More about Canada

I started writing about things that were definitively British earlier this year – Blue Peter, Burtons, Ultravox, Victoria Wood - but I think that I am learning just as much about Canadian culture by living with B as I am managing to indoctrinate her in the ways of the Brits. So she taught me all about what Hallowe’en is like in Canada a month ago. And last night I had an education in Canadian Football. Specifically in the cult of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

B is from Saskatchewan and her football team, the Roughriders, who usually lose, had made it to the final of the Grey Cup – I suppose the equivalent of the Champions League here. They were playing Montreal in Calgary. The game started at 11.30pm GMT, and some friends of hers had very kindly offered to host a game night with nibbles and live streaming of the match. We painted our faces green, learned the words to ‘True North, Strong and Green’ and the rules (roughly) and watched until gone three in the morning.

I got quite into it towards the end – the Riders were winning all the way through and it was a nailbiting finish, with Montreal two points behind with one second on the clock and a penalty kick that would win the match for them if they got it.

The kicker ran back, hit the ball, it soared through the air and… missed!

No seconds left on the clock and the Riders’ fans filling the stadium began to celebrate.

But there was a problem. The referee had his flag up and it turns out the Riders had had one too many players on the pitch. Montreal got the chance to take their penalty again.

And of course this time they got it, winning the match by one scabby point.

Poor B. I’ve still got ‘Rider Pride’ stuck in my head though…

Awards…

It’s the time of year when everyone starts getting practice for Christmas festivities and what better way to do it than with awards ceremonies. Black tie, white shirt, dinner jackets, trousers with the crease down the front, champagne receptions followed by a sit down three course meal. Bliss. Last night we all piled down to Old Billingsgate for the International Customer Publishing Awards. We were shortlisted in five categories along with about a gazillion others in each. In theory it’s just a nice night out and a bit of a social. But in reality, we want to win. Although we know the work we do is good, and our clients like us, actually the validation an award gives you is too tantalising to be blase about.
So we weren’t cool at all, but competitive, and annoyed when other people won awards in categories we knew we were better in. Crys of politicking flew around the table. Our production manager got more and more bloshy and started to heckle. One by one our categories came and went, until there was only one more left….
And we won it, to great sighs of relief all round. We’re not a big company and we were up against some very large ones, so it’s a double celebration when we punch above our weight.

The night was still young – there was comedy and cabaret and a goose and posh frocks and red wine, soft pink and purple lighting and all kinds of curtained off cushioned cubby holes for conversation and controversy, before carriages and home and a very late bedtime for a school night.

BBC Big Personality Test

I’m a sucker for personality tests so when one of my work colleagues asked me if I’d done the ‘BBC’s Child of Time, in collaboration with LabUK, Big Personality Test’ (don’t you just love all the capitals?) I was loading up the website and clicking on the multiple choice tickboxes before you could say Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

There’s some fairly personal questions on there so if you’re massively private you probably won’t want to share the answers with half the nation’s psychiatrists. Well maybe not half the nation’s psychiatrists, but the results are anonymised and are being collated to see if there is any correlation between lifestyle and personality.

I’m not entirely sure what it is I love about all this self-analysis since I never learn anything I didn’t really know before and if anything they tend to make me seem a bit scary and full on. I really hope people who know me don’t think I’m scary or full on… Maybe that’s why I’m always keen to take them. Maybe one day I’ll do a personality test that will conclude:

‘You are generally, a genuinely nice person to be with’.

Which is, I guess, all any of us really want to hear.

Teenage crush

‘Did you ever imagine you’d be sitting here with me like this when we were at school?’ he said.
‘With you driving and your wife and your daughter? No way,’ I replied from the back of the car.
Flash back more than fifteen years to when I was a teenager and in my imagination I can see it as it was, a vividly different world. I had a schoolgirl crush on this guy in the year below me at school for what felt like an eternity, but thinking about it must have been at most two years. I felt flushed every time we spoke to each other, and every single word felt heavy with a subtext and a question – do you even like me?

My brain overthought everything to the point of making even the most straightforward conversation painful and awkward. Everything mattered deeply, every comment, look, gesture was analysed and interpreted to reveal whether the person who uttered, glanced, waved at you liked you or not. And if you thought they didn’t it really REALLY mattered.

