A big week

I can't believe it's been two years already since I sauntered through my Mum's garden and married my Lovely Boy.

More than that - I can't believe it's been a year since we celebrated our first wedding anniversary in a Mexican emergency room. 

Please can we hit the pause button for a minute?? For reals, if things move any faster, I can see myself, cartoon-like, slipping off the back end of the treadmill that is Life.  

It's been a big week. And it's only Thursday.

Comings and goings

So we’re back. And it feels….

Familiar.

And strange.

I’m just freewheeling with my emotions at the moment – ignoring the stunned, slightly dazed feeling that comes from a cocktail of jetlag, overwrought emotion, uncertainty and exhaustion – and focusing on the minute to minute. And the truly genuine joy at being back amongst the family.

First the boxes....

GONE.

Two more weeks and so will we be.

Our marriage survived the packing (just), the house is still a mess, the heart a little heavy (hug me and I cry) but for the first time is that a delicate whiff of ready anticipation?

I wrote a book.

Elsewhere in the world brilliant friends of mine are on the brink of delivering small humans. This week, yesterday, I was borne of a book whose labour has only taken three and half years. I feel overwhelmed, elated, terrified and not sure what to do with it. I just keep staring at it. For several hours last night it went like this:

(Dazed wandering about the house, book invariably clutched to chest or held at a length with look of clinical curiosity.)

“It’s a book. I wrote a book.”

“I, me, I wrote a book.”

“I wrote this.”

“A book.”

“It’s a book, an ACTUAL book.”

“Oh my god I wrote a book.”

(Ongoing disbelief and dumb wonderment etc. etc.)

Dear London, we need to talk

Dear London,

Don’t think this letter isn’t hard to write. It is. I’m surprised at how hard it is because it turns out my feelings for you have grown profoundly over the last five years and I would call it love. I do love you London. But we both always knew it wouldn’t be forever.

I wish I didn’t have to break it off (not least because I typically prefer the exquisite agony of the dumped to the all-consuming guilty relief of the dumpee…) but don’t you agree its best we part as friends, with fond memories intact, on good, nay great, terms and happy in the knowledge that we really gave it a go and for a while it was wonderful. Because it was. It is. It’s just time we started seeing other cities.

Lido love

I miss swimming. I miss ocean swimming, I miss outdoor, non-chlorinated swimming. I miss having no excuse not to go swimming...

All of which is a whiny roundabout way of telling you I went swimming this morning and I freaking loved it. I've ditched Camberwell Leisure Centre, as clean and relatively convenient as it is because I haven't swum outdoors since Mexico and deep in my bones I need to be back in the water and under an expanse of (blue but grey will do if it must) sky.

Goodness me I'm almost thirty-three.

Goodness me I’m almost thirty-three.

Another birthday and what looks like being another shit faux-summer day with a teenager for a temperature #forfuckssake

But putting the weather aside for a moment, I’m excited about 33. I definitely prefer the odd numbers but beyond that, it feels like a good age, a good moment. It’s not 34-and-my-god-your-reproductive-window-is-now-officially-waning and it’s not 30-my-god-you’re-twenties-are-over. I think it’s my new Barbie age.

If only my Barbie age hadn’t been 27.

Food porn et Paul Cezanne

Another cracking couple of days chilling in Provence with LB and Le Parents. We spent the best part of this morning having indecent thoughts about cheese and prosciutto and fresh strawberries and macaroons and more cheese and more olives and warm baguettes at St-Remy’s weekly farmers market. (I just started typing an analogy about food porn and this market taking things to the next level but it started to get a bit unseemly so I deleted it. So I’ll just say this: Oh. My. God. Best farmers market. Ever.)

A Suitcase and a Spatula

There are moments in a friend’s life. Birthdays 18… 21… 30… (god, 40), the first dates, the weddings, frequently babies. There are dream jobs, first houses, fuck, sometimes there’s just a really awesome pair of new shoes and a bottle of good wine. And then, well then there’s the launch of a first book.

A pop-up invite and a very posh dinner.

It started with a pop-up invitation the likes of which I'll probably never receive again.

Actually, it started a couple of weeks before that, when we interviewed the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset for a film for the website. Thanks to a confluence of art world activities, all sponsored by the same luxury fashion brand (one of them: my job; another one of them: the Fourth Plinth Commission) I found myself in Trafalgar Square nearly a week ago exactly to witness the unveiling of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's newest work for the square, Powerless Structures, Fig.101.