6 posts tagged “blogging”

I always keep a glass of water by my bed at night. Granted, at least once a week this is essential for dawn raids on imminent hangovers. That desperate gulping as day breaks and your head is swimming... the dogged hope that this classic act of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted will somehow mean you can move your head without it falling off in the morning... Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about, you old soak.

My water habits are also slightly OCD- I simply can't sleep if I don't have water next to me. Often I'll kick the glass over when I venture loo-bound during the night. Oh my, water water everywhere, mostly on my bare feet, and not a drop to drink! The loud kerplunk is enough to jolt me out of the semi-slumbering state which is vital during such night-time toilet missions. Again, you know what I'm talking about: you can be awake throughout the entire "proceedings", and yet still asleep. Anything from a painful bed-post thwhack on the calf, to a misplaced kick to the water glass, can break the spell. Maybe if I wasn't so intent on glugging down water all night long, I wouldn't need to get out of bed so often . It's a Catch-22! My god, the drama. But never fear, I've recently adopted one of those "sports" mineral water bottles as my night-time goblet of choice- the ones where you pull the teat (ew?) out with your teeth before guzzling the water. So no more under-bed floods. And when you drink from one of those bottles when you are lying down and half asleep, the effect is that of an actual baby. How ironic, that my sole consumption of sports water is whilst sleeping.

Sometimes, I confess, I leave my water vessel, be it a water bottle or a glass, beside the bed for nights on end without changing it. Normally this is because I've brought another glass to bed and shoved the old one further underneath the bed amidst all the shoes, old copies of Grazia and other ditrus. The water eventually forms tiny bubbles which have on occasion made me think "yum! fizzy water!" before taking a swig and tasting something strangely similar to plasticine (anyone else eat plasticine as a child? no?). The glass gets kind of cloudy and scummy. It's not pleasant. As much as I love the water, I leave it to fester. Do you see where I am going?

bokker.vox.com is a metaphorical glass of water and indeed, I have left it to stagnate and grow tiny bubbles of neglect beneath the bed of life. I have not replaced it with a clean, refreshing new blog. I fully intend for you to sip from the cup of my blog, maybe even glug it down through a sports teat. But I have to start again, somehow. So, as a mere droplet of water from the tap of my brain (OK will stop that now) here are five headlines from my world, this weekend:
1) It is still raining. This summer is like water torture this year, a perpetual dripping and gushing with none of the sun-soaked, barbeque-guzzling, farmers-tan sporting ice lolly goodness of last year. Curses on all of you living in places other than Britain, where perhaps you are dancing merrily in the sunshine and complaining of being too hot. I swear I will never moan about hot weather again.
2) I have left the cushions outside on the new garden chairs (new garden chairs! eek!). I tied them on this morning in a moment of delirium when the sun came out for about five minutes. And now they will be wet.
3) I went to the Royal Horticultural Society flower show on Thursday and would have died happy that night. The yarden is so hot right now. We're having babies together. Runner bean and radish babies. Nasturtium, lavender and even big courgette babies. And, my favourite babies, tomatoes! But they are still green. Which, frighteningly, is exactly what I was banging on about this time last year. With every season, turn turn turn and all that. Except last summer it was eleventy degrees in the shade and this summer it is November. My tomatoes were green but my face was burned. Now my tomates are green and my hair is wet, and we haven't had a barbeque since April, oh woe.

GDN

Do not be fooled by the bright sunshine. This was a temporary miracle which lasted less then two hours.

4) I am supposed to be writing scripts for work at this moment. Hence I am writing my blog. Ha. Work is hard. I need a payrise. SHOW ME THE MONEY. Thanks.
5) I must go and move the cushions. Of course, though, it has just stopped raining.

How I long for the halcyon days when I had time to roll blu-tak on my desk as though mad. I'm so busy, I might break. But as I was saying to my sister (who has finished her degree! Hurrah!) earlier, two things which sometimes annoy me about blogs are a) people going on about how tired and busy and stressed they are (guilty, moi), and b) people showing off about their fabulous weekends/lives. As my life has latterly consisted of a) tiring busy stressfulness and b) a fabulous weekend on the North East coast with friends (and icecream), I am spent. I have nothing for you. Get out.

But how about my new photo? Brilliantly grotesque, no? No arms-length, big-eyed myspace posing for me. But also it's first full photographic view of Betty in all her glory. If you're thinking of getting a clear brace, have a recce of Betty. Enlarge the photo at will and gag at my icecream tache as you do so.

