Mess Neutral

1. Go on Strictly Come Dancing because my Mum loves it, then mercifully get voted off on the first week due to inability to move hips

2. Go on the charity celebrity versions of quiz shows, where they always make the questions easier, thus rendering me genius-like

3. Be interviewed by journos/columnists that I love reading then spend the whole time asking them questions

4. Create a decade-long fashion frenzy for looking plain

5. Finally fulfil my resolution to blog more regularly by employing a social media assistant to do it for me.

I know it was only two posts ago that I mentioned I was travelling America for six months but, oh! How the time flies! And flying I will be, in a few short hours. It turns out that the me of six months ago devised a fiendish web of psychological trickery to ensure the current me wouldn’t miss my flight, which resulted in me getting to the airport a day early.

This means I have had a whole extra 24 hours to spend parading up the I-205 Multi Use Path and relaxing in my cheap motel room, to reflect upon my time of wanderlust. To be fair, it wasn’t really wanderlust, more wandermildlyinterested.

Although there are some things I will miss (that I will get to, eventually), I feel it would be more positive to list the things I am looking forward to. Though thinking about it, this is probably just an inverse list of things that have pissed me off recently, so sod positivity.

1. HUMAN-SIZED TOWELS

While serial hotel-dwelling has many perks that I cannot for the life of me think of, among the worst things are the distressed wafers that hotels like to pass of as towels. On the spectrum of human size, I am nestled down the fairly petite end, so if I can’t manage to enrobe enough of myself to prevent a public indecency charge, should I fall out of a motel window, perhaps after being startled by a lizard, then how is a regular grown-up sized person meant to manage? (That really happened by the way. The lizard in the room, not the toppling out of window semi-naked.)

Would an extra inch or two be too much to ask for? Let’s leave that question there. I’m going to start lobbying the international hotel industry to demand they implement a minimum boob-to-vagina towel measurement standard, as a matter of urgent safety.

At home, there will be towels large enough to encompass my whole body at least twice around, head-to-toe. Towels big enough to live in, which is something I occasionally like to do for several days at a time.

2. SAUSAGE ROLLS

Possibly spurred on by that Lovely Eggs video that I have on almost constant repeat, I have been longing for this monarch of British bakery products. There was a very strange stretch of the upper peninsula in Michigan that seemed to be lined exclusively with pasty-selling huts, where I temporarily sated my savoury pastry craving with an excellent over-sized replica Cornish pasty. Yet once I crossed the pleasingly-named Mackinac bridge into the larger, mitteny bit of the state, the huts vanished.

I am baffled at this extreme culinary localisation, and am very glad to be returning to a place where mulched up meat in flaky pastry is worshipped nationwide.

3. X-MAS

Probably because I haven’t been shopping or watching much TV, the X-Mas spirit has been fairly late coming to me this year. However, that spirit has come perilously close to being quashed entirely by the horror that is American X-Mas radio stations. What started as a pleasant festive musical diversion rapidly spiralled into deep, psychological torment with violent shaking triggered every time some crooner starts reciting the names of Santa’s reindeers.

Now I’m pining for British X-Mas, with its comfortingly crap TV and superior Christmas #1 back catalogue. Not to mention over-cooked turkey, weird presents from family and, most importantly, beating everyone at Trivial Pursuits.

One thing the USA does get right is the very tasteful decoration that adorns its suburbs. I desperately want one of these inflatable light-up nativity scenes, but there’s simply no room at the inn/my suitcase:

And, not to get all sappy, I’m looking forward to seeing my family. I guess half a year’s absence intensifies the rosy hue of remembrance, but I really did enjoy X-Mas last year, with its deluge of snow that was probably annoying at the time but now seems rather charming. One of the things I like about my parents is that they have never got out of the habit of being providers. Whether spurred on by parenthood or not, they have this magical ability to always have stuff around, the kind of stuff that I never think about needing, but when it’s there I realise is really great. Like clean human-sized towels, functioning heating systems and more food in the fridge than two-week old leftover curry and milk that has about half an hour before it goes gloopy. Sometimes I look around at my friends to see who has managed to achieve this level of adulthood, and wonder how they got there. I feel like this is something I could maybe achieve, but it would require such hard work and re-wiring of the brain to connect it more directly with reality that it isn’t worth it.

4. A SINGLE TIME ZONE

While I do love that time zone shenanigans means you can download The Good Wife straight after it’s aired on the east coast and finish watching it before it airs on your telly on the west coast, I fear this is outweighed by more serious drawbacks. Specifically: fucking with your mind. Although I’ve rarely had to be anywhere at a specific time while I’ve been road-tripping, it’s still nice to have a sense of both where and when you are. Mrs Satnav, under some duress, took care of the geographical side of that but, left to its own devices, it appeared America had little interest on informing me when I was hurtling an hour into the past or future. That’s just rude.

