The house-hunting continues apace. A sluggish, disorganised pace, like a tortoise with a lot on her mind. I partly blame London for this as rent seems to be so inexplicably high for the grotty wretched griefholes on offer. Today i found myself edging my search up further and further into the suburbs of North London until i accidentally found myself eyeing up a flat in Watford. Imagine that?!! ME, voluntarily living here in Watford hahahaha, i cackled, this evening, regaling my parents’ friends with this hilarious thought, while they treated me to an unamused face that said ‘I live in Watford. Voluntarily. Your point is..?’

My parents and I have never seen eye to eye on Watford. They say it’s nice, i say they’re confusing ‘nice’ with ‘horrible’, probably, i console them, they’ve got a bit confused by Nice biscuits, which IS an irresponsibly confusing brand name. No, they snap, ungratefully shaking off their slankets, I am NOT confused, it is NICE. Yes yes i coo soothingly, tucking them in harder.

Watford’s my hometown, i was born and raised here. Rather than engendering any loyalty in me, this simply means i’ve had 28 years to eye it up and formulate a watertight dislike of it. Test me on my dislike, i promise you, i will have prompt and vehement answers. It’s one of those places where if anyone is ever, god knows why, enumerating its charms, they will invariably say ‘good transport links’. This means ‘Don’t worry, you can leave it quickly.’ A town which uses the M25 as a permanent emergency exit is not going to reach Venice/Rome status any time soon. If a friend said he had a new girlfriend and one of her merits was ‘no mutual friends so it’s easy to dump her without any awkwardness’ you would not leap to peruse your hat collection.

I went to an engagement party today, where i had to bat away lots of ‘you next?!’ questions. To save time i employed one phrase throughout – “I’m too sexy to be a wife!” It doesn’t mean anything but if you deliver it with enough emphasis you can create the fleeting illusion of charisma, just long enough to squeeze past your interrogator and grab a slice of salami.*

Everyone was smart/casualling the fuck out of this engagement party, it began at 3pm, it was clearly the right thing to do. Everyone except my dad. I arrived late (naturally..) to find him in a natty grey suit, with a stripy shirt and pink tie, perched on a pouffe nibbling cheese. I turned up just in time to hear someone say how nice and smart he looked, to which he replied mournfully ‘well, i never get to dress up anymore.’ Which gave the impression that his handsomeness was his only pleasure in the evening, that this party was merely the conduit to his love of a suit. It also gave the (mistaken) impression that his life used to be all feathers and ballgowns and this evening was a brief escape from drudgery, a chance to peacock around like the old days. Admittedly, he used to have an afro (Mum swears the day he cut it off she realised to her displeasure he was shorter than she’d thought. But they were married by this point and back then ‘misleading hair’ was not grounds for divorce.)

Of course a pig in a petticoat is still going to roll in mud…as the saying very rarely goes. And sure enough, i left him playing nicely with his friends, having a conversation about parties, but it would seem, piecing back through the mess, that they strayed from parties to booze to overdoing it to sick, and i returned from the buffet clutching my spoils to hear him confiding ‘..but sometimes, even when ive got no more sick inside me, i keep retching..’ and then demonstrating, to a frankly sickened crowd. As i said yesterday, he gets lost in the finer points of tone and appropriate chitchat. I taught him a rule to help him know what to do, the rule is “If you’re saying it, you probably shouldn’t be. So stop, change the subject and mention in passing that you’re on very strong hayfever medication”. Rule for life there. Stick it in your bag for life and you’re set.

*There was a buffet, i wasn’t just grabbing at assorted meats like an opportunistic corpse-groper. If Watford was bedecked with cooked meats ripe for the picking i would be more inclined to love it, though it would be smelly in summer.

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