Some observations:

1)    BROWS

You will doubtless be aware that the Front Row (or FROW if you read Grazia) is the most exclusive place to be seen at fashion week, and is – for absolute Grade A people watching – far more compelling viewing than the catwalk. At no other [...]]]> I have completed my very first fashion week!

Some observations:

1)    BROWS

You will doubtless be aware that the Front Row (or FROW if you read Grazia) is the most exclusive place to be seen at fashion week, and is – for absolute Grade A people watching – far more compelling viewing than the catwalk. At no other time would you get to see Anna Wintour, Phillip Green, Kanye West and a 15 year old blogger with a feathered pineapple on their head shoehorned onto one bench like a bunch of strange netball reserves.

All the other rows are much less fabulous, since they can only be reached with a sideways late-to-the-cinema shuffle, which is a special kind of challenge when most of the occupants (men included) are wearing 7 inch heels. Though I spent most of my time on the back row – or BROW in the spirit of Grazia –  there were a few moments in the dizzy heights of 3, and I even hit the big time at John Rocha with a 2, where I was within spitting distance of the Editor of Vogue. I did not spit on her. Here I am on the BROW at Mulberry, you can just see me at the back, to the right of my colleague Robyn with the glasses:

2)      SHOES

The trouble with spending your time on the BROW is you can’t see any of the outfits properly from the waist down, unless you’re in possession of a periscope, which I wasn’t (poor preparation). I therefore have no idea what next season’s shoe / knee trends are, though if you’re in the market for some specialist waist-up fashion forecasting, I am your woman.

On the same token, should you wish to fake a front row status at fashion week, it’s best to talk non-stop about the shoes:

‘Did you make it to Giles?’

‘Oh yes. Fabulous show. Fabulous (you say, lighting up a Vogue menthol and waving it about) Loved, loved, loved the shoes’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, they had these beautiful miniature bows. About a 1mm wide. Tiny. On the inner heel. Gorgeous’

3)    CLOTHES

One of my favourite Fashion editors once wrote that the ‘anything goes’ mantra is nonsense, and that dressing for fashion week is a fraught and stressful process. I would disagree, but with one crucial caveat – anything really does go, as long as it’s not (gasp!) normal. In broader terms, you have three options:

-       Showcase a perfectly planned trend-by-numbers capsule wardrobe (snag: you need a bit of cash for this)

-       Dress head-to-toe in black and hope for the best

-       Look insane

It might not be fair, but by this logic Kirsty Allsop’s Sister made more of a faux pas by pitching up at Jasper Conran in jeans and a Boden twinset than the Japanese male blogger in the long green skirt and fur crown. I took the all-black option, reasoning that in an emergency I could always pass myself off as one of the Somerset House bar staff.

4)    WRONG SEATS

I sat in the wrong seat at Emilio de La Morena. I say ‘wrong seat’, I actually had a standing ticket  so technically all the seats were wrong for me: ‘Excuse me Madame. You’re sitting in my seat’ said a suited Italian man, tapping me on the shoulder. By the indignant-embarrassed look on his face you could tell he was having an inner struggle between his sense of fashion week one-upmanship and the blatant anti-chivalry of kicking a girl out of her seat in plain view of at least 150 other women.The fashion week one-upmanship won over and I was ejected to scuttle back to a standing spot by the door. Back in my place.

At Topshop I had a Standing * ticket, which is marginally better than a plain old Standing ticket, by virtue of the teeny tiny asterisk. This little star meant we didn’t need to queue, and our standing spots were picked out at least ten minutes ahead of the normal standing people.  You know you’re into a hierarchical business when even the standing people are marginalised. I did wonder if there was a Standing (-) ticket which allowed you to come in only if you promised to stand at the very back. With your eyes closed.

5) EXCITED BAD IPHONE PHOTOGRAPHY

I am not cool enough to see Kate Moss whisk past in double denim and not to try and get a shot of it, at any blurry costs. So, without further ado…. Here is Kate Moss!

