just another ride home

A lady walks into a shop.

Me.

I head to the sleekly lit counter and go about my business – searching for a non-chemical mascara if you must know – and then, suddenly, something fluffy plunges fuzzily onto the faux wood floor. It makes that bones and fur in a heap noise that only a falling dog (or mammal?) can make. The dropper, made up to the nines as only a chihuahua owner can be, goes overdrive into guilty mwahmwahmwah mood. The little pooch – diamante jerkin and all – seems fine to me and, clocking the shop assistant’s raised eyebrow, I accidentally let a stifled giggle slip out.

They didn’t sell what I was after.

I then walk in a daze down the clogged tube steps and escalators and am so entranced by the enthusiastically gay swaggering bottom before me – not to mention the manicured aroma and elegant, floating handbag arm – that I miss my tube.

This does, however, give me the chance to witness one of the most spectacular falls I have seen on the TfL network. (Almost as impressive as the two drunken, middle-aged ladiez who on their way home to Essex caught a heel and dived hand-in-hand in a squealing mess along the central floor of Liverpool Street Station to rapturous applause.) A large green-jacketed man goes flying, utterly losing it in a belly down whooosh along the centre of the carriage as the tube staggeringly whirrs out of the station. I imagine his eyes at scuffed shoes level.

Arms go to reach him as my own hand flies to my impressed, laughing mouth.

————–

And a little pic from my trip to India last month… Spot the monkey.

a thumping heart and coursing veins

The tubes rumble and steam under this great, beating city. They stop and start, shudder and moan but always, onwards keep going.

It all links together – a web of botched causeways, slip streams and dead ends, haphazardly, organically united under the coarsely slashed circle.

Its lifeblood, pumping through its veins 19 hours a day: we, the greying commuters. We seeth along its clogged ducts, feed into bottle-necks, cram behind the lost tourists, tut at the trundling, obese bags and three-wheeled prams and relentlessly pant in search of fresh reality.

It’s another world down there, the monoclinical lighting, globs of chewing gum – usually, perfectly, lodged in the nostril of a star on a poster – and stink from the bowels of life above. Every day we file down, rush and push, squeeze, raise eyebrows, grimace and shove, sit, avoid eye-contact, stare, lean, welcome, pour out, rush along, bustle and beep beep into the blinking morning. Then the formula flips and it’s dark and the mood is different and more foreign is ringing around the tin carriage, people who haven’t worked, first timers on the system, oh how weird that must feel… and once again we’re spat into cold, shivering energy.

The cartes huitres, the lights, the whirring wind forced through the pipes. Beggars, bad buskers, lovely drunkards and the occasional, fleeting glimpse of a face with a future you’d like to be part of.

Welcome to Monday.

 

 

wild salmon in tranquility

Imagine the world’s best salmon, added to the world’s most decadently naughty foie gras, tickled by oyster tapioca, licked by air-thin daikon radish slivers, punched by immense hits of umami and sweet, smoky soy wafts. A crunch of immaculately trimmed and fried silver skin, a sand-pit of unidentifiable edible dust. All kicked into perfect, spankingly fresh touch by a slice of sharp, crunchy granny smith and peppery ginger.

Aside, a diminutive dollop of thick, black, elemental salmon belly fat, cast into the night by shots of squid ink.

I was lucky enough to be at the World Sushi Awards on Saturday. I still can’t get over the flavours of Swedish chef Sayan Isaksson’s mouthful of fresh sushi. So utterly brilliantly thought out that I can’t help but wax lyrical, sail close to wind of verbosity and slip into raptures at the thought of it.

I’m making myself sick with envy.

udder shudder

A technical term, I think you’ll find, for the involuntary reflex that besets those who have over-eaten at St John restaurant. May also affect those who have recently come to learn the provenance of many industrially farmed livestock products (timely cross-ref: Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece).

All meat and dairy products succumb to the stuttering reaction – a flinching, grimacing cheek, pulled in revulsion. Sufferers are prone to worry peers with Tourets-like nervous rictus motions of the mouth and face. It aint pretty.

