It's been a thousand years since I posted, I know. Where to start ( Read more... )

Bizarrely (or maybe appropriately?) to Milton Keynes last night, to see the Sean Mathias/Ian McKellen/Patrick Stewart Godot. I’d misread the train timetable, and got there much too early, and, having never been in central Milton Keynes before, was naively under the impression I could wander about the centre of town, and have a drink before the ( Read more... )

I am writing this on my bed, in a bedroom which contains every movable item from the living room, including two sofas, a hat stand, several large plants, a dining table and chairs, a small cupboard full of glasses, and a set of botanical watercolours, plus the new cooker and washing machine. For lo, verily, it occurred to us that we should do the ( Read more... )

I have a ticket to Pete Postlethwaite’s Lear tonight, but I may decide not to risk the tube having already stopped for the night by the time it ends. Or maybe the snow is an excuse. I honestly find Lear difficult to reconcile with the average notion of an evening’s quiet enjoyment, and good ones are harder to bear than mediocre ones. The ( Read more... )

We got back from Switzerland late last night, after a week with friends at their chalet in the Bernese Oberland. We’d spent the end of December down by the lake, as G. had the final nights of an opera run, so we spent New Year’s Eve eating fondue with the cast and crew after the final performance of a very silly opéra bouffe, and danced to the ( Read more... )

I. left at five, with an unfeasible number of very badly-packed white shirts, to spend ten days in the Middle East signing a deal, and I feel unreasonably depressed. It isn’t helped by the fact that our houseguest, H, is still staying with us three weeks on, slightly to my disbelief - she can’t move into her new flat until next week, so I’ve felt I ( Read more... )

Curious moments of the last week:

Sitting in D’s restaurant, watching him haggle with one of his Tipperary foragers, a big, handsome, weatherbeaten woman with henna-red hair -  about the price of rosehips and morels, which she’s pouring out on the counter from a plastic sack.  Brief romantic fantasy of living in a caravan in the woods, actually ( Read more... )

I had today earmarked for a short, sharp half-day of current chapter rewrites, followed by a bath with lavender oil and a new novel (Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army), before meeting for dinner a friend who has again emerged from a psychiatric hospital, and seems admirably sanguine about life. But I. is currently hiding out at home with his phone ( Read more... )

I.’s job is in meltdown and as I sit at home wrangling with my book, I expect any minute to see him come in the door carrying the contents of his desk and rolling his eyes at being on ‘gardening leave’ - an expression that sounds even madder in central London than elsewhere. (And when used by a man who couldn’t tell a hydrangea from a hyacinth.) At ( Read more... )

Much serious discussion with I. last night, about what we both wanted from life,  and whether his potential Middle East project is likely to make us enough money to make things a bit more secure - it’s clear his current job is about to end abruptly within weeks, and we’re both enough children of the Irish seventies and eighties to be uneasy at the ( Read more... )