These shoes make me fleet of foot and light in heart..

I feel impelled occasionally, by some inner compulsion, driven by being the proud owner of a bunion blog that rarely, these days, lives up to its name, to mention footwear. When I was young, I used to wear black plimsoles with elasticated fronts. These were only worn in school for PE. My mother would never have allowed me to wear these on the street. Normal leather shoes sufficed for school and best. That's how it was.
This summer sees the second season of the navy Skecher shoes in my wardrobe. They look very much like plimsoles and are so comfortable, lined as they are, with memory foam. And joy of joys... they can be freshened up by a cycle in the washing machine.
As I currently practice Brahms Lullaby which I can remember my childhood self singing in Summerswood Primary school: "When the dawn tints the skies/ I will make thee arise" and gaze down at my plimsoled feet, I am six years old again. Not sixty three.

                                                  

Follies...

Le soleil brille! And then some. Unheard of for a British bank holiday when the unrelenting rain drives the truly determined into cooking their bangers on primus stoves under bus-shelters. I'm going back a bit. And it was my Uncle Roscoe and my cousins who did that. Not our branch.

What does unadulterated sol do to the sun-starved Brit? It turns, Ah, sol! into ar-sol. That's what it does. Most of whom are driving soft-tops. It turns them into eejits, as they say in Glasgow.

We were behind one on Saturday night, on our way home from seeing Sondheim's Follies at The National. Incidentally, a fabulous introduction to Sondheim. Imelda Staunton, Tracie Bennett and Janie Dee were all on sparkling form. Real goosebumps moments. We loved it. Anyway, heady with the joys of Broadway, we hit the high road.

On a balmy summer evening, the soft-top in front of us in the queue to get on the motorway decided to remove his roof, as the lights turned again from green to red. Why you would want to do that on a motorway when your companion has long free-flowing locks is beyond me. Try untangling that coconut matting, lady, when  you get out of the car! Ha! I remember that as a folly of my youth. But as my incensed husband sought to roar after him up the motorway, I attempted to still the not so youthful folly to my right with one of my famous hairy eyeballs.  Which he couldn't see. So we burnt off ahead of them and celebrated the final folly of the evening. What a great day.

Marital calories..look who's counting?

If April is the cruellest month, then Thursday is the naughtiest day the week for me. Post weigh-in, I am assailed by an assortment of devilish temptations to which, if I succumb, I have a whole week to remedy.  I start off well, with a salad, nutritious and well-balanced and then it's time for a smackerel of something small, but calorie-laden.
Today, I am going to share my temptations of the week.

Skinny Cow ice cream. 121 calories. Well, obviously seduced by its aspirational name, I believe that if I eat the whole packet, I will become one. And the Ginger Snaps are 20 calories a pop. Mind you, they are very thin which means that I have a licence to eat at least six at a time, and still feel smug, if over-spiced.
Meanwhile, Dearest has recently slowed down a little on his, I bought these for the grandchildren jag. I have shoved enough articles under his schnoz to ram home the message that these goodies are not not goodies for young teeth and waistlines. Nevertheless, there is a surfeit of schtuff that he has bought in their name. Now, I am not one to nag. I resort to leaving little notes and saying nothing. (Oh God, she's one of those women, I hear you thinking. Well, let me tell you, I've left some very funny notes in my time..) So when I discovered a half-consumed packet of Jammie Dodgers (yes, Jammie Dodgers. Even I can give those a wide berth..) under the arm chair. (You'll note, no attempt to disguise the activity) I put an article from the newspaper inside the packet with the remaining biscuits. "Eating too much sugar could make men depressed".

Wasted. Did he notice it? Did he heck? I had to draw his attention to it. Which, as you know, is not the same when you have to explain a joke (even one with serious intention).
I am not sure about this research. Because withdrawing sugar from a sweet-toothed tiger means you are just left with a tiger. Who's perpetually hungry. And snarly.
While I, it goes without saying, am all sweetness and light. Perpetually. Even when bloody ravenous.

Unexpurgated Joy...

I've just returned home from visiting Joy, my late mother's remaining friend. She is 87 and has the mental acuity of someone half her age. And a fearsome ability to express her mind. Occasionally with colourful language that lights up the room.
She is one of the few remaining living connections to my late parents and while the time is spent in wall-wall conversation, it is interspersed with jobs that she is no longer able to do. So I clean brass that her arthritic fingers can longer burnish, I dive under a bed to reach a stored away replacement washing-bowl, and I dust the top shelves that she can no longer reach.
She makes the meals and pours the wine with an extraordinarily steady hand, and regales me with tales of grandmotherhood, accompanied by hoots of laughter.

