red carpet

I watched most of the very ghastly BAFTA awards thing, mainly because I wasn't properly up to doing anything else. I should have just gone back to bed and read the papers but I knew if I did that I might fall asleep early - and then I would risk waking in the small hours and doing the night watch . Now I should go to bed but feel wired and restless. I blame BAFTA and the state of heightened boredom it induces so that one feels obliged to chew through the best part of a box of wine gums. Paul McCartney looked in a shocking state, I thought, as though innerly propped up by something or other (drugs?) but not really in himself. In a thin voice, he promised us a "rockin' evening." The closest we got to that was Helena Bonham Carter hogging the space to receive best something-or-other (King's Speech etc). Bad behaviour does, after all, promise a measure of intrinsic interest. But she also looked in a bad way, as though on some kind of disorientating medication, not in herself but still up herself. Am I being a grumpy old blogger? Good.

The truth is that as far as I am concerned, nothing could be right after the glitz parade of designer frockage at the beginning when they all arrived and spilled themselves onto the red carpet. I know it is part of what happens, what one expects and what, presumably, every single person in the whole world apart from me really wants to see. But every time I allow myself to watch something like this I wish that just one of the actors would decide to turn up in the equivalent of my purple shell-suit trousers. It is very unlikely that I will ever be spilled out onto the red BAFTA carpet but if, for some unfathomable reason that none of us can forsee, this does ever happen I promise to you, my brothers and sisters who carry the torch for true artistic (not to mention aesthetic) integrity that I will not under any circumstances be dressed in designer clothes or any other glitz-schmatter that leaves my shoulders and most of my boobs bare. It is February, forsooth! I will be dressed in my Purples with matching cashmere jumper, string of pearls and grey hoodie if it is raining, fake Uggs on my feet or possibly Crocs with striped purple socks showing through the holes. So no-one will be able to accuse me of not having Style. But there will be none of the dreary glitz we were subjected to this evening.

But soft ye now, for we are almost in Valentine's day, and today being Valentine's Eve (it's almost another Christmas as far as hotels are concerned, so why not?) Mr. Signs and I went out to stuff our faces with sunday lunch at the local posh hotel. The pianist played right through the Sound of Music and followed up with the Godfather and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Mr. S ate rare roast beef and I my fillets of plaice on a bed of crushed new potatoes followed by poached pears and chocolate sauce. The French waiters (yes, all French) hovered and spun around us while outside the wind and rain lashed at the high bay windows and for one brief moment it might almost have been possible to imagine that we were in some well-rehearsed play in which we played our parts beautifully. We laughed and we love each other. Bring out the red carpets.