Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#12: Brian - Porcelain Telephone

Okay, so now everyone thinks I'm this great big lezzer, and all my lesbian mates think I'm one of the sisterhood now. They've stood by my side to expiate and purge Briony #10's memory, and carefully not mentioned that I'm snivelling. So a huge party, and one of the hosts, female has decided to become flexi-sexi for the night. A really good looking, intelligent, sexy, interesting host, too. She propositions me. Still stuck in character I say the wrong thing: "I'm not interested in straight girls".
Spot the irony.
She tries repeatedly, and I'm a fool, a total dimwitted bulb head for resisting, but what the hey, I'm drunk, popular, flirting wildly, and loving it.
So how the hell did I end up in the toilet all night boffing a squaddie?
They'd drunk a hell of a lot by 2am, when I went in there. God knows what they all did to save their dignity until 6am, when I came out. Shamefaced. Tiptoeing. A lesbian of Ill Repute.
And honestly, I spent half the night, inbetween loud shags, chatting about the role of metaphor and reported speech in Roddy Doyle's novels. I swear.

Posted by Clytemnestra, as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#11 Briony - Venus Fly Trap

I met this girl while drunk at a gay bar on New Year's Eve. I'd intended to stay indoors at my parents' house, while they went out, and nurse my broken heart, but at five minutes to ten, I bunched my bravery up in my boots, reasoned that everyone gets a snog on NYE, and went out to a gay bar in a strange town, alone.
My assumptions were correct, and I got three dates from the next three hours. Meeting Briony the week after, I was fascinated by how butch, how mannish she seemed. People seem to think lesbians go for butch dykes because they look like men. No, they go for butch dykes because they're women. Nothing like a promise of sexual ambivalence, of strength, power, and crossing all your boundaries to get me going. I had a good evening, but things didn't feel right. Still, I was damned if I retreated with my tail between my legs, not after the other two dates had turned out so badly, so I followed the poor ex-naval rating home.
Man, was she butch. And tattooed. And pierced. And into Sado-masochism. By the time I got into her bed, like any good butch, she knew I was terrified. I looked at the Venus Fly Trap next to her bed. The plant had an electrical current in it, wired direct to the mains plug. I enjoyed kissing her, but my pretences at S&M were window dressing, and she knew it. She held me and told me it wasn't a good idea, that I was just to sleep, get up tomorrow, and leave knowing she was a friend. I was safe. I relaxed.

Posted by Clytemnestra, as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#10 Briony - My Pyramid*

[* In the sense of barely any time or investment on her part, but a whole universe of emotion on mine.]

I knew she was a dyke before I turned around. Queuing at uni in South West London to start a post graduate course, my gaydar was heightened enough to tell a rug muncher by a shoe style, a way of standing, the nape of a neck, a glance. Or a voice. And her voice, behind me, disembodied, said 'gay'.
We became firm friends. Both more twisted and sarcastic than the conventionality of our lives allowed us to be. Both too cerebral, obsessional, quiet and geeky to survive in the world without adapting and hardening. I saw her bookshelf, and I wanted her.
In fact, most of the time, I wanted her. When she brushed my arm in the Refectory. When she constantly bumped into me on the walk through the woods to uni. When she leaned in towards me to offer a sarcastic whisper, and I caught a scent of her perfume, her body smell, or the sweet sickly tang of her breath. When I sat in the Refectory at lunch and she only ever sat with me. Only ever spoke to me. Only ever gave that deep throaty, dykey laugh with me.
I passed. I passed for dyke. My first uni had been somewhat of a "lesbian bolt hole" to quote the alumni, and fifty percent of my friends were LGB. I had been to gay sex shops, to summer and winter Pride, knew how to play the Northern Line Game (eye contact too lingering, knowing smile, sly wink, blow a kiss) and my favourite nightclub was a monthly (fnarr) dyke nightspot. I was pretty sure of myself fitting in fairly unobtrusively into the gay subculture if I tried. I knew for truth that the cool dykes never fuck with a straight girl, never come on to a bi. If I wanted this woman, I had to play experienced, absolute, hundred percent Kinsey dyke. I was pretty sure of myself. Pretty sure. Not certain.
So I passed for gay. Never mentioned the boyfriend in North London. 'Outed' myself at uni in a deplorable high drama public showdown with a homophobe, a showdown that Briony knew was coming, and hid from, in horror that I'd out her too.
I realised that I'd have to make the first move. (These days, I realise that all women are passive, that this is always the case, no matter how butch they think themselves.)
I cancelled a date with Brian #8. He decided to drop the whole venture, see a friend. So it wouldn't make any difference if I went to the same bar that night with her, would it? You can see what's coming, can't you? Of course he turned up. I sat in that bar with my boyfriend, his best friend, and my girlfriend. I went home with her, to the sweetest most gorgeous night of longing yet not fulfilling I'd ever passed in a single bed with a woman entwined in me. Secretly. No confessions to either party. And I got away with it. I did. I carried it off.
The guilt was too much for me. First I cried at home to my flatmate, who thought it a brilliant opportunity to try to jump my bones. Then admitted to her, and broke it off. Then I cried at home some more. Finally, I traced him, and tried to get him to sit in a cheap cafe, for me to break it off. I had loved him, after all, and I wanted someone else. It was the most decent route left to me. But I couldn't find a cheap cafe, like the MTV shorts told you to. In fact, I spent so long tramping around Islington looking for one that he accosted me: "you're trying to find a cheap cafe to dump me in, aren't you?"
Another night of crying to the other flatmate, another badly avoided clumsy pass. Finally, I crawled, guilty, back to Briony's. By this time, she'd shown me that she had a long term, all consuming beloved girlfriend herself. That she was willing to date me but not to love me. Any sex we had would be a punishment for the love of her life, nothing more. Walking out to the shop for plum jam, with tears in my eyes, I spied Brian #8 on a bus, waving cheerily at me, forgiveness in his eyes. I was wearing trouser's he'd given me, which still had stains in the dye from illicit, furtive sex with him a year before. I left. shattered.
One more try: after a day wrangling with myself, and a night crying while listening to KD Lang (see, I was still passing), I rode the two hours of train from South London to North East, to Briony's apartment. Looked in amazement at the sensitive intellectual soul on display through her books. Knew this woman had a power to hurt me. To hurt me more deeply and woundingly than any man ever could. I should have run screaming. But here's the kicker: I found that thrilling.

