Chocolate Piano

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

What's in a name?

I have changed names on the Graun talkboard, twice in a week. I registered a new name, more or less for the hell of it, and didn't remember that I'd used the same details to register as Thea, about eight years ago.

My brother, who also posts, spotted my first new name, which is a childhood reference - well, he would, wouldn't he? He and I check up on each other online from time to time - I found out he'd done something clever from reading his posts (he doesn't blow his own trumpet much) and he was about to call me when I rang him, because he hadn't seen any posts from me in 4 days and was worried that I'd been eaten by an Alsatian. The second one - I think I've told him what it is. We shall see.

It's odd, though. After so long, Thea is part of me. A real life friend said that my online persona was calmer and less combative (I'm paraphrasing here) than my real life self. So here's a chance to be more joined up (or even less so). Already, Helen is different from Thea - it's a sort of licence to be cheekier and naughtier.

When I was little I was desperate, in rapid succession, to be called Caroline, Emily and Pippa. I wonder what I would have been like if I had?

Lord Gym

And another thing. As this seems to be functioning as my online diary, I should record that I bought ten sessions of personal training at the gym as a sort-of birthday present. I can't decide if I'm enjoying it, but I like Alex, my trainer, very much - a 25-year-old rugby player with arms the size of tractors, beautiful shoulders (it's nice to have something to look at while you're being tortured) and a quiet sense of humour.

I'm alarmed by how much he has contradicted a lot of the advice I have been given about how not to further knacker my back and knees, but as I'm neither dead nor crippled yet, he may have a point, even if it does involve bending with a straight back holding a 25kg bar. He talks about "restoring normal function" as something that I can do, which nobody (doctors, chiropractors, osteopaths, physiotherapists, pilates teacher) has ever done before. Oddly, this raised my hackles - I don't know why. There is obviously a part of me that likes my clicking, creaking, aching joints as they are and would be perturbed to have "normal function" back again (after 21 years). Truly, people are very odd, and I include myself in that. Is uniqueness, even in the degree of individual joint-buggeration, so very desirable?

(Having said this, I can still make him blench by threatening to make him hold my knee while I move it through its full range. It feels/sounds like shaking muesli in a box.)

Water, water everywhere

I am trying, in a sneaky and unannounced way, not to drink for a month. I have been thinking for ages that I ought to try. I am now halfway through, and thinking that I actually will make it. The only people I have told I’m doing it have been too drunk to remember that I said it.

It’s not that difficult, really. It’s just dull. I have been out on several boozy evenings in the last couple of weeks, and have got used to clutching my fizzy water. And another thing that I have to face up to is that I have used the excuse not to do this before that “everyone will notice” (though I’m not sure exactly what is such a problem about that, come to think of it). In fact, on the occasions I’ve been out, nobody has noticed. Or commented. I have had the car with me, which creates a ready-made excuse, but nobody has noticed anyway – until the end of the evening when you are very popular as you can drive everyone home.

But I have to say that I do miss wine. I miss the palaver of it, the corkscrews and choosing a bottle, and I miss the taste, and the feeling. I like the feeling of being slightly drunk. Is that a problem?

Just what we all need

This is a test post to see if I am really too stupid to put pictures on my blog. It's from Kyrenia, where we went on holiday in October.

Another country

I get easily obsessed with things from the past. When I was a child growing up in Staffordshire, we used to go past the ruined Ranton Abbey on our way to school, and I was scared and excited every time I saw the ivy-coated tower above the trees.

http://www.thornber.net/staffs/html/ranton.html


A few years back, it was the last Jewish tailor's shop in Petticoat Lane, the wooden interior with the pinstriped suitings standing out in old-fashioned sobriety against the pound shops and sari fabric shops. It's gone now, but it led me to the book "Konin" by Theo Richmond, about a vanished shtetl in Poland, and I suppose, eventually, to the Jewish music that I did last year at Dartington.

