Entering my thirties initially seemed like quite a big thing, so I tried to prepare myself for a bit of a psychological adjustment. As it happens it hasn't been too bad. I'm older - there's nothing I can do about it, so I might as well just go with it. I've spent several years underachieving, so that sense of not fulfilling my potential is nothing new :-) There is one thing, though, that I haven't managed to avoid - the baby thing. I've never thought of myself as a particularly maternal type, but suddenly there are kids everywhere in my social circle. Almost imperceptibly it crept up on me. People started having babies of their own or acquiring stepchildren, nieces and nephews. Suddenly I was required to shop at the Early Learning Centre on a fairly regular basis. Occasionally I began to feel broody.
Apparently this is quite a common occurrence upon turning thirty. Your peers begin to breed, your parents start to drop hints about wanting grandchildren and then you read one of those articles about fertility declining dramatically at the age of thirty-five. Before you know it you're waking up in a cold sweat, wondering if you should just nudge the boyfriend and start to get jiggy with it there and then. Luckily there is a cure for all of this. You should make haste and borrow a car.
Let me explain: the boyfriend and I bought a sensible hatchback a long time ago. It's a great car because it's really practical. We've fitted camping equipment, sofas, a dining table, my rather less than athletic mum and all sorts of other stuff in the back with no trouble. It's been reasonably reliable and we've been perfectly happy with it for years. When we moved over the summer it was a godsend. So when our friends were moving flats recently it seemed like a sensible idea to lend it to them for a while, as they drive a slightly less practical vehicle. In return they let us drive their car - a Mazda MX5. On the weekend when we were in possession of said MX5, the boyfriend got called into work to fix something. Purely in the spirit of supportiveness (and not because I like the idea of posing in a sporty coupe) I decided to accompany him. So, there we were, driving around Docklands in bright winter sunshine, with the top down and Verdi's Requiem blaring out of the CD player. The heated leather seat was warming my bum to perfection and my pashmina was fluttering attractively in the gentle breeze. The car was so much fun! The car only had two seats! The annoying yet persistent ticking of my biological clock was silenced in an instant.
I highly recommend the Mazda MX5 experience to anyone, broody or otherwise. Escape the tyranny of biology through the wonders of automotive engineering. Just a word of warning though - put the top up before you drive through the Blackwall Tunnel. The fumes aren't nice. Mind you, they probably don't do a lot for your fertility, either.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Au Revoir Twenties! (Part Deux)
Let me start with a little romantic tale. A few days after Christmas, we dropped my mother back at her house and decided to drive to Bluewater to check out the sales. Negotiating post-festive traffic on the M2, the boyfriend (the wonderful boyfriend, actually) asked me if there was any particular restaurant I'd like to go to for dinner on my birthday, which was fast approaching. I was mulling it over when he said "How about Les Cinq Saveurs d'Anada, where we had such a good meal on holiday?" I thought he was just talking hypothetically until he told me we were leaving for Paris in a week.
Les Cinq Saveurs is not just a veggie restaurant, it's a full on macrobiotic festival. My French is pretty bad, but I swear the label on the beer I had last time I was there promised that it was biodynamic, harvested at a certain phase of the moon and had some sort of friendly bacteria in it. It was such a pleasure to find a really good vegetarian restaurant, especially in Paris where meat is loved so greatly. As a veggie, even though I'm not super-strict, I find myself eating the compromise dish on the menu quite a lot - the cheesy pasta or the omelette, so I love having a wide choice (mind you, we can't eat at such places too often - the boyfriend's stomach tends to react violently to too many beans - but every now and again is better than never). So I was really looking forward to going back to Les Cinq Saveurs, but unfortunately when we got to Paris we found they were shut for their annual holiday. We ended up going to another, random vegetarian place we found on one of our walks instead.
Le Grenier de Notre Dame is a tiny place, rather appropriately established in 1978 (like me). The food turned out to be really good. There were even some extremely healthy looking toasted seeds served as a snack with our champagne apperitif. I rather liked the juxtaposition of health and decadence caught up in that. For my main course I had an immense vegetarian paella, with lots of black olives and cashew nuts, while the boyfriend had a vegetable cassoulet. We topped it all off with mousses - he raspberry, me chocolate. Joy of joys, I cannot describe to you my excitement when these arrived at the table presented in the most gloriously kitsch manner, topped off with plastic palm trees!
Resisting the temptation to hula down the steep spiral staircase in honour of the fantastic plastic trees, we left the restaurant. Paris around the start of the new year was a beautiful place. The Christmas lights, trees and decorations were still up everywhere, there was an ice rink in front of the town hall and from billboards on every street corner the Mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, was wishing us a Bonne Annee. The French make a big deal of Epiphany (6th January - the day after my birthday) so everybody was still in a festive mood. Full of champagne, a rather nice vin d'Alsace and lots of vegetarian food, and buoyed up by the jovial city atmosphere, we decided to go to a famous Parisian jazz club. Le Caveau de La Huchette has a bar on the ground floor, but we wanted to be downstairs in the cellar. The place was full, absolutely crowded with people and very hot. For a long time we just hung around on the stairs, listening to the band play some unfamiliar but frantic swing and be-bop. If we had been at a similar place in England I reckon some officious health and safety person would have told us we couldn't stand there, I'm sure of it, but France is different so we could soak up the atmosphere without being molested.