I miss my blog. It seems a luxury to be able to sit down and spill the contents of my brain into the laptop, these days. During my filming travels recently, I have had a hundred ideas for posts, some of which made it into the rather indecipherable post of a few days ago, in one or two word form, but most of which have plopped unceremoniously into the bog of forgetfulness.

Of course, I miss the people I love, and would love to see more of, more than I miss my blog. I haven't spoken to my sister properly all week, for example, when usually we're connected by the umbilliphone every few days. And when I arrive home from another few days filming, I prefer to interact with The G rather than the  broadband cable.  Ack, that sounded rude somehow.  Totally unintentional, I assure you.

I pity the fool who puts the internet before real life. But I suppose, in these times of maximum work and minimum free time,  if I were to update regularly, my friends and (selected members of) my family would at least know that I am still plodding on, and as beyond comprehension as ever.

Ah, blog posts about blogging. Don't you just adore them? Logging on to someone's blog, hoping for some juicy divorce, pregnancy or at least vague emotional trauma, and instead you get: Who am I? What blog I? And why?
Or alternativey: I blog, therefore I am (a geek).

Anyway: mwah, bokker.vox.com, mwah. I heart writing in you.

So, in the spirit of catching up with myself, here are some snapshots of past week in Bokland:

Last Sunday heralded the arrival of two new and exciting additions to the living room: a rug and a coffee table. Truly we are grown-ups now. Also, seeing as I destroyed the wooden floors by dancing on NYE and peppering the florboards with pock-marks from the ragged metal stumps which used to be shoe heels, the rug has proved quite fortuitous in helping me not to cry when looking downwards. The coffee table, too, is a friend indeed. No longer must I balance the laptop on my crossed legs, where it threatens at any moment to tip over and land delete-button first, onto some part of  my anatomy, and erase whatever masterpiece I am creating.

Oof, this is tiring. Perhaps it's too ambitious to think I can catch up with all my blogging today.

Hey, but you should go and see the Guillemots.* They are bloody brilliant live. But if you do and go and see them, make sure not to stand next to a coterie of Mean Girls and their gay sidekick, who stand with arms folded throughout the show, muttering bitchinesses. Especially don't listen to their conversations, if you don't want to hear them talking about your boobs. Yes, really. There was one chief bitch- the prettiness, blondest, poutiest, meanest of them all. She held court with Gay Best Friend at her shoulder. The others were plainer, and gathered around Chief Bitch and the GBF. Whenever they started to twitch their shoulders or hum along with the songs, a sharp comment from CB would put them in their place. Maybe they wanted to enjoy themselves. How very dare they? Chief Bitch gave me a number of dirty looks throughout the show.  I was so close to putting my sweaty, actually-having-good-time face up to the face of CB, and saying: "Listen honey, I'm older and nicer than you, and I was bullied at school by girls like you. You are like so ten years ago. And these friends? They don't like you, and they'll ditch you as soon as they get an ounce of self-belief. And if you're not having fun, you know where the door is". But I didn't, obviously.

Also, it was Valentines Day this week, of course. When I first got together with The G, my sisters would ridicule me because any question they asked about what we had done at the weekend and whether we'd had a good time, would be answered with a list of what food G had cooked for me and everything else we might also have eaten. Our first anniversary? Lovely, thanks. We had sticky toffee pudding and bailey's ice cream. A minibreak to Paris? Very romantic, lots of croissants. Moving into our first home? A great excuse for fish and chips. But for a girl like me who loves her food, I've just never been able to quite believe that I got a guy who used to be a chef, and have always considered it to be one of the cleverest things I have ever done. He totally used his cooking skills to reel me in, seven (yikes) years ago. So in time-honoured tradition, this was our Valentines Day: smoked salmon with creme fraiche-scrambled eggs; duck breast with mustard mash and curly kale; Nigella's molten chocolate babycakes. And by the way, they're not Nigella's, they're mine.

In other news, the yarden will soon be making a re-appearance round these parts. It has been sitting there, all brown and twiggy and cold, throughout the winter. Whenever I looked out of the window, I would feel vaguely guilty at my neglect, even though Alan Titchmarsh (whose book I actually bought today- The Gardener's Year. You see, there is a level of cool which is just so beyond cool, beyond ironically-cool even, that it is just unbelievably cool. And that's where buying Alan's book registers. Um.) assures me that this is not laziness on my part, but that "February finds gardeners looking for some real gardening to do". Indeed, he even advises me that whilst "the first shafts of weak spring sun are all it takes for container-fever to strike", I must resist the urge to tear off my clothes and hurl myself onto my flowerpots wearing nothing but my gardening apron. "Bide your time", he warns, or "if you can't wait, make the most of evergreens for now". And so I must simply gaze at my bay tree and cast aside the feeling that leaving the yarden alone during winter is not tantamount to leaving your leg hair to grow wild or your eyebrows amok. It is all part of the circle of life. Having said that, container-fever did strike briefly this morning, and I attacked some of my lavender and herbs with secateurs.
 
