Imaginary Hugh Jackman answers the questions that no one but me was asking. At 3am. In my head.
Dear Hugh,
I don’t really understand what Uber is. I thought it was… well, I told my husband what I thought it was, and he laughed at me for ages but then didn’t correct me. I think maybe it’s more of a London thing, but I haven’t lived there since bendy-buses and I’m woefully out of touch.
Also, all my friends use Air B&B, but I feel this is surely the best way to wake up wrapped in tinfoil while someone lists your pancreas on eBay?
Please advise!
Mate, forget it. You know how I get around? I walk, like a man. Or prowl, like a grizzly. Or jack a motorcycle from a barn, ride it through a wall and bang it down a dirt track, raking the ground with my mighty claws any time I want to execute a parking manoeuvre. And no, none of that was meant to sound dirty, grow up.
What’s Uber? I dunno, Google it, get the app, get over it. But yeah, if someone says you can stay in their outhouse in Vanves for ten Euro and a Twix then they are definitely going to rob you blind, photograph your junk and send your thumbs back to your mother in a fur-lined matchbox. We all know that, come on.
Dear Hugh,
Is it acceptable to send my toddler to her new nursery with a glossary of all the mad shit she keeps repeating? For example, at the moment she walks up to me twice a day and insists “We don’t do magic, we’re elves! HADOO!” But because she’s two, it just sounds like she’s speaking in tongues through a malfunctioning Darth Vader mask. And what if the nursery people aren’t even aware of the complex socio-political themes of Ben & Holly’s Magic Kingdom? Should I propose a weekly vocabulary summit?
Yours helicopteringly,
Jenny
Yeah, go on, have a summit, and why not make it daily? Or better, just follow the kid around wearing an interpreter headset, like at the UN. Or, you know, you could actually take advantage of the wildly qualified daycare professionals and go home and do some work.
I’m gonna tell you what I told my arch-nemesis and noted Dundonian, William Stryker, when I was skewering him in X-Men 2: “How does it feel, Bub?” That might not mean anything to you, but frankly these movies ain’t Shakespeare and it was slim pickings, right? Right.
Hey Hugh,
Several younger friends are all over Instagram with photos of their pregnant bellies cradled in wildflower meadows, plus pristine nurseries, swaddles hand-knitted in musk ox, piles of tasteful paperbacks they’re planning to read and usually some kind of ambitious quilting project for when the baby’s napping. Am I duty-bound to tell them to cover everything in tarps, buy a shitload of frozen pizzas and mentally prepare some brutal late-night insults for their significant other? I feel bad for them.
Sure, if you want to send them into a goddamn meltdown. You want me to tell you that you’ve got perimenopause and Type 2 diabetes in your near-future? Or that one day you’re finally gonna grind your molars into dust and you’ll have to eat creamed corn for the rest of your life? No.
If someone had warned me, back in 1886, that I’d soon have terrifying retractable bone claws, become a fugitive murderer, fight in all of the 20th Century’s most attractively-uniformed wars, kill or maim pretty much every woman I’ve ever loved, be forcibly weaponised by a shady military organisation then press-ganged into a team of mutant do-gooders, you know what I’d’ve done? EXACTLY ALL OF THAT.
So shut your mouth and send them a sack of organic cashews or whatever in three months when the pictures get all blurry and insane.
