Aesthetically Pleasing

Time is a precious thing. Time spent with family and good friends can be priceless. So, as time was fast running out on LouLou's latest jaunt to Blighty, and I had a day off from the daily grind, we organised a Grand Day Out.

It was like planning a military campaign. I feel sure Winston Churchill had an easier time of it sorting Dunkirk than we did trying to book tickets for the Cult Of Beauty exhibition at the V&A. There's something rotten in the state of the V&A's online booking system. I had the same palaver last month when Red came to stay. Undaunted, LouLou rang up and booked tickets by phone. Spoke to a real, live person. What a novel idea.

We booked the earliest time slot available and rolled up around 10am. The Cult Of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860 - 1900 shows how a group of artists and artisans aimed to bring beauty into all forms of everyday life. From the splendour of the Edward Burne-Jones memorial tablet at the opening of the exhibition to the Whistler etchings, the William Morris designs, the dark and wonderful illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley - it was a delight from start to finish. I particularly love the way the Aesthetic Movement artists depict their women - languorous, bohemian, dishevelled - the very opposite of the strait-laced norm for Victorian times. No swooning and overtight corsetry for those ladies:

Bet she didn't even wear knickers, let alone a corset

Quick wander through the sculptures on the way to the café (has to be said, there's something about the male form in classical sculpture that gets us girls...erm...a bit swoonsome). Had a lovely lunch - in the most gorgeous of surroundings:

Beats the shit out of McDonalds

Then scones and jam for me, coffee and walnut cake for LouLou. On to the V&A shop, and the purchase of something William Morris would approve of. "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or beautiful." So, I bought a Morris pattern cotton hanky, which will be pretty to look at and also gather any snot I might have hanging around. Beautiful and useful. I'm a budding aesthete.

Had a wander up Knightsbridge, then a quick tube hop to the Southbank. Time to redeem my payment-in-kind for seamstress favours rendered. My new membership for The Southbank Centre gave me free entry to the Tracey Emin "Love Is What You Want" at the Hayward gallery. She's much maligned, Miss Emin. I didn't know so much about her work, but now I've seen a load of it, I like it and I like her. She lays herself bare through her art, which I think a pretty brave thing to do. No stones lay unturned here, and it definitely wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea. As I was looking at a piece about menstruation, which included small perspex cases with a used tampon in each, a bloke and his wife came round the corner. He took one look at the cases and said "oh, for God's sake" and stalked off. Have a sneaky feeling Wifey dragged him kicking and screaming to see Tracey's jamrags, and he'd much rather have been in his slippers watching the cricket on telly.

She's not wrong, our Tracey

Thirsty work, this culture lark. Once we'd had our fill of Miss Emin's musings, we took in the view from the members bar at the top of the Royal Festival Hall, aided by some delicious prosecco. At this point, we discussed the modern world, and the lack of written correspondence. Previously mentioned, I'm a huge fan of receiving post, and a pact was formed that we'd aim to send each other handwritten mail every month, probably consisting of any old tripe on our mind at the time of writing. The thought of us, years down the line, as a couple of old dears with shoeboxes full of cards and letters and musings on art/music/Life/bollocks, fills me with joy. I can only imagine what a hoot it'll be to re-read what us youngsters got up to when I'm propped up by my zimmer frame.

Time stands still for no woman and we have to leg it sharpish. Shakespeare's Globe is our last port of call. This was a good idea on the part of LouLou. Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe is on the bill - what a great setting and superb production. Witty, dark and thought-provoking, it's the tale of a man who'd sell his soul for power and knowledge, and is brought to life in a traditional-looking yet still very modern way. And despite over 400 years having elapsed since Marlowe wrote the play, the language, humour and issues feel as current and relevant as ever. The costumes were top stuff too, particularly any of the devilish characters. I found myself spellbound and neither of us could believe it when the play finished and three hours had passed. Three whole hours. And I still didn't want it to end. Apart from the fact my arse was actually a bit numb:

