How to Make Friends and Influence People

Blow up three round balloons, quite firmly


Push a small cloth bag of marbles into each balloon making sure that the ends of the bag hang out below the rim of the balloon and tie-off the ends of the balloon and marble bag into one knot. Don't question this, just do it, The balloon might burst the first couple of times you try it, but eventually it will work

Tear a newspaper of your choice into strips (I favour the Financial, Sunday or Oban Times)

Fill washing-up bowl (or bucket) with tepid water

Dip the newspaper strips into the water and then apply to the surface of a balloon

Make sure each balloon is completely covered in paper with no gaps except for a small (tiny) circular space around the knot of each balloon

When this first layer is drying, apply a second layer. Repeat until you have good coverage

If you want to cheat and use Copydex, I won't tell on you

When the paper shell is dry and hard to the touch (could mean sitting up all night watching, touch-testing and re-testing), stick a pin through it popping the balloon, but crucially you must hold onto the knotted bit that's sticking out and make sure you don't lose it up into the brain cavity area

Next you need to paint a face on one side (or both sides if you want two-faced friends) of the shell and add a wig, make-up, facial hair or jewellery as desired

Take a pillow and sew to each of the four corners an arm or leg (tights (colour of your choice) stuffed with scrunched up newspaper)

Tie a ribbon around the bit of the balloon and bag sticking out and feed and re-feed the two ends of that ribbon through a circular bit of cleaned washing-up bottle that you cut up earlier even though I forgot to tell you because you are so smart that you anticipated you would need a neck bit and I might forget until now

Safety pin the ribbon and the plastic neck to the middle top of the pillow

You have now made a new friend.

Repeat until you have 3 (or more if required - not recommended, they can pair up and leave you alone, but with 3 there'll always be one left over for you to talk to) new friends

Name them (I named mine Keanu Reeves, Drew Barrymore and David Foster Wallace, for example)

Put Radio 2's Jeremy Vine Show on and let them know you're just popping out for a while (ask them if they need anything while you're out, he/she/they is your friends and maybe feeling vulnerable and new at the moment) (and they are naked, which is why you are going out anyway)

Buy capsule wardrobes - casual, formal and at home lounging around vestments, including underwear and shoes. Definitely hats, too - for each

Spend a few hours getting to know each other a little then set off for a caravan holiday on the South-West coast of Scotland (you will have to do the driving, and pack the car and make the picnic, but they won't need pee-stops on the way)

Enjoy your holiday

PS: Don't forget to take them home with you (unless you have a huge argument or you decide your first attempts weren't that great and fancy making new ones when you get home again, in which case you could leave them artfully posed around the caravan for the next occupants to find and maybe have more luck with than you did)

Not too far from the truth

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

I hate bagpipes

I hate bagpipes. I'd rather listen to someone screaming for an hour. If I stood on the hill behind my house and screamed very loudly every summer Sunday evening between 7 - 8pm someone would complain, I'm sure. When that bastard bagpiper does it, it's all "culture", "heritage", "tradition", "stirring".

It's very horrible. Are we listening to the same thing?

I had assumed everyone else really hated bagpipe music too and they were just pretending because it was the right thing to do, like with beer or Mozart, but no. I've got into enough Highland taxis now to know they actually listen to the stuff of their own free will. Incomprehensible.

*

Yul Bryner is better than bagpipes.

(pic stolen from erin o'brien's blog)

What does it feel like?

I've been studying Psychometrics with the OU and last week my exam result arrived. (78% so yay!). I love exams, always have. It's the element of surprise that I like - what will the questions be? how well can I answer them? what result will I get? They feel like works of art, creative experiences. Even if I don't know the stuff very well or care less.

This was the first ever where I sat down and just blanked. Totally empty head, nothingness, very scary.

I'd booked into a swanky hotel for two nights before the exam and just read and read, so felt exceptionally well-prepared. I even sat in the ante-room and while the other candidates poured over last minute notes, I just sipped my water and gazed out of the window, smugly. Then, after asking to sit at a new desk because mine was too wobbly and slowly and calmly filling in all the admin bits and opening the question paper to decide which ones to do and in which order, I just freaked. Suddenly ALL the names and dates I'd learned vanished, I couldn't remember the difference between key concepts, the hands on the clock were spinning, whizzing round. I looked around the room and everyone else was scribbling away.

I felt like putting my hand up and asking them to stop while I pulled myself together, I seriously considered it. It took about 10 minutes which seemed like ten seconds and ten hours at the same time.

