Gazing through the Glass

It was my birthday today, and my Dad gave me a laptop, which was incredibly kind of him, so I can get back to my blogging. After the last post I had a bad few weeks when i didn't feel like posting, and then I managed to find a nightmare job in an office selling roof insulation, where i have no access to the internet. It is SO TERRIBLE. I know that the job isn't going to last long as it is run by two dodgy brothers and they're always telling me to delay sending out the payments etc. IT's miles away from Hammersmith, too, so getting there takes a tube and the bus.
I work surrounded by stacks of files and papers so all anyone ever sees is the top of my head. And you wouldn't believe the men they employ to do the insulation. They're basically unemployable - huge, scary and tattooed.All they want to do is earn enough money to get completely rat-arsed, so they work like mad the first part of the week, and then they go out on a huge bender, and on Fridays I get endless customers complaining no one has turned up - or that really foul-mouthed, grimy workmen have arrived and accidentally hit the head off a garden gnome carrying a pack of insulation in, or else used the toilet to be sick etc.
Ho well, at least i can pay the rent and buy catfood and just about keep up with the credit card payments. I feel really envious of Rache. She keeps sending me lovely postcards of Greece and telling me she's in heaven. Apparently the spring is the best possible time there: it is all green and there are loads of birds, and it is warm enough to swim. Sigh. Poor little Mirabelle seems really sad. There's a pigeon building a nest outside my window and she just watches this pigeon all day. She's worn a little bald patch on her lip rubbing at the glass trying to get out. I know how she feels.

Is This the End?

Oh well, apologies for not posting for weeks, but I like to be an upbeat, optimistic person, and everything has been so terrible recently that I just wanted to hide and cry. But I’ve resolved to be upbeat EVEN ABOUT THE BAD THINGS.
Well, before Christmas there was a huge rush to finish work for this company, which made me quite optimistic that we’d all keep our jobs and everything would be fine, etc. But there was a huge meeting a week ago and we were told we were all ‘being let go’. A few people are staying on, in case things get better, but not me. And I’ve only been with this company three years so I will not get much redundancy.
I’ve been frantically looking for work since, but the problem is that it’s expensive living in London, so I can’t just work in a sandwich shop or something. And meanwhile, it’s weird going round the shops and seeing how cheap everything is (that I can’t afford to buy). It’s like how people describe a tsunami: this weird thing happens of the sea retreating. And then there are all these huge fish flapping in pools, and you think; ‘Wow! Free treats and bargains!’ And you don’t realise what a horrible thing is coming over the horizon.
Incidentally, what IS going to happen? Does anyone know? Will all the shops shut? Will armies of grey-faced unemployed be trudging along the motorways? Will money become worthless? (In which case, I’ll be happy, as my overdraft will be meaningless.)
Rache has decided to go and live in Greece. Vasilius has found her a job working in a café run by another cousin of his, and she says she doesn’t care if it doesn’t work out with him. All Greek men are so gorgeous (in her opinion) that she’ll just find another one. She was wondering if I’d like to have her evil cat, Oskar, but I said No! She’s just going to release him on to the streets if I don’t take him, as she reckons there will be too many cats in animal shelters and he doesn’t stand a chance there.
It feels like the end of so many things,
Anyhoo, I’m going to post every few days now, filling you in on what happened over Christmas etc. So no more long long gaps.

Swede Teas

I’ve just spent hours Christmas shopping. HOURS. My feet are sore, I’m more drained than I’ve ever been in my entire life, and I’ve only got a small bagful of stuff. So, obviously, I’ve got to go again. And again. I kind of half-wish that the government had banned Christmas this year, to save money. A bit the way Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas back after the Civil War. Wouldn’t that have been great? Then no one would have felt they had to buy loads of stuff any more, or send any boring old cards, and there’d have been all the joy of secretly, illegally buying presents, and secretly celebrating, in a small way. Sort of like prohibition, with illicit Christmas parties going on in the cellars of innocent-looking shops.
At about 3 I met up with Glenn for tea, because he wanted top see me, and I do not want to end up sleeping with him, and tea is a meal it is pretty well impossible to:
a) get drunk at
b) extend late into the evening.
It isn’t romantic, either. I wanted a cream tea, but the nearest we got was scones and jam and a pot of tea, along with a smuggled tub of clotted cream in my handbag. (I’m going to leave the remains under my bed for Mirabelle to find, in a bid to enrich her environment, as Topiary has suggested . (The best way to enrich her environment and stop her being bored, of course, would be to buy a mouse from a pet shop and release it into the flat. But that would be cruel to the mouse, so I can’t do it.)
Glenn was wearing a truly gross black T shirt reading: ‘For my next trick I need a condom and a willing volunteer’. I asked him where the lovely cat-fur one was, and he said he’d borrowed it from a friend of Jasmine’s, just to please me.
Also, as we were eating he told me that most jam is about 60 per cent swede. Even strawberry jam. It’s used as a filler, as soft fruit is so costly. He knows this cos a farmer near him in Cornwall grows Swedes for jam. Isn’t this depressing? Next he’ll tell me clotted cream is made of pig fat or something.

