Who said spending money replaces some kind of basic emotional need that isn’t being fulfilled?! WHO?! Money can’t buy me love….pah! you been to thailand?!
Pie-fingered, I am a busy girl at the moment. I love it, I still have choice. In what to do with the dark wintry nights. Sometimes I use that time wisely. Sometimes I don’t….
Tonight, after a full-on blurting session with monsieur henderson, (he was wise, I used his yime), I returned to the witches hut and pondered over, (other than soup-eating), what to do with my precious hump-night.
Hmmmmm. I know - I’ll spend a thousand quid on a mac and final cut express, so that I can completely whirl off the radar and become a goggle-eyed stinking obsessive for the duration of my hibernation.
Done. Purchased.
Does this lift my weary spirits? Marginally. Yes.
Do I feel guilty? Fuck no! Tried to dip into the old ISA but compu’a said no, so did a bit of tinkering, and along with my £400 bonus I found out I’m getting this month, the shit won’t flick me till mid january, when I shall be so addled with hallucinogenics I won’t much care. Or I shall find it all terribly amusing.
The less money I have, the less it means to me.
Godiva shall provide.
I’ve had to create a third eye-dentity, by the way. It occurred on another momentous train journey. I was on the way to honk out a jackie green at an irish free-for-all, and two snubby-nosed colleagues boarded the train, and hesitantly sat, with me.
“don’t worry, I don’t bite”, I muse, twinkle in the old mince pie, moving my half-dead rucksack to make space for a pair of cleaner-than-thou tight buttocks.
A ‘middle-aged’, (what the heck is that nowadays), gentleman, and his pert twenty-something posho female compatriot crack open some plastic bottles of wine, (unoaked darling). I eye them up. The wine bottles.
But no offer of sweet supplement sublime for me this evening. Instead, some dry, chin-stroking conversations about blah. Egocentric projections.
I pretend to sleep with one peeper open. They talk about the x factor. I don’t watch, but I’m quite clever at music. They keep forgetting the names of bands. I casually slip out the nuggets they require.
The man now retracts his houghtiness and gets excited about john legend. I pipe out ordinary people for the girl – she doesn’t know it. He ignores her.
“put a bit of the old romance back in the relationship, eh?!” I say – on learning he’d taken his lady wife with him to see the legend.
Now he’s interested. He used to be a journalist. Interviewed simon thingie who knocked up baby spice. What journal, I say. Entrepreneurial, he says. Hmmmmmmmm. None of my alter-egos are the least bit impressed.
The train pulls into the ever-wondrous east croydon. I gather up my morsels.
Suddenly:
“who ARE you? What do you DO?!” In desperation he loses the false air created daily for the dear guinevere beside me.
“Er, I’m on my way to a gig actually. I’m playing”.
“WHERE?!”
“pub.”
He looks out the winda:
“in east croydon?”
“no. london bridge”. I need to exit. I reach into my sow’s ear and produce two blog cards. I hand them over in a deliberate fashion. He thanks me.
“BUT WHO ARE YOU??! WHAT’S YOUR NAME?!” - slightly manic now.
I panic - sloth in the headlights - what do I say? Godiva? Ridiculous.
I hurriedly whimper my ‘real name’ and scurry off. I feel dirty, used, name-raped if you will.
So I got to thinking – I need a normal name that’s not me god-given one, so that I can mix godiva with pleasure.
Mother came on facebook.
What a statement.
Mother came on facebook, and asked me how to get foreign characters on her status, as in ‘touché’, as in ‘doppelgänger’, as in ‘שִׁירָה’, But not as in ‘epikhairekakia’, (greek) or schadenfreude’, as it is known in german. (all the journos are getting that one in).
Wickedly, I comment that special characters are a writer’s secret. Let the old girl figure out something technotastic for her good self. And in the process of copying and pasting these scripts, I see my real name - in greek script. And it looks beautiful. And it spells a new name. And I like it. And it begins with ‘G’, which feels right.
The wife tells me that according to psychologists, you shouldn’t change your name. This is because you are attempting to alter your whole identity, and are not addressing the past and are attempting to leave behind the great big shitheap of a mess you have created for yourself for the past blogteen years.
