Other People's PAs

There is an odd relationship between the staff of important people. We seem to spend half our lives either pestering other people's staff to get us in, or telling other people's staff to bugger off. Naturally, a strange love-hate affair can begin between two equally busy and equally important people.

More or less one of the first phone calls I ever made in my job here at $charity was to the PA to the CEO of another charity, which my boss had agreed to be on the board of trustees for. We'll call the PA Dee.

Dee was very friendly. She'd not long started her job too, and was genuinely happy to hear another voice on the phone who seemed as nervous as her. We chatted for a while, and tried to arrange some dates. Unfortunately, my boss being indecisive, and her boss being difficult to pin down, things were difficult. Needless to say, I seem to have spoken to her on the phone more or less once a week for the last 8 months.

She called today. We caught up on how things have been, tried again to arrange something with my boss and her boss, and of course, failed, and then I announced that I was leaving $charity. She seemed genuinely upset about this, and we chatted some more.

I've never met Dee face to face, and I almost certainly never will, but she is one of the few things I will genuinely miss about this job. She was warm, kind, and understood what it's like to work for a busy person. If only all PAs were like that, the world would be a much happier place.

Up in smoke

I have long battled with my addiction to nicotine.

Not that I've ever tried to quit. Far from it. I've been smoking regularly for 13 years now, and I have only ever made token attempts to rid myself of the habit. I did manage to give up for around 6 months at one point, but this can be worked out as exactly the length of time that I was aware of my pregnancy, and shortly after, while I was breastfeeding. Other than that, my only notions have been to give up around obvious landmarks.

"I'll quit when it's legal for me to buy them."

"I'll quit when I turn 18."

"I'll quit when I start working."

And so forth.

I began to wonder, a short while ago, whether I would ever grow out of the idea that smoking is cool. The simple fact is, smoking is cool. It's not big, nor clever, but there are few things sexier than such images as skeletal young French women, wearing the latest Haute Couture, sitting outside a cafe in gay Paris, tenderly pulling on a Gaulois.

Obviously, I agree that the smell can be a turn-off. My brother, for several years longer than I have, still carries a lingering pong with him that is almost nauseating, even to myself, a fellow smoker. I long ago learned to blame it on his brand, and the fact that I'm not sure he's brushed his teeth in the last decade.

But still, puffing on a cigarette can carry a whole world of benefits. Imagine a device that not only calms you down, gives you an excuse to talk to people, but also gives you a legitimate excuse to leave work for several periods of 5 minutes over the course of a day without fear of sacking. And to think, this device only sets you back around £15 a week! For those of us who genuinely hate our jobs, smoking is a gift from God.

But of course, all gifts have their ultimate price. You know what I mean. They plaster it all over packets, write horrifying screen adverts to warn us of it, and the whole of the non-smoking world is taught, from a very early age to ostracise us for it. I came to thinking recently why these tactics have not yet worked.

I believe it's because there really are a great deal of us who smoke. And it's very easy to warn someone to wear their seatbelt, because otherwise they might die tonight, but it's difficult to warn someone off an activity that won't kill them for at least 30 years. Even with the wonders of modern health care systems, 30 years is still an awfully long time out of a persons life. In 30 years, one could become a world famous author in a great number of different topics, spawn a classroom full of children and grandchildren, sail around the world as many times as one fancies, and yes, probably get into a car without wearing a seatbelt more times than it is possible to count.

Who are we to be so selfish as to hog all those wonderful experiences though? And what would be the point of any of them, unless we were able to sit back in our respective chairs afterwards and enjoy a warm, calming cigarette?

Smoking might not be cool. But judging by modern standards, it will very shortly become a very retro, and cult thing to do, rather like cocaine became in the late eighties.

And we all know that retro is cool. Time Out told me so.

Going with the flow

I really don't understand what's happening to me.

6 months ago, I was almost indistinguishable from your average 20-something female goth. Actually, I probably fit more the average remit of male goths - long black hair, undercut, stretched piercings, baggy trousers and Cyberdog vests - but let's not begin by splitting hairs.

