Malcolm's Baubles

The lovely Annie Rhiannon commented on Mr BC's blog that life at Casa Blue Cat must be 'a laugh a minute', with the pair of us being so side-splittingly hilarious and everything.

Bless.

Of course she's not wrong - what with Mr BC being a comedy professional and me being, er, a professional, the standard of conversational wit at our house is always extremely high, as this exchange from last night should demonstrate:

ME (looking at laptop): Oh look, there's a glass-blowing evening at Malcolm Sutcliffe's art gallery next weekend. There will be free mince pies, and you can blow your own baubles.

MR BC: Pfft. I can blow my own baubles at home whenever I like.

ME: No you can't. You've got too many ribs.

MR BC: Oh, now, there was no need to turn it into smut.

ME: Oh wait, apparently you can't blow your own baubles at all. Apparently Malcolm does all the blowing.

MR BC: What do we do?

ME: We watch.

MR BC: I'm not going all the way to West Street to watch Malcolm blow his own baubles.

ME: He wouldn't be blowing his own baubles. He'd be blowing your baubles. For a fiver each.

MR BC: I don't want Malcolm to blow my baubles.

ME: There are free mince pies.

MR BC: All right then.

The Spinsterella Memorial Post

Young Stalin...




*would*

My Middle Class Orgasms

(Anyone who is related to me, or who works with me, may care to look away for the duration of this post, as I fearlessly throw my editorial policy to the wind...)

It's been a long time since I stopped reading Cosmopolitan, and you don't get too many articles about the female orgasm in Wired or the Economist, so I don't know if this is common or not. But essentially, all you need to know (although you may feel that you didn't need to know this at all) is that at times of - ahem - intense sexual pleasure, I hallucinate.

These aren't your run-of-the-mill swirly psychedelic visuals, of the sort produced by illicit hallucinogens. Oh no. They're much more refined than that. More refined, and more materialistic. And quite design-led. So refined, materialistic and design-led, in fact, that sometimes it's a bit like watching a film of A Rebours directed by the art editor of Elle Decoration.

Here, by way of example, are some of my frequently-recurring coital visions:

• A lovely Elizabethan knot garden



• A lovely Elizabethan knot garden under the snow



• An entire collection of retro Marimekko-style furnishing fabric



• A flotilla of steampunk airships in the style of Fornasetti



• A set of cushions with bold art naif flower prints



• Some nice candy-coloured notebooks with a treeline silhouette motif

I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this, other than that my brain has somehow accidentally got wired up to Condé Nast. I don't know whether I'm inadvertently producing issues of House and Garden, or they're streaming back copies of World of Interiors straight into my head, but either way it's an arrangement that works for me. You can never see enough nice stationery, in my opinion.

Next week: My Middle Class Dreams, starring Florence Broadhurst and Nigel Slater.

Patroclus 0, Editorial Policy 0

Everyone knows my editorial policy by now: no sex, no blogging when depressed.

But you know, hypothetically speaking, what if I suddenly really wanted to tell the whole world about what the lovely Mr BC and I have been getting up to?

Sensible approaches might be:

1. Start a juicy anonymous sexblog (advantage: may also result in massive book deal).

2. Whisper it into the ground, in the manner of King Midas (disadvantage: office is very quiet and open plan, people might hear what I'm saying and then wonder why I'm lying on the floor saying it. It might erode the air of professionalism and gravitas that I like to project in the work environment).

3. Write it in an actual diary book thing (disadvantage: years of bending my fingers back to 'impress' people with my double-jointedness have left me unable to hold a pen).

A not-terribly-sensible approach would be:

4. Write about it in the company newsletter.


So naturally I chose option 4.

The company newsletter is distributed every Friday to hundreds of people in the technology industry, including all of my clients. My 'column' is written under my own real name. Within minutes of receiving it, a client sends an email to the general company email address saying "good to hear Patroclus is getting some!"

I hide under my desk for the rest of the afternoon.

Radio Silence

Yes, well, I tried to write something very serious and considered about Raymond Williams and the structure of feeling, but it appears that I can't trust myself to write anything at all - not even about deceased cultural theorists, mmm, saucy - without committing a flagrant breach of my Strict Editorial Policy. Radio silence will therefore be observed until further notice.

*grins wickedly*