hattiehattie

Embarrassing picture alert

2009-12-25T17:39:00.001Z

Merry Christmas, you lovely lovely people.

A few things to say today. First of all I should announce the results of the 2010 poll, which was a raging success. With a whopping 70 votes, it got a better turn-out than the last series of Big Brother. So, without further ado, let me announce that the winner for the pronunciation of 2010 waaasss... (drumroll...) 'twenty-ten', with 44 votes!

And, sadly for my flatmate, 'two-thousand-and-ten' got only a pathetic 24 votes. Sorry Sandeep.

I hope you're all having a wonderful day. I'm proud to say that despite a migraine, an eye infection, two heavy colds and the cat having a fit during Christmas lunch, the Crisells have managed to triumph over adversity and have a very nice time. I've spent the whole day drinking champagne and playing with my nephew's toy garage, while alternating between wearing a really tasteful spangly Santa hat and these very attractive antlers:

Don't be jealous - some of us just have a natural elegance.

There are lots of things I want for 2010 - not just a MacBook, and the incredible dress I saw in Stylist two months ago, which is going to be in shops in January but will probably sell out before I get anywhere near it - but serious things too.

I want my family to be happy and healthy and have a good year with a minimum of stress. I want to make progress in my career. I want to sort out all the mess in my flat and turn it into somewhere I feel a bit more proud of. I want the problems at British Airways to be resolved in a way that means my gorgeous friend Jenni can (a) keep her job, (b) keep loving her job and (c) afford to live. I want Sandeep to be offered a fantastic job when she qualifies as a solicitor. I want Claire to have some well-deserved time off and come and get drunk in London with me. I want Tim to have the good year he truly deserves, and I want Denis to have the time of his life in Australia - but then I want him to come home before I miss him too much.

And I want all of you to enjoy twenty-ten too. Much love from me, your reindeer friend.

xxxx

It's poll o'clock

2009-12-08T20:38:00.002Z

Yes you heard: poll o'clock.

Sandeep and I have just had an argument about next year, or more specifically about what we're going to call it. 2010 in writing of course, that's easy. But I want to plump for "twenty-ten" (less effort) and she wants to go for "two-thousand-and-ten" ("less wanky", she said, before elaborating "a tool would say twenty-ten").

She feels very strongly on this. "You might have to say twenty-ten if everyone else says it," I pointed out.

"I won't," she said firmly. "I will never say it. I refuse."

There was a pause. "It's like the 'two-thousand-and-twelve Olympics'," she added.

"But that's called 'London twenty-twelve'," I replied.

"No," she said. "Just no."

This argument's threatening to run and run, and there's only one way to settle this: a poll. It's just up there. Off you go.

My talented friend

2009-12-07T23:42:00.008Z

I have an American friend called Josh Parish. He's a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, but like most of my American friends I met him in New York.

Josh has a certain presence. He's fiercely intelligent, humble and kind - he's someone I admire very much, and having spent time with his friends and family and wife, I know I'm not alone. Recently he sent me this link to him reading some of his own fiction. It's about 15 minutes long and it's moving, and evocative, and exciting. Knowing that friends of mine can write like this makes me question what the hell I'm doing, which is probably a constructive thing.

I highly recommend you give it a listen. Just go to the link and click on '4_Josh_Cast_1109.mp3'.

The Better Mood

2009-12-02T20:02:00.003Z

The last week has been a bit crap... and quite a lot better at the same time. You can therefore be confident that you won't want to slit your wrists by the time you get to the end of this post (unlike the last two).

I've had a little bout of what I assume is laryngitis. By which I mean, I had a crappy cold, and then suddenly I completely lost my voice on Saturday night and it still hasn't really come back. I had no idea that I loved talking so much until I couldn't do it any more. I mean, I really love chatting. To spend four days having to make the choice between remaining mute or doing a really painful Marge Simpson impression has been tough. It has also meant that I've had to cancel a phone interview I was doing with Sarah Beeny tomorrow, because I didn't want her to feel alarmed at the thought that something from hell was on the other end of the line. This is very disappointing for (a) me, because I'd love to speak to her and (b) my mother, who has stated several times that she'd be willing to swap one of her existing daughters for The Beeny if the opportunity should arise.

So it hasn't been a week full of joy, on the whole. But on the other hand, I think something's changed in my brain in the last few days. I think I'm sick of being miserable. The autumn was so full of problems and bad news that I think I've actually run out of worry. I have no worry left. I'm worriless.

And now it's December - no longer autumn but winter, and the month of Christmas parties, mulled wine, and sparkly dresses that are probably a waste of money because you'll never wear them next year. This weekend I'm having five of my best geordie girls round for Christmas drinks and I am going to declare it Officially The Beginning Of The Festive Season. I've bought a terrible Christmas CD that I will force them to listen to, and I'm going to dig out my most garish fairy lights to decorate the lounge.

Then later on we're all getting in a taxi and heading off to a party, probably cackling like a coven of pissed witches. It's going to be pretty similar in theme to the nights we've had every Christmas for the last ten years, and it's going to be bloody BRILLIANT.

So there you go. No more doom and gloom. It's Christmas time and we're going to enjoy it if it kills us. Now pass me those mince pies and let's get cracking.

He wields that drill with such authority

2009-10-25T12:40:00.001Z

If you know me, know of me or have been within a ten metre radius of me at any point over the last month, you'll know I've been having some toothache. I've been pretty brave about the whole thing and you've probably only heard me mention it eight or nine times. I am terrified of the dentist. Something about having a total stranger fiddle about inside my face while I lie there totally helpless and unable to speak makes me uncomfortable. Call me crazy.

With this in mind, when I arrived for root canal on Wednesday I asked the dentist if I could listen to my iPod during the treatment, to take my mind off it. His head nodded politely but his eyes were full of disdain.

I think my dentist is very attractive. I can't be 100% certain - there's always the chance that he only seems attractive in contrast to the horrendous experience he inflicts on me. He's Polish, blonde, smiley and quietly charming. However, I'm not certain he actually passed any of his exams.

The problem is that I'm quite thick, and therefore going to the dentist for me is on a par with having brain surgery. What he is doing is so beyond my understanding that I would never be able to accuse him of doing it wrong. I mean he could tell me he needed to crush my teeth to a powder, and mix that with flour paste in order to rebuild them as one giant tooth-panel. He could suggest that we replace all my teeth with whistles. He could remove my tongue and send me away with a course of penicillin and an Etch-A-Sketch, and I would shrug and use it to scratch out a spidery message to friends: "I told him to do what he thought best. He's so handsome!"

The iPod did help with the anxiety though. I settled on In Rainbows by Radiohead, which is both calming and sort of involving, and made me feel weirdly detached. I started to imagine that instead of getting root canal, I was in a cinema watching a trippy feature-length arthouse film filmed from the point of view of a mouth, with In Rainbows as the score. Which weirdly, I later found out, is Thom Yorke's next solo project.* In some ways it was similar to how I felt while watching the Danish musical Dancer In The Dark at the cinema: trapped and hopeless about life. In a peaceful sort of way.

Drifting around on the music in my head and enjoying the local anaesthetic, I started to perceive my mouth as a big marshmallow cave rather than a house of pain. Which was quite pleasant. I also found that I'm so ignorant of what dental processes involve that I couldn't make any sense whatsoever of what the dentist and his assistant (or was she a dental nurse?) were doing. Mysterious implements were whipped quickly in and out of my sight and I couldn't turn my head to get a better look. At one point the dentist pulled out something that looked like my old Walkman headphones, but with a hand-pump on one end, and jammed that into my gums. Later his assistant produced a big metal spike and starting heating one end of it up using what looked, out of the corner of my eye, like a cigarette lighter. My eyes must have been wide with alarm under my stupid plastic goggles, but no one took any notice. Finally what I could have sworn was the mains lead for my flatmate's Toshiba laptop was produced and the dentist made me press it against my teeth while he and the assistant left the room. When they came back I was all ready for them to pull a six-foot floor lamp out of my gullet like in Mary Poppins, and then perhaps perform some sort of musical number about death. It felt like anything could happen.

They also had an unsettling habit of using my, er, chest area as a makeshift instrument table. The dentist would say, "I need two yellows and a purple," and the woman would wander off to a drawer, reappear with some coloured metal things, and casually line them up on my T-shirt, like that was the most appropriate thing in the world. More painfully, a couple of times some horrible chlorine-y tasting solution went down my throat, and at one point acid was spilt on the side of my mouth, and it really burned. I now have an attractive scab on my face, which is going to make a great impression when I start my new job tomorrow. ("Hi, I'm Hattie - I'm the new lifestyle producer. Before we start, let me clear the air: this thing on my face is not a sexually transmitted disease but rather an unfortunate dentistry mishap. Right - where's my desk?")

Throughout the procedure the dentist kept stopping what he was doing, leaning close in to my ear and bellowing "YOU OK?", while punching me jovially in the shoulder. Then when he finished he smiled charmingly at me and said in his lovely Polish accent, "There were many many complications." He explained that one of the menacing-looking spikes that he'd been jabbing into my tooth had snapped off. It is now forevermore living in my root canal. "It shouldn't bother you," he said shortly, before changing the subject.

In summary, I think my dentist may be a sort of Catch Me If You Can-style phoney, and I literally have no idea what he has done to my teeth. And yet, I sort of love him. We've been through so much together.

*The Thom Yorke thing is a lie, but if he wants to use the idea then I am, as always, 100% behind him.

Preaching to the choir

2009-10-23T13:15:00.004+01:00

So, I've mentioned many times how much I love Twitter. And I really do: it's become a big part of my daily routine, and I feel like my online interactions - with friends, with strangers, with people from my industry, with experts in various fields, with comedians and journalists - bring me into contact with a lot of thought-provoking ideas and some great, interesting, funny online content. And 'content' really is just a silly 21st century word for ideas again, so there you go. I might be kidding myself, but I feel like for me, life is enriched by what I find on Twitter.

That said, over the past 24 hours I've become more aware of a possible drawback of Twitter, and I wanted to talk about it a little here. Yesterday I threw myself into some serious discussion and a lot of piss-taking on the subject of Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time. I supported the BBC's decision to invite him on, and then I made fun of the ridiculous comments he made. I was lucky enough to have one of my tweets 'retweeted' - copied and distributed further - by the comedian Iain Lee, and another by Charlie Brooker, and suddenly I was getting retweeted by dozens of total strangers, and getting some lovely and funny responses.

The atmosphere on Twitter - from where I was sitting - was great last night. We all seemed to be in agreement: Nick Griffin is a repellent, bigoted and ignorant man and his policies are so ill-thought out and unpleasant that no one with any sense would vote for him - and those who have voted for him before have surely now seen him for the racist buffoon he really is. People were triumphant that he'd been shown up on national TV.

When I woke up this morning I felt much more uneasy about the whole thing. Here's the problem: on Twitter you don't have to follow anyone whose ideas you disagree with. Also for that reason, it's likely that the majority of the people who follow you will be more or less coming from the same point of view. It's a nice set-up - it makes you feel as though you're among friends and kindred spirits, because essentially what you're doing is tuning out everyone whose views you don't agree with.

In that sense, we might call Twitter a community, but it's got to be one of the only communities in which you can surround yourself only by people you like. You don't have to listen to the people who are talking about how great it is that Nick Griffin wants to tackle immigration, or how poor Nick is being victimised by the "lefty" BBC. It can give a very skewed perspective of public opinion, and when I logged back on to Twitter this morning, I was disappointed but not shocked to see Iain Lee commenting "Depressing night listening to TalkSport. Turns out most people thought Griffin came across well and they'll vote for him."

Well of course they did, because the listeners of TalkSport are most likely not the people I've been paying attention to. But they have as much right to vote as any of us, and if as a nation we are going to stop the BNP from growing in power then these people's concerns need to be addressed. Tearing apart racism to a bunch of people who already hate it is about as much use as sitting around a dinner table with close friends and putting the world to rights. All we're really doing is preaching to the choir, and (I know from personal experience) it can be dangerously easy to feel smug when everyone agrees with you.

I still love Twitter, and I'm not going to stop using it. It's great to find that there are many, many others out there who share your point of view, and I had a really good laugh reading their comments last night. But as a political tool I don't think it's going to achieve much, because it cordons us off into groups of like-minded people. There's dialogue and sometimes debate, but our views are rarely strongly challenged, and we aren't required to make any effort to listen to the people on the other side of the fence. When it comes to achieving any serious cultural change, unfortunately it falls to the other political parties to win back the respect of the voters, and to all of us to actually vote.

I LOVE Liz Lemon

2009-10-19T20:07:00.001+01:00

So, as I told you last time, my flatmate and I now have cable TV. This is what has kept me going through the aforementioned shitty autumn of 2009.

When I was a kid it felt like we were the only family in Newcastle who didn't have Sky TV. My parents stubbornly refused to give in, however much I begged (and continued to beg, year after year after year). They said I watched "enough crap as it is". Well, parents, I can now confidently reveal that you were wrong. For now that I have all those extra channels, I know for certain that I have not been watching enough crap.

On Saturday my flatmate went away and left me alone with the cable, so this weekend I have done very little except (a) sleep, (b) carb-load and (c) watch multiple episodes of: True Blood, The Real Housewives Of Atlanta, Hung, Samantha Who?, 30 Rock, Buffy The Vampire Slayer (I don't care, I like it) and Sex And The City. I've also got a lot of America's Next Top Model waiting for me, and I'm toying with series-linking The Ellen Degeneres Show. I am starting to develop genuine emotion for the cable box. I think I'm in love with it.

Also, if it weren't for cable, I would not have learnt Liz Lemon's airtight technique for getting out of jury duty: just dress up as Princess Leia. I leave you with the evidence.

[Incidentally, when I started looking for a 30 Rock clip on YouTube to share with you, it popped up with a list of videos 'Recommended For You'. Apparently YouTube thinks that I need to watch a video about how to find a bra that fits. Because if your friends won't tell you that your breasts look like two puppies fighting in a sack, YouTube will.]

Autumn 09: Just no.

2009-10-15T17:09:00.000+01:00

I've noticed something over the past few weeks - something interesting and sinister. And now the time has come for me to share this information with you, dear reader, and see what your thoughts are. So this is what I've noticed: so far, autumn 2009 is awful.

Usually I love autumn: I get to wear boots and scarves again, everything smells autumny, there's Halloween and Bonfire Night (let's face it, very nearly as good as Christmas), I can fatten up because no one can tell, I can have a hot water bottle at night - it's brilliant. Not this year. This year I feel like I'm trapped in a cheap soap opera. All my nearest and dearest are going through heartache and stress, dilemmas and drama. I won't spill their woes on the internet, but as for mine: I broke up with my boyfriend. I have toothache. My hair is at an awkward stage. I spent my wages too quickly this month. There seems to be a plague of spiders going on. I did really badly in a pub quiz last night. Everything is shit.

