Never Blue

I don't see my lovely friend Darren much - in fact I think I've only met him three or four times, and not for a year or two. He lives in America so we don't bump into each other down the pub. But occasionally these emails pop into my inbox and inside them I find mp3s. He's responsible for introducing me to Bo Diddley, among others. This one arrived last week - it's one of Darren's own songs, and he has allowed me to post it up on the blog*. I think it's quite lovely and it has a definite ring of The Beach Boys to it. Also, for your information, that's Darren in the picture. If the music isn't your sort of thing, you can definitely still enjoy his beautiful facial hair.

*It's not a video. Annoyingly, Blogger won't allow me to post up an mp3, so I have to put a picture on it.

I got shot!

I've been to a family reunion this weekend. We have one every two years. It features 80 descendants of my great-grandfather, and it tends to take place at slightly bizarre spots in the countryside. This year it was a hotel in Gillingham. If you're not familiar with Gillingham, it's one of the Medway towns in Kent. If you google it, you can't find much about anything except for the football team. I don't want to say that that's because Gillingham has nothing else going for it... so instead I'll just leave that idea hanging in the air while I look at my laptop with a raised eyebrow.

We took Milo (my nephew) out in his pram yesterday, walking grimly along the side of the motorway until we found a little park. Actually it wasn't so much a park as a field of dog turds and syringes, but let's not quibble. On the way back to the hotel we were just bellowing small talk at each other over the noise of the traffic when a car came past very fast and I felt myself being hit hard in the thigh by a small missile, which ricocheted into Milo's pram. I gasped and clutched my leg, and when I took my hand away, both dress and palm were covered in orange liquid.

"Oh my god!" said my sister dramatically, recoiling as we stared at each other, horrified.

"It's not blood," I pointed out, a bit unnecessarily. I lifted my dress to see orange all over my leg, and there was already a little bruise forming.

Pulling myself together, I retrieved the object from Milo's pram, and discovered it was a little plastic pellet.

Yes, dear reader: someone had leant out of the window of a moving car and shot me with a paintball gun.

I'll be honest - I wasn't really hurt, or phased, although it was a bit irritating. But if it had hit Milo, or my mother, I would have been beyond furious.

Riding high on the drama of my ordeal, I headed back to the hotel to wash my dress and mope about in my room, staring at my bruise in the mirror and wishing it was a bit worse. But no sooner had I got the orange paint off my hands than I started to hear a weird singing/shrieking noise.

At first I thought it was kids messing about outside. But no. These were repeated, operatic wails. It was only when this was joined by a second noise - the sound of bed springs creaking enthusiastically - that I realised that it was coming from whoever was in the room next door, and that they were having one hell of a Saturday afternoon in there. To make things worse, the wall was so thin that I actually had to double-check that they weren't in my room, perhaps having sex in the cupboard containing the ironing board, the coffee sachets and some UHT milk.

This scenario was disturbing enough, but as they embarked on the second round of moaning and panting mere inches away from my head, something even worse dawned on me. What if the noise was coming from some unidentified relative of mine? I jammed my fingers in my ears and went back to looking sadly at my leg.

On the plus side, when I headed down for dinner I had become a sort of war hero. People came up to me looking anxious and hugged me, telling me how disgusted they were that I'd been shot. "It's assault!" they said, outraged, and then, "How are you?" in concerned tones.

"Oh, I'll be alright," I said, in my bravest whispery voice. "It's just a little bruise." Truth is, it's a miniscule bruise. I'm just thankful it was under my clothes otherwise I would have had to beef it up with purple eye shadow.

To lighten the mood, I told a few people about the shagathon next door. They loved it. My cousins told me it was probably my parents. I said I reckoned I'd heard their parents' voices. Hilarity ensued. When I came down for breakfast this morning I was greeted by a cheerful "How's the mega-bonkers?!" from my own father.

Thankfully I never found out who it was. That's two crimes committed against me this weekend, and neither of the culprits were caught. My uncle had a bad time too - he got up for a wee at 5am and discovered 20 wasps having a party in his bathroom. I blame Gillingham. Really and truly, it's all Gillingham's fault.

And now it's Autumn again.

Aaargh. Blog, I miss you. I think of you every day, but I haven't managed to write a post for almost three weeks.

So what have I been doing for the last 19 days? Well, the first few days, of course, were spent recovering from the wedding-crashing incident and trying to persuade my parents that I'm not an alcoholic. This is the problem with publishing your embarrassing stories on the internet.

I've been to see two of the films I mentioned in an earlier post - Coco Before Chanel and Mesrine: Killer Instinct. Neither, disappointingly, were as good as I'd hoped. Coco was lovely, but it barely touched on her career, which is sort of the reason I'm interested in her, and we didn't see many of her designs until the last thirty seconds of the film. Mesrine, though, baffled me. It wasn't a bad film, but from the reviews I'd read (especially in the Guardian), I thought it was going to be exceptional. Vincent Cassel is great to watch, but there was no character development and just as you started to get into a plotline, it would stop short, never to be mentioned again. Also, I'm not averse to a violent movie, but at one point it felt like every single scene featured Mesrine smashing a glass in someone's face or shooting off their kneecaps at close range. My dad was next to me guffawing at top volume at the ridiculousness of it all while I sat grimly with my hand over my eyes, waiting for the gunshots and screaming to die down.

Off to see Broken Embraces next week. I think I'm going to have to give up on The September Issue for now. Even though it's been promoted to death by papers, magazines and blogs, it seems to be showing a handful of times in London at about three obscure cinemas. I don't understand why the distribution is so bad. My theory is that the media have gone crazy over it because it's about the media. If you don't work in this industry, does it look boring as hell? I suspect maybe it does.

I went to Notting Hill Carnival at the end of August. I always have a great time, but this year was odd. I blame it on the weather, which was not nearly as beautiful as it usually is for Carnival. It was a day that included rum and dancing (standard) but also one of my friends getting in a fight after pinching someone's wig, Tony from Hollyoaks being spotted working in a bar, and later, me and Denis having to take a stranger with a head injury to the hospital (non-standard).

Big Brother 10 came to an end last week. I wrote for the website, as I did last year, and again it was sad to see it finish. I work with such nice, funny people, and the job is so silly and entertaining. Next year will be the last one, and I hope I get to work on it again. Should be a good one.

Next week I'm going to New York, and I can't bloody wait. Also coming up this month are (possibly slightly less exciting) trips to Kent, Newcastle and Cheltenham. Actually Claire will be in Cheltenham and she's investigating a wedding we might be able to crash, so you never know.

The Newcastle trip is badly overdue. It's been a year since I was there. I feel very settled in London, but recently my heart is aching for Newcastle and my friends up there. Most of all I miss my honorary grandmother, Margaret, who is an angel. She sent me a letter yesterday with photos of her standing outside her house in Sunderland, and I burst into tears looking at them. Time to go home, Hattie. I'll try not to weep all over the blog when I get back.