Remember Nigel, the International Man of Mystery next door?
No, of course you don’t: it’s now been almost six years (SIX! YEARS!) since Nigel was last sighted, and almost two since I last wrote speculatively about the possibility of him being either a spy or a serial killer, so I doubt I have any readers left from Those Days. (“This was all fields! And we had to walk uphill in the snow, both ways! And we could go to bed and leave our door open… oh, we still do that, don’t we?”) It’s OK, though, because here is the series of deeply exciting and not-at-all-hysterical posts I wrote on the subject, you’re welcome:
An Introduction to Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door
Nigel is Sighted
Nigel Update
Nigel, the International Man of Mystery in my Attic
Nigel Alert!
Here Come the Men in Black
It’s OK, I’ll wait here while you read them.
You’re done? You’re sure? I will ask questions, you know. OK, well, anyway…
Today, people, I bring you A NIGEL UPDATE. And, actually, I’ve just realised that it’s almost exactly the same as the LAST Nigel update I brought you, so now I feel kind of stupid. Here is a completely unrelated photo I took of the Magic Garden Centre yesterday to distract you from the fact that I’m about to tell you the same thing twice. I said, I’m about to tell you the same thing twice:
I thought it looked a bit like some weird, alien culture attacking earth, no?
What was I talking about? Oh yeah: Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door.
So, anyway, this morning there was a knock on the door (which was closed AND locked at the time, go us!), and for once it wasn’t the police. (Yeah, still not over that, obviously…) In fact, it was a Mysterious Stranger in a suit, with a long black overcoat and a leather folio thing full of official looking papers. I mean, I’m assuming they were official looking papers, here: I witnessed this man from behind the closed blinds in the bedroom window, so I didn’t actually get a close look at the papers. They could’ve been photos of shoes, for all I know. That’s what I would carry around in a posh folio thing, anyway. Let’s pretend they were official papers, though. And that the man was from MI5. Trust me, it will make this post much more interesting.
(Let’s also pretend I was wearing this dress at the time:
Dress of My Dreams
It won’t make the story any more interesting, unfortunately, but it WILL give me an excuse to post a photo of that dress, and God knows, I’ve been looking for one.)
Terry answered the door.
“The eagle flies at midnight!” said the man. OK, he didn’t. But he did start asking Terry a whole lot of questions about Nigel. Where is he? When was he last seen? Where does he work? Who is he REALLY? That kind of thing. All of the questions we ask ourselves about Nigel, really.
“Look,” said Terry, “If I knew all of this, I’d be a happy man, because then my wife would stop bugging me about this.” Yeah, no, he didn’t. Terry did, however, ask the man who HE was, and what he needed to know all of this for, at which point the mysterious stranger deftly changed the subject, and, without actually answering Terry, started repeating his “Where is he, have you seen him?” questions. Probably to see if he could catch Terry out, I would imagine. They do that.
(WHO ARE THEY?)
After that, the man went outside and had a good look around the property, looking exactly like a spy. Like, EXACTLY. And afterwards, Terry came upstairs and said to me, “Did you get a photo of him?” And I said, “GOOD GOD, MAN, WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR? It’s not like I’m going to Instagram the Mysterious Stranger at the door, am I? They’d probably cut off my hands for that, or something!”
(NO, SERIOUSLY, WHO ARE THEY?)
And then Terry looked at me, like, “Well, you Instagram everything else, so…”
Conclusion: er, there isn’t one, really. It’ll be six years this summer since we last saw him. The mystery continues…
Tagged International Man of Mystery
A few weeks ago, Terry decided that he hadn’t seen enough snow over the past couple of winters, so he and a couple of his friends booked a series of snowboarding lessons at a place in Glasgow. The lessons are mostly on a Sunday, and because my car is yet to be fixed after my little fender bender over Christmas, this means that I’m left home alone.
Now, I don’t know what you do when you have the house to yourself for several hours of a Sunday afternoon (I’m guessing probably NOT THIS, though…) but I experiment with ridiculous hairstyles:
Yeah. So, obviously I didn’t actually go out like this – it was a “strictly for fun, and also boredom” thing – but I’d always wanted to try out a massive beehive, and by that I don’t mean the little baby beehives I sometimes do with a bumpit, or that velcro thing I got from eBay that one time, but a proper Amy Winehouse/Marge Simpson/Patsy from AbFab kind of ‘hive. (Mostly Patsy, to be honest. Because when I’m older, I intend to make Pats my role model, and just be drunk all the time…)
I will also wear sunglasses all the time, because… actually, because I do that anyway. People hate me for it. I don’t care.
