Blurry Backgrounds

Lets Be Having You

2012-01-22T09:30:00.000-08:00

For someone who has never robbed a bank or killed a person, I seem to spend an awful lot of time explaining myself to the police.

Last night, I was on my way to a girlfriend's house because she has recently had a knee operation and so can't walk. More to the point, she can't dance on the tables at nightclubs either, so we decided to spend our Saturday night at home eating pizza and watching a rerun of the Golden Globe awards. My girlfriend lives in the suburbs (everyone has their faults) so I packed an emergency survival kit and headed out of London to see her. I had got no further than two streets from my home, when I saw the oh-so-familiar blue lights flashing behind me. At the time - and I'm not proud of this - I was programming my GPS with my left hand, texting her for the address with my right hand, and steering with my knees.

"Do you know why I've pulled you over?" the policeman asked.

"No", I replied, because innocent until proven guilty.

"I've pulled you over because you've got no lights on" he explained.

"Oh fab!" I shrieked, understandably delighted at having got away with the whole dangerous driving thing, but causing the policeman to surmise I must be drunk.

"What have you been doing for the last hour or so?" he asked me, and I answered as honestly and thoroughly as I could that I'd fed my dog, vacuumed the stairs, re-arranged my cookbooks, had a shower, changed into my pyjamas and left the house.

It didn't take Sherlock Holmes to see I was telling the truth because I was standing there in my pyjamas with wet hair and a dog. But this policeman didn't seem to read those telltale signs and so asked outright if I'd been drinking, which caught me somewhat off guard because who drinks in the shower?

He explained that one of the most common things people do when they're drunk was to forget to turn their lights on. I thought of telling him that the most common thing most people I know do when drunk is have wild sex with work colleagues, but I decided against it.

Eventually, I convinced him that I was stone cold sober and crime-free, other than being a little casually dressed for a Saturday night, and he let me continue my journey.

Hardly more than 12 hours later, I found myself face to face with one of his colleagues in Holland Park this morning. Holland Park is a beautiful space and has many things going for it, including wooded areas, tennis courts, wild peacocks and a Marco Pierre White restaurant. On the downside, they don't allow dogs off lead. Possibly this is to prevent dogs running onto the tennis courts, possibly to prevent them attacking the wild peacocks, possibly to prevent them attacking Marco Pierre White. Who knows. But the point is, your dog has to stay on the lead.

Now, if you consider that I am someone who doesn't comply with the 'No Texting While Driving' rule, how much attention do you think I pay to the 'No Dogs Off Lead' rule?

Precisely.

So, there are me and my dog Dorothy - me happily walking around the park and Dorothy happily running amok chasing the peacocks - when a policeman walks around the corner, closely followed by the chip on his shoulder. He took out his notebook and pencil in a very official manner, seemingly in an effort to make me feel intimidated but actually having no effect on me whatsoever because I've got loads of notebooks and pencils at home and don't find them intimidating in the least.

He proceeded to ask me where I had been that morning. All this interaction with the local constabulary, who's first question always seems to be what I've been doing for the last hour, caused me to consider popping a daily timesheet through the letterbox of the police station every morning, so as to save us all some time. I've had pathologically jealous boyfriends who needed less information on my whereabouts.

However, I answered as thoroughly as possible that I had read the New York Times on my iPad in bed, had a shower, eaten breakfast (tea and a bacon sandwich, ketchup on the side), walked the dog through Hyde Park and was now on my way home. And I was thoughtful enough to speak slowly so as to give him enough time to write it all down on his nice little pad.

Despite me being so helpful, he issued me with a written warning anyway. Although I should point out that I had no I.D. on me at the time so I'd be lying if I said the idea of giving him a false name and address didn't cross my mind.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I wasn't in the wrong to have Dorothy off lead. Clearly I was. I just can't believe that one cocker spaniel loose in the middle of a park is the biggest problem facing London's Metropolitan Police force and the best use of this policeman's time.

Or, for that matter, his notepad.

Happiness is an iNap

2012-01-15T13:49:00.000-08:00

Technology sales people the world over (and I should know, I'm one of them) love to tell you that technology improves productivity. Not to cast dispersion on my own profession but what a crock.

Technology means that we spend our evenings in front of a laptop screen rather than having meaningful conversation with our families (or maybe meaningless conversation - you know your family better than I do). Owning an iPhone means that the first thing we do when we wakeup in the morning is check email rather than make love to our girlfriend (not that I'm bitter but you know who you are and no, I still don't care that it was marked urgent). While 90 trillion emails are sent every year, 89 trillion of them are utter rubbish unless you happen to be on the lookout for a penis extension but why would you need one of those when the only women you ever meet are your opponents on Xbox Live?

And who am I to talk. I just spent 20 minutes typing and sending an email to the person sitting next to me.

Don't get me wrong, technology would have made us more productive if we still communicated only the same amount of information we used to. But we don't. Now, because people can share Youtube videos of their one year old Tommy eating a carrot, they do. And even though everyone except his Grandma thinks Tommy looks like a gremlin, we all waste two minutes of our lives that we will never get back posting a comment about how adorable he is, when lets face it, if we really thought Tommy was that cute, we'd have our own child and stuff it with vegetables.

Because it looks cool (my benchmark of whether or not something is a good idea), I recently converted to using an Apple Mac at work, rather than a Microsoft laptop. Talk about mistakes.

First, none of the standard Microsoft applications such as powerpoint or excel work as well on a mac and the excel files I did receive from colleagues were populated with blank fields where there should have been numbers. This turned my sales forecasts into a game of Bluff. (By the way, it was 6 weeks before anyone realised I was making the numbers up - further proof that while we may think we're being productive all day, we're kidding ourselves). Secondly, nothing says "Bill Gates for President" like a week of heavy emailing with any application other than Microsoft Outlook. And finally, good luck installing an office printer on an Apple Mac. Do you know which print driver the HP LaserJet Enterprise M4555fskm uses? No, neither do I.

For this reason, I am possibly the last person in London to get an iPad. Constantly being told that life without an iPad was so 2009, it became clear I needed to get one (remember 2009? That was the year Air France flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean killing 228 passengers on board, Israel invaded the Gaza strip and started a war that resulted in 1400 deaths, and Apple ran out of the iPhone3, forcing millions of mobile phone users to survive with only 16Gb of mobile data storage. Just an all-round dreadful year).

As it happened, thanks to a wonderful Santa, I received the surprise gift of an iPad on Christmas morning. While I didn't care whether my iPad was 3G or Wireless, or whether it had 16Gb or 64Gb of memory, I will admit that Christmas Day would have been a miserable write-off for everyone in our house had my iPad not been white with a pink cover.

Thankfully, Santa had read my mind this year, meaning that everyone could happily enjoy the true meaning of Christmas without any tantrums from me. Not all households were that lucky. My Mother, for instance, telephoned in a terrible mood, because she had been given a Nintendo which she didn't want. Last year she had received a KitchenAid ice cream maker which she also didn't see a use for, so she was furious with her boyfriend for ruining her Christmas by giving her "duff presents two years running". Oh yes, It's the thought that counts in our family.

Anyway, as I said, I was given an iPad. I fell in love with it immediately and fast became one of the "I don't know how I ever lived without it" set. And so began my metamorphosis from a person fully engaged in the life, environment and people around her (except when I am at work obviously) to someone who can think and talk of nothing but Apps.

With there being 140,000 iPad apps available, and me having a pathological fear of missing out on something, it was just a matter of time before I became an addict. There hasn't been a day in January that I haven't bought a new app. I have apps that tell me the latest golf scores, the weather in Beijing and the local time in Portugal. No matter that I hate golf, or that I have no plans to travel to China or Portugal, on the basis that I have previously been to both places and the only positive thing I could find to say in either country was that at least I wasn't in New Zealand.

I also have an app called Dropbox, which enables me to store the book I still haven't started writing yet (by any other definition, a blank document) in my 'dropbox' so that I can easily continue to not write my book on my laptop.

I can now read the newspaper in the coffee shop, except I don't drink coffee. I can zone out the other passengers on a London bus by watching Downton Abbey online, although the only way I would ever get on a London bus is if I was hit by one first. And I can get instant access to extra recipes in the online Donna Hay cooking magazine even though I use my kitchen so rarely I asked my landlord if I could convert it into an extra cupboard (Which was a silly idea. My kitchen is nowhere near big enough to be a cupboard).

Consider the iNap app - which allows you to sleep at work without your colleagues noticing by making "work sounds" like a tapping keyboard, paper shuffling and mouse clicks. I haven't spent the 99c on that one yet, but i can see how it would have it's uses. Think about it - organisations spend on average $15,035 on technology per employee, and the employee uses that technology to play an app that means they can snooze all day at the office. Still believe technology improves productivity?

On the other hand, I can now view the YouTube videos of little Tommy eating his carrots anytime I like.

Marvellous.

How to Be

2011-09-08T13:24:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but no matter where I am, I always want to be somewhere else. Many people have experienced this feeling, most typically when they are at work, but for me it is an affliction that can strike anywhere. I could be sipping champagne in St Barts with Russell Crowe, and there I would be, suntanned and tipsy, wondering what Hugh Jackman was up to.

If I am at home reading a book, I wish I was in a cafe writing a book. When I am in a cafe writing a book, I wish I was in Provence writing a book. And now that I am in Provence writing a book, I wish I was in Las Vegas playing low-limits poker and knocking back rum and coke with my $20 buffet breakfast.

No-one understands better than I, the Freudian explanation as to why I am haunted with an inability to simply 'be', rather than to 'be somewhere', but this understanding has done little to lesson the problem and so there you have it. Or more to the point, there I have it, 'it' being a life sentence of discontent.

Take this week for instance. No, really. Take it.

Here I am, in a lovely farmhouse, with a heated pool, overlooking the hills of the Luberon Valley, with the most gorgeous cocker-spaniel that ever lived as my companion, and all I can do is wonder what everyone is getting up to an hour down the road in St Tropez. It's all I can do not to jump in the car and go and find out.

I came here alone to write. I thought that the only thing standing between me and becoming the next Agatha Christie was a week of peace and quiet. Instead, I've learned an invaluable lesson. In fact, I've learned a couple. And one of them is that if you want to write, you have to have something to write about.

Here in the French countryside, I am struggling to find anything noteworthy. Or perhaps I am just struggling to find anything funny. I get up every morning, I buy a croissant, I eat the croissant, I lie by the pool all afternoon, I have a glass of the local Chateauneuf-du-pape, and then I go to bed with a book. (The book is not to read, you understand, but to swat things with. The bugs here are amongst the biggest I have ever seen and that includes my stint living in Australia which has the scariest creatures anywhere on earth, and I don't just mean the men. Last night I killed two bugs in one go by swatting a moth, which was being carried across the floor by something resembling a tiger prawn. That's how big the bugs are in this place).

The only activity in my week thus far has been a trip to the vets today, to book a Friday afternoon appointment for Dorothy's tick and tapeworm treatment, which is a requirement for re-entry back into the UK 48 hours before we travel. The receptionist at the Veterinary clinic spoke not one word of English, and whilst my french enabled me to secure an appointment for 5:15pm tomorrow, I needed to rely on charades to explain what the appointment was for. I don't know if you've ever tried miming "Tick and Tapeworm Treatment" but let me tell you, it's very difficult to do while still maintaining an air of sophistication.

I have come to the conclusion that, despite convincingly proclaiming the exact opposite in every job interview I have ever had, I'm not a self-starter. Unless someone is telling me to do something, I just can't see the point of doing it. So vacations alone lead me to mope around all day, unable to simply 'be', but likewise having no idea what to 'do'.

A friend of mine, Tony, is a wonderful, arty, creative type who makes new friends more easily and more often than I make tea. At this very moment he is on vacation himself in India, no doubt stumbling on a previously-undiscovered Punjab tribe, wow'ing the locals with his Flip camera, and getting them all to pose for his next award-winning photography book. His advice to me is that what I lack on these trips alone is a project. Something not only to keep me busy (my cocker-spaniel has that covered) but also to give me a purpose for being here.

I'm sure he's right. He does yoga, after all, and don't all people who do yoga know a thing or two about life that will forever elude those of us who forgo Sunday morning Ashtanga for a bacon sandwich in bed? (Or is it the other way around?)

But right now, what I really feel I need is not a project. What I would really love at this very moment in time, despite being forty years of age, is my Mom.

Each year, my Mom and I used to take an annual vacation together. Nowhere too exotic, unless you think Puerto Banus is exotic, which actually we did. Just somewhere in Europe like Spain or Mallorca or Sardinia. The main criteria for the destination was that it had to be fun and it had to be sunny, our measures of a successful holiday being 'number of nights we got home after 5am' and 'strength of suntan gained'. There were two inventions of the 20th century that were of no consequence to us, one was Ovaltine and the other was SPF.

Every single day of every single one of those holidays followed the same routine. Each morning my mom would make us get up and go somewhere, usually a shop but if we ran out of shops then an ancient ruin, before we were 'allowed' to spend the rest of the day relaxing. I would resent not being left to lie around the pool all morning but she would insist that I would enjoy my afternoon rest much more if we busied ourself with some activity first. We would then return to the pool just in time to get the best suntanning hours between 11am and 3pm (the ones all dermatologists tell you to avoid) and while I went for a swim, my Mom would make lunch. Every day she would ask me what I wanted on my sandwich and every day I would say Ham and Cheese and every day she would give me Tuna and Cucumber.

And now here I am on vacation alone, eating a ham and cheese sandwich and free to do nothing all morning, hell, all day if I like, and all I can think is how I wish my mom was here to drag me to see some old village tomorrow morning, then come home and make me a tuna baguette.

So, having thrown more money at this little experiment in self-discovery than Marie Curie spent discovering penicillin, I've basically learned that a) there are more important things in life than sandwich filling; b) never again should I live in the middle of a major metropolitan city wishing I lived in a log cabin in Alaska, and c) neither will I sit in a busy office kidding myself that it's a lack of peace and tranquillity that is preventing me from becoming number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

In the meantime I will spend one last day twiddling my thumbs in the middle of nowhere before I leave the french countryside to drive to Paris on Saturday.

