Just in case you were wondering what to get me…..it’s the new Ferrari California. Apparently it’s very versatile. Although there isn’t much room for the kids. Oh well, never mind.
I wouldn’t mind it for my birthday either, which is tomorrow by the way. I plan to spend several hours in a spa and drink lots of pink champagne, though possibly not at the same time.
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2009
My stepson Hugo is here. He is wonderful. But he wears his boxer shorts underneath his swimming trunks. What’s that all about?
Right, down to business…we saw the house. It is heavenly, totally heavenly. It was built in 1750 and looks like it will last another few hundred years. It is all marble, stone and wood. Solid, safe and glorious. It reminds me a little of an English farmhouse.
We played tennis on the tennis court. I played well and Leo lost a tooth. A sure sign that we must buy it. Having said that we can’t afford the asking price, but are keen to offer less. In part because we have just been told by the lady in the boulangerie in the nearest town (and they know everything) that we it is only worth a third of the asking price. But when you’re in love it’s hard to be practical….
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2009
….Leonardo and er, some girl at summer camp. Yes, he is a little sketchy on the details but, he is in love and engaged.
“Why?” I asked him.
“Mummy, you know I’m going to have dark hair when I grow up. She’s got dark curly hair. That’s the thing,” he explained.
“Lovely. What’s her name?”
“She’s called…er, I have no idea.”
He explained that she is one of a family of five children. And furthermore one of triplets. “You got the ones in the middle what’s this size,” he demonstrated to me. “Well she’s one of those.”
He is very sweet, talks about her all the time and calls her his girlfriend (mainly I am guessing because he can’t remember her name). She apparently calls him “cute boy” and loves his hair going to one side. He is very worried that he won’t see her when camp finishes tomorrow, but I have promised to get her number.
I feel bad for Miranda, but she did go to Venezuela for the summer. What’s a boy to do….?
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2009
As I said, Bea and Olivia could not join Facebook because they are too young. Instead they joined the BBC’s social networking site for kids. This is Bea’s bio, which was sent to me as I had to approve it before it went live:
my name is bea and i love singging and i love dancing i love watching tele but not all the time i love playing lots of games i have 2 sisters and 2 brothers my little brother is called leonardo and hes five years old he loves spiderman then my oldest sister she is called jullia and she is 15 years old my other oldest sister is 10 she is named olivia then i have my oldest brother named hugo he is 16 years old i live at abu dhabi at 25 strret little 8 street i love shopping my secret is that i love a boy in france he has black hair and he’s like me
It was the last sentence that broke my heart. I asked Olivia if it is the boy I suspect it is, the one she has always loved, a little cutie called Julien who was in her class and is the son of the local woodman (who is also quite cute).
“Yes,” she said. “She sometimes thinks she sees him in the street and then she thinks ‘oh he’s here in Abu Dhabi’ but it’s never him.”
I haven’t talked to Bea about it, Olivia says I’m not meant to know.
I feel terrible dragging her away from her first love and even more terrible that I had no idea she even thought about him any more.
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2009
Never mind the arrival of the Daily Mail in the region, the big news yesterday was that Louis has a girlfriend. “She’s called Elisa. They even kissed on the lips,” Leo told us when he came home from school. He was more scandalised than my mother was when I showed up at home with dreadlocks. Actually come to think of it, she wasn’t remotely scandalised.
Anyway, Leo was shocked. Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells. Then this evening he came home looking all pleased with himself.
“I kissed Louis’ girlfriend,” he told me happily chomping on a carrot.
“Didn’t he mind?” I asked.
“We was hiding,” he replied, somewhat smugly. This girl spells trouble, at four years old. So does my son.
“Mummy, who will I marry?” Leo asked after a minute or two.
“Who do you want to marry?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe Louis’ girlfriend,” he said. “But definitely someone with long hair.”
Talking of marriage – one of the ways they may illustrate the Mail serialisation of the book is to show me ten years ago at our wedding (June 1998) and compare the picture with me now, wearing the same dress. Here is an exclusive sneak preview. The photographer kindly said I could publish it for free with a credit. His name is Ben Lister and his website is www.benlister.com.
When I sent my mother the picture she called to say how amazing it was that I could still get into the same dress ten years on. What most readers of the Mail won’t realise is that the back wasn’t done up.
So the pressing question of the day, apart from who will Leo marry, is when did my rib-cage grow, and why?
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2008
So it’s finally happened. Well I say finally, she is only seven, but it was only a matter of time. Bea has a boyfriend. She came home yesterday from the leisure centre where French schoolchildren spend half-term if they’re not skiing glowing with the news.
“I’ve got a boyfriend, I’ve got a boyfriend,” she chanted all around the house. I asked all the obvious questions like what does he look like, where does he live, what do his parents do, can he ride a bike, does he play rugby, where does he go to school?
“He looks like a girl,” said Bea. “And he’s got a girlfriend.” Then she went back to singing and prancing around the room like a ballerina on acid.
So not a great start is my conclusion. Rupert is more concerned for the boy, Sammie as he is called.
“In Papua New Guinea they advise you that if you have a car crash you should head for the airport immediately and get the first plane out of the country,” he said as he watched Bea celebrate her new relationship. “I strongly suggest Sammie does the same.”
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2008
I find myself in the Hotel Amour in the red light district of Paris. My room is called the Library room, the far wall is lined with French porn books and magazines. The remaining walls are painted black and the only piece of furniture in the room is a large double bed.
I have not run off for a dirty weekend with some porn-obsessed Frenchman. I am with Rupert who is writing a series of Paris hotel reviews for the Times. Today we leave our den of iniquity and head for a hotel without naked women on the walls.
