How Not to Cope With Empty-Nest Syndrome

The Physicist and the Lawyer have left for Uni in order to actually qualify for the aforementioned titles. I realise that perhaps I have left them ill-equipped for this adventure. Important things have not been passed from mother to daughter in the proper way.

The Lawyer, although adept in her field, has discovered that she doesn’t know proper cutlery etiquette for high table, why gowns have shoulders like American footballers and how to deal with impenetrable forms from government bodies. The Physicist, despite being an old hand at gowns, carnations and massive equations is still lacking in basic Tesco skills.

Meanwhile I, left to my own devices on my own, have had a minor revelation. Major revelations can be a tad painful so I’m sticking to minor ones. I can now do whatever I want.

So far I have:
Worn a mini-skirt
Turned the music up far too loud
Watched inappropriate videos
Changed my clothes up to seventeen times a day
Had strange men (or at least the Unknowable Man) round the house
Despaired of strange men
Despaired
Not got a job
Forgotten to go to bed
Smoked
Drinked
Not tidied up
Slept with the cats on my bed
And not eaten a proper meal.

Who needs teenagers?

How Not to Change Sex or Free Sky Everything Kills Mr Garth

I have become someone else. A man to be precise. Never respond to things that offer you free stuff. Because that’s how it happened:

Three goggle-eyed months ago a piece of paper alighted in utmost innocence upon my doormat (I have one of those) (mostly for the cat to sit on in order to enable us to construct basic easy-to-read sentences). FREE SKY EVERYTHING FOR THREE MONTHS!!!! It declared. The paper, not the cat or the mat. JUST RING THIS NUMBER!!! You may recall all of this. It was easy. I rang the number. I got free Sky everything. I watched Sex and the City. A lot.

All I had to do was ring the number again three months later and cancel so as not to be paying for expensive Sky everything for the rest of my life. Frankly I should have been suspicious given all the capital letters and exclamations marks.

I was very sure not to forget. I put reminders on my Google iPage, my calendar, my walls, my hands and on post-it notes that covered the cats and the mats.

Clutching my ‘Welcome to Sky’ letter I rang the number. Pressed some numbers. Waited. For a long time. Eventually a young man answered.

Me: I want to cancel my free Sky everything.
Young man: What is your subscription number?
I looked at my letter and read a number that was quite like infinity.
Young man: And the account holder’s name?
I told him my name.
He denied that I had an account.
I looked at my letter.
The account holder transpired to be a Mr George Garth.

I don’t know a Mr George Garth. Although he sounds like a nice enough chap. Although by a strange coincidence I live in a place that sounds remarkably like that.

Me: I believe there has been a computer error. I know not of George.
Young Man: Only the account holder can cancel the subscription.
Me: He doesn’t exist.
Young man: You cannot cancel, only Mr Garth can.
Me: He is a fictional character.
Young Man: Can he come to the phone?
Me: Hang on.

I fetched Mr Garth.
Me (in unlikely put-on deep voice that sounded a cross between someone with a heavy cold and an orang-utan): I want to cancel my Sky everything subscription.
Young Man: Is that Mr Garth?
Me: Yes.
Young Man: You cannot cancel as you have another month to go.

In the strange warping of space-time induced by satellite transmission September had become October.

Mr Garth: But can’t I just cancel?
Young man: No.

Mr Garth hung up. He was confused, befuddled and a little wary. He also was developing a sore throat from talking like a member of the ape family. He was worried that it was all a ploy to make him pay forever.

He picked up the phone and dialled. And waited. For an infinite amount of time. A young woman answered.
Mr Garth: I want to cancel my free Sky everything.
Young woman: What is your subscription number?
Mr Garth looked at his letter and read a number that was quite like infinity.
Young woman: And the account holder’s name?
Mr Garth: Mr Garth.
The young woman then gave him a forth degree interrogation as to his viewing habits. This was most revealing as to Mr Garth, his views, his lifestyle and his inner-most secrets.

It turned out that Mr Garth really didn’t care for TV at all; he preferred a good book and an open sandwich. His kids were now banned from watching because three of them had committed very heinous crimes of an undisclosed nature brought on by too many violent films and the other six had eschewed their studies in order to watch Sky everything. His wife had left him because she couldn’t withstand another advert depicting the germs that lived in her toilet. His two cats and several cocker spaniels had become addicted to Sex and the City.

Mr Garth: So really I do need to cancel my subscription.
Young Woman: What about sport? Don’t any of your family watch the sport?
Mr Garth: I want to cancel my subscription (he was getting very grumpy now, not to mention a tad hoarse)
Young Woman: But you still have a free month.
Mr Garth: I want to cancel my subscription (he was losing the will to live now, not to mention a becoming more and more shrill)
Young Woman: Well you have to give 30 days notice on this sort of account.

It’s a sad but little-known fact that fictional characters can actually die of frustration.

I suspect I have been caught by an elaborate piece of consumer entrapment which makes time distortion, the reality of fiction and the dangers of Sex and the City look like orang-utan play.

How To Tell if a Man Fancies You Using Philosophy

The Unknowable Man’s spare career (we should all have one) (mine is as a cat walker) is as a Consultant Freelance Philosopher. The public need for such a person is fairly self-evident. Oft have I wished to consult a Consultant Philosopher on the finer points of philosophy for those every-day questions such as:
Why did I walk into this room?
Where have I come from to arrive here?
Does this interesting pile of junk on the kitchen table actually exist?
If I have free will then why is the solicitor charging me?
Why are Fallacies so often pathetic?
And
If this is reality then why does it seem so dusty?


Philosophers tend to ask the really BIG questions, such as
WHY?
HOW?
WHAT?
And
PARDON? (those are the politer philosophers)

An interesting thing about the big questions, I’ve noticed, is that they tend to be very small.

Whereas Relationship Physicists (my other spare career) tend to ask very slightly longer ones:
‘How do you tell if a man fancies you?’ tends very much to be the favourite.

So, in a spirit of trying to find something in common with the man I’m sleeping with I will now attempt to discover:
How to tell if a man fancies you using philosophy-

Step 1: ask the BIG questions

why do I want to know if he fancies me?
how will I know if he fancies me?
what does ‘fancies’ actually mean?
pardon me for asking.

Step 2: answer the BIG questions
This can obviously only be done in a personal context but if you’re stuck then some examination of the types of knowledge such as a priori and a posteriori (most relevant here) will probably be as useless as anything else.

Step 3: come to a philosophical conclusions. Popular ones include:
‘Something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.’
‘An infinite capacity for taking things for granted.’
‘Some touch of madness.’
And
‘Fuck knows.’

All in all I’m beginning to suspect that philosophy may not be the way forward for the Big Question. As a famous philosopher said:

‘Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know.’

And as a famous scientist said:

‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.’

Perhaps it’s time to stop asking The Question. Surely we all really know the answer. 42.

How Not to Be Judged By Karl Marx – Or Socialist Sex and How to Do It.

There is a portrait of Karl Marx. On the wall of the Man’s bedroom. There is a certain sense that Karl is overseeing proceedings.

Of course we all have something on our bedroom walls. Some appealing art or peeling paint that looks down upon goings-on in the bed. I have a painting of what is probably the sea, for obvious metaphorical reasons. I also have a drawing of a naked man (known as Dangly-Bollocks Man), for obvious metaphysical reasons. He has is face politely averted.

Karl, however, in his best Mona Lisa style is looking very directly. Judging. What goes on. Quite a lot has been going on.

Now I am worried that my sexual activities with The Man (henceforth to be known as the Unknowable Man for obvious reasons which we will never know) may not be of a sufficiently socialist nature. That possibly Karl might disapprove.

The question is – am I the bourgeois of the sex world? Should I be instigating revolution and the fair distribution of orgasms? Is it fair that the few should have so many and yet the many have so few?

As Karl himself said ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ So perhaps on this premise we can be reassured. The Unknowable Man has the abilities and I have the needs. And Karl has the beard.

Mamma Mia! Or How Life Really Could be a Musical

I’ve been to the cinema. The film went like this:

A young beautiful blond 20 year-old was about to get married.
She sang a song.
Her 40 –something-year-old mother did DIY.
She sang a song.
Some men were involved who also sang.
There was dancing.
And in the end it wasn’t the beautiful blond 20 year-old that got married but the 40-something-year-old mother. She lived happily ever after. With Pierce Brosnan.

Mamma Mia!

This, I feel should be a parable for life. Aside from the Pierce Brosnan bit.

So why, we ask ourselves, isn’t life more like a musical? When was the last time that a group of people were, at one moment discussing something quite mundane, like money, or oranges, or perforations and then spontaneously broke into a song and dance routine? Where are the hidden orchestras playing overly-arranged tunes? The young tight-buttocked men grinning inanely whilst flinging their limbs into the air? These, surely, are the elements in life that lead to long-lasting happiness.

And so I feel it is my mission to rectify the aforementioned shortcomings. I have the technology. I have just purchased the costumes.

This is how it will go:
A not-so-young woman wants a man.
She sings a song, the orchestra plays from her iPod (we won’t worry that no one else can hear it for it is only the main protagonist that we are interested in).
The young tight-buttocked chorus dances and flings limbs about (this will be in miniature using the woman’s daughter’s ex-collection of Ken dolls but some cunning camera work will cover this lack of scale).
The woman dances wearing her new costume that she bought for her forthcoming holiday but will double up for the purpose (a purple tankini and a pair of red houndstooth daps).
A man sees her (through the kitchen window) (for this is a kitchen-sink musical) and falls in love with her.
He sings a song (or possibly it is groaning, but we are not sure, nor do we actually care).
The man is not Pierce Brosnan because his singing is crap.
In the end the woman of a certain age marries the peeping Tom accompanied by a dancing chorus of Kens and Barbies and much merriment and music that only she can hear.

