Now, let me qualify first of all that I think David Jason is the God of television heaven. If British Comedy were a country, he’d be on their stamps.

In Del Boy I find essentially an amalgamation of my entire family in one small, humourously-bad-at-French man, and I have David Jason to thank for the one comforting programme I have to watch if I’m ever too far away from said crazy brood. Every episode is a masterpiece, and he also steals two of my other favourite things ever to appear on the tellybox in the form of Open All Hours and The Darling Buds of May. They’re cleverly written, even more cleverly performed, and joyfully feelgood. He can do no wrong.

That is: until now. David Jason is currently starring in The Royal Bodyguard, written by Justin Sbresni and Mark Bussell, appearing on BBC1 on Mondays at 9pm. In it, he plays the recently appointed Royal Bodyguard (er, clue’s in the name) and general all-round buffoon who falls into things a lot.

So far – out of a hopeless loyalty to the man whose work has so far set the benchmark for what I expect of British comedy – I have persisted in watching all four episodes. And so far, the only thing I’ve learnt is that when he signed up to this series, David Jason was surely on intensely potent narcotics, being held at gunpoint, or just mischeviously picturing the stupid looks on all of our faces. Oh, and also: boy, does he love spilling stuff on people. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING, DEL BOY?

David Jason is not the main character because there are no characters: just a number of people wearing costumes that say things to one another that sometimes, very rarely, remind me of something vaguely amusing. The whole show is so two-dimensional it makes Carry on Camping look  like an arthouse film.

It’s not big and it’s not clever, in fact it’s not anything much at all. It’s so frustratingly predictable it made my eyes bleed until I was longing for an episode of Chucklevision or something, and it is to original plotting what Pat Butcher is to earrings (God rest her soul). It’s like a CBeebies reject, and I found myself cringeing so much I swear at one point my eyebrows actually folded into my face. I honestly can’t understand how it got a primetime slot on arguably the most prestigious channel there is without the use of some kind of hostage situation.

I’m not angry, I’m just really disappointed. Because now – much like how we tend to remember the hangover more fiercely than the shenanigans and tomfoolery had the night before – I’m scared all I’m going to remember of David Jason is this intensely bad decision. The Royal Bodyguard did the same thing for me and David Jason as that one, last Long Island Iced Tea did for me and my night out last week: made me shout at inanimate objects, caused me to lose valuable hours of my life, and left me hesitant to risk them again. Not cool, DJ. Not cool.

Well, I blame school for this one entirely.

As a child, we seemed to live for the holidays. Not just because it meant a few weeks without having to look at the maths teacher’s weird button earrings, or getting detentions for spreading rumours that the physics teacher had silicon bum implants that expanded when he leaned against the radiator at the front of the class, or even because on the last day of school we tended to do daft things like filling the Deputy Head’s office with balloons (all true, in our case), but because the holidays gave you a chance to regroup.

Among the holiday sleepovers, pirate parties and trips to a rat exhibition at the local museum (oh yes, we were the cool kids), I always had a chance to catch up, to re-evaluate how I was doing things, and to decide what needed to be different and make it so. Repainting my room lilac and yellow (LILAC… AND YELLOW!) was a very bad by-product of this, but it’s important to learn not all changes are good changes at some point or other.

I started to associate this metamorphosis-period with the holidays, and the holidays alone. So when, mid-way through term, I’d find things were getting on top of me, or I needed to change my gameplan when it came to my (home)work-life balance, or even when I just needed to tidy my bloody room, I’d automatically put it to the back of my mind until the holidays.

I’d wait for the time when I had time, and just muddle through until then, even if that meant I made life harder than it needed to be, and also even though this re-evaluating ate up a lot of my rat-exhibition/forming a girlband/writing-a-frankly-dreadful-musical-about-hairdressers time with friends when the actual holidays did turn up.

I left school almost six years ago now, so I no longer get such regular holidays (although, I plan to rectify this when I become QUEEN OF EVERYTHING.)

And yet: I still wait for the holidays to sort my life out. Time booked off work tends to end up NOT with relaxing, or even a cheeky trip away somewhere sunny with passionfruit margaritas on tap, but rather with fretting about how I’m going to sort my life out before ‘term’ starts again.