My latest find is rather posher than this. I started driving a different route to work after one too many close encounters of the articulated lorry kind on the M8, and after a bit noticed that there was a funny looking tower thing set back from the road, and a very ornamental gateway. It turns out that they are all that's left of the old house of the Duke of Lauderdale, Hatton House. Built in 1680ish (records disagree), it was dynamited in the Fifties.

After a while of driving past it every morning, in the end I had to drive along the track that leads off the road and see what was there. All that remains is two ornamental towers with a wall running between them, enclosing an ornamental terrace that was originally in front of the house. And where the house used to stand? A very ugly 1950s farmhouse and outbuildings. It's strange to think that nearly 300 years of living, and very grand living at that, has left so little trace. There: my very own Brideshead moment.

nale.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/. ../hattonhouse.html

Nothing beats live theatre, dahling

I've just been to the theatre on my own (to see Measure for Measure at the National). It was good, both the production and the experience. I don't think I've ever done that before, but all my nearby friends were busy and it was a last minute decision. It felt very.... grown up.

It's a tricky, tricksy play and it's hard to like the heroine, who refuses to exchange her virginity for her brother's life. Maybe the idea would have been less unpalatable, or at least slightly more believable, in the seventeenth century (though if you read accounts of the time, a woman's "honour" was a currency then as now, though the rate of exchange was perhaps more than a few Bacardi Breezers).

In other news, what the FUCK is happening in America, with states banning abortion "even for victims of rape and incest"? Mind you, there are rumblings here - a woman who has been given an award for improving the way that women in need of an abortion are treated in her hospital has also been branded a baby murderer and had her home address posted on the internet. Women don't go around having abortions for fun. If you want to make a difference, work to improve sex education and access to contraception. Fuckwits. But worrying, dangerous fuckwits.

Sign language

I've always loved defacements of posters and official notices, provided they have an element of wit (there's something rather creepy about the habit of sticking chewing gum over the eyes of poster models on the Tube escalators - modern iconoclasm?).

Example: The lifts at Earl's Court have a sign saying "Obstructing the doors causes delay and may be dangerous". For as long as I can remember (and I've been living near there for 11 years), they have been regularly altered to read "Obstruct the doors, cause delay and be dangerous". This makes me smile every time I see it.

Similarly, a poster warning about abandoned luggage ("there's two choices for what you can do about it") with a picture of a dangerous-looking rucksack, has been amended to add the helpful advice "Kick it". Now that I am a sensible, responsible member of society, with a job and all that, I like to see other people keeping the 14-year-old flag flying.

But then, how to account for the very official signs on the bollards by Leicester Square, which say solemnly "NO DIGGING", with a phone number? Anyone who is contemplating digging them up is either a) in a JCB and not likely to be reading notices pinned to the bollards themselves, or b) too drunk to read, or care.

Fortitude

Oh, hello blog: I thought I'd lost you - incipient senility leading to forgetting username, and all that.

I turned forty a couple of weeks ago. It was brilliant - ten friends came to Edinburgh, we ate and drank obscene amounts, we walked up Arthur's Seat, all that sort of thing. It was odd to have people with me: I have got used to Edinburgh being largely a solitary pleasure.

I leave this project on 31 March to return to London, with distinctly mixed feelings. I haven't enjoyed the work, and have had one of the worst colleague experiences of my life, but I've loved the place itself. It's felt rather like living in Istanbul did: a discrete, glittering experience quite unconnected with everyday life.

But just now, being forty feels horrible. I feel old, miserable and tired. I rushed around like a mad thing yesterday and it has completely destroyed me today - I have had to keep going back to bed for little naps, like some Victorian invalid heroine.

This morning, I realised that my usual makeup was making my face look like a powdered, idiotic travesty of a pantomime dame. I scrubbed it all off and did something different, and added to my list of things to do "when I'm back in London" - get a makeup lesson.

That list currently includes:

Go to the dentist and get a checkup and two back fillings replaced:
Investigate tooth whitening:
Get the boot light on the car mended:
Sort out pension arrangements:
Buy flat:
Get job that requires rather less travelling about.

And on the seventh day, I shall rest.