6) PRESENTATIONS

These sound very posh, but they’re actually just a cut-price alternative to a fashion show, which cost around £100 000 to put on.  No, I’ve no idea where it goes either, but it’s not on backstage catering that’s for sure (the average fashion week model is so thin, you could post her to Hong Kong for less than 50p). This presentation I went to featured models in animal masks. I feel like this model drew the short straw:

You can just imagine them divvying it up beforehand:

Model: Look, I get that it’s animal prints and everything, but do we really need the masks?

Model 2: It’s to cement the theme

Model: And why am I the baboon? Do I already look a bit like a baboon? Is that it?

Model 2: No of course not. It’s… Completely random

Model: That’s alright for you to say, you got the tiger, tigers are cool and sexy. Baboons are not.

7) ICE CREAM

At least they could console themselves here, at the Mulberry ice cream stand. Now that’s a trend I’m definitely on board with:

On Thursday night I made a Nigella chilli con carne, containing – true to Lawson form – two [...]]]> Last weekend  was a bit middle-aged – there was a dinner party, an antique shop session (where, embarrassingly, I bumped into someone from work, destroying any remaining notions that I do cool things with my weekends) and a golf course.

On Thursday night I made a Nigella chilli con carne, containing – true to Lawson form – two whole bottles of sweet chilli sauce. Nigella’s culinary formula is to take a dish of average calorie content and lace it with butter, cream, sugar, lard, goose fat, chocolate, melted mars bar, cheese, golden syrup, mascarpone, or any other readily available ingredient packed with heart attack, so the final dish contains enough calories to fuel an arctic circle platoon for six months straight.

It was pretty good though – the next day I discovered two of my end-of-the-night guests had scraped the cold leftovers straight from the dish before they left at 2am. Among these guests was Kenny, who arrived with his trademark 24 pack of Carling, hefting it onto the kitchen worktop with the grim purpose of a builder positioning a pavement slab, and George, who decided at 1.30 that it would be a good idea to throw the bung of Dave’s full whisky bottle out the window so we’d ‘have no choice but to stay and finish it’.

Sadly no-one felt particularly bound to this impromptu whisky pact and we got halfway through before things began to wind down and Dave nipped into the kitchen to cover the unfinished bottle with a bit of clingfilm.

Having refused to play golf with me on faintly sexist grounds, Ed agreed to meet me halfway with a Sunday evening date to the driving range. We took a few of his clubs (drivers, or maybe they were irons. Actually, they could have been drivers. I can sense you don’t care – they were golf clubs) on the bus through Tooting and walked for twenty minutes to a sorry-looking public course. I think the lovely green ones are only open to the sort of men who own expensive whisky and trouser presses. There is a sign by the golf club in Elie (Scotland) where we went on family Summer holidays for fifteen years that says ‘No women or dogs’. This isn’t tongue-in-cheek, it’s deadly serious – golf courses are the last refuge of the pompous. Judging from the ones I have seen before being shooed away (along with a couple of daschunds who’d turned up on hind legs to try their luck) I can see why the men might have tried to keep golf courses to themselves for so long; they’re the male equivalent of a spa – nice and quiet, plenty of neatly mowed lawns to look at, the theraputic whack and plunking of balls carrying through the air.

Ed and I got a basket of 100 balls and stationed ourselves in a booth, next to a man trying to instruct his 5 year old son (‘you’re NOT going to be any good at this Freddie, unless you hold the club PROPERLY’ – poor little sod)

‘It’s not a very big distance to the end’ I remarked to Ed, observing the 50m long netted area in front of us, littered with hundreds of little white balls.

‘Trust me, you’ll be OK with this distance’

‘I’m not so sure’

‘Seriously – you’ll be fine’

‘But I’m just going to keep hitting the end’

‘Yeah, OK. Tell you what – I’ll give you a pound for every time you hit the end’

At first, he may have had a point – even the five year old boy was sailing them past me. But after a while I got the hang of it, and Ed, to his alarm, found himself ten quid in debt as a succession of beauties sailed into the end netting.

‘You do know that whenever you do an air shot, it’s minus a pound’

‘What? You can’t introduce a new rule halfway through just because I’m doing well!’ I said, hitting an air shot.

‘Oh dear. I’d be careful. That’s minus a pound’

If we’d played by the rules I would have walked away with twenty-four of Ed’s pounds; twenty four more than he was expecting, I think. As it was, my air shots brought the figure south to twelve, an amount I have stolen from his change drawer in the last few weeks to pay for my morning coffees, so we called it quits.

