Out and about

One of the many reasons I love living in London is the endless opportunities to do things. Yet I am always taking this forgranted and forgetting to blog about them. So to recap on some recent activities...

Mr Planet and I have celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary by dining out on fantastic Polish food at the restaurant and vodka bar Baltic in Southwark.

We've collected bark, twigs and leaves and chased pigeons in Russell Square, taken Little Planet out for burgers and fries at Byron near Holborn and shopped (in Marylebone) for bedding and photo frames at The White Company, children's books at Daunts and steaks at The Ginger Pig.

We've gorged on ice creams (green tea, orange, chocolate) at Lick in Soho.

I've been to the cinema to watch the fun and quirky Young Adult.

Over the next few weekends and months, we've booked or plan to see... Complicite's production of The Master and Margarita at the Barbican, Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach at the Barbican, English National Ballet's My First Sleeping Beauty at the Peacock Theatre with Little Planet, David Hockney at the Royal Academy and Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern.

And with the weather picking up, there are the Royal Parks and, closer to home, the Heath to romp around in again. Winter has been spent shrugging one cold or tummy bug after the other off so I am looking forward to Spring.

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!

34 weeks

It's been a fraught start to my maternity leave. M was away in New Orleans and I missed him terribly. His touch would have been the perfect de-stresser as I dealt with the seemingly endless procession of John Lewis delivery men (AEG washing machine, Siemens fridge/freezer, Brabantia bin, spare double bed), house clearance men, plumbers (for defective washing machine), John Lewis after-sales clerks (for ditto) and BT. On Saturday night, I was so stressed that I was physically sick. And now it's a week of guests (though fortunately family and close friends only), antenatal visits and classes, and more deliveries.

And this house is so much bigger than I've been used to in recent years that in my heavily pregnant state it's such an effort to go up to my lovely bedroom to nap, so I catch the zzzz's on the sofa. I can't even think about cleaning and hoovering the house in preparation for all the visitors. And taking/collecting dry cleaning or shopping for food just for lunch is simply too much of an effort. I waddle heavily and feel like everyone is staring at me and I feel like an elephant. Fortunately the lovely M is now back and, as always, takes as much on as he can and never complains.

Not knowing many pregnant women before me, I didn't realise how much bigger and tireder the last month of pregnancy makes one. All I want to do is reside in the deepest silence that exists. I want no words, no sounds, no movement, no obligations to anyone. I want perfect stillness.

But inspite of this, just now I took a step back and walked around my house and stroked my huge belly and thought how lucky I am, how much my life has changed for the better these past two years, how I wouldn't have it any other way.

My daughter is growing exponentially and rolling around to her heart's content inside of me. I think about her constantly. This weekend, I attended both the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre Of Taiwan's magical and ravishing Moon Water performance at the Sadler's Wells, performed to Bach's Cello Suites, and Paco Pena and Nishat Khan fusing flamenco guitar with Indian sitar (MP3 link) at the Royal Festival Hall. As well as enjoying it for myself, I kept wondering how Little Planet was enjoying the music also. Certainly throughout she was rolling around and stretching out.

I am so excited for her to be born and gaze upon her and hold her and cherish her for hours on end. But I admit I am also attached to her snuggled tightly inside of me. For while she's inside of me, it's just me and her and the bond is between just the two of us. These last few weeks are the weeks to treasure. For once she is out in the world, I will have to share her.

Gushing

Is anyone still here?

What a whirlwind... The crisp autumnal air, the clear blue skies and the fiery crinkly leaves have all conspired to inject new energy into my jet-lagged bones. I love Autumn.

On Friday, we saw Akram Khan perform Zero Degrees again at the Sadler's Wells with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. My review from the last time we saw this performance remains unchanged, but I marvelled again at how the loose, fluid movements of Cherkaoui contrasted beautifully with the logical, almost alacritic movements of Khan. This now counts as my sixth Akram Khan performance, all of which are collected here on my blog since 2004. Obsessed, moi?

