I have a lot of thoughts and feelings. What sort of personal site would this be if I didn't write them out for your reading pleasure?
So, recently I went on a big family holiday. Because I come from one of those families, we tend to all go along together once a year or so, for at least a week of fun, frolics, sea, sand, and screaming arguments. Last year we skipped the big family holiday to prepare for this year’s – a two-week stay in Orlando, Florida.
At risk of sounding like a complete spoilt brat, I have been to Orlando a few times. This was my fourth time visiting but my first as an adult (sort of – last time, we arrived two days after my eighteenth birthday and I was delighted to approach a bar for an all-American cocktail one night, only to be shot down by the incredulous barman, as you apparently have to be twenty-one to drink in the US. Democracy manifest!). However, it’s also the first time I’ve come with a cabal of small children, which is both better and worse in many ways. Quite a lot happened and I thought this might be a more interesting read than the usual gazing at my singular and brilliant navel that I post on here. So, to begin, a dramatis personae:
Our trip began at 2am, when we all woke up at home, brushed our teeth, blearily pulled on clothes, and made sure our final belongings were packed. We (me, Mum, Dad, Nanny, Grandad, girlfriend, and the oldest kid) were picked up by a quiet taxi driver who loaded our cases in the boot and said literally nothing to any of us for the entire journey up to London Heathrow Airport. Our journey was pretty much smooth sailing and I’d never seen the M25 so quiet – probably because it was pitch dark and 3am. Once we pulled up, we hovered awkwardly outside Terminal 3 whilst my parents snuck a quick fag, glancing furtively around for security. After a few minutes, the other cab pulled up, and out sprung my sisters, both BILs, and all five of the children in a remarkably clown car-like fashion. The driver also got out, but he didn’t go to the boot to unload the cases. Instead, frowning, he went to his front right wheel.
‘All the wheel nuts have come out of his tyre,’ said BIL the Younger. ‘It’s fucked,’ he added, helpfully.
‘It was just going bonk-bonk-bonk the whole way up there,’ said BIL the Older, hunching his shoulders and bobbing up and down to simulate the way he’d presumably bounced, I guess seatbeltless, around the cab.
‘Not the whole way,’ said Big Sis, breathless, as she attempted to strap my two-year-old niece into her pram. ‘The nuts only came out as we rounded the corner into the airport. I guess it was the speedbumps.’
We turned our attention to the driver, who, with a panicked expression, was going back and forth between his open drivers’ seat and the flattened wheel.
‘Our driver’s just gone – only just this minute,’ my mother called to him. ‘Why don’t you ring him quick, see if he can give you a lift?’ What exactly she thought he’d do with the taxi, which was now undriveable, I’m not sure. Either way, there wasn’t much else we could do at this point, so – feeling more than a little sorry for the taxi driver now stranded at 3:15am at Heathrow – we picked up our bags and wheeled our suitcases into the terminal.
Check-in didn’t open until 5am, so we stood awkwardly in the cold terminal with the other people waiting for our flight, who were either bleary-eyed families like mine, or Disney adults who had already adorned themselves with their matching Goofy t-shirts and mouse ears. There might even have been a couple of Americans waiting to check in for their flights home, but I didn’t hear any. Once check-in did open, it was relatively smooth sailing (surprisingly) and we got through pretty quickly. In the terminal proper, we had breakfast and mooched around some of the duty-free shops; I bought myself some new sunglasses. Our flight had a delay of forty minutes, I assume because of the IT issues that had plagued many airports in London in the days prior, but once the gate opened we made our way there and waited. Both of my sisters boarded before me, by virtue of each having children under five. Once both of them and their respective broods had almost been swallowed up into the large staircase leading to the aeroplane itself, a puzzled-looking fellow passenger approached my mother.
‘Excuse me. Is this your bag?’
As it turned out, Little Sis had been so engrossed in arguing with BIL the Younger and trying to stop my grizzly, tired three-year-old nephew from screaming that she’d walked off without her bag.
‘Oh my God! Thank you. I can’t believe she left her bag,’ said my mother, as though forgetting things in such a manner wasn’t Little Sis’ speciality.
On the plane, me and my girlfriend sat in two seats by the window, with the rest of my family scattered around in seats nearby; behind the two of us were a very loud Welsh couple who kept kicking our seats. The journey also passed mostly without incident; however, my five-year-old nephew didn’t much like the flight. He threw up a couple of times and spent most of the nearly nine-hour trip sitting wound up in blankets between his parents, with a doleful expression on his face. We assumed the poor kid had travel sickness.
A moment of in-flight hilarity came when the oldest – who had previously declared himself to be ‘the boss of the kids’ – was explaining to my mother what all the buttons on the screen in front of him did.
‘And, Nanna, this one,’ he said, pointing to the call button, ‘you shouldn’t press it.’
‘Why’s that, then?’
‘Because my dad pressed it, and they came and told him off.’
What had actually happened was that BIL the Older pushed the call button by mistake, which meant that a member of the cabin crew came to see if everything was alright, as is typically what happens when the call button is pressed.
‘Really?’ said my mother, amused. ‘Who told him off?’
My nephew blinked up at my mother innocently. ‘The servants!’
After a long flight where I slept for about forty-five minutes – during which the lady behind me was presumably also asleep as I couldn’t feel her channelling her inner Jude Bellingham against the back of my seat – we finally landed. Orlando Airport is large and well-lit and beautifully air-conditioned, which meant that when we actually went outside, the humidity hit me with the force of a thousand suns.
We hired a vehicle, which – on account of there being fifteen of us – ended up being a big fuck-off minivan. By the time we reached the house, we were all boiling, exhausted, and the kids were either shrieking with excitement or irritation or both. The house itself was pretty nice – very spacious, and with a pool. Girlfriend and I selected our room (which had, inexplicably, two arcade machines stationed outside it – for the first five days, we were awoken at five a.m. by the three oldest kids madly buttonmashing to Mortal Combat, but by that point we were pretty settled in and decided it wasn’t worth moving).
On the first full day, we decided that we would go to the famous car show in Kissimmee Old Town. I’m not much into cars. I don’t know much about them except how to drive one (and that’s debatable at the best of times), but my father, girlfriend, both BILs and my youngest nephew, who has just turned three, are, so it seemed a good use of everyone’s time. Also there are multiple bars and shops in Old Town, which helped.
Girlfriend was driving that night, and as she was, the heavens opened and some good old Florida rain began screaming down. Not only was it dark, it was busy, and there was nowhere to park.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ said my mother, cheerfully.
‘There’ll be loads of parking round here,’ said my father, gesturing vaguely to the right. ‘Don’t park too far away. My knee hurts.’
Little Sis was grumbling. ‘God, look at it. Why’s it raining?’
My girlfriend pulled around to the car park. It was totally full.
‘Okay,’ said my mother, uncertainly, ‘go round there. There’ll be loads, I bet...we’ll probably have to pay, but that’s alright.’
‘I don’t mind paying,’ muttered my father through gritted teeth, ‘as long as it’s not too far to walk.’
We went around again. No space.
My three-year-old nephew began to wail. He tried to unstrap himself from his car seat.
‘No, baby. You have to stay strapped in,’ Little Sis said, irritation creeping into her voice, as she plugged him in again.
‘Go round there,’ suggested BIL the Older, helpfully. ‘Near that motel.’
Again, nothing. The rain continued to pour down. It smashed against the windows of the car, growing louder and louder until –
‘For God’s sake!’ Little Sis exploded. ‘This is fucking ridiculous. Why do we even have to go tonight? We’re here for two weeks!’
‘Because we said we were coming tonight, so we are!’ replied my mother, aghast. ‘We’re here already –’
‘But it’s pissing it down!’ Little Sis shrieked. The three-year-old, attempting to unbuckle himself once again, joined in with his mother. ‘And now the baby’s upset –’
‘Turn right here, maybe there’s parking,’ said BIL the Older.
‘I don’t want to walk around in the fucking rain looking at shitty old cars! We could do this at home!’ fumed Little Sis. ‘For God’s sake, let’s just go.’
‘My knee hurts,’ added my father.
‘You aren’t the only person on this holiday!’ snapped Big Sis. ‘Look, now the kids are crying. They want to go.’
‘No they don’t! They want to go back to the house and watch YouTube!’
‘Honestly, maybe we should go home. My knee –’
‘This is a family holiday!’ yelled my mother. ‘We are all supposed to get on! Look, pull into the left here...look! Loads of parking.’
