A grand day out

Brighton was a joy. Amazingly chilly sunshine ceded to amazingly chilly fogginess, but walking by the sea never fails to lift my spirits, even if my teeth are gritted against the cold. I could have simply stayed in my amazingly comfortable room at the Cavalaire Hotel but I needed to walk after the four-train, six hour journey down from Edinburgh, and if only I hadn't then decided I needed a spot of retail therapy, I wouldn't have tried to singlehandedly prop up the ailing British economy by dint of nobly handing over the contents of my slender wallet. But hey - I wouldn't have bought a divine pair of gladiator sandals ( for all those occasions where I anticipate going into the arena for the express purpose of being mauled by lions: a.k.a book festivals) nor would I have spent a merry hour or so struggling in and out of a succession of breathtakingly chest-compressing sports bras in forgiving shades of black, coal and soot. I didn't exactly need the sandals, but the sports bra was long overdue - the current once-white-but-now-taupe model being the kind of undergarment your mother warned you about* being run over while wearing.

*As if you'd put on your best scanties and then go out and deliberately fling yourself under a moving vehicle all the better for the A&E staff to admire your impeccable taste whilst picking bits of your person off the tarmac. 

Also, there's something quite encouraging for reluctant gym bunnies about buying new kit - it's not exactly inspirational, but it does vary the monotony a little. And monotony there is by the square hectare at the gym. Urrrrrghh, it is So. Very. Boring., especially on the days that my gym buddy doesn't show and I have to put in my lonely miles on the treadmill without the respite of conversation. There are only so many thinks I can think before my Inner Couch Potato starts the Seditious Whispering, and to my horror last time I went, some close descendant of the Marquis de Sade was - gasp - making toast downstairs from the cardio suite and had left all the fire doors open, all the better to waft the zephyr of carbohydrate concupiscence under our innocent noses.

And then somebody sneezed. Wetly. Explosively.

If you'd managed to hook all our rolling eyeballs up to a Van der Graff generator at that precise moment, our combined voltage could have blownthe sneezer straight across the room. As it was, we just kept calm and carried on. Proving once and for all that the Spirit of the Blitz is alive and stalking the land.