“No thanks, am not really into getting my Chakra’s aligned, I have just recently relocated my ovaries thanks” I said to the hippy looking woman who boldly sported a shock of white hair.

 

She was younger than me but was brave enough to resist Wella number 5 hair dye, am just not ready to ‘come out as grey’ some women can carry it off and their families accept them being grey, not for me, am staying in the Wella number 5 closet.

 

I don’t look sexy and natural with grey locks; I look like I might milk goats & live in a static caravan site or have walked off the set of a Dickens show set in Newgate prison and am the old woman with two days to live.

 

This hippy grey haired woman Desdemona (I swear that’s her name or she changed it on Twitter or something similar) met me in a cafe and immediately decided I needed her help getting my aura and chakras sorted out. I really needed a cup of strong tea and a bacon roll.

 

“Do you have headaches and trouble with your stomach?” she asked sagely as she gripped my hand and massaged between my thumbs and forefinger, making my stomach hurt. Doesn’t everyone have headaches and stomach pains? Come on they must do eh? But her eyes were imploring me to agree with her about headaches and stomach cramps; I stared at the woman making bacon rolls.

 

The constant massaging on the web between my fingers was making me quite violent.

 

Turns out Desdemona used to be called Sheila and had been a fish gutter in Aberdeen till she met a bloke at Glastonbury who gave her an ‘experience’. Am not sure if what he did was consensual but she seemed to like sharing her skills. I got up and walked away- starving and determined to get my roots done.

 

You see I don’t mind ‘alternative therapies’ but there are some I would avoid – like getting hot stones stuck to my back, somehow that reminds me of the shit my big brother used to do to me when I was 7 years old in the sticky summer days in Glasgow.

 

Some women love spa therapies and it helps them unwind.

 

They way I relax and it is truly better than any spa ever, is hanging out & staying with my best pals Monica or Shirley. We can lie on the sofa, eat nice food, talk shit for hours and shout at the telly, then sleep for ages and wear nothing but sloppy clothes and not bother to wash hair or wear make-up. Just having great one on one time with my pal and talking, debating, arguing processing issues that bother me is so amazing and ultimately relaxing.

 

Good pals are better than alternative therapists or personal life coaches. Good pals tell the truth about you horrific dress that you think is lovely, they also refuse to let you leave the house with that eye shadow you think is ‘on trend’.

 

Good pals can resolve sexual, marriage and career issues better than any single mantra filled nut-job who charges for every single piece of faux advice they batter out.

 

There’s a bloke I know who pays a shed load of bucks to a life coach who had previously worked with astronauts at NASA- he loved telling me this fact- as the coach apparently personally helped those chosen moon walkers to gain the wherewithal to fly into space.

 

I asked him “what did he do? Point at the moon and say- go there?”

 

He was really annoyed and said ‘to fully get the best from a life coach you had to be willing to give yourself up to fate and face the challenge’. That’s what every single newborn does naturally when he slips from the amniotic sac and faces life, isn’t it?

 

The reason am banging on about this subject is- I have decided to lose weight and try to get myself fit and everyone told me I should get myself a personal trainer, full time nutritionalist and motivator. I don’t disagree and had a great chat with a bloke from Kaizen Fitness in Glasgow and this month and am not ruling it out. But firstly am going to see if I can possibly try to do start it on my own. As at the end of day, if I can’t make myself do it, trust me nobody else will.

 

If you have any diet, help and advice or like me pretending to be a life coach occasionally follow me on Twitter @janeygodley

 

 

“Why are you old and have funny hair?” my great niece Julia asked me as she stroked the evil cat she calls a pet. She is only five and doesn’t understand that I am allowed to still be alive and she also doesn’t know that genetically she just might inherit my bushy fucked up hair. “Why are you still alive little cheeky face?”

 

 I laughed back and she quickly replied “I am alive coz I know the numbers of days I have left and I know yours as well” she stared intently at me with big eyes, then walked away as she squeezed the cat firmly under her arm and banged the window with one angry fist and a pigeon flew off in a startled flappy panic.

 

I think she might be Carrie from the horror film.

 

My point is Julia is a funny wee kid; she is startlingly blonde with the bluest eyes and has the weirdest off beat sense of humour which makes me happy to be her auntie, sometimes she tells me she can hear my bones moaning. That’s not a sentence many five year olds get away with to me, but I love her.

 

 My bones are moaning by the way, I am at that age when a noise happens when I bend down sharply to pick up something as small as a hair grip or try and brush the back of my bushy fucked up hair. My arms are like stiff doll arms – it’s an age thing!

 

So 2012 is upon me and I have to better organised, and by organised I mean I need to stop hiding paperwork under the couch and actually physically dealing with it.

