Still alive.

So: hi! I neglected to mention that I’d be spending a month in the States with no wifi. And being that I am quite lazy, I need the wifi to do writing-type blog-related stuff. I need the laptop aspect of the laptop, not just the mechanism itself. You know, you can call it a laptop, but sitting in a small guest room at a small table to write next to photos of my mother's dog and my dead grandmother isn’t really stroking my 21st century creative self-delusion. Don’t fence me in, man.

There was an unfortunate spate of ill health which also made it impractical to think about anything internet-related. First, I was the carer, then the care-ee. I am still finding forgotten plates of dry toast in idle corners of the house.

Unfortunately, this trip was somewhat focused on and oriented around eating a great deal of delicious food, off which the edge was quite effectively taken by the unrelenting and unwelcome attacks of biliousness which have persisted for the last week.

I found it hard to enjoy New York. Something has happened to me since I was a fresh-faced youngster wandering the mean streets seeking excitement and intrigue. I have aged. I have both hardened and softened. I struggled to sleep in the hotel for fear of bedbugs and roaches. I was horrified by the omnipresence of urine. New York is like a giant urinal. Every pavement, doorway, steaming kerbside, cool shadow, scaffolded façade, grassy garden – it all stinks of piss. I felt offended to my core, particularly in my queasy hypersensitive state.

Anyway, that's not the whole story, but that's all there is for now. There's good stuff too, but I've sat at the table with my Grandma for long enough today.

The lovely man returned to London yesterday on account of needing to earn a crust, and I am here. It’s beautiful here, and I am enjoying my mother’s company, but I miss him. And I’m still worried about the bedbugs we may have brought home from our hotel.

Um, nothing to see here.

I'm not sure how to gauge your expectations for what you read here, but if I were you I would keep the bar low today.

I have been preoccupied recently with Butter by Nadia dresses. Anyone know anything about this? There's a skirt and loads of stretchy fabric you wrap around yourself. I think this was kind of a thing in the early 90s, this 'one garment a dozen ways' idea. I bought a skirt/dress in Kensington Church Street in 1992 which was basically a long tube and bless me if I didn't look amazing in it for the five minutes of my life when I had a great figure, but it was essentially a stretchy hobble and I couldn't walk more than a couple of inches per step. I'm sure I bought some elaborately wrapped thing there as well. Folly of youth, etc.

I'm entering my yearly holiday packing hysteria period and I have a fantasy where I pack a single dress plus three or four pairs of shoes and toiletries and off I go. It seemed like maybe this could be that dress. If I had the income, inclination and bottle to spend more money, I'd be really interested in this (which isn't a dress, but you know what I mean). So obsessed am I with these garments that I trundled down to Clapham and had a look in the flesh. (The Clapham stereotype isn't a patch on the reality. I couldn't move for buggies - single, double, triple, what have you. I have never seen so many babies in my life.)  So now the dream has died. I couldn't love these dresses in real life. They were kind of, um, cheap. And I can't get past is that you are wearing a big long scarf all twisted up around you and one false move and it could all unravel. So the dream is gone and I still have to pack.

I continue to drag my arse if anyone's interested. I'm in good spirits and everything, just swimming through treacle.

The last time I felt like this, I went on a special diet from the herbalist - yes, I am that woman - and it really did me good, but I've got a bit lazy. I need to kick that back into gear.

I have my share of skepticism regarding Chinese medicine and acupuncture, but when I feel low I tend to hibernate and avoid doing anything practical or positive, which I'm pretty sure is even less effective than the results of the most critical studies of herbal medicine. I have at times resorted to stuff which I had no faith in - EFT, CBT, massage, light therapy, homeopathy - just to get the process, a process, any process, underway. And it isn't a bad approach. If I had relied on my own dubious methods (junk food, credit cards, ill-advised alcoholic liasons), I'd probably be dead. In any case, I wouldn't be better.

(If it means anything, six months on that diet improved my thyroid results, and that was a test done by my GP. So, you know. Not exactly empirical evidence, but it'll do for me.)

All that is just a vague explanation/excuse for another monumentally lazy post today. It helps if you have an interest in cooking. If you don't, here's a photo of the garden furniture we scored at the auction a couple of weeks ago. (Because that's far more enticing. And I sent it to my mum yesterday, so it's on my desktop. You're welcome.)

And maybe, even if you don't like cooking, you will feast your eyes on this beauty. I am making lots of bread lately. I fear I may be obsessing a little. I don't think my thyroid likes it. I should knock it on the head.
(I have one on the go now. Shush, you.)

Anyway, if you do enjoy cooking I implore you to make this straight away. Homemade bouillon - what a heroic idea! Heidi Swanson has posted this amazing recipe on her lovely blog 101 Cookbooks, but it was inspired by Pam Corbin, who wrote The River Cottage Preserves Handbook.