Posted by Clytemnestra, as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#9: Brian - The Rubberised Man

At the time I met Brian, he was the last person I would fancy. Short, flexible, crawling, funny, rubber featured, like Mr Bean. He had all the hallmarks of a great pal, and none of the attractions of a lover. Still, a distant boyfriend, the sudden jolt of finals ending, an employer who tried to drag me into bed daily, and the licentious influence of the rapacious fmc all conspired so that when the object of seven hour's flirtation passed on the chance (fool!), I reasoned that if Brian #9 had been up for those drunken sugar fights in the italian restaurant, he probably wouldn't mind being dragged from his sleeping bag for a shag either.
Correct.
The only surprise, really, was how kind, gentle, and caring Brian #9 turned out to be. He made cheap sexual misconduct feel like an act of trust, and a part of me has always honoured him for that. He did indeed become a somewhat over-tactile friend, and invited me to his wedding, where he was as lecherous, rubbery faced and pucely crawling as ever. The sweetheart.

Posted by Clytemnestra , as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#8: Brian - Light of My Life, Fire of My Loins

Oh, I loved this one. He was soooooooo unsuitable. But it was the first time I fell in love at first sight, and despite the appalling way I treated him, I love him still. I have a horrible feeling that I was the most tortuous, demanding, repressive partner he ever experienced. Certainly it was some time before I spent a moment in his company that wasn't blitzed by a haze of uppers, downers, psychotropics or alcohol. He was so much fun.
We met at the Glastonbury Festival. I was returning home from a mystical and bad tempered sojourn in a Cornish forest, and stopped at Glasto en route. Arriving at the festival with Brian #5, a spare lesbian mate, a car and a crate of beer, two young Mancunians began tailing us about, pointing and shouting "Beer..."
Eventually, we relented; we charged them two E's per person for an equal share in the beer (remember that by day three of Glastonbury a black market barter economy is in full flow, where the most prized items are bread and chocolate, and the least a handful of magic mushrooms or a few dabs of whizz). By the time a frosted pink dawn seeped across the Tor, I was in love.
The lesbian and the car split two hours later, deciding Gay Pride was ... well, cleaner than this hettie mud wallow. Twenty four hours of feverish hand holding later, Brian #5 lost the scrap of paper containing Brian #8's telephone number.
I made him tear our belongings apart searching for it. I wept all through the three hour wait for a train. I wept while bunking the 350 minute journey back to London. I cried myself to sleep once home, trying to convince myself that the drugs had made me overemotional, that it was somehow unrealistic to have loved and lost within a twenty four hour trip.
Four weeks later, Brian telephoned unexpectedly. We talked, flirted and exchanged books by mail. I was spending seven hours a night on the telephone to #8 (who lived four hundred miles away), and #5 was beginning to suspect. I invited him to stay for the week of my twenty second birthday. Meeting him at the station (truthfully, by now I had forgotten what he looked like), my heart leapt directly into my mouth. He was beautiful.
He was folded on the floor of Euston Station, reading, and didn't look up immediately. When he did, I felt his eyes travel over my body, from my feet, along my legs, over the mini and T shirt, to my face. And he smiled. I knew then this was no Ecstasy side effect. Love at first sight. Amazing.
Brian #5 was the only one amongst the three of us with a day job, so constant munching of amphetamines allowed us two the freedom and excuse to stay up all night, and lie in bed together all day while Brian #5 worked. I remember a neighbour - now a famous movie critic who comes across on the small screen as an eminently reasonable man - but back then seemed a terrifically po-faced loser - hammered on my door at two in the afternoon. Was I aware that playing The Young Gods orchestral thrash punk records at top volume until six am could be construed as harbouring sociopathic tendencies towards one's neighbours? Where was my "fella"? He was ready to "punch the bastard."
In a rumpled, sweaty dressing gown, conscious of having made all sorts of noises, earlier, I slammed the door behind me, on a prostrate reclining, naked Brian #8; I flushed, wriggled, and protested that #5 was not here.
The look he shot me was utterly searching, his recognition of what was going on utterly transparent. His eyes registered "That Bastard Brian #5" had something worse, more craven and slippery than an angry neighbour to contend with. His eyes met mine for a brief second. "Bitch," they said, silently.
I didn't care. He was everything. A toxin that I welcomed. I managed another week before being caught out.
The only man I ever licked every single inch of. I wanted to consume him. My friends all loathed him. I gave not one fuck about that. His eyes were like a bolt of electricity to me. Even looking at a photograph sent a 200 volt shiver through me.
He would make me cassettes of music that reminded him of me when I wasn't there, which was often. He took cans and packets of foods and changed the labels to spell my name, then sent them to me, the contents already eaten. It was an all consuming, total, devouring passion. Even my father took the piss.
At the peak of my infatuation (sorry: drug-crazed frenzy), I callously dumped Brian #5, told him it was his fault for being so sexually repellent (cruelty! I actually uttered the line "sex with you is like milking a beast." Poor man. He never slept with a woman again) and was involved in a vicious fracas in Brixton. A gang of three guys jumped me, smashed glass into my eyes and drop kicked my face. A national TV soap star saved me (the extremes of life as a London drug fiend), and took me to hospital where a lesbian friend pilfered all the rubber gloves in a state of hysteria.
I felt nothing. Nothing. Nothing touched me like he did. To the degree that they had to prescribe me the most massive downers. That's how in love I was. That much.

