Tales from my handbag

If I was a boy I would be Bear Grylls but with a slightly smaller nose. He and I share a love for going off-piste although I don’t fancy killing a dog, slicing it down the middle with my Swiss Army knife and waggling my hands around in its hot organs to keep my fingers from dropping off in the Yukon.

I wasn’t exactly in peril last weekend but I did go to Nyman’s Gardens and get a bit lost with Mr Tye the DIY. It started innocently enough; we admired a few big trees, I took pictures of wild garlic and Mr Tye, still in recovery from last night’s bean stew, let rip with some industrial strength trumps. Then I suggested we add a bit of spice into our ramble by leaving the track and striking off into a bush. Naturally, my big hair got caught up in some very angry brambles and I ripped the back of my jeans while hurdling a barbed wire fence. Following this, tempted by a plantation of giant cabbages. I tried to vault a stream but tripped, skidded through the mud and  slid into the water. That’s when it got a bit Deliverance. Somehow, we’d wandered into some sort of game reserve complete with makeshift dens, tree viewing platforms, electric fences and men in black with guns. Tye, fearful of having his dark interior plundered by man flesh, quivered behind a tree. I took the hysterical route. Anyway, the upshot was, we were ‘rescued’ by two Chinese photographers who put us on the right track back to the grounds of the house where a couple called Richard and Alison were celebrating their wedding with a bouncy castle and the Buena Vista Social Club.

The next day, I went to a tango class in the Pavilion Gardens with a load of middle aged women and a teacher called Kirsty who had enormous knockers and very thin legs. There were way too many of us for the size of the tent plus there was a ruddy great sofa in the middle which meant we had to mince around in a circle to avoid treading on each other or falling over the furnishings. As per, I was playing the man but then, after we’d learnt a basic promenade, I got flung up against the real article, a midget of a man called Darren who had to take a very firm grip of me to stop me whizzing him off. The idea in tango is to lean in with your head at an angle while keeping your body away from your partner – easy if you’re both the same height but if you’re dancing with a circus freak, you’re prone to toppling. Next up was ‘Miguel’ who told me he was Brazilian but then his accent slipped and he turned out to be Michael from Portslade. Michael had the misfortune of clammy hands and an excess of saliva. Needless to say, I didn’t lock heads with him for fear of an invasion of his oral fluids.

It’s festival time in Brighton which means a whole lot of showing off, and drawing attention to oneself. These are not necessarily the same thing. For example, when I went to see the Gay Men’s Chorus in a church the other night, the highlight  wasn’t ‘I am what I am’ but all the traffic to the vestry toilet. God knows what was going on in there but it was a big crowd pleaser; indeed, one Oriental ‘lady’ (this being the month of the Lady Boy, one never knows for sure) tottered along three times in her high heels – never once trying to muffle her clacking, even during the tender yet miserable rendition of Michael Buble’s ‘Home’. Talking of disrespectful audiences, last night, I went to see some modern dance at the Dome.  First of all, we were confronted by a small pocket of Pro-Palestinian supporters outside who were protesting at the Israeli fiddlers playing in the Corn Exchange. Then, we were just settling down to some plinky plonky legs akimbo, decidedly non-Nijinsky moves when a family of four featuring a topless 10 year old boy – slumped down behind us and proceeded to chew, burp and slurp their way through the performance while simultaneously smelling of wee. After a sort of avant garde Gay Gordons where the dancers kept launching themselves, foetal-like off each other’s thighs, our aromatically challenged neighbours were moved to the back of the auditorium where they could reek and rustle to their heart’s content. Then, during a totally silent piece, someone’s mobile went off and four people stomped out. We later found out that there’d been a bit of a rumpus in the Jerusalem Quartet involving the same shouty people we’d seen at the entrance. Some old people in the audience cried while others tried to wrestle the protesters to the ground. And all the while, like the Titanic, the band played on. Talking of live performance, I went for a walk on the normally peaceful South Downs the other night and, on returning to Ditchling Beacon car park, found a man standing by his open-doored camper van playing a saxophone willy nilly. OK, so he wanted to share his jazz warbling with us but we didn’t need the bloody Hammond organ backing track. I mean, there’s a time and place. Talking of which, half naked man over the road has recently taken to going the whole hog and removing his underpants around tea-time and standing, quite casually, hands on hip at his front window. I did wonder if his was an Open House and he was doing a bit of performance art but then the police came and took him away so maybe not.

