Entries from September 2005 ↓

I was terribly brave last night and went off to my first ever yoga class. I haven’t been to the gym in over a year and feel like the walk to and from work is just not enough to make sure I don’t end up in a permanent sitting-on-office-chair position. I say ‘brave’ because I’ve never really understood where yoga comes from. I know plenty of ‘normal’ people do it (including my mother (yes she’s fairly normal!!)) but I was still petrified that I was going to be asked to find my spirit inside or take place in some ranting chanting prayer or something … but it was all perfectly harmless. Well, actually it was NOT harmless. Yikes! It was a beginners class and obviously I did not know what to expect yet it was nothing like I imagined and way harder than I thought it would be. My muscles were screaming by the end of the 1.5 hour class and I was a shaking mess so actually did not find the lying-down-under-a-blankie-in-the-dark bit at the end as creepy as I might’ve done because my poor body did indeed need to ‘reflect on my practice’.

Today I do ache in my back and shoulders and hamstrings but I am no longer scared and think it will be very good for me so I’ll be going back. Plus their 10-class ticket is orange!!

Purchased Scrabble at the weekend. I must say, I was not that impressed to find that we’d spent $40 on far less than what was in the box when I was a kid – no green baggie for the letters to live in (just a plastic bag which is dumb because you can see though it duh!); wooden tiles which arrived on strips of Sellotape which means they’re now sticky and stick to the board, your hands, the inside of the plastic bag; no pencils and no little score pad! Hrumfff!

However, we played our first ever game of Scrabble together – we’re not that good – using only 3 and 4 letter words mostly but in an absolute fluke (despite a strong start from yours truly) we ended up with exactly the same score! Crazy aye!

Second game, I won, but got exactly the same score as the first time! Double craziness …

I just got a delightful letter in the real post today from my 12-year- old goddaughter. Firstly, I can’t believe she is 12 as I’m sure it’s only a couple of years since she was born and I used to hold her while she slept – clad in my very sexy tie-died purple tights with my permed fringe (struth!) and secondly, I can’t believe how well she writes. Not that I actually know anything about 12 year olds and what they write except for my own experience as one, which when replying to her letter, I realised was 20 bleep years ago (struth!!). Made me think back to what it was like about to go off to college and who I hung around with and what I was doing and listening to and reading. (Hung around with kids I’d always hung around with as there was only one primary school and one college, trying to avoid their awful older brothers, listening to Rod Stewart vinyl when I wasn’t listening to my own hours and hours of scales and practice for my next piano exam, riding up and down the main street on our 10-speeds and reading nasty Enid Blyton (Famous Five).) Wow – a lifetime ago. 

I have just started the first biography that I can remember reading. Bruce Willis: The Unauthorized Biography by John Parker. It’s quite strange reading a biography after reading mostly fiction because in this biography, every person mentioned in conjunction with Willis’s life or anything that might’ve influenced him is named.

Normally when reading fiction people are named if you need to remember them because they have a part in the story, otherwise you just gloss over their existence.

“Bruce called into a bar on his way home to drown his sorrows after yet another failed audition. The barman was sympathetic and poured him an extra shot at no charge.”

In this book, they are all named for their 1/10th of a second of fame.

“Bruce called into The Thirsty Actor, a bar located at the time on the corner of Greene and Thompson Streets in Soho, on his way home to drown his sorrows after yet another failed audition at the Paramount Theatre for a part as an extra in the Greenwich Village Community High School’s version of The Caravan directed by the enthusiastic principal Jimmy Jones. The barman, Ed Porter who’d worked in the bar for three years since leaving high school was sympathetic and poured him an extra shot of Bourbon, Bruce’s poison during the late 70’s.“

For example!

I suppose I am reasonably vain and while I don’t pass judgement on people of different sizes and shapes, I still secretly wonder how some people can wear the stuff they do.

