Procrastination and cellulite

Monday
Lucy is home at the moment, busy revising. Actually, as much as she’d no doubt LIKE to be busy revising, she has clearly inherited her mother’s talent for procrastination. Which is why she found herself sitting thigh to thigh with me on a bus bound for Hampton this afternoon instead of pondering over the intricacies of the law of tort.
Now, I had a perfectly good reason to go to Hampton - I had an optician’s appointment at the Tesco’s at Serpentine Green. Lucy, however, could come up with no good reason at all apart from the fact that she wanted to keep me company. Still, bless her, she’s young, whereas I am a seasoned procrastinator with years of well-honed excuses and polished justifications under my belt. I’d love to share a few of them with you - some of them are classics, they really are - but I’m saving them all for my book. 101 Reasons For Not Doing Something You Really Should Be. I’d be writing it now if I didn’t keep putting it off.
It cost us £3 each on the bus! £3! No wonder we had hardly any fellow passengers and the Serpentine Green car-park was heaving with cars. There wasn’t even a proper bench in the bus stop. Honestly, why does the government think we are going to stop using our cars - or “gas guzzlers” as they persist in calling them - and take public transport instead when it’s not comfortable, convenient or affordable? I say, can you all hear me down there from the top of this soap box?
Fortunately for Lucy, the closing-down sale in Dolcis distracted me from my invective.
“Oooh!” we both said, gazing in wonder at the racks and racks of half-price shoes. Was there ever a lovelier sight? (Apart from cheese on toast, obviously.)
Lucy found some boots for £10 and a pair of metallic grey snakeskin wedge shoes for £7. I found just one boot I rather fancied, but it didn’t have a price tag and the assistant couldn’t find its partner so my shoe-buying hysteria fizzled out rather unsatisfactorily.
It didn’t really seem fair if you ask me. Lucy - who wasn’t even supposed to be there - had two top-value pairs of footwear and all I got out of it was one unidentifable boot. Whoever said procrastination didn’t pay? Probably me.
Sunday
Mr Young and myself drove down to Essex this morning; we’d been invited to friends for lunch. We’d met Terry and Sarah on holiday in January, but hadn’t seen them since. It’s always a bit risky, isn’t it, meeting up post-vacation with holiday acquaintances? Those people you remember being so desperately entertaining over rum cocktails in the early hours of a tropical morning can often turn out to be desperately dull over a gin and tonic at half past six in a Milton Keynes Wetherspoons.
Fortunately, Terry and Sarah turned out to be just as nice as we remembered them. And they had two bottles of champagne in the fridge, which sort of guarantees someone’s niceness in my book. (“How To Tell If Someone Is Nice” - page 27, if you’re interested.)
I hadn’t been able to decide quite what to wear for Sunday lunch - as we might go for a walk, I’d decided on smart jeans. White jeans, actually.
I wasn’t sure about the white jeans.
“Can you see my cellulite in these?” I’d asked Mr Young, turning my rump towards him as he paced up and down the bedroom, looking at his watch.
“What cellulite? You haven’t got any cellulite,” he said.
Now, Mr Young always says this to me and I’ve always thought it extremely gallant and rather flattering. However, today it occurred to me that perhaps he doesn’t actually know what cellulite is. Perhaps if he actually knew that cellulite is horrible little dimples of fat that draw attention to exactly the parts of your body you would rather you didn’t have attention drawn to, then he would said instead, “Not very much” or “Not really” or “Only a little bit” or the bald lie “NO!”.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss. As is, of course, a half-price pair of shoes.

Posted in Uncategorized on May 24th, 2008 by admin | | 0 Comments

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