I went to see this one with an entirely open mind. Apart from the first two paragraphs of a review tacked up on the wall of the cinema foyer, I deliberately, staunchly refused to read anything about it, as I wanted to go along with a clear and empty mind.

It’s a very beautiful film.

Penelope Cruz is the impossibly glamorous mother of a grumpy, frumpy daughter, living in a dead-beat wind-swept town in a fairly anonymous corner of rural Spain. Almodovar spends a lot of his camera time looking at either her bum or down her top at the deep crevice that sits just inside the top of her tight dresses, and the rest outlining a simple story of three women living, loving and fighting with each other, all the time learning more about their own and their friends’ pasts. It’s like a Spanish Desperate Housewives set many leagues from the closest city.

There are deaths, reunions, fights and tragedies. The only thing that’s missing is a marriage to round things off, and while much of it shows how hard are the lives that they live and how resilient they have to be, there is some genuine laugh-out-loud humour that lightens the flow at the perfect moment.

I’m sure that there is a metaphor in there somewhere: something to do with the wind turbines that appear again and again and again, never still for a moment in this town where the wind never dies down. Are they telling us that this is a story about how our lives turn full circle? That what goes around comes around? That our pasts always come back to haunt us?

Perhaps all three, and perhaps none of them. What is true, though, is that the two hours of this colourful (in the most literal sense), charming film pass by almost as quickly as the breeze that is so central to its characters’ torment. And even if the punch-line can be guessed not long after you pass half way, it’s a worthy watch that would probably repay re-viewing once you know how it ends.

Litres of paint spread on the walls: 15
New lampshades bought and fitted: 3
Hours of Radio 4 consumed: 27
Number of times a presenter has almost induced a brush-flung-at-radio incident: 8
Cheese and Onion pasties eaten: 3
…and quiches: 1
…biscuits: 25
Cups of tea drunk: 17
…and coffee: 8
…blackcurrant and apple juice: 2
Paintbrushes ruined: 4
Rollers rolled: 2
Thumbs sliced open: 1
Walls painted: 28
Ceilings still left to smarten up: 1
Doors dripped on: 5
Neighbourhood cats tickled: 2

I think, in short, the flat is ready for sale.

I went back to my old life today for the first time in over a year. My tenants, you see, moved out last week, after 12 months of renting my flat. So I’ve decided to sell up. I was up before the crows and out buying paint and brushes and dust sheets and rollers and, after breakfast, picked up the keys from my agent and headed over to the pseudo village to see if anything had changed.

It hadn’t. The walls were the same sunflower yellow I’d chosen eight years ago, the light in the hallway was still a little too dim for my liking, and I recognised some of the neighbourhood cats (although sadly they didn’t recognise me).

I went to Asda to buy some lunch and found it full of the same brain-dead zombies and pre-cooked chickens as it had been when I last went there, almost two years ago, although they’d done away with some of the more ambitious lines in their home prettyficating department to make way for toilet brushes and plastic cups.

Just about the only thing that had changed was the size of my flat, which seems to have grown by at least 75% since I was last there. I’d been hoping I may have been able to blitz every room by the time I knocked off for a bath, but by six I’d done a first coat on just the two bedrooms and the hallway, with the kitchen, lounge diner and bathroom still in their virgin unpainted state.

It felt good to be back there, though. I sat on my familiar and now well-bettered settee drinking tea as the sun streamed in through the windows and for a little while wondered what it would be like to move back. I’m quite tempted, although I know it’s the wrong thing to do for a hundred different reasons.

Whoever gets it, though, I hope they’ll feel the same way living there as I did all those years.

But… whether I feel the that way myself by Monday evening, which is my revised ETA for the end of painting, is another matter altogether.

Yesterday. Vinopolis. We’re standing around quaffing, waiting for the event to start. Champagne on tables, sausages on plates being carried around by the waiters.

9.20
Waiter: Prawn?
Natasha: No thank you.
Waiter: Why not? I didn’t cook them, you know.

10.15
Waiter: Sausage?
Nik: No thanks. I don’t eat meat.
Waiter: Why not? How can you not eat meat? I couldn’t live without eating meat.

11.22
Waiter: Cheese stick?
Stuart: Only if you smile.
Waiter grimaces.

12.05
Waiter: Cheese stick?
Nik: No thanks.
Waiter: Why not?
Nik: I don’t want one.

Nice venue. Shame about the staff.

Here’s a bit of desperate marketing from KitKat. The idea is that you fill your mug with tea and slip a KitKat bar into the specially-shaped chiselled slot in the bottom. Why? So the hot tea can melt the chocolate and you can enjoy the confectionery equivalent of a tuna melt.