There’s only one time zone I need. GMT: the original and best.

5. SHOPS YOU CAN WALK TO

Oh, corner shops! How I have missed thee.

There is little in life as disheartening as being able to see a place a short distance away, then realising there is no possible way to walk there, owing to the intervening 10 lanes of traffic. Not only that, there’s no way of even getting to the 10 lanes of traffic, because there are another six lanes running parallel outside it. That’s my idea of hell. Or, Texas.

While cities are pretty similar in all the countries I’ve visited (which is almost every country in the world with passable toilet facilities. Plus France), it’s out in the sticks that you can get unstuck. The car-centricity of America outside of its urban centres (and, I would argue inside a fair few of those urban centres) is so notorious because it is entirely true. I was startled, when driving through some suburbs after dark, to realise that there is a complete lack of streetlighting. But that makes sense: streetlights are largely to aid pedestrians, and no-one walks anywhere. Pavements and paths peter out unexpectedly, as though roadworkers gave up halfway, overwrought with the futility of it all.

Obviously, people must get used to driving for several miles just to get to the nearest shop. For me, however, when I’ve shuffled semi-dressed to the kitchen, having summoned all my energy to make a cup of tea only to find the milk is off, I can just about hold it together enough to bundle up into some overwear and stagger the thirty seconds to Sainsbury’s to buy a fresh pint. If I had to get into a car and drive across town, it would be that nanometer too far, it would break me.

Ironically, there’s no corner shop for miles where my parents live, in a particularly obscure location in rural Wales. But, as I mentioned above, they have sufficient restocking magic that this will never be a problem.

6. VEGETABLES

This may be a surprising entry. You may also be surprised to know that my current belief is that as humans advance, we should aspire towards vegetarianism, even veganism, for environmental and economic reasons. However, I am far more selfish than principled, so I continue to feast on bloody steaks.

Unfortunately (or fortunately for fans of cows living beyond toddler age), my trip has been low on steak and high on cheap filler. I think prolonged ramen consumption would make anyone get misty-eyed over the verdant allure of a broccoli floret. I am sure this feeling will pass very quickly.

7. NO MORE PHOTOS

Like with any new toy, when I first got my camera I was eagerly playing with it at every opportunity, snap-snap-snapping away at anything that moved, or didn’t. Which is to say I have a lot of pictures of sheep.

This enthusiasm persisted throughout much of my trip and, when my camera stopped working after a run-in with some aggressive spray at Niagara Falls (I probably should have seen that coming), I was most distraught. It eventually dried out and came back to life, and I continued my inept photo-documenting with renewed vigour.

Under pressure from friends and family that weren’t convinced I wasn’t just spending half a year sat on a sofa in Britain somewhere, I began to upload some pictures. Uploading photos on a crappy (but beautiful) netbook using intermittent hotel wifi is perhaps one of the most soul-destroying activities to emerge out of western technologisation. Day by day, I found myself increasingly reluctant to take photos, until my quivering trigger finger refused entirely to shoot, so distressed it was by the prospect of having to do something with the many thousands of pictures that digital cameras goad you into taking.

Even after I had expended great uploading effort, when my sister (who had been one of the most vocal in demanding evidence of my travels) started to browse through my flickr account, she said to me: it gets a bit boring after a while.

You don’t fucking say.

So, this X-Mas there will be no family photos. At least not taken by me.

Last October I was going to write a post about eggs for British Egg Week. I didn’t quite gather my thoughts in time, so thought I’d put it off ’til Easter, which also came and went in the blink of an eye. I’ve decided I’m done with seasonal deadlines. Besides, I’m sure everyone was on such an albumen high after this year’s Egg Week that they probably needed a bit of time to come down.

But even after that decision, I found it hard to know where to begin. Every time I thought I had pinpointed the beginning of my egg fascination, I found trails leading farther and farther back into my undergrowth of half-remembered eggy anecdotes.

Maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, we are all ex-egg-dwellers, or maybe ex-eggs, or maybe both. Egg philosophy, like life itself, is brimming with such cyclical conundrums. The most famous, of course: what came first, the chicken or the egg? I like to think it was a tie, because I hate to see anybody lose.

So, like that guy that wrote that long series of books then died to get out of finishing them used to say, this isn’t the beginning, but it is a beginning.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 1 – AN EGG IS LAID

One day about ten years ago, I was round at Robert’s house at uni, waiting for something monumental and life-changing to happen. Then we watched Pink Flamingos.

