Art

I wish I could draw. The peaks of my envy are off the chart when I notice the person next to me doodling; casually sketching the Vitruvian Man in the margin, achieving the palette of the most-accomplished Scottish Colourists with Stablio fineliners… that sort of thing. As somebody who holds their pen like a gibbon making its first acquaintance with tools, clambering onto the bottom rung of the great ladder of evolution, I can barely draw a straight line unaided. I recall with a soft shudder, an art teacher of mine – an individual who had taken to inspirational teaching like a duck to magma, and who applied a thick layer of smugness along with her morning lipstick – taking a turn about my class before asserting that whilst some classes were good at art, ours – she devoutly hoped – was better at music. Whilst not the sort of warm encouragement a thirteen-year-old armed only with a sketchbook and a stick of charcoal might yearn for, this was probably a fair assessment. I could always toot a goodish sound from the clarinet, but I found Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue far more difficult on the paintbrush.

School took any interest or enthusiasm I had for art and crushed its gentle spirit under a pile of marking criteria and a wide selection of discouraging noises made with the tongue. I was never going to be the next Leonardo – not unless he was far more into blowing ink with a straw to make tree silhouettes and taking leaf-rubbings with wax crayons than history books have hitherto suspected – but I might have taken some enjoyment from drawing a diseased-looking cat in the corner of my notes about William Wordsworth. Instead, I was far more likely to be the child in the art lesson adeptly removing the ink cartridge from her fountain pen, pouring the contents into her hands, and then ‘please-miss-my-pen-exploded-may-I-go-to-the-bathroom’… never to return.

However, I always loved galleries. My mother – check out her blog this week about education to get a glimpse of my childhood, sullen in a skirt at museums, operas, plays and galleries – believed that being seven-years-old was no bar to seeing my first Shakespeare play, appreciating La Bohème (to her chagrin, with subtitles), or learning Elizabethan history through a trip to The National Portrait Gallery. I will not dwell on how much this somewhat eccentric childhood explains the person I have undoubtedly become. Far from staring at the screen of my iPad (which hadn’t been invented), watching videos on YouTube (which didn’t exist), or propping my diminishing brain in front of endless children’s TV (because it was only on for an hour each evening on two channels), I spent an inordinate amount of time – and a birthday party – at the Cardiff National Museum… and it was great! I do not regret a single missed episode of Art Attack – even though that was quality programming and inspired a generation with newspaper and PVA glue. I was busy, captivated by electronic dinosaurs, mammoths, blue whale skeletons, fossils, semi-precious stones, eggs, a little dark room filled with stars (like where Ross and Rachel have their first date), and a stuffed ox, which looked like it might at any moment reanimate and run you down. Until I moved to Germany, this childhood paradise marked my only face-to-face encounter with a red squirrel, albeit one that had spent considerable time with a taxidermist. And upstairs, an art gallery, in which the usually-officious security men, who attempt to stop you molesting the artwork, told my mother that they had never noticed how many dogs there were in paintings until, aged three, I became a frequent visitor and dog-spotter.

If you ever find yourself in London – and why shouldn’t you from time to time – there are some startlingly ugly cherubs to be seen at the Wallace Collection: something which my father and I didn’t do justice, having spent too long with a hearty lunch. The restaurant creates the illusion of sunshine in Britain by having trees indoors, obviously holding us spellbound – although the pink lemonade and tender beef stew may have been a contributing factor – so with forty minutes until closing time, we had an excuse to sprint past Damien Hirst at several stew-filled mph. Years later in gay Paris, my mother and I were alone among holiday-makers, disturbingly reminiscent of the antelope in The Lion King, in sedulously avoiding the Mona Lisa. Us less Mona-motivated antelope were allowed to graze the rest of the gallery’s virtually deserted corridors in peace, where I fell in love with Géricault and discovered that I can’t look at the Venus De Milo without the phrase ‘carved by Gummi artisans who work exclusively in the medium of Gummi’ floating through my head. My mother also lamented that, since it turned out that the whole Van Gogh ear debacle probably isn’t true, my entire knowledge of art history has been obliterated.

