Pasta & Pesto

I wake up this morning to the sound of New Flatmate practising the recorder. I have a crazy hangover, considering how early I went to sleep, and am starving.

"Are you going to cook me breakfast?" I ask him, staggering out of my bedroom and interrupting his latest (kind of catchy) rendition of Three Blind Mice.

"No," he says, putting down the recorder determinedly. "I'm going out for a coffee."

"What?! But Old Flatmate always cooked me breakfast when I was hungover!" I squeal indignantly. But it's too late, he's already out the door.

Hmm, I think, poking around the empty kitchen cupboards. He made a pretty good chili the other night, in fairness to him. I really must learn to cook something myself soon. I find an old tin of sardines and eat them from the can, standing there in my vest-top and knickers. What am I going to do when I'm a proper grown-up with kids and stuff? Do babies eat pasta and pesto?

Madonna

Talking to Oprah about her adoption of Malawian baby David Banda, Madonna said her children Lourdes and Rocco hadn't questioned the arrival of the new family member.

"They've never once said, 'What is he doing here,' or mentioned the difference in his skin colour, or questioned his presence in our life," remarked the pop star.

What she didn't mention was the confusion his ridiculous name had caused them. Hopefully she'll be changing it from "David" to something slightly more ordinary before too long.

Mullet

Well, I finally got round to doing something about my ridiculous lopsided haircut last week, booking an appointment with hair-styling superstars Toni&Guy.

"Who will be cutting it?" I asked the receptionist. "Toni, or Guy?". But they both must've been on holiday or something because I was assigned someone else instead.

"Can you make both sides the same length, please?" I asked him, nicely.

"No problem," he said, hacking off all the beautiful curls from each side of my head and leaving the back a little longer. Great. Because what I really want when I visit my love in California next month is a bloody mullet.

Pfft. It took me months to grow out my last stupid boy haircut and now I have to start all over again. Friends try to reassure me that I don't look like a boy at all (mostly by text message from abroad, without ever actually having seen it) but the lady at the swimming pool went and confirmed it yesterday by handing me a blue locker key for the men's changing room by mistake.

Arrfgle.

Ginger-vitis

According to my dentist I have "ginger-vitis". Great. So not only was I blessed with crap skin and orange hair, but I get gum disease too?

Leafing through a recent issue of Cosmopolitan in the waiting room (well, it was from 1996, recent in dentist-waiting-room terms) I entertained myself with a short quiz. "How many times a month do you weigh yourself?" was the first test. Pfft. What kind of a question is that? Surely that depends on what month it is? Obviously for a longer month, like October, the answer is going to be something like 62, whereas for a particularly short month, like February, the answer will be, ah... uh... what's 28 times two? Hmm...

Luckily I was saved from too much mathematical brain-ache by the dentist calling me to The Chair. He had a good poke around before telling me about the ginger-vitis and deciding to send me to "toothbrush school", where they will teach me to brush my teeth, apparently. Toothbrush school? I've never heard of such a thing.

"Thath rih-ick!" I exclaimed.

"Sorry?" he frowned.

"Oh nevermind," I said. His English wasn't great and my Icelandic, as usual, was rubbish, so throwing in the word "ridick" with a little round mirror in my mouth wasn't helping.

"How many times a month do you floss?" he frowned down at me again, from behind his mint-green surgical mask. Floss? I've never flossed in my life. I once saw a woman flossing while she was driving and it looked very dangerous.

"Uhhh..." I said, trying to think up a good lie. "Uhhh... well, doesn't that depend on the month? Like, for a particularly short month, let's say, uh, February, it would be a bit less, like maybe, ah... uh..."

My first class at toothbrush school is next week. I will report back.

Banksy

"The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit."

www.banksy.co.uk

Healthy Apppetite

Some people say I have a "healthy appetite", but I prefer to call it "eating an entire 16 inch pizza while the delivery boy finds the right change".

I once went to a wedding where the female guests were served a different menu to the male guests. No joke. While the women nibbled lettuce, fish, and sorbet––in that order––the men shoved down tiger prawns, slabs of beef, gravy, roast potatoes, thick chunks of chocolate cake, custard, cream, more custard, crème brûlée, and deep-fried Mars Bars topped with pistachio ice-cream.

I was starving.

