My man in Moscow
Joe Brown went away on business again on Monday morning - this time to Moscow - a prospect which did not fill him with joy, particularly as Monday was a Public Holiday in Blighty. This meant that I was left alone to attend a community BBQ at the local Club Room - an event held to re-introduce the Club Room, with its potential for all sorts of community activities to the locals following its rather splendid refurbishment, including CCTV, after a spate of mindless vandalism over the last couple of years. I tagged along with my immediate neighbours and very quickly, the clutch of residents at the bottom of the pot-holey road where we live herded together, all of us with a white sticker bearing our names and addresses stuck to our chests. It was quickly apparent that my skip-hiring and digging extraordinaire has not gone unnoticed and I was warmly welcomed to the fold with my mass weed-clearing. Undoubtedly, the locals are aware of Joe Brown’s history at the Little House by the Big Wood, as viewed through their windows and I strongly suspect that there have been mutterings over fences about the level and amount of garden rubbish and general lack of attention going on with the garden in recent years. I hope they are aware that Joe Brown did the best he could given that his business travelling was increasing and the demands of a sick, highly needy and demanding wife took priority over lawn and ground elder issues. I am sure they noticed that he was not living at the property for well over a year, during which time his now ex-wife did stupid, nonsensical things to the house and filled the large garage with crap before she moved out once and for all. I trust they appreciate that once he returned after they divorced, he spent time gathering himself back in his home, relishing the peace and quiet and relinquished responsibility towards a woman who was, by all accounts, barking mad and had neither the time nor the inclination to resurrect his squash-growing ways and tidily edge the lawn. They better had be well aware as I certainly had no intention of discussing it with them and wandered off to take pictures, unaware that my neighbour’s dog had slobbered over my lens.
The fifth skip within a year, filled with unwanted rubbish, has been collected, the planks for the raised beds in the vegetable garden have been delivered and, with squeals of excitement today, I noticed that seedlings in the potting shed have sprouted. I’m having lunch with Joe Brown’s parents tomorrow and I’m well on my way to digging out a new flowerbed. Joe Brown comes home in time for the weekend.
Heaven on Earth
**
“I thought you’d finished” said the man delivering the skip last Friday, his face very familiar from having delivered four skips over a two week period during the Great Garden and Garage Clear-out of 2007. I gestured towards the three-quarter dug vegetable plot and the mountain of scrubby, weed-infested turf piled up on a sheet of tarpaulin, itself next to the pile of builders rubbish acquired from having the bathroom moved at the beginning of the year. The plug chain of the old sink twinkled in the morning sunlight. “We had” I replied.
By Saturday afternoon, I was losing my humour about the whole thing - the mountain of turf had been wheelbarrowed into the skip, filling two-thirds of it, with me occasionally bouncing around on top of it like the neighbours’ children do on their pesky trampoline to pack it down as much as possible. I still had what looked like a huge amount to dig and I was starting to emit tennis-player like grunts with every plunge and lift of the garden fork. Joe Brown, with his bad back and no-no digging ability, did not help matters on a couple of occasions by standing watching me, casually smoking a cigarette. He wisely retreated into the house before he was forked into the earth as I started to wrestle with thick, long roots which I firmly believe were from the leylandii hedging and not the flowering cherry tree. I finally fell into the house, announced it to be done and was bitterly disappointed to remember that we had no gin in the house, being Saturday and past 6pm an’ all. This time last year, that plot was a weed-jungle surrounding a 15ft x 15ft x 5ft high pile of Large Garden Rubbish including two wooden bird tables which, following Garden Clear Out of 2007, was coming dangerously close to happening again after the two apple trees were pruned at the beginning of this year. Quite frankly, I never thought I’d see the fucking day when it was cleared, flattened and, judging by the crumbly, sweet-smelling earthy soil I’d dug out and over, oozing with produce potential.
“I can’t believe I’ve done it” were the last words I said to Joe Brown on Saturday as we lay in the darkness, my sunburned arms radiating heat across the bed.