Christmas is the worst, because everyone else has time off too, and everyone else seems to spend it wondering what they can do today to make them feel proud, which quite frankly gnaws into the eat-party-fall over-sleep-repeat routine way too much.

So you want to quit the smokes (dodgy or otherwise), eat more green things, have more adventures, start writing a musical about hairdressers, whatever: why wait until January 1st to decide to do it? Why not do it the second you think of it and spend your January energy on a more fun start to your year? (I highly recommend rat exhibitions.)

Resolutions are fine, but waiting until New Year’s Day to implement them is a little bit mental when you’re just putting unnecessary pressure on one tiny period. Be Resolutiony whenever. Because, otherwise, what if you fail? Oh dear. You’re going to wait a whole year again, aren’t you. Give yourself a slap in the chops and go and sit in the corner.

Just like when you wake up to see it’s 8.21, and you have to wait until half-past before you get out of bed, putting off something you already know you want just wastes precious little segments of your life. Basically: get up when the alarm rings, silly.

Happy Sunday 1st, everyone. And thank you: this daft wee blog got 11,000 views last year. You’re all ace.

Firstly, let me qualify that I have achieved a lot this year. Just a few of those things are:

• Met some truly special people
• Become a paid writer
• Worked with one of the best blogs out there, writing about what I love
• Had some adventures, including absinthe being administered out of a drip, a night on a bench in London, a lock-in, getting mistaken for Lady Gaga, exploding my kitchen, killing an awful lot of ants, and singing songs about knees.
• Visited Bordeaux and deepened my love of wine
• Moved house
• Started a new novel
• Entered short story competitions
• Proved I can actually cook

I like rabbits, but I feel like towards the end this year I’ve sort of turned into one. A creature of habit, unadventurous, hopelessly timid and a bit foolish. Fortunately, all those metaphorical carrots have helped me see a bit better in the dark, and I feel like now more than ever I know what I want and where I’m going.

And guess what? 2012 is the year of the Dragon.

Song: Phyllis Nelson – Move Closer “Hey baby, you go your way, and I’ll go mine… but in the meantime…“

So it turns out moving house takes up more time than I imagined.

My wondrous month of November has been packed full of:

• Lovely chats with every utilities company in the history of the world to tell them I’m cancelling. My “Thanks, you’ve been very helpful today” was followed by a stony silence more than once. I think niceness scares people in call centres.
• Endless trips back and forth with cars full of junk. Don’t try moving house in a 1.1 Kia Picanto. It’s like typing a novel using only one finger.
• Hiring both an end-of-tenancy cleaner and carpet cleaner. The carpet cleaner ended his visit by GIVING ME A C.D HE HAD MADE OF HIMSELF SINGING. Is that… normal?
• Searching through all my boxes of clothes to find a dress to wear to the Domestic Sluttery Book Launch. There was free vodka, Sian’s speech made my eyes a bit soggy, and there was free vodka. I had a headache the next day.
• Reading Good Girls Do Swallow by Rachael Oakes-Ash. It’s a very readable book about body image, eating disorders and the pressure put upon women to be slim in order to find happiness. Somehow it made me feel both utterly inspired and terrifically greedy at the same time. I think I need more time to digest that one.

Anyway, somehow another month has slipped by and I haven’t blogged. Which, bearing in mind my last blog was all about how I was going to do NaNoWriMo, probably doesn’t fill you with optimism for me reaching the 50,000 word target.

…And you’d be right. I did manage a paltry 10,000 words, but this experience was not as forgiving as I’d hoped it would be. I wish I’d dedicated my month to it, but it has filled me with more resolve for next year.

Now, onto the title of this blog. As well as time-restriction, too much wine and a whole lot of life getting in the way of completing the novel, I was also struck by a strange sensation of being bored by my own writing. I know, I know: NaNoWriMo isn’t supposed to create masterpieces, it’s supposed to create vast volumes of words to sculpt and refine over the following months, but my main issue – above and beyond the others I’ve mentioned – was I didn’t take the time to find a story before I started. It was a bit of an obstacle when you’re trying to write almost 2,000 words a day.
“Ooh, I’ve started my novel! Right! What should happen now?”
“……………………..” (for about an hour and a half) 
“Shit. I really haven’t thought this through.”

