Minnie me

So I was standing on a blissfully unpacked Embankment tube station platform this evening. I had put my handbag and a carrier bag on one of the grey steel seats affixed to the wall and I had half turned away for a moment and was looking at my phone.
"Excuse me," said the geeky looking gentleman who was sitting on a separate bank of seats about ten feet further down the platform. I braced myself for something unpleasant. I had no idea what he was going to say, but I was fairly confident that I might need to be braced. I smiled at him. He gestured at my belongings on the seat behind me.
"One of those little tube mice has just crawled into your handbag," he said. "If you have any food in there, you might want to discard it."
"Ooh!" I said, excitedly. I absolutely love the little tube mice, and sure enough, when I turned around, there it was, sticking its little head out of my green leatherette bag and wiggling its whiskers. I took a step towards it and it quickly scurried up, over and down, across the floor and down onto the tracks in a jiffy. The excitement was all over far too quickly.

Still, even though I am fond of little tube mice, and even though I'd clearly seen it vacate my bag and scuttle away, I still felt a bit ginger as I picked up my bags when the tube arrived, and even now, when I think about it, I get a little tingle about my ankles as if a creature may be about to shoot up my leg. Odd, the way one's mind works, innit?

The geese are getting fat

Ooh, I know what I forgot to record. And it's momentous, truly massive news: I have booked my ticket to Glastonbury 2009 and every time I think about it, I am hit by a brief but violently whirring influx of butterflies. I have been wanting and intending to go to Glastonbury since I was about 20, and I have never had the money or the companion or the free time or the nerve all at once. And suddenly, I realised that if I wasn't careful, I would be a 45 year old ex-music-obsessive who has never attended the greatest music festival in my home country, possibly the world. Sure: it'll be muddy and rainy and cold and miserable, and there will be horrible queues and terrible food and loos like cesspits, and all my stuff will get nicked and someone will be sick down my back and I'll get separated from my friends and my tent will be moved in the middle of the day when I'm nowhere near it, so that when I stumble back late at night / early in the morning, I can't find it, and I'll end up crying and sleeping around some weird Druid's campfire but I can't flipping wait. I've heard that Elbow are playing, which is good enough in itself - but rumour has it that the reformed Blur are headlining, which would be the best thing ever, with the possible exception of the news that Bruce Springsteen may also be on the bill. I know it's madness, I know I'll hate every second, but I want to go and I won't be beaten. I can always come home.

My week thus far has been dominated by my physical weaknesses. From Monday to this morning, I have had a fairly horrific cold, involving sweating and coughing and aching ribs etc. I was so ill that I left one of our work Christmas lunches yesterday without even seeing, let alone eating, the pudding that I'd already paid for, effectively turning down free food, something I don't think I've ever done before. I'm still feeling a bit confused about that. Anyway, as one condition improved, another developed, and I am now healthy of throat but in agony of jaw, as my lower left wisdom tooth has decided that now is a good time for its annual growth spurt. This usually lasts for around a week and involves a lot of hot, pulsating gum sensations, with me rubbing my cheek a lot in a bid for sympathy, applying oil of cloves to the painful area and then retching as some of it sneaks down my throat. Revolting.

I was meant to be out tonight at a speed dating event that was being filmed for the pilot of a new TV show - my friend from choir was coordinating it for the production company and roped me in, but then told me today that their computers had been wiped out by a virus, she'd lost almost everyone's details and she suspected that tonight's gathering might not be the hotbed of male talent she had initially promised. Instead, I finished my Christmas shopping, came home, donned my festive velour (a red nightdress covered in white snowflakes), put the iPod on Christmassy shuffle, ate a lot of chocolate and then began a marathon gift wrapping session accompanied by a couple of glasses of white wine. It was all very civilised and I am now exhausted. Tomorrow evening I have a date with a guy who had to leave his sister's wedding because he thought he was dying of SARS. He is absolutely extraordinary and I can't wait to meet him. Full report back in due course. Now I'm going to top up my glass, watch last night's Desperate Housewives and go to bed. Couldn't be happier.

Celebrate good times, come on

So the big news is that this is LLFF's 300th posting. Yup. In the 25 months since I started this blog, I've recorded random, disconnected stuff precisely 300 times. I've been unemployed, I've been busy, I've been bored, I've had two boyfriends and two break-ups, been on holiday to Dubrovnik and the States and Paris, work trips to Amsterdam and New York, minibreaks to Cambridge and Brighton, Bath, Northern Ireland, Devon, Penzance, York, Riga, Edinburgh and Suffolk, and walked from the source of the Thames in Gloucestershire to Oxford. I've seen Mark Ronson and Alistair Campbell, Tony Benn and Rufus Wainwright, The Clientele, Ray LaMontagne, Camera Obscura, Amy Winehouse and a zillion others at Live Earth and Live Eight. I've learned a fair bit about wine tasting and house buying, banking and varicose veins, and a little bit about men and exercise.