Then on Saturday night, we attended Philip Glass's musical adaptation of Leonard Cohen's The Book Of Longing poems. I like Glass's original compositions, but find his adaptations of other peoples' work less passionate and inspiring than the originals. I enjoyed this night for the majestic presence of Mr Cohen himself. What a man! Though he sat in the audience for the entire performance - at the end of our row no less - he did recite one of his poems for us on stage and there were other recorded recitations throughout. I would have enjoyed the night even more if it had been just him and his voice. He has a dark and brooding drawl that draws one dangerously in and his descriptions of love and sex and passion and women and God that are so addictive. In short - he is very sexy... and in his 70s! He's also followed Buddhism (without necessarily calling himself a Buddhist) for several decades and several of the audience questions directed at him about spirituality were flowery, pretentious and almost cultish. He deflected those with poise, tact and elegance revealing a man whose spirituality is so private and ingrained that he doesn't have to go on about it. My hero.

Much of Saturday was spent viewing flats and houses in our area - 10 in total. We shortlisted a couple of places in our minds, but I was not entirely convinced: the layout was odd, or the decor was too sterile, or the second bedroom was too cramped and made me feel claustrophobic. And then we opened the door to a three bedroom house in a leafy, quiet street 5 minutes from where we already live and we were instantly smitten. The decor was all wrong, of course (bright red walls in the living room, lilac walls in the bathroom, pine everywhere), but every room was the perfect size and the layout was perfect - a double living room, a double kitchen with room for a large dining table, a pretty private garden with well-established shrubs and trees, two excellent-sized double bedrooms upstairs plus a good sized single bedroom which can be our study or, later, nursery.

We are both used to making instant decisions - quickly weighing up the pros and cons rationally, but ultimately going with our gut. Though we saw a few more houses and flats afterwards, this was the one we kept thinking about. So on Monday we put in an offer and, after a little haggling from both sides, our offer was accepted and they took the house off the market. This morning we set the ball rolling in terms of mortgage, surveyor and solicitor. It could all go pear-shaped and we are prepared to keep searching. But in the meantime, I can't help dreaming of my new house! I pray we can move in before the New Year.

I'm not done with our Japanese trip... hang in there and I will get round to blogging more about it.

A weekend affair

M returned from work on Saturday morning at 4 and then had to leave again after four hours sleep. Alone, I spent the morning contentedly pottering at home, but by lunchtime I was itching to get out and about.

Luckily by lunch, M had finished his work and we met up at the ICA where we lunched on handcut chips slathered in tomato sauce and mayonnaise (me) and linguine with black olives, basil leaves and cherry tomatoes (M).

Then we went to the ICA cinema and watched first-time American director Gary Hustwit's Helvetica - an engaging and witty look at the world's most ubiquitous and, it turns out, controversial font. The documentary charts the font's origins back to a small foundry in Switzerland in the 1950s and its rise to wordwide prominence as a clean, modern and functional typeface - the staple of global corporate and national and local governmental logos and signage, from the US Postal Service to American Apparel.

Here's a great interview with Gary Hustwit in the Daily Telegraph.

"One day in 2005, Gary Hustwit was wandering through the streets of New York, listening to music on his iPod, when he suddenly noticed something very odd. The signs on bin lorries, the opening-hours notices hanging from café doors, a newly opened American Apparel store: all of them were emblazoned with exactly the same kind of lettering. He looked around a little more: to his left was a billboard advertisement for American Airlines, to his right the name of a subway stop; these two also shared the same typeface. 'It was like a secret language,' Hustwit recalls. 'It seemed like I was the only one who realised it was everywhere.'"

Walking outside, after the film, I admit I couldn't help counting all the times I spotted the Helvetica font - much to M's annoyance.

In need of more knitwear now the temperature has dropped, I popped into John Smedley. John Smedley has been making fine knitwear from its mill in Matlock, Derbyshire for over 200 years now and its Merino yarn is specially bred by nominated wool growers in New Zealand. The production process is meticulous, as its website describes:

"After knitting, the garments are scoured or washed using water from John Smedley's three springs - this is a crucial stage in the manufacturing process giving the garments their characteristic 'soft handle'. Additional processes render the garments shrink resistant and machine washable, a unique feature considering such delicate techniques are applied. Each John Smedley garment goes through three stages of hand supervised pressing to ensure correct fit and shape before highly trained seamstresses hand finish the garments, applying neck trims, buttons and John Smedley labels."