If you ever make soups, stews, roasts or gravy, this stuff will change your life. It's not what you think it is. It's much much more than the sum of its parts, and so much more than bouillon. It adds a whole layer of extra flavour and an incredible savoury silkiness to anything gravylike. Yes, there's salt, but it isn't the salt that makes the magic. I don't know how it does what it does really, but it's amazing stuff.

I made it originally to use up some scraps of veg and herbs. We had pots and pots of overgrown woody parsley running amok in the garden, and some tough stems off the top of fennel bulbs. What I'm saying is that I made this from offcuts and stuff that would otherwise have gone to waste, and it is culinary flipping gold.

I more or less halved the recipe, and also reduced the salt by, erm, a bit. Which means I don't remember. I reduced it by maybe a third. I used sea salt, because I'm kind of a sea salt nerd, and I couldn't bring myself to use it all. It worked out fine, and I had one of the jars of bouillon in the fridge for a month or so with no mould or other ill effects. The other is in the freezer, and it isn't frozen solid, so I guess it's okay too.

I used leeks, celery, carrot, garlic, fennel, parsley and coriander, plus salt. Oh, and I didn't have sun-dried tomatoes, shallots or celeriac, so I didn't use them.

Also, a teaspoonful is great on avocado on toast with a squeeze of lemon. Don't say I never give you anything.

So very tiredzzzzzzzzzzzsnort.

Seriously, could I be any tireder? Dragging my caboose for sure.

So, not much of a post this week. Instead, how about you read this poem? I read it once and had to track it down so I could read it again, so I could know where to find it.

Talk amongst yourselves and I'll have a little nap. It's nice knowing you'll be here when I get back.

In the meantime, enjoy a photo of a little dog on a beach. You're welcome.

Drink and dreams and shame.

Here I sit, full of hangover and self-loathing. Does everyone get those together or is it just me? Alcohol in regular doses can contribute to depression, but is a single dose - or overdose - of alcohol able to make you feel like you'd like to crawl under the carpet and die of embarrassment? Who knows.

As far as I know, I have done nothing to be so badly ashamed of, drunken or otherwise, or at least nothing more shaming than any socially-inept person might usually do during a night on the tiles. (If you know otherwise then please don't go out of your way to correct me.

Last night I went to see a reading by the lovely and talented Belgian Waffle in Kilburn and while it is true that I went charging up to her to introduce myself without realising that she was in the middle of a conversation with someone else, I was not actually drunk at that stage, so my embarrassment is modified by the knowledge that this was behaviour of which I was in complete cognitive control. Now that I embrace my awkwardness as just another personal flaw, I don't mind it so much. (I feel foolish for being thoughtless and goofy though. Definitely one of my social loser moments.)

I also chatted with The Harridan, who, like Mary Archer, was a vision of elegance, fragrance and radiance. And despite her assertion that she is the Typhoid Mary of vomiting bugs, I remain unmolested. For now, anyway.

I think it's only fair to state for the record that, though all three of us have asserted that we are unwashed, unkempt and socially useless, they lie! They were both beautifully washed and, um, very kempt. Gracious in company as well.

My thoughtful gesture of the evening was to try to keep my beery breath to myself during conversation, and I'm not even sure if that was a success. 

Possibly owing to the beer, plus the cheesy snack I ate before bed, I had a funny dream (she said as everyone instantly glazed over) in which I had a chaste, romantic boyfriend who wooed me with hand-holding and eyeball-gazing and caring and sharing. He resembled a rough-looking version of Robert Pattinson with imperfect teeth. (I should point out that the Twilight phenomenon has barely touched the periphery of my consciousness, and really only in two ways: the part of my brain that hates ugly pervy crap about passive girls in peril and the ubiquity of this bloke when I am perusing Mail Online. How his close facsimile ended up in my dream is a mystery.)

So in the dream, I realised that the lovely man had come home and was downstairs as I sat chastely with the in-dream boyfriend upstairs at our in-dream beach house. There were some stabs at silent Hollywood melodrama as I ran up and down the stairs hoping to prevent either of them from discovering each other, but eventually the in-dream boyfriend told me he knew about the lovely man and agreed to discreetly depart in haste. I awoke and gratefully realised it had been a dream and I hadn't cheated (however lamely) on the lovely man and, to paraphrase John and Olivia, he's the one that I want.

In this uncharacteristic spirit of gratitude, I have compiled a brief and partial list of things for which I am very grateful: Radio 4, tea, the two little dogs, modern dentistry and The River Cafe.

And you?

Now with more eggs.

