A Recipe for the Single Woman

I’ve been doing a spot of cooking. Because I can be quite resourceful like that. Making handy stuff like cup-hooks, shelves and super-computers out of string, gaffer tape and oddly shaped root vegetables. I once made a whole vehicle out of a pumpkin. It’s well documented.

I’ve been doing a spot of cooking. Many of my more avid readers have asked for the recipe.

This is it:


Take several good pastimes – Patience, Twister, and Mastermind are best but if you haven’t got those in the fridge you can substitute Monopoly or possibly, in desperation, Cluedo.

Incorporate a bushel of ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’. Never ever substitute ‘Just a Minute’ but ‘Start the Week’ is totally acceptable if not preferable.

Stir in a minimum of 72 inches of best beef. Remove all offal, scrag and tripe. Caramelise until sweet and golden brown.

Knead, truss, render mostly harmless.

Stuff with a great number of fresh dates.

Finish off with a garnish of 2 kiwi fruit and a large banana. Use a fresh banana, if you only have a spotty one then use a good raising agent. Put banana to one side for that really authentic look.

Mince to generally add to the ambience (that’s you not the ingredients)

Relax

Enjoy your perfect Welsh (or nationality of your preference) rarebit in a bain-marie. Or not marie as you see fit.


And who said cooking for one is unrewarding?

A Spectacle in Spectacles

I have new glasses. Well, not new, but I’m pretending. In fact they are re-found. I now look totally different. I look like someone from a Specsavers advert.

The outstanding feature of people on the Specsavers advert is that they would never ever be seen wearing glasses in normal life.

The moment the advert comes on one cannot help but think ‘look, they are wearing glasses. Gorgeous sexy people are pretending to be like normal people. Something strange is going on. The world has become myopic.’ When I say ‘look,’ obviously first you must put your glasses on.

So, that’s how I now look. Gorgeous, sexy and wearing glasses. Not just normal glasses but obvious glasses. Glasses with black rims.

So that’s how I now look. Gorgeous, sexy, wearing glasses and intellectual. The black rims are not just black but they go all the way around, and up the sides and join my ears to my face in a black-lined kind of way. Like a fifteen-year-old in the 1950s - a previous era before I was born

So that’s how I now look. Gorgeous, sexy, wearing glasses, intellectual, fifteen and dated. This is all very disturbing.

The great thing about wearing glasses, whether they are a throwback to the fifties or hugely trendy ones from Specsavers, is that one can take them off.

So that’s how I now look. Like a blurry blobby pinkish thing with a brownish topping.

How I Didn’t Become My Mother but Became Someone Else Entirely

Something terrible has happened. Life has gone seriously awry. I was always led to believe that eventually, sooner or later, and certainly by the time I am of any given age over 30 (which I am) I would become my mother. I looked forward with a certain amount of eager anticipation to the day I would be normally deranged artist who has little interest in cooking, cleaning and the whereabouts of any of her belongings. Surely I was destined to understand the great masters, have an inside-out knowledge of Greek myths and leave coffee cups in my studio until they moulded sufficiently to become art?

But no, events of the last week have revealed that I have become someone quite different.

This is what happened:

Christmas was over (as usually tends to happen this time of year) and thus I was impelled to remove Christmas and all its incumbent trappings from the sitting room. After the usual amount of indoor gardening (taking the chainsaw to the Christmas tree in order to dissolve it into small enough pieces to remove it from the room) I stood back to admire my now de-Christmased space.

It was a mess.

Had I been ever destined to become my mother I would simply have got out my sketch book and drawn the interesting shapes and textures that now inhabited the aforementioned space.

But instead I went to shopping. And bought baskets. Little baskets, medium sized baskets, large baskets and baskets that defied size categorisation. I was particularly pleased by the fact I only spent £6.

Into these receptacles I put:
books,
videos (not ‘Love Actually’ because I burnt that for making me cry) (you know, the scene with Emma Thompson) (if you don’t – don’t watch it) (well you can’t because it’s all melty and charred)
homework,
physics notes (the physicist was home and busy making copious notes that only Niels Bohr, Einstein and she understand),
hair bobbles of dubious vintage,
hair brushes of dubious functionality,
dirty plates of dubious heritage,
clean plates (probably only clean by the virtue of having been licked by kittens),
the tv,
a number of sofas
my life of celibacy
banal questions about the meaning of love,
and
most of my sanity.

I stand back to admire my work. ‘Wait!’ I cried, ‘insufficient soft furnishings!’ (this is strictly a girls house now so any of the Beloved’s objections to things soft are now irrelevant) (or at least not my problem)(we won’t delve further into the subject of the Beloved and things soft). So, I throw throws, I plump cushions, I range rugs, I place kittens strategically around the room, I tie little bows around things that might need little bows.

I stand back to admire my work. ‘Wait!’ I cried, ‘Dust!!!’ I put on my white gloves and wipe surfaces with feather dusters, kittens and damp rags made of old tights.

