Clearing out

How was your weekend?

I kicked mine off by watching the new Bridget Jones movie with the youngest and my sister. We booked our reclining chairs, sat down with our gin and tonics in plastic cups, pressed the buttons and … nothing happened.

Well, my sister’s chair whirred into position but the youngest’s and mine didn’t move a millimetre.

I thought about being my usual “oh well, mustn’t make a fuss” self then decided “bugger it, I have a bad back I want that bloody reclining seat”.

So I marched up to the front desk and politely complained.

Young men with flashlights swarmed into the cinema but nothing could be done and the session was full, so they couldn’t move us and we got free vouchers as an apology.

My sister kindly gave ailing me her reclining seat and we laughed and cried our way through the movie.

As my sister’s friend said, it’s not going to win any awards, but we enjoyed it. Weirdly, the bloke from One Day was the toy boy eye candy in it.

I loved the New Year’s Eve party at the end of the movie, it was filled with so much joy. And even though Hugh Grant is a grumpy old man in real life and was a complete bastard as Daniel Cleaver in the previous movies, I do love how he hams it up in the role.

Apparently the script even made HIM cry.

Grant spoke with MovieWeb before he filmed his scenes and revealed: “It’s based on a book that Helen Fielding wrote, which was inspired by her having to bring up her two children by herself after her husband died.

“So it’s very funny, but it’s also incredibly moving as well. I just read the latest draft on the plane yesterday, and was, you know, properly crying. Yeah, the stewardess was very surprised.”

After a lightning speed trip to Newcastle to have lunch with my parents on Saturday, I spent Sunday alternating between resting my back and clearing out cupboards.

Now that I’m an empty nester I can ruthlessly go through the crap and get rid of the excess clutter without worrying that I’m accidentally disposing of my child’s cherished possession.

If it was cherished, I’ve decided, they’d have taken it with them.

There are four piles in the hallway: one for the storage room downstairs, one for the garbage, one for the recycling and one for the charity bin.

It’s been very satisfying, though I still have a long way to go.

There have been some excellent finds along the way too, like a blow-up pool noodle that I can pack in my luggage for my next snorkelling trip.

Actually, it wasn’t all work and no fun. I also treated myself to a pedicure because I can’t reach my toes at the moment and the nails were starting to resemble claws.

I went for a low-key brown shellac to replace my sparkly Christmas red.

DD got home around midday on Sunday from his Beijing meeting and went straight to IKEA to queue for an hour to return the double bed mattress slats he accidentally bought and replace them with queen ones.

Welcome home!

He was so shattered – understandably – from his 32-hour round trip to attend a single meeting that we decided to postpone our usual Sunday afternoon together.

I wandered up to the supermarket instead and bought the ingredients for Mongolian lamb as comfort food, as that’s one of our regular dinner orders when we’re in the mood for suburban Chinese.

All in all, a pretty low-key weekend for me.

PS Oh! I also watched David Tennant’s BAFTA’s version of “500 Miles” a few times. LOVE IT!!!