Angry? We're bloody furious

Bangkok’s Melbourne Cup is the Australian and New Zealand Women’s Group’s biggest fundraiser. Cancelled last November because of the threat of floods, today has been billed as ‘melbourne cup Retrospective.’

I don’t care what it’s called; I get to wear my fascinator. At last.

Back in September K and I began planning. We talked about inviting the same women as last year, minus those that have moved (C & C we miss you) and trying to find the theme. Then, good ol’ Husband came up with the idea/theme. Was he trying to tell me something?

K & I set of for Pratunam for materials and then I began work on the prototype. My second design got the thumbs up.

Big thanks to K for helping to cut out hundreds of pieces of felt.

 It was fiddly, but it was worth it.

Can you see what it is yet?

Absolutely, we could have bought them; these little guys are sold everywhere but where would the fun be in THAT? Major thanks goes to the generosity of Obsessively Stitching blog who has put up the how-to-make and pattern for (non commercial use) for the angry birds.

Then it was time to get everyone round so I could teach them to assemble their hats, Blue Peter style.

The finished fascinator:

Hello? *Waves*

I'm sorry I've been AWOL.

What have I been up to? I've been to the UK and eaten quite a lot of cake - most of it wheat free but not all of it. Sorry body. It was my Dad's 82nd birthday and Daughter and Sister made him a 'light chocolate cake' from Harry Eastwood's Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache book. It was quite simply the best cake I've ever eaten.

My sister taught me to make tzatziki and I cooked quite a lot; most out of character.

I raced like a maniac around the countryside seeing people and doing things but people drove and trained around England to come and see us too. Thank you people. Several things got cancelled and we weren't able to reschedule and other things didn't get arranged in the first place. I'm so sorry to people I didn't manage to see.

We got back to Bangkok just in time for Sister in Law and her family to arrive. They had a week in the city and then we all set off for a week by the sea - Koh Samed. I'll skim over the fact that I had what I think might have been flu while there. At least I could look at the sea while I felt crap.

And then the kids went back to school and it felt like we'd never been away.

I feel very 'start of a new term' though. We've started planning for our Melbourne Cup hats - I am feeling very excited about these. And I've bought myself a food processor (both Husband and I bought food processors to the relationship. We both had them as students and bits had broken off so that nothing fitted together in the end. They were judged too falling apart to make the trip to Thailand. Both were twenty years old which I reckon was pretty bloody marvellous and is why this week I bought a new Kenwood.) I've continued to cook quite a lot - tzatziki, hummus, leek and potato soup, guacamole. I'm failing to buy sweet potatoes in Bangkok at the moment so I can make Leon's sweet potato falafel. Leon says it must be the ones that are orange inside. Somewhere else it said there are Japanese sweet potato and the internet said that what Americans call yams, often aren't. Or something. So I keep going to gaze at sweet potato shaped things in greengrocers, wondering if they're the right thing to buy.

And I'm writing. I've had five days of storming writing or rewriting to be accurate. I appear to have worked out what needs doing with the novel and I feel a bit floaty about it.

I'm beginning to think the fairies might have dropped in and exchanged me for a slightly better model.

And they're off... (to Melbourne Cup)

Precious little progress is still progress

I had a sudden shock on Saturday morning when the York Writing Festival programme pinged into my inbox. About a trillion months ago – the kind of notice that is required – I booked air mile tickets to go home for this writing conference. I kept my fingers crossed that the dates wouldn’t change because my tickets can’t!

I had worked it all out. I’d have time to finish the edit; send it to some readers; get their feedback and still have time to go through it again. It had seemed at the time as good a deadline as any on what is turning out to be the never ending novel.

So when I saw the festival programme I began hyperventilating and determined to get down to work. What progress have I made toward hitting that deadline? Errrm, precious little… but I have tidied my office. Still, you can’t write in chaos, can you? What? You can? Yeah me too but tidying seemed so very much more attractive…

I seemed to have slipped on my public humiliation tactic of writing what page of the edit I’m on. I must remedy that immediately. Page 54 - which represents about a sixth of the novel.

And by the way who is planning to attend the York Writing Festival? Let's have a show of hands please.

Here's one I made earlier...

Six weeks ago: someone asks me if I’d like to join their friend’s table for the Melbourne Cup charity lunch at the beginning of November. I don’t know everyone on the table but I say yes.

Five weeks ago: someone mentions that there’s a theme to our fascinators. (A fascinator is a headpiece – not as full as a hat; it perches on the side of your head.) Someone has seen a picture that they like and perhaps we could find someone to make them.

