The List

Stuck in traffic on the M5 en route to a wedding on Friday afternoon, my friend and I decided to kill time by discussing which celebrities, if the unlikely occasion were to arise, we’d sleep with (their interest in us/attraction to us/consent obviously not being taken into consideration).

He went first with the not-very-original-but-universally-acceptable Kiera Knightly (let’s face it, having a unique choice of celebrity doesn’t exactly give you better odds on a. meeting them or b. sleeping with them), at which point I realised that his motive for accompanying me on our recent visit to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 was not because he’d enjoyed Johnny Depp’s impression of Keith Richards so much so the first time around he was going back for seconds (unlike me, although to be honest I would have returned if Johnny Depp had been a motionless mute – although preferably at least semi naked). I then told him repeatedly that while, yes, I agreed that she was attractive, she looked uncannily like a horse and had big eyebrows.

After that insult, it was my turn to make my confession.

So I told him one of mine. He proceeded to tell me just how wrong he thought I was (as have several people since).

For a person who can barely remember the lines to row-row-row your boat, I can remember pretty much every line from Ghostbusters. I can remember all the incidental music. I can remember the songs. I can remember pretty much the whole film, if I had an hour and a half to sit there and go through it in my head. My sister and I watched it recently with her increasingly frustrated boyfriend who didn’t really understand why we had to talk over the whole film doing what I abhor in anyone else and saying the lines ever so slightly before the character does, and announcing all the swearing that wasn’t in our heavily massacred 6 year old friendly version. It was one of my defining childhood films. I knew where the ad breaks were and the disturbing top of the pops parody from a comedy Christmas special that was on prior to the film.

And I remember Bill Murray.

It couldn’t have been anyone else. Rick Moranis, even for me, even as a six year old, wasn’t going to be considered as the favourite. Harold Ramis was a geek and got fat. Dan Aykroyd was Dan Aykroyd. And nobody can remember Winston Zeddmore (I had to look up his name. Ernie Hudson. I’d forget that if I didn’t have Amazon open in a browser window).

But Bill Murray was cocky, self-assured and a coward all in one, a womaniser and a git. And I loved him.

Then came Lost In Translation. And my 6 year old platonic love affair happened all over again, except to a twenty-something woman, not dissimilar to Scarlet Johansson (only with regards to the fact that she is also twenty-something and a woman. That is unfortunately where any similarity ends), and perhaps not as platonically as it once had been. Bill Murray had joined the ranks of the likes of Harrison Ford (also, I have found out, a little wrong) and Justin Timberlake (yes, young boys and old men. No in between). He was on The List.

This discussion about the fabled List had recently cropped up at a party of my boyfriend’s sister’s where I discovered that a close friend of my boyfriend has the same person on his List as my boyfriend. The elf like ex Neighbour Natalie Imbruglia.

Before I started going out with my boyfriend I knew of this innocent crush/disturbing obsession. The day she married Daniel Johns was a sad day I recall, feeling that he had truly ‘lost’ her (although, I note, she still remains a firm favourite and in number one spot on his List). But she still manages to make consistent appearances in my life, in the most unlikely of places. The majority of mix CDs have at least one of her tracks on (and often some of the more questionable tunes make an appearance, bumping off more reputable tunes). She sneaked onto a recent rock mix CD in New Zealand, jammed in between the Foos and the Chilis. He suffered a torrent of teasing for this and refused to listen to the track as I had laughed so much through the first airplay that he had to skip it and sulked for quite some time.

Its not that I don’t like Natalie. Despite some of her tunes perhaps not being at the height of musical genius, one track from Counting Down The Days actually features church bells, I do listen to her albums with what some of my friends would perhaps comment on as being slightly concerning regularity all things considered, but occasionally I resent the frequency as to which she pops up in my day to day life.

Last year I got an email from my boyfriend which went something along the lines of ‘I’ve got two tickets to see Natalie Imbruglia, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to’. All in one keyboard breath. I went, to ensure he didn’t hang around the stage door afterwards as much as anything, and attempted to make sure he was fully aware of my presence throughout the entire gig by holding his hand to the point I was annoying myself. But to this day he’d be hard pushed to remember if I was there or not, but I’m damn sure he could describe accurately what she was wearing.

At least Natalie’s a looker. I don’t know if your List is in anyway supposed to relate to your real life relationships, but you don’t want your boyfriend to lust after a minger (I have refrained for asking him his opinion on mine, although he did buy me both Indiana Jones and Star Wars trilogies before leaving for New Zealand, in order to keep me quiet, which it did).

Another one of my boyfriend’s less generally desirable ‘celebrities’ is Michelle Ryan. Yes, that’s her, the one from Eastenders. There are hundreds of stunningly attractive celebrity women out there. Not in this lifetime would I have conceded Michelle Ryan as being one. Sure, she’s not unattractive. But surely, if you have your choice of all the women in the world (and, because this is purely theoretical, he does, and if he actually met either of these women he would not under any circumstances be sleeping with them, a fact I am unsure if he is aware of), Michelle Ryan wouldn’t be in the top two.

Ever since my confession, I have been the subject of much ridicule and have found out that while my choice may be slightly disturbing, several other Murrayites (for that is what we call ourselves, or we would if there was enough of us) have also crawled out of the woodwork to stand united with me, one of which was my sister.

After the ridicule subsided (for that day at least), my friend and I both called a truce by settling on Scarlett Johansson, who appeared to be a good all-rounder for both sexes and seemed like good middle ground between Bill and Kiera (on what terms, we didn’t enter into).