North Finchley on my mind (and Palmer's Green, too)

I turned twenty-one there.

For my birthday, I got a bonsai tree. They were a new thing then, and I loved it. I couldn't keep it alive for much longer than a year, if quite that - it died of either too much or not enough watering, I can't remember, and I took it to the bonsai shop to be fixed when it was clearly dead, and the woman at the shop gave me a dirty look as to a murderer, and said something on the lines of "I told you not to plunge it to water it - I remember this little tree".

I think we went to eat at an Indian for my birthday - one of our two favourites, either Rani's or Jai Krishna's. Rani's was probably in Finchley, and their starters were to die for. We became such regulars I was awarded first a gold and then a platinum card, which gave us ridiculous discounts. We took the office Christmas party there once, I think that's how I got the platinum card. Their business really boomed later, and they enlarged the premises, but I seem to remember it impaired their food. It was coming out of Rani's, after a meal to celebrate a friend's birthday, that I saw the full moon had been and gone and I hadn't had a period and I realised I was most likely pregnant. I was, with my firstborn. But that was later. Two years later.

Jai Krishna's was a little further away, maybe Stroud Green (does a road named that exist in London? I don't know. Maybe I just made it up now. It matters little). Their food was even stranger - once, I had "Idli Sambar", it came in two bowls, one had a red liquid, the other one a grainy cake, and the waiter gestured at first one and then the other and said "Idli - Sambar - Sambar - Idli". The taste experience was so alien - lovely, but completely alien - that I felt the process needed a new name, it couldn't really be called eating. They had no alcohol license, but you could nip into the off-licence across the street for a bottle of wine or some beers. They would charge you fifty p corkage charge for a bottle of wine. I can't remember what they charged for beer corkage.

Around that time, I had my waist-length hair spun into dreadlocks - spindled, I think the term was - by a friend of a friend (in fact, the same friend from whose birthday party I was coming when I realised I was pregnant). She worked at a hairdresser's. She did my hair at her house, but she charged me for it anyway. I hated my locks at first and loved them later and hated them again much later. I don't have naturally curly hair and had to work on the things for ages before they really set - months. It taught me the technique of making dreadlocks with distinctly Caucasian hair, and I did it for a few friends who wanted them, later. I didn't charge them anything, though.

It was almost exactly this time of year, we had a big Hallowe'en bash, fancy dress and everything, in the back garden that was the biggest I have ever had, it stretched out and became a weird orchard/wood/common and none of us really knew where our bit ended. For once, everyone actually turned up in fancy dress, it was pretty good, and someone asked us if we'd want to take on a stray kitten they'd found - we had just given away the last one of my hand-reared litter named after the Beatles. The kitten arrived a couple of days later, in terribly starved and manky condition, and I fell in love with it instantly. It was named Punch, and after a day or two, I found him limp and weird and obviously very ill but purring louder than any cat of such a diminutive size should have been able to, in his cat litter tray. I carried him to the vet's on the High Street. They diagnosed him with meningitis and didn't give him a very good chance of surviving. I was too upset for words, but one of the people we shared house with asked if it was contagious to humans. Punch pulled through, though, and became the big little kitty love of my adult years. He loved me more than any one of my other cats ever - I would wake up in the morning and he'd be purring on my chest, dribbling onto my face, and he'd climb onto my shoulders and fashion himself into a muff around my neck when I was studying. Later, when we'd moved to Palmer's Green, he disappeared and was never found, even though I left notices on every lamp-post in the area. One person only rang me, and he was offering me kittens from his cat's litter. I didn't really want to face it at the time, but he probably got run over on the North Circular, or became chicken chop suey at some less-reputable Chinese.