All straight men worthy of my acquaintance should desire hot, high seas mansex with Lieutenant Horatio Hornblower, aka Ioan Gruffudd.

...

Excuse me a moment while I think of hot, high seas, Horatio Hornblower mansex.

This may take some time...

BLOCKHEAD
Anne Heche* is looking quite fat.

ME
You reckon?

BLOCKHEAD
Yeah. She's all heavy around the middle. When she sits up she looks like an overripe pear.

MUM
I wonder if she's pregnant.

BLOCKHEAD
Oh, no, she can't be.

ME
You mean she's not desexed?

MUM
We have no idea.

BLOCKHEAD
I thought she had a tattoo in her ear but it was just dried blood.

MUM
Oh God, could you imagine?

ME
Her kittens would be batshit crazy.

MUM
I know.

ME
I mean seriously crazy. You'd have to put them all on ritalin as soon as they came out.

BLOCKHEAD
Rachael, I am not giving Anne Heche's kittens ritalin.

ME
Why not?

BLOCKHEAD
It's not good for growing young minds.

MUM
You know I couldn't give them away.

BLOCKHEAD
Mum, we already have four cats. it's not legal to have that many.

MUM
I know. I don't care.

ME
You know that would make you an actual crazy cat lady, right?

MUM
I'm at peace with that.

ME
The man would come to check the meter box and you'd chase him away by hurling cats.

MUM
Well, perhaps Blockhead's boyfriend's much-loved younger sister would like one? No, wait a minute, that wouldn't be a good idea.

ME
Why not?

MUM
She has Down's syndrome and might be a bit rough with the little cat. Kittens are quite fragile, you know.

ME
You can't be serious.

MUM
Perhaps she could have a more robust pet.

ME
Mum, even Koko the gorilla was allowed a kitten. Are you saying Blockhead's boyfriend's much-loved younger sister is less responsible than a gorilla?

MUM
Perhaps she could have a pig.

The conversation didn't end there, but you get the idea.

* Otherwise known as my sister's cat. Anne Heche is not her real name, just an apt one. I don't know why I'm protecting the identity of a cat, but this cat is truly crazy. She just showed up one day and stayed. She likes Blockhead a lot. Indeed, she never leaves Blockhead's room and gets very distressed when my sister goes away. I get the impression she would very much like the rest of us to die. If my mother and sister ever come home to find this cat hunkered down in a jerry-rigged fort beneath the dining room table frantically fashioning a tin foil hat I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Also, I do not like writing abstracts, no sir, I do not, and I now have a nice clean uni email account to prove it.

Where some have a scale of cheese and tomato to express emotional distress, I have a BBC scale. Rather shit days require a dose of 'Red Dwarf,' which never fails to bring me back to simpler times. Times when Doc Martens were the coolest footwear possible, my friend Clare's penguin-shaped Mr Flibble eraser made her the coolest person ever, and the only people worth talking to were those who knew the entire back catalogue of the Doug Anthony All Stars by heart. Flat Sunday nights need the high seas homoeroticism of the original Captain Tight Pants Horatio Hornblower. But for the kind of PMS that sees me sobbing hysterically on the phone to my mother over 'The Tyra Banks Show,' however, I need the big guns. I need nothing less than 'Yes Minister.'

The thing about 'Yes Minister' is that, to put it politely, it's a touch dated. There's Jim Hacker poorly chromakeyed into his chauffeured car, matinee idol waves atop the kind of sagging, pale face that would never make it onto TV today, and there's Humphrey beside him chewing through his lines with breathless, over-articulated determination, and there's the, well, the other one, the underling who's always smirking a little. You get the sense that 20 yeas ago these gentlemen would have just killed at law revue and 'Yes Minister' is their nostalgic way of reliving the glory.

Of course, my parents loved 'Yes Minister,' and I loved watching it with them, pretending as though I knew why it was funny. Now that I'm grown up I can acknowledge that it often isn't, but there's a seven year old part of me that doesn't care. Finding 'Yes Minister' funny is part of my mental image of what makes a grown-up grown-up, along with picking up dry cleaning, wearing sensible shoes to work that make restrained clipping noises on the tiles, and being boring and tired at night.

Anyway, all that aside, if you're feeling a touch on the hormonal side perhaps you should get the stiff upper lip of Jim Hacker into you. Well, not literally, of course. What about this politically sensitive scene where the good Minister finds himself in some Middle Eastern country where no alcohol is served and his wife has to be made an honorary man before she can attend some official function? Of course, being plummily upper class and British, they have to be on the piss at all times, and so smirkingly keep calling each other into the quaintly named 'communications room' to take urgent calls from a Mr Haig and a Mr John Walker. Please also note the Middle Eastern dignitaries, who look like a collection of accountants at a Lawrence of Arabia theme party. This is middle class, polite comedy at its finest, people.

