Every Day I Write the Book

Robert Burns: Would he have blogged?

Definately. What better way to get the ladies?

First of all, thanks to all who responded to my initial three questions about blogging. Ahh, you're just great, so you are. If you missed it, then click here to put your oar in the comments box. There's no time limit, despite what I said earlier.

So to recap, for those who missed the last post, or for any goldfish reading, I’m doing some research for a talk I’m going to give on blogging. In the next wee while I’m asking my blogger readers some questions about their blog-life.

But before I wade in with your next set of questions, one commenter asked me via the email, whether I was going to answer my own questions. It is only fair. Here are my answers to the first three questions from the Misssives post What’s It All About, Alfie? (Which was very nearly What’s it All About, Archie?, after my sister’s father in law sang the wrong words, but only she would have got it, and you would have thought me a mental, so I reverted).

1. What prompted you to start a blog in the first place?
I was doing a lot of travelling in one particular year. First off, I took ten of my students on an exchange trip to Finland for two weeks. During that time I sent regular group emails to friends and family with stories of the goings on of my students and impressions of the land of Death Metal that is Finland. People seemed to find them funny and some people even wrote to me to say that they had read bits to friends or passed them on. Two months later I was off to Sri Lanka on a school trip with my husband (check me!). I was speaking to my own students about how I could set up a travel website so that I could put up my diary for my friends and family, and one of my students said I should do it as a blog. I didn’t know what a blog was. My students set me up with a Myspace page, and off I went.

This kind of thing would happen quite a lot when I was a lecturer. My students also showed me how to retrieve voice mail messages off my mobile, send texts and they told me what a MILF was. Since I left teaching I wonder what stuff I’m missing, now I don’t have them to keep me right.



2. What keeps you doing it?
It has an addictive quality, doesn’t it? Once back from Sri Lanka, I missed doing it, so I started blogging outside of travelling. Pretty soon I started reading other people’s blogs and this lead to the realisation that I was on the wrong blog platform. I didn’t use the acronyms OMG or WTF or LOL and I hadn’t a photo of myself with a fringe over one eye, my breasts exposed and my cheeks sucked in. Myspace was not for me. I moved to Blogger and started the Misssy M Misssives properly. One of the first things I started to read was Post of the Week which introduced me to others’ blogs. When I got first shortlisted for Post of the Week myself, I felt so excited I was nearly sick. Even though I don’t think it got me many readers, it gave me a bit of validation which I think I needed when I first started. In fact POTW isn't doing so well recently...you should all go over and start nominating blog posts you like to reinvigorate it, it is a great idea. See my side bar for a link.

Nearly three years on I would have to say that the readers and feedback I get is a part of the reason I still do it. But to be honest I’d still be writing blogs even if I got no comments. I can’t imagine giving up, it’s part of my life. Even my friends have started calling me Misssy. Misssy’s not my real name, you do know that, right? What would that say about my parents' literacy levels?


3. Has it evolved into anything different as time has gone on?
Well, yes and no. It’s not a travel blog anymore, because I’m not travelling all the time, more’s the pity. I suppose it’s just a personal blog, but I do try to tell stories rather than write a diary. Occasionally, I try different things, like I have recently stuck up a short piece of fiction, and then I had a heated debate which seemed to go down well. I rarely do serious stuff, so I suppose I err on the side of humour. I can’t see that changing. Life’s too serious as it is.

I'd also like to think my writing's got better. Because if it hasn't then.... oh dear.

****

And so to the next set of questions for you all. To the comments box with you!


1. Did you write stuff at all before starting your blog? Tell me more...

2. Did any other writers or bloggers inspire you when you started?

3. Has blogging inspired you to write material outside of your blog?

Again, email if you don't want to share publically. In the words of Dr Frasier Crane, "I'm listening..."

STOP PRESS: Part three questions now up. Click here!

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What's it All About, Alfie?

I have been asked to give a talk about writing for the Word Festival in Aberdeen. More specifically, the talk is to be about writing a blog. So, in the spirit of research (cloaking nosiness) , I thought I’d turn to the readers of the Misssives (the ones who are also bloggers, that is) and beyond, to get your opinions and personal experience. I have a shedload of material I can say about writing the Misssives, but the whole hour can’t all be about my blog. Can it? No it can't, narcissism or no.