After a meal of bone cups of stinking molten veal marrow lava, a whole suckling pig – some perfunctory cabbage thrown in – and a load of sickeningly heavy suet ginger puddings, udder shudder followed by veganism seemed the only option.

Sorry Joe, I know you’re tutting as you read this. Many vegetables, minimal meat and perhaps even some home-made almond milk, here I come.

pointless ladders

192. Brookside on Bangladesh on Huguenots.

Tights. You wear them once then they die.

A night on the plank and the ninja recline.

A one-finger slap is delicately sly.

Naked flitters between the rooms – a stealthy flummox will get you by.

My new home. The plank is the bed. Last night I dreamt I was camping, it is that unforgivingly hard. The recline to pillow level is executed with stealth and speed – as uncomfy as the ancient futon may be, bed itself is always blissfully welcome. My tights might as well be compostable, their micro webs unzip at such an alarming pace I wonder whether I am the only woman in London to get through five pairs a week. Please Nasa, invent a 10 denier that lasts. Next time you want to slap someone, try the one-finger slap. It’s subtle, it’s to the point, it’s pathetic. It does the trick. A stealthy flummox is nothing more than a decoy for the greater good. Useful and utterly necessary. Naked flitters are not only possible but cockle-warmingly ordinary when it comes to a landing around which it would be impossible to truly swing Hello Kitty’s runtish little brother.

two-and-a-half drinks down

“OMIGOD! Didn’t he sleep wiv what’s ‘er face? You know, er!”  She tuts through gloopily varnished lips, whilst her right hand lingers, poised in mid-mascara stroke, the caked black wand humming around the side of her head like a conductor desperately attempting to control a microscopic orchestra. She tuts again, the summons isn’t working and the name, it seems, just won’t come. “What’s ‘er face?!” she half-tuts, half-sighs, shocked with her slippery grip on such juicy gossip amongst such a captive audience on such a promising Friday night.

We, the passengers of the Central Line tube rumbling towards Liverpool Street, are just as interested to know who he is as her three mates are.

It’s the end of the week, the venn diagram time of the evening when two diametrically opposed forces converge on the tube. That twilight zone in the forever crepuscular life of the underground, when each carriage becomes a temporarily interlocked front line of the post-work-had-a-few-pints-and-feeling-decidedly-in-the-mood-to-rip-it-up camp and the weary, urban-tanned, work-laden, exhausted, mentally bedraggled, spreadsheeted-to-death heavyweights.

The swaying bodies either reek of offices or booze or both – the carriage wobbles, so do we and it’s a tipping point. It’s home or game on.

Hardly an argument for the poor souls on their way to the nightshift, or the beaten young father on his way back to his baby. Or the tourists, tired and lost and ripped-off. Or to the lads, nervously jiggling with pre-piss-up nerves, pints in their eyes and girls in their dreams. And earshot.

Laughter the sound of fluffy picture frames and bags of fresh chips brings me back to the tutter, who is now declaiming the virtues of make-up application on the tube. She smears a worryingly khaki coloured paste across her forehead, leaving a no-mans land between her hairline and the painted skin. The odd thing is, her skin was fine beforehand. Better, actually. But that’s not on their minds – least of all hers as she squints into a swimming, stamp-sized mirror.”‘E gets around! Omigod, didn’t he sleep wiv that other one as well? E gets around doesn’t ‘e?!” They all shriek with alcopop-fuelled excitement and more lipgloss – the single most powerful tool in the urban girl’s arsenal – is passed around with cooing reverence and a round of bubblegum-scented appreciation.

jerk off

I’m lying in my darkened bedroom, grey light creeping in around the curtains.

The air is humming with the pulsating blades of a helicopter, hovering pretty much directly above my home. It sounds like a noisy tractor, chopping away at nothingness instead of a harvest.

The tractorchopper started whining at 7:30am. On a Sunday.

