Sorry for the radio silence…but…I’ve been off having a life - I know that’s a strange concept to most bloggers who seem to exist only in the weird emptiness of cyberspace but there it is. I mean I could blog every other day (if I could be bothered) but do you really want to read about where I went to have a coffee - or what happened to me at work? Hell most of the time I don’t want to be there so the least I can do is to make sure that you poor fuckers who are living vicariously through me have something interesting to read about. Fair enough, instead of reading the ramblings of someone who is rapidly turning into a grumpy old woman, I could tell you all about Nietzsches theory of cosmology. But lets be honest here, do you really want to read intellectual stuff- like healthy food, intellect is fine in theory but in practice I’d rather just have a big Mac. (and I know I know 25 million hectares of rain forest are cut down in order to provide land for beef cattle to graze on but you know what - I’ll have mine with double cheese and pickle. I’m sorry, I’m alive therefore other things are going to die.) Agree with me, disagree with me (since I’ll never meet you I don’t really care one way or another!) don’t give a damn, but if you want intellectual then go read a book - any uni web site will give you a reading list that will keep you busy for years…I’m bright, 5 A levels (and I did mine before they made the courses easy - media studies indeed!) and an a honours degree prove that I don’t need to name drop. As the late lamented Paula Yates (http://www.who2.com/paulayates.html)said when a journalist suggested that she was seen as a bimbo by the public ‘I could tell you about the essays I write about renaissance artists but do you really want to read them.’

Since I last checked in I’ve moved house, had nearly two months worth of houseguests, got on with my book, proof read my brothers book (he just got book deal - which leads me to wonder maybe a little less life and little more writing would have stood me in better stead throughout my twenties!) Rediscovered both my cleavage and my sex life ( I must admit the one led to the other!) with my partner ! extremely unfashionable I must admit…to actually find that you still fancy your guy ( thought I better be gender specific here although I know that’s terribly unPC ) like mad after seven years! Wilde (http://www.cmgww.com/historic/wilde/) would definitely have something to say about that, nearly as bad as talking to your husband throughout dinner, (there you go two famous people mentioned so far, shall we go for a threesome (sorry, one track mind at the moment!), cooked up a storm and worked out the vagaries of Adobe Premier. Oh did I mention I’ve been to work and kept the house clean as well….

I’ve also - due to the rediscoverage of cleavage - started exercising, I mean its all very well when your tits start growing but when your hips do too that’s when its time to take action. Man it hurt - I used to be fit and then when we moved to Edinburgh I got so busy working that I didn’t have time to exercise - a paltry excuse I know but the only one I got. Exercise started to be the thing I’d do tomorrow…bad mistake!! especially after a year, so the Dave Prowse ( Darth Vader to all you film boffs - a very nice man and not a bit as scary as he appears on film) exercise book came out and the masochism began…( not that I’m averse to a bit of masochism so long as it doesn’t involve wearing strange rubber outfits but if that floats your boat then go for it - just don’t tell me about it)

I mentioned my poor aching muscles to a friend of mine - (surprsingly enough I do have them - friends that is, not muscles) who immediately started to bemoan the fact that I was buying into the whole standardized view of what women ought to look like. Now I know that this isn’t going to be popular (like I care) amongst a lot of women but you know what - Fat is not a feminist issue - fat is eating too much (with the notable exception of several very rare ailments). Now whatever shape you are - cool. If your happy with how you look -great. Personally I believe that size doesn’t matter unless it matters to you… I like to be thin, that’s what makes me feel good - if I get bigger than a certain size then I don’t like it cos my clothes don’t fit properly and my trousers start to cut off my blood supply at the crotch, but I don’t think that the world should be the same shape. But if you aren’t thin and you want to be then please - do the world a favour - either do something about it and its very easy, just eat less crap and take some exercise or shut the fuck up…You aren’t fat because men control media and force some twisted view of femininity on you (and even if they do - surely being a post modernist women you can be ironic and look like a fifties icon, after all Marilyn Monroe would equate to a size sixteen nowadays and no-one can dispute that she was beautiful) you’re fat because you eat too much and exercise too little. As my granddad was wont to say when anyone complained about their weight - ‘no one fat came out of Belsen’.
(Before anyones sensibilities are offended by that and I must admit that without this addition it could come across as very offensive, I should just mention that he was in a concentration camp for the duration of the war)

