First Thoughts of 2013

ITEM: You know, you think that you’re really close to somebody and that they understand you totally, and then they go and say something that shows they don’t know who you are at all.

Case in point, the friend who bought me a crate of Thorntons chocolates for Christmas and then the other day came out with this – ‘I thought you’d eat a box a week, not a box a day.’

ITEM: I told a friend that I’d had a dream about her, and she immediately came back with: ‘Was I fucking Johnny Depp? If not, I don’t want to know about it.’

And men are supposed to be the shallow, superficial ones. Yeah, right!

ITEM: I am hoping if I tell The Imaginary Girlfriend that I’m saving Fifty Shades of Grey to read over Valentine’s Day she’ll conclude that I’m a hopeless romantic and not recognise it for the shabby delaying tactic that it is.

ITEM: Sometimes I worry about the state of modern music, and so at the risk of sounding like my father bad mouthing The Beatles in his day, I have to say that the Christmas Day Top of the Pops, which once upon a time used to be a wonderful advertisement for the health and vitality of our music industry, was simply dire this year. When you watch a programme showcasing the supposed best of the year and your favourite act was Coldplay it’s time to buy ear plugs.

How all these bands look and sound alike, the sheer banality of it all, was brought home to me by a casual, and ironic, remark made by my sister. Watching Girls Aloud she asked, ‘Which one is Victoria Beckham?’

ITEM: As I may have mentioned before, Christmas is the one time when I am exposed to soap operas, and it’s amusing how the same plots seem to recur year after year. For as long as I can recall, one of the big three (Corrie, Eastenders and Emmerdale) has a plot twist in which somebody realises their partner is having an affair with somebody else when they see that somebody else displaying the surprise present they’d expected to receive.

I’m scared to use the aftershave a friend gave me in case her partner gets the wrong idea.

ITEM: WordPress sent me a summary of ’2012 In Blogging’, full details of which I am not going to share as it will only underline how pathetically few visitors this blog gets. I am however gratified to learn that the search terms ‘lucy liu bondage’ and ‘lucy liu in bondage’ continue to drive traffic here. Three cheers for Lucy and all you kinky buggers who want to tie her up.

And also apologies to whoever came here the other day after a search on ‘blow my trumpet gay sex’. I really feel that I have let you down.

ITEM: ‘Health and safety rules stopping children getting work experience in companies, says David Cameron’ blared a recent headline on The Torygraph website.

Is this, I wonder, the same David Cameron who last year drove off leaving his eight year old daughter Nancy behind in the pub?

Yes, I believe it is.

Further comment seems superfluous.

ITEM: So, I’m reading the Introduction to a collection of poetry, and the author takes time out to gratuitously unload on ‘gurus and petty reviewers’ and airily dismiss the breed as wannabe writers, the literary equivalent of ‘a spoiled child on a beach whose sandcastle comes out the wrong shape . . . so he goes around kicking in everyone else’s’.

Cool. Some people don’t like reviewers. I get that. What I don’t get is, if you feel that way, why don’t you simply instruct your publisher to not send out any review copies.

And, as a matter of fact, my sandcastles were always perfect, studded with pretty sea shells and topped by coloured pennants that waved merrily in the breeze, so there.