Sunday

The ONLY worthwhile thing I've achieved today has been cleaning the messy polish off my nails.  Seriously.

For the past couple of weeks I've been sporting Models Own Juicy Jules, a mega-glittery shade that, let me tell you, goes down a STORM with the under-5s.  I think they think I'm some sort of fairy.  Anyway, it's pretty but a total beeyatch to remove. I'm pretty sure the main ingredient is Superglue.  There are two known ways to take off Juicy Jules; either by compulsively picking at it during moments of boredom or nervousness (one reason I needed it to disappear today - I've got an audition tonight and it wouldn't do to be scraping off the remains of my manicure during!) OR by the very useful method invented by Gem Fatale, which I am demonstrating below.

I think I resemble some sort of creepy alien from Dr Who that might make Kayleigh hide behind a cushion.  Without my make-up on I DO look a bit like a minotaur, it's true.

What you have to do is cut a small piece of cotton wool, dip it in nail varnish remover, attach it to your nail with a strip of kitchen foil (I used Sellotape, because money (or, for that matter, kitchen foil) doesn't grow on trees y'know), sit and wait for ten minutes, then un-tape and simply wipe away any remaining sparkles.  I daresay soaking your fingertips in nail varnish remover isn't very good for your health, but one has to make sacrifices for the sake of glamour, doesn't one?

*Sigh* I thought writing a toast post (about nail varnish remover of all things. How low have I sunk!) might count as achieving something today, but it clearly does not.  Ah well. 

Whoopie Sunday

As a blog reader, my favourite blog posts are those 'I've nothing to say, so here is a little rundown of what I've done recently' ones.  When done by proper bloggers they have neat paragraphs accompanied by gorgeous photographs in soft colours, taken using clever Nikon things and knowledge of words like "macro" and "exposure".  The photos depict delicious tidbits served on charmingly mismatched vintage crockery, or close-up shots of shopping bags with swatches of fabric peeping out as a taster before an outfit post, or piles of hardback books artistically placed next to an empty teacup and three artistic biscuit crumbs.  They're never blurry or with a finger over the lens and there's never any clutter or grime in the background.  Heavenly.

I, on the other hand, offer you this crock of shit as a 'Here's what I did this weekend' blog post!  Enjoy!

Just over a month ago I wrote this tweet:

"Dear world, I am sick of wearing tights and boots, so it is therefore Spring from now on. Please act accordingly."

Well it looks like I got my wish!  As you probably noticed, unless you had the misfortune to be working nights last week, or unless you spent the weekend holed up in your bedroom playing internet role-playing games about trolls and not washing, yesterday was not just 'Spring-like' or 'summery' but BLAZING HOT.  I started the day with a swim (and that healthy, sunny morning image is a bit of a bluff, because I actually didn't roll out of bed until almost eleven, and then I pouted and grumbled my way into my swimming costume and out of the house because I wanted to sit in my pyjamas and play on Facebook...)  and here is a letter I composed while I was grumpily swimming:

"An open letter to all troglodytic* idiots who frequent East End Pool;

(*Yeah, I know I’m going a bit overboard with the word troglodyte recently but, you see, I live near Byker so I encounter a lot of socially-challenged cavemen.)

Dear idiots,

East End Pool is not a low-rent dating agency.  If you want to pick up a strumpet, go to the Biggmarket.  The girls there are younger than me, drunker than me and probably wearing garments much smaller than my swimsuit.

Sod off,

Bette

And then I came home and got over myself, and then I sat on my bed with the windows open and did some worky things, and then I went out to try to find an open charity shop to which to bequeath a bag of my discarded junk. (Failed, but the heavy bag and I had a nice long walk in the sun!)

This next anecdote didn't actually take place on Sunday, but whatever.  Here's a pic of my latest bit of interior decorating, which earned me the comment from Simon: "Well. You've obviously got too much time on your hands."  Fair point I suppose, but I felt it was a little bit rich, coming from Teachy McBoring himself...!