There are no young beautiful blond 20 year-olds involved because she died of embarrassment in the very first scene.

I believe it will be a hit and run on Broadway for many years until purple tankinis and red houndstooth daps fall out of fashion and women of a certain age are no longer wanting men.

Don’t Panic – Or Dark Matter and How to Find It

It’s ok. We can all stop panicking. They’ve found Dark Matter, or at least found something dark that may lead to them finding something that shows something dark. That may matter. Or not.

Dark Matter, for all you non-physicists out there, (or for all you physicists out there who think physics is something to do with science), is invisible, very very difficult to find, constitutes a great deal of the universe, is difficult to pinpoint, put your finger on, touch, smell, hear, understand and essentially makes the world go round. Does this remind you of anything?

There have been a number of methods for trying to find Dark Matter:

Look in the sort of places where Dark Matter likes to hide (these include space, dimly lit bars which resemble black holes, the internet and under the bed (that’s if you’ve merely mislaid the D.Matter rather than having lost it or never found it in the first place)).
Use a Dark Matter Detector (these include the darker reaches of the soul, the sleeve, and something that looks like an internal organ or possibly is an internal organ).
Pretend you aren’t looking for it and hope you happen across it.
Look for something that resembles Dark Matter and simply pretend it’s the real thing (a very popular alternative).

Never confuse Dark Matter with the Dark Ages although as the Dark Ages approach those who have mislaid, lost or never found Dark Matter tend to get even more confused than they already are.

I’ve been fumbling about in the dark with someone who matters and am just as confused as ever. But at least I’ve stopped panicking. Because I now know that it is possible to find Dark Matter. In theory. Or something that resembles it.

How To Tell If a Man Will Continue to Fancy You Using Statistics

I just read that 31% of people aged 45-54 who married in the last year in the USA had met on the internet. This is heartening news. Of course statistics have a tendency to belie the realities of life in the same way that life tends to inflate vital statistics.

A famous statistician once said ‘we are not concerned with the matter that is uncertain.’ But that’s what’s the matter. Uncertainty.

Having established that The Man probably does fancy you (note the use of the second person as if we aren’t really talking about me at all), how does one discover whether he will continue to fancy you or if it was just a passing fancy? And if passing is fancy why is it comparatively popular?

Statistics may prove to have some insight into the problem. So:

How to tell if a man will continue to fancy you using statistics –

1. Gather your sample (no, not that, that’s how to use biological techniques) (we may come to that another day).
2. Observe the experimental setting (bed, sofa, hillside, kitchen or bicycle).
3. Take extensive and exhaustive notes on extensive exhaustion (try not to get your pen confused with anything else) (oh and try and be subtle or the Man may wonder why you have to write everything down and take this as a sign of early-relationship-memory-loss, evidence gathering or belief in astrology).
4. Use numbers.
5. Analyse the numbers using statistical analysing sort of things.

Statistical analysing sort of things can be either
a) Descriptive – where you make a nice graph (usually shaped like a breast), a tasty pie chart (shaped like a pie that some bastard hasn’t divided up fairly at all), or a bar chart (shaped like New York). You can also use numerical descriptors about deviation. In my case I will stick to just the usual deviation.
b) Inferential – this is said to account for randomness (that’s handy) and draws inferences (don’t we all?).

I set about the task. This is what happened:

From my sample I inferred that due to the randomness of life, the exhaustion occurring from experimentation and my inability to understand the setting of my bicylce, I came to the analytical and statistical conclusion that the answer to ‘Whether the Man Would Continue to Fancy Me’ was:
14
with a mean of 78
and an average of 28,892,892.
Or, in a more descriptive manner:
a graph that was shaped like an aardvark pole-vaulting,
a pie chart that was pencil and onion flavoured
a bar chart that strangely resembled Einstein’s hair-do in 1953, or possibly the Outer Hebrides.

The problem with statistics is that, like men, even when one has them, they are more or less impossible to interpret.

How I Did Meet my Guardian Soulmate or How to Be as Educated as Einstein or 101 Classic Books

This may be the most ridiculous and desperate thing I’ve been asked to do. Matt, in his wisdom, has sent me this task:

Equipped with only a very very long list of ‘classic’ books I’m supposed to
Look at the list and:
1) Bold those I've read.
2) Italicise those I intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books I love.
4) Pass it on to a few others so's they can inevitably defeat me.

Why? I ask myself. And shouldn’t he have also sent tea, cake, a bivouac and one of those shiny silver blankets to see me through this?

They say that education is not about knowledge or information. Like sex, and all good things in life, it is about technique. Einstien, when asked what the speed of sound was, said that he didn’t know, he didn’t need to know, because he knew how to find out. There are some simple methods of finding out:
Ask someone who knows
Read a book
Look on the internet
Experiment.

The infamous questions that are commonly asked of my blog are:
How to tell if a man fancies me
How to find a g-spot
And
Guardian Soulmates (although technically that’s not a question we know what they mean).

I still don’t have any knowledge of or information about:
How to tell if a man fancies me
How to find a g-spot
And
Guardian Soulmates

But I know a man who does. A man slept with me. I am therefore highly educated. I can now ask this man who knows
How to tell if a man fancies me
How to find a g-spot (and many other places worth visiting)
And
Guardian Soulmates
and has probably read all these books and many trillions more, looked on the internet, found me on Guardian Soulmates and if I am as lucky as I’d like to be will proceed with further experimentation.

And re the ridiculous task - Matt did this because Gary asked him and Gary’s a dreamboat. I don’t know Gary. But since Matt is also a dreamboat I guess that (by inductive logic) is why I should do it:

1 [Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen]
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – erg
3 [Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte]
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling or some of them
5 [To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee]
6 The Bible or more than I’d have liked to
7 [Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte]
8 [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare or some of it
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien – also erg
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - although it's in the pile
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 [[[The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger]]]
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy or some of it
25 [[[The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams]]]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky – but the Man has read it 1000 times
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 [Emma - Jane Austen]
35 [Persuasion - Jane Austen]
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 [[Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne]]
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 The Magus - John Fowles
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 [Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen]
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding !! I haven’t read that!!
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath – oh dear
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (but the Lawyer said it was rubbish)
83 [The Color Purple - Alice Walker]
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 [Charlotte’s Web - EB White]
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom otherwise know as ‘I hope books in heaven are a shit-load better than this
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 [[[The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery]]]
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I really need to add
101 [[[[Mostly everything by P.G. Wodehouse]]]
and all this generally goes to prove that I’m a girl and was once a child. I don’t know who to pass this on to so if any of you would care to play this rather insipid game feel free. Or spend your time reading a good book. Or on the internet finding knowledgeable people.

How to Tell if a Person Fancies You Using the Laws of Chemistry

They say it’s all about chemistry. Or at least it’s a ‘valued quality’ for an ideal match on Soulmates. They don’t have physics. Which leaves me wondering if there’s really a place in the world for Relationship Physicists. I think I may have to convert to being the Relationships Chemist.

So – How to tell if a man fancies you using the laws of chemistry:

First let us examine the science of Chemical Kinetics. This seems relevant as movement and collision are involved.

Rate of reaction –
Factors that affect the rate of reaction:

Physical state:
If your target person is in a poor physical state (wobbly, purple, limbs arranged in a Picasso-esque manner or a bit Dali around the edges) this will have a detrimental effect on his/her ability to react. Reaction times will be slowed. Therefore they may fancy you but you will have to wait a year or so to find out.

Concentration:
‘Concentration plays an important role in reactions’ (this is a direct quote) (that’s why I’ve used the quotation marks) (not just for effect). From this we infer that if your target soul is not concentrating he/she may simply forget to fancy you and fancy something else that passes by their field of vision, like a chair, a pint or a small woodlouse. This may make you feel like a small woodlouse. Or a chair. Or liquid.

Temperature:
Folk of a higher temperature have more thermal energy. More thermal energy may lead them to remove some outer layers. Or some inner layers. Do not confuse this with attraction. It’s them that’s hot. Not you.

Catalysts:
Whilst the catalyst remains unchanged during the reaction the elements involved undergo a transformation of some sort or another. Catalysts can range from ‘beer goggles’ to ‘wine piz-nez’ to ‘cocaine blindfolds’ to ‘crowd spectacles’ (this time I used the quotation marks for erroneous effect). I heartily recommend them all. It may be your only hope.

Equilibrium:
Doesn’t come into it.

Interestingly Beer’s Law may give some clue as to how to actually get a person to fancy you. It states that there is a dependency between the transmission of light through a substance (this obviously includes attire) and the coefficient of intensity. I’ve always liked Beer.

How Not to Email a Guardian Soulmate

They say that money can’t buy happiness but where’s the empirical evidence for this? Strangely, then when I Googled ‘money can’t buy happiness’ it turns out that there are a number of scientific studies that appear to demonstrate just that. However, never one to be put off by evidence, fact, science or the truth I have decided that money will buy me happiness and have done it again. Subscribed to Guardian Soulmates.

But this time it’s going to be different. This time I’m not going to sit there and hope that my well-worded (or wordy anyway) profile and glamorous picture will bring the Soulmates flooding in. Or trickling in. Or thank you the person who emailed me last time. Nor am I going to believe that simply ticking ‘Any’ for all the boxes in ‘my ideal mate’ will attract Mr Right. Or that adding all the cute guys who are way out of my league to My Favourites will mysteriously make them in my league. This time I’m being proactive. I’m taking control. I’m actually emailing people.

I have a technique. This is what I do:

I find a man I fancy. Or a man.
I carefully read what he’s written.

I then craft a cunningly worded sentence or two to say how interesting and sexy they sound. Examples include:
‘You sound interesting.’
‘You look nice.’
‘I read your profile.’
And
‘I fancy you.’

