HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT

To celebrate the fact that I turned 29 on Sunday I decided to throw a little ‘soirgay’ at my place so my friends and I could all get ‘to-gay-ther’ and have lots of drinking and debauched fun, to a soundtrack consisting of Madonna albums, Madonna soundtracks, Madonna greatest hits, and Madonna 12” mixes, with the odd Madonna DVD thrown in, just to mix it up. It was also an opportunity to put a theory I have to the test. The theory involves a cooker, The Folks and their love of proving how fabulous they are in front of my friends, and is a mixture of complete cuntistry on my part and complete genius, also on my part.

I have been after a new cooker for a while now, as the one I have is older than me, is as temperamental as me and needs to be given lots of attention before it will even heat up a tin of soup. It is like that annoying vibrator you own that sometimes works after being charged all day and sometimes doesn’t. Or like sleeping with a male escort, you never know what you’re gonna get. The oven door hangs off, the grill doesn’t work, it is impossible to clean and halfway through meals it will randomly turn itself off, which is incredibly frustrating when you are trying to get something to rise……

Anyway, I have been dropping hints with The Folks for the last 4 months in the hope that they would buy me one. I’d say things like ‘I would have cooked you something but the oven is on the blink’ or ‘I’m living on breakfast cereal at the moment because the hob will not light up’ or ‘Sorry it’s so cold in here, I usually heat up the place with the stove, but as you know it’s not working’ and was sure I had done just enough to secure me a sparkling new cooker for the Christmas just gone. I was convinced that they would buy me one, so decided to spend the money I had put aside for it on even more Christmas presents. For myself. So you can imagine my utter disappointment when they arrived with my presents and the closest thing to a cooker I got was a candle lighter.

I cursed myself silently for spending my cooker fund, and the harsh realisation hit me that I would now be living on toasted cheese sandwiches until I could afford to save for another cooker. How COULD I have been so stupid I asked myself? And as soon as I thought the question in my head, the answer came to me even quicker than David Beckham does in my prison rape fantasy. As always, there was a major flaw to my plan.

The Folks are very generous and love nothing more than to lavish gifts upon me; in the last year they have bought me a state of the art tumble drier, a rather fabulous barbeque, fixtures and fittings, appliances and much more. However, all of these have been given to me in front of people. Now, as I was spending Christmas with friends, and they were spending it at home there was nobody to see the presents I had been given and therefore no need to buy something extravagant. What is the point of giving if you have no audience eh?

So, with my birthday, approaching and now growing sick of cold soup and toasted sandwiches I had an epiphany. To have a ren-gay-vous ON my birthday with lots of guests and invite The Folks. Surely if there is an audience there will be a cooker.

The Folks arrived at 2:30 and presented me with a card and a bottle of champagne and of course big birthday hugs. Mmm I thought handling the bottle, is this my cooker? By 4pm everyone had arrived there was no cooker in sight, and I had already had too much to drink. I began to think that all I was getting was said bottle of champagne. Not much cooking you can do with that I thought, so I opened it, downed it and started to feel somewhat hard done by. I went to the bathroom and sat in there wondering why The Folks hated me so much. What had I done to deserve this?

I was already starting to feel quite drunk as well as sorry for myself and decided not to leave the bathroom for the rest of the day. This shindig had been a complete waste of time and I wondered what the Sarah Jessica Parker I was thinking by putting this on? Just as I was about to take an overdose of the Vitamin C in my cabinet everyone outside started singing Happy Birthday, and I walked out to find The Folks, with the cooker I had been yearning for, and all of my friends gushing telling me what a lucky person I am and how fabulous The Folks were. And just like that, it went from a celebration of my birthday, to a celebration of The Folks.

So, I got what I wanted and they got what they wanted. I got the cooker and they got the adoration of being the world best Folks, just as I had predicted. If only I had thought about it logistically pre Christmas, who knows what I could of bagged myself for my birthday?

I now want a flat screen TV so, I guess I will be having another ‘soir-gay’ next year, and of course, The Folks are invited.

Is it cuntistry, or just pure genius?