Rae's Blog

Have you noticed how many middle aged women iron their jumpers flat and end up with a V shape imprinted in the back from the neckline at the front? Look out for it tomorrow. I bet you see loads! Why didn't their mothers teach them to iron properly?

It's probably fair to say that most people have a 5 year plan. They know where they want to be in their career, which voluminous off white (or red)collection of silk and sequins they shall wear when plighting their troth to the man of their dreams, how many small people with genes similar to their own will demand to be fed and entertained...and so on.

On the face of it, my 5 year plan is much simpler. I plan to go grey.

On my head at least...

When I say I plan to go grey, that misleads you slightly. It suggests that the harrowing nature of the half decade ahead will cause my follicles to cease producing colour in sheer horror at what is befalling them. No no no. Much less dramatic. Through the inheritance of family hair, I have been grey since I was about 23. I just dress it up in a healthy(ish) layer of dye every 6 weeks. My hair is magically returned to its original shade of brown along with my bathroom walls and any white paintwork around the house, and the backs of my ears and the cream carpet and several pairs of pyjamas. Well... enough I say. I plan to be grey and proud in 5 years time, but the preparation must begin today.

When I was 11 and I realised that I was supposed to be able to read the blackboard from the back of the class I persuaded my Mum to take me to the optician. I was indeed short sighted and my Mum cried. She thought it was all her fault for passing on ther rubbish eyes to me. I couldn't understand why she was upset. I got to wear some cool specs with Roland Rat on them. Wearing glasses has always been something that in my own head has made me feel special. What I'd rather she cried for was the amount of energy and money I have spent on trying to keep my hair brown, or red, or purple over the last 10 years. My mum has been greying for as long as I have known her and did it naturally, without chemical intervention. I'm thinking now that I should have done the same. As it stands, according to the internet (which never lies) I have a 5 year road ahead to transition from brown to blonde, to grey. And at least 2 years of that is going to look crap.

This is how to do it.

1. Dye your hair completely brown for one last time.
Done. At the beginning of October 2007.

2. Have blonde highlights through the top and front of your hair.
Done. I look pleasantly sunkissed. And £55 poorer.

3. When your grey roots grow back in, dye just the roots with a lighter than normal shade of brown.
Done. Sort of. This evening. It's really difficult to get just the roots if you want to wear your hair in anything other than a centre parting. It's also difficult to see round the back. I may have missed enormous chunks and just spattered the wall. I'll have to wait till daylight to tell. I do know that I have covered most of the blonde at the front, and the light brown looks fairly similar to the dark brown I normally use. The grey roots are kind of brown. A sort of grey brown stripe down the middle of my head. Also there are chunks of blonde that I have missed completely, but they aren't in any way consistent. Or attractive. I look like a skink...and if you've read my last post you'll know I also smell like a skunk. It's going well so far.

4. Next time you are at the hairdresser, add to the blonde highlights, especially through the top. With each successive visit more of the brown will be lightened, making the grey roots less obvious as they grow in. This may take 3 or 4 years.
All very well in theory, but did I mention the £55 a time. That's a lot for every 6 weeks. Still, I've committed to this now. I shall make my next appointment. However it will have to wait till after Christmas as people may not undertsand the sacrifice of their presents for the good of my hair.

5. Once you are completely blonde opt for a short style. It is more becoming for a lady of advancing years and will lead to a faster transition from blonde to grey.
Advancing years. By this stage I guess I'll be 37...so yes, point taken. I doubt I should still be wearing bunches at 37.

6. You have survived the unavoidable year of horizontal stripe as your natural colour grows in, but you are now looking your age and looking fabulous. Well Done!
This is all very well, but I bet that as soon as I hit 38 and the grey is finally in place, I start wearing (more) purple and dye my hair pink! then I'll have to go through the whole process again.

On the whole it could be worse. I'm glad I inherited my Mum's hair. My poor brother has ginger hair. Or at least had. He's now pretty bald. Bald would be worse.

(PS. I searched Google Images for a picture of "grey hair". Seems like a fairly innocent search...apparently not. Rudery!)

I bought a different than normal deoderant this week that claims to keep you dry for 48 hours. I think this is too long. It implies that it is okay to go for 2 days without washing and this clearly is not the case. Unless you're stranded in the desert or something. Even then...baby wipes!

