If you're dappy and you know it

Apologies for being horribly remiss in keeping up this week. I’ve been drowning in deadlines and such… I meant to drop a short note to explain earlier in the week, but I forgot. Actually, I opened up the create post thingy, wrote half of it, remembered something else I had forgotten to do, then shut my computer down without paying attention to what I’d been doing. Then I forgot.

This sort of thing happens quite a bit – I’ve often said that if I was to be hit on the head, or in many years to come lost my marbles, no one will know the difference because I will be just as dappy as I have always been. A few weeks ago, after a night out, I waited for a tube at Liverpool Street Station to get the Circle line to Embankment then Waterloo and on home. I’ve been through Liverpool Street Station a million times, and am perfectly aware that a couple of other tube lines run from the same platform (Metropolitan and Hammersmith and City.) I’ve done this a million times and it has never posed much of a challenge. So I wait on the Westbound platform, happily engrossed in my Ipod, a million miles away. A tube comes along and I get on it. It isn’t until we’ve gone a couple of stops that I notice that I’ve managed to get on a Hammersmith and City line and we’re at Shoreditch. Rolling my eyes at my idiocy, I get off, cross the platform and get the next tube back to Liverpool Street. A couple of stops later, I jump up… only to discover that I didn’t catch the next tube back at all, but got on a District line going further in the opposite direction. I am now at Bromley-by-Bow, right in the East End, and have just missed the second to last train from Waterloo. Bollocks, I think, berating myself for not paying attention. Carefully I get myself to the correct platform to head back to Liverpool street, and sure enough 15 minutes later, I am back on the Westbound platform ready to start anew. A tube comes along and I get on it. And find myself, on the Metropolitan line, at Algate. Back at Liverpool Street yet again, I suddenly remembered that I’d never had this problem before because I usually get on the Central line which is at an entirely different platform. Just an average (hour and a half without gaining so much as a station in the right direction) commute in the life of Claire. In case you’re worried, I did make the last train out of Waterloo by the skin of my teeth, and it was the right train!

They say that absent mindedness is the mark of a creative mind, and I would like to think that’s true. That I spend hours at a time wandering in and out of various rooms in the house wondering why I am there, or answer the phone and go off to tell the person that the call is for then get distracted and leave teenaged girls hanging on the phone for minutes wondering why my brother won’t speak to them – until someone picks up the phone to make a call and is perturbed to find someone on the end of the line, that I miss train after train in the morning looking for my shoes… that are on my feet… because my mind is so filled with brilliant creativity that it has no room for the minutiae. Maybe – my dad is definitely pretty intelligent and yet he showed up at Heathrow airport a few weeks ago for a flight to Dubai… only to find that his flight was leaving from Gatwick and he had my brother’s passport with him.

I suspect that it might be an attention span thing. I am often accused of not speaking in full sentences, never mind thoughts, during a conversation – my mind races so far ahead of my mouth that I forget that the poor person listening to me is only as far as my mouth is and skip ahead so they hear: “Yesterday, no wait… there was an email… and it’s my birthday!... but I don’t know about Oslo…” which must be a bit like listening to half a phone conversation. I was once so intrigued by the girl sitting in front of me on the bus arguing with her boyfriend that for days afterwards it would pop into my head and I would wonder how he justified himself… sorry, what was I saying?

Apologies

I am going to be horribly neglectful this week as I scrabble to meet a bunch of deadlines - but will be back in force next week!

Culture Confusion

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the differences between various versions of the English language. That particularly entry would have been, sadly, completely lost on my 7th grade Social Studies teacher. (Social studies, I should explain, is the U.S. equivalent of history and geography classes.) Early on in the first semester, she asked for me to stand up and introduce my language to the class. As my family had moved to Connecticut from France, I assumed she meant French, so stood up and muttered “je m’appelle Claire” or some such brilliance. But no, she shook her head. She wanted to hear some Scottish. Err, what? A woman who taught geography for a living was impressed with my grasp on the English language, and wanted me to speak some Scottish to the class. Unfortunate then, that there is no such language. A Scottish dialect of Gaelic, maybe – spoken by around 23 people these days, I believe, and very few of them in Glasgow. The closest I have come to Gaelic is the last line of a song warbled at family sing-a-longs, a “braw bricht moon-licht nicht” which might not even be real Gaelic for all I know. There was no arguing with her (perhaps it was a bit of a struggle for me, English not being my first language and all) so I cheerfully reeled off some gibberish and left the poor woman to her delusions.

