Living for Disco

I’m not all that comfortable with the idea of a traditional hen do. I mean, I have been known to go out and get leathered on occasion, and sometimes – yes, it’s possible – I do make a tit of myself in public places. However, I’m not the kind of girl that likes to rampage around town wearing learner plates and deely boppers, drink lambrini until I’m higher on sugar than alcohol, get strange men to sign my breasts or find myself at the end of the night puking into my own knickers. I’m far too much of a snob for that.

Because of this, it didn’t occur to me that there would be an objection when I booked a narrow boat for the day for myself and 8 friends, with the view to having a grand day out on the river. We’ll probably be a bit worse for wear from the night before anyway, so it will be a lazy day with a few beers and a pub lunch – at least, that’s my plan.

I paid the deposit weeks ago, and when I phoned up to get further details we had a brief and friendly chat. Until…

“So, what’s the occasion anyway? Birthday? Corporate team building day?”

“No, actually”, I said. “It’s my hen do.”

Silence. Then strangled nervous laughter, which broke at the end.

“Ahhh, hahahahaha, you kind of slipped through the net there,” he said brokenly. “I really wish you hadn’t told me that. Oh, oh dear. Hmm. Errr…”

“We’re very refined”, I said, remembering the last time I had a few too many glasses of fine wine while involved in a water-based activity. I fell off a punt into the River Cam. Twice. “Honestly, we are. We’re all in our thirties.” This didn’t seem to reassure him. Maybe he’d seen too many episodes of Sex and the City.

“Er, I’m sure you are,” he said, clearly not believing it for a second. I could tell that in his head he pictured his precious boat wending its way down the river, steered by a group of shrieking middle-aged harpies waving giant penises and exhorting all the fishermen en route to get their clothes off. “It’s just that single sex parties…” He trailed off.

“Oh!”, I jumped in, grasping at the only straw I had left. “There will be a man there”.

“Oh god. Oh dear god, it’s a male stripper isn’t it?”

“NO! Jesus, no. Definitely no. It’s a friend. He’s going to be the sober and responsible one.” He didn’t believe me.

But seeing as I’d already paid the deposit, he let it go, this once. His parting shot was to tell me that the £50 deposit payable on the day was dependent on the boat coming back, in one piece, by 7pm, with all equipment on board, and they were to have had no more than two complaining phone calls from horrified canal folk as we wended our way down river.

Dammit, I thought, as I put the phone down. No accosting of canal folk. Who am I going to get to sign my breasts now?

I have lost weight!

I have this beautiful red dress that I bought for a steal on ebay (I love ebay), and when I got back from Australia, I put it on to go out to our weekly jive class. Yes, we jive, people. We will be jiving the night away come our wedding day. It’ll be like playing skittles on the dance floor.

Anyway, I put this dress on, and looked in the mirror. My reflection gently suggested that it might not be a good idea to wear it, as if I breathed, or moved or anything it might just, oh, EXPLODE at the seams, and render me naked before my peers at the Winton and Moordown Royal British Legion Club. And god knows, you don’t want that to happen while you’re executing a Parisian Basket.

So anyway, I put this dress on yesterday, and not only did it fit, it was slightly roomy. Result! So I wore it with pride, to work, and as soon as I got in the car to go home, the strap broke, and I had to drive home with one boob hanging out.

My consolation is that at least my fellow road users had a svelte and shapely boob to look at.

I haven’t really been stressed about the wedding plans before now, but just in the last few days I’ve been finding myself having nocturnal nightmares about Gordon turning into a hideous ex boyfriend of mine, or only having work shoes to wear, and waking nightmares about forgetting some crucial thing which will result everyone having a miserable time, or cost us an extra x-thousand pounds.

This morning I’m feeling particularly tense and tearful, so I decided to google wedding stress. I don’t know why. No other wedding advice I’ve solicited from the internet has been remotely useful. It’s all about fascinators and wedding favours. What is it with wedding favours? Surely the idea is for people to give YOU presents? And I’m buggered if I’m paying 25 quid a head for a small box full of sugared almonds.

Anyway, the advice about wedding stress is pretty much the same. It falls into two categories:
1. Advice for brides with pushy parents (Say NO! Learn BOUNDARIES! You don’t HAVE to marry at Papa’s golf club – glory be!)
2. Advice for brides whose future spouses are not supportive of the planning.

Neither of these affects me. My mother, I suspect, is quite enjoying the fact that she doesn’t have to plan anything, as Gordon and I are fairly sure of what we want. She merely absorbs the updates with interest (and the occasional expression of alarm if it sounds expensive), and tries to work out what she’s going to wear.

Gordon’s mother is even less involved. We’re not even sure at the moment if she’s even coming. She didn’t react well to the fact that we put ‘karaoke’ on the invitation, and seems to think that we will be married in the company of a bunch of drunken lager louts in the middle of a rain-soaked, shit-spattered field, while cows chew desultorily at the hem of the guests’ best dresses.

So, not the traditional family stress for me. As for Gordon, he is as invested in the planning as I am, thank the lord.

No, I need to work out how to cope with monosyllabic photographers, venue proprietors who fail to make any helpful suggestions for buffet menus, cake bakers who seem incapable of baking reasonably sized cup cakes with paper cases that stay on, and a bill that is rising out of the murky depths of our debt like a cash-gobbling kraken.

