Places To Quaff and Quarrel - Cafe Des Amis

Why. Why, I pondered wide-eyed. WHY must it be so hard to get a decent margarita these days?

True,  I don’t spend ALL my time looking for one. And…well several places in Canterbury appear to be offering them now I do a Google search…and I know a lot of people in the UK may be more concerned about being underwater…....but, damn it, this is important!

This pondering took place last Friday night, as I gulped down increasing ales in one of my usual dens of inquiry and found myself craving my favourite cocktail. Nobody panic – I still like beer that tastes like twigs and beards. But every now and then I want to pass the evening sipping something sharp, strong, and full of bite (for I am but a girl). Frozen or shaken, just make sure there is a nice layer of salt on the rim of the glass and we’re golden.

2014 and 'The Plan'

I rejected new year’s resolutions this year almost as fervidly as I rejected dry January.

I’m all for self-improvement but the first few of hours of a new year should not be spent sitting primly in front of a crisp new notebook, jotting down whimsical yet thought-provoking ‘dreams’ for the weeks and months while sober. No, January 1 should be spent curled up on the bathroom floor, hugging a bag of bread. One eye should be glued shut by an errant false eyelash (even if you are male) and your booze, ash and vomit covered clothes should be in hurled mess in the bath. Ideally, a child (possibly yours) should come in around midday to drape a towel over you and say ‘there, there’.

This is why I have waited until February to write of the year ahead, lest my thoughts be lost in the tidal wave of positive thinking spewing out of my dearest friends’ sauvignon-starved brains.

Now, there was no good reason for my not doing dry-anuary; I succeeded admirably last year and did a bit of dry September once. A bit. But screw it, there was still drink in the house come January and I was damned if I was going to let it spoil. (Booze spoils if you leave it untouched for more than three days. It’s a fact, look it up, it’s definitely probably true, ignore the French).

Thus, with a few extra weeks of excess accomplished, I met February with a more agreeable stance on my general well-being. Plus I have a show coming up in just over a month’s time that requires Victorian costume i.e. skirts so tight that you look permanently faint and furious. And when hiring my outfit, I was so taken with a fetching lilac number that I insisted to the director that it fit perfectly when in truth I lost a kidney moments later. If I want to survive this show, those extra 5lbs have to go. (It won’t be a booze free month, you understand – I have Places to Quaff and Quarrel at and I’m also probably a drunk)

But it was when I reached this point of determination on one element of my life that my brain began to get ideas above its station and started trying to make me do other things.

Let me put this perspective. I am writing this the night before I attend a Cuban salsa class.

ME.

As I said, I don’t like new year’s resolutions because they are invariably hollow, doomed to fail and are made on your bathroom floor as you recant your sins. But now that January and all its pious judgement has finally died, I’m suddenly all up in the rest of my life’s face.

Hmmmm...(I’m musing)…learning a proper dance has been on my ‘to do’ list for a while…and it would be nice to learn some steps other than the Kate Bush freestyle/Michael Jackson disgrace/shuffling the cards/stabbing the hooker moves I’ve worn out so thoroughly…..of course the blog is my biggest priority this year, but there could be room for other stuff…pretty stuff…and it's not like I don't enough to do already. Aside from the day job, blog, am dram, music and trying to fit in eight bottles a gin a week...

My mind was set, and a plan had to be drawn up. So here it is, for you all to gaze upon. For what is the point of a life plan if you don’t publicize it so that others will envy and hate you and wish wish WISH they were you?

Oh. Sorry, I mean (sigh) I’m publishing my 2014 plan so I will be compelled to do most of it because if not I don’t know the social media Gods will find me in the night and cut off my hair and the lands will dry up and probably something like a plague upon my houses and various wombs.

Plan for 2014, in no particular order

1. Make more phone hats
2. Write something every day and be totally brilliant at it
3. Complete my writing schedule and monthly plan for the blog (instead of scribbling random words and obscenities on open Word documents and then accidentally sending them to my boss)
4. Launch weird vaudeville/cabaret music act, and therefore sing in public at least six times. Or in pubic, as I first wrote. Either suits
5. Pick a name for the music act. We have it narrowed down to two, and we need to move on because it’s just getting sad
6. Run three big-scale digital media projects at work
7. Buy more light bulbs for the living room so that I can see what I'm doing for once
8. Drop final 5lbs and reach target weight
9. Reach at least 500 followers on Twitter. Because I NEED this
10. Ring up the security alarm company and ask them if cats make a difference to the sensors, and pray that they don’t
11. Take a dance class. Attempt to be good at it.
12. Boost the blog’s pageviews and reach X by its first birthday (I have the figures written down somewhere but I’ve had some wine and I don’t want to go looking. But I do have a target! I think)
13. Cook a new recipe once a month (I cook all the time, so I am being realistic, and because of no. 8)
14. Go to Paris on Eurostar
15. Engage with more bloggers and contribute to at least two forums regularly
16. Read at least six novels (look, it’s not much for some of you but with the amount of shit I am doing already, even this is pushing it!).
17. Go to Edinburgh and photograph the shit out of it
18. Write more songs
19. Fuck, this is taking a while. Better put on some espresso
20. Buy espresso
21. Decorate the main bedroom. Somehow. Maybe a few pictures will do…the espresso will help me plan this
22. Write honestly about my ‘crashes’
23. Improve my French (when I say improve, I mean for the love of GOD make it better)
24. Shop at more thrift/charity shops and try fixing up three outfits myself
25. Direct a play (I’ve added this because I know I’m already doing it in the summer)
26. Continue last year’s furniture up-cycling prowess (I’ll share details in the future) for other people as well as for me
27. Once current blog features have bedded in, set up film review feature because it’s your true love
28. Ooo and that should include a regular bad movie night!
29. Continue to dream about writing part-time and using one of those nice shared-office spaces with similar type! And then imagine hanging myself in that office
30. Maybe do some vlogs!!! Maybe….

