Oh, My Dear, Sweet, Pale, Waltzing Priest in a Petticoat.

There is, it seems, a market for Poodle of the Caribbean.

Photos by Bancroft Media.

I think I may just have a little lie-down now.

Love Thy Neighbour. Long Time.

"I am saving your latest blog post for a moment of work boredom tomorrow, but I need to make it clear that I expect a post about MG and the gang, STAT."

I arrived at work on Friday to find the above comment glaring at me from my Facebook wall. Now, when you only have five readers in the whole wide wonky world, you’re not really in a position to refuse orders. Hack one of them off and there goes 25% of your readership.* What’s more, Bec is really the Fury Godmother to my blog; that is, she suggested I start it, got swine flu to prove it, and has since then even actually read it.

In short, when Bec wants a post, Bec gets a post.

Her own latest blog is about neighbours: a sewer-splashed Etiket Met Emsie guiding you through everything from offering them canapés to vandalising their mail. Which, apart from being chock-full of invaluable tips, also led me prancing down memory lane – in my case, more of a dingy alley – where I have my own share of colourful neighbours.

It is this alley that Bec wanted the tour of.

I should begin by explaining that I am descended from a long line of Calvinists, bred through generations to embrace the simple life. My grandfather’s generation was the first in our family to leave farming behind in favour of academia; the rest never bothered beyond Std 2 education (a sensible move in my opinion). Today, wholesome farm living has been replaced by a certain urban dinginess, but the surviving members of our clan still nurse the belief that there is something vile and muddy about being too posh; that even if you should (God forbid) earn enough to move out of your humble cottage below the railway, you should rather just stay put and find something worthy to spend the money on, like a pilgrimage, or sending someone with less cash than you to university.

Though I have not yet put anyone through university, I have saved up for my share of pilgrimages, and to this day feel a peculiar shame when confronted with anything flashy. My family is so dozy about safeguarding its goods that my father and sister actually had the following conversation one afternoon, when my phone rang unexpectedly** and I, in surprise, sent my dad’s 21-year-old Passat screeching into the wall of Rondebosch Café.

Dad (coming home and surveying the damage): Hmmm. Do you think M had a bit of a prang?
Sister (puzzled): Nah, I think that’s the one I made four years ago.
Dad: Ah. Well, I’m sure M will tell us if there’s anything to tell. Tea?

It follows, then, that my family takes pride in its anti-snobbism; that we find a certain piety in being ever so slightly dodgy. Not too much, mind; but just enough not to be accused of ostentation. And to ensure our share of interesting neighbours.

When classifying bad neighbours, there are really only six routes one can go: noise, mess, drugs, nudity, madness or sex. As a teenager, I was exposed to nudity, madness and sex; as a young adult, to noise, mess, madness and drugs. As a teenager, my neighbours were a naked violinist (beautiful); an angry old lady (deaf) who would turn her hearing aid up as high as it could go and then complain of unnaturally distorted noises from her neighbours; an oily divorcee (depraved) who would leopard-crawl under the security doors of an evening and ask my sister and me out on dates; and a young woman whose orgasms were quite spectacular (perhaps she was watching the naked violinist). No need for any talks on the birds and the bees for me, no sir. I learnt it all from Cath at 103. As a fifteen-year-old trying to get my beauty sleep before exams, I would bash on the wall, to no avail. Eventually I took to imitating her, grunting and wailing against the concrete in the hope that she would hear me and get the picture. She didn’t. Maybe she could tell I was faking, and thought I needed practice.

When my sister and I left the family bosom, we went one better. My sister moved into a flat opposite one of South Africa’s more embarrassing confessional poets, who also boasts a number of sexual harassment charges; and a feisty fellow we came to know as Masturbating George. The poet would sit about drinking tea and having angst, while MG developed a strange fondness for my sister and would spend his days at the window, drooling and wanking, as she typed away at her thesis. Clearly a chap with an appreciation for academia, we thought.

It was around this time that my sister also began leaving her car unlocked so that the neighbourhood kids could sleep in it. The car in question was a tiny Renault with rather ambitious racing stripes down the side, and a radio that was connected to the headlights using a telephone plug. It wasn’t up to much on the highway, but made a fine shelter for homeless children, who were, I might add, rather better neighbours than Masturbating George.

