Uncategorized | Sadie Hasler

Doing It

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Sadie Hasler

About twenty one months ago or thereabouts, I blurted out something in bed that’s gone on to change my life. I was talking to my best friend (texting, on the phone – she hadn’t just swung by and hopped in to keep her feet warm) – and having a moan about some idiot we worked for. A shambolic cretin who never paid anyone, who – we had just discovered – wasn’t even using his own name such was his checkered past of shady incompetence. We were hacked off. We knew something had to give. So I blurted. “I just want to do plays all the time, like, run a theatre company.” There was a pause just long enough for Hew to type “LET’S F***ING DO IT THEN, WENCH.”

So we did. Or started to. Our complicity in those moments turned our energy from low and despondent to wired and exuberant. It was quite an unceremonious beginning really, I suppose. I was in bed for one thing. But it felt important.

Few things we say in a day actually bring about change in our lives. There are small things, like “But I don’t fancy steamed fish tonight, I fancy steak, a bloody big one.”, but rarely something monumental to altering the progression of your time, thoughts, actions, and priorities for a considerable proportion of your future. Something that in its simplicity and brevity at once casts out all other options.

“I just want to run a theatre company.”
“So let’s do it then.”

Our company Old Trunk will turn two in June. I will turn 34. It seems a good age to have realised suddenly, after a life of drifting from thing to thing, that you know what you want.

We have had, I’m sure, an untypically blessed start for a new company. Since our eureka moment we have produced two plays I wrote which have been very well received locally and in London, been funded by Arts Council England twice in an increasingly difficult financial climate with cuts being made left right and centre, represented the Arts at the House of Commons, and appeared in the Sunday Times magazine. Lots of other lovely stuff we’re proud of.

I know that our success so far is largely down to our defiant determination to work our socks off constantly to the exclusion of most other things, to the amazing talent we are lucky to have in our cast Charlie and Edd, but we also owe the angle of our trajectory to some other wonderful people.

We’ve been lucky enough not only to have wonderful patrons, but also to be mentored by an arts organisation called Metal. They heard of our work, and asked us to curate the theatre tent for last year’s Village Green festival. We were honoured. They mentored us through the Arts Council application, offered invaluable help, introduced us to a whole industry load of thinking that we, being new, simply didn’t know and stood no chance of rapidly discovering for ourselves. They came to see our shows, and spoke up about us to other arts groups who didn’t know who we were. We were nothing but a couple of plays and a big bag of vague wishes that might never have been realised, but then we were given the clarity and support to do something with it. Because of their mentorship we are now being funded to take our two plays to the Edinburgh Festival and we’re so happy and excited we can barely make it to the end of an hour without sighing like girls.

We don’t know what the future will hold. We’ll work hard to keep ascending, doing the things we love, and are actually now bolstered even further by the desire to not let our supporters down.

It took a moment of ‘sod this’, of saying “Let’s bloody well do it”, but it also took people believing in us and opening a door as wide as our own scope to dream.

Three Days In Bed With A Bloody Big Pork Pie

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Sadie Hasler

It’s not an exact science, but sometimes you can tell how much fun you’re going to have by the size of the rustic pork pie you’ve just bought from an artisan bakers. If it’s big enough to break a window from five meters, you can strap in for some serious good times. As I say, not a definitive equation that Hawking would bother expounding with his mouth-jabber at a lecture to collected genii, but something in it nonetheless. Maybe just one of those arcane old unwritten laws from the Olde Englishee booke ofe Olde Factes. Like: Rain = Wet, and Sheep = Bad Gay Farmer Jokes. Big pie = Happiness.

Matt had some gigs up Northish last week so we turned it into a mini break, which essentially meant going to a town we’d not been to before, allowing ourselves to eat twice as much as we usually would in a normal day and then rolling around on a kingsize bed feeling like we’d earned the imminent nap. We did a bit of walking too but didn’t want to undo our good work.

It was on one of these walks around Bakewell in Derbyshire that we stumbled across The Pie. And the Bakewell tart. And the cheese. And the chutney in the cute jar. And the coconut jam pie that looked like the baked dandruff of angels. And the olives, though I’ve forgotten what they had to do with the ‘midlands in February’ theme we were going for. We also, for good measure, bought a bag of mixed salad because as we all know having something green on the plate offsets most of the carbs and saturated fat.