OK, not everything. We all have jobs. We're all basically healthy. I got cable TV installed last week, which is amazing. Still though, I'd like for things to just get a bit generally better. I'd be interested to hear if other people's friends and family have been going through similar crap or if it's just people who know me.

Before I go let's perk things up a bit with a list of Five Things To Be Happy About.

We still haven't had Halloween or Bonfire Night. They could really put a different spin on this autumn. Also I have an American friend who's recently moved to London, and I'm not sure she even knows yet that we burn an effigy of a man on 5th November. She's going to love that!
I've got into Fleetwood Mac (the latter years). Amazing!
My 18-month-old nephew has learnt to say 'Hattie'.
I really like this nail varnish.
It surely can't be long until the third season of Mad Men starts on BBC4.

Sorry for this godawful post. Something more interesting soon.

Never Blue

2009-09-15T20:41:00.001+01:00

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!

2009-09-13T19:05:00.001+01:00

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.

2009-09-11T12:55:00.004+01:00

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.

Wedding crashers

2009-08-23T14:01:00.008+01:00

This morning, at 7.50am precisely, I woke up the way they do in films - sat bolt upright, eyes wide in utter confusion. Various things were on my mind: Why am I lying on sofa cushions on the living room floor, instead of in my bed? What happened last night? And why did I think it was acceptable to sleep in just my underwear while staying in the living room of my friend's parents' house?

I'm currently staying with Claire, her husband Hywel and her parents at their house in France. We all went out last night, and then Claire's parents went home to bed and the rest of us went out some more. I could remember the bare bones of what happened but nothing whatsoever about the last half an hour of the night. I wonder if we took any photos, I thought. Maybe if I can find my camera it will give me some clues.

I located it in my handbag, which was on the floor near my feet. I switched it on to find that we had indeed taken many, many photos. The first one I saw was Claire helping a strange man inflate a rubber ring round his waist. No recollection of that whatsoever. Also included were some of Claire and me with our arms round some French people I felt I'd never seen before in my life, laughing as though they were our oldest, dearest friends.

I decided the priority was to put some clothes on and clear away my 'bed' before Claire's parents appeared. As I bent to pick up the sofa cushions I got a sharp pain in my knee, which I noticed was mysteriously swollen.

I was definitely sober at some stage, around 6.30pm. That much is certain. Then we all went to a fête in a neighbouring village, where we had calamari and frites and much, much rosé. There was an oompah band and they played lots of French songs and then, weirdly, YMCA, and we all sung along.

Four bottles of wine later, we all came back to the house but then headed out for a nightcap at a little bar on the seafront. On our way there we passed a wedding party - the bride was wearing the sluttiest wedding dress the world has ever seen. It stopped just under her crotch at the front, with a huge ruffly train behind, and laced all the way up her bare back. It made Pamela Anderson's white bikini look a bit prudish. It looked like a really fun wedding.

At the bar we sank another bottle of wine or two before the grown-ups went home, and then Claire and I hatched the plan to get ourselves invited to the wedding. Walking back past it, we noticed the bride getting changed by her car. And when I say getting changed, I mean that she stripped down to her G-string and then rummaged casually through the boot of the car, looking for something else to put on. She didn't seem fussed by all the onlookers.

Claire, Hywel and I installed ourselves on the pavement opposite the wedding, and after that my memories of the night are as follows: Claire running towards us excitedly holding up a bottle of wine that she'd collected from the house (so that we could drink in the street outside the wedding. Like tramps); Hywel demonstrating that he could pick both of us up at once and hold us almost above his head, which is quite high because he's six foot seven; Claire giving the bride a balloon and telling her she looked beautiful in an attempt to bribe her way into the wedding; a load of guests coming out to join our party in the street; and that's about it.

What I do not remember, but Claire tells me did happen, is that we made friends with someone called Benoît; that we ripped all the celebratory ribbons off the bride and groom's car, brought them home and attached them to Claire's parents' car; that I fell flat on my face outside the house (hence the knee) and that she laughed at me and then tripped over me, and we couldn't get up for laughing so hard.

(Also, apparently I was begging for a cigarette, but mercifully no one had any. I haven't had a cigarette for eight months and if I'm going to have one now, I bloody want to remember it.)

All in all, perhaps one of the best nights ever, and I'd do it all again despite the ginormous hangover I am now suffering.

Claire and Hywel are moving away from London in a week, which half-breaks my little heart. This weekend has been perfect - spending time with them is effortlessly enjoyable. Claire and I have, in her words, got "the same soul, different colour schemes". I don't mean to be cheesy, but hers must be the colour of sunlight. Life is so bright with her around. Few people could create a night like that during one weekend in a sleepy French town like this, but I always know I can rely on Claire.

A shorty... but a goody

2009-08-16T23:58:00.000+01:00

I just rediscovered this clip from The Office. It may just be my favourite bit, and the IT guy, who frankly wasn't in the show nearly enough, is one of my favourite characters. Enjoy.

'Mantha has underestimated Lynne's knowledge of popular culture.

2009-08-10T19:27:00.000+01:00

I've already added George and Lynne Explained to my blog roll (right), but I've decided it deserves a bit of extra attention. The latest post, here, made me laugh out loud. It only has 15 followers, so I don't think enough people know about it.

Hey, since you brought up the subject of followers - have you noticed that my blog only has a paltry 27 followers? Maybe you might want to sign up? Or maybe I might want to improve the quality of the writing? If we all pull together I think we can crack this.

But I did enjoy Harry Potter.

2009-08-07T18:53:00.005+01:00

So it is in the world of cinema. Months and months of The Ugly Truth and Transformers 2 and Ice Age 3 go by, and just as I'm starting to forget why I love going to the pictures so much, autumn - or late summer - unleashes a whole load of exciting releases. I can't remember the last time I wanted to see so many things. In case anyone in the universe is remotely interested (and so that I don't forget), here is my list.

Coco Before Chanel

Claire pointed out that in some ways, this looks like it might be a bit boring. However, I hope it isn't. In any case, I can enjoy just about anything starring Audrey Tautou, and the costumes are bound to be amazing.

The September Issue

I spend a lot of my working life at magazines, and I cannot wait to see how things run at American Vogue. I sort of don't care whether Anna Wintour's a giant bitch or not - it's not unusual for talented, successful people to have hideous, unbearable personalities, and I don't think it takes away from the magazine. Having said that, it might add entertainment value to the film.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct

I have loved Gerard Depardieu ever since I saw Green Card at a birthday sleepover when I was 10. But this film doesn't just feature Gerard Depardieu - no, it features Gerard Depardieu, Vincent Cassel (of La Haine, one of my favourite films ever) and exciting gangster action! Joy, joy, joy.

Broken Embraces

Pedro Almodovar is brilliant. Penelope Cruz is completely hypnotic. I'VE GOT TO SEE IT I'VE GOT TO SEE IT I'VE GOT TO SEE IT!

Phew. Sorry about that, I got a bit overwhelmed by all the cinema joy. I'll stop now. Is anyone else looking forward to seeing these, or has anyone seen them already? I'd love to hear your thoughts - unless you thought any of them were really really awful, in which case Shhhhhh.

Chess. Ice skating. Radio 4.

2009-08-03T19:35:00.001+01:00

I've always had a tendency to immediately abandon anything that feels daunting. This is why, afraid of grazed knees and humiliation, I never learnt to ride a bike. And that wasn't all. Year after year, challenges have fallen by the wayside. Hockey. Physics. Telling jokes. High heels. Skiing. Cryptic crosswords. Karaoke. Hosting dinner parties. Eyeshadow. As soon as I noticed my pitiful lack of natural ability in these important areas, I gave up trying.

I've always thought that I've got a sort of an instinct for what I can and can't do, and I'm a strong believer in listening to it. (Deep down, I sort of think I usually know best. Don't tell anyone.) So as soon as I get that feeling of dread in my tummy that says No, no, I'm not going to be able to do this, it's going to be AWFUL, I attempt to retain as much of my dignity as possible by walking away, changing the subject or leaving the country.

Recently I was commissioned to write something that took me wildly out of my comfort zone. I can't go into detail here, but it's something fictional and funny. This is not the kind of writing I do. I don't do laugh-out-loud character-based narrative. I do pointless observational chatter, or sometimes PR fluff in various forms. Nevertheless, I accepted the commission because I thought it sounded like something I would want to read. I didn't think much beyond that.

That's right - I'm stupid.

When I sat down to write it, I went from jaunty excitement to full-scale horror within about fifteen panicky minutes. I attempted to draft a couple of sentences. The room started to feel like a humour vacuum. I couldn't think of anything funny at all. Not only was it not funny, it wasn't even plausible, and something implausible has to be pretty fucking funny in order to make the reader suspend disbelief. I began to feel sick. I put it off for days. I asked the opinions of the many funny writers I know. All of their reasoned advice was blanked out by my own inner voice saying They can do it just because they can do it. They were born with it. You weren't.

I came really, really close to calling up and telling my employers I was going to have to pull out of the project. It would have been really humiliating and unprofessional, and I've never done it before, but I felt I'd rather do that than send them something cringingly bad. I thought about this for days, and then I sat down and forced myself to write a first draft.

It wasn't hilarious. That's not going to be the tidy and uplifting ending to the story. But it wasn't awful. When I sent it in to give them an initial direction of where I was going with it, they said they'd laughed out loud. Possibly they were exaggerating to be pleasant, but that's ok. The point is, so far it's not a disaster. I had anticipated awkward silences, and perhaps a rebrief or some firm suggestions as to how to improve it. But they don't seem worried at all.

I haven't finished it yet, and I'm probably putting a curse on myself by writing this before the work is successfully complete. But I'm weirdly not scared about it any more. What it appears to have proved is that sometimes, we shouldn't listen to our fearful gut instinct - the one that says, leave it, you're going to mess it up. Sometimes it might be holding us back. The project may not end up a roaring success, but I don't think I'm going to do a terrible job. And if I get offered this kind of work again, it won't keep me awake in a panic every night.

Maybe I'm being boring and sanctimonious in this post - sorry if so. I'm writing it as a sort of reminder to myself, because this small experience has been an eye-opener for me. It means that maybe I can do the other kinds of writing I've ruled out too. Maybe I can write proper fiction if I wanted to. Maybe I could master eyeshadow, or learn how to tell a joke without killing the punchline. The world is my oyster.

However I'm not going back to skiing. Maybe I'm a bit more confident now, but I'm not insane.

My eyes! My eyes!

2009-08-01T17:21:00.004+01:00

I'm at work. On a Saturday. Yep, true story.

Anyway for that reason I have to keep this brief, but I did want to pop by and say hello. Also I wanted to share this optical illusion with you that I saw in New York magazine. First of all (Part One) I'm going to show you a picture, and then (Part Two) I'm going to blow your mind.

*clears throat*

Part One:

Part Two: the 'blue' and the 'green' in the above picture are in fact exactly the same colour.

I know! But it's true. There's an explanation here.*

*Unfortunately there is no explanation for why I am such a huge geek.

And don't get me started on kids

2009-07-27T12:34:00.002+01:00

A faintly embarrassing truth about me: invite me to a wedding and I am guaranteed to weep sentimental tears of joy during the ceremony. I don't care if I've never met the couple before in my life, or if I'm secretly running a sweepstake on when they'll divorce (I've never done that, honest. I definitely didn't do it at your wedding). Something about a couple standing up there in front of everyone forces emotion from my wizened old heart. In a wedding situation involving me, there is always a 99% chance of precipitation.

On the other hand, attempt a conversation about the possibility of me getting married, and there's quite a strong chance of me vomiting or slapping you in the face. Sign a contract that requires me to commit to something for the rest of my life? Why in the name of jumping Jehovah would I want to do something like that? I don't even want to commit to myself for that long.

Having said that, I had a moment of 'getting it' on Saturday at a wedding reception. I'm going to try and explain what dawned on me.

I may have written this here before, but I often have a bit of a problem with going to bed. I find myself staying up late for no reason whatsoever, literally doing nothing except feeling faintly uneasy. I do it because to go to bed feels to me like saying "OK, I accept it. I have given up all hope on this day getting better. Nothing else of worth is going to happen today so I might as well just throw the towel in." And that's just depressing.

I tend to view marriage in the same way. "Fine. My years of being single and free and having an exciting and adventurous life are over. The happy years are behind me. I may as well just bloody get married and give up on life." The phrase 'to settle down' doesn't help. I think of getting married as an ending - hopefully a happy one but let's face it, you rarely know for certain (except, I say confidently, in the case of Claire and Hywel, who I envy hugely because they've each found the perfect person). I don't want an ending. I love my life as it is, and the thought of giving up now depresses the hell out of me.

(Of course you'll have realised by now that I'm mental, and you'll be wondering what the hell my parents put me through to result in this dysfunctional view of relationships. Well actually they've been happily married for 38 years, so unfortunately I can't lay the blame at their door. Which is irritating.)

What I realised in a moment of clarity, while my friend James was telling the wedding party that his new wife is "the sunshine of my world", is that getting married doesn't actually signal the end of your life.

(I'll just pause briefly in case any of you are like me and need to let this revelation sink in for a moment. I am also going to sit and stare agog out of the window.)

...

Apparently when you get married you continue your life, and your adventures, but you just commit to doing that alongside someone else - generally someone you're pretty fond of. It's not like being glued down, static, to Married Life. It's like holding hands with someone and travelling along together.

I'm still slightly struggling with my new perspective on marriage but I'm going to try and hold on to my mini-epiphany. To summarise: going to sleep is usually not the end of things; you generally wake up to a fresh new day. Marriage is a fresh new day too. At least I believe that to be the theory.

With an eraser and everything.

2009-07-23T23:27:00.003+01:00

Good evening, readers, and may I start by saying how attractive you look tonight? Haircut, is it?

I'm writing this on my iPhone from my bed, which is a bit like blogging for the new millennium if it weren't for the fact that blogging itself is quite new millennium. It's been a lowkey week, dominated mainly by trying to work my way through the tub of houmus I bought on Monday, trying out different spellings of hummus, and trying not to think about swine flu.

I'm now completely addicted to the book I mentioned, Valley Of The Dolls. I don't want to spoil it for you but let's just say I'm halfway through and already there've been some very risqué antics, some illicit drug taking and some shockingly implausible dialogue. Deep joy. It also entertains me by featuring lots of references to a sad old middle-aged woman who turns out to be 34. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that if a man doesn't buy me a mink and a diamond ring in the next year or two I might as well be dead.

I wish I had an exciting tale from my own life to share, but it's been a bit short on adventure recently. At a party on Saturday I did the limbo under a giant pencil (yes, an actual pencil). Is that any good?