You can be as flouncy as you like, and shove a whole collection of snazzy similes, jazzy juxtaposition and witty…wit into your masterpiece, but actually most people want to open a book and step into a world, rather than bask in your creative genius. You’re aiming to be a story-teller, not an instant classic. The story, and what you’re trying to say through it, is everything. YOU NEED A STORY, LAURA, FOR GOD’S SAKE WHERE IS YOUR STORY? Ahem, anyway, you get the point.

Someone recently told me ‘You do realise people are everything, right?‘ and it made more of an impact than they intended. I tried (too hard) to create winning characters, and I think I had some potential, but to do it properly you need to test them in actual action and drama – like we are all tested in our daily life, making decisions on how to act, when to be honourable and when to lie, what to say, what not to say – otherwise they’ll remain ‘clever ideas’ rather than becoming actual people to your readers. I view my favourite characters from novels I’ve read as old friends that hold a special place in my memory  - I don’t really sit there and marvel at how succinct and innovative their dialogue is and how nicely the writer described the tree they were sitting next to.

Don’t get me wrong – some of my novel actually wasn’t entirely abhorrent to me. And the pressure to squeeze out such vast quantities in such limited time does force you to let your imagination run wild, so I’ve stumbled upon a few trinkets of possibility for future writing. It’s just, in an awful lot of it, not enough happened, and those possibilities weren’t stretched as far as they can go. It was a learning curve I’m glad I didn’t miss.

So here we are, on the very verge of the most romantic, magical and inspirational month of the year. Everywhere you look, there’s a story. It’s my job to find a good one.

Song: Here’s Where The Story Ends (“It’s that little souvenir of a terrible year which makes me smile inside…”)

Today marks the Second Anniversary of this blog springing to life, and it also marks the First Anniversary of my time at the cosy little cottage in the village with its flowery EVERYTHING, bunting, huge fireplace and tin of ornamental spam (don’t ask). And, for a third year running, this week has produced some huge changes in my life.

You see, this time last week I was planning a blog post about how the cottage has changed the course of my life in many ways but ultimately for the better. It has, from securing me my independence and making me act like a grownup, to giving me some of the best house parties ever and sending my social life into orbit. It has basically been a year of good times. I can vividly remember how things felt this time last year, and it was pretty fantastic, so this blog feels strange for me to write.

The big changes this week started when my housemate moved out (miss you already Clairey) – this was planned a while back, but it was still a massive change to my daily life. I knew I’d miss having Claire around, but I’d pretty much said yes to staying at the cottage until the end of February by myself, and looked on this in a “Ah, sweet freedom – my own little space” kind of way.

Except, that’s not quite how things go:

1. SHIVERS.
   As well as being the week Claire moved out, it’s also been rather chilly for the first time in months. Our cottage is from a time before insulation, double glazing or not-having-holes-in-the-windows were invented. And, pretty sharpish, I’ve had to remember the lost art of sleeping in a woolly hat and gloves, and doing the ‘I can’t feel my arms or legs’ dance before I get out of bed each morning so I don’t fall over.
2. SILVER.
   As Claire moved out, I had a little ‘let’s give myself a panic attack while I do my finances’ afternoon. All those parties have taken their toll, and it turns out I can’t afford to put the heating on this year. I’ll refer you back to point #1…
3. SADFACE.
   I didn’t realise how much I was used to having company. The cottage loses all of its charm as soon as you’re there all by yourself for a whole evening. You start talking to spiders on the wall or – even weirder – tidying up, and that’s no way to live your life.
4. SCRAWLING.
   This week, I was re-introduced to the lovely Chris, a fellow with whom I went to the same school for seven years and yet – despite both going on to do Englishy degrees with the aim to write for a living – apparently we both pretty much ignored each other for the duration. He’s now working in the same office as me for a few months, and I’ve discovered he’s a fellow blogger (check it out, he’s totally ace in a born-to-write way) and also dabbles in novels. He duly reminded me that November is NaNoWriMo month, and also reminded me that I’M SUPPOSED TO BE A WRITER BUT I DON’T WRITE ANYTHING ANY MORE.
5. SEEKING & SCHEMING
   I also caught up with my lovely, travelling-the-world-and-improving-it-as-they-do-so friends Marianne, Guy and Ashleigh. They’ve been to amazing places, they’ve done extraordinary things, and then they’ve come back and made us all murderously jealous. Not intentionally, you understand, and more importantly they’ve inspired my friend Kelly and I to remember that we have our own travel/supercoolstuff dreams.

