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Aug 29

I haven’t bought 1, let alone 2012 tickets!

Do you ever feel like you’re missing out on something? Over the past few months I’ve been thinking I might just be the one remaining person left in the country who hasn’t got tickets for the Olympics. “Maybe it’s because you’re an Australian” one of my friends said or “maybe it’s because you’re not.. .well, you know, really all that sporty looking” said another. (That was the one I’ve made a mental note not to send a Christmas card to by the way). After explaining that us ‘chubbies’ do indeed have eyes and a brain, thus the ability to watch sports, I was still left thinking maybe I should have joined the crowds who hysterically thrust out their hand (and wallet) to nab tickets to sports they’ve never heard of. Worse still, I’d even started thinking my workmate Trev was ‘lucky’ to have paid over  a thousand pounds for tickets to Wimbledon, followed by football……… in Coventry.

 

Anyway recently I heard a politician, can’t remember which, loudly proclaim that the 2012 Olympics would be ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’! So I guess it’s only natural people stampeded to the website, because you don’t want to be the only one that misses out, do you?…. Even if you can’t name any athletes who compete in half the sports you’ve signed up for.  This is what really amused me, because when I looked at the list of sports which sold out quicker than a supermarket clears fans on a hot day, it struck me that I don’t know one single person who has ever, or would ever pay to see a game of table tennis, hand ball, water polo or synchronised swimming. Nor do I know anyone who would part with cash to watch wrestling or Judo. In fact I can actually recall my best friend’s own parents even made excuses to drop her off rather than hang around to watch her learning such a dull sport. And don’t start me on the BMX. I may be wrong, but wasn’t the last BMX bike that anyone over the age of 12 showed any interest in, last seen flying into the sky at the end of a Steven Spielberg movie?

 

I know sports don’t have to be sexy to be fun, believe me I know this first hand. From about the age of nine I spent every Saturday morning playing golf. (It was the bush and there wasn’t much to do). I also know I probably WILL find myself staying up late to watch telly during the Olympics for no other reason than it’s “The Olympics”. Admittedly though the sport I’m secretly looking forward to watching the most is archery, not the least because one of the American competitors, I think his name is Kevin Costner, is an incredible shot! Plus if he wins I know most of the words to their national anthem. Although I tend to get lost after the ‘everything I do I do it for you’ bit.

 

Jun 27

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In a jam

Have you ever wondered how many is too many when it comes to taking souvenirs from a hotel? Reason I ask is on the weekend I think one of my friends severely overstepped the mark, yet when I asked the guys I work with most of them said ‘You pay for it in your room price anyway’. Admittedly I’m not talking about thieving anything as large as a bath robe (or even a bed which I’ve since discovered once went missing from an American hotel). The offending articles were just a bunch of miniature pots of jam. Yes I know, who’d be desperate enough to nick jam worth about two pounds from a hotel you were paying about 200 quid a night to stay in? Answer: my friends.

Picture the scene. There we were just finishing breakfast when my friend picked up a jar. No sooner had we started discussing how practical they were for a single person, than she had tucked a few into her bag. Feeling guilty, I then shuffled a few from the stand at my end of the table onto hers to make the theft look less obvious. Then, almost before I could blink, she’d shovelled those into her handbag as well. By my reckoning at that stage the score stood at Hotel nil – Handbag 6.

This then sparked the following conversation between everyone at the table,

Friends: “We could have eaten them so what difference”?

Me: “But we didn’t eat them so it’s stealing’.

Friends: ‘Yes but we could have, so putting them in a bag is just the same as eating them’.

Me: ‘Given long enough a human being could eat this chair, does it mean you can put it in your handbag too’?

Not sure if you noticed, but I can be a little obnoxious at times.

Wondering what the rules are when it comes to hotel souvenir etiquette, I paid a visit to my one great source of knowledge (the internet) and tried to find out. Turns out there aren’t that many. Toiletries, the shoe polisher, paper and pens are all fair game, but if anything else ‘accidentally’ falls into your suitcase, you shouldn’t stress about the price of sending it back, because legally the hotel can add any replacement costs to your bill.

So as my criminal friends tuck into their ill gotten gains this week, I know that I for one will be sleeping easy in the knowledge my home isn’t full of contraband. Mind you my easy sleep may also be aided by the fact that every evening I’m able to enjoy a relaxing shower using the luxurious Aqua Di Parma products I nicked from the Ritz Carlton in Bahrain. You see, a friend told us if you lock the toiletries away in your room safe each morning, the staff must replace them.

