Know Yer Onions ...

Had a lovely weekend in London and Essex with my old pal, Pansy Smilso, and The Gorgeous God Daughter.  We went to the Valentino exhibition at Somerset House.  They were in raptures.  I confess to being wholly underwhelmed.  Sure, I appreciate the quality of the garments; the skills and the work involved in producing a couture garment (although the lighting was as subdued as a bunch of five year olds who've just been told the class hamster is unlikely to make it through the weekend, so it was pretty hard to see the detail of any of the garments sufficiently well to actually appreciate much).  It was just, I think, that no matter how much money I had, and assuming I could put aside my revulsion at spending god alone knows how many thousands on a single garment, Valentino is just not my style.  To my mind, it's the Per Una of haute couture: perfectly acceptable garments utterly trashed by the addition of unnecessarily fussy details.  So that was that.

We ended the afternoon at Brasserie Zedel with a pot of tea (both of us) and a rather fabulous Mille Feuille Vanille (me).  In all truth, that was just to kill time until The American Bar in the basement opened and we could hit the cocktails.  Honestly, Pansy is such a lightweight these days: I downed four  White Russians in the time it took her to wade her way through two Clover Clubs!!

Back in Essex, Trev Bang Tidy (Pansy's husband) was commissioned as taxi to collect us from the station and, as luck would have it, picked up a chinese takeaway on the way home.  So I helped him out with the leftovers and tucked into a couple of spoonfuls of chow mein and half a bowl of chips, which Pansy helped me with (the chips) and followed that with a tidy slice of christmas cake.  I think I might have been allergic to something in the chow mein ...

Anyhow, whilst quaffing cocktails and being our usual slightly off-the-wall selves (never let it be said we let a joke die: if it was funny then, it's still funny twenty or thirty years later. We are loyal to our shared humour for sure!) we did actually get around to some serious conversation.  Turns out, according to Pansy, if you can get past the prickly exterior, I have enormous depth; I'm multi-layered like an onion; although the second layer is almost totally demented.