‘I think you’ll find it’s by Henrik Ibsen. And I think you’ll find Gabbler is spelt, and indeed pronounced, with just the one b.’
6 p.m. Oh, fuck. Just googled Hedda Gabbler and it IS by Henrik Ibsen and spelt with one b but ‘Hedda Gabbler by Anton Chekhov’ is now all over the front page of everyone’s script. Never mind. If nobody at Greenlight has noticed it, there’s no point telling them now. I can always pretend it was intelligent irony.
9.15 p.m. Kitchen table is covered in charts. These are the charts as follows:
CHART ONE – DAY HOMEWORK IS ISSUED
e.g. Monday: maths, word problems and suffixes, for Tuesday morning. Tuesday: Indian god colouring and evaluate Craft and Design – bread, mice, etc.
CHART TWO – DAY HOMEWORK IS TO BE DELIVERED
CHART THREE
Possibly redundant chart, attempting to incorporate elements of both Chart One and Chart Two using different colours.
CHART FOUR – WHAT HOMEWORK SHOULD IDEALLY BE DONE ON WHICH DAY
e.g. Monday: draw and colour ‘family crest’ for the ‘ic’ Suffix Family. Colour in Indian god’s arms.
Ooh, doorbell.
11 p.m. Was Jude, in a traumatized state, falling inside and wandering shakily downstairs.
‘He wants me to tell him to lick things,’ she said dully, slumping on my sofa, clutching her phone, staring morbidly ahead.
Obviously I had to stop everything and listen. Turns out Snowboarderguy, with whom it has been going quite well for three weeks now, has suddenly revealed he is into sexual humiliation.
‘Well! That’s all right!’ I said comfortingly, putting a delicate swirl in the froth of her decaffeinated Nespresso ristretto cappuccino, feeling, as always with my new Christmas Nespresso machine, slightly like a barista in Barcelona.
‘You could tell him to lick . . . you!’ I said, handing her the beautifully constructed beverage.
‘No. He wants me to say things like, “Lick the soles of my shoes, lick out the toilet bowl.” I mean, it’s just not hygienic.’
‘You could get him to do useful things like housework. Maybe not the toilet bowl, but washing-up!’ I said, trying to put the gravity of her situation above my own hurt feelings at not having my cappuccino-froth design praised, or at least commented upon.
‘I’m not having him lick my washing-up.’
‘He could lick it to get the worst off, then put it in the dishwasher?’
‘Bridget. He wants to be sexually humiliated, not wash the dishes.’
Was desperate to cheer her up, particularly as everything was now going so well for me.
‘Isn’t there something humiliating you might enjoy?’ I said, as if persuading Mabel to go to a children’s party. ‘What about . . . blindfolds?’
‘No, he says he doesn’t like the 50 Shades stuff. It has to be, like, I’m just making him feel disgusting. Like he said he wanted me to tell him he had a really small penis. It’s just not normal.’
‘No,’ I had to concede. ‘That’s not really normal.’
‘Why did he have to wreck it? Everyone meets online now. Turning out to be nuts is such a cliché.’
She threw her iPhone crossly onto the table, which knocked into the cappuccino and completely ruined my design on the froth.
‘It’s a zoo out there,’ she said, staring morbidly into space.
DIRECTION!
Tuesday 14 May 2013
1 p.m. Just nipped to Oxford Street, delighted to find that Mango, Topshop, Oasis, Cos, Zara, Aldo, etc. have all read the same edition of Grazia as me! Looking at the real-life clothes after so long looking at the websites was almost like seeing film stars in real life after seeing them in magazines. Now have full celebrity-at-airport outfit comprising skinny jeans, ballet pumps, shirt, blazer and sunglasses though not the – perhaps requisite – enormous overpriced handbag.
Wednesday 15 May 2013