One hello and one goodbye

Let’s start with the goodbye first. It’s a goodbye to my faithful little HTC phone. I have had lots of happy times with it. It has served me well for time telling, text messaging, phone calling, photograph taking, WordPress posting, Facebook checking and many other exciting things.

It was my first phone with a big screen. Previously, I’d been all into the clicky-buttons phones, sniffing haughtily at these ‘fancy new phones’ that were like mini computers. Just get a computer, thought I.

Well! I needed an upgrade as my clicky-buttons phone was caving in from oldness. The extremely young looking boy in the shop convinced me to get a big-screen phone. And it was like a revolution in my mind! What’s this? I can play music? And watch YouTube? And see when there are comments on my blog? And check emails? And play a game where you kind of tip the phone up and a little ball rolls around? Epic!

I was immediately converted. I jumped into the big-screen-phone gang with both feet.

And then, um, I, um, I kept dropping it. Um. Yeh. And it slowly got less and less efficient. And I kept needing photographs of every. little. thing. And it started going really slowly because I had taken a thousand million hundred photos (approx.). And I had had it for over two years which, in phone years, is, like, I dunno, a million years or something?

On Thursday, it was time to address this issue. This old-battered-phone issue. I went in the shop prepared for a lot of chitchat and signing things. Ten minutes later, I emerged with a beautiful slick Samsung SomethingOrOther which I love. I don’t have the history that I have with my HTC but the early signs of love are brewing in my heart for this new beautiful Samsung.

Now for the hello. It’s a big hello to the new Whole Foods in town.

I tried, people! I tried to be like, “Urgh! Whole Foods! They’re so big and take-over-the-world-y.” But then I went in there and I quite liked it. I was mighty confused about what to get for lunch because there was so much being thrown at me. I could have hot/cold/salad/soup/burger/burrito/fruit/biscuits. I just didn’t know where to look. I picked up a yoghurt after a while and wandered around like a lost child trying to find my friend.

I scoffed at their silly signs about how much they’d done in the local community since arriving and complained about the limited seating.

Then this rush of warm fuzziness rose up as if from nowhere and I realised I was loving the new Whole Foods. I very nearly bought one of their shopping bags made from recycled materials because I was so caught up in the moment. The staff were smiley and cuddly, like baby pandas. And the food looked wonderful. And the people in the fruit section were trying to offer me samples of their freshly whizzed smoothies.

And now, unfortunately, I love the new Whole Foods. Dammit.

Show me the Old Stuff

“Wow, is this the original table that was here in the chapel in 1330?” I asked the room guide in the Old Chapel at Ightham Mote.

“It is definitely of that period. You can see it was quite stylish for the time because….”

“Yeh, but is it the actual real table from 1330? From here?”

“Well, it has been acquired by the Trust to replicate what would have been here but it’s not the original from this room, no.”

“Ah.”

And I wandered off, looking for some actual old stuff. I found one of the sitting rooms and a lovely little fireplace.

“Is this an original fireplace?” I asked the room guide, all excited.

“Yes, it was built in the Victorian times.”

Pfft! Victorian times! Whatevs. I need medieval or nothing.

When I reached the kitchen, I found out the sink had been built in 1330 and I just stood looking at it going, “O wow. What an old sink.” I wanted to get my Indiana Jones on and start having an archeological adventure but the truth is, I’m not equipped with the historical knowledge to really draw any fascinating conclusions about the development of sink building by looking at the sink.

Actually, after about 30 seconds of going, “O, wow,” the people I was with had moved into the next room so I just walked off.

There is the same thing when I am demonstrating in the Ham House kitchen. People always ask which bits are the oldest. Once they’ve looked at the table, I tell them that the mantelpiece thing over the range is original.

They go up to it – it’s a peice of painted wood on the wall – and they look at it really closely and they go “O wow.” Then they walk off.

I could understand it if I was going to do a bit of dendochronology and start dating the origins of the room by looking at the wood. But once my insatiable need to see The Old Stuff has been met by something old, I just go, “O wow, it’s so old,” then walk off.

What is this Old Stuff obsession about? Is it a bit of one-up-manship?

“I’ve totally seen older stuff than you. I saw a kitchen sink built in 1325. Beat you!”

Sunglasses, longboats and One Direction…. Just another day in my mind…

I had quite a wierd dream last night. It was kind of a mishmash of stuff from the closing ceremony.

One Direction featured heavily, not sure why. My brother was doing something at the Olympics, like he was volunteering there or organising something. So I was going to see him or sneak in the park with him or something. But you got there by boat. So I was on a longboat in my sunglasses.

I know why I was in my sunglasses. Last night, a friend was dancing in the closing ceremony so I was keeping an eye out for her but I haven’t got very good eyes and didn’t have energy to go and look for my proper glasses. But my prescription sunglasses were just next to me. So I was sitting watching the TV, in a darkened room, at 9pm, with my sunglasses on, yelling and whooping every time I thought someone looked slightly like her.

I also think the longboat must have been the Annie Lennox bit of the closing ceremony.

So I’m in a longboat, wearing sunglasses going down a river to the Olympic Park. And One Direction were in the longboat too, sitting near me. And they were looking over at me and saying something to each other, as though I were a famous celebrity they were too shy to say hi to… (My true desires come out in my dreams apparently! Or maybe I just feel that’s the level of reverence with which people should be struck when I am around them.)

The next bit I remember clearly. It must be because when I was watching them in closing ceremony I was thinking about how young they looked.

Anyway, they were still looking at each other and then me. I think they were trying to work out whether I was looking at them as they couldn’t tell because of my sunglasses. I, cool as a cucumber, dropped my sunglasses down to the end of my nose so that they could see my eyes and said to them, “Guys, I’m 27.”

