Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto’s Weblog

Mitzi Szereto and Teddy Tedaloo with the BBC Radio Shetland "Sideways" crew

During my recent appearance at the Wordplay book festival in the Shetland Islands of Scotland, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by BBC Radio Shetland presenters Jonny Polson and Amz Fisher for the “Sideways” programme. Topics discussed include how I got started writing, teaching erotic writing workshops, my upcoming books (including Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts), and pretty much everything else I get up to that’s suitable for broadcast on the BEEB!

Listen to the interview here:

http://mitziszereto.com/Sideways BBC Radio Shetland with Mitzi Szereto

My famous furry sidekick and partner in crime Teddy Tedaloo (or McTedaloo) and I are recently back from a glorious weekend in the Shetland Islands of Scotland (aye, laddie), where I was invited to appear at the ninth annual Wordplay book festival. Though I’ve been to other parts of Scotland (see my blog posts 1, 2, 3), this was my first visit that far north, and I was warned of high winds that might blow me over into Norway, but instead I just ended up with my hair being blown the wrong way.

On the Saturday I did a talk and performed readings from my short story “Hell is Where the Heart is” from Getting Even: Revenge Stories and two selections from In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales. I think it went over fairly well, since I didn’t hear any snoring. On the Sunday morning I conducted one of my erotic writing workshops. The somewhat unusual fact that it was scheduled at 10am on a Sunday morning was pointed out to me by several people, and, though I worried that it might conflict with church services, I went ahead with it anyway, playing to a sellout crowd who clearly found some divine inspiration!

Mitzi Szereto and Teddy Tedaloo on the boat cruise

I tell you, it was all happening in Lerwick that weekend. Aside from Wordplay, there was Screenplay (the film festival), and even a blues festival taking place. Ted and I managed to squeeze in the screening of Requiem for Detroit from film director Julien Temple, who was in attendance. We even went on a boat cruise to Bressay and Noss, which left at least one person seasick (Ted was looking a bit green himself) due to the rough seas, though it was great fun when we went along at a swift clip. We were at the aft with some of the heartier passengers, hanging on for dear life to a pole, the wind in our hair (and fur), as we rode our watery roller coaster. It left me feeling unsteady and queasy for the next 24 hours, but hey, it was worth it!

Mitzi Szereto and Teddy Tedaloo with BBC Radio Shetland presenters Amy Fisher and Jonny Polson

When I landed in the Shetland Times, I figured I was a pretty hot commodity. I (along with Ted) was also interviewed by the presenters of BBC Radio Shetland’s arts and culture programme “Sideways”, and they were most impressed with Ted’s erudition and fine fashion sense. In fact, I suspect the young lady presenter quite fancied him (can’t say I blame her, Ted being an extremely handsome bear). I suppose with all this publicity it shouldn’t have been surprising that the entire town seemed to know who I was – from the local tourist office to the blokes who operated the tour boat (one of whom suggested I teach erotic writing to the other passengers). I tell you, I was feeling like a real celebrity. Until…

…I found out that Teddy had almost made the cover of the festival brochure. At that point I began to suspect that it might not have been me the festival folk wanted to grace their stages, but Ted. This wasn’t the first time I’ve been upstaged by him; however, things really became glaringly obvious when Julien Temple entered into a discussion with Ted about doing a film about his life, only to end up in tears (Julien, not Ted) when they couldn’t agree on a soundtrack. Julien wanted The Sex Pistols; Ted’s more a Temptations bear. He loves their song “My Bear.” (I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day…)

Mitzi Szereto and Teddy Tedaloo at Fort Charlotte

Which brings me to the subject of food. Did I mention the breakfasts at our hotel? You’d never get that kind of breakfast in London, EVER. I asked for a small kipper to accompany my other selections, and I got a kipper the size of a vintage Cadillac. And it was a real kipper, not some freeze-dried, shrink-wrapped, bargain kipper either. One breakfast was enough to feed me for an entire week.

Of course, no venture outside of my front door is complete without some mishap. My worst fear on returning home was the tube strike, which began at tea time on the day of the evening I was to fly back to London. When I arrived at Gatwick, it was pissing down with rain. However, the adventure had only just begun, for my suitcase had not arrived along with us. I suspect it had remained behind at Edinburgh airport (where we changed planes) to avail itself of the whisky-tasting table at the duty free. Note that I’d carried this piece of luggage with me for the two flights on the way up, but encountered a problem at Sumburgh Airport in Shetland, where my tweezers appeared to spark fears of a terrorist attack.

