Shamela!

(See here for an explanation of the title, if you should be so interested)

Eeek, the first date. More particularly, the first date after many, many years of no dates at all, during which time a once-joyful relationship became slowly more joyless with every passing day. Nerves. Horror. Excitement. More horror. The strong desire to leg it out of whatever venue you have picked, a desire which can only be combatted by the swift consumption of a double brandy at the bar as you pretend to sip half a lager while looking anxiously around for someone who might, given further consumption of said brandy, resemble at a big push the bronzed Adonis in the internet profile pictures. The sense of unreality, as you suck in your gut and raise your eyebrows, the sudden attention to all those parts of your personality that you really couldn't give a flying one about and neither could your friends (Grade 8 on the piano! A love of foreign films! Highly knowledgeable about bulbous plants! Keen correspondent with political figures on the plight of several nations of peoples around the globe!), the extra make-up, the best underwear, the desperate searching for a clean top with no holes in it...

All these things are pretty misleading, really. However, as it turns out, I was no more guilty of this than anyone else. Far more innocent of it, in fact.

I stood up to greet him. He winked at me as he came nearer and yes, he was cute. Long-ish hair tinged blonde by the sun, from the looks of it; one onyx earring in his left ear, just the right amount of stubble, big dark eyes, nice smile, and from the look of his body he certainly hadn't been lying about all that sport. All in all, very easy on the eye. I put out my hand; he took it in both of his and kissed me on the cheek. I was blushing slightly as I sat down - and then he began to speak. 'So! Did you find it ok? You seem to know some pretty good places in Cardiff, have you been here lots before? To tell you the truth I don't go out drinking an awful lot these days, no, not really, I find it all a bit much really, it makes me feel a bit strange and I don't really think I can cope with it all that well...still, here we are, great you could come, how have you found this whole thing?' All delivered in a strong south Wales accent, at top speed, and with slightly maniacal movements of the head. I peered in a bit closer at those big dark eyes and saw that the pupils were so dilated, the irises could really have been any colour at all...

Curses! How can this be? All my efforts to weed out stoners, and still - even on the bloody Internet - still they find me! My inner bubble deflated somewhat as I realised that I had been on this date, with this guy, many, many times before. It goes like this: we talk a bit, at first on perfectly reasonable subjects such as work, family, where we live, education and such like. Then we find an area of shared interest, usually something political or philosophical or, more commonly, music. In this case, it was the Smiths, Noam Chomsky, Freakonomics, socialism and football. More or less in that order. I was surprised, given the length of time that had passed since I had last been on a proper date (seven years ago, at least) that the format doesn't appear to have changed. Wait to see what they're drinking before you ask for that pint that you really want. It may be that you have to order something a bit swifter to drink. Such were my thoughts but my date didn't seem to have noticed...'well, people these days, they're all into such bollocks, aren't they? Well take my sister and her partner, they've not married, as all right thinking people should agree not to do, why would you want to, it's all just bollocks...' and so on. By this point I had resigned myself to listening to him and taking salient points to recount to my friends later.

Eventually, the conversation turned round to his yogic practice. I asked if this was why he didn't drink very much these days and he looked up at me furtively. 'Well, it's that and other things, I mean I've never been very good with alcohol, it makes me go a bit...funny, you know? And I mean, well, I smoke a bit of weed, you know...' It was all I could do to stop myself laughing out loud and say well, yes, I could tell from the second you walked in mate! Instead I feigned indifference and said something about decriminalisation. He nodded vigorously and I listened with the same barely feigned indifference to his thoughts and treatises on various drug laws and policy. He told me had been a prolific writer since his trip to India, writing political thoughts and research...And then I saw that I was on a date with Cuckoo (click here to see the character in question). Really and truly.

Still, I had great fun. I mean, he was easy on the eye even before I was three pints of Hobgoblin down. He offered to walk me to the station to catch my train, which was just as well as I had no idea where I was going. I thought I'd conduct an evaluation. 'So,' I ventured, 'How do you feel this date went?' He was grinning. 'Oh, yes, very well, very well indeed,' he said. I was about to gently disagree when I noticed he was walking very close to me. Very close indeed. He yawned, and then I felt an arm around my waist - the old stretch-and-yawn! Terrible. I was about to remonstrate with him about his cliched behaviour when he stopped walking and turned to face me. 'Yeah,' he said, 'this has definitely gone a lot better than I thought it might.' I was about to ask what he mean when he lent down and, without asking permission, kissed me. On the mouth. With tongues, straight in. The cheek! The nerve of it! How dare he...oooh. He's actually really quite good at this. Mmm. This is actually really quite nice. And the beard feels nice and soft and...I mean...what was I saying?

