Milk in first

"The recommended way to take tea with milk is to put the milk into the cup first."

So says the incredibly pretentious-seeming tea shop which is conveniently located very close to a tube station on a direct line between where my train gets in and where my parents will park and about equidistant from each.

Quite right too.

Mammoth catch-up

It's the middle of the day and I'm meant to be working, except that my common sense appears to have vanished and I am without any of the critical faculties (e.g. being able to read and notice things) normally required for proof-reading. I have just tried to write a cheque to pay for the veg box and not only did I almost write 'veg box' after the word 'PAY' instead of 'Eat Organic' but also almost put '22nd December' in the space marked 'DATE', while simultaneously wondering a) how many vegetarians I know, b) how many of them are coming to my barbecue (you know, that thing you do outdoors in the summer, not shortly before Christmas) and c) how many bean-burgers I should make and when I should put the beans on to soak. This is then further complicated by the fact that last time I made burgers, all the people who were supposed to eat the beef-burgers actually wanted bean-burgers cos they were different and funky, so now I have to make enough so that my dead-cow-munching friends can try some without the vegetarians feeling peeved that we ate all their food again. (You know, sometimes I really don't blame them for being smug and self-righteous.) However, it seems as if the vegetarian contingent is solely composed of Anu, who cannot possibly eat more than three burgers, especially if we do vegetable kebabs (ah - must buy vegetables), so I probably needn't worry too much.

I now want to add 'buy vegetables' to my to-do list, but I'll probably end up writing something like 'learn Turkish' and end up actually doing something like 'wander round the house with one shoe on worrying about cobwebs and not end up buying a feather duster'. The only possible explanation I can come up with for this is that I've just been catching up on Zoe Williams's Anti-Natal column in the Guardian and am, in sympathy, functioning rather like I imagine the mother of a newborn might.

Or maybe I just haven't had enough tea.

I had a lovely time at home the other week, only really marred by the fact that I had to come back to Wokingham at the end of it! We had a barbecue, news of which was greeted by almost all members of Nik's family with a combination of surprise and condescending amusement, which is not unusual in people from Surrey, but this lot are (half-)Swedish for heaven's sake and should be vaguely aware that sometimes it is sunny enough to eat outside north of Hertfordshire. We ate out in a wonderful restaurant called The Grainger Rooms which everybody must go to for it is fabulous and fabulously reasonable: a three course menu was only slightly more than the price of a main at the only restaurant in Wokingham of comparable quality (though, admittedly, everything they serve there does come with foie gras and truffle sauce...). I had my hair cut in Corbridge and bought a dress and ran into Sarah's mother, and bonded with my dad in his vegetable patch, where the dog kept trying to eat all the broccoli. I met up with Sarah and heard all about her trip. Charlie made us play Balderdash and Davy kept coming up with wonderfully amusing answers that were far too clever for the makers of the game to have thought of and thus losing rather catastrophically. I am alternately amused and alarmed to notice that my parents appear to have produced:

• one child who turns up her nose at Earl Grey tea made with artificial flavouring rather than proper bergamot flowers;
• one child who scoffs at 'people who go to Radiohead concerts to hear Creep';
• one child who's threatening to turn into a classicist and will thus go through life believing everyone, even people with firsts in Modern Languages from Oxford, to be ever-so-slightly intellectually inferior to himself.
  

Then I went to Paris to visit Gaelle, whom I haven't seen in about four years, and we both later confessed to having been a bit worried lest it was rather awkward, but somehow we found to have enough to say to each other to stay up till 3a.m. both nights. We did very little other than wander, talk and eat (and randomly look at the pictures outside the UNESCO building) but it was much fun. And her boyfriend carried my enormously heavy bag all the way across Paris and lay down on the pavement to take a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night. (Not at the same time. I only took one photo the entire time I was away and it was of the dog. Surprise, surprise.) She told me that she cuts his hair herself, which seems like a win-win arrangement (boyfriend does not have to spend money on haircut; girlfriend does not have to put up with boyfriend looking like ex-convict for three weeks after he finally relents and spends money on haircut), but when I suggested trying it, Nik gave me a rather sceptical look, as if my wielding sharp objects in the general vicinity of his head was not a prospect he greeted with unbounded enthusiasm.

I am currently proof-reading lots of translations, which are getting progressively lewder. In the last few weeks I have learnt more French slang terms for penis, the various orifices into which one might insert said body part and the act of doing so, not to mention derogatory terms for women, than I ever did in 12 years of formal education; which is no mean feat as the French, by and large, like to imagine that they all talk like the immortels of the Academie Francaise (that was a crossword clue recently, which is why I remember that's what they're called) and the existence of, say, an equivalent to Urban Dictionary would a) be incredibly helpful right about now but also b) signify surrender to the malevolent and pernicious forces of Anglo-American cultural imperialism and acknowledgement of the huge, gaping chasm between written and spoken French.* So I am currently using the limited resources available to me to try and work out if 'zoulette' is yet another synonym for penis or yet another less than pleasant term to denote a woman, in particular a woman from la banlieue. I'm hoping it's penis, because otherwise I have to grapple with the different cultural resonances of la banlieue and the suburbs.

I am shocked not so much by the subject matter, but more by the knowledge that real live grown-up people** with respectable jobs actually think and talk about women in this way. It's like they live in this crazy porn-world where sexual pleasure is just about doing more and more outrageous things with a penis, rather than, like, all the other fun stuff. Possibly as a result of all this, I have started reading The F Word on my breaks and actively embracing feminism in a way I never bothered to before because all the good parts were just common sense and all the other parts made people look shiftily at you. I've also reached the conclusion that the opposite of talking about shoes is not talking about Heidegger, it's talking about cars and farting, and so I can knit myself pink cardigans whilst listening to The World Tonight and not feel guilty about one or the other. So I've recently, without any inherent contradiction, used my hard-won economic independence to spend exorbitant amounts of money at Bravissimo and, for the first time in my life, am wearing a bra that actually fits me and own a shirt that doesn't gape! And my other clothes all fit me better too! Oh brave new world, that has such cleavage in it! And I currently think my breasts look rather fabulous and I keep staring at them and not getting anything done. I'm sure the novelty will wear off.***

I have no idea who Barbara Grizzuti Harrison is/was, but this feels rather appropriate right now:

“I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna Fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.”

* As someone who has been known to correct 'cascaded' to 'disseminated' while writing up minutes, I appreciate I am on shaky ground here.

** I use the term 'grown-up' loosely, here.

*** I will now be able to gauge who reads this blog and who doesn't by observing who turns up to the barbecue and greets me with, 'Happy birthday, Hannah! Nice boobs!'

Doesn't have to be taxing? Pull the other one...

I just tried to fill in my tax return. It made my head swim. I couldn't find the Self-Employment (short) pages and I think this is discrimination against short, self-employed people. I think being 'a farmer, a market gardener or a creator of literary or artistic works' sounds ideal, but it appears to make the whole damn business more complicated. I now think this is a government ploy to stifle agriculture and art. I'd quite like to move to a cash-free economy, now, please.

I'm going to drink some vodka now. If Nik doesn't get home for dinner soon, that will also make my head swim.