 

Everyone makes so many New Year resolutions; mine are to stop dreaming that one day I will get to do physical expressive dance to Supertramp live on TV and time to focus on real life and quit imagining that George Clooney will like touching my boobs.

 

These are some of the things am planning to stick to-

 

I am going to try and catch the postman everytime he slides a card in my letterbox telling me I wasn’t at home to receive a parcel, as he tiptoes away from my door with my parcel.

 

 

I am going to make a concerted effort to stop shouting at my husband when he gets up to go to the loo in the middle of the night and knocks over the washing basket. And I promise not make that huffing noise when he splashes on the floor round the loo bowl.

 

I am going to stop rolling my eyes everytime my daughter Ashley talks about William Shatner and I promise I will stop pretending he has died and I had heard it just then on the news.

 

I will definitely try and book rail travel 300 days in advance so that a simple cross country train journey doesn’t cost more than a daily drug deal for Oasis circa 1997.

 

From now on I will stop buying clothes that fit a woman called Gwyneth who is thin, willowy and doesn’t live in my house and start buying clothes that can fit my body which is the shape of a sturdy yet stumpy box.

 

I will stop shouting FUCK OFF CUNTS at the TV when anyone called Kardashian or Jersey Shore or TOWIE comes on and will calm myself down by pretending William Shatner is dead and telling this to Ashley, you see that’s a big distraction as I have explained before.

 

I will give up moaning about the phenomenon that is cupcakes- ok here is my last rant, they are just muffins with glittery expensive icing- stop charging £5 for that shit ok?

 

So there we have some of my intentions for the New Year. Hope you like them and if you get bored follow me on twitter @janeygodley

 

 

I was in London recently and just love getting time with my pals and catching up. Also getting the chance to do The Set List show at Soho theatre was just absolutely amazing. It’s a show where the minute you step onstage you are handed a piece of paper that tells you the subjects your gig will be based on. It’s a bit like jumping off a cliff naked in front of the people you desperately want to impress and have your period at the exact moment you bend your knees to leap off the edge. If you have ever had that dream you are naked and can’t use the buttons of a phone to get out of the street filled with people staring at you? Then that’s the feeling The Set List gives you and the only way out is to talk funny and make people laugh to get you out of the situation. I did it.

 

Monica my dear pal cheered and laughed all the way through and gave me a big hug as I walked off stage and thanks to Paul Provenza & the Set List team for the chance to do the show again.

 

I do love a walk down Oxford Street to see all the bright Christmas lights and look in the windows and feel that wonderful seasonal excitement. Though we don’t really do much Christmas stuff now that Ashley our daughter is a fully fledged adult- I do miss the feeling and get nostalgic at rosy cheeked kids in red mittens all giggling queuing up for Santa photos.

 

The other weird thing is when am doing Christmas comedy gigs, and the all jingle Christmas songs are on....I quickly realise that all these songs I was singing to in the 80s were out when most of the staff weren’t even alive. I am old. That’s official.

 

Christmas gigs can be notoriously difficult as people get raging drunk and have no interest in your funny stories....there is nothing better to bring down your comedy swaggering ego than to stand onstage and get whacked by a turkey breast on the shin bone as you almost reach a punch line.

 

Just a head’s up to people being dragged to a comedy night at Christmas party works night out, if you don’t like comedy and hate shutting up- just refuse to go and if you are a drunken person that hates comedy and likes throwing food? Please stay at home and whack yourself with a ham in private.

This time of year in Glasgow the drink and party season is in full swing, I watched two girls in astonishingly high platform shoes (that actually looked like surgical wear) hold onto each other trying to cross a road and fall like timber in front of moving cars.

 

Luckily they crawled onto the pavement dragging their Lulu Guinness bags and Jimmy Choo’s onto the vomit spewed pavement. One of them had a black hair piece that fell out and washed away in the gutter and she scrambled on bloodied knees trying to save it from going down the drain. Classy.

 

The other phenomenon on freezing winter nights in Scotland is the sheer amount of young men and women who refuse to wear a jacket, the two drunken girls I just mentioned were in thin shiny fabric off the shoulder dresses, it was 2 degrees below freezing in Glasgow. I don’t ever recall going out disco dancing in the late 70s and thinking “it’s snowing out there am going to find a sleeveless short dress and ditch my winter coat”.

 

Maybe I am old now and this is the way old people talk, but seeing young guys in thin tee shirts standing in the snow literally shivering and trembling with mild hypothermia makes me wonder- what makes them do that? Do you not get laid if you own a jacket nowadays? Is that a new code- wear a coat never get fucked? When did that happen?

