My Horse And I 6/1/12

Don’t rent property from a private landlord. 

That’s the number one piece of advice I would give anyone arriving for the first time here. 

You may not get as much  square footage for your money from an established organisation in a block, but provided you have not violated any rules, you will get your money back at the end. 

With many private landlords, you may just have two choices at the end of your lease, when they are holding on to a chunk of your money on whatever pretence they choose. You can walk away, or sue. I sued. And I won. Californian law is very strict. Suing is a hassle, but well worth it. 

This time round, I have been far wiser and also been able to steer many people away from people I know to be bad landlords. Spread your experiences; it helps your friends, and LA is a very small place where a bad name counts for a lot – if you see what I mean.

   

 Another valuable piece of advice I wish I had been given when I first arrived three years ago is: never, ever, ever go to a post office. Unless you want to have three birthdays while standing in a queue for a stamp, do your business by any other means. 

In fact, hiring a horse and sending your letter by hoof will take considerably less time than organising it through the mail.

   

 Returning to any country for a second time when you have left it reminds you of just how naïve you were when you first arrived. Hopefully, you have learned lessons; unfortunately, you will just make different mistakes. It’s as true of life the world over as it is here.

    

For example: when I came here from the UK, I was naïve enough to think that cup cakes might be better than they were at home, where the experience was like sucking on a box of sugar cubes (that would have been better served being fed to the horse who delivered your letter). 

Having seen the queues outside the cup cake shops in Beverly Hills, I was optimistic. Big mistake. Had I bought a sugar cane farm and sucked on it for a week, I could not have been prepared for the massive hit of the sweet stuff that sent me rushing for the rest room. Gross. Now, you would not find me queuing for a cup cake any more than you would find me taking relationship advice  from a Kardashian. 

Learning such things is . . . well . . . the icing on the metaphorical cup cake.

   

Back in 2009, I was also naïve enough to think that there would be an LA hairdresser who knew how to cut hair in a style other than anything that makes a woman look like The Addams’ Family’s Morticia – or, if you’re a man, Lurch (and heck, I’d had enough of that look from my landlord’s entourage). 

I had such bad cuts, I would have been happier emerging looking like Uncle Fester.

    

They just can’t do short hair here, not least because they hardly ever see it. Long hair is as de rigeur as Botox and lip implants, and unless you are a poodle, you can forget coming out of a salon with a short haircut and looking like anything other than a lesbian trucker or a serial killer. 

When I returned to the UK after a haircut here, I risked arrest as children ran for cover.

   

 The main thing I wish I had known in 2009 is that no one area is Los Angeles: especially not Beverly Hills which, for the most part, I found to be an enclave of narrow-minded, humourless, not very well travelled people who believed themselves to be the centre of the universe. 

Don’t get me wrong: there were and are some wonderful people, especially in the five star Beverly Wilshire and a select number of restaurants; a huge number of people working in the film and television industries are also among the brightest you will ever meet, and it is always a privilege to meet them and learn from their very varied experiences.

   

 Santa Monica is not the centre, either. While it has among the best sunsets in the world, it feels miles from any working environment and a magnet for lots of people who don’t want to do very much in life other than hang out at the beach.

    

West Hollywood is a vibrant, working environment, but not a great place for a woman to stand a chance of meeting a bloke.

    

The truth is: whatever you want, the city has it all. Outside TV and film, it’s still a cultural wasteland compared to New York or London, but there are worse wastelands on the planet.

   

Anyway, that’s enough for now. 

I have to see a man about a horse.

  

    

   

Me And My Misopohonia 5/19/12

Last night, the American television network ABC aired a programme about 19 year old Emma Riehl, who suffers from misophonia – literally, a hatred of sound.

The neurological condition means that sufferers endure high states of anxiety triggered by certain sounds; their inability to tolerate them often forces them into a life of solitude.

  

I have suffered from misophonia all my life – I just didn’t know it. In recent years, my tolerance to particular noises is so low, it has drastically curtailed activities that most people take for granted.

  

Take eating. Many of my friends think I have an eating disorder because, when we visit a restaurant, I rarely eat anything.

It’s not that I don’t like my food – I eat like a pig at home; I just can’t stand the sound of other people’s noises, and the tension in my stomach makes it impossible to consume anything other than several drinks to calm my nerves.

  

I can’t stand the sound of a fork twisting pasta at the bottom of a plate or, worse, the scraping of a spoon at the bottom of a yoghurt pot. So bad is my response to the latter, I can no longer eat breakfast in a hotel restaurant when I go away.

 

My brother, to whom I am very close, drinks coffee at very high temperatures. I have to leave the room when he drinks, as the tension while waiting for the slurp as he descends upon the liquid, makes me feel not just annoyed but angry – and I am not an angry person.

