No wees, please! Running *in* London

With carbo loading, catching up with friends and a sleepless Saturday night in the Royal Borough undertaken, the 6am alarm on Sunday morning felt pretty hard.

Despite the recommendations of many experts, my breakfast was like Rihanna's wardrobe: only half done.  I had in fact remembered to bring along a plastic bag filled with a few handfuls of my familiar 'long run' usual of Swiss supermarket-brand chocolate muesli, but forgot to get any milk.  Instead, I crouched down on the bathroom floor (so that Love Chunks and Sapphire would not be woken up); hastily gulped down three 'protein balls' I'd sampled at the runner's expo the day before and washed the sticky scraps of lingering seeds down with a godawful sample of coconut 'water' flavoured with 'coffee.'  All was expunged with a half bottle of water and a nervous wee.

A shaky couple of selfies were taken - one by Sapph who did get up and insist on a 'full body shot.'  No slim greyhound, me, but my chunky trunks and Achilles bandages were about as ready as they'd ever be.  

A short tube ride to Simon's hotel - his lovely wife (and my friend) Gianna was in good spirits for us; I hid my nerves by goofing around and having ANOTHER wee. In their bathroom.

I'm the sort of person who immediately wants to know where the nearest toilets are: in cafes, on trains, at tourist spots, in friends' houses......  My friend Jill can attest to how many times she found herself waiting as I 'ducked in' for a wee during our travels.  The marathon map had been reviewed at length and it was quite literally a comfort to know that toilets were being provided at regular intervals throughout the route.

 

Simon's sister, Pauline (far left in the picture below), lives in Bermuda and was running in her TENTH marathon, this one as a 'training event' for the ultra triathlon she was doing later in the year. Her daughters Tor and Jessie (both doing their second marathon), were running for the same charity as me: Action Against Pre-Eclampsia.  Less than a year ago, Tor had suffered the condition when pregnant with her baby girl.

A tram ride to Kings Cross station on still-silent streets took us to the train that had been exclusively arranged for the 40,000+ marathoners.  The carriage we were in was lively with chat, jokes and the smell of liniment.  We sipped from water bottles, munched on energy bars and tried not to slide off the carpeted seats in our skin-tight lycra leggings.

Arriving at nine am, an hour before the start, was in no way being anal as the site itself was enormous. Dozens upon dozens of trucks were lined up, all neatly numbered for us to stow away our belongings until we saw them again past the finish line.  My belongings were mostly in my bum bag (hotel key, ipod, headphones, iphone, energy gels and a hanky), and my thoughts were also bum-related: The queue for the portaloos - at our four stations - were each a half a kilometre long.  I needed to stake my spot.  Immediately.

Best decision I ever made. Simon played his boy card and found a tree, but we gals nervously stretched our calves in the line, jiggled our thighs and noted how quickly the time was flying by.  Rolls of toilet paper were passed down the queue to avoid any dripping disappointment when in the portoloo pod itself.

The relief of making it into a surprisingly clean toilet and out just as the overhead PA instructed us all to get ready at the starting line - in the finishing time we estimated - was immense.

An enormous cheer erupted at 10am, but there was no discernible movement forward for us, standing next to the 'Five hour finish' flag.  I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for runners twenty or more years ago knowing that time was ticking even though they had yet to cross the starting line.  All I could do was hope that I'd laced up my own magic individual timer chip to my shoelaces tight enough.

At 10:23am, we shuffled over the starting line.  Simon and Pauline were running alongside me; Pauline leading the way in dodging around the other runners.  There was no clear space to spread out so a lot of ducking and diving was required.

"Go Simon!"  

"Well done, Pauline, you're looking good!"  

Oh, so that's why everyone had their names written on their t-shirts: the crowds that packed every single centimetre of the route were reading them and yelling out encouragement.  Ah well, in my navy and black I'd just have to stay anonymous... "Go for it, blue cap!"  "You can do it, Cappy!"  Bless them: they had made up something to call me, and it was far better than Big Nose or Bubbling Buttocks....

"Bloody poms and their imperial measures," I panted to Pauline.  "Running miles takes FOREVER compared to kilometres!"  Each mile was marked by an arch of red balloons and my squinting eyes were always searching for the next one.  It was with an immense feeling of disappointment to see the beloved balloon display in the distance only to reach it and realise that it was for a charity cheering spot and not because another mile had been covered.