I then craft a cunningly worded sentence or two that lets them know just how interesting and sexy I am. Examples include:
‘I have written a load of bollocks on my profile.’
‘I can catch a ping-pong ball on my nose.’
‘I know how to read.’
And
‘My shoulders match.’

Then, finally, and this is the important part, I craft a cunningly worded question so they can answer my email without the awkwardness of not knowing what to say. Examples include:
‘How do you come to be living in Iceland/London/The World?’
‘Why have you put up that appalling photograph?’
‘Can you direct me to the Caves of Redemption?’
And
‘How?’

So far three people have replied. One of them didn’t have a subscription yet, one of them had let their subscription lapse and the other was the man who emailed me last time. And they say money can’t buy happiness. Pah!

How Not to Win a Local Election

I’m being stalked. First it was the letters through the door every 2.64 minutes. Delivered by hand by the mysterious minions of the group of stalkers better known as The Big Three. Then the stalkers started knocking at my door. Now the phone calls have started.

When the phone rang I of course hoped it was the man of my dreams. It could, in fact, have been the man of my dreams. He sounded suave and sophisticated and asked if I was me, the Physicist or the Lawyer. I was momentarily confused and said I was the Physicist. I hastily corrected myself. The Physicist is in Harrogate so I could hardly have been her. But then he broke the bad news to me. He was calling on behalf of one of the Big Three. I don’t like to think that the man of my dreams spends his leisure hours as a stalker.

At first the attention they paid me was mildly amusing. It gave me some spurious sense of being loved, to know that the fate of the local council and hence the whole of the British electoral system and the future of the Europe, the world and extraneous black holes was in my slightly mud-stained and keyboard-worn hands. The letters extolling the virtues of the Big Three and their exciting policies re my locality, including opening the footbridge (now mysteriously achieved without particular reference to any of them), the speed humps, the lamp posts, the drains, the felling of innocent trees and the unknowable smell emanating from the vicinity (although I suspect it is a political stench) made me smile gently at their dedication to the petty, superficial and minor-soap-opera-esque. I chortled humorously at the fact that they all were innocently espousing the exact same policies re the speed humps, the lamp posts, the drains, the felling of innocent trees and the unknowable smell emanating from the vicinity.

Now it’s really getting beyond a shaggy dog story. The footbridge is worn to a Tarzan-like rope structure with the amount of walking the minions have performed upon its newly polished surface. The speed humps have humped into even larger edifices with all their cunning driving with their wheels on either side of them. The lamp posts are completely eroded by minions’ shaggy dogs. The drains are as drained as I am. The amount of paper they have inserted through doors will have felled at least as many trees as they are trying to save. All our letterboxes are suffering leaflet fatigue and our doorbells are receiving expensive counselling due to the trauma of prospective councillors poking nonchalantly at them.

And so now it is very clear who I shall vote for. The Small One. Who put ONE leaflet through my door and trusted my ability to read. OK, the Welsh was challenging, but I assumed he was interested in the speed humps, the lamp posts, the drains, the felling of innocent trees and the unknowable smell emanating from the vicinity.

How Guardian Soulmates Became the Choice of the Moderately Eccentric

Good news. I have been re-visioned. That’s not like revision. No major studying, note-taking or sunbathing is involved. It is like reclassification except without the class. Reification.

Good news. I am no longer, mad, batty, insane, nuts, barmy, balmy or balm. I am now officially moderately eccentric. This, I feel, is an improvement. And it’s not just me who has been involved in this re-visioning. It has been validated by my whole family. All two daughters of the Oxbridge (or Camford as it’s been re-visioned) variety. What higher source of verity could there be? Verity denies all this of course. However the cats agree.

So, now, relieved of the burden of madness, battyness, insanity, nuttiness, barmyness, balmyness and skin cream I have once more joined Guardian Soulmates. Under the guise of sanity. Or at least moderate eccentricity. All my hard research led me inevitably and inextricably back to where I started. Just like the red shoe incident. And life. And roundabouts.

This is why the moderately eccentric chooses this particular brand of site in preference to all the others:

There is NO winking involved and thus we are freed from Painful Facial Distortion Syndrome.
There are semicolons in their lists giving a comforting veneer of intellectuality.
They ask you if you prefer a carrot or a stick (I chose string).
The carrot and stick thing is the total of their psychological profiling.
They consider it possible that once you took drugs (but we all pretend we don’t).
There are no annoying pop-up things telling you that you are being stalked.
There are no stalks.
Folk as eccentric and re-visioned as myself write long eccentric stuff that makes as little sense as this. I find this comforting.
The quality of the voyeurism sans subscription is totally top of the list.
My horoscope advised that I might find my soulmate.
The bloke I fancy is on Guardian Soulmates.

I already have 3 fans. He’s not one of them.

How Not to Seduce Olympic Athletes

I’ve just spent a deal of time on the floor with Iwan Thomas. This has led me to believe that perhaps the only answer is segregation of some sort.

This is what happened:

I went to the gym with the Physicist. She ran, I rowed, she cross-trainered, I went on the Kylie-Bum device.

In case you need to know (and you do if you aren’t sporting Kylie’s bum but would like to) (I am because I do know) it’s those recumbent bikes. At first it’s hard to understand why anyone should want to lie down and cycle at the same time, especially in the gym when any movement forward would lead one to collide with the bank of TV sets. But a quick experiment with one of these apperati reveals that your gluteus maximus undergoes such trauma that it is obviously Kylie’s vehicle of choice.

It’s also hard to know why every gym sports a bank of TV sets when there are so many other fascinating things to look at. Iwan Thomas for example.

So, we ran, rowed, cross-trained, Kylie-bummed and then I headed for that corner of the gym where the mats are in order to stretch my aching maximus. He (Iwan) was on the adjacent mat. Improving his biceps brachii. I smiled. He flexed. I moaned gently to myself. He had his iPod on so didn’t hear me. I had my iPod on so may have not moaned quite as gently as I imagined. I stretched my maximus by deftly touching my toes, glancing Iwan-ward hoping he would admire just how very flexible my maximi were. He flexed his pectoralis major. My gastrocnemius fluttered. I did an unlikely yoga pose that involved putting my knee in the general area of my ear and tried at the same time to catch his eye. I caught mine instead.

Meanwhile the Physicist had finished running and joined us on the mats. She proceeded to be blond, young, do fifty sit-ups followed by the splits. Iwan smiled at her. I turned the volume up on my iPod to cunningly disguise my middle-agedness.

I have written the gym a note and put it in the suggestion box. What I have suggested is this:

Could we please have gym segregation? The not-so-young of us would like not to be exposed the blond, beautiful and muscled Iwans and the Physicist/gymnasts of the world as it can cause strain of the gluteus maximus, impair our cardiac functioning and dissolve what self-worth we had applied prior to arrival.

The management replied:

You’ll find that it is written in the small print of your contract with the aforementioned establishment that all persons over the age of forty are, for their own safety and well-being, to keep their attention firmly fixed on the bank of TV screens provided for just this contingency. Any breech of this agreement is at your own risk.

How Not to Learn about Men on Internet Dating Sites

I’m still testing internet dating sites. It’s a big job.

This is what happened:

For a number of days, weeks, or possible millennia, I have been exhibiting my profile on a plethora of sites. In the interest of science you understand. Nothing to do with being sad, lonely, celibate and having discovered that Rolos are very hard to find these days. I am not an addict. And in the interest of fairness, equality and non-prejudicialness I have been reading other peoples’ profiles. Mens.

And this is what I’ve learnt:
All men are sincere, fun-loving and honest.
Many men ride motorbikes and believe this to be sexy, attractive and cute.
All men have a good sense of humour.
Most men have travelled a lot, thus forgetting to have a proper relationship.
Those who have travelled a lot are prone to list all the countries, beaches and small tributaries they have visited.
A large number of men are too shy/ugly/famous to put their pictures up.
A significant proportion of men don’t believe in spelling, punctuation or words.
Men are as bad as women re putting up photos of them that were taken 20 years ago.
There are others who lie about their age but forget to put photos up taken 20 years ago.
And yet others who put photos up but don’t let people see them, which is very mysterious and distrubing.
People use acronyms that I don’t understand. GSOH.
Some men have taken pretension onto a greater plane than one might have thought possible or even probable.
Some men are very cute.
The cute ones are out of my league.


And since there has been a lot of interest in ‘How to tell if a man fancies you’ and since the internet dating way of being is de rigueur amongst singletons these days I have also investigated how to tell if a man fancies you on an internet dating site.

Here’s how it works:

They wink at you.

Childish I know.

;-)

How Not to Internet Date (Again)

The internet dating voyeurism is hotting up a pace. Someone from Match.com winked at me. I winked back.

Truth be told it’s not really very satisfying. It feels somewhat shallow as relationships go. I expect it to continue like this for some time. Probably because neither of us can be bothered to pay the subscription. So all we are left with is winking. It’s tiring on the eyelid and leaves one feeling a tad lopsided.

But then I got an email from a man. Warning me that the incidence of STDs amongst the over 45s was on the increase. It would have been quite exciting, implying that he was willing to share his STD with me, or at least prevent sharing his STD with me. Only the man was my brother. He’d heard this good news on Woman’s Hour. At least I’m reassured that there’s a man with a feminine side out there concerned with my welfare. I told him that my life of celibacy is hardly likely to lead me to the land of STDs. He recommended that I try a different kind of internet dating site.

This is what happened:

I logged on the Parship.co.uk as advised. The premise behind this site is that finding the perfect mate is not down to good looks, chemical attraction, shared beliefs, STDs or the last Rolo. It’s all about psychology.

Simply take the simple compatibility-profiling test and the site will give you a list of simply compatible people who are a good psychological match.

