Since last May, I have tried to write dozens of entries, two of which got published despite them being awful, the rest I don’t think even got as far as being saved, let alone deleted.

So I’m going to attempt to take a stand against the fear of recrimination when I go back to writing the way I used to. Names will be changed to protect the guilty, except mine of course, which in my wisdom I chose to use as the name of this blog.

Perhaps it will help to fill the awful void that I know has been left in the lives of approximately 139 people since I decided to commit Facebook suicide. I know they miss me – well I know they miss the extra person on their friend count anyway.

I thought the hardest bit about killing Facebook would be filling the hours of my life that I would get back, but it turns out I’m very good at wasting time with or without Facebook and haven’t missed it at all.

What actually gave me the most painful insight was the fact that people, on noticing I wasn’t there anymore, assumed I had only removed them. Even though they knew there would be no reason for me to single them out. That and the fact that anyone who knows me well, and most of my FB friends did because I was quite selective, would have known that if I had a beef with them, the chances of me sloping off quietly rather than deploying some verbal bile is very slim.

It reinforced my dislike of the whole thing to think that my friends are actually that wrapped up in the popularity contest element of Facebook that they would assume I would use it as a way to slight them. I’m really pleased to have opted out.

That said, I’m not promising I won’t return to it – it wasn’t really ever supposed to be a grand gesture. I’ve been saying for years that something about it made me uncomfortable, and that discomfort has only increased as news has broken of investments from big business and the increasing estimated value of the site, basically as an immense intelligence source.

I think that I’m suitably lemming-like as it is; Facebook was just a step too far. Maybe my opinion will change. Maybe it’s a sign of my own insecurities, like back when it first started to bother me, that I don’t want to be there anymore.

But at least for now, when I next go back to Cambridge, for example, and get asked how I am by someone I haven’t seen for ages I won’t tell them a little anecdote to illustrate my answer only for them to say “oh yeah, I know, I saw it on Facebook”. That’ll be nice. Then again, I’ll probably not actually see anyone, because every social event will have been co-ordinated through Facebook, meaning that I don’t get invited.

I wonder if, once I start writing the blog again properly it’ll be read at all now that I can’t link it from Facebook? That had never occurred to me before…I guess the repercussions are yet to entirely reveal themselves. Last night I couldn’t enter a competition to win a years supply of free pizza because I had no Facebook account to ‘like’ the pizza place on…how long will I be able to cope with that kind of mindless discrimination?

Because I know what was going on in my head at the time of writing this blog, it seems a little out of date to me now, but you guys shouldn’t really be put off by that, and more importantly…it’s all I’ve got…the creative well’s a little dry lately…I’m working on it.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here it is…

An old work colleague of mine from Cambridge recently got back from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where she has been performing a show she wrote. I went to see its inaugural performance at the Hen and Chickens Theatre Bar in Highbury Corner, before its arrival at the Fringe and as I watched, I realised something that had never occurred to me before.

As Lizzy explained, the premise of the show had come about one drunken evening when – sozzled on various alcoholic concoctions – she confessed to having a crush on a stranger that she kept bumping into by accident. She decided that in order to gain some confidence to deal with the matter, she would contact everyone she had ever had a secret crush on and fess up.

It was a pretty ballsy plan and she did it on camera, eliciting various reactions. Her motto throughout was “be WOTM”, which I believe stood for women of the moment, but according to Google it actually means ‘women of the moose’. In the absence of an explanation for that anomaly, I’ll move on.

The basic point is, that there was a moral to her rather lovely and very funny story, which was to grab life, and maybe a few crushes, by the balls and tell them! Admit it, she proclaimed, what’s the worst that could happen?! For a split second, I actually fell in with the consensus of the room at that moment – it was a great theory.

No sooner had I begun considering who would be first on my list before I realised; all the people I’ve ever had crushes on already know! There isn’t a single secret one. I can never be that discreet. I might keep quiet for the first few days, or weeks, maybe months if there is some greater force at work, but there is no-one that has been fortunate enough to escape the eventual revelation that I’m at that moment besotted with them.

