In it to win it?

One of the inescapable signs of my own personal ageing process, apart from the obvious ones like grey hairs, wrinkles and the total inability to tolerate any form of human idiocy, is insomnia. It’s a horrible thing, insomnia. Nothing else is quite like it. It is the only thing which deprives you of a night’s sleep thus rendering you good for absolutely nothing at your work the following day and yet which you cannot, with good conscience, use as a justifiable excuse for not turning up to work the following day. “I’m not coming in today because I didn’t sleep very well last night” sounds very weak and is unlikely to result in any sympathy. Whereas “I’m not coming in today because I broke my ankle running for a bus in platform heels when I was drunk” is much more believable, in spite of the fact that at least when you were having insomnia you were in fact in your bed, (and presumably sober, since when was the last time you got mangled and couldn’t sleep like a hibernating bear afterwards and often in the most unusual places?) and at least trying to get some sleep before you had to go to work, which is a much more responsible state of affairs for an employee. You would think.

Lots of people have cures for insomnia. Mine is to imagine that I have won £150 million on the lottery, and then work out what I would do with all that money. It usually goes a bit like this:

1)      I will not move house. You can’t make me. I don’t want a bigger house. I can’t even keep this one clean. And yes, I know I will have a huge pile of cash with which to pay someone else to keep it clean, but a lottery win will not change the fact that I am Scottish and thus morbidly tight – why would I pay someone money to do something that I can do myself? And anyway, big houses give me the creeps. Big houses have many more corners than small houses in which creepy things, both human and arachnoid, can hide. Why would I want that?

2)      I will, however, consider buying another house with enough space for me to install a swimming pool and a football pitch. Or, heck, I may just buy a swimming pool and a football pitch. Or I might buy the house next door, flatten it (sorry Netta) and build a swimming pool and a football pitch there. No real need to apologise to my lovely neighbour though, as I will have already given her a huge cheque just because she’s nice and she pulls my curtains and puts my lights on when we’re away on holiday. And possibly to make up for the fact that I am the world’s worst and most forgetful cat-sitter and she STILL trusts me enough to look after the poor neglected creature when she goes away on holiday. It’s a good thing cats can fend for themselves, food-wise, and cannot tell tales. That’s all I’m saying.

3)      I will make all my friends and family millionaires, as long as they agree never to mention it again, and promise not to be grateful because I would hate that. We would have to have some sort of contractual obligation not to show any gratitude. I am going to need a clever lawyer.

4)      Little Vulture will get enough money so that she can retire extremely early (ie now. I mean, why wait?) and spend the rest of her living moments not worrying about Mr Osborne stealing her pension, taking photos of exotic wildlife in hot places, and coming home every so often to show me the photographs. Her, not Osborne – I have no wish ever to see his photographs. However, if she shows me any more close up photos of moths or stick insects, or once more hides a gigantic moth’s wing in an innocent looking notebook, I reserve the right to withdraw all her funds immediately. Moths are my problem area, as she well knows. And telling me they’re pretty is not helpful. They are not pretty – they are hairy, creepy and get stuck in my hair. What WAS she thinking.

5)      Lioness will get enough money that she can direct her fabulous business from behind a pair of sunglasses and a margarita on a poolside sun-lounger, and can fly home on a private jet once a month to pick up a box of Cadburys supplies and have a decent Chinese take away.

6)      Bear will get enough money to buy his dream home and pay some muscle to go and sort out either a) the seven circles of hell that is the English house-buying system or b) the total hairballs who keep gazumping him or suddenly deciding to withdraw from the whole process at the very last minute, just because they can (see item a) for reference). And he will be so pleased that he will sell me his black labrador’s MOST beautiful puppy from her next litter for insanely competitive mates’ rates (ie for free).

7)      Judge will get his 5-a-side football pitch, his on-site swimming pool and his tri-annual skiing holidays.

8)      Boxer will get her asymmetric bars, her horse and her tri-annual skiing holidays.

9)      My brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Jolly Boy and Malnu-Trisha, will get enough money to pay for their house in Florida, their Majorcan riding holiday and someone to take that confounded holly bush they hate so much off the front wall of their house.

10)   Engineer and I will buy a house in France a stone’s throw from a fabulous boulangerie. Enough said. We will also buy the house next door to the house which Jolly Boy and Malnu-Trisha buy in Florida, since my family’s level of enjoyment of a holiday seems to be strongly correlated to the presence of their family on that holiday.

11)   Horrifically, there are 30-somethings who are in gainful employment and still cannot afford to buy a house these days. Thus I will purchase a house for Boxer and a house for Judge, so that I do not have them still living under my roof in 25 years’ time when Engineer and I want to go to our French boulangerie house but don’t quite trust them not to have an Empty* whilst we are away and trash the place. Better that they trash their own places.

12)   Engineer will let me have a black Labrador puppy, because I will have given up the job which gets in the way of my leisure time, and instead I will be walking my dog, writing my blog, and cleaning all my sodding houses.

13)   I will probably need to keep enough money aside to pay for liposuction and other weight-loss-related surgical procedures on a regular basis in order to stop me from becoming a human balloon (see item 10 above). On the other hand, it looks like I will have a fair number of houses to clean and animals to exercise, so maybe that will help to keep the weight off.

*An Empty, for those who were not brought up in Glasgow, is a party which takes place in someone’s house when word gets around that their parents are away for the weekend. It almost always ends in disaster because someone always figures out how to break into the carefully locked drinks cabinet.