Oh! There goes a lung

2009-07-13T23:40:00.000+01:00

So, I'm ill again. The most probable culprit is Milo, now aged 16 months. He was a bit sick for a day or two last week, then made a quick recovery. Since then, both his parents, three of his grandparents, his great uncle, his aunt (me) and his grandparents' lovely neighbours have all come down with it. Cue much vomiting in and around London (although I escaped the actual chundering this time and just felt like it was about to happen all day). The boy brought down at least nine adults.

Milo has a special skill for this. My sister described him today as a "crawling biological weapon". You spend an hour or two with him speeding around your ankles on a mission, occasionally looking up to adorably try one of his new words ("brush" is my personal favourite) and to point at something meaningfully before abruptly losing interest. The following day you're doing what my dad referred to as a "yodel royale", retching up some of your internal organs into the nearest bin. It's sweet really. In a way. Bless him.

And no wonder!

2009-07-11T11:57:00.001+01:00

My lovely friend and sometimes-colleague Cat (she hasn't updated her blog since February. I think if you click on that link and read it you will agree that this is a crying shame. Do leave her some comments to persuade her) has lent me her copy of Valley Of The Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. It is her favourite-avourite book. She loves it so much that her copy has been reinforced with sellotape, and frankly I'm in a constant state of anxiety in case I accidentally leave it on the tube/drop it in the bath/leave my one-year-old nephew alone with it and return to find paragraphs all over the floor.

I wanted to share with you the not-at-all-melodramatic blurb written on the inside cover of the book. Ha-hem.

From Broadway to Hollywood, this is one of the fastest-selling, most whispered-about novels ever. And no wonder! It reveals more about the secret, drug-filled, love-starved, sex-satiated, nightmare world of show business than any book ever published.

It is about the world where sex is a success weapon, where love is the smiling mask of hate, where slipping youth and fading beauty are ever-present spectres. It is a world where the magic tickets to peace or oblivion are "dolls" - the insider's word for pills - pep pills, sleeping pills, red pills, blue pills . . . and pills to chase the truth away.

VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is the story of three of the most exciting women you'll ever meet; women who were too tough or too talented not to reach the top . . . and unable to enjoy it once they were there!

ANNE WELLES: the icy New England beauty who melted for the wrong Mr Right . . . an Adonis famous for his infidelity.

NEELY O'HARA: the lovable kid from vaudeville who became a star and a monster.

JENNIFER NORTH: the blonde goddess who survived every betrayal committed against her magnificent body except the last.

Each of them was bred in the Babylons of Broadway and Hollywood. Each of them learned about making love, making money, and making believe. Each of them rode the crest of the wave. And each of them came finally to the Valley of the Dolls.

This novel - big, brilliant, savage and sensational - tells its inside story . . . the shockingly true story behind those headlines . . . knowingly, compellingly and intimately.

Don't miss it. And don't lend it to a friend. You'll never get it back.

Clearly Cat hasn't read the inside cover carefully enough.

I'm about 30 pages in and so far I've only met Anne and Neely - but I'm very intrigued as to what betrayals are due to be committed against Jennifer North's magnificent body. I am going to try to imagine myself a star of the book. Perhaps something like:

HATTIE CRISELL: the naive northerner who found her feet in the Big City - only to be brought to her knees by the cruel world of romance.

Or:

HATTIE CRISELL: the sensitive writer who made it big in digital media - but lost her soul along the way.

Or:

HATTIE CRISELL: the promising talent who got dragged into a world of after-work boozing in seedy London dives.

It's a work in progress.

By the way, gang - I'm in the process of planning a website for myself. Nothing exciting, just somewhere that will link to my blog etc, for work purposes. I have a very talented designer who is going to help me out but I think I'm going to go for something very simple. Having said that, it would be great to hear anyone's thoughts on what should go up there - whether I should go completely minimalistic or try something a little bit cleverer. Any ideas, stick 'em in the comments section. Thank you.

Jeff Goldblum: "He was not only a friend and a mentor, but he was also me."

2009-07-02T14:46:00.002+01:00

Last Thursday, as you all know, Michael Jackson died. I heard about it on Twitter just after TMZ broke the news, and I sat in front of my computer and the TV for two hours, looking for more information. Twitter comes into its own in these situations - if there's a latest development, you can be sure that someone you're following will tweet it. It's a bit like having 100 people to gossip with - which maybe doesn't sound that appealing to some of you, but considering my line of work, I'm in my element.

Anyway. During all the Michael Jackson Twitter flurry, some hilarious joker set up a fake news page announcing that the actor Jeff Goldblum had also died that night, which turned out to be utter bollocks. And this morning I saw this clip from The Colbert Report, which really tickled me.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Jeff Goldblum

I love Jeff Goldblum. Apparently he's dating this very lucky 21-year-old actress. Humph.

In other news, Claire and Hywel's wonderful wedding (did I mention Claire got married?) has been featured on the very well-known (if you're into that kind of thing) wedding blog, Style Me Pretty - here, here, here and here (look out for me looking a bit awkward in the bridesmaid picture). They've described it as a "sweet, sophisticated British wedding" with "chic style" (they add, "Doesn’t it just kill you that even the guests are chic!" - a-thank-you-very-much). The photos are gorgeous, and are by the talented photographer Marianne Taylor. If you're getting married (well, you might be) I know Claire can't recommend her highly enough.

I'm still alive.

2009-06-30T16:41:00.004+01:00

Hi, long-gone readers! It's your friendly-but-incompetent blogger here. It's been 20 days since I last blogged. Twenty. I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself.

I'm blogging in my underwear at present. Not in a saucy way, but in more of a holy-cats-it's-hot-today-and-I-refuse-to-sweat-through-another-T-shirt-especially-when-the-washing-machine-is-broken sort of way. It's only 32º (that's 90º, to those of you who work in Fahrenheit). I know that's not very hot if you're from Egypt, or India, or Oklahoma (hi, friends from Oklahoma). But it's enough to turn me into an irritable, sweaty, lethargic bore with a clammy tomato face.

Now that you have that attractive image in mind, let me proceed with the blog post.

So, I haven't done much blogging this June. This is what I have done:

worked very hard. OK, quite hard. I'm not a miner or anything. However I have returned to work on Big Brother, which involves sitting in a grubby portacabin for nine hours a day with no natural light. So not completely dissimilar to mining.
gone to three gigs: Britney Spears (free ticket, much fun), Kings Of Leon (we got told off by the woman behind us for standing up, to which Jenni replied "Do you think we're at the ballet?") and Bruce Springsteen (brilliant brilliant brilliant).
been to the dentist for the first time in a few years. Terrifying.
been to the theatre twice: Hamlet (starring Mr Jude Law. He wasn't bad... he was just a bit too... Jude Law) and Jewels, which is a Balanchine ballet and reminded me of a magical sparkly Christmas.
been a bridesmaid for the third time. You know what they say: 'Three times a bridesmaid... obviously a loser'. It was Claire and Hywel's wedding, so let's blame them if I end up a miserable spinster. Although actually I see myself more as a jolly spinster.

So, to the matter at hand. I read a couple of articles the other day about what is apparently a downward trend in blogging. It seems people are abandoning their blogs left, right and centre. I don't want to be one of those undedicated bastards, but I fear I'm heading that way.

According to this article, 95% of blogs have been abandoned. One of the reasons it cites is that bloggers have moved on to Twitter, where they can express a thought quickly and get an instant response. I think that's the issue with me. I love Twitter. I use it to ask people's advice, make stupid jokes, get information, share music, see what the funny people are saying and occasionally vent my rage. It's made me lazy with the blog, which takes much more effort and provides me with much less feedback and interaction.

But I don't want to give up on hattiehattie. I feel it's part of who I am now and I'm determined not to let another month pass with only three entries. Please shout at me if I don't stick to my word. Shout gently, though.

Piling and re-piling: the secret of my success

2009-06-10T21:19:00.000+01:00

When I was 18 and working as a barmaid in Newcastle, I once went to a party in a squat.

It had all the ideal features of a party: it started at 3am, it was full of 'cool' people, it felt vaguely dangerous, and my parents would have been horrified if they'd known I was there.

The squat was not a pleasant place. There was no furniture, only dirty bedding in the corners of the rooms. There was no electricity. Every aspect of it was manky. It wasn't a place where you wanted to touch anything or anybody.

I was reminded of that squat when I got home from work tonight and walked into my bedroom. In fact, the current state of my bedroom makes that squat look like the white, flower-filled waiting room that Mother Theresa probably sat in before they opened the gates of heaven.

I don't know why I'm such a slob. Considering I had daily "Tidy your room!" bollockings throughout my childhood and adolescence, you'd think I'd have OCD by now. In fact, I think my parents owed me that, and have let me down. Forget unconditional love and a private education - an obsessive compulsive disorder is the practical gift that just keeps giving.

But no. Their continued, shouty efforts to make me into a tidy human being failed to have any impact whatsoever. I never have any urge to put things away as soon as I receive them/take them off/get them back from the laundry. Instead, I have a highly developed filing system based around a structure you'll be familiar with: the pile. By organising letters, receipts, magazines, postcards, tickets and books into piles all over my bedroom floor, I can store them vertically instead of horizontally. This creates the psychological illusion of tidiness. It's only when the system begins to overflow, piles merging with each other, clean clothes scrumpled under dirty clothes, and I find that I'm using widely spaced stepping stones of carpet to reach my bedroom door, that something needs to be done. This something usually involves a quick sift through about 30% of the stuff, a chucking away of 80% of that, and a re-piling. Then I'm good to go for another five to six weeks.

The weird thing is, outside my flat I'm not a disorganised person. In fact, especially in my professional life, I'd say I'm a highly organised and efficient person (any friend or family member who wants to leave a sarky comment about this, on yer bike). There are never bills hidden in the piles - I pay all my bills as soon as they come in. My life is planned weeks in advance. I always have clean clothes and a fully charged phone and enough money in my bank account and all that everyday jazz. Those who haven't been to my flat probably think I'm quite a 'together' sort of person, not someone who they would imagine living in squalor. And yet, behind closed doors, I'm the kind of girl who has six dusty old glasses of water - or worse, cups of tea - positioned in random spots around her bedroom.

My room is like the portrait of Dorian Gray. The more shambolic it gets, the greater my power. Or something.

Awkward...

2009-06-09T18:00:00.008+01:00

Hi kids. Sorry I'm late. It's been a somewhat hectic couple of weeks, with friends staying, odd work hours, preparations for Claire's WEDDING!!, and photo shoots.

Yes, you heard. Photo shoots. OK, there's been a photo shoot, and there's another one on Thursday. Neither of them are glamorous or count as real photo shoots.

Check out my new profile picture. Yes, that's me, smiling coquettishly at someone sitting on your right. On Saturday my family all had our photos taken, separately and together, at the request of my dad. Up until now we've only ever had pictures of us all looking a bit tipsy at Christmas, with party hats on, but now we have proper professional photos to put on the wall.

Getting my picture taken is not my ideal way to spend an afternoon, as I've explained before on this blog. Point a camera at me and I either grin like a moron or start awkwardly looking for the nearest exit. It's a credit to the photographer we used that only about 20% of the images feature my special trademark awkward facial expression: one eye closed, the other half open.

Then the day after tomorrow I've got to pose for some photos for a magazine I sometimes work on. They needed someone desperately and my boss emailed me saying "You will never work here again if you don't do it". So you might say she charmed me into it.

Now seems as good a time as any to point you to AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com. You've probably seen it before, but it bears looking at again. Just look at this lovely portrait, brimming with the fun and affection of family life:
It in no way reminds me of my relationship with my parents.

The hattiehattie playlist returns

2009-05-20T14:19:00.005+01:00

Last week I posted a link to a Spotify playlist. Later that day, Spotify went down and my playlist became inaccessible (cheers for making me look like an idiot, Spotify). BUT, it seems to be back today. And I've added another song (Multiply by Mobius Band). Give it a go.

Of course if nobody comments on it again, I can just assume Spotify's still not working. So at least that's like a nice protective hug for my ego.

Batman in my bedroom

2009-05-19T19:36:00.003+01:00

On Sunday morning I woke up in Paris with a feeling sometimes known as... The Fear. It was that abstract unease that often accompanies a bad hangover, when you wonder exactly how obvious it was to all your friends that you had one too many shandies last night (or in my case, caipirinhas), and exactly what you were conversing with the taxi driver about. In French. When you don't speak French.

It all started well. On Saturday night, after a lovely afternoon with Barry and Marion, I headed out to meet my old university friends Sarah and Alex in a shabby but irresistible sci-fi themed bar called UFO, on Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud. One fast caipirinha later, we were skipping off to a cheap and cheerful pizzeria (not very French, I realise) where Sarah (who had been drinking for a few hours) kept saying "You've got to catch up!" and topping my glass up with vinegary red wine.

Then we got to the main event: Eurovision. For those lucky enough not to know what I'm referring to, the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual celebration of Eurotrash in the form of a music competition. Every country in the continent (or most of them) submits a song, and then everyone votes for a winner. A good Eurovision song must meet at least most of the following criteria:

As Alex sagely pointed out early on in proceedings, it must have someone playing gypsy violin.
Everyone on the stage must be wearing a hideously tacky costume, featuring sequins, cleavage, lycra and feathers.
Wherever it comes from, at least part of the musical number must be sung in heavily accented English.
Any male who features in the performance must be unbelievably camp.
Each song must feature some sort of faintly disturbing dance routine. If a skirt or two gets ripped off, so much the better.

Then when it comes to the voting bit, each country has its own (debatably) good-looking TV presenter to come and announce the points awarded. This presenter will usually attempt a series of crap jokes and puns before getting to the points, perhaps in the hope that this could launch an international career for them. Also, it is a given that every country will give the highest points to the countries nearest them. It's all political. It's fabulous.

So the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 was on Saturday night, and Alex insisted we find somewhere to watch it. Disappointingly, it turns out that the French couldn't be less interested in Eurovision, so we ended up in a tiny English pub which had three other customers: two silent English blokes and one incredibly drunk Irish man. We'll call him Pat, because I think that was his name.

While Sarah, Alex and I sat in a corner, knocking back rum and cokes and shouting at Norway, Pat kept stumbling over to our table, asking us where we were all from, shouting about Ireland, spilling his Guinness and then trying to give us all hugs. Charmer. The reason we were shouting at Norway was that Norway won. By a landslide. Their song heavily featured a virtuoso gypsy violinist.

By the end of the contest, I was in such a good and patriotic (and drunk) mood that I was on the verge of doing my own performance of God Save The Queen.

I was just about to ask the others how they were getting home when Sarah cheerfully announced that we were going to meet her friends back at UFO. My head said no, but by this point my heart was driving.

So off we tottered to the bar, which was now overflowing with Parisian hipsters. At least that's my hazy memory. I also remember having a conversation with a very good-looking and arrogant French boy on the stairs. I have literally no idea what was said or whether I even managed to string a sentence together.

