In which I remember that I used to write a blog

Hello. How have you been? You look good. Have you been working out?

It's been a while. We're all busy people. You know how it is.

But I'm still here, the gloves are still here, and I have definitely not abandoned the place, as someone abandoned this Barbie motorhome, just around the corner from my house.


Barbie is exactly the kind of doll who would get in her Barbie motorhome for a drive with some of the cool boys from the wrong side of town, then crash it into a wall and stroll away on her long, biologically impossible legs, leaving someone (her dad, I imagine) to pick up the pieces. And pay for them. And where's Ken in all this? Working all hours at Topdoll, just to get the money to buy Barbie some stupid necklace which she'll get bored of in about a week. God, Barbie is such a bitch.

Anyway, through the medium of poor iPhone cameraship, I can bring you the edited highlights of exactly what you have missed during my three weeks - three weeks! - of non-posting. You can tell things have turned to rust somewhat, Miss Jones-wise, by the fact that I had half my stupid finger over the lens in the picture above.

So in the last three weeks, I have been mostly:

1) Raging against the ill-punctuated.

Shame on you, TCM channel caption writers, you fool's.

Also at fault: the makers of novelty item "The Surprising Leg", found at a rainy faux-country fete.

I think you will agree with the packaging designers that yes, most certainly, it '"look's so real".

I feel there is a certain pragmatic flatness about the name, however. I have had a brainstorm with myself, vis-a-vis a blue-sky name for the product. I am suggesting 'Legs and Woah!' It is at once a hilarious play on the Top Of The Pops dancers of the late 70s, the period when, presumably, this hilarious novelty was conceived, and also suggests the expression of surprise emitted by the prankee on finding the incredibly lifelike demi-limb/limbs protruding from a closed filing cabinet, wardrobe or similar.

2) To quote the defunt we're-so-much-more-than-a-boy-band Busted, Sleeping with the lights on

That's because this dancing eyeless mask of Robbie Williams haunts my dreams after I spent two and a half hours standing behind it at a recent Take That concert.

3. What else? Well, looking for signs, as usual. The omens were particularly good ahead of the recent Marbury/Miss W (as was) nuptials. Nuptials is a ludicrous word, much beloved of magazines attempting to avoid the repetition of the word wedding by substituting it for a word never actually used by real people in the real world. I am not a real person, I'm a carefully constructed fictional character, so it's OK. See also 'locks' and 'tresses' for hair. And 'don' and 'sport' for 'wear'.

Anyway. The signs:

First, a heart-shaped crisp in my bag of Walkers on my train journey to Wedding Town.

Secondly, a double yolk in my B&B-breakfast poached eggs on the Big Day. Look at the two yolks of Marbury and Miss W, joined together in the albumen of eternity.

I don't know what it says about me that I then ate them both.

Anyway, it's nice to be back.

ALERT: Earnest gag-free Olympic self-indulgence, in which I can't decide whether the Olympics should be singular or plural

A couple of weeks ago, I found my new favourite view in London:

Waterloo Bridge From The Bus At Night Time is feeling pretty bloody second best these days, let me tell you. My new No 1 is from a cafe that overlooks the Olympic-park-in-progress. With my mania for all things Olympic, I don't know why I haven't been there before, but that is the joy of London. It's full of places you don't have to visit because they're on your doorstep and you could go and see them any time you want.

Beside what is essentially a building site with promise, an enclave of British Day Out seems to have cropped up. Parties of school children trickle past. Cyclists flit by at high speed, causing those of a nervous disposition – I am foremost among their number– considerable anxiety. Get off and walk, you hooligans, people are trying to drink lattes here. The hale-and-hearty post-middle-aged stride along purposefully, occasionally stopping to peel off their rucksacks and unwrap the kind of tinfoil-clad packed lunches that have yet to embrace the modish likes of hummus and home-made lentil salad:

I don't mind telling you, the whole spectacle swelled my heart, then almost broke it. I'm not totally sure why.

But I know this – and bale out now, cynics; seriously, go and read some nihilistic free verse or something, because here comes the syrup – the Olympics breathes the kind of excitement into me that I sometimes think I definitively and permanently exhaled during my teenage years. I feel as though it's always been there in my life, like my family, or my best friends, or a football team.

That's no twee overstatement. It's a simple fact. I'm a fresh-faced 37 and the Olympics are at least 2000. Of course they've always been there. Admittedly, once every four years is not a particularly great meet-up rate (I have cousins on the other side of the world who I see more regularly than that) but when it happens, it's like we've never been apart.

Cynics, don't make that face. I warned you.

I have a vague recollection of the Moscow Games, but Los Angeles in 1984 is the first I really remember. I was 10. There are phrases from the television commentary that I think will still be in my head even when my own name, my way home and the importance of personal hygiene is not: Carl Lewis taking the final relay leg to win his fourth gold medal ('And the big man has the baton!') and Daley Thompson's decathlon ('It's a better one... It's a better one... It's a better one... It's a better one!').