It was fairly obvious that I would love this film: students are programmed to enjoy weirdness and I will never stop loving bowel movement-related humour. But there was something more going on. Where other people saw a deviant comedy about aspiring to be the flithiest person alive, we saw one of cinema’s greatest love stories. A pure-hearted romance between star-crossed lovers: Mama Edie, penned in her wicked daughter’s trailer, The Eggman, her suitor and would-be saviour. Maybe it’s more like Rapunzel than Romeo and Juliet, but I’m sticking with Shakey for a better egg pun caption.

Naturally, I have spent the last decade of my life looking for my eggman to sweep me into a wheelbarrow and whisk me off to a better life, but this never happened, so I became a lesbian.

Like with all self-discoveries, this egg-piphany has triggered great introspeggtion (I am going to hold off the egg puns now, don’t worry). I have come to believe that my id is an egg, but to find its origin requires swimming a few lengths up the fallopian tubes of the great chicken of life.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 2 – CAN’T BOIL THESE EGGS

The other great influence on my life, from a very early age, has been computer games. One day I may write My Life in Computer Games, which can’t possibly be as odd as this post. The very first game I played on anything more substantial than a Game and Watch was Chucky Egg on the BBC Micro at school. It was that game, in conjuction with Granny’s Garden, that started me down the questionable path that life has taken me. But what if, as well as opening the gateway to geekery, Chucky Egg had cracked the shell of another, more insidious influence?

Prime ovum and self-proclaimed King of the Yolkfolk, Dizzy was my anthropomorphic hero-of-choice on the Atari ST. While best known for puzzle platformers such as Treasure Island Dizzy and Fantasy World Dizzy, I had a soft-boiled spot for his Pac-man-esque outing, Fast Food. The player directed Dizzy around a sequence of outdoor mazes, hungrily gobbling up burgers, pizza and soft drinks, while avoiding getting devoured himself by various enemies. Power-ups came in the form of condiments, that unleashed certain effects that made the runaway fast food less, well, fast. I credit this game, with its nightmarish visions of evasive high-speed fried-chicken and a food-chain-gang gone wild with giving me enough mental resilience to side-step the eating disorders suffered by all the other girls at school.

Far removed from this constant threat of being scrambled, the Final Fantasy series chose to take a more nuturing view of egghood, making it central to gaining control of the recurring chocobo characters in many episodes of the franchise. Final Fantasy VII had a notoriously tedious/weirdly addictive chocobo breeding side-quest, that although technically peripheral to the main game, is integral to the whole RPG ethos of maximum time-consumption for dubious rewards.

This was taken to a new level with Final Fantasy XI, the series’ first online instalment, where it requires four whole real-life days of staring at an egg before so much as a hairline fracture, and a couple of months total before you can actually ride the blighter. I suppose it’s not much different from an in-game tamagotchi simulator. But there’s a reason that tamagotchis eventually tanked in popularity: they were fucking stupid.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 3 – SURE AS EGGS ARE EGGS

The truth is that I needn’t look so deep in my analysis of egg obsession. Because, you see, eggs are everywhere. Not just what we eat and where we come from, but how we speak. Is there another foodstuff that lends itself so often to idioms? You can be a good egg, a bad egg, a rotten egg. You can have an egg-head, a nest egg or egg on your face. You can egg someone on, tread on eggshells and put all your eggs in one basket. Just to name a few.

They can be a form of transport (per Lady Gaga’s ovoid sedan chair), housing, musical instrument or sex toy. I’m sure there are many varieties of egg porn if I dared to look – maybe Two Eggs One Basket?

I am not the only one consumed with all things egg – many ancient cultures believed that the whole universe was one giant egg. That’s a religion I can get on board with. Even the most important festival in Christianity has been co-opted by a lot of jiggery-eggery, which I can’t complain about, because Cadbury’s mini eggs are perhaps my favourite seasonal confectionary.

Long ago I envisioned collecting all of humanity’s egg experience into a masterwork of literature: The Ovossey. It would be part novel, part onslaught of egg-related facts. Such as: when General Franco was serving in the Spanish army in North Africa, he invited a fellow officer to dine with him who he considered cowardly.  He instructed his chef to serve his comrade mountains of eggs; in Spain huevos are slang for balls and he was implying the officer could do with some.

Alas, I was never to complete or even begin this oeuf oeuvre; reality hit, I got a job and life got boring. My dreams were as crushed as a fresh meringue beneath the buttocks of a failed Weight Watcher.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 4 – GOLDEN EGGS

It’s not just their metaphorical properties that are overwhelming, but the sheer joy of the physicality of eggs. Next time you open a box to hastily crack an egg or two into a pan, I ask you to pause for a moment, and consider that egg in your hand (if you are averse to real ova, I suggest getting the rubber variety from a National Trust gift shop of your choice, or ebay).

