[Sorry for the non-update. I’ve just come back from a rather good anime convention in Birmingham, where I was up 40 hours straight – no, make that 41, the clocks went back – including running an all-night film show. I am thus incapable of writing anything coherent. Luckily, here is our American ambassadress to pinch-hit…]

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE – ALMOST!

This American Ambassador had her first taste of a ritualistic form of female bonding involving many types of distractions, leading up to, but fortunately for this group, not quite including, eventual slaughter and sacrifice. Not by the participants themselves, but by the aforementioned American Ambassador, whose only function was to make sure that the event ran smoothly, the natives well-fed and the rituals kept fair, mediating all differences of opinions (fights), administering first aid when necessary and diagnosing all manner of odd hypochondriac symptoms.

I am describing the horrible details of a pre-pubescent female slumber. I lived through it! I have always said “no” over the years whenever my daugher asked if she could have a slumber party. But it was her 11th Birthday. And those Bambi Eyes…pleading with me, begging me…”Ohhhhhhhhh Pleeeeeeeeeassssse”
Call me sentimental.
Call me a good mother.
Call me stupid.
I caved. I said “yes”. 10 small women showed up. Yes they were small, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t have personality. They were drenched in personality. And they were loud. And each had distinguishing traits. And all played the weirdest games…. I watched in horror as they played:

• THE SANDMAN: One person lays down on the floor. The rest sit around her body and watch as one person kneels by her head and massages her temples then other parts of her body as she recites this: “I am the Sandman, I will be operating on you today. First I will cut off your legs and fill them with sand” (run fingers lightly over the victim’s legs, then press on them) “Then I will cut off your arms and fill them with sand” (run fingers lightly over the victim’s arms and then press on them) “Then I will cut out your stomach and fill it with sand and cement” (runs fingers lightly over victim’s stomach and presses on it) “Then I will cut out your face and fill it with sand, cement and bricks” (runs fingers lightly over face and presses on it) After this ritualistic chant, the victim is then asked to get up, whereupon she says she can’t. They all laugh.

A couple more games similar to this one were played entitled:

• CAT SCRATCHES: Victim is led to believe her back has been scratched by a crazed kitten
• LIGHT AS A FEATHER, STIFF AS A BOARD: Victim is led to believe they are light as a feather and the rest of the group can pick up the body with two fingers

All very strange to observe. Then, of course, I was asked to participate in a few other activities entitled:

• FREEZE DANCING: they dance, I pause the music, whomever moves is out until only one person is left
• HAND IN THE BOX: feel inside and guess what is inside the box
• WATER BALLOON RELAY RACES
• BLIND MAN’S COTTON BALLS: really… Don’t ask.

I ordered Pizza and Hot wings for dinner. They ate snacks consisting of crackers, cheese, chips, salsa and apples (hey, they’re my kids, I can feed ’em whatever I want!)

Ten girls. Screaming, running, dancing, displaying and comporting themselves borderline between still being children and giggling that some boy is in love with them and hysterical giggling when one of them points to a water balloon with a tail and screams that it’s a BOY, causing them all to shriek. Oh, brother… What new and exciting adventures await all these budding pre-women in only a few years (or from what I observed, in the case of a couple of these, only a few months!).

Jim, eat your heart out! [Who, me? JhM]

Of course, the end of the evening brought them sprawled on the floor of the living room in their nighties and sleeping bags, watching “MERLIN” with all the lights out, and whispering spooky stories, playing pranks on the ones that had already fallen asleep. Ahhhh…. I remember those pranks in my youth. We used to put shaving foam on the open palm of the unsuspecting sleeper and tickle their nose. Or place their fingers in a bowl of really warm water, watching carefully to see if they would pee on themselves as they slept… Yes… the good ‘ol days.

Well, in the end I didn’t murder the little pre-menstrual darlings even though there were a couple of bitchy moments there that I had to quelch. All in all, a very good time was had by all. Well, most. One of them kept walking around the house, holding her neck, making strange noises, saying she felt sick, and had asthma, and her stomach hurt, and she had a sore throat, and could she go swimming?

