Nine Inch Nails

THANK YOU to the lovely Lara and Seth who have given me a ticket for Nine Inch Nails live in London next month as a late birthday pressie. This is just the coolest thing ever.

WOOOOHOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Did I mention I was going to see Nine Inch Nails live?

WOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Did I mention I was going to see Nine Inch Nails live?

WOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Did I mention I was going to see Nine Inch Nails live?

WOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Never seen them, always wanted to and now, Cinders, you shall go to the ball.

Very happy woman today.

Also, I just found out Rammstein are playing up here that week too, so with a bit of luck I'll be on my way to Spain black and blue and deaf and grinning :)

King of the Mingers

Many years ago, a torn-faced witch of a boss of mine looked over the partition at me, and apropos of very little (other than a failed marriage, no discernible dates and two teenage daughters getting more than enough for the three of them) said "You know you'll never find a man strong enough for you, don't you?"

That was something of a slap in the face at half past three on a wet Wednesday afternoon but as I was entirely unsure how to respond, I left it well alone. I did, however, move my chair back a little so I wouldn't get caught in the blast radius when the house was dropped on her.

It's been bothering me since, but not for the fact that to date at least, she's been right.

Anyway, it came to mind for reasons best known to my mis-wired subconscious as I was walking home from the pub last night just before midnight. On a Saturday night. I got confused looks from drunk men (apparently I'm not fat or ugly enough to merit intrusive comment these days) and pitying looks from women all of whom, without exception, were dressed like the worst kind of trashy movie whore.

See, there are those films with tasteful whores (think Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places) and those films with comedy whores (think Crocodile Dundee) or films with real whores (and I'll be damned if I can think of any right now) - but those films that want you to see the seedy side of a city. Hillside Strangler did that quite well last year, although the movie is an offensive piece of crap. Still, the whores did look reasonably authentic. Or you could go look at the girls who populate the roundabout on the highway near my parent's place in Spain.

But it strikes me that the discerning, pissed-up, under-educated, grunting, badly-dressed moron trying to get value for his £15 (and not just a third-rate blow-job behind a skip somewhere) would be hard-pushed to tell the city whores from the city mingers, even on a good day.

You know that only mingers are holidaying on the Costa Brava these days when the lads would rather risk life, limb and hard-on crossing four lanes of motorway traffic to get to a bored whore who will just give them a third-rate blow-job behind a skip. But at least the weather's better, eh?

Anyway, as I walked home through crowds of pregnancy scares waiting to happen, I ruminated on the average woman's total inability to dress herself, although judging by the doorway action, getting undressed isn't quite so much of a problem.

See, I would love to say, hand on heart, that any woman should wear whatever the hell she damn well pleases if it makes her happy. No really. But then I feel just as strongly that it has to be a good idea to dress in a way that accentuates all your strengths and makes you look your absolute best. This rarely extends to lemon yellow ra-ra mini's and strapless white tube dresses nicely set off against corned-beef legs. Which, on a total aside, reminds me of a scary French sausage called anduillette (I think) which is a white bag of lumpy gristle with added multi-coloured mysteriees and when you grill it, it looks like a waterlogged corpse exploding.

The streets last night (and most other nights) were full of women who saw something that looked fantastic on the hanger, bought it, crammed most of their cellulite into most of it, added a pair of canary yellow stiletto's and ventured forth. Looking like scary French sausages.

Oh thank you, uber-minger, for making me feel dead classy.

Last week I saw a hen party staggering their ugly way down Cockburn St. 11 women all wearing the kind of boho-chic that even looks bad on the fashion pages, but amongst them one woman (lucky bitch was over 5'10" if she was an inch) in a very short black simple dress, glossy hair, legs that went on for forever (they were tanned too) and she was seriously striking. She had the kind of body and the kind of walk that would leave men dribbling as she went past. Good on her. I hate her, but good on her anyway. Then she stopped across the road from where I was sitting, bent forward, and lifted the back of her dress, flashing her (doubtless perfect) arse at some guys a block behind them. Then when done, she clapped her hands, squealed and ran around high-fiving her girlfriends. Not quite so classy. Then, just in case they'd forgotten her, she did it all again.

So you wonder….why? Well ok, I wonder why. I have a cleavage you could lose the rescue dog in, never mind the skier, but I never ever get the urge to flash it at anyone. It's hard enough getting undressed in front of one person without giving the world a gander. I'm sure most men would be appreciative, but what would be the point? No, that's not strictly true - what's in it for me? That's a much better question. What the holy crap would be in it for me?

A couple months ago I was in my local with a bunch of people I've known forever, and with them a guy I'd never seen in there before. We are all chat-chat-chatting all night and it's a very pleasant evening. I had on a black zip top and under it a vest that was doing my head in. It's reasonably low cut but gapes in the middle (it has since been stitched shut) so I spent half the night trying to close the gapey bit and was wishing I'd worn something - anything - else.

At some point, the new man said "Have I bought you a drink yet?" I answered no. He said "I'd like to buy you a drink. What are you drinking?" So I told him and he went up to the bar. I went to the bathroom and when I came back he was still at the bar so I went to talk to him while he was waiting to be served. When he had both our drinks he held mine out to me. Before letting me take it, though, he said "Well, you've been flashing your tits at us all night like a whore, so I suppose you've earned this."

I told him where he could stick his drink and went and bought my own. What fucking planet do I live on that that's considered an acceptable thing to say to someone?

The conversation often goes around the intelligent, single women I know (the women who have found someone wonderful are thoroughly envied, trust me) about the fact that if only we were stupid and girly and behaved in thoroughly non-threatening and silly ways, we could attract no end of male attention. But that's missing the point. Male attention is easy to attract. Insultingly easy, most of the time, but it's attracting the attention of someone worthy that's so bloody difficult. Hence my original point, if I had one.

So I'll never find someone strong enough? Ok. I'd rather be on my own than with someone feeble. But strong enough for what? For me? Am I really so scary? Strong as in confident, brave, secure and capable? Is that really so much to expect? Strong enough to be faithful, that would be nice. Strong enough to be the other whole person in a relationship, that would be nice.

But according to at least one wicked witch 'women like me' don't stand a hope in hell.

A friend of mine (infinitely scarier than me - when a mutual friend introduced us he told me he reckoned we'd either be friends for life or kill each other on sight…) met her gorgeous and devoted husband when she drove him home after a meeting. She'd had an appalling day and was in a fearful mood - livid, fuming and resentful of the diversion on the way home. He thought she was scary and wonderful. She could barely acknowledge his presence. He wanted to see her again. She was oblivious. Is this how it has to be?

It can't be that the world is just full of Neanderthals who only want to fuck some pastel-clad screeching minger in a doorway surrounded by spilt chips and vomit.

In any decent scientific experiment that involved as many variables as my love life, there would at least be control. Where is the control, dammit?

There's a wonderful quote in Lanark, which I am loving reading. Lanark encounters a mad Scotsman when seeking refuge from his emotionally volatile wife and newborn son. The man says to him:

"You see, women are different from us. They're seventy five percent water. You can read that in Pavlov."

