Funny, Life, London, Women

Hold the front page, the royal baby is on the way

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bubblebaby

In case you were wondering, not every Londoner has pitched a tent outside the Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital. Or Buckingham Palace for that matter – where the press has been waiting for so long that journalists are turning into (LEGO) bricks.   It would be easy to assume so since the Internet world seems to have been taken over by #royalbaby hysteria and perhaps in the eyes of non-Brits, London has become some sort of giant waiting room with people waiting to light up cigars and pop open the champers. (As for the real world, well, then that’s a whole different case.)

Even the most royal-friendly amongst us (and let’s face I don’t know many of those) are keen to turn on Guardian’s ‘Republican’ button by now as the baby talk progresses to take over the news. Commemorative royal baby packs of detergents ? Check! Bite&Reveal Donuts for baby’s gender? Check! Stunts with royal oversized babies, Will and Kate doubles or Queen lookalikes? Check! Royal Morning Sickness bags? Check! (That last one might be handy nevertheless when the #babynews nausea kicks in).

The Crossed Cow blog sees the conversations emerging from the baby mania and the focus on the future world that the child will grow up in as a positive outcome. Edie Greaves writes that  it ‘encourages us to think more deeply about society, even if we are not parents’. That could be one way to look at how businesses, journalists, parents, grandparents and almost everyone is jumping on the royal baby bandwagon trying to fit their story in and just grab some of the attention that surrounds the birth of a single child.

I could just be bitter about all this because I drew Chardonnay in our office royal baby name sweepstake. Which is kind of fitting as Chardonnay will be my drink of choice once the pot is handed over to the lucky bugger that drew Alexandra. Yes, I’m betting it’s a girl.

 

 

Life, Writing

Through the looking glass

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Truman Capote, modeling the mask for his famous Black and White Ball, 1966 Photo taken from Jewels du Jour
Truman Capote, modeling the mask for his famous Black and White Ball, 1966

A few posts ago, I shared with you my recent experience of taking part in a creative writing class. The term is now over but my adventures are thankfully not. A small group of us has stuck to it, meeting every week (or at least trying to) at the same place and time, and presenting new work.

It’s great to be part of a small community of storytellers; you can see the spark in people’s eyes when they have brought something they feel proud to have created. You can tell how much they value the responses to their work – whether positive or not so much – because of their eagerness to polish that piece of text, to make it into something that others won’t skim through but will stop and examine and consider for themselves. Our conversations take us places we might not have thought of when we set out to write and read, be it imaginary or concrete.

Last week’s project involved perspectives. We set out to find other characters in our previous stories and let them take over the narration. My pheromones ball story was the one I felt had the most potential. Since I shared that one with you, here is how I imagined it told by the other main character (with a few changes, inspired by my comrades’ comments):

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Funny, Life, London

You can’t always get what you want…

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Last weekend, I was lucky enough to watch the Rolling Stones in concert, performing live after 44 years in Hyde Park. Certain articles and blogs made me consider that maybe I should be feeling guilty that I allowed myself to enjoy this gig – because it was all too expensive, too middle class and too sponsored. Nevertheless, I not only loved the concert but also the overall mood and shared experience. Which at times could only be described as hilarious and/or weird. For example…

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Funny, Funny Note, London, Love

Funny note #8

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Last night 70-year old Sixto Rodriguez, playing a sold out gig in London, got Hammersmith Apollo on its feet, clapping and shouting I LOVE YOUs.

Between songs he delivered the following joke which he said never gets old:

Mickey and Minnie are at the office of a marriage councillor. The councillor turns to Mickey and says:

Mickey, being stupid is not reasonable grounds for divorce.

Mickey replied:

I didn’t say she’s stupid. I said she was fucking Goofy!

Life, London

A little bit of London loving

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20130506-192700.jpg Today I spent some time updating this blog. I changed the theme, added to the “About me” section and made sure that all my posts now have featured images (because I decided that I can’t deal with the absence of a visual element to my scribblings). While I went back to my old posts, I recognised a pattern… This blog started almost at the same time that I started to experience and love London. It was called Sticky Notes as I aspired to keep coming back to it with different topics and different tones – which to an extent happened. But let’s be honest, most of my notes should have been called London Sticky Notes to begin with (and maybe I should have asked VisitLondon to incorporate them to their promotional material seeing that it seems that I only seem to be inspired by the good stuff). Continue reading A little bit of London loving →

Away, Films, Greece, London, New York, Pop culture

Blink and you’ll miss it

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Say you were born during the mid-eighties in Athens (or most of Greece for that matter). Say that like most of the kids of the same age, growing up you probably had not only one but two television sets in the house – those bulky TVs that took up almost as much space as a small piece of furniture (I remember ours had gum stuck on the door of the compartment where the control buttons were). The chances are that anything you watched that wasn’t Greek was most probably American. The chances also are that almost all of it was either filmed or set in New York.

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Away, Life, London

Home is where?

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About a a year ago, during a rather dull layover back to London from Athens, a bored Dutch border control employee asked me what the purpose of my visit to London was.
I must have been taken aback by the unexpected exchange that constituted something more than ‘Hello!’, ‘hello’, ‘thanks’ and a nod to proceed. I replied the first thing that came to my head:

For work.

While she checked my passport, I quickly pulled my thoughts together. Concentrate, what the hell did you just say? I tried to think fast how I could remediate what I had just uttered. It’s not that it wasn’t true but it felt like an incomplete statement.

I live there.

I left the border control with a sense of disappointment, my own instinctive responses surprised me.

I remembered that day tonight while coming back from a work trip in Switzerland. A clear sky awaited our descent into City airport and as I watched the lights twinkle and the city so beautiful and vibrant, I thought to myself, I’m glad I’m coming home.

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Life, London

London snapshots continued

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Image

A little girl in a tutu eats a biscuit sitting on her father’s shoulders.

A man walks down Percy Street holding two pineapples, one in each hand – a pack of mint in his shirt pocket.

A woman waits for the bus. In one hand a headless lamp, in the other one a huge empty bottle of champagne.

A man tucks in his box of discounted chicken outside Sainsbury’s in Camden.

A girl on the tube holds three teddy bears with floral hats on – the fabric getting caught in her red fingernails.

An old man carries his old radio around playing God only knows dragging an empty carrier bag, looking in his pockets for God only knows what and talking to himself.

A guy in a yellow shirt with planes jives in a liquor store, his dame wears a yellow flower in her hair.

Most days I’m there to take the frame and yet manage to stay out of it. Then some days the objects of my observations turn around to communicate with me; maybe our one common identity – that of the Londoner – is what brings us together for a moment.

Like the lady sitting next to me at Starbuck’s in Waterloo station quietly reading her copies of free magazines while I was sipping my coffee watching people come in and out. She passed the first copy on to me and when she left, she handed me the rest and smiled as if she had done a good deed.

And the old gentleman who was walking his dogs around Camden Square and guessed by my excitement when I played with his pug and labrador that I must have had pets  at some point and loved them very much. Who also guessed as he said that I must have studied law – and lo and behold, he was right about all of the above.

There’s a secret code sometimes between us. Something that makes people turn around in the direction of a fellow Londoner’s gaze when he’s stopped in the middle of Russel Square looking at something and smiling a full blown smile. And it’s a dog crazily chasing after a remote control car in circles making everyone giggle.

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Now if this post sounds too soppy and sugary sweet, gimme a couple of days. Once the clouds and rain are back, it’s all going to be a rant about bloody late buses and imaginary droughts.

Laconic ain't my thing