I suspect that this is the hard drugs of internet dating. I’m beginning to wonder if this dabbling in dating sites is leading to true addiction.

I took the test. Twice. Under two different names. Is this illegal?

I had to answer questions as far reaching as the North Circular Road, as probing as my dibber and as questionable as my blog. There were even picture questions, I was expecting inkblots but none turned up, much to my disappointment.

They sent me my matches. Twice. Interesting men included someone in the military, an oil engineer and an egomaniac. I wasn’t allowed to see their pictures because I hadn’t paid the subscription. I’m beginning to think that the last Rolo thing is better than psychology. Chocolate usually is.

Now I’ve signed up to Datingdirect.com.

Can one get help for this sort of addiction?

How Not to Choose a Candidate

The Lawyer is going to be 18 soon.

There is going to be a local election for County Councillor.

These two facts are not unrelated.

So, the serious business of who to vote for now affects the whole family. The serious business of local elections seems to be very serious. Every five minutes or so another candidate’s minion hobbles by our door and inserts another exciting hand-crafted leaflet.

There are some pretty big issues at stake. We read the exciting hand-crafted leaflets very carefully:

The Tories have a two-colour printer. They are very keen to get the footbridge reopened. In blue.

The Plaid people’s candidate went to Oxford. This is obviously a point of division within our home. He’s very keen to get the footbridge reopened.

Labour also have a two-colour printer and are extraordinarily abandon with their use of red. They are very keen to get the footbridge reopened.

The Lib Dem candidate has a leaflet that folds. She’s a bit of a super-model. There are shots of her in various outfits in a variety of exotic locations – In an anorak outside the post office, in a twin-set outside the school, in tweed outside somewhere that could be a field. She is very keen to get the footbridge reopened.

The choice was, frankly, mind-boggling. At first we thought that really, on a local level, that we should leave our natural party-political prejudices aside and vote purely on the issues. We are very keen to get the footbridge reopened.

The election is next week, or possibly the week after, or, sometime soonish. If only someone had mentioned that in their leaflets.

Today they reopened the footbridge.

We are fairly stymied.

How Not to Internet Date

I’ve fallen off the wagon. Yes, for some whole weeks I stayed off internet dating. But, somehow, possibly without my knowledge, I’ve signed up to Match.com. It’s not that I had anything against Guardian Soulmates, they were fine, cute and moderately dandy. It’s just that, well, if I signed up to that one again then all my ex-dates would see that I was back and it would be revealed just how really sad, terminally foolish and obsessed I am.

Also, my friend, whom I met through Soulmates, would realise that all my swearing off internet dating and swearing on being single was a complete, utter and overwhelming sham.

The problem seems to be that it might be addictive. Like any good drug it is the promise of some high that is better than some low or medium elevation. Just click on this man and your life will be better.

This time, however, I have it all under control. I’ve got it sussed. No more disappointingly unanswered emails, winks, nudges, adding to favourites. Rejection is not on the agenda. There will be no more lying in bed at night wondering why WhiteKnight34 hasn’t contacted me, why HeavenGuy11 doesn’t want to have sex with me, why Wnaker26 hasn’t proposed yet.

I have a cunning and infallible plan.

This is it:
I won’t email anyone, or wink at them, or nudge them, or poke them in the bollocks.

It will be like coffee. The smell will be better than the tasting. For I am simply a voyeur. I will read the profiles but not touch the keyboard. I will fantasise but not indulge. I am not addicted.

How to Talk to Men in the Not Real World

Having recently retired from internet dating I decided that what I needed to do was practice talking to men in the real world. Since I don’t live in the real world this proved tricky. So I practiced talking to men in the gym.

This is what happened:

Expedition 1 -

I sat down at the rowing machine. A man sat down at the rowing machine next to me. So far so good. I chatted for a jolly thousand meters or so on topics as wide ranging as my children, my children and my children. The man was moderately interested in the theme. Even had a word or two on the subject himself. I then realised that it was the ex-Beloved and father of the aforementioned offspring. Still, at least I’d spoken to a man.

Expedition 2 –

I sat down at the rowing machine. A man sat down at the rowing machine next to me. So far so good. I checked that it wasn’t the ex-Beloved. It appeared not. Conveniently the display on his machine was broken. I helpfully suggested that if he followed me stroke for stroke he’d know how far he’d gone. He ran away.

Expedition 3 –

I waded into the Jacuzzi. A man was sitting next to me. We sat watching the swirling waters for some time. He looked at the clock. I said ‘What time is it?’ He said ‘Ten to ten’. I said ‘Thanks, I haven’t got my glasses on and am therefore completely blind.’ He laughed a nervous high-pitch laugh. He got out to reveal that he was wearing a bikini.

Expedition 4 –

I waded into the Jacuzzi. A man waded in next to me. I peered as closely as I could to ensure a genuine gender check. We sat watching the swirling waters for some time. He looked at the clock. I said ‘What time is it?’ He said ‘Ten to ten’. I said ‘Thanks, I haven’t got my glasses on and am therefore completely blind.’ He laughed a reassuringly deep although nervous laugh. ‘You look like a nice sort of chap.’ I ventured. He may or may not have smiled. At last, a result.

This real-world stuff seems a lot safer and more productive than online romance.

Not Sex and the City or 'Point of View – What’s the Fucking Point?'

I’m still supposed to be writing my Critical Study. It is now entitled ‘Point of View – What’s the Fucking Point?’ The answer, it turned out, quite fortuitously, was on Sky Everything.

I’ve been watching Sex and the City. It’s a program with multiple limited third person limited multiple perspectives. As well as a first person narrative point of view . This tends to put the whole idea of Sex in perspective, or at least from my point of view.

And I noticed something. Wherever the characters go they meet someone to shag. And they live in New York.

It’s a well known fact that Cardiff has all New York has to offer except without the wide pavements, wide sidewalks, Americans and lack of discourse about rugby. So, therefore, logically, wherever I go I should meet someone to shag.

Logic is a flawed logic I find. For this hasn’t happened to me. As someone wise once said – ‘Some are born celibate, some achieve celibacy and some have celibacy thrust upon them’. I have accomplished all three. Without the thrusting bit.

But I’m not going to be outdone by New York. I have briefly given up living in a musical and being Mary Poppins in favour of (sorry in favor of) living in a Welsh version of Sex and the City. Entitled Sex and the City. Interesting how the title works for both places.

Episode 1:
I get splashed by a bus.
I write on my computer a telling question: ‘Are New Yorkers sexier than Cardiffians?’
Friend 1 tells me about her sex life – it doesn’t exist.
Friend 2 asks me how to tell if a man fancies her – I explain about quantum physics.
Friend 3 doesn’t exist.
I go out to the greater metropolis to get chatted up and taken home by a sexy man. This doesn’t happen. I buy shoes.
I write on my computer – ‘Yes. And we buy shoes too. Albeit shoes from Clarks with flat heels and orthotic inserts. But they are red.’

I write on my computer - ‘The problem is that Welsh men don’t watch Sex and the City. They watch rugby. So they don’t understand multiple perspectives. Or that when a sexy woman in flat red shoes with orthotic insoles gently nudges their car in a multi-story car park that means she wants to be propositioned. They think that propositioning is something to do with rugby.’

So, thus I found out – the point of point of view is fucking. Or not. As the case may be.

I’m going back to being Mary Poppins now. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

What I Probably Shouldn’t Have Done

A letter came today. You may never see me or hear from me again. I thought I’d better warn you.

Other consequences may include:
Obesity and/or starvation.
Out and out war between rival factions of Physicist, Lawyer and Writer.
Sore bottoms.
A greater knowledge of all things.
Not getting my critical study finished.
Learning how to cook but not actually doing it.
Not writing that novel.
A greater degree of culture (not in the yogurt sense).
Not ever finding Mr Right.
Never having sex again.
A beautiful hand-sewn quilt.
Complete and total social isolation.
And
Possibly
Death.

This is what the letter said:

Get three months Sky subscription free. That’s all the Sky channels. Which is about a zillion. Call this number.

I called. I have free Sky subscription. Now. Already.

It’s better than Mr Right, it’s better than sex (ok, not better than sex but no one sent me a letter saying ‘free sex for three months just call this number’).

It’s on until Sept 20th.

Help! Please bring food, drink, spare AA batteries, After Eights, Before Eights and a change of clothing (for me and children, I expect you to arrive in clean clothing as is appropriate for a guest who may end up staying until the autumn). No we can’t watch the sports channel. I cancelled that one.

How Not to Live in a Fairy Tale

Yesterday I went to get the Physicist and all her worldly goods from her seat of learning for what’s known in the trade as the long vac. Nothing to do with hoovers. We had a number of fairy-tale encounters. This is what happened:

Once upon a time there was a mother whose daughter, after being in a far away land of academia for many months and weeks, was finally allowed home. The mother got in her silver chariot (or small car) to go collect the daughter but had no fuel. And the fuel-deliverers were on strike. After searching high and low, in dell and out of them, she finally found, hidden away in a mysterious woods, a petrol station that actually had some petrol. It was very expensive petrol. When the mother asked the curiously twisted and wizened old man selling the fuel why it was just so very costly he replied ‘It is magic petrol. For from this moment hence your fuel gauge remained steadfastly on full’.

‘Bollocks’ said the mother but paid the old man the money and went on her way.

When she got to the land of academia she discovered that the Physicist hadn’t packed all her worldly goods and chattels. For she had been to a ball and lost her slipper, or at least a silvery kind of shoe. They knew what had happened of course. Anyone would.

In the end they left a note for Prince Charming re the slipper:

‘Please return shoe you evil stealing bastard and if you have let the entire population of Oxford maidens try on this shoe and if it has been damaged or infected in any way due to this I expect appropriate compensation.’

