Skol!

I was very aware of two things when I undertook the challenge not to drink for month:

1. That many people (myself included) wouldn’t see it as much of a trial and not really worthy of fundraising, particularly when compared to 'proper' challenges like marathons, triathlons and the like.http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/sober-for-october-charity-giving-baby-wearing-week-go-home-on-time-black-lives-matter-black-history-a7339326.html
2. In talking about how hard I found it, I risked making myself sound like an alcoholic.

Well, it has been hugely challenging. Every time I’ve been out in September, (and,as I said in a previous post, September had a few anniversaries, birthdays and social engagements:
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=978691151524409415#editor/target=post;postID=2960031899805656908;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=5;src=postname)
I’ve felt a little kick of...of what exactly? Longing? Craving? Blimey, I really do sound like a lush...

On Fridays, whilst chatting to some of the parents (and staff) at school and nursery pick-ups, I’ve had to put on a rueful, comedy sad face - listening to them talking about how much they were looking forward to opening a bottle of wine that evening (or Prosecco, or gin, or whatever). Yes, it’s a bit of a cliche - the whole ‘wine o’clock’ thing but one which many people buy into.

I don’t think I’m an alcoholic. I haven’t suffered from the D.Ts, since I stopped drinking, or had any of the other withdrawal symptoms, which can (according to webMD) include :

• Shaky hands
• Sweating
• Mild anxiety
• Nausea
• Vomiting
• Headache
• Insomnia

But, as I said, I haven’t found it easy.

Is this because I reach for an alcoholic drink, rather than doing yoga, when I feel stressed?

Is it because I associate alcohol with celebrations?

Is it because going out for dinner doesn’t feel like enough of a treat (come on, isn’t the fact that you don’t have to cook it or clean up after it enough??) without a glass of wine?

Is it for all of those reasons? Probably.

Am I going to give up drink forever? Nooooooooo!

Am I going to think more about measures and moderation? Yes!

Did I lose any weight? No I f*cking didn’t and this is the last time, dear reader, you’ll ever see/hear me mention weight. I feel that harping on about it makes me a BAD FEMINIST and also a bit boring so that’s it, am done talking about it. If I ever mention my own or anyone else’s weight again, feel free to throw gin in my face (preferably mixed with elderflower tonic...there she goes with the cliches again!).

So, there you have it, not long now before I can start knocking them back again (in moderation!).

Thank you for bearing with me while I've gone on and on about it.

And thank you to all who sponsored me! There's still time, if you haven't done so already:

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Shyama-Kasinathan-dryathlete2016?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ExactTarget&utm_campaign=20160929_70371

Pilot Season

I’ve watched three excellent comedy pilots recently and, as I’m running out of things to watch on Netflix and the Great British Bake Off is to go over to the dark side, I hope that all of them get picked up.

Megalith, Amazon, have produced their own little stable,  (and I’ve kind of pinched their tagline for this post) Three new pilots: I love Dick, The Tick and some other thing with Jean-Claude Van Damme in it (that I couldn’t be bothered to watch). The one that stood out for me was I Love Dick.

https://www.amazon.com/b?node=9940930011

Based on the experimental, (part-memoir) novel by Chris Krauss, of the same name; I Love Dick is funny, innovative and quite touching, in an offbeat way.

The central character of I love Dick (also called CHRIS KRAUSS) is a struggling filmmaker who (in her own words) is ‘straddling forty’ and accompanies her husband, SYLVERE (Griffin Dunne) to a Texas outland, which houses a ramshackle artist's community. Chris is played by Kathryn Hahn, more often seen in minor but memorable comedy roles, she appeared in Parks and Recreation as a ruthless political adviser. Sylvere is due to teach a class at a school run by the DICK of the title - a quirky and charismatic Kevin Bacon. Chris reluctantly accompanies Sylvere to a welcome party that is populated by crass, pretentious types, who are both unwelcoming and overfamiliar, in equal parts.

“You’re the holocaust wife.” A party quest says to Chris. (Sylvere’s speciality is a ‘new interpretation’ of the holocaust).

In amongst all the posturing nonsense, sits Dick, nonchalantly rolling himself a cigarette. Chris is instantly captivated by him and invites Dick out to dinner with she and Sylvere. Dick accepts and, at the dinner, is both challenging and flirtatious and Chris seems to fall instantly in love with him (or form an instant infatuation, depending how you view it). The program is interspersed by her voiceover, reading out snippets of her letters to him (the sourcebook is made up of letters).