Revived with cocktails from the bar and taking advantage of the break between sets, we found a better perching place near the stage and the dancefloor. Once the band started up again it was hard to know who to watch - them or the people dancing. There were teenagers, middle aged couples, bald men, handsome besuited men and one old lady in a hat dancing on her own. It was frenetic, but everybody was totally concentrated on their moves. Some sprinkled the floor with talcum powder to stop friction getting in the way of their feet while others made serious looking hand gestures to their partners, seeming to indicate which way they should whirl them around next. Certain couples patrolled their own particular section of floor, cutting off any potential incursions by others with a steely glare. The energy of the whole place was just phenomenal and I had the most amazing evening there.
It all started to wind down at around 2a.m. The boyfriend told the trumpeter how good he was in broken, mojito-tinged French. They seemed to understand each other well. After such a full day I should have been staggering back up the hill again to Rue Mouffetard, but the journey didn't seem difficult at all. Maybe I flew. Anyway we made it back to bed and sleep, but just a little sleep. The following day was the first Sunday in the month, meaning that all French national museums in Paris were free to enter. Free being my favourite price, I was keen to take advantage of this. So in a happy, sleepy, post-birthday fog we took on the Musee d'Orsay, having got there early to avoid the queues that had put us off going there before. It was good. They had a book about Rodin and hands in the bookshop, too. All things considered, it was a great way to commence my thirties. I just hope the rest of the coming decade is going to be as good!
Les Cinq Saveurs is not just a veggie restaurant, it's a full on macrobiotic festival. My French is pretty bad, but I swear the label on the beer I had last time I was there promised that it was biodynamic, harvested at a certain phase of the moon and had some sort of friendly bacteria in it. It was such a pleasure to find a really good vegetarian restaurant, especially in Paris where meat is loved so greatly. As a veggie, even though I'm not super-strict, I find myself eating the compromise dish on the menu quite a lot - the cheesy pasta or the omelette, so I love having a wide choice (mind you, we can't eat at such places too often - the boyfriend's stomach tends to react violently to too many beans - but every now and again is better than never). So I was really looking forward to going back to Les Cinq Saveurs, but unfortunately when we got to Paris we found they were shut for their annual holiday. We ended up going to another, random vegetarian place we found on one of our walks instead.
Le Grenier de Notre Dame is a tiny place, rather appropriately established in 1978 (like me). The food turned out to be really good. There were even some extremely healthy looking toasted seeds served as a snack with our champagne apperitif. I rather liked the juxtaposition of health and decadence caught up in that. For my main course I had an immense vegetarian paella, with lots of black olives and cashew nuts, while the boyfriend had a vegetable cassoulet. We topped it all off with mousses - he raspberry, me chocolate. Joy of joys, I cannot describe to you my excitement when these arrived at the table presented in the most gloriously kitsch manner, topped off with plastic palm trees!
Resisting the temptation to hula down the steep spiral staircase in honour of the fantastic plastic trees, we left the restaurant. Paris around the start of the new year was a beautiful place. The Christmas lights, trees and decorations were still up everywhere, there was an ice rink in front of the town hall and from billboards on every street corner the Mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, was wishing us a Bonne Annee. The French make a big deal of Epiphany (6th January - the day after my birthday) so everybody was still in a festive mood. Full of champagne, a rather nice vin d'Alsace and lots of vegetarian food, and buoyed up by the jovial city atmosphere, we decided to go to a famous Parisian jazz club. Le Caveau de La Huchette has a bar on the ground floor, but we wanted to be downstairs in the cellar. The place was full, absolutely crowded with people and very hot. For a long time we just hung around on the stairs, listening to the band play some unfamiliar but frantic swing and be-bop. If we had been at a similar place in England I reckon some officious health and safety person would have told us we couldn't stand there, I'm sure of it, but France is different so we could soak up the atmosphere without being molested.
Revived with cocktails from the bar and taking advantage of the break between sets, we found a better perching place near the stage and the dancefloor. Once the band started up again it was hard to know who to watch - them or the people dancing. There were teenagers, middle aged couples, bald men, handsome besuited men and one old lady in a hat dancing on her own. It was frenetic, but everybody was totally concentrated on their moves. Some sprinkled the floor with talcum powder to stop friction getting in the way of their feet while others made serious looking hand gestures to their partners, seeming to indicate which way they should whirl them around next. Certain couples patrolled their own particular section of floor, cutting off any potential incursions by others with a steely glare. The energy of the whole place was just phenomenal and I had the most amazing evening there.
It all started to wind down at around 2a.m. The boyfriend told the trumpeter how good he was in broken, mojito-tinged French. They seemed to understand each other well. After such a full day I should have been staggering back up the hill again to Rue Mouffetard, but the journey didn't seem difficult at all. Maybe I flew. Anyway we made it back to bed and sleep, but just a little sleep. The following day was the first Sunday in the month, meaning that all French national museums in Paris were free to enter. Free being my favourite price, I was keen to take advantage of this. So in a happy, sleepy, post-birthday fog we took on the Musee d'Orsay, having got there early to avoid the queues that had put us off going there before. It was good. They had a book about Rodin and hands in the bookshop, too. All things considered, it was a great way to commence my thirties. I just hope the rest of the coming decade is going to be as good!
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