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.

I fucking love the idea of matchy matchy dressing with my boyfriend. In fact it’s something I try to trick him into doing regularly, but he’s yet to fall for it and was rather annoyed with me when we left his house last weekend in almost matching scarves. I, conversely, punched the air with glee.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t want us to look like creepy twins, or like that couple who wear one red one green Converse each that Alexander Fury keeps seeing in Tesco, but there’s something fun and ridiculous about being part of a secret gang of sorts who wear the same clothes and do the same shit. I love secret gangs: I used to wish when I didn’t have anyone to ride my bike with that I could get a whole gang of friends and dress them up in leather jackets, then we’d ride around and maybe find a secret island like in Swallows and Amazons, and hang out there for the afternoon. Come on! Who doesn’t want a secret gang? Handshakes and haircuts, secret words and songs, imagine it!

If you think about it being in a relationship with someone is a bit like being in a secret gang as long as you do it right. The best things about secret gangs are how everything cool you do is exclusive and under wraps. So if you and your boyfriend call each other pet names, or have private jokes, it becomes 100000000% less cool and fun when you say them in front of people. This goes double for dressing up. While Halloween is the one day of the year this advice/rule/whatever can take a hike, I want you first to look at Dough Reinhardt’s face and think twice before you dress as the tooth fairy and a… ummm…. depressed molar?

I find that most people and pets find being dressed up like an amusing toy incredibly humiliating no matter how much I’m, er I mean, you’re enjoying it which is a damned shame. Although, duh, your boyfriend isn’t a toy some days it would really be a lot better if he just let you do his mascara, draw a glitter lightning bolt on his face, and squeeze into some co-ordinating platforms, because then the two of you could act out some sweet as fuck Bay City Rollers videos. Or you could wear matching suits and pretend to be city boys. Or put on wigs and pretend to be Lady Gaga and her reflection. The possibilities are ENDLESS.

Just remember the secret gang’s rule: keep it indoors, because then no-one can laugh at you.

Pictures from Fuck Yeah Cute, I Love Pugs, and Jezebel

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!

While on the bus to work a couple of days ago I sat near two old ladies. They were discussing the reasons women were marrying later and later, and sometimes not at all. It was, they reasoned, because women were too picky. Back in their day (I have no idea how old they were, but they had pure white hair and milk bottle glasses, so old old?) girls learned to love someone in time, instead of expecting to be in love straightaway. Cute huh? It’s like Stockholm Syndrome but with roses. Awww. This ‘expecting true love lunacy’ is because apparently we women go around with a check-list in our heads, trying to find people who will check all the boxes.

This got me to thinking what I want in a boyfriend, and the list I came up with was pretty ridiculous in retrospect. Here is a what I decided:

• Must dress well. No sandals, no ‘witty’ t-shirts, no polar fleece.
• Interesting teeth.
• Funny or witty but not wacky or zany.
• Taller than me.
• Likes comics.
• Does not have a wiry beard. Or wiry leg hair.
• Listens to decent music, possibly not everything I like because that would be odd, but a nice overlap would be good.
• Not sweaty.
• Does not exercise or talk about eating healthy.
• Likes animals but in a normal way.
• Does not scowl at children.

As you can see it was a lot easier to think about what he wouldn’t be like than what he would be. Although if he looked like this I wouldn’t care what he acted like. Phwoar. For all I know ‘he’ might turn out to be a woman, after all as Patrick Wolf says “I don’t know whether I’m destined to live my life with a horse, a woman or a man.” Nobody does really, you never know who you’re going to fall in love with or when or why, that’s the ‘great’ thing about it. My mother fancies Keanu Reeves and yet she got married to my Dad who is smart, skinny, and very English. Who you’re going to fall for is a totally unfathomable mystery! Only I do hope it’s not the horse.

Six months or so ago I quit the internet. Technically I just left Facebook and Twitter but that constitutes 90% the internet so it’s the same thing to me. As an intensely competitive person I was spending too much time trying to figure out whether my life tallied up to that of my old school friends. In my head lived a constantly updated bar graph where points were earned and lost according to how well you were doing in your work, love, and social life. Every time I logged on it felt like the game was bogging me down with pluses for beautiful children and minuses for going to All Bar One after work. Turning on my computer was a depressing chore.

Worse than the game was my secret shame: stalking boys. Everyone’s looked someone up once or twice. You might have even googled someone’s name to see if they were a registered paedo or really into WoW. That’s all fair game. Once I start though I can’t stop. It’s not just boys: once I was searching for Jean Varon dresses on ebay and found a girl who looked familiar. After 30 minutes of searching I found out she was the child of a Tatler regular and where she worked. See? My stalking is inclusive! Everyone can get involved! It’s a multi-cultural multi-denominational multi-sexual kind of thing!

Upon my shameful return to Facebook I vowed that I would not make the same mistakes again. No more late nights figuring out our mutal friends or squinting through 10 pages of party pictures, none. But like an alcoholic who reckons they can have that one glass of champagne and still be fine, I slipped. During a bout of insomnia I found myself searching for my first ever boyfriend. Then random boys I’d crushed out over the years. Then someone who was a friend of an ex’s friend. Then someone who had looked hot in a photo of said ex’s friend’s friend. I developed e-crushes on them and started checking their profile when I was bored at work. Seeing what they were up to, whether we were going to any of the same events, that sort of thing. I tried to guess if they were single by how close girls stood to them. People I had never met became real-er than real. My own friends barely seemed as close as these boys with Flickrs, Twitters, Tumblrs, Last.fm’s, and Facebook pages constantly pinging the world with their every move. It didn’t feel wrong, not at all. Not even a tiny bit.

And then I would see them in the street and suddenly it was back to square one. They were still a pretty boy who didn’t know me and I was a pretty mental girl who knew what they ate for lunch. All the information gathering I’d done was useless because I couldn’t admit to it. What could I say that wouldn’t be creepy? “So, you like Chris Ware? Me too!” or “Did you see HEALTH play the other day? I missed them.” For fuckssake it freaks me out when my friends remember what I put on Twitter, never mind strangers.

The more I checked-in on these boys the quicker my crush wilted: the more irritating they seemed and like a real relationship it faded and died before it had time to be anything good at all. After 2 months back on Facebook I got bored and started hunting for Jean Varon dresses anew. Everything was rosy. I felt like a normal non-psychotic person again and then I met my kryptonite: the boy who cannot be found. The most recent photo I can find of him is from 2 years ago. No matter what clever scheme I hit on I can’t find him; after 2007 he just disappears. My competetive nature has me combing my brain, and Facebook, for clues, pictures he might be in, places he might have been, and nothing nothing nothing.

Though it burns so bad to even consider admitting defeat I think I am going to have to. And next time I see him I’ve promised myself I’ll say hello and ask if he wants to talk about Uncanny X-Men.

Photos by Richard Kern and Marija Strajnic.