It was at this point that I turned to Sarah with a look of panic in my eyes and said firmly, "I'm really drunk." I remember turning down the last caipirinha. That was probably a good choice. Soon afterwards I headed back to the hotel, which is where I awoke eight hours later feeling a bit sheepish.

To sum up, I had a fucking great time in Paris.

Also, I thoroughly recommend the hotel I stayed in, which was one of the cheapest I could find (apart from hostels) and couldn't have been more comfortable and stylish. It's called Mama Shelter; it's a Philippe Starck designed hotel and you can check it out here.

Here's me in my lovely room (snapped in the mirror):

The only slightly creepy (or cool, depending on your perspective) thing about the hotel is that there are Bruce Wayne masks hanging in the rooms. You can imagine how I felt when I opened my eyes on Sunday and was confronted by Bruce peering at me, his face inches from mine.

Paris, I shall miss you. London, I'm still happy to be back.

IMPORTANT P.S.: There's an excellent breakdown of Eurovision - with photos! - here. Thank you Fug Girls!

Tout seule!

2009-05-15T16:56:00.002+01:00

Bonjour! I'm finally in Paris. I'm typing this on my iPhone, which means it might be full of weird spaces and typos. More annoyingly, if I swear, the phone will disapprovingly change it to 'ducking' or 'shot'.

I'm currently listening to awful French radio in my hotel room, but let's not judge the trip by that. The hotel is totally gorgeous, the eurostar was very exciting and I'm meeting three old friends in a couple of hours.

It's weird (though exhilarating) to be here on my own. The first time I came to Paris was eight years ago. It was an 18th birthday present from my first proper boyfriend. We broke up soon after. All I remember from the trip is being surprised by how ducking huge the Eiffel Tower was.

I came again when I was 20 with Sandeep and Suzy, who were my university flatmates at the time. We stayed in a grim hotel in the red light district. The blankets on our beds were actually old curtains. There were suspect stains all over the carpet. Very quaint.

And now here I am 6 years later, staying somewhere cheapish but nice, and not in the last awkward throes of a doomed relationship, which is all good. But I am on my own, which is different. I'm quite capable of looking after myself and finding my way round, but I did feel a bit anxious trying to work out the ducking confusing Metro system. Going out tonight will be brilliant, but would be less scary if I were ten and my parents could just work out all the details. Being a grown-up is exhausting.

I'm going to wind this up now because I'm talking a load of shot. What a stupid aunt I am. A bientôt, blog. Many bisous.

Euros aren't what they used to be

2009-05-14T17:20:00.001+01:00

Hello readers. I'm no longer in Crete, but not yet in Paris. I have a slight tan, several very irritating mosquito bites and very little money left thanks to the crippling pound-euro exchange rate. But all in all, it's turning out to be a wonderful week.

I thought I'd try a little experiment today. I'm not a music writer and I'm not ahead of the curve on bands, but I do take an interest in new music and I have a few helpful friends who point me in the direction of stuff I'll like. I've found Spotify to be a very useful tool in all this so I thought, using Spotify, I would put together a little playlist for you of songs I haven't been able to stop listening to over the past few weeks.

If you don't know what Spotify is, I highly recommend you download it (here)*. You just type in whatever you feel like listening to and it plays straight away, like listening to a CD - except you don't have to buy it, it's all free. You can't put it on your iPod, but that's the only drawback I can find. You can save whatever you like and build your own playlists and share them, as I have above. It's ingenious.

My little playlist is mostly electro pop stuff: Friendly Fires, La Roux, New Young Pony Club and so on. It includes one song I heard for the first time today, by Little Boots, who was recommended to me on Twitter by this lady. The main thing is that this kind of music makes me want to dance, which I see as a huge plus point. I hope some of you will have a listen, let me know if you like any of it, and maybe recommend your own current favourites or even post a link to your own Spotify playlist in the comments section. I hope you like this idea - to me it seems like a really nice use of technology - like us all sitting down together, somewhere in the blogosphere, and exchanging CD collections.

*Bugger. Just discovered Spotify is not available in America or Canada. So since not everyone can join in, here's the playlist in case you're interested:

Jump In The Pool - Friendly Fires
In For The Kill - La Roux
Paper Planes (DFA Remix) - M.I.A.
New York Girls - Morningwood
Fan - New Young Pony Club
Stuck On Repeat - Little Boots
Talking, Talking - New Young Pony Club
Lights Out (Tepr Emo Remix) - Santogold
White Diamonds - Friendly Fires
Suffragette Suffragette - Everything Everything

A round-up

2009-05-06T14:06:00.002+01:00

Lately, a few people have complained that I've posted too many "Look what I found on the web!" type entries, and not enough "Listen to what I've been up to!" ones. That's because most of the things I get up to are either too dull or too interesting to share with the world. But nevertheless, here's a little round-up of the latest mundanities from my life.

SO. First piece of news (using the word 'news' so loosely that even the word 'potato' would probably be more accurate): I saw this today, and recognised it as more or less exactly what I am looking for in a man. Like Aidan from Sex and the City, but with a beard. Where are men like that? Do I have to move to America?

Secondly, I've come to terms with the trip to Paris (next week). I have come so much to terms with it that I have booked a five day trip to Crete just before it. I'm not going on my own to Crete, but I am going with someone who is terrified (loudly terrified) of flying, insects and germs. So that will be an exciting warm-up experience for my solo holiday afterwards.

Thirdly, I've had bridesmaid dress traumas this week. It's all very easy to find a normal frock to wear for work or a night out, but when choosing a dress that you will have to wear in daylight while people watch you walk down the aisle, and take endless photos, you start to obsess over details. I don't want to wear something that might make me look a bit chubby. I don't want to wear something that is a bit weird from certain angles. I don't want to wear something that is going to cause me to pass out from asphyxiation. I don't want to wear something that will make me look six months pregnant after dinner. I don't want to wear something I will accidentally rip on the dancefloor. I don't want to wear something that one of the other guests will turn up in.

This is the latest candidate:

It's McQ by Alexander McQueen and it's from Asos. (Obviously that's not me in the photo. I'm less extreme in the fringe department.) Thoughts? If you could just leave a comment below, putting yourself in one of the following categories, that would be helpful:

1. "Yes! This frock is surely woven with pure wedding joy. You will in no way look stupid or 'with child'."

2. "No! This frock will make you look like a pig wrapped in a curtain."

And finally: The Apprentice is on tonight, and for the first time in three or four weeks I am going to watch it when it's on, God damn it. I am not playing Apprentice roulette any more, where every person I meet the following day could at any moment blurt out "Did you see that guy with the fat chin get fired last night?" and ruin the whole show for me. I am going to be the person who might blurt that out. My turn.

Ooh la la! Un poulet! And other useless French.

2009-04-30T23:33:00.001+01:00

I've spent the last six weeks in a quandary. A travel-related quandary.

It started well. A much-missed friend from New York (Barry, who I have seen once in the last four years) got in touch to say he was planning a trip to Paris, and another beloved friend from university (Sarah) moved to Paris, and the planets seemed to align and I thought, "Woo! Weekend in France!"

I had a seductive mental image of myself sitting glamorously on the Eurostar, sipping champagne, wearing big sunglasses and reading poetry. I thought "I'll be an independent gal about town. I'll go to galleries. I'll eat brie for lunch. I'll sit outside cafes and drink espresso, even though I hate it. I'll hire a poodle." I fell a bit in love with this fantasy. I told everyone I was going. And then, from nowhere... I found myself not booking it.

I not-booked it for a month and a half.

At first I avoided thinking about it. Then as the weeks started to fold into each other and Le Grand Weekend was fast approaching, I started to worry. My French is sketchy at best (or should I say, "Mon francais est... er..."). My knowledge of Paris is very minimal. And I'm just a bit of a chicken ("C'est vrai, je suis un poulet").

It's been quite odd. Doing things I find a bit scary gives me a thrill, so for the last six weeks I've been frightened and excited to the point of paralysis.

Finally yesterday it reached a point where I really couldn't stall any more. I wasn't going to be able to book anywhere if I waited any longer. Like pushing myself into the deep end of the pool, I abruptly booked my trains. There was no going back. And today I reserved a room at what looks like a really lovely (and cheap) little hotel.

So that's it. I'm actually going to Paris on my own. Bon. And merde.

Note to self: things I must not do in Paris:

1. Start smoking again.
2. Get lost and burst into tears.
3. Kiss a French boy. (They will only break your heart.)
4. Ask the gendarmerie for directions. (They are police, but they are not 'friendly bobbies'.)
5. Cause a political fracas.
6. Use the word 'hiyaaaaa'.
7. Pretend to have read Le Deuxieme Sexe, even though I do have a French copy of it that I pretentiously bought at a market on the Seine when I was 20.
8. Allow myself to be guilt-tripped into posing for a hideous street portrait. Again.
9. Kiss a French boy.
10. Start smoking again.

Your blog is better than my blog

2009-04-24T11:18:00.000+01:00

Oh no... You can always tell when I'm having a busy month because the blog turns into a combination of apologies about the lack of posts and items borrowed from other people's blogs.

And since we're on that subject... here's another one. My First Dictionary is a daily blog of illustrations apparently designed to teach children new words. Except they're all very disturbing. Here's one of my favourites:

...*shudder*. And here's another:

They're not only funny - they're also weirdly moving. Well done someone called Ross Horsley, who is apparently responsible. And sorry for stealing your content for my own currently rather paltry-looking blog. And sorry to my readers for that too.

So on this occasion, I managed to combine the blog theft stuff with an apology. I'm getting good at being bad at blogging.

What a beautiful ornament!

2009-04-17T16:55:00.005+01:00

More 'great tips' like this on the hilarious Hero of Switzerland blog (click on 'Top Tips'). Unbelievable.

Something quite special

2009-04-16T22:55:00.001+01:00

The good thing about a crap bank holiday weekend is that it's only four days until you get your next weekend to make up for it. And thus we find ourselves on Thursday night already. Hurrah!

The weather is shitty in London. Grey and drizzly - the sort of weather that makes it impossible for me to keep my hair straight, which is a daily source of frustration. But then again, the cherry blossoms have bloomed on my street, and for about 15 seconds when I walk under the trees on my way to or from work, I feel light and blissful.

So here's something else lovely - something that also cheers me up on my way to and from work. A few weeks ago a musician friend in America sent me a song - Met You On A Saturday by Bo Diddley. I've never listened to Bo Diddley before and I had no idea what to expect, but what I got was something beautiful and romantic, which I play every day and which never fails to put a smile on my face (so a big thank you to that friend).

I wanted to direct you to iTunes or Spotify to get hold of this yourself, but it's not available anywhere. I was apprehensive about putting it up on the blog, but my friend tells me that it's such a rare and unknown song that I would be doing Bo Diddley a favour. With that in mind, I present it to you now. I hope you enjoy it as much as I always do.

How am I supposed to get skin cancer under these conditions?

2009-04-12T18:00:00.000+01:00

Aren't bank holidays weird? I haven't been a proper part of one for ages, because last May I was more or less unemployed and for the rest of the summer I was doing weird and irregular shifts working on the Big Brother website. In both cases I didn't really have a clue when the weekends were, so all bank holidays meant was that all my friends with normal jobs would bugger off and abandon me for three days.

For those who don't live in the UK, a bank holiday is a day when offices across the country (and banks) shut down and most of us get a day off. They usually fall on a Monday, so you get a long bank holiday weekend. This time, it being Easter, we have Friday and Monday off. In true British tradition, we have been provided with the kind of dreary, useless grey weather that makes you want to go to work.

What a waste. If it were sunny we'd all be out in the park, eating icecreams and burning our noses. That's a proper bank holiday. Sitting indoors squinting at my laptop is not what I had in mind.

I'm supposed to be going out tonight to celebrate this joyous annual occasion of having four days off in a row. I don't even feel like it. It's drizzling. Drizzling. To drink margaritas and wander giggling through Soho would feel wrong under these conditions. I feel I should be snuggling in front of a fire with a large man named Frank. Actually that sounds rather nice, but I don't even know a Frank.

In summary, I didn't know what the big deal was with bank holidays, and now I've truly experienced one, I know that they're bullshit. So thanks, Britain. Thanks.

In other news: yesterday I was standing in my parents' living room holding Milo, who is aged one and has thus far not been very interested in speaking English. As I hovered there with him perched on my hip, the cat moseyed past and Milo pointed at her and said casually, "Pussycat."

The only other person who witnessed this was Jenni, and although she says she heard it too, I think she might be humouring me. My sister doesn't believe me. So I'm recording it here because I know that you, dear readers, will believe me. My nephew is a genius.

*The photos are by Martin Parr. I borrowed them because I think he's wonderful.

And hilarity ensued

2009-04-08T18:02:00.005+01:00

Today has been the funniest day I can remember in a long time. Here's why.

At lunchtime I discovered this blog, which celebrates the terrible disasters of professional cake-making, and in particular the occasions when bakers misunderstand what the customer is asking for. I laughed so hard I wept. For my birthday I'd like a cake that says something like 'Happy birthday Hattie - can you use low-fat margarine as she's getting a bit chubby' in icing on the top.
My delightful colleague Kirsty and I spent much of the day 'jackarsing about'. That's a new phrase she coined - feel free to use it yourself next time you are hiding biscuits from someone, making double entendres and giggling like a teenager.
This afternoon Claire accidentally sent an email intended for me to the sales director at her company. He asked her a work question and she responded, "I think I might have a beauty evening this evening. Nails, fake tan etc. xxxx". This tickled me so much that I was snorting like a wild boar for a good 30 minutes afterwards. What did the sales director think she meant by that?! Did he think it was some sort of bizarre attempt at flirting? I love it. I absolutely love it.

I have to go now as my friend is waiting for me at the pub. Just wanted to share the joy with you all. Check out those cakes.

Unnatural acts

2009-04-05T14:19:00.000+01:00

I'm trying to eat less. It's not going well. I just followed a lovely healthy salad lunch with crisps and a packet of Minstrels. Bah.

The reason for my new 'eating less' regime (let's not call it a diet) is that I have to walk down the aisle behind Claire in two months, and I don't want my pretty bridesmaid frock to loudly burst open at the seams during the wedding dinner. Or worse, the speeches.

I'm supposed to be starting some exercise soon too (hang on... sorry, I was just a bit sick in my mouth). I'm not really an exercise kind of gal. This morning I bought my first ever sports bra, because two black eyes might ruin the wedding look too (most of you don't know what I look like, but let's just say my body... wasn't built for speed). I'm going to pilates and salsa classes, not that I've actually started either yet. Apparently you're not allowed to drink during pilates, so we'll have to go to the pub after.

Urgh, exercise. Designed to make you feel inadequate and like a poor specimen of humanity. Urgh.

End of another month

2009-03-31T23:30:00.000+01:00

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!

2009-03-26T14:20:00.001Z

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

2009-03-17T12:52:00.004Z

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.