I’ll never understand how other people are so discreet, I can see why it’s beneficial, but I can’t do it. If I feel something, sooner or later I’ll vocalise it, and probably very soon after that I’ll regret it.

Blurting out the truth is kind of my thing, it’s not just something I do when I’ve got a crush. It is really any time that something is burdening my consciousness. It might come out in context, or completely randomly, it’ll usually be facilitated by alcohol and rarely accompanied with any real care over the delivery…so for those of you who have been on the receiving end, there you go, you should understand now, I’ve said it!

It’s the age-old blog problem (if anything blog related can be described as “age-old”?) that the more personal you get the more of a can of worms you seem to have released. Admittedly, I’ve gone down the fairly personal route before, but an obituary is a step beyond my usual rambling about the mortifying consequences of the last party I went to.

I’ve tried to come back to it and write like I used to but it hasn’t been possible until just now. Every time I looked at the existing homepage I just thought, “how can I take it down? How can I write over it with the inane shit that usually gets posted up here?”.

I had to eventually – even if all I’m really saying this time is that I’m back. Or I think I am, I’m hoping once I start the momentum will return and it won’t be another 3 months before I try to write something again.

There is another problem of course. I’m not quite living the life I was when the more anecdotal blogs seemed to be coming so easy. Sofa surfing and doing jobs that more or less encouraged staying up all night, drinking the best part of a bottle of Plymouth gin and writing bullshit for hours. The potential consequences are still the same but I am finding myself a little held back by this new and strange sensation of not actually wanting to lose my job.

That hasn’t stopped all of the deviant behaviour, it’s just reined it in to a greater extent than before. Is this growing up? Or just a change of priorities that means that scheduling has to play a greater role in one’s work / life balance?

Whichever it is, I’ve not mastered it yet. I’ve found myself holding back from drinking on nights that are perfectly timed and located for a bender that would never have any real come back but then going out with colleagues and getting smashed!? Why? Because it’s always been the way with me, that if there is an inappropriate course of action open to me, it will invariably be more attractive than the alternative.

Anyway, the point of this little window into my latest neurosis is that the same kind of goes for the blog. In the past, I worked hard to ignore my fear of people actually reading this. It took months for me to start writing about things that I knew didn’t always show me in the best light, but in the interests of truth and frankly a good story, I included, well more alluded to, them anyway.

Now, even if I were to persist with that pathetic way in which I try to dress my sad little life up as an ironic farce, it might not really be appropriate to have my name on it. I mean, I’m not actually Hunter S Thompson, sadly. I’m an editorial assistant on a load of B2Bs – there’s really no room for Gonzo journalism there…again, sadly. Nah – it’s all a bit real life now really.

So what’s the blog going to be? It needs to change, it needs a new identity or I might get tempted to write something inappropriate. I might end up going down in social media history as one of those hideous morons that have been sacked for saying something not only retarded, but professionally unforgivable, and then have to skulk back into the cosy safety of writing from a window seat in the Almeida. Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad? NO!

So…today, the maddest thing happened, I got up and went to work, and then came home again. I’m doing it tomorrow too!

Yoda and I in Cairo, May 2008

Looking back on the past few months now, it feels like everything has fallen into place. Tomorrow is the first day of my new job as an editorial assistant, and consequently the first day of the rest my career. After what seems like a lifetime of aimless flailing, I seem to be heading in the right direction at last. If the vigorous arrival of Spring wasn’t enough to signal that a new chapter was beginning, then the closing of a chapter in my own families story certainly was.

Everyone has at least one family member, usually outside of the nuclear family, who informs the person they have become and aspire to be. Parents and siblings do this by being omnipresent throughout your upbringing, but when members of your extended family play a big role in your life, it’s usually because you have subconsciously chosen them to. I think there are probably two of those people in my extended family, and one of them, my grandmother, is now sadly gone.

