I find the most miserable month in London to be February. The refreshment I feel after the Christmas break has worn off, the next holidays seem far away and I wake each morning to the unremittingly cold weather of February. If you think that sounds bleak, it's because February is bleak!
Thankfully, this February some good friends of ours decided to marry in Perth - a perfect excuse for G and I to jet out of London and head to summery Perth for 12 days.
The wedding was beautiful - the bride looked stunning and the groom very handsome. This is a couple blessed in the looks department, but they looked exceptionally wonderful on their wedding day. It was a fantastic wedding and we happily spent the night drinking, eating and catching up with good friends.
The rest of the Perth trip was also pretty wonderful. We stayed at my sister's house. My sister (A) has three gorgeous children. Well, most of the time they are gorgeous. The eldest is about to turn 14 and I won't say anything else about him because it may be that, when he can tear himself away from facebook, he reads this blog. Anyway, to be honest, there's not a lot to say other than that he's incredibly smart, funny, loads of fun and I miss him to bits when I'm in London. The youngest two are also terrific. AP (a mischievous little girl) is 3 and JP (a boy otherwise known as The Pudding, for obvious reasons) is 2. While each is terrific, together they can be a handful. One minute they would be playing together sweetly, but by the time I had hold of the camera, the play would have degenerated into a brawl with each screaming "it's mine!".
AP is a beautiful blonde, but has decided that she wants to have dark hair, like her mum's. She is convinced it will turn dark, and keeps asking visitors if they can "see the black coming through", pointing to the roots of her hair. She is ridiculously intelligent and determined to get her own way, a combination of traits that I'm sure will serve her well in life but which prove rather challenging in a three-year-old.
The Pudding is also clever and full of boyish charm. He is obsessed with rubbish trucks and any time he heard a beeping noise would excitedly shout "rubbish truck", looking for the beloved vehicle. The Pudding, for no good reason, took to calling G "man". If he was looking for G, he would ask "where's man?". He knew G by name, so I'm not quite sure where the "man" name came from - perhaps it was his retribution for the fact we kept calling him The Pudding.
The Pudding is currently going through toilet training, a process which wasn't always successful while we were there. Thankfully, being a guest, I could usually pass him back to his parents on those occasions but once or twice found myself having to clean up decidedly adult-looking (and smelling) products of his bodily functions. G also found himself the recipient of The Pudding's bodily functions. As he was walking around the garden, with The Pudding having a piggy back, I saw G's face go from happy to horrified, as he asked The Pudding: "my back's wet, is that wee??" only to have the Pudding giggle in response and tell him it was.
When we weren't being entertained by the children, G and I managed to catch up with family, including celebrating my Dad's 60th. We also caught up with a couple of good friends and saw the very flash new house One friend and his significant other have bought.
G and I also reacquainted ourselves with Perth's beaches.
Walking along the white sand at Cottesloe did rather make me wonder why we are living in London. That is, until we went to Beaches cafe and were charged $5 for a take away coffee. When did Perth become so ridiculously expensive?
We arrived back in London just over a week ago, which has been a bit of a shock to the system. After 30-something degree days, I'm struggling to stay warm in the 3 degree days of London. I'm also missing everyone in Perth terribly. However, February is now over. And G and I have a holiday to Paris to look forward to in the next month and theatre tickets to several shows. All in all, things are looking up. And we're still beguiled by the charms of London. Just not in February.
