home sweet home

Back from HK. Hubby in Pokhara with his secret dwarf wife. Or attending a leaving do for a colleague. Either: you choose. Personally I prefer the dwarf wife option - he's always had a bit of a gnomic streak, so it would make perfect sense for him to choose bigamy with a pygmy. Anyhow, whatever the reason, he is not here, which is why I'm alone in the living room with a large spritzer and some leftover fried liver (sounds grim but actually jolly tasty, but perhaps I am just vitamin B deficient and that's why I crave liver, spinach and chickpeas).

So, yes, here we are back in Kathmandu.

There was a survey thing in the Economist the other week which rated the world's cities according to quality of life. I'm not sure how many cities there are in the world, but we came fifth from bottom. Which is not surprising, as things are pretty grim outside the wierd expat bubble we inhabit. Apparently Vancouver came top. Not sure where Hong Kong was, but it must be near the top, as things do actually work there and it's not at all scary (not once during our week did I worry about civil unrest, being run over by an adolescent on a motorbike or dog poo, which I have to say was a welcome respite from day-to-day life here).

However, it is still good to be home. Especially as Meena is trying to mollify me and as a result making things that actually taste nice (although as I said that might just be my vitamin deficiency kicking in). Before I went away I asked her to come in one day whilst we were on holiday and clean the kitchen. She didn't. I was just a bit irritated by this, not really angry, but it came on top of having some wierd middle-ear-thing as a result of flying, which meant that on the morning after we got back I felt as if I was at sea in a force seven, so I just wasn't very happy when I told her she really needed to clean the fridge and the microwave please. She's been trying to get into my good books ever since (cocoa biscuits with white chocolate topping: yum, yum!). And I've been to the doctors to get a prescription for travel sickness tablets. The thing is, they don't entirely work, so I do still feel a bit, well, tipsy, a lot of the time - everything is swaying gently - but without the giddy euphoria or desire to sing karaoke (shame!).

Kids have their friends for a sleepover, so we have two eight-year-olds and three four-year-olds crammed into the Twins' room. It's not even half-past eight and it's pretty quiet already, so I think I'm almost safe to have another spritzer and put on a DVD. The only problem is that I have only got sad DVDs left unwatched. I have one about a widower with two kids coping with his wife's death, and one about a Japanese dog coping with his owner's death, and I don't think I can cope with either of them. So I might have to watch yet another episode of Mad Men, in which you end each episode wondering quite what enthralled you for the last forty-five minutes or whatever. It's quite oddly addictive. There are almost no sympathetic characters in it, apart from the hard-done-by wife and the hard-done-by secretary (I think the writers are women). The men are all amoral at best. And yet somehow it's compelling - but that might just be because I have nothing else to watch (a bit like me suddenly finding Meena's cooking as tasty as you fancy).

Does anyone have any ideas for good DVDs or box sets (preferably not of the coping-with-death-of-a-loved-one variety)?

Aha...it is now completely quiet upstairs so I am off to the pre-feminist dystopia of New York in the early 1960s. Night x