The Ten Commandments, Part I

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Now, I think I’m a pretty reasonable woman, I like to go out with my friends, I’m sociable and fun, I like to meet and chat to people, have a drink and a dance.  I’m interested in interesting people.  But there really is an art to the chat-up, a certain etiquette if you will, that one should follow, or at least try to take into consideration before approaching a group of slightly tipsy, intelligent women, who will bat you around like a wounded sparrow.  It really isn’t rocket science.  

The Ten Chat-up Commandments according to Annie P: First installment, lessons one – five

The likeness is uncanny.

The likeness is uncanny.

Thou shalt not let thy opening gambit be, “You look like Leonardo DiCaprio” – I appreciate that he is sometimes handsome, but it may have escaped you that he is a man.  And so by the very nature of that fact, if you are talking to a woman, it’s highly unlikely she will be flattered.  Trust me.  Likewise if you say, Johnny Depp, Zac Efron, Channing Tatum (personally, I don’t get this last one, but apparently he’s popular with the kids.  Too much beef in his neck for my liking).  Despite their handsomeness, it’s irrelevant, they are men, this is never going to proffer positive results.

Thou shalt not continue digging.  It’s aleady too late, your initial impression has been indellibly seared onto the brain of your target, and will not be buffered by the following: “Wait, that’s a compliment“, nor “No, no, like a female versión.”

Thou shalt offer up a cup of wine in penance for your misdeed and not refuse point blank to buy the object of your ‘affections’ a drink.  Do you not know (British) women at all??  This is the way of the world.  “Hello there, sorry about that, you’re pretty/I saw you in the restaurant/you seem interesting.  Can I buy you a drink?”, “Thank you, that would be nice/no thanks you’re a bit scary.”  See how easy that is?  Either way, you know where you stand.  “Hello there, sorry about that, you’re pretty/I saw you in the restaurant/you seem interesting, can I buy you a drink?”  Repeat after me.

Thou shalt observe the five first basic steps of the human mating ritual;  meet, chat, offer drink, take number, invite to dinner……… after that depends on the motive of both parties.

Thou shalt not completely bypass the above and say, “Why don’t you come to my house in Sitges?”  Um, let me think for a moment…..apart from the fact you said I look like Leo?  Because I don’t know you and you might hack me into tiny pieces, eat a piece of my liver and then feed the rest of me to the seagulls, in delicious beak-sized morsels.

To be continued………………..

*Tune in tomorrow for the next installment of, ‘How Not to Woo Women’.

Happy Easter/Lindt Day

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I hope that:

the cute Easter bunny (from the hare,  ancient symbol of fertility.  Ancient as in, like really ancient, say maybe even more than 2014 years ancient).

came and laid lots of eggs in your house (see above AND, to be honest, just plain weird science) – ooh!! Might be my Sunday afternoon movie. A classic, I think you’ll agree.

made of chocolate – gluttony.   Deadly sin, I saw the movie with Brad Pitt.  ooh!! Might be my Sunday afternoon movie #2.

On this beautiful day…..

Enjoy time with your family, have a great day,  fill your boots –
off to buy my own body weight in Lindt rabbits, and that’s a lot of choc!

Wow! Chocolate’s really interesting.

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Did you know that:

Drinking chocolate was first  popularised in Europe by the Spanish who sweetened cocoa with sugar cane.

They introduced it to the Italians and the French – ha! (Sorry, bit of adoptive rivalry with my European cousins)

Cocoa beans were used by the Aztecs as a form of currency, which was chronicled by the Spanish conquistadors of the time.  It was also used in the payment of taxes to the powerful. I think women might still consider trading in chocolate,  anyone ever thought of trying it out?

“I will give you fiddy bean for the Choos and that’s my final offer. Fiddy.”
“Please leave the shop immediately madame.”
“Fiddy TWO, fiddy TWO!!!” Quietly ‘encouraged’ to exit by burly security guard.

Cocoa was also valued in other contexts such as religious rituals, marital rituals or as medicine (alone or mixed with other plants) as well as being a nutritious food. The belief that it was “a gift from the gods” gave it appeal in pre-Columbian societies as a symbol of economic well-being. Women have known about the medicinal properties of chocolate for time and memorial. FACT.

In Spain, chocolate was part of a number of seventeenth century palace rituals offered to visitors, as part of the “entertainment”. The ladies of the Court offered their female visitors a dose of cocoa along with various sweets (cakes, sweetened bread, muffins and brioches) and a vase of snow. The chocolate was served to visitors who rested on cushions.  I couldn’t help but notice the similarities to the reception  guests receive on visiting my place.  Think latter-day Joan Collins,  offering up tasty morsels in delightful heart-shaped boxes with satin ribbons.

