Great gaffes of our time.

“Oh yes”, I twitter. “K brought a huge box of chocolates back from Belgium with him. Really good ones, as well.”

It is only then that I remember I’m talking to two senior members of the Thorntons chocolate family.

The words “Unlike all the mass produced crap you get over here” hang unspoken in the air between us.

It’s the sort of hole which you can’t realistically dig yourself out of. Could you?

For the record, I’m actually rather fond of Thorntons chocolate.

The 40 in 40 Days Project.
5. The First Single (1971)

In magazine questionnaires, musicians are often asked to name the first single they ever owned. The question is presumably designed to give us an indication of the artist’s earliest formative influences, and so the answers given are invariably – suspiciously – classics. Anarchy In The UK. My Generation. Starman. Virginia Plain. Dancing Queen. I Heard It Through The Grapevine. Heart Of Glass.

Mine – the record which single-handedly turned me on to rock and roll - was “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”, by Middle Of The Road.

Summer 1971 was the time when I first started following the singles charts, and over 30 years later, I still haven’t quite stopped. I’d just been given a transistor radio, and I’d found Radio One. Tony Blackburn at breakfast time, Jimmy Young in the mornings, Noel Edmonds, Dave Lee Travis, “Diddy” David Hamilton but most importantly of all, Alan Freeman’s “Pick Of The Pops” top 20 countdown on Sunday evenings. I visualised the singles chart by imagining all the artists standing in a line on little podiums. The number one act would be standing on the far left, in the foreground, brightly lit. The number two act would be next along on the right, slightly lower, slightly further back, slightly less well lit. And so on, snaking back to 20, to 40, to infinity. Every week, when the chart changed, I imagined all the acts swapping places - the climbers stepping up hopefully into the light, the fallers gradually slinking back into the shadows, the new entries descending onto their podiums in a puff of smoke. In this way, the charts were entirely personalised, bestowing a natural, endless drama upon the weekly statistical ritual.

My big songs of that summer were mostly catchy bubblegum. “Co Co” by The Sweet, “Tom Tom Turnaround” by New World, “Never Ending Song Of Love” by the New Seekers, “Me And You And A Dog Named Boo” by Lobo. Also, slightly more credibly, “Get It On” by T.Rex and “I’m Still Waiting” by Diana Ross. But “Chirpy Chirpy” was the one for me. A nice bouncy tune which you could sing over and over again on car journeys, and their singer Sally Carr looked so cool, carefree and groovy on Top Of The Pops, with her long blonde hair, mini-dress and boots. I thought it must be great to be a pop star – you’d just have fun all day long, and you’d live in a world where everything was shiny, colourful and new.

My father had just bought a cassette recorder, and he taped myself and my sister singing our own version of the tune, with my sister doing the “all together now!” bits towards the end. Later that Summer, he was helping out at a large Inland Waterways Association boat rally, by doing a spot of commentating over the site’s tannoy system. In between events, he took along some cassettes to play. He hadn’t written down what was on each cassette. Yup, you’ve guessed it. A couple of thousand boat enthusiasts from around the country were treated to the sound of Michael (9) and Mary Jane (7), sweetly trilling “Oo-wee, chirpy chirpy cheep cheep, chirpy chirpy cheep cheep chep (all together now!)”.

And the bastard let the tape run! We were mortified.

Middle Of The Road are still performing to this day, mostly in Germany from what I’ve gathered. Do you know what? I’d still quite like to see them.

The 40 in 40 Days Project.
4. The Toy Store (1980)

After A-levels in 1979, I had stayed on an extra term at boarding school in order to sit the Oxbridge examinations. I was applying to join Christ’s College Cambridge as a law student, where both my father and paternal grandfather had studied. One of the people interviewing me was a personal friend of my maternal grandfather (himself a QC and former master of the Inner Temple), who had been tipped off in advance about me. However, no nepotism in the world could have covered for the truly pathetic interview which I gave, nor for the pitiful exam papers which I submitted. Still, no matter – the Law department of Nottingham University had offered me a place, commencing in the autumn 1980. My future was secured.

So, how to fill the intervening nine months? The idea of staying in the war zone that was the family home, with my father and stepmother constantly rowing and constantly taking their anger out on me, was just too awful to contemplate. Three years of school holidays had done me quite enough emotional damage as it was. I needed to escape.

