Being Me

Things which arrived through my door today. One. This envelope, minus the card it presumably had contained, dropped on the doormat in a plastic bag, bearing the message, 'The Post Office sends its apologies should any of the contents of this package be missing.' I think it's from my brother, so I have messaged him to say, 'Was this card/non-card from you? If so, was there a mahoosive cheque in it?' One can always hope. What amused me was the Post Office's apology, which sounds tentative, as if it were only a slight possibility that the contents were missing when they know damn well they're delivering an EMPTY ENVELOPE. What's more, they deliver it in a sealed plastic bag, as though in itself an empty package is a PRECIOUS THING one should be grateful for, like one's BREATH. Two The next thing to arrive was Russell, delivering our groceries. For the first time, we'd ordered from Morrisons. We usually order from Tesco or Sainsbury...

Classic films - the Christmas versions. The Shawshank Reindeer CasaSanta A Sleigh Named Desire Santasia Bonbon and Clyde Rebel Without a Claus The Bride of Frankincense Wrapatouille Leftovers Behind Rock Scrooge Les Misteltoes The Texas Chainsaw Midnight Mass Ding Dong 101 Decorations Lord of the Ribbons The Bird's Not Done Frankincense and Sensibility From Russell, with love Marzi Pan Mangermouse The Mince Pie Who Loved Me Okay, I'll stop now. Hope you're enjoying procrastinating about your Christmas preparations as much as I am.

I wrote this poem about a million years ago. But I thought it might amuse you as we approach the mince pies and lashings of mulled wine festive period .... Note  the shape of the poem.                                                                                                                              DIET I went on a diet on January First. By Feb I felt quite a success. By March I was thirteen pounds lighter and could get on my little black dress. In April I stayed on a plateau, but by May I was finding it tough.  In June I had quite a few bad days. By July I had had quite enough. I didn't do much until Christmas ...

I stepped on a snail on Monday evening. It must have been a Big Daddy snail because it went 'CRACK' and then 'CRUNCH' under my shoe as though I'd stepped on a pound of nut brittle. I think I even heard it cry, 'Not yet! I haven't been on my Caribbean cruise! Or abseiled down the Shard! Spare me!' I hate stepping on snails. But this was even more significant, because I had just been to see Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men' - a National Theatre production which had been filmed and was showing in my local cinema. Have you read the novel? I won't completely spoil it for you if you haven't, but let's just say that two people in the novel get bones broken. And this particular production doesn't hold back on the cracking sounds. Think SNAP but not the card game. More, tree trunks being broken in a hurricane. It was these cracking sounds I was remembering as I walked down the dark alleyway JUST at the moment when the snail and I met...

I lost so much weight yesterday ... As I gazed around me at the floor of the hairdressing salon after my haircut, I thought, 'Surely that's at least a kilo.' My hairdresser went a bit crazy with the scissors, like a person with a lawnmower who can't find the off-switch. I think she may have been cross with me because I rang her in the morning and begged for an afternoon appointment. ('Please, please, please fit me in - I look as though I've been dragged through a hedg - no, scrub that - I AM that hedge.') Why would she be cross, you ask? Surely she wants the custom. The thing is, I only ever have a dry cut.  Unlike most other women I know, I hate being shampooed and frothed and dried and fluffed and puffed about in the salon - I want to get out of there and back home where people only touch me with my permission and ideally a warrant. So she sprays my head with a garden sprayer, cuts for about five minutes, takes a paltry amount of money from me, a...

Words are so totally, like, last YEAR. In case you missed the news, Oxford Dictionaries announced a new Word of the Year yesterday, except that what they've chosen is to the world of words what I am to the world of Paris catwalks, little black dresses and getting through train station barriers without turning a smidgen to the side. The 'word' they have chosen is this. It's the graphic that's been chosen. Ignore the word 'emoji' underneath it. (Why not just go ahead and ignore all words, every word, from now until you die? Everybody's doing it.) The graphic is called the 'Face with Tears of Joy' emoji. Here's a news article all about the winner and reasons for its choice. The piece also lists some of the words deemed not to deserve the title of 'Word of the Year'. One of them is 'refugee' but, golly, who's heard THAT recently? Another candidate is 'they' as in the kind of they used instead of he and s...

Things I have realised about five ten twenty  thirty years later than I should have.  1. That 'Frances can be verbose' wasn't a compliment. A Junior School teacher wrote it on my school report and until I was thirty-nine I thought it meant 'good with words'.* 2. That the secret of looking confident is usually just that. Looking it. And most people don't get past that stage, and still manage. 3. That other people don't always appreciate you singing along, so my Granny was right to clamp her hand over my mouth in 1972 when she took me to see 'The Sound of Music' and I was screeching 'Climb Every Mountain'. 4. That in the middle of the night, a classroom seating plan or a phone call to a difficult relative is a Massive Issue, but at nine in the morning, can be calmed with marmalade on toast. 5. That the friend's mother who said I had a 'silly little face' in the 1980s wasn't exactly an oil painting herself ... .... ...