitments back in Australia - well, one commitment specifically. (Gosh, that reads like I left a downtrodden husband and three dull-eyed but obnoxious children at home. I didn’t, obviously. I’m going back to work on a TOP SECRET PROJECT… one that’s not really that top secret. I do have some pretty fun plans though, and will reveal all in the months to come, if anyone is still around to care.)
I’m not leaving immediately - it will be around the second week of June. Yes, that means I haven’t booked my flight yet. I haven’t even handed my notice in at work. Don’t be fooled by the disorganisation though - that’s just how I roll. I’ve already told my boss that I’m outta here, and he’s looking for my replacement (which I think is a bit rude, since he doesn’t even have the decency to look lost and forlorn while he’s doing it). And plus if I don’t actually come home for reals this time I will probably be kicked out of my family.
The general plan is to move back to London town in a couple of years, once I’ve done stuff and been cool and hung out with my peeps whatnot, and maybe even gotten a tan (probably not though, I don’t want skin cancer).
WARNING: I’m most likely going to be a bit of an Eeyore about this whole leaving London thing in the weeks to come (oh boohoo, this might be my last walk in Hyde Park, this might be my last visit to Borough Market, this might be the last time a North London youth spits in my general direction, this might be the last time I see a gypsy woman change carriages on a moving underground train while carrying her infant child… BOO. RADLEY. HOO) but truth be told there are things about moving home that really excite me (besides the obvious family, friends, whatever), and the main one of those things is that after a two-year hiatus I will be going back underground (literally) to make music again, and I actually CANNOT wait for that. (Oops… that’s the TOP SECRET PROJECT. Big reveal fail.)
So anyway, this post was pretty much meant to be a heads up that many of my Blog Every Day April posts are going to be (like most of my posts usually are anyway) extremely London-centric. In a me-centric sort of way, but that’s to be expected I suppose.
(OH! Side note… on my work blog I got my first nasty comment recently, although the commenter probably didn’t foresee the joy it would bring me. He called me a ‘London-centric, air-kissing fool’. ME! London-centric! Air-kissing! And he got that just from reading this post. I’ve never been so happy in my LIFE!)
Ciao, mwah-mwah xx
P.S. I’m aware, by the way, that it’s 01 April today, and just to be clear - I really wish this was some kind of lame, nobody-cares-you-idiot April Fool’s Day joke, but it’s not.
P.P.S. Just because you haven’t heard me bang on about how awesome Australia is (yet), doesn’t mean I’m ONLY about the London love. I am still patriotic to a fairly absurd degree. For the record.
I appear to be in denial about Digressica.com, because any time someone asks me about it I say, “Why yes, I do have a blog. I am a blogger. I like to blog. I… blog and stuff.” But clearly that is a dirty lie, or at least it has been for the month of March.
However… I have several excuses. Would you like to hear them?
Excuse #1. I have a FUN NEW PROJECT! It is called Domestic Sluttery, and it is the brainchild of Siany, who had the genius-like impulse to gather three lovely gals (the gorgeous Robyn, the stylish Gemma and the delicious Jane) and me (the… Australian one) into a circle of fabulousness to blog about a) cooking, b) cocktails, c) design, d) homey things and e) er, other fun stuff. The tagline is The home and lifestyle blog for women who have better things to do, and I think that pretty much sums it up. If you’d like to know more (i.e. if you have ovaries and excellent taste), please drop in and say hi.
Excuse #2. I have been writing The Book. This may not seem like a big deal, but for the last several years I have compiled tens of thousands of words worth of outline, plotting, re-plotting, planning, character profiles, place names, miscellaneous ideas, brief passages, re-writes of brief passages, re-writes of re-writes of brief passages… and somehow have never written a full, cohesive chapter of this book that I’ve been saying I’m writing for I don’t know how long. I do have excellent intentions - every weekend I tell myself I’m going to spend my whole Saturday or Sunday just writing. Instead, I spend a couple of hours writing outline, plotting various ideas, jotting down snippets of dialogue and drinking lots of coffee, before finally I give up and go shopping.
Recently I had to ask myself, “Self, are we actually writing a book? Or are we writing around a book? Even worse - are we talking about writing a book without actually writing one at all?”
So I decided to sort myself out. I did this in the same way I sort all of my brain-induced problems out. I PSYCHOLOGICALLY DERREN BROWNED MYSELF!
If you are wondering what this means, let me give you some examples.
a) I find it difficult to get up in the morning. So sometimes I will reset the time on my phone to some time earlier than the actual time (usually a random number, e.g. 43 minutes earlier) so that I will get up earlier the next day and be on time for work. However, if I KNOW that I’ve done this, it sort of defeats the purpose. So while I’m resetting the time I will try to distract myself, for example by singing along to Blame It On the Boogie by the Jackson Five AND doing the dance at the same time, or by inputting my credit card details online to buy something pretty and distracting, like Scarlett Johansson (this is a lie, I have never bought Scarlett Johansson online, I am just using her as an example because she is pretty - you cannot deny this - and also she is distracting, because whenever I see her in a movie I find her very annoying, and it distracts me from the film-watching experience. Perhaps this is not such a good example after all), or by setting the timer on my coffeemaker at the SAME TIME as I change the time on my phone, so that my brain switches the two things around in my head and I magically forget that I am playing a trick on myself.
b) That was really tiring to write about, so I’m not giving you any more examples.
SO. I booked into the Urban Writers Retreat. The UWR is held monthly at The Make Lounge, a lovely place in Islington where people go to make stuff and meet cool peeps and hang out and stuff. The Derren Brown-style trickery came into play because the UWR costs £35, so you kind of feel like you are financially committed to actually writing while you are there (from 10am to 6pm), also you have committed your entire Sunday - an ENTIRE HALF of your precious weekend - to doing nothing but write, and ALSO… this is the biggie… there’s no wifi at The Make Lounge.
Nobody loves the internets more than me (well, except maybe Larry Page and Sergey Brin), but when it comes to writing, my general policy is that
THE INTERNET IS EVIL.
So anyway, to wrap up, I went to the Urban Writers Retreat and by the end of the day had 5,000 words and a full plotted outline. And then, even better, I started writing at home. Properly. And in Starbucks. Properly. Full sentences and everything. It’s a revolution.
Excuse #3. Um, my leg is haunted.
Excuse #4. My laptop got stolen… by a DINOSAUR!
Excuse #5. I have been distracted yet again by the terrifying, awe-inspiring, time-sucking accidental genius that is Mad Cow Tourist Info.
Excuse #6. I made you some cookies.
Excuse #7. You’re pretty.
And for my next trick, I will tell you all about the EXCITING AND OVERLY AMBITIOUS COMMITMENT that I am making. It is called Blog Every Day April, and was inspired by YA author and general Baroness of Greatness Maureen Johnson. The idea is to… blog every day in April.
I commit to this idea and am determined to create something EVERY DAY in April, including weekends. Every day, I will find something to say. I embrace the reality that there is always something to talk about, if you are willing to take the time to look for it.
I, Digressica, promise to blog every day in April.
Of course, I’m obviously going to cheat by scheduling some of my posts (sorry, but I have to - Shezwa and I are off to Bath this weekend), but my intention is for something written by me to go live on Digressica.com AND Domestic Sluttery EVERY. SINGLE. DAY in April. And I hope that will make up for a crappy March.
Do you have a blog? Perhaps you should join the BEDA movement too! Go on, it’ll be fun, maybe.
