Love

I’m in love with Simon Amstell. 

Seriously. I fancy the tight little pants he wears in my head right off his sexy chiseled bum. Sitting on my own at home, watching him on TV, I find myself unconsciously laughing at his jokes extra loudly, and for slightly longer than I would naturally, then biting my lip while twisting a strand of my hair round my finger. His dark eyes and hunched, awkward demeanor effect some sort of cosmic dark magic that tickles me right down my spine. I intently follow his walk about the stage, consumed by the absurd notion that it would be just great to nibble at his hair…

Why am I making public my creepy obsessive tendencies? Because despite how clearly deranged it makes me sound, I know I’m not alone. The concept of celebrity crushes is something I have always been a bit confused by. It strikes me as more than a little silly to fancy someone you’ve never met. I’ve been openly freaked out by my friends drooling over film-stars, guitarists, Derren Brown … (well, that one still does confuse me). I’ve taken part in countless conversations that go a bit like this:

Me: ‘But you don’t know David Tennant. You’ve never had a conversation with him. When you see him on TV, he’s playing a character. How can you be deeply in love with someone who doesn’t know your name?’

Friend: ‘He is perfect. One day I will marry him.’

In the real world, it takes me more than a look, or even a conversation to decide whether I actually fancy someone. Probably more than two or three encounters. Even then I may still not know. I’m not exactly the hopeless romantic type. In fact, I think an official ‘sexual attraction and compatibility trial period’ would be a great system; you agree some dates with the candidate in question, and spend a week together in a hotel, maybe abroad. You turn your phones off, eat snacks, have tickle fights, play Pictionary and compare music collections. You also keep a log rating your excitement and tingles on a scale of one to ten each morning afternoon and evening, and a tally counting the number of times you fiddle with your hair, or speak in a ridiculously high pitched and yet husky tone completely unnatural to you. Once the week is over, you take your log home, catalogue your results (maybe draw some graphs), and see if you in fact might have feelings for the person in question. You then compare your results with the candidate: if you both tingled at least at a level 6 roughly 50% of the time, you can go in for the whole relationship thing. If you want. Like, seriously, I think this needs institutionalizing.  I mean, someone at some point chucked the whole ‘marriage’ thing out there.

‘William! Ranlyn! I’ve got it! This thing they do in the Bible? No, after the bit where they don’t allow prostitutes in Israel … before the command to add fringe to all clothing. Yes, ‘taking a wife’; I reckon we could make it big. We can sing songs and get rings, sign a Godly love contract, and then Godefryd’s your uncle! The girl is yours forever. Once ‘marriage’ has taken place, your wooing days are over my friend! She lives with you and looks after your sheep, and your children, and your mother when she gets old. Plus, you get official usage of the phrase ‘ball and chain’. Eh? Oh, hang on, hand me back the proposal, I’ve got an addendum ….. There. Her family also pays your family as much money as they can. Perfect, now it’s a good way to keep the women at home and richest people a class apart too! EH? EH?’

See, that took off. But I digress, that’s the real world**. I’m talking about the kind of slightly-a-bit-fictional world of fancying celebrities. I no longer find having a magnetic attraction to a public figure you know nothing about akin to an invasion of privacy. (Nor is it in any way equivalent to spunking over Megan Fox’s severely airbrushed tits/face in FHM. Lets just clear that up right now. I love Simon Amstell even when he has spots.) 

I’m never going to be in a room with Simon Amstell. People say my crush is silly because he’s gay. And!? Him being gay is not the only reason me and Simon Amstell being together is never going to happen. It’s not even the second or third reason. That I don’t know him and have never met him are also pretty solid grounds. That doesn’t pain me either. I have a ridiculous level of attraction to him, because the idea of us being actually together is such a surreal idea that I can be over the top and silly with it. In my head we get along famously and never have disagreements unless we’re discussing deep philosophical issues, which we do like to engage in occasionally over a glass of red on a Sunday night. It doesn’t matter that I don’t really know much about him at all, that his stage presence probably isn’t the real him at all, or that he may not like me back, or that he’s gay, and in a relationship. Hell, I like the gay thing. He’s my fictional perfect man. I’m just basing my fantasy in reality. It’s the ‘hot crush’ equivalent to reading Harry Potter when I was five and imagining the Great Hall at Hogwarts as my Grandma’s living room. Siobhan’s head Simon Amstell does not exist in real life. So yes, I do sound a little creepy, but it’s cool like, because I would never confuse Siobhan’s head Simon Amstell with the real one. With Siobhan’s head Simon, we play scrabble, say lovely sexy things and make each other origami sea-creatures (I make a mean narwhal). But if I met him in real life I probably wouldn’t hopelessly vie for his affections. I can’t even do origami. Instead I would probably tell him that while I find him hilarious and fantastic, much as I tried to like it, I really didn’t find Grandma’s House engaging at all. In fact I thought it was a bit egotistical. Sometimes love is cruel.

