#bridgetbythebridge

#greatful

 

No spelling mistake, all puns intended, I meant that. I am GREATful. I’m doing great and I am grateful. 

It is likely down to having had a bit of a rough start to 2014; a bit of a rough start being a loose way of describing the cataclysmic, cosmic slap in the face I was dealt last year. At almost this exact time in 2013, I was winging my way to Sydney with no job, no real prospects of a new one and having just been informed that I’d be moving out of my mouldy, rotting French flat. Unemployed and homeless; how’s that for an ego-crushingly spectacular way to start a new year.

They say that you have to grit your teeth and bear the angst and the anger of the bile-rising downs to recognise the sparkling joy and unicorn giggles of the ups. On the 30^th December 2013, when I boarded a plane in Sydney bound for Paris and total uncertainty, I’m not sure I would have agreed with them. Almost 12 months later, safely on the other side of the Temple of Doom, I will grudgingly accept that they are right. #bridgetadmitsdefeat

I’m having a blast kids! I’ve got a flat on the river, I’ve got an accountant and I’ve got a corn on my right pinkie-toe from stomping the city; traversing the town from the brick facades of the East to the white columns in the West.

This will likely be my last one for 2014; it will certainly be the last one in England. So this is the one where I tot up the events, remember the nights before and the mornings after. This is the one where I say Thank you.

London. From Greenwich

 

 

Behind every Great woman there is an even Greater army of professionals who keep her in order, safe from bad hair days, fluffy eyebrows and the grisly eye-socket halos of last night’s Pinot Grigio. Thank you to the man that whips the curls into a coiff, who transformed the brash and brassy blonde into a brasher, bolshier brunette. Thank you David of Blenheim. Karolina, the only human to attend to my netherest of regions, thanks to you. Karolina who can convert even the most traumatically embarrassing, eye-wateringly painful and just plain legs in the air while she looks up there depilatory act into a laugh a minute storytelling sojourn on her plastic bed of hair and hilarity. Thank you to all the girls at Groom for not asking why my nails are painted two different colours. Thank you girls for screaming with me like a gaggle of tweens high on coke, when we ogled Louis Tomlinson puffing as we were buffing. 

Thank you to my new very adult accountant Michael, who is working out how to get my money out of France without handing over one half to Hollande and the other half to Cameron. Thank you Alexandra who bleaches my bathtub and thank you to Waitrose for home-delivering my wine. #notsurethatsagoodthing Most especially thank you James at the door. James, a tall burly, blonde hulk of a man who checks me in and out of the Material Mansion, always asking after my health and wellbeing, is sort of like a husband, sort of like a big brother, sort of reassuring in a gigantic metropolis that someone knows I’m gone and expects me home each evening.

I have a Great job. I work with Great people and do Great work. It is satisfying to contribute positively to the advancement of humanity even if I’m not a heart surgeon. I help get people jobs and apparently I make the whole nervy process a bit of a laugh. So well known for my ‘candidate care’ I’ve been nicknamed The Fluffer. I get them nice and ready before they go on camera, attending to their every need. I have been back and forth to the US and am fully stocked up on Advil PM. I’ve been to Dublin more times than I can remember, the memory suffering a bit after all that black beer. Most importantly for me, I’m learning again, my brain is wired and inspired. I meet people all day long and learn more about us every day. I am genuinely Greatful for the nutters that sit by my side. I’m most especially Greatful to The Duchess of Hertfordshire, my Girl Friday who hugs me when I cry, who understands (and acts upon) my unique blend of posh-sweary-strine and who is a golden delight to be near… every single day.

I’m thankful to England for welcoming home her second-generation daughter. I’m thankful for the BBC; they should just buy the television for the whole world and rid of us all that tripe and shite. I’m thankful for mouth-itchingly-tangy cheddar cheese and The Borough Market. I’m thankful for Strictly, for Graham Norton, for Olly Murs and I’m on my knees in gratitude to the five beautiful boys of One Direction. Especially that Harry, my mind wanders…I’m thankful for the big red buses and the overstuffed tube but I am more Greatful for my long walks along the Thames in the sunshine. Watching that salty, grey water flush its way up and down the muddy banks has calmed my frayed nerves and softened my hard edges. #watermakeseverythingbetter

I’m overjoyed to have new kids to play with!