Shockingly, they all kind of went, “O! O really?…” And mumbled apologies, embarrassed. They then got on with looking at the view of the park from the boat and forgot I existed. One of them, though, the youngest looking one with the blond hair, kept looking back. But I didn’t drop my sunglasses down again.

And that was my slightly mental post-closing-ceremony dream.

I have concluded a few things:
1. Deep down inside, I obviously feel that I deserve celebrity status, or at the very least, for people to admire me more.
2. At the grand old age of 27, I already feel that ‘younguns’ will think I’m old.
3. I need to find my proper glasses.

Disappointing

So far, this holiday has been quite disappointing.

Yes, dinner was lovely, but where was the burglary from the till at gun point?

Yes, the garden is huge and very impressive but where was the old war hero, hiding out in the disused chicken coop because he’d been rejected by society?

Yes, there’s a lamppost at the end of the garden path which is EXACTLY like the one in the forest in Narnia and I got really excited, but where’s the old wardrobe that transports you there?

And yes, the weather was quite nice and sunny, but where was the exciting thunderstorm that we could all be a bit scared of?

And ok, the drive here was great fun and we all sung very loudly to silly pop songs from our childhoods but that is beside the point! Where was high speed car chase and the lorry crash?

Yes! I am in book heaven and there are more books than I can count in this lovely house, but where are the strange voodoo dolls and torture equipment?

There have been no crimes, no mysteries to solve, no forays into another world and no inexplicable natural phenomena.

So unfortunately, thus far, it’s just been loads of fun and really nice.

Budgeting in Laos

A few years ago, some friends and I were travelling around South East Asia. We had just crossed the border from Thailand into Laos and were staying in the capital city called Vientiane, on the banks of the Mekong River.

When we first arrived there, I think we had come in by coach and it was quite late in the evening. We just wanted to drop our stuff somewhere and go and eat. We weren’t really big on the whole planning-ahead scene. We loved the carefree nature of just turning up and seeing what we could find. So we hardly ever pre-booked hotels or anything. Sometimes it ended us in some pretty sticky situations but, on the whole, we preferred it. It suited us because we didn’t always know when we would be moving on, or where to.

So this time, we got off the coach, wandered along the front and saw somewhere which looked quite nice (we usually made do with ‘a bit grotty’ but this time we went for ‘quite nice’ because we were too tired to keep looking).

We go in, ask for a room for three and are taken to a really nice, quite plush room with wooden furnishings and a generally lovely ambience. It was a bit pricey but we agreed that we would just stay one night and find somewhere cheaper the next day. We still had a few weeks of travelling left and not a lot of money to do it on.

So the next day, around midday, we packed up our bags again, shouldered our weights (mine was getting ridiculously heavy by this point as I kept collecting books faster than I could read them and pass them on), paid our bill and told the owners we were leaving. As we stepped outside of this lovely comforting enticing hotel, the heavens opened….

We trudged the streets, getting more and more soaked, looking in any hostels, B&Bs or hotels we could find. We walked for maybe an hour and found a hostel with a room for three people which already had five hundred fleas in it, another place with a cockroach in the bath and some other places more expensive than the one we just left. I think we saw a few which just looked quite old and about to fall down. The entire time, it rained.

Fed up and getting quite grumpy by this point, we stopped in a little cafe to dry off and get something to eat. The afternoon was arriving and we hadn’t had anything, having not suspected that finding a room would prove so difficult. We started arguing a little bit with each other. This person needed to stop being so fussy, they were only fleas. And that person needed to relax about the big crack down the wall, what’s the problem, it probably only lets a little draft in. What’s a cockroach in the bath? We won’t bathe then, no big deal. And who cares if the room smells like urine? You’re getting too fussy, we’re on a budget here!

After skirting around the obvious for a long while, we eventually all admitted it. We had nowhere else to go but back to the same hotel we left an hour ago. We’d come full circle in our search and as we left the cafe, we realised that we were just around the corner from the hotel.

Sheepishly, we shuffled around the corner and approached the hotel. We sneaked a look in the front and, sure enough, the same people were at the desk. Earlier, they had asked us why we were leaving and we had explained that we were students on a budget, we needed somewhere more affordable.

We hung around outside for a few minutes, deciding who should lead the walk of shame back to the reception desk. I think I was nominated in the end and we re-entered the hotel, quietly explaining that we would like ‘a room for three, please.’ Of course they recognised us. With huge smiles on their face, they took down a key and lead us back to the exactroom we had left an hour ago and told us to make ourselves at home….

When we left the hotel a few minutes later, desperate to put some distance between ourselves and our shame, the rain had stopped and the sun had come out. And it stayed pretty sunny for the rest of our stay in Vientiane at that hotel.

O is for…

OLD!

Now I’m not going to patronise anyone born before me by suggesting that I’m ‘old.’ I’m not. It’s my 27th birthday today and should I avoid any more life threatening situations (my recent one is still fresh in my memory), I’ve probably got a good long while to go yet.

But 27 is older than I’ve ever been before, and as a girl who thinks of herself as ‘still a bit of a trampy student’, it’s quite a shock to realise I’m only three years away from 30. I guess I’d better get on and actually do some ‘life things’ then!

I wonder if people think I look almost 30? I don’t. I think I still look a bit silly and young. Should I take to wearing ‘power suits’, maybe? Stop finding swearing and the word ‘boobs’ so hilarious? Pre-empt middle-age-ness and start using anti wrinkle cream? Join a gym? Start wearing make up? Own a pair of high heels? Own a little black dress? Do something with my degrees? Any suggestions?