On a twelve day whirlwind tour around Italy, a friend and I escaped the forty degree sunshine by stepping into every gallery in sight. I was therefore able to pit her against my arch nemesis St Sebastian. To outline my theory about the blighted St Sebastian, let us take Pietro Perugino’s painting of this scene from the Bible that I missed, in which John the Baptist and St Sebastian visit the Madonna and child. The real painting is at the Uffizi in Florence. My contention – and it is one which all right-minded art historians will soon adopt – is that Perugino, and many many other artists, leant their non-paintbrush-wielding arm on their canvases, with the result that when they eventually leant back to admire their Renaissance handiwork depicting Jesus and an assortment of BC cronies, they realised to their horror that they had neglected a long thin section of the painting. Well, it would look silly to add a harmless shrub, an exotic urn, or a random dog to this Biblical scene. What the artist needs is someone recognisable, holy and completely innocuous. And, across the myriad of time, artists everywhere came to the conclusion that squeezing in St Sebastian – standing in a corner mournful, arrow-filled, and crying out for a good slap – was the perfect solution to all of their woes.

all I’m going to say is that Giles Gilbert Scott had clearly never been to Auschwitz

Just like music, I don’t think anyone should judge you for what art you like. (you won’t believe that statement by the end of this paragraph) Unfortunately, modern art is not my thing. Sorry. If you’re cherishing a piece of string or a blob in a frame, I honour you. You clearly understand something that I cannot access. My best friend and I were almost removed from the Tate Modern by the officious-looking geezers mentioned above, for becoming too hysterical at the pretentious interpretations of the artist that accompany the installations. Now I’m not so foolish as to believe that art has to be something that you’d want hanging in your sitting-room, and I am in awe of Picasso and Matisse and Braque and Cézanne… but installation art leaves me standing in a corner with St Sebastian. I will never think that Damien Hirst is a genius for putting animals in formaldehyde and giving it an unbearably ostentatious name, nor am I up for what is essentially paying money for a ramble through an Ikea warehouse. And I think that Tracey Emin should have just tidied up occasionally. Although it’s certainly a creative way to get out of picking up your room: sorry mother, I can’t sort out my desk right now, I’m entering the Turner Prize.

The real joy of an art gallery is that whatever city you are in, you can always find old friends, undiscovered pieces by your favourite artists, or with luck you might even discover something new. In Munich – where I’ve been for an unbelievable seven months – I am happier and at home forgoing the Modern and plumping for the new Pinakothek, where I can wander excitedly amongst Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Monet’s lilies, Stubbs’ peculiarly muscular dogs, Manet’s portraits, Degas’ fabrics, Klimt’s gold, and Rodin’s sculptures. Bliss! For one euro, that keeps me off the streets on a Sunday.

PS. In a short-lived bid to win au pair of the year, and spurred on by a friend’s impending visit that evening – an opportunity for beer if ever I heard one – the kiddiewinks and I entered into the spirit of Easter with ferocious egg-blowing, egg-painting, egg-dyeing and generalised egg merriment. No one inhaled any raw egg, no one cried when their eggshell shattered, and we had Ottolenghi’s butternut squash frittata for dinner. Winning.

Frozen

It is April. Your last blog was in February. You have had 9 weeks to think of something amusing to say. I DEMAND another post.

