And Then I'm Happy For The Rest Of The Day

We went for a walk in the park yesterday afternoon, me with my tail wagging and Andrew with his tongue hanging out. It was lovely and sunny. We walked up Chesterfield Avenue, past the entrance to the Zoo. Sticky kids spilled out from the gates onto the path, clutching parents in one paw and stuffed penguins in the other, waddling two by two towards their cars. We borrowed my brother's Zoo pass a couple of weeks ago. I thought we'd get great use out of it. I had notions of us swinging with the lemurs after work on weekday afternoons, purring at the tigers and reading the red pandas a story at bedtime. But the Zoo closes at 6, and we've been busy at weekends. So we haven't gone at all.

"What would you like?" asked Andrew, rooting in his pockets for change when we got to the ice-cream van. I would like a three-day-weekend every week so that we have more time to do nice things like eat ice cream in the park and go to the zoo. "A 99, please" I said. But we only had enough change for two small cones, so that's what we got. And they weren't small at all. We slowed our pace, the better to eat our ice creams, and wandered off the path towards the polo grounds, taking care to avoid the oddball dressed head-to-toe in khaki raingear lying in the grass a few metres in from the road. He could only be playing with himself, we concluded.

The polo was in full thwock. "Hockey on a horse!" said Andrew and we stood at the fence on the far side of the pitch from the pavilion to watch the game. An unseen voice provided a running commentary through the pavilion's PA, though the only other spectators were in a huddle of three on the upper tier. "And Whompey comes in again for a challenge... eh, do you want to come in here?" the commentator said. Attention please, a child has been lost in the tunnel of goats...

Then the rain came. We finished our ice creams and headed for the shelter of the chestnut trees that line the Avenue. Some of the lower branches had been picked clean already, even though the conkers would still be white in their shells. "Snuggle for warmth" said Andrew, and he pressed up against me and kissed me. I remembered the oddball lying on the grass (playing with himself) and looked over to see him getting to his feet, soaking wet, and picking up a plastic Tesco bag from the ground beside him. I wonder what was in it. Binoculars and cheese and pickle sandwiches, I bet.

We made a run for it then. Well, we walked. We were too far from home to run. We held hands and Andrew told me that I looked very pretty in the rain even though I knew my fringe was hanging in rats tails down my forehead and my wet summer dress made me look like a sack of spuds. The rain was coming down so hard that drops were running down the sides of my nose and up into my nostrils. Sure what could you do but laugh. We got to the Fountain Road and Andrew broke into a trot. "Run with me, Pussycat" he said, and I huffed up the road after him, trying in vain to suck in my tummy and swallow my lungs.

It had almost stopped raining by the time we squelched around our corner. We got to our door and I laid my hands on the warm red brick of the house, feeling all the happiness in our home seep up my arms through my fingers. Andrew apologised later for taking me to the park, what with the rain and the pervert and the two small cones.

Husband, you warm the cockles of my heart.

Review: The Inbetweeners Movie

Lydia Rose Bewley. I couldn't find any pictures of her from the film itself.

I spent the whole film anxiously watching to see how they'd treat Jane. The Fat Girl. Because I'm a Fat Girl. She's pretty. I'm pretty. They even put her in one of my dresses.

Jay called her a fat pig from outer space and ran away when she took her clothes off to go skinnydipping. Later, she gave him a blow-job in the toilet. He'd grown as a person! Yay! Happy ending!

I'd rather he'd given her head, to be honest.

They did manage to squeeze a fat joke in about eating out though, fair play to them. In the post-credits sequence a door opened to catch them in the act while they're in bed having sex feeding each other slices of pizza. Dirty pigs! LOL! It reminded me of the post-credits sequence in Bridesmaids where Megan talks about the open flaps on her big bear sandwich.

Big fat fucking sigh.

Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Charlton Heston Not Included

Apes eatin' biscuits, ridin' horses and beatin' up polis. Quality entertainment, if you're into that sort of thing.

The Magic Number

I wrote the post below for the feminist blog The Anti Room, who kindly gave me a platform for my inane and smutty chatter. I'm reposting it here for your delight and entertainment, and to save me having to write anything else for a couple of days because I am very lazy. Aren't you lucky?

