Tales from my handbag

On the final day of my Icelandic sojourn, the girls suggested we go to  a sweat lodge. Now this is not a particularly Icelandic pursuit but in the spirit of doing everything once, apart from incest and drinking your own wee, I agreed to take part. The sweat lodge was located in the back garden of a ramshackle bungalow, down a cinder path just off highway number 1 on the outskirts of Reykjavik. On arrival, we were greeted by two old queens and a herd of rabbits (I know this isn’t the correct collective noun but they were seriously en masse). Everywhere I looked there were bunnies – around our ankles, under the cars, in the bushes. Why there were so many and why they were so tame was never explained but this is Iceland – a country that believes in elves and trolls so let’s say no more. The house itself (which was thankfully bunny-free) was a labyrinth of small interlinked rooms, each one festonned with fairy lights, lurid murals and various eclectic nicky nacky noos. No surface was untouched by the hand of kitsch.

The first stage of the sweat involved putting on some cheap plastic sunglasses that corresponded to our date of birth (I was turquoise), having our pulse points dabbed with a melange of suspicious smelling unguents and then going inside for some wild dancing in the disco room. Here, 18 barefoot men and women in various stages of undress moved, grooved, shimmied and flailed to the likes of Frankie goes to Hollywood, bongo from the Congo and something by Madonna involving the lyrics ‘kill the bitch’. It wasn’t exactly spiritual but we did all get off on the raw energy of  ‘Relax, don’t do it’ and I had tremendous fun shaking my maracas. After we’d worked up a light sweat, we put our cozzies on and went out into the chill night air to the sweat lodge itself, a low-level yurt type construction covered with tarpaulin and blankets with no windows and only a small entrance. We had to bend double to get in – scrabbling to find a space in the dark, smoky interior. There we sat, cheek by jowl in a circle around a fireplace waiting for the sweat to start. Then the hot stones came in, the flap went down, the water went on, and the chanting began. ‘ooooooohhh I’m not claustrophobic, I’m not claustrophobic’, I chanted to myself as the Mexican lady with the big legs next to me keeled over. In between each 15 minute session of wailing and panting, the flap would open and someone would throw a wet flannel and a bottle of water at us. By the end of the fifth session, one girl had had a panic attack and legged it and I was rolling around moaning and wiping my face in the dirt – the only piece of cool in the whole ruddy place.  Then Nonni (Master of the Flannel and ecstatic dance DJ) said we were done and could leave. I crawled out and collapsed on the grass, a quivering wreck. Nonni came over and threw a bucket of cold water over me and we all got in a hot tub. Later on, around midnight we had some watery soup and Nonni read my rune stones. He said I shouldn’t travel the next day as something would happen. I felt like slapping him.

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.

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!

I was on my way to post a letter when my hitherto taciturn neighbour – a swarthy stoner with a rectangular head and sporadic stubble – beckons me over the road. Him: ‘Can I have a quick word?’ Me: (thinking, have I rammed his scooter during one of my  bish, bash, bosh parking manoevres, or maybe I’ve inadvertently stolen one of his recycling boxes?) No, nothing so prosaic…..’What do women want from men?’ he demands, his swarthy brows knitting as he draws heavily on his Camberwell Carrot. So deep, so meaningful, and so utterly weird. I mutter something about ‘understanding’ and ‘being listened to’ and, thinking about my rotten compost bin and toilet that jerks alarmingly to one side when an arse descends on it, throw in ‘most of us appreciate an occasional burst of DIY too’. As I’m musing on all the other things women want from men, like the ability to fight off a bear and an innate understanding of what’s good and bad in the underpant department, Oddbod mumbles something about a pizza, straddles his scooter and buggers off.  Later on that day I have two accidents; firstly, a new shop at the bottom of my road causes me to fall off my bike. I’m casually peddling along the pavement when I catch a glimpse of a baby in a bell jar. In a shopping street normally populated by Cuban hairdressers and Nigerian Mini-Marts, this is a strange sight indeed. I do a double take and lose my balance, falling off my bike, whereupon the shop owner invites me into his freakish emporium for a rummage. The shop specialises in ‘roadkill couture’ and Victorian antiquities and I put on a good show, marvelling at the Zebra’s head on the wall but really, I don’t feel that a set of stuffed spiders or a pair of mahogany calipers are going to add anything to my life so I make my excuses and leave. Later on that night I scald my hand on a hot saucepan and now have a large suppurating blister on my palm. I take much advice on whether water blisters should be burst or not but decide to operate on myself with a large darning needle. I am now leaking plasma left, right and centre.

Last Friday, an animal (possibly a bird or a fox on stilts) shat inside my jeans. I wasn’t wearing them at the time; the incident occurred while said jeans were on the line, drying. The excrement was the colour of a beige cardigan and it caused me some consternation because I didn’t see it until I was pulling up my jeans in the bathroom. Now my first thought was that I’d had a little accident. But wait, the offending streak was at the FRONT of my jeans, not the rear. Either something had gone horribly wrong with my back and front bottom plumbing or a careless seagull had eaten some Spanish cucumber and let rip over my washing. Any road up, as they say in Hinckley, I am hoping this incident will bring me luck. Later on that day, I found a slug in my nibble and tuppaware cupboard. It wasn’t eating; it was just lounging around on the bottom shelf. I chucked it over the fence with extreme prejudice. Talking about animals in crazy places, in Berlin last week, I went for a gander at the Brandenburg Gate. As if this marvellous edifice alone wasn’t enough to inspire awe in the tourists, the authorities had seen fit to jazz things up a bit with two teenagers in GDR guard costumes, a gorilla, a chicken and a Darth Vader. And no-one was laughing!