Arms ladening with award-winning country produce, and some wine and chocolate (for emergencies), we tottered dutifully round the historic town, halfheartedly looked at some antique fairs, bought some DVDs from an ageing hippy in a church hall (for emergencies in case all the hills were shut), earwigged upon the burgeoning politics of a second-hand bookshop (new volunteer Des challenging old-timer Jane’s systems – I almost cracked the spine of a Reader’s Digest Dick Francis waiting for that one to play out.), and then went back to our room for the real purpose of the break. Bed.

From the crisp starchy whiteness of our hired cloud we nestled and surveyed the hills stretching out before us. They were, as we suspected, unfortunately shut for activities that day – but from our nest we could gaze over them anyway.

Kingsize beds are brilliant, aren’t they? Duvets are brilliant. Pillows are brilliant. Boyfriends in their pants are brilliant. Views of Derbyshire hills all wavy like a green desert mirage through the radiator heat – brilliant. Spring sun yawning through trees probably planted by Jane Austen when she was taking a break from writing an era-defining classic – brilliant. Church bells at unfathomable times like the village is run by mischievous masons, busybody starlings whooshing in and out of the eaves with gossipy chirrups, nearby pub lights like lanterns switching on with a wink at dusk, calling you back out into the cold. Wellies, tankards, fires, ale pumps, dogs, flat caps, locals, rain, the prospect of rain, the coming of rain, the escape from rain. All bloody brilliant.

England. Sometimes you’re so much a part of it you forget it’s there.

I sighed at the headying intoxicating normality of it all. It was nice to be away. More specifically it was nice to be under the sheets in the afternoon with my boy and a bloody massive pork pie. Three days of this passed like a naptime dream.

When the time came to leave, by way of thanking the cleaning ladies for our lovely stay I did a diligent pre-tidy as an act of respect and left them the bag of salad. I knew they’d know what that meant.

Three Sisters, Hamlet, & Roy

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Sadie Hasler

When I was about fourteen or fifteen I saw an amateur production of Three Sisters at one of my local theatres. I knew nothing about Chekhov or the play, but I was enraptured from the first scene. This was partly to do with the bustling dresses and the audacious way in which one of the sisters, Masha, whistled in a most unladylike manner (which reminded me gleefully of Jo in Little Women), but it was mostly to do with the performance of a man named Roy Foster, who had an altogether different air about him than the others. Like for him there was no script, no process, but merely a truth he was choosing to reveal to you that night. Utterly natural and with such quiet authority you would do anything he said, even if it meant taking off your shoes and running over fields of just-ploughed corn.

A couple of years later, while studying A Level Theatre Studies, with the memory of Three Sisters still strong, I started devouring Chekhov, wanting to soak it all in and learn from it. I’d spend my free periods and lunchtimes in the school library reading all the playscripts they had, feeling like those words were the best thing I could ever do with my time – a feeling I still get when I see or read plays by great writers; that it’s an investment for my soul. I went to see The Cherry Orchard, cried. Went to see Uncle Vanya. Wept. The longing dark heart of Chekhov’s plays spoke to some latent part of me then as a simple teenager, which speak to me even more now that – doubled in age – I am far less simple. I write plays, run a theatre company, feel passionate about theatre because of all the fire that was stoked up in me during that period of my life. It shaped me.

The last play I saw Roy in was about three or four years ago. He played the ghost of Hamlet’s father. My ex boyfriend/dear friend George played a brilliant Hamlet, and I watched them both in my favourite play that brims with themes close to my heart. (Not so much ghosts and suicide and love for a dead father, but Danish military politics, obviously.) I thought how strange it was that an old face and a new love had come together in something that was so important to me.

It was an odd night. I had stupidly chosen to read my father’s last texts written in the last few days before he died on his old Nokia, which I fired up in the pub down the road over a gin (a bloody big one) before rushing down to watch Hamlet. A strange decision on my part; but something I couldn’t have delayed. Private reasons, but it was a strange night to watch a play about dead fathers & the effects they have upon us. Especially as the modern production made use of mobile phones. It rang with a new and searing relevance for me; almost too much to watch. I later wrote a bit in my book about it. If Roy, if George, had been lesser actors the pertinent meanings in the text would have been lost to my disgust; turned me all hand-wringing distraught Ophelia at what they’d done to ‘my play’. But they were brilliant.