‘Dear Dick, Every letter is a love letter.’

The words flash up, white on a red background, accompanied by Hahn’s voiceover.

The stories that Chris writes about Dick, the narrative that she weaves around him, seem to ignite something in Chris and Sylvere’s marriage.

I’m intrigued to see where the program makers will take the story, if I Love Dick gets made into a series. I’m reading the book at the moment and the program bears only a slight resemblance to it. The book is made up of letters, meditations on art, gender politics and memoir. It is highly personal and revelatory (At least, It seems so, but we are unclear how much of it is fiction). The flyleaf proclaims it to be the ‘most important feminist book of a decade’.  It doesn’t have much of a plot to it, it’s more of a treatise. It poses something of a challenge in terms of transferring this into a linear narrative (perhaps they won’t even try) and this is why it must be picked up! It’s the most interesting thing to emerge from an already stellar, U.S stable, this year.

The second, pilot I watched, homegrown this time, was The Circuit, written by Sharon Horgan and Dennis Kelly, who haven’t collaborated since the brilliant BBC3 comedy, Pulling.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-circuit

The Circuit  features the most excruciating social gathering since Abigail’s Party.  Adeel Akhtar and Eva Birthistle play hapless GABE and NAT who end up at a dinner party at the house of warring couple HELENE and SASHA.  They seem to step, along with the other guests, directly into a domestic fallout, between the hosting couple, At one point the diners hide in the bathroom for a while, under the guise of examining the new fixtures.

The Circuit is hilarious, albeit uncomfortable, viewing. There are misunderstandings, rows and broken bottles. It’s weird but when you try a describe it - it makes it sound like a slightly more violent version of Terry and June but this doesn’t really convey how funny it is. Just give it a watch and see what you think.

Finally, the third pilot, another British one - Motherland.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v3wrn

Sharon Horgan has her hand in this one too, as well as comedy olympian, Graham Linehan, comedian Holly Walsh and Linehan’s wife Helen Linehan.

Anna Maxwell Martin plays a working mother, JULIA, who gets her dates mixed up and tries to take her children into school in the half term. She unexpectedly finds herself having to entertain her own and someone else’s kids and her frantic desperation, as she tries to sort out some childcare, is all too familiar. But if this makes it sound like something that only smug marrieds can relate too, think again. Motherland perfectly encapsulates the boredom, ennui and quiet panic, which often accompany parenthood. It also examines the rather scary and alienating world of the school gate mafia - the coterie of full time, uber parents (generally mothers) who don’t make newcomers particularly welcome.

A male parent, KEVIN, played brilliantly by Paul Ready - who also appears in The Circuit, playing a vulnerable, sensitive party guest, is made very unwelcome by the uber mums, as is LIZ (played by Diane Morgan, more commonly known as Philomena Cunk, acolyte of Charlie Brooker). Single mum, Liz, is seen as a sexual threat but doesn’t seem to care about the fact that she and Kevin have been exiled from the ‘big table’ in the coffee shop.

Motherland basically follows a day in the life of Julia trying to cope with being in sole charge of her own children but it is very, very funny!

Is it October yet?

Day 15 of the ‘Dryathalon’ challenge and these are my findings:

A lot of the time, in the past, when I thought I was hungover, I was actually just really, really tired!

How do I know this? Because I have experienced that same fuzzy-headedness, lethargy and low-level despair several times now, without having consumed a drop the night before. So I can now conclude that it was sleep deprivation rather than dehydration, that was making me feel like a chewed-up weevil.

Giving up drink doesn’t necessary lead to weight loss.

I put on a pound and a half in my first week off the sauce!

It’s not that alcohol makes you thin - that would be an outrageous claim, I think it’s that, for me, I compensate for not drinking by eating sweet things. I keep thinking - ah well, I must be saving so many calories by not drinking, so I may as well eat this, as I shovel in the biscuits. The other night I was home alone, quite content with the twin tranquillisers of Netflix and chocolate trifle at my disposal and I binged on both.

‘You are replacing alcohol with sugar’, a couple of people have observed.
(They had some of those posh biscuits at a training day, last week; the ones that have been decorated with real gold and have 3 different types of chocolate, applied in different ways, onto different surfaces.)

It’s not that you can’t have fun, without drinking, it’s just that life seems a little lacklustre without it!

This is worrying; the fact that I’m finding it so difficult forces me to wonder whether I have a problem, seriously, am I an addict? I keep craving alcohol at random moments.

