An advert for London

Hey You
Yes You
Do you own an enormous rucksack? Do you have the ability to come to a sudden halt with no warning at all? Do you like to stop immediately after ticket gates to put your travelcard away? And most importantly have you devoted your entire life to standing on the LEFT of escalators?
Then why not come to London? In particular why not time all your journeys to take place in rush hour and then stand in the doorways of tubes looking slightly shell shocked and panicked as commuters surge past you and expect you to stand in spaces you assumed were too small for ants to congregate on.
Of course I welcome tourists to our glorious capital city and appreciate the revenue they create. This doesn't stop me for wanting a tourist free fast lane on all pavements and a ban on them using the tube to go one stop at the height of rush hour.
Oh I know that I've mucked around in foreign cities and sat on buses at 5-30 merrily moving my shopping as a thousand people try to cram on. I too have also taken forty five minute train journeys in to the arse end of hell as I attempted to navigate a subway system to take a journey which would have been a maximum of a three minute walk (New York I'm talking to you). But that was different, that was me and I have never, ever, decided it would be a good idea to meet up with forty language students on the busiest thoroughfare I can think of. I have some limits.
Oh such petty annoyances clutter my life. I need to rise above it, there's just infuriating about being stuffed in to a carriage with a thousand other people whilst people who have clearly spent the day at the zoo rather than at work look at each other and go 'gosh I couldn't do this every day'. Well then don't do it anyday. Leave the zoo at 4 or hang on till 7. I don't have those options. I leave at 6. We haven't got round to staggering our office hours yet, we all leave at the same time.
Given the option I would commute to work by bike or a nice walk. Unless I want to get up at 3am I can't do this. So until then I need to get on with it. I resolve to get on with it about 6 times a week. Then I spend the journey home sat in a luggage rack and I'm back to square one.

Tanning

I am back from a very pleasant holiday in Greece. We had no access to a themometre (or a clock, which led to some strange meal times) but in our estimation it was ‘very hot’. Conversation with everyone you met centred around two topics. The first was the heat. You heard various tales of how hot it was. Stories of ’47 degrees in the shade were heard’, given that I wasn’t dead I didn’t believe those stories but like I say –very hot. The other conversation was mosquitoes. They were insane. I have been bitten over 30 times and I was one of the lucky ones. I am rocking some particularly beautiful ones which have bruised around the bite. My dream of returning bronzed and glowing with health are dashed. I have returned looking like someone you wouldn’t sit next to on the bus in case you got scabies. My dream of returning bronzed from a holiday is a dream that just won’t die. I am 31 years old. I am ginger. I have freckles and no discernable eyebrows or eyelashes. I have had to receive actual medical advice regarding the severity of burns that I got from merely walking to the shops. Yet still every holiday I go on there’s a voice in my head that says ‘this could be the year, you could go brown, you could have an amazing tan, you just need to let it build up gradually’. This theory is slightly flawed given that I lived in Australia for a year and returned paler than when I left- just how gradually am I planning on building this tan? Still I once again decided that this would be the holiday of brownness. But in the spirit of letting things build gradually I slapped on the factor 40 and kept to the shade. However this time there was the complication of the mosquitoes. By the time I had suncream and bug cream on this created some kind of reaction which made me erupt in to a disgusting rash and my skin take on the texture of gravel. Which meant I had to forgo the bug spray and get bitten a lot. I was still pale though. Then I fell asleep and burnt my back.

So I resorted to my default sun bathing position- in the shade with every inch of me swathed in towels. A bit like I'd died but no one wanted to interupt their holiday to deal with it so they'd fashioned me a shroud out of luridly coloured beach towels. Just waiting for it to get a bit chilly before they take me fishing and generally recreate 'Weekend at Bernie's'. So I return. Bitten, red and with some weird bubbly skin thing going on. Not really what I was aiming for. Great holiday though. I think my favourite bit was being told by a waiter that the reason Greek people weren't being bitten was because they drank ouzo - so we dutifully downed a couple of shots each night. When we told another waiter this theory he merely shook his head and said 'a man told you that right? I don't want to know how this story ends'

Film idea

I have a radical idea for a film. I think it could spark a new genre and a mass spin off market. Following in the steps of Twilight, Step Up, Street Dance, Street Dance 3D it’s a film for teenagers who can’t be bothered to develop any tastes of their own and so rely on the media to tell them what they like.