Sometimes Shakespeare is like watching a stained glass window light up at sunrise. It starts dark and obscure and takes a while but god it’s worth it. When you become familiar with a play that’s when it really illuminates. I’ve seen a lot of Hamlets, and seeing Roy in it almost seemed somehow inevitable. He’d been there at the start of my classical theatre experience, half my life ago when he introduced me to Chekhov, and here he was again years later, as assured and accomplished as any actor on a professional stage.

Roy passed away a couple of weeks ago. I know many dear friends who are deeply affected by it, and who will miss him greatly. I’m sure there are those who cannot imagine life continuing in quite the same way without him. They knew him far better than I did, so this column isn’t so much a tribute to a wonderful man I wasn’t honoured enough to know that well personally.

However it is a respectful tip of a Chekhovian hat to a fine actor who brought words alive that stayed with me, that lit up a path, and a low curtsey to the ways in which people can make a mark on your lives without their ever knowing.

Not Just Any ‘Olanus – Coriolanus, Donmar Style

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Sadie Hasler

It was approximately five seconds into the hot topless actor’s onstage shower scene that I got my mojo back. It had been missing. I only realised it had been missing about six seconds into the hot topless actor’s onstage shower scene. (I actually think my mojo resurfaced somewhere during the sword fight just before but it wanted to make sure it was worth sticking around. The shower scene did it.) By the time the hot dude stopped having a wash, I had realised that I’d been in a veritable coma til that night.

Like a lot of people, my mojo had been kiboshed by the dreary season, the new year doldrums, the rain, the ‘what the hell am I doing with my life’ mini breakdown I’d been pondering having once the general malaise had lifted.

Who knew it just took a critically-acclaimed actor in greasepaint shaking off gelatine blood under a ruddy big tap in one of London’s most respected theatres?

(The actor has a name of course – he’s not meat in a wig. Tom Hiddleston. He’s done some stuff. People quite like him. I like him. He’s clearly been classically trained in washing and fighting. What’s not to like.)

So there I was. Coriolanus. Shakespeare. The Donmar Warehouse, Covent Garden. Theatrical Mecca and Mojo Restorative. The play was the talk of the town, not least because it had wowed audiences in Odeons around the country as part of NT Live. I was a lucky girl to get tickets.

As I left the box office, waving my ticket of privilege while the rest of London brayed outside, I could hear someone at the counter flatly refusing a woman requesting tickets. She wouldn’t believe him that there were none. Maybe she was Trevor Nunn’s auntie or something and was used to a special throne being wheeled out. As I wandered off to take my seat, I could hear him almost shouting in her face. “NO – I SAID WE DON’T HAVE ANY TICKETS AT ALL.” I don’t mind admitting it made me feel better about myself, my life, and the fact I had a seat and the posh lady didn’t. Maybe that’s when my mojo started stirring. Vive la revolution, dahling.

I don’t normally respond to the arcs and indents of the physique. If a chap flexes in front of me he is much more likely to get a yawn than a giggle, but what with this being Theatre I was creatively disposed – nay, obliged – to wolf-whistle as loudly as I could. I held back. Because it was Shakespeare. Everyone knows Shakespeare is very, very serious. Unless everyone gets a funny bit all at once, and then it’s ok to laugh – but it has to be with an air of deep intellectual understanding or you just look like a dog poo in clothes.

I didn’t know much about Coriolanus. I once saw an ‘adult adaptation’ languishing on a video shop shelf whose capitalisation of the last four letters of the title left me deeply doubtful that it had any blank verse in it at all. From my general Shakespeare knowledge I knew it had: some Romans, some fighting, and some squirty blood-jam effects like everyone onstage is a doomed doughnut. I’d never been desperate to see it. I like a bit more fairies kissing and stuff, or at least some hey nonny-nonnying before a nice quiet suicide. Not fake swords and allusions to bum. But Coriolanus had me wanting to charge the streets of the west-end looking for a (very artistic) fight.