After a moment, Lanark said "Men are mostly water, too."

"Yes but only seventy percent. The extra five percent makes the difference. Women have notions and feelings like us but they've got tides too, tides that keep floating the bits of a human being together inside them and washing it apart again. They're governed by lunar gravity; you can read that in Newton. How can they follow ordinary notions of decency when they're driven by the moon?"

So that's my excuse. I must be tidal. That would at least explain why the miserable, self-indulgent bits of my grey matter are sloshing back and forth in messy whorls of dead dogfish, opaque glass, blue rope and wooden crates.

Hey! Those geese are honking!

21 June, Summer Solstice - the longest day and the shortest night of the year.

Longest day began as a piece of irony I refused to find funny. I'd had an abysmal night and woke feeling sluggish and surprised at having finally managed to get some sleep. Ignored the day as long as possible then had a bath (never a good sign when the long dark teatime of the soul kicks in before noon). I crashed, woke, crashed, ate, crashed, read and crashed. That helped two hours go by. Then just as I dozed off, a friend called and not only gave me whining privileges but helped to make some of it better (thanks, Al).

After that, I dozed properly, then got dressed and went to meet Lara for a run. We haven't been out for two weeks so I was dreading it, but as it turned out, not only was it a gorgeous evening but we finally managed to complete our first target. That felt pretty damn fine, let me tell you. I even did a lap of honour round a tree at the end of it :)

It's becoming like Twister though. Last time, the move I made was Left Ankle Swollen. Today it seems to be Right Knee Twinge. All very worrying. We both feel ridiculous running around, even though we both don't look it, but as Lara gets spots before her eyes, I begin to wonder if one day I will just hack up a lung :)

She mentioned that Solstice plans were being made, so I pootled off to check my email (the one I was dreading and had spent the day avoiding wasn't there…) but my editor was moaning that I couldn't do the impossible for him (fine, you go do it) and I made it back up the road in time for seven of us to head down to Portobello beach, pick up Mo, get on to the sand and light a fire.

I've just had the most wonderful evening. For a day that started and passed in miserable anticipation, it was glorious that it ended so well. Me, Seth, Lara, Graham, Eireann, Sharon, Alex and Mo ate, drank, talked nonsense, took ninja pictures, made sandy pigs nipples, watched geese honk their happy way overhead and watched the tide come in, change its mind and go all the way back out again.

Some time after Mo left (well after 1am), we saw an illumination flare and, calling the coastguard, discovered they were already out looking for a lost boat. After that, I lay on my blanket and dozed by the fire, hearing intermittent bits of conversation and occasionally just watching the embers flicker and dance to their own orange-blue tune. For quite a while, there was no grief in my head and lying on cool sand, warmed by the fire and listening to the tide sneaking in, it just wasn't possible to be angry or disappointed or harangued or pressured, and that felt really good.

The sun set, the sky went midnight blue for a little while, then it all started to get light again and as we drove away at half past three, the sea was just turning a deep greeny blue, and it was hard to tell where sea stopped and sky started.

We drove up Arthur's Seat, just to see the clouds turn a little pink and the sky get a notch bluer. The city was quiet, the air still warm and entire committee meetings of seagulls were colluding on lawns and Lara said it was so they could learn the new day's dance steps :)

The longest day became a fun evening, a languid night and a peaceful dawn, and I'm not sure I can or want to ask for more than that.

Sunday

What an odd weekend. I spent the week being resentful of having to attend the Art School show on Friday evening, when in fact I was just resentful of being committed to attending. What a freak. Someone please smack me upside the head (whatever that means) the next time I complain about men being commitment-phobic.

The show, however, did little to make me glad I'd attended. I'm not sure how loud you can say this, or how often, until the truly talentless admit defeat and go work for McDonalds, but bland is not ironic, it's just bland. Rubbish all piled up is still just a pile of rubbish, and worse than that, would someone please tell the Situationists that without humour, they are no more than failed wannabe drama students.

That aside, to rescue my mood, I saw a a great architectural remodelling of the concrete abortion that is Appleton Tower, some truly beautiful woodcuts and some limpets that were lit up. I don't know how. Maybe they'd just had great sex.

Afterwards, Ruth and I went to Ecco Vino where we drank Prosecco and Pinot, and ate fantastic fritatta and spiced, yummy salad. My mood improved to the point where I was willing to be outside the house on a Friday night. I went to K Jackson's, got slightly more inebriated and then went dancing. Can there be any sight sadder or funnier than a 35 year old heffer flinging herself about in an unduly enthusiastic manner to 'Footloose'? I fear not. Still, I was in that happy drunk state where I could still walk without crashing into things, and could dance with my eyes shut without falling over, but still felt wrapped in bubble wrap and rather happy in my soul. At least drunk enough not to feel fat, clumsy, undesirable and stupid, which is always a bonus. Thank all the Gods for vodka.

Not sure if it was the booze or the hippo-tranquilising meds for my hayfever (it says non-drowsy, and they're right - but had it said 'non-comatose' I would have had to have a wee word with Trades Descriptions...), but most of Saturday slipped by in a dozy haze. Every time I sat down I slept, so I didn't make it out the house until around 4.30, and even then made the walking dead look agile. First to Filmhouse to do a little work (and when I say little...) and then back to K Jackson's, but not until after I'd been to see SPIDER FOREST which was playing as part of the touring Korean Film Festival. Beautiful movie. People died, they were miserable, heart-broken and damned. Such things often settle my mood.

I made it home, pie in hand, around 1-ish (I think) and conked out, full of redundant, restless anger (for reasons I still haven't fathomed) and had horrible dreams. Again. Every couple of months I seem to spend a couple of weeks being afraid to go to sleep they get so threatening, and this is just the fallout from the most recent episode. I get to scare myself, hate myself, threaten myself, then sit bolt upright and awake, fizzing, until I either pass out or get fractured and frightening sleep. I hate it. What do you do? As a teenager I used to smash my face off the wall until I was properly distracted by real pain instead of the weird shit my subconscious used to dredge up, but the braincells I have left know this is stupid. When I couldn't explain the bruises away any more (my mother was convinced some random boy was hitting me, and the truth seemed even more embarrassing) I used to walk around Glasgow all night, because eventually it would alleviate whatever was going on in the murky smelly stagnant bits of my brain.

Last night, as with so many other nights, I woke up retching. Now there's an attractive image. You fancy me or what? Stressed, exhausted and just fucked off with not being able to shift the mood, I re-read some writing I'm trying to do, decided I was talentless and spent the longest hours of the night wallowing in self-pity, which started to feel ridiculous and over-indulgent by 5 this morning when I finally crashed. I seem to be having adolescence all over again. Lovely.