I met a guy in india who kept bragging like a bloating and syphilitic dead squirrel about how he’d changed his name. His new name was a foul mixture of random syllables and paedophile’s dreams. Repulsive.
“and you’ll NEVER know my real name!” he poops out like a mangled trumpet.
Blankly staring at him I realise I have not the strength to kill him with my snake tongue, so I take solace in the knowledge that he has a great big shitheap of a life behind him, and needs to declare this to the unlistening public of india.
But I need my new name, and I’m falling in love with her. I’ve told three of my close advisors, and they love her too!
And as if my bank could sense this new freedom from the shitheap, I complete my order in the online apple store.
And I get an 0845 phonecall. Is it a hoax?
No, it’s a strange recorded woman. With multiple personalities. ‘She’ is ‘calling’ from my bank. They have detected some unusual activity.
The woman on the end of the blower says I have to press various buttons that remind me of my age and fading mortality, in order to validate my overspent existence.
It’s okay, I can do this. I’m quite intrigued by the fact that some duffer keeps interjecting mrs clarity’s monotone with certain personalised words in cockerney.
And this malarkey goes on for quite some time. I have to verify my recent spending. Eek. Did I just spend £978 in the apple store? 1 for yes. Did I spend £16.89 in a, (interjected voice), ‘UK SUPERMARKET’ yesterday? Probably.
Did I, in fact, fritter £4.20 in a bookshop in luxembourg yesterday?....
WHAT?! Erm! Well, it’s only £4.20, but I wasn’t in luxembourg yesterday as far as I can recall. I was tripping through the town centre with ms mushy pea on a paranoid mission to mars, as I remember?
Frickin freezing and there’s a smith’s round the corner.
Was I in a bookshop in luxembourg yesterday? 1. I press. Yes.
The list goes on. It’s only transactions for the last twenty-four hours. It’s getting a bit dreary. Then the lovely tin lady says thankyou, I am permitted to stop pressing the dodgy buttons on my new fifteen quid phone and fuck off.
Unless, she says, I am planning on using my card in the next two hours. In which case, I must press 1, apparently.
I pause. I think I may have spent enough in the last twenty-four hours. But what if?! What if I win ‘learn to dance with strictly come dance dancersize’ in that time and can’t show my ebay-eagerness to the willing seller?! What if I get snowed in and need asda to come to my rescue? What happens if I suddenly remember to pay my council tax online?! Press 1! Press 1!
I wait, with baited breath – what happens if I don’t press 1? 1 is the only option the kind lady is giving me! If I hang up, will the phone start wibbling again and remind me of my instant karma?
“casually spending a grand on a computer you don’t really need godiva? Changing your name willy-nilly just for a bit of bemusement are we? Not likely love, and your purchase ain’t going through till you’ve verified these details. You are old, and you are stupid enough to go all the way to luxembourg to buy your jazz mags.”
I don’t press 1. The lovely lady says all I need to do now is hang up. Hang up and not spend anything for two hours, if I can possibly manage that. Not spend my service charge fund money on a computer I don’t really need. Then sit here and wait patiently for my plastic friend to regain its freedom.
And then tomorrow, I must patiently wait for the object of my love to arrive. And not feel guilty.
No matter how the bloodsucking, recession-causing motherfuckers of banks, who run from their shitheaps of past existences by bankrupting the whole country, repossessing our rot-ridden boxes of ‘homes’ just in time for a fuelpoverty, povertyfuelled winter of discontent, want me to feel.
I shall not feel guilty. No. I shall nurse my winter-bruised coldwater bottle of a soul with some spending balm. I shall tell it, ‘there there, timid wonder, stop your rumbling, goodheart.’
No guilty pleasure shall I gain. But RSI, a mortgage repossession, a clinical diagnosis and some emotional displacement shall all be mine come the morning delivery…..
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RIP John (but I ain’t your frickin yoko….):
blog-about-u demo by godiva
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1 comment:
Lovely song, good vocal harmonies :-)
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