So my teen film: it’s about a posh teenager who for some reason has to leave their private school and attend a run down, horribly terrifying school/prison which is entirely inhabited by all the children of the Sylvia Young Theatre school doing ‘tough cockney’. Why the posh child can’t attend a normal comprehensive with a mixture of people in it is not clear but also unimportant, Tarquin (as posh child shall be known) is flung in to this new environment. But here’s the revolutionary twist – Tarquin CAN’T street dance. He can’t even do any old fashioned dancing that he would have learnt at his posh school like ballet or morris dancing which he would have fused with street dance in an amazing new fashion leaving his peers breathless with respect and waving their fingers around and saying ‘hey yo that posh guy he is off the hook innit’. Instead Tarquin is forced to make friends and influence people by getting to know them and talking to them about a variety of topics. At some point he may do something utterly radical like go to the cinema with them hang out in a shopping centre rather than go to an illegal night club and have a dance off with a terrifying street gang who express themselves through skipping and speaking threateningly without ever swearing. At the end of the film Tarquin realises that if he just keeps his head down for a few years, makes some decent friends and then goes off in to real life rather than thinking that high school is the most important part of your time on earth and the best time for your life to peak is at age 15.

It’s radical but it might just work.

Technology

I had to go to the bank this lunch time. To get there I had to navigate the joys of Oxford Street. This meant I not only dealt with the weather in July (rain/sun/rain/sun/hail/sub tropical cyclone/snow) but I was also wearing flip flops which meant that every so often I lurched sideways and nearly head butted some scaffolding. I also dealt with tourists who walk insanely slowly and suddenly and without warning stop dead. I got called a rude word by one for over taking. But hey, you can’t be too down when there’s coffee available on every corner and you work in the centre of one of the greatest cities on earth. Besides I was to have a real treat this lunch time. My mind was about to be blown.

I encountered the whizziest paying in machine I have ever seen. I had cash to pay in and so I trudged in, filled out a form and was looking around for an envelope to put it in when I realised things had changed (I don’t really pay in too often, I’m more of a taking out kinda girl). Envelopes and even paying in slips have gone, replaced by a machine which you just fling cash in to, it counts it and adds it to your account instantly. I did it bit by bit just so I could watch the little trap door open and hear it count the money.

Ahh technology. It’s great isn’t it. Makes paying in money that little bit more fun. I am also enamoured with the sparkling water tap we have here. I am easily pleased. But as I sit here drinking sparkling water and marvelling at paying in machines I am also quite angry. The emergency debate on phone hacking is taking place and it just staggers me to see what’s been going on.

Personally I think the people who sanctioned it should be called to account. Those that did it should be called to account and the whole sorry episode should be blown wide open and everyone involved should be exposed. But at a lower level, why did no-one ever question it? I watched the news this morning and there were journalists and friends of journalists talking about the pressure of the job and it was used as a justification for the acts. I know it’s easy to get caught up in a job. I know the feeling that it’s the most important thing in the world and then with a couple of months hind sight you think ‘Wow, I totally lost perspective there’. But seriously, as someone was hacking a dead girls voicemail and deleting messages did they never think – ‘you know what, I don’t think this is what I should be doing. No job is important enough.’ I fail to see how someone’s moral compass can be so off that they could do that. But they did. And as people higher up refuse to resign and say they knew nothing about it the problem continues. It doesn’t matter if they did or didn’t know. Someone needs to take responsibility. Someone needs to say ‘This simply isn’t right and it happened on my watch’. The more they cling to the wreckage the more they are causing damage to the families of the victims. They are also causing harm to themselves. They have lost their grip of reality and morality and need to walk away from the place they are in whereby they think these acts are acceptable. They need to hack in to their sense of decency.

Friends and phones

It is said by many that the mark and measure of a true friend is being able to go for months without talking then picking up as if nothing has happened when you do see them. I half buy in to this theory, surely in these days of mass communication it’s not that hard to stay in touch – but at the same time I have many of these friendships myself. Mainly by virtue of having lived in some far flung places and having friends that still live there and also because I really, really, deeply loathe speaking on the phone. My phone is always on silent and nowhere near me. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you. I just don’t want to talk to you on the phone. Let’s get a coffee, let’s DO something. And if that’s not practical due to geography then send me an email. I’m better in email.

You can edit what you say in email. You can embellish events to make them sound interesting, because here’s the thing – when you haven’t spoken to one of your true friends in six months how do you make it sound like you have achieved something in half year? I spoke to a friend of mine the other night. He has a very exciting job. I don’t know exactly what he does but involves a great deal of dashing and daring and living in numerous foreign countries. He also has a love life and is very happy. I have no love life which immediately cuts my conversational material in half and whilst my job is fun and I enjoy it a lot it mainly involves being in an office rather than wrestling tigers whilst holding a bayonet between my teeth.