At the six mile mark (around 10km) it was time for me to take my first energy gel.  The plan was to not stop running at all during the event, but of course that was the moment for the zip to bust on my bum bag and my uncoordinatedly sweaty finger tips just could not rip open the top of the gel pack.  So, I stopped, calling out, "See you Simon and Pauline - run like the wind!" before using my teeth to rip the top off, suck down the cola-flavoured ooze, slug down a bit of water and push on again.

Not too much water slugging though.  My biggest fear was having to do a wee (or worse) during the event. "Sip little and sip often," was my mantra, especially when I discovered that the loos on the route now had lines of at least a hundred dejected-looking runners (or, in their case, non-runners) sadly but urgently waiting for their turn.

Love Chunks and Sapphire were part of the charity cheer squad on Tower Bridge at roughly the half-way mark.  However, with the road festooned with abandoned water bottles and surprisingly-deep and frequent pock marks in the bitumen, my efforts to spot them in the crowd were less than the ones to keep remaining upright and uninjured.  They were there somewhere though and I knew it.  Sickly sweet to say, but utterly true.  My heart beat loud and strong for them both on that famous landmark. 

My caution at not trying too hard to spot them in the crowd wasn't unfounded.  A young girl saw her mates in the crowd, whooped a greeting and made her way over to their side of the road to give them a high five when she trod on a water bottle and instantly pitched forward, smacking her face onto the gravel and burning her hands.  My gasp of sympathy was all I could do to help before first-aiders picked her up and carried her, now sobbing, to a chair.

The next ten miles were the cruellest of all.  No cheer squad for me ahead, still completing Mile Thirteen and yet could see the runners on the opposite side of the road returning from Canary Wharf and having the joy of seeing Mile Twenty Three and a glimpse of St Paul's in their (much swifter) sights.  Ah well, there was more plodding to do, each step stickier than the last due to thousands of empty gel packs covering every surface that the water bottles didn't.

After doing all of my training with music, the iPod and earphones stayed in the bum bag during the race.  It seems foolish to write the word 'race' because it wasn't.  It was a Challenge, a Day, an Event, but never a 'race.'  The only victory would be in finishing it.

The calls from the crowd; the music played by fans and bands in pubs, gardens, balconies and roundabouts; the hilarious signs made for friends and everyone ('26.2 miles. Because 26.3 would be stupid'), and the runners around me were all the entertainment and inspiration that I imagined.  And more.  "You are all sexy. You are all people I want to have sex with.  You are sexy runners and you will finish. Sexy sexy sex!" called out one bloke who ended up with a sore hand after receiving more than his share of high fives from laughing marathoners as they passed.

I overtook ten rhinos, one eight foot tall light house, several fairies, a twenty-strong team of ghurkas wearing 25kg packs and boots; a strawberry, the Gherkin building, a karoake singer who carried a cordless microphone and speaker stack as he ran; the armless Black Knight from The Holy Grail and the world record contender doubled over as he carried a Smeg fridge on his back.

I was overtaken by three other rhinos, a bagpipe player, half a dozen bananas and a gorilla.  Sapphire reported later that the poor Gherkin building smacked the top of his head several times on the red final timer screen at the finishing line before figuring out that he'd have to lean to the west and edge in that way.

Thankfully, the imperial measurement sticklers eased off at Twenty One Miles when markers for kilometres also appeared. Thirty Five Kilometres.  This was the longest I had ever run in my life and the calls for "Cappy! Go on Cappy!" and seeing the Millennium wheel on my left and Big Ben up in the distance changed my grimace to a smile.  It was still difficult to believe that I was there, doing it, in my favourite city in the world.  Chubby, daggy, chocolate-addicted old me.

My pace was distinctly slower in the second half than it had been in the first half.  It had been this way in all of my training runs too and was not something that was going to upset me or make me stop. My heart rate felt steady - no uncomfortable puffing, but my legs....!  Numb feet, shins with a pulse of their own and every bone below my waist seemingly on fire. 

Big Ben looked magnificent up close and to run up to him, along the back of the houses of Parliament on a road specially closed for me (okay, and 40,000+ others) was an incredible feeling.  Exhaustion and exhilaration blended into an emotion that is not possible to describe and may not be one that I'll ever experience again.  The faces of LC and Sapphire swirled in front of my burning eyes before my legs dragged me on to Birdcage walk, turning the corner and seeing Buckingham Palace looming up.  

And kept looming....  Was I on a treadmill?  Had the movie stopped running and I was at a standstill? Had I fainted.....?   It was here that they thankfully started counting down in two hundred metre stages....  1,000......  800 ......  600 ....... 400..... 200.....