Brian #8 took me to Paris in 1992, where in a dingy, frightening Bastille dive, I had my first tumultuous orgasm.
At point of extremis, I experience visions, always. I've never met anyone else who experiences (/admits to experiencing) this. They are uncontrolled, 3-D technicolour tactile smell-o-vision, and excruciatingly real. Different every time. A vision of a section of busted tyre, smelling of tar in the rain on a forest road, for instance. A nun with rotted teeth and gnarled knuckles laughing. That night I saw my first vision: a Swiss mountain road, in melting, mud-spoiled snow, with rotted sienna leaves half drowned in the ice, curling precipitously towards a peak. (And boy do these things make me suspicious of the religious 'ecstasies' of thirteenth century virgin martyrs. Bernini's Saint Theresa comes to mind....)
Exactly ten years later, still battle scarred by his year with me, happily married to a marvellous Japanese foxy girl, he emailed me out of the blue.
"Happy anniversary," it read, "Your first orgasm. Do you remember?"

Posted by Clytemnestra , as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#7: Brian - The Zipless Fuck

Some fucker I met at a nightclub, who looked like a wart hog. Vile. So vile. His moment is a refusal, under an unforgivingly bright burglar light, in a frosty breeze block garage. Wish I could rewind, wish I could wipe that.

Posted by Clytemnestra, as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

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Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#6: Briony - Freeway Girl

Do you recall that Brian #5's best friend used to throw unsuccessful all night parties to get him and me together? My then best friends both had an enormous schoolgirl crush on her. An attractive actress, artist, and a middle class hippy chick pothead, they thought she was everything cool. I thought she smelled funny. And I felt constant creeping envy of her unconsummated closeness with Brian #5. Perhaps it was the non-consummation I actually envied.
Anyway, a small party, much flirting between Briony and Mad Dwarf Girl, much tactile, hands-laying, much wine. A miniature orgy ensued, of the mild, unexciting suburban style. And how suburban, frozen, and calculating the venality turned out to be. Fuelled by fear, envy, cowardice. George Orwell would have been proud.
Have you ever fucked someone purely to prevent them from boffing someone else? Don't. It's the most soul destroying nasty thing. To be caught up in a moment that should be about giving, to be entirely focussed on what is not present, upon taking. That was some of the nastiest most soul-destroying sex I ever experienced in my life. It felt hollow, brutal, like a rape, where I was the rapist. I felt no desire. I felt no urge to please. Only to distract her, to occupy a space, to prevent.
Such was my introduction to the sapphic netherworld's seamy underbelly. It scared me so badly that I didn't touch another woman for five years.

Posted by Clytemnestra, as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#5: Brian - The Ageing Pop Star

Appropriately, after four years living with this musician, I find it hard to select a representative moment. However, this moment might just do: I awoke, found a stray homeless man, leafing through the copious and comprehensive record collection, stepped over the prone, curled and foetal unconscious body of my one and only, (who had fallen head first onto a full ashtray in an acid and Tennant's Super fucked stupor earlier that morning), to fill the kettle at the kitchen sink. I left him there, and showed the nice, young, encrusted Italian beggar the door, before leaving for a lecture on medieval literature.
As a sexual style, Brian was artistic, clammy, gentle; although one could also insert frenzied and ineffectual rutting into into that sentence. After I left, he reverted to his strings of male ballet dancers with a sigh of relief.
But Brian had begun as a mysterious, Bowie-like figure. Tall, vulpine, bonily attractive, with an aquiline nose. Think John Hurt, young and rangy. I had spotted him while in a pub with Byron, the year before, who had whispered to me about Brian's chart single, his reputation for liking it rough and for swinging both ways. All of which added to the glamour.
Years later, I discovered that Brian had been following me home from school since I was fourteen, that he thought I had teeth like David Bowie, and that half of the parties I had been to with Brian #3 (who eventually turned out to be Brian #5's regular dealer) had been engineered specifically by Brian #5's best friend in order that he meet me. Of course, I'd been too preoccupied by the social awkwardness of public intercourse with #4; I left early, sober, and uninitiated each time. Some may deem a man who stalks schoolgirls not the most attractive of suitors, however, I was that supremely egotistical age of seventeen, where obeisance to oneself appears to be a logical state of affairs, so this only accentuated Brian #5's aptitude, as a paramour, his qualification to be my devotee.