Four and a half weeks ago: no-one’s quite sure who the twelve women are on the table but someone thinks one of the other women has an idea for a fascinator.

Four weeks ago: No-one has contacted K or I talk about hats. I wonder if K and I are control freaks. But no-one else seems to be worried that no-one knows anything.

Three and a half weeks ago: K emails some of the women she does know to find out what is being proposed. I hear from K that one person answered the email and they think someone had an idea for a fascinator. Maybe we can find someone to make it for us.

Three weeks ago: I start thinking, I google, look at magazines and books. I send K a picture. We wait a bit because one of the women knows that someone had seen a picture they liked for our fascinators and maybe someone’s got it in hand.

Two and a half weeks ago: we send around a picture to some of the women we’ve discovered are on the proposed table.

Two weeks ago: K and I go to Chinatown to purchase goodies to make fascinators.

One week ago: I begin a prototype.

Yesterday: I complete the prototype.

This morning: eight women came over to my apartment to learn, Blue Peter style, to make their own fascinator. We made three extras for the women who couldn’t come today but someone is certain they know who they are.

Tuesday next week: Melbourne Cup.

Melbourne Cup (for the last time)

This is us strutting our stuff down the catwalk, shortlisted for the 'best table' costume prize.

It makes me realise that you can the women out of Britain ...

May we always be able to laugh at ourselves and not have to wear something 'pretty' with a label to explain what we've come as.

My photographs are dreadful; here's hoping that friends will have pictures to send me.

Costume clue

Tomorrow the costumes will be worn and then I can forget all about them.

The traumas of the printers doing them wrong, not once but twice, are still fresh in my head. As is the person who came to collect their costume who wasn’t on my list. (We’d had an extra one printed ‘just in case’ and I’d made an extra hat because ‘thirteen is unlucky’ but I still get the hot and cold shivers when I think of how close we came to not having enough costumes.) I’m vowing never to do it again - until the pain wears off - and I find myself volunteering for it all over again this time next year…

I can’t unveil yet, but I’m going to give you a clue.

I did have my toenails painted as part of the theme and I took a picture to show you, but honestly, when I saw the photo… uncooked pork sausages came to mind and I decided not to put you through it.

So you’ll have to do with this. Note: I haven’t been at Photoshop again.

Today

Today was marked in the diary some four weeks ago as ‘the great hat making day.’ In truth, I don’t think any of us actually wrote that in our diaries because that would have been a bit, well, silly, wouldn’t it? I wrote something more like ‘S & C coming over to help make hats’ but the fact is that it’s taken on epic proportions in my head as one of the problems that I might, possibly, conceivably, hopefully, be able to solve.

(Aging parents who refuse to accept they could do with a spot of help: no, I can’t crack that one.)

But I can make the hats for the Melbourne Cup. Hmmm, I haven’t yet been able to work out how to hide the bits that we don’t want to see… so actually I haven’t resolved this problem either but three heads, when S & C turn up, are likely to be better than my jetlagged and under par one.

But it’s another day not writing, and the woolly one is banging out those words… I have, over the last few weeks of fretting about the folks who refuse help, also been worrying about the dénouement of the novel. Mostly I’ve been agonizing over the location and whether removing the characters from the setting – which is pretty important to the novel - will weaken the story or not.

In the end, I’ve decided to remove them… for the truth of their characters; inside the house they will not tell the truth. Therefore they must be removed. In order to have them elsewhere, I need to research something and a couple of days ago I heard back from a friend I was at art college with. She’s willing to answer some questions and so now, after the hat making, I can crack on with the last 10-15k of words.

Better watch out woolly one; I can still put you in the hot wash…

Letter to Brain

The Towers
Bangkok

Dear Brain

When I said to Susan ‘I don’t need to worry about the Melbourne Cup hats until I get back to Bangkok’ I didn’t mean the very first night I got back. I had just done a long haul flight and could really have done with the sleep. You, Brain, would have benefitted from said sleep. And, there were after all, only a few hours left on the Sunday; worrying could have waited until Monday. You know, daylight hours? Then I could have done something practical about the worrying.

I didn’t mean you to think that waking me at 1.30am after two hours sleep on the very first day I got home, and keeping me conscious and worrying about design and technical putting together of hat until 5.30am was necessary: particularly not when the alarm goes off at 5.45am.

See, Brain, it's now 9.20am on Monday and I need a night's sleep already.