I’m writing this post from Estonia, where I’ve come for a few days to review a hotel. It’s an hour until dinner and I’ve succumbed to the packet of expensive mini bar nuts while writing this, the shells of which are now strewn in little triangular piles all over the room, as if I’ve just been paid a visit by a pistachio Blair Witch. The building is very old and, according to the general manager, haunted by a female ghost who turns the pile of books in the master suite upside down when you leave the room.  

Yesterday it bucketed down with rain, and we were given an umbrella tour of the Talinn old town, embroidered with plenty of fabulously grisly medieval stories from our tour guide: the monk who was executed for axing a maid to death because she served him an omlette ‘as hard as a shoe’, a neck shackle in the square where they used to put gossiping women, and an old pharmacy with dried deer penises used to help restore libido.

We tried some local cuisine on Friday night – roasted boar, pig ears, and (in an impressive Estonian attempt to incorporate meat into absolutely everything) bacon infused bread. Last night was Russian food (caviar, vodka, miniature apples, herring and beetroot) and a eurotrash club called Déjà vu, where we sat on a VIP table with the cover girl of Estonian playboy and a group of men who all looked like variations on the baddie from Grease.

The women here are all beautiful; the men are not, an imbalance evidenced by the amount of drop-dead gorgeous women who seem to have very little clue as to exactly how drop-dead gorgeous they actually are. Meanwhile, the template of male beauty is best summarised by this shop mannequin we passed this afternoon. Though – I’ll admit – I do like the jumper:

‘It’s not quite true about the puddings you know, I found one I think you’d like, it’s  called Bingbingka, and Milli [her Sister]’s been eating it for breakfast. I am eating spring rolls for breakfast and getting fat.’

She’s also had a [...]]]> I got an email from Adina in the Philippines, in response to my last post:

‘It’s not quite true about the puddings you know, I found one I think you’d like, it’s  called Bingbingka, and Milli [her Sister]’s been eating it for breakfast. I am eating spring rolls for breakfast and getting fat.’

She’s also had a £6 bikini wax and met her granny’s new dog, which – like all the dogs her granny has owned – is named after the President. Uncle Jim has made an appearance too, toupee and drawn-on moustache still very much present and correct (‘he was talking to me but all I could think of was, man, what brand of eyeliner do you use to draw that thing on? It doesn’t smudge, even in the humidity! It’s got to be something expensive. NOT Rimmel’)

She also informed me with ill-disguised glee that the reason my name, Lucy, had caused so much hilarity with the band of second cousins we’d met back in 2005, was not – as I had patronisingly assumed – because they found it exotic and western, but because ‘Luthy’ in Filipino is the word for fanny.

I’m writing this on my Dad’s laptop from the kitchen at home, the planned activities of the weekend having been rained off by a Sussex monsoon. It was Mum’s birthday yesterday so we had dinner at a restaurant in Petworth, where I ordered a starter of ‘lamb sweetbreads’ because I thought that sounded quite nice. Turns out ‘sweetbreads’ are the testicles, so not very nice at all.

Funny how the most unpalatable parts of an animal are always referred to in culinary nomenclature as ‘a delicacy’, even though they are always without exception the least delicate bits of the beast in question (intestines, stomach, testes).

Of course it didn’t help that when they arrived, my Dad lifted them off the bed of lightly toasted brioche on which they were nestled and dangled them from his fork ‘they would have hung like this, I think ’. In case you’re wondering: like eating a large pair of chicken oysters, but just a little spongier  

It’s been, by all accounts, a busy week at work. I was sent to interview a singer on Wednesday, who happens – despite her unmistakable teen appeal – to have two very ardent fans in both Ted and Stacey’s boyfriend Tom.

‘I’m going to need an autograph’ Tom told me on Tuesday night, in a tone that implied this was an absolute necessity, like a new kidney: ‘it needs to go – and this is important – Dear Tom, Love you longtime, brackets, capitals NOT TED, close brackets, and then her signature. Got it?’

The interview took place on the sofa of a small hotel room, with a retinue of three PRs, two personal assistants and a photographer, all perched on the bed, listening in.

