Not Helping Cops With Their Enquiries 7/14/09

There are many times I have wanted to resort to violence while standing in line, waiting to be served in Vodafone; but in Beverly Hills’ AT & T phone shop, today a man really did threaten to come back and shoot everyone.

I was standing patiently, waiting to make my own complaint. It’s become something of a habit there. The first time I complained about my i-Phone, which I still think is the worst toy ever to have been produced. I swopped it for a Blackberry, but had to take that back, too, because the red message indicator didn’t light up.

I was supposed to have received a $100 rebate after buying the Blackberry, but when it never arrived I went back to complain. That was six weeks after the purchase. They told me to come back after eight, hence my presence in the shop.

The violent man, who must have been about 103, was quite well dressed, speaking with a German accent, and wearing a hearing-aid. He was also shouting very, very loudly. They had been happy enough to take his money, he screamed, but now they wouldn’t do anything to help him. Nein! (Okay, maybe I imagined that bit).

The female assistant was nonchalant, to say the least. She never even looked at him, didn’t seem to be listening and, as his voice escalated, just fingered his receipt.

Then she called the cops.

Oh, yes. They really don’t mess around in Beverly Hills. Apparently, if you ever want to get anyone off your back, you just have to say four words: “I’m calling the cops.” Not only is your botherer gone within the first five seconds, the cops arrive within the next five.

And there they were. Already outside. But my war criminal (naturally, I had built up a little story around him, in which I had made a citizen’s arrest on a Goebbels-type monster hiding in the Hollywood Hills) had fled.

The cops started asking the assistant questions, and by now I was at the front of the queue and able to eavesdrop. How old was he? She reckoned in his seventies; no, sixties, contradicted the male assistant. Weight? She reckoned 190 lbs. No, no, no, said the male: 160.

They were hopeless! Whereas I, who had been watching the whole scene, had taken in every single detail. As I would in the UK, I felt it my citizen’s duty to add my two penneth.

“Was he bigger than me?” the very plump cop asked.
Yes, said the assistant.
“No, no he wasn’t,” I chirruped. “He was actually quite slight . . . And nowhere near 160lbs even . . . And . . . “
“We’re askin’ them,” said the cop.

I was crestfallen. In the UK, the butcher, the baker and candlestick maker would, by now, all have gathered from neighbouring shops, each to give their own account of what they had heard (or not) or seen (definitely not).

En masse, we would have retired to a bar to mull over the details, united in citizen solidarity against the ever-increasing tide of violent crime.

Yet here I was, being told to keep my nose out: I, the only proper witness, who had taken in every single morsel of the man, and who, for goodness sake, as a writer, did this for a living.

The cops weren’t like this on CSI or Law and Order. Witnesses were forever stepping over barriers they had been told not to cross in order to fill the cops in on missing bits of information that might prove useful. Next thing, they were dating the cop they had spoken to, before being shot in the chest and dying, ensuring that the cop continued to live out the rest of his days in loneliness and misery. But I digress.

The assistant went on to say that the man had said he would come back and shoot a couple of people; then, that he would definitely come back and shoot her. What had been his complaint, the cops asked.

Wait for it: the phone his friend had bought the day before did not have Bluetooth and was incompatible with the equipment in his car. Oh, ye gods! Hand me that Magnum.

My own complaint took just five seconds, as I was handed a phone number to call about my rebate. “But I was told to come back to the store,” I tried, as a delaying tactic, hoping to chip in again with a bit more info.
“No, just call that number.”

I thought I had better apologise to the cops for what was clearly a breach of criminal etiquette. “I’m really sorry,” I said, “but I saw it all when nobody else was looking . . . “
“That’s fine, ma’am.”

They just weren’t getting it, were they?

“And he had a hearing aid in his right ear!” I whispered conspiratorially on my way out, just in case the man’s name, address and phone number in their hands was not enough to lead them directly to him.
“Hearing aid, right ear,” said my cop to his partner. Ha! Result.

To date, my only other brush with the law took place in the five star Beverly Wilshire Hotel, when I was witness to a local hooker throwing a dish of wasabi nuts (“That’s W-A-S-A-B-I”) at a man who had accused her of, er, being a hooker. Naturally, I had had a front row seat and saw everything. At this rate, I might soon have to ask for witness protection.

Or maybe not. Instinct tells me that next time, I should keep my gob shut and let the cops get on with their job. I just don’t envy the staff in Cardiff next time I visit my local Vodafone shop, as I’ve picked up a lot of tips to get myself to the front of the queue.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Victoria's Secret Is Out 7/6/09

I’ve always wondered exactly what Victoria’s Secret was. Now I know.

She has never worn any underwear.

