The D Word

The D Word

Right, so it’s Sunday night, and for some unfathomable reason my family is still watching The Olympic Opening Ceremony. Well, I say family, it’s mainly my Dad, with everyone else taking sporadic breaks to come and watch. I’m not exactly sure why we’re still watching it 48 hours after the rest of the world saw it, except that he watched it last night and claims that he can’t remember anything he saw. Which of course is worrying for many reasons, not least because how can you possibly forget the delirium-inducing sight of huge punk heads springing up and down to Pretty Vacant? My sister and I have just had to introduce him to pretty much every band beyond the Beatles, his excuse for his ignorance being ‘it’s not my era’. Okaaaaaaay… But you were (apparently) alive in the 70s? And also the 90s? (The Prodigy also proved to be a mystery). His comment on being told the rapper was called Dizzee Rascal – ‘Oh, that’s his name is it?’ Er, probably not his real name, no. Oh. My. God. Memories flooding back of when he corrected my sister’s pronunciation of Coolio in the mid-90s as ‘Hoolio’ (Julio). ‘How do you spell it?’ ‘C.O.O.L.I.O.’ ‘Oh right. Yes you’re quite right. Coolio.’ (We often discuss gangsta rappers in my household, that’s just how the Shortt family roll).

So yes it was amazing blah blah blah, but can we have some real news now? I opened the Sunday Times today and think I had to skip to about page 18 to read something that wasn’t Olympic related. Even my Mum, surprisingly racist towards the British for someone who has lived here for over 30 years, enjoyed the show. Usually her only concession towards England is that she enjoys the ‘Today’ programme - and would miss John Humphreys if she returned to the states - but I actually found her weeping on the sofa as she watched the opening ceremony, muttering between sobs ‘I thought it was going to be a wash-out, but it’s amazing!’ Yeah yeah, Danny Boyle is a Directing God.

But I still don’t find Mr Bean all that funny.

In other news, apparently I am now at an age which provokes a response of ‘Oh Wow’. I was chatting to a PT at the gym and he asked how old I was. When I replied 31 he looked gratifyingly surprised and said, ‘Oh wow. You do not look that age at all’. I wanted to ask if he has misheard and thought I said 41? Er, surely 31 is still a relatively young, down-with-the-kids, could-still-be-at-uni-albeit-as-a-mature-student age?! Well, wonder no more my friends, the 15 year old PT has spoken and declared me Officially Old. *Sob*. To add insult to injury, one of the Fat Security Men at my work asked me if my ‘Forever Young’ t-shirt was ‘Hopeful?’

Case closed. I am a relic.

You will be pleased to hear that on Thursday I managed to prevent the F word being broadcast on (Soap) award-winning daytime TV, and thus have no doubt prevented the cancellation of our show and in fact the collapse the of the entire British Broadcasting Corporation. I arrived into work on Thursday morning to be greeted by an email from the company who write our subtitles: apparently they had noticed that the Black Eyed Peas song ‘My Humps’, which we had used in the episode due to be broadcast that day, did not contain the line ‘I drive these brothers crazy’ but in fact clearly said ‘I drive these fuckers crazy’. I duly went in to relate the good news to the producer, who turned white and said ‘WHAT?!!’ We listened to the line about 20 times, decided that we couldn’t actually tell what it said but we had better change it just in case, and then realised that the tape was in London. Brilliant. Anyway, the rest of the story is pretty dull but all you need to know is that by some wizardly of post-production they managed to replace the offending line with a musical overlap, and I got inducted into making a ‘circuit booking’ – whatever the hell that is – where someone they ‘play the tape down the line’ to London. To make a great situation better, the switchboard at the relevant company in London couldn’t transfer me directly to anyone, and Kristal, the only person I managed to speak to directly, was on her first day - poor lamb - and seemingly failed the grasp the concept that we were broadcasting the episode in 3 hour’s time. Anyway, the replacement edit was broadcast and no doubt millions of letters of complaint avoided. Yep, that’s why they pay me the big bucks.

Oh no. Hang on a minute. They don’t.

Overheard at the BBC

SCRIPT EDITOR: Ganache is a funny word isn’t it?

SCRIPT EDITOR: Isn’t that Denis the Menace’s dog?

Yep. These are the people who make the magic happen, people.

