Bernadette Strachan

BECKHAM'S BITS  David Beckham, when will you have enough money? When will you stop putting pictures of yourself in your knickers up in shops? It’s distracting, frankly, and the tattoos make you look like a very well groomed pikey. If you spend a thousand pounds a day from now on, you’ll still have more disposable income than Midas, so please, Becks, put ‘em away.

THE DANGERS OF SPARE TIME  It’s been two weeks since I gave my sainted editor my latest manuscript. In that two weeks I planned to start writing a radio play, spring clean the house, visit all my neglected friends, go to the theatre, wash the dog, in short do all the stuff I can’t normally do because I’m locked in my study, superglued to my laptop. In the event I did nothing. Oh hang on. I made curtains for Niamh’s doll’s house.
 
TELEVISION  Well, The Apprentice is over and with it any hope of conversation from me. I was obsessed, to a degree that is unattractive in an adult. I knew everything about Ben, about Yasmina, about, God help me, Nirdal. I studied the way their emotions flickered across their greasy faces (who does the lighting for that show? Everybody looked like day old rice pudding) and I saw in to their souls. Now, though, I am bereft, and Big Brother simply doesn’t cut it. I can’t be party to any situation where one adult (in this case a producer) encourages another adult (in this case a publicity seeking freak) to change their name by deed poll to Dogface. Urgh. I avoided Britain’s Got Talent (which could be renamed Simon Cowell’s Got Nerve) until the final, which was mind blowingly dramatic, banal and urgh-inducing. The self pitying saxophonist was beyond parody. But it led me to Diversity. And to Ashley, the choreographer and main hottie. An exhaustive poll (of the two other women in the room at the time) proved that it is not only alright to fancy Ashley, it is mandatory.

PIE It was a very good shepherd’s pie that I made last week (top tip: a dollop of tomato chutney in the mincey mix) but I thought it would never end.

Day after day, when Matthew would hopefully ask what was for dinner, I’d say brightly ‘Shepherd’s Pie!’ as if he hadn’t already eaten his own weight in the bloody stuff. ‘Great!’ he’d say, then slink off to keen somewhere. But it’s all gone now. And I won’t be making Shepherd’s Pie again until perms come back in to fashion.
 
SHOES ON THE BED I pride myself on not being superstitious.  My parents were super-superstitious and it infuriated me. My Father would dance a polka of panic if he cracked a mirror, and my Mother happily prophesied an argument if she saw knives crossed on a plate. There’s no place for these doughily peasant fears in our bright shiny modern world. I chase black cats, I laugh in the face of the single magpie, I detour under ladders. Why, then, am I unable – physically unable – to put new shoes on a bed? Accustomed to spinning in her grave at my beliefs or lack of them, my very superstitious Grandmother is presumably having a smug little rest just now.

DOG/EGG CONUNDRUM If you read regularly (and God bless you and keep you if you do) you’ll be aware of Mavis, our dog.

You may also be aware of Eggs Benedict. I’m inordinately fond of both these things, altho’ Mavis is better company. I ordered Eggs Benedict when Matthew and I had a rare Niamh-less night in a hotel to celebrate our wedding anniversary this week, but as I raised the fork to my mouth I stopped. (This is rare – forks do not stop on the way to my mouth, unless there’s a fire alarm or somebody is pointing a gun at me.) ‘Here,’ I said to my husband of exactly eight years. ‘What does that smell remind you of?’ ‘Mavis,’ he replied without hesitation. Put me right off.

And here’s the start of an occasional series! Oh the excitement.

No, I don’t like him Anton du Beke. Can’t like him. (I haven’t tried very hard, but all the same.) He’s so oily, treating the viewing public as if they’re a mass of sex-starved octogenarian ladies all gagging for a glimpse of his bony behind as he drags some poor celebrity around the Strictly Come Dancing set. He seems to be becoming a celebridee in his own right now. He looks at the camera as if there’s a mirror on it, and he’s admiring his own glorious features. I saw him in the street the other day and purposefully didn’t let on I recognised him. Ooh, I’m hard, me. Oh, and his real name is Anthony Beak, for goodness’ sake. I think I’ll write my next book under the name Bernadine du Strack.

Yes, I do like her Claudia Winkelman. Once I’d come to terms with the thinness, the orangeness, and the nature of the eye make up, I realized I love her. She’s funny, and original, and so very small that it puts her on a par with Mavis vis a vis cuteness levels. I like to see witty women doing well. And she’s got lovely hair. I only really like the sort of people you can imagine lunch in a restaurant just going on and on with, and I fondly fantasise that Claudia and I would still be there when dinner started.

