Satan claus,Sally Army and cough drops!

The festive season is now fast approaching and I have to admit it feels very strange. Without the usual mayhem that ensues at this time of year in 'Blighty' it just feels like any other week. When I say mayhem, what I actually mean is I haven't spent the last week panicking that I have not done any shopping and am not permanently hungover! With no work parties to attend and most friends out of town, the build up has been quite sedate and my liver is thanking me for it.

It is quite liberating not being bombarded with Xmas adverts on the television and radio.Shopping is a joy because there are not five hundred thousand blokes doing exactly what I usually do - hitting Prada and Gucci on Xmas eve in a panic - and the streets are not crowded with gangs of boozed up Santa's! I have finished all my shopping and feel very organised and in control, yet something just doesn't feel right.

It might be that I read yesterday that Blighty is experiencing a cold snap and temperatures will go as low as -6 degrees. It is still pretty warm here something we don't associate with Xmas and I am playing cricket on Saturday! The Delhites however, are at least trying to do their bit to help me find my festive cheer and take me closer to home. Most of them are wrapped up like a Himalayan mountain rescue team to try and combat the morning low of about 15degs!

It is the funniest thing when I go for milk in the morning in shorts and a tee and pass the security guards huddled around fires with hats, scarves and gloves, even the dogs are now wearing coats! I have no idea why, yesterday the temperature was 26 degs!

It is not just the lack of liver damage,cold and shopping that is missing though.Nor the fact we have a tree we have christened Kate (after miss Moss due to it looking slightly anorexic). This will be the first time that 'A' and I have spent Xmas away from our families. My "supermum" had her last chemo this week and has the energy of a teenager! She would be the first to admit that she can be a tad "humbug" about all things Xmas but this year she has had a road-to-Damascus-Scrooge-like-turnaround and is as excited as a dog in a butchers shop! Xmas will be a very special one this year in The Conde house and we will be drinking a huge toast to mum's continuing good health.

"A"'s family need no excuse to celebrate Xmas. when it comes to excitement and dedication to the cause, they can make The Griswald family look like Jehova's witnesses. It is not uncommon for Christmas dinner at their house to last 4 days. A family camped out at the table refusing to admit that the day is actually over! They have stocking presents; Santa presents;tree presents;table stocking presents and afternoon tree presents! No exaggeration! I have been with 'A' for 12 years and still have no idea how it all works!

It does though and Xmas with the Conde's and the Light's is a yearly highlight that will be sorely missed. We will though be doing our best to recreate some of the magic for our boy's and with the help of Bob Dylan's 'Christmas in the heart' CD on a permanent loop we are slowly but surely getting there. We even had the 'Sally bash' turn up last night to serenade us with carols. Armed with a lot of spirit, tambourines, a Bontempi keyboard and the scariest Santa I have ever seen, they sang a few fave's while Raffi cowered in the corner hiding his eyes from "Satan Claus"!

It was all very festive in an Indian kind of way. In an attempt to make up for scaring a 4 year old and a "thirtysomething" (I have been barred from stating my age in public as 'A' said that it would make it easier for people to guess her age and she is still not admitting to a day over 30) man to death, Satan Claus gave us a bag of sweets. All very nice and Rafa was just beginning to warm to him when we realised that they were in fact cough sweets!

As I said all very Indian, this is how I feel Xmas will be this year. A little slice of 'Blighty' with an Indian twist, our only problem now is finding sprouts, feel free to send out an emergency food parcel for us. I will gladly swap them for a kilo of Honitus honey and ginger cough drops!

In the mean time,Merry Xmas to all and thanks for reading, over 2000 hits now!! Mulled wine anyone?

Indian house husband: Broken hearts

Indian house husband: Broken heartshttp://www.marieclaire.co.uk/community/blog/433798/a-soul-mot-in-365-days.html

Broken hearts

I read Lucy Robinson's blog in Marie Claire yesterday and felt it needed to be read by as many people as possible because it is quite brilliant.Click on the link to view.

The pain just drips off the page and as I was reading it I was almost in shock, as I realised that a heart could be broken so badly. After taking a while to digest it and reading it again a few times, my focus turned from pity for Lucy to intrigue at why break ups seem to hurt women so much more than men.

It was at this point that I stopped and thought whooooooo there! This is a nest of vipers you really don't want to disturb, be sensible, leave it there and walk away.Unfortunately the stubborn part of me kept wandering back for another dig around and I started to go back through the hazy mists of time to my own relationship break ups and those of my friends, to see if I could recall anyone hurting that badly.

Now I have had more than my fair share of break ups over the years, but I don't ever remember spending week after week crying and contemplating suicide. More to the point, I never heard of an ex of mine being in a bad way either. Is it just me, am I completely shallow? Was I actually such a crap boyfriend that nobody ever felt bothered enough to be upset by me finishing things?

One of my relationship's ended with me being beat up with a saucepan! After I had dropped the bomb shell that I wanted to end it, she stormed off to the kitchen to get a pan to scoop up my gold-fish because "I am taking my f****** gold-fish with me because it is my f****** gold-fish and not your f****** gold-fish, I f****** bought it for you and I f****** hate you and hope you die" at which point I started laughing. Big mistake. She proceeded to pound me with it before going outside and "keying" my car. I still have a phobia for all things Prestige to this day.Not long after she was in the tabloids linked to a member of the royal family so she clearly didn't have too many problems getting over me.

