LOL archives

Just a couple more today and then I absolutely promise to stop this cheap excuse for posting.

1. Neglect - ur doin it rite.

There are hundreds of amusing pictures of me like this, discarded in fields, up cliffs, in trees, buried up to my chin in heather, abandoned to my fate in a field full of sheep. You want your children to like brisk hikes, views, sensible footwear? Do not do this to them. That is all. Also, I blame you, Bearded One, for my overdeveloped thighs from walking up all those fucking hills.


2.I iz in the cuntry dressin liek the kween mum.



I LOVED this dress - Marks and Spencer's finest, with a frankly ill-advised drop waist and sash - it came in nuclear pink too and several of us had it, causing no end of tension at birthday parties and end of term discos (Dexys Midnight Runners and Shaddapa your face). It was all silky (nylon) and look, I so sophisticated I am wearing a scarf AND 15 denier black tights - the sign of über elegance for me. Truly, I am the height of North Yorkshire pre-teen chic. However I am also in the country, poor poor me. This - pre-glasses - is probably the stage where I still enjoyed it and at which I wrote the terrible scrapbook (made for FUN and emphatically not for school) Prog Rock Step Dad also brought along. It includes the following priceless lines in which I sound like a sensibly-shod custodian of a National Trust property in my mid 50s:



"It is very interesting, farmers in Coverdale do not enjoy walking, they walk merely as a means of conyevance. I enjoy walking in the dale a good deal, the views are absolutely stunning".



"Briefly, Sonny is a pony I ride, he is a 12.2 hh strawberry roan with a blase and a white sock on his near hind leg. He can be an unpleasant monster, always rolling in the river and eating the wrong things. I have seen him eat a button, a tissue and a Penguin wrapper! He lives with his fellow equine, 14.2hh Seaspray. I have fallen off him 16 times but he is quite nice really."



"The village of Middleham is of great historical interest, containing the ruins of Richard III's castle. The river Cover is fed by a good deal of small streams which give the landscape its slightly rippled look"



Ha! For fun, people, for FUN. There's a reason I look like I am waiting for a small sherry in this picture, and that is that I am suffering rural seclusion-induced premature middle age.



Moving on.

3.Smiel? Noewayz. Not fur eyt years at leest.

This outfit bears the hallmarks of a trip to Warehouse in Leeds, which was the ultimate, ultimate day out for me. A trip to Leeds, the great metropolis - the heady promise of a haircut at Vidal Sassoon, and a trip round the stylish hot spots of the Westdale shopping centre. I remember getting a t-shirt with 'Warehouse' written on it in neat black capitals and feeling I could actually die happy now. Well, happy but unsmiling, obviously I suppose. The rest is probably Miss Selfridge. Do you remember the joy of going to Miss Selfridge on a Saturday? How it just contained absolutely everything that was good about the world? If I had died at this age, I would have wanted my ashes spread in Miss Selfridge. I can remember exactly how that Miss Selfridge belt felt (very light - plastic) and how I felt it just finished the outfit to perfection.

I suspect I am actually bursting with happiness in this picture, but nothing on earth could have induced me to show it. Lashes caught sight of this picture and said I looked like a "maîtresse d'ecole"

4. Angzt? I haz it.

I think I might actually be wearing the iconic Warehouse t-shirt here, as well as the all important Burlington socks, not that they are helping any.

This is Quaker school ski trip. I have never known misery quite like it, except perhaps the geography field trip when I started having bizarre out of body experiences and my mum thought I should see a psychiatrist (geography! It's dangerous kids. Just don't do it. If someone offers you a fluvial glaciation pattern JUST SAY NO). My best friend Alex and I are sharing a bedroom with the cool girls and everything we have - our C&A sensible ski trousers and giant elasticated ski masks, sensible white briefs and wellington boots - is showing us for the tragic social failures we are. The cool girls have all in one white or powder blue ski suits, hot pink pants with those stringy thong sides and moonboots. All we have to offer is our gigantic foreheads. The wildest of the cool girls stays out all night with a dodgy old ski instructor, to our awe. Here I am probably reading Anna Karenina and wondering if we will have to have whitebait for dinner again. I voluntarily refused to join the better skiers group, because I was terrified of ending up with the cool girls and preferred to stay with my fellow 'remedial sports' travellers. This being Quaker school, there were plenty of us.