Which is why I shall always be eternally grateful to my aunt and uncle. No doubt knowing full well what was going on up in North Nottinghamshire, they discreetly offered me their spare bedroom in Loughton, Essex for the entire period, providing I could find a job in London. And so I wrote letters to all the major department stores, asking for work. Eventually, I was offered a job by Hamleys of Regent Street, the world’s largest toy store, commencing in January 1980.

On the morning of my last day at home, my father came bursting into my room in a particularly filthy temper. He was looking for an umbrella which he’d lent me a couple of days earlier. While I had been using it, the button had somehow come off the umbrella, so that it could no longer be closed properly. I hadn’t dared tell him. Now he discovered it for himself. Flying into a rage, he started trying to beat me on the backside with it. It’s the only time he ever attempted violence towards me, and he wasn’t making a very good job of it, but I was still already in tears when my stepmother Sally entered the room.

In a parallel life, Sally could have been a camp icon. With long blonde hair, a deep husky voice, a theatrical manner and a sometimes outrageous dress sense, she exuded a raddled glamour, a sexuality which could border on the threatening, but also an underpinning, redeeming, vulnerability. Take equal measures of Alexis Carrington Colby Dexter, Jilly Cooper, and Patsy Stone from Ab Fab, and you’ll get the general idea. Seriously. I’m not joking.

Anyway, on that particular morning, Sally was pure Alexis. She stood in the doorway, watching the pathetic scene of enraged father smiting whimpering son, and then simply said, in her iciest tones:

“John, don’t hit Michael. You might break the umbrella.”

After breakfast, she spoke to me again.

“Michael, you are leaving this house today. Frankly, up till now, you’ve been a bit of a bloody disappointment. I hope that in the next few months, you’ll do some growing up.”

On the train down to London, I resolved never again to spend more than three or four consecutive nights at home. I kept to that promise faithfully.

So, for the next few months, I commuted between Loughton and
Oxford Circus on the Central Line, and did my time as a sales assistant on the ground floor of Hamleys. At the time, the store was a few doors up from its current address, and the culture of the place was still of the old fashioned, “Are You Being Served?” variety. There were strict hierarchies within the company, and a great deal of the usual (though new to me) management pettiness and employee disgruntlement.

On the ground floor, there were a lot of freelance product demonstrators who weren’t employed directly by Hamleys. They were a great bunch, drawn to a great extent from “resting” performers and musicians. Our Lego lady was a former Tiller Girl, with legs to match. Our Pelhams puppets lady used to sing with big showbands, such as Jack Parnell’s. In her younger days, our Corgi lady used to do a “sexy stockings and suspenders” singing and comedy act in the clubs – by then, she was getting jobs as an extra on TV dramas such as Juliet Bravo. Our “Magic Plastic” demonstrator (you know, those do-it-yourself balloon kits where you squeeze a blob of gunk from a tube and inflate it – takes the polish off furniture, but we don’t tell them that) had played some gigs with The Members (“Sound Of The Suburbs”) and was forming a band with some former members of X-Ray Spex. Most of them didn’t give a stuff about the job, and so we’d have a good laugh and bitching session every lunchtime in the Dog And Trumpet or the Shakespeare’s Head at the top of Carnaby Street.

The biggest character of all, though, was our floor manager – Keith. He had been a full-on hippy love child in the 1960s (kaftans, bells, beads, flowers in the hair, technicolour love-ins at Alexandra palace, the lot) and had never really recovered. He claimed he’d “gone straight”, and so would sometimes attempt to prove this by displays of excessive authoritarianism. The rest of the time, he was a hoot. He would prowl round the floor like a subversive caricature of Captain Peacock in a bubble perm, trying to score dope off some of the younger assistants (and sometimes succeeding – you’d occasionally see lumps of hash being flung over the counter at him in full view of the punters), or sidling up to you while you were serving, with a hardcore porn mag hidden inside a Hamleys bag, which he’d then secretly show you as you were counting out the change (“What do you think of the snatch on that, Mr. Slater?”)

Don’t get the wrong idea though. Keith was immensely likeable and popular, and we developed a great banter with each other. He saw me as something of a “project”, and considered that, having led a sheltered life, I needed “bringing out of myself.”

On one memorable occasion, Keith approached me. “Mr. Slater, may I have a word with you please?”

