Petrina Binney's Blog, page 65

Day #94 A Trip To The Hairdresser

I’ll admit, I haven’t been to the hairdresser in five or six years, but still, it’s one of the best things there is.

There’s a scene in ‘Orange is the New Black’ where Piper starts crying when Sophia starts washing her hair for her in the lean-back sink. The reason she cries at that moment is because it’s been a long time since she’s been touched. I’ll underline her explanation – it’s not romantic, it’s just the feeling of being cared for by another person.

I totally get it.

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We’ll not focus on how pathetic I have been, because this is a positive post, but there was a time there where I was reduced down to my component parts. It really did take a very long time for me to remember that I am more than jokes and cooking. At the time I’m thinking of, I wasn’t even that.

It was difficult. All I will say is: If you’re considering dating an estate agent, good luck.

I don’t recommend it.

Anyway, I was feeling pretty appalling and two friends of mine, Stacey and Charlotte, were training to be hairdressers. Whether they really needed someone to practise on, or they sensed the sadness in me, I don’t know, but I went in, and Stacey gave me great hair and the attitude to go with it.

Gawd bless, Stacey. That day meant the world to me.

Day #93 Quotes and Being Quoted

Now, I’ve put ‘Quotes’ as my subject for today, and that’s not quite what I mean. Yes, it’s good to have a quote, just in the back pocket, in case the opportunity comes along.

The one I tend to go with is from Denis Thatcher, although he might have been quoting Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln, depending on your Google search. “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

I wish I could remember that one after more than two pints. As it goes, after two pints, it’s a wonder I remember words.

Anyway, what I’m really referring to is entirely self-centred. Sorry.

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Image from Family Guy, brilliant.

I have been quoted back to myself a couple of times, and it really is the finest thing there is.

A Mate at the Bar: ….and then what happened?

Me: She seemed quite happy. I think she smiled.

A Mate at the Bar: Was it ‘a smile crept up from the depths of her underwear’?

Me: Holy Hell.

Quote from ‘Sex, Death & Canapés’ © Petrina Binney, 2018. For it is I.

UK: https://amzn.to/2MXOaXL   –   USA: https://amzn.to/2olxxHK

Frankly, I live for the day someone quotes Jen’s failed confession from ‘Sex, Death & Venison’ in their wedding vows:

“I love your smile. I love your laugh. I love being here with you. Just standing in the kitchen. I love how lucky you make me feel just to be with you. I love going to sleep, and waking up, with you. I love the way the light plays on your face. I love this. I love us. I love the way you make me feel. I love everything you are, and everything I am when I’m with you. I have loved every inch of these last few weeks and I can’t imagine what my life would have been without them.”

Quote from ‘Sex, Death & Venison’ © Petrina Binney, 2019. Me again.

UK: https://amzn.to/2SYVKRC   –   USA: https://amzn.to/2W0UAai

Gosh, but that’s pretty. It’d take some remembering, I accept, but it would be pretty.

Day #92 The Human Tongue

Don’t get ahead of yourselves. I am referring to speech.

Mostly.

Yes, all right, but let’s get back to speech for a moment. There are things we would still have without human speech, but some of it would lose its meaning.

Poetry: excellent example, if I say so myself. Sometimes, reading in our heads is powerful, but hearing a poem aloud can make all the difference and bring the language to life.

Jokes: I consider myself funny, but I suspect I’m funnier in real life than I am from the page. Maybe I’m mistaken. Do feel free to let me know.

Audiobooks: some people (and I know some of them) don’t have time to sit and read a book to themselves. They don’t necessarily enjoy reading from a Kindle – the light can be hard on the eyes. But a book, read aloud, by a compelling narrator, can be the difference between enjoying a novel and not even bothering with it.

Years back, my mother had a crack at listening to all of the tapes to ‘A Remembrance of Things Past’, until she realised how long it was. She gave up within the first dozen tapes. But audiobooks make a lot of difference to people on long journeys or too busy in their lives to sit and read. (Really, it’s on my list of things to do. Honestly, if I knew I would wind up doing the audiobook myself, I would have made Joaquin Recesvinto a Scotsman.)

Without the human tongue, it’s questionable what we would think of when we consider John Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, Matt Berry, Alan Rickman. In terms of vocal skills, these are among the best.

Occasionally, you get someone who has a stunning singing voice with a speaking voice to break glass. I’ll not name them because one of them died a couple of years ago and that’s disrespectful, and the other one looks like she might sue. I’ll leave her to your imagination.