Well. A person can dream, can’t she?

Post-Olympic Hangover

 And it’s a doozy. I have been living and breathing the Olympic Games for the last 3 weeks, and now that it’s over I am listless and distracted. I have gone cold turkey regarding my insatiable Twitter habit. It no longer does anything for me, since no Tweet starts with the words “GOLD MEDAL!” or “TEAM GB!" I fear that, as a class C drug user moves on to class A narcotics, soon I will be left with no option other than to move on to something more addictive than Twitter. If such a thing even exists.

So here, in order to keep my own personal Olympic flame burning for just a little bit longer, are my favourite thoughts and memories of what has been, in my opinion, an enthralling and captivating competition.

1)      Football (the male variety) took a back seat in the nation’s consciousness. We ignored it, and sometimes we even mocked it for its injury-fabrication and its badly-behaved, overpaid, spoilt young men. Even those of us who love football (of which I am one) ignored it. And do you know what? It was great. We now know what sporting prowess really is. It is not the Gucci-clad guy with the overloaded bank account who turns up for football training once in a while. It’s the lady hockey player who had her jaw broken but returned to play for her team 1 day after an operation to repair her jaw, by inserting a metal plate in it, with her face bound up in bandages and sutures. Can you even imagine a footballer doing that? Of course you can’t. Kate Walsh, Team GB Hockey Captain, we salute you.

2)      The lady carrying and selling beer in the Olympic Park, who, laden with a back-breaking cool bag, nonetheless managed a few dance moves and drummed up an enthusiastic crowd by shouting “Buy some beer and get some dancing feet!”

3)      The fact that there was a sizeable section of the nation, including me, which airily imagined itself to be immune to the Olympics. At the end of day 1, I’m pretty sure every single one of us was eating our words, and on the sliding scale of interest levels we had all departed “ambivalent” and were rapidly heading for “obsessed”. How did THAT happen?

4)      The lady who, in spite of the fact that it was 11.30pm, she had probably been sitting in her high chair with her loud hailer for a few hours, she was surrounded by drunk and ecstatic Norwegians (I think Norway had done particularly well at Handball on that day) and she almost certainly needed a stiff gin and a bite to eat, managed to make up, on the spur of the moment, a rap which thanked everyone for coming today and directed them gently but firmly towards the exits and the less busy public transport options. You go girl.

5)      Usain Bolt. Simple as.

6)      The other male sprinters in Usain Bolt’s races who weren’t Usain Bolt but had a go at being him anyway. Epic Fail. Note to you guys: until you can win the 100m running backwards with one hand tied behind your back and the other one waving at the crowd, fuelled by nothing but a diet of McDonalds Chicken Nuggets, and start celebrating your victory at around the 75m mark, you will never achieve his level of cool. Live with it.

7)      The remote control minis which beetled up and down the athletics throwing area ferrying the throwees back to the throwers. How much did you want a shot of those? How long do you think they took combing the country to find someone over the age of 12 who could be trusted to operate them competently? If I had actually been given that job, how many times do you imagine the track events might have been disrupted by the sudden inadvertent appearance on the track of a mini carrying a couple of javelins?

8)      Clare Balding, who wept copiously every time ANYONE from Team GB won ANY colour of medal. She was permanently surrounded by reams of paper containing all her facts and figures. Could they not have found her a larger table? Or an iPad perhaps?

9)      Denise Lewis and Colin Jackson, who made us all feel so much better knowing that it wasn’t just us who jumped up and down and yelled ourselves hoarse at the track athletes (who could hear neither them in their sound-proof TV studio, nor us in front of our TVs at home) to try and make them go faster.

10)   Michael Johnson, who wore the long-suffering look of a man who was a) American and therefore exceedingly unlikely to jump up and down like a numpty for the sake of Team GB; b) FAR too cool to jump up and down like a numpty for the sake of any team; and c) only there, amongst these crazy people, because it was down in black and white in the terms and conditions section of his legally binding BBC contract.

11)   Jess Ennis. See item 5.

12)   Mo Farrah. Ditto. We love a bit of Mo.

13)   Beth Tweddle. Ditto. Made doubly pleasurable because of the infinite rhyming possibilities. The whole nation had stolen a march on every possible tabloid headline for the following day. We’d done them all, folks.

14)   Heck. ALL our medal winners. Especially those who had got there in spite of having all their funding withdrawn. In effect that’s the same as me doing my job (except without the sweating and bleeding and vomiting of course) but not receiving my salary. Wouldn’t happen, let’s face it.

15)   That moment during the Opening Ceremony when the person we all thought was Dame Judi Dench or Helen Mirren dressed up as the Queen turned around to Daniel Craig and said, “Hello Bond…” and 55 million jaws simultaneously hit the ground as we all realised it actually WAS the Queen.

16)   Gary Barlow in the Closing Ceremony. You cried, didn’t you. Of all the courage we saw over the 17 days of the competition, surely his was the greatest.

17)   The moment during the Closing Ceremony when a chance camera angle visited upon us all the sudden but inescapable realisation, courtesy of Messieurs Cameron and Johnston, that the Conservative Party may be crap at governing, but they are far worse at dancing.

There are a million other memories. How many accidents were caused by people scrolling Twitter obsessively whilst walking across the road I wonder? Roll on the Paralympics, I can’t wait.