I bought an extra-fine (30 gauge) Merino wool cardigan in charcoal grey. The yarn is so soft and sumptuous and smooth that it feels like a second skin and I can't stop touching myself! I will return for a few more colours.

We then popped into the White Cube in Mason's Yard for Gary Hume's American Tan exhibition featuring abstracts of the athletic forms of American cheerleaders in mid-performance but heavily objectified so the eye hones in on split crotches, legs akimbo, a pom pom atop a taut arm. High gloss paint on large aluminium canvasses and painted bronze sculptures. The effect was both pornographically disturbing and thrilling. And as an aside, I couldn't help being reminded of American Apparel ads.

In the evening, we saw A Disappearing Number by Complicite at the Barbican - a play about mathematics, identity, love and loss.

Srinivasa Ramanujan, a poor, young Brahmin, was working as a clerk for the Madras Port Authority at the turn of the last century when he wrote an unsolicited letter to British mathematician GH Hardy. The letter contained highly original and unorthodox mathematical theorems that Hardy thought "must be true because, if they were not, no one would have the imagination to invent them". He persuaded Ramanujan to overcome his Brahmin taboo on foreign travel and come to England, and later Hardy described their meeting as the "one romantic incident of my life".

The play interweaves the relationship between Hardy and Ramanujan with that of a modern day relationship between a mathematics lecturer and her husband who works in hedge funds. I thought the intertwining of narratives worked really well. The layering of sound and film was also brilliantly executed, and one of my favourite moments in the play was the interplay of kathak dancing, kathak chanting and the recitation of a mathematical numbering sequence.

A few things didn't quite work for me: the recurring conversation between one of the protagonists and a call centre worker from Bangalore was cliched and stereotypical; the play could have delved more deeply into the "romantic" relationship between the English and the Indian mathematicians; it could have explored India's ancient history of mathematics better; and it could have made more of the links between mathematics and kathak dance.

It also took me a while to gain empathy with the two modern characters and early scenes with them detracted from the main story. However, by the end of the play I was so empathetic with all the characters that I was in tears. The first time I've ever cried at the theatre.


Sunday was a quieter affair. M put in a few hours working from home during the day. We grocery shopped and cleaned the house; we breakfasted on poached eggs on toast; we read last weekend's papers because we hadn't finished them last week; we blended strawberries and oranges into juice; we surfed online and flicked through magazines. We have so many magazines still to read - Marie Claire and Red, the Tate Etc magazine, Wallpaper*, Monocle, the Royal Academy of Arts magazine, BBC Good Food, The Economist, New Yorker (devoted to food) and my personal guilty pleasure Oprah. M is in France on business from tomorrow, for three days, so he packed.

We also strolled through the park and ate a late lunch at Ottolenghi in Islington. I've passed by this place many times before but Tommy's blog reminded me that I really should try it, so we did. What a place - such devine salads and cakes! Between us we had wonderfully dressed salads of flavourful beetroots, potatoes, mangetout, French beans, courgettes and sweet potatoes, and scrumptuous desserts of a vanilla and rose cup cake and a mixed berry pavlova. Why can't they open a branch in Soho?

Later in the evening, while M was on a conference call, I made a Moroccan meatball stew for our dinner. But by the time it was cooked, M announced he had to go into work again. So I ate alone and have enough for tonight (Monday) too for M is away.

M is a "magic circle" lawyer and this week he's worked 80 or so hours spread across 7 days. I am proud of him because he rarely complains, he enjoys his job, and he still wants to enjoy what little free time he has (with me!). I will never again moan when I myself have to work long hours. Those City lawyers earn alot but they certainly earn their keep, and then some.