I could not have written this entry two months ago when it first began to seem that the end of her nine-decade epic might be drawing to an inevitable close. Despite her having lived in Cairo for almost three years, I could not accept that she might not be coming home. My parents, siblings, cousins, uncle and aunt warned me that I should be prepared, but I choose to maintain faith in her recovery rather than accept the only likely outcome.

Oddly, faith is not something I’m much affected by on a daily basis. No one who knows me well would describe me as an optimist, so piling all my hopes on the best possible outcome was most out of character. I can only explain my feelings as having been entirely for her and informed by her. My grandmother was a devoted Catholic. Like most Catholics her age, I’m sure she was not so devoted out any inherent saintly leanings, her devotion was in-built and unwavering because she was raised that way and never deemed her hardships reason enough to turn away from it. Over the weeks that she was ill, I found myself drawing a strange comfort from her faith, it was as though I could borrow it to support her while not really having to entirely take it on as my own. “She’s spent almost a century making friends with God”, I thought, “So he’s bound to listen to me praying for her, she’ll have told him who I am”.

I was never baptised, both my parents are Catholic, though my mother’s family are a little less overt in their relationship with God than my Grandmother was. My father, being my grandmothers son, was of course also raised a Catholic (with all the baggage that such an upbringing entails, namely; guilt, guilt and more guilt, subtly deflected by a disproportionate helping of forgiveness). This being my parent’s provenance, you may be able to imagine my Grandmother’s horror when I was born and they revealed that they had decided not to have me baptised. They had some new-age, new-fangled, liberal notions about me being allowed to choose my own faith, and thus it was left up to me.

Grandma was appalled. Firstly, my great-uncle had already purchased the obligatory gold christening bracelet with my name and date of birth etched into it. Secondly, did my parents really want to risk me floating about in Limbo with all the other dead babies if, god forbid, the worst should happen? My grandmother’s fear of me ending up in Limbo was not in fact such a wildly irrational one.

One of the most amazing things about this women, and trust me there are too many to go into in one blog entry, is the stoicism with which she faced one of every women’s most feared eventualities; the loss of a child. My grandmother didn’t lose just one child, but five. She was originally from the middle east and was living in Libya when she married my Grandfather and they settled down to start a family. For reasons that I suppose she may never have fully understood herself, and I never asked about, she suffered a staggeringly high number of very late miscarriages, which today would probably be survivable premature births. Despite this, she soldiered on to discount medical advice to the contrary and endure nine months in hospital, and daily penicillin injections, to have her first surviving child, my uncle. Five years later, she took the risk again and my father was born.

Thank goodness she did, or perhaps I would have always been in a kind of Limbo; not quite me, not quite here and certainly not a part of her. So, it must have been with all that in mind I guess, that not long after I was born my Grandmother decided to quell her Hannah-Limbo fears once and for all. I had been left with her for the day, while my mother did whatever chores needed to be done. When she came to collect me, Grandma was mid-ceremony, sprinkling the contents of a plastic Virgin Mary shaped bottle of holy water on my oblivious little head. That was my Grandmother, determined, defiant, full of boundless love for her family, and quite frequently caught in the act doing something she really ought not to be, like secretly performing DIY baptisms.

She used to tell me stories of the trouble she got in to at school. “Oh I was mischief,” she would say with a tone that suggested “mischief” barely begun to describe it. She was mischief all her life. She was mischief when, as kids, she took my cousin and I out for meals and to get the waiters attention she would raise her arm and click her fingers while shouting, “Garcon! Garcon!.”

We would shrink into the backs of our chairs as the waiters rushed over to be told that the pile of chips, she had accidentally dropped under her chair earlier, had been thrown there by “that fat women”. She would gesture at an unsuspecting neighbouring diner with an indignant jab of her tiny little finger. Then, somehow relieved by having got that off her chest, signal her renewed satisfaction with the situation by brushing her hand through the small cow-lick at the front of her short grey hair, lean towards us kindly and softly say in her beautiful French-middle eastern accent: “Qu’est-ce que tu veux, darlink? Do you want anything else?”