STOCKHOLM Very jolly, the Swedes. Never thought I’d write that sentence. I thought my trip to Stockholm would be a two day long Bergman film, but it was a delight. Stayed in a hotel owned by Benny from Abba. Yes, really. It was 5 star funky opulence and comfort, yet cost less than I’ve paid for chain-hotel misery in this country. The Swedes are very well dressed, very cool, but friendly and natural. I felt right at home. Not because I’m well dressed, you understand, despite the new trousers I was sporting, but because everybody spoke to Matthew and I as if they’d known us for years. I saw no WAG-style nightmare young women at all, although there were herds of 80’s kids. The night before, at home in Kingston, we’d passed countless girls dressed for an orgy somewhere much warmer than Kingston, and it was nice to be surrounded by women with actual clothes on, as opposed to strips of lycra. I’m a convert to the Nordic way of life, but this always happens. I come back from Rome on an imaginary vespa, and when I get back from Ireland I cry sentimental tears over anybody whose surname begins with O’.

PRINCE Niamh, my 5 year old, is a Prince devotee. Especially 'Get Off' and 'Kiss'. Although she confuses him with Michael Jackson. Her love of the latter led to me trying to explain plastic surgery in terms she would understand. He asks the doctors to change his face around I stammered.

TELLY Hoovering up the Easter leftovers before the post-Easter diet meant that I was enjoying a cream tea for dinner as I settled down to watch the first instalment of Hell’s Kitchen. I learned so much. I learned that Linda Evans’ lips are not nice (they seem to have been turned inside out by a bored plastic surgeon). I learned that Grant Bovey (husband of Anthea Turner, God help us) refers to himself in the third person. And I learned that Marco Pierre White is the most ponderous, self obsessed sod I’ve ever come across. The simplest question gets a Yoda-esque, carefully enunciated response. ‘Where,’ you might ask, ‘do you keep the cheese, Marco?’ He would reply, ‘Ah my friend. If it is cheese you seek, why do you ask? If I were to tell you, what would that make you?’ (He often includes one of these mantrap little questions, to which there is no correct answer, only kitchen-y death. Quite fun watching Adrian Edmondson struggle with how to answer ‘Did you season it?’ about a beef sandwich.) I hope fire never breaks out in Hell’s Kitchen because Marco is incapable of shouting ‘FIRE!’ he would have to drawl ‘When heat meets chip oil, my friend, something is bound to happen.’

BOOKS Just finished The Genius and The Goddess by Godfrey Meyers, a book that examines the professional and emotional partnership between Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. There are snippets in here that Mr Miller left out of his mighty memoir Timebends, and much new, scurrilous stuff on Marilyn. (The bald assertion that she was a prostitute seems unsupported by any source.) Such a beauty, such a pain in the ass. Sorry, arse. I always catch vocabulary from reading.

EASTER I baked a cake, a gooey chocolate one which is my default cake. There were chicks on it, not real ones, that would be silly. Dressing the table for a big lunch I started off stylish and chic, then mouthed oh sod it and strewed the whole thing with rabbits, chocolate eggs, fluffy chicks emerging from plastic eggs, the lot. We had not one but two easter egg hunts. We know how to live, don’t we?

WRITING  After a week off (Stockholm, then Easter visitors) I’ve forgotten how to do it? Any tips, anyone?

NIAMH A five year old is great fun. Most of the time. The time that you aren’t debating with them who’s in charge (clue: it’s not them), or forcing them in to hated tights, or explaining why it’s not a good idea to carry the dog by its nipples. (Insert link to your fave pic of Mavis under ‘the dog’)Occasionally they render you speechless. I wish I could recreate for you the look on my husband’s face when, over a pub lunch last Sunday, Niamh announced “I haven’t slept with thousands of men”. After some gentle investigating (you have to pitch it just right so they don’t realise they’re being interrogated or they clam up like WWII POW’s) we ascertained that this was a line from her favourite film, Mama Mia. So thank you Meryl Streep.
 