2009-03-16T22:21:00.006Z

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

2009-03-15T12:09:00.003Z

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

2009-03-11T22:23:00.004Z

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.

2009-03-11T21:53:00.002Z

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?!"

2009-03-05T22:47:00.001Z

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.

P.S.

2009-02-25T21:06:00.002Z

Soon after I published the last post I started sneezing and developing an earache, and I'm actually now feeling quite ill. I'm a bit under-the-weather this week and that might partly explain why what I wrote earlier was so bad-tempered. I still feel the same way about Zoe Williams' article, but maybe calling the post 'Do shut up, Zoe' was a bit excessive. With this in mind, I would like to say a very small sorry for that bit.

Sorry.

Do shut up, Zoe

2009-02-25T14:12:00.001Z

There was an incredibly irritating article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian today, arguing that 21st century cinema is trash, whereas television drama is mature and courageous. I feel moved to present my objections one by one:

She's not making an even-handed comparison. She's comparing clever TV shows like The Wire to big budget silly blockbusters like Confessions of a Shopaholic. If she'd compared Mad Men and The Sopranos and Six Feet Under to The Lives of Others and The Reader and Away From Her, she might have been able to make a more interesting argument, even though of course she would have been wrong, because cinema and TV are equally capable of producing diamonds or shit.
And to elaborate on that point, let's have a look at some of the ratings 'success stories' of British TV: Deal or No Deal, Coronation Street, Holby City... I love television and I don't think there's anything wrong with enjoying a funny episode of Come Dine With Me or the EastEnders Christmas special, but let's not delude ourselves that the channels are packed with intellectual, challenging viewing options - a lot of it's just silly entertainment (and the same goes for cinema). You have to look quite hard to find all that 'emotional complexity and political texture' she talks about.
My final point is a small one. Zoe says, 'Changing cinematic presentations of women have been very well documented - we seem, as a gender, to have been getting stupider since about the mid-90s... on the big screen you have heroines such as the "journalist" in Confessions of a Shopaholic, the "lawyer" in Legally Blonde(s), the "lawyer" (again) in Sex and the City (the movie) - all putatively demanding careers, undertaken by people so thick they can't understand basic words.' I know Zoe likes to pass herself off as a leading feminist, but I think she's called it wrong in the case of Sex and the City. The lawyer character - Miranda - is clever and hard-working and serious. If you've watched it, you can't reasonably compare her to Legally Blonde. Also, the character originates in the TV show, which Zoe later goes on to praise. Here's a writerly tip for you, Zoe: it's always a good idea to read something through and check for consistency before you email it off to be published.

Sorry that I've got on my high horse for this one. As a freelance journalist who has to pitch for work, I find it irritating that such a nonsensical, ill-considered idea for an article gets commissioned just because it has the name 'Zoe Williams' on it. If she was unknown, she would never in a million years have got this published - and quite right too.

My new life in the wild west

2009-02-20T15:30:00.001Z

I have a shocking and upsetting announcement to make: I'm moving to the countryside for a month.

When I say "moving to the countryside", I mean that I am moving to a western suburb of Greater London. I am moving approximately twenty minutes further away from Soho. This is not a move I anticipated making voluntarily.

The reason for this uncharacteristic decision is that my parents are going travelling for a month and someone has to feed the cat, Minty. There was talk of moving Minty to my sister's flat, but she's getting old and is showing signs of decline - she's losing weight and has started (occasionally) pooing on the carpet, much like an elderly relative with dementia (what, other people's relatives don't poo on the carpet?). Sigh. It's very sad. So I will be spending the next month mostly sitting on trains and cleaning up poo. But it will be worth it for the quality time I will get with Minty, the two of us sitting on the sofa, her moulting, me having a vodka and tonic, while watching America's Next Top Model (Minty loves Jay Manuel).

I'm sort of excited about it, in a perverse way. There's a little high street with nice pubs and shops. It's like living in a village, except better because it's London and nobody knows or cares who you are. And the house is big and I can pretend it's mine. I can play the piano (badly) and abuse the Sky Plus and run up the phone bill. Maybe I'll write a novel. No, I probably won't write a novel, that's ridiculous.

This morning I've been gazing at The Book Cover Archive - an online catalogue of beautiful books. It's very diverting. Only yesterday, Sandeep agreed to lend me The Worst Thing A Suburban Girl Could Imagine, after I caught sight of the cover and decided it would be a really good read.

A cover should give you an instant idea of what kind of book it is, and who's going to enjoy it. If the cover is doing its job, you should be able to use it to judge the book. So there. I'm championing snap judgements.

Ruffers, Ol' Big Mouth, Goop and the gang

2009-02-16T20:54:00.003Z

I've had the last week off, and I've had a thoroughly lovely time. I've been eating lots, socialising a bit and watching loads of films (and some Mad Men and some ER, but I won't get started on those again). Below is a list of what I've seen, and I think it shows that I am an equal opportunities viewer: I don't just limit myself to great films - I also watch (nay, enjoy) quite a lot of crap. And on that note...

1. Just Like Heaven - I'm going to grasp the nettle and boldly confess something: I hired this from LoveFilm. Yes that's right, I paid to watch a movie in which Reese Witherspoon goes into a coma, becomes a ghost, and haunts the man who's subletting her apartment until they - unpredictably! - fall in love. I did it because I needed a quick hit of Mark Ruffalo (who Sandeep has dubbed 'Ruffers'), and I'd do it again, I tell you.

2. Vicky Cristina Barcelona - I've already rattled on about this in a previous post, but I went to see it again last week. That's because (a) I quite like seeing things twice, (b) it was showing at a convenient time and I really wanted to go to the cinema, and (c) Woody Allen films feel like comfy pyjamas to me. Always nice to get into.

3. The Devil Wears Prada - apparently most of Britain watched this on Channel 4 last week, because I got a lot of messages afterwards saying that I look a bit like Anne Hathaway, or as I like to call her, Ol' Big Mouth.

4. Two Lovers - I went to a preview screening of this but I really, really recommend you see it when it's released next month. It's moving and thought-provoking, and Joaquin Phoenix is just an exceptional actor. Even Goop Paltrow is good, and Vinessa Shaw is so beautiful. Here's the trailer (sorry it's too wide for the blog. Not sure what I can do about that):

5. Friends With Money - Yeah, that indie film that Jennifer Aniston did, that nobody went to see. I actually caught the beginning of this one afternoon on TV, and was gripped enough to record the rest, so that says something I think. The cast are very good - Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand and Catherine Keener are all favourites of mine - and although the film wasn't very successful, I found it quite a sensitive, thoughtful examination of married life. And not much happened, and I like those sorts of films.

6. Revolutionary Road - I was warned that it was crap before I went, but I didn't agree at all. It's so, so bleak, but very powerful. It made me think about the choices we make, and the extent to which we control our own happiness. Definitely worth seeing, although maybe not if you're feeling trapped in your life. Don't lean too close to the abyss.

7. Frost/Nixon - Again, wonderful. I've never seen Michael Sheen in anything before, and I found him so watchable. He's capable of making you laugh with the subtlest facial expression or mannerism - and he's just as good at expressing anxiety, inadequacy, disappointment. Frank Langella was amazing as well - so determined and so sad as Richard Nixon. If you could measure entertainment, I think Frost/Nixon would work out as excellent value for money. Go and see it.

8. Sex and the City: The Movie - I can't think of anything to say about this. I'm a girl and I reserve the right to enjoy Sex and the City, even if a lot of it is ludicrous.

So there you go. I have to say it's been a really happy week, and I'm going to try to watch lots of movies this year. Let me know what you've seen recently, and what you thought of the above.

I have something 'funny' to show you

2009-02-11T16:30:00.001Z

I don't want this blog to turn into a round-up of things I've pinched from other people on social networking sites, so I promise to write a proper post about something non-social-networking-related very soon.

However. The comedian Peter Serafinowicz (forever beloved to me for his performance as Duane Benzie in Spaced) today twittered a link to this website: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. I was very happy that someone (apparently someone called Bethany Keeley) had taken the time to document this weird phenomenon, which is infecting shop notices the world over, like some sort of virus that kills off meaning and sense.

It reminded me of a sign that used to be in the window of a pub in Edinburgh, which I think said:

"Toilets" are for customer use only

If your bathroom facilities need inverted commas, I don't think I want to use them anyway, thanks.

To finish off, I really wanted to post the very funny montage clip of Tim and Duane from Spaced. But Youtube has let me down - it's nowhere to be found. Just take a moment now to imagine the chuckles you could have had, and curse the universe for depriving you of them. Bah.

Sooty? Sweep? Sue? Sweep? Sue? Sooty?

2009-02-10T15:16:00.003Z

A friend just posted this on Facebook. I used to love The Sooty Show. Is it just me though, or is that screaming animation with dubbed sound a bit eerie? Every time they repeat it, the programme feels more and more like a weird video installation in a gallery. Anyway, enjoy.

Bit of culture, innit

2009-02-09T23:14:00.005Z

As I said once before, I really love the Poems on the Underground scheme. Tonight on my way home I saw this one, and liked it a lot. It's by Jacques Prévert, and you can read the original French version here (Daisy, I expect you to tell me if it's a bad translation).

Alicante

An orange on the table
Your dress on the rug
And you in my bed
Sweet present of the present
Cool of the night
Warmth of my life

Mainly Twitter, but also a small koala.

2009-02-04T15:04:00.005Z

Ooh, that was the most interesting poll yet, from my perspective. Nay kept inching ahead, but in the end Yay stole it with 19 votes to 17. Almost all of my real-life friends said Nay to Twitter, but then that's what you get when you are the biggest geek in your friendship group. I think they're wrong, actually, and I'll explain why.

It's taken me a few days to get my head round Twitter. At first I approached it as a series of Facebook status updates - little silly thoughts about my day or whatever. And I looked round, and a lot of other users are going with that interpretation - and some of them are funny and interesting enough to make it work, and most of them aren't. But since Twitter doesn't really work on a system of having 'friends', it all started to look a bit pointless. Especially since I'm already on Facebook and can keep in touch with people perfectly well using that.

But then I looked at this, which slightly changed my perspective. The benefit of Twitter is that it isn't just about finding out what your friends are up to - it's actually a way of finding all kinds of news as soon as it breaks, and communicating directly with people who aren't necessarily your friends but who have something interesting to say. You don't have to plough through their interests and their photos and their friends - all you see is what they say, and it's easy to start or stop following them. It also somehow seems more acceptable to stop following someone on Twitter than to defriend them on Facebook - there might be someone on there that you love to hear from, but if their tweets are primarily about their work, it's perfectly reasonable for you to stop following them. And you can still dip in and out to see what they're up to - most people's profiles aren't private.

As a blogger I think Twitter is also a useful way of communicating with more people, and I know a lot of lovely Twitterers have visited this blog over the last week, which is great. The concept feels to me like the perfect combination of sophisticated and simple: it's sophisticated in the way it connects you directly to a huge number of people, and simple in the sense that it cuts out all the extra noise of other networking sites, so that you can focus in on the conversations that interest you. Somehow it feels both more and less personal than Facebook.

There are also auxiliary sites that help you get more out of Twitter, depending on what you want. I like Twitscoop, which tells you which words are being used the most in Tweets at the current time. This is how I found out about the recording of Christian Bale shouting, before it hit the news. And if there's one thing I love, it's being first with the gossip.

So there you go: I'm sticking with it for now. I don't think my updates have been great so far, but I'm still getting the hang of it, and I hope to get better at it. You should keep an eye on me. And if you're on there, please leave a comment and your Twitter name on this blog so I can check you out.

And now, for the animal fans, here is a picture of a koala. There's a heatwave in Adelaide, and it went into someone's garage to cool down, and took a bath in a bucket of water. I don't know why I'm finishing on this note, except that I thought the Twitter chat might be a bit dry. I'm rambling now. I'll stop.

There once was a girl who joined Twitter... something something pitta? I don't know.

2009-01-27T15:38:00.002Z

I've joined Twitter. I did it mainly because a friend joined it and went on and on about it, climaxing with him sending me an email announcement that "it's all about Twitter now" and "Facebook is for yokels".

I'm impressionable and silly, so I joined. I haven't updated much yet because I'm still trying to figure out how it all works, and I'm not sure I will stay on there. But if you're curious, have a look.

So that brings me to the point of this post. What do you think? Is Twitter a fun and useful way of keeping in touch, in the way that (I would argue) Facebook is, or is it just a load of pointless self-indulgent rubbish? I've been trying to come up with a clever way of asking this question, maybe by rhyming Twitter with "shitter" or asking if all the users are "twatters"*, but frankly I can't be bothered. Let's keep it simple:

Twitter: yay or nay?

*Perhaps 'clever' wasn't the right word.

Happy birthday Claire!

2009-01-24T15:24:00.001Z

Just a quick note to say a very happy birthday to one of my very bestest friends, and probably the loyalest reader of this blog. Here are some of my favourite things about Claire:

Her hair is spun from light
She is always in the mood for champagne
She's one of the funniest, smiliest, sweetest people I have ever met.

Also, she has great legs. You can't see them in this picture, but trust me.

The inauguration

2009-01-22T14:14:00.001Z

I was working from home the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, and I watched it on BBC1. I felt like I was watching something I would remember for the rest of my life. Friends of mine were there on the National Mall, among the 1.5 million who turned up to watch the ceremony. I wish I could have gone.

I loved Obama's speech. Other presidents might have gone for something unreservedly optimistic, which would have been arrogant and inappropriate. I loved the fact that instead, he delivered a sombre and forceful speech about responsibility - about the responsibility that America has to the world, and about the responsibility that American citizens have to rebuilding their country. He talked about the importance of not shying away from difficult decisions, and I really admired that. He comes across as someone who's remarkably determined, and takes his role and his own responsibility incredibly seriously. Bush always seemed like someone who'd been voted in by his friends during a drinking game, and was just having a great time. I don't know if Obama can solve all the things he is setting his sights on, but he seems like someone who will do as much as he possibly can, and do it as effectively and as appropriately as he possibly can - and he seems like someone who can do a lot.

It was a wonderful ceremony (the only thing that struck me as odd was the lengthy Christian prayer that seemed to take a central role in proceedings. Separation of church and state, anybody?). I felt elated to see Obama take over from George Bush. But if you watched the BBC coverage, you'd think that the best thing about him is that he's black. To me, that attitude belittles him. Of course I can understand that for African Americans, it was a hugely historic and inspiring day. But while it's wonderful that skin colour apparently is no longer an obstacle to reaching the highest levels of American politics, that's not the reason why Barack Obama is a good choice for president. Otherwise they could elect Eddie Murphy and we'd all be celebrating. Obama is a good choice because he is - or he certainly seems - extremely intelligent, moral, compassionate, practical and ambitious. He doesn't seem self-important, foolish, greedy, ignorant or irresponsible, like the last president. So that's why I'm thrilled that he's in.

