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.

Coming Soon....

I have joined the modern age. Oldest television in the world has died and I have been forced to buy a new one. Oldest television in the world was probably twenty or so years old and had lived with a variety of families before coming to stay with me. He was unique in many ways. Firstly he was obese. I had him plonked on a chest full of all dvds etc the day I moved and he’s stayed there ever since as he was too heavy to move. Four years my Royal Family board game has been trapped in that chest. Four long years. He was also a little bit of a tyrant. If he didn’t like what you were watching he would simply change channels. He particularly liked to change himself on to the AV setting which wasn’t very enjoyable for anyone. But I loved him, even as he got deafer and deafer and would randomly turn the volume up to compensate for his lack of hearing. It was when he turned in to the widest, deepest, heaviest radio that I decided we really needed to part ways. Having no picture at all does somewhat limit your televisual enjoyment.

I chose a new television. A television that was HD, wasn’t a metre or so deep and had all the channels I required already in the television (just in time too as they turn the analogue off this year). I took advantage of having a party round at mine and asked strapping lads to carry oldest television to the bin area outside the flats where it could collected by the council. Even in death oldest television was only thinking of others. Rather than make me pay the twenty pounds the council wanted to collect him he arranged for himself to be stolen from the bin area the night before they arrived. The thieves have got themselves a good thing there. Or an ancient non working television that was left out in the snow for three days so is probably liable to electrocute them.

But most excitingly of all new television is connected to the internet. I can watch things on I-player, you tube and through the wonders of technology I can stream love film direct to the television. I have been a member of love film for years. I am on the lowest plan there is. Partly because I am rubbish at making time to watch films but mainly because I kept losing the flipping discs so really only got through two or three a year. But now the possibilities are endless. I have already watched one! But what to watch? Unlimited access to films gives me the same problem as I-tunes. The possibilities are endless – but I don’t know what I want! I am overwhelmed by choice. I think this is where trailers come in.

But the trailers seem to have been made by people who haven’t seen the film. ‘The Help’ a hard hitting film about the civil rights movement in 1960s America was made to look like a flimsy rom com in the trailer. I did actually go and see it and was astonished to find the film was really good and true to the spirit of the book. The trailer however was rubbish. Happily though when I went to see ‘The Help’ I was privileged enough to see the best trailer I have ever seen (for a film I have no intention of seeing). It was ‘War Horse’. Now thanks to stage play and various reviews I know that War Horse is a stirring and moving film about the role of horses in warfare. From the trailer it looked like the film was about the forbidden love of a boy and his horse. Their intense sexual love spans countries and time. Even when he is apart he carries a photo of the horse with him. He dreams of him.

Now thankfully the people who will pay to see the film are far more intelligent and know what the film is about and may have circumnavigated the trailer. If the cinema relied on selling tickets only to the people who had seen the trailer the theatre would be filled entirely of clammy individuals feverishly stroking their My Little Ponies and whispering ‘this is our story Toffeeapple. Our love will be recognised’.

I suppose it’s one way of dodging the usual trailer problem. Putting the entire plot and all the jokes in to the preview. This is normally because the film is a dud and the only way you could be convinced to part with money to see the full length thing is to be convinced that it looks half way decent. I have seen many, many appalling films this way. Films so awful I would rather watch horse love. I was about to say that at least with new telly I don’t have to go to the cinema to watch these things but that casts me in bad light and makes the whole thing rather unsavoury.

Dictionary Corner

I don’t know when it is that the list comes out detailing the words that have been added to the dictionary this year. It must be around now. After all we get bombarded with all other kinds of cack, Sports Personality of the Year, greatest moments of 2011 (good luck, it’s hardly been a cheerful year news wise – they’ll have to keep showing that clip of the Panda’s arriving at Edinburgh zoo to try and balance out the economy) and the reviews of the year, where you sit around going ‘Thora Hird is dead? When did that happen and why wasn’t I informed’. I have my own traditions, I go to my Mum and Dad’s house and read all the Christmas letters they have been sent and frantically try and piece together the lives of families I have never really met. I then set the freeview + to record everything I want to watch over Christmas and then delete it all come January. This all gives me an enormous sense of joy to counteract the usual force of my natural ennui.

Yes do note the use of ennui for it cunningly links back to the first sentence of this beautifully crafted piece. I find ennui sums up the trials of life neatly and there is not really the equivalent in English. Roughly translated (you’ll have to excuse me, my French is a little rough, my google skills however are second to none) it means “Listlessness and dissatisfaction resulting from lack of interest”. Now consider it used in a sentence: “listening to Bernard talk about the traffic on the north circular gave me an enormous sense of ennui”. Sounds slightly more poetic than ‘Bernie bored the tits off me” doesn’t it?