What is Freedom?

Went out with Glenn last night. I think I said yes because when he asked me he was wearing a T shirt that said ‘No Outfit is Complete Without a Little Cat Fur’ – and I was touched. We just went to a pub in Hammersmith, and had sinister pub pies. (The kind where you honestly couldn’t say what the meat is. I thought mine was probably chicken with gravy browning, but Glenn, who knows a lot about cheap food, said it was more likely New Forest Pony, bought cheap in the autumn round-up, or else mechanically recovered meat slime, pressed into believable shapes.) It’s quite slimming going out with him.
He was going on about the Five Freedoms – a thing to do with chickens, where a well-looked after battery chicken is able to run, dustbath etc. Anyway, then he got on to what he thought the Five Freedoms for humans were, well, what they were for him, specifically.
1)The Freedom to live in a warm dry place with no rats or mould.
2)The freedom to eat food that doesn’t make you sick (or creep you out)
3) The F to be in a place where you possibly COULD have a relationship if you wanted
4)The freedom not to be hassled by The Man (ie not to be bothered by letters from the bank or credit card companies complaining about debts). (This would include freedom from landlord types popping in unexpectedly to see if you are breaking your tenancy agreement re cats.)
5)The Freedom to dream about the future and not be stressed out by global warming and governments doing nothing about it.
Every time Glenn talks I realise how different he is from me, in a kind of puzzling, disturbing way, that almost entirely cancels out how great-looking he is.
I said that one of my Freedoms would definitely be the freedom to wash in a lovely bath whenever I wanted, and put on perfume and crisply ironed laundry and a selection of (possibly vintage, to be ecologically sound) clothes and shoes. Oh, and have access to a hairdryer. He replied oddly to this. He said: ‘Yeah, that’s why we put in the bath-house.’
‘Where?’
‘At the farm.’
‘What farm?’
‘The farm where I live. In Cornwall.’
‘Aren’t there bathrooms in the chalets?’
He looked puzzled, and then started laughing. Strange man.

Mirabelle Goes Hunting

Yesterday Mirabelle slipped through my legs as I was coming in from work, and shot down the stairs and into the street. She’s so fed up with being shut in the flat all the time. I suppose it’s not much of a life for a cat, but what am I to do, when she isn’t even supposed to be there?
It took ages to find her, shouting along the street and hoping that my landlord didn’t suddenly decide to pop up and ask me what I was doing. And eventually, when it was really dark, and I was frozen stiff, I found her in one of the gardens in the next street. She had a bird in her mouth. A blue tit. I put my fingers in her mouth and to get her to open it, and the bird got free and just flew straight out into the sky. I hope it survives. But I suppose it couldn’t have been that badly injured if it could fly.
I was so glad she hadn’t got hit by a car or something. Apart from anything else, I hate going to the vet. It is a bit weird the way vets behave, don’t you think? Especially the way they give the pet your surname, and call out the whole rigmarole when the vet is ready; ‘Stripy Jenkins’, ‘Flufflepuff Mackintosh’ etc. Makes me wish I’d called Mirabelle ‘The Marchioness of Mirabelle’ just to make it all sound stupider. (It is strange, really, when you think of how even old, very dignified human beings are only called by their Christian names in hospital wards.)

