There’s a cigar man waiting in the sky

Dilemma: want to buy hostess gift for the woman who has everything. Then remember she’s the only person who has ever offered me a post prandial cigar. So (energy saving lightbulb moment) (the light took a long time to arrive) I take myself off to Havana House on the High Street feeling very naughty. It’s all very “no under 18s” and masculine and reeks of forbidden stuff. Maybe this is what it feels like to step inside a sex shop? I am in unknown territory: I have no understanding of tobacco products and am flummoxed by most things Cuban. Fortunately a lithe young man leaps to my aid, springing from a room at the back and landing mid shop floor. He has lots of curly blond hair and a cadaverous complexion. I explain that I’m looking for a gift for a lady. I’ve never been invited into a humidor by a man before and I trembled as a virgin tobacco purchaser should. He produced cigar after cigar – all large Churchillian/Castro-like things, all shaped & coloured like healthy poo and certainly not the sort of thing I had in mind. Er .. something shorter, thinner and ..um.. pink? Curly man looks at me askance. I know what I mean. In another life, when I was living in Lausanne (I have a past of which you know nothing) there was a vogue for cigarillos about the size of a long cigarette. They came in pretty boxes of 6, each with a dainty wee holder and I swear they were coloured like jewels – pink, lime green, purple, blue … They were gorgeous & lovely to hold and to watch in someone else’s hand.

Havana House doesn’t do girlie. So we settled on a handful of dainty-ish Romeo & Juliets which he packaged up for me, doing away (thank goodness) with the huge stickers saying “This gift will kill you!” “If it doesn’t do that, this gift will abort your baby and make you stink and all your teeth will rot and fall out!” Which is no doubt true – however, I doubt whether your doctor or dentist would give you a round of applause for eating a buttered crumpet with jam either, but all you get with that is a sell-by date and dodgy nutritional information.

I’m back!

I haven’t actually been anywhere, mind. But it’s summer: the weeds! the watering! the hammock! the overwhelming desire to linger outside on these gorgeously endless nights have all torn me away from Ruby the laptop and we’ve been missing each other.

Summer=exams. Son no. 3 sat his last A level paper on Friday and he looked so happy. We have been in purdah throughout his exams because summer also=hayfever. No meals outside, all windows and doors shut tight against the villainous pollen. I have purchased pills, nasal sprays, eye drops, local honey .. I Googled “witch doctor Oxfordshire”. Nothing seems to work. Anyway he’s now taken off to Greece for a scuzzy holiday with a gaggle of mates. Their accommodation looks more basic than my memories of boarding school but hey, it will be hot and sunny and they’re a stroll from the beach. It was the fact that they had to take their own loo roll that I found disconcerting. I ran through the list of do’s and don’ts with him: guard your passport and your dosh; don’t let anyone spike your drinks; don’t lose the immodium; change your underwear; don’t come back with any sexually transmitted diseases – that sort of thing. I think I covered everything.

Soltice yesterday. The longest longest day. Celebrated with a glass of Prosecco in the White Horse along with a happy jostling crowd (everyone’s happy when the sun shines), choral reflections in Exeter college chapel and a jolly good piece of fish outside in the Quod courtyard… spoiled only by 4 lads who chose the table next to us and then proceeded to have an increasingly loud & rude conversation. (Old Stoics apparently – you have been warned) (should have taken a sneaky photo to send to the Headmaster: ha! That would have been fun) I ticked them off, of course, as was my duty as a middle-aged harridan, but to no avail. So we swept out to take coffee at home. Top down on the car with summer ball fireworks exploding in the still slightly light sky, glittering ferris wheel somewhere on Christ Church meadow, in car music on probably a bit too loud .. arrived home and watched satellites scudding across the now night sky. Just sometimes this life can be ridiculously jammy, I thought. Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.