Now I’ve experienced this from both sides of the coin so I think that I have a right to comment (although if I hadn’t I’d still stick my twopennorth in) I also don’t believe that the western portrayl of women in the media leads to eating disorders. As a young teenager I was anorexic. Living as we did then 6 miles away from the nearest village, with no television and no magazines to hand I only saw large, wonderful, Beryl Cook like farmers wives who looked fantastic because they were happy. So there was no pressure to conform unless it was to have another slice of fruitcake. In my experience, eating disorders are about control and the lack thereof. The one thing, often the last thing that you are able to control about your life is your food intake.

From sixteen until the age of twenty I had what kind people called puppy fat and less kind people called flab. I didn’t have anything nice to say about anyone that was thinner than me and spent all my time and conversation making nasty comments about other (thinner) women. Until one day I realised that maybe I should stop bitching about those that were thinner and just get thinner myself. It took a long hard look in the mirror and six months of extremely hard work to lose the excess weight, it took standing in clubs with a bottle of water instead of several jack daniels, it took no crisps, no ice-cream no seconds and sit ups till I vomited (thank you Dave Prowse for the times I went to your gym, you took charge of my workout and I threw up in the changing rooms!) ….and I discovered several important facts… the main one being that you can be thin or you can be bright but you can’t be both. And the worst part I discovered about this fact was the following… Its not men that start to treat you like a bimbo - its other women. Men don’t treat you any differently unless you start treating them differently, you don’t suddenly become a sex object. In fact and heres something I bet you didn’t know - most men don’t prefer skinny women because then we don’t look like women we look like men without dicks. Its the other women you have to look out for. They’re the ones who will automatically assume that the weight you lost must have been your brain cells, They’re the ones that castigate women for having boob jobs, lipo, botox, good skin, their picture in a magazine, looking better in that dress than they do…and the reason (and listen to this guys it’s a trade secret that I’m giving away here ) every pound we add on the woman further along the bar is a pound we can take off ourselves, every bit of cellulite we highlight is a bit we can tippex off our own thighs, every tarty outfit ‘that women’s to old…doesn’t have the figure…has a nerve to be wearing’ makes our own clothes fit just that bit less tightly, every blonde we dismiss as a bimbo jumps our own IQ up another point.

Yeats http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5379/yeats_index.html got it all wrong when he said that we paint the our face to search for the one we had before the world was made - we aren’t searching for anything or anyone, its our armour against the slings and arrows of other women.

And now - with the time at 01.42 and the third rendition of Sweet Home Alabama I’m going to do some proper writing
(Aren’t you impressed? I named checked five people and two of them recognised intellectuals to boot!)

Its been a while since I blogged but been busy writing other stuff and organising the apartment (I love the liberties the Americans took with English - I mean, doesn’t apartment sound so much better than flat.) I’ve also just reread a really inspirational book which I pinched from my bro. - “Crazy from the Heat” the autobiography of David Lee Roth ex-(or possibly now rejoined, its difficult to keep track sometimes) singer of Van Halen. I know that sounds terribly bimbo doesn’t it? I’m supposed to find great literature inspiring, something with very little story but way too many pages, or I should be inspired by poetry, art, music, (classical or opera of course). If I had intended to read autobiographies for inspiration then it should be some obscure feminist writer, or someone who lived X hundred years ago. I certainly shouldn’t find the memoirs of a blonde haired, rather pretty rock singer inspiring and I’m certainly betraying my principles as a women by finding encouraging someone who insured himself against paternity suits, well…Sorry, I do. And if he’d lived X hundred years ago it would be OK to be inspired by him so I’ll just bypass time and cut to the chase.