A couple of years ago she was irritated by the youths on other side of her garden wall who were drinking, and using foul language. They had even chucked the contents of the litter bin over the wall. "And I could smell the cannabis, darling," she told me with such authority that I didn't bother to ask her how she knew. So she went to place a complaint at the local Police Station. She told them in great detail all that had been going on, and about her confrontation with them.
"I told them, darling, that I had asked them very nicely if they would desist from emptying the rubbish over the wall. They looked at me and the ring leader told me to fuck off. The Police asked what I did next. I told them, I did as I was told. I fucked off."

Currently, she is  being inconvenienced, but not troubled by, nuisance phone calls. She is always very polite and tells them that she is not interested. She says she will ask one of her sons to sort this for her. In the meantime, I have come up with up with an alternative approach. This is the card I will be sending her, to say thank you for having me...

Bye bye, Brucie: Sir Bruce Forsyth 1928-2017

"Nice to see you. To see you nice!" our dear departed Aunt Margaret would say, with the sweetest of smiles, even in the grip of pernicious dementia. It was Brucie's catch-phrase. A legacy of his seventy years as an entertainer.  Today, aged 89, Bruce Forsyth, the last of the great all-round British entertainers has died.
I am of an age where I remember him from The Generation Game, good wholesome Saturday evening entertainment. My parents would have remembered him from Saturday Night at the London Palladium when he took over from Val Parnell. Our children remember him from Strictly Come Dancing. His career spanned all generations, keeping us entertained, until he gave up Strictly, only a couple of years ago because of ill-health.
I feel a sadness for his passing. Not for him; despite his increasing frailness, he managed to retain a sharp mind and wit. No, I am swamped by nostalgia. And an incipient longing for a bygone era that looks simpler and more rosy with each passing day.

"Didn't he do well?"

Bolder and blonder she goes...

If you leave me unattended in Buddleigh Salterton on a wet and chilly summer's day for three hours because you have to visit an elderly client, what do you expect? I could have burnt through a lot more than the five Charity shops. I could have emptied the dress shop, or the tea shops. Instead I ended up with two small handbags.
I wasn't really looking for a fulsome response from Dearest, who, in all fairness, is not big on beading. Yes, beading. Intricate fine beadwork.  I'm not sure that I was, until I saw this very cute little bag. Brand new it was too. ("Because someone bought it, and thought it was a disaster, Mum". Or the other comment I liked was, "It's bringing out your inner Drag.." as in -Queen, I suppose.)
I gave it a road trip today. It is big enough to carry phone, purse, glasses and keys. I was going to the hairdressers.
Jodie thought it looked, "Different". I recognise code. My mother used to say that something was Unusual, if she wanted to avoid hurt, rather than, Bloody awful..

But Gustav embraced it with all the gusto that I desired.
"It should, of course, be worn like this. More of a clutch-bag," he said, modelling it, with his usual savoir-flair.
I was using it as a small handbag, not as a clutch-bag.

So there we are. The style-police are giving it a big thumbs-down. But I shall continue to use it, just the way I intended, because I love it.
If I sound a little defiant, it might just be because I am getting bolder. And just a little bit blonder...

Getting into the Swing of it...

If you're not interested in piano-playing, please feel free to give this entry a body-swerve. My new found piano teacher is on her summer vacation. We're talking the whole of the six week break here. I have not used this as an excuse for shirking. Oh dear me no. Piles of laundry reproach me from the corner of my eye (as dear Ewelina is also on her summer sabbatical) and as for dust... well, I'm adopting the Quentin Crisp approach. After four years, you really don't see it. Because every idle moment when I'm not watering a garden, I am practising my pieces on the piano.
Sandra, my teacher, before she sallied off, left me with Surfboard Boogie by Martha Mier. Oh, this in my kind of music. Yes, I love the Mozart (just one piece, before you think I'm coming  over all grand) but in my mind's ear when I started out on learning the piano, this was what I imagined I might one day be playing. Such a simple soul.
As soon as I worked through the first page, I was enraptured by the familiar sound of either a boogie or a woogie. The brick wall came on page two when the seductively simple arrangement of notes, no matter how fast I played them sounded nothing like the You Tube demonstration. (So helpful but only so far.)
Darlings, I had no swing. Nope, no swing at all. No matter, how many times I played the demo (once fooling Him-in-the-next-room into thinking I might have a marketable talent after all) it still sounded incontrovertibly wrong.
A friend of mine came round for lunch yesterday. She doesn't play the piano, or even read music, but as a former dancer, she does understand rhythm. Beverley rut-tut-tutted the rhythm in my ear and suddenly my fingers began to find the swing that my classically trained fingers (Do you like that? Makes me crease!) had failed to find.
This morning I went back to it as soon as I had waived Dearest off. Bloody hell. I was back where I started. Then all of a sudden, I started rut-tut-tutting, and the fingers obeyed.