For the second leg of the South Downs Way Odyssey our cosy trio was augmented by two new ramblers, Gilbert and George. It was all a bit Enid Blyton, what with the police, the pork pies and the bump in the night, not to mention the lickiness of Finty. But let me start at the beginning. Of course, this was the weekend of the Great Monsoon so Jeremy, Brad, Gilbert and George and I were all kitted out in gagoules, waterproof trousers and shower caps. George was showing off in a voluminous black cape but the South Downs Way rambling veterans among us took this flamboyancy to be simply nerves and didn’t make a fuss. The weekend began back at Buriton at the end point of leg one so naturally, the first point on the agenda was Jeremy’s under-carriage. Was it healed? Had he brought his trusty Germolene, just in case? Jeremy informed us all that he was wearing seamless underpants this time so there would be no chafing of his vitals. ‘Hurrah’, we all shouted and off we went. Click, click, click went our Nordic walking poles as we strode up the lane. We’d barely got onto the Downs before I’d spied a pair of stripy boxer shorts in the middle of the path and then, a police car came trundling up alongside us. Naturally, I flagged it down and demanded to know what was going on. They hadn’t come to investigate the errant knickers but were looking for people using the South Downs Way in the ‘wrong way’. I took this to mean ‘doggers’ but no, actually, they were referring to dirt bikes and twockers. I told them I would be vigilant for twockers and also took the opportunity to alert them to the underpants but they just laughed and said underpants were not on their ‘things to do today’ list. And so we carried on; the day was a bit drizzly but we had some interesting banter – like whether Brad being forced out of his Lake District boarding school on Sunday afternoons in the driving rain had affected his mind (we’ll be observing him over time), and whether our eyeballs are the same size now as they were when we were born (my theory is that an animal’s eyes are disproportionate to the rest of its face so that its mother continues to feed it – and the rest of our face catches up later – the others said I was talking crap). We didn’t see many other walkers but there were plenty of mountain bikers – whizzing past splattered with huge dollops of chalky mud. This part of the walk was much more open that the first leg, taking us through huge fields of rape and with (misty) views out towards the sea and surrounding downland. At the end of the first day, Gilbert had a hole in his boot and Brad’s dicky knee was playing up but with a fabulous new large-scale waterproof map, courtesy of Gilbert and George, we hadn’t got lost, been shouted at by dog-hating girl-racers and there’d been no rows either about the route although I did have to take Gilbert and George to one side and recite the Hinckley Ramblers’ mantra ‘ye shall only ever walk as fast as the slowest person’ to stop them going rogue and forming a splinter cell. That afternoon, after some delicious pork pie and mustard in a local hostelry, we arrived at Sunnyside cottage in the charming village of Cocking which was run by a lady in a cardigan. She took one look at Finty’s dirty bottom and slung Brad and Jeremy in the garden room then escorted the rest of us upstairs where there was one double and one twin room. There was a bit of kerfuffle on the landing, what with all the bags and the wet things and somehow Gilbert got escorted into the twin by Mrs Cardigan leaving George and I to the double. Faced with the prospect of me and a big bed, George had an attack of the vapours but after Mrs Cardigan had gone off to make some buns, we swapped over and harmony was restored. That evening, after more than a few bottles of red wine, we had a heated debate about where Jamie Oliver got his chops from, and if Gareth Williams’ impossibly neat hair and overly full bottom lip were critical clues to his ugly demise locked in a travel bag. In the night, I got up to wet my tuppence and got lost in between the bed and the ensuite. I couldn’t find the light for the life of me and was fumbling around for 10 minutes before I realised the bathroom was on the other side of the room and I’d been trying to get into the wardrobe. Over a hearty breakfast of eggs and black pudding we discussed another bedroom incident from the previous evening. While treating myself to a post-perambulation mini-pedicure, I’d drizzled my No 7 Vixen nail varnish onto Mrs Cardigan’s extremely combustible eiderdown. Brad suggested I attack it with remover but Jeremy, who, it has to be said, is a chemistry genius, suggested it might dissolve the fabric and we’d end up with a ruddy great hole. I elected to throw a scatter cushion over my stain and forget about it. We said goodbye to Mrs Cardigan and strode out into a deluge of Biblical proportions. Torrents nay, rivers of chalky mud flowed off the Downs and within about half an hour 3/5 of us had sodden feet. Brad developed a blister and Gilbert’s hair was a real mess. Only George remained dry and not a little smug under his cape. But then, at about 2pm, the rain stopped, the sun came out and we had a moment of bliss on some Bronze Age burial mounds. Soon after that, we ambled into Amberley and the end of our rain sodden ramble. We had a group hug; Jeremy stripped down to his underpants for no real reason and a couple of us cried. Roll on leg 3.