Except in reality, all that happens is the chocolate sticks to the wrapper and you end up with just a mess. Unless, of course, you unwrap the KitKat first, which keeps your foil clean, but leaves your mug with a sticky bottom.

Nice try, boys. But no.

I’ve not had any spam for weeks. Now normally that would be a good thing – nobody likes spam – but it does make you wonder what else isn’t turning up.

So, today I switched hosting companies. Not entirely hitch-free, since they emailed the login details to the new account, which meant that to access them I needed to use them to log in to the account inside which they were locked. Confused? Hmmm.

So, it’s been running on the new host now for most of the day, and my spam count had rocketed up to … a big fat zero.

Which leaves me wondering where all my spam has gone. I used to get over 3,000 a day, so I’d expect to have at least 1,500 racked up and ready to download now if that old account had been stripping them out, and the new account isn’t (I checked).

Either the spammers have given up on me (I hope they’ll forgive me for not being too hurt by that fact), or the spam problem has been solved in my absence.

I wonder.

Dad was in London this weekend, leaving Provence in the supposedly safe hands of the French. So, we arranged to meet for brunch; something we used to do about 20 years ago. I can’t believe it was two decades back. I was still at school, and probably grumpy about having to get dressed up smart on a late Sunday morning.

Times have certainly changed.

They don’t do it on the top floor of the Hilton any more, with a view out across Hyde Park. Instead the brunch bunch has transplanted itself to the Marriot where the same too-much-money rich bitches pile their plates high and leave half of it, course after course after course.

The food is excellent, with thick cuts of rare, pink tuna stakes in the nicoise salad, anchovies the size of small trout in the caesar, and more deserts than a whole series of Delia Smith which, at £12.50 a head if you book through Top Table, is nothing short of a bargain. The ultimate high-class ‘scoff as much as you can eat’ buffet.

It was also a very good excuse to be out of Chelmsford. This weekend it’s been over-run by boots-wearing, mud-encrusted music fans for the V Festival, which I can hear streaming through the window as I type, almost as well as I would if I was stood before the stage in Hylands Park.

The last time I went, I think, would have been to V98, when we’d stood in the pouring rain to watch Robbie Williams, and Sal had concussed herself on a concrete block in the chill-out tent, after which she spent some time chilling out in a St John’s Ambulance.

One of the great things about being 32, though, is that you can adopt an air of supreme superiority about the whole affair, and not feel that you might be missing out by not attending. Particularly not when, as last night, you’re tucked up in bed listening to a tropical deluge hammering down, thinking about the poor wet fans in their single-skin festival tents two miles down the road.

Those time that have changed have changed for the better.

The BBC is making a programme about the British Museum called, unsurprisingly, The British Museum. There’s been a board at the museum’s Montague Street entrance announcing the fact for some months now, probably so you’re not surprised to wander around a corner and see a mummy sprout a boom mic.

They emailed me a couple of weeks ago to ask if I’d meet them for a chat in the Great Court, over coffee, about why I go there so often. So we agreed on them today, and I took a late lunch to sit down for 30 minutes with two of the BBC’s finest. The coffee was very good, too.

The show’s not due to air until spring, but they were happy to talk about some of the bits and bobs they’d picked up since they started filming there back in February. Like the fact that every one of the thousands of panes of glass in the roof of the Court is unique. Or that the London seagulls don’t see it as glass, but as the gentle waves of the ocean, which they dive-bomb (literally), leaving it spattered with dirt. To get rid of it, they have specially-trained cleaners who go up there with soft rubber-soled shoes and walk across the glass with brooms to brush it all off.

They also, rather disappointingly, told me that the Secretum doesn’t exist any more. It did once, but as society’s mores have changed over the years, we’ve become less shocked by supposedly obscene sculptures and art, and so its contents have been gradually distributed among the most appropriate galleries of the museum.

As Wikipedia puts it:

The Secretum is a name given to Cupboard 55 in the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities at the British Museum, London. Inaccessible by the public, it has a reputation as a repository for exhibits of an erotic nature. Though claiming to be from ancient cultures, many of the objects are Victorian fakes and are deemed unfit for public display on grounds of quality, rather than because of their supposed obscenity. In any case, the museum’s attitudes to material previously deemed to be obscene has now changed, as shown by the Warren Cup.

I may never have seen it, nor would I ever have had a chance to peer inside but somehow, now that I know it is no more, something of the museum’s mystique has died.

I so wanted it to be true.

Humour? Advice? Inspiration? They print a lot on the side of your morning coffee these days.

Is the BBC posting subliminal messages on its web site?