These five things, all conveniently beginning with ‘s’, combined and made me realise I’ve sort of been coasting for too long. I like the cottage, ergo I stay there. It’s very easy to be drawn in to creating your own little ‘way of life’, spending all your expendable income on bubblebath, shoes, nice restaurants and other ultimately useless ‘treats’, ensuring you continue to cruise from year to year in a happy but ultimately settled state of being.

Don’t get me wrong – that’s awesome, but I’m just not there yet. I don’t have a job in which I plan to stay forever, I don’t have a relationshippy reason to stay in one place, and I haven’t done all I want to do before I find both of those things either. Basically: I’m not ready for the settled lifestyle I’m living, I have other things left to do and the luxury of being in the right time in my life to do them.

My problem is: ‘other things’ are a scary prospect, and I’m not very good at scary prospects. It seems like since I graduated last year and ventured for the first time into a world with no plan, I’ve been trying desperately hard to pretend there is a plan and that plan is pretending I’m too old to have adventures. This week, I realised I’m not. I’m 23, I have no ties, and I have an awful lot I want to do. So here’s the part where I start doing it.

THE PLAN

1.  At the end of November, I’m moving out of the cottage. I’ve spent too long being ashamed of the idea of moving back in with my parents, convinced it meant failure. My friends have shown me what it actually means is the freedom to do anything but fail. Until such times as I know where I actually want to live, I’m living with my family again.
2. I’m bloody well doing NaNoWriMo. Chris, another friend Alex and I are all diving into the abyss of writing 50,000 words in a month, and we’re going to enjoy bullying each other into making it to the end.
3. I’m going to travel. Next year, Kelly and I are doing Europe. We’re going to write about it as we go, and see what happens on the way.

It’s a three-point plan, but it basically boils down to something Steve Jobs said in his speech at Stanford University in 2005. The whole thing is inspiration in the extreme, but this extract really smacked me in the face:

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

I know I’m perhaps taking his words a little out of context here, but this week has made me realise I’m simply not ready to settle just yet.

Song: Shirley Bassey – This Is My Life (sing it, girl!)

I said I’d do this blog malarkey once a week, didn’t I? Oh deary me. Life seems to get busier all the time, but the nice thing about it all is it definitely seems to get better all the time too. I’m learning that ‘better’ and ‘easier’ definitely don’t mean the same thing, but I think I’ve stopped minding.

This week I was idly perusing over my blog posts from this time last year. Not just because I’m some sort of narcissist (granted – debatable): this week it is a whole year since I moved into my cottage (more to come on that later this week) and it’s also almost two years since this blog began. I’ll do an ‘anniversary’ post next week (‘Oh, GOODY!’ I hear you cry…silently) but something really stood out to me that I felt I should talk about.

I’ve almost totally lost my fierceness. Not the ‘danger to poor little woodland creatures’ fierceness, I mean the Tyra Banks “Girl, you are fiiiiierce!” fierceness. I used to have it in abundance, to the point that it’s become a catchphrase amongst my closest friends who have perfected saying it in the absurdest way possible, but I think I might have hidden all mine away under my bed or mistakenly packed it away in the loft with the Christmas tree.

This time last year I had ferocious ambition, infinitely firmer self-control and – to be honest – I got more stuff done, and wrote better blogs. I enjoyed reading some of them this week because they reminded me I could be a good writer. No one has called me that in ages, not even me, and that can’t be too smashing. If you’re not writing something that you, at the very least, want to read, then you’re failing epically somewhere along the line.

