Monday 18 July 2011

Meeting the Locals


I have developed an exciting way of meeting people in my adopted neck of the woods, by pretending to be a starstruck Sex and the City fan who has mistaken them for Kim Cattrall, who played the erotically voracious Samantha.
I came up with idea quite by accident last Sunday when we got off the Thanet Loop bus in the horrid Westwood Cross retail sector, where every big name in British retail is represented, and where there is entirely too little shrubbery — indeed, where there is no shrubbery whatever. Claire had bought herself one of those very sweet, and a little bitter, iced coffee concoctions she’s grown so fond of. A woman who looked marginally more like Kim Cattrall than like Samuel L. Jackson, say, sat down near us, and I found myself wanting to pretend I was a starstruck Sex and the City fan sure she had formerly played the erotically voracious Samantha. I expected that she would deny it, of course, but I would insist, feigning indignation at her apparently not being up to the task of indulging the fans without whom she might still be back in Liverpool, womanning a till at Iceland and auditioning at night for an amateur production of Mama Mia, though I think Swedes spell it Mamma.
My former life partner Nancy used to accuse me of finding myself more hilarious than I found anyone else, and this was indisputably a case of exactly that.
The other evening, there was a programme on Channel 5 about recent goings-on in the world of entertainment. The pretty young woman half of the female-male hosting team said that it appeared the such-and-such young actress had been cast to portray the young Charlotte in the apparently forthcoming SATC prequel, whereupon the otherwise obliging and chirpy male host proclaimed, “I’m really not bothered,” which is Brit for, “I don’t care.” In so doing, he endeared himself to me a treat, as I have long believed SATC to be God’s way of punishing the straight world for centuries of persecution of their gay neighbours and siblings.

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