Quite an experience I must say. I am not a party “pooper” by any stretch. But if I hear “YMCA” one more time, my PSYCHO knife is coming out of the drawer ……

REE!!! REE!!! REE!!! REE!!!

Chris Fata

When TC’s American ambassador Chris visits London, one of her favourite outdoor pastimes is playing ‘Spot the Psycho’ on the Underground, even if she does seem to think that the majority of fellow passengers should be locked up in strait-jackets. I reckon this is largely the result of “tube catatonia”, the fixed stare adopted by most passengers in order to get through the hell of moving from A to B. Rush hour is bad enough for us locals, never mind someone from Arizona (a state bigger than Britain, but with a sixteenth of the population) to whom it must seem like cruel and unnatural punishment.

One was thus inclined to take her tales of encountering the seriously disturbed with a grain of salt, despite some corroboration of public transport weirdos from TC’s ‘zine reviewer, Lino. But they do exist, and I bumped into one on Thursday night — probably my first such genuine encounter in ten years of using the tube.

I was coming back from Euston, where I’d met a briefly visiting friend for a couple of pints, and was now heading to Tulse Hill, groaning under the burden of a large cardboard box of videos. This was still the tail end of rush hour, so the train was busy; the only seat was in the corner, next to a woman, in her 50’s. She had her bags on the seat.

I said, “Excuse me, can you move your bags please?”

Looking straight ahead, she ignored me.
Ordinary people might have taken the hint — not Jim McLennan after two pints.
Very pointedly, I repeated the question.
Equally pointedly, she ignored me.

Yet again: question, but no response. I reached across her to move the bags.
Oblivious no longer, she snapped, “Don’t touch them!” and held onto her scabby luggage.
Umpteen possible responses flickered, Terminator-like, across my brain; I settled for ‘sarcasm’.

“Oh, so does your luggage have a season ticket then? Or do you simply not understand English?” — from her accent, she sounded East European, maybe some kind of Czech gypsy. This probably explained why my withering satire was, indeed, withering on the vine. One other passenger, however, stood up to offer her seat to me — gratifying, but not the point, so I politely declined.

King’s Cross. A lot of people got off, so I could now sit down on the seat opposite her. I was *miffed*, latent British xenophobia boosting my anger (how DARE they come over here and behave like this!), though her behaviour would have been unacceptable from the Queen Mother. Adopt tactic #2: replace Terminator with Rambo, something about “you wanna fight a psycho; you gotta become a psycho”. I start staring at her, fuelling my gaze with every ounce of hatred in my veins.

She noticed. Then looked away. Looked back, clearly unsettled, then away again. Result. She said something to me; I didn’t hear it, and kept right on staring, cold and level. If her head had exploded, I wouldn’t have been too surprised. She snapped something else at me, another unheard question. Stare. Stare. Stare. Angel station. One more incomprehensible piece of gibberish, then just before the doors closed, she broke, scooping up her rubbish and slinking out of the carriage. Tube psychos 0, Mildly Pissed + Severely Pissed-off Scots 1.

To my surprise, someone opposite said, “What was THAT all about?”. This rare break with tube protocol (don’t look at anyone, and never speak to them) allowed me to rehash the story — or at least, my side of it, her mileage may have varied. Still, I’m sure it kept the rest of the carriage entertained for a couple of stops. I can’t deny it was gratifying; if I ever get out to Arizona, I’ll try it on the local psychos there. Or perhaps not — out there, there may be fewer loonies, but they probably all carry big guns…

I don’t go to the theatre often, ‘cos I’m generally put off by the stuffy atmosphere, cramped seats and exorbitant prices — for thirty quid, I can have an entire night out, involving beer, curry and table dances. But on special occasions, for special people, I have been know to let myself get dragged along, and generally have a blast: the last time was on my mother’s 60th birthday, for ‘Riverdance’.