They searched my suitcase and everything in it looking for my sinister contraband – you’d have thought I had a bomb strapped to my back from the way they were going though my stuff. When they found the offensive item and threatened to take it off me, well… I wasn’t having it. I can’t buy those tweezers anywhere (and they never caused a problem before in a carry-on), so after a few minutes of discussion, they agreed to mail them back to me if I paid for postage. Then it was suggested (especially since the plane was a small propeller one) that I should just check the bag all the way to London. By that time I would have agreed to anything, therefore I hurriedly checked it, instantly regretting it and having an ominous sense of foreboding that it would not be arriving with me. All during the flight I feared the loss of my mobile phone charger, my camera charger, numerous items of clothing, my favourite black suede boots, the Shetland fudge and Scottish tablet I’d bought, bits and pieces from the festival…

Despite my scarily accurate sixth sense, my tale has a happy ending. The suitcase was recovered (and fully intact) and delivered to my home the next night, and Teddy and I are now making really quick work of that Scottish tablet and Shetland fudge!

If you fancy trying your hand (so to speak) at a bit of erotic writing, you can catch me at my Literotica workshop in the first weekend of October on the Isle of Wight.

(A bit of after-party merriment, featuring fellow Yank, Will Kaufman.)

Teddy Tedaloo (aka McTedaloo)

Right, you’ve stuck it out this long, and for that I give you credit. Do you realise this is turning into a long-term relationship? Hey well, I’ve been told I’m a good catch, though don’t go getting any grandiose ideas here! (And that goes for my mystery texter with the baby oil too!) Let’s just stick to the blog posts for now, shall we? So (drum roll!) it’s on to the final installment in my Scotland series…

After a weekend of amazing scenery, Bondage Bob, and deep-fried Mars Bars, Teddy and I were dropped off at Glasgow Central in plenty of time to get the train back down to London Euston. I say “plenty of time”, but that plenty expanded exponentially due to the delayed arrival of our Virgin train. In a nutshell, I had a good hour to kill. And there’s only so many times you can keep going into The Body Shop to sample the balm, you know? I love balm. Good balm. If you want to court me, buy me balm. I don’t need diamonds. I just need balm! Oh, sorry, I’m digressing, aren’t I?

With my hands nicely balmed up, I headed over to the chilly platform, where I got into conversation with some lost Dutchman about the rubbish public transport system in Britain, which killed a bit more time until the big red Virgin train pulled in, spewing out its harried passengers so that this new batch of harried passengers could climb on. I quickly confiscated a couple of seats (Teddy prefers the window since he likes to look out at the passing landscape), and we settled in, my only worry being when to start on the packed lunch my mate Ben had prepared for me. We weren’t even half a mile out of Glasgow Central before our supposedly high-speed train came to a dead halt between a scenic pile of rubble and some grim tower blocks. We sat there admiring the view through our rain-streaked window (Ted wasn’t impressed), waiting for an explanation as to why we didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

At long last the train lurched back into service, doddering along like a little old man for a good twenty minutes until it picked up a more respectable speed. The explanation, when it finally came, prompted the entire car to erupt into laughter. It was the classic British Rail excuse – the one we’ve all heard about, yet always believed was a myth. LEAVES ON THE LINE. Now I’ve been through it all, including a delayed train blamed on a “fatality on the line” in Romford. Okay, I admit, if I lived in Romford I’d be tempted to fling myself in front of a speeding train, too. Having said that, it was also Valentine’s Day. Talk about a double whammy…. As for this delayed train, I was not at all happy about the fact that it would get me into Central London right at the start of Monday evening rush hour. The beautiful Scottish landscape I’d left behind was fast fading in my mind’s eye. However, just before we crossed the border into England, I saw one last rainbow from out of the train window. And this time I made a wish.

With each place it stopped, our train became more and more packed with passengers. Bits of luggage were shoved everywhere and anywhere, dangling precariously above our heads and sticking out into the aisles, which made trips to the loo a challenge. We held onto our seats as if they were made of gold (which in a way they were). Poor Teddy was clinging by a thread to his window seat, growling at anyone who so much as even glanced in his direction. You’d think Virgin Trains would allow for the high number of passengers on their west coast route by adding additional cars. I’ve travelled this route a lot, and it always ends up standing-room only in either direction. One time I had to sit on my suitcase in the snack bar, another time by the loo. In fact, I once saw a woman so desperate for a seat that she actually sat on the toilet. I mean, we’d all paid for a seat, so why couldn’t we all GET a seat? I tell you, if there was ever a reason to do another volume of Getting Even: Revenge Stories…