The bride's name was Scarlett; I forget the groom. I didn't know either of them, just got dragged along as the date of someone I did know. His name was Tony and he was trying to get into my knickers. He said that taking me to weddings was a good way to go about it; that it would soften me up a bit. But he was too good-looking, too charming, too flighty, and I wasn't about to become another notch on his bedpost. Well, I once let him go down on me for half an hour or so, but only out of sheer boredom. I drank with him, played pool with him, and went to ridiculous weddings with him. But I never fucked him.

So he dragged me from marquee to marquee and this time the bride's name was Scarlett and I was starving. "Psst!" I hissed at the maitre d', as he swooshed by with his white cloth and silver platter. "What's going on with the food here? I'm starving!"

"What did you expect, ma'am," came the reply, "at the wedding of a character straight out of a 1940s board game?" His lips pushed against my ear as he spoke, so as not to alert Reverend Green.

I let it go; polished off Tony's Mars Bar and knocked back seventeen flutes of Moet to make up for it. But you can rest assured that, come my own wedding day, my top priority will not be colour-matching the serviettes, or stacking the perfect champagne fountain, but tracking down Miss Scarlett and force-feeding her pork crackling topped with Baileys, tagliatelle, and whipped cream.

The Most Sarcastic Girl in the School

Going out drinking with the Most Beautiful Girl in the School has its benefits. Spending Friday night at a bar being absolutely swarmed by men is one of them. Or rather, she was swarmed by men while I entertained the ones in her queue with my good humour. Actually, I just so happened to be ovulating this weekend so I was looking pretty damn foxy myself, I have to say, in my short skirt and cowboy boots. Man; I felt like a woman.

Well, that's all I can tell you first-hand because I don't remember anything after 11 o'clock. I was told the rest the next morning, by the Most Sympathetic Girl in the School, who lovingly brought me Anadin and mopped up the splattered piles of vomit next to my bed.

I'd been in top form, apparently, firstly endearing myself to a famous Icelander; "What are you famous for again?", and then delighting a crowd of Glaswegians with my crap (and rather Welsh-sounding) "Scottish" accent. Later, when there was nobody left at the bar that I hadn't already irritated, I stalked backwards onto the dance floor, my arms spread wide, clearing a space around me as if I was about to perform some kind of spontaneous Flashdance. The crowd parted and clapped in a circle around me, holding their breath as I proceeded to, er, dance like my dad at a Christmas party, my feet shuffling together with my thumbs in the air. I tried to get the Most Sensible Girl in the School to have a go too, but she was more concerned with ensuring our coats and bags weren't getting robbed over at the bar. "There's more to life than coats and bags!" I scolded her pompously, before losing my balance and admitting (rather responsibly, I thought, seems it was only 1 o'clock) that it was time to go home to bed.

I demonstrated how to sneak off inconspicuously by diving Jack Bauer-style through the bar and rolling out onto Parliament Square, hands clasped together like a gun. Unfortunately, the swarms of men somehow noticed our exit and ran out after us, just in time to see me pulling down my knickers in a Parliamentary rose-bush and taking a very long, and very splashy, Parliamentary wee.

Oh dear. I found it rather hard to get my tights up after 17 cosmos and a bottle of Jacob's Creek. Eventually, the Most Motherly Girl in the School had to step in, helpfully tucking both my bottom and my entire skirt back into my knickers, so that I waddled around "like a deformed person". Not so foxy now, was I. "My bag!" I wailed, as I stumbled around looking for it in the bushes. "There's more to life than coats and bags!" scolded the Most Sarcastic Girl in the School, before lugging both me and my bag up the road and tucking us safely into bed.

The next day was a write-off, of course, although we did manage to make it out for a shaky early-evening walk down by the sea. Which is where I came to wonder, how come I look like a torture victim when I'm hungover, but the Most Beautiful Girl in the School gets away with this?

Real Men Piss Sitting Down

The first time a guy sat down on the toilet in front of me I was taking a bubble bath and thought he was about to take a dump. Urffgh. Then it turned out he was just taking a slash, and that's how he always did it.

The second guy I met who does this is Bjarni, who made page 14 of daily Icelandic rag Fréttablaðið yesterday under the headline, "Real Men Piss Sitting Down". Look, there's a picture of him next to a picture of a toilet. There's also a picture of the Chairman of the Democratic Party, who, you'll be interested to know, does it standing up.

So, sitting down or standing up? And I wonder what made page 14 of the papers back home yesterday?