When Grandma moved to Egypt, almost three years ago, it was to be with her ailing younger brother, Nick. He had been ill for years, but was now getting far worse and my Grandmother was determined to fulfil her duty as his older sister and take care of him to the last. I can’t pretend I wasn’t selfishly hurt by her decision to go for so long. I realised, as you often do, too late that I had not made as much time as I should have done as a grown up to see her and spend time with her, and now she was out of reach completely.

In 2008 I was lucky. My uncle decided to take me with him to see her and I went to Cairo for four days. We spent almost all day, every day with her and my great-uncle in their apartment in downtown Cairo. It changed the way I viewed my heritage and my Grandmother. I saw her a little as she must have been before she moved to England, before she had to do everything around the house for herself and before she was extricated from the patriarchal limitations of her heritage. She was still mischief, but it was a different kind, it was almost accentuated by her new situation. She was no longer mischievous with the goal of asserting herself as the head of the family, as perhaps she was with my pseudo-baptism, but instead was rebelling about the fact that, in Cairo, she was always going to be second to her brother.

On the first day, we arrived with suitcases full of gifts and supplies that they each had requested from England, as apparently Cairo is entirely devoid of shopping facilities. Grandma had demanded my uncle bring her 100% cotton sheets from John Lewis “because they do not have them here”. No cotton, in Egypt? These are the lines over which madness and wisdom clash. Being utterly irrational is a privilege that every descendant of my Grandmother abuses frequently, myself included. I have no idea whether it begun with her, I imagine it goes back generations, but she certainly championed its continuation, and why the hell not!? To banish it would be, well, rational!

This blog is not the place for a biography of my Grandmothers life. It is, however, the place for me to express my love for her in the only way I know how. These stories are by no means the sum of the women we knew as Grandma, Mother, Nanny, Meme, Yoda. I’m not sure I could fit her into a novel, a trilogy of novels even. She surpasses summary or explanation for me because she is me. She is the reason I am so proud to be a Gannagé-Stewart, instead of just a Stewart. She is the reason that “settling” has never been good enough, because I know she visualised me doing something fantastic with my life, and that thing being whatever it was that I wanted it to be. Mary made mistakes, but she never let them break her. I know that is why, when I last saw her, as close to the end as it was, she fought to see us one more time and to hear us one more time. To maybe even miraculously recover and waggle her finger at us jokingly one last time, jab us in the ribs and tickle us one last time and ask us “now girls, tell me please, what do you want to eat?.”

Mary Stewart (née. Gannagé) 1918 – 2010

I haven’t changed my mind about the negatives of social networking since then, but I have certainly embraced the positives. I have begun tweeting like an attention-deprived teenager, much to the amusement of my friends, and the apparent distaste of my family. The tweeting, despite its frequency, has so far seen little mention of my family, aside from one horribly ill timed drunken mention of my Grandmother being taken in to hospital in Cairo. I woke up the next morning with no recollection of having tweeted anything of the sort, but I had several missed calls from worried family members. They had known nothing of her illness until they saw my Facebook status, which auto-updates from Twitter.

I was mortified. Why would I have felt the need to do something so insensitive? Well, a couple of bottles of wine had a lot to do with it. But the more likely explanation is that I had received the information through Facebook chat, so tweeting it as an act of catharsis probably seemed natural. If there can be anything “natural” about none face to face communication. This lapse in cyber-courtesy demonstrates why I have had a small epiphany when it comes to all things Web 2.0 and beyond. Because it demonstrates that you can’t blame the tool for its mis-use, only the user. We like to separate ourselves from our actions online; we feel we have a right to behave differently there because it has been regarded as some “virtual” realm where actions don’t have consequences and are not related to what’s happening in “reality”. Which is of course absurd unless you are playing a game, reading a story or watching a film, the nature of fiction and the ways for us to enjoy it have not changed, and neither has reality, the internet is just a new means of delivery.