Also if it removes the ability to sweat for 48 hours that surely means that lots of smelly badness stays inside your body. Or that you start sweating heavily from your top lip. The other problem with this brand of deoderant is that it has the sickly sweet odour of flesh gently decaying from the bone. The kind of smell that catches the back of the throat, thus enducing the dry boak. I should have stuck with Vaseline Intensive Care. I knew where I was with that. I knew that a quick scoosh at lunch prevented my ladylike glow from becoming offensive...now I'm paranoid that the people on the bus are looking around for the passenger who died somewhere around Rosyth.

Two of my current shows down, two to go.

Last saturday night I was singing in a charity concert production of Iolanthe (any excuse to be a fairy). It was with an extremely enthusiastic church group and through what I can only imagine was Divine intervention it all turned out rather well. Okay, so the hastily construncted wings smelled quite strongly of urine (for reasons I decided not to investigate), and we were victims of the most astonishing heckler I have ever encountered towards the finale, but I think on the whole everyone enjoyed themselves.

Just as the tension was racking up and the Queen of the Fairies (a pleasant man in a large gold dress) was about to sentence Iolanthe to death for marrying a mortal (oops...spoiler) and I was counting like mad to ensure the fairies made their entrance at the right moment, I was distracted by a movement somewhere above my right ear. I glanced upwards to see part of the ceiling move and a grubby head pop out. In a thick Northern Irish accent the head exclaimed;

"Will you people shut the feck up? Some of us are trying to sleep!"

and then disappeared back into the ceiling. I may have been the only person who saw and heard this unusual interjection because nobody else mentioned it afterwards, but I don't think I imagined it.

Suffice to say I missed the entry.

This week I have been playing Bass for Savoy. 10 years since I was on the same stage in the same show they were doing Salad Days again. It has been a really fun run and the show was impressive. I'm not going to review it fully because I saw it only from an angle that allowed me a full view of the inside of cast members noses and for some of the songs was distracted by having to read music and follow the conductor - all rather inconvenient. I'd also find it really difficult to do without comparing to our version, which isn't really fair on anyone. I can safely say that the choreography was the best I've seen for a while and the leads carried the absurd action easily. It's not everyone that can make a mini piano with magical powers, a series of insane uncles and a trip in a flying saucer seem like the most natural progression a story ever had, but they managed it well.

From my point of view (and it is of course all about me), I was the interesting position of having my performance fed through an amp for all to hear. This doesn't usually happen and I was not prepared for it. I'm used to showing up mainly for the look of the thing. The Double Bass line is hardly the most pivotal part of a band...but it looks cool. Therefore I usually get away with playing the first beat of most of the bars, sometimes in the right place, and miming the rest. This time I was quite loud and so had to attain a degree of accuracy. Sadly that also meant I couldn't really watch the songs...I tried, but every time I took my eye off the music I'd get lost and start playing seven shades of mince for a while. It's lucky that the lower register of the instrument is heard by most people as a rumble rather than distinguishable notes. I think only elephants and dolphins can tell the low E from the low F#...and I didn't see any of these in the audience.

It all made me feel rather old and tired really. The sheer effort of working all day, playing all night and then going straight home to bed and getting up to do it all over again has left me pretty much wiped out. So much so that the thought of partying with the student energiser bunnies was just a bit too much to take. Also I've learned from experience that there is very little in life more depressing than a cast party for a show you weren't in, so after a pleasant drink with another cast member from the first time round I hopped the night bus bound for Fife and bed.

Another mitigating factor in my decision not to party was that I had developed a small and inappropriate crush on the leading man. I didn't realise this had happened until I went over to congratulate him on his brilliantly funny performance. I walked towards him with the words "well done" forming on my lips but felt a blush building from my toes so body swerved him and kept walking into the ladies toilet. How unseemly for a woman in her early thirties to be unable to talk to a handsome and talented young man without stuttering and grinning and gently perspiring from the upper lip. Of course from that point on I was in full crush mode and sure that any manner of eye contact or laughter at his game of Charades with Troppo in the second act would indicate my newfound love for this boy (at least 14 years my junior). Of course in reality I am not even a blip on his radar and he will happily go about his business unmolested by the creepy old lady from the band...but a sense of proportion is not the most obvious symptom of crush.

So yes...that has been my week.

Oh. And Doctor Who. It was genius. I'm glad they got Stephen Moffat to write it, he's always spot on.

"You're my Doctor".

Lovely.

(please note the remarkable self retraint I have exercised in not posting yet another picture of David Tennant. That's personal growth that is...!)

Once upon a time, there was a girl called Rae.

She moved to a land far away where she had less easy access to the pub and her friends than she was used to.

Instead she watched massive amounts of TV and became obsessed with the internet.

In order to fill the hours when she wasn't at work with something more worthwhile than eating crisps, she began a kind of online diary, where her every thought was laid bare for passers by to see.

