Let me take you by the hand along the streets of London town..

I am having a splendiferous time.

So much has happened since I last posted that I hardly know where to start. I shall try to address it in chronological order.

First, the lunch: It was fabulous.
Mrs. Trefusis, Liberty London Girl, India Knight and Belgian Waffle at Shoreditch House.
We met at one, or we should have met at one but I was horribly late because I idiotically decided to drive, underestimated my travel time, then got confused in manner of elderly lady by the rejigging of the one way system at Shoreditch since I was last there, finally parked and then wandered around on foot looking myopically for the entrance to the place which was not where it ought to have been according to my badly self written directions. However, I got there in the end and they very sweetly waited for me to order and were very gracious about my tardiness. I was a little shy and quiet at first but soon started gabbling away, and before we knew it several bottles of wine had mysteriously disappeared and we were forced to retire from our table to a lounging position by the pool. From there we started to Twitter and even broadcast some photographs, including this very fetching one of my good self, taken by India Knight. It was a most merry and raucous time and hopefully will be repeated in the not too distant future. I am plumping for a kind of Twitter/blogging ‘conference’ next time which can be written off for tax, and therefore held in an exotic location – Bahamas? Vegas? Anguilla? Tahiti?  
Still, I’d happily come back to London for another. Any excuse..

Lunch ended at approximately 6pm, which was highly convenient as this was exactly the moment that my old friend the video director turned up to meet me for drinks so I didn’t actually have to relinquish my spot on the lounger by the pool. That would have been too difficult. We just put blankets over our knees, ordered cocktails and eventually dinner. By the time this finished I was much too tired to make it to see Jo’s show. My friend was slightly disappointed as he had been looking forward to watching naked ladies, but was far too gracious to insist – he could see the jet lag catching up with me, but I promised we would do this another time. Jo has been twirling the tassels for several decades now and shows no particular sign of stopping. God, she’s fabulous!

I had a thrilling visit to a retro sweetie shop the following day- I had promised Five I would bring her all the types of candy I used to like as a child, and as luck would have it this particular place was on the way to my grandparents’ cottage in Kent, so I stopped off in Dulwich, found a parking space right outside (of course!) and walked in to what was my idea of heaven, aged 6. This time I had more than 10p to spend. 

Oh yes!

Jars and jars of delicious sweets lined the walls. Sherbet dibdabs, pear drops, toffees, butterscotch, flying saucers, refresher chews, fruit salad, blackjacks, tom thumb pips, rhubarb and custard, foam prawns and bananas (not together, obviously), humbugs, traffic light lollies, sugar mice, drumsticks- ooh the list went on and on. Unfortunately they were out of Caramac, but you can’t have everything, can you?

I left half an hour later and £25 poorer, but it was SO worth it. I’ve been waiting a lifetime to go into a sweet shop like that and buy anything I wanted.
Did someone say teeth? Surely I won’t need those for much longer?

I spent a lovely restful couple of days in the country with the old folks, enjoying the beautiful English countryside, the birdsong, the flowers, the greenery.  
How I miss that in California! It’s so pretty here, so gentle. I took lots of photographs, including some great ones of Jessie, the naughtiest spaniel in Britain. My grandparents think she is reasonably well behaved, but actually she is quite dreadful and jumps on people, drags food off the table, runs around yelping, eyes rolling crazily, and generally makes a nuisance of herself in a puppyish manner despite being eleven years old. I’ve become rather fond of her over time, despite her unattractive qualities and have come to view her bad behaviour as a sort of conduit for all the irritation and rage that her master – a model of propriety – could not bring himself to express due to being a consummate gentleman. Sir F is a restrained, understated, elegant and literary man but he has a dark side that he no longer has the physical capability to express. What better than an uncontrolled beastie like Jessie to do his dirty work for him? It’s not that she obeys him and does bad things at his bidding. It’s that she obeys no-one and he quietly, gleefully enjoys the ensuing mayhem, clears his throat apologetically, offers the opinion that “Jessie is trying to tell you that she is very fond of you” then he slopes off for an afternoon sleep.
Genius. Passive aggression via domestic pets. I am planning this for my own dotage. 