Having just visited the LA store of the same name, it is the only conclusion I can reach. Had I been a hippo in the bra section, or a weasel in the knickers section, there is a chance the garments might have looked halfway decent on me; but as a relatively normal shaped woman, I could not have looked more ridiculous had I strapped myself upside down to a giraffe on roller skates.

I confess to not having worn a bra for over 20 years, and no knickers for 10. It’s not that I’ve been trying to make a statement; just that owing to my broad back, bras always felt uncomfortable and left me with scars; as for knickers: well, did they get smaller, or did I just get bigger?

I suspect that my aversion to bras is because my first one was so small, a couple of contact lenses would have done the job just as well. It was a 28AA white lace doily thing that Mum bought from Marks and Spencer, and I was utterly embarrassed.

My friend Pat had been the first girl in the school to need a bra, and we had all gathered round at break to admire the aircraft hangar it undoubtedly was, so I knew that I was painfully inadequate in that department. I felt rather sorry for Pat’s mother, who must have spent an entire week’s grocery bill on the monstrosity needed to house her daughter’s growing mammaries.

I stopped wearing them round about the age of 30, but as I have been contemplating having a boob job in California, thought I might try something a little less drastic first. Having lost over 2 stone, and now weighing just 7 stone 6 (104 lbs), I fantasised about slipping into the sexiest cups that would instantly transform my 50 year old chest into that of a buxom, desirable 23 year old, and set off for the Victoria’s Secret sale with high hopes.

The last bra I bought cost about £2.99, so a $19.99 reduced price tag didn’t seem much of a bargain to me. Heck, a boob job suddenly looked like the cheapest option. I didn’t even know what size I was. The last time I was measured I was a 36B, and thought that with my weight loss I must be down at least to a 34B.

I rummaged around in the 34B section and came up with a corset type thing, a camel type thing (the animal, not the colour), and a tiger print thing (ditto). I have to call them things because they bore no resemblance to any bra I have ever seen. When I went to try them on, I had to perform my own manual surgery just to cover myself; even then, I looked like two ladles left to melt in a pan of boiling fondue.

I called the assistant, who suggested I try 36B; that meant I would be back where I was 20 years ago, which really depressed me. Not as much as when I asked her to measure me, though, and she declared me to be a 34C: not, it transpired, because I had grown in cup size, but because half my cup had transmogrified and was now well on its way to my back, via my underarms. Only the promise of a dam in which to contain it again seemed likely to convince it to return, and so off the assistant went in search of 36C.

The not very nice bras on offer at 34B were a veritable Impressionist exhibition up against the Salvador Dalis available at 36C. God, they were gross. Gross colours, gross fabrics, gross shapes. Had they been breathing, you would have taken them to the vet to be put out of their misery.

I had been contemplating a D cup, if and when I decided to go under the knife; but as I gathered up my underarm flesh and scooped it into the C cup, I thought that if I could just push a bit up from my now rather loose stomach, I would have enough not only to compensate for a boob job, but top-ups that would sustain the illusion for about the next ten years.

I didn’t even bother looking at the knicker sale, which looked to me like a dental floss convention.

I’m rather depressed about it all. When I was fatter, I had a great, smooth bottom; now, it has so many folds and creases, I could re-market it as a book. My once quite decent breasts are now barely bigger than my ears, and not anywhere near as pert. The reason I stopped wearing underwear in the first place was because nothing fitted me; now I’m thin, and it still doesn’t.

If Victoria has a secret, I’d like to know about it. Because from where I’m sagging, there’s no mystery.

Not Quite Ready For My Close-Up 6/29/09

When did going to the cinema get so complicated? What happened to the moth-eaten curtains opening and closing before the film began? What happened to Kia Ora, Pearl and Dean commercials, and usherettes carrying melting choc-ices in their hanging baskets?

I admit to having gone to the cinema just three times in the past 20 years. Because I get everything sent to me on DVD and watch it, courtesy of Bafta, alone at home, I’ve become a bit of a recluse when it comes to leaving the house for my entertainment.

The last film I went out to see was nearly 10 years ago, and it was a press showing of The Matrix that I went to with my then boyfriend. I don’t know which was longer: the film or the seven-month relationship. But I know that I prayed with equal longing for both to end – with a bullet to my head, if needs be.

I went to see Sixth Sense round about the same time and didn’t enjoy that, either. People had told me there was a brilliant twist at the end, but as I had spent the whole film assuming that Dr Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) was dead (Oh, come on: anyone who had seen Ghost must have known that from then on, dead didn’t mean dead in movieland), I thought that the twist might be that he had been alive all along.

When a character spends two hours speaking to no-one but a child who sees dead people, even the dumbest person has to start asking why. My boyfriend didn’t, which is yet another reason why he’s an ex.

