End of another month

Not enough blog posts lately, I know. I'm a blogging failure. Or a failing blogger. Both. I'm not going to write properly now, either, because I have to go to bed, but I wanted to drop by to recommend that you see The Damned United, which is brilliant. I saw it on Sunday night. Ooh and I saw Richard E. Grant walking outside the cinema! But that's not relevant. Just see the movie.

She put sugar in her soup!

I have decided that the time has come to reveal my huge secret girl crush. Ladies and gentlemen... Ms Catherine Keener!

I've just read this interview with her in the Guardian (which is also where I stole the picture from...) and I just think she's brilliant. I think we'd be friends if we knew each other. (Why wouldn't an Oscar-nominated Hollywood actress want to be friends with a scruffy old blogger from London, hmm?)

If you haven't seen her in anything then I thoroughly recommend Capote and Being John Malkovich. Here's another good interview in which she talks about playing Harper Lee in the former (also, did I mention that she's 50 years old and still totally gorgeous?):



The girl's an inspiration. OK I'll stop now. Read the interview though.

America's Most Delirious Top Model

I was made redundant a year ago tomorrow. I feel the need to celebrate this with a blog post, because it was absolutely the right thing to happen to me at that point and I'm grateful for it, and I'm in a much better situation now than I was before it happened.

Everything feels good this week. After the hard plod through winter, we're now doing the pleasant stroll towards summer. Or at least spring. I haven't needed to wear a scarf for at least ten days now. Milo will be one year old next week. Claire's getting married. My birthday's coming up (and no, I don't think that's depressing). The Apprentice is starting soon. I love this nail varnish colour. So much to be thankful for!

God, I'm pathologically cheerful this week. What the hell has happened to me? Must be some sort of chemical imbalance as a result of the virus.

Speaking of the virus, there's something sort of funny that I've been meaning to tell you. I may or may not have mentioned that I've been watching a lot of America's Next Top Model lately. An awful lot. One or two episodes a night, actually, and following various different series (or 'cycles') at once. Staying at my parents' and having access to the Living channel has obviously gone to my head. Anyway, my obsession reached a scary point last week when I was ill. This is a bit weird. Prepare yourself.

In the middle of my night of vomiting, when I presumably had a very high temperature, I hallucinated that Tyra, Miss J, Jay Manuel et al (the ANTM judges, in case you haven't seen it) were berating me for not giving my all to the sickness. "Try different poses," they told me, as I lay sweating and recovering from my third or fourth barf. "Give it more intensity and fierceness in the eyes. At this level of the competition we're looking for you to be more creative."



"I'm trying!" I kept telling them, wracked with anxiety and wondering how to make my vomiting more imaginative. I so desperately wanted to impress them, but they just kept shaking their heads and looking disappointed. "If you can't bring more to these pictures, you're risking being eliminated," they told me sadly.

It may be a good thing that I'm moving out of my parents' house and away from their TV this week.

P.S. Obviously that's not me in the picture - it's Joanie from America's Next Top Model Cycle 6. Thank you Joanie for portraying my anguish so beautifully.

The cat's ok! And other news.

She's on a special diet for her kidneys, and some medicine and stuff, but hopefully with a bit of TLC, Minty is going to be A-OK.

*pauses a moment for you to celebrate raucously*

Alright then, you probably don't really care, but I didn't want to leave you on the cliffhanger of my last post.

I feel so much jazzier than I did last week: the cat doesn't have to be put down, I don't feel sick any more, and I'm doing a much less stressful job with an easier commute. Say goodbye to moaning, complaining, sickly Hattie, because she's gooooonnne. (Well, she's not totally gone. Imagine that she's perhaps in the kitchen making dinner or something. She could come back at some point, but the main thing is she's not around right now. And fun Hattie is here, and we all know everyone prefers her.)

Another thing that has brightened my perspective on everything is some news from two of my very dear friends: Claire and Hywel are getting married. Huge congratulations to them: it's hard to imagine a lovelier, funnier, more well-suited couple (or a better-looking couple actually, but let's not be superficial). I'm so happy for them, and I'm anticipating a very fun wedding, and that's only partly because I'm going to be a bridesmaid. Hurrah!