Somewhere in the background – don’t think we don’t hear you, brother – is a bass beat, straining against the sabbath calm and heavy with the anticipation of bigger, better, louder tunes.

The crafted oil drums are out, lying idle under cheap B&Q pergodas, ready to billow and belch out half a ton of jerk chicken. The blades keep on chopping.

It’s Carnival and I’m scared. And tired.

I hear a click of key in lock and the clunk of a chubb bar falling back. The door squeaks open and old uncle Jamaica’s obscenities, muttering murmers and self-banter drift in through my open window. Slippers shuffle along stained concrete towards relief. Any second now, I will hear the trickle of old man’s piss falling pathetically into the gutter, meandering down the red brick wall and dousing the weary drainpipe.

emptiness

On death.

I am feeling morbid at the moment. Not morbid in a down, dragging at my heels sort of way, rather in a scary, eye-opening, ah, so that’s what this is all about! kind of way.

Every day in the newsroom I read of another soldier, baby or unfortunate, wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time expiry. Another soul poofs into nothingness, leaving a bank account, some clothes and a yearning family behind. Cameras flash, pages are filled and stories, stories, thousands of chinese whispers of varying degrees of ludicrous wrongness trickle and seep through the mass.

It is starting to feel like every news story, every account, tale, yarn, history, missive and poem is irreconcilably forged around the eventual empty space that will one day just be.

The strange thing is that the world keeps on turning and the streets keep on droning and the bees keep on humming and all of those people who have been torn apart and are left behind keep on walking, talking, eating and sleeping – and agreeing to being photographed and interviewed for the day after tomorrow’s bin linings.

It sometimes feels like the living live to take care of the dead.

It happens to thousands – probably millions – of us every day. And we are all replaced. As we, too, need to be taken care of.

ashes and ironing boards

One of my mother’s proudest moments, she won’t admit, is visiting Lords and standing inches away from a crumbling clay urn, paper label curled with age, handwriting spidery and faded. The Ashes, secreted in this diminutive and unexclamatory mini vessel, mean a lot to her. The glass that protected and separated the icon steamed with our breaths as we admired the odd little signifier of so much of her identity.

She’s not what you’d describe as sporty and doesn’t own a black labrador, a barbour or a cricket bat. She doesn’t even have a son and as I far as I know has never played cricket as an adult. She has introduced a hundred friends to avocados and is never knowingly beaten in the kitchen. She’s Australian. A closet hooligan and creative soul, she’s banished to the guffawing countryside, wellies-and-pearls brigades of the home counties, and is a unique and rudderless woman.

Test cricket is the only time when much ironing seems to unfold (or fold?) at her helm. Having ironed all of Thursday, Friday presented obstacles of the aeroplane variety that meant distance between my mother and a telly. This is how our texts went:

11:22 Cricket results please x

me: 4-1 aus, england 425, hope that makes sense x

11:34 Help does that mean an aussie is out already? X

me: Yep… The office went wild. Sorry mumma x

11:37 Who, katich?

me: Oh no you’re not going to like this. Ponting has just been knocked out. Hughes was before. 10-2. X x

11: 41 ohmigod

me: You have to start a blog on this. It’d be a classic. x

11:45 I might have left the country

Phone call – mother checks that I am not laughing or going wild with rest of office. Shocked at the possibility. Sounds despondent, saddened and even desperate.

14:15 Dare i ask the score? X x

me: 63 for 2. getting better! X x

17:29 Do you know the score now? X

me: Ok cricket 156 for 8 bad light stopped play xx

I haven’t heard since…She is, of all places, in Turnberry this weekend. Not watching golf.

bhag

I’m getting myself a bhag.

It’s going to be lovely and shiny and a bit smelly and definitely very scary. I am going to be sucked into the gloopy sea, pop around the fizzing stars, bump into flame red Florence on the dewy, messy Stone Circle and bump along on the hot coals of the deep underbelly.

