Once again, many apologies for my protracted absence this week – I have been feeling fairly off colour and not up to my usual riotous banter. To be honest, I am still not quite on colour, whatever that might involve, but duty calls and my fans are impatient. Plus, I have so much to tell, the backlog is becoming unmanageable.
It all started on Monday, when I left work early and came home in the freezing afternoon to prepare for Eva’s wedding. With a slightly tragic level of excitement about a mid-afternoon bath, I turned on the taps and then scampered upstairs to perform some minor follicular operations. Sadly, my faithful laptop beckoned me so persuasively that I became sucked into the internet, fully aware that the hot:cold ratio downstairs would almost certainly be negatively affected as a result of my dilly-dallying. Eventually, I tore myself away and galloped down the stairs as delicately as possible. Tentatively, I inserted my hand beneath the Badedas bubbles, dreading the catastrophic lukewarm sensation that would tell me that I had over-run the hot water and it had now run out. But lukewarm it was. Cursing, I told myself to remain calm. Surely in a few moments, the hot would be back and I could bathe in heat. Patiently, I waited for at least five minutes, and sure enough, the hot tap was hot once more. For around nine seconds. I repeated this process, conscious that the clock was ticking and that I needed to leave home in around forty minutes – and that a small towel would not be quite enough in the way of garments. But when the next hot blast also failed all-too-soon, I knew I had no alternative but to enter the tepidness. Already cold, physically and psychologically, the sensation was akin to stepping into the North Sea in January. My goosebumps were painful. I sat down, determined to stay positive, but sadly, this maturity didn’t last long and only seconds later I was frantically running the still-cold hot tap, determined that the boiler would kick into action eventually and knowing that every second I let it run cold was merely making my liquid surroundings even less pleasant. The gargantuan waste of water added moral quandaries to my predicament: could I get out or should I stay in and suffer? Feeling sure that I’d learned my lesson, I scrambled out as quickly as I could and prepared for the wedding at lightning speed.
The marriage was beautiful, fairy-lit and musically stunning. Eva was gorgeous in royal blue, Pete’s speech was hilarious in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones. I sat next to two lovely boys at dinner, both married, both fathers – but entertaining none the less. Celebrity count was excellent – although this started a row when I jokingly accused one of my friends of filming the ‘supergroup’ on stage in order to upload it to YouTube. He took this as a serious and massively offensive slur on the nature of his friendship with the bride and groom and this quickly spiralled into an argument fuelled by far too much delicious wine on my part. Something about being at a party with school friends from two years above me while having a row with a boy I used to fancy when I was in my teens – it all took me back a decade or so. I suddenly felt like I was back at the Feathers ball in the Hammersmith Palais – although thankfully my fashion sense has progressed beyond a £10 black lycra minidress and black lace-up Palladium shoes. Wince. In my drunken excitement, I also managed to set my mum’s coral red pashmina on fire with a tea-light during the canapés section of the evening. I was devastated but I was sitting next to one of the judges from Britain’s Next Top Model and became strangely embarrassed that I hadn’t even managed to make it to dinner without falling into the ‘major liability’ category, so I wafted away the smell and hid the irreparable shawl down the back of my chair. And mum: I’m so sorry. I’ll replace it. Seriously.
On Tuesday, disaster struck when what I had thought was a hangover became a life-threateningly serious virus (read: cold). I went to work as normal but found myself shivering pathetically, sweating profusely and all sorts of other very attractive things. I went to bed early that night, slept all day on Wednesday and most of last night and woke up feeling slightly more human this morning. The highlight of the illness has to be the hallucino-esque dreams I had last night, one of which must have involved an old man. I woke up in the middle of it, in my pitch-black bedroom, and thought that the old man was lying in bed next to me. This didn’t strike me as particularly unexpected – but then I realised that his face didn’t look quite right. ‘Hang on,’ I thought to myself. ‘That’s not the old man – that’s a mask! Someone is trying to make it look like the old man is in my bed! They’ve put a Spitting Image style floppy rubber mask of his face here!’ I picked it up to toss it away – and suddenly I realised with a flush of embarrassment that it was, in fact, my cushion. The corner had bent to create the effect of a long, beaked nose – and my hyper-active, cold-fuelled imagination had done the rest.
And now it’s Thursday – I’ve stumbled through work, still feeling fairly sorry for myself – and yet there is good progress with the flat, which is finally picking up pace after a terrifying 48 hours where no one could get hold of the vendor and I thought he had evaporated or been arrested for paedophilia. Fingers crossed for some concrete positive developments tomorrow. Until then…
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