Last day at work! On Tuesday I start my new and very exciting commissioning job, and part of me is panicking and thinking ‘Why did they give this to me?! I am inexperienced!’ but another part is thinking ‘They saw I had potential and good ideas and if they didn’t think I could do it they would’ve hired someone else’. I hope the second part wins out, as publishers can smell fear.

My leaving party was last night. Started off in the boardroom with wine and snacks, and presents. I got a Routemaster clock (with a 159 on it!), Routemaster coasters, a Cath Kidston shower cap and bangle, lots of gummi sweets, some 1950s naked lady flick-books and a £50 Homebase gift voucher, which I had requested. Hurrah! A new BBQ for summer! Garden furniture! 1970s retro wallpaper! I managed not to cry during my boss’s speech (as it was brief and upbeat) but I did tear up when I opened the gift from him and his wife (my ex-boss). They got me a silver business card holder with my name engraved on it.

So today, like all the best days, has been lazy and food-based. Met Tom at Chequers this morning for a sausage, egg and bacon sandwich*, met Nihara for lunch at Livebait, and am shortly going for a coffee/exit interview with HR.

Countdown to the last hour of work… Think I’ve actually gone a bit mad with nerves caused by leaving the company I’ve been bitching and moaning about for the last four years. It feels like stepping off the edge of a cliff – what if the new place is horrible and run by sadists (their benefits package suggests this is the case)? What if all my new colleagues are humourless goons?



*when you order this sandwich the guy at the counter yells ‘fried egg!’ and three minutes later another guy runs up from the basement carrying a fried egg on a small silver platter

A trip to H&M at lunchtime to cheer myself up (more on that later) proved fruitless. Loads of cute(sy) little tops and blouses with puff sleeves, smocking and Peter Pan collars look great on the hanger but bad on anyone with boobs, and besides, where am I supposed to wear them? To the office, where I need to look competent and confident rather than like a giant baby? So I got nothing.

Just found out that in a bizarre twist my new job will actually pay less than my current job. Yes, really. Over the weekend I found a letter telling me that in December 05 my salary had gone up by £800 (I should really remember this, right?) so my new job will actually only pay £700 more a year than my current one. And here’s the best bit: the hours at my new job are longer (9-6! Eek!) so my new salary won’t be any bigger at all.

Lessons learned: commit salary details to memory, or at least to diary, and, when offered a new job… negotiate.

Where to start? The prospect of posting again after 5 or 6 weeks silence is pretty daunting. We’ve been in the US for three weeks: a proper holiday that I didn’t realise I needed so badly until about two days before we left. We flew to New York first and spent a few days walking around, eating, drinking, took the Staten Island Ferry, went to the top of the Empire State building (sucks! Avoid at all costs!) and to the Top of the Rock (viewing deck of Rockefeller centre – amazing! No queues, empty... tourist NY’s best-kept secret), had coffee in Bryant Park and peeked into the New York Public Library, walked around Wall Street.
We stayed here, in Chelsea, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone. Cheap (for NY), central, nice rooms, free breakfast and coffee, and the lovely old brownstone was a joy to return to each evening.
My favourite day in New York was our last before leaving for New Haven. We went to Zabar’s, a giant deli on the Upper West Side and spent $50 on a picnic feast of cheeses, salami, smoked salmon, bread, fruit salad, cheesecake, olives, garlic & onion jam and fizzy drinks. Then we found a sunny spot in Central Park and stuffed our faces.
On to New Haven, where we stayed with Rachel and Jason for a few nights. Lots of birdwatching, good food, board games and Rachel’s unofficial Yale walking tour. I loved this building - made of marble ¼ of an inch thick to filter light and remove the need for any windows. R&J also took us for the best Indian buffet I’ve ever had: a largely vegetarian feast including street food, fresh naan, chicken tikka and dosas at your table, and many amazing things I have never tried before. I’m craving it right now. We also had our first lobster roll (delicious but dripping with butter – I was glad we split one) and visited Foxwoods Casino, where I won $12.50 on a slot machine.
Back to NY for one night with Steve’s friends, and a night of burgers at Fanelli’s, drinks at Five Corners and Beauty Bar (http://www.beautybar.com/) and playing pool till the wee hours at a corner bar in Greenwich Village where we were the only customers.
Chicago was great – to list all the fun things we did there would take hours. Highlights include bowling, Cubs game (where they lost 9-2), chocolate buffet at the Peninsula hotel, dinner at Twin Anchors and going on a crawl of Bucktown boutiques with Therese, where every shop had free champagne and snacks. One of my best Chicago memories is hiring bikes and riding for miles along the coast of Lake Michigan, past the beach and up to Belmont Harbour. Steve and I visited the gorgeous Frank Lloyd Wright studio and house in swanky Oak Park and great, huge breakfasts were consumed at Ann Sather, Tre Kronor and the Breakfast Club, among others. Phew. Photos soon, or check Rachel's blog (link on the margin) for photos of the Connecticut part of the trip.