When London was bidding for the Games, I remember calculating how old I would be if/when they took place. I also calculated how old my dad would be. I always imagined if the Games ever rolled into my town, it would be him I would go with. Every summer, during my school years, he would drive my mum, my brother and I from our home in Norfolk to Crystal Palace, to the international athletics grand prix. I remember the agitation of being trapped in the 6pm south-London traffic on the way there. I remember seeing enormous bails of blank paper waiting to be news-printed in glass-walled presses somewhere north-east of the city on the way home. I now live incredibly close to the stadium that we used to drive three hours to get to, yet I rarely visit. (See paragraph two.)

When the games were awarded to London, on 6 July 2005, my colleagues and I stood around a TV set in the office, caught up in the excitement and blinking back Grade A Olympic Emotion* (me) or clutching on to an excuse not to do any work (some other, stupid people).

24 hours later, we were standing around the same TV set in the same office, watching Tony Blair give a hastily arranged address to the nation and frantically trying to contact friends and colleagues to make sure they weren't on that bus or those three tube trains.

Then, two months later, my dad died.

I don't remember too much about those weeks between the start of July and early September. Except I knew there was something different about that summer. You never see it coming, I don't think, but I'm convinced I could sense something creeping up behind me, waiting to shove me off the Precipice Of Pretty Much OK into The Pit Of Really Hard, Horrible, Grown-up Stuff.

I do know how lucky I am that nothing like that had happened to me before.

But something I do recall from that time, amid the isolated flashes of trauma, is a sense of disbelief that any of those extraordinary, enormous events were actually happening. At the time, the over-riding emotion I felt about any of them was that it was all just so... weird. For those months and quite a few immediately afterwards, everything was confusing and awful. But slowly, the Difficult Things become assimilated into your older, sadder self and you shuffle forwards.

The reality of the Olympics was probably the slowest concept to take hold. It pretty much got bumped, emotion-wise. But a couple of weeks ago, there was the evidence in front of me. The Games are growing three-dimensionally before our very eyes, in steel and brick and mud and access roads. Despite the skeptics, who seem to be positively willing the budget to be bust apart and the deadlines to be broken, they are Definitely Happening.

And seeing the stadium almost at touching distance (definitely at touching distance if I was, like, Mr Tickle – or maybe Peter Crouch), I couldn't help but think of Now and Then (the popular terms relating to time, not the coming-of-age chick flick with Demi Moore) – how life was before that summer, and what came after, and also what didn't.

My dad would have been thrilled by the Olympic site and its construction. He would have found any excuse to drive us around it, tirelessly seeking the best vantage point, revving and reversing until we were car sick, marvelling at the curved roof of the velodrome, watching the cranes, walking into places he wasn't meant to go, attempting to befriend frowning security guards in neon coats. Since he died, I've never had a strong sense of my dad being 'with me', like people who go on about that kind of thing always seem to. He's never appeared in a dream with the answers I am seeking – like the reason why the lamps in my flat keep fusing – and he's never apparated in front of me in TK Maxx, pointing the way towards a brilliantly bargainous and perfectly fitting Chloé dress. I'm five years stronger now, but at times like this, despite my excitement, my chest almost bursts with the sense of him not being there. Not scowling at the cyclists cutting him up on the path. Not eating a hard boiled egg unwrapped from tin foil.

And while I often imagined sitting in the stadium's cheap seats next to my Dad, I'm sure that on occasion I probably also imagined attending the Games with an adorable, curly-haired child or two of my own, hoping their tiny souls would absorb the privilege and the atmosphere, while I smiled beatifically, concealing how peeved I felt at shelling out £5 per branded Olympic ice cream and having to take them to the toilet just before some crucial lap or throw. While this is by no means biologically impossible, it's looking unlikely. I waited a long time for the Olympics to come to London – and they did. There's other things I've waited a long time for, and I'm still waiting.

But in my dad's absence, I visited the Olympic park with my friend Mrs G and my adorable curly-haired godchild Sonny – even if he's a little young for ice cream and he wasn't revealing his most adorable side on the day we visited. Instead, he rolled around on the concrete pathway doing angry crying for the best part of an hour and bellowing 'NOOOOOO!' at any attempts to mollify him, until passers-by started looking anxiously at us, wondering whether they should intercede.

Sonny is just another way in which things have changed since London won the Games. But a happy way. Ivy, his older sister, is another. She's 5 now, and I imagine she might have high-fived my dad on the way past him in some celestial Arrivals/Departures hall.

And then there's their mum, my friend, Mrs G. Like many of my friends, she was there before and since, and will carry on being there. They're Olympic, my friends – and yes, cynics, I am actually saying this. Not expensive and excessively sweaty and fond of ugly mascots. No. Constant, and getting closer all the time. And only a normal amount of sweaty.

* It is my intention, at some point in the future, to write a post classifying the various grades of Olympic Emotion. You probably know better than to hold your breath for it.

Table for two?