And no doubt, as I move through the hustle and bustle of the city on Saturday night, fighting with four million other people for a seat in Cafe de Flore and paying ten euros an hour for a parking space, I'll wish I was back here.

Peace in the Valley

2011-09-04T13:53:00.003-07:00

Having dreamed of going away somewhere peaceful and relaxing, to start writing my crime novel, I settled on Provence. It seemed idyllic. I saw pictures of lavender fields and olive groves and flea markets, and I thought "what's not to love?", completely forgetting that I don't actually like lavender, olives or fleas.

I found a house with a heated pool, a view of the Luberon hills and a grand piano (which I can't play but it will look good on the photos). Even though the rental cost is more than the house I rent in Notting Hill, which I would never have believed possible, I sent off a cheque for one week, because not content with merely dreaming up a crazy plan, I then like to throw money at it and make it happen.

I left England via the Eurotunnel and drove for 12 hours from one end of France to the other, subsisting on nothing but ham sandwiches and Jelly Babies until finally, I arrived at my new home for the week. Exhausted, I forced myself to stay awake just long enough to heat a bowl of "soupe de legumes", take a long hot shower and curl up in bed with my dog for a good night's sleep. And only then did I find out about the bats.

The master bedroom would indeed have a view of the Luberon hills if they cut down the tree directly in front of the window, but then where would the family of bats live? If the fear of bats ripping my eyes out hadn't kept me awake all night (and it did), the flapping of their wings would have. My Mother, in an effort to be helpful, reminded me that bats are blind but how does that help? So they can't see me when they tear my eyes out. And?

Fortunately, my bedroom is swarming with bugs as big as saucepans, so if a bat did come indoors, the competition for airspace would probably cause it to fly straight out again.

At 6am, I gave up on getting any sleep and headed out to Isle Sur La Sorgue, the famous Provencal flea market, where I had read that french antiques can be found at bargain prices. You may think that 680 euros for a brass lamp is a bargain but I struggled to see it as such and I treated myself to a chocolate croissant for 80 cents instead. Anything with chocolate in the middle for under one euro is a bargain in my book.

It started to pour with rain (lucky I spent all that extra money renting a place with a pool, eh?) so headed home to make breakfast and watch a DVD of "Murder, She Wrote" for research purposes. The fact that I could have saved myself a small fortune and watched DVDs in the rain back in London was not lost on me.

After a deep sleep ("Murder She Wrote" has that effect) the dog needed something to distract her from eating the 18th century sofa so - still in torrential rain - I walked her to the nearby village of Menerbes. The house owners had advised, in their advertisement, that Menerbes is a mere 2km walk away. They had neglected to mention it was 2km up a steep hill.

The sun came out so I headed back to the house and pool, but got lost. Luckily, my dog is a cocker spaniel, a breed that has an incredible sense of smell that enables them to track their way home, so I let her lead the way. When one hour later I saw a sign that said "Welcome to Oppede" , a village 3km in the opposite direction, I reminded myself that this is no ordinary cocker-spaniel.

Miraculously, but no thanks to my dog who would be half way to Switzerland by now if she was still navigating, we made it home while the sun was still shining.

Being British, I like nothing more than getting topless and lying on a sun lounger. And so there I was, topless and lying on a sun lounger, when my next door neighbour chose his moment to come on over and introduce himself. Wearing nothing but bikini bottoms, I racked my brains back to my french lessons at school but struggled to recollect the past participle and so, try as I might, I couldn't remember the French for "My boobs used to be a lot firmer than this". With my broken french and his broken English, I learned that he is a film director and has a problem with the heating system of his pool. Either that, or he watches a lot of films and cleans pools for a living. He would have to clean a heck of a lot of pools though - his house is directly next to this one and it would take ten minutes at a brisk pace to jog to his front door. He also told me that he is here to be alone because his Mother died last month at the age of 60, which is odd because he looks 55 if he's a day.

After making a supper of beef stew and plum crumble, all the while bewildered why I was cooking on vacation when I never so much as boil noodles back home, I lit the candles on the terrace and sat down with a glass of wine to write. Peace at last. A full five seconds elapsed before I heard a rustling in the woods and my cocker spaniel - ever the loyal guard dog - ran inside the house and hid, leaving me to fend for myself. Figuring that the noise lurking in the bushes was either wild dogs or the French Film Director, I prayed for wild dogs, ran inside and locked all doors and windows.

I now lie here in bed and I can hear a banging sound every few minutes. Bearing in mind that I am alone in a 5-bedroom house in the middle of several acres of woods, what can the sound possibly be other than a mass murderer?

I have realised that going somewhere peaceful doesn't necessarily bring you peace. But come hell or high water, the book starts tomorrow.

Ignorance is Bliss

2011-08-28T14:13:00.001-07:00

In addition to not having a television, I do not read newspapers. This is why I couldn't pick out Lady Gaga in a lineup.

I realise I should read a daily newspaper. For starters,  I would perform better at work as it would keep me up to speed on the financial issues affecting my clients and my industry (snore). Moreover, a better understanding of current affairs would enable me to make light conversation at cocktail parties, rather than relying on tequila body shots and a limited repartee of blond jokes to pass the evening.

But the thing is, I can't be bothered.

Besides, at any given point in time, one can actually guess the news:- Someone in the Middle East will be fighting with someone else in the Middle East; Somewhere in the world is experiencing the worst droughts in history; Somewhere in the world is experiencing the worst floods in history; America is in even more debt than they were last week; the French aren't getting involved; and the English Prime Minister is cutting short his vacation in order to deal with it all.

(Sidenote: As the English Prime Minister has had 4 vacations this summer, perhaps someone should point out to him that if he really fancies a refreshing change of scene, he could always try popping into Number 10).

Occasionally though, I get caught out.

Friday evening, I returned home from a 3-day business trip to find that, in my absence, my bath had begun leaking through the kitchen ceiling below and my kitchen floor was a swamp. So far, so normal. Living in a Victorian Notting Hill townhouse, leaking pipes are as normal a part of daily life as mice and Prada-clad neighbours. When I first moved into the house, I didn't realise this. A dripping ceiling would have me in a flap, calling in an emergency 24-hour plumber and locating the stopcock to switch off the water supply. But these days, I'm so used to the sound and sight of dripping water that the combi-boiler could explode and I would barely bat an eyelid.

So, anyway, I called my landlady, who had left London for a weekend shooting clay pigeons and drinking martinis at her country manor, to tell her that we had a leak.

"Oh dear", she responded  "another one?"

I assured here that I had put a bucket under it so not to worry, we'll deal with it in October because there is no sense ruining the last of our summer with it. She was audibly relieved and agreed this was "A marvellous idea" and we moved onto more pressing matters. (More pressing, that is, than the fact that - judging by the regularity and strength of the dripping - my bathroom and kitchen were about to become one room).

"I'm absolutely having kittens about all this trouble in New York", she said, and of course, I had not got one clue what trouble in New York she was referring to, but by the concern in her voice I was getting the distinct impression that I should. I bought myself time with a sympathetic "Mmmmm" and she went on to explain that her daughter was scheduled to fly out of Manhattan to London for business, and she was frightfully worried. Now, because two of my best girlfriends live in Manhattan, I was also frightfully worried and I didn't even know why.

You see, this is why I don't read newspapers. Now I was imagining terrorism, plane crashes, rioting and civil war whereas 5 minutes previously, my biggest concern had been locating a mop.

I went online and checked SKY NEWS and the problem, of course, turned out to be Hurricane Irene.

For 48 hours, I have been held in the grip of newsmen everywhere because nothing makes a newscaster's day like a good natural disaster. I have not slept properly, read a book, walked my dog or left the house. For two days, I have alternated between SKY news, BBC news and CNN, searching for the best online coverage of subway closures, power cuts and scenes from the "battered Bahamas".  I focussed my attention on nothing but Hurricane Irene as it "roared up the East Coast" towards my two friends with whom I have been in constant email contact. We decided whether they should evacuate the city and debated the best way to safely store their Manolo Blahniks out of water's way (remember, I have become an expert at this - see above).

Even as late as 8:30am EST today, we sat waiting on the edge of our seats as the storm surge was expected to hit Lower Manhattan within the hour. Carnage was expected. New Yorkers had stockpiled food and water. "The edge of the hurricane is finally upon us" advised mayor Michael Bloomberg.

And then..... nothing.

Turns out, it was just a tropical storm. By 9am EST, people were out buying their New York Times and enjoying Sunday brunch. By 10am, sunshine was peering through the clouds. By 11am, my girlfriend was at her yoga class.

Please don't misunderstand me - I am obviously very, very happy that the Hurricane did not strike this wonderful city and it's people. And I recognise that even as I write this, 15 people from the East Coast have been killed by Hurricane Irene, that damage to New Jersey and NYC boroughs like Brooklyn and Queens has occurred and that acres of real estate have been flooded. I empathise that the last thing the people of NYC deserved was another crisis and that the last thing the US economy needed was four days of economic shutdown. I am immensely relieved for NYC and it's people that this natural disaster was averted.

My point is this - I have read the newspapers and watched online news for two whole days and where did it get me?  If I had not known about the hurricane, I would have had two wonderful days happily watching back to back episodes of "Murder, She Wrote" and throwing a frisbie for my dog. I would have sat down to read my new James Thurber short-story collection and dozed off on the second page. I would have baked myself a rhubarb crumble and had a mani-pedi. And what would I have missed out on? Nothing.

I could spend my life reading The Times and worrying about what's happening in places I have never been to people I have never met. Even if what journalists report wasn't exaggerated with an air of impending doom in order to keep us from switching to a different news channel, what can we actually do about it, other than worry? Statistics show that 40 percent of what people worry about never happens, 30 percent has already happened and can't be changed, and 22 percent is beyond our control. In other words, whats the point of worrying? And if we're not going to worry about it, whats the point of missing "Murder, She Wrote"?

The next time someone tells me they are stressed and anxious about a world news item, I am simply going to remind them that "stressed" is "desserts" spelled backwards. That can't be a coincidence.

2011-08-21T11:54:00.000-07:00

I've always been plagued with the vague notion that everyone else is having more fun than I am. Then, one day, university student Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook and proved it.

I was frantic. Thanks to Facebook, it had become clear everyone else has 180 friends (I have six), people are at parties till 3am (most nights, you can find me on my sofa reading the collected poems of Edna Vincent Millay) and seemingly everyone I have ever known is happily married with two beautiful, well-behaved children (I am single and have one cocker spaniel, who's hobbies include digging a whole in the hallway carpet and eating my Manolo Blahniks).

According to Facebook, everyone was richer/happier/thinner and having more parties/holidays/sex than I was. Even people with children, which can't be true, can it?

No, it can't. The more I used Facebook, the more I began to see that the opposite is true. Judging by the frequency and content of their posts, people weren't having fun, they just wanted to pretend they were. Or, giving them the benefit of the doubt, their benchmark for 'interesting and noteworthy' is much, much lower than mine.

Three Tuesdays ago, for instance, I arrived home and found Ronny Wood of The Rolling Stones, sitting outside my house playing with Dorothy, my cocker-spaniel (she was taking a break from my Manolo's and chewing the buttons off Ronny's cardigan). I said Hi to Ronny and thought nothing more of it, other than to bath Dorothy to wash off the smell of his unfiltered cigarettes. I certainly didn't post about it on Facebook.

In comparison, here are some of the things my facebook 'friends' have shared on their 'wall' in the past seven days:-

Angie went for a shower before her evening shift
Helen ate a sausage sandwich, with ketchup!
Peter has passed his Kayak Level 1 course
Maria's pet budgie lost 8 feathers

Are you bored yet?

They can't actually think these things are interesting. Oh God, do you suppose they think these things are interesting??

I started to question the quality of my friends. One girlfriend of mine - she is a successful and highly-paid Director of a multi-billion dollar company, so presumably not a complete imbecile - was at a restaurant and posted a photograph of her husband's meal on Facebook. Rather than share in the delight at his 16 ounce sirloin steak, my first thought was "For the love of God woman, get yourself a hobby".

I could only think that people need to post these things because their daily routine is so boring and this is a way of bringing it to life. Why else would a person eat a cheese and pickle sandwich and then feel the need to tell 278 of their closest friends about it?

Because in the same way as people who tell you about all the great sex they're having, aren't really having any, people who want to show you what a fabulous life they're leading, aren't really leading one. If they were, they would have neither the time nor the inclination to post a minute-by-minute account of it on the internet.

But for people who are not leading lives that incite the envy of others, Facebook presents a wonderful opportunity to draw the admiration of those around them, simply by being selective about what to share. This is why no-one ever posts a picture of themself on a "fat day" even though we all have them. It's why there are no youtube videos of frazzled mothers failing to calm their toddler throwing a wobbly in the supermarket, even though every toddler throws a wobbly in a supermarket.

Do the maths - if Facebook is an accurate representation of life, then how is it no-one ever posts details of the extra-marital affair they are having, even though 76 percent of married people are, at one time or another, having one?

I no longer fall prey to these tactics, and instead feel only pity when someone posts that they have just landed safely in Malaga. (Actually, to be fair, I have always felt pity for anyone who finds themself in Malaga). And I merely roll my eyes at the people who share their achievements online. "Just ran a half-marathon!! " posts James on a Sunday morning, as I lie in bed reading novels and eating jam donuts.

Rather than feel I am missing out on something, Facebook has given me a new sense of contentment with my own life. I have realised that for every evening these people are out until 3am, there are twenty other evenings they are home watching Eastenders. And while I may have only six friends, they are six real friends who I truly love (and none of them would be daft enough to run 12 miles on a Sunday morning, even if George Clooney was giving out free cupcakes at the finish line).

You may ask why I am even on Facebook in that case. And I would tell you that when someone comes up with a better, faster way to stalk an ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend, I'll be dropping FB like a sack of spuds but until then I'm stuck with it.

I'll be honest. I don't post pictures of myself on a fat day either. My facebook entry includes a profile photograph of me sailing a yacht in the Caribbean seemingly having a wonderful time, when in truth, the week on that yacht was the closest thing to hell I have come yet (and remember, I once spent a week on The Algarve). There were times on that sailing holiday when I wanted to get off the boat so badly, I seriously considered putting on my life jacket and swimming to Florida. But you wouldn't know that from my facebook page.