After this pleasant interlude I zipped by Canterbury to see a cousin and then went back to London to fetch my friend – the one from the plane – to go to a party. It was an enjoyable evening, but one full of strange ghosts too.
This friend, as I mentioned in my last post, is one I have known since birth. He is actually the elder of two brothers,  his  younger brother and I being the same age, and we all spent our early years together in north west London.
As life has turned out, the younger brother and his partner now live in the flat they grew up in and have two small boys aged 4 and 2 who I have not seen since the eldest was a small baby. Although these days I am closer to the older brother, in childhood the younger brother and I were totally inseparable and many happy hours were spent playing in that flat together. 
I rang the bell- and this was odd enough, recalling the decades that I have stood by that door, and after I was buzzed in climbed the stairs up to the flat. When I came in there were lots of people milling around – the younger brother and his wife were going out to a wedding and so there was a babysitter there, several other adults getting ready to go out, the elder brother getting his jacket and phone etc. I glanced over into what used to be the playroom and saw that it was, once again, a playroom which was strange, but not strange, if you know what I mean, and then I walked into the living room and got a huge shock when I saw what at first glance appeared to be my friend, the younger brother aged 4 sitting on the sofa watching The Clangers. This was very confusing. How could he be 4, watching The Clangers, on this sofa, when I was the age I am now standing here? This was not right. Surely I should also be 4 and any minute his mother, who is the shouty type, would come in and yell at us for eating on the couch/giggling/nothing in particular.  Then the younger brother walked in, really my age,  which was further confusing and I asked him how it was possible that this had happened. He didn’t know. He really didn’t know.

The party was very nice – delicious food, pleasant people and most of all a chance to spend time with a beloved friend. In some ways it feels like no time has passed at all since we were kids, and in other ways like we are in a hiatus of time because obviously we are the age we are, at the stage of life we are at, and yet here we were, in our hometown, navigating the streets, talking our own language and comparing notes on our expat status. 
I drove him home and we passed South End Green, by the Royal Free Hospital. With a shock, we saw that the Hampstead Classic Cinema is no more, it is now an M&S Simply Food. We were deeply traumatised – how many childhood films and teenage fumblings had we both had in that cinema? Truly appalling! No doubt it’s been like that for years, but it was the first time we’d seen it and it was like a small death in the family. We agreed that we were very glad that we were together when we discovered that heart rending fact. It would have been too awful to find it out alone. We laughed on the outside at our foolishness, but inside a small part of me cried.

The next day was Sunday and I met a girlfriend in town and we wandered all over London eating, drinking and giggling in the glorious weather. It was a magical day and everything I wished for came true. Tables by the window instantly became free at the Tate Modern restaurant,  front seats at the top of a number 15 routemaster bus  presented themselves(Oh, how I love a routemaster bus! London not London without them), numerous cups of tea were drunk at various places and important conversations were held, and finally we ended up at the Edgeware Rd., a favourite haunt of mine, where we ordered a ridiculous amount of Lebanese food from gracious, besuited gentlemen and then rounded off the evening by shopping for mint tea glasses and soumak at the little arabic supermarkets that line the busy street where people sit out and smoke fruit flavoured tobacco in hookahs and drink dark, cardamom flavoured coffee late into the night. I actually thought that there was nothing that could add to the perfection of this marvelous day, but as we went into one last shop in search of the perfect glasses for my friend, I cast my eye over the selection of chocolates below the counter and there, to my delight, were CARAMAC BARS.

I bought 14.

We shared one on the train home, giggling and licking our fingers, swooning with nostalgia.They are just as delicious as they ever were.

Not quite sure any will make it back to Stepford, but I will try my best.