Alright. DMY – an expression so vile that it is forced by me and The Simpsons to have an acronym (see Urban Dictionary to reveal the unpleasant truth). Keep your knickers on! Here is a long overdue blopic. And because the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in the past nine weeks is that I bought a fifty pound pair of River Island jeans for a fiver, and because you did something bad in a previous life, you will now be subjected to one of my film reviews. Today: Frozen. My suggestion would be to save yourself the trouble and just watch the Honest Trailer here. Try not to waste too much of the rest of your life hopelessly devouring all Honest Trailers available like a fat kid with a caterpillar cake. Man those things were great…

*Ahem*

Most people – and by ‘people’ I mean adults who have NO children and are NOT children and therefore have NO excuse to waste an afternoon watching a film aimed at six year olds – probably encountered this film through the posters and trailers, or if they work in hospitality and catering, walking back and forth through a hot kitchen to hear Idina Menzel singing That Song. I suspect my first encounter with Frozen was a tad more niche (that’s neesh, not nitch by the way). To keep sane through the drizzle and fog of… well 2014, I’ve been watching Looking. It’s a brand new HBO series and it’s basically America’s attempt at Queer as Folk (something incidentally which, like The Office, our cousins across the pond enjoyed, got their hands on, missed the point entirely, and ruined). Looking is therefore fifteen years behind the times as it attempts to follow the lives of three gay men in Manchester’s gay scene – no wait, that actually is Queer as Folk – this is set in San Francisco’s gay scene. It’s a sort of well-acted and moderately-amusing drama series which gives the impression that gay men in San Francisco are all sauna-going, threesome-having, facial-hair-growing, leather-wearing, cone-smoking, artsy-fartsy, startlingly ethnically diverse, dissatisfied, thirty-something year olds who are almost constantly having anonymous sex whilst exposing almost no flesh on camera, continually skiving work with no consequences and traveling everywhere on public transport. Seriously, for rich kids who party all night and own cars, they spend a lot of time abandoning their cars in favour of sitting on trains, in buses and walking. And then the one who’s in Being Human and Sherlock – the history boy with the ears – he shows up and is described as ‘a white Will Smith’, and he’s like the English, ethical one with the steady job and the boyfriend… until he cheats on his boyfriend with a co-worker. But I digress. The main character in this series is played by goat-farmer turned teen-star-of-the-stage Jonathan Groff. So I watched Frozen because when I Google-d him I was bombarded with adverts for Frozen, interviews about Frozen, awards connected with Frozen and That Song.

So at last, Frozen. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a good film. Blondy and Gingy get embroiled in a sort of magically induced amnesia plot, requiring 24 hour surveillance. The unimaginable trauma of growing up inside the family castle, complete with its own statues of armour, huge empty banquet halls and art gallery, is too much for Gingy. It’s hard to comprehend such suffering! Whereas the unexpected deaths of their parents in a freak boating accident leaves both girls strangely unmoved, mainly because Gingy suffers from an undiagnosed neurological disorder which leaves her fixated with building a snowman. Seriously. She sings about it. A lot. In short, Blondy is some sort of icy King Midas who uncontrollably unleashes an eternal winter on Arendelle, so Gingy stomps off to find her and bring her home, with help from who else but a schizophrenic, his long-suffering reindeer and a talking snowman whose catchphrase ‘Hi, everyone. I’m Olaf and I like warm hugs!’ is the least memorable catchphrase since David Mitchell was forced to say ‘it only remains for me to thank our guests. They were all truly unbelievable and that’s the unbelievable truth’. Shortly before rushing to the asthma pump.

Blondy and Gingy

Look, the film was fine. And yes I bought the CD and no I still can’t get That Song out of my head and yes it spoke to my inner teenage girl who wanted to be misunderstood and used the word LOL on MSN too much. But – and please don’t send round a pack of angry troll rocks (yes you heard me: troll rocks) to sinisterly ‘fix me with love’ when I reveal this – but I’m not sure that I really understand what the fuss is about. Sure, the songs are great and it looks… like Tangled, and Blondy will inspire her fair share of anorexic peroxided girls and lovestruck boys blah blah blah. I’m not sure that I lived it, breathed it, dreamed it and wanted to be either Anna (official Gingy) or Elsa (Blondy’s baptismal name). Maybe it’s because, as always, I’m right and it just isn’t as good as The Aristocats and Aladdin and The Lion King and all my other childhood favourites, and things really do just get worse and worse, and everything really was better when I (and everyone) was younger. Or maybe – oh good lord – maybe I’m just no longer Frozen‘s target audience? Maybe Disney aren’t pandering to me? Maybe I’ve grown up…

Nahhh.