I’ve replaced ambition, self-discipline and a sense of achievement with washing up, wasting hours in bed and ‘muddling along’. This time last year, my blogs were full of the former, but recently my head has been so full of the latter that I’ve not even bothered blogging. Who wants to read about that stuff? Not even my Mama would bother tuning in for that, and she thinks buttons are exciting (true story).

It stops now.

Reading the blogs from this time last year filled me with such potent senses and memories that it felt like I was back there, and I remembered how it felt to be that together. I was so on track, and I didn’t even realise. Now I’m going to stop just accepting stuff, and I’m going to start to take risks again, and doing what I want to do rather than just what is easy. As I said at the beginning of this post, sometimes you have to choose between life getting easier and life getting better.

All this spiel applies to my writing more than anything. I have a confession to make: I haven’t written anything of merit since MAY THIS YEAR! All my short stories and novel ideas have belly-flopped at the first hurdle, crumpled by a lack of self-belief, and more firmly stamped on by a ridiculous amount of distraction. This is how it goes:

“Ooh, now that would be a great idea for a story! Okay, I’m going to write it. Wait, this first paragraph isn’t as good as it should be… I’ll rewrite it. And again. And again. And ag-OOH SOMEONE POSTED A SHINY GARDEN CENTRE CATALOGUE THROUGH THE DOOR!
… Wow, I can’t believe it took me an hour to read that catalogue from cover to cover before I remembered I don’t even have a garden. Where was I? Oh yeah, this story. No, it’s not working, I’ll have lunch and then start again. Ooh, Scrubs is on. Ooh, they’re showing eight episodes I’ve already seen back to back!
…Oh no, now it’s dark and I’m hungry again. Ooh, I have a text. YES SOMEONE WANTS TO GO TO THE PUB! Well, the wine will inspire me
…zzzzzzzzzzz.”

And that, my friends, is how every single one of my novels has died over the past few months. I have a little novel graveyard in a box in my room, most of which consist of less than a thousand words, and I don’t believe in any of them enough to try and revive them.

I read a quotation around Christmas last year that reached out and slapped me across the chops, and I keep forgetting about it:

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

Toni Morrison

I’ve got to stop giving up on stories because I’m scared no one else wants to read them. If I want to read them, then TALLY HO. And I just have to take risks and wrestle the story into what I want it to be. I’m presuming by now you’ve worked out that this also works as a relatively cheesy metaphor for my life. Let’s just say I’m picking up my pen with a firmer grip from now on.

I’ve already mentioned him on here a few times, including when I shared the amazing Italian song he found for me: Papaveri e Papere. That is one of my favourite things I’ve ever discovered, but he’s shared so much more than that with me and continues to do so. So I thought I’d chronicle just a few of the ways he’s made my life awesome:

1. He taught me the piano.

One of my favourite photos from when I was tiny is my sister and I sat at his fantastic Roland piano while Grandpa teaches us a tune or two. And throughout my teens he taught me some of the best pieces I ever learned to play. I wish I’d kept practising – they were super fun. My favourite was a book of jazz duets – I always did the easy top part, and I could still never get the rhythms right, but we played them anyway and had a jolly good time.

2. Stacey Kent

Stacey Kent – I Wish I Were In Love Again

Our jazz LOLs weren’t restricted to the piano: oh no! I can remember when he used to pick me up from school sometimes, we’d listen to CDs in his car and one particular voice stood out: Stacey Kent. When she sang, it was so easy and so relaxing, it felt like being in a warm bath. Serious audio-nectar. She also sings in French – perfect, much?

3. He taught me French

Leading on nicely from Stacey Kent’s French tunes, my Grandpa is also responsible for several of my biggest moments of WIN during my school years. From Year 7 until Year 13 I learned French, and I was always one of the top of the class. In my Year 7 oral exam, my teacher gave me full marks and actually said “I can’t believe your accent when you’ve only been learning for a year!” I almost exploded with pride. This is all down to my Grandpa, who spent some time out in Paris before he was married and – unlike me and my shoddy piano loyalty – has kept practising and is still pretty much fluent today. He taught me pronunciation, he corrected my grammar, and most importantly, he chatted to me in French. It was awesome. It was also the reason I always got an A.

