Wednesday 22 October 2008

And I'm back...

After a fabulous week in Portugal (note to self: week is never long enough, three years should just about cover it next time), with The Fisherman, my mum, dad, sister, her husband and my niece, in a fabulous villa, I am back on The Rock again and realising how much I miss living elsewhere. To distract myself from thinking that I perhaps made a mistake by moving back from a city I adored to an island where I feel stifled appoximately four times a week, I will list some stuff instead and think about shoes.

Number of times I compared my tan to The Fisherman's and found mine to be lacking: 8
Number of times I fell out of the rubber ring in the pool: 4
Number of dinners out: 6
Number of BBQs: 1
Number of times I said to The Fisherman, 'But you fish every day, why do you want to go big game fishing/look in a fish market/do something else fish-related': 200
Number of times I have complained about 'post-holiday blues': 2 million
Numbers of surfs: 2
Number of times I thought a Portugese driver was going to deliberately murder me with his scooter in my heap-of-shit hire car: 9
Number of times I crazy-danced to Foo Fighters with my 2 year old niece: 8
Number of times my parents forgot I was 21 and not 8: 15
Number of times I reverted back to my role as 'youngest child': 7
Number of hours I stayed out partying on the night I returned in an attempt to distract myself from the fact that I was back: 24
Number of times I have considered moving back to Brighton and/or going travelling on a prolonged holiday: 86 billion

More cheerful post tomorrow!

Friday 10 October 2008

Bollocks to this...

...I'm going on holiday. Back in a week!

Thursday 9 October 2008

These are a few of my favourite things...

I have borrowed a meme from Just Me (http://justme-randomramblings.blogspot.com) for today, as I'm feeling uninspired by my own life (the llama/bear hybrid incident has not happened...yet)

Favourite Things in the following Catagories....
CLOTHES SHOP I love, love LOVE all the little shops in the Laines in Brighton...if I had to pick a favourite it would probably be Pink. Or Fashion Temple. Or Smooth Criminal, or JuJu...arghhh too hard!

FURNITURE SHOP I'm not really grown up enough yet for this question, as I still tend to base my furniture choices on what costs the less or can be found in my parent's attic. I do enjoy pressing my nose against the window of Habitat and making wistful keening noises though.

SWEET Has to be the brown and white Guylian shells. I used to live with someone who was Belgian in my first year at Uni and she told me these were 'an abomination against Belgian chocolate'. Fortuneatly for me, I strongly disliked this girl, so her negative opinion only served to reinforce my love for them.

CITY BRIGHTON!! Saw that one coming, didn't you?

DRINK Cider and black (I'm still a student in my head), vodka and redbull and, more embarrassingly, I must confess a secret love of sherry. Every Sunday, my mum has one of those tiny glasses of it, and, despite kicking and screaming against all things parentlike, over the last few years, I have done the same. (Once, when The Fisherman caught me, I had to pretend I was taking it through to my mum, because I was so embarrassed about my old-lady tastes).

When I was a child, my mum used to let me have a sip out of her glass, until one day, when I bit through the glass and a shard went between my teeth and turned my gum yellow. My mum, understandably, said there was no way we were going to A&E because it would involve explaining why I had been allowed to drink sherry at roughly three years of age, and luckily enough for all of us, it turned out fine. I don't remember anything of the incident, but that could be because I was in a toddler-sherry-induced haze.

MUSIC Too much to list! I love the new Razorlight track at the moment though.

TV SERIES Oooh again, a bit too much to list...Desperate Housewives, Teachers, Hustle, Friends...the list goes on. (You can see my tastes are very highbrow)

FILM True Romance, Wayne's World, Football Factory, Rise of the Footsoldier, Pulp Fiction, Love Actually. My tastes range from the extremely violent to the extremely slushy...but I am terrified of horror films and even found Hot Fuzz too scary, pathetic creature that I am.

WORKOUT Ha ha ha ha! Oh, you were serious?!

