Fly-By

I wrote this entry long-hand during a meeting I was in on Thursday morning. It is now Saturday morning and I am just now getting the chance to post it, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about my week in Lisbon. But, I am going home this afternoon! Hurrah!

From Thursday:

Lisbon is ridiculously busy and I’m averaging about 17 hours of work a day. About the city itself I can only tell you that it appears to be raining. But I haven’t actually stepped outside this hotel since Tuesday evening.

My only comment about Portuguese cuisine is that it is mostly very nice, apart from a bizarre culinary technique which involves liquidising otherwise delicious foods and then whisking them up into a ‘foam’. I have had goats cheese foam, potato foam and chocolate foam, all of them the consistency of something you could use to shave your legs. It is quite bizarre to eat these normally-lovely foods, with all their flavour but none of their texture. It must be like what you have to eat when you have lost all your teeth.

Anyway, apart from that I have no cultural observations about Portugal whatsoever. I’m staying in a Marriott, so I could basically be anywhere in the world. Apart from the foamed food anyway.

I get back to London, and solid food, on Saturday, after which normal service will be resumed. I hope you’re all having lovely weeks.

Oh yeah, that.

So, hey, remember how I’m getting married? Yeah, I haven’t mentioned it much over here but frantic planning has been taking place over the last couple of weeks. We were originally going to have a wedding next summer, so I was all relaxed and thinking I had ages to find a venue and think about dress styles and wedding favours and invitations and all that nonsense.

But then J decided he couldn’t handle 14 months of wedding planning, so instead we’re doing it this year. THIS YEAR. November 29th, to be precise. Which is a whole lot sooner than next summer. Which means I am freaking out about how much I have to organise in the next, um, 187 days. Thankfully I have Teabelly, maid-of-honour extraordinaire, to help me sort everything out.

So, I am trying to be calm. I have a list of things to organise. I have books on wedding planning. I have bridal magazines. And tomorrow Teabelly and I are going wedding dress shopping. It will all get done, and it will be lovely, but I am anticipating a fairly stressful next six months.

And in 188 days I will be a married woman. Holy crap.

Parts Foreign

So, Manchester United won the Champions League last night in Moscow, and J was there to see it happen. Actually it has just occurred to me that Champions League is missing an apostrophe. It should be Champions’ League. Bad form, UEFA. Very bad form.

Anyway, my boyfriend is now driving home from Manchester airport, giddy, hoarse from singing, and very very sleep deprived. I am delighted that his team won because otherwise I would have had to live with a sulky boyfriend for the next few weeks. So thank you, John Terry, for hitting the post during the penalty shoot-out and inadvertently increasing my quota of domestic bliss.

However, I would like to point out that the amount of fuss being made about John Terry’s miss is slightly bonkers. This quote, from The Times (who should know better) is particularly gasp-inducing:

Avram Grant, the Chelsea first-team coach, has a perspective on life because of the traumas his family suffered in the Holocaust, but even he was struggling to find the words to ease the pain of Terry, who was white with shock.

That’s right sports fans! The Holocaust, well, it was rough and all. But it was nothing compared to missing a penalty during a game of football. That’s real suffering. Gah.

Anyway, enough about football. It is boring anyway. Next week I am going away to parts foreign. I’m going to be in Lisbon all week for work. Although please don’t get jealous because I fully expect to be so busy that I’ll be lucky to set foot outside.  I am just being transported somewhere that’s very hot and sunny and interesting, and then being forced to stay indoors all day and do work. Frankly I’d rather stay in the office.

I will have internet access but a) I don’t know how much chance I’ll have to write and b) I doubt I will have very much to write about, since I will just be working all day long, with added extra bonus evening working as well. And believe me, my work is just not that interesting. You never know though, the inside of my hotel room might turn out to be fascinating. We shall see.

Why I Should Have Paid More Attention in School

For the last few weeks I have been indulging in a Monday evening treat with some friends of mine. There is a pub around the corner from our flat which, on a Monday evening, runs the hardest pub quiz I have ever known. I can answer, on average, about two questions out of forty, and mostly those are the rare ‘popular culture’ questions that get thrown in amongst the geography/history/politics questions about which I am shamefully clueless.

But, despite being mostly a dead weight on a team of vastly cleverer people, I do have my one moment to shine every week. Because every week there is a ‘cryptic cities’ question, and for some reason, my brain just wraps around these and solves them in a most pleasing manner. Here are a few that have come up recently. See how you do, answers at the end:

Poncho village
Secure the era
Reduce the amount of mixing
Reserve a sleep
Battle tool

Other than this though, I mostly just stare blankly when the quiz master asks things like ‘what is an anagram of ‘colonialist’?’ or ‘how many times has man landed on the moon?’. Luckily I try to bring J with me whenever I can, as he is the sort of man who reads history books for fun and knows how many elements there are in the periodic table.

Last night, our team won after a tie-breaker, which was tremendously exciting, and it means that next week we all get a free meal. And even though I almost caused us to lose by insisting that ‘fetid’ meant ‘meat that has had fly eggs laid in it’ (it’s actually flyblown, which, duh), I am still enormously proud. I will be ordering the lincolnsire sausage and mash next Monday night, and it will taste like victory.