I’ve known a number of homeless people who made better neighbours than MG, mind you. I shared my backyard in Mowbray with two intrepid braaiers who would come and light a cosy, crackling bonfire in my parking spot, sharing companionship and good cheer over a cup ‘o meths and a nice bunny chow. They did this in the company of Drunk James, who lived next door to me and never – to my knowledge anyway – did very much else, unless you count his habit of drunkenly whistling through the keyhole at my parakeet in the wee hours of the morning.

I got to know Drunk James because he would spend his days hanging over the fence and checking out my friends’ cars. If a particularly posh one came to visit, he’d wink and leer.

“Niche wheelsh,” he’d say knowingly.

Come evening, he would light a fire in my bay. “Relaksh,” he’d say. “You gotsha bay wisha besht view.”

I should point out that my bay overlooked the garbage cans.

A little further afield, a friend of my sister’s had a particularly vocal berghie couple camping in her garden, having invited some of the neighbourhood crew to pitch a tent there. The only rule was that good fences made good neighbours; i.e. she would give them their space if they gave her hers.

Giving privacy from her side was more difficult than it was from theirs, since walls are soundproof and tents are not. Returning home one night after an evening out, she heard a woman’s voice ring out through the garden, every syllable dripping with post-coital smugness.

“Justice,” it purred, “Dit was nou soe lekka, ek wens my hiele lyf was poes.”

Drunk James, Post-Coital Patty and the Braai Buddies are not the strangest kids on the block, however.*** I’ve definitely known weirder; for example Sick-Bucket Simphiwe, who lived above me in the Mowbray building. Simphiwe a) vomited into my pot plants from time to time and b) accused me of allowing strangers to park in his bay and harbouring the fugitives in my flat. “I’ll get those motherf***ers,” he would hiss on his witch-hunts, glaring at me through the windows as he ran laps of the building.

Simphiwe, I should add, had a nasty habit of practising guitar at 1am (he only knew two chords) and watching TV so loudly that it would drown out my CD player even on its highest setting.

“You’re cramping my style, b**ch,” he’d say when I asked him to turn it down.

Another intriguing gentleman in our complex was apparently already there when my friend Sally lived there a good ten years ago. This one drove a white bakkie, although drove is probably the wrong word, since I never actually saw him take it anywhere. He spent his days marooned on the roadside, fiddling with the aerial and peering anxiously at the sky.

“He’s trying to make contact with other life forms,” Sally explained when I asked her about it. “He’s convinced he’s going to get through any day now.”

Also fixing their gaze firmly on the heavens was the church choir on the other side of the building. Given who we were living with, I don’t blame them for needing a little gospel. They practised on Sunday evenings, which didn’t bother me so much; there’s something about singing at twilight that colours a building with a strange pathos and surrealism.

“Give us a J!” one would cry as Drunk James drooled over the fence.

“Give us an E!” the next would warble over the bunny-chow-and-meths picnic.

“Give us an S!” another would holler as Simphiwe hurtled past, muttering.

“Give us a U!” the fifth would howl as chunks of beans splashed into the impatiens.

“Give us an S!” the last would trill as ET-Phone-Home hopefully twiddled his aerial.

“All together now: Who we gonna call?...JEEEE-SUS!”

Amen, sisters, I would think. We could probably use a blitz from a celestial clean-up crew. But I never said that bit out loud. It was my best shot at neighbourly love.

-----------

*Or 20%, as I realised later. But I leave the error there as testimony to the fact that BA students cannot do maths.
** How else do phones ring?
***Though their aliases would make a great name for a band. Greatest Fireside Hits by Post-Coital Patty and the Braai Buddies. Instant winner, don’t you think?

A Pair of Original Partici Pants.

There are many benefits to hanging out with BA graduates. Firstly, they are usually poor and slovenly, and will not judge you if you give them box wine and ready meals for dinner. Secondly, they write the best emails. Thirdly, they appreciate horrible puns. And fourth(ly?), they have a greater capacity than any other population group for talking unadulterated rubbish.
 

My friend Anna is definitely one of the forerunners in this category, which is why we spent eight happy hours last week discussing words which should be assigned new meanings. It’s an interesting thing, this, because if you put a word in the wrong context, it’s not that hard to draw your own conclusions (witness the ease with which one begins to understand A Clockwork Orange a few pages in). With enough people to join our revolution, I think it’s only a matter of time before we get to use words randomly, for whatever purpose we choose. It’s the logical conclusion to how language develops anyway; we’ll just be accelerating it. 