PASTRIES I'm rather wary of pastries because the flakiness tends to get stuck in my throat and then make me cough involunarily, spluttering little crumbly flakes over everything in sight. This is not, however, anywhere near as impressive as when my dad involuntarily coughed during a sip of espresso in a resturant and splattered the table, wall, and, oh yes, prospective client with hot coffee. So now you know where I get it from.

COFFEE Ah, I didn't even see that coming! Not such a fan (see above) but wouldn't say no to a mocha...I'm more of an Earl Grey tea kind of girl though.

I may come back and update this later...possibly with my review of the steak and ale pie crisps. I know you're on the edge of your seat...

UPDATE:
In a wonderfully serendipitious moment of blogging psychic-ness, the lovely Leonie (sorry if that sounds like some kind of letchy uncle type phrase, I just used it because I have a bizarre need to alliterate as much as possible) (http://www.leoniekate.blogspot.com) has tagged me in the same meme that I borrowed from Justme, but I don't know how to tag or link people - can anyone help me please?!

Wednesday 8 October 2008

Missing the Brighton Nights

I am feeling rather sad today because all my friends who are still at uni are posting their photos on Facebook of what looked like a fantastic Freshers Ball. At Sussex Uni, the actual ball is simply a precursor to the amazing, my-favourite-ever-annual-event (excluding Christmas) 'rave in the woods' behind Sussex Uni.

Run by travelling pikeys (may not be politically correct, but that's how one described himself to me when I was nearly savaged by his three-legged dog, an experience I felt was deeply lacking in originality and conforming to the pikey/gypsy stereotype in a rather dull way), it begins at 11pm and goes on until about 11am the next day, with a huge sound system, bonfires, fire poi, mad dancing and a trek across the field to reach the event that is lit only by the faint light of hundreds of people's phones as they attempt to climb a 3 bar gate and stile in complete darkness, aided and abetted by an interesting combination of drugs and alcohol.

This is exactly my kind of event, involving, as it does, dancing, loud music, outdoor drinking, dancing on a small hillock as the sun comes up, meeting enourmous amounts of people under trees in various states of inebriation and not being entirely sure where you know them from when you see them again and the propensity to 'accidentally' stumble into someone you quite fancy. Of course, there is the downside of not ever being able to find the person you fancy because of the amount of people there/complete lack of light/conviction that there are giant luminous rabbits in the trees and also the large amount of mud and bruises from falling over, but these downsides can be easily overlooked. In the years that I attended the rave, I made several lifelong friendships and perfected the art of accidental stumbling.

Now, I am no longer in Brighton, and the rave still continues (obviously I didn't expect it to stop just because I was no longer there to fall off the top of the three bar gate with an embarrassingly loud scream that was instantly muffled by an equally audible squelching noise as the mud claimed another victim) (you'd think after the first time, I'd learn. Pigeons learn faster than me). I am in Guernsey, which is sorely lacking in outdoor events. I am in a serious relationship, and while I am very happy, I feel nostalgic for some accidental stumbling in the dark. While I have a life I am happy with, on days like these I seem to get ambushed by a feeling, which I can only describe as, 'Is this all there is?'

While there are many things I don't miss about being a student (begging the bank for an overdraft extension, the constant ache of missing my boyfriend, buying tins without labels when my money ran out and realising that the tin of tomatoes I had hoped for was actually a tin of stewed pears, which doesn't go so well with pasta and plastic cheese), there are many more that I do. While I don't particularly miss modelling, it seems sad that I don't have the opportunity to do it over here if I wanted to. I miss the live music and gigs, the pier, Concorde II, The Volks, the Laines, the shops, the pubs (especially The Mash Tun, World's End, The Gladstone, The Fishbowl and The Fortune of War), the wide range of people and the random events that constantly used to happen to me. There, anything could - and did - happen. There, my life was ungoverned by anything, here I feel like my path is mapped out ahead of me.

I'm sorry to be melancholy, especially as I have a huge amount to be thankful for, and I'm also a little afraid that now I've said my life is mapped out, I am going to be hit by a huge and hideous surprise. Feel free to share experiences of leaving uni, and cross your fingers that the next time I blog, I won't be describing the experience of being attacked by a huge bear/llama hybrid as punishment for moaning about my life.

