It’s been my birthday today. I mostly didn't tell anyone. I tell myself I have simply not got excited about it this year, and that’s truthful. I had my fairytale birthday treat going to see the ENO production of Turandot at the Coliseum with Mark
I spent most of today in a "Nothing pleases me" mood; mind full of intention movements to get busy, to achieve something tangible and all I did was slept late, read a book, and ate too much, knowing it was comfort eating but not why I felt in need of comforting.
Finally got my act together enough to give myself a bit of home pampering and managed to fetch the kitchen splashback thingie from FedEx before they closed then headed for the Nursery to see Paul, Dee and the shorts: they’d got me a new DVD player as I’ve been moaning that none of mine work any more (or I can’t get them to work). Replied to Paula’s (exhausted after climbing Scafell at the weekend) text ; called Sid, who had forgotten about La Tasca this evening. Feel a bit giggling about that; if it had seriously mattered to me, I would have reminded him; Paul couldn't go as he's done something evil to his back, and although Dee offered to go to dinner with me, I had just said I would go to Sid’s for a drink and so went off, feeling happy and loved, having kissed the children goodbye: only about three times each.
Alex got ‘beaten up’ at school today; still has a bite-mark on his arm, and an incipient bruise round his eye. Nowadays they fill in pre-printed forms, ‘violence reports’, and somehow manage to confuse the details in less than twenty words. If the marks on Alex’ arm at 6:30pm were the result of the other boy ‘trying’ to bite him before 3pm, I expect he’d have lost the arm if he’d ‘really’ been bitten.
Sid has surpassed himself again on the different fox birthday card: a Mick Cawston print of a disreputable fox smoking a pipe; and had bagginsed the small mountain of books and DVDs I didn’t fancy carrying back with me last time, hospitably provided a bottle of 1997 something-very-nice which we drank comfortably, chatting and listening to the 1920’s/30’s originals of stuff the Bonzo Dog DooDah Band played several decades later.
I declare my birthday enjoyed.
Monday 12 October 2009
Saturday 10 October 2009
Turandot
Fabulous, spectacular, LOVED IT!
It’s Mark’s favourite opera, and I happened to see it was on at the Coliseum so got tickets and sent him an email on his birthday, with this link and a lot of white space instead of dots or something to where I’d pasted the details of the performance date and seat numbers at the bottom of the email, where he didn’t find it.
Opening his presents in the pub, no-one knew it was his birthday so I sneaked the card, Marilyn Monroe, to one of his poker buddies who got various friends to sign. Chelsea lost to Wigan that day and MarkG wrote ‘sealed with a Wigan kiss’ on the back of the envelope. Rotten swine.
He liked his presents but declared I’d done a Deron Brown on him telling him the opera scarf was cheap nylon. Hmmmpppphhhh. It’s not.
Dinner was unfortunately so-so, if anyone wants to go to Preto for a lovely laid-back dinner, go in the early evening before they get busy and the service suffers.
Good call though unintentional on the opera date, between his birthday and mine. Sudden and momentary panic when I realized that giving him both tickets meant he might take someone else. He was gallant enough to say he doesn’t know anyone else who’d know what to wear.
Bad call on getting from work to the theatre, I needed to get changed into the wonderfully easy to wear but fabulous looking black dress MrsG gave me a long while back, with the super sequined black bolero top. I’d decided on the louboutin-like black patent platforms with the red suede heel, the Fiorella dinky red bag with the dangling red and black hearts, and, though I’ve still never got round to replacing the laces with black ones, full length red leather opera gloves. All that elegance was languishing in corporate heaven on the day. In the opposite direction from work to the opera house; the hotel being closer than the pub or Mark’s place but in entirely the opposite direction.
It seemed like a good idea to be waking up where my work clothes were; turfing him out when I left for work the next morning and had to check out would have been rather unkind so I decided it would be a good plan to leave work about 4:30, collect the glam outfit and remind everyone in his local that we love getting dressed up. They think we’re both nuts.
It was going quite well till the traffic caused a schedule reset about 6pm when the 24 bus had been sitting growling on the spot for at least 15 minutes on Victoria Street. Back to plan B, my private dressing room, aka the pub loo, scene of many transformations. Adam the barman coped admirably with my swanning in, ordering a couple of doubles then swanning upstairs to get changed saying I’d pay for them when I came down. By the time I’d done the transformation, and persuaded Adam to porter my bag downstairs, Mark had arrived, all hot horniness in top hat and the non-nylon opera scarf (he WAS wearing other clothes) and got stitched paying for the drinks.