After two years we’re about half way through the £500 worth of showers, gels and shampoos we brought home with us.

Jun 15

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Fathers Day

I saw an advert for Father’s Day the other day. It featured the world’s most beautiful man, with his stunning wife, and two children who could have been genetically bred to resemble a real life Ken and Barbie. The dad was unwrapping some kind of power tool, and everyone one was smiling so much I found myself wondering if any of them had pulled a cheek muscle during the photo shoot. I know I was supposed to look at the picture and think the only way to give a man that kind of smile was to buy him a power tool for Father’s Day, but come on, there are only a few things you can give a man that will make him smile like that, and most of them don’t involve a power tool.

So what is the ideal gift to get a dad on Father’s Day? Well, failing him giving you a list, I think the best thing you can give a dad this Sunday is the knowledge he’s ‘done good’. Take it from someone who over the years has wasted a lot of money on golf accessories, gimmicky books and completely useless gadgets. Blokes aren’t like us girls, they don’t ‘need’ gifts on special occasions. Unlike us they’re lucky enough to be blessed with a trigger in their brain that says ‘that’s just tat’. This year we will have been without my dad for five years and if he’s up there watching, I’m sure a part of him is probably thankful for five years of ‘executive gifts’ he hasn’t had to unwrap.

On the weekend I was sitting beside a friend who was holding his four week old son. He was completely smitten and you could tell he now had one mission in life – to do everything he possibly can to help his son grow up to be happy and healthy adult. Don’t know about you, but telling your dad he’s managed to do that seems a far better present than a pair of socks.

So to my dad, and any others out there who; ran behind their child’s bike the first time they rode it (and put plaster on their knee when they fell off); who collected their daughter when she broke her ankle skating at age 13 (and bargained the cost of setting it down to a carton of beer); who didn’t get mad when you caught your daughter reading Famous Five by torchlight after her bedtime, and who was always on hand to chauffer her to countless sleepovers (yes mum I know you did too, but it wouldn’t be fitting to mention that while talking about Father’s Day), I just wanted to say, you did a great job.

Take it from someone who once had to say her final goodbye to her dad over the phone, if there ever was a day you should pick up the phone to say hello and thanks to your dad, it’s this Sunday.

Jun 12

Wychwood 2011

Glamping


Well, well, well. Campers of Oxfordshire, you’ve got a little secret don’t you? Every weekend hundreds of you head out into the countryside to get back to nature and ‘rough it’.

Or do you?

For many years I’ve stood by and watched as several of my friends have packed up their boots, trailers and campervans and embarked upon their annual trek into the wilderness. I’ve listened as they’ve bravely told me tales of having to do without basic necessities, and I’m not too embarrassed to say I’ve even marvelled at their stories of surviving by foraging for nuts and berries.

That was until last weekend. You see, until then the closest I’d ever been to the world of camping was… well.. a store called ‘The World of Camping’. So in my naivety I’d imagined all campers belonged to a super race of humans who are all able to build a tent out of tree branches and a piece of string. Safe to say that opinion was changed for good on the weekend when I toddled off to Cheltenham to the Wychwood Music Festival. (For those of you living under a rock it’s a music and literary festival held within the Cheltenham Race Course each year).

While there I got a sneak peak at how the so called ‘professional campers’ do it when I was allowed to enter their world  (that section on campsites where you see all the super trailers and big white vans that us tent owners can only dream of affording to stay in). As I walked into their enclosure, bravely holding my fluorescent green wristband aloft for the security man to see I don’t mind telling you it all felt a bit like I was crossing the border into another country, waving my arm in a special salute to secure access. It was all so unfamiliar, and well, so big! Kind of like a campsite for the cast of The Land of The Giants. The first thing that caught my eye was how many vans were decked out with satellite dishes and awnings bigger than most apartments I’ve lived in! Then came the generators which I mistakenly thought were for a little light at night. Wrong. Nowadays these are used to power iPads, televisions, telephone chargers and games consoles. Outside was no better either. The humble campfire has been replaced with the deluxe four burner BBQ, and if you don’t want to line up with the great unwashed, you can also get your own posh wash private shower cubicle, which can be accessorised with a portable ‘loo with a view’ privacy canopy.  Sofas, carpets, fridges, the toughest thing these people had to do on the weekend was decide whether to drink the red or the white.   I’m told they call it glamping, but with all the fancy accessories and fairy lights hanging from the awnings I think they got it right when they called it camping.


