Revolutionary tweets

Twitter has revolutionised the way I chronicle my life. Before I discovered Twitter for myself - years after everyone else, it seems - I had to keep note of everything I did in a notebook and later in the Notes app on my iPhone. And then I would collate these notes into a post for this blog.

Now I can Tweet as I go about my life and simply copy and paste (with a little editing down) into this blog. It may be a lazy way of blogging, but then blogging can be seen as a lazy way of keeping a diary. And in all honesty, without the ease of Twittering I doubt I would be able to blog as frequently as I am able to do.

There is another reason why I copy and paste most of my Tweets into this blog and that is that one day soon I will self-publish this blog in print form as my own personal record of the last six years of my life - and boy what a last six years these have been!

March tweets:

• My 2nd ever Mother's Day was wonderful. 21 month old Little P presented me with a handpainted card complete with painted handprint. Then....
• ...Mr P took myself, Little P & both her Grandmas out for a Turkish lunch. Delicious minced lamb and chicken kebabs, hummus & baklava.
• The 1st colours Little P was able to identify were not the typical primary colours we expected but pink, purple, black, brown, grey, white.
• Little P loves singing (loudly!) & can sing Old MacDonald, Hickory Dickory Dock, Twinkle Twinkle, Row Your Boat, & Baa Baa Black Sheep.
• Little P loves dancing. She has a unique style like old black men from the deep south twisting & shaking their bodies to the Devil's tunes.
• All her little buddies jump up & down to music; not Little P - she twists and turns and shakes her limbs like a possessed child!
• Had my 1st embarrassing moment in public with Little P today: I was wheeling her home from daycare when we passed a boy & his older mum...
• ...Little P pointed to the pair exclaiming "Boy! Boy" Then JUST as the older mum passed us, Little P pointed up at her & stated "Grandma!"
• ...Little P's voice was so loud, the mother must have heard, but I was too mortified to look back :-0
• A girl told me that she doesn't want kids because she doesn't want her life to change. But what is the point of life if it remains the same?
• I value thinking time in work so highly that it's priceless. It's shocking that there is so little time to think at work!
• To think deeply I go to the office toilet, for a walk, or have a document open and pretend to be looking at it...
• But mostly I do my deep work-related thinking after/outside work because at work you have to be busy all the time (so crazy!).
• Jury service is over. It was intense but so interesting that I want to do it again. However, we didn't come up with a majority verdict...
• ... The case was so complex even the judge admitted its complexity. The case is now up for a retrial so I still can't discuss it.
• Grandma is looking after Little Planet today so Mr Planet and I are off into town.
• Strolling along the Southbank, a leisurely read of the papers in Benugo (bfi), blown away by Gerhard Richter's Cage paintings at the Tate.
• Lunch @ The Swan at The Globe: fish cake with poached egg & hollandaise; smoked mackerel salad; sticky toffee pudding & honeycomb ice cream.
• Provisions from Borough Market: enoki, oyster, shitake mushrooms; thyme; rhubarb; Burnt Sugar fudge. 3pm: Now home to play with Little P.
• Sea salt fudge by Burnt Sugar = delicious!!
• Poule au pot with homemade aioli for dinner tonight, followed by Waitrose key lime pie.

Easter tweets:

• Lovely day spent with my parents. Little P especially enjoyed eating my mum's khichuri (a spiced lentils & rice dish with peas & potatoes).
• Tonight's dinner was yakitori (chicken thigh meat skewered with spring onions, chicken livers skewered with asparagus) with tare sauce.
• In the UK, we have Good Friday and Easter Monday off, so it's a 4 day weekend for us. We have no plans other than serious chilling.
• Our plan to holiday in Hong Kong in October has been postponed to January 2011 as the case M will be working on will coincide. So instead...
• ... We will plan a couple of European holidays this year. I'm thinking of Amsterdam and Istanbul as I've visited neither city.
• Almond croissant & orange juice @ Le Pain Quotidien for breakfast in Holborn before getting my hair done @ Aveda.
• Coffee beans from Monmouth & bath, hand & face products from Kiehl's in Covent Garden (including the much hyped acai moisturiser).
• After all my years living in London, I have finally stumbled upon Ziggy Stardust's red telephone box in a dark corner of Heddon Street!!!!!
• I am so happy they have not knocked down Ziggy's telephone box :-)
• Ilya & Emilia Kabakov's sublime The Flying Paintings, in Sprovieri gallery. Idealised Russian scenes floating within white space. Ethereal.
• Zara's new home collection is so bright and colourful and Summery.
• Pizza lunch @ Il Baretto then shopping in Marylebone: fillet steaks @ Ginger Pig, cheese @ La Fromagerie, clothes for Lil P from Bonpoint.
• Also bought books for Lil P from Daunts: Dr Seuss' Daisy-head Mayzie, Curious George Feeds The Animals, Harry & The Dinosaurs Go To School.
• Pretty photo frames @ The White Company, tarts @ Paul. Enough shopping! Returning home to enjoy time in the garden whilst weather is fine.
• After a great morning shopping, a delightful afternoon in the garden: M planting seeds, Lil P pushing her dolly in its buggy, I was dozing.
• I've finished cooking tarka dal, lamb korma & aubergine curry with tamarind and coconut for tonight's Easter dinner for M & I & 3 guests.
• Lil Planet enjoyed her Mr Potato Head Easter egg this morning but thankfully isn't yet bothered about chocolate. She ate just a small piece.
• This Easter morning we spent a few hours in the park chasing Little Planet through the muddy field. She laughed so much. She is such a joy!
• Now it's 2.30pm and Little P is napping. Peace and quiet subsumes the house for an hour. Lovely!
• 10am Easter Monday: M & Little P are in the garden. M is mowing the lawn, Little P is pushing her dolly in the buggy and throwing her ball.
• And me? I'm inside, curled in the sofa, reading the weekend papers cover to cover. Apart from having been up since 6.30am, this is the life!
• When the wind shakes the branches of the trees, Little Planet exclaims, "The trees are dancing!". I love seeing the world through her eyes.
• It's park time!
• Bratwurst, mashed potatoes and mustard for dinner tonight, followed by mixed berries crumble. The end to a lovely and quite relaxing Easter.