PS. Oh my God, the can is open and there are spoiler-shaped worms wriggling everywhere. Don some sturdy shoes and stop reading now if you don’t want to be wading ankle-deep in them. I’m going to reveal my biggest irritation with this perfectly good film. It was the critics and audiences everywhere going ‘Oo, it’s a story all about girl power and feminism and sisterly love and everything is sunshine and rainbows and dogs poo candyfloss’. Only it isn’t is it? Because Gingy still marries some stereotypical manly man, without whom she would have been – okay, not totally – but mostly useless. I mean, before he turns up she has no idea where she’s going and there’s a whole montage of her just falling in snow. Like a fool. A girly fool. Plus she fell in love with the first man she clapped eyes on, even though he did turn out to be the evilest thing since sliced bread… evil sliced bread. Sorry Gingy, but you’ll just have to admit that Brave got there first with a much better redhead and a much more powerful idea. Although I think it’s safe to say that Frozen’s tagline writes itself. “Frozen: a world where girls are not completely useless without men.” It truly is the feminist statement for a new generation.

Film

And I’m back in Exeter.  I’ve washed my sheets, I’ve made a huge consignment of chilli and – you’re not here – hell, yes, I’ve even vacuumed.  So all I’m waiting for now, other than a job, a substantial lottery win and a magic wand or lamp-harbouring-genie, is the phone call from national treasure Kirsty Young.  Now, I know exactly which eight songs I’d choose for Desert Island Discs; and my goodness, people will be snapping off their radios and gnawing through their power cables I can tell you, in a valiant yet futile attempt to escape the confusion of Robbie, Elgar and Tim Minchin that will render Kirsty speechless that day.  In fact, I’m waiting for the day when the Discs format begins to pall – and seeing as it’s been a radio stalwart since 1942, that day must surely be creeping ever closer- and Miss Young steps up as the first presenter of Desert Island Films.

Some Like It Hot (and don’t pretend you didn’t know that you would now be subjected to my list in full) would be top of my list if I were, by some fortuitous misfortune, marooned on a desert island with a hamper of DVDs, a DVD player, a widescreen TV and an inexhaustible supply of electricity.  No one my age seems to have seen Some Like It Hot and I have made it my duty to make the formal introductions: two musicians, gunfire, cellos, Marilyn Monroe, cross-dressing, birthday cake, Spats, terrible impressions of Cary Grant, pearls, Osgood Fielding III (what a great name), roses, elevators, alcohol, saxophones…  Yeah, that about sums it up.  It’s a farce-comedy-romance-musical-gangster movie.   My adoration of Jack Lemmon simply increases whenever I watch this film and here he conjures up one of the best sequences in film history.  You’ll see…  It must also surely have won the award for ‘the best final line in a film ever’.  If such a category does not exist, instate it now, and posthumously give it to Lemmon.  Once you’re a signed up convert, you can watch The Apartment too.  Although, Some Like It Hot is undoubtedly lessened in its glory by Marilyn Monroe’s absolutely awful dress, and the delightful knowledge, courtesy of Tony Curtis, that she was like kissing Hitler.  Or do these things only add to its charm?

Singin’ in the Rain: (I may as well come out now as allergic to Andrew Lloyd Webber.  To those who adore him, I apologise, but I don’t really even like the song he wrote).  But yes, I love a good musical.  I’d be sorely tempted to conceal High Society, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music in the box as well, but I would have no hesitation in choosing Singin’ in the Rain every time; even though it’s a wrench to lose Bing Crosby.  I have known this film by heart for as long as I can remember and my island would never get me down so long as I could caper and sing along to every single song in this film.  Plus, watch Gene Kelly dance and hear Jean Hagen speak.  “Haunting”… in two very different ways.

