Less like a chav and more like a ninja

I picked out a plain black tracksuit, because it makes me feel less like a chav and more like a ninja, and I'm taking two different classes at the gym to go with it — Body Combat and Yoga.

Body Combat is a big mixture of Taekwondo, Jujutsu, Cappoiera-however-it's-spelt, Muay Thai, T'ai Chi, and whatever other martial art they butchered in our quest for flatter tummies and tighter bottoms. I suspect that if a wise and elderly master of these ancient art-forms ever came down from his remote Chinese forest to sign up for a class at my gym he would be most displeased.

Yoga involves lounging around on the floor and is much more difficult than it sounds. I don't know if ninjas do much yoga but it seems to work for me.

How to strike up a casual conversation with a famous musician

The trendy hotel I stayed in at the weekend happened to belong to a trendy recording studio, and I'd heard that its private bar was likely to be full of trendy rockstars on their lunchbreaks. You can imagine my disappointment, then, when the bloke from Coldplay walked in.

Never mind, at least he's a celebrity, and fortunately I've had a fool-proof plan prepared for quite some time now, in case I ever had the opportunity to befriend a famous musician.

Step 1: Use natural conversation-starter — ask for a light, for example, or roll eyes and say, "Urrfgh, wedgie!" whilst pulling knickers back out of bum at bar.

Step 2: Pretend not to have recognised him at all — talk about self at length then casually ask, "So, what do you do?"

Step 3: Let him avoid question and tell you about his very dull record collection instead. He'll enjoy the freedom of conversing with someone who isn't a gold-digger — for a change!

Step 4: Name-drop some of his band's painstakingly obvious influences — he'll think "finger is on pulse" and artistic tastes are similar to his. (You could even name-drop his own band here if you think you can pull it off).

Step 5: Feign embarrassment when he eventually admits to being famous musician — excuse ignorance by exclaiming, "God, I'm so sorry! I haven't got my glasses on!"

Step 6: Praise shockingly bad 5th track on his last album that nobody liked — don't gush; he'll see through it. Just say you thought it was "a real grower".

Step 7: Go on to design his band's next album cover and be the official photographer on their upcoming world tour.

Unfortunately, I'd just about got to Step 5 with the Coldplay bloke when I realised I really hadn't got my glasses on and he actually was a carpenter from Birkenhead like he'd been saying he was, after all.

It'll seem a bit roomier after a while...

I'm in Liverpool this weekend, with my mother, staying at a kind of strange Japanese-ish hotel that I found on the internet. We are sharing a room — out of budgeting rather than love — so I'm quite glad I didn't book us into one of their capsules by mistake. I can just imagine trying to talk her into climbing into one of those things. "In you go mum, go on, it'll seem a bit roomier after a while. It's got Wi-Fi!"

Despite my hasty clicky-clicking on lastminute.com she has very kindly offered to buy me some new clothes. Which is bad timing, really, seems I optimistically see myself two dress sizes smaller by the end of next month. What I could really do with, then, is something to help me work towards my goal.

"A tracksuit?!" she tuts, horrified, as if she has suddenly realised that her only daughter is a chav.

"Yes," I say, casually trying to hide my large hooped earrings underneath my hair. "For working out in, innit?"

"Well, alright then, but I hope you don't plan on wearing it around the village!"

Um, at what point did our parents start being embarrassed about us? I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.

Everybody loves dolphins

There is so little going on in Wales that the news teams have to make most of the headlines up. If it hadn't have been for our lucky outbreak of bird-flu yesterday then the only news we'd have got would've been Scientists Discover Dolphins Talking With Welsh Accents. I'm not joking.

Oh well, I'm going back to Ireland soon. At least they have Sinn Fein.

The social highlight of my week

The doctor's clinic in my little Welsh village is in a very small hut where all the old people congregate on Monday afternoons. This, apart from Friday Club at the pub, has become the social highlight of my week.

"So why are you here, then?" you'll be asked in the tiny waiting room, if you ever feel like joining us one day. You'll be asked very loudly, of course, because everybody is going deaf and nobody wants to miss out on anything.

Now, you can cough and sniff and fake a head-cold all you like, but as soon as you get your turn with Dr Roberts we'll all know the truth because we'll be able to hear you. The hut is too small and the walls are too thin and I think we can all agree that it's better to be known as The one what got the crabs than That liar what got the crabs, don't you think?

Because "dead" is less pretentious

At the last minute it suddenly seemed foolish to ask my ridiculously good-looking best friend to take her clothes off in front of my boyfriend. I had to think up a different pose; something less attractive.

"It's a bit chilly for a nude shot," I said, in the hazy heat of a sunny afternoon in late May. "And anyway, we should do something less pretentious. I know! Why don't you pretend to be dead?"

"Dead? Dead is less pretentious?"

"Yes! Flop down on the grass there, go on, fling your arms out and roll your eyes back. Very good. Don't worry about looking bad. It's in the name of art, after all."