And so, I found myself in the front row at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket, alongside a host of tourists, awaiting ‘Phantom of the Opera’ with some trepidation, since I’d always viewed Andrew Lloyd-Webber as the spawn of a particularly easy-listening Satan, fit only for Radio 2. On the plus side, at least it would be Grand Guignol easy-listening, given the subject matter inherent in Gaston Leroux’s source novel, much adapted in Hollywood since, with everyone from Lon Chaney to Robert Englund putting on the mask.

Luckily, however, it was nowhere near as bad as I’d feared, with the story being fairly faithful to the original, dispelling doubts about Lloyd-Webber tacking on a happy ending. It’s still dark, melodramatic and fairly heavy on the Gothique, while the costumes and sets were very impressive, especially given the rapid scene changes. Indeed, they were occasionally perhaps TOO impressive, you found yourself admiring the backdrops and the other technical aspects, rather than paying attention to what was happening.

And what was happening, to Lloyd-Webber’s credit, was also a lot less banal than I anticipated. The opera-within-a-musical format seemed to give him some leeway for experimentation, and while there were still the obvious hits i.e. ‘Music of the Night’, they were gratifyingly unrepresentative of the overall thing. Though it IS a little hard to pick out the lyrics, when you’ve got half a dozen people, all singing different things at the same time.

Not that this was a major problem, since we all know the story. Roughly: hideously deformed freak meets girl. Hideously deformed freak loses girl. Hideously deformed freak gets very upset and starts offing people. Given this, it’s no surprise that the overall feel was as much Lamberto Bava or Michelle Soavi, ‘Demons’ or ‘Stage Fright’, than ‘Cats’ or ‘Aspects of Love’. That is wasn’t yer usual musical fodder was probably a good thing in the circumstances. The girl in question was not what you’d call a ravishing beauty (Asia Argento need lose no sleep), but I suppose you have to take what you can get when you’re a hideously deformed freak…

This being live theatre, there were a couple of embarrassing moments, notably when the Phantom’s mask fell off a little prematurely while singing to his love. To both their credits, she affected not to notice his (sigh…) hideously deformed face, while he swiftly covered up with his hand, while he groped around for the mask, not missing a beat along the way. Some of the pyrotechnics were distinctly of the “damp squib” type, but I guess you can’t expect ‘Armageddon’ on stage.

After two and a half hours (including interval — drinks not too badly priced, to my surprise), the curtain came down. I must confess to stifling a couple of yawns in the second half, but I was never in danger of actually falling asleep. Admittedly, this WAS because the seats were less comfy than your average bus — they really need to sort that out, if they want to compete with other entertainments. In no way has it usurped the position of cinema in my affections, and it’ll probably be another couple of years before I go again, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.

Summer’s over – the leather jacket had its first outing this afternoon – and we are now careering towards Christmas at an alarming rate. I think I have probably got another two, possibly three weekends, before Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon becomes just too problematic. [Never mind the hordes of dawdling tourists, it’s the hordes of dawdling Christmas shoppers who are the spawn of Satan]

This Christmas, however, threatens to be even worse than usual, since it’s quite likely that I’m going to have to WORK for most of the festive season, since the company have banned anyone in the department from taking any holidays in December. The reason for this was described, in their usual understated way, in the Sun newspaper earlier in the week: CHAOS IN STORE screamed the headlines. Apparently, there’s this thing called EMU, which is going to happen on January 1st and will really screw up all the shops and things.

The Sun, in their limited, low-brow, non-intellectual way, have only just realised something that has been painfully freakin’ obvious to me and the rest of my colleagues in the IT department (motto: “have you tried switching it off and on?”), as we struggle to come to terms with most of the major currencies in Europe vanishing, and being replaced by ECUs. With the standard of decision making we’ve come to expect from our bosses, the task of converting all our systems to appreciate this little fact is taking somewhat longer than expected. That’s “somewhat”, as in certain managers are now looking forward to Christmas with all the enthusiasm of particularly overweight turkeys.