Rainbow books!!  To protect your eyes from crap photography, edited in Pixlr by my own fair mouse-clicking fingers.  I had been inspired by pictures like this:

(Please overlook how this one is infinitely better than my amateurish effort)

Anyway, the next event of Sunday was that me and Simon made whoopie pies from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook.  You know, whoopie pies, those neat, flat little cakes sandwiched together with gooey stuff, the latest craze from America and now being sold in the very chicest London patisseries.  These things   ----->

Simon was measuring out ingredients with German precision and I was skipping around the kitchen with excitement.

SIMON:  Can't you go away?

BETTE:  No!  I'm helping!

SIMON:  ...Must you be helping?

(This toast post is turning into The Chronicles of Simon Being Mean To Me.  Memo to Simon: be nicer!)

Anyway, following the recipe to the letter (TO DAS LETTER, JA!), the whoopie mixture began to form.

These were banoffee whoopie pies, by the way.

At this point, let me introduce you to these two miscreants:

Combine these, chuck in some icing sugar, add enough butter to sink a ship, and there you have the whoopie pie filling.  Diabetes on a plate, anyone?

SIMON:  Hurry up and take the picture!

BETTE:  Hold on, I'm trying to find the right camera setting...

SIMON:  Have you not got a 'gloop' setting?!

(I must be remembering the series of events wrongly because those are clearly my arms, but the general wittiness still applies.)

Finally, they were ready and, er, they didn't turn out quite like the dainty little snackettes in the Hummingbird picture above...

You could build a house out of these things.  You need two hands to lift them, and biting into one is like eating a burger.  Let me tell you, a burger made of cake might sound like bliss, but when it involves a whole jar of Marshmallow Fluff, you need a seriously strong stomach!

Didn't stop us from eating 5 between us in two days, though.

Burp.

Cheap thrills

SMALL BOY: [solemnly] Miss Hamer, this is for you.
MISS HAMER:  What is it?
SMALL BOY:  It's a stone.
MISS HAMER:  ...lovely!  Thank you!

Good afternoon, viewers!

Today I have been shopping.  In the total absence of anything interesting to read on these pages, would you like to see pictures of my purchases?

Tacky-fantastic pin-up girl t-shirt from Primark.  (Attention Primark employees - don't stick the size labels over that plasticky, iron-on transfer stuff!!  I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to scrape that shite off - it's worse than the labels on the soles of shoes!)

Umbrella (I binned its totally broken predecessor on the drizzly walk into town), purse and hair flowers, all from Accessorize.  Did you know Accessorize/Monsoon do a Boots-Advantage-card-esque rewards scheme now?  I was very excited until I read the small print and found that you need to spend £250 to get a £10 reward voucher.  Ah well, maybe by 2015 cheapskated me will have bought enough outlandish hair accessories to earn myself the price of a pair of earrings!

Make-up!  More to the point, FREE make-up!  Max Factor have an offer on - spend £15 and get a free gift.  I was in need of some foundation, having got to the stage where you have to shake and scrunch the bottle until the last drops dribble out with a wheezing death gurgle (I've had a cold this week and have been trowelling on the slap to try and achieve a healthy pallor!), so I bought the 'Lasting Performance' stuff (in a shade slightly darker than usual because that's what the magazines tell you to do when it's high summer, and IT WILL BE SUMMER SOON OH YES YES IT WILL.  To bump my total up to fifteen squid I bought a lipstick called 'Touch of Red', which is actually quite subtle and rosy.  I like it.  And then for freeeee I scored a make-up bag (actually quite a good one, with a detachable pocket and little holders for make-up brushes), a sachet of another foundation, which escaped the photo, a mascara, eyeshadow, lip gloss and nail varnish.  Wahey!  I also bought a cheaperiffic white nail varnish because I read about a technique for getting marbled nails that I'm interested to try.  The pretty notebook and pen are going to be wrapped up and given as a birthday present tomorrow.

