The true value of a 'bestie' ...

On the Florence - Milan Frecciarossa high speed train (and what a lovely piece of engineering that is, she says as she removes her anorak) a couple of young women sat across from me at the table. One immediately burst into tears and a long Italian conversation ensued wherein Bestie reassured her friend that it was all his fault (I don’t speak Italian but some things don’t require translation).

Bestie dried Crying Girl’s eyes and then realised that her makeup was now looking rather ramshackle. Out came the travel box of makeup complete with at least two dozen shades of eye shadow, four blushes, several lip glosses and foundation, and for the next half an hour Bestie reapplied Crying Girl’s makeup while all the time soothingly reassuring her that it was still all his fault. By the time we reach Milan happiness, along with eyeliner, was restored to its full glory.

The trouble with being la végétarienne ... and other current French troubles.

There is not much that I don't love about France, except foie gras. But it's hard to love a country when they start charging you for being vegetarian. It's not like there's a shortage of cheese in France that they can't just throw a slice on the plate! So as I make preparations for the summer's Pyrenean walking I fully expect, Refuge Marialles, for my €3 extra supplement, some extra quality vegetables.

Je suis aussi un peu annoyed that I had to fly home from Milan yesterday instead of taking my beloved tren de nuit. The rolling SNCF strikes finally caught up with me, and while I admire French militancy in the face of attempts by anyone to curtail the long lunch, I will never forgive them for making me fly into City Airport. This landing involves descending sharply through thick cloud with zero visibility until popping out next to the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, thinking ‘ummm do we have enough clearance over the Excel Centre’, but before being able to worry too much about that getting buffeted by wind shear off the Thames and  bouncing all the way down the runway into a reverse park at the terminal. I could, however, spend hours sitting on the DLR platform watching the prop planes swaying across the tarmac as they come into land, marvelling at how flight really is an amazing feat of engineering, or an unnatural act of magic (and where did I put my anorak).

Defying English weather ....

Curse you, English weather! My challenge event today was cancelled due to the persistent snow and high winds in Kent. Unfortunately, having spent all of yesterday eating bread, rice and cake, the amount of glucose in my system was demanding some kind of work out. So I spent ten minutes of my Sunday hauling on my favourite winter leggings with fleece knee warmers, a skins thermal top, a thin fleece top, wind cheater, thermal gloves, face buff, wool hat, and thermal socks in gortex shoes. This is what I had to wear to defy snow, wind and a skating rink of black ice along the towpath for the next two hours of my Sunday, with a killer final 30 minutes hauling arse through bitter headwinds to home. I was, surprisingly perhaps, joined by hordes of other people who think going for a potter in sub zero conditions is a fine way to spend part of their day off, with others wearing anything from shorts (must be Northerners or Canadians) to puffer jackets (soft Southerners). Whatever gets you out there ... but I am so looking forward to Spring (okay, it is supposed to be Spring now but it will come properly ... eventually).

The affects of ageing ...

Towards the end of my 50th year a young man stood to offer me his seat on the Tube and in an instant I realised I had aged. The signs were there: I was overcome with waves of nostalgia watching T2: Trainspotting and re-listening to Alanis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill' on their 20th anniversaries. And at Glastonbury I found myself trying to sing Mary J. Blige songs to two teenage poppets who'd never heard of her, but who, in return, sang me snippets of One Direction songs they liked.

The trouble with ageing, I thought, as I realised that I'd now been alive in the world at least 30 years longer than the poppets, is that I seem to have less patience brought on by being in sight of the terminus, but fortunately also care less about the small stuff. K.T. Tunstall wandered into the massage tent she'd left an earring in the day before where I was naked except for my bonds knickers, and neither K.T. nor myself could give a rat's arse.

That kind of contentment is worth getting old for and if we can get through life causing as little damage to ourselves and others along the way, we've done alright. Scar tissue must never be allowed to accumulate, and 'if onlys' lightly collected, dusted off occasionally and then forgotten about at the back of a high shelf in a room seldom visited.

So in honour and celebration of half a century, even in a world of Brexump, while revelling in the complicated entanglements beyond a Manichean universe of good/evil, left/right, long lunches and fairy lights have been (and will continue to be) interspersed with unproductive walking and hours of Jane Austen.

My deepest thanks to those who have travelled with me during various decades along the way, and the various posses over the last year of finding Wally.

