Crafternoon

I went home for the weekend to find my mother furiously ironing applique on to pieces of felt.

It was what has become a regular occasion in my childhood home - crafternoon. In what I hope is just a passing phase similar to recycling iron and hessian bags during the Great Depression, mum has decided Christmas is a commercial runaway train and this year she will be personally making every decoration, Christmas card and probably gift for relatives and friends.

I've never seen anybody tie festive bows on reindeer heads with such ideological certainty. There's somewhat an audible zing as the ribbon riffs against itself, sounding very socialist with a hint of a Russian accent.

She's always been quite talented in this respect, but her penchant for cross-stitching farmyard animal scenes has relegated her work to a niche market of potentially very weird chicken fetishists and really, we don't want those people in the house.

Last year, instead of an actual Christmas tree, she sewed a festive tree on to a 30cm piece of cloth and bequeathed it to me for the Yuletide season.

"It's an heirloom," she said.

"But you literally just made it," I replied, foolishly ignoring my cue to just accept the gift.

"Yes, and now it's an heirloom."

I believe it is now in a packing box, ready to be unearthed for my bemused flatmates this year. They'll probably want to get a tree, which is so 1992, and I'm going to have to explain to them the importance of honouring my mother's needling and that yes, we can hang it somewhere where it won't get in the way. Like Poland.

She's added to that for this year, handing me a very joyful runner-thing which I assume goes on a table but which I will probably wrap around my head approximately 2 hours after I crack the next bottle of wine.

Don't get me wrong. I'm always quite chuffed to receive these crafty gifts as it means mum has been thinking of me again. I suppose she still feels guilty for spreading the rumour that the hospital gave her the wrong baby back after I was born. I think she's probably right, though, as I've always had a sneaking suspicion that my family and I were strangers trying to eat dinner from the same plate in a dim-lit restaurant. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Her Christmas cards are coming along very nicely, I must say. I was really very restrained and didn't point out that each one is costing her $2.65 to make (cardboard and gold stamps are really just so pricey) and that she could probably buy 50 for just shy of $5 at Crazy Clark's.

Mind you, the Crazy Clark cards are always so terrifically morbid.

I remember I received one card with a snowman melting on the front. The look on its face was so aghast. It was the same as the look on a child's face who has, for the first time ever, understood what death is. It's like the Christmas card was not-so-subtly reminding: "Say Merry Christmas now...BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE."

And I did that year. For Frosty's sake. I said Merry Christmas to everyone.

I said it to our dog. He wagged his tail a bit, but I think it's because he was thinking about something else.

At least my mum's cards are very cheerful and bright with the requisite amount of silver and gold flecks sprinkled across them, like the Bling Fairy has paid a personal visit.

How very quaint.

This post is so gay

So, technically, I only came out today.


In a world driven by the vagaries of social networking and the whims of people who play Farmville, nothing is ever really confirmed as 'totes for real' unless you've done so on Facebook.

Today, I finally plucked up the courage to change my Facebook 'Interested in' status to 'men' which is a little like reading a Carebear confessional that divulges the saucy secret: 'by the way, I like rainbows'.

This is a bigger deal than it seems.

I came out progressively. My sexual unveiling to the world was like a 12-course degustation menu where some people were like 'oh, I love this' and others were all 'God, you abomination' and then everybody was drunk and we laughed a little bit.

The point being, I started coming out 3 years ago (I'm 23) and since then there has been a steady flow of milestones that helped chart the course. Milestones like being gay in a gay bar instead of pretending you're uncomfortable, telling your mother, mentioning the whole gay thing within 6 months of telling your mother to remind her that it wasn't a phase.

You know, the usual.

The last hurdle was to say it and say it loud on Facebook.

Why do I care?

Truth be known, I shouldn't. The content of a person's sexuality should no more be the dinner party conversation than a person's choice of favourite colour, or why that man from down the street has so much tinned ham in his wheelie bin. It's really of no consequence to anyone. Unless you're friends with a lot of pigs, in which case, shame on you.

But it didn't quite feel complete. It felt like I had swum the English Channel only to cling to a marker buouy 20m from the finish saying 'you know what gents, I think I'll just call it a day here'. And people will be all up in my grill saying 'well, it's only fucking 20m, you might as well just do it'.

And my argument to date has been, you know what, I don't care. I've done the hard yards up until now I don't need to do the other 20m. It's so inconsequential! It's like a bee's dick. Who needs that when you have the whole bee? I realise that made almost no sense.

But let's be honest here. You need to put the little finishing touches on things. Like if you're making a children's doll and you don't want to put eyes on it, you probably should because have you any ideas how fucking creepy those things are without eyes? Details matter.

So today, I made the change and told my 535 Facebook friends, some of them from high school, that I like men.

I've gone from apparently being interested in 'nothing to see here people, move along' to liking men.

I'm not expecting anything to come of it.

Now, this might seem like the trivial pursuit of a Generation Y professional mountain-from-molehill builder. Not the case. I don't care.

I don't care in the same way that I don't really care that you've worn horizontal stripes with vertical stripe pants. It doesn't change the way I live or anything like that but Good Lord it would make me an ounce happier if you changed.

