taps mic; looks quizzically at sound control booth

I was in Officeworks the other day with The Gelchild, picking up items for planning prior to going home and doing some planning to help the young wretch make it through this semester relatively unscathed (although the world of structured education being what it is, and she being who she is, some level of scathement - scathementness; scathementosity - is inevitable).

Anyway.

We were wandering down one of the aisles and I was giving voice to various thoughts I was having about the stuff we were looking for, in ways that only 10 years ago I would have found totally cringe and yet today, in my 50s, feel increasingly acceptable and normal. (And only 10 years ago I would have found this attitude in itself horrifying, I feared it, and now I'm all like, eh, whatevs.)

So I was chatting away and then from ahead of me I hear someone say "I'd know that voice anywhere" (which, let's face it, in the case of my voice is absolutely not a compliment). To my amazement it was my old friend Alice Keppel! (I just did a hunt on the blog to see if she'd been previously mentioned and to my astonishment she appears not to have been). Why is it when you run into one of your glamorous friends - the type who look glamorous even when, as was the case with Alice Keppel, they're dressed in old jeans and a jumper - that is the day you've decided you can get away with being in public in that pair of stained trackies and your hair three days passed its used by date for a good wash?

We were chatting away and then I thought to introduce The Gelchild and then followed it up with, "I'll have to explain her to you when we catch up. It's a long story."

And I guess I'll have to do the same here at some point.