I've had the opposite of writers' block - I shall name it writers' flood - whereby I've had so much to say that I haven't known where to start and, to keep things simple, decided not to start at all. But yesterday I became so passionate about something that I realised the time to speak had finally arrived.
What was this subject that dragged me out of non-blogging apathy? Not Paul's 30th weekend when we all flew up to Scotland and stayed in an incredible house and I cooked for 12 people even though one half of the double oven was broken and there were no scales and I was meant to make birthday brownies and they came out looking like a flat brown biscuit and we drank a lot and wore wigs and hooted hooters and Paul played with a remote control helicopter for longer than was strictly polite and two of his friends got it on which was just too funny and I returned to London a shell of my former self but feeling vaguely saintly? No.
OK - maybe it was the long weekend when the choir I'm in went to the beautiful and not-nearly-as-stag-night-infested-as-expected Riga in Latvia for a flimsily devised tour so that one of our number could see a ladyfriend in Latvia for potential snoggery, but which then turned out to be exceptionally funny, involving drinking sour cream, a lot of sweating on dancefloors, a random hut at 2.30am where we danced unconvincingly to drum 'n' bass, a splendid concert with a young Rigan choir who were really good, a fantastic minibus journey where we harmonised, freestylee like, a gargantuan catalogue of music ranging from The Beatles to Paul Simon to the Grease Megamix to The Lion Sleeps Tonight? Non.Perhaps it was The Apprentice which, once again, is just being too annoying for words with all the candidates being so thick as to defy the realms of imagination, let alone actual possibility, and now we find that one of them actually submitted his application form with multiple spelling mistakes - and I'm talking about words that don't actually exist rather than mere synonymic errors which, in these days of spell-checkers, is so unforgiveable that I cannot believe he even made it into the first round of the auditions process but there's the BBC for you? No.
Or maybe it was the trip to Glyndebourne to see the Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea (which I just wrote out and then looked up on Yahoo! to see if I'd spelled it right and by jiminy, I had!), my first foray into this ridiculously elitist, unaffordable, glamorous, anachronistic British operatic tradition where Paul had paid extra for well-spoken public school minions to carry our pre-ordered picnic across the lawns and set up our hired table and chairs in a good position by the haha close to the little lambs in the field and from whence we could take advantage of the setting sun over the house, and where, as I walked towards the auditorium for the first half, I told Paul that although I enjoyed opera, I'd never really honestly understood all the fuss about it, always being much more moved during the Tonight medley in West Side Story or even Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat in Guys 'n' Dolls, and that I have always had a twitch of irritation when people wax lyrical about opera like it's some sort of cultural manna or when Julia Roberts cries in Pretty Woman at the end of La Traviata, or when Cher cries in Moonstruck when they're watching (if memory serves me correctly) La Boheme at the Met with Nicholas Cage, because I have never had that wrench of emotion and I didn't really believe that anyone really ever did (much like those smug, hateable morons who guffaw really obviously at all the 'jokes' in Shakespeare to show everyone in the theatre that they connect on a deep level with the subtlety of the Bard's humour when all that's really happening is that someone's making a pathetic pun about penises), but then at the end of the opera, I was absolutely silenced at the beauty of the final duet and suddenly found tears in my eyes and couldn't believe I'd turned into such a cliche? Still no.Surely it must have been the fact that, on my way back from choir on a Monday evening a couple of weeks ago, I traipsed across Grosvenor Square in my Birkenstock clogs and work clothes, carrying two heavy bags, and found, upon reaching the other side, that the gate had been locked, and, worrying that the man was working his way around the perimeter, locking each gate in turn, realised that by the time I crossed back to my original entrypoint, I may be entirely trapped, so seeing no alternative, climbed out of the square over the four foot high black wrought iron spiked railings, and although my ample buttocks cushioned me from a rear skewering, I still slightly slipped on my way over and carved an inch-long gouge into my left shin, leaving a lovely thick scab and a surrounding bruise that turned blue and then black and then yellow and now grey? Nope.
Alternatively, was it the week-long illness from which I suffered greatly since I last blogged, an illness presented to me as a rare gift from Paul which had me bedridden, sweating and struggling to speak for several days, missing two crucial choir practices and sending me into an OCD-exacerbating frenzy of cabin-fever - was it this that drove me finally to update all you Faithful on my progress through this hilarious rainforest of life? Again, no.
So: not, then, the opera, not a trip to Scotland, not a leg injury, nor a near-death experience has inspired me to clear the backlog. What has finally propelled me to write, dear readers, is my calves.
Never my favourite body part, my calves have always been broad, seemingly untannable, and covered with an even sprinkling of hated hair follicles. Sure, I am familiar with the benefits of the razor and I use my Venus regularly - but all too soon following this procedure, the sandpaper effect returns. I tried to ignore it, but Paul's regular gag which involved "exfoliating" the soles of his feet by rubbing them on my legs did not make me feel like the sex kitten I know I am deep down. So I've had them lasered. And, after just one treatment of a likely five, they are already so improved that I feel like my beauty regime has changed forever. My self-confidence is boosted, my tights don't self-ladder and Paul now needs to buy a new pumice stone. I am not alone in my passion - two other lasered friends called the experience 'life-altering' and I am now happy to admit that I too rank it as one of the most pleasurable painful experiences of my thirty year existence. Ladies of the world, unite - you have nothing to lose but several hundred pounds sterling and a lifetime's supply of razor blades.