Due to the sunny nature of the day yesterday and a comment from one of the waitresses at Nikau about a rumour that girls were out in bikinis on Oriental Beach, we wandered over that way. We found a fairly central park bench to sit on amidst the crowds and took in the fairly typical beach scene:

• the crowd of boys in long board shorts playing with a ball
  
  


• the back-packer travellers in jeans, long-sleeved shirts, and boots with their packs sitting on a blanket stolen from Emirates airline
  
  


• circle of Goths/junkies dressed in black sitting in a circle drinking beer and wine straight out of the bottle, waving their arms in the air and making slurred proclamations
  
  


• Mr-Metro, rippling and tanned showing off his dolphin-diving grace in the breakers testing out his new waterproof digital camera
  
  


• a real man, who probably drives a great big noisy flat deck Ford with an enormous killer-looking dog with very enormous balls. He (the dog!) had a kind of cute look at times and just when we were saying you can’t judge a dog by how mean he looks nor by the chain with metal spikes around his neck which dug right into his flesh when the real man yanked his leash, the dog went ballistic at a guy with a camera, and the real man shoo’d away a couple of little kids that went up to pat the nice doggy saying “Ahh, no, don’t come close, he’s not good with children“.
  
  


• a few small clutches of skinny teen girls in the lolly-pink singlets, cut-off jeans and fake Armani glasses smoking and looking with distain at the boys playing ball
  
  


• and right in front of us, a group of girls in their early 20’s who seemed to be unaffected by those nasty women’s magazines proclaiming that you’re only beautiful if you’re thin and detox regularly by eating beetroot and carrot juice, because there they were, wobbly bits and all in skimpy bikinis cutting into their flesh, smoking and swapping stories about who texted who and who was seen at so-n-so’s party.
  
  I found my eyes drawn to it like the car accident or animal squashed on the side of the road that you just can’t look at, yet always do. But good on them for just being comfortable with who they are.

On my morning coffee trips over the last week I’ve seen a guy with an orange cast on his foot. It’s a proper orange too. Not sure I’d go as far as breaking one of my bones just to get this orange accessory!

It’s a lovely summer’s evening in our apartment and it’s usually on day’s like this we feel particularly creative when it comes to cooking. And on a Saturday night there’s plenty of time to create. Our fridge looks filled with lovely fresh ingredients – fresh pasta, basil, marscarpone, old gouda, cream, home-made aioli, chardonnay, asparagus, zucchini …

Hopefully we’re going to have success in creating a 3-course meal consisting of:

• Chargrilled asparagus with aioli dressing
  
• Fresh pasta with basil and Julienne zucchini
  
• Honey and cinnamon wafers with marscarpone vanilla cream & summer fruit

Oh my God! Today we saw a lovely black pussy cat out on Victoria Street with his owners. They’d just got out of their car and he was on a lead and he sat on the man’s shoulders and just looked around as they walked off down the street. He seemed quite comfortable and the man didn’t get very far because every time he walked by anyone they wanted to stop and pat the cat. We were across the road and didn’t get the chance to run across for a pat.

Fascinating! It’s not a nut or a meg, but specifically the kernel in the seed of the Myristica fragrans tree grown in the West Indies.

This, from ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, Part VII Micropedia:

The tree is cultivated in the Moluccas and the West Indies principally, and elsewhere with varying success. The trees may reach about 65 feet (20 metres) tall. They yield fruit 8 years after sowing, reach their prime in 25 years, and bear fruit for 60 years or longer. The nutmeg fruit is a pendulous drupe, similar in appearance to an apricot. When fully mature it splits in two, exposing a crimson-coloured aril, the mace, surrounding a single shiny, brown seed, the nutmeg. The pulp of the fruit may be eaten locally. After collection, the aril-enveloped nutmegs are conveyed to curing areas where the mace is removed, flattened out, and dried. The nutmegs are dried gradually in the sun and turned twice daily over a period of six to eight weeks. During this time the nutmeg shrinks away from its hard seed coat until the kernels rattle in their shells when shaken. The shell is then broken with a wooden truncheon and the nutmegs are picked out.

Last month I did begin on my Patricia Cornwell quest but before I could get onto the 2nd book in the series my partner got hooked so I have let him get a book or so ahead. To fill the gap before I start on the 2nd book I attempted an historical novel The Coffee Trader by David Liss set in 17th century Amsterdam, about a commodities trader who discovers the mysterious coffee fruit and it’s mysterious effects if you grind it up and drink it so sets about trading it. Unfortunately, because I read at night mostly and because this book was fairly hard going, I kept falling asleep after only 2 paragraphs and could not get into it. So I have put it aside for holiday time!

Instead I returned to chick lit and devoured Marion Keyes’ latest novel The Other Side of the Story and have just started on Sophie Kinsella’s latest Undomestic Goddess, which is not in the shopaholic series but is just as good.