It still astounds me how little many nationalities – I must be honest here, I have found it particularly prevalent in Americans – know of one another. It is particularly amusing to experience people with what seems like a genuine pride in their – for example – Celtic heritage (I once attended a Highland Games event in Virginia of all places, and watched people sweltering in the Southern heat in kilts, asking about the carb content in meat pies – when they’d be better off enquiring as to the meat content – and drawling about their Sca-aatish roots) yet vaguely imagining the motherland as a tiny, rainy place (okay, they got that bit right) where people habitually take heroin and wear blue paint to kill the English. Thanks very much Hollywood – that is in fact, just Saturday nights. This time last year, I went on a date with a very sweet young man from Toledo, who kept mentioning Stonehenge. I think I might have visited Stonehenge one half term when we first moved to England, but, to be honest, it hasn’t featured much in my consciousness since, so I was a little bit confused. Eventually it transpired that he’d wanted to find out about where I was from so that he could talk to me about it (I was incredibly touched, I don’t think that any one had ever studied for a date with me before) and when he googled ‘London’ he came up with Stonehenge. This rather makes me wonder about the websites giving hapless Americans the impression that there are rural, mystical rock formations just off Piccadilly Circus, but equally, how could an intelligent man of nearly thirty have so little an idea of what London might look like?

To be fair, we’re not much better. My uncle – from South Boston – got asked whether he was a cowboy when he and my aunt briefly lived in Glasgow in the 70s so many times that he eventually used it as his occupation when he signed on (“Occupation?” “Cowboy.” “There’s nae coos in Glasgow, son.” “That’s why I’m unemployed.”) I spent my high school years in the States, and have worked there plenty, yet still fail to fully grasp exactly what fraternities and sororities are, and why they are so important. I know plenty of people who have visited New York, Florida and possibly Vegas, and assume that that is all there is to the U.S. Well, them and flinty-eyed, tornado-strewn, sibling-loving Southerners who are regularly visited by aliens and vote for George Bush – they never bother to consider the existence of the friendly and unbelievably hospitable Mid-Westerners, the gruff and entertaining New Englanders or the laid-back, family orientated and adventurous people of the Pacific Northwest. (Not to mention of course, that there is plenty to commend NYC, Florida and Vegas!)

It seems strange to me, that in this day and age of mass communication and accessible international travel, many people simply seem to be too lazy to bother getting to know those outside their own shores. While misconceptions between Americans and the British are funny and inconsequential, it cannot be ignored that this is a time where appreciation, understanding and respect for cultures beyond our immediate ken is essential.

Hard to be Hard to Get

The headline on the women’s magazine caught my eye: How to Make Him Fall in Love With You. It struck me as a rather handy talent to have. It might be nice to be able to make men fall in love with me in three easy steps: it’d probably get me out of a few parking tickets for one thing.

However, after buying the magazine and perusing said article, I realized that it wasn’t random fun tricks to generally appeal to people with penises (the sort of thing that I imagine French women are born knowing) but was actually about making a particular ‘him’ fall in love with you. The very ‘him’ in fact. I was astonished. I can vaguely remember such dating advice articles in teenage magazines. Teenage dating, as I recall it, is less about compatibility and connection and more about which bloke has a car (or at least the keys to his parents’) and will impress your friends; so I can understand the necessity of having a few handy seduction tricks up your sleeve. But surely to goodness as adults we’re a bit beyond that?

I’ve never held much truck with anything designed to manipulate things that are best left to fate. My one experience on an internet dating site was when a friend and I surfed around one for a laugh and came across profiles for both her long-term boyfriend and the bloke who’d just dumped me saying that he wanted to spend time on his own. It simply doesn’t make sense to me that in order to meet my thpecial thomeone I need to do things that are out of character for me or behave in an unnatural way. Surely it makes more sense that I will meet someone who will suit me – and me him – doing the sort of things that I do anyway? What's more, the advice in the article frankly disturbed me. One suggestion was – this was for blokes you meet at work – to match your mood to his. So (this was the example specified) if he is pissed off with the boss, I must be too. What on earth would I want with a bloke who was so thick he didn’t get that I just happened to fall out with the boss every time he did? What if I had just been given a raise, and an hour later the object of my affection stormed around the office yelling about what a jerk the boss is, I am supposed to jump up and agree and add – for good measure – that I think we should all go on strike? What if someone said ‘but Claire, you just got a raise’… ?