It doesn’t help that I’m on a detox diet this week. As far as I can work out, we are allowed to eat rice cakes and drink water. Actually, it’s not that bad, but I’m hoping to lose a bit of weight. I have put on a stone since I tried the dress on, and I don’t want the evil bride-shop witch to have any excuse whatsoever to make further belittling comments when I go for the fitting.

Still, I hate dieting. I’ve never had to do it before. Usually by 9am I’m craving chocolate croissants with butter on, and a slice of toast. I can’t drink caffeine or alcohol (horrors!), eat wheat, oats, dairy, or anything that’s been cooked for more than 5 minutes. Apparently, according to the wedding stress advice, healthy eating really can help. To be honest, it’s making me tired, flatulent and inclined to shove dates attractively into my mouth every time I feel a blood-sugar dip coming on, which is every ten minutes.

It’s torture. TORTURE.

Roll on Friday. On Friday, I can roll out my traditional stress busting method – a big, fuck off glass of white wine, and good company.

It can’t come too soon.

I have been very busy over the last few days, commuting to and from my new job. This commute is quite long - at the least 1.3 hours - and I’m finding it so challenging that all I can do when I get home is collapse in Gordon’s arms (after he has finished peering through the catflap in an amusing manner) and demand wine. You think I’m joking.

So you will understand that it took a great deal for me to stump up the energy to review Indiana Jones’ latest offering. Here are some of the things that I found annoying:

1. The cute gophers. Anyone who lets George Lucas near a film these days is asking for trouble. It’s a good thing he wasn’t involved in Schindler’s List, otherwise all the Jews would have been rescued by little furry chipmunks shouting ‘oy vey’ and looking alarmed when the Nazis goose-stepped past.

2. It’s nuclear. New-clee-ar. Not new-cew-lar. George W Bush says new-cew-lar. Don’t be a moron.

3. Just how many women who’ve been jilted at the altar would greet their ex-paramour with anything less than a winklepicker to the gonads? Just how quickly did she succumb?

4. Sword fighting on the back of jeeps. Yawn.

5. Cute monkeys (see cute gophers above) teaching Indy jnr to swing through the jungle like Tarzan. George Lucas should be shot (see above).

5. Everything else.

Awful. Just awful. Don’t waste your precious, non-commuting time.

In other news, thanks for the lovely comments to the last post, which I will answer, as each and every one deserves an answer.

I eventually want children, and my body is beginning to tell me that I’d better get a move on, as I’m getting on a bit, and I do want to be able to play with my kids without the aid of a zimmer frame*.

However, Gordon has said (with increasing firmness, the more time we spend with friends who have more than one child of toddler age) that we should probably check that we’d make good parents first, by getting a kitten and practising on it.

So, we have a kitten. We haven’t named it yet as no names really seem to stick, apart from Kitten. It’s been four days, and I’m wondering whether we would make good parents. For example, is it wise to let your six week old (as yet unnamed) child hurtle up and down the stairs, stick its head through the bannisters, fall backwards off the sofa onto the wooden floor, and play delightedly with a small pile of gravel in which it has just buried its own excrement? I even lost her the other day, only to find she’d got stuck in the cupboard under the sink while investigating our bleach collection.

I admit I’m trying to give her the care and sustenance she needs. She likes to try and suck on my eyeball, which I’m trying to dissuade her from doing, as it is a) uncomfortable and b) unhygenic. I mean, she’s usually just licked her bum clean. Conjunctivitis anyone?
I also let her sleep in our bed, which I understand can be comforting for young children. However, waking up at 5.30 am with a cat on your head isn’t the best way to ease yourself into your day. Particularly when she generally attacks anything that moves, which includes your bleary, blinking eyelid.

She is very, very cute, which is why people get kittens in the first place, I imagine. She’s also completely insane. She stalks us eveywhere we go. Our toes have puncture wounds that would be the envy of a bevy of lorikeets. Nothing is safe.

We bumped into the neighbours from whom we got her yesterday, and he asked us how it was going.

“Bonkers isn’t she?” he said, with a certain degree of schadenfreude. I thought all kittens were bonkers, but he assures us that of the litter of six, this one was particularly nuts. I expect to come home to find her swinging from the light fittings one day very soon, and like most mothers, I like to think that this is merely a reflection of her extraordinary brilliance.

On a weirdly serious note though, it struck me that cats live for 14 or 15 years. I hadn’t really thought about this before. She’s probably going to be our cat for a very long time. For the first time, I’ve actually had to consider the very real nature of our commitment to each other, which has been somewhat overshadowed by the excitement of moving in with Gordon and planning our wedding. It’s bizarre that it’s taken something as tiny as a kitten to bring this home.

Naturally it hasn’t changed anything - just clarified a few things to my satisfaction. However, it’s also made me consider our relationship through a further layer of understanding. It does make me wonder whether anyone really knows what they are getting into when they say ‘I do’, or when they get a kitten together.

Above all, spending time together with the kitten has made me realise that we’re really going to have to do the dusting a bit more often. If anyone sees the amount of fluff on Kitten’s whiskers, we’ll soon be getting a visit from the RSPCA, and I’m not ready to start the recrimination stage of our partnership just yet.

*Although they can do wonders with science these days, so I might just store my eggs and wait til I’m 60.