I took a look at the tags I've given posts over the years, and I guess it's quite telling. Books, my father, food, friends and the media have all had nine entries. Commuting, geekery, relationships and money are joint with ten. Alcohol, self-obsession, movies and property all scored 11. Music and choir are fittingly joint at 12, along with travel. Boredom and TV are tied together with 13 entries apiece. Office life, a phenomenon which still feels unusual, is alone with 14 entries. Celebrities and London, both subjects close to my heart, have 15 each. DIY sits alone with 16, politics with 19, and my bête-noir, public transport, has 20. Fat and jobs have 21 entries each. The internet has 22. Then things jump forward with my oh-so-common tag, Jane=idiot, having 28 posts, men with 31 and modern life with 35.

So here's to LLFF - written by a man-obsessed, yo-yo dieting mentalist who cares more about DIY than alcohol, more about the internet than money and more about public transport than music. Or maybe that's just what strikes me as interesting at the time.

Anyway, apologies to Tabitha and others for the most recent delay - I was busy and then I became traumatically ill (read: have a cold). Last Wednesday was our book club Christmas party - we'd read Portrait of a Marriage which was fascinating, but unfortunately we were all far too distracted by each other and the Secret Santa that we found very little time to discuss the book as clearly presents and gossip are far more important than intellectual discussion. I went out on Friday night too, to a party full of people I met on an online forum for London lovers, which was crazy and odd and fascinating. I had a delicious portion of microwaved apple and blackberry crumble, which probably shouldn't have been a highlight and perhaps suggests more about my evening than it should. Annoyingly, I caught a cough from some generous individual along the way, as I awoke spluttering on Saturday morning, just a few small hours before our choir's sell-out Christmas extravaganza in Mayfair. Fortunately, the symptoms stayed in check thanks to a few spoonfuls of Benylin (I tried sugar and it did nothing. Practically perfect in every way? Ha! Mary Poppins was just a feeder) and the concert went really well.

Afterwards, the aching and the sweating started in earnest, so rather boringly I ditched the jam-packed pub and headed home with Ed to watch the X Factor final. As with all reality shows, which reliably become less interesting the closer they get to the last moments, it was a fairly unexciting night, the highlight of which was Beyonce's performance of Listen with Alexandra, a moment that felt briefly goosebump-inducing - or perhaps that was just my fever. Hilariously, my V+ timer had issues and the recording cut out in the pause between Dermot saying 'And the winner is...' and making the announcement but I managed to witness the winner's hysteria in full the following morning and cringed into a bent-neck, full-body wince at the full extent of the sobbing and breathlessness. I wish it wouldn't mean so much to them, I really do. Sigh.

Yesterday I lay around with Ed watching TV, making CDs and eating on a continuous sweet/savoury loop, missing out on two very fun-sounding parties in an effort to shake off the bug and not infect anyone else. Now it's Monday evening and I've watched the gripping Sicko by Michael Moore, thanked my lucky stars (again) that I don't live in America, laughed a LOT at Bush having shoes thrown at him in Iraq, sighed at reading about all the midnight laws he's sneaking through before Obama's inauguration, winced to see that Hugh Jackman will be hosting the Oscars, and am now semi-comatose on the sofa after wolfing a gargantuan Thai takeaway in front of University Challenge, barking out the answers I knew through mouthfuls of tempura and noodles. There's another busy week ahead so I'm hoping my batteries will feel semi-charged by tomorrow morning.

So, this is me, 300 entries old, still largely lost, still occasionally looking for fish, but mostly very happy about it, wishing you all excellent health and hoping that you stick with me for the next century. It's going to be great.

Goodness

I had no idea that I haven't posted since November. How shoddy. Many apologies, but... well, it's been absolutely freakin' mental around here. I now have so many anecdotes that I am actually weak with the weight of them, and won't even remotely be able to recall them accurately now, on the spot.

Anyway, not to worry. I'll just ramble on in my normal style and you can do your best to keep up. So... let's see... where were we? Monday 1 December, our choir performed in the first carol concert of our season, a charity service in aid of prostate cancer. It went OK but we did have to suffer the indignity of the inaugural performance of our choreographed routine accompanying Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree, a moment of intense humiliation for me and several other choir members. I stayed out far too late in the pub afterwards when I should have been rushing home to pack, so then ended up throwing random and disassociated items together into my suitcase well after midnight.

