Tales from my handbag

I do like a bit of showing off so when I was asked to be an actor in a natural disaster training exercise for some Foreign Office types, I jumped at the chance. We were on location in a Sussex forest. Except it wasn’t Sussex; it was Kretinsburg, formerly part of the Soviet bloc, an unruly, God-forsaken place, full of hare lips and polyester tank-tops. There had been a mud-slide and a team from the Foreign Office had flown in to assist any British Nationals in the region. My first role was that of a surly soldier in charge of checking bags at the ‘airport’. This mostly involved me rifling through delegates’ ruck sacks and confiscating Kit Kats. Every now and again, just to mix things up a bit, I’d slide my gun up and down someone’s leg, a sneer dancing over my thin Soviet lips. I then played  ‘Jane’ a British national who had a mouth like a sewer and a missing husband, ‘Alex’ who had asthma and a poor sense of direction. After that, I was driven to ‘Kretinsburg’s General Hospital’ where I played a woman with hypothermia who spent a lot of time pacing the ‘wards’ dressed in bacofoil, moaning a la Lady Macbeth. By the end of the exercise my fingers were ice and my emotions raw. As for the delegates, I believe a few had nervous breakdowns. That’s show business eh!

With the Season of Suicide upon us, I thought I’d tickle my misery gland good and proper with a screening of possibly the most depressing film of all time - The Road. To sum up: man and boy go for an almighty long ramble without changing their underwear. En route they find some tins of Del Monte and a group of peckish cannibals. Man goes  skinny dipping and dies. Boy finds new rambling partner. It put me in mind of the Co-op last week when people went berserk in the bread aisle for want of a white bloomer. Having said that, I regularly go berserk in the Co-op, usually owing to low staff IQ and poor layout whereby till queues extend way past the bog paper into dog food rendering those on a hunt for bog paper and/or dog food unable to secure said articles without rubbing body parts or treading on loose babies. Having said all of that, even if it got so bad I actually killed someone in there, I wouldn’t want to eat them, bloomer or no bloomer.

As if New Year’s Eve isn’t depressing enough, I went to see The White Ribbon at my local art-house cinema. It was all part and parcel of my Germanisation process; I thought I might pick up a few handy phrases to sprinkle into my conversations with my house-guest, Herman the German - but all I got was a lot of talk about cabbages, dead sparrows and a very oblique reference to teenage masturbation which, let’s face it, doesn’t pop up in  a lot of conversations. Stylewise, the film was a bit like the 60s horror,  Village of the Damned, (you can see the original trailer on Youtube) but with better hair. Everyone was miserable (especially the dead sparrow)  but then I suppose if you went to bed with your hands tied down to stop you fiddling with yourself, you might be a tad moody of a morning.

I am adding something new to my cv - dog handling. Over the last couple of weeks I have learnt key skills such as how to walk a dog without a. strangling it and b. getting caught up in its extra long, totally impractical lead and falling over. Also, I have learnt how to pick up and bag a medium sized stool without a. feeling the warmth and b. soiling my hand. However, this morning I was faced with a fresh challenge. The first poo came and went without a hitch but then, without warning, a second poo arrived. Here’s the question, if your dog has done his business and you’ve dutifully bagged it, does that render the second poo null and void in terms of the need for it to be picked up? I didn’t have time to contemplate the moral issues; we were being observed by a curtain twitcher so I had to act fast. Luckily, said turd was small enough to be handled by a rain sodden mini Avon catalogue which I found languishing in the gutter. Thank God it wasn’t diarrhoea!

It’s not often that you get to use the word ‘treacherous’ but I’ve used it several times recently to describe conditions outside my front door. I ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ when the first flurries appeared and gaily laughed at the children shoving snow down each other’s pants on their way to school. But then my road became a death trap. ‘Aaaaarrrggghhhh’, ‘wooohhhhhhh’ I cried as the ice rink conditions sent me hurtling head long into a neighbour’s bush. My low point was getting stuck in the middle of the road and having to get down on all fours and crawl home from the pub. On a lighter note, I’ve discovered that the wildlife in my back garden does not like chocolate and chestnut terrine but does like rough puff pastry.