Physicists are not interested in romance.

Eventually, the mother and daughter drove merrily down the road laden with the worldly goods minus one shoe and slip of notepaper.

Then there came an evil smell.

‘I hope that’s not our car that is making that smell.’ The mother said.
The car veered in agreement.
‘I hope that’s not our car veering dangerously about the place.’ The mother said.
And then the car showed them a cheerful warning light of the brightest orange imaginable.
‘I wonder what that means.’ The mother said.
The car stopped and, as if to answer the question, emitted a deal of evil smoke from the wheel.

The mother, luckily enough, belonged to the RAC (Rent A Charming-man-to-come-and-rescue-damsels-and-physicists-in-distress). In due course a Knight arrived in his van of the brightest orange imaginable.

‘Your car is knackered.’ Said the Knight, ‘climb on the back of my van and I will carry you home. Or at least to Leigh Delemare, in the land of the rip-off coffee. For I cannot cross the border. But there will be another Knight just as charming as me, of even greater power than me who will carry you to Wales, the land of the rugby, and there deliver you to your home under the smallest mountain in the world.’

And so, after many hours and minutes of travelling in vans of the brightest orange imaginable with lights of flashing yellow and Knights of the utmost charmingness the mother and the daughter arrived at their home under the smallest mountain in the world.

The mother wanted to kiss the Knight but the daughter thought it would be better just to fill in the form and sign it.

And so it came to pass that the curiously twisted and wizened old man in the petrol station was right, for the fuel gauge was still on full.

‘This petrol really is magic.’ The mother said.

And from that day hence they never used another drop of petrol. Nor did the car ever move again.

How Not to Write a Critical Study or Grow Tomatoes

Today I was supposed to be writing my critical study. A jolly 8,000 words of a vaguely academic nature with references, bibliographies, long words that sound impressive but are simply substitutes for shorter words that people actually understand, and thoughts of a meaningful nature.

This is what happened:
I wrote ‘What’s the point of multiple points of views?’ That’s the title or thereabouts. And then I thought I might take a break.
I went outside. My neighbour gave me some tomato plants and informed me they were best grown in the greenhouse. I have one of those. But there was a problem. I had not ventured into the aforementioned structure since the departure of the ex-Beloved. The aforementioned ex-Beloved loved the aforementioned structure. So much that he verily filled it. With stuff.

So, with a quick word of reassurance to the tomato plants, I embarked on Clearing the Greenhouse.

Some eight hours later I had:
Thrown out five bin-bags of rubbish.
Taken four wheelbarrow loads of dead stuff to the compost heaps.
Removed the twelve cats that had taken up residence.
Taken a shatter (that’s the collective noun) of broken glass to the tip.
Washed inches of green unknowable stuff off the glass.
Removed the several homeless persons that had taken up residence.
Cleaned a thousand empty pots, ex-margarine cartons and devices for seed germination.
Removed the seventeen dead bodies of creatures that the twelve cats had dragged in.
Arranged a thousand empty pots in order of size, colour and literary preference.
Had a little swim in the water butt to discover why it wasn’t butting.
Did a nifty repair job to enable butting.
Applied a sledge hammer to the surrounding steps.
Cemented the surrounding paving.
Done a cheeky laminate flooring job to revive the sagging shelving
And
Written a list on my blog to annoy my brother.

But moreover I had come up with the answer – The point of multiple points of view is to come to a better understanding of the characters. And I did. I finally understood that I’d been looking at my life from the wrong point of view all along. My quest for Mr Right is over. I am Mr Right. I’m going to make someone a wonderful husband.

Why Ceilings aren’t Clouds and Bathrooms aren’t Heaven

Today it rained in the kitchen. Not the usual course of events.

This is what happened:

I came downstairs expecting to make a fulfilling cup of coffee. It was raining in the kitchen. From the ceiling. I wondered if the ceiling might have become a cloud overnight. Indeed it had a bulbous appearance and the drops were definitely emanating from it. In a minor rainy-day sort of way. Splashing merrily onto the floor. Dripily-dropily.

At first having a cloud for a ceiling didn’t seem like a very sound idea. Most builders, architects and DIY impresarios like myself tend to eschew the whole cloud-ceiling idea as impractical, technically tricky and a little overcast. Yet, I thought, as I watched the gentle rain falling gently on the floor, dripily-dropily, maybe it’s not so bad. It might certainly further my ambitions to live with my head in the clouds especially since my house is a small cottage designed for dwarf-like Welsh minors, no, miners, and therefore the ceiling is extremely adjacent to the floor. And, after all, a cloud for a ceiling implies that upstairs, in the bathroom, there is probably a cloud for a floor. I might walk on Cloud Nine (except my house is number eight but that’s a trivial incongruity), or roll cherub-like amongst the fluffy whiteness, or discover that in fact my bathroom is heaven.

And so I went upstairs putting on my best cherubic expression, trying to look plump-of-limb and prepared for heaven. I was disappointed. The floor was much as it had been aside from a tad damper. The carpet resembled a beige quagmire and made delightful squishy-squashy noises when trod upon. There was also a similar dripily-dropily thing going on. This time not from the ceiling but from the cistern.

The gods of toilets love me not.

After removing the 22 pieces of tongue and groove panelling attached by 66 screws I wrapped the cistern in a towel. The dripily-dropily stopped. The cistern felt cosy.

I went back downstairs to inspect the kitchen ceiling. It bulged some more. The dripily-dropily had become more of a dripliy-plopily. Knowing a thing or two about how bad-tempered plasterboard can be when asked to hold up a lot of water I poked it with a screwdriver. It pissed on me.

The gods of ceilings love me not.

Now I am likely to fall through the cloud as I’ve had to lift all the floorboards to dry it out. I am also in need of some sort of gangplank to access the toilet. And more towels as the cistern has wet the ones already provided. In fact a new bathroom/kitchen/house might come in handy.

But strangely I miss the gentle dripily-dropily squishy-squashy not-heaven.

How Not to Write a Script for the BBC

I have been trying to write a script for the BBC. Not that they actually asked me to. They generally asked the world to. So, seeing as I am in and of the world I thought ‘I can do that.’

I appear to be somewhat wrong. It’s going to be 36 pages long. I’ve written 30 pages. Page 31 is tricky. I thought of jumping straight to page 36 but a leap of six pages seems dangerous to body and possibly sanity.

It’s called writer’s block I think. I’m attempting to cure it by some serious research. This is what I’m doing:

Checking my emails to see if anyone has emailed me pages 31-36.

Reading my google iPage to see if Wikihow offers pages 31-36 or my horoscope predicts that I will soon write the aforementioned pages.

Looking at the Radio Times page to see if there’s anything good on the TV that I could be watching that might tell me about pages 31-36.

Checking my emails to see if anyone has emailed me pages 31-36.

Seeing the random ways people have found my blog. This turns out quite interesting. Most people, as usual, want to know how to tell if a man fancies them. Others have wondered about shoes, g-spots (I wonder about those too), sausages (I’m sure I never mentioned them), tents, grey, and how to stop someone fancying you. I actually know the answer to that – fancy them.

Checking my emails to see if anyone has emailed me pages 31-36.

Looking on Facebook to see if anyone knows what’s on pages 31-36.

Writing a blog post about why I haven’t written pages 31-36.

Googling ‘pages 31-36’. I’ve found:
Dancewear,
Preventative Cardiology (I assume that’s like not fancying anyone ever),
Stimulus-driven Attentional Capture (I guess that’s trying to make someone fancy you by prodding them with electricity),
Cornelius C. Platter’s diary (anyone with a name like that should have their diaries eaten alive),
Resonant Tunneling and Coulomb Oscillations (probably what to do once someone does actually fancy you)
and
The Final Report on the Durability of Precast Segmental Bridges (more than likely a straightforward guide to keeping a man fancying you).

But essentially what I’ve discovered is that everyone else has managed to get way past page 31. It’s just me.

I’m thinking now that if instead of having writer’s block I had some other condition like writer’s bloke then I wouldn’t be spending Saturday evening not writing pages 31-36 but could be having an interesting conversation, sex, or bickering.

So please, would someone email me either pages 31-36 or a writer’s bloke.

Oh, the script is called ‘The Tomatoes of Forgetfulness’. This probably explains the problem.

How I didn’t Meet my Guardian Soulmate

I have retired from internet dating. For the time being anyway. Not because I’ve met my one true love (or perchance I have) (more of that later) but because they wanted money. The dating site, not the men. Although sometimes I might have been tempted to pay the men. Services rendered and all that. If only any of them had. But I wouldn’t have been able to anyway. I have a lot of wonderful things, cats, daughters, (sorry the other way round), a rural idyll, dandelions and a small widget to make coffee akin to amphetamines. Money, being the root of all evil, not buying you love, and being hard to come across, I don’t have.

I could have just left my profile up but I worried that some poor fellow would see it, fall deeply and irrevocably in love with me and then find that, due to lack of funds, I could never speak to him, and that he would become deeply embittered, kill himself by throwing himself off a motorway bridge, cause a massive pile-up that included various world leaders on their way to a peace summit and so miss their chance to save the world from war, destruction, pestilence and coffee akin to amphetamines, and so we would all die of war, destruction, pestilence and coffee akin to amphetamines. Thus rendering internet dating obsolete.

Internet dating turned out to be a lot like shopping. I go into town and in the very first shop I find some shoes that are really nice. But then it’s the first shop, maybe there are better, redder, sexier more shoey shoes in the other shops. I spend a tiring day/week/year/lifetime trawling, inspecting, smelling, trying on other shoes only to decide that the very first pair of shoes was actually very nice.

And so I seem to be dating the first pair of shoes. The shoes may or may not think this is the case, as shoes are unfathomable creatures. This pair particularly so. It may be that the shoes have in fact wandered off. For how can any of us tell if shoes fancy us? I certainly can’t.

