Wednesday's Windows

There have been two main themes in the UK's window displays this summer:

• Celebrate Britain/Jubilee/Olympics
• And Not..

I may post others in coming weeks, but Selfridges wins the prize for the most wonderful. (It probably also has the biggest budget... but that's life, eh?)

Don't forget to scroll down to the bottom picture for my very favourite window: it's all about the tea, people.

Wimbledon

The seaside

The boat race

Changing of the Guard

Britain's high streets

The Pearly King and Queen

The English fete

Britain's obsession with the weather

A builders' tea party

We're still dry...

In another life I dreamed about being a window dresser.

Here are two windows that caught my eye while I was in London. Nostalgic?

The first one is John Lewis.

The second one is Love Bakery in the King's Road. The Union Jack cake in the window was a wedding commission.

Friday Photo

Burger King, Charing Cross, London

Blogging from Blightly

As well as the sunny weather, I brought food poisoning to London. This explains my unscheduled absence. I had planned my blogs. Instead I found myself having to plan my bogs. (Oh dear, I’m sorry.)

I got off the flight, dumped my cases at the hotel and went off to find a hospital with a walk in GP unit. I am sort of, slowly, on the mend but disinclined to explore the list of restaurants and cafés I’d got planned for this trip.

Facebook friends will know that I made a special boot purchase in Bangkok and I was excited to have ten days in which to wear them. But so far, the weather in London has been hotter and sunnier than Bangkok (middle of the rainy season.) THANK goodness I slipped in the flip flops at the last minute.

On Monday I’m off to Arvon. That’s meant to be time to retreat into my writing so I’ll see you here if I manage to schedule some posts. Who knows?

Monday memories: Christmas 1986

I’d been going out with Not Yet Husband for about two months. Notions of husbands couldn’t be further from my mind because my first term at university had finished and we were meeting for the first time on fresh turf: Covent Garden. Just us. Would we still like each other away from university?

(I just went to ask Husband if he had any fond memories of this trip. Readers, he had no memory of the momentous occasion. He looked hazy and said, ‘was it a big meet up in the Punch and Judy?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it was just us.’ ‘Oh. Did we have lunch in that place in the middle?’ I said, ‘you’re guessing aren’t you?’ He said, ‘well I have lots of memories of Covent Garden…’ I said, ‘but not this special one?’)

To be fair to the old bloke his faculties are probably going. He got glasses for the first time yesterday: reading glasses. At last I’m not the only one… When he got home from the glasses trip he did a bit of tidying. He ventured into the button box where he found a number of treasures. A tie pin (aw gawd, did I really fall for a man who wore a tie pin?); an ARP badge (air raid patrol) and a single earring of mine.

He remembered (vaguely) that these earrings had been purchased by him in our dating days (though he couldn’t put an exact date on it) during a trip to Covent Garden (where we might or might not have been with other people) and was distressed that he had only found one. (The other one was in my jewellery box; I had kept it for sentimental reasons in spite of its singleton status.)

We had wandered about Covent Garden market and saw these gorgeous earrings. They were expensive and we were students but Not Yet Husband told the girl he wanted them. To our horror, the expensive price tag was for a single earring only (damn that trendy Covent Garden) but by this time NYH was unable to back out.

Regular readers will know how much I like lizards. I have blogged about all sorts – monitor lizards here and here; a blue crested lizard here; various gecko visitors here and a skink here. But I thought the lizard fascination grew while I was in Thailand; apparently not.

I wonder what those two young people wandering around Covent Garden in Christmas 1986 would have thought if they’d been told what life had in store for them.

For scale these are about 1cm tall and wide. They are inserted from the back of the ear lobe.

******

As a public humiliation tactic, each day I will show my progress (or otherwise) on my edit: page 31.

Friday Photo: London October 09

I love this picture.

At dusk in October the simple 'black and white' of the decorations and roofs made me think of Mary Poppins and Bert the chimney sweep.

When the Christmas lights are turned on by a minor celebrity, I expect it'll morph into a garish and bland image.

Just been released

I was nodding off in the departure lounge on Tuesday night. Anyone who knows me – actually anyone who’s read my profile – will know that sleeping tops the list as one of my favourite pastimes. A midnight flight, when it’s on time, is a challenge to me. But one that’s delayed causes me consternation: will I make the flight? Will I be curled up in a corner of the airport, sleeping?

So it was delayed and I really was nodding off in the departure lounge but when at last I did get on the ‘plane, I wrapped myself in my blanket, I buckled up, put my eye patches and ear plugs in and I went to sleep. I was unconscious before take off.

Not so nice was waking with a migraine the following morning, which beggared me all day yesterday. During landing I got my ear thing. (One out of ten flights, I can’t equalise my ears and I’m in rocking pain until they ‘pop’ themselves.)

My room is tiny but in an achingly trendy part of London and I am entertaining fantasies of a pied-à-terre here. That is what fantasies are all about.

