What I secretly hope will happen at the end of every Gilbert and Sullivan Opera

Embarrassing Moments

When I was a teenager, magazines had slightly different content to what they do now.  Nowadays it’s all very trendy and hipster but when I was younger they were full of very tame, childish stuff; interviews with Boyzone about how much they loved their mums and stickers of the Spice Girls and free CDs and sparkly lip-gloss.  Nowadays it’s all about cocaine and auto-erotic asphyxiation and mothers eating their babies or something.

My favourite parts of the magazines of my teens were the embarrassing moments, which all had the same basic formula:

One day I was going to meet my friends in the park for some boy-spotting.  I picked up a cute top and a pair of jeans and got dressed.  Once I was out of the house I noticed that Satan and the four horses of the Apocalypse had come to inflict their eternal darkness upon the Earth.  Also, the heel broke off my shoe just as I was passing some top totty: how embarrassing! 

Having arrived in the park and met my friends, I noticed that the water had turned into a lake of fire and the geese and ducks had all become ravenous for human blood.  As we were running away from them I tripped over and fell flat on my face! When I looked up I saw that a bunch of totally cute boys from my school were watching; one of which I’d had my eye on for months! Needless to say, he never talked to me again! CRINGE! 

Just then, some crows came to peck out my friends’ eyes and feast on the sweet nectar within; while I was shielding my face I looked down to see that I had a pair of pants hanging out of my jeans pocket! What a red face!!!!

The funniest moment of my life (thus far)

People often throw around the phrase; “That was the funniest moment of my life,” but rarely mean it.  I, in fact, know exactly what the funniest moment of my life was and I remember it like it was yesterday:

My bessie and I were in a Borders book shop (which has since closed, but that’s another story) and we were simply browsing, not buying.  I was still at school at the time so didn’t have money to buy all the books I wanted.  I did, on that visit, buy a book about Edward II which turned out to be largely gay porn, but it was extremely historically accurate and probably more useful to me for my A-Level history coursework than any other book was.  (That’s also another story, however.)

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a man carrying a very large, hardback book.  I don’t know what it was as I didn’t get a close look, but he just had it open in his hands, which must have been difficult for such a heavy book:

Without warning, the book seemed to become top-heavy, and begun to fall over the top of the man’s hands.  It was too late for him to stop it, so he was forced to allow it to spin round until it landed in his hands the wrong way up.  Unfortunately by that time it had gained so much momentum that it begun to spin uncontrollably four or five more times before it ended with the man spread-eagled over the ground with his head in the centre of the book:

The look of helplessness and concentration on his face, as well as the frantic desperation of his actions caused me to lose complete control over myself.  My bessie and I, not wanting to laugh in front of the man, ran off in separate directions to silently weep with laughter for a few minutes until we found each other, wet-faced and exhausted, a little later.

Nothing else that has happened in my life has been funnier than this, but I’ll let you all know if this changes. 

Oddly-placed Spider

Apologies for the lack of posts recently; I am currently residing in the happiest place on Earth (i.e. Buxton) and I have little to no internet access.  I will do as much as I can in the next few weeks but it will be tricky!

The other day, my family and I went to a kind of ‘living museum’ where there were people walking around in Tudor costumes.  Some of them were very ‘in character’ and were convinced that they lived in the 16^th century while others were telling us about how it was they got into re-enacting in the first place.  The highlight of the trip for me was when I was playing ‘Ball-in-a-cup’ and I managed to get two in at the same time- one in each hand! None of my family managed it and I’m sure they were all very jealous.

They also had a very accurate 1940s home set out all neatly with contemporary furniture, but, strangely, there was a Halloween spider sitting on the mantelpiece:

That’s a bit ‘arachronistic’ I thought!  

The craziest thing to happen at an airport

I received a text message from a very good friend of mine yesterday; it’s probably one of the best text messages I’ve ever received in my life:

“I was in Heathrow airport on Tuesday.  As I was queuing up to get on the plane, a man came past wheeling a massive trolley full of sanitary bins from the ladies’ toilets.  They were stacked 5 or 6 high.  There must have been at least 60 of them, and they towered over everyone’s heads.  Although they were strapped in, they were swaying quite precariously.  I had a horrible fear that they would fall, discharging their loathsome loads all over the floor like the end of a blood-soaked game of jenga.  It made me think of you.”

Even I'm confused by this and I'm the one that made it.

My Mountain Adventure

About a year ago, a good friend and I went up Glyder Fach; a mountain in Snowdonia.  It was a moderately entertaining story and I’d like to share it all with you.  I don’t like to use people’s real names, so, for the sake of argument, my friend’s name is Tiberius.  As far as you know, Tiberius is his actual name.  It should be anyway.

