Help me pumps!

I spent Friday night in the company of my lovely friend Neil (he sometimes reads my blog which is why I've used the adjective 'lovely' to describe him. But he is lovely anyway) visiting Tate Britain which had a late exhibition on. God knows what I was thinking but I decided to wear to London my gorgeous black patent platform high heeled lace up brogues, which I usually wear to get in and out of cars or taxis.

Just savour that description a moment - 'high heels', 'patent' 'platform' 'lace ups' - any fellow shoe lover will understand how I feel as I type those words. They look great too, sort of sexy but like they mean business and also a tiny bit edgy with their platform sole and a little bit camp with their patent shininess. I could go on forever going on about how much I love my shoes but there is one thing that I cannot love about them - they bloody hurt!

I think I imagined I would just jump on a train, then a Tube and then stroll elegantly around the Tate in what Amy Winehouse would describe as my 'f*** me pumps' except they wouldn't be as gross as that if they could speak; my shoes would say it in French.

It transpired that I walked in said shoes more than anticipated and, worse still, when we got to the gallery, we spent ages walking around looking for the exhibits following possibly the world's most obscure map. By the time we left I was in agony but trying to look as if I wasn't although a couple of times I had to hang on to poor Neil for support as I trolled along in my tarts trotters and even considered asking him to do my laces up when they came undone to save me the discomfort of getting down to floor level. We found somewhere to eat after a stroll that I bore stoically (yes I did Neil!) and I gladly kicked them off, or rather unlaced them, under the table and breathed a sigh of relief, hoping a small glass of wine would anaesthetise my feet a little and allow me to put them on again for the homeward leg of my journey.

The problem is I actually have silly feet - wide with high insteps and little stumpy toes. Its genetic as my sister and mum have exactly the same feet. Indeed, we have all bought the same sandals to accommodate our unhappy feet. My Wolkie sandals (I was first to get them I should like to record) are my concession to comfort. Their funky green colour appeals to me and mitigate the slightly less funky Velcro fastenings. The main thing is wearing them is like walking on air, unlike my gorgeous high heeled shoes which are like walking on pins with someone stepping on your toes every few seconds.

After seeing me in them and noting how gladsome and full of vigour I was, my mother, sister and cousin (we all have the same little fat Welsh feet) bought the same ones and we are all agree that they are shoes of wonder. We are not alone in this as our sandals sell out at an alarming rate and you have to get in there early to secure a pair for the summer.

Flora took a photo of my mother, my sister and me wearing our Wolkies together which I have atached to this post. If you could see our faces you would see visions of seraphic bliss. I wish I could have said the same for Friday night!

Further confessions of a Diet Coke addict

I have an admission to make; earlier in the blog I said I had given up Diet Coke and even added a photo of me pouring my last one down the sink. A month ago, feeling somewhat tired and harassed, I was sitting outside a cafe when I was suddenly and inexplicably seized by a desire for a Diet Coke. A friend, who knows of my tendency to become addicted to the silver monsters, gently suggested I shouldn't but nevertheless I drank it down in devil-may-care defiance of all good advice.

That was the start and since then my Diet Coke consumption has been steadily increasing. I hadn't stooped to buying multi-packs but I was making far too frequent visits to Bargain Booze and the Co-op.

So at the weekend I decided enough was enough: I would give up again after a month falling off the wagon. Horror stories of cirrhosis of the liver and other nasties had been related to me and I knew the day of reckoning had come. Yesterday was day one of my detox - not too bad and I managed to assuage my desire for a Diet Coke with some bottles of carbonated water. Today though has been awful. My head is banging away and I feel totally wiped out. Yet I know that if I can get through the next few days the worst will be over.

But how to stop myself going back to the Diet Cokes? I think the root of my problem lies not only in an addiction to caffeine but also to my tendency to body dysmorphia. Basically I always feel fat. It doesn't matter how thin I am, and I have been rather too thin at times, inside I feel like a great brick outhouse of a girl. And so, I watch what I eat and jump on and off the scales with alarming regularity checking my weight. If I put on weight I feel miserable and a failure, if I lose some triumphant and set up for the day. Like many women I have a weight that makes me feel like I'm in control and the ideal is to be a little under this so there's some room for manoeuvre. Writing about it like this makes me realise how screwy it is but I also know it's pretty common and in most other respects I'm a well-balanced, sensible kind of person.

