sunday life: in which I commit!!

This week I learn to commit. With a wedding.

I have a friend who, each week, around Thursday afternoon, sends a perfunctory email suggesting we catch up “some time” over the weekend. I attempt to narrow the parameters: “Sunday brunch?” She’ll then reply, not with a concrete time and place, but again loosely: “Cool. Will buzz you Sun AM.”

Invariably, Sunday comes, she doesn’t call and around lunchtime shoots a text, “Sorry hon, can’t make it. Next week?” And so it goes.

The whole flaccid caper drives me rather mental. Her invite is as flimsy as a philanderer’s promise; she wants options to be available for the weekend, but she won’t damn well commit!

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sunday life: cos it’s cool to be calm

This week I took wise counsel from a bunch of nice 22-year-old blokes in Ramones T-shirts.

On Friday night I found myself in a down-an-alley-way-up-a-rickety-staircase bar brimful with young men born since the advent of personal email. They wore winkle-pickers and their older sister’s cardigans and drank longnecks of Coopers. It felt like it was 1983; I knew the words to all the songs.

At the expense of sounding creepily like Germaine Greer (remember that weird book The Beautiful Boy in which she infatuates over barely-adult boys?), I’ve been in the company of very young men a lot lately and find them intriguingly charming. (A shout out to their mothers – you’ve done a stellar job.) I also find them curiously relaxed.

This, in spite of the fact they all seem to be juggling a crazy array of blog design start-ups, music piracy operations and 17 Twitter accounts. “Do you ever get stressed?” I asked Mike, a cherubic kid who runs two street art galleries and DJs at weekends. He adjusted his ironically dorky glasses and said, “No, because these days it’s cool to be calm”.

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sunday life: fashion and my fraud complex

This week I make my philosophical peace with fashion.

If I may, I’d like to indulge in a run-down of my surreal fashion experience this week. It has a life-bettering point, of sorts, toward the end.

So, Wednesday I find myself tricked up with hair extensions and smoky eye, parading down a catwalk with a dozen professional models half my size and age. It was for charity and all terribly Sex and the City, specifically the episode where SJP trips over doing a charity parade in New York. Mercifully, I merely veered off course briefly, to make way for a model charging at me doing that curious “donkey gait” that models do.

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sunday life: my interesting chat with a boxer

This week I drink chai with a man who used to beat people to a pulp for a living, to see if he knows how to make life better.*

There’s this thing I’ve been doing for a while now. Every fortnight I invite an interesting stranger to share a cup of tea or a wine, so I can learn more about how this mortal coil spins. It’s not as creepy as it sounds. One time it might be an academic I admire. The next a disagreeable blogger I want to understand better, or a work contact I’ve only ever dealt with via email who I keep saying I should actually meet some time. Some time never happens, of course, unless you got off your bum.

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