And lo and behold – there was! A football pitch’s worth of empty parking spaces. Our cup runneth over. Triumphant, my mother turned around to smile at the rest of us.
‘See? The universe supports us!’
So we all piled out of the car into the rain. My grandparents produced, seemingly out of nowhere, two bright blue rain ponchos. The three-year-old was still wailing.
‘We’re gonna see cars,’ I said to him, trying to calm him down. ‘Lots of cars.’
‘Cars,’ he wailed. ‘Cars.’
‘Yes, cars.’
We walked slowly, in defence to my grandparents and my father’s aching knee, through the rain, which shone on the asphalt against the sparkling street lights. Old Town was busy. There were people everywhere, locals and tourists alike. We ducked into a bar, where my mother was delighted to be told that, after eleven once the kitchen shut, she could smoke inside.
‘Smoking inside!’ she sighed, reminiscing.
Somebody was caterwauling to Cher’s Believe on the karaoke machine. I ordered a bright blue rum-based cocktail for me (for which I was ID’d, something that rarely happens to me at home) and a Coke for my girlfriend, who had started her own impromptu karaoke to the song.
‘I’ll get up there,’ she said brightly, dancing. ‘I’ll do Kylie.’ (Despite being a butch lesbian, my girlfriend has the music taste you’d expect of a camp gay guy).
The actual car show was pretty cool if you’re into that sort of thing. They travelled past slowly, some waving, others staring straight ahead. We wandered around and looked at the shops, which sold mostly touristy junk. I had another cocktail. We were all still pretty groggy from the flight and not yet accustomed to the time difference, so at about half nine we decided to make a move. As we wandered back up to the car park, I could see Little Sis and BIL the Younger ahead of me, gesticulating wildly. Oh dear. They were arguing, though I wasn’t sure why.
‘There’s the van, look,’ said my mother. But as we got closer to it, we saw that it wasn’t at all. Frowning, we looked around. Big Sis went off to investigate. I used the opportunity to turn to my girlfriend, who had never travelled so far from home.
‘Are you having a nice time?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘The car show was cool. Where’s our car, though? I swear I parked it over there.’
Girlfriend and I went gingerly towards where the rest of my family had gathered. My mother turned to me, and spoke – and as she did I saw it. The rain had stopped for a little, but now it had begun again, and I saw the evidence of its stopping smeared in one big dry streak across an empty car parking space. Strange. The people there must have just left –
‘The van’s been towed!’ my mother exclaimed.
‘What? Towed?’
‘They tow vehicles here. I read it online, you know, in the Facebook groups I’m in.’
‘Towed why? How?’ But my question was answered when I looked up. Across every row in the car park, clearly visible and obvious, were multiple signs. We were supposed to have paid for parking – and on another, at the front of the car park, to where we all dashed when we realised what had happened, TOW AWAY ZONE.
‘Oh my God!’ wailed Little Sis. ‘What are we going to do?!’
I like to think I am good at dealing with high-pressure situations, but that night – jet-lagged, in a foreign country, with no means of getting home – I panicked. My stomach dropped. Horrendous images flashed across my mind. We’d have to sleep outside. We’d all get arrested for sleeping outside. We’d get deported for sleeping outside. We’d –
‘My camera!’ Big Sis gasped. ‘My new camera! It’s in the car!’
At that moment, I realised just how much beer my mother had drunk as she swayed lightly. ‘It’s fine! We’ll get an Uber!’
‘The pass to get back into the resort is in the car,’ snapped my father. ‘How are we going to get home? We need to get that car back. Where have they towed it to?’
‘It’s fine,’ my mother said soothingly. ‘Ring the number on the sign, look.’
BIL the Younger tried it. No answer.
‘Let me try,’ volunteered BIL the Older. Still nothing.
‘Let me ask on the Facebook group,’ said my mother.
‘Fuck the Facebook group. Why don’t you go and ask the security people at Old Town? It’s their car park, isn’t it?’ said my father, wincing for the pain in his knee as he sat down.
So BIL the Younger sprinted across the road to the security booth. He came back after about ten agonising minutes, gasping for breath.
‘So,’ he panted, ‘the car – it’s here.’ He held out a scrap of paper, with an address and a phone number. ‘The security guy let me use his phone. The tow yard is fifteen minutes away. It’s three hundred dollars –’
‘Three hundred!’
‘If we pick it up within the next few hours,’ he continued. ‘After midnight, it goes up.’
‘Okay,’ said my mother. ‘So. Why don’t we try and get an Uber to the tow place? Then we can get the car back.’
‘What, an Uber for all of us?’ said my father, appalled. ‘Don’t you know how much that’ll cost? No, I’ll go. Me and you,’ he added, pointing at my girlfriend. ‘You can drive it back.’
My girlfriend shrugged and said sure, pulling up the Uber app on her phone. My grandparents sat on a bench and frowned.
‘What’s going on?’ asked my grandmother.
‘The car’s been towed,’ said my grandfather.
‘The car’s been what?’
‘It’s been towed,’ he replied, louder this time.
‘What?’
‘IT’S BEEN TOWED.’
‘Why’s that, then?’
‘We didn’t pay for parking.’
‘Didn’t we?’ said my grandmother innocently. ‘I didn’t know we had to pay. It’s raining again, isn’t it?’
My father frowned again, this time at my grandparents. ‘Perhaps your mum and dad should come too,’ he said to my mother. ‘It’s dark and it’s raining.’
‘What about my kids?’ fumed Little Sis, whose kids were sitting perfectly happy and content in the well-sheltered double pram. She gestured to the smiling children, who had decorated their faces with bright blue slushies. ‘Can’t you see how upset they are?’
‘Mum, Dad,’ said my mother. ‘Why don’t you two go with Father and Girlfriend? They’re going to pick up the car.’
‘Where’s the car?’ asked my grandmother.
My grandfather said, ‘Is there enough room in the taxi?’
‘There should be. Go on, you two go.’
Eventually, the Uber appeared, a sleek black vehicle. My girlfriend gave me a kiss, sent me her live location on WhatsApp and disappeared into the taxi with my father and my grandparents. I felt sick as it grew smaller and smaller down the road. Suppose they met trouble on the way? Suppose they never came back? Suppose –
‘Well, that’s that, then,’ said my mother brightly. ‘That bar’s still open.’ She turned to BIL the Younger. ‘Why don’t you go and get us a beer?’
‘Yeah, get me a cocktail,’ Little Sis added, having seemingly brightened up after their earlier argument.
At least some people were happy. Even Big Sis had calmed down about her camera. She’d pulled out her smartphone instead and began a recording for her Instagram page, regaling her followers with our shared tale of woe. The two littlest kids were sound asleep, my five-year-old nephew was playing with a toy and my five-year-old niece was messing up Little Sis’ phone. It was only the seven-year-old who seemed concerned.
‘Auntie Lala,’ he said, worried, ‘what’s going to happen? When can we get the car back?’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘They’ve all just gone to get it.’
His bottom lip began to wobble. Oh dear.
‘But I wish the people never towed it,’ he said, and he began to cry. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Kiddo, it’s alright,’ I said to him, patting his head. ‘We’ll be back at the house soon –’
‘No, home,’ he wailed. ‘In England.’
Poor kid. By virtue of being the oldest, he had definitely been the most excited for the holiday, and now he was sobbing. I pulled out the WhatsApp location map on my phone and showed him.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Can you see the picture of Girlfriend, in the circle? That means they’re all at the tow yard now, where the car is. All they have to do is say that they’re very sorry and give the towing people the three hundred dollars and then we can get the car back.’ I consulted my watch; by then it was a quarter-past ten. ‘I reckon we’ll be home in half an hour.’
Elsewhere, BIL the Younger was considering a career change. ‘Good little earner, this towing business,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll start one up.’
Little Sis drank some of her blood red cocktail and took a puff of her fag. ‘Yeah, then we can go on loads more holidays.’
‘I actually cannot believe this,’ said Big Sis. ‘We’ve been here a day.’
‘Well,’ said my mum, ‘we’ve been here four times before, and this has never happened. At least it’s something to tell people –’
With that, my phone began to vibrate. My girlfriend was calling me.
‘Hello?’ I said hurriedly, body flooding with relief. So they weren’t all dead in a ditch.
‘Hi. Okay. So we’re here, and it’s three hundred dollars in cash.’ She sounded remarkably calm.
‘Oh! Good. Great! So have you got the van back?’
‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘no. We don’t have any cash. So your dad’s gone off with some bloke to get some.’