For those of you who don’t know, and there may be a few of you out there, as I mentioned David Lee Roth (DLR) is/was the lead singer of one of the biggest, if not the biggest rock group of the mid 70’s early 80’s who then went on to have a successful solo career, play Vegas, write a film script, rejoin and leave Van Halen and in his spare time climb mountains and trek across most of the uncharted territory of the world. The thing that I love about it all is not just that he did it with a grin that looks like the cat ate the canary, the cream, the goldfish, your best friends sister and the cheer leading squad, but that every photograph, every stunt, every T-shirt, every rumour was a deliberate set up. An illusion carefully created in order to conceal the real intent which was to get as successful as possible as fast as possible.

For example and one of the rock myths you may have heard of is that Van Halen demanded that their rider contain a huge dish of M&M’s sans the brown ones in their rider - (a rider is the stash of food and drink given to the band in their backstage dressing room.) If there were any in the bowl then they wouldn’t go on stage. As a prima donna story it’s guaranteed to cement their place in the rock and roll hall of demanding diva’s - however the reason why they insisted on no brown M&M’s is breathtaking in its brilliance. Van Halen’s stage set involved pyrotechnics, huge lighting rig’s and a wattage of electricity usually used in firing up a town. The technical specs for such a show were very precise. By inserting the anti brown M&M’s clause in their contract somewhere in the small print DLR knew instantly whether or not the venue had read the technical spec’s. If there were any brown M&M’s in the dish then the chances were the venue hadn’t which meant that things would go wrong on stage.

To cram all that in one lifetime (and he ain’t dead yet) is pretty inspiring in the first place. To do it while maintaining the persona of a beach bum is sheer genius and brings me back to the point I made in my last blog about making your life look casual - whistling while you make your escape.

Which is a roundabout way to get to the point of this blog…( if you could just telepathically bone up on the references that I’m likely to throw at you - rock music, drug culture, mindless films, the importance of wonder bra’s, lipstick, exotic shoes and trashy novels - it would be helpful to me and make reading these a lot shorter for you.)

The past couple of weeks I’ve been putting my house in order. Literally. Its never been a pigsty as mum (and dad) ingrained the need not to have ingrained dirt but its always been surface clean not really clean. Throwing out the crap, reorganising my files, scrubbing the places that I haven’t scrubbed for weeks if not months, ironing, washing windows, sills and paint work, putting things into closets in an ordered fashion, has declogged my brain. You get inspiration while your cleaning the u-bend of the sink. Gems will pop into your brain while your ironing the sheets. Honestly.

So I’ve come to a basic set of conclusions about happiness, the real double expresso stuff. The leap out of bed in the morning and wanting to do your sit-ups type of happiness cos god it feels good to be alive. And when you’re happy, everything else you do is a breeze.

You won’t read any of my conclusions in a self help book because they aren’t glamorous. They aren’t new age, and they aren’t touchy feely. They aren’t about relating to your inner child, they’re about giving it smack and telling it to stop whinging.
You don’t get me time, you don’t imagine yourself a colour and you certainly don’t look in your wardrobe to discover the clothes you buy for the person you would like to be unless your ironing them and hanging them up.

They are about boring, old-fashioned words like responsibility, self-respect and duty. They involve concepts like hard-work, elbow grease, strategy and denial.

They certainly don’t involve any phrases like creative fulfilment. Because if your getting on with it then you are.

Before I begin I’d just like to point out that all my thoughts, writings and concepts are copyright to the author (me) and that they are put up here on the condition that they remain so. I do not give permission for them to be reused by anyone other than me, in whole, in part or even for someone to take the essence of what I’m saying and rewrite it and my company pay’s a law firm a vast amount of dosh to make sure that this remains the case. If you do want to quote me - then e-mail and ask and I’m sure we can come to some arrangement. I do not subscribe to the theory that in the great scheme of blogs everything up here is up for grabs out of the kindness of my heart. This is my life and I only have one, these are my thoughts and I’m responsible for them, this is my time that I’m using to type them out and I’ll never get it back again. And here ends the first lesson in self respect.