I’m horribly late but Sunday was spent sowing seeds in the potting shed and mass anxiety has set in that the raised beds aren’t in place, the pathways aren’t lined and barkchipped although I’ve only just drawn out a plot plan and haven’t researched cheap planks for beds.
Still, my strawberry plants are fine in the potting shed, the raspberry plants acquired over the fence from my neighbour a month or so ago have been growing very well in the plastic carrier bag they were handed to me in, the gooseberry bush from Big Bro’s garden is still looking chirpy in the plastic tub, seeds of various vegetables have been sown and my local garden centre - referred to as the sweet shop - has my number should they get some comfrey seeds although the lady at the till said that if they don’t, she’ll dig some up from her garden for me. I’ve abandoned my novel in favour of Grow Your Own Veg, I spend the evening soaking my aches away in the bath whilst picking at the callouses on my hands, I tutted and curled my lip in disgust on the basis of being lightweight as I caught up on Gardeners’ World and watched Joe Swift call a digger in to scrape off the weeds on his new allotment plot rather than Do It Himself and I worry about the ants in my compost. What the hell? This is heaven.
** I would have uploaded picture of dug over veg patch but Flickr’s being silly.
Mothers and Daughters
I pressed End Call on my phone and dropped it in to my pocket, having finished a conversation with one of my sisters that two weeks previously I’d never given any thought that I would need to have. Pulling my black raincoat around me against the cold Winter wind whipping round the building - the coat that this sister said made me look frightening to old ladies and children as it billowed out like a cloak as I marched along - I walked back through the automatic doors, pausing out of a recently-acquired habit to squirt anti-bacterial gel on my hands, and made my way to the lifts. As I stood waiting for one of the four to arrive, it struck me that none of the people bustling around me knew, they had no idea what my story was, why I was there.
The lift doors opened and I stepped in after a few others - people who chattered on, taking no notice of the black-clad woman standing amongst them. Just as I pressed the button marked 8, the doors started to close and a woman appeared in the quickly decreasing gap holding a baby carrycot. I held my hand against one of the doors which hesitated then slid open again. She stepped in, wafting further cold from outside into the lift. “Thank you” she murmured.
The doors closed and the lift ascended, various people chattering, carrying flowers, a balloon, bags. There was a ting, we halted, doors opened and people stepped out. Once the doors closed again, it was just myself and the carrycot-holding lady left as we began to slowly drift upwards in our box. I looked downwards, vaguely glancing at the contents of the carrycot. Babies don’t normally hold much interest for me but, at that moment, I wanted something to focus on. What I saw shocked me. Nestled amongst the white blankets and under a pink, beribboned woolly hat was a face, a perfect little face - two closed eyes, symmetrical half-moons of dark eyelashes, a small bump of a nose and a rosebud mouth. Slightly pink-tinged cheeks. It was a tiny, tiny face - her whole head seemed little bigger than an orange.
“How old is she?” I blurted out.
“Six days” the lady answered. Her voice sounded small, she sounded tired, she sounded worried. Her face was as pale as the baby’s, her hair frizzed by the cold and rain outside. “She’s a bit small” she continued. “She was a bit early. My first, I’m rather terrified by her, I didn’t think she’d be this small”.
“How much does she weigh?” I asked, my disbelief that a human could actually be so small and live - breathe in and out without the need of being surrounded by starched uniforms and bleeping machines. I’ve never seen a ‘bit early’ baby before and certainly never a truly premature baby.
“I’m not sure what she weighs now but she weighed 5lbs, 3oz when she was born”. I laughed out loud. The frizzy-haired lady looked at me quizzically, clearly laughing at her baby’s lack of baby-bouncing weight was not what she expected.
“I was 5lbs, 3oz when I was born” I explained. “At six days old, my mother put me outside in my pram to get some fresh air. It was Winter and she told me she’d had to brush the snow off my pram before she brought me indoors”. The lady audibly gasped and almost mouthed “My God”, my reaction having been exactly the same when my mother told me what she’d done with her newborn fourth child. Both myself and the new mother looked down at her child, undoubtedly musing on the idea of putting something so small, so tiny, so vulnerable and precious outside in the snow completely shocking. “You were fine” my mother had said at my outraged shock at her more than blase behaviour “You had lots of blankets, you had a hot water bottle wrapped up with you. Did you no harm”.
