At least once a day I drift into a blissful daydream about Serge Gainsbourg where we re-enact scenes from Histoire De Melody Nelson and generally jump around having fun and doing suitably Gallic 60′s things like smoking Gitanes and running along cobbled streets while breathlessly laughing.

Most people who I tell about my Serge love do a double take. “Serge? Gainsbourg? The ‘Je t’aime’ guy?” then they screw up their faces and tell me how perverted he was or about the Whitney Houston incident. Once or twice I’ve even been told how he evilly coerced France Gall into singing a song about blow jobs, which she innocently thought was about lollipops. On the latter count all I have to say is really, France? Really? Pull the other one. Fair enough, the guy made some pretty tasteless photo shoot choices with Jane Birkin (his then wife) and he did make that really creepy song ‘Lemon Incest’ with his daughter, but the overall impression one gets of Gainsbourg is a highly sexed man who loved women, and his family, who’s work ranged from the classic, to the sublime, the surreal, and beyond. Unlike most modern pop stars who hide behind a façade of respectability Gainsbourg was honest, painfully so and saw no reason to sugar coat his preferences. No matter what I hear about him, listening to the raw passion in his voice as he sings Ballade De Melody Nelson smoothes away any of his rough edges, and makes it so easy to retreat back into my black and white dream.

Of course I have crushes other than Serge and his knee shakingly beautiful voice: in fact one of my other long-term loves is Slash from Guns N’Roses, specifically during G’n'R’s 1987 Ritz gig. The thing is Slash now, and Slash at any time after 1987, has mutated into a bit of jerk. He writes self-indulgent biographies detailing what a prick he was, and how much he hates Axl Rose, as the two of them frequently argue in public about the most mindlessly petty things.

While I’m happy to point out that Gainsbourg was a very different person to the shambling greasy perv he is made out to be I have no desire to do the same with Slash. Its because I don’t care about Slash now; I have no interest in how he’s matured as a person, what he did after Use Your Illusion, how he feels about being in any of his subsequent bands, none of that crap. It’s also because Serge is dead so it’s easier to idolise him.

1987 Slash was a the perfect pin-up, the pinnacle of everything he’d ever be in public at least, so if I Doc Brown from came whizzing by in his DeLorean and asked me where I wanted to go it’d be to the Ritz, to stand right at the front, in a leopard print bodystocking, frantically swiping at Slash as he leant over the crowd. After he’d picked me out for some one on one post show backstage treatment, I’d hop in the DeLorian and be happy to wake up back in 2010. Obviously I’m hoping that this has no major repercussions on the world’s time line, although even if it did affect Slash in some profound way G’n'R had already written and recorded Appetite for Destruction so I think everything would work out fine. Who really needs November Rain anyway?

Time paradoxes aside, having Slash and Serge as my top two crushes creates awkward conversations when these sorts of subjects come up, those typical late night ‘guilty pleasures’ conversations. Other people’s secret crushes are people like the mild mannered Zachary Quinto, or wooden Stephen Moyer; people so nice and evenly mannered that my choices make me seem like an unstable masochist. However I’m unlikely to change my allegiances soon, and even if Slash came out with a bizarre Mel Gibson style rant I’d still fantasize about that half hour spent with sweaty top-hatted Slash in a backstage room in 1987.

You see it’s a fantasy, I don’t know anything about either of them; Serge could have been a puppy kicking maniac in his spare time, Slash could be personally doling out soup to street orphans every night, it’s all academic. Their politics, their views on women’s lib, bleh, I couldn’t give a toss. I just want to dream about fun, French accents, and deft fingers. And why not? Why make it realistic? Why can’t we in our fantasies seperate the real from the imaginary and give the people we find beautiful every attribute we’d like them to have in real life?

Do any of you have a genuinely guilty pleasure of a crush? If so tell! To those of you who can’t make the quantum leap, I say try, or at least make your dreamboats less mundane!

