I am a fundamentally lazy person.  I don’t know why this is but it’s always been the case.  It started when I was a child when I huffed because I didn’t want to clean the bathroom, do the drying up or clean out my rabbit, extended into senior school when I didn’t much feel like doing my homework or revising for my exams and continues to this day when I don’t want to do the hoovering, clean the bathroom or anything else that isn’t fun.  In short, and probably like most people, if it’s a chore it’s boring and I don’t want to do it.

That said, I think my main problem is that I lack discipline.  I am fully aware that if I spent an hour or 2 every morning doing various chores around the house it would always be pretty good and a lot less work in the long run.  My house is huge and really does require an element of discipline in order to keep on top of it.  So every so often I might put a little housework timetable together, couple it with a spreadsheet of what meals we’ll have on which days and feel utterly virtuous for the 2 days I follow it.  And then I’ll do something different like meet a friend for lunch or take my daughter swimming and the housework somehow falls by the wayside.  I don’t mean for it to happen but I’ll get up one morning and there will be a sea of tea cups, beer bottles (not mine) and dirty plates all over the house.  Now, it never takes long to sort it out but I do get that same huffy “I don’t WANT to do my homework” feeling about it.  At my age.

I’m lucky enough to have quite a few friends and they come and visit me regularly.  Somehow, though, just before they come I can always be found in a panic furiously cleaning, mopping the kitchen floor, scrubbing the bathroom, hoovering the stairs and whatever else I can think of because all of a sudden it all looks terrible.  How did that happen?  I only did all that 2 days ago and now it looks like I haven’t cleaned anything for 6 months!  And after they’ve arrived I will notice dust on the skirting boards.  What must they think of me?!  I can’t help it if I just don’t think to do things like that.  But I will make a mental note to add that to the chores list.  And I’ll put it down for Mondays too so at least it’ll get done during the virtuous phase of days 1 and 2 of timetable following.

The hardest thing for me is that all this just doesn’t come naturally when for other people it seems to.  There are people in the world who you know for certain will have spotless houses if you dropped in on them unannounced at any time.  I want that!  I’m so jealous!  I really have to work at it and usually fail quite spectacularly.  So if you turn up at chez Flaherty any time soon and I’m not following the housework timetable let me apologise in advance for the stairs not having been hoovered and the dust on the skirting boards.  I didn’t notice that it needed doing until you got here.

Cider, can’t touch the stuff.  At least not any more.  I rather spoilt cider for myself as a teenager when it was the drink of choice for the underaged girl about town.  We didn’t like beer, spirits were too strong and alcopops hadn’t been invented yet.  I’d seen how weirdly Thunderbird and Mad Dog 20/20 made people behave too plus they both tasted rubbish so cider it was and the cheaper the better.  Many the 3 litre bottle of Olde English passed our lips round at someone or other’s house.  How very classy.  Then as we got a little older and started to try our luck getting served in pubs we diversified a little.  Our mantra was no longer “the cheaper the better” but “the stronger the better”.  Many of the bad nights I experienced involved Diamond White, K and, my personal favourite, snakebite and black.

It was the sheer volume of bad nights that put me off cider over time.  Not bad nights in the sense that bad or upsetting things happened but bad with much throwing up or falling over.  Though thinking about it that is pretty upsetting.  There are myriad tales of my rampant misbehaviour when under the influence of the stuff, and to this day I can’t tell them apart.  Perhaps it could even go some way to explaining why I left the house looking so bloody awful with my frizzy hair and nasty glasses?  No, I think I might be deluding myself there.  There was one time when we went to the Duke of Buckingham in Old Portsmouth and drank lots and lots and lots of K.  The DofB was our Friday night haunt and we used to arrive very early before the bouncers went on the door as we lacked fake ID.  Because we’d got there so early we drank loads but it wasn’t until we left the pub and the cold outside air hit me that I realised what a state I was in.  I could barely walk and it must have taken hours to walk back to my friend’s house.  But not before I’d fallen over and scratched my Deirdre Barlow glasses.  Or run right into her front door while attempting to outrun the security light.  The bruises were quite special.

Now if I take a sip of cider it all comes flooding back.  It doesn’t have to be cheap nasty stuff either, even the expensive stuff my lovely husband insists on drinking on Sundays has the same effect on me.  Even the Sheppey’s cider that he reliably informs me makes your wee smell of apples.  It’s the cider twang, it makes me all unnecessary.  Strangely, snakeyB was never something I went off, despite the fact that it’s a pretty lethal concoction and banned from most pubs.  The lager and blackcurrant are sufficient to disguise the evil cider twang and so, even now, I can still drink it.  Here is a photo of me at my fairly recent wedding enjoying a pint of the good stuff with friends.  It was like old times.  See how shiny our faces are. (I am in SO much trouble now!)

Luckily for me about a year after my first foray into pub based underage drinking, with the irreversible cider damage already having been done, Two Dogs and Hooch hit the pubs and getting shitfaced became so much easier.  The alcopop was born.  These were times before they coined the phrase “binge drinking” but that’s exactly what we were doing.  We went out every Friday and Saturday night and our aim was to get drunk.  It seems odd to me that these days there is so much in the media about the binge drinking culture, what a disgrace it is that our young people would behave in this way etc etc.  Are they honestly trying to tell us that when they were young they didn’t do exactly the same?  Of course they did.