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And also;  you can make giant sculptures of just about anything in it.  Saint George fighting the dragon (?),  a street lamp (??),  a komodo dragon (???) and Chicken Little (????).

I think the little people enjoyed our afternoon,  and Madame L and I certainly enjoyed it, along with the free bar of 70% we received on arrival,  which was inhaled before we even reached the first exhibit.  0.00213 of a second.  Might be a record.

Sometimes, when left to your own devices

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you might find yourself on a sunny, Sunday afternoon, post morning workout, full of the heady mix of endorphine and caffeine buzz, roast chicken dinner and glass of red wine haziness, an element of twitchy boredom and a too-bloody-handy pair of sharp scissors, (which just so happen to be excellent for cutting hair); fighting the overwhelming urge to radically change something.  And it isn’t the decor.  Even though my inner dialogue is saying, “put the scissors down and step away from the mirror immediately, Anne Pank”, I’m not listening.  In fact I’m tellling it to go the f*ck to Hell and mind it’s own business.  If I want to cut a fringe in, I bloody well will cut a fringe in and ain’t no-one going to stop me.  Oh wait, that’s exactly true because there’s no-one here.  Mwah ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!

I really appreciate it, when I get a little bit of time absolutely and completely on my own, because it doesn’t happen very often and honestly, I bloody love my own company.  But it’s in these solitary moments, that I appear to have the kind of impish urges that usually end up in crazy dye jobs and wonky hair cuts that need rectifying professionally and/or nearly burning my eyes all the way out of my head with glue, trying to do my own eyelash extensions. I don’t even wear them, I’m just innately curious.  (Read: a bit misguided.)  I have painted walls ‘interesting’ colours before now, but that’s not possible in my sub-let.

It is blindingly apparent that I am still that mischievious five year-old girl who, with poor old Schmookie the family cat wedged firmly between my calves, tried to ‘give her fur a little trim’ with my bright blue, plastic child’s scissors, when I thought there was no-one about.  For schmookie’s sake thankfully there was, in the shape of my parents standing quietly behind me until the eleventh hour, when, with scissors poised menacingly above a clump of gripped fur, my mother uttered, “eeerrr herm”.

My results could be either of these

My results could be either of these

So it may well be, that the next time we chat, I’ve given myself a proper saucy bowl-cut or super-cybery-spacedy-kind-of-Terrahawks fringe, entirely by acccident, but with all good, ‘in the interest of science’ or ‘I’m a little bit bored’, intentions.

Footnote: I hope you remember Terrahawks, the Gerry Anderson 80s classic and one of the most terrifying children’s televisión shows around.  If not, look it up kids.  If you’re nerdy hip, it’s right up your street and it will provide you with some retro-cool fodder to impress your friends.

Remember, you saw it here first………. You’re welcome.

There’s nothing I like more

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than occasionally pretending to be a real grown-up.

I think that my actual grown-upness might have peaked between February 2010 and September 2011.  This is the period when I lived together with my boyfriend of the time, in a rather nice apartment on Pall Mall (the Liverpool address, not London).  Shoes off at the door, nice bathroom/kitchen, little balcony.  We had a shared bank account for bills and rent.  We both had OK jobs, we took holidays.  *Sundays were my favourite day then, lazy wake-up, the papers, big breakfast, walk, chat, nap, movie……..  Look at Annie P , all growed up.  That’s how imagine the accepted view of adult life is.  Lovely.  Then the arse fell out of that world.

You might be surprised that I didn’t say I was at the height of my adultness when I was married, and it would be a natural assumption.  But I was twenty six at the time, what did I really know then?  I hadn’t lived with my fiance for three years, he in Wales and I studying in London.  I shared a big house in Queens Park owned by Mr and Mrs Brown, held together with sawdust and glue and painted pukey blue throughout.  Five of us lived there and found creatures burrowing into the carpet under the sofa.  We stayed for a couple of years.  He lived in ‘our’ fisherman’s cottage in Wales, alone with ‘our’ dog and drove ‘our’ yellow VW Beetle and we saw each other twice a month.  Yeah, super mature.

I have periodically during my life, had to start over completely from scratch.  When on a whim, I impulsively moved from London to Liverpool to get my foot on the property ladder, I lived in mouse-infested halls of residence for six weeks while the purchase of my new house there completed.  I was thirty-two.

And now having moved to Barcelona almost three years ago, I at the age of 43 39, share an apartment with another woman in EXACTLY. THE. SAME. SITUATION as me.  A year older, no boyfriend, no children but lots of nieces, nephews and godchildren.

