Concentrati...

I couldn't follow the plot of Upstairs Downstairs on Sunday. I find this quite worrying. It's not like I was wrestling with the intricacies of Chekov or following something in a different language (which lets face it isn't going to happen unless there is an indepth French drama about directions). I was watching a Sunday night costume drama and I did not have a clue what was going on. Someone channelled Unity Mitford, a monkey was gassed and then someone was pointing out areas of low pressure over Birmingham. There is a small chance I fell asleep half way through and woke up during a different programme.

I think I have been spoilt by Downton Abbey. I know we're not meant to compare the two. They are entirely different programmes about life in the recent past and the lives of those both above and below stairs and how world events impact their lives. I followed Downton. I mean it helped that a caption would come up telling you that three years had passed and yet the characters would still be having the same conversations (sometimes in the same costumes). Time whizzed past so quickly there was people with massive beehives doing the twist outside the windows and the youngest daughter and the driver were still discussing their love.

Upstairs Downstairs however expected me to have brain power which is not sky high at the best of times and certainly not at 9pm on a Sunday. I had to remember who people were from the first three episodes, be aware of it's place in history and try and work out why they were gassing a monkey (I think it's because Eilleen Atkins has left the series and the monkey belonged to her, they may have also realised that working with animals is expensive and time consuming and therefore the best thing to do was gas the monkey). Expect anyone with an expensive costume or habit ('oh but I love champagne) to be taking a short trip headfirst down the stairs soon.

I am going to watch it again. I love a good costume drama and I adored the first round of Upstairs Downstairs. I (blushes modestly) am too young to remember the first time it was broadcast but I got the first series on video for my 21st (attempt to pretend I am young fails) and now it seems to be on ITV3 all the time. It's fabulous and I shall dedicate proper time to watching the new series rather than lounging in bed.

Clarification

I possibly didn't make it clear in the last post that domestic violence goes both ways. Any violence isn't to be tolerated and there is a case that violence against men is trivialised. My main issue is irritating teenagers... and Chris Brown

Worrying

I was at the station the other night. I was nearly home and wandering across the concorse, a group of teenage girls, I'd guess they were about 14, were walking the other way. It's half term so I assume they were off some where fun and as teenagers are want to do they were bellowing their joy. There were the usual characters that make up a group. The incredibly loud, confident, pretty leader. Two girls, also pretty and willing to agree with whatever she says (shouts) and the dumpy one who is allowed to hang around because she occasionally makes them laugh and makes the others look good by comparison. (This sounds so bitter, you can guess which one I was). Anyway. Teenagers are annoying, we all know this. They shout their opinions and think they are hilarious. Depending on my mood I either enjoy listening to their 'dilemmas', which are always easy to follow as they are transmitted at volume and include so much detail. Or I just wish they'd shut up and spend my journey silently plotting their downfall. However on this occassion I was simultaneously worried for them and despising of them. And this is for why;

They were talking about Chris Brown.

Not his music (he'd just won a grammy and performed at the ceremony), no - loud confident girl (who was wearing shorts, in February) was loudly proclaiming the view that 'He's so fit he could hit me anytime.' One of the two pretty friends laughed and said 'Yeah he could hit me in the face and I wouldn't mind'. They all laughed and carried on walking.

Now I'm sure they thought they were being mature and ironic and we were all congratulating them on their irreverant and post modern humour. We weren't think that they were pathetic children who were broadcasting ideas that they have no idea about and were transmitting at a volume when they had no idea of their audience. Now I am glad that they have never experienced it and so do imagine it to be not that bad, I am terrified however that they think domestic violence is OK if the man is fit, that domestic violence is something to be dismissed and that domestic violence is a topic that is up for jokes.

It's not.

Domestic violence should be a subject that is discussed freely and openly. There should be no judgement on the victims and help should be sought and freely given. However domestic violence should be a taboo subject when it comes to humour. Oh I know the majority of people are joking and would no more dream of hitting their partner or kids anymore than they would think about going postal with a gun in a shopping centre, but there's the 1% that thinks that they are justified in going home and beating seven shades of shit out of their wife because they've had a bad day and it's that 1% that hears the jokes and uses them as a defence of their actions. Somethings are so horrendous that they should not be joked about. Humour justifies actions and makes unacceptable things palatable. Most of us, thank God, are far enough removed from things like this that we feel safe joking about them. Our family isn't affected therefore we can joke. But it's always someone's family that is being affected.

It also leads to girls coming out with comments like the girls at the train station. It breaks my heart. Not only because it's girls turning on other women and justifying violence against them, but it's girls betraying the rights that we have fought for. It's in living history that it became illegal for men to hit their wives. We fought long and hard not to be seen as our husbands property. These girls take these rights for granted and so abuse them. They need to know how we got to this point. We need to respect our past and band together so we don't go backwards.

And Chris Brown should just fuck off.

