Blue Ladies

We're with Mig and Lady V at their lovely flat in Bounds Green. One of their walls is covered in vintage, slightly scary, 1960s Tretchikoff Blue Lady prints; those creepy images of exotic women who look like they've been covered in silty clay, baked in an oven and then stuck in the deep freeze! I think there was a whole set of them including an Indian lady and a Chinese one. My Grannie had the African lady on the wall in her blue room. She was a scary blue-faced Nubian creature and she used to stare down at me in my bed. Her black eyes stalked me around the room then watched me whilst I slept.

Look at her! What a nasty, yet deeply mystical piece of work... And what is that behind her? Some kind of Biblical sea scape? Or a dark, menacing cloud of voodoo?

It wasn't just the blue lady who freaked me out. The room itself terrified me. It had a stillness to it, a heaviness, a dark energy and a crazy indigo carpet. I was once found hanging from a cot in that room. I'd apparently turned my blanket into a noose and fallen over the edge. It's amazing what a baby will do to escape a pair of evil eyes. Those blue ladies have much to answer for.

Not my hat!

I spent the day in Greenwich Park with Philippa, Moira and their respective families. It was baking hot. Sitting in the sand pit was like sitting on a Mediterranean beach. Philippa spent the day looking for shade whilst I basked like a gloriously happy gecko.

Let's all boycott LA Fitness! They have now removed all the weighing scales from the changing rooms and replaced them with digital super-dooper things in the main gym room. The new scales cost 50p a pop, and you're not allowed take your clothes off to weigh yourself. Surely removing the weighing machines from a gym is like removing all the tread mills. People who go to gyms have a right to weigh themselves obsessively. You go to a gym to lose weight, right? Talk about a blatent money-making scheme. I've already written to Watchdog about it. Nathan is now calling me "DOH" Disgruntled of Highgate.
350 years ago, and the weather was so ghastly that Pepys was forced to stay in the City, prevented from getting to Whitehall to see a group of people being knighted by the King.