5. My pane let me show u it.


Paging Sylvia Plath? We have a bad poetry emergency! Such intensity in that giant forehead.. I am probably trying to smile, but I just can't. I am too damn miserable. You'd be miserable too with those glasses. WHAT IS WITH THE GLASSES, TEEN ME?? If my mother was alive I would be wanting to know exactly what was going through her head when she allowed me to choose these punishingly horrible frames.

Ok, photo archive is over. I'm not sure quite why I find it so compelling. I just want to try and fathom the alchemy that turns a precocious, confident eight -going-on-fifty year old into that angsty, inarticulate ball of awkwardness and alienation. Why? What's the point of adolescence? What evolutionary purpose did it serve to be a miserable arse for five to seven years? Is it better now, or worse?

I have no answers. But I want to go back and tell teen me that eventually I will live in Paris, have a dog, have a French lover and a wardrobe of elegant black clothes just as I dream (though I will not be a famous show jumper or actress or date Mark Shaw from Then Jericho or even Ian Chisholm in the year above me), but that none of it will be anything like I am expecting it to be back in 1987 in my Laura Ashley pink bedroom. I would try to convey to my mopey self-absorbed 14 year old self that I will waste huge chunks of my life being dissatisfied and restless and passive and that this is what I will regret later, not having to wear glasses, or thinking my knees are too bony, or not having black Reebok hi-tops. And that for pity's sake I should get off my bed and turn off Morrissey and call Alex and we should go to Miss Selfridge and buy some more cheap crap and I should bloody well enjoy those thighs because I won't have them forever.

It wouldn't work though, would it?

A trip to the archives

So much I should be doing, but I keep returning, endlessly fascinated, to the horrid photos Prog Rock Step Dad brought. They're like archeological artefacts and weird puzzles at the same time. How did this:

Become this?






Or this?






Adolescence is so cruel. One day maybe I will show these to my boys when they are fretting about spots.



How about these two?



(and let us take a moment to contemplate what an ugly baby I was - moon faced, and baleful with hard boiled eyes that stayed open all night)

How come they have been replaced by this terrifying freak show - 80s rent boy (or member of Bros?) and well, it's indescribable really. Gormless, graceless geek child perhaps?

I remember this photo, and this party. The belly with the tie behind my brother is the Bearded One, and it's one of his work Christmas parties we were both required to attend. As was traditional at these occasions, there was some lovely post-grad marine biologist I was mooning hopelessly over in my tongue tied fashion, and my brother got rat arsed and angry and had to be carried home after publicly berating the Bearded One for his failures as a parent. Happy times.

This one makes me smile - I look like Lady Diana.

I am in my Laura Ashley phase, aged 17, on exchange in Casablanca with Aurélie, who is a model.

Aurélie only eats SlimFast and apples and goes to ballet classes all the time when she isn't with her monosyllabic boyfriend. She barely speaks to me in the three weeks I stay, even though we have to share a bed, and her maid sleeps in the corner of the bedroom on the floor, though she does invite me to watch the filming of a commercial for sweets or shower gel or something she is making. It is during Ramadan, and at the end of the surreal day everyone sits in a giant tent and eats harira and dates.

Morocco is a total revelation for a girl from York- it is ravishing. I completely fall in love with it - food, snow tipped mountains, camels, staying in the medina in Marraakech, riding horses through the desert at sunset. I have never dared go back - how could it be as beautiful as I remember? Aurélie's neglect barely registers with me, since her friend Karim kidnaps me and introduces me to nightclubs, Prefab Sprout and sex. I can see why when I look at this photo - I am the picture of English innocence. It must have been terribly tempting.

Here I am suffering terrible torture yet again at the hands of my father. I must be 15, proudly wearing my paisley shirt with, I vividly remember, electric blue nail varnish. Under the shirt there is some dreadful local York band t-shirt that I am wearing like a badge of honour. I went to a lot of "gigs" as I called them self-consciously, and felt like a total hipster. If it was one of those places where you paid admission and got stamped on the hand, I would try not to wash my hand for at least a week to show off my total hipness. Of course, the whole coolness thing was totally undermined by the fact that I was either chaperoned by one of the band member's mothers, or by my mother's friend Andrew. I am a sort of goth lite. And where am I? I am at some scuzzy rural pub in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales, where my father has been dragging me up and down hills and fulminating about my attitude. I will spend my time gloomily reading novels or old copies of NME between bracing 4 hour walks, and pressing my head to the radio to try and pick up radio one. You can see in this picture that I am trying to decide whether to kill myself, kill him, or merely sulk a little harder.


Just one last one? This is just for the outfits. I mean seriously, the seventies, what a decade. A Clothkits CLOWN SUIT for a birthday party? Yes, yes and thrice yes!

