Introducing Ray Winstone as Bitter Lemons

A few weeks ago, a kind friend of mine suggested, after reading my blog, that I should publish it and then have a film made of my life, Carrie-style. Which is obviously something I’m planning on doing. When I can be bothered. She then posed the question as to who would play me in the film. This set me wondering…..

My own suggestions of Beyonce or Eva Mendes were laughed out of town. Frankly, I found this disappointing, since they’re talking about casting a black Bond, so why not a black or Latino Lemons? It’s essentially the same sort of movie… Perhaps, however, the audience wouldn’t be convinced when Eva Mendes looked down at her ample bosom and complained that her boobs weren’t big enough. And, whilst she has some skills, I’m not sure Beyonce is a good enough dancer to portray me in a film. Maybe she could have some lessons?

Clearly unable to make an objective decision, I turned to my friends and family for ideas. A quick bit of research by means of my Facebook status revealed that they think that I should either be played by someone beautiful and French or by Ray Winstone (thanks Chris).

Now. Whilst I can understand the obvious parallels between my own life and that of the serial hard man Winstone, I’m not really seeing the whole Juliette Binoche thing. I mean, sure, she’s a brunette and I’m a brunette. And she’s French, and I’m half French…but that’s really as far as it goes. I mean, I’m half English too. So if the only qualifying factors for playing me in a film are hair colour and nationality, then Winstone trumps Binoche, since I’ve heard he likes Marmalade and watching TV. And I also like Marmalade and watching TV.

The funniest thing about this whole French association, is that when I’m in France, everyone bangs on about how English I look. And truth be told, I don’t look a huge amount like my petite, delicate French mother. In fact, I look exactly like my Dad, Big Tone. Except not bald. Thinking about it again, perhaps Tone is the best man for the job. He hasn’t acted before, but he is pretty amazing at most things, so playing the part of his twenty-something year old daughter in a film shouldn’t pose any problems. He might have to wear a wig and have his legs waxed for the role, but he could leave the chest hair and the jowls. And he was once the North of England Ballroom dancing champion – so we don’t need to worry about him in the big dance numbers.

All of this pondering on who might play me in a film reminded me of the time when, as a teenager, I posed for the village portrait painting class. I sat absolutely still for 6 painful hours (harder than it sounds) and daydreamed about the family heirlooms of the future that were being produced before me. And throughout the sessions, I wasn’t allowed even a glimpse of the paintings. That pleasure was saved for the big ‘reveal’ at the end of the second class, when each of the artists proudly turned their easels around to face me.

Unfortunately, my excitement at seeing myself through other people’s eyes meant that, when I was met with 12 paintings that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Bianca ‘Mrs. Ricky Butcher’ Jackson’s fridge, I failed to disguise my horror. Had I not spent 6 hours sitting in their direct line of view, I might have offered up the same question to the ‘artists’ that Bianca so carefully asks Tiffany every time she is presented with a new ‘family portrait’. ‘WHO the fiddlesticks is THAT?’

The paintings bore about as much of a resemblance to my face as mayo does to salad cream and I wondered whether I had accidently stumbled into a portrait painting class at the RNIB. In one ‘portrait’ I appeared to have had an allergic reaction to shellfish. Another portrayed a woman with a head so small, that Channel 4 would have paid a lot of money to make a documentary about her. A third portrait saddled me with a trout pout and a skin tone that wouldn’t be out of place on The Simpsons.

Maybe my biography should be an animation….? But who would voice my character? Where did I put Beyonce’s number again?

Stuff I liked this week

My favourite line of this biog: “Winstone recalls playing with his friends on bomb sites until "Moors Murderers" Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were arrested for killing three children” : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Winstone

Words cannot describe my excitement before, during and after this momentous occasion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coIKTFyn5ow , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRn00BMve_U, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKmji-H3pJk , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eLVSSNPnY4

I want a brand new house on an episode of Cribs

Now….whilst there are a series of things that I could use this blog for (killing time at work, talking about design, settling scores, recommending recipes, scamming people out of their hard-earned-cash, raising the profile of primordial dwarves, discussing London Transport or getting dates for Nathan), I’ve chosen not to, since I don’t think you’d be interested and I’d like to keep it fairly light and low-brow. That isn’t going to stop me, however, from conducting a little market research and using this blog to significantly change my life. I need a platform for my talents and some advice on how to go forward and I think this might well be the place. The thing is, you see, I want to be a pop star.

There are a couple of other career options open to me, which I am still willing to explore. I’d like to, for example, be a journalist and write this kind of nonsense for cash. Or I’d happily be a gangster’s wife. I’m not adverse to chocolate tasting. And I will never, ever, shelve that dream of being a Blue Peter presenter (PLEASE GOD). But if none of that works out. I’d like to be a pop star. Or at least in a REALLY cool band.

Now, before you ask, I’m not entirely unqualified for this career. I can sing. Not like Aretha or Alicia or Beyonce. More like Norah Jones, or a Corr or Snow White. And definitely better than Posh Spice, JEdward or that nasal nightmare Pixie Lott. I’m not necessarily as hot as her though.

So what to do? When I was a teenager, I was in a band. A group of boys at my school had watched ‘The Commitments’ (awesome 90’s film) and decided to form a band exactly like The Commitments. Except not poor, Irish and unemployed, but white, middle class and teenaged. I was playing Dorothy in the school’s production of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (unprecedented disaster) when my heartfelt, broom-clutching rendition of ‘Somewhere over a Rainbow’ inspired the guitarist in the band to invite me along to be one of their three backing singers.