Further Reading:
Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons
Slash: The Autobiography by Slash and Anthony Bozza

Further Listening:
Histoire De Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg – Spotify
Appetite For Destruction by Guns N’Roses   – Spotify
A brief Serge Gainsbourg sampler I made on Spotify, otherwise look for the Initials S.G compliation.

It seems that no matter what time I leave work my bus is full of teenagers. No matter if it’s girls or boys, they’re always talking about girls: who’s a slut, who’s a priss, who’s not even worth mentioning. On and on and on. I feel like I know about the sexual lives of every teenager in Dalston at the moment. No matter how hard I bury my nose in a book I hear them, “She slept with him yesterday is it?” “Oh, my, god! What a slut!!!” Nice girls, nice.

This is something that I guess I keep going over on this blog: what the fuck is a slut? What does that word even mean? As I’m too much of a nerd to ask the teenagers themselves I turned to the next best thing: Urban Dictionary.

This is by far the most popular answer. A slightly confusing backhanded compliment, but hey, it’s not terrible just sort of shitty.

Things get worse however…

Leaving aside the idea that someone could disassociate from their body quite at will (can someone teach me that?) this is a textbook definition and raises so many questions. Why does engaging in sex frequently and sharing your body with more than a handful of people make sex less special? What makes someone’s sexual preferences discriminatory? What about all those girls who make their boyfriends wait and wait and wait and then get cheated on, treated badly, and dumped? Should they have worked harder beforehand? Probably not. If you give it up on the first date or after the wedding it doesn’t make a shit of difference. Some people are douchebags, some people will be horrible to you. Sometimes you can sniff them out in seconds and sometimes it takes years. The amount of time you wait between meeting them and getting acquainted with their genitals makes no damned difference.

Now for ‘meaning and significance’. I think that often sex can be likened to food. Some meals you wolf down, on the run, barely tasting them or appreciating them, others, like Christmas dinner, leave lasting memories each time it’s consumed.

Sex is the same. Sometimes yes, it has meaning and significance, the first time you have sex after you fall really truly in love with someone is magic. For me in that moment the whole world seems to stop and there’s a lightbulb over head feeling: this is it, this is me and the person I love being totally, utterly together. It’s one of the most precious moments you’ll ever have, I think. I don’t know what having a baby is like, but I guess it’s like a non sexual version of that. With added pain.

But yes, sex can have meaning it can have significance, it can be an exploration of trust, an episode of mutual discovery, and a fun filled rollercoaster ride, sometimes all of the above at once. And other times it can be like scratching an itch. An itch you just can’t let alone. Do you have to scratch that itch with someone who understands you? Who likes you? Who thinks you’re hot? One out of 3 generally isn’t bad, but no, not really. Sex is sex, a strange, heady concoction that  can be tied up with emotions and meaningfulness, but mostly is about being in the moment and something going on around your genitals.

Firstly: chill the fuck out! That guy was being nice to you, and you just pissed on his dreams!

Secondly… what people say about sluts, and by extension sex, says so much more about themselves than ‘sluts’. Here we have someone equating sex with personal validation. The intricate way that her self-view is built into her idea of sex makes me think that for her having sex is a minefield: she at once wants to be accepted and loved and sees sex as a way of expressing this, but is also caught up in the idea that to give it away means that she doesn’t respect herself. She’s trying to withhold sex in order to get sex. Confusing? You bet.

FYI ‘man’ next time you see that lady give her a hug, she needs it.

SHIT! WE’RE ALL SLUTS!!!! Not you men. Don’t worry, you’re safe.

Amen. Read it, memorise it, and if neccessary tell people it, but in a more condensed manner because it’s kind of long, and leave out the bit about nipples showing, because sometimes we just can’t help it ok?

Stop calling other girls sluts, stop judging people by how many people they’ve slept with, and stop using it as a catch all insult. If you must call someone something nasty, and sometimes you must, then get creative! Call them a slinky eyed bottom feeding mouth breather, a higgedy piled rust bucket of pity, or a banana split on a cupcake, whatever feels right!

Or just move to Sweden and start confusing people.

