Gift shop despatches

Apparently there are some people in the world whose idea of a good day out does not include either a gift shop, or a cup of tea and a nutritionally void item of baking. To those people, I say nothing because I have nothing to say to them.

Although I could perhaps wrestle my antipathy to the floor for long enough to say:

You would probably go to Kew Gardens with your friends – if you had any, which, like, you totally don't – and you would stride through the shop in your ugly shoes, with your overrated sense of purpose, on your way to the toilet, without a sideways glance and you would completely miss the Never-Ending Wall Of Technicolor Confectionary.

You are the kind of person who thinks there are two kinds of jam in the world: red jam and marmalade. You would probably look at this jar of High Dumpsie Dearie, which I have learnt is a traditional recipe for Plum, Pear & Apple Jam, and think, 'Why don't they just call it Plum, Pear & Apple Jam?'

You are probably not even excited by salt and pepper shakers – or a 'cruet set' as people who write copy for mail-order catalogues are wont to call them – in the shape of guinea pigs.

Your heart is made of sawdust and steel – not silk and steel, that would make you Five Star – and nuts and bolts done up too tightly. If we were at school, you would probably borrow my felt-tip pens without asking, and press too hard, and then not put the tops back on properly. You have to push them on until they click, you savage.

Sky's the limit

I have things to say, but I am too busy sobbing at Michael Jackson's memorial service and shouting at Kay Burley to say them.

Kay Burley is conducting an inappropriately euphoric interview with two Welsh ladies who had taken a speculative trip to LA to soak up the atmosphere of mourning, and had then been given tickets to get into the Staples Centre by Sky News. Both the Big Reveal ('How would you like to be watching the service… inside?') and their Big Reactions were as if their homes had been chosen for a 60 Minute Makeover, or they had found one of Willy Wonka's golden tickets.

Burley is catching up with Dead Jacko's own Violet Beauregarde and Veruca Salt after the show, as they froth about what a blast it was.

'And who's the best TV channel around?' smarms Burley, repulsively.

'Thank you, Sky!' they beam back.

This is a memorial service, you cretins, not Mecca bingo.

I am reminded of a line spoken by Janeane Garofalo to Uma Thurman in The Truth About Cats And Dogs, a romcom which I love, but which is probably not considered among the greats (see also While You Were Sleeping) as Uma is practising for a newscaster audition:

'You might want to make the carnage a little less upbeat.'

So, with this trauma weighing heavily upon us, let's turn instead to the great directory of Speedy Pictorial Blog Posts.

Many are the important messages that have been written on napkins - 'Bartlet for America' is just one. And here is another - a portrait by Young Miss Jones The Younger of her beloved aunt, drawn on Sunday.

You may notice that her rendering of my hair is, colour aside, uncanny. As is the alarmingly unflinching way she has captured my classic British pear shape, total lack of discernible cleavage, and the puny sloping shoulders that leave me infuriated with shiny-materialed shoulder bags on a daily basis. Sylvia Plath said in the poem Child: 'Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.' In the matter of my portrait, I could handle the clear-eyed candour of my youngest niece being slightly less clear-eyed and candid. I am misappropriating Sylvia Plath's words somewhat here, but I like them, and she left them lying around, so what does she expect?

The legs are less convincing. Or are they? I was sitting down, after all.

Glory days

If I had £1 for every conversation I've had with girlfriends lately about how incredibly hot Bruce Springsteen still is at 59, I'd have about £4.50.

So let's spend that £4.50 on a hotdog and some root beer, even though I would rather have a milkshake, sit back and enjoy these…

Viva la revolution… but let's have a sit-down first

I'm not saying definitely, but I think I'm being targeted by a collective of geriatric guerilla revolutionaries who want me to join their number.