And to finish, just in case you're not feeling cheerful, I recommend this video (I'm not allowed to embed it for some reason) of the comedian Robert Webb doing Flashdance for Comic Relief. Someone showed it to me in the office today and it really tickled me. Such enthusiasm! He's really taken those moves seriously. An impressive performance.

House of plague

The last few days have been... trying. After I last wrote on Wednesday night (when I said I was "flushed" and "lethargic" and that the cat was "being odd"), two things happened: (1) I got ill; (2) the cat got ill.

This led to a really fun episode on Friday when I had to take the cat to the vet to find out if she was dying, and I kept having to sit and put my head between my knees in the vet's office because I still had a temperature and thought I was going to faint. I also really embarrassingly burst into tears on the phone to my parents' neighbour, who felt so sorry for me (or worried for my mental stability) that she came round with Lucozade and home-made soup. And I may have had a brief sob down the phone to my cousin's wife too, who I called for veterinary advice, and have actually only met two or three times. All in all, not a good day for my dignity.

They were both incredibly sweet to me though. It reminded me how great women are. If I'd done that on the phone to a bloke, chances are I would have got an awkward silence and a bit of coughing.

Anyway, the vet said the cat needs blood tests to look for diabetes or problems in her liver or kidneys, but the lab is closed until Monday, so I was sent home to nurse her for two days. She's perked up a bit actually, poor old thing, and is eating a bit again. My cousin's wife the vet said that's encouraging, but then she gently added that I should prepare myself just in case I have to make "a difficult decision" when the blood test results come back. I am preparing myself for this by trying not to think about what it means.

Meanwhile I just saw this advert on TV, which made me homesick for Newcastle. This is where I'm from, and I haven't been there for six months. It's a lovely part of the world. Admittedly it doesn't look quite as lovely as this from every single angle on every single day (closing time in the Bigg Market, for example), but still, it's a wonderful place. You probably should visit. I'll come.

Having a coke with you

Doing a bit of slightly uncool Mad Men research on Youtube, I just stumbled across this: a video of the poet Frank O'Hara reading his poem Having A Coke With You. I love it. How could you ever be unhappy again if someone had written this about you?

It sticks with me that my dad has told me several times that poets are the most talented and remarkable writers - he's right.

And it would take up time that I could use for blogging.

I'm in the middle of a very long post about something very personal, but I can't quite bring myself to finish it yet. I'm concerned it might be boring for everyone except me. But I want to write and I want to say hello to you all, so here I am.

I'm so tired. I worked from home today and haven't left the house - how can I be this exhausted? It's 9.20pm as I write this and I can hardly keep my eyes open. And I'm a night owl. I've just caught my reflection in the mirror on the living room wall and noticed my face is very flushed. I think it's too hot in here. Maybe that's why I'm so lethargic.

Minty (the cat) is being odd too. She hasn't eaten much all day but she seems hungry. She keeps jumping when I type, which is strange because I spend all my time here typing and you'd think she'd be used to it.

At the end of this week I'm leaving my current freelance job and going to work somewhere else for a couple of weeks. This will most likely mean more blogging. The place I'm working at the moment leaves no time or energy for that, which makes me sad. I never forget about this blog. I love getting your comments and I check every day to see who has updated their own blogs. In the periods between my posts, I feel sad and guilty about it. I'm very grateful to those people who bear with me.

While I've got you here, let me run something by you: I have a small dilemma. A photographer acquaintance wants to take some pictures of me for his portfolio. I haven't seen him or really been in contact with him for five or six years, but recently he got in touch and asked me the favour of posing for some photos (fully clothed photos. I'll just spell that out in case you were suspicious). I thought about it, and said no. He tried to persuade me, and I said no again. He's a nice guy and a good photographer, but I'm essentially quite an awkward girl and I don't really like having my picture taken. I've conquered this with the technique of just grinning like a maniac every time anyone so much as picks up a camera near me, and that serves me quite well for drunken nights out - but in the day time, with someone I don't know well, sober and not allowed to resort to my cheesy grin, I don't know what I'd do.