“Certainly, Mr. H------“

“Some friends of mine are making a pornographic movie, Mr. Slater, and I wondered whether you would be interested in appearing in it. We are looking for an inexperienced, spotty schoolboy type such as yourself.”

He outlined the plot for me. Scene One: Mike walks down street, meets pretty lady. Scene Two: Mike and pretty lady back at her place, getting jiggy with it, at length. Scene Three. Pretty lady’s mother bursts in on us. She joins in. Scene Four. Mother’s lady friend bursts in on us. She also joins in. Cue credits.

I politely declined. What, I explained, would happen if my father were ever to see it?

I saved up my cash and in August 1980, left Hamleys and went Interailing round Europe on my own for a month, casting myself as Valerie Singleton in an extended “Blue Peter Special Assignment” and not getting myself into nearly enough trouble.

Many years later, I met someone who had worked at Hamleys a few years after me. I asked what had happened to Keith. It turned out that he had got progressively weirder, and had eventually taken his own life.

I did indeed do a lot of growing up down there.

Stories from the bible - in Lego. Beautiful.
(via Linklust - I'm getting to grips with blogging etiquette now).

K returns from Belgium; I dash round the house retuning all the radios before he gets in (*). He arrives with a large box of fantastic Neuhaus chocolates (three of the greatest delights of that much underestimated country: beer, chocolate and fashion). Even after the flight, he’s looking immaculate – tie still straight, not a crease in sight. That man was born to wear a suit and tie. My very own Niles Crane!

K also has a selection of Euros – notes and coins – my first sighting of the new currency. Always a fence-sitter on the integrated currency issue, he has returned as an enthusiast. He’d been visiting his international distributors, and had attended a sales meeting, along with representatives from half a dozen European countries. For the first time, the entire meeting was conducted with reference to the Euro only, and it simplified matters greatly. Everyone there seemed to be visibly enjoying their new ability to communicate on an equal footing. It just made complete sense.

This morning, after an entire week of existential pointlessness, I am finally given a small piece of work to do. This is a great relief.

Suppose I’d better get on with it, then.

(*) Though not before discovering the second decent single of 2002: The Chemical Brothers “Star Guitar”. After the disappointment of “It Began In Afri-kak-kak-kak”, this is a return to form. In a strange way, it strikes me as having something of the dynamic flow of Roger Sanchez “Another Chance”, though it’s quite different in stylistic terms (this is more twisted, more techno). There’s also a lovely, unlikely, soft choral sample which balances nicely with the toughness of the track.

This all bodes well for the forthcoming “Come With Us” album, around which there seems to be something of a Buzz right now. Why, even the jaded media hacks on the Popbitch message board have been praising it, and they rarely have a kind word to say about anybody, or anything…

The 40 in 40 Days Project.
3. The Simulated Wank (1985)

As a student, I did a fair amount of acting with the university dramatic society. However, competition for roles was fierce, and my confidence in auditions was initially weak. As a result, for the first couple of my five years at Uni, I could only land fairly ropey bit parts, in some fairly ropey productions (my Pablo Gonzales in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and my Fedotik in “Three Sisters” will not be remembered as dramatic triumphs).

However, on joining the German department in my second year, my stock rose, erm, dramatically. As seemingly the only available and willing German student with a previous acting record, I was immediately – without audition – cast in the leading role (der Heutige) in Max Frisch’s complex “Die Chinesische Mauer”, which was to be that year’s official German department production. It was a massive challenge: my first lead role, in a foreign language which I hadn’t studied for over two years, and I was to be on stage more or less constantly, with truly vast numbers of lines to learn. During the initial script readings, I couldn’t disguise the fact that I barely had a clue what my lines meant, and I could see several furrowed brows around the room, clearly thinking “My God, what have we done?”

Still, I rose to the challenge and the production was a great success. This lead to a casting the following year as Wang the water seller in Brecht’s “Der guter Mensch von Sezuan” (sod the alienation effect – we rewrote the songs with catchy little tunes, and I played Wang as “the audience’s friend”, rather in the style of Buttons, or Winnie The Pooh). Finally, after my year away in Berlin, I was cast as Hänschen Rilow in Frank Wedekind’s notorious expressionist drama Frühlings Erwachen.

