Next up is Mrs Dolittle's column. As you can probably guess from her pseudonym, Mrs Dolittle talks to the animals. Not for her, however, the time-honoured tradition of talking to an animal by vocalising speech sounds, waiting for it to meow, bark or squeak, and then cooing "oh, he thinks he's people!" No, Mrs Dolittle communicates with animals psychically. She meditates quietly and tunes into what animals are thinking. She goes into a trance to tap into your pet’s thought processes. She brain-rapes them, essentially. Let's not sugarcoat this.
This month, Mrs Dolittle is forcibly inserting her mind into a hen.
Or rather, several hens, starting with Henry who tells Mrs D about how wonderful it is to submit to her partner, the cockerel Bertie (who , Mrs D notes with with stunning insight, 'is rather cocky'). 'The hens accepted that their cockerel was the boss,' she says admiringly.
She moves on to a broody hen, Francine, sitting on a clutch of eggs, who has a 'feeling of relaxed purpose’. Mrs Dolittle asks her if she’s bored and gets the reply ‘Not boring at all. Youngster to hatch, very important.’ So charmed is Mrs D by this ‘wonderful experience’, she tells us she will communicate with her whenever she is stressed.
Through Mrs Dolittle, C:IF is promoting its sly anti-feminist agenda that women should submit to their men and will never be happier than when fulfilling their maternal duties. C:IF wants us barefoot and pregnant and chained to the wall of the barn.
Ignoring this misogyny, I pressed on. There is a lack of chickens in south London so I chose to commune with an animal more commonly found here: a squirrel. Specifically, Ceiling Squirrel, who lives in our loft and likes to scrabble around noisily in the evenings.
Earlier this evening, I sat back on the sofa, closed my eyes, and waited. Sure enough, within minutes there was a tell-tale pattering and thumping overhead. 'Hello?' I thought very hard. 'HELLO?' Nothing. I wondered if Ceiling Squirrel had heard me and was translating my thoughts into Squirrelese and forming a response. This could be slow. This could be like using chat rooms on a dial-up connection in 1995. From up above, nothing but the sound of tiny paws scuttling around. Thump. Bang. Clamber, scramble, tumble, CRASH.
'I wish you would be quiet, Ceiling Squirrel!' I thought loudly.
And suddenly, Ceiling Squirrel came though. 'No, you don't,' he psychically replied, 'because that would mean I was dead. Then you'd have to deal with my stinking rotten corpse. FUCK YOU. I’m going to fuck shit up in here until the end of your tenancy.'
I ended the connection. No-one needs a squirrel cursing directly into their brain. Some people may see this exchange as me projecting my thoughts about our loft-dwelling pest. I assure you, it is not. Ceiling Squirrel spoke to me. There is no real evidence for this, but it is a fact.
CONCLUSIONS
I need to tell the landlord about the You Know
What in the You Know Where. (Shh. He can hear you.)
What's your guilty television pleasure?
My television is innocent until proven otherwise.
I just wrote a paragraph about how rubbish I am at blogging, but it was so rubbish that I deleted it.
You'll thank me when you're older.
Christine Stockall is employed to do rubbish smudgy pencil drawings of people who have appeared to her, and
BACK ON THE FLOOR, BINKY.
Conclusion: not all dreams are messages from the other side. In fact, none of them are.
Tomorrow: Following Mrs Doolittle's advice, I try to psychically commune with an animal.
It’s Jef’s birthday soon and, being a man of simple pleasures, he has only requested one thing – an insanely hot chilli sauce. He already owns a bottle of Dave's Insanity Sauce, which makes me cry just to look at it and has a tongue-in-cheek message on the side claiming it can also be used to strip waxed floors and remove grease stains from driveways. At least I hope it's tongue-in-cheek. This is the even stronger sauce Jef wants to add to (his half of) dinner:
Chillis are measured on the Scoville scale, a measure similar to the Beaufort and decibel scales. Mad Dog 357 Special Edition measures 600,000 Scoville units. For comparison, a mouth-burning Scotch bonnet peaks at 325,000 units and the pleasant warmth of a jalapeno clocks in at a mere 5000 units. If a jalapeno is a gentle breeze, this sauce is a hurricane. If a Scotch bonnet is a noisy workplace, then this sauce is a jet engine. Taking off in your FACE.