I think this is a result of the ‘I’m on a diet’ phenomenon: as soon as you cut something out and tell yourself that it is forbidden, you want it. (This is just one of the many reasons why diets don't work, people!) I could go into a melodramatic reverie here about how I’m seeing the world in black and white at the moment and that food has no flavour but that wouldn’t be accurate. Struggling for an analogy for the world without booze, I was thinking about the parched, flat, unyielding landscape of Kansas, in The Wizard of Oz, the other day. However, the thing about that is that, ultimately, Dorothy preferred Kansas (‘there’s no place like home’) to the vivid candyland of Oz, didn't she?

By the end of this month will I suddenly decide that I don’t need to drink any more? Somehow I seriously doubt it and am already planning a celebratory bottle of fizz for the first of October.

I’m beginning to understand why everyone makes such a fuss about coffee

I love tea but coffee carries more of a hit.

I am no more motivated now than when I allowed myself to drink

I’d just like to get something straight here - I don’t actually drink that much, no really, stop chortling, it’s true! Three or four times a week at most! Sometimes just once a week, at the weekend. And if I drink at home I have one or two glasses of wine (before falling asleep on the sofa), so perhaps it was somewhat unrealistic to expect a sea change in appearance/attitude/sleep patterns etc. But it is all too easy to focus on certain things as being factors that are holding us back or making us behave in a certain way, when really the responsibility lies within ourselves, our own psyche.

So, of course, the tea-totalling me is still lacking a little in courage and drive.

Also, I don’t think that being in a state of inebriation ever made me say anything I didn’t mean, it’s just that alcohol amplifies and sometimes slightly distorts things.

So, with that, I leave you to go and make myself a ‘real’ coffee.

It’s nearly the weekend, have fun my friends, I shall be raising a glass of soda water and lime at a friend’s birthday celebration. Cheers!

And if you want to donate to the fundraising page, here is the link:
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Shyama-Kasinathan-dryathlete2016?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ExactTarget&utm_campaign=20160915_70371

Books: the good, the bad and the patently ridiculous

Have you ever read a book that was so bad, you felt ashamed of yourself for finishing it?

All along, you knew that the book was dreadful; that the characters were poorly drawn and unbelievable, that the content had ‘nothing to say about my life’, and that the book had no moral centre, and yet you still kept reading it. Why??

I have just read such a book and now I feel grubby and ashamed.

Maestra - by L.S Hilton had been recommended to me, by someone who’s opinion I respect, as a well-written, more intellectual version of Fifty Shades of Grey. This person hasn’t actually read Maestra, just read about it, and the assumption seemed to be that just because L.S Hinton is an Oxford graduate, who usually writes historical books, that the book would be a masterpiece (with a load of sex thrown in).

This is not the case at all. The book reads like a terrible (but not a particularly entertaining) 1980/90s bonkbuster. Set in the art-world (with plenty of uninteresting detail of how things function in an auction house), the characters are brittle and one dimensional and there are loads of references to fashion labels. I suppose this is supposed to make it aspirational but I couldn’t give a flying f**k about designer brands and all mention of them becomes tedious very quickly. And the sex, the sex is dreadful, just so woeful. It is the most mechanical, joyless and unerotic sex, I’ve read. There is no way of writing this without sounding sexist so I’m just going to say it; the sex reads like it has been written by a man, or an adolescent boy, because there is so little ‘preamble’.

The characters in Maestra eat a lot of fish and figs before getting down to business (heavily unsubtle symbolism of food representing genitalia). There is a particularly revolting scene where a character retrieves a sea urchin for he and the main protagonist, Judith, to eat raw before following this appetising snack up with some deeply unsexy sex. They bark instructions at each other, like despotic P.E teachers, and really, they may as well have been playing rounders for all the interest it held.

There is a particularly gruesome murder, towards the end of the book, which features dismemberment, which is only slightly less unpalatable than the sex scenes.

The bright red cover features an illustration of a vertical tear - more clunkingly unsubtle symbolism, and a sticker warning of adult content. There is a picture of the author on the flyleaf and, guess what? She has long blonde hair and wears designer clothing, so she must be qualified to write erotic fiction. Far more so than old E.L James who, leather jacket notwithstanding, looks like she’d be perfectly at home behind the cake stall at a jumble sale. (I amused myself this morning by imagining what the 'E' in E. L. James stood for. The most likely candidate would be Elaine but I was trying to imagine the unsexiest moniker: Edith? Ethel? Edna?) How about L.S Hilton? Linda? Leeza?)