Tuesday 2 December I took the Northern Line to King's Cross in the morning, met my parents, boarded the Eurostar and travelled to Paris. Having moved out of the family home in March this year, this two night, three day break was the longest uninterrupted parent time I've had for over eight months, and I must say it was rather a shock to be back in the fold. They are both almost everything wonderful and I love them to pieces, but my dad's insistence on stressing about possible negative future occurences is nothing short of debilitating. I bore it by taking the mickey out of him as much as possible, but there was a moment at Gare du Nord on our final afternoon where I was tempted to stuff him into a left-luggage locker and go sightseeing alone. Other than that brief blip, we had a wonderful time, eating and drinking far too much (as is correct at such times) and having a good look round Versailles, which created historic overload within almost a few seconds of arrival, but was still mighty impressive. I especially loved the hilarious contrast between the temporary Jeff Koons artworks that were being exhibited both inside and outside the palace, and the traditional ostentation of the original building - but the oversized metallic balloon animals upset my father a little. The driving horizontal rain and icy wind made looking round the gardens impossible, so maybe I'll return another milder day to enjoy those. Certainly a trip worth making. And the double-decker trains out there and back were cool too. On Thursday we tried our best to walk alongside the Canal St Martin and had OK food at the very cool Hotel du Nord. It was an area of the French capital I'd never seen before and I'm glad we made the trip. That said, I think that most of the reason why Paris is wonderful is that it's a fun city to meander around. If the weather is minging (which it really really was), it does reduce the funcount quite substantially. I don't know if I'd rush to go back there in winter again. And yes, I know that sounds like I'm an ungrateful, heartless daughter. I'm not saying I didn't have fun: I did. And my parents are well aware of that. I hope.

Friday I saw the Chief Superintendant - we went to see Waltz with Bashir which was fascinating, although the policeman has just got back from six months in Afghanistan and I was aware of him wincing every time a bullet or a missile whizzed across the screen. Did bring an even more intense resonance to the viewing experience. Saturday, my friend Toby brought me carrot cake and drank a lot of my tea, and then we went for a walk along the river which was lovely until we reached the area by the Millennium wheel, when the tourist build-up became unacceptable and we both gave up and headed for Waterloo. That night was the X Factor semi-final, which was unremarkable in every way except adorable 16-year-old Eoghan's absolutely heart-wrenching devastation on finding out that he had made it through to the final and Diana, his 17-year-old love, had been booted off the show. I know a bitter old cynic like me should be more hardy but I must admit that my eyes did brim with tears as the young hobbit sobbed 'I love you! I love you so much!' with a conviction that only a teenager can muster.

Sunday was fairly hilarious. The choir I'm in had a day trip down to Poole, in Dorset, to perform in a concert. When we arrived, after a three hour coach trip, we found that the gig was 'Christmas with Morse', featuring a few songs by us, interspersed with many, many readings by two men connected with the popular book and TV series, Inspector Morse. The performance itself was pretty unremarkable with the exception of a lady in the front row who was obviously Morse's number one fan, and, when a vaguely Christmas-themed extract from one of the stories was read to the audience, she mouthed along with every. single. word. and then gave the speaker a solo standing ovation at the end. Oh - also, on our final song, we were given a note and were expected to come in, singing a beautiful, lilting chord. Unfortunately, none of us could work out what we were meant to be doing, and all sang a note plucked at random. It sounded horrific. Ed, who was conducting us, turned to the audience and said 'I think we'll try that one again.' Fortunately it was better second time around.

On the way back to London, we bought a lot of booze in a BP garage. I was charged £1.49 for a bottle of nice Chilean Sauvignon Blanc and a large bag of blue Doritos. "That can't be right," I said to the man behind the counter, waving the receipt at him. "Don't worry about it," he shrugged. Delighted. Then we sang raucously the entire way to town, including such hits as The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Jingle Bells (Cockney remix) and I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly. Brilliant.

Monday I was desperately hungover at work, which wasn't a good start to the week - and in the evening there was another choir rehearsal, which was a bit grumpy-making for various reasons, although it was useful in that it helped me decided that I definitely did a little bit fancy one of the new guys in the choir. Helpfully, around 24 hours later, i.e. late last night, he sent me an email asking if I knew if another girl in the choir was seeing anyone romantically, as he wanted to ask her out but didn't want to face the embarrassment of being knocked back. It was like being back at school. Well, not my school, obviously, as we barely knew what boys were, let alone dreamed that they might one day want to go out for a drink with us. But that high school cliche of the boy nervously approaching the girl, asking if he can ask her something, her looking up all hopeful and ecstatic that he's finally going to ask her to the prom, and then him saying 'Do you think your friend X would come to the prom with me?' and her getting all crestfallen and having to disguise it - well, it's still alive and kicking, aged 31. Still, fortunately he isn't the only iron in the fire, as it were. And now that I know he doesn't like me, I have actually gone off him. Funny how that works, isn't it?

Anyway, before he sent me that email, we had all performed at yet another concert (this is yesterday, so Tuesday), and had more drinks in the pub afterwards, which was once again really really fun. Choir at Christmas is just brilliant, even when boys don't fancy you. Feel very lucky to be part of it all. But now I am running on empty, big time, and there is no sign of a break - I'm out every night for the rest of the week and most of next week, too. Dead a long time, dead a long time, dead a long time. Will try and be back before too long. Hope you're all having a fun packed Advent.