My mother, by this point, was staring at me, wide-eyed. She swayed lightly on her feet. When I spoke, her eyes only grew wider. ‘Oh...so my dad’s gone off with some bloke…?’
‘Yep. He shouldn’t be too long, and then we’ll be back with the van.’
After I’d hung up, my mother spoke at once. ‘Sorry, where’s Dad gone? With some random guy?!’ I explained it to my mother, as best as I could. She laughed. Laughed and laughed and laughed.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said, as though her husband hadn’t gone off with a possible serial killer in a foreign country. ‘Gotta laugh or you’ll cry!’
‘Well,’ said Little Sis, ‘this has actually been really fun. The kids are both asleep, me and BIL the Younger have made up, and I’ve had a cocktail. I’ve had a blast.’
Let me tell you, I’ve never been quite so glad to see the van when it did finally pull up, driven by my girlfriend and containing my grandparents (who’d somehow lost their rain ponchos) and my thankfully-unharmed father. On the drive back to the house, I leaned back in the seat and breathed a sigh of relief. It was alright. The holiday had reached its’ low point; it wouldn’t get worse from here. Only way was up.
I actually quite like themed entertainment, whether it’s a renaissance faire or a birthday party themed around a particular media property, and that includes theme parks. The theme parks in Florida are – unsurprisingly – some of the best around. During our trip, we went to Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure, Volcano Bay, Magic Kingdom, and Epic (although Girlfriend and I didn’t actually go to that one – more on that later). Despite my enjoyment of theme parks, I don’t like massive rides, as I’m a massive coward. I like kiddy rides and the 3D-style ones are good fun, too – we went on The Simpsons ride, the Jimmy Fallon one (I understand that he is basically the American Jonathan Ross, but he has a ride and Jonathan Ross doesn’t so I guess that’s one point to Fallon), and the Harry Potter one with the drop, for which we had to queue for forty-five minutes.
Since I am now an adult and am therefore no longer subject to my mother’s theme park whims (‘Well you have to come on this one because we can’t leave you on your own – stop crying! Look, there are tiny kids getting on this one!’), I would have been happy to ignore the scary-looking rides – but there was one that had been in my periphery for the entire day at Universal. One that had loomed over my head for the entire trip so far, the ride whose ghost had haunted me since we’d booked the trip.
The Revenge of the Mummy.
Stop laughing. I promise that I really and truly don’t go in for the thrill rides; I carefully studied the warning poster at the entrance of all the rides before we got onto them, looking for the words ‘speed’ and ‘sudden’ and ‘drops’ and walking in the other direction if I read them. But The Mummy...okay. So as a kid, I was made to go on it, and was terrified. Not because of the ancient Egyptian iconography or the creepy mummies that jump out at you, but because of the sheer speed and force of the ride. I have a memory of sobbing profusely in the gift shop whilst my mother, exhilarated from the ride, tried to calm me down. But that was when I was a kid. I am a grown adult now. The ride surely couldn’t be that bad – especially not since the oldest three kids were all tall enough for it. I studied the sign at the entrance. It said it was a ‘roller coaster style ride’. So not a proper roller coaster, then? Trying to look as cool as a cucumber, I made my way into the line with my parents, girlfriend, BIL the Older, the elder three kids, and Big Sis (Little Sis had more sense and didn’t fancy it, and besides somebody had to watch the younger two, and my grandparents decided they’d rather have a sit down on something that didn’t move at forty-five miles an hour). I stuck my hands in my pockets and tried to look nonchalant, but I was sweating, and not just because of the Florida heat. Sweat beaded on my forehand, prickled at the back of my neck. We went through the queue area. I stared at the hieroglyphs on the wall. My heart was in my throat.
Finally it was time to get in the ride cart. I sat next to my girlfriend, who was looking around with interest.
‘Is this really fast, then?’
‘No,’ I squeaked. ‘I don’t think so. Uh. I don’t know.’
She gave me a withering look, frowning. ‘I thought you’d been on this before.’
‘Yes. Well. It was a long time ago.’
‘It can’t be that bad,’ she said, as the ride attendant checked that the lap bar was down properly. ‘The kids are on it.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, wishing I could jump up and dash for the coward’s door. ‘It’s not that bad,’ and then we were off.
So when the ride begins, it takes a slow cruise around the track whilst ominous sounds play and a recently-mummified man tells you to leave because the curse is real, whilst other mummies pop out at you and projections of scarab beetles skitter grossly around the walls.
‘Is this it?’ my girlfriend whispered in my ear, appalled. ‘It’s just a ghost train?’
Reader, I couldn’t even reply. My mouth was as dry as the sand that had been tossed lazily on the ground of the queue area to make it look more ‘Egyptian’. Because the thing is, my girlfriend likes to pretend that she’s rough and tough but she is actually just as bad as me. The ride cart reared up to the projection of the villain, who laughed and yelled, ‘Your souls are mine!’
At that point, this happens. The ride cart speeds backwards, spits you onto a turntable, and tosses you around and around at significant speed for what feels like an hour. You can’t hear the mechanics of the ride anymore, the squealing of the cart wheels against the track. All you can hear is screaming. All I could hear was my girlfriend having a large-scale mental breakdown.
‘No!’ she shrieked. ‘No!’
‘Whee!’ I could hear my mother behind me, consoling one of the children, who had begun sobbing. ‘Isn’t it fun! Look, here’s the drop!’
In situations like this, when your breath has been robbed from you and your head is spinning, it’s worse if you keep your eyes shut. The Mummy is a dark ride, so of course you can’t really see, but if you concentrate – and if you don’t have a Shaq-sized figure sat in front of you – you can kind of see what’s going on. I stared ahead, breathing hard. Drop? I couldn’t recall a drop. But no, there it was. The jewelled studs of light that adorned the centre of the track were sloping upwards. Very much so. By this point, my girlfriend was hyperventilating. Also by this point, the ride has this fake-out scene where you think it’s over, only for the ceiling to alight with fire and then send you hurtling off again – and so, breathing hard, I gripped the lapbar and down we went.
When the ride actually finished, the staff were clapping, which they do every time a cart comes back. It felt like mockery. I was shaking when I got off.
‘What the fuck was that?’ my girlfriend gasped as we lurched into the gift shop. ‘I thought it was a kiddy ride! Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t think it would be that bad,’ I said gravely, trying to get my tremors under control. Big Sis, who had been on The Incredible Hulk ride multiple times (note: sixty-seven miles an hour, zero to forty in two seconds, seven inversions) laughed at us.
‘That is a kiddy ride. Look, the kids loved it.’
The kids were ashen-faced. They looked how I felt.
But I’d done it. I had faced my fear (even though it was literally just as bad as I remembered) and now, gratefully, I would never have to go on another scary ride again.
Other rides that are worth writing about:
Girlfriend and I had been so traumatised by The Mummy that when we went to Disney, we queued up for forty minutes to go on the Snow White mine cart ride, which was a relatively recent addition to the park. By the time we got to the holding pen at the front, we were close enough to see how quickly the cart moved as soon as it started – and there was a drop, too, but we couldn’t see the track from where we stood. She turned to look at me.
‘I don’t think I can do this.’
‘What? Why?’
‘There’s a drop. It could be massive. It’s like The Mummy all over again.’
My breath hitched in my throat. It could be. And since I hadn’t been on this one before, I had no frame of reference for how terrifying it was (or not); the Snow White ride was mostly outside and, true, we had seen it pootling along the track, and, yes, it hadn’t been going that fast. But that’s because we were stood still looking at it. It was surely different if you were actually on it.
‘Well, it’s too late to back out now,’ I said, my voice tiny. As though on cue, the cart came back. And the staff – oh no. The staff were clapping.
‘They only clap on the scary rides!’
As the gate opened to allow us on, I saw that a woman with a small child was leaving the row we were due to enter. Also, beside us, two eight-year-olds were excitedly jostling their way into their row.
‘It’s a kiddy ride,’ I said firmly. ‘We’ll be fine.’ I wasn’t sure.
We got in. Pulled down the lapbar. I secured my handbag in the netting at the front of the ride. And then – goddamn. It was a kiddy ride if ever I’d seen one. It was good fun, though. When the ride was over and we pulled back into the unloading bay, we were looking sheepishly at each other.
‘I can’t believe we nearly bottled that. How embarrassing,’ said my girlfriend.
