How to put a dampener on a lovely summer evening

Picture the scene.

You're up on the roof terrace of a pub in Kings Cross with some friends, enjoying the last couple of hours of sunshine and demolishing fruit-stuffed glasses of Pimms as the day slips seamlessly into balmy night.

After an hour or so, you glance down at the bench next to you. Then you look at the floor. You glance nervously to the opposite seats (maybe you put it over there?) and for reasons unknown, start patting your pockets-  as if you normally pop your handbag in your jeans for safe keeping.

"What are you looking for?" says a friend, having seen your eyes step up their frantic search behind you and on adjoining tables.

"Oh, just my handbag..." you reply, all casual, like.

Others join in the search. 

"It's definitely not here."

"No" you sigh, acknowledging what you knew when you first looked down. "It's gone."

That's annoying, you think, the Pimms and Prosecco softening the blow slightly as you borrow a phone and start cancelling things. Someone alerts the bar staff, another friend tops up your glass and two others go and rifle through the bins outside, returning with three other stolen credit cards in their hands; none of them yours.

Someone tops up your glass.

You mentally list everything that was in the bag: your everyday survival kit.

Wallet (no cash these days, thankfully), debit cards, drivers licence, National Insurance card. Boots, Tesco, Necter, spare SIM card. Diary, phone, Oyster card. Bus pass. Bits and bobs you keep close. Moleskine diary, your plans for the next few months, the ideas written in the back. Your shit HTC phone that you actively urged people to steal regularly, but feel a bit lost without now that it's gone.

On your way back from checking the toilets, the calm feeling is shattered by the realisation that you've also lost the key card for your block. The keys to your flat. Was your address written anywhere?

Your glass is filled again.

The bank arrange for emergency cash, you get a taxi home. Your housemate lets you in.

The list of things you've lost continues to rack up the next morning as you start your day. Earphones. Mac cover-up. Dior lipstick.

Throughout it all, you're calmer than expected. A friend sums it up nicely with a cautious question.

"Urm, was it...it wasn't....it wasn't...The Bag, was it?"

"No, no. Thank God."

"Phew."

"I know." you sigh, hangover creeping in as you write down all the things you have to do before you can get to work. "Every cloud."

Being British and the Cake Conundrum

There are many, many wonderful things about being British.

Like, when three people are standing around a kettle in the office kitchen waiting for it to boil, the lull in conversation can always be filled with mindless observations about the sun, rain, clouds, heat, cold (or lack of it).

And no matter how chaotic the shop, there will always be a staunchly adhered to queue at the pay desk, populated by people who possess the ability to communicate using only tuts and rolls of the eyes.

Then there's the way the transport system in our capital city is governed by a set of rules based on maintaining order and politeness: letting people off the train first, allowing those in a hurry to get by on the escalators, giving up your seat for someone who needs it, and then shutting the hell up so everyone can brood at the lack of space in silence.

We live in a country where "sorry" is probably the most spoken word in our collective vocabulary, uttered even if we're annoyed and complaining about something - which we frequently are - and yep, we do that really well, if quietly, too.

But for all these entertaining little British nuances, these little quirks based around maintaining order - sometimes there's the feeling that people can be just too damn polite. Not wanting to tread on toes or rock the proverbial boat, we'll often say the opposite of what we want when asked. I like to call it The Cake Conundrum:

They say: Would you like the last slice of cake?

You think: Yes. Say yes. You're starving. Say yes. Yes, yes, yes.

You say: Oh, no thank you. I'm stuffed. And I ate yesterday, so I really shouldn't.

All of which keeps the world a lovely polite place, but doesn't really do you (or your rumbling stomach) any favours.

The Cake Conundrum can be reversed and applied to many situations, but the end result is the same. One person doesn't say what they really want, and ends up feeling worse, maybe even a bit resentful for it. The other person has their cake, eats it, then feels rude when they later find out, usually by via someone else, that they deprived someone of much needed food.

To carry the metaphor to its healthy end: I suppose sometimes, I feel like I eat a lot of the cake.

You ask me a question, you'll get an honest answer. If you're dithering, I'll decide. You see a husky dog on the tube with a face like a cuddly bear and stare at it longingly; while I'll bound up to the owner, pat the dog on the head, ask it's name ("Bonza") and smile all the way to work.

Because politeness is good, politeness is great. Politeness makes this country go round.

But sometimes, it's good to shelve the weather talk, tell the cashier to hurry up, ask that person next to you to get their bag off your lap, and not automatically apologise when someone else bumps into you. Aside from anything else, you'll feel better for it.

And always, always smile at the dog.

Weekend fail.

London disappeared under a thick cloud of white at around 11am this morning. Not long after that, I decided that driving three hours north through areas designated a harrowing shade of orange on the Met Office website probably wasn't the most intelligent idea in the world.

I was meant to go to Manchester this weekend for the long awaited, twice rearranged meeting with my friends from uni; Jellyfish and Stingray, but given the view - or lack of it - from my office window, we went all sensible and called it off.

Then the sun came out.

