The Salad Days

Today is the first day that finally looks like spring in London. It’s still a bit too cold for the usual bikini brigade – you see people sunbathing in the parks as soon as the temperature hits 70 – but I legitimately need my sunglasses today. It’s sunny and clear – so clear that I could catch glimpses of Big Ben from the taxi the whole way down St. James Street.

There was so much traffic on Pall Mall I decided to get out and walk the kilometer or so to my office, and I couldn’t help thinking back to the first day that felt like spring last year. It was in March, before we’d even sprung the clocks ahead, and I remember that like today, it was a Wednesday. I’d just come back from Belfast, stayed up late closing a story I’d reported from there, and then had a 9 a.m. booksigning in Hampstead. I wore my favorite outfit, the one I wore at least once a week: Seven jeans, a Temperley wrap sweater, and black Victorian lace-up boots I’d bought in Berlin.

After the booksigning I met up with a friend who’s quit his job to write his novel, and we both skived off for the day. We went to Regents’ Park and then walked to Primrose Hill and sat outside in a café for hours, only interrupted by occasional texts from his then-girlfriend, who he finally stopped being constantly on the verge of chucking only a few weeks later. For me, it was the first heady days of The Married Guy (not that I knew to nickname him that then). Those were the salad days -- in all senses of the word -- and it felt like they might last forever.

Now my friend is with a woman I think he’ll marry and I see him maybe once every two months. The Married Guy is, well, married (though apparently he already was when I met him, too). The boss who sent me to places like Belfast – and much farther afield – is gone, and so are most of those assignments. Neither those jeans nor the sweater fit, and I wonder if they ever will again. Occasionally I wear the boots, which – despite my best efforts – still have flecks of mud from the walk to Primrose Hill.

Where will I be at this time next year?

* * *

Today’s cab ride was back from the Jimmy Choo offices, where I’d been invited to a preview of the autumn/winter collection. The goodie bag – probably the only Jimmy Choo carrier bag I’ll ever have – contained what is probably the only Jimmy Choo accessory I’ll ever own: a shoe horn.

Swinging a Jimmy Choo carrier bag is probably up there on the “I’m a princess” scale with swinging a proper hatbox (both times I’ve had one men have jumped to help me with my luggage), and I walked through the Embankment Gardens in a daydream. When I arrived in my office our bureau assistant – who’d been to the press day earlier -- and one of our interns (not even this one) were both looking quizzically at the silver item in the lilac Jimmy Choo box. “I can’t work out what it is,” the assistant said when I walked in. “Is it a jam spreader?”