A Bright Tomatoey Future

I’m feeling a bit weird today because I’ve been eating tomato sandwiches all weekend. Rachel told me she had a friend who managed to lose three stone by eating only brown bread and tomato sandwiches. For two months. It’s a lot cheaper than LighterLife (esp as tomatoes are in season) and I happen to LIKE tomatoes. And brown bread. Rachel couldn’t remember what her friend drank with the sandwiches. Obviously she drank SOMETHING. So I’m going for water, green tea, and the odd gin-based cocktail.
Oh, and Michael invited me to a breakfast meeting Wednesday morning. I’d read in the Sunday papers that the thing to do if a man you are interested in gives you their card is to wait a week or so, and then ring them up breezily and say you’re going to be in their area and can you drop in for a brief coffee to ask them something. And so I did that. And he said – why not breakfast?
So now I’ve got to think what to ask him. (Because I didn’t think of a thing. In case he said No) Jo is not being very helpful. In fact she’s in a really giggly mood. She made rhum babas for chocolate-time and I think she must have seriously overdone the rum. She’s suggested:
1) How much money have you got? And
2) Would you like to get married again – soon?





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What Do Builders Want?

The Woo has complained on her blog today, about some unpleasant male stranger being rude about her appearance, and raised the topic of whether she’s perhaps dressing inappropriately – by wearing nice, sexy clothes. I find this a terrible prob, myself. Whenever I wear anything especially nice: full prom dresses with high-heels, boned, corseted bodices, city shorts etc, I get SO much abuse. You just wouldn’t believe it. Yesterday a builder shouted: ‘Hi! Miss Piggy!’ at me, and then fell about laughing so much he nearly tumbled off his scaffold. And I wasn’t wearing anything outrageous at all. Just a slit pencil skirt skirt more than two inches above the knee and beautiful pink stilettos. What do builders, white-van man et al expect ladies over 35 to do: dress like librarians? IF we DO dress like librarians we get ignored. (And the ignoring is done in a painfully rude way, too.)
And another thing I hate: those articles in the women’s pages of upmarket broadsheets TELLING you what you should wear and mentioning the depressing words: mutton dressed as lamb.. They always say you ought to cut your hair off, too, once you get close to 40. As far as I’m concerned there’s no point going to all the trouble of having your hair streaked blonde if you’re going to trim it to look like a prison wardress. I’d always rather have torrents of abuse than become ‘invisible’.
Grr. I’m going to go off and eat some cake now.

Cocktails...

Felt I was so mean being unenthusiastic (and envious) about Jo’s engagement. So I took her out for a celebration cocktail after work, and told her how happy I was, and how I wished it was happening to me - and she burst into tears and said she knew it was all a dreadful mistake. But she so wants to be married and have children, and she feels time is running out. She said: ‘It’s going to take AT LEAST four years for me to get to this stage with anyone else, and if I waited until then I’d be forty-three and too old to have a baby, wouldn’t I?’ (Two years to find anyone worth going out with, a year to coax them into moving in together, a year to persuade them into popping the question.) She’s quite right. I’d do exactly the same if I was her. But isn’t it sad? Still, after countless cocktails we both discovered we were really looking forward to the wedding.
Got home a little fuzzily just now to find a note from the landlord pinned to my door. For a terrible moment I thought he’d discovered I was illegally keeping a kitten, but it turns out some nutter has been piling up rubbish behind the stairs in the basement and he wants them to stop doing it. Such a relief!

Autumn Wedding Envy

Jo came rushing in to work today, glowing with excitement, an engagement ring on her finger. She said she and Martyn are going to get married in September. It’s not a terribly good idea, of course. (See previous posts – esp ones listed ‘weird sex’.) But of course I said how wonderful!, And how exciting!
Somehow I don’t think Jo is going to be much use to the office from now on: she’s already started looking up wedding-dresses on the internet. On the plus side she said she was going to try out a whole range of different chocolate-cake recipes on us before she decides on the right one for the wedding. (It’s going to be chocolate, of course – with white frosting. And chocolate sauce on the side.) Oh, and I’m going to be a bridesmaid, because I was so kind to her when she fell out with Martyn, and also because she ‘doesn’t have that many friends’.
I do hope the bridesmaid dress won’t be
1) Too tight
2) Ridiculous, and lemon or mauve (Or all three).
3) Heavily frilled
4) Oh, and I’ve just discovered that ‘stressed’ is ‘desserts’ spelled backwards, which explains a lot about Jo, I think. And me.

