Croatia: Spellbinding. Intoxicating. Hysteria-inducing.

In September, I went on holiday with my friend Daisy. It was a fun trip, so I thought you might like to hear the highlights. I’ve been trying to write the opening paragraph. My notes read as follows:

Punched in neck. Larry Grayson. Wine under fluorescent strip-lighting. Leaky shampoo.

Hmm. I’m suddenly concerned that the trip might have been more traumatic than I recall. Especially given that all this happened before the plane took off.

The plan had been simple. Take backpacks to show everyone how young and intrepid we are. Get to the airport nice and early to smugly enjoy over-priced pre-holiday we-deserve-this drinks.

The reality had not quite lived up to this. During their affectionate farewell at the train station, Daisy’s boyfriend somehow punched her in the neck. The check-in man had inexplicably felt the need to say, ‘Shut that door,’ a reference both Daisy and I were mortified to be old enough to recognise. The ridiculous queues at both Security and the Terminal 2 bar were so upsetting we ended up knocking back vile white wine under the oppressive glare of canteen lighting at the airport equivalent of a truck-stop. And the less said about the toiletry explosion in my luggage the better.

Not the most auspicious of beginnings to our adventure. Positively rocky, you might say. Don’t worry; it picks up later on.

We started with a few days on Korčula, a beautifully picturesque island off the Dalmatian coast, followed by a 3-night sojourn in Dubrovnik. Let’s start with Korčula. First, the history. Marco Polo might have come from there. Well, he definitely visited once, and there is a family named Polo who have lived there for years. And apparently, that's proof enough.

And now the culture. Korčula Old Town is a mini-Dubrovnik. We wandered the narrow streets, marvelling at the stunning buildings of butter-coloured stone. We swam in the clear calm waters of the Adriatic. One evening, we climbed up an erstwhile wartime lookout tower that now serves great cocktails. Oh, and then Daisy fell off a commemorative cannon.

The next day we got caught in an almighty downpour over lunch. Naturally, we did what any self-respecting Brits would do, pretended it wasn’t raining and carried on eating. It’s a shame we didn’t notice our guidebook swimming in a nearby puddle. The pristine guidebook Daisy had been lent by a kindly old professor colleague. I can only imagine his pained wince when she returned it to him.

And then on to Dubrovnik. Ah, Dubrovnik. If you haven’t been, go. It’s great. There is seafood. There were peacocks. Ice-creams are apparently bigger there than anywhere else. In the evenings, live music plays in the square, inspiring couples to spontaneously begin dancing. One night we were taking a turn around the port and were delighted to hear some kind of male-voice choir taking advantage of the acoustics inside an old stone bastion to sing Croatian folk songs. We rounded the corner to find the a capella group was made up of youths in hoodies, bewitching an audience of middle-aged tourists. A magical moment.

And that’s the thing. Croatia was full of incredible enchanting moments. We were sipping prosecco one afternoon at a bar ingeniously carved into the rocky walls of the city, taking in the sunset and watching dolphins plashing in the sea below. Daisy was so overwhelmed she proposed to me. Well someone should, she said. It feels like the thing to do.

It was an idyllic week, albeit one that occasionally seemed to be masquerading as a farcical comedy of errors. I leave you with the final episode of our adventure. We called on the owner of our rented apartment to return the key. A mysterious character, she seemed to spend her days chain-smoking, incessantly laundering towels and buying up Smurfs 2 merchandise for her grandchildren. Unexpectedly, she invited us in to try a cake she had made.

Ooh, what kind? asked Daisy, politely. You will see, she muttered darkly. And see we did. It was rum cake. Or Rhum Cake, as I prefer to imagine it spelled in Croatian. And more rum than cake, if you ask me. British to the end, Daisy and I both studiously powered our way through the rum-soaked confection that resembled flammable custard more than anything else. And then happily tripped off to catch the bus to the airport, slightly drunk and inadvertently interrupting someone’s wedding photographs on the way. Sounds about right.

Work Do or Work Don't?