Strange Religious Episode

Ho well, haven’t posted for ages as usual. I’m always promising myself to be a much better blogger, but I get swept up in things, and it just doesn’t happen. It is like dieting. I always want to be much thinner, and intend to do something about it, and then time slips by and I realize I’ve just GOT FATTER. I hadn’t weighed myself for weeks, and a few days ago I noticed my favourite trousers were really hurting round the waist, and had actually given me a sore, where the buckle goes, and so I got on the scales and was just horrified. How could I have put on so much without eating any more than normal? Also, it’s been cold recently, and I thought that made you lose weight.
Anyhoo, work is more stressful, as quite a few people have left, and we have to do their stuff, as well as ours. I asked Jasmine about Michael, and she said that she’d heard his company was really struggling, and he’d been spending a lot of time in the US recently trying to get refinanced or something.
Last weekend I went home, as Jacob was being confirmed, and they wanted me to go to the service. I can’t think why this was happening, as he’s never struck me as religious at all. Also, all the other confirmation candidates were frail little girls in sticky-out frocks, and it was strange seeing this large, shambling teen in a badly-ironed shirt in the middle of it all, with an uneasy smile flickering across his face. Ever since the poisoning incident I’ve been so suspicious of his motives. It’s wrong.

Life Gets Stressful

Well, I’ve spent all week working on a campaign leaflet thingy and being ceaselessly bothered and harassed by the design department who’ve kept demanding it earlier, even though it was impossible to it do that fast. I even took it home, and worked on it in the evenings, which is unheard-of for me. (Mirabelle jumped on my computer keyboard and pressed the wrong keys – just to rack up the tension.) And in the end I had to hand it back before I could do it half as well as I wanted to AND no one even said thank you for all the extra work I did. It left me feeling so let down. Like that famous remark someone once made about working for the BBC, that it made you feel like a mushroom: kept in the dark and with sh*t dumped on you at regular intervals. Really, work is getting so stressful now. Every one is in a state all the time. The designers were almost in tears yesterday.
Just as a sort of relief, because I felt so let down, I spent the early evening doing my hair and make-up and choosing an understated outfit. (Black, of course, plus some amazing gladiator shoes that I can hardly walk in, and cost far too much.) Then I tottered off round to see if Michael was in, and I could have a chat with him. His house was in darkness, and as I got closer I saw a For Sale board outside it.
Anyhoo, I’ve rung his number a few times since then, and I’ve only got the answerphone, so I don’t know what could have happened to him.

A Hostile Environment

Today is Jo’s last day at the office, and you would not believe the amount of cakes she has brought in to commemorate this truly tragic moment. There is even a still-warm apple-cake that she must have baked around 7.30 or so. And home-made chocolate croissants that I’m fairly certain you gave to be up at about 4 a.m. to look after because fresh butter has to be rolled-in then.
She looks a bit tired and harassed. But then she’s very disappointed not to be made permanent. We all thought she would be, because Julia, who had gone off on maternity leave. and who she was covering for, announced she wasn’t coming back after all. (Her husband is a doctor and they’re all moving to his new practice in Scotland.) The firm says they won’t be filling her job for the moment. I find this ominous. Along with the news that they’ve cancelled the Christmas party.

Turnover Newsflash

Re the story about the apple turnovers: there are two to a pack, so the guy ended up with FOUR HUNDRED apple turnovers.

Fat Cats and Apple Turnovers

Ways I am economising in the Squeeze:
1) Cheap catfood for Mirabelle. This also ensures she does not become overweight, making me liable for fine of £20,000 (according to new laws about pets).
2) Take sandwiches to work instead of going to prêt. This is NOT enjoyable at all, as now I either have a high-stress early-morning sandwich-making moment, or stale, damp sandwiches made the night before.(Why do they go damp?)
3) Have started going to Sainsbury once a week. and haunting the marked-down section at the magic hour of 7.30. Moneysavingexpert said this was the thing to do. But it is psychologically quite depressing as you have to hang around a lot and people look at you suspiciously. And the ticketing people grow to loathe you.It’s doubtful whether a few packs of chicken-breasts for 60p are worth this grief. Also, strange trampy types start talking to you. A v smelly man with missing teeth has started turning up at the same time and coming over eagerly to chat to me as a ‘fellow-scrimper’ Last night he told me that his best find was when they marked-down the apple turnovers to 1p a packet. There were 200 packets on offer so he triumphantly bought all of them. For £2. He is so proud of this story, but who would want 200 stale apple turnovers? Except a madman?

