09.12.12- Poetry, Parties and Please Refrain

This is how attractive I feel today

Well what a weekend. On Friday I had a swollen tonsils and a dry cough, so to cure it I went for a run in the freezing cold rain for over an hour and came home with hands the colour of Parma Violets and shuddered like a crack addict in a washing machine for the rest of the day. Now I am coughing up a lung and wanting to snot everywhere, which makes me feel extremely sexy. I will not however let this stop me going to the English Society Christmas Dinner on Wednesday as I have a lovely new purple dress, the ticket cost £25 and I’m sitting on the Dead Poets’ table with a lot of wine and a poetry lecturer and I plan to get merrier than Father Christmas on Prozac.

                On the Friday afternoon, I went to my lecture. I sat in the lecture theatre looking super-keen with my glasses on and books out before anyone else had arrived.

                Nobody else did arrive. So that was that and I went to get a JC’s coffee alone and feeling like a knob. In the evening, I was very very excited to go and see Gillian Clarke and Carol Ann Duffy read out their poetry at the Dylan Thomas Centre. What you have to understand that to me, a poetry whore, this is the literary equivalent of going to see Beyonce and Shakira. Gillian Clarke and Carol Ann Duffy neither look nor act anything like Beyonce and Shakira but to me they are far more exciting. My nose ran disgustingly throughout the entire performance, I was sniffing like a Dyson on overdrive and I nearly cried at a poem (because actually, I do have a soul, no matter what my past lovers will tell you) but I loved every damn minute of it. The bottle of merlot clinking in my handbag ready for the party I was going to afterwards, I would have happily cracked it open, propped my feet on the old bloke’s balding head in front of me and sat there glugging it as my favourite ladies read out their work for the rest of the night.

Beyonce and Shakira?

                But sadly it had to come to an end and I queued up with the other poetry sluts who wanted their books signed so they could go home and get off to some metaphors and the rest of the stuff we like to do. As I approached the table to get it signed, my head was filled with questions I wanted to ask them. Intellectual, deep questions. Yet when I got to the table and stood before them with their books under my arm, the only question left in my head was “Do you like mince pies?” and all that came out of my mouth was “Ngggaaaaargh.”

Well done Bridget fucking Jones.

Eventually I left with my name written in their hand on the front of my books (I now guard those books like Gollum with The One Ring To Rule Them All), jumped into the car with the lovely James Crofts and headed over to my wonderful friend Lucy’s house for a party. With the knowledge that I’d have to get up for a shift at 6.30am, I only planned on having one glass of mulled wine and going home after an hour.

Two and a half hours later, I’d smoked half a packet of cigarettes, slurped up most of a bottle of merlot through a straw and was dancing horribly to Flor Rida with Roisin. Miraculously, my throat didn’t hurt at all.

"S'alright, I'll just have one."

And then Saturday morning came. I got up on time for work. I’d downed nearly 2 litres of water before bed so didn’t have a hangover. But my throat and chest felt horrific. To Sainsbury’s I went. They announced Santa’s arrival over the tannoy and I held back from jumping at the perfect opportunity to re-enact my favourite scene from Elf where Will Ferrell in tights screams “SANTAAAAA! I KNOW HIM!” Instead I punched the air, said “yesssss” as some bloke in a Santa outfit walked past to sit in a shed and carried on serving people cigarettes and lottery tickets.

Saturday evening I went to go and see my bestest best friends Will and Matt perform at Please Refrain’s first gig with my other talented buddies Rhianedd and Chris. I felt really proud of them. Really, really proud. They’ve come so far in a year and they did fantastically. However, I had to leave by 10.15pm as I was sweating like Augustus Gloop in a Thornton’s queue and had to drive home and go to bed. But I did so feeling the sense of pride Mufasa must have felt when he looked down at Simba, except I’m not dead or made of stars and I’ve never fallen off a cliff into a stampede of wildebeest, which makes me feel better when I’m having a bad day.

And then there was today. It was nothing spectacular. I wrote up my review of Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke for The Siren (go online and read the magazine, it’s good and I say so: www.thesirenswansea.com) and took my red lace dress back to the shop as size 8 is too big and it looks like I’m having a fight with a scarlet potato sack. I have lost weight again as I’m stressed over what to do next year and should probably eat a big pie, but as it goes I don’t like pie very much; especially not pork pies because they taste of pigs’ cold bum. I shall also be going to see the wonderful James Beynon, which is always the highlight of my day because he is one of my best friends in the world, one of the only people in the world who understands me and who I can tell anything to, and is genuinely the wittiest person I know.

Plus ordering a cup of tea makes me feel sophisticated. Or fucking old. In any case, I wish I had a cat to carry in my handbag along with my extra-strength Beechams.

Santa, you’d better bring me a Persian this year, you bastard; I can’t be fucked with socks.

James and I are the most happy-go-lucky people you could possibly wish to meet