Thanks, everyone...

..for giving me such a special birthday. Whether you called or texted or emailed or were there to help me celebrate in person, thanks a bunch. In what has been a very difficult year it meant so much to me to be buoyed by your best wishes and for you to have given up your time (and condemned yourselves to a very tired Monday, if this office is any indication!) so that I could have so many of my favourite people in the one place. So a very heartfelt thankyou, and all my love to you.

Just for the record, though, the Gold Team rocks!

Feeling Guilty?

Sure you are. Even if you're not, go here. Now. It's intriguing.
Something oddly reassuring about the fact that we all sneak around with things hidden inside us.

Christmas Smells Like Nectarines

The Whitsun Weddings

But with less Alan Bennett.

One of those dreadful mornings this morning - woken at 5 (FIVE!) in the... gasp! ..morning by this newfangled sunlight stuff from a dream that I was Chinese and running feverishly through rice fields to escape a band of gunmen and to try and warn my family (presumably also Chinese). This one was immediately preceded by a dream that my friends and I had been front row at a Cat Empire concert (at which I kept buying useless merchandise) being held in a theatre with an odd, sloping floor, so that I was at the performers' feet, and all the less fortunate behind and below me were getting was a splendid view of my arse. The ultimate problem was that the lead vocalists for the Cat Empire were, in fact, Cheech and Chong.
NO MORE BLOODY CAFFEINE BEFORE BED!

Anyway, woke up absolutely bursting for the bathroom only to remember that late last night we had finally located the source of that odd smell - viz, blocked (eww) drainage pipes splendidly overflowing into the garden (eww, eww) and wafting their vapours fragrantly over my washing (eww, EWW)! Decided to risk a surreptitious flush anyway (successful), and tried to creep past the cat, apparently fast asleep on the washing machine, to no avail.
If ever you're a tourist in areas prone to landslides, take Ziggy with you - his MRRRRRRAAAAAAOWWWW can pierce through even the thickest concrete and did, I'm sure, wake most of the neighbourhood when he found I was awake and available for feeding service. Breakfast over, the horrid animal then disappeared to spend the rest of his sleeping hours curled up WITH GINETTE. Harumph.

ANYWAY, the point was that when I awoke I was convinced it was Sunday. There should be a name for the utterly gut-wrenching disappointment that you experience when you discover that it is, in fact, Monday, and therefore you aren't up splendidly early, you are supposed to be leaving in three minutes. Extra points for realising the reason you're supposed to be leaving in three minutes is you're taking your grandmother shoe shopping and the only clothes you've got clean (because of the foul waft in the garden) are the ones you wear when you've got your period that make you look like a
semi-erected wedding marquee and you're going to have to endure the lecture on cholesterol-free margarine again.

Oh, and I went to another wedding. Long but beautiful.
Made me want to be somewhere - anywhere - else.

You can't be Cereas...

Discovery of the week - our work Internet policy prohibits our accessing the Coco Pops website!

The Hell-Bent Frenetic Crazy-Paced Mad Rush

Quite often, working in television is a constant panic to keep all the balls in the air at once, trying to accommodate local, interstate and international stories for several bulletins, entering scripts and jumping between feeds to check stories to tape and catching the occasional update from the studios. You can easily go for several hours without stirring from your chair - if you're not careful, without looking away from the screen. It's stressful and heart-thumping and quite exciting.

And then there are days when nothing is happening. Not a sausage.

And when nothing is happening here, NOTHING is happening, and I can't think of anything to write about and you get a bit carried away hitting
'Next Blog' and funding your ever-more-desperate descent into debt by looking at THIS collection of general fabulousness. (For which I hold you entirely responsible, Ms "Oh, They've Got These Fabulous Watches". You've created a monster.)

Albion

It crept up on me yesterday morning. Rain for the first time in months, staining the asphalt dark and settling the dust in the air, lending a chilly edge to the wind and washing the cars new. Sitting in a favourite cafe for breakfast but seeing the street with foreign eyes. Eating on the outside, alien inside. Strange but safe. The ozone in the air. Stopped at traffic lights in Crystal Palace in the seamless rain. My favourite corner of my uncle's local. The checkouts of the Tesco in Horley. The beginning of such a powerful longing for England.

Only in This Business

Could you find, simultaneously open on your taskbar,
two Internet Explorer windows...

"Welcome to Blu Tack.com"

and

"Twisted Sister.com: The Official Online Home of Twisted Sister"

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

# There's a bright golden haze on the meadow

# There's a bright golden haze on the meadow

# The corn is as high as an elephant's... #

Such light! Such levity! Such laughter!

Why do my feet barely appear to touch the ground?
Why am I so delicately light-headed?
Why is every child rosy-cheeked, every flower a rose?
Why is the air full of songbirds calling my name?

Am I in love? Have I discovered a cure for cancer?
Have I painted a masterpiece?

You ask me why?

I've finally done my bloody tax return, that's why!

Good For What Ails Ya

If only I'd come across Wendy Cope's poem a little earlier...although this is in no way a remedy for your delicious predicament, LM : )

Two Cures for Love

1. Don't see him. Don't phone or write a letter
2. The easy way: get to know him better.

This Week's Band Name

Is 'Tempura Hat'.

What?

Today it is so bloody hot and I am such an experienced procrastinator that instead of cleaning the kitchen, ironing something to wear to work, rediscovering the earlier eras of my bedroom floor and practising for the impending translation exam of death and despair, I have been sitting here online completing a wine connoisseur quiz. The irony is that despite knowing sod all about wine - I like to drink it, but I prefer beer and I couldn't tell my grenache from my merlot* - I was awarded the second highest level of "expert in the making" at 85%. I feel betrayed. Does that mean that all those sex compatability and career tests I've done in Cosmo were... (Gasps) ..not reliable?

*God, that was a stretch for a pun!

La vita e' bella

Especially when there is such tender affection behind a platonic hug and kiss that it makes me go all wibbly inside.

Eavesdropping

Boys frighten me sometimes. Overheard in Woolworths this evening...

Young man (wistfully to his flatmate):

Man, we would live so cheaply if we could eat dog food.

Major Achievement

I've finally seen the end of The Sound of Music.

Now, look, that may not seem like a mammoth feat, but it's taken me years.
I must have seen the first three quarters of the damn thing at least 10 times. And I knew how it ended, of course, but it's been one of those Jane Eyre-type things. Twice I read Ms Bronte's novel and got stuck in the same place - the third time I managed to break through to the end (and now it's one of my favourite books). Odd how your cherished parts of something can change as you get older. (I'm sure I never used to cringe at spontaneous song quite so much.) Fictional it may be, but for now I'm going to believe that if a curtain-wearing, bowl-cut-sporting nun can win her man, surely I must be in with a chance!

Now all I have to do is stay awake for all of Spaceballs.