  

Tapping, chewing, scraping – many people find these noises irritating, but I really cannot be around them. Last week, I had to ask my cleaner to stop chewing; to me, the noise was like a hurricane, and I felt like hitting the gum out of her mouth – and I am not a violent person, either.

  

My life as a television critic is spent with the remote control permanently in one hand, as I have to hit the mute button if anyone is eating or drinking on screen. Characters or presenters tapping at a keyboard is another sound that drives me to distraction, just as it does in real life.

A few weeks back, I appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme and, while waiting for my item in the studio, John Humphrys’ sidekick was tapping at her keyboard. My palms started to sweat and I dug my nails hard into them, so extreme was my feeling of fury.

  

“Excuse me, but are you going to be doing that throughout?” I asked. I knew I would not have been able to carry on through what felt like a hailstorm coursing through my every vein.

  

I can move carriages up to ten times on a train if I can hear somebody texting – which they are allowed to do in the quiet carriage. Indeed, I once became involved in a row when somebody objected to my intense sighing and mumbling about the noise. Long-haul flying became a nightmare, with the sound from other people’s headphones – another personal hatred.

They say that misophonia is a rare condition and little understood. It is also very different from hyperacusis, which is the over-sensitivity to the loudness of a sound. Alas, I have that, too, and spend the little social life I have asking staff to turn down the music in bars and clubs.

  

Alas, there is no known cure. Ear-plugs are a no-no for me, as the sound of my own breathing similarly drives me to distraction. Some recommend therapy – but I am sure that whatever noise the therapist made would counter any effectiveness of the treatment.

  

So, for the moment, I just have to live with it, as I suspect my misophonia will only stop when I am six feet under.

Even then, I wouldn’t rule out the earthworms getting on my nerves.

  

Dying Is An Art 5/12/12

There are many things I was told throughout my childhood that turned out not to be true.

If you swallow chewing gum, it will wrap around your heart and YOU WILL DIE! for one.

If you don’t go to sleep, the Bogey Man will come and get you (subtext: AND YOU WILL DIE!).

If you don’t look right, look left and right again (I think that was the order), as the road expert Tufty tells you, a bus will come along and YOU WILL DIE!

Small wonder I didn’t die of a heart attack caused by fear, long before I reached adulthood.

  

I am convinced that the reason I, and so many of my friends, never experimented with drugs was because of a very effective poster campaign during our teens. It was, basically: if you take drugs . . . yes, you guessed it . . . YOU WILL DIE!

  

I was brought up with a fear of dying from a very early age, not helped by a church background that instilled in me a fear of the afterlife – heaven, if you were good; hell, if you were bad. Good meant have to take eternal afternoon tea with all the old fuddy duddies from church, and hell was just being very hot. I didn’t fancy either much.

  

Then, at Durham Road Junior School in Newport, on the last Friday of every month there was a roll call at the end of assembly, listing the pupils who had met a bad end for not adhering to Tufty’s road safety instructions.

  

“Steven XX, stepped out from behind a parked vehicle. Dead. Jane XX, ran into oncoming traffic. Two broken legs.”

  

The headmaster saved up the broken limbs and fatalities as if they were our reward for good behaviour: look what might have happened to YOU, had you not listened to Tufty! Be grateful, give thanks, you are ALIVE!

  

My secondary school, Brynteg Comprehensive in Bridgend, did not deal with death much better. Musical instruments were allotted to pupils for just one year at a time, and I was in the clarinet queue.

  

One morning, the headmaster announced in assembly that the lead clarinet player of the orchestra had been killed on his mo-ped on the way into school. There was barely a beat of breath between that announcement and his next sentence: “Would Jacqueline Stephen please go to the music room at break.”

  

The music teacher handed over the box containing the clarinet as if it were the Crown Jewels. When I opened it, the reed was still damp, evidence that the poor lad had been practising even before he took his fateful journey. I didn’t want the instrument anymore, and every time I put it to my mouth after that day, it was as if all I could taste was the dead boy’s spit.

  

I’ve been thinking a lot about death this week, as I have many friends who have lost their parents in recent weeks, and I have had my fair share of friends die recently, too. There is a sense that for every one who goes, I am taking another step closer to that final gate, and it doesn’t feel good.

  

I’ve also been thinking about it because on Monday, the next part of the brilliant series Seven Up hits our screens. I was just a year younger than the participants when this brilliant documentary series first aired in 1964 and I have followed their fortunes and disparate lives every seven years since.

  

The original experiment was to bring together working class and middle class children and see how they interacted; it was a social experiment – nature versus nurture – and the results were often surprising, and sometimes less so.