This play, known in English as Spring Awakening, is a superb, powerful exploration of repressed adolescent sexuality. There is a rape, there is an abortion, there is group masturbation, and there is – gasp! – boy on boy kissing. It was banned in Germany for many years – and even in the 1980s, our professor was known to be opposed to idea of us staging a production. So, naturally, we waited until he was away on sabbatical, then did the play anyway.

I was delighted to find that my three scenes were as follows.



Scene One. A soliloquy. A water closet is wheeled on stage. The door swings open. I am in my nightshirt, sitting on the toilet, looking at a postcard reproduction of a classical nude and getting all steamed up. Eventually, frustrated by the refusal of the image to come to life, I rip the postcard up, and chuck it down the toilet. The door shuts, and I am wheeled off to the sound of flushing.



Scene Two. A home for disturbed boys. Again in my nightshirt, I join a circle of boys who proceed to do the “wanking onto a coin” game. Originally, our producers wanted this to be accompanied by Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax” – but we talked them out of it. We had no need of such cheap stunts!



Scene Three. A love scene – between me and the most handsome lad in the department, I was delighted to discover. Result!

Actually, the rehearsals were painful. I think the poor guy was terrified of having to do that scene, bless him. As for me, my coming out process had by then reached the stage where most people in the department probably knew I was gay, but I still didn’t talk about it, except to my immediate circle of friends. So, unfortunately, I was just as uncomfortable in rehearsals as he was.

There was also an unavoidable part of the scene where I had to kiss him on the lips. “Er küßt ihn auf den Mund.” Can’t get clearer than that, I suppose. By performance time, I was quite comfortable with this (after all, he was gorgeous) – but on watching the video afterwards, you can quite clearly see him swiftly recoiling from me as if he’d been given an electric shock. It must have been such a horror for the poor lad…



The production was a resounding hit – so much so, that we were asked to take it down to London as part of that year’s national German student drama festival.

And so it came to pass that I ended up having a simulated wank in front of the German ambassador.

Bang went any chance of a future career in the Foreign Office.

And I never acted on stage again.

In this day and age, I could almost believe this. It actually works, as well!

If this leaves you somewhat baffled, there's a further explanation here.

I've said it before (though not on here), and I'll say it again (now you're all listening). Magnetic Fields "Sweet Lovin' Man" could sound really great as a cheesy hi-energy Almighty Records cover version. Doncha think?

Oh, and I stumbled across a promising new blog. Only a few days old, but so many words already. And good ones at that!

Also...Adrian at insubstantial, cheers for that.
(all together now: outboard. river. blue tail. tail fly...)

Last time I had a hangover this monstrous, I spent the day communicating via single sentences only. Today, I’m not sure I can even manage that – but let’s try, shall we.

With K away in Belgium for the night, Buni and I had a night on the tiles together. World Service for a classy start to the evening, then the familiar trek: Lord Roberts, @d2, NG1. NG1 was busy, but felt like a youth club, and I felt like the trendy vicar in the corner. Still, we danced. “Crying At The Discotheque” and “Flawless” being our top tunes of the night.

Then, just as we had our coats on to leave, Hall and Oates “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” came on – the original as well, not some ghastly remix. Straight back on the floor (by now almost empty), coats flung to the ground beside us, mouthing as many of the words as we could remember. Ah, such drunken bliss.

Which is why I didn’t get out of bed till 9am this morning. Good job the office is only 10 minutes walk away.

I was talking to Buni about the Boy George “thought of the day” from yesterday, and discovered that he firmly disagreed with it. However, we were by then too pissed to be able to mount much of a discussion, so I made him promise to convey his thoughts on his own blog this evening. I’m interested in his perspective, as a) he’s 10 years younger than me and b) he used to hang out with Boy George and his crowd in the late 1980s. Also, he hasn't updated since Christmas Eve, and I think it's time he did (I can be a bully sometimes, but it's always for your own good, d'you hear?)

Ouch, my head. I can’t believe I ran out of Nurofen. Stupid, stupid boy.

With apologies to my more erudite, mature readers...

I've been wondering for a while whether Big Rik was persuaded to take a bung in return for throwing the match. But for this?