Well that was boring, wasn't it?  I will atone by showing you some grafitti I saw round the back of Morrisons some weeks ago.  I had to dig out the camera lead from my Random Shit Box to show you this, so I hope you appreciate it!

The intoxication of being a public spectacle

Lazy Sunday, still suffering the post-show blues, and nothing to do (except Mount St. Washing-Up, but the less said about that the better...) so I thought I'd amuse myself with a nostalgic retrospective of my six years in the Gilbert and Sullivan society.  This will be of interest to no-one, I'm sure, but I'll try and keep the cliquey anecdotes and plot summaries to a minimum!

2006 - The Gondoliers
The Gondoliers, like many G&S plotlines, involves secret love affairs and babies being mixed up at birth. Also kings, dukes, gondoliers, contadine and gratuitous bits of Italian lyrics.  I was a fresh-faced fresher and had never heard of Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan, had never sung in parts, couldn't read music and was generally bewildered throughout rehearsals.  Our production suffered a change of director mid-way through, we performed in a conference room with no stage, no lighting, no wings, no set and no dressing rooms, one of the leading ladies got pneumonia and couldn't go on, I mimed the whole way through and was too shy to squeak a word to any of the principals, and me and my fellow first-years had the time of our lives, became Gilbert and Sullivan geeks from that day on, and never looked back.

I'm on the end of the row, and I must have known the notes for that bit, or else I'm miming rather convincingly!

Here's a snap from my first G&S after-show party (also the first time I drank gin - another case of never looking back!).  The neighbours complained, the police threw us out at 5am, and I sobbed all the way home for reasons I no longer remember.  Good times!

2007 - The Sorcerer and Dracula Unhinged
Unsurprisingly, The Sorcerer's about a sorcerer.  Also disastrous love potions.  Very silly and lots of fun.  Onstage...

I am on the table in the middle, about to fall out of my top by the looks of it.

Offstage...

Slept on the party hostesses' living room floor that night, and three of us got a taxi home the following morning - looking like the above photograph.  I'll say this for stage make-up - you can pass out on the living room floor in it, and wake up looking more or less the same as you did 16 hours earlier, when the curtain first rose!

This was the year we began doing second shows in the summer term, and our first one was an original script and G&S songs with new lyrics.  It was about vampires, accountants, gravediggers and PhDs.  The chorus were zombie newspaper reporters.

With cat-like tread, beneath our graves we're found.  We're all quite dead, but still we move around.

Here I am, dancing at the after-party. Pretty dress (I still wear that from time to time!), chubby knees and totally demented hair!  Looking more like a zombie than I did on stage, actually!

2008 - The Mikado and Sherlock Holmes and the House of Almost Certain Death
Blah blah, usual G&S nonsense, but set in Japan this time.  If our society had a budget for costumes we may have worn kimonos.  But it hasn't, so we didn't.

I am kneeling, behind the Three Little Maids.

This after-show party was held at my house, as I was on the committee that year. (Fulfilling the role of totally inefficient Treasurer.)  Following tradition, we upset the neighbours (I don't understand why some people just don't appreciate acapella, top-of-our-voices drunk renditions of classic G&S choons in the small hours of the morning, I really don't...) and Mrs Nosy Next Door came and let herself into my house in her dressing gown and bedroom slippers to shout at me.  Whoops.

Our summer show that year was a new adventure for everybody's favourite consultant detective and his sidekick.  I played a jealous, broken-hearted housekeeper (with lines to say and songs to sing!), but there are no pictures of that, so here's a rehearsal snap of my Act Two cameo as a lady of ill-repute:

The Sherlock after-show party:

Bored, Simon?

2009 - Patience and How to Marry an Aristocrat

Patience.  Milkmaids, aesthetes and thwarted love affairs.  Here I am as Lady Saphir (demonstrating what Simon calls my Miss Babs face...)  Offstage, I am now a postgrad, but unprepared to bury myself in the library, talk about postmodernism and wear sweatshirts, as it seems is customary amongst some of the postgraduate section of the School of English.  I loathed my Masters Degree and lived for Tuesday night rehearsals and my theatrical pals.

