What we did on our holiday

If this was always my writing view, I feel this blog would be a whole lot cheerier.

I haven't been on a family holiday in years - I can't be the only one who hit 17 and decided that the thought of spending a week in one place with only people I'm related to for company was, well, A Bit Much. Plus, my family are strongly in favour of beach/pool holidays, whereas I can do that for about three hours and then start to go a bit crackers and need to find a museum or an art gallery or a church tower to climb, stat.

But something about working in an office 9-5, Monday-Friday, has made the whole doing-nothing-for-a-week holiday seem much more appealing, so when my mum asked if I wanted to join her and my sister in Greece for a week, I said yes bloody please.

It's beautiful here - all I've done since Monday is eat, swim and gaze in stupefied awe at the crystal-clear Aegean Sea (sorry sorry sorry). So the following is what happens when I don't really have anything to write about...

1) Hotel restaurant buffets make fools of us all.
"What do you mean, I wouldn't dream of having a bowl of bircher muesli followed by French toast and an entire pot of tea for breakfast at home?"


2) Related: no-one does any exercise on holiday.
I tried doing some 'proper' swimming - it's a pain in the arse being one of those irritating people who's just found out how good exercise is - but people kept getting in the way, being leisurely and having fun - so eventually I gave up on that one.

3) You quickly identify that one family you either want to befriend or be adopted by.
It happened on day 2. They arrived at the pool - two couples, with five children between them. Dads in Ray-Bans and Boden shorts, mums trying to keep track of little ones (more on that in a moment). One dad looked a bit like an older version of Drummer Boy if I closed my eyes and thought about it really hard. Children with names like Oscar, Florence and Oliver - obviously. It was love at first sight.


4) You quickly identify that one family you hope either suffer a freak incident of food poisoning or all get nibbled to death by mosquitos.
It happened on the evening of day 2. They were on their way to the marina, as were we, and I overheard them say something incredibly rude about the Russian family standing about eight feet away. Who does that? In front of their kids? Come on.

5) Mothers are mothers, no matter where in the world they may be.
During the course of the week, Mother Dearest and I came to verbal blows over the following: Caitlyn Jenner, me asking to borrow my sister's lip balm, my relationship choices, her refusal to eat anything more interesting than salad. For us, that's pretty good going. She also managed to plan my entire wedding (I'm not even engaged) before we even got off the runway. She'd written a guest list on her boarding pass.

I am now even more convinced than I already was that, whenever the time comes, myself and the unlucky gentleman are going to elope.

6) Airports are weird. 
Our flight was at 6am, so we got up at 2.45. Ouch. Pro-tip: don't spend the afternoon before a 3am start drinking beer and talking nonsense in the sunshine, no matter how much you enjoy listening to your love interest's folk band. You will go to bed feeling mighty strange and full of regret in every shade. You will feel even stranger when you find yourself wandering round Duty Free at Gatwick at 5 in the morning, trying to buy perfume and/or sunglasses and wondering why your heart's not in it. Dude, it's 5am. You are not meant to be shopping, you are meant to be in the land of zizz. Sit down and doze off. Right after you've done Smith's, though.

7) Boys will be boys to the end.
I was finishing a glass of wine in the hotel bar, after Mrs Lightweight and Sister had gone to bed, minding my own business and having a Facebook Messenger "difference of opinion" with DB, when a young man approached and offered to buy me a drink. I declined, but he sat down anyway and we started on the small talk. He looked rather nonplussed when I asked what he did, so I asked if he was a student, and when he rattled off the four subjects he was studying, the penny dropped. "Ohhh, you're an A-level student".
"Yeah. Are you at uni, or...?"
"No... I'm 25."
Conversation over.

8) Gender stereotypes rule on holiday.
When the family in (3) arrived, it was the men who took off with the kids - they couldn't wait to throw their sons into the water and teach their daughters to swim without armbands. One mum was left holding the baby for a good hour - and yeah, it was a super-cute baby, but all it could do was lie on a sunlounger and dribble a bit. Not much fun for mum. After a while, dad came over and said "do you want a go in the pool, darling?" If it had been me, the reply would have been brief. YES PLEASE, AND A COLD BEER. NOW.

On the Bambi bookshelf: poolside edition

Holidays are basically made for reading all those books you mean to get around to but never do, and so far I've done The Rosie Project and Don't Point That Thing At Me.