Hamlet: ‘You see, little creatures that have gathered on my island, where I come from, we do this thing called ‘acting’.  We also write these things called ‘plays’.  And although the 1996 film may total 4 hours and 2 minutes, it is at least 4 hours and 2 minutes of one of my favourite plays with one of my favourite actors.’

I suspect that it is necessary to take a children’s film with you: something to sit rather sadly on your island, on the less jolly days, and revisit your own childhood with wistful nostalgia.  Whilst I’d be tempted to take Aladdin or Pirates of the Caribbean or The Lion King or… this could become a very long list.  But, in my heart of hearts, I know I would grab the 1995 version of The Wind in the Willows complete with its beautiful music, exquisite animation, the Vanessa Redgrave framing narrative, and Alan Bennett, Michael Gambon, Rik Mayall and Michael Palin.  And it keeps all the bits with Pan and the otters.  To be honest, who could possibly say no to such a great book with such a brilliant cast?  If you could say no to it, then I am afraid you are not welcome on my island.  Swim on by please.

I think I’ll have to take something, brace yourself September, Christmassy.  Tempted to nab Diehard or The Taylor of Gloucester, but would in fact take The Muppet Christmas Carol.  Of course.  It’s sort of a musical, sort of a children’s film (great), but it’s also a heart-warming Dickens-novel (even greater) told through the medium of muppets (definitively greatest).  And who doesn’t laugh at Michael Caine awkwardly singing and, with no less awkwardness, smiling with muppets?

So now I’ve got ‘only one more sleep till Christmas’ firmly in my head, it all gets a bit tricky.  Would I take Beginners or Grosse Pointe Blank?  Shame or Withnail and I?  The Talented Mr Ripley or 12 Angry Men?  A Hitchcock or a Woody Allen?  I’m not even considering television series (that’s a blopic for a different island altogether which would be rocking a lot of Brideshead let me tell you).  All of the aforementioned films are, in my humble opinion, brilliant.  Obviously, some things are instant no-nos.  The Impossible for example.  Quite a good film, but no one stranded on a desert island wants to watch a film about people drowning or being horrifically injured on a small island; nor do I wish to feel that Naomi Watts, in the midst of a natural disaster, has still scrubbed up better than I do on an average day.  There’s nothing quite so bad for the soul as being ill-favourably compared to a celebrity by a coconut.  So, for my final three film choices I’m going to have an independent arts film, something that always makes me cry, and something I haven’t seen yet.

And here they are.  I really want to take An Education, The Opposite of Sex or Cold Comfort Farm, but I fear they’re not pretentious enough (!), and their titles make very peculiar reading when placed side by side.  I’ll have Trainspotting instead, with An Education on the B side, if I may (and I may).  It has the advantage of making Britain look bleak enough for me to find my island cosy and inviting.  Also it has Ewan McGregor in it, so I’m sold.  My island’s feeling cosier by the second.  You may wonder why I want something sad with me, but I think it might be nice to sob with some purpose on my island.  Not that having a coconut as your only friend isn’t sad enough when you’re stranded in the middle of the ocean (it had better be a Caribbean island with a coconut tree), but sometimes you just fancy a sad film.  Seeing as there is no way I am taking Life is Beautiful or Amour to a desert island – there are limits to just how sad I wish to be and limits too to the amount of emotional support a coconut can provide – I suspect I shall have to take American Beauty, which for some reason I found incredibly sad (and it’s little comfort to me now that I’ve been through the emotional wrangler it’s on IMDb’s saddest films ever list).  And finally Pulp Fiction, because everyone goes on about it as though it’s the answer to something.  And if it is, then fabulous.  I’ll be able to say that I liked a Tarantino film which will be a novel experience for me.  And if it isn’t, then it gives me something to moan about on my island.