It’s going to be filled with answers, questions, magic, rage, mystery, wonderment, power and dreams. It’s going to smell of honey-suckle and frankincense and sizzling garlic and warm sun-kissed skin. There’ll be clanging bells, weeping angels, wooping whistles, love and friends.

It’s my big, hairy, audacious goal and I am scratching, clawing, searching for the courage to take steps to its edge.

a b c d t g m j x y z

Everything’s behind at the moment. My time-keeping (although it was ever thus), my blog post-keeping and my brain. I can blame all three, I hope, on Glasto. The aftermath is still cooling off. I can’t work out, for example, why the words in my last post are tiny – perhaps it’s just my computer, but they seem to be stuck hovering somewhere round the font 7 mark and are really terrible to read.

I blame it on seeing Tanya Gold rolling around in a soupy brown moat of portaloo-flavoured bin puddle on day 4 of the Festival. Clean as a whistle, she approached, plopped down and rubbed away, dumpily slopping her ample behind in its stinky filth and trying her absolute hardest to do what pretty much no-one else did: get muddy. All in the name of accurate reportage.

Back to London and back to the wider world and that, this week, means the mournavision that is MJ in death. I have just cooked dinner watching the last chunk of the memorial. Surprisingly, I even managed to eat and keep my food down.

I tried to summon a little bit of emotion, just a teeny drop of teary reflection, but I couldn’t (perhaps my heart is also a bit behind, on Glasto time), no matter how hard I tried, I felt zilch. It’s hard to feel sad about someone who is so iconic, so god-like, so globally super-dooper-mega-famous and so seemingly untouchable that he never seemed like he was human to me, anyway. He was a car stereo speaker, a worn-out record, a brand new cassette tape, a full dancefloor, a sparkling dance move, a trilling warble, a funky bass, a hot, hot dancer, a first song, a last song, but never a real person. To me.

So, there you have it:  from Tanya to Michael in one neat sweep of the emotionless spectrum. Next time I will have my full brain back, I promise. And fonts shall be legible.

tweet off

I have just signed up to Twitter. Two years after my techgeek friend (everyone really should have one) claimed it was the future, I have finally come around to its simpering ways. Work made me do it, actually.

I’m heading to Glastonbury in a matter of hours – and the queues are looking shambolic. The weather, too, is looking more than a little restless, with various forecasters flippantly interspersing words like sunstroke, heat and scorcher with rainstorms, downpours and clouds. I’m practically indecently assaulting my faux veneered desk, such is the level of my enthusiasm for touching wood for sunshine.

I’m going to try to Twitter from the Festival as much as my phone battery, wherewithall and sobriety allow. I’ll be keeping an eye on celebs in the VIP area, eavesdropping on band gossip and sampling the local delicacies – ie, cider.

I also want to check out the eco goings-on and speak to some of the sustainability guys down there. It’s a miracle that 150,000 bodies decamp to a corner of Somerset and leave very little trace. Leave no trace is the ideal, but tent pegs are horrible to locate with a hangover.

So, back to Twitter. It’s occurred to me that if the rainforests are the lungs of the earth, then celebrities are her twittering vocal chords. I’m not sure where this leaves us mere mortals, but follow my progress, keep updated and stay in touch via twitter.com/daisydumas.

Hmmm. I just wrote the above for work – but I’ve abandoned the mission. The reality of actually logging on and twittering (yuck) from the world’s biggest music festival for the benefit of my boss is very, very, veeeery remote. In fact, let’s face it, it’s as good as extinct.

I can imagine it, though. Fast forward 20 hours… Pink ice blocks and goblin fairies floating in red sea of wellies, mud is frothing from the speakers and my cider is full of imps… Mad, I tell you.

beer wellies mud tents portaloos tapioca

and press passes! BLOOP… I’m going to Glastonbury.

My virginal body shall be offered to the festival gods in the name of journalistic integrity and all I ask in return is for some sunshine.