The Cycle of Learning

The Cycle of Learning

How has your Friday the 13^th been so far? My sister’s has been about as disastrous as it gets. First of all she woke up with a One Direction song playing endlessly in her head (‘Baby you light up my life like nobody else etc.’) and then she discovered that she was sharing her morning shower with a gigantic spider. I like to think that the moment she saw said spider was a bit like that scene in Arachnophobia when the spider jumps on the girl’s head. Although, let’s be honest, the spider was probably more upset than she was to find a blonde giant in his new hotel. And now she’s had to go and teach a class of Italian teenagers how to speak English. It’s their last day of summer school, they don’t care, and apparently there’s already a web of complicated love triangles between The Three Eduardo’s. I like to think of them as not being unlike The Three Musketeers, but with Italian accents, raging hormones and a packet of parma ham in their backpack.

I love hearing her stories about her kids at the summer school. Apparently the Italians never shut up. The Chinese are very studious but they hate playing games. The Greeks are all there to learn. She has been playing the ‘yes/no game’ with them, where they are not allowed to reply yes or no to a question. Question (Destiny’s Child): Did I need to explain that? What does it say about me (or YOU) that I did? Anyway, moving on…. Apparently they were asking the boys, ‘Is your boyfriend Justin Bieber?’ Cue panicked looking Italian 14 year old, desperately wracking his brains for an answer, eventually coming up with, ‘Maybe?’ At which point all the kids repeat ‘maybe, ha ha!’ and fall about laughing. Do you feel old when I tell you that none of the kids know who Britney Spears is? Alana said, ‘come on, ‘Toxic’?’ Nope.  Nothing.  Zilch. And here I was thinking that I was relatively on trend having ‘Circus’ on my i-pod. Relative, that is, to the rest of my playlist. (Neil Diamond and Joan Baez anyone?)

In other news, my new American passport has finally arrived, yay! They haven’t rejected me! I have somehow slipped under the Yankee net once again. It was taking so long to come that I was starting to fear they would say ‘not this time’ on the grounds of being a Bad American i.e. I’ve never actually tasted pumpkin pie and we have never had a Thanksgiving meal in my house. However, I do feel I have just the requisite amount of WHOOP WHOOP! attitude, self-belief, outlandish size teeth and partiality to trans-fats to keep me in dual citizenship for the next ten years (when my current passport expires and I’ll be 41. Oh God.) It’s a relief since it was such a bloody nightmare getting my photo done. For American passports you can’t just have a regular photo booth picture done. Oh no. It has to be done in colour, by a specialist photographer, with ridiculously specific details on mm distance eyes from mouth etc. It’s a bit like measuring the shorts of a flea when it comes to how much white background you can have from the edges. And then the dude that took my picture kept complaining that my hair was ‘too fluffy’ and I needed to smooth it down more. Well, sorry mister, I have frizzy hair, it’s called GENES!! I already had about 500 Kirby grips in my hair, but he kept frowning at every picture he took, muttering ‘no, no good, too fluffy, America is the strictest you know’. Eventually, obviously despairing of my hair’s refusal to stay down, he came over and smoothed it all down for me himself, rearranging all my grips for me.

That was fun.

 This weekend is the last of the Les Mills launches I am required to do THANK GOD. Don’t get me wrong, I obviously love teaching and the launches are really fun, but it is also incredibly stressful. Every three months we (instructors) get sent new choreography to learn, and you have 3-4 weeks to get your head around what might be 1 to 9 routines to learn – dependent on how many programmes you teach. The cycles goes like this: Excitement about new releases – deciding which tracks are your favourite etc. Enthusing to all your members about how much you love the new attack. Listening to the music endlessly – in your car, at home, at work etc. Practising anywhere you can (for me, this means standing outside our offices with a stick at lunchtimes practising pump, getting weird looks from the crew if they happen to be filming nearby). Then, as the launch date approaches, mild panic starts to set in and you wonder how you are possibly going to learn 8 tracks by 5pm tomorrow. You swing between panicking about the choreography, and feeling totally fed up. You decide that you never want to learn anything else in your life again, EVER. At the 11^th hour you have to get real: the cool down is going to be freestyle. 10 minutes before the launch you have no idea whether it’s a double step touch or a squat tap, or a 2/2 or 3/1. The launch starts. Everyone else seems to know more than you. Without fail you get something wrong – never the part of the choreo you were worried about though. The launch finishes. You feel a massive sense of relief. Cue champagne, relaxed shoulders, sleep, excited messages on Facebook.

Then you realise there’s only 2 months left before it all starts again.

OVERHEARD AT THE GYM

Fitness Instructor: I only make £6 an hour on the gym floor. Rubbish. I used to make more than that selling drugs.