Everything went wonderfully well after that; finished our drinks, found a taxi, managed to get there with about five minutes to spare (positively EARLY for me but Mark was twitching a bit) Compliments, compliments and more compliments from random strangers making a point of coming over and/or saying loudly that they were pleased someone had made the effort.
CLASS seats! I thought they’d probably be behind a pillar or something since they were right at the end of a row but it turned out that the only people in front of us were in the orchestra pit.
I can’t do it justice but searched some reviews to find out what real aficiandos thought
Good
good
ermmm & not so good
Sod ‘em – it worked for us. Totally bizarre treatment but it all worked, the spooky little girl was never explained, I managed to guess the writer’s part in it but missed the fact he got gorily massacred at the point where Puccini had died rather than work out how the opera should end. I doubt Puccini had pigs in mind but I thought they were wonderful, and casting Liu as a shabby heroin type was pretty cool. Kirsten Black managed to mangle english but in a full-on operatic fashion.
Even the taxi back to the pub was in the best tradition, Mark imperiously indicating that I couldn’t walk easily on cobbles to get to the taxi rank when the poor taxi driver was missing clues like the stick I’d recently refused to use. Anyway, it’s all wrong having to walk to a black cab when your imagination is working along the lines of a sleek black limousine purring to a stop exactly when and where you want it.
Time for bed. Holiday last week involved being miserable as sin getting over my flu, perked up a lot with the LLM chorus singing Happy Birthday to me and loading me with lovely gifts when I’d forgotten all about it, then chilling nicely for a few days. Wasn’t over-impressed with having to go back to work today, but the evil annual appraisal calibration convocation is over for another year and I decided to come home tonight and have to get up early tomorrow instead of having to get up early this morning – and Mark won the first poker game of the new league. Hurrah!
‘night
Will maybe write up the Brighton expedition in a while
It’s Mark’s favourite opera, and I happened to see it was on at the Coliseum so got tickets and sent him an email on his birthday, with this link and a lot of white space instead of dots or something to where I’d pasted the details of the performance date and seat numbers at the bottom of the email, where he didn’t find it.
Opening his presents in the pub, no-one knew it was his birthday so I sneaked the card, Marilyn Monroe, to one of his poker buddies who got various friends to sign. Chelsea lost to Wigan that day and MarkG wrote ‘sealed with a Wigan kiss’ on the back of the envelope. Rotten swine.
He liked his presents but declared I’d done a Deron Brown on him telling him the opera scarf was cheap nylon. Hmmmpppphhhh. It’s not.
Dinner was unfortunately so-so, if anyone wants to go to Preto for a lovely laid-back dinner, go in the early evening before they get busy and the service suffers.
Good call though unintentional on the opera date, between his birthday and mine. Sudden and momentary panic when I realized that giving him both tickets meant he might take someone else. He was gallant enough to say he doesn’t know anyone else who’d know what to wear.
Bad call on getting from work to the theatre, I needed to get changed into the wonderfully easy to wear but fabulous looking black dress MrsG gave me a long while back, with the super sequined black bolero top. I’d decided on the louboutin-like black patent platforms with the red suede heel, the Fiorella dinky red bag with the dangling red and black hearts, and, though I’ve still never got round to replacing the laces with black ones, full length red leather opera gloves. All that elegance was languishing in corporate heaven on the day. In the opposite direction from work to the opera house; the hotel being closer than the pub or Mark’s place but in entirely the opposite direction.
It seemed like a good idea to be waking up where my work clothes were; turfing him out when I left for work the next morning and had to check out would have been rather unkind so I decided it would be a good plan to leave work about 4:30, collect the glam outfit and remind everyone in his local that we love getting dressed up. They think we’re both nuts.
It was going quite well till the traffic caused a schedule reset about 6pm when the 24 bus had been sitting growling on the spot for at least 15 minutes on Victoria Street. Back to plan B, my private dressing room, aka the pub loo, scene of many transformations. Adam the barman coped admirably with my swanning in, ordering a couple of doubles then swanning upstairs to get changed saying I’d pay for them when I came down. By the time I’d done the transformation, and persuaded Adam to porter my bag downstairs, Mark had arrived, all hot horniness in top hat and the non-nylon opera scarf (he WAS wearing other clothes) and got stitched paying for the drinks.