Now it’s not that you have to hype your life up to gargantuan proportions and I’m sure he didn’t ring up to hang on my every word as I recounted tales of dashing and daring – I’m pretty sure it was more of a catch up. But when your life is reduced to six months of ‘you know, going out and stuff’, it does being to sound like you are sitting home night after night rocking and talking to a special teddy bear friend called Mr Trousers.

Of course the second I got off the phone I remembered I had been away, I had done quite a few things and was actually ticking along quite nicely and there was no need to plunge head first in to the existential crisis I was heading for. However it would have been beyond weird to ring him up and suddenly start listing what I had been doing and doing so would have doubled my allotted phone time for the month (about twenty minutes). Therefore yes there are friendships where you can pick up and carry on and I love those kind of friendships and am grateful for them but you really do need to pick up and carry on and not try and summarise your life so far. Either that or you have to overcome a hatred about talking on the phone.

Dog Suicide

I was very relieved this week not to have participated in the suicide of a dog. I was at a meeting at a friends house and their dog was wandering around. At one point during the meeting someone leant over to me and said "the dog just got something out of your bag, I don't know what it was though".

There followed a rather frantic game of 'Kim's game' where I desperately tried to remember what I had had in my bag and what the dog could have eaten. My phone, my purse, my keys and my make up were all still there so I was fairly confident the dog wasn't in the kitchen tarting himself up and making long distance calls before driving my car away to do some shopping. I assumed the dog had just eaten a reciept or something but then I suddenly remembered that I had a pack of neurofen and a load of anti-hystamines in my bag that were now no longer there. The visions of a transvestite dog now turned in to visions of a dog in serious danger.

I pretty much reassured myself that I would have heard the dog crunching his way through a load of tablets and their plastic packaging but I still had niggling doubts that I had inadvertantly provided this innocent creature with the tools to end it all. The rest of the meeting wasn't a relaxed affair. I eventually confessed all to the host who laughed and suggested I take a wander to the kitchen to check on the dog. Who was fine. And seemed to me to have a smug look on his face.

Technology

Technologically speaking it’s not been a been a good couple of weeks. Admittedly some of it has been my fault. A great deal of it has not. I was not built for this age. I should be in the 1920s marvelling at a picture lantern. Not losing the will to live in the Car Phone Warehouse. Which by the way is the most ridiculously out dated name for a shop. Who has a car phone? It’s like popping to the Betamax Warehouse to buy a dvd.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the cinema one Sunday afternoon. I saw the Time Travellers Wife, which is alright, not sure I entirely understood it – just as I got my head round one concept (oh he can go forward and backwards) another one would spring up which would fox me – how could he write a list of the exact dates he would visit her? Anyway the sight of Eric Bana dancing around in the nip meant that I was fairly cheerful when I left the cinema, I checked my phone for messages, I had none, so I put my phone back in my bag. Or so I thought. I actually put it through both handles of my bag and it landed face down on some tiles and shattered the screen. Which isn’t handy when it’s a touch screen.

So I took it to the Car Phone Warehouse to make use of the insurance that I fork out for every month. Apparently they had to assess my claim as I have claimed on my insurance before. Yes, I have, when I hurled my phone in to a pint of water when I was asleep. This is why I have insurance, because I am clumsy, even when asleep. This is why I now wish to set the insurance wheels in motion. But no, I had to wait 72 hours to be assessed. So I thought I’d spend my time usefully backing up my phone. Or in my case, merrily deleting all the photos off both my phone and my computer. Did it properly too, can’t get any of them back. Great. I was mature about it. I cried.

I awoke on Monday ready to start the week afresh. Got to work and discovered that the central locking in my car had failed and I was locked in my car. I sat there for a while trying to decide whether to crawl out the boot or fling myself out the window. I wasn’t entirely sure if there was a release catch in the boot and I didn’t really fancy then being trapped in there. I also wasn’t too sure of my ability to Dukes of Hazard it out the window. However after a lot of pulling at handles and kicking the door (technical) I could get out the passenger side. Which is how I spent the three days before I could get it to the garage and have it fixed. So glamorous.

It was the strangest thing to break in a car. Almost as odd as the time that the wind caught my car door and knocked it off the hinges and I had to have the whole door realigned and glued back on.

Just so you know I drive a ford not a clown car where the doors fall off at random.

But now I have a car that opens and shuts and a temporary phone until mine is returned, still no photos though. Two out of three isn’t bad.