Also, I loved him fluffing his lines.

Below, two clips: Obama's wonderful speech (read it here), and the specially composed John Williams piece that was performed before he was inaugurated.

Sorry!

2009-01-19T23:15:00.002Z

Oh my God, it's 19th January and I've only written three posts this month! I ought to be ashamed.

I am ashamed. I haven't had much time to write lately and I haven't had much to write about. I have the ongoing problem that a lot of the things I want to write about are off limits, because they're personal and they involve other people, and even if they're just funny, happy things, I don't think it's necessarily my place to write about them on the world wide web. So that's tricky. And it's a shame, because really my friends are a lot more interesting than me.

So I'm just popping up to say that I haven't gone away permanently, and I hope you won't either. I'll be back as soon as I think of something to say. I estimate this will happen in the next few days. Hopefully. All topic suggestions welcomed.

Meanwhile, I'm going to steal an idea from Sarah Brown and just point you to some things I have found funny recently:

Playing With The Boys (also stolen from Sarah Brown. That's the last thing, I promise)
Hey Ladysmith - from Dear Old Love
Book Him - more Dear Old Love
Food for thought - from Tim McSweeney's blog
A Travel Tale Told by an Idiot - from 123 I Love You
Kate Winslet: "Gather"
Glenn Close is off to see the wizard - from Go Fug Yourself

Back soon.

Rude word rude word alert!

2009-01-13T22:44:00.003Z

My friend Claire - you may know her from such comments as "Please stay away from me until the snot stops" and "I liked the one about the dog best" - had trouble sleeping the other night. To fill the awake time, she began planning a new magazine she might start - one that would analyse some of the worst people of our times, and not only of our times but of DAYS OF YORE.

The next day, to entertain me when I was bored at work, she mocked up the cover. It's got the worst of all the rude words on it, so don't scroll down if you're sitting in the office, or at your grandma's house, or in church. Click on the picture to enlarge it. Thank you.

"At the impasse I ran into friends..."

2009-01-12T14:09:00.000Z

I'm still a big Woody Allen fan (which I have to defend every time the subject comes up with friends), and I liked his piece in the Guardian this morning.

'Scarlett came to me today with one of those questions actors ask: "What's my motivation?" I shot back: "Your salary." She said fine but that she needed a lot more motivation to continue. About triple. Otherwise she threatened to walk. I called her bluff and walked first. Then she walked. Now we were rather far apart and had to yell to be heard. Then she threatened to hop. I hopped, too, and soon we were at an impasse. At the impasse I ran into friends, and we all drank, and of course I got stuck with the check.'

It's a spoof diary of the making of his new film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which I saw at a preview screening a few weeks ago, and really enjoyed - mainly for Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Woody's dialogue can be a bit stilted (she admitted reluctantly), but in the hands of those two it became really natural and passionate and exciting. Maybe it's some sort of Spanish instinct.

So my recommendation is: if you hated Match Point and Cassandra's Dream, but still have a soft spot for ol' Woody, give Vicky Cristina Barcelona a try. You can always listen to your ipod during the bits with the American actors.

An effective cheerer-upper for possible January blues

2009-01-11T22:00:00.003Z

Happy new year! Actually 11th January is probably a bit late for that, isn't it? Happy slightly-less-than-new-but-still-definitely-not-old year.

I'm not feeling awfully chatty tonight so I'm just going to show you this clip from Flight of the Conchords. My friend sent it to me last week when I was feeling a bit down. If you're feeling a bit down (only a bit - it's not a miracle worker), I challenge you to watch this and not feel slightly better (only slightly - see above). Go on. I CHALLENGE YOU.

The hattiehattie Review of the Year 2008*

2008-12-31T12:28:00.003Z

I started January 2008 with someone who told me, during the celebrations, that he hoped this would be the last year of his life. That really got things off to a fun start. I'm pretty sure that he's still alive as the year draws to a close, but sadly I'm not in touch with him any more. I hope it's been a much happier and more positive year for him than 2007.

In February I reignited a relationship with a different guy - the one I mentioned in my last post. Even though everything was going tits-up at my office, it was quite a fun month, and at least I got flowers on Valentine's Day.

March was a bit difficult because I was made redundant - but I didn't give a monkey's, because it was also the month that Milo, my nephew, arrived. He's the most beautiful, funny, sweet baby you could imagine, and I look forward to teaching him bad habits and stupid jokes (unfortunately this is all I have to share) as he gets older.

I was basically unemployed in April, a fact that is reflected in the number of blog posts I wrote: a record 23 in one month. All of them boring, because I had nothing to do and nothing to talk about.

In May it was hot, and I sunbathed in my bikini on the lawn outside my flat. Now it's zero degrees and I can't imagine ever wanting to strip to a bikini outdoors ever again, especially in England. Anyway, it was also my 25th birthday, which I loved, and it was the month that I finally, thankfully, got a job.

I started that job in June, and I'm so glad I did. Other than being a barmaid when I was 18, no other job has been as sociable and as fun. June was also the month I went to see Radiohead, and banged on about that a lot on the blog.

In July I... didn't really do anything except work.

August was great, because I went travelling around Washington (state) and British Columbia. I discovered David Sedaris (excellent), s'mores (sickly) and Jaeger bombs (usually not a good idea).

In September my job came to an end, and I headed up to Newcastle to pack up my things before my parents moved house. It was a weird and slightly depressing month, but with fun interludes when I went out and got drunk and went dancing with my friends. As it came to a close, my good friend Sandeep moved to London and we became flatmates again. It was the first time in two years that I'd lived with someone, and it's been a total success, and I don't mind saying that I love her very much.

In October I developed a huge crush on Barack Obama, met some famous comedians and went on some dates. I also welcomed my parents to London, which was lovely.

We were all in a celebratory mood in November, getting ready to wave goodbye to the chimp who's been inhabiting the White House for the last eight years. I was doing my second reality-TV-related job, and I'm about to go into my third now. I didn't particularly want this to be my professional niche, but apparently it is, and I suppose at least I've got a niche.

And finally, December: nose-blowing, working, and Christmas-present-buying.

In 2009 I hope to stay in employment, read more, produce better work and spend some time in New York. For my friends and family, I hope for everything wonderful they deserve, and most of all that they stay healthy and happy. For the world, I just hope Obama is as clever and moral as he seems, and that this recession slows down a bit.

I hope you've all had a good year. Thanks so much for reading the blog. I genuinely appreciate you all, and I promise to try and write more interesting stuff in 2009.

*complete with unruly capitalisation

Ari Gold

2008-12-29T10:00:00.001Z

LOVEFiLM have sent me the fourth season of Entourage. Favourite Ari Gold quote so far: "I parted the Red Sea for you. Don't piss on the sand."

Urrrrrrrggghhh (in a sort of pleasant way)

2008-12-26T18:56:00.000Z

Greetings, my seasonally bloated friends. Am I the only person who has gone into a post-Christmas stupor, or is this widespread? I think my brain must be full of champagne or gravy or something. I want to write something but can't think of a single interesting thing to say. I was going to post a picture of myself in my Christmas cracker hat, but never got round to taking one. It's probably for the best - it made me look like a moron.

I'm off now to watch Twilight, which is about a sexy vampire, apparently. He may be underage, so on second thoughts I'll retract "sexy". To be honest, I'm looking forward to re-entering the real world and seeing other human beings, and hopefully not hearing any Christmas songs or doing anything remotely festive for another 12 months. It's been great, but I'm starting to feel like a zombie. Not even a sexy zombie, just a zombie.

I'll stop rambling now. Let me know how all your celebrations went. I'm not sure how long it takes the brain to process gallons of gravy and champagne, but I think a bit of blog chat with non-family members might help the process.

Ze End of Ze World

2008-12-22T14:16:00.003Z

"Well, have a nap... THEN FIRE ZE MISSILES!"

City girl

2008-12-16T22:36:00.006Z

On the tube on the way home from work tonight I read an article in New York magazine called 'Alone Together', and I liked a couple of paragraphs so much that I actually got out a pen and circled them. (A bit weird, but people do weirder things on the tube.)

Apparently, social scientists have found that those who live in cities are less lonely than those in small towns - even when they might appear isolated because they live alone (which I did in London for two years). The idea is that humans are driven to find social interaction, and in a city there's just more chance of finding it:

'John Cacioppo, co-author of Loneliness, is part of the school of evolutionary psychologists — and certain biologists too — that believes our species wouldn’t have survived without a cooperative social instinct. In their book Cacioppo and his co-author, the science writer William Patrick, argue that loneliness, like hunger, is an alarm signal that evolved in hominids hundreds of thousands of years ago, when group cohesion was essential to fight off abrupt attacks from stampeding wildebeests. It’s nature’s way of telling us to rejoin the group or pay the price. “Nature,” they simply write at one point, “is connection.”

From Cacioppo’s point of view, our large brains didn’t evolve in order to do multivariable calculus or compose sonatas. They evolved in order to process social information — and hence to work collaboratively. “And if you look at any city,” he says, “you see that we have the capacity, as a species, to do so. They show we can work together, we can trust one another. We couldn’t even drive through city streets if we didn’t trust that people would follow rules that protect the group.”

Cities, in other words, are the ultimate expression of our humanity, the ultimate habitat in which to be ourselves.'

I love this idea. I'm a city girl through and through - and through, and through, and through.

I've complained before that compared to Newcastle (or New York, for that matter), London is unfriendly. It's true that it's not an easy place to meet people. You need an introduction here - it's not like my hometown, where anyone might spark up a conversation. If someone talks to you on the tube here, you move seats. But it's a place of huge possibility, and once you've got those introductions it starts to feel not so big, not so scary - just busy, exciting, and full of different experiences. Even when I first moved here, and for a few months I was lonely, I still loved it.

Essentially, I'd rather be squashed into London with millions of strangers, queuing with them at the supermarket and cursing them when they keep me awake at night, than living in a pretty village and smiling at the same forty people everywhere I go. Not an atom of me is, or has ever been tempted by living in the countryside. I don't know why, but all I really want around me is other people. Even the weird ones on the tube.

Dear Old Love again, again

2008-12-11T20:27:00.001Z

If somebody wrote this about me, I'd probably have to get back together with them.

Go on, tell me I'm disgusting

2008-12-10T20:49:00.001Z

When you do something stupid, there's only one thing more embarrassing than everyone laughing at you: no one laughing at you.

I'll give you an example. A couple of months ago, a journalist friend emailed me to say that he'd been typing away at an article when his chair had suddenly collapsed. He'd landed comically on the floor, surrounded by chair bits. He looked around, laughing, but there was no one else there. So he just had to stand up and go and find another chair. What a waste.

Similarly, I remember my mum once falling through a deckchair on holiday. The fabric just ripped under her, and her bottom went straight through to the ground, leaving her wedged in the wooden frame. The rest of us laughed so hard we could hardly even explain to her that she had to sit still until we found the camera, but she was good-natured about it. Admittedly, it took us a while to find the camera, and her sense of humour was failing a bit when we got back fifteen minutes later. But I like to think that deep down, she was glad it happened.

Somehow, being embarrassed is more embarrassing when no one laughs. This week I'm doing a freelance job at a magazine. My colleagues are very nice, but we hardly know each other and they're impeccably polite. I've got a really, really disgusting cold. Today I estimate that I've blown my nose about 70 times, gurgling endless brain water into endless hankies. The bin next to my desk is over-flowing. It's the only job I've done where, when I offer to do a tea run, nobody takes me up on it. I've become repellent.

Yet they won't make any jokes about it. They won't even tease me a little bit for being so utterly disgusting. It's awful. I feel 18 times more self-conscious about it than I would if they would just laugh at me a bit.

I emailed my friend, the chair-breaker, thinking he would understand. I told him my nose was running like a tap and nobody was mentioning it. He replied "Hmm... Just leave it for about 45 minutes so that it's all over your face. Then turn to someone and ask them for a stapler." Seconds later he followed this with an urgent P.S. email: "Let me know what happens."

I might try it tomorrow. I'm going to push them until they cave in and call me a revolting, disease-ridden snotbag. If no one's insulted me by the end of the week, I'm leaving.

I award myself 2 out of 10 for blogging frequency

2008-11-30T22:11:00.003Z

Hello my blog-reading honeys. I'm just dropping by to say I've been a really shit blogger lately - yeah, we both know it.

The reason is that I'm currently doing a freelance job that's sapping my energy a bit - I'm out for almost twelve hours a day and then have more work-related stuff to do in the evenings. I keep writing blog posts in my head on the tube to work, but then I don't have time to write them down, and I forget them. They are really good ones, though. Just imagine that you've read them and they were really enjoyable. That's probably better than the actual experience you would have had if I'd typed them up.

Anyway, I'm only doing the job for another week, and then I will be chattier... if any of you are still checking the blog by then. Sigh.

Also, how are you? I seriously would like to know.

Malfunction

2008-11-20T21:11:00.003Z

I want to write a post, but unfortunately I think I've broken my brain.

First of all I've damaged it quite badly at work this week (I've been showing up on time and leaving late, which is the opposite of my usual healthy routine), and then I finished it off by drinking 47 bottles of Grolsch last night. Which of course is exactly what you should do on a Wednesday night when you have to get up at 7.30 the next morning to go to your new job.

Here's some things on the plus side though.

Richard, Iain and Kate are coming to stay this weekend, and they're really fun and I haven't seen them for a year.
Come to think of it, this time last year my job situation was miserable. And now it's not as miserable. So that's good.
I might be spending some time in New York next year. This is such a ginormous plus that I would like to superimpose it in big letters over my entire blog, but that's just impractical.

Screenwipe

2008-11-18T19:52:00.004Z

I know it's a bit last minute, but you should really watch Screenwipe tonight on BBC4 at 10pm. It's a new series and I got a sneak preview of the first episode, and it's very good. Funny and insightful and topical. So off you go and set the video, or Sky Plus, or just sit in front of the telly for the next two hours until it comes on, OK? Go on. Off you go. It's good!

And here's a teaser:

And yes, I know, this is still not a proper post... I promise I'm trying to think of something proper to blog about...

Chipmunks do the funniest things

2008-11-16T11:32:00.005Z

In theory, I'm not interested in funny animal videos, and I don't particularly want to see them on a blog. In practice though, I watched this clip with Claire on Friday and I laughed so hard that cheap Cava almost came out of my nose. There's a clue in that sentence: maybe I was a bit drunk. But is it funny when you're sober? You tell me.

P.S. Yes, you're due a proper, non-link-related post. Yes, I'm thinking about it.

Dear Old Love again

2008-11-13T00:43:00.000Z

This made me laugh.

"I'm scared I have worms!" and other stories

2008-11-12T12:36:00.005Z

I'm going to steal an idea from a blog I looked at the other day*, and start keeping a list of all the bizarre things people have googled on their way to my blog. Sometimes they're really odd, and really funny. It's down there on the right hand side, at the bottom. Look out for it; I can only remember the most recent few at the moment, but I'll be updating it regularly.