The Ausholes and I have made a little circle of laughter and light in the dark. We see each other every couple of weeks, drink our weights in wine and compete for the crassest crack, the most perverse pun and the best devilishly deviant double-entendre. Sunshine’s giggles, his Raphaelite Romeo’s blue eyes and The Mangineer’s naughty-sexy eye-sparkling smirk fill my world with smut and I love them for it. #itsthenextbestthing    

A special shout for The Critique, my partner in plays, my sister in Shakespeare, my girlfriend at the gala. We met Benedict, ogled Armitage and flicked Freeman’s sweat of our shoulders. And we went to the Theatre too! She’s brought me back weeping, laughing and on one memorable occasion snoring (jetlag), to a world I love; a world chock-full of words, of intermission whispers and of whistling at her new puppy.

I’m Greatful to the expatriés who followed me through the Tunnel to the Tower. New Girl moved in the summer and made friends with Tartan Tom. The Body will be here soon and we’re all working hard on getting Braveheart to upgrade and move across the ditch so he can wear his kilt in public un-ironically. Those that haven’t made the move permanently have still been over to visit, Louis tried and failed to colonise Great Britain and The Fashionista screamed louder than Queen. To my Tequila Sister and Apollo, we’ve had a rough year, but I came through and you will too. #fruitshouldbegoodforyou 

But a girl wants only one thing, and that is to be loved. #bridgetsbigbeatingheart

 

San Sebastian. In the sun.

 

I’m so needy, so weepy and so hormonally charged with hysteria that I need two families to fill me with the requisite love to keep on holding my battered brolly strong against the shitstorm. My beloved Belloncles, Papa, Maman and Q, who filled my nostrils with lavender in Provence, stuffed my belly with fish in Marseille and smacked my eyes with sparkles in San Sebastien, filling the frightening dead-space between The Fruit Company and The Social Network with adventures in the rain and jamming my summer weekends with sunlight and Sancerre.

It’s hard to describe just how much I love these people; indeed most of my friends (and likely theirs) just don’t get it. I haven’t got my dad anymore, so the stern glances from Papa when I spark up, his paternal concern for my sozzled brain and even the time he took my phone off me for 4 days keep me on the straight and narrow. The concerned emails from Maman when she hasn’t heard from me for a few weeks remind me that there are people this side of Sydney who’d miss me if I was gone and even the incessant piss-taking I endure from my French brother Q, who, like the Australian one, never misses an opportunity to put me in my place, are magnificent understudies for the real deal far, far away.

The real deal.

In a week, the only 3 humans who love me despite the rage, the rouge and the tearful deluge will envelope me with sarcasm and I’ll know I’m home. The Smartarse, The Art-sist-olger and my Motherbear will fling their arms around my tired, sloping shoulders, I will mewl like an infant and after a day or two of reclaiming my spot as the butt of the big-forehead jokes, I’ll wish I was back at my Great-home.

The power of their love will push me forward, passionately, purposefully and Pinot-grigio-ly into 2015 and for that I say thank you. 

#stilllife

Louis XIV, dear friend and reigning Monarch of the 17^th Arrondissement, recently visited me in London for a wonderful weekend of food, fun and frolic. He likes to visit London, eat all my Number 5 Waitrose Mature Cheddar and then return home to take advantage of the comparatively free French healthcare and have his arteries unclogged. When he took a short reprieve from cheddar munching during our dinner at the recently opened Mondrian Hotel at Sea Containers, Louis said something that has since been etched on my conscience.

‘Paris is like a museum. It is beautiful, but it hasn’t changed for 100 years’

As a former resident and a lifelong obsessive of the City of Lights, this phrase struck me as perhaps the most pertinent words of truth I’ve heard emanate from Louis’s non-cheddar filled mouth. He, French but not Parisian, is a little less in love with Paris these days. Museums, walls lined with objéts d’art are places one visits for a few hours, maybe even a day, but they aren’t places where one resides. All artifice, all dust cloths and glass display cases, one can’t actually live one’s life with vigour and energy and passion and errant limbs and life-force...one doesn’t live in a museum.

Since I left Paris in March of this year, I’ve been back just three times; a work trip for less than 72 hours and twice more for pleasure, on each occasion having been invited to a friend’s party. In total, I’ve spent 6 nights in a city I called home for well over 6 years. It should actually have been seven nights, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t because ancient things in museums are worth a lot of money and people steal them. Ancient things like the copper in the cables over the train lines between Calais and Paris.