In other news, I am loving listopia.co.uk. I have also been musing on buttering the back of one, or both, of my kittens, to see if the rule about toast always landing butter side down and cats always landing on their feet holds true when combined.

Yours, with gratuitous melancholy and nostalgia,
Fishwife

Update: I have just tried the new McCoys Winter Warmer flavour of Lamb and Mint. It is quite nice, but has a tad more mintiness than I would normally consider ideal in a crisp. Tomorrow: steak and ale pie flavour.

Tuesday 7 October 2008

Lost and found

Today I have so far:
- Slept through my alarm and awoken at 8:55am, meaning that I had all of five minutes to get up, get dressed, moan for at least ten minutes about something (ranges from the weather to my own inability to develop Cheryl Cole's hair overnight), feed the Illegal Kittens and walk to work. Suffice to say, I managed to get the getting up and dressing done, all while moaning about how late I was, which shows time efficiency, I think.
- Realised, at about 11am when my brain was finally kicking into gear, that I have no idea of the whereabouts of my passport and it might be handy to locate it since I'm going to Portugal on Saturday. I contacted my friend, who works at the Passport Office, via the ever-handy medium of Facebook, who cheerfully told me it would cost me £107 to get an emergency one and reminded me to pay with a debit card, to avoid the credit card surcharge. I in turn cheerfully reminded her that there is not a bank in the land stupid enough to give me a credit card, so that shouldn't pose too much of a problem.
- Eaten a bag of Oriental Rib McCoys, absentmindly, while panicking about said passport
- Followed these with some beef flavoured Monster Munch (they're back! *punches air in crisp-related jubilation*) and a chocolate orange bar.
- Driven like a bat out of hell (who's lost it's passport) to my parents house, where I bizarrely found said passport in a bag deep in my old wardrobe that I haven't used for about three years. Since I've definitely used my passport more recently than that, it will remain a mystery, albeit a satisfying one because I got my passport back in the end. I could have made the finding more dramatic (even if it was just to use capital letters, so that it looked like The Finding, but I couldn't be arsed)
- Eaten a slice of homemade chocolate cake pensively, while reflecting on the state of the world in general and the state of my wardobe in particular
- Typed up the cheesiest radio script in the world
- Had a mild argument with The Fisherman, as it transpires he will not be in from Fisherman Land (aka, the sea) until Friday morning, negating his promise to take me out for a pre-holiday dinner on Thursday, with even my threat of kicking the kittens not changing his mind (joke) (I think they would come and kick me back in the night after fashioning eight kitten-sized steel-toe capped boots, because that's the kind of kittens they are).
- Tripped over absolutely nothing on the pavement and staggered embarrassingly, before grinning sheepishly and trying to look dignified at the same time. A dignified sheep...rarely happens, let me tell you.

Things I will do this evening;
- Spend a couple of hours with the Brownie pack I volunteer with (sadly nothing to do with delicious chocolate cake squares) learning about Food and Currencies From Around The World, while fending off requests to go to the toilet every two minutes (from the children, I hasten to add) and minor fights about who is better at plaiting hair
- Make some variety of pasta and eat while watching my DVD of Teachers and musing over the merits of Andrew Lincoln versus Navin Chowdhry
- Try and think of a more interesting blog for tomorrow

Happy Tuesday!

Friday 3 October 2008

Accidental KitKat Thief?

I think I may (and I stress, 'may') have stolen a Kit Kat. I popped out to get a sandwich at lunch today (warm lamb roll with mint sauce - it was delicious, even somebody baa-ing at me in manner of a small fuzzy lamb didn't in any way diminish my enjoyment, because that's the kind of carnivorous bitch I am) and then stopped off in the corner shop to get some crisps to go with it (Oriental Rib McCoys, since you ask). I got back to my office, devoured my sandwich and, with mint sauce dripping attractively down my chin, reached for my crisps...whereupon, to my suprise, I pulled out a shiny, red, four-fingered Kit Kat.