Tiberius and I were planning to drive to Snowdonia to film stuff on the top of the mountain at sunrise.  Because the sun rises at about 4am in June, we had to get up there pretty early.  His ambitious plan was for us to leave the South-East at 7pm on Friday, arrive at the foot of the mountain at about 1am on Saturday, and climb straight up.  We had these handy lights that we could strap round our heads so we felt okay about it being pitch black;  As well as being useful, they also made us look really cool:

Tiberius and I were actually very sensible about this mountain climbing- we packed our heavy-duty walking boots, waterproof climbing trousers, base layers, fleeces and scarves, and we had plenty of snacks for when we were climbing.  I’d spent all day Friday making sandwiches and cookies and we felt absolutely ready to face this beast of a climb:

After a 7 hour drive we arrived at the foot of Glyder Fach, a little later than we’d hoped, at 2am.  Feeling pumped, I proceeded to give Tiberius a list of things that I would need out of the back of the car: “I’ll need my walking boots, my trousers, my gloves, my hat…”

“Yes.” Tiberius said fearfully, looking in the back seat.  “That’ll be in the suitcase which we forgot to bring.”

I thought he was joking for a moment, but I quickly realised that he wasn’t.  After a minute of finding it all quite funny, we were faced with the grim reality of the situation; there was no way we could go all the way back home, and the shops wouldn’t be open for another 8 hours, not that there were any shops around there anyway.  We had no choice but to climb in what we had.

Luckily, I was already wearing my base layer on top, but we must have looked quite a sight:

We began our ascent in quite high spirits; imagining that this would be a good story to tell everyone when we got back.  I even took a picture of a slug for some reason:

After a while, however, I begun to doubt that we would ever get back.  Because we were in the dark and neither of us could read maps, we ended up at a dead end.  Now I would rather fall to my death than backtrack and find another route (another of my bizarre phobias), so we ended up doing a lot of stuff that really should not be done in ballet pumps and flip flops:

Eventually, however, we reached the top, and it was FREEZING, despite being summer.  The views were great:

We wouldn’t have got these shots if we had gone at a more sensible time of day when there were lots of people around.  I don't know if those are rocks or sheep in the last one.  As we began to descend, we met a couple of guys coming up.  We were, at that moment, attempting to slide on our bums down a scree path, and they looked at us like we were insane.  I couldn’t really blame them.  Possibly the funniest part of going down the mountain was when we were walking across a flat area with lots of sheep, and suddenly, Tiberius disappeared beside me.  I looked around in alarm to see that he’d stepped into a bog! The expression of shock on his face was absolutely priceless:

Tiberius actually got a bit cross with me after this because I wouldn’t stop laughing for about 20 minutes. 

As we got closer to the bottom there were more and more people coming up, and, thus, more embarrassment.  At this moment in time, I was caked in mud all the way up to my knees; my shoes? Ruined.  In fact, because I’m too cheap to buy new shoes, I still wear them quite a lot, even to fancy places.  Nobody would guess that they’d been up and down a mountain.

Tiberius and I arrived back at the car at 10am; eight hours after setting off.  With a brief pause to wash our feet in a nearby lake, we drove straight home.  While the views were lovely, I don’t think I’ll be climbing up any other mountains for a very long time.  

Some more of my beloved Childhood characters!

Being stuck at home gives me little chance to gather inspiration for this blog, so if I am a little lazy over the next few days, do forgive me.  Perhaps people like seeing pictures I drew when I was very small better than my other material; if so please tell me! In fact, let me take this opportunity to thank everyone for reading so far, and please do tell me if there’s a post you particularly do or don’t like as it’ll help me make it more entertaining.

Anyway, you may remember that I mentioned Hassy Dombed in a previous post, who had her insides scrambled by something and died.  In fact, I had this mixed up; THIS is Hassy Dombed:

Hassy Dombed grows taller 'til she dies she is dead.  And THIS is the girl who got her insides scrambled:

Clare doesn't want Jayne to die but Jayne does die.  I was truly obsessed with death as a child.  Here is my take on Romeo and Juliet:

What I enjoy most about this is how happy they both look in the accompanying picture, despite being about to die.

Another common theme of my childhood pictures is things that I remember being frightened about.  I was obviously frightened of murderers going by this:

When I used to visit my auntie in London I slept in a bed that had an ironing board at the end of it.  I remember that the board had these really long ears and in the dark it looked kind of scary.  In fact, I would lie awake all night worrying that this ironing board was going to grow huge and jump on me and kill me.  I then began to fixate on the light bulb that seemed to be hanging very precariously from the fitting on the ceiling.  I decided that the bulb was going to drop and kill me as well. 

Whenever I was scared of something as a child I used to draw pictures of it to make me less scared.  This whole incident with the ironing board inspired me to create one of my most popular characters, ‘Mouse-Out.’ I have no idea why he was a mouse or what he may have been attempting to get out of, but here he is: (I imagine that I dictated to my mum what to write as my writing wouldn’t have been that good when I was about 4.  It amuses me more to imagine that I just drew the pictures and my mum would have had to imagine what on earth was going on, which is rarely clear!)

However, I didn’t stop here; Mouse-Out went on to have more adventures.  I can’t decide whether I find it very sweet or very sad that Mouse Out got a toothbrush and toothpaste for his birthday: 

And, of course, let's not forget the incredible Outsighn and Detour; if you haven't heard of them and all their wacky adventures, you haven't lived.