 

Sacré Coeur and the Palais Garnier

Have you ever spent 6 hours in a train that only moved for 2? Have you ever wondered how much piss and shizzle can be poured into a train toilet before it starts to bubble and froth and stench and…well anyway, the answer is about two hours worth. Have you ever wondered how long a French person will sit in a closed space without the right to light up a cigarette? Less time than it takes to block a toilet. #bridgetalmostbarfed

This isn’t the first time that I’ve been stranded on a Eurostar because an opportunistic thief had cut the cables over Lille. The little buggers pinch the copper out of electrically charged train lines. Evidently the copper is even more valuable than, I don’t know, a beating heart?

As I mentioned, this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. The copper gets pinched all the time, the lines aren’t fenced in, lying out in the Normand sun, poaching with the sunflowers, the canola and the bones of a billion dead boys.  On this particular occasion, 8 trains were affected and we’re all getting free return tickets. That is 8 angry crowds of 750 people and at an average of  £150 per ticket, Eurostar will be shelling out a million pounds; money that will be reimbursed by the SNCF who are responsible for maintaining the lines. 

How much do you think it would cost to build fences to prevent people cutting out the copper? Call me crazy, but if French politicians spent as much time maintaining infrastructure as they do maintaining wives, mistresses and high-class sex-workers, the French might want to stay in France? Or maybe they don’t like razor wire fences drawing harsh lines across the bellevues of Normandy? 

After a few choice remarks for the unfortunate folk who work for Eurostar and a decent morning’s sleep, it was time to reacquaint myself with the boulevards, the baguettes and the Beaujolais. #bridgetbythebrasserie

 

The Louvre. A museum.

 

 

Paris, the only city in Europe that remained intact after the Second World War eviscerated the others, is really very, very beautiful. If you’ve seen a movie featuring Paris, you’ll be familiar with the twinkling lights along the Champs Elysees*, the glass domed, tricolore spiked roof of the Grand Palais, the long boats floating up and down the Seine and my personal favourite, the white domes of Sacré Coeur up on the hill. Apart from a handful of notable exceptions^, the entire place was built a century ago. All the buildings are the same design, built from the same stone and only a few are over 6 stories.  Wrap around balconies are reserved for the 1^st and 5^th floors. 

The symmetry, the uniformity and the muted colour palette make for a beautiful canvas upon which to daub the long brown hair and oversized scarves of the parisiennes… and the black smog of a trillion scooters. The canvas, much like the unsmiling face of Mona at the Louvre, is static. In France, still, static, inert, unchanging, classic...they are all euphemisms for beautiful. 

Think of the most famous French designers and you’ll get my point.

Gaultier. In a museum.

 

Gaultier has been churning out a version of the mariniére for three decades. Don’t believe me? Go check out the exhibition in Melbourne where an entire room is dedicated to blue and white striped remixes of the same original T-shirt. A T-shirt that the French Navy has been wearing since the little man led them into battle against Wellington. (Did you know, the original had 27 stripes, one for each of Napoleon’s victories…Wellington would just need one gigantic stripe, more is not always more Nappy man!)

Coco Chanel wore a black dress every day for about 50 years and we’ve been wearing them ever since. Black dresses, bouclé suits, camellias and velvet-strung-pearls have been the staples of Chanel since the thirties. White collared, pony-tailed and gloved, the house of Coco’s current chief, Herr Lagerfeld, has been wearing a version of the same Dandy suit for almost as long.

LV monogrammed cases, Hermés retina-searing tangerine totes and Moncler’s vile v-covered valises are all stuck in a time when people paid other people to carry their luggage. A time when they were placed in dedicated wooden luggage racks, not hurled into the undercarriage of an aircraft. They are emblems of an era that, like La Belle Epoque, has gone the way of the Dodo. Unless one of the Grand Maisons is making a 4-wheel drive roll-on case, that ways less than a tube of toothpaste, most people aren’t interested.

And thus begins the lament of the today’s Frenchman.

 

The hustle and bustle of modern times is leading to the gradual extinction of artisanal trades and entrepreneurs. In a few years there will be no one to hand-cobble shoes, no one to whittle your clothespins and no one to French your lamb shanks; it will all have been outsourced to Slovakia just like Renault, Citroen and Peugeot. #quellehorreur

People the world over visit Paris for a few days to gape and gawp at her inert beauty. They meander through the corridors of castles and galleries and avenues in awe. But the tourists don’t live there, they take their photos and then they all go home…just as I did today. 

