Right, I need to update you on TSB.

Posted on August 16, 2010 by londondifferently| 6 Comments

I know, I know. No-one with any dignity would have an update to give on TSB. No-one who can take a hint.  

These do not apply to me. I have updates.

You see, the pickle when I’m besotted with someone is that no matter how reluctant they are, I will eagerly hop from foot to foot yelling “pick me!!! PICK ME!!” until they crumble.

Thus TSB and I have been seeing each other fairly regularly, pretty much ever since he tried so hard to escape that time. Things seemed good again. He seemed to be getting over his baffling disinterest in me. Slowly, I’d beaten him down we’d built back up to talk of a mini-break in the Highlands. He would be heading there with all 72 members of his family at the bank holiday weekend: would I like to come, he’d asked?

Ooooh yes!

He was talking of coming out to see me in Zambia. How would I feel about that?

Elated!

He was – bestill my beating heart – beginning to moot ideas for things we might do together after Zambia. In 2012. A point so far in the future that we’d be able to visit each other in our flying cars.

Still, before we could do any of that, he was going on a boating holiday to Croatia.

Shall I just hand over to you here? You have the script. Did he meet a pretty girl? Check! Did he fall in love? You betcha. Is he taking her for the family trip to the Highlands instead of me? Of course he is.

We met up for dinner after his trip. Had lots of nice chitty chat and catching up, except that all I could think was you didn’t contact me at all you bastard.

“So…” I began as soon as I had enough beer in me. “Should I worry that I didn’t really hear from you last week?”

“Ah,” he gave me the Princess Diana eyes. “Yes… Thanks for bringing it up,” he said, curiously mistaking my throbbing misery for wanting to help him out. “It’s just, I’ve met someone.”

Yes, I thought, confused. Me. You’ve met me, no?

Oh.

“While you were seeing me?!” I blurt in horror.
“No! God no!”
And thus I learned that we were, in fact, no longer seeing each other.

I compute.
“But we last slept together just before your holiday.”
“Yes…”
“You met her on your holiday?”
“Yes.”

Oh please let her be a chavvy Essex slag. With a honky accent and an IQ of single digits. Let her have streaky fake-tanned ankles and a genetic predisposition to obesity, and several types of VD, including a couple of the really dischargy ones.

“Oh wow! I’m thrilled for you!” What am I saying? No I’m not! He peered at me cautiously.
“Are you sure you don’t mind me telling you this stuff?”
“Of course not! The first flush is the best bit! I want all the gossip.” WTF?? I looked around for a paper bag to stem the upcoming hyperventilation.

So he proceeded to tell me all about her.

She’s French. Bloody French. I never had a chance! LOVES the things he’s into, he gushed. A stage make-up artist, who’s having a three month career break before moving into movies. The movies! A three month career break! I tried not to think of all the fabulous summer sex they would be having during her heavenly career break while I would be spending the summer letting my bikini line sprout wild simply for something to keep me occupied.

“Oh, she sounds great! How old is she?” Be a hag. Be an infertile crone with a walnut for a womb.
“31”. Feck. Baby ready. Not just a holiday boff: she’ll be doing her utmost to keep him.

Of course, it would be giddy to assume that just because she’s 31 she wants to marry him and have his babies. So I present to you Exhibit B:

They’ve picked out the name they’ve decided they’d like to call their first-born son.

Yes, the name of their first-born son. They’ve settled on ‘Tristan’, he explained proudly. Discussed and agreed in their first week of seeing each other.

HOW do the bloody French manage to bring up baby names in the first week and still make themselves seem alluring?

I kept up my inexplicable chipperness all through dinner, before we said a solidly final goodbye and I exploded like a water balloon on my way home.

There, I set aside maturity – it has no place in modern heartbreak – and looked up her facebook profile. Her photo, needless to say, is gorgeous. A delicate beauty with sun-spun curls framing her Mona Lisa smile.  

My own facebook profile photo is of a Fraggle.

Still, she is turning away from the camera, which leads me to hope one side of her face has fallen like a land-slide, like Sloth from the Goonies.