During those down times on public transport when I'm not thinking self-indulgent thoughts of despair and loneliness, I am trying to imagine ways to earn the vast amounts of money that would enable me to stop taking public transport at all.

On this occasion, I had an if-I-do-say-so-myself-which-I-do brilliant idea for a short-term money-making venture, only I was not on a bus or a train. I was at my desk at work, exchanging emails with friends about where we should have dinner together. Would we patronise the Strada cucina, where we would play fast and loose with its rustic Italian menu thanks to our exclusive* 2-for-1 on main courses voucher? Or Heston's new place? Le Gavroche? The Ivy? At this point, imagine, if you will, a light bulb turning on above my head.

One of my dining companions has a daughter. She is called Ivy. She is five. Possibly. I'm never very good with the ages of friends' children. There are too many of them now. The numbers tend to fall away in favour of broader categories such as 'Will they repeat after me when I inadvertently swear in front of them?', 'Can they take themselves to the toilet?' and 'Are they now too embarrassed to kiss or hug me?'

My idea is this: we set up a pop-up restaurant called not 'The Ivy', but just 'Ivy' – at Ivy and her family's house. It will be some kind of brilliant satire on its well-established namesake and related culinary hotspots. The master stroke is that the executive chef will be none other than Ivy herself. Each meal will be a daring and unchartered voyage on the high seas of 'cooking'. With geographical serendipity, Ivy and her family live in Hackney – the perfect place for a deconstructed, anti-establishment, east London version of The Actual Ivy.

Scenario one is that people, tourists probably, would turn up mistaking our place for the real deal.

Scenario two, we fool people into thinking this is the hottest booking in town for destination dining.

Scenario three, we don't fool people, but they still want a part of our cutting-edge play on destination dining.

It's a win-win-win situation.

We, the grown-ups – relatively speaking – will stand beside the oven nominally supervising as Ivy serves up raw chipolatas dipped in jam to her surprised/delighted/alarmed customers. Main courses, which include her signature houmous-dipped whole banana and trio of felt-tip-glazed rice cakes, are £32.50. For an extra £5, Ivy will wash her hands before she prepares them. Premium customers, who want the ultimate Ivy experience, can pay £85 for a seat at the Chef's Table, where Ivy will wheel her plastic Bluebird A La Carte kitchen alongside your seat and demonstrate her innovative skills in front of your very eyes. She is enjoying a period of experimentation with Lego at the moment, and may choose to serve you her Lego brick tartare, garnished with Lego spaceman (helmet missing, presumed eaten by the cat). Unfortunately, it's not possible to source the ingredients for this unique dining adventure locally, but we will rely on excellent Danish artisan suppliers.

Those less au fait with fine dining may feel intimidated – how to go about eating such a confection, which cutlery to use – but one should simply approach it as one would any other food prepared by a small child: pick it up between your fingers, move it expansively through the air towards your mouth, and secrete it in your fist, while making gulping, chewing, then swallowing motions, and rolling your eyes in rapture, saying, 'Mmmm, this is DELICIOUS!'

Ivy would be particularly excited by a visit from the noted restaurant critic Michael Winner, although she may not be able to turn her thoughts to the kitchen until she has made him crawl around on all fours while she climbs on his back and pretends he is a pony. She may not be the first.

We would be sitting on a GOLDMINE.

*exclusive to anyone who uses the internet

In sympathy

Recently I found myself in the glum position of having to buy an 'In sympathy' card to send to a friend – a friend from university who I don't see so much these days, yet when I do, our relationship is immediately and reassuringly as it ever was. One of those friends.

I am big on trivial outrage – one day I'm hoping that will develop into proper grown-up indignance about Really Important Things that I can expand upon at dinner parties – and one enduring outlet for my contempt is the ugliness of mainstream greetings cards. Yes, of course, there are beautiful, stylish, clever, handprinted-by-artists-in-their-Hackney-studios ones out there if you look hard enough and want to pay £4.95, but on the average high street, in the average stationer nestling between Caffe Nero and Dorothy Perkins, you are assailed by only the ugly, the twee and the retch-inducing. Who buys them all? Someone, anyone, tell me who? It can only be that same mysterious, hidden number who buy the 'gift ideas' stacked by the tills in John Lewis and Borders before Christmas, those poor potential presents sitting there like plain girls in nightclubs, waiting for desperation o'clock to tick-tick-tick around.

One of the ways in which I am turning into my mum is that these days I buy good greetings cards whenever I see them. They live in a drawer as a loose and peaceful Quality Cards Collective, alongside printer paper and bits of Useful Ribbon, until they are called to action. I have not yet purchased a special box to keep the good cards in, like my friend Ms B, but no doubt that day will come.

'In sympathy' cards are, appropriately, the most depressing examples of Card Crime. Of course, if you are the person receiving one of these cards, what it actually looks like is so very much the least of your worries (along with when you last ate a proper meal and what was it like to sleep right through the night) that maybe that's irrelevent. But that doesn't mean we should fob these vulnerable people off with the dregs of card design, like the government planning to surrender the poorest and weakest 10 per cent of children to the aliens in Torchwood: Children Of The Earth, purely because no one was likely to miss them.