 

May 25

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Mid Summer Nightmare…

Have you ever noticed there are some people in the world who always manage to back the right horse, or be in the right place to make an extra bob while the rest of us are never quite that lucky? This year I had planned to change all that. This year I was going to be one of ‘those people’. And after five long months of waiting, plotting and scheming, this week was supposed to be the week I would be able to look in the mirror and say ‘Sue you are a genius..

Sadly it didn’t quite turn out that way. The sorry tale started back in January with my best friend’s mother calling to say she’d seen David Tennant and Catherine Tate on telly talking about their new play. Within moments I was online determined to get tickets to see the lovely Mr Tennant and whatshername in London. Unfortunately, so it seemed, so was the rest of the country. After enduring nearly an hour of the ticket site crashing, freezing and just generally being unable to handle the demand of Tennant’s adoring fans, I eventually found myself at the payment screen.

Poised to pay I noticed they’d accidentally doubled my ticket order. What to do? I daren’t press the ‘back’ button and risk losing out, so I threw caution to the wind thinking, ‘I’ll sell the extra tickets on eBay’! So, parting with nearly £500, I knew all I had to do was sit back and wait for my tickets to arrive… and wait.. and wait. After a month I phoned the box office to be told they weren’t be sending out tickets until just before the performance to discourage touts and forgers. Feigning disbelief someone would do such a thing I told them I was very concerned I wouldn’t be able to give my elderly relative the tickets for his birthday and couldn’t they make an exception? (No they couldn’t). Changing tack I emailed an official complaint a week later stating it was illegal to change the condition of sale. (Apparently it’s not). Finally after four months of waiting they arrived, and no sooner were they in my hands than I had them up on eBay. Anxious for a sale I concocted a story about having to sell them for my mother who had broken her ankle at Easter. I mean who would lie about Easter?

Finally five months of stress and worry was all about to pay off. My eBay auction was coming to its conclusion. With just a few hours to go I could see that no less than 14 potential buyers were watching, this was going to be a catfight! So as I sat practising my subtle but fitting new signature, Sue the box office billionaire, I noticed the auction had ended. Nervously I clicked on the link to see they had indeed sold….. for £10 less than I’d originally bought them for.

By the way, the name of play?

Much ado about nothing.

May 19

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Dear Hollywood….

I know the economy is in a bit of a state, and there’s a fair chance a new war will erupt in the middle east any day now, but quite frankly this week it will take something much bigger than them to beat the most depressing piece of news I’ve received in a while, and that is the fact that Top Gun is turning twenty-five. (If you’re not familiar with the movie, it’s a tender love story between a man, his best friend and a plane. There also might have been a girl in there somewhere too).

At the risk of seeming like a slightly over dramatic 39 year old who is desperately fighting growing old, or ‘up’ for that matter, Hollywood how could you have let this happen? Surely there should be some sort of rule where when any movie involving a childhood heartthrob reaches the age of say ten, that we all agree to never speak of its original release date ever again? I bit like the Labour Party and Gordon Brown. I really think this could be a win-win situation. All we the audience have to do is promise to do is pretend we don’t notice all of the nips and tucks our ageing pinups have had while all Hollywood has to do is  end their fascination with releasing commemorative boxed sets which only serve to remind  us our glory years are behind us.

Although that said, after a quick trawl back through history, I’m not exactly sure 1986 should be described as ‘glory years’.  After all it was the year millions of us became addicted to Neighbours on the BBC, 500 million of us watched Prince Andrew marry Sarah Ferguson at Westminster Abbey, and Channel Four received complaints from nearly that many people for broadcasting the first advert for a sanitary towel ever on British Television.  No wonder a movie featuring semi naked fighter pilots has been so fondly imprinted on our brains.

So as an entire new generation of people line up at American cinemas to watch Top Gun on the big screen for it’s (whispered) ‘25th Anniversary’, I say damn you Hollywood, damn you for making me wonder just how old all of my former teen pinups are. Furthermore damn you Google for making it so easy to find out!  If you’re a child of the mid 80s you might want to turn the page now, because discovering that Tom Cruise and Michael J Fox are both getting ready to celebrate their 50th birthdays is a shock you really don’t need. Nor do we need to know that The Hoff ( who, just to be clear was only on my pinup list in his Knightrider years), is edging towards his 60th. Tom Selleck, the only man to ever look good in a Hawaiian shirt, is celebrating his 66th birthday, and worst still, my final ‘hottie’ Harrison Ford is not far off his 70th birthday! OH – MY – GOD, I can remember my grand dad being 70.