  

As the group moves towards their sixties in 56 Up, there is something desperately poignant about those early years that saw them so full of hope, excitement and joy, and something equally so desperately sad about knowing that they, too, are next up to the gate: arriving, as Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It says, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.

  

  

Tom Jones - Truly Unusual 4/29/12

The room fell silent.

And I mean silent, as if we had been thrown into a state of suspended animation.

We were all pretending not to notice.

We were trying not to whisper.

But it was all to no avail.

AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHH! It’s Tom Jones!
 
Call me sentimental, call me a groupie, call me Welsh . . . I don’t care. Because when Tom enters the building, the building knows it.

Awesome does not even begin to cover it; you feel that if you were just to touch the hem of his perfect suit, all would become well in your life.
 
I was in a London hostelry on Thursday lunchtime when Tom arrived for a long day of interviews. An orchestra of jaws hitting the floor echoed in the room; waitresses sprang into action, as if they had been electrocuted; food hovered in mid- air, forks taking a reverential pause, every prong star-struck in the great man’s presence.
 
I nearly self-combusted, pretty much as I had done a few years back, when I interviewed him for the ITV show This Morning. I could barely get my words out. He was adorable: polite, articulate, professional, sweet, incredibly humble and not at all starry.

And, I kid you not: on Thursday, when he took his seat in the restaurant, the previously clouded heavens above the glass roof separated, casting a single, pure light on our man and his table. I swear to you: it happened.
 
The man is a superstar. Listen again. SUPERSTAR. His voice is phenomenal; his genius unquestionable; and, huge credit to his manager son Mark – Tom is the best run act in show business. Without question.
 
Jones’ ability to re-invent himself, appealing to different generations, while still holding on to his core audience, is a tribute both to his and his son’s talent.

The entertainment business is incredibly tough and longevity rare; possessing talent is not enough – we only have to look at the list of failed reality show winners to know that; you have to know the audience, too.

And you specially have to know when to take a punt on giving that audience something different and changing their perception. It is no mean feat to be performing for nearly 50 years and, incredibly, still maintaining a formidable presence in the charts – and on both sides of the Atlantic.
 
Along with will.i.am, Jessie J and Danny O’Donoghue, Jones is currently appearing on The Voice UK, the BBC1 Saturday night talent show for wannabe singers. His track record brings immense credibility to the panel, and his charisma and charm bring a sprinkle of stardust that you just cannot manufacture.

You either have it or you don’t. And Jones does. By the bucketload.
 
On Saturday night, in a rather embarrassing off-key opening singalong among the judges (well, two were off key), Jones was, simply outstanding: at 72, he still has it, and his voice still takes your breath away.
 
I was seven when It’s not Unusual was released as a single and, when I had my first record player three years later, it was one of the singles my parents gave me from their enormous collection. Even at that age, I knew that there was something special about the voice.

Tom’s being Welsh like me was an added bonus, of course, and I remember playing the record over and over again, hurling the microphone from my parents’ tape-recorder and acting, for all the world, as if I was on the Vegas stage.
 
Las Vegas is the place that made Jones a truly international star and he performed there for a week a year until 2011. It is the place where women threw their hotel keys and underwear onto the stage – the latter becoming a trademark of his concerts.
 
I have seen Jones perform just once, in Cardiff Castle’s grounds some years ago. It was, without doubt, an extraordinary performance and, when I got to interview him, I felt honoured. I still do.
 
This week, we had a brief chat when he left the restaurant. He was, as ever, delightful; after a long day of interviews that must have been exhausting, I thought it incredibly gracious of him to take the time to say hello again.

In a world where so many “stars” with minimal talent act like divas, we are blessed not only with someone who is truly a great star with a great talent, but a really nice man, too.

I salute you, Sir Tom.

Always have, always will.  

Simon Says . . . Too Much? 4/22/12

This has not been a good week for Simon Cowell.

On Friday, the journalist Tom Bower published the music mogul’s “unofficial” biography (Sweet Revenge: the Intimate Life of Simon Cowell), which exposed, amongst other things, an affair with ex-X Factor judge Dannii Minogue.

In the days leading up to publication, the papers were packed with stories about Cowell’s apparent inability to commit to one woman, along with headlines about Dannii’s alleged feelings of betrayal.

Cowell allowed Bower access to his lifestyle and he was also happy for friends to talk to Bower. I know this because Bower phoned me and I declined to be interviewed, even though Simon had no objection.

So, has Cowell just been uncharacteristically naïve in, effectively, giving the thumbs-up to the project, even though he has not “collaborated” per se?

It can’t be comfortable to be painted as a cad with several women on the go (Sharon Osbourne has now stuck her two penneth in by announcing this), nor as someone who talks about women in what have been described as derogatory terms (it is claimed that he said the affair with Dannii was “just a few bonks”).