Before that, the last time I went to the cinema was in 1990, when I saw The Godfather III. That, too, turned out to be a rather chequered experience. I saw it in Cardiff’s Queen Street, in a venue that had just imposed a non-smoking policy. I took no time at all, therefore, in complaining about a man who lit up barely ten minutes into the film.

When he was asked to put out his cigarette out and refused, staff (clearly inspired by having spent the week seeing how the Mafia operated) called the cops, and, within the minute, three armed officers arrived to evict him. They didn’t mess around in Cardiff.

Living in the heart of movieland, and also now trying to write my own script, it seemed only logical to start hitting the cinema again.

Although I watched dozens of films before I did my writing course here, and have watched possibly more television over 20 years than anyone in the world, there is nothing quite like the experience of the lights going down in the cinema, knowing that your life is untouchable for the next couple of hours; and continuing to keep real life on hold when you emerge into daylight, carrying the fictional world with you and nursing it secretly, in the warmth of your heart, for hours afterwards.

Everywhere you look in LA is a reminder of the city’s great cinematic tradition. I can see the Hollywood sign on the hill from my apartment block; enormous billboards scream about the latest releases in all the shopping malls; everyone’s conversation on which you eavesdrop appears to be littered with the words “picture”, “deal”, “script”, or “contract”. “Tell Jerry/Sam/Steve to call me” is a familiar refrain that leaves you longing to know whether Jerry, Sam or Steve ever will, or whether they, too, are destined to enter the great ether of unknowns that is as vast as it is real.

I had wanted to see The Hangover for some weeks, but having walked to the Beverly Centre a couple of miles away and discovered that it was not showing, lost interest; but this week, after a long work-out and an even longer walk, I finally made it to Century City, where The Hangover was showing in not just one, but two cinemas. And, more to the point, two of 13 other cinemas, all housed under one roof.

“Next guest, please,” said a girl behind glass as I stood in line. Guest? I was a guest? Not just a punter whose money they were glad to take, before thankfully shutting up shop at the end of the night? Sure enough: a great big neon sign above her head indicated that this was the place for Guests to purchase their tickets. I already felt rather special. Heck, they know how to treat people in this country.

They know how to feed them, too. Outside the Guest ticketing area, there is an outdoor dining terrace that, during the summer, shows films. In the adjoining complex, there are loads of restaurants and cafes serving food from about 20 countries that you can – get this – TAKE INTO THE CINEMA WITH YOU.

In London, there are small cinemas that allow you to take in alcoholic drinks and that serve food while you sit around on sofas (the Electric in Notting Hill started this small revolution), but I don’t think that there are any larger complexes that have caught on to the idea of your being allowed in to eat your supper on your lap.

One of the reasons I have always hated the cinema is that I can’t abide the smell of popcorn, and am even more averse to people crunching it around me when I am trying to concentrate, so I wasn’t sure how I would feel about having to contend with the conflicting smells of burgers, pizza and noodles. But if there is one thing I have learned in life, it is that your irritation levels drop substantially if you do exactly the same as the very people who are setting off your irritation.

So, off I went to purchase my burger and fries takeaway. Having been on a vegetarian diet and drinking copious amounts of carrot juice for three months, I figured that after my strenuous day’s exercise and no other food, it wouldn’t hit the waistline too hard.

“Buffalo?” said the sales assistant.
“No, beefburger,” I said.
“Yeah, but you want buffalo?”

My Welsh accent makes it difficult for people to understand me in LA, and so I resort to doing what Brits do when they go to Europe and can’t speak the language: I speak very loudly and very slowly.

“I – DO – NOT – WANT – A – BUFFALO – BURGER - I – WOULD – LIKE – A – NORMAL – BEEFBURGER.”
“Yeah, I get yer. But yer want buffalo?”
What was it with this damned buffalo? Had they had a job lot delivered by mistake? “BEEF! I – WANT – BEEF. YOU – GOT – ANY – BEEF?”
“Sure we got beef. We got beefburgers. But we only got buffalo size.”
“Oh, I see!” I finally twigged and therefore resumed normal speech patterns. “It’s beef, but buffalo size. Er, how big is buffalo?”
“It’s about this size,” she said, making a gesture that seemed as if she would have to acquire arm extensions to give the buffalo full credit for its enormity.”
“Okay! I’ll have the burger, buffalo size.” Finally, we were getting somewhere. “And I’ll have fries with that.”
“You want the combo meal, with a drink, too?”

Oh, why the hell not. By now I was losing the will to live, let alone eat, and praying that the film would not be (a) this long, or (b) this complicated.
“Yes, please. Why not.”
“How you want your meat cooked?” Eh? I get the choice of how I want my meat cooked? At a burger bar? I figured the buffalo might take some cooking, so said: “Well done.”