Diet Coke is a major weapon in the weight obsessives armour. It's almost calorie free, gives you something to do when you feel hungry and something to fiddle with, 'fills you up' and makes you feel like you are controlling the situation. I've read about models who live on Diet Coke in an effort to maintain their underweight silhouettes.

Of course all this confession to the ether is fuelled by feeling a little bit down owing to withdrawal from my upper of choice. In a few days I will feel more positive, the headache will be gone and I will see the wood for the trees. For now though, it's crap!

A word in your shell like

I've just purchased a book called 'Chambers address to impress: 200 words you should use'. I was gratified to note that many of the words were among those I already use on a regular basis including: visceral, atavistic, epitomise,circumspect and alacrity.

However, there are some other words which, while I know their meaning, I've never been able to use until now, either due to lack of opportunity or a vague feeling that I am using them incorrectly. Welcome to abstruse, tendentious, sententious, prescient, obloquy and opprobrium.

Quite how I shall introduce these words into my conversation I am still unsure. It's not as if you can go into Sainbury's and use them at the checkouts; although I used to work on the checkouts at Sainsbury's and would have been delighted if someone had said: 'The service in here is the most egregious I have come across for some time, there is a paucity of understanding of customer requirements. I must say my dear though, that you are the exception, offering an exemplary service. You are without doubt the paradigm of how a checkout assistant should be, nay an exemplar.'

I am now spending time practising using these words as you never know when you might meet someone who appreciates your use of elevated vocabulary. As a child I used to chose words at random from the big dictionary and write stories around them (when I wasn't listening to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf; I was an odd child) and am now embarking upon the adult equivalent.

I feel it would be disingenuous of me to say that I was not making it my study to impress. However, I despise dilatory behaviour and believe incontrovertibly in inculcating habitsof self-improvement and eschewing any tendency towards laziness, which is deleterious to the mind, the corollary of which is a decline in ones innate perspicacity. Innit?

A lovely, yeasty blast from my past....

Funny I should mention Horlicks in my last post. The other day I was in the local chemist shop and it occurred to me that you never see Horlicks Tablets anymore. We used to sometimes be treated to them when our grandmother went to visit her friend Mrs B in the chemist down the road, where Mrs B served behind the counter and got all the gossip on the ailments of her neighbours.

Horlicks Tablets were little tablets that tasted like, er, Horlicks and came in a foil tube surrounded by a satisfying little paper tube. They gave you a lovely Horlicks hit with some for later as they were rather dry and got stuck in one's teeth. They were hard to extricate from the tube so often you had to nibble them out which meant the ones beneath got a bit soggy and would stick to the wrapper, so often you had a Horlicks tablet and the foil.

Sadly they don't appear to make them anymore or I would have introduced my children to this delight. Even now I can feel the weight of them stuck in my molars- oh bliss! But wait. I have discovered that they are still available in America. I'll wager if we reintroduced them here, there would be a lot of interest and it could save our young people from the evils of cannabis, glue sniffing and other recreational drugs as they have all the requisite features of foil, tubes etc and the only side-effect is a nice snooze. What could be nicer?

I am off forthwith to mention it to Mr Brown. He might make me Horlicks Czarina and I can spend all the returned expenses money on importing tubes from the states and of course setting up manufacturing facilities in the UK. It can't fail to work!

And the Horlicks goes to........

Yesterday evening saw S and I being nominated for an award in the same category as Anthony and the Johnsons. Since the category also included June Tabor and The Levellers we figured our chances of winning were extremely slim but were glad nevertheless to go along to the do and enjoy a little reflected glory.

With free wine on offer it seemed rude not to have a few glasses and I soon found myself a little tiddly. So much so in fact that I said to one person nominated in different category: 'I haven't see your show but I really wanted you to win'. Hopefully I'll never see this person again, indeed they may be thinking the same.

Thing is, I did mean it. I really liked the look of their show and hoped they would win. Of course if theatre critics worked like this, many a really bad show would have a long run and many a good one would fail. But actually, that happens anyway so maybe it's something to consider.

This morning as I trudged to the station at 6.30 in the morning in fishnet tights that dug into my toes and agonising high heels, I really felt that the previous night's wacky glamour had dissipated and that reality was kicking in with a vengeance. There's nothing chic about blisters, that's for sure.