In the popular high-street stationer (which seemed such a Palace of Promise when I was little and I would take my Christmas tokens into the Cambridge branch with tiny, trembling hands, and now is home to three-for-two paperback offers and family bags of Wine Gums) where I was forced to buy my card, the choice pretty much ranged from this:

To this:

I would never, ever, ever, I-really-can't-say-ever-enough-times-here buy a birthday or Christmas card from the same school of design as this. Yet this was entirely typical of the sympathy cards on offer. To paraphrase Morrissey, when he was still with the Smiths, they say nothing to me about my life.

But somehow the whole language of consolation seems foreign. What does 'passed away' even mean? Do the phrases 'at this sad time' or 'offer my condolences' skip naturally off your tongue? Not so much. Yet if you are sending a sympathy card, you feel such a responsibility not to make someone who is already feeling desperately upset feel any more desperately upset (it really is the least you can do, etc etc) that you grope around for the safe choices that everyone else uses. If you are the recipient, it is extremely curious to find that everyone around you is speaking in bizarre Tongues Of Grief (those who are not too scared of upsetting you to speak at all, that is). Although admittedly, you are in such a state of high confusion already that this new development is only a subtle shade darker on the Confusion colour card.

So at this sad time (you see!), swathes of vocabulary find themselves newly deployed, words that do not intersect with any other part of the Venn diagram entitled 'Stuff You Normally Say'. Yet funnily enough, no greetings cards exist which say 'I'm really sorry about this totally shitty thing that has happened to you' or 'When I think about the things you are having to deal with at the moment, I want to be sick', which may be more along the lines of what you actually mean.

In these situations, I would normally choose a blank card with some vaguely soothing flora on the front, and a large white space inside where I would agonisingly scratch out my awkward words of support, but even the blank cards presented a harrowing choice. In the end, I went for a more versatile 'Thinking of you' design, in which a cartoon crocodile hurried somewhere carrying a cup of tea.

I am assuming it was tea. Everyone drinks tea when they're upset, right?

Maybe not my finest hour.

I don't even think it was the right 'Thinking of you'. It seemed more to be saying 'I'm thinking of you now and again, like when I see someone else who is also in a plaster cast, or who also has glandular fever, or a woman crying in a restaurant surrounded by four girlfriends nodding sympathetically, with the one nearest her rubbing her upper back and saying that there's someone better for her out there.' A kind of 'Oh, chin up' thinking of you.

I'm not sure that it exactly said 'Thinking of you while I spend 15 whole minutes in front of the cards in WH Smith totally paralysed by remembering the kind of things you might be experiencing.' But it was the most like something I would normally say, or buy, on any other day of the week. Some kind of normality. There is not much of that around when someone you love has died.

It's not just cards, though. I don't know if this is an OK thing to say or not, but the whole aesthetic of commiseration and funerals seems the only area of our lives that has not been awarded some kind of style makeover in recent times. Given the revolution in interior design that has happened over the last 20 years or so, coffins have yet to embrace the same clean lines and tasteful Farrow & Ball-style paint colours on such a sweeping scale. Gloss surfaces and brass handles persist. In death, people are surely being housed in fabrics and finishes they would never have had in their dwellings when alive, but I'm not sure there are many alternatives.

Perhaps this is because, fortunately, we don't have to make these choices very often. And when we do, we are in a state of shock and disconnection. And when they're over, we don't want to dwell on them. We don't look back at pictures of the day. Unless we're really weird.

Perhaps I will open up some kind of supremely tasteful, forward-thinking funeral director's business, with a sideline in stationery. I'm sure they do exist already, but I'm not sure where. I could probably only do the front of house – I wouldn't be too good in the back where the (non-)action happens.

In the week after my dad died, I decided I might like to retrain as a registrar. The one we saw when we registered his death was so businesslike and buttoned up, and her office so chilly and charmless. I understand she didn't want to reduce us to sobbing wrecks with her overwhelming compassion and kindness, but I wouldn't have minded feeling a bit less like I was getting my road tax application stamped in the post office or signing on.

That ambition only lasted a few weeks. I doubt this one will be any different.

Cagney and Jonesy

Although I am currently working for an American-owned company, I was still a little bit surprised to see this on the door to the toilets recently.

This uninhibited embrace of the US vernacular confused me, as I had the firm understanding that the building remained a bastion of Britishness, an impression based on the following lazy stereotypes watertight scientific evidence:

• In the shadow of the building, on the East side, people like to drink beer in a huge crowd outside a bar, at the merest suggestion of sunshine.
• For the last two weeks, these people have also been watching Wimbledon on a big screen temporarily erected there.
• Most of the offices inside the building work to the rhythms of an endless cycle of tea drinking.
• There is always fish and chips in the canteen on a Friday.

