Holiday hijinks in Bath and London

Hello neglecterinos, yes I've been slack again lately and fallen a bit behind with blogging. So, quick wrap-up of what I got up to over the festive period.

First off, it was a three-train trip across to South-West England: train to Paris, Eurostar (for the first time in many years - very pleasant and it was surprisingly half-empty on Christmas Eve), then train to Bath. I had planned a lot of time between trains, mostly expecting chaos on the Eurostar, since it seems every Christmas brings its share of pictures of unhappy crowds at Gare du Nord or St Pancras, unable to get home for Christmas due to 'fluffy snow' or something. This part, however, went off without a hitch. It was only at Liverpool Street where it was confirmed that things were going quite wrong due to the floods that had hit England. I was *so* early (about three hours) for my train that it wasn't even showing up yet, but the raft of cancellations were not a good sign. Basically, there were trains every half an hour, and all the trains on the hour (of which mine was one) were cancelled. So when, two hours before, my train popped up as cancelled as well, it was no big surprise. I was at that time enjoying my first pint of cider on English soil (drinking vast quantities of cider being one of my very favourite activities on the other side of the Channel) but I decided to take a snap decision, abandon three-quarters of my poor pint and rush down to take the next train going, figuring that a train on the tracks were worth two hypothetical trains in the sidings.

With the trains either side cancelled, everyone toting suitcases and backpacks, and possibly other chancers like me hopping on far in advance, the train was predictably rammed. I spent the first hour standing in the corridor by the toilets, very uncomfortably jammed in alongside dozens of other passengers. Despite this, everyone seemed in pretty good spirits. The only slight sign of bad-temperedness I saw was one woman trying to board the already-packed train at Liverpool Street, pleading "please let me on, I'm desperate to get home for Christmas", which earned the obvious riposte of "what do you think everyone else is doing?" Other than that, not too bad and I even got to Bath early!

Christmas was quiet, just me, Liz and her parents. We started out with church at a lovely old Anglican village church. It's been a long time since I've been to church and I'd forgotten quite how much standing up is required, so I spent most of the service regretting wearing heels and wondering when we would get to sit down again. It was conducted by a Lady Priest, which was a bit of a novelty for this former Catholic girl (she was quite good, as priests go), and of course I was pleased to get some carol singing in!

Liz and me at church on Christmas Day

By about 3 pm, after lunch, the champagne and red wine were taking their effect and I was pretty sleepy! Safe to say there were no ragers for the whole trip: I basically stayed on France time, and since I go to bed every night at 10, thus 9 pm in the UK, most evenings were spent with Liz and I fighting to stay awake to a decent hour.

This was all for the good though, as it meant the next day we were up bright and early for the Boxing Day sales. Ahhhhh, England, how I love your sales! We spent about 3 hours just in Debenhams, and I think by the end of the trip I'd spent up to the tune of around 500€, oh dear. Good things were bought though! Along with my usual pretty dress fetish, I managed to pick up sensible flat boots (the first I've had in my life, but I must say I'm now a convert! Comfortable Boots Are Comfortable: hold the front page), a new trench coat, a black triangle skirt (so versatile), and the one I'm proudest of: a suit for £30! Bargain!

The suit in question

If I'm honest, the following days were also largely spent shopping & having pints of cider in pubs, but we did manage a little bit of sight-seeing too. I dragged Liz into Bath Abbey for the first time ever, if you can believe it. Her parents have lived nearby since she was a teenager, but she's not really big on that sort of thing and spent quite a bit of time sitting quietly waiting for me to finish looking around. It's gorgeous though! (I've been to Bath before but I don't think I went in the Abbey - it was just a daytrip and we saw the Roman Baths and Jane Austen's house.)

The outside of Bath Abbey

Inside Bath Abbey

The gorgeous fan-vaulted ceiling

A pretty chapel inside the Abbey

Best name ever! The Abbey was full of memorial plaques, with a high number of military men and people with connections to the West Indies (slave trade I suppose)

I found this interesting: the English calendar was reformed in 1750, changing to the Gregorian calendar and changing the beginning of the year from 25 March to January. Hence this lady's birth year needed adjustment!

An unspectacular picture of the Royal Crescent

The Bath weir

We also made a trip to the village of Bradford-on-Avon, not to be confused with Bradford not on Avon. The pub behind Liz in the photo below may be old and pretty but featured such incompetent service that we ended up leaving. I think we waited about half an hour and enquired three times, no pints were served. By the way, the South-West is cider country, and I found my new favourite, Thatchers Dry cider! Unfortunately, the supermarket we visited had none in stock, so I came back to France hauling the medium-dry variety with me, which is not the same at all :( 

It wouldn't be England without a little bit of rain

We also visited Bristol, to have dinner with Liz's brother, but not much to report from there. We saw a pretty church but we had to leave to buy Liz some phone credit after she received a text from her Dad reading "At hospital. Your mum had an accident. Getting plastered". Turned out she just broke her arm (well, that's bad enough) but the plastering involved was of the arts-and-craft variety, not the "something awful has happened, I'm getting blind drunk to cope" kind, which is a bit better! And then we went to a pub and had some more cider and checked out a lovely indoor market, where as luck would have it, there was an entire stall selling about 50 different masks, perfect for our New Years masked ball!

