[December 29 2003]

Bah fucking humbug.

Well, thank God that's over for another year. Just New Year's Eve to get through and I'm done for the festive bloody season. I did my usual "buy all my presents on Christmas Eve because I'm in denial" stress session and spent far too much on everyone out of sheer guilt. God I hate Christmas. Swamped by the memories of childhood disasters past, I just want to bury my head under the duvet and stay there while everyone else pulls crackers and wears silly paper hats.

I had a nightmare last night. I don't remember much of it except I was back in the Brent Social Services offices in Stag Lane, Kingsbury, North London, where I worked in my year off between school and university. It was a place where the poor, the huddled and the child abusers came for relief, guidance or indifference, depending on who dealt with them.

Working there I met my first pre-op transsexual, my first child abuser and my first lobotomy patient. Strangely enough, the lobotomy patient was the most interesting. She was a woman who had suffered with post-natal depression (and maybe a couple of other things) in the 60's and to "treat" her, some enlightened soul had given her a frontal-lobe lobotomy. She had six sons and they turned her from depressed into a vegetable. Interestingly enough, her sons were all vegetables too - nature or lobotomy-nurtured, I wondered. They would troop in once in a while and gurgle at me, which I took as a sign they needed to see their social worker. The pre-op transsexual was fun too, as he/she could never decide which loo he/she wanted to use when he/she came into the office. It varied. Some of the social workers used to take bets on it.

The child abuser was just rather pathetic and small and not at all the demon I had expected him to be. His children had rickets, which was not something I'd ever encountered outside of television documentaries on Africa, before.

Anyway, in my dream, we were all back in the office and someone (an angry client?) was chasing us round there with a gun and blasting all the glass partitions and shooting up the desks. I found refuge in the staff room, with its smoke fug, low chairs and tea-stained mugs. But I knew sooner or later he would come for me.

I used to have two recurring anxiety dreams, neither of which I've had for a few years now. The first would involve me being out and about somewhere when suddenly I would begin to feel my teeth loosening. Then sharp little shards would start dropping out of my mouth - lots of them, and I'd realise all my teeth were falling out. The dream would always end up with me in a cab on the way to a hospital, holding my teeth in with my hands. And no, I don't want to know what that means.

The other one, which I had all through my twenties was even nastier. I would be at a party and I'd meet a nice boy. We would start snogging (or whatever) and I would be having a really nice time, when suddenly I would remember that it was my A Levels the next day. I had English Paper I in the morning, Latin Paper I in the afternoon and History Paper I the following morning. I would go into a terrible, heart-stopping panic which would increase when I suddenly realised that the exams actually started today. That's when I usually woke up screaming.

A Levels were the exams we did when we were 18 to get us into university. I was lazy at school but usually sailed through exams with minimal revision and maximum guilt and stress. My A Levels were no exception. I did a revision timetable about three weeks before and spent the next three weeks revising my revision timetable and watching Crown Court on telly with a plate of oven chips beside me. A couple of days before my A Levels were to begin I was frantic, in tears and hating myself. My mother was drunk and unsympathetic and my father was away at some conference on Norwegian oil business rotating pump accessories, or something.

It was too late and I was going to fuck up. I can feel the gut-churning fear now.

So I ate Pro-Plus and didn't sleep at all and passed the fuckers but the experience was awful, hence the recurring dream.

Years later, I was hanging out with a bunch of tree-hugging pagans and I mentioned the dream. They told me I had to resolve it or I would never get rid of it. Yeah, right, whatever. One of them did a little ceremony with me where we gave my dream up to the goddess. I humoured her as I thought it was rather sweet.

But the next time I had the dream it was following its usual lines of snogging followed by absolute terror (yes, yes, I get the symbolism), when I remembered that I'd already done my A Levels and my law degree and I didn't actually need these A Levels as I was only doing them for fun (fun?!). So I calmed down, but by then, in my dream I'd lost my libido, so didn't resume the snogging.

Typical. The Goddess gives with one hand and takes away with the other.

Posted by eurotrash at 10:50 am
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[December 23 2003]

Heathcliff. It's me. It's Cathy. I've come home.