I took the beehive down before Terry got home. I did show him the photos, though, and he kind of laughed in a strange way, and looked at me funny. Then I think I heard him calling his friends and saying he can’t leave me on my own no more, or he comes home to Snooki, apparently.
P.S. Those of you who asked me on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram: a ton of volumising powder, then a ton of backcombing. And seriously, that’s it.
So, after yesterday’s incident, in which Terry left the front door open all night, prompting the police to pay us a visit in the early hours of the morning, I resorted to desperate measures to make sure the same thing couldn’t happen with the BACK DOOR:
What? A bit of an over-reaction, you think? Trust me, this particular event has been in the post for a loooong time now. A looong time. It was just… unfortunate… that it had to happen on the very day the doors in our house were already under a black cloud. And hey, isn’t it funny that we left the front door wide open, and then made sure it was totally impossible to get out of the back one? And by “funny”, I mean, “GAH, I’m going back to bed now. With wine.” Who knew doors would one day declare themselves The Enemy?
That’s how Terry came to spend all of Friday afternoon procuring, and then fitting, new locks and handles for both of our doors. It took a while. And it was FREEZING. Now our house is like Fort Knox, though: or, at least, it will be, assuming we actually remember to LOCK THE DAMN DOORS, FFS.
I don’t think he’ll be making THAT mistake again in a hurry, somehow.
We tried to rescue the day with a nice, relaxing evening, but right before we went to bed we let Rubin out, and he came back in like this:
I refer not to the OMGDEMONEYES, but to the mud on his face, paws and undercarriage. We don’t know what happened out there in the garden. We honestly don’t WANT to know. But it did mean that at 1am in the morning, we found ourselves facing a “Dog in the Bath” situation:
And that concluded our Friday the 13th. We’re not really looking forward to the next one…
Tagged Terry
(Coat, H&M; skirt, Topshop; sweater, Primark (c/o my parents); boots, Sam Edelman; watch Michael Kors (both c/o Shopbop))
On Friday 13th, I was woken in the early hours of the morning by the sound of Rubin barking.
I opened one eye and looked around the room. Yup – pitch dark. It was either very, very late, or very, very early, and neither one of those times was one I wanted to be awake in, so I closed my eyes again and hoped Terry would get up to deal with whatever it was that was going down. And Terry obviously thought the same thing, so we both lay there for a few seconds in the dark, playing “Rubin Chicken”: the game in which we both pretend to be asleep and wait to see who will break first and get up.
(I am THE CHAMPION of Rubin Chicken, by the way. UNDEFEATED.)
Rubin barked again.
“SHUT UP RUBIN!” Terry and I yelled, almost simultaneously. (Whoops: cover blown!)
But Rubin did not shut up. In fact, he took the hysterical barking up a notch, and as I lay there and listened to him, I realised that this was not his usual, tentative, “Oh, hai! I can come into your bed, plz?” bark. It wasn’t even his slightly sheepish, “Dudes, I need to gooooo…” bark. Nope, this was his “OMFG, SOMEONE IS BREAKING INTO THE HOUSE AND WE ARE ALL ABOUT TO BE MURDERED IN OUR BEDS, EXCEPT NOT ME, BECAUSE I’M UP, BARKING!” bark. Oh, crap.
Terry realised this at the same time I did, so he threw back the covers and dashed out of the room, and as he opened the bedroom door, a second realisation hit me: Rubin was not barking from his usual night-time location, which is, for reasons too complex and yet boring to go into here, the hall outside our room. No, Rubin was barking from DOWNSTAIRS somewhere.
Now, it’s not totally unknown for Rubin to be downstairs when he’s not supposed to be. A few years ago, Terry constructed a low barrier (We refer to it as “The Perimeter”, as in “Quick: set up a perimeter - they’re not going anywhere!”) to keep him confined to the hallway when we’re out, but Rubin has recently learned that he can push the perimeter over if he really wants to, so occasionally we will return from wherever we’ve been and he’ll meet us at the front door, all, “Hai! Come on in, take your coats off, let me show you around!” He doesn’t normally do this during the night, though, because, well, he’s asleep, so for him to be barking his “INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT!” bark, downstairs, in the wee small hours, made me wonder if there actually WAS an intruder, as opposed to, you know, someone sneezing in the next street, or a bird landing on the lawn, or one of the other non-events that tend to make Rubin lose his mind.