Recently, I received a mysterious communique through the post. My name and address were handwritten on the envelope - rather than the usual printed labels fronting oily incitements from Foxtons and invitations to vintage fairs I have never been and am unlikely to ever go to. This was thrilling enough in itself. Then I noticed the spidery quality of the biro-work, and wondered if my nan was trying to communicate from beyond the grave. I would show you the envelope but then you would all know my address. This would be fine, obviously – it's not like I don't trust you – but what if you all dropped by at the same time? I only have four chairs, and where would the other three of you sit? Actually, I can show you this bit:

Before I opened it, I wondered if it was a personal, handwritten invitation to compete in the baking contest at this year's Lambeth Country Show. (At the same event a couple of years ago, someone in a position of power in the horticulture/baking/vegetable modelling tent was unnecessarily rude to me as I was attempting to view the winners just when they were about to clear everything away. I swore then that I would go away and learn from the world's baking virtuosos, from Vienna to Kyoto, then come back with a cake that would BLOW THEIR TINY MINDS, win the competition, and TAKE THAT MEAN OLD BIRD DOWN. This is part of a pitch I'm working on for a quirky British film comedy called The Flour And The Glory. It's just a working title). ANYWAY. It was not that. It was several sheets of A4 covered in tutting, typewritten capital letters of outrage. It was from someone in their late 70s who is very disappointed with our glorious government. They begin thus:

'I know of pre war years, fear free streets, open front doors and when life was simply happy for all.'

I don't know if this means they fear free streets or know of a time when streets were free of fear. At the very least, their organisation could do with a specialist in adjectival hyphenation.

In essence, they tell me that England is on the verge of destruction, and if you were to ask any of their pensionable comrades what they thought of our political system, 'THEY WOULD REPLY CXXP, SXXT OR RXXXXXH.' This either represents a particularly coy approach to swearing, or RXXXXXH is such an abominable cuss that even I, with my great enthusiasm for the raw broadness of the English language, am unable to imagine the depths of repellant profanity shrouded by those Xs.

The letter, from a group calling themselves 'The Grey Ones', essentially urges me to contact the Queen and request that she abolishes all political parties, and embrace something they're calling the priorities poll. It also includes the phrases 'THE DAYS OF PARLIAMENTARY JANGLE WILL BE OVER', 'PICK UP YOUR PEN AND TRY FOR YOUR FUTURE' and 'GOD HELP ENGLAND AND HER TOMMORROWS'.

It runs to five pages, and I felt utterly spent just reading it. I can't imagine the titanic effort involved in its composition. I can only assume the author was briefly rendered super-human by the triumphant completion of a particularly vexing crossword, or slaying their nemesis at bridge. Look, here is one of the pages. The bad cropping is a result of my sub-standard scanning, not of their hurried, furtive library photocopying, sheets of propaganda concealed in the pages of The Gardener's Yearbook.

Maybe these were the ramblings of elderly fanatics, but they were elderly fanatics with my name and address, and I was pondering exactly how worried I should be about this a couple of weeks later, as I was enjoying an al fresco lunch by one of Wapping's most attractively dried up bits of the Thames. Probably, I reasoned, I wasn't a specific, isolated target. Probably I wasn't that special. Probably my neighbours had received a similar communication. I could find out, but that would involve me actually talking to my neighbours.

So I had resolved to forget about it, but as I started to walk back to the office, I took a look behind me, in my gently OCD way, to make sure I hadn't left anything behind. There, under the bench where I'd been sitting, was a screwed up piece of paper. I am 100% positive it was not there when I sat down. I thought it was the receipt from the purchase of my Waitrose lunch, so I went back to pick it up because a) show me a litterbug, and I'll show you a loser and b) I didn't want some grubby old lunch pervert knowing what sandwich filling fills me up (incidentally, considering their positioning in the market, the selection of sandwiches in Waitrose is Poor Indeed). But it was no till receipt. It was, of course, a coded message.

First, I thought, 'What would The Usborne Detective Handbook [which I owned in 1981] tell me to do?' Secondly, I decided that the handwriting looked a bit French (I had a penfriend for six weeks in 1984) and with the sleuthiness of a more stylish Columbo I had deciphered that the letters were the initials of the days of the week in French (lundi, mardi, mercredi etc). Oui monsieur, I have an A-level and didn't my would-be conscriptors know it. Somewhere in a sixth-form centre in West Norfolk, my academic records are missing from a filing cabinet, and a school secretary sits tied up with her own support tights. However her assailants have left Radio 4 on. They wouldn't want to miss The Archers, so nor, they reasoned, would she.