I don't share my true self online because I have to protect my online brand. Facebook is a world without walls. If you're not careful, it's a place where your Managing Director from the office gets to meet your best friend who's a lap-dancer and your ex-boyfriend who has "Thunder" tattoo'd across his chest (because that's his name).

So, one has to assume nothing is private and accept friend invites only from people who will give a good impression. Recently, I refused a friend request on this basis and was rebuked when we next met in person. "I'm sorry", I explained, "I had to ignore your request. That's my online presence and I can't be friends with just any old body".

"But I'm your Mother!", she cried.

The Four Stages of Loss

2011-08-01T13:54:00.000-07:00

I'll get straight to the point - My last boyfriend cheated on me. This surprised no-one, least of all me. He had cheated on every woman he has even been in a relationship with including his wife, who he then abandoned with their 6-month-old baby to care for. Which is never a good sign.

You may be bewildered to hear, having read that previous paragraph, that I have been advised by numerous people that the reason I am still single is because I am "too picky".

In my case, he cheated on me with a 50-year old from Hemel Hempstead which - aside from the whole infidelity issue - renders him un-dateable on account of him being willing to spend that much time in the suburbs.

Joan Rivers once said "Whenever my husband is late home, and I know he is either lying dead in the gutter or is with another woman, I always hope he's dead". She is really on to something. Because the night my boyfriend was sitting sipping cocktails with this woman (to be fair, she was probably drinking a mug of Ovaltine) I really do wish he'd been standing in the middle of the M1 getting hit by a freakishly fast Juggernaut.

At times like these, it's important to be thankful for small mercies. I'm thankful that we weren't living together so the break-up didn't involve a division of our belongings. I got to keep everything that is mine (a savings account, a home full of designer furniture and a Porsche Boxster) and he got to keep everything that he owned (2 tents, 3 snowboards and a toaster. And not even a Dualit toaster. Just a regular Morphy Richards one).

But even so, I prepared myself for the four stages of grief:-

Denial

This is a phase that changes in nature depending on the era. In previous years, it was categorised by such activities as:-

driving by your ex-boyfriend's house in the middle of the night, for no particular reason.
asking friends he hasn't met - and therefore won't recognise - to follow him to his new girlfriend's house to learn her address. Again, for no particular reason.
going through his rubbish bins to gather receipts and credit card statements, thus enabling you to piece together his movements since you broke up, including where he has taken her for dinner, what movie theatres they are frequenting and how many Mars Bars he bought at the petrol station.

Nowadays, all of this psychotic stalking (and more…. so very, very much more) can be done from the comfort of your own sofa, simply by logging onto Facebook. It's a fair bet that the new girlfriend will be receiving congratulations from her "friends" on changing her status from 'Single' to 'In a Relationship' and that she will be plastering her 'wall' with pictures of her new beau (who is technically speaking, your old one, although, in my case, the term "beau" is a bit of a stretch).

After one particularly productive evening on Facebook, I learned that the woman he cheated on me with was called "Pam", was an awful photographer and had big gums. I also learned that she owned a horse named Penny who was originally suspected to have a knee problem that would prevent her from competing but was given the all-clear by the vets, causing Pam to comment on her wall "Yippeeeee……!!!!!!".

It's my personal belief that any 50-year-old who still uses the word "Yippee" in a sentence should be approached with caution, but her friends were once again full of congrats. (Wow, this woman really was having a great month, wasn't she?).

Anyway, my ex commented on the picture of Penny "She's sooooo beautiful…. I can't wait to see her…. xxxxxxxx", which, once the dry-heaving wore off, gave me an overwhelming sense of elation. Because he can't stand horses.

He was lying to Pam already.

Anger

Of all the four phases, this one was the most enjoyable.

Disbelief that he cheated on me with someone not only in her 50's, but in Hertfordshire of all places, quickly turned into fury when I realised that he had taken the Apple TV with him! With my Columbo Series 1, 2 and 3 on it!! If he wanted to go, fine, (I never really saw him all that much anyway), but who in their right mind gets caught out for cheating and stops to pick up some electronic gadgets as they sprint out of the door?

Then again... who in their right mind buys a Morphy Richards toaster? The signs were there all along, weren't they?

It is during this period, you will learn who your true soulmates are. My good friends came over, told me that I could do better, said that they never liked him and pointed out that neither, in actual fact, did I. When they finally understood the true nature of my distress, after I explained "But you don't understand! It was Series 1, 2, AND 3!!", they kindly clubbed together and bought me the DVD boxset.

My soulmate, however (and she knows who she is) was the one who spent the evening helping me to hack into my ex's Match.com account. Knowing that his type is skinny blondes, we sent flirtatious messages from his account to every obese brunette we could find and replaced the descriptor "Honest" in his Dating Profile with "Would say black was white if it would get me laid".

I'm not making this up, by the way. If you ever need another reason not to internet date, remind yourself that this guy actually described himself as "honest" and "responsible" in his profile.

Take Note: If you are a man reading this, it is during this phase that you will take up long-distance cycling and triathlons. In one sense, this is as healthy for you emotionally as it is physically. After all, you will be spending time with the only other demographic that is as sexually-frustrated as you are, namely groups of 40-year-old married men, mostly corporate executives, who have been married for twelve years and haven't had sex for the past six. (For some reason, they think that getting fit and lean enough to cycle 90 miles will make their wives attracted to them again. It won't). However, you would do well to consider that if winning the Tour de France seven times didn't make Lance Armstrong a well-adjusted emotionally-healthy middle-aged man, how much do you realistically think a Saturday morning ride around The Chilterns is going to do for you?

The highlight of the Anger phase for me was the day I cleared out my laundry room and discovered that my ex had accidentally left behind two jackets. One was a beautiful crushed-suede Armani blazer which I gave to the homeless man at the end of my street who sells The Big Issue. I'm all heart.

The second was a casual jacket that I gave to charity, but not before checking the pockets. In it, was a leftover £10 note. I took the £10 and bought an extra-large rawhide chew for my dog and an Iced Custard Slice from the French patisserie for me.

It was the most delicious Custard slice I have ever tasted.

Depression

This phase can vary in length depending on how good your parents were, how good your therapist was, and how many REM albums you own.

I accepted that I was in for 6 to 12 months of various states of distress, ranging from 'a bit cheesed off' to 'clinically depressed'. So, I decided to embrace it. I bought myself a new duvet and comforter, loaded a selection of murder-mysteries onto iTunes and stocked up the fridge with milk chocolate truffles. I cancelled all social plans, put on some baggy clothes and hunkered down to spend the next few months staying home, feeling down and watching back to back Sandra Bullock movies.

That was on the Sunday. By Wednesday, I was bored to death. Happy as a clam, you understand, but bored to death.

I really did give it my best shot to be miserable but none of the symptoms of depression appeared. I just couldn't seem to see a downside to him having gone from my life. Never again, for example, would I have to explain why hanging a surfboard on the living room wall is not appropriate decor for anyone over the age of 19. I realised I would no longer have to fly economy (he had always refused to spend the extra money to fly in Upper Class because he argued, "after the flight was over you have nothing material to show for it" although he never seemed to mind spending £500 a month on drinking beer). Then when it dawned on me that I had sat through my last ever episode of 'Deadliest Catch' I finally wept. With delight.

(What is it with men and 'Deadliest Catch'? It's a series about a bunch of fishermen. They go out on a boat. They catch a load of fish. They stink. THE END").

Admittedly, I was plagued by a lack of sleep. But I remedied this when, after 2 nights of insomnia, I decided that enough was quite enough and bought a copy of The Financial Times, which never fails to make me nod off. I don't even have to read it, just having a copy in my handbag makes me feel tired and listless.

Realising that baggy clothes have never made anyone feel, or look, better, I threw them out, polished off the chocolate truffles and moved on with my life.

Acceptance

Some months after all this occurred, I was having dinner with some friends in a restaurant called Asia de Cuba. By then, things had quietened down. My ex was still with Pam, Penny's knee was healing nicely, and I was happy in my new life watching Columbo and flying first class (sometimes I was even doing both at the same time. You only live once).

"Oh my God" said one of my dinner companions, Elizabeth. "A woman on the table behind you has just shrieked, jumped on her boyfriend's lap and is all over him".

My friend Julie and I turned to look.

It was my ex-boyfriend. And the blonde sitting on his lap wasn't Pam.

To summarise, he was cheating on the woman he had cheated on me with. You're probably thinking I was ecstatic, euphoric and overcome with the desire to take a photo of them both to send to Pam via Facebook. Lets see if she posts that one on her wall, right? No more "Yippee........!!!!!!!!" for Pam.

But no. All I felt was sad. Sad for him. Sad for Pam. Sad for all of us. (Not sad for Penny because like I said, her knee was doing great).

He seemed genuinely pleased to see me and came over as he later left the restaurant. Despite his date's attempts to pull him away, he was obviously keen to chat for a while, although I wasn't very talkative because by then my Black Cod had arrived and when you've paid £34 for a fillet of fish, you want to make the most of every bite.

As he asked how I was and how my puppy was, there was no malice in his eyes, only fondness. In truth, he looked completely and utterly lost. And it occurred to me that he always had.

My ex-boyfriend lives a high-octane life. Constantly hopping from one city to the next and never staying in one place long enough to develop any lasting relationships or friendships. Moving from one woman to another - too afraid to be alone, but equally afraid to let anyone get too close. He risks his life in extreme sports, lives on the edge financially and surrounds himself with acquaintances who love the man he pretends to be, rather than standing still with someone who accepts the man he is.

Some may think he runs at life, but the truth is he runs from it.

Seeing the loneliness in his eyes, a strange thing happened. I was able to see past Deadliest Catch and Economy travel and instead remembered that during the time we were together, he had supported me through one of the most difficult periods of my life. I thought back to one evening in particular, when he had driven to my house just to walk me to the end of my street to get a slice of pizza because I felt unable to walk 500 yards by myself. (No, not even for pizza. That's how bad it was).

Dating him had been like dating a hurricane, and holding on for as long as I could had used up all my energy. But while he will live out his life that way, I was now free to partake in the simpler things in life, things that were too "normal" for him to enjoy but were enough to make me happy. Things like baking rhubarb crumble, or swimming in the ocean, or reading books. Or buying a new Porsche 911 Carrera.

Now free of all my anger, I wish him, wherever he is - probably Ibiza - only that he can be happy. I wish that he can live the life he would have lived if only his parents hadn't messed it up before he even had a chance to get started. I wish that one day he will shed the need to climb a mountain just to feel alive, and will instead experience the joy that I feel from simply sharing a bag of cheese doodles with my dog.

Alas, I can not say the same for Pam. I'm only human and I am not yet ready to wish her anything other than hemorrhoids, especially when I think of her sitting curled up in his tent watching my Apple TV.

But then on the other hand, bless her, I sure hope she likes toast.

The Longest 10 Hours of Their Life

2011-07-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

Our national airline, BA - which many people think stands for British Airways but actually stands for Bloody Awful - have gone and made a right royal cock-up. Prince William and Kate Middleton took a first class BA flight home from their first tour as a royal couple, returning from LA to London, but before the flight even took off, the in-flight entertainment system malfunctioned leaving them unable to watch a movie during the 10-hour journey.

The technical difficulty only affected First and Business class passengers. Can you imagine it? The people in economy who just bought their ticket for £250 from lastminute.com, are happily curled up in their Adidas tracksuits trying to decide whether to watch Harry Potter or Jackass 3D. And there you are, sitting in First Class, having shelled out £3600 for your seat, with nothing to do for 10 hours except talk to your husband.   Its enough to make you ask for a parachute, isn't it?

Fortunately, Will & Kate have been married for only 11 weeks so probably aren't yet at the stage where having a conversation with eachother seems about as appealing as sucking your own eyeballs. But thank God it wasn't the Queen and Prince Philip who, despite having been married since 1947, reputedly haven't spent ten hours alone together in total. Which is one reason their marriage has lasted so long.

I recently went to a wedding in Mallorca. I was the 'date' of my girlfriend Julie, and the wedding was of two of her friends from New York. We were the only single people there (except for one slutty blonde and one single guy Kenny, and oh boy is that a story for another time) and nothing makes me want to be rich and married less than hanging out with rich and married people.

Julie, on the other hand, is yearning to walk down the aisle, and looked enviously at the other couples attending the wedding. By the fifth day, I pointed out to her that although we had sat at breakfast with the couple she was envying the most - attractive, early 40's, two cute children - we hadn't yet actually seen them speak to eachother. They seemed to have their routine - she would read the newspaper and he would jiggle the baby, then he would read the newspaper and she would feed, burp and change the baby - but we had yet to see them exchange a sentence. If this was marriage, I couldn't see what was so great about it for anyone other than the baby.

Not that being single necessarily leads to more conversation though. The slutty blonde and Kenny weren't speaking by day 5 either.

Maybe men and women just aren't meant to speak. I mean, really, men and women have been talking to eachother for years, and what good has ever come of it? When women talk about whatever is troubling us, do men really understand? And when men talk about whatever is troubling them, do we really give a rats ass?

Which is why having to spend 10 hours on a plane together without 13 tv channels to distract us would be awful.

Bloody Awful, in fact.

Footnote: As an apology, BA have offered all first class passengers a £200 voucher towards future flights, which surely had any savvy customers asking if they are redeemable against future Virgin Atlantic flights?

2011-07-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

"The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one"

Oscar Wilde

For some time now, I have been wanting to write a funny and entertaining piece about corporate life. I have been struggling, however, to get past the first paragraph on account of being unable to think of anything that is funny or entertaining about corporate life.

Career advice from experts (ie, Oprah) advises us to follow our passion. "Do what you love", the saying goes, "and the money will come". But while I can see how that would work if you happen to be born with a love of gun-running, I have never found anyone who wants to pay me for doing what I love most, which is eating iced buns and watching Columbo.