And if cummings could get his r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r across to generations of morons in schools, I don’t see why a little poetic licence should be a problem for the rest of us. We’ll have crayon-smacking ice-cream and witches in our hair. We’ll have gorilla cakes for tea and take road trips in a big-wheel carbuncle. We’ll invite puffers to our parties and jump penguins in the soup. It will be trifle! It will be cherry! It will be dilly! 

(And see, you probably got the gist of that, didn’t you?) 

As things stand, I’m already guilty of word abuse. I am most comfortable in English, but it was not always my first language, and sometimes – especially when I’m tired - I forget surprisingly obvious expressions. And when I want a word and can’t find it, frustration leads me just make new ones up (wangtard or holbungler, for example), or randomly inject adjectives that (to me) sound more accurate, even if I use them incorrectly. I find the DA a little soggy, for example, or I don’t like that scriptwriter; he has a greasy turn of phrase. 

But I have nothing on my sister, who is both extraordinarily imaginative and extraordinarily stubborn. She is magnificent. She doesn’t like rules, and I don’t think she really believes that conventions of meaning apply to her. Over the years, she has developed an entire language; a world of disparaging neologisms. To my sister, “good” and “bad” do not exist; the world is instead divided into “real” and “joke,” which to her seem more descriptive. Hot, milky tea is real tea. A large, snow-white bathroom is a real bathroom. Or, if you introduce her to people who annoy or offend her, she will dismiss them with one regal flick of her wrist. “Sies. Silly joke people,” she will say, and stalk off. “Joke exercise,” she will sniff as she passes the elliptical trainer.

She also has a wonderful array of randomly constructed insults at her disposal. “It’s called a vehicle! Drive it, you puff-eared Oros Man!” she will fume in traffic. LONDON IS KAKHOLE AS REMEMBERED. UGLY PASTY ZITS FOR PEOPLE, was her pithy SMS verdict from abroad. And my personal favourite is her way of raising an eyebrow at thick, dull, waxy skies and muttering darkly: “Van Gogh weather,” before shutting the door with a grunt.

But these are all intentional twists of meaning. Sometimes a word begs so hard for an alternative definition that one can’t help reinventing it. Porsche, for example. Which, as I’ve mentioned before, I spent my entire childhood believing was a kind of fowl. Or participants, as I said to the abovementioned Anna.

“Every time I read the word ‘participants’,” I complained to her, “my brain separates the syllables. I read Partici and then pants, as though Partici is some kind of Italian designer.”

“Yes, yes,” Anna encouraged. “Prada handbag, check; Gucci sunglasses, check; Partici pants, check!”

You can see why I hang out with her.

“Bolshy,” I continued, “sounds juicy, like a fruit. This melon is bolshy.”

“Yes, I see that,” Anna nodded. “Kinda squishy-like.”

“Stomach,” I added, because another of our favourite topics is lunch. “Sounds like a well. An abyss. She fell down into the stomach. Though maybe that is just mine.”

“No, no,” said Anna. “You are far too thin to have an abyss in your stomach.” Because outrageous lies form one of the cornerstones of true friendship. “But abysmal. Now that sounds medicinal, like an anti-inflammatory. And dismal. What a pill. Take two spoons of dismal and call me in the morning.” (Well, tell me you’ve never had that kind of day.)

Crimpolene sounds to me like a laxative or window cleaner; blancmange like a garment or some kind of eccentric ablution procedure. She pulled the blancmange around her shoulders and slipped into the icy night, for example. Or She shut the bathroom door and hurriedly blancmanged her sweaty feet.

Anna, on the other hand, thinks it is “stipple on walls” or “a hideous floral scrunchie”.

Pubescent sounds to me full-bodied and colourful: After the rains the sky swelled into a pubescent rainbow. Mushroom sounds like what it is, a fungus; though fungus in turn sounds like a would-be aristocrat’s name. This is my son and heir, Archibald Ignatius Fungus.

My personal favourite was Anna’s colostomy, which is “what happens when there are too many people in a train carriage and some of them have to hang out of the doors”.

“In a colostomy there isn’t…mushroom!” she sniggered. “HAHAHAHAHA!”

