Living for Disco

Just this minute, I got a lovely email from VSO. It begins as follows:

“Dear Rachael,
Having only recently returned as a volunteer, it can be quite tough ensuring a semblance of a social life on a budget. Gigs go out of the window, dancing is kept to a sober minimum and meeting friends can only be done on a monthly basis. The incredible finale to our 50th Anniversary could hold the key to your partying-on-a-shoestring problems: phenomenal artists, amazing venue, fantastic guests, all for a budget friendly price.”

I am composing a reply:

Dear VSO,

Thank you, once again, for emailing me with this lovely special offer without bothering to find out anything about me first. I understand that you have MANY returned volunteers on your books, and that it must be difficult to communicate in a personalised fashion, but may I suggest that you refrain from making assumptions in your emails? Particularly as you took the trouble to address this to me personally. You know what they say about assumptions – they make and ASS out of U and ME. Ha ha. I always enjoyed that little joke.

I would like to point out the following: It is now almost a year since my stint as a volunteer ended – would you class that as recent? In that time, I have thankfully been able to secure gainful employment, and am not as restricted in my ‘semblance’ of a social life as you might imagine. I have been lucky enough to attend some live music events in the last few months, and have been privileged to enjoy listening to Hot Chip, Bjork, Laura Veirs and Joan as Policewoman, among others, at VERY reasonable prices, and with a fabulous view of the stage on each occasion.

With regards dancing, I do this on a weekly basis at the very least, as I am learning to jive in preparation for my forthcoming marriage. Occasionally – mercy! – I even have a glass of wine during the evening.

I am also slightly confused as to your crieteria for measuring the frequency of meeting friends. I would be interested to see your calculations. In any case, sometimes my friends come down to Bournemouth, where I live, to see me. Sometimes I go to see them. Although I don’t see them as much as I would like, admittedly, this is rather due to a shortage of weekends in the year than an inability to stump up £6 for a Saturday fun fare on the National Express bus service.

I thank you for your offer of solving my shoe-string party budget problems. However, I’m not sure that this offer is all that it seems. For a start, the £15 budget friendly tickets that you mention appear to be tucked away at least 3 miles from the stage at the Royal Albert Hall, which as we all know is a little on the large side. They also appear to be ‘restricted’ viewing seats. Last time I took a restricted view seat at the theatre, I was forced to ‘watch’ Kevin Spacey perform in the Ice Man Cometh from behind a 2 foot wide pillar. It was a less than satisfying experience. All your other tickets appear to begin around the £32 mark.

In addition, as you may be aware, the UK has residents that live outside the Greater London urban sprawl. Yes! I know – those crazy kids! It would take me some considerable time to travel from home, on a school night, to the Albert Hall, the extra expense of accommodation and food, as well as the transport costs, which, once you take into account the astronomical price of petrol in these times, as well as the cost of parking in our glorious capital, will in all likelihood push my budget evening up well over £100. All that, and I will have to rise at 5am in order to make my way through rush hour traffic and make it back to work on the morrow.

I realise that I’m probably being unfair to you, and that I should be thanking you for notifying me of this fabulous opportunity. However, your insistence on making sweeping assumptions about who I am persists in driving me up the wall. There are better ways of approaching people. Please, for your own sake, get a clue.

Many thanks,

Rachie

I’m not all that comfortable with the idea of a traditional hen do. I mean, I have been known to go out and get leathered on occasion, and sometimes – yes, it’s possible – I do make a tit of myself in public places. However, I’m not the kind of girl that likes to rampage around town wearing learner plates and deely boppers, drink lambrini until I’m higher on sugar than alcohol, get strange men to sign my breasts or find myself at the end of the night puking into my own knickers. I’m far too much of a snob for that.

Because of this, it didn’t occur to me that there would be an objection when I booked a narrow boat for the day for myself and 8 friends, with the view to having a grand day out on the river. We’ll probably be a bit worse for wear from the night before anyway, so it will be a lazy day with a few beers and a pub lunch – at least, that’s my plan.

I paid the deposit weeks ago, and when I phoned up to get further details we had a brief and friendly chat. Until…

“So, what’s the occasion anyway? Birthday? Corporate team building day?”

“No, actually”, I said. “It’s my hen do.”

Silence. Then strangled nervous laughter, which broke at the end.

“Ahhh, hahahahaha, you kind of slipped through the net there,” he said brokenly. “I really wish you hadn’t told me that. Oh, oh dear. Hmm. Errr…”

“We’re very refined”, I said, remembering the last time I had a few too many glasses of fine wine while involved in a water-based activity. I fell off a punt into the River Cam. Twice. “Honestly, we are. We’re all in our thirties.” This didn’t seem to reassure him. Maybe he’d seen too many episodes of Sex and the City.

“Er, I’m sure you are,” he said, clearly not believing it for a second. I could tell that in his head he pictured his precious boat wending its way down the river, steered by a group of shrieking middle-aged harpies waving giant penises and exhorting all the fishermen en route to get their clothes off. “It’s just that single sex parties…” He trailed off.

“Oh!”, I jumped in, grasping at the only straw I had left. “There will be a man there”.

“Oh god. Oh dear god, it’s a male stripper isn’t it?”

“NO! Jesus, no. Definitely no. It’s a friend. He’s going to be the sober and responsible one.” He didn’t believe me.