I guess you could say that would make me a perfect fit for a job in the world of made-for-tv murder mysteries, and that I should be living in LA right now working on the next series of CSI. But when you grow up on a council estate in Wolverhampton, no-one positions "Film Producer" as a viable job prospect. In fact, they don't mention any job that would give you a chance of elevating yourself to middle class. I was 24 years old before I even knew there was such a thing as an investment banker (which although too late to become one was just in time to date one, so all was not lost).

No - being paid to do what we love was never something our schoolteachers positioned to us working class kids. Doing what puts food on the table was the aim. And this is how - instead of becoming a scriptwriter - I came to work in the dynamic and exciting world of I.T.

Fortunately, while I am not particularly ambitious or career-driven, I do a very good impression of someone who is ambitious and career-driven, and I have found this to be a fairly effective way of climbing the ladder. So I swan around the office all day in my sharply-tailored Armani suit while typing ferociously into my blackberry and looking concerned about the latest Gartner report and so far no-one has figured out that the only reason I am even in the office is to use the colour printer.

In truth, I am very, very lucky to have the job I have. I work for an excellent multi-billion-dollar company; I have a team of smart, nice people who inspire me every day with their intelligence and ingenuity; I get to do interesting projects and make decisions that make a difference. And best of all, there is a lovely man in the car park who washes our cars while we are in meetings (I'm not kidding. If I ever lose my job, my first life-rebuilding task will be to update my CV and the second will be to buy my own bucket and sponge).

So yes, I have a great deal to be grateful for, and I am. I'm just saying that I.T. isn't very glamorous.

But it was once.

Back in the late 90s, I was lucky enough to be selling telecommunications equipment during the dotcom bubble. One minute we were a bunch of bored people in cheap suits selling fax machines, then someone invented the internet and suddenly we were professional jetsetters (see note 1) . Between 1997 and 2000, the only person earning more money and having more fun at work than an IT sales person was Mick Jagger.

During those years, venture capitalists threw money at anyone with a web presence because although at that time they didn't get the point of the internet, or see what value it could add, they didn't want to risk missing out on it either (I know the feeling. I feel exactly the same way about men).

For example, they invested $375million in an online greengrocer called webvan.com who went bankrupt within a year, which surprised no-one because lets face it - you would have to sell a LOT of online carrots to pay back 375 million dollars. Companies with 20 members of staff and a website were suddenly worth more than General Motors. Mobile phone operators paid $17bn for a 3G network licence in the UK - that's seventeen billion dollars they paid for air. Even Trinny and Susannah got involved... far be it from me to say anything negative about the duo who brought Spanx to the masses, but they started an online fashion website and burned through £12Million before anyone realised that their company didn't actually do anything.

And in the midst of all of this, I worked for a company called Nortel Networks who was selling all these startups the internet equipment they needed to, well, start up. Business was booming and we weren't just working in a bubble... we were living in one.

For a year, my role required me to spend Monday and Tuesday in Madrid, Wednesday in Frankfurt and Thursday and Friday in Paris. For the life of me, I can't remember why. People would say to me "Oh, but it's not as glamorous as it sounds, is it? All this business travel?" and I would think that yes, actually, it is. We dined in the finest restaurants, we stayed at Hotel Costes, we flew first class. It was like being Elle Macpherson, only without her legs or looks (obviously).

This is how crazy the world had become.... My sales manager - who prior to the dotcom boom was living in a 2-bedroom semi in Luton - had scheduled a meeting with the CEO of Tiscali in Sardinia and because the flight would have to make a change in Rome, we instead hired a private jet. Lets have a quick recap - we weren't film stars, we weren't MI5 agents, and we weren't the Prime Minister. We were just IT sales people and we expensed a private jet to fly to Sardinia to sell a bloke some phones. And no-one thought this was odd (Nee Note 2).

Lady Gaga has been quoted for saying that "when trying to decide between a man and a career, a woman should remember that a career won't wake up one morning and tell you that it doesn't love you anymore". But in 2000, that is exactly what happened. Almost overnight, some bright spark finally realised that none of these internet companies were actually making any money and the technology sector collapsed.

Nortel Networks experienced the biggest quarterly loss ever on record at the time - $19 Billion - because not only had they been supplying the equipment to these startups, they had been lending the startups the money to pay for it. See the problem? Good. You're way ahead of the Finance Director at the time who approved it.

And so, as the dotcom bubble burst, so did mine. First class travel was banned and for the first time in 4 years, we boarded aircraft and turned right. We learned to eat with plastic knives and forks again. Faced with the reality of flying in economy and staying at the Holiday Inn, we considered that maybe we didn't need to take a four-day trip to Brazil for a one-hour meeting after all and that a conference call may suffice.

All jokes aside, $5Trillion of market cap was lost. Even at the time I write this, the NASDAQ is today worth only 50% of it's value at the peak of the dotcom boom. Many people lost their life's savings and hundred of thousands of people lost their jobs. Many lost their homes. Most of us had thought that the extravagant money we were earning was a new reality and so forgot to save any of it for a rainy day (or maybe that was just me). Nortel Networks, once the largest and proudest company in Canada, had squandered it's assets and never recovered.

Remember at the beginning when I said there is nothing funny about corporate life?

Exactly.

Note 1: Although Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet, the truth is that no one single person invented the internet. Several people - in a development process that spanned many years - contributed to the invention of the internet. And none of them were Al Gore.

Note 2: Except for my mother, who's ability to smell a rat is as remarkable as her inability to keep quiet about it.

Thank-you for waiting

2011-07-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been having something of a dry spell, and I don't just mean my sex life. For two months now, I have had writers block.

Some have believed this to be because I am so happy and content with my life right now that I feel no need to write.

As if.

Other people - shrinks mostly - would argue that my noisy mind has been chattering to keep difficult feelings away, so my creativity hasn't had the space to surface and make it to this blog. All I know is that I have been reading a lot of the early 20th century humourists like Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, which fills me with a fear of writing because I know I will never write a sentence that is as good as one of Dorothy Parker's sneezes.

But I am back now. Back with a desire to tell my stories in the hope of reassuring someone out there that no matter how much of an unending series of cock-ups their own life seems to be, things could be worse. They could be me.

So before I get started on catching you up on my last two months, please allow me, someone who has never had any patience, to thank-you for yours. x

Seven Million People Can't Be Wrong

Last month, I considered leaving London to live in the country. I can't be sure what brought on this episode, but I haven't entirely ruled out a brain tumour.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't the countryside I was considering, it was Surrey. But I've now lived in Notting Hill for so long that anywhere that isn't within 50 yards of a deli, an eyebrow-threading bar and a homeless person is considered "the sticks".

My motivations were mostly financial. If I told you how much I pay to live in this one and a half bedroom house in Holland Park, you would be forgiven for thinking it includes a full staff and use of a helicopter. With my tenancy agreement due for resign, my monthly rent was being increased in line with UK inflation, which is currently 5.2%. All my arguments that I don't know anyone who has been paid a 5.2% salary increase this year fell on deaf ears, so I reviewed my monthly budget. I calculated that if I cancelled my gym membership and car insurance, it would cover the hike in rent. After some negotiation with my landlord, he agreed on an increase of only 3%, which meant that I could keep the membership to the trendy gym I never use, but would still need to drive carefully and slowly for the next year (which, as many a traffic cop can tell you, doesn't come naturally to me).

At the same time a lovely friend of mine had decided to leave her flat in South Kensington and move out to a house in Virginia Water, in Surrey, and she invited me out to her new pad for Sunday brunch. As I pulled into her driveway, I was awestruck. It is beautiful. For less than two-thirds of the rent I currently pay, she now lives in a quaint 3-bedroom cottage, with a tiled roof and a garden so large it has manicured lawns, flower beds, overgrown woods and a swamp. That is in addition to the undercover parking for three cars and a pebbled driveway. As I sat under her oak tree, listening to the birds chirp, I wondered whether I could delay re-signing my lease to give me enough time to decide whether to stay in the city or move out to the suburbs. As it happened, it turned out to take hardly any time at all.

In fact, it took four hours.

Two of those hours were sitting in my car as we drove over to visit a third friend and colleague who is also the owner of a magnificient property that has me green with envy. Her driveway is so large it has an extra house on it, plus paddocks and stables for horses. Admittedly, I don't actually have any horses but I still wouldn't say no to some stables. (Hey, I don't have any hot dates lined up either but that doesn't stop me having a drawer full of Agent Provocateur lingerie. One lives in hope, right?).

The 6-mile journey that took two hours reminded me of the days I lived in Berkshire. The most prevalent change in your lifestyle when you live outside of London, is that two hours of your day are always sitting in your car because you are constantly driving somewhere, buying something and driving back home with it. DIY Stores, garden centres, shopping malls. Nothing is within walking distance except for other people who live in the suburbs, and there is no point popping around to see them because they're not in. They're in their Audi on the way to Waitrose.

Here in Holland Park, on the other hand, I can put the kettle on, pop out to fetch some Laduree macaroons, call in on the way back to buy some freshly-cut peonies, a punnet of organic gooseberries and a Diptyque candle, stop to try on a new pair of Christian Louboutin slingbacks I've been coveting and still be back before the kettle has boiled. (This is also why I am flat broke, but that's another story).

If I don't feel like cooking dinner - and who does? - I can leave my front door and be sitting in a 5-star restaurant next to Kate Beckinsale ordering bangers and mash (me, not Kate Beckinsale) in under a minute. If I want to renovate a second hand piece of furniture, I take a stroll down the Portobello Road. If I want to take in a French movie, I ride my bike over to the Curzon cinema. If I run out of any item at all, anything from Jammie Dodgers to Dr Haushcka handcream, I have to walk no further than the end of my street to re-stock.

It pains me to say it, but Nigella Lawson was right about something. She said the countryside is like Christmas - there is nothing to do but eat and sleep. And the suburbs are worse, because there are things to do, they're just not very much fun. So every week, people drive around in their cars to get to work and back, then every weekend they drive around in their cars to get to B&Q and back. And despite spending half their life sitting at traffic lights, they never seem to use the time wisely and ask themselves "What, exactly, is the point of all this?".

Following a wonderful afternoon with my girlfriends - they are great fun and worth the drive - I got back in the car and returned to London.

It was Sunday evening and I was hungry. So hungry, in fact, that I briefly considered getting out the instruction manual for the oven and working out how to put the grill on. But instead, I put on my Versace pantsuit and made the 7-minute journey to the restaurant Scotts for dinner. I sat at the bar with Barbara Windsor (of Carry On films fame) on my right and Alan Rickman on my left. I paid £65 for fish & chips and a slice of peach pie. And I thought of all those people I'd passed in the suburbs that day, who were surely now sitting on their sofas watching You've Been Framed on TV.

Then I signed my lease for another 12 months.

Note to all readers living in Surrey: Take no notice of me, I'm just jealous of your big house and garden. In all seriousness, I hope you've had a lovely afternoon in Ikea.

The Beginning, The Middle & The End

2011-05-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been wondering if it would a good idea to marry my Australian ex-fiance. It would be a win-win situation. He owns a house and a BMW, plus he is really hot and I would get to have sex with him whenever I felt like it.

I'm sure there are other upsides to being married besides these, it's just that no-one I have spoken to can remember what they are. Least of all my married friends.

Of course the best thing about marrying him is that I would never have to get naked in front of another man ever again, which means I could really get stuck into all the cakes and pastries I have refused myself over the years. And if the worst came to the worst and I got fat and he divorced me, I would get his house and BMW.

Thats what I meant when I said it was a win-win.

I chose to mention this to a friend of mine Julietta, not so much because I needed her advice but more because sometimes it's good to put something out there just to see what comes back. With hindsight, Julietta was probably not the best reflector.

She lives her life and makes her decisions based on fear rather than desire. In other words, she takes the course of action that can't end badly, rather than following the path of what she would enjoy. As an example, she broke up last year with a guy she was dating because he liked salsa (the dance, not the dip) because what if, one day, he met another woman at salsa class and had an affair? This spring, she broke up with a man who didn't work - he had £12million pounds in the bank - because what would happen if one day he asked her to also give up her job so they could laze around and travel the world first class together, but then after ten years he left her, single and without a job. So she lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment eating take out and dating on the internet, because how could that possibly end any worse than it started?

Here is how my conversation with Julietta went.

"I am thinking it would be lovely to marry Greg" I said.
"Mmmm. You know, Sarah", she continued "My fear for you is that you will be happy for a few years and then you will realise that he is not the one for you, or he will realise that you are not the one for him, and then you will break up. But by then you will be 50, and you will be too old to meet anyone else, and you will have lost your figure, and maybe you will have moved to Australia and then you are stuck on the other side of the world with no friends and no money, completely lonely and wishing that you had taken more time to see who else is out there".

Gee, I hadn't thought of that. (And lets not even get started on "who else is out there" because I have seen who else is out there and I could write a very long, very shocking book on it).

One problem with living the way Julietta does - and there are many - is that you run the risk of getting to 80 and having no crazy stories to tell your grandchildren (that you never had because what if they got polio??).

Like the time, aged 24, I went to the Bahamas with a man I met in a nightclub, for example. He was living in Nassau where he owned a construction company and having met him only once, I arrived at work at 9am one Monday morning and found a fax from him awaiting me (these were the days before email, facebook or mobile phones - its hard to believe now, but there really was a time when we went for entire minutes without telling someone our location). The fax asked if I would like to join him in The Bahamas in April. I didn't know Julietta in those days so couldn't seek her counsel and had to make my own decision. By noon I had booked a BA flight to Grand Bahama and bought two new bikinis.

In the run up to the trip, I was living the dream. The plan was to meet him at Miami where we would spend a couple of days before continuing on to his place in Nassau for a week. Today of course, I wouldn't be seen dead in the Bahamas, but back then this was pretty glamorous for a girl from Wolverhampton and I set about making everyone wildly jealous.

And then I arrived at Miami airport . And he was wearing white canvas shoes, linen slacks and a v-neck sweater, a la Miami Vice circa 1987. I knew immediately that there was no way I could ever or would ever be attracted to this man. As we drove over to his hotel, my mind flipped between lamenting the dark lighting in nightclubs and developing a strategy for getting out of this one with my knickers still on. Which seemed less and less feasible when we got to his (our) hotel suite and I saw a bottle of champagne, a four-poster bed and a mirrored ceiling.