Last night we ventured out into the surrounding red light district. As we walked past yet another sex shop Rupert commented that there is something deeply unsexy about sex shops. I agree. They are cheap looking, badly designed, badly lit and full of unsavory characters. In fact I don’t really understand the point of porn. In our hotel there are tasteful black and white photos of naked women on the walls as you go up the stairs. They look quite sexy. If they were pornographic they would not be. It’s like that old saying that using the feather is sexy, using the whole chicken is perverted.
Maybe it’s an age thing, but I was in no way tempted to go into any of the sex shops we saw, even the one that rather intriguingly offered to cater for lesbians, homosexuals and amateurs.
There is no doubt about which category I fall into.
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell
“Come to lunch,” he said. “My wife is away.”
Whereas when we last saw each other twenty years ago this might have been an invitation to spend the afternoon in bed, now that we’re middle-aged it was not my body Heathcliff was after, but my children. His wife being away he had to entertain his three somehow, and three children of a similar age sounded like a good idea.
So off we went with directions to his house, a few miles away from my mother’s. I won’t pretend I wasn’t nervous. I was. Heaven knows why. But seeing a man I last saw on my 21st birthday and was madly in love with for several years suddenly seemed very scary. A friend of mine said it was a stupid thing to do, that it would shatter my illusions and ruin the image of my first love. My mother said it was a good thing to do; dispel the myth once and for all (she never liked him).
I explained to the children who he was, how I was mad about him and that he never cared for me. “Why was he not in love with you?” asked Bea on the way there. “Weren’t you pretty enough? I think you’re very pretty with your long hair and bras with secret pockets.”
“Thank you darling,” I said, praying she wouldn’t mention the secret pockets to Heathcliff.
We arrived at his house and he came out to greet us. He looked, well, pretty good actually. Older,but really just the same. He was sweet, very welcoming, cooked home-made bolognese sauce as we gossiped about people we knew all those years ago.
I am sad to report though that Heathcliff showed about as much interest in me today as he did twenty years ago. In fact I don’t think he was any the wiser about me when we left at 5pm than he was when we showed up at 12.
The upside is he is mad about chocolate and is very good at making it. We tasted some truffles, they were divine. On the way home Olivia said she could still taste them.
His children were sweet. Rather gratifyingly his seven-year-old son fell in love with Olivia. What did she think of him?
“He’s far too ugly for me,” I heard her tell my mother. Revenge is even sweeter than a chocolate truffle.
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007
When I was in London last I met Heathcliff’s wife. You may remember Heathcliff. He was the first love of my life and we were recently put in touch through a mutual friend. I have yet to see him again after more than 20 years but I have met the mother of his three children.
She happened to be having lunch in the same restaurant as the above-mentioned mutual friend and I. The friend, being rather mischievous, called her over and introduced us. He didn’t let on that I knew Heathcliff years ago and had been desperately in love with him.
So what did I think of this woman who ended up with the man I wasted more time dreaming about than I care to remember? It was slightly uncanny because she looked very similar to him; dark hair, fine features. She seemed rather cold, but attractive, and had a very deep sexy voice (rather like his). At one stage he called and they chatted like wives and husbands do. She called him darling and told him what train she’d be home on and not to forget someone’s gym kit. Just a normal domestic scene but I found it hard to grasp that that was Heathcliff on the phone being someone’s husband and father. To me I suppose he is still 19 and getting high in nightclubs.
Apparently his wife didn’t think much of me. “She was rather tartily dressed,” my source tells me she reported to Heathcliff. Tartily dressed indeed. I was wearing jeans, flat shoes (Tod’s, natch), a Sonia Rykiel strappy top and a Hobbs cardigan. Hardly play-boy bunny kit.
At first I was furious, but then I remembered that she’s meant to be a lesbian. So maybe tartily dressed is a good thing?
Meanwhile my youngest daughter Bea has me sussed. “This is mummy,” she announced this morning. “She goes to the shop and comes back with lots of bread which she puts in the freezer. Then she takes it out. But it’s too hard to eat so she feeds it to the ducks.”
Maybe I should stop by the river on the way home from the bakery; cut out the middleman?
Thank you all for your lovely comments and reviews as per yesterday’s blog. I hope that miserable onion is really bitter now s/he’s almost been pushed off the amazon page.
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007
An article in the Daily Mail today tells us that men are now too scared to flatter women or to flirt with them. Apparently in our PC times a compliment is all too easily seen as an insult. So a ‘you look nice today’ can be miscontrued as either ‘I want to sleep with you’ or ‘you looked terrible yesterday’ or ‘I want to borrow your stapler/pen/hairbrush’.
When I was in London last week we had dinner with some friends at the Groucho Club in London (like you do). Towards the end of dinner I went to the loo. Walking in through the door of the restaurant bit as I walked out was a young man.
“I don’t mean to flirt or anything,” he said. “But you’re really very pretty.”
This comment didn’t make me want to call my lawyer, or my husband, or glare at the man with feminist rancour. No, it made me want to throw my arms around him. But as I concluded he was possibly myopic or deranged or drunk or in fact a combination of all three I resisted. But I floated back to our table and have to say I have only just stopped floating several days later. “I’m really very pretty,” I tell myself at least 100 times a day.
Why do women bother to wear make-up, curl their hair, buy lip gloss and go on diets if it’s not in part to make themselves attractive to men? (Obviously it’s mainly to irritate other women) And what exactly is so wrong with them noticing? If there are any men reading this; go forth and flirt immediately.
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007
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