Dusty report

Since being in London, Dusty has weed on the floor twice, once while sitting in it to her great shame. She has been sick today in two locations, though that's nothing novel. Back and hips: bony. Eyes: bulgy and red. Tail: still wags. She has insisted on plodding upstairs twice today meaning I've had to take the Stannah down twice. She has also valiantly attempted to chase the cat several times.

Foxed

Obnoxy Foxy,

Foxy Knoxy – news skimmers

may be truly foxed

Eliza Gray goes viral!

Drop into the Apple store. Outside is a shrine of half-eaten apples. Inside, on every Mac, iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone screen, is my tribute haiku to Steve Jobs. Yes! Recognition! Must write and tell Uncle Maurice.

Golden Age Thinking

Lily and I came up to London for her exeat weekend. She went back on the school coach yesterday, giving me a few days in which to recapture my pre-marital youth. I'm dining out in glittering style with friends from my old Chelsea circle, the soignee Vincent and Anais, and wild-haired professorial Charles, each of whom is, in their own way, a throwback to another era, living in their own Golden Age. We each deposit a glasses case on the table.

'The glasses case is the new mobile phone,' I say, looking at the line-up of matt oval cases. Ding  ding! 'Maybe that could be my new entrepreneurial enterprise!' I exclaim. 'A glasses case that doubles up as a mobile phone!'

'And you could open up it up and it would have a compartment for your keys!' offers Vincent.

'Brilliant,' says Charles, who is the only human being left in Britain without a mobile phone. 'I'd have one that you could open up and there'd be nothing inside. It would get everybody off my back who wants me to get a mobile phone.'

'And there could be an ear-piece hidden in the arm of the glasses,' says Vincent.

'That's already been invented,' I say. 'Hearing aids in glasses. I've seen them in Saga magazine. That'll be the next thing we all need.'

We exchange tut-tuts about the young nowadays ruining their hearing with these earphones blaring away on the Tube, and then Charles announces, 'Gout.'

'Gout?' we query.

'Gout,' he confirms. 'Another thing they don't tell you you're going to get after 50.'

It seems he's just got through his first bout of gout. It's something to do with not drinking enough water and a build-up of uric acid which ends up in your big toe and causes huge pain. 'I'm not the only one,' he adds. 'I keep meeting people who have it. I'm trying to look on it philosophically, a kind of badge of honour.'

'Like syphilis,' I say.

He looks a little taken aback, but throws himself into the spirit of the conversation. 'Yes, and then I'll go mad.'

'Oh, we'll all go mad,' I say, and tell them about Daphne.

'Passion and energy!' declares Vincent. This, he maintains, is what you need to not succumb to the perils of ageing. 'I am 57, but children don't perceive me as that. I confuse children by being passionate and having energy. The minute I lose those two things I'll be an old git.'

'But you're just as bad as the rest of us,' I am quick to point out, 'not being able to find the right words and umming and aahing - the only difference is you plough on and don't break off to complain about your terrible memory.'

'Exactly!' agrees Vincent. 'When you keep saying, "Oh how terrible, I can't remember what I was going to say," it's self-fulfilling.'

'It's definitely happening to me,' says Charles. 'I don't have the same mental recall.' There is a stunned silence. This is very worrying news, since Charles is a brilliant academic who keeps his mind active and stimulated, and if he's lost his mental recall then that scotches Vincent's theory and there's no hope for any of us.

'Maybe it's the male menopause,' I suggest. Again, Charles looks taken aback. 'I think it is a real thing,' I add. 'It's all the hormones doing funny things. But maybe once they've sorted themselves out, we'll all go back to having brilliant memories and be full of energy?' Except, to be fair, I never had a brilliant memory nor abundant energy.

We are just tucking into our main courses and second bottle of wine when Anais points out that the film is starting in three minutes. We're going to see Woody Allen's latest, Midnight in Paris. Vincent commandeers four cardboard coffee cups from the bar, we transfer our wine, I wrap up my remaining chips in a napkin, and off we dash.