FEET My feet are happy. Smooth and soft and silky, they are ready for sandals. Before my luxury pedicure in Soho, my feet were like the feet of Satan himself. After an oxygen mask(?) and some cling film and the attentions of a nice lady, they are fit to be seen. I was with two girlfriends, one of whom is about to be married, so pretty feet was our gift to her. After the whole foot thing, we drank loads of champagne in a hotel bar, saw Shilpa Shetty, and went home. Louise, one of my co-pedicurees, admitted she’d asked the therapist what she was using to get rid of the hard skin and was told “a cheese grater”.
 
THE APPRENTICE An hour of bliss, some of it watched through my fingers. I love The Apprentice, although it should be retitled ‘How Not To Succeed in Business’. The people who apply, scattering deathless quotes thither and yon (“Let’s work until we bleed”) have no idea. Some of them are lawyers. Some of them are teachers. I wouldn’t let any one of them cross the road to buy me a bottle of milk. Why do the women wear such nasty mannish suits, with ill fitting blouses underneath? It’s either that or berets and nattily knotted scarves. Surely there’s a middle way, Apprentice Ladies? A jewel coloured fitted cardi a la Nigella? And Sralan doesn’t suit thin. I preferred him with a little double chin under that carefully tended stubble. I’m waiting for the personalities to unfurl this year, but already I don’t like the Geordie bloke, who’s spitting surly criticisms. (I’ll probably end up rooting for him. That’s the way The Apprentice goes.)
 
EGG BOX-RELATED GUILT Today Niamh needed to bring an egg box to school to decorate. I bought a box of six especially. I forgot to put the egg box in her bag. And now I am suffering the agonies of the damned. I can’t deal with these blips rationally  where Niamh is concerned: I am fast forwarding from this egg box scenario to a life spent in squats taking drugs and arguing with a man called something like Shady Pete.

KNITTING A tiny little v-neck, navy blue and soft, is taking shape on my needles. It’s for Jack, who’s brand new.
 
MY EDITOR Jo edits my books. She’s petite and dark and quite quiet, and kind of fascinating. She came to lunch the other Sunday, and we all stood out in the garden with drinks in our hands. She squinted in through the window of my study, saw ‘RESEARCH’ in capital letters on my whiteboard, then clocked ‘pig disease’ beneath it. Jo voiced some concern for the next book, reminding me that I am supposed to be writing romantic comedies.
 
TODDLER-DULTS Grown men dressed like toddlers – eh? They’re everywhere, particularly fast food outlets. Big six footers with feet like canoes, clad head to toe in soft and fluffy sweatshirt material. Baggy top. Baggy trousers. Really baggy trousers, with a  gusset down by the knees. Are they trying to regress? My Dad would never have left the house dressed like a baby. It was suits all the way. Even to garden in. (Although that was an old suit.)
 
EYEBROWS I’m not sure why I’m sharing this, but I have over plucked my eyebrows and I look like 70’s vintage David Bowie, not in a good way.
 
WRITING On the home stretch with book number six. I love my heroine, she’s a little older and more cynical than my other girls. I’ve moved her to the countryside, Somerset to be precise, and I feel energised whenever I visit her there in my mind. As usual, I’ve cast the male leads in my head. The women just blossom, but the men are physically modelled on famous blokes. This time I’m dealing with Billy Nighy and Matthew MacFadyen. A tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.

CELEBRIDEES Richmond is just up the road from me in Surrey. I find it caters to my window shopping needs, and also to my celebridee-spotting needs. All sorts of actors live there, some quite famous (Richard Attenborough), some who give rise to lengthy ‘oh God, what was he in, that thing set in the twenties, he was the brother’ type anguish. One Richmond celebridee is almost always on the streets. He’s so reliable, and so wonderfully typical of the breed (he wears a scarf in a casual knot that only actors can achieve). I speak of Richard E. Grant, the patron saint of Richmond. He passed my husband outside House of Fraser this week, his lion-like head high in the air. I missed Saint Richard, but I spotted Mackenzie Crook in a bobble hat a little later. (BTW the very best spot to find Saint Richard is in Boots, for some reason.)

FILMS Have you seen ‘In Bruges’,the film written and directed by (one of my favourite) kind-of-Irish writers, Martin McDonagh? If not, see it.