I talk about the fit bloke (/technically brilliant demi-god of the modern stage) carrying out his post-battle ablutions like I’m some kind of knee-rubbing hot-flusher, but it’s all in jest. Mostly. I was naturally more enthralled by the dead good words that were written thousands of years ago when everyone had mules for tea and wooden teeth and stuff; I love the poetry and power of Shakespeare. But mostly I felt myself caught up in the magic of it; the elements of theatre that fuse together to leave you tipped forward in your seat, your mouth slightly open, your breath stoppered, and the nape of your neck just that little bit chilled. Enchantment that you simply do not feel in your normal waking-walking-talking life.

At the end, as the audience filed out I turned to my friends and saw we all had the same ‘silent wow’ faces on. We had that priceless moment that can be had in the darkness of a theatre before you emerge into the light and try and find words for what you’ve just seen.

The next day I woke and felt different. Feisty. Geared up. Like I could have taken on whole legions of oiled centurions with my breakfast banana. I whipped through my morning tasks, did a bunch of stuff I didn’t even know needed doing, FEISTILY. I whipped around with that bit of shining, almost inhuman energy we all got to take home in a lovely theatre doggy bag. Art had fixed me.

And thus, verily, forsooth, was my mojo reinstated. Adieu.

Sick – or – What Happens When A Columnist Ignores her Editor’s Offer of a Week Off

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Sadie Hasler

There’s no avoiding it. Every now and then you have to stop pretending that you’re not completely disgusting. You get ill; you have to be sick. You have to give in to the oesophageal constrictions of doom, walk unnaturally quickly like you’re in a silent movie, slam a door, do your business, then whimper gratefully that you made it to the appropriate room. Curl on the floor like a baby with the intolerable addition of the sense of indignity in it all.

Last week I wrote about how wonderful humans are for sharing stuff. The wonder of the internet linking us all up, joining us together. All that nice ‘aren’t people great’ sort of stuff.

Last week’s me knew nothing. Last week’s me was a putz. Sharing. Sharing is what idiots do. Sharing is the act of the profane. The warped outflingings of the weak.

What on earth do we think we’re doing, kissing and shaking hands and sneezing in the same room as each other. That’s how all the gross stuff happens – wafting around in groups, being all kinds of disgusting together, rubbing up against each other, carelessly spewing germs onto each other, fraternising our cells in the incessant dirty recycling of spores. Sharing.

Humans are disgusting. Life is disgusting.

I think I got this bug from my seven year old nephew, who is almost never disgusting so I forgive him, but I can’t be sure. Apparently the whole town has got it anyway, though I don’t see the whole town holding its hair out of the bowl in a ponytail of gloom. My bathroom’s too small to accommodate them all I suppose, and people feel compelled to use their own. I cast my mind back to that man in the shop who thrust some dirty change in a dirty manner at me. It must have been him, the swine. My nephew’s too pretty to make me sick. He’s got freckles of angel dust and hair made out of bits that fell off the sun and shit.

Thank god germs are invisible. We’d all be running around hollering and waving our arms in the air like loonies caught in a twister of bees if we could see the things that might fell us to our beds at any time. Not that bed’s the right place for this one. Not if you’ve got good sheets.

I knew I was going to be struck down because I couldn’t do tea this morning. That’s how you know you’re sick – if you can’t do the most normal things like drink your goddamn tea, you’ve got nothing.

And then – this. The Great Purge of 2014 as it shall be known henceforth in my historical scrolls.

There’s a moment of revelatory candour after you’ve been sick. The knowledge you have sunk to a nadir of nastiness but that it’s only upwards from there; a kind of rebirth, rejuvenation, and the strange liberation that comes from knowing you’re no better than a hippo sluicing itself in it’s own juices. Not really. There’s a certain relief to be found in that. We’re all as disgusting as each other because our bodies are all the same, give or take a few bits, and most of us haven’t got a clue what’s going on in those slurpy sacks of mess and wonder and woe. Our own internal mysteries. Because let’s be honest – sometimes when your gut rumbles, you can never be entirely sure that a little critter hasn’t crawled in and taken up in the warm nook between kidney and spleen, can you? Anything could be going on in there. We’ve got holes everywhere. Stuff can get in. Remember Inner Space? Not just a classic 80s kid’s movie about a little dude poking around a much bigger dude’s guts – but an existential study of the utter chaos of being a human lumbered with a vessel doomed to an inglorious yucky confusing inconvenient stupid death. They didn’t put that in the blurb. It was just sub-plot. It’s the sub-plot to everything. There was no sequel to that film, you know. Or The Goonies. Or Labyrinth. Or Space Camp. Or Flight of the Navigator. Or Batteries Not Included. Cocoon got a second bash though, didn’t it. And The Never-ending Story I think, but I think they felt a bit obliged because of the title.

