oh aunty...

Have you watched TV lately? There’s an irritating new filming trend going on.
Imagine a world in which the BBC (or whoever, though it does seem prevelant on the Beeb) is unable to afford a camera that is big enough to film someone’s entire face, or, if you're a fan of sci-fi, a world where cameras big enough to film an entire face haven't yet been invented, or, if you're a fan of sci-fi-mutation, a world where people's faces are so huge that no single camera is big enough to catch them in their entirety, anyway, what you get in these worlds, and, more and more on our TVs are silly shots of someone’s ear and cheek while they give you their opinions on fashion (yes, you Ozwald Boatang, love your squared off collars btw), or close ups of people's mouth and teeth or some such. Obviously, on Crimewatch this is understandable but on documentaries can we not just have normal shots of people’s faces while they share their knowledge?
Someone please forward this to Points of View.
My publisher has just bought Boys II Men greatest hit. Bought! Imagine....

London has just experienced its coldest day in a decade and all the plants in our garden have drooped. so much for hardy perennials!
i am currently sitting in the freezing cold kitchen with a glass of mead. I know! Mead. I've tried it before and quite liked it but the glass i am drinking actually tastes pretty rank - imaginge washing a Locket down with some washing up water. And I've got a whole bottle of it, which i think even i will have to pour down the sink.
regular readers will know how much that will hurt.
i am, as i sip, watching a new TV show which may knock YBF from my FTVS (that's You've Been Framed from my Favourite TV Spot). the show in question actually isn't actually a million miles away from my beloved YBF, as it offers participants plenty of opporunities for injuring themselves. it's a bit like Extreme It's a Knockout. 'Players' have to run round an assault course (weird compound noun, if you think about it) which has things like 'the balls', which is a roll of huge red balls on columns that contestants have to leap across. There are five of them. So far, no one has made it beyond the second one. Another challenge involves crossing a wall, which they have to kind of straddle and inch their way across. Did i mention that the wall has holes in it and fists coming through throwing punches?
My favourite round so far, though, has been the one where the players are whizzed round on roundabout before being bunged off to do another series of trials.
It's hilarious. Fortunately (for them) the contestants are well wrapped up in padded vests and helmets and all of the equipment is wrapped in padding. but i'm sure somewhere there's an extreme version using the same course but without the padding. but that's probably pay per view.

A mate of mine keeps sending me links to porn sites. these links invariably feature people doing very unseemly things to each other, and, in particularly erm, interesting examples, to themselves. i shan't go into details but isn't it funny how when the more porn you watch, the more bizarre sex seems and the less appealing it is? i say forget castration for the sexual deviants - put them in front of youporn for a couple of hours and they'd soon be begging for an episode of Corrie.
or is that just me.
now, there's no way to link that story to the next one so let's pretend you've clicked through to a whole new story.
i was once wandering the streets of Barcelona, round by the picasso museum, when i suddenly found myself being accosted by a female beggar asking me for money.
first of all she asked me for a coin (to translate literally) while i was outside the bank waiting for my sister. i politely declined her request.
next, she got me while i was sitting on a terrace having a glass of wine. once more, i refused.
finally, as i came out of the shop of the textile museum she came up to me AGAIN and asked me for some money.
me: 'No'.
her: 'Why not?'
which i must say, totally flummoxed me. I genuinely couldn't think of any reason why i, who had plenty of cash, shouldn't give any to this (it has to be said, pushy) woman who had none.
which just goes to prove. if at first you don't succeed, pester, pester and pester again.

thank goodness for button-them-together double quilts, i say. take an autumn weight 9 tog, button on a summery 4 tog and you get a very warming 13 togger to keep these winter chills at bay. does anyone actually know, or indeed care, what tog means?
and so, this is Christmas. and what have you done?
well, thank you for asking. i've been to visit the mum, adding an extra twist to proceedings by taking the ex boyfriend along. needless to say both mum and nan seemed to prefer him to me. is it just in our family that our relatives always seem to prefer our friends to us, their next of kin? i sometimes think they probably don't like us very much. they love us to bits, of course, after all we are their flesh and blood, but i don't think they'd want to sit next to us (sisters and I) on a long train journey, or be stranded with us on a desert island.
thank goodness for therapy (lots of goodness to thank today!).
and while we're not on the subject of dancing, may i just ask why is it that some girls seem incapable of going onto a dancefloor without waving their arms around in the air. it's like an epidemic. pingyarmup syndrome. there you are, having a little bop when suddenly, seemingly without your consent, first your hands, then your elbows begin to creep up to the side of your head and before you know it you are swaying around looking like Jodie Foster in Nell. did someone once tell someone that this was 'sexeh!', because if so, i'd like to set the record straight that it isn't.
and if you've got long hair, that somehow gets tangled up in an acute attack of pingyarmup it's most definitely not 'hawt'! i recommend dancing with a pair of 8KG dumbbells in your hands. this should help keep them out of harms way.