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!

These feet were made for walking

Little Planet had her first ever fitting for shoes on Saturday. We took her to John Lewis on Oxford Street and they measured her as size 4.5, width E. We bought her some red and tan Start-rite Dinky Tots (photo above) and some pink and plum Clarks Dizi Days (photo below). She looked so cute and grown up stomping around the children's department. She also looked very pleased with herself.
That afternoon, both her Grandmas came over to our house. We all spent the afternoon enjoying the warm and sunny weather in the garden. M's sister and her boyfriend also popped round later and, after Little Planet went to bed, we all ate roasted sea bream followed by blueberry clafoutis for dinner in celebration of both my mother-in-law's and sister-in-law's birthday.

Sunday morning was spent in the park - an expedition which has become so much more fun and enjoyable for M and I now that Little Planet is walking. She particularly enjoyed chasing after the pigeons!

Her vocabulary is growing by the day. New words she's been saying in the last week have included "keys", "shoes", "tractor", "cheese" and "wow". And when she sees her bedtime book Goldilocks, she says "Goldy"! She is quite the little communicator at 15 months. She also enjoys singing (not the words, but the tunes) - "Ba ba black sheep", "Row, row, row your boat" and the theme tune to "In the night garden". And I am teaching her David Bowie's "Starman" when she is in the bath, which she is beginning to pick up the tune to while we play with her bath toy star. She is also taking a great interest in dressing herself. She tries to put her socks on, as well as her bib and she also tries to put her arms inside the sleeves of her baby-gro or jacket.

After lunch, I left M baking bread and Little Planet having an afternoon nap and went with my mother-in-law and mum to the cinema to watch Julie & Julia, about the food blogger Julie Powell and food writer Julia Child (photo above). The movie has received such bad reviews, but I was thoroughly charmed by it. It was utterly uncomplicated and simple and didn't pretend to be anything other than a feel-good movie. Perfect Sunday matinee fodder. Though I admit, I'd have happily watched the movie had it been solely about the effervescent Julia Child but not if it had been about the self-absorbed Julie Powell. And of course, the entire movie was unadulterated food porn! I am itching to try out Julia Child's recipe for beef bourguignon.

And then back home for a roast chicken dinner, the leftovers of which I am now making into spinach and chicken curry with new potatoes for tonight's dinner. M is on his way home and I am very hungry.

Weekend delights

• My mother-in-law was visiting for a long weekend, so on Thursday, while M was at work, we took Little Planet to Giraffe in Islington where we both lunched on burgers and fries whilst Little P watched the lights, the balloons, the other babies and children and their mummies/nannies, and played with a paper napkin
  
  
• M took Friday off work, so we left the baby with my mother-in-law and browsed Comme des Garcons' Dover Street Market in Piccadilly. I was particularly taken by the new Play childrens' range. Within a year - the smallest Play Kids size is still a little too large for her - Little Planet can wear clothes just like her mummy! I also bought some grey buttons from the Labour and Wait stall to replace the cream buttons on my trench coat, as I think the matt grey buttons will look more interesting against the creamy beige material
  
  
• We lunched at American brasserie Automat across the road, where M had his favourite macaroni cheese with spinach and bacon and I ate a burger with ham, pineapple and cheese. We shared a dessert of Mississippi mud pie with pistachio ice cream and watched all the Mayfair hedge fund boys have their long Friday lunches
  
  
• A collection of Stuart Luke Gatherer paintings caught our eye at the Albemarle Gallery. I liked his parodies of middle class and professional lives
  
  
• We strolled around Green Park and St James' Park and enjoyed the crunch of autumnal leaves underfoot
  
  
• We viewed Pieter Bruegel's masterly painting The Massacre Of The Innocents at The Queen's Gallery in Buckingham Palace. It was interesting to learn that the figures of babies and children being massacred were later overpainted by order of the Emperor Rudolph II, who owned it
  
  
• Then onto the comprehensive Rennaissance Faces: Van Eyck To Titian exhibition at the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. As usual, I was too tired to take in all the analytical connections being made, but I enjoyed simply absorbing the works emotionally. M is far more intellectual than I and loves reading and assessing any art exhibition's curatorial interpretations
  
  
• We refueled on restorative green teas at Mitsukoshi on Regent Street. I love the peace and quiet of their most private (but still quite popular) basement Japanese restaurant and tea room
  
  
• We ate an early dinner of assorted tapas and charcuterie at Dehesa on Ganton Street (behind Carnaby Street) and then rushed onto the Jubilee Line to see...
  
