2 day week

I was off work for the first two days of the week just gone. I was supremely lazy and didn't even leave the house (or change out of my sweat pants). Here's what I did:

• After M left with Little Planet to go to daycare and then work, I washed up the breakfast dishes and then... well that was the extent of my domestic duties for the day!
• I blogged
• I finished reading Jeffrey Eugenides' superlative, Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex. The novel begins: "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkable smogless Detroit day in January 1960, and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974"
• I read all the weekend newspapers (FT, Observer and Herald Tribune)
• I ate hot buttered toast (homemade rye bread with caraway seeds) and vegetable soup, plus lots of chocolate chip cookies
• I responded to urgent work emails (I had no choice)
  
• I watched Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in the elegant movie Guess Who's Coming To Dinner while outside the wind howled and the rain poured down in sheets
  

It's nice to have days of solitude like these - so good for the soul.

Yesterday was Friday. Both M and I took the day off as annual leave. Compared to the first two days of the week when I stayed at home, this day was a busy day. After dropping Little Planet off at daycare we:

• Headed to the Southbank and ate hearty breakfasts at Giraffe: M had huevos rancheros and I ate a full cooked English breakfast. The food was delicious but it's such a shame that only restaurant chains exist on the Southbank
  
• Then onto the Hayward gallery for the bright, bold and brilliant Ed Ruscha exhibition (photo above)
  
• Walked back over the river and caught a bus to the Royal Academy for the playful, colourful and extremely busy Anish Kapoor exhibition
• Down to the White Cube at Mason's Yard to see Damien Hirst's latest paintings (which seemed to me like modern day versions of Francis Bacon as re-envisioned by the Chapman Brothers - in other words, wholly derivative)
• Lunched on delicious handmade-noodle soup at Baozi Inn in Chinatown (photo below)
  
• Afterwards, we went to the Covent Garden Odeon to see the Coen Brothers' latest movie The Serious Man - a fantastic black comedy
• Stocked up on tea at Postcard Teas and provisions (fresh fish, cheeses, wine) at the John Lewis Food Hall
• Headed back home to pick up Little Planet and then meet my mother-in-law who has just returned from a long holiday in Chille and Argentina and is staying with us for the weekend
• While M and his mum prepared Little Planet for bed, I took a cab to the Sadler's Wells Theatre to see Akram Khan and Nitin Sawhney perform Confluence - a highly-emotive performance that fused Sawhney’s music with Khan’s contemporary spin on classical kathak dance. I've lost count how many times I've seen Akram Khan (photo top) - blog posts collated here - and I try not to miss a show.

So what a week. In all I was at work for just two days. I dread the amount of work I have to catch up on on Monday (I'm trying not to look at my emails, which is difficult considering they are all on my iPhone). And now the weekend is here - and the sun is actually shining!