*I wish I could remember whose blog it was. If I remember, I'll update this post.

On growing a thicker skin

2008-11-11T21:48:00.002Z

On Friday night I went out with a new friend, who I like very much. She's a lot like me in some ways, but a nicer, less irritating person. Which is exactly what I look for in a friend. Anyway, I digress.

One of the things we talked about on Friday was the toughening-up process that we go through in our twenties (and perhaps continue through for the rest of our lives). I feel like I've grown an extra layer of skin since I moved to London, and particularly over the last year. For one thing, I've become an expert in the casual relationship. A casual relationship, it seems, is when one person is less interested than the other. I've been on both sides of this dynamic, sometimes at different points with the same person. Both sides are stressful and make you like yourself less. This is unpleasant, but helps with the toughening up.

I recently bored you all by complaining that I had to go through all my teenage belongings and decide what to chuck out and what to squeeze into my tiny little flat. One thing that I found a lot of, alongside the excruciatingly cringeworthy diaries, was mementoes of old relationships. Letters I received, letters I wrote and never handed over, home-made Valentine's cards, presents. A lot of them were embarrassing and were transferred straight from dusty old shoeboxes into black binliners. But some of them were heartbreaking.

The most painful were the cards, letters and gifts left over from my first real love - the boy I felt so close to that when we broke up, it was like having something amputated. I'd forgotten how soppy we were. Nowadays we're good friends, and we care about each other, but of course the baby talk and the funny nicknames and the endless declarations of love have to go out the window once you're no longer an item - for self-preservation's sake. I'd forgotten it all. It was six years ago that we met - not a very long time, but it's hard to believe either of us were ever that sweet or that open. I can't imagine being like that with anyone again. The friend I spoke to on Friday, who is married and a few years older than me, said that in her experience, you don't get it back - that unbridled willingness to pour all your feelings out, for someone else to do with them as they please.

On the plus side, my relationships aren't quite so painful these days. I think they're getting a bit less painful all the time. I wonder if they're getting a bit less wonderful too.

The polling station is closed

2008-11-10T13:30:00.001Z

...and I can reveal that 61% of voters agree that Hywel is in fact Faux-bama!

And definitely no more than three of those voters were his girlfriend Claire.

I think we've all learnt something here today. Democracy lives on.

Again, again

2008-11-10T13:00:00.004Z

I wanted to get a closer shot, but then I would have been a solitary, unshaven 31-year-old man snapping photographs of elementary school children getting on a bus, and I thought to myself, perhaps not today.

I know I've mentioned 123 I Love You about 12 times, but I wholeheartedly believe that it's the funniest blog on the internet (and probably funnier than a lot of those non-internet blogs too). Please read the latest entry. Thank you.

Faux-bama!

2008-11-06T14:10:00.000Z

In the wake of Obama-mania, my friend Claire came to a startling realisation: her boyfriend, Hywel, looks a bit like Barack Obama.

[dramatic pause]

This being the most exciting news since, well, Obama was actually elected, Claire ran with it and mocked up a little photo comparison, which she dubbed 'Hobama'. I prefer to call it 'Faux-bama', so that it doesn't look like we're calling Barack a tart. Et voila!:

I was sceptical until I saw the pictures - but look at the eyebrows! The smile! The funny sticky-out ears! Cast your votes, politics fans. I have a hunch that this is going to become a bigger issue than the economy. As Claire said, "Together we can make Hywel the second most powerful man in the western world. Yes we can!"

A very happy day

2008-11-05T11:56:00.001Z

Also, I'm feeling better. Even Republicans can celebrate that. Hurrah!

Election day

2008-11-04T12:00:00.000Z

I'll keep this brief, because my stomach hurts so much that I can't sit up to type. I'm writing this with the laptop balanced on my chest. It's a pretty elegant pose, I'll tell you that much. Anyway, it's the big day, and I'm exceptionally excited. Hopefully this man is right, and we're on the brink of a big change. Obama, I'm rooting for you - yes we can!

Wassup 2008

2008-11-03T17:47:00.001Z

I'm ill today. Too ill for chatting. I'm just giving you a weak, wan wave (alliteration unintentional) from my (death-?) bed, and then I'm going to sink back down under the covers and do some more feverish shivering and sweating.

Anyway, here's something to be going on with.

For the original advert, click here (it's funnier than I remembered).

You and me are great - everyone else is disgusting

2008-10-30T20:09:00.002Z

This morning on my way to work, I was sitting opposite a man in a suit. He didn't have a newspaper. He didn't have a book. He looked bored. So after a few minutes, he followed the example of five-year-olds the world over, and cured his boredom by sticking a finger as far up his nose as possible. He really foraged around in there. He was immersed up to the first knuckle. And then he brought his finger out, and absentmindedly licked it, and then sucked it. At this point I gagged. And then he inserted it back into his nose for another helping.

The weirdest part was that he wasn't remotely surreptitious about it. He was looking around, making eye contact with his fellow passengers, reading the adverts on the wall of the tube... and all the while, digging about in his left nostril. It was as though picking your nose and eating it was the most natural and appropriate thing in the world to do in front of strangers.

Then on tonight's journey home, I was squashed tightly between Arsehole McElbows and Stinky von Halitosis. The former was hogging my armrest and jabbing me aggressively in the side, but I was forced to turn my head towards him just to get out of the air current coming from the girl on my left. I think she may have had some sort of gum scurvy. Something was definitely decomposing.

In summary, today was not a good day for me and public transport. That's all.

Flobber

2008-10-26T19:28:00.007Z

I'm about to inflict my second ever meme on you. If you don't know what a meme is, you could read my last one, although to be honest I think I might have been delirious when I wrote it so maybe don't bother.

Anyway, my fellow blogger Brother Tobias tagged me to do this meme, and it's quite a fun/easy one so I'm going to do it. Here are the rules:

Link to the person who tagged you (done)
Post the rules on your blog (done)
Write six random facts about yourself
Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them (I'm not going to do this, but if anyone else wants to meme it up real sweet, I would be interested to read what you've got to say)

And thus we begin a little story I like to call: Six Random Facts About Hattie.

I can't ride a bike. I've mentioned this in passing before, but I've never really explained it, so here goes. My parents tried to persuade me to learn. Sadly, even at the age of four, or whenever it is that you start doing that kind of thing, I already had the fear of hurting myself that was later to become my trademark. I was quite happy pedalling up and down the street with my stabilisers on, but I didn't want to take them off and go through the horrible process where you teeter around and fall off and graze your legs. Then it got to the stage when my friends' younger siblings were taking off their stabilisers, and suddenly it just became too humiliating to learn alongside them. So I can't ride a bike. I did almost learn a couple of summers ago in France. I have video footage of that, which I thought about posting up here, but it's embarrassing for two reasons: (1) it's footage of a grown woman who can't ride a bike, and (2) I'm wearing a bikini and I look all pale and flobbery. Anyway it was very hot and I didn't want to put my health at risk by overexerting myself, so I ended up sunbathing instead of cycling. Thus I still can't do it.

I once met Chris Morris. Actually it was last weekend, and he was very nice and unaffected and interesting. (I know that name-dropping is frowned upon, but since he's a bit of a hero of mine and it is a fact that I have met him, I thought it might be acceptable.)

Several years ago, I had spectacular and sudden food poisoning, and vomited all over my bedroom floor. I was in such a bad state that I couldn't begin to clean it up, so my then boyfriend gallantly stepped in and washed the (revolting) carpet, while I lay sweating and shaking in another room (I was barely conscious, but the smell was too bad even for me). He then spent two days nursing me and sleeping next to me, even when I was vomiting all through the night into a bucket by the bed. I can't even think of the words to express how grateful I was in my sickly, helpless state. Anyway, I'll get to the point: a few weeks later, for unconnected reasons, we broke up. I still feel really guilty that he did such a nice thing for me in the dying days of our relationship. I should really invite him round and let him be sick in my room. It's only fair.

When I was a kid I watched the unbelievably '80s film Mannequin every Friday night. I did this while eating fish fingers and chips. Every Friday. For years. This was my favourite bit:

These facts aren't painting me in a very positive light, are they? I'll tell you a better one: I'm a bloody great speller. I only wish that I had been born in America, so that I could've taken part in spelling bees and had my remarkable talent recognised across the nation. I would probably be President by now. I would.

I'm a terrible, incorrigible flirt. I really enjoy it, but it doesn't half get me into trouble. Still, if I wasn't a flirt, I'd just be a non-bike-riding, pale, flobbery geek, so I think it's a valuable part of my repertoire. People aren't so interested in talking about spelling, but if I wink coquettishly and compliment them on their hair, they're all ears. If I didn't do that, I'd probably have to clean up my own sick.

Smilo

2008-10-19T13:19:00.000+01:00

I've been trying to write something for the blog, but I'm running low on inspiration today. I just wrote a post all about depression, which was a hoot as you can imagine, so I've saved that for another time when you really need cheering up.

I'm listening to In Rainbows, which is always guaranteed to do two things: (1) make me want to write; (2) make me depressed. Unless I want to turn the blog into a copy of one of my adolescent diaries, I think it's best if I switch this off and try some Simon and Garfunkel or something. OK, done.

I'm going to see my nephew Milo this afternoon - the person who can cheer me up like no one else. I haven't written about him for a while, but he's even more lovely at seven months old than he was as a newborn. He talks (not English); he laughs; he plays; when I bath him he splashes his fists repeatedly into the water until the carpet, my clothes and my hair are all soaked. This would be irritating with anyone over the age of four, but is somehow adorable with a baby. He's just wonderful, really. For some reason it makes me feel good to spend time with someone who finds my painted nails, my jewellery and my hair all so fascinating that he goes wide-eyed, shrieks with excitement, and then tries to cram them into his mouth.

(By the way, it turns out Simon and Garfunkel wasn't what I was after. What my psyche really wanted was Cars by Gary Numan.)

From Badger to Barack

2008-10-16T23:16:00.000+01:00

Good God, my crush on Obama is raging out of control. He's eloquent, he's clever, he's moral, he's charismatic: he seems to be the daydream we've been nurturing to distract ourselves while that Republican moron has been in the White House.

Considering the USA seems to control the western world these days, it's frustrating not to be able to vote outside America, or to be able to help in any way with the campaign. To make myself feel a bit better about being stuck here and totally useless, I've added a Barack Obama badge to the blog - below right. I'm pretty sure all my readers are either voting Obama already, or not American, so this badge is going to make no difference whatsoever. It cheers me up to look at it, though.

Badger

2008-10-16T19:27:00.005+01:00

As far as I know, most people had one special teddy bear that they treasured throughout their childhoods. I know this because I've discovered beloved, threadbare soft toys in the bedrooms of some of my most macho ex-boyfriends (when I say 'most macho', bear in mind that I've mostly gone out with troubled artists and that kind of thing. I'm not comparing a wrestler and a bouncer here).

Anyway, my special bear was more of a badger. His name was Badger. (My sister has a treasured toy too: he's a blue teddy. His name is Blue Ted. Maybe my parents didn't read us enough stories.)

He came into my life when I was four years old. I had measles and a high temperature, and my parents were worried. I remember my mum leaning close to the bed and asking if there was anything that would make me feel better. "Get me a toy..." I croaked weakly, "...that I can dress and undress." I had a God complex even then.

A couple of hours later she returned with Badger, who was wearing blue and white stripey pyjama bottoms, some pretty snazzy tartan slippers, and a red velvet dressing gown with a pocket. Thrillingly, the clothes weren't actually sewn on to his body. Revived by the gift, I took them all off. Then I lost them. Badger was to spend the next 21 years in the nude.

Other toys came and went, but Badger was there through my whole childhood. I used his head as a pillow. His snout, which had once pointed at a slight diagonal, as though he was gazing wistfully into the mid-distance, soon became squashed at a right angle to his body. He was forever looking off to the side. He didn't mind.

My mum and I devised a whole personality for Badger. He was intellectual. He wasn't interested in kids' games. He was always doing evening classes in things like philosophy and politics at Newcastle University. He enjoyed fine wines and the occasional cigar.

Last week I went home to pack my room up, and as usual, found Badger chilling out in bed, naked as the day he was born. When I cleared out my bedside table, I found his long-lost (and very dusty) clothes. I thought about packing Badger - who was also a bit dusty - and his things in a box, but I knew he'd be really pissed off by the time he reached London in the removal van, so I brought him on the train with me.

All this explains why now, hanging on the dryer in my living room, next to two t-shirts, a cardigan and a dress, are a very small dressing gown and some tiny pyjamas ("It looks like we've got the fanciest baby ever," noted Sandeep). In my bedroom, propped on the radiator, are a little pair of slippers and a slightly bedraggled and resentful-looking (but clean) Badger. I think he's going to like London - the theatres, the restaurants, the women - but God knows how he's going to take the news that he can't sleep in my bed any more.

Dead Set

2008-10-14T15:07:00.002+01:00

On Sunday I was invited to Bafta, where I attended a screening of Dead Set, the forthcoming E4 horror series written by Charlie Brooker.

I should point out that I am not the kind of person who is often invited to Bafta. I spent most of the afternoon (after the screening) sitting quietly in the bar while more important people chatted over my head. Nevertheless, I'm glad I went - Dead Set is clever, it's scary, and I wholeheartedly recommend you watch it: Monday 27th October on E4. Trailer below...

26. Start flossing

2008-10-14T14:32:00.004+01:00

I have a week off work. I have a to-do list with 25 tasks on it. I've done the seven easiest ones. I'm currently listening to the Ladyhawke album at an antisocial volume, and gazing despondently at my tax return, which I really, really, really don't want to deal with.

Yesterday I decided to bite the bullet and register with a London dentist. I called a local practice, who said they had no space for new NHS patients and referred me somewhere else. I called the second, slightly less local dentist, and had this conversation:

Me: Oh hello, I'd like to register as an NHS patient please.
Them: OK. What's your name and phone number?
[I painstakingly spell out my name, to avoid another 'Happy Christel' incident]
Them: Right, we're not taking new NHS patients at the moment, but I'll put you on our waiting list. We'll give you a call in three to six months.
Me: Three to six months?
Them: Thank you, goodbye. [click]

Urgh. What if my teeth all fall out next week? I could be Gappy Christel for half a year, for all they care.

Urgh again. Must stop procrastinating and get on with the to-dos. The tax return can fuck off, though.

The real insult is...

2008-10-13T00:13:00.003+01:00

My clever friend Sarah recommended the website Dear Old Love on her blog - and I love it.

This one is my surprise favourite (so far), because when I read it, my train of thought went like this:

That's so funny.
What a weird thing to be offended by, though.
What a geek.
I don't use hotmail as my primary email.
I really hate hotmail, actually. It just doesn't work properly.
Gmail pisses all over hotmail.
Come to think of it, I always feel disappointed in a person when they give me a hotmail address.
...
Oh dear.
I am that geek.