Perhaps the true sign of a successful dinner party is the relative blueness of the post-prandial conversation? I came upon this idea last night in a sprawling house in Brunswick, after a very satisfying, gently lit meal of handmade lentil burgers, chips and roast mushrooms. I was well-fed and relaxed, drinking from a tiny wine glass and enjoying the company of several charming musician types and a florist, and we were discussing poo. Someone mentioned that this was perhaps not the best after-dinner conversation when I remembered that most every truly enjoyable dinner party I'd been too involved intense discussions about bodily functions, depraved sexual acts and jokes about date rape and babies. Take Karen and Toby's recent, very mature Bastille Day party, where I learned that what I knew as 'the barracuda' was also known as 'the shocker.'

What do you reckon?

Our problem, I thought, was that neither the world around us nor the future stretching before us contained any image in what we might conceivably become. We were stranded in the present as in a stalled, otherwise empty subway train, and in this isolation we clutched morosely at each other's shadows. - Margaret Atwood, 'Hair Jewellery.'

What she said.

For someone with the moral strength to say what needs saying, I refer you to KP.

Otherwise, there are times when I very much like the British.



Via I love you in the face (Best. Blog title. EVER.)

I live in a rather cafe saturated area, which is a novelty for me as, back in Canberra, the only food or beverage provider accessible by foot was the Page Tavern, a place you wouldn't enter without a hepatitis vaccination and some thick soled shoes. The choice really is endless, from tiny places staffed by cheery hipsters endearingly clad in ruffled aprons, to serious grown-up places where the bread comes with olive oil and there's a stack of Vogues and In Styles by the door, to somewhere called 'The Sensible Sandwich' where the sandwiches are, indeed, sensible and I've heard they do a mean schnitzel.

But the place I favour is none of those things. It's rather, well, bland, all late 90s chocolate feature walls, vaguely South American background music and cold, flabby slabs of frittata in the lunch cabinet. It's almost as though someone has taken the Australian Tax Office's downstairs cafe and transplanted it into the middle of Melbourne. Still, for some reason, I am fiercely loyal to this little cafe, partly because the staff are friendly, partly because it's close to my house, partly because they do a mean soy latte, but mostly because it is my muse. Whenever I've found myself stuck in a writerly way I go down to my beloved, rather naff cafe, order a coffee the size of an infant's head, and get to it. It always works.

Anyway. A while ago one of the friendly girls who works there, a woman with an array of beautiful but puzzling tattoos wound around her forearms, asked me my name. I told her and she repeated it several times so she'd remember. I was chuffed. This meant that I was now A Regular. I'd be wander in of a morning and I'd be one of those people they all greet by name, and they'll make 'the usual' and crack lame jokes about Mondays and so on.

A few weeks passed. The woman with the tattoos did, indeed, greet me with a name every time I came in, but it took me a while to fully parse that she was not saying my name. She was calling me Anne. Somehow 'Rachael' had metamorphosed in her memory to 'Anne.' I was hardly offended. Hey, brains are tricky things, and she has a lot of regulars to remember. But then I realised that all the staff were calling me 'Anne.' In this haven of oily pressed foccacias, dry muffins, pan pipes and Dulux Chocolate Truffle I was no longer Rachael, I was Anne.

I'm not about to correct them. I feel as though Anne is my alter-ego. Whenever I walk down there I try to get into Anne's head, thinking what will Anne say this morning? How did Anne's weekend go? Will Anne have the blueberry friand or the muesli slice? Sometimes it's a bit nice to start the day as someone else.

The girl I buy my coffee from told me today is going to be the coldest day this winter. 'It's snowing in the Dandenongs,' she explains. 'They reckon it'll hail tonight.'

That makes sense, I say by way of reply, and scrape the sole of my right shoe against the inside of my left ankle.

I couldn't sleep last night. There must be people out there who get polite forms of insomnia, a genteel wakefulness that gives you eight extra hours to read or click through the internet or play X-Box. That's not me. I work myself into a silent panic, stare at the ceiling, decide it's both too difficult to get up and too depressing to stay in bed.