So that was the South-West, next stop was London for a few days. I stayed with my uni friend Amber, caught up with Rick and Kiwi Liz, visited Borough and Camden markets, popped into Tate Modern (so nice that it's free), got my hair cut and paid my respects to my main man John Gower in Southwark Cathedral. I like to think he was pleased to have a visitor who's read (some of) his stuff.

Scary church in East London. Have these people not heard of Heaven's Gate?

Gower's fancypants tomb

And then it was time to get our glad rags on for NYE. We were going, as mentioned, to a Masked Ball at the Paradise, somewhere around Kensal Green I think. I don't have particularly high hopes for NYE, but I must say it was a fun night. Not amazing or particularly different from any other night out, but fun for my first London NYE. I've got to say the highlight of the evening was probably the greasy, greasy delicious fried chicken we got on the way back (only something ridiculous like £3 or something like that). Amber and Jen were busy getting chatted up by some drunken lads and I was there just like "omnomnom CHICKEN you guys!" It made me realise that I don't think there are any fried chicken joints in France (probably Paris) other than the odd KFC. Oh my god, you are missing a trick, it was the best thing ever!

Anyway, here are a few snaps from the evening to close out the holiday report. I struggled back to France on the 2nd with an insanely heavy suitcase AND a giant sports bag I had to borrow from Liz's parents because of all the shopping! Worth it though!

Me, Amber and Jen before heading out for the evening (I don't have my shoes on yet if you're wondering)

And a little NYE selfie

Drinking cider on the tube on the way out. Pure class

Group shot at the Paradise, once the other girls finally arrived (and Charlie on the left made it over from France too!)

I have my eyes closed, but it's not quiiiiite so bad with a mask on. My mask spent most of the night on top of my head, but Amber loved hers! I think she'd wear it full-time if she could

Me, Liz and Charlie. Horrible photo, but the only one I got!

Liz loves the old "finger in the mouth" pose when she's had a few

Festive frolics

Alright, the dust of the festive season has settled and I've recovered enough to recap the events of the last couple of weeks.

I celebrated Christmas without my family for only the second time this year. The first time was in Moscow in 2006, where the 25th of December is just another working day. I did have a Christmas dinner on the 24th with a bunch of teachers, but otherwise it was not particularly exciting. This time round was also pretty quiet, but enjoyable (and not marred by teaching English!) I went around to my friend Laura's place for Experimental Chicken and other delights. Experimental Chicken, you ask? Laura's a scientist, and our 3.30€ Christmas chicken was fresh from her lab. That may be enough to put off the more queasy among you, but she did assure me they only sold chickens from the Control groups of experiments, so they were unlikely to be pumped full of weird substances. In fact, I think they're quite possibly better in that respect than normal chickens from the shop. They do come, however, intact, complete with heads and internal organs. I respectfully requested that the one of us who spends her working days chopping up mice brains dealt with the chicken prep, so by the time I turned up it was looking just like what you'd buy at the supermarket. She did say, however, that the lungs are particularly difficult to extract. Yum!

Anyway, we had a nice dinner, watched Love Actually (I'd seen it before, but didn't remember anything about it, which is apparently shocking to everyone for whom it's practically a religion) and played charades, at my repeated insistence that Christmas wasn't Christmas without a parlour game or two. I ended up getting home at around 4.30 am, so we must have had fun!

Quick quiz #1: What is this?

If you answered anything other than "extremely strong 2 year-old Gruyère", then you would be wrong. It doesn't even look like cheese!

Christmas markets in front of the train station

Quick quiz #2: How many exposed breasts should be on display at a Christmas market?

If you answered "none", then clearly you are from some puritanical English-speaking country.

The correct answer, of course, is six

Our Christmas dinner. I think we did quite well!

Laura and I just before digging in

A week or so later, it was of course time for New Year's celebrations. I was a little bit pissed off going in, because we had been all messaging back and forth on Facebook about a joint budget to buy wine and food and party supplies and pretty much everyone said 20-25€. Then on NYE itself, the message came through that it came to 33€ per person. Which is a pretty big increase on that. Why bother asking people's budgets if you're going to go about 50% over what was agreed on? Anyway, what can you do? It wasn't worth getting upset about, even though I still think there was no need to buy 15 bottles of sparkling, an unknown quantity of still wine, beer, vodka, rum, gin etc. etc. for a dozen people. If we'd actually drunk all of that we'd probably all be dead.