Meringues and No Cream

I was very aware of T-shirts over the weekend. (I particularly liked the anti-EU one, invariably worn by twinkling Irishmen, reading ‘The Leprechauns Made Me Do It’.) And, you know, it was odd, but at least a couple of times I’m sure I saw that zombie one again. Always worn by someone with long hair, whose face I couldn’t see clearly. Once it was at Hyde Park Corner on Saturday morning, as I was getting off a bus, and later, in the evening, as I was wandering along the King’s Road, more than a little worse for wear. (So that sighting was probably imaginary.) Oh, and I rang Jasmine and she said she’s never seen Glenn wearing a zombie T-shirt. So that’s a relief.
Michael never phoned. Jo said this morning: ‘Well, “We must do lunch” IS rich-person’s-speak for “Fuck off and die”’ – which I thought was a bit rude of her. Also, if Michael never wanted to see me again, why would he give me his card? I wandered casually past his house at the weekend (after a few too many bubbles) and he was having another party, the whole place lit up, and a string quartet playing.
Anyhoo, today it’s back on with the diet. I’m having yoghourt, instead of whipped cream, with the meringues Jo has brought in.

What'll I Do, Without The Woo?

Well, the last 24 hours have been pretty dispiriting, and I hate being dispirited. My credit card statement arrived (or rather, I finally got up the nerve to open it) and immediately felt like someone had stabbed me. How could I have spent so much? I spent most of last night trying to reattach the tags convincingly to the banana dress so I could perhaps pretend to the madam-shop owner that I hadn’t worn it. Aagh.
And then last night I went out for a Chinese with Jo, and just as we were getting into a lovely conversation I was suddenly sure I could see Glenn outside the window on the street, looking in at me.(He even had a T-shirt on with: ‘In case of zombie attack, follow me’ written on it, which was even MORE disturbing). I got up and went outside to check, but he wasn’t there. And Jasmine says he went off festivalling the day before yesterday to the West Country and she doesn’t expect him back for ages. So obviously I’m starting to have hallucinations. Does that stuff they sprinkle on Chinese food give you them?
And finally, this morning when I went to log on to my favourite blog, The Woo, I was told I was not welcome. It’s a private site now, for her friends only.(And I’m not considered to be one, sadly.) How will I manage without my daily shot of inspiration? Oh, and it’s raining, and I’ve just washed my hair and forgotten my umbrella.
If I was a computer I’d switch myself off and start again..

Giant Bananas and a Seductive Physique

Last night started very well. As I was leaving the hairdressers’ I spotted one of those tiny madam shops filled with swish designer clothes, and had a quick look round, and found a beautiful yellow dress with a frilled front that made my décolletage look like two irresistible peaches in a tight bowl. It was v expensive, but I told myself I was going to take the gladiator sandals back, so that was £49 off the price straightaway.
Of course, all the other women at the party were dressed in black, which made me feel like a giant banana, but I’d been half-expecting that. Michael actually recognized me, though he got my name wrong. And I had to sit between two businessmen types who kept talking across my front. Whoever wrote that article last week in the Telegraph about men being boring was absolutely spot-on. They talked about cars so much they even seemed to bore EACH OTHER. (One of them kept yawning, and boasted that he’d got up at 5 to work-out in the gym.)
The food was just wonderful. There was a ‘trio’ of something to start with, and then langoustines, and then something I suspect was veal. (The menu was on the table but out of reach and the boring men wouldn’t stop talking long enough to hear me asking for it.)
And after an almondy dessert we went into an incredible room upstairs with a huge window looking out across London, and a slightly pissed, skeletal woman staggered up and apologised for her husband’s rude behaviour (he’d been on my left) and said that he hadn’t used to be like that, success had gone to his head. And then she described how last week, when service had been slow in The Fat Duck, he’d started banging his knife and fork on the table and shouting: ‘I want my dinner!’ like a two-year-old.
So all in all, it would have been a pretty nice evening even if Michael hadn’t come over a kissed me goodbye. (A mwah kiss, and he had to stand on tiptoe in his elevator shoes, and I got his sweat on my dress.) But then he also gave me his card and said we should do lunch sometime, and I gave him MY card, just in case.
And all the way home in the taxi I kept comparing it to Carla Bruni’s first dinner with Sarkosy and wondering if in the future, I’d be able to say, believably, of Michael, that I was ‘seduced by his physique and intelligence’.

Nettles, Chocolate-Chips and Annoying Flab

J (who is actually called Jasmine, I’m fed up with calling her J) has been ill all morning, throwing up in the toilets. She said she thought it must have been something Glenn cooked her last night. He made her nettle soup, apparently, and she’s not sure where he got the nettles from. I wouldn’t want to eat a London nettle, myself. There can’t be a single one that hasn’t been urinated on.
Anyhoo, she was just getting ready to go home when she called me over and said did I want to go to a party at Michael’s tonight? She was supposed to go, representing the agency etc, and she’s pretty sure she won’t be able to make it. So isn’t that amazing? I’ve just rung up the hairdresser’s and booked an emergency blow-dry, and I’m sitting here wondering what to wear. I really wish I hadn’t eaten all those cakes now, as I’ve got this disgusting roll of fat round my waist. I’m definitely not having any more of Jo’s chocolate-chip cookies today.