 

My other bug bear is fragrance adverts on TV at this time, I really don’t understand them especially if you watch them with sound on mute. It basically is a woman in a torn billowing frock with smudged eye makeup running down an alley then caressing the bricks and staring into the distance- she looks sexually assaulted but then she sticks her fingers in her mouth and a cat jumps off a trash can and she stares at the moon and then clutches a bottle of perfume? What the fuck is that about?

 

So here we are almost at the end of the year and my blog is becoming more and more sporadic – I am feeling weird about life. Another year gone and I still don’t know where my career or life is going; shouldn’t I have all this shit figured out by now?

 

No is the answer, I don’t know much at all despite getting to this age. I only know when its cold- wear a jacket.

 

 

Employees use Registered Charities Twitter account to Bully.

 

(I deleted this earlier but read again as there are further kinks to this story especially at the end)

 

Last week I got into a robust twitter debate with a woman from www.mckeeconsultants.co.uk who specialise in diversity and equality. Anyway the lady online persistently demand that as she is a feminist she was entitled to know on why I openly use the word ‘cunt’ online. I told her that I didn't need to explain myself to her nor anyone and refused to justify my language. I then expressed how ironic it was that a feminist was demanding a woman explain her words. I refused to explain my motives to her and will always do so, as I don’t believe I should have to explain my vocabulary to anyone.

 

My twitter profile says “The most outspoken female stand up in Britain” (Daily Telegraph). I cannot give you the timeline of McKee Consultant’s tweets as she deleted the entire argument (such was her commitment to her own words), though I do have a screengrab of them. In the middle of this twitter debate a person from the charity Sky Project in Kilmarnock (they recently asked me to be a patron to their kids charity) added to the debate by saying “You are a patron of our children’s charity. Would you say these words to our young people?”

 

I responded to Sky Project by saying something along the lines of “I don’t think coming online to question my motives is professional and I can always un-patron” I couldn’t understand why suddenly a charity I have been dealing with got into this twitter debate of the word ‘cunt’.

 

Firstly I felt Sky Project were questioning my ability to work with kids because I say ‘cunt’ (I have never put myself up as a child role model THEY asked me to be patron) and secondly why are they getting involved? Then I quickly realised that McKee Consultants and Sky Project are friends and contact each other regularly. Fine- I thought, she is sticking up for her pal McKee and now she has lost me as a patron. That’s what happens when you use a charity’s registered twitter feed to have a go at people, no big deal.

 

I opened my twitter a day later and there was a tweet from a children charity Hill House Care http://www.hillhousecare.org/ that said “Calling yourself a comedienne is an insult to all things funny, Call yourself a children’s role model? Hope not”

 

Now I was stunned, I genuinely don’t mind people calling me crap and unfunny, it happens a lot to be honest on twitter but for a registered charity to come online with this unprovoked attack annoyed me. Yet again it mentioned my ‘children’s role model’ (which I am not) and so a very short blast of past tweets revealed yet again that McKee Consultants, Sky Project and Hill House Care were all linked together and friends on and offline.

 

Then @hillhousecare1 deleted the offending tweet and sometime later spouted stuff about freedom of speech and then deleted that as well! (See a pattern emerging? Offensive tweets- delete-delete?) So there we have it, I got into a debate over the word cunt with a woman and her mates waded in under the guise of the charities they work for and had a go at me. My online friends all took exception to the tweets and many complained to Hill House Care and some of them were pretty verbal about a charity being used to slag me off.

 

So then Hill House Care and McKee consultants both claimed cyber bullying. (Sky Project who may have a more clever person working their social media apologised and backed off). To date Hill House Care has never apologised and both they and Mckee Consultants have deleted their tweets regarding me. Yes they did that old nugget of the passive/aggressive world of “we got into an argument, lost it and now claim aggression in our direction” how professional?

 

Again at this point I’d like to re-iterate that my anger is at the charities public accounts being used to insult me, not the insult itself. In terms of insults I’ve been called a lot worse… but never by an anonymous person hiding behind the guise of a children’s charity.

 

So the upshot is, I feel bullied by a children’s charity! I have written to Hill House Care and want their board of directors contact details as I believe the person reading my complaint might be the actual tweeter- so the best way to get to the bottom is to let the charity commission know that a charity is using its status to have a go at people.

 

 

By the way- Hill House Care claim on their website to be ‘Non Judgemental” and McKee Consutlants claim to promote “equality and diversity” I have NEVER claimed to be a child’s role model.

 

 

So after I posted this blog today I got an email from Mckee Consultants and apologising – which I accepted and I accepted the apology from The Sky project- as of yet I haven’t had an apology from the person who actually tweeted from Hill house care. The tweets all came from a mother, a sister and a daughter in the same family.

 

 

After I deleted the blog to let the dust settle on the issue I got an email from a journalist and school teacher called Douglas Bane who sent me an email titled “Scottish comedian forces children's charity to close because they said she wasn't funny”.