Given this conviction, and the fact that the day had been low on drama thus far, I wondered if some kind of Star Spangled Banner-related adventure might occur only when you walked through the door. The sign was a message, an invitation. Mostly, I hoped that if I went in, used the toilet and came out again, it would not be into the lair of the women's glossy magazine from whence I'd come, but some detail-perfect US office environs – with my wishlist scenarios being the newsroom in Broadcast News or Cagney and Lacey's professional base camp. Or that I would not exit through a door, but have to climb out of a filing cabinet, like Hong Kong Phooey. That is the power of the word janitor.

A few years ago, Ms S and I went to a Halloween party as dead Cagney and Lacey. It wasn't that we wished Christine and Mary-Beth ill – far from it. It was more that we were seeking some blonde/brunette duo to essay, and we needed a seasonally spooky twist.

I have blacked our eyes out, to protect Ms S's identity and my own, and also because I am proud of my laughably limited Photoshop skills.

You can see from this photo that while Ms S looks awesome, I have failed to achieve a truly convincing physical representation of Mary-Beth Lacy. It is almost as though tucking some cushions in your waistband just makes you look like yourself but with cushions tucked in your waistband, as opposed to a matronly and thick-set 46-year-old several sizes bigger than you. As it is, my puny Joneser The Softy shoulders and child hands are still much in evidence.

What you cannot see in this photo, though – not clearly anyway – are: 1) Our brilliant facsimile NYPD badges, designed by Ms S, and crafted from foam board and safety pins. 2) Our attention to detail with the fake blood, which was exemplary, in particular where it was coming out of our ears. This, as everyone knows, is TV shorthand for 'OK, this is really bad. You know how this is the last episode of the series? Well, come the next one, this much-loved character with blood coming out of their ears will not be in it.'

Anyway. Did I go through the door? Have I now returned from a dreamlike American adventure in which I was a stranger in a strange land? I did not. I have not. It was the men's toilets.

'Just remember what your old pal said...'

This week the Why Miss Jones Legends Tour rolled into the Southbank. Into the Southbank? Onto the Southbank? Whatever. Legends are beyond the laws of prepositions.

Out of all the hundreds of people hanging out in the many capillaries of the Festival Hall on a Wednesday night in May – the laptop lizards, heads down, engaged in Very Important Projects; groups of girls meeting up for after-work drinks who don't want to go to a bar because one of them is pregnant and they'd like to maintain the facade that their friendship is about so much more than alcohol; stylish yet vulnerable female bloggers in their mid-30s waiting to see Randy Newman with their mum – it's funny that the person who smells really very strongly of that damp smell when your washing doesn't dry properly, which is also a little bit like wee, that person who is sitting at the adjacent sofa to you in the bar, should then be sitting right in front of you during the concert. Lean forward a bit can't you, DampWhiff? I've got a cold and everything, but it's not that bad.

Randy Newman, if you're asking, was brilliant. I'm a compulsive clock-watcher at events like this. Not as much as at the theatre, where, over the years, I've missed some truly life-affirming dramatic moments because I've been craning to make out the hands of my watch in the dim lights of a nearby exit sign. Even if I'm having a Perfectly Nice Time, I'm still wondering how soon I can get outside and feel slightly less like I'm about to have a claustrophobic episode. Not with Randy. Were it not for the fact that I get really hungry about every two hours, I could have sat and listened to him all night. The last time I felt like that was with Lee Hazlewood a few years ago at the same venue, and he's dead now, so hang in there, Randy, won't you?

*Crunching change of subject alert*

One of my very best friends is 40 today. It seems ludicrous that I now have close friends who are 40. I realise this is galling to anyone over that age, just as I want to punish hard anyone who says, 'Oh my god! I'm 25! That's, like, SO OLD!' Still, the fact remains that most of the time, I can't believe anyone in my peer group is old enough to buy a malibu and Coke in a pub without a push-up bra and lipstick on. So here's Randy, without the satire and without the shadows – unless I'm blanking some very deep subtext – just for her.

I love the way that the best singers aren't always the best singers.

I'm sure the birthday girl couldn't care less about Randy Newman, by the way. I just couldn't find a good clip of Olivia Newton-John doing Xanadu.

A Candy Heart Too Many

I've said this before and I'm going to say it again, so I don't mind if you go away and get some chores done and come back in three paragraphs' time. We're all busy people.

As you go about your life as a single person, you tussle with the cliches of your gender, your age and your marital status, and – hopefully – leave them winded and redundant on the pavement behind you, with sand in their face.

It's kind of a sandy pavement.

And then, despite your most assiduous efforts, you find yourself inhabiting some chick-flick cliche. Today, Miss R and I inadvertently played out a scene from the Sex And The City movie, featuring Carrie and Miranda. The difference was that we did not have a row, and one of us did not have a thwarted storm-out.

So, there we were meeting up in Beckenham – it is equidistant from each of our homes – for our semi-regular Sunday arrangement of lunch and cinema. We had, however, overlooked the power of the calendar. Here is the scene inside the restaurant, featuring our fellow diners:

I have obscured their faces in case any of them were conducting an affair, having told their loving spouse that they were just popping out to the florist, and then the supermarket, and then the chemist, as they rushed between home and restaurant in a caper comparable to the exhilarating climax of Mrs Doubtfire.

