Why Can't I Be Stephen Fry???????

We went to see Stephen Fry on Saturday. That is we went to see him at the theatre - we didn't pop round to his for tea or anything. I like Stephen Fry: I love him on QI, he's a great actor, a clever mimic, and I am in awe of his brain, his wealth of knowledge and his wonderful use of words. This theatre performance was to promo part two of his autobiography - so it was Stephen talking about the early and middle chunk of his life. Did I enjoy it? Yes, most of it - although being honest, some of it was way too elitist for me - but then I'm definitely a pleb. Stephen was warm and garrulous and rambling and told several lengthy and intricate tales about how he was a lost cause in his youth and sort of stumbled into stardom. Sadly, because I'm the aforementioned pleb, some of it was just a touch too luvvie for me. However, the man is without doubt a genius.

But the whole thing was ruined because I got the nutter sitting next to me...

You know how you always get them on a bus or a train? It isn't just me, is it? Oh, right... Well, anyway, on Saturday night I got the theatre equivalent. There was one empty seat next to me in a sell-out full house. And, just before curtain up, in he came. Bustling along the row, treading on toes, all multi-patterned jumper, cagoule, and haversack. As the lights dimmed, he dumped the haversack and rushed down to the front of the stalls, stood on tiptoe and peered on to the stage. Then he cantered back, threw himself down beside me and said excitedly "I can see him in the wings! He's ready to come on!"

I smiled weakly and edged further away - difficult in theatre seats. He leaned towards me. "I saw him in Cambridge last night and Norwich the night before and tomorrow I'll see him in London!"

Oh, great. I'd got a Stephen Fry groupie...

Fortunately, Stephen made his entrance then, and Mr Groupie was on his feet whooping and hollering. I shrank down in my seat as everyone turned to stare at us. The Toyboy Trucker, safely out of the spotlight on the other side of me, laughed. A lot. Anyway, once Stephen got going, Mr Groupie, who clearly hadn't wasted his time on the tour, loudly spoke every line along with him, albeit slightly out of sync. It was like having a slightly bizarre echo. Mercifully this came to an end when Mr Groupie burrowed into his haversack and brought out his sandwiches and flask of coffee. Generously he offered me a sardine and tomato. I declined. And by this time The Toyboy Trucker was, naturally, doubled up...

Maybe it was the stench of the sardine sandwiches, but I was getting pretty tetchy. So, when Stephen said that as a writer he was arrogant because all writers are arrogant I wanted to yell WRONG! I was absolutely itching to leap up and say WRONG, WRONG, WRONG - but, given that thanks to Mr Groupie our row was already the centre of attention and The Toyboy Trucker was giving me One Of Those Looks, I didn't. I just sat and simmered and tried to ignore the pungency of the sardines.

Then, just to add to my irritation, Stephen announced that the entire tour had been organised by his publishers (Penguin) to promote his latest book - and that after his hour and a half on stage he'd be doing a book selling-and-signing session in the theatre.

Well! Fancy that! Stephen Fry gets a publisher-paid tour of theatres - a sell-out nationwide tour of theatres seating thousands - and I get the local book shop if I'm lucky. Stephen Fry has queues and queues of hundreds of people winding for miles round our major cities, I get a few friends and people sheltering from the rain or waiting for the next bus to Kingston Dapple. Now I wonder why that is? And why, oh why, can't I be Stephen Fry?

Sadly, my book-signings always remind me of the days when I travelled with my Dad, the fairground organ and traction engine to do shows in remote rural locations. I've lost count of the times that Dad used to peer out on a bleak field with the rain falling horizontally in a force ten gale and say (in pre-PC days) - "good crowd tonight - three paraplegics and a daft bloke with a dog"... because it seemed that at every country fayre we attended, all the minders used to dump their charges in front of the organ with a cheerful "Never mind a bit of rain...let's park you here! Oooh, look at the pretty lights! Listen to the pretty music!" before sodding off to the beer tent...

And then I'd trundle on and dance the can-can in a monsoon to a less-than-impressed audience. Actually, it's funny with hindsight, just how much of my early life could have been lifted straight out of Cher's Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves...

Anyway, those less-than-packed performance days are EXACTLY like my book signings - except of course that I don't dance the can-can any more - maybe I should....

So - the picture at the top of the post is Stephen's very crowded book-signing and this one is mine.... Spot the difference???????????????

