Book 2, Chapter 45

I looked up into Jean Luc's rich brown eyes and he lowered his head to kiss me…
On the nose!

Banging the door behind me, I stomped into the apartment. How dare he treat me like a child! It’s not as though I wanted to kiss him, with that stubbly chin unshaven since yesterday, but on the nose!

"Had fun?" asked Litara looking up from her laptop. “Ah, Jean Luc…”

“The man is impossible. He kissed my nose!”

“And you wanted him to kiss you where exactly?”

Instead of answering I put on the kettle and prepared a bowl of muesli with all of the extras I could find in the cupboards like almonds, hazel nuts, dried fruit, a banana, coconut flakes, fresh grapes… Other girls comfort eat with ice cream or cake but my body craved the contents of a health food store in preparation for war on the male of the species!

“I have seen Jean Luc in action and as you would expect he’s had a whole string of girlfriends that I've seen. Without wanting to put you down, if he wanted you that way you would have slept with him by now.”

“Oh fine! First I don’t want him but now you leave me feeling that because I haven’t had sex with him I must be too ugly!”

“There are alternatives. I employ him and you are my baby sister so maybe he doesn’t want trouble from me.”

“And? You said there are alternatives so at least two reasons.”

“He might want more from you than a quick shag!”

Eating then going straight to sleep is not recommended and I only managed 4½ hours asleep before waking in need of therapy. I was alone in the apartment and Litara had given me a credit card but, beyond medical costs, we had not talked about the money I was to be paid during Dumblebit’s adventure and during the preparations so I had been treating the whole media experience like an unpaid internship. As I'd managed to get by on my earnings, the promise of a billion pounds to come from Bill made me uncomfortable about pressing my sister financially. Sometimes though a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, which is shop!

I went out in skinny jeans and a boho top but the apartment was in an area being developed at great speed where although there was a lot of mess there were also some new shops and a few shops from the old days selling West End goods to the newcomers at East End prices. What the rest of the world knows as first-class knockoffs were made in the same workshops as the designer originals and that is where I found my dress for spring, going on summer. Someone more sophisticated than I would have carried it home but the need was strong so I changed in the shop and set out to explore Canning Town.

A lot is made of the distinction between tourists and travellers seeking an authentic experience of another place, another culture. The difference is bogus as I can now verify having twice during my walk been stopped and asked for directions by those who assumed I was local and then I was asked like any tourist what part of Wales I came from when I ordered a pot of tea and and a slice of cake in a café.

Looking about me as I drank my tea I was seeing urban regeneration on a scale even larger than that I'd grown up with in Cardiff. What was the difference between this and the work done by Bill's billion pound trust? Governments could pass laws to force the owners to sell them slums and derelict industrial sites at a low price. Government schemes should benefit from economies of scale where a billion pounds was peanuts compared to the whole. On the other hand governments were rife with corruption and they were manned by people who wanted to be re-elected. To provide short term jobs and lucrative contracts for their friends governments built infrastructure that either nobody wanted or was so expensive to maintain that only the rich could afford to live there. They too often produced the two G's. Ghost-towns and Gentrification. Even when a really successful regeneration occurred, in time that pushed up property prices so far the next generation couldn’t afford homes in the same area they had grown up, at least until their parents died and left them property. Maybe not even then.

Naturally when I resumed my walk the rain gods were tempted by my new dress and April lived up to its showery reputation but ducking into a charity shop those gods that look after those of us that naïvely leave home unprotected provided the perfect solution at a charity shop price in the shape of a white flower-shaped umbrella to match my new dress.

There is so much to see in a new part of town when you have time to explore. I picked up two baguettes and pâté from a newly opened delicatessen and grapes from an old greengrocer’s but I did have to finally circle back toward the apartment as the streets filled with people making their own way home after work. Some were old Eastenders some recently arrived City types. I did stand out rather from both groups in my new dress among everyone else in work clothes which may be why I subconsciously slipped into Naomi mode with something of a strut and a twirl to my umbrella until a wolf-whistle pulled me out of my reverie to seek out the perpetrators; a small group of roughly 16-year-old schoolboys. I gave them a wave and a smile for their politically incorrect deed because life can be just too dull with only the industrious and do-gooders around.

Our timing was perfect as Litara and I arrived at the door to the apartment block at the same time and my big sister immediately picked up on my new acquisitions and much improved mood.

“Soon I’ll be raiding your wardrobe little sister the way your eye for clothes is developing. Do I smell fresh bread too? Race you up the stairs - last one in does the washing up.