Even posing as a corpse there was still something quite alluring about her. But isn't that what Photoshop is for? Cue blue lips and bloodshot eyes. And that year-round tan? Forget about it.

My casual clothes and patronising demeanor

Staying with my mother means I've become tech-support guy overnight. She got her own computer recently, to feed this terrible addiction to blonking that hounds our family, and now I finally understand how Bjarni's patience is tested in order to live peacefully with me; "Have you tried restarting? Yes? Oh, here you go, I'll just plug your mouse back in...".

But I'm not really much help when it comes to her PC, because, as you can probably tell by my casual clothes and horribly patronising demeanor, I'm a Mac. And not only am I a Mac, but I'm a graphic designer Mac, which means that while I can make horribly patronising adverts in a flash, and, indeed, in Flash, I'm not much good when it comes to simpler software, like Microsoft Word for example.

"How do you delete pages in Word?!" I wailed at my PC friend over the phone, out of earshot of my mum so I wouldn't ruin any of the illusions she might have about me.

"You just delete what's on the page and the page disappears," sighed PC, wearily.

Still, I was able to feel smug and patronising again later on when a warning on my mum's screen told her she may need to re-install some damaged software.

"What was the last thing you installed, anyway?" I asked.

"Mozzarella," she replied, with absolute certainty.

Now that I'm an actual photographer...

Just because Bjarni likes things like "spreadsheets" doesn't mean he's not the most generous man in the world — as demonstrated when a package arrived from Amazon to where I was staying in London at the weekend. At first I thought it was "a gadget for his X-Box" (whatever that means) as that's exactly what he told me to expect, and that I should just stick it in my rucksack and bring it back to Dublin for him whenever it is that I return. It seemed a bit strange, then, that this "gadget for his X-Box" came wrapped up in fancy green paper with a ribbon and turned out to be a brand new Pentax K100 with my name on it. Well, with my name on the gift-tag, I mean. He's not that bling.

Now that I've got a camera with a big lens sticking out of the front of it I feel like an actual photographer, just like when I first hit the "publish" button on my blonk and felt like a published author. Finally I can stop taking blurry pics ("but you say on your photoblonk that you're okay with that!") and photoshopping them to death just to get something decent out of them. Not that I'm expecting a shiny new camera to improve the content of my pictures. In fact, I think the opposite may have happened, as I've just spent the morning taking very high-quality yet incredibly dull close-ups of bluebells and "babbling brooks" in the forest.

Luckily, the only two people who are happy to take all their clothes off in front of me are joining me in Wales this weekend, so expect lots of pretentious (and perfectly focused) nude photography on my Flickr sometime next week. Probably in black and white.

Other people's diets are as interesting as other people's dreams and tax reports

Now that I'm a size 16 again I guess I should try to get back into some kind of shape by making the most of the Welsh mountains — where I'm staying for the time being — or by going on a diet or something. Except nobody's allowed to "go on a diet" anymore because we all know that diets never work. Instead we have to call them "healthy eating plans" so we can get on with skipping meals and eating fried chicken as soon as we get drunk, as usual.

Sosban Fach

Every day, when I wake up, I thank the lord I’m Welsh.
— Cerys Matthews, Catatonia

I’m not very patriotic. In fact, I’m the only person I know who’s never visited the capital city of their own country. Being from the proper part of Wales (the north part, I mean) Cardiff never interested me much, and if I wanted to go to a city then it’d be somewhere closer, like Dublin, or somewhere worth it, like London. It wasn’t until I moved to Iceland that I took any notice of my nationality at all — there were no Welsh people over there whatsoever, y'see, and so I decided I must be a bit special after all.

Some people would give their right arm to be Welsh. But only the Yanks of course, who, having only 400 years of history themselves, jump at the chance of inheriting a bit of culture — despite “history” being our standard English oppression and “culture” being our back-catalogue of Tom Jones records.

My blogchum Chris Cope is the ultimate wannabe, having said to his wife one Sunday afternoon in Minnesota, “I think I want to be Welsh”. So he quickly learnt the language online and off they went to Cardiff, leaving their families and careers behind them in exchange for a lifetime of rugby and The Charlotte Church Show. Why did he fall for Wales when he could have had either of the two more popular Celtic countries? He obviously hadn’t taken any notice of the Anglo-Celtic pecking-order: the Scots are happy to be Scottish, everybody else wants to be Irish, not even the English want to be English, and nobody could give a toss about the Welsh.

A couple of real-life friends of mine also moved to Cardiff recently, facing me with one of life's tougher decisions. If I go to visit them, then, despite a top weekend of eating crisps and drinking lager, I’d never be able to use my vaguely amusing only-person-I-know-who’s-never-visited-the-capital-city-of-their-own-country anecdote again. Which, at this stage, would be a bit of a shame I think.

More on Chris’s sordid affair with Wales tomorrow night at 9 on S4C

How do you pronounce "Bono"?