And here is a picture of our romantic corner table. It is a terrible picture, but that is because the camera on my phone does not perform to its upmost in 'mood lighting'.

In the picture, you may – or more likely may not – be able to discern the following:

1) [Out of shot] The speaker above my seat, strenuously emitting 'sexy times' music, drawn from an opus of 80s soul. It was kind of nice really, as it's been ages since I heard Sweet Love by Anita Baker. The volume did become something of an issue though, forcing the amorous to crank their sweet nothings up to a seductive bellow: 'YOU LOOK REALLY, REALLY LOVELY TODAY.' 'THE LAST YEAR HAS BEEN THE BEST OF MY ENTIRE LIFE.' 'OH NO, I'VE LEFT THE PRICE ON THOSE CHOCOLATES, QUICK, GIVE THEM BACK A MINUTE.'

2) An enormous cushion taking up half of my already padded seat. I have no idea why it had to be there. I can only imagine it was in case we were completely overtaken by the carefully orchestrated ambience and had no choice but to make sweet, sweet love right there on the banquette, necessitating some extra comfort.

3) Balloons. It's not clear if these were complimentary, but we didn't take them with us, as it may have inconvenienced the people sitting behind us in the cinema. With their potential to deflate mournfully over time, or else explode suddenly – and disappointingly – without warning, I'm not sure balloons are such a brilliant symbol for the occasion.

4) The restaurant's regular decorative motifs, which contributed to the overall atmosphere of 'RED! RED! IT'S VALENTINE'S DAY! RED! VALENTINE'S DAY IS RED! WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE WITH YOUR PLATONIC SAME-SEX FRIEND, YOU COLOSSAL CUCKOO IN THE LOVENEST?'

Anyway.

We carried on to the cinema to see the new Disney film, The Princess And The Frog. And I am aware that as unmarried, thirty-something women, this choice marks us out as being likely to have an enormous row of stuffed animals on our beds. (I mean cuddly toy animals. Not, like, taxidermy. As yet, we are nowhere near that kind of weird, although there is no eccentricity I would be foolish enough to rule out in both our futures.)

In any case, love struck for both of us in the cinema foyer, as the man behind the Ben & Jerry's concession was amazing. And by that, I mean he encouraged us to try as many of the flavours as possible, entirely for free. He was either extremely enthusiastic about his job, or else was trying to bring down the Odeon chain from within by giving away all its retail stock. For the record, he likes every flavour, except for the Cheesecake Brownie, which he just can't get on with. He thinks it might be because it has a strange after-taste. He also prefers the Low Fat Fro Yo Chocolate Fudge Brownie to the full-fat version. It's lighter and the brownie pieces taste better.

This over-enthusiastic approach to product promotion may, however, have contributed to what we saw on the way into the actual cinema. On the other hand, the sheer emotion of this most spontaneous and genuine of festival days may just have proved too much for one young cinema-goer.

My choice of song for the day would be Valentine, by Willie Nelson ('Candy heart… if anyone could, you could have a candy heart'), but, so far, there is no clip on YouTube that exactly fits what I'm looking for. And if that is not a metaphor…

Female, 34, GSOH, seeks vocation

One of my old friends who I caught up with at the weekend was telling me that he is finding the career break he has embarked upon something of a challenge. He is struggling with the concept of being paid reasonably well for a menial job that barely strokes his brain with a tiny feather, let alone taxes it, and allowing his nervous fibres to gradually cease their twitching and have a lovely rest.

This is a man who has been grafting away in local politics for about 15 years with little break and scant reward because he thinks it matters, not because he wants power, status and shinier brogues. Prior to this, he felt compelled to pursue a career in the church. Now that he is actually taking a break from relentlessly working for the benefit of others, he finds himself unable to settle into what the rest of us might call an easy life. Apparently, in his world, there is simply nothing to be done but help people. Even now, when he is trying his very best to submerge himself in a restorative daily routine of drinking tea and making necklaces out of paper clips, he hears the calling to good works over the jangle of the workplace radio.

What is this calling? I listen for it everywhere, but I only hear train announcements, other people's one-sided mobile phone calls and the bubble of fluid in my ears (I have had a cold). I am a procrastinator and a ditherer, and envious of anyone who feels with utter conviction that they must heal/preach/sing/dance/rescue/sculpt/build/other. I mean, I get annoyed when people punctuate poorly, but I can't say I'd lay down my life in order that the world could finally learn the difference between its and it's. I like to write, but I'm not one of those from whom the words pour out with all the force of molten lava heading downhill to Pompeii. In contrast to my friend, I believe I could quite easily make a career out of taking a career break. In fact that is precisely what I've been doing for two and a half years. 