Answers:

Cape Town
Anchorage
Leicester (less stir – get it?)
Bucharest
Warsaw

Football Widow

Next week Manchester United and Chelsea are playing in the UEFA Champions League final, and J is desperate to go. Which would be fine, normally. Except guess what? The match is in Moscow.

This wasn’t stopping J though. He emailed me at work yesterday with this insane plan involving driving to Manchester next Wednesday (all the flights from London are full) getting a plane to Moscow, going to the football match, watching the match, going back to the airport, flying back to Manchester, and then driving back to London. You’ll notice I didn’t mention sleeping in there anywhere? Yeah.

I did try to be the voice of reason. I pointed out that we would be sacrificing two days of annual leave, a night’s sleep, and enough money to pay for a week’s holiday, on A. FOOTBALL. MATCH. But J was determined, so eventually I agreed to go with him and booked next Wednesday and Thursday off work.

And then I started thinking about it and realised it was actually pretty great. I mean, the atmosphere will be incredible, and how fun will it be to fly to Moscow on a plane full of excited sports fans? And we’ll have the afternoon in the city to look around, and then the match will be really highly-charged. Also, it’s pretty cool to go to Moscow for a night. It’s an adventure! Within an hour or so I’d gone from thinking OMG-no-fun-what-a-waste-of-money to OMG-HOW-EXCITING.

And then J emailed me again and told me he was taking his friend instead, because I hadn’t sounded very enthusiastic. BAH.

 

Sunshine Days

It’s been summer in London these past few days. Summer comes to Britain sporadically, unpredictably, and never for very long. And when it happens, it is a point of national pride to drop whatever it is you’re doing, get outside, and enjoy it. We all know how fleeting it is.

It has been hot and sunny here since Saturday, by ‘hot’ I mean about 25 degrees (77 F), and that lasted until this morning, when we woke up to a grey and windy day, with the promise of heavy showers later. Summer has been and gone, it seems. This morning on the tube there were lots of shivery people in short-sleeved shirts and bare legs, caught out by the caprice of our climate.

I love London when the sun shines though. Everybody is outside lapping it up, trying to soak up as much light as possible before the clouds draw in again. This weekend our communal garden was a sea of bikini-clad sunbathers, and the streets were filled with people on bikes and kids on roller skates, and everywhere you went people were smiling, thinking of holidays and long walks and trips to the country.

Summer will come again, for a couple of days, maybe a week. We will all rush outside, blowing the dust off our sunglasses and preaching to each other about the necessity of sunblock. But you can never get too comfortable with sunshine round here, never take it for granted. It will always be special, unexpected, and short-lived.

Filling Time

We were just getting ready to go out on Saturday evening when J came over to me with a small gray piece of metal in his hand and said ‘I think I just lost a filling’.
Blessed as I am with excellent dental health, I’ve never had a filling, so I wasn’t sure what the correct response was to this news. I tried ‘Oh, is that bad?’ and J said he was pretty sure it wasn’t good.

I decided to treat the occasion with the gravitas J obviously felt it deserved, so I told him he should go to the dentist first thing Monday morning to get it sorted out. Apparently, though, this wasn’t gravitas enough:
‘I have a hole in my tooth!’ he protested.
‘Yes’, I said, ‘you should get it seen to on Monday, for sure.’
‘But I can’t eat!’
‘Really? Why not?’
‘Because I have a hole in my tooth!’
‘Oh.’

So, we hopped on the almighty internet and found an emergency 24-hour dentist surgery in Baker Street. (‘It’s lucky we live in London’, I told J, trying to reassure him. ‘If we lived on a remote Scottish island you’d be stuffed’.) The dentist saw J reasonably quickly, and in the time it took me to skim-read three issues of Better Homes and Gardens(shabby chic will apparently be all the rage in summer of 2006), and for J to make some not-entirely-brave groans of agony, he was all fixed up and amusingly numb of face. He wouldn’t let me poke him in the cheek though, which I thought was very unsporting of him. We went on to have a very nice time at the birthday party, and J got to show everybody his fallen filling and give us all regular updates on the numb-status of his left cheek, so it was all good.

In case you’re wondering what it was that caused this filling of many years to give up its grip on J’s molar, you’ll be interested to know that it wasn’t a very chewy toffee or a particularly hard ice-cube. Nope, J’s filling was undone by a slice of seeded batch loaf toast with jam. J is claiming it was the seeds that did it. If he’d just stuck to unhealthy white bread he could have saved himself a lot of pain. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Panic! World suddenly not my Oyster!

I lost my Oyster card at the weekend. This pains me on several levels:

First, I pride myself on being the sort of person who does not lose things. Ever. OK, well, except umbrellas which I can be depended upon to lose with unerring regularity. But apart from umbrellas, I am good at hanging onto my shit. So losing my Oyster card smacks right at the heart of my own sense of self. Who am I? Who is this strange flighty person who has lost a possession? How dare she?

