Am I the
last person on earth to discover the meaning of happiness?
“Aha!” you
might be thinking, “Young Sarah has at last seen the light and found her faith!
She has embraced her Jewish roots and decided to move to Israel to work on a
kibbutz with Abraham and Gavriella. She has forsaken the false joy to be
derived from material goods and will dedicate the remainder of her days to helping
others and living off the land.”
Don’t be
ridiculous. I’ve finally found Love
Island and podcast My Dad Wrote a
Porno.
For the unenlightened,
Love Island sees a group of hot
20-something boys and girls put together on an island where they “couple up”,
share beds, and try to find true love. And win £50K. The show’s
producers regularly introduce new “fresh meat” so there is a constant sense of
unease amongst the contestants and they desperately have to form alliances
(sexual or otherwise) to assure them of their place on the show. My favourite
contestant is Marcel, who used to be in the early noughties hip-hop group
Blazin’ Squad (yes – I did just Wikipedia that). Nobody recognizes him, so he
takes pains to take each member of the island aside to tell them, “hey, it’s no
big deal, but I kind of used to be famous. I was in a pop band, you might have
heard of them, Blazin’ Squad…?” The best reaction comes from the people who clearly have no idea who he is even after he tells them, but pretend to be
impressed, whilst obviously trying to memorize the name of the band so they can
Google it once they are back on the line.
And then
there is the genius that is My Dad Wrote
a Porno. It’s basically exactly that – this guy’s Dad wrote a series of
(really bad) erotic fiction, and in each episode he gets together with his 2
mates to read a chapter out loud and provide a critique of the material. The
book is called Belinda Blinked and is
written under the pen name Rocky Flintstone. The lack of any real story or
character development is more than compensated for by use of terms such as “vaginal
lids”, “private pussy area” and “her tits hung freely, like pomegranates”.
I mean, if
this isn’t literature at its finest, what is?
In other
news - Ellen Riddolls will be delighted to hear that The Times has confirmed –
I am too old to be a millennial.
I have
spent the last couple of years indignantly claiming my status as a hip,
happening, down-with-the-kids millennial. (That sentence alone should have told me that I'm not). I was reassured by various reports that
it’s those born from 1977 onwards that qualify as so-called millennials. And so
Ellen and I have argued – frequently – that I am part of this group (just),
despite my refusal to use Snapchat and inability to add to MyStory on
Instagram.
Anyway,
apparently I actually belong to a sub-generation of millennials known as xennials.
Here’s what
makes you a xennial:
You must
have been born between 1977 and 1983. You’re not quite as cynical as generation
X but pride yourself on being less entitled and optimistic than millennials. Apparently
our defining feature is that we were the last generation to grow up before the
digital age. We enthusiastically
embraced Myspace, MSN and mobile phones in our 20s while still remembering what
it was like to organize our first date as a teenager using the landline. We can
remember all of our best friends’ landline numbers off by heart and probably
still have a Hotmail account. We spent our formative years watching Party of Five and My So-Called Life (I still have the box set. It was a crime when
they cancelled that show after one season).
To add
insult to injury, the Giant From Upstairs made the following accusation last
week in a health and safety related email (bear with me). He said, “Sarah,
young grasshopper, you are old and past it. You’re MySpace….. I’m young and
current – I’m Facebook.”
And now I
find out that the fucker was right.
I recently
returned to the Motherland for Best Friend’s Wedding and man it feels good to
hear the Brummy accent. I eavesdropped to an entire conversation between three
24-year olds who are planning to go into some kind of (frankly, quite dodgy
sounding) business venture – purely for the joy of hearing that melodic whine
that makes relating even the best of news sound like the apocalypse is nigh.
Things have
changed though. For one thing, Mr Egg is no more. I know!!!! A staple of my
adolescent years, Mr Egg was the greasy spoon where you could “eat like a king
for £1.50” with the pleasure of having a giant fried egg suspended from the
ceiling above your head. The Dome (II) has also gone, another relic of my
teenage years where you had to order all the ingredients for Snakebite and
Black - separately because they refused to mix it for you at the bar - and they
regularly had those 1990s ubiquitous foam parties. For those of you who have
never had the pleasure of attending a foam party, imagine a dance floor covered
entirely with a white sticky cloud that conceals groping hands and leaves your
hair in tangled rats tails and your Maybelline running in rivulets down your face. The first
one I ever went to was particularly memorable as Kirk Bennett’s contact lenses
produced an allergic reaction, turning him into a privately-educated 16 yr old
version of Dracula, then Sarah Williams – wearing a red dress - sat down right
next to me – wearing a white dress – and turned one side of my dress a
lovely shade of pink so I resembled a human Fab ice-lolly. Good times indeed.
On the plus
side, there are still a few things you can count on to remain the same. Like
the fact that Saturday night is always the busiest night at the bar but
Chameleon still only chooses to have 4 of the slowest bartenders in the history
of uncapping Peroni behind the bar. There are still gangs of sleazy
50-something year old men in suits trying their luck with the girls who've definitely pre-loaded on Smirnoff Black before they came out. And the Bouncers still look like they hate
everyone.
I’m going
to end right here after 3 people informed me, on reading my last post, “I
really liked your blog. I haven’t finished reading it yet, but I will.”
Uh huh. For
those of you who have made it to this point – I love you and I will
give you a million pounds to reward your dedication.
PM me.