I stand back to admire my work. ‘Wait!’ I cried, ‘something terrible has happened!’

I haven’t become my mother.

I have become the polar opposite to my mother. I have become Anthea Turner.

The Babe Year

They say that every woman has her peak in life. Her ‘Babe Year’. This is the year that one is thought of by sundry men (and boys) as a ‘Babe’. The time in life when codicils such as ‘for your age’, or ‘considering you have given birth to two large and hungry infants who are now Babes themselves’, or ‘discounting the stretchmarks/wrinkles/immense bagginess’ are not attached to the phrase ‘sexy’.

I have discovered mine. 1976. The long hot summer when I was hot and many a boy had urges to, untangle my hair and share my tent and get into my stylishly cut speedo swimming costume.

These recently unearthed photographs prove my point:

(I'm the one without the beard)

This is what happened:

‘Look at these photos we found,’ my Mum says.
My sister looks. ‘You were a Babe.’
I look. ‘Ah those were the days when boys were boys. Plentiful and totally lacking in technique.’
My brother looks. ‘What did you ever do with my orange tent?’

It is yet another example of life’s great injustices. I was a Babe, the boys were queuing, and when they reached the end of the line and into the Babe the sex was crap. It took another ten years for the quality of the sex to improve, at which point I was engrossed in a life of fidelity.

Now that my life of fidelity appears to be over (probably because the Beloved didn’t actually know me in my Babe year) (and therefore doesn’t actually realise that I was a Babe) I glance over my shoulder in a spirit of hope and desire. The queue appears to have disappeared. I am justly surprised. My Babe year appears to have been 31 years ago. I am justly surprised.

I see what must have happened. The members of the queue, some of whom sported the above terrible facial hair, have starved to death standing in line. Or possibly it was dehydration that did them in. Or they waited until 1977 and joined punk bands, had terrible piercings and expired from bad music and dubious taste.

Still, I may have been a Babe in 1976 but my 2008 bum is now a famous book cover:

Please form an orderly queue.

How Not to New Year

It was New Year last night. Or rather it is New Year. And it will probably continue to be New Year until the year is deemed to be in some state of toddlerhood. February I think.

Although the whole New Year thing is some strange construct constructed by some strange bods (Roman I suspect) it does have a preponderance to induce a certain amount of perpondering on topics such as the previous year, last year and what effect last 365 days has had on one’s life.

A quick glance reveals that 2007 was shit. However an in depth and scientific analysis reveals otherwise. Science is a great comfort.

This is what happened:

I thought I should write a New Year blog post. Since it was New Year. And my fans were missing me. Because I had run out of words. Divorce does that to people. There are billions of divorced people who have been struck dumb by the process but never mention it.

I thought I should write a New Year blog post. You know, one of those ‘reviews of the year’ one gets so much on television. Being short of celebrities I thought I might simply look back to the beginning of the blog (which is of course now a celebrity itself).

I did that. You can do that yourself but I will save you the bother by telling you that it was a list of things I should do before I’m 50. Which is in a few years. Or possibly in a few years more than that if you believe my spin-doctors. Or me.

This was list:

Do a press-up without collapsing in an undignified heap -
Which I can now do! The heap is entirely dignified.

Bake a cake without forgetting it’s in the oven and burning it -
Which I can now do (or at least I haven’t burnt a single cake this year)(mostly because I’ve bought them from the Coop)

Play the chord of F (F is for fuck-this-is-a-difficult-chord) - This hasn’t quite been so successful as now I can’t even remember how to open the guitar case.

‘The Head of the Cow’ (obscure yoga pose) - Which I can now do. HA! (that’s the involuntary noise that occurs during this pose)

Get married - Well, I did the next best thing – got divorced.

Learn to Salsa Dance - Again, the next best thing – broke my foot.

Drive all the way around Coryton roundabout without stopping for a red light -
Done. Stopped by police. But done.

Finish my novel - Done! It’s a pile of unreadable shit but it has sufficient words to qualify as a novel.

Walk into a room and remember why I’m there - since I now hobble into rooms I consider this ambition achieved.

Understand what a comma splice is – Yes, I, think, so.

Be a famous and rich novelist - Too ambitious so am striking this from list.

Empathise with slugs – No problem. Another totally positive aspect of divorce.

Make love in a swimming pool/lake/body of water that isn’t the bath - I have now amended this to just ‘make love’

Ski - now amended to ‘watch tv’

Like olives – now amended to ‘like’

Remember where I have put the car keys – Yes. Safe, secure and locked in the car.

Write a blog – Yes. I think so. Mostly. Aside from when I didn’t.


So, after a careful count of 2007 successes and failures the score is:
Successes – Mostly.
Failures – Hardly any.

Obviously I now hope that 2008 will be filled with just as many outstanding successes.

Coming soon – A new list of 50 things to do before I’m 50.
Which will include learning how to count to 50.

Happy New Year