The former I picked up when I went into a charity shop to donate some books, somewhat defeating the whole point of the visit. It's brilliant. Genuinely funny and touching - though some of the characters aren't entirely realistic, but hey, they're characters in a book - I can't wait to read the sequel (The Rosie Effect).

 The latter was given to me by Drummer Boy at Christmas, because he was very taken with the description of the protagonist, and knew I would be too: "I am Charlie Mortdecai. I like art and money and dirty jokes and drink. I am very successful". And while I wouldn't have chosen it myself, it's a strange little treat - chock-full of so many evil, but oh-so-quotable lines:

"Women are great advocates of sex in bed because they have bad figures to hide (usually) and cold feet to warm (always)."
"I weakened some of the coffee with some of the whisky and drank it, suppressing a gagging shudder".
"...I was wearing my Complete American Disguise: a cream tussore suit, sunglasses and a cocoa-coloured straw hat with a burnt orange ribbon. The effect was pretty sexy, I don't mind telling you. Mr Abercrombie would have bitten Mr Fitch if he'd seen it".

It's like Withnail, or Black Books, but with art - equal parts wit, whisky and skulduggery (was trying to go for another 'w' there but nothing really fitted).



Got to go now, pool awaits.

How to survive a Truly Terrible Week

I didn't start this blog so I could use it to complain about my life (no, really). I mean, yes, I do a fair bit of complaining here, but I either try and make it relatable, or, if it's personal, do it with a sense of humour and a hefty dose of self-awareness. (Life tip: make jokes at your own expense before anyone else has a chance.)

But God, this week's been a bit of a shocker. I won't go into details, because it would be very tedious - and if you work and/drink with me, you've probably already heard - but in short, there's been at least two work-related disappointments, many flat-hunting setbacks, and lots of arguing and crying. I have a pathetically low tolerance for stress at the best of times, being rather feeble and easily panicked, so I'm glad this Terrible Week is nearly over.

I'm no Pollyanna; it's hard, when nothing seems to be going as planned, to not take it very, very personally. It's also a shame, when you have a job, qualifications, a functioning relationship (by the skin of its teeth, anyway), and a bunch of good friends, to still feel like something of a failure. No, I'm not doing quite what I want to be doing, career-wise. No, I'm not earning as much as I'd like. No, I don't have my own place. The best I can do right now is stick a "yet" at the end of those sentences, and resolve to keep on keeping on.

So, in the interests of this post having at least some redeeming qualities - and not simply being, as a dear friend said the other day, "just a wank on the page", here's how to get through your own Truly Terrible Weeks.

1) Caffeine.

In tearful times, there's a lot to be said for the great British tradition of a nice cup of tea. Ideally, it should be made by a love interest - all other romantic gestures are trumped by a well-timed, unasked-for cup of tea. They just are. 

In sleepless times, you need to up your caffeine game and hit the coffee. If you're ploughing through a tough day/week/year at the office, and trying to do it while sleep-deprived, you're going to need good, strong coffee.

2) Talk to your calmest, most interesting friends. One of the week's few bright spots was having a long chat with one such friend about everything from growing tomatoes to Go Set a Watchman. It was soothing - as long as I didn't focus on the fact that he was due to leave for Japan within 48 hours and I probably wouldn't be seeing him again for well over a year.

3) Remind yourself of, and keep chanting, all the motivational quotes and sayings you can think of. Make your own up if you have too. You'll feel like a walking tumblr, but it will help. Useful ones are as follows:

"Success isn't permanent, and failure isn't fatal."

"For every thirteen no's you hear, the fourteenth answer will be a yes".

"There will always be someone else who fucked up worse, and managed to turn it around" - I don't think this is a common saying, but it should be.

And two old favourites: "it could be worse" and "onwards and upwards".

(You have to believe this nonsense otherwise you'll go crackers or jump off a bridge.)

4) Don't hate-stalk. We all have those Facebook/Twitter/Instagram friends who are achingly smug, and sadly have much to be smug about, so don't do it to yourself. You'll only end up hissing things like "she's 25, how the bloody fuck can she afford a cleaner?" to yourself, at 2am.  

5) It's sod's law that the day you receive bad news is the day someone in your social circle gets a promotion/engaged/baby/frankly obscene payrise. Smile, nod, congratulate through gritted teeth, and take a large gulp of gin.

6) Gin. Wine. Beer. Pick your poison, have a couple of glasses. Any more than a couple and you stand a good chance of weeping yourself hoarse, or restarting a really old fight. Neither of which will make you feel any better, despite what 'drunk brain' may be telling you.