Perhaps, on my way home one dark evening, I will suddenly notice an old-fashioned streetlamp lighting my way to a vocation. Perhaps I will not. Still, I continue to listen and look out for it. And last night, I dreamt that I was being sold a ukelele by Len Goodman, so perhaps there are some clues there from which I may divine my path.

Dictionary corner part 462 - holiday special

Offshore frotting (noun) Safe-sexual water-bound physical interaction with attractive foreign stranger during vacation time. Origin: ANON.

With thanks to one of Miss Jones's favourite readers for this addition to the lexicon.

Three steps forward, two steps back

If, like me, you read or occasionally work on mid-brow, middle-youth women's magazines, you will have come across many articles about how to achieve the state of happiness. Real, genuine, inner, total, spiritual, lasting, you-may-no-longer-need-to-read-women's-magazines happiness. The kind that sees you pictured on the page in soft focus, a low sun behind you, your hair well-conditioned, some kind of organic white cotton dress on and an ecstatic, God-I-am-just-so-amazingly-happy!-Look-at-me-and-how-happy-I-am smile on your face. This, the articles claim, is happiness that propels you skywards above trivial concerns like fretting that your toddler can't count from one to ten in French, or worrying whether you should be tipping your cleaning lady.

A constant in these features is a menu of tips from happy women, who are inevitably successful start-up businesswomen or celebrities who Have It All. And one of the tips invariably tells you to think of three good things that have happened to you that day. It's count your blessings for the noughties. Over the last couple of years, I've been amazed to actually find myself doing this. I am congenitally hostile to the literature of self-help, but this advice somehow disarmed me. 

So today, I had lunch with a new friend (1), I had a lovely comment on this blog (2), and my friend Stuart did clever and artistic things with some ideas we have for world domination (3).

When you consider that the lunch took place in Leon, it's actually four things. Christ, maybe I am actually happy. But then, with perfect dramatic timing, the bad news snuck its arm around me to chloroform my good spirits. Firstly, I discovered, purely by accident, that a lovely friend of mine has been quietly, but horribly, unhappy. Then, secondly – and this is a detached, random sort of sadness – I read that Father Adelir Antonio de Carlo was confirmed dead, his remains discovered off the coast of Brazil a couple of weeks ago. I hope that history remembers him. I will. Father Adelir Antonio de Carlo had lifted off three months earlier, elsewhere in Brazil, attached to 1000 helium balloons. He was attempting to break a world record and raise the money to build a rest shelter for local truck drivers. A previous attempt, with half as many balloons, had seen him blown over the border into Argentina. This time he had packed with him an array of all-weather clothing, cereal bars and communication devices – all of which signified that this would, more likely than not, End Badly. Yet our hero's conviction didn't waver, and he was not to be talked down into coffee mornings, jumble sales and other more pedestrian endeavours. It seems a quaintly old-fashioned kind of martyrdom, and although the outcome was, of course, no surprise, it still adds a weight or two onto an already  heavy heart.

And it means that I'm now only +2 happiness. Or am I? It seems wholly inappropriate that a nice lunch is the perfect inverse of a friend's bad fortune. The latter should be far more significant. Even counting triple, I'd be, at best, back to zero. And that's if Father De Carli's death only counts as -1. The women's magazines don't explain this. I should obviously be thankful that I'm still technically in the black, happiness-wise, and start counting again tomorrow.

On not talking to strangers

It's all too easy to criticise another person's efforts to find a mate. Let none of us glass-house-dwellers feel too smug – all of us have been, are, or will be at some point involved in wild gestures of self-abasement in an attempt to stave off the dreaded loneliness.

But with that caveat firmly in place, you have to conclude that, sometimes, people aren't really helping their cause.

I was having lunch at the weekend and a friend was telling me that a few days earlier she had been walking down a local street when a van stopped suddenly in the middle of the road, impeding the progress of the cars behind it, who had to begin manoeuvring around the now stationary vehicle. The driver got out and sprinted over to my friend, alarming her slightly from the off, and asked her for directions to Sevenoaks. My friend is the very epitome of goodness, so she started to respond as best she could, but soon his more amorous intentions became apparent, and he asked her out. As I'm typing this, I feel that it's in danger of sounding almost romantic – you're walking along and a man just has to stop and talk to you. It's like the Impulse ads of the 80s which I considered, at my impressionable age, impossibly romantic. But let me first say that my friend is in her early-mid 30s, could easily blag mid-20s, and hot. Her suitor was in his mid-40s, could easily blag mid-50s and, well, not so much. In addition, him telling her 'Don't worry, it's not an assault' may not have carried the reassuring warmth he was hoping for. Further more, having grown up in the heyday of public safety information films, a strange man in a van propositioning you is maybe not so much the answer to your wistful, girlish prayers as just quite weird and creepy.

I know this because it also happened to me, a couple of years ago. Again, a street; again, a van. He wound down his window to talk to me – but not to ask for help, as I'd thought. Oh no. He wanted to enquire whether I would go out for a drink with him. I know he was not the same character as my friend's admirer as he was a much younger man, but he had also armed himself with a verbal disclaimer – 'I know this is a bit weird but…' – guaranteed not to make you feel safer in any way.