Fug

It is absoutely imperative that I leave the house tomorrow. I think I have entered some kind of dismal pre-hibernation phase (though obviously without the fasting, and do not check my ears for unpleasant discharge and flatness or I will punch you).


Fucking January. You have no point. You are just here to torture me. Do not come telling me all about your amazing sales. I do not wish to know about YSL Tribute shoes reduced from €900 to €100, thank you Paris Colleague. I do not have €100 and the CFO has hidden all the money in a new set of paranoid arrangements. This "snow" business is quite aesthetically pleasing, yes, but it dampens my thought processes even more than the usual grey Brussels drizzle. Other than these poor offerings, what is in it for me, January? Nothing. The opportunity to lay down an extra layer of cellulite and disappear under a mass of dirty laundry, most of which I am wearing simultaneously.


In short, I am becoming the most fucking boring person in the world. I have spent today sitting dead eyed in front of my screen, trying to fathom the tiny Skinny McStupid dog and its tiny brain, failing and wiping up its shit, staring into space and thinking about my many imminent deadlines without doing anything about them. Sometimes, for kicks, I go and have a slice of Christmas cake with Skinny McStupid attached to my ankles by the teeth. Thus has the day passed, like a week of Belgian Sundays.


And now, it is 6pm and the CFO will be back shortly, expecting to be back in the 1950s with, you know, a warm, clean house, hot food and clean stuff; children with homework done and new plasters on their stitched up chins, and quietly engaged in improving pursuits instead of rolling Skinny McStupid in a urine stained coat in the wreckage of the house and allowing it to nibble their stitches. And more importantly when he gets here, the keyboard turns into a pumpkin and blogging is outlawed.


Is this the shape of things to come? How on earth am I going to entertain you with my new part-time existence if it leaves me flaccid and brainless? I resolve to do better tomorrow, but have had to hand my duties over to Tortank for tonight.

He has more to say than I do, and he's spent the last 6 weeks in the crisper drawer of the fridge. It's that bad.

Oscar

Ever since we agreed I could go part time, I have been nagging at the CFO to get a dog, on the basis that once you obtain one thing, you should immediately start arguing for another. I think he taught me that, so he has only himself to blame.

Whilst agreement in principle was thrashed out through a process of attrition some weeks ago, the details have been trickier. The CFO likes his dogs big and stupid and faithful. I like my dogs small, elegant, irascible and frankly not terribly bothered about you. Cats, basically. Initial compromise discussions alighted on this for its tortoise friendly properties:

On reflection, however, I vetoed the Welsh Terrier on the basis that it is poo coloured and I could just imagine those moustaches filled with drool trailing over me demanding to be loved, and me just not being able to see past its ugliness. I may be shallow, but at least I know it.

The CFO then came up with this:

"You ARE joking? It looks like the kind of dog you get from a bloke in a pub when you're blind drunk and haven't been home for three days and you think in a misguided moment it will stop your wife from throwing things at you. And of course the kids fall in love with it when you bring it home but your wife hates it and hates you even more for being such an unbelievably stupid bastard."

"Well, what do YOU suggest?"

The CFO had already vetoed the dog of my dreams:



And for my 'reserve' dog, I really wanted one of these:

But apparently they are vicious killers when it comes to other animals, such as, for instance, tortoises. Every dog I suggested would turn out to be a vicious killer basically. So no go.

"Hmm. I want a whippet then."

"C'est quoi un weeepette?"

"Like a small greyhound. Very smooth and calm".

"Those TREMBLY things? How can I train it to kill burglars?"

"Admit you are very demanding: It must be trained to kill burglars AND not to touch tortoises."

"Yes, but but but..."

But a couple of days of intensive googling later convinced him la mort dans l'ame, that indeed, a weepette was the thing for us what with it not being smelly, not shedding hair and enjoying blankets and sleeping 20 hours a day. And ever since he has been encouraging, one might even say goading me, to get one. If he was hoping I would finally see sense, he was of course dealing with the wrong woman. Yesterday he stood over me and forced me to phone a woman with weepettes somewhere near Amiens. And so I found myself today driving five hours to collect this weepette who we have called Oscar, although the spawn are still calling him "Weepette".

And now, of course, I am terrified. Broken nights, poo everywhere, risibly poor discipline - haven't we been here before? What WAS I thinking? Fuuuuck!

He's very sweet though and goodness he likes to sleep.