Posted by Clytemnestra, as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#4: Brian - The Killer

And so began a run of sexually ambivalent men. Brian was in love with, and a fully fledged stalker of my friend Rocky. Rocky was my own teenaged version of Mrs Madrigal and Barbary Lane - a fifty-something Californian pot head, wise beyond his years, an ex-servicemen obsessed with origami, and being cultured and intelligent, something of a catch on the gay scene. Brian, however, was a dimwit News of the World reading arsehole from Aberdeen. He would sleep with anything and anyone - primarily, I was to discover, because he was so enormously endowed that his standard sexual experience consisted of jealous men or screaming women who refused him on sight of the monster. (including myself; "you're not putting that ... that ... thing in me!" His response was to sigh fatalistically).
Brian had bought the house opposite Rocky's (a one-time liaison had introduced the two), and had a telescope set up in his bedroom. He knocked on Rocky's door every day; he knew Rocky's movements and whereabouts intimately. After enduring Brian's speeches about Constable's 'Hay Wain' and the music of Sade (a good ten years after Sade's era), I decided the man was both fool and bore.
He gave me my first driving lesson - a white-knuckle ride, I recall. The last time I saw him, Brian was brandishing his pork sabre in sausage-sword fights in a pub toilet. He was a gentle but stupid man, yet the last time I heard of him, Brian had been chased out of town by an actual angry mob after not one but two hit and run accidents, the second killing a ten year old girl. Misjudgement. Oh what misjudgement I showed. You sell yourself cheaply if you don't know what you're worthy of yet.

Posted by Clytemnestra, as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#3: Brian - The Shiver of Ice and Whiskey

A seedy, middle aged artist.
Oh, how the overly romanticised had fallen. We were friends, would chat about our paintings. One New Year's Eve, I held this artist, and kissed him in a hot, steamy pub. By chance, he'd moments before drained his tumbler of whiskey on the rocks. A chaste, warm, cuddly New Year's kiss - but his mouth tasted of sharp, full whiskey, and shocking cold ice. It was a surprise, and I pulled away, looked at him fresh.
It was months before anything came of it, but I knew right then that I'd have him someday.
This was the first truly casual, emotionless lover I'd accomplished. In contrast to the flailing but passionate Byron, Brian was competent, but unmoved. He lived a street away, and with a defiance that was frankly hard hearted, I'd flout my newly acquired teenaged curfew by wandering over to Brian's house and holding his plump smooth body close, to have wordless, inartistic sex every day before teatime.
Eventually the coldness, the seedy nature of the coupling began to dawn on me. I began to wander to the park to wash with freezing water in public toilets and cry, instead of finding my way home for the family meal. Brian's art didn't seem all that inspired (I believe a Trafalgar Square pavement is his canvas these days), his home a stinking pit. I started to realise the too soft bed was the only part of his life I'd truly seen. My next lover pointed out that everyone else in the town was completely aware that Brian was an ex-con, the local drug dealer, had a history which was well known. And I was glad that at the time it had been wordless.

Posted by Clytemnestra, as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#2: Brian - Cheap and Nasty

I can't even remember this young rake's name. Dancing at a nightclub in Gloucester (quote of the evening from my first openly gay male friend, Fashion Victim: "I'm a trained dancer, and so I have ways of responding to such dire music; but I can see that you're finding it difficult, dear.")
This was a short, plump, gingery Brian, whom I barely knew. A man in dungarees, for heaven's sake. Smashed out of my brains and feeling rebellious about the wayward Byron, who at that point persisted in snogging mental defectives then regaling me with the gory details, I decided to wreak my awful revenge by tawdry smutty bad sex in a nightclub with a chap I did not find the least bit appealing, nor would I ever want to see again. Come on girls, I know you've done it. Drunk enough to lose all sense of perspective, I completely failed to notice, amongst the artillery fire of disco lights and awful, predictable bombardment of 'YMCA', my location. I'd selected the open stage of the nightclub upon which to portray the destruction of reputation, honour and self-esteem.
Blase the next day, I had refreshingly little memory of the episode. Not for long, when at least sixteen people expressed how horrified my low morals had made them. The quiet, mousy, literary type no more.

Posted by Clytemnestra, as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#1: Byron - The Ancient Moonlight Kiss

Can you imagine? Clytemnestra and Byron? Could there be any more of a romantically christened union than two children tasting their first experience of physical lust than Clytemnestra and Byron? Even the most graceless virgin must in some way acknowledge the lure of the melodramatic, to take a first lover that is, truly, Byronic.
Ah well. I guess names can mask a world of horror. I found Alexandria soulless and impersonal, whereas Catford, say, is a place of unparalleled excitement and adventure.
No, really.

