From the London Book Fair to the Aileen Wuornos Look-Alike Contest Winner From Hell…

Before the week in review starts - Pete has given me an award (thanks!) called I Love Your Blog (for the rules, please go visit Pete's blog)(for the Award - look to the right) - and I am supposed to pass the award on to 7 bloggers - so I looked at Pete's list, and went from there. Well, and I cheated, too.

Here they are:
Chris, FH, freddie, Jan, Janey, Sarah, Sylvia and Whirl. If you already have one of these puppies, feel free to ignore me. If your name is EE, you would've gotten one, but you won't use it.

Now for the post:
(a/k/a: a short version of what happened the rest of the week)

After a nice breakfast at the French place in Mayfair (Jan told me it was called Richoux, so here's the link: http://www.richoux.co.uk/mayfair.htm. We sat at one of the tables in the third picture. I know this is mindblowingly important to you and to this narrative!) we checked out of the hotel and went on over to the London Book Fair.

Note: If you're female and you ever do go to the London Book Fair (LBF from now on), a word to the wise is in order here - DON'T wear a smart black pantsuit. Why? Because 99% of the women aged 19 to 90 in the book fair were wearing black pantsuits - smart, unsmart, fitted, unfitted, buttoned, unbuttoned, but bottom-line: black. I'm just saying, as a marketing effort, or even making sure you looked pretty good, it was a big sop of a failure. Unless you wanna blend in and be forgettable - and actually, that worked out pretty well.

I was massively hung over from the South Bank White Wine Society meeting the day before. I'm talking el draino, baby.

I'd taken aspirin, had boatloads of bottled water, peed the requisite follow-on river, eaten a decent breakfast at Richoux, walked some to clear my head, but even so, when Jan and I arrived at the LBF, apprently I still looked a little lost. Some bright, cheerful kid/pretend-do-you-actually-have-pubic-hair-yet-no-no-I-don't-wanna-see-I'm just-asking-kind-of-boy-man (in a black suit) at the entrance said "You look a little lost" and I smiled at him and said "Actually, honey, I'm a lot hungover", and that was my black-suited entrance to the book fair, headache and all.

I won't go into the full meal deal on the book fair once we got inside (and you know I could, but anyway) I was pretty sure I'd died and gone to heaven. Aisle upon aisle of publishers, large and small.

I kept wanting to genuflect and hold my arms up to a heaven I don't actually believe in, seeing all these publishing names (but hey, in a place like this, worship was my ingrained response) but worrying I'd be arrested or sent to the London version of the asylum kept me on my feet.

HOWEVER, and it's a big however, a bummer soon occurred.

I was planning on taking a gander at the literary agents there - not to pester them, just to check them out and see who was who. But guess what - someone had already figured out people might wanna do just that - or maybe more - infringing on time and being all-around potentially irritating in a place that was supposed to be a trade show, and so they stowed all the agents away upstairs, and you had to set up a meeting to get up to see them at all. I might've done that off the cuff - I chat people up and then write to them later for a living - but I was out of my element, still in happy shock at where I was standing, and, uh, there was the little matter of my mind-muddling hangover. So this part was a bust.

Had I known I couldn't have gone gandering, I wouldn't have bothered going at all, to be honest, but it turned out all right. It's like I always say: Recon is always a good thing, as long as you're not spotted. And, as no one even knew to look for me, or cared to either, I was safe.

So Jan and I walked around London and did other stuff -Chelsea is pretty - came back later in the afternoon, and her amazingly nice Cockney-accented, suited taxi driver friend Jim picked us up and drove us down to Somerset.

We slept most of the way home.

Jan and her husband own a gorgeous B&B, Berachah, tucked into the side of the hill beside the Tor on the outskirts of Glastonbury. I slept in the Green Room, and when I woke up and looked outside the next morning, this was my view...



For perspective purposes, or something, here's a view from the top of the Tor - Jan and Conrad's B&B is down this path and slightly to the right...



