Cock, fanny, whatever

For one day a year all normal canons of taste are cast into the indifferently style-erasing maw that is the Eurovision Song Contest. I was to watch it with my girls and a friend of mine I met thirty years ago on teaching practice. I printed the scorecards off, then prepared a buffet tea of hydrogenated vegetable fat, salt and sugar.

Francesca turned up dressed as a Dutch peasant, all golden tresses and a long white milkmaid-type dress. Although she's a couple of years younger than me, she's a bit deaf, and in cahoots with my children, who appear to suffer from the same impairment, she turned the TV up so loud I had to stuff bits of paper in my ears.

Iceland had an MP in their band, while Poland brought a washerwoman, chosen for her singing ability alone, which helped them win the UK televote. Hungary judged that a pissed-up Saturday night audience of Czech farmworkers and Russian postmen would take to a song about child abuse and neglect. Russia's entrants tied their hair together and toyed with perspex poles on a see-saw, and Ukraine brought a dancer in a giant hamster wheel--one of the usual crop of redundant Eastern European acrobats. On the internet, we didn't have long to wait before the traditional foreigners' exchange of insults over Eurovision, expressed in the default phrase of girls who don't speak much English: "You are bitch!"

Our song, ("Something's stirring in the silence / And it reeks of passive violence)" finished 17th, up two places from last year. The contest was won by a bearded Austrian transsexual, prompting one Russian politician to remark that "the participation of the obvious transvestite and hermaphrodite Conchita Wurst on the same stage as Russian singers on live television is blatant propaganda of homosexuality and spiritual decay," whilst the former Speaker of the Duma, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, announced that this is "the end of Europe." The leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party said "Fifty years ago the Soviet army occupied Austria. We should have stayed."

I pored over pages of comments on the Guardian about the words "conchita" and "wurst". It's a fecundly polysemic dyad, having many different resonances in slang in South America and Austria. It could mean "little shell sausage", but it also suggests "cock, fanny, whatever, I don't know" in parts of Austria.

Trina watched it at her house, and rang me up in drunken midnight enthusiasm saying that we must go to it live. The following day she'd booked us a flat in Vienna for that week.

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"So, who's that girl you've been flirting with on Visage Livre?"

"Oh her [Italian-Looking Woman]. No, you've met her. You met her the other day. She was sat over there. She was that girl at the party."

"She's very pretty. So why are you... dallying with her?"

"No, no, there's nothing there. She is pretty, but do you think I'm going to run off with someone who works in recruitment? That's a fucking non-job for a start. I tell you who is pretty. That girl who took over your job. She is gorgeous. I loved that necklace she had on, do you remember--those grey stones on a silver thread, and that beautiful grey skirt and those black boots--you know, when we all went out to that Chinese. She is gorgeous." Trina smiled and started riffling her hands through my hair.

When we got in I noticed that the bailiffs had been round again. Fortunately we'd all been out. I swept the note up as quickly as I could but Trina saw it, and this morning she rang and asked me the usual questions, "I'm not having you go to jail," "how much would it cost just to postpone them," and so on. I want to hasten my imprisonment, not postpone it. It would be a bit embarrassing, being in the local paper, but it's hardly something that will hinder my future prospects, seeing as I have none.

Before my fifteen minutes of infamy, I'd prepare Kim with a list of what has to be done while I'm in the Queen's Hotel. Trina would add more to my problems, by making me explain why I hadn't entrusted the task to her instead of Kim, but Trina cannot handle situations with which she is not already familiar, having had a narrow upper-middle class life. She'd get in a tizz and go tearfully in person to the bailiff's offices in Liverpool, where they would light up at the sight of a comfortably off but legally uninformed, love-smitten girlfriend. "But they were so kind and understanding, looby. They gave me a cup of tea while they put my card through."

Never mind, at least I'll be secure when I'm old. Got this from the railway pension people the other day.

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Let's talk about sex, baby. Could I make a polite request to the women of Lancaster please. More white cotton short-sleeved broderie anglaise tops with the first couple of buttons undone. Saw this girl the other day in town wearing one, lanyard dangling down her cleavage, and I was transfixed. Oh dear, I have become a tit-starer in middle age.

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I was googling how to get to Vaduz, because I am not going to meet this European Marketing Manager for Zeneca, or whatever she is, in Glasgow next month, and we were flirting and chatting by text and she pre-suggested a second date in Vaduz, where she's been, and I said I've got David Beattie's history of modern Liechtenstein, and in the course of looking how to get to Liechtenstein, I discovered one of those rich women's blogs which consist of photographs taken during showy-offy visits to places where everything is charming.