But grumbling over, we had a lovely evening, and I must say the extra touches of decorations, party poppers, hats, sparklers, confetti etc. did make for a more special vibe than your average party. Just before midnight, we played charades (theme of the season it seems) amid concerns that things needed livening up before 12 (not sure if charades did the trick or not, tbh - especially with the francophones!) and then there was dancing and confetti throwing and suchlike. I almost caused a riot by scheduling several NZ tunes one after another on the party playlist. All my shrieking of "cultural imperialism" didn't save me from being officially banned from commandeering the laptop again. Ha. We were also hanging out the window at some point yelling at men passing by, since there was a distinct dearth of single men at the party (slash of our collective acquaintance). I'm pretty blind, it was dark, and they were wearing hoodies, so I couldn't really tell what they looked like, but after a short conference it was decided that they were not good looking and therefore would not be invited into the party. So my shouting out the window at them went along the lines of "Eh, les mecs! Les mecs! ...... Continuez!" ("Hey, guys! Guys! ..... Carry on!")

I fell asleep on Caro's couch at about 5 am, I think with the distinct idea in my head that I was just taking a little nap before continuing to party. In actual fact, I woke up freezing cold around 9 and crept into the spare bedroom to continue my "little nap" until around 1 pm, when I woke up to find that Caro had already done almost all the cleaning up. Oops! Ironically, I was the only one who slept there, and I probably live the closest. At least I didn't have far to walk of shame it in the morning, although pretty much everyone I came across on the short walk home was looking remarkably chipper and not like they'd slept in their clothes at all. Unfair!

A quick selfie before heading out for New Year's Eve. It's the only time of the evening where I can be sure my hair and makeup look okay

Party group shot

Philippa and Caroline on the dancefloor

Me and Caroline shortly after midnight, shortly before man-hassling

If this were America's Next Top Model, I'd probably be told off for looking shorter than I am, and possibly like I have a wasting disease in my lower limbs. Other than that, good photo

Just chillin during a round of charades

Post-confetti attack. As you may be able to see, it got in all the drinks as well, but I vowed to make it my personal mission to drink them all anyway

Me and Laura

Jen, Laura, me and Marcia at around 4 am when the weak-willed were heading home

I seem to be a fan of photos leaning over. I did actually receive complaints that my dress wasn't as low-cut as usual (for reals), so this may be making up for it

Philippa the confetti fairy

Rudi, one of the 3 men (all partners of other guests) attending our soirée. Where the single men at, Tours?

Ladies in black - Véro, Marcia and Caroline

The aftermath

Anyway, hope you all had a fun time too and Happy New Year!

Bonne année 2012!

For those of you demanding crazy stories of my wild doings on New Years Eve, I give you:


Yes, I defrosted the frozen fridge of doom! Actually not on New Years Eve, but it is the single most exciting thing I have done in a long time! I had been valiantly trying to eat everything in it so I could unplug it before I went away, but I couldn't eat fast enough (and I wasn't exactly going to drink bottles of mayonnaise and so forth) and I also had doubts about leaving it to defrost all over my flat, so I left it plugged in but decided it needed tackling regardless when I got back. At first, I just unplugged it and wandered off for a bit, but upon closer inspection it became clear that it wasn't going to just melt by itself in a hurry. So I developed a system of throwing saucepan-fulls of hot water on it, scraping at the ice with a ladle and then gathering the ice out of the bottom of the fridge and melting it in the sink.

It took about an hour of hard work before the remaining ice came off in a few big sheets. So bear in mind, this is AFTER melting about half of it:



It then took about another hour to give the fridge a thorough cleaning, including all the trays. It actually was pretty clean, considering I only got it in August, but it was a good opportunity to do it. So, New Years Resolution? Keep my beady eye firmly fixed on any signs that the Frozen Fridge of Doom is making a comeback!

Other than that, I don't really want to call it a resolution, but I went to the gym on Friday, Saturday and today. Not New Year's Day since it was closed and I was a little bit hungover, but still, good going! I read something recently by a guy whose resolution *last* year was to work out every day and he made the argument that it was actually easier to stick to, because you didn't fall in the trap of thinking "I have to go three times this week, so I won't today, and I won't tomorrow, but I'll definitely, definitely catch up later this week" and then falling off the wagon. I realise a lot of people say the exact opposite, that you shouldn't try to set these sorts of "extreme" goals, but it made a lot of sense to me. So, I might not make it to the gym every single day, but I'm going to try and make sure I get at least 3o minutes' exercise every day (which is actually not really a change from now) but that I really do also make sure I'm down at the gym as often as possible.