I don’t know if you know, but it is actually summertime. Yesterday, one of the children at school questioned me for a solid three minutes about the validity of this claim, and grew confused when I confirmed that it is, in fact, summer. “It isn’t sunny,” he said, “so how can it be?” I assured him, but he was having none of it. Children have literally stopped believing in summer; it is now a seasonal fairytale.
So what with the rain, and the double dip recession, and the imminent arrival in London of 70,000 tourists wearing bum bags and befuddled expressions, there doesn’t seem a whole lot about which to be cheerful. The French are trying their best to alleviate our gloom by offering free trips – albeit to France – for every gold medal the British Olympic team win, but something about this feels very smug, very….well, French. I firmly believe that relief can be found closer to home: now is the time to let our guilty pleasures run amok.
The joy I take in my own G.Ps is immense, all the more since I started dialysis, as unless I have a hangover or an episode of Twenty Twelve to catch up on, it is fair to say I don’t really enjoy dialysis. In fact I find it so disagreeable that even the smallest delights are amplified simply because they are not dialysis. Hitherto, I have been reluctant to share my G.Ps – not because I think anyone will steal and sully them, they won’t, because they are very sad - but because they are very sad. Indeed, such a loser am I that in compiling my list I was forced to recognise just how many items can be achieved without having to leave me house.
My bedroom.
Fine, my bed.
They are as follows:
1. Doing the Evening Standard Crossword. This must be completed in bed, just before I go to sleep. The soft glow of my little nightlight is also preferable to the brash glare of my Ikea floor lamp that’s all like, “Yeah, what, I’m bright, go fuck yourself”.
2. Reading the celebrity gossip on the Daily Mail website. The articles continue on for a nautical mile, and each is trashier and more inane than the last. An example from today: Girl off Towie wears shorts (I’m paraphrasing, but I swear to God...)
3. Cheese and onion triangles from M&S.
4. Watching University Challenge – if only to assure myself that I am nearly as smart as some of the students, and more attractive than nearly all of them.
5. Long, hot showers. Expensively long. Especially on Saturday, when things get freaky-long.
6. Thinking about cake / researching cake recipes / buying cake ingredients / baking cake. Currently on the agenda: the chocolate chip mini muffins I plan to make for the last day of school.
7. Plucking my eyebrows.
8. Anything that isn’t my Masters reading. It was from this G.P. that number 2 was spawned.
9. Tidying my bedroom. I make it messy, I tidy it, it gets messy again. It is literally the Circle of Life. I like to watch documentaries on 4od whilst I am doing it, too.
10. Putting on my pyjamas as soon as I get home. If my work wasn’t so anal I wouldn’t actually ever take them off.
11. Radical, spontaneous haircuts. Recent examples have included asking Maisy to chop off my pony tail with kitchen scissors and a cut that cost £13 and took 20 minutes.
12. Walking in the rain whilst under my umbrella (the umbrella is fairly important here).
13. Listening to early 90s dance on Spotify. This only became possible when I discovered how to enable Private Session mode.
14. Reading Tim Dowling’s column in the Guardian Weekend magazine. Not that weird, right? Except I also fantasise about how we meet (through Twitter) and become mates.
15. Deciding how I am going to spend the imaginary money I get from my imaginary Lottery win whilst walking to work (NB: I imagine this whilst I am walking to work; that’s not when I discover I win. No, that happens when I get back from the gym on Sunday morning and am idly browsing the BBC News website). I am quite benevolent, and I am not greedy: in my totally private and autonomous fantasy, I have capped my winnings at 1.7 million – because otherwise it is unrealistic.
16. Flapjacks. Mother Hicks-Beach’s recipe only.
17. The last, but probably the most pleasurable of all: watching The West Wing. Incessantly. Repeatedly. I have lost count of how many times I have watched each one of the episodes. I can quote entire chunks of dialogue verbatim. I ace the nerd-fan quizzes on the web. I love the characters like family and I have yet to tire of it. It reminds that there is wit and intelligence and warmth in the world, not to mention Bradley Whitford, at a time when it is cold, wet and dark and supposed to be hot, dry and light. There are few greater pleasures than immersing myself in the travails of Bartlett’s White House. And I don’t even feel guilty for saying so.