Stupid Book Fair

Every year I feel guilty about not wanting to go to the London Book Fair. So every year I make myself go, look around, pick up tons of catalogues, hang around the Chronicle Books stand trying to steal stuff, and go home. But not this year. This year I will not go, and see what happens. Will I miss out? Will the world come to an end?

Weekend was spent proofreading, dancing, and sewing. Finished a big proofreading job, which will go towards paying for a laptop. Shortened a pair of curtains for the living room (yeah, only took us 4 months to get around to that), altered a silver & white 60s dress (think it was a wedding dress) to knee length to wear to a work dinner this week, and had dance rehearsal on Saturday and dance reality on Sunday. We’d been asked to perform at a plus-size beauty pageant at the Café de Paris in Leicester Square. The whole thing was being filmed for Channel 4 too, so unless we’re edited out we’ll be prancing across a screen near you in June or July. The Café de Paris is a pretty amazing venue, all red velvet and chandeliers (but nowhere near as nice as the Rivoli Ballroom), and the basement where we got ready had upholstered walls, giant velvet beds with mysterious white stains, and those mirrors with bulbs all around them. Oh, and cockroaches. As the audience wasn’t there to see us, and didn’t know who the hell we were, the applause when we were introduced was muted – OK it was nonexistent. The people sitting by the catwalk looked bored, and while this should have put me off it made me laugh. Also, we were all sober, as there was no rider, only a very expensive bar. We did get applause at the end, though, and I was out of there by 6.15 and home by 7.30. Doing it all again on Wednesday night at Goldsmiths, where those enterprising students are putting on a night of entertainment for International Women’s Day.

A parental summit took place yesterday, with Steve’s parents and my mum coming over for lunch. It was the first time they’d met, and we hoped they’d get on. Steve cooked lunch, I removed potentially offensive magnets from the fridge (‘Oh shit – I turned into my mother’ and ‘You suck big time’ – both gifts, I’ll have you know), and made sure the bedroom had nothing in it to suggest that anything other than sleeping took place in it, ever. However, I neglected to remove two packs of cigarettes from on top of the TV (both purchased about a year ago and mostly unsmoked), and my copy of Cunt from the bookshelf. The same bookshelf Steve’s parents perused with interest.

Four dresses and one c1960 Louis Feraud coat on eBay: £35
Haircut at little Japanese place in Covent Garden where they don’t speak much English and you look through a book of haircuts and pick one and they interpret it to suit you: £30 (a bargain in London)
Manicure: free, cos I do it myself at home
MAC lipstick in Lady Bug: £11
Feeling attractive and cute: priceless (or £76. Either way, I think that’s a bargain)

Last night we made a recipe from Saturday’s Guardian. It had three ingredients: frozen fish fingers, a tin of Heinz tomato soup, and grated cheese. It was absolutely delicious, despite being a violent orange colour, and we counteracted the salt & additives by serving it with broccoli and granary bread. And Miss Marple on the telly.

Steve has synesthesia, which is apparently quite unusual in a) men and b) right-handers. It’s inherited, too, so maybe our kids will be able to taste shapes and smell music. Steve sees people and days of the week (among other things?) as colours. Apparently I am a rich purply shade. Damn right.

The first post of 2006 is about food. I’m thinking of taking up smoking, as apparently it’s a marvelous appetite suppressant, but sadly after about two drags on a cigarette I get really woozy and start stumbling into traffic (as nearly happened this afternoon outside the office), so I may need a plan b. Not wanting to ruin my day of healthy eating (fruit & fibre cereal, green tea, sushi) I just went to Tesco for carrot sticks and houmous. Yay me. The photo is what I had for lunch yesterday: McDonald’s.

We have a slight mouse problem. We found a dead one, curled up next to a Quality Street wrapper (they do love sweets, bless ‘em) when we moved in, and one ran into the bathroom when Steve was in there. A few days ago we left a loaf of seeded bread, in its wrapper, on the kitchen counter, and when I picked it up the next morning there was a giant, chewed hole in the wrapper, a chunk of bread missing, and lots of crumbs. Oh dear.

Jingle all the way...