God that was awful.

Like being suffocated with clingfilm in a Derek Jarman movie. I could see you all and I was shouting and everything but no words would come out. I was lost. Outcast. Friendless. I even had to go to Blogspot. It was the worst. I nearly ended up eating my own arm. I had nothing else to do.

My previously unshakable confidence in Upsaid is a little rattled now, but like the ex-boyfriend I was cyber-stalking when I found it, I still have a rosy glow of affection for the site.

In other news, we decided on Saturday night that the most redundant sexual act is a handjob. A narrow winner over that pointless gymnastic contortion known as 69. Surely everyone over the age of 21 knows that in order to orgasm while having one's genitals licked, one has to concentrate. Usually one has to concentrate on pretending someone else is doing the licking. Competently. There's a fantasy for you. Anyway, what you don't need is some steroid-enhanced frat boy swinging his way round and jamming his willy in your mouth while you're thinking of Prince (only taller and not mad) being there instead. Put it away dear. It's not big and it's not clever.

But handjobs? I mean, why? Why on earth do you chaps WANT us to rub your willies? Blowjobs I understand, but hand jobs? We're rubbish at them. And they bore us and it shows. And our arms get tired and we never seem to rub hard enough and we don't have willies so we haven't the faintest idea what works for you, pressure-wise. Very much like you are with our clitorises (clitori? clitora? clitorati?). Anyway. You're crap at handjobs and so are we so can we just agree to watch the masters at work and play to our strengths from now on?

DISCLAIMER: This is not based on any recent experience as I haven't had any. I'm all talk, me.

Posted by eurotrash at 8:11 am
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[December 19 2003]

A real Yule log.

England is cold and grey, so no surprise there.

To cheer myself up I made some parnsip, ginger and lemon soup today. With some frozen stock I made last time I was in England which has since lain neglected and unlamented in my sister's freezer. Last night I marinaded some chicken strips in lime, coriander, cumin and tumeric, stir-fried them and served them in toasted pittas with a houmous/greek yoghurt mix and a greek-ish salad. I forgot to buy feta cheese, but then no-one is perfect.

My sister and I have entirely separate hobbies. I like to cook, she likes to garden. I am renowned for my ability to kill houseplants and she routinely burns oven chips. Of course in New York, I rarely cook. For one thing it's no fun cooking just for yourself and for another thing I am beseiged by extremely competent and cheap restaurants who will deliver. That's one thing the Americans have got down pat. If you lot could just understand Indian food, I'd be in heaven.

So I'm cooking up a storm at the moment and wondering what to do for Christmas dinner. This is not as easy as it sounds. When you grow up with an alcoholic parent, Christmas is just another excuse for carnage. Whether it was mum passing out and snoring at midnight mass or hurling my sister's Christmas presents through the french doors and onto the lawn, it was never dull and usually awful. One of our rituals was waiting to see how far mum could make it through Christmas lunch and which course she would actually fall into when she passed out. In later years, she never made it past the turkey.

As a result, my sister and I have a deep abiding hatred of roast turkey. I think I might do roast beef with ginger and rosemary, vegetables, potates and yorkshire puddings. There is something deeply restful about making yorkshire puddings.

And of course, no Christmas would be complete without my Christmas Brick. This is our own little ritual as second generationers. Every year I attempt to bake a cake. But this is no ordinary cake. My darling niece is violently allergic to just about every fun thing going. It's a wonder she isn't in a bubble. No dairy, no eggs, no soya, no nuts. So try making a cake without dairy or eggs, why don't you? I do. Every year.

I start with a dairy-free cake mix. Then I use egg-substitute. Then I fuck it all up. Every fucking year. And what comes out of the oven is unquestionably, unarguably, indisputably, a brick. One year I dropped it and it cracked a floor tile in the kitchen. People have broken teeth and hearts trying to eat it. It is vile. A cake abomination. And every year my darling little niece has the smallest of nibbles, tells me it's lovely and goes and spits it out in the upstairs loo when she thinks I'm not looking. Bless her.