He emailed again this morning, after a couple of months of silence, to say that he hasn't given up on me yet. He said, "I'm really self conscious too, but there's no getting away from the fact that you are Hattie Crisell, and you are who you are, and I think the Hattie Crisell of 2009 should be caught on camera, don't you?"

Lovely as his shameless and calculated sweet-talking is, what's the answer to that? Well, I have been caught on camera in 2009, on various nights out, and on those occasions I've perfectly demonstrated my mastery of the maniacal grin and the awkward grimace. I have thus fulfilled my photographic destiny.

His argument is that I don't have to feel self-conscious because he wouldn't ask me to pose in any way or pull any particular face. He just wants me to be natural. Curiously, that makes me feel more self-conscious. I'd rather be directed than just sit there like a sack of potatoes, wondering what the hell to do with my eyebrows and my hands. On the other hand, he is remarkably persistent, and he's been very sweet about it, and it seems like it would help him out. Should I just keep saying no, or am I being a bit unadventurous - or perhaps more importantly, ungenerous? I don't know what to do. What do you think?

"A Booker prize? For me?!"

Hello! Sorry I've been AWOL for the last eight days. I'd love to say I've been on holiday but the truth is I've been working, sleeping, working and sleeping. And maybe a bit of drinking, if I'm honest. (Vodka and tonic with lime is the drink for Spring by the way. Claire and I had a meeting about it and that was the outcome.)

Housesitting for my parents is working out well. The cat has pooed in the house twice, but once it was in her own bed, which I considered quite a selfless act. All in all, we're getting on well. And the commute into central London is tiring but not unpleasant. The best thing about it is that on every train journey I'm reading a book called How Not To Write A Novel, which is entertaining me endlessly.

To clarify, I'll probably never get round to even trying to write a novel, mainly because if I did it would probably be a dispiriting disaster, but I have been kicking the idea about. Then one day on Twitter I saw this book recommended by Peter Serafinowicz (his second mention on my blog... honest, I'm not obsessed with him), who described it as "one of the funniest things I've read in ages". Which sounded quite good.

And it was an excellent recommendation. It's a guide to the common mistakes that unpublished authors make, that lead to their manuscripts being rejected. Call me basic, but this one made me laugh out loud on the train:

'Heroes should not masturbate or ogle strangers in the first three chapters. Readers understand that people have sexual needs, but if the first thing they see are those needs, they will just think your character is gross. It's not that the reading public is uptight or moralistic; they know everybody masturbates, has unworthy thoughts about the buttocks of colleagues, etc. The reader also knows everyone poos. But if the first thing a character does is poo in front of the reader, the reader will think of him as the Pooing Character forevermore.'

It's not all about stuff like that, I promise. It covers plot, characters, themes, setting - all the so-easily-fuck-up-able parts of a novel. If you're interested in writing fiction, cast your eye over it.

Having said that, I suspect that a major reason why I'm enjoying it so much is that it has given me a whole new fantasy of becoming a novelist - and this fantasy can be taken in so many directions! I get on the train, open my book, and within two minutes I find myself gazing out the window while smiling to myself like a weirdo. Here are some of the scenarios running through my head: being able to answer the usually awkward question "What do you do?" with the humbly uttered reply "I'm a novelist"; sending out invitations to my book party; being interviewed by the Guardian/the Culture Show while wearing something gorgeous; talking about the whole new writing philosophy I have unwittingly created; looking at the lovely cover of my book, with my name printed on it... basically everything except for the actual work that goes into writing the book and getting it published - which surely can't be that hard, can it?

In related but less silly news, there was a good article about professional writing in the Guardian the other day. They asked real, actual, published authors whether they enjoy the process of writing. Of course, I fantasised about being interviewed for that as well.

So long for now; the cat's being awfully quiet and I think I'd better go and find the antibacterial spray just in case.