Trumpet

Flatmate bought a trumpet. He arrived back from Dublin with it today; it's all shiny and new with a case and instructions and a little cloth to polish it with and everything.

"Wow," I said, trying to mask my utter disappointment. "How much was that?"

"500 quid," he told me, proudly. "These things are not cheap."

500 quid? Oh dear. How am I going to justify stuffing a brand new 500 quid trumpet down the back of the sofa like I secretly did with his recorder?

Your Questions Answered

Can you really cut one worm in half to make two worms?
No. If you cut one worm in half you get two pieces of dead worm. I know because the kids next door and I did it when we were little. Well, we made Adam do it. At five years old he was the youngest, so he did whatever we asked. He sliced it very carefully down the middle, making sure the two new worms would be equal in length, in case that was the only way it worked. We stood over the two bits, waiting for it to start wriggling again. It bled a little, and we poked it with a twig. Nothing happened.

Why do women fake orgasms?
Because they think men care. No, but seriously, sex guru Lou Paget writes; "A woman fakes it for three main reasons: 1) she does not want her partner to feel he is not doing a good job; 2) she hopes it will encourage her partner's own orgasm; 3) she assumes she is not going to orgasm, so she fakes it to give a sense of completion to the sexual encounter." Make it your New Year's resolution to stop this. It doesn't teach a guy anything and just ruins things for the rest of us.

What does Twenty Major look like?
Nobody knows, he's entirely anonymous. When I live in Dublin I'll probably bump into him unknowingly in the pub one night — we'll be having a beer and he'll be just dying to tell me, bobbing up and down with excitement and squeezing his knees together like he needs a wee. "It's me! It's me!" he'll want to say. "It's me, Twenty Major, your blogchum!". But he won't be able to in case I shop him to the tabloids and they out him, leaving him jobless, with only a half-baked book deal and one appearance on Richard & Judy to live on for the rest of his life.

Can babies eat pasta?
This is a very popular question; 95% of my readers end up here by Googling this. The answer, according to some commenters, is yes — but they didn't give any details of what kind of pasta or how old the child has to be. Probably not a good idea to serve up spaghetti bolognese. Even I have trouble eating that, and I'll be 27 next month.

Why does he wear my knickers?
For exactly the same reason you wear your knickers: they're silky, they're lacy, they come in all kinds of pretty colours and they make him feel sexy. However, should you ever catch him admiring himself in your once-white now-grey Marks 'n' Sparks cotton briefs with the holes in... that's when you need to start worrying.

Stomach-bra

I know I've put on weight when I'm bouncing around my gym class and I wonder why nobody's invented a stomach-bra yet.

I go through phases of working out; it's all or nothing. Usually all for about four weeks and then nothing for about eight — besides watching exercise videos on the sofa with a blue-cheese pizza, that is.

Having a boyfriend plonked on another island isn't much inspiration to stay in shape. Some people say they work out because it makes them feel good, because the endorphins give them a rush and make happy things happen in their heads. Whatever. I work out to make myself more attractive to the opposite sex. And the unopposite sex. Although maybe the endorphins have some kind of effect after all because I can't seem to remember what the opposite of opposite is.

I started Body Combat again last night, and yoga the night before. I'm meeting Bjarni in two weeks' time and I don't want my stomach-bra getting in the way.

Peter Prendergast

Peter Prendergast taught me art at foundation level, back in Wales in 1997. It's natural to feel nostalgic after someone dies, to look back and say, "If it hadn't have been for him..." but I'm not romantacising. He was the most inspiring teacher I've ever had—and the most gruelling—and I've never worked so hard as I did during that year of my life.

He taught life-drawing, which I was never particularly good at, but that didn't matter. He taught me to really see what was in front of me, instead of guessing, or making it up. (It was usually a naked lady, of course, perched on a stool). He drove me to think about everything I did. If I hadn't have worked like that then I'd probably be working in Iceland-the-supermarket by now.

Carneddi on a Summer Day is one of my favourite paintings — every time I see his work I get homesick for Snowdonia. I wrote to him recently, after not being in touch for many years, and I told him that in the letter. I'm really glad I did; he died a couple of weeks ago, and I only just found out.

Street 'n' Hip-hop

I'm not a particularly graceful person. I took ballet classes briefly as a small child, until I realised my parents were cruelly calling my butterfly dance "the elephant dance" behind my back.