So what with the rain, and the double dip recession, and the imminent arrival in London of 70,000 tourists wearing bum bags and befuddled expressions, there doesn’t seem a whole lot about which to be cheerful. The French are trying their best to alleviate our gloom by offering free trips – albeit to France – for every gold medal the British Olympic team win, but something about this feels very smug, very….well, French. I firmly believe that relief can be found closer to home: now is the time to let our guilty pleasures run amok.
The joy I take in my own G.Ps is immense, all the more since I started dialysis, as unless I have a hangover or an episode of Twenty Twelve to catch up on, it is fair to say I don’t really enjoy dialysis. In fact I find it so disagreeable that even the smallest delights are amplified simply because they are not dialysis. Hitherto, I have been reluctant to share my G.Ps – not because I think anyone will steal and sully them, they won’t, because they are very sad - but because they are very sad. Indeed, such a loser am I that in compiling my list I was forced to recognise just how many items can be achieved without having to leave me house.
My bedroom.
Fine, my bed.
They are as follows:
1. Doing the Evening Standard Crossword. This must be completed in bed, just before I go to sleep. The soft glow of my little nightlight is also preferable to the brash glare of my Ikea floor lamp that’s all like, “Yeah, what, I’m bright, go fuck yourself”.
2. Reading the celebrity gossip on the Daily Mail website. The articles continue on for a nautical mile, and each is trashier and more inane than the last. An example from today: Girl off Towie wears shorts (I’m paraphrasing, but I swear to God...)
3. Cheese and onion triangles from M&S.
4. Watching University Challenge – if only to assure myself that I am nearly as smart as some of the students, and more attractive than nearly all of them.
5. Long, hot showers. Expensively long. Especially on Saturday, when things get freaky-long.
6. Thinking about cake / researching cake recipes / buying cake ingredients / baking cake. Currently on the agenda: the chocolate chip mini muffins I plan to make for the last day of school.
7. Plucking my eyebrows.
8. Anything that isn’t my Masters reading. It was from this G.P. that number 2 was spawned.
9. Tidying my bedroom. I make it messy, I tidy it, it gets messy again. It is literally the Circle of Life. I like to watch documentaries on 4od whilst I am doing it, too.
10. Putting on my pyjamas as soon as I get home. If my work wasn’t so anal I wouldn’t actually ever take them off.
11. Radical, spontaneous haircuts. Recent examples have included asking Maisy to chop off my pony tail with kitchen scissors and a cut that cost £13 and took 20 minutes.
12. Walking in the rain whilst under my umbrella (the umbrella is fairly important here).
13. Listening to early 90s dance on Spotify. This only became possible when I discovered how to enable Private Session mode.
14. Reading Tim Dowling’s column in the Guardian Weekend magazine. Not that weird, right? Except I also fantasise about how we meet (through Twitter) and become mates.
15. Deciding how I am going to spend the imaginary money I get from my imaginary Lottery win whilst walking to work (NB: I imagine this whilst I am walking to work; that’s not when I discover I win. No, that happens when I get back from the gym on Sunday morning and am idly browsing the BBC News website). I am quite benevolent, and I am not greedy: in my totally private and autonomous fantasy, I have capped my winnings at 1.7 million – because otherwise it is unrealistic.
16. Flapjacks. Mother Hicks-Beach’s recipe only.
17. The last, but probably the most pleasurable of all: watching The West Wing. Incessantly. Repeatedly. I have lost count of how many times I have watched each one of the episodes. I can quote entire chunks of dialogue verbatim. I ace the nerd-fan quizzes on the web. I love the characters like family and I have yet to tire of it. It reminds that there is wit and intelligence and warmth in the world, not to mention Bradley Whitford, at a time when it is cold, wet and dark and supposed to be hot, dry and light. There are few greater pleasures than immersing myself in the travails of Bartlett’s White House. And I don’t even feel guilty for saying so.
Comments
Post a Comment