PS. This was an unbelievably difficult task and I’m so sorry I name-checked so many different films.  I want to take every one of the ones mentioned, and about thirty others.  It turns out that living on a desert island just isn’t for me after all.  Damn.  My pal Kirsty, if she hasn’t tried to asphyxiate herself with a plastic bag by this point, would probably ask me, slightly fixedly, which one I’d save if my island flooded.  ‘Definitely Singin’ in the Rain.’  Appropriate.  And a luxury?  ‘Either my teddy-bear or a guitar.’  Meanwhile, the coconut sends his best.

Week 4: Parties

And so, this funny non-term of ours is rapidly coming to a close; for cheery little undergraduates anyway, who are desperately trying not to contemplate being plunged into the horrors of life, and instead are busily throwing parties.  And I must say, I’m all in favour. You’ll be surprised to learn that trying not to contemplate drowning in the duckpond of life by writing a dissertation, is not terribly effective, so it’s a welcome relief to go to some parties, even if it does make you feel strangely ancient, as people twitter on about graduation and the prospect of the daunting hat.  No… not that hat – that’s a party hat, not a mortarboard.  Do not confuse the two.  Although, if you find yourself embracing the divine Floella Benjamin wearing one of these beauties, please send me the resulting photographs.

This week’s blog is not a Pippa-Middleton-Nigella-Lawson-Biff-Chip-and-Kipper-style dream guide to parties, complete with triangular sandwiches and cupcakes.  In fact, it’s barely the sort of party you’d wish your five old niece to attend at all.  But, unless you’re heading out to a vomiting asylum of debauchery – and remember, the parties I attend tend to be hosted by English students – there are still a couple of pitfalls that I blunder into when facing the average student party.  And yes, I am going to share them with you, and no, there’s nothing you can do about that!

The first problem is an old one: hair.  It’s actually a problem that stems from not living with other girls.  Firstly, I forget that when a party starts at 9pm, and at 8.56pm my housemate and I are still in pyjamas, I have already fallen perilously, Mufasa-like, into trap number one.  It will now take him those remaining four minutes to put on a clean shirt, and not the good forty-five that it takes me.  This is because washing, drying, straightening and taming hair is a lot of work, but the result is that I am never anywhere on time.  Plus, if I was surrounded by a flock of girls, I’d have some clue as to what to wear.  It’s the age old problem: how do you know whether you’ll arrive in faded jeans to see everyone else prancing in ball-dresses, or, conversely, you sashay up in your best gown to observe girls who’ve donned onesies?  It’s already a nightmare.

My second problem is a problem of the modern age: a certain social media site that means that when you’re introduced to someone, you definitely already know everything about them.  You’ve seen their conversations with your friends, you know where they live, what they study and the word count of their current essay.  But, as etiquette has not caught up with the times, you cannot, on any account, simply tell them this.  ‘Hello, I’ve stalked you on Facebook’, or rather ‘Facebook has made me your stalker’, is not an acceptable opener with strangers.  Even as the conversation winds its painful way on, and it becomes clearer and clearer that the same is true the other way around, you both have to pretend that every piece of information comes anew.  And so you begin to run the frightful risk of having the Facebook-stalkers conversation; otherwise known as the ‘hello-my-name-is-yes-I-know’ conversation.  This begins when they say ‘my name is’ and you, unthinkingly, cut them off and say ‘Betty, yes I know’.  And as Betty stares at you in horror, and implores you to reveal how you knew, and the Psycho music heightens in the background, the only lie you can mumble to Betty, not catching her eye, is ‘ummm… facebook suggested you as a friend’.

