Long time no write. Silly season was as crazy as predicted and new year's day came around way too soon. To be perfectly honest, pre-Christmas didn’t offer a single second for me to breathe and 2010 has been, quite frankly, dull. As per usual, my new year's resolutions are made up of a clichéd list of unachievable delusions. And as opposed to being a positive list of ambitions and plans for the new year, it reads more like the ten commandments, with every 'resolution' starting with the words ‘you shall not'; ‘You shall not order Domino's pizza'. ‘You shall not drink 15 Havana and lemonades'. ‘You shall not call your ex boyfriend'. 'You shall not drink 15 Havana and lemonades, call your ex boyfriend and console yourself the next day with Domino's pizza'.
So…rather than render my life completely devoid of pleasure by banning anything remotely desirable, I have settled on giving up alcohol..for a month. I figured this will kill a number of birds with one stone; I will lose weight, I will spend less, I won’t text people when I’m drunk. What I didn’t bank on, however, is the boredom factor. Some of you may have noticed that it is pretty chilly outside and quite honestly, I’m struggling to think of things to do that don’t involve watching TV or going for a drink. I’m quite concerned with both my lack of imagination and motivation to do anything other than watch Celebrity Big Brother (I hate celebrities…I hate Big Brother…I love Celebrity Big Brother?). When I was younger, I was always busy making something, painting something, singing with my band or swimming. I don’t know what’s happened; On Saturday, I took the tube to Angel, went into a couple of shops and then came home. And this felt like an extraordinary achievement. On arriving back in my manor at 3.30pm, I pondered over my options for the rest of the day…and I was stuck. Ordinarily, I would take a trip to see Bookshop Man before heading to the closest bar to drink rum and read my book. Instead, I headed home and texted my ex-boyfriend…
I really hope that my Mum isn’t reading this, since she has her own worries about my drinking habits; namely - she thinks I’m an alcoholic. She called me last week and asked how I was feeling. ‘Are you having any cravings?’ she asked. Her tone of voice betrayed her deep concern; ‘Did you think I would?’ I asked her. She seemed genuinely surprised when I informed her that I wasn’t really finding it difficult not to drink at all and was just a little bored. ‘But is it having any side-effects?’ she asked ‘….are you feeling sick?’.
My Mum tends to imagine the worst-case-scenario. It would be unfair to say that she had a sheltered upbringing, I mean, how many people have been chased through the Atlas mountains by a gang of gun-toting psychos? But she’s not really one to over-indulge. She doesn’t really drink, she doesn’t eat a huge amount and she likes nothing better than cycling ten miles or running for an hour. She might like me to mention here that once, when she was at university, she bought a packet of menthol cigarettes and smoked one in her room, before deciding it wasn’t for her. That was a crazy day. Mum doesn’t even keep painkillers in the house; I was 19 years old before I realised that I could quite easily shake a headache by simply swallowing Neurofen.
I was not surprised, therefore, to receive a telephone call from her whilst I was still at university, asking me whether or not I thought my brother was injecting heroin. My little bro, sixteen at the time, had developed a bit of a penchant for the wacky backy, a habit that he had had for some time but seemed to have escaped my Mum’s attention. This, in spite of the fact that he and a group of his friends would regularly turn up in her kitchen at 3pm, ravenous. My mother was terribly pleased that the giggling crew of jackals loitering around the hob had such healthy appetites and would cook up enormous pans of pasta to feed them, inadvertently becoming the ‘cool Mum’ in the village. It was to her horror, therefore, that my brother admitted to her that he had trouble going to sleep without smoking a joint. After mulling it over for a couple of minutes, she came to the logical conclusion that he was, in fact, a smack addict. Obviously. And despite the fact that my brother’s addictions these days are limited to penny sweets (which he orders online by the bucket-load) and Appletiser, my Mum still watches him like a hawk when he goes to crazy on the vitamin supplements….’you can’t be too careful….he does have an addictive personality’.
Stuff I liked this week My favourite advert of 2010:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQcVllWpwGs My mate BD’s band’s free download:
http://indieelectrorock.blogspot.com/2010/01/burn-before-reading-have-your-cake-and.html (one day he WILL be famous….let’s hope it’s for his music rather than his unusual fetishes).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM7tKFqe7Sk
