razzmatazz (part I)

you can read this here as it is, or you can go here and see pictures and fabulous things!

“are you gonna go out or are you staying at home, eating boxes of milk tray?
watch tv on your own?
oh aren’t you the one with your razzmatazz and the nights on the town?
oh oh oh” (pulp – razzmatazz)

this week has been just mad. i swear to god, i’ve been in bed all day, watching telly, texting people and eating a box of milk tray. for the past week i’ve only slept a fitful five or so hours before having to get up and do it all again. let’s start from the beginning:

monday

probably the most sedate day of the week. i had an exam that day but i did absolutely no revision. i took my book in the kitchen and pretended to revise but inevitably ended up prancing around and listening to the radio, so when 2:15 came around i wasn’t expecting great things from myself. it was only a crappy multiple choice, and i ended up doing an ‘ip, dip, do’ on quite a few. when i got back we decided to do what ms-quilt did and made a ginormous tea. potato wedges, cajun chicken, chicken rogan josh, boiled rice, egg friend rice (claire guessed the recipe and it was gorgeous). and then me and lucy polished off the rest of the ice cream. groo. we all sat around stroking our fat pregnant like bellies and all agreed to have such a tea every night that week. that was the last big buffet we ever bothered to do.

tuesday

ooh, today was a big exciting day! all sunday and monday i’d decided that i wanted to get a tattoo. now, i usually go through periods of wanting to get one, but i usually have a crap design or i never have the time to get one, so the interest wanes a bit. plus most people know that i dislike tribal tattoos, celtic tattoos, cartoon tattoos, chinese/japanese writing tattoos, tattoos with people’s names on, and tattoos on arms/legs/hands/feet. i think getting a tattoo from the selection at the parlour is stupid, because chances are a hundred people have waltzed in and picked exactly the same one. so that’s most of them then. but on sunday night i found the most gorgeous picture and i just had to have it. plus i thought it would be a nice way to celebrate the year, especially since i’m about to travel and start work, and i’d done well in my exams. i figured when i’m a downtrodden housewife at 35 i could look at my tattoo and remember that i used to have fun and be quite clever. i did a real verruca salt and snapped ‘i want it now!’ and texted lucy (who has a five year tattoo on her stomach) to tell her i wanted it done and we should go to leeds in order to do so. she texted back saying ‘how does tuesday sound?’ oh crapola. no getting out of it then. i told jack and tony and they spent the next 48 hours, staying up until 3 in the morning on both nights, trying to convince me not to do it. i said they were both miserable old granddads, but i said they would be granted full access to ‘i told you so’s’ if i regretted it.

but still, on the tuesday, they offered to come along to lend their support and see me in pain. so we had a little gaggle of me, lucy, tony, jack and claire all trekking to leeds (home city in my heart, ahh). it felt like a school trip, i was this close to organising us into a crocodile and following the teacher.

sensible old me had still done the research on tattoo parlours. i found one that came highly recommended on the itchy leeds website called ‘ultimate skin.’ it sounds scary already. i printed out a map of where it was, and we got there far too quickly for my liking. i was starting to panic a bit and the thought of getting out of it was getting quite desirable. but still, i wanted it done more than anything. strange feeling. a bit like when you’re strapped in and just about to set off on a rollercoaster – you queued up for an hour to get on it, but you’d pay vast sums to get off it as soon as the ride starts.

when we got there, i was very intimidated as all there was was a door and some steps leading up to the studio on the second floor. so i had no way of checking the cleanliness of the studio or how busy it was or anything. this was massively off putting, but remember, i was with claire ‘i have no fear’ hills, who promptly opened the door, took my hand and dragged me upstairs. it was a nervous trek to the top.

i needn’t have worried though. the look of relief was visible on everyone’s face (especially mine) when we saw a lovely clean studio with bright blue walls and a woman having a tattoo done quite calmly.

there was one woman there doing the tattoo, who i recognised from the website as alison. she stopped tattooing and i squeaked i was enquiring about a tattoo. she told me to sit and wait so all five of us perched ourselves on the little benches and started absentmindedly looking through tattoo magazines. i was also desperately trying to make eye contact with the woman having the tattoo, and i mouthed ‘does it hurt?’ to which she made the motion of ‘so-so.’ she’d finished in next to no time so i nervously produced the picture of what i wanted and asked if i could have it done in a chocolate brown colour, to which she replied that it could be done, but it was likely to bleed and would be better done in black. so i said that was okay and put down a £10 deposit and she told me to come back at 4:30, in an hours’ time. we were all quite hungry by then, so we went to mcdonald’s, where my boyfriend rang and ‘wished me luck with the hot needles’, and i just stared at my free tweenie toy from my happy meal in silence and started to get very, very scared.