Still, today is Sunday, and it was a day for me. Still is :) I got up late, late late and made a yummy and healthy lunch. I went for a walk, browsed in Fopp (oh god the money I could spend in there!) then had coffee at Rocco's place on the Mile, watched the world go by, read my book, then transferred to Maxie's and sat on the terrace above Victoria St and read some more. The building opposite their terrace, on the roof, used to have a small glass and wrought iron conservatory that was full of plants with one large reclining chair in the middle. I have long been envious of the owner of that space. How glorious to be in total isolation in the city, on the roof, just the sky to distract you, surrounded by green. Bring a book and a glass of the good stuff, and what more could you want? If the world won't fuck off, then create somewhere where you can fuck off from the world.

It's not there any more. I guess they moved. But what kind of philistine would take it down??

I drank good Sauvignon Blanc, and tried not to hear the minging whores of hen parties screech their ugly way to and from the Grassmarket, on the rare occasion they set blistered foot outside their pink stretch hearses. You can only hope they all die. In pain. Alone. I suppose it's too much to expect them to do it quietly.

I'm reading Lanark at the moment, and although it's shameful I haven't read it before now, I am adoring it. Spending time in Thaw's morose, self-obsessed company this weekend has at last allowed a degree of transference to take place, and I can feel the mood settling.

It's muggy and weird outside, so I am going to go find somewhere else to sit and read, and maybe just maybe, top up the good Sauvignon I had earlier.

Best thing today so far was a huge banner hanging outside Deacon's Close on the Mile. It read "Clairvoyant Gathering". HAHAHAHAHAHA
So why make the banner? These people aren't medium's, they're below-average's if they need the banner. Losers. A bunch of potato-faced wimmin in velour that's only missing the storm pegs, muttering on about your future all the while wondering what happened to theirs.

And on that bilious note, my lovelies, I take my leave of you.

Dragons, finger puppets and high literary ideals

So the pic of Dragon Lake comes from Aerial Postcards which has gorgeous photo's from the Landsat (like this one) and Hubble too. You have to hope it's that shape cos two dragons had a mid-air collision and one went tumbling to earth, crashing to the core, leaving a very clear dragon-shaped hole behind. That would be cool.

I cleared some of my stuff out my friend Eddie's storage facility yesterday. I had forgotten I am the proud owner of a Captain Caveman finger puppet. I also found things like my garlic press, some frighteningly sharp Spanish knives and a ton of films I forgot I owned (soon, an entire Sunday will slide past while I become one with the sofa and watch them all back to back...). I also unearthed about 40 cd's which is a minor-demon-send as I am bored to tears by all my music, and have been entirely reliant on gifts from people who have good taste in music. I've spent a fairly happy day working my way through stuff I haven't heard in a year :)

I read a piece in one of the Sunday's recently by someone furious at the profusion of iPod's. I thought this odd (actually, it was guilt-inducing as I am dying to buy one...or nice equivalent) but the bulk of her case was the fact that if your iPod can hold 4000 songs, then this means you are using music as wallpaper and not actually enjoying it. Is that a weird opinion? I would LOVE to have 4000 songs at my disposal, given that my mood ricochets all over the place, all the damn time. Sometimes I need Rammstein and then by the time I've crossed the street, I need Mozart. And all points inbetween! She also seemed upset by the idea of people being off in a world of their own. I've never figured out why this is a bad thing. Her stated preference, it should be noted, was for a street party in London near Kings Cross which meant from a mile away she could hear I Will Survive. Gimme my own damn world any day :)

My morning started fairly well with a meeting at Mercat, there to discuss the potential for publishing an anthology called Read by Dawn, to showcase not only the mighty talent of the Andrews, Gav and Stef, but also to involve some other famous bods and put out a timely collection of new horror writing which'll hopefully be launched at our 13th Anniversary festival in 2006. Apologies if you are now short of breath, that was a ridiculously long sentence. Anyway, things suddenly seem quite positive and I am a bit excited by the prospect that something that's lived in my head for so long might finally become a reality (note to all the other things that live in my head - don't get your hopes up...)


My film treat of the week has been going to see a restored print of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, a film I'd never seen because I always wanted to see it on the big screen. It's thoroughly dated but a bit fab. And there's the astonishingly beautiful Jimmy Dean looking a little like a young Robert Mitchum from some angles (watch it again, you'll see what I mean).

Dragon Lake, Siberia  

Last Mango in Paris

Ages ago on the Turbulent Soundscape forum, a bunch of bored film fans started trying to outdo each other with the challenge of taking a film, changing one letter only of the title, and coming up with a tagline for the new invented movie. To start with, I list all the ones that other clever sods came up with, then there are mine. Enjoy, and feel free to play :)

The ones I can’t take responsibility for…
Southern Heiress runs off with tramp in GONE WITH THE WINO
Shortage of exotic fruit in the French capital in LAST MANGO IN PARIS
Arctic explorers menaced by a Rasta from space in THE TING
Cricket from the Dark Side in THE UMPIRE STRIKES BACK
1024x768 or 800x600 pixels Mr Anderson? in MATRIX RESOLUTIONS
A philosophical view of the Vietnam War in PLATO ON
Angry obese people in re-inforced roadsters in 2 FAT 2 FURIOUS
What we really think of American police assault units in T.W.A.T.
Premature ejaculation in the back of a stolen car in DONE IN 60 SECONDS
Nordic serial killer re-enacting Milton in SVEN
A man realises his bride is ugly in The WEDDING MINGER
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the synagogue...JEWS
Ms Jolie gets the worst assignment ever in WOMB RAIDER
Deadly martial-arts rodents on the loose! in MORTAL WOMBAT
Obese programmers get hitched in MY BIG FAT GEEK WEDDING
The lead singer of a shitty boy band searches for the evil warlord who killed his parents and enslaved him in RONAN THE BARBARIAN
Every man’s dream date in SEX PIES AND VIDEOTAPE
Clint Eastwood goes fox hunting in the mountains in WHERE BEAGLES DARE
Adventures of an unscrupulous bank manager in HIGHLENDER
Teenage witches express preference for heavily-processed cheese in THE KRAFT
Imotep is released, but can’t work out how to get out of his pyramid in THE DUMMY
A deluded anarchist tries to topple civilisation by jumping out at people from behind walls in FRIGHT CLUB
A hobbit saves the world from the evil queen by rolling around in a muddy puddle for 90 mins in WALLOW
The world gets taken over by the hearing impaired. I said, the world gets taken over by the hearing impaired in DAWN OF THE DEAF
Solve the puzzle-box to summon the PC technician in DELLRAISER
A top-secret military vegetable goes missing in BROKEN MARROW
Michael Jackson finally closes the doors to Neverland in THE LAST BOYS
A business man suddenly finds himself as a pauper struggling for survival in LOST HIGHPAY
A man and his simple-minded friend roam America selling burger ingredients in OF MINCE AND MEN
Idiot goes native with American Indians in DUNCES WITH WOLVES
Noble warriors, on victory, retrain as overly-competitive hairdressers in LEAST OF THE MOHICANS
Competitive but unhygienic animal shows, hillbilly style in BEST IN SOW
Alternative bombing options don’t exactly lead to military supremacy in A FRIDGE TOO FAR
Daniel Day Lewis’ career slips further from his grasp in THE UNBEARABLE SLIGHTNESS OF BEING
Fictionalised history of the inexorable spread of the AIDS virus in GERMS OF ENDEARMENT
The real story of the British race to be the moon in LAST IN SPACE
Timelord gives up saving the planet and pimps out his assistants for better financial gain in DR HO
Porn-alike of classic SF in THE BACK HOLE