“Clearly did you no harm” said the frizzy-haired lady and I was conscious of her looking at me, really looking at me, starting at my shoes and slowly upwards to my full height of 5′9″.
The lift tinged, slowed to a halt and the doors opened at floor 8. I gave the mother and child one last look and, with a small smile, stepped out, caught in a throng of people who’d just spilled out from other lifts as they hesitated to look at the signs pointing ways, signs I had no need to look at and signs I would not see again. I remember it flicking through my head as to how it could be that I could have a seemingly coherent conversation with someone given the circumstances.
“Thank you” said a voice behind me. I turned, not sure if the words were directed at me. The frizzy-haired lady stood in the lift holding her tiny baby girl in her carrycot. “Thank you” she said again. She smiled. She looked brighter. “I feel a bit more reassured having seen you. Thank your mother as well for me”. I opened my mouth but there was nothing there. What could I say? How could I explain?
“I will” I said just as the doors closed on her and she disappeared. I turned and went to join my eldest sister who was gathering up various belongings so that we could leave once and for all, leave the hospital where we’d watched our mother draw her last breath not half hour ago.
Tick, V.G.
After a full day at my desk on Monday which had me whipping through paperwork in a manner I’ve not achieved for months, I’ve spent three days hard labouring in the garden digging. The result of this mass burst of energy is that I have vestiges of biceps, am more bendy of back and legs and two thirds of what will be the vegetable garden, including barkchipped pathways, has been cleared of scrubby grass and weed-infested earth. I also have a sunburned back of neck, a windburned face, callouses on my hands and a virtuous aura. Although I sank in to a lavender scented bath at the end of each day, my hair was not washed for days and despite wearing rubber gloves to avoid the danger of touching a worm with my bare hands, my fingernails were caked in dirt even though I scrubbed and scraped them across a soggy bar of soap every day. I left a trail of clods of earth in Waitr0se yesterday as I couldn’t be bothered to change out of my gardening shoes before doing the shopping. I learned that the thin orange, centipede-like creatures and the pale, fat grubby things in the earth should not be ignored but despatched along with the weed-whose-name-we-cannot-mention as these will Eat My Veg, by God! The cheeky robin got cheekier as the days went on, the woodpecker remained as flitty as he ever is, I witnessed the Fat Black Bag heaving her belly through the stock fence and saw a pheasant coming an inch from certain death following an encounter with the Tabby Panther. The only disappointment to the week was not waking up to find him devouring the freshly killed carcass of a muntjac on the lawn. I also admit to being frightened by a root I unearthed which had me backing away and brandishing the garden fork bravely at it. In my defence, it looked like it had ears and I thought it moved but it was just the wind.
All in all, I’ve had a productive week which, for the first time in ages, I think earns me a tick, V.G. Also, given that today is the first day off my three week purge of various foodstuffs including anything fermented, I think I’ve earned a glass of house red this evening. As I lift the glass, I fully expect a bright light to descend upon the Little House by the Big Wood and a choir of angels to sing.
Handful
The sun drew me away from my desk this morning, not least to peg two loads of laundry out on the line, with the first gardening job of the day to check for muntjac damage and I was pleased to see that my efforts to block holes in the hedge with pots and criss-crossed bamboo poles seems to have fended off any further tulip damage - in fact, one tulip was beginning to bloom although looking a little embarrassed by its chomped, stubby petals from a previous visit. I’ve been keeping a very careful eye on the four snakeshead lillies growing round the apple tree as, although losing half a dozen Queen of the Night tulips (this picture does not do them justice) is bad enough, the loss of my snakeshead lillies would find Joe Brown waking up to see me hanging out the bedroom window brandishing a crossbow and vowing to revoke my non meat-eating ways. I’m a mean shot with a bow and arrow and I’d have the little fucker’s eye out with a crossbow, I assure you.