As well as funny, I think of myself as a gourmand. I love food. I love to cook. I’m very much a throw-every-herb-in-until-it-makes-sense kind of girl. But without the human tongue, food would only be fuel. It could not be an event. A friend of mine has no sense of taste or smell, and I don’t think there’s any individual I feel sorrier for than him. Can you imagine Greek lamb or Mississippi Mud Pie without any flavour? God, what would be the point in anything without the flavour?

But for singing, speaking, tasting and Saturday nights, the human tongue is without equal.

Day #92, have at it.

Day #91 A Water Filter

Now, I’ll admit, I’m new to the team on this one, but we have the hardest water imaginable in East Devon. Really. I know I’ve said it before, but the reason we have such soft skin is that we’ve been bathing in limescale, buffing ourselves to baby-softness for years now, so we have no choice in it.

I have tonnes of time for people who exfoliate but seriously, if I can give any advice, let it be this: have two, maybe three, showers in East Devon. There’s no exfoliant like it and you’ll be soft for the rest of the year.

As it goes, I’ve been drinking coffee since I was seventeen, but I’ve only been able to taste it properly for the last year, when Aimée insisted we get a water filter.

Oh my, I’m spoilt.

From start to finish, through my childhood, I thought water was the most boring drink possible. I now have a new appreciation for it. It’s a lot sweeter than I thought. And, at this time of the year, I’m very grateful for the filtered type because it’s not easy knocking back antihistamines with water, peppered with brick-dust.

Water, people. The future is here, and it’s filtered.

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Day #91 of things to be happy about – water filters.

Day #90 The Hips of Giovanni Ribisi

Day ninety, and I haven’t even run out of ideas. I’ve been drinking though, so I might be a bit slow on getting to the subject, which is….

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Giovanni Ribisi. Or rather, the hips of Giovanni Ribisi.

Yes, he’s a tremendous actor who has been in Friends, X Files, Ted, A Million Ways To Die In The West, and tonnes of other stuff, but more than that – the man has liquid hips. Really.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

I’m unlikely to again.

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And it’s slightly hypnotic. Enjoy.

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My drinking has to do with our coming fifth in the Legion Quiz and Chilli Night, despite our team covering all ages from 25 – 80-ish. But, as it turned out, we were very good at singing along to the music round, but absolutely lousy at remembering the names of the recording artists.

You can’t be great at everything – this is a very good life lesson, and one worth taking note of while I wait for a film deal.

Have an excellent rest-of-the-weekend, everyone.

Day #89 Secrets

Buffy: “So on a scale of one to a million, how much are you hating me right now?”

Willow: “Zero. You were scared, you kept a secret, you know? That’s-it-it’s okay. I mean, secrets aren’t bad. You know, they’re normal. They’re better than normal. They’re good. Secrets are good. Must be a reason why we keep them, right?”

– Buffy and Willow, Revelations, season 3, Buffy The Vampire Slayer

I’ve worked behind the bar for quite some time. I’ve already told my boss: when I reach ten years of pouring, I expect a badge. Or an MBE. I’m not fussy.

Roll on September.

Anywho, in my time behind the bar, I have been told secrets. Big secrets. Huge secrets. Massive, universe-exploding secrets. I’ve been told small secrets. Eeny-weeny secrets that somehow seem enormous, probably because of the number of years they’ve been kept. Whether big, small or indifferent, these things are not mine to report. They will not appear in my books. That would be cheating.

It’s the code of the bar-person. No bar would have kept me for nearly ten years if I couldn’t watch myself. And I would hate to be the one to break the accidental trust we all place in our barmen. The trust might only have been placed because of tequila, but I don’t want to be the one to spoil it.

From time to time, someone will come into the Club and say, “Oh, my God. I’m going to explode. Did you hear about (someone)?”

Chances are, I have, but I can’t say that. Instead, I say, “Possibly.”

Unperturbed, they’ll carry on. “Well, which bit did you hear?”

“No, no, no,” I reply. I like to think there’s a glint in my eye, but it’s probably Southern Comfort. “They don’t keep me here for decoration.”

“Well,” and then the story will fall out them because they simply have to tell someone. I’ll pour the drink and never say a word about it.

But really, I would recommend bar work to anyone who wants to write anything. You learn so much about people by serving them drinks.

Day #88 Hazel Eyes

Now, I’ll qualify this by stating I love all colour eyes. There’s not an eye colour I don’t like. Cliche alert, but perhaps there is some truth to the idea that the eyes are the windows to the soul. I have people in my life with all colours of eye.

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My eyes are caramel brown, a little bit like tiger eye.