Anyway. What?

Oh yes. Ugh.

I’m dreaming of the last lull. The little spot of dazed sitting you do after the last purge before you suddenly get up right as rain and eat a multi-pack of Hula Hoops just to remind yourself you’re alive.

I’m just going to watch The Goonies one last time. And then die.

Dear Axl Rose

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Sadie Hasler

Dear Axl Rose,

Hullo!

I’ve never written to a rock star before. I feel obliged to come clean straight away and say that the closest I’ve ever got to being a fan is liking some boys who wore your T-shirts in the early 90s. I did however think the guns with the roses emblem was very evocative and pleasingly apt (Guns & Roses – nifty – I get it) – but then I listened to Julian Lennon’s Saltwater non-stop for about a year around the same time so I’m sure you’re not hugely desperate for my approval.

Anyway.

I just wanted to say hi, and to tell you something. For over a year and a half, every morning as I squint at my phone while I’m waiting for the kettle to boil, I see that my column has been read in different countries across the world, and that some of the more exotic hits have come from people searching for you, Axl Rose. Here’s why.

I once wrote a column about being stressed, and my friend telling me it wasn’t worth it; they quoted something you had said – “I don’t worry coz worry’s a waste of my time”. I thought it was a good quote, even if it was from a song about being smacked off your tits on heroin. It actually stopped me worrying for a bit. It had a nice husky Jack Daniels air of authority about it. I listened. Now, when I feel a little weed of worry growing up my leg, I think of your simple rocker’s wisdom and try and ‘rock up’, as it were, and sort myself out.

Because of you, my friend quoting you, and me writing that column, every day I have a trickle of people that find their way to me as a result of typing your name. They read the column of an unknown British girl because they like a cool American icon. They’re probably looking for tour dates or what the hell it was you were up to with that snake in a Kentucky motel, but something prompts them to click on my little site. They probably think I’m a nerd and wonder what I’ve got to say about anything cool like Rock, and they would be right – I am a mere recycler of your lore, and a not very faithful adapter – and afterwards they’re probably very disappointed and click away again tutting – but the interesting thing is that they find me at all.

The internet’s weird isn’t it, Axl Rose? Like for instance, when I decided to write this column I thought I’d look you up. Three seconds later I was reading about your life – about your upbringing, about your Dad, about your success, lulls, and crazy loves. The internet, though it spouts a lot of tripe, also makes us all strangely knowable, across any distance. It shrinks the differences in our lives, makes it possible to be friends with people you’ll never meet, and makes lonely people less daunted by their isolation.

I’ve always liked that ‘six degrees of separation’ theory – that we are never further from anyone than six people. We all link up. No matter how big and bonkers the world gets we’re never far away from each other. You’re with me every morning and we’ve never met – and it wouldn’t be impossible, if you were ever googling something, for you to stumble across me too. That’s pretty cool. It may not be true serendipitous randomness – it may be more to do with search terms and web optimisation and the maths of hits and how far people can be bothered to scroll through the engine’s listings before they find you – but it makes the world seem less big and scary to think of the little unimportant things that can keep us together, no matter who or where we are. S’nice.

Anyhoo, I’ve taken up too much of your imaginary time. You’re probably playing a piano in scuba gear at the bottom of your swimming pool in Malibu. But before I go, I’d like to also take the opportunity to apologise for my karaoke reign of terror a few years back, when – after a lifetime of being too afraid to sing in public, under the influence of sake in Tokyo – I discovered an operatic rendering of Sweet Child o’ Mine that got me laughs. It became my go-to song because I knew I’d get punched less than if I cracked out the Lisa Loeb.
I really hope you’re not psychically linked to your music every time someone ruins it. That would suck.