We can innovate the way people use and consume online media, but we need to stop denying its potential and fictionalising it. It is the most real and tangible evidence of real globalisation that we have seen after decades of trying to deny that a global society would ever occur. It’s here people, it’s been here for decades and it’s probably time to accept it. Embrace it even. I personally believe it’s the way forward, why do we have such a negative opinion of global co-operation? Are we still scared of a world order, dictators and cat stroking evil genius’ taking over from leather office chairs? Is it possible, perhaps, that resisting co-operation actually creates the perfect climate for all those things. Accepting change on every level is difficult but ultimately the only way not to be left vulnerable, and in a tiny way, that’s what my new love of all manner of twittery is about.

I have started regarding social media and the culture of the internet as a kind of third way. It has the potential to do all the things that societal structures of the past could not maintain. It’s the start of a global infrastructure that if allowed to reach its potential would re-write the way we approach just about everything. Yet we’re still resisting. Even at the lowest levels we can’t innovate our approaches enough to make the most of the new tools available to us. The media, for example, recoiled in horror when the internet became an outlet for journalism and entertainment, when they should have been rejoicing at opportunities to re-invent media content. The scope was enormous and we are still not even thinking outside the confines of traditional media. We may have moved content online, but the real potential of the new format has been largely ignored in favour of taking defensive action against the perceived damage it has caused to the more archaic formats.

Somewhere in the recesses of my cold, subjective heart there was a little pit of sadness that tied me to fellow journalists the world over at the plight of print. Today though, that is gone. I find it truly ridiculous that people will lower their opinion of content just because of the medium it is delivered via. I guess it’s human nature, like perceiving more gravity in a speech delivered in received pronunciation than a regional accent. There was a time when broadcast media would avoid a northern twang like the plague in order to retain an authoritative voice. We would find it ridiculous now if the media rated the value of information broadcast by the accent it was read in, and I imagine that’s how we feel about the diverse ranch of mediums now available to us for the written word too.

I have diverted a little from my original discussion of careless tweets, but it does have to do with the reasons that I want to be present and interacting with the internet. I am not expecting to intercept cyber-terrorism or conceive a new political structure with the web at its heart (although I do think that would be a jolly good idea), but I do have very optimistic exectations of the internets place in society as time goes on.
In the meantime, my family can rest assured that the primary outlet for my discontent with them will remain my blog. It may not seem fair but it seems like non-disclosure to me if I leave out the elements of my existence that I feel most driven to divulge. It’s my nature to wear my heart on my sleeve (I hate that phrase by the way, so forgive its inclusion) in person, and I am only comfortable doing the same as a writer. Fortunately though, if I looked to twitter for a release on every beef I have with my loved ones I would never have the time to tweet the more important things, like the colour of my socks or what I’m having for my lunch or the fact that Earls Court has grass on it’s walls today!

If that’s no enough for ya, here’s some further reading in the form of my new blog at Cambridge Agenda Magazine:

Into Exile – The Adventure Begins

Let’s get ready to Rum Ball!

So that’s probably the point that we’re all missing isn’t it? Why is it that everywhere I turn I’m being advised on how to make myself richer, more beautiful, less stupid, more fashionable, sexier, funnier (hah…I’ve nailed that one thanks…a cunning mix of lame self-deprecation and searing sarcasm…the fucking Don Giovanni of wit!). Even punters at the pub see the melancholy in my eyes and advise me on the way forward, the latest pearl of pub wisdom; “Loads of people are talented, but it’s the ones that really know what they want that make it.” Are you sure drunk pub man? Are you sure it’s not the ones that plough through the opposition like possessed maniacs that make it?

Today I read several articles on the fact that it has been scientifically proven that women need more sleep than men, on account of our tendency to multi-task. Women are neurotic, I’m not being funny but it is a fact. We’re not multi-tasking the whole time, most of it is just us tripping out and thinking that if we stop tripping out; the world will implode and it’ll be all our fault that other peoples babies, all the worlds bunnies and all the hot men we haven’t met yet went up in smoke. Yeah, I know, all the feminists hate me now, I’m letting the side down by telling the truth. Stop you’re whinging and go and get 7.5 hours sleep before you have to take responsibility for your own fatigue on top of everything else.