They are just hats; how hard can they be? Don’t answer that. I know that you think assembling and subsequently hiding the feathers’ join seems a similar challenge to splitting the atom… but you know, I don’t think it will be. We have a glue gun, UHU, staplers and a needle and thread. I've even purchased some of those eyelet things. You do, after all, in your dim and distant past have a degree in sculpture: I reckon we can do this, you and I. We can put together a fascinator/hat thingummyjig - alright, thirteen fascinator/hat thingummyjigs to make everyone happy.

Anyway, Brain, I just wanted to send you this message to let you know that if I spend some of today working on the design (that’s if I can stay awake) I would really appreciate some sleep tonight. Okay?

Love JJx

Take a deep breath: following on from Saturday

I’ve heard it said that Sampeng Lane is half a mile and I’ve also heard one and a quarter mile. It doesn’t really matter how long it is because it feels like five miles and you’ll be good for nothing by the end of it.

I do absolutely love Sampeng Lane – it’s a must-go to for anyone who enjoys shopping but it’s nicest when you’re there for a browse rather than something you must find. I could have scoured other parts of Bangkok for the items for our Melbourne Cup costume and not find them. I’d waste two days looking so I figured I might as well go straight to Sampeng Lane. If Chinatown doesn’t have it, it’s probably not available.

It’s a bit of a nightmare to get to. There are various routes; the one I take (not the river) is to go by underground to Hua Lampong and take a taxi to the far end of Sampeng – the Pahurat Indian Cloth market end. Hua Lampong is a train station from which naïve backpackers and tourists emerge regularly and the taxi rank here seems to attract the less honest taxi drivers. This is not the same for most of Bangkok.

Sampeng is a long lane of shops facing each other that in some ways puts me in mind of medieval England, where people on a top floor could lean out and shake the hands of people in the opposite building. The pathway is maybe a meter or so wide because goods spill out on the walk way to entice us in. Mobile food hawkers sell their wares; motorbikes, mopeds and hand carts laden with goods weave in and out of the people.

Sadly for me, there isn’t a Starbucks half way along.

Uh Oh: what have I let myself in for?

To say ‘Melbourne Cup is a horse race’ is probably a bit like saying ‘Shakespeare was a writer.’ I don’t mean to enrage any Australian readers (*waves*) I just happen to think horses are for riding and not watching… However, that doesn’t stop me from booking a place at the Anzwg (Australian and New Zealand Women’s Group) organised Melbourne Cup each November.

I used to go to point-to-points when I lived in Kent. It’s a form of amateur horse racing over fences for hunters but I’m only a teensy bit ashamed to say that for me it was a social event: beer tents and flirting with boys (it was a long time ago.) I rarely saw a horse.

I’m sorry; I know I’m a disgrace. As I say I like horses enormously, I just prefer riding them to watching them run.

Melbourne Cup is a bit like Ascot – that’s how seriously it’s taken – except I don’t think bizarre costumes are ever worn at Ascot (unless you count some of those outfits!) For Melbourne Cup, everyone dresses up either in formal race attire or in fantastic costumes. I think this year is my fourth time. I’ve always gone with the BWG and most years a costume theme is organised but I don’t take part in costumes. I make them; I don’t wear them. (Shhh: This is because I don’t like anyone looking at me!)

However, last week I found myself sitting next to costume queen, CD, and we cooked up an idea for a team costume. And now it’s happening and because I’m helping to organize it…I’m going to have to wear it. I hadn't even had a drink when I agreed to it!

Take a deep breath: yesterday I went to Sampeng Lane in Chinatown to source materials…

Bleurgh

Last Monday I could hardly stop smiling as went to meet Carol in the afternoon. The reason for this was the writing … the words … the pile of them grew bigger and bigger. I was enjoying it. One minute I was on 15k and then a couple of minutes later I was on 18k. Wow.

Then on Tuesday I went to the Melbourne Cup celebrations organised by the Australian and New Zealand Women’s Group where I drank too much champagne. I went home and I haven’t felt right since – and I’m writing this on Saturday.

Worse than ‘not feeling right’ for four or more days, is the fact that I’ve annihilated my writing cells.

There are lots of people around me with loved ones with serious illnesses and here I am making myself feeling utterly crapulous voluntarily. What a stupid thing to do; my poor old body.

I’ve said lots of times ‘I’m never drinking again’ so there’s no point in saying that but I do think that perhaps alcohol and I don’t really get along too well. If I’m honest, it’s not just over indulging that makes me feel awful; even a couple of glasses will do it.

The combination of feeling terrible and not being able to write … well, it’s just not worth it. I think I may have to live a life of near teetotal boredom.

I hope I still get invited out sometimes.