Between the ages of 12 and 17 I was kissed precisely three times. First after my 12 birthday by my childhood crush (I screamed and kicked him in the legs) then aged 17 at a party where I got so drunk I passed out face down on the grass. The third time was by the person I would later lose my virginity to.

Most of my teenage years had been spent wondering why no-one wanted to kiss me. Ok so I was spotty and had bushy hair, but around age 15 I’d tamed my eyebrows and shrugged off the thick tortoiseshell glasses in favour of contact lenses, and yet offers were still thin on the ground. When I met my first boyfriend 3 weeks before my 18th birthday I realised he didn’t just want to kiss me while I was sloppy drunk. He wanted to hang out, talk rubbish, and watch telly with me. While we’d talked about lots of things on our 3 dates, but we’d not talked about whether I was virgin or not; it just hadn’t come up in conversation. For two whole weeks I thought about whether we would do it soon or not. If I told him that I’d never done it before I was worried he’d want to make it ‘special’ and there was nothing worse in my mind. Rose petals and candles might do it for some girls but even then I knew they’d just make me laugh. Though the majority of my friends weren’t doing it I wanted to. I knew it was going to be great: adults never stopped talking about sex. There was a big secret in the world and I wanted in on it.

Providence was on my side.

My parents inexplicably went to Brazil for two weeks just after I started dating the boy. I called all my friends and told them that I was home alone and having a party. On Saturday night teenagers turned up in droves, clutching corner shop bottles of vodka and Panda Pops, and we drank ourselves silly. Sometime around 2am half a dozen of us were left to sober up and clean the house. After a cursory tidy we decided to heat up a pizza from the freezer. Everybody, minus the boy and I, went to the kitchen to figure out how exactly this would happen. We looked at each other and got down to some hardcore making out. As he scrabbled at my top I suddenly thought to myself “Oh my god, we could do it right now. Here. In my front room. On the sofa.” I pushed the door shut with my foot. We had sex.

For the next few days I wandered round thinking even harder than before. So that was sex. It must get better. Maybe I would figure out what to do, or he would, or maybe something would change inside me and it’d be like all those late night movies: thrashing, hair gone wild, screaming, that sort of thing. I still didn’t tell the boy it was my first time, I didn’t really care if he knew or not. He was my boyfriend, he cared about me and we were still going out. I figured adult life was going to be pretty awesome. I think I was right.

(Picture from Radioactive Lingerie)

When I was a kid I told my mum that when I grew up I wanted ‘a red car, red dress, and red stilettos’ much like, it turns out, Cassandra in Wayne’s World. Though she looks totally sweet in a hair metal groupie sort of way, and I have always admired the work of Bebe Buelle and Sable Starr, I’ve found over the years that I’ve gravitated towards clothes with much less stretch lace, and a lot of bows and ruffles. Gradually the older I become the more childish my clothing choices. Only the other day I was thinking about getting my hair cut and the only photo I could find that in any way related to what I wanted was the youngest girl from The Chronicles of Narnia. Looking at that photo I would actually kill to own that cardi and dress too. Phwoar. Amazing.

Although wearing childish clothes could imply I’m some sort of infantilised, sexless, girl-child, forever trying to recapture a youth I never really had, it couldn’t be further from the truth. I don’t want to start deconstructing my outfit choices because I dread turning this post into Pseuds Corner, but it seems that both men and women are obsessed with judging people on the way they dress. It is apparently imperative that we all have a distinguishable look, one that is solid, unchangeable, and instantly recognisable. There is not scope for moods, changes of attitude, or concessions to comfort. If you want to look sexy, and attract men for one night stands (it appears) you need to wear something short, tight, or low-cut, and preferably all three. If you wear glasses you could maybe be a ‘sexy secretary‘ (extremely NSFW link!!! hint: it features a video of Sasha Grey) but if you fail that test you’re relegated to quirky, cutesy, or worse: interesting. Wait, you can only be one of these things by the way! If you were both things surely that would mean you were not only sentient and possibly interesting but also a sexual creature. Madness. We all know these things can’t go hand in hand.