The 40 In 40 Days Project.
2. The Step-stepfather (1994-96)

From around 1979 onwards, I would regularly use James Hamilton’s weekly “disco” column in Record Mirror as a useful shopping guide, whenever I fancied a danceable alternative to all the “John Peel music” I was buying at the time. The first 12-incher I bought on the strength of his column was Edwin Starr’s “Contact”, closely followed by the long forgotten “Change” by Zulema (produced by Van McCoy, it still sounds wonderful to this day – maybe someone will eventually discover it).

One day in the summer of 1982, I followed three recommendations in the James Hamilton column. “Walking On Sunshine” by Rockers Revenge, “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash, and “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force. These three radical new tunes – stark, stripped down, electronic yet still soulful – were for me a kind of musical epiphany, matched only by the impact of punk at the back end of 1976.

From then on, James Hamilton’s column was required weekly reading. It was the first section I would turn to in Record Mirror, more often than not during the walk back from the newsagents. I would meticulously scrutinise every last word - re-reading the same columns over the next few weeks as the pre-releases gradually became available - keeping months of back issues to hand for cross reference purposes – circling the tracks I owned on the RM club chart - marking them with a T if I only had them on cassette off the radio – marking them with a hyphen if they were tracks on my “want list” – and so on, and so on, fairly obsessively.

The great thing about James Hamilton’s column was that he always attempted to describe the music as accurately as he could, rather than letting too many of his own opinions get in the way. To this end, he more or less invented his own descriptive language, which made more sense the longer you read the column. If James said a record was “a 0-116-0 initially chix cooed gently lurching and jiggling then stridently wailing and cantering purplish electrophonic boom-boom-boinker”, you kind of knew what the track was going to sound like.

From late 1986 to late 1989, while I was DJ-ing my own club nights, James’s column became my bible. From late 1989 to the sad week in 1991 when Record Mirror folded, I continued to maintain the habit. Even after that, I would often catch his column in the “rm” pullout section within Music Week, or in “Jocks” magazine (which eventually mutated into today’s “DJ” magazine).

And then, in late Spring 1994, around six months after my father died, my stepmother Sally started dating him. By the end of 1994, they were married. Which kind of made James Hamilton, by the most extraordinary coincidence imaginable, my step-stepfather.

In the Summer of 1994, Sally brought James to Nottingham, to meet me and K over dinner. Understandably, she was very nervous about this. How would I feel, meeting her new partner so soon after my father’s death? Would I view it as an insult to his memory? Well, of course I was absolutely fine about the whole thing. How could I not be – she was going out with my musical guru!

For a DJ, James cut the most unlikely figure. He was tall, always smartly dressed in jacket and tie, and with a decidedly patrician, slightly aloof, almost authoritarian manner. Try and imagine a cross between Colonel Sanders and James Robertson Justice, and you’ll be halfway there. But I took to him instantly. The two of us spent almost the entire evening talking about music to a highly detailed degree, no doubt boring K and Sally to death in the process. I soon discovered with delight that he was every bit the obsessively passionate enthusiast I’d imagined him to be, with encyclopaedic knowledge of every last fact, and seemingly perfect memory recall. Hey, quite like me really!

He was also a great name dropper. Hey, quite like me really! Except that James actually had some names worth dropping.

In the 1960s, he’d been the resident DJ at London’s hippest mod club, The Scene. He’d worked in another club owned by the Kray twins – the Beatles would regularly pop in. He accompanied the Beatles on their first trip to the States in 1964. He helped organise James Brown’s first UK tour. He hung out with Miles Davis. He dated Philly singer Dee Dee Sharpe (of “Easy Money” fame), who later married Kenny Gamble (I love the thought of my parents being on the same Bonk Chart as Gamble and Huff).

In the late 1970s, James visited New York’s Paradise Garage club, where the now legendary Larry Levan was the resident DJ. This was his first exposure to beat-synched mixing, and it blew his mind. He returned to the UK, then dragged other members of the “London Soul Mafia” DJ-ing fraternity back out to NYC to hear it for themselves. Everyone’s jaws hit the floor. From that point onwards, James included “beats per minute” counts with all his singles reviews, measured with scientific precision by a stopwatch and his trademark “clickers”. Basically, he was responsible for introducing the concept of BPMs to the UK.