Anyway, Maestra is a cold, hard, brutal book and it reads like the person who has written it, hates humanity. People get murdered, but you don’t care, because everyone in it is horrible. The main character reeks revenge on her enemies but you are indifferent, because she is the most revolting one of the lot.

Tea-totalling fun

Hi there, Reader!

How are you? Did you have a good summer? I sincerely hope so. Haven’t we had some exceptionally fine weather? I got to do one of my very favourite things this summer, but I’ll come back to that later. Having resolved to give up drink for the month of September, I’ve been forced to reflect on fun things to do, that don’t require* any alcohol.

*Technically, nothing actually ‘requires’ alcohol to enjoy it - ya know; dancing, weddings, meals out...technically, they can all be enjoyed when you’re not drinking. Am just mentally sifting through the weddings and events that I attended (as an adult) and didn’t drink and usually this was because I was a) hungover OR b) Pregnant (but never both, what sort of person do you think I am??). But we don’t actually need to drink, do we? Have you ever been at a wedding and witnessed the kids, skidding across the shiny, parquet floor on their knees (before being hoiked up by some killjoy adult)? They didn't need booze have a good time, did they? Chances are, they were having a far better time than you were - you poor, drunken sap! (Sometimes, in the quest for a natural ‘high’ I have been known to copy my kids and roll down hills or climb trees, it doesn’t always end badly.)

Two days dry now and am still waiting to be suffused with feelings of wellness! I thought that I wouldn’t meet my first hurdle until tomorrow, when I’m going to a big, family lunch (where the wine usually flows like water). But actually, my first hurdle came last night when I went out for dinner with the immediate family. I don’t drink much when I go out with the children, but I would usually have a glass of wine and had to content myself with a cranberry juice instead. (If you think that giving up drinking for a month is not really worthy of fundraising: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Shyama-Kasinathan-dryathlete2016, especially when compared to running a marathon or shaving your head, may I suggest that you try it yourself; it’s quite scary to see how much alcohol plays a part in your life.) And this morning, how unfair is this, I felt hungover without having touched a drop. Perhaps it was the rich, heavy meal, but I slept very badly last night and woke up with a dry mouth and fuzzy head (and was plagued by demons in the early hours).

So, anyway, enough moaning, back to the fun things:

1. Swimming in the Sea (One of my favourite things to do in the world, ever!)

You don’t need drink to enjoy this, in fact, I (and everyone else) would strongly advise against it. I’ve always loved swimming in the sea and this year did it on the hottest day of the year, after a relatively warm summer, so it had the bonus of not making it feel like I was going have a heart attack when I first ventured into the water.

Why is it so brilliant? The sense of peace, the feeling of space (when you look out to sea), and, sorry to get all hippy-dippy about it, but the feeling of being connected to/ at one with nature.

2. Walking through the park, or any other green space

I have to strongly resist the urge here to say that nothing finishes off a nice long walk better than a nice pint of bitter shandy/glass of red wine/ice-cold beer.

Imagine a long walk on a cold, frosty day, finished off with a warming hot chocolate/pot of tea/coffee/pint of foaming nut-brown ale (no, no, no - sod off you - voice of the lush!)/peppermint tea!

3. Seeing a really good children’s film at the cinema

I worried at first that trips to the cinema with the noisy little blighters would be fraught, stressful affairs but I needn’t have worried. When you go and see a children’s film on a weekend morning, ALL the kids are noisy, so you don’t have to worry too much about shushing yours. Go and see the film towards the end of its run and you have the cinema to yourselves. (Take a big bag, sneak in your own, cheaper snacks - you don’t really need me to tell you this, right? Everyone does it, don’t they?? But, shush, don’t tell anyone that I advocated it.)

Best films seen recently:

Paddington

Minions

Finding Dory

4. Reading

Have you ever tried to read when you are drunk? On the way home from after-work drinks, maybe? It’s a disaster, you can’t remember where you got up to when you pick the book up again, the next day. Don’t read and drink, folks, enjoy your Kindle responsibly.

The perfect accompaniment to a book? A cup of tea - NEWSFLASH - tea retains its heat better than coffee, I think this might be a scientific fact, but I can’t be bothered to research it. Try it now - go and make yourself a tea and a coffee and see what happens.

5. Afternoon Tea

Some people might argue that an afternoon tea is only topped when it comes with a glass of champagne. (Not me, now that the voice of the lush has been kicked into submission.) I mean, who needs bubbles when you have crustless finger sandwiches and little cakes and scones and things…..?

Are you convinced yet? (Am I....?)