Netball brings out the wind in me. I don’t know what it is, but as soon as I get that bib on, I start evacuating, top and bottom. It doesn’t happen during Pilates, which is odd when you consider that Pilates is all about sucking in hard the vagazzle – a bit like you do when you need a wee on a train but daren’t go in the toilet in case you spontaneously combust, like that women on a train recently. Actually, I may have made the spontaneous combustion bit up but there was a woman who burnt to death in a Gatwick Express toilet recently, wasn’t there? Anyway, back to the programme.  Last Monday, during a particularly complex Pilates manoeuver involving me lying spreadeagled on my stomach while arms and legs flapped about in a sort of dry breaststroke, I thrashed out, fingering the lady with the big bunions several times. My problem is that I have a ‘long span’, as my Australian netball coach likes to call it (she is too polite to call me a freak) which is why, when I’m marking an attacker and they’re trying to get the ball past me, I can bat it back into their face and make their nose bleed.

It’s all go on the allotment and not just in the vegetable department. Boring Brian, the octogenarian Nordic cruise lover who tells me he can dig for 9 hours without stopping has been hanging around my compost bin wanting to chat asparagus, while Emphysema Jeff has invited me to sit on his bench and have a rummage in his biscuit barrel. Meanwhile, in the community shed, there’s been a lot of shouting as Deaf Ron has been in charge of the shop which means simple requests like, ‘have you got any celery in the back?’ can take a while to elicit a response. I have taken to miming which can be a dangerous game when it comes to root vegetables. But my biggest current concern is Alan, two plots down, who may or may not have taken a shine to me. A thin and pasty, long haired individual, Alan, aka Eccentric Nobhead, spends most of his time lying down next to his pond, fiddling with flowers. At one point I thought he might be dead but then realised he was having a nap. Later on, he wandered over with his flask of nettle tea and lay down again, right by my broad beans. I have now discovered that this is a man who keeps his finger and toenail clippings in a jar on his desk, at work. Say no more….Some of the names have been changed.

Yesterday, I woke up with a blocked nose hole but I reckoned, if I was careful, I could survive the day’s breathing on one nostril only. I have to stress, this was a gay rambling day, guaranteed to be a titter and a half, so, I donned my cagoule and chunky socks, dropped a Cox into my pocket and whizzed down to the station to meet the gang. The walk, just outside Haywards Heath, was sublime: we marvelled at a huge viaduct, oooed and aaaahed at the pretty snowdrops and laughed ’til we felt sick, when one of our party slipped on his arse in a claggy field. By lunchtime, I was Coxless and desperate for food but what was this, on arrival at our pre-arranged pub pitstop, we were met by three members of the Russian mafia; one was as wide as he was tall, another was the spit of Doctor Zhivago and all three had hair coming out of their nostrils and their ears. Luckily, after a quick frisk, we were allowed in – but only because we’d booked a table. Post-lunch, regretting our orgy of Vimto and chunky chips, we plodded the last mile or so back to the station, where, inspired by the mist and a man with a whistle, I came over all Jenny Agutter and started running up the platform, crying ‘daddy, my daddy’. Unfortunately, before I could get the second ‘daddy’ out, I’d fallen over a small dog and lay bleeding, my right leg ripped to shreds – yet again. Bang goes that knee modelling assignment.

It was an exceedingly breezy day in London town but I did clock one pair of flip flops and a strappy top. Granted, I was in the Underground at the time where the air is a tad more balmy but even so… I fought the urge to push flip flop man under the Circle Line but couldn’t resist a wince and shiver as I sidled past spaghetti strap lady on the platform. Having said that, I myself had spent the previous night stripped to the waist, fanning my torso with a copy of Horse and Hound in a friend’s Indian four poster in deepest Chiswick. It didn’t help that the bed was made for tiny Indians which meant I had to sleep diagonally, plus, I was joined in the wee small hours by the family pets – a small, but very hairy and exceedingly windy dog and a bored cat that kept trying to crawl inside my duvet. The next day, I went to the Affordable Art show in Battersea which was all men in suits with swishy hair and girls with bright red lips and swishy dresses. We saw a cow’s head that had been blown up so it looked like a Space hopper and a photo of lots of ladies who’d remembered their crop tops and high heels but forgotten their knickers. None of it was affordable, not even the collection of miniature goblets made out of Quality Street wrappers. On the way home on the train, Caroline Lucas shared our table. I held back for two seconds but then, unable to hold it in for any longer, effused,  ‘I did vote for you, you know’. She was very gracious, not like Jon Hegley, who ran away when I told him I loved him in a pub once.