James had always lived alone, and had never married. Now in his mid-fifties, he finally moved away from London, and in with Sally, into the house in North Nottinghamshire which I had known since the age of 3. Straight away, he had the letterbox widened so that it could take the deliveries of 12” singles and albums which poured through almost daily, stacking up in the old breakfast room. He continued writing his Music Week and “DJ” columns from the living room table, always working right through the night on copy deadline day. I found it utterly bizarre that my old family home, where I had always been criticised as a teenager for spending too much time playing pop music, was now home to all the hottest, most upfront white label pre-releases.

Just a few days after marrying Sally in late 1994, James discovered that he had cancer. (*) The last time I saw him alive was on June 16, 1996, sitting up in bed, his skin an eerie shade of yellow, but still perfectly lucid. His last words to me, as I left the room, were “Stay cool”. The next day, he was dead.

James had left a set-list for his funeral, which was played as a medley in church by his old friend Pete Wingfield on electric piano. It started with Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender”, which had been played at his wedding to Sally. It ended with James Brown’s “Night Train”, with Pete Wingfield reluctantly obeying strict instructions to commence the track by shouting “All aboard, the Night Train!” The original vocal sample had just been back in the charts as part of Kadoc’s dance hit “The Nighttrain” – a big Tall Paul Newman Trade anthem at the start of that year, which I had gone mental to on many a sweaty Sunday morning (it was the height of my Tradebabe phase). Maybe it was to some extent James’s parting nod to the contemporary – I like to think so, at any rate.

Now widowed for the third time in 20 years, my stepmother was never really quite the same again. Always a heavy drinker, she had stopped almost entirely in order to nurse James through his illness. Now, she started again. Less than three years later, she was dead from liver failure. Her 17 year marriage to my father had been conducted in an almost constant state of war, but her short marriage to James had been like an Indian summer of happiness for her. I’m glad she had at least a taste of that in her life.

To this day, every now and then, I catch myself thinking “F**king Hell! Sally married James Hamilton!” I’ll never quite get over it.

---

(*) My thanks to L.A. for the following amendment:

"The only correction I would make to your account is that both James and Sally knew about James' cancer before they got married, but I don't know if they told everyone. This makes Sally a remarkable woman indeed and in case you were not aware of this fact, I thought it might give you another wonderful thought to have about her, and how special her relationship with James was. They adored each other as you say. She took him on knowing he was dying...quite a remarkable lady."

Until a couple of days ago, when I first read the answer to question 2 of Chig's quiz, I'd never even heard of him. And now he is no more.

Pop quizzes. Oh, how I love them. This is all getting very incestuous.

For the third (and final) day running, I have effectively no work to do. At all. The project I've been working on since I joined this place last Summer was wrapped up last Friday, and there'll be no new work assigned till tomorrow.

Thank goodness there's blogging to give meaning to my existence!

Taboo - the musical.

There are at least two key aspects of youth culture in 1980s Britain which, I feel, will never be "revived". One: the sheer political fervour of the times ("Which side are you on?" "Wearing badges is not enough / in days like these"). Two: the wacky hairdos.

After punk, after the New Romantics, the scene based around London's Taboo club in 1985-86 now looks like the last, desperate gasp of elitist, individualist "wacky hairdo culture", before post-Live Aid cultural homogeneity set in, followed closely by the egalitarianism of the acid house explosion. And now they're turning it into a musical! (*) Hurrah!

At the end of an interesting, appetite-whetting piece in today's Guardian, dear old Boy George says something strikingly perceptive. I'm taking his second sentence as my thought for today.(*) The official website's a bit shit, and you need Flash, but it's better than nothing.

I have a new regular blog to read: Dave In London. Well, he was nice about mine first (I am a sucker for a compliment). And he writes very well (I am a sucker for language). And, um, there's another reason (I'm a sucker for that as well).

The 40 In 40 Days Project.
1. The Au Pairs (1966-68)

As a family, we were still quite posh in the 1960s. Sort of lower end of upper middle. So, of course, we had to have au pairs. There were five in all:

Au Pair Number One was Genevieve, just 16 years old, from Paris. She was a feisty, wild, free, rebellious spirit (by our sheltered standards, at least) – full of fun and laughter – so my sister and I loved her, of course. Whilst my parents were deeply suspicious, of course.

Genevieve was eventually sent home early in disgrace. My father had to haul her out of one of the village pubs after midnight, where she was found enjoying a lock-in with a bunch of long distance lorry drivers. Atta girl!

