Christmas and New Year

The TB has the flu (again!) so it was just the 3 of us for Xmas, and the most christmassy part was drinking bucks' fizz and playing Cludeo by the fire!

I managed to turn out a top hole lunch of beef wellington and lava chocolate puddings with vanilla ice cream (not together, veg with the beef wellington and chocolate pudding after!) but I am rubbish at shopping for the long hall so we now have no eggs, hardly any bread, no butter and no fruit juice until the shops open tomorrow. It has finally stopped raining so I'm off to take the dog for a walk.

But first, a review of the year - hardly any travelling apart from Naples which I didn't like much. But I met JK, saw Patrick Stewart play Prospero Bought new house, got a whole dress size less fat, became self employed and I'm doing OK. I could use more work but the income hasn't dropped so next year is better they tell me - sounds good! I'm well on the way to having the major health issues sorted and that's a good thing, and doing lots of fun regular exercise, mostly down to the flexibilty of freelancing, hurrah. Notably, made some new friends which I'm especially proud of because the general view seems to be that it's impossible once you are over 40!

Things I am going to do in 2008 ( not resolutions because I've already booked some of them!)
- have an appointment with a professional stylist to go through my wardrobe and take me shopping.
- take a motorhome on a drive from San Francisco to LA via Yosemitie National Park
- take the AB riding on Holkham Beach
- and I'd really like to start a supper club, must think of some interesting people to ask........hmmm

Ploughing through snot

I know, I know it's boring, but honestly I have had this cold since the middle of November and it is starting to drive me more than slightly mental! I am responsible for a hefty slice of the profits of both Kleenex and Lemsip and am really starting to wonder what I have to do to shake this thing off.

I'm taking vitamins that are supposed to boost the immune system, echinacea, saunas, baths with tea tree oil and lavender. Lots of hot lemon and honey drinks. And bracing walks wearing a large woolly hat.

I can't sleep it off because of the whole sore back thing - and one is making the other worse I'm certain of it.

So if anyone out there in the blogverse is keeping the magical cure to themselves- do share, please!

Christmas for the Bewildered

Bloody hell, just tried to order meat for Xmas day and the order book is closed!! - eep so got to go to Butchers this afternoon and buy it, he swears that it will still be fine on Xmas day, I hope so! - eep

Amazon has yet to turn up with the presents so we could have old meat and no pressies - disaster! So much for leaving things until the last minute, but frankly Christmas is still a week away so it doesn' t feel all that last minutey!!

Better get round Waitrose for the other stuff tomorrow then and only leave the veg for Xmas eve.

I have given up on Christmas cards completely and everyone is going to get a nice email saying I love them loads but I've spent the card budget on buying books for a slum school in Manila! I Hope they approve.

Beecham's Powders and Bolly don't really mix

It is the season of Christmas parties, so of course I have a cold and a sore back, yes still, I have partaken of every quack cure known to woman (known to this woman) but still I sniff, and the skin on my face is drying and flaking off - I look like the Mummy.

But I am made of sterner stuff, and anyway it's too painful to lie in bed, so I headed off to the West End yesterday for lunch in an awfully nice restaurant called Pattersons. The reason this isn't a restaurant review is that I drank 3 glasses of champagne on an empty stomach and I can't remember what I ate! - but it was very nice.

And , oh joy, I was sitting next to a guy works with the woman who was the class sex pot when I was at Uni, and he said without any prompting "but God, I can't beleive you were in the same class as P you look SO much younger than she does." Call me shallow but I've waited 25 years for that one - hurrah!

Then came the horrible ending to any Xmas lunch the walk east up Oxford St looking for a cab, it is truly a magical time of year as I found one before the Tottenham Court Rd , so home before 10 - and the superior muscle relaxant qualities of Bollinger meant I had my best nights sleep for weeks!

Xmas Pudding Ice Cream

As close as I get so making my own puddings! - S0 enjoy

1 small tub double cream - lightly whipped
250ml tub of best Vanilla Custard - Watirose Vanilla Custard is BRILLIANT for this
100 mg sultanas
100mg mixed peel
Slug of rum
Slug of Port
Juice of an orange
tsp of cinnamon or mixed spice

soak the fruit in the booze and orange juice and add the spice. Mix together the whipped cream and custard and then add the soaked fruit and booze. Freeze. If you can whip it as it's freezing or churn in an ice cream machine that is even better.

