mercredi 17 décembre 2014

The greatest break-up song.

I've listened to this a lot over the past couple of months.  That is all.


jeudi 11 décembre 2014

Some Girls

Has anyone been watching 'Some Girls'?

It was recommended to me only recently and I am a little bit obsessed.

I love Viva.  And Saz (great fringe).  Rocky may be my current favourite.  I basically want to be Miss Bitchcock when I grow up...

Most of all, it's just really great/funny writing that manages not to fall into lazy stereotyping.  It is currently cheering up these winter evenings for me no end.

mardi 9 décembre 2014

An Irony...

Early this morning, I was on my way to the gym.  To be honest, this doesn't happen very often (at least not first thing in the bloody morning).  But for once I'd had an early night and woke up before my alarm - so I chucked on some leggings and ran out the door towards the beach.  I watched the sunrise over the sea and headed to the gym for a lovely swim and a sauna to warm up before I went to work.

Gold star me.  This rare little tale makes me sound far more wholesome than I really am, and I must admit I was feeling pretty Zen/smug.

Then, when I was nearly at the gym, I passed a branch of Pizza Hut.  I have lived in Brighton for eight years now (have I, or is it nine?) and I have never once been inside this branch of Pizza Hut.  In fact, I don't think I have been in *any* branch of Pizza Hut for far longer than that.

Now, I am not a food snob by any stretch of the imagination.  I love a burger when I am hungover; for this very reason, I'm afraid I have frequented the Burger King at Victoria station more times than I care to remember.  I also love a pizza.  We're lucky to have some really great pizza places in Brighton - not only do they do 'proper' pizza but they tend to be a lot cheaper than a Pizza Hut takeaway, so it doesn't really get a look-in these days.

However, just the sight of the Pizza Hut sign in this scenario made me (as they say) literally 'LOL'.  Because no matter how long it's been since I was last there, the Pizza Hut sign is part of my history.  And it used to be to get out of gym...

When I was in Sixth Form (bearing in mind I had stayed on at my small school rather than going to a less-archaic sixth form college), Wednesday afternoon was Games afternoon.  The sportier girls would play hockey or run cross-country.  At the time, I was definitely not one of them.  One of the options was to go to the local public gym for the afternoon instead.  My similarly non-athletic best friends and I worked out that this was the best option - because it wasn't highly monitored.  So, we could go to Pizza Hut for the afternoon instead.  In those days (the dim and distant late 90s), the all-you-can-eat lunchtime buffet was £4.99 (I was shocked to note this morning that it is now £6.99!  but pleased it still exists). More to the point, you could get a refillable Diet Coke and (shamefully) back then we used to take full advantage of the fact that you could still smoke in there, which seems unthinkable now!

For a second, I quite fancied a slice of pizza, even at that time of the morning - an impulse that never goes away?  But I carried on to the gym, weighing up the ratios of how things change and how they stay the same.

vendredi 5 décembre 2014

A nice idea.

When I was a small child, I was obsessed with the idea of a message in a bottle (not the Police song)...  This is even better...

I recently gave a beloved book to a girlfriend - and it occurred to me that it had originally been recommended to me by a girlfriend, who had been recommended by...  You get the picture.

So, we had the idea that - upon finishing the book - my friend should pass it onto someone else.  We wrote our names in the inside front cover, and she decided that next she would give it to her sister, with instructions about passing it on.

A chain letter book.  I love the idea.  I want to keep this going and make more of them!

lundi 1 décembre 2014

Carey

Sometimes I think that certain songs follow us around.  They are there for us when we need them.  Waiting.

I was in the pub on a Sunday afternoon, drinking red wine.  It had been a bad week.  But I was with a great girlfriend, sheltering from the rain and cold, drinking through my hangover; that morning I had been to a second-hand bookshop and bought copies of 'A Room with a View' and 'Brideshead Revisited'.

Then this came on.

"You look really, really happy," the barman said as I sang along with every word.