And mine…
A mad scientist whose genius leads to a world of bald woodland creatures in FAWNMOWER MAN
The true story behind 'swimming with the fishes’ in THE CODFATHER
The medical condition brought on by wanking over an unconscious Uma Thurman in PULP FRICTION
Livid owner of a shit car decides to get even in MAXI DRIVER
Soldiers, guns and drool in FULL MENTAL JACKET
Russian roulette to find the shaken-up can in THE BEER HUNTER
How far will you go to get your hands on a hidden stash? in NIGHT OF THE MUNTER
A secret cult of out-of-work beach workers fuck with the future in TWELVE DONKEYS
Tom Hanks stars in frankly disgusting porn-alike of crap Stephen King adaptation in THE GREEN MILK
A cute green giant does frankly disgusting things to talking donkeys in SHRIEK
If you drink it, they will come - FIELD OF DRAMS
An obsession with chaps leads to lunchtime duel in THIGH NOON
Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn up the creek, without the proverbial paddle in AFRICAN QUEER
Geordie travesty remake of classic Hitchcock - THE BORDS
Jack Nicholson, bored to tears all winter, annoys the crap out his wife and son in THE WHINING
Johnny Depp, after serious injury, is forced to relax in PILATES OF THE CARRIBEAN
Tom Hanks loses the plot about his fruitless search for a full-bodied Merlot in THE THIN RED WINE
Murdered Japanese girl trapped in Arctic ice crevice returns to wreak vengeance in PINGU
Lovelorn man in Egypt drinks so much he hallucinates in the cinema in THE PURPLE NOSE OF CAIRO
Porn-alike of classic 80s tale of teenage rebellion in GRUMBLEFISH
River-folk start marrying off their children in bulk in SEVERN BRIDES FOR SEVERN BROTHERS
Battle against soulless corporation scales linguistic heights in ROGET AND ME
And some I couldn’t think of strap-lines for….
MINORITY RETORT
GOOD WILL HURTING
APOCALYPSE COW
THE MALTESER FALCON
and AGING BULL

A word about my links

Dead by Dawn, because Dead by Dawn is the only place that horror fans should be at the end of April in any given year.

Filmhouse is the best cinema in Edinburgh, bar none. Please come and enjoy it, but be vewy vewy qwiet during the films. Please. Otherwise my blood pressure will rocket and there will just be a cloud of red mist where I used to be.

The Onion requires no justification whatsoever.

Abandoned Places is the website of Henk van Resbergen who is a Belgian pilot but also a photographer of beautiful derelict industrial sites. Just gorgeous.

Aerial Postcards is like porn for lovers of military aircraft, which is nice if that's what floats your aircraft carrier, but also, it has stunning pictures from Hubble and the Landsat, including one of Dragon Lake in Siberia.

The ninja site someone recommended to me ages ago - just read PumpUP I & II. This stuff still makes me laugh out loud.

And finally the work of the lovely Jennifer Shiman whose bunny remakes are a wonder to behold. She has done bunny justice to: The Shining (has to be seen to be believed), Titanic (eewww naked bunnies!), The Exorcist, Scream, Freddy vs Jason, It's a Wonderful Life, Pulp Fiction, Jaws, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (albeit the remake, shame on you girl!) and Alien...

...and all this with the promise of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Highlander, The Big Chill, the 1953 War of the Worlds, Star Wars, Scarface, Rocky, King Kong and Night of the Living Dead all still to come! Jennifer Shiman rocks.

Sky Ear is possibly the coolest thing. Silly to explain - go see!

Who ate all the peas?

Oh man, could I be any more tired? Last night I dreamt I was awake. For eight hours, I dreamt I was having real difficulty getting to sleep. I tried everything, but just couldn't drift away. Then I woke up. Some mornings, you know the minor demons are high-five'ing each other, the fetid little shits.

I went to see CONSEQUENCES OF LOVE last week. I just wanted to see a movie where nobody died, and given the fragile state of my heart, I really wasn't in the mood for anything that had the words 'epic love story' or 'tragic love triangle' in the synopsis.

CONSEQUENCES was a real delight. My kind of movie. The protagonist is a man who lives in a hotel, and has lived there for eight years. He barely interacts with the other inhabitants (who include a passing sales rep and an aging couple who used to own the place but have fallen on hard times thanks to the husband's gambling addiction). Even the waitress who speaks to him every day is not deemed worthy of a response. Instead he watches the world, occasionally writes in his book, sleeps, walks and indulges his ritualistic weekly heroin fix.

He is so still, that it becomes like a Tati movie watching all the other figures orbit around him. You barely notice the pace pick up, the complications set in, others emotions get the better of him, but as information about his past is revealed, the cornered nature of his present and ultimately doomed nature of his future becomes clear. But this is not a sad film. Melancholy and reflective yes, but not sad.

It is a film about the things you do because they must be done, not because you need external approval (a subject very close to my heart). About the effect you have on people's lives, even when those people are distant to you. About the legacy you leave behind for all time with each interaction. It's such a beautiful film, not just for these reasons, but also because the composition and cinematography are so striking but also delicate - you never feel that any of the story is being crowbarred home - it just seems to unfold as if you were undoing what seemed to be a simple piece of origami that was really complex and impossible to refold.

I also went to see the Javier Bardem flick MONDAYS IN THE SUN when the real star of this film is Luis Tosar (When the Bell Chimed 13, La Comunidad). Four men, unemployed since the shipyard's closure, gather in their friend's bar, the dole office and the inter-island ferry, to debate their future. A story of Spanish men, deprived of their public masculinity and contribution, forced to try to accept their wives' support. It takes the suicide of one of their number to bring some perspective to their individual and collective struggles. A slow movie - there is no resolution, just a burgeoning understanding of a new reality - the laziest comparison I can make is think Full Monty without the laughs, music or nudity.

And tonight Rebel Without a Cause, and soon the new Batman movie and maybe, just maybe, eventually, there will be a horror flick worth getting excited about.

Wouldn't that be nice.

World Tour of the chocolate-producing bits of Europe

On the personal-and-whining front, I am properly exhausted. The kind of exhausted that means sitting on the floor in the morning and crying cos I can't get up, and having showers sitting down, and randomly passing out all the time like some wannabe narcoleptic. All very attractive. Something to do with working 121 hours straight, then going on a stupid stressful road-trip then going into a job that requires getting up at 6am. So I quit.

This week I am mostly sleeping until I wake up. Oh thank you Jesus. And then in a month's time, I am going on holiday for a month. Somewhere so hot, all I will be able to do is lie around and listen to the sound of my brain baking in its own juice. Mmmmmm...holiday.

