Topiary treats and overgrown gardens

Last night I went to the theatre. The Theatre Chatelet - which is a lovely old barn of a venue, but the balconies have supporting posts that make for poor viewing for 50% of the seats up there. I had a seat with a crap view, but I moved.

This turned out to be a big mistake.

As soon as I moved, someone else jumped into my seat, so there was no going back. And I'd sat myself down next to a typical Bobo mother and her chatty, chatty, CHATTY child. After ten minutes of his running commentary, I had to ask his mother to shut him up.

"But he's only a small child" she said. "he doesn't know how to behave".

"Well then maybe he shouldn't be here, if that's the case", said I.

Mother tutted and child was quiet. For a while.

The show was Edward Scissorhands - the Matthew Bourne ballet version (very good, see it if you can). The production is pretty true to the film, and Edward does marvellous things with bushes and hairdo's before being seduced by the local slut and becoming an outcast. it's all very sad.

A short while in there's a scene where there are a couple of people holding up 'vote for Upton' signs - it seems the mayoral election is on. This pleased chatty child no end.

"Maman, regarde! Il ya une manifestation!" he yelled. "J'adore les manifestations". (look Mom, a demonstration! - I love demonstrations)

It seems the spirit of '68 is alive and kicking.

And then every time a scene ended he would say "is it the interval?".

When the interval finally did come, there was a treat waiting for everyone sat in the surrounding seats. 'Mommy' got out a big envelope from her bag and from the envelope took out a contact sheet of photographs.

"Darling, tell Mommy which one of the photo's you like the best. Which one does Mommy look prettiest in?"

Well, I had to look, didn't I?

The photo's were of 'Mommy' lay naked on a bed. Artistically naked, not slutty naked, admittedly, but it would be hard to say that Mommy looked 'pretty' in any of these shots.

It looked like she had a dirty great bathmat in her lap. She didn't, it was just her lady garden, which had overgrown somewhat.

The small child said he didn't like any of the pictures. Apparently Mommy looked dead in them and he didn't like that.

"Oh well", she said. "I guess I'll have to ask Uncle Georges to take some more".

Cowboys and Indians

We had a great dinner yesterday evening. Even the obvious racism didn't detract too much from the food, the ambience and the company.

It was my Lovely Paris Friend's birthday and we went out to La Coupole. In the Parisian world of good old-fashioned brasseries, La Coupole is one of the kings - real vieille école stuff - with amazing service and great food.

The waiters are in bow-tie and dinner suit, and they all come together to sing happy birthday to you - if you organise this in advance. I didn't, but someone at a table nearby did, so hopefully LPF got a bit of vicarious pleasure from this...

Anyway, entrées of oysters and prawns were fantastic and we followed this with two of the main courses for which the house is famous. LPF took the steak tartare, I went for the lamb curry.

What happened next surprised me. Now, I worry that I am being totally anglo-saxon in my reaction to this. I've asked French colleagues this morning and they think it is perfectly acceptable and that it is in fact 'typique'. This is what happened:

The waiter who had served us all evening came with the steak tartare for LPF and presented it with a flourish. My lamb curry didn't appear.

What did appear was an Indian man - yes, a man from India - wearing a maharajah's outfit - yes, a maharajah's outfit - wielding a silver domed trolley.

With a muttering of something like "your curry, sir", he pulled back the cover of the trolley and proceeded to serve up the curry from within. He did this with impeccable style and class, but nonetheless I couldn't get away from the nagging thought at the back of my mind...

...they have employed an Indian and dressed him up in 'Indian' clothes just so that he can serve curry to the middle classes?

What worries me is that I'm seemingly the only one who thinks this is wrong.

What you gon’ do with all that junk?

Now, I’m not saying that I’m, like, Randy Jackson or anything but when it comes down to what the cool folk are saying these days, I’m pretty good at working it, dog.

You know, all this ‘hanging with me homies’ and such, it’s given me a bit of an insight into gangsta speak. You know what I mean, bitch?

I know whether something is ‘phat’ or fat – not that it can’t be both (I give myself as evidence here) and I know my ice from my bling. I’m even pretty good at translating regular American into the Queen’s English.

If someone wants to hang on the sidewalk, I know they’d probably like a sit down at a pavement terrace. If he tells me that ‘that bitch ain’t shit to me’ I know he’s not talking about Boubou the French Bulldog and her constipation.

