Sitting upright in a chair is so last year. Anyone who’s anyone over here has a zero gravity chair which ‘enables a neutral spine alignment, improves blood circulation, relieves muscle tension and promotes overall wellness.’
Now, I bet you all wish you were lying in a sort of head-down-legs-up contraption too … a bit like birthing stirrups, for those who remember that sort of thing.
And the problem with lying in this position is that it makes holding a book rather tiring, so you can buy another contraption that holds your book up above your head, enabling you to read without exhausting your arm muscles and thereby undoing all the benefits of lying in the chair in the first place.
What I want them to invent next is an extra long heatproof straw, so I can drink my coffee in a recumbent position without tipping it all over my face.
***
Last weekend I came across a dog party in the local park. The owners of the birthday dog had erected fencing to stop any gatecrashers from snaffling the treats, and there were balloons and balls and a selection of toys. I gathered from the picture and the balloons that the birthday boy was Kai, who was two … or possibly five.
I couldn’t see Kai anywhere, but he may have lost his distinctive red beret earlier in the party, perhaps during a vigorous game of musical bumps.
When I arrived at the party, the owners were all putting painted squares of card or canvas into plastic jiffy bags and then spreading peanut butter all over the bag for the dogs to lick off. It wasn’t a very good game – there was no competitive spirit or prizes. And I really hope the dogs weren’t sick before they got home, or the park would’ve looked like Bedford High Street late on a Saturday night.
***
Josephine is a cook who comes to cook dinner three times a week for the family. I don’t have much experience of private chefs in California, so I can’t say definitively that she’s a little eccentric, but it certainly seems that way to the untrained eye.
To begin with, she always wears a huge double thickness face mask, which hangs right down below her chin and reminds me of the scarves that cowboys and outlaws would tie around their faces before robbing the saloon or kidnapping the sheriff. And she always wears a large red sunhat … indoors … and a bulging bumbag swivelled around behind her back. I have absolutely no idea what she looks like when she’s not wearing her cook’s uniform. She could have pointy ears, gold teeth or a large moustache and I am never going to find out.
Josephine agrees in advance what she’s going to cook and the ingredients are provided for her, but she can’t resist fossicking around in the fridge and cooking up anything else that takes her fancy too. This creates a problem for me as I cook on the other days and often find that the ingredients I want have disappeared. For example, my planned salad had to be abandoned after Josephine decided to cook one and a half lettuces to create a random side dish. Who cooks lettuce? The answer, of course, is nobody. And that’s because one and a half lettuces makes a generous salad, but cooks down to create a minuscule side dish, which is hardly worth the bother of making. But I have now found a solution to my problem – on Josephine days, I hide any ingredients I need under the bed. It’s effective, but I worry that it’s making me as mad as Josephine.
Although there’s hope for me yet, as I haven’t started washing my carrots in the dishwasher, which is Josephine’s preferred method.
And Josephine isn’t just a cook, she is also a kind of shaman. She explained that the Universe has given her the power to heal. She told us this as she waved her hands mystically over a small child’s bumped head. He did stop crying, but that may have been because all the waving was a great distraction.
One afternoon I was late getting back home and she was waiting on the doorstep to start her shift. I apologised for keeping her waiting, but she told me not to worry, as she had luckily brought a small camping stool with her and was sitting on that on the doorstep. I wondered why on earth she had brought a camping stool to work, but then I realised that the Universe must have told her that she was going to be locked out. Being on good terms with the cosmos definitely has its advantages.