Tales from my handbag

I was on my way to post a letter when my hitherto taciturn neighbour – a swarthy stoner with a rectangular head and sporadic stubble – beckons me over the road. Him: ‘Can I have a quick word?’ Me: (thinking, have I rammed his scooter during one of my  bish, bash, bosh parking manoevres, or maybe I’ve inadvertently stolen one of his recycling boxes?) No, nothing so prosaic…..’What do women want from men?’ he demands, his swarthy brows knitting as he draws heavily on his Camberwell Carrot. So deep, so meaningful, and so utterly weird. I mutter something about ‘understanding’ and ‘being listened to’ and, thinking about my rotten compost bin and toilet that jerks alarmingly to one side when an arse descends on it, throw in ‘most of us appreciate an occasional burst of DIY too’. As I’m musing on all the other things women want from men, like the ability to fight off a bear and an innate understanding of what’s good and bad in the underpant department, Oddbod mumbles something about a pizza, straddles his scooter and buggers off.  Later on that day I have two accidents; firstly, a new shop at the bottom of my road causes me to fall off my bike. I’m casually peddling along the pavement when I catch a glimpse of a baby in a bell jar. In a shopping street normally populated by Cuban hairdressers and Nigerian Mini-Marts, this is a strange sight indeed. I do a double take and lose my balance, falling off my bike, whereupon the shop owner invites me into his freakish emporium for a rummage. The shop specialises in ‘roadkill couture’ and Victorian antiquities and I put on a good show, marvelling at the Zebra’s head on the wall but really, I don’t feel that a set of stuffed spiders or a pair of mahogany calipers are going to add anything to my life so I make my excuses and leave. Later on that night I scald my hand on a hot saucepan and now have a large suppurating blister on my palm. I take much advice on whether water blisters should be burst or not but decide to operate on myself with a large darning needle. I am now leaking plasma left, right and centre.

I have a few housekeeping issues to sort out following December’s climatic rumpus. First of all, I am without a telly; my aerial has become bent – I can get CBeebies and occasional blasts of Tomasz Schafernaker but precious little else. I have also lost yet another fence panel. Is this God’s way of trying to tell me to grow a bush? Furthermore, I am also experiencing tragedy in the window and door department; my back door and two of my windows are jammed. I have been yanking vigorously but to no avail. I am currently working out how I can escape during a conflagration through a window that measures 1′ by 3′. Failing that, I reckon I can just about get through my small dog flap if I put on a pair of Spanx and am prepared to dislocate my shoulders. Next on the diy agenda is building a container for my collection of horse shit on the allotment. I have accumulated plenty of discarded pallets from nearby skips in the hope that a man will pop by and offer to turn them into a couple of bins. Instead, I get a young man at the door dressed in knickerbockers and a ruffled shirt who has spied said pallets down my back passage and wants to relieve me of them. Despite his Dickensian proclivities, and a little repulsed by his audacity, I say ‘no thank you – go and raid your own skip Pip’.

We all need a mini-break from time to time so when Friend X suggested we get away from this crazy world we call life, I jumped at the chance. We slung a toothbrush and a couple of pairs of pants into a bag and headed off to deepest, darkest West Sussex – Cocking to be precise. En route to our weekend idyll, we passed by Cowdray Castle where there were bikes for hire. ‘Let’s go on a bicycle adventure’ I gleefully suggested to Friend X, who, it had to be said, was ill-prepared for anything rustic and was wearing furry snowboots and a Prada poncho. Ooh, it was a mucky ride, taking us alongside gurgling streams and through woods festooned with carpets of leaves and oceans of black, treacley mud which kept flicking into our face and hair. We also got gobfulls of the local insect life as we thundered, legs and mouths akimbo, down the narrow country lanes. 20 minutes into our ride at a crossroads, we suddenly came upon a cluster of be-wellingtoned men casually leaning against their 4x4s gazing expectantly at the field opposite. Friend X had swallowed a bluebottle and was choking to death so we had to stop and while I was doing the Heimlich manoeuvre, I took the opportunity to ask a man with a big nose what he was doing there. Turns out they’d come to watch the hunt. Somehow, very quickly, the conversation turned to gay sex. Our Nigel Havers look-alike was both a complete homophobe; ‘well, it’s not bloody natural is it?’ and a misogynist; ‘no, I’m not married – done it twice but it takes too long to break them in and too much dosh to get rid of them’. We sympathised in a patronising manner and cycled off again only to get completely bloody lost. By now, Friend X was complaining of shooting pains in her buttocks so I suggested we ignore all KEEP OUT, PRIVATE signs and cut across country. This involved much throwing of bikes over hedges and hiding behind trees lest we get shouted at by men in tweed. We even ran into Nigel Havers again; ‘hello you two old bags’ he gaily called out as we wizzed by him walking up a huge gravel drive to a house that Friend X said had featured in Atonement. His casual insult put me in mind of the time me and a friend ran naked around a croquet lawn at a wedding, only to find out later we’d been spied by two estate workers who referred to us as ‘screechy and scrawny’. Anyway, eventually, as the fag end of day was stubbing itself out, we arrived dirty and a bit puffed back at the cycle shop. The next day, we decided to go on a ramble to Fittingworth Wood. Here, we ran into the local ramblers, a septogenarian group of mostly men who circled us like thirsty vampires. They were very keen to get us onboard as members (a snip at only £4 a year, although that didn’t include rambling holidays, one wrinkly old man with no front teeth was keen to point out). Did we want to join them on their 10 miler? Friend X didn’t think her buttocks were up to it so we politely declined then proceeded to get lost yet again. As we were trying to work out how to get out of the wood, we ran into a nob on a horse who, I fear, thought he was in an episode of Robin Hood. ‘Hop on Maid Marion’, he cheerily cried, flicking his switch at me. Rural folk are not my milieu, I officially now concur.

