Pinch me...

....Actually if it means I'm going to wake up then don't.

I am so blissfully happy right now. I am allowed to be blissfully happy right now. I am going to enjoy every single second of being blissfully happy right now. Ok, that’s the last time I’m going to write blissfully happy before I jinx it.

I am now back from my trip to Copenhagen and you may deduce from the opening to this post that I had a fantastisk time. Wonderful company, wonderful food, wonderful drink and I managed to get a wonderful job to be started as soon as I get to DK. The whole trip was like a dream that I never want to wake up from. You know when you watch a film and the plot is just incredibly ridiculous and you sit there shouting at the TV “What? Oh come ON. That would NEVER EVER happen. Urgh, God this film is stupid.”? Well that’s what my week in Copenhagen was like. It does happen sometimes. It really, honestly truly does happen. And this time it happened to me.

I had a slight blip on my last night there when I couldn’t help but think that this was all just too good to be true and so surely it couldn’t actually BE true. But a little cry (partly brought on from being utterly overwhelmed by everything and partly brought on by stupidly letting my imagination live the moments when I’m going to be saying goodbye to everyone I love here), a strong, safe, lovely hug, and some words of wisdom soon sorted me out.
I will not feel guilty about good things happening to me. I am not going to ruin the good times by anticipating and worrying about the bad because that is just stupid. I am going to enjoy this and wrap myself up in every inch of it.

A weighty issue

A lot of people don’t understand my borderline obsession with books and reading. They wrongly assume that I think of each book as a trophy to sit on my bookshelf once finished, titles and authors proudly shouting of intellectual prowess, cultural variety and literary knowledge. If anyone took a good look at my bookcase they’d quickly realise that this isn’t the case! Showing off is not why my books are important to me. Each book contributed to my opinions, to who I am and who I aspire to be. Some books made me laugh, some made me cry, some were just beautiful but they all made me feel something. Each book is a part of me, living in a part of time that’s past. So asking me to leave them behind is like asking me pack up my memoires into boxes and put them into storage to be ignored and useless. I don’t want new versions of any of them. I want my originals, with huge gaps between turned down corners from when my greed for the pages outlasted my need for sleep; with phrases underlined in indigo ink so that I can pick out anything that gave me something to chew over; with stained edges from knocking around in the bottom of my bag with makeup, food and leaking felt tips because I couldn’t leave home without it in case I get a spare 2 minutes to delve inside it.

I’m not completely romanticising my move to Denmark. I know that there will be times when I long for home, my mum, my dad, my best friends. Times when I long for the job that I know inside out, the busy tube, The Thames, my old local, the comfort of the house that I grew up in and much more. It will be these times that I look to the familiar and unlike my piano, books are things that I CAN take to comfort me when I get lonely, to cheer me up when I’m homesick and to calm me when I’m frustrated.

Some people think it’s insane to weight my moving to Denmark suitcase with books. I know it’s necessary.

Possibly the best line in literature...

"Ryan's freckles were a join-the-dots enthusiast's wet dream."

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Image credit Hulton Collection

Copenhagen: The City of Sustenance

I think it’s hilarious that prostitutes are offering free sex to delegates attending the COP 15 summit as a protest against Copenhagen City Hall distributing leaflets dissuading visitors using prostitutes when prostitution is a perfectly legal activity in Denmark.

How hypocritical of a country whose marketing campaign for tourism was a video of a Danish woman who had had a one night stand with a foreigner whose name she does not know, gotten pregnant, had the baby and decided that the best way to find and tell this man he had a baby was through this video.

The anti prostitution plan has backfired superbly hasn't it Copenhagen? Awareness of Copenhagen's red Light district has probably increased ten fold. Hold on, unless this was their clever little plan all along...

SPAM?!

Why is junk email sometimes called spam? Junk, I can understand. Spam I just don’t get. What do rubbish emails have to do with a precooked meat that looks like jellied vomit in a can?

Actually come to think of it I don’t get the whole SPAM “meat” thing either.

Oh no, the word SPAM has gone over and over in my head so many times now that it seems like the most ridiculous selection of letters ever to form a word and has ceased to mean anything.

I'm now even more confused then when I started. Damn Spam.

Super super super excited

I’m super excited today because this time next week I’ll be in Copenhagen. No, I’m not moving early, this is just a pre move visit with my 2 girlfriends, cunningly engineered to coincide with Copenhagen at its cosiest time in the hope that they will fall in love with the city like I have and then have to come and visit me lots and lots and lots.

Planning this visit has been quite hard though – how do you fit all the wonderful things Copenhagen has to offer into just 3 short days (actually 2.5 days when you take into consideration flights etc)? You can’t. So I’ve had to prioritise. So I’m planning:

Wandering through the town on Friday ending up in a cosy pub in Nyhavn for Gløgg

then having a traditional Danish dinner

then shopping on Saturday

and then a visit to my favourite place on Earth, Tivoli

and then a walk in the countryside on Sunday before they fly home.