I’m going home to London where St Paul’s Dome and The Tower’s Turrets compete for skyline supremacy with The Gherkin and The Cheese-Grater. I’m going home to London where I have a choice between hand sliced cheese at the market or the convenience of home-delivered whatever I feel like. I’m going home to London where taxi drivers invented their own app, twice, to compete with the onslaught of Über. I’m going home to a city that is moving forward; where there’s enough space for me to move around without breaking the porcelain. A city where we all looked at the Poppies, we remembered why they were there, but then they were taken away to make space for new memories.    

 

Poppies. Midway through the moving installation.

 

 

London isn’t perfect, far from it. London is overcrowded and over-polluted and overstuffed with crappy clothes from Swedish chain stores. But it is moving. Like ballet, and ballroom and running dogs and babies learning to walk; moving is my kind of beautiful.

 

 

 

*Did you know that means Elysian Fields…as in, heaven for ancient Romans? Well now you do. 

^Each built by a recent president, you can identify the phallic column of Valery Giscard-D’Estaing’s Tour Montparnasse, George Pompidou’s ridiculous Gallery, Mitterrand’s Pyramid at the Louvre and Chirac’s giant pot-plant, the Quai Branly Museum

#materialgirl

 

This past week, I, like you, like everyone else on this rolling rock that has access to an internet connected device, and no doubt some who don’t, awoke to the naked image of Kim Kardashian thrust upon my weary consciousness for time eternal. As I am wont to do when rudely awoken by naked gleaming vaginas, I posted a snarky something-or-other on Facebook. An hour later, clamping the bench seat of my red cabin, many metres above East London in a cable car^, I wondered how many of my Facebook friends might agree.

Some did. Some no doubt ignored me for being old, out of touch with what the kids are up to, a fuddy-duddy pearl-clutcher or worse still, a feminist.

Most interestingly, by way of riposte to my snarky remark, my brother, father of a pre-teen daughter, replied in the comments with a picture of a near-naked Madonna. It was his way of putting my overly vocal opinions and me back in a tacit box (all puns intended). His way of reminding me that Madonna, my girlhood idol, did much the same as Kim, exposing herself for fame, for money and for notoriety. But Madonna, unlike Kornea Kancer, possesses more than a modicum of talent.

Dedicated to my dear brother, known in these pages as The Smartarse, I’ve moved up the scale of progesterone fuelled rage from snarky asides to full blown bra-burning filibuster. Hold onto your Earl Grey, she’s about to go postal.

 

 

Manet, a later, equally scandalous version of Titian

 

 

 

In no way shape or form do I object to full frontal, or partial, or possible, nudity. I find the human form beauteous in all iterations of its myriad forms. That sentient cells covered in skin can be grown inside a sack of blood, hurtled at speed against a car bumper or penetrated by platinum pellets…and still ambulate, is nature’s (not God’s) most exceptional and exquisite achievement. I love necks, I love pecs and I love the fleeting flecks of brown I have dotted all over me, each little stain a memory of some day or other in the sun, swimming, my opalescent skin visibly excited by the cool touch of the sea. 

Bums, large and small, male or female, seen wandering off into a bedroom door are like an invitation to open an envelope of lust and love and lusciousness and are best observed betwixt the pages of the French Rugby Team Calendar (NSFW). Bums…like boobs, perfect pairs of clutchable carnality.

I think boobs are at their very best when unctuously spilling over the hardened pearl encrusted line of a bodice, something about the hard and the soft, the juxtaposition of stiffened tissue and soft, creamy white flesh. Maybe its my unnatural obsession with Colin Firth in a cravat or a fatalistic obsession with Anne Boleyn or more likely its because the favourite photo I have of myself, taken through the excellent lens of the Art-sis-tologer, is a black and white of me, in a boned red corset, boobs front and centre like the prow of a pirate ship. I reckon I give good décolletage.

I think penises and vaginas need context to be beautiful. Context in the human form of Fassbender can make any appendage attractive c.f. Shame. Context in the painted form of Titian’s very famous Venus of Urbino is a pretty perfect depiction of the naked female form c.f. The Uffizi in Florence. But a portrait of a flaccid penis while interesting isn’t the most attractive thing I might imagine and a close up of a vagina à la Courbet is more biological than beautiful.

