Tales from my handbag

Summer means camping and camping is great fun, provided you like eating burnt things and don’t mind having a constant dribble of urine down your leg from badly executed al fresco weeing. A friend has very kindly given me her two-man pop-up tent. I have a practice pop-up in my back garden but am sadly unable to pop-down, despite stage by stage instructions. This is Crystal Maze but without the skipping baldie in the Bet Lynch overcoat. After rolling around the garden for an hour or so, and a few useless tips from my window cleaner, who’s popped by to have a dump, I give up. Later on, with the help of a man friend, I manage to coax the pesky thing back into its bag. What I fail to notice until I’ve pitched my tent at the campsite, is that despite this being a two man tent, I seem to take up most of its sparse interior. Plus, I have to sleep diagonally otherwise my feet hang outside. The night is long: three wees, one bad dream (I’m Charles Bronson, struggling to tunnel his way to freedom with only the help of an emery board), a screaming baby and a man with loud, extended wind in the next tent.  And then it’s time to get up. Dave, the campsite owner, who tells me he’s spent his night at a very relaxing orgy involving a pond and a bag of grapes, suggests I get a bigger tent. Oh God, have I really got to go to Millets again?

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.

If you go down to the woods today, in floaty trousers and without a balaclava, you could end up with a weeping, distended eye socket and knees the size of watermelons. It all started innocently; friend X to me: ‘would you like to go on a ‘plant journey’ in the woods?’ Me: ’sounds like hippy shite but I’ll do it.’ We rendezvoused with our fellow plant travellers (imagine lots of cheesecloth and Chinese slippers) in a quiet country road and silently made our way through the forest until we came to a fire in a clearing. Whereupon, a very smiley lady welcomed me by wafting a bowl of smoking sage leaves all over my nice clean cardigan. Then we had a pow-wow around the fire and were instructed to go and spend some time with an oak tree; get to know it; share life experiences, that sort of thing. We were also given a handful of oats for us to use as a sort of tree warmer! I offered my oats to a young oak and started chatting, as you do, but then I got interrupted by a vicious mosquito which had was attempting to drink me dry through my smokey cardigan. This opened the flood gates and I spent the next half an hour swatting midges and picking other brown flitty things out of my ears and out of my pants. Thankfully, we were then summoned back to the fire by a penny whistle for some group meditation that involved going down a hole to another world - all to the strains of a badly played bongo. Needless to say, I couldn’t find my hole and I was starting to itch, not to mention the fact that I was ravenous for my acorn burger washed down by nettle tea supper. This morning, I look like the Elephant Woman. Note to self: a tree is a tree. It does not talk; it does not eat porridge.

Acrobatics - let’s leave it to the Chinese shall we? There was a time when the only acrobatics you saw came courtesy of Olga Korbut and her steroid sisters, tossing and a-tumbling on the telly in pursuit of Olympic Gold. Now, everyone’s at it and I have to say, the flic-flacs and triple twist back flip with cartwheel combos are just not the same. Take the Insect Circus, witnessed at Brighton Fringe Festival. For a start, they weren’t real insects. They were people dressed up as wasps.zzzz Secondly, they were shite. There were ants standing on other ants’ shoulders and there was a bunch of bed mite hand puppets squirting water at the audience. Not forgetting the ‘bull’ fight with a stag beetle that was so piss poor, I was shouting for the coup de grace. I was hoping for a strip tease in a teacup to alleviate the boredom but this being a children’s show, we had to make do with a ladybird in a sequinned bra doing hula hoops. Come back Billy Smart, all is forgiven.

It’s Open House season in Brighton. Or should I say, let’s be nosy and go and marvel at someone’s cornicing. An afternoon of Open Houses for me, is like going to an art gallery except you can’t say ‘that’s crap’ too loudly and the artists, far from being dead, are normally in situ, mingling, having intense conversations about papier mache. Sometimes, they even wear their art, like the artist who had a knitted swan hanging around her neck. The highlight, apart from the £25 monkeys made out of old socks, was my local Baptist church which hadn’t quite got the right end of the Open House schtick. There was some fusty smelling needle point and a few water colours of the West Pier on fire. But my favourite bit was the grainy video of some religious nuts being water boarded in a jacuzzi, sorry, baptism bath. Well, it makes a change from fuzzy felt bonnets.