Second, my Oyster card was in a really cute little leather Oyster card holder from Radley. It was pink! With a puppy on it! Naturally, with the loss of the Oyster card comes the loss of the holder. And woe, for a replacement, the evil people at London Underground have given me an Ikea Oyster card holder. Ikea! I HATE Ikea! Stupid blue and yellow purveyors of cheap sofas and meatballs. Curse them.

And third, most distressingly of all, losing your Oyster card while living in London is like suddenly and unexpectedly losing a leg. You can’t go anywhere! There are barriers at every turn! The smallest journey becomes suddenly impossible! Being Oysterless in this city is an unrelentingly distressing experience. (Incidentally: I am aware that losing your Oyster card while living in London is nothing whatsoever like losing a leg – I apologise for flippancy – don’t hate me one-legged people!)

I didn’t like Oyster cards when they first came out, because of course they are computerised, and you can’t fool a computer into thinking your bus pass hasn’t expired when it has, like you can a busy and hassled bus driver. But apart from the fact that they limit my ability fare hop, I have warmed to the Oyster card. I am sad to think of my original Oyster, lost somewhere in West London in its little pink leather Radley jacket. That Oyster card had been with me since 2004. We had history! Poor little lost Oyster.

But, I have a replacement. I had to get one! I had to go to work and stuff. So I am taking on London now with this Ikea-branded pretender, although it will only be Ikea-branded for as long as it takes me to find a new and less offensive holder for it. It’s early days, but I think we’re going to be OK, I think we’re going to get along. Provided this isn’t the start of some losing-my-stuff spree that I have unwittingly embarked upon. If you need me I will be over here, knocking furiously on wood with one hand and clinging to all my worldly possessions with the other.

May!

Hurrah for it is May! I like you May. You have not one, but two bank holidays – one at the beginning, one at the end – well arranged May! May is absolutely definitely positively not winter anymore. You may not actually be properly summer yet, May, but you are not winter. No siree bob. Winter is OVER if it is May.

It is May and the sun is shining. Actually right now it is shining right in my eyes and making it difficult to see the computer screen. But heck, the sun is shining. I WILL NOT COMPLAIN May, don’t you stop with the sunshine, you hear?

Yesterday (when I was not at work because it was a May bank holiday! One of two! One more bank holiday still to come in May!) J and I went for a drive in the sunshine with the roof down and good tunes on the stereo, and thanks to that 30-minute May sunshine exposure, I now have freckly knees. I am delighted about this! Even though actually since just the tops of my knees are freckled, it kind of looks like I have forgotten to wash my knees, for a really really long time.

Also the freckles on my top lip make it look like I kind of have a bit of a mustache, which is not a great look. But, it doesn’t matter, May! Because they are freckles – not dirt or unfortunate facial hair! Freckles! From sunshine! In May!

It is May and everybody is happy because they got a day off work this week and the sun is shining and people on the tube were smiling(!) at each other today! And not even at the misfortune of another! Just because! May, will your wonders never cease? I do like May.

Round the Bendy Buses

So, as of this evening London will have a new mayor. Or maybe not. We might have the same mayor. Right now, nobody knows. But we all voted yesterday anyway. Today they’re counting all the crosses in all the boxes, and tonight we’ll know. 

A lot of people are very upset about the prospect of Boris Johnson winning. An almost equal number of people are very upset about the prospect of Ken Livingstone winning. I am mostly just alarmed that the number one hot topic of the whole damn campaign has been the evils (or not) of the flipping bendy bus.

Bendy Bus: Scourge or Saviour?

As Boris declares:

The bendy bus is unsuitable for London’s streets, they are twice as dangerous as non-articulated buses and have almost three times the rate of fare evasion. I will phase out bendy buses and run a new competition to find a 21st century Routemaster that has full disabled access, runs on clean fuel and has conductors.

And as Ken responds:

There are currently 399 bendy buses in London. Bendy buses carry 149 passengers and a double decker carries only 90. To have the same passenger capacity 620 double decker buses would be required. Approximately 3 shifts per bus are required on intensive routes requiring 1,736 extra conductors and 651 additional drivers. The annual salary and add on costs (national insurance, pension, uniform and recruitment) of a conductor is £28,000 and a driver £35,000. This requires an extra expenditure of £72 million (£49 million for conductors and £23 million for drivers).

What we can conclude from this debate, I think, is that bendy buses may be a great peril to our civilisation, or they may be the answer to all of society’s ills, but either way, banging on about them to this extent is both boring and slightly absurd.

I actually quite like bendy buses. They are clean; they are heated in winter; they are big enough that they’re rarely over-crowded; and you can give yourself an easy thrill by standing with one foot on the bendy plate and one foot off it while going round corners. What’s not to love?

There have, of course, been other more serious aspects of the mayoral campaign, and I should probably stop being quite so flippant about it all. But, well, I like being flippant; it’s what I do best. And in the meantime, little crosses in boxes are being counted all across London, and tonight we shall have a new mayor, or the same mayor. And tomorrow we shall have new buses, or the same buses. It is all quite thrilling.