I must make one thing clear at this point. Coyness aside, the mere sight of me trundling along a pavement is unlikely to make anyone slam on their brakes, and believe they hear a celestial chorus starting up. Which led me to wonder just how long he'd been cruising the streets of south-east London looking for not so much The One as Anyone. My suspicions of premeditation crystallised when he produced a scrap of paper with his name and number on it, without taking even a second to scrabble around for a pen and something to write on. Was there a stash of them, pre-written, in the glove compartment, all set for the moment when a lone female should wander across the crosshairs? How many had he already given out? I would have been borderline impressed if he'd had a pad made up of them, ready to tear off and hand out, like the world's least rewarding raffle tickets, but that would have been more about my enthusiasm for stationery than his caramel-smooth moves.

It's not that I don't believe in love at first sight. I might do. I don't know. Do I? Maybe. I do know very happy couples who met on public transport and struck up conversation, no doubt ignited by physical attraction, but realised in a more genuine, spontaneous and, oh, I don't know, healthy way. These three-door kerb-cruisers, though, seem to be scuppering their own plans by the heady scent of desperation they've splashed on all over, an apparent lack of discernment, and their insensitivity to women's concerns for stuffy old-fashioned values like personal safety. But I'm curious. Do these tactics ever really work? Really? 'Well, I was on my way to Sainsbury's, but stuff the Nectar points. A drink it is. Should I just get into the back of your van now? I could bind and gag myself if it will save you the bother. Just let me know where you keep your gaffer tape.' And it is hugely unlikely I would ever go out with a man who sat next to me on the bus and opened our conversation with 'You have boyfriend? You come with me? I make it real good for you.' Also a true story.

Certain members of my family are probably reading this and thinking 'Well, lord knows you're not getting any younger. A nice offer like that, and him with his own van. You could do a lot worse.' But I'll take the shepherd's pie for one and the promise of not appearing posthumously in a Crimewatch reconstruction, if it's all the same with you.

Gonna eat Smarties like it's your birthday…

Happy, happy birthday, Miss Ivy Green x

Dictionary corner Part II

Bev's memory finger (noun) A physical gesture and/or verbal exclamation mid-conversation in acknowledgement of a point which must be returned to and discussed further, a related thought/incident/anecdote, or a tangent to be subsequently explored. To do so at the moment of usage would constitute unnecessary distraction or plain rudeness. Often used in intense, rapid female discussion where many voices are competing to contribute.

ORIGIN Engl colloq, 21C: My friend Stef's friend Bev.

Juno, Tracy Barlow and the criminal element

So we went to see Juno last night. Of course we loved it. I'm almost annoyed by the predictability of me loving it. Let us count the factors they put in place to snare me. Smart-mouth, hyper-literate teen speak? Check. Alison Janney? Check. Acoustic, whispering soundtrack? Check. Jason Bateman, changing of the seasons, hand-hewn title sequence, Belle & Sebastian, for Christ's sake... 

I always find it grating in the extreme when people say to me, 'Ooh, you'll love this', or 'This will REALLY make you laugh.' In fact, it only inspires me to make a point of absolutely not loving it, or remaining steadfastly stony-faced. I am nothing if not stubborn. (What can I say? I'm a Capricorn, this is how we roll.) Of course I'm infinitely more multi-faceted and endlessly fascinating than anyone who thinks they know me and my love of whimsical Americana could possibly predict. Aren't I? Oh, apparently not. (By the way, I've just worked out where the italics button is. This novelty will wear off soon, I'm fairly certain.) 

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Juno was the way it featured fictional characters goofily picking up instruments, singing and strumming along, without making me cringe in any way at all. Lest we forget, this is never usually the case. Evidence for the prosecution?

Is it only me who can't watch this? Julie, Julie, Julie... Or is it actually Ethan Hawke who really brings the cringe here? I can't decide.

Afterwards, Eleanor make the excellent point that Juno made being 16 look a lot better than being thirtysomething. And someone else – probably me, actually – said it made being 16 look a lot better than being 16. Personally, I followed the Tracy Barlow model of adolescence –staying in my bedroom, shunning any form of natural light and listening to pop music I would later disown. 

In the real world, even one of us becoming a real-life crime statistic shortly before the film  began could barely dim our enjoyment. It's disquieting to have your narrow-mindedness affirmed. There I was in the restaurant, enjoying my black beans and meatballs (organic tapas, since you ask), looking at our neighbouring diners and thinking to myself, 'That's unusual. Two men out for dinner together, and they don't even look gay,' only for them to leave the restaurant without ordering, having liberated my friend's purse from her handbag. Anyway, if you went to the 9pm screening of Juno at the Greenwich Picture House and wondered why the police were interviewing that glamorous, pregnant woman, now you know. She had been Wronged. Although you probably knew that anyway, since the only people likely to be actually reading this were probably there at the time. 

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