Tales from my handbag

Dogs. What are they for? What do they want from us? Why the smell? Last night I got up close and personal with a bull terrier called Moo, and I have to say, I quite enjoyed it. Ever since our Blackie licked Nivea Cream off my knee then licked his bits (I think it was that way around), I’ve had a soft spot for dogs. And when I say ‘dogs’, I mean proper dogs - the ones with deep voices, a musty whiff, and the flexibility of Olga Korbut, enabling them to chew their genitals with ease. Oh those heady summer nights of 1976 when the family visited Dorset in a Sprite caravan and Blackie had an irritated ball sack. How our caravan rocked to the rhythm of his chomping as the poor mutt struggled to relieve himself of his terrible affliction. Thinking about it, I reckon he might have had dog VD; well he did put it about a bit. Dogs eh!

Ever since Liza Minnelli screamed her knickers off under that Berlin bridge, I’ve been a fan of Christopher Isherwood and his deliciously decadent tales of homo angst. So I went to see A Single Man. It was one big after-shave advert, featuring tonnes of moody close-ups, mostly involving eyebrows and teeth, interspersed with some rather pleasing revolving buttocks and a lot of brown furniture and 60s nicky nacky noos. I particularly liked Mr Single’s bathroom, which had a strategically placed window through which he could gaze at his neighbours while having a morning poo. This was a man who kept a very tidy knicker drawer, which cleverly disguised the fact that inside he was mentally deranged and about to shoot himself into the hereafter where he could snog his younger, recently deceased lover to billio and back. Thankfully, fearful of splashing his Egyptian cotton bed linen with brain, he decided instead to go for a midnight swim and mull things over with a man in a mohair sweater. Cue more buttocks. Very pleasing in an Alan Bates/Oliver Reed dingly, dangly romp-athon sort of a way.

Somebody give me a trumpet; I think I’m going deaf. Either that or maybe people are gobbling their words a bit too much (yes Tommy Lee Jones in ‘No country for old men’ and Marco Pierre White in his shepherd’s pie adverts - I’m talking to you). I was in the pub the other night and a man came up to me and asked cheerily ‘are you gay’. Now this may be Brighton where we’re all a bit woolly but even so, I was struck by his audacity. For opening gambits, this was even more shocking than when a man approached me in Bubbles nightclub in 1977 and told me he liked my eyebrows. Anyway, back to pub man, I laughed hysterically (while inside I gave his silly bald head a good slapping). But then it turns out I’d misheard him; he was actually asking ‘are you going’ because he wanted my seat. I need to, a. have my ears syringed, b. learn to lip read or c. get myself a bloody trumpet.

Karaoke is cracking. Frazzles are fab. Together, they make for a formidable Saturday night’s entertainment. The location of my weekend Bacchanalian extravaganza is a small village hall on the outskirts of Brighton. I know this is going to be a night to remember when I’m accosted at the door by a man in trackie bottoms and Chinese slippers who’s selling raffle tickets. I buy three strips and make my way to the karaoke where two tuneless pre-pubescents are caterwauling their way through P-p-p-p-poker Face . At the bar I am served by a sneering teenager with enormous knockers who is smoking and eating a mini quiche while simultaneously thrusting said knockers at the man in Chinese slippers (who’s too busy preparing his trolley of Lambrini-esque prizes to notice). When it’s my turn to perform, I warble my way through ‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to’, ruing the day I chose a song with so many choruses and soooo many high notes. After I’ve hit the last duff note, there’s a not inconsiderable round of applause, but that could be for the six year old boy who’s been spinning on his head for the last half an hour and who has just moon-walked his way to the toilet. I make up for my shocking singing with a near-perfect Macarena but lose my way during Agadoo. At which point I call it a night and go home to watch Casualty.

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.