Forget about the need for speed,  I feel the need for stiff drink.

May 11

Spring Clean

Last year I made a life changing decision, ok admittedly I was forced in to it by a severe lack of money, but nonetheless, it was still life changing, and having just done a huge spring clean, I’m so glad I did.

It’s official, I have given up my addiction to ‘new gadgets’. Fancy phones, iPods, iPod touches, game consoles, fancy computer tablets….forget about diamonds, gadgets used to be the way to this girls heart. I know that means I’ve just outed myself as a big geek, but I’m kind of proud of it. I don’t mind if you know I get excited by the fact my phone has a weather ‘app’ which makes a mini windscreen wiper swipe across it on a rainy day. (I should have left that bit out shouldn’t I? It makes me look really sad and goes a long way to describing the single bit of Sassy and Single doesn’t it?) But have you noticed how now more than ever, our addiction to having the ‘latest anything’, means no sooner have you worked out how to turn  your shiny new purchase on, than a newer, better and very tempting version of it is already on the shelves?

Makes me wonder where all this ‘out of date’ stuff will end up. During a recent clean up it felt really wrong to throw out an old computer monitor which although it was in perfect working order, was fourteen years old, thus it was the size of a small portable television (well at least the size small portable televisions used to be before they too visited slimming world).  Other things I threw out included a darkroom developing kit  (I can’t even remember the last time I printed a photo out, let alone did it myself) and a video recorder. Again, it’s been well over 10 years since I was the member of a video store.

Feeling guilty, I then went online to check the second hand value of a few other things lying around the house. (Be warned, you might want to have a stiff drink in hand if you try this yourself!)   My large TV which originally cost about a grand? Now worth twenty quid on eBay.  My (formerly) expensive SLR film camera complete with zoom lenses, also £20. A hand held Nintendo Game Boy with games, £4. And collectively the seven mobile phones I’ve got sitting in a drawer are worth £24. Strangely their chargers are now worth more than the actual phones are!

I’ve now decided there is only one solution to saving both the planet and my sanity, and that is to become a hoarder. Admittedly it will make me an even bigger social outcast than the whole geeky girl thing did, but on the up side, having spent Sunday evening watching Antiques Roadshow, I’ve calculated it should only take just over sixty years for everything I’ve got to become valuable again.

May 4

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A Right Royal Day Out…

I went to London last week for a wedding. You might have heard about it? According to the groom it was ‘supposed to be a small family affair’, and I guess it was, to someone who probably uses the word ‘millions’ fairly often in his day to day life.  But for myself and most people I spoke to on Friday, it was one of the biggest and loveliest days we’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing, but not for the reaons I would have expected.

Most of my friends thought I was a little crazy for going down. What sort of fool would choose to travel in to the centre of London at the same time a million other people were pouring in?  Alas the lure of being part of a ‘once in a generation’ event was too strong for this camera carrying Aussie. Mind you I wasn’t the only one. When the ticket seller at Thornhill Park and Ride told the crowd waiting he thought the bus coming may be full (it wasn’t even 7am yet), it was pretty obvious I wasn’t the only crazy one.

Knowing I had more chance of receiving an official invite than I did of actually getting a decent view of anyone or anything official (the crowds were at least 20 deep in places) my first stop was Buckingham Palace to soak up the atmosphere,  which is where I noticed the strangest thing. Person after person with huge smiles on their faces. In fact, with the exception of the heavily armed policemen patrolling the perimeter of the palace, every – single – person on the street was either laughing or smiling! In over ten years of visiting London I had never seen such a bizarre sight. Stranger still, people apologised if they bumped into someone and on public transport strangers weren’t just looking each other in the eye, they were also talking to each other.  If you had an accent you were asked where you were from, and if you had a child, complete strangers offered to get out of your way to give them a better view.

It was like all normal ‘London Rules’ had been suspended for the day. Flags, scarves and stupid hats were the order of the day and most seemed desperate to have their photo taken with people who were dressed like that weirdo you usually go out of your way to avoid sitting near on the Tube. Outside the Abbey the atmosphere was just as lovely. I even noticed a 6 foot something guy offering to take photos for the people near him ‘because he had a better view’.

I’d guess everyone has a favourite memory from the day, maybe it was the moment they said I do, or the image of little Grace Van Custem with her fingers in her ears, but for me it’ll be just how much ‘un-London’, London was for a day.  That and the blurry photo I managed to take of the Queen.