So, I was in a club on Friday night and this really attractive guy came up to me. He was early forties, good clothes, salt and pepper hair (be still my beating heart) and he was American.

“Hey man” he said.

“Hello” I said back, trying for all the world to sound like a member of the Royal Family.

“Your junk man. It’s good.”

“Thanks, erm, yours isn’t so bad either?”

“You gonna give it to me?”

“Erm, probably. Possibly. Erm, what do you mean…?”

Well, he told me. I was a little surprised and a little impressed. Surprised that he was referring to the good stuff as junk. Impressed that he’d spotted the good stuff in the first place. Impressed he’d got the balls to come and talk to me.

Reader, I was impressed enough to let him have the junk….;-)

Hard to beat

So, it's the weekend. I have a Suntory and coke in my hand and from where I'm sat, the world looks pretty good.

Before I head out for a bit of what Paris has to offer, I thought I'd just say this. The Singer series was a funny story to tell - funny in a strange way, most definitely not ha ha. But it was a big bit of my life and I'm pleased it's over. Getting it down in black and white here was a good thing to do. Thanks for bearing with me and thanks for not telling me that the blog had turned miserable. And thanks for the lovely words as the story progressed.

So, back to 2008 and I'm in a great mood. I love the promise that Friday evening brings - a weekend ahead with friends to see, drinks to drink and restaurants begging for patronage! Does it get any better?

And my big job for the weekend? Sort out my wardrobe for my trip. Next Saturday - the 1st - I'm taking the big bird over to Chicago for a week of, well a week of Chicago. Tips anyone?

And the great news is that Monday's trip to Brussels has been cancelled. I can take it easy without thinking I have to get up early Monday morning and drive to Belgium. A big relief. Although I do have to go to the UK this week, but that's a fly in and out kind of trip. Easy.

The rest of the week looks pretty good too - I have the ballet on Tuesday (Matthew Bourne's Edward Scissorhands, which I saw at Sadlers Wells, but is truly amazing) and then Aimee Mann at La Cigale on Friday. Too exciting.

It's going to be a great week, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

Folks, there's a weekend out there, just waiting to be enjoyed.

Let's do it.

The singer - Part VI - the end

After a short stay in ‘hospital’ K was sent home, pending a date for his trial. He went to his parents’ home and we spoke regularly. I know this sounds weird, but I kept in touch because on top of everything that had happened we were friends, and I felt he needed a friend. And I’m sure I didn’t want to just walk away either.

After a month or so, he called to ask if he could come and stay at mine, in the spare room. His parents were being too overbearing and he needed some space, needed to live like an adult. I said yes. I didn’t know what else to say.

K came back to live at mine and did indeed move his things into the spare room. He would sometimes sleep there, sometimes sleep with me.

During his time in hospital and the month afterwards K had been diagnosed as suffering from a form of psychosis. He was taking tablets to send him to sleep and others to wake him up. Seroxat became his best friend.

His mood wasn’t what you’d call stable. He would become enraged quickly, never violent, but angry. He was a totally different person to the K that I had known ‘before’. Sex brought on awful nightmares for him, but his libido hadn’t disappeared. Ultimately, the seroxat put paid to any hopes of a sex life for him and he became frustrated.

Socially, he was a nightmare – I never knew what to expect and I ended up rarely going out. It was too hard to mix him with friends and family, and leaving him behind led to arguments and awfulness.

His day in court finally came and he was acquitted. He never gave me the details. He wouldn’t allow me to go to court with him. He told me afterwards that he had planned to kill himself on his first day in prison had he been found guilty. He had hidden heroin in a condom in his backside for this very purpose. This is what he told me. He showed me the heroin.

As his talk turned more and more to suicide I started to get scared. I was way out of my depth here. I would talk to him about his future and he would say that the big difference between us was that I wanted a future and that he just wanted to disappear, to end it all.

But then some days I’d come home from work and he’d have cooked dinner, rented a DVD, put flowers in the kitchen. We’d sit together on the sofa like an old married couple and watch the movie, his head on my shoulder. These days would upset me more than the angry days.

And then my Dad died.

I wasn’t able to grieve for myself, look after my mother, deal with my brother’s strange behaviour and handle K all at the same time. He wanted to be my number one priority and I couldn’t do it.

