I’m going to be on BBC Breakfast on Friday morning. I have spent the last three weeks on a crash diet because I don’t want to find out that the adage about the camera adding ten pounds is true after the event, when I walk off set and switch on my phone to find a dozen …
The UK reached a high of 16 degrees today, which necessitated half the population stripping down to shorts and T-shirts in the gloriously mistaken belief that summer had arrived. I sighed at the way the British* so wholeheartedly leap into action the moment the thermostat edges into double figures but conceded that it was perhaps …
Clutching my phone and hyperventilating, I call John. ‘Help,’ I whisper under my breath, ‘I need help.’ ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘There’s too much gravy.’ ‘OK. What do you mean?’ I take a step back, banging into a trolley, and take in the full, eye-blistering, mind melting array of gravy options. I’m powerless, my brain pulling …
Dear Alula, Yesterday you cried. You were inconsolable. You want to leave now, you sobbed. You don’t want to make friends in England, you said, because you’ll just end up leaving them, so what’s the point? You’re really bad at math, you cried. And you call braids braids, not plaits. Who calls them plaits anyway? …
John left Bali yesterday. For good. Kadek cried all day. I stood, looking at all the junk he’d left for me to clear up, and scowled. When I first heard that John had been offered a job in London my first thought was, well at least there’s Skype. It was funny though because about three months before …
“I am never, as long as I live, stepping foot in Kuta ever again. EVER!’ I tell John after a day at Kuta’s new and glitziest mall ‘Beachwalk’ which should come with a sign saying: ‘check your soul at the door.’ I should have known to be suspicious when I took Alula to the loos …
It’s trick or treat time. Being British I’m faintly disturbed by this tradition; squirmish about the concept of fancy dress (the effort involved seems commensurate with axing the trees to light your own funeral pyre), cynical of the commercialization of yet another pagan / christian ceremony and also mightily stressed out by the following email, …
So I’m lying in bed and I’m thinking about Brad and Ange. And I’m thinking that the bed I’m currently lying in is big enough for Brad, Ange and their 6 kids to all sleep comfortably in. Hell, the Brangelina could have one of their infamous sexual showdowns (the kind that has their security guard …
I am sitting amidst a pile of cellophane wrappers and discarded shoes – plastic tweety pie emblazoned fake crocs, Disney Princess bow-clad horrors with heels, sparkly beaded flip flops. I am in tears. ‘If you don’t choose a pair of damn shoes by the time I count to ten I am going to send you …
I’m glad I called the taxi for 11.30 and not 12.30 as I originally did. I’m glad for a number of reasons. But mainly because if I hadn’t we’d be sleeping the night in Little Chalfont right now instead of flying high on a 747 on our way back to Bali drinking our third vodka …
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