Having reached my destination I limped pathetically to my car, shivering in my thin top which was fine last night but was now providing little benefit but a nod to decency. Once home I put on a pair of flat shoes, warm trousers and a jumper and breathed a sigh of relief.

Yes, I am quite relieved to go back to the world of the cosy and mundane. Plans for tonight include a nice hot bath and an early night - oh bliss! I bet even Anthony has a pair of slippers and likes of mug of Horlicks now and then. If only he'd turned up I could have asked him.

The winner was the wonderful Lady Carol of the Moon.

All out of proportion

The mother of a friend of Flora's has lost 7.5 lbs recently. Or a whopping 7.5 lbs as the tabloids would say. I was musing on this last night and trying to work out what proportion of my own weight 7.5 lbs was, eventually working out it was just over two thirds.

I'm still not convinced though and I started to wonder if other people can work these things out without having to lie in bed counting on their fingers and doing the three times table in their head. Maths is my Achilles' heel and no mistake; I'm the girl who knew the things we used in maths were called Cuisenaire Rods because I liked the name but had no idea what they were for.

I've improved over the years through gaining a bit of confidence and finding ways and means of doing things but proportions always get me. To be honest if someone tells me a place is 300 yards away I wouldn't have a clue how close it was but I do know the green around which I lived as a child was 100 yards long so I use this as my guide.

I find percentages incredibly difficult to get my head around. I've never understood how you can get 110% of something when a percentage is a proportion of 100. Can anyone explain that to me?

My lifelong relationship with my weighing scales means I am an expert on my own pounds and stones but I couldn't pick up a bag of sugar and tell you how many ounces it was or even grams. Inches I work out through shoe heels. I have a vague idea what a three inch heel looks like but centimetres I'm not sure about at all. Are they bigger than inches - I think they are?

The odd things is that, despite this difficulty with being able to visualise and assess proportion, I have a very good sense of direction; however, I think this is less to do with being able to intuit distances and the lie of the land and more to do with being nosy about road signs, landmarks etc. I wonder if the sense of direction I prize so much would be as good in the middle of a desert for instance. I am also utterly instinctive about time. I couldn't tell the time properly until I was fourteen when suddenly I had an epiphany, realising at last what three quarters of an hour actually meant. Despite being a slow developer on the time front, I've always been pretty good at guessing what the time is, perhaps employing some deep-rooted, atavistic skill at reading the position of the sun. I like that image, me as urban Aborigine reading the skies.

So should you meet me, don't tell me that the place I need to get to is 600 yards away. Tell me it's past a pub called the Nags Head and that I'll pass a pound shop and a fountain on the way. I'm 110% sure I'll find it then and if you want to meet me don't tell me the time, I'll come when the sun is low in the sky.

Carnival time

The sky is a clear and blue outside and I'm hoping this beautiful weather lasts until tomorrow, the day of the Luton Carnival, billed as the biggest one day carnival in the world. Last year torrential rain resulted in it being cancelled meaning disappointment for many and lost revenues for the council, trades people and sponsors.

But why do I care? I suppose I have a bit of love/hate relationship with Luton. A supporter always of the underdog, I can see that life is a bit of a struggle at times for one of Britain's least loved towns. Once possessing a rather fine town centre, the heart was ripped out of it during the 1960s to make way for a monstrous Arndale centre, replacing interesting old buildings like the Plait Hall where straw plait was traded in the heydey of Luton's traditional straw hat industry.

The railway and proximity to London brought industry to the town and with industry came ugliness. Yet even in all this industrial bleakness there are the odd gems. I work in a very fine listed building, an oasis in a rather souless industrial area.

Wave after wave of immigration has turned the town into a cultural melting pot and a rather successful one at that, where racial tension exists but mostly people work together. This rich mixture of cultures is one of the things that is showcased in the carnival not least the amazing costumes made by Afro-Caribbean groups who dance along the street to thumping sound systems on the back of trucks as the carnival processes through the unlovely streets of Luton. And it's not just the Afro-Caribbean community who join the mas clubs to make costumes, all across the area people are joining in and people come from outside the town too to show off their ideas.

It's hard being Luton, one of the 'crap towns' but I think it does carnival supremely well and my goodness it deserves a break. I can't be there tomorrow but here's hoping the sun shines on everyone.