Bad blogger

I know, I know. I am a bad blogger. I have been to all sorts of places, done all sorts of things and had some pretty heavyweight conversations in the past week, but I couldn't get my head around writing about them.
I apologise.
In my defence, I did get half way through a post about baring legs in the spring weather, but it started raining and suddenly the post seemed a bit irrelevant.
Anyway, here is where I play catch up. In the last week my relationship has gone to the edge and back. Maybe not quite all the way back, but back enough to be able to breathe. There have been some tears and some heart rending moments, but there have also been some pretty lovely moments for the two of us this week as well and things feel generally much better.
Moving swiftly on, I have a rather good story about getting eyed up by Orlando Bloom at the ballet. I shall hopefully be dining out on this for a while because it makes me feel rather better about myself that I have for quite a while.
It is rare that I get any good perks through work, unless your idea of fun is attending a lecture by a semi-world famous architect in your spare time, so I jumped at the offer of two tickets to the ballet at an evening hosted by Audi. Yes, Audi the car makers. No, don't ask me why they invited an architecture journalist to a performance of Cinderella, because I have no idea. But I am very grateful they did. I took JFK as my date and decided to get my legs out in my black Acne sack dress and Topshop heels with my hair scraped back into a ponytail, lots of black eye liner and red lipstick. I even ditched my glasses for the dreaded contact lenses.
We had amazing grand tier seats. We were surrounded by tv celebs of the nicer kind. There were canapes of steak on a single chip and crab cakes and champagne during the intervals and a lobster buffet after the performance, which was fun, but a bit patchy. The principal dancers, cinderella and her prince played by Marianela Nunez and Thiago Soares, were very good in my humble opinion so I was thrilled that they came back to meet the celebrities meaning I could get them to sign my programme. She was scarily sinewy up close, he was a bit of an old-fashioned hunk of the type that belongs on the cover of a Mills and Boon bodice ripper.
And I am fairly sure Orlando Bloom eyed me up. And then gave JFK a wink. So either he is gay, fancied us both, thought I was a prostitute or just through JFK had done well. I'm plumping for the latter as it is much better for my ego. The upshot of all this is, although I have never previously fancied Orlando Bloom, I now have filthy dreams about him.
Last weekend I also had my feet nibbled by fish in a bucket in the name of smoother skin.
Possibly the weirdest beauty treatment I have ever tried, it simply involves plonking your feet in a bucket of warm water with lots of tiny cleaner fish in it which then proceed to eat the dead skin off you feet. It sounds pretty foul, but feels surprisingly ok, especially when administered by a man with extremely nice arms and that traveller-bum thing going on that is, occasionally, more than a trifle attractive to look at (as long as you don't start asking him about his travels because anything he says is pretty much bound to be completely tedious).

(Nibbly fish)

The stall with the nibbly fish is in the newly opened and revamped stables market in Camden. Not what it once was, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I quite liked it. There were some interesting stalls and it had a nice atmosphere and I may even go back. Could this be the re-birth of Camden?
Although Camden makes me feel old, and brings back a disturbing mixture of memories from my teens and early twenties, I do hope it does have a renaissance because I am very fed up of East London. 
On Wednesday I attended a Science Museum Late which focused on the issue of beauty. Aside from meeting some very interesting people, including the editor of marieclaire.co.uk and the curator of the museum's new gallery of sustainable fashion, the event was also unexpectedly fascinating. Sponsors L'Oreal assembled an impressive group of speakers for a round table discussion on why beauty matters and what beauty is.
Sadly, the panel neatly sidestepped some of the more interesting audience questions about skin lightening in india and the use of parabens in cosmetics, but there was a lot of talk about the importance of self esteem and identity that got me thinking. No talk about the flip side of course, the feelings of inadequacy beauty can engender in both the young and old, the frankly sinister spectre of plastic surgery or the fact that my little cousin feels that without a thick cake of make-up she is invisible.
Fashion and beauty have also always gone hand in hand, and there was no discussion of how our notions of beauty have changed with fashion or why. But it certainly got me thinking, and I shall be coming back to this at some point in the future.
Other things that have happened - I gave my cousin a make-under and she gave me a make-up, the result being that she looked like a less intimidatingly perfect version of Gwen Stefani and I looked like an oompa loompa that had an accident with the blusher. And today I went to the final day of the Dover Street Market market and spent too much money. More on this tomorrow. I promise.