Fawl and Boobs

I know, I owe you all a post on what went wrong with our trip to Vegas, but quite frankly it’s hard to get in to the mind-set of being stranded in the desert in 110º heat when overnight autumn has arrived in Santa Barbara.

Sorry, ‘fawl’ as you imagine I say.

I love autumn. It’s so much easier to consider a large glass of pinot and some Grey’s Anatomy when it gets dark at 5pm than mid-summer when by rights you should be out ocean-swimming past 8.

There is a barely perceptible chill in the air, at the tail-end of a breeze or in the shade of a building. That feeling that there's just a little more oxygen to breathe. Brittle-cold blue-sky days are by far my favourite, but they are as scarce in Santa Barbara as they are in North Yorkshire, so I will take this sudden greyness just for a change.

Seasons are nothing if not subtle over here. You can tell it’s autumn by the fact the temperatures will occasionally creep below 70 and it says September on the calendar. That’s about it. There is even the half-hearted promise of some rain in our future, although it's been so long since we've had a decent downpour that I might have to explain to Anna what the chuff is going on! It is so strange to live in a place where rain is talked about as an event days in advance. Where people watch the doppler-radar for a hint of green with awe and reverence. Ok, maybe that's just my husband who gets the day off work if it rains....

I've been reminiscing recently about rain, about that sharp breeze you get as a pre-cursor to a shower in England, the one that blows all the leaves backwards exposing their silvery undersides like a sylvan shoal of fish. Trees don't really have leaves here, not big fat deciduous leaves, just small spiky drought-resistant leaves. There is no 'fall', no leaf-mulch, no season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

So you see, I can’t really write about being stranded in an overheated car in the middle of the Mojave, when there’s a slight chill in the air and I’m forced to think about maybe grabbing a cardie. For the love of God!

So I’ll talk about boobs instead.

My muppet assistant handed in her notice last week. Then a couple of days later she told me she was taking 5 days of her 2 weeks notice to get herself a nice new set of boobs. I have two assistants and they both have fake boobs. Hello California! They are so prevalent here I’m surprised they don’t come free if you buy 3lbs of House Blend.

I don't know anyone in England with fake boobs. Quite frankly, under all those woolly jumpers what's the point? Living here makes you think about it though, particularly after nursing leaves you feeling a little, how should I say, 'deflated'.

So I said to LK, "What would you think about me getting a boob job after we're done having our eleventy-billion children" and he replied "you don't need a boob job, you've got a great rack" etc etc.

Good man!

But then a few weeks later he said "So, if you were going to get a boob job......."

Ten years of marriage, and he is still human.