       

Ducking and diving even as I passed over the line, I burst into tears.  Dry ones, as my face was encrusted in salt powder, but sobs engulfed me for a few moments as a volunteer deftly removed my timer chip and another one handed me a Finisher medal. 

It was a warm day, and this "Cappy" was finally grateful for having man-hands large enough to grip water and glucozade bottles the entire way; be able to smile at the kind comments from the crowds and - even more importantly - not faint like four other people did around her as they shuffled through St James' Yard to meet up with their loved ones. 

  

Four hours and fifty two minutes from start to finish.  Elite runners would have enjoyed their victory, had a long hot shower, completed a lengthy press conference, inhaled a banquet and had an hour long massage in that time but it was 'under five,' and good enough for me.

It was also the longest I'd ever gone - in waking hours - without a wee!   I cried again when LC and Sapphire were spotted.  Maybe it was a pointless and vain challenge, but they had been with me for every sweaty, sticky and slogging step of the way.

I am so thankful to them both.

Hating with Honesty Part Three

To be honest, I don't think I'm a really vehement 'hater' and this is only my third Hating with Honesty post in seven years: the first one was published in 2007 and the last one in 2008. However, a few niggles have started to emerge beyond the obvious ones such as why is Kim Kardashian the most Googled person for 2012 and are we allowed to punch anyone who says 'for the win' yet?

Here are the things that make me want to whistle air through my imaginary dentures and waggle my crab-like finger in the air.....

Ryan Gosling















I honestly don't see the attraction.  I even - and this causes me no small amount of shame - found a second-hand copy of The Notebook; read it to find out what the big deal was and suffered for my curiosity before suffering again through the exrementally soppy movie. What is the magic oestrogen-luring essence that this man has that I can't perceive?  He looks like he should be decorating the top of my latte, not headlining movie marquees....

Boston Terriers

I'm a dog person. When Milly's with me, I have to provide a wide enough berth so that she doesn't snap at her fellow canines in jealousy, but when she's not, my trips are always made longer due to the need to stop, ask 'Is he/she friendly?' before having a pat and a chat. But Boston Terriers repel me. They seem to have scored all the leftover body parts of a Corgi, Pug, Bulldog and the many unwanted mutant features of inbreeding, put into a fur-lined blender and tipped out with an unappetising 'glug' onto the ground with the final humiliation to be left without a tail.  Like X-Factor contestants raving on about how much they love their mothers, Boston Terriers always leave me shuddering slightly.

Apple tarts / Tarte Tatin

Cake. Cake. CAKE. The French Suisse seem to believe that everything tastes better in, on or under flaky pastry. But a dry croissant for breakfast or a sheet of pastry with some apple slices pressed into it gets boring very, very quickly.  Without moistness, self raising flour, chocolate, icing or custard it's just a brown rectangle of over-priced snooze; the Tom Cruise of bakery produce. 'Oh, goodie. Here's the eleven hundredth boulangerie selling tarte tatin. How exciting and creative.'  CAKE!

Channing Tatum



















I haven't seen any of his movies but even in my advanced state of ageing I'm not unaware of the various swoonings and droolings over this bloke that occurs with sickening regularity online.

He's sort of musclier and chunkier than Ryan Gosling, but the question is the same: Why? What is this flesh and bone replica of Mr Potato Head exuding that brings all the cerebrally-challenged chickadees to his chippery?  Shouldn't he be putting on my winter tyres and topping up my antifreeze?

Zombies and vampires

Buffy whooshed by without a glance. Twilight books were endured when my eleven year old was reading them and quickly summarised as cold blooded Mills and Boon for virgins. Vampire Diaries and the plethora of zombie telly shows and movies leave me about as excited as seeing tarte tatin on long haul economy flight menu.  Why not be done with it and have the vampires (sexy, boring and murderous), zombies (irretrievably stupid on all levels) wage war with the ridiculously cartoonish Marvel characters that also seem to hold so many movie-goers' attention?  Winner is the last man (or half robot or undead corpse in love with a wolf) standing!

Bushy beards on young blokes

Fellas, most of you, when you're in your twenties, are lovely to look at.  However, when the hipster urges take over and you decided to grow a bushy beard, you take me back to those oh-so-steamy photos of 1850s gold prospectors, upstanding Victorian philanthropists and men who ate each other when lost on expeditions.  Having to hold a brief conversation with a bearded bloke with cappuccino froth dangling from his Dastardly Dan moustache was not a heavenly moment for me last week.