4. He made me a Book Thief

Just like Liesel Meminger in my favourite book, The Book Thief, I too have a series of volumes on my shelves that do not belong to me. Things like James Thurber’s short stories. Things like a collection called Other People’s Clerihews (if you don’t know what a Clerihew is you *have* to look them up, they’ll make you laugh all day). Things like a book about teaching yourself Russian. These books have been instrumental in making my life a better thing, and they’re all his. And I keep meaning to give them back, and then convincing myself I’ll read them one more time before I do. This is really a public apology, Grandpa. I should give you your stuff back!

These books also symbolise the fact that he has instilled in me my passion for English. He proofread all my essays, he shared his favourite authors and plays with me, and we still laugh about how when I was little and he asked me what I’d done at the weekend, if I said “Me and my mates went shopping” he wouldn’t let me continue unless I corrected myself, sheepishly rephrasing “Oh…my friends and I went shopping”. Yep, he made me a grammar geek. And I’m proud of that.

5. He Keeps This Blog Going

Sometimes, I feel I don’t have time to continue doing this – not know I’m getting paid for my writing, doing three jobs and trying to write another novel. But I always think of the great chats this blog produces with my Grandpa, and then I realise I have way too many brilliant things to show and tell him and I’d never remember to fit them all in our brief Sunday afternoon chats. And knowing he likes reading it encourages me to keep going, and to try and keep the content interesting and the writing as decent as possible.

He also corrects my bad habits – such as saying “I heart it” way way WAY too much, and writing too much in brackets (I’m always going off on a tangent – DAMN, I’m doing it again), and it’s refreshing because too many people are too scared to tell me where I’m getting slack, and this makes me a better writer! Plus, sometimes he’ll just give me some feedback that totally knocks me for six. Like yesterday, when he commented on a book review I’d written:

HOW AMAZING IS THAT? If that doesn’t inspire me, nothing will.

Lastly, he sends me the funniest stuff to put on here when I’m running low on ideas. Which is all the time. This blog post was originally just going to be me telling you about his latest send – super comedic pianist Slim Gaillard – but it sort of spiralled and then I realised that – much as Slim will knock your socks off – I was a whole lot more excited about telling you about Grandpa. This is also a nice way to link the end of my blog to the beginning – it’s been a long time since we’ve played his piano together, but I’m hoping Grandpa and I can have a giggle attempting to play a tune with the backs of our fingers like Slim some time soon:

So there you go. He’s ace. I don’t think I tell him often enough how hilarious, fascinating and wonderful he is. He’s like my very own Dumbledore, and I heart him big time (haha, sorry Grandpa, I couldn’t resist that. Or these brackets.)

In case you haven’t seen the story, or the offending designs, you can do so here. Yeah, basically, it’s a t-shirt that compares a girlfriend to an animal, as well as a t-shirt that lists what most people would consider unacceptable excuses to do something that seems to be implied as being violent or unreasonable, quite possibly towards a woman.

After an outcry that spread around Twitter more quickly and more surprisingly than the #replacebandnameswithpancakes hashtag, Topman issued a hasty statement confirming they would be withdrawing the offending items from sale, but re-iterating they were only meant to be comical.

My issue is: if they’re joke t-shirts (admittedly horrendous ones), why should they have withdrawn the t-shirts from sale? I thought freedom of speech was fully operational in the UK:  if Nazi-bumming twatheads like the BNP can do a Party Political Broadcast on the BBC in the run-up to the elections, then I’m pretty sure Topman can sell t-shirts designed to be worn predominantly by idiots.

“But they’re vile and unfunny!” Yeah, I know. I don’t like them either. I think if you wore either of them, you’d look a bit of a massive tit. But I also think the same thing about wet-look leggings, flat caps and crocks. Just because it’s what I reckon, it doesn’t mean they should be banned. That’s not how stuff works.

There’s a lot of things I find vile and unfunny – Jim Davidson, my ex-boyfriend and everything that’s ever appeared on Jackass, to name just a few – but I choose to eradicate them from my own life, rather than insisting they’re no longer in everybody else’s too.