So, Byron. Slight, dark, slim with fine features, olive skin, soft lips, kind eyes, sensitive hands. A musician; first in a long line of such. We met in a gaudy nightclub, both watching and deploring others possessing less self awareness than we. We agreed to go for a long walk in an icy April dawn, before the moon fell, and before the sun came up. Wandering, talking exhaustively, the question of a kiss arose. I had only ever kissed Briony in primary school, Brian at a sixth form party. I demurred, pointing out that he might not possess the oral skills required. He instantly offered to practise - and we stood side by side, french kissing the cold dark window of a deserted bakery in the small hours, before comparing the patterns left by lips, tongue and breath. Thus I was satisfied he was qualified, for the first kiss I ever cared about.
I was that age of gawky teenage where you feel a pained kinship with the elephant man and nothing is more certain that the fact that nobody could ever love you.
We walked to the oldest part of town - a ruined country estate, and wandered through the huge oak, ash and sycamore trees that edged the hill, looking out over the pitch, twinkling horizon, and the looming Downs beyond. Walking further, we decided that in the days before the estate's ruin, this corner must have been an orchard. Blundering through a hedge into one of the gardens lining the old estate's perimeter, we found a set of children's swings, and rocked, talking in the moonlight , for another four hours.
Yes, we did attempt sex, but two virgins plus a cold snap are not exactly conducive to a grand amour, and the logistics and geometry of the thing defeated us. I felt it as a personal affront at the time, a humiliation of the highest order, a failure on my part at the whole enterprise of love and sex (Although really, a fearful, still sixteen part of me was rather relieved). It was years later that I'd become experienced enough to notice that the delectable Byron - with the soft eyes, the moist red mouth, with the sweet warm saliva - and a lack of knowledge of female geography that was stupendously absolute - Byron was himself clearly unschooled and inexperienced. Its the nature of early-mid teens to assume that everyone but oneself is born 'knowing' these things, after all.
I didn't lose my virginity that night (that honour was reserved for a seedier, older, more conventional locale, a year on), but I did lose my heart, my soul, my innocence. The glorious summer of longing and wanting, and waiting that followed, I often walked through the same orchard, knowing and reliving that moment again - crisp air, frozen grasses, dark wet leaves, frosted vapours of breath, thick coats and warm bodies beneath, icy, silvered moonlight and above all a feeling of something ancient, something almost tribal occurring - that was the moment I'd remember. The moment my adult world began.

[* In honour of how it sounds I've given a pale shadow of this nom de plume to all the other assignations and liaisons in this series]

Posted by Clytemnestra, as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas

Pulling Power

Now Playing: Philip Glass, 'Vanessa and the Changelings'

Last night I got back from visiting Toulouse in Paris. It was definitely the best weekend of 2003 by a long way. It was such a fucking relief just to simply not have to be me for two days. Added to that I now have a sappy schoolie crush on Toulouse's boyf, Ernesto, who is exactly like every flamingly masculine boy I ever fancied at school.
Thank you to JatB, who's been posting up my old crappy discarded draft-blog-posts in my absence. I notice she didn't pick the one about the alphabetti spaghetti recurrences in her sex life .... ;o)

* * *

Toulouse made me go to parties, and kept dragging over gorgeous but rather straight women for me to chat up. My technique was somewhat less than successful.

"Was that a secret lesbian code?" asked Toulouse, the morning after the night before.
"For what?"
"Reading a comic book and ignoring attractive women who try to speak to you at parties."
"Oh, that code. Yes, it's part of an elaborate lesbian seduction ritual. When they try to dance with you, you must face the other way with your arms folded."
And a face like thunder.
"Thought so."

Perhaps I need to brush up on my technique.

* * *

At a party in Paris, I kept hiding in the coat room and stroking the apartment cats. That's awful, isn't it?

* * *

Arriving at Gare du Nord, I was horrified yet again by the sameyness of French fashion. For a fashionable nation, the denizens of the capital don't half look generically downtrodden and grim. I was, I admit, wearing way too much red - patent red knee boots, long red coat, red belt, red socks, multicoloured striped sweater. And at rush hour on Friday at Strasbourg Saint Denis, everyone else was wearing sober black, sober blue, sober grey ...
I got to Toulouse's place, and although unutterably more stylish than most, he too was wearing black.
What's with the black? I had paranoid internal conniptions the rest of the weekend that I looked like a mental defective escaped from the country asylum in my clownish brights.
By Sunday, I was panickily counting every red coat I could find. With relief, I noted eleven red coats, only one of which was in the Eurostar terminal (and therefore possibly not French at all). With typical gaucheness, I assured myself that in a day and a half flat, I'd started a city-wide trend. Rah.
Back in London, I travelled the Jubilee line, the only red-coat-wearing passenger in sight. My fellow Britishers were there in abundance; wearing sober black, sober blue, sober grey ...

* * *

As well as taking me to a party in the largest, most bizarrely constructed Parisian loft I've ever seen, Toulouse and Ernesto took me out for dinner somewhere real ritzy on Friday night. Explaining that French menus go in for much colourful allusion, that French waiters just shrug when quizzed about contents, they guesstimated I'd ordered a pork dish. When it arrived, faces fell, and Toulouse said the description had been 'literal'.
Literal? Literally food? He refused to elaborate until I'd eaten it. It did actually taste nice, but my mind was racing as I digested. What could it be? It had to be offal, for him to refuse to translate like that. Ernesto said his Argentinian grandfather had used to eat it, worrying me further.
I made believe I was eating morel mushrooms and strips of fried squid. My mind couldn't help wandering: Lips? Cheeks? Trotters?
Finishing the dish, I reasoned with myself that whatever it turned out to be, it had tasted salty, baconish, nice. I wouldn't balk too much at eating it again. Mild flutterings of panic across my stomach couldn't change that. What was it?