I waded diddies-deep into one of those conversations about sex at a party on Saturday night. You know the kind, the two-drinks-too-many kind that leaves lasting friendships in its wake. Because they know too much. By the time I rocked up they’d already gotten through the bravado part of the conversation (concerning the more exotic aspects of their erotic histories) and were down to that unlovely question, the one with no right answer and an infinite number of wrong ones. How many people have you slept with?

I don’t know. I have an idea, and I could count them out on my fingers, but I have no head for figures and no desire to go streeling through their names as a party trick. I answered with an assured smile and an approximation, and then proceeded to make excuses for myself because I wasn’t sure whether my play was higher or lower than expected, and what they’d read from it.

I also confessed to them that I did keep a list at one stage.

It sounds vulgar, I know, but it was closer to lovehearts on a copybook cover than notches on a bedpost. I wrote their names in a little hand-bound notebook with a banana-leaf cover, and I gave each of them a page to himself. I never added any other detail, though I briefly considered developing some kind of code to qualify my relations with them. A little loveheart for the ones I thought I loved (most if not all of them, woe is me!) with a line through it where they hadn’t loved me back (sigh).

I spent most of my twenties wearing a thick pair of beer goggles and my heart on my sleeve, living in an apartment in the city centre and working in administration, like a heroine in a romantic novel written on someone’s lunch break. Having spent my teens cocooned in long-term relationships with unremarkable boys in a small country town, the world became my lobster when I moved back to Dublin. I don’t want to take the seafood analogy too far, but I made a right pig of myself.

I threw my banana-leaf bound book away when my fondness for office efficiency and Excel spreadsheets had me considering opening one in which to catalogue my lovers. I liked the idea of being able to rank them chronologically or alphabetically. I liked the linguistic frivolity of keeping them in a “spreadsheet”. I couldn’t think of a good name for the file, though, or of an appropriate place to save it, and these practicalities made it seem distasteful. Probably because it was. I reconsidered my book in the same light and binned it.

I used to dread that a lover would one day ask the question. I worried that the number of men I’d slept with would make him think that I was a SLUT. Or that he’d expect me to have kinky tricks up my sleeve. Or that he’d think I had a vagina like a wizard’s sleeve. I worried that the number of men I’d slept with would make a new lover feel insecure. I worried that the number of men I’d slept with would tell a new lover that I was insecure.

So I talked about it with friends. But not before I googled “average number of sexual partners” because if you want to know something and are too embarrassed to ask, The Internet is your friend. Or not. “Less than you think” said The Internet. OMFG! I thought AM BIG SLUT AFTER ALL! and then I set about qualifying my query by googling “average number of sexual partners for Irish woman in late twenties who works in administration and lives in an apartment in the city and so on and so forth” until I arrived at what seemed like a more realistic figure and felt better about myself. Then I talked about it with friends, thought a little more about what they’d had to say and how it changed my perception of them (or not) and wrote a giddy article for a magazine about it.

Which is why you shouldn’t talk to me about these things at parties.

A year or so later, I was lucky enough to meet a man so good and honest that I stopped worrying about what he or anyone else might think about how many people I’d slept with. And, Reader, I married him. What has surprised me since is that far from sweeping my sexual history under the carpet now that I’m a Married Woman, I’ve found that the grounding my relationship with him gives me has allowed me to talk about sex with a frankness, lust and humour that I wouldn’t have thought possible back when I was gallivanting around the city, euphemistically enjoying myself.

As for my totty tally, I’ve abandoned all notions of keeping a list. Assigning each of my past lovers a number doesn’t give any idea of their value. It assumes that they’re all of equal worth to me – they’re not. But they deserve to be acknowledged (though not by name) for how they’ve each contributed in some small way to making me who I am.

Review: Harry Potter and the [whatever the last one's called]

in-joke

I spent the first 127 minutes biting my nails. Which is just as well, because I spent the last 3 minutes wishing I still had nails so that I could claw my eyes out.

Kinda like Lord of the Rings, then.