Significant events of the year, part two: the break-up

Not the Aniston-Vaughan movie, though that was also a bit disappointing, but the actual real-life event. I won't go into any detail other than to say that 2007 will probably be the only year in which I will tearfully shout 'I don't even like bloody offal!' (Presuming, that is, that I don't make my fortune by opening an offal processing plant and then get interviewed about it on Look North.) I hope Nick’s not offended at being outed as a rejecter of the Simon Hopkinson cook book featuring infeasible amounts of offal.

One pleasant side dish next to the excessively heavy offal of breaking up and everything feeling up in the air is that having no ties makes anything seem possible. It suddenly seems quite exciting to have new romantic possibilities. Not to mention the ramifications in other areas of life. I could do anything! Go anywhere! Flicking through my internet history of the last few months I note that I have investigated job vacancies with the British Antarctic Expedition and wondered if the Alaskans need any nurses to come and wrestle bears. After much umming and ahhing, however, I have decided to take the much more rock n roll option of buying a house and getting a dog.

Significant events of the year, part one: new job

I had been waiting for a long time to get a job as a community nurse. I may have had slightly high expectations of how much my life would change because I spent eighteen months thinking 'this wouldn't happen in the community!' I imagined that the new job would be like the old job without the bad bits. I thought that those lovely moments in nursing where you've got a quiet ward and you get to spend all morning helping an elderly person to have a wash and do their hair while they tell you their life story, would stretch over my whole week and the hideous bits where pcp patients can't breathe and you start to feel sick and jittery knowing what's coming next, would disappear. What I hadn't considered was the notion that the job would just be entirely different. There are certainly very few 'jesus-fuck-what-am-I-going-to-do-should-I-call-the- crash-team-why-didn't-I-listen-more-closely-in-lectures' moments. Sadly though, the pay off for not being there for people in the gritty bits is that, um, you don't get to be there in the gritty bits. Most of my patients greet me with a friendly smile but the wee transaction I have with them hardly seems more significant than the one they have with the postman every morning. One lady I visited asked me to come back later because the mobile hairdresser was due and apparently she has a very busy schedule. Makes me kind of miss washing dead people.

On the upside, one cracking aspect of the new job is that I get to have a good nose round people's houses. Who knew that people still had toilet roll holders with built in ash-trays? (I mean the standing up on a pole toilet roll holders there - just in case you're imagining a crocheted doll holding an ashtray aloft.) And some interesting situations do arise that would never have come up in hospital, a man who had only grunted at you as you changed his catheter suddenly jumping off the sofa to show your colleague his cabinet full of nazi memorabilia, including a rather large sword, for example. Yikes.

Love Me Slender

Love Me Slender is the best name ever for a slimming club based comic play. Sadly, the title of Love Me Slender is probably the play's finest attribute. As we were walking out of the theatre auditorium I overheard someone say ‘well, it was certainly different’. Different?! Different to what?! It didn't seem very different to numerous sketches that have cropped up over the years based on slimming clubs. Having said that, it may have actually been written before the other low-cal comedies, like Fat Club, Little Britain, etc. Even so, original or not, it was pretty poor. The main character’s lines were all really clipped as if she didn’t want to use excessive words. I don’t know if that was supposed to be analogous with her attitude towards biscuit consumption, but it was quite nauseating long before the curtain fell for the interval.

Anyway, the play was, er, not the thing, because we were actually going to see if we might like to join the theatre group that put it on. All my prerequisites for amateur theatre were there – a musty smelling bar with wildly inconsistent drinks prices, an eccentric audience (on this particular night comprising entirely of over-sixties, largely owing to it being over-sixties night), and a lot of red velvet. There was one further bonus: one actress so poor as to make us sure we might get a part at some point. I know somebody somewhere once said that acting is all about what your face does when it's not your turn to speak, but this woman took that comment very seriously and spent most of the play contorting her face into Frankie Howerd-esque gargoyles, stroking her chin and scratching her head in response to the most innocuous sausage-roll based banter coming from her fellow players.

During the interval a slightly odd man from the row in front turned to us and asked us if we were enjoying the play. Naturally, since I’m so honest I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Do you girls do any acting?’ Before we had a chance to answer he put on a slightly more sinister tone and added ‘maybe not on the stage, eh?’ How very odd. I’ve no idea what he was suggesting but I felt like I’d been accused of being a hustler or a prostitute and all I did was smile sheepishly and do the ‘hhhm’ noise that I do when I haven’t heard someone properly. Then he stood up, fell over and said ‘excuse me, my hearing aid’s not working’ and walked off.