Monday 22 December 2008

Home #7

Duffy's a bit odd, isn't she? I've just found myself watching her doing a BBC session in somewhere called St Lukes. It looks like an old church, now that she mentioned the name of the place. she's wearing what appears to be an empty teabag with suitable holes cut out of it for her arms and legs. And her head, of course. She doesn't seem to have a philtrum, like Julia Roberts, and is about as Welsh as it may be possible to be. 

All of this renders her disarmingly natural, unexpectedly so from my jaundiced perspective. I was expecting someone a lot more showy. Even her dancing, to use entirely the wrong word, is charmingly clunky, which is rich coming from me. All in all I've rapidly started to become quite fond of her, in a relieved sort of way. She seems far too real to be successful in this day and age.

Unfortunately she sings like she's recently had a tracheotomy at the Helium Clinic. It's weird, because on the radio, I'm thinking of the song 'Warwick Avenue', her voice is much more sultry and husky. Like a 7 year old doing Lauren Bacall or Lee Marvin, maybe. A smoker's voice. I suppose if Penelope Pitstop smoked.. oh, I'll shut up about her now. Just felt compelled to mention it.

Talking of smoking - and I'll take a bow now for that effortless segue, if you don't mind - I've not precisely succeeded in my proposed quittage, I'm sorry to say. It's very hard, after all, and made harder when you're up till 7am every day in a Danish heavy-drinking milieu, but that's not a very good excuse, because there are no very good excuses.

So I'm a bit disappointed in myself. This is nothing new. 

However, time is wearing on - as usual - and, while it's still on my side, it's tapping its fingers on its coffee table and glancing at the clock. Why it would glance at the clock, except for the purposes of a rubbish metaphor, I don't know. It's 12.15 am, is my excuse.

So. Tomorrow I'm off to the running-shoe-shop. Then to the gym. I have to get back on track, as it were. I don't feel like I've ever been on the track in the first place, but I know I have felt that way only recently, and 'on track' is defined by feeling a certain way, so I'm sure I'll remember what I'm missing, and therefore be reassured by the missing of it. (This is a clumsy way of saying that I'll realise what progress I've made, however scant the progress may be, once I get back into the regime).

Christmas shopping. Oh dear. That'll have to be shoehorned into tomorrow somehow. I'm tempted to tell all of my potential giftees that my gift to them this year is my solemn pledge to do the best I can over the coming months to succeed next May and trust in their selfless, wise and thankful approbation, but I don't think I'll get away with it. Anyway, you can't wrap stuff like that up. You can wrap failure up, of course, in fact that's all you can do with it, but what kind of present is that?

It'll be fine. Small beans in the terrific chile of life. 

Right, Duffy's finished, I'm off to watch Survivors.


(PS: thanks for the comments. It's easy to say that feedback like that really means a lot to me when I'm writing this nonsense, but it's true. It's nice to know that it's not just me ranting into nowhere. Merry christmas to you, I really hope it's just one of many, many good ones to come :o)