In two weeks I’ll be there, pitched, purposeful and partying, poised to discover a messy, colourful, crazy Mecca at the end of my own little festival Haj. It’s only taken 28 years.

In other news, I’d like to say thanks to all of you who provided no help whatsoever in my quest to make perfect tapioca pancakes. Your disinterest/inaction/befuddlement has, on one hand, given me little hope in the overall mission, my chances of perfection in the task assigned now hovering around slim to none. And on the other – fortified by my worrying obsession with Brazilian ebay clips teaching me, via various Mamas in various headgear, how to make the bastards – made me more determined than ever.

Ha. So there.

runny honey: number one

Welcome to runny honey: number one, the first in a hunger-selective series of food snippets.

TAPIOCA

Brazilians in London, answer my prayers.

I’m trying to make tapioca pancakes, the amazing white half moons that beautiful bodies breakfast on day in, day out along Brazil’s northern beaches. It’s a very unBritish thing to picture cooking, but tapioca melts and forms a pancake without any liquid or oil. I think, I hope. It’s worth experimenting, even to capture just one Proustian droplet of the warm, squidgy, chewy pancake filled with melted cheese, sweet condensed milk and shaved coconut that I ate on Jericoacoara beach in 2002.

It’s been an eventful and convoluted journey, one that I hadn’t expected to be quite so blind and, frankly, unchartered in these necks of the woods.

Having read The Hungry Cyclist, I got all excited and brought a big, easily accessible bag of tapioca, poured it into a hot pan and waited for the sago seeds to magically bond. Needless to say, nothing happened. At all. Not even a little bit burnt sago seeds happened.

I tried blending them, hoping to powder the stubborn pellets. I tried frying them in butter. I tried soaking them. Nothing worked.

I then ventured all the way to Clapham to visit very ooh-la-la restaurant, Trinity, and ordered the prune tapioca, hoping to learn a bit more. It was delicious, but eating the boarding school variety didn’t aid the quest for knowledge of the pancake variety. Trinity, by the way, is a marvel.

I have researched virtual and far for the elusive farinha tapioca – grainy flour that should, I am told, do the sticking trick. Having scoured websites, Brazilian shopping forums, Harlesden supermercado tips and the Brazilian Embassy in London online, I’ve finally found it, sitting, alone, on a dusty shelf in a tiny Brazilian supermarket all of two minutes from my home. Amazing.

So far, so good? Am I doing it right? I can’t quite believe I don’t need any glue, not even water – or is the joke on me? Here goes…

rudeboys love the burn

From a distance, there would have been a shimmery wobble over London at times last week: a hazy heat hit the city and we were treated to our own oasis of warmth amidst a wintry late spring chill.

Needless to say, the damp bite’s back, making the heatwave seem nothing more than a mirage in the verdant distant past.

But – mmm – that sun. It beat down like a massage after a marathon ( I can only imagine), like a hot shower after camping in the rain, like warm rays after a year of cool days – precisely what it was. And when the sun shines in London, the whole city throws down a collective tribal dance and goes bananas.

Brixton swealtered. The whole samba-rhythmed Caribbean community poured into the streets – and out of  an acreage of skimpy lycra – as Red Stripe cans rolled, tunes beat on and policemen slowly prowled up and down Coldharbour Lane. Fixies teetered along Brick Lane, glass and bad haircuts everywhere. Farringdon burst onto the pavements, cigarette breaks for once a damn delight. Harrow Road’s pavements smudged into stringy stickiness as globs of chewing gum melted and clung. Reggae, Irish jigs, fortifying Guinness and the obligatory police van all as omnipresent as ever, but with sun in their steps.

And from SE2 to N2 and beyond, rudeboys, ripped-off mountain bikes, labels, cheap jewellery and Jafaican accents took up sentry on every junction, street corner and Costcutter doorstep. Fried chicken shops went into overdrive and water guns sold out. With the odd bass-heavy BMW surrounded like bees to a honeypot, neighbourhood posses multiplied and dominated the streets last weekend. ‘Young professionals’, drinking lager on the grass in combat shorts and Havaianas, didn’t stand a chance.