There are already signs of new life. I have a pot of snowdrops in full bloom (in as much as a snowdrop is ever in full bloom), and a few innonocent, transculent little broad bean shoots pushing their way through the soil, waiting for nasty squirrels to bite their heads off.

And I wait, trowel poised, for Spring to come around and the yarden party to begin.

*Edited to add link, because I'm in a linky mood. But please be warned, there are inappropriate naked ladies in the coments sections of the Guillemots myspace page. 

For someone who "wants to be a writer", I'm doing a great job of neglecting the only two outlets I have: this blog, and The Novel.

I have thoughts and themes, sentences and paragraphs and excessive punctuation marks, and a quip or two, swilling around in my head. I will bash them out soon. I promise (myself).

In the mean time I'm back in that state of being and doing which knocks me off my feet every couple of months: it's filming time again. Life has been a whirl of freezing my toes off in Northern cities; understanding the meaning of wanting the ground to swallow one up whilst being bawled out by an angry mid-tantrum presenter; feeling like I might throw up with the hilarity at the comic talents of another presenter; shoving my way through nightclubs, camera in hand; fending off pissed Geordies shrieking "TV! TV!" and diving into shot; lying prone on couches in hotel bars, shell-shocked from 13 hour filming days; running on adrenaline and also copious amounts of unsuitable food which I have crammed into my gob whilst on the run between shooting locations.

And across in the more meaningful spectrum of life, I've been missing my boyfriend, family and friends as I dash all over the country (and kind of forgetting what they look like); rejoicing at news of a new baby in the extended family- news which I haven't officially been told yet; and feeling like chucking bricks through the windows of a large organisation which has, outrageously, not given a graduate job to my fantastically talented, interpersonally gifted genius of a sister. I shouldn't feel like crying about this- but I do, goddamit! I feel like wringing their necks- have they no sense?!

And worst, worst of all! I am away filming next week and will miss the first rehearsal of "Whiter Shade of Pale" at the gay chorus! I ask you, is there NO JUSTICE IN THIS WORLD?

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(Obviously that last thing is not actually worse than the bastards turning down my brilliant sister, or indeed worse than me not seeing anyone I love for days on end. Just in case my totally unsubtle sarcasm passed you by...)

Most of all, Why?

I've been wondering why I blog, why anyone blogs, and why we read blogs. Because damn, I love reading blogs. And writing mine too, although I can't shake the feeling of Why?

Why should we assume that people want to read about our lives? Why not write it in a personal journal, or not write it at all? What's the fascination?

I think I have cracked it. I think that the basis of the existence of blogging, and perhaps the very essence of human nature itself, is very neatly and somewhat depressingly summed up in a graffiti exchange I read on the toilet door in All Bar One on Saturday:

The original graffiti read: "S**** M***** I hope you suffer like you made me. Don't rest in peace"

Someone had responded below: "Whatever, bitch"

And another person had written: "Please translate. This is interesting!"

Discuss. Or don't, whatever.

Things that are tricky when writing a blog:

1. It's difficult to measure how much one should talk about, or reveal about, one's relationships, with friends and the other half. Now I realise, this is why all those bloggers sound so smug about their "perfect" relationships/lives ... it's because they don't want to reveal secrets/offend people by writing about them, and they don't want to share extremely personal troubles which are really nobody's elses business.

2. Finding subjects to write about which are not wild-eyed, frothy-mouthed angry rants, miserable tear-stained wailings  or gleeful self-congratulation (ie  here's one all about my fabulous weekend and all the fantastic people who love me) is a real challenge.

3. It's quite weird when, of an evening, one's boyfriend asks "are you feeling better now?" when he was never told about the bad mood in the first place.

4. It's hard to stop oneself from bitching about one's colleagues/employer. At times my fingers are itching to spill some bile all over the keyboard... but really, it could end in tears. And I don't rate my chances of earning money from blogging if I get sacked for it like some people.

5. Frankly, it's hard not to feel ridiculous for thinking that anybody apart from the people you speak to in real life anyway, and who therefore have no need to read one's blog, would want to read said blog, and therefore, it makes one wonder, why I am writing it? Am I self-obsesed? (newsflash: everybody on this planet is self-obsessed. It's what makes us human).

6. It is very hard not to sound like the Queen when using the word "one" to indicate oneself.  I don't think I'll do that any more.

What do you find challenging about writing a blog?