I’m starting a new work thing next week, and so it was quite nice yesterday to receive a couple of emails from my new boss and another soon-to-be colleague confirming a meeting this Friday.

Great, I thought, they seem to be a nicely organised and efficient outfit, and these emails strike a thoroughly friendly and convivial tone. I’m looking forward to working with them. They seem like lovely people.

So far so positive.

I then checked my phone a while later, and was surprised to see a calendar invitation from a woman I have never heard of, with the vague and innocuous-sounding title ‘Dinner and Drinks’. That’s odd, I thought, probably a mistake.

And then it started.

A barrage of messages relating to said calendar invitation from what seemed like thousands of strangers. Who are these people? I shouted in my head. Why do they want me to have dinner with them?

Eventually, I figured it out. This was the arranging of a Work Do. I had been invited to a Work Do. Next Thursday. For a job I haven’t even started yet.

How did this make me feel, I hear you ask. Keen to get my social butterfly on and make some new friends? Sure, a bit. Slightly worried that this level of advanced planning was a tad over-zealous and looked suspiciously like organised fun? Yes, certainly. Struck with a weird sense of impending doom and deja vu? Most definitely.

For this isn’t the first time that this situation has arisen. This exact scenario occurred in 2003, and it did not go well. Curiouser and curiouser, I hear you observe, intrigued.

Back in my first real job, when I was a young whippersnapper fresh out of university, I worked in the cut-throat world of academic bookselling. And on Day One of this exciting employment, it transpired that the ridiculously early Regional Christmas Do was coming up that Thursday, and two people were mysteriously unable to attend at the last minute, and would me and the other new kid Kris like to come along?

Kris, lucky bastard, had a prior engagement, but I foolishly accepted the offer. Indeed, I was quite looking forward to it. Isn’t it funny that sometimes you can be so wrong?

The whole thing was a mad nightmare.

It took place at a pub in Nottingham which has a real barge and part of the canal running through it like some kind of water feature. In my experience, open water inside public places filled with drunk people is a whole list of accidents waiting to happen. Several poor staff-members spent the whole night patiently steering said drunk people away from the barge. Apart from the one who seemed to be running a book on which inebriate would be the first to fall in.

The Do itself turned out to be one of those awful all-inclusive affairs, where several companies each book a table, and you get your seasonal festive dinner and an evening’s ‘entertainment’ (for this, read crap crackers, crap DJ and crap dancing). Although, it was quite fun to bond with 2 of my colleagues (both named Sarah), as we slagged off the other companies’ dance-floor activities and took advantage of the open bar.

I learned an eye-opening amount about my new colleagues that night. There was the unfortunate lady who had cycled 20 miles to get there in the pissing rain, because her partner Colin, a mean crazy hoarder, had gone back on his promise (made 3 months before) to give her a lift.

Then there was the muppet Trainee Manager, your basic knobhead whose personality was a rubbish combination of sinfully boring and inordinately bossy. It’s true; the next week, he insisted we spend an entire afternoon adjusting poster positions until he considered them satisfactorily perpendicular.

And then there was Julie.

I had spent a pleasant afternoon with Julie earlier in the week, labelling sale-stock and building vast pyramids of cheap art books, during the course of which I learned quite a bit about her holiday home in the Dordogne, her grown-up sons, and the best place to get a manicure in Nottingham. She seemed a lovely woman, who worked a few afternoons a week primarily to fund her trips to the nail-salons of the East Midlands.

And yet she chose to spend this evening drinking her own bodyweight in Sauvignon Blanc and getting impressively, uproariously, shitfaced.

She went to the Men’s toilets. Several times. And told us all about it. Every time.

She accosted our Manager, backed him up against a wall, and then railed at him for 40 minutes about how he was basically the worst manager in the history of the world and was solely responsible for running the company into the ground, prodding him forcefully in the shoulder all the while.

And then she cornered mild-mannered, ex-RAF pilot Toby, the strapping 25-year-old delivery driver, and tried to take him home with her.

Like I said, impressively shitfaced.

Eventually, Toby apparently poured her into a cab and, we assumed, she went home.