More than any city demographic, subculture, vein or branch, rudeboys love the urban burn.

new hudson

I rattle!

I rattle really loudly when I trundle over the anachronistic (but oddly modern as I think they think they’re a bit of a defense mechanism) cobbles at the top and bottom of the most lovely Kensington Palace Gardens.

I rattle down Brick Lane and along Hackney Road. I rattle, clunk, tinnily click and tick, tick, tick along.

That’s what happens when you own a 1930s New Hudson bike, with original Sturmey Archer gears and a little pouch on the back. She’s a dull black colour (which I am under strict instructions not to tamper with – it’s a rust thing, you see) and she has shiny handle bars and a huge happy head lamp.

The rattling was a tad embarassing at first, like a pair of squeaking 8th grade school shoes, but I’m feeling pretty good about the old girl’s foibles now. At least London knows when I’m coming.

Honestly – the policemen at the cobbles stop their time-passing and look up when I round the corner and take on the stones – if they’re not on their way to the miniscule security cottage to make tea or coming back with empty/full mugs thereof, that is.

Oh I love my bike! She’s a thing of pre-wartime stark beauty, not smart or flashy, just very, very functional. And rattly.

crafty – or just born that way

My bike rides to and from work are indulgent thinking time – they are pure revery, mostly nonsense, often about my route, elevating the slightest shop facade changes into beacons of unwelcome socio-economic change, or road alterations into council-endorsed masterplans to prevent me from arriving at work on time. My route’s idiosyncracies evolve in semi-diurnal patterns so that each morning, life feels fresh and each evening it feels like it has regressed – the Caribbean boozer on the street corner and its ever-present patrons a little more ready and raring to go at 5:30pm than at 8:15am.

But lately, in fact, most of the time I’ve cycled in London – about a year a half – I have had to factor another element into my mobile thinking time. An element of awareness, cunning and avian expertise. A parameter of skill that is centred upon safety and my deep, dark, inner prejudice.

Pigeon dodging.

They are everywhere and yet nowhere – my wheels hurtle towards them, screech sideways to miss their mangy feathers, they disappear in the nick of time and pop up at the at the very last nano-second. I don’t want to touch them – for both of our sakes – but they sit in my path, refuse to budge and then saunter (a sort of hyper-saunter, if possible, like running away quickly in a slow manner, akin to Usain Bolt watched in slow-mo…or is it the other way round, like Eric the Eel in fast-forward?), taking their own sweet time to move in a way that can generously be described as flaky.

I’ve heard them called sky-rats but that puts them in the league of snazzy hover-boards or x-ray glasses, which they are most definitely not. They obviously have very poor peripheral vision – like burkha-clad women or blinkered horses – and a bike, unlike a cab or a bus, just isn’t big enough or loud enough to grab their litter-pecking attention. Yet, I have never heard of a pigeon/bike collision in London. Come to think of it, the only pigeons I ever see in London are alive and well, a few sporting the truly manky one-legged look, but clearly not victims of RTAs.

I conclude, therefore, that this species of winged survivors, whilst being a general nuisance and very unpretty, is cockroachy in its evolutionary steadfastness. Or, perhaps, a) I am a supremely fast cyclist, catching pigeons unaware and representing the only challenge to them acoss the city b) pigeons are really quite good at dodging bikes, so good, in fact, that they now spice the moves up into a game of pigeon (like chicken, but more urban), c) my cycling time revery is leading to places that need never be considered – it is time to change my route or d) I am so slow on my bike, deep in thought, that I creep up quietly and practically squash the poor, harmless creatures. I am not stealthy, they are not clever and I am mistaking their inherent London born-and-bred insouciance as Darwinian cockiness.

I’ll have to ponder this on my way into work tomorrow morning.

out damn spot

We sit in our dog-eared lounge after the pub closes, a bit bungle, drinking cheap white wine that tastes of dried apricots, smelly socks and nit lotion.