I was there another 20 minutes and had finished my Diet Coke by the time the buffalo arrived. They re-filled my cup to say sorry (they are also incredibly efficient at putting things right when they go wrong here). I don’t normally drink fizzy, sugary drinks, even low calorie ones – especially low calorie ones, as I am ever mindful of the observation that only fat people drink Diet Coke, but as it was free I gratefully took it.

Once I had added all the freebies from the salad bar to the buffalo (onions, two kinds of chilli peppers, salsa, jalapeno cheese, ketchup, tomatoes), I looked as if I was going on vacation when I finally made it into the cinema.

There was a big warning beforehand, on a soundtrack that included mobile phones and babies crying: it instructed people not to bring their own soundtrack with them, and I opened my case of beef as quietly as I could, only saying “Shit!” out loud once, as the juice from a chilli spurted all over my clothes when I bit into it.

My first job as a teenager was as a cinema usherette. I was paid £4 an hour in Bridgend’s Embassy Cinema, and was instructed to add a couple of pence onto each sale and keep quiet about it, because the manager was creaming the profit off the management.

The enormous basket hurt my neck, and although I thought this would be a small price to pay in return for being able to watch films for free, I discovered that there was no pleasure in seeing anything in instalments over one or two weeks. I saw The Towering Inferno 22 times, and by the end of it would happily have set fire to the Embassy cinema, had I the means.

The Hangover was considerably more pleasurable, and I would willingly see it 22 times; in fact, I think I might. Hilarious, beautifully and tightly written, I thought that sitting there, stuffing my face with buffalo and chilli, I was the happiest I had been in years.

Unlike British audiences, who talk throughout whole movies, the Americans were totally gripped throughout. Maybe it was because their mouths were too crammed with their supper to be able to talk, but they made great company. They went “Ahh” when a character was being treated badly; they laughed at every single funny line; they had their hands clasped to their mouths during a hair-raising car-chase. They had clearly gone to the movie to watch the movie, and that’s what they did.

I left the movie theater having acquired, amongst much else, the ability to say (and spell) “movie” and “movie theater” – essential tools, given that people had looked at me blankly when I asked where the films or cinema were on my way there. I also felt totally exhilarated and high on the whole experience and wondered why on Earth it had taken me so many years to get back to watching movies on the big screen.

Now, I think I really am ready for my close-up.

Jeff Goldblum - My Part In His Resurrection

Giant black poodles do not make the best guide dogs for the blind. That was what I learned this week as the world came to terms with the death of Michael Jackson. A strange combination of events, you have to admit, but life does get increasingly more strange here.

The Jackson news came when I was on the treadmill at the gym, where I had been watching it on NBC, Fox and CNN. When I managed to find a channel that wasn’t showing the event, I managed to tune in to a commercial that just so happened to have Jackson singing I’ll Be There on it. Well, not anymore he wasn’t.

That was my own private thought, shortly before jokes started clogging up my Blackberry. But this "humour" felt like something unreal taking place in a dreadful hole of incredible shock. Other jokes quickly followed. “And he looked so well” said one. “He’s re-releasing the Thriller video in six weeks’ time” said another. All inappropriate, but a reflex reaction.

I felt desperately sad. I grew up with Jackson at the centre of my pop world, and although Donny Osmond was my great love, no one can take away the huge impact Jackson's music, not to mention his influence regarding the recognition of black artists (or blacks in general, come to that), has had upon the world. Too young. Too soon.

I had moved to the stepper by the time the next bit of news arrived, again on a friend’s text: “And now Jeff Goldblum. Found him on his back with his legs in the air.”

I’m not a big fan of jokes about people who have only just touched down the wrong side of rigor mortis, but had let it pass with Jacko because when I was 14, my mother decided to give me an afro perm so that I would look like him.

His hairdo was, at the time (well, according to my mother), the height of fashion. I sat through double history in school (How could you, Mum? A schoolday, too?), with my duffle coat hood up, sobbing my heart out. At lunchtime I went home and made her take it out with the same level of peroxide that she had put the dastardly thing in with.

But Goldblum? What? Had he died? How? Had he been ill? And what was there to laugh about if he had? (I hadn’t ever seen him in The Fly, so didn’t get the joke anyway).

I met him a few months ago, when we both appeared on Richard and Judy, although not together, alas. He was on with Kevin Spacey to talk about Speed the Plow, in which they were starring at the Old Vic. I was on to talk about a highly destructive relationship I had once had with one of my school-teachers.

“So, you shagged a teacher!” the ever- sensitive Richard Madeley said, as I walked into the studio (Actually, I hadn't, and it was a lot more complicated than that, but heck, they who appear on daytime telly must die by its sword).

Jeff Goldblum putting his arm around me more than made up for it, and it was my knowing that he practised Transcendental Meditation that subsequently sent me back to it. I learned the technique years ago, but had let it lapse; the stress of trying to find 20 minutes to meditate at the end of each day nearly gave me a coronary; but now, in tandem with my new healthy lifestyle, I make sure I fit it in, and it has once more lowered my blood pressure to normal levels.

