Handle with care

Today's blog is dedicated to my friend Sarah, who recommended I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and to whom I am eternally grateful for the experience. Bloody hell is it one heck of a blinder. I was gripped throughout, heart in throat stuff, even though not much happens in the wasteland, and I finished it on Saturday afternoon while I was at Nicole's, surrounded by countryside so wonderful it was cliched in its perfection, while four year old Alice came up to me every minute or so to ask if I would tickle her and play with the masks. In the end I had to put her in front of a DVD while I turned the final pages; huge, hot, wet tears dropping over my lower eyelid and splashing onto my jumper. What a truly original novel, inspiring, bleak and yet hopeful, forces us to be so grateful for the absurd gifts we have, beautiful, sparse prose style, literally the opposite to anything I could ever write. I absolutely freaking loved it.

My weekend at Nicole's was restoratative, replenishing my sleep supply as well as the size of my thighs. Now I am back in the smoke where I belong, and feeling quite perky having actually managed to get up when my alarm went off this morning. I did half an hour of yoga (my standing forward bend has suffered as a result of non-practice over the past week or so) and am now at my desk, counting down the minutes until I can run out of here like a greyhound out of the traps and head into town for choir practice. I'm feeling extremely perky about the next few weeks, full of beans about 2010 and the only thing that's slightly floored me is an email from Kate showing photographs of the world's most romantic marriage proposal ever, where photo one shows a very pretty girl walking along with her boyfriend on their way to Brixton tube to go to work, and then you see them looking up at the front of the Ritzy cinema, and it says both their names, and then 'The Proposal', and then the next photo she's gobsmacked, then he's down on one knee, and she's crying, and then they're hugging, and then they turn smiling to the photographer, who's the groom's brother, who's been snapping all along from across the road, and they wave, and it just blew me away. I know, I know, relationships aren't all hearts and flowers, but I'm over-emotional, Cormac's made me worried that the end of the world is nigh, and I feel like being kissed by a nice boy who doesn't namecheck Houdini in his list of romantic heroes.