This suspicion seemed to be confirmed when, even after Terry had thundered downstairs to join him, Rubin’s barking continued at the same, hysterical pitch. What the hell was going on down there, I wondered? Why hadn’t Terry done something to shut Rubin up? Was he just standing there, watching him bark crazily, or… or had he run downstairs, been instantly killed by the INTRUDER, and now Rubin was barking at Terry’s prone body, while said INTRUDER crept slowly up the stairs towards me?
This seemed like the only possible explanation for Terry’s silence and Rubin’s continued barking, so I got shakily out of bed, and as I did so, I happened to find myself facing the bedroom window. The bedroom window which looks out onto our driveway. Our driveway which now had a POLICE CAR sitting at the bottom of it.
OH. MY. GOD.
You know how people say, “My legs turned to jelly?” Turns out that’s actually a THING. My legs almost gave way under me as I realised that this was IT: this was that moment I’ve been expecting all my life – the one where there’s a knock on the door on the middle of the night, and the police are standing there looking solemn, and saying, “You might want to sit down, ma’am, I’m afraid we have some bad news…” And in that instant, your whole life shatters, and nothing is ever the same again. It happens in the early hours of the morning of Friday the 13th, 2012, and even as you make your way along the hall, on legs that feel like they don’t belong to you anymore, somehow remembering to grab your dressing gown from the bedroom floor as you pass, because you figure you’ll want to be at least semi-clothed for whatever you’re about to be faced with, your mind is screaming REWIND, REWIND, and you’re thinking, “NONONO, I don’t want to do this. I was just lying there, sleeping. I was going to get up and go for a run, and do my work, and later maybe watch a movie and have a glass of wine. I don’t want to do THIS instead,” and you don’t even know what THIS is, but you know it’s going to be horrendously, unspeakably awful, because the police don’t knock on your door in the middle of the night for nothing, do they?
Halfway down the stairs, I paused. The living room was empty. Rubin was still barking at the door, and from the porch I could hear the low murmur of voices as Terry spoke to the police. I could just sit here, on the stairs, I thought. I could just sit here and wait, and delay the inevitable. And I thought, who is it? What has happened, and to who? And then I didn’t think any more, I just got up and I walked into the living room, picking up Rubin, and hearing Terry give a small laugh in the porch, and…
WAIT, WHAT?
A laugh? He’s laughing at something? The world isn’t ending?
And then I sank down onto the rug, and I sat there and I waited.
A few seconds later, the door opened and Terry walked into the living room. “Oh, hi!” he said brightly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world for us to be meeting in the darkened living room at this time of the morning, him fresh from a brief doorstep interview with the police.
“WELL?” I hissed. ”What THE HELL?”
“Oh, that,” said Terry nonchalantly. “Someone called them, apparently. It seems that our front door was wide open, so they had to come round and check everything was OK.”
And that, my friends, is why I began Friday the thirteenth, 2012, with one of the biggest frights of my life. Because Terry didn’t close the front door when he took the rubbish out last night, and our neighbour noticed and called the police, worried that we’d been murdered in our beds or something. And… let’s just say there wasn’t any sleep for either of us after that. I may actually never sleep again, because ever since that moment when I saw the police car parked at the end of the drive, my mind has kept circling back to What if? What if they really HAD been knocking on the door with some unthinkably awful news? And then I wouldn’t be sitting here, drinking coffee and looking at shoes on the internet, while I think about maybe taking a walk later with the dog.
I still feel like that moment is coming for me. But not today.
(And I’ll be checking the door myself from now on. Also: WINE. Bring it.)
P.S. I have to admit that, once I realised nothing awful had happened, I got a bit excited thinking it might be something to do with Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door (Now into Year 5 of his unexplained absence). Alas, that particular mystery remains unsolved…
Sometimes I wear jeans:
And sometimes Rubin jumps all over me, like the crazy WOLF he is:
Sometimes I buy bright blue shoes in the Zara sale:
And sometimes Zara completely messes up my order, and sends me the same shoes TWICE. And charges me for them.