Got an e-mail from M the other day, she saves my life at work cos I’m usually whizzed through all the stuff I need to do by about 12.30 so for the rest of the day I need to look busy and how better than to be typing. Anyway this one enclosed an url http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/000809.html for an article (or rant) from this guy who was sounding off about the uselessness of people ever trying to get books published and it really pissed me off.

Basically he was saying that it’s pointless for people ever to try to get books published because even if you manage it you’re unlikely to make a living from it and there are so many bad writers in the world who needs any more. I can’t agree with what he was saying - some, admittedly not many, make a good wage from selling books, JK thingummy a case in point, Jilly Cooper, Tolkien (OK so he’s dead - but family done all right out of his writings.) That young kid in America who sold his teenage angst novel for millions…can’t remember his name but was on the late show a couple of months ago. Yeah not everyone’s a brilliant writer but then if you look at Van Goghs early painting - man he was bad… or Doris Lessing who published her first book at seventy (she’d written all her life, she just thought she was good enough to submit something at seventy.) People get better. And to be honest with how many billions of people in the world - if you can get just 1% or even .5% of them to like/read oh hell lets be honest here, just buy your stuff then you’ve got a best seller, enough money to pay the rent and you’re doing something you enjoy to boot.

Anyway I figured that my reaction made a good first blog cos I’d spent the past week trying to decide what to say…I mean to me the whole point of these blog things is to sound off. Say all the things that you might not say in public but if you pin it up here then its kinda public isn’t it so you’ve let off steam, someone somewhere in the intersphere might read it and take it on board and you can get on with your life without pissing off too many people. However unlike this guy I don’t think that they are or should be a solution to someone’s aspirations of being a writer, that seems second best - ‘I’ve spent all this time and emotional energy on this novel but I’m not even going to attempt to get it published because its really difficult to get published and I won’t make any money if I do, so I’ll hang it up here on the off-chance that someone somewhere might read it. If I really want an audience then I can send a round robin e-mail to my friends so that they can read it’ - Hell if your gonna do that then might as well print off the manuscript and push a copy in their hands - at least then they can read it in bed.
Now if the point of art is to provoke an emotional response then the guys a second Picasso. And what he said, from a financial point of view is possibly true in pound shillings and pence although as I said I don’t agree. But the point he seemed to miss is that we all need our dreams.
Over the past couple of months my whole mentality’s changed with regards to writing - in fact to art in general. I have always been creative - not my expression, just using the generic term for someone who writes, paints, sculpts, I don’t call myself an artist or creative. I work, and by that I mean I use whatever tools it takes to get the idea out.
I believe if you don’t reach for the stars you won’t stand a chance in hell of touching them….

I said this to M in my e-mail to her and she pointed out that there were a lot of her students who believed that writing a best-seller would get them out of a hated job when they needed to sort the job out first.
I know what she meant. To be honest a couple of months ago I would have agreed whole heartedly with her. In order to be creative you need a perfect life, fresh flowers, me time and someone to clean the toilet for you - now I don’t agree.
If you’re in a hated job then, like a prisoner of war - its your duty to escape, and if you dig your tunnel by trying to write a novel, get a picture sold, sign a record deal or whatever, then whatever it takes…However - like all escapes you have to plan your campaign…so you need to know your industry, your market, your competitors, you need to be able to fraternise with the enemy (i.e. the corporate, PR, AOR’s, etc…) and know the local dialects. So you learn all this while you start to dig…and then you have to steel yourself for the thought that this escape attempt might fail - but it shouldn’t stop you digging a new tunnel. I think the problem is the problem that many artists have now which is they won’t get their hands dirty by treating it like a business…it is a business..if you think about the Anthony Gormley exhibition ( which M and I went to the other week) - he didn’t have anything that radical to say about humanity or about inner space - nothing that hasn’t been said a thousand time over by anyone who did the hippy trail in the seventies before coming home and getting degree, - but he got two floors of a new gallery and a whopping amount of cash to say it because he knew, not instictively but through practice - what the arts councils, public bodies etc. wanted to hear.

The trick I think is to be able to make it look casual, - its the whistle while you escape which belies the three months/years/decades digging the tunnel…