I have absolutely zero recollection of buying any form of chocolate-based snack and now the rest of my afternoon has been taken up with wondering if I am an accidental snack thief. I can be absent-minded, in a way that I try to think of as endearing but is actually bloody annoying, for me and anyone affected by my lack of short term memory, and it is possible that I could have put it into my bag without really noticing. Not on purpose, obviously, because I've never really been into stealing things, not even when I was a professional Teenager and petty theft went with the territory.

However, it is equally as possible that I paid for the Kit Kat and the mundanity of the act (and also of this post, I'm beginning to realise) escaped me, in the way that I always have to go back and check my hair straighteners/oven/wind-up llama is switched off, because I do it so often, my mind actually blanks the act out. I really hope I did, because otherwise it's just a short step to menopausal kleptomania/forgetfulness that sees women called Doris being publicly shamed for slipping a tin of beans into their handbags, and at 21, I feel a bit young for this yet.

In other news, Guernsey has just scored a point in the living stakes because when I realised I couldn't pay for the aforementioned baa-lamb sandwich because I only had my card and the shop didn't take cards, the guy behind the counter (who said "How-do" to me when I entered the shop, the exoticness of which charmed me greatly, as Guernsey, being as far South as you can get in the UK, never gets Northerners here, because they are too sensible and Northern to be bothered with our fancy Southern ways. And fair play to them), told me that I could come in and pay for my sandwich on Monday instead.

This could have been because I had a red-faced, hiccuping tantrum and rolled around on his shop floor when the sandwich was nearly withheld, but it's hard to tell. (Joke)

So that restored my faith in humanity and the trust of people in others...which is now making me feel even worse about possibly stealing the Kit Kat. Bollocks.

Friday Feast again

Appetizer

What was your favorite cartoon when you were a child?

I must confess a special fondness for Top Cat and Road Runner. Recently, the Illegal Kittens have been doing some pretty damn accurate impersonations of the latter when they fall off the edge of the surface by simply refusing to accept that they have reached the end and continuing to walk, cue wide, comedy scared-kitten eyes, bristling fur and a loud thump, followed by two confused expressions on furry faces. Perhaps I should change their moniker from Illegal Kittens to Incredibly Thick Kittens.

Soup

Pretend you are about to get a new pet. Which animal would you pick, and what would you name it?

I would probably get a llama, because I am enamoured with the pointlessness of them, and the way they spit when annoyed, which I wish I could emmulate, but manners stop me. I would probably name it Bert, or Nigel, and get it a lovely shiny lead, which I could lead it around on. If I got another cat, I would definitely name it Chairman Miaow, which I wish I could have done with the previous kittens. I would actually have another cat, just to call it by that name.

Salad

On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being highest, how much do you enjoy getting all dressed up for a special occasion?

10, 10 10! If there was an Olympic sport made out of getting ready, I would bring home the gold medal. A glimmering gold medal that has been getting ready all day, polishing its shiny bits, buffing up its not-so-shiny bits, putting in its chicken fillets, applying the exfoliator and smoothing down its ribbon.

Main Course

What kind of music do you listen to while you drive?

Anything and everything. At the moment, I am particularly favouring 'Waking Up' by Elastica in the mornings. I also LOVE Foreign Beggars, The Beatles, Gabriella Cilmi, Dizzee Rascal, Lethal Bizzle, Feist, Morcheeba and Foo Fighters. My music taste is diverse, to say the least.

Dessert

Do you have any piercings?
Piercings I have: Two bars in my tongue, one through the back of my neck.
Piercings I had before work made me take them out: One through my lip. I mean literally, you could see the top of the bar in the top of my bottom lip, and the bottom half through my lower lip line. I LOVED it, because it was quite unusual. Then I sold my soul to the advertising industry and had to remove it.
Piercings I had before I realised they were way too much hassle: Two flesh tunnels, one in each ear, which I used to hang hoops through, in a rather punk-chav way. One scaffold through my ear, which, whenever anyone came within an inch of my ear, caused me to duck away, emitting small, high pitched, bat-like squeaks, such was the pain of it for six months. I spent these six months sleeping only on one side and waking with a cricked neck and aching ear, before I saw sense and removed it. In retrosepect, I think I may be a bit dim for not removing it earlier.

So that's my Feast - happy Friday!