I'd eaten a pig's ear.
Revulsion.

Logging On

Now Playing: Phillip Glass , 'Morning Passages'

I'd never quite realised how utterly unsociable / dehumanising computers can be, until I wandered along five carriages of the Eurostar train and spotted the loud, boisterous happy family of four who had irritated me so much in the ticket queue by singing, chatting, playing with the door sensors.
At a family table, three of them had assembled their laptops, and all stared glumly and silently ahead, tapping away, while the youngest sat bored and unencumbered by technology.
The presence of three liquid crystal screens had sapped all the verve and lively interchange from them. They seemed barely conscious of each other's presence, and the youngest kicked the wall disconsolately, ignored.
I know I'll sound an awful prig saying it, but somehow I think the loud and annoying games of Snap, Dominoes, Cheat, Lady and Queenie of my childhood train journeys seem preferable.

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What Foibles do you Have?

Nicked from Alfred the OK, yet again.

Adult Foibles

Eating food by ingredient sequence.
Ordering my books on the shelves by publisher. (One night, before my finals, in a fit of caffeine, I speed-read the complete works of Shakespeare, then still had time to arrange my books in order of literary influence.)
Maintaining frozen, panicky eye contact with spiders.

Childish Foibles

Aged five, leaving all the doors open on the first floor open so I could pee while never taking my eyes from the witch who lived in the tree outside. (Bipolar? Moi?)
Covering every orifice -- particularly ears -- with the blanket before I could sleep (so the Devil -- or the Earwigs -- couldn't get in.) See Alfred for the inifinite efficacy of the protective eiderdown.
Spitting on the front step so my sister would trip. (Actually, I did this only once, then hid behind the hedge. My sister raced out, singing, tripped on the step, hurt herself badly. I was horrified. I resolved there and then to reserve my powers only for good, never evil.)
Muttering the words "lesbianlesbianlesbianlesbian" all through the thirty five minute walk to school.
Not looking in a mirror for more than thirty seconds, once per day. "Somebody" had told me the devil might stare back at me if I looked too often.
Refusing to ever button my coat up in winter.

Body Dysmorphia

"If I'd known I would live so long, I would have taken better care of myself."
William Blake

Each of us, no matter what a sad act, has one complex, life-long relationship - with our body.
One of my favourite bits of Frankenstein - when the Creature informs Victor Frankenstein in the Caves of Ice that he plays the flute; "in which part of my body did this knowledge reside?" Perhaps musical talent is in the soul, but the genetic heritage you take from your makers is real enough.
One of my favourite Friend in Danger of Attack with Sharp Objects remarks came from HarvardBoy, a few years ago, when I was a porky porky lard ass. He wandered up to me one morning and said "you know people with big round bellies like yours are at a higher risk of heart disease."
When my face fell in horror, he attempted to mollify me by pointing out how much more rotund my belly was than any other part of my body, and that only someone who truly cared would say this.
Yes, he can still walk unaided, but it was a close-run thing.

The body that you're born with, versus the body that you make for yourself. And how you imagine that body to look is fascinating to me.
Nobody ever sees their back view. Sit in a busy station, and you can pick out one person in twenty who really really doesn't visualise their rear view when they dress in the morning.
Ack, that wasn't what I meant to blog about - I'm skinny as a rake, but I have what feels to me like podge in a layer across my belly. I know that exercise would tauten it. But I'm so skinny that it feels unfair. If I'm going to exercise, I at least want sexual reward.
Actually ... (brightens) ... the gym's good for voyeurs, innit?

Chatty

Why do people keep chatting to me? Do I have friendless and gullible tattooed on my forehead?
'Talk to Me; I Don't Run or Scream for at Least Ten Minutes'?

Scene: The Garage. Late afternoon.
Wanker: Are you going to be buying diesel or petrol?
Gullible Twat: Neither. I want to wash my car.
Is this a Pepsi petrol taste challenge? The car is covered in bird shit. Is he blind?

Scene: The Supermarket Checkout. Evening.
Wanker: Is that The Times?
No, love, it's a pigeon. Are the two inch high letters confusing you?
Wanker: Are they tabloid now?
It is, I suppose just about possible that I shrank the newspaper in the wash, smuggled it back in here, and now I want to pay for it.
Gullible Twat: No, they publish a tabloid option. You can choose. I think they're trying to compete with The Independent.
Mistake number one. Don't engage the nosey fuckers in conversation.
Wanker: (nods at the front page) Have you been following that case? Has he admitted it?
Dunno. Have you got halitosis? Oh, I see you have.
Girly Twat: Dunno. I think he has.
If I read the sodding paper, I might know. But that would involve you shutting the hell up and letting me buy the damn thing.
Wanker: What?! Her, too? Admitted it.
Oh pur-lease: talk in full sentences if you want a bloody answer.
Girly Twat: (sigh) No. He admitted they died in his house. He blamed her for the lies.
Wanker: Have you got a loyalty card? I did read about it, but I didn't ... it was a bit ...
Say goodbye to the Lady Coherence and all her little followers, folks.
Please God, just let me pay and extricate myself from this.
Girly Twat: It got a bit horrible reading all the details, didn't it? Yeah.
Oh great. Now I feel guilty and voyeuristic for buying The Times. The least hysterical newspaper I can find, and you infected it with prurience by association. Bastard. Gimme my change.