Eggs were to last weekend what drugs and violence were to Altamont - omnipresent, intrinsic and very, very destructive. To be fair, my weekend didn't involve any fatalities, but that's probably due to the absence of Hell's Angels. I also have had an egg for breakfast every morning this week and if you don't hear from me for a while I am probably in hospital. Or helplessly having a stroke on the carpet. What are you waiting for? Call an ambulance!

On Sunday, we had huge artichokes with hollandaise for dinner. That was almost a meal in itself, but then there was steak with, er hollandaise and meringues with cream and soon I will have the memory and attention span of a goldfish due to the many inevitable ministrokes. Steam engine. Werewolf. Millard Fillmore. See? It's happening already.

This is what I will be blaming for my inability to imagine anything interesting to write here.

So, what's been going on, you might ask?

There is an ongoing effort to clear the enormous shed which makes the garden look like an airfield with a hangar in the distance. Do I believe that everything that presently lives in there will fit in the tiny floor-level cupboards under the eaves in the loft? I do not. Do I think there's enough time to get the neighbours' teenagers to take up the decking so we can get and fill one of those huge garden storage box things before our shed is knocked down and/or we go on holiday? All of which has to be done in precisely that order? And the decking must not under any circumstances be touched by the lovely man, whose back was nearly broken the last time he tried to remove it, thus the summoning of the teenagers? Well, just call me Me of Little Faith.

Also, we have a handyman. He will be doing the lion's share of the shed-related things. He is a super-nice, lovely family man with good manners, very personable and always fragrant with laundry soap smells. He doesn't sleep much, and is usually up at dawn, pottering about and getting all eager to get started. Shortly after, he comes to my house.

Last time he was doing work here he and I had words - well, I had words. He is a dropper-in. He is well known for spontaneously knocking on your door at 9ish on a Saturday or Sunday morning to discuss some future project. He may have said that he will start on Wednesday, but that won't stop him from coming to drop stuff off on Monday and Tuesday. He is always early. He also likes a cup of tea and a chat.

That should separate you, dear readers, into two handy categories. Group A will be thinking, How lovely. I wish I could find a builder who doesn't stink of sweat, fags, concrete dust and last night's whiskey binge, who turns up when he says he will with his manners and polite conversation. That woman really is an Ingrate! Hmmph!

Group B will be rocking in a corner, hands on face, trembling gently, firmly headbutting the wall.

In my home, there is no unplanned early. There is no version of dropping in which is welcome or encouraged. Emergencies are different of course. By all means, if you are on fire or being chased by an angry mob, please feel free to knock. We probably wouldn't turn you away. The phone is cordless, so you won't mind calling the emergency services from the porch. Just leave it there when you're done. Good luck to you. See you on recycling day!

Why does this bother me so much? Aren't builders known for starting work early in the day? Well, yes, that is true. The thing about our handyman is that he gets earlier and earlier. I can be ready for him at the arranged hour of 8am, but at 7:50, when he rings the bell, I'll be brushing my teeth in my dressing gown. The next morning when he arrives at 7:45, I'll be naked smearing deodorant on my armpits with a toothbrush poking out of my mouth. The following morning when the door goes at 7:40 I will be peeing and apoplectic. I will be weeping tears of fury as I belt my dressing gown and descend the stairs, knowing that for the following 30 to 40 minutes - the first minutes of my waking day, minutes when I could be sleeping, drinking tea alone or staring into space - I will instead be forced to sit politely and interact with someone with whom I do not sleep or live. In other words, I will be strapping down and ball-gagging my Real Self, forcing all that early-morning lizard-brain bile down where it will bubble and fester.

In the early days, the handyman did a lot of work in our house. At times it has felt like he lived here. This was during my hibernation period, when I was settling into the house and getting used to living in a community. I may only have moved a few streets away, but my last home was a first-floor flat, with no one walking past your window, waving and chatting when you went out with the rubbish, no one ringing your bell and then looking in your windows to see if you were in.

I was simultaneously attempting to settle into domestic life with the lovely man. As lovely as he is, how easy is it going to be for two people - one on the near verge, one on the far verge of 40 - to successfully set up house together when they have both been living alone for the last 12 or so years? That's at least 24 years of combined singletude! What are the odds?

I went a little bonkers during that first year. (Maybe 18 months.) I'm better now, but for how long?

Okay, just one more quick paragraph about this. Handyman is also a crazy gossip, proudly enumerating the many faults of various neighbours, how they neglect their homes and never want to pay the going rate, etc. So having him stroll into my pestilential kitchen of an early morning gives me major agita. Finally, before you ask, yes I have asked him approximately a thousand times to please ring before he decides to drop in, and it would be great if he could arrive at 8 and not 7:30. He just doesn't listen.

So. And how are you?

About myself.

I am not in a bad mood as such, but I seem to be struggling to refrain from lecturing people about their stupidity. More of an eye-rolling mood really.