We broke off (partly because there were people walking past shouting things like 'Oh my God!' and 'Ugh!') and I then realised that despite my protestations, I had in fact been standing on tiptoes, and therefore I wobbled over, fell into him, and he fell smack into a pile of bins behind him. He stood up, brushing his hat and coat down. 'Oh dear,' I said. 'Slightly embarrasing,' he said. 'For you,' we both said. Uh oh.

We got to the station, where, despite some more snogging, lasting quite a while, I just made my train back to Bristol and got straight on the phone to GBF, who rather uncharacteristically squealed like a girl and demanded I met him in the pub for the full lowdown. We arranged to meet and I realised that, whatever came of this, I had finally made an important step forward; that this signified a turning point in my life, the final goodbye to any residual feelings towards Daddio I had been harbouring. No more hiding in B&Q or garden centres on my childless weekends. No more worrying about chores, the state of the front yard, or what the old bat up the road thinks about me and my kids and the number of empties in my black box on a Thursday morning. From now on, life is going to be as much fun as it can possibly be. I was feeling good, feeling positive, as if I were 21 again and the world was my oyster. Life had colour and meaning again. This, I knew, was going somewhere.

I sat in the quiet carriage and gazed out the window at the lights of the city. It all looked so beautiful. How amazing, I thought, that technology can do all the things it can do. Its function changes our lives, and its form, these lights for example, change our landscape and make everything it casts a glow upon seem fuller, brighter, more beautiful. You can look upon a filament and see nothing, or you can see the whole world. I drifted off into an existential reverie, the quiet of the carriage broken only by the steady rhythm of the train, a comforting, blanket-like peace...then my phone bleeped, very loudly. The other passengers gave a collective tut and frown. I apologised and checked the phone. It was my date from earlier. I read the message and began to laugh. And laugh. And laugh, and laugh, very loudly...

Very nice to meet you earlier. Hope you get back ok. Perhaps on another occasion, if you would like, I can come to Bristol and we can shag each other senseless? 

Like I said. This was a definite turning point.

Sex and the Single Mother

Or, more accurately, No-Sex and the Senile Mother, as this is very much the way things had been going for quite some time here at Axis Towers. It's almost three years since the Axis' dad took off, his heels scorching  skid marks in the hallway, for pastures new (and chavvier, in my opinion, but what else would a newly dumped woman say?). Since I stopped working for the hellish Old Place, and started a far more reasonable job with a far more intelligent manager, I have been feeling, well, well. Unbelievable. As the previous post shows, I even started wearing make-up, and using the mirror. Obviously, what I saw was pretty appalling; after two children and years of neglectful self-care I look more like my grandmother than she probably does (God rest her soul). Dropping cheeks, one eye that looks permanently lop-sided, sparse and inconsistent eyebrows, an inexplicable clump of spots on the cheeks, and - worstest of all - the Mummy Tummy. Ugh. Hideous. Nothing can be done about the Mummy Tummy. I know that without even trying. (Of course, this might be part of the problem, but I'm too terrified by it to try and deal with it. Better to pretend it just isn't there.) The Mummy Tummy is truly horrid, flaccid handfuls of post-pregnancy stretched flesh, clinging on to your body despite your desperate wishes for it to just fall off. Of course, some people I know were leaving hospital, post-delivery, in their pre-pregnancy jeans. Good for them. I'm absolutely bloody delighted for them. I, however, was not. I have Never Been the Same Again.

Such a brutal knock to my confidence was caused by the MT that I also had decided I was probably going to spend the rest of my life alone. There's hardly a lot of talent around here in sunny SB - and besides, once Daddio left me a stranded single mother, several of my married friends politely but rapidly chose to cease and desist with the offers of dinner and drinks chez leurs (I know that that's not proper French) in case I chatted up their husbands. Ha! I wanted to shout; more fool you - I'm free now - I'm not going near any of those feckers EVER AGAIN, so don't you worry, sister (if sisterhood is, in fact, a concept that is anything other than alien to you). I mean, I had the Axis. I had a job that I and everyone else who worked there loathed in sufficient measure to require post-horror drinks on a regular basis to dissect the latest idiotic move by the management, therefore bonding many of us as close friends. I had great friends and neighbours. I had a garden. I did not need, nor want, nor ever plan to be ever again with, a man.