I’m not saying men get off much better than women in this ridiculous charade, however the manners in which men have to dress to be considered sexy, seem to be a lot less time consuming than they are for women. Really everyone gets a bum deal, forcing us all to either feel dour and neutered or constantly on and aware of our sexuality. What we need to do is recognise that much like with sex itself different things can make different people’s heads turn. Whether its a ruffle along a neckline, or an pea-coat hitting a hipbone at a certain angle there’s something to float everyone’s sartorial boat.

Someday, in my uterus, where nothing other than blood, lining, and maybe a few lonely sperm cells have been, there may be, A BABY. Although I don’t particularly want one any time soon, or for a long time at all really, the thought sometimes enters my head and plagues me for days. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m getting older and more mature friends but I know of a handful of people pregnant in real life, and a few of my favourite bloggers are either getting ready to, or have just popped one out.

Excited as I am for them the idea of one day having one of my own freaks me out. Making a life? With someone else? And then looking after it for the next eighteen years MINIMUM? BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR CREATING SOMEONE WHO WILL ONE DAY GO ON TO BE A MEMBER OF SOCIETY? I’m having palpitations at the mere thought of it. What if you or your future baby daddy has a disease that you didn’t know about and you give it to your kid? Or you fuck them up badly when you thought you were parenting them in all the right ways? What if you drop the baby, or feed it the wrong thing? What if you just don’t love it?

But never mind any of that what about being pregnant? My mum said that she watched Alien not long after conceiving me, and sometimes when I kicked she would freak out and worry that I was an alien going to burst out of her stomach. It’s a thought I return to frequently when I see my friends bursting out of their dresses, waddling to the supermarket. They look amazing, but what if? what if?

People have always been around pushing babies out left, right and centre, which leads me to believe it really can’t be that bad. I try to soothe my anxiety related thoughts by telling myself that if it was so dreadful people would have stopped once effective contraception had been discovered, and we’d have slowly died out as a race.

So many people make it look like a fun, enjoyable way to spend time, rewarding even, but then there are the slew of programmes

that make it look like the worst idea you’ve ever had. In fact anything involving teenagers, or god forbid teenagers having babies, makes it look like hell.

All in all I think my paralysing fear of having a baby because it will a) inhabit my body like a parasitic host, b) change my life FOREVEREVER, is a good thing. This way I’m extra vigilant about making sure I don’t get in the club, and if and when it does happen I’ll have thought about it so much over the years that hopefully I won’t fuck it up. Or maybe I’ll fuck it up worse? Oh no, now a whole new can of worms has opened up in my brain!!

I really need to stop watching things like Teen Mom, 16 and Pregnant, Kizzy: Mum at 14, and reading things like Love It!, Hello, and old issues of Closer, and looking at other people’s baby’s with a stink eye while on the bus. I might get a reputation…

I have no idea where either the photo of Dakota Fanning or Lindsay Lohan came from, sorry!

1. Call an ex.
Speaking to your ex will only make your current singledom all the more unbearable, and if you’re foolish enough to meet up bad things could happen. Worse than sex things. Like telling him how lonely you are, how much you miss him, or that you think you’re (still) in love with him. Or you could do all that WHILE having sex with him! Eek!

2. Go to the cinema.
While a good film can pull most people out of even the darkest moods, going when you are feeling like Bubbles without Michael is a terrible idea. Almost every film has a romantic subplot, and crying over Couples Retreat or Crank 3 is only going to make you feel more pathetic than you need to.

3. Tell a friend who has a boyfriend that you’re lonely.
While this person will, at first, be all ears and you’ll feel like your black little heart is about to be unburdened, you will eventually feel obliged to ask how their boyfriend is, and then that crashing feeling will smother you again.

4. Clear out your room.
It might seem like a good idea, out with the old, in with the new, that crap, but once you start uncovering all the books and t-shirts he lent you you’ll be sat, a gibbering wreck on the floor wailing about dying alone with cats.

