you tart

Of course I was ill this weekend, just when there were plans with girlfriends, a party splattered with neon paint, cold clear weather to walk in.

Still. We laughed and went to an exhibition and ate thick hot chocolate in a cafe filled with bittersweet scents, drank too much wine in a favourite pub. Every year since we left school I have travelled with these girls, the Tarts, and after they left on Sunday I flicked through my travel notes. I never wrote about Bordeaux, other than in that nostalgic romantic way from E's living room in a creaking apartment. Here, because I still haven't got around to posting any more of my summer travel e-mails and reflections, are a few notes I wrote while spending time in a wonderful French city last September:

J is having a rather sexually frustrated time of it. Things she has yelled out this holiday, with no prompting:
"BOOBIES!"
"Can you switch this fanny thing off?"
"Willy!"
When asked why she'd said the last one, she replied "I don't know. It just came over me."
...
I have just found a Parker ink pen in S's bag. S says:
"It's for drawing in my eyebrows."
Gullible E asks, after a pause, "What colour ink does it have in it?"
...
J, as she hides a piece of gum in a napkin, giggling to herself all the while:
"Nasty surprise."
...
Stood in the winery cellar, having boring making-of-wine process explained to us. French man keeps referring to "Racking off."
E starts to giggle and a minute later we are both the subject of disapproving stares as tears of laughter start to trickle down our cheeks.

I did write a lot of pretty, prosaic pieces about the churches and the architecture and all the overblown deliciousness I usually indulge in. But this sitting around and eating and laughing is the stuff memories are really made of, don't you think?