Now, my area of responsibility is particularly the Millennium testing – yep, I’m not looking forward to Christmas 1999 either – but this has not exempted me from being sucked into the general milieu of…well, panic is perhaps too strong a word (yet…give ’em time…). This weekend saw my beautiful, pristine, calm and peaceful Millennium environment invaded by a load of unwashed EMU databases and programs, filling up all the error logs, using up disk space and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

Admittedly, the reason my system was beautiful, pristine, calm and peaceful was that hardly anyone was using it — tumbleweeds roll majestically across the disk drives, etc, etc. Millennium testing is SUPPOSED to be completed by the end of ths year. It won’t be, since we’re all too busy attending meetings about EMU. The only positive thing is that I have no evidence which suggests that any other financial institution will be any better off. One set of panic-stricken programming is enough for anyone to cope with, though the two were initially largely lumped together under one umbrella; fortunately, someone realised, in the back of their lizard brains, that you need to do DIFFERENT THINGS to cope with the end of the millennium, and a change in currencies for 300 million people. I guess this stroke of genius explains why I’m not a manager…

However, I doubt very much that the banking world will collapse as we know it. At least, being painfully aware how it usually teeters on the brink of chaos anyway (again, not just in my company, this is fairly general). If you saw the things that went on, you would pull your money out of the bank, switch it to gold bullion, and leave it in a sock under your mattress.

Having been with my current employers for almost ten years, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in the job marketplace. But I still shake in terror at the recollection of nightmarish interviews, in which smirking members of the personnel department — sorry, that’s now “Human Resources”, isn’t it? — would unleash sneaky questions like “What do you think is your biggest weakness?”. You would mumble something totally implausible like “I am too ready to sacrifice my health through overwork for the greater glory of the company”, and pray they’d hurry up and move on to your O-level results.

Needless to say, when the chance came to put the boot on the other foot, I leapt at it with both hands [pausing only to mangle severely a few metaphors en route]. For the company was having an open night, and for my sins, I’d been selected to act as a screener. This is not-quite-an-interviewer; you go through people’s CVs with them to make sure they have the necessary experience, and filter out the real deadwood before passing the rest on. However, it was still enough to provoke visions of shrieking “Kneel before me, mortals, and QUAKE at the POWER I hold over you” at bemused applicants for the post of business analyst.

Sadly, this was to remain unfulfilled — as did the one about desperate supermodels prepared to trade sexual favours for employment in the IT department of a major, but somewhat backward, financial institution. I largely found myself interviewing a series of grey people whose major personality trait was the complete lack of any. The disturbing thing was that the people I’d actually want to work with, inevitably lacked any sort of relevant experience — people with years of web experience are not really required by a company which still views the Internet as a tool of Satan. How many ways are there to subtly tell someone, “You don’t want to work here”?

The organisation of the whole event left a bit to be desired, not least having the event at an old brewery, but only supplying orange juice. It is my belief that interviews (and indeed all business meetings generally) should be conducted down the pub; after three pints, you get a far better idea of what someone is really like. There was also a startling failure to realise that some positions would be more attractive than others: they didn’t seem to realise they’d get more “analysts” turning up than “database administrators”, so there were queues for the former while the latter failed to see ANY applicants during the entire evening.

For the first interview especially, I think I was probably more nervous than the interviewee, especially as we had no time to prepare, by looking at their CVs for example. For some people this was no problem, they’d would happily witter on for ages, while you frantically scanned their application form for anything you recognised — “oh, so you live in Brighton? Do you come up to London on the Thameslink trains?” was one of my more desperate ploys. But in other cases, the answers were monosyllabic in the extreme, and when you know sod-all about the position in question, this means that you run out of steam inside about two minutes. It seems churlish to chuck them out on that basis — you tend to err on the side of caution and send anyone through to the next stage, as long as they possess the right number of limbs (plus or minus a couple).

This is thus somewhat in the nature of an apology, to those individuals who were keen enough to turn up, hoping for a job opportunity, only to be faced with a gibbering wreck, slamming back the orange juice and droning on about trains. Sorry. But, hey, I was probably doing you a favour…

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