Au Pair Number Two was Elsa, from Austria. She used to sit me on her knee and teach me German nursery rhymes (eins zwei drei! pikka pokka pei!). I thought she was lovely.

So lovely that – on her very first day – I took her down to a spot at the bottom of the garden which I’d named “Thoughtful Place”, and asked her to marry me. When my grandmother came down to see where we were, I apparently told her “Go away Granny – Elsa and I are getting married!”

Of course, she turned me down and I turned queer instead. That’s where it all started, you know! From a broken heart!

Au Pair Number Three was Noelle, from a village near Barbizon, south of Paris. She was more of a distant figure at the time, who spent more time helping my mother round the house than playing with me and my sister. In fact, I even complained about this once to my parents. Oh, I knew my rights.

Despite this, Noelle was the only au pair with whom we stayed in touch. Every Easter for a few years afterwards, I would fly out unaccompanied to Paris or Boulogne, to stay with her and her family. She would let me into her secrets (“Do not tell my father! He will be very angry!”) and I would meet her boyfriends (I particularly remember a dishy communist called Jean).

Noelle was – is! – obsessed with Thomas Hardy, and we used to think that she was rather too fond of casting herself as one of his tragic heroines, forever to be doomed in love. However, the real thing finally came in the shape of a jolly road sweeper, who she took up the aisle in Summer 2000.

My mother and I flew out for the wedding, which was held in a large church in the small town of Milly-en-le-Foret, where Noelle works as an English teacher. She also sings with a choir, who were all there to sing for her in church, in a programme of music which she’d carefully chosen for the occasion. As the choir sang to her (quite beautifully, I might add), she came down the aisle with her groom from across the social divide (some her family disapproved strongly of the match, and boycotted the wedding). Well into her fifties, and with half her face semi-paralysed from a stroke many years earlier, she looked serene, yet somehow triumphant at the same time. Love had finally come at last. I cried and cried. It’s the only time I’ve ever cried at a wedding.

Au Pair Number Four was Anne, from a small Finnish coastal town called Rauma. Like Genevieve, she was fun, always laughing, and always had time to play games with us. Also like Genevieve, she was a teenage “looker” who could wrap all the local boys round her little finger – and she knew it. But none of them ever really got anywhere with her (not for want of trying, either) – as soon as she got back to Finland, she got engaged to the boy from back home, and married him not long afterwards.

Au Pair Number Five was Tuula, also from Rauma. Unlike Anne, Tuula was a reserved, morose figure. She would sit quietly in the living room, reading for hours on end. Her reading material? An English dictionary, which she was reading from cover to cover as if it were a novel.

No-one knew how to get through to her. Everyone found her weird, difficult. What nobody knew at the time was that Tuula’s parents were in the process of splitting up – she had taken the au pair position as a way of escaping her miserable home life.

Various eligible boys in the village were introduced to her – she showed no interest in any of them. In fact, there was only one person whom she would open up to. Me, as it happens! Tuula and I got on famously well. We would go into little huddles in my room, and she would tell me all about Finland – I was fascinated, and badly wanted to visit. She even taught me simple conversational Finnish, which I used with glee.

I don’t know what became of her, but I hope she found happiness. As it was, I didn’t get to visit Finland until 1994, by which time I’d forgotten all my Finnish except the numbers and the days of the week.

Ever seen the 1959 film Upstairs And Downstairs? Well, it was all a bit like that in our family for a while. There was just one thing I couldn’t understand: why didn’t we ever get Au Pair Boys? I got quite wistful over this. Wouldn’t it be great to have an Au Pair Boy to play with me and tuck me up in bed at night?

Hmmm. I’m saying nothing else….

The first decent single of 2002?

If I'm alone in the house after K leaves for work, or if he's away on business, then I get the rare treat of being able to listen to Radio One in the mornings (when K is around, only the Today programme will do). So this morning, I was delighted to hear a new cover version of Monsoon's 1982 hit "Ever So Lonely", as re-recorded by Jakatta (a.k.a. Joey Negro, a.k.a. Raven Maize, a.k.a. loads of other names).

It's a decent, respectful, dancey update of the long forgotten Indo-pop hit, done much the same style as "Ray Of Light" (actually, you can sing the verses of "Ray Of Light" along with it - I know because I tried). The vocals sounded just like Sheila Chandra's originals, so maybe they've been re-used, or else they've got Sheila Chandra back in to re-record them, or else they've found a good soundalike.

