Watch out for the teeth

We were in London for A to attend an Anthony Robbins seminar. A seminar for 12,000 people. Over 4 days, starting early in the morning and finishing at about 11 at night. With hardly any breaks. And lots of shouting and dancing around. And hugging of total strangers. You can probably tell it's not exactly my type of thing. More like a definition of my own private hell, in fact. Just thinking about it is enough to bring on a migraine.

A reported back to me each night, in the brief interval before grabbing a few hours sleep before the Tony thing began again. I have to say what he told me makes a lot of sense and I'm quite sure that if you apply this advice systematically to your life, you'll see big changes.

But as a full paid-up introvert greedy for peace and my own space, I do object to the relentless American worship of the extrovert. It seems you are only a valuable human being if you can be constantly 'out there', doing , achieving and talking, always talking. What about time to assimilate, to reflect and let the unconscious bubble through with new thoughts and ideas?

I can't help feeling an instinctive distrust of American self-development gurus and their perfect teeth.

Squeezed into the Tube

Yesterday we came back from a week in London. Here's the blog I drafted in my notebook last weekend:

"I find I don't enjoy travelling in the Tube as much as I used to. Maybe it's the undreamt-of horror of the bombings, maybe it's getting older, maybe it's living in Cornwall, but these days when the doors slide closed on all those packed bodies, I need to let my mind shift sideways to a place which does not acknowledge where I am and what would happen if ...

I wonder how much this is behind the famous refusal of Londoners to ackonwledge each other, catch each others' eye while travelling at such close quarters. Maybe, like me, they are counting off the stops - only 3 to go before I can squeeze out back to the relative freedom of the platforms and corridors. Out there it may be like a sauna but at least it doesn't smell of stale bodies and at least there is somewhere to run."

This morning we heard that 2 bombs had been found in central London.

That's what I call a chocolate biscuit

I've just read a piece on the Telegraph website by AS Byatt about how miserable it is when one's favourite products are discontinued. How I sympathise.

For a brief and heady, not to mention calorific, period, M&S used to sell ginger biscuits stuffed with stem ginger and covered with thick chocolate. And I mean thick. So thick you only got six in a packet. I'm sure there were shameful and secret occasions when I ate the whole packet instead of a meal. When they were discontinued I was so grief-stricken and disbelieving, I would still go and stand in front of the biscuit display, as if I could bring them back by willpower alone.

And then there was Waitrose sparkling apple juice with ginger, which was lush, but also unaccountably disappeared from the shelves.

My current loudest lament - Gap cotton and Lycra capri pants. It must be about seven years ago now that these beauties appeared. Cropped summer trousers with a tummy-flattening side zip and an elegant tapering leg, split at the bottom. I had three pairs but I'd have bought ten if I'd realised I wouldn't be able to get them again. I look for them in vain every spring and every year I've been disappointed. This is a puzzle to me - surely this is precisely what Gap is for? This year they have come up with 'boycut' cropped trousers which just about cover your bottom cleavage and have pockets sticking out in all the places you want to look slim. Uh? I just don't get it.

I'm sure there's masses more, but just to end on a positive note, I remember Clinique Almost lipstick - a cross between lipstick and gloss which was discontinued but then hastily brought back following a howl of customer protest. Power to the shopper.