Of course, it rocketed to high heaven when I heard of Mr Goldblum’s “death”, so swings and roundabouts and all that.

On top of his being my inspiration to seek meditative calm, Mr Goldblum is the new face on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and his comic timing and charisma have sent this series soaring to even greater heights.

In fact, I was in the process of writing him a fan letter, saying as such, last week. So news of his demise literally threw me off the stepper in tearful shock.

And yet no one could substantiate it. Google said that the New Zealand police had (at that point) confirmed the news (which they hadn’t); and every single US channel was still covering Jackson’s death.

In Britain, our broadcasters would have been among the crowd, just so happening to find the tallest, slimmest, blonde female mourner, to say what the star meant to her. They would instantly have started speculating about the amounts of medication that might have led to the death. In the US, they stuck to the facts – and it was boring as hell. Acres and acres of footage from concerts, and that Thriller video, over and over and over again.

When Britain woke up, my friends, who clearly have no conception of the size of Los Angeles, assumed I must be among the throng, if not already choosing my hat for the funeral. “It must be amazing there,” they texted. Er, pretty much like every day, actually, apart from not being able to find anything decent on the telly.

Others suggested it was a bit strange that since my arrival in LA, the showbiz world had lost Michael Jackson, Farah Fawcett and Jeff Goldblum.

They had not yet heard the confirmation that Mr Goldblum was very much alive and that the whole thing had been an internet hoax. Pretty damned sick, I call it. Also, Kevin Spacey had Twittered to put everyone straight and asked people to stop spreading rumours – the ultimate irony, on a site by its very nature designed to spread information as quickly as possible.

With my new best friend Jeff resurrected from the dead, I woke with a light heart on Friday, but that damned Thriller video was still on every channel. I tried to get away from it and went to the gym again, but it was still hogging the news channels on the equipment TVs, and it was also on the changing room telly, too. Yet it was still so hard to take it in.

At least you can always get a bit of peace in the pool, because they play classical music in there. But no sooner had I landed in the water than a blind lady arrived with her guide dog (a black poodle the size of a horse), plonked him by the side of the pool and left him there while she went in for some exercises.

Now, I have the utmost sympathy for anyone with any sort of disability getting some exercise; and I love dogs. But this damned poodle barked. And barked. And barked. And barked. I swam 50 lengths that took me 45 minutes, and still the creature was at it every time the water moved, which, with all eight lanes filled, you can imagine was pretty often.

I thought that after 24 hours of non-stop Thriller (and I really used to like it), the dying throes of a hyena would have been music to my ears, but a poodle is no golden labrador when it comes to guarding its blind.

Finally, I could stand it no more and ventured off to the steam room. After ten minutes, I thought I would rest for a bit in the Jacuzzi. No chance. The damned dog had moved to the Jacuzzi area and stood guarding it with Alcatraz-like enthusiasm. A naked woman started to go down the stops, but our curly friend was having none of it, barked wildly, and the breasts never even made it to the first bubble.

“They’ll be bringing in their tigers next,” moaned a woman in the dressing room, which just made me wonder what sort of company she kept of an evening.

Still, at least Jeff Goldblum was alive and well and living in Los Angeles, and, being awake while Britain slept, I was one of the first to be able to start telling everyone. I texted. I phoned. I e-mailed. It was the very opposite of that bizarre, secret pleasure one has, when breaking news of a death to people who are not yet in the know.

Jeff Goldblum is alive!

I could shout it from the rooftops. Best of all, nobody was singing about it.

The Future's Not Bright Or Orange 6/23/09

What a lot of psychics there are in LA. You would think that they would have had the foresight to know that opening up three doors away from a rival isn’t going to be good business; but if you walk to West Hollywood or, as I did today, back from Melrose Avenue to Beverly Hills (think of the longest walk you have ever done and treble it), there are, literally, dozens.

No, I still don’t have a car, because I am trying to save money; hence my decision not to take a taxi, either. The one I took to Melrose cost me over $20, and I had to suffer yet another driver trying to get to grips with the fact that Wales is a country in its own right and not a city in England.

For some reason, this fascinates them; and today’s man also wanted to know which were the “friendly” people in the UK. That bit of the conversation was easy: everyone except the English.

The prospect of running out of money and having to return to the depressing British winter is already depressing me, so I thought I would drop in on a psychic to find out when my bumper pay cheque for the book I am writing was likely to arrive.

The Psychic Centre, on La Brea, promised much from the posters that lined the road on my way there; when I found it, a massive sign outside was promising a special $10 dollar reading which, at half the price of the taxi fare, seemed a good deal.