I receive a mystery letter in the post. A survey. Specifically, PATIENT EXPERIENCE TEAM SATISFACTION SURVEY. A satisfaction survey from the Hounslow NHS makes me feel a little... funny.

Odd. Antsy. I find it difficult to quantify what the exact feeling is, but I know it is going to provoke careful, vicious pedantry.

NB: I want to state clearly that I do not think I am a better, more perfect person, grammatically or otherwise, than whoever composed this survey. I merely want to mock. And complain.

First of all, they have spelled my address incorrectly. Secondly, in the first paragraph, as a noun, take-up should be hyphenated, snapshot is one word and I think you mean 'disadvantaged' with a d on the end. Also, About Yourself? How about trying the word "you," as in, "About You." Figure out you vs yourself, I am begging you.

Question 5 - 'What do you consider to be your ethnicity?' contains the options 'white' or 'other white background,' along with a further variety of ill-conceived choices.

Indulge me, just for a moment. WTF?:

Also?

I can't even think of anything funny to say about this. To be clear, I find it funny, I just don't know what I can add to make it funnier. 

And finally, hilariously furious chicken-scratchings of myself. Just call me Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. At least this should save me the trouble of filling in the bit about mental health.

I scribbled this "comment" indignantly until it dawned on me I could never send it for fear of looking like a disturbed shut-in. I'm not sure how different it is posting it here, except that this is where it apparently makes me feel good to parade things I am normally embarrassed about.

*********************

If you cast your mind back, you may remember that I mentioned a certain medical procedure that is supposed to take place. A letter was received, with a form which wants returning, via oddly-inscribed enclosed envelope.

Hi Charlie!

***********************

In the "On The Other Hand" files, in the midst of having a tantrum on the phone with my dental insurance provider due to an ongoing argument about what constitutes 'maintenance' vs 'treatment', I find out that I have paid them £600.59 and they have paid me £1440. So woo-hoo me and my fucked up teeth. I'm now not as bothered by the £81.50 I maintain they owe me. So, lemons and lemonade, etc.

And on a final technophobe note, I ask you, why is my Macbook dashboard always wrong about the weather? There is a little weather widget in my dashboard which contains vaguely seasonal weather information (summer=warm, winter=cold) which is never accurate.

Does this seem right to you?

In which I (wo)man the barricades in a slightly jaded fashion.

Every time I see my Muji smock I think "I should throw that out." Then I put it on and wear it because, despite making me look sixteen months pregnant, it is amazingly versatile and for that reason I love it. It can be worn over leggings or jeans or pajamas. It's cool in the summer but warm with layers in the winter. It has a delightful blue and white ticking stripe which goes with everything. It doesn't bind or chafe or cling and it has a sort of classic shape, so while it is true that it is an extremely comfortable and casual garment, it is not the sort of caftan-tent that might signify you have given up all hope and shrouded yourself in preparation for burial.

Just this morning I threw it on over my minimal summer sleepwear because my dressing gown was in the wash and I prefer to avoid startling the postman with the sight of my merrily unbound bosoms. And now I feel like a Jane Austen character doing some delicate watercolours in the sunshine in a meadow. I'm pretty sure it makes me look like one too. Or Edina Monsoon.

Having read this and this and this, (thank you Invisible Woman and That's Not My Age for the food for thought) I'm feeling a bit bolshy. I used to think that Trinny and Susannah and Gok were sympathetic and understanding, acknowledging that not everyone is or can be young, tall, slim and modelly, but actually, is that all we're hoping for? Forgiveness for our grave inadequacies? Tight knickers to make us look slimmer so we don't need liposuction?

Just altering the script a little - changing thin to healthy or firm or flattering - is that enough? I would prefer the whole of this misogynistic appearance industry to please get off my back about how I look. Also, I know this undermines my argument, but I would rather look like Germaine Greer, Patti Smith, Grace Jones, Molly Parkin or Zandra Rhodes than any of the automatons proclaiming the new black.

We are all formed and twisted by patriarchy and consumerism and fear, inescapably so. Like many others, I am ambivalent and conflicted about femininity and image and appearance; I refuse to care about it and I can't help caring about it. But some women are living well in it and with it. Swearing and spitting, dancing and raging and not worrying about how it looks, or at least not letting their worries stop them.

I am an ordinary person in my middle years, slightly eccentric, more than a little lazy and I have other stuff to do than worry endlessly if I am putting forward my healthiest, firmest, most flattering self today. I  love the creativity and drama and glamour of dressing up, but now I have a chest of drawers to paint, for god's sake. And I need to buy dog food and dental floss.

And on that note, let us all look upon the awesome spectacle of Miss Grace Jones, in her smock.