But seeing as I’d already paid the deposit, he let it go, this once. His parting shot was to tell me that the £50 deposit payable on the day was dependent on the boat coming back, in one piece, by 7pm, with all equipment on board, and they were to have had no more than two complaining phone calls from horrified canal folk as we wended our way down river.

Dammit, I thought, as I put the phone down. No accosting of canal folk. Who am I going to get to sign my breasts now?

I have lost weight!

I have this beautiful red dress that I bought for a steal on ebay (I love ebay), and when I got back from Australia, I put it on to go out to our weekly jive class. Yes, we jive, people. We will be jiving the night away come our wedding day. It’ll be like playing skittles on the dance floor.

Anyway, I put this dress on, and looked in the mirror. My reflection gently suggested that it might not be a good idea to wear it, as if I breathed, or moved or anything it might just, oh, EXPLODE at the seams, and render me naked before my peers at the Winton and Moordown Royal British Legion Club. And god knows, you don’t want that to happen while you’re executing a Parisian Basket.

So anyway, I put this dress on yesterday, and not only did it fit, it was slightly roomy. Result! So I wore it with pride, to work, and as soon as I got in the car to go home, the strap broke, and I had to drive home with one boob hanging out.

My consolation is that at least my fellow road users had a svelte and shapely boob to look at.

I have been very busy over the last few days, commuting to and from my new job. This commute is quite long – at the least 1.3 hours – and I’m finding it so challenging that all I can do when I get home is collapse in Gordon’s arms (after he has finished peering through the catflap in an amusing manner) and demand wine. You think I’m joking.

So you will understand that it took a great deal for me to stump up the energy to review Indiana Jones’ latest offering. Here are some of the things that I found annoying:

1. The cute gophers. Anyone who lets George Lucas near a film these days is asking for trouble. It’s a good thing he wasn’t involved in Schindler’s List, otherwise all the Jews would have been rescued by little furry chipmunks shouting ‘oy vey’ and looking alarmed when the Nazis goose-stepped past.

2. It’s nuclear. New-clee-ar. Not new-cew-lar. George W Bush says new-cew-lar. Don’t be a moron.

3. Just how many women who’ve been jilted at the altar would greet their ex-paramour with anything less than a winklepicker to the gonads? Just how quickly did she succumb?

4. Sword fighting on the back of jeeps. Yawn.

5. Cute monkeys (see cute gophers above) teaching Indy jnr to swing through the jungle like Tarzan. George Lucas should be shot (see above).

5. Everything else.

Awful. Just awful. Don’t waste your precious, non-commuting time.

In other news, thanks for the lovely comments to the last post, which I will answer, as each and every one deserves an answer.

I eventually want children, and my body is beginning to tell me that I’d better get a move on, as I’m getting on a bit, and I do want to be able to play with my kids without the aid of a zimmer frame*.

However, Gordon has said (with increasing firmness, the more time we spend with friends who have more than one child of toddler age) that we should probably check that we’d make good parents first, by getting a kitten and practising on it.

So, we have a kitten. We haven’t named it yet as no names really seem to stick, apart from Kitten. It’s been four days, and I’m wondering whether we would make good parents. For example, is it wise to let your six week old (as yet unnamed) child hurtle up and down the stairs, stick its head through the bannisters, fall backwards off the sofa onto the wooden floor, and play delightedly with a small pile of gravel in which it has just buried its own excrement? I even lost her the other day, only to find she’d got stuck in the cupboard under the sink while investigating our bleach collection.

I admit I’m trying to give her the care and sustenance she needs. She likes to try and suck on my eyeball, which I’m trying to dissuade her from doing, as it is a) uncomfortable and b) unhygenic. I mean, she’s usually just licked her bum clean. Conjunctivitis anyone?
I also let her sleep in our bed, which I understand can be comforting for young children. However, waking up at 5.30 am with a cat on your head isn’t the best way to ease yourself into your day. Particularly when she generally attacks anything that moves, which includes your bleary, blinking eyelid.

She is very, very cute, which is why people get kittens in the first place, I imagine. She’s also completely insane. She stalks us eveywhere we go. Our toes have puncture wounds that would be the envy of a bevy of lorikeets. Nothing is safe.

We bumped into the neighbours from whom we got her yesterday, and he asked us how it was going.

“Bonkers isn’t she?” he said, with a certain degree of schadenfreude. I thought all kittens were bonkers, but he assures us that of the litter of six, this one was particularly nuts. I expect to come home to find her swinging from the light fittings one day very soon, and like most mothers, I like to think that this is merely a reflection of her extraordinary brilliance.

On a weirdly serious note though, it struck me that cats live for 14 or 15 years. I hadn’t really thought about this before. She’s probably going to be our cat for a very long time. For the first time, I’ve actually had to consider the very real nature of our commitment to each other, which has been somewhat overshadowed by the excitement of moving in with Gordon and planning our wedding. It’s bizarre that it’s taken something as tiny as a kitten to bring this home.

Naturally it hasn’t changed anything – just clarified a few things to my satisfaction. However, it’s also made me consider our relationship through a further layer of understanding. It does make me wonder whether anyone really knows what they are getting into when they say ‘I do’, or when they get a kitten together.

Above all, spending time together with the kitten has made me realise that we’re really going to have to do the dusting a bit more often. If anyone sees the amount of fluff on Kitten’s whiskers, we’ll soon be getting a visit from the RSPCA, and I’m not ready to start the recrimination stage of our partnership just yet.

*Although they can do wonders with science these days, so I might just store my eggs and wait til I’m 60.