After we’d finished the interview, I pulled the crumpled square of Google map I’d used to get there out of my handbag and apologetically dictated the message to her, as the audience on the bed absorbed my shameful naffness in silence.

‘Sorry about that’ I said, shuffling out of the room, ‘I’d never normally ask, but my friend… he loves you’

‘No problem!’ she chirruped.

‘It’s OK though, he’s not a weirdo or anything. He’s an accountant’

‘Do you want a picture of you both? As a souvenir?’ said one of the smiley PRs.

‘Er – yes?’

It’s not a good photo. She is of course already far slimmer, trendier and also – through paparazzi practice – has mastered the body flattering semi-sideways pose, I am standing straight on next to her, arms pinned to my sides, grinning like a goon.

I thought this would be the lowest point of my week. I hadn’t predicted there would be lamb testicles.

I’m baaa-aaack!

Did you miss me?

Heck, it’s quite possible that you didn’t even notice. But for those that did, all four of you, there is no real excuse for the radio silence so let’s just blame the weather, this whole rain-hot-rain-hot thing that’s going on at the moment is pulping all my creativity. I’m having a [...]]]>

I’m baaa-aaack!

Did you miss me?

Heck, it’s quite possible that you didn’t even notice. But for those that did, all four of you, there is no real excuse for the radio silence so let’s just blame the weather, this whole rain-hot-rain-hot thing that’s going on at the moment is pulping all my creativity. I’m having a mental blog – with bad puns as the main side effect.

So what’s new? Adina has moved out for a month. You’ll be relieved to hear this isn’t because I’ve broken her mandoline slicer: she’s gone to visit the Filipino side of her family with Josh. This is actually a trip I did with her in 2005 for the finale of our Gap Yah travels, the highlight of which was meeting her Great Uncle Jim, who had a toupee and a drawn-on moustache. She chose to tell me this less than 30 seconds before Uncle Jim arrived so I had no time to prepare myself mentally. She also told her granny I would love to try a traditional Filipino pudding, then sniggered as a bowl of what looked and tasted exactly like sweet baked beans in jelly was placed in front of me and, out of sheer, bloody-minded politeness, I ate the whole thing.

We stayed for a week with her grandparents in Manila, which I thought was called Vanilla right up until my plane took off:

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Vanilla’

‘Ah. Where’s that?’

‘It’s the capital of the Philippines’

[Pause]

‘Oh right. Yeah, I know’

(As you can see, my friends are as good at geography as I am)

During our visit we traveled to a beautiful island called Boracay; big on thong necklaces and very cheap cocktails. Adina’s granny felt we were too young to travel un-chaperoned for the island leg and insisted on Weng the cook and Ding the driver coming with us, whose zero experience of flying coincided disastrously with our plane having to make an emergency landing just after it’d taken off, as the Catholic passengers of the tiny plane held hands and prayed for our souls.

Also, despite the fact that Adina is half-Filipino and I am blonde, many people we met insisted we must be sisters. This didn’t make much sense to me, but then again nor does cheese ice cream, so perhaps it’s just a cultural thing.

We have a nice Adina-upgrade for the month called Daniella, whom Stacey has already taken a shine to after she expressed a mild interest in Come Dine With Me. Stacey loves Come Dine With Me, it’s her signature TV programme. I can always tell she’s home when I walk through the door if I can hear strains of the snarky CDWM voiceover man drifting down from the living room. She too is going off traveling for six weeks later in the summer (she has a long teacher holiday) just as Adina returns from the Philippines, probably sniggering about how she made Josh try the baked bean pudding from hell.

Josh, if you’re reading this, don’t accept any puddings. Nothing is safe –  not even ice cream.

After calling my Mum, checking my emails, finishing all of our welcome tortillas, noticing that Fern Cotton was sitting at the neighbouring table and reading [...]]]> I met Gretchen and Rosa for a Mexican after work on Friday. Gretchen got stuck in the big Friday monsoon and Rosa went to rescue her so they were running late.

After calling my Mum, checking my emails, finishing all of our welcome tortillas, noticing that Fern Cotton was sitting at the neighbouring table and reading the menu, I decided to go ahead and order some wine.