After a year or so she felt that she was perhaps becoming a bit too attached to this diary and wasn't getting out as much as she should. She decided to try real life for a while in order to stop boring dear readers with endless analysis of David Tennant and Michael Ball's every bowel movement.

Never one to do things by halves, Rae threw herself back into real life and interaction with corporeal people with so much gusto that she removed all opportunity for updating her little corner of the internet. In the wake of this time management debacle podcasts fell and people stopped dropping in to say hello.

She now has so much to tell you, gentle reader, that she doesn't know where to start...so instead she is going to sleep, perchance to dream.

Tomorrow, she might tell you all about her Bridesmaid adventure...if she gets out of bed, washes some underwear, hoovers, washes the dishes, learns some lines, makes 10 pairs of fairy wings and goes to 2 different rehearsals first...

This week I received a phone call from a customer who received the books we posted her and was grateful to have them. Nothing remarkable there you may think...except that the said books were posted to her on the 31st of August. It took nearly 2 months for 3 books to get from Edinburgh to Fife, thanks to the postal strikes. Even without postmen walking away from their jobs every 10 minutes, the snail mail has a reputation for unreliability and general rubbishness. Therefore I think it weird that in the latest tv campaign they have decided to celebrate their shitness as though it is something to be proud of.

There are several problems with this advert.

1. Why on earth - even through the rose tinted spectacles of "hilarious" post modern irony - would you want to advertise that your product is a bit rubbish.

2. Why on earth would you cast the "piss woman" from the Thick Of It as the comely mother figure when all it does is put me on edge in case she asks me if I know what it's like to clean up my own mother's piss.

3. Why on earth would you advertise that your shops are infested by ants?

4. Why on earth would you encourage customers to go the the Post Office when chances are their local branch has been closed down and converted into an Alldays?

5. Why make out your staff to be morons?

6. Why Joan Collins? Just Why?

I'm thoroughly excited about the prospect of Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd. As with all musical movie adaptations (apart from Jesus Christ Superstar) it will ultimately turn out to be fatally flawed, but I'm still in the anticipation stage. The trailer is out! it fails to mention that there might be singing involved...but it looks cool! Even Sascha Baron Cohen (who usually makes me feel ill) looks good.

Pleaseletitbegoodpleaseletitbegoodpleaseletitbegoodpleaseletitbegood!

While Sweeney Surfing I also found these...

This is ill advised, but has a great aural death halfway through.

This one is just barking...

I remember a more innocent age when we rushed home from Youth Orchestra to watch Twin Peaks and then poured over every detail at school the next day. Of course we didn't understand it and weren't even sure if we liked it (not that that was an admition to make in public) but it brought us together. It led to some exceptionally overwrought poetry and a personal obsession on hiding secrets in the hollow post of my newly purchased brass bedhead. Short kilts and thick tights were coupled with cashmere and pearls and tips on tying cherry stalks with our tongues were exchanged (and we knew a lot about cherries. You could buy them fresh from Willie Low's for roughly 9 days out of every 365). There was a community spirit in the sharing of a televisual experience.

Times have changed.

Now everybody is watching Heroes, but nobody is talking about it. Poetry may well be written to the cheerleader or Peter Petrelli's mental illness as drawn in the ever changing mood of his hair...but nobody is sharing it. This is the consequence of modern viewing habits and the consideration and kindness of the human race. Now that evrryone has what Chirpy calls "a Tellybox" (ie Sky Plus, TIVO, or cheaper equivalent), nobody watches telly in real time anymore. The tellybox means that Hollyoaks can be watched in chunks at 3 in the morning on a wednesday, instead of taking up teatime 5 days a week. It means that no matter how much the scheduling of Holby City is screwed up by the vagaries of River City you can still catch a spot of open heart surgery, cocaine use, Patsy Kensit fishlips and sex whenever the mood takes you. The consequence of this change in viewing habits is that although everyone is watching Heroes, we're all at different points in the story and heaven help the over eager babbler who spoils the twist in the Save the Cheerleader Save the World episode. It means that face to face TV conversation has been reduced to;

"Are you watching Heroes?"

"Yes."

"It's good isn't it?"

"Yes."

The end.