The man from Winkworths is coming next week. We contemplate clearing the house up to spring clean standard. We all focus on a single, unsightly red splodge staining the centre of our once-magnolia ceiling, directly above the coffee table and below Humphrey’s bed.

Pure Macbeth, it is impossible to see the red spot as anything but a seeping blood patch, dripping and pooling from a gruesome murder scene only feet above. The red spot remains and insists on constantly, silently, reminding us of a ghastly evening.

Fake blood, you see, is hard to remove from ceilings. And walls. And clothes, carpets and pillows. It’s behind pictures, on the underside of the sink, streaked along cracks in the floorboards and flicked across insides of cupboards. It’s dribbling form Marilyn’s black and white glass-covered pout and speckles the private view that is the back of the loo door.

Nearly half a year after Halloween and its hectic, crowded, ghastly fun, the spots refuse to budge. The scary gourd is still sitting on the window ledge, next to the plastic spider and I have only just found the last of the rolling, socketless eyeballs, I think.

Out damn spot! We don’t want to frighten the lovely customers. But judging by things so far, our wrinkled and happy sitting room should be presentable and clean in about 6 months’ time. By Halloween, that is.

lagged

Air-travel without the journey, plane, airport or destination - NEW for this summer time!

Get all the holiday-induced jetlag you could ever envy by living in the UK when the clocks change. For optimal results, make sure you are domicile (or on a long-term visit) over the last weekend of March when, all of a sudden, hour hands across the nation unceremoniously slide an extra hour down clock faces.

I had to scrape myself out of bed this morning – my maladjusted bodyclock thought it was 06:15, afterall, and getting to sleep last night was a long process, my mind refusing to shut down an hour earlier. I am not hungry but the flashing red digits on our oversized newsroom clocks tell me it is time for my lunch break.

On one hand, this is the beginning of the loveliness that is BST – lazy afternoons that slip idly away at 10pm and busy, bright mornings that awake youthfully early.

On the other hand, one hour’s time change means it’ll take 24 hours to recalibrate my internal rythyms and feel normal once again, according to NASA. It’s jetlag, without the jet. But, like most holidayish components, it’s worth it.

two-inch roots and four-inch heels

Seven days until my little sister’s wedding.

We’re all sorted, organised and briefed. I have my orders, know the schedule and have even dry-cleaned my macintosh. It’s all fine – perfect, in fact, apart from the physical, bodily – phenomenological, if you will – side of things.

I look in the mirror and see wrinkles – lots of them – small, crinkly ruts just sprouting from nowhere, seemingly overnight, certainly within the past year or so. They splinter over my skin like a river system, forming valleys and troughs along the way.

My hair has a good two inches of darkness crowning its birdnesty summit and my whole body feels like it needs to be high-pressure hosed, the urban tan (grey, wintery, polluted) scrubbed away under controlled conditions. I’m white, a little tired and a bit cold a lot of the time.

It’s looking up though and as the magnolia buds on our front patch unfurl to pink, sepia-toned floppiness, I realise how much I am looking forward to the big day!

We’ve downgraded our bridesmaidy footwear from the mooted 4-inch weapons of mass destruction to sleeker, lower ones and I am heading to the miracle worker tomorrow to have my roots duly attended to.

But there’s nothing I can do about the wrinkles. I wonder, in a moment of cosmetic-perfumed revery whether their arrival means that I’m set to miss out the in-between bit – jumping straight from dewy, youthful springiness to saggy, aged and past it in one fell swoop. Is this what my mother has always knowingly feared as she desperately hypes beauty sleep, moderated alcohol intake and not smoking to her four daughters? Will I look back and see old-age as starting at the time my younger sister (and baby of the family) got hitched, leaving me with only one unmarried ally?

It’s all a bit scary. But at least I won’t go grey overnight, shaken by impending spinsterhood – the bleach should put paid to that.