follow the thread

On my way back from Pret (mayonaisse with that? How about some extra mayonaisse?) I cleverly managed to get the strap of the belt of my coat stuck in the buckle (how much or a trannie or weirdo does that make me sound? Like I’m wearing a safari suit in December, which btw, I’m not. I’m wearing a belstaff ripoff: black, greased-ish, with said buckle). Anyway, don’t ask me how as I don’t know how I managed but got the strap stuck and was forced to yank it out. This, somehow, pulled a bit of thread out so that it was wrapped round the buckle*. The only way to sort it out was to cut myself out of my belt. As I did this, I held one end of the string in my hand which caused my belt to bob around mid-air as if it had a life of it’s own. This reminded me (finally, I get to the point) of those funny toys you got in the 70s that were like overly fluffy pipe cleaners attached to lengths of invisible thread that you would pull around your person making it look like there was a flourescent caterpillar wriggling all over you. Crazy. And slightly disturbing as they used to whizz around quite quickly.
*talking of getting things caught, I once went ‘up west’ with my mum and sisters one Christmas and we went to The Oxford Walk. Younger readers will know this retail hotspot as The Plaza on Oxford Street but back in the day, it (thought it) gave Brent Cross a run for its money. Upstairs was one of those photographic studios where you could get sepia-tinted pictures of yourself in olde-worlde costumes (remember The Good Old Days on TV?), which sisters and I duly did. My nan still has one on one of her units.
Anyway, back in the 20th century we headed down the escalator back down to Oxford Street and somehow I managed to get my brand new black and white mohair jumper caught in the side of the moving staircase, causing a thread to pull and causing me to be sucked into the side of the escalator. I remember that horrible feeling of rising panic as I realised I was trapped. Only a quick thinking passer by saved the day by pulling my jumper and me out of the metal jaws of impending death or at the very least disfigurement. The jumper was ruined.
Another jumper that I lost in an unfortunate manner was the first I ever knitted. Yes, I knitted! And this was long before it was a trendy pursuit. I knitted myself a fluffy grey number with a low neck (OK, my nan had to help me sew it up) and I loved it. I was about 14 at the time and Skinderella-style skinny having started to shed the puppy fat that had helped make my life miserable for the previous decade and a half. I also made the fatal mistake of lending the jumper to my mate Geraldine who had (and indeed continues to have) rather large breasts. When I got my jumper back it was stretched beyond wearability around the chest area and fit only to be gifted to someone with huge breasts.
I still love my knitwear.

mary poppins!

I was, in my younger days, something of ‘a goer’. Now there’s a word that you don’t hear very often. Definitely one due for a revival, along with referring to someone as a bike. In fact, I think I’m going to start referring to myself as the office bike and see if there’s any improvement in my love life (and another one due for rediscovery).
Anyway, in my younger days I used to like to party. Hard. No pill, powder, paper and paste was safe if I was around.
One evening, getting ready to go out with mates one of them announces: ‘you must try this’ before putting something round and white in my mouth.
20 minutes later and I suddenly feel like an elephant with 10 tonne eyelids.
How hilarious – my friends had given me a sleeping pill. I was furious as I really wanted to go out that evening but had to go to bed, where I slept until the next morning and woke up feeling seriously groggy.
I’d completely forgotten about that until reading the story of the young girl who had been kidnapped by her own mum but who had, for a couple of years before then, been regularly drugged with valium. Not only was she doped, she was then sent to school. Now that’s unkind.

school dinners

slow Friday. alone in the office but let's not get too existential, eh? whatever happened to chocolate custard? everyone, at some point during their school days, ate chocolate sponge with chocolate custard. these days you never see it on menus anywhere!