Perhaps I would have more time for following these sorts of rules and regulations if I was any good at them. I once read an article about ways to come across as more flirtations and sexy in everyday life. Again thinking of getting out of parking tickets, I thought ‘great, I’ll give this a go.’ One tip was to try to look up at guys through your eyelashes. Easy enough, one would think - except that I am not especially short. Maybe I am just used to ginormous Canadians, but I have noticed recently that – especially in heels – I am as tall if not taller than a good proportion of the men in London. So, to look up at them through my eyelashes I have to lean my head down which gives me a double chin which surely cancels out the seductive qualities of the looking up, not to mention I can’t see a bloody thing through the clumps in my mascara. Another tip was to think about sex a lot, which will apparently immediately make my body language unconsciously sex-kitten-like. This would have been fine, if it wasn’t for the fact that – surely I can’t be alone in this – unless I am actively participating, the thought of sex is frankly hilarious. Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way that suddenly snorting with laughter at the thought of a quivering willy headed for me doesn’t do much to increase the chances of it happening.

Some time ago, I was having a conversation with a friend about the latest state of play with an on/off situation I was in last year. Her exact words were “if you like this guy so much, why do you keep being so bloody honest with him?” And, to be fair, my directness about my feelings for him clearly was making the poor guy pretty nervous, but do I really have to put in an Oscar winning performance of not being interested in order to get the guy? Just to be clear, I can be unavailable. I am, in fact, unavailable to every bloke I don’t fancy – it’s with the ones I do that the problems start. Even if I was willing and wasn’t such a crap actress so might actually pull off a cool, perfect girlfriend act – at what point would I be able to give it up and go back to being me? After we were officially boyfriend/girlfriend? There would still be a chance for him to run a mile in fright, so perhaps I should wait until the wedding night? Perhaps the naughties equivalent of a blushing bride shyly revealing her virginal nudity would be me sitting the poor guy down to reveal on no uncertain terms that I would rather stick pins in my eyes than watch another football game and that I actually really like our boss?

Having said all this, I realize that as I am currently single I am perhaps in no position to dismiss tips or advice that might get me all loved up the way I am apparently supposed to be. But – and perhaps this makes me a hopeless romantic despite my cynicism – I still believe that the bloke who is right for me is a) out there somewhere, and b) whenever I do stumble across him he will fancy me clumpy mascara, disagreeing with him and utterly un-unavailable and all.

Same Old Scandals

It is rare to open a newspaper or magazine without being confronted by the latest Hollywood scandal. From marriages lasting days and drink driving to indecency, from the latest Lindsay Lohan tantrum or Russell Crowe fight to Bennifer and Brangelina, we devour the details while expressing shock at how celebrities seem to think that fame is a license to behave above the law or decency. Often we point to the glittering icons of seeming perfection that decorated Hollywood in the first half of the last century, claiming that the early stars knew how to behave.

Yet the popular notion of Hollywood as a den of iniquity isn’t new; it is as old as Hollywood itself. Hollywood was a community founded by filmmakers running from New York in order to escape paying patent rights on filmmaking equipment – so it was, perhaps quite rightly, immediately awarded an image of a haven for the wanton and wicked. By the mid 1920s, Hollywood had been rocked by scandal after scandal. Imagine for a moment that George Clooney had impregnated, married and shortly thereafter divorced a succession of teenage girls, Jim Carey had been arrested and tried, three times, for the vicious rape and murder of an aspiring actress, Julia Roberts was the last person to see Steven Soderbergh alive and the ensuing investigation exposed her cocaine addiction, Brad Pitt had died from the ravages of heroin addiction, and Harvey Weinstein was mysteriously shot aboard a yacht belonging to Rupert Murdoch.

Speculation was rife as to the reasons that such goings on were so prevalent in the so-called ‘movie colony:’
Unfortunate though it be, the assembling in more or less forced intimacy of considerable numbers of persons of both sexes whose code of personal behavior is not the rigid sort that pervades the general walk of life, is likely to produce results that shock the world by their nature.
Suggested the Omaha Bee on February 4, 1922. However on February 6, the INDIANAPOLIS NEWS maintained that:
The trouble seems to come from a combination of a low order of mentality and big salaries... Few things are more dangerous than money in the hands of those who have no idea of its value, and not the slightest sense of the responsibility which its possession imposes.
And on February 7, 1922, the New York Evening Mail pointed out that:
Those who are in the public eye owe public morality a greater debt than those who are not, because their example can do so much harm.
It is interesting to note that these very same opinions could be, indeed have been, applied to celebrity scandals ever since… perhaps ninety-odd years don’t make as much difference as one would think.

Entertainment that appeals to the basest inclinations of human nature hardly began with Hollywood. Whenever I read social commentators bemoaning the extreme violence of Se7en or Saw, I wonder if they know anything of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Or to those who complain of the toilet humour of the latest Farrelly Brothers’ offering I would suggest they read Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (especially The Miller’s Tale – I had to endure the burning indignity at 14 years old of being the one to have to read aloud the immortal line: “let flee a farte” to my high school English class and am not sure I have ever recovered.)