(Sometimes there are two pairs of shoes involved in this saga, but seriously, the less said about that, the better.)
Sometimes Rubin and I dance together:
(Yeah, I’ve no idea.)
Sometimes I have no idea how to end my blog posts, so I just post more random photos of my dog and hope no one will notice:
Sometimes.
(Jeans, Topshop; sweater, Primark (gift from my parents; shoes, Zara; watch, Michael Kors, c/o Shopbop)
FASHUN BLOGGING = SO HARD, you guys! Witness:
In other news (which will be totally repeated news if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter: sorry!), yesterday morning we woke up to this:
Well, actually we woke up in the middle of the night, to Rubin barking hysterically in order to alert us that the the house was falling down. It wasn’t, thankfully, but it really did sound like it for a while. This is the fourth time we’ve lost our fence in the past few weeks – I’d blame the fence, but everyone else’s was more or less the same. (And normally it just blows down: this time it snapped right out of the steel fence posts, thanks to our neighbour’s bin being thrown at it by the high winds.) We got off lightly, though: there was some pretty major damage around town/the country in general, and I from what I’ve heard, at least two people were killed, so we were lucky: fences can always be fixed…
Tagged green dresses, I hate winter, rubin
(Dress, River Island; shoes, Ted Baker, c/o Sarenza)
Happy New Year, everyone!
I know I’m a little late to the party with my New Year post, but that’s actually quite fitting, as I was almost late to the ACTUAL party, too, having:
a) Managed to use rollers in such a way that my fringe ended up perpendicular to my head, and had to be held down with bobby pins.
b) Realised that I’d forgotten my phone, and that we would have to return to the house for it, because, OMG, how would the Internet manage without me tweeting on it, and posting Instagram photos of my shoes all night?
c) Sent Terry back into the house for said phone, only to realise after he’d been searching the house for it for five minutes that, whoops, it had been in my handbag all along! Sorry, Terry! (And then I didn’t tweet or Instagram once, all night. Huh.)
(Somehow in all of this, I managed to persuade the long-suffering Terry to snap these photos, too, although he had to take them in about 30-seconds flat, in a process which felt a lot like having a mugshot taken, not that I would know. If I ever DO have my mugshot taken, though, I fully expect I will try to put my hand on my hip and give a big smile…)
We spent the evening with both of our families, and a couple of friends, at a local restaurant which was hosting a New Yea’rs eve dinner/party. As some of you may recall, I absolutely loathe New Year, as I loathe any kind of reminder that hey, time’s a-wastin’! Not getting any younger! Or, as my mother-in-law would say, “You never know when you’re a-gonna go!” But if there is a good way to celebrate such a mournful (to me) occasion, then I guess surrounded by the people you love is the way to do it. And it definitely beats all of those years spent at home, watching the Edinburgh castle piper play his sad lament as the clock strikes midnight. It also beats all of those years spent looking at the clock and going, “Is that it? Has it happened yet? Do you think we’ve missed it?” In other words: a good time was had by all. Even me.
As for 2012, I know it’s customary for bloggers at this point to provide a perky list of resolutions, but because I don’t like to set myself up for failure, I haven’t made any, other than my usual two:
1. Remain alive
2. Buy shoes
I will definitely manage at least one of these.
On the second day of Christmas, I dropped my iPhone while getting out of the car, and cracked the screen.
On the third day of Christmas, I scorched my favourite skirt while trying to iron it.
On the fourth day of Christmas, I backed my car out of a parking space and into another car: no one hurt, and just a scratch to the other car, although there is a bit of damage to mine. The financial damage, on the other hand… well, let’s all just keep out fingers and toes crossed that it’s not too bad.
I have spent the last 12 hours or so repeating, “At least no one was hurt, at least no one was hurt.”
I’m pretty much DONE with the days of Christmas, now, to be honest, but I’m thinking that if these things come in threes, that’s me used up all of my bad luck now, surely. Surely.
The fourth day of Christmas also brought these, courtesy of Sarenza.co.uk, whose Brand Ambassador programme I’m a part of:
Hopefully my luck is on the turn…
Tagged shoes
(Dress, Closet; shoes, Kurt Geiger)
Happy Christmas, everyone! War is over! Oh no, wait, wrong song…
This year I was dreaming of a White Christmas, and by that I mean “a white dress”. Well, I wouldn’t have been talking about snow, would I?
