February - sun, surf and bodily functions

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. 

coming home

G and I have returned from our sadly very brief holiday in Perth. We arrived back in London on Monday with golden tans, a stock of cherry ripes and tim tams and, less happily, terrifically bad jetlag. A few days on and we are returning to a pasty white colour, have consumed all the cherry ripes and tim tams but, happily, have almost recovered from the jet lag.

The trip did not get off to a brilliant start. The 22-hour flight from London to Perth is never pleasant, but this flight proved particularly bad. We were on Singapore Airlines, normally known (at least by me) for its great inflight entertainment, decent food and service. Sadly, perhaps because we had only paid 400 pounds each for these return flights, all of those aspects were missing. We found ourselves with a dire selection of movies; after trying (and abandoning) such cinematic delights as The Ugly Truth and The Time Traveller's Wife, I gave up on the inflight entertainment. I also discovered my newly purchased book was dreadful, so the flight was spent largely with me blankly looking at the back of the chair in front of me or trying to entice G into a game of I Spy (he refused, after pointing out that there are only so many times you can spy a chair, fold-up tray and seatbelt before the game becomes boring). G had also, with the best of intentions, requested a special meal to accommodate my seafood-eating vegetarianism. Unfortunately, rather than ordering the vegetarian meal for me, he ordered the seafood meal. As I discovered, this was a meal exclusively of seafood. And not just any seafood, but overcooked, inedible seafood. Given that in the current security-conscious climate, airplanes are unlikely to stock steak knives, I decided that eating my seafood meal would prove physically impossible, and so concentrated my efforts instead on stealing G's dessert and crackers. As a result of all of the above, I suspect that G's enjoyment of the flight was approximate with my own.

Thankfully the holiday in Perth was significantly better than our flight there. We celebrated our birthdays, caught up with dearly missed family and friends and succeeded in gorging ourselves on food and wine, thanks to those very kind family and friends. We were also able to reintroduce ourselves to an adorable niece and two nephews. Aside from a minor incident involving me setting off my uncle's house alarm by breaking into his house (who knew?) all went very smoothly.

While it was wonderful seeing our friends and family, I confess it was strange returning to Perth. It took a little while from when we arrived for me to acclimatise myself to the place. Being now used to the incredible human traffic in London, seeing entire streets devoid of any visible people took some getting used to. I also made the mistake of (very innocently) being surprised at a dinner party when someone mentioned the West Australian had a food critic, and before I could stop myself blurted out "but are there enough restaurants to justify a food critic?". Not surprisingly, that latter comment was not met well, and I quickly found myself trying to backtrack and explain, honestly, that what I meant was that in London, there's a new restaurant opening every minute due to the enormous population, but surely there couldn't be that many new restaurants opening every week in Perth. Admittedly, the comment made me sound like a pretentious tool. It also served to show me (and this is a lesson I ought to have learned by now) that I need to find a way of disconnecting that part of my brain that causes me to blurt out whatever I'm thinking without screening it for sense and soundness first.

I love Perth. I love the beach, I love the weather, and I love the sense of space (once I get used to it). But I have to confess, I missed London while I was gone. While I was very sad leaving Perth and my family and friends (and there were more than a few tears shed for those I was leaving behind), I was also looking forward to getting home to London. And for the first time, I realised I was calling London home and really meaning it.