But irritatingly, she has high privacy settings. Very inconsiderate. All I could glean is which groups she is a member of. Still, this was enough.

  1. A massage club. (Ho.)
  2. The MMA clinic.

 MMA?

MMA is cage fighting.

He’s dating a god damn cage fighter.

Why, WHY, am I not the one running off to make babies with a cage fighter? Surely that is MY role??!

And it turns out she lives around the corner from me. Oh hurrah! Any day now, my solitary commute could be brightened by coming across them skipping along to the tube, cheeks still flushed from that morning’s attempt to make Tristan.

Still, even though you will lose all dregs of respect for me, I can’t help but feel oddly happy for him. He wasn’t into me. He simply wasn’t. He couldn’t help it, any more than I could help being smitten about him. And Frenchie sounds like the lady of his dreams. Not that I’d realised he wanted a butch cage fighting type, but each to their own. I guess I was just too willowy and feminine.

So here’s to them: a phenomenally lucky pair. I genuinely hope it works. It’s finally given me the closure I needed, to focus on Zambia, and to create a new life there. And, hopefully, to find genuine love of my own someday.

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Posted in Dating

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Did you know that babies have an off switch?

Posted on August 6, 2010 by londondifferently| 5 Comments

An off switch. On their heads. A patch which if you press it, you will puncture the baby.

I found this out when I went to hold my very first baby last night. Not MY baby obviously.  No chance. I’m a responsible lover, so am of course on the Pill. That, and no-one wants to boff me. I’ve gotten sloppy with remembering to take the Pill now. I had a panic recently when I realised that I’d missed four throughout the month. But then I realised that it made absolutely no difference to my chances of getting pregnant. This wasn’t as comforting as you might think.

But then again, last week I went to take it and found that I already had. Tuesday’s pouch was mind-bogglingly empty. How?! When?! This has troubled me. When did I eat that thing? Had I got up in the night and fancied a snack? Sleepily munched on my pill and returned to bed sated? Mystery.

I digress.

The teeny little honey-bunch who was boldly subjected to my experimental baby-holding was Niall, the most astonishingly adorable little boy that you could ever hope to cuddle. But moments before he’s tentatively placed in my arms, my friend informed that he has a button which under no circumstances am I to press.

Oh fecky feck.

It turns out that babies are born before their skull has joined up (WHAT? How on earth did that one give evolution the slip??). This results in a soft spot on the top of their heads, where the only thing preventing you from shutting down their motor and cognitive development is a bit of skin.

This seems an astonishing oversight in mankind’s development, one so enormous and so implausibly lethal to the human race that it’s a theory which begs to be tested. But I’m assured that if I do, my finger will carry on going until I skewer their poor little brains. How many babies did mankind get through before we made this link?

If you look really carefully, which I did because it became my greatest source of terror, you can just about see it. It looks like the cutest, softest little dimple. But it might as well be a huge flashing button seductively asking if you’re too chicken to press it: the impact on my overwhelming curiosity boils down to the same.

Fortunately, protecting the meltingly wonderfulness of Niall had a stronger appeal than experimentally pressing his off-button. But I’m just not sure I can trust myself if he hadn’t been so gorgeous. What if he’d been one of those mash-faced ugly ones and seemed a little more dispensible?

So I was going to give you an update on my lovelife, since one is due, but I will try to knock that out over the weekend instead. I figured that the greater imperative was that I let you know about the death button on babies, since there seems to be a lot of babies going around these days and it’s something to be aware of.

Remember: do not press.

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Posted in London Normally

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Oh the shame.

Posted on July 25, 2010 by londondifferently| 1 Comment

It would have been better if I’d been booed off stage. At least that would have been character-building.

At least it would have meant I’d made it on to a stage.

At least it would have meant someone was there to boo me.

I think it was karma for me being so full of myself all weekend.