  
• ... the magisterial Leonard Cohen at The O2. Oh my goodness, what a performance. I have written elsewhere about my adoration of both the man and his music. I have loved this man - who is old enough to be my grandfather! - since I was a teenager. This old man writes the sexiest and most spiritual songs of love and lust that I have ever heard. His music is truly transcendent
  
  
• We left during the encores and managed to get home just before midnight. Little Planet was fast asleep in her cot and we capped a wonderful evening with some delicious Suntory Hibiki
  
  
• We slept in late on Saturday morning - well, until 8am, which constitutes a lie in with a 5 month old baby. I think I have mentioned before that Little Planet hardly ever cries because she's hungry and she's content to simply doze or play first thing in the morning. This Saturday morning she woke up at around 6.30am so we popped her into bed with us and she fell asleep. Hence the lie in!
  
  
• After our usual leisurely weekend breakfast of croissants and strong, freshly ground coffee, we left Little Planet with her Grandmother again and M and I headed back into town to do some more Christmas and birthday shopping
  
  
• From Arigato in Soho, we stocked up on a variety of Japanese condiments for my sister-in-law, including mirin, soy sauce, sushi rice, rice topping and nori sheets. From Waterstone's on Piccadilly we bought her a Japanese cookbook and from Muji we bought her wooden rice bowls, chopsticks, dipping bowls and a big cloth bag to put everything in. I love giving food gifts to people
  
  
• From Zavvi on Piccadilly, we bought a variety of CDs for Little Planet, including yet another Baby Einstein classical compilation and Disney's Christmas carols!
  
  
• We lunched on green curry fried rice with char-grilled chicken, chilli prawn fried rice with shitake mushrooms, and fish cakes with cucumber and peanut relish at Busaba Eathai in Soho. The service was as bad as ever but the food was as delicious as ever (albeit a touch too salty for my liking)
  
  
• In the evening, I cooked a prawn and red pepper curry with coconut milk and also a sweet potato and spinach curry with Bengali five spices. And after dinner, around 9pm, I collapsed into bed while M and his Mum watched TV (Little Planet had been fast asleep since 6.30pm)
  
  
• We managed another lie in this Sunday morning, then M fed Little P and took her downstairs to play while I stayed in bed until 10am. Such bliss
  
  
• We went to my sister-in-law's house for a long Sunday lunch. She lives just a few minutes away from us, but now she is in a new relationship we hardly ever see her. She made us pizzas. She loved her birthday present of Japanese goodies
  
  
• Poor Little Planet missed most of her daytime naps today due to the lie in and the extended lunch out so was very ratty as the day draw to a close. She simply catnapped in her buggy, which isn't restorative enough for her
  
  
• After he has fed the baby and put her to sleep, M will made pork tonkatsu again with shredded cabbage and sushi rice for our dinner
  
  
• Another lovely weekend nearly over. Boo hoo

Choice pieces...

... from the past week.

• Dancing to the Sugababes videos on TV with Little Planet in my arms
• Eating M's risotto with rosemary and borlotti beans
• Being riveted by the John Adams series on TV
• Enjoying the return of Heroes
• Dressing Little Planet in jeans, beanie hats and NYC sweats (photo below)
  
• Lounging around reading the papers as Little Planet naps and it pours with rain outside
• Playing David Bowie and Tom Waits CDs to Little Planet, exposing her to superlative classics such as Ziggy Stardust and Rain Dogs
  
• Devouring beef stews and lamb curries on chilly nights
• Getting our garden shed erected
• Getting our kitchen spotlights fixed
• Enduring Little Planet's extremely fussy feeding and hoping it's just a phase
  
• Celebrating Little Planet's 4th month birthday
• Cracking hazelnuts and almonds and walnuts
• Taking Little Planet to her very first art show - Gerhard Richter's 4900 Colours: Version II at the Serpentine (photo above). She loved all the colours!
  
• Taking her for a stroll around Hyde Park in the glorious sunshine
• Taking her shopping with us at Whole Foods Market in Kensington
• Finishing Ann Packer's engaging The Dive From Clausen's Pier and Jonathan Raban's disappointing Surveillance; beginning Sarah Addison Allen's Garden Spells
  
• Relishing my time away from the baby - for example, a walk alone to the local shops, or watching the astounding and harrowing Il Y A Longtemps Que Je T'aime at the cinema in Covent Garden alone, or eating sushi alone at Tokyo Diner in Soho

Hanging out

The arrival of this weekend was much welcomed, capping a brutal work week for M and a stressful week for myself and an unsettled Little Planet. The weather was glorious and our little family of three enjoyed some quality time together.