Yes, embarrassing. Also embarrassing was the other ride I’ll mention, back at Universal’s Islands of Adventure – Popeye and Bluto’s Bilge-Rat Barges, which isn’t scary but is a wet ride. The first time we came to America, we got onto the raft and my great-aunt, who’d been with us at the time, tutted.
‘Look!’ she’d said. ‘The seat’s all wet!’ Whilst the rest of us buckled in, she’d pulled a tissue out of her handbag and dabbed the seat dry. If you’ve been on the Popeye ride, then you understand why this was a pointless exercise, but in case you haven’t, I’ll enlighten you. Most wet rides have you getting splashed a bit and maybe the soles of your shoes end up wet, or perhaps the top of your head. But the track that Popeye’s courses over has water sloshing into the raft, hip-deep; you travel through waterfalls that soak your head; also, there are always kids manning the water pistols at the top of one of the walkways beneath which the ride passes, so they soak you, too. By the end, we were all drenched. My eldest nephew, who was sat next to me, kept shrieking ‘It’s gonna be a bumpeh ride!’ in the style of the shrunken head on the bus from the third Harry Potter film – I think he yelled it about forty times in the space of the six minutes on the ride. But the problem wasn’t any of that. The problem was that I’d decided to wear sensible shoes, as these theme park days invariably involve a lot of walking. And because I’m a you-know-what-bian, they had to be Birkenstocks. Lace-up Birkenstocks. Suede lace-up Birkenstocks that cost me a hundred and fifty quid.
Let me tell you. I got off that fucking ride, already soaked, and my shoes were full of water. I took them off and tipped them out. What you might not know about Birkenstocks is that they contain footbed soles, which are thick and comfortable and mold to the shape of your foot and also, apparently, are very absorbent. I had no choice but to slosh uncomfortably around for the remainder of the day, feet bathing in the filthy Popeye’s water. It’s a miracle my toes didn’t go gangrenous and fall off. And they also took two days to dry, even in the Florida heat (the Birkenstocks, that is).
The final ride I’ll talk about is back at Disney and is much more my speed, being that I am a coward who likes little rides that don’t go very fast and keep me upright at all times. That’s right – it’s a small world, after all.
It’s a Small World goes at about five miles an hour and takes you through many scenes of ethnically diverse puppets doing various fun things, whilst bright lights flash in the background and the most irritating song known to man plays at ear-busting volume in the background. But that’s okay. I like it because it’s slow and because nobody ever wants to go on it, so you’re pretty guaranteed a queue time of less than five minutes, so then at least you can say you’ve been on something at Disney. Whilst we were on the ride, I looked around adoringly at the cute puppets whilst my not-that-worldly girlfriend tried to guess which country they were from. For some reason, she looked a bit bored, and I think the ride’s message of universal brotherhood and the shared human spirit was lost on her, because she kept sighing loudly and looking at her watch.
The issue came when we were in the final room (representing, possibly, Russia and the polar regions). Our little boat, already travelling slowly, came to a stop. It bumped up against the boat in front. Actually, lots of the boats in front had stopped, and when I looked round, I saw that the ones behind us were stopping, too.
‘I hope we don’t get stuck,’ I heard the annoyed-looking teenage boy in front of us grumble, clearly having been dragged on by his mother and small sister. ‘This would be the worst ride to get stuck on.’
So. Yeah. We did get stuck. For ten minutes. Which doesn’t sound that long, but when all you can hear is ‘Iiit’s a small world after all…’ over and over again, it does get old pretty quickly. It’s the sort of thing that people say as a joke – ‘Wow, I’d hate to get stuck on that ride!’ – but of course, we did get stuck on it. Because it would be me, wouldn’t it?
We were self-catering for our time in the USA, so one of the first things we did when we arrived was go to pick up groceries. Where else would we go but Walmart?
Walmart seems really cool to us Brits because it – like everything else in the US – is huge and imposing. As a result, you can buy literally anything you want, including guns (your mileage may vary based on the state you’re in), and so this meant that we were hoping to only need a couple of Walmart trips. My girlfriend was particularly impressed by size of this Walmart, which I have to assume is similar in size to all the others in the country.
‘It’s bigger than the Tesco in Bar Hill!’ she exclaimed excitedly (the Tesco in the unassuming town of Bar Hill is, inexplicably, one of the biggest in the UK; you could probably fit two Bar Hill Tescos into the Walmart we went to). Another cool thing about Walmart is that the shop assistant a) bags up your shopping for you and b) you don’t have to pay for carrier bags, though they are the incredibly flimsy sort that tear up in a moderately strong breeze. The downside of Walmart is that it is Walmart. A lot of this was lost on me the first few times I visited the US, but Walmart appears to be – at least to Americans – easily one of the worst supermarket chains, probably on a par with Aldi (which weirdly also exists in the US). The reasons why are exemplified in this song by Jesse Welles, which I found myself humming as I walked through the aisles of hyper-processed YouTuber-branded snacks.
Outside of Walmart, we also went to some shopping malls. Not really much to report, except that I finally got to go to Hot Topic, somewhere that thirteen-year-old goth Lauren was always desperate to go, and that I also got an incredible discount for no apparent reason on this beautiful emerald-green floor-length gown in Banana Republic; the tag said it was $125.99, so whilst I was mentally calculating the tax on it, the sales assistant rung it up for $53. Score!
Buying food is technically shopping, so I also want to mention the restaurants. Big Sis really wanted to go to Chilli’s. I had a chicken burger (sorry, chicken sandwich) with a fuckton of chips (fries, I mean) and the best mac and cheese I’ve ever had. I also ordered a frozen cherry margarita, which came in a glass so huge that I had to hold it in both hands. Later, we also went to Olive Garden. This isn’t news to Americans, but apparently in Olive Garden they give you never-ending soup or salad and these long, warm rolls which they call breadsticks (though delicious, they are quite unlike any breadsticks I’ve ever had). None of us realised the scope of the food we were offered. I had zuppa toscana, which was an (admittedly odd, but delicious) combination of Italian sausage, kale, and potato. I also ordered shrimp alfredo, but by the time the alfredo came out, I was full of soup, so the lady boxed it up for me. Also related is my girlfriend’s odd affliction, where – should she be out to eat somewhere – if she sees that the restaurant serves a calamari starter (or appetiser), she has to order it.
‘But you get soup for a starter,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but I can get calamari too. You’ll have some, won’t you?’
I don’t especially like calamari, but I will eat it, so I shrugged and said sure. When it came out, I was expecting four or five rings of calamari and a pot of tartar sauce. There were three pots of sauces (each different) and, no joke, about thirty pieces of calamari. To her credit, my girlfriend did seem to regret her choices instantly. By the time her dinner came out (grilled chicken alfredo), she also had to have it boxed up.
BIL the Younger also provided some hilarity. So, both my parents, Little Sis and BIL the Younger are smokers. They have, what we’d call at home, fags. It’s a fairly common term here, but of course, it does not mean cigarette in America. They all know this, but it’s difficult to break deeply entrenched habits, hence the shrieking of ‘Can I bum a fag off you?’ over the heads of some small and disturbed-looking American children at Disney. Anyway, by the time we got to Olive Garden, BIL the Younger was gasping for a fag (sorry) but had no lighter. We were welcomed into the restaurant by the sweet and obviously gay host, who apologised for the wait whilst they found us a table. BIL the Younger stood up. He was in a nice restaurant with family. He smiled as he approached the host, and was careful to enunciate his words properly.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose any of you have got a lighter I can borrow so that I can go out for a FAG?’
Oh dear.
The poor host looked shaken, but he smiled. Thankfully, he did seem to understand that BIL the Younger was not in fact about to commit some horrendous homophobic hate crime.
‘I’m sorry, sir, I don’t. There’s a Seven-Eleven not too far from here, though?’
‘You can’t say that here!’ I hissed at him when he, defeated, came to sit back down.
‘Yeah,’ said Little Sis, ‘it’s like you’ve just called him a poof.’
Somewhere up top, I mentioned that my nephew was sick on the plane, which we all put down to travel sickness. The kid does get travel sick, to be fair, and so does my sister. He seemed to have brightened up by the time we got to the house, so it had to be that.
The next day, BIL the Older wasn’t feeling too great. He spent most of the day in his room.
‘He gets like this on holidays,’ said Big Sis sympathetically. ‘He once practically missed out a whole stag do in Benidorm because of it. I reckon he needs some probiotics.’
And then Grandad got ill, too. After a day or so, he was fine – and then nobody was sick again for about a week. It had been travel sickness, BIL the Older’s regular holiday affliction, and perhaps the heat. Not a bug.