Anyway, I'm not gonna do a play-by-play on the rest of the week - because I'm about to go over again on Thursday, but there were a few things I can't pass by without mentioning. For example - this village called Godney, and the pub/inn there:
http://www.godneyvillage.co.uk/sheppey.htm

There was a gnarly olive tree just by where we sat out back, drinking and looking over the River Sheppey...



This is my niece (Jan's daughter) Rachel - an absolutely AMAZING artist, and a darling person to boot, in the shop she and Jan have in Glastonbury.



One day, she babysat us and took us to a pub called the Royal George in a beautiful village called West Coker. The flag kinda surprised me...



I mean, the Stars & Stripes and the Royal George? So I asked the bartender and it turned out they'd hung it a couple of days before because this singer from Texas had been performing there, and he gave them the flag. Interesting gift, but there ya go.

And this was the first place I'd ever noticed food (and I've been in Britain quite a lot over the past eleven or so years) called Bubble & Squeak:



One night I met a friend of Jan's. She came over and we sat in Jan's roof garden in the dark, each with our own warm blankie, talking about South Africa and drinking and wine and friends and men and masturbation. Wish I could tell you I wasn't sloshed, but I'd be lying. It was a wine week.

And Jan and her friend and I met another friend in the George & Pilgrim in Glastonbury, on St. George's Day, and we sat watching drunk guys climbing in the window...



...which of course made it seem super important that we meet back there in the evening, for the festivities. So we did.



They'd given away the table we reserved, so they gave us another one, and about a minute after the four of us sat down (with our wine) this Gargantua of a Brunhilda bitch, and I mean by that - she could've been in a Harry Potter novel, cast as Hagrid's long lost sister - no kidding - came trouncing up to us, leaned over and glared and told us to 'git the 'el off mye tabel'.

Uh, no. Fuck, no, actually. We just looked at her - and I knew, even though I'd only just met Jan's friends over the last day or two, that we would get along just fine.
So she stomped and clomped around and hollered, and I did wonder if she was planning on beating the crap out of us (or trying to), and it was kinda weird, because the place was decked out for a medieval night, and there were medieval singers singing, and it was all supposed to be peace and love and la la la, and here was Gigantica Slutnick, but there ya go. Her little weenie boyfriend (and yes, it DID occur to me that there was no way in hell that guy could mount her without a ladder), came over and apologized later. He looked like he was used to doing a one-man cleanup committee apology-a-thon in her wide wake. Poor guy.

Yeah. You're right. I enjoyed the whole thing. I love it when weird shit happens. My only criteria is - I have to live through it - and as you can see since I'm writing this, so far, so good.

Anyway, lots more good stuff happened, just a rolling of days into nights, a warm relaxing pause, and then it was Saturday and time to go.

I've flown a lot - with and without friends and family - and this time, of course, I was alone, and gonna cherish it, these last hours to close up shop on my singular and good week.

And it worked for about 15 minutes after boarding. Then SHE came. I swear to you this chick looked like Aileen Wuornos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileen_Wuornos.

I mean so much so that I looked again. And again. And I have to tell you, after hearing about all the horrible things that happened to this woman as she grew up and after, I've always felt so sorry about her and her life, so sick about it, thinking, hell, what would almost anyone have done in her shoes?, so I was predisposed to try and be nice, even though this was certainly not said person. But she dressed like an aging hooker, and she was rude and abrupt and her hair was dirty and uncombed, and she was obviously on something, so...

So she drank and drank - the little bottles - and she tossed and turned and stared at me, so I stared at her - and she went through rum, then vodka, then went back to the back and came back with more - and I walked back and told the attendants I was actually a little worried about being seated next to her. They said they'd watch her.

Then, I got pissed. I was pissed that she was the person putting the period on my goddamned last day of freedom for a while, and I was pissed that she was pissed. And that's when she was in real trouble.

I waited for her to flounce her ass around once more; she accomodated. She popped her elbow, again, over on my side of the seat.

Move.

That's all I said. No yelling, no ferocity in voice. I just said it. She looked over at me, about to pop off at the mouth. I just looked at her. She moved.

And I didn't have another problem.

So...that was my week. I promise I won't tell you all about the next one.

But if you guys have one to tell, have at it!