Peanut, she says, is a rodent. The peanut scuttled back into its hole. Pincer is to me a footman; a snooty butler in livery. With one flick of her wand the fairy godmother turned the mouse into a well-trained pincer who took up the whip and began driving the coach.

For that matter, I think Cinderella and Chlamydia should be interchangeable, as should dollop and buttock: Put a buttock of cream on my apple pie, will you? And Princess Chlamydia had a hot set of dollops. She wound up with cinderella after one too many encounters with a pincer.

Nostril sounds to Anna like a wise old man. Tell Uncle Nostril what’s wrong, for instance. Or She approached the wizened Nostril with the reverence of a -

“Of a pumpkin,” I interrupted. “A religious novice. I aspire to be a monk, but I am at present still a pumpkin.”

Well, it was downhill from there; the stories started flowing like custard through cake.

“There is one for mushroom!” I cried. “It’s a dirty beard on a pervert, full of last week’s chicken.”

“Armadillo!” Anna countered. “A fruit. A pink one. Watermelon-and-armadillo salad!”

“Which you can enjoy with Pimms and a dash of candied demon!” I whooped. “Yes!”

“Treble!” came the next. “A pudding, or a coward. Just look at that gibbering treble.”

“Transkei: an embroidered hanky!”

“Gripe: a small grave!”

“Bales: a swollen stomach from eating too many fatty foods. He had such bad bales that we had to bury him in a gripe.”

“But he was dug up by a persimmon!” howled Anna. “The endangered mountain lion!”

“Which was tracked through the bush by a brave and gallant Towel!” I said. “A junior army officer!”

“Yes,” Anna nodded eagerly. “Poor thing, the training module is very bulbous.”

“A weaker man would have broken out in endorsements,” I marvelled.

“Or turned a bit hilary.”

“Drowned in a blog.”

We fell into a companionable silence.

“Percolator,” I said eventually. “What do you think that means?”

“Dunno,” she said.

“I think it’s the weirdo who stares at strangers on public transport,” I mused. “Just look at that percolator giving me the dribbly eye.”

“Indeed,” agreed Anna. “What a mushroom there is on him.”

She paused.

“I wouldn’t want to be next to him in a colostomy – would you?”

Oh Deary, Deary Me.

It's not just the Bible getting the vampire treatment these days. Jane Austen is also getting a whipping of the supernatural kind.

Take a look at this.

I would say a few words about it, but really, there aren't any.

Here, Piggy, Piggy.

As some of you already know, I bought my own home recently, and moved in this weekend. I am at the moment still so in love with it that my head is good for very little else, and I spend an inordinate amount of time staring at my brandspankingnew sundeck, gaping and drooling.

But even in this lovesick state, I’m able to see that since I named my blog after that ole pig virus, I might as well add my two cents’ worth on the subject. Especially since at least two of the messages I received this weekend were not rhyming odes to the beauty of my flat (I mean really!), but warnings to “be careful” of swine flu.

Now, this annoys me on a number of levels. Firstly, because if it is not a love sonnet to my north-facing slice of perfection, I don’t want to hear it.

Secondly, what the heck is “be careful” supposed to mean? Don’t get flu? (Because, you know, most of those twerps went out and got it on purpose.) Pack up my H1N1 in an old kit bag? Forbid random passers-by to spit on me or sneeze into my hand? I mean, how exactly does “be careful” help me? There are many situations in life where one can reasonably be careful, and it might make a difference: don’t cross the road without looking; don’t sit on high ledges if you are prone to talking with your hands; make sure your bikini straps are properly fastened; if you’re planning on reheating your lunch, smell the chicken first; don’t trust a corner-café pie in the wee hours of the morning; don’t trust a boy in a Haile Selassie T-shirt at all*. But honestly, how is one supposed to modify your behaviour to prevent the flu germs from finding you? It’s not like you can put up signs on your front door forbidding them to enter (though I’m told there are plans in place to teach them to read before 2010).