Jef originally requested this sauce which, at a
brain-shattering four million Scoville units, needs to be added to food using a
pipette. I refused on the grounds that I will have no food in the house that
could kill a child. It is basically a terrifying weapon that should be
dismantled by specialists and the original recipe destroyed. IT SHOULDN’T BE.
So happy birthday, Jef. Happy throat-burning, eye-watering,
finger-blistering birthday.
I have decided to fall off the wagon. It's time to blog.
About what? What have you got to say?
I don't know. I'm a bit rusty, in truth. Perhaps I should go to the Vox front page to inspire me. It should always be the first port of call for the pick of the bunch (where mixed metaphors and squared clichés collide!)...
So what do we have?
A half-white, half-yellow train! Yay! I fucking love half-white, half-yellow trains! I have no idea what the commentator is slurring, because he's being drowned out by a half-white, half-yellow train! Which is outstanding, because I cannot get enough of half-white, half-yellow trains. I was promised a 'Holiday Ham Toss', but this exceeded my expectations and then some.
Wait! There's more excitement - the lead story:
"Sometimes you need to prepare Thanksgiving Dinner on the day before the day. Like if your daughter won't eat turkey, and you have to cook a ham!"
[culture is good]!
Oh no! I've left it too long! I'll never fit in now; now that I know that whatever I blog about how frequently I wipe beneath my draining board; how my plants are doing pretty well, but still I worry how they might be slightly underwatered, and that the central heating can't be doing them much good; how I find it hard sometimes to remember if this is the fortnight when they take away the recycling bags, or if it's the next; how the road had quite a lot of spray last time I went driving; I will never be beige enough to feel part of the Vox family.
Or maybe I got there without realising it. Perhaps I'll sink back into the wallpaper for another six months. Keep your eyes peeled for transport and recipe updates next summer.
What was your favorite class in high school? (And no, lunch doesn't count.)
Lunch class? Pah.
How about smoking behind the newsagents across the road class?
Or bunking off and going to Drummonds class?
Or maybe those free periods either side of lunch when my friend would drive us to the Dome on the Kings Road and I'd drink gin and tonics before returning to my A Level English Literature class?
Lunch class, schmunch class.
My particular favourites are the boredom/hunger and the lack of productivity ones.
- More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can't wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that's not only better, but also more directly involves me.
- Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realise you're wrong.
- Have you ever been walking down the street and realised that you're going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you're crazy by randomly switching directions on the pavement.
- I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.
- Is it just me, or are 80% of the people in the "people you may know" feature on Facebook people that I do know, but I deliberately choose not to be friends with?
- Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn't work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ's. We just figured it out. Today's kids are soft.
- I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.
- How many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear what they said?
- I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars teams up to prevent a d*ck from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers!
- Every time I have to spell a word over the phone using 'as in' examples, I will undoubtedly draw a blank and sound like a complete idiot. Today I had to spell my boss's last name to an attorney and said "Yes that's G as in...(10 second lapse)..ummm...Goonies".
- Whenever I'm Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public, I feel like a kid on Christmas morning that just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don't mind if I do!
- Why is it that during an ice-breaker, when the whole room has to go around and say their name and where they are from, I get so incredibly nervous? Like I know my name, I know where I'm from, this shouldn't be a problem …
- You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you've made up your mind that you just aren't doing anything productive for the rest of the day.
- Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don't want to have to restart my collection.
- There's no worse feeling than that millisecond you're sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.
- I'm always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.
- I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Dammit!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What'd you do after I didn't answer? Drop the phone and run away?
- I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it's on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.
- Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.
- Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey - but I'd bet my ass everyone can find and push the Snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time every time...
- I think the freezer deserves a light as well.
...and oh my, what a book. Finished Dan Brown's latest? Desperate for something of similar calibre? Then you're going to LOVE The Mistress by Martine McCutcheon, aka Tiffany out of EastEnders, who seems to have foolishly forgotten to employ a ghost-writer for her debut novel. Her website describes it as "warm, sexy and heart-wrenchingly moving" although "tepid, predictable and ball-achingly dreadful" might be better, going by the first chapter at least. You can read the opening here but here are some of the best bits should you not wish to taint your brain with it:
He was a sweet, cheeky chappie in his thirties with cute dimples – a typical black-cab driver
‘Happy birthday, dharrling,’ purred her Russian friend Assia. ‘The fur jacket and dress are both divine.’
... with a misty air of spirituality she looked Mandy straight in the face and whispered loudly, ‘This is a rose quartz. I got it from the tree festival. It will bring you love.’