Ye Good Olde-Fashioned Fun

As we waited for our bus back to Disgracelands, I remember thinking that William Morris et al would have approved of our perfect day out. Aesthetically pleasing for every single moment, it will always remain in my mind as a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Bottle Of Red, Bottle Of White

It's past midnight. Not a pumpkin quite yet, and the NYC Massive have swung into town, on matters mainly property related. I've been on a shoot all day, and on my return, LouLou and Andy F very kindly took me out for dinner. Superb food, delicious prosecco, lipsmacking Malbec and a tasty bit of Fighting Cock (that's a quality bourbon, you heathens) all adds up to us, at Disgracelands, sitting side-by-side (no Sondheim) on the soon-to-be-defunct Slug (curvy black sofa, seats 13?):

It's long and it's black and it's taken thirteen asses

And we can't stop laughing. I mean laughing our tits off. Is this LMTO? LMAO? LMFAO? LOFSHOOTS (I like this - Laughing Our Fat Stupid Heads Off On The Slug. Nearly as good as the time I started up an internet debate site for weighty issues of the day called The Important Topics Forum UK Division - TITFUKD).

Youtube black hole - here are things we have just pissed ourselves senseless at (and generally approved of):

A spoon and a jar. Basic brilliance.

Pissed Northern working class. Basic brilliance.

Finest lyric ever written (debate rages on). Basic brilliance.

Best bought-in-from-US-Sunday-ITV-10pm-1970s-sitcom. Ever. In my life. Etc.

Not basic. Still brilliant.

Other things we have tittered at included...erm, well, can't mention any of them, as I may get struck off Blogger for being bang out of order, überprofanity and inappropriateness. But at least one of the things included Andy's Uncle Graham, tits and Serge Gainsbourg.

I love the NYC Massive and we love booze and we love Disgracelands.

I will blub my daft Northern head off when I have to leave this flat.

I'm pissed.

(Postscript: staying up getting battered with old friends when there's a smiley-be-nice-sort-stuff-be-professional 10 hour shoot at 8.30am the next day isn't the smartest move I've ever made. Just re-read the above. The neighbours must hate us - that was some LOUD laughter. Or maybe they'd wish they could join in. They wouldn't want to join in on my hangover. Nothing strong coffee, pastries, 2 paracetamol and extra make-up can't fix, mind. I feel rough, and I'm on a shoot with Nicola Sanders, an Olympic athlete with the leanest body and tightest backside I've seen for years. Her body is a temple. Mine is an old wheelie bin.)

Dead String Brother

OH MY GOD! THEY KILLED STRINGER!

No, this isn't an episode of South Park. I've just watched E11 of S03 of The Wire. I'm having to have a little rest, put the kettle on and have some chamomile tea and a biscuit before I watch the season finale. I suspect he may not be dead. OK, wish me luck - I'm going in. Deep breaths, calm, calm...

NB: this is the closest I'll ever come to a tweet. Twitter/tweet - jesus. These things all have shit names. It's bad enough knowing I "blog". But at the top of that shitheap is surely the name they use for the internet stick thing. I'm using one now. You know it as a d*ngle. See, I can't even bear to type it.

Thank You For The Days...

So, here I am curled up on the Field Of Dreams (laugh away, those in the know), favourite pasta in bowl, last two episodes of Series Three of The Wire ahead (you feel me?), and the loveliest of days behind me. I haven't felt the urge to scribble much over the last couple of weeks - not due to lack of subject matter (I've witnessed two superb gigs: The Cave Singers were brilliant as ever; King Creosote at the Union Chapel made me blub like a baby). My written will has been weak, but today changed all that.

Sometimes, you just get one of those days. I think there's a name for them. Blue Ribband (oh, Blue Ribband - you can only dream of being Tunnock's...)? Red Ribbon? Red Letter? A great day. And I've just had one. It's swept away (a bit of) the misery of knowing that two of my very nearest and dearest aren't well at all and that Life can be (a bit of) a fucker.