I went up the steps to find four women tucking into their Subway takeaway lunch around a crystal ball and a pile of Tarot cards with crumbs on them. Through a full mouth, the fattest one asked whether I was looking for a reading, and pretty much splattered me with the contents of said mouth when I said Yes.

They then could not decide who was going to do me, but called a scruffy girl of about 18 from the back, who looked pretty cheesed off at having her lunch break interrupted.

“What d’you want?”
“Well, what is there?”
“Tarot, palm, crystal ball, eye.”

I had had my eyeball read once before, when I was doing a health programme for Channel 4, and I hadn’t been very impressed. Did the eyeball of a junk food fanatic show spinning burgers in their depths?

Would my LA eyes now reveal the gallons of carrot juice I am drinking: and, just like the advert, would I be filled with optimism that my future was both bright and orange?

I wasn't really sure that my eyes were going to be the best predictors, as I was wearing some new mineral make-up that I bought at the weekend, and appeared to be suffering an allergic reaction to it; hence my eyes were very red with all the rubbing I had been doing to wipe away the constant torrent of water pouring from them.

“Have you had any of them before?”
“All of them,” I said.

A Tarot reader had once told me that I would have twins. Never happened. A crystal ball reader told me that I would marry someone whose name began with W. Never happened. The only W in my life was a William I once dated, who told me in a Paris café that I was the most intelligent, funny, fantastic woman he had ever met – he just didn’t fancy me. Stuff Paris as the City of Love.

Last year, passing through Turkey on a cruise, I had my Turkish coffee cup read, in the same way that people read tea-leaves. I was told that I spend money on big things (tell me about it – I spent 12,000 euros on a Chloe dress after one too many white wines a couple of years ago), that I would be very rich within three years (one down, two to go), and that a man whose name began with S was going to help my career big-time.

I tell you, if Simon Cowell doesn’t shift his backside quickly, I’m going to be on Skid Row.

My LA psychic was clearly having an off day and seemed highly irritated that I had even deigned to enter the room, let alone demand anything once inside.

“Is it all right if I tape it?” I asked, producing my Blackberry. That was a definite no-no. “Can I take notes?” “No. We don’t like that. It’s supposed to be private. Why would you want to tape it?”

Honestly, this was like pulling teeth. I could have finished this life, gone to an after one, AND returned as a sub-species in the time it was taking her to predict the next . . . Well, how many years? Heck, I only wanted to know as far as September. At this rate, I would be lucky to know what I was going to have for dinner.

“So what d’you want?”
“Okay, I’ll have the eye.”
“You want me to read your eyeball?”
“Yes, let’s go for that.”
“That’s $45.”
“But your sign outside says that you’re doing a special deal for $10.”
“Yeah, that’s a palm reading.”
“Okay, I’ll have one of those.”
“To be honest, it’s not very accurate.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. I read my friends’ palms all the time and am deadly accurate. I have told them about things in their pasts that they have not even shared with their closest family and friends. I have made grown men cry with the accuracy of my palm-reading.

I can even read my own. I’m going to be very successful, but there is going to be a clean break of some sorts before I achieve that ultimate success (could that 6000 miles across the Atlantic be it, I have wondered?).

I’m going to live a long life and I won’t have any kids (my 50 year old body fills in the gaps that my palm has left out on that one).

Clearly, there was going to be no such insight in LA, so I walked out of the centre without having spent a dollar and muttering something about it all being a bit of a con.

In fact, given my own skills in this area – certainly, compared to the La Brea ghoul - I think I could open up a psychic centre in LA and do very well out of it.

The way the money is going, together with Mr Cowell’s ongoing silence, it looks as if it might be my only option. Dollar for your thoughts, everyone. You know where I am.

Casting Pearls After Swine 6/14/09

Apparently, there are some women on the planet who will do anything to get the men in their life out of it. Given the amount of trouble I have getting them in there in the first place, not to mention acquiring enough chloroform, rope and chains to keep them there, I can’t see that it’s a problem I’m ever going to encounter.

So, I am completely mystified by a website called outofyourlife.com. As most things do these days, this came to my attention while exercising in the gym and watching the machines’ TVs, and I couldn’t wait to get home to find out more.

The TV commercial features a blonde woman handling various pieces of jewellery. They’re shiny, they’re chunky and, for the most part, fairly hideous. At one point, she examines a pair of un-matching ear-rings, as if trying to decide which she prefers, and we learn that each one relates to a man who, in real life, she was unable to decide between.

As she places each piece in jewellery in a special, lined box, the voiceover explains once you’re no longer with some man, the moment comes when: “It’s time to get his jewellery out of your life too.”

And how can you do this? You just let outofyourlife.com buy it all from you – and, yes, they even provide that special little box in which to place it all before you Fedex it off.