Yes, the second t-shirt lists reasons most commonly given by rapists and wife-beaters to justify their actions. It doesn’t actually approve these reasons, nor does it even allude to what the t-shirt is trying to justify. To be fair, they could be apologising for eating all your biscuits or pissing in your wardrobe, for all we know. But even if they were alluding to something more serious, if it’s a joke then what’s the harm? No one wearing it would seriously be thinking “RIGHT, I’ve got the t-shirt on, now all I need is the rohypnol.”

Plenty of comics are renowned for joking about far worse things. “If you can’t beat ‘em… what’s the point of having kids?” says Lee Mack.  In the ‘worst  person to be married to‘ category on Mock The Week, Frankie Boyle said: “When I said I was a positive person… I meant HIV!” And Louis CK talks at length about how he prefers being white: “Seriously if you’re not white, you’re missing out. This shit is thoroughly good.”

I happen to find all of the above funny, and yet somehow I don’t endorse child cruelty or racism, nor do I wish to belittle people with HIV. On the other hand, I don’t laugh at jokes about Michael Jackson being a paedophile, and I also hate Al Murray’s “all women are secretaries” thing. They’re not my kind of humour. But they’re jokes – albeit jokes about serious topics – and they’re entirely subjective, and if we start censoring them then we have a serious problem. I just choose not to listen to them, and not to laugh.

Besides, it’s not like these are the only t-shirts to make jokes about violence to the opposite sex. Jesus, if you think Topman are bad then David and Goliath must be shitting themselves: they built their name around the “Boys are Stupid, Throw Rocks at Them” slogan, and more recently have been stocking a t-shirt  akin to the ‘What Breed Is She?’ Topman monstrosity, one with the slogan “Dogs Make Better Boyfriends“. Sexism works both ways, and although this is equally demeaning to men as the Topman ones are to women, we’re somehow less outraged.

Or how about this one from popular t-shirt site Zazzle? This isn’t about violence, it seems to be about murder; and good grief, at least the Topman one apologises. And yet somehow Zazzle, as well as David & Goliath, remain a lynch-mob free zone.

Of course they do. They’re jokes. Jokes on t-shirts. Some you’ll find funny, some you won’t. Buy the ones you do, if you like. Don’t buy the ones you don’t. Because if we are to justify getting rid of the Topman t-shirts, we need to get rid of any other t-shirt someone finds tasteless or offensive, otherwise Topman becomes some ridiculous scapegoat.

And just to clarify: I’m a feminist. I always have been. And this post isn’t decrying some nonexistent Hysterical Women Brigade as being wrong for being anti-domestic violence, or anti-sexism. The thing with subjectivity is we’re all entitled to be offended by these t-shirts. We’re entitled to think those that wear them look like massive tits. But I strongly defend those people’s right to be able to look like massive tits, whether we like it or not.

“I get a little bit closer to feeling fine.”
Song: Every Day Is A Winding Road – Sheryl Crow.

It’s been almost a month since I wrote, and that’s sort of the reason why I’m writing now: I’m writing to say, basically, I don’t do things regularly.

It’s a curse of mine – one that I’ve always had, but that has grown and mutated to particularly monstrous levels over the past few months. Everything I should do regularly – from blogging, to slapping moisturiser on my face, to keeping in touch with the people in this world I can actually stand – I do well for a bit, and then something within me flicks a be-your-own-worst-enemy switch and it’s like I purposefully begin to avoid doing it, even though nothing in my life has changed to make doing it more difficult. I’m taking being a commitment-phobe to a whole new level.

So what is it? Laziness? Maybe, except I work about fifty hours a week as well as running my own house, writing novels, socialising (the one thing I definitely can do regularly…), and juggling about a dozen different, constantly-changing, mostly ridiculous hobbies (KNITTING, ANYONE?! Thought not.)