And it's so easy to do it...so what's the point of enduring that little niggly voice tell you to grow a pair and just do it.

Old by a whisker

Like most terrifying experiences in my life, it happened in front of my mirror.

I was grooming myself in the hasty manner to which I’d become accustomed, preening haphazardly through my hair like a frenzied fiancée trying to find a misplaced diamond ring in a drain.

It was early morning and I was running late, the irony not lost on me that this is the only time I am ever running.

And there it was.

Perched tactlessly on my forehead like an awkward teenager at a cocktail function.

A grey hair. My first. An abomination against nature.

Like dinner guests who show up before you’ve even had a chance to clean, this had arrived early.

I’m in my 20s, I’m too young to see my silent mortality reflected back at me in the mirror. This was a blemish on a truly spectacular head of hair that has had hairdressers ‘oohing’ since it first grew out as a baby. A double-crown atop my head – my grandmother said it would make me very smart, possibly the only time in her life she was wrong – led my own mother to predict that I would bald and bald early.

Her prediction was peppered with more inaccuracies than a revisionist history textbook.

My hair, it turns out, would be my trading card well into my later years and would leave others swooning in delight at its fulsome bounce and radiant sheen.

Or so I thought.Now, don’t get me wrong, there are many people who manage to do ‘grey’ or even ‘silver’ with remarkable grace.

The salted suave look of partially grey hair can be an aphrodisiac – just ask George Clooney and the 10 million plus women currently plotting ways to fuck him.

And sure, it’s easy enough to hide a head of grey hairs if the idea sits silently.

But that’s not the point!Hiding the grey hairs wouldn’t be any less of a crime then living out your life knowing you’d hidden an adulterous affair from the children, or that you had a secret passion for Justin Bieber that just wouldn’t abate.

The burden of such a secret would be wearisome.People could admire your luscious locks and your inner monologue would scream: “It’s a lie! An elaborate ruse! I’m an imposter and my hair a fraudulent, if dashing, mess of deception!”

Perhaps it isn’t even the aesthetics that bothers me – perhaps it’s knowing that my hair had the audacity to sprout a grey one earlier than it ought.

Perhaps it is what this symbolises: I am no longer a spring chicken. Nay, I’m not even a chicken.

This is a rude thought to have at 6am in the morning when you’re face looks like it has had the life sucked out of it during the night.

When you’re leaning into the mirror, poking and prodding and wondering how much rhinoplasty would cost, the last thing you need to encounter is a sign-post to your inevitable doom.

So imagine my surprise when, plucking at this foreign object, it dislodged immediately.

It was a cat’s whisker.

I scarcely want to imagine how or why a cat’s whisker found its way on to my forehead.

But you can begin to appreciate why it is that I have so very little time for cats.

Bad luck indeed.

And then there was blog

Some of the worst things in existence are cyclical.

Ferris wheels. Bad arguments. Murder clowns on bicycles.

Some punters would argue the universe itself is cyclical – switching through periods of inflation, deflation, creation and recession ad infinitum.

This is good news if you don’t want to get up to look for the television remote.

Assuming you have all the patience in the world, it (and an assortment of planets, matter and the cosmos) will eventually come to you.

The life cycle can be bad too, particularly for giving anybody an excuse to use the words ‘frog spawn’ legitimately in conversation.

My assault on the Internet appears to be similarly predictable, arriving and dissipating in bursts of mediocrity as it so often seems to.

So, the as yet unranked news is this: I’m back.

There’s a hitch, however, in that somewhere in the past 10 months my ability to write cohesively or interestingly has dried up like a desert prune.

The neural synapses that used to fire at least a little bit whenever I was thinking about words tend to, these days, sputter like farts in an elevator.

People say writing is like riding a bike; you never forget how to do it.

Also, it’s dangerous at high speeds.

I tend to disagree on two counts.

First of all, it is entirely possible to forget how to ride a bike.

Been there, zig-zagged into that frangipani tree.

Secondly, riding a bike is comparatively easy, even though I can still get it wrong.

Foot, pedal, handlebars and something about the laws of gravity, motion and inertia (quickly learned in the brief moments after being flung forward over the handlebars).

Writing is somewhat more complex.

There are some 400,000 combinations of four-letter words that can be made from our 26-letter alphabet and that’s to say nothing of the two, three, five, six, seven letter and so on combinations.

This in turn says nothing of the combination of words in sentences, the almost infinite permutations giving rise to a spectrum of quality the likes of which could take your breath away.

And many combinations, for that matter, that wouldn’t.

We’ve all heard the thought experiment of an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters eventually recreating all the great works of literature.

This is true.

The only reason it hasn’t been proven yet is because nobody makes typewriters anymore.

So, the real trick of writing is not to fall into the trap of statistical largesse.

It’s easier to be bad – those monkeys weren’t hammering out Shakespeare on the first attempt – then it is to be good.

The point being, I can’t just come in here slinging words around anymore than I can mash my hands against the magnetic word poetry sets on your cousin’s refrigerator and call it art.

Or can I?

Welcome to the Ambiguity Report.