During the credits and voiceover it becomes apparent that Owen Wilson - Gil in the movie - is playing Woody Allen. Hesitant, self-doubting, veering between boyish enthusiasm and sneery-sarkiness, he feels a pull to 1920s Paris, with its artistic and literary geniuses, and lo, along comes an old-fashioned car and transports him there.

Gil's father-in-law-to-be declares, 'Nostalgia is denial. It's Golden Age thinking,' and I think, That's me! I'm a Golden Age Thinker. But which Golden Age do I wish I were in? When I went to the Great Dorset Show and Mary Arden's Farm I wished I lived in an age of simple living and values, where the harvest is gathered and threshed and winnowed and milled locally and you get a bag of fresh wholewheat goodness at the end of it. Of course I wouldn't actually want to be part of the threshing and winnowing process, but in the Golden Age of the Great Dorset Show, that's men's work. Mind you, I'd be having to milk the cow and wash up in cold water outside. So, all things considered, a thumb's down to that Golden Age.

The Golden Age of  Pride and Prejudice? Not bad, particularly if one were Elizabeth Bennet. The Belle Epoque, the Golden Age of choice of Gil's 1920s paramour? The Golden Age of Downton Abbey? Not bad, not bad. But I think Gil's got it right. The Golden Age of the Mitfords, Waugh, PG Wodehouse and F Scott Fitzgerald, of glittering society parties and chivalry and attentive staff and gloves and hats and fur wraps and dining out and zipping down to the South of France or steaming over to New York and not being expected to work for a living. That is the age for me. The Golden Age of Style. And Standards. And Cocktails.

Hmmm, I suppose you'd have to live through (or die in) at least one World War, though. Oh God, and the misery of slipping standards after the 30s would be surely too much to bear.

Oh God. Am beyond stage of recapturing youth. Am Old Git in denial.

Nocturne

05:30

Creaks and bumps from Lily's room. I have a hunch Dusty is in trouble. She can't get downstairs by herself. I wrench myself out of bed and, sure enough, there is a dark puddle on the carpet. With the steroids and diuretics, poor Dusty is drinking and weeing gallons. So this is it. Her first 'accident'. I pull on my old jeans and take her down on the Stannah, let her out and go upstairs with the head torch, the Marigold without the hole in the finger, a bowl of water and a cloth. After a good few minutes of my scrubbing, a little head pops out from the duvet with a look of confusion on its face.

'Poor Dusty's done a wee,' I say.

The head burrows down again.

I go down and sit with Dusty in the kitchen for a while. She looks so utterly mournful and defeated. She is such a noble girl, my heart goes out to her. How ignominious, this reduction at the end of one's life to the bodily functions of a toddler. I smooth her silky head and neck, feel down her spine, protruding more each day, the bony knobbles of her hips where the muscle is wasting away. The swelling is returning around her neck and chest, her eyes are glassy black with red rims. My poor beloved darling girl.

Pad thai triumph!

What a difference it makes when you have the right ingredients for a recipe! When I tried this a couple of nights ago I was disadvantaged by having no prawns, no beansprouts, no spring onions and no peanuts - which might put off many a cook given that these are the chief ingredients of pad thai. Eliza, however, likes to improvise. She used left-over broccoli (only slightly yellowing), butternut squash, a red pepper and cashew nuts along with the statutory rice noodles, egg, Thai fish sauce and chilli. Very nice, if bearing only passing resemblence to pad thai. But now! We could be in Bangkok! A big plate of chilli-hot, tangy-sour, fishy-salty, nut-crunchy, new-laid-eggy, tender-prawny, slimy-noodly yumminess!

Bit peasanty for the pop-up, though.

So farewell then, Steve Jobs

An Apple a day
didn't keep your doc away;
may you rest in peace*

*and may my iPhone never die

The Idler's Tour of Asia

18:50


Dan phones on his hands-free to see how I got on.

‘I’m exhausted. The bloke was completely knackering to be with.’

‘But did he have a job for you?’