Everything went wonderfully well after that; finished our drinks, found a taxi, managed to get there with about five minutes to spare (positively EARLY for me but Mark was twitching a bit) Compliments, compliments and more compliments from random strangers making a point of coming over and/or saying loudly that they were pleased someone had made the effort.
CLASS seats! I thought they’d probably be behind a pillar or something since they were right at the end of a row but it turned out that the only people in front of us were in the orchestra pit.
I can’t do it justice but searched some reviews to find out what real aficiandos thought
Good
good
ermmm & not so good
Sod ‘em – it worked for us. Totally bizarre treatment but it all worked, the spooky little girl was never explained, I managed to guess the writer’s part in it but missed the fact he got gorily massacred at the point where Puccini had died rather than work out how the opera should end. I doubt Puccini had pigs in mind but I thought they were wonderful, and casting Liu as a shabby heroin type was pretty cool. Kirsten Black managed to mangle english but in a full-on operatic fashion.
Even the taxi back to the pub was in the best tradition, Mark imperiously indicating that I couldn’t walk easily on cobbles to get to the taxi rank when the poor taxi driver was missing clues like the stick I’d recently refused to use. Anyway, it’s all wrong having to walk to a black cab when your imagination is working along the lines of a sleek black limousine purring to a stop exactly when and where you want it.
Time for bed. Holiday last week involved being miserable as sin getting over my flu, perked up a lot with the LLM chorus singing Happy Birthday to me and loading me with lovely gifts when I’d forgotten all about it, then chilling nicely for a few days. Wasn’t over-impressed with having to go back to work today, but the evil annual appraisal calibration convocation is over for another year and I decided to come home tonight and have to get up early tomorrow instead of having to get up early this morning – and Mark won the first poker game of the new league. Hurrah!
‘night
Will maybe write up the Brighton expedition in a while
Tuesday 6 October 2009
faint hearted
Offered £190K for this house yesterday and the agent says they declined so I guess the other lot offered more. No sense of relief, just faint regret, and there is still the possibility the other lot will have to back out. I can get another £10K easily but would be tied to a £2K mortgage for the next ten years ~ ach decisions, who'd have thought I'd ever be so rich? And how very un-British of me to discuss lucre.
How do people make these decisions? No phone a friend (well, I did ask P to choose yes or no, very scientific), no ask the audience (well, I did ask Sid), a bit of inside information that someone else had offered and a reluctance to commit, but the decision-maker coin-toss came up heads for offer the extra ~ and I haven't. Thinking out loud here, it's not as if I was actively looking for a new house, more that it's across the road, still near my son and his family, and has an integral garage, and I blame my son for winding me up that I should buy it. He says he was only joking
How do people make these decisions? No phone a friend (well, I did ask P to choose yes or no, very scientific), no ask the audience (well, I did ask Sid), a bit of inside information that someone else had offered and a reluctance to commit, but the decision-maker coin-toss came up heads for offer the extra ~ and I haven't. Thinking out loud here, it's not as if I was actively looking for a new house, more that it's across the road, still near my son and his family, and has an integral garage, and I blame my son for winding me up that I should buy it. He says he was only joking
plans
ahhhhhhhhh - having called sick today and spent the time morphing in and out of feeling pretty OK and really weird etc, I have done and discovered scary and exciting things!
I have plans. PLANS!
Plans for dancing, plans for getting into super-serious (but sensible, really, it IS sensible) debt, plans for going to the cinema to see
this - Judi AND Sophia
and this - does ANYONE go to see just the film, or am I just one of millions who would go to watch Johnny even if he was asleep?
and it's time I was asleep ...
ah - for them as read and fancy the trip to the sticks; La Tasca next Monday
I have plans. PLANS!
Plans for dancing, plans for getting into super-serious (but sensible, really, it IS sensible) debt, plans for going to the cinema to see
this - Judi AND Sophia
and this - does ANYONE go to see just the film, or am I just one of millions who would go to watch Johnny even if he was asleep?
and it's time I was asleep ...
ah - for them as read and fancy the trip to the sticks; La Tasca next Monday
Sunday 4 October 2009
How did it get to be October?
Every year I indulge in wishful thinking that this year I will get to my birthday without seeing drifts of dead autumn leaves. Every year I get a sense of sweet nostalgia that the world has turned again and summer is really over.
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