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.