‘No, not really. Not at the moment. And possibly never. I couldn’t quite work out whether he was winding me up with all his ‘eh, Eliza, eh, ehs’ or whether he was quite impressed. He was sort of grinning inanely at me and kept leaning across the desk to tell me things.’

‘And to get a closer look down your front?’

‘Possibly. But he was quite rude about my age, considering he’s far older. He kept asking about my energy levels and I pretended they were like a 21-year-old’s, but frankly I feel worn out after half an hour sitting in his office. I’d like to do The Idler’s Tour of Asia.’

‘That would be great, because then you wouldn’t have to go to Asia at all. You could do it all from your armchair. Maybe you could do a… what’s it called… a webinar. I’d be on for that.' Dan is warming to his theme. 'You’d have to make sure everybody had a webcam so you could see they were paying attention and not wandering off to make a cup of tea…”Stay with the group, please.”’

‘Would I have to have an umbrella or a flag?’

‘Yes, and you could all wear baseball caps with the name of the tour on the front.’

‘I’ve been wondering about the baseball caps. As long as they’re not yellow string nylon.’

‘And people would receive an Idler’s Tour kit with two mini packs a day,' Dan continues, 'and they’d have to attend two sessions a day for a week so that people would actually have to dedicate some time to it…’

‘And there’d be spices and a make-your-own pad thai kit in the pack…’ I suggest.

‘”Sachet 1,”’ says Dan, ‘”Open at the beginning of the Monday morning session.”’

‘Cow poo,’ I say. ‘”Please tread in contents of Sachet 1”.’

‘Before they start,’ says Dan, ’they’d have to turn the oven on and put a pan of water in it and as the session starts, they’d have to open the oven door and stick their head in. It could be very interactive in that way.’

‘Sachet 2,’ I say. ‘Drains. Tip contents of Sachet 2 into pan in oven.’

‘And then you could have a sachet of mosquitoes or tsetse fly, and on Day 2 or 3 you could ask, "How did you sleep last night?" And then you’d know whether they’d been throwing themselves into the tour properly.’ Dan breaks off. ‘Eurgh! Somebody’s tipped a whole load of Sachet 1 on the Candlebury Roundabout. Hang on, just closing the windows.’

‘So what do you think I could charge?’

‘Oooh. 500 quid?’

‘Flights excluded.'

Interview: Asia tour leader

‘Mrs Gray!’ Mike says, proffering his hand. He eyes me up and down. ‘Although we should really be calling you Mrs Peacock! Or Mrs Rainbow! Eh?’ he adds, clapping me on the back and batting his eyebrows up and down suggestively.

I remove my drooping pashmina and stuff it in my bag. ‘Oh well,’ I say. ‘Just entering into the Asian spirit!’

He ushers me to his faux pine desk under the strip lights, pulls up a chair and swivels to face his assistant. 

‘Janet – cup of chai for Mrs Gray.' He swivels back to me. ‘Chai? Yes? You like chai? The real thing. Bring it back from Delhi!’

‘Yes, that would be great, thanks.’

‘So,’ Mike says, ‘what makes you want to be a tour leader to Asia? Not too old for it?’ He laughs, his eyebrows yoyoing up and down.

‘I have a Passion for Asia!’ I smile.

‘Excellent, Mrs… what should I call you?’ he says.

‘Eliza. Just Eliza.’

‘We all have a passion for Asia, Eliza. Goes with the job! Now…’ He twiddles a turquoise plastic Cathay Pacific pen between his fingers and looks at his printed sheet. ‘Areas of Expertise?’

‘Well I lived there for years,’ I say. ‘In Hong Kong, Saigon, Bangkok, Singapore,' I gesture towards his Singapore Airlines desk calendar, 'and I travelled all over the place, so I know it like the back of my hand.’

He is nodding and making notes on his sheet. ‘We call it Ho Chi Minh City these days, Eliza, eh?’ he grins, eyebrows a-yoyo. ‘How long ago d’you live there?’

‘Oh… not that long ago.’

