Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto’s Weblog

Mitzi Szereto slums it on a BMW motorbike

Okay, anyone who’s seen the latest Mitzi TV video “Born To Be Wild” can probably figure out that I’m a bit partial to motorbikes. In fact, some of the happiest times I’ve ever had were riding pillion when I lived in LA. Those were the days, flying along Pacific Coast Highway on the smog-tinged ocean breeze! (I’ll omit details of how I once drove into a wall in Beverly Hills while actually driving one of the things. Well, at least it wasn’t a wall in Compton!)

I guess it was inevitable that this subjugated desire of mine should once again rear its ugly head. Being the resourceful lass that I am, I put the word out that I wanted a ride.

An invite was soon forthcoming.

However, things never quite go according to plan – at least not where I’m concerned. What started off as an autumn Saturday afternoon motorcycle ride into the English countryside ended up landing me in the midst of what appeared to be a camp of survivalists in rural Essex.

Tank Girl

Now Essex is known for many things; survivalists aren’t usually the first thing that comes to mind. Chavs, footballers, footballers’ wives, bleached blonde hair and fake orange tan (see footballers’ wives), Essex girls, white stilettos (see Essex girls), West Ham supporters, holidays in “Ibeefa” (see Essex girls), the highest rate of marriages in the UK (and the highest rate of divorces), and a sledgehammer accent (innit?) that can strip the paint off metal – these are the things that have put Essex on the map!

Oh, yeah, and Jamie Oliver. Now he’s the kind of Essex boy you’d want to bring home to mama. In fact, he’s probably the only Essex boy you’d want to bring home to mama, unless you fancy your mama being besieged by copious uses of the “C” word, which is bandied about by these finely reared Essex lads as often and easily as one might ask for a cup of tea.

Anyway, I was dead excited about my scheduled ride into the country on the back of a BMW motorbike wiv my new m8 “Mister G” – gun runner, rapper, and drug cartel kingpin from the West Country. But as the day drew near, I began to suffer a twinge of anxiety. Bad enough I’d just read a news article about a motorcyclist in Scotland who ended up in hospital after colliding with a sheep. Apparently the guy sustained a lot of injuries, however, that didn’t stop him from being billed by the local council for damage when his motorbike caught fire and melted a portion of the road’s surface.

The sheep died.

Then I kept getting SPAM emails from some insurance company in the UK that specialises in road accident coverage. Was somebody trying to tell me something?

We weren’t even ten minutes into our ride when we passed through a village with a preponderance of funeral directors, not to mention a cemetery located conveniently close by. Another sign? Was I teasing the Grim Reaper by daring to do something I might actually enjoy? I realised later that the village had a very large population of elderly folk. Hey, you’d think they’d figure out not to move there, what with the high mortality rate. Sort of like that TV show “Midsomer Murders“. Why do people live there when the murder rate is something like 85%? I mean, how dumb can you get?

I decided to get a photo of me slumming it on a BMW motorbike, so we pulled off the road into an area that looked for all intents and purposes like a family campground. However, rather than pup tents and screaming tykes, it looked like we’d landed in the midst of a military coup. Tanks, weaponry, army boys with rifles – with the only tents in sight army-issue with camouflage netting. I kept expecting Charlton Heston to appear holding up a rifle that could kill a charging buffalo as he muttered something about “from my cold dead hands”.

Oh, yeah, he is dead. Guess that gun thing didn’t work out too well for him after all.

As for the survivalists, something wasn’t adding up. First of all, the men I saw didn’t look as though they were cast members from the film “Deliverance“. Second, I didn’t hear any banjos. In fact, the one major thing that gave a hint that something wasn’t quite kosher was an old phonograph playing The Andrew Sisters. Turns out it was just a harmless gathering of retro-military aficionados camping out for the weekend.

I’m now looking to recruit someone with a Harley so I can have another pillion ride. Though after this visit to the Twilight Zone, maybe it might be wiser to hit Kent?

On second thought, maybe not. It’s south of the river. And as any proper Londoner will tell you, you just don’t go south of the river!

From my cold dead hands...

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In this fragile and depressed economy, I wouldn’t want to wish bad on any business. But there are times when it’s pretty obvious that a business is a serious blight to the community. Sometimes you aren’t aware of just how major a blight it’s been…

…until it’s gone.