Gout, and Reproachful Cats

Oh well, I spent the evening with Rachel and feel much better about everything. After all, the thing I caught is very easily cured, nothing really. And the weekend was still worth it, a brilliant glimpse of another world. And now I know it really isn’t for me, that life. (Also, the food at that hotel gave me terrible indigestion. It was all really perfect,tender prime meat, no vegetables to speak of, lots of alcohol, and divine puddings. Sort of guaranteed to give you gout.) (And wind. I was really glad I was alone for the first few hours after I returned home. Mirabelle kept looking at me reproachfully.)
Rachel thought that Michael looked a bit odd, too. ‘Supposing he WASN’T rich,’ she said. ‘And you were walking down the street with him. Wouldn’t you feel the teensiest bit ashamed?’ This is always Rachel’s test of whether a guy is right or not: whether you feel the slightest twinge of shame or unease to be seen in their company. Trouble is, it is such a hard test for men to pass, really.

Bathing in Chocolate

Well, the good news is that I’m not pregnant, and the bad news is that I’ve got some kind of VD. Not a terrible, life-threatening, incurable kind, but a non-specific sort. I really hate going to the walk in-clinic for this stuff. I hate the way they just assume - kind of half-smiling in reception- that everyone who goes in there is
a) pregnant, or
b) riddled with VD.
And, of course, I hate the way they are right.
When I was being rubbed with hot mud and wrapped in plastic at The Grove, the massage lady had the whole medical thing just right: caring and gentle and concerned. The nurse at the walk–in place was the opposite.
Oh, and it makes me wonder what else has to happen to make going to The Grove with Michael definitely NOT worth it. I feel it’s sort of hanging in the balance at the moment.
Still, at least my local Tesco has ‘discontinued’ luxury chocolate for 39p, so I’m just going to overdose on the stuff until I can drink cocktails again.

The Chocolate Minibar Beckons...

Of course Michael hasn’t been in touch. Rachel and I met up for a drink on Monday night and I told her I was going to go to the walk-in clinic for a morning after pill and she said, ‘Are you mad! If you get pregnant by him you are set up for life!!’
So I didn’t go. But it is very very unlikely I could be pregnant anyway. (Given what happened.) And also I feel angry and suicidal so clearly have PMT.
If I was a man I’d always send flowers afterwards, just to make people feel better.
Still, I have scrubbed out my whole flat, and last night I had a bath with all the White Company soaps and bubblebaths and stuff that came with the hotel room. I was thinking of buying a mini fridge and stocking it up with nuts and chocs, but maybe that is going too far…

Everything With Plums

Well, I’m back at work now, and the weekend all seems even MORE dreamlike. The place we went to was called The Grove. It says on its headed notepaper that it is ‘one of the leading hotels of the world’. Well, it just made me long to be rich. For ever.
When I woke on Saturday Michael was sitting up in bed in a bathrobe, all washed and shaved, tapping away at his laptop. I immediately ran to the bathroom for a long session of using all the complimentary soaps and stuff. And redoing my makeup. When I came out he said we had to rush off to breakfast at once as he had a session booked for me in the Spa.
That Spa! I could happily live in it. I felt a bit full of breakfast when I went in (I was down as ‘Miss Danielle Mazzini’ which was odd, and everyone kept addressing me as ‘Danielle’, which I went along with quite happily. Why not?) I lay in the jacuzzi, I had a sauna, and I half-heartedly did aquarobics with a load of other women (Whose pasty, elderly husbands were lying on beds round the pool, reading newspapers.) The women were obviously first wives, because they were all middle-aged, and quite worn, but with lovely, expensive hair. They were – and this was so comforting – mostly stouter than me. Well, very slightly. I’d been so scared they’d all be supermodels or trophy yummy mummies. After an hour I started a series of insanely expensive treatments intended for Danielle, like mud wraps and facials and foot massages. I was treated as if I was a very precious object – a designer handbag, maybe – and polished and wrapped reverently. Showers were run for me, and I was told not to go to the trouble of picking up my knickers, because of course they would do that. It was amazing. In between I lay in a darkened relaxation room, drinking ginger tea and listening to a tape of goat-herds tinkling bells by the sea.
I finally left about 5, feeling all pink and beautiful and massaged and creamed and de-toxified. Michael had told me I could go anywhere in the hotel and grounds and just have anything to eat or drink I wanted, all I had to do was give my room number and sign my name. (I gave Danielle’s, to avoid confusion.) Wow! It was so great! I had a special detoxifying smoothie, just to round up any last remaining toxins, followed by salad and champagne in the Stables restaurant. (The place has lots of restaurants, all with annoying names.)(If you decide not to have a sweet there, to be slimming, and just order coffee, it comes with a chocolate brownie on the side. Or a ritzy chocolate.) Then I wandered back up to the room, all the staff smiling and greeting me and asking if there was anything they could do for me? I spent ages trying to look incredible. I just wished I’d been able to pack properly, as I’d chosen quite stupid stuff, the way you do, if you are in a hurry. My shoes didn’t really match my long black silk dress with the bow on it. And the dress was a bit tight, despite all the saunas. It looked sausagey.
And finally Michael came back, as I was watching the widescreen TV, lounging on the bed nibbling on the contents of the mini-bar – and we made love. He was very kind. And seemed rather sad. But it was sort of disappointing. He asked me if I wanted to go to the restaurant or have room service, and we settled for room-service, so we could stay in bed. (Caviare, fois gras, lobster and plums. Practically everything on the menu came with plums or plum coulis, it was really hard to avoid them. (There was even a plum on the bedside table, in a stylish, Tate Modern fruit bowl.) The rest of the weekend was a blur of saunaing, and de-toxifying, and having golfing lessons from the golf teacher, and lying in the huge bed feeling incredibly grateful to Michael, and wanting to make him happy, but…well… failing. It’s never really happened to me like that before. Sometimes he actually looked like he was crying. And I wanted to make this good for him, but it seemed that I couldn’t.
Anyhoo, last night he dropped me and Mirabelle back at my flat, and the place seemed so, so shabby and dirty and cheap compared to the hotel. Even the bedclothes. The sheets were really heavy at The Grove, and smelled of some delicious, light perfume…