Posted by eurotrash at 9:14 am
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[December 17 2003]

REDRUM! REDRUM! REDRUM!

When I first flew to Manhattan on business I stayed in the New Yorker Hotel. It was the run-up to Easter weekend and absolutely everywhere else was full to bursting. There had to be a good reason to stay there - I'm not competely stupid.

In England, when we went to hotels for management meetings we always went to some chintz-laden overblown den of obsequiousness, complete with a golf course so that I would learn the lesson that management team bonding was not really meant for the non-golfing girls. Or girl, I should say, as I was always the only one.

As a result, I had no idea that you could stay in a hotel on a business trip and actually hear the prostitute next door being disembowelled with a chainsaw. Until I stayed at the New Yorker Hotel.

I was used to genteel plushly carpeted floors, mock tudor windows and staff who bowed humbly if you passed them in a corridor. In one palace of unctuous servility in the Surrey countryside, as I passed a chambermaid in the hall she flattened herself against the wall and whispered: "Sorry", as if apologising for her mere existence. At another hotel, they gave you a fluffy cat toy on your bed. The idea was that if you didn't want your bed turned down, swiss chocolates left on your pillow, and random poor people tortured for your pleasure outside your window, you would put the cat outside the door. "Put the cat out for the night". Geddit? And that way you would not be disturbed. Gloriously nauseating. Or nauseatingly glorious. Whichever you prefer.

Before this trip I hadn't been to New York since I was a kid, and I was a little nervous about the whole going abroad on business thing - something the New Yorker Hotel did little to alleviate. There were screams, shouts, drills, chainsaws, thumps and no chintz. It all looked very mustard coloured and Taxi Driver dingy and I kept expecting Travis Bickle to knock on my door with a room service tray and a God-given mission to do unspeakable things to me.

But the worst bit was nearly killing myself in the bathroom. You see, I'm used to having a bath that fulfills the functions expected of a bath. As opposed to an extended shower tray. Good God, America, if you don't like baths, don't fucking have them, but don't give us bath-loving Europeans some miserable fucking compromise by giving us precisely four-foot long and six-inch deep cat litter trays to bathe in. It's insulting. And I'm not even French.

Every time I squish down in my pathetic little excuse for a bath tub, with either my tits freezing and my legs underwater or vice versa (but never the two at the same time) I want to find whoever invented these abominations and really fuck with their life. It's not like you have to have a bath and fill it up. I know you lot hate baths, well fine, don't fucking have them. But why the hell do you have to go and spoil it for the rest of us with these midget-sized bird-baths? I could barely squeeze my niece in one of them and she's only seven.

So I was in the bathroom of my New Yorker Hotel spider hole, brushing my teeth. And due to the rather cramped layout of my bathroom back home, I generally used to perch on the side of the bath while doing that. Without thinking I turned my back to the bath and went to perch. Unfortunately, my arse came crashing down about a foot lower than my brain remembered was usual and I landed folded up in the bath as my head went SMACK! into the wall behind. The bang was so loud it even gave the chainsaw masscre man next door pause for thought.

I was terrified I'd given myself a concussion and would walk in to meet my new boss the next day and vomit all over him or something. I didn't, luckily, and I'm reasonably sure there wasn't any blood left in my hair by the following morning.

Anyway. I'm flying back home to the UK today, so you won't be hearing from me until Thursday at the earliest. While there, I will be luxuriating in a full-sized bath. I may well even sleep in it, if I get drunk enough. I hope you all amuse yourselves while I'm gone - if you'd like to tell each other some more poo stories, here's some inspiration kindly submitted by 3leggeddog. Predictably, I have a good one about doing the WALK OF SHAME from a SAFE HAVEN, but that will have to wait until I'm off the plane. Do me proud, darlings.

Posted by eurotrash at 1:20 am
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[December 15 2003]

Employees MUST wash hands.

Fingering. What the hell was that all about?

When I was a teenager, everything was all about bases. Which base did you let your boyfriend get to? And of course, "fingering" had its own dedicated base. Quite fitting for something we spent so long anticipating, talking about and engaging in.

