Girl Gone Mild

Just posting about "Going Wild" - as Keith from the highly addictive A Taste of Garlic blog puts it - evidently exhausted me, since last week was very quiet. I did go out on Friday, but only round to a mate's where we drank wine and ate blinis and no-one Went Wild in the slightest. Is there possibly a "Girls Gone Mild" section I haven't noticed?

Actually (and this is 100% true) the most exciting event in my life last week was that I finally bought a dressing gown after discovering that Auchan sells ones that don't cost 40 €. Last night it was finally dry and ready to wear and I have therefore vowed to spend my winter thusly: 60% in bed, 30% in my dressing gown, 10% in my dressing gown making soup. Work may have something to say about me turning up in a giant blue dressing gown, but honestly it would be NO WORSE than what half of my colleagues actually do wear. So much for the French being chic.

As for the soup, I bought a big soup pot and a stick blender and I have decided I am going to spend the winter living off soup and beans and hot chocolate with Baileys in it (it's been a heady time for making decisions on how to spend the winter, I tells ya). I was going to start last night with the soup, but I forgot to buy onions and hence I was forced to eat a can of beans which were meant to go in the soup for dinner and they were surprisingly delicious. Hence why beans make the cut for my winter menu. I also had what I've decided to call une baguette éventrée, because everything sounds so much classier in French. This consists of fisting a baguette in order to extract its fluffy inner goodness, and then throwing the crust away. I confess this under conditions of strict anonymity, since I'm quite sure that if the French catch you in the act it's 10 years' imprisonment on Fort Boyard for you!

(By the way, if you think me talking about soup and dressing gowns and beans is too exciting for words, pity my poor mother who also got a whole email of me talking about soup and dressing gowns and beans.)

If you're anything like me, this weekend you failed to care that New Zealand won the Rugby World Cup. It did, however, give me the chance to smirk at some rugby-loving Frenchies, which is better than having rugby-loving Frenchies smirk at me, so it's all good. I did actually try to go and watch the final (and by 'watch', I mean 'not watch' while seizing the opportunity to drink cider at 10 am in the morning without people judging me). I was meant to meet up with some friends at The Pale, an Irish pub near the cathedral, but when I got there it was so packed that there were lines out both the doors with people standing on chairs in the street to try and get a view of the TVs. I hung around outside for a bit until I got a text that the people I was meant to meet had decided to go to Place Plumereau instead, which is about 10 minutes away. When I got there, however, I got another message saying everywhere was too full and they might be going to around the train station (in totally ANOTHER direction) but would text when they had found somewhere. I hung about for a bit then decided to walk towards the station, mostly because there is a place there that sells the best brioches in town and I thought I might have one for breakfast. When I got there, the brioche place was closed, I'd been wandering about for 45 minutes and still hadn't received a text, and so I decided to go home. Where I proceeded to not care about the rugby some more. (Actually, I was chatting to my friend Rick, who is American, on Skype, and he informed me of some of the rules of rugby – I thought you could only kick after a try, apparently this is incorrect. We mutually decided that an American explaining rugby to a New Zealander is probably a Portent of the Apocalypse, so if your week is disturbed by plague and pestilence and horsemen, you probably know who to blame.)

Then I had a nap with Bob (the cat) and woke up feeling like I had a hangover. Which is even Not Fairer than when I feel like I have a hangover after only a couple of glasses of wine, since not only had I not been drinking, I had in fact been THWARTED in my plans to drink before noon, which only goes to show that you may as well just get pissed in the morning and not care who's going to judge!