I was delighted at a recent and, I hasten to add, lovely party – which picked up considerably when I tell you that I arrived an hour late to instantly have the front door closed on my face –  to be offered tea-glorious-tea at not far gone midnight.  Subsequently I had a stream of people sidle up to me and whisper, longingly, ‘ooo, where did you get tea?’  I knew we were all middle-aged really.  It’s simply a question of how well you hide it.  Drinking milky tea at 00:02 at a house party, gives me a wobbly 2/10, I suspect.  But, I’m sure you now quite understand why you’ll find me floating face down in the aforementioned duckpond of life, my hair half-straightened, jeans bunched under my dress, and the kettle boiling, instead of attending a party.  It’s simply too fraught with hazard.

PS. So you might be wondering whether, after an enjoyable party, I then diligently used the following day, exhausted, but not too dehydrated – thanks, tea – to do some serious work on my looming dissertation.  After all, when hangovers are merely something I’ve read about, why shouldn’t I celebrate this fact by curling up under my duvet – nearly June, eh? pah! – and squiggling down several hundred words about children’s literature.  I’m sure that you can all predict the answer, but, seeing as gifs have been a hot topic of debate on the bbc headlines this week – frankly, it’s about bloody time! it’s not as if anything more vitally important than this is happening anywhere in the cosmos right now, and it’s good to see them finally tackling the difficult issues and knowing that I, for one, will sleep better tonight knowing that I will no longer publicly humiliate myself saying ‘jif’ instead of ‘gif’ like the uncultured fool I was – I’ll let Mr Cumberbatch give you my answer instead:

Week 2: Driving

Crossing the main road back to our flat is a somewhat alarming experience.  Without being accused of hyperbole, I consider it not incomparable to Mufasa taking on the wildebeest.  Now, I don’t want to ruin a children’s classic for you, but it would be fair to say that Mufasa doesn’t come off best, and I suspect the same would be true of me coming up against one of the mid-life-crisis mobiles that shoot the lights outside my window.  But the other day, shambling my way back from campus, and entirely failing to regulate my own body temperature in the bizarre dolly mix of weather we are currently experiencing, I happened to cross in front of a learner driver.  Simba’s watery eyes, tragic howls and terrified little paws begin to look like the smug satisfaction of a greedy wasp at an abandoned picnic in comparison with the boy driving that L-plated Fiat.  His obvious panic – mingled with my own as I dashed in front of him, hoping that he’d accurately secured the handbrake – put me in mind of learning to drive myself and that is my blopic for this week.

I’d like to go on record as saying that I did not want to learn how to drive.  I couldn’t imagine that my parents, or society, wanted to take my terrible sense of direction, my worm-length concentration span and my occasional inability to decide right from left, give it a dose of petrol and set it loose on the roads.  I learned to drive during my last year at school, and then I took, what I’m sure is an all-important year off, before passing my test in my second year of university.  No, I didn’t pass on my first attempt due to the fact that my examiner was forced to use his ‘only in emergencies’ brake.  I maintain that I would have made it, and that the white van coming around the roundabout towards me wasn’t going anything like fast enough to hit me.  My examiner explained that he wasn’t so sure and felt unwilling to risk it.  Showing his nerves there, I feel.

I also wish to just clarify that, since passing, I haven’t really been granted a huge amount of fire-power.  I am able to drive my father’s Toyota, but it’s not exactly like being left in charge of a caffeinated grizzly bear or a sabre-toothed tiger with a skateboard.  Don’t think that I zoom off, like a rocket to the moon, 90mph-ing it down the motorway, leaving caravans, Bentleys and horses in my dusty wake.  Mr Toad, I am not.  I’m normally trapped between the caravans, hoping that, if I put a heavy foot down flat enough, I can crawl past one before slotting back in again.  In a twelve year old Yaris, whose inner matrix is more chewing gum than anything else, maintaining that vital 62mph for caravan-passing can prove a challenge.  It’s a lot more like being at the wheel of dormouse who’s overdone it somewhat on the Propofol.  Many is the holiday my friends and I have taken – five teenage girls, two guitars and luggage – where their squealed encouragement to the car has not perturbed the tortoises, snails and some smaller floating land masses from overtaking us.

