The One Where Life's A Treat;

And by ‘treat’ I mean ‘giant crap-hole’.

So, hi all! Things have been quiet here on the blogfront, so hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Mine, unfortunately, has been kind of Crappy. Not to be all Doom & Gloom, but the entire Christmas holidays haven’t really gone according to plan. Various plans were cancelled because as soon as I didn’t have the Deathly Flu Bug anymore it hijacked my friends’ immune systems, and then I developed Cabin Fever & Repressed Anger Issues. I’ve basically become nocturnal, so I may just have to marry David and become Mrs Gravedigger, and my attitude is somewhere in the realm of “Sunlight bad, darkness good.” I unintentionally developed the habit of not taking my medication, but my head didn’t go ~snap~crackle~ or ~pop~ and I’m now getting back into the habit of taking it again, so it’s all good. But yeah, I felt a little like Harry during the Order of the Phoenix when he’s constantly angry and just generally a bit of a miserable git. HOWEVER, I now know that for future reference I am a fundamentally optimistic person and I simply have to let myself experience the lowest possible level of Doom & Gloom before climbing my way out of the sewer > basement > ground level > a million flights of stairs/lift > roof terrace, which is where I’m at now.

Anyway, that’s just the Rosie-centric prelude to the real event. To cut a long story short (and my rambling skills guarantee that it would be a loooo-hongggg story) there’s been a nice festive pall hanging over the Christmas/New Year period because my nanny got rushed to hospital for something serious enough on its own account, and then in her v. confused state attempted to ninja-escape her hospital bed but only ended up falling straight backwards and fracturing her skull on the floor instead. AWESOME. Her brain was leaking the red stuff, but the doctors refused to operate because the thing she was admitted for in the first place meant that placing her under anaesthetic would induce The Big Sleep, and chances were operating would do more damage than good, so they basically said we’ll see you at the mortuary in two days, peace. However, because my nanny is nothing if she isn’t Stubborn with a capital S, several days have passed and she’s still ticking over. I have no idea what the prognosis is, and seemingly neither do the doctors, which is very helpful.

Thankfully, I’ve inherited a convenient (though perhaps inappropriate) coping mechanism from my father, which is to laugh in the face of Doom & Despair. Maybe it’s not nice, but if I’m going to have eyeliner running down my face I’d much rather it be from laughing than greeting.

Hospital Highlights include but are not limited to:

The Awesome IKEA/Grey’s Anatomy Hospital with Post Box & £5 Distributing ATM. This one kinda speaks for itself, but seriously, the hospital is très cool. Of course, when your formative experience of hospitals is limited to the Western, which is seriously a crumbling Medieval ruin with electricity and a smell worse than a tramp’s arsehole, anything looks good. But this place is extra-cool because it has these like outdoor-but-indoor walkways between the wards. And since the only time I’m there is when it’s dark and stormy, it has a very The Mothman Prophecies quality to it.

The Mother of All Awkward Lift Moments. So my mum, dad and me are all in the hospital lift going to visit and this man I saw the day before gets on and apparently him and my dad have bonded over the fact their mothers are both expecting visits from the Grim Reaper any day now. My dad says ‘Hi there, how’s your mother?’ and the guy looks at him with glistening eyes and a watery smile and meekly gulps out ‘She died an hour ago.’ My dad’s all ‘Oh... no... I’m... so sorry...’ *awkward manly back-shoulder-clap* And then there’s the painful whirring silence of a hospital lift dragging its steel carcass up another two floors. The guy gets out and my dad immediately grabs his own ankle and says ‘Put my foot in that one, didn’t I?’


My Father's Talking Shoe. The sole split open on the way to the carpark and he made it talk and the three of us fell about in stitches. And then got a drive-thru McDonald's. MMM.

The Dispossessed Uncle, who has only recently obtained Australian citizenship despite the fact he’s been living there for 26 years which basically makes him an immigrant, now has to reapply for a British passport in order to enter his own country.

The Psychic Cousin, Kylie, daughter of the above, 4 months pregnant, heartbreaker of the bedreadlocked and a total hippie to boot, informed us we should not worry about Nanny because, you see, it isn’t her time to go, and Kylie’s psychic, don’t you know?

The Old Woman Who Mistook an Umbrella for Agnes, which is a variation on The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I’m alone in the room with the invalid, resting against the boiling hot radiator and the freezing cold window, and she slurs ‘Agnes?’ And I say ‘Who’s Agnes? One of the nurses?’ because my nanny doesn’t know any Agnes’s, and she points to the black IKEA umbrella sticking out of the sink and once more says ‘Agnes’ and I say ‘No, that’s an umbrella’ but she continues to insist that this black umbrella is in fact Agnes and I continue to insist that it is not and she puts an end to the metaphysical debate by asking ‘How do you know it’s an umbrella?’ and I search the ether and swear I hear Descartes laughing at me from beyond the grave and eventually I merely say ‘...Because that’s what umbrellas are shaped like.’ She gives me a look that quite clearly conveys I am talking absolute rot, pure mash potatoes, and that the umbrella-shaped-umbrella is not an umbrella at all but is definitely Agnes. Whoever that is.