 

 

He went on to do a hatchet job on my character BUT went onto paint the women who wrote the tweets in such a naive, innocent way and it emerges I am the woman who is singlehandedly getting the charity shut down- in fact he makes it seem, it was always my sole intention- here is an excerpt of his email about me- the one he intends to get published.

 

 

"The attempt to smooth ruffled feathers came too late. By this time some of Janey’s followers had taken up the story and were spreading her “horrific personal abuse” version.

 

Unaware of the full story and unwilling to trawl through the archives, two board members of the second charity, resigned at the weekend. The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations withdrew its support. Prospective funders have pulled out. As I said, Janey has influence"

 

 

Now I have never contacted anyone regards getting the funding cut and those who know me, know this would hurt my soul.

 

 

So I sent a statement to the journalist who strangely gave me the offer to change the end of the story and the headline to "Janey Godley steps in to save struggling children's charity"

 

 

So I spoke to the woman from The Sky Project who in fact is the least of all offenders in this weird story, she apologised last week after her slightly hurtful tweet and it turns out she knows Douglas Bane the journalist and in fact they used to be in a relationship together.

 

 

She asked him to ‘help’ and his way of helping was to threaten me with a rotten unbalanced article about me. He is also a physics teacher and works in education!

 

 

I feel his part in this was to put the ‘frighteners’ on me and hope that I would back down and delete my blog. Well Douglas you obviously don’t know me well enough and if anyone else in the press wants to pick up on this wee debacle of story do let me know. BTW I am still getting emails accusing me of trying to 'break people' instead of 'letting this go'. They somehow have become the victims and I am the bad witch.

 

 

Sometimes the word cunt doesn’t quite get across what I mean today.

 

 

I love Glasgow and I adore it at this time of year when my dear green place becomes awash with russets, browns and burgundy, when all the trees decide to go on the ‘turn’. So on Saturday I headed into to town to look at clothes in fashionable shops that I can’t wear (they never look right on me) and look at coats that make my small dumpy frame look like a Hitler’s youth camp leader.

 

So I sauntered into my local underground tube station at Georges Cross and pulled out some change for the automated ticket machine. The 20p coin kept falling right through and finally after four attempts I gave up. I shook my head and huffed as I walked towards the ticket booth and the wee older man behind the counter said “just as well your head is attached to your neck or it would have fallen off shaking it so much at the machine, I bet you if I went to the machine I could make it work. Must be because you are a woman”

 

I stared at him in astonishment and simply said “A single please?” and imagined what it must be like to work with men who still think it’s 1975, the Bay City Rollers are number one and it’s ok to make mother in law fat jokes and call women ‘fat cows’.

 

He held onto to my ticket and repeated “must be a woman thing” and sniggered at me. Now normally I would verbally erase his damp polystyrene personality but I merely said “That’s sexist, can you please just give me my ticket?” and then took it and headed down the escalator quite calmly, because I know the best way to deal with this. I twittered it. I found the Glasgow Subway on twitter and included them in the whole debate.

 

Now I am dealing with the complaint professionally and can then publish the emails online and let everyone know what happened. That’s what I love about twitter and the internet. We no longer deal with shit like this alone, we can include our small world of followers on the ups and down of the service we receive and create a stooshy (Scottish word for trouble) very publicly.

 

A few folk have told me as comedian I should have had a sense of humour about the wee old man who is sexist and I did think about that, but then I recalled a good few young men and women work in that booth and imagine the shit he comes out with and they might not have the balls to deal with him. Maybe they wait for the day when the public finally snap and report him, well I just did. The Glasgow Subway people replied to my tweet and are dealing with it as we speak.

 

So now am in London where the autumnal carpet is gathering and my favourite view across the Thames looking down towards Westminster looks glorious in the late winter sun. Am staying with my mate is just back from New York and has no provisions in the flat but has a glut of ‘organic cleansing bark tree root’ and ‘virgin coconut oil’ and some dried garlic bulbs. Luckily in my bag I had a banana which to me is the world best fast food and can be carried in a handbag until a food emergency rears its head.

 

I believe that people who don’t have at least a brown loaf in the freezer or some cheese in a fridge must be subjected to getting their tits rammed in a door repeatedly until they remember for future. Of course am joking....I off to the local shops to get some breakfast meats and wish it was 1975 again, as I would buy some cheese crispy pancakes and settle down to watch Swap Shop and hope David Essex will come on live and talk cockney. I would pull on my size 10 tight ribbed polo neck and stroke the flat area where gigantic breasts will eventually grow and shake my snakelike hips to the Bay City Rollers and wonder if one day I will marry Donny Osmond. 1975 you were good to me.