But that was the last that anyone ever saw of her. She evidently came round the next morning, could remember enough of the night before to be completely mortified, and couldn’t bear to see any of us ever again. We were quietly informed in the next week’s staff briefing that Julie had decided not to pursue her career in part-time bookselling.

So, you see, this ‘Dinner and Drinks’ that I’ve been invited to next Thursday, seemingly a friendly and happy little get-together, is fraught with dangerous possibility.

I’ve tentatively accepted, but if a barge is even remotely involved, I’m leaving.

Big Apples & Paella

Today is my half-birthday. Happy Half Birthday to Me! Woo HOO. I can practically hear Kool and the Gang, inviting me to celebrate and asking what my pleasure is.

Another half a year older. Let us celebrate and observe this important occasion immediately. See you in the pub in 20 minutes? (Actually, by the time I get this published, it was probably yesterday. So we’ll rain-check on the pub idea).

I’m sure you’re all thinking ‘What? Is she completely barmy? Who the hell even knows when their half birthday is?’ Permission to approach the bench and defend myself.

The only reason I know that today is my half-birthday is because today also happens to be my best University friend’s actual birthday. Even more coincidentally, today is also my best Canadian friend’s three-quarter birthday. Which in my head is a fascinating situation completely worth of note. See, simple.

Anyway, back to my blog. So it’s my half-birthday. Making me 31 and a half precisely. Which, in true Carrie Bradshaw-style, got me to thinking…

I was having dinner a few weeks ago, and people started asking some classic dinner-party questions. You know the kind of thing…If you could have dinner with anyone, alive or dead, who would it be? If you had to have sex with an animal, which one would you choose?All pretty standard.

Then someone asked, Where will you be when you’re 40? And my answer was both immediate and instinctive. Oh, I said airily, I’ll be a writer and I’ll be living in New York. And then we all agreed to celebrate my 40th birthday in my amazing Brooklyn Heights loft apartment when I will make an excellent paella. (Making excellent paella being one of the other goals I will have achieved by the time I’m 40).

Super. Life plan all in order. I’ll start sourcing saffron and arborio rice immediately.

But this morning it occurred to me that it’s not the paella thing that I should be focusing on. It’s the writer thing. You see, I’ve always just assumed that the writer thing will come through at some point. I just need to let it emerge chrysalis-like, as and when it’s ready. But with only 8.5 years to go, it might be time to artificially inseminate some cheetah DNA into the caterpillar, and get this bad boy off the starting-blocks asap.

Because other than this blog, there’s not a great deal of my writing that has met the gaze of the public. I have numerous apps and notebooks to record inspiration as it hits, and a multitude of folders on my laptop with research and the beginnings of chapters. But nothing concrete. Nothing published. Nothing finished.

So here it is. I figure if I commit details of a few projects to the blogosphere, it will encourage me to find the wherewithal and follow-through to finish the damn things. And once they’re all complete, fingers crossed I’ll be across the pond, attempting to find the best saffron and chorizo suppliers that the East Village has to offer.

Without further ado, here is a list of my current novelistic projects, to be wrapped up and completed by 2021. Eek.

NB: The following descriptions may seem a bit cryptic; this is purely to ensure no-one steals or rips off my amazing and innovative ideas.

1. The one about the Victorian circus.

2. The one about the wine-expert amateur detective. Also featuring monks and charlatan physicians.

3. The one about the car-wash attendant in Bradford.

4. The one about Woodstock. And an old woman with no teeth.

To be featured in Bestseller listings 8.5 years hence. Watch this space.

Kicking It Old Skool

Yes, of course I love my iPhone (invented 2007), my hairdryer diffuser (invented 1992) and Crispy M&Ms (apparently invented in 1999, although it feels a lot more recent, if you ask me).

But this week, I have been enjoying a bit of wistful nostalgia and living in the past. And not just a half-arsed ‘Yeah, let’s bring back leg-warmers and slap-bracelets’ kind of past. I’m talking a ‘way back before I was even born’ kind of past. This is retro with a capital R. Retro, if you will.