I used to think that fancying celebrities was ridiculous and a bit insane, given that it’s not a two way thing. But having my own obsession has taught me that it's actually brilliant. You never find out their flaws, no-one’s off limits, and as long as you don’t get weird on their twitter feed, hang around where they live or send their other halves hate mail, no one gets hurt! Edward Cullen, Kylie Minogue, David Cameron … Whoever floats your boat, they’re yours!

*Simon Amstell, if you are by some freak chance reading this, we should definitely have a drink some time. In fact no, let’s not. I don’t want you to burst my bubble.

**Not the completely historically inaccurate world of my head.

'I'm from Hertfordshire Darling'

My first post of the new year, 20 days in. This poor blog's been neglected for 3 whole weeks. Sorry about that. My friends were back from university for Christmas and I got quite excited. There’s been a lot of catching up to be done. Now they’ve all returned to studying and my to-do list once again reads something like:

 - Find a job

 - No, seriously, find a job

 - Any job

 - Sort out banking and tax forms

 - Start getting up before 11

Of course now it’s snowing all serious plans are on hold, but once the weather clears up I will stop writing rude words outside with sticks and taking pictures of frosty spiderwebs, and get back to sorting my life out. Well ‘get back to’ may be slightly over-optimistic wording. ‘Start sorting my life out’ may be more accurate. I haven’t been in St Albans that much at all these last few weeks. Considering there’s not that much to entertain or distract me here, it’s strange that this fact depresses me slightly.

I went to Scotland last weekend. It was lovely. I met up with my best friend from childhood (and from, like, ever) and celebrated her turning 21 in beautiful, rowdy, drinky, teary style. Getting off the train at Waverley always makes me feel excited and nostalgic, and whenever I go back to Edinburgh, I always find myself wondering why anyone would leave. After spending all of 5 seconds in the capital, the crash of rain and the sound of piping hits my eardrums, and my mindset completely reverts into ‘local’ mode; 5 minutes walking down Princes Street and a brash Scottish twang that I never really had even when I lived there injects itself into my accent, and I’m complaining about tramlines, Lothian bus fares and tourists with everyone else.

This time, despite being overjoyed and excited and completely ready to blend seamlessly in to the post-hogmanay birthday celebrations, I found myself not quite so brash. I didn’t encounter anything as drastic or conscious as feeling out of place, or like a foreigner (which, in fairness, with my accent and dislike of irn-bru WKD, would have been easy to do in the circumstances). But in hindsight, I think after having been away in the States, I arrived with a slightly reinforced southern identity. Going for walks round St Albans on Google street view was easy to explain away as simple home-sickness when done from New York. Now though, I found myself in Edinburgh, my second home, still talking about pub closures, and the accordion man, and the field I had to take a piss in once. I think I may have become an official, proud Home Counties resident.

Not, I hasten to add, that I have become some kind of League of Gentlemen style ‘local’. It doesn’t mean that I’ve somehow suddenly accepted everything I used to hate about living in a £4 a pint Tory safe seat where the shops are shut by half four and people wear suits to the pub. I’ve not started baking cupcakes or taken up knitting, I’ve not joined the town council and I’ve still never bought anything from Liberties, Boohoo or Waitrose (apart from gingerbread). But I think there might be something deeper to be gleaned from that fact that throughout my weekend in Scotland, home of whisky and Tennents and Brewdog, I stayed markedly sober, playing only the less popular (and much less interesting spectator sport) ‘water-pong’. Ditching the cava around 2am, and getting into my pajamas, I reasoned to my friends and fellow revelers that ‘where I come from, the pubs shut three hours ago.’

Maybe it’s just living at home, and not frequently being around so many people my age. Maybe it’s not being at university. Or maybe it’s something more. Maybe it’s what 8 years of St Albans residency has done to me. Maybe it’s having spent most Friday nights since I was 17 in the same two pubs that put disco lights on after 9pm and host dodgy middle-aged cover bands; the strange purgatory to which teenagers living in English towns are seemingly committed until they move to London. Maybe it’s, despite having grown up there, not being from the city. Maybe it’s not being used to ‘Hive ‘til Five’, or having ever heard of a ‘jager-train’. Maybe it’s that during the compulsory pre-party drinking games, after a few rounds of ‘never have I ever been fingerblasted in St Andrew’s Square’, and ‘never have I ever got my foof out on a Lothian bus’, I hadn’t drunk a drop, and felt the intense need to stand up in the middle of the circle and declare (in slight deviation from the standard game format) ‘I’m from Hertfordshire! Drink if you’ve ever realised mid-way through sex that you’re doing it to the Radio 4 shipping forecast!’ before downing the rest of my G&T. Level the playing field. Cultural difference, innit.

For those of you who don't know, this is the accordion man. He really deserves a shout out.