Best of 2009 – the shortlist

Warning: this blogpost requires participation (please…)

According to my stats, these posts have been the top ten most viewed this year. I suspect the top one is purely because it includes a picture of Colin Firth in a wet shirt.

Why I should wear my glasses instead of being so vain
25 random things
A tribute to the end of a beautiful relationship
Cultural Shorthand #1: Blue Peter
Reunion
18 miles in a day
Flatmate’s fiance’s conversational skills
The DNA of dating
Cultural shorthand #4: Victoria Wood
The First Day of My Life

But these aren’t necessarily my favourites or the most representative. For example there have been several date related posts that I quite like:
Dating: the default position
He’s just not that into you
Marmite
The ongoing ‘when is a date, a date’ debate
The DNA of dating
Kulu Kulu or An example of when it’s definitely a date

And some philosophical wonderings…
One hundred posts
Simple pleasures
Thirty (part two)

And stories about great…
The wedding of the century
18 miles again
Top Gun

…and reckless exploits:
Briallos to Teo and Teo to Santiago
Oblivious
Flirting with the devil
You can’t take the north out of the girl (Flex…)
Carols with a twist

So it’s hard to choose – but what’s your favourite posting from the Girl from Clapham in 2009?

(This is where you get involved and leave a comment… ;o))

Snow on the solstice

Odds are ever-shortening on a white Christmas, but I wonder how many people bet on a snowy solstice? The days are now officially lengthening, the nights are shortening, the temperatures will rise and spring will soon spring upon us.

But in the meantime, the winter solstice, marker of the middle of winter, is one of my favourite days.

We had our flat Christmas – salmon and cream cheese on lovely bagels and a sherry to start, followed by roast rolled shoulder of lamb with pork and chestnut stuffing, roast parsnips, carrots and potatoes, garlicky leeks, bacon, mushrooms, courgettes, all smothered in onion gravy, with champagne. A short breather, and then Christmas pudding with brandy sauce and vanilla ice cream.

In the afternoon, the clear skies had turned to a dense pale grey, the temperature plummeted and all of a sudden, through the blinds, the air went thick with snow, covering everything with a feather down duvet of white, which sat reflecting the yellow tungsten light for the rest of the evening.

G and B and I, ate and ate and ate and laughed and then sat, slightly slumped on our sofas, watching a film, slowly digesting, feeling fat and full and snowily satisfied.

Marrieds v. singles

Later the same Saturday I went to two parties. One was full of marrieds. One was full of singles.

Both had their own special merits, but I’ve never really experienced such a stark contrast in one evening. It’s rare to be in a situation where the company is exclusively married or exclusively single these days – even when I’m with people entirely my own age, people are involved in all kinds of different stages of relationships.

At the marrieds party, the only non-marrieds were my friend JS and me. The ladies chatted about their kids. The blokes talked about DIY. JS and I don’t have any kids and we’ve never had much cause to get out a saw and cut things. So we were at a conversational disadvantage. The lovely hosts chatted away to us while we clocked two of the guys checking out the hinges and brackets on doors and shelves, and critiquing the angle of a radiator… It was, we concluded, another world.

We left and headed to our second party, the ’singles’ party. We also fitted all kinds of stereotypes – slightly overdressed for a house party, lots of circulating and perhaps trying a little too hard to make an impression on strangers, some dancing, clever banter, and the occasional pair sneaking themselves off into a corner. But, it should be noted, since it was a Christian party, no numbers, or saliva, were exchanged…

A window to the future

Time zones are a funny thing. We know that every day is 24 hours (and a bit) long, but globally, every date lasts something nearer to 37 hours.

I was told a story on Saturday of a couple in Australia who needed to finalise paperwork before the end of a certain date in order to save their business. Midnight came and went and the day was officially over. At least it was in Australia. They realised that if they finalised the paperwork, faxed it to London, had it officially stamped there and submitted from the UK, it would buy them an extra 12 or 13 hours. They did it and it saved their business.

So Saturday began early. Really early. I got up at 5am to prepare pancakes for two girls who were coming over to watch with me, via Skype, the wedding speeches of our NZ friend, Sarah. We would be joining them 6am our time, 7pm their time. The Skype connection was made. Outside the window of my flat the ground was icy, the temperature hovering around minus two, and it was dark. Through the screen of the laptop we could see another world – there, people were wearing strappy little tops and sporting sunburn. It was clearly warm and bright and stayed bright as the evening wore on. They had had a full day of preparations and celebrations. We had yet to start our day.

It was a very strange experience, seeing into what is essentially the future.

We saw the bridesmaids give a speech, spoke to the bride and groom, had a good look at her dress, heard the groom and bride’s speeches, with great clarity, as if we were actually there and not huddled together in dark midwinter in London.