So don’t hang out in 2013. Come on, grab your coat and a Mint Wispa for the road (they should bring those bad boys back, shouldn’t they?) and let’s bez it down Memory Lane together.

Here are 3 of my collisions with history from the past 7 days….

1. I went to where custard was invented. Did you hear me? Where custard was INVENTED. Impressive, no?

I should probably clarify, as I might be exaggerating a smidge, or over egging the pudding, if you prefer (lolz). I went to where Mr Bird invented custard powder in a tin circa 1837. Apparently, the original notion of custard started somewhere in the Middle Ages with a recipe fondly known as Crustardes of flessh but that sounds horrific, so we’ll leave that one alone, shall we?

Back to Mr Bird. He invented custard powder because his wife had an unfortunate egg allergy. Poor Mrs Bird. Presumably he didn’t want her to go through life without knowing the joys of custard. As indeed no-one should.

Anyway, The Custard Factory is in the Irish Quarter of Birmingham, and it is now a delightful little complex of vintage shops and ace cafes. Unfortunately, it is not a museum of custard. A panda can dream.

2. I have been playing Yahtzee. Like a demon. I conducted an informal survey and it seems most people played this as a child. You remember, it’s the one with the dice and the cup and the shaking.

I, on the other hand, played it for the first time last month, and am now completely addicted. I forced my flatmate into printing off score-sheets at work and we’re now embroiled in a full-on tournament. A Yahtzee-athon. The Yahtzee-bowl. I’m still working on the name. The important thing is it’s currently 3-1 to me.

3. I got a splinter. (Stay with me; this story gets more dramatic in a minute. Actually, it totally doesn’t. It gets marginally more interesting, but stay with me anyway). So, I got this splinter. And I couldn’t get the bugger out. And it really hurt. And it completely disappeared into my finger and all that remained was a big red lump. See, marginally more interesting, as promised.

I started having a terribly dark vision whereby said splinter gets into my bloodstream, whooshes up my arm and then my heart explodes. So I did what any sane person would do. I took it to the pharmacist lady in Boots and asked her if she thought I would die from it.

I fully expected her to roll her eyes, feign deep concern at my 6-year-old’s affliction, and send me packing. But no. She said I needed something called a Drawing Paste. I must have looked somewhat sceptical or confused, because she then explained in words of one syllable that it was a paste that would coax it out. What the f? I thought. Is it suddenly 1822? Have we now rejected modern medicine in favour of crackpot Victorian ointments and tinctures and other ridiculous quackery?

I didn’t say any of this, of course. I obediently paid for my pot of Drawing Paste, went home and consulted Google. Guess what? It’s an actual magical thing. A mysterious salve that can somehow suck foreign bodies out of you. Well, not quite magic. Turns out it’s magnesium sulphate, which cures a myriad of ills, including asthma and constipation. Obv.

And you know what? It only bloody worked. Five days of paste-smearing later, my finger ejected a massive shard of wood.

So you can keep your new-fangled modern technologies. I’m sticking to custard and quackery.

Don't be afraid to act more like a pirate...

So here’s the thing. I’ve had a revelation. A big one. Mega. Are you ready for it? Are you? Drum roll please….

We shouldn’t work too hard.

Ta da. You like it?

Now I know what you’re all thinking. Something along the lines of ‘No shit, Sherlock’. Am I right? Or maybe you’re just making a noise: Durr. Of course we shouldn’t work too hard. Work is rubbish. The only good thing about work is home-time. Or lunch-time. Or the bit when you’re booking holiday.

So far, so obvious. Hard-Fi have been saying it for years; we idle away the working week because we’re all about LIVING FOR THE WEEKEND, man. Yeah. Don’t worry; I have a point. Stick with me.

Sure, we all resent work a bit, and inboxes and printer jams and spreadsheets and the word ‘commute’ are basically some of the most awful things in the world. But somewhere underneath it all, I think most of us believe working hard is a necessary part of life, and something you just have to do if you want to be successful or, you know, buy stuff.

Today I received indubitable proof that too much hard work IS A BAD, TERRIBLE AND AWFUL THING.