We’ll have to save the rest for their next visit…

Red Carpet Moment

Yesterday morning was one of those mornings where your bed is the comfiest, cosiest place in the entire world; every last curve of your body is taking pleasure in relaxing against the mattress and pillows and the darkest blue 7am accompanied by the wind driven rain against your window is pushing you deeper and deeper into the warm cocoon of soft duvet you’ve created for yourself (writing this is actually making me want to relive that all over again). So, you can imagine that it was an easy decision to swap washing my hair and actually thinking about my outfit for an extra 15 minutes in bed. ERROR.

2pm that day…my colleague wanders over to my desk and I begrudgingly remove my earphones to hear what he is going to try to add to my workload (this isn’t unfair – this is the standard result of his little trips to my desk). This time though he actually brings good news - he has a spare ticket to the Where The Wild Things Are premiere in Leicester Square tonight AND after party and wants to know if I would like to go. Yes, yes I would like to go. I would like that very much indeed. However my morning duvet indulgence means that you could fry an egg with the grease from my hair (although it probably wouldn’t taste great) and my old, holey green dress, leggings and flats are far from red carpet compatible. Oh dear.

3pm that day…I’m drinking a coffee, reading Vogue and being given a massage by the chair I’m sat on whilst my hair is being manipulated by a man and his hairdryer. One of the many benefits of having a female boss is that in a crisis such as being invited to a premier but looking like crap, is that she will understand the need for you to take an hour to go and get a blow dry. The outfit will just have to do, in a “I’m so cool that I don’t need to try hard” kinda way (not sure I pulled that off but there was nothing I could do about the outfit so it was tough).

7pm…I’m super excited because I’m about to walk down the red carpet. Unfortunately, it was soaking wet from being pounded by the rain all day which had created puddles like potholes in a country lane so rather then strolling elegantly down the carpet, I had to navigate my way through the puddles by hoping from one foot to the other praying that I didn’t trip, skid or land incorrectly in rivet of rainwater. Not exactly what I had imagined. But the paparazzi were in sight now which quickly and easily distracted me. I’ve never been that close to a group (ravenous herd may be a more accurate description) of photographers before. I found it quite exhilarating to hear them all screaming at the young, beautiful and famous that sauntered down the carpet to try and manoeuvre them into position for the shot that was going to earn them their name in the credits of a magazine the next day. I think I may have angered the mob slightly as my position on the carpet whilst waiting to go into the cinema must have been slightly in there shot and they kept shouting at me to move and I was like “Where?, Where the hell do they want me to move? I physically can’t move forward and if I move backwards I’m going to be even more in their shot!” I could only assume that they wanted me to move INTO shot for them so I prepared my best pose and moved into the flashing bulbs…Just kidding. After deliberating over where the hell to move so that I wasn’t in their shot I just turned around so at least my face wasn’t in shot and thought they’d just have to be happy with that. They did stop shouting at me after that so I can only assume that it was the thought of my face in their shot that was offending them so much. Nice.

7:45pm…It dawns on me that the microphone has been set up at the front of the cinema since we sat down in a row 3 from the front (in itself odd – shouldn’t these seats be for important people?!) and yet no-one has come out to address the c list celeb dotted audience which more than likely means that the premiere has been split between 2 different cinemas in Leicester Square and I am in the one reserved for lesser folk. Not that I mind, I’m just happy to be there. It just explains a lot. Eventually though Spike Jones (the film’s director) comes out and introduces the film. I like him. He is understated and a little aloof but genuinely passionate about the book that inspired this film and the result which we are about to see.

9pm…The film was stunning. I had been wondering how they were going to manage to turn a classic picture book consisting of 60 sentences into a full feature film. Imagination. I loved it.

10pm…a few free cocktails, some perfectly catered canapés and a spot of celeb spotting (they must have merged the 2 audiences into one after show party venue as the list of celebs spanned from D to B at the party) later and I’m left thinking that this isn’t what I expected. It seemed that the people at the party didn’t really laugh, or eat or look like they were having fun at all. They just kind of stood in small groups, rolling their eyes when someone from the social circuit approached them who they clearly thought beneath them. I had a nice time, don’t get me wrong, and the room was dressed beautifully. It’s just that I think everybody acts all nonchalant at these things, afraid of making a wrong move and I think I’ve had more fun sitting in my front room with the girls. That sounds unbelievably ungrateful, doesn’t it? I’m not ungrateful, the whole evening was brilliant (and free), it’s just that your imagination can run away with you sometimes and the reality of a situation can be completely different, not bad just different.

No matter, all in all as I lay in bed yesterday night I thought back to my morning’s extra 15 mins in bed and laughed at how differently my day had panned out to what I had thought might happen. I had my hair done, went to a premiere and hung out with rock stars and supermodels drinking free cocktails – not bad at all.