Would this have been possible ten years ago? I think not. And I became more and more amazed at how privileged we are to have the technology to join with friends in celebrating, regardless of dates, time zones, continents, oceans and thousands of miles.

Festivities

As the Venga Boys once sang, ‘We like to party. We like, we like to party.’ Especially when partying means an excuse to dress up and look pretty.

I got out my party dress and GHDs. And then a pair of tights, since it started snowing heavily and there was no way I was going out bare-legged. Only mad drunk girls on hen weekends in Blackpool are that reckless.

Last night was the first of a glut of Christmas parties – our office do – and the contrast between this year’s and last year’s, which was definitely a recession do, couldn’t have been greater.

Last year we went to Camino (which is a great little venue for drinks after work on a Friday night) at Kings Cross, ate tapas, drank beer and went home early.

This year we went to Vertigo 42 at the top of the old NatWest tower to drink champagne and nibble on canapes, while gazing out over the neon and yellow sulphur lights of London.

Then we went to the Wapping Project for dinner – Wild boar to start, venison for the main course and then I couldn’t resist having a cheese board to finish instead of pudding. All washed down with red wine. O so festive. Delightfully expensive. And very yummy.

Christmas carols with a twist

Sometimes I do wonder about myself and why I volunteer to get myself into ridiculous situations. Need someone to do something slightly silly or potentially humiliating in public? I’m there, drawn by some strange magnetism.

So it was that I found myself standing outside Clapham South Tube station last night, alone, with a tin of Cadbury’s Roses open at my feet, holding a big sign with the words ‘Sing with Me’ painted in red, about to launch into Once in Royal David’s City, solo.

I very rarely get nervous about singing in front of people. Ask me to play the piano in front of people and my hands and legs will shake uncontrollably. Ask me to sing, and I’m normally as cool as a cucumber.

But not this time.

Two hours before I arrived, I was sweating, my stomach was gurgling, and my heart was pounding with anxiety. Why, oh why, had I volunteered to do this? What on earth was I thinking?

It started like this – a few of us wanted to sing carols in a public place, but we didn’t just want to turn up like a bedraggled bunch, debate what we would sing for five minutes, quibble about the starting note, and have embarrassed passers-by throw money at us. We wanted to do something a little more creative, a bit more inclusive, and to do it for the sheer joy of singing out.

I love carols – the harmonies, the soaring descants, the tingly feeling of the words on your tongue – and I don’t ever feel like I get to sing them enough at Christmas. And I go to church, so I reckon that means the majority of people hardly get to sing them at all. They feel like magic when you hear them and better still when you sing them.

We decided we would give people the chance to sing along with us and create a kind of carol singing flashmob. We would redeem singing on the streets from the buskers and charity fundraisers. We would create a spontaneous ‘gloria in excelsis deo’ with the commuters.

But obviously we actually were organised and we needed it to look unplanned, and this is where the idea of the lone singer came in. Everyone would arrive from 6.30 onwards to sing. But I volunteered to start at 6.25, alone, with my sign, so that as my friends joined me, to the people coming out of the Tube station, it would look like they had just randomly and spontaneously decided to join me.

I checked the time on my watch, cleared my throat, and began to sing.

FF has written beautifully about carol singing. She comments that ‘Choir singing is about being part of something bigger than just ‘I’.’ She’s right. Singing alone left me feeling exposed and vulnerable. I didn’t care who it was, I needed someone to join in and sing with me. My singing was not an invitation for people to watch me perform; it was an open invitation for community.

As people strode out of the station, they looked, some looked twice and you could see the flicker of the thought ‘Should I join in?’ pass through their minds. But to be the first to join a lone singer is a risk too. What if I can’t sing in tune? What if people stare at me too? The transition from anonymous commuter to street performer is a fairly giant leap to make without psyching yourself up.

So I sang alone. All six verses of Once in Royal, until, finally, and to my great relief, one of my friends arrived with her little girls, to join me. Once they’d joined in, it snowballed, and one by one, random ones of my friends came and joined in, and random commuters came, took words and sang a carol or two with us.

Lots of people got money out of their wallets, and got confused when we told them to put their money away, and to take a chocolate or join in for a verse or two instead.

Slowly but surely, my reedy little lone voice had rich altos, dark brown tenors and even a rumbling bass added to it, so that when we sang ‘Gloria in excelsis deo’ it was full and resounding, full of the instant joy that comes from being part of something bigger than yourself.

Art is beauty and beauty is art

It almost passed me by, because, after years of outrage, scandal and controversy, the Turner Prize was awarded this year to someone who had created something actually beautiful.