The Fan and the Flower

2008-10-06T23:53:00.009+01:00

On 24th June 2005, a couple of days after I arrived in New York, I went to the Rooftop Film Festival at the Automotive High School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a weekly event through the summer, but that night the theme was love, and we watched ten short films on that topic. One that really stuck with me was The Fan and the Flower, an animation directed by Bill Plympton, written by Dan O'Shannon and voiced by Sideways' Paul Giamatti - it chronicled the unconsummated love affair between a ceiling fan and a potted plant.

I've never been able to remember what it was called though, which has been a source of irritation for the last three years. Anyway, today I found the programme from that very night, and I tracked down the film online. It's seven minutes 23 seconds long and it's silly, sweet and utterly charming - I would recommend giving it a watch*.

The other film that really stood out that night was I'd Rather Be Dead Than Live In This World - a 17 minute film by Andrew Semans about a couple who become so smitten with each other that they stop going out altogether and form a sort of cocoon in his flat. At one point I think they're driven to eat some kind of sauce or jam out of a jar just to survive, because they've eaten all the rest of the food and they can't bear to go out. It's weird, it's funny, it's surprisingly sexy and you can find more information about it (and a great trailer) here.

*This used to link to the film on Youtube, but it's now been withdrawn. Clearly the film maker doesn't want his work being screened for free all over the web, which is fair enough, if a little bit disappointing. To watch a clip from The Fan and the Flower, click here.

P.S. I updated this post in a hurry and have just discovered that for the last 15 hours or so, rather than directing readers to a film clip, I've been sending them to look at some shoes I bought online yesterday. Oops, sorry about that. The correct link is now in place. Nice shoes though, aren't they?

*Insert double entendre about self-raising flour here

2008-10-05T23:35:00.002+01:00

I just received a spam email entitled 'Upsize your hotdog into a french loaf'. I didn't open it, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't offering baking advice.

I really appreciate it when a Viagra salesman takes the time to come up with smutty metaphors. That guy really went the extra mile. If I had a hotdog of my own, he might have just won himself a customer. Or not.

Packing off again

2008-10-05T12:17:00.000+01:00

I'm going back to Newcastle to help my parents with their big house move - again. Last time I was clearing out school work, photos and notes; this time it will be old clothes (which I will mostly chuck out, in the hope that no one will ever see them again) and books (which I will mostly keep, because I'm weird about books).

I'll also be getting rid of a lot of shoes, and I've made it my mini mission to find a way to recycle them. Last week I discovered that at the end of my street is a shoe recycling bin, put there by these kind people (with a slightly weird website. Check out the 'Sites' section - I sort of thought it might have a list of locations, rather than a series of photos of bins?). They take your old shoes, however crappy, and transport them to Africa, where they are refurbished and given to people who need them. I'm really impressed by that idea, and by the thought that there are nice, altruistic people out there coming up with good things they can do for other people, and actually going to the trouble of implementing those ideas. I'm trying to remember the last time I did something charitable - other than just using the shoe recycling bin, which, let's face it, is a pretty paltry effort.

So anyway, I'm hoping I can find a way to recycle my old shoes in Newcastle. Failing that, it's going to be very difficult to just chuck them in the bin - and no one really wants to see me wearing my old flowery baseball boots around the streets of London, do they? Oh do they? Oh OK, I'll bring them down.

What a load of old goop

2008-10-02T13:19:00.001+01:00

Claire has just drawn my attention to the brilliant Hadley Freeman's article in the Guardian, about Gwyneth Paltrow's new spiritual guidance website: Goop.com.

Who would like to join me in making 'goop' the new slang word for poo?

The results are in...

2008-10-01T20:10:00.000+01:00

Well, it's been a record-breaking week on the blog. A mind-boggling two dozen votes were placed on my documentary dilemma. Yes, you did read that impressive figure correctly. Mum, you really put the hours in, and I appreciate that.

Anyway, it's time for me to reveal the result. The atmosphere is tenser than at one of those Eurovision song contests when Terry Wogan starts complaining that it's all political and that Norway and Sweden always give England nil points, or something. So, 62 per cent of you voted for me to take part in the potentially fun matchmaking documentary. But sorry, giddily optimistic voters: I went with the 37 per cent of you who thought it would be a terrible and humiliating mistake. (The other 1 per cent must have chosen secret option no. 3.)

That's right, I'm not doing it. It turns out that my journalist friend wants a sweeter girl - the kind of girl who will wholeheartedly enter the process looking for love. She doesn't want somebody who will make sarcastic comments all through the interview, then spend the whole date text messaging while repeatedly mumbling, "This is so embarrassing." So she's decided to dump me. I've been dumped, and I didn't even go on the date in the first place.

I feel good about the situation, though. I like my love-seeking to be a bit more spontaneous. And anyway, Ariane had some kind words: "I wouldn’t do it. When you go on to be wildly famous and successful, they’ll wheel out 'When Hattie Went On A Date' on every talk show."

That's right: when I am wildly famous and successful. And I'm going to get started on building my fame and success just as soon as I've finished eating this toast and reading Heat magazine.

P.S. The poll was fun though, wasn't it? Must do that again.

Help! Help!

2008-09-25T22:29:00.006+01:00

I have a dilemma, and where there's a dilemma there's an opportunity to hold a poll, and frankly I just can't resist polling of any kind. So let me tell you what the problem is, and you can give me your views by clicking yes or no over there on the right.

This evening I received an email from a journalist friend who is making a documentary and wants me to be in it. It's about a matchmaking service, and she wants me, as a young single woman, to be her guinea pig. I would be filmed going to meet the matchmakers, talking about my 'ideal man', and subsequently going on a date with whoever they find for me. The question is, should I do it?

Here are some facts to help you decide:

The documentary will be screened on a cable channel that I have never heard of, and on a website I've never heard of - so we're not talking high profile.
Nevertheless, I'm not really a 'looking for love' kind of gal, and I don't really want to paint myself as a lonely heart. My heart is quite jazzy.
I would be paid a modest sum for taking part.
But I'm not really comfortable on camera.
It might be fun though, and the friend who has asked me to do it is lovely and trustworthy.
Realistically though, she is also a journalist and will want to make a good story. Hopefully this would not mean making me look like a desperate loser.

OK, get clicking, readers! Oh, and by the way, I don't want to make an arbitrary choice between yes and no, so it would be helpful to have at least three votes. Mum, that means you're going to have to vote twice.

Nothing to see here

2008-09-24T20:46:00.002+01:00

I haven't forgotten you, loyal blog reader(s). It's just that it's been a very busy week and a very nice week, which means that (a) I haven't had much time to write, and (b) I haven't had anything to complain about. I could just write a lovely account of lovely things, but that's a bit bloody tedious to read, really, isn't it?

Ageing gratefully

2008-09-18T00:27:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow I'm going back to London. Sadly, this does not mean that I've completely cleared my childhood room. I've got to come back in a couple of weeks to finish it off.

The last week has been weird, sorting through hundreds of scrappy notes and cards and letters. They're all filled with the haphazard scrawls of me and my teenage friends. Of course there's funny stuff in there, and things that make me miss those people - but I've mostly been reminded of the petty arguments, the painful experiences and the stupid mistakes of my adolescence. I don't envy or particularly like the me of ten years ago, or even the me of fifteen years ago. (I wonder if I'll be saying the same words when I'm 35 and 40?)

Some people loved their teenage years. I don't understand how those people managed to come through it all unscathed. I'm just happy to be an adult now - albeit an adult who eats a lot of crisps, is frightened of dogs, and doesn't know how to ride a bike.

Dust. Dust.

2008-09-13T16:52:00.000+01:00

Three days into the big clear-out, I'm starting to lose my mind a bit. I've still only gone through about a quarter of my room. I'm the kind of hoarder who has kept, for example, a shoebox full of club flyers and bottle tops from nights out. Don't ask. I have no idea what I thought I would want with them in the future. If I carry on like that, I'm going to end up one of those old ladies with bags of hair under the bed, perhaps sorted into cat and human. Anyway, I'm going off-topic here. So far I've filled a bin bag and a half with rubbish, three crates with recycling, a couple of big boxes with things to give away, and several boxes with treasures I can't bring myself to part with.

I also found a shoebox of mementos from an old boyfriend, which was a tiny bit heartbreaking because it reminded me of a time when I could just be soppy with someone, without making it sarcastic.

It's so dusty in here. I think I'm getting black lung.

Excavations: mostly embarrassing

2008-09-12T00:01:00.003+01:00

Today I've started clearing through my old bedroom at my parents' house. It has been a lot more enjoyable than I expected, so far.

First of all I found a very hot poster of George Clooney, circa 1998. Sadly I don't think I can carry off putting this on my wall at age 25. Ewan McGregor, Beck and Robert Downey Jnr are all going to have to go, too. I might have a special place in London for my Marlon Brando picture.

I found a long passage of philosophical writing, which I copied out of the introduction to a book of E. E. Cummings' poetry, presumably in the days when I was studying A Level philosophy and wallowing in angst. It was a slightly depressing reminder that at one stage, I was able to comprehend sentences more complex than "Rachel has found herself in a bit of a fishy situation after dropping Rex's salmon dinner in the Living Area". I also apparently copied out Talking In Bed by Philip Larkin, a poem about post-coital awkwardness, which has turned out to be a spooky forecast of my adult lovelife. Haha. Ha.

I found an illustrated biography of Vincent Van Gogh, which I made for an art project when I was 12. This is embarrassing from beginning ("Van Gogh's life was not a particularly happy one. He had gonorrhoea") to end (where I have signed off, dotting the 'i' of 'Hattie' with a star, and the 'i' of 'Crisell' with a flower). This is going in the bin.

I found a very cheesy signed passport photo, sent to me by a basketball player I had a huge crush on when I was about 13 or 14. Something Bale, possibly? I can't read his handwriting. I do remember that I used to write him very heartfelt letters, and he always wrote back.

I was thrilled to find a whoopee cushion, but then very disappointed to discover that the rubber had rotted and it was all cracked, and no longer capable of making amusing farty noises. Luckily, my baby nephew now does that for me.

I found many, many photos of me wearing hideous outfits age 18-19. Apparently I used to favour big hair and a crop top and baggy jeans. On the plus side, Jenni and I look like we were having just as much fun as I remember.

I found the shirt my school friends all wrote on, when we were 16 and finished our GCSEs. Someone has helpfully written "boobies" on my chest in big pink letters, and "ENTRY PROHIBITED" with an arrow pointing down my back. Someone else has written "You will never be a mouse" on my shoulder, and a girl whose name I barely recognise has told me that she will love me 4eva because I am her fave person. Anna, who sometimes comments on this blog, has written "Hattiana Dazy Crystal, you're the sexiest person I know. THIS HOUR OF DARKNESS IS MINE! Love Anna xxx".

I have no idea what this means, but there's no way I'm throwing my shirt out.

Help me though. Should I keep:

my witch's broomstick (for future Halloween costumes)?
my Hawaiian skirt (for future Halloween costumes)?
a mysterious disposable camera, and a black and white camera film, both of which are obviously full of pictures? I could get them developed... but more embarrassments are sure to lurk within.
my cassette single of The Fugees, Killing Me Softly, bought when I was 12?
a bag of something called 'Confetti Namz', which are tiny silver and pink strips of card in the shape of the name Harriet? Now don't answer without thinking it through - for example, you could throw them at me if I got married to myself.
a compass? I'm talking about the kind you use to draw circles. What does one do with a compass in the real world?
four keys in various shapes and sizes (origin unknown)?

More along these lines tomorrow, I suspect.

Diversity bingo

2008-09-11T00:02:00.005+01:00

Well, I'm turning into my dad. Not in the sense that I'm morphing into a lanky 65 year old who wears brown corduroy trousers and listens to The Police, but because I'm increasingly baffled and irritated by modern life. And also I listen to The Police.

On the train on the way to Newcastle, I was seated near a very smiley woman who was travelling up north to hold a diversity training workshop. She spent the first half of her journey preparing some badges, which I assume were for a roleplay exercise. She got out some sticky white labels and carefully wrote different job titles on them, her face contorted with concentration: LAWYER, MILKMAN, SHOP ASSISTANT, ACTOR, MINER, and so on. Because some of us just don't know how to speak to miners.

Next she started to write different... well, it's hard to say what they had in common, but I suppose they were all 'characteristics'. JEWISH. HIV POSITIVE. USES A WHEELCHAIR. HAS RICH PARENTS. MUSLIM. STUTTERS. GAY.

Having prepared all of these, she devised a schedule for the training day. I was trying my very hardest to read her handwriting upside down, but sadly I could barely decipher any of it. Happily, the one sentence I could understand was:

"11am - Diversity bingo"

I started to envisage the climax of a game of diversity bingo, at which point a racist office worker (in the guise of an HIV positive, Muslim actor) would sob "House!" as he saw the error of his previous BNP-supporting ways. He would turn to the stuttering, wheelchair-using gay miner next to him, and the pair would embrace, fat tears pouring down their diverse cheeks, as they joined together in an emotional performance of a traditional Jewish song.

Diversity bingo might just be what this crazy, mixed-up world has been waiting for.

The whole thing made me feel like I was in an episode of The Office. Or more specifically, the 'Diversity Day' episode of the American version of The Office. Or more specifically... this bit here.

Pack off

2008-09-10T11:38:00.002+01:00

I hate packing. I know I've mentioned this before, but I hate it so much that I could actually write an entire blog about how much I hate it (perhaps the blog would be called PackingPacking? The very thought of it sends a shiver down my spine).

Anyway, today I am going home to do The Biggest Pack Of Them All. Yes, my parents have selfishly decided to leave my hometown of Newcastle, so I have to go and clear through 25 years worth of clothes, schoolwork, photos, fruit-flavoured bubble baths that people gave me for Christmas, plastic bags that I kept to use again because they looked cool, postcards I received fifteen years ago, song lyrics that I painstakingly wrote down and then stuck on the wall to express my own angst-ridden psyche, Valentine's cards from people I dumped, Valentine's cards from people who dumped me, and so on.

Perhaps I'm making this sound more fun than it is. It's not going to be fun. At all.

To compound the un-fun-ness (what the hell is the appropriate word?) of the trip, I must also go and say tearful goodbyes to my friends in the north-east, who I will not be seeing for drinks on Christmas Eve this year. I must bid farewell to the city that knows me as an 18 year old giggly barmaid, and commit permanently to the city that hasn't noticed me yet.

It's not so bad. I do love London. I'm just being dramatic.

Anyway, I better go and pack for the packing trip. By the way, if you want dibs on my complete collection of Making Out books (Ben's In Love is a doozy), or perhaps my many pairs of Miss Selfridge dungashorts, now's the time to say so.