Some people rhyme Bono with "mono" and other people rhyme Bono with "oh no". His mum — like David Bowie's mum — should have thought of this when she named him, in order to avoid mass confusion later in life.

Either way, U2 are the most overrated band in existence. They've only managed to write one good song in their entire pop career so far, which, considering they've written a total of 793 songs altogether, is not very impressive.

Some might argue that Bono has the right to drop his last name and go by his first name alone because, like "Jesus" and "Kylie", he's done so much good for the world. I say it doesn't matter how much charity work you do — if you wear your sunglasses indoors it's going to take more than eliminating third world debt to stop everyone thinking you're a twat.

130 kilos of wax

The bad thing about quitting your full-time job at an ad agency is losing your full-time ad agency salary. The good thing about having a credit card is that you can keep spending that same salary even though it doesn't exist anymore. Oops, I seem to have over-spent. Mostly on day-to-day essentials though, like taxis, wine, and 130 kilos of wax.*

Why don't I understand the value of money? Am I a spoilt brat? I can't be, my parents were povs when I was little, I'm sure. I mean, I've read my brother's journals and he wrote things like:

March 4th, 1986
Today is Annie's birthday and she is six so as a special treat mum bought some jam and we had it on our bread for our dinner.

But that's okay, because these days I can spend €40 on a face-cream and eat it on my bread any time I like. That is, up until Bjarni sat me down in front of a "spreadsheet" (a tad severe, I thought) and made me type in my income next to all my outgoings. And by "all my outgoings" he means everything, even a kiwi fruit that cost me 25c. Then we watched as the scary spreadsheet thing calculated it all and told me how much money I don't have. Huzzah!

Pfft, spreadsheets. Who really uses spreadsheets? People like Bjarni, I suppose. Which is why he owns his own apartment and I am in trubb with my Mastercard.

*I didn't realise candles were so expensive!

The safe old-fashioned way

A very good friend of mine fell in love recently, I’m happy to report. It happened out of the blue, with a beautiful Canadian who is now visiting Iceland for the summer.

“Eep!” I said to them, two absolutely gorgeous women all happy and shiny in love with each other. “This is great news, where did you meet?”

“Well, we don’t really tell anybody this,” said my friend, her cheeks turning red. “But we, uh, first met last year on the internet...”

Bjarni — who usually does absolutely everything on the internet — laughed, and pointed out that he and I met the safe, old-fashioned way. The safe, old-fashioned way being that I let a drunken man feel my left breast in Kaffibarinn and then went back to his place for drunken sex.

Why is meeting people online still considered such a taboo? Tsk, these days I wouldn’t let a guy anywhere near me unless I knew beforehand what his top five favourite films are and where he puts his apostrophes.

Breakfast with Ursula

This morning I had breakfast with Ursula, which sounds like it should be the name of a book, or a film. Or possibly a book that was later adapted into a film that everybody tuts at because the director got the main character all wrong.

Ursula is a Swiss woman who has lived in Iceland on and off for about ten years. She speaks seven languages, which, if you're British like me, you'll be startled at because you didn't even realise that seven languages exist. Ursula is so brilliant at Icelandic that even the natives can't tell straight off that she's a foreigner. She once told me very proudly that one Icelander found her pronunciation and grammar to be so good that his first impression was that she was just a little bit retarded.

It's skills like these that make Ursula such a fantastic mountain guide — along with an ability to drink whiskey all night, get one hour's sleep on a pile of lava, and then happily lead thirty French tourists over the hostile Icelandic highlands. Other equally useful skills include train driving and playing the cello. Or is it the viola, not the cello? Pfft, if a director was to turn Ursula's character into a film then everyone would tut for getting it all wrong.

I met Ursula around three years ago when I didn't have any friends, which was great timing, because Ursula had hundreds and thousands so I just borrowed some of hers. Being friends with Ursula is like being friends with a Swiss Army knife. She can cook you a meal with her left arm, fix your jeep with her right arm, and open up your bottle of beer in her ass.

I think everybody needs a friend like that in their life.

The Family Home

We're staying with Bjarni's parents this week, seems we no longer have apartments of our own downtown. This is fine with me as, being the charming and delightful young lady that I am, I get on brilliantly with both his mom and his pabbi. I say "mom" instead of the Icelandic "mamma" because she is American, which must be where Bjarni gets his Californian looks from — though she insists she's actually from Ohio.

I like to romantacise my relationship with his mother and say that we get on because we both understand the implications of falling in love with an Icelandic man. But actually I think it's because the first time I was introduced to her she baked me an apple pie and then whipped my arse at Scrabble — qualities which invariably endear a person to me.

I'm hoping that she feels similar warmth towards me, despite my tendency to publish intimate and potentially embarrassing anecdotes about her son's sex life on the internet. Which is why — because I am too utterly charming and delightful to bring it up at the dinner table this evening — I must take this opportunity to point out that the suspicious buzzing noises coming from her bathroom every morning and night are actually those of my electric toothbrush, and not of my famous pet rabbit.