Ahora Caigo

HOLIDAY! CELEBRATE! And other words that end in an A sound...

We recently returned from a week in a teeny, weeny, holiday bungalini. It's been the making of this month. I calculated before we went that we hadn't been away on a holiday, just the two of us, without any computers, wifi coverage, nor much in the way of mobile phone reception, for the best part of 16 months. We didn't even....shhh... take any conditioner. (Straggly, unruly hair is a small price to pay for inner peace.)

The truth is we've not had much time, or many euros to spare. Oh, eff off, you live in a sunny place, I hear you protest. You can walk to a beach, you lucky biscuit. ¡Callate, puedes caminar a la playa, eres afortunada! OK, I admit, we can see palm trees from the living room, but we have chirruping emails to answer, rooms to clean, laundry to dry, ironing to do and several weekly food shops just like everyone else. Add some recent life/family/health/job insecurities to the mix and well, Little House on the Prairie it ain't.

So that's why ditching the city for this place for a bit was much needed. See how it makes the Mister look positively catalogue-model winsome?

The best bit was that there were two best bits: we could walk to a choice of two unspolit beaches along a rocky coastal path pretending to be mountain goats, and also - we had a barbacoa to put chicken on, something that took us right back to gnawing on jerk chicken with blackened fingers in our beloved Brixton. 
Oh, and a bonus thing. We learned loads more colloquial Spanish from the truly alien pleasure of watching telly in our little bungalow. We haven't owned a telly in more than a year. Ahora Caigo (quite literally, Now I Fall, or Now I Get It! - a game show where competitors fall through a hole in the floor at breakneck speed if they answer incorrectly - and  Millonario Anónimo (you know the format, but did you know it would be even more tear-jerking in Spanish? It's la crisis, you see) - were our favourites. 


I tell you what, we needed that holiday. Because the real work starts here. You remember that New York job I went for two posts ago?

They only went and gave it to me.

That's right, we're moving to NEW YORK FFS OMG ETC ETC.

I'll go first in August, and the Mister will follow in a few months, so now we are on EMOTIONAL HIGH ALERT and are bobbing wildly up and down like crazed trampolinists, veering between elation and woe at the thought of separating our lives - the ones we've just spent 11 months soldering together in this live/work space that has been our business and our home and our adventure and our comfort blanket all in one.

This is pretty big, yo.

I can totally manage another year older (if it comes with cake and Jennifer Love Hewitt's blessing). Part 1 of 2.

Birthdays are strange things. It seems that people want them less, the more of them they have. Like socks. Or jobs. Or reality TV shows.

I'm still within the commonly acceptable age range which is allowed to welcome birthdays, but I think I'll have to give up the right to annually self-worship in approximately 730 days. Unless, of course, I take some well-thought-out, cogent advice from the Femail section of the Daily Mail, which quotes that veritable woman-mountain of inspiration, Jennifer Love Hewitt :

Last year when Jennifer Love Hewitt was 29 she was quoted as saying: ‘I'm so excited! It's my dream age. I don't know why but, literally, since my 12th birthday I've wanted to turn 30. There's nothing more graceful or elegant than the beauty of a female when she has figured out who she is.’

So until then, when I've figured out who I am (?@!&$*) Love Hewitt, I've decided to go all out.

This year was all organised as a series of little surprises by the Mister, who deserves an enormous medal for not bowing to the continual pressure I subjected him to whilst trying to find out what we'd be doing on the day, and for managing to involve my mum as well, whilst keeping everything a delicious secret from me. Our conversations the week beforehand went mostly like this:

Me: Tell me.

Mister: No.

Me: Oh, go on.

Mister: Do you really want to know?

Me: No.

Silence.

Me: Oh, go on.

(repeat ad nauseum).

So in the end, the day went like this.

We met my mum at a secret Piccadilly location at 11am which turned out to be Fortnum & Mason. She and I had a treatment each - me, manicure, she, pedicure - in their Beauty a la carte rooms. It was heavenly. My nails have never looked so spiffing.

The Mister went and had a pint and read his book nearby. We reconvened in an hour, then we all went up two flights of stairs to the St.James's Restaurant for proper afternoon tea.

I know. I'm a fiendishly lucky woman. Look at the cakes!

We ate a lot of cake. And sandwiches. Delicious little sandwiches for rich people with tiny little hands that couldn't hold a real-sized sandwich. It was really quite illuminating. And lovely. Did I say lovely already? I think I'm still having sugar highs.

After lunch we went to Oxford Street. That was a bad idea. By then it had started to rain. But we persevered, for my mum's birthday promise to me was a new pair of shoes. I know! It's like I had died and gone to some kind of Femail-sponsored heaven. It almost made me want to buy something fashionable. Eventually the rain reminded me that nothing is worth Oxford Street in the rain, not even new shoes. Yes, I'm cancelling my subscription to Grazia as I type.

So then mum called it a day, because we were going to see a film, and because, in her words, 'the evening is for lovers'. Aw. Don't you love mums?

The film we went to see was called 'Le Refuge' and it was on at the Renoir, which is another brilliant move from the Mister because he knows I'm a sucker for those Frenchies and their art-house sexy addiction films about drugs and babies. Anyway, more about that another time. You can read a review of the film here.

Then, suddenly, it was nearing dusk and I thought the day was over. But oh no. There was more to come.

For that, you're going to have to wait, because it deserves a sparkling post full of joy and now it's a Monday night at 11.43pm a few weeks later and I'll have to remember every detail to do it justice because it was a lovely evening. Ok, so it rained. A lot. But that didn't spoil a thing. It was lovely and warm and sunny inside. Oh, did I mention it was lovely*?

*All, right, I'm aware this sunniness may be getting annoying. Just one more post and then it's back to food and grumps.