Sex, violence, and lives of charmed and shallow excess have existed since the dawn of the human race; and have been discussed and represented in art forms for almost as long. Was the greedy consumption and flamboyant wealth of the court of Henry VIII any ‘worse’ than the ostentatious bling lifestyle exposed in The Fabulous Life of…? Indeed, was he any more deserving or worthy of such riches than Paris Hilton or Jordan? The difference seems to be that today, we are aware. Thanks to the high visibility and accessibility of entertainment and the personal lives of those that make it, we all know what they are up to. We question and dissect and judge, and thanks to a combination of the social revolutions of the 19th century and the launch of talking pictures which humanized the stars of the silver screen, we are more aware that there is little fundamental difference between “us” and “them.” They say that we are hardest on that which we recognize within ourselves: could the horror-stricken scrutiny with which we greet the latest Hollywood scandal be nothing but reaction to the self knowledge that we would behave just as badly given half a chance?

Loser is the New Black

I would have thought that cool people ski. You see celebs on the slopes all the time, with their chic outfits and sleek goggles, shwooping through powdery snow then undoubtedly heading off for an evening of exclusive après ski. That may well be the case for them, but the thing is: I ski. I ski in fourteen layers of jumpers and waterproof trousers, whatever sunglasses I can find in the hall cupboard, a hat that looks like a tea cozy, and far from shwooping cleanly, I struggle off the chair lift, adopt the crash position, point myself in the direction of ‘down’ and scream most of the way. And at the end of the day, when the über cool après ski is getting going, I am in the car, looking as though I have had a chemical peel except for my startlingly white, pasty even, eye sockets singing along to French radio.

It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, I was all about being cool. I spent my teens and early twenties scouring Portobello Road for outfits worthy of Carrie Bradshaw (which wouldn’t look as though they cost a fiver,) begging, borrowing and flirting with every doorman in the West End to gain entry to the Atlantic, the Met Bar, Chinawhite, or whatever club was top of the list that week – I even worked at a few trendy venues just so that they would have to let me in, and carefully vetting the people I considered hanging out with to ensure the perfect mix of impoverished but funky creatives and slick imminent executives.

I am not entirely sure when it all changed. I suspect that Canada had something to do with it, a country where ‘cool’ generally refers to the weather or beer; all of a sudden my carefully created London image seemed… a bit daft. Don’t get me wrong – I will always love fashion and the lure of the VIP room that I have no business getting in to will always be the occasional Saturday night challenge, but I am happy to have discovered how much more fun it is to be utterly uncool. What’s more, I’m in pretty good company. Chris Martin recently mused that while every other band was getting their knickers in a twist over being the coolest, Coldplay decided that they’d concentrate on being the least cool – and I’d say it’s working out for them. J.D. Fortune refers to himself as a lanky geek – and that doesn’t seem to be holding him back much at the moment. In fact, it seems to me, that not being cool is the new being cool.

If I was still hung up on being in with the in crowd, I wouldn’t have had so much fun at a boyband concert with my sister, screaming along with the thirteen year olds (once upon a time my ever so credible – whether I actually liked it or not – taste in music was the cornerstone of my coolness) nor would I happily spend plenty weekends slobbing around in sweats playing Scrabble with my Grandma. On a spare afternoon in L.A. a few weeks ago, when I could have headed for Sunset or Rodeo and posed with the best of them, I went – wait for it – to the library. Yes, the L.A. Central Library where I whiled the afternoon away devouring newspapers from the 1920s (early Hollywood being an obsession of mine.) Indeed, if I held any last hopes of being cool, would I giggle to myself over the tragic title of this blog - eclaire, for goodness' sake?

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that no one is born cool. Well, maybe Kate Moss, but that’s it. Mere mortals like the rest of us have to work bloody hard at it, and there comes a point when the rewards – an evening spent teetering in an outfit that doesn’t fit chatting with people who are neither interested nor interesting for the most part – just aren’t worth the hassle. If I’m right and geek chic really is the trend of the naughties, then I look forward to observing the few true cool trying to fit in with those of us in the know. Posh launching herself at a glass door in the vain hopes of braining herself and having to walk through the shop pretending not to be dazed? Kate trying and failing to mis match her socks and concentrating to become so engrossed in the newspaper that she utterly misses her mouth and pours half a Starbucks steamed milk (I’m not even cool enough to like coffee) down her front? Brad and Angelina leading the Birdie Dance and being mortified when they do it so damn well that they look cool anyway?