I told myself to relax, close the booklet, take some deep breathes, think about the sea lapping on the shore under August moonlight, blah, blah, blah. "It's not fucking working. Aaarrggh!". Tried looking for my favourite topic and making notes. Still nothing. After twenty minutes I'd resigned myself to failure. I picked the first question on the paper and just started writing, anything I could think of connected with the topic whether it answered the question or not. When fifteen minutes was passed I stopped and started on question 2. Twenty minutes later, number 3. Somewhere in the process my head must have come back online because that result is good, but the shock of blanking threw me and I've been convinced that if I'd passed it would be by a mark or two at most.

I used to wonder what happened when your mind goes 'completely blank', why people screamed when they saw dead bodies, how they knew they were really in love. Now I'm wondering what it feels like to be an actual grown-up entitled insider adult lady.

Why do some people make you laugh and others don't?

Emma, who lives in Llanwrst, AnnieRhiannon territory but I'm sure they don't know each other, makes me laugh till I cry. Nine years ago our first coversation went something like this, "Your shoes are no good for standing and walking around in", "Hello", "Hello. Change your shoes", "OK", "Good, what's your name? I'm Emma".

If I overheard other people having our conversations I'd shake my head dismissively and coolly leave the room - we spend entire evenings chatting on the phone, saying not very much about anything, but taking the Ss out of everything we ay, (Jeu Chrit upertar, The Penninular War, ing a ong of ixpence), randomly using trigger words to set off the FBI phone taps, having the ritual conversation about Simon Cowell, Simon Callow, Matthew and Harry Corbett that makes us laugh so much that we can barely breathe enough to splutter out the last line, "What's that you say, Sooty?".

We don't like the same music, TV programmes or films or books, or fancy the same people (well, Brad used to be a given before he went off with Angelina) or have the same politics or moral values or similar experiences or expectations of life, and, apart from Phoenix Nights, the same things don't make us laugh. But we can easily spend 5 hours on the phone or 3 weeks sharing a hotel room without a cross word or a moment's uncomfortable silence.

Every year or so we meet up to go on holiday together. This evening I was looking at some of the photos we've taken in various places and there seems to be a disproportionate number of pictures of private investigators' offices.

And, signs.

Life as cure for broken hearts and dead souls

Yesterday I had lunch with an ex-colleague, who, since we became ex-s, has become a friend. She's a wonderful woman who lives life to the full more than almost anyone else I know. She did more last week than I've done since 2002. This weekend for instance she's off with her family and friends to Sea Bangor 2007, a maritime festival in Northern Ireland. They'll dress, painstakingly authentically, as pirates, re-enact some pirating on real tall ships using actual cannons and generally have a good time. Last weekend she played viola in an orchestra visit to the Isle of Coll, (Inner Hebridean island), next week it's a dance workshop in preparation for a Regency themed ball, after throwing a barbeque for some visiting Russian friends and taking her son to auditions for Junior Mastermind. And running her own very successful translation service.

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I'm exhausted just typing it. How do people become such wonderfully free spirits that they can let go of their lives so easily in order to live them so fully? It's made me think about how tightly I've been holding on to the details of my life in recent years.

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Nick reminded me of the Unbearable Lightness of Being. The gist, for me, being that life has no value, weight or meaning other than that which we construct or accept for it ourselves.

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So, in the spirit of living a bit more freely I've accepted her invitation to a commemoration of the 1745 Battle of Prestonpans at Holyrood, Edinburgh in September. I have to make a dress from a contemporary pattern and materials, learn to dance a la mode and get into character as a comely whore (don't know which'll be the most taxing). Two days of partying and carousing and being on display, meeting new people and generally letting go.

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I've never done anything like this before and I already feel inspired to try more and more new things until I start to forget to remember to hold onto the life I have and to live the life I could have if I let myself, again.

Dream a little dream

For 12 weeks a year I get fantastic full-colour film quality dreams.

This week (Bye then!) I was in a boat without sails going round in circles planning to sail around the UK and wondering whether to (Yup, OK seeya, call ya soon) head off northwards, or to go down the West side first then save rounding the top till, (ciao bella) till the end.

Then I got out of the boat and was standing in the harbour and this enormous whale erupted from the water and just kept on rising higher and higher till it was as big as the hill behind it. I was afeared that when it crashed back down all the water would empty out of the bay. As it began to sink down I could see the water coming in slow motion so I turned my back on it, hunched my shoulders and put my hood up. But when it came it wasn't too bad after all.

Then I had (oo just you and me, then?) a round black box in my left hand and I had to open it up and shake out all the crabs of different sizes that had been splashed out of the water. The biggest (bye?) fell on its back and I had to turn it over so it could scuttle away. Hum. Um.

The next night I took a trip back to the place where I grew up .....

PS:Chris van Nus are you avoiding me?!