Something to sing about

Oh I’ve had a lovely weekend.

Visits from best friends from home are just the tonic to my life gin. It means to be pajamed until 2.30pm, talking and laughing and drinking tea. It means desperately absorbing the ease and familiarity, wit and delight of a dear friend, like sunshine on an increasingly autumnal day, so enormously grateful in the knowledge that you can live on the other side of the world for five years and still pick up like it was yesterday.

It’s been a lovely, lovely weekend.

A slice of vintage heaven

It’s so dull to exclaim “I can’t believe it’s May already!” but the fact is I can’t believe it’s May already. Mexico, the epic January snow, the epic Easter snow, Easter – the year hasn’t been dull and it’s about to get that much more exciting when the parentals arrive on Saturday.

I haven’t really allowed myself to think much about their visit, mostly because for the last month I wasn’t sure they’d even make it, thanks to a lil’ family cancer scare that wasn’t fun for anyone. But everyone now in the cancer-clear they’re t-minus 5 days until London and I cannot wait.

They are going to freeze their Australian “24 degrees and we call this autumn” arses off, mind you. But I have to confess I don’t have much sympathy because they only have to put up with it for five days before we all head to Provence for a week. And then Nice and then Mantava and then Venice for the biennale. It’s going to be tough, I know. But after their five days of London sprinter (that would be spring, dressed up as winter) and our seven eight months of this bollocks I think we’ll all have earned a little continental respite.

I cannot say it more plainly: the weather is not improving.

FEAST

Oh the joys of an English winter. First the collective germ-sharing that is public transport dishes up a London-wide epidemic of stomach viruses and "vomiting bugs" (oh delightful) and then, when the immune system is down and out, along comes snot & co. to really amp up the already considerable gross factor.

All of which is a very whiny, long-winded way of saying, I'm currently at home with a box of tissues and a nose that's running at Olympic speed. The stomach bug has gone now thankfully but I wasn't much up for eating last weekend, which was totally inconvenient given we went not to a feast but The Feast on Sunday.