7) Remember who's on your side. And remember too that anyone who gives you advice or criticism is doing it from only one place, one perspective - their own. Parents and grandparents grew up in different times and different circumstances, which will have formed and shaped their opinions and outlooks.

8) You are not obliged to let the bastards get you down. You are allowed to say "sod it, I'm going to enjoy my evening and worry about this tomorrow". If it gets to Friday, and it's sunny, and you're in good health and not alone in the world and still have some money in the bank, then put your face on and get yourself a drink.

9) Shut Up and Dance. The day that massive, camp, super-poppy choruses like this fail to cheer me up is the day I walk into a lake, to be honest with you. Being someone's "discotheque Juliet teenage dream" sounds like a shedload of fun, too, where do you think one would apply for such a position?

On the Bambi bookshelf

Normally, I'd give books that run to 600 pages a wide berth - being of the opinion that if a writer can't finish a story in less than 400 pages, they're just showing off all the words they know as opposed to actually dishing out a plot - but something about this one made me want to give it a go. And I'm so glad it came home from the library with me. Part family saga, part forensic examination of a marriage, part something else entirely, it's incredibly well-written (no overblown, flowery prose here), and quietly addictive. It doesn't feel like an Epic Novel, even though it's been hailed as one. I can definitely recommend.

I can't quit you

Or: the rise and fall of Facebook

I'd quite like to not be on Facebook anymore. Not for any hipster-ish reasons - as knowing my friends, that will be the first accusation, and if that were my reasoning, I'd have deleted my account years ago. It's just kind of... boring now. I sort of can't be bothered. There's very rarely anything good on there. And that's not a specific accusation levelled at the people I'm friends with, not at all - it's simply that my social circle joined it at about 17, and while we've been changing over the last few years, so has Facebook itself.

Teenagers aren't joining it now (I have this on good authority from my 14-year-old sister) - probably because their parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents are, and are posting pictures of their walking holidays and mid-morning snacks, and bitching about the weather/the government/traffic. It used to be where you posted 102 pictures of one night out, then complained and commiserated about your hangover, then planned the next night. Statuses covered everything from the ever-so-slightly-amusing, to the wryly self-mocking, to the unashamed complaining. Now, I don't have too much of a problem with the inevitable rise of engagement ring/wedding/baby photos - well, I suppose it depends on how bitter hormonal I'm feeling, but most of the time, I quite like looking at pictures of pretty jewellery and dresses and cute babies. Who doesn't?!

Because the kids wised up very quickly when they saw that it was where Mum was posting their baby pictures, and decided not to go there, it's become a place for grown-ups to check up on each other. It's a given now that employers will search for the profiles of prospective employees - in an interview last January, the interviewer said to me "I see we've got a couple of mutual friends, how do you know Dan Smith?" (Not his real name, clearly.) This was eighteen months ago, and it felt a bit weird then, but now, I'm just assuming it will happen.

These days, my social media channel of choice is Twitter, which trounces Facebook in almost every way. It moves faster - if you forget to close the tab and then look back after a few minutes have passed, there will be at least 50 new bits of content. With the 140-character limit, there's less space for the braggers and moaners to brag and moan. It's perfect place for writers and wordy types - unlike the rest of the internet, on Twitter, text performs better than images, in terms of content-sharing (Twitter people are MY people). If it's images you're into, there's Instagram.

Twitter is also slightly less showy-offy, and a bit more "let's just share fun and interesting things with each other". Obviously this isn't always the case; a number of high-profile Twitter users - mainly women - have had truly shocking experiences with the site, and it has been very hard to get that abuse taken seriously. But for the small-time, non-famous user, it's a pretty good spot to be. Especially if you like words.

The other brilliant thing about Twitter is the sense of community. A gorgeous example came a couple of Fridays ago, during Channel 4's The Last Leg - while discussing the Budget, comedian Adams Hills suggested that anyone who was in need of, or could offer help (anything  - doing some shopping, mowing the lawn, looking over a CV) should tweet their offer or request with the hashtag #legup. Within an hour or so, there were nearly 16,000 tweets containing the hashtag. "If we're going to get screwed," said Hills, "we might as well push back". It was totally heartwarming - I saw requests for jobs answered with "send me your CV!" as well as fundraising targets being smashed left, right and centre - all because for a few hours, genuinely decent people were connected, held at a virtual stopsign by social media.

