I have nothing to say that would hang together nicely in a tag, or a category – I’ve not wet myself for LITERALLY weeks, for example – so you’ll have to just make do with a collection of thoughts and events which have been screaming through my pastry-befuddled brain.

I say ‘pastry-befuddled’ because we, at Fray Inc. Towers, have been buying the expensive Waitrose croissants of late (twice a week at least), the ones that have the enticing words ‘Croissants Au Beurre De Charentes’ strewn across its single-use plastic packaging. I think it means ‘These are proper croissants, made with a lot of butter that has been produced in the best kind of proper butter-producing place, and they will accordingly be both crunchy on the outside and also stringy and soft and stretchy and very moist in the middle’. This is all correct. Since we went to Puglia last summer (*proud middle-point adoptee alert*) and discovered that they cut open croissants with scissors to slosh in two hefty slatherings of nutella, only then putting them into the oven to crisp up, we’ve been doing the same. So I ate mine this morning (AFTER A RUN, THANKS), and the end bits from Otis’s uneaten stash, and then….I’ve topped off the empty-calorie carb-debauchery with a cinnamon roll from Ole & Steen because my friend Lawson told me, after a lot of cinnamon roll research, that they do the best ones.

Unfortunately, I had an altercation with a woman in the Tottenham Court Road branch of Ole & Steen, because when you get in, you take a ticket from the prominent ticket-box at the door like you might at the doctors, or the passport and post office, but here there was no helpful ticker tape calling out your number. So it was awkward, and I wasn’t sure it was my turn, and first some other person swooped up from behind when the lady at the till asked for ‘next’ and produced his ticket and I shrank back, feeling ashamed I had not really believed in their system. So then someone else yells ‘next’, and even though I am at the front of the chaotic, non-overly queue, I look around in a coy, unconfident way (which is a bit how I drive – I lose my nerve at the last moment and become a hazard) and this brassy older lady in workout tights and a ballet skirt and cascading blonde tonged curls with a denim jacket says:

OH! JUST GO! 

With all the ennui and yet barely contained rage someone in a ballet skirt and three-quarter length leggings can authentically muster.

And so I was a bit hot, and said (sarcastically, pointedly, crankily, probably rising to an indignant higher register as we get near the end)

OK!  Thank you – I haven’t actually even been here before and so I don’t know the system…? 

And maybe I said ‘SHHEEEESH’ loudly and made a bit of an embarrassing fuss.

And then felt very hurt and cross about the stupid shop and mean ladies with no tolerance for new consumers. As I exited Ole & Steen, I stared very hard at the back of the ballet skirt lady’s golden, fluffy head and mouthed ‘COW’.

But the cinnamon roll was really good, so.

Things that have happened 

1. I got stopped in the road by a Range Rover which pulled over and the driver yelled something out to me. It was Joely Richardson, and she asked me where I got my dress. It was Zara, btw.
2. I had an interview scheduled with a lawyer in Washington, D.C. for my new job and I needed Otis not to come in and ask me to find him an obscure soft toy/a glass of water/biscuits and so I set him up with Monster High on netflix on my laptop and a glass of water because I knew he had had hot chips for lunch (ace parenting right there) and he would need a drink and I would be mid-serious interviewing and so I preempted it all and asked him not to come into the office ( which is really my bedroom – but you knew that). When I did come out, Otis was sitting there looking a bit sheepish, the laptop was swimming in water, and he told me that a ghost had tipped his glass over. It cost £400 to fix, which means that my last two weeks at Selfridges were only to pay for that.
3. This morning I went to a blogger thing for the launch of a new Cartoonito channel with Otis, who was totally not feeling it and who would only sit and glumly eat cheese straws and tell me how much he wanted to go home. I watched as a bevy of ex-footballers wives, TOWIE stars and Big Brother contestants came in, tanned with gleaming white teeth, followed by their kids who uniformly wore matching playsuits (girls) or matching short back and sides haircuts and bomber jackets (boys), all very enthusiastic, and the mums were like eerily familiar, and yet not. Like….somewhere in your head, you have a scrollable Daily Mail sidebar of shame, picked up from breakfast TV and overheard conversations on the tube and Metro newspaper articles in the celebrity bit, and of course from the supermarket when you are waiting in line at the checkout and your phone doesn’t get signal and your eyes settle on a bewildering shit magazine with someone orangey on the cover. Well. Those people were all there, and one lady (whose kids were matching, obvs) asked me if I was blogger and I said yes, and asked her if she was a blogger, and she looked surprised. She was only Miss Wales, circa 2003! The shame. So I was totally unfamous and really, probably, should have just left the branded cupcakes and cheese straws to those who had already done their time on British TV.
4. I left Selfridges and now I am working on a US magazine called Diversity & the Bar, and I am also working on editorial for the Luxury Law Alliance. All you need to know is that both jobs will (probably, maybe, I need to calm down) take me to new York this year. I thank you.

Photo essay for your viewing pleasure

Casper got sunburnt while swimming in the freezing waters of the Serpentine, and his face puffed up in an allergic reaction very cutely:

Mark went away doing something with guns and baby deer (*wince and cringe*) and we spent the morning in Paddington Basin playing with the fountains and my camera effects:

Barnaby tried to teach Magic how to do tricks worthy of Britain’s Got Talent. This was the highlight (he wouldn’t do any other tricks):

At Cartoonito, both of us feeling unfamous and unworthy (spot Vanessa Feltz and Danielle Lloyd) and so channelling our feelings into tiny colouring-in:

Otis and I, immortalised in cartoon form:

And that is all. Until next time, then.