Loopy Lou |

In this age of needing a Face lift when you really don’t need one, and dogs being dressed up as babies, I don’t understand what happened to the word Love. At one time it was written as was intended, in a myriad of ways–In fancy font and in block capitals–But now it has been reduced to something so much less meaningful: the xxx is what I’m talking about. There is no doubt in my mind that the xxx has more or less taken over. What must Cupid think!

This is on my mind mainly because it was my birthday the other day, and my boyfriend gave me a really lovely card. It had kittens fighting on the front, and I adored it from the moment I laid eyes on it. And then I opened it and read the message, and I was still smiling–But then I moved my eyes lower and saw it where that word should be–The word. Instead of the L word was xxx! I swear the exclamation mark almost broke my stupid romantic heart–

Then it was just awkward, of course. I didn’t want to talk (I was crying) and my boyfriend, bless him, just wanted to know what was wrong. And I tried I really did. I tried to tell him what was wrong, and it just sounded stupid and girly. But, when I finally did tell him, he smiled at me. The evening turned out fine in the end, and after that he promised he’d try harder.

“We aim to quantify and make significant the complex and harrowingly difficult to understand logic that surrounds web-space design, and by doing so make more productive and efficient the underlying nature of your burgeoning business. In essence, we aim to make life simpler for our customers”: Really? You could have fooled me. From that ‘simple’ sentence I had the strangest feeling that actually what they really wanted was to baffle me and cause me a severe mental break-down–

Yes people, we now live in the age of high-speed, high-tech information; coming at us from all angles, twenty-four-hours-per-day. As such many businesses have adopted the ‘chuck as many complicated words at the consumer as is metaphorically possible’ ethos, and because of this horse insurance is now known as equine insurance and having your carpet cleaned is known, in some circles, as ‘initiating a hygienically sound, no-nonsense approach to extricating all the grime and filth from your precious carpet’. Why! Why does it have to be this way?! Why does it all have to be so ludicrously overdone? That’s the really big question of the millennium. Forget why we are on this Earth and whether or not extra-terrestrial life exists: I want to know why we have swapped the decent and easy-to-read language of old for stupidly complex and difficult to read information that helps nobody and nothing.

I suppose we can’t have it all and that’s the point. If we want to have high-tech products, technology and new more efficient ways to live our life, we will have to accept that language will also change as we go. Simply, we have come too far and we can’t pick and choose what we keep and what we throw away: we have to take it all and do our best with what we get.

So the annual cheese rolling thing has been cancelled, you know that big event where people somewhere in rural Britain (can’t remember where) get together and roll a cheese down a hill. Last year hundreds more people turned up then usual and now it’s been cancelled. I know it’s because of health and safety and that kind of thing but it’s a shame when people can’t get up and roll a cheese down a hill when they want to. It’s not like it’s something that sets out to hurt people and everyone knows what the risks are so if someone gets a bit bumped and bruised then hey that’s life! I think so anyway. I think there’s something sort of beautiful about a bunch of people just hanging out on a hill top and doing something odd just for the pure hell of it. The world is way too sensible in my opinion. There’s something really sad about having to be logical all the time. I mean genuinely sad, as in unhappy. I think happiness is all about moving away from logic and moving towards silliness and the surreal. Don’t you think that the world would be a truly bad place if everyone was sensible and logical all the time? Let’s embrace weirdness! Let’s go out and wear different shoes from different pairs if we want to. Why the hell not? Let’s go and grab silliness by the throat. Let’s hug a cheese instead of a tree and bring a bottle of olive oil instead of a bottle of wine! Why not? The only thing stopping us is social rules and inhibition. Sometimes I want to wear a paper crown to the shops and guess what? I do. I get all sorts of reactions. Some people think I’m a bit unstable and some people know I’m making a statement. I don’t care what people think though, I’m me and if I want to think outside the crazy multicoloured box of life then I will.

As most of you know it was recently my birthday, and my friend Cynthia gave me a chemical skin peel as a gift. Now I have to say, I have no idea what she was trying to convey me; but after I got over the relative shock of how strange the present was, I went and realized that it was actually quite enjoyable. I would suggest it to anyone!

Horrible things have happened as a result of people following trends. Take the shell-suit, for example. A glorified plastic bag, but with colours that would make a drag-queen cry. Had experiments been conducted into the wearing of shell-suits and the big corporations not forced their advertising on us (the kind of experiment I was thinking about was locking people in rooms with shell-suits for a couple of days, and watching their panic rise: enough to suspect that shell-suits are a terrible thing) then no family would have felt like if they didn’t purchase a family-pack of shell-suits they were doing something terribly wrong. The other trend which springs to mind, which I am sure you have guessed, is dunking biscuits in tea. This sordid past-time has its roots in global biscuit firms. “Dunk your biccies it tastes good!” they said. What a ploy! Not only does it ruin the flavour of the tea (seriously it makes it taste like diesel), it perpetuates an idea that tea needs tampering with. TEA! The most sacred of things. If a family of lepers—nothing against lepers but their disease of course—came to your local swimming pool and said “we’d just like to have a swim, you won’t mind the bits of loose skin falling off will you?” Can you reasonably imagine yourself saying “Why would I mind? Please, the more the merrier!”?

I think we must be on the same page about now.

So, there are other more complex reasons why dunking biscuits in tea is a criminal misdemeanor. Contamination is one: what’s happening when you dunk a biscuit is that the tea is becoming infected with biscuit taste. Think it’s not a problem? Well, you’d be wrong. Through many years of abuse, tea flavour has changed and the generations have learned to accept this new flavour as correct. That means that when they taste tea the pure way it should be made, they think there’s something wrong with it!

I live near fields. In fact, out of my back window it’s only fields as far as the eye can see. Sounds boring doesn’t it? Oh, how you’re wrong about that! It’s an awesome thing living near fields. You see all sorts of strange things which you could never witness in a city.

I have seen some pretty bizarre things over the years, but nothing beats what I saw last week–a duck racing a heron. And not in the air, no, that would be far too predictable–no people, these two jokers were racing each other on the ground!

I stepped back from the window, worried that I might ruin the racing-line of one of them by glaring too much at their little beady eyes. To begin with the heron looked like he had the race won—bigger legs and more power, obviously—and then the duck came out of nowhere and stole it at the very last second (unexpected but thrilling). The heron showed his / her utter frustration with a noise that sounded a bit like the noise women in stilettos make when they fall over and break a heel off when drunk. In other words it (the animal) was miffed, and rightly so. He (or she) had let down the species considerably, and I had a strong feeling that the ducks would never let them hear the end of it…

I should mention that I was half-way through a bottle of red wine when I saw this. And I did see it. But I have a feeling that the wine made it much more exciting than it actually was.

So that’s one good reason to always keep a bottle of wine near the window I think. Just make sure the room you are in is not too high off the ground. And by the way, there’s no connection between living near fields and drinking wine. Or women in stilettos and poultry for that matter.

Important news, the ski holidays bookings for our long weekend trip have been looked after. Next monday is the cut off for the downpayment, please get it to me as soon as you can get it together, I will be vrey upset if you don’t!