Fabulous on warm mince pies!! Or even better mincemeat shortbread -recipe to follow!

Stupid Back

My lower back hurts - really hurts. It hurts worst in bed at night, so bad that it wakes me up, but it's fine when I'm walking around or swimming or sitting or pretty much anything other than lying down.

This means that I am short of sleep and very very grumpy.

I have been to the chiropractor and have to go again on Saturday - there was an almighty click which she "adjusted" my lower spine and to be honest I've felt a bit sick ever since.

Perhaps I should just go out and spend £500 on a new memory foam mattress - the way I feel at the moment I would pay £500 for a good night's sleep!

I thought that I was fairly intelligent and reasonably well informed

I don't know if you watched the Tony Blair documentary last night. One thing still leaves me puzzled. He thought the war in Iraq was , I quote "morally the right thing to do".

I can understand why he thought it made economic sense - oil
I can understand why it might have been politically expedient - you don't argue with the USA
I can understand why he thought it might be in this country's best interests - ditto


But "Morally the right thing to do" - why? On what basis. Because it's not on any basis that has ever been rationally explained to me.

Lovely Weekend

Really nice weekend - although I'm starting to wonder if people come to stay with us for a bit of "regression therapy" , staying at Lippy's is a bit like being at your mum's when you were 10; you get to go swimming, take the dog for a walk, eat home made pizza and watch Robin Hood on Saturday night and get the papers and a roast dinner Sunday lunchtime. Perhaps running a country house hotel is my true calling? Who knows, it's a bit late now anyway!

In other news the parish magazine carries an announcement about the new "dog waste dispenser " on the village green......they actually mean a dispenser for poop scooping plastic bags, at least I think so. Meantime my own personal dog waste dispenser is asleep under the desk.

The inside of bloke's heads

TB "You can still tell that lad was born prematurley"

Lippy "How, he's not small for his age, in fact he's quite tall for a ten year old."


TB " No, not that, he just always looks a bit startled!"

Places I haven't been and would like to go to.

1. Sri Lanka
2. Angkor - Cambodia
3. Hong Kong
4. Palawan
5. Kota Kina Balu
6. Prauge
7. Barcelona
8. Berlin
9. Iceland
10. Big Sur - California
11. Sydney
12. Dubai

I really want a holiday!

How much for a letter?

When a client asks "how much for a letter" and I reply £180 plus VAT it always sounds ludicrous, even to me!

But in truth, it's never just a letter - I need to understand the case, make sure that the person who actually owes the money is the same as the person the client tells me owes the money (you wouldn't beleive how often it's someone else entirley) , remind the client they can charge interest and check out the invoice figure and the figure I'm being told to collect add up.

And that (along with money laundering compliance etc) takes about an hour - my hourly rate is £180 which is how a letter can cost £180 plus VAT

Lippys Occasional Gude to London Restaurants no - I've lost count now!

Anyway Salaam Namaste in Millman St, Bloomsbury (not far from Coram Fields!)

Lovely food, really really lovely - Fish curry with green mango, Duck Breast in a spicy yoghurt sauce that I can't remember the name of ( a couple of pints of Cobra and the senior moments really start to kick in!). The Tarragon Squid starter merits a very special mention - it was gorgeous and I've never seen or tasted it anywhere else.

It's also worth mentioning that they have 20% off between 5.30 and 7.00 so if your hungry and don't mind eating early , go for it! Whole lot including the beer was just over £20 each - bargin!

One odd thing, men and women don't seem to come to this restaurant together! Apart from one table of BIP's (British Indian Princesses) complete with Mulberry handbags and chaperone, the place was full of cricket club types trying to be funny. So you must go because the food deserves much better!

Lovely attentive service so if you do go leave a big tip!

Occupational Hazard

I was arranging to go out to supper with a friend and this happened;

Friend : "Shall we go to this new restaurant, it's got great reviews?"

Lippy : "No, I sued them when they were still at their old place and they might remember!"