At the same time he stopped taking his pills. He had decided that he was well and that he could stop the medication. I understand now that this is part of the rollercoaster of depression, but it was so new to me. Put this together with all of the other pressure, and I was pushed to the edge.

I was grieving. In the last two years, I had buried three grandparents and, but a week earlier, had seen my father into the ground. I had a psychotic lodger/boyfriend, a newly widowed mother and a brother who couldn’t see past his own grief to think about anyone else. I had closed my doors to friends as K got worse. And my family just weren’t interested.

All I wanted was to be at the top of someone’s list, but there was no one.

One night, I tried to explain this to K. He told me that I had no idea what it was like for him. That I was selfish and that I didn’t care. That he was going to kill himself. That his death would be my fault. That he’d stage it so that I was the one that found him and that it would be ugly.

That was it. I went upstairs, packed his bags and phoned his father. His son was no longer my responsiblity. I took my keys off his keyring and I told him to leave.

Getting him out of the house wasn’t easy and I was afraid. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I’m no weakling, but he was a very strong guy and the situation was tense. This sounds incredibly dramatic, but if he wanted to kill me, he could have done so. Very easily. Nothing would have surprised me.

With K out of the house, I left by the back door. I locked the house behind me and quickly, quietly went to a local hotel.

I presume he waited for his father, but I don’t know.

Today, it’s six years later, and the hard part for me is not knowing what happened next.

He fell off the edge of my earth and I never saw or heard from him again. His parents wouldn’t take my calls and the single letter that I wrote was sent back unopened.

I hope he is alive. I hope he is well. But really, I can no longer bring myself to care.

The singer - Part V

Shortly after the New Year, Jenny dumped K. He gave me no explanation, I didn’t ask for one. She disappeared off campus for a while, but when she returned she was as friendly to me as ever. I was obviously not implicated in their split.

Me and K? Well, he became a fairly regular visitor to my place, but always on a pretext – he didn’t want my housemates to know we were sleeping together, but they were no fools. He would tell them we were working on a university assignment together, that he was borrowing a CD, that he wanted to show me a new video he had bought.

And all of this – the ‘schoolwork’, the ‘CD playing’ and ‘video watching’ – we did behind closed doors, with minimal noise…we wouldn’t want anyone to hear anything that could incriminate him, would we?

University ended in the early summer. We both graduated (me with a first, him with a lucky 2:2) and I headed off to the Midlands to start a new job.

K got on a plane to Australia and there he stayed until the end of the austral summer. He wrote to me often and sent me photo’s of him looking tan, fit and healthy. He was working as a dive instructor in Queensland, and loving it.

We would see each other on and off for the next few years. We were great friends – friends with privileges, if you like.

One year, in January, he turned up on my doorstep. He was just back from another stint working in Australia.

He stayed at my house for 5 months, during which time we lived like any other couple – well, when we were inside the house, at least. He came to family dinners and parties, but always as my ‘friend’, my ‘lodger’. He met my friends, my colleagues, my neighbours. He always introduced himself as my friend from university, despite the fact that we shared a bed every night of the week.

During these months he didn’t work. I fed him and watered him and paid the bills. I bought him new clothes and took us out to the pub. I was a bloody fool.

Then, as the summer started, he moved to Cornwall. He’d got a diving job down there for the summer and would be back in the autumn. He told me he loved me, that he’d miss me, but that this was a great job. I was pleased that he had got a job – that would be a relief to my bank account. But I was sad that he had gone. I missed him.

In September, I got a call from the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. He was being held in Plymouth and had given my name as his next of kin. Could I find him a lawyer?

The Police told me that he’d been arrested after he’d had an argument with his girlfriend (girlfriend? This was the first I knew about a girlfriend). They’d argued and she claimed that he’d opened the car door and pushed her out. He maintained that she had jumped.

At the time, they were travelling at forty miles an hour.

I rang round and got a lawyer to go and see him. I prepared myself to walk away from this awful situation.

Three days later he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

How could I walk away now?

Ding dang dong

Am I wrong to love this song as much as I do?

Just fabulous. The group is les Rita Mitsouko and the song is called Ding Dang Dong (ringing at your bell). Available at the sign of the apple.

And how classy is the lead singer, Catherine Ringer?



I challenge you to not dance to the chorus with your arms above your head...give it a go...you know you want to...