For me art has always been defined as something beautiful. If a created object arrests the eye, purely because it’s aesthetically pleasing, I can accept that it’s art. It doesn’t have to be a literal interpretation of a scene on canvas. There is beauty in nothing more than a solid block of colour. The idea for me, is that you just want to stare and stare and stare. And that in staring at something, you experience something beyond yourself, that art becomes transcendent in some way.

So Richard Wright winning the Turner Prize is a victory for my personal understanding of what art is.
Shirley Dent made this point in a Guardian comment piece.. ‘…art can transfigure the most mundane of human moments and gestures. Secular art today has all too often lost sight of this great gift of art, to transcend the human moment in the very act of capturing it.’

And in an interview with Charlotte Higgins, Wright points out the fact that art cannot be owned or held onto – that it’s bigger than a painting or a sculpture. ‘”The fragility of the experience is the hinge for me,” he says. It makes the work more like a musical performance, he explains, something that exists in the memory of the creator and the audience, but can’t be owned, sold, or carried around. “There’s already too much stuff in the world. And it buys you a kind of freedom. Not having [paintings] come back to haunt you is a kind of liberation. You make something, and a month later it is gone”.’

In the monthly e-mail update from Artisan, Steve Cole writes, ‘I am fascinated by the reality that most beauty is not only temporary but also unseen and unappreciated.  Artists are significant players in this constant flow of beauty through words, film, music, the movement of a body, a brush, scalpel or mouse.  Innovative and unique beauty is in each of us and our challenge I believe is to interact playfully. In the words of the philosopher Roger Scruton beauty has the potential to ‘amplify the joys’ and bring ‘consolation to our sorrows’.

I know this is lots of quotes from lots of other people, but I’m fairly inspired by the idea that beauty in art is enjoying a renaissance, and that, through seeing and staring and contemplating beautiful, if transient, things, we gain a capacity to move beyond ourselves and recognise something grander and eternal.

Foy Vance

CC and I headed over to Union Chapel to see Foy Vance.

Quite frankly, I can’t get enough of Foy Vance. I’ve seen him more times than I can count, and it was strange to think that now he can fill Union Chapel, when maybe three years ago I was seeing him perform to twenty people in the basement bar of the pub next door to the famous Night and Day club in Manchester…

Anyway, Kill it Kid started the night off, and to give them credit, I quite liked them. I always think it’s hard to make a judgement on a band you’ve never heard before when you hear them as a support act – you’re not always in the zone for their kind of music. But I’d happily listen to them again.

But like I said, I wasn’t there for them. I was there for Foy.

He was amazing at Union Chapel, starting the night with an acoustic version of Abide With Me which was perfect for the candlelit church we were sitting in. Pews don’t ever feel as uncomfortable when you’re totally absorbed in what you’re hearing.
He completely milked the acoustics and the atmosphere so we heard more of his melancholy and reflective songs, including the gorgeous Billie Jean cover that seems to come as standard these days. But I didn’t feel cheated, especially when he finished the night (officially – of course he did an encore) with Two Shades of Hope.

It’s hard not to be moved when you hear it live.

Here’s the words:

If there’s one thing that I know, it is the two shades of hope –
One the enlightening soul, and the other is more like a hangman’s rope.
Well it’s true you may reap what you sow, but not that despair is the all time low.

Baby, hope deals the hardest blows.

There was once someone I loved, whose heart overflowed his cup,
And his shoes got covered in blood, but he never knew cos he only looked up.
Well he was a troubled soul who had known pain more than most I know, yet it was hope that dealt the hardest blows.

The girl that holds the hand of her somewhat distant man, though she did everything she can, still his heart set sail for distant lands.
And she wonders sometimes if he knows how she feels like a trampled rose?

Baby, hope deals the hardest blows

Some people think their sin caused the cancer thats eating into them and the only way that they can win is by the healing of somebody’s hands on their skin and praying…
But when the cancer does not go…

Baby, hope dealt the hardest blows

Now all these truths are so, with foundations below them. They were dug out in a winter’s cold, when the world stole our young and preyed on the old.

Hope deals in the hardest blows,

Yet I cannot help myself but hope

I guess that’s why love hurts and heartache stings and despair is never worse than the despair that death brings

But hope deals the hardest blows, dear

The hardest

Hope deals the hardest blows.

…but you can’t take the north out of the girl (or Fl-fl-fl-flex!)

The party moved on to The Swan at Stockwell (where incidentally you get a sausage supper included in your entry fee – that is my kind of place). But because I was up early the next morning, I left at 1am to catch the night bus home.