My first thought was that I would have dumped any guy who bought me such rotten jewellery to begin with; but then I remembered that apart from one brooch, no man has ever, ever bought me so much as a diamante hair-grip.

When I was 30, the man I was with bought me a china duck: a hideous, lime green and yellow, china duck vase whose only function I could foresee would be as something to smash over his head when the relationship ended (where were those websites supplying bubble wrap for packing up china ducks when I needed them, eh?).

In Wales, we have a custom of giving carved, wooden love spoons to the people we care for, not jewellery; but even in that respect I didn’t fare well. One Valentine’s Day, I opened up a gift that arrived in a love spoon box to find a pig’s trotter inside. Quite how that was supposed to woo me is another of life’s mysteries I have yet to fathom.

My last serious boyfriend gave me the single – not even the album, goddammit – of Mambo Number Five. You know the one – the guy who likes a bit of this woman here, a bit of that one on the side etc. etc. And I had to lend him the money to buy that.

Where on Earth are all these men who give jewellery in such abundance that it can be sent back in return for cash? I don’t have a lavish collection, but what I do have, I bought myself. Last year, for my 50th, I treated myself to a diamond tennis bracelet. It was something I had always wanted and, after a few drinks in Turkey, while covering a cruise for the Daily Mail, I saw a psychic in a hotel.

“You always spend money on big things,” she said. On the way back to the ship, after a few more drinks, I stopped off at a jeweller’s and bought the bracelet. I suspect that the minute I left the hotel, the psychic was on the phone to the shop, telling him: “There’s another one on her way.”

I really love diamonds, but if they are a girl’s best friend, where are all the men who know this and, more to the point, act upon it?

I have my eye on a rather exquisite, long chain of diamonds to match my tennis bracelet at the moment. I saw it while window-shopping on Rodeo Drive and went in to ask the price. “That would be $175,000, ma’am,” said the rather charming salesman. “It’s platinum.”

I kept a straight face. “Do you have it in white gold?”

“That would be $75,000, ma’am.”

Ever since the movie Pretty Woman, in which the assistants on Rodeo Drive treated Julia Roberts’ character Vivien with such contempt, all the stores are careful to behave towards everyone as if they have loads of money – even though, given my current financial circumstances, contempt would have been entirely justifiable.

But I didn’t see any man leaping out from behind a pillar, waving his cheque book, declaring: “No, no. Let me, Miss Stephen.” “Thank you, Mr Gere.”

In Spain and LA, I see women draped in jewels all the time; so what have they got that I haven’t? A lot of space between their ears, I suspect is the answer, and men with money (and the equivalent acreage in nothingness between their ears usually) appear to like that.

So, for all my being unable to fill that little satin box and receive my cheque in the post from outofyourlife.com, I’m grateful that I pretty much live by the intomylife.com premise, and that I don’t dislike anyone enough to hand back anything I’ve ever had from anyone.

And that includes the green and yellow china duck. At least it was given in love. The only exception is the pig’s trotter. I hope the guy who sent it caught swine flu.

Tarmac Orphan 6/10/09

Twelve inches is a long way in travel. The world may be getting smaller, but when you’re standing at A, desperate to get to B, and only twelve inches separates you from your destination, B might as well be on the moon.

The weird thing is: you wait all your life for a man in uniform with a powerful weapon to turn up, and then three come along together.

The details of my European trip have been eclipsed somewhat by the problems I had getting out of France and the subsequent problems I had getting back into the US. I feel as if I have lived most of the last 48 hours as a sort of Tarmac orphan, passport at the ready but unable to go anywhere.

My crime? A heavy suitcase packed with books and a couple of bags of loose change.

Nothing about me, I am sure, indicated that I was going to be Semtex catch of the week, as I arrived at the Eurostar Customs on Monday morning. I was loaded up because each time I return to the US, I ludicrously feel that I have to bring another section of my enormous library back home; I suppose it’s my comfort blanket.

I’ve been told by Eurostar in the past that women travelling alone are targeted because they tend to be the biggest drug traffickers, but apart from smuggling in a box of Oxo vegetarian stock cubes last time I returned to the US, my activities in this area are rather limited.

Personally, I blame the Alsation. I am quite at ease with small dogs, but when a very large one starts leaping around when your stuff is coming through on the conveyor belt, it can be a bit unnerving.

My terror was that it was going to eat my MacBook Air laptop, without my having had chance to back up the book and screenplay I am writing, so I was not really paying attention to the Customs man when he asked: “What’s in your case?”

As I had, in total, five bags, I couldn’t remember what was in the specific case to which he referred, so I said: “Things”. Wrong answer! “What things?” “Er, books, clothes . . . “ (and can’t you get that damned dog’s nose away from my computer).