So, over the next couple of months leading up to the talk, I thought I’d do the odd post where I ask you all a question or two about your blog and your blogging habits. I have loads of questions, actually, but I’ll limit them to two or three per post.

Today, I want to concentrate on one thing; how your blog started.

So, I have three questions.

1. What prompted you to start a blog in the first place?
2. What keeps you doing it?
3. Has it evolved into anything different as time has gone on?

Of course, if anyone is too shy to reveal anything in the comments box- email me. All contributions are welcome.

C'mon fellow narcissists, let's talk about you!

Stop Press: Jan 29
Thanks for the responses so far- have had a few via email too.For those of you still ruminating- hurry up and comment as I'm putting up the next three questions very soon, (and to the person who mentioned it- I will start the new post with my answers to my initial 3 questions)



If you've already given me answers to these questions, you can jump straight to my next three questions on blogging here.



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Flakes on a Plane

The tenuous excuse I've been
waiting for to post this photo

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I were an extremely rude person devoid of manners but at the same time full of my own importance. I’ve a feeling that it might be sensational.

Your rudeness would take people by surprise and as a result you would usually get whatever it was you wanted, even if you looked like an arsehole getting it. But you wouldn’t care about that, you’re too self-unaware. How liberating to not give two hoots?

The reason I’m thinking about this is that I'm thinking about a woman that I sat next to on an airplane recently. She is an air steward’s nightmare; the high maintenance passenger. My family are sat behind me in a row of three and I am cast adrift one row in front beside Princess, who I immediately assume is clearly unused to having to share anything, which is why she blanks me when I say "Excuse me!" three times in an attempt to squeeze past her into my window seat. (Woohoo! Window seat! Dancer!)

Our twenty something anti-heroine is on the phone chatting loudly. She is describing her situation at this exact moment to her call recipient, as people tend to do on mobile phones, and I’m half expecting her to say, “Yes, I am on the plane, it is dark outside so I don’t care I’ve not got the window seat and there is a woman hovering two inches above me making squeaking noises but she might go away if don’t look at her.”

She chats away and ignores all three polite requests from me to move her ass. For my fourth attempt, I say, “Hi, hello, that’s my seat over there, I need to get into it. Could you move over , please”. Reluctantly, she raises her gaze slowly towards me and, still continuing her conversation, moves her knees to the side. Now anyone who’s been on a BA flight to Aberdeen from London knows that there is not enough space between one’s knees and any other surface present to allow a person to skip past. I look at her knees and then back at her face with a silent ”You are kidding me, Precious, aren’t you?” thought bubble just above my hair.

Wonder of wonders, the still chatting woman huffs a bit and actually gets up into the aisle, and I am able to get to my seat. For the first time in my personal history I am hoping for another person to occupy the empty seat next to me so that I do not have to be the person in closest proximity to the Princess. But this doesn’t happen. The flight is only 1 hour 15 minutes but once someone bugs you, they bug you and nothing is going to change that. A steward comes over and asks her to switch off her phone. She does not acknowledge his presence in any way, but after he has gone, she ends her call. I note from this action that she is aware of an existence outwith herself and therefore can be held fully accountable for being a pain in the ass. Her condition is not a medical one.

The plane takes off and she boredly and noisily flicks through, without reading or even glancing at every single page of the inflight magazine. I have to put my Walkman on to muffle the noise of the pages being palm-slapped and then whooshed over in dramatic fashion.

The drinks cart arrives. “Two cans of Coke” are ordered by Princess without so much as a please or thank you. I ask for a Hemlock and Cranberry with a twist but they only have Gin and Tonic which’ll have to do.

Meeester catches my eye in a ”what the blazes is she like?” type eyebrow manoeuvre. He is living it large with Indy and Junior Misssy behind me, who are not as annoying as Princess despite being up a bit late and having had a whole host of E numbers by way of a sweetie or two at Heathrow.

Dinner arrives. Princess unwraps her food and immediately wolfs her bread roll. As the steward moves off, she calls him back. “I need more bread” she says.

Our steward says that he’ll have to see how many meals are left with an internal additional monologue of “because this isn’t a fucking restaurant, girly, and I’m still serving other people if you hadn’t noticed” apparent in his trained forced smile.

The steward then does the same eyebrow manoeuvre to me that Meeester has done previously, and, just like that, we’ve connected in our distaste for Princess. I know he’s going to save me first if there’s a crash situation. I’m sorted. I smile knowingly to myself as if I’m one of the passengers that makes it to the island from Flight 815 in Lost.