Last weekend was White Night in Brighton. What that, I hear you ask. Well, I’m not sure because this year, like last year, I was there but not there, if you get my drift; the action was strangely elusive. Early evening I’d sauntered up to Kemp Town to hear a man warbling away on an organ in a glorified garage. This being Brighton, I was drinking Bishop’s Finger out of a Clarice Cliff teacup and trying not to rub up against a sink full of someone’s dirty dinner plates. Warble over, I went down town to check out the bohemian action. First off, I passed through the Old Steine where a couple of flappers were holding a Charleston dance class in a big top. On New Road, a woman/man/bit of both was singing Dolly Parton tunes to a sozzled mob from a small balconette while in a church on West Street, they were holding life drawing classes in the vestry – apples or tits, there was a choice. I headed for the Pavilion Gardens where I joined a queue for five minutes for I know not what. Then I headed for Fabrica where I’d heard there was going to be a bit of shouting but when I got there the shouting had stopped or quite possibly hadn’t started. Next was the Dome which was thronged with all manner of costumed folk: zombies and nymphomaniacs were favourite and in the ladies toilet, someone (probably the King Kong I’d seen at the bar) had ripped a toilet bowl off its moorings causing quite a flood. This, I felt, was more in keeping with the likes of the Stanmer Arms (famous for the night a man had his ear bitten off because he’d looked at someone funny). On the way home, I didn’t trip on a coke can and sprain my ankle like last year but I was glad to get in and have a nice cup of tea.

The night after the coffee cup reading, I went on an adventure in a tank. Our group was mostly German but for some light relief, there was also an odd Japanese woman who spent the whole day eating dried fish on the back seat. We were heading to Thorsmork, scene of the volcanic eruption that blighted the airline industry early last year. On the way, we passed by an aluminium factory, an ‘Elf Church’, and a town full of greenhouses. With the Icelandic diet full of stuff like shark, sheep heads and fish balls, apparently, they go ga-ga for exotic fruits. Yes, this was banana city. Anyway, the town, our trusty guide told us, is built on a very thin crust of earth which can make gardening a bit of a precarious business. No double digging here then! In fact, one family famously had a geyser explode in their front room one Friday night while they were watching Deal or no Deal. Moving on to the volcano, we collected a plastic bag of volcanic ash, went to the toilet and got soaking wet trying to cross a glacial stream. Oh how we laughed as we stumbled across volcanic boulders, leaping from one rock to another and occasionally losing our balance and toppling into the raging torrents of water, right up to our knees, soaking right through our two pairs of trousers, special rambling socks and new leather boots. Gggrrrrr! At the end of the trip, back at Friend A’s, I had a quick sulphorous shower then it was onto the ladies-only ecstatic dance class. With Moby on the sound system and the honk of incense in the air, we twizzled, swooned and skipped our way barefoot around the room. There was a bit of ‘smudging’ – although that had to stop when one lady singed her snood – and at one point we all had a group hug. I found this a little claustrophobic as I was on the inside and had a very hefty lady called Stella who was giving me way too much love from behind and pressing me into Olin’s quite frankly, dangerous breasts. Of course, my other problem was wind – what with all that jumping up and down on my eggs and cold meat breakfast, I had terrible difficulty holding in my gases. Finally, the ecstasy reached a climax and we sat around in a circle, massaging each other’s knobbly bits. And so, with my chakras wide open and positively tingling, it was time to get pissed. We headed down to the local pub, a cavernous working men’s club style gaff rammed to the gills with one-armed bandits and pool tables. Sadly, they were short on punters, save for three be-hooded odd-bods who were sat at the bar, huddled over their pints, watching a documentary about polar bears on the bar’s big screen. In the ad break, one of them staggered over, slipped me some Icelandic blarney and kissed the top of my head. Was this my coffee-cup hero? God help me.