5. Log onto Facebook.
Why let an endlessly updated stream of other people’s happy lives mock yours? Oh look! It’s Clara and her boyfriend snuggling in Devon on a long weekend. Isn’t that lovely?

Look, just light a fag, crack open a beer, and scream along to Live Through This till you think you might puke. You can thank me later.

Photo by Dash Snow.

When I was a teenager I thought I wanted fast cars, fast people, bright lights and the big city. My life was so mundane that I wanted someone to come and sweep me away into a new one. So I waited patiently for someone to spin my world around but they didn’t come. My brain constantly resembled a Louise Rennison book: hearts on everything, glitter drenched rainbows over all my dreams. Despite being SO SO IN LOVE all the time I was terrified that someone prettier, or cooler, or smarter, or skinnier, would come along all the time. After all what could anyone want with me when they could be with some raven headed pixie girl who ran her own magazine from the garret of a Georgian mansion?

Biding my time hoping to be dazzled made me bored and grumpy: I was now in my twenties and still waiting. Every day was unbearable. Then I had a revelation. One evening, a shitty rainy Wednesday, against my better judgement I went to see a gig with a friend. At 4am I was standing wrapped in a nothing but a shower curtain on a burning hotel mattress while skinheads danced around me trying to douse the flames with brandy, all of us singing and laughing. And that’s when I realised it: I could be my own adventure.

Maybe it shouldn’t have taken causing a few grand’s worth of damage to an innocent hotel room to realise that but it did. No-one was going to come along and ‘save’ me because I didn’t need saving. All the excitement I wanted was there for the taking: I just needed to reach out and touch it. I’m not saying it’s been some smooth ride since then, nor am I going to claim that my life is a high octane thrill ride, but it’s a damned sight better than looking at every face trying to figure out if they are the one who’s going to inject the glamour into my life. The reason I was so scared of that girl in the garret? She was out there, doing things, not waiting to be found, and I was horribly jealous.

It is killing me to type this, it really is, but waiting to be driven appears to be a, whisper it, girl thing. Boys don’t seem to plan on a jazzy girl coming along and changing everything in their life, unless they’re in an indie film, and then it’ll just be to teach them to get in touch with their feelings (don’t mind me while I barf over here). I don’t want to use the words ‘knight in shining armour’ but that’s exactly what it is.  Whether it’s Josh in Clueless rescuing Cher from a life of braindead inanity, or Robin saving Helen from a lifetime of bogey eating in Wetlands, there’s always a man ready to take the wheel and continue the drive. Even in adverts women are constantly being rescued.

But what happens after the credits roll? Once you’ve finished being thankful for your saviour where do you go from there? When I meet my Future Baby Daddy I don’t want to kick it while he decides the course; I want us to be co-pilots, bobsledders, tandem cyclists, or possibly even runners in a three legged race. If I’m hammering this point a bit much it’s because it’s important!! All these stupid dating books I’m reading (for you! not for me! I hate them!), and all the advice I get from my friends, tells me that if I wait ‘he’ will come. Why do I have to wait? If I can take control of my life in every other way then why can’t I take control here? Waiting turns us into slaves to romance. Waiting makes fools of women, it takes us back to the predator/prey idea of relationships, and belittles the efforts that we make to meet someone new.

It’s hard not waiting, almost as hard as waiting, and there are books, tv shows, and nosey old ladies on the bus, who are going to tell you “When you least expect it, they’ll come along, and then everything’ll change!” but I’d rather be getting on with my life and living it the best way I know how, than counting the days on my calendar until he comes along.

Photos by Yann Faucher, blog title stolen from Heartsrevolution‘s awesome song C.Y.O.A

In the first of what will hopefully be many videos my lovely lovely best friend Alexander Fury and I consider the question “Why Am I Single?” That refers to me, sadly, as he has an equally lovely boyfriend. Bastard.
FYI, the choice of such a flowery name for this show will become clear within seconds. Enjoy!

The Heart Has Its Reasons – Episode 1 from Vanessa Danger-Rampling on Vimeo.