Notes to Self for the New Year 2018

Okay, it really could get worse but if in need of rescue try the following:

1. Salzburger Nockerl ... and don't even think of anything less than the full eight eggs.

2. Engage strangers at nearby table to accomplish task, proving that conviviality is possible if there is common cause.

3. And if it really does go to hell in a handcart, then, and only then, take the dumpling of last resort ... the Germknödel. Yes, that is a Brexit/Trump/Office for Students/having to deal with 'men who use feminism as a stick to beat Islam' proof dumpling the size of a soup plate, covered in a mound of poppyseed and sugar, sitting in a pool of butter, with a spiced plum jam reservoir in the middle. My arteries, like the rest of me, will go down fighting.

Adventures in soup ....

So Dingo Baby was making his first foray into cooking lentil soup, unsupervised. Having never been in the spice cupboard before he had a guess at what he thought was cumin seed. We now have cardoman flavoured soup but I think he‘s on to something ... it’s delicious!

Adventures in London's musical underground ...

Having introduced Dingo Baby to Midnight Oil I felt compelled to accept his invitation to a night with Mac de Marco, if for no other reason than to experience the Coronet, a legendary sticky floor venue in Elephant and Castle, before it is inevitably knocked down to make way for more unaffordable apartments built for overseas investors to rent out to Londoners at exorbitant rates (read here the litany of injustice involved in this demolition of communities' and people's futures from Southwark Council and Australian developer Lendlease).

A quick tour through Youtube and I discovered that Mac de Marco's style could best be described as stoner or slacker rock so I was expecting mostly stoners and slackers to be in the audience. It's always disconcerting when expectation and reality don't meet so it took a few moments to adjust to being surrounded by a crowd of young, preppy, posh accents seemingly engaging in their own version of cos-play for a few hours, i.e., a mass sing-along of not particularly subversive lyrics wishing they too could be swigging beer and whisky from the bottles lined up on their speaker stacks.

Maybe after years of dance tents and stadium gigs, or the fact that I was just sipping on burdock and dandelion soda, I was also struggling with the repertoire of three minute pop songs ... just when you think the song is going somewhere, it stops. It was only in the second half that some of the music started to get more interesting but by then the state of mind of the band was starting to disintegrate along with the cheese sandwiches and other food stuffs being thrown at the stage (which was pretty funny). It was also funny to watch Mac de Marco (clearly a talented musician who will not age well) replace the drummer who then came to the front to sing; only he can't sing so it started to be largely unfunny after ten minutes. With long pauses and occasional guttural screaming, the jackass-ery finally came to an end with a five chorus version of 'I'm Henry the Eighth', lyrics substituted for something vaguely comical but I had given up caring. Apart from a freestyle long version of an instrumental somewhere at about the half way point (which was exceptional), my vegan souvlaki from the Greek cafe in the neighbouring BoxPark was the best thing from the evening (and the ride home on the night tube;  always guaranteed to be ethnographically fascinating).

I recognise that as the oldest woman at the gig, with a penchant these days for 'been there, done that' eye rolling,  my opinion on these things is doubtless considered worthless, but I would counter with the following vignette ...

This morning, on the way to a well earned recovery brunch in E20 (because dandelion and burdock soda can take it out of you), we crossed the no-person's land of Hackney Wick warehouses still to be demolished, to hear the ever louder pulse of a techno rave being illegally held in a squat. As the grinding bass lines reverberated off derelict walls and the houses of suffering neighbours, we started to see the late morning wreckage emerging, blinking, into winter sunlight, sitting in gutters with cans of beer, crashed out on nearby benches, digging holes in the ground for no particular reason, grinning maniacally in baggy cargos, hippy tie-dye and dreadlock splendour, make-up smeared down sweaty faces, in desperate need of a shower and sleep, weaving their way down the street beneath the ever encroaching cranes of gentrification to the overground station. And this was the vanguard of early leavers .... the hard core still had another eight hours of partying to go.

Now that, fans of Mac de Marco, is proper stoner/slacker behaviour, although debates on its authenticity are irrelevant if you have to live next door to it and I suspect neither the ravers nor their preppy brethren nor Mac de Marco were feeling particularly spritely today, and that, as I smugly sip my  dandelion and burdock soda, is a waste of a beautiful winter's day.