A pint of Pimms and a bout of Bondi longing

So I am officially wilting. As temperatures "soar" towards 30 (in honour of moi no doubt) I am flagging/melting/sweating/sooking - take your pick.

It is nearly 7pm, the sun is still hot and high in the sky and I have just reached the bottom of what will speculatively be the first of at least three pints of Pimms - strawberry heavy and oh so delicious.

I shouldn't complain but when the weather is this beautiful - and beautiful it is - all I ache for is the cold embracing slap of a Bondi wave. If I close my eyes I can feel it now. Tepid showers just aren't the same somehow, even with my swimmers on.

Vintage

So turning 30 was actually quite wonderful but you'll have to get back to me about BEING 3o because I'm still not entirely sold on that concept. TURNING 30 is about LB-made chocolate ganache for breakfast and presents and surprise bunches of flowers from my sister and pedicures and rooftop dinners. Even the skies were blue.

BEING 30 is about being undeniably no longer young. It's about contemplating a lack of career while friends at home are literally in labour with their first child, it's about realising some things in life probably just aren't going to happen - flying to the moon, cuddling baby pandas in China, learning to drive a manual car in a competent fashion - and realising that time is for the now. It's part-trepidation, part-excitement and part-philosophical headfuck... oh, you're not sure you want to be 30?... Well how exactly do you plan on changing that... apart from turning 31?

Yesterday was such a special day and by far and away the greatest gift was realising that however imperfect I am my life is full of thoughtful, generous, loving people and job or no job, wrinkles or deep facial trenches, I am loved for exactly who I am. For that, and so much more, I am forever grateful for the people in my life. And when they give me jewellery that looks like this...

... and that come with a holiday to Turkey, well you see what I mean about being loved. Spoilt even. It is truly humbling.

Today, BEING 30, it is about job applications and overdue art reviews and nannying and Real Life. But there is still ganache for lunch I suppose.

Stuck in the writing mud.

LB is off secret squirreling this weekend in anticipation of D-Day next Wednesday (the D in D-Day being "Doomed To Be Considered Old Always From This Day Forward") and I am across the river nannying, or, as I like to think of it, earning my next haircut.

The weather is obstinately beige and not becoming of early summer and the lethargic efforts of the sun are proving contagious. My writing has crawled to a near-halt over the last two weeks and I'm struggling to muster the enthusiasm for much beyond a bowl of Special K on the couch. I might be tempted to diagnose a case of the birthday blues - or an existential crisis of thirty proportions but in the interests of good mental health (mine and those that have to suffer me) I'm choosing to whitewash the feeling in a mash up of philosophy and sentiment about this thing we call A Milestone.