But I do really enjoy driving.  It’s not the wind in my hair through the cracks in the bodywork, the thrill of the Hollywood car chase, or the independence to get hopelessly lost on my own time.  It’s not even the obvious allure of having your friends look at you and seeing a huge, smiling taxi where your face used to be!  It’s the ability – as an entirely hypothetical example – to say ‘don’t worry, Mother, I’ll fetch the milk’, jump into your father’s car, whap on the sunglasses, blast on the Tim Minchin, get the AC roaring, slam the car into reverse, and (very gently) roll backwards into your mother’s car…  Then flee.  Obviously, I’d never be that stupid.

 

PS. No picture? Here it is. This is really why cars are on my mind this week.

Yup, right outside my flat window. Over the coming days, our hedges, which looked pretty healthy in the immediate aftermath, sort of turned an unusual, and I suspect unhealthy, colour, wilted and died. I’m pretty sure the car was a write off too. Not sure I’m too keen to be back on the road any time soon. Fortunately, the council fixed the road at 6.30 on the Saturday morning. Needless to say, we were thrilled.

Week 6: Deadlines

This is my favourite blog.  Not because it’s necessarily wittier, profounder or in any way superior to any of the previous or future blogs, but simply because writing it is preventing me from gazing hopelessly at my impending deadlines.  Yes, if you’re lucky enough to get one, then you are currently experiencing Opportunities Week… (or Reading Week as the world outside of Exeter calls it!)  And the opportunity that I am currently taking advantage of is the opportunity to go home, see the new James Bond film and stare with horror at the books I haven’t read in preparation for an essay I haven’t started which is due soon, but the exact date of which escapes my mind.

I’m not certain that this is what my tutors, parents or, for that matter, James Bond himself had in mind, but I would imagine it is the most common usage.  I’m sure Bond adheres closely to his deadlines.  You don’t get to work for Queen and country if you can’t remember the rhyme telling you that, as there are only 30 days in November, that research report is due sooner than you imagined.  Although nor can I imagine a scene in Casino Royale in which Daniel Craig murmurs to himself, ‘thirty days hath September, April, June…’  During Reading Week, I can only imagine that tutors – waking at 11am, hazily remembering that there’s no teaching this week and dedicating their days to thinking intelligent thoughts and drinking* – comfort themselves that students are leaping up at dawn for a few hours solid work before gleefully hiking to the library to chuckle over the excitement of inter-library loans.

Simply from the number of Bond related Facebook statuses, I get the impression that essays nationwide are being neglected like healthy snack alternatives, (as Miranda astutely notes, ‘savoury muffins? the world is full of enough disappointments’) in favour of a night at the cinema.  Universities may as well have just accepted their fate and said ‘alright, this week is dedicated exclusively to students who wish to see Skyfall.  Go, post a witty status and try not to accidentally spend £2000 on an Omega watch, no matter how much you may strangely feel the impulse.’  We all saw the product placement and it won’t work on me, although obviously I now exclusively drink lager!

And so, as usual, it is my hero Douglas Adams who gets the attitude- certainly my attitude to deadlines – just about perfect: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

PS.*I am of course aware that Reading (sorry) Opportunities Week coincides with half term and therefore tutors who are parents have to wake at 6am in order to annoy their children and then spend the day grumbling and entertaining them.  Probably by seeing Skyfall…  Ah the circle of life.  Though not the one Mufasa talks about.  That would have been an entirely different and age-inappropriate movie had Mufasa thought that life’s problems with hyenas could be solved by Daniel Craig and a Beretta 418.

And on the subject of deadlines, I would like to point out that even the world is ominously depressing.  Dead.  Lines.  Perhaps if they were called cake-puppies or snow-day-presents we would be more inclined to treat them with reverence and joy.