I thought that nobody could have ever experienced this much pounding discomfort from being in love. It felt heavy and sharp in every cell of my body. It ached.
Man, I am so glad I’m not a teenager anymore.
I couldn’t have imagined, aged 14, being able to sit in the company of this guy with equanimity, completely at ease, not thinking about the conversation, not panicking about what I was saying and how it would be interpreted, not fretting about giving the game away. I couldn’t imagine not being in love with him.
And then when we left school, we almost immediately dropped out of each other’s lives and I couldn’t imagine there would ever be a time when I would chatting away to him in the middle of a weekend away. Sitting in the back of his car. With his wife. And his daughter.
Lots changes in fifteen years but that doesn’t stop life from throwing you the occasional pleasant surprise, to remind you of how far you’ve come and give you the imagination to see how far there could still be to go.

Secret gardens

Guerilla gardening: gardening on a piece of property, usually public land that does not belong to you

According to Wikipedia (which is, of course, a totally reliable source) ‘London has a diverse range of peoples, cultures, and religions, and more than 300 languages are spoken within its boundaries. In July 2007, it had an official population of 7,556,900 within the boundaries of Greater London, making it the most populous municipality in the European Union. The Greater London Urban Area (the second largest in the EU) has a population of 8,278,251 while the metropolitan area (the largest in the EU) has an estimated total population of between 12 million and 14 million.’

So it should be no surprise to find, with so many people in such a diverse space that there will always be secret things going on to uncover.

Little did I know that every day I catch the bus to work, I pass two guerrilla gardens – one on the Elephant and Castle roundabout and one just along from it at St George’s Circus.

They were planted by a guy I’ve been researching as a potential feature idea for Go Ape’s magazine Tribe: Richard Reynolds. He’s a guerilla gardener. He goes out at night and plants up pieces of derelict public land abandoned by local councils. Although it inevitably becomes a kind of political statement about the use of open spaces and our attitudes to the urban environment, more than anything he does it because he enjoys gardening but living on the tenth floor of a tower block makes this tricky.

Having read his Twitter feed and watched bits of videos of him, I think I might have developed a bit of a crush. I certainly feel inspired to get my gardening gloves out and get some plants in my backyard for next summer. But instead of reading my third hand description of what he does, I’ll let you watch him talk about it instead.

Dead trees and Louis Theroux

It’s been a while since I’ve walked in to work but today I made a special effort and was rewarded with two sights to behold: dead trees in Trafalgar Square and Louis Theroux on his bike.
The dead trees in Trafalgar Square are part of a week long art installation called Ghost Forest to highlight the devastation of deforestation. The stumps will have belonged once to trees as big as Nelson’s Column. It does give Trafalgar Square the air of a graveyard.
Louis Theroux was spotted at the junction of Tottenham Court Road with Euston Road, right trouser leg rolled up, no helmet and a baby seat on the back.
With exciting, interesting and intriguiing things like these to see on the way to work, I really feel like I could have missed out on loads by not walking in the past couple of weeks. Back to pounding the pavements, I think.

Chocolates and carrot soup

I’ve not had a night in for eleven days. I got home from a weekend away in Southampton late this afternoon and took the opportunity to finally tidy and clean my space. I also turned a bag of carrots and some tomatoes into soup for lunch for the week while finishing off a box of birthday chocolates. I suppose this has to mark the official end of my thirtieth celebrations.

The contents of my fridge and food cupboard are now: half a bag of cherry tomatoes, an almost empty tube of tomato puree, an open block of butter, two pieces of stale pannetone and four eggs:

Well not quite. I have got other bits and pieces floating around too, but this serves to demonstrate how little time I feel I’ve spent at home. And there’s no real point in food shopping when I’m only going to be in one night this week too.

Despite seemingly being so busy, I don’t seem to be able to think of anything exciting to report.
Is this part of not being in your twenties anymore? Your time is not filled with exciting encounters, philosophical debates, cultural exploits, but with nights out doing things so unremarkable there’s nothing to write home about? Or is it that my brain is now so aged I’m unable to think of how to make these things seem interesting?

Here’s what I’ve done the past ten days:

been to governor’s meetings
given guitar lessons
done church stuff
been on a date (which I did write about so perhaps should be excluded from this list)
eaten pizza with a friend
learnt about children’s holiday camps in Moldova
travelled to Bridgend
fed 60 people Parkin and Treacle Spice Cake

Yep. There are plenty of things to write about. It’s just a bit like filling up my fridge, I know I need to do it to live, but I’ve not really had the time to do it. So unfortunately this post is probably the equivalent of eating the remnants of a box of chocolates – it’ll have to put you on until I’ve got time to do something proper.