The World Tour of Europe was all a convoluted way of getting to Cannes. Cannes is madder than a delusional badger. And it's quite horrible, in it's own wee way, but only if you take it seriously.

Good things about Cannes - lusting after pretty boats in the marina, people-watching, French food, being by the ocean...

Bad things about Cannes - absolutely EVERYTHING else.

See, if you have money or a really successful business or quality product to sell, I'm guessing Cannes is a blast. Me, I was there on a cheapie, but still managed to have (exhausting) fun.

There's a Cinema de la Plage, which is just a million deckchairs and a cinema screen, so we went to see Bullitt and Night of the Living Dead, so that was cool. I met George Romero after he introduced his film, which was also very cool. Bizarrely, he looks like JIM BOWEN GONE BAD - they are so alike!

The market in Cannes (which is mostly held in the Palais) involved going around and around and around and around talking to all the distributors I usually deal with by email, saying hello, trying to make connections. Every conversation revolves around, "here, let me give you my card.." which you end up saying so automatically you might as well hand over Mr Bun the Baker for all it means by the end of day three.

But I got a bunch of free movies (seen most of them - utter mince) and met some good people, although mostly outside Le Petit Majestic which is the bar off the Croisette where everybody ends up at some point or another.

One night I went to a party hosted by my friend Loris' company, Minerva. An Italian company, having a party in a marquee on the beach. Smashing. So I go. Hand over my invite, head inside, instantly get free Champers from the cute Italian waiters - so far so good. I find my friends and my host. Sit down to blether. My host is married to a gorgeous woman called Olga from Belarus who is one of those women (think Sex & the City's Charlotte) who looks immaculate, is intelligent, sweet and effortlessly beautiful. I feel like a sweating hippo next to her, even though she's so nice, and go outside onto the sand to sit on one of the loungers and be near the sea, something which always makes me feel good.

It's then I read the blurb and find out that the party is co-sponsored by an Italian Spa Island, hence the Sheherezade tents and masseurs everywhere.

Near me is a futon mattress and a smiling Thai girlie who catches my eye and asks me if I would like a massage. Yes I would. So I take off my shoes and lie down, and for the next 45 minutes I get treated to a fairly glorious massage at her very expert hands. Halfway through this, bits of my insides are beginning to relax to keep up with the outside bits, when some stuff happens. Picture this. I am lying on a mattress on the sand with my feet pointing out to sea. Into the party comes an Italian "starlet" (I use inverted comma's cos she was older than me) and she starts prancing around with her girlfriends, right at my feet. The next bit of kerfuffle is two photographers (I'm not sure if two counts as paparazzi or just her brothers paid to wear ill-fitting tuxedos and pop some bulbs in her general direction) and they stand at the other end of the mattress, right behind me, kicking sand in my hair, and taking piccies of the half-naked wench.

The lovely Thai girl leans in and whispers 'this isn't very relaxing is it?' I agree with her, and she says ok, 'we start over' so I really got one and a half massages, which was sweet of her. But lying there, I thought, if I see this pic in tomorrow's trades, I'll know that three feet below that photo is me, on the beach, with one knee up by my ears, getting sympathy from an over-worked Thai masseuse. Ah, Cannes. What a crock.

Once I was all done there, I went back inside and sat with my friends, but the "starlet" wasn't done. She went into one of the Sheherezade tents (they were really just a roof with the sides rolled up and a bed and a stand full of yummy oils) and lay on the raised bed to get a head massage. Photographers duly followed suit. Trouble is, from where we were sitting, she didn't have quite enough class (or fame, obviously) to keep her legs shut while she was getting pummelled. The kind of view that would put you right off your kebab, trust me. Specially if it was as badly packed as hers.

At that point, a 40 minute walk by the sea back to the apartment seemed like a fine plan, so I left, got an ice-cream cone at the end of the Croisette (fresh coconut sorbet, if you must know) and meandered home under a spectacular moon by a sympathetic ocean and sat on our balcony and watched the waves and did justice to a rather nice bottle of white and read my book. Parties. Ha.

Anyway, beginning of the trip....as I was leaving Edinburgh for London, crossing at some traffic lights, I heard the best conversation:

Says old lady with no dog to young lady with teeny dog-with-head-cone-on
"Ah, he's so sweet...why's he got the cone, then?"
"Well, he had an abcess behind his eye that grew so big it came out the top of his head. Vet says he's lucky it didn't go through his brain...."

It's cruel to laugh, isn't it?

Just checking.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

What fecking use is a flea cone if a rogue abcess has squirreled through your skull??

Anyway. London. I know everyone gets to a point where they are sick of London but it hasn't happened to me yet, and I hope won't for a while. I arrived on the Friday night and after a quick shower, tried to get changed, but discovered that, worryingly, I haven't grown out of my fantastic knack for 'bizarre packing' which means I have a bag full of really interesting stuff but every time I go for something I actually need, it's not there. Grr. After much growling, I finally headed up West to meet my friends at Camden tube where they were flyering for clubs. A bunch of people turned up and some went clubbing, some went to a party, and we ended up in the Dublin Castle on Parkway. Love this bar. We even got a seat, which is kinda unheard of.

The next night was off to the Bricklayer's Arms off Rathbone Place where we got to sit outside which was a bit lovely. My friend Paolo came out, as did Rob Morgan and Duncan Hopper who'd been at the festival and it was very cool to see them under less stressful circumstances. Much beer was drunk (enough to think hanging out in Soho a good idea) and eventually we ended up in Balans till 4am drinking silly cocktails and failing to get food poisoning from their menu. All very good. I am never going to complain about talking nonsense all night with utterly gorgeous men who are also interesting and intelligent company. Kid in a candy store :) The one thing that would have made it perfect would have been my own beautiful boy there too, but he was already pre-booked that weekend.

The night begins to end with a jolly night bus journey home on which nothing untoward happens, sadly. Sigh. I love it when London gets untoward. It finally ends when I slip into Carrie's bed and she flings one sleepy arm over me and we crash out till the sun wakes us up rather later than planned on Saturday.

Pootling round London later that day, I see "Back the Bid" banners everywhere, all of which say 'Make Britain Proud' on them. Britain? Oh yeah. London gets the Olympics, and suddenly all commentary, focus and attention will be split equally across Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England. My arse it will. I say we finally instigate the Stoneybridge Bid. This is the B-side of a rant about the booklet of "British Films of 2004" I was looking at last week, that had a picture of the London Eye on the cover. So that's Britain is it? Anyway, the highlight of my day is finding Mincing Lane :)

After London, I flew to Brussels. I love Brussels. It's not the city that immediately strikes you as being beautiful, but it really is. Also, they make beer and chocolate, so how the hell could you not love them?

