It lives!

Shove over, Frankenstein. Today I have been doing some crazy chemistry of my own. I have fused the Victoria sponge with Black Forest Gateau, or Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, as Dr Frankenstein would doubtless have preferred it (I imagine he also enjoyed a Victor-ia sponge. My God, I am HILARIOUS). It is made of chocolate sponge, black cherry jam, vanilla buttercream, glacé cherries and grated chocolate (I didn't have any chocolate vermicelli so I improvised with a grater and a miniature bar of dark Green & Blacks I got free with Marie Claire. I am nothing if not resourceful. It is a mystery how I did not earn more badges at Brownies).

Next, I will attempt to create the Flappenberg, a daring hybrid of flapjack and Battenberg.

Yes, he really can. Because you're worth it.

When I was on the bus tonight on my way home, I overheard a woman telling her friend about the magazine she'd just bought, an American title called Essence. 'It's got an article in it about Michelle Obama and her mum,' she told her. 'It looked lovely.'

Then, more wistfully, she said, 'I need to spend some time in America. America does wonders for your hair and face.' 

If this is a new development, I hope the reckoners are taking this into account in their 100 Days Reckoning. That means you, Marbers.

Soldier in a silver blanket

It is a source of shame to me that I have lived in London for 13 years and never in person watched any part of the London Marathon – even though I cry at the highlights programme every year without fail (the limping heroes! the ludicrously rousing music!). This year I managed to be in the middle of town on the day, which represents real progress, and even caught a fleeting glimpse of a straggler in the wheelchair race on the Embankment as I crossed Waterloo Bridge above him on the 176 bus. However, my business in town was to see Tony Beak and Erin Boag in Cheek To Cheek at the Coliseum, a birthday present from Lady C (so maybe it's OK if your birthday cards are still up three months on, as long as you are still harvesting your presents), rather than to weep at athletes.

Running a marathon is pretty much an everyday miracle but still, a miracle is a miracle. Right, Jesus? Because of this, I can never quite believe my eyes when I see the marathon runners suffering the trials of public transport on their way home. I don't know what I'm expecting. I'm sure there's little enough in the hospitality budget for the elite athletes. There's no way it can run to a chauffeur-driven car for each plucky club runner or foolhardy fundraiser.

Still I always feel it's fundamentally unfair when, as this afternoon, I see someone in a batman costume waiting for the bus in the resolutely inglorious environs of the Elephant & Castle, or watch a woman dissuade the bus driver from whipping the doors shut for minute on agonising minute on Denmark Hill while her race-weary companion winces his way down from the top deck, as though there were upturned razor blades on every step.

If you have a medal around your neck, even if it is materially worthless, forged from melted down fragments of an unloved Esso Coin Collection, surely you should not have to dirty your hands with Oyster cards, or your aching legs on a matted tube seat studded with chewing gum and fried chicken bones. It somehow shatters the illusion of heroism. It's like going to visit the Wizard of Oz and discovering the little old man behind the curtain, or seeing the rods furiously working the limbs of the Muppets. And I don't want to witness Clark Kent going about his everyday business, even though I usually fancy him far more than I do Superman. 

I don't understand it. But from being in town this afternoon, I understand this most clearly. If my husband or partner had just run 26 miles, probably painfully and for charity, I wouldn't then make him follow me around the Charing Cross branch of Jigsaw, sitting red-faced and weary outside the changing rooms while I tried a load of new clothes on. Even if there is a sale on.

Presents and cards

I am back from a week in Florence and Assisi. So many very special, sacred souvenirs to choose from, but I finally decided to get you one of these:

You're welcome.

One of the first things that occurred to me when I got back to my home, apart from 'Is this what my flat smells like to other people?', was 'Is three and a half months too long to leave your birthday cards up for?'

I decided no. They may as well stay up for at least the next eight and a half months, just in case I don't have any at all next year.

Search, copy, paper jam, destroy

When I turned on the photocopier today, at the glossy women's magazine where I was employed, this was the display that greeted me:

What it appears to show to me, a techno-network novice, is the way in which various photocopiers in the building are talking to each other in a manner that ordinary men and women cannot fathom, in order to strengthen their allegiance, to the detriment of the human race. I think we can reasonably infer this.

They are basically daleks. 

A women's magazine is the ideal location for some kind of big screen/small screen/any screen techno-peril epic, if only for:

a) the appropriately inept way most of the staff would run away from their digi-bot attackers, tripping and stumbling and whimpering in on-trend grey patent platform heels.

b) the volume of squealing that can be effortlessly provoked. I've heard this reach eardrum-maiming levels of hysteria at the arrival in the office of a free easter egg. Confronted by a phalanx of marauding photocopying machines with lids flapping open and shut like merciless jaws, and copying lights blinding their victims as they try to escape… Dolby surround sound has never heard the like.

We will speak again in one week's time.

Careless whisker

Part of getting older is realising you are unable to marshall your corporeal flesh and fibres as authoritatively as you used to. Tissue and hair can no longer be relied upon to keep their old stations, but instead are seizing areas where they previously had no business being.

Yesterday I found a rogue hair – one could panic and call it a whisker, but I'm trying to give up being the panicking kind – on what I can only describe as my cheek. Somewhere beneath my skin, a maverick follicle had decided to break cover and start its very own sideburn several centimetres from its former comrades – or as I like to call them, my actual hair. 

I don't spend a lot of time looking at my own face. There's some room for improvement and I have neither the time or the money to put the work in. However I look at it often enough to attain the conventional hygiene standards necessary to hold down regular work, and a little more often besides. But I did not see this one coming. It perhaps crept up on me during a swift and deadly night-time ageing exercise. Certainly, stealth was employed. 

I am channelling the spirit of the Blitz though. Things could be worse. I could have found it on the end of my chin, or protruding from my nose, or nestling in what I optimistically call my cleavage. And I will fight. I may have given up on being ID'd in shops and bars, but I am not yet ready to be a hairy-faced child-scarer. 

I will vanquish it with my weapon of choice, a steel rapier. Which is to say tweezers. Several other hairs may come to avenge it, but I will be ready for them. I've got my pride, after all. It's right here where I… oh.

'Far from the frenzy of the frantic world above...'

Most of the Disney films of the 70s remind me of going to the ABC Cinema in Cambridge in the school holidays – of arriving to see a queue unravelling around the block and around the next corner, and hoping as passionately as you can when you're 5 that we would be safe when the cinema manager brought his arm down through the line of people, like a guillotine, dividing us into those who would get in and those who wouldn't; of my mum's 'cinema' glasses which she never wore at any other time.

Approximately 30 years on, I can remember the pattern on the skirt Mrs Jones was wearing when we went to see Bambi as I spent so long with my face buried in it, sobbing hysterically.

Anyway, today on the telly: Bedknobs & Broomsticks. Angela Lansbury, David Tomlinson, Cockernee children, innocuous 1940s swearing ('You've won the ruddy cup!'), talking fish in evening dress, and this…