Now I have a house and a new baby, my life is much more domestic than it's ever been. Just look back at the evolution of this blog from 2004 to see just how domestic my life has become. New motherhood, and the mundane, housebound routines that accompany it, has been a hard thing for me to adjust to as you well know from my recent posts. However, though I am greatly looking forward for Little P to get a little older so we can go out and do more things again - a few months, just a few more months - right now this is my life and I am resolved to make the most of it and make the little things count, like Little P's first smiles (above)!

Saturday morning began as leisurely as a morning can begin with a baby who awakes at 5 or 6am. We fed and played with her, put her down for a nap, had our own showers and breakfasts. M went for a run as I made up a few feeds, washed up and put on a load or two of laundry. Then the three of us went shopping for provisions.

We put the baby down for another nap at lunch time (though she had slept a little out in the pram too) and I headed into town alone to watch the gloriously camp and hilarious Mamma Mia! movie with the gorgeous Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan. The music I grew up with and still love is the gritty, dark likes of Nick Cave, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, but the mother-love hormones currently raging through my system made me laugh and cry at the wonderful renditions of Abba songs and the emotional mother-daughter storyline. And like the rest of the audience at the West End Odeon, I applauded when the closing credits came up. How wonderfully embarrassing! I popped into Liberty for some decadently expensive Ren body cream for myself, and then into Borders and John Lewis for colourful Lamaze toys and books for my little treasure.

Back at home, M filled me in on his day. Now we have this house, he loves spending time in it at the weekend, especially because he's rarely home during the week. I, on the other hand, crave to disappear for a little bit on the weekends as I now spend so much time at home. So he had spent an enjoyable day feeding and playing with Little Planet, putting her to sleep, doing some gardening, reading, cleaning... generally pottering around.

We ended Saturday with a barbecue dinner à deux of chicken and lamb chops and sat in our garden until darkness fell catching up as we have hardly seen each other this week. Though we both have some very good friends, essentially we are both loners. When we were single and didn't know each other, we had both always been able to spend contented days, even weeks, without seeing other people. Fortunately for our marriage - and perhaps why it works so well - we also love being loners together. It does sound cheesy, I know, but M really is my best friend.

After our al fresco dinner, we gave Little P her last feed of the day, put her to bed and then watched a few episodes of the brilliant Californication on DVD starring the surprisingly sexy David Duchovny.

I spent all of Sunday at home with M and the baby. We went for a stroll around the park in the morning, ate feta cheese and watermelon for lunch, cleaned the house, read, napped, ate roast chicken and homemade alioli for dinner by candlelight in the garden, looked after Little P who slept for much of the time but who, when awake, brightened up our day even more by throwing us little smiles. Yes, our baby turned 7 weeks old on Saturday and is smiling at us.

In and out and about

On Saturday, my mother-in-law looked after Little Planet for the day while M and I went into town. The two of us walked along the Southbank in the glorious sunshine to the Tate Modern, where we saw American abstract expressionist painter Cy Twombly's Cycles And Seasons retrospective. The early and middle work of this artist's oeuvre failed to stir much emotion in me - I found much of it rather bland - but his later works were lush and impassioned - for example, his haunting Hero and Leander triptych and his verdant green paintings. I particularly loved the painting above with its calligraphic paint strokes like a Chinese nature scroll. We also checked out the comprehensive An Urban History Of Photography exhibition featuring a wide range of photographers such as Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Wolfgang Tillmans and Jeff Wall. It was such a treat seeing so many wonderful photographers in a single exhibition.

We lunched in the Tate Modern's member's room on the fifth floor and got updates on what Little Planet was getting up to with her grandma. Then we made a quick detour to M's office on Fleet Street. He worked for an hour and I sat in reception reading the weekend paper - or at least I was trying to read: I was so tired I had to struggle to keep myself from dozing off.

We grabbed a cab to the White Cube in Mason's Yard where we saw Jake & Dinos Chapman's new work If Hitler Had Been A Hippy How Happy Would We Be which controversially featured Hitler's original, rather bland watercolours of landscapes, Roman ruins and still life defaced by the brothers with psychedelic rainbows, stars and love hearts. Also downstairs was their disturbing installation depicting thousands of miniature Nazi soldiers carrying out acts of mass torture and bloody cadavers hanging off trees being pecked at by vultures. Upstairs was a collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century-style aristocratic portraits doctored by the Chapman brothers to incorporate ghoulish masks and deformations.

Then we crossed Piccadilly to the Royal Academy for the quiet, subtle and contemplative canvasses of haunting interiors and deserted landscapes of Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi; into Waterstone's bookshop for baby books for Little Planet; into Zavvi for Beck's new album Modern Guilt and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's mesmeric movie Syndromes And A Century; then a browse in DKNY and Nicole Farhi on Bond Street and Muji on Carnaby Street.

