Lipreading London

Yesterday, Friend Who Knows Big Words came for dinner. She leaves for Vietnam in two months so I am seeing as much of her as possible before she goes.

It was great. I found out all about her recent holiday in Columbia, where she had a mud bath in a volcano, and I also quizzed her some more about her new home-to-be – Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC)...

*sniff

She's still working on her plan to get me to move there and set up a cake shop, but I'm really not sure I'd be able to lipread Vietnamese that well!

Speaking of friends trying to get me to move, tonight I am seeing SuperCathyFragileMystic as she's in town unexpectedly. She's just got a GP placement in the Wild West um... Country and is looking at buying a gorgeous flat in Bath or cute chocolate-box cottage in one of the surrounding villages.

The house prices are slightly more palatable compared with London, which makes me a teeny tiny bit jealous, as I can barely afford a parking space right now, let alone a building with four walls and a roof over it.

Knowing this fact, she announced that she wants a housemate... or neighbour… and thinks I’d be ideal.

‘Affordable housing,’ she said to me.

‘Love my actual job in London,’ I replied.

But really, a cake shop in the Wild West um... Country – could that work?

The main part of me thinks no, because although it is actually my childhood home, I would be following a whole load of ex- and RICH Londoners there who have already set up the cake shops, bought the country piles and pushed the house prices up. And I don’t really want to be a social cliché that looks like it has walked straight out of the starched pages of Country Life.

*GAH!

And come to think of it, I'm not that convinced I could lipread the West Country accent that well either!

But perhaps I could have a chain of cake shops, in addition to my lovely day job – one in London, one in HCMC, and one in the Wild West um... Country?

I could call it, ‘Around The World In 80 Cakes’ and have 80 different varieties of icing and cake mixture, while writing books in my spare time, and...

*sigh

…back to reality…

…which actually isn’t all that bad. After all, I can actually lipread the London accent and I think if I left, there’d be one or two things I’d miss… just one or two.

*blush