BombayJules is AWOL

So it's a bit quiet on the blogging front because I am in the UK dealing with my passport and visa renewal, house and pet matters.  Being here has made me realise how much I miss my relatively new home in Mumbai and in particular the sun!  Before I went to India, I wondered to myself how I would cope with the heat but being in London....well it's just too darn grey (sorry UK peeps!).  This is a little in contrast to the previous time I was here and I rejoiced in the simple pleasures of England.  Oh well. Here is a little more I have written about my Easter Weekend for Chalo! Magazine:

It was the Thursday before Easter weekend when I had arrived, and the UK could not be described as anything other than cold and miserable.  In fact it was the second coldest April since records began and I really felt it.  As the wind whistled through the gaps in the windows of our ancient house and the snow started to come down, I already began to start missing Mumbai within a few hours of getting through the door.  How I yearned for the sun streaming through the floor to ceiling sliding doors of our Bandra sitting room or even the need to put on the air-conditioning!  I could even forgive Mumbai for being too hot and humid to go outside which I am sure it is by now.

Foolishly, I hadn’t really taken into account that is was going to be Easter when I booked my flight home…I had arrived husbandless and all my friends had already fled London to go and see family and friends. The neighbours had wisely pulled down their blinds and escaped the city with their small children.  Now I was even more miserable – and there was no way I was going to spend several hundred pounds on a last  minute train ticket to go and visit my own relatives up North.  How I missed my hubby and our driver who would take us anywhere on a weekend whim!  

However, I did still at least have the company of my cats. So there we sat for two days with the central heating turned up as high as it would go, cuddled up on the sofa inside a fleece, pashmina and blanket and an additional heater to warm our feet/paws.  But as hard as I tried, I just could not get warm.  Eventually (and to prevent myself freezing to death and being eaten by wolves) I prized myself away from British Daytime Telly (consisting mainly of repeats of Homes Under The Hammer, Come Dine With Me and Top Gear) to go to the supermarket.

I gleefully skipped up and down the aisles of Sainsbury’s swinging my shopping basket (which served well in getting my circulation going).  It is possible that my heart may have completely stopped sitting there on the sofa! There is nothing like the sight of organic Bressingham duck breasts, ‘Taste The Difference’ Lincolnshire pork sausages and sunny Sicilian Lemons to warm the cockles of a gourmet non-dieter. How I’d forgotten how wonderful our supermarkets are!  I must have spent hours in there; stroking tubs of hummus and coleslaw, squeezing Italian plum tomatoes and Hass avocados, sniffing bars of Green & Blacks chocolate and eyeing up bottles of cheap Rioja.  If I’d been spotted on the security cameras, I am sure they’d have called someone to come and take me away. But of course by the time I got to the check-out I would soon come down off my high. Thirty quid for a small chicken, some veg and a pint of milk! (and of course those Taste The Difference Lincolnshire Pork Sausages and a Melton Mowbray Pork Pie).  Get me back to Mumbai where I can get a bag of the freshest, most delectable vegetables from Pali Market for a mere pound!  And two plump chicken breasts from Joseph's for a couple of quid! How people are surviving in the UK, I just don’t know.

Anyway, it’s taken me a while to get motivated and writing this piece has proven difficult – something about Mumbai really does do something for my creative juices. But I’ll be back soon and look forward to coming up with more topics for my blog!  See you soon!

No photos of Mumbai scenes but instead a picture of my cat Wooster before he was taken to his foster parents - we fought each other for the TV remote control over the Easter Weekend

My other cat Binky - happy to pose for a photo shoot during a fit of boredom 
(yes it's true, I am a mad cat woman!)