The next time you’re tempted to stay late at the office, do unpaid overtime (or any overtime for that matter), or start pissing around replying to emails on your Blackberry on a Sunday, just remember the following story…

Last week I received advance warning that I would have my dreaded annual teaching observation at some point this week, but that it could be in any one of the lessons I teach. Cue 5 days of insane working, replacing both sleep and showering with caffeine, writing reams and reams of incessant planning and tracking materials, and being permanently prepared to launch into uber-professional, super-organised teacher mode should an observer turn up to any of my lessons.

Today it finally happened. The observer-lady arrived at 9 this morning, and watched me deliver a thrilling lesson on fancy-sounding verbs and why eggs are a symbol of treasure (the yolk is supposed to be GOLD, yeah?).

Anyway, long story short. After all my hours of making beautiful resources, finding inventive ways to explain the words ‘anoint’ and ‘sepulchre’ to people who don’t speak English, and writing a lesson-plan longer than my arm, this is the main feedback observer-lady had to offer…

Feel free to act like a pirate.

I kid you not. Her actual suggestion was to not be afraid and just GO FOR IT. Channel eye-patches, parrots and peg-legs. Shout Arrrr at my students. Become Long Jen Silver.

Basically, she had cottoned onto the fact that my usual teaching strategy is to act like a knob, and hope that it’s memorable enough to be classed as education. She’s right. It is.

So from now on, I’m swapping the spreadsheet for a parrot and starting to use the phrase ‘bilge rat’ whenever possible.

There you have it. Proven fact. Working too hard just isn’t worth it.

Captain Jen Sparrow. Over and out.

Now, where’s that bottle of rum…

Come On Get Festive.

So, it’s that time of year again. You know, the most wonderful one. With kids jingle belling, and much mistletoeing, and other made-up words we’re apparently allowed to use just because it’s CHRISTMAS. Yes, that’s right. I upper-cased it. It’s CHRISTMAS.

It’s no good trying to resist it. CHRISTMAS is bloody everywhere. I’m writing this at my Mum’s dining-table, and there are 3 ridiculous signs that it’s CHRISTMAS all within my current line of sight:

1. There is a Yankee candle on the coffee table that is RED APPLE WREATH flavoured. What the hell is an apple wreath? Why (never mind how) would I go about attaching red apples to wreaths? Said candle also proclaims to be ‘with authentic Yankee fragrance’. Whatever that means.

2. On the sideboard I can see the weird metal thing I won in my cracker on Christmas Day. I can only assume it’s some kind of heavy-duty paperclip. Or maybe a bookmark. Either way, it’s ridiculous.

3. Perhaps the most ridiculous thing of all is sitting right in front of me. It’s a new addition to my parents’ array of Christmas decorations, a jaunty little silver wire tree that sits on the table. Now most of their decorations are pretty much as old as I am and therefore have history and memories attached - our Snoopy and Woodstock bauble things, for example. Amazing.

So this new tree is a bit of interloper. Which is perhaps why I somewhat irrationally, TOTALLY HATE IT. It’s annoying and too modern and seems to be somehow spring-mounted so that with every letter I type it jauntily bounces about. See, annoying. But I can’t quite bring myself to move it (or bin it). That would label me as the Scrooge character in our little war. And I’m not having that.

So anyway, I hope you’re all having a fabulous Christmas, with your very own personally perfect balance of eggnog, brandy sauce, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, sherry and any other festive liquids you may require.

And don’t worry if it’s not all going perfectly. Christmas can be tough. And sometimes things go wrong.

I remember the year the sprouts got mislaid, so that my Dad had to drive round the whole of Huddersfield on Christmas morning attempting to locate some. And god bless the cornershop newsagent in Brighouse who was a) open and b) inexplicably sold sprouts.

Or the year the turkey somehow got put in the oven upside-down. At one point, my Dad thought he was carving some kind of 5-legged poultry mutant. I think that one will forever remain a bit of a mystery.

So, in the interests of CHRISTMAS spirit and spreading festive cheer, here are 3 stories to cheer you up if your goodwill starts to unravel. They are all true traditions provided by my actual friends. You know who you are. Thank you for sharing. You’ve all brightened my life with your festive tales.

