dark beige

Kirsten, 34, is a PR Executive at a top agency in Notting Hill, West London. She lives in nearby Ladbroke Grove with her boyfriend, advertising executive Mark Crumpsall, 36.

Here she takes us through a day in her hectic life.

Monday

Monday is me-day. I get up really early and luxuriate in a long, hot bath, using seaweed scrub to make my skin feel radiant. Mark will often have to leave very early so we’ll try and grab some hot buttered English muffins and tea together if we can.

Then it’s time for work – I work close to home so I love to stroll along through Notting Hill and just take in the beautiful day. There are so many wonderful, exciting people – white, black, brown and yellow – it’s like a huge kaleidoscope. Sometimes I feel like Hugh Grant in Notting Hill – the film, not the place! (Well, both!)

When I get to work, I grab myself a scrumptious mocha latte (can’t think without caffeine!) and sit down with the papers – my faves are The Mail for the news, The Guardian for the features and The Sun for the gossip!

Then I’ll meet up with my team for a meeting at about ten a.m. We’re supposed to be discussing the week ahead, but usually we have to first get through the weekend behind us! (Come on girls, you know what I’m talking about!). My girls are great – there’s Shelley, 24, Clara, 26, Vanessa, 25, and Michael, 28 – I call him a girl as he’s a gay man! He doesn’t mind – he started it!

After we’ve got through all the gossip, we’ll get down to business and go through where we stand regarding various projects and who’s doing what in the week ahead. Now, down to work! Between quarter to eleven and one o clock I’ll sit at my desk, check my e-mails, take phone calls and read Eve.

At one I meet up with my best girly friend Maria who works nearby and we’ll just grab some sushi and a punnet of strawberries and go and chill in the park. Maria’s awful – she’s recently become single again and she’ll always be pointing out a hunk here, and a sexy bod there. Of course, I never look – well, not often! (Sorry, Mark hon!)

Then back to work for another four or so hours of e-mails, meetings and phone calls – life can be really tough at the top!

At six thirty I have my yoga class over in Holland Park, where I let the city pour away to be replaced by something more pure and wholesome. I don’t know quite what, but I always think it might be a little like humus.

When I get home, I just want to relax, so I change into my fave PJ’s and softest, comfiest top and go and lounge in the garden, ice cool Pimms in one hand, Marian Keyes novel in the other, my little toes running through the soft grass.

Mark usually has badminton on a Monday so it’s a great chance to just relax and indulge myself with a fresh chicken salad and a glass (or two!) of wine, and watch all my favourite soaps, and then if nothing grabs me, I’ll pop in an episode of Sex and the City on DVD and catch up with Carrie, Samantha and the gang.

And they say Monday is the worst day of the week? – It’s heavenly bliss!

Interviewer Martha Voller, of Germany’s K-4 network asked Smith if there had been a lot of fun and games on the set of his latest movie. "Oh sure, it was a blast!" Smith replied, "We were always goofing off". "A bit like in the Fresh Prince?" Voller asked. "Yeah…kinda. Though half the time, we were just doing that stuff for the cameras. A lot of those bloopers weren’t real".

Almost immediately, you could feel the shockwaves rippling throughout the entertainment world, perhaps why only moments later Smith said "Oh no, not really! Of course I’m kidding y'all!", but nobody was fooled.

Further investigation by a blogger from Montreal, who has since been discredited by NBC, outed as gay, possibly a peadophile,and has now mysteriously disappeared, (if you really look around on the web you can still find some of his stuff) revealed that early on in the first series, an episode was being filmed, when Alfonso Ribeiro, the actor who played Carlton, ran through a door too quickly, slipped on a rug and hit his head on the kitchen table.

As he lay on the floor dazed, Smith quipped in his inimitable style "That’s got to hurt!", bringing the eager white crowd to its knees with laughter. The producer on set saw how well it had gone down, and insisted it be added to the end credit sequence to add an extra laugh to the fledgling show.

"The next day", one source who was too frightened to reveal his identity told the blogger, "everyone was going nuts about how funny the blooper was. It totally outshone the show. I don’t think any of us realised what we’d created". However, it did not stop there. A media analyst noted that the blooper had kept people watching to the very end of the show, where normally they would start to flick channels the moment the credits began to roll. This meant that they were more likely to stay with NBC and watch both the advertising break and maybe even the next show.

Thus, the following day, an order came from high up in the corporation that they wanted bloopers to run through the end credits every week. "At first it wasn’t a problem", the mystery source (who may now be dead for all we know) revealed - "the guys were young and making mistakes a lot, and there always seemed to be enough to fill out the 30 seconds. But towards the end of season 2, things had already really changed. They were tight now, the show was slick – there weren’t that many mistakes being made. So people started to pounce on the smallest thing and try and really blow it up. One time James Avery (Philip Banks) coughed in the middle of a line. It really wasn’t that funny. But then Alfonso Ribeiro tried to turn it into some kind of human cough beatbox and then Will started rapping over it. They just about got away with it, but people on set were a little bemused by the whole thing".

But then apparently things just got worse. The source continued: "Soon enough everyone was doing it. If someone remotely fluffed a line, it would be seized upon and forced into something really big. Will would just go off on random tangents, stretching the blooper as far as it would go. I always thought he was hogging the stage, but now I think he was actually being noble - if he went on long enough, that blooper would last the whole credits". (So, next time you rush to judge a scene stealing ham actor, just remember - you don't know all the facts).

