A bittersweet birthday

It's been a tiring week. 

Where my tears have stopped the rain has begun in earnest. No, not bad poetry or heavy-handed metaphor but literal, pouring, sobbing rain. It's been fitting if not a little obvious but the melancholy weather has suited my sentiment the last few days as I've slept, pondered, remembered and grappled with the complete sense of unreal that her passing has brought. I can't bring myself to say the D word because I can feel her still here - in the sense that I remember her touch, see her in my Mum, know what she would say and continue to receive emails and cards from people who met her and loved her. I just still can't quite believe she's gone. Perhaps if I'd been at home it would seem more real but for now it just feels strange. 

Hyde Park Corner between showers and after dinner.

And so my birthday on Thursday was bittersweet. LB made the day very special with thoughtful presents and cupcakes and dinner at our favourite Spanish restaurant and a haircut and pedicure improved, if not brightened, the day also. 

On Friday I had lunch at Hix in Selfridges with my lovely, dear friend before we amused ourselves with the cosmetics counter and a spin through Gray's Antique Market in search of wedding accessories. The inscribed dessert at lunch was another small, special moment. Last Friday LB, Tor, The Hungry One and I went for dinner at The Corner Room in Bethnal Green - a joint birthday dinner - that was delicious, delightful and very good fun. I think it was a good idea to get some birthday celebrations in early this year as I haven't much felt like celebrating since then. Don't get me wrong, I'm not disillusioned or anxious about 31, I'm looking forward to a year in odd numbers, but frankly, between work and grief I am completely shattered. I slept until 3.30 yesterday and woke at half past one today so I'm glad the urge to celebrate en masse completely passed me by this year. 

Some of the decor at The Corner Room...

So much has happened in the last 12 months - some serious Life boxes have been ticked: incredible job, impending wedding and yet adulthood still feels relative. I'm glad not to be 30 anymore, with all its significance, but mortgages and babies are as foreign a concept to me as ever and I continue defiantly to understand grown up as the right to drink wine on a Tuesday and book an overseas holiday online using my own credit card. Each to their own I suppose but there was something quite serendipitous about my Wednesday morning Oval tube station philosophy lesson which I think sums up everything the last week and last year has thrown at me, from the mouth of Muhammad Ali no less:

And so another year begins. 

It's my party and I'll eat cake if I want to

So I am now officially 29 and one week old. So far so good.

My birthday last Tuesday was pretty fabulous. The morning was spent in a state of relative productivity, finishing a couple of articles for a magazine I used to write for at home, and then the afternoon spent imbibing champagne on the rooftop terrace at chi chi Boundary in Shoreditch with Cleo. And then an amazing dinner that night with LB and assorted LO (Lovely Others). Sigh.

A room of one's own

As sad as it will be to not help keep Mike in Belsize Park warm through the winter months I do suspect a lovely room for one in Bethnal Green will make for a suitable consolation. Thank fucking god - I have found a room. But more than that - I have found a room in a lovely house owned by a truly lovely girl that I would love to live in - and they it seems, would love me to live in too. Collective sigh of relief please.


Add to that two days of consecutive sunshine and I could weep with joy.

Not sure when I'm going to move in - hopefully next weekend - but I'm terrified I'm going to jinx it somehow so don't want to think about it until I've handed over my paltry Australian shekels, got my key and dumped my crap all over the floor. Fingers, toes, eyes all crossed until then please.

School is still going well - but the work has started all of a sudden - last week it all seemed so civilised, with early finishes and vino after lectures. The concept of actual work hadn't really occurred to me. Oh how that has changed. I spent two and a half hours yesterday at the Tate Modern working on two object analysis assignments. Really so interesting but exhausting - was completely catatonic by the end of it - not even a scenic walk over the historic Tower Bridge could assail my sookiness. It is pretty phenomenal though when you can pause momentarily at any one random spot in London and have the extraordinary history of this city overwhelm you.

I caught up earlier in the week with an old friend from Brighton days nearly a decade ago (p.s. when did I get this old?) Anyway, we had a grand old time but it really drove home for me how exhausting Making New Friends can be. Am enjoying it - and there are some really incredibly fabulous girls on this course (and have I mentioned yet that when I say girls I mean girls - not even a token gay man. Welcome to impending spinsterhood...) but I'm finding it strange and occasionally disconcerting to be "the Australian", "the one who's always wanting a 'quiet, early night'", "the one who proposed the 'Up Yours' theory in the Tate Modern" (which is catching on by the way), "the one with the necklaces", "the one with nice skin whose cheeks turn pink when I talk in class" (uhuh...), "the one who turned up 40 minutes late to the welcome party and arrived right in the middle of the speeches only for the new Institute director to then ask who the token Australian was?" Excellent.

I would have a crisis about it but I'm too busy having crises about employment, the cost of public transport, whether or not it's acceptable to eat Special K for breakfast and dinner and the fact I am already sick of everything I own and have nothing to wear.