Yeesh.

I have to be fair to him, he planned a wonderful weekend in Miami. He took me for lovely dinners, arranged excursions that he thought i would enjoy and even took me shopping to Bal Harbour. He was a fabulous date. A fabulous date, that is, to anyone who had a crush on Don Johnson.

But meanwhile, I feigned headaches, stomach-ache, back-ache and jetlag for the next two days until, when I had run out of body parts that could possibly be in pain, I had to confess to him that I was not attracted to him and I would not be going on to The Bahamas with him. Considering he had thrown a boat load of cash at the last couple of days and not even seen me in my underwear - not that I am suggesting that is a sight worth paying for at the best of times - he was incredibly sweet. "No problem" he said, "Just come to the Bahamas with me as friends. You'll love the island". And, because this was 1994 and they hadn't yet made the horror film 'Dead Calm', that's exactly what I did.

The second the plane landed on the island, he turned into a psycho. Think Julia Roberts' husband in "Sleeping with the Enemy" meets Charlie Sheen after a particularly heavy pub crawl. With his ego clearly bruised he went from angry to insecure to spiteful to just-plain-nut-job. Stranded at his home as I was (yep, I honestly believed I could stay in his house as just friends. I know, I know, I know) he took to torturing me with sleep deprivation by playing loud classical music in the middle of the night. And not chipper, chirpy classical music by Handel or Mozart either.... no, it was the really dark stuff by Wagner and Rachmaninoff. For anyone who is not a classical music buff, these are like the 19th and early-20th century equivalents of The Smiths.

There wasn't an available flight off the island until the weekend I was already scheduled to leave. You may be wondering why I didn't just move out of his house and into a hotel and this is a two-part answer. One, it was Spring Break, so every hotel was at full occupancy, mostly with American College kids having way more fun than me and Two, I had hit my credit-card limit buying a new Gucci clutchbag for the trip (It may have been 16 years ago but I was still me, people).

The reality is that I was stuck on an island with Norman Bates.

So.. do you remember a few paragraphs back when I was telling you about Julietta? Well, Julietta would never have got herself into this mess because she would have known that one day he would marry someone else, or she would have visioned a freak hurricane on the island, and she would have stayed safely tucked at home where nothing and no-one could hurt her. In short, she would have predicted this awful ending or one even worse and avoided the trip in the first place.

Except, we're not at the end of the story yet.

Clearly, I needed a distraction. So I enrolled on a PADI scuba-diving course because it has been my experience that nothing is as distracting as trying to breathe while under 40 feet of water. And besides, what was the worst that could happen? I could get eaten by a shark. At least that would put an end to Rachmaninoff.

And as proof that when God closes a door she flings open a window, my scuba-diving instructor was young, blonde, tanned, 6'2" and an absolute scrumbucket. I can't remember his name but he was American so lets call him Tyler. Puzzlingly, Tyler asked me out on a date.

It's puzzling because I can't think what on earth he saw in me. Perhaps it was seeing me for eight hours a day in a bikini. And anyone who has ever seen me in a bikini is right now thinking "Nah, that can't be it". But when underwater, objects appear increased in size by 30% due to light refraction so if you stick Elle Macpherson at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean (wishful thinking?) even she would look bloated. So, I can't have been a pretty sight, what, with me looking 30% bigger than I normally do, plus wearing an inflator jacket and a flourescent green snorkelling mask.

But, on the other hand, it sure wasn't my strength as a student that attracted him. Not to put too fine a point on it, I suck at scuba-diving. I'm scared of water and I hate the sensation of fish on my skin. At one point, I remember him commenting that I had been the first diving student he had encountered who could sit on the ocean bed 20 feet below the surface and continue to breathe through the respirator even while sobbing uncontrollably.

But, like I said, whatever his reasons, he asked me out. And so yes, what was meant to be a dream holiday turned into a nightmare trip, and yes I had to share a house with a psychotic lunatic, and its true that, still now, I feel nauseous every time I hear Prelude in C-Sharp minor. But when I am 80 I will be able to look back and tell the story of how I started a vacation with a man I met in a nightclub and I ended it with a blonde, tanned diving instructor. And when you add up all these stories, they make a life. They say that I lived, and I loved, and I laughed. Maybe I didn't laugh about it at all the time, but eventually after many, many sessions with a good shrink, I laughed.

What Julietta doesn't understand is that by avoiding an unhappy ending, you have to miss out on the happy beginning. And worst of all, you miss out on the middle.

Love Yourself

2011-05-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

Women's magazines periodically run an article advising single women, in the absence of a man to supposedly take care of them, how to pamper and be kinder to themselves. The piece invariably centres around how single women should buy themselves flowers, take long hot bubble baths and prepare themselves a healthy and delicious dinner served on proper crockery. And right away, they lose all credibility because if there is a dinner out there that is both healthy and delicious, I certainly don't have the recipe for it.

You know what I had for dinner tonight? I had an easter egg. And then you know what I had for dessert? I had another easter egg. Luxury chocolatier Charbonnel &Walker are selling off their leftover champagne truffle eggs at 75% discount, proving that Mr Charbonnel and Mr Walker could teach these magazines a thing or two about what women want.

Without even calling my other single friends, I can guarantee that this is not the least nourishing meal being served this evening. My friend Michele, for example, will about now be sitting down to a slice of Brie, two Ritz crackers and a bottle of Burgundy. Most suppertimes another friend of mine, Priya, will get home from work, kick off her Christian Louboutins, then stand at her sink eating a bowl of cornflakes.

One of my most memorable single girl dinners was in New York last year, when I stayed at the home of my friend Julie. After a long day walking around the city, I returned to her apartment and found her in the kitchen serving supper. It was a bowl of brussel sprouts. You're probably thinking it was a bowl of brussel sprouts to accompany a roast dinner. Perhaps a bowl of brussel sprouts with bacon and chestnuts. But no. Just a bowl of brussel sprouts. When I explained that I hadn't eaten since breakfast and perhaps needed something slightly more filling, we dug around in her fridge freezer and found 2 nail polishes, a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and some turkey burgers. I don't know if you have ever had turkey burger and sprouts for Sunday night supper, but let me tell you that with enough Stoli inside you, it's not as bad as it sounds.

Julie is a successful, high earning and over-achieving woman. Admittedly, she is the only person I know who has worked in the world of Investment Banking for almost twenty years and doesn't have a cent to her name, but I feel confident that if she wanted to take a long hot bath and make herself a moussaka, she would. But really, in a world that offers us late night shopping at Bergdorf Goodman and spa vacations in St Barts, is there truly a woman out there who, when the desire to give herself a treat strikes her, thinks to herself "I know, I'll go home and cook myself a nice piece of salmon"?

I admit that this presents more of a dietary issue in your 40's than in your 20's. In your 20's, you get invited out to dinner by men in sports cars at least 4 times a week, and you can fill in the other nights with beans on toast. Whereas if, in your 40's, you rely on dinner invitations from handsome men to satisfy all your nutritional needs, you will get scurvy.

Malnutrition aside though, I don't know any single women who feel they are missing out on anything by not laying a table every evening and dining on a balanced, home cooked meal with their cat. You know how they say that people never get to their death bed and wish they had spent more time at work? Ditto the kitchen.

Here's who I think should learn to pamper themselves a little better - The women who slave over a hot stove every night cooking delicious and healthy suppers. For goodness sake girls, treat yourself to a donut.

Serpentine Cafe

2011-04-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

Having gone on and on about how I am going to start my book this Easter, can you guess how many pages I have actually written? Clue: It's a round number and it rhymes with 'bugger all'.

I am furious with myself because I even have the plot formed - it's going to be loosely based on my real life, where I have an Australian fiance who I have broken up with, I start dating again, I go to a bar with a friend of mine called Meghan, where I meet an enigmatic guy who texts me madly and then mysteriously vanishes. Ok, so for any of you who read this previous entry you will know that so far, it's not 'loosely based' on my real life. Thus far, it is in fact a memoir.

But then I get a visit from the police (again, those of you who have read my previous blog entries know that we are still not into the realms of fiction here) because the enigmatic guy from the bar has been murdered, and I am getting the blame because the police have found my 11 texts to him the previous day and don't believe I have only just met him. Because who in their right mind sends 11 texts to a man they only just met, right?

Exactly.

Anyway, I have the whole story planned in my head - I know the victim, who killed him, why they killed him, that I get into all kinds of scrapes getting to the bottom of the mystery in order to save myself, and that the Aussie ex-fiance saves the day. All I have to do is sit my ass on the couch and write the damn book. But because I LOVE self-sabotage, I have instead found a hundred things to do this weekend ranging from laundry, to painting furniture, to long, long walks in the park with Dorothy, in order to avoid writing Chapter one. Because I might write Chapter One and then Chapter Two and then on and on until I have finished the book and then what if no-one likes it?

It's like Samuel Taylor Coleridge said... "Writing is kind of a zen question. If you write a book and no-one reads it, is it really a book?"

Of course the upside is that if I do write the book then I also get to kill off Bernard with an axe so that would be two dreams of mine fulfilled.

Anyway, due to my writers block, I needed to kill a few hours this morning before my Easter lunch date with Meghan (of Zuma fame) so as to be absolutely sure I didn't sit at my desk and write.

So I walked Dorothy all the way to the Serpentine cafe in Hyde Park, where she was very patient and sat nice and quietly as I took the pictures above. And I'm the Queen of Sheba.

ps, This is an actual cottage on the way to the Serpentine, in the middle of London ... isnt it adorable? I bet if I lived in that house I would finish my book.

Batwoman

2011-04-11T20:04:00.000-07:00

This morning, my ex-fiance went for a 60km bike ride before breakfast (and herein ends the mystery of how he became a 40 year old man with a 20 year old's body). He kindly invited me to go with him, which gave me a good opportunity to polish up my acting skills as I pretended to look like I actually gave it serious consideration. Instead, I declined so that I could visit Sydney's Botanical Gardens.

Those of you who have been following this blog for some time will be likely wondering what I was heading for a garden, having never before mentioned any tendency to spend my Sundays with a lawn mower or having written any long flowing paragraphs about the splendour and beauty of begonias. You are quite right. I couldn't pick out a begonia in a line up. No, my main reason for visiting the gardens was to get the best view of the opera house and bridge, like the one above.

My mission was almost aborted though, when I got to within range of the gardens and found that I couldn't park in the spot I needed to, because there was a triathlon in the city that morning and the gardens were part of their route. Over 1000 people participated in the triathlon causing me to ponder what people in Sydney had against lie-ins, closely followed by wondering where I could instead park. My only option was to stop some distance away and then walk through the gardens in order to get to the photographic spot. Lucky me.

No, really - lucky me. Because if I hadn't done so, I would never have got to see some of the most beautiful birds, which any other country would have in cages but here in Australia are just casually pottering about the city. This country really does have some astonishing wildlife, and I don't mean just the men.

I was as happy as a clam strolling around with my camera, until I realised that the very loud squawking in the trees above me wasn't the birds. I had unknowingly wandered into the batcave and was completely surrounded by a canopy of bats, or as they are called here, flying foxes, which gives you some idea of their size. As I legged it out of the area, while wondering how often a bat drops from a tree, I noticed that the garden officials had posted a sign asking visitors (I assume as some kind of ironic joke) not to touch the bats.

Who, in their right mind, would touch a bat?

Then again who, in their right mind, would get up on a Sunday morning and do a triathlon?

Note to ex-fiance: How long does it take to cycle 60km anyway? Me, I would still be pedalling by Thursday, but should I assume you will be making it home for dinner?

The bats

Bondi Beach

2011-04-10T15:15:00.000-07:00

The Swimming Pool at Bondi Beach yesterday

It was 28 degrees and sunny in Sydney yesterday (Aussies call that "autumn"), so I headed over to Bondi Beach. Me and about five thousand other people.

When I saw how many people were on the beach, I was reminded of my favourite Diana Vreeland story. Over a career spanning 30 years, Diane Vreeland was the editor of Harpers Bazaar and then Vogue magazine, and was an icon of fashion and style. Living in the manner to which she had become accustomed, she never used public transport until one day, after many years of being driven around Manhattan, her husband - for reasons unknown - insisted that they take the bus for the first time. "Oh look Darling!", she exclaimed as they boarded the bus, "there are other people on it!".

I can relate. It would have been wonderful to have Bondi Beach to myself yesterday but as that was not to be, I stayed for two hours of sunbathing, which most Australians would consider more than enough sun anyway. Remember, this is a country that wears SPF30 when it's raining. So then I headed home for a nap, because is there anything more tiring than relaxing?

Despite it being many years since I lived in Australia, my sense of direction has not improved in the least and I, quite predictably, got lost on the way home. Yes, the car has a GPS system but I think we have established a long time ago that I have trust issues so I often find it hard to believe that the computer knows best. Which is how I found myself accidentally in Surry Hills.

Surry Hills is a Sydney neighbourhood not unlike London's Notting Hill or NYC's Greenwich Village. A bit cool, trendy boutiques, lots of cafes, and people hanging out. Most notably, it is the home of Sparkles Cupcakery, a glamorous bakery that sells cupcakes for dogs, so I parked up to get a little treat for Hobbsy and take a walk around. As they also do a variety of cupcakes for humans I got one for the ex-fiance too, for when he returned from his weekend in Canberra later that day.

Note to ex-fiance: Enough is enough. Hurry up home from Canberra else I am going to let Hobbsy eat your cupcake. And your shoes.

Bourke Street Bakery in Surry Hills. Expect cues around the corner for their delicious breads.

Coffee at The Book Kitchen

Cupcakes for your pooch at Sparkles Cupcakery

Ici Et La, for great french finds

Surry Hills Street

Streetlife

Somone looks like he needs a cupcake,

Surry Hills is home to one of Bill Granger's cafes.

The Boat House

2011-04-08T16:33:00.000-07:00

Hobbsy

Back when I was in a relationship, my girlfriends used to tell me that I should have some time alone. "You need to be alone for a while", they used to say, "you really need some time alone". And now that I'm alone, I can't work out what is meant to be so great about it.