In Brussels, my friend Mireille is good enough to come pick me up and she introduces me to her hugely tall rock monster friend Patchouli (seriously!) who is friends with Lemmy and is abandoning us in favour of a trade union party. Just when I think this sounds cool, I find out we have been invited to a Spanish trade union party across town, there to see Mireille's favourite band, PPZ 30 (before you ask, it's a special kind of cement...)

On the way to the gig/party, we pass a shop called (wait for it...) DICK FISH. Hahahahahahaha! I have absolutely no idea what they sell because they are shut, but I dread to think :)

So the gig is incredible - the band are sublime and Mireille and I drink cloudy cider from Asturias (I've had this in Spain and it's bloody lethal) and we dance all night.

The next night I go to meet and talk about horror movies with my friend Thibaut who works on the Brussels International. He is very sweet and seems very quiet but is one of those wonderful people who is just full of surprises. He was all loved up because his new girlfriend turned up at the Bal des Vampires (the Brussels Horror Fest closing party) dressed as Carrie, completely drenched in blood :) A very hairy-and-scary Antonio joined us, and despite first impressions he turned out to be interesting company (owns a mobile recording unit, spends most of his time in West Africa blah blah blah).

Anyway, we go to continue my odyssey of alphabetically conquering all Belgian beers and I have a Kwak. I know this sounds like some kind of deeply unfortunate toilet accident (right up there with "I've quiched myself..." is "I've Kwaked myself..." but actually it's a ludicrous tube glass in a wooden frame and when you are mostly finished the beer and down to just the bubble at the base of the glass, it goes KWAK!!!! every time you take a glug. Well, it made me smile :)

We sit outside at the foot of a gorgeous church until 1am and eat well and drink well, and at some point the conversation turns to dumb pets and horrid childhood-pet accidents. I mentioned that my mum used to have (what until now I thought was) the world's dumbest dalmation, because it could get lost in its own turning circle, but Thibaut decides to share a story that when he was 14 and they lived on the second floor and had a dalmation, his dumb dog one day sees a bird on the ledge of an open window, and, fancying his chances, decides to take the bird out, so runs across the room and launches itself at the bird which promptly flies away, and so poor spotty dog plummets two floors to its untimely (and seriously dim) death.

Now obviously this isn't funny, not least for the dog (not to mention any passers by who may have been a tad upset to look up and see a slightly surprised dalmation hurtling their way) but that doesn't explain why we were helpless when he told us.

When we'd recovered a little, I asked him if he wasn't totally scarred by the whole thing, and his punchline was that, well, he didn't really like the dog anyway.

Those wacky Belgians.

After that we headed into the city and sat outside another bar and got acquainted with yet more beer until around 3 when I was dead on my feet. Thibaut walked me to a cab rank and I went home, managing somehow to have a reasonably complex conversation with the driver, in French, all the way. Now, Mireille has a gorgeous 13 year old Alsatian called Mirti who likes to sleep sprawled across the very dark and very narrow hall. I discover she likes to sleep like this when I trip over her and smack into a wardrobe. Very classy. Mirti just snuffles and turns over. Me, I go upstairs to do the cold compress thing on my face, given that I didn't fancy sporting a black eye for the remainder of the trip, but I needn't have worried - so many late nights I just look like the poster-child for an advanced smack addiction anyway. Only not as thin. So only from the nose up.

In the morning we went to the Brussels festival office to say to everyone and they fed us salami and beer and jaffa cakes for lunch. Mmmmm. Blech.

The train to Amsterdam was a blast, not least cos I splashed out an extra ten Euros and travelled first class and lay across huge, soft leather armchairs in an empty compartment and once settled, it was red wine and chocolate-coated Belgian waffles all the way to the 'Dam.

My friend Jan lives in a typical Dutch house, but even he admits that their staircase is a little terrifying. It's not so much terrifying as fecking vertical. The steps are about four inches deep and there's three flights. Kinda fun with luggage. Getting it back down again is gonna be exciting. In the same way as jumping off a cliff onto a spike is exciting...

Still, the sun was shining and we sat by an open window above a canal, drank good red wine and blethered until finally heading out to a Turkish place round the corner with Jan and Donna and Bart, one of Jan's colleagues I know, and we ate SO well. Yu-hum. Just the yummiest hummous in the world, good Cacik, the tenderest lamb, sweet Turkish bread and spiced veggies. And two more bottles of good red wine. I love my life :) Then everyone else bailed and Bart and I went for a couple more pints and a walk through bits of the red light. The last time I saw Bart was during Sitges last December so it was really lovely to catch up and be sympathetic to tales of someone else's lovelife.

I finally made it home a little after 2am (the scary steps after much wine are enough to induce religious fervour in anyone, trust me) and conked out on the air mattress, only occasionally being interrupted by Boris the cat who decided to get all territorial with the leopard-print duvet cover.

Today is Memorial Day here, and I am off to the Jewish Museum. I really love being in this gorgeous city and indulging my needs to just walk about and go see stuff. Now there are easyjet flights directly from Edinburgh, it just makes me want to come back and spend a ton more time here.

Tonight Jan's presenting a screeninig of DARK HOURS at the Uni so I'm going to that, and Alan's just told me that there's a ska gig tonight cos THE TOASTERS are playing at 1am, so I may have to go to a gig (I never made it, sadly, but next time.)

Tomorrow is Liberation Day, so most things are shut but the entire city will be celebrating, so I have no idea what that entails but I'm sure it will be fun. Truthfully I'm pleased that I have a late flight to Geneva because it means I still have two whole days here, and that means I can just walk until I get lost and find random things. I really love to travel alone.

So. The Jewish Historical Museum. This bit isn't going to be funny for a paragraph or two, so skip to the end if you want the bit about Snurks.

The Jewish Historical Museum is actually four synagogues together, the earliest dating back to the mid 1600's. The museum has displays of all the acoutrements of Jewish life, from daily living to major ceremonial shenanigans and it was all really lovely to have some of the stuff I do automatically explained in terms that I understand, i.e. not crippled with passive-aggressive manipulation and guilt :)

It was a genuinely odd experience partly because I wasn't sure what I wanted out of it, but also because it drew a really straight emotional line for me to certain aspects of how I grew up and actually allowed me to appreciate them in an entirely new light. No major religious conversion, but a clearer understanding of why particular objects and rituals were so important to my parents to continue to use or to host when the only explanation you get as a kid is 'because I said so' which resides in the elegant Excuses Hall of the Chocolate Teapot Museum of Usefulness.

And there were girls in their early 20's davenning (the wobbly prayer thing where people do that action like the bobbing chicken lighter). I've never seen girls davenning. It doesn't happen. It felt so odd I might as well have caught them masturbating I was at such a loss of what to do. I mean, obviously it's good...why the hell shouldn't women daven?

Listening to my friendly audio-guide handset, it said I should stand on the Bimah for the next instalment. Now, the Bimah is the central platform in the synagogue which faces the Ark. Only men are allowed there - that's been a given since I was old enough to know I was being excluded. I couldn't do it. I just sat there, frozen, thinking "I can't go on the Bimah, I'm a girl". And you can probably fill in the blanks of how that left me feeling. I did eventually go up, but it felt wrong and disrespectful and I kept expecting someone to do that Bodysnatchers point-and-scream until I ran away. A really odd experience.

