ALEXANDRA SHULMAN'S NOTEBOOK: Perfect night is ruined... by a swarm of flying ants

Daily Mail​

3 days ago

We were in the garden early one evening last week, planning to have supper with friends and enjoy the long, warm night. The wine was opened, the dips were in place and the gossiping had started. And then, we started to notice them. The ants.
At first there was the odd one on the table which could be swiped away, but soon it became obvious something very strange was happening.
The ants were flying in rather than crawling up from the floor, landing on our arms, legs and in our hair, dropping into the glasses of wine.
Being very British and wanting to make the most of this warm weather, we tried to ignore them, but eventually there was no denying that this was deeply unpleasant.
The ants were falling down the front of shirts and dresses. Ant-laced houmous is nobody's ideal dip.
I feared for what would happen once I brought out the pasta. Eventually we admitted defeat and moved back indoors.
'It's the Night of the Flying Ants,' my friend Fran said, which sounded like an old Eastern proverb rather than an actual event.
But she turned out to be correct. It was indeed The Night of the Flying Ants, which is a brief period when young queens leave their nests to mate and start new colonies.
They leave on the same night but unfortunately, they hang around romancing for several days. It happens during a very hot spell, usually in July.
I have yet to discover whether there is a connection between the ants and the swarm of ladybirds that stopped play at the Test Match between England and India at Lord's the following evening.
I'll never learn to get over tennis FOMO
FOMO – the fear of missing out – is not a condition I suffer from in any circumstance other than around tennis.
I couldn't care less about not being invited to a party, but with a fantastic Wimbledon that has kept me glued to the telly more than ever, I lament not being part of a tennis-playing gang.
To put this into context: I used to be quite good at tennis. As a child I had lessons and our father was determined his offspring would play brilliantly.
'Keep your eye on the ball till it hits the racquet,' he would shout. Although I was never a likely rival to Martina Navratilova, I was passable.
Tennis was one of the few games I enjoyed, and until relatively recently I played singles matches and also felt confident enough to join in a game of doubles, not minding if I was the least talented player.
But in the past year or so something has changed and in comparison to others around me I am now really hopeless – and the more hopeless I am, the less inclined I am to play.
It's not helped by my entirely unscientific survey of tennis players of my acquaintance, which concludes that they come into the hyper-competitive personality type. There is an obvious solution to all this, which would be to have some lessons, but that is where the problem really lies.
As soon as I have to learn something, it becomes a chore rather than a pleasure, so despite the fact that I could no doubt scrub up my game, I stubbornly refuse to get coaching. The odd foray into taking lessons only confirms that I simply don't want someone to tell me to change my grip.
So, the truth is I'm probably stuck now as the outsider.
Perhaps it's not traditional FOMO I am experiencing but Frustration Of Missing Out. With only myself to blame.
We all have one of doze days, Hugh...
My sympathies to actor Hugh Grant, who was shown on television having a nice snooze in the Royal Box at Wimbledon. As a borderline narcoleptic myself, I am frequently falling asleep at inappropriate moments.
The last was at home at a dinner we were giving when I jolted awake to hear myself saying to my boyfriend, much to the astonishment of the assembled guests: 'David, I think it's time we went home.'
Why the caped look is out of this world
It's hard to know what's going on with the trend for caped evening wear.
Both Brigitte Macron and the Princess of Wales appeared in caped gowns at the Windsor State banquet last week, while Princess Maxima of Netherlands wore a vibrant lime green caped jumpsuit at a Nato summit in The Hague.
They certainly looked impressive but in a strangely androgynous comic book way. More like an empress in a sci-fi world than a glamorous woman on Earth.
Failed memory test I won't easily forget
On the 'no good deed goes unpunished' front, I was invited to take part in a survey by Imperial Health Care.
Since Imperial were in charge of an operation for cancer I had last year, I thought I should give something back for their research and agreed.
The first section was fine, with the usual enquiries about previous illness, gender, race etc.
The second part was about cognitive ability. No problem, I thought.
But by their calculations I come into the bottom 30 per cent for my age in just about every category including planning, verbal reasoning, and delayed and immediate memory.
I accept I'm never going to be a good tennis player but… really?
Accessories that are only for moneybags
It's unfathomable that anybody would pay £7.4 million for a handbag, even the original Birkin just sold at Sotheby's.
But then it's equally unfathomable that the most sought-after contemporary handbags cost what they do.
The Row's Marlo leather bag comes in at £5,380 and is the go-to for those-in-the-know wealthy shoppers. Worth is only what somebody is prepared to pay.