Once upon a time in Anatolia, a man had a perky prostate, went for a wee by a bush on a dark, windy night and then did a bit of chatting in a very cramped car. Meanwhile, a  man who looked like Jesus tried to remember where he’d buried the man he’d recently murdered and a pretty girl made some tea in a candlelit cupboard. The chatting and the searching went on for about three hours and then, right at the end of the film, when they’d found the body, a very moany mortician performed an autopsy without an apron. As you can imagine, it was a bit messy and one man was squirted in the face with some liquid poo. Then I went home. Sadly, the late hour meant I had to make do with a very makeshift meal of beans on toast with two inferior chocolate biscuits for pudding. My next visit to the Duke of York’s was on Saturday to see the Met’s La Traviata. As usual for the DOY’s operatic occasions, the cinema was full of old people with very neat hair and shiny shoes. There were a lot of sandwiches and flasks of tea flying around the auditorium and quite a bit of coughing, tickly and chesty, although no-one died which was a bit surprising, given the proliferation of perambulatory type support equipment in the auditorium. The opera followed the usual operatic plotline – trollope type with decent size rack has an epiphany, falls in love within 5 seconds of meeting portly man, rolls around on the floor for a bit and then pegs it. The End.

Last weekend we embarked on our South Downs Way odyssey – an epic journey full of emotion, bad map reading and Germolene emergencies. I was a little late owing to a wrong turn in Petworth and the fact that, having been on a speed awareness course last week, I was driving like Miss Marple. Oh yeah, and with no Tom Tom in my car, I was relying on my ‘it’s somewhere around here’ cavalier style of map-reading and the kindness of strangers to locate our rendez-vous, a tiny village called Buriton that was in the arse-end of nowhere. So, an hour late, we all piled into one car and whizzed over Winchester way to another small village which was notable for its fine cottage architecture and a depressed horse. There was a slight delay in starting as my two companions had a struggle to get their poles the right length. Then we lost the dog, who decided she didn’t want to walk 12 miles on her short hairy legs and preferred to run pell-mell up into a stranger’s bedroom. We eventually extricated her by waving a sliver of Tesco’s Finest pressed pork under the bedroom window. And then we were off….Our morning passed pleasingly enough as we traversed along the fine chalky pathways among gently undulating hills although Jeremy (not his real name) began to feel an itch in his general Tomasz Schafanaker region which warranted a bit of pant realignment. After lunch, we were a little disconcerted to find the South Downs Way took us along a very busy A road with very little verge. Brad (not his real name) had the dog on a lead but we were continually being thrust into the hedge by thundering jugganauts and one very aggressive driver even slowed down to say ‘get your fackin’ dog off the road’. We very soon realised that we’d read the map upside down and so had to make a detour through some primrose-festooned woods and up another chalk escarpment to pick up the trail again.  By this time, Jeremy’s chafing had escalated and he had to duck off behind some farmyard machinery to apply a slather of Germolene. I took the opportunity to wet my lettuce and only then, did I realise we’d stumbled upon a bunch of paragliders on the other side of the hedge which meant both Jeremy and I had an aerial audience for our arse flashings. That night, having walked 12 miles, we stayed in a pub and ate some pork which, it turned out came from one of Brad’s pigs. Strangely enough, the only other diners in the pub that night were some pudding suppliers from Swanage, two quite rotund individuals who gave us a long lecture about the quality of their Rum Babas. Continuing on a porcine theme, after dinner, we settled down to a game of ‘pass the pigs’ while Jeremy read us a couple of chapters of ‘The adventures of chunky’, courtesy of the pub bookshelf. And so to bed… The following day, we had more mileage and more climbing but the sun shone brilliantly and, thankfully, the Germolene had worked its magic so Jeremy was able to stride out with new-found confidence – although Brad’s dicky knee began playing up. All went well; we had lunch on Butser Hill with some very shouty, bare-chested men, and then we got lost again – this time in Queen Elizabeth Park, right by the A3. We’d taken a detour off the track to visit a cafe in a car park  but sadly, the cups of PG and slices of drizzle cake we’d anticipated were a no-show owing to the cafe being closed. We had to make do with my thermos flask of tea (which tasted of coffee) and one Rocky Road biscuit between us and the dog (who had run out of his pooch pellets). However, this did sustain us through the next hour’s twists and turns as we tried to navigate our way out of the woods and back to Buriton and the end of leg one. On the way home, I threw Miss Marple out of the window and assumed my usual Jeremy Clarkson demeanour.  Sometimes speed is of the essence.