Sure, you can go to the doctor once you already have flu symptoms, but by then it’s too late, isn’t it? And in any case, it’s not a good idea to accept Tamiflu unless you are on death’s door, since the biggest danger associated with swine flu is not the virus as it stands now, but the virus as it will evolve if Tamiflu is overused and the bugs develop an immunity to it. Then we’ll really be in trouble. So really, the only way to “be careful” when you have swine flu is for the sake of others; i.e. stay put, keep your sneezes to yourself, and don’t overuse flu drugs. But, I’m sorry to say, there’s not much you can do to “be careful” for your own sake. Unless you count postponing that brisk hike you had planned to take up Table Mountain, but I am pretty sure that if you had swine flu, you would not be chomping at the bit for it anyway. This “be careful” business is certainly no use to those already suffering from the virus; if the gong’s going to bang for you, it’s going to bang for you and there’s nothing you can do about it. Except bedrest, and that’s what you should do for ordinary flu anyway.

There’s another level on which this swine flu hysteria is bugging me (excuse pun). And that’s the feeling that it’s all so terribly out of perspective. Now, I’m not saying I’m not sorry about the chaps who have died, because that’s awful for them, really not very nice at all, and I’m very grateful it’s not me. But so far, one person has died of swine flu in South Africa (the other, the Dept of Health was quick to point out, died of other complications unrelated to H1N1) relative to, um, how many of HIV/Aids? HIV has been galloping across the globe since the New Kids on the Block were actually new, and in all the intervening years I have not once received an email or SMS from a friend warning me to “be careful” of HIV. Which is rather a shame, since that’s the kind of SMS one probably should send your friend at four o’clock in the morning when she is having drinks with some silver-tongued, statuesque creature whom she doesn’t really know, but who has all sorts of opinions about her cleavage.

The point is, a message warning your friend to “be careful” of HIV/Aids is not only more to the point (since it is a far worse pandemic, meaning it is more widespread, and death is a sure thing rather than an occasional possibility); it is also more useful, since HIV/Aids is mostly sexually transmitted, and being careful might reasonably have some impact on your chances of contracting it.

And even if you take HIV out of the equation, swine flu is still not the most dangerous thing out there right now - not by a long shot. Poor nutrition is a global killer, as are aggression and stupidity: people take drugs and get into bar brawls and blow each other up left, right and centre. Car crashes are one of the single biggest causes of death in cities all over the world, and the number of first-time car buyers increases every year; yet I notice that nobody is messaging me to say MILLIONS OF YOUTHS ON THE LOOSE IN THREE-TON KILLING MACHINES; FREQUENTING URBAN AREAS! BE CAREFUL! FORWARD THIS TO 20 FRIENDS AND SAVE A LIFE!

If you really are that keen on saving your friends’ lives, there are a million messages I can think of that you might reasonably send instead, assuming you really care and are not forwarding random rubbish just because you are a hysteric with nothing to do. Call me if you have been drinking; I will fetch you, for example, or Are you sure about that hotel in Hillbrow? I know a great backpackers in Dunkeld West. Or Don’t go out with that guy; he has shifty eyebrows.

But people (and I use this word in a very general way, I know) seem to have the bizarre idea that warnings are more fun if they are more pointless**; or maybe they are too lazy to think up a personalised warning to suit a particular friend’s lifestyle, but want to look like they care, so send out mass messages instead. Or maybe chain messages make them feel informed and important, as though they are privy to cutting-edge information spreading through the underworld; specialised knowledge not even the officials have their grubby paws on yet. Or, in the case of the HIV warnings that never come, it might be that because HIV is often sexually transmitted, it is considered impolite to warn your friends about it, for fear that it would make them sound nasty or make you sound like a killjoy. But if you’re worried about sounding nasty, I’d venture to point out the suggestive nature of the word “swine”; and if you’re worried about being a killjoy, I’d say that stampeding people at parties booming “BE CAREFUL OF SWINE FLU!” is just as likely a conversation stopper.

So, I suppose, barring genuine and personal concern, what’s left is paranoia. But for what it’s worth, I’m sick of pointless warnings about things that are beyond my control. I’m sick of people bombarding me with horrible stories of germs that are out to get me, serial killers that have their heart set on changing my tyres at shopping malls, or rapists leaving tape recordings of babies on my doorstep. I’m sick of the completely superstitious belief that if you only follow instructions, somehow you will be immune to life’s unpredictable catastrophes (and the accompanying implication that if tragedy does befall someone, it must in some way be their fault for not BEING CAREFUL.) If you think memorising a million poorly-spelled chain mails is going to make you immortal, I’ve got news for you. Terrible things happen to people every day, at random, through no fault of their own, and that’s part of life: if you are one of the lucky ones, it is nothing to be righteous about. So stop warning me about all the ways I could die, since that’s a given, whether it’s swine flu or a car crash or HIV or a tumble down Table Mountain. When it’s my time to go it will be my time to go, and the only way to cheat myself of my rightful, joyful time on earth will be to waste it pondering all the ways I could trip the light switch on my way out.