So, I hear you ask (voices in my head) - what was so special about today?

Nothing, really.

I pottered about with friends.

We looked at vintage bits and second hand tat.

We ate cake.

We sat in the sunshine.

Dried my bedding at the launderette.

Had a teatime pint of shandy on my own, ate crisps, read The Guardian Guide (still marvelling at how Specs work).

The usual stuff.

But, as ever, those not-much-happened-but-how-perfect days serve to make you realise that Life, fucker though it can often be, can also be sweet.

(Postscript: I have favour Tourette's. Often, I'm out with friends, and they'll be in a pickle over how to sort this/that, and before I even know I've done it, the words are out there - "I can help/drive you there/fetch this/sew that/alter those jeans/collect the kid from nursery". (That last one's a massive lie and you know it - I've never uttered those words in my life). Yeah, I'm just a giver, me. A few weeks ago, I was Saturday pottering in Muswell Hill with Lady Doc. We popped in some fancy interior design shop and she saw the fabric of her dreams. She wanted drapes for her boudoir. "I can make them!" I blurted, not really thinking. Now, I love Lady Doc and Mister Doc dearly - he's my oldest male friend and she's a top bird. But this fabric was bloody expensive and a bit on the heavy side. Frankly, I've been shitting myself that I might make a right cock-up and our valued friendship would be in tatters over a pair of curtains (it would be curtains over the curtains - brilliant). I needn't have worried. They were a nightmare in the making, but even if I blow my own seamstress trumpet, they turned out very well indeed. I delivered them over a nice glass of wine this week, and the pressure was over. Today's loveliness began with an envelope on my doorstep from the Southbank Centre. On her 40th, I bought Lady Doc membership. When we were there together a while back, I mentioned that, although I've often given Southbank membership as a gift to friends, I've never treated myself to it. And so, clever girl, she's treated me instead. It's one of the sweetest gifts I've had for a long time, and has obliterated the pain of making those bloody curtains.)

Dead Meadow: Going Like The Clappers

Having missed a Dead Meadow gig last month (sidetracked by The Scot/a public house/booze), this month's appearance by Washington D.C.'s finest was attended by me and the fragrant Lou W. Thanks go to Howard and Lucy Local for bringing the sexy/heavy back to Islington. Crammed into a heaving Buffalo bar, we were only mildly annoyed when an unfeasibly tall arsehole and his very loud and annoying American girlfriend shoved their way in front of Miss W and I, only to proceed to turn into a wall of snogging and sweet-nothing-whispers. Lou asked "are you planning to snog throughout the entire gig?" and I reacted like this:

Take that, sir

DM played a blinding set - closed my eyes and drifted off on a sea of heavy psych (was rather disappointed to see that Stephen McCarty is no longer on skins - a truly amazing drummer with the finest facial hair a man can sport got married and a little bird tells me he's been obliged to do some proper settling down...). At one point, I think I re-enacted how Steve on bass gets when he's pissed on stage (he wears specs and can't see very well without them) by jigging up and down to the amusement of Lou W. All very funny until I banged my shin on a bar stool creating a bruise and egg-shaped bump on my leg of mammoth proportion. That'll teach me to tit around. Ouch.

Bit of hanging about after brought some nice Irish Whisky (ta, Howard) and a chat with Steve-Bass, discussing spectacles (naturally) and The League Of Gentlemen, of which he's a huge fan. He even managed to get in the Crème Brûlée "it's a shit business" quote, which made me love him more than ever. Apparently, I told him it is confirmed that DM make the best make-out music on the planet, voted by parties on two hemispheres. At some point, I may have used the phrase "going like the clappers" but I'm not sure if this translates well across the Atlantic.