Our day ended with dinner at blink-and-you'll-miss-it Japanese restaurant Kikuchi on Hanway Street, tucked behind Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. This is our favourite Japanese restaurant because it is so unpretentious and yet the food is staggeringly fresh and of high-quality and the service efficient and very friendly. It's not cheap though and it's easy to spend well over a hundred pounds here. We devoured turbot roll with plum sauce, deep fried tofu with ginger, a sashimi platter, a sushi platter, mixed tempura, pickled horse mackerel, soft shell crab, spinach with egg, scallops with citron miso, green and red bean ice creams, Asahi and Kirin beers and Shōchū made with sweet potato and barley. A delicious and refined end to a lovely day.

But of course, we had missed Little Planet and were eager to return home and see her again.

We didn't stray far from home on Sunday and spent most of it feeding and then playing with Little Planet, settling her off to sleep, then chatting in the garden with my mother-in-law, her friend, and my sister-in-law. In the evening, M prepared a Vietnamese meal on the barbecue of chicken and beef skewers with marinades of freshly-prepared ginger and red chilli sauces and a side of green papaya and prawn salad. Little Planet was asleep upstairs in the nursery. I can't wait until she is old enough to enjoy her dad's cooking.

Little Planet was five weeks old on Saturday. She can now hold her head up unassisted, open her hands fully, lift her head more than two inches though not for longer than a few seconds. She's beginning to sleep for 5 or 6 hour stretches at night. She is more alert and can stay awake for longer during the day - though we still try and restrict her awake time to around an hour or an hour and a half between sleeps otherwise she gets overtired and has trouble settling for her evening sleeps. Her face shows recognition when she sees her dad or I. She can stay for longer periods - 10 or 20 minutes - by herself under the activity gym or in her bouncy chair.

Rejuvenated

My "day off" yesterday completely rejuvenated me. As M looked after Little Planet for the day, I popped into town to see the fabulously sassy and emotive Sex And The City movie in Leicester Square. It was like hooking up with old friends and I cried and laughed and cried again as the characters went through their individual dramas. I love the clothes and I hope I look that good when I am in my 40s. At the end of the movie the cinema hall - packed almost exclusively with women - applauded. When I walked out into the sunshine, I walked with a spring in my step. Like the SATC girls I felt happy at my own life's progression too - from single girl about town to wife about town to mother and now mother about town! My expanded, evolving identity feels damn good.

Having shunned most Japanese food throughout my pregnancy due to nausea, I craved sushi so I ducked into Wasabi for my first sushi fix in nine months. From the Algerian Coffee House in Soho I bought Monsoon Malabar beans; from Lina Stores also in Soho I bought spaghetti; from Minamoto Kitchoan on Piccadilly I bought delicate Japanese sweets made from peaches and biwa; from Zavvi I bought season 2 of the Gilmore Girls on DVD and the weighty yet ethereal album Sunday At Devil Dirt by Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan; from DKNY on Bond Street I bought a grey tunic dress and from Nicole Farhi next door I bought a midnight blue blouse; and finally from the John Lewis flower concession I bought a couple of potted succulents and a white orchid for our living room and kitchen.

When I returned home at 8pm, I kissed my sleeping little girl's head and caught up with M. He told me she had had another unsettled day but it sounded a bit better than Friday. He'd managed to clean the house, do laundry, do some gardening, play with Little Planet and cook a roast chicken with roasted sweet potatoes and baba ghanoush for our dinner. All in between trying to feed, change, burp, wind and settle her.

Today I am home alone with Little Planet as M has to work but it's been a much better day. I have been calmer due to yesterday's outing and she's been much more settled. The two things - my calmness and her settledness - must be related, but then again not necessarily. Babies are not predictable. I've managed to go for a walk to the park with her with little incident as well as spent an hour or so playing with her. At 3 weeks, she is spending a little more time each day awake, which makes it so fun because then we can play.

Today's better day warrants another "Typical Day" post, which I will type up in the next day or so as these Typical Day posts prove that when it comes to babies there are no "typical" days!

38 weeks

In direct contrast to a previous post, the last few days have been much, much better. I have had more energy and fewer naps. I don't know what it is - perhaps it's the cooling of the weather.

...I have eaten cupcakes bought home by M from Candy Cakes in Covent Garden and then been inspired to bake my own vanilla cupcakes dressed with butter icing and violet flowers (above) as well as butter scones, which we demolished over the weekend.

...I have slow-cooked ratatouille for my mother-in-law and sister-in-law and enjoyed an evening eating it with them before they crossed the waters to Portugal for a week's spa break.

...I have slow-cooked a courgette, cherry tomato, ricotta and lemon sauce for orecchiette pasta for M.

...I have eaten a scrumptious Indian meal cooked by M from Madhur Jaffrey's comprehensive Ultimate Curry Bible: Cauliflower gosht (above) and lamb in a mustard seed sauce.

...I have spent many an hour preparing our bedroom, as it is shaping up to be a Zen haven with a lovely corner just for the baby (above with moses basket, baby changing unit, and armchair and footstool for holding and feeding her and singing to her), for she will sleep in our room for her first few months before we move her to the nursery. I can see myself and Little Planet spending most of our hours in this heavenly corner.