…I was washing my dusters. Christmas makes me go a bit mental on the cleaning front. I’ve been down on my hands and knees washing my skirting boards and have even tackled that oft neglected rear of tap blind spot with a sprinkling of bicarbonate of soda and a squirt of lemon. Came up a treat. Carrying on the Biblical theme, I have also taken on the role of Good Samaritan, walking my neighbour’s dog, pulling another neighbour’s curtains twice daily to confuse burglars and even feeding the poor little sparrows with my left-over cheesy pasta bake. I am now quite au fait with dog shit and after a week of rather challenging curtain duties, have pinpointed the exact amount of ‘yank’ required to avoid pulling them off the rail completely. As to the sparrows, well, there aren’t any but I did get two really ugly crows fighting over a floret of broccoli.

How many saxophonists does it take to burst an eardrum? Who knows but I can tell you that when there’s seven of them in an enclosed space and they’re jamming hard, doobie, doobie, do, and the spit’s flying, it’s not advisable to sit on the front row. The leader of the band had a gammy leg so he was sat centre stage for the duration of the set while other band members wandered on and off, drinking beer while admiring each other’s finger work. There were also a lot of appreciative ‘yeahs’, ‘woahs’ and head noddings from band and audience alike as soloists went into dizzy raptures with their instruments. In fact, the bass guitarist seemed to spend most of his time on the verge of an orgasm judging by his gaping mouth and squinty eyes. Disappointingly, I didn’t see one black polo neck although  there were a lot of people with beards, including one woman but that’s jazz for you.

I’m not a fan of folk music; tin whistles and tapestry waistcoats leave me cold but I do like a berber with a bongo so I was very happy to go and see Tiramisu or whatever they were called. They were a lively bunch of swarthy gentlemen dressed in robes and wrap-around bonnets and they played a pretty mean geetar. The lead singer resembled Keith Richards (weird but strangely cool) while his sidekick was a sort of Bob Marley type (hair like a brillo pad and wavy arms). That was last week. Last night, I went to see a blast from the past - Yellowman, a cross between dance hall reggae and High School Musical. Another lively performer, now in his sixties, Mr Yellowman came on dressed like a basketball player and proceeded to high kick and grind his scrawny groin at the crowd. How we whooped. The audience all had dirty necks and wild, stary eyes but they were very appreciative of Mr Yellowman’s gurgling and moaning. I quite liked it too.

A vigorous rub down with high grade sandpaper does not turn me on. I get no frisson of excitement from power tools although a man in dirty overalls with a mouth full of nails does have a certain primal appeal. When jobs need doing I get a man in to do them. It has to be that way because a. I hate all that preparing rubbish and b. I am a bit clumsy and prone to stabbing/piercing/hammering myself when charged with a diy tool. However, our exterior is looking shabby so, galvanised by ‘him upstairs’, I have been doing it. Trouble is, I don’t know what I’m doing. Is it ok to use a fish slice to scrape flaky paint? How do I sand my window frames without shredding my knuckles? Where do I put my knees when climbing a ladder? Aaarrrgghghgh.

If God was still alive he’d have done a Reggie Perrin yesterday, such was the mayhem of Brighton seafront. I challenge anyone to enjoy a game of volleyball when, a. Concorde 2 is playing host to a thrash metal screamathon involving bats, babies and quite possibly lesbian vampires, b. there’s a hairy bikers’ convention in full throttle, and, c. said hairy bikers’ are all experiencing a simultaneous mid life crisis and think they’re Dennis Hopper, giving the world the finger from the comfort of their own low-arsed,  ’sit up and beg’ motorbike that looks more like a commercial lawn mower. All that, and there was a force 10 gale and intermittent showers causing our ball to go anywhere but inside the court. This meant, every now and again, one of our ultra clean and perfectly manicured Men’s Health readers had to go and retrieve the ball from amidst the melee of greasy ponytails and bandanas, thereby risking being weed on in an act of ritual humiliation. Phew, what a day.