So I can categorically assure you that I was not offended, affronted or outraged by The Kountess of Krass and her Komical Kackle. My first actual thought was isn’t she shiny! My second was that her boobs were very much bigger than I had expected. In both cases, I expect, my questions should be addressed to the postproduction team rather than the slippery subject herself.

I wasn’t offended; I was bored. I was apathetic. I was genuinely uninterested in the breaking of the Internet by someone whose biggest claim to fame is her excellence at making very famous friends. And even that is most likely credited to her mother. #mommyknowsbest

Then my brother compared the grinning, slickened Kim to Madonna, mid-performance-live-on-stage-gyration and I was angry. Every one of my hackles rose, he had bated me with a thrown down gauntlet and I wished I were geographically close enough to throw something at his head. That had been an effective method of keeping him quiet when the three of us shared a bedroom. #wheresmycabbagepatchkid

 
 

It is 30 years this week since Madonna released the song that got her kicked off the stage in Rome by an outraged Pope. Like a Virgin was released when I was eight. I had the cassette tape; I had fingerless lace gloves and teased, frizzy hair. I wanted, more than a “Barbie and the Rocker”, a tutu/wedding dress, but had to make do with a frilled skirt and a singlet. Madonna, had there have been an Internet in 1984, would no doubt have broken it, but she didn’t, she couldn’t. Madonna had to work her very, very small, oft exposed arse off to get anywhere near the record companies and MTV executives that would be bought, sold and schmoozed into selling her songs or buying her highly risqué music videos.

Madonna is a trained dancer, she had been accepted into university to study contemporary dance but moved to New York to pursue her dream and take her first steps into what we now know to be world mad-domination. She has, over the past 3 decades, worked tirelessly to reinvent her image, she’s toured the world 9 times (except bloody Australia) and she’s directed a couple of atrocious films.

I agree, sometimes she gets it catastrophically wrong, especially the film bit. I can’t say I’m a committed fan of her lengthy political speeches about love and hashtag rebel hearts and how we can overthrow it all with naked raving. But you have to give it to her; the woman is phenomenally talented. She can bang out a damn fine pop song and put on a spectacle of a show. You don’t have to love her, but without her gyrating in a Venetian gondola 30 years ago, there’d be no Kylie, no Gaga and perhaps no Britney. #notsadaboutthatone

She also gave a big-eyed eight-year-old girl a reason to ask her mother what virgin meant. It was a conversation that would lead to a premature understanding of the sexual act but at least I wasn’t shagging Shane in the Grace Bros carpark.*

Ten years later, and arguably the precursor to KUWTK, Madonna’s Truth or Dare was her fly-on-the-wall documentary of the Blonde Ambition, “touching herself” tour. The now boring and largely uninteresting image of her fellating a wine bottle or being snubbed by a pre-Melanie Antonio Banderas is now so passé as to be childish. Sucking on a bottle isn’t half as shocking as seeing Kim do it for real in her pre-Kanye sextape. Madonna ogling Antonio isn’t half as schadenfreude-y (that really was the only word) as Paris Hilton’s incessant 140 character jibes at her former lady lieutenant.

Madonna did it first, she made a whole book of naked pictures, and she backed it up with actual skill. Gaga does it today and sings torch songs live with Tony Bennett. Fassbender goes full frontal but backs it up with a stellar performance in every fucking film (pun, yes, intended) he makes. I take my clothes off every day. If you don’t believe me, you can come over at 5am when I wake up to shower before another full day at work earning the living that supports me, some of my family and infuriatingly, still, after a year away, some of France. A living I earn based on the power of my mind, my body and my genuine desire to improve the lives of the people around me. 

 

So yes brotherdearest, I was angry that you would compare the two. Without Madonna, Kim and her sisters wouldn’t exist. Madonna may have sung a song about a Material World, but Kim, her cheap handbag sponsorships, her wedding selfies and her Internet not-really-breaking-pictures actually made it real.

 

 

 

 

^This week my commute took me 90 metres above London. This Emirates Air line isn’t so much double-decker dirigible directed down under as cable car creek crossing

 

*A closet conservative, Motherbear was less concerned about us practising sex as she was us ever having it in ‘The Grace Bros carpark’