But not if you’re easily offended. (Although perhaps you should see it all the more if you are easily offended: it might offend you so much that you are shocked through the whole gamut of offence and come out the other side, unshockable.) It’s a smorgasbord of wit, gore, tawdry romance and, yes, offence. McDonough is quite egalitarian: everybody comes in for abuse. And that is why it didn’t offend me at all. In fact, I didn’t want it to end. Colin Farrell was getting a chance to act, really act, for once and his glee was clear. He ran barefoot through the rich, rolling Irish cadences of the script, kicking the words about like a footballer, heading the cruel, deadly jokes in to the back of the net. (Martin McDonough is, I feel obliged to add, wildly handsome. This doesn’t colour my view of his talent – I’m equally rabid about W.B.Yeats and have no desire to manhandle him – but it’s a nice bonus. Check him out here.)

TELLY OK. Some days have passed and now I feel strong enough to talk about it. ‘Paris Hilton’s British Best Friend’ … For those of you who haven’t seen it (Stay that way! Save yourselves!) the show is based on Paris’ very real need for a best friend in Great Britain. As you do, she is auditioning them on television. Not for Paris the dull business of meeting somebody at work, discovering a shared love for, say, Radiohead, going for a quick drink, then arranging lunch, then maybe going to Tenerife together. No, Paris is smarter than you and I.

So, various people apply, and once they are accepted, have to jump through all manner of debasing hoops while sharing a ‘glamorous’ (i.e. predominantly pink) house in London. They all love her, they adore her. I know this, because they say so all the time. What there is to love about Paris is hard to discern. She is not funny, nor kind and she has the voice of a small man. Last week’s humiliation involved each contestant being filmed as they read a note from Paris apologizing that she had been called back to L.A. and telling them that they had been disqualified. ‘The only lie,’ intoned Paris, the little old man with the huge handbag, on voiceover, ‘I hope I’ll ever tell them’. Because, hee hee, she was teasing: she just wanted to see how they’d react to being eliminated.

Well, uurgh. Basically. Yuk and uurgh. At least eighteen times more offensive than anything Martin McDonough could dream up.

One poor woman, who had met Paris a handful of times, always with the camera running, and in the company of several others, sobbed that she had no friends and believed that Paris was the only person who truly understood her. That floored me. I realized how much Paris Hilton is a figment of other people’s imagination, a chimera produced by their need. If all these people stop wanting her, would she disappear? We can only hope.

The girl who said she was disappointed because she’d hoped Paris could help her build herself in to a brand was eliminated.

When did little girls stop wanting to be ballerina’s and want to be brands, I wonder?

CHILD-RELATED HILARITY Niamh is my little girl. Five, going on forty eight, she has a big head and lots of hair. Lounging on the floor with our spaniel puppy, the estimable Mavis. Niamh was whispering to her, ‘You’re so cute, Mavis. You’ve got lovely little eyes, lovely little ears, lovely little paws, lovely little nipples.’

(By the way, those glasses are Chanel. Just saying.)

DISPLACEMENT While ‘working’ this week, I followed a trail of breadcrumbs around the web that somehow led me here. Is it really really funny or the stuff of nightmares (those eyes)?

TODAY I Googled my way in to a whole new world. And it was more disturbing than the eye-popping stuff my dog-loving friend Eryl happened upon when she Googled ‘pregnant bitches’. In the new novel (50,000 words in, thank you for asking) one of the characters befriends a pig.  The pig falls ill. The reader must believe in this pig’s illness, worry about it and root for said pig’s recovery, or I am not doing my job properly. So I Google ‘pig illness’. Oh, the pictures. I may never sleep again. Pigs, it seems, don’t catch polite little colds, or develop tickly coughs. No. Pigs’ vulvas ooze. Their rectums twist. Their snouts, for the love of God, atrophy.  The world is divided in to people who have seen pictures of pigs with their snouts dropping off and people who haven’t. I am now one of the former and I mourn my lost innocence.
 
WHAT ELSE? Oh yeah, there have been mystery flowers delivered! Ooh, the excitement. A pretty bouquet of purplish, yellowish flowers was left on the porch. There was no addressee, no note. They could, I suppose, be for my husband but come on, they’re not. So they’re for me! Unless there is a five year old at my daughter’s school with too much pocket money and a precocious interest in the opposite sex. Who could they be from? It’s not my birthday, it’s not an anniversary, I haven’t done anybody a super-good turn in the last few days. So it must be love. Mad, passionate, reckless, leaving-flowers-on-the-porch-without-a-bleedin’-note love.
 
FOOD Two nice people, soon to be married, came to our house on Sunday. I gave them roast lamb, with garlic and rosemary smeared all over it, some roasted potatoes (done in the Italian style, cubed and tossed in herbs), a greek salad and some hummus. Sounds odd I know, but works like a dream. The afters were chocolate pots, and given that they involved only two ingredients, both of them delicious (chocolate and crème fraiche) they were rather disappointing. Like going on a blind date with Brad Pitt and having him talk about brass rubbing all night.
 