Friday date night

After work, I met M at the Sadler's Wells for a spellbinding dance performance by Taiwan's Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Cursive: A Trilogy. Organic, amorphic, primodial movements set against the sound of the sea, the rain, the howling wind, foghorns, bird song, bells. Dancers spinning like dervishes, pulsating like a slow heart or undulating as one amoebic form while scrolls of rice paper unfurled and streams of ink dripped down to the floor. True to the spirit of chance as set forth in the I-Ching or The Book of Changes. The dance was inspired by kuang chao or wild calligraphy, considered the pinnacle of Chinese calligraphy in which all the rules are broken and the characters set free from form. You can immediately see the diverse mix of influences in their artistic approaches, from the kinetic alacrity of martial arts and the meditative motions of tai chi, to the graceful fluidity of ballet and the chaotic exhuberism of modern dance. Oh, to have that level of command over my body - no, not command as such, but for my limbs and joints and muscles and bones to be as limber and as supple and as fluid! Perhaps it's back to the yoga studio I go. I first became aware of this dance company at last year's sublime Sacred Monsters performance with Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan - partly choreographed by Cloud Gate founder Lin Hwai-min. This is what I can't wait to see - Akram Khan's collaboration with the group for Lost Shadows.


Having just missed one of the many rain showers we're suffering in London of late, we walked to the bustling Exmouth Market and had rosy apple cocktails and beers at The Ambassador. The Kasteel Cru beer was deliciously clean and sparkly and I learned that night that it was brewed with Champagne yeast. Then across the road to Sam and Sam Clark's unpretentious Moro. Only the wait staff looked under 30. The diners looked like they read The Guardian, grew organic vegetables in their allotments, were lecturers or senior public sector workers, and only wore fine-knit woolies - no suits. The food was rustic and robust, though a touch too oily and fatty for my liking. We started with grilled sardines and baby broad beans with slivers of dried tuna and mint dressing. For mains, I ate wood-roasted pork with salsa mojo and new potatoes and M ate a meaty hake cooked in salsa verde with peas and clams. We finished with chocolate and apricot tart and Malaga raisin ice cream with Pedro Ximenez. We washed everything down with delicous glasses of dry sherry and red Massaya wine. Too tired and inebriated for a bus or the Tube, we hailed a black cab to take us home.

Phases

Last night we saw a triple bill of dance set against the music of Steve Reich at the Barbican. Part 1 was performed by Rosas, featuring Tale Dolven and legendary 46 year old Belgian choreographer and dancer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker who danced to Reich's Piano Phase and Violin Phase. During Reich's Phases, as described by Wikipedia:

"the performers begin by repeating a rapid twelve-note melodic figure in unison. One player continues, keeping tempo with robotic precision, while the other slowly speeds up until they are lined up, one sixteenth note apart, and then resumes the previous tempo. The cycle of speeding up and locking in continues throughout the piece, with a new figure being introduced once the original figure has come full circle".

The performance by Rosas unfurled rhythmically, with the two dancers spinning in and out of unison on a minimalist stage, whirling in and out of white light and black shadows in hypnotic response to the recorded music.

Part 2 featured the Richard Alston Dance company who performed to a live synthesis of Perotin's 12th century Viderunt Omnes and Reich's "speech melody" and "medieval polyphonic" Proverb. This was a much more conventional and disappointing performance with the male dancers in tights prancing like so many impish Pucks across the stage. I was reminded by turns of A Midsummer's Night Dream and Spike Jonze's amateur troupe dancing whimsically in the shopping mall of Fatboy Slim's Praise You video. I was so uninspired that all I could do was "package watch" in between the yawns.

Far more explosive was Part 3's Akram Khan Company, dancing to a live London Sinfonietta performing Reich's Variations for Vibes, Piano's & Strings, which Reich wrote specially for Khan. The Akram Khan Company danced with hard, masculine vigour, sparring with the musicians and whipping everyone up to the night's only standing and rapturous ovation. A triumph.

Tentative steps

It's been a whirlwind year (since the last time I posted here): newly engaged to M in Thailand in February, new house in North London in March, new job in Noho (just north of Soho, obviously!) in May and in the midst of all this I've still been enjoying London. Last week, for example, we saw Akram Khan and Sylvie Guillem perform Sacred Monsters at Sadler's Wells in a sexy modern mesh of classical Indian and classical Western dance forms.

"I have spent my life studying and performing kathak. It is the source of my creative process. Working with Sylvie Guillem is an exciting new challenge, giving me the opportunity to explore another classical dance language with one of its greatest exponents, and as a result unearth the things that are most often lost between the classical and modern world" Akram Kahn.