More from that source; "Alfonso would pretend to forget lines, James Avery would try and break the set, but the worst of all was poor old Joseph Marcell, the British guy who played Geoffrey. He was a properly trained Shakespearean actor, man! He wouldn’t pretend to fluff his lines for nobody. Then one day some executives paid a visit to him in his dressing room, looking like they meant business, if you know what I mean. Next thing you know, he was tripping over all the place, saying his lines backwards, one time he even started squawking like a chicken and laughing maniacally. It may have been funny for the audience, but I just saw a broken man".

Across the entertainment world as a whole, seismic shockwaves have been felt in the aftermath of Smith's accidental confession and the subsequent fall out. In Britain, "much-loved" entertainer Dennis Norden was said to have turned a ashy, grey colour when told of the news, and within 20 minutes he was found dead. "He just seemed to give up the will to live" said an onlooker. Elsewhere, Steve Penk was taken in for tests, and Terry Wogan ordered to rest up.

It's not clear whether Smith can come back from this scandal. The formerly squeaky clean high topped heart throb had always been seen as a great role model (although he was always outspoken in his criticism of "hardcore dance"), so he may be able to come back, as long as he is humble and contrite in the same vein as Mel Gibson after his anti-semitic ejaculations.

But the real question on everyone's lips in Tinseltown right now - who else has been "out-faking"?!!!!!!!

Only time will tell, but we at Dark Beige have a feeling this one could just be warming up...

Yo, yo, yo. Listen up Brother Arelrad, young round-headed nigga. This is your first day so I’m gonna go easy on you. I got some wisdom to spit, and you better listen up if you think bcuz you got some crazy ass smock and a Gargamel haircut you can come into this abbey and know where it’s at.

I’m Brother Cadfael, the craziest Benedictine you ever saw. Ya’ll heard of me. I been solving crimes in this mean monastery for over fifteen years now, and if you wanna make it, you better watch and learn.

Round here we got a saying: The streets is my only vestry. Out here you can get burned, man, you can go to a dark place where there ain’t no turning back. You show a weakness to these Franciscan fucks and they’ll feed on it, and feed on it, and feed on it, until there ain’t nothing left of you but a bald pate and a charcoaled Bible. Never show weakness!

Today's your training day. Gonna show you around, give you a feel for the business. I have thirty-eight cases pending trial. I have sixty-three active investigations. There's another two hundred and fifty cases on the log I can't clear. I got the fuckin’ powers that be on my back, disliking my methods but respecting my results.

I'm supervising five monks. That's five different personalities, five different sets of problems. You, Brother Arelrad, if you got the guts to succeed, will be number six. I don't got time to baby-sit or hold hands. You have one day to show me who you are and what you can or cannot handle.

You can't hack cracking the mead addicts and good book hustlers, feel free to work a pussy desk job fining vow-of-silence breakers. Hear me, Brother Arelrad?

You better. Ain’t no punk faggot gonna make it to Abbott!

Word is bond.

Let me just remind you that I am a KICKBOXER who is an experienced STREET FIGHTER. Fuck with me and it’s your DEATH WARRANT! Just being near me is a MAXIMUM RISK, I’ll KNOCK OFF your head, leading to SUDDEN DEATH.

You’ve got NOWHERE TO RUN if you don’t leave now, so go, get AWOL!

I’m a UNIVERSAL SOLDIER of a TIMECOP. Oh shit, that doesn’t work quite so well.

Erm...do you want to see my ass?

Jamie suddenly realised that while he knew his 1993 Radio 1 Roadshow T-shirt was a cool and ironic purchase from a fashion website, costing him over £30, to the casual observer he might just look like a day release mental patient who hangs around bus shelters smiling hopefully at kind-looking young men.

Jamie saw that there was a danger that his accompanying outfit and accessories were not uber-hip enough to fully convince someone who did not know him and his dryly post-modern wardrobe, that he wasn’t just a mentalist.

A distressed Jamie told us "I was wearing some Nike tracky bottoms that I got from J-D. They’re a little bling-bling but that’s how I like to rock it sometimes. On my feet I had some wacked-out old Converse that look really beat up, on that whole Steve McQueen tip. On an ordinary day, combined with some different items, both could have made up one half of a seriously cool, don’t-give-a-fuck double whammy.

Maybe if the pants were completed by some new ice white Nike dunks from the States, or the Converse went with some classic ripped Levis, I would have looked on it. But when I looked down I realised I just looked a bit like a tramp".

The problems didn’t just stop there, unfortunately. "My hair was a little wild, and I was rocking the bed-head look, but you know sometimes you actually look like you’ve just got out of bed? It was one of those ones.

All this combined with the Radio 1 t-shirt, which has given so many people so many hours of pure pleasure when seen with a retro Reebok windcheater, a dustman’s coat or even a Sergio Tacchini golf jacket, and I frankly looked like a local unemployed".

Jamie is now taking steps to ensure that it never happens again. "From now on I’m going to make sure that I’m never wearing more than two ironic items at any one time. It’s one thing to be a cunt, but it’s quite another to look like one".