*Thanks to the ever-pithy Judi Stewart for this

** See previous post on proportional relationship between pointlessness and fun

Countin' Flowers on the Wall.

I bought a mood ring this weekend. This is because, diseased kidneys and all, I was up in Johannesburg, working at a SARS function – and believe me, a weekend with 400 tax collectors can leave one in urgent need of silly jewellery.

I also bought it because when mood rings were actually in demand, I was 12, and in those days 25 bucks would buy you two movies or a Spur burger and chocolate brownie, and somehow being at the cutting edge of Grade 7 fashion never measured up.

These days, however, I’m more gainfully employed, and fortunately able to afford both food and a vast array of totally pointless things. I try to exercise this right as often as possible.

Which brings me to a weird thing I noticed about this mood ring. Now, I know it’s all really about fluctuations in your body temperature (spent a few happy hours alternately tossing it into iced water and dangling it in front of the heater to observe the effects. Like a magic diaper baby, only with more colour variety, and no awkward gender stamp on the bum. Anyway.) But here’s the thing. When it’s on my body, it mostly hovers around sky blue (dozy, serene, relaxed). Yet when I eat, it immediately swings to a deep, satisfied indigo, which, according to the key, is “joyful, loving, amoreaux, romantico”. (And if my mood ring says so, it must be true.) The only exception to this rule has been right now, as I sit here stranded at the Wimpy in OR Tambo airport after my flight home was grounded, eating what is arguably the worst sandwich ever made. In response to this warm-plastic-and-monkeymeat horror, my ring has turned an awkward amber-red, translated as “aufgewült, unsettled, anxious, troublé, sin resolver”; a mood change not even Kulula could induce when they told me that, after a 21-hour shift and 7 hours’ sleep in two days, I would be placed on standby indefinitely.

It’s a curious thing, this, because it got me thinking about pleasure, and why we don’t spend more time seizing it in easy, accessible areas. The way I see it, happiness is like a great big bank. Here’s how it works: bad stuff = debits, good stuff = credit. If your debits exceed your credit, you will become unhappy.

Then you get the currency. Big bad things cost more than small annoyances. Big happy things give back more than small happy things. So here’s the thing. If you don’t have an array of enormous happy news items to stock up with (a wedding, the purchase of your dream home, sticking your foot out as Natalie Becker approaches the stairs) then you have to focus on accumulating a larger bank of small joys. And many of the most joyful small joys are the most pointless things, like buying a mood ring you did secretly want when you were twelve, or having liquorice for breakfast just because you can, or waking up early on a Sunday to run along the seaside, or emptying out an entire bottle of Shipmate Bubbles into your bathtub because there’s no one around to stop you. This is because duty is the opposite of fun, so the less necessary something is, the greater the fun injection.

This means, then, that you should absolutely not compromise on the little things that make you happy. We’re told not to sweat the small stuff; I think we should start. Don’t put food in your mouth that you don’t really love: if you have a sweet tooth, don’t bother with Beacon, buy Lindt. If you love pesto pasta with roasted pine nuts and pecorino and fresh spinach, spag bol in the bag is not good enough. Don’t read books that don’t grab you by the scruff of your neck and refuse to put you down: if you think The Grapes of Wrath is overrated (I do) give it the finger and read Harry Potter instead. If you don’t feel beautiful – not just okay, but beautiful – in what you’re wearing, don’t step out of your door until you’ve put on something that makes you feel amazing. If the gym freaks you out and you hate their playlist, get an mp3 player and take up a sport that you do love. Doing things you hate doesn’t mean you’re a hero, it means you’re to lazy to look for what you love. Chores are for kids with strict parents, and you’re all grown up now.