On my second night in Reykjavik, I had a choice of dinner – sheep’s head hot pot or fish balls. I’d seen the sheep in the supermarket and they didn’t say ‘eat me’ so I went with the balls. After dinner, we headed down to the local geothermal pool for a spot of hot tubbing. De rigeur in Iceland is a naked, and very thorough shower before you get anywhere near the water. Then, when all your bits are nicely warm and tingly, you slide into your cozzie and run barefoot and dripping outside into the dark, dank Icelandic night and flap around like a headless (and featherless) chicken looking for some sulphorous bubbles on which to park your frozen derriere. I simmered gently for a while in one tub then slipped into the adjacent tub  which was coming up to a rolling boil. It got a bit intense so I went and petted myself in the pool then nipped into the sauna but, as you’d expect, there were a lot of Viking types lying around on sun loungers with flannels over their dangly bits so I called it a night. The next evening I was invited to a Buddhist meeting at a nice little bungalow in the burbs. We did a bit of omming, lots of hugging, then had some nibbly cheese crackers. After that, by way of a spiritual finale, I had my coffee cup read. Apparently, I’m going to meet a 38 year old Icelandic hunk who won’t like me much for the first three weeks then will become like a limpet and never let me go. I am still waiting for this to occur….

On my first night in Reykjavik, I was treated to a celestial smorgasbord. We’d popped over to a nearby island to see Yoko Ono turn on the Imagine Peace Tower – a fabulous light installation that’s lit every year to commemorate John Lennon’s birthday. I was mingling at the back of the Reykjavik Ladies’ Choir and trying not to fall: a. over the cliff and b. into a big hole that led to the electrical nerve centre under the marble peace statue. This being not the UK, there were no fences, no keep back signs and no big dayglo bruisers, smoking ‘tabs’ and looking like they’d rather be in the pub than protecting the public from electric shocks and drowning. No, this was casual; this was the Icelandic way. Anyway, the choir had just finished a some lovely tra-la-la peace and love ditty when all of a sudden, up popped Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon. Yoko was wearing a jaunty peak cap while Sean had on a dwarfish top hat. Yoko read a little poem, someone shouted ‘I love you Yoko’ (not me) and then we all sang ‘Give peace a chance’ although, of course, no-one knew the words to the verses so we blah blah blahhed a bit and then Yoko flicked the switch and a column of bright white light came on stretching high up into the clouds. Then, out of the crowds I spied a hulking, Viking brute of a man. Yes, this was the Mayor of Reykjavik, a former comedic actor who I’d seen on BBC4 in a comedy about a petrol station. I waved but sadly, he didn’t see me as it was pitch black and I was wearing a balaclava. As we chugged back to the mainland, up in the sky, the Northern Lights came out to dazzle us. Oh how we ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ – yes, they do ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ in Icelandic too. The next day, I was hanging around the Civic Hall, as you do, when all of a sudden, who should pop up but the Mayor. This time, there was no getting away for him. I gushed, as per, and then we caressed and Friend A took a pic. Later on, the lady at the information desk said Kofi Annan was in town too – but sadly for me, had gone off for a geo-thermal soak at the Blue Lagoon.

