I think I'll be six now forever and ever.

(Blowing bubbles on my 20^th birthday.)

Hello gentle ladies and men. Please accept my apologies for my lack of updating. I have been working a lot, holidaying, volunteering with 3 year-olds, and trying to shift a never-ending cold (excuse me while I go blow my nose). I have a lot to write. In the meantime though, I’ll leave you with a short conversation that happened while I was serving a bald man and his friend coffee yesterday.

♥

Bald man: "Sorry for asking, hen, but are you old enough to work here."

Me: "Yes. I’m actually twenty."

Bald man’s (cheeky) friend: "Twenty? What... inches?"

Oh how very hilarious.

♥

I can just about guarantee you that every day I go into work, a customer will tell me how young I look or ask if I’m still in high school. I like to shock them with the truth: ‘No no, I’m in university. Going into third year. I'm twenty actually.' (Bam!)

(...if I'm honest
though,
I can't
quite
believe it myself.)

What ho!

I’m just home from a week’s holiday to jolly England. It was splendid, and quite sunny – warm enough for carrying our coats about (rather than actually wearing them). There was one wet day though. A very wet day. Thunder and lightning and rain bouncing off the ground sort of wet. It happened to be the day that we had picked for an open-top bus tour of Bath.

This picture was taken while we all huddled under the shelter of ‘the Assembly Halls’, mustering up the courage to brave the rains. These boys had given up trying to shield themselves. There was no point - they couldn't get any wetter. Water dripping off their noses, shoulders hunched, feet dragging, amused (but slightly pathetic) expressions on their faces. Poor things. We also looked rather similar by the time we got back to the car. It was quite exciting though. There is something of the sublime about being caught in a rain shower.

♥

I called my Grandpa this afternoon, and was telling him a bit about the holiday.

‘We went to London one day and saw the Lion King, and another day we went to Bath and ---‘

‘Did you get wet?’ He asked. A husky chuckling tumbled into my ear through the receiver. (This sort of humour is rooted deep in the bones of all the male members of this famliy.)

‘Yes. Very funny. We did get wet in Bath.’

four small things.

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Bonjour! The past few weeks I have been: working more hours in the cafe (which has been quite interesting – lots of funny customers, a saxophonist, and delicious mistake ‘hot chocolate brownie’ ice-cream sundaes), going to two conferences, finding out that I passed 2^nd year university (with ‘distinction’ – hooray!) and spending rather too much time pottering about the house doing nothing (which I must stop doing). I will write a proper post later. For now though, here are a few things that I’ve noticed...

(one). A car with eye-lashes...

(two). The fact that it’s June and it already looks like autumn. Brown, shrivelled, dead leaves. Something's wrong with the trees...

(three). Even though I’m not an ‘animal person’ ...when asked to look after pets, I inevitably end up falling a little bit in love with them and proceed to embarrass myself when they leave by bursting into tears. This has now happened twice: once when looking after Shadow the Dog for 3 months and just there when looking after Tasha the Cat for 10 days while my Grandparents were on holiday. (Incidentally... as I seem to be writing an awful lot about moustaches on this blog, I might as well continue and tell you that Tasha was so named because she has a white moustache. They’ve had her for 16 years, and I only just found this out.)

♥

(four). And my sister found this music last night which is lovely.

Thinking of moustaches...

I saw a moustachioed man at the train station on Tuesday. He looked rather like a walrus. He was fat, with braces to keep his trousers up. And it was a large moustache - a big, looping white one that covered half his face... but in such a way that it wasn’t a beard. Quite clever, really.

It must be very itchy to have so much hair on your face, though. And his wife must find him tickly to kiss. If he has a wife, that is. (One shouldn’t assume.) Maybe he can’t find one because of the hair-up-the-nose issue. Or maybe he chose to have the moustache instead of the wife. He might of. I can imagine it was an active decision that he made after his pie-loving sweetheart – Marion Appleberry – told him she would ‘only ever marry a clean-shaven man’.

He might have stood in front of the mirror the day after she said it – face covered in shaving foam, hand clutching his razor – wondering: did he love her enough?

‘Can I sacrifice this hairy beauty to marry Marion? Marion – my soul mate, my one true love, the apple(berry) of my eye? Will I shave it all off to be with her – that fine figure of a women who shares my passion for marmite on scones, and finds my interest in small-rodent taxidermy endearing? Will I? Will I?’

A dilemma to be sure.

‘Marion or moustache? Marion or moustache? Marion or ---’

 

He threw the razor to the floor. He splashed his cheeks with water.

‘Damn her facial-hair preferences!’ He (maybe) cried. ‘The moustache will always be first in my heart!’

Now he spends his days drifting around train stations, a living monument of how staying true to yourself, no matter what the cost, is possible!

 

(He’ll never admit it, but sometimes, when he is picking scone crumbs out his whiskers, he does feel a little lonely.)

♥

Pictures from: marc johns (again).