There's a short list of things that stop me quitting Facebook altogether:

1) it's a good place to promote the blog. Every time I look at my stats*, the Facebook link is one of the highest traffic sources.

*Something I do embarrassingly often when you compare it to the amount of hits I actually get.

2) it's the easiest way to stay in touch with my farthest-flung friends. (I possibly need to examine my priorities, having just put "promoting my blog" above "having and keeping friends" - but there you go.)

3) the messaging function is handy (especially if you and/or your partner are, to use the technical term, utterly shite with your phones) - in spite of the slightly weird way it tells you when someone's 'seen' your message. I'm certain that's caused a billion arguments since its introduction - "I know you got my message, Steve; what the hell were you doing that it took you four hours to reply, hmmm? HMMM???"

Let's be honest, I'll probably stay on Facebook; it still has its uses, and not enough of my friends get Twitter (what's to get, guys? Imagine a virtual pub, around the time of last orders, where everyone's having opinions quite loudly and merrily). It won't be long before the next social networking site lumbers into view.

On the Bambi bookshelf

It's another creepy stalker thriller; but a straightforward one this time, told from the victim's point of view. Wonderfully dark, the characters cling to you like cobwebs and show up in your dreams, long after you've finished reading. And finishing it won't take long - I'm a fast reader anyway, but I tore through this in a matter of hours. I think I may need to try and move away from stalker stories now, though, as they're starting to freak me out.

Get loud.

When under pressure, or placed in a stressful situation, some people get loud. They shout, sigh, huff, bang doors, slam pens and books on their desks. They cry, and spit snarky retorts across rooms. (I'm one of these people.) Other people go quiet. They retreat, tuck themselves and their messy, unravelling feelings away, and go very still and say nothing at all.

We suspected the Budget would be bad news for the young, poor and vulnerable, and our collective sense of dread turned out to be utterly justified. In short: "Housing benefit has been scrapped for 18-21 year olds, the new minimum wage will not apply to anyone under 25 and maintenance grants for poorer university students are gone, replaced with another loan. Our poorest students will now leave university with a higher debt than those from more affluent backgrounds" (from here).

The comment pieces that appeared in the days that followed were telling: "What have young people done to Osborne to deserve such contempt?" asked The Guardian's Polly Toynbee - to which I suspect the answer has less to do with what they have done and more to do with what what they didn't do - i.e. vote for a party that wasn't the Conservatives. Jonathan Freedland, also at The Guardian, had an interesting take on it. But it's Sali Hughes' piece on housing benefits, from The Pool, that best illustrates what these cuts will mean for young people.

It's simple, and stark - the less money and support you have, the smaller your world gets – and the bigger, darker and scarier the ‘outside’ becomes. Opportunities flicker and evaporate, and the chances to change your situation appear less and less often, and eventually stop cropping up altogether.

You come to a standstill. You are young – late teens, early twenties – but you are not how young people are ‘supposed’ to be, which is sociable, lively, ambitious, and energetic.

You have to spread your energy thinly, so eventually you stop moving, stop dreaming, stop fighting – because moving, dreaming and fighting require fuel and fire you cannot afford to expend.

You stop fighting your own corner, and don’t have anyone to fight it for you.

This is how you crush a generation – you take away their support, you make it harder still for them to progress, you all but tell them they don’t matter. They don’t have a place in this country; it isn’t built for them.

You write them out of their own stories; render them voiceless and inanimate. But in doing so, you set fire to the future. Because that’s what happens if you screw over the young – you burn any hope of a better future; you reduce all the cities and ideas and stories that would have come, had they been given even half a chance, to ash.

Those of us with voices and homes and fuel and heat must now get loud, on behalf of those without. Those of us who can act, should - march, protest, join societies, make it known that this is not what a lot of us voted for, this is not the society we want. Make some noise.


Sorry this is quite a bleak one. You know what's not bleak? This song. Just try not singing along. Just you try.

Give E.L. James a break

Plucked this one out of the air, to soothe my itchy keyboard fingers...

E.L. James did a Twitter Q & A on Monday, and it went exactly as you'd imagine. People didn't hold back - if you want to see the worst of it, check Buzzfeed's take on the conversation. I'm not going to link that one though, because it just seems horribly inevitable that they would screenshot the most scathing tweets, give them some captions and call it an article. Listicle. Whatever.

Although I've criticised the author in the past, and have spluttered with laughter and disbelief when I have dipped into the books, I'm kind of bored by the critical mauling she still seems to be getting.

