Syrup of figs!

When Mother Nature gave out hair she dealt me a raw deal. All my life I have struggled with baby-fine, flossy stuff that grows incredibly slowly, has a slight and annoying kink and just won't do as it's told. As a child, while my sister had thick, ropey plaits mine just made two pathetic, thin sticks. Ribbons wouldn't stay in my hair as it was so silky and fine that they just slipped out.

The only thing in favour was that until I was in my early twenties my hair was a gorgeous pale blonde (I have to buy if from Toni and Guy now although my natural hair is still pretty light). Indeed my piano teacher dubbed me The Girl with the Flaxen Hair. Even my Dad, not known for dishing out compliments, said my hair was beautiful - until I went out!

I've always longed for long, rich swishy hair which does what it's told and isn't like a small baby's cast offs. As a little girl I used to draw pictures of long-haired princesses whose tresses reached past their knees, while my own hair would barely grow past my shoulders. By the time I was nineteen I'd had enough and had it all chopped off into a funky crop which suddenly made me realise I had cheekbones!

The desire for amazing hair has never dimmed however, so I was quite excited to buy a long black wig to wear to a fancy dress party where I am hoping to look like Vamipira from 'Ed Wood'. With visions of me looking like Winona Ryder or Catherine Zeta Jones, I put on the wig and realised I looked more like a deranged transvestite.Deciding the fringe might be the problem, Iasked Flora to cut it which she interpreted as 'cut it off' rather than 'trim it', leaving my wig with a stumpy fringe that stuck out. According to my mother this modification made me look less like a deranged transvestite and more like Sitting Bull.

A little wig gardening followed and it now look almost reasonable. Well, at least it looks right for the costume but does it suit me? Sadly not a bit. I took if off and realised that Mother Nature gave me my fine, fair hair for a reason - like it or not!

Three little words

I love you. Those three little words that mean so much. One always feel that such iconic words should be said with just a little effort on the part of he/she who proclaims them, which is why I felt a certain sadness on discovering that the careless lover can simply pick a template on his/her mobile phone to say 'I love you'. How galling to discover the one you love and/or are stalking pressed a button, probably with one hand while stirring his/her beans (which is not a euphemism unless you want it to be, in which case invent your own).

Worse still there is another template for 'I love you too'. How low can you go? My charitable side reminds me that these templates might aid the ardent but dyslexic lover but personally I'd rather have a misspelled but deeply felt message than one supplied by Mr Nokia.

Where can it go from here: 'Sorry to hear you're dead', 'Pass the salt' 'How about it?' Soon nobody will need to speak, we'll just blue-tooth our platitudes to one another.



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Feeling the benefit

I was wondering today when it was we started to tell people not to wear their coats indoors as they won't feel 'the benefit' when outside. Is that true? Are you more likely to succumb to pneumonia because you wore your coat inside?

My grandmother believed any number of things would give you pneumonia including going outside with wet hair and not wearing an adequate vest . I suppose in the days of antibiotics we are more cavalier about these things, however I can report that I have ventured outdoors with wet hair and no harm came to me although I had a slightly cold head.

But the old coat chestnut? Is it a testable theory I idly wondered. You would need two groups of people - those that normally feel the cold and those that don't. I belong to the first group and know I would moan about being cold in any situation so it's not really scientific. Then you'd have to have a control group of people who don't care one way or the other. Then there's the coat. Does it only apply to thick or thin coats? Astrakhan or wool? Fleece or quilted? It would not be a straighforward study, that's for sure.

Oh and the meaning of the word 'benefit': what benefits one person might not another. As a permanently cold person, I'm all for wandering about in a duvet with a zip up the front (in fact my winter anorak is essentially a duvet with a zip up the front with the mildest nod to style) but for some a skimpy cardigan affords benefit.

Sod the Hadron collider, this is an experiment that needs doing - now.

A gottle of geer!

S had bought herself a vent doll? Vent doll, apparently, is what those in the know call a ventriloquist's dummy. He's the real deal too with a square mouth, apple cheeks and a maniacally disturbing expression. Let's just say you wouldn't want to wake up in the night with him looking down at you!

This acquisition awakened in me a desire to learn the gentle art of ventriloquism. I've been looking at a book on magic which, three pages in, hits me with the revelation that the chief skill of ventriloquism is to avoid moving ones 'countenance'. Well glow me gown!

Still I am convinced that I could learn to do it, up to a point. I rather like the Shari Lewis and Lambchop style which involves gritting your teeth and speaking through them with a rictus grin on your face. The magic book says you do this to look as though you are enjoying/responding to what your puppet is saying.