So, um, wish me luck or something because I haven't got a fucking clue*, and the CFO is sitting back with a slight smile playing around his lips as Oscar leaps, jaws open, for my jugular.

*Er, Belette? How's it going your end? Help!

The Book of Belgium, Chapter 3, Verses 5-8: Instant Karma

For as ye reap, so shall ye sow saith the Lord.



Those who mock the amusing domestic accident statistics thoughtfully provided by Rospa* shall be smote down by a Palmier biscuit.



And they shall suffer sorely of a severe laceration to the cheek. And there shall be much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the land of Bel-gium.



The infidels shall burn their thighs on a hot water bottle whilst asleep.



And their children and their children's children shall suffer mightily to have three stitches in their chins in a smiting by seesaw accident and the casualty departments of Bel-gium shall be filled with their lamenting.



In the space of one day.



And the Lord shall saith unto them "You don't look so bloody smart now, do you?"



For thus is it written in the scripture.

Thanks be to God!

*513 biscuit accidents in 2002. FACT.

Ten step plan for a painless return to work

Returning to work after the Christmas break is hard, but Belgian Waffle is here to guide you through, reminding you of all the social niceties you may have forgotten, like closing your mouth occasionally, forming sentences and wearing underwear. I have selflessly reproduced below my own pointers to myself on coming back to the office. I feel many of them will be of use to you. I live to serve others, as you know.

1. Use enormous effort of will to shower, locate clean clothes and dress in them. If necessary, reward yourself with a short nap when this has been accomplished. Whilst your desire to go to work in last night's tights/hoodie/no bra combo is entirely natural, it should be resisted if possible. Putting the hoodie back on top of the clean clothes is fine, as long as the stains are dark in colour. Shoes, rather than novelty slipper socks, should be worn. Put a spare coat in your bag. You will be needing it later.

2. Arrive at office, ideally before midday. If you find yourself wandering aimlessly around a shopping centre looking for someone to make you a cup of tea, phone home so your nearest and dearest can remind you what you went out for.


3. Sit peacefully in darkness for an hour because lights no longer work. Send snippy message to Dirk the homophobic building manager. Discover sometime later that you have in fact merely failed to turn lights on properly. Send rectificatory message to Dirk saying his services are no longer required without explaining exactly why (imply you have repaired lights yourself).

4. Delete 500 emails without reading them. Batches of forty at a time are optimal. After each batch allow yourself a half hour nap, either placing your head on the space bar of your keyboard, or simply allowing your body to slump backwards until you are staring slack jawed at the ceiling. After 200 emails you should take a lunch break of between 2 and 3 hours to wander round the shops pre-planning fantasy sale purchases (Sigerson Morrison silver shoes with pom poms - check; Comptoir des Cotonniers shapeless sack tops - check; flat patent boots/kimono coat - still looking). If you are in a civilised country, you may even be able to make fantasy sale purchases, but this is a matter for your conscience and your financial advisor.

5. Restock chocolate plate. Eat contents. Restock again.

6. Speak to noone. This is easy since there is noone to speak to. The rest of the eurodrones are all still neatly folded in their stackable grey boxes in the cellar. Dirk will go and unpack them early on Monday morning and wheel them back to their desks. It is however acceptable to give the coffee machine a firm pat and a whispered 'beste wensen' when it asks you to 'maak uw keuze'.

7. Do not attempt to deal with the red light of doom (voicemail). There is a time for such things and that time is never. Do not answer phone. It is probably the person looking for the 'Planning Familal de St Gilles' calling again. Even if it isn't, it is unlikely to be good news. Best avoided.

8. Try to find out whether your country has a government. If it does, celebrate with a nap. If the new PM has a ridiculous name, celebrate with another nap. Consider feasability of rendering new PM's features in fondant icing.

9. When going to the ladies - do NOT give in to temptation to stand on loo seat to check on holiday weight gain in the mirror. In your weakened state a fall could be fatal, particularly as noone will find your broken corpse 'til Monday. Nearest and dearest will not notice your absence since they are spending the day killing things, or watching things kill things, or trying to kill each other. You can however take advantage of The World's Least Flattering Mirror © to consider whether fillers/botox/Crème de la Mer or merely increased intake of fluids other than coffee and gin would be a good plan.

10. Leave office around 3pm, draping the spare coat over your chair, placing a fresh cup of coffee by your monitor and a document with a pen on top in front of it. Go home. Tell family "work was manic and I need a rest". Go straight to bed with 500g of leaden Christmas cake, a pot of tea and a tawdry magazine.