N.B. I last heard Sheila Chandra a few years back on Jools Holland's "Later", doing an amazing virtuoso unaccompanied vocal piece called "Speaking In Tongues", where her voice mimicked Indian percussion instruments. She's quite the serious "world" musician these days, I think. Hope this single makes her a few bucks. It's out at the start of February.

Those of you who are experienced bloggers will already know this, but I've just discovered the blogdex URL search. Type in the URL of a weblog, and it will show you which other sites have linked to it. It will also give you a ranking, based on the number of links you have received (providing you've received more than one link, that is).

Typing in the URLs of the blogs I read on a regular basis (see left hand sidebar), I discover not.so.soft at 68, brainsluice at 246, swish cottage at 453, blogadoon at 920 and over your head at 1386. Then there's a big gap, followed by the midfielders. Then another big gap. Then, troubled_diva. At number 12,787.

Clearly, there's work to be done!

Actually, no there isn't. I quite like being an obscure little cult blog. It also means I can link directly to pictures on other sites without feeling guilty about the extra traffic it creates.

Right, hopefully that will be my last self-referential posting about The Act Of Blogging for some time. On with the content!

If you want to know the answers to Chig's 2001 fiendish pop quiz, go look at the comments - they're all there now.

Incidentally, Chig has his own blog, which he's just started updating again after a few weeks' inactivity.

Shit my boyfriend and I talk about.
(with apologies to Mil Millington)

Over the last few nights, K has started squirting the room with Molton Brown Paradisi Air & Travel Spray, just before getting into bed.

By the time I get upstairs, the air is thick with the stench of Product. I look at K lying in bed, reading Harry Potter.

“Ugh – it smells like a poof’s parlour in here.”

He replies in a matter of fact tone. “Well, it is a poof’s parlour.”

“Yeah, I know, but couldn’t we butch it up a bit? Make it smell like a…Locker Room, or something?”

To this end, I let out a loud, long fart. K throws me a look over the top of his glasses. I shrug.

“Got to do something to get rid of the stench, haven’t I?”

We both collapse in giggles.

This is the sort of shit that my boyfriend and I talk about. On a regular basis.

The My Way Blog Awards.

Hooray! Forget the bloggies - here are the official blog awards for us no-mark D-listers! Vote now!

The 40 Days To 40 Project.

Tomorrow, there will be just 40 days left before I turn 40. Which is all the excuse I need for yet another list - sorry, Project. I'm going to count down the remaining days by writing about 40 different events in my life - one per day. These will be taken more or less randomly from a short list which I've drawn up, so don't expect any sort of consistent narrative flow.

Some entries will be uplifting, some will be dramatic, some will be funny, some will be depressing, some will be easy to write, some will be difficult, some will be long, some will be short. With luck, they should all be of interest.

Gulp. I've committed myself now, haven't I?

Pop Idol eviction predictions.


1 - Rosie. As I've said here before, I can't bear that singing voice of hers, and - like Simon Cowell says - she comes across as "surly".


2 - Zoe. I'm not a fan. Thought she murdered "Street Life", and her performances are too over-eager and "please please love me". She's still very young, and it shows - think she'll benefit from maturity.


3 - Gareth. He hasn't raised his game - still the same as he was on the very first show. If he's not doing ballads and staring up into the middle distance like a cute ickle bushbaby, then he's a bit lost. A one trick pony.


4 - Hayley. She's not really my cup of tea personally, but I do think she's the most talented of the gals by some distance. Grimly effective.


5 - Darius. The nation loves to see an underdog fighting back. He has become strangely endearing, and he's also hugely talented, dammit - in that cheesy cabaret way of his. He's a man out of time, who should have been around doing variety shows in the early 70s - I could just see him in a big velvet dickie bow and frilly shirt. My career advice to Darius: he would be PERFECT to represent the UK at Eurovision. How the matrons of Europe would clasp him to their collective bosom!


6 - William. As far as K and I are concerned, the runaway favourite. He has the personality to match the talent, and he keeps picking great songs as well - his "Ain't No Sunshine" on Saturday was - honestly - stunning. Right up there.

We shall see...

Freudian Slip du jour.
Erm, oops!

Chig's lyric quiz - the answers.