Spaghettiing the Banana

I had a lovely time on Saturday. I didn’t think I’d enjoy it – I went off to my Dad’s, in Bristol. He remarried ages ago, and this was a big party for one of his step-children (who is 21). After the birthday lunch (in the back room of a pub) we all went back to my dad’s house and the children were messing around. My favourite step-brother is the youngest, Jacob, who is twelve and looks sort of angelic – blond curls hair, willowy, brilliant at sports – but isn’t. We’ve always got on well (except when he was a baby, and I resented him, of course), and he tells me stuff be probably wouldn’t tell his dad or mum, and I find some of it really interesting and amusing. Like - recently he’s discovered that if you push a piece of raw spaghetti into a banana it gradually absorbs all the juice from the banana over a few hours, and turns into a sort of slimy worm that horrifies anyone unsuspecting who bites into the banana .
Last time I visited he was really into dropping a special peppermint called Mentos into diet coke, which turns it into an explosive fountain. (He first did it in the garden and accidentally traumatised his pet rabbits – they didn’t know what to make of this sudden monsoon of sticky brown rain. You can still see where it fell on the greenhouse.)He’s planning to fill the bath with custard and walk on it next week. (Because, for some complicated reason to do with physics, it can support your weight, so its sort of like walking on water.)
Anyhoo, it was so great spending hours having silly conversations with him and his friends in the Indian summery sun. It makes me feel I would really, really like to get married and have children soon.

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’.