Land agents to renters

We pay a small - no, large - fortune to rent an apartment that has not been updated since 1970.  The balcony turns into a small swimming pool when it rains and has since flooded the apartment downstairs. Sapphire's unused bidet develops a strong ammonia and mouldy pong that permeates the bedrooms at least once a week and we were sent three angry letters (in French) when our rent payment was not processed by the bank and was subsequently five days overdue.

So, with fairly frequent contact between my good self and the man who manages the property, it was a big surprise when he wrote back to my email last week requesting that someone come and look at our stove top (two out of the four hotplates have decided that being 'hot' is no longer their bag) and announced that he didn't know how I was.

"Pardon me, monsieur? YOU and four other men knocked on my door yesterday to come and see la piscine (the pool) that was my balcony for yourselves, checking the drain and taking photographs. Have I so little charisma that you have forgotten me already?"

But you are not in my records, he wrote back.

"Erm, I must be, buddy - because you send me rent slips every month with MY NAME on them and we've been transferring you money for over eighteen months now...."

Let me check, he replied, suspicion oozing from every keystroke.

"So, about the oven and the enormous whistling draft that blasts through our living room from the sliding door..."

Yes, you are on our records, he wrote, as though he was informing me of that fact.

I KNOW THAT, stupid rental man!  "So the oven...."

Please email me tomorrow when I'm available to read through tenant's concerns before forwarding them on to the owners for consideration.

Horrible ugly stupid rude rental man!  I decided not to email that as my reply.

BBC News channel

The Beeb is mostly known for being a stalwart for consistency, fair-minded reporting and for looking beyond their own borders.  Having a news-only channel would, we thought, be a brilliant way of keeping up with current events all around the world in a language we could understand (unless the story came from Wales).

Sadly not so, unless you are only capable of absorbing three stories at a time.  Even then, those three stories are repeated over and over and over for at least two days, so that breakfast time on day two will see the same video footage from the day before. No, not overnight so that muesli munchers can come up to speed with things that occurred while they were still snoozing in their doonas, but the day before.

Sometimes, the typer of the ticker tape thingy that runs along the bottom of the screen can only be arsed to write a single sentence on a single story that rolls by at a snail's place ad infinitum.  Surely, if sending reporters to all corners of the globe and footage and editing is prohibitively expensive, Tony the ticker tape typer can pop in a few more sentences for us to read?

'Rate me' Facebook photos



















Erk.  Any photo where the subject matter is one's self, especially holding an iPhone where the subject can gaze at one's self during the taking of it, is enough to make all prospective viewers want to heave and (fairly) surmise, "No wonder he's single, he's already found his life-long partner in love."

And the girls ...... oh dearie, dearie me.  Being friends of friends with buddies and acquaintances of Sapphire has shown me that the cleverly angled iPhone photo that enlarges the eyes, gives the duck pout credence and recedes the chin into the far distance - all done while pushing the shoulders unnaturally forward to produce a credible replica of cleavage - makes up approximately 98% of all photos loaded up onto Facebook pages by girls aged between eleven and twenty nine.

"Like my new winter hat," asks Bubble, which is sitting so far back on her head in order to show off the pulled forward shoulder length hair, off-the-shoulder tank top and double-handed upside down peace signs.  Or, "I'm so ugly today," says Twinkle, leaning forward in her black bikini, fluttering her kohl lined enlarged eyes and pouting in pink frost lip shimmer.

If I wasn't so old and supposed to be a role model or sensible mother or some other such tomfoolery thing like that, I'd say, "Yes, you are. No go and put some clothes on and turn your account off."

Nicki Minaj / Kei%$#a / Rihanna et al

Notes for all of you:

If you need auto tune, quit the business.

If you can sing - then for Lindts' sake go have a good scrub in the shower, put on some clothes and stop putting out videos that ram it down young girls' throats that it's only when you behave like nymphomaniac pole dancin' gang molls does your 'song' hit the itunes charts. Please.

Kate Moss interview in Vanity Fair

Ah, the chat that was going to reveal the secretive, never talkative Ms Moss. The one that would delve deeply under the surface to find out how she thinks, what her motives are, the life lessons learnt.  A quarter of a century in the spotlight; she must have some witty anecdotes to share. Vanity Fair will make sure that we find out what charitable causes are close to her heart; how she priorities her time to develop her skills as a responsible parent; the contribution to society that drives her to unselfishly devote her energy to further her knowledge and understanding of homelessness/poverty/discrimination/disability and people with bad dress sense.....

