Tales from my handbag

Friend X has a proposition for me: do I want to be a supporting artiste on a short film being made in Brighton? I’m to play ‘mature lady at a dinner party’. Any opportunity to show off, thinks I although I’m not sure about the ‘mature’ bit. When I learn there’s nudity and tomfoolery with creamy desserts AND buff thespians (ones off the telly) involved, I get very excited. My spirit is soon dampened when I learn I’ll be decked out in Harris tweed. Furthermore, my bouncing locks are to be scraped back and moulded into a sort of frigid librarian bun (a bit like my old Junior School teacher, Mrs Wibberly - yes, that was her name). When they’ve done with me (the hair takes longer than expected as daring bits keep trying to escape the confines of the bun), I meet up with my ‘husband’, Lionel, a gentleman with big teeth and a mustard sweater. Lacking any directorial lead as to my ‘motivation’; am I a chatty type? do I eat meat? how strong is my bladder? - I create my character - Daphne. Lionel and I are swingers although he’s very big boned so we decide he’s more of a voyeur than a participator. Daphne, however, throws herself into almost any milieu, most of it going on in Peacehaven. On set, famous telly actor is playing the piano in a private apartment. Daphne is sitting on a sofa, smiling serenely. Next scene, Daphne wears an Alice band and Lionel is hoola hooping on a Wii.  Daphne laughs a lot in this scene. Next scene, there’s a crowd of party-goers in a corridor. Daphne is in sludge coloured top with chunky necklace, chatting to Anthony, an effete older gentleman who keeps popping Polo mints. Famous telly actor barges past and nearly knocks Daphne’s ‘Shiraz’ all over Polo man’s shirt. Daphne looks miffed but then, noticing that telly man is barefoot, assumes a perplexed visage. Daphne then gets into a huddle with Polo man, as foreground for a close-up of telly man looking a bit deranged, this time with socks on.  We do low chat but I throw in a few shriekish laughs to fit in with my swinging personality. In the dressing room, it takes a while to shake off Daphne. Well, I am a professional, after all.

‘I am Love’ should be retitled ‘I am noisy’. Sumptuous, elegant, seductive, yes. But boy, did the Recchi household, with its endless wooden floors, take a battering from all those high heels. It was clip clop, clip, clop, clip, clop, upstairs and downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber. I didn’t see a patch of carpet, or a pair of slippers, just a lot of sliding doors and swishy scarves. Tilda had some lovely china and an assortment of Alice bands but then she got ravished by a chef and decided a bob was more practical, what with all that buccolic rumpy pumpy and hanging around in hot kitchens. Talking of hot kitchens, the film had a strong flavour of Master Chef, what with all the food close-ups. One minute they were smacking their lips over an upmarket Cornish Wafer, the next dishing out what looked like cabbage water with somebody’s foreskin in it. And in one memorable scene, Tilda did a wonderful impersonation of John Torode. I’ve never seen mastication like it.

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.

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’ve just been to see The Wrestler. Not a good choice if you’re hard of hearing (Micky Rourke has been to the Sylvester Stallone School of Speech Impediments and has graduated with a mouth full of marbles) or dislike seeing the abuse of stationery items (one of Rourke’s opponents wields a staple gun, to great gory effect I might add). Rourke is supported by the usual circus of blue-collar characters  -  soft-hearted hooker, man-hating daughter, bouncers, pervs and feral kids. I especially liked the cold meat counter scene where Micky struggles to conceal his hair extensions in a hairnet and then has a hissy fit and bleeds into the potato salad. If playing your washed-up, has-been self is all it takes to get an Oscar these days, then it’s probably in the bag.  Â

