Madame Galina's Doings Diary

He Travels Fastest Who Travels Alone

I couldn’t have travelled to Suffolk to spend Christmas because Liverpool Street Station closed before I had done my last corporate Sugar Plum. Which reminds me: be careful what you wish for...

Sixteen or so years ago, walking down Grosvenor Place mid-December, I saw a violinist going into an events venue. A doorman took her coat. He tried to take her violin, too, letting go with only nanoseconds to spare before her teeth met his hand. Moving along one window, I watched what happened next. The doorman ushered her into a Green Room where a lush rider of wine and finger-food was laid out. Reaching into his inside pocket, he handed her a thick white envelope. A humungous fee for playing, no doubt.

And I stood on that pavement hankering for my own gig in Grosvenor Place.

I got my wish last week. Galina for an advertising agency, at Il Bottaccio, number nine. I was provided with the doorman, the wine, the food, and the fee equal to seven months rent. Sadly, I brought with me a pulled hamstring, a strained thigh, and the nasty case of pharyngitis caught in Afghanistan. I cried on the way back to the 390 bus-stop, I felt so lousy. Nor was I consoled by the ad-lib of the year. The company CO put his tongue in my mouth while he administered CPR to me/Nikya after the snake bite. As I got to my feet during the opening bars of the Scarf Pas De Deux, I said, “Euugghhh…I can feel the herpes virus on the march up my gums.”

Which brings us neatly back to travelling. And me being fast this Christmas. (Panto will never be dead while you're alive. Ed.)

Shopping for just me, I was in and out of Sainsburys, Whittards and Lush like a Springbok. Having no issue, I could leave the Opera House after Patineurs and not inflict Beatrix Potter on myself. On the day itself, setting off after part two of David Copperfield with my outdoor clothes over my pyjamas, I could do the summit of Primrose Hill once for every slice of lamb (four) and still be home in time for Everybody Loves Raymond.

Because I wasn’t slowed talking to a partner and/or loved one.

“But how can you stand it on your own?”, asked everyone I told I’d be lone for Christmas.

Back to the slow people on Primrose Hill. As ever, I eavesdropped on conversations.

“See? If we’d left ten minutes earlier when I wanted to, we wouldn’t have totally missed the sunset.”

“But we’re trying to stop him kicking the ball when he’s in a group. To get him to think of others. So you joining in with playing with him when he’s just kicked the ball thus missing an opportunity to think of others, which is what, as I say, we’re trying to get him to do, is less than ideal, darling…”

“Yeah, great: greenery. But if we’d gone where I asked for us to go, there’d have been a lake as well.”

See? And don’t get me started on my own family Christmases. One year my mother knocked my father out with my ballerina musical box, another my father almost drowned my mother in the sink amid the post-Christmas Dinner soak, a third my brother tried to stab my father with the mini-trident I used to toast marshmallows when I was on an Enid Blyton kick. Two things came from these experiences: a career on the stage, and a vow never to spend another Christmas en famille.

So, striding for the last of four times quickly down Primrose Hill listening to the stress talk around me I was feeling smug. There ahead, was another person alone. A young woman with shampoo advert hair and a chamois leather coat. She was also walking quickly.

As she followed her path down the hill, I thought, "Comrade..."

Some thirty yards from the gates, she turned onto the grass and walked to an oak tree. Having prayed for a few moments, she stuck a badly made pair of wings to the back of her chamois and flitted round the tree singing piercingly in Gaelic.