Home again. I have been in the car it seems for all eternity. Ahhh.

I have been away.  I am back.  It is bliss.  I feel as if I have run a marathon.

I sit here, feeling excessively tired but peaceful, on my sofa in my sitting room.  There was no blog last week, I did not have the time.  This is where I long for staff, so that I always have time for the fun things in life, but as yet I have no staff.  I have an erratic Giant Boy, some moderately helpful lodgers when they are around (they are always working or asleep or silent in their rooms), and helpful friends. Though as I write the lawn is being mown by the anxious Polish lodger, so for a brief while I am under the illusion that I have staff, and I am very grateful to him.  The last time I looked, he was dutifully making nice lines amongst the weeds and dandelions in the grass, and Giant Boy was bouncing on the trampoline.  Probably best that way.

There are no chauffeurs, housekeepers, admin people, PR managers or bubble bath staff on the books yet.  No gardeners, laundry workers, menu planners or pastry cooks in my life but they will come, oh yes, they will come.  When the time is right, I will start by interviewing the pastry cooks. They will be asked to make giant pastry swans and small pistachio tarts and I will select the best one by working through the swans and tarts until I have made my decision.  And if I can't make a decision, I will employ them all.

I woke late this morning after a terrible dream where my friend Olivia was legging it into the distance away from me on a railway platform, and I could only stand still and sway, with trains featuring somehow somewhere - I woke late to find the room spinning around me when I stood up, and wondered if perhaps I was dying.  The room was coming up to meet me.  If I get to the bathroom, I said to myself, and I am still alive, I am simply over tired and the cure for it is 1.  Bed  2.  Bed.  3.  A Pastry Cook. (to cook, the pastry cook does not leave the kitchen).

Let us have a snippet of what I have been up to.  I am too tired to make long paragraphs (or sentences) so we are going to have bite size chunks - and this will suit you, too much and you will also find the room spinning and think that you are dying.  Then you too will have to go to bed with a Pastry Cook and then the whole world will start to spin.  So here is a selection of what I have been doing

• Circling the globe twice in the car
• Spending nights with friends while having - 
• Meetings with people about AGD, the Conversations and Art
• Driving a lot
• Lunch parties
• Driving
• Dinner parties
• Late nights
• Driving
• Taking Eileen to Heathrow to move to Tanzania for 3 years
• Piling my car with stuff Eileen does not want any more like her flat screen telly
• More of the above with knobs on
• Driving

Twenty First Birthday Party

Oldest Son was 21 this week.  It was a low key affair, and we had a jolly breakfast with chocolate croissants, mango and pineapple smoothies, cards and presents.  He used to love the Spice Girls so Giant Boy put them on and we remembered how Older Son used to dance to I tell you want I want what I really really want in an orange Spice Girl tee shirt when he was about 3 years old.  

Then it was time to have a smoke in the garden and get back to being cool and detached.  The real partying began when he left to go to London later on in the day, and I think they are still going now.

Yeah, well, still Spice Girls fans.  

Dolly Parton

Fancy Girl took her tired old Mum to a Dolly Parton concert at the O2 in London.  It was as wonderful as you can imagine, and I had an absolute ball.  Dolly is in her late sixties and belts around the stage for hours night after night in high heels and I have come away more amazed that she is not tired and I am, than with her spangly sequinned shorts and tops.  I expect Dolly has about three pastry cooks.  

Waiting for Dolly with my own Dolly, Fancy Girl with her tired old Mama who is sitting down for the whole concert due to not having enough pastry cooks to help her

Tanzania

I spent yesterday with Eileen in her flat as she prepared to leave it for three years.  She has moved to Tanzania to work over there for HMRC.  I got, as you read above, the flat screen telly and she doesn't know this, but all the veggie sausages in her freezer.  We went to Heathrow in a taxi, and when we said goodbye we both cried.  That surprised us both, and I have been feeling very lonely ever since.  I had to get back to her flat in Norbury to collect my car, and check a few things for her.  It was then that I found the freezer full of Linda McCartney veggie sausages and decided that every cloud has a silver lining.  

It was all a bit sad, so here is the Departure Gate behind which Eileen has gone to Dar Es Salaam and I went back to Bognor without her.

Work and that kind of stuff

I am so sorry, there is work, I do care about the dying, but I can't remember anything about it.  I have been having meetings, I have been organising the Conversations, I have been agreeing to take AGD to places but that is about it. I wrote it all down and everything I agreed to will happen, (if they remind me), but what with the lack of staff and the spinning head, I am not too sure I even went away, I am not even sure I saw Dolly.  Maybe Eileen is in the kitchen and we never really went to the Departure Gates at Heathrow....

I am going back to bed (without a pastry cook working on any pastry for me in the kitchen) now, so that tomorrow I can focus in the studio.  I do have a new portrait to do, and I have been thinking about something new for AGD too.  The idea is so unformed that I will let it make a bit more sense before putting it down for you all to see.  My dear friend Lizzie, the musician who wrote the piano music for AGD, has gone on tour again in America and has left me her cottage for the month of July.  I aim to get there as soon as I can, for a little while, to think things through for AGD and what it all means now that I am no longer painting for it.

Until then, it is probably not a good idea to ask my anxious Polish lodger to rustle up a three course meal for me, he doesn't know he filled the Staffing Dream briefly while mowing the lawn earlier.  He wouldn't understand.  I will just have to make some tea, put some veggie sausages in the oven, and give up for the day.  

This really will be good.  I am on the ball here, and Gail and I intend to roll these out as often as we can.  See you there. Exciting!