Life As a Dream (with pumpkins)

Well, I’m having a truly incredible weekend. It’s like a dream. On Friday, after work. I went off to the hairdresser to get my highlights done. I had thought of NOT doing this, being short of cash, but am so, so glad I went ahead with it, as my hair was looking terrible.
Anyhoo, afterwards I had nothing special to do and it seemed a waste ofd my great hair to do nothing with it, so I thought I’d pop into the Cadogan Arms for a cocktail. (I had just enough money in my bag, so did not have to go to the cashpoint, which has been randomly refusing my requests for money this week. It let me have cash Tuesday, but not Wednesday. V embarrassing.) I was just about to order when someone put their hand on my shoulder and said ’The delicious Scones!’ (Well, actually, they used my real name, which, for pointless security reasons, cannot be used on this blog.) I turned round, and guess who it was! Michael. He looked very rumpled and tired, and smelled of drink, and he has a friend with him, and he introduced me, keeping his arm round my waist at all times. So we sat down together, and the friend asked what I did etc and then the two men had a rambling talk, which seemed to be in code, about some company they owned. I didn’t listen, as Michael kept buying me different champagne cocktails and lining them up in front of me on the table and asking me what they tasted like. It was so so odd. He was so affectionate. It was like we were suddenly such close friends. Anyhoo, in the end his friend drifted off, and Michael put his face in his hands and said: ‘Scones, scones scones!’ He shook his head. And then he said, taking my hand, ‘I don’t suppose you would… No, no you wouldn’t.’
It took ages to get it out of him what he wanted, but he said he longed to take me away to a hotel for the weekend, would I agree?’
Well, OF COURSE I said yes! (Who wouldn’t?) He wanted to go STRAIGHT AWAY, so I said I had to go home and get some clothes, and see about Mirabelle etc. And in no time I found myself in a taxi, going to my flat. Michael waited downstairs while I flung stuff into a suitcase. The Japanese girls were not in, so we drove Mirabelle round to Rache’s, where I KNOW she will have a lovely romantic weekend with Oskar the totally-transformed cat. Rache came out to the taxi to have a good look at Michael, giggling, which would have been embarrassing if I hadn’t been so numb from the champagne, and then we were off.
We just sat in the back of the taxi, Michael gripping on to my hand tightly, and drove through the rain. He said, fuzzily, ‘You don’t know what this means to me, my darling Scones,’ and then fell asleep. I had no idea where we were going. It was to a huge stately home type place in Watford.
Michel piled out of the taxi and paid with a huge roll of cash, and then we were in to reception, surrounded by warm air, and polished glass, and incredibly polite staff. And pumpkins. The place was curiously decorated with sort of mad modern art stuff. There were trees with tiny orange paper lanterns on, like fruit, in reception, and the oddest paintings. And piles of pumpkins everywhere. I suppose because it is Halloween. Or was
So we went straight into a very dark restaurant with a vast oil-painting (of pumpkins, of course). And we had a ‘tasting menu’, which is when they keep presenting you with, say, a thimbleful of very salty soup, or a piece of meat the size of a bar of soap, with a squiggle of coloured sauce on it, and then they whisk it away and bring more plates, and more silver knives and forks, and another thimble. And we drank more and more champagne, and Michel kept squeezing my hand and telling me how wonderful I was, and laughing indulgently at everything I said.
It must have been about I a.m by the time we went to the suite, which had a huge four-poster bed. I ran a bath and tried out all the free soaps etc and when I got back to the bed Michael was fast asleep in all his clothes, snoring unbelievably loudly.

