The Devil Wears Lipstick

Went to see a jewel of a show last night: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by theatre company 1927. A devious blend of sinister fairy tales, peep-hole naughtiness and nonsense verse, all delivered with gallows deadpan and cut glass accents, it left me feeling utterly elated.
After a mood-setting music hall Charleston, a series of darkly comic vignettes unfolded, blending white-faced actors with scratchy film and animation in a virtuosic display of precisely-timed anarchy. Edwardian nursery stories were deliciously subverted, so that children dress up as crack whores, twin sisters torment grandmamma with sticks, and the Devil does drag. Combined with 1920s touches of silent-film piano, cabaret and black bobbed hair, it was a bit like Louise Brooks reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales on acid. A perfect nightmare before Christmas.

Noooooo!

Leaving France, I thought I'd escaped the sickening sight of finger heart. I almost spat coffee when I saw the below image in the Guardian jobs pages, at the bottom of a recruitment advert for an Associate Director, PR & Communications. I wonder if you can guess which organisation thought it appropriate and desirable to represent themselves with such a nauseating abomination...

Snugg as a bugg

The first real frost overnight! Icing sugared backyard. Wandsworth Common looks anything but as I jog around it, in full winter regalia (running gloves and triple-layered top). I zigzag delightedly from puddle to puddle, cracking the ice as I steam around the great milky field. Disgruntled ducks tread gingerly on the pond, walking winter miracles on the solid surface. It’s been months since I’ve been able to go jogging, thanks to a dicky ankle, and to ease back into it on such a morning makes me hum with pleasure.
Less humming at home, where the cold really seeps and bites. No double glazing here, just thin chilly panes sapping the central heating. I find myself doing housework just to warm up. Yesterday, finally fed up with frozen toes, I stormed into M&S and bought myself the daggiest pair of slippers I could find. Tan moccasins. Dreadfully, wonderfully lined with thick faux fur. To deal with the cold, I’ve decided, you just have to embrace your inner bogan. Manky trackie daks, ratty cardigans and layer upon layer of fashion-backward poly-fleece.
In fact it seems that bogan is the new black here in London. There is one store in the glittering new Westfield London (infinitely flashier than Fountain Lakes, it seems, and blingier even than Bondi Junction) which has had to employ door bitches (seriously) to control the velvet-roped crowds clamouring to get inside. It’s the Ugg boot shop.
So there you have it. The London look for Winter 08/09: BoBogan (Bourgeois Bogan. Or should that be Fauxgan?). Top Shop shelves are already groaning with skinny jeans and check flannel shirts. Time to complete the trend with my fake fluffy footwear, which shall now be known as the mockasin.
As showcased in the timeless stylings of Michelle and Ferret.

Le retour

It was our first trip to Paris as visitors last weekend. Since giving up our resident status and moving to London back in July, I have often wondered how this first visit would feel. Would we be mauled by melancholy and remembrance of things past? Or would it be too soon for that; would we simply fall back into a humdrum residential experience? Both possibilities made me apprehensive.
As it happens, our time was too rushed to take real stock of any reaction. From the moment we picked up the family wagon hire car, the weekend was a tense blur of motorways, ferry crossings, traffic and packing. Saturday, our only full day in Paris, slid by in unsatisfactory fits, shopping aimlessly while I tried desperately to think what I’d rather be doing. It was of course wonderful to see friends – generously warm and welcoming as ever. That was one of the very best things about our brief return: discovering that, for us, the beauty of Paris will no longer just be in the buildings or the river or the light.
Having said that, I did experience one thrilling, “pinch me I’m in Paris” moment. After battling the grey waves of shoppers on the rue de Rivoli, we turned a corner and there, backlit by sudden sun, were the towers of Notre Dame, capped by the distant dome of the Panthéon. Moved almost to tears by this familiarly ravishing sight, I was then delighted by a new marvel: the delicate white Tour Saint-Jacques, finally unwrapped after years of restoration. We sat at its foot sipping cafés express, gazing on the bleached stone tracery, and I realised with relief that I need not fear this Paris ambivalence. We will take the best of both worlds, sashaying like locals along the boulevards, while gasping like tourists at treats (re)discovered.
Let them have cake, and eat it, too.

Holiday highlights 2

Dinner in Ajaccio, our cheerfully shambling waiter serving wild boar and bitter dark myrtle liqueur

The harrowing hairpinned Gorges de Spelunca, and the relieved rush getting out of the car unscathed

Square towers squatting on warm rocks reflected in bright gentle blue

Close encounters of the cloven-hoofed kind driving through unhurried trips of mountain goats

High granite picnics and crushed wild mint

Following a liquid jade tumble up and up to its round mountain source

Strong local beer tasting of chestnuts and malt

St. Florent sunsets over Cap Corse, shushed by waves on the pebble beach below

Holiday highlights 1

Impressions from Bordeaux and the Périgord:

Chatty apéritifs with Mum on the thin hotel terrace, hung over the darkening spires of Bordeaux
The shock of grey gothic stone and hot terracotta looking down over Cathédrale St. André
Witnessing opulence restored leaf by gilt leaf in the jewel-like Grand Théâtre
The overblown tumult and exuberance of the Fontaine des Girondins

Picnics watching fish swim lazily in the Dordogne, fixed in the limpid current
Skirting the twilight vineyards, hands sticky with blackberries and figs
Staying with the sun from first to last through the full high arc of blue, day after day
Feeling slightly voyeuristic at vendange watching the harvester tickling the grapes beneath vineleafy skirts
Distant pops of hunters’ shot and treehouse ladders to canopy lookouts
Dining and laughing amongst the vines, evenings dissolving into parlour game idiocy
The postcard perfection of the Château de Montbazillac

Sunk

I fear I’m becoming a naturalised Pom because of my kitchen sink. I have always sniggered at the curious English practice of washing up in a plastic bucket placed in the sink. I always thought this a pointless and parsimonious little habit – a bizarre hangover from post-war bleakness perhaps. (Was Fairy Liquid rationed?)
You’d thank that it would be drought-dry Australia with this thrifty tradition of sparse water washing. It’s only recently however that grey water collecting and whiplash showers have become so widespread there. Surely if there’s one country that should be up to its elbows in luxurious suds, it’s England. With so much water falling down everywhere outside, showers should be lavish monsoon-like affairs, rather than these anaemic dribbles which are so useless at removing shampoo.
So when quizzed about the bucket-in-sink phenomenon, most English people murmur something about being able to empty leftover wine into the sink without tainting the washing-up water. Now it won’t surprise you to learn that I’ve never had a problem with leftover wine, but I have succumbed to the English method simply because my sink has a leak. So until it’s fixed, I’ll have to go native as I snap on my Marigolds and bend over my frugal bowl of bubbles.
Fortunately, before I become irreversibly anglicised (dare I say minogued?) I’m off to France and Italy for a few weeks of continental therapy. I’ll blog more on my return, I promise.