Ha!
Well, it all started going wrong after the ill-fated Olive Garden trip. We all got home, chilled out a little, splashed about in the pool. By the time we went to bed, Girlfriend was sat propped up with pillows on the mattress, face pale, eyes shut.
‘I don’t feel very well,’ she said, simply.
The first time she threw up in the en-suite toilet, I got her some water and asked if she felt any better. She nodded. It was unfortunate, but it couldn’t be helped – she doesn’t exactly have the strongest stomach anyway. I shut my eyes and tried to go to sleep. I did not manage to get any sleep at all. Girlfriend was awake every half an hour, vomiting loudly and performatively in the toilet. I knew when she was going to be sick because she jolted herself up from the bed so sharply that the mattress wobbled. I asked, snippily, if I should get her a bowl. She said no. She’d throw up in the toilet as God intended.
By six a.m. she’d stopped vomiting, which was good, but we were both so exhausted by the lack of sleep that we stayed home the next day whilst the others went to Epic. Mostly, we stayed in bed and watched Say Yes to the Dress.
It was fine, though. It was all fine. I hadn’t been sick for years by this point; never as an adult, anyway. Girlfriend might have been weak to sickness bugs but I wasn’t. I’d avoided a nasty bout of norovirus once, even when everybody in the house’d had it. I was not going to get this bug.
Anyway, I woke up at midnight a few nights later whilst my girlfriend was watching Netflix with stomach cramps.
‘I’m going to have one of these anti-sickness tablets,’ I said. They were chewable and pink and tasted like cherries. ‘Actually, they’re quite nice. They’re almost like sweets!’
Wrong, wrong, wrong. So wrong. I woke up every hour and ate another one, sipped water, prayed for my stomach to settle. We were supposed to be going to Disney the next day. I was determined not to be sick. Unlike when Girlfriend had been ill, I did manage to get a little sleep – but when I woke up, I still didn’t feel right. I cleaned my teeth and scraped my hair into a ponytail and powered on through.
Downstairs, Big Sis was pale-faced as she put the finishing touches on my niece’s princess dress. I frowned at her.
‘I don’t feel well,’ she replied, simply. Well, at least it wasn’t just me. My stomach roiled as the kids piled into the car, excited for Disney. It was all going to be fine. I just needed to eat, even though I didn’t think I could face any food. The Florida heat bore down upon me. I was already hot, and I was only growing hotter under the sun. Hotter. Shakier.
I remember thinking oh no and holy fuck and various other exclamations, but I didn’t manage to vocalise any of them. Girlfriend was frowning at me.
‘You alright, babe?’
I opened my mouth to reply and immediately threw up all over the ground beside the van.
It wasn’t just me who threw up that day, though. The Disney attempt still went ahead. My niece, dressed as Cinderella, turned to her father in the back of the van and said that her tummy hurt. She didn’t feel well. She –
‘Oh, God! Now the baby’s been sick!’
And the poor girl was sick all over her Cinderella dress.
In the end, we went back to the house and I slept for six hours. Fortunately for me, I was only actually sick once (on the ground, in full public view of everyone to see), and my niece was more or less totally fine after (kids are resilient). A few days later, we attempted Disney again – and this time, nobody was sick. As far as I know.
Never going on a family holiday with these people again.
A short entry this time. It's been a while since I've updated, and there are some reasons for that, and some of those reasons would make sense if you heard them and others wouldn't. A big chunk of the 'reasons' are simply laziness. I've been playing video games and listening to music and scrolling joylessly through Reddit and not writing and not reading and not studying, so obviously it stands to reason that I haven't thought to update here, either. But I'm back anyway - kind of.
I've been trying to avoid picking at my nails, so I've been painting them. I bought two bottles of Sally Hansen nail polish from the pharmacy a few weeks ago, something I've rarely purchased in my life. One bottle forms step 1, according to the screw-top lid, and it's 'onyx-pected' - Sally Hansen-speak for 'black'. The other feels cool on the nail, like ice or rubbing alcohol, and the bottle is silver, probably because the polish inside is clear. No cute Hansen-ism for this one; it's just called 'top coat'. Anyway, once it's on - smudged a little because I'm out of practice and have poor fine motor skills anyway - it's nice and shiny and I can see the vague outline of my face in my thumbnail. It'll last a day or two until it chips. Start again. I took it all off a few days ago because I'd kept topping it up, which I sense you're probably not supposed to do, because it kept going clumpy where I tried to daub it over the cracks. I'm not sure what I'm doing when it comes to nails - or really any sort of feminine beauty practice - although clearly I give off the impression that I do, because when I was at the pharmacy, there were a couple beside me, perusing the Sally Hansen nail polish stand. They were picking up shiny bottles and them putting them back down, speaking soft Spanish to each other. My Spanish is limited to a handful of useful phrases ('no hay papel higiénico', 'uno mojito, por favor', 'lo siento, señor, mis amigas es muy borrachas') that I picked up in Ibiza when I was eighteen, so I didn't know what they were saying and also didn't particularly care to know. I grabbed the blackest nail polish and then, on closer inspection, got the top coat too, thinking that I might as well go the whole hog and get both. At the till, where I stood by myself because the (relatively large chain) pharmacy had no staff ready to ring me up, I tapped my bare nails on the counter. Perhaps somebody would hear it and think 'Oh no, that poor woman, her nails are bare, I can tell by the sound they're making as they tap obnoxiously against the counter'. That didn't happen though, so I just kept still. There were no staff around but even if there had been, I doubt I'd have said much, as I don't like to bother people. Anyway, the Spanish couple were still milling around. I was in a world of my own when I heard the man say, 'Excuse me. Can I ask you a question?'
I don't like it when men ask if they can 'ask me a question' because sometimes it's, 'Can I have your number?', to which the answer will always be 'no', but I was in a public place and the guy's girlfriend or wife was with him, so I shrugged and said 'sure'. He held up the Sally Hansen nail polish he'd selected, baby pink - I didn't see what cutesy sobriquet they'd decided to give it.
'So with these, do you need to use the light thing? You know, the machine?'
I knew what machine he meant because both of my sisters have hair and beauty qualifications from college, and I've seen them do gel nails. You stick your hands under a terrifying UV light machine and then bring them back out, nails gelled, so shiny they still look wet. To be honest I actually had no idea what the answer was, because I'm hopeless at nails or hair or makeup or anything of the sort. But the guy clearly thought I knew, and I decided to act like I knew, too.
'Uh, no, I don't think so. You just put it on.'
'Oh, good! Thanks so much.'
Anyway, I was sort of pleased to realise that perhaps I don't look as hopeless as I think I do.
What else is going on? I've been writing lots, silly little stories about women and their lives that aren't for anybody's eyes except mine, just because they're fun to write and I'm not putting much effort in, so it's kind of easy. I do feel like I'm not flexing my writing muscles as much as I should be, which is maybe a bad idea, but at least I'm doing something. I've also put on a lot of weight, because I've been eating poorly and not exercising. My chest feels tight nowadays, though maybe that's just because I'm recovering from a cold, which somebody at work gave me. It's made its way round a lot of us now. The manager returned from her holiday today, and said she'd heard that we were all sniffly; I told her that I hope she doesn't get it and that she may, with any luck, have missed the incubation period because she's been away. Who knows.
Oh, and I'm going on holiday in a few weeks. I'm going to the USA. I've been before, but not for many years now, so we'll see how I get on. I have an exam for university whilst I'm there, at 5am. Hopefully I can get it done quickly. I'm not looking forward to it. Anyway, that's it for now, I guess.
So right now it's hot. Perhaps this is something of an understatement; anybody in Europe right now will know what I mean. It's been thirty-six Celsius at the hottest here, and although it's supposed to cool down dramatically this weekend, I fear I can't fathom it. It's been a week of searing heat, of living inside an oven. I can't wait for the temperature to go down to a balmy twenty-four. It'll feel like heaven.
To be honest, I'm really complaining about nothing, because I've been at work normally in this heat, and my workplace is beautifully air-conditioned. So I don't really have it as bad as other people. I guess the issue is that we're just not built for this heat here - houses don't typically have aircon and they're not built in such a way that would encourage coolness, exactly. Last year I wrote about that heatwave and my thoughts on the heat are the same now as they were then (I hate it), so I won't go too much more into it. I can't wait for summer to be over.