Maybe, therefore, it is in fact the opposite: I’m doing far too many things and subsequently literally do not have the hours in the day to do those things, therefore most of those things I’m supposedly doing don’t get done. If you get my drift.
So suddenly, my ‘nightly’ facial cleansing/toning/moisturising routine becomes more like a nightly routine of thinking ‘I must remember to do that’ and embarking on a search for cotton-pads, before giving up and being distracted by something shiny. And my supposed weekly blog becomes one of those ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’ things thirty days in a row. Maybe if I had less things to do, I’d have more energy to get the important stuff done. Or at least more time to dedicate to finding reasons for not doing it…

I guess this perpetual inability to do anything regularly also comes from the fact that I don’t have a daily routine. I don’t have any kind of organisational structure to my life in general. In fact, I often don’t even have a plan for how or where I’m going to get food during the day. That sort of thing just doesn’t come naturally to me like it does to the Hermione Grangers and Hyacinth Buckets of this world (or, you know, people that actually exist), and I’m not even sure that’s entirely terrible: I like spontaneity and haphazardness, it reminds me that I’m the one in the driving-seat of my life and keeps the scenery from being too monotonous (yes, alright, end of driving metaphor.). Basically, what I’m trying to say is sometimes I should probably take a sandwich to work for lunch or something.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, things have got a lot worse recently. Life is spiralling out of all semblance of normality, to the point that I think it’s been two months since I actually went to a supermarket to do a food-shop. My lifestyle, friendships and ambitions are becoming as messy and unhealthy as the contents of my fridge. So this blog post is a way to say: this will stop. I mean, I’m not going to turn into my mother or anything, but I am going to try to creep back to where I was a few months ago. I’m going to at least try and keep on top of things.

So:
I will blog once a week, because that’s realistic.
I will go out and drink a bit less (I apologise in advance for failing at this), and
I will endeavour to do at least one thing each day that makes me think ‘So this is what being a grownup feels like.’ Like buying food, paying bills on time, and being a decent enough person to keep in regular contact with my friends.
Oh, and I’m going to buy more cotton pads.

Yes, my fridge and freezer have gone to the great big pearly kitchen in the sky, conveniently kicking the bucket the day before I’d promised my friend a slap-up meal. Small salvation was brought in the form of my housemate, who found a mini-fridge which was just about big enough to hold one can of beans. Still, it would do for holding one or two vital ingredients.

The only problem I had was I didn’t have time to buy the ingredients until twenty minutes before my guest arrived. And we were both really hungry after a hard day at work. So, not only did I need something that didn’t need a fridge, I needed some fast, easy enough to prepare with my guest watching, and yet still really tasty.

Here’s what I came up with:

Angel-hair chilli prawns
Serves: 2

Ingredients:

150-200g angel-hair pasta
One packet of king prawns (cooked with tails removed)
1 large chilli, finely chopped
Zest of one lemon
Juice of half a lemon
1 handful of chopped parsley
6 tbsp creme fraiche
Three large tomatoes, roughly chopped
1/2 an avocado, roughly chopped

Method:

1. Cook the pasta according to the instructions, then drain the water.
2. Return to the pan, and add the rest of the ingredients except the tomatoes and avocado. Make sure they’re all warmed through, but be careful not to overdo the pasta or it becomes less angel-hair and more angel-snot.
3.  Just before serving, stir through the tomatoes and avocado.
4. Serve, preferably with a glass of opulent pinot gris, or four.

Raspberry, elderflower and gin coulis (served on – yes, horribly un-impressive meringue nests.)

LOOK, FORGET ABOUT THE MERINGUE NEST BIT, OKAY? It’s actually embarrassing. But it’s all I could do whilst half-cut and without any way of storing good ingredients.

My original plan was to do elderflower pannacotta or something, which actually would have been worth blogging about, but the coulis I concocted out of thin air after a bottle of wine did seem too yummy not to share. Just stir together the following:

• A dozen or so raspberries, pressed through a sieve

• Juice of around 1/4 lemon

• A couple of tablespoons of elderflower cordial

• A healthy splash of your favourite gin

• Sugar to get the coulis to the required sweetness (I think I used about two tablespoons. Icing sugar might make it a little thicker too, depending on how gooey you want it.)

It’s truly delicious, and a nice cocktail ingredient too.

Next week… something that didn’t come out of a packet. Ooh.