Since the Great Garage and Garden Clear-Out of 2007 which had us removing the out of control compost heap which contained a kitchen (I kid you not), we’ve been dutifully filling one of three compost bins with garden and kitchen waste. I decided that it was time to check progress at the bottom and I am delighted to report that it looks composty, seriously composty people and smells spot-on composty as well. Words fail me although, suffice to say, I grabbed a handful of it and emitted sounds that should not be emitted in one’s garden.
We had huge plans last year for a large vegetable garden but due to a combination of building works not happening, i.e. concrete base for greenhouse, and general laziness on my part, it is unlikely there will be a harvest festival at the Little House by the Big Wood later this year. The proposed vegetable garden, which should be finished and filled with neat rows of veg by now is, as I write, currently writhing with ground elder and stinging nettles. Just to add to my “Time’s running out” mode, I’ve decided that I need more flowerbed space with thoughts of tall, scented, wavy things, bees droning in foxgloves and vague thoughts of floating down the garden of a Summer morn in flip flops to gather flowers for an arrangement in the drawing room despite the fact that we have no drawing room. I need to dig and seriously dig for any of this to happen although today was a day of tidying the flowerbeds that I already have in the company of a robin who chattered in the cherry tree and stamped his impossibly thin legs because I wasn’t providing enough worms.
Joe Brown is currently away on a business trip having left Monday morning. He returns tomorrow evening. I always miss him more than I think I will and sigh with relieved delight as I grab handfuls of his grey hair when he walks in the door.
Just like magic
Even though I delivered two chests of drawers from Big Bro’s to storage unit No. 46, there’s more room to swing a Fat Black Cat in it than there was as my ugly but oak dining table and chairs are going to auction and my tatty old sofa was successfully crammed in to my hatchback, courtesy of three helpful men, and taken to the tip although I confess I had to look away whilst they broke its back to get it in the car.
Before I went to the Set, I made an appointment to go and see my main man, he who makes me whimper by crunching my bones back to where they should be and is also a practitioner of kinesiology which must be the most weird and wacky diagnostic therapy known to man but one which, believe me, works and it was primarily for this malarky that I wanted to see him. I’ve had a series of minor, unspecific and seemingly unrelated vague ailments of late and I suspected that I may have a candida issue, the likes of which no daily probiotic drink was going to deal with. I’ve had this before and it was no surprise to be told that my suspicions were correct and I’m consequently on a three week purge of various food items to basically starve my system of what’s keeping this little fucker multiplying and growing in my system as prolifically as ground elder does in my garden. Bovine dairy products are off the menu although products made from ewe’s milk is fine, sugar in any form is out, anything fermented or malted is no go, mushrooms are to be avoided and yeast is the food of the devil. Having had a wife who had a list of ailments and allergies as long as both your arms, Joe Brown is well-versed in catering for a partner with special dietary requirements but I suspect there was an element of his heart sinking to his boots when he realised he was going to have to be a packet reader when cooking although I assured him wholeheartedly that it was definitely only going to be for three weeks. This is just as well as specially made, dairy-free soda bread and soya spread just doesn’t cut the mustard with me and a life of no chocpots, red wine, proper bread and proper butter, Marmite and vinegar on my chips is just too ghastly to contemplate.
Three weeks henceforth, I’ll have more energy, may even drop some weight, I will not feel like a bloated pig all the time, my eyesight will improve and I won’t feel the need to squint in even vague sunlight (strange but true), my head will not feel like it’s full of blancmange and my short-term memory will magically reappear.
Taking stock
I went here last Friday which, given my previous rather hand-wringing, whiney post, I probably didn’t deserve to spend the day wafting round palm-fringed swimming pools wearing a fluffy towelling robe in flip flops with my hair an unattractive mix of sticking up and plastered to my face as a result of having had an Indian head massage, a facial and spending forty minutes lying star-shaped floating on the surface of a darkened pool of water and dead sea salt, listening to piped New Age music synonymous with my Glastonbury, hippy ways. Call it Money-Wasting Frippery of the Highest Order if you will but I defy anybody to spend a day at a spa being pampered and not feel at the very least highly refreshed and/or that their life has been sweetened somewhat. If nothing else, there’s something really rather splendid about someone else dealing with the hard skin on your feet, filing your toenails and painting them Black Cherry.