Fingering was more than a sexual act. It was a struggle between your conscience and your emerging sexuality. It was a mark of maturity, a rite of passage, and a huge fucking bore, frankly.

The bases went roughly like this, as I recall.

BASE ONE
Snogging with tongues. Entirely permissable.

BASE TWO
He "cops a feel" of your breasts. Acceptable.

BASE THREE
He "fingers" you. Bordering on slutty, depending on the length of the relationship. If you let a boy do it the first night you snogged him, then you were heading for a life of prostitution and drugs.

BASE FOUR
Two variations on this. One had it being you'd given him a blow job. Another that it was intercourse. No-one I knew at school ever got to this base, needless to say.

Fingering was dreadfully dull though, because they hadn't invented the clitoris when I was young. Even I didn't know I had one. So you'd be snogging your boyfriend in a phone box at Golders Green bus station and he'd slip his hands down your jeans and whammo. The fingering would commence.

And it would consist of your boyfriend sticking a few fingers up your undercarriage and jiggling them around enthusiastically. And you'd sort of have this out of body experience, looking down on yourself and thinking:

"I do hope he's enjoying himself down there. God this is boring. Why is he making that grunty wheezy noise? Does this make me a slut? No, I've been going out with him for three weeks now, I think you're allowed to finger after three weeks. Are you? Yes, I'm sure three weeks doesn't make me a slut. Is he ever going to finish? Ouch! Easy tiger, no need to rip me a new one. Wow it's cool having a boyfriend who will finger me. Just wait till I tell everyone at school on Monday. I wish he was a little less spotty though, but at least he doesn't have braces on his teeth, like C's ugly little weirdo boyfriend. Jesus, I wish he'd hurry up and finish. I wonder if this will ever be fun?"

Of course, it never was fun. I spent my teenage spent years zealously guarding my virginity, but guiltily allowing sweaty heavy-breathing little boyfriends to jab their fingers where the nuns would not have approved. I don't recall that fingering was something that we were supposed to enjoy anyway. It was a rather one-sided affair that you permitted to be done to yourself for fear of your boyfriend chucking you and labelling you "frigid", which was about the worst thing you could be called in Hampstead.

Apart from "poor", of course.

Posted by eurotrash at 9:37 pm
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It's not me. It's you.

I was talking with a friend last week about how he broke up with his girlfriend. As it happens it's quite a good story, but lord I had to almost beat him senseless to get it out of him. You can tell he's a boy.

The whole thing about dishing up the details of your break-up is so that you and your friends can obssess over every little moment you spent together, searching for clues that point to the fact that he was a hopeless loser that you now realise you should never have been seeing in the first place. He was actually crap in bed and you faked a few of them. Well, most of them, now you come to think about it. He dressed like a Lutheran minister. He held his knife and fork like a five-year-old. And so on and so on until you begin to feel relatively relieved the fucker dumped you.

The worst boyfriend I ever had, looking back on all of the candidates over the years, was Charles. He was the one who made me sleep on a camp bed for two-and-a-half years.

Charles. Oh Charles. What a dreaful little chap you were. You were the boyfriend all my friends hated. And my family. Come to think of it, you could alienate total strangers, from a distance of up to five miles. Even today, you are a byword for the kind of boyfriend I should strangle myself rather than ever go out with again. To that extent, you achieved some immortality. Congratulations, wanker.

Here are some reasons everyone should hate Charles too.

1. He was totally, horribly, almost unbelievably inept in bed.
   
2. After we had sex, he made me get out of his bed, unfold the camp bed he kept underneath and sleep on that, as he claimed sharing a bed made him go numb.
   
3. He was a drummer and everyone knows they're obsessive bores, second only to rowers as the worst boyfriend material in the world. My next boyfriend was a rower, unfortunately. I am older and wiser now, thank God.
   
4. He was an unemployed art school drop-out but his parents still didn't think that I was good enough for their precious baby even though I fart postgraduate degrees.
   
