I WONDER what happened to Natasha and Verushka, the two nice girls in Kyiv who painted me orange?
The minute I wake up, I don't put on make-up, because Mr Lash insists I look better without. He hasn't got over the makeover the Ukrainian girls gave me in a cafe where I was minding my own business eating Kyiv Cake.
"You'd look quite pretty if you wore ten inches of panstick," Tasha told me; while Verushka attacked me with gigantic false eyelashes and a can of superglue.
They just happend to have an enormous sack of slap with them, in case they bumped into a spy's wife who wasn't making the most of herself.
They apologised for not having "ironware" to big-up my disappointingly flat hair. And Verushka got a warning look for pulling up my thermal vest to examine my Big Naturals.
"You need to show off your assets," she persisted, casting a disapproving eye over my footballer's legs; product of a mis-spent youth taking penalties when I should have been on a muscle-wasting drug.
My new besties admired the results of their makeover, while I tried to avoid looking in the mirror. They gave me a henchgirl-red lipgloss as a parting gift.
"Your secret weapon," Vrushka said.
"Try to make an effort," Tasha advised.
Back at the Grand Hotel, I narrowly escaped being beaten up by the gentleman pimp who controlled the lobby. He mistook me for a freelance trying to work without coughing up commission. Not that anyone would have noticed a black eye, I was wearing enough kohl to be mistaken for a slapper panda on the pull.
My face is back to its usual milk-bottle white, but I still have the henchgirl-red lipgloss sitting on my dressing-table and a few more days to go before I've finished digesting the Kyiv Cake.
Tasha and Vrushka are Ukraine's secret weapons, people who refuse to be beaten. Ukraine is Russia's Vietnam, a war that can only be lost.
Funny guy
Creepy Neighbour reported me to the police again for "laughing". It's not illegal to have a sense of humour (yet), but try explaining that to someone with an IQ of below 25.
Almost a hanging offence to laugh when there's a paranoid loon about, but it's OK to call the Prime Minister a "fat, albino dwarf" on social media.
BJ has a Bad Hair Day every day and has been insulted so many times I (almost) feel sorry for him. Let the person who's managed a pandemic, war, recession, and has never told a lie throw the first brick.
Writing novels is making up lies for a living, according to my mum, so I have plenty of practice. My default lie, when invited for "drinkie poos" by a sex pest poet is, "I'd love to but...there's a cake defrosting in my bag."
I've never been asked what type of cake. Being a noseyparker, that's the first thing I'd want to know.
I've used the cake lie on the same pest three times. Not mentioning names because I've forgotten his. Let's call him Decayed One.
The Decayed One first invited me for drinkie poos in the Poetry Society bookshop. Next time I was ambushed was at UEA, where I taught Autobiography as Fiction – showing students how to make up lies for a living. He didn't recognise me, but the defrosting cake excuse made him uneasy.
The last time the Decayed One invited me for drinkie poos was a film preview, where we were the only two people in the cinema. Neither of us was watching the film. I was watching him to make sure he didn't come any closer, he was watching me in case I escaped before getting his creepy invitation.
This time I just told him to f*** off. I'm not a social drinker. I drink alone, or with Mr Lash.
Hungry like the Woolf
Tomorrow is Dalloway Day, a celebration of Virginia Woolf, who never recovered from being played by a large prosthetic nose attached to Nicole Kidman in The Hours.
Woolf had a beautiful profile, so it's unclear why the nose was allowed to take over that movie. Maybe it was supposed to make Kidman look intelligent? Instead it dominated the film, leaving audiences to wonder if Sam Taylor-Wood was her stand-in.
Woolfie's association with the Bloomsbury set, whose lives are frequently fictionalised in film, has made her more famous than her books alone might have achieved.
Mrs Dalloway, a novel set during one day in June when Mrs D is having a party, isn't everyone's taste. As my mum says to me, "You're no Barbara Cartland."
Woolf started as a blue-stocking but turned into a fashion junkie after her affair with Vita Sackville-West. Like Princess Diana after her, she was dressed by Vogue, whose editor sourced Matisse print dresses and mannish tailoring for her to wear with her big flat shoes.
Virginia had such a nice life, being sucked up to at parties by T S Eliot and the other Bloomsbury bitches, why did she want to leave that room of her own to jump into the river Ouse?
To be fair, Woolfie had lost all her teeth by the time she suicided and the "birds were talking Greek"; a sign that the party is over.
She wrote two suicide notes. Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again...and jumped into the river wearing her husband’s raincoat weighted down with bricks. If you want to view her sinister, spidery handwriting, they are in the British Museum.
Only a weirdo – or a writer! – leaves two drafts of a suicide note. But dying is a good career move. Sylvia Plath wasn't a bestseller until after she gassed herself. Mishima ensured he would never go out of print by disembowelling himself live on television. Marilyn was immortalised after dying in Chanel No 5, though we only have Karl Lagerfeld's word for that. She might have been wearing mascara as well.
Would I write my suicide note in lipstick or blood? I'm too shallow for suicide. And I've missed the deadline for dying young.
Carole Morin is Glasgow-born novelist who lives in Soho, London. Her next book, Fleshworld, is published on July 28
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