Aimée’s eyes are a dusky RAF blue.

My Dad’s eyes were battleship grey.

My Gran’s eyes were cornflower blue.

My Uncle’s eyes are denim blue.

My Mother had the strangest eyes in the family. One was sky blue, one was emerald green.

One day, I hadn’t long been up, and I wandered into my mother’s bedroom. Neither of us said anything for a while, but I realised she was staring at me. Eventually, I had to ask, so I did.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Has one of your eyes turned blue?” she asked.

“No!” I baulked, and ran to the mirror to check.

My face was exactly as I’d left it, so I went back to her bedside to show her.

“Oh, they’re brown,” she replied, deflated. “I don’t like brown eyes.”

Now, that might sound rude, hurtful even. It was funny, largely because normal people don’t start their day that way. I made her a cup of tea and we went back to talking about Eastenders.

My main character has hazel eyes. She’s made up, but she has beautiful eyes.

Day #87 History

Indeed, history. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Aztecs and such.

In all honesty, I think it’s the reason soap operas are so popular.

You’ve got all the big emotions and the borderline incestuous relationships, utterly appalling catastrophes and threats of vengeance, without the heavy-chested, forehead-mopping of opera. And soaps echo so much of ancient history. It comes down to the iron-handed side of human nature. The wars and passions and horror, it’s in all the history books, but it seems to be at that safe distance of – all these people are dust.

Except they’re not. This is just life.

If you haven’t seen the BBC production of ‘Rome’ from 2005 – good lord, you must.

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Let’s take a look at the cast list, shall we?

Kenneth Cranham

Ciaran Hinds

Ray Stevenson

Kevin McKidd

Indira Varma

Polly Walker

James Purefoy

Lindsay Duncan

Ian McNeice

Lyndsey Marshal

The list goes on… and my word, it’s just great. Of course there are gritty moments. Everything was quite brutal in ancient cultures. Life and death were so closely entwined as to be expected, almost with a shrug. And you can learn everything there is in human nature from history. I don’t say that people can’t change. An individual can go through many incarnations in their own life. Just look at Cher.

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That said, people have always been people, and the basics of humanity don’t really go away. There’s something comforting about that.

So, there you have it. Day 87 of #365HappyDays – History. How else can we learn?

Day #86 A Job You Love

Now, according to Google it was either Confucius or Mark Twain who said: “Choose a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”

Like everyone else, probably through the history of time, I’ve had jobs that didn’t matter to me. I’ve had jobs I hated, jobs I coped with, jobs that came with Christmas music on a loop. I’m not great with enforced cheeriness and the hours of jingling did nothing for my peace of mind.

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But a job you love is one of the finest things there is. To wake up with a smile, and the contentment that comes from knowing that what you do actually matters to somebody, is a tremendous feeling. Now, at this point in my career (such as it is), there are a couple of people who genuinely like what I do.

And here’s my point: Now is the time to catch on to my series. It might seem like early days and, all right, it is, but those couple of people mean the absolute world to me. They have given me the wherewithal to do the job I love.

You know who you are.

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In other news, I’ve written a letter to my older self to ensure I stay on track. If I’m not still writing when I’m forty, I’m getting a telling-off from my nearly thirty-seven year old self. I’m prepared. I’ve got a bit of a mouth on me. I hope I keep it.

(whispers) I’m building a career on it.

Day #85 A Jog That Doesn’t Do Damage

We’re back to the ambition posts. I don’t run. I don’t jog. I walk. I walk fast. Frankly, it’s more like marching. Perhaps it would even be marching if I knew how to hold my thumbs. Sid talked me through it once but I think I’m just cursed with inelegant thumbs. No matter how I hold them, they seem to jut out awkwardly.

And, I’ve said this many times at Movie Night so some of you might know this but, if I was being chased down by an axe-murderer, I would hope that a well-timed joke would be enough to save my skin. I don’t think I could hurry my pace even in desperate circumstances.

However, it’s not just lack of practise, fitness, finesse or thinness that puts me off vigorous jogging. It’s not the many years of smoking, drinking and general slouching that turns me cold. It’s not that I turn reddish purple at the slightest hint of purposeful velocity. It’s that modern bras don’t come with enough support.

If you don’t remember them, you’ll have seen the 1940s style bras, the pointed Madonna-esque cotton jobs. They had inch-thick straps and seemed pretty damn sturdy. Like two chest-mounted air raid shelters, with zigzag stitching.

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I need one of those. But in violet. Or turquoise. Might as well give the paramedics something pretty to look at when they resuscitate me.