Incidentally, I think one of the biggest benefits of being a grownup is directly related to this; that for the first time you do really get to be a kid, something you can’t really do when you are young, because everyone is so busy telling you to grow up. I love getting older. I love that I can fill my life with the things only I want, and that I don’t have to explain it to anyone. I love that I can do all the stuff I wanted so badly when I was little. I love that I can wear tinsel wigs and coloured hats if I’m in a bad mood. I love that I can have Kir Royales for dinner or draw pictures on the walls or turn a perfectly good pair of socks into a puppet if I feel like it. I love that my bathroom is peppered with quotations that I like to read on the loo, and that nobody tells me to hurry up and stop hogging the facilities. I love that my parakeet attacks anyone whose shoes she doesn’t like (it’s true) or that I can open my doors to friends 24-7 if I want to. I love that my bookcase (which I only found out some years too late is actually made of stinkwood – oops) is now lime green because I happened to have the paint and needed some cheering up one gloomy afternoon. I love that the most expensive skirt I ever bought died an honourable death in a pool of mud when I got too carried away running races across a field after a formal dinner. I love that my shopping trolley bulges with all life’s essential items, like Nutella and lemons and reject Bonnie Tyler albums and balloons and champagne (which I keep in the fridge at all times because I believe life is there to be celebrated, and it’s stupid to wait around for Christmas).

I have been unhappy for long periods in my life, and now that I’m feeling better about the whole business, I refuse to compromise in areas where it doesn’t cost me much to be demanding. Occasionally I look at the balloons and party hats and streamers in my life and worry that the whole thing is turning a bit Michael Jackson, but mostly I just think I’m right. As human beings, we spend so much time compromising on big issues (relationships that aren’t good enough, but which we stay in because we are afraid of cutting ourselves loose and drifting out into the big wide unknown ocean; friends who feel too far away, but who we never say anything to for fear of appearing tense or clingy; jobs that don’t satisfy us but which we are afraid to leave because when you really chase a passion, failure hurts more) that I think it’s positively irresponsible not to seize happiness in the less challenging areas, where we know we can. Especially when it comes to the small things, where a little selfishness won’t harm anyone else. Refusing to compromise on the big issues in life can cause hurt to others; spraypainting your dustbin in a funky colour will not.

And because I seem to really like lists (something I only realized looking back over earlier blog posts), here is a list of things I refuse to live without, because in their small way, they are essential to happiness. I’d love it if you’d add your own.

1.Running along the Promenade on sunny Sundays in winter, listening to Belinda Carlisle and Barry White songs. The fitter you get, the better it is, because then you can sing along.

2.Pine nut, pecorino and spinach pasta. It takes 10 min to make and is so insanely delicious that I come over all funny just thinking about it.

3.Janis Joplin.

4.Good sandwiches with loads of tasty goodies in them. As the girls at gofugyourself put it, “This is why we are in favour of more flattering pants. More flattering pants = more sandwiches and far less agita from people squawking about your minor holiday weight gain. Also, more sandwiches = more happiness. It’s like one of the fundamental rules of basic math.”

5.Pyjamas.

6.Fiona Apple. She is pure poetry.

7.Heroes.

8.Kath and Kim.

9.Yoga.

10.Harry Potter.

11.Sister Crazy (the world’s most beautiful book).

12.Tabloid news from Romania. Romania is a screwed up place. My favourite news item reported a nasty incident where a wall collapsed on the minister of agriculture’s head. Instead of renovating the houses of parliament, government held an exorcism.

13.The International Society for Giant Pumpkins. (It’s real.)

14.Jewellery.

15.Beetroot.

16.Sentimental country songs.

17.Gothsinhotweather.blogspot.com

18.The Princess Bride/ Legally Blonde/ But I’m a Cheerleader/ The Wedding Singer.

19.Kid-type jokes (e.g. the muffin joke, the one about Snoop Dogg’s umbrella, the moose and the tortoise, or Sebastian the prawn. If I haven’t told you these yet, tell me and I’ll post them).

20.Weird Al Yancovic’s parody of Bob Dylan’s music video for Subterranean Homesick Blues.

21.The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

22.The lyrics to Subbacultcha.

23.Bebe’s exceptional upper arms. It makes me happy that somebody achieved arms like this.

24.Reading dictionaries and wikipedia.

25.Googling random statistics (largest-ever tiger, tallest-ever wave).

26.Imogen Heap.

27.Doing nothing.

28.Polar fleece.

29.Naps.

30.Muesli.

31.Sprinting.

32.Peaches.

33.Balloon animals.

34.80s rap.

35.Long swims out to sea with my dad.