Bit of An Animal?

Well, now you're talking!

Sebastian Chabal.................ooh yeah baby!

Headspace

Yesterday 160 people lost their jobs because, at least in part, one of my client's didn't beleive me when I told him what he needed to do.

My lack of persuasive skills means 160 people with no income just before Christmas.

It's not my fault, I gave him the right answer, and sketched out a plan that would have kept everyone happy and kept him trading.

There is something weird going on too - everyone you speak to has run into an ex-lover and is having a hard time rationalising it. Maybe it's a horoscope thing. Me, I still love everyone I've ever loved - it's my strength and my weakness.

It's going to be a long, cold winter, I can feel it setting in .

Slap!

I'm not really a make up girl, I'm more a "cover your face in vaseline and go horse riding in a force 8 gale" type.

However, I am now "on camera talent" to coin the phrase and have my very own "Mac Pro" Card - so I decided to brave the depths of Neal St ( too trendy by half) yesterday afternoon and get shown how to do make up for a shoot.

What a performance - it takes an hour to do make up properly and even then I don't look that fab. But what is startling is how much make up it takes to even show up under lights. What looks and feels like half a ton of slap in real life, is hardly seen on a camera. See Exhibit 1 - 50 tonnes of eyeliner not looking like 50 tonnes of eyeliner. Weird!

Retro Cooking - Chilled Cheesecake

Back at early teenage parties in the 70's , well on my less than trendy housing estate on the outskirts of Stoke anyway, there was a bit of a craze for cheesecake and cider...a more vomit inducing combination is difficult to come up with, but we were aiming for it.

Anyway, in the spirit of all things nostalgic I decided to make a chilled cherry cheesecake yesterday - you know the sort of thing, digestive biscuit and butter base , filling basically a mixture of Philadelphia Cheese, icing sugar and whipped cream, all topped off with cherry conserve. Heart attack on a plate. And you know what, it wasn't half bad. Not something you'd want to eat every week (without throwing up, but stop right there because that's an eating disorder missy!) because you would be the size of a small house, but I won't be waiting another 30 years to make another one....probably because I may well be dead by then.

Fashion

According to December's Vogue, the Jack Russell Terrier is the Fashionista's dog of choice.

Looks like I'm right on trend!

So much for the AB telling me I'm insufficiently stylish!

Home Working

The Times is seriously starting to annoy me on this subject "home working = low productivity" according to it's correspondent this morning.

Dear Times Correspondent Woman,

This morning in your opinion column you concluded that home working is no sort of working life at all. And certainly not any sort of effective working life.

Sorry love but no, I used to bill 5 hours a day when I worked in a law firm and I bill 5 hours a day now. Just because you have the self discipline of a jelly fish doesn't mean everyone else does. I do not eat all the time because the fridge is close, in fact I probably eat a lot less because there isn't a Starbucks around the corner.... in fact if you could install my own private Starbucks barrista in my kitchen (prefereably one who looks like Orlando Bloom) then my life would be absolutley perfect in stead of just pretty much perfect.

I still get up, get dressed , wash, take child to school and keep pretty much normal office hours. What I don't do is spend 2 hours travelling in and out of the city every day wasting my time and the planet's resources.

So sorry you haven't got any self discipline or motivation dear Times correspondent but please don't conclude from the fact that you can't do it, that no other bugger can!

Seethingly yours
Lippy

The Biology of Winter Ailments

Having spent a lot of the last week coughing and sneezing I've become somewhat obsessed with snot.

When you have a cold what factors determine the amount of snot you produce? No really, some people seem to just have a little sniffle, others are practically hoiking up buckets of slime. Is it genetic? Because it's a protein secretion is it diet linked like lactation - do better fed people produce more snot? Is it linked to the nature of the virus infection itself - I know bacterial secondaries make it thicker and more green. And if you cough so hard you burst a blood vessel it's the blood that turns it brown.

But there is a huge variation in texture from foam to practically putty - that must be in some part due to a dilution factor?

There has to be PhD in this for someone. Sponsored by Kleenex perhaps - "The Absorbent Quality of Tissues in relation to the defined Classes of Snot Produced by The Common Cold"