'Liz wants us to have a day out. She's doing an article for the Standard. Can you come on Sunday?' Asks Yvonna, while I'm watching Bunk vomit into a gutter at the Irish Wake (so The Wire's not all ripped bodies and shotguns).
'No, can't do Sunday. I'm doing Worcester Man.'
'Aw.' She doesn't even bother trying to persuade me as she knows it is futile. Worcester man has been in Croatia for a week and I haven't seen him since our Connaught weekend. Much as I love both Yvonna and Liz and the chance to further exploit my life in the pages of the Evening Standard, there is no contest. I say I could juggle around my work and go in the middle of the week and we settle on Wednesday for the day out.
'What's the story?' I ask.
'Remember when we went to Henry Moore?'
How could I forget? Worcester Man, who was a follower of this blog back then, felt so sorry for me after reading about me picking my way through a field of sheep droppings that he invited me out to lunch (I had much the same success with my ex husband twenty seven years ago when he asked me what I did at the weekends and I answered 'knitting'. Then I was lying. Unfortunately, about Henry Moore, I was telling mostly the truth.
'Well, we had so much fun..'
(We did? Yes, yes, okay, we did. Kinda.)
'...that Liz suggested it to her editor as an idea for a piece. Arty days out for people in London on a Staycation. She's going to hire us an open topped car.'
'So a sort of Thelma and Louise do Bexhill-on-Sea instead of Brad Pit..?'
I can't see it being big in the Box Office, can you - though a man in a pizza parlour in Boston did once ask my daughter if her 'mom was Susan Sarandon' when my hair was short and red (and presumably I looked eleven years older than I am)? Prospects of vigilante adventures don't improve when Liz tells me we'll have a photographer traveling with us, and says that I might 'wear an interesting coat.' I'm painting a picture, am I not... Three women of a certain age in 'interesting coats' and big jewellery, off to do a spot of culture. On My Single Friend - the dating site - Yvonna apparently put this on Liz's profile: 'She has lots of lovely coats.' You can just see the men beating the doors down.
We have already surmised that this is going to be a female only venture after deciding when we went to the Henry Moore house that if we had happened to run into three blokes wandering round a sculpture park, they would be tossers. Especially if, after guided tours and garden centres, they decided, as we did, that the ideal way to top off the day would be to go off and see an art film.
So there we are. A little foretaste of the future when all the men are dead and a day at the seaside means visiting a Modernist pavilion and not stripping off in the sand-dunes. In fact, when a day at the seaside means no ruddy sand at all but pebbles like bad cellulite as far as the eye can see.
I meet them in Hammersmith. Liz has been too busy to get the promised sports car so we're setting off in Yvonna's Volvo Estate (okay, it might be a BMW, but you're catching the vibe...) Liz and I should both be sponsored by LK Bennett as we're working the Mother of the Bride look in our frocks - me in the pink polka dots(it's my official photography frock) and her in blue roses (the shop assistant actually asked her 'when's the wedding?') and Yvonna has brought two dresses so she can change if she gets flushed... The photographer - a young, blonde, glamorous Southern gal from Atlanta arrives with a slow, sexy drawl, a camera bag and a six month pregnant bump.
Thelma and Louise plus two and a half in a hatchback. Yep, this is the stuff that road trips are made of. Far from Bourbon and a Beretta, the car is full of print-outs from AA route finder and bottles of Evian. Bexhill-on-Sea, on the other hand, is full of pensioners with a scattering of disaffected youth with purple hair on skateboards.
Worcester man texts: I'm sure you have brought the average age down by 50%
Nevertheless, amazingly, the sun is shining off the silver and bald heads lined along the undulating curve of the De La Warr Pavilion. The sky is desktop blue. The sea is flatter than a teenager's stomach. Yachts bob up and down like fat women's breasts in a jacuzzi. It's all quite beautiful and rela....
'Look at me. Smile. Now talk amongst yourselves. Look interested. Raise your glasses. Smile again. Hold that pose.' Says Rachel, click, click, clicking her camera.
...xing,
Or it would be if we didn't have to hold our stomachs in while the geriatric population of the south coast tutt at us disapprovingly for blocking their view of the sea, wondering why three large ladies who are obviously not models for anything other than Matron Monthly, are looking delighted and slightly deranged as they clutch glasses of rose, while having their photograph taken, endlessly, by the young pretty, pregnant one.
We are not the most popular people on the balcony, or the beach, or indeed in Bexhill.
'Can I have my picture done?' asks a small, fat boy of about twelve puffing on a cigarette, as an old man with a belly that hangs almost to his knees remarks that we seemed to be stalking him as everywhere he goes the three of us are posing for photographs. As I look around me I keep thinking of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and the lyrics from that song by The Crash Test Dummies:
Someday I'll have a disappearing hairline
Someday I'll wear pyjamas in the daytime
but substitute 'iron perm with Dame Edna Average curls' for the disappearing hairline. Someday, I'll wear polyester because it drips dry, and pants that come up to my armpits. Someday my stomach will follow a beat behind the rest of me (as my backside already does according the chap who told me recently that I had a 'musical' bum which he insists was a compliment). Someday I'll not order the steak because I won't be able to chew it. Someday, I'll be a National Trust Nazi and show people round a local heritage site and scowl at other old women who ask questions. Someday I'll always wear interesting coats and bleach my moustache.
God.
Thankfully, our next visit to Charleston, where Vanessa Bell et al gave 'interesting' the sort of meaning I hope it will still have when I'm in my seventies, was a foretaste of the sort of old age I would quite like to have. Yvonna and I had both been there before but she does the guided tour again because she has 'forgotten' (flushed and forgetful). I remember it all only too well. I went during my Jocasta Innes phase and still have the painted floorboards, furniture and one door in the kitchen as proof. Instead, Liz and I sit outside with the photographer and eat cake in the garden surrounded by hollyhocks and drowsy bees, reading the Guardian and engaging in scurrilous gossip. Behind us an old man in a Panama hat listens intently and makes old man harrumphing noises, or snores. Though he seems to be awake at the time.
'Isn't it lovely,' gushes Yvonna with a dreamy smile on her face. 'Why don't we all buy a house in the country and have an arty commune where we spend our days block printing and painting. We could all cook together and be surrounded by nature.'
Liz, who feels about the country the way I feel about Birkenstocks, looks horrified, and frankly, what with the three hour traffic jam on the motorway on the way back (thankfully we were too late for the visit to Anne of Cleves' House in Lewes - something fun for another day, huh?) nothing short of an open marriage is going to get me to settle down in the bosum of the countryside or a commune of arty women.
Though Worcester is not without its charms.
Not that I've actually seen any of them. Most of its attractions, so far, are to be found indoors.