Now, in my Linguaphone French language learning course, the Customs man – le douanier – is rather a nice chap. There is a family travelling together and he takes a shine to the daughter, Valerie. “Le douanier,” it says, “Il admire Valerie” (translation: he wouldn’t mind giving her one, there and then, over the conveyor belt).

I’ve always thought it was a bit sexist, but whatever it was that old Valerie had, I wished I now had it; but “Le douanier . . . Il deteste Jaci” was clearer much nearer the mark.

He told me to lift my case and put it on a table that seemed like double my body height. Not only was it too heavy to lift, I have a longstanding shoulder injury that would have made it impossible to do so anyway, and I told him so.

“You don’t lift it, you don’t travel.” I asked for help. “I’m not going to do it,” he said, and would not budge on the matter. I started to cry. “There is no point in crying, you are not going anywhere.” So, we were stuck: me, case, man with gun.

Eventually, a tiny female member of staff, even smaller than me, came over to lift the case, and I was almost on my way. The officer opened it, took out Dr Raj Persaud’s book, The Motivated Mind, threw it back, and told me I could go.

Maybe he thought that I was so motivated, it was not beyond the realms of possibility that I could grab his gun, shoot the lot of them, and still have time to eat the entire supply of croissants in the Frequent Traveller lounge.

I thought that would be an end to my day of Customs hell, but there was more to come when I reached the US some hours later. Although I have an I Visa that allows me to come and go freely, man number two with gun was having none of it.

They always ask you why you are entering the US, and they do so with such an air of “You so much as sniff our air without asking permission” that I am trembling so much, the paramedics almost have to be called in.

I was sent to another line, where man number three with gun awaited me. He wanted to see everything – and I mean everything – in both cases. Why were my cases so heavy? (There’s a dead Alsation in one of them; why do you think?). Why was I carrying so much loose change?

Was I carrying any food? Er, no. There were a couple of boxes of herbal tea for various digestive conditions that I thought best to keep to myself. Not that I would need them, as my bowels were now well and truly working without recourse to outside assistance.

But it was the books that really interested him. He too alighted upon The Motivated Mind, with Dr Raj Persaud’s picture on the cover. Now, Raj is a very handsome man, and someone I used to work with in TV, but suddenly he had the look of an accomplice about him. He is also of a non-white persuasion, which was something that had not even occurred to me before. Clearly, very dodgy indeed.

The official moved on to Save the Cat, Blake Snyder’s screenwriting book that is my Bible and that I carry everywhere while I am writing my movie. There is a very good picture of a cat clinging to a rope on the cover, the premise being that early in a movie, your hero should do something – such as saving a cat – that endears him or her to the audience.

But suddenly the cat didn’t look so clingy. In fact, it looked rather pained, as if someone had been trying to string it up two minutes before and it was in its last dying throes.

“If you want to write a movie it’s the best book,” I ventured. “It really is and most people do want to write one here don’t they and that’s why I came here and . . . “ Breathless, hopeless . . . If you’re in a hole, stop digging, but as if my spade were not doing an efficient enough job, I had brought in a JCB to help dig myself in still deeper.

Now, not only did I have a motivated mind, I tortured small animals. Quite clearly, it was going to be a small step from thereon in before I exercised my newly acquired killing skills on humans.

“Passport,” said my interrogator, and went off to a computer. All I could think of was the Little Britain sketch Computer Says No, as I awaited my fate. Had I done or said anything in the States that might warrant my not being allowed back in? I really didn’t think so. Apart from being born small and Welsh, of course, but it was only the English who ever had a problem with that.

Richard Curtis, the brilliant brain behind Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, had been on my flight, and he sailed through Customs. We had spent a brief time chatting on the plane, when I recalled a course he tutored many years ago, when he told me that all his movies were about the same thing: How do you find the right person to love?

Luckily for him, we had to return to our seats at the point where I had started to tell him that life wasn’t like the movies, that men suck, life sucks, Customs officials suck.

The last words he said to me as he left the plane were: “I’m sure you’ll find love eventually” (though you have to be honest: Love, Eventually as a movie title, as opposed to the movie he made - Love, Actually - doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

So, when I descended from the plane, I was dreaming of happy ever afters and Hugh Grant meeting me at the airport with a bunch of roses. Then the men with guns captured me. Like I said, Richard: life ain’t like the movies.

I am now safely back in the US, and at the moment can remember very little of my trip. I do, however, recall visiting a friend’s house in Paris and walking up the Champs Elysees, where I saw an old man holding a very small penis, urinating beside a tree. I confess to knowing the size because I stopped briefly, just to remind myself what a penis looked like (we’re talking a couple of years here, give or take a magazine or two).

It didn’t do much for me, I’m afraid. Twelve inches may be a long way in travel, but even a man with a gun couldn’t get me to hang around for two.