My first encounter with Akram Kahn
My second encounter with Akram Kahn
My third encounter with Akram Kahn

We also saw a couple of films from London's Asian Film Festival - Firecracker: the tempestuous modern Indian gothic movie "Ek Hasina Thi" (2004) directed by Shimit Amin about an unassuming young woman wreaking havoc and revenge on the dashing lover who has embroiled her in his murky underworld dealings; and a melancholy triptych of stories about love and loneliness in Singapore by director Eric Khoo - "Be With Me" (2006), which received a five minute standing ovation when it premiered in Cannes and which had me sobbing by the end.

The films haven't always been good. Last night I was out with my friend R, who is leaving London for Ireland, India and Hong Kong soon, and we were bored out of our minds by the rom-com movie Trust The Man. I had wanted to see it for a little light chick flick entertainment after a hard week at work, but it was too bland to be entertaining.

Our unsettling excitement of the night - save for several glasses of very nice Pinot Blanc at the Cork & Bottle Wine Bar off Leicester Square and some lovely sushi at Taro in Soho -- was towards the end of the movie when out of the corner of my eye I spied a shadowy figure walking past me. He hunkered down low on a seat two rows in front of us and when I looked over, all I could see shining through the darkness was the whites of two eyes peering through the gaps in the seats at me. I trained my eyes on the screen and after a few minutes I felt him move back past me to the other side of the seats and hunker down again. I alerted R and we scurried out of the cinema before the movie ended, relieved to be away from the white-eyed man and the boring film.

My trip home on the Tube was equally eventful, but in a sweet way. At Kings Cross, a gaggle of drunk girls in their mid to late teens hopped on the train in short skirts, high heels and flashing rabbit ears on their heads. It was close to midnight and one girl kept shouting out to her friends, "Four minutes to go, four minutes to go, and then I'll be nineteen!!". Midnight came and all her friends sang happy birthday, encouraging the rest of us to sing along too. Another woman sitting in front of me rose as the train lurched into a station and she wished the girl a happy birthday and pecked her on the cheek then said it was her birthday too. The girls shrieked and sang her "Happy Birthday Kate" as she got off. A few stops later another passenger told the girls that they had made him happy because it too was his birthday. Not believing their luck, the girls launched into "Happy Birthday Kevin". By the time I got off the train, the entire carriage was smiling or laughing - a rare occurrence on the London Underground!

In recent weeks I have discovered the sublime wonder of Yauatcha in Soho - Alan Yau's gorgeous all-day teahouse and dim sum restaurant that serves 150 varieties of tea (including the subtle and fragrant white tea which apparently has more antioxidants than green tea) as well as 24 varieties of dim sum and a range of exquisite pastries (my favourate being a blackcurrant mousse sitting on a biscuit base and topped with fresh blackcurrants); and the chilli hot revelation of Bar Shu also in Soho - a Sichuan restaurant in which most of the dishes are flavoured with Sichuan pepper, to tongue tingling and numbing effect! On my birthday in August my fiance M took me to the fabulously expensive Roka restaurant and Sochu Lounge where we downed saki and shochu cocktails and ate incredibly flavourful and fresh sushi and other Japanese dishes.

I've also been discovering new places to eat through work: Navarro's tapas restaurant, Fino tapas restaurant and Italian restaurant Passione, to name a few.

Since my last post, I made the leap from the charity to the corporate sector and my new job at a big international digital marketing agency is also very hectic and exhilerating.

On top of all this work and play, we've been managing to find time for a spot of wedding planning. We realised recently that there is a February theme to our relationship: we started dating in February 2005, we got engaged in February 2006, and we're getting married in February 2007. So we've been busy registering our intention to marry with the local council (last week) and booking a venue (in Hampstead by the Heath), sorting out catering (today), music (nearly there - found a classical Indian band), working out the guest list and invitations.

A few weeks ago we attended the civil partnership ceremony of two female friends of ours who have been together for 10 years and have 3 children. I was honoured to be one of the witnesses. The ceremony itself was simple and moving and the party the next night raucous and fun. On top of the sheer happiness we felt at witnessing the official celebration of the union of two of our closest friends, we began getting very excited over our own ceremony next year.

But now I've tentatively started blogging again, I'm sure you'll be bored by all sorts of wedding planning!