Long weekend

Saturday:

• Breakfast at home of feta and spinach boreks from Yasir Halim.
• M bought shirts and a tie at Gieves & Hawkes, we bought two blouses (for me) and an Airtex shirt (for him) from Muji, and browsed menswear - Martin Margiela, Hugo Boss, APC, Dries van Noten - in Selfridges.
• Lost ourselves in a surrealist (2001: A Space Odyssey-like) dreamscape in Selfridges - Dadadandy's The Fountain Of Innocence.
• Lunched on cheese and dill pickles (M) and egg and anchovy (me) rye bread open sandwiches at the Nordic Bakery on Golden Square.
• Popped into the Algerian Coffee Shop on Old Compton Street to stock up on Indian Mysore coffee beans.
  
• Bought books in Waterstone's on Piccadilly: Rattawut Lapcharoensap's Sightseeing, Kenzo Kitakata's Ashes and Seicho Matsumoto's Inspector Imanishi Investigates for M; Manju Kapur's Home, David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and Richard Yates' The Easter Parade for me; Wired and Time Out New York magazines (with David Bowie on the cover, yes) for both of us.
• Saw the late Lee Lozano's gently soothing, abstracted geometrical pencil drawings and colour washes at Hauser & Wirth. Lozano in 1968: "In physics, all straight lines are really curved if you extend them far enough. And if you've been doing straight lines for a while, the next thing is to try curves. Where else is there to go but all the way round?"
• Was mesmerised by John Maeda's floating or pulsating or swirling or flittering digital landscapes writ large or small on canvas, iPod screens or computer screens. At the Riflemaker. Maeda image above.
• Uninspired by the both childlike and adult-like pencil sketches of Chris Orr's Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo and London drawings at the Jill George Gallery.
• Finished the day off with a meal at the fabulous and busy and laid back Santa Maria Del Buen Ayre in London Fields. Shared a 14oz prime Argentine sirloin steak, a 10oz grilled Argentine fillet steak, two Argentine-style pork sausages, black pudding and provolone cheese (below) plus several bottles of Quilleros, followed by crème caramel with dulce de leche for me and cheesecake de dulce de leche for M.

Sunday:

• Began the day with Mysore coffee in bed and Yasir Halim croissants.
• Cleaned the house, did laundry, sorted out meals for the week.
• Lunch of poached eggs on a bed of spinach on toasted flat bread at home.
• Went to Hampstead to revisit Burgh House, where we were wed over two months ago (photo below).
  
• Walked across Hampstead Heath in the crisp air and intermitent sunshine. Ate gooey chocolate fudge cake in Kenwood House and lay in the grass looking up at the trees.
• Walked back home, getting lots of pollen and what felt like tree shrapnel in our eyes, via Highgate and Crouch End.
• Cooked breaded veal schnitzel with fried potatoes and tomato salad for dinner, washed down by a bottle of Cahors wine which M bought from Toulouse last week.
• Finished the day with a re-run of Ugly Betty on E4.
  

Monday:

• I can't believe how much detail I used to write in each blog post. It's enjoyable - for me at least - to revisit my life before (well, at least before October 6th) and after M.
• Browsing my archives, I stumbled upon this post on the ways being with my husband (then my fiance) had changed me. The notes still apply.
  
• After a leisurely morning lying in bed late, drinking coffee, eating croissants and Turkish cheese, watching the rain batter our windows, surfing the blogosphere, perusing cheese muffin recipes, reading the weekend FT and the Sunday New York Times - I was disinclined when M suggested we go into town again today. He's far more active than me and gets cabin fever frequently. I, on the other hand, can happily spend many hours pottering around our house doing nothing in particular. I've been known, for example, to waste entire weekends watching episode after episode of Sex And The City or Buffy The Vampire Slayer (my guilty pleasure) on DVD - well, at least when I was single. So when M suggested this morning we go for a meander around the British Museum, I screwed up my face and said, "Let's not". Then he dangled this carrot: "We can pop into Waitrose in The Brunswick in Bloomsbury". Suddenly I began dreaming of all sorts of edible goodies I could buy...
• But luckily the rain continued and we settled in, instead, for an afternoon at home watching Japanese movies on DVD: Tony Takitani - a muted and evocative meditation on love and loneliness, self-sufficiency and dependence based on Haruki Murakami's short story (this link contains an abridged version of the story), and Yasujiro Ozu's 1952 masterpiece Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice following the rekindling of love between a bored and very different Tokyo couple. Here's a great post on Ozu. "Everyday life, rendered tellingly, provides more than enough drama to engage us deeply" - Ozu.
• For lunch, as the wind howled outside and the rain continued to lash against our fragile kitchen windows, M made us both bowls of hot sushi rice topped with sliced veal schnitzel (leftover from last night's dinner), grated daikon and umeboshi plums with a dipping sauce of mirin and soy. He served the donburi with small bowls of miso broth with dried wakame seaweed.
• For dinner, he's now roasting a chicken and we'll have it with roast potatoes and a carrot and caraway seed salad.
• I can't believe the long weekend's over.