Oh dear. Very hungover today. John S had a New Year's Eve party last night. It was a rip-snorter, if a tad delayed. There was a band from the Balkans and some evil Mexicans armed with tequila and vodka who poisoned me with their accursed shot glass.
Bleurgh. That's all I can think to say at the moment. Bleurgh.
We had a murder mystery dinner party last night with a swinging sixties theme, hosted by the ever-sexy Mimi the Maid. It was fun to play dress-up and everybody looked gorgeous, baby!
It was a hilarious evening but towards the end I couldn't shake the image of the "What Dogs Hear" Far Side cartoon out of my head. Except that in my head I'd retitled it, "What Sober People Hear".
I was pretty sure there were some funny, witty lines flying across the table, but I think if any sober people were listening in, most of the conversation would have sounded like "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah SomethingInsanelyHumourous, blah, blah, blah, blah".
I went ice-skating at Somerset House last week. It was a last minute thing and I only knew one other person there, Kirsty the Kiwi, but it was still good to reaffirm my innate Canuck superiority in the frozen pond department.
If nothing else, moving to England has completely eradicated the inferiority complex I had back home about my poor skating ability. Yes, I still can't do cross-overs backwards, but here no one even knows what I'm talking about. I've instantly become a sporting star!
Previous Ice Skating at Somerset House Entry from 16 January 2003
My charming spouse and I went up to Birmingham and this is the only picture I took the entire weekend so I thought I'd better share it with the world. I have only a vague notion of where it is. We were on a bus to Wolverhampton when I took it. And we were on that bus for a very long time. A word to the wise -- the bus from Birmingham to Wolverhampton takes an hour and fifteen minutes and costs £1. The train takes 20 minutes and costs £3.60. Take the train. It's worth the extra £2.60.
Vicki had been doing some part-time work for the dance department of the University of Wolverhampton. We were going up there to see the student show. I love seeing student shows. You get to meet the performers during the intermission and everyone is so excited, especially the audience.
I'm glad we went, because a few days later they offered her a permanent job, only half-time for now, as a lecturer at the UofW. It was good to meet some of the folks she'll be working with and a couple of the students she'll be teaching.
I read an article on how to be a super flirt in "Take a Break" magazine. I can't remember most of it, but the one piece of advice that really stuck out for me was to make sure you always keep your thumbs on display.
Since reading this piece of advice I have become obsessed with my thumbs. Are they on display or not? If I wiggle them, am I acting like a shameless hussy? (Or whatever the male equivalent of a hussy is -- a hussar, perhaps?) Do I have sexy thumbs? Should I get a manicure? If I get a manicure, will they give me a discount if I only want my thumbs buffed?
I've also been casually checking out other people's thumbs. One of my co-workers is always chewing on the edge of her thumb. Is that supposed to be some kind of sign? If it's some kind of phallic replacement thing, I imagine it would be quite painful. If someone asks me to thumb wrestle, what are they really trying to say? If someone has ugly thumbs, does it mean they will be a terrible lover?
Anyway, that's what's been on my mind lately -- thumbs.
Well, I think I've blown my chance for minor league TV celebrity fame. Regular, devoted, slavishly obsessed readers will know that I was approached to be on a reality TV game show about how to pick up babes. It was all set for February. They were even going to pay me real money!
But yesterday I got a phone call from the director. After a few seconds of light conversation I could tell that he was sizing me up to see if I could talk funny as well as write funny. I fear I did not do well. I mean, My God! I'm Canadian. And I'm a geek. Hello! Call the Boredom Police.
So he's asking me all these questions about how to pick up women and my brain is whirring because I have no idea. Did anyone in his company even read the blog article about my supermodel party? My entire success with women, such as it is, is based on huge dollops of blind luck, an unabashed tendency to dance like a spastic ungulate, and the deep-seated certainty that I have absolutely no hope of seducing them so I might as well try to befriend them.
It was quite disturbing. He asked me things like, "what kind of lines do I think work on women?" How the hell would I know? It's been more than a dozen years since I was single, and even then I don't think I ever used a line on a woman. I dimly recall (when very drunk many many years ago) beckoning a waitress over and saying in a stage whisper, "You know, I'm not wearing any socks."
But, even then, the line was meant to be ironic and I was actually trying to impress a women sitting at my table (once again a friend of mine – God it's hard to seduce your friends!). And I suppose it worked. The waitress fled in fear, but my friend laughed. Never did sleep with her though.
So I'm talking to this guy on the phone and it's becoming clear to me that he's looking for a suave lounge lizard type of guy and I have to come up with something funny to say and I'm stuck. And I start worrying that I'm blowing my chance to be on a reality tv game show and then I start worrying that I'm concerned about blowing my chance to be on a reality TV game show and how pathetic is that?