The next step is speaking and this involves replacing some letters with others that sound vaguely like them, which is harder that it sound and more stupid. The book recommends copying the speech of 'uneducated people' or children as this will render your garbled speech more natural. Who doesn't know a child who asks for a 'gottle of geer' after all?

So to summarise, it really couldn't be easier; speak like someone very thick, grin a lot and keep your countenance still.

D-File!

I am considering offering myself to the Guiding Association as a 'rudeness consultant'. Flora recently joined and was given a very trendy little booklet called The G-File. The name immediately made me flinch slightly, with it's unfortunate amalgam of elements of G-Spot and, er, paedophile.

I imagine people with cleaner minds will now be saying 'I didn't see that at all. It just made me think of 'gee whizz' and nail-file'. Ah dear innocents, you are losing out on a whole world of smuttiness. I recently stopped the car to take a photo of a van belonging to a company called Tracklube who dealt in 'flange lubrication'. Oh how I chortled to myself - it really made my day.

Returning to the G-File, it's clear that the Guiding Association failed to take advice from people with fertile imaginations such as mine. I would have warned them, advising them to choose something slightly less dubious sounding such as The Guide Guide for instance. I like that, it says what it is, the repetition of the word Guide has that ironic, noughties feel about it and most importantly it plays with notions of meaning in a satisfyingly post-structuralist way; it says what it does on the tin but the tin is just a linguistic construct anyway and has no essential tin-ness about it. So there is no meaning which means there is no need to come to Guides and get badges because language is slippery and therefore you haven't got a badge anyway but something that isn't a dog or a kettle..... Fantastic!

The lady's not for turning....

....doing three point turns, parking or reversing. Due to a temporary malfunction on my modest little Su uki WagonR, I am driving my Dad's humongous, eff-off people carrier. I feel like I'm driving a tank in one of those old Soviet military displays.

How do people drive big cars? And how do people drive lorries and the like? Only today I saw a tanker driver do the most precarious maneouvre in a tight space, terrifyingly close to some parked cars. I watched from the window, with a person who owned one of the aforesaid parked cars, my heart in my mouth as the driver negotiated the limited space with the articulated vehicle. How can he do this yet I can't even reverse out of a parking space in my Dad's car without asking someone, anyone, to see me out?

A lot of it's about spatial awareness - something I don't have much of to be honest. The rest I suspect is to do with believing you won't hit anything. I can be miles away from an obstacle and still convince myself I'm going to hit it - which somehow makes my chances of hitting it greater (don't ask me how this works but it's true).

My little Su uki may be mocked (yes, you know who you are cruel mockers) but at least I've got a cat in hells chance of parking it and getting it round a multi-storey car park without scraping it against any walls. Come back Suki, all is forgiven!

Pig headed

Yesterday I was looking through the Observer food magazine when I came across, oh horror, a picture of a pigs head. There it was with its bristles bristling and its piggy nose still slightly moist. Apparently this should have filled me with joyous apprehension for the approaching festive season. Actually, it just made me yearn for a nut roast and nut roasts are pretty awful too.

My repugnance earned me an exasperated reaction from J, the arch carnivore extraordinaire (I swear that if he was desperately hungry that man wouldn't balk at biting a lump out of a passing hedgehog or slow moving rabbit), who told me that my reaction was the result of conditioning and being removed from the process of food production.

He does have a point. My contact with food is mostly via Sainsbury's where meat is packaged and sanitised, with no need to think about where it came from and indeed what happens to the rest of the animal. I can totally see that it makes sense to use the whole animal. To slaughter a creature just to use only a part of it doesn't make sense on any level. Yes, I can appreciate this even if I'm not willing to suck on a pig's trotter myself.

Debates like this always makes me think of the scene in 'Jude the Obscure' where Arabella, Jude's wife, gets him to slaughter the pig. Jude is so 'sensitive' to the pigs plight that he ends up putting it through more distress, spoiling the meat and kicking over the bucket of blood that Arabella was going to put to use. Arabella, who is a viscerally practical woman behind her pert exterior , is furious and reading the book you can't help feeling for Arabella being married to Jude and having to cope with his finer feelings when as she says 'Poor folks must live'.

J's argument is that in the event of a nuclear holocaust he'll be a survivor as he's happy to eat all sorts of animals (not to mention his willingness to embrace Mother Nature as his personal en-suite). There won't be Linda McCartney veggie sausages come Armageddon according to Mr G. I do see that his Bear Grylls type propensities will serve him well should things go badly and indeed I'd quite like to have his company in this situation as I think he'd know what to do (although whether he would take me along with him whinging all the way is another thing).However I do have one major reservation. How do I know that when he's finished dining on all the local wildlife he won't turn to look at me in the firelight and see, not a woman, but a potential juicy snack? Every bit of me!