I refer to the recent (and what appears to be major) fire at a popular nightclub on the local High Street: on the surface an unfortunate event, in reality a blessing – at least to us poor bastards who live within drunken shrieking distance of it. It happened early Sunday evening before it was due to open. I’d just arrived home from a Mitzi TV video shoot in Kensington (an arduous task, since there was engineering work on the rail line, necessitating a replacement bus service which increased my travel time by a good hour each way). I was attempting to chill out when I smelled a very nasty burning. And no, I wasn’t cooking!

My initial thought was, had Burning Man suddenly been relocated from the Nevada desert to a town located on the edge of London?

When I went to look out the window for any signs of new-age “radicals” singing “Koom-By-Ya”, I saw that the air was thick with smoke (slightly worrisome what toxins might have been IN that smoke), and it sounded as if every fire engine from every fire brigade in southeast England was heading my way. I was ready to grab Teddy and my laptop, and get the hell out.

Fortunately, such measures proved unnecessary; the smoke appeared to be slowly thinning. Just to make sure all was well and neither Burning Man nor Armageddon was taking place in the hood, I decided to find out for myself what was happening. However, no sooner did I reach the sidewalk when a neighbour called down to me from his balcony (Romeo, oh Romeo!), informing me that the entire High Street was closed off and the famous infamous nightclub had been charred. Satisfied with this explanation (he was cute, surely he wouldn’t lie to me?), I returned to the warmth and safety of my flat, where Teddy and I kicked back with some Swiss chocolate.

Well, that night was the first night in two years I heard nothing but blissful silence. No shouting, no yelling, no shrieking, no sirens – nothing but a gentle breeze and the occasional chirping of a bird (along with Ted’s occasional snore). Coincidence? When the same thing happened on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, I had to conclude that no, it was not a coincidence, but a direct result of the fire. Clearly, the vast majority of anti-social behaviourial problems and criminal activity taking place in my town stemmed from one main source: the nightclub.

No more nightclub, no more problems.

I can’t begin to tell you what a pleasure it’s been not to hear drunken sluts shouting and shrieking till all hours, along with their chavvy male equivalents who seem to think that being a “man” means to be so inebriated they can’t even walk. Oh, and of course swapping STDs with their drunken female counterparts in a toilet or alleyway.

In the immortal words of Alf the Cockney Devil from my short story “Hell is Where the Heart is” (Getting Even: Revenge Stories): “Put the spoiled little shits in the army, that’ll make men of ‘em.” (And women, too, no doubt.) I should add that Alf’s idea of a real army was the Israeli version. Wish I could say these booze-soaked blights to modern civilisation were an anomaly. Alas, they’re more the rule than the exception in the cities and towns of Britain.

All I know is, I don’t want things to go back to how they were. In fact, I’m tempted to run for political office, if I thought I could keep this menace of a nightclub from re-opening and re-attracting the scummier residents from the less salubrious towns within commuting distance to mine. Just think what I could do if I was on the local council. We could have a Mitzi TV video featuring quirky councillors engaging in a singalong at their local pub!

Oh, yeah, I did that one already.

Okay, how about an egg and spoon race?

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Well, it’s that time of year again when I’m receiving panicked emails from my mother informing me that yet another hurricane is about to hit South Florida. Seems like only yesterday when this end-of-the-world scenario was transpiring, with wild-eyed rabid shoppers climbing all over each other to lay claim to the last torch (flashlight to you Yanks) on the shelf at The Home Depot, not to mention queuing up to buy petrol for the family car. I well remember being stranded in Glorious Sunshine Land during Hurricane Katrina, the eye of which went right over the roof of my mother’s house, sparking off a psychedelic light show on the power lines that would have put any rave to shame, leaving us with no power for several days – and no air conditioning. If you’ve ever spent a summer in South Florida, you’ll know that this is tantamount to the very worst of CIA torture techniques. It took three days before we could find a hotel that had either electricity or a working generator. My flight back home to Blighty had to be delayed by another week, and I was never so glad to see the glum-faced immigration officers at Heathrow in my life.

Which makes me wonder why people get so worried about earthquakes. I’ve experienced a few during my time on the West Coast. These are the little things in life that keep you on your toes. I mean, there’s nothing like being jolted out of a sound slumber at 5am and having to sprint naked into the nearest doorway (for those of you who don’t know about such things, doorways are apparently the strongest part structurally in a building). With the opening lyrics to “The End” by The Doors playing in your head, you wonder if this is finally THE BIG ONE that everybody’s been going on about – the one where the San Andreas Fault will crack wide open and swallow up Los Angeles. Now I ask you, is that such a bad thing? Just think, no more mediocre television sitcoms or plasticised dim-witted celebrities!