Certainly, I was proud of who I was, and the image I presented. Even at work, I would push the envelope from time to time, wearing brightly coloured, large guage jewellery in my piercings, and deliberately donning outfits that showed glimpses of my alternative tattoos. I had no shame about regaling my colleagues with tales of my high-jinx within the London goth scene; the drugs, the bisexuality, the open relationships, the all-day-all-night parties, the pounding pounding techno music.

My current job appears to be turning me to the dark side. I joined this company, having come from a creative media environment, where it's not even as simple as "anything goes", it's more along the lines of "the wierder, the better." However, in this city-based, mainstream, 9-5 world I find myself in now, I have been assailed on all sides by the modern standards of women. Strappy sandals, gypsy skirts, hand bags, hair straighteners, designer glasses... the list goes on.

Honestly, the designer glasses weren't new for me. For years, I've had a beautiful teal green pair of rectangular Emporio Armani frames, which I have worn to death. But now I find they are no longer special, or unique, as they once were. The strappy sandals (actually, they're flip-flops covered in sequins, but who's keeping score?) were a matter of necessity. The current heatwave forced me out of black trainers and into some kind, any kind of shoe that would look both presentable, and allow my feet to swell without cutting off the circulation. The gypsy skirt I had owned for years, was also, I told myself, a consequence of the temperature. Seriously, long heavy trousers on the Tube are a recipe for disaster, or at least a nice case of Thrush. Also, I had recently acquired a pair of control top shorts from M&S, which removed the Fat-Thigh-Issue of heat rash between ones legs within 20 minutes of leaving the house.

Up until this point, I had managed to escape any particular form of self-loathing for this vague transformation by the fact that everything was still black. "I'm still living on the edge," I said to myself, "I am still filling the most basic requirements of goth." All this, despite knowing full well that black is... well, the new black.

However, this morning, I have outdone myself. I have always avoided bags carried on the shoulder - to me, they always appeared impractical and cumbersome, whereas a simple backpack provided comfort and security, and given the right backpack, one could look less like a student and more like someone on their way from, say, the gym, or a 5-mile hike in the Malverns.

But over the weekend, I bought a copy of Red magazine. I told myself it was just "something to flick through" while drinking my iced latte and waiting for the train. With it came a free gift, the most evil gift you can foist upon a woman struggling with her own individuality.

An oversized handbag.

I'm told these are all the rage these days. I can see why. It's remarkably comfortable to carry, spacious, and makes it terribly easy to get at the multitude of things that for some reason all women must carry, or fear being gunned down by the gender police. In my defence, it was not only free of charge, an enormous pull for someone like me, but it is bright pillarbox red with large, black, yonic flowers on it.

But my appeal means nothing compared to the fact that after only one short morning of carrying it, I am forced to admit to myself that I actually rather like it. And I'm idly racking my brains, wondering if they have any nicer ones on eBay.

Perhaps I ought to be put out of my misery now, before I turn into one of them. One of those city girls that I hate. The secretaries who drool over Nicole Farhi summer dresses and long for Jimmy Choos. The PAs who talk about little beyond their boyfriends and their weight and their hair treatments. Those girls who I go to lunch with every day. Those girls who I actually like spending time with.

Perhaps it is possible to be among them, and not become entirely assimilated. I can only hope that someone is able to pull me out if this experiment goes awry.

On the passing of time, part two.

This is likely to be a bit more rambling and stream-of-consciousness-esque. I will forgive you if you fail to keep up with me.

I have always had a very strange relationship with my chronological age. As a child, I was often told that I was 4 going on 40. I was the youngest of my generation in our family, so I grew up around adults, and even when I found myself as the oldest child in a family (when I was fostered at the age of 9), I treated my younger siblings with disrespect, and did not appreciate having to consort with those younger than me. This did not serve me well.

Worse still was during my school years, when I was one of the youngest in my year. I strove to behave older and more mature than my peers, which only served me scorn. For a long time, I was not accepted among others of my age, as I wished to be accepted above them, and I was - but only by the teaching staff, which won me no favours.

The older I got, the more I wanted to be even older. I made up stories to make me appear older, and tried to behave as though I knew my way in the world. Mostly, it worked, and for many years, people guessed me as older than I was, and I was flattered every time. It wasn't until I was 23 that I started to become more comfortable with how old I was.