To add some comic relief into the fray, the little electronic signs above our seats didn’t kick into gear until well into our journey, sparking off chaos when nearly all of them suddenly announced “Reserved” (omitting such pertinent information as reserved from where TO where) – whereupon those of us who’d laid claim to a seat early on had to embark on a game of musical chairs. Still more comic relief came in the form of a new passenger who kept dragging her suitcase up and down the aisle as she hunted for her reserved seat, passing it again and again and asking everyone if they knew where seat number 58 was. I tried to contain my laughter, as did the fellow seated across the aisle from me as she passed seat 58 for the fifth time, eventually abandoning her quest and moving on to the next car, suitcase in tow. Seat 58 steadfastly remained where it was, empty and very likely snickering at the woman’s folly. As I munched on some nuts, I worried if the smelly fellow with his smelly dog whom I encountered on the journey north was going to end up on my train again on the journey south. Fortunately he didn’t appear. In his stead, we were blessed with the company of a marathon nose blower who got on somewhere between Warrington Bank Quay and Crewe, and this Pavarotti of the nasal passages regaled us with a series of wet arias that seemed to be never-ending in their length and frequency.

After this interminable journey, we finally arrived in London (late of course) – a place where I’ve often felt that if I ever fell down in the street no one would even notice. After a lovely weekend of being looked after and cared for, the sudden shock that nobody is there waiting for you at the other end can be quite overwhelming. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the weather was awful, with great gusts of cold wind and rain pissing down. Not the nicest welcome home, by a long shot. To make matters worse, the stairs leading into the tube were slippery and dangerous as hell. If you’ve ever taken the London Underground, you’ll know that everyone is always in a big bloody hurry to get somewhere (or nowhere). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve imagined myself crashing to a broken heap at the bottom of the stairs and being stepped over as a mere nuisance to the flow of foot traffic.

I will say that returning on this dismal autumn day had a brief moment of redemption when, as I gingerly made my way down the stairs, a young man suddenly appeared at my side, asking in a heavy London accent if he could carry my suitcase (and no, he didn’t steal it!). Frankly, I was gobsmacked. For a moment I thought I might be in the wrong city, until I got on the tube train – and the first language I heard being spoken was Russian.

Yup. I was back in The Big Smoke, alright!

Mitzi Szereto and Teddy Tedaloo at Loch Lomond (Yes, Dorothy, that's a rainbow coming out of my head)

What began as a rather tedious train journey north to Glasgow (you just knew I’d work a train in here somewhere!) turned into a visit to a magical and mythical landscape – the kind of landscape that makes you confront the superficiality of what most people refer to as “Life” – i.e. that pissing away of days, weeks, months, and years in the pursuit of money to show others just how successful you are… and boozing, to show others just how popular and entertaining you are. At the end of it you’re left with nothing but regrets and lost time, because you’ve learned too late what’s really important. But that’s a subject for another day and, perhaps, another blog.

Meanwhile, back to the train. It wasn’t all that bad until we got about halfway up the west coast route, whereupon our increasingly crowded Virgin Trains car gained two new passengers: a very smelly fellow with his very smelly guide dog. Okay, I can forgive the dog – he smelled like wet dog, so be it. But I cannot forgive a human being living in the 21st Century who’s unwilling to clean either his body or his mouth. The fact that I was sitting downwind of the dog’s arse didn’t make things any easier, though at least it occasionally cloaked the stench of its owner’s breath, which had begun to permeate the entire car. As if the gentleman didn’t make his presence known by smell alone, his mobile phone (which, as one would expect from being on a train, continually went off) had as its ringtone a Tarzan yodel. Yes, I said Tarzan, as in King of the Jungle. Perhaps the fellow aspired to smell as if he actually lived in the jungle, too. Thank god I had the brief distraction of a text from a number I didn’t recognise, the message suggesting that I “get it on” with its sender and a litre of baby oil. I didn’t reply. (Considering the pinched nerve in my neck that I woke up with, I’m now wondering whether I should reconsider this offer.)

Fortunately, everything faded to a hazy memory upon arriving in the amazing land of lochs and castles and rainbows known as Scotland. Teddy (my bear) and I were invited up for the weekend by my friend Ben (whose mum happens to be a big fan of my Getting Even: Revenge Stories – smart woman!), and a change of scene was just the tonic in what had been a very upsetting week. Being Scotland, the weather was bound to be temperamental, and we expected to be thoroughly drenched on our Saturday excursion to the coast. And yes, there was a bit of rain, but there were also stunning moments of sunshine, clouds, and a multitude of rainbows that inspired me to make a wish, providing I had any hope left that wishes can come true.