Just as I was halfway through the wine, and Fern was probably wondering whether that girl licking the crumbs off her welcome snack plate had been stood up, they arrived.

Two good things to report about my little partners in crime: Gretchen has had her hair cut shorter and it looks great and Rosa has quit her job and been cast in Hollyoaks. Quite a starry evening all things considered: me, Gretchen with her nice hair, Fern Cotton and Maddy from Hollyoaks, who was rehearsing for stardom by being late for a journalist.

Rosa’s being introduced this week via a saucy little holiday storyline in Wales and is already showing all promising signs of being one of those hand grenade characters producers like to chuck into a soap every so often to prevent everyone getting too comfortable.

With any luck she’ll head up to Chester after the holiday with a winning Wales tan, tornado her way through the happiness of at least half the characters, select a nemesis and set her hair extensions on fire after a slanging match outside The Dog.

Her character (and therefore she) was in a bikini for most of the first episode, flicking her hair about and making come-hither eyes at the boys. By the looks of it she’s in a relationship with this one guy but planning on getting the guy that’s going out with the other girl, who I think is her Ex, and the other girl knows it so has taken to hating her, and there’s also a lesbian storyline going on alongside that between the two other girls in which she may or may not end up being involved. I am yet to learn their names, but otherwise I’m very much on board.

Once I’d got over the initial weirdness of seeing my friend behind the fourth wall of the television (I kept hoping she’d turn and wave into our sitting room – she didn’t) I was proud of her, least of all because it takes serious balls to appear on National television for the first time in a bikini.

I actually felt a wave of associated panic imagining what I would do in the very unlikely event that I got cast in a soap and told to do the same. I’d have to insist on one of those Victorian bathing suits and claim I was developing a new and kooky layer of my character that’s really into vintage swimwear.

I texted my Sister about it, which caused all manner of confusion: ‘on TV? Where?’ /‘In Hollyoaks!’ / ‘but where?’ she answered.

I don’t really know what she meant by this, though my Sister struggles with most forms of entertainment television.

This is the conversation we had last week while watching  Made In Chelsea:

‘That Caggie can’t act’

‘They’re not acting’

‘Yes they are. They’re actors’

‘No they’re not’

‘Yes they are’

‘No, they’re not’

‘Yes they are – see that boat they’re on? That’s not really theirs’

[pause]

‘OK, it might not be their boat, but they’re still real people’

‘How do you know?’

‘That’s the point of the show. The characters are real, the situations are fabricated by producers for our entertainment’

‘Yes, and the characters are fabricated too’

‘No – because then it wouldn’t be a reality show would it?’

[pause]

‘See  - look! Would she really just happen to show up? It’s so staged!’

‘Yes, that’s slightly staged’

[triumphantly] ‘Exactly. So they’re acting’

‘But they’re not actors‘

‘But they’ve been told what to say’

‘Only to an extent’

‘To an extent? What does that mean?

‘They’ve probably been told to talk about something specific to fire up interest, but not exactly what to say’

‘So they are acting’

‘No… because it’s a real situation’

‘In which they’re being told where to sit and what to say…’

[pause]

‘Shall we watch something else?’

‘Yes OK’

Last weekend was spent in Mallorca enjoying the definitive perk of working in magazine journalism: the press trip.

If you’re not sure what a press trip is, imagine a school trip, but substitute the damp youth hostel in Swanage for a five star hotel, and the educational [...]]]>

View from the roof (yes, that is a bed)

Last weekend was spent in Mallorca enjoying the definitive perk of working in magazine journalism: the press trip.

If you’re not sure what a press trip is, imagine a school trip, but substitute the damp youth hostel in Swanage for a five star hotel, and the educational objective for getting drunk and eating nice food, and you’re pretty much there.

We were in Palma, half of which is beautiful and steeped in history, half of which is a concrete mecca for hens in glittery cowboy hats. We were in the old bit, near the cathedral, a wonky grid of very pretty and very narrow cobbled streets, each featuring at least one shop selling lizard souveniers.

The lady who conducted our Saturday tour of the old town explained that ‘the leeezard eees a very important part of Mallorca, eeet is a local leeezard’ – a part of me I’m not proud of found the way she pronounced lizard very funny and I might have brought up the local lizards more times than absolutely necessary because of this.