Fripperies aside, I have become somewhat pursed-lipped and bootfaced about the level of opulence of my lifestyle of late and I’m having no more of it. No more will I cruise Ebay for handbags and Brand New in Box shoes and I’m certainly not buying any more plastic packets of liquid vegetable stock when a) there’s stock cubes in the cupboard, albeit unpleasantly over-salty all of them and b) I can fling the scraps from my signature dish of roasted vegetables - did you see that, I made it like I had a well-known, no-one else can do like I can dinner recipe - into a stock pot and make the flippin’ stuff myself.
I shall also be taking stock of my stuff down in the Set and am Billywhizzing down there tomorrow morning to move furniture out of storage and possibly to the local tip which, believe me, will be recycled to people’s houses before I’ve driven back to Big Bro’s, move at least a chest of drawers from Big Bro’s to storage and generally fuck about with contents of boxes to try and cram them into a smaller space so I don’t appear like I’m secretly stashing a whole houseful of stuff which is, I hasten to add, simply not the case. I would like to make it known here and now that Joe Brown is well aware of my storage unit although I suspect he’d probably rather not actually see it in its entirety.
I shall also be filching plants from Big Bro’s garden - at least four roses if my memory serves me correct, some of which may or may not have been planted by my mother. Certainly one of them is possibly a Gertrude Jekyll being pink and so heavenly-scented it takes you over the hills and far away in your mind and I shall therefore battle with Big Bro’s heavy clay soil and bring it home.
Rag doll
A week or so before I went to Paris, something reminded me of the rag doll that I have and having established in my head that she would, like the vast majority of my worldly possessions, be either a) in storage or b) in Sister Two’s garage in a box, I am not ashamed to say that I fretted somewhat - so much so, I drove down to the Set to go get her. Not surprisingly, I returned home with not just Sarah the rag doll but four boxes of various possessions which remained packed away, partly because I was distracted by impending Paris trip but also because we still had the builder in the house finishing off refitting the room that was the bathroom to be a laundry room, the very idea of which had me squealing with glee in honour of my Inner Housewife.
As the builder packed up his tools at the end of last week and chugged off down the lane for the last time leaving trails of white smoke from the back of his van, I opened one of the boxes I’d brought back, marked ‘Kitchen’. I cannot really explain the reason why but, as I do virtually every time I open one of my boxes, I started to weep. In a way, I can understand why I cry but equally, the squidged up feeling in my stomach catches me by surprise every time. Each box is like a memory box, with items so small, completely insignificant and unimportant to anybody else but to me, they’re evocative of so many memories of times gone past, good and bad, that make up the person that I was and am. None of the items are familiar to Joe Brown given that he never saw me, knew me or witnessed me in my own home - I came to him in a weekend bag which just got bigger and bigger and eventually out popped two cats, a huge wardrobe of clothes and I never went home.
Big Bro called me last week - following his recent engagement, he’s moving in with his fiance and is giving up his rented house at the end of this month as well as shedding virtually all his worldly possessions. I need to clear out the couple or so chests of drawers of mine that are still there and I was asked if there was anything of his that I wanted. In a way, I hugely admire his ability to willingly cast aside a whole houseful of stuff that has made his house a home for the last decade since he split from his wife but I have to say, I was rather shocked. In comparison to my stashing of tatty furniture in storage In Case Things Go Wrong, to me this flinging aside of physical and metaphorical mattresses by Big Bro smacks of debonnair to say the fucking least. Perhaps Big Bro is happy to shed himself of possessions that were largely accumulated throughout his marriage which dissolved into unhappiness whereas all that I own was gathered together, for the most part, before I bought the House of Gloom with you-know-who. Perhaps Big Bro is able to throw any caution that he has to the wind whereas I, who claim to like streamlined living, will cling on to things that I have no need for until they get given to charity by the storage company after I’ve popped my clogs.