Last weekend I had a sock incident in the Brecon Beacons. I was staying in Ponty Pandy’s only public house complete with bunkhouse attachment, stale nibbles and porcine landlord with pudding basin hair. Now I love a ramble, involving, as it usually does, a leisurely pace, a hot beverage with a Pppppppenguin and, if I’m lucky a wee in a bush.  However, this ramble was a 20 mile Challenge in the company of a bunch of seriously dull council employees. We had a trading standards officer, a couple of widget counters and a man who did something in leisure centres – think Gordon Brittas in waterproof trousers. The day didn’t get off to a good start – the pub had no muesli, no stewed prunes, not even any Rice Crispies. It was a Welsh-all-in or nothing, so I had a slaver of black pudding on a slice of 5050 (that’s brown bread that’s been bleached white but doesn’t taste of either) then it was check you’ve got your whistle, your survival bag and your sandwiches – more slices of pig on 5050 – and we were off. From one rain-sodden tussock to another we leapt whereupon I discovered my waterproof boots weren’t waterproof at all. We then chucked up the hugely steep and perilous Pen Y Fan. En route, we passed a woman with a handbag and a shawl, and, most peculiarly, a man with strange rubber shoes with individual toes in them who’d lost the plastic end of his walking pole and had walked all the way down to the bottom to find it, saving himself, oh I’d say about 50p. Meanwhile, the council boys, fuelled by their morning sausage, had chased each other to the top and were now eating bananas and laughing like drains at the impossibly named adjacent peak of Fan Y Big. The view was lovely but on the way down, my ultra chunky wet socks started to chafe and friend A got the urge to wee. With no bushes in sight, we could either form a human shield around her with the council bores, or she could hold it until the next check point (whose facilities turned out to be a bucket in the school stationery cupboard). By this time, we’d hooked up with a Scottish Munro bagger and a building inspector from Neath who for the next two hours, regaled us with tales of altitude sickness on Kilimanjaro. By tea time, our ordeal was over. Back at the bunkhouse, we fought over the shower and who was going to have the Welsh faggots – and then we went to bed. Tidy.

Yesterday, Mercury was in Retrograde. I know this because my hairdresser has just told me through the toilet door. I am sitting on a cheap plastic bucket having a wee because my toilet is blocked. I am hoping it will be unblocked before the solids come calling. Anyway, my buttocks viciously slashed by the bucket rim, I shift uneasily from cheek to cheek while my hairdresser attacks my unruly barnet. As usual, we chit-chat but this time, having debated whether Amy Winehouse uses a B&Q mini pergola inside her beehive to stop the flop (I think not) or why my nose is two shades browner than the rest of my face (it’s too bloody big), or why the man in the BP garage thinks it’s ok to draw attention to my perky nipples when I go in for a pint of milk (it’s not but I enjoy calling him a twat in front of the other customers), we discuss the planetry alignments and whether they really do mess up our day. The conclusion is, yes, Mercury is going backwards and it’s impacting big-time on my u-bend. When the hairdresser leaves and I no longer resemble the big one from the Hair Bear Bunch, I go to my loo with gusto. I fashion a pokey thing out of a coathanger and plunge my bogbrush in and out with great vigour but nothing works. Then I decide to throw a bucket of hot soapy water down there to dislodge whatever incongruous object is causing the obstruction (I chuck all sorts in my loo: hair, wasps, cheese). Unfortunately, having filled my bucket in the bath, I can’t get the hot tap to turn off. An hour later, when the plumber finally arrives, he fumbles his way through the steam, turns off the tap, dons some elbow-length black rubber gloves and goes down into my drain. There, he discovers something that resembles a big chunky dreadlock but turns out to be roots from next door’s ivy. I am pleased to say my arse is now in recovery and I am flushing with impunity.

My name is Anna and I have woodworm. It’s a bit like having nits but instead of having crawly things mooching around your barnet, you’ve got beetles running rampage in your turtlenecks and ‘pooing’ sawdust all over your slinkies; and when they’re not pooing or burrowing, they’re making love on your curtain rail. I tried to deal with them manually, ie sucked the suckers up the hoover but they are prolific love makers and their seemingly inexhaustible shageroos are producing herds of incy wincy brown beetle babies. Anyway, I went down to Homebase to get some essence of death but unfortunately, it was rent a dimwit for the day and I got a pasty boy with over-zealous grease glands who had never heard of woodworm but tried to sell me slug pellets. To cut a long story short, I have now treated my woodworm by throwing the bloody chest of drawers out. What’s funny is that it’s disappeared from my back alley where I left it so I can only assume that my little friends are now copulating with gusto, their compound eyes firmly fixed on someone else’s Billy bookcase. Meanwhile, I’m still getting the sawdust out of my gussets. Talking of pests, my garden snails have been getting me into trouble. The thing is, on examining my lettuce the other day, I found a big fat mollusc having a good old chomp, and, as you do, I ripped it off its leafy lunch box and threw it over the fence into the car park next door. However, unluckily for me, my neighbour was just about to get into her car and the flying snail hit her on the head; she wasn’t best pleased; the snail wasn’t too happy either.