Anyway, I've had quite a few instances recently where I've felt off the planet, for lack of a better term. I've been floating around aimlessly, feeling untethered to the ground beneath my feet, feeling like my mind has ballooned and loosened and floated away into the ether. I'm not sure why this is. I have been putting it down to the heat, but I know that's not really the case, because I've felt like this during cooler times too. I keep replaying things, over and over, in my mind, agonising, ruminating. To combat this, I've recently been writing more, though nothing that's been posted here (which is why I haven't updated the web site for a while). A few years ago, I started work on a Lovecraftian horror novel, which was originally designed as a companion piece to a now-permanently shelved other Lovecraftian horror novel, which I did actually finish but which I now cannot find (possibly as the result of some sort of manic episode in which I assume I deleted it from my computer out of embarrassment). I began writing both of them in the bizarre Covid times of 2020-21, and then the second one came into itself and developed a world of its own, and I started and re-started that one a few times; the current draft was started in June 2023. At the time I remember saying to my friend that I intended to get the first draft done by October of that year, but then I got distracted with other projects and shelved it for three years by accident. But now that draft is NEARLY done. The problem is, I have this horrible habit where I'll write something that I know is utter dogshit but leave it in, for the sake of continuity and/or of hitting my daily word count, and then say to myself 'Nah, it's alright. I'll fix it in editing.' If I could set up some sort of magical MacGuffin that would give me a mild electric shock every time I said or even thought a particular phrase, 'I'll fix it in editing' would be that. But I'm three years and 74,506 words in, so I'm now in too deep to do anything other than just finish what I've done. And then fix the shitty stuff in editing.
But I've actually quite enjoyed going back to my roots, as it were, to write a horror story. I cut my teeth on SF and horror fiction, and in my own writing recently I've been straying from genre because my grand literary delusions have me thinking that I could be a big name litfic writer. But I like writing genre. It's what I'm used to, and there is such a suspension of disbelief that you can practically handwave anything you want that wouldn't make sense in the real world. Why do your vampires sparkle rather than burn up in the sun? Magic! How come the police didn't properly investigate that murder and just let the villain protaganist get away with it! Magic! (And chronic underfunding of the public sector). But also it's just fun. I've been writing since I was a little kid because I've always liked it, because I've always found it fun. Whether I am able to make a proper career out of it or not, I'll keep writing for the rest of my life. It's fun and it makes me feel real. Once I've finished the novel and polished it up to a reasonable and readable standard, perhaps I'll start serialising it here. Maybe.
So last night was the Eurovision, which I really like and usually watch every year. This year, as with the last couple of years, the whole thing has been very fraught, mostly because the big boys at the Eurovision committee seem hell bent on letting a country (which is not even in Europe) compete, when that country is currently waging a violent, genocidal war on its neighbour. (I couldn't in good faith write this piece without mentioning that). I do still really want to believe that the contest is about the music, though, and the Eurovision has always been a campy, stupid spectacle to be enjoyed. So here's my play-by-play of each country's performance.
Poor Søren was apparently one of the bookies' favourites, so it's a real shame that he was put first. First is a dangerous position to be in, because the Eurovision final goes on for hours and by the end, you're exhausted and can barely remember any of the songs, let alone the one that came on first. However, I think that his song was one of the better ones. I like it when countries sing in their native language, and the energy and performance was peak Eurovision for me. Even if he did spend most of it gyrating in what Graham Norton called a 'perspex box like a petri dish'.
Germany haven't won since 2010. Last year's song Baller was incredible and felt more cultural than Latvia's singing folk ladies. This year however was dull and uninspiring. Very middle of the road. The outfits and dance were too derivative of Chanel's amazing 2022 entry for Spain, SloMo. Sorry, Germany.
Ooof.
I wonder if the reason he was in the crystal contraption at the start was for his own safety? People have jumped the stage before. The audience clearly did not like this one because they all appeared to be standing dead still, perhaps in protest. There was lots of booing and later on during Israel's jury vote, I swear I heard shouts of 'Free Palestine'. I'm not really sure what else anyone was expecting. In terms of the song, Noam has a nice voice and the dancing was good. But like Germany's, it was pretty forgettable and middle of the road.
...Yeah. I didn't like this one. She sounded really ropey and struggled to hit the notes. I felt the song sounded too close to Kylie Minogue's Padam Padam, which is a much better song. The falsetto thing she kept trying to do didn't really work. Also, let it be known that my girlfriend turned to me and asked, after the first chorus, 'Is this song meant to be in English?'
He's wearing sunglasses, but the resemblance to the YouTube chef Joshua Weissman is uncanny.
The ghostly spectre of the middle-aged woman at the start is unsettling. And why is Anis wearing chainmail? The song is nice though, and my take on it is that he clearly loves his momma, which is nice and very Ukraine 2022 (without the implication that his mother is in fact that motherland). And oh - the ghostly spectre is on stage now! Overall this is too pretentious and confusing to be a winner, but the sentiment was nice.
(At this point, I'm wondering in my Notes app why the male host sounds so much like Christoph Waltz's Hans Landa? It can't just be because they're both Austrian. The cadence is very similar. Oh well.)
Ooh - the first novelty song of the year! The outfit was vaguely reminiscent of Cha Cha Cha, Finland's entry in 2023. And then in the chorus he starts TikTok dancing. I did like the staging for this one, especially when he goes room-to-room teaching an old woman and a statue how to do the dance. He's having fun, and that's the most important thing.
Ukraine usually do really well, but this wasn't it. Boring. She has a good voice and she does hit the notes well, but there's nothing particularly interesting about this, especially when you take into account some of Ukraine's previous entrants (Kalush Orchestra, Jerry Heil and Alyona Alyona, and of course the classic and iconic Verka Serduchka).
So Australia were utterly fucking robbed last year (Milkshake Man was PEAK Eurovision, and it didn't make the finals). They've clawed their way in this year with a bookies' favourite. Her outfit is gorgeous and the staging is also beautiful. She has a brilliantly powerful voice, and is reminscent of Cher to me. This is what Eurovision is for!
I am a metalhead and it always saddens me that metal acts don't always do too well at Eurovision (except Lordi in 2006), but there's a reason for that. Serbia's main man is dressed as a goth bat and spends the first few minutes lurching ominously across the stage. It was all a bit anticlimatic, though I did think the breakdown was cool. If only the rest of the song could've been like it.
The outfit is a choice. He sounds a bit nasal and at one point I fully thought he was going to take his top off, but thankfully he didn't. The staging was cool but...ehh. The rest of it is pretty dull and I'm baffled by the hugely positive reception. (I've written in my notes that I didn't think Malta was at risk of winning, but they did pretty well with the jury votes, soooo...)
Oh no. Technical problems abound! I didn't think the performance was that bad even with the technical issues. The house of mirrors was cool, but generally it was pretty forgettable. His voice was nice though.
This was fun and an oasis in the sea of otherwise pretty boring ballads. The way she sang 'bangaranga' in the chorus reminds me of Nicki Minaj's Roman voice which she doesn't really seem to do anymore. But the chair dancing was cool and this one actually had energy which was nice.
The body and face art is very neatly done and it looks cool. The vibe of this song was nice and it sounds like a magic spell. I was also, personally, really rocking with the costumes. I'd like a dress like that.
...Why?
But I ask again. WHY?
Another year, another embarassment on the international stage. Look Mum No Computer is obviously very talented and knows his stuff, but it doesn't translate here. The song was trying too hard to be quirky. I turned to my girlfriend after the first chorus and to my amusement, we were both pulling the same face. At least he was wearing DMs.
Royaume-Uni, nil points! God save the king (and all of us who had to watch this).
Why is she trying so hard to Berghain? Stop trying to Berghain! Stop reheating Rosalia's nachos! I listened to Lux last year and it changed my life and clearly Monroe's as well, but COME ON.
She is very talented though. The last high note of the bridge was too shrill, but it's nice to see opera at the Eurovision and I can see Monroe going far. Also, I will always admire France's steadfast utter refusal to send songs in anything other than French, year after year. Way to buck the stereotype, France.
Nationalism, but make it fun! Or perhaps patriotism is the right word. This one was nice and fun, and Satoshi is clearly having the time of his life. Did they borrow their chainmail from Albania's entry?
These two are literally the most Finnish-looking people ever. This is another of the bookies' favourites. But why does he look so sweaty? Is he in a sauna? That's pretty Finnish. That, or the lights are just hot? I guess that fire's burning too. The violin performance is great, but the dress is a bit of a choice. However - look at her arms! Linda's fucking shredded!
