Living for Disco

I am very, very bored. I have been reduced to playing desultorily with a bit of blu-tak that I found stuck to my desk yesterday.

Fortunately for the blu-tak, I found this at Birdy’s and I almost laughed with glee. It’s a meme! Hurrah. They’re always a good excuse for time wasting.

I forgot to put this bit in yesterday:

Welcome to the 2005 edition of getting to know your friends. What you are supposed to do is copy this entire blog entry (although perhaps not the bit about the blu-tak) and paste it onto a new blog entry that you’ll post. Change all the answers so they apply to you, and then publish. Leave a comment if you do this.The theory is that you will learn a lot of little (random) things about your friends, if you did not know them already.

What time did you get up this morning?
6.30. Don’t ask me why I am suddenly able to do this. In the UK, getting out of bed before 8 used to elicit wails of despair. It could be because now my usual bed-time is 9pm. Unless I have a particularly exciting bit of jigsaw to finish off.

Diamonds or pearls?
Diamonds. Actually, I like pearls – they’re softer and prettier, but they can be a bit ‘old-lady’-ish, something I try increasingly hard to avoid, in case I wake up one morning with an uncontrollable urge to put on tweed and a pair of sensible shoes, and go out looking for the village murderer behind churchyard walls.

What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
Lord of War. It would have been more enjoyable if the projectionist had bothered to focus the film for the middle 45 minutes, but still.

What is your favourite TV show?
CSI. Love it. Especially Warrick. Mmmmm.

What do you usually have for breakfast?
Toast. I’m supposed to say something healthy like fruit. I did start off well – I ate loads of yoghurt and fruit for breakfast in my first month here. But now it’s toast and marmalade, and fresh coffee.

Favourite cuisine?
Thai. Bit of a bummer – you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to get hold of fresh coriander here.

What food do you dislike?
Blancmange.

What is your favourite CD at the moment?
KT Tunstall – Eye to the Telescope. Or the Zutons.

Morning or night person?
Depends on whether or not I have a hangover.

Favourite sandwich?
Bacon. Or Fish-finger. Both with ketchup.

What characteristic do you despise?
I’m with Birdy on this one. Bigotry.

Favourite item of clothing?
A bright pink corduroy skirt with blue flowers printed up the side. I will cry when it finally wears out.

If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would it be?
Japan. Which is nice because my friend has just been posted there for three years, so if I ever get enough money for the flight, I’m off.

What colour is your bathroom?
A kind of grim sandy colour, with tiles that show up every single bit of dirt. Also, the mirror, which is nice and large, is covered in toothpaste splatters. It must be someone else. I’m very neat with my spitting.

Favourite brand of clothing?
Brand?

Where would you retire to?
If I could retire right now? I don’t think I would.

What was your most memorable birthday?
Oh god. There have been so many.

Favourite sport to watch?
Gymnastics. It’s so graceful.

Who do you least expect to complete this?
Everyone.

What is your shoe size?
7. Having large, wide feet, I was cursed with ugly shoes for the duration of my school career. Once when I was six, I deliberately left a pair of really hideous shoes under the benches in the girls changing rooms at school. For weeks I denied that they were mine, and my mother finally reclaimed them one parents’ evening. And made me continue wearing them. Oh, I did have a pair of red pixie boots when I was 14. I loved those.

Pets?
Boris.

Any new and exciting news you’d like to share with us?
I have news, but I’m not sure I want to share it yet.

What did you want to be when you were little?
An astronaut. I can’t remember why he would have been able to do this, but when I was very young, my Dad sometimes used to bring me home amazing close up photographs of the surface of the moon. I wonder where they went. I turned out to be a bit of a dunce at maths though.
I also wanted to be a writer.

What is your favourite flower?
Sweet pea.

What date on the calendar are you looking forward to?
12 January 2005.

One word to describe the person who you snaffled this from?
Inspiring

If anyone is anywhere near as bored, and devoid of stuff to do as me, please feel free to nick this and do it. Now I have to go and try to extricate a small lump blu-tak from my hair. Excuse me.

Has anyone else noticed that Santa is an anagram of Satan? I’m sure that, every year, I think I’m the only person to notice this. It still amuses me though.

Also, last night I noticed that pigeons here may be prettier, less flea-ridden, and less likely to take your arm off for a piece of sandwich than in London, but they sound strange. I keep thinking it’s the neighbours having sex, but it’s just a combination of Boris snorting, and the pigeons honking in the tree outside.

This is Boris.

He’s my dog. My inherited dog. I don’t count him as my neighbour’s dog, because all they do is feed him and ignore him. The poor love is starved of affection.

He gets very excited whenever I come home, and leaps out of the shadows, barking like the guard dog he definitely isn’t. He shows his delight at my presence by pissing on my bicycle on a daily basis.

He also brought me a lovely flower the other day that he’d uprooted from the flower bed, and which he had clearly spent all afternoon flinging around in an attempt get the dirt off. Most of the petals had come off too, but it was a nice thought.

I quite like Boris, even though when he rolls over to be tickled, he always shows off his rather unsettling, mishapen pink penis, which means that most tickling lasts a limited amount of time, and is accompanied by the words “Put it away Boris.” He also snorts in a way I’ve never heard any dog do before. Sometimes I wonder about his provenance.