I feel for the sake of utter corniness I should make some joke here re shoes and soles and souls and soulmates. But I’ll save you from that.

PS – Shoes - if you read this the whole shoe metaphor thing was purely accidental. I do not now, nor never have, think of you as a pair of shoes. Although if you’d like me to…

My Birthday Email or Zipadeedodah

It’s my birthday. I got an email.
It said
‘Here's wishing you a very happy birthday! Let's hope that this is the
year when you find that someone special at Guardian Soulmates. Warmest regards,
The Guardian Soulmates Support Team’

This, I believe was a cruel and heartless thing to do. After all, it stands to reason that if one is a member (albeit lapsed) of Guardian Soulmates (other dating sites are available) then there is a stongish likelihood that one is spending one’s birthday alone. Without one’s soulmate. So rubbing it in and being the only birthday email one might receive is just a tad insensitive.

I am, however, not downhearted, grey, drab, gray (that’s for my US audience) or slightly cheerless. For I have discovered many truths of being single, things that only single people can do just because they are single.

Here are some of them:

Burst into loud and tuneless song any time of the day or night.
Dance naked in the kitchen without giving the impression one wants sex.
Talk to friendly inanimate objects.
Kiss friendly inanimate objects.
Shout at not friendly inanimate objects.
Dance clothed in the kitchen without giving the impression one wants sex.
Give the impression one wants sex without the danger of offending.
See the world through rose-tinted glasses.
Fantasise about Prince charming.
Wear glass slippers.
Use words like ‘itsy, didums and zipadeedodah’.
Be happy without anyone thinking one is crazy.
Be crazy without anyone thinking one is crazy.
Be without anyone wondering why.
Wonder about being without anyone wondering where their clean pants are.
Not wash pants.
Not wear knickers.
Sleep in trees.

So, to The Guardian Soulmates Support Team I’d like to say ‘fuck off’. Because, and this is a fact, only single people live can live their lives as stars in musicals, when they marry they have to leave immediately. Or the musical ends.

Zipadeedodah!


P.S. now I’m going to see Sex in the City with the Lawyer because only single girls can really enjoy a film like that.

P.P.S. of course it wasn’t the only email, text, card, present etc – thank you all my friends, family, Beloveds, ex-Beloveds, cats and Beloveds-to-Be. Except the Beloveds, ex-Beloveds, cats and Beloveds-to-Be who completely forgot.

Donny!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Something very exciting happened. I’ve been to see the Osmonds.

I was innocently eating dinner, or as innocently as I ever eat dinner. My mobile rang. ‘Are you an Osmonds fan?’ my friend asked.
‘Are you at the pub quiz?’ I asked.
‘Can you name five Osmonds songs?’
‘Am I a woman in my forties?’
‘They come on in half an hour I have a spare ticket.’

My heart raced. It was only puppy love. I dashed upstairs and changed into my best flares, paper roses, shiny top and floppy peaked hat, grew my hair down to beyond my shoulders and broke out in a display of colourful acne. Crazy horses couldn’t keep me away.

Half an hour later I was sitting in the Cardiff International Arena with most of the mid-forties female population of the world. Waiting. In anticipation. In an anticipation only those who have known the unrequited love of the world’s premier heart-throb can anticipate.

We chatted to our mates and wondered if we had time to nip to the loo before they came on.

Soon the waiting became too much. We nipped to the loo. Then the waiting and lack of heart-throb became too much. Hysteria was setting in. We stamped. We clapped. We shouted ‘We want the Osmonds’.

And there, like a miracle, they were, all very many of them.
My friend shouted:
Alan!
Wayne!
Merrill!
Virl!
Tom!
Donny!
Jimmy!

I shouted:
Donny!

Strangely no one shouted:
Marie!

Much swooning and general middle-aged hysteria went on.Thus:


And it all made me realise that I had missed out a very essential part of growing up. As a teenager I never did the hysteria thing. And frankly thought the Osmonds a soppy, pathetic, time-wasting, drippy lot who were only good for dentistry adverts.

‘Donny I love you!’ I shouted. Hysteria is a lot better than it’s made out to be.

How Not to Go Camping on the Gower

It’s raining. It’s half-term. Some people decided to go camping. This is what happened:

My sister (from here on to be referred to as The Artist) her partner (from here on to be referred to as The Artist) and my nephew (from here on to be referred to as The Train and Transport Expert) decided to go camping.

They didn’t have a tent. So bought one on a well known auction site (from here on to be referred to as e-bay). They live in London. The tent was in Port Talbot. The Artist, the Artist and the Train and Transport Expert had never met the tent before. Nor had the tent met them. They decided to meet, greet, and erect the tent in my garden. Just to make sure it was a tent. And not an elephant, hamster or tower block.

We may, at this point, ask ourselves – How many Artists and Train and Transport Experts and Writers (that’s me although many other proper and improper nouns are applicable) does it take to erect a tent bought on a well known auction site?

Essentially an infinite number. So we had to draft in the Lawyer too (dragged from her post-exam bed in a state of advanced post-exam stupor). She had done such things before. I had done such things before, but the before that I had done them in was in the days that tents had triangular elevations and rectangular aspects. These days it’s all curves and contours. Like my body except harder to comprehend.

Now understand that this tent is large. Not one of your one-Artist tents that has room for just the Artist, a nibbled pen and a small sketch-pad. No, this tent is designed to house (or tent) an army of jobbing Painters, Sculptors, Potters and Cameo Cut-Out-Profile-Scissor-Wielders. And a Train and Transport Expert.

We began in the early afternoon in my garden. We finished in the late evening in my neighbour’s garden. The initial destination of the half-term camping expedition was the Gower. The tent, although of generous proportion, didn’t quite reach the Gower. So the cunning plan was to de-erect the tent and move it and its army of Artists and Train and Transport Experts to the Gower on Friday.

Then it began to rain and generally wind. Thus making it impossible to de-erect the tent without transporting a soggy tent or not transport a soggy tent because it had blown away in the direction of central Cardiff.

It’s still there. The Artists and the Train and Transport Expert are still here. This is Wales. It may never stop raining. They may never return to their delightful council flat in North London that is about half the size of their tent.

I have made enquiries at the local school to see if any further training for the Train and Transport Expert is available. If anyone can employ a couple of Artists please let me know.

How Not to Formicate

My internal body thermostat is broken. It’s a problem. This is what happens:

Mostly I’m fine
Then
My feet freeze from the toes inwards in a sensation reminiscent of a paddling in the North Sea not wearing sufficient Wellington-ness.
Then
My face becomes rosy and generally glowing like an embarrassed lady from a Victorian novel.
I glow like and embarrassed lady from a Victorian novel.
My breasts decide that since they are the most important part of me they’ll go on double-glow duty, and since there are two of them they decide to go on quadruple glow duty like a collection of ladies in a Victorian novel gossiping about the size of their husbands’ cummerbunds.
Meanwhile my knees and upper shins are fine, a sort of balmy spring afternoon Edwardian novel about the great outdoors manner of fine.
My toes continue to freeze like a novel of unspecified vintage about polar exploration.

I’ve told the doctor. Her solution was to remove some blood. I’m assuming that she felt that all this glowing and Victorian-ness was due to an excess of blood. And the removal thereof was a Victorian style solution. She had no leeches. I’m quite glad about that.

It all makes it difficult to know what to wear of a morning. This is what I’ve come up with (working up from the floor region) :
Twenty pairs of thermal walking socks (on each foot)
Jeans or legwarmers (rainbow striped)
A cummerbund and bustle
Nothing
A pair of pre-cooled coconut shells
nothing
A scarf
A gel-filled face mask
A balaclava
A straw hat with a jaunty collection of peonies and a puce ribbon.

The doctor believes that it is a case of Raynaulds Syndrome meets PMS meets the Perimenopause. I’ve just looked it up on Wikipedia and it informs me that it might be a case of formication. If only.

How to Stop a Man Fancying You and then the Opposite

I know, jumping the gun a bit, but, just in case.

Because this is what might happen:

I finally get a man to fancy me. We go out, we stay in, we get married, we live happily ever after. And then, well, what if I’m fed up with him, or he turns out to be not Mr Right, or a serial killer, or someone who leaves toast crumbs in my shoes? There will be no solutions left (aside from divorce, murdering him or disguising him as a hoover and hiding him in the cupboard under the stairs ) aside from getting him not to fancy me.

Prepared or what?

So - How to Stop a Man Fancying You Using Newton’s Law of Cooling:

The law states: The rate of change of the temperature of an object is proportional to the difference between its initial temperature and the ambient temperature

In our case we obviously want to reduce the temperature of the object. Simply a matter of reducing the ambient temperature. There are a number of ways of doing this:
Hide all the object’s clothes.
Turn off the central heating (also saves the planet as well as your sanity).
Move to Alaska (this may not work as the men to women ratio is about 6.456:1.3 ).
Make a suit out of those ice-cube bags and put it on him when he’s not looking.
Throw a bucket of cold Ribena over him.
Blow on him.

It may be the case that the object objects to being cooled by any of the above methods. Objects can be stubborn like that. The last resort is to simply point a pair of heated curling tongs at him and tell him to fuck off.

Now I’m thinking that surely if this works for stopping a man fancying you, science being what it is, the opposite approach should engender the opposite effect. And since, at the moment, I’m still on the opposite end of the process and conveniently an object is coming to my house tomorrow. I have a cunning plan:

I’m going to –
Turn my heating back on
Wrap us up together with woolly jumpers, long johns and my hot water bottle (which has a cover like a baby rabbit; that should help).
Fill the bath with hot chocolate and throw us in.
Curl his hair.
Hug him whilst in the throws of menopausal hot flushes ( I knew those would come in useful for something).
Blow on him.