But has he really done anything so terrible? To me, it is a complete non-story: “Single man has sex.” So flamin’ what! And is talking about a couple of bonks really so bad? That’s not kissing and telling; in my book, that’s nothing more than recalling fondly.

Also, let’s not forget how kind Simon has been to all his exes, who remain his friends. He gave ex-fiancee Mizhgan Hussainy a house reported to be worth $8 million; his previous girlfriend, Terri Seymour received one of lesser value (if I were Terri, I’d ask him for a big extension to make up the shortfall!).

Is it "paying" someone off (as has been reported) if you give them a house when you want to move on? No, it’s showing incredible respect and acknowledging that when a relationship ends (and they do, for goodness sake), it does not have to be the end of friendship; it is just the start of a new kind of relationship.

To me, recognising a new beginning in the end is a sign of incredible maturity. All I end up with at the end of relationships is an overdraft the size of a house, having bailed out another loser.

I have known Simon for many years. He is mega smart, very focused, very funny and very kind. He has been adorable to my family and friends when he has given us tickets to his shows on both sides of the Atlantic; and he has been a supportive friend who has offered good advice when I have gone through bad times.

I admire him both personally and professionally, and to have achieved huge success in the US as well as the UK is an achievement of breathtaking proportion. If he is harsh in his judgments over the panel choices in his shows, it is because he has to be; vast sums of money are at stake, and if the product is not right, even more heads will roll.

This isn’t just entertainment, it is big business, even more so in US television, which eats people for breakfast and spews them out mercilessly.

Simon sacked Cheryl Cole from US X Factor because she simply didn’t cut the mustard; she had a great opportunity and blew it by not playing hardball and putting herself out there the American way.

Simon may be an emotional person and, at heart, a romantic, but is also the consummate professional, and he hasn’t worked this hard for this long, building a formidable reputation, to see some girlie tantrums blow it all away.

He will ride the storm of this book, as he has ridden so many others. The man is a genius. A very nice genius, too. Complex, but nice.

So, Simon: do I get my house now?

Eggless At Easter 4/8/12

Eggless at Easter.

I admit to feeling a little bit sad.

It’s a horrid time to be alone, and even worse than Christmas, when at least you can gatecrash people’s parties or go to the pub to mix with other loners.

I used to love Easter as a kid. On Good Friday, my brother and I would be dispatched to “Jean the shop” in the village of Coity to pick up the hot cross buns, and eat them, still warm, at the kitchen table. Saturday night would be like Christmas Eve, in sleepless anticipation of the cache we would find at the bottom of our beds, come Easter morning.

The violet foil that was the Cadbury’s egg with its brown cellophane bag of buttons; the pot of gold that was Crunchie; the mini eggs stashed like private jewels in a chocolate case that opened with all the joy of cracking a safe. I loved them all.

I can’t remember when the eggs stopped, although I suspect it was during my teens, when concerns about my body outweighed the chocolate. But although I have never had much of a sweet tooth, there is just something about an Easter egg that brings out the chocolate lover lurking in my savoury depths, and, this morning, I am really craving an egg.

My oldest school-friend posted on Facebook that she is feeling lonely, and I know what she means. Despite the chocolate, there has always been something faintly depressing about Easter.

I blame the church. As soon as the joys of Christmas were past, the hymns we sang in Hope Baptist Chapel in Bridgend, where I grew up, definitely took a turn for the sombre in the months leading up to Easter. Green hills far away, rugged crosses, bloodied limbs – it was all a reminder that lovely as Jesus’s birth was, we should not forget the real meaning of Christmas – which was a very gory death.

Then came Easter Sunday, and the hymns took a bit of an upturn. “Jesus Christ is risen today, Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-le-eh-lu-u-jah!”

Hallelujah, indeed.

And we would go home from church to secretly stuff our faces full of chocolate and spend the rest of the day in disgrace because we had “spoiled” our dinner.

But as an adult living alone, Easter is the most depressing of all holidays and seems even more of an exclusive – and excluding - family time than Christmas. At Christmas, people tend to stay at home and catch up with friends and family; at Easter, they all head off, usually to catch some sun after the depressing winter they have invariably endured.

Quite why they do this is beyond me. Last week, I caught an easyjet flight to Malaga that was nothing more than a flying crèche; Cardiff’s Apple store yesterday had nine appointments free in the Genius Bar. I wanted my computer to have problems just so that I could take advantage of them.

So, being at home by myself, I have decided that this year, I am not going to be eggless and lonely. I am going to go to the shop and buy up all the 50% discounted eggs, head for the pub, watch the rugby, and not think about crosses and blood.

Let’s think resurrection, not recession.

Cadbury – my gullet awaits.