Sunny day sweeping the clouds away

It’s not that easy being green
Having to spend each day the color of the leaves
When I think it could be nicer being red, or yellow or gold
Or something much more colorful like that

It’s not easy being green
It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things
And people tend to pass you over ’cause you’re
Not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water
Or stars in the sky

But green’s the color of Spring
And green can be cool and friendly-like
And green can be big like an ocean, or important
Like a mountain, or tall like a tree

When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why, but why wonder why
Wonder, I am green and it’ll do fine, it’s beautiful
And I think it’s what I want to be

All this week Google have absolutely delighted me with pictures on their home page celebrating the main characters of Sesame Street in honour of the programme’s 40th anniversary. Which meant of course, I had to go online and watch old clips of Monsterpiece Theatre, the Grouch, the Count, Bert and Ernie, the Cookie Monster and Big Bird.
A winning combination of 1970s style psychedelia taught me my numbers using a pinball animation and a purple puppet with maniacal laughter taught me what order they go in. Big Bird reassuringly had an imaginary friend in Snuffleupagus (until he magically appeared one day) and so did I in Worzel (until he distressingly disappeared). And together with the letters on the lids of Smartie tubes, hundreds of us learned our alphabet through the programme.

We learnt to co-operate with each other, share, be helpful, and to speak a spattering of Spanish.
Sadly, like the letters on Smartie lids, you can’t get Sesame Street on normal TV in the UK anymore. I’m fairly convinced that’s why the press keep going on about how this generation of British kids are growing up illiterate, bad at maths and unhelpfully rude.

Kulu Kulu or An example of when it’s clearly a date

I went out for yummy sushi (I know this compromises my stated fish principles but there were mitigating circumstances and I’ve written before about how principles can be flexible…) on Friday night, just round the corner from Covent Garden at Kulu Kulu. It’s a proper sushi restaurant complete with conveyor belt, freshly made dishes, set price plates and everyone squashed up together on stools, trying to eat rice with chopsticks.

I highly recommend it.

I was there on a date. Unlike on other occasions this year, there was no confusion that this was a date.

First, because as B so rightly pointed out in her comments on my last post it’s ‘a date if you’ve only just met and arrange to see one another, alone, with no purpose other than to be together.’ This is an extension of the fundamental criteria but a very valid one. I met L at a party, he politely asked me for my number, texted when he said he would and arranged to go out with me.

Second, he very generously paid for dinner.

No other criteria were fulfilled but enough had been done to make it completely unambiguous.

It’s tempting here to do a Guardian Saturday magazine style ‘marks out of ten’ thing but I’ll restrain myself because it’s not fair to L. Suffice it to say, I had a very lovely time and enjoyed the peace of mind that comes from knowing exactly where you stand and what you’ve got yourself involved in, as much as the good food and conversation.

The DNA of dating

‘I read somewhere that if given a choice between sex and peace of mind, she said, most people would choose peace. Personally, I said, I do fine with a little anxiety.’
The Story People

It took them 13 years to outline the basic sequence of the human genome, to ascertain what makes us broadly genetically different from other living things. Obviously, within the human genome there are multiple variations, but ultimately they’ve worked out what bits of the stuff of life make up humanity.

I wish someone would do the same for the genetics of a date. I know, I know, I know I keep going on about this. But seriously – unless someone clarifies soon the anatomy of this particular aspect of male-female interaction, the chances of this particular combination of DNA being passed on to further the human race are slim.

So, I intend to begin mapping it, for the benefit of confused single womanhood wherever she may find herself.

Here’s what I know so far…

The fundamental definition:
A date is one guy, one girl out together. 

It should be noted that this in itself is not sufficient criteria to mark it out as a date. I could go on a job with one of my male work colleagues and that would not be a date.

Therefore, the fundamental dating criterion must accompany at least two of any of the following to constitute a date:

Hand holding

Kissing

Not splitting the bill

This list needs to be longer in order to completely cover the whole anatomy of all permutations of dates, daytime, nighttime, first, second and third dates. Anyone got any ideas to add, based on their research?