Ten minutes later the returns with a flourish and a genius display of barely restrained passive aggression. Princess is presented with a second bread roll.

“Here’s your extra bread madam. Now, have you got everything that you want?”

“Yes, thanks”

“You sure you’ve got everything?"

"Yes."

"You like two of everything, don’t you madam?”

“Ha, yes”, she says, “Hmmm. Yes, he, he”in a Yes, I'm a Scream Aren't I? type of a way.

Self awareness function-engage!

“Just so you know, I don’t think I can manage a second plane for you, madam.”

The steward winks to me out of sight of Princess.

Yeah, he’s definitely going to save me over her.

You’re toast, Princess.

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Half Ton Son

Last night I forced Meeester to watch a programme on the telly that he had not wanted to watch at the time, so I had recorded it. He didn’t want to watch it because he said that doing so would be voyeuristic. This is after we had watched that bird off Shameless nimbly chew her own toenails on Celebrity Big Brother. Hmmm. The programme was “The Half Ton Son” about Billy, a nineteen year old from Houston- not the Scottish Houston, which has no drive in MacDonalds, to my knowledge but the US Houston which most certainly does.

Watching this documentary segued neatly in my brain to a debate that was raging over at Canadian Blogger Extraordinaire, Ex-Urban Pedestrian’s place about whether obese people should pay for an extra seat on an airplane or whether they should be allocated double seats as a matter of course. My comment was quite hardline. I claimed that being obese was effectively a life choice. Not a choice to be fat, but a choice to overeat, a series of choices made every meal time, every snack time, to ignore your better judgement, to ignore the signals given to you by your body, and eat more than you need. Watching the documentary about this boy last night who, at his peak, weighed over 67 stone, has done nothing to change my mind on this issue. Billy’s greed and eating problem was made doubly worse by a mother who was an enabler of his greed and a willing provider of too much food for her mollycoddled, spoiled son. She was as much to blame for his life threatening size as he was, if not more so. And he was quite happy to devolve responsibility to her.

Now according to the scales on WiiFit, just about everyone is obese, but how many people on a daily basis do you come into contact that are morbidly obese. Me, I used to work with someone who is. Yet, I never saw him eat. Other than that, no, it’s still not really that common to see people in the UK who have massive folds of fat hanging over their front bottom area, are wheezy just walking down a corridor, or who genuinely would need two seats on an airplane.

However in the US, it is extremely common, and I never really saw horrendously morbidly obese people until I worked in New Orleans in 1990. I was shocked and horrified at how human beings could morph into the size these people were. I genuinely had never seen people who looked like that before. And I live in Scotland home of the sliced sausage and the deep fried pizza! What were they doing that was different to the rest of the world?

As I worked in a restaurant which offered a limited selection of “All You Can Eat” items, I served a great deal of obese people. To a man, they all ordered Diet Coke with their 10 consecutive plates of deep fried shrimp or barbecue ribs. The first time I took someone’s diet drink order in this situation, I nearly choked from surprise. I thought they were taking the piss out of me.

The other waiters had a name for this type of customer, they were called “Salads”.

“Why ‘Salad’?” I asked.

“Because they always order a side salad and never touch it” said my colleague.

“Like some kind of coverup,” said another.

“Like the diet drink order?” I said. “Yes, like that. That’s a cover up too”.

People can be fat all over the world, but the level of obesity that I saw in the States horrified me. And running back and forth with the 7^th consecutive plate of something that most people would only manage two of, for someone nudging 30 stone, yes, has made my opinions hardline about this. Little choices, mounting up to becoming something that becomes a health problem, which then becomes an addiction, which then becomes a human rights issue, which then becomes someone else’s fault for offering “All you Can Eat” items, or “Supersize” items, or no extra seat on an airline.

But this all started with little choices. Theirs, their mother’s, whoever...but choices all the same.

Not often we have a serious debate on the Misssives, but what do you think?


Stop Press: Gordon McLean of top blog Informationally Overloaded, who commented earlier here, has written his take on being fat. Read it.

Stop Stop Press: And XUP has opened the debate ever wider. This one will run and run...Read that too.