His eyes were beautiful, and despite being tired they sizzled, full of knowledge, some sadness but most of all, kindness.
and my favourite:
If you went for it, truly went for it, you could get the life you wanted here, and that was Mandy’s aim – to have it all. And why not? She’d read a greeting on a card once in Paperchase on the King’s Road that had truly stuck with her:
Reach for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.
It's like she's torn up her Marian Keyes, Sophie Kinsella and Louise Fielding novels, covered herself in glue, rolled around on the floor and handed in whatever stuck to her publishers.
How have the ways you use your PC to stay connected with family and friends changed over the years?
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Many years ago, when I was a wee lass, I remember my parents would use our local PC to send messages to our friends and family. Every time my mum would blow a special whistle he would turn up, bicycle clips still attached, his jolly, shiney face laughing away, ready to take the post card to Aunty Connie in Newton Abbot or the pair of socks to Grandpa in Usk.
On high days and holidays our PC would literally tie us together with lengths of string to our neighbours - the sense connection we felt to each other when we celebrated the Queen's silver jubilee in 1977 was something that has never been repeated. Oh the merriment we had when one of us needed to use the loo - you just can't imagine! The rope burns are just faint scars of a happy occasion.
Later, in my mis-spent youth, I used my PC to keep me in touch with far-flung friends. All I would have to do was to commit some sort of petty crime (brick through the window of a local cattery, impersonating Bros - that sort of thing) and my PC would take me to a station where I was allowed one free phone call. I'm telling you, before the invention of facebook - this was the most effective way of keeping in touch with the relatives you see infrequently.
As I grew older, I became PC myself - I started calling my friends and relations things like 'vertically challenged', 'hygienicly taxed', 'fiscally tested' - we found we could all connect by being PC - even our PC joined in and called us 'area squanderers' and 'gorey intellectually sub-normals'.
Since the days of the first PCs I think we have come a long way and I certainly feel more connected to my friends and family since it takes them ages to work out how I'm insulting them.
Dear internet,
My weekend was so action-packed (note: this may not conform to other people’s definitions of the term) that I’m going to tell you all about it.
On Friday night, my volunteering shift was interrupted by a bumblebee as a big as a mouse. Honestly. Massive. I had to send three men out to deal with it – who reported back that it was actually the size of a poussin – and then it kept coming back in. Maybe it just wanted to talk. It was eventually banished with a flapping copy of Grazia.
Saturday night saw me sitting in the dark in a scout hut, clutching a plastic cup of wine, waiting to shout “SURPRISE!” at one of Jef’s friends who had been thrown a surprise birthday party. He didn’t cry/faint/fall over/run away/wet himself when the lights were turned on and all his family and friends were revealed, crouched under a peeling ‘Jesus Loves You’ poster. I would probably have done all five, and been sent home in disgrace.
The DJs looked like they were straight out of Phoenix Nights, talked all over the records, and over ENUNciated EVerything in exciting DYNAMIC voices, i.e. they were amazing. They took requests but had a “no Fleet Foxes” rule. They foolishly played a ska-punk version of Take On Me instead of the superior A-ha original, and I raged about not being able to do my special Take On Me dance. It involves whirling arms and no shame. Talking of dancing, I’ve noticed recently that most women have a sedate way of dancing, which involves polite sidesteps, swaying hips and shoulder rolling. I have perfected a dancing style that is probably best described with the euphemism “enthusiastic”. I am messy and awkward and not terribly aware of the shapes I am making. I dance for myself and not for the crowd. It is not pretty. This is possibly why I’ve had more teeth removed than I’ve had boyfriends.
Towards the end of the night, Jef decided that he wants to throw a Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men party for his 30th. He will be Danny Dyer, and the guests will be required to dress as dangerous men, who will duke it out over the course of the evening to determine once and for all who is the deadliest. I predict a Hitler vs. Harold Shipman final.
Fast-forward to Sunday: last night I was woken several times by Jef’s housemate slamming doors and stomping around. I’d usually have been propelled out of the bedroom by the force of my own rage, but Jef’s housemate is going to war today, to Afghanistan, and I thought that if you’re going to cut a man some slack, it’s surely on the eve of his enlisting. So I lay there and fumed and tried not to think dark thoughts like “fuck off and die” because maybe he will.
I’ll leave you on that note. I hope you all had super-fantastical weekends.