Thanks for listening, Axl Rose. I would totally give you the universal hand signal for Rock right now if my fingers bent that way without the other hand helping them.

Peace out. (Do you rockers say that or is that just hippies?)

Your secret friend in England,
Sadie Hasler
Columnist/Dog-owner/Karaoke Ruiner of Your Biggest Hit.
(Sorry. But those high notes are asking for it.)

The Humble Have Beans

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Sadie Hasler

I knew I wasn’t a natural at being vegan when I spent ten minutes staring at a yoghurt trying to remember what it was made of. The fact it was white hinted that it was probably dairy-ish, but other than that I remained unsure for a worrying amount of time.

I was ‘going vegan for the day’. I felt under a lot of pressure and kept pausing to question key things, like ‘did this sandwich once have legs?’ and ‘did this come out of a teat at any point?’ If the breakfast yoghurt dithering was anything to go by it was going to be a long 24 hours.

I was doing it for my friend Wendy. Wendy finds her birthdays hard, for reasons known to her friends. So she made this year’s mean something else. She could think of nothing she wanted more – more than any presents or stream of proffered drinks or social gatherings – than to invite her friends to be vegan for a day. She tried to calculate how many animals would be saved by us giving up meat and related products. This makes her sound a bit heavy and didactic, but she is nothing of the sort. She is unstinting in her passion for animal rights but never makes us feel like chumps for liking bacon. She has the sweetest heart I know.

She puts her money where her mouth is too, our Wends – protesting, saving badgers, volunteering at sanctuaries – and never to make herself look good. She just does what she feels is right. And this year on her birthday she started a small movement. Not to preach, or to convert, not to feel good about herself, but to turn her special day into a pragmatic approach to reducing the demand for cruelty. It’s easy to give a day to Wendy. Loads of us said yes.

Mid morning, as I found myself beseeching a doughnut to just give in and tell me if it had egg in it, I had a revelation. Baked beans. I have always had a profound respect for the humble bean. They would get me through. And they did – until dinner. Then I had another revelation. Chips. I could have chips and for one day it would be the choice of an elevated conscience, not the guilty decision of a dirty one. Chips heroically consumed, I knew I was on the home straight.

At a bar later that night, we all stood round chatting with Wendy, and I was somehow glad that we didn’t much discuss the shared theme of our day. Chips and beans didn’t feel like much of an effort, really. Not far off an ordinary day. I was glad I’d done it, but I was uncomfortably aware of the hypocrisy of making an easy gesture I would no doubt go back on shortly afterwards. It’s not that I am a savage carnivore whose incisors pang for steak – I don’t eat a lot of meat – but I don’t feel ready to give it up. As for the animal-related products that pass through just as poor living conditions, treatment and processing as the bloodier production of flesh – well, that’s an even trickier sacrifice – not because I crave those things in isolation, but because they seem to be everywhere, in everything.

Though my intake that day was easy in the end – convenience food at its simplest, the thought and decisions constantly whirring behind all I stuff I bypassed was not. My vegan day made me realise that my eating meat is not a preference more than it is habit and laziness. I don’t want to have to think. I selfishly pick other things to be my life’s priorities, and a big ‘change’ would slow me down.

Vegans have to really think. Vegans have to research. They have to stay focused. It takes effort and resourcefulness and creativity if you want to eat well and not get bored.

I considered having vegan days more often; being more organised and actually earning my right to cry over stories of animal cruelty, knowing my tears alone don’t mean a bloody thing. And I wrapped up a tin of beans for Wendy, as a silly memento of the day she made us all think.

The £9 Britney

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Sadie Hasler

It cost me nine quid for a start. That’s Reason #1 in why I should have suspected the haircut wouldn’t end well.

Reason #2 was the fact I had interrupted two perma-sniffing Ukrainians in what looked like a half-hearted game of scissor darts. Tumble-weeds of split-end sweepings wafted across the floor in an eerie wind.