5. His ghastly mother once gave me a seasonally-themed matching set of socks and handkerchief for Christmas.
   
6. He thought he could speak French, but he couldn't and it was horribly embarrassing listening to him try.
   
7. Even my father hated him, and he never normally even noticed our boyfriends.
   
8. He thought he was an intellectual, but he could clear rooms when he pontificated on the burning questions of the day. People threw themselves out of windows to escape him.
   
9. He dumped me the week before Christmas. Then came back and stalked me for three years in a very needy way.
   
10. He wore leggings.

Posted by eurotrash at 12:08 pm
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[December 11 2003]

Bloody hell.

There was this chap I used to work with many years ago, who used to talk the most imcomprehensible gibberish with tremendous enthusiasm. We'd be sitting in meetings slumped in our chairs while he raved about paradigms and silos and accelerated growth curve tendencies. He was an irritatingly cheerful son of a bitch too, always ready with a hearty smile and a playful slap on the back. God I hated him.

But I hated him the most when I was menstruating because this guy could string a five-minute chat into a four-hour meeting with just the one chilling phrase: "I think we need to knock a few heads together on this one, eh?". And then he'd passively-agressively shoo you into a meeting room while he happily rounded up some other victims so he could play "Let's chair a meeting!". He no more knew how to chair a meeting than I know how to play the nose flute.

He'd talk rubbish, we'd try to explain things to him and then he'd sum up. And get it wrong. So he'd talk some more rubbish and we'd try and explain things to him and then he'd sum up. And get it wrong. Again. So he'd talk some more rubbish....... you get the picture. And woe betide anyone suggesting a "comfort break". He'd get a wee bit shirty, like you'd just spat on his baby, and tell you that we'd be finished in a few minutes so we'd best just press on ahead. Lying fucker.

These meetings would last for hours and hours and hours. Sometimes he'd have to order lunch in. Then dinner. I heard he once made it to breakfast, but I think that may be an urban myth. Now sometimes meetings are the best place to be if you don't actually want to do any work. Hell, I've come across some people who build a whole career on meetings. They'll meet with anyone - the cleaners, your mother, the hatstand in the corner. All they need is a whiteboard and a designated minute-taker and they're off.

But here's the deal. All you meeting-whores out there bear one thing in mind. Take a look round at your victims. Are any of them women? Under the age of 50? Likely to have small cylindrical compacted cotton-wool bullets jammed up their vaginas and a padded absorbent brick stuck in their knickers? Hello?

Yes. Welcome to the wonderful world of MENSTRUATION. While you're there with your enormous cock, enlightening the planet on the need to break down silos and reinvent the paradigm, we're sitting there wondering how much longer that tampon we put in five hours ago, just before you dragged us into this unneccessary worship of your ego, is going to hold against the monthly red hordes. And surrepticiously checking that you're not leaking in the middle of a business meeting is not easy, I can tell you. On top of that we've probably got period pain, menstrual depression and we fucking hate you at the best of times.

Combine that with the stress of leaking blood all over one's thrillingly expensive Agnes B beige Mistress of the Universe skirt, and you're cruising for a bruising, buddy. It might be verbal but it's still going to hurt.

Posted by eurotrash at 10:34 pm
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[December 10 2003]

Keys to the heart I don't have.

Boys, boys, boys. Take a lesson from a girl who's been some places, done some things and woken up not knowing where she was.

This concerns lines. Chat-up lines, pick-up lines, call them what you want. Just don't ever use them. Ever. Really.

Do you want to know something? Heaven is not missing an angel because I'm here on earth. And if I was really an angel do you think I'd be in in a low-class den on the LES? No, I'd be out buying Manolos and champagne and I'd be shagging John Cusack, not you. And I'd be smoking in bars too, because Bloomberg wouldn't be able to touch me.

Nor is the sky missing a star, because I have fallen from on high. If I really was a star fallen from heaven I would be a jumbled mass of crumbly stuff of interest only to astronomers and geologists. While I do attract more than my fair share of science geeks, I like to think my appeal is just a little more widespread.

And no, I don't have a map, so if you're "getting lost " in my eyes, I don't really care. You should have taken precautions before you left the house.