(Postscript: last Thursday was one of the freakiest gigs I've ever attended. The Lexington on Pentonville Road hosted the album launch of Koolaid Electric Company's first ever release. Bernie, Scooter Steve and I witnessed Circulus (70s medieval oddboddery - head honcho Michael Tyack is moving to Glastonbury to set up a mind-bending church - are you getting this? Scooter Steve said he expected to see an 18" tiny Stonehenge descend from the rafters at any minute) and We Are Animal (perfectly ordinary bunch of lads doing loud things with their instruments - the only sane part of the night). Next, completely unannounced, two youngsters, who looked like they should be hanging around outside newsagents persuading adults to buy them 10 Benson & Hedges, picked up the mics and started doing something which I believe to be MCing. Shit MCing. I thought it was a joke. I believe the mot du jour for this is 'random'. After a brief interlude of peace from that racket, KEC took the stage and played their blissed-out, shoegazey psych for a bit, which was all well and good. Bizarrely, they then invited the yoof back up on stage to do fast-rap-MC-shite over the top of their swirlings. Stunned silence followed and I'm not entirely sure how I got home. I think I got a piggy-back from a dwarf straddling a unicorn, because I felt like I must certainly be off my tits on acid and had a sneaky suspicion David Lynch was filming me from the shadows.)

All About The Afters

Being a Valerie Singleton, I reckon I'm pitied by my coupley friends. They think I'm a lonely old spinster (hahaha), who doesn't eat properly (hahaha), that if I had a man I'd cook proper food (überhahaha). I often mention warming up a little tin of Heinz Tomato soup, or a nice Pot Noodle just to see their little faces look aghast...

Last night, my hard work paid off in spectacular fashion, and poor starving Spinsterella went to a great big fat foody ball chez The Marrieds.

Armed with a nice bottle of white and Gerry's finest Evangelista limoncello, I rocked up to witness a total mother of a pudding in the making (I'm not here to wax lyrical about the main course, tasty though it was - everyone knows pudding is the hero):

I bought them this heart-shaped Le Creuset as a wedding gift-

how sweet *barfs into bucket*

There'll be no over-egging this pudding

Not just bread and butter - organic lemon curd and pan d'oro, ta v much

Lady Married adding the finishing touches

I witnessed the obscene amount of cream, sugar and general oh-so-bad-but-goodness that went into it. Once we'd eaten a very healthy main course, pud appeared in all its glory, accompanied by my limoncello (snapped in Hipstamatic - there's something of the yesteryear about bread and butter pudding, and though this was a modern take on it, it made a pretty picture old-stylee):

Bravo, Lady Married - delicious

Limoncello: like an angel doing a citrus wee on your tongue

Lovely evening, lovely friends, lovely food. Lovely. Note to self: expand vocabulary, not just waistline.

(Postscript: during the course of the evening, chat moved - and I use this word advisedly - to bowel movements. It seems there's a thing called the Bristol Scale, which charts the type of stool one produces when doing one's toilet. Bit like a Richter scale for shit:

Fascinating. All agreed it was normal to have a look, and it seems we're all regularly knocking out 3 and 4 - like it states "sausage or snake, smooth and soft". Lord Married (this is a new identity for him - I have to protect these rock stars when talking about their toilet habits) says that in the past, and due to...ahem..."living it up", he has produced a 7 on several occasions. I can only surmise that when Elvis finally shitted off this mortal coil, he went up to 11. How more rock 'n' roll can you get?)

Our Survey Said..

Been busy, so no time for my usual lolling around in cafés reading the paper. I haven't even had time to read paper stuff at all, so Specs haven't had much of an outing. Time to remedy that. Specs and I went to The Haberdashery this morning, gathering today's Guardian on the way. Specs worked their wonders - I can read stuff, and not just at arm's length, folks. Amazing, this wearing glasses lark.

Now 11pm. Just got into bed. Quick look at Guardian online in case anything's been happening in the world whilst I've been curled up with McNulty and Stringer Bell (series 2 of The Wire going from strength to strength - aiii). Clicked on this article from G2 again:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/09/most-stupid-quiz-answer-ever

Read the comments. Go on - do it. I may be easily pleased, but I had to wipe the tears from my sleepy eyes.

Q: "Name something you hide in your socks when you go swimming."

A: "Your legs."