‘Before they changed the name, eh, Eliza?’ I keep expecting him at any minute to say, ‘Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more!’

‘No,' I say primly. 'They’d changed the name officially years before, it’s just that the locals still called it Saigon.’

‘Ah, you’d know, Eliza, eh? Living there…  So what, two, three years ago?’

‘Yes, roughly – perhaps a bit longer.’

‘Four, five?’

I look out of the window, as if trying to remember exactly when it was that I left. ‘Well it was 2000 and… oh, was it 7 or 6…?’

‘OK, say five years, shall we Eliza? And you go back regularly? Yes?’

‘Yes… although not as often as I’d like. It’s tricky with children, isn’t it? Although Lily can board whenever she likes now, so I can go away at the drop of a hat.’

‘Excellent, excellent. And, just to clarify, any particular Areas of Expertise?’

‘Food. I have a Passion for Asian food. I’m passionate about it! I cook it all the time, in fact I run a secret pop-up South-East Asian restaurant with a friend. So I know all the markets in Bangkok and Sai… Ho Chi Minh, and I know what to order and where to get the best pad thai and the best Vietnamese spring rolls, oh and the best cha ca in Hanoi – it’s this amazing sort of interactive fish dish with dill and noodles, where you put all the ingredients into this wok…’

‘Excellent, excellent, Eliza,’ he says, nodding and scribbling.  

‘And,’ I say, warming to my theme, ‘I have a Passion for Fashion. I know all the secret places to buy silks and the best tailors who can copy your own clothes or a Vogue pattern in an evening…’

‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘What about the history and culture? The architecture? Religion? Buddhist temples, wats…’

I’m aware that I’m screwing my mouth up in the same way Lily does when I ask her if she’s been secretly using her Ipod Touch.

‘So, I presume you’ve got bags of energy,’ he says, ‘despite being … of a certain age ourselves, eh? Shall we say, Eliza?’

‘Oh yes!' I don't wish to be lumped in the same category as him. He must be at least 57. 'You need loads of energy when you have children and a pop-up restaurant.’

‘Because when the group’s energy is flagging, you’re the one who has to keep the spirits up. Mmm? Yes, Eliza?’

‘Yup, yup, absolutely.’ His clipped speech is rubbing off on me.

‘OK. Let me throw some situations at you. Our Western tour leaders have to be able to think on their feet. Supposing you’re at a deserted hill station and the last train has been cancelled. What d'you do?’

‘Um… well, I’d ask a member of staff at the station where the nearest hotel was.’

‘And if all the staff had gone home?’

‘Well we must have had transport to get to the station. So I’d ask the driver to ask someone, or to take us to the nearest hotel.’

‘Excellent, excellent. And what if the driver had gone?’

‘Well I don’t think he should have done. He should have waited until we were safely on the train. I’d always make sure my driver waited.’

‘Excellent, excellent!’ He’s laughing and scribbling. ‘A client has a peanut allergy and you go to a local restaurant in some out-of-the-way place where they don’t speak English. What d’you do?’

‘I wouldn’t advise anyone to go to Asia with a peanut allergy,’ I say. ‘What about pad thai? Satay? Cha ca, even! It’d be miserable for them.’

‘Excellent! That’s a good one!’ He’s leaning back and guffawing. ‘Tell them not to go! Excellent!’

‘Well, I’d make sure they had their epipen with them…’

‘That’s a good one, Eliza! We’d hope not to have to resort to that at every meal,’ he laughs and leans forward conspiratorially. ‘It actually happened to one of our leaders and he got a local to write down, ‘If you give this woman a peanut she will die!’  Did the trick, Eliza!’ He leans back, laughing. Humph. His eyebrows are wearing me out and anyway, there would still be traces of peanuts in the wok, so frankly she's lucky to be alive.

‘Now,’ he says, ‘you have a Difficult Client on the tour. Some chap who bores for England. Whenever anyone mentions anything, he’s been there, done that and he’s done it better. Your other guests are getting mighty pissed off, yes? Yes? What d’you do?’