I don’t think he’ll spot what I’m up to will he?

How Not to Find a Man to Fancy You

I heard some handy pieces of relationship advice. From Lulu. Who was hosting ‘Sunday Lovesongs’. Which I was listening to as a form of aversion therapy. Lulu is highly qualified to give relationship advice as she sang ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’ in the Eurovision song contest.

This was her advice on the topic of finding your perfect man –

1. Remember, no matter how many many many many many many (I added a few of those manys) years you have been looking for Mr Right he is out there somewhere.

2. Be beautiful, or as beautiful as you can.

3. Think what attributes you might like in your perfect man. Then in order to find him think of the places a man with those sorts of attributes might be. Then go there. Looking beautiful, or as beautiful as you can.

I lost no time. I made myself as beautiful as I could with the limited resources available to me. These included:

A toothbrush
A hairbrush
Hair
Teeth

Then I was stuck. So I rushed to the computer opened Wikihow and put ‘Be Beautiful’ in. And proceeded to follow their advice:

1. ‘Seek beauty’. I assumed this was an important preliminary step so I found what beauty I could that was knocking around the house –
A clean kitchen floor
A cat
An apple
A carrot
A potato shaped like a potato
The Lawyer hunched over her revision.
Essentially that was it. And I ignored the Lawyer as any attempt to be beautiful alongside a seventeen-year-old version of a much more beautiful version of myself is fucking hopeless. I returned to contemplating the potato shaped like a potato.

2. ‘Recognise the beauty in yourself. Look in the mirror and search for beauty. By now, you've probably noticed that the most beautiful things in life are often subtle and hidden’ Well put I thought. I searched and eventually discovered that my right shoulder was of a moderately attractive nature.

3. ‘Enhance your physical beauty’. I did a few press ups.

4.’ Develop your inner beauty’. I drank some very pretty coloured fruit juice.

5. ‘Create beauty outside of yourself.’ I drew a flower on my arm.

6. ‘Character is beautiful’. Good.

It went on to advise listening to some music that made you dance and sing and smile and then your happiness will shine. What usually happens to me is people leave the room with comments like ‘life’s not a fucking musical’. Although, of course, mine is.

So, now I was beautiful I set forth to seek my perfect man in places that perfect men like to hide.
I wore the white fluffy dress with all the skirts as it was the only item of clothing I had that showed my shoulder off in all its moderate attractiveness.
I danced and sang to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as is appropriate and makes you sound precocious which surely is akin to beauty.
I drew a few more large pink felt-tip flowers on my arm just to make sure.
I took of the usual amount of character (in retrospect I probably should have toned that down a bit).

This is where I went:

To the DIY shop

He may have been my perfect man, I’m not sure. He had a nice bright orange uniform. And his chat-up line was original:
‘Would you mind leaving the store?’
Fairly obviously he wanted to get me on my own. I’ve given him my number.

How Not to Test if a Man Fancies You

Something odd is going on. Someone is using my distorted laws of relationships to understand the laws of science.

This is what he wrote (his name is Bryan) ‘you've done a great service to all the budding scientists of the world’ and there I was thinking I was doing a service to all budding confused potential lovers in the world.

So I’m thinking maybe I’ve got this all wrong, backwards or somewhat distorted. Perhaps I should be using the basic laws of relationships to understand the laws of science.

And so I was lead to attempt to find out what exactly the basic laws of relationships are. This was a while ago. There was a fairly major problem. There are none. Or at least all the ones I was offered on a famous search engine and online encyclopaedia differed from each other. As any dedicated researcher like myself knows that means that there are none.

Why has no one applied the scientific method of proof to the field of relationships? It seems simple enough. All that is required is the use of observation and experimentation to obtain a law.

Hence I took it upon myself to do so.

This is what happened.

Hypothesis tested:
Man fancies Woman

Equipment used:
Man
Woman
Test tube

Method:
Put Man and Woman together in a test tube, mix thoroughly and observe what happens. (Note – I couldn’t find a test tube of sufficient size so I had to put the Man and the Woman near a test tube instead) (Also note that I didn’t actually have a man to participate in the experiment so I had to use a cat instead) (so for Man read cat).

Results:
1. Man and Woman had interesting conversation about test tubes.
2. Man and Woman tried to use test tube to grow a baby.
3. Man had a nice purr and snuggled down on Woman’s lap.
4. Man discovered that there was a mouse/football in the next room so he left.
5. Woman washed up test tube and went to bed.

Conclusions:
Probably not.

So – Basic Relationship Law 1:
Men don’t fancy women if they are cats and not men. But they think they’re okish.

Obviously there is a lot more work to do. I’m applying for a research grant. Or donations. Please. This is important work. Also if there are any men out there interested in furthering my research please contact me as the cat is not all that cooperative.

And Bryan – research suggestions always welcome as I can see now the whole reverse field is fraught with hazard. And cats.

The One with the Not-Dead Bird

There’s a bird. In the house. Not dead. There are cats. In the house. Also not dead. This is a problem.

It all began one bright spring day. We were feeling bright and spring-like and so were the cats. One of them (and I’ll mention no names so as to protect the innocent) caught a bird and brought it into the house.

Actually it all began before this particular bright spring day, it started in the dead (and this word will be coming up again soon) of winter. When I decided in my wisdom (which is what I like to call my disturbed mind) that what our house really needed were some nice fluffy, innocent, cute loveable man/baby substitutes. But just like real life (this isn’t real life, this is my life) the men/babies turned out to be not fluffy, innocent, cute and only sometimes loveable. They turned out to be hair-droppers, furniture-defacers and hardened killers.

In days of yore when I had a man and babies I spent many a wonderful hour/life dealing with delights such as –
Live nappies
Lively mud on surfaces
Mud on live people
Underfoot Barbie accessories
Living physics experiments
Mostly alive man
and
Underwear

Now I have man/baby substitutes I deal with such delights as-
Dead mice
Dead shrews
Dead worms
Dead birds
Dead fluffy toys
And
Deadly fear
of dead things.

But the thing about dead things is that they are static.

There’s a bird in the house. Not dead. Not static. There are cats in the house. Also not dead or static. I have isolated the two genres with a cunning use of doors, shut cat-flaps, rope and chewing gum.

I’ve left what doors I have left (after isolating the cats) open. I’m hoping the bird will leave of its own volition.

At the moment it is in the hall saying
‘meep meep meep meep tweet’.

This is progress. Earlier it was entirely silent. Then it was only saying ‘meep meep meep meep’. ‘Tweet’, I feel is a good sign. A sign of recovery. A sign of new life and perhaps a will to leave the premises of its own free will.

So meanwhile I wait. I cannot open any doors for fear the man/baby substitutes will meet the not-dead bird. I cannot close any doors for fear the not-dead bird will not meander home with an extra ‘tweet’ on it’s lips but will decide to stay and turn into a dead thing. I have a deadly fear of dead things. My deadly fear of dead things has left me in a live-bird in the house situation.

Help.
Meep meep meep meep tweet?

How to Tell If a Man is Single Using Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion

There’s someone in Australia that I’m a bit worried about. I don’t know who it is. A woman I highly suspect. So we’ll call her she. She is confused and bewildered, as are most of us. Or most of me. She has been trying to find out how to tell if a man is single. By reading this blog. Yet I’m yet to inform my confused public how to tell if a man is single. But I’ve been there. So in a reverse piece of Googling I feel beholden to pontificate upon this subject:

How to Tell If a Man is Single Using Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion

Kepler was a chap. So already we can infer he knew something of the matter. He married a 25 year old woman who was already widowed twice over. Already we can infer that he was a reckless chap. And married.

He invented some relevant laws about bodies moving in orbits about two focal points which we might apply here to answer our question.

Law 1: A body might move in an ellipse with two focal points. So what we need to discover is does the body in question obey a Keplerian orbit or does he adhere to the old fashioned ideas of Aristotle and Ptolemy?

How to test:
Does the body in question move elliptically? Tip: The essential difference between an ellipse and a circle is the degree of squashiness.

Law 2: The body moves faster when away from the foci.

How to test:
Measure the exact speed of entrance and exit. Next measure the staying rate. Which is greater?

Law 3: The body moves faster if the foci are further apart.

How to test:
Move yourself further away from where you suspect the other focus is. Tip: If you think the other focus is on the far side of town then you go to Antarctica, Timbuktu or Rhyl. Repeat Test 2.

Obviously there is some maths involved here. If you feel you are not good at calculations then use an observational technique:

Does the body in question come straight to you from any given point?
Does the body in question give a straight answer?
Does the body in question leave straight away?

Finally, if you find yourself asking yourself ‘Is he single?’ you probably already know the answer without reference to any sort of science.

How I’ve Found my Perfect Career

I’ve finally found my perfect career. Well paid, interesting, high-flying.
This is what I’m going to be:
An astronaut.

Don’t think I’ve gone into this without any research. Or much research. Or a passing piece of research. No, I’ve dug trivially into the ESA (European Space Agency for you non-astronaut types) website to discover if I’m properly qualified for the job.

This is what they specified:

Youth – between the ages of 27 and 37. Is that youth? Still some people say I look as young as 38 which is very near 37. My mental age is in single digits as is my emotional age. So, when averaged out I’m about 27.5757. Perfect.

Experience - They must have experienced Real Life – I believe my life has been as genuine as the next space woman’s.

Scientifically Minded – I am the Relationship Physicist after all. They suggest that a degree in science might be a boon. Well I have a degree in miscellany which is surely better. And my daughter will have a degree in physics so that must count.

Patience – anyone who has waited this long for Mr Right has proven that not only do they have patience but they also have idealism, unrealistic expectations and excessive optimism.