This time last year I finished a course in African Dancing and, encouraged by my apparent talent for stomping around wailing with my bum sticking out, decided to join another class called "Street 'n' Hip-hop". That's cool, I thought, I'm cool. I listen to hip-hop, y'know, Jurassic 5 and all that. This sounded like just my kind of thing.

"Street 'n' Hip-hop" turned out to be me, six 15 year olds, and an (even younger?) teacher showing us how to spasm about on the floor to a song that seemed to go, "Get down motherfucker, yo yo mo' fucker get down, get down on the flo', else I blo' yo' mo' fo' brains out... mo' fo'". Or words to that effect anyhow — I can't remember exactly how it went.

Now, if it had just been spasming about on the floor to that kind of... filth, then I probably would've managed it. It's just that we had to kind of jump up again after each spasm, spin around in a circle, then grind our hips provocatively towards the mirror before finishing with a scowl.

As you can imagine, I had some trouble taking all this in at once. The other girls, however, seemed to get it right straight off; all pursed lips, bare midriffs, and yo' mo' fo' attitude.

"How many classes have I missed?!" I wailed at the teacher as I struggled to pull myself up into the "grinding" position.

"None," she scowled at me from the scowling position. "This is the first lesson".

Oh dear. I was twenty-five years old and, as I had been warned on the booking line, this was "quite a young class".

"No worries," I'd said, as I paid the £140 fee. "I'm cool, y'know, I listen to hip-hop, Jurassic 5 and all that."

I never went back.

Irish Blonk Awards

My friend Technorati has just informed me I've been nominated by two people for this year's Irish Blonk Awards.

Two people! Being the proud owner of a Genuine Irish Mammy™ and having lived in Galway for five minutes as a teenager automatically qualifies me to "play for Ireland", apparently. Well thank you, two people, although I'm not sure how much weight that tenuous link is going to hold with other Genuine Irish Blonkers™, such as Sweary, Kav, Twenty, Devin and, of course, my most Truculent Horse — all of whom I've voted for myself.

Y'know (like most other people in the world) I always wanted to live in Ireland, but there was a typo on my application form and I ended up here instead.

Snow

Cycling through two feet of snow is really difficult. Even with 50 nails on each tyre, a balaclava, and heated gloves (courtesy of, like all battery-operated products in my life, the Most Beautiful Girl in the School).

Most pavements in Reykjavík are heated, which I know sounds completely ridick, but it's true. There's so much geothermal water around that they just pipe it under the paving slabs to melt all the snow. Though not the pavement between my house and my work, of course.

Bjarni asks me what a "balaclava" is. He googles it. "Oh, a ski-mask," he says. A ski-mask? I thought this was a "ski-mask". But now that I think about it, of course, they're ski-goggles. Which explains my perplexity as to why American bank-robbers are reported to wear them during raids. (But hey, this is nothing compared to when we first went out together and he told me my "fanny looks nice in those jeans").

Anyway, I like wearing a balaclava. Partly because it keeps the blizzard out of my face, but mostly because it makes me feel like a ninja. Which is a good way to feel when you're trying to get through the pitch-black Icelandic winter.

Where is Kelso?

Flatmate is in Dublin for a few days—leaving me to fend for myself with my canned sardines—so I've invited my former flatmate Kelso over to cook for me.

Kelso has recently arrived back from mountain-guiding in Peru and discovered something called "the internet", in particular blogging and Flickr. He insists that Flickr is pronounced "Flick Are", burps a lot, and is generally quite annoying, so whenever he comes over we tend to bury our noses in our MacBooks and avoid eye contact. He cooks something delicious, I eat it, we spend the evening nerding, and if we want to talk to each other we use MSN.

We first met a little over two years ago in our language class. He said "My name is Kelso" in really shit Icelandic, I said "My name is Annie" in considerably better Icelandic, and we've been friends ever since.

Women our age

The last time I saw my beautician—and when I say "my beautician" I mean some woman in the hairdressers on the corner who's waxed my eyebrows for me a couple of times—she recommended me "the perfect moisturiser for women our age".

Women our age? I've googled her social security number and can clearly see she was born in 1967. From now on I'm spending two hours in Photoshop each time I want to leave the house.