And that's that.

******

I just wanted to say that I’ve felt a bit bad for Facebook this week. All it did was try to brighten up your day with a film just about you, and suddenly everyone is baying for blood for such cursed sentimentality. Twitter positively went in to melt down due to the sheer volume of hate.

Oh Facebook was fine when you wanted to show off about your big night out, tell us all ‘I’m just so confused right now’, or post pictures of your awful children. But when FB reaches out to you, you fling the gesture back in its face like so much rotten meat.

And on its BIRTHDAY!

If your film was filled with banal updates and pictures of you looking fat, you only have yourself to blame. You should lived better, and been less fat. And have words with all of your friends for only liking posts involving someone’s death or a new home. They only did so because they want invites to parties or wakes.

But the truth is, I feel bad because I’ve been neglecting FB on a personal level, when it has been a good and loyal friend. Once a FB addict (but only for the most witty reasons), I have now moved my daily ramblings to my blog and have started courting Twitter as a result (bigger audience). Poor Facebook barely gets a look in from my personal account, and when I do update, it’s only so I can scream “read my blog!”. I’m a bad Facebook friend, but a worse friend to Facebook.

This should be another aim of mine this year: to better balance the love on social media. Assuming I have time. Or that any of you notice.

Monthly Roundup - And A New Look

Tiny darlings and moderately sized stalkers, welcome to the brand new look for The Demon Gin!

Why, you may ask? Why change the format at all, I don’t like CHANGE, you might wail. Much as I liked the original format, it was always my intention to upgrade it and create something unique for the blog. And when I say create, I mean I paid someone to do it.

Twitter Be A Harsh Mistress

I’m always insanely psyched up after a good social media training course, and was fortunate enough to be sent on in Nottingham last week for the day job.

I adore social media more and more each day, not just because I use it regularly in my personal life but because of its possibilities. It is media, it is news, as it happens, live in your face. It is life. It may not be the life you lead, or that you want people to lead, but it is life as we see it nonetheless.

I’ll wager that most of you reading this here stream of consciousness came here via Facebook or Twitter. Eh? Yeah, you did.

Interlude - Rudolpho

Rudolpho swung his cape around his shoulders and cackled insanely for a bit. He regarded himself in the mirror, and smirked so hard that his hat fell off.

The flintlock pistol jutted proudly from his waistband. The stilettos strapped to his thigh glinted in the candlelight. The vials of acid glowed in his velvet bandolier like grim emeralds. His expression promised unmentionable pain and misery to those who dared near him.

There was one final accoutrement to add to the ensemble, the last and most important weapon in his arsenal, the one item that would command everyone in his path. With a smug smile, Rudolpho clipped a big bunch of keys to his belt.

“Let’s see accounts try to stop me using their photocopier now.”

Originally penned in 2008

Places To Quaff and Quarrel - The Black Dog, Whitstable

Something wicked has come to Whitstable.

You may not know it, you cannot hear it, but walk down the high street of this quaint seaside town and it’s there, in the corner of your eye, watching you. The Black Dog…A micropub…There is no way to continue to make something sounds brooding when using the word micro...

Now that I have set the scene, and appropriately ruined it, let’s take a short interlude to explain what a micropub is, for those who don’t now or who can’t work it out from the actual name. (Yes I know we’ve only just started but I feel like an interlude!....no, YOU shut up!).

Of Doomed Beauticians and bareMinerals - Obvious Beauty Tales

In an effort to distract myself from the crippling agony that is living without the internet, I decided to venture out in to Canterbury at the weekend to purchase things for my face.

After my usual breakfast wines, I packed my finest shopping rifle and left the house. It was only when I was half way to town that I realised I’d forgotten my purchasing salts and my browsing spear. But I could not be bothered to return for them.

New to Obvious Beauty? Try the beginners' guide
 
First port of call was lunch with fellow Canterbury blogger Miscriant, at which we laughed over tea and she pointedly failed to consume the cyanide I'd slipped into the remains of her courgette cake. It was a nice lunch. Then it was on to the mecca that is Canterbury’s own Fenwicks.

Look at Clarins over there, trying to hurt us all.

Ahhhhhhhh Fenwicks. A leap up from Debenhams, on shaky ground with House of Fraser, and staring mournfully through the frosted window at Selfridges. You can buy a designer coat, or scrabble shamefully for a bargain in Oasis. I like to wander the fragrant paths of the beauty 'hall' and gaze upon the faces of each hapless beauty consultant.

Obvious Beauty - The Basics

Over the years, I have bought and used a lot of beauty products. And over the years, I have managed to still have a face. This seems like as good a reason as any to inflict my trumped up views on beauty on the lot of you.

Therefore, I will occasionally write up reviews and ramblings on the tools of the beauty trade to share with you. Plus it's an excellent way to fill those periods of time when I have literally nothing else to write about. It's just the sort of nice chap I am.

My remit is obvious beauty - the things I think you need to know and the things you shouldn't ever speak of.

But every good series needs an intro! The standard pilot show, the gallop through the basic plot, background, characters and tone, so we all know what we're letting ourselves in for and can confidently drift along with the episodes to come.

So here is my basic started guide of tried and tested beauty tips, suitable for boys and girls.