But without a doubt the pièce de résistance was The Time My Grandmother Forgot Who I Was. This happened approximately two minutes after the above whilst I was still alone in the room with her. My dad was outside talking to the bitch of a doctor about how when we arrived my nanny was out of bed, sitting in a chair, and disconnected from the alarm meant to notify nurses when she moves cause she’s high risk and whatnot, to which she had no answer. My nanny also claimed she’d been walking around the ward/nurses’ station for ages and ages but no one had batted an eyelid, which is highly unlikely as A) she can’t stand never mind place one foot in front of the other, and B) she was in a flashy hospital gown, and by flashy I don’t mean glamorous. Whilst she was out there walking around for ages and ages, she also apparently phoned home and was shocked and dismayed to discover that no one picked up. Truthfully, it would be more disconcerting if someone did pick up because that person would be either a burglar or a ghost, because since I was old enough to be aware of my surroundings I’ve been convinced her house is haunted. Anyway. So, two burly nurses hoisted her back into bed where she curled up in the foetal position and went between dozing and peeling away the blankets saying she had to get back to whatever imagined activity her prostration had interrupted. But she was under no circumstances to attempt getting out of bed, so I persisted in putting the blankets back over her which culminated in an unpleasant crescendo when my dad walked in and she shrieked at me ‘DON’T!’ This was about the clearest her speech had been since she fell, but the expression on her face was somewhere between terror and indignant anger. My dad came over, said ‘Is everything okay?’ and the invalid, curling up to his side of the railing and still regarding me with that same expression, pointed and said ‘Who’s that girl?’ And I admit that had my dad not been there at that moment I would have been reduced to a pair of human tear ducts. However, he was there and he tried to laugh off the amnesia, saying ‘That’s Rosie AHAHA, that’s your granddaughter AHAHA!’ But, like, it never clicked. Now, look, I know Little Red Riding Hood had it pretty rough being almost eaten by her imposter lupine grandmother, but at least the wolf knew who she was! This was a different kind of trauma: this was realising that the old woman in the bed may look like your grandmother, but as far as she’s concerned, she isn’t. And that’s how fragile it all is.

ANYWAY, it hasn’t been all bad; there have been several good points. You may think them petty, but I haven’t been in a position to be picky. The aforementioned good points include: all the lovely books I got for Christmas, most of them involving John Green because I Love Him, all the Kermode & Mayo podcast-listening, the Bourne Identity soundtrack, writing impassioned reviews (...watch Monsters...watch Monsters...) because I wasn’t inspired enough to write anything else, the discovery of the word 'asshat' (again thanks to John Green), reconnecting with my trapper hat which makes me look like a Russian yeti in tartan, Davidoff incorporating the B in my name by calling me B-side, The Oatmeal because it made me LOL IRL when nothing else did emoface, winning the tube of Pringles at K-dawg's homemade Deal or No Deal through sheer mind power and hunger, officially proving I am Bad Luck incarnate since every Pictionary team I was in lost, watching I Walked with a Zombie at like 3am with mum and tea and Quality Street, catching the second half of the Great Expectations adaptation and remembering how much I loved the book and falling a little bit in love with Pip's mouth, and going to see The Sleeping Beauty ballet for the second time with my mum and Lorraine, and before that getting dinner with them in Sarti’s whilst being served by a total Adonis. Did I ever tell you I love ballet? I do. I also love the Theatre Royal cause it looks like a proper theatre with gold leaf and balconies and red velvet curtains everywhere. 


So you can see I haven’t had a particularly productive Christmas Holiday, and if you ask me how much I don't want to go back to uni next week on a scale of one to ten I will tell you the answer is infinity plus one. I’m dreading Classics because if doing double English is like running a marathon with weights, then doing that plus Classics is like doing a marathon with weights and a giant fat sleeping man on your back. Unnecessary and ultimately totally masochistic. But it’s only ten weeks, so I can deal. THAT’S JUST ONE BUS PASS < which is how I measure my life instead of in coffee spoons.

So now that it’s 2012, I guess Resolutions are in order. I have a few: 1. Be more happy. 2. Be less selfish. 3. Go to the cinema more often, even if this means sometimes going myself. Man, do people even do resolutions anymore? Ah, who cares, as long as the apocalypse doesn’t come this year it’s all good.

To summarise, the past month (and to a greater extent this entire year, which has gone by frighteningly fast while I’ve stood in the same silly place, but let us not dwell) has been A Total Suck-fest. But things are looking slightly up and I shall be reunited with my friends on Saturday which just so happens to be the five-year anniversary of our departure to Alpe D’huez so Madleen and I will probably greet about Hardcore Guy & his Boyfriend and doors being opened and man this is a long and badly-punctuated sentence and I think that’s all folks before the Zombie Syndrome kicks in again on Monday.

Over and out.