Matt is amused by mine and Simon's camera faces.  I'll have you know that's the finest acting NUGSS has to offer, young man!

A few months later, in How to Marry an Aristocrat, I was Cacophony Hicksville, a brash, mercenary American heiress with a blonde wig, cowboy boots and an accent that kept flip-flopping between southern belle and gangster's moll.

I remember this as a pretty good cast party, but judging from this photo it must have been rather dull!

2010 - HMS Pinafore and A Tale of Liquor and Dice
It's 2010 and I'm a real grown-up with a job and lots of student debt, but still I cling on to my student days and G&S, because all the Gilbert and Sullivan alto parts are old ladies, and the only way a 23-year-old who still gets asked for ID in bars can get away with playing an old lady is in a student society where everybody else is nineteen...  HMS Pinafore is my favourite G&S operetta (the babies-mixed-up-at-birth plotline is back, you'll be pleased to note) and I played poor, crushed Cousin Hebe.

I love this picture from after the show.  No idea how I got my face to go like that.  I assume gin was involved.

The chap in the hat next to me in the Pinafore photo (my friend Matt, the only person other than me whose name appears on the cast lists for every single NUGSS show since we came to university!) wrote our next summer show, which was about gambling and gangsters in the 1920s.  Proving my earlier point about altos and old ladies, I played the role of Lily de Leazes, an elderly zoo owner, whose feckless son had gambled away her pride and joy.  Apparently one of my friends' parents, seeing me flitting around in the bar post-show, asked "Who's that? She wasn't in the show, was she?"  I enjoy how the real me is totally unrecognisable from my character!  To illustrate, here's demure, stately Lily: (vintage dress that used to belong to my great-great-aunt, vintage kid gloves, vintage shoes, and totally fake plastic pearls!)

And, er, showing my true colours a few hours later!

2011 - The Grand Duke

By popular opinion, our best production yet.  It's one of the lesser-performed shows (because its plot MAKES NO SENSE!) and not very famous, but I think because of that, everyone involved worked extra hard to make it funny and entertaining, and I think it turned out to be a real crowd-pleaser.  I hope everyone was very proud of their efforts.

Me being a bad-tempered costumier in Act Two - all my own clothes!

The after-show party was a hoot, as usual.  I'll spare you the photos of me getting progressively drunker and more embarrassing, but here's a nice one of me and my friend Hannah, another old-timer from the Gondoliers days.

My theatrical friends are the main reason I haven't yet managed to grow up and leave NUGSS.  The Gossip and Scandal society (or Gin and Sore heads society...) is the way we met and the glue that holds us together, spread all across the country as we are now - where would we be without the mischief and rumour-mongering that goes with putting on a show?  The actual performances are just an added bonus!

What's next?  Another production of HMS Pinafore, but set in the 1940s/WW2 this time (It's going to be SWELL, I can't wait!) in May, and after that, who knows?  I heard a whisper of The Pirates of Penzance...  Maybe soon I'll bite the bullet and join one of the other G&S societies in the area and leave NUGSS to the real students.  I suppose it's got to happen sooner or later, and my clinging on to my lost youth is getting a little bit ridiculous!  In the meantime, there's no business like show business!

(Anyone who is remotely interested in the things I have wittered on about today may visit the NUGSS website, since Matt spends so much time making it splendid!  I promise to be less geeky in future and post more pictures of clothes (Although - really the clothes pictured in this toast post are way more interesting than the usual day-to-day outfits that you guys flock (Yes. Flock. In hoardes.) to my blog to see!) Now, suppose I'd better go and scale that washing-up mountain I was talking about!)

Three Things Right Now

Posing in the bathroom with giant head bow and shiny purple camera Casimira while waiting to go out:

Loving how theatrical my little vaudeville-dressing-room bedroom looks with the lights off and the lamp on:

Super stripy, fudgy, chocolatey cake I made:

SIMON: [tutting] Somebody has left this cake in a non-uniform shape! [Cuts off a sliver to make it symmetrical]

BETTE:  I can't believe we've eaten exactly half a cake today.  