But why the hell were so many strangers chatting to me today?

Scene: Car park. Late evening.
Wanker: Excuse me, but where do you get your hair done?
In the bathroom, with the nail scissors, whenever I feel horrifically depressed, love. Why?
Girly Twat: Toni and Guy in Canary Wharf. Erm ... er ... uhhhh ... why?
Wanker: (whips out advertising brochure for a beauty salon) mmmfle murmur mumble ...
Okay, it got too boring even to type out.
He wanted a #50 downpayment on my next haircut, right there in the car park. If it hadn't been well-lit, I'd have thought he was offering to do it himself, with this shiny big hunting knife ...

I thought the point of London was a belligerent malevolent glare can replace ninety percent of normal discourse.

Too busy to blog. No really. Look, it's shorter than sodding usual, alright?

Running around like a mad happy thing, trying to collect all the bits of old crusty manky underwear, and the odd faded bogey, so that the place merely appears dirty and unkempt while it's being house-sat this weekend. They can't seriously be offended by just three days of dirty dishes, surely? It's only a month or so since I changed the sheets. Well, okay, four months, if you're going to count that other bed as well. Perhaps they'll just think the sheets are satin. Sort of satin in the middle.
With mucus stains.
Duch came over the other day and remarked upon the clumps of cat hair clinging to the side of the bath. I swear to you that's not a normal occurrence - in fact it was probably somehow her fault. Nay, definitely. The old beef mince in the drains is her fault, too.
Oh yeah, must sweep all the kitty litter out of the hallway. And pick up the dirty clothes from the pile I started in September. I'll leave the mouldy coffee in the cafetiere - it's doing no harm to anyone. The blue-green crystals forming inside the teapot are quite pretty really.
Oh, and hide the Christmas presents - don't want anyone to know in advance how crap they are, do I?
All so I can go visit Toulouse in Gay Paree - a full twelve months since I last left the forbidden isles, and about time too. I shall thoroughly enjoy anything that doesn't involve screaming at the general public, or being woken up at an ungodly hour by a moist cat's arse. Yippee!

Car in Crisis

Now Playing: Shut the fuck UP you bloody noisy fucking neighbours from hell - SHUT THE FUCK UP.
(Sorry.)

Given what a distrustful, obsessive control freak I usually am about anything that matters, I persist in being amazed by the miracle of the motor car.
As a five year old, I ate too much cheese before bedtime once, and dreamt I invented the motor car. It was another 25 years before I figured out what a clutch pedal or gears did, though, despite having a 12 speed bike and a dad who explained the thing every other weekend.

Girly Twat: I was told you sometimes sold second hand cars?
Butchy Man: Yes, but we don't have anything right now.
Girly Twat: (sobbing into the telephone loudly) You don't understand .... I know nothing about cars. You don't know how easy it is to take advantage of me. If you don't promise to help me, I'll lose all my money and get a death trap. Please please help me. (outright lurching heaving sobs)
Ahh but you do understand something about cars, you manipulative minx - you just did nought to hysterical in under four seconds.
Butchy Man: (heavy sigh) Oh okay then, I'll keep an eye out for you.

There's not much that's as disempowering as having a car and knowing absolutely nothing about how it works. The awful thing is my growing propensity -- unheard of in my youth -- to try to girly my way out of it.

Girly Twat: I need to bring my car in for its MOT.
Butchy Man: Okay - It's a Volkswagen .... what?
Girly Twat: Um.
Fucking amazing. Four years of university to accredit that bloody um.
Girly Twat: Golf. Polo? Volkswagen Golf. Polo.
Listen, love, if you're going to lie so blatantly - and it is a blatant lie, you have no fucking idea what that car is - then at least try to stick to a consistent lie. Say Mini Metro. But stick to your story for at least two frigging seconds.
Butchy Man: Which is it?
Girly Twat: It's red.
It's time you did the dishes, sweetpea. Your brain is hurting. Jesus.

I first discovered this technique of being a hopeless loser, but affecting a giggle and short skirt while doing so aged about 25 (I was a late developer in the girly stakes - didn't wear pink till I was 29, and thought I better do it quick before it took on Barbara Cartland hues.) Faced with the fourteenth house move in four years, staring despondently at the huge amount of stuff that I'd piled, homeless, for one fortnight into the flat of an Uncle Charles of someone at work, I swallowed my pride and put on a bright blue mini and stilettos. I picked up one bag and clattered affectedly down the stairs when the removal men arrived. "Sorry, I'm not feeling awfully strong."
Fucking hell, should have tried that years ago... Not only did they move everything without the usual tired recriminations and blackmail, they paid for me to go eat breakfast while they did it, then sorted me out a new flat. Still, the shame of it rankled a little. I mean, it's cheating, isn't it? If you're a dyke.

Butchy Man: So, here's that secondhand motor I rang you about. Look, I'll lift the bonnet for you, okay. There.
Watch it, mate - I know this is a legal requirement, but you're getting pretty technical there. I might faint from the added pressure to my dizzy little head.
Girly Twat: Oooooooh! Is that what they look like inside?
Hey look, at least you didn't shout 'yecch! all dirty!'
Butchy Man: Do you want to test drive it now?
You can just hear the horror in his tone, can't you?
Girly Twat: Oh no, no, no, I can't drive. You'll have to test drive it for me. I'll watch.
What kind of a social fucking retard takes a car for a Test Passenge? A mincing girly twat, that's what.