They say you should never wear white after Labor Day, but I generally just ignore Them, and this was no exception. My choice of attire did cause some consternation amongst my parents and Terry, who couldn’t understand why I would choose to wear something I had absolutely NO CHANCE of not spilling red wine/ketchup/coffee/anything else I touched on, but actually, I surprised everyone (including myself) by managing to keep the dress clean all day, partly because when we sat down to dinner, Terry and my mum draped me in lots of different aprons and tea towels and various other garments, so the dress stayed white. It’s probably going to be my biggest achievement of 2011, to be honest: the family were all so proud!
Anyway, we had a fabulous Christmas, and here’s what it looked like:
I didn’t photograph the food other than the sorbet and, well, the wine, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it existed, although not for long, because my mum and dad really excelled themselves this year and Terry and I lost no time in clearing our plates.
Actually, I tell a lie: I did photograph the dessert, which was lovingly made by my mum, who also put together the “heart” theme on the table:
My mum needs to go into party planning, seriously. Both of myselves agree:
Instead of a Christmas tree, this year my mum created a “Random Tree”: a branch from the garden painted white, hung with fairy lights, and then festooned with little “random” messages which we all wrote in the run up to Christmas and read out on Christmas Day. (It was going to be a wishing tree, but we thought it might be more amusing to allow people to just write whatever took their fancy, and also, I don’t think anyone wanted to listen to me read out what would essentially be the entire Christian Louboutin back catalogue…). It was a really cool idea, so we’re going to do it next year, too…
As for Rubin:
Don’t be fooled (by the dogs that he got/he’s still, he’s still Rubin from the block…): he is posing here only very grudgingly. He was much more interested in the (edible) contents of the Christmas stockings my parents and his Auntie Lila provided, so Sam the Dog was all but forgotten. Poor Sam.
And that was Christmas day! At some point in the food fest, we managed to fit in a visit to Terry’s family, who we’ve also been spending time with over the past couple of days: two of Terry’s brothers and their families are in town, so it’s been great to catch up with everyone, and we still have lots more planned, so there may be large gaps between blog posts. Then again, there might not be, so don’t go getting your hopes up.
Hope everyone’s having a great holiday!
(P.S. My blog is taking comments hostage again, and we’ve no idea why… if yours doesn’t appear right away, don’t worry, you haven’t been blacklisted or anything – it’s just the blog behaving badly, and your comment will be published as soon as I’m online!)
(Skirt, ASOS; Shoes, Giuseppe Zanotti c/o Shopbop; top, ancient, no idea)
Wow, ever since I realised I have nothing to post about here any more, I’ve been posting a LOT, huh? I bet you’re all thinking, “God, I hope Amber’s going somewhere without Internet access for Christmas, because that’s probably the only thing that will shut her up now…”
Well, I AM heading to my parents’ place for Christmas (they DO have Internet access, of course, but I promise not to abuse it), so this is my official “Goodbye, farewell, have a Happy Christmas!” message. To help me spread tidings of comfort and joy, here is a photo of Rubin in a holiday sweater:
Don’t worry, he only had to wear it for long enough to get the photo. And he was almost hysterically excited by it, for some reason. Maybe he secretly wishes he was a personal style blogger?
Or, you know, maybe not.
(He’s been bathed and groomed since this was taken, by the way. Winter is a hard time for him – and by “him” I mean “us” – because every time he goes outside, he returns looking like he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. Sometimes I think he probably HAS…)
Here is what he’s getting for Christmas, and seriously, you guys, DON’T TELL HIM:
It was labelled “Sam the Dog”, so it will be one of the few toys Rubin owns which has a REAL name, and isn’t called something like “Ponky” or “Bluddy” or whatever. I cannot WAIT to see his face when he opens this on Christmas day. He’ll either be SUPER DUPER EXCITED by it, or he’ll completely ignore it in favour of ripping the wrapping paper it came in to shreds. Maybe both, actually.
Anyway, that’s more than enough from me for now: I hope you all have a very happy holiday, and that you, too, get something as exciting as a SAMTHEDOG under your tree!
Happy Christmas!
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