Take yesterday, for instance. I was still at Sydney's Northern Beaches - alone - and found an amazing space called The Boathouse, which is part restaurant, part flower-stall, part boat-dock. It was an adorable spot, but - being alone - I had no-one to "ooh"and "ahh" with about how wonderful it was so I sat there having a glass of wine with my fish and chips. Alone.

Did I mention I was alone?

Half way through my chip butty (you can take her out of England but you can't take England out of her) I decided that, as much as I love my friends, they have not got one single clue what they are on about. Being alone might be fulfilling and it might lead you to an ultimately more satisfying relationship in the end, and it might teach you to appreciate your own company, but it's boooooring. So I got in the car and drove back to Sydney to be back with my ex-fiance (remember, the good-looking one with the cute butt?) and our old dog Russell Hobbs, better known as Hobbsy for short.

As it happens, the ex-fiance had gone to Canberra for a charity event and was staying down there at a caravan park. As lonely as I was, I wasn't lonely enough for a night in a caravan park. So instead I called up a friend of mine Toni, who being the good Australian that she is, invited me over for a BBQ. I headed over there for a glass of wine and was delighted to learn that she had also previously been to The Boathouse, so we coo'd over the place for a good half hour, followed by a further 20 minutes of shared adoration for the cupcake holders sold in the Donna Hay Store, and I was almost back to my old self.

The one last thing I knew I needed was a cuddle. I politely declined staying for the food and headed home to change into my pyjamas and curl up on the couch with Hobbsy. I made a plate of Beans on Toast for the two of us to share for dinner, followed by a dessert of pretty much all of the ex-fiance's Lindt chocolate, then I tickled her tummy as we watched a CSI Miami omnibus together.

It occured to me that when my girlfriends said I needed time alone, what they meant was I needed time without a boyfriend. Time spent single. Time spent with no significant other, no Plus One.

They didn't mean time without Hobbsy.

ps, Note to ex-fiance: if you're reading this, I didn't really let Hobbsy up on the couch. Nor did I give her any chocolate. And I definately did not let her sleep on the bed with me. No way.

The Boat House, Palm Beach

Demons

2011-04-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

Barrenjoey Dock

Once upon a time, I had a fiance, and then I had an ex-fiance, and now I have a friend. A really good-looking friend with tight abs and a cute butt, but a friend nonetheless.

He proposed to me ten years ago at the hotel Barrenjoey House in Sydney's Northern Beaches, and, because I am a sucker for punishment, I decided to stay there again for a few days while I am here in Australia. It's the first time I have returned and although I had bleated on about how I would be fine, he drove up here to meet me for dinner on Wednesday night, just in case the trip had become all too painful and I was trying to hang myself with my computer power cable (it happens).

In our old room - oh yes, I even stayed in the very room he proposed in.....that's how much I love to stick a knife in my own heart - there is a black and white picture of Barrenjoey dock which I spent many hours recreating on this trip. When facing old demons I find it really helps to have something to keep you busy.

People like to say that it's the things you didn't do that you regret but I can't help thinking there is some cherry picking going on. I do not, for example, regret not emmigrating to Canada in 1998 when I had the chance, and committing myself to a lifetime of sub-zero winters, saturday nights spent watching ice hockey and bad dress sense. And I do not regret not giving up my job to go to live with a man who I was never in love with, in a cabin in France - a country I have never liked - to live the life of a kept woman which I have never much fancied, although I am embarrassed to admit I gave it serious consideration when he asked (I have father issues).

But do I regret not getting married and settling in Australia?

That would be telling.

The Wardrobe in Room 3

I'm back

2011-03-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

After my last relationship ended, I was determined to stay single for a year. But the trouble is that a whole year of taking out your own garbage is an awful lot of garbage, so a dear friend of mine, Meghan, took me to a fancy cocktail bar on Saturday night to find me a new, supportive, loving relationship. Or, at the very least, to get me laid.

I should also point out it was a very loud cocktail bar - this will become relevant later in the story.

I tend to go for muscly Australian men, a lot like the one in this photo above. As luck would have it, this is a recent photo of my ex-fiance who happens to be single. Unfortunately he also lives 12,000 miles away in Sydney. But as even more luck would have it, I am flying to Sydney on holiday next week! Can you believe how much luck I'm having lately???

Oddly, the man whom Meghan and I met on Saturday night looked nothing like this but within seconds of checking in my coat, I clocked him. He was tall, handsome and impeccably dressed, standing at the bar sipping white wine. I realise I had my champagne goggles on, but he was not entirely unlike James Bond. I pointed him out to Meghan and she agreed that he was handsome and was probably Scandinavian, or possibly Dutch. We hoped not Dutch (obviously).

For two hours, he and I caught eachother's eye, but he didn't come over to speak. Not that I have an over-active imagination or anything, but I assumed this was because he was on a top secret mission and didn't want to put me in any kind of danger with the Russians.

And then around 10:30pm ..... he got up and left. He didn't say Hi, didn't ask me for my number, didn't ask me if he could buy me a new car. I was nothing short of gutted. Bear in mind, I had been mentally planning our wedding for the last 90 minutes so the disappointment of his departure was pretty overwhelming.

I ordered another round of drinks. As I did so, I caught sight of him outside writing something on paper from the doorman, while on the phone, and I assumed he was settling his bill. But then as my drinks arrived, he re-appeared and said - and I quote - "Hi, I'm Bernard. Great Louboutins", gave me the piece of paper, and left. I opened the paper. On it, he had written his name, his number, and a request to please text him, followed by "Thanks, B".

See what I mean about him being an International Man of Mystery?

Before we get too excited though, this leads me to speculate on a number of points:-

  1) Writing this, rather than speaking it, makes it look like his name is pronounced "Bernard", when in fact, we concluded that his name is actually pronounced "Ber-naaaaarrrd", because - remember - he is Scandinavian. Clearly Sarah and Bernard does not have nearly the same ring to it as Sarah and Ber-naaaaarrrd. "Sarah and Ber-naaaard" says "sexy, glamorous, cosmopolitan couple with fast cars, fabulous outfits and weekends in Monte Carlo". "Sarah and Bernard" says "3-bed semi having a weekend at the London Travel Lodge for their 15th wedding anniversary having saved up the cash from all those extra brick-laying jobs he's been doing".

  2) He had recognised that the shoes I was wearing were Christian Louboutins. I knew that paying £450 for a pair of shoes so painful they can only be worn for a maximum of 3 hours a week would one day pay off. I mean, there just had to be an upside to those shoes, if only to make up for the back-ache and bunions.

  3) Now we had to decide how long I was going to wait before texting him - should I text him immediately, or wait till the next day? Having solicited most of the other women in the bar for their opinions, the answer seems to come from a complex equation consisting of:-
   (how good looking was he) x
   (whether you want a relationship or just sex) x
   (whether we think he has now gone to a private members club and could get us all in).

I decided to wait until Sunday afternoon. I texted him my number and so began the long, painful, drawn-out process of existential dread and angst, known as 'dating', which seems to consist of the odd evening out, mixed with a lot of wondering whether and when he will call. Though actually, I needn't have worried because he texted right back within seconds, and again, and again, to the point that I not only got fed up of him interrupting my afternoon nap, I also had to wonder whether I had found myself the only co-dependant MI5 spy in London. (I do seem to have a bit of a radar for that sort of thing. You show me a room full of men and I'll instantly become attracted to the needy, lying, cheating sex-addict. It's a gift).

Around the 9th or 10th text (how did people date before cell-phones?) he asked me where I was from. In the name of not becoming a lonely old spinster, I neglected to tell him I was from Wolverhampton and instead mentioned I lived in Holland Park because think about it people - how many Bond movies have been set in the West Midlands? And I asked him the same question, to which he replied "I'm Irish. Single, Travel a lot, Live in Kensington. Pretty straightforward really".

This leads to yet more speculation:-

  1. Irish? But I had really got my heart set on moving to Norway!! I had, in fact, spent the best part of the afternoon planning the interior of our log cabin, which we would live in with the puppies we would buy each-other to celebrate our engagement. "Yes, but maybe he owns a castle in County Clare", Meghan tried to comfort me, because she loves the Irish accent. Personally, I have never heard of County Clare but it sounds cold and rainy.

  2. A loner, who travels a lot, living in Kensington? I just broke up with a loner who travels a lot and lived in Kensington!! This must be what the self-help books refer to as a 'relationship pattern'.

  3. This really does mean he pronounces his name Bernard. I told you the bar was loud.

I now have some key decisions to make. First, do I date a man named Bernard, and if so, do I ask him if he would mind if I called him James instead?

And second, he has now texted me 13 times (!) and still not actually fixed a date for us to meet. I called another girlfriend Priya, who advised me that this is perfectly normal dating behaviour these days and that expecting someone to actually phone and have a real-life conversation is so 2005. If he hasn't asked me out by Wednesday but is still frantically texting, do I ask him out even if only to avoid getting rheumatoid arthritis in my fingers? The answer to this one by the way is NO. Absolutely not. Never ask a man out. Getting rheumatoid arthritis is definately the lesser of these two evils.

I am furious with myself for expending so much energy worrying about whether a man I have never spoken to will call. It is an illustration of how absorbed in this dating drama I have been for the last 48 hours that I only realised an hour ago we are at war with Libya. (And I only learned that because it is on the front page of The Times which Tesco have thankfully stacked in the same aisle as the half-price Easter Eggs).

But, it is still nice to know that on my first night back out on the scene the tallest, most handsome, closest thing to James Bond in the whole bar wanted me to have his number. It's like I said to Meghan after he handed me the note, "Meghan...." I said, "....I'm back".

"Honey...." she replied "....I don't really think you ever went away".

Crazy Salad

2011-02-24T13:18:00.000-08:00

A girlfriend of mine once lived with a guy for 3 years until they eventually broke up and he moved out. I can barely remember his real name, but we nicknamed him 'waste of space guy'.

They lived together for 3 years in her 4-storey house and after he had packed and removed his belongings, including all household items that he had purchased over the 3 years, the only discernible difference was that she was down a set of salad servers. Though the house was filled with sofas, beds, furniture, lamps, accessories, electrical appliances and white goods, his only contribution had been two green, plastic, long-handled salad spoons.

What astounded me most is that when he moved out - to a dingy bedsit in Clapham - he actually took them with him, packing them in amongst his clothes, shoes and sporting gear. Which made me wonder how long he sat on his beanbag with his cricket bat in one hand and his salad servers in the other, before he realised that he didn't even own a bowl to make a salad in.

You can see where we came up with his nickname, can't you?

I speak of this, because when my most recent boyfriend and I broke up, the biggest difference in my life is that I could no longer watch my favourite American tv shows, which he used to download for me using Bit Torrent on the internet. I had long suspected this practise wasn't entirely legal, but faced with the alternative of watching Coronation Street, I turned a blind eye. I turned several blind eyes each week, in fact, and thus became addicted to a number of hit US shoes that will probably appear on screens in the UK at some point in the next few years, but who has that kind of patience?

After that relationship ended, therefore, I was hit with withdrawal symptoms pretty bad. Yes, I still had a full set of kitchen utensils, but most evenings I was trying to slash my wrists with most of them in order to avoid watching Panorama.

Last night, faced with a choice of 'A History of Ancient Britain' or 'Masterchef', I decided that enough is quite enough. And so it came to be that I spent my evening coming to grips with BitTorrent. At first glance, it seemed like a pretty technical world of trackers and transmitters and decoders, but it was actually much simpler than he had made it look. (Perhaps he had wanted to add value in the relationship by doing something that I couldn't do myself, but he didn't fancy re-tiling the roof). Turns out that with a fast internet connection, and a flagrant disregard for copyright laws, you can be watching the latest episode of The Good Wife within minutes of it airing in the US.

So my dog and I curled up on the couch (she is still not using the designer bed I bought her, I am thinking of deducting it from her pocket money) and settled down to watching our favourite hit US TV shows. The internet is a magical thing.

Going Underground

2011-02-18T15:53:00.000-08:00

Every single time I sit on a London tube to get to the office, I ask myself where in God's name I have gone so wrong with my life that I now start my days sitting on a red and blue velour seat while trying not to touch any surfaces. The fact that I once lived in Sydney where I started my day with a swim in the ocean, yet voluntarily packed my bags and boarded a flight home to London, is a testament to how bad I am at making personal choices.

Anyway, this morning was worse than usual. I've become used to the people on the tube who sneeze without a tissue, and those who haven't showered, and even those who want to talk while sitting on the tube (most commonly known as 'tourists'). But this morning I found myself sitting opposite the most dreaded of all dreads - two people in love.

They were a fairly young couple, I'd say around mid-twenties (I don't know when I started thinking of people in their mid-twenties as young. I think it was shortly after I stopped considering Puerto Banus an appropriate holiday destination but still several years before I started to read my annual pension statements with genuine interest). They were kissing, and holding hands and looking longingly into eachothers eyes, and smiling. I ask you, who smiles at 7am? Who? Who?

Clearly, I needed to get away from these lovebirds pretty quickly but as I looked around the carriage, there was only one other vacant seat, opposite a man in a suit, carrying a briefcase and a hacksaw. I am not making this up. You've got to figure that if there is one homicidal maniac on the whole train, it's probably the dude with the hacksaw. With another eight stations to go, I looked up at the couple opposite who had now started to tickle eachothers' ear-lobes, and decided to go with the lesser of two evils - being hacked to death.

Truth be known, I was probably feeling cranky because I had very little sleep last night, having shared my bed with my cocker spaniel puppy. Once, when struggling to come to terms with a situation, a wise man said to me "Sarah, if it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck....... maybe it's a duck". But the thing with Dorothy is that she looks like a cocker-spaniel, and she walks like a cocker-spaniel and she barks like a cocker spaniel........ but she snores like a donkey. So, who's to say what she'll be when she grows up.

I'd like to say I am typing this while sitting in my trendy studio with a glass of Shiraz but the truth is I don't have a trendy studio and I am typing this in bed, tapping loudly on my keyboard in attempt to drown out the sounds of Dorothy/Eeyore once again kicking out the ZZzzzs. Why don't I make her sleep alone downstairs you may wonder? I guess there is more than one kind of love. The ear-nibbling kind those youngsters on the tube have is certainly one (wonderfully exciting) kind. And the middle of the night snuggle I get from this puppy is another.