You don’t get warnings about earthquakes, therefore there’s no need for those panicked trips to Home Depot or the BP station. Theoretically you’re supposed to have an emergency supply kit on hand anyway, which includes flashlight, radio, batteries (gotta have them batteries, and I don’t necessarily mean for the flashlight and radio either!), canned food, and a generous supply of water for both drinking and washing (and to help flush the loo if things get really dire). Of course hardly anyone bothers with this. I never did. Guess I figured I’d just get in the car and get the hell out of town.

As it happens, we have earthquakes in England too, though they’re pretty wimpy compared to those butch California ones. I remember being awakened in my bed in Sheffield in the middle of the night, thinking “did we just have an earthquake?”, whereupon I promptly fell back to sleep. The next morning I heard on the news that there had been an earthquake across the Pennines in Greater Manchester. A few broken windows and fallen bricks – nothing remotely along the lines of the 1906 San Francisco quake that nearly destroyed the city or the one in 1989 that re-deposited cars on the upper level of the Bay Bridge to the lower level.

Volcanoes. That’s one thing we don’t hear too much about on our curious little island, though they do exist. Now those can be tricky. I lived in Seattle for awhile, and had a rather oblique view of Mount Rainier from the balcony of my apartment. In fact, I even climbed it once (Mount Rainier, not my apartment building), though abandoned the quest at the halfway mark when I passed some snowboarder who couldn’t have been more than 15 looking on the verge of a stroke as he scrambled back down after only having made it part of the way. Needless to say, I ended up leaving Seattle before any lava came rolling in my direction. Or any more snowboarders.

I guess it’s safe to say that I’d take an earthquake over a hurricane any day. I mean, why get all worked up about something before it even happens? Then again, why not just opt for the quiet life? Aside from random earthquakes, windstorms, floods, tornadoes, strikes, football hooliganism, terrorist attacks, riots, never-ending engineering work on the railways and tube, Chancellors with surnames like “Darling“, and wood lice that somehow manage to get through your front door, life in Britain is pretty peaceful overall.

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It’s often been suggested to me that I should seek out the office of British Prime Minister. Okay, so maybe it hasn’t been suggested – or not that much anyway. Granted, I don’t have the dark jowly Scottish charm of Gordon Brown (or thankfully the stomach), but what the hey?  I’ve been in England long enough - I’m really more English than American, so why not become Prime Minister? I can’t drink tea without milk, my sense of humour is warped (Papa Lazarou is my idol, Dave), and I’ll take a pint of beer over a glass of wine at the pub any day. Now I ask you: is that English or wot? The only thing that needs sorting is an appropriate political party; I don’t fit into either Labour or the Tories, and as for the Green Party or the Lib Dems, nah. Dull, the whole lot of them! So here is what I propose: The Erotic Party. You’ve got to admit, it has cache. It just rolls off the tongue (ahem), doesn’t it?

The thing is, do I really want to live at Number 10 with folk coming and going at all times of the day and night? What if Maggie Thatcher popped round for a cuppa? Bet she’ll use up all my demerara sugar, like the workmen always do whenever they come by to do repairs. I’ve yet to meet an English repairman who doesn’t take 3 sugars in his tea. And then there’s the Queen. Oh, I’ve no quarrel with her, she’s a fabulous old bird, but that husband of hers is a real lech. I don’t fancy fending off his roaming hands at a cocktail party. And I know already that it’ll be a major hassle to get all these visitors to remove their shoes before they come indoors; I’ll have to appoint someone specifically for this task – the Shoe Removal Whip or some such. Whip? Hmm… considering that I’ll be the leader of The Erotic Party, that might lead to some unwanted speculation. As for Number 10 itself as a place of residence, I’ve heard it’s cramped, and I suspect there might be rising damp. Are those windows double glazed? Doesn’t look like it to me. If you’ve been through an English winter (and spring, and summer, and autumn), you’ll know all about the importance of good double glazing and proper insulation.

I suppose I’ll have to give this a bit more thought before I decide. Do I give up the exciting jetsetting life of writer, editor (and occasional teacher) of erotic literature just for some silly little job of running an entire country?

I ask you, what would you do?

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