Now that I have confessed all, I will also tell the truth: it wasn’t French radio I was singing along to on the way back down from the mountain. It was ABBA.

At least Two Nations

We had only lived in the U.S. for a couple of weeks when, during a family visit to a furniture shop, I found myself in need of a dustbin. Having been entrusted with the care of my two youngest siblings I yanked the two of them by the hand over to the counter where I proceeded to ask the lady where I might find such a receptacle. Well I would have done, if when I caught her attention and she turned to look at me expectantly I hadn’t suddenly found that I couldn’t for the life of me think of the American word for dustbin. (It’s garbage can if you’re curious.) We had moved to Connecticut from Paris, so I was used to finding myself in public places without the required vocabulary handy, but somehow searching for a word that was English but wasn’t, utterly stumped me. In panic I ended up blurting “trash! ... litter! … rubbish! … dirt?” and eventually “things people don’t want any more!” before, flustered and burning with the shame and self loathing that can only be felt by a mortified pre pubescent, I turned on my heel and ran, dragging two toddler brothers behind me. The poor woman must have thought that I suffered from some bizarre and G rated British form of Touretts'.

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago, when there was a lively discussion on Rockband regarding some “sparkly pants” that Jon Farriss had worn during a recent INXS concert. “Flipping heck, how did they all get to see his pants?” I thought, cursing the fact that he’d worn trousers throughout the show I’d seen. Of course, given that he was sat behind a drum kit for the whole thing I realized that I couldn’t, in all fairness, swear to the presence of trousers but I was fairly sure that I'd have noticed visible pants. Given that it’s taken me this long to recover from the infamous Y fronts from the Taste It video, I was a bit apprehensive of finally stumbling across these mythical trousers-less shots. And slightly concerned – isn’t that the sort of thing one gets arrested for in America? And sparkly pants – wouldn’t they, err, chafe? I was in such a panic that I very nearly shouted “things people don’t want any more” and ran away, before I realized that these were Americans discussing his pants – he wore sparkly trousers. Not even my ensuing concern for his fashion sense detracted from the relief.

My confusion was not unlike that experienced by a good friend of mine when she signed up for a temp agency upon moving to Vancouver and was told to wear “smart pants” to her booking – she wondered what sort of job she was being sent to where the state of her knickers was relevant. Or the reaction of another friend to bars in Australia who seemed to positively encourage VPL by mounting signs on their doors saying “no thongs.” (Thongs being the Australian word for flip flops.)

There can be quite serious consequences to not speaking the appropriate version of the English language. On my very first trip to the States, at four years old, I developed an irrational terror of my uncle. He’s over 6 foot with red hair, a long red beard and unintelligible Boston accent, and I was entirely convinced that he would feed me to their equally ginormous and red haired dog given half a chance. So it was to my utter horror that I awoke late one morning to find my mum and my aunt had popped to the shops and I was alone in the house with the Scary Uncle and suspiciously hungry looking dog. When I slunk into the kitchen trying to be invisible, he asked if I was hungry. Too afraid to do anything but nod mutely, I was astonished when he then offered me a jelly sandwich. Jelly? As in jelly and ice cream? (or Jell-o to Americans) I was being offered jelly before I’d even had lunch? And what sort of sandwich could there be that had jelly in it? In joy I leapt to the table, thinking that maybe this country and my Scary Uncle weren’t so bad after all, only for my horror to return with a vengeance when he placed a jam sandwich in front of me. I hated jam. Loathed it. No idea why, but I felt it very strongly.
“What’s the matter? You said you like jelly, don’t you?” Demanded my scary uncle.
I whimpered mutely to myself: “then why did you give me jaa-aamm?” but could only nod again. As soon as his back was turned, I realized that I could both keep him happy, and the dog from eyeing me up, by feeding the detested jam sandwiches to the dog. Who gobbled them up then proceeded to throw up everywhere. Apparently he felt the same way I did about jam, but the following day when my cousin took me into school for show-and-tell she introduced me by saying “this is my cousin Claire. She’s from Scotland and she made my dog puke.” And 20 Bostonian kindergarteners radiated waves of hate in my direction as only dog loving kindergarteners can.

So I think that George Bernard Shaw had something when he observed that we are “one nation divided by a common language” although I must say that it is with some pride that I inform people that ‘A’ level French isn’t my only foreign language. In addition to being able to say “I love you” in Italian, Russian and German, I am also a fairly fluent speaker of American, Canadian, Australian and one of my 2006 resolutions is to master Irish.