“Oh I think that’s mine,” I’d said to the bored internet cafe assistant, who was flicking through the script I’d printed out for my routine that evening. (Yes. That’s right. Bored. He was reading my script and was bored.) He handed it back.
“Did you like my material?” I asked, aiming at cheekily charming. My material.
He glanced back at it, faintly embarrassed for me. “I wasn’t reading it. £1.60”
“I’m a comedienne, you see,” I tested it out. Yes, I thought. Very me.
Pause.
Awkward.
“£1.60.”
“It’s for my gig tonight,” I confided generously, handing him the cash. He looked at me as with as much distaste as if I’d just told him I was about to have a smear test. Taking a slow chew of his gum, he focused onto the middle distance and waited for me to leave.

They were mercifully cheerier on the course. We were a group of six students, a friendly, supportive bunch with generous laughs. Apart from one, who was an anachronistically aggressive racist, and who will certainly not be invited to the Queen’s garden parties any time soon. After he plunged us into mirthless horror with his pithy racial profiling of the entire population of the Middle East, one of the other students asked what he meant by “Coconut”.

“Well, it’s like a fucking…” he faltered. “Like… like Eminem. Like a fucking brown inside and white outside.”

The group gave this a moment’s consideration.

“Aren’t coconuts white inside? With a brown shell?” I hoped this would come across as sweetly non-confrontational and not a trigger for him to turn up on my doorstep in a pointy white hood.
He stared at me with huffy nostrils and the room tensed up.
Then, wordlessly, a little bit sadly, he turned back to his material, scanning his script to find a joke which didn’t depend on his retarded concept of a coconut.

“Do you like M&Ms then?” asked Phil, one of the other lads, to break the frost.
Aggressive Racist looked at him blankly. “Eminem.”
“Yes, M&Ms.”

We chortled nervously, waiting to die.

“Eminem,” he clarified slowly. “The rapper.”
“Oh you like their wrapper!” Phil teased.  Aggressive Racist could not compute. “You like the packaging? Of the M&Ms?”
Our tutor Jay shifted in his seat. Say something funny to deflate this, I willed him. Being funny is your job. This is your moment!
The internal working-out of Racist’s mind inched slowly across his face. “Oh right. Ha! Yeah! M&Ms.” He thought about this for a minute, allowing an idea to slowly half bake. “But, the thing with M&Ms is that once you’ve eaten the colourful shell, what are you left with?” He paused dramatically to maximise our discomfort. “Brown!” he said triumphantly.

Oh you didn’t, I thought.

Oh you did not.

“Brown!” he repeated, unclear why we were curling into our chairs with horror instead of slapping our thighs with appreciative delight.

“Right, let’s leave it there!” the tutor jumped in, dismissing us for a break to let the tension in the room unwind.

Still, apart from the socially awkward hate-gags, the course was good fun and a real eye-opener. Over the two days, we worked to develop a tight five minute set to perform on the Sunday evening. We ran through various exercises to help us write material and whittle it down only to the funniest bits. We learnt the alarming pitfalls of the microphone, the paramount importance of connecting with the audience, and that being a comedian is largely an exhausting, thankless, penniless, soul-destroying life. I couldn’t wait.

But wait I continue to do. The show was due to start at 8.30pm. By 9pm, the room contained half a dozen trembling new comics clutching sweat-sodden scripts, and my three heroic mates who had come along to support me. The night was called off. Even the fact that I was the only one with mates nice enough to come didn’t cheer me up about the disappointment of not doing my set after two days of building up to it.

“OK guys, it’s not what we’d hoped,” Jay acknowledged. “But you do have a couple of options. We can book you into a slot in a regular comedy club, but the audience will probably be drunk, be hecklers, this really is the worst way you could start. An absolute baptism of fire. I strongly recommend that you wait until the next graduation show at the end of September.”

“I won’t be here at the end of September,” I told him. His eyes filled with pity. “Baptism of fire, then?” I asked.

“Um. Yes.”

So baptism of fire it is. I ran through my set with a friend I could trust for honest feedback before I sign up to an open-mic annihilation. She was gracious and charitable, and even pointed out that one of her laughs was a genuine one. She then gently asked what material I would use for my actual routine?

So, I will rewrite my set. I will then book a comedy slot and let you all know, well in advance so you can come wave a little flag of support through the heckles.

*Think funny thoughts, think funny thoughts*

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Posted in Stand-up comedy

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