Lately I've been sleeping well, but last night, as soon as my head hit the pillow, I knew that I wouldn't be. As soon as I got in bed I felt a slimy, creeping kind of panic, but it was too cold to get up so I thought I'd curl up, stay warm and wait it out. But I couldn't. After a while I crept out of bed to find my emergency stash of Xanax, which usually knocks me out, but last night was one of those nights where it just didn't, where my body became pleasantly heavy and relaxed but my head kept going and going and going. That's when my ankles started itching.

In my half-asleep, half-awake state all I really knew was scratching my ankle felt good, better than anything, better than sex or a truly powerful sneeze or even Shanghai Dumpling. So I scratched and scratched, and then my other ankle began itching, so I scratched that, and it became a frenzy of scratching, an unrestrained, onanistic orgy from my knees down. I may have even let out a moan of pleasure. Eventually I fell, quite unaware, into sleep. When I reluctantly woke up, to grey skies and heavy rain, the covers angrily twisted, my ankles were red-raw and swollen. I must have kept on scratching, even in my sleep.

So today I have itchy ankles, unwashed hair, wet, cold, feet, and it's going to hail. My head feels somehow padded, as though there are wads of cotton in my ears. I watch the rain come in on the BOM radar, drifting islands of blue and green. Time to hunker down, settle in, eat fruit toast, read things I don't have to. Time to turn the phone off and quit checking my email over and over and over. Time to go to bed.

For those who were at KP and the Toby's most excellent Bastille Day bash, here is the recipe for the chocolate, orange and black pepper cake I brought. Please also note that I actually posted to poor, neglected Thus Bakes. I have quite the archive of food pictures that need writing up, so hopefully that will be forthcoming.

If you're interested, the recipe for the warm puy lentil salad can be found over on Orangette.

So a collection of us were sitting around last night with my bicycle-loving housemate watching the Tour de France when someone asked the very astute question: 'What happens if you need to go woo woo?'

To which my bicycle-loving housemate replied: 'Well, you've got teammates, right? So one of them rides up beside you and holds on to your handles while you have a slash off the side of the bike.'

'Oh. So what happens if you need to poo?'

'Well, you just do it in your pants.'

'...'

'I mean, you can scoop it out later.'

'...'

'You can hardly stop to have a poo. I mean, this thing is down to microseconds.'

'That really begs the question of why anyone would want to be on the sidelines, then.'

Suddenly I understand the look of pain and determination on the cyclist's faces when they speed towards that yellow jersey.



As a rather massive aside, this video of my favourite fake husband Four Four's cat Winston eating mashed potatoes is making me unreasonably happy.




Also, let it be known that if you make a cheesecake for sweets for dinner one night you may well find yourself devouring the (not inconsiderable) leftovers over the course of the next day. You will then fall into bed feeling like a the tubbiest tub o'lard ever to have eaten too much cream cheese.

OH FOR FUCKS I HAVEN'T BEEN THAT STRESSED AT ALL LATELY.

Ahem.

And I'm on the old Blackmores multi, for what it's worth. I know I've got enough vitamin B.

Sigh.

Quite.

I am contemplating the purchase of a new bottle of smelly water to mask the scent of my profane and stinky body. Which one should I choose? The contenders are:


Commes des Garcons White, which smells like old books, photocopy toner and authority in a most pleasing way.


Agent Provacateur, which is floral and spicy in a way that tickles the upper sinus pleasantly, but nowhere near as slutty as the name and kinky pink bottle suggests. And don't get me started on their asexual and rose-laden scent Maitresse, the one with the naked woman on the bottle, that makes you smell like an elderly turkish delight.

and


Viktor & Rolf Antidote, which, well, let's put it this way. If you put a young Michael York (think Cabaret, or Logan's Run) in a Fair Isle sweater, gave him a cup of Earl Grey, then squeezed him to extract his most vital juices, it would smell like this. I think this is a good thing. Also, the Google image search revealed this very charming image of men waltzing with other men in tuxedos, and I rather want to encourage such things.



To provide context, I usually wear Mitsouko by Guerlain every day, and have done so for so long I can't even smell it. I do this as a kind subconscious terrorism. I want to be able to 'smell like' something, so that when my nearest and dearest smell that thing they can't help but think of me. I augment this with Viktor & Rolf Flower Bomb, so the honey-sweet, oozing floral category is already filled.

As an aside, Transformers was as totally rad as a big, retarded action film about giant transforming robots can be expected to be. The casting was as implausible and wooden as the dialogue. A robot pissed on someone. Some orange-coloured, shiny Australian woman asked if someone could 'hot wire a computer.' It made me happy. Then again, I think I'm becoming rather plebeian in my old age. The other day my only contribution to a discussion about Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust was to pithily remark that it was 'totally gay.'