“Hi. I have forty minutes. I wondered if you could sort this mess out in that…”
“Sure sure, yes. I take you over.”, One Of Them answered brusquely as she simultaneously took my coat, sat me down, and choked me with a black cape tied too tight. I gagged like a bileous superhero and tried not to be offended by her desperation to plonk me down. My hair wasn’t that bad, was it?

“You can do it dry if you like.”, I offered, conscious of time. Nothing good ever came out of that sentiment.
“So, you obvussly want all this to coming off?”, she gestured with the bottom ten inches of my hair like a flick-blade. I quietly said I was thinking more like three inches, just to take off the wonky bits that had built up from my ill-advised home self-trimmings.
“Rilly? (Long pause in which I maybe blinked a full three times). Ok.”
And off she went. Snip snip.

I don’t know what was more unsettling – watching her cutting my hair in the mirror, being able to watch myself watching her cutting my hair in the mirror, or being able to watch twenty of myselves watching twenty of herselves cutting my hair in the kaleidoscopic mirrors around the salon. She moved like a majorette who had recently switched to ninja arts and kept dropping the nunchucks. Her scissor blades kept snagging on my cape.

“I’ve never said this before, but I saw a picture of Britney Spears with these sort of fringey flicky bits and I wondered…
“Sure sure. I do.” She muttered as she dragged thinning scissors down the canopy of hair wailing at my cheek. I saw my hair fall to the floor in slow-motion.

I thought of Britney. She’d had some hairy rides with scissors and stuff and had come out of it ok. I wondered if the sartorial tragedy I saw unfolding in front of me would earn me a pity residency in Las Vegas but I knew I’d never be able to pull off the sequins. I choked on one once. No one is going to pay two hundred dollars to see me panic-choke and gesture for a Heimlich from Barry Manilow in the front row.

She finished up. Pulled my lengths long and tight against my face like she was trying to exorcise demons from my follicles, then plonked her scissors in a cup. She wrenched my poor cape from me. It was like being parted from a cousin in an Auschwitz queue. I wondered what would happen to it.

I did the British thing. Beam. Teeth. Bluster. “Gosh, that feels so much better, thank you!” as I limped over to the counter to pay. I stared into my purse and wondered if Matt would still love me with my new head.
“Where’s your tip box?”
Rattle. Infinite echo.

I re-entered the cold feeling lighter, nervous of my first glimpse of myself away from the stilted trippiness of the comedown salon. I pondered hair and femininity and style and hiding behind a mane and the art of tipping and Britney and assertiveness and paying more than nine pounds in future, when I realised I’d left my coat and had to go back. Which was handy, because I wanted to check I still had all my ears.

Killing Kids With Christmas Trees

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Sadie Hasler

My Christmas tree is a sorry thing to behold, it really is. I’m staring at it now. It’s naked, and bent to one side with all the indignity of a groom on his stag do, leaning against a lamp-post with his tackle between his arse-cheeks. The decorations came down last week, with the promise that the tree would soon follow, but ‘soon’ is as vague as you want it to be, isn’t it.

I can’t even take the glory for Phase 1: De-rigging. Matt did it while I finished my dinner one night. I think he made the most of me being a painfully slow eater to take action. With a decisive flourish no less – whipping the shiny things off as quickly as Sid James would a cackling nurse’s bra, and laying them neatly in a box for next year. I stared at him while he did it, chewing like a cow on cud.

I was quietly affronted that it had taken him no time at all to completely undo the hard work I had put into scattering a load of cheap tat betwixt the rapidly desiccating branches of a prematurely felled fir, but I was also a bit aroused by his no-nonsense action so I forgave him.

I’d had every intention of doing it at some point anyway. I really had. Mainly because I had been reminded of my laxness when my sister had reminisced, aloud to everyone on Christmas day, how I had once taken my tree down in June. I was about to haughtily defend myself when I was visited by the flashback of throwing a shrivelled brown corpse from a second floor window (surprisingly tricky) on a blazing summer’s day and decided to keep my mouth shut. I knew then, as my sister laughed, as I pretended to laugh, as Matt stared at me with a big grin that just about covered his panic, that I would have to pull my socks up this year and aim for a February deconstruction, at the latest. For the sake of my relationship. For the sake of not defenestrating a fir and killing a skipping kid newly broken up for summer hols. Christmas shouldn’t kill kids when they’re not expecting it. I know that much at least.

