It’s a day of celebration, but also one on a knife edge. There were slight flickers of hope in the last couple of days (I refer to the election in the UK), but it feels really precarious. Inevitable that they’ll be crushed, this is not a time of many happy endings. Please may there be, […]
Days out
Yesterday I went to a conference where perhaps the highlight was one that almost no one actually knew about: that one of the virtual attendees forgot to turn off their camera and turned up wearing only a towel, and that too on their head. Fortunately for this person, only a limited number of people actually […]
Poison in the air
Here I am, in Lahore. Just before I left the startling news arrived that the seller had accepted the offer (we had assumed he would want to bargain). So I left the house for the last time. It was not the house I grew up in, nor was I born there (as the GF was, […]
Overspent
After a few days of anxious slaving, I sent off the report I was working on and then had a couple of days free before leaving. So of course other obligations cropped up, most importantly, collecting all the presents I need to take with me to Lahore. Today, first, we went to see a flat […]
Countryside cousins
We took the train to Tring, in Herfordshire, where some of the Gentleman Friend’s relatives have moved to a toll house on the Grand Union Canal. It’s a very picturesque house, quite large, with a little toll room and some pretty outbuildings and a large pond where the previous owner kept some rather grotesque carp. […]
Filthy
A filthy day today. Cold, raining, miserable. A bad day to go into town, for other reasons as well, but I had to go to Liberty and collect a gift I’d bought online. Liberty is always a hellhole, particularly on weekends, when the weather is bad,, and in the runup to Christmas. Today it was […]
Stiff neck
That’s what my mother always told me, and I suppose she was right. I went to a physiotherapist for the first time for what I had long thought was incipient RSI. Turns out it’s not what I think of as RSI, but an exceptionally stiff neck which is sending referred pain down my arms. So […]
Midnight detective
In the afternoon I went to finally order my glasses. Due to my high prescription I need to get quite small glasses, which don’t seem to be all that common these days, so the final shortlist came down to a couple of adult pairs that looked as close to my old pair (thick black plastic […]
Watching the English
Unrelated to anything specific in the past few days, but thinking over the years, just how lacking in compassion the English upper middle classes can be. I am thinking, particularly of things like the huffing and puffing when someone kills themselves by throwing themselves in front of a train. I find it really distasteful how […]
In the clubroom
This morning everyone left, thank heavens, and the house is quiet again. The Gentleman Friend and I went to see a matinee of Blank at the Donmar Warehouse, first stopping at one of these newfangled food courts that seem to have erupted everywhere. Similar to Hutong at Lot 10, or a Singaporean hawker centre, I […]