Close Encounters of the Puzzling Kind

Jo rang and asked if she could come over at the weekend, and we went off shopping together. I got some gladiator sandals – odd, really as they don’t do much for my body (or my feet) but they are comfy (always good – and certainly a startlingly new feeling for MY shoes). But as they are fashionable, they make quite a lot of my clothes suddenly work in a way they didn’t before. Still, I’m not sure yet whether I’ll keep or return them.
Anyhoo, while we were rustling about with shopping bags, and having iced lattes, Jo told me another jaw-dropping thing about her sex-life. She has NEVER EVER COME. It really made me wonder about the mechanics of her encounters with Martyn. I mean, how do you decide to stop having sex if neither of you come? Do you just turn to each other and say: ‘It’s been half an hour now, shall we stop – and have some chocolate cake?’ Jo said, when I finally got the nerve up to ask her, that she just makes a sort of special noise, to imply that she’s very happy, and then Martyn slowly finishes. But it is really strange, don’t you think? I’ve been unable to stop thinking about it all morning.

Walnut cake and Blissful Solitude

Well, Jo left this flat yesterday. She made it up with Martyn and he came and collected her, and it was very weird meeting him, when I knew so much intimate stuff. Like how annoying it is being on the pill with him – when it is hardly necessary – and how he’s more excited by a white stocking and suspender set than a black one, and how he howls like a wolf at good moments etc. Topiary told me that his problem is caused by drugs, but he’s told Jo that it is because he has issues with trust… So prostitutes are famously trustworthy, are they? Most men don’t seem to have trouble having sex with THEM.
I was all set to dislike Martyn because I’d been so angry with him all week to cheer up Jo , but he was a shy inoffensive sort. Very red cheeks, smells terribly strongly of soap, shoulders hunched. He seemed about half Jo’s size, but maybe that was just his personality.
And it is so blissful being free of Jo. She is an adorable person, but I did get tired of wiping up sugar-spills on the kitchen surfaces, of the mess of all the pillows and sheets on the sofa bed in the flat, of the way she was always in the bathroom when I wanted to be…
Mirabelle misses her, though. She got in the habit of sleeping on Jo’s trolley-suitcase And she also got keen on cake. I didn’t know cats ate cake. But they seem to like freshy-baked, still-warmVictoria sponge. There’s one good thing: I got Jo to try cooking things WITHOUT chocolate. So today she’s brought in walnut cake. With white frosting. It’s the best cake I’ve ever tried. But maybe her reconciliation with Martyn didn’t go that well, else otherwise why would she be making walnut cake at 5 a.m.?

The Man Who Can't Do The Opposite of Go

Oops, sorry about that, but it’s like being a double –agent at the moment, with constant surveillance. What I was going to say is that Jo’s boyfriend has this difficult thing wrong with him: he cannot come. Or at leastvery often. So – as Jo says – every intimate encounter involves him saying he might or (after nearly an hour) he nearly did, and her trying incredibly hard (with the help of Rigby & Peller corsetry, sex-tricks from mags like Marie Claire and Scarlet). And, mostly, total failure. And the worst of it is, she says, that when he’s alone he says he manages to get there perfectly well. To start with, it didn’t really matter, especially as he did, more often, and also said she was the best etc, but now it is getting worse and really starting to irritate her’
And I think the really problem is that they are total opposites, because she shows no sign of leaving this comfy flat with ensuite kitten. So they’re the man who can’t come, and the woman who won’t go.

Cakes and Weird Sex

Well, I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging for a few days, but things have been so fraught here. Jo came into work on Friday in tears, saying that she’d had this terrible row with her boyfriend - and that she hadn’t had time to make the chocolate chip flapjacks she’d promised. It was very difficult, as people kept coming into the office from other departments, having heard about chocolate time, and having to be pushed back out again, because she was crying.
Anyhoo, I said why didn’t she come back and have dinner at my place? And one thing led to another and suddenly she turned up with a trolley-suitcase for the whole weekend.
It was nice in one way, but the weather was so hot! You don’t really feel like eating a home-made chocolate Victoria sponge when you’re sweating, even if it is stuffed with whipped cream and strawberries. I never, ever thought I’d ever get in the position where I wouldn’t actually WANT cake – but I came quite close on Sunday.
So the whole weekend we’ve been going out to Regents Park – loaded down with picnic hampers – and sat under the trees while Jo goes on about her boyfriend, Martyn. I shall have to go soon, as she’s the sort of person who likes to read the paper over your shoulder, and I don’t want her to know about this blog. Or anyone at work to know about it. And she hasn’t moved out yet, either. But he sounds a very peculiar man. Apparently he can’t have normal sex at all, and can only…