Bravery – anyone who has waited this long for Mr Right has proven that not only do they have bravery but they also have idealism, unrealistic expectations and excessive optimism and extraordinary bravery.

Prepared for strange lifestyle – Already there.

Psychologically sound – Well, I sound psychological.

I have written the covering letter for the application:

Dear ESA,
I want to be an astronaut because I believe I will be ideally suited to being an astronaut. The suit will be ideal to cover any unfortunate bumps that exist on my body. The weightlessness will ideally cover my usual lack of balance. The long hours stuck in a confined space with only a few young, experienced, scientifically minded, patient, brave, prepared and sane astronauts will ideally be ideal for my idea of an idealised life.

The applications open 19 May, mine will be first on their spacemat.

How Not to Impress – Or Compost is Sexy

It came to pass that I was showing someone that didn’t know me very well around my garden. Someone I quite wanted to know better. Sometimes I should know better.

This is what my garden usually looks like:
A pastoral idyll
A woodland glade
Sissinghurst
A garden

You know how it’s easy to take for granted what you see every day. Until you find yourself seeing it through someone else’s eyes.

It turned out that this is what my garden consisted of:

Paths with broken dragons who wanted to be real dragons when they grew up but remained stolidly concrete.
A compost heap.
An unmown lawn that had turned into a purple meadow.
Another compost heap.
An artefact made of breezeblocks and red render that wanted to be a bench in the Gaudi style but never quite achieved its ambition.
Dandelions.
A garden structure made of old ladders and guttering that wanted to be a Zen Japanese Tea House but had long since passed its ambition.
Another compost heap.
A greenhouse housing not greens but a thousand demi-johns with gross mysterious algae floating about in them in the post-post-modern grunge style.
Another compost heap.
More compost heaps in the art nouveau/vieux style.
A tin bath filled with mouldy water and old leaves in the Emin style.
Another compost heap.
Erosion.
Corrosion.
Exposition.
A compost heap.

I’ve just consulted Wikihow as to how to make a good impression on a man. Strangely there was no mention whatsoever of dandelions, compost heaps or mould.

I’ve also just consulted Google as to how to tell if a man fancies you. There was an awful lot of mention of me. And no mention of compost.

Since many people set such store on internet expertise I thinking that a bit of reverse experteeism could work here:

The most attractive thing a woman can have is a great number of compost heaps.

Sexiness and the ability to compost are practically synonymous.

How to Keep a Man Fancying You

I have been dubbed ‘The Relationship Physicist’. I am wearing this moniker with pride, pleasure and a small blob of blu-tac. My continuing mission to discover the truth of relationships through the unbending laws of physics and to bend the laws of physics to the slightly limp rules of relationships continues apace. Or at least continues at a pace slightly slower than light speed and slightly faster than snails’.

Today’s question, brought on by a bout of perspicacity, is:

How to Keep a Man Fancying You

Or

How to Conserve a Relationship/Attraction Using Standard Laws of Conservation

There are various laws of conservation, the better known being about not dropping litter, annihilating rainforests and good husbandry. Which includes good wifery and good loverery. My remit, however, requires me to maintain that spurious air of science. So let us look more deeply into the real deep physical aspects:

How to Apply the Laws -

1. The Conservation of Energy –Move very slowly to avoid exhaustion. Eat plenty of sugar. Don’t get out of bed.

2. The Conservation of Linear Motion – Remember, linear is not the only way. Plenty of folk enjoy oblique, spoonerisms, roundabouts and, (if it’s your cup of tea/coffee/Horlicks), tortuous.

3. The Conservation of Angular Momentum – fairly obviously this is applicable only when a correct/preferable/plausible angle has been achieved. The usual technique is to discuss baked beans, Tory politicians or fish.

4. The Conservation of Electric Charge – this is the most and veryest important. It is well known that without that spark any relationship becomes mundane and flat, not to mention flaccid. It is a challenge to conserve the electric charge but a good battery, capacitor, or close positioning of appropriate electrodes is popular. As is the Tantric practice of static.

5. The Conservation of Probability states that nothing is certain. Even should you most assiduously adhere to the above laws of conservation, assiduous adherence cannot be guaranteed.

How Not to Be Transformed

I’ve had a strange day of transformation.

This is what happened:

The physicist must return to her seat of learning. Mostly because she has exams and her seat at home has become so covered in calculations, biscuit crumbs and cat hair that she can no longer discover exactly where to put her bum.

Accompanying the physicist back to the aforementioned seat are all her precious worldly goods and chattels and ball gowns. They must be transported by car. By me. So I decided to clean the inside of the car (ball gowns are pernickety souls).

And then I decided to clean the outside of the car (ball gowns are pernickety souls). And discovered a deal about why men clean cars. Something about all that rubbing and polishing of bodywork and the ‘vroom vroom’ noises (that was added by the boy next door) (I said ‘tra la la’).

I discovered that I liked cleaning cars. This is worrying stuff. Especially when you add in the rest of the day’s activities which included:

Doing things with screwdrivers
Playing in mud
Inserting my hand down my trousers to adjust my underwear
Not brushing my hair
Not shaving
A conversation about football
Farting
A conversation about exactly what roads to drive on
And
Mislaying the hoover.

I was, until today, of the opinion that I wanted a man. Now it turns out I may be a man.

Luckily I have a cure. I will go and sew another thousand twinkley beads onto another ballgown. Not only that but the girl next door has just presented me with a DVD of ‘Enchanted’ and a tiara to wear whilst watching it. I’m putting it on now.

How Not to Take Advice – Or How To Get a Man To Fancy You

There are a number of things I’d like to know, these include, (obviously),
‘How to tell if a man fancies me?’
Why would I want a man to fancy me?’
‘How to get a man to fancy me?’
‘Wherefore art thou Romeo’
and, the thing that I really really want to know:

‘How the hell do I get the fucking cat hair of every last piece of furniture/item of clothing/person in the house?’

I have cats. I love them. Mostly.

The times I don’t love them is when they bring me things like dead things, half-dead things and things that really should be dead. And when they eat the Physicist’s Very Important Friend’s blueberry muffin. And the whole hair thing.

But I have an answer. Or rather, I have something that has the answer. My google iPage ‘How To’ gadget.

I typed in ‘How to Remove Cat Hairs’

This is what happened:

The first article told me to get a roll of sticky tape and roll the tape on my hand and roll my hand on the hair.
I did that.
Now I’m typing one-handed.

The second article was entitled ‘How to Get Cat Hair Off Your Tongue’, it went thus:
1. Swallow the cat hair half-way, so it is still in your throat.
2. Move your tongue along where the hair is, to move it on the side of your mouth.
3. Get the hair on the tip of your tongue.
4. Pick it off with your hand.
I got as far as 1. I tried 4. and removed most of my tongue with the tape.

The third article was entitled ‘How to Shave a Cat’. Now that sounded like a sensible solution. A certain amount of flailing and general cat tussling ensued. However the cat, for reasons best know to itself, objected.

Another solution was to bathe the cat. Same problem as the shaving really.

Now, not only is every surface of the house covered in cat hair, so am I.

Finally it offered me ‘How to do Animal Makeup’. I painted my face as a cat, I am covered in fur.

I googled ‘Do Men Like Cats?’

A certain Franny Syufy assured me ‘Real Men Love Cats’

Fucking sorted.

How to Tell if a Man Fancies You Using Superstition Alone

There are days on which science just doesn’t work. Those sort of days where cats fall upwards, quanta are visible to the naked eye, and naked men are invisible. Or possibly not there.

These are the sorts of times where one has to turn to superstition alone the answer the big questions in life, like 'Why am I here?' 'Why do I hear?' 'Can one hear y’s?' And, of course that old chestnut ‘How Can I Tell if a Man Fancies Me?’

Although, just so you don’t think that the above chestnut is the only form of nut people google to discover my blog, recent queries have included:

‘How to hoover woodlice.’ (I’ve referred that to Anthea)

‘Does everyone have a G-spot?’ No. And, as of the moment they turn the Large Hadron Collider on, no one will.

‘How do you to find a G-spot?’ OS maps are traditional, modern folk use Sat Nav, I advise thoroughly searching the entire body as it’s simply more entertaining that way. Whatever the method you use do it soon before they make the black hole. Not that black hole, include that one in your search.

‘What to do in the sauna?’ Not break your foot.

‘Morreau naked.’ If you really want to see me naked I’m on public view in the changing room of the gym most nights, on the book cover and if you require a private viewing please make an appointment. Reciprocosity expected/anticipated.

And, of course that old chestnut ‘How Can I Tell if a Man Fancies Me’.

The thing about superstition, as opposed to science, as a method of discovery is that it is a lot more straight forward.

Here are the top ten ways of discovering if a man fancies you using superstition alone:

1. If he crosses your path wearing black (especially black pyjamas, underwear, a black condom or a darkish colour negligee)
2. If he ties knots in his handkerchief, or his trousers look like they’ve got a large knotted handkerchief down them.
3. If he walks under a ladder carrying a penny that he’s just picked up (it also shows that he knows how to balance evil with good if that’s your sort of thing)
4. If he has a foot like a rabbit or a rabbit like a foot long.
5. If he is standing at the foot of a rainbow (a small warning here – leprechauns are infamously bad lovers)
6. If you see him shooting stars (again, a warning, if he is shooting very famous stars in a public place it really doesn’t bode well for a long-lasting relationship)
7. If he is 13
8. If he gets into the wrong, or even the right, side of your bed
9. If he itches your palm (or possible anywhere else)
10. If he breaks mirrors (of course you might not fancy him then)
11. If he knocks on wood (ok, wood fetishists may not be your cup of tea but at least he fancies something)
12. (my personal favourite) If he’s a chimney sweep and says ‘cor lurve, I really fancy you’ in a fake cockney accent.