Last post of 2005, as we still don't have a computer at home, and I'm off for the next 2 weeks. Huzzah! In no order, this is what I'll be doing:

reading the 15 or so books I bought/was given over the past year and haven't even opened
baking ginger and white chocolate cookies for Emerald's party
sewing curtains for our living room
watching films
drinking in the afternoon (let's be honest, in the morning too. As Steve and I are spending Christmas with our respective families, we're going to have a separate Christmas day, complete with champagne breakfast and presents)
painting the walls, hanging pictures
going to Ikea (urrrggh)
going wedding dress shopping with my recently engaged big sister
taking long walks in the parks near my house

Merry Christmas!

London’s a small city, despite the 8million people.

Over the summer I used to see a woman on my bus to work. She was very heavily pregnant, with glasses, long dark hair, always reading a book, and wore flip-flops. Today I saw her crossing the street with her partner, pushing a pram. Not sure why, but it made me happy.

Work Christmas party tonight, and although I want to go (free food, free booze, look at colleagues all dressed up and flirting), I also really want a night (OK, a week) at home reading and snoozing. Have decided to stay for a couple of hours (until the food runs out), then head home for an early night. Best of both worlds.

When I started writing this blog, over two years ago, there were over 20 bus routes in London served by Routemasters. Now there are none. My fondest memories are of the 15 (when I lived in Whitechapel I'd take this to work), and of the last route to go, the 159, which took me from Kennington to work, and took me and Steve to each other's houses. Feel like an ass cos I missed the last 159 today: I thought the last one was at midnight - in fact it was at noon. Very sad.

And even more...

More bus pics, if Blogger will cooperate...

It's really the end. As of tomorrow, the Routemaster will be no more. Sure, there are the crappy heritage routes, which don't go anywhere a Londoner would need to go, but the last real route, the 159, makes its last journey (from Marble Arch to Streatham, via Trafalgar Sq, Lambeth North, Kennington Oval and Brixton) just after midnight tomorrow. Judging by the crowds lining the route this afternoon, the final journey will see more people on the streets than Chas & Di's wedding. The 159 was my route when I lived in Kennington, and it may sounds stupid to have such fond memories of a bus, but I do. So today I rode from Oxford Street to my old stop in Kennington, then crossed the road and came back. Hundreds of people took photos of the buses. Not just bus enthusiasts, either: tourists, young people with cameraphones, kids, businessmen, police. I took photos, too: the quality's a bit crappy, as they were taken with a phone, but here they are.

You know those pics I allegedly posted last week? They never showed up, did they? Let's hope this works...

Yessss! Steve on Hungerford Bridge on a very cold and foggy Sunday in November.

And me and T ice-skating!

If only I could make the pics go in order it would be perfect...

What a shitty week to be a woman. The papers are full of articles reporting the Amnesty International survey which found that 1/3 of people think that if a woman flirts/dresses provocatively (whatever that means) or is drunk she is at least partially responsible should she be raped. Nice. Maybe it was naïve to think that this attitude died out several decades ago, what with the conviction rate for rape standing at under 6% and police estimates that only 15% of rapes are reported to them. But it’s the tone of the newspaper articles I hate: the headlines all say things like ‘drunk women more likely to be raped’. Why not ‘rapists target drunk women’? Why is the onus on women to behave, to not drink, not flirt, not wear short skirts, in other words, to do everything we can to protect ourselves from it? So unless I go out wearing jeans and a baggy sweater, don’t drink, and don’t make eye contact with a man (could be construed as flirting!), I am asking for trouble. Why is the problem of male violence women’s responsibility and not men’s?

Also making the front page is binge drinking. Despite the statistics showing that men are more likely to binge drink than women, and more men are alcoholics than women, articles about binge drinking are always, and I mean always, illustrated by a group of pretty twentysomethings in strappy tops clutching goblets of chardonnay. Give me a fucking break. This always reminds me of the brilliant and oft-repeated (usually by her) Julie Burchill quote that there are men out there who cannot bear the thought that somewhere, at some time, a woman is having fun and getting away with it.

OK, some happy things now. The lovely Therese and Dan are staying with us for a couple of weeks, and it’s a pleasure to have them here. Not only are they cooking up a Thanksgiving feast tonight, but they’re going to do some DIY too! Yes, they are earning their keep. Last night we went ice-skating at the Natural History Museum (see pics), followed by stuff-your-face Japanese in Catford. I am proud (ashamed?) to say that we got through 20 dishes between the four of us.

I love Polly Toynbee.

Just had soup for lunch. Like so many of the new Covent Garden Soup Co. offerings it was pretty bad. Will I never learn to stick to mushroom or broccoli and stilton? It was citrus chicken and sage, and just tasted like creamy orange drink with bits of chicken in it. I still ate two bowls, despite the chest pains caused by salty badness. I asked my colleague if he wanted some, and told him to get a mug. He came back with a glass, and I don’t know why but watching someone drink a glass of soup is right up there as a Horrible Thing to See.