At the back of the N155 with me were two girls deliberating about where they were supposed to get off, and a stocky black guy on his phone. I asked the girls ‘Where are you going?’
Sheepishly they replied, ‘Infernos – we were hoping we wouldn’t have to admit we were going there out loud…’ Infernos is a very cheesy club, but apparently a guaranteed good night out. I told them which stop they wanted and when they asked me how much entry was, the guy in the middle of us started gesticulating trying to indicate the price. In the meantime he was saying ‘No I’m not with anyone. I’m not with anyone! I’m on the bus! The people you can hear are the other people on the bus! No I’m not with another woman…’

The girls and I looked at each other, they hopped off and I settled back into keeping myself to myself.

He got off his phone just before Clapham Common bus stop, turned to me and said ‘That was my ex-girlfriend.’
‘Yes. I thought it sounded like your girlfriend or something,’ I replied.
‘No no! She’s definitely my ex,’ he assured me. ‘We broke up eight months ago, but…’ and then off he went into a long diatribe about how she’s so jealous and how she pesters him etc. I nodded and smiled.
‘Anyway,’ he said ‘Where’s your boyfriend?’
I think it’s fairly clear by now that I’m more often than not, an idiot. So I replied, like a div, ‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’
‘But you’re beautiful!’ he exclaimed, ‘Where are you going?’

So I told him I was going home and he decided he would stay with me on the bus, past his stop to mine, to keep talking to me.

He asked me for my number. So I gave him a fake number. Because I was caught on the backfoot and didn’t really know how to say – ‘No I don’t want you to have my number.’ But then he was about to call me there and then to check it worked, so I said ‘No no no no no! I’ll take your number.’ He gave me mine, but then asked me to call him so he had mine and he was sitting opposite me and I didn’t really know how to get out of it. So I gave him my number. He gave me a big beaming smile, to reveal one gold front tooth among a set of white ones.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Flex, like what you do with a muscle.’

O dear o dear.

He got off the bus at my stop and I stood listening to him continuing to chat about his ex and how paranoid she is.

A bus went past the other way and he groaned because he’d missed it. ‘You’re the one who’s to blame for that. You’re the one chatting!’ I said.
‘Listen, I’m going to go, but I’ll call you right. I’m sober. You’re sober so there’s no reason not to. What a great story this will make when people ask us how we got together eh? ‘O yeah, we met at the back of a bus’…

O my life. I watched him disappear then walked home.

At four the next morning I got a text from him:
‘Sweet pracious lady u r… it was very nice talking 2 u, wiv yr sweet voice. Hope u had a fantastic night out. I take u r @ home safe and sound _/\_… Beautiful! Good night and gold dreams >’.’<! Regards Flex… x…’

Clearly he’s the dotdotdot king.
He then called me at teatime the next day.
And has texted me every morning until today.

You’ve got to admire a man who’s persistent, but seriously – there are limits!

You can take the girl out of the north…

Apparently you can take the girl out of the north, but you can’t take the north out of the girl. For example, if I overhear that someone is lost, and I think I might be able to help, I’ll ask if they want my help, rather than sitting silently, and smugly, thinking ‘Aha! I know the answer but I’m not telling.’

CC is the same. So on Saturday night, when we were out for CJ’s birthday drinks and CC found a girl in the toilets looking slightly distraught, she asked her if she could help.
‘I’m on the worst date of my life ever,’ she said.
‘Right,’ said CC. ‘This is what we are going to do. You are going to go back out there and a couple of minutes later, I will come out, look surprised and say ‘Hi! What are you doing here?’ We will pretend we are cousins, you will come upstairs meet my friends, get rid of your date and then join us for the rest of the evening.’

So that is what they did, this poor girl coming up the stairs to join us, with her poor internet date trailing behind her, with his coat and scarf still on and his iphone out… Clearly he hadn’t thought the date was going very well either. CC introduced them both to us all, then the girl took her date downstairs and got rid of him, before returning and buying us all a round of drinks out of gratitude.

A few minutes later, once she had calmed down, she asked us if there were any single men at this party. So we introduced her to the three blokes sitting on the bench opposite us, and made a joke that it was a bit like Blind Date.

‘Oo, let’s do Blind Date,’ she said, and started asking them questions – ‘If you were a kitchen utensil, what would you be and why?’ She went the whole way and asked them each three questions, before settling on number one, a guy who CJ knows from climbing.

When we left, they both looked delighted to have discovered each other, the rescued girl resting her hand on climbing boy’s bottom as they stood in the pub doorway. ‘Thank you so much,’ she whispered to us theatrically ‘You rescued me from a bad date and you’ve also set me up with Number One!’

We just hoped she would eventually remember his name and save herself some later embarassment…