It stresses me out just reading that stuff, partly due to my genders leaning toward irrational neurosis and partly because the lack of sleep in the average women’s life is probably down to the fact that we can’t sleep for worrying about how little time we have for sleep. Work harder, take up yoga, charm everyone, aim for the top, be graceful, be one of the boys, eat five a day, look stunning, act like you don’t know it, play it cool, go for what you want, drink water, be on time, be fashionably late, be amazing in bed, sleep more.

How about just find out what makes you happy and do that? Ok, so you might not live as long, or be as rich but you may find that your days on this earth are worth breathing in and out for. I can’t decide whether my thoughts on this matter are down to realising that it’s about going to bed and waking up (approximately five hours later if I’m working the next morning and twelve if I’m not) with a smile on your face. Or whether 27 years of ambition thwarted by fear have just made me give in. Either way, the pursuit of happiness in whatever form you eventually find it has got to be the way to go.

It brings you back to where you started in a way though doesn’t it? So you shrug off all that external pressure and really think about what would make you happy. Is it having the career you always dreamt of? A home you’ve made your own? Changing someone elses life for the better? Writing a novel? Finding the love of your life? Having kids? Making a name for yourself at the top of your profession? Yes. It is. I want it all and I want it now.

P.S When that’s not playing on my psychological ipod, it’s the theme tune from Cheers…

The Peppermint Skip

I remember arguing the case for selling the peppermint skip, with an eco-aware friend of my brothers, after watching The Age of Stupid back in March. I swore to her that if I ever lived in London I would sell the car. She seemed unconvinced and despite my apparent resolve on the matter I, in fact, secretly doubted my own rant. I was sure the prospect of selling the car would either eventually inform my decision to stay in Cambridge, or I’d end up taking her with me.

I loved the skip so much I had mentally pencilled her into the life stories of every forthcoming generation of my family. That car was going to witness the conception and birth of the unfortunate sole that would have no choice in later inheriting it. And, as if that wasn’t beautiful enough, the same was planned for every generation after that, until the inevitable outlawing of the internal combustion engine. At which point she would become a family relic, preserved eternally, probably as some kitch seating solution in the cinema at Gannagé-Stewart Towers, to remind my descendents of my unwavering dedication to a lurid green mark three Golf Cabriolet.

So what changed? Frankly, I have no idea. I can’t pin-point the change. I don’t know when I realised that despite trying to tie up loose ends I was still lugging a heap of material baggage with me, pointless stuff that did nothing more than represent a moment in my past. I bought the car the first time Car Crash broke up with me. I never expected we’d get back together, I wouldn’t have taken him back after he’d pulled that shit, or that’s what I thought. I was 24 and still travelling light as far as emotional baggage went. I had pride and ambition. So there’s no telling why I bimbled off and bought a convertible like some sad old fucker called Nigel in the midst of a nervous breakdown. That is, however, what I did. Only to take Car Crash back not just that once, but several, ego-crushing times over the following two years. Obviously if I could advise that Nigel-like Hannah now, I’d bollock her for the quarter-life crisis and encourage her to pursue journalism straight away. That way maybe I wouldn’t be regurgitating the tragedy of my mid-twenties from a far more successful friends sofa-bed, just weeks from turning 27.

So, the cars gone, along with most of my other trinkets and keepsakes that did nothing but remind me of a bygone era. I’m left with almost just me, a bare bones version of myself on which I could potentially project any one of a million possible identities. There are two problems, the first is that personal reinvention seems to be far harder the older you get. The second is that I keep stumbling over the realisation that I don’t really want to reinvent myself at all. I just want to drop all the bullshit and remind myself why I quite like being the self-deprecating, while still irritatingly self-righteous, over ambitious yet terminally inactive, tirade of lyrical neurosis that I am. There was a time, brief though it proved to be, when I blithely accepted all my flaws and even embraced them so that they slowly diminished into charming eccentricities rather than debilitating conditions.

