You know, MORE is more

Two dear friends and I are having a joint birthday party in two weeks' time, and because we are jointly turning 101 (35 + 35 + 31) we felt we should inflict our memories of youth on our equally old friends by having an 80s pop star party. It's great to dress 80s (teased hair, shoulder pads, plastic jewellery and ridiculous make-up) but even more fun to live out your fantasies and come as your favourite 80s pop star, no?

Of course, that means we'll have 17 Madonnas and at least two sets of The Cure.

Actually, there were other birthday party participants - Taurus seems to be one of those signs that gets on best with its own kind - and we nearly had a willing Bananarama, but May is, for this crowd, insanely social. And expensive. You can't give the Star Sign of Material Possessions a shabby gift. And in fact it's generally a bad idea to come to a Taurus birthday party without a gift at all (Bulls have long memories when it comes to Stuff).

But back to the 80s for a second. Weren't they great? Bigger hair! More make-up! Dafter clothes (which we thought were, like, totally fresh back then). And an explosion of creativity in the realm of pop. I wondered to myself today, who would I remember from 2007, popstar-wise? Er, I'm not sure I would. Where's this decade's outrageous Madonna? Is there one? Will the class of 2010 think back on how silly they were to have done the equivalent of 'Walk Like An Egyptian' (and secretly liked it, though we knew it looked silly)? Will they know all the words to their enduring equivalent of 'Love Shack'? Will they know how to have fun? Will they know how to Wang Chung? I wonder if the great industry that pop music has become isn't just churning out artists who look and sound like other successful artists. After all, if you want to be the next Pop Idol you have to sound, well, exactly like Bono (think back to the end of the worldwide competition a couple of years ago) - and as little like yourself as possible.

It might be just that I'm removed from pop because my formative years are over (yes, looooong over, shut up) and that's why everyone seems to look and sound quite similar. But I don't think so. Because I'm stuck for choice as to who to dress up as for my birthday party. Do I don a suit, white socks, a pencil neck tie and a floppy fringe and be Spandau Ballet, or should I have leather pants, lots of crucifixes and go as Billy Idol? Curl my hair, slap on lipstick and black nail varnish and I could be the transvestite-y dude from Depeche Mode. Put on dark glasses and a piano-key jacket and lose all kind of facial expression and then I'd be the non-Neil Tennant half of the Pet Shop Boys. Tease my hair, find an eye patch and dress like a flouncy sailor and you've got Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive. Actually, dress in any extremely weird way and you will likely end up looking like an incarnation of Pete Burns. And those are just a few of the options for the boys. For the girls, there may be even more. Ankle boots and a ruffled skirt? Pat Benatar in 'Love Is A Battlefield'. Huge, teased hair and a wind machine? Bonnie Tyler.

See, everyone had a look, a bit of individuality within the general excesses of the 80s. Off-the-shoulder jersey-tunic with a belt and white pointy court shoes? Oh, well I suppose that could be *anyone*, couldn't it?

I'd like it if the world went back to having individuals, though I've recently read that this insistence on standing out from the crowd is, like, so Generation X.

Of course, 80s pop creativity could also just be because everyone was off their tits on coke and acid. But damn, I miss it.

Flee the country!

It's quite one thing to be told by ex-Joburg friends visiting from New Zealand to leave the country because South Africa is supposedly 'like, so hectic' - after all, they are surely making themselves feel better for moving to a place where everyone speaks funny, where 'music' equals 'Abba'* (they are classical musicians, and now severely unfulfilled in Christchurch) and where it rains more than England - but quite another to be harangued by a homeless man at the end of my driveway on the same topic.

His argument, loosely bracketing a request for cash and just so I'm clear on this, completely uninterrupted by myself**, was rather more circuitous but much more clearly thought out. He told me if I were to emigrate I would be saving the lives of my 'beautiful, unborn children' (alarming: just how did he know about the suede Armani shoes I want to buy?) and that 'you know when someone says they're your friend but actually they hate you?' Yes. 'Okay, consider 35-million people who aren't really your friend.'