BOOKS Reading ‘The Other Half Dies’ by Sophie Hannah. She is the new Ruth Rendell and if you knew how I worship at that lady’s altar you’d know how much that compliment means from me. Twisted, misanthropic, deceitful, complex – sounds like most of my ex-boyfriends, but Sophie’s books are unputdownable. I’m going slowly with this one, partly to stretch it out, and partly so that her style doesn’t affect me too much. Halfway through writing my current novel, it would be disastrous if the tone suddenly turned menacing and spikey, as opposed to warm and funny.

I’m also losing myself in Oscar’s Books by Thomas Wright. I’ve always loved Oscar Wilde. His Irishness, his flamboyance, his insistence on his own peachily lit version of reality in the face of the grim truth, and that wrecked slab of a face. The plays bore me, but the story of his life has such sadness and brilliance: the man’s irresistible. If you’ve never read his fairy tales please treat yourself. They have a wistfulness that stays with you. Anyway, back to the current book. Thomas Wright has tracked down Oscar’s personal library, the one which was auctioned off like so many rotten cauliflowers on the pavement outside his house after he was put in jail for kissing boys. He discusses the books,and their importance to Oscar’s self-creation with erudite joy. I’m loving this book, although I’m not always up to it, as I read last thing in bed and sometimes it’s all I can do to follow ‘heat’.
 
TELLY Still recovering from Robert Webb on the Comic Relief dancing competition a couple of weeks back. This week’s wasn’t so thrilling. Angela Rippon scared the tripe out of me, and if I want to see cast members of The Bill riverdancing I’ll ask, thanks very much.
 
Snog, Marry, Avoid continues to delight and dismay in equal measure. Girls addicted to make up and skimpy clothing receive a makeunder, whereby they are parted from their make up and cajoled in to nice dresses and emerge looking a bit bleh, to be honest. The best bit is the filmed excerpts of the victims getting ready for a night out, the air thick with hairspray, as they clamber up on to stripper shoes and discard peekaboo bra’s for being too matronly. A lot of pink. And a lot of Bacardi Breezers.
                    
I’ve given up with The Wire. Season (as they say in the States) one was riveting, but the second batch is uninvolving. The show’s habit of parachuting you straight in to the story with scant explanation, and of letting the characters rattle like machine guns with their impenetrable ghetto accents was awesome. But now, like a bored Marie Antoinette, I am tossing John McNulty and his colleagues away.

I wish I’d never seen Peep Show before, then I could lock myself in a room and catch up with all four (is it five?) series. But I have seen it. So tough.
 
DOG Mavis, our Cavalier King Charles spaniel is on a diet! She’s only six months old. The vet wants to be able to feel her ribs (Mavis’, not the vets’) and can’t. Mavis looks fine to us, but then we gaze at her with the besotted eyes of enslaved lovers. I mean, look at her. 

Does she look fat to you? It’s Jessica Simpson all over again. I’m doing what I’m told though, and cutting out her lunch. Poor old Mavis.
 
FIBS I have lied this week. To other Mothers at my school. It wasn’t an actual lie, it was the sin of omission (which, according to the nuns who taught me is just as bad). I didn’t tell them that the professional looking poster I knocked up for the upcoming Ceilidh night was created by Matthew. Ah, sure, what’s the matter? (And you can shut up, the ghost of Sister Columbanus.)
 
WORK I do love research. It’s not as hard as writing a book, and it can involve speaking to interesting folk. For the book I’m immersed in at the mo’ I’ve been canvassing women whose opinions I trust for their views on men. What infuriates them about their partners?

I unleashed something. Taciturn types who normally email me with messages like Monday good for lunch. Where? sent me reams of information. And it wasn’t looking good for the men.
 
Apparently men expect an arch of swords if they manage to make cheese on toast without injury. They always turn on the centre light in a room, even if the lady of the house has spent ten minutes neurotically setting the ambient light with the care of a safecracker. They throw wet towels on the bed. They put things back in the wrong cupboards. They leave dirty mugs on the worktop directly above the dishwasher without ever having the imagination to open said dishwasher and place said mug in it. They have feet which are not pleasant to look upon. And they talk all through Sex and the City.
 
Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t hit ‘em in the head with a shovel.