Bottom right of this shot is a creepy, Spanish-speaking Winnie The Pooh, probably soliloquising on why it was suddenly so hot and where the hell Chrisophe El Petirojo had got to and since when could he speak Spanish.

There was also a great deal of women dressed in Disney inspired flamenco outfits, smiling bravely in the heat through the layers of crinoline and polyester. Spanish Winnie The Pooh and the flamenco ladies had little pots in front of them where you were supposed to deposit money as a thank you for dressing up / learning a second language.

I imagine this is a bit of a thin enterprise, especially when you’re competing with a vast array of lizard keyrings, lizard bottle openers, lizard-shaped lamps and (my personal favourite) screw-in-the wall feature lizards. I was tempted to bring a feature lizard back for my parents, who would then be forced to hang it up by the back door whenever I came down to stay.

I was in a very silly mood for most of the weekend. I’m not sure if this was aggravated by tiredness, the aforementioned luxury school trip vibe or just the sheer excitement of being in another country for such a frivolously short period of time. After dinner on the second night, we were asked to fill out feedback cards. I gleefully ticked all of the far right Very Good boxes (as the food was brilliant, but there wasn’t a brilliant box) and followed with:

How did you find the overall experience? Very good!

What brought you here tonight? I heard you were very good!

Name: Verity Goodwin

Email address: Very...@veryverygood.com

Any further comments: That was very good!

This really isn’t funny now. At the time, over-sunned and full of tapas, I found it side-splittingly hilarious. A stark reminder that humour is always context-reliant. It reminded me of when Stacey and I were 14 and we decided to see how many times we could include the word ‘porridge’ in our end of year Home Economics exam (just the sort of crazy shit you can expect from an all-girls school in Surrey.)

Though we had persuaded at least 20 others to do the same, we were caught and rounded up as ‘the porridge ringleaders’, on the basis of our having used the word at least 43 times in one essay. Possibly already sensivite to implications that her subject was lightweight, the head of department was furious, and as punishment we were forced to create a five-board display all about porridge ’since you seem to know so much about it’.

Stubborn, point-proving bastards that we were, we went to town on the display – there were porridge leaflets, giant porridge bowls with pull-out porridge facts, a 3D border of spray-mounted oats, porridge poetry and essays, talking cartoon porridge men. It was brilliant.

I’ve forgotten why this story is relevant. Let’s move on.

After dinner on the second night we went out until 6am to a club called Il Divino, packed to the rafters with twenty-something girls in white corsets being bought drinks by their ‘uncles’. This was people-watching at its finest.

The following day was spent nursing a hangover here:

The visual is to help you understand that the prospect of peeling myself off a sunbed to get to the airport for the 9pm flight wasn’t hugely attractive, particularly with news that it was raining cats and dogs in London  (or lloviendo a cantaros as our Castillian friends would say).

In the event we were early to the airport and ended up killing time here:

I started giggling about the fact that we were drinking coffee in a place called Ars at 7.30 Spanish time and was still giggling about this when we landed four hours later in rainy Inglaterra. I giggled about this on the train home, in the cab from the station, walking upstairs to bed and when I was brushing my teeth. Again, perhaps it’s all about context.

It’s now very clear that an absence from this place has been altering my personality – so slowly I hadn’t noticed it, like the movement of tectonic [...]]]> I realised on Saturday night that the reason I’d been feeling so middle-aged of late is because I hadn’t been to the World’s Best Nightclub at all this year.

It’s now very clear that an absence from this place has been altering my personality – so slowly I hadn’t noticed it, like the movement of tectonic plates – gradually turning me into a boring TV-loving bastard with the social staying-power of a soufflé.

The great irony is that everything about the World’s Best Nightclub should make me hate it: the grubby Kennington location; the rum drinks that make the floor sticky; the pokiness; the irredemably naff bamboo beach bar decor. And yet, probably down to some sort of rattan-based aysphixiation, I have never had a bad night there. I’ll arrive feeling lacklustre, vow to drink only one, drink many many more than one, stay out until closing time and wake up the following day thick-headed and light-walleted.