Like all issues concerning race in South Africa, this went on a bit. But I was fascinated to hear what this (as you have guessed, white) homeless man had to say, because he had been living behind my house for a month. There's a piece of land that used to be part of the property I now own but has since been separated by a wall. The subdivision bears some outbuildings that I suspected - and now know for sure - were being used as a home base by vagrants (more than one set, if this latest squatter - I apologise, informal settler - is to be believed). And if I ever wondered why I was twice so efficiently burgled***, it's because the burglars**** could just hop over my back wall whenever I wasn't around, which in my superbusy and supersocial life is all the time. The lazy owner of that piece of subdivided land has now, after rather more than a year, finally decided to clear the ground and start building, which means there are now no more vagrants living behind my pad. And a few weeks ago, my house really did begin to feel safe again - it hadn't for many months - and now I know why that should be.

Only, now I get stopped in my driveway on my way to work to be asked for cash - and essentially told to leave or die - by someone who may or may not have had a part in the nicking of All My Stuff.

I am amused.

Also because this should happen on the day that the Scrivener points me to this article.


*Not that I have anything against Abba. Heavens, no. In fact, anyone who knows me knows I am the world's second-biggest Abba fan (H.D. is the first). But, good music though it is, it's not quite so intellectually satisfying as say, Die Kunst der Fuge.
**Possibly because there was no place to politely interject, and also because I was curious to see how it all ended. Like, in my death.
***US readers: burglarized. Also, dear folks across the Atlantic, you spend the day lying around, not laying around.
****US: burglarizors?

The best feeling ever...

... is certainly not love. No, no, no. It's when you thought you already had the entire output of a composer* you really like and then you suddenly realise that you've completely forgotten that Mendelssohn also wrote some pretty spiffy piano trios. And better yet, this is not just theoretical knowledge (for there is much music that exists, as yet, still only in manuscript form) - I found a great recording of said trios, and Naxos be praised, for a mere 59 rondts. Or, in international terms, about what I paid for two Pepsis at a Thames-side eatery in London a few weeks ago.

*Dead composer, I mean: So there's pretty much no chance he or she will be writing further wondrous works. Hmm. There may well be a market for the Undead Symphony or Eine Kleine Zombiemusik, but that's probably material for another post.

The beginning of the end

Welcome to my new neurosis.

Having got through my twenties with no real signs of The March Of Time on my person it comes as a stonking great unwelcome surprise to discover that Father Time has had a go at me.

I look fantastic in a pair of Guess? jeans. I have what American writers of bad gay fiction would term a 'bubble butt'. Leaning suggestively while ordering drinks at gay bars has gotten me places. If not for the fact that my face lets me down in the looks department, I probably could have been a model. In fact, as a child, I was - until such time as the modelling agency discovered that my constantly surly expression was because I have an irrational and firm dislike of having my picture taken.

Anyway, back to the present, and age 30. What did I see this week in the harsh light of changerooms?

Saggage.

The nail gives up the fight

I'm sorry that the 'stubborn nail' has caved. I suppose it was inevitable. If she were still living there, how would homeowner Wu Ping have gone to the shops, short of some serious climbing gear?

Supposition #2: in such a rapidly urbanising country as China, the needs of the many must surely outweight the will of the few.

And speaking of things that don't seem right, and moving from large issues of choice to rather more mundane choices, I have just discovered the world of food additives. Turns out all the bread I currently consume - multigrain, low-GI and all good things like that - contains flour improver. Flour improver? I thought flour was flour, and can't imagine why - or even how - something that has served humankind for thousands of years would require improvement. Sure, I knew it was added to those awful little sticky cellophane-wrapped takeaway muffins but I didn't think it was being added to real food like good old bread.

I'm floored. Flour improver. I can't see how flour can be 'improved'. So I asked a chef who is married to a woman with food allergies about it. He said his wife was 'allergic' (intolerant, more likely) to the wheat in store-bought bread, but reported no ill effects from eating bread made from scratch. He further claimed it was the 'improver' that was the source of irritation. (Potassium bromate, I believe, is a nasty thing. It might not be being used anymore though. The Flour Advisory Board says that these days ascorbic acid, otherwise known as gold old vitamin C, is used.)

Was this wifely support for the chef husband's baking? Perhaps. But my own wheat-loving and latterly digestively sensitive self is apt to believe it.