I guess it’s always good to start with the classics when going through date locations, after all they’re probably classics for a reason! So let’s start with the timeless dinner date.

Personally I love dinner dates: if you pick the right spot they’re warm, cosy, last just the right amount of time, and if you’re very lucky you might not have to pay the bill. Oh and they involve lovely lovely food, duh!

Firstly DO NOT worry about eating in front of someone! If you envision a future with this person, and I assume you do since you’re going on a date and not just fucking, you will have to eat with them and often. Obviously you want to keep your gob shut while eating, never talk with your mouth full, and avoid anything that is liable to stain your top, but Jesus H Christ you shouldn’t be doing that in public anyway! This isn’t primary school!

Back to the point… I can imagine nothing worse than going somewhere posh and quiet with someone who I hardly knew. Not because I fear smart restaurants, in fact if a man took me to Claridges I’d throw a fit of joy, but because it would be such a difficult place to get to know someone. How could we bond while I worried what side plate to use, and whether I sit straight enough? There’s no way I could offer to pay the bill and so I would feel indebted to the other person which would really set the date up badly in my eyes. FYI: anyone who’s only in dating for the free dinners and bad sex doesn’t deserve the treat, so don’t bother.

I believe the key to an amazing dinner date is keeping it casual. Near my house is the perfect diner with big snuggly leather booths to hunker down in which serves delish milkshakes and macaroni cheese, and is utterly unpretentious. Most Sundays you can find my best friend and I in there surrounded by newspapers and ketchup stained napkins chatting and dancing to the 70s classics blaring from the radio, so when it comes to picking a date location I almost always choose it, which is kind of embarrassing to admit! Ok so it’s not the classiest joint and if my date chooses a burger it’s pretty funny watching them try to eat it with gravitas, but I feel so comfy and happy there it doesn’t matter, and as long as he doesn’t splat ketchup in my face he can gnaw away for as long as he pleases.

When you make dinner a grand affair on which your budding relationship does or dies you are only setting yourself up for failure. Take a chill pill and discover the magic of dragging your beau down to your favourite coffee place, diner, burger joint (but not Maccy D’s that’s a step too far!), or pancake house, and sharing cherry pie while moving ever closer across a leatherette booth. Only rotate your locations because otherwise the waitresses start winking at you, and that can get really awkward really quick. Not that I know that from experience… obviously!

Photo of Patrician Grill Restaurant by Paul Gorbould, photo of The New Piccadilly by Bowbrick.

Ah syphilis! Catch this and you’ll be in the company of Baudelaire, Wilde, Hitler, Nietzsche, and my number one historical hunk Beau Brummell. Easily treated, but difficult to spot, syphilis is often mistaken for dozens of other ailments, and incorrectly treated due to its relative current obscurity.

It starts with one, or more, small painless sores (chancres) on or around your genitals. Now before this feature becomes regular I want to make one thing clear, sores on your genitals are never good. Ever ever ever. If you see any, even a tiny eeny weeny one, go and get it checked out immediately. Do not wait to pass go and collect £200, get to a clinic stat!

Of course, there’s a difference between an ingrowing hair and a sore, but it’s better to be safe than sorry, and you can always pick up free condoms while you’re there so it won’t be a wasted trip.

Back to the sores. So it starts out with a sore, and stupid here doesn’t notice it, or fails to get it checked. The next thing you’ll be suffering from is either a skin rash, a sore throat, and possibly tiredness and a headache. Aka what most people feel like every damn day. After this your symptoms will dissappear and you will feel well for anything up to years, however the syphilis could return, causing your face to become deformed, open sores to form on your body, and your genitals to look, well, there are pictures out there, google them if you dare.

Ironically syphilis is extremely easy to cure in the early stages, a simple shot of penicillin, and it’s gone. Avoiding it is even easier: use a condom, properly, and every time.

So remember if you see a sore on your vagina you may well be about to die from syphilis so get it checked out! Or die. It’s your choice.

Picture from Wikipedia