As I got to 24, I began to make noises about feeling old. I didn't mean it. I still felt young and insignificant. I still wanted to be older, I still wanted a physical reason for my emotional respect.

I'm 25 now. I've accepted my place in life, and I feel like I am finally where I belong, a place where my maturity meets in bags under my eyes. And I'm beginning to realise that this is starting to make me less mature. I am totally irresponsible with money, and I have yet to grow out of taking lots of drugs, falling over, and wearing clothes that are much too silly.

Still, 25 seems good. Maybe I'll stay here for a while. Wake me up when I'm 31.

On the passing of time, part one.

I honestly can't think of a better day to start a new journal, besides the week after my birthday, especially since it's my 25th. This is a saga in two parts - part one: birthdays past.

The first birthday party I remember was my 6th. We had just moved to England about a month prior to it, and yet somehow, my mum managed to round up around 8 neighbourhood kids to attend. Some of them ending up being my friends for a long time to come. That was a pretty damned good birthday.

I don't remember another birthday until my 13th. It was a proper girly sleepover, and my mum let us take over her bedroom for the evening, so me and 5 of my mates stayed up late, watched movies, ate popcorn and curled up together on a giant waterbed. Three days later, my mum was taken into hospital with a slipped disk - caused by having to sleep on the floor.

My 16th was pretty awesome. My mum had gone to Australia for the entire summer and left me with... a credit card. Bad idea. On the night of my actual birthday, about 15 of my mates came over, trashed my house, drank all my mum's booze, and my brother, who was supposed to be watching us, hid upstairs playing computer games. At one point, two of us went on a mission to buy some weed, got ripped off by some dodgy black geezer, but managed to take home a Canadian guy who'd helped us try to catch the black geezer. He was cute.

My 17th, I spent in a nightclub with my then boyfriend, Mark, my best mate, Chris and his sour-faced girlfriend, one of my schoolfriends, Becky (slightly lanky and ugly), and my Australian role-player friend, Skippy, who didn't care that she was ugly. Hilarity ensued.

I had a pub lunch for my 18th. I was very heavily pregnant at the time. That sucked. My mum bought me a microwave.

We went wild for my 19th, and went to London for the night (I was still living in Oxford at this time). It was great. I snogged a 17 year-old and gave myself whiplash from moshing too much. One of my best friends copped off with my lodger, and I didn't speak to her for a while, because I wanted him. I spent half of the next day in hospital because of my neck. But it was still a good night.

I spent my 20th with my then boyfriend, Alex. We went to a restaurant and he spent the whole time drooling at the waitress and refused to leave a tip. Three days later, we were fighting, 4 days later we'd broken up for the second, but not the last time.

My 21st was my first birthday after getting back together with Mark, whose birthday was 6 days before mine. We had a joint party, loads of great people came, it was a really great party. We tried to go clubbing afterwards, but I got yelled at for wanting to buy drugs, so we went home.

When I turned 22, I was in the middle of a very intense, sexless affair with a soon-to-be-married friend. I was deeply in love. I had recently discovered that I shared my birthday with another guy I knew from IRC, so we shared a party. Nobody except my lover and his fiancee knew it was even my birthday. I got so drunk that I shouted obscenities at another friend, and had no idea why I was being told I shouldn't drink so much. I went home and cried, about the state of my social network, and my desperately complex lovelife.

I was in hospital on my 23rd. My son had taken a dive from a swing and broken his arm very badly, and I was there until past 11pm, and was in a horrible state. We were due to move house in three days time. We never did get around to celebrating.

On my 24th, the grand total of my entertainment was a slightly squished birthday cake that work had got for me, and my friend Martin doing handstands in the backyard. 6 days later we were burgled.

And last week was my 25th. Despite most of my close friends being away for a festival, things have gone surprisingly well. I had a BBQ, a paddling pool, lots of Pimms and champagne, and a jolly good laugh. On the following thursday, we went to the pub, got horrendously drunk, played pool, and waded in the Barbican fountains - don't do that, by the way, it has a resident population of leeches. Otherwise, very enjoyable though.

I think it's safe to say that I might be getting old, but at least I'm learning how to enjoy my birthday again :)

Good morning!

Yes, I have one of these now. Just in case livejournal blows up. Or in case I finally manage to start writing interesting things about life/work/family, etc.