Considering that I have to call the AA yellow van man out simply to change a tyre on my car, it's a fair miracle that any vehicle of mine has survived the four collisions and six break ins of the past three years since learning to drive.

Girly Twat: Excuse me? You look strong.
Butchy T-shirt Man: (assumes the startled look of a sexual harrassment victim) Unhh?
Yes, you. I'm verbally molesting you in front of your mates. You better come up with the goods, needle dick.
Girly Twat: I can't do this. (wild gesture under car bonnet.) Can you get the lid off this water tank for me? I've been trying for aaages. I hit it with the oil can but I'm too weak to....
Actual real live shame prevented me from finishing that sentence. I'm going to hell.
Butchy T-shirt Man: Grunt. (easily turns lid screw.)
Girly Twat: (bursts into applause and hops) Ooooh, thank you!
Butchy T-shirt Man: (runs)

Lidl

Mood:  vegas lucky
Everywhere on earth has somewhere like Lidl. It's the place near the welfare offices, where the poor people shop in small values for items that were bought in huge bulk. The place that wastes no time on ambience, customers, heating, even on shelving. A wooden pallet on the floor containing 500 tins of Polish corned beef is enough - the real attraction is the price.
The first time I went to Lidl, my mum took me, and I was surprised by how similar it is to shopping abroad. You know that disorientation you feel when not a single package in an entire aisle says anything you recognise, in the colours you're used to letting rest in your supermarket peripheral vision, or even any labels in your own language. Similar products, but with ever so slightly wrong names. I bought a packet of Jaffa cakes yesterday, only they were fairy-sized, in a pack, not a tube, and they were called Mini Orange Sponges.
This spring, I'd waited a few times in Lidl car park while the ex signed up for her UB40 at the council offices across the road. But I'd concentrated my energies then on posing with my new secondhand car, and seeing how many pikeys I could persuade to wink at me by wearing ever more revealing outfits. This is not at all the same thing as Shopping at Lidl.
So, shattered after a two hour detour through the wrong Thames tunnel, last night I decided to break my commute at Limehouse Lidl, in the hopes of buying some Germanic looking crap. Germans do Christmas food well, don't they?
The first thing that hit me was the clinging, uncared for damp smell. This is like walking into Iceland a day after they switch the freezers off.
The second was: no shelves. Lidl will dump the packing box on a crate on the floor, saw off the top and bung a price sticker on. Bish bosh. No arranging of the organic pasta sauces so the labels face outwards.
Then the lack of organisational theme: summer flip flops next to battered Advent calendars, next to alien breakfast cereals that feature unfamiliar cartoon monkeys, next to Swiss cheeses. Of course I say a lack of theme, but whoever placed the lighter fuel alongside the cheap bottles of Schnapps must have had some sense of humour.
I hadn't leapt back in horror at the size and texture of a fat uncooked Bratwurst for a good twelve months, so there was a welcome sensation. Some of the less exotic products did attempt to translate themselves for the uninitiated - just as whenever I go to France in winter I get reminded that truly no lie, the rosbifs love to eat rotted food each Christmas (mince pies? plum pudding?), so the mince pies here had helpful subtitles: pastry cases with mincemeat inside. I dunno, still sounds a little rotted to me.
Clutching my stack of comestibles (mini orange sponges, apples in metric weights, Magenbrot and bon-bons mit sahne), I queued with the other plebs. And queued. And queued.
Because at Lidl, there's only ever two people on checkout, and they can take all the time they want to, knowing full well there's nowhere else you can go if you don't like it. Even Kwik-Save is pricier. Inching past the special offer Stollen, marzipan fancies and other utterly non-english sweetbreads, I began to notice the unhealthy pallor of my fellow shoppers. The way a cut glass accent sounded wrong. How many people were clutching multi-packs of Eastern European branded lager. People in thin looking unbranded clothing, with acne, rosacea, and pinched expressions.
I once rented a flat in Berlin, during reunification, and the interminable queues at Lidl made me recall being poor and going over to the East in order to feel richer for a day; before the border controls dropped entirely, and during a particularly cash-strapped spell. In West Berlin I was just a hick Britisher with crappy German, who used to get spat at on the U-Bahn if I spoke too loudly in English, and wore the wrong fashions (white instead of black - horrors!) (Christ, I loathe Berlin, but that's another story...) Behind the Iron Curtain, I was suddenly transformed into rich decadent Westerner. I minced up to the largest department store, where elaborately made up, grandiose assistants gave you a chit that allowed you to approach the one single triangular stack of tinned fish in the store. I followed the shopping spree with a trip to the restaurant of the most expensive hotel I could find, and stuffed myself with the finest bacon, eggs, cold gravy and lumpy mash, because that's the most expensive thing they served. From that point on, I decided not to glory in my wealth, but to stick to feasting on fried chicken in Kreuzberg. Brrrr.
Back in Limehouse, fourteen years later, as I paid for my wares (in cash - coins - putting your food on Visa as I'd normally do seemed to express a wanton and unseemly frivolity), I was interrupted by boozer number six in the queue returning to quibble about his 50 pee money off coupons. I left the change and got out of there.
Perhaps I should buy a cheaper flat, something that still allows me enough money to shop in a place that sells Clementines.