We don't get gospel very much in the Eurovision, so this is a welcome addition. It must be hard to dance on that ledge...also, she definitely sang the word 'shit'. By this point it's past the watershed though, and we're all adults here, so it's fine. She reminds me a lot of Ella Eyre's performance on the song 'Waiting All Night' by Rudimental (I mean this positively). Aw, she's crying! This is a big moment for her.
He looks like one of those painted guys who stand around Trafalgar Square and try to get you to pay for a picture with them. Maybe it's just art and I'm too dumb to get it, but why is he dancing like that? Please, tin man, I'll find you a heart. Just stop singing.
YES! Eurodance at its BEST. RETURN TO TRADITION, EUROVISION! NO MORE SHITTY BORING BALLADS! JUST DANCE!
My girl and I both spent quite some time fist bumping to this. I love it. The singing. The staging. The choreography. Even the mask (I have to assume it's for reasons of privacy rather than Covid). Big ups to Sweden, the undisputed champs of Eurovision.
Antigoni was apparently on Love Island, which I refuse to watch but my girlfriend thought she looked familiar. She realised this with a gasp just before Graham Norton said it.
Very Cypriot-sounding chorus and a fun, dancey track. Antigoni has fantastic stage presence. My girlfriend was unimpressed with the 'fucking gloryholes' lining the edge of the stage at the beginning, out of which golden hands poked. Now there's a real Eurovision sentence.
Sal here seems like a really nice bloke. This song is in honour of his wife and the theme is nuptials. The choreography is impressive. I was expecting a slow boring ballad, so I was pleasantly surprised with what we got. He struggles to hit the notes and is off-key at points. He was obviously emotional at the end though, which was sweet. He won't win, but he'll win many hearts.
He's trying too hard to be a cross between Yungblud and Harry Styles (and one of those is definitely a better performer than the other). It was okay. Different, I guess? Too derivative to be memorable.
I honestly do not know what to think. This was heavier than a lot of the other songs tonight (except Serbia) and the light-up leashes are neat - goes well with the costume design. I can't tell what the woman in white is meant to represent or if she's even singing. The song is attributed to just Alexandra, so I assume not? Another example of operatic vocals - JJ did this last year and it worked well for him, so now everyone wants to have a go.
(In my notes, I wrote that I "can see this going the way of the Lord of the Lost", Germany's abortive heavy attempt a couple of years ago. They finished dead last with nil points. However, I have to eat my words, because the juries liked this one, and Romania finished with its highest points to date).
His voice does NOT match his bone structure. I was expecting a high-pitched keen. The song is camp and generally kind of dumb, so great Eurovision fodder. I'm not a fan. Girlfriend reckons it's too similar to 'Bad Guy' by Billie Eilish, but I don't hear it.
So there's my thoughts. Bulgaria won for the first time, which is good for them. I also didn't drink whilst watching it this year, which was both less and more fun at the same time. Anyway, thanks for reading.
I've been busy recently and so I haven't really done much with Crushed Marigolds for at least a month. I also haven't been writing as much. This is mostly because of school (it's been amping up again) and so whenever I come home from work, I sit down to study for a few hours and then it's ten p.m. I keep having ideas of what I want to write, but I don't have the time to force them into fruition. Or rather I do have the time, everyone has the same twenty-four hours, you gotta make time, but I don't have the energy. I have sometimes been exercising and sometimes not. I've put on weight; my jeans don't fit properly.
I applied for an apprenticeship in an area that is exactly what I want to do, but I can't get funding for both the apprenticeship and school, so it'd be one or the other. I went with my instinct - I've only two years left of school, it's been my whole life for the last four, I cannot stand the shame of dropping out of university again, and I'm supposed to be the clever one - so after a conversation with the friendly chap from the apprenticeship company, I withdrew my application. He said I could always apply again, and the fact that I'd had to withdraw wouldn't reflect negatively on me. I spoke to my mother and my girlfriend about it, who both seemed to think I had done the right thing; my friend said I should have gone for the apprenticeship. Either way, it's done now.
Every day, more things appear. More things appear to pile on me. Some of the things are changeable (and I'm doing my best) but many, most, aren't. The oppressive cost of living crisis which means I do not earn enough to buy a house, or to do much of anything, really; the hellscape world we live in threatening nuclear war every five minutes. No wonder people are anxious and depressed nowadays. And I don't even have anything to write about.
But the other day I was going through my old files and I found a science fiction novel that I wrote way back out in 2020. I was stuck at home, like everyone else, and through a campaign of 2000 words a day, I had a first draft done in one month. I wrote two further drafts from there, and then got stuck and never again looked at it. I can't believe it was 6 years ago. 6 years ago, I was very different; quieter, not studying, dropped out of uni, not sure where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. The global situation was pretty desperate, if you remember, and back then I had an alarm that went off with the radio. So every morning, all I heard on the hour was 'coronavirus!' I had started a new job, but I got sent home after a month due to the incoming pandemic and so I went home and wrote my science fiction novel and even though I couldn't even leave the house - for I was too gripped with fear - I felt proud. I'd done something.
So I guess what I'm really saying is that more things appear every day. But those things rarely change. And anyway, this will pass.
I get this tremor in my hand sometimes, my right hand. I have it right now. I sit up at my desk, spinny soft grey fabric chair from IKEA with my back flat. I think it's to do with the way my arms are angled. The soft flesh of my forearms presses against the sharp edge of the wood. My hands are pitched up against the keyboard; my laptop is balanced on one of those plastic holders that is supposed to provide wrist support and prevent things like carpal tunnel. I wonder sometimes if maybe my position is cutting off the circulation in my arms somehow, but then surely I'd get the tremor in both of my hands? I'm not too sure.
When I was at primary school, I had an amazing teacher. He wore his hair in tiny little dreads (called 'em rastas) and he brought his guitar to school every day to play us songs. He was an amazingly effective teacher with some astounding methods; for example, in our history lessons, we'd play what he called Doctor When. The classroom was our TARDIS and he would step outside into the playground and shout back what he 'saw'.
"Motte-and-bailey castles, children! And horses, and ladies in long raggedy dresses..."
"The Normans! It's the Norman times!"
He was a fantastic teacher. I was absent for only one day of his classes, because I was genuinely ill, and was miserable to miss it. He was, in some respects, a bit like Jack Black's character in School of Rock (though unlike Dewey Finn, he was actually a trained and qualified teacher).
Anyway, he was also an artistic man, and we spent a lot of time drawing in his lessons. He was a great artist, but when he drew, his hands used to shake. We'd crowd around the table, and he'd demonstrate the day's sketch for us. We were silent, in awe and deference to his authority; authority which none of us ever challenged, for we had no desire and too much respect for him to do so.
One day, one of the boys - I think it might have been Brad - asked the teacher why his hands shook when he drew. He said, with what seemed to be a gentle nonchalance at the time,
"When I was little, my dad used to shout at me a lot. He shouted at me whenever I drew. It scared me, and it used to make my hands shake. So even though I'm grown-up now, my hands still shake when I draw."
As a small child of maybe, at most, eight, I didn't really register the significance of what he'd said. It was a brave thing to admit, and especially to a class of children, some of whom were undoubtedly being hit or otherwise hurt at home. I wonder if that was why he'd said it; to make it obvious to us all that, should we ever be hurt, emotionally or physically, by a parent, we could go to him?
I still don't really know. When my hand shakes, it's hard for me to type, so I have to stop. Bend my hand back (I'm a little double-jointed, something I get from my mother), roll the wrist, maybe stand and take a few steps. Drink some water. Sit down again, start typing. The quicker I type, the less time my hand has to shake, so the quicker my synapses fire, the more I can say. I only get the shakes sometimes, and seemingly at random and without any real warning. My teacher had them all the time.
Whenever my hand shakes, I am always transported back to that day.
For the last few days, or weeks (I am no longer sure, time shrinks and contracts around me), I have been feeling what I guess you could call dejected. Burnt out. Not hopeless per se - I'm not quite there yet - but not at my full ebb. Everyone feels like this sometimes, I know. It is part of the normal spectrum of human emotion, and I am not seeking to pathologise that which is pretty normal and within the bounds of what you would expect for a human person. That doesn't make it pleasant to deal with.
I guess what's really getting me down is the humdrum monotony of my life. When I was sixteen, if you'd asked how my life would look ten years later, I would never have said that it would look like this. At the time, I was planning to head to university to study social work. I expected that I'd be a young professional by the grand old age of twenty-six, with a flat of my own and maybe I would even be married...
Ha!