Mah Nah Mah Nah

I love the Muppets. Deeply. I am mildly distrusting of anyone who isn’t a fan. My biggest regret in life is of not making a Muppet when I visited FAO Schwartz. Christmas kicks off in style when I allow myself to watch ‘A Muppet Christmas Carol’. I am reduced to tears of laughter every time
I listen to the Rowlf classic ‘You and I and George’. I am reduced to tears every time I hear ‘The Rainbow Connection’. For some years I worked in the studios where the Muppets TV show was recorded. There’s a photo on the wall of all the Muppets on bikes. Sadly I missed the recording of the show by about 25 years or so but strangely my aunt worked on the Muppet show in those very studios. When my brothers and I were little and we would visit our grandparents (my aunt’s parents) we were given old copies of Muppet scripts to draw on the back off. My aunt was given a
Rizzo the Rat when she left the show and let us play with it so we used to act out the scripts we had with Rizzo and various other toys standing in for the other characters. We’d push two armchairs together (this also made a very good slide) and lay on the floor and do puppet shows from there.
My favourite Muppet is Rowlf. By virtue of the fact that he’s hilarious, has a great voice and can play the piano. Fozzie is up there but oddly I never had a huge amount of time for Kermit. I appreciated that he had to hold the show together, attempt to get Peter Sellers on the stage whilst he was having an existential crisis, fend off Miss Piggy’s advances and play the
banjo but I never really found him as appealing as the others. Then I saw the new Muppet film yesterday and reconsidered my choice.. Kermit is the greatest leading man ever.

The film itself is amazing. Despite the fact the cinema was filled with some of the most loud bastard children I have ever heard (note to parents, if your child is still rustling a paper bag at the end of the film, you’ve bought it too many sweets. Oh and note to the girl who answered her
phone – there’s a special place in Hell for people like you), it was an hour and a half of pure joy and Kermit was at the centre of it. His relationship with new Muppet Walter and his commitment to his friends recaptured the heart of the Muppets and oh, I’ll stop trying to analyse it, it was amazing.

Being a musical helped. I’ve never really got over my own life not being constantly interrupted with song and dance numbers. As a Flight of the Concords fan I loved the music throughout the film and as a bonus I got to hear ‘Rainbow Connection’ again.
My only question now is when I can go and see it again. I’ve been told by many people that today is too soon. I disagree but will bow to external pressure.

If Wishes Were Horses

The floatation of Facebook on the stock market and the news that several people are set to be billionaires prompted an office discussion of 'what would you do if you had 18 billion pounds'. Inevitably most of us could easily give away 17 and a half billion. Is there anything in the world you need that you can't get with 500 million? And if there is do you really want to have to maintain that lifestyle? I think I may have wittered something about travelling and paying for friends to come with me (and give up their jobs). I don't need to plan it too exactly.

However there are also things in life I fundamentally need and are becoming more pressing by the day. I need to make some money and fast. If only so I can maintain the life I have.

1. I need a PA. Not because I have such a fast paced, international life but because I am flawed. At work I am fine. Plan things, sort things, deliver things. Personal life - hmmmm. A case in point; my birthday. Failed to organise anything (not the first time). Eventually decide to rally the troops and go for lunch followed by the Muppet movie. Sorted. Except the film isn't out yet. So lunch it is!

2. I need an electric blanket. I am freezing. I am sleeping in pyjamas, hooded top, socks and gloves. The heating is on. I know I could buy an electric blanket easily. I have just not sorted myself and bought it (see note 1)

3. Paint. I need to paint the front door. This is because I have to kick it to open it

4. I need to fix the front door. So I don't have to kick it to open it

5. I need a Muppet. One of the biggest regrets in my life is not making one in FAO Shwartz

6. I need Irish breakfast tea. The best tea in the world and oddly not available over here.

I think when you look at all these things I'm fairly sorted. Therefore I don't need 18 billion. Good job too really

Power Up

I was given a tablet for Christmas. This was not simply a way of getting me to shut up and be quiet it was in fact an Android tablet. An ipad but not an ipad. We are now in a quite deeply committed relationship. Despite working in an industry where I know how to work a reasonable amount of fancy pants equipment (although my Dad still doesn’t trust me with their sky+) computers and I have never really got along. I bought my first lap top about seven years ago from PC world. I got the well known brand Lenovo– yep you heard me. I got it home, turned it on and nothing happened. It would not come to life. I charged it for a couple of years. Still it wouldn’t turn on. I returned to PC world and explained, half laughing, that the computer I had bought for them the previous day didn’t even turn on. They told me it was not their problem and I would have to take it up with the manufacturer and gave me a help line to call. I asked if I could use their phone. No.

I rung the help line, they told me to return it to the shop. I said I couldn’t. They said they’d call me back, they did, I explained it to 15 people. I cried. A Swedish man told me ‘ I think you need to have a cup of tea, I’ll call you back in ten minutes’. I did, he did. The upshot of it was they sent a man to my house to replace the entire motherboard and I developed a great hatred on PC world. The computer was…OK. I could type on it which was all I really wanted to do. I got used to turning it on a couple of days before I wanted to use it so it had times to come to terms with it. I never asked it to upload photos or anything complicated which would cause it to just shut down. Then one day I accidently upended a cup of tea in to the keyboard. The computer locked itself and the keys refused to work. I dried it out with a hairdryer and by sitting it next to the oven. Half the keys still refused to work. Sadly the half which made up the password to unlock the computer.

