Tales from my handbag

Ever since Christopher Boulter’s Bill Sykes bludgeoned my Nancy with a rubber mallet in 1970, I’ve had a soft spot for Oliver, the musical. At the weekend, I went to see some other 10 year old with a uni-brow and matching tash commit murder most horrid behind a bit of mdf. Rather like the Bill of my youth, this Bill couldn’t act to save his life but he had a marvelous lisp which made up for it. Dodger was ginger and Fagin kept fluffing his lines. Nancy, bless her heart, was three feet taller than the rest of the cast and had obviously been to the London Bridge branch of SpecSavers but her Oompahpah was tremendous. Other highlights: Mr Brownlow’s Peter Wyngarde sideburns and the valiant efforts of the assorted extras to casually mill around the postage stamp stage without a. bumping into each other or b. crashing into the cardboard book shop and Victorian vegetable barrow. Talking of vegetables, next day, on the allotment, Len, the hairy road sweeper with the Filipino, vegetable hating internet bride, approached me with an offer. If I wasn’t too bothered by excess gas, would I be interested in taking a bag of Jerusalem artichokes off his hands. It was a very windy night.

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!

Ooh, what a gay day; in the run up to Pride it’s been puffs on parade left, right and centre. Firstly, on Saturday night I went to see the Brighton Gay Men’s Chorus. It was all histrionic renditions of ‘Wherererererere is love’ juxtaposed with a very raucous ‘There is nothing like a dame’ and masochistic ‘Hit me baby one more time’. My favourite part was when the Desperate Fishwives did Girls Aloud and ‘The Promise’. The shimmying was first rate and when they ripped off their dowdy macks to reveal sequinned boob tubes - you can imagine the audience was in apoplexy. Anyway, next day it was Paul’s birthday soiree so it was up to London for a glass of sherry and a prawn vol au vent. The conversation was flowing but before it could turn into a Cava frenzy, I hightailed it to the Royal Albert Hall for some vertiginous coughing. I was expecting to see the orchestra in face masks but no, there was no evidence of swine flu just the usual consumptive cacophony inbetween movements. Oh, yes, and the man next to me had the hardest handclap I think I’ve ever heard.

I am turning into a tampon advert; I have unleashed my ponytail, put on a pair of tight shorts and am playing volleyball, tennis and netball and riding a bike while tossing my hair and laughing hysterically. I am the Goddess of Multitasking. The injuries are coming fast and furious. Last week, during a vicious netball match, I ripped both knees asunder while hurling myself at my opponent’s ankles and yesterday I suffered a groin strain and got me a mouth full of sand while showing off playing beach volleyball. I think someone better get the Ralgex, there’s a mid-life crisis on the horizon.   Â

Bloody hell, a flurry of snow and the country goes ga-ga. Is this all it takes for the hermetically-sealed citizens of this country to step out of their front doors and actually speak to each other? When I woke up yesterday morning, I had a Life on Mars moment when I looked out into the street and saw people - not scurrying to work or school, eyes down - but sliding down the road on makeshift sledges and having snowball fights with their neighbours. It felt like a street party but without the jelly. At my local shop, people were queueing for milk rations and laughing with strangers. Bizarre. Meanwhile, further up the road, there were two car crashes and a broken down M&S delivery lorry, a woman had collapsed in the Co-op and a child had cracked his head open on a shop floor swimming with slush. Blimey, it felt like an episode of Casualty. Today, the snow looks to have melted somewhat but even without going outside, I can bet the spirit of the Blitz will have disappeared with it. Shame.Â

I had a pasty man at the door today (that’s pale pasty not pastry pasty). This pasty man, think Uriah Heep with winkle pickers wanted me ….well actually, I’m not sure what he wanted. His opening gambit was ‘now don’t be scared’. Now, I don’t know about you, but if someone says ‘don’t be scared’, I’m immediately going to be scared but it was ok. He was one of those phone company sales people. Time wasters more like. In contrast, last week I had a man come to the door whose opening line was ‘do you want to do karate?’. ‘What now’, said I, thinking I quite fancied getting busy with a pile of bricks. But no, he wanted to enrol me in a class. Then today, the phone rang. There it was, the empty pause of the unsolicited sales call - and just as I was expecting Johnny Foreigner to say ‘hello miss, can I speak to the person in charge of your cellotape’, there was what sounded like a large fart. Blimey, this is all a bit Carry On thought I but no, I listened on, only to realise it a was in fact, the sound of a ship’s foghorn. I was being invited on a cruise. Me, on a cruise. I ask you. I get seasick on my garden seat so I don’t think I’ll be joining the Saga set just yet. I’m still thinking about karate though.

Yesterday I stole a packet of sandpaper from B&Q. I  casually secreted it beneath a bag of manure in my trolley and luckily, as my till technician had a lazy eye and non-specific fatigue, my ‘error’ went unchecked. Feeling brazen, today, I rode the train without a ticket. Who knows, tomorrow I might kill someone. Watch this space!

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

I’m in a state of shock. I just went up to the garage to buy a pint of milk, as you do, and the shop assistant, a woman in her 50s, looked at me longer than is normal for your average shopping transaction scenario. I thought, she either fancies me or I’ve got a bogie/spot/misplaced hair. Then she came out with it, ‘Oooh, you look like Celine Dion’. Celine bloody Dion, that Swiss/Canadian/thinlipped, ex-Eurovision, Titanic theme tune warbling chanteuse? Thanks a bunch. Still, it’s not quite as bad as being likened to Margot Leadbetter from the Good Life which I have been, on more than one occasion. God help me!Â