Hah!  The majority of page space was given to Kate's topless poses generously peppered with glowing quotes (in bold type) from various fashionistas and around six vaguely coherent sentences uttered by Kate herself. The end result was about as revealing as my triple-pile, 180 centimetre blue beach towel.  The much-touted hidden depths were the equivalent of the film that you peel off between a boiled egg shell and the egg itself.

Muesli bars

Why do they insist on calling them 'bars' when, unwrapped, they're about the equivalent of two teaspoons of sticky oats?  Why are they 'breakfast for busy people' when people usually like more than 21 grams of solid food to satisfy their hunger?  Why are the packets 15 centimetres long, but the 'bar' only eight?

Cup cakes

Like low rider jeans, saying 'swag' and Lady Gaga, you've had your fifteen minutes of fame, cup cake.  This obsession has escalated to ridiculous levels where icing has been pooped out from a great distance and is, in fact, larger than the dry/boring/tasteless cake itself.  Maybe the next craze will just be the icing and decoration without the cupcake underneath?

How I Met Your Mother

This show is on constant re-run on one of the British second-tier freebie channels, so even when I try to avoid it, it is manages to wedge itself into my consciousness at least once a day when I'm channel surfing to find things to record for later.  The lead guy possesses the same amount of charisma that I clearly do for my land agent and the little red headed girlie who used to be in American Pie is one of the worst actresses I've ever seen. No, cuteness doesn't make up for lack of talent.  The irony doesn't escape me that Neil Patrick Harris (Dr Horrible) plays Barney who, if the world was fair, would have his own sitcom and leave the other four 'characters' in the Seasons 1-8 remainder bin.

Fingernail 'art'














Apart from endless iPhone facebook 'selfies', nothing says 'I spend too much time on myself' than fingernail 'art.'  Painting cartoons, logos, flowers, stripes or dress-matching designs onto (usually) fake fingernails also implies that the owner of such tacky travesties does very little work.  Nails with mini sequins embedded into them are not going to be much use when zipping up a small child's winter parka, popping open a long life milk box or scrubbing off the scum around the plughole.  Oh, and they don't distract the viewer from less desirable body parts either.

There. That's enough for now.  Time for a trip down to the Dog Forest with Milly.

Autumnal Brocante

I'm supposedly in the thick of NaNoWriMo (27,000 words at last count) and factoring in a sick Sapphire (three days off school) and my own four day migraine (still lingering), but hopefully you'll understand why my inclination to blog has been fainter than a Kardashian talent.



But autumn has arrived in Geneva and a brocante or two has been visited. Bring out the photos!

Firstly, a pencil sketch with '1881' written just above the signature. Yes, after I proudly popped it into an IKEA frame, Love Chunks pointed out that the stall owner could have just written the date in there, hoping a sucker like me would be eager to part with a huge ten francs. Fair point.



Another stall holder thanked her lucky stars when she had five copies of this old watercolour of Geneva and five of us duly purchased one each for two francs a pop. Clearly drawn in the days before the Jet D'Eau emerged from a busted pipe in the lake during 1886 or the UN was ever heard of. So, mass produced tat, but I like it anyway.



Found these French spice drawers and instantly fell in love with them. Not so LC or Sapphire, who both said 'Erk' when I stuck them in our admittedly-not-very-sympathetic Billy bookcase:



But YOU can see why I liked it, can't you? Glass drawers made in handy scoop shapes?



Ahem, moving right along. We have darling Milly, reluctantly being forced to sit in the corner and pose in front of my twelve franc bargain - an old wooden snow sled!



Perfect for storing Love Chunks' muddy shoe collection:



Peter Rabbit has always been one of my  picture books and Sapphire has a tiny figurine depicting Peter snuggled up in bed after his adventures. A Wedgewood plate for five francs - yes, thanks.



And a cheap poster of the classic WW2 shot of St Pauls' cathedral surviving the devastation of the blitz? In an IKEA frame that I realised was so unbelievably cheap because it didn't have any clear plastic cover or glass in it?



Second hand book sales are another addiction of mine. English versions preferred of course and when there's a twice-yearly clearance to help raise funds for more books AND a bunch of old Pommy ladies are selling cups of tea and fresh sandwiches filled with cheddar cheese and Branston pickle, I'll be there with bells on. And found, on the 'Antiquarian' table, this little beauty from 1909:



It was interesting to note on the spine that he was called Hans Anderson. No 'Christian' inserted in, unlike Danny Kaye's movie of 1952. "I'm Hans Christian Anderson, I've many a tale to tell..."

