Snowstorms and Backdoors!

What a week. I found myself caught up in the snowstorm on Sunday night when leaving Ronnie Scott’s in Soho after a gig. The sight was extraordinary piles of snow everywhere. The narrow streets around Chinatown looked like a bizarre Christmas spectacle meets Pleasant Ville film set. People were building snowmen and throwing snowballs at each other. There was a noticeable silence that was almost noisier than the usual hustle and bustle. After only a few minutes outside I was covered in thick snow flakes. People were thrilled by the whole experience. Everyone was laughing and playing and it seemed that a bit of snow had turned introverted grumps into giggly children. It was beautiful but after a few moments my excitement wore off. Call me demanding or simply German, I have seen more and better snow and at that moment all I wanted was to get home.

Travelling in London on any given day is an adventure but on that Sunday night it was close to impossible. No black cabs, the buses were sliding down the street, the tubes were closed off (at least I think they were I didn’t even bother giving it a try at that hour). So what to do? Being a girl with a very long CV in nightclubbing, I resorted to the obvious, the good old mini cab option. Of course even that was a struggle on a night like that. No cars, well yes there were cars around but it took them hours to get through Piccadilly. My overwhelmed cabbie was so scarred of the intimidating sight that he didn’t want to take me “all the way to Bayswater”. “All the way to Bayswater?” I am not talking about Peckham, Bayswater is a mere 10 minutes on a normal day.

What my cabbie didn’t know however was that I was not going to give up on him and more importantly on my warm seat home. I gave him directions trying to steer him away from the mayhem of sliding buses and cars moving along like snails on their day off. I sweet talked him into taking a U-turn into a smaller side road. Finally when my ride home seemed like it was going to end abruptly- we were stuck between two buses and a few cars in the middle of Piccadilly and my Indian cabie suddenly snapped- I made him a practically indecent proposal that so I was sure, would trigger off his male pride. I suggested that a friend of mine, conveniently in the cab next to me and even more conveniently a race car driver might switch seats with him and take charge of the wheel. “He has a lot of experience”, I said confidently and my plan worked like magic. Suddenly nothing was a problem any longer and shortly after that the traffic evaporated and we drove along the snow filled park and I finally made it to bed.

A few days later I watched Revolutionary Road a very moving and disturbing film. It put me in a sombre mood and stirred an almost paranoid fear of suddenly finding myself leading a conventional life. Nothing about my family and upbringing has ever been close to conventional. Since the age of 15 I have moved to a different country every other year. It’s a two year itch sort of thing. I speak five languages although neither of them properly if spelling is considered a vital part of a language. As my directorial editor loves to point out, I cannot spell to save my life neither in English, nor any other language.

My family lives scattered around the globe and my mother’s habit of moving is almost as bad as mine. Her particularity however is moving after us. When I moved to Paris she moved to Paris shortly after. When I moved to New York she bought a place and now divides her time between New York, Regensburg (Germany), Paris, Rome and Watamu (Kenya). She collects flats like other people collect stamps, well no one really collects stamps but you see where I am going. Like a child unwrapping its presents she loves the novelty of exploring a new city. One might say that her favourite occupation is finding the perfect apartment, decorating it in a sight specific manner and then selling it and starting all over again. Every place has a completely distinct interior. She has an incredible taste and passion for contemporary art and design. It is as though her hunger for moving is fuelled by her insatiable appetite for decorating. She can’t get enough of it. Like an artist she will go through phases, from the opulent, psychedelic colour infused Takashi Murakami world to the clean sober, minimalist simplicity of 1950s design, her latest creation in New York.

Our home in Germany is the perfect place for her to live out her decorating binges and purges. The place is pretty big therefore quite hard to fill up mind you she has managed to do so regardless. Consequently she had Philipps de Pury sell off a huge chunk of her collection a few years ago in New York and then she began all over again.

Where was I? Oh yes my fear of leading a conventional life. Fat chance for that to happen, after all who can claim to have grown up with the infamous Chapman Brothers sculpture of a naked child with an anus growing out of its head staring at you, in the entrance of your house? In fact Fuckface was only one of many disturbing pieces of contemporary art scattered around our place. So much so, that our school friends weren’t allowed to sleep over when we were younger because the children came home haunted by nightmares. So I know that I have always been very far from a conventional life in suburbia but lets face it I have a job, I live in a flat, I even have a favourite coffee-shop where I get my soy latte exactly the way I like it, creamy and unsweetened, sounds very conventional to me!

So my fear of convention came with me the next day when I was invited to join a friends hen’s night. And it was so unconventionally conventional. Beat this, a bunch of girls celebrating their friends last days of singledom by learning how to give the perfect hand job by a wannabe actor/masseuse/sexpert! How incredibly conventional is that? Why not have us over for a cooking course or a flower arrangement class?

And then there was Charles famous pre- BAFTA party where my esteemed colleague Illegally Blonde and I spent hours stuffing FQR’s into Chanel goody bags at Annabel’s. Oh what a night! What I loved about it however was arriving at Annabel’s in the afternoon and taking the backdoor via the kitchen into the club. I do love backdoors. I am a proper backdoor Jenny. There is something infinitely cool and slightly sleazy about the backdoor in a sort of rockstarish kind of way. Our mission at the party was to hand out FQR’s to VIPs (I hate that word, I mean what the hell?) and take snaps of them whilst reading it. Well put it this way we managed to get only one picture of Rufus Wainright, Bryan Ferry and me. Look how proud I am!

All the others we asked were too insecure about what they might be endorsing. They obviously hadn’t read FQR or had they? Well if they had they would have known how wise their self-obsession actually was. Just kidding…anyway tune in for more next week until then…xx

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Princess Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.