Over time I could get in. The delete still refused to work so I got used to highlighting and overwriting. The space bar only works if you slam it, so I stopped working in the library. I would type hundreds of words and look up to see that I had been typing on only three keys and I had written in some kind of experimental vowel only language. I borrowed a computer and finished the novel. I now have some weird superstition that until it’s sold I shouldn’t buy a new laptop. So I may be some time.

But now I have the tablet. And we have a deep bond going on. I was always fairly anti kindles – I didn’t think you could beat a real book. I still think that. But when you’re on the commute home and you finish your book isn’t it a lot easier to have a device where there are hundreds there waiting for you? When you’re lying in bed and you’re suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to read Mallory Towers isn’t it great that you don’t have to wait for the library to open or trawl second hand book shops. When you are reading a Lesley Pierce or an Emma Blair isn’t it great that no one can see the cover and assume you are illiterate but rather keen on the poverty and bizarre incestuous lifestyles of 1930s Britain?

I have also cut down on my paper recycling by downloading the papers on to my tablet. Haven’t quite worked out how to do the crossword yet but I’m sure I’ll crack it sooner or later.
And best of all – the flipping thing turns on

Please don't leave me

Sleep. When your surname is Sleep you get used to the jokes. Every September when you’d get a new teacher you’d brace yourself for the read through the register and the inevitable ‘Sleep? Not in my lesson you don’t’. As a result of years of getting letters addressed to Sheep, Slep, Sleet and worse it’s become an instinct for all my family to give their name as ‘Sleep, S, L, double E, P, as in go to bed’. Which works quite well until you get a perv (I don’t wish to generalise but it’s normally estate agents) who says ‘is that an invitation?’ You learn to live with these things you remind yourself it could be worse, you could be called Bumgardener or something. Especially as there are people who never ever call me by my Christian name and only call me Sleep or Sleeps or Sleepymonster or (my favourite) Sleep Doggy Dog. Someone once questioned why I had signed a birthday card with my given name. Well it’s because it’s my name and people who refer to themselves as their nicknames are normally (I am desperately trying to think of an exception but I can’t) dicks.

I have also always been extremely good at sleeping. At my peak I could hit around 16 hours a day (I’d like to claim this was when I was a baby, I was probably about 20 at the time). My mum would always say that I was the last of her children to sleep through the night. I would feel bad until it was cleared up and established that I slept through the night at six weeks old. Since then I’ve never really stopped. I’ve powered on sleeping nine hours a night and then at weekends topping up with a nap. I could sleep through storms, riots, people shouting at me, in parks, outside museums and once memorably in a karaoke bar. Sleep serves me well. And then it stopped.

Without warning I suddenly dropped to three hours sleep a night. This was last August. I would go to sleep as usual around midnight, I would fall in to a lovely deep sleep. Then bang on 3am I would wake up. And that was it. Occasionally I would fall back asleep at around 7-30 only for the alarm to go off half an hour later. There would be a moment of disbelief and then you’d realise you had very little choice in the matter and you had to get up. Some nights I’d lay there, some nights I’d watch tv, some nights I’d go to Sainsburys. Every night I’d go to bed in the hope that this would be the night that I would sleep through. It never was. I began to put myself to bed like a baby, warm bath, milky drink, calm atmosphere. I stank like an old lady due to the vast amounts of lavender I chucked around. Still nothing. I began to hate my bed. I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Funhouse episodes (it’s on at 4am on the Challenge channel).

You cope. You live with the constant nausea, the constantly being close to tears, the inability to make a cup of tea without screwing it up (milk in the cupboard, pouring the tea down the sink and stand there holding an empty cup, knowing that something’s not quite right but you’re not sure what). Every conversation you have normally involves you at some point rocking and saying ‘I’m so tired, I just need to sleep’. Then suddenly you’ll get five hours or something and it will revitalise you and you think it’s broken and then you sink back to three hours. It’s all you can think about. Occasionally I would hallucinate, that was actually fairly enjoyable and did take my mind off things. Every morning I would get the tube to work and fantasise about flinging myself in front on it. Just so I would be unconscious (and I know dead, but I was more concerned with sleeping). I refined my plans slightly to thinking about putting my arm in front of the tube, so I’d get a hospital stay, drugs and sleep. I told a woman at work my plan and she gave me a look of horror and informed me the tube would take my arm off. It’s possibly another symptom of insomnia – inappropriateness. There are certain conversation starters that just don’t work.

It’s also a desperately competitive business not sleeping. Everyone is having less than you. People with children, people who are stressed – if you were to listen to everybody you’d believe that we are a twenty four hour society. No one sleeps. Everyone has got it worse. But with the best will in the world, I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep.

And then miraculously I did. Christmas night I slept for ten hours and I’ve not stopped since. Bed has once again become one of my favourite places. I look forward to getting in knowing that I’ll be unconscious and won’t be laying there staring at the clock crying because I’m so tired but can’t switch off. I can nap! I don’t know what changed. I don’t care what changed. My best friend is back and I never want him to go away again.