Let the egg nestle perfectly in the centre of your palm, feel how its shell pleasingly curves along the contours of your flesh. I am feeling relaxed just thinking about it. I am sure eggs are like an ovoid incarnation of the golden ratio, I can’t think of another form that looks and feels so right.

Believe me, my interest in the oviform is entirely innocent, though the same cannot be said for others. One of my all time favourite literary experiences was when Robert took me to the library one day and handed me a book to read. The library was silent back then, when mobile phones were still new enough that people didn’t think they had the right to keep them on everywhere. It was in this atmosphere of reverent silence that I dutifully read the first chapter of the book, seemingly a coming-of-age story about a boy and a girl, then happened upon the first line of the second chapter:

“That was the period when Simone developed a mania for breaking eggs with her ass.”

I jiggled as wildly as an egg in boiling water, but I kept it together and did not erupt out loud with laughter. The book was Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, which regularly makes must-read lists, and I can heartily recommend for the whole family.

Perhaps the best thing of all about eggs is their plentiful nature. There is no rarity – eggs for all! Why some of us can even make them, as evidenced when one pops out every month, heralded by a crimson fanfare. I am not sure what those tiny sort are good for, but I hear the NHS is so enamoured they’re upping what they’ll pay for them.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 5 – HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR EGGS?

I’m not going to talk about the multitudinous ways to cook with eggs because, really, there are as many ways to cook eggs as there are personalities and also I’m shit at cooking. All I will say is that everyone should eat them, because that’s what Shirley Conran told me. I understand that vegans may object to this, but I’m not sure I fully understand why. After all, chickens keep laying all these unfertilised eggs, surely it’s our duty to spare them the emotional scarring of endless phantom pregnancies? Obviously, I only advocate buying the free-est of free range eggs with nauseating pictures on the box of multiple generations of the family that farmed them, who are so nice to chickens that that guy probably mistook the one on his knee for his own son.

When it comes to the pinnacle of haute oeuf cuisine, there’s only one contender. A creation so grand in scope that I took a 400-mile diversion to go and see it, forget Saturday Kitchen’s two-egg omelette, I’m talking about the 5027-egg omelette at this year’s Giant Omelette Celebration, in Abbeville, Lousiana.

If 5027 sounds like an strange number, that’s because they started off with 5000, then add another egg each year, ensuring it’s always going to be bigger and better. The omelette-making was quite a spectacle, but just one of many egg-themed events that took place over the weekend celebration. Possibly my favourite was the tractor egg-cracking competition (where you had to reverse a 1950s John Deere into an egg and try and make the smallest crack possible). I made a promising start on my attempt, managing to touch the egg without cracking it, however, I overshot it on my retry, resulting in a messy eggy double-tap.

I was in good company on the tractor, featuring several local beauty queens, a priest and a Grammy award-winner. The priest narrowly lost out in the end, but I think the biggest losers numbered in their dozens.

MY LIFE IN EGGS EPITAPH – EGG-NOG

I was going to finish this post with a short story entitled A Very Short Story About a Very Large Egg, but I decided to do a poem instead, because rhyming is fun, also it could be sung to children to give them nightmares about the end of the world.  Maybe this will be the first in a series called Apocalyptic Nursery Rhymes.

I looked back with no sense of mirth
To see the space where once was earth
To glimpse the ruins that remain
Of our great blue and green terrain

Or floating fragments of the crust
Where we once stood with faulty trust
So obssessed with climate change
But blind to what was really strange

From ancient rumblings in Minoa
Vesuvius and Krakatoa
Right to Eyjafjallajökull
There’s something geological

That hints at our bleak ruination
Each earthquake rends a new striation
Too late did our great minds begin
To see the cracks came from within

Volcanic belches boil and flare
Bright in the incendiary air
The fuse lit on this powder keg
Our primed, explosive giant egg

A scaly creature shaking loose
Its albumen of magma juice
And bursting through its birthing gates
That we’d known as tectonic plates

The crack felled a world population
Except for us out on this station
Now we seek somewhere new to dwell
As dustmites on a frail egg shell

If Hollywood makes a disaster film about the Earth really being a giant space-dragon egg that starts cracking and kills us all, I am suing.

BUT WAIT!

You don’t think I’m ending the world’s-longest-post-about-eggs without one more treat, do you? I think I’ve already shown this video to anyone that is likely to read this, nevertheless, it bears rewatching.

Ok, I think I’m spent. Only comments with bad egg puns allowed.