What of the numbers? Here they have made an error. The Grey Ones are clearly trusting that my B grade in A-level Maths was not the fluke I will happily admit to. I am no mathlete, and so their message to me remains a mystery.

So how did they find me? Simple surveyance. Staking out Sainsbury's, spying on shoppers, communicating between the aisles with walkie-talkies - or, more likely, two tin cans with a length of string between them, constructed in HQ laboratories, or as they're more prosaically known, Someone's Shed. They saw me in my cardigan and comfortable sandals and knew I was their girl. "Wood Pigeon, this is Murray Mint. Do you receive? Confirming re-up of Battenburg in civilian's basket. Positive target identified." Perhaps they had even seen the small packet of wet wipes I like to carry in my bag fall to the floor as I was getting out my purse at the self-checkout.

But still. Two messages, and I was yet to reciprocate their contact. Then, on Sunday, when I was returning from the Shennan Birthday Celebrations, I saw this pasted on a empty shop window near where I live:

Unless you are, like, Superman (and he totally reads this blog), you will be unable to see what this says, but it is one of the pages that I received through the post. Clearly, the Grey Ones are getting twitchy. I mean, twitchier than normal. They are taking some risks - and I'm not talking about eating crusty French bread with their dentures in. They are taking a chance on a public showing.

It made me uneasy. And who does one turn to when one is scared? When one feels one is being pursued by pension-drawing agitators? One's family. of course. But when I showed Mrs Jones (65 on Sunday) the first letter, in the hope of some reassuring words, she said ominously: 'There will be a revolution. I know it.'

Et tu, Maman?

Jack your body

I was buying my lunch in M&S at London Bridge on Friday when I noticed a girl, early-20s but it's hard to tell (when I was in Norfolk recently, a bus driver asked me if I was UNDER 19 and it was the greatest moment of my life), roaming the aisles in black and white face paint.

In my usual open, non-judgmental way, I assumed she was on her way to her first Glastonbury, and demonstrating to all the stiffs staying in London exactly what an anything-goes time she was going to have down there.

Then, when I was queuing up to pay for my Mexican three bean wrap and half-price cherries, I found myself standing right next to her. In a way that was both sheepish and slightly attention-seeking, she shouted to her friend who was being served, 'Will you wait for me? It makes me look slightly less weird.'

We had a moment of catching each other's eyes, and she did a bit of eye-rolling and 'I'm so embarrassed.' I told her what I had surmised about her kerazee Glasto get-up, but she shook her head and said glumly, 'I'm Jack The Ripper.'

She worked at the London Dungeons, as it turned out.

'It's alright for her,' she said, nodding at her friend. 'She's a plague victim.'

I can confirm that the friend did look dramatically, and terminally, fake-ill.

'She gets a costume,' Jack said. [She was right. Plague Victim was working a generic olden-days skirt, and a dowdy blouse item.] 'So everyone knows she's playing a character. I just have to put a big coat and hat on over my own clothes.'

I was interested in the gender politics of a woman playing the prolific murderer of prostitutes. Obviously I didn't say that. I just went, 'But you're a girl. Cool.'

She explained that since she was pretty much covered up, with a scarf across half her face, she could loom out of the shadows and slash away with drama-student abandon, and no one would know that under her coat she had been concealing not just a knife, but also breasts (two).

[Has anyone ever written a horror film set in a chamber-of-horrors re-enactment experience? I went through one at Madame Tussaud's a few years ago, when I was there in the evening for a work party. I honestly thought that was the way I was going to die. Incidentally, the evening ended prematurely after someone spilt red wine on Wax Madonna's white suit. A couple of years before that, I had been to a record launch there [Moments Where My Life Sounds More Exciting Than It is No 64] and the management became quite distressed when one of my colleagues pulled Wax Alan Titchmarsh's trousers down. But really, what do they expect?]

Anyway, I was excited by my brush with grim-faced wearers of horror facepaint. However, not everyone is so easily impressed. We ended up paying at adjacent tills, and her cashier looked her up and down, before saying in a voice of sighing and ennui, 'Who are you today, then?'