As long as we all have someone to love, thats what matters.

Goodnight....x

Say It With Cookie Cutters

2011-02-14T01:44:00.000-08:00

I may not bake with my cookie cutters but at least I took a picture of them.

One good thing about being in your 40's is that you no longer feel any pressure on Valentine's Day (at my last count, there are 3 good things about being in your 40's by the way, and 'great knees' isn't one of them),

As a young woman in my 20's, February 14th was accompanied by a wave of existential dread. I lived in fear of not receiving an anonymous bunch of red roses delivered to the office. Then at some point in my late 30's it dawned on me that I don't even like roses and the relief was immense. Kind of like all those years I wasted worrying that I hadn't backpacked around Europe, until it occured to me that Europe is old and dirty and everyone smokes, so finally I could settle on my couch and become addicted to soap operas without worrying I was missing out on something.

And then there was the Valentine's Night dinners. Hard to now imagine that I yearned to be taken to a restaurant that was over-charging for a set menu that almost certainly included Tiramisu, but I did.

But with age comes the wisdom that couples who look happy on Valentine's Day and couples who are genuinely happy every day are two very, very different things.

It was an employee of mine who really confirmed this for me, when after 6 years of marriage her husband cheated on her with a glamorous blonde who worked in an art gallery. They seemed incredibly happy together (my employee and her husband, not her husband and the blonde. Though now I come to think of it....). They lived in a multi-million pound home on the same street as Mick Jagger, they had two adorable children and they took amazing vacations to places many can only dream of. But when deciding whether to take him back after the affair or file for divorce, I asked her what she loved about her husband that would make her want to stay with him and she replied, in all seriousness, "Well, he keeps the garden immaculate and every January, he files my tax return".

So yes, I am grateful that the days of Valentine's day-angst are over. Last night, I was going to bake heart-shaped doggie biscuits for Dorothy, but having realised that she had been uncharacteristically quiet for some minutes I went into the sitting room to check on her and found her eating a blue felt-tip pen. So, instead of baking, I spent the best part of my evening shrieking to the emergency vet, rinsing navy blue ink out of Dorothy's mouth and comforting her as the plastic pen itself worked it's way back out of her system one way or the other. And if that's not true love, then I don't know what is.

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone, especially single women in their 20's. I promise you, it gets better.

The Cats Whiskers

2011-02-12T14:04:00.000-08:00

Before I lived here, I would think nothing of spending an hour on the motorway to drive to Notting Hill in order to visit one of the area's cafes or boutiques. But now that I live right in the middle of Notting Hill, I rarely leave my house. I live next door to a restaurant frequented by many a celeb (Ruby Wax is in there as I type - I saw her go in about an hour ago), yet in the last 6 months I have eaten there precisely twice. On most Sunday evenings you can find me painting my own nails despite the fact that I live so close to one of the city's trendiest manicure salons that I can practically smell the nail polish.

This is just one of many, many examples of me wanting what I don't have, then getting it, and not wanting it any more. But, as Diana Vreeland said, "Contentment is for cows".

So today, I decided to venture out onto the streets of this neighbourhood, with my camera and Dorothy, and remind myself what all the fuss is about. And what most of the fuss was about today, was a cat.

During the first few months of a puppy's life, it is important to get them socialised to as many things that it will experience as an adult dog - traffic, babies, old people, back to back episodes of Columbo, etc - and I did a pretty good job of building up her memory bank with all of these things. But the one thing she never got exposed to was cats. Which could explain some of the mutual angst that arose today when we came across this gorgeous cat, who we naively stopped to say hello to.

Cat appears behind it's gate

Cat gets closer

Cat gets vicious

Cat won't back down

Dorothy refuses to walk another inch

You can see why it's so much easier just to stay home, can't you?

One Day

2011-02-10T15:41:00.000-08:00

Because I am nothing if not obsessive compulsive, I recently purchased 45 back issues of Donna Hay food magazine so as to have the complete collection. They are absolutely gorgeous and choc-full of recipes I will never use, dishes I have no intention of making and cakes I will never bake.

Likewise, by the side of my bed, is my stack of Elle Decoration magazines, brimming with pictures of stunning beach-houses I will never own, fabulous studios I will never take photographs in and cosy log cabins I will never build.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

Today, my manager was on television interviewing the entrepreneur and founder of Coffee Republic, Sahar Hashemi. ( I am fortunate and lucky enough to work at a company where this kind of thing happens all the time. Once, at a sales conference, we had a choice of two speakers at the same time: Bill Clinton or Lance Armstrong. You may wonder why when given a choice between taking life advice from an ex-President or from a man who dated an Olsen twin, some people chose the latter, but it takes all sorts). Anyway, while discussing how to increase one's creativity, my manager replayed a quote to Sahar "If you want to do something, do something". Which, as my magazine collection demonstrates, is pretty simple to say but induces all kinds of anxiety when you actually come to put it into practise. Kind of like gutting fish.

Did you know, for example, that Hitler wanted to be an artist? An incredibly inspiring friend of mine recently introduced me to the book The War of Art - a guide to overcoming resistance to your own creativity and living your true life. The author, Steven Pressfield, tells the following story of how Adolph Hitler went to Vienna to study as an artist at the age of 17. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and School of Architecture, but have you ever seen one of his paintings? Or a building he built? No, because his resistance to his own creativity overcame him. It was literally easier for him to start World War II, than it was for him to face a blank canvas.

Likewise, rather than take a risk and actually create the life I want, it easier for me to buy magazines and look at pictures of other people who have the life I want. It's self-defeating and incredibly life-wasting but it does have the advantage that I can do it while sitting on the couch with a cup of tea and a custard slice. For a moment, I can even convince myself that it's ok that I do this, that I can catch that wave in the next life. And then the quote from Ray Charles, which is placed in the centre of my inspiration board, catches my eye:-

"You should live every day like it's your last day,

because one day,

you're gonna be right"

Ray Charles

Wise man, Ray Charles. Wise man. Probably not a big collector of magazines.

In the Groove

2011-02-05T14:03:00.000-08:00

Today has been one of those days when I just couldn't get into a groove. Having spent all week working hard, I have been dreaming of a creative weekend baking, painting, writing and learning the art of calligraphy. I even bought a calligraphy pen, 12 nibs and a pot of pink ink which, as is happened, turned out to be a complete waste of £12.50.

I baked a strawberry and rhubarb pan tart that looked nothing like the one in the Donna Hay magazine, although I followed the recipe to the letter. I started to knit my snood but had to give that up when the dog ate the wool. My watercolour proved right every art teacher I ever had - I am better off sticking to maths and science - and I'm not ready to laugh about the calligraphy.

Knowing when I'm beat, I decided to give up all things creative and treat myself to an afternoon with a book, so curled up on the sofa with Ivana Lowell's memoir, "Why Not Say What Happened?". It's her tale of a life that looked glamorous and extraordinary as an heiress of the incredibly wealthy Guinness family, but was actually riddled with abuse, alcoholism and tragedy. I figured that a tale of miserable multi-millionaires would really cheer me up, but after Ivana recounted the story of the Queen Mother coming to dinner in their Hans Crescent mansion, I concluded that there are miserable poor people and miserable rich people, but rich is still better.

There was only one remaining way to salvage the day. Shopping. So I grabbed the puppy and headed over to the designer dog store Mungo & Maud, to buy Dorothy a new bed. Bearing in mind that one of the reasons I wanted a dog was so that I would have an excuse to buy a Mungo & Maud dog bed, you would think this would turn my day around. But £185 later, I introduced Dorothy to her new pad and she unhappily sat in it just long enough for me to take precisely 2 photographs then went to sleep on an old pink sock instead.

I am trying to remind myself that we need to have bad days so that we can appreciate the good ones, but I'm a bit busy making a list of all the things I wish I had bought myself with £185. So far, the only thing it doesn't include is more nibs for my calligraphy pen.

Dorothy letting me know exactly what she thinks of her new bed.

Money well spent.

Dorothy learns the art of knitting.

More is More.

2011-02-02T05:26:00.000-08:00

Delicious desserts and photography from blog: Desserts for Breakfast

I have a love-hate relationship with New Year Resolutions. Love the idea of them, hate actually keeping them. And so it is that just a few days into January, I always find myself with a list of great intentions, ignoring all of them, continuing to do exactly as I have always done, but feeling guilty about it. It's kind of like catholicism but without any kind of after-life to look forward to.

This year, I found myself tired of my usual list of resolutions, which I have always managed to convince myself were both truly life-changing yet remarkably simple (note: it has been my experience that nothing that is truly life changing is ever remarkably simple). My resolutions always seemed to centre on having less of something... 'Wear Less Black', 'Eat less chocolate', 'Spend Less Time in Meetings Daydreaming About Harry Connick Jnr'. But who am I kidding? For starters, everything I own is black. In order to wear less black I would literally have to go to work in my Mother's wedding dress.

So this year, my resolutions were focused not on the adage "Less is More" but on what I now believe to be the more accurate version "More is More. Less Is Pants". They are:

   1) I will eat more desserts. Especially for breakfast.
   2) I will waste more money on leather biker jackets, even though I don't have, and never will have, a bike.
   3) I will spend more time in bed reading novels, with big cups of tea and packets of jammie dodgers. And not 'literature' novels either. I'm not talking Tolstoy here - I'm talking trashy murder-mysteries featuring sassy female leads and cute cops with big muscles.
   4) I will designate one day a month to be Columbo Day, and celebrate it by watching back to back episodes of Columbo while eating self-saucing chocolate pudding.
   5) I will spend more time in meetings dreaming about Harry Connick Jnr (if that is humanly possible, though I have to admit I am pretty much pushing the boundaries on that one already).

Of all of these, I first made a start on the desserts. Obviously. But as I have previously confessed, food photogrpahy is a lot harder than it looks, so I am sticking to eating them rather than photographing them. Photographing them is Donna Hay's job.

Donna Hay Plum & Chocolate Clafoutis

Donna Hay Self-Saucing Chocolate Pudding

Famous

2011-01-22T05:47:00.000-08:00

As my puppy, Dorothy, and I set off on our early morning walk today, a man in a black BMW convertible kerb-crawled past us and stopped at the end of our street. It would have been normal to assume it was a drug-pusher, or pimp, or mass murderer, but this is Holland Park and nothing that edgy ever happens in Holland Park. If he was a drug-pushing pimp, he was lost.

"Are you lost?" I asked him as I approached the car.

"No, no" he replied " I just wanted to say hello to Dorothy".

I swear to God, I have never seen this man before in my life. Suddenly very relieved I had got dressed before leaving the house (many a morning I go for our first walk of the day in just my pyjamas with wellies and a knee-length puffer coat over the top. It makes it so much easier to get back into bed with tea and jammie dodgers later), I asked him how he knew Dorothy. He replied that he saw her almost every day, which had me puzzled, because I am with Dorothy almost all day every day and I would definately have remembered a dude in a black BMW convertible.

I scanned my memory bank over the last few days and weeks to work out when she had found the opportunity to sneak out and get to know the locals, without me noticing. It had to have been either when I was watching Columbo or napping, I concluded, noting that the thing about watching Columbo and napping is that one invariably leads to the other.

"She goes into Anthony Sharp estate agents every day, and I am across the street" he explained, making everything clear. Sure enough, every morning on our way home from the park, Dorothy and I call into Anthony Sharp Estate Agents where she gets fuss, tickles and two dog biscuits. They adore her and it's a great treat to end our walk, even though she does make an embarrassing muddy mess on their white tile floor, leaving me apologetically backing out of there as they frantically mop the area.

The problem with this routine is that Anthony Sharp estate agents are not open 24 hours a day. So when we take the same route and pass the storefront in the evening, Dorothy digs her heels in and looks longingly through their doorway. She then sits on the pavement and cries until I take her in the store, which of course I can't do. I don't know if you have ever tried explaining to a dog that shops close at 6 and it's now 8, but it's pretty difficult to get the message across when there are dog biscuits at stake. After a few minutes of trying, I drag her past the store, making me the bad guy.

So, anyway, we chatted to the gentleman in his car this morning but Dorothy lost interest pretty quickly (he didn't have any dog biscuits on him and Dorothy has her priorities pretty much set) so we continued on our way to the park. As we walked, I pondered how it can be that my puppy has been living in this neighbourhood for 3 months and already has an ever-growing circle of friends, whereas I have lived here for 4 years and there are still only 3 people in London who know my name. And one of them is my GP.

I guess she's just a lot cuter. And you can't beat that.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

2011-01-21T03:29:00.000-08:00

You know that question "If you could have a dinner party with five people, dead or alive, who would they be?"? Well, the second of my five is always Alfred Hitchcock. (The first, in case you were wondering, is author Dorothy Parker - hence the naming of my puppy Dorothy Parker who is turning out to have a remarkably similiar personality to her namesake. If only I could train her to write).

I've been reading my new book on Hitchcock this week and then decided to instead photograph my new book on Hitchcock. I took a couple of the shots with a really high ISO in order to re-create the 'grainy' image of his era. But no-one creates atmosphere the way Hitchcock did. As most people know, he appeared in every one of his movies in a cameo role - but not a lot of people know that in The Saboteur, he appeared in a cameo role sitting on a bus next to - can you guess? - Dorothy Parker! Heaven for me.

Cheap At Half The Price

2011-01-16T09:54:00.000-08:00

My new doggie-chocolate-drop dish

At this time of year in London, it's best to avoid leaving the house. If you absolutely have to go to the shops for essentials (bread, milk, treacle sponge, etc) then whatever you do, do not under any circumstances take your credit card with you. Because you can't swing a baguette without hitting something that you don't need, and don't want, but have to buy because it's in the sale at 70% off.

Take yesterday for instance. With the weather being a bit cold and damp I hit on the idea of making myself a stew and so walked to the store to get a pound of stewing steak, 2 carrots and a parsnip. I returned home with a 500-thread-count Flat Sheet and Pillowcase Set reduced from £140 to £36, three Lash lengthening Mascaras for the price of two, and a Zadig & Voltaire leather biker jacket (which was not reduced at all, but by then one purchase was pretty much blurring into another).