Sweet Dreams

This is my dream bedroom. Sadly, it isn't how my real bedroom looks. It isn't how my real bedroom has ever (or will ever) look because The Toyboy Trucker would leave me. It is, however, exactly how my new heroine's bedroom looks and I'm dead jealous. New heroine (Francesca, known as Frankie) in Never Can Say Goodbye, is a girl after my own heart who loves colour and clutter and all things retro - which is why she's running a vintage frock shop and dresses like a bag-lady and has a tart's boudoir bedroom... I can only claim one of these...

Anyway, because I've been obsessed by bedrooms lately, I thought I'd mention Frankie's and blog about mine. It's still not finished. It's been well over a month now and it still looks like a shed... Why, in the name of all that's holy, we ever got into this mess, I still can't quite understand.

It all started when The Toyboy Trucker decided he'd like a telly in the bedroom. I'm anti telly-in-the-bedroom for all sorts of reasons - main one being The Toyboy Trucker falling asleep with something loud and violent blaring out and me having to stuff my ears from the explosions and screams and avert my eyes from the blood and gore and eventually having to stumble from the cosiness of the bed to switch the damn thing off. The Toyboy Trucker convinced me that we've moved on technologically since 1987 and he'd have a remote control and headphones and I'd never notice it...

So, I gave in, and said okay - we'll have a telly in the bedroom... The Toyboy Trucker excitedly bought one - all flat-screen and DVD-playing-and-recording etc etc - and that's honestly where it all started. Because we quickly discovered we actually hadn't got anywhere to put a telly. We had one socket and a bedroom full of old brown furniture - lots of dressing tables and chests - that had belonged to my Nan. And none of them were in the right place for a telly, and they were all crumbly and rickety and decrepit to boot. And the walls wouldn't support a bracket because they were covered in pictures and lots of disintegrating 1970s wardrobes... So, it was decided - all for the sake of a damn telly - that we'd have a bedroom make-over. We'd ditch the mis-matched clutter and, despite my private yearning for a purple and pink girly glory-hole, have something pale and plain and pristine.

It all sounded so easy. We measured the room. Men from the furniture shop measured the room. All the measurements tallied. We chose an entire range of pale beech furniture, hand-built, and made-to-measure. In Germany. We were going to have a bank of wardrobes at one end of the room, including a walk-in, and lots of new matching chests, and one of those over-the-bed-and down-the-sides contraptions incorporating masses of cupboards and shelves and little twinkly hidden lights. Men-in-shorts were brought in to remove all the old stuff and decorate the room in a nice tasteful cream and rewire the bedroom to enable us to have a telly.

The new furniture arrived. Thirty boxes of it. The delivery men chuckled as they hefted it upstairs. As soon as they'd left I understood why. Most of it was self-assembly, very little of it was labelled, and the instructions were in German...

I'll gloss over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Tempers, it must be said, were frayed... By the Monday night we were no longer speaking but we'd got two-and-half wardrobes built; the walk-in wasn't built or even slightly walk-in because we had two left sides and no right one (it's going to take another 6 weeks to get a replacement); the drawers didn't fit the chests - and funniest of all (okay, not at the time - but with hindsight....) was the fact that the over-the-bed contraption didn't fit bloody anywhere... The measurements had been taken across the middle of the room. No-one had taken into account that a) there were big chunky skirting boards at the bottom and b) this house is 70 years old and the walls aren't exactly even...

Men-in-shorts were recalled to do what they could. Suffice it to say they had to remove part of a wall. It took three days to burrow through plaster and bricks and breeze blocks. The upstairs looked like Beirut, we were all coughing and spluttering and sort of permanently grey, and the lovely fresh cream decor was covered in dust and rubble... Oh, and we'd got a kind of knock-through effect into the spare room. Still, the over-the-bed thing eventually fitted - even if we're now sleeping at a rather odd angle, the bookshelves slope like they're starring in the final throes of the Titanic, and the little twinkly lights are somewhat intermittent.

Of course, because the wardrobe cluster (that's how it was described - honest) isn't finished owing to the lack of right-side-of-walk-in, most of our clothes are in bin liners and suitcases. I'm still picking brick rubble out of the cats and from between my toes. The bedroom looks like a bomb site - albeit a nice cream one.

And the thing that started all this? The telly? Still in its box until such time as the bedroom is finished, which, as far as I can tell, *might* just be before the start of the 2012 Olympics...