Have him mugged by a cyclo driver. Feed him blowfish testicles. Leave him behind at Banteay Srei.

‘I’d ask him to sit with me on the bus and we’d have a little tete-a-tete…’

‘Go on, Eliza, go on. Our tour leaders have to be diplomats, you know.’

‘And I’d find out where he’d really like to go to where no tourist ever goes, which would be like a real trophy in his travelling cap…’

‘Trophy in his cap, eh, Eliza?’ The eyebrows are yoyoing again.

‘Or a feather, even. Anyway, then I could arrange a special trip for him and tell him not to tell the others because they’d be really jealous, and I’d send him off with a local guide.’

‘Excellent, excellent. Good plan, Eliza. Mmm. Send him on a side trip, get him away from the group. Good plan.’

Mike rounds up the conversation by telling me he doesn’t have any particular vacancies for tour leaders at present, but it was excellent to meet me, and he’ll be in touch as and when.

Puh. After I’ve given him all those brilliant ideas for dealing with tricky customers.

Come on, I say!

Compose self after dustbin debacle and succeed in not micro-managing Lily while being enthusiastic about her cantering triumph all the way to school. Levity of car journey improved by running into the local hunt. As we putter along behind the huntsman, he stops and turns to holler at a stray hound behind us in a frightfully posh accent.

‘Come on! Come on, I say!’

At the same time, his horse lifts its tail and poos. We are still laughing and saying, 'Come on, I say!' when we pull into the drive of the Manor, where I remember her music theory and enquire nonchalantly if she has done any.

Silence.

I don’t scold her. In a calm, throwaway manner I suggest she do three pages today since she has her oboe lesson tomorrow and her teacher asked her to go through as much as she could and she hasn’t even opened the book yet.

‘OK, Mum,’ she says, running from the car.

14:45

Right. Thrilling job interview is at 4pm. Half-an-hour to get there. Just time to wash and blowdry my fashionably orange-yellow hair.

15:05

OK, that’s done. Now, make-up. Concealer under the eyes and on raspberry-ripple veins. A dash of Tawny Whisper to emphasise cheekbones. A lick of Maybelline Great Lash mascara on my Great Loss eyelashes (another middle-aged thing they don’t tell you about). No point in eyeshadow since it gets lost in the overhang. Right. Outfit.

15:25

Oh God. Must leave by 3.30 at the latest. I’m WADING through discarded clothes on floor, YANKING out Ikea storage boxes from under the bed, RAMMING them back again. Can’t find anything suitable.

15:35

Argh. New jeans had Thai green curry stain down knee so am wearing old frayed jeans, glittery embroidered turquoise silk tunic for Asian touch and beaded fuchsia pashmina for auxiliary Asian touch. Plus black riding boots, rapidly wiped clean with floor cloth. Hopefully conjures the right blend of country casual and exotic flair.

Bloody tractor! Bloody outsize ploughs taking up the entire width of the bloody road! Bloody hell!

I pull the sun visor down and look in the mirror. I affect the expression of one who has just spotted a beloved friend. ‘I am passionate about Asia!’ I smile. ‘I have a Passion for Asia!’ I lick my lips. ‘I have a Passion for Asian Food!’ 

At last! Thank God he’s turned off!

16:02

OK, I’m at The Barns. Which unit is it? Oh God. I’m rummaging frantically in my I Love Mistlebourne Market hessian bag which I forgot to decant into my vintage Indian quilt bag but, bloody typical, the address is at home. OK. There’s a board over there. A sudden gale force 10 has whipped up and it’s chucking it down but here goes! OK. Unit 15: Asia To Go.

16:06

Where the hell is Unit 15?

16:09

Burst into the lobby for Unit 15 and stand there dripping. Compose myself. Right.

16:11

Hmmm. Apparently Mike is on the phone to a client. Janet asks me to wait in the lobby. Look into Iphone screen to discern level of dishevelment. Hmmm. Is that mascara down my cheek? Better nip to the loo.

16:22

Still waiting.