Yes, the sheets feel like silk. And who doesn't want longer eyelashes? But had I not left the house, I wouldn't be sitting here thinking to myself "Oh deary me, these old sheets are so scratchy and my lashes are so short". But once you've eyed the discounts, it doesn't take Christiane Amanpour to convince you that you can't afford not to buy them.

My friend Michele is the worst for this. She is addicted to shopping (she lives in Greenwich Village in Manhattan so it was a fair bet she had one psychosis or another - lets just be grateful that she's not addicted to work instead because work can seriously ruin your chances of having any fun in life). When shopping with Michele, I will pick up some obscure item that I like but can't imagine a use for, and without even pausing for breathe, she will come up with 101 uses for said item. "You can burn a candle in it, and you can keep your earrings in it, or you can put nuts in it at Christmas, and what about dog chews, you need a place for dog chews.... " and on and on her list goes until you find yourself standing there in the middle of the store with a glass dish in your hand, wondering how in God's name you have managed to live without it all these years.

Which is how, today, I went to meet her for a coffee and came home with a new french glass dish for my doggie chocolate drops.

The dog, in fact, seems to get the good end of this deal all round. Not only do her food treats have a nice dish but I also got out of the shower last night and found her making herself comfortable on my new silky sheets just minutes after I had put them on the bed. I wouldn't be surprised to come home and find her trying on the biker jacket for size.

Although I have to say, my eyelashes do look longer.

What Was I Thinking?

2011-01-04T15:39:00.000-08:00

Oh, how the mighty fall.

There I was in early December, strutting around the Chelsea Garden Centre, smugly telling anyone who would listen what fabulously high ceilings I had in my Notting Hill terrace and how I simply had to make the most of it with an enormous Christmas tree this year. I purchased a 10 foot Blue Spruce, brought it home and spent several hours decorating it, while listening to Bing Crosby with a bauble in one hand and a glass of eggnog in the other (me, not Bing Crosby).

Never once did I stop to wonder how in the name of God, when January came around, I was going to get this 10 foot monstrosity back out of the house again.

Not even when I unpacked it in my sitting room and, as I peeled away it's netting and the branches unfolded layer by layer, the room grew darker. Not even when more and more furniture had to be removed to make space for the dense foliage did it occur to me that this tree was double the width of my staircase.

It never occurred to me at all, in fact, until today - known to most as 4th January, but forevermore known to me as "Dyson Day" - when it was time to take down the tree.

Plan A was to throw the tree out of the sitting room window, over the balcony and onto the street below (my lounge is on the second floor of the house which is pretty common in Notting Hill. Don't worry if this makes no sense to you, it makes no sense to anyone, especially anyone with a 10 foot Christmas tree to dispose of).

Unfortunately, the general rule of thumb with trees is that the taller they are, the wider they are, and there comes a tipping point when the tree is so tall, it's width will prevent it's disposal through a window. By my calculations, that tipping point was around 4 feet shorter than my tree.

I quickly came up with a Plan B - to lay a protective sheet on my sitting room carpet, then saw or chop the tree into smaller sections and dispose of it one garbage bag at a time.

I went to my toolbox in search of something that could do the job. It will probably give you a good idea of how large and well-equipped my 'toolbox' is if I explain that, more accurately speaking, it's a shoebox. I will just point out though that it's a Gucci shoebox, so while it may not be one of the biggest toolboxes in the world, it's certainly one of the trendiest. Size isn't everything.

Inside said 'toolbox' is one piece of sandpaper, 5 paintbrushes, a trial pot of Farrow & Ball emulsion in "Lime White", some blue-tac and 2 screwdrivers. (Actual screwdrivers, not Screwdriver cocktails, though that's not a bad idea come to think of it).

So, as you can see, while I was fantastically prepared should I be overcome with the desire to repaint a very small wall and tac posters to it, none of this helped me with the removal of the Bavarian forest in my lounge.

The only Plan C I could think of was to drag this thing down the 3 flights of stairs, then vacuum all the pine needles. I don't know if you've ever seen how many pine needles a 10 foot Christmas tree sheds when it's dragged down a flight of stairs, but let me tell you, it's a lot.

After just 5 stairs, you couldn't see any of my first floor carpet for foliage, and the tree was stuck between the wall and the banister of the first floor landing. Teasing it around the corner was not an option, the only thing that would make it budge was clearly a big push. I knew this would cause most of the needles to drop and would require me to cancel my plans for the evening and instead spend the night hoovering. Yes, ok, I will admit that my only plan for the evening was to put on my pyjamas and watch Murder She Wrote, but still, it was a plan, you know?

I poured myself the last of the Christmas sherry and considered whether I should continue with the tree's removal or just leave it stuck there on the landing, grab the dog and move house.

Were it not for the fact that I couldn't get bear to leave behind my collection of Columbo DVDs, Dorothy and I could well have been settling into our new home this very minute. As it was, I pushed the tree down the stairs, through the hallway and out the door, by which time it was merely a branch, bare of all but the most robust needles. The rest, of course, were covering my floor giving a new meaning to the term 'carpet of leaves'.

Sometime around 7pm this evening, I went insane. Three hours of vacuuming stairs will do that to a person. I cried, I blathered, I questioned why people love high ceilings in the first place. A 7 foot ceiling, I stated several times, is more than sufficient to prevent most people banging their heads when they stand up. I believe the highlight of this argument was when I screamed out "How many 11 foot tall people are there in the world, anyway???". (I was alone in the house at this point, just in case you thought I was exaggerating when I said 'insane').

So for next year, I have already planned my Christmas tree. I don't care where I am living, or how high the ceilings are, I am getting a 3 foot, artifical tree.

And then I think I'm going to forego baubles and instead decorate it entirely with Swarovski crystals. It may not be the biggest Christmas tree in the world, but it will be one of the trendiest. Size, like I said, isn't everything.

It must be Christmas....

2010-12-20T14:08:00.000-08:00

One knows that the Christmas holiday is almost upon us because Nigella Lawson is once again gracing the covers of womens' magazines. I don't know what it is about that woman but nothing says "Seasons Greetings" like Nigella stuffing a sausage roll while wearing a gold organza ball gown.

One magazine in particular - Woman & Home - is offering us 48 new recipes for Christmas Day this year, ranging from Maple Glazed Butternut Squash to Couscous stuffing. But who are they kidding? While we may all read these recipes with varying levels of interest, come Christmas Day every woman in Britain will be stuffing the turkey with Paxo and serving it with roast potatoes and brussel sprouts, just like she does every year. You show me a woman who gets up on Christmas morning and makes couscous stuffing, and I'll show you the food editor of Woman & Home.

I shouldn't sound so cynical. Apparently, 'tis the season to be jolly, but I say lets call a spade a spade. 'Tis the season to avoid department stores as if your life depends on it, is what it is. Although for me, this year, it's different because this year I have my puppy Dorothy. In other words, my Christmas is punctuated by my constant cries of "Dorothy, stop eating the Christmas tree!" and "Down Dorothy! Put the wrapping paper down!".

But little Dorothy makes everything better, and Christmas is no exception. Decorating the tree, for example, wouldn't have been nearly as much fun if she and I hadn't played tug of war with the fairy (who was finally saved from decapitation only thanks to the bargaining power of a handful of liver treats). Oh, I know people say that Christmas is for children and that having a puppy is different to having a child, but lets do a quick recap - she wakes me up several times a night, my day's schedule is entirely dictated around her mealtimes, and I'm shattered and ready for bed by 9pm. How exactly is this different?

Anyway, I have taken this week off work to stay home and I had great plans for a creative week. I was going to take lots of puppy photographs, start my novel (as if), try out new recipes for winter mealtimes, bake my first ever tarte tatin, and read, read, read. Instead, I have spent most of the time sat on the couch in my pyjamas watching a tv channel called Xmas24 that shows made-for-tv christmas movies all day every day, which - despite being low budget and utterly predictable - are remarkably addictive.

And of course I've done all this while eating slice after slice of Tunis Cake from Marks and Spencer, each of which is a little slice of heaven with fudge on top. How on earth will I fit into my gold organza ball gown should the desire to stuff a sausage roll overtake me?

Anyway, that will have to be it from me today. I've gotta go, Dorothy's eating the Christmas tree again.

Merry Christmas everyone, with love to you and your loved ones. I wish you all a truly wonderful holiday, x

Still the best-selling Christmas fragrance of all time - Chanel No 5.

One of my favourite Christmas decorations, bought from Sweden. I find Dorothy several times a day looking longingly at him, thinking of the fun she could have chewing off those buttons.

A Kangaroo Christmas ornament, bought for me by an almost-Mother-in-law, when I lived in Australia. A reminder of warmer times.

Dorothy. Looking up at the Christmas tree that tastes soooo good.

Chew Chew

2010-11-09T14:33:00.000-08:00

Can anyone explain to me why my kitchen floor is currently cluttered with two milk-tasting dog bones, one rope tug of war, one Kong filled with peanut butter, two beef-scented donut-rings, three schmacko chews and an assortment of tennis balls, yet my 11-week old puppy is chewing my computer power cable?

Despite studying a heavy selection of books to prepare me for getting my first puppy, the fact is that nothing prepares you for getting your first puppy. I've got books ranging from "Inside of a Dog" to "The Perfect Puppy" to "The Idiots Guide to Dog Training" but none of them really tell you what you need to know, like how to explain to your puppy that you can't play tug of war right now because you are on a very important conference call or how to stop her eating your (clearly very tasty) cushion covers.

Yes, I know it doesn't have to be this hard work. I bring it all on myself. She is yet to eat a morsel of mince that hasn't been organically reared and purchased from Lidgates - Butchers to Her Majesty The Queen - on account of if it's good enough for the royal corgis, then it's good enough for my Dorothy. Last week on her first visit to the vet, he kindly offered her a liver treat so that she warmed to him before getting her vaccination, and unlike every dog that has passed his door before, she wouldn't even eat it. She just looked at him as if to say "Dried liver? No thanks, I wouldn't want to spoil my dinner. I'm having sirloin steak and basmati rice tonight".

Speaking of the vet, I kind of got a vibe that he fancied me at first, right up until the point where he asked me which dog shampoo I use and I honestly answered "Oh, I don't use dog shampoo. I bathe her in Jo Malone Lime and Mandarin shower gel". I think it was at that point that he figured out just how high maintenance I really am, though personally I would have thought that a man with his qualifications could have figured that out by the Louis Vuitton dog lead.

I will admit though, that I'm starting to agree that designer items and dogs don't mix. When she was wet and cold from walking on the beach this weekend, I snuggled her up in my Ralph Lauren purple label cashmere cardigan. I don't know if you have ever smelt a wet dog, but that's now what my Ralph Lauren purple label cashmere cardigan smells like. Not exactly what Ralph was planning.

But you know what, Ralph will just have to get in line because this isn't exactly what I was planning either. With my uncanny ability to idealise other people's lives (I blame the fact that I was brought up on a council estate), I used to look at people with their dogs, and think of their wonderful morning walks and their afternoon naps, and I never gave a thought to the sleepless nights, or their half-eaten dining chairs, or the seemingly endless poopy-scooping.

But sometimes what you weren't planning turns out to be just what you wanted. As I sit here, albeit in my odd socks and with bags under my eyes, she lies curled up next to me snoring and snuggling, and I absolutely love her to bits.

I guess it must be true when they say that life is what happens when you're busy planning something else.

Puppy Love

2010-11-02T16:03:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, I turned 40 a few weeks ago, and with it realised that I had been so busy during my twenties and thirties that I completely and utterly forgot to get married and have children.

Oh well.

So despite being the commitment-phobe that I am (I don't even have SKY television because it means I would have to sign up to a 12-month contract) I decided it was time I had the lifelong companion that I longed for. So I got a puppy. She is a cocker-spaniel, she is 9 weeks old, she is absolutely adorable and as I type this, she is eating my coffee table.

All the books suggest that if she is eating my belongings it is because I haven't given her enough doggie chews to keep her occupied, but trust me, my floor is covered in so many dog toys and chews that I am considering renting this puppy her own house.

They're even colour co-ordinated. Determined as I was not to spend my weekends roaming around Pet World (the animal equivalent of Toys-R-Us. How do you people with children stand it in there? Do you drink heavily? ) I instead prepared myself for her arrival with a few key purchases from Mungo & Maud, the independant luxury pet store in Pimlico. It's the kind of place where the Prada-clad salesman sells you a 3-inch piece of rope for £18 while keeping a straight face, but then I'm the kind of person who buys it because it is a muted coffee colour and will go with my couch, so who's the real idiot here?

Anyway, it was a waste of money. I put her to bed the first night with her favourite soft toy (pictured) and the said piece of rope, then headed on up to bed thinking that would be enough to keep her occupied. The next morning I returned and a swift review of my kitchen led me to conclude that she must have had a few of her Doberman friends over during the night, and challenged them to a Tug of War with my Williams Sonoma limited-edition pink oven gloves.

I have ignored the dietary advice from the breeder, who suggested I feed her Oatibix with Goats milk for breakfast, Scrambled eggs for lunch and meat with rice for dinner. Please. This is more cooking than I normally do in a month and lets not forget I am down a pair of oven gloves. So as I spend the next few days interviewing for the right vet and select one based on his credentials, the quality of magazines in his waiting room and how handsome he is compared to that bloke from All Creatures Great and Small, I'll ask for his advice on what to feed her. In the meantime, she seems pretty happy tucking into the Organically-Reared Prime Lean Minced Beef from Marks and Spencers, then snacking on my kitchen chairs for occasional variety.

I love her sooooo much. The only thing left for me is to choose her a name. Maybe I will name her Coco. Maybe Daphne. Maybe Dorothy, after my favourite writer and poet Dorothy Parker.

Or, on the basis that you are what you eat, maybe I should name her "Coffee Table".

Ready to go shopping, this is her in her RAC harness for travelling safely in the car. Lets not talk about the state of my skirting boards.