There was also an extensive exhibition of Yevgeny Khaldei's photographs. He was a contemporary of Capa's I think, and was the official Russian war photographer during WWII. His photo's included loads from the Nuremberg Trials in '46, the Reichstag, Berlin as it fell in '45 and so many others. An extraordinary selection of pics and some deeply distressing - images you can't possibly prepare for.

It was a good day. Somehow it's a really positive experience to see close-up an existence that is so much more extreme than anything you are likely to have to deal with, and therefore you are left feeling slightly ashamed of the minor inconveniences you whinge about, how privileged you are, and who had to suffer for you to be so privileged. I went and sat by the water and was glad that I have my freedom, my health, my family and my beautiful and valued friends. I don't know what I did right to get these friends, but it's a constant delight to me that good people find room in their lives for me. So there.

I wasn't remotely in the mood for company before the screening so I called Jan, told him where I was and asked where a non-tourist should go to eat. He recommended Jaare which is over a canal and is really lovely. It's huge, and in one part of the ground floor they have long tables - five by two, if you know what I mean - all joined up, with reading lights right down the centre and a huge armchair at each one. The tables are very wide, and designed specifically so you can spread your Sunday papers over them and read while you have brunch. How civilised is that?! Anyway, without thinking about it, I had smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches (how very Yiddish of me) and a couple of Belgian beers and was eventually all fired up to go to a movie.

Before the film there was 2 minutes of silence across Holland, which of course we observed, and then a screening of Dark Hours which I love.

The next day was Liberation Day and the entire city was on holiday. The streets were crazy-busy, there were open-air gigs everywhere, there were huge things happening that night and for most of the day there is little to do but walk around, drink a beer and people-watch, which I did from the canal cos I figured I was due a canal cruise.

I went walking in the morning, though, and got deliberately lost to see where I would end up. I found the Snurk Klinik!! Huzzar for Snurks!! I don't know what Snurks are, or how you get Snurk or if it's infectious or even dangerous but there didn't seem to be an emergency room there so maybe Snurk can be treated at home with just a bit of string, some cheese, a hot towel and plenty of bed rest...

It did make me want to start a legal practice, though, just so I can call it DickFish & Snurk, Lawyers to the Challenged :)

After that, I went to Vondelpark to the Film Museum, then fed some ducks and went and sat on the balcony and drank good coffee and watched the world go by. Ducks are good (particularly with garlic, Boom! Boom!) but they are also kinda snooty (maybe I had the wrong kind of bread...)

After that I meandered through the park to see some of the gigs and had a hotdog. With much mustard (five kinds!) and I only recognised three, the other two remain an intriguing but slightly worrying mystery :) I can feel the peripheral bits of my eyes still leaking as some of it was so strong but so good! Clears the tubes and all that.

Jan has a couple of friends at UIP (the biggest film distributor on the planet) who we went for curry with, and even though I thought it would be film talk all the way, it was actually much more interesting and much more fun! I was going to surf and see what horror movies they've put out in the last couple years so I could manage not to put my foot in it by talking about how crap all the remakes and studio pics are, then I thought bugger it, I do think most of the remakes and studio pics are unadulterated mince, so let's just have that conversation :) Note to self, drink less wine than everyone else...

After that, I flew to Geneva. On the first night, we spent the evening in a bar called Scandale with four mad lasses from Bristol who were there visiting one of Ol's friends. Much fun. Much beer. Much chat.

We came home around 2 and Ol accepted a backgammon rematch challenge having lost to my mighty backgammon supremacy earlier in the day :) We played a couple games, had a couple more beers, then sat and talked reasonably interesting nonsense until nearly 6 in the morning. Although it's completely glorious having Ol back in my life and to watch this friendship get back on track after a decade of no communication, it's not something we'd actually discussed, so we have now, and it was lovely. His girlfriend is a sweetheart too.

The next day we went exploring Geneva, and went for fondue for lunch. Dear god that's so much cheese! We drank nice Pinot and ate all the cheese in the world. My arteries still feel like they're full of cheese. I didn't eat for the rest of the day (couldn't even manage chocolate, that's how bad it was) and then most of the next day too. For a cheese-holic, I was kinda surprised that it was three days till I could eat cheese again. Don't get me wrong, it was a quantity problem, not quality :)

So...the next day we went to Gruyeres. The sun was blazing and we drove for an hour and a half there to visit both the H R Giger Museum and the castle. Obviously Gruyeres is known for cheese. And when I say cheese I mean cheese on everything, including the soup, salad and desserts. After the fondue adventure, I had had enough cheese to last me a year, so opted for cheese-free soup and salad (a rarity!) as we sat in the sun for lunch.

Now, most countries you go to don't look anything like the postcards but Switzerland is different. The museum was ok (more impressive was the Alien-themed bar and I used Ol's digi camera to take some pics that he'll email to me next week and I can send them to you if you would like to see the coolest bar stools imaginable....). Anyway, it was really the castle that blew me away. Begun building in the 11th century, it is beautiful, grand and impressive. The Alpine foothills all around were so green, and the distant clouds cleared a little so the Alps were visible. All the green fields are infused with yellow from dandelions and other little yellow flowers and it just looks too pretty to be true. There was no wind, just this lush valley that extended for miles and blue sky and a glorious castle and I sat on the ramparts and watched the valley do absolutely nothing for quite a long time. Yes it's beautiful, but it's also where John Howe was inspired by the same view, amongst many others, when he did the conceptual artwork for Pete Jackson for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The drive back was on the motorway high above Lake Geneva and as the sun came off its zenith, Mont Blanc was illuminated and the sun just bounced off the still water and the Alps and it was nothing short of breathtaking. The air here is really clean, it's wide open, green and unbelievably chill and beautiful.

Fun thing though - on the way home we passed by a bunch of spiral concrete staircases laid out on their backs and sides on the grass by the side of the road - the factory was a little way behind - but it just looked like Escher got bored trying to find all the edges in his jigsaw and gave up and went home in a huff.

I went shopping for Swiss chocolate (not the worst time in the world) and tried Swiss beer which is a bit rubbish, but they are excused for their obsession for all things dairy and sweet. I'm incessantly listening to Goldie Looking Chain and my birthday cd for sanity at every available minute, and have remembered all kinds of odd French words and even learnt a new one. Sadly, it's not even remotely rude.

And then to Cannes.

Sneaky web-gags for the deserving surfer...

On the Ryanair website recently. God, I swear one day I will get to travel on an airline that doesn't have the fecking phone number printed on the side of the plane. Anyway, their website was gloating about having opened up a new Eastern European route and it said "60 Years after VE Day, Ryanair Liberates Poland"

Jesus Christ, that's a tad tactless isn't it?