Modern dance. Who, what, why? Questions left unanswered last night, despite two hours of dancing, prancing and bouncing to the unmelodic strains of a central heating system. Eat your heart out Margot Fonteyn, this was more nutcase than Nut Cracker. There was lots of running on and off stage, standing like a coat hanger and doing what looked to me like a contemporary Gay Gordons but without the skipping. And for variety, they threw in a bit of group semaphore. Plinky plonk went the violin. Bouncy, bouncy went those tight buttocks. SOS went the arms. Meanwhile, the man sat behind me had some sort of stomach condition. Trump or rumble? Who cares? This was art.

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.

‘It’s late, we’re drunk - let’s go and swing our pants’ I hollered last weekend to my friends (and most of the neighbours probably). So, to celebrate the fag end of the Brighton Festival, we  grabbed a taxi and thundered down town to the Spiegeltent. The saucily named Guilty Pleasures was churning out the cheese but try as we might to make an entrance, it was to no avail. ‘I’m sorry, you can’t come in without a ticket’ said the 12 year old door girl, sucking furiously on her cigarillo (I know, it was that sort of place, men dressed as chihuahuas and girls with handlebar moustaches).  So, we repaired to another venue called Madame Geisha’s. Apparently, inside it was all spanking and sparkly gussets which sounded nice but we didn’t have the energy for domination. No, instead, we found a beer tent complete with karaoke booth. And this is where we stayed, doing windmill arms to Bonnie Tyler’s ‘total eclipse of the heart’ - not easy when there’s three of you rammed into a telephone box. Â

Like most women, I do love a fireman so imagine my joy when, on Wednesday evening, I nearly got carried down a wobbly ladder by a man with big hands and a yellow helmet. I was hanging with the thesps at the Unitarian church, the venue for my friend’s play. It was a double hander, or is it header? Anyway, there were two of them on the stage: Dorothy, our heroine, who had a lovely bob and a young man with needlechord slacks and a faint lisp. Just as they were starting to get cosy, there was a CLONK, CLONK, CLONK on the stairs at the back of the chapel. A flicker of irritation darted across our heroine’s face but she simply turned up the volume and soldiered on through the clonking. Then the next thing, a man’s voice boomed out from the back, could we please evacuate as there was a small problem with the electrics and the fire brigade was on its way. There not being any visible signs of fire, we all sauntered out just in time to welcome two engines and 10 firemen, complete with some very long hoses. Now, I’m used to fires in places of worship; my favourite was at St Andrew’s in Hove when the Brighton and Hove Gay Men’s Chorus had their South Pacific medley interrupted by quite a vicious conflagration in the vestry. This week’s electrical ‘fire’ was quite tame in comparison. However, I did get quite a thrill from being in such close proximity to  such chunky heroes. My only other intimate experience of a firefighter was when one came around my house to measure my windows for some blinds. Turns out he was only a part-time hero; I could tell from his hands he wasn’t the full shilling. �

Following a visit to my allotment where I indulged myself with a vigorous bout of strimming, I have several injuries: cuts and bruises to my upper and lower torso, sunburn across my upper bottom and a broken toenail. Yeah, ok, so I’m cavalier when it comes to garden implements. On a positive note, my broad beans are coming along nicely as are my onions. Looking at my very full and positively steaming compost, I was reminded of the short video I made as an entry to Loose Women’s ‘Make me a Loose Woman’ competition. I opined for a full minute on the joy of outdoor weeing. Sadly, having watched Monday’s episode, it appears I have not been chosen to appear on the programme. And after all that hard work on the part of Nev who was my cameraman/director/fluffer. He must have had a very sore wrist after our afternoon session! Bloody ITV, they don’t know what they’re missing.