Needless to say, I bumped the other two off (probably by singing louder than them) and was soon promoted to front woman, alongside front man and Stars in their Eyes runner up, Clinton (who actually is in quite a successful band in Norway these days). And so the glory days began. Five years of Friday and Saturday nights on the Cambridge pub circuit, with occasional trips to the scary Fens, singing covers of soul and funk songs to middle-aged drunks, our parents (not necessarily mutually exclusive entities) and our single groupie, Dale.

When, however, the band reached the difficult second album stage (university called) and artistic differences were causing rifts between the rhythm section and the horns (we couldn’t afford the train fares), the band were forced to split and I was left bereft, with no outlet for my creative juices (drunk in Leeds). Almost ten years on, my talents remain unused and wasted, only to be heard by my bathroom tiles and anyone within a 200m radius of my shower between 7.30 and 7.45am (I know who you are you weirdo).

So I need a plan. I’d welcome suggestions for band names / my stage name in the comments box below, along with any potential routes into the music industry. Likewise, if anyone knows any gangsters who need a wife, Blue Peter bosses I can ‘persuade’ into casting me or someone who edits a national newspaper, let me know…

Stuff I liked this week

Pure, joyous, genius: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0N2bp-XhS0

The phrase every girl dreams of: “cheap Valentines gifts”: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/deals/cheap-valentines-gifts

Be my Valentine

It’s getting to that time of year when a pinky-red cloud casts a shadow over our lives, calling into question the solitary bliss in which we spend our days and shooting a pang of loneliness into our warm and open hearts. Valentine’s tends to be a bad time of year for everyone. For those of you that have ‘someone’, it throws anxiety and fear into your stomachs when the realisation kicks in that the present you just shelled out November and December’s salary on is not going to ‘cover it’ for February too and a new inventive, insightful, thoughtful and probably expensive gift is going to be required if you’re to remain out of the dog house. Valentine’s is even more worrying when you have been specifically instructed by the love of your life ‘not’ to buy something, since Valentine’s Day is a ‘commercial invention designed to engage our consumerist society and forcing them to spend untold amounts of cash (which would be much better used by the starving children) on clichéd and insincere declarations of love and affection’. I have a couple of friends who spout this sort of Namby-Pamby bullcrap around this time every year, only to be bitter and disappointed when their instructions are followed to the letter and a donation is made in their name to the local hamster-welfare charity.

It goes without saying that Valentine’s is pretty rubbish for those of us ‘without other half’. My problems start as early as Christmas, when I have to start figuring out who to send cards to. Besides the short novel that gets written and sent annually to the love of my life, I have to whittle a potential 20 recipients down to a reasonable 3-ish, before choosing the tone, style and content of my cards. As a child and young teenager, I was a veritable Valentine’s card making factory. I would spend March through to December having jumble sales, running fun-runs and being sponsored for my silence in aid of the fight against deforestation and global warming. I would then spend January and February undoing all of my hard work when ‘Operation L.O.V.E’ came into effect. Reams of pink, red and white paper, gallons of PVA glue and vats of glitter would be carefully crafted into love-hearts and painstakingly folded into flowers and stars. A few minutes would then be spent composing the appropriate poem to accompany my homemade efforts. Usually something along the lines of ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, my name is Emilie Lemons and will you be my boyfriend and love me for ever and ever?’, before they were carefully sealed with a lipstick kiss and distributed in a timely fashion (often via our school Valentine’s post box). Then the waiting would ensue.

And still the waiting ensues. I did go through a period of receiving a red-rose every year from one of the boys in my form who sat behind me in registration (you know who you are…). Which was lovely, but did not always make up for the fact that he spent the rest of the year taunting me for my flat-chested-ness and trying to throw bits of screwed up paper through my hooped earrings… He also used to send one to the girl who sat a couple of seats away from me. Who didn’t have a flat chest.

One year, when I was ‘teaching’ 7 year olds in South Africa, I made all of the children in my class make Valentine’s cards in their art lesson and then went to great pains to describe that they could send them to anyone they liked, someone ‘really special’, who made them ‘really happy’, like ‘their best friend, or their Mum or their favourite teacher’. I then feigned horror and surprise when 16 cards arrived in my pigeon-hole by lunchtime addressed to ‘teecha Emeley’.

I have also (occasionally) had a boyfriend on the dreaded day and they have responded in various ways to my neediness. My first boyfriend would shower me with rings and jelly tots and all the good stuff. Pretty much everyone who followed failed to meet my requirements or ran into disaster. There was the year when my uni boyfriend paid my housemate £2 to make us baked potatoes with baked beans (since he was making one anyway), which the three of us ate in front of Eastenders. And the year when my Northern boyfriend took me to the Lake District’s equivalent of Fawlty Towers and it rained incessantly. Then there was the year I had the flu, ruining the love-of-my life’s attempts to surprise me with home-cooked dinner and instead scaring the crap out of him when I appeared in the kitchen mid-way through his second verse of Ray Charles ‘I got a woman’ and causing him to throw too much Worcester sauce into his jerk chicken.

But this year is definitely going to be a good one. I can feel it. Royal mail are on alert, I have cleared out my inbox and Bill Gates has been warned. I might even take the day off work to help direct the lorries into the sorting depot I have hired. 2010 is the year that Operation L.O.V.E will finally come into fruition.

P.S – Get along to Switch it Up on Friday to bag a date…


Stuff I liked this week

Get gluing: http://www.marthastewart.com/photogallery/valentines-day-cards#slide_3

Not as good as a Blue Peter effort, but nevertheless gratefully received: http://www.moonpig.com/CardGallery/Greeting+Cards/keyword/ROMANTIC/gallery.aspx?adid=GUKPerLove09&gclid=CLjY9Oq9v58CFeZr4wod9HSR0g

Probably a better way to spend your hard-earned cash: https://www.oxfam.org.uk/donate/haiti-earthquake/index.php