Or more accurately her Majesty’s left arm.

Apr 30

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Friday Nights In…

Do you know what one of the best things about getting older is? It’s being able to do what you want, when you want, and not needing to give a damn what anyone else thinks. They say human beings are at their most creative at two points in our lives; when they are very young, and very old. Well, at least one very expensive creative consultant my old company employed says that. But I think he’s right. When you are young you haven’t learnt yet to worry about what everyone else thinks, so everything you do isn’t clouded by other peoples opinions, and when you’re old, you do what you want because you simply don’t care what everyone else thinks.  This ‘getting old’ thing is starting to look better every day!

Take last Friday night. From about the age of thirteen Friday night becomes that big night of the week you look forward to, it’s ‘party night’, ‘pub night’, or just plain old ‘going out night’. Wherever it is you end up, it always means the last thing you’d want to be caught dead doing on a Friday night is staying in.  Because after all, that would be B-O-R-I-N-G! This in mind, last Friday night I and three of my good friends had the Friday night we had been looking forward to for weeks! Imagine if you will, great food, fine wines, and headline entertainment all rolled in to the one evening. Which… just… happened…to…be… a night watching the latest Harry Potter DVD at a friends house.

There we were, four grown adults excitedly making popcorn when my friends teenage son smiled at us in that tolerant eye rolling fashion as he headed out the door for a proper Friday night’s entertainment. He was off to the cinema with his girlfriend. Laugh they might, but come on, what cinema provides you with marinated Pork Belly on a bed of wilted cabbage with a chilli coriander sauce, followed by chocolates and toasty warm popcorn, accompanied by Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc and French dessert wine?

We knew it wasn’t the coolest way to spend a Friday, 4 thirty to forty-somethings watching a kids movie, but what did we care? The food was served, the wine was chilled, and the cushions were plumped. Everything we needed was at home. Well, everything except for the actual movie. It appeared that despite all our precision organisation of food and drink we had actually managed to cock up the bit where we decided who would bring the movie. (Turns out my friend had cancelled his order of the DVD when he’d heard I’d been given a free one, but I didn’t think to bring the free copy with me because I knew my friend was buying his own copy). Anyway, queue panicked phone call to Blockbuster, a hurried trip into town, and before we knew it we were on the sofas, the lights were dimmed and we were all sitting down to the ‘Best Friday Night In’ ever.

Magic!

Apr 19

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Britain’s Got Talent(ed) manipulative TV producers

Last weekend 11 million people in this country sat down to watch one single TV show. 10 million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine of them probably loved every minute it. Then there was me.  Maybe it was because I watched it on the catch up thing the next day and I’d already heard about the acts, or maybe it is because I know too much about how TV shows manipulate what we see for entertainment purposes, but last weekends return of Britain’s Got Talent made me angry.

It wasn’t the dancing dogs, the eyeball popping feller, or the dancing granddad that upset me, it was when one of the judges, reacting to the stand out performance of the night, said “I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect much from you, to be honest”. Aargh!! That comment made me want to scream for two reasons. Number one, the judges DO know what to expect, because the acts have already auditioned for someone far less famous and they have notes about them in front of them, and secondly because I couldn’t quite put my finger on whether or not that was the worst compliment I’ve ever heard paid, or just a plain old insult.

If you didn’t see the show, 19 year old Michael Collings wowed the entire audience when he sang Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. His voice was brilliant, his guitar playing was great, the boy clearly has a lot of talent. But what really bugged me is how the (now obligatory) back story painted him as an uncultured bumpkin living in a caravan with his parents. They even managed to squeeze in an unusually large amount of close ups of the tracksuit he was wearing. The same tracksuit was also ridiculed by the judges as he started to perform. I know what the show is trying to do, they’re trying to find another Susan Boyle and by playing on Collings’ lack of social skills and media training, the hope is we will love him even more.

The thing is, he’s good. In fact he’s really good. He’s so good even one of my incredibly cheap colleagues who never pays for anything if she can get it for free, says she would buy his album tomorrow. I guess this is what makes me uncomfortable. Am I naïve to think it would have been nice if someone from the production crew had advised him to put on a nice pair of trousers and a clean shirt, or even God forbid, removed the bit of the film where he couldn’t remember the name of the Royal Variety Show? I can’t help but think it would have been nice to see the young feller given the chance to look as good as he sounded for his worldwide television debut.

 

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