Boris has been helping me do my jigsaw. He does this by sitting with his head on my foot, and slapping his tail against the patio doors every time I start singing along to music. I noticed this yesterday - it’s quite flattering.

He also makes me feel safe at night. Although I know that he would never, in a million years, attack a burglar, I have begun to find his habit of running around the house and barking throughout the night quite comforting.

So, that’s Boris. I thought I’d hate him, but I don’t. He’s quite sweet really.

I’ve only ever spent two Christmases away from the bosom of my family.

The first one was the Christmas of 1998, the last before my father died. I spent it with my ex, in our bijoux flat in New Cross; we were joined by our friend Flip. We spent months filling up the hamper cardboard box under the coffee table with food and drink. It took us almost as many months to get through it all.

For the first time ever, I had my own stocking. In it was a yo-yo and an orange. We drank a lot of gin and tonic, even more champagne, and after making ourselves sick on a dinner of roast duck, followed by Stilton, we calmed our churning stomachs with port.

It was clear and crisp outside, and the trees – recently pruned mutilated by the council didn’t look as brutally stunted as they had during the autumn, when all the other trees still had branches. We danced on the sofa a lot. It was great.

The second one was in 2001. I was in Egypt, leading a group of Christmas-hating holidaymakers through the Western Desert. As they persisted in telling me, their getaway was precisely that - an attempt to flee the horror of the festive period. They’d paid for a week free of Santa, and that was that. It didn’t seem to make any difference to them that I hadn’t.

The Western Desert is beautiful, and was one of my favourite trips, but this time I was, rather unfortunately, lumbered with a driver who had clearly missed his career niche as a vodka-fuelled clown in the Russian circus, a bus with too few seats, and a woman called Penny who seemed incapable of listening to anything I said*.

Christmas Eve dawned bright and hot. Determined not to be deprived of all hope of seasonal enjoyment, I had sneakily purchased two bottles of Omar Khayyam red wine, at great expense, while in Luxor. We squeezed ourselves, with difficulty, into our mini-bus, and drove, squabbling over leg and elbow room, to the market. I should really have learned the words for ‘cinnamon’ and ‘cloves’ before getting to the shop, and after being offered with increasing bemusement a selection of goods including tinned salmon and washing power, I just started sniffing the spices myself. They must have thought I was completely mad.

So that night, in our cosy camp, we sat around and I made a triumphant mulled wine over the fire. It was marvellous. Salah, our driver, came along too. Although by this time I’d become completely sick of his constant lateness, bad driving** and regular disappearing acts, the group seemed to have taken him to heart. They seemed to find our conversations amusing. I don’t know why; they routinely went like this:

“Salah, we’ve been waiting here for almost forty-five minutes, the police have got bored and gone to look for you – where on earth have you been?”
“Ah, my watch/shoe/belt/wallet broke and I had to fix it. Then we had a coffee and a smoke. You have very beautiful eyes.”
“Thanks. Can we go now? And next time, please don’t disappear – we’re really late.”
“M’ish mishkela, m’ish mishkela***, you are very lovely”.
“Don’t mish mishkela me, there is a bloody mishkela. And you’re not going to get anywhere by complimenting me. And I’m not lovely - I’m fed up”.
He’d then look at me mournfully, sigh, get in the bus, and drive us to some shop or other owned by his uncle, where he’d stop, and refuse to drive any more until we had bought something.

The sight of him dancing maniacally around the campfire, fuelled by mulled wine, his beer belly drooping attractively over his a semi-transparent white sarong will stay with me forever.

Christmas Day was even better. There’s an extremely old Christian cemetery that looks over the encroaching sand dunes just outside Kharga. It dates from around the 3rd Century AD, when the Roman emperor Diocletian decided to expel all Christians from the empire. Many of them came to this empty, seemingly god-forsaken place to escape persecution, and for centuries they buried their dead in the necropolis. Because it never, ever rains there, it’s fantastically well preserved. One guide I had used to insist on going down in to the crypts and bringing up ancient corpses until I asked him to stop.

Anyway, I made my group gather in the crumbling, mud-brick church, I forced them to sing Christmas carols for me until I was satisfied, and I let them go.

I wonder what this Christmas will bring?

*“Please make sure you go to the bank before we leave Luxor as we might not be able to go in Kharga” – witness spending four hours in various banks on 23 December, in Kharga Oasis – an ugly town of staggering parochialism - trying to cash a cheque, while Salah and Samir, our police escort, disappeared, never to be seen again, into a coffee shop and the rest of my group mooched around sulkily.
“Don’t stray too far from the camp, and try not to sleep in any vehicle tracks – ha ha!” – witness spending an hour next morning frantically searching the desert before finding her curled up in a landrover track some half mile distant.

** On our way back to Cairo, I awoke from a brief doze, to find an unearthly, terrified silence reigning over the bus. Looking around, I realised that we were hurtling along the highway at breakneck speed, driverless, and Salah was nowhere to be seen. I was convinced for a second that he had finally had enough, and hurled himself from the moving vehicle. Then I realised that he was driving with one arm, while conducting a long search under the passenger seat for a bag of pretzels.

***No problem