...I have finished reading Mavis Cheek's witty and sardonic Yesterday's Houses and started reading Penelope Lively's City Of The Mind; I have thrilled to both Boy Child and Climate Of The Hunter by Scott Walker, whose sexy deep vibrato seems to always set Little Planet off, and have also been enjoying Madonna's Hard Candy and Nick Cave's Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!; and I have swooned to Katherine Hepburn in the magical movie Summertime.

...I have hosted a coffee morning for some of the mums-to-be from my antenatal class and enjoyed the company of these women who range from civil servants and researchers to TV and music producers.

...Here's my bump at 36 weeks - 2 weeks ago. I don't know why my wrist looks so strange here; must be the overhead lighting...

...I have perused online for terracotta pots and herbs to grow in our garden, plus ideas for growing a Japanese garden.

...I have been weirdly excited by a phone call from a client who hadn't realised I was on maternity leave. It made me miss work.

...I have craved, just for a couple of days thankfully, bland ready-made curries and samosas and quiches and potato salads and cheap chocolate mousse from the supermarket, which was strange as thus far in my pregnancy I had only craved milk and fruit (perhaps why I have only put on 15lbs in weight to date - I thought I would put on much more, but really the only thing that has gotten bigger on my body has been my stomach).

...I've bought more clothes for the baby from Green Baby (and her first teddy bear from Mothercare)...

...With women in my antenatal class beginning to go into labour now, I have written my birth plan and begun packing my hospital bag just in case.

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.

Easter drift

In the end I didn't do much more than drift from one thing to another without purpose, which makes a refreshing change as I am a woman who likes to plan.

I watched season premieres of House and Grey's Anatomy, neither of which I've seen before, as well as the new Dirty Sexy Money, which is looking promising. I chatted with my parents and with M over the phone twice a day as he travelled between Jacksonville and Manhattan (where I'd instructed - whoops, requested - him to look at camcorders, laptops and DKNY clothing for me). I watched Brief Encounter and a few episodes of The Waltons on DVD. I watched The Way We Were. I filled my bags at the Food Hall in John Lewis and cabbed it home, chatting about Thailand with the affable taxi driver who has a Thai wife and 8 month old daughter living in Issan. I ate alot of Green & Black's milk chocolate and blood red oranges and marmite on toast, though not all together. I stayed in bed late, sleeping, napping, reading Hullabaloo In The Guava Orchard and The Inheritance Of Loss, and listening to Loretta Lynn, Leonard Cohen and Lambchop on my iPod. I wrote in my journal - a pretty pink and cream Japanese notebook from London Mitsukoshi's JP Books. I did laundry but I couldn't be bothered to hoover and dust the house despite my mother-in-law coming over on Easter Monday (today). I showed her around the new house. We went out to eat Turkish food with her friend and my sister-in-law and we looked at baby photos of M. We watched the 4D video of Little Planet's scan. I watched my belly dance as the baby did her rolling and kicking and hiccuping routine inside me. I browsed baby and nursery products from independent sellers on the internet. I read other peoples' blogs. And tomorrow morning I am off to my parents' house to eat home-cooked curries and drift aimlessly for another week.

I miss M so much. It's the longest we've been apart. I know from my own experience that a life spent largely alone can be rich and rewarding if you continually endeavour to make it so. But it's wonderful how much texture, shape and rhythm a loved one gives to one's day.

27 weeks

• M has been away on business in Lisbon and didn't come back until Saturday night, so I took advantage of my regular playmate being away and spent the first part of the weekend vegging out. I am so tired. I'm struggling through my afternoons at work and keep waking up throughout the night because my growing bump and my aching pelvis makes it uncomfortable to turn in my sleep.
  
  
• Needing the loo and an increasing number of quite vivid dreams are also waking me up throughout the night. Usually my dreams are work-related, around the theme of not managing to get all my work finished on time. But the other night, I had my first ever fantasy-themed dream that I can remember, where I was in a dark, dank forest filled with ancient trees with twisty limbs and ogres with gnarled faces. I wasn't being chased and nothing nasty or frightening happened, but it was a strange and vivid enough environment to awake me.
  
  
• I am really counting down the days to my maternity leave now - a month and a half to go - just so I can catch up on my sleep during the day and generally take it easy. But also because the experience of pregnancy, birth and becoming a mother is becoming more and more absorbing to me. The all-absorption is perfectly natural of course and I'm not really questioning it. Yet because my career has always been so central to my life and I am very ambitious, the shift in focus is rather strange.
  
  
• On Friday night, I snuggled into the sofa alone with a plate of vegetable and prawn stir-fry with rice balanced on my belly, a glass of milk and a DVD of The Hours that had me sobbing uncontrollably. I don't remember crying this hard the first time I saw this movie. Must be all the hormones combined with fatigue.
  
  
• On Saturday, I went out for a walk locally, dropping off and picking up dry cleaning along the way, and buying croissants and the paper which I spent most of the day reading from cover to cover. I fell asleep for an hour; I made up a playlist on my iPod of "happy music", featuring the likes of the Scissor Sisters, Dolly Parton, Nancy Griffith, The Killers, Prince, Beyonce, David Bryne, the Sugababes and Girls Aloud; I ate twiglets and surfed the net; I vacuumed and did laundry. Generally I pottered and drifted and slept.
  