Catford isn’t famous for much (I think they have a dogtrack and a market), but it is famous for having the best all-you-can-eat Japanese restaurant in London. And it’s no ordinary buffet: the food doesn’t stand there all day, and it’s not MSG-tastic. You go in, sit, and are given a menu of 8 starters, 8 sushi, 8 mains, and 8 specials, and you pick, for the table, 8 items. They’re made to order, so the prawn tempura roll is crispy and the batter is still warm. The gyoza are porky and spicy and fat. You eat it all, then you order another 8 items. Then another, until you a) die b) are asked to leave (rather wisely, the menu states in bold that dining time is 2 hours). All this for £10.90 per person. Last night me and Steve shared 8 dishes and were fit to burst, and the thought that we could have had 8 more was both frightening and exhilarating. We will be back.

Food eaten today
2 slices sunflower bread with cheddar
I Krispy Kreme glazed donut
1 small treacle flapjack
2 bowls chicken soup (see above), 1 slice of bread
Slice of frosted carrot cake

On Monday I got a call at work from the Evening Standard. They asked me if I had any thoughts about ad exec Neil French’s comments about women being crap employees etc. etc. Basically they were asking me to write an angry letter, and the fact they had to ask indicates that women weren’t filling the ES mailbag with furious screeds, but were instead just rolling their eyes and getting on with their lives. I obliged, and they published my letter, and thankfully I wasn’t fired when I got to work the next day. I criticised the publishing industry for the lack of women at the top, despite editorial assistants being 95% female. By the time editors reach the stage where they’re commissioning, somehow 60% are men. By the time employees reach the board of directors, about 90% are male. Where do all the women go? And where do all the men come from? (My ex-boss, a female editorial director, emailed me to say ‘they mostly come from bookshops’. So I never should’ve left Borders after all…)



Last night I went to the House of Lords. I’ve always wanted to see the place, and it is beautiful inside. Really breathtaking. I was there for a talk organised by Abortion Rights UK, with speakers including several Labour MPs, Diane Holland, a trades unions representative; Jo Salmon, Women’s Officer for the NUS; Guardian columnist Zoe Williams and several others, including a woman from NOW. The venue was packed and we moved to a bigger room, which quickly became full and about half those attending had to stand for the full two hours. The meeting had been called to discuss the attempts being made by right-wing politicians to reduce the time limit on abortion, ostensibly to do away with ‘late term’ abortions (which receive a disproportionately high number of column inches despite accounting for 1-2% of all abortions performed). The speakers were inspiring, impassioned and articulate. Zoe Williams spoke about how the media represent abortion: as a tragedy, never as a reasonable option. No one on TV has abortions, unless it’s in a period drama and they go to a backstreet abortionist. No celebrity comes out and admits to having had one, although as 1 in 3 British women have terminated a pregnancy, we all know people who have. She mentioned in passing her own abortion, and a middle-aged Camilla Parker-Bowles doppelganger with pearl earrings spoke up cheerfully: ‘I’m the co-chair of Abortion Rights UK, and I had three abortions before the law came into force.’ There were women (and a few men) in their 60s and 70s, who had fought for the law to be changed in 1967, and defended it in the 1980s when it was under attack, and who expressed sadness to be here again, fighting again, when we shouldn’t have to.

Worldwide, over 80,000 women a year die as a direct result of backstreet abortions.

YUM: Curried parsnip soup.

I caved in, and I bought a pair of skinny jeans. I have bad association with any trouser that tapers at the ankle, as my first pair of jeans (circa 1987) were from Bhs with hems so narrow my mum had to buy a size larger so I could get my foot through. I looked like a turkey in them, and ever since then I, like so many women, have embraced the boot cut. But, feeling all 30 of my years, and dressed like a businesswoman/undertaker (black boot-cut trousers, long black coat, sensible flat shoes), I decided to try the trend all these hip young things (Kara, Kyle, most London gals) are wearing. So I went to Gap. Not the first place you go to for cutting edge design but, dang, they really do have nice stuff. Plus, they boast that their skinny jeans make you drop a dress size as soon as you put them on. So I took a few pairs into the fitting room, along with a pair of city shorts, which made me look like this dude. But the jeans… they were a revelation. Suddenly I saw what all the fuss was about. I looked younger, thinner, I suddenly had a new wardrobe staple to wear with boots (forgive me Father, but I will tuck them in), flats, dressy tops, casual tops. I cackled to myself and I bought them.