Tuesday 8 January 2013

A Nice Relaxing Holiday (yeah right)

I'm rubbish at holidays. Completely useless. For years I had the handy excuse of no money and unstable employment (hello, TV industry!) to keep me safe from the nightmare of holidays. But sadly, now that I'm a grown-up and on a salary that's not an embarrassment, I have to confront them head-on.

It's not that I've been burned by terrible holidays in the past, with the exception of a misjudged family holiday to Ibiza aged 14, the only highlight of which was me finally losing my last stubborn milk tooth. Generally speaking, all my holidays have been great. Aged 17, I spent two weeks in Zante with friends, thrilled to be getting away with public drinking. I loved Italy. I got shown around Copenhagen by a (sort of) native, and got the unique pleasure of hearing 50,000 Danes sing what they thought were the lyrics of Angels at a Take That concert. I had a crazy and inspiring five days in Edinburgh during the festival. And then last year I had a gay wedding in Spain, which was precisely as fabulous as you'd imagine.

So my problem isn't the holidays per se. The holidays generally turn out okay, apart from the constant headache I get in hot weather (one of these days the industrial quantity of ibuprofen in my suitcase is going to be cause for an airport strip-search). My problem is that one week of (semi) relaxation in return for a couple of months of stressful planning and at least a week of exhaustion (read: hangover) afterwards doesn't really seem like a fair trade.

First, you have to wonder if you should really be blowing a grand on a holiday when it should be going into the one-day-possibly-owning-a-shitty-studio-flat fund. Then I stress about time: How much holiday allowance do I have left? Would I rather save it for Christmas? What if I get [insert whatever writing thing I've recently applied for] and I need to take some holiday time to prepare that?

Then there's the destination. I finally have enough money to visit New York - the only place I've ever genuinely wanted to go to - just at the time when none of my friends can afford it. All other destinations are really just Not New York in comparison, aren't they?  I'm not an adventurous traveller, I don't really care if I never trek through South America and I'm subconsciously terrified of being murdered in Thailand. So until Thomas Cook start selling trips to fictional places, I'm going to struggle to muster much enthusiasm.

Finally, there's the key question you need to ask yourself when planning any holiday: Is it worth the 1,000 emails that I'm going to have to trawl through upon my return to work?

I find it strange that people will think nothing of dropping £500 on seven days of lying on a beach and dozing. And yet if I want to spend a week at home writing continuously, people think I'm crazy. But that is my idea of real relaxation. Contrary to popular myth, holidays are frickin' stressful.

Saturday 5 January 2013

My Third Eye is Blocked (Fnar Fnar)

A few weeks ago, I went to see a psychic.

The atheist in me wants to immediately follow that statement up with an assurance that I don’t actually believe in spiritualism, of course, I was just researching for a script.

On the one hand, there are so many stories from over the years that it’s hard to dismiss it outright. On the other hand, it’s obviously a load of old bollocks, isn’t it?

Spiritualism (or fortune telling/clairvoyance/mediumism, whatever you want to call it) is so ingrained in British culture that it’s hard for us to shrug it off entirely. It’s in our collective conscience. When people say something is ‘on the cards’, they ain’t talking about blackjack. Brits believe in ghosts and psychics in the same way that Americans believe in aliens and Jedis (not that I’m saying that I don’t believe in Jedis – I’ve seen my brother play Call of Duty, that boy’s midichlorians are through the roof).

I headed off to see the psychic with as open a mind as possible – ready to be impressed by either some sort of magic or some impressive Sherlock-style cold reading. I was also determined to play the whole thing with a poker face in place – I wasn’t going to make things easy for her.

We started 45 minutes late (what sort of psychic can’t foretell bad traffic? You get those sort of ‘vibes’ just by watching BBC Breakfast, for Christ’s sake) and my poker face met its first challenge: not giggling at the repeated use of the phrase ‘third eye’. Apparently my Third Eye is blocked. If I learn to unblock it (some sort of PH-balancing wipe, perhaps?) I could be just as psychic as her. I’m a natural ‘sensitive’. No matter how sceptical you are, everyone secretly wants to hear that they have vast psychic potential. I refuse to be taken in by this blatant flattery.

The next challenge was to not look at her with utter disdain as she attempted to call forth spirits of my departed loved-ones (“I’m seeing someone very stern, with their hair pulled back. Very stern. Stern but loving. Really quite loving, actually...?”) After a minute or so of furtive guessing, I put her out of her misery as kindly as I could. I didn’t want to psych the poor woman out too early on in the reading.

Things lumbered on in a relatively disappointing fashion and I began to realise that, secretly, I really wanted to believe and she was spoiling it for me. She dealt Tarot cards for my past, looked at them blankly and eventually remarked “there’s really not much here” (she had a point there – I had the happiest and most uneventful childhood known to man). My future cards just told me what she expects all young women want to hear from a psychic: I’ll meet a handsome man, everyone will fancy him but he only has eyes for me, blah blah offensive-cliche blah.

With every ounce of my supposed psychic ability I projected “I AM A WRITER” at her. That’s all I wanted, some show of real psychic skill by identifying what I consider to be my defining feature. “AT LEAST PICK UP ON SOME CREATIVE ENERGIES!” I projected furiously. “I MADE IT EASY FOR YOU, I’M WEARING A BRIGHT RED COAT! I AM CREATIVE!” But sadly, that one passed her by. Perhaps the message got caught up in that blockage round my Third Eye.

I was going to come out of this session with even less belief that I’d gone in with. But then, just before I left, something happened. “There’s something wrong with your throat,” she said, looking at me quizzically. This was the last straw. Assuming someone has a sore throat just because they’re wearing a scarf indoors is the easiest type of cold reading there is – and also wrong. I was just chilly. Nowt wrong with my throat. I was about to spoil my poker face altogether with an expression Maggie Smith would be proud of, when she continued. “You feel things very strongly, down here (she grabbed her gut), but when you try to say them they get stuck in your throat and you can’t make them come out.”

That shut me the fuck up. That is, word for word, how I have described my inability to have emotionally honest conversations. I have said those exact words, complete with the same hand gestures, in conversations with people. How did she know that? How?!

I’m sure, if you analyse it, there could be an excuse. Perhaps my expert poker face tipped her off to my emotional coldness. Perhaps it’s something she says to all her clients – after all, we Brits aren’t known for our effusive emotions. Or maybe she really can see people’s chakras (whatever they are).

But it means that I got to leave with some sort of tentative belief, or the hope of a belief, that there’s something else going on. Hell, I’m a writer. It’s far more interesting to semi-believe in impossible things than to live in the real world. And that’s why there’ll always be a business for psychics.

Thursday 3 January 2013

I'm baaack!

To celebrate the dawning of a new year, I made myself a list of acheivable goals for 2013. Points nine and 10 were:

9. Start my blog again, this time with a focus on real life adventures rather than TV/film/comics.
10. Have some real life adventures.

The order that I put those two statements in tell you everything you'll ever need to know about my priorities in life.

So, Follow the Nerd is up and running again. Yes, it'll still be a wee bit nerdy. Yes, I will still go on the odd feminist rampage. But it'll be about REAL THINGS now.

(For my TV/film/comics journalist, keep an eye on Bad Haven and Starburst, and for updates on my short film keep an eye on the Seven Stages of Geek blog.)