  
• By the evening, though, I was feeling rather bored. Luckily I had theatre tickets booked and headed to the Barbican to meet my sister-in-law for dinner at the Waterside Cafe and a sleek and modern production of Hedda Gabler, which was chillingly good.
  
  
• By Sunday, my regular playmate had returned to London laden with Portuguese almond tarts and goats cheese. We woke up late; I bought a free range chicken and some beef from the butchers; we breakfasted on hot croissants and coffee.
  
  
• And then we traipsed across to east London and The Baby Show at ExCel. I still think it's a little early for us to be buying things for the baby, but we are now deciding what types of breast pump or moses basket or pram or baby sling to buy, so it was nice seeing our chosen products up front.
  
  
• I already have catalogues from Beaming Baby, Little Green Earthlets and Green Baby and want to buy a number of things from each of these so it was great seeing their actual products on show at ExCel and having our delight in the clothes and toys ratified. Really, please do check out their stuff - truly lovely and just a little bit different from the usual stuff you can buy at Mothercare, John Lewis et al. ExCel allowed us to discover another unique mail-order company - Lula Sapphire. Most of my baby wish list will be made up of items from these small stores.
  
  
• I picked up a couple of DVDs there, focussing not just on life with a new baby but also on the birthing process itself because I really need to start thinking about this now! I picked up Miriam Stoppard's Having A Baby and what looks to be a particularly excellent DVD by the venerable Yehudi Gordon, Sheila Kitzinger and Caroline Flint called Birthwise: Your Creation, Your Choice.
  
  
• And from the Natal Hypnotherapy stand we picked up a gym ball that was also being marketed as a birthing ball (which M appreciated a lot!).
  
  
• The best thing for both of us about being at The Baby Show today, though, was seeing all those babies - most of them very cute indeed. Really, now that I am pregnant I am really making up for never having been a broody person and rarely having given a baby a second look.
  
  
• I've really popped out now. I look decidedly pregnant and more and more people are offering their seats to me on the Tube.
  
  
• For the public at least, it feels my belly has a life separate from me. It feels quite odd how some people stare at it as if it is not adjoined to me but is a unique object to marvel at or reflect on or simply to stare at absentmindedly. I feel like waving my arms in front of them and saying, "Hello, it's me, I'm here too, this is part of me".
  
  
• I've been getting my first Braxton Hicks - painless, "practice contractions" of the uterus that become more noticeable as you enter the third trimester. I've only noticed them twice so far. The front of my abdomen suddenly hardens and then pops out for a few seconds. At first I thought it might be Little Planet sticking a limb or her head out against me, but when I read about it more I realised they were the actions of my own uterus. My belly truly does have a life of its own.
  

Anniversary weekend

Our anniversary weekend began on Thursday night with a sumptuous meal at Veeraswamy - an Indian restaurant overlooking Regent Street. It was touch and go whether either of us would make our reservation as work had kept us steaming and stressing until the very last minute. But once inside the elegant interior and settled into our cosy booth with rose petals strewn across the dark wood table, we began to unwind. We toasted our year of marriage with wine and lychee juice (guess who drank which) and M presented me with some exquisite diamond earrings handmade by the same jeweller on Fleet Street who had made my engagement ring and our wedding rings. We devoured a variety of dishes whose names I've forgotten but everything was perfectly spiced and immaculately presented and the service was very discreet. Afterwards, we treated ourselves to a cab home.

We took Friday off and our extended anniversary weekend unfurled at a wonderfully active pace. We began the day with runny poached eggs on granary toast and slathered with tomato ketchup. We took a bus to the Thames, caught the Juan Muñoz and Duchamp, Man Ray & Picabia shows at the Tate Modern (who knew that Duchamp had been an accomplished competitive chess champion!), then walked along the South Bank - as we used to do often when we were dating - to a packed Canteen in the bowels of the Royal Festival Hall. Canteen is well known for its fresh British cooking and for the ethically sourced produce they use. There, M ate fried pollock and chips and I ate chicken and mushroom pie with greens, mash and gravy. We followed our mains with hearty desserts of treacle tart and Jersey cream (M) and apple crumble with vanilla custard.

In between bites, we were captivated by a huggable, cuddable three week old baby who had a full head of thick black hair and was very, very sleepy in her mother's arms. Now that I am pregnant, I am broody like never before (which I suppose is a good thing) and I couldn't take my eyes off her. By dessert, though, we had become distracted by a mixed Anglo-Indian couple dining with their three young children. We looked at the little girl with her dark eyes and long, light brown hair and rosy pink cheeks and wondered - as we do often now - how Anglo-Indian Little Planet will look like when she arrives in this world. My manager is English and married to an Indian woman and he admitted that when his wife was pregnant with their son they too could not help looking at other half-Indian babies and wonder. So glad we're not the only ones!