I remember one particular break up that I was slightly cut up about and I my well have spent a week moping in my bedroom, listening to Leonard Cohen. Other than that though I am at a loss to remember any lasting upset. There was always something else to do like playing football, drinking with mates, playing football and drinking with mates, playing football and ...... hang on, was it really that simple? Is that all it took to get over a break up?

While women spend weeks puzzling where it went wrong and what they could have done different, do men really just play or watch football and drink with their mates.Is that our only defence mechanism? Millions of years of evolution and the best we can come up with is football and beer.

Are we really that basic and shallow? Are we all the same? Do any men go in to a year long slump? Not that I recall. I remember Marc breaking up with Barbara when we were 15 and taking to his bed for a week because "We had a pregnancy scare and I really thought it had bought us together as a couple, but when she found out the test was negative she dumped me". He actually missed a Friday night disco at North Park over that, the pain was so acute. He eventually got up because "I could smell bacon and it was Villa Man U. on the telly"

I had another mate Dave who split up with Tor after seven years together at the age of 23. She was younger and "felt she was too young to be settled down" and as I recall, it hit Dave pretty hard. He spent about a month listening to tape recordings of Northants Fm's Sunday night Cuddle-on-the-couch-show and played crap for our football team at the time, but before you knew it was back drinking snake-bite and black propping up the bar at Rockefeller's looking for a new girl!

At the same time, I knew some girl's who were completely devastated and "would never be the same again" and "will never be able to love again" because of break ups. One girl I knew actually attempted an overdose while another eventually got married but still always kept a picture of my mate (who dumped her) in her purse and apparently does to this day!

Why do women seem to suffer so badly with break ups? One female friend theorises that men always "hold a bit back while women put their everything in to relationships" thus leaving themselves more vulnerable when things go wrong.I don't believe this for a minute. I think I have always given my all to relationships but sometimes they just don't work out. When that time comes you have to make a practical decision about what you are going to do. Maybe that is it, maybe men can compartmentalise things practically while women do it emotionally.

I don't know all the answers but I am so glad I have never spent a year feeling like Lucy - and quite a few of her readers who have tagged on comments. I really hope as well that I have never made anyone feel that way but if I have I am really sorry. Nobody should ever have to suffer the sort of pain Lucy describes but that, and her on-going search for a decent bloke through Internet dating make for fantastic reading.

SO thanks Lucy, not only for providing thought provoking and genuinely touching blogging but for also reminding me how lucky I am to have found 'A'. If she was to ever get fed up of my general idiocy and call it a day I may well be feeling your pain!

http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/community/blog/433798/a-soul-mot-in-365-days.html

Missing decade

I have just been back to "Blighty" and had a huge trip down memory lane. The North End Lads (NEL) were reunited for the first time in too long and I got chance to spend some time with my fantastic mum and dad. They are doing well and my mum is putting up a Stirling fight against her cancer. Dad is right along side her and helping her every step of the way, when he is not tripping over dishwasher doors left open by me! Apart from that though, there seemed to be a general feeling of doom and gloom about the place.

I had forgoten how bleak the British autumn could be. It seemed to be raining from the time I landed to the time I left and good news was far from the front pages. I think it was my brief trip back to Clapham though that has brought on a strange longing for the "noughties". Not usually one for nostalgia - unlike 'A' who loves it but thinks it isn't what it used to be! - I have found myself drifting back misty eyed to happy times and wondering where it all went?

Has anyone seen the noughties? Has anyone else lost them? I have spent the morning looking for them but can't find them anywhere! We are just a few short weeks from a new decade and this one seems to have passed by while I was busy doing something else.

I know having thought about it at length this morning that I have crammed a lot in, but still refuse to believe it was actually 10 years long. In that time I got married;had two children;travelled 40000km around India;lived in a foreign country;lived in eight properties;had four jobs;visited 11 countries;had seven friends, two uncles and a grandma all die yet it seems to have gone in the blink of an eye! Nearly 15% of my three score and ten gone, consigned to history,the annals of time never to be returned.

Surely it can't be more than 3 years since we all sat around waiting for planes to drop out of the sky and computers' the world over to crash, causing catastrophe on a global scale? No more than 3 years since we were deciding whether to pay out huge sums for a ticket to a super-club, or "getting away from it all with a few friends to a cottage in Norfolk/Devon/Cornwall"(delete as applicable)? No more than 3 years since we really did "PARTY LIKE IT'S 1999"!? I won't accept it has gone, I feel cheated and want it back now. If anyone finds it please hand it in to the local police station.

The Noughties were always going to be fantastic. All us thirty-somethings now, who were late twenty's then and in our prime knew it was going to be a great time in our lives. Something special was in the air, our J.F.K.(Tony) was in power, Oasis were number one and everything seemed possible. Here on the cusp of the next decade that same air has rotted, our Nixon (Brown) is in power,Bob the builder is number one and that "anything is possible" feeling seems to have been replaced with dread!

I didn't feel any remorse - apart from missing family - on my departure back to Delhi. I really feel that this decade is going to be even better than the last despite the massive debt the Government has saddled us with and despite the fact there seems to be little optimism about.

It is so much healthier to look forward to the amazing times ahead than the amazing times behind. I don't know what the "teenies" will have in store for us but I know they will be great. While I am with 'A' and the boy's they always are, so if you do find the "noughties" down the back of the settee, or in the gap between the driving seat and the hand-brake in the car, just leave them there. I don't actually want them back, I am marching on to the best ten years of my life!