So instead of catching up with some much missed mates I haven't seen in over a year, I'm at home, blogging next to a Boy who, after last night's excess, had a bath, some food, and promptly fell asleep at 9pm with a Pooh Bear clamped under his arm. Ladies and gentlemen, the Christmas party season has claimed another victim:

Conversation round this neck of the woods, as you can probably tell by Pooh's rather wide eyed stare, is riveting.

A plea to all drivers, re: inertia

This weekend I drove up to East Yorkshire.

On the way, it occurred to me that there may be some driving instructors out there who are omitting a very simple piece of advice from their lessons, and depriving a nation of some essential car knowledge. 

Next time you're poodling along the road in your car and need to slow down (perhaps you have found yourself to be 1mph over the speed limit, or you are approaching a speed camera at 30mph, and know without doubt that you will get caught for a crime you are not committing, unless you drop to 25. Maybe a rogue leaf can be seen making its way towards the kerb and threatens to flutter into your path), just think: could this action be achieved by simply removing my foot from the accelerator? Do I really need to touch the brake pedal for absolutely no reason, repeatedly, and cause a wave of blinking red light panic to ripple through the cars behind me, thus slowing an entire lane of traffic?

Consider this, over braker: is your aim to frustrate the car behind you into yelling "WHY ARE YOU BRAKING? WHY? WHYY?", when you're on a long, straight, otherwise stress free road with no one in front of you? Or would you rather just slow up by, you know, withholding your foot from the pedal which causes speed to build, and saving the driver behind from giving herself a brain haemorrage from banging her head against a metaphorical brick wall?

The answer, of course, is "Why, yes that does sound better".


PS. London and the South East - I've seen the future. It's white, cold, falls from the sky in flakes, causes endless news reports, a plethora of boring Facebook photo albums and makes already shit drivers a lot worse. You have been warned.

De Ja Vu

While I’ve been sunning myself on Bondi Beach this week, the Boyfriend continues his epic mission across Europe. In fact, his current travel plan sees him cover more countries in five days than I plan to on my entire trip. How's that for progress.

So, the update. Instead of waiting for his Monday flight from London, he decided to try and fly out of somewhere in Europe. He took the Eurostar to Paris, where he discovered that all trains to Spain and other airporty places were full, and got interviewed by BBC Radio 1. He then queued up to buy a return ticket to the UK, and by chance, got talking to someone who told him that he could get a coach instead. After an overnight stay and 16 hours on a coach, he arrived in Madrid.

You with me? Right. So today, he’s got a flight from Madrid to Cairo, Egypt. After an hour there it’s onto Dubai, where he’s got a fourteen hour wait, then another flight to Singapore for another little stop. He’ll finally arrive, completely exhausted and malnourished from an airline food overload, in Sydney on Sunday evening.

Part of me is expecting him to arrive as planned. Another part is fairly convinced that something else is bound to go wrong. A third part is going “Shit the bed, Jo. This bloke must really like you to make all this effort. You better look hot, and buy a proper box for the presents you were just going to wrap in newspaper”. Oh, and the fourth part is quietly hoping that my freshly waxed bits stop resembling a plucked turkey by the end of the weekend.

Still, if this whole episode has taught us anything, it’s that you really can’t control Mrs Mother Nature. Well, that’s what I’ll be telling The Boyfriend anyway, when the predicted 26 degree heat on Saturday inexplicably drops to rain and cloud just in time for his arrival. Ha.




Fingers crossed again please: for weather, for imminent arrivals, and my red bumpy waxy bits. Ta.

I'm going to Greece on Friday.

Two days will be spent in Athens, sweating like a fat British tourist in a hot country, then me and boyfriend will be meeting his parents on their boat for a week of sailing around the islands. I say sailing. I will mostly be lying on deck, book in one hand, sun cream in the other, attractive red blotchy heat patches and sunburn creeping over my body.

I'm preparing myself: spending more than my requisite 30seconds in the sauna in an attempt to get my body used to the heat, and booking hotels. I found one, by the way. Eventually mum said she'd help out (i.e. pay for a night) which has meant we're able to stay somewhere that doesn't offer an entrance carpet made of discarded needles or by the hour room service, if you catch my drift.

Even booking a nice hotel wasn't easy. I booked on priceline.co.uk believing it to be the cheapest room rate, then found out that it was actually more expensive than booking through the hotel itself. One firmly worded email and a phone call later, and that particular booking was cancelled so I could rebook minutes later for 20 euros less. Watch out for those pesky sites, they'll get ya. 'Best Price Promise' indeed. Pah. PAH!

Also, does anyone else hate it when you get a litttttle bit burnt, or even just a bit red on the old shoulders, and some smart arse (usually with a ravishing golden tan) goes 'Oooooooooooooooooooooooh...you've caught the sun, ouch! That looks painful!'

Have I? Does it really? You mean pasty white me has dared to get some colour and it's not the socially accepted orangey brown that the world aspires to? And they always have that really concerned look on their face; a mixture between pity and sympathy like you've just failed a test or something.

Look, tanned people. Us whitey's are perfectly aware that if we go in the sun, we'll go red. We accept that. We know. It's often not that painful. It's just a bit hot. Telling me that my face has gone the colour of a tomato will not make the situation any better. You go your colour, we'll go ours. Don't look at us like we've contracted a disease that will wipe out the tanned population unless we put some factor 30 on.

Brown is so 1990.