I now worry of course that my Just In Case approach smacks of a certain lack of commitment - if Big Bro, who divorced after twenty years of marriage, can happily pitch up at his fiance’s with a reasonable wardrobe of clothes and one cat but no key to a storage unit, why can’t I? Am I that jaded that, although within months of saying that I would never live with another man again I did just that, I will not let go of my practical ability to make a home for me, myself, I. Joe Brown has been more than accommodating in terms of wanting me to make this my home - haemorrhaging cash into the bathroom and laundry room aside which was the plan anyway - he’s cleared out piles of stuff, his beloved vinyl collection is now in the attic, we’ve successfully managed to house the contents of my complete, working office and he chivalrously ignores my plastic, light-up flowers. There is, however, practically, a limit to how much furniture and general stuff we can cram into what was a three bedroom house and is now a two. With a laundry room.
I’ve dispersed the contents of one box hither and thither - my mixing bowl and cake tins that have, over the years, produced variable results are here for me to look at whenever I like and the last remaining floating candle I made a decade or so ago is in a pot on the window sill in the laundry room. Sarah the rag doll however is still in a box along with Pinkie - Sarah I know needs cleaning as she’s a bit grubby and the colours in her dress ran when I washed it a few years ago. Pinkie is pretty much beyond redemption but the pair of them are here so that’s fine.
Paris in Spring
I think it would be fair to say Joe Brown and I did an awful lot of rather aimless wandering on Saturday and Sunday in Paris and it was therefore a good job the weather was better than anticipated. We both agreed that exploring cities with someone else is a new experience as the pair of us are unused to holidays and used to taking time out on business trips alone. There was consequently much asking of “Well, what would you like to do?” with the back-and-forth infuriating answer of “I don’t really mind - what would you like to do?” Undoubtedly not one of our best moments but we were in Paris, we did walk along holding hands and he managed to cadge a hideous shot of me, arms folded and looking like a sour old witch.
The hotel began to get noticeably busier towards the end of the weekend and on Monday morning Joe Brown donned his suit to go do his thing at an all day meeting downstairs and left me in our room sprawled across the biggest bed I’ve ever seen with the day stretching out ahead of me. Having carted round guide book, umbrella, assorted essential female paraphenalia and large, heavy camera for the previous couple of days, rather surprisingly in retrospect, I ditched the large camera in favour of my scratched old smaller one, left my sunglasses behind and took a taxi to the Louvre. All I can say about the Louvre is that it all becomes a blur after a while and I got somewhat bored but I did see you-know-which painting and came across an artist whose work I didn’t know and rather liked, not least because the two paintings I saw had elements of Escher about them.
I spent a happy hour or so at a table outside the Cafe de Flore squinting in the bright sunshine before meandering my way through endless streets and taking increasingly crap pictures. By the time I arrived back at the hotel the number of besuited people milling around the lobby was alarming, not least because they all had name badges on reminiscent of my trade fair days and I felt as though I’d been playing hooky all day and I tried to look as inconspicuous as possible as I purposefully strode towards the lifts clutching my Sephora bag which seemed to be something of an accessory for all women in Paris. When Joe Brown returned to our room, I was yet again to be found in bed but this time wrapped in the puffy duvet and nursing sore feet and a headache.
I had made the decision before we went that I would Buy Lingerie In Paris but had chickened out of going in to any of the fancy shops I’d seen the day before. It’s not often I feel intimidated but having experienced the curled lip haughtiness of a French shop girl some years ago who viciously snapped my bra strap against my back and snarled “Marks and Spenceur!” when being sized for a bikini had rather put me off. I also rather suspected that, like many women, I was wearing the wrong size bra which would be viewed very dimly. The lady in the shop I eventually ventured in to was charming and it was politely pointed out that I was a B madame, not an A.
