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’.