We first stopped off in beautiful Loch Lomond. One of the most famous of the Scottish lochs (though not the one Nessie lives in), it’s a place where you can imagine yourself holed up for days on end, if not years, with that one special person in your life, not caring about the rest of the world with its collapsing economies and endless greed and transient human relations. (Oh, I forgot – they call this “Civilisation”, don’t they?) In this romantic setting, my friend Ben and his girlfriend Bex had each other. As for me, I had Teddy (who now prefers to be known as Teddy McTedaloo) and a pervy text message promising, if nothing else, a hell of a lot of baby oil. I had to feel bad for dear old Ted, since he had to suffer the indignity of being hung in his backpack from the hook on a toilet cubicle door while I had to spend a penny. He’s a forgiving bear though, and we more than made it up to him as we continued on our scenic road trip, which terminated in the coastal town of Oban.

Where we met Bondage Bob.

I take it I have your full attention now. It’s bad enough that even my own mother was urging me to find out what a Scotsman wears beneath his kilt, but I have to contend with you lot as well! You’re just dying to know who Bondage Bob is, aren’t you? You’re probably imagining all sorts – me dressed in shiny black latex from head to toe, swinging my cat o’ nine tails as I mete out your punishment for being a very bad boy (or girl). Hey, calm down!! You couldn’t be more wrong about the kind of relationship my friends and I had with Bondage Bob. You see, we made the acquaintance of our new friend at a little fishmongers stand at the seafront. Initially we opted for some mussels and scallops to take back home and cook up (my mate Ben’s a cracking chef!). However, not finding anywhere suitable to have a light meal at that in-between hour, we returned to get some cockles, langoustines, and a crab sandwich, deciding to have an impromptu picnic in the car. As we began to make our way back to where we’d parked, Ben determined that we needed a lobster, so we returned en masse to the very same fishmongers, who by this time treated us like family. Enter Bondage Bob, who derived his moniker from the fact that his front claws were bound in a decidedly kinky fashion.

With Bondage Bob inside his cosy plastic bag of ice, we drove off to find a nice spot to park along the seafront outside of town, whereupon we commenced to partake of our picnic of cockles, langoustines, and crab sandwich. As we ate, we plotted strategy for an invasion of one of the seafront homes (remember, this is the land of castles and invaders), the plan being to usurp the residents so that we could move in and create an internet start-up in what Ben (a techie) aptly christened “Silicon Bay”. Scarfing down my share of seafood in the backseat, I ended up with several wet spots on my jeans from the cockle juice (oi, watch it!), the pads of my thumbs turning into pin cushions thanks to not always successfully managing to peel the prickly langoustines. Their remnants I discreetly dropped out of the car window, leaving a telltale heap of shells on the road across from the multi-million-pound homes facing the sea. Let’s just say that we literally hightailed it out of there before the locals rang Inspector Taggart (there’s been a murr-durr!).

As for Bondage Bob, he’d gone from the beautiful Scottish seaside into the grimy boot of a Vauxhall Vectra, then onto the floor of the front seat by Ben’s feet, only to be relocated to the floor of the backseat by me and Teddy. Don’t think he was neglected though; Ben offered him a square from a Galaxy chocolate bar, which I ended up happily eating. After all this, not to mention our car nearly colliding head-on with a lorry, it was no wonder Bob was not looking so great by the time we got home. It was suspected that he was dead, though I was still assigned to go online to search out a way to help him meet his maker without too much emotional trauma. I’d heard that if you massage a lobster, it goes into a trance, so there could have been yet another use for that baby oil! It turned out we didn’t need either the oil or the wooden mallet Ben had bought at Tesco. Because deceased or not, Bob boiled up a right treat and did himself proud, despite his rather Shakespearean end. (Alas poor Bob, we knew him well.)

I’m now wondering if maybe I should’ve stayed in Scotland. It’s possible my friends and I could have made a go of that start-up in “Silicon Bay”. And who knows? Maybe I might have found some lovely Scotsman to carry me over one of those amazing rainbows. Aye, a wee lassie can dream, can’t she?

Bondage Bob awaits his fate

Bob groovin' to the Red Hot Chili Peppers

Boiled Bob

Bondage Bob, a distant, but fond memory