It felt somehow wrong to walk in to Notre Dame swinging a rope-handled bag containing red be-ribboned black and white dotty underwear but I decided that Our Lady had seen far worse travesties in her time and went ahead. I took no photos and, to be honest, found the incessant flashing of cameras and crowds with their sizzing puffy jackets and squelchy rubber shoes irritating. I did light a candle in the quietest corner that I could find for my Own Lady who would have been delighted by my purchase of the day and closed my eyes and listened to the service that I managed to catch with its slight overtures of Gregorian chant which I love.
Back at the hotel I fussed about in the room given that I was On Duty that evening accompanying Joe Brown to a work dinner thing, clumping around the room in my new red suede shoes whilst wearing a pair of Sticksy’s old socks to try and stretch them as much as possible. Again, I made a camera mistake and didn’t take one with me which I immediately regretted having arrived at the restaurant to find sparkly red stars strewn round the candle on the white tablecloth with a view of L’arc de Triomphe out the window. I smiled and shook hands with various people, sipped champagne and hissed at Joe Brown in a very British-like manner to not make a fuss because my meat-free main course had not arrived by the time the rest of the table had cleared their plates. Everyone was invited downstairs to the nightclub where a French singer was putting in an appearance whose mimed singing, dyed hair, earnest cupping of young girls’ faces in the audience as he crooned was so fabulous, Joe Brown and I were in fits of laughter when, with a flick of his hair and theatrical twist on his heels, he brought his show to an end. The crowd erupted and I actually had to wipe tears from my eyes. If I could find the lead for my mobile phone, I’d upload the probable shite photos I took of this stupendous show of French cheese.
I may like my red shoes, Joe Brown likes my shoes but my feet were complaining bitterly by the time we left, our timing splendid as we managed to catch the coach back to the hotel with other sensible partypoopers and I caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower which sparkles with lights for a short while on the hour when dark which was probably one of the most magical manmade things I’ve ever seen. A nightcap in the hotel bar which included a glass of champagne Joe Brown acquired whilst I was powdering my nose saw us done for the evening and we headed off towards our room. I took my shoes off in the lift on our way to bed.
French polish
*
Joe Brown and I are going to Paris for a long weekend tomorrow. I’ll say that again - Joe Brown and I are GOING TO PARIS FOR A LONG WEEKEND TOMORROW. I myself won’t be working for any time whilst we’re away, unlike he who’s working Monday and Tuesday. My days of being a seasoned international business traveller appear to be over. I don’t miss the slog of them but I confess freely that I do miss the ritual of dressing for business - I do actually like wearing suits … and skirts that swish as you walk, with heels that click down corridors. I was always a shocker with shoes not really that long ago - I had perhaps three or four pairs including my slippers in total, all of which were flat, black and dull which I would abandon once my abuse of not reheeling and never polishing them made them give up and die on me once and for all. In recent years however, I have caught myself salivating over shoes and I now don’t know how many pairs I have. When I first started doing business trips, Sticksy would polish my shoes for me the evening before I left whilst I sat amongst an array of papers trying not to panic as to whether I had enough back-up information, notes and wondering if I could yet again get away with ‘winging it’. Putting on a suit made me feel better as I felt that if I looked the part I may therefore be better able to act the part. To this day, even though I regularly buff my shoes, the smell of shoe polish evokes a mixture of anxiety and a frisson of excitement. To me, it’s the smell of doing business.
This trip will, for me, be pure pleasure and no business other than accompanying Joe Brown to a meal one evening with shedloads of his work colleagues which I shall try not to fret about and shall endeavour to not drop anything sauce-like in my lap. Two full days with Joe Brown, two full days on my own and five evenings together. In Paris. PARIS! I now need to go and stare blankly into my wardrobe and wonder what the devil I’m going to take to wear. I’ve already been grilled by Sister Two who wanted to know what coat I was taking, did I have gloves, what are they like and when was the last time I had my hair cut? Pale blue one, yes, red leather, just over a week ago. I was also reminded to polish my shoes before I go. Which I have. Aside from one pair which need no polishing - they’re new, they’re red, they’re suede and they have 4 inch heels.
* Photo by Joe Brown