If you really are a thief, out to steal my heart, then you'd better have a good lawyer. And just for the record, I don't have a heart.

Mind you, perhaps even those lines are preferable to the man who introduced himself to me by saying: "You've got great tits". Well, thank you and goodnight.

I think a simple hello will suffice, after which you can introduce the topics of your modelling career, your PhD in neurology, your multi-million dollar trust fund and your house in the South of France. Oh and your great personality of course. That's really important too. Really.

Failing that, you can try what the chap in the bar in Brooklyn did last night. I was sitting at the bar nursing the third of what became way too many vodkas, when the barman walked up to me, grinned rather awkwardly and shoved a glass of clear liquid in my direction. He said: "The gentleman at the end of the bar would like you to have this glass of water on the rocks, with his compliments". I looked over and this chap raised his glass to me. My first thought was that he was implying I was a lush. But then he smiled and waved and I realised this was a "line".

And a jolly good one it was too, I have to admit. If only he hadn't looked like a diseased badger, great things might have happened.

Posted by eurotrash at 5:57 pm
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[December 09 2003]

Man in need of a smack.

I don't usually mind if my upstairs neighbour wants to play a bit of music in the evenings. Even if his speakers are on the floor and even if my furniture does begin to vibrate. I don't even mind that he plays the same fucking song over and over and over again. I don't know what it is, but it's complete shite and contains lots of high-pitched "woo-woo-woos". Think adult-orientated rock meets dying cat.

What I do mind, though, very much indeed is when that fucker starts SINGING ALONG to his tasteless puke-inducing middle of the road rock. And stomping. Out of time to the music.

I can picture him now as I write this. Prancing around in his Freddie Mercury leotard, his hands gripping his hairbrush microphone, yowling his little soul out to "I Wanna Know What Love IS......" rediscovering the days of his youth when fame seemed a possibility and accountancy as a career was something to be sneered at.

But listen here "Eric" (for that is his name). There's a reason why you aren't famous. It's because you are NO FUCKING GOOD. Comprende?

You can't fucking sing a note. You sound like the death rattle of a corpse. Only worse. And deader and maybe decomposing. You stink. You suck. You make me want to throw rocks at you. You have a silly little beard that doesn't work. You are small and round and balding. This may work for Elton John but it doesn't do anything for you, duckie.

Now I don't care that you can't sing. Most people can't. Take it out to a log cabin and warble your tone-deaf little heart out honey. Take some bongos and have a fucking party, why don't you.

But when you are in your one-bedroom apartment in Hoboken, directly over mine, please oblige me by putting a fucking sock in it before I snap completely under the pressure of repeated listening to your own *special* interpretation of all your Michael Bolton albums and slit your fucking throat.

Posted by eurotrash at 7:37 pm
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[December 08 2003]

I Am The Anti-Blog.

It has come to my attention that I have not been nominated for the Weblog Awards 2003. It has been my honour not to have been nominated for the following categories:

* Best Blog
* Funniest Blog
* Sexiest Blogger Alive
* Most incredible blogger that like, totally everyone totally loves, like those nice girls at school who are just so nice and they look great and have nice glossy hair
* Most Foulmouthed Blogger (a shock upset there)
* Least Employed Blogger
* Blogger most likely to have fallen in love with another blogger and told everyone about it
* Blogger most likely to have had bad sex (in the past five years - that's me out then, sadly) and told everyone about it
* Blogger with the most creative Google search hits (another upset)
* Drunkest blogger (Christ, is anyone paying attention?)
* Blogger who's taken the most KGB pills (Maccers and Manhattan Transfer edged me out there, the fuckers)

I'd like to thank everyone who made this possible.

When I run my alternative weblog awards I shall create some categories designed purely to enhance my greatness, and more importantly, my chances of winning.

