movin' on up

If you haven't seen me around much lately, it's because I've been moving in different circles. Rather swell circles, if you must know - filled with people for whom single malt whiskies, original art, and indoor plumbing are not luxuries, they're givens.

I think, when you do see me next, you'll notice a distinct improvement. I've acquired a bit of polish. I no longer wipe my nose on my sleeve - better still, I no longer wipe my nose on anybody else's sleeve, a trick that may have seemed oh so amusant during all those dear nights on the docks, but which I've been brought to see is perhaps not quite the thing.

When I do have to wipe my nose, I've learned (assuming there's no 2,000kc note handy), to ask myself, "What would Brooke Astor do?" and then wipe it discretely - in the drapes.

My conversation is much better too. I'd always heard that great minds talked about people and small minds talked about ideas, but it turns out I'd heard that from a moron and it's TOTALLY the other way around. So I've dropped all references to the Menendez Brothers and the Fatty Arbuckle scandal from my repertoire, and instead I talk about life after death, and are movies art? and what is the capital of Sweden? Ideas.

I've also learned to take more care about my dress. Where once I would have dashed off for an evening's entertainment without so much as running a fork through my hair, I now take a moment to straighten my hat, button my gloves, and remove the cat hair from my jodhpurs. And it pays let me tell you. People really seem to notice when you make that extra effort, "Nice jodhpurs," they'll say, or "I didn't even know you HAD a horse." It's enough to turn a girl's head.

So, I can't promise I'll be seeing much of you in future, because me and my new high society friends (pictured below) will probably be spending a lot of time discussing ideas, and wearing jodhpurs,and avoiding the docks, and bedazzling our matching gowns, but I promise to keep you posted. Consider this blog a window on my new life and feel free to press your dirty little noses against it!


[Note: all the pictures in this post turned up in a google image search for "high society."]

twas brillig...

If you know how crazy I am about celebrities - the older and deader the better - then you can imagine my joy at discovering LEWIS CARROLL lives in my hood!

Yes, THE Lewis Carroll. Anglican non-minister. Mathematician. Author of Alice in Wonderland. Possible pedophile. And the only way I discovered it is that he found someone's missing cat (SO like him) and put up a poster on the gate to Havlickovy Sady.

The cat, it said, "Was brindl, with white on its wether and neb."

I'm sure it was found gyring and gimbling in the wabe, but there was no room to include it on the poster. Lewis had to nip his poetic tendencies in the bud and give a phone number and address at which the kitty could be collected. And what a frabjous day that will be for its owner!

In celebrity-sighting terms, this is right up there with the time I met the prime minister of Canada and the morning I had brunch at a table near Selma Blair (who shares a last name with the former prime minister of Britain, which used to be the boss of Canada - eerie!)

Watch this space for more dead celebrity sightings!