Red for danger

I'm back in Blighty.  And about to leave it again.  Kinda. 

But back to the rest of last week: India meant long days and room service in the evening whilst typing at my computer (work, I'm afraid!) so I have very little knowledge of the country outside of my very nice but bland hotel.  Except.  One day we went out to the countryside for some business visits.  It was an experience.  Firstly, the drivers out there are crazy - it's terrifying.  They all fold their wing mirrors in so they can shimmy through gaps in the traffic; shimmying is not comfortable.  We were the 3rd car in a convoy when I thought my end had come.  We were overtaking a fast mountain of steel - a lorry bowling along a narrow country road so fast that we struggled to overtake.  And then a car driving a similar speed zoomed round the bend (yes, they overtake on bends, crowns of hills - you name it); our driver had to slam his brakes on to a standstill and pull sharply behind the lorry.  The oncoming car didn't bother declerating and missed us by about 6"; even the Indian people in our car gasped and moaned.  On the way back we carefully pulled around the sign saying the highway was closed until - surprise! - we found the highway blocked; we drove onto the scrubland and tried to drive around the blocade, we couldn't; we reversed back on to the highway and drove back down it.  The wrong way.  In the dark.  Until we came across a wall of sand.  Back down the road (the right way this time) until we found the slip road we'd entered on.  Then back down that (the wrong way) at high speed.  And we hit a dog.  Not clipped it, comprehensively bashed it.  I can only hope it was dead or it would have been in terrible pain.  And then we went over such a big bump, so fast, that my colleague in the back got mild concussion from being thrown against the ceiling.  And all this on a day where I went 15 1/2 hours without being able to eat and 16 1/2 without being able to use the loo.  Possibly a record. 

Then another appalling flight - NEVER go BA direct.  Inedible food, scruffy planes and screeching children running wild.

I had hoped that routinely missing lunch might have meant I lost some weight, but eating biscuits when I could just because I didn't know when I'd be able to eat again, did not, I suspect, lead to weight loss (haven't dared to encounter Scales of Doom).  But when I went for a wedding dress fitting it was distinctly snug.  And whilst I'm not battling with jet lag (mostly because I was up for 19 hours a day over there and the last day I was up from 7am on Friday solidly until Sunday 3am so was just generally exhausted) I am battling to come off sugar.  What's annoying is that I don't even LIKE biscuits - it genuinely was re-fuelling.

Tomorrow off to County Down for a wedding on Saturday.  In a very tight dress (that Vivien Holloway one again) and very high painful shoes.  There's a lot that could go wrong here. But I'm hoping I've negated the jinx by trying to add some colour to my faded hair:  there is colour but sadly it includes bright scarlet streaks at the back.  Oops.  My hair is literally scarlet with embarrassment at itself!