If the world operated the way I believe I am designed to, the word bullshit (one of my favourites so I’d be quite sad about this) would no longer need be used. We would all drop the mind games, formalities and ceremony of every tedious human exchange and just be a little more fucking Tourettes about it all. That’s just me though, it is another example of my selfish nature, it would just make it all a bit easier for me. Because I’m not a player, I’m not especially interested in the game. I know some of you get a kick out of it but I just get stressed out, kinda tired and pathetic and then withdraw into a room with a bottle of wine and write shit like this. I’m much happier with all my thoughts just out in the ether were people can pick through them and decide what they like without me having to put a lot of effort in.

That’s why, a couple of weeks before Christmas when I decided I was going to stop speaking to my Dad for a while to preserve the remainder of my sanity, I walked into work physically displaying the weight of that decision in every facet of my being. The regulars caught on straight away that something was wrong. I am, believe it or not, typically the most buoyant and jovial face behind that bar. On this day though I was projecting the blackest of auras that I could muster, quite deliberately. I didn’t really want anyone to know why, I just decided they should know not to cross me, not to invite me into their games, because I wasn’t playing. It’s lucky I’ve cheered up since because a particularly trying patron of some 15 years, who has to be tolerated despite his irritating disposition, has taken to referring to that day approximately every 10 minutes ever since.

The truth is in 2010 I haven’t made any resolutions because I don’t want to resolve to change this year. I don’t want to augment who I am on the basis of badly researched predictions of what society may like me more for. Neither am I sticking two fingers up at the rest of society for wanting to do that if they want to. I’m just sitting out the game, like I sat out dance classes when I was 5, and, mortifyingly, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, when I was far old enough not to be freaked out by the hangman’s noose scene. That’s not such a great example really. The point is; for the first year in a long, long time I’m definitely not de-toxing through January, giving up smoking, drugs or alcohol, in fact I’m taking drugs back up, or inventing a load of personality traits that I’d prefer to the ones I already have. Neither am I disputing that anything is possible and liable to change – particularly as being recklessly fickle is another of my more wonderful traits. Oh and any family that are reading this, if any of you still do, I still love you, I just can’t stand to be around you and they’re just little, harmless drugs, nothing to worry about. (I forgot to mention that the dropping of bullshit applies to my blog, but I guess that’s obvious now. Shit, that sounded a little like a resolution!)

HanElf 2009 – Merry Christmas! from Hannah Gannagé-Stewart on Vimeo.

That said, there are worse places to be spending my evening off. I almost settled on staying in, but then I remembered why I find other human beings so intrusive. I am currently staying at friends shared house while he is away on holiday. I haven’t really seen many of the housemates because I have been working almost the entire time but one of them was in the sitting room when I got back this evening. He’s a nice enough chap, an American, a city professional who has been travelling on business the last few months and is grateful to be settling in one place for a while.

He seemed quite at home this evening, in his pyjama’s on the sofa, watching the usual evening soaps on Channel 4. To be fair, my arrival and tendency to talk a lot probably burst his bubble a little, and perhaps I upset his equilibrium to the point that he struggled to adequately judge the appropriateness of some of his comments. It felt a little to me as though the general undertone of our chit chat revolved around the suggestion that I should; at best, seek a man to fund my lifestyle or, at worst; be using my sexuality to far greater advantage with my trusted friends and even maybe him. It was all a little odd. I remember now, that the first time I met him, which was in fact the day he moved in; my friend and I both noted that he, within moments of meeting me, had assessed my current situation and suggested that I find a man to shack up with / sponge off. Perhaps that’s just how it’s done in Nevada, I thought.

My decision to evade any further innuendo and brave the elements came when he casually suggested I attend a local Burlesque night with him and the other male resident of the house on Friday night. Fortunately, I was able to remind him I would be at work, but he closed the invitation with, “I could buy you a drink…you’d have to put out though.” To be fair I probably didn’t do all I could to discourage him, particularly when I told him my favourite pub anecdote to date. I’ll share it with you too, and you can judge whether this was perhaps why I was left open to such a barrage of suggestion.