Anyway, I printed it off to prove it, cos they'll probably have to take it down sooner or later. It's even better than the MSN home page one a few years ago that had a photo of a 50 year old mom in a pink sweater, wearing some jewellery, with the caption, "Why not give your mother a pearl necklace for Mother's Day this year? Loved that one. Got hard copy of that, too.

All the wrong body fluids in all the wrong places. In Wales.

I went to Wales. That was nice, in a weird way. I have friends there who took me to what is the award-winning Best Fish 'n Chip place in Wales. God it was good. My centre of gravity had shifted so much after the main course I couldn't fit in pudding. Although I ate it, obviously. Skip pudding? Are you mental?

Also, I was in the company of their hyper-active 4 year old who had a new Thunderbirds toy and was full of sugar and chips. A frightening combination. Afterwards he ran alongside the harbour and I figured, kid, if you fall in, I'd sink faster than John Prescott in a vat of gravy if I have to get you out, so we're both gonna die. Kid did not fall in the water. Huzzar's all round, I feel.

Anyway, that night, because he's been good, he gets to watch one of his video's so he and I settle in front of the telly to watch Pinocchio. Only it's not a good version of Pinocchio, it's a weird one with Genevieve Bujold and Martin Landau and Udo Kier and John Sessions (?!) and millions of other real actors in it but 4 year old is happy, and there's something really nice about being curled up on the floor with a contented child you didn't have to give birth to, watching kids movies and eating sweeties.

At some point, kid gets bored and starts crawling round me on all fours pretending to be a puppy, which is cute. He keeps putting his nose on me, then going off for another crawl. He puts his nose on my foot, and I say 'kid, are you wiping your nose on me?' thinking we can have a laugh about the fact that he's not. Only, he lifts his head up, grins and crawls away, and there, on my sock, right on the bridge of my foot, is a HUGE wet stain. SWEET JESUS ALMIGHTY.YOU WIPED YOUR NOSE ON ME??!!

I am disgusted. That is seriously manky behaviour. Small child is
laughing.

Then I think.this is all fucked up. I am 35 years old and some very
attractive men have deposited body fluids on bits of me, often in a far messier and more random fashion than this small boy, so why am I so disgusted? God knows. I think basically because there was nothing in it for me. Also, deposit of body fluids is usually followed by two of you in a shower, getting all hot and wet and clean and grinning madly cos you know the minute you are done washing each other you will get out and go do it all again.

Before the snot incident, much, much earlier in the day, I'd gone for a run down to the beach and then walked along (not so much a beach, more a major collection of rocks) where I'd found lots and lots of dead dogfish, in various states - one of them complete. They're really beautiful little teeny sharks, but it is the kind of shoreline where you keep expecting to see a dismembered hand sticking up between the stones. And yes, I do watch
too many horror movies, but I swear even if you'd spent your life never watching any, you'd still feel the same way.

Oh and on the way back to the rail station on the Sunday, we got stuck in traffic behind a van from The Animalarium. MADE UP WORD!! Isn't that just a farm? Or a zoo? Animalarium indeed.

So that was Wales.

I came back up to London and - due to some deeply bizarre boy news - I was due major girl sympathy for getting the emotional equivalent of being twatted in the face by a big frying pan so my gorgeous friend Carrie phoned out for curry and we vegged in front of half hour BBC comedy and stuffed tikka and tarka dhal down our necks, washed down with particularly good Pinot Grigio. Yay for us.

I managed to fit in some meetings on the Monday and then headed North again.

Now, despite the fact that I have written to complain to both companies, I just have to name and shame them here.

Virgin, you are the shittest rail 'service' I have ever been on. I pulled down the tray table so I could eat my lunch, only to find it covered in ants waged in what seemed a major territorial battle with a couple of big fat earwigs. Blech. No lunch for me. Moved seat, felt all itchy for the rest of the journey. And GNER, you run a close shit second. Both companies had out-of-order Switch machines, one company had a faulty tea-urn and the other ran out of coffee (eeeeekkk!!). They both ran over two hours late. One couldn't switch the heating on, the other couldn't switch it off. On one train, there was blood smeared across the back of the seat in front. And trust me, there is good reason why the Birmingham-to-Aberystwyth train is referred to locally as "The Vomit Comet". And all this in four days. It's bad enough travelling with the great unwashed (does anyone really need to drink Carling Black Label at 10am??) but to get treated like so much cattle all the while is just rubbish. Mooooooo! You utter bunch of BASTARDS.

If you don't stop Googling, you'll go blind...

I can hear the neds going past the window, and that will do as reason enough for not going out on the weekend anyway although I am also broke, so have decided to do some work. This, clearly, isn't work, but I am easily distracted.

I hate being broke. When the hell is some kindly passing eccentric rich idiot going to just *give* me some bloody money so I can have a life? Oh, and the first person to tell me you don't need money to have a life is getting a fork in the head. Yes you fucking do. Anyway, I'm not just blogging to rant about being skint. No, really. Well, not just that.

See, this work I'm not doing took the form of me trying to write a pitch for a publisher, so thought I'd do a little vague Googling for "horror anthology" and although it returned something like 31,000 responses on Amazon (ah Amazon, you are vaguer than a fucking over-medicated, upside-down octegenarian, aren't you?), I was much amused then much unsettled to discover that only about three returns were actually anything to do with horror stories as you'd expect them to be (ie, vampires, zombies, people growing second heads, giving birth to bald sloths, that kind of thing) and the rest were for books about governmental conspiracy in the US.

Then it occurred to me (though the appalling thing about being on a bloody dial-up at home is that I can never face doing this) that maybe if you did a search for - oh, I don't know - "perfect chocolate chip cookie recipes" or "puppies" or "novelty butt plugs", you probably get just as many returns for books about governmental conspiracy in the US. Which I think is a whole book in it's own right. Sigh. There's yet another book I'm not writing.

Anyway, the point of this drivel, is that even five vodka's in, I found myself, mid-Google, in a state of bewildered shock (in part due to the vodka, granted, but not entirely) because in the top twenty was a book called (and god, I wish I'd made this up) "A Short History of Tractors in the Ukraine".

How short? Who's to say that tractors aren't the main form of currency in the Ukraine? Maybe the tractor industry secretly sustained the Ukraine for decades? Maybe they are being melted down and reshaped into marital aids. Maybe they go for a bomb on eBay. Hang on, I've just written the word bomb. Will men with no necks turn up at my door? Will the CIA suddenly hear the-machine-that-goes-ping go into overdrive? Who knows. Hang on..bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb. That's better. Anyway, I am almost tempted to buy the tractors book. Along with 'A Short History of
Screaming' and also maybe the softback version of 'How To Give Up Buying Self-Help Books".

Has anyone seen the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon where Calvin tells Hobbes that he has "decided to verb words to see what it sounds like."? He ends up by deciding that "verbing words is weird". It is, tiny wise 6 year old, it is indeed. But I've done it here so no forgiveness for me. I've Googled, texted and blogged. You can't do that with a PDA, can you? "Oh yah, I palmed that". See, I think that means something else entirely :)