We took a cab to Soho and I bought M a vintage bottle of Suntory Hibiki whiskey from Gerry's on Old Compton Street for his anniversary gift. We bought pancetta from Camisa & Son then walked to the Odeon Covent Garden. The film we wanted to see was an hour later than we had thought, so we bought tickets anyway then strolled over to the Aveda Institute on High Holborn for tea.

It's disappointing that the Aveda Cafe is now a Le Pain Quotidien because they no longer serve the delicious and frightfully healthy range of herb teas, freshly squeezed juices and sprouted salads they were famed for. But the atmosphere is still as good as it used to be, with the high ceilings, wooden tables, kilim rugs, constant whir of hairdryers, the all-pervading aroma of herbal hair products and beautiful stylists and beauticians dressed all in black. This is where I always get my hair done and I took the opportunity to make an appointment for tonight.

The film we saw was Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights. One of the reasons M and I fell in love was over a mutual fondness for Wong Kar-Wai films and we were intrigued to see the Hong Kong director's first movie in English and with English-speaking actors. The reviews for this film have been lacklustre at best and I wasn't sure I would enjoy a film featuring Jude Law, Norah Jones and Natalie Portman. But we were both entranced by this beautifully shot, sweet and sentimental tale of love and loss.

Back home, we were too full to eat a dinner, so we snacked on toasted peanut butter sandwiches and some delicate yuzu and cherry sweets from Minamoto Kitchoan on Piccadilly instead.

Saturday began with a stroll across the park to pick up bagels and buttery croissants then back towards home to drop off and pick up laundry, buy meat from our local butcher and the FT and International Herald Tribute from our local newsagent. After a leisurely breakfast at home with the papers, we headed into town to watch the heartwarming and heartwrenching (and extremely funny) movie Juno at the Curzon Soho. The music (and perhaps also the sugar from the pack of jelly babies I was devouring!) sent Little Planet into a kicking frenzy throughout.

At the Annely Juda Gallery on Dering Street, we were blinded by the retina-burning canvasses of Sigrid Holmwood, who paints luminous Swedish pastoral landscapes in a combination of traditional pigments and bright contemporary fluorescents. Her work reminded me of Karen Kilimnik, only a touch more gimmicky and a shade less complex, but enjoyable and absorbing nonetheless.

We stocked up on provisions at the John Lewis Food Hall and then bought an anodized skillet from the kitchenwares section. I also bought M the second part of my anniversary gift to him - a pair of heavy crystal whiskey tumblers.

We took another cab back home and dined on fillet steaks, pomme frites, sweet fresh tomatoes and peppery watercress, followed by cherries for dessert. Then spent the rest of the evening listening to Bach's cello suites (Pablo Casals), which again had the baby kicking away, and reading.


Sunday - our actual wedding anniversary day - was a much quieter affair. I needed to rest after so much activity, so while M dropped in on his cousin who was celebrating his 9th birthday, I spent the morning snuggled into the sofa with Indian Vogue, Monocle and Ian McEwan's graceful and immersive Chesil Beach. Then I dozed in bed for a few hours. M returned home with his mum, who stayed for an hour's chat. For our proper anniversary dinner, M roasted a chicken and served it with a pomegranate and parsley tabbouleh and homemade red chilli harissa sauce. Then we settled into a quiet evening together, reading (M read the whole of the new J.G. Ballard autobiography in just a few hours - he was so rivetted), listening to music and simply being.

What a wonderful weekend; what a wonderful year; what a wonderful man I married.

Happy birthday, Mr Jones

I'm celebrating this guy's birthday today - 61 today. The only celebrity I still obsess about (since I was a child). I know Elvis would have been 73 today, but I don't remember him. It's the leper messiah I grew up with in the 1980s (albeit a decade too late), so Happy Birthday Dame David Bowie - your music and your many different looks have given me untold pleasure over the years.

My personal top three favourite David Bowie albums of all time: Station To Station (1976), Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980), Heathen (2002).

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.

Taking it leisurely

The merest hint of a cold for both of us on Friday, so close to our Japanese trip in a few days, led us to take a far more leisurely approach to our weekend this week. On Friday, for example, we had planned on meeting up after work for another wander around the British Museum's Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan exhibition, followed by dinner at nearby Biwon or Abeno. Instead, we went home and made oven-cooked fish fingers, chips, peas and loads of tartare sauce for a TV dinner with Steve Coogan's very funny Saxondale - followed by store-bought apple crumble. Oh, we eat well!

The bright and sunny Saturday morning saw us still in bed at 10am. M finished re-reading Haruki Murakami's South Of The Border, West Of The Sun and flicked through a couple of Daido Moriyama photobooks, while I watched music videos on my iPod - an eclectic mix of David Bowie, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Leonard Cohen and The Pussycat Dolls.

While M read the weekend FT over a breakfast of toast and sheep cheese, I watched Rachel Allen cook a slow-cooked, spiced shoulder of lamb on BBC1 and surfed the blogosphere. Then it was my turn to browse the Saturday papers, while M watched Football Focus.

By lunch, though, we were both itching to get out and about. We hopped on a bus then walked a little along the Regent's Canal to the Parasol Unit on Wharf Road