Does Carrot Cake Matter?

Apologies for not posting this week, but my computer at work broke, so I had to share with Valerie (in the same office) and of course had to be v careful. For a moment, there, I thought they weren’t going to replace the computer, ever, and this would mean I was going to be sacked FOR SURE, but it seems to be OK, though there is a strange atmosphere hanging over the place, somehow, and I didn’t dare make a fuss about the new computer taking so long to arrive.
Well, the party at Jasmine’s last Friday was an austerity party. We were supposed to make do and mend etc and bring wartime recipes. I took along a carrot cake, as they ate that in the war (though of course back then they were not baked by Mr Waitrose), but other people really got into it, making stuff no one in their right mind would want to eat, like mock-sausages and dried egg. I was very excited about this person I was being invited to meet, but it turned out to be – Glenn. Mind you, it was an improved model of Glenn. He had cut his hair short, and did not smell of alcohol (in fact drank fruit juice all night). He had a Tshirt under his jersey and later (we all went out to a Chinese restaurant) when he got hot I saw it read: ‘Die Hard: Take Viagra’, which is quite amusing, really. Glenn was incredibly well-behaved and very clean. And, as you know, he is extremely good-looking, with his dark hair, slim figure and blue eyes. He told me he’d been in AA since I last saw him and he is turning his life around. He lives on a big farm in Cornwall with a group of friends, and he kept saying why didn’t I move down there too (with Mirabelle, of course) as I could have my own place – no strings attached. It sounded like a sort of chalet in the woods that I could have if I wanted. It sounded quite tempting. Especially as they are almost completely self-sufficient, with a cow for milk, and a veg garden. Nothing else happened, but I found myself wondering, much as Sarah Jessica Parker does in those Sex in The City voiceovers: Is Money Really That Important? Maybe I’ll have to investigate. Or maybe not.

Clothes, clothes, clothes...

I was lying in bed at 4 in the morning, fretting about this and that, when I started thinking about clothes. Isn’t it weird how significant clothes are? Even clothes you’ve never worn, never even touched. Like – I just have to THINK about Richard Gere’s cheesy white suit (and cap) in ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’ and I feel this sexy frisson. And thinking about Richard Gere himself doesn’t do it. It’s the suit. And then there’s the lovely coffee-coloured dress (with tight belt) that Julia Roberts wears to the races in ‘Pretty Woman’. I loved that. I kept meaning to buy one like it, but never did, and now it’s almost as if I did anyway, I feel such affection and nostalgia. And I saw ‘Priceless’ last night, with Audrey Tatou in it, and that film is, really, about clothes. Not that any stick out particularly (though the evening dresses are amazing – though they wouldn’t suit me. They’re for very slim women with tiny tits.) It’s just that you find yourself looking eagerly at the clothes, not the people. They’re really NEW clothes, too: there are lots of shots of people snipping tags off them.
Anyhoo, Jasmine wants me to go to her place tonight to ‘meet someone that she knows I’ll like’ so I’ve been running over my clothes in my head. Pity I can’t buy new ones…