It is not, however, an expensive place – after you’ve parted with five pounds on the door, a Zombie (like a spirit and mixer, but more of a spirit and spirit and spirit and a tinsy thimble of mixer) is exceptional value at £8 considering one glass contains more rum than a pirate’s cave. My Sister once got so drunk on them she nutted the large totem pole by the dance floor and had a black eye for a week.

However, the most important point about WBN is it passes the Lionel Richie litmus test with flying colours. The best way to judge a DJ is by their willingness to play Lionel Richie. I requested him in WBN once and the DJ not only played the song right away, but he played both the songs I had requested back-to-back, with no concern for how this Richie double bill might reflect on his creative reputation. All he was thinking about were my immediate dancing needs. (Don’t think that because of this they play Chesney Hawkes all the time and people take their tops off to the Baywatch theme tune. It’s good cheese. Not sad, mouldy, student nostalgia cheese.)

On Saturday night I managed to reach and remain in a truly ecstatic state of drunkeness, when every song is the best song you’ve ever heard and you love everyone very very mush. When we got back to the house at 3am, Gary and I cooked 13 fish fingers we found in the freezer and were so hungry we stood by the oven and quietly hoovered the lot while everyone else wasn’t looking.

There is a battered yellow sofa in Ed’s kitchen that is built for the sort of alcohol-cushioned 4am confabs that begin and rumble on so easily until the last person has slipped away to bed. I began to wilt at around 4.30, when Ian decided I should at least help him finish the half bottle of wine someone had abandoned earlier. Needing absolutely no more, I continued to drink the wine that was poured with mechanical efficiency into my glass, only to realize too late, as I was beginning to feel myself slur, that the first bottle had been finished long before and we were well into a second. Needless to say, after I finally managed to get to bed at 6, I woke up feeling exactly as I deserved to.

She doesn’t really like running on her own because there’s no-one [...]]]> After 4 days spent in the indoor 10 metre triangle of illness (bathroom, bedroom, sofa) I was feeling better, and a little bit claustrophobic, so I walked to the park with Adina to time her while she went off on her very short daily run.

She doesn’t really like running on her own because there’s no-one to talk to. Adina doesn’t like doing any activity you can’t chat through. I think her solo runs are short because she can only physically run for five minutes in one direction before something important to chat about pops into her head and she has to run back so she can tell someone about it immediately, like a homing pigeon.

I found a bench to sit down on and watch the world go by while Adina ran off to do one loop, before coming back for a chat, then going off to do another loop. It was nice being outside, once I’d graduated from feeling like a vole that’s been dragged feet-first from its burrow. I watched some smug exercise couples chug past in matching lycra and a man walking a very small dog with an expression of deep embarrassment.

I don’t think I’ve ever sat purposelessly on a park bench before. I felt like an old lady at the beginning of a film with a deep story to tell, which I end up telling to a nice, if slightly bland, young girl who happens to sit next to me, about a passionate wartime love affair (with Eric Bana as the love interest and me playing myself) and ends in tragedy. And I have a deep south accent, even though we’re in Battersea.

This thought was interrupted by a text from Stacey (away visiting her grandparents) distraught about what a bastard Natalie Cassidy’s fiance had turned out to be: ‘Adam, Ronan, Ryan, who next?’ I’m personally very worried it’s going to be Gary Barlow. He’s my new Gary Lineker, after Gary Lineker Disappointed me by leaving his wife of 25 years for a 19 year old model. That hurt us, Gary. I sat on the bench and worried about Gary Barlow hypothetically cheating on his wife Dawn, until two four-year-olds with their mothers in tow met on the path in front of me to have a chat. There is something so gorgeous about hearing small children exchanging adult pleasantries with each other:

Child 1: Hewwo Hawwy

Child 2: Hello Ben

Child 1: How are you Hawwy?

Child 2: I’m fine fanks Ben, how are you?

Child 1: We’re having fish fingers at home

Child 2: That’s nice I like fish fingers

The children continued to witter on about the weather and rocketing South London house prices as the man embarrassed about his tiny dog walked past again in the opposite direction and Adina returned from her run:

‘How did I do?’

‘Seventeen minutes in total. Ten for the first run, seven for the second’

‘OK’

[pause]

‘Oh god, before I forget, I have to tell you about what happened today’

‘Oh?’
And she was off.