Despite my good intentions, you understand why I felt a bit hurried. I felt like Matt was saying “Hey, weird girl. See the big tree that wouldn’t naturally be found in the corner of the room, still in the roasting tin you put it in because we didn’t have a fancy bucket? Well, one more day of it being there and it stops being cute and festive and just turns into a reminder that we’re rubbish.” I wasn’t ready. I am quite used to being rubbish.

On the whole though, I think it looks like we’ve found a nice collaborative system. Matt strips the tree and puts the box in the loft, and I murmur vaguely about the indeterminate time hence when I shall drag the corpse of the Christmas past down the hall and brazenly into the street, my furtive lobbing days proudly behind me. Maybe that will be our Christmas tradition. I suppose new ones get made all the time. My best friend decided whiskey macs and glazed hams on Christmas Eve are to be his new tradition, and why not. I suppose that’s part of the fun of being a grown-up – you get to make up traditions according to your own sense of fun.

Maybe mine could be finding different seasonal outfits for a tree that doesn’t want to leave.
Maybe Matt would find that fun.

Hang on, I think I’ve got a spring bonnet somewhere…

Bird in a Black Tie

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Sadie Hasler

I tried something different on New Year’s Eve. I dressed as a bloke. I didn’t actually beard up or pad my pants with socks or anything, but I took what I thought would be the easy way out of a black tie soirée. I don’t mean I shinned down the drainpipe when the canapés ran low. I mean I opted for a low stress option. I took it literally. I wore a black tie. And a man’s white shirt.

That afternoon I had been on a charity shop spree with the girls, and when I joked that I was tempted to go as a bloke to save the anxious lady trussing, they said “why don’t you then?”

Charity shops are the right places to take your friends up on a sartorial challenge. Need a man’s white shirt that doesn’t gape at the boobs and a thin black tie for a 10-12 year old boy? Look no further than this potluck bin, madam.

Thus was it decided. No dress for me. No laddering of tights, no rotating strapless bra. A white shirt and a bar mitzvah tie. I didn’t even wash the shirt. I got it home and when I realised it smelled clean and not of geriatric puke, I just whacked it on.

Initially I whacked it on with a skirt and tights, thinking I looked a bit preppy, like a prefect with a hipflask. But when Matt’s eyes popped out of his head and he said, between fondles, that it might be a bit ‘risqué’ for company, I got a bit huffy about outdated saucy connotations ruining everything for us non-prostitutes. So I put some black trousers on and thought I’d feel better.

But I didn’t. I felt like a nob. I felt like I had tried even harder in not ‘trying’, even sluttier than if I’d worn the slurpy dress that once popped a nip out as I suckled at a vodka luge. I was cross that my solution hadn’t solved the problem. Cross that I should feel just as uncomfortable in a dead man’s shirt with a ripped elbow with no bits, no obvious femininity, no ‘effort’ on display.

The little bell in the feminist ward of my brain rang out: “Oi. Dipstick. It’s because you’re not supposed to wear the timeless power garb of men – you’re supposed to be sculpted in a dress pleasing to the eye and hurtful to the waist.” I shushed the little bell. I didn’t have time for feminism; I was running late and Matt had got ready in a man-typical five minutes and was casually strumming his guitar while I stood, hating myself.

Then I realised something. There is something about any kind of ‘proper dressing up’ that always makes me feel naked. In both expensive dresses and cheap dresses comes the same awkwardness. In revealing dresses or modest dresses, a similar feeling of exposure. In costumes for telly or plays, always a strange displacement. The fact is most sane people feel a little daunted when they think people might really be looking at them. Like, really looking. And in ‘dressing up’, you’re sort of inviting the society of glances, the culture of being watched. Which is a bit bonkers when you think about it.

I think, really, I mostly got cross with myself that, despite all my maturing and emboldening, I might still not be ready for the statement that is “I am bored of dresses and shall tonight be wearing the same as you, Big Bob McManfist.”

I wonder if it will always be that way or if I’m due an enlightening period in my late 30s of totally not giving a dog-doo. I hope so. I have a fancy for waistcoats and pocket-watches.