Of wrinkles, rabbits and roadshows

'Watch the mirror, count the lines,
The battle scars of all the good times'

So sang Soft Cell. It’s Marc Almond’s birthday today, too; I wonder if he feels old? I certainly do after a weekend of carousing: out for a meal on Friday, out to make the repeated acquaintance of Mr Gordon’s and Mr Bombay Sapphire on Saturday, then rounded off with a barbeque (of course it rained) on Sunday.

I need a weekend off to get over my weekend. I just can’t take the pace anymore. I don’t know how I ever did. At one point, going out three nights in a row would have signified a good time; now it signifies that a week of early nights is in order if I want to catch up on my beauty sleep and forestall any more on those insidious wrinkles.

The most bizarre thing about my weekend, however, was the taxi ride home on Saturday night. We climbed into a car with an avowed killer: our driver’s day job was in vermin control. He claimed to own more than 35 ferrets. Apparently they don’t smell if you clean them out every morning.

I spend much of my time avoiding rabbits when I’m driving. The taxi driver, however, spent most of the time trying not to avoid them. I postulated that knocking them down on purpose wasn’t really very fair. On the contrary, he responded, he was doing them a favour: the ones he knocked down had myxomatosis. How he could tell in the dark, while driving, I don’t know. I certainly couldn’t: maybe I should eat more carrots instead of giving them all to the Grey Mare, or it could be that my age is beginning to tell on my eyesight.

The Antiques Roadshow is in Alnwick tomorrow. Perhaps I should take myself along …

A night at the races

I returned from Friday’s night at the races with a cold, blisters on my feet and a lighter purse. The cold and blisters were, I believe, caused by my pursuit of glamour despite the intemperate weather. The lighter purse was due to a number of factors, including gin, Pimm’s and having to buy my own ticket.

I don’t normally pay to go racing on the night before the Northumberland Plate – my mate usually provides me with free tickets. Somewhere along the line, we managed to cross our wires and he got me tickets for Plate Day itself. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to go racing two days in a row – especially with jugs of Pimm’s (or should I say jugs of fruit and ice with a trickle of Pimm’s) costing £15 a shot. One of my friends was determined to drink champagne because she felt her usual pint wouldn’t complement her dress; she saw the price of the champers and stuck to lager.

Jump racing is my sport of choice, so each time I go to a flat meeting, I am bowled over by the Munchkin-esque stature of the jockeys. I am not terribly tall and I did have 3.5in heels on, but these guys barely reached my shoulder. I wonder how many of them are the equivalent of a female size zero and how many eating disorders are hidden under the brightly coloured silks? I wonder if the thrill of galloping home ahead of the opposition makes it worth missing your dinner. I contemplated this as I paid for my Indian takeaway on the way home.

Bottoms up!

I am a gin girl. Served in a long glass, with lots of ice, a generous slug of the necessary, a squeeze of lime on top, then rubbed around the rim before topping up with a tonic. For preference, the gin should be Bombay Sapphire (thank you Gill!) followed by Gordon’s; I’m not that adverse to unbranded stuff either. But it must be a thick wedge of lime not lemon; this is the only conscious Americanism I have.

I was once thanked for my gin-mixing skills in a wedding speech. I like to think I can mix a decent drink – and was put in mind of my mixing mentor by a comment on Drunk Mummy’s blog about pink gin.

I worked behind the student union bar when I was at university. The permanent bar manager was a small, lean, grey haired man, with a Wikipedia-esque knowledge of alcohol. An old bottle of Angostura Bitters lurked behind the bar; no one ever used it and I asked what it was for. A couple of dashes in an empty glass, a measure of gin, swirl it around and voila – pink gin.

Angostura Bitters, however, I was informed, was poisonous in large amounts. Guinness, he told me, was no good for vegetarians: apparently in days of yore, the fattest rats in Dublin lived in the brewery’s malting room and occasionally were swept into the mixture along with the grain. Bitter, he said, was fermented over fish scales.

He also told me the addition of quinine to tonic water dated back to the days of the British Empire. Apparently, it was used to guard against malaria and the only way the British could be persuaded to take it was in their G&T. I think a nice glass of gin would persuade me to take my medicine too…

Twenty-one

My little brother has just celebrated his 21st birthday. He is much taller - and certainly more grown-up than I was at that age.

I hit the magic number in the middle of a heatwave. It was the summer of Nessum Dorma and Gazza’s tears; Madonna was Vogueing and I had a holiday job picking strawberries. The majority of my big day was spent in bed feeling sorry for myself – I had lain in the sun too long the previous day and had burnt my back. I was tempted out with cards and parcels that had arrived in the post from my far-away family and friends, and a proffered glass of gin mixed with champagne. It made me maudlin and melodramatic.

It was a summer of transitions: I was a month out of university and a month out of the relationship with my first great love. I spent a lot of time navel-gazing as I hovered on the cusp between two different worlds. It was a time of freedom and opportunity, but I felt the rug had been pulled from under my feet.

If Dr Who offered to whiz me back there in the Tardis, it would be interesting to visit my 21-year-old self. I’d like to tell her that everything would work out OK; but I wouldn’t want to swap places with her.

Isn't this marvellous?

The lovely Gill at The Dark Blonde blog did it for me after I admired her Sean begging for absinthe.

Gill is a poet, writer and digital artist and her blog has some fabulous stuff on it - lots of which seems to be absinthe inspired...

Go have a look.