In which I am humourless and self-regarding

Longtime readers will know I am a bit funny about death. And by funny, I mean not funny at all.

A few years ago, I was heartily bereaved, and I now believe that if something like that happens to you, you are never quite the same. This is no kind of emotional Top Trumps, with me claiming a win over someone who has never had that happen to them. If you haven't, I am honestly so glad for you. I just know that That Thing cuts through my life like a cheese wire, dividing it cleanly into How I Was Then and How I Am Now. And How I Am Now is so very terrified of That Thing happening again, it renders me a craven victim of superstition and karma-paranoia, who responds to jokes about the demise of the famous and eccentric not with brazen, anarchic laughter, but with a fearful bite of the lip or an anxious furrow of the forehead. How I Was Then hates this about How I Am Now, but How I Am Now has me in quite the aggressive half-Nelson, and How I Was Then is now too weak to fight back. What I'm basically saying is that, when it comes to macabre jokes, How I Am Now is Gripper Stebson, while How I Was Then is Walter The Softy.

Holy intertextuality, Batblog!

Not exactly, critical theory fans. I just wanted to write that.

Another consequence of That Thing is that I am now blindly over-understanding, and an ardent cutter of slack, in the case of anyone messed up and fairly odd, since that has been my default setting since It Happened. Terrible things have been written about Michael Jackson doing terrible things. I have no idea if they're true, and it's not in my job description to decide. But in the matter of his prodigious but wholly legal eccentricity, I'm not sure it's so wildly disproportionate to anyone else's. It's just that the rest of us are working to a slightly tighter budget. If you wanted a chimp, a theme park, your own sweet shop, and you could afford it, and no one was telling you no, you would be spartan indeed not to get Apes R Us straight on the phone.

Personally, I would have an owl sanctuary. I would spend millions on gardeners. I would have a fleet of ice-cream vans. I would probably dress as Katherine Hepburn most of the time, on the days when I wasn't being Henry VIII or Joan of Arc. I would own several robots. Sometimes when I am walking along the street, I pretend I am in a race with all the other pedestrian drones, and I hear BBC commentary in my head, rising to a frenzied pitch, as, after making up 30 metres, I draw level and pass an old lady. Were I loaded, and had I never lived a normal life or learnt that it was unorthodox and profligate, I would rent a stadium and some ringer athletes, and stage my own Olympics, at which I win every event, because I have paid everyone else to lose.

Everyone is just trying to keep the comfort in, and the badness out, in whatever ways they can. And it may seem as though the concept of dignity has had no place in a conversation about Michael Jackson for about 20 years, but the effects that were wrought upon his appearance were, I assume, merely an attempt to create his best version of Jacko, to hold back the march of ageing and decay, to show he was the boss, even if the rest of the world could see this was fallacy; even if the rest of the world was laughing. And that's really no different to any man who's ever bought a toupee, or any woman shoehorned into a dress that's a little bit too small. Everyone has a thing they do or wear because they're desperately clinging on, and because they think it's the thing that makes the difference, to the mystification of The World. You have your thing, and I have mine – we just don't realise that no one else gets it. And I don't think I want you to tell me.

And despite Michael Jackson's costly arsenal of cosmetic procedures and high-strength pain-relief, he was eventually betrayed by his exhausted, mortal heart, like millions of 50-year-old mortgage slaves and middle managers before and after him. And when you see Jermaine Jackson peering over the top of a stockade made of microphones, at the eye of a storm of flashbulbs and clattering cameras, he is just one man, emotionally broken, having to tell a large group of strangers that his brother died an hour ago.

My favourite thing I have read or heard today is an ex-colleague's Facebook status. You'll be unsurprised to learn it is not a joke. It was something like: 'I have danced more to Michael Jackson's records than to anyone else's, and so have my kids.'

[Shit, even I am pondering the wisdom of writing 'Michael Jackson' and 'kids' in the same sentence. Maybe How I Was Then is not entirely a lost cause.]

Some reasons why I love an illustrated dictionary

[from the The Collins Pocket]

[from The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary]

[from The Oxford-Duden Pictorial English Dictionary]