Landing in my own (home) country is so odd. It never fails to surprise me how strange it feels to be in a place where I am likely to be understood. Still there is the feeling that I don’t understand the place, as though I’ve just been let out of prison and am not familiar with how things work. I had to buy a coat yesterday because it’s cold and I didn’t have one. My wrap wasn’t sufficient. I forgot to put my card into the machine – I tried to hand it to the cashier and he motioned to the machine as though I’m a bit retarded. “Do you want to wear it now?” he asks, and I think he thinks I’ve just been released too.

Bits and pieces

So here's a bitty post.

I fly tomorrow night. I have stuff in London to do first but it's a blessing that I'm going to the UK, because I can stay longer (thanks to half term and a lovely Husband) and go down to see my folks once I'm done with stuff in London. (My Dad's been moved to a cottage hospital but is moving a bit more now, though still in lots of pain.)

'Stuff' includes, among other things, the gorgeous and talented Lenny Henry in Othello (oh be still my beating heart) as well as my industry day with The Literary Consultancy.

And this is the final picture in the Pratunam series: the ladies who make the costumes.

OFFICIALLY OVER-EXCITED

This week’s been a washout as far as writing has been concerned: novel writing at any rate. (Pah: just as I started a personal race with Sheepish and I’ll be seriously lagging behind this week and tomorrow is WC day (word count day!)

This week has been full of sickness (mine and Daughter’s) and of course I should be writing now because this afternoon I am on the Neilson Hays Library stand at the Living in Bangkok exhibition at Bumrungrad Hospital.

But instead of writing, I’m jumping up and down with excitement because I read this yesterday. I had, up to this moment, been quietly excited but my trip to London is getting closer and OMG I think it’s time to lose control. This is Othello with Lenny Henry at Trafalgar Studios. AND I’ve got tickets. OMG, OMG. I am going with Leigh. Yay yay yay. Othello is my favourite Shakespeare play and I have a rather large soft spot for Lenny Henry and every faith that he will be stupendous. I am wondering if Leigh will be embarrassed if I want to go to the stage door to swoon a bit…

Now I’ve got myself over-excited. I’ve got to calm down and write lots of words so I don't shame myself in front of Sheepish tomorrow. And then I can get off to the hospital to promote the library when really what I want to do is think about LH as Othello...

International traveller...

I’ve gone from the incredible faceless woman to the incredibly stupid one… all in the space of a few days.

This is what I looked like on the aeroplane with my face and eye masks. We landed and had a couple of days to recover, see my folks and visit the opticians etc before it was off to the Novel Racer weekend. The meeting was in Birmingham on Saturday but Spiral Jen and I were travelling north to stay with a writing friend for the weekend.

I shall leave out the heart stopping phone call that morning from a medical centre in Canary Wharf “Mrs B? We’ve got your husband here and we’re just transferring him to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel…” Obviously I cancelled my w/end plans and rushed over to RLH at Whitechapel. It was only after the doctors diagnosed ‘Man Pain’ did I reconfirm my weekend plans.

Because of the above, Jen and I missed lunch; instead we rearranged to meet at the impressive and shiny St Pancras in time for our train to Derby. That’s “IN TIME FOR OUR TRAIN, SPIRAL JEN…” There were a series of progressively panicky phone calls and texts from me, and eventually Jen came huffing into view. By this time I had checked which platform the Derby train went from, but with only three minutes to departure Jen, who’d booked the tickets, had about 42 identical looking train tickets to sift through and of course the buggering barriers needed the right one not just any old one. Just in time, we got through the ticket machines, jumped onto the train and began walking down the train to Coach E where our reservations were.

Funny; we ran out of coaches at D. Then it went something like this:
“Can we go through that door?” I said to the ticket man.
“Nope.”
The doors shut, in preparation for departure.
“Oh. How do we get to coach E then?”
“Let’s have a look at your tickets, love.”
I heard whistles blowing in the distance.
“Is this where you’re going?”
“Derby yes.” Why would I have a ticket for a destination I’m not going to?
“This is the train to Fife, love.”

I can’t remember much of what happened at this point… some squealing, possibly, about whether he could let us off before we began moving…He was only too delighted to lose us. Anyway a kind man on the platform sorted us out for new route with a change at Leicester.

We had the loveliest weekend with lots of laugher, gorgeous food and chatter. It was brilliant to meet up with more Novel Racers in Birmingham, and then all too soon it was Sunday and time to go. Our friend dropped us at Derby train station. “Look,” she said, “It goes from Platform Six, and there isn’t another one on there. (The air was heavy with the unsaid ‘Surely even you two can manage the right train this time…’)

Of course we could. The trained arrived; we checked the displays for coach numbers and boarded. The train slid out of the station. Our reservations were C19A and C20A so we were bit confused: should we be in coach C or A? I left Jen with the bags and went off to find out.

I found a nice man who told me “This is the train to Edinburgh, love.”

I wish I could tell you I was joking but I’m not. We had to get out at Chesterfield and catch another train; one that was actually going to London.

See, I’ve thought about this a lot. I think to catch one wrong train is probably stupidity; to do it twice … means your brain is concerned with loftier thoughts.