In order to ease some of the monotony of working in a pub I have been trying to teach myself to draw a shamrock on top of pints of Guinness. It shouldn’t really be all that difficult, it’s just a figure or eight with an extra loop and a little tail, but it takes practice to make it look recognisable and deliberate. So I have been practicing. A few of them have kind of worked so far, but mostly they have been pretty rubbish, or I’ve given up and just left an untidy scribble topping the foam instead. One was so bad, that I noticed a group of drinkers who had clearly seen it done properly elsewhere jeered at my laughable attempts. Last nights efforts were spectacularly bad, particularly my final go.

The landlord entrusted me with some shindig in the top bar, a Christmas party for a local production company. The MD had put the business account card behind the bar and all his employees spent the evening merrily taking outrageous liberties, ordering round after round of quadruple Gin and Tonics and multiple shots of Tequila and Sambucca. About half way through the evening, I was pouring a Guinness when it ran out mid-pint and I had to call downstairs for the barrel to be changed. When I came back to it, the half full glass had been settling for far longer than the usual time. Thick firm foam coated the top of the Guinness; ideal shamrock territory. I decided to give it a go. I began pouring the second half of the pint, and carved a perfect figure of eight. Beautiful I thought, this is going to be a REALLY good one…the rest is a haze, but when I withdrew the glass from under the tap I realised, to my horror, that I had quite clearly drawn an enormous phallus on this poor mans Guinness.

In panic I decided the only thing to do was be overt. If I handed it over without saying anything it would look as though I had done it to imply that I thought he was in some context; a dick. Or, that he particularly enjoyed them, or deserved to have one graffitied onto his beer. I couldn’t disguise it and he had already waited long enough for it, there was no time to stall. So I handed it over with an explanation; “I’m really sorry I seem to have drawn an enormous cock on your Guinness, but I don’t want you to think it in anyway reflects on you, it was an accident.” At which point I couldn’t contain my amusement any longer and myself and his friend burst into hysterics. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, no really…” my pleading was obviously making things worse, “no really” I said trying to be serious, “I don’t know how that happened”. It could have ended there, and it really ought to have done. But by this point his friend had decided he had never met a more attractive barmaid than one that drew penises on drinks, and had called over a select group to witness it. Somehow I was drawn into high fiving them all in recognition of my artistic talents. So was the story of the shamcock. A story, perhaps, only to be told in future as an earnest warning to other barmaids wanting to shake up the daily routine of bartending.

This morning proceeded along the usual lines. At 7am my phone began vibrating and playing, with increasing amplification, the alarm tune that makes me feel like I’m waking up hung-over, on the dusty floor of a saloon, in a town called Furrball. It’s usually just after I realise that actually I’m on a sofa bed in north London that I knock the wretched device off its perch on the arm of the sofa and under the mattress. Making the first task of my day, to grapple around under the sofa to locate a phone which I only want to switch to snooze so that I can repeat the whole farcical episode nine minutes later. And nine minutes after that, and possibly; nine minutes after that.

Once I had surrendered to the inevitable fact that I have to get up, I then set about task two. Making coffee and a bowl of cereal occur with neither of them becoming a confused hi-bred of the two in the process. This is not as easy as it sounds if you’re “not a morning person” or terminally cynical and working two jobs. This morning breakfast was made yet harder by the presence of my friend’s cat, Mog. Mog is a very personable little furrball (who would have thought I’d get that word in twice!) however her insistence on poking her head in everything you are trying to fill, pour or boil at 8am was almost enough to flip me over the edge.

Miraculously I did make it out of the door at a reasonable time in the end and arrived at work only after 10am because the gatekeeper at reception seemed to be struggling to deliver two AV technicians to the cafeteria. My main problem now is that, despite being here and wanting to achieve something positive having made the effort to get here, I still feel decidedly like someone scraped me off the tracks at Kings Cross this morning.