Swan - thong

The Michael thing was cancelled at the last minute as he had to go to America. Sigh.
We were talking at chocolate-time about how thongs are long out of date (I brought up the topic, because I’d discovered the Woo doesn’t wear them.) It’s the era of the hipster brief. I said I felt sad about this, because I’m so fond of thongs. Jo said she once had a Labradoodle that had a THING about her thongs, and used to search through the laundry basket for them and then eat them. (They came out the other end whole – but of course unusable.) Jo’s point of view was that they are dirty, stupid things. You can never keep them totally spotless, and they cut into you. They’re stressful to wear, too.
This is all true (and I suppose if my thongs were regularly recycled through a dog, I might feel the same), but I still adore the way there’s no panty-line, the way they look your legs so great, the way they look so pretty in the shop (and in a drawer), how small, and delicate and flimsy they are, as if you’re this beautiful little dolly that the female stereotype says you have to be.
‘Yes, but have you ever tried looking in a changing-room mirror, the ones with the gross back view, when you’re wearing one?’ Jo said, biting into a chocolate macaroon. She didn’t mean it nastily. Us ladies of the cakey build do have probs with back-view mirrors. But I always refuse to look at those views. In my mind I always look like that woman in Crocodile Dundee from behind, when wearing a thong. (In the scene where the crocodile tries to bite off her head.)

Chocolate-Time!

It is very difficult sticking to my diet at the moment, because a new person has arrived in the office - Jo. She's here to cover for P, who is on maternity leave. Jo is a very lovely, friendly woman, with a habit of saying 'It must be chocolate time!' at about 11 a.m. (and at 3.30 p.m.), pulling out a floral cake-tin, and handing round huge wedges of sticky, gooey chocolate fudge brownies that she has made herself.

Jo should be HUGE, but she isn't - just sort of comfortably upholstered, with a very fresh, pink skin, and that glossy hair that people who over-indulge tend to get. (The benefits of being a little overweight are great hair, fewer lines, and attractive tits. I'm not quite sure if this really makes up for a muffin-top stomach and being unable to fit into your jeans or skirts.)

Still, at least all her home-baking has stopped me feeling sick, the way I did after Glenn's breakfast. Jo says she'll bring in her special recipe macaroons tomorrow.

So that's two things to look forward to: I'm seeing Michael again tonight.

A Breakfast to Forget (As soon as Poss)

Had a bit of a fright on Sunday. I was lying in bed with Mirabelle, eating a bit of cheesecake that got unaccountably left over, and reading Heat, when the doorbell rang. So I got up. (In my best silk negligee. I think you ALWAYS have to wear gorgeous underwear etc, even if you are alone, otherwise what is the point of living? Also it has to colour-coordinate with the other stuff you wear.This is not extravagance, just common sense.)
Anyway, I was glad I have this rule as it was Glenn. He pushed his way in before I could slam the door. He looked quite clean - no earth on neck, hair tied back, T-shirt reading ‘I’m not a gynaecologist, but I’ll have a look’ – and he had a Tesco bag in his hand. He said he’d brough me some breakfast, and asked where the kitchen was.
I thought the best thing to do was humour him, so I said I had to change, and rushed into my room where I rang J and asked her to come over at once. Then I put on a frumpy long-sleeved top, trousers and no make-up, and went to see what Glenn was doing.
He’s transformed my kitchen: found the tablecloth and spread it out, and put some (slightly droopy )coloured tulips in a vase, and poured out a strawberry smoothie, and was just fiddling with my coffee machine. The place smelled of bacon and buttered pasrty: he’d grilled some bacon, made scrambled eggs and heated up four almond croissants (my favourite). I was really touched, especially as he didn’t appear to be mad, or drunk, or angry. He just made a huge fuss of Mirabelle (who was purring loudly, the slutty thing) and asked me if I minded being told I was the most beautiful, sexy woman he’d ever seen?
We’d almost finished when J turned up, looking cross and red-faced and out-if-breath, having sped across London. She shouted at Glenn, telling him not to bother me etc. I felt awful, and really sorry for Glenn. And then she looked at the breakfast and said; ‘Where did you get the money for all this? Did you steal it?’
Glenn looked pleased. ‘No.’ he said,
‘Well how did you get it, then?
And Glenn explained that he’d gone round the back of Tesco’s at 5 a.m. and PULLED IT ALL OUT OF THEIR RUBBISH SKIP.