My considerable acting skills have been called upon yet again. Not my usual professional assignment, rubbing shoulders and sharing Ribena with Bafta-nominated lovelies at gay drinks parties. No, this time I’ve been romping around the woods on a hostile environment training exercise for some hapless aid workers who wouldn’t know Sir David Morrissey if he was floating down the Limpopo in an upturned dustbin lid. I was playing a worn-out under secretary called Debra, who, due to civil unrest in the fictitious town of Derkha Derkha, was trying to get out of the country and back to her lesbian lover in Wolverhampton. The only problem was, she’d had her bag containing passport, phone and money stolen and consequently, was in a bit of a lather. My opening scene was in a tent (aka Derkha Derkha Airport) where I was hassling the local militia (three IT students from Brighton Uni), to get an exit visa. They waggled their ak47s at me and insulted my mother so I turned my attention to the incoming British aid workers: a dusky woman with a smirk, and her side-kick, a fresh-faced public schoolboy type who had eye-contact issues. They were more bothered by the fact that the immigration officer (a landscape gardener from Hove who’d once been in a Curly Wurly advert) had confiscated their tic tacs and had no interest in helping me get the hell out. In the second scenario, I’d entered the British aid camp, looking for my friend, Bridget, who’d gone missing and was insulin dependent. For this scenario, I’d ramped up the hysteria which led me to suspect that I was actually being unfaithful to my lesbian lover in Wolverhampton and my extra-curricular squash matches with Bridget had led to ex-pat intimacy. I kept coming in and out of the camp shouting for Bridget and stomping into tents demanding that something be done. Nothing was done, but I did get a cup of tea and free access to a box of Rose’s chocolates (which amazingly, hadn’t been confiscated by the Curly Wurly man). Eventually, to shut me up, they gave me a replacement passport and put me on the next flight to Cyprus. I think Bridget probably got shot.

Over the last few days, I have been mostly decorating. My boudoir has been in bad need of a make-over for some time, what with the bumpy walls, flaky radiator and much abused carpet that has, over the years, generously soaked up all sorts of spillages from red wine to red nail varnish. My odd-job man du jour is Tyrone – a cheery type who drinks Tick Tock and throws in the odd bit of jazz-funkateering in between nailing down my wayward toilet bowl (fat people are now welcome to come over and evacuate with impunity) and filling my cracks. I am Tyrone’s ‘decorator’s mate’ but apparently, if this was the real world, I would have been kicked off the job by now for aggressive rollering and my inability to paint in a straight line. Tyrone says this is the first time he has ever gone home from a job with paint on the inside of his underpants – and apparently it’s my fault. I protested vigorously at this but later, I did notice a ladybird in the back garden sporting a sage green, matt vinyl head. My slapdash technique in skirting board sandpapering has also led me to spray blood up Tyrone’s freshly painted wall – good job I’m not a hand model. Continuing on a make-over theme, this morning, I had my Supernova Hydrating Matis Facial – 45 minutes of lying flat on my back in a room the size of a coffin while some eejit with a diploma in nonsense slaps pungent ungents all over my face then massages them into my upper bosoms (funny sort of ‘facial’ if you ask me). The highlight of the treatment was when she put the kettle on and steamed me wide open. I’ve never been so clean!