There hasn't been so much rutting and tutting in here since we watched The Game of Thrones last week. But I'm having such a lovely time. Now that I've found the right time..

Simple pleasures...

Does watering count as gardening? If so, I've been doing an awful lot of gardening in someone else's garden these past two weeks. My brother away filming, and my sister-in-law away in Spain with their boys. This year they have developed a wonderful vegetable garden and built a green house. Really serious dedication to domestic agriculture. I just had to volunteer myself to keep everything alive until their return last Sunday.  I could not imagine anything more dispiriting than returning home to rotting tomatoes, or wilted seedlings. So I watered diligently even though the weather provided almost unremitting rain for the duration.
My reward was to pick as much produce as I possibly could. I have to say that leaving with my pockets stuffed full of baby tomatoes and the occasional runner bean made me feel that I was scrumping.
My joy was diminished, however, when one day upon my return I flopped down into an armchair without first removing my coat and pureed the contents of my pockets.
I took a Harrods plastic bag with me the next time...

Rough Justice...

I think we tend to think, sometimes smugly, that in this country we have the best legal system in the world. However, over the past couple of months I have to say my faith has been rattled. Two cases in particular involve young women who have been given lenient treatment because the male judge has deemed them too intelligent to be punished appropriately.

The first, an Oxford undergraduate, Lavinia Woodward ,was apparently an aspiring heart surgeon. I'm  not convinced she was practising when she stabbed her boyfriend with a bread knife. Her crime, described by the judge as "pretty awful"was not obviously sufficiently awful to warrant a commensurate penalty as, he believed, it would put a stain on her future career. I should cocoa.

The second instance, last week, was when model/Business Management student, Natalia Sikorska, received a conditional discharge after stealing almost a thousand pounds worth of goods from Harrods. The judge praised her "considerable talents". For talents, read assets, my darlings.
Though not much cop at nicking things, obviously. Maybe he thought the Marcus Lupfer jacket, the Claudia Pierrot shoes and the Pinko handbag all went rather well together as an ensemble..The sheer deliberation of it all!  But what was that all about the silver knife she stole?
Ah, but maybe she was planning to stab her boyfriend in the leg...

I shake my head at the alarming message this is sending out. I would chat on, but I'm just off to Harrods to try my luck.
Don't worry. My lack of considerable talents will keep me on the straight and narrow.

Harrods prices are never a steal

The antidote to a summer cold is a visit to Game of Thrones...

It's taken me till now to recover. Rewind to Sunday. Another damp dank afternoon. Where did summer go? One of us was suffering from a summer cold. The other was just suffering.
Inspired, I suggested that we watched Game of Thrones. We are surely the only two left on the planet who have not watched this show. I have resisted easily, on the basis that we did not have Now TV, yet another subscription channel. Anything that requires passwords slows me down, generally. Puts me right off. It puts Dearest even off-er, and generally incurs a foul mood. So I took the plunge this week and signed up, alone, in the coolness of an afternoon.

We limbered up with Riviera which had been given full page adverts in the press. It had to be good. We love the south of France; we love a thriller. Let me warn you that it is an extraordinary achievement to shoot the most exquisite coastline so that it looks like a bad travelogue from the seventies, with dialogue and acting to match. Toe-curlingly ghastly. What a waste of money.

Game of Thrones was by contrast a box of delights. A strange thing to say about something which contains extreme violence, lurid sex and more breasts that I have ever seen in my entire life. Just as well it was HD not 3D.  But great story-telling and beautifully directed. And finely acted. The only problem was that Now TV was taking this out of circulation the next day. Ten hours of episodes and ten hours left in the day.
We watched it until the final credit. Nobody fell asleep. We didn't bother with food, just plentiful cups of tea, and we loved it.
Last night we put on The Affair. More rumpy-pumpy. We limped through the first episode. There's only so much you can take...