Even more interesting was that the book was a prize awarded in 1909 by the Vicar EA Johnson to the student John Jenner for 'General Proficience, Good Conduct, Punctuality and Regularity.' Poor mite; dumb as dodo dung but turned up anyway. Probably liked his prunes, too.....



Modern books aplenty of course. There's few things nicer than knowing you have a delicious pile of reading awaiting you.



.....with one additional selection that even Milly doubted I'd get through.



Yep. War and Peace. Brand new; never been attempted. Handed in for re-sale instead. Will it end up the same way again...?



Time will tell. Until then, there's always time to step away from the desk and wander outside for some autumnal squirrel spotting.

Carrefour, chicken breasts and cat crap

Mr Migraine is having his monthly visit but this time he hasn’t left after his bog-standard three days.

It is Day Four now and, unlike human house guests, I can’t blow my nose in the shower because the noise and reverberation – enhanced tenfold by the high ceilings and tiles stuck to the roof level – makes my brain cry, then swell and finally pump out a rhythmic heart beat of pain that sees me doubled over and able to touch my nose to the Jovial Douche label on the shower gel bottle.

Still, it’s a Wednesday and it’s been a while since I’ve tried to depict what an average day for a work-from-home freelance writer involves.

Of course, there isn’t really an ‘average’ day. Factors such as how many jobs I’ve bid for versus how many additional queries from potential clients need to be responded to compared to how many jobs I’m currently working on + scheduled Skype calls + new jobs won + repeat clients x those who email me rather than apply via the online agencies – freebies for friends divided by a truckload of procrastination.

So here goes.

6:45am - The alarm on my digital watch goes off. Peep-peep twenty times until it gives up. No snooze or repeat on this little thing. I can hear LC in the shower and Sapphire’s toilet flushing. My head hurts and I don’t move.

7:00am - Trouble is, my watch has two alarm settings, so 7am goes off also, peep-peep, twenty times. I get up, slide on the wedding ring and watch, take my Effexor and put on my Dog Clothes. At the first clink of the house keys, Milly scoots in; tail thumping against the bedside table. We take the elevator downstairs to give her ten minutes to wee, sniff, poo and scamper in the Dog Forest before a bowl of Migros-brand Matzingers and fresh water.

7:10am -  Love Chunks hands me a coffee which helps wash down two Exedrin migraine pills that a friend smuggled to me from the US. My face slowly feels as though it is starting to unfold itself.

7:40am -  We take the elevator downstairs again, but this time we’re two floors underground and walk past the eerie cement-lined bomb shelter, strangely singing overhead shower pipes and wind tunnel whistles. Milly’s ears flatten until we reach the car.

7:53am -  Arrive too early for Sapphire to walk into school and goof off. I love these seven minutes. She’ll point out kids in her class, kids in her creative writing club and teachers as they pass. If I can make her laugh just as she’s closing the door and saying goodbye, I superstitiously feel it’s an omen for a good day.

8:00am -  Find a parking spot right in front of the Japanese embassy. No doubt my ensemble of bed hair, cornflake eyes, dragon breath, ancient running t-shirt, trakkies and thongs aren’t seen too often in these parts.

8:30am -  Milly’s now securely behind the bathroom door, whining. “Misty.... Misty......Misty...... where are you sweetie?” I’m feeding a four year old rag doll cat who lives in the apartment block next to the embassy but she’s not showing her face. Her poo, on the other hand, is on proud display in the foyer, on the bottom step of the spiral staircase, in the laundry and, finally, the kitty litter tray.....

9:00am -  Back home, I bathe my arm. She managed to swipe me one after letting me think that she wanted her back stroked.  Drew blood, the little bugger.  Her farewell was a glimpse of her arse before it disappeared under the double bed.

10:00am - At Carrefour supermarket, five kilometres over the border in much cheaper France. Freshly showered, hair still wet and grasping a badly written shopping list. For some reason, the tune of the 1970s US sitcom Happy Days gets played at thirty second intervals which doesn’t help make the fading effects of the Exedrin any easier to take.

11:00am - Two trips from the car, through the two specially-locked garage entry doors, the swinging saloon-style elevator doors to finally arrive at our double locked front door – and back – with the groceries. It’s my own fault really. The Siege Mentality is strong within me – why buy two tins of tomatoes when you can grab four packs of three? Two measly bottles of diet coke when 24 cans are within easy reach or a litre of long life when eight are already plastic-wrapped with a convenient carry handle?

