Have a little bit of pointless fun every day

Ticking this off in the Great Easter Purge, but I’ll continue to post any particularly fun and pointless shenanigans.

He had been shopping in HMV, and was at the till with four slash-and-maim Japanese horror titles when he glanced down and right next to the till he saw the first series of Maid Marian and Her Merry Men on DVD! He immediately ditched the gore in favour of the kiddy show – God knows what the people in the shop thought of his change of heart – and wowee what a wise choice he made. We watched four of them last night and it’s even more brilliant than I remembered it. Now I know where half mine and my brother’s family quotes come from! So, so funny, and a surprising amount of adult jokes, thinly veiled political comment – wonder what Paolo would make of it – and a strange obsession with hot water bottles.

Waiting for maxsquatch to pick me up in York to complete my journey, I had an unexpected hour to kill. So I went to get a takeaway coffee with the intention of wandering along the river enjoying the peace and quiet. The man in the cafe was so friendly that on a whim I asked him if they had any old bread or anything I could take to feed the ducks, and to my delight he gave me a carrier bag full to brimming with old bread, scones, even croissants and pains au chocolat. There was no way I could get rid of the lot myself, so I meandered along, doling out dried-out baked goods to the other people on the river bank like some kind of pied piper till there were dozens of people chucking food to the ducks. I’m amazed they didn’t sink. I wound up spending a pleasant half an hour chatting to a gang of sixth-form students on a day out, while we split an old loaf and fed a couple of aggressive geese. One of them commented to me that she hadn’t fed ducks for years and had forgotten how much fun it was, and I was really chuffed. On the way back to meet Max I felt really happy and smiled at everyone I saw on the way. About half of them smiled back genuinely, and I left York on a real high, feeling like I’d really impacted positively on lots of people’s days. It was lovely!

..to do a backing-singer-style dance, with lots of interpretive hand movements, to “School of Rock”. Ooh, keyboard break, time to play air keyboard on the desk!

So many of my pointless fun entries are dance-based. I’m beginning to wonder if it does actually serve a purpose after all.

Ooh, also, I’ve just got my hands on loads of Half Man Half Biscuit songs and I’m guffawing away at the lyrics.

“Well, I heard a lovely rumour,
That Bette Midler had a tumour,
So gleefully I went to tell my friends,
But they said it was a lie,
That she wasn’t going to die,
“And by the way, have we got news for you!”

And they told me that the man I had always known as Dad
Hadn’t met my mum when I was born,
And they told me that I am, but I hope to God I’m not
The bastard son of Dean Friedman”

Baloo was under my duvet, wound around my ankles and feet like a kitty muff (tee hee!), with his little chin resting on the bridge of my foot. Askit had draped himself around my head so I was wearing him like a Russian hat. I reached for my phone to take a photo but he let out a plaintive miaow which quite clearly translated as “Gawd! I was comfy, you bitch”, and stalked off to gaze moodily out of the window.

..Lucyann and I were watching Just the Two of Us – pure plebdazzle-party style entertainment. Chris Fountain and Jo O’Meara were singing “A Whole New World” from Aladdin, which just happens to be one of our favourite singalong songs. In fact, we hold a vague ambition to work out a folk duet version of this and perform it at one of Lucy’s gigs. Anyway, the song got stuck in our heads as it is wont to do and we started singing it, but the lyrics eventually mutated until they went:

I can show you my nose
Shining, shimmering splendour
Tell me, princess, when did you last let your nose decide?

A whole new nose (yes, it’s under your eyes)
A new fantastic sense of smell
I can sniff anything
From nice to ming
Let me share my whole new nose with you

I have no idea where the nose theme came from but we kept up singing it for about an hour and it just didn’t get any less funny.

Saturday night saw me, paperfaerie, lucyann and sweetcherrypie out on the lash to mark the emigration to New Zealand of a friend of ours and it was fun fun fun fun fun! We did lots and lots of tag-team dancing, made a right exhibition of ourselves and cared not a jot what people thought of us. In fact, while I was talking to paperfaerie in the toilet, sweetcherrypie and a mutual friend of ours apparently performed a showstopping dance routine that had people actually taking pictures. I am gutted that I missed it. But here’s a pic of the Newcastle 43T laydeez. L – R Lucyann, me, sweetcherrypie and paperfaerie.

The other day Lucyann and I were sitting drinking tea, as we are wont to do. We both started slurping our tea in an exaggerated fashion, with a noisy gulp and a refreshed “Aaaah!” We steadily got noisier and noisier with the giggling and the trying to out-do each other until I had Lucy in a kind of Pavlov’s Dog scenario where she was unable to get anywhere near her tea for a genuine sip because every time she did, I raised my cup to my own mouth and just seeing me out of the corner of her eye made her collapse in giggles. This went on for a good ten minutes. Yes, we are extremely childish.

Spurred on by my success in avoiding supermarket rage by harnessing the power of dance, I’ve been lord of the inappropriate-place dance over the last few days, mainly due to my new-found addiction to “Chicken Payback” by The Bees. Much of Christmas Day was spent hanging out on the back stairs smoking out the door with friends, and within seconds of me putting it on the stereo, five or six of us were doing crazy ‘60s dancing all lined up on the steps. After “Chicken Payback”, we put on Chas ‘n’ Dave’s Old Time Singalong – an hour and a quarter of non-stop (not even between songs!) all-rahnd-the-old-joanna singalong, “White Cliffs of Dover” and “Knees Up Mother Brown” and everything. Ben and I did a sort of pearly king and queen do-se-do round the kitchen. The Chas ‘n’ Dave became hypnotic after a while – it really is quite relentless, like hardcore trance for elderly Cockneys. It was perfect on the day, though, ridiculous as it was. It got everyone nodding their head and spawned silly dancing, and that’s good enough for me.

Oh, and yesterday I danced in the bath (to “Chicken Payback” again, sorry) and this afternoon I mamboed round the bedroom with Baloo to the Richard Cheese cover of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”.

They’re a bad, bad, bad place. Panic-stricken fights breaking out over the last bag of frozen sprouts. No Terry’s chocolate oranges to be had for love nor money. Thank God I’m a veggie and don’t have to indulge in a bare-knuckle fight for a turkey. But still I braved Tesco yesterday, for stuffing to take to Roy’s on Xmas day, and Xmas treats to put in my malfunctioning fridge, and I had a bit of pointless fun by sticking The Zutons on my MP3 player and dancing down the aisles lip synching along, ignoring all the sour-faced dawdlers who glared at me as if to say “For God’s sake, it’s Christmas, get a bloody stress on, woman.”