I’m all grown up now and drinking has become something I do only occasionally.  Tonight, for example I drank 2 weiss beers.  Very tasty they were too but it took me all night to drink them.  I have the odd glass of wine sometimes but if I’m completely honest I’d rather have a glass of coke or a cup of tea.  I no longer drink to get drunk.  Well, only very rarely.  This may just be because I don’t go out much at the moment and because I want to stay healthy for when we think about having baby number 4, but for now this is how it is and I like it like this.  One thing’s for sure though, even if I were trying to get drunk I most definitely wouldn’t be partaking of any cider.  Even if it could make my wee smell of apples.

Everybody loves music, don’t they?  I certainly do and I’ve always thought of my musical taste as being eclectic and fairly wide.  Looking at my iTunes library it turns out this isn’t the case at all.  I’ve often wondered what it is that causes people to have different musical tastes but I suppose it’s the same as anything else.  Just because I can’t understand why talentless puppets like Girls Aloud or Westlife enjoy huge success doesn’t mean they’re not worthy of it.  Does it?  Can many millions of people really be wrong?  Well, I think they must be but then I can’t abide manufactured pop.  However, I am fairly certain most of the world is peopled with morons so…

From a young age I’ve loved rock music.  Proper, heavy rock music with all drums and guitars and stuff.  Not bands like Status Quo, though, because although they tout themselves as “rock” I see them more as “cheese”.  And are they really still alive or are they all kept going with animatronics like the Queen Mother was for years?  No, I mean bands like Queens of the Stone Age, Soundgarden, Faith No More and the like (yes, I am aware that 2 of those bands are from the past, although FNM have reformed it seems.  I wonder if they’ll be the same?).

I’ve often wondered why it is that I liked this particular kind of music because when I was growing up my parents didn’t listen to anything like it.  Their taste is far more folky and I remember being subjected to the delights of Joan Baez (uuurgh), The Fureys (bleurgh) and Roger Whittaker (gah).  They did redeem themselves a bit with Cat Stevens and Simon and Garfunkel but I can’t help but think that damage had been done with the other…fustier artists.  I REALLY hated Joan Baez’s voice.

When I was very young I liked a fair amount of chart music, bought a few singles and listened to my older sister’s “Now That’s What I Call Music” LPs.  She had them right from number 1 back in the early 80s.  Check out the track listing!  God, that’s rubbish, isn’t it?!  You can tell they were struggling if they put in 2 Kajagoogoo songs AND a solo effort by Limahl!  I think I must have listened to volume 2 more.  Hmmmm, maybe not looking at that one’s tracks.  The very first album I bought was by Terence Trent D’Arby in 1987 when I was 11 and I remember liking Soft Cell and Michael Jackson around then as well.

So when exactly did the transition in my musical taste happen?  It’s strange but I can remember exactly how it happened.  One minute my childhood best friend and I were listening to pop music (she liked Fuzzbox! Pink Sunshine, remember that?), then Aerosmith released the album Pump and I was hooked.  Around the same time my friend found a tape in the car her family had hired while on holiday in America, Shout at the Devil by Mötley Crüe; she brought it home and we loved it.  So we bought Dr Feelgood as well.  And The Real Thing by Faith No More.  I actually remember vividly the day she bought that album and played it for the first time, I’d never even heard of them but it was possibly the only time I’ve played an album and loved every song on first listen.  And that was that, pop music was more or less a thing of the past for me.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with any more of that.  But it kind of changed our lives.  Music is unusual in that, at least when you’re young, it can dictate a great deal to you.  How you dress, which pub you go to and consequently who your friends are.  In our teens music was the be-all and end-all to us.  We were pasty visions in black clothes.  We wore band t-shirts.  We liked tie-dye.  I had REALLY bad hair and didn’t smile much.  I didn’t have much to smile about because I had really bad hair.

Yikes

See?  It was pube-like.  Horrendous.

Most people grow out of the dressing according to musical taste thing, or at the very least tone it down a bit as they get older.  According to some of my friends I dress a bit like a hippy sometimes but I wholeheartedly refute that, I just like long skirts.

For a few people, however, this isn’t the case.  There is something of a worrying trend amongst some people I used to know of living in the past.  They continue to dress the same way, they still go to the same bars, their circle of friends has never evolved, it’s the same people still doing the same things week in week out.  As far as they’re concerned the mid to late 90s, its music, its fashion, everything, was the place and time to be and they cling to it with every ounce of their being.  That seems odd to me.  Sure, that was a good time in my life but an awful lot has happened since then, some really good, some unbelievably bad.  I’d like to think that acknowledging all that has happened and accepting that time moves on and that things change makes me the hopefully well-adjusted person that I am today.

So, yes, I still listen to music, old and new, and I try not to limit myself to one particular genre although that is a struggle when you’re compelled to avoid certain radio stations in case you accidentally hear Girls Aloud.  But music no longer the holds importance it did to me when I was young.  I don’t wear as much black anymore, I definitely don’t wear tie-dye and my hair is MUCH better.  I no longer use music to define me.  That’s not to say I haven’t inflicted my taste onto my children because I have, even the baby, and also I do tend to dictate what we listen to in the car. Old habits die hard, what can I say?