12:00 midday - The chicken breasts are marinating, cous cous is completed, the rice salad is cooling and the groceries are unpacked. Milly and I go down to the recycling bins across from our building – directly in front of the Qatar Embassy – and get rid of the cans, bottles and plastics from a week of 13th birthday celebrations. Back via the Dog Forest, where Milly gets to leave another large piece of herself and greet the Schindler’s Lifts blokes as they sit on the edge of the flower beds smoking.

1:00pm - Right. Today’s work. But not before I read my emails and see what some of my favourite bloggers are up to. Might as well eat lunch too. And a second coffee wouldn’t go astray.  And the dark load is ready to be hung out. Or draped, really, on the chairs in the spare room and the IKEA clothes rack by the pantry.

2:00pm -  Writing time. Honestly. I’m in the ‘final eight out of 50 applicants’ for a local copy writing job. They’ve sent me an assignment to complete by the end of the day in order to see what my brain and typing fingers can create from a make-believe micro-needling procedure that needs to be pretend-advertised. Boooooring. Somehow I find myself crouched on the floor, my eyes staring into Milly’s as I sniff her lovely soft ears and kiss the top of her head....

2:20pm -  DO IT. It’ll take TEN MINUTES and then press ‘send’ and forget about it!

3:00pm -  Okay, so it took fifty minutes and most of that was spent trying not to retch at the words selected and the sales techniques employed. Prostitution by keystroke; not helped by Mr Migraine bursting through again.

3:15pm -  Look at yesterday’s Skype interview notes with hot Melbourne chef and his new company. Realise that, at forty three years of age I should be able to understand my own handwriting and home made abbreviations by now.

3:30pm - Click the ‘x’ in the top right hand corner of Google Chrome, Explorer, Email and Spotify. Take two more Exedrin.

4:00pm -  Finish chef write up and email to him for comment.  

4:05pm - Sapphire arrives home from school.  Needs to use the computer for homework.  From the fart at my feet, Milly's ready for a walk and I'll quickly reply to some emails.  The father of the student I started tutoring yesterday is happy with his son's feedback when he got home last night.  I write back in sensible language about the teaching strategies I'll be using whilst mentally hoping that he doesn't find out that the good report is probably because I gave his son diet coke, made him laugh and said 'shit' a couple of times .....

4:30pm - "Mum pleeeeease can you get off the computer now. You've had it ALL DAY."  Yes but now the muse is kicking in - the website update for the Arizona blokes' restoration business is almost writing itself and the HR article for Canada is flowing, baby, flowing!

5:00pm - "OK Sapphire, it's all yours."  Love Chunks is bringing two work mates home for dinner and the living room is orange with Milly's dust bunnies and Sapphire's breakfast croissant crumbs.  Time for a quick vacuum, rearrangement of the wet washing and assembling of salad and more fresh raspberries to artfully scatter over the supermarket bought tart.

......11:30pm - With guests departed, table wiped down and dishwasher on, I realise that Sapphire's left the computer on. Check emails and freelance accounts one last time. Ghost writing book job is mine.  Press release position is mine.  CV editor, website copywriter, proof reader, online researcher, expat tutor and corporate report writer jobs aren't.  Probably a good thing really; where would I find the time?

You'll never guess

.....where we've been. I mean, most of you know that we've moved to Switzerland:



Last weekend, however, we decided to snatch the Friday and the Monday and take a short trip away from the land of fondue, fridge farts and furtive fireworks.

The weather is the best hint of any.



Even a proudly Swiss-engineered and manufactured umbrella was made a mockery of, the entire material cover and frame whisked out to sea faster than a tornado in a trailer park.



Cold, wet and hungry we ploughed on, ready to take Snap Two of my new tradition - Eating In Front Of Famous Monuments. The above one, aka The First, featured a prosciutto and emmental sanger in front Chateau Chillon near Montreux and the second one....



...... a Cadbury caramel Wispa bar in front of Stonehenge. Would have been a Creme Egg if I'd been able to find one.

Love Chunks, after all these years, still retains a sense of bafflement, pomposity and a dollop of shame at my antics.



Sapphire, on the other hand, just tells me to 'shoosh.'

All in all, it was a wild and wet few days that loaded us with heaps of history, a re-acquaintance with the left-hand side of the road and more than a few opportunities to chuckle at the West Country farmers' accents.  Not to mention access to local cider, chips, bacon, carrot cake and the ability to pass the time of day with shopkeepers, bus drivers and fellow tourists.