1. Friend 1 is now 30. She is a rational mild-mannered adult with a very important responsible job. And yet she still fights her older sister and father to get through the living-room door on Christmas morning in order to be the first to reach the presents. And I don’t mean they playfully bat each other out of the way. I mean they have an actual violent battle using the cardboard tubes from rolls of wrapping-paper. Sadly, she didn’t win this year. I have yet to find out who was successful in beating their relatives into submission.

2. Leaving a sherry and a mince pie out for Santa, and a carrot for Rudolph, is a longstanding tradition for many families. I was amused this year to see via my friends on Facebook that somewhere in north Wales, Rudolph got a neatly-peeled carrot, and in Kent he was the recipient of a little pile of pre-chopped Marks and Spencer carrot batons. This would horrify Friend 2, who is much more serious about reindeer refreshments. She and her brother used to leave a bucket of water and a bale of hay in the garden. What good is one measly carrot? And this is my favourite part… after opening their presents, they had to go outside and shout up into the skies, ‘THANK YOU SANTA’. How their parents and all their neighbours must have laughed.

3. This one is possibly my favourite. Friend 3 spent Christmas a few years ago with her sister’s family. Friend 3 is very normal and lovely. And so it’s not all that surprising that she’s not hugely close to her sister, who is a bit mad and weird and has some funny ideas. Oh, and she’s extremely religious. But Friend 3 went to visit, determined to embrace the funny ideas. Upon sitting down to their Christmas Dinner, she was more than a little surprised and baffled when the family started to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Dammit, she thought. It’s my niece or nephew’s birthday, and I’ve somehow forgotten, and it’s awful, and I feel terrible. Confused, Friend 3 nevertheless politely joined in singing, and was relieved and thoroughly entertained to hear them all finish the song, with ‘Happy Birthday dear Jesus, Happy Birthday to You!’ Awesome.

Happy CHRISTMAS everyone!

Sherlock Panda

Grab your magnifying glass. Activate those little grey cells. This week, I’d like you all to do some serious detecting for me. It has come to my attention that I am being plagued by several mysteries.

I’ve tried to channel Nancy Drew and solve them by myself, but it turns out I’m shit at sleuthing. (Rats; there go my hopes of becoming the new Jessica Fletcher in my middle/old age).

So, if you could take a moment to consider my mysteries, and shed a bit of light on them, I’ll be totes grateful. Answers on a postcard.

1. I use my keys every day. To lock my flat, to unlock my flat, to retrieve my post, to get into my locker at work. Let’s say I handle them on average 4 to 5 times a day. They’re also pretty nice and distinctive, due to the Lotso and Mr Pricklepants keyrings attached to them.

And so it’s somewhat weird that I’ve suddenly noticed there is a large bronze key on there which is a complete mystery to me. I have no recollection of ever acquiring or using it, and I have no clue what it unlocks or opens up. It says E*S on one side and 058 on the other. Can anybody crack this code?

2. I used my windscreen wipers a couple of weeks ago, just flicked them on and off to clear a few rogue raindrops.

Only they didn’t go off. They kept merrily wiping. And wiping. And wiping. And it didn’t matter which notch I put the wiper-lever-thingy onto, or how many times I shouted ‘How are you doing this?’ hysterically at the car. They just kept going. Ignoring the fact that I was doing 70mph along the M62, and really not in a position to explore the manual.

After 11 minutes, they mysteriously stopped. And have behaved themselves ever since. Windscreen wiper gremlins? Or something more sinister?

3. In my phone, I have saved the number of a ‘Gavin’. Which is odd. Because, to my knowledge, I have never met anyone named Gavin. Let alone considered myself on friendly-enough terms with one to save him in my phone without adding his surname. Does anyone know a Gavin? A Gavin that I might know? Gavin, if you’re out there, who the hell are you?

4. Where the fuck are my panda ear-muffs? I could really do with them right now.

Yours, perplexed but ever on the case,

Sherlock Panda.