She’s gone away for the Easter holiday, so this is my opportunity to fake being a grown-up.  I am swishing about the place as if it is mine, (imagine full length house coat and feathery mules here.  I am.)  And I’m wondering how long it is before I can really get away with wearing a turban, giant sunglasses and giant earrings at all times, breakfast, lunch, dinner, indoors, outdoors, to bed.   I will at least feel like a proper grown-up for just over a week and then life will return to normal, figuring out how to actually save money, start a pension, open a health insurance policy, maybe buy a flat.

*More or less my Sundays are exactly the same all the time, because they have really always been my favourite day of the week, with or without a significant other to share them.  I just insert a different person as and when it becomes possible.

Thought for the day

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I am quite sure that a lunch that consists of a ball of mozzarella with a blob of pesto on the top, neither counts as a healthy balanced diet or is eaten by any of the following:

Halle Berry
Angelina Jolie
Jennifer Anniston
Rosie Huntingdon-Whitley
Jennifer Lopez
Rhianna

(Maybe Nigella Lawson or Monica Belucci)

#theworstlazy’cook’ever

Nothing like a bit of introspection

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Having joined two great friends for a lovely dinner last night, and a stimulating conversation about life, love and the world at large, we came to the same somewhat sad conclusión, that each one of us was a bubbling cauldron of hang-ups and emotional inadequacies, a little bit psychologically messy to some degree, in one way or another.  Two of us were British – women, and the other a chap from Argentina and from the off, we highlighted our cultural differences in handling emotional situations.  Happiness, sadness, disappointment, anger and the whole gaudy rainbow of sentiments in between.  But are we truly representative of our country’s stereoptypes or is that an easy excuse, a security blanket to grip on tightly to when we’re under some kind of pressure to express how we really feel?

Here I’m thinking exclusively of Britishness.  Bearing in mind the English language is full of drama and exaggeration, we are viewed, largely, as icy and distant.  It really upsets me when people say this about me, as I view myself as a prestty jovial, open book.  (Except when I am in a very bad mood for no good reason).  From my writing here, my Facebook page and Twitter, you can pretty much get a gist of who I am, frivolous, carefree, irreverent, I don’t profess to write work worthy of academic publication,  I write about being an auntie, gin, high heels, tits, bums, farts and willies (well, not farts actually, because I have never found and will never find, anything in the slightest bit funny about them).  I present in a Barbara Windsor sort of ‘ooooh, I say….**insert giggle here‘ way.

But is this really me?  Am I hiding behind a facade of silly life stories, packing up my true feelings tightly in a box (*wrapped in a pink ribbon of course), and stowing it away in a dark, dark place under the stairs, to be opened up on my death bed – maybe.

*Case in point, balance something slightly serious, with something really silly……..

Mother’s Day 2014

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Happy Mother's Day Mums

Happy Mother’s Day Mums

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Mum’s are amazing (that’s why I’m not one.  I’m magic, but I’m not amazing).  And so it’s only fitting that there should be a day that celebrates these wonderful, mystical creatures who do forty thousand jobs a day and keep it together (mostly).

The card I sent my mum, had the following message on the front:

“Happiness is

Having a mum who is also a friend”

Because it’s absolutely true.  I talk to my mum about everything and anything and especially when I’m feeling unsure or p*ssed off about something, she’s the first person I ask for advice.  I tell her everything and I trust her opinion.

And reading the posts on Facebook of those friends with kids, yesterday, was both interesting and really rather heartwarming.  Mainly because I always thought that I personally didn’t really appreciate my mum until I was much older, but it appears that maybe kids do realise how much their mums do for them, much earlier.  And there were some posts of photos of mums who are no longer here and who are missed greatly.  And I dread that day, because that’s when I think I’m going to feel really, truly adrift.   There is nothing quite like a huge hug from your mum, especially when things are a bit, ‘meh’.  My mum is my anchor.

 

Posts yesterday ranged from, “Just been brought two slices of toast and a glass of coke in bed.  Breakfast in bed from L.”  to photos in the local press of cards made by sons, and my personal favourite, from one of my nephews to his mum, which read;

“I like you, I love you, I don’t want to kill you, you are loved“

Her response, “I don’t know whether to be happy or scared!!”  Out of the mouths of babes.

So,  mums everywhere, the ones I know and the ones I don’t, I stand up and I salute you.  You are mothers, housekeepers, fixers, doers, personal shoppers, organisers, seamstresses, bill payers, artists, advisors, maths teachers, fashionistas, sports enthusiasts, mentors, nurses, therapists, taxi drivers, banks, wives, doing it alone, DIY experts, making ends meet, chefs and above all, pretty bloody amazing.

I hope you know it.