* Most creative use of poo on a blog (ME!)
* Best culinary blog involving use of semen (ME!)
* Best blog for dietary/oral sex advice for vegans (ME!)
* Drunkest, sweariest, most midget-attracting blogger (ME!)
* Most creative use of vodka. Day or night (ME!)
* Puking blog of the year (ME!)
* Lifetime award for unemployed blogger most likely to physically fuse with her pyjamas (ME!)
* Blogger most likely to be considered Maccers' "Ugly Friend", by love-stricken New York waiters (ME!)
* "Ugly Friend" blogger most like to end up snogging love-stricken waiters' own "Ugly Friends" after sipping the dregs of the champagne that the waiters bought Maccers' but that she can't be arsed to finish because it's non-vintage darling and she doesn't *do* non-vintage and anyway she's way out of their league so what's a bottle or two of champagne thrown to the underclass like me anyway? (ME!)
* Blogger most likely to end up posting entries from Guantanamo Bay, dressed in an orange boiler suit (ME!)

You see, in my universe it's all about ME! Vote early. Vote often. Nominate yourself in whatever category you can come up with, but don't expect to beat me. I'm corrupt. At some point before I get deported I'll hold an awards ceremony in the Bulgarian Bar, crown myself queen of the blogosphere and order a round of vodka shots for all you losers. I can be gracious in victory.

Posted by eurotrash at 6:08 pm
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Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

If you ever go to a Miami hotel, take your own bottle opener. That's my advice.

That way you won't end up with the man in the next door hotel room calling reception because he thinks two drunk English girls are trying to break into his boudoir and do unspeakable things to him. He should be so fucking lucky, frankly. Nic and I were only trying to use our side of the doorknob to get the caps off two bottles of Heineken. Some people are so uptight. We'd already broken the fridge and two of my cigarette lighters trying to get some leverage on the damn bottle tops so this was a last resort.

I thought of doing a Fridgemagnet special and trying to bite the caps off, but then I remembered he bitterly regrets breaking his tooth doing that, so I refrained. In the end we managed to get the top on one slightly loosened and after about half an hour of the bottle dribbling we had a quarter of a glass of beer each. Those two hours had been two hours well spent. Note to hotel: next time just send a fucking bottle opener up when we ask you to please. It saves on the breakages.

I won't even go into the Planes, Trains and Automobiles-esque hell of trying to get to Miami on Friday in the middle of the blizzard. Suffice to say:

This is Maccers and Elizabeth in Queens (yes, Queens!) about four days into the ordeal:



This is the pair of them sufficiently mellowed by Sunday.



And this is Nic exploring her inner chair after a quarter of a glass of Heineken.



The whole weekend was made even more bizarre by the fact that you couldn't walk ten feet without bumping into someone from New York as it appears half of Manhattan was down there for some D-list celeb wedding of some bloke who writes something about the Hamptons and who had seven engagement parties all sponsored by Oprah and Nestle Foods or somesuch. We were gleefully anticipating most of his wedding party being trapped in New York all weekend as some kind of karmic payback for his awfulness, but I hear Shannon Doherty and P Diddy made it, so God doesn't apparently exist.

And it seems I'm always doing the wrong thing. We went to the Delano Hotel bar, which looked like the bastard child of Midtown and the Meatpacking district and was full of small men with ponytails who would have wanted to be Don Johnson a few years ago. And I met a big fat jolly Italian wine importer called Rudolfo who wanted to pimp me out to either of his idiots sons, Sergio or the other one whose name escaped me nanoseconds after he told me what it was. Sergio was large and doltish and drooling and the other one was small and an investment banker. I don't know which was worse. But I'd had a few vodkas and wanted to practise my Italian ("Go to the Devil!" "Fuck off!" "Screw your mother!" - how they laughed) so I was being what I considered friendly.

It wasn't till I got back to a thorough telling off from the girls that I found out they'd all just been talking to my magnifico breasts, which perhaps explained why they didn't flinch when I told them to screw their mothers.

Posted by eurotrash at 1:46 am
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[December 05 2003]

Forgive them father, they know not what they do.

As can be imagined with the child of a raging alcoholic depressive and a semi-detached absentee depressive, I grew up rather pissed off.

I lived my childhood and teens constantly terrified that someone would find out that my mother was barking mad and an alkie to boot. I believed that it would make me an outcast at my overachieving posh schools. Maybe it would have, maybe not, I'll never know. But I predictably overcompensated for my fear and torment by developing a hard-as-nails shell. Bullets, missiles and bombs bounced off me.