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Funny Girl

I even love that armpit hair

I want to talk about Streisand. Or Barbra to her friends. I’m sorry, I know this view is not a popular one, but I love Babs. I love her so much that, I tried to be her last night. Me and my excellent husband held a 1969 Party for some reason, and I channeled La Streisand. Sadly, the voice isn’t up to par in any way, but that’s not the point- I just needed the Streisand vibe, the Streisand aura, the Streisand magic.

Here are some thoughts on Barbra related stuff:

• On paper she’s an ugly bird- long hooked nose, one eye going to the shops, the other coming back with the change- but in reality she’s stunningly beautiful. How can that be? She is a visual conundrum. She shouldn't work, but she does.
  

• I didn’t like them taking the piss out of her on South Park. OK, turning her into a Manga robot was a tiny bit funny, but in my heart of hearts I felt it wasn’t right. Nobody who could sing Evergreen and nearly have me crashing my car unable to see out the windscreen through tears could ever destroy a whole town, much less exterminate rude little boys with laser beams from her eyes. To suggest this is sheer unbridled lunacy.

Wrongness

• Barbara once made a play for Walter Matthau and was flatly turned down. You are not going to put that in your CV, are you? It’s amazing she was ever able to recover from that. As upsetting as it would have been for my herione, I would, however, have loved to know exactly how Matthau rejected her. I like to think that it might have gone something like this, “Come on, you crazy beaky broad, are you kiddin’ me??? With my nose, and your nose....ahhh, getoutahere!”

• I played her duet album with Barry Gibb, Guilty, to get ready on my wedding day. My sister did the same. We did it in a non-ironic way. Our love for the Streister is pure ..oh, and soft as an easy chair, fresh as the morning air, seldom seen by two.

• My friend, Emma, once went as La Streisand to a party and forced her husband to go as Kris Kristofferson, paying homage to the duo in the outstanding 1970's film, A Star is Born which should have got Oscars for the hair alone. In one of the most hilarious moments of my entire life my friend, Sezza, said this to the wannabe Kris, “Where did you get those fake teeth- they are hilarious!” They were his own teeth. Another argument for having video recordable eyesight for later playback. Come on Future, provide us with that technology forthwith!

• I am the only person in the world to have enjoyed both “Prince of Tides” and “The Mirror Has Two Faces”. Guilty as charged, take me to the cooler, officer.

• Babs is so famous that Word Spellcheck was able to provide me with the correct spelling of her name when I spelled it Striesand, not one minute ago. Now that's what I call being an icon!
  

So here’s a nice pic of Barbra and then one of me being Barbra.

Babs enjoys a cheeky class of Pomagne

Misssy cuddles up to mystery blond

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In Cold Blood

Maggie Simpson was a January baby, no doubt about it.

January babies of the Northern Hemisphere are always cold. Particularly cosseted first children like me born in January, who are wrapped like little sausage rolls from the second they push their little nose out past the perineum straight into layers of wool and towelling and anorakage. For the first six months of their lives they are bound Sarchophagus-like in blankets and quilting, topped off with woolly bonnets and then squeezed into a contraption that is a hybrid coat and sleeping bag. Their skin doesn’t see the sun or feel the air til July, a good seven months after having the vernix washed off it.

When I heard that Michael Jackson had nick named his kid Blanket, I thought, “That should have been my name...”

So I’m cold. Yes, yes, we all are, but I am particularly cold because I’m a January baby and no amount of clothing is ever enough to warm me up. I’ve been away recently to Disneyland and Paris where it was colder than the chest freezer of Satan in his Hades home, and this is what I wore from skin outwards:

1. A bra (woot woo)
2. A thermal strappy vest
3. A long sleeved thermal vest
4. A long-sleeved t-shirt
5. A short sleeved t-shirt ( I only put it on cos it was there)
6. A cashmere jumper
7. Another cashmere jumper
8. Woolly tights (Regulation issue for all Scottish women past October)
9. Jeans
10. Four cheese baguettes for sneaking into Disneyland strapped to my body (they don’t let you bring food in but their’s is shit and costs £50 per item and you have to speak French to get it from them)
11. A leather jacket
12. A padded coat
13. Hat
14. Gloves
15. Scarf (wound around torso for warmth)
16. Another scarf (for decorative purposes)

Someone actually thought I was one of the Disney characters I was that padded. I let them take my photo and said nothing.

So I’m a cold January baby born 7^th January. I won’t be blogging tomorrow as the mid-life

crisis officially begins and apparently that’s quite time consuming.....

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