I’ve taken many diverse forms of transport in my life - shared a coracle in India with five motorbikes, been towed by a diving boat through the Great Barrier Reef while clinging to a fishing net, flown a microlight over the Channel and back. But my latest escapade beats everything. In Dorset at the weekend, Dirk and I had completed the 7 miles of coast known as the Undercliff Walk. Made famous by Meryl Streep who had her Victorian pants pulled down a bit briskly by Jeremy Irons in ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, the walk is windy, steep and very hot and steamy owing to its unique microclimate. Having arrived a bit knackered in Lyme Regis, we went about hitching a lift back to where we’d parked the car. While Dirk slunked about in a bush out of sight, I stuck out my thumb and smiled in a coquettish ‘I’ve been a very naughty girl and not adverse to a bit of hard spanking’ look. Our first lift was from a Pole called Conrad. He stank of fish but had lovely thighs. However, he could only take us part of the way. No sooner had he dropped us off than an icecream van pulled around the corner and offered us a lift. We threw ourselves through the serving hatch and sat like pigs in shit amongst the discarded cones and cardboard boxes all the way back to our car. That’s something else to tick off my list of ‘things to do before I’m 50′ (like I’m that sad). Talking about pigs, the day after the Undercliff walk, we went back to the farm where I’d first met Babe. With intrepidation, we approached the sty. Would Babe recognise me? Would he still love me? Or worse, would he have turned to sausage? As soon as he saw me he scurried over, oinking his little oinks of pleasure, wiggling his little piggy derrier, batting his long ginger eyelashes. He cocked his head as if to say ‘have we met before?’, had a long drink from his trough then pissed off again. That’s it, I’m getting a dog.Â

Camping’s great isn’t it? Sitting around a real fire, cooking sausages, snogging the boy in the next tent and falling out of a tree and breaking your leg. Love it. Dirk, me and the kidlets have just been to Ashdown Forest for the weekend. We had everything, a fabulously louche campsite owner, Dave, who positively encouraged us to get pissed and make lots of noise, acres of land where we could wander willy nilly, Pooh Bridge, and, wait for it, Tom Cruise at the local garage. Yes, Tom Cruise. And, according to Dave, my new best friend, he’s only 5′ 3″. Dirk says all famous people are short and newsreaders all have enormous heads. I tend to agree. When I was at the BBC a week or so ago to support the Brighton Gay Men’s Chorus in their bid for stardom in Last Choir Standing, I saw the newsreader, Thomas Schafenacker. He only came up to my middle but his head was the size of a basketball.�

I’ve just been to see that French film ‘Water Lillies’. For those of you who don’t do arthouse cinema, it’s a coming of age film involving synchronised swimmers and their poolside shenanigans. It was quite sweet really, reminding me of the times I used to go and stand outside Robert Sharp’s house in the hope that he’d come out and snog me (he never did - I believe he’s bald now). I digress. I’ve just remembered why French films really irritate me. The women are almost always unremittingly miserable. They never smile, they never crack a joke and they never, ever, indulge in idle chit chat. What they do do , is stand in windows, staring at traffic/lie on beds staring at the ceiling/lean up against trees staring at dogs or other trees. And what gets me is that they always get the guy. God, give me strength. More Inja. We’re in Coorg, in a homestay in the hills. It’s the night before we do our mountain hike: Thursday, 14 February. ‘A rude awakening at 4am. The local pundit had passed by to perform a puja which involved our host family standing out in the courtyard right outside our bedroom, while the pundit did lots of waving, whooping and hollering with a tray of fire and a rather large sword. God knows what was going on, but it lasted for 3 hours. We got up around 8am and had breakfast - pretty much the same food that we’d had for dinner the night before. We thought we’d be hiking alone but just before we were ready to leave, a rickshaw drew up and two Americans got out. In their late 50s, they were dressed in full walking gear, the woman with a long plait and little round glasses, the man with a ponytail and a stoop. The walk was tough. We climbed through the jungle, passing coffee plants, cardamon and elephant dung. Up, up, up, we went through the treeline and to the peak just below Mount Kottabetta, the third highest peak in the region. From the top, we could see a good distance across rolling, tree-covered hills. It was truly beautiful and serene. Well, it would have been had it not been for the American woman who didn’t stop speaking from the moment we set out until the moment we got back. (What is it about Americans and their inane questions? They’re like children. Everything has to be explained in minute detail. What is that beetle? How many legs has it got? Would you say it was blue or green? Uuuurggggh) When we got back we had more of the same food then, thankfully, the Americans left and we wandered to the waterfall for a splash around. I couldn’t stay here for long, the diet is too samey. We’re both gagging for some variety, even an omelette or cereal or fruit. Curry for breakfast is not my ideal.’ more….