By the time I got to university I avoided home as much as possible and once I started my career in regional journalism I avoided home even more. I hated my mother and was very hard on my sister for still being on decent terms with her, even though she was still subject on a daily basis to my mother's drunken furies. The fact that my sister is one of the most decent, compassionate people on this earth didn't occur to me until years later when my mother was dying. Lord, I was a self-righteous fucker.

Until then I honestly believed that I would never forgive my mother. I spent years praying for her to die (Catholicism is *so flexible*), and then years imagining not going to her funeral. I was a drama-queen too, you may have guessed.

All that changed when she was pretty much dying and thanks to my sister I spoke to a very wise woman who helped me see my mother as a human being rather than a physical manifestation of supernatural evil. It was really something of a relief to get rid of all that anger and hatred. Like dropping an entire hod of bricks that you've been carrying with you over your shoulder everywhere since you were born.

But there's one thing I just can't forgive my parents for. Even after all these years. And that is the affair of the slashed exercise bicycle. I still burn with indignation nearly 30 years later.

You see, I was always doing *bad* things. It was hard not to in our household, as simple things like watching Hart to Hart on TV, reading a tabloid newspaper or masturbating were wholly verboten and would result in rants, punishment and years of being held up to ridicule at dinner parties and family gatherings.

I'd lie when I got caught, of course, it was safest to, as if you actually admitted to any crime the punishment and public shaming were even worse than if you denied it. So for all the things I got caught and punished for, well, that's just the price you pay when your parents are odd. Like getting slapped by the nuns, it's just an occupational hazard.

But the one time I got slammed for something I didn't do really fucking pisses me off, to this day. Probably because neither of my parents have ever apologised for it. At least my mother did eventually say sorry for slapping me round the face when I told her Pope John Paul II had been shot. I'd run out to meet her as she unloaded the car with groceries to share the news. I was going through a pious phase and was eager to share the Holy Father's near death ordeal with her. It's the only time she ever hit me. She whacked me and screamed: "Don't you EVER joke about something like that again!". It took her roughly 25 years to say sorry, but better late than never.

The exercise bike had originally been my grandfather's. When he died it was shipped over from Canada with the other stuff my father had inherited. No-one used it, it just sat in the attic, largely invisible to everyone. Until the day of the mysterious slashing. It was a Saturday and my sister and I were looking forward to going to the birthday party of one of the girls who lived on our street. Then my father came down to the kitchen and announced that the seat of the exercise bike had been slashed and he wanted to know who had done it.

I hadn't, that's for sure. I was too busy getting caught with porn mags to sweat the small stuff. And my sister was frankly incapable of sin, as everyone knew. My mother used to refer to her as "the angel who cannot tell a lie", which was pretty much accurate. To this day she's a crap liar, so she never really even attempts it. And she certainly wasn't the slasher type. But some bug crawled into both my parents' arses over this one. I guess it was because in our strange world, an exercise bike counted as a family heirloom. Jesus. You couldn't make this stuff up.

We denied having anything to do with it, but to no avail. They just wouldn't believe us. I was almost delirious with indignation, as this was one of the few times I WAS ACTUALLY FUCKING INNOCENT, GODDAMIT.

The bastards banned us from going to the birthday party until someone confessed. Well screw you and your fascist tactics, daddio. So we spent the afternoon in isolation in our bedroom, dreaming of pass the parcel and Punch and Judy and paedophile alcoholic magicians pulling rabbits out of hats.

We felt noble, like seven-year-old Che Guevaras. But we still didn't get cake, balloons or our birthday party going home presents and that really hurt.

However, one of the joys of growing up is know that it won't hurt nearly as much as if my flight to Miami tonight gets cancelled because of all this bastard snow. You want pissed off? You'll see pissed off. Just be at LaGuardia airport round about 5pm and watch me cry into a vodka and tonic. Admission price: FREE.

Posted by eurotrash at 11:32 am
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