Shopping for codeine at Boots chemist, purchasing clothes without the 'you must be kidding me' automatic gasp of shock when the price tag is turned over, newspapers full of supplements and enduring a choking fit after Love Chunks made me laugh to hard over breakfast were all worth the admission ticket.  These are the experiences we up-ended our lives for.

And the winner is.........

I haven't bought a Bonne Chance ticket for the Swiss lottery yet. This is mostly due to shyness and lack of French than any realistic understanding of how bleak the likelihood is of my numbers coming up, but heaps of locals surround the booth at the local shopping centre in their eagerness to find that 500,000 franc Scratchie that might pay off a fifth of their mortgage.

Giving gambling a Swiss miss might possibly explain the amusement I derive from our weirdly shaped FUST washing machine.

It was purchased second-hand via an expat website and is an upright device which is far cheaper than a front-loader. However it's also much narrower than the usual 5 - 7kg ones from Australia.

When you open the inside, you can see a round 'tyre' made of stainless steel. This is almost exactly the same as that found in a front loader but positioned 90% around. And, when closed, you can't sit there and watch it through the round window. It's a sacrifice I'm prepared to make to save over a thousand francs.

Back to Herr Fust. The little catch is flipped open and - Ta Da! - the washing is crammed in. A surprisingly decent amount of dirty clothes can be done and apart from it sounding like the first spaceship to cross the screen in Star Wars when it's on the spin cycle, I'm pretty happy with our three hundred franc find.

But there's more. When closed, the little internal tyre thingy reminds me of the prize barrels that used to feature on television shows so often when I was growing up.

"So kids, all of your entries into our big Win a Week with Winky Dink competition have been placed in this barrel here, and we'll ask Humphrey B Bear to do the honours and reach in to pick out a winner......."

Nope. Not me.

Still, it's been six whole months and not one single sock has gone AWOL yet, so I'll class that as a small win.

Edition Nineteen - Word Verification Explanations

It's been ages since I've compiled a list of word verifications or 'captchas' that I've had to type in to comment on other blogs and a few have popped up that are just asking - nay, begging - for an official definition. Besides, my brain needs to think about something other than translating the German instructions on Sapphire's nausea reduction tablets, coordinating Nafeesa's school and hospital transit routes and explaining to Milly that I'm not responsible for the driving rain that is preventing us from having a long walk.

Are you ready?

Redinneo - the meal produced from desperation - usually late on a Thursday evening - that combines two incompatible leftovers such as spaghetti bolognese and pumpkin curry. These optimistic blendings rarely convince the family that it's nouveau cuisine or even a successful pairing; more like a bad interpretation of shepherd's pie.

"I'm hungry, Mum. What's for tea?"

"Uuuhmmm...... how about some redinneo?"

(silence). "I'm not really that hungry, actually...."

Prent - The person who chooses the '8 items or less' checkout when they clearly have more than fifteen. They are invariably inconsiderate, selfish and extremely ugly. In short, a Prent.

Flads - Overly-confident marketing campaigns that utterly fail to catch on. Examples of flads in recent times include any non-animated movie starring Angelina Jolie, citrus-coloured clothing, The Prince of Persia action figures, carbonated milkshakes and Gordon Ramsey's restaurants in Australia.

Zoole - a pet in a backyard swimming pool. Large dogs such as labradors are often zooles in summer time thanks to being hurled in by adults sloshing with too much sparkling shiraz or kids wanting to see their much-loved Rufus or Honey frenziedly paddling. Humans who are also having a dip risk having the flesh scraped off their ribs by canine claws if a zoole desperately keen to reach the steps and get the hell out of the water happens to be thrashing alongside.

Gathy - the annoying draught that only you notice. Most common in old cars, doctors' waiting rooms, so-called bus 'shelters' and the homes of those annoying people who never put their heating on even when your snot has frozen. "Cold? It's not cold - let's open another window; we need some fresh air in here!"

Fornicka - sexual intercourse performed on kitchen counter tops. Presumably for ease of cleaning afterwards.

Poveva - the first world struggle of the well-paid living in a country with a stratospheric cost of living. Examples include Geneva, Oslo, Zurich, New York, Tokyo and London. Budget blow-outs mean that households used to eating meat suddenly find tinned lentils, quark and macaroni make filling-but-failing replacements and rent day sees the bank account looking more scoured than Lindsay Lohan's nostrils after a court hearing.