I'm tired of people slagging her off because they all seem to have completely forgotten that Fifty Shades started as fan fiction. Have you read any fan fiction? That world is a topsy-turvy place. It can be hysterically funny, sexy, dark, wildly creative, and it's a fantastic concept when you think about it - people feeling so much affinity for fictional characters that they start making up their own stories for them - but ultimately, it's just a bit of fun. A writers' playground. Anything can happen in the fanfic world, and that's the beauty of it. People are writing Sherlock - Fault In Our Stars* crossovers. The joy of that is utterly endearing, isn't it? And besides, there are worse hobbies to have.

*They're also writing Sherlock - My Little Pony crossovers. That leap just boggles the mind, quite frankly.

By her own admission, Fifty Shades was James' "mid-life crisis writ large. All my fantasies [are] in there". She said that in an interview. So her critics are laying into her for 1) having the tamest mid-life crisis in history - I mean, come on, who rebels by sitting at a laptop and writing four books? That's the kind of mid-life crisis I want, please - and 2) for writing about her fantasies. God forbid a woman should have a non-vanilla fantasy, and be open about it, right?

And while we're on that bit about her mid-life crisis manifesting itself as a sudden need to write thousands and thousands of words, let's just consider that very thing for a moment. She's written four books - four hugely successful books - since January 2009. How many people do you know who reckon they could bash out a book? How many people do you know who've actually done it? I've been trying to do it on and off - more off than on - for months, and it's really hard. You need to write a lot of words, apparently.

With the publishing industry in its current state, and with so much Content Available For Free On The Bloody Internet (one of my favourite rants), shouldn't we be applauding the authors that sell like E.L. James, celebrating the unanticipated successes, taking heart from the fact that books, whole books, are being bought in their thousands, if not millions?

Aside from anything else, James is laughing all the way to her accountant and back again, as she's reportedly worth £37 million now.

There's a lot of well-thought-out, articulate criticism that's been levelled at her, and that's OK, for the most part - books, films, TV programmes, etc shouldn't be exempt from criticism just because their creators never expected them to become successful. Of course it's worth looking at how women, various minorities, sex, relationships, power and so on are being depicted in popular culture, because that culture can be used as a mirror for what's happening in the real world. And the internet has made discussing and criticising works of art and cultural phenomena something everyone can do. Almost anyone can compose a tweet, write a blog post, fire off a Facebook status. Again, that's great. We can discuss the latest episode of Games of Thrones or Humans as they're shown, in 'real time' and share our reactions, create a conversation. But I think we're still in the toddler-tantrum phase of the internet, really. We're still making the rules for this relatively new environment as we go, and we're not there yet. We haven't quite civilised the space, figured out the etiquette; there's still too much shouting and rage, too many trolls and vitriol.

We just need a little perspective - she's a woman who wrote a story to amuse herself, and it made her very rich. Good on her.

 

On the Bambi bookshelf

Oh, You. I have to admit, I ignored this several times when I came across it in various bookshops, writing it off as one of those trashy summer thrillers that you might grab at an airport WHSmith's, in the last ten minutes before boarding. I don't think it's possible for me to have been more wrong about it.
I found it in my local library - I'm currently a bit obsessed with the place - and the comparisons to Gone Girl reeled me in. (Say what you like about GG but it was one heck of a page-turner.) Having finished Hausfrau, I was in the mood for another addictive, read-in-one-hectic-go piece of literary ass, and damn, did You deliver.


It's a classic tale - boy meets girl, boy fancies girl, boy becomes so obsessed with girl that he follows her, steals her phone, hacks her email and social media channels, breaks into her apartment, gets into a relationship with her, and then things get a bit murdery... It's Fifty Shades if Christian never discovered BDSM* and instead went full psycho. There's no major twist - a couple of minors, sure, but nothing gasp-worthy - but the impact of the book comes from the fact that it's written from the stalker's point of view. He's a brilliant character (unlike Grey, then) and I so, so want to see a film version of this. I know a sequel's due shortly, but a film would be fantastic. It says a lot for Kepnes' skill as a writer that you end up empathising with Joe a lot more than you do with his victims. It even manages to be a bit sexy, in places (yes, I'm doing some major self-analysis as I type that).

Days later, I am missing this book, and Joe, really quite badly.

Here's a fitting song for this post. You'll know what I mean when you listen to it.

*Yes, I am aware that what happens in the Fifty Shades books isn't an accurate portrayal of BDSM.