Today, I counted six tits in my back garden – they are obviously winding themselves up for some mass spring avian shagathon because they won’t bloody shut up. ‘Don’t pick him, pick me, I’ve got what it takes’, they seem to say, the little darlings. Meanwhile, at the front of the house, the man opposite keeps taking his top off and standing spread-eagled at his window. I try not to look but he looms large every time I wander anywhere near the bay. I’m thinking, is he wearing pants; has he got an over-active gland or is he just trying to say ‘hi, I’m a guy and I’m casual’. Whatever, it’s just a little bit freaky so I’ve now positioned the sofa so I can give due deference to Jeremy Paxman masterfully urging the spods on University Challenge to ‘come on’, without feeling nudey man’s unblinking eyes gliding, Norman Bates like, over my supine form. Naturally, with spring in the air, my thoughts have turned to grooming. So, today, I took myself down to the hairdressers for a shampoo and set. They’re very right on in my salon which means they’ve recently ditched regular towels in favour of large, recyclable sanitary towels. So, after the ritual torture that is the backwards hair wash, I have to suffer the humiliation of having my head wrapped in a grossly inadequate, incredibly tight towel that makes me look like an inmate from an 18th century lunatic asylum. Jimmy, my ‘hair technician’, tells me that he can ‘towel off’ most ‘normal’ people with just two of the Doctor White lookie likies. However, with me being a fully paid up member of the Hair Bear Bunch, I require five towels and even then I’m still dripping. Next week, I’m going for an Ultimate Hydrating Matis Facial Treatment. Dammit, I will be a Goddess.

It was Saturday, around tea-time when we were thrown into the final spin of Wagner’s Ring Cycle – six hours’ worth of warbling, scrambling up the scenery and dry-kissing by some very chunky individuals. Our hero, Siegfried, had thin lips and a straggly mullet while his Brunnhilde, a passionate red-head, looked like she’d run up her own dress from a couple of potato sacks and a Doctor Marten shoelace. No wonder he ditched her for the lopsided lady with the Tressy hair and the tin boob. Siegfried had a horn and he used it to maximum effect to woo sack woman and tin woman. It looked to me like half the chorus also fancied him, especially when he  leapt off his boat and stood, legs akimbo, sword a-thrust, and suggested to a man he’d only just met that they should both self-harm and then get all Twilighty with each other. Everyone, it seemed, was keen to get hold of Siegfried’s ring, especially, three be-sequinned river nymphs who kept climbing up the ‘river’ on their hands and knees and then hollering, ‘give us your ring’ as they slid down like they were on the Helter Skelter at Brighton pier. All I could think was how shiny their bottoms must be after each performance. Anyway, then Siegfried got speared by his new mate’s brother, a colossus of a man with messy dreads, at which point, tin tit woman started lamenting how she’d ‘never hear his horn ever again’ – and the man next to me started crying (there were a lot of light-footed types in the audience, as well as mature ladies with lazy bladders). We had two intervals; during one, I had a rose-flavoured cup cake and darjeeling; during the other  I munched on a Jamaican pattie from Cummin Up, a pop-up shabeen on the other side of Preston Circus. The following evening, I was delighted to see the director – who had so skillfully coaxed my perfect performance of ‘lady in autumnal tweed chit-chatting with gentleman friend at cheese and wine party’ in the short film, GG –  was awarded the Bafta for his screen-play of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I still daydream about David Morrissey with no socks rammed up against a bookcase while I shared nibbles and Ribena with a mature homosexual. Happy days.

Last week, the Artist formerly known as Prince hosed me down in my back garden. He’d come over for a chat about Sheena Easton and his Power Generation but somehow the conversation turned to sweat. It turns out that my shower was bust and I was ponging so Prince offered to wash me. As this was a dream, I was wearing my dad’s big white shirt and no pants. Needless to say, Prince did a very thorough job; quite a feat when you consider he was wearing a pair of very high heels and tight purple leggings. This was in neat contrast to my previous night’s dream where I’d had a visit from Johnny Rotten who’d been sent a poison pen letter along the lines of ‘I want to gouge your eyes out and set fire to your privates’. Naturally, I offered to become Johnny’s bodyguard and we took a train to his North London hovel where he insisted I cuddle him better. The next morning I woke up with the after-taste of Johnny’s green teeth in my mouth which was appropriate, considering I was going to the dentist for a check-up. Unfortunately, as I cycled down town the heavens opened and we had a hailstorm of Biblical proportions. The hailstones were pinging in all directions, upstairs and downstairs and in my ladies chamber and despite my best efforts to stay dry, by the time I’d arrived at the surgery I was sodden in the bottom. (People without bikes never understand why saddles absorb so much water in wet weather but take it from me, they do.) My new dentist, a dark hairy Greek with a side-line in sarcasm, merely laughed at my discomfort, telling me I’d feel better when he’d extracted two teeth. I said, ‘Demis, save your gallows humour for your drowning nation.’ He didn’t laugh at that!