However, the weird, irrational, biological twitch cannot be controlled by sheer willpower, and sure enough, I began wondering about that chromosome-deficient half of the human race once again. Admittedly, it was in a stop-start-y kind of way, but then the inevitable happened: someone pointed out to me the usefulness of having someone else around to help control the Axis. I can't remember who; it might have been PregBF, it may have been GBF, but whoever it was, I began thinking, WHAT a good idea, fairly quickly. And also - someone who could reach things - how I missed the sheer reach of Daddio's 6'3" for opening windows, cleaning tops of cupboards (ha!) and such like! So it was to the internet - in particular, a certain broadsheet's dating site, the equivalent of the singles bar for over-30s who know their arancini from their armpit. Thus, I could specify. 5'12" and above, please. Certain level of education (ok, snobby, but with reason). No vegetarians. Must like guitar music and have at least heard of, if not have a vast collection of, Sub Pop vinyl and/or back issues of the NME (no later than 2002 though, that would be very sad). Over 30. Can complete this sentence: 'Punctured bicycle, on a hillside, desolate...'. Laughs loudly and often, can wink without looking like they should've gone to Specsavers, DOES NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES think 'Thatcher had a point', can wash their own pants AND fold them AND put them away, makes loud appreciative noises when sampling my cooking (which is faultless) and bloody well washes up afterwards. Oh, and also a chance to break my peculiar habit - notably, that every man I've ever been involved with has had more than a passing fondness for the old weed. Why? I don't, especially! Why do I go for them? At least on the internet  I could filter out the bong-lovers.

Obviously, I didn't say any of this. Instead I went for the usual blarney about wanting someone I can connect with, someone who is kind and generous and enjoys life and blah blah blah blah blah. I may even have mentioned James Joyce. Honestly. Who gives a crap about James Joyce?

Quite deservedly, the male population of this particular site responded with a collective 'Meh.'. Too idiotic to mend my mistakes (which included a profile pic taken the day after the Kong had accidentally broken my nose - about which, more later, if you can stand the suspense), I dealt with it by checking the site daily and sulking at the lack of interest. Until, of course, I got an email from a man who seemed Just My Type - oooh, yes he did. Bit alternative. Quite intellectual. Tall, pale, Welsh, glasses, longish hair, same interests, correct spelling and grammar. And the best thing was - he was fit as a butcher's dog. Sporty but 'without the connotations that that term usually implies', or so he claimed, running, cycling, surfing, footballing and presumably, if he'd wanted to, pirouetting his way into my affections via some parma-violet prose. I was pretty convinced you can't do a half marathon in 1 hour 40 if you've been smoking up a storm the night before.

After a few messages we decided to meet. I summonsed Counsel Inc, who is also of South Asian extraction, round to discuss. 'Oooh,' said Counsel Inc. 'He's been to India. And...oh, God! He says no country has affected him as profoundly...bloody hell. You're going to spend your life cooking chapati in his kitchen while his mum and dad try to plot how to set fire to your sari and make it look like an accident and he does yoga in the front room instead of getting a job.' She peered more closely at the pictures. 'And I'd put money that any date with this guy will end in you smoking weed behind Caerphilly Castle. You're going to be high as a kite when you get home.' I protested feebly, but in truth I didn't really care. It didn't really matter what this guy was like (to some extent, obviously, for safety's sake, if he appeared at all mentally unstable, predatory or admitted to liking Robbie Williams I would be right outta there), this was a big, big step for me to take, and take it I would, as soon as humanly possible.

In the two weeks leading up to the big day I did more exercise than I have ever done in my life. Was it possible to get sporty in such a short time? I would find out. Nothing really happened, except my resting heart rate was lower. The Axis thought it most amusing that I could run up the path with them after a couple of days so got their scooters out to improve my speed, the encouraging coaches that they are - although 'COME ON FAT MUM!!!' may not have been the boost I was looking for...I laid off the booze (a bit), took some vitamin supplements and made a hideous face mask out of mashed bananas, a couple of eggs and some oatmeal. It did nothing. I considered making it into muffins but decided against. In the end I plucked, trimmed, buffed, smoothed, moisturised and polished myself until I was as silky and soft as the Kong's backside. Straight after a bath that is. Definitely not at any other time.

I was ready. I got on the train. The train arrived on time. I was on time. No! I was early! This never happens, how has this happened? I ring GBF in a panic. 'Help! Whaddoo I do? I'm early!' Relax, he said, how early? 'Ten minutes!' GBF gave a snort of derision. 'Ten minutes?! Well, for you, that's like a month, I suppose...shut your face, go get a coffee and sit down with that copy of the New Statesmen you've bought purely to show him you're intellectual.' I protested, feebly once more. 'I didn't get it for that! I just...never get much of a chance to read it these days...I...ok, yeah, I did. But where's the harm? A picture says a thousand words and there are lots more words and pictures inside so I reckon...' GBF sighs contemptuously and tells me to shut up and sit down. I do so, having first appraised the bartender. Nice, friendly, handsome-ish. Wonder if...? No, I cannot start looking with interest at every man I meet. Every bloke that comes in, I wonder, is that him? Until finally, he comes in. It must be him. Cute, tall, confident, chatting happily to the bartender. He looks over - and walks in the other direction. Then the guy behind comes up to me. 'Hello,' he says nervously, 'I think you might be my date.'