Now, obviously, when you are sixteen, you are very young, very naive, very green. I had thought that twenty-six seemed impossibly grown-up and mature, and although I am grown-up, I often feel half a child still. There is no sense in going back and wishing to take my younger self by the shoulders and shake sense into her; it's sense that she would not understand due to age, but would eventually gain thanks to age. And I know, rationally, that I am still very young, and that I have plenty of time. I know that when I am thirty-six I will look back at this time with mingled embarrassment and nostalgia.
But also, I think there is some merit to the way I feel. Yes, twenty-six is young, but there are others around me of the same age who have proper careers, are married, have children. I am in a relationship, but we aren't married, and children seem very far off. I do have a job, but it's not a career. And this is the point which my brain keeps catching on, that of my fucking job. I don't dislike the job. The job is pretty straightforward and doesn't require unsocial hours. The pay isn't great, but neither is the responsibility. I can't work from home, but it does mean that I am able to leave my work at work. The people I work with are generally very nice and I have made some lifelong friends there. I guess I just didn't think I'd still be working there. The month just gone marks my sixth anniversary.
It happened like this - sixteen-year-old me worked really hard and got into university. She went for a year, liked it, met nice people, and realised on the eve of her second year that she didn't want to do social work at all and probably never had. So she dropped out. She already had a job at a shop, where her contract was for eight hours a week and she usually managed to get more, but she needed a proper job with more hours and more money, just for a year. She was going to try and settle herself and then go back to university after a year. She was going to study sociology or psychology or philosophy.
But she ended up staying at the job she found, because the job she'd applied for - part-time - miraculously became full-time and she found that she liked the routine. But then she decided to go back to university, albeit online, albeit part-time, but she kept at her job, and then she became I and I am still there.
I believe there is an old Jewish proverb that applies here - "You make the plans, and God laughs".
There's no progression. The nature of the job dictates that, as does the structure of the organisation I work for; positions at a senior level are exceedingly rare. I would need to wait for somebody to die or retire for a post to open. Promotion does not exist. It also isn't at all related to the degree I am doing. Every day that passes fills me with another drop of dread; what if, because I lack the required experience, I can never break into the industry I'm studying for? I look at jobs in my area for somebody with my level of experience (read: none), and I apply for them, and I never hear back. I know that part of this is the generally nightmarish job market at the moment - and I know also that I should just be grateful to be in work, as there are scores of young people who simply cannot find anything - but that only stems the dread flow for a little bit before it begins dripping once again in earnest.
I am stuck in this rut. Spinning my wheels. I keep thinking that perhaps I ought to hand in my notice and take a year-long sabbatical. Go travelling - backpack around Vietnam, roam the streets of Barcelona, maybe camp up in the Scottish Highlands for a bit. Maybe focus entirely on writing and get one of those fucking novels that have been brewing in my head written, actually written, not polished up to a half-draft before being abandoned in favour of another, better idea. Maybe I'll take a year out and get fully up to speed with my schoolwork. But my workplace doesn't actually allow sabbaticals - not for somebody in my role, anyway - so I'd be leaving and then spending a year with no job. If the market's bad now, it'll only get worse for somebody who has spent a year out of it entirely.
I have felt this way before, and I know it will go away. What is stopping me from making changes? The fact that I - for all I have said above - actually fear change quite a bit, I guess. And like I said, I know I'm being a bit of a baby. I know I should be lucky to have a job, even if it is dead-end and ultimately a bit pointless. I do have skills - mostly technical, and of the customer service variety - so I know that it isn't totally hopeless.
I don't know. I guess I just want to wallow for a bit. I'm sure I'll feel better soon. I already feel a bit better for having written it all out.
I don’t usually do New Years’ Resolutions, or not these days, anyway. Like a depressing number of teenage girls, my resolutions throughout my adolescence were usually appearance-based – ‘lose weight’ took the top spot for a period of four or five years – and were generally unattainable entirely. (For example, the year I turned twelve, I took the idea of a fake genetic condition called Alexandria’s Genesis very much to heart, and my resolution that year was to, no joke, dye my hair silver and convince my mother to let me wear violet contact lenses. I do not need to wear contact lenses, or even glasses. Thus this resolution was quite quickly crushed).
However, since being an adult, I have given up with resolutions, simply because they do not usually work. Sure you’re filled with new resolve and dedication when January first rolls in, but by the 20th, you’ve given up. The running shoes you bought remain unworn in the wardrobe and the yoga classes you signed up for will actually just tick past whilst you spend another evening in bed watching Netflix, but our constant ‘reinvent yourself!’ culture remains happy.
But – and this is the crucial bit – because I have managed to make quite significant changes in my life over the last couple of years, changes that I have for the most part succeeded in sticking to, I feel more confident about the idea of a resolution. But I don’t want to call it that, because then it feels like an obligation. So I have decided (albeit a bit late), because I am the master of my own destiny, to decide which things will be in for 2026, and which will be out.
Carrying around my nice, black, moleskine notebook and a pen will be in. Occasionally, I – whether at work or on a walk or sitting in a coffee shop – will be overcome with the desire to write, but because I exclusively write on a laptop, this is not always practical. By carrying around the notebook (which I bought – Christ only knows why – at an airport, so of course it cost me almost thirty pounds), I will be able to force myself to jot down thoughts on a more regular basis. This will also have the added effect of hopefully improving my handwriting. Carrying a notebook is in.
I have a habit. A nasty habit. One that irritates my girlfriend, mother, and older sister (in that order). I – when bored, spaced out, walking along, doing just about anything that leaves my hands unoccupied – pick and peel the skin from around the tips of my fingers. Essentially, I flay myself. It ends up hurting quite a bit when, for example, washing my hands in water that is slightly too hot. It is also rather unattractive.
My girlfriend, convinced I will end up with sepsis, gently slaps my hand when she sees me doing it. It has even begun to leech into her dreams; once I was awake in an early morning haze and she was not. I was scrolling through Wikipedia on my phone and the tap-tap-tap of my nail against the screen must have sounded too much like me picking for her liking, because it made her – in her sleep - whack me. (She did feel bad when she realised what she’d done).
Anyway, I am going – with my most honest effort – to attempt to stop picking this year. I only started doing it a few years ago, so it’s hardly something that I’ve had to do my whole life. Picking the skin around my nails is out.
I sit here writing on my laptop at my desk. On the wall, just about a little over level with my head, I have a corkboard. Currently on the corkboard are notes to self; essay plans and due dates, an envelope to remind me to pay for a periodical, a sweet note written to me by my girlfriend. But I also have some – well, perhaps affirmations is the wrong word, but – things written down. For example:
EVERY DAY, YOU MUST CHOOSE BETWEEN THE PAIN OF DISCIPLINE AND THE PAIN OF REGRET
Or,
THE LONGER YOU STAY ON THE WRONG TRAIN, THE MORE EXPENSIVE THE JOURNEY BACK BECOMES
and so forth.
I am going to write more of these. I am going to tack them up around my mirror and scatter them about my house. I will write them out and stick them into my purse; I will tuck them into pockets of coats and jackets. I have to start saying them to myself. Why write something if you don’t even believe in it?
(Incidentally, if anybody out there on them world-wide Internets has any further ideas for inspirational little witterings, please tell me).
Believing these things – and thereby believing in myself – is in.
Having no fun is out. Self-doubt is out. Eating one biscuit and then deciding ‘fuck it, seal’s broken, gimme the rest of them’ is out. Feeling bad because I don’t read forty books a year or because I read something less than literary is out.
Working too hard is out, and so is not working hard enough – I need to be in the Goldilocks zone.
Over-reliance on streaming services is out. I was sorting out my bookshelf and found CDs and DVDs that I’d long forgotten about. My laptop doesn’t have a built-in CD/DVD drive, so I’ve bought an external one.
Listening to music that I’ve bought and paid for is in.
Listening to whole albums rather than just the singles is in, or should I say back in – teenage me listened to albums in their entirety all the time.
Writing consistently and well is in. Again, this is a harking back to a time before; during the pandemic I wrote two whole novels is as many months because I wrote two thousand words a day. (I was also furloughed; I want to write more, but I do need to be realistic).
Being calmer, more chill, is in. Eating fruits and vegetables and oily fish is in. Drinking three litres of water a day is in.
Gua sha is in. Flossing my teeth every day is in.
Recognising the beauty and horror of the world around me – duality, yin-yang, two halves of a coin – is in.
(This post was supposed to be done in January. Ins and Outs start now).