SIMON:  Can't you?

BETTE:  No, you're right, I can very well believe it!

SIMON:  Tch, it's only a little one.  It's a two-person cake.

Happy Birthday Simon!

Lazy Saturday - Cult or Classic?

What IS the plural for Quality Street?  Is each individual choc a Street, so you have a box of Streets?  When I was at school and those completely horrendous Rockport boots were en vogue with the completely horrendous oiks at my completely horrendous school, you used the brand name as the plural. ("You got new Rockport yeh? Ow much woh theh?", "Undred." "Ah, mine woh undred n twe'y.") One Rockport, two Rockport, one pair of Rockport.  Is it the same with chocolates?  Anyway, I've had five so far.



Reliving school has made me feel quite faint and I've forgotten what I was going to talk about.  Something about the water gushing down our kitchen walls and the reservoir under the floor tiles?  Well anyway, to cut out all of the important details in order to make a long story short, the heating's off and the windows are all open and the flat is COLD.

"I'm cold."
"Let's go out somewhere warm.  Let's go to the Butterfly Cabinet."
"But I want to be thin."
"But the house is full of chocolate."
"Flawless logic, let's go out and have pancakes."

(Anyone interested in the flooded-kitchen saga may visit Simon's blog for a rather vile photograph of a burger and the full detai -actually, he hasn't really put any more details than I did, so don't bother.)

And then we came back and ate Quality Street/s and watched 'Allo 'Allo.  Here is a picture of a doll I found at Granny's house:

Dead ringer, ain't she? Right down to the plait and "GO AVAY!" expression.

Best thing about 'Allo 'Allo is the perfect WW2 hair.  Well, if you overlook Yvette's '80s perm, Helga and Edith always have amazing updos that are exactly right, AND they're different every episode.  I like that the show's stylists put a lot of effort into the hair.  Hair is important.

We're going to see The King's Speech tonight (because today is the 8th, not yesterday).  The Tyneside Cinema is extremely pretty, and I imagine the film will have good costumes.  And I'm going to have popcorn for tea.

Wo-o-oah, give me a chance, 'cause when I start to dance, I'm a mooovie star!

My new favourite blog:

http://essbeevee.blogspot.com/

Someone please restrain me from sending Sarah of SBV a stalkerish email with an itemised list of why we should be best friends. 
(It would start as follows:  1. We both like berets and dresses and bargains, and glancing at her photos I've seen a few things that have twins in my own wardrobe.  2. She has exactly the type of blog I'd like mine to be (a bit style-y, but not a Fashion Blog, a bit nice-things-I-like-y, but not a Flickrporn blog, a bit I-am-chatting-on-mindlessly-about-my-daily-life-in-a-warm-and-funny-narrative-voice-that-enchants-the-reader, but not ever a dull blog), but with better photos.  3. She has nice hair.  4. We seem to both like using snatches of vaguely-relevant quotes or lyrics for blog titles.  5. She likes red dresses and dressing "matchy-matchy".  6. She makes nice cakes, and I feel it's very sensible to have friends who make nice cakes.)

It is January the FOURTH (I actually had to look that up because I couldn't remember the hell how many days old January was!) and I haven't got a New Year's Resolution yet.  I tell you what though, 'Banish the Christmas Podge' isn't going to be one of them, or if it is it isn't going to have much success.  Yesterday was thwarted by Simon appearing with a fruitcake, today was thwarted by the staffroom still being full of Christmas biscuits and chocs, tomorrow I'm going out for dinner...  What's a girl to do?!

There haven't been many dead movie stars gracing the pages of betteontoast for a while, so here's a selection to make this gloomy January evening (apparently we're going to have more snow later this week OH GOODY (SARCASM)) a bit prettier.

New Year's Resolution: Become more like Jane Russell.