Obsessing About Bernie Ecclestone

Fretting about my dad has got me thinking about fathers. I’ve always disliked Bernie Ecclestone – without ever meeting him – just because he runs Formula One, probably bribed Tony Blair, and is repulsive, teeny, and married to a v tall, v glamorous v young Slav wife. (And looks like he wears an unconvincing, Elton-John wig. Ugh.) And yet his daughter Petra is a hard-working success and says: ‘Dad has worked hard his whole life. He doesn’t deserve to see his daughters going out flashing their knickers, I want to make my parents proud.’ Obviously, he’s a brilliant dad. And then look at Bob Geldof. Everyone has always SAID he’s a brilliant dad: devoted, self-sacrificing, strict but fair etc etc. And yet Peaches Geldof is out flashing her knickers, taking banned substances, marrying on a whim in Vegas etc. So he CLEARLY didn’t do it right.
I was obsessing about this yesterday, and Helen, who works in the other office on my floor, said it was because how you turn out is all about heredity. ‘Didn’t Geldof take drugs and run wild when he was young? Didn’t Paula Yates? See?’ I don’t really like to believe this. It means that your future is sort of predestined the instant you’re born.
Anyhoo, sorry about posting this dullish thought, but I have been obsessing about it.
Oh, and my dad is very kind and unselfish and never took vast quantities of drugs, so doesn’t really deserve to be slowly poisoned. (If that is what Jacob is doing.)

Strange Flus???

Haven’t posted because I’ve been feeling so peculiar and unwell. I haven’t really wanted to eat anything since the weekend (except tea and toast, very occasionally) and while it’s a bit worrying – what did Jacob put in the Green Thai Curry? – at least my clothes aren’t too tight any more. I’ve been reading all this stuff about people getting kidney failure as a result of cooking up poisonous mushrooms, so I hope it wasn’t one of those. I even rang my dad, last night about it. He said they all seemed to have had a peculiar kind of flu that had laid them low for a few days, but they were now on the mend.
‘What about Jacob?’ I asked
‘Oh – Jacob didn’t get it. He never does.’
‘So have you had a lot of these flus?’
‘From time to time. Let me see, we had one back in August. I remember that because it was an odd time of the year for flu. And then Dawnie and me were bad in June. Very bad, for two days, but that was brought on by the cold and wet.’
So this makes me wonder. Is Jacob some kind of a psychopath teenage poisoner, working up to some sort of serial-killing spree by practising on his family? Or have I just gone mad?
Still, it is nice being slightly slimmer. And I notice that almost everyone I know has put on about half a stone (or more) over the summer. Probably because it was so wet and miserable. And they’ve been worrying about the squeeze.

Strange Foods

On Sunday we had a Green Thai curry for lunch that Jacob made (he’s been having cookery lessons at school and got v enthusiastic about being a masterchef) We all felt strange afterwards, and I decided to go home early. I’m not sure it’s a terribly good idea teaching teenagers to cook. Who really wants to eat their stuff? I mean, you feel uneasy the whole time, especially when you look closely at their expression and see how little they are eating. (And remember how they like doing silly experiments.)
Anyhoo, it was a good thing I came home early as when I got in with Mirabelle in her basket I saw a note on the mat. I was just opening a tin of catmeat for her (Mirabelle lost her appetite while at my dad’s, oddly enough. But she was desperately hungry when we got home.) When I opened the note. It was from the landlord, giving me 24 hours notice of a flat-inspection. So I stuffed Mirabelle and her dish of catfood in her basket and just raced up the stairs to the Japanese girls, but they couldn’t have her, either, as THEY were having a flat inspection, too. So I raced downstairs again, shoved the dirt-box in a carrier-bag, and rushed out into the street with all my cat-related items, and luckily managed to get a cab and go to Rache’s. And she was in – it was so, so lucky. Then I had to rush back to the flat to be there when the landlord arrived.
It was Ok. The only sticky bit was when he looked round the kitchen and saw the opened cat-food tin on the counter. Fortunately it’s a top of the range pedigree variety and doesn’t REALLY look like cat-food. (Esp as the part of the tin with the cat’s face on was turned to the wall.) I spread some on a cracker and bit into it, and then hastily put the tin in the fridge. So either he thinks it was pate, or he thinks I’m a little eccentric. Or that I’m economising in a stupid way, due to the squeeze. And none of those are grounds for kicking someone out of a flat that they keep perfectly clean, are they?
I haven’t wanted to eat anything, since, though. I seem to have stumbled on the best conditions for dieting: get teenagers to cook for you, eat catfood, and practically DIE of panic and anxiety.