I AM NEWLY ADDICTED TO BEEFBURGERS. I eat them in brown pitta bread with relish and cheese and tomatoes and radishes. I've cooked so many (and convinced the alarms the entire building was burning down) that the whole place reeks of said fry-ups as you walk in. Not having the use of an oven any more because the old one's so dirty and grease-filled it smokes like a towering inferno whenever it's on (but no flames). So I carbonize mine in a pan. I'm not averse to blackened meat. I really like the whole indoor-BBQ aspect. But the last but one was a bit too Hiroshima-crunchy. In fact the only thing non-nuclear about it was it didn't glow in the dark and didn't make your fillings tingle.
Anyway: right next to me in a carrier bag as I speak are four of Morrisons own prime beef quarter pounders. 99% beef. I have this inner excited glow of looking forward to cooking them, which is quite sad. And it's about the only excitement I have left. The dreary depths of autumn are mounded rotting-leaf high... police constables have been issued with advice leaflets on how to avoid slipping up and injuring themselves in these terrorous times. I found an embossing stamp this morning and have been embossing everything I own. I am still reading (the end of) Bahnhof Zoo and lots of things re Japanese. But apart from that I feel like jumping before an oncoming train. I just hope I win Euromillions' £90,000,000 jackpot on Friday. Unlike some of those American lotteries I hear about, this one pays you the entire sum tax free in one lump. How cool is that. You could even buy a house in Kensington and Chelsea with that money...
I mean, if £90,000,000 can't solve my problems: what will???
Talking of money, who else was a fan of 80s soap operas? My personal favourite was the Australian Return to Eden. Unlike Dynasty it wasn't so boring you could only admire the set-design. Most of the caste of this Australian "miniseries" (not based on a novel) had been in Prisoner Cell Block H so me and my brother called them by their prisoner names as the rich-bitch drama unfolded. All I remember was Travers from Prisoner (the Joan Collins figure) had a psychopathic hatred of her pudding-basin-coiffured rival, the motherly Stephanie Harper. O ~ I recall the name to this day. How full my life must have been in the 1980s.... just about every cliffhanger seemed to feature a twisted-faced Jilly/Travers's Aussie-vowelled threat: "I'm gonna get you, Stiffany Hairper!" Here's a few clips:
Peta Toppano (Travers/Jilly) official site.