And then I get distracted thinking of various guys I could recommend in my place. There was a guy I knew back when I was treeplanting named Preston. When we hit town for a night off he would never bother to get a hotel room and just rely on picking up some woman in the bar -- partly for the sex and partly just to save the price of a room. Now he must have had a few tricks up his sleeve. He would know what lines work on a woman. And then there's my crazy landlord who has had more sexual partners that I have red blood cells.
And so, of course, being distracted, I'm just answering in monosyllables and the guy laughs every now and then but he's a Kiwi and they're easily amused and he works in TV and can I trust him and it just hits me that really, I'm quite dull. And so I panic and start telling him the story about how my wife proposed to me after I impressed her with some frantic air guitar to the song "You Shook Me All Night Long" by ACDC. It was on the empty dance floor of the Fort Nelson Hotel bar in Buttnowhereville, Northern B.C. but it's too late and he obviously doesn't want to hear it. And he hangs up with the immortal line, "We'll call you."
And so, I think, "that's it; no Jade Goody type fame for me." Bugger.
My crazy landlord proved his craziness once again by taking myself and my charming spouse out to the country for New Year's. We stayed in a gorgeous old B&B that started life 650 years ago as a monk's college. It's called College Farm and is in the middle of Norfolk in a tiny village called Thompson. Check out the pictures. It's gorgeous!
It is run by a delightful 80 year old lady named Lavender who seemed completely impervious to cold. We were there for three days and despite the fact it was bloody freezing in the house she tottered around in her bare feet the entire time.
Despite the chilliness of the place, we had a fantastic time. The house was everything I'd always dreamed an English B&B could be. I suppose that includes the inclement indoor weather now that I think about it.
For New Year's Eve we went to the only pub in the village, the Chequers, which had fantastic food and a bit of a New Year's disco after dinner. We ate too much, drank too much, and danced too much. Then we stumbled home in the pouring rain and sleet with the help of my new magic phone which has a torch built into it. It was nice to see some genuine darkness again. The sleet was less welcome, especially by my landlord who complained at the top of his lungs literally without pause the entire 20 minutes it took us to struggle back to the B&B. It was truly an impressive performance.
Some time during the night the sleet turned to snow and we woke to find the grounds a beauteous white – a lovely start to the New Year.
The day after, we went horseback riding at a place called Middle Farm. Sinead is an experienced rider but the rest of us had only been on horses once before (on separate occasions) so it was all pretty basic. We did get to do a little bit of trotting and had a small ride around the farm, but that was about it. I was hoping to herd some cattle or chase some foxes or something. Oh well, Maybe next time.
We had some friends over just before Christmas and ended up playing a card game called Spoons. It's a grand game. Like that other Sport of Kings known as politics, it's all about passing the buck, violence, and greed.
The rules are simple. Everyone starts with four playing cards in their hand and then the dealer takes a card from the deck and discards one from her hand. The next person picks up that discarded card and does the same. The goal is to get four of a kind. As soon as one person gets four of a kind, they grab a spoon from the pile of spoons in the middle of the table. Then everyone else has to grab a spoon. The catch is that there is one less spoon on the table than there are players. And that's when the violence kicks in.
It's kind of like musical chairs, but with spoons. And no music. And everyone is sitting around a table instead of running in circles. And there are cards.
The person left spoonless at the end of the round suffers a forfeit of some kind. Last night they were just given a letter and were out of the game once they had spelled "donkey". How hilarious is that! Man, we laughed when Shields ended up being the Donkey. Hee! Hee! Hee!
Of course, things aren't always so civilized. When I was a teenager I played strip spoons a couple of times. In this variant, the stakes are much higher. I remember one particular game at Iain Ramadallah's house in which things were getting a bit edgy. In particular, Dawn Bannerman had lost everything but her panties and a buttoned shirt. I believe Iain was wearing her bra as a hat. The cards were passing fast and furious. Suddenly, Derrick got four of a kind, grabbed a spoon and smashed his fist down on the remaining spoons. They flew all over the room. I was the lucky one. One of the spoons struck me in the forehead and dropped in my lap. Everyone, except Derrick and I, threw back their chairs and began scrambling over the floor. One by one people emerged victorious with a spoon clutched in their grasp. And then, directly across from me, Dawn Bannerman stood up empty-handed, looking defeated.
But what's this? Stacy Horton was also spoonless. There must be one spoon remaining somewhere. And then they both spotted it. The last spoon had landed directly behind my chair. Stacy raced around the table to get it. Dawn had no time for such niceties and leapt on to the table, landing on her knees just in front of me. The buttons on her blouse, which were already under some strain, popped off; her shirt flew open; Iain's table snapped in half, propelling Dawn onto my lap and her naked boobs into my face. We fell over backwards onto the spoon just as Stacy arrived. They were both too intent on getting the spoon to regard me as anything more than an inconvenient obstacle and scrambled all over me, their hands pawing and clawing and reaching into unmentionable places. It was the best sex I had ever had up to that point.
That game remains the highlight of my spoons playing career.
(although I have had better sex since then)