Paint It Black

Creative expression is very much in vogue and therefore encouraged here at Axis Towers. Having grown up in a somewhat repressive and restrictive environment, where mess and dirt were the enemy and any kind of stepping out of line was viewed with disproportionate disgust, I have renounced the creed of clean and decided not to punish for minor misdemeanours such as treading an entire box of crayons into the carpet or painting your little brother's face blue with a permanent marker. At times, though, I struggle to keep the long view in mind; that being, the Axis need to use all media to fully realise their potential, sometimes the short view (what-the-bloody-hell-have-you-done-to-my-furniture/walls/ceiling) wins out. And the look of sheer greedy glee when they spy an unopened box of chunky, fat crayons, powdery chalks or perfectly pointy pencils will raise a smile in most, so I guess it's worth it.

It's a common reaction, and one I've recently begun to display with regard to make-up. I made it through the best part of 30 years with the barest minimum of slap, but now that I'm being run ragged daily by the vicissitudes of life, a bit of warpaint seems a reasonable and sensible step. Quite why I think that some glorified poster paint can hide the sunken eyes, puffy cheeks and disturbingly shapeshifting jaw, I do not know, but I'm happy to attempt to fool myself, and everyone else. It started when I had a few hours to kill before a wedding; I wandered into a Mac stand in Glasgow and was immediately confronted with a tiny South African goth who looked almost exactly like a fairy, gossamer wings 'n' all. Staring at the different but unidentifiable pigments, utterly confused, I asked her for foundation. 'What sort?' '...' She sighed in exasperation. 'If you want me to help you, you have to tell me what you want.' I blinked at her, mildly, like a cow in a reverie whilst chewing its cud. She tutted and sighed again. 'OK. Do you want dewy? My skin is dewy. Do you want it to look like this?' I nodded, dumbly, and she pulled out a brush and began dabbing away with something wet and a bit over-brown that made me look like I'd just been swimming in a chocolate fountain. Somehow I plucked up the courage to inform her that I was a bit old for the wet-look. We settled on something that worked pretty well, I handed over a week's worth of lunch money, and that, I thought, would be that for another year.

However...for some reason, I've become completely infatuated with it. The little bottles, tubes and pots; the voluptuousness of a new kohl pencil; the velvet softness of a wet powder eyeshadow; the fact that my brown skin carries purple as a blusher much better than as an eye colour. I wander round the cosmetics stands of high-street chemists, stroking eye crayons, oohing and aahing at nail paint, sampling testers of different primers. All at once, the colours and textures calm and comfort, excite and embolden. I keep thinking of new ways to paint myself, to warp the bare foundation of what is there and make it into something prettier, more symmetrical, with the beholder's gaze drawn to the points I want it to be drawn to. Control.

'Ooooooooh,' said the Axis when, having broken through the complex set of biometric security controls with which I guard my bedroom, they espied the pretty little collection of £1.29 tiny pots, tubes and bottles. 'NO,' I said, as fiercely and with as much intent as I could. They reached upwards eagerly, feeling at the little glittery tubs much in the same way as I did. 'Mum, what is it?' I tried to explain. 'Well, it's like paint, but for Mummy.' The Pie looked confused. 'Are you going to turn blue?' 'No, son. It's...well. It's to make my eyes sparkle, and...and...to make me look pretty.' I pick up a brush. 'Look. This helps my eyes. I look rough today.' The Pie is shaking his head, blinking his ridiculously beautiful and lush long black eyelashes, coveted by several of my female friends. 'No, Mum. You don't.' How touching. 'You always look the same Mum. I know, 'cos I've been with you for a long time now, five years, and you always have looked the same.' Er... 'Thanks, Pieface! I think...'. Bless him.

Later comes the backlash. An advert for the shampoo I use comes on, featuring a bird with long, glossy hair flicking it around for no particular reason. The Axis are entranced. Pie turns to me quizzically. 'Mum. Why don't you buy stuff like that?' Oh, I do son. That's the one I buy. Instantly, I realise I should never have responded, as the vile child rejoins thus, predictably: 'Why doesn't your hair look like that then?' Grrrr...well. Because you have clean uniform every day and don't eat McDonalds for your tea, amongst other things, my Piefaced Child. And I wouldn't have it any other way, but at some point I'm going to have to sort it out, because...well.

Because I'm going on a date, that's why. Horrors.