Friday 17 August 2007

A cunning plan

Unbelievably I appear to have a hangover again, and it's Friday again - must be the fact that I only have time to blog on Friday afternoons when work is quiet, and when I'm hungover so I can't quite face too much work because honestly I don't go out that much, though it would certainly appear that way! (It's also the summer hols and the princess is away again, so I really feel that I have to maximise on socialising before real life kicks in again.)

Last night was just a relatively quiet evening in Soho (for once) with an old work friend, but in order to maximise upon child-free time, I'm also going out tonight with university friends and to a wedding tomorrow - I think my liver is going to be a swollen wreck by Sunday! And worst of all we're going on holiday the week after next so I'm supposed to be on my bikini-body diet and exercise regime (which is clearly not going too well after an immense jacket potato and cheese at lunchtime!) For a brief moment at lunchtime to day I did think I might go for a run to perk myself up, but then decided a nice lardy jacket potato would probably be more enjoyable. No pain no gain? Absolutely!

Anyway, to the point of my post... I had lunch on Wednesday with a girl I used to work with here, who is now a glamorous digital marketing type in order to discuss my latest (and possibly most brilliant) ploy to gain international recognition for my fantastic manuscript: I am going to launch a viral campaign on Facebook (oh I'm so down with the kids me)

One of my other friends (aren't I so lucky to have such a bunch of talented and helpful friends?!) is going to build me a little website where I plan to host the book, or at least a good part of it. Then via my cunning Facebook viral marketing campaign, I can spread the word (quite literally) and get lots of people to visit the website, read the book and comment on how brilliant it is, thereby providing an instant market for the publisher who won't need to do any more work to sell thousands of copies! Brilliant or what?

Of course these things never go quite according to plan, but here's hoping...

(And I'm off to get me a hair of the dog and fast!)

Friday 3 August 2007

Is everyone weird?

I was wondering this yesterday after lots of emailing with one of my friends about her ex-girlfriend and how weird she'd turned out to be and it made me think about whether anyone is actually "normal".

I suspect the answer is no, but then I have always thought I was relatively normal, and most of my friends seem to be too, as are their husbands/boyfriends, but perhaps that's because we don't delve into each other's hearts of darkness too often. So maybe it's just that the more you get to know someone, the more you find out about their hidden neuroses, idiosyncrasies etc and uncover their weirdness. Though I still maintain that there is a scale of weirdness and this particular ex of my friend's is right up there!

There were some people out in Soho last night wearing their weirdness right on their sleeve though - the princess is away at her aunty's this week, so Mummy and Daddy have been cutting loose. (Oh my god, you don't appreciate how nice not having kids is until you've actually got them, by which point of course it's too late! But it does make the rare occasions alone oh so delicious - the 8am starts, the late nights watching films, the no rushing to the childminders the second work's finished.)

Anyway, Mummy went out with her work chums last night and drank her bodyweight in cheap rose and white wine spritzers and ended up at 3am in some dive on Brewer St dancing to hardcore techno with a Bulgarian Marc Almond-alike! I love those nights when you get to a certain point and wonder how the hell you ended up where you are and oh, why aren't you in bed? Sadly they are precious few these days, but I made the most last night.

Needless to say, today hasn't been the most productive at work, what with spending most of the day eating potato in some form (4 hash browns for breakfast, a plate of roast potatoes for lunch) and of course the inevitable dissections of the night and looking at everyone's photos (how did we manage before camera phones??)

We were talking about best hangover foods this morning, and someone said dairylea squares which to me seems akin to inviting yourself to give up and be sick, but the humble potato has always been my trusty friend, in whatever form it chooses to take, though I've been told by a reliable source that any yellow food will cure a hangover, which is why egg, chips and lard are always so good!

Ok, time for me to sign off - it's the weekend! I need to go home and have a speed siesta before getting in the car and driving a few hundred miles (not the ideal after 4 hours sleep) but my writing friend is accompanying me, so at least we can spend the evening discussing how crap our careers are and how we're misunderstood, tortured geniuses, and it's the publishers loss, not ours. Gaa.