In the same way ‘Bunga Bunga’ parties conjure up just the kind of ‘What the...’ image that is required to imagine Silvio Burlesconi’s party habits. Do we have anything that could quite vividly paint such a word picture? I think not. This is why we are so often reduced to exclaiming ‘They’re just so ..UGHHHHAGHDHGHHHHHHHHHHH”. I did fashion a word that totally summed up the vilest person I have ever met but sadly it’s so foul I can not use it in public, let alone write it down. I sometimes say it when I am alone just for the sheer pleasure it gives me as it trips off the tongue. It sounds a bit like ‘Benedict Cumberbatch’ and I am constantly amazed that people haven’t accidently called him Benedict ***********. Until I remember the filth only exists in my own head.

I remember a friend of mine once winning a game of Balderdash by claiming that a certain word (I forget what) was ‘A Dutch word meaning a kind of empty sadness’. The beauty of that phrase has stayed with me despite the fact I have forgotten both the word and it’s actual meaning.

However my favourite new word is Kummerspeck. A German word meaning excess weight gained by emotional over eating. It literally translates as ‘grief bacon’. This could be the finest word in existence. There is nothing that compares in the English language. I am thinking of creating a word that sums up the feeling you have as an adult that you really should like olives but still think they are vile. Answers on a postcard

Power of a Woman

Kelly Rowland performed her new single on the X Factor last night. As is traditional in these cases she was stripped backstage and then forced to perform a strenuous aerobics routine whilst huffing and puffing about how she wants to have sex on the floor. I think the exact words are ‘I’m Down for Whatever, down for whatever, baby for you I’d make love on the floor’. Which as we all know is how you judge your life partner. She experimented with the lyrics, ‘I think I can see a long term future with you, you treat me like an equal and I could perhaps imagine a joint bank account’ but it didn’t scan so she went with the humping on the lino. This is hot on the heels of Nicole Scherzinger performing her latest single ‘Be my Baby’ which was basically her making sex noises and then occasionally whooping ‘C’mon UK’. She too had had 90% of her clothes removed and been sprayed with some kind of glitter hose.

Oh course it’s not just the women, when Justin Beiber performed he had his lad out and sung about how he’d like to be taken over a kitchen bar stool. And Olly Murs, he leapt around lunging and bending in just a jock strap like he was having an internal cavity search and sung a song which seemed to be entirely comprised of pre-ejaculation sounds. Oh did you miss that episode? That’s because it never happened. Boys are allowed to sing normal songs (even if they are crap – Beiber I’m looking at you), wear clothes and even shock horror, play instruments. Girls can’t. Girls must be naked and sing about what they want boys to do with them. And why is this?

Why it’s because we’re so empowered. Think about it. Some days you think ‘Wow it would be nice to have equal pay with men, to see an equal number of women in the cabinet, perhaps see a woman on a comedy panel show. To not have to pay VAT on tampax.” And then you think again, how could I bemoan these things. I have equal rights, I am empowered, I have the right to dance around like a page 3 girl on acid singing the sound track to a porn film – because I am empowered! I am not appealing to a male tabloid readers idea of a what a woman should be because some how, some how, it has become the norm that women WANT to do this. Female celebrities give interviews about their sex lives, pose in their pants, if they are incredibly empowered they’ll go fully nude. Truly we are equal. Except you don’t see Take That completely naked, on all fours, biting their finger and looking back over their shoulder. The Kaiser Chiefs don’t have to give interviews about what they like in bed. We are treated like second class sexual objects and some how we’ve been convinced it’s a great idea!

Women: grow up. Put your clothes on, get some self respect. Talking graphically about your sex lives doesn’t make you liberated it makes you a whore. And I’m not talking about a sexual whore (do what you like away from the cameras, I really don’t care) it makes you are a media whore. Your records and talent aren’t good enough to make the papers on their own merits so you strip. Perhaps up your game and make it on your own terms (like the boys).

You’re making us go backwards. Girls these days want to be pop stars. Kids of 6 and 7 dance in a way which would make a lap dancer blush because they are copying what they see on TV. The X factor is so called family viewing. Well come on little girl, dance for the boys. After all it’s all you’re good for. Famous women, You have an opportunity. Make it OK to be a woman, a funny, opinionated, intelligent woman. Who is able to compete equally with men. With our trousers on.