Getting a life......

The look of horror on my goddaughter's face said it all:
"But why not?" she whispered, confused and saddened at the same time.
All I'd said was, I don't do 'Bake Off'. Or 'Strictly' or 'X Factor'. Or 'Masterchef'.
So now it's out there. It's not that I don't do TV. I love TV. I love 'Nurse Jackie', 'Veep', 'Who Do You Think You Are', Graham Norton ...... Michael Portillo on a train to anywhere. 'Mad Men' could be my specialised subject. However, should I look blank when a friend says:
"Did you see Mary last night?"
I am bombarded with a million reasons why Sue Perkins is saving the human race, one soggy-bottom at a time. It's honestly not a judgement call. I'd fight for the right for you to watch it. I just don't love food shows. Or competitions. But don't get me wrong, I love cake. It's just that watching it makes me hungry.

It's the same with Facebook. I don't do that either and it makes people very mad. And I don't tweet. Or get Linkedin. Until recently that is, when in order to validate myself and prove I existed, so I could join something I subsequently didn't join, I had to link up. Overnight I became connected to hundreds of people, many of which I have never heard of and have nothing in common with.

Last week I went out to a performance at a local gallery. I saw someone I'd met where I'd worked last year. She knew the gallery Director and introduced me. She knew someone she thought I should meet who works in the same area as me. They also know a writer/artist I met a few years ago and really admire who is having a show next month and invited me to the private view.

Top tip: get linked in by going out. 

French without tears.......

I lay on a lounger, canopied by twisted vines, knotted through with climbing roses, my bare legs and pale toes warmed by the hot autumn sunshine; I am in France, enjoying the last of the pink wine ......... not now of course, now I'm back home, swaddled in winter woollies, playing catch-up with the sky plus (oh the anxiety of trying to get through Mad Men and Downton Abbey before they roll round again......). But, for a few days, I was away.

'Do you like chestnuts?' asked my friend.

'Yes I do,' I said, 'I love them.'

I had decided some time out was needed. So, armed with a ludicrously cheep return flight to Rodez (honestly, it cost more to get to Stanstead and back.....) I'd packed my ryan-air-sized-suitcase and wheeled off to the Aveyron, in south central France, to stay with an old friend and her young family.

'Right then, lets walk up the track and get some,' she said, 'kids....'

Entente cordial reigns supreme in this multi-cultural home, made-up as it is of a German, two from Vietnam, two from Mali and a Brit..... all abroad. Really, it's like visiting the UN. I stuffed first my pockets and then the children's, with the shiny, fallen chestnuts and we trudged back to the house: an old stone farmhouse, beautifully restored over the many years they have lived there, with the creative eye of a real artist.

'Do you not prick the nuts first?' I asked.

'No,' said my friend, 'I don't think so.'

And so we sat in the heavenly kitchen, hand-painted, patterned walls, strung with chandeliers and the kids' artistic endeavours, listening to the sound of exploding marrons, buried deep beneath the embers of the range. And drank the pink wine.

It wasn't a long trip and I have never visited so late in the year before, but a change, as they say, is as good as a rest. We picked the last of the red tomatoes and yellow courgettes from the vegetable patch, all part of the beautiful garden, it's winding paths and stone steps leading to hidden treasures buried amongst the flora and fauna (gardening: an unknown skill my friend developed after leaving London 20-odd years ago, with enormous success) and we ate soft cheeses and ripe figs sitting in the sunshine. This is an area silenced but for the sound of rutting bulls and the squawk of force-fed geese, this is peace and quite on a grand scale, no roads rage or sirens whale, just the occasional whine of a moped and the bark of a distant dog. And the crunch of gravel under foot as more pink wine is brought to the table.

I ate thick slabs of moist date and walnut cake, baked with the walnuts collected by the children, and stirred the quince jam made with the quinces that hung heavily from the tree close to where we sat and ate, which would fall suddenly with a thud; their heady, perfumed scent still haunts my nostrils. I slept soundly in a large, attic room with a small, single window, waking every morning to a view of butterscotch-coloured cornfields and undulating, French-green, countryside, studded with ex-pats. It was good. Could I live there? Without my sofa cinema, theatre, openings, private views? No, not right now. But I can still eat, drink, play........

Top-tip: go see 'The Social Network', so, so entertaining and absolutely why I've never done Facebook.......

No comfort from strangers....

I have a friend who is not so much dating as 'flinging' with a man who broke her heart over 20 years ago. He married the girl he'd dumped her for, now he's divorced. Home alone, he presumably mused upon his past.... a common event when the present goes wrong and we can't see a future. He found her on Facebook. She's not mad about him but she was free. Another friend was 'reunited' by mutual friends, with a man with whom she'd had a one-night stand 25 years earlier. Both now divorced with kids growing up, they managed 18 months of romantic bliss until France (the country that is) put an end to it. I myself clocked up several years with the good friend of a good friend, a man whose path I'd crisscrossed for over 20 years, until his mid-life crisis proved you really can't teach an old dog new tricks, but that's a whole other story (as Norman Mailer's last wife so brilliantly put it: 'I bought a ticket to the circus. I don't know why I was surprised to see elephants....') In fact, just recently I was approached by two gentlemen callers: one from the very-long-time-ago past, the other a mere ten years ago, both passing through and in need of company.

It's a story I keep hearing recently: 'we actually met years ago....'. Maybe it's an age thing. When you've been around for quite a lot of years there's been enough time for divorce or death to kick in. And there is something strangely comforting in a past remembered if not shared, a suggestion of known provenance rather than the leap of faith into the unknown arms of a stranger. Which has it's place. And it's time. But is a return to the past a good move? Or are we trying to fit a square peg into a round hole? If it didn't happen then, why will it work now? Or was it just the timing that was out, the planets wrongly aliened, the fact you'd already let the wrong one in?

The joy of dating past forty is no less pockmarked by pain, than at any other time. In fact it's worse. Devoid of youthful resilience and an endless supply of potential suitors, it's a tough call. The Internet, that bastion of open-hearted lust monkeys, is no place for old people. The extremely attractive, financially sorted girlfriend who'd flirted with a few virtual dates before she found love in the arms of the old flame from France, recently returned to the net and decided to be honest about her age of 55. Nothing, no one, zilch, zero, not even one of the bald boys. Embracing her maturity, she tried an over 50s site and yes, there were takers, but.......they were all so old. Is the only way forward to go backwards? It's harder for women, we can't even grow old disgracefully. Take some 50 year old man, fill him full of vodka, sit him at a bar with a fag on (oh those were the days) and women will be queuing round the bloke (see Serge for verification....) try the reverse as a women? Not such a good look. And no one wants to wake up looking like Bill Wyman. Oh the injustice of aging.......

Top tip: keep young and beautiful with 2 parts flaxseed (also known as linseed, who knew...) 1 part pumpkin, sesame and sunflower seeds (Neal's Yard make this ready mixed) quick whizz in the grinder and sprinkle on cereal, soups......anything. Am for 2 large spoonfuls a day for all your omega needs.