creepy crawling

there is a large spider in my room. i really, really, really hate spiders. it keeps appearing just in my peripheral vision, and then when i go to whack it with the nearest large object, a shoe say, or harry potter and the half-blood prince, it vanishes.

i am slightly reasurred by this site debunking the story that the average person eats several spiders a year in their sleep. but just the thought of it possibly running over my face in the night is enough to make me never want to sleep again.

did i mention that i hate spiders? i really hate them.

update at 01:49 - i just saw it run out of the door. with any luck the cat, a notorious spider-murderer, will polish it off!

caution. to prevent electric shock...

i've done a bit of, er, autumn cleaning around here - spruced up the old side links and added a few bits and bobs, including new and (though i do say so myself) rather lovely little bullet points, which you can see along the side there. del.icio.us is now doing it's own javascript to put on your site, so i have. it's down there on the left, under "reading/linklog". if you hover on the links you can see what i had to say about them.

one link that i was going to post over there, but didn't because i thought it was worth saying a little bit more, is the really brilliant copy, right. it's an mp3 blog, and the author posts only cover versions. she's got good taste in music, and her choices are often brilliant. for instance, at the moment, she's got some magnetic fields covers, including kings of convenience doing luckiest guy on the lower east side. get over there as soon as you can before she takes them down, but the site's always worth a look.

which reminds me... mentioning the lower east side that is... i'm going to new york a week on monday. that would be the 5th. our kid and i are going for a week, all by ourselves. it's sad but true that at (nearly) 24 and 21 we've never actually been on holiday by ourselves before. miss modernage and dorothy from cat and girl were kind enough to give me some great tips and hints, but if you've got any, they'd be most appreciated.

i would particularly like to know about plug sockets and voltage - will i explode things if i just plug my ipod charger into a socket changer into the wall? i don't understand these things and i don't want to melt my pod.

in the meantime i've been gorging myself on gawker and overheard in new york and making lists obsessively.

if anyone wants a postcard or something bringing back, email me.

i will totally post before i go though. how rubbish would i be if i didn't... don't answer that.

a la recherche

i just had a totally proustian moment seeing robbie and mark introducing girls and boys on top of the pops. i'm watching the britpop story.

i can't believe how long it's been. louise wener is really pregnant. also graham just said about damon going to see blair "if damon had suddenly been a lizard in a mod suit i wouldn't have been too surprised". ooh and jarvis announcing that blur were "top of the pops" ten years ago. my god! time to revisit some of those old records i think.

picture this

my content producing skillz have been employed elsewhere this week, mostly because i have just got a digital camera, and i've been attempting to make the most of it. ooh yes, this means you don't have to put up with my dodgy camphone pics anymore. it's exciting. so i've set up an account at flickr, and i've put up a few of the pictures i've taken so far.

elsewhere, last.fm/audioscrobbler has had an attractive makeover and now offers a whole journal thing, so you can see my review of the scissor sisters show at work last night. and you should also read popjustice's report of the night.

and here's an addition to my stars in bars series (which has been so erratic recently because i've not been on the bar much recently, and i don't count the box office)

#6 - kelly osbourne came to the upstairs bar last night with two female friends (actually i have a feeling one of them was her sister). she ordered a cider and black, but we were out of blackcurrant, so she had it with cranberry juice instead. which struck me as an, er, unusual combination. she was very nicely turned out - her hair was particularly sleek and shiny - though i think she was wearing shorts. she's surprisingly small in real life.

(previously in this series mark owen, martin freeman and mos def, adam cornish and toby young)

having just said that i don't count the box office, i will make an exception for the unbelievably hott gael garcia bernal, who came in for ed harcourt/tom mccrae last month. every head turned to look at him, straight men were turning gay and gay girls were turning straight, he is an adonis. and i don't think i'm overstating my case.

affinity (part 2)

worst. theme week. ever. i'm succumbing to inertia - virtually the only thing i'm capable of doing at the moment is buying stuff off amazon! so here's the thing - we'll make it a theme month! two posts a week on a different animal. so here's the second part of the rabbit week, and then we'll move onto another animal. kay?

i've touched on this topic once or twice, but actually i've never really elucidated, though a lot of you prolly know this anyway.

i spent three summers between the ages of fifteen and eighteen performing in the kids' plays at the open air theatre in regent's park. my first year there we put on a musical version of watership down (not featuring 'bright eyes') as you can see from the pic there.

then in my last year there, the show was fattybottypuss, in which i played a rabbit again in the first act. by this point they'd realised that the kids' shows could bring in a good audience, and we had proper costumes (i even had a fatsuit for the second act). I had a little tail and everything.

for all three shows i did at the open air theatre (the other was jungle book), we were encouraged to go to london zoo and observe the animals we were playing. they do have rabbits at the zoo. in the childrens' zoo. they're prolly special rabbits, but essentially they're bunnies.

i know this sounds like pretentious actor-wank, but it is good to watch the animals to get their little mannerisms, so i went down a few times to watch the bunnies. you could watch them for hours, or at least thirty minutes. you watch an animal for long enough and then recreate some of its movements, it's hard not to start to empathise with them.

even now, i occasionally get the urge to wiggle my nose, or stamp my er... hind leg.

affinity (part 1)

i'm not sure i can think of 7 reasons i have an affinity with rabbits. so i'm going to post as many as i can think of before moving on to other animals, prolly cats and if i get really stuck: monkeys. i don't have a great affinity with monkeys, so that one could be a struggle. you might want to keep your fingers crossed, or perhaps suggest other animals i might have an affinity with.

this is rabbit. that's her name. i was not an especially imaginative child, but i can at least take some comfort in the fact that jk rowling's first writing was about a rabbit called rabbit.

rabbit was my childhood toy - you know the toy everyone has, that gets trailed round in the dirt and is there to comfort them when they've got the mumps and occasionally gets left behind somewhere and has to be retrieved by mum or dad while a wailing child stands behind them.

this did happen to rabbit, who got left behind in an ice cream parlour in tuscany when i was 7. not knowing the word for rabbit (it's coniglio apparently), my mother was forced to do her finest impression of a cotton-tailed nose-twitcher. fortunately rabbit was found and returned to me, and went on to visit several other countries.

yes she was a pretty well travelled bunny: she went to france a number of times with my school, including skiing with me in avoriaz. i bought her straw hat in cornwall - ooh she looked elegant! she even came to see father christmas with me once - she wanted something to keep her head on.

because she was so well loved that her seams started to give, and today, she's held together with all sorts of strange stitches in weird threads that i've done over the last ten, fifteen years.

but there comes a time when a cowgirl bunny just won't cut it in bed anymore. and as i grew up and started to put my toys away (both metaphorically and literally - a lot of them are in the loft, waiting for the day i have the urge to play my little pony again), rabbit was sidelined. still, she enjoys a privilaged position on my sofa, and i've even knitted her a scarf to stop her head falling off.

so that's the first reason i have an affinity with rabbits - i spent a lot of my childhood with one.

old enough for nursery school

happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear atsot (even though i usually pronounce that as initials rather than an acronym), happy birthday to you!

so it's really been three years since i started posting here. i have accumulated readers like, oh, a skoda attracts admiring glances - which is to say not very many, but i'm very grateful for those i do get.

i know things have been a bit quiet around here recently. and i'm going to make a concerted effort to do more posting dammit, especially now i've got the wonder of broadband.

might kick the whole shebang off with a theme week, if anyone wants to make a suggestion, the comments box is below. otherwise it could well end up being 7 reasons i have an affinity with rabbits, and i'm not sure anyone wants that.

oh, and the picture's me, aged 3. i really did look like that once upon a time.