I don't have a Tellybox (but, Santa, if you're reading this, I'd like one), but I also scarcely watch telly in realtime. Hey, I hardly ever watch telly on telly anymore. Thanks to DVDs, 4OD and now VeohTV I can lie on bed and watch via the computer. Why would I sit in my draughty living room on the sofa where the cushions don't live up to their name or purpose of existence, when I can be snuggled under the duvet with pillows supporting my rapidly atrophying limbs?
Why the atrophy? Well that's a good question, thanks for asking. It could be because I have just watched 9 weeks worth of episodes on the trot without moving even so far as the kitchen to put the kettle on. I have gorged myself on Heroes, or House, or Buffy, or West Wing and a perfectly good day off has passed without human interaction or the dishes being washed.

I now approach a 22 episode series as I would a packet of biscuits on a dull sunday afternoon. I tell myself that I'm only having one or two. Halfway down the packet I begin to feel disgusted with myself, but by this point can't stop. With three biscuits left I feel bloated and wish someone was here to help me eat them, but decide there is no point in leaving them now and polish off the pack. Once they're gone I wish I hadn't been such a glutton, but it's too late and I'm left feeling a bit sick, ironically empty and bereft of purpose for the next few hours. This was my exact feeling on finishing episode 23 of Heroes. I knew what became of the exploding man but a crushing sense of anticlimax followed because I had nobody to pour over the details of the twists and turns with. Now it's just ...credits roll...andyou'rebackintheroom.

Well, I might have someone to share with, but nobody is brave enough to just come out with it. The Heroes survivors need some kind of badge, or handshake to facilitate open dialogue on the gayness of the ending and speculation on who is going to unexpectedly pop up in the next series. I'm desperate to talk about it because I really need to get it out of my system before I sink my teeth into the banquet of Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip that I've got lined up for my next binge.

So it's been a while. Here are the things that have been occupying my brain recently;

>:-[ The snack machine at the Bus Station in Edinburgh has Roast Ox flavoured crisps in it. This has precipitated a mental riff on other Biblical crisp flavours. Lowly Donkey flavour, Firstborn Son flavour, Locust flavour and Pestilence and Vinegar were my particular favourites. One of my colleagues may now adapt this as a game at his sunday school...or maybe not.

The BBC is planning on saving money by showing more repeats on BBC3. Surely this is in no way possible. The entire schedule is taken up by whichever bad parenting show they have on a loop that week, something we've seen already about how to rob people and 23 episodes of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. I love to witness the slow progression Sheridan Smith's character makes from chav to the poshest girl ever to wear a tracksuit over 300 odd episodes as much as the next man...but honestly - enough already!

I worked very hard to get into Heroes on the third attempt. BBC2 helpfully replayed the first 9 episodes for me over 2 evenings. It mainly gave me a headache. I think I'd quite like to see the cheerleader die. The nurse who absorbs people's powers has a good flop to his fringe though. I have seen the guy who plays his brother in something called Mysterious Ways with Rae Dawn Chong. I remember liking it, but I have no idea where I saw it or why I was watching it, or what it was about. Meanwhile back in Heroes, the Jekyll and Hyde woman has really strange pale make-up that stops abruptly on her beetroot red neck. If I'm noticing all these things, I can't be particularly swept up in the story.

Where the hair oil (as my mother would say) are my nail scissors? I've looked everywhere and can find only pair after pair of tweezers.

I met some very cool people at the hen weekend I was on. One of them only recently discovered that unicorns are in fact not real and cannot be visited at the zoo.

My sofa is way more comfortable if I pull out the bottom cushions a bit and let the back ones drop down into the gap. This has been a revelation in living room comfort that has allowed me to re-watch season 2 of Buffy in a previously unknown state of bliss. David Boreanaz aged quite a lot for a vampire over 7 years. James Marsters must have a hideous portrait in his attic.

Tomorrow is the 39th anniversary of the first performance of Hair. I shall therefore end on a song;

"Harmony and understanding,
Sympathy and trust abounding,
No more falsehoods or derisions,
Golden living dreams of vision,
Mystic crystal revelation,
And the mind's true liberation,
Aquarius,
Aquarius."

...I think they might have been on something when they wrote that.

So my Mum has gathered up her bits and pieces...washed the rest of my clothes, folded them and laid them out to be put away, washed every dish in the house, hoovered, cut the grass, built a fence, solved a puddle problem on the path, laid 5 tons of gravel and left some winter flowering panses in a pot at my front door, and gone home.

When she made it to her house there were no builders, joiners, plumbers or electricians despite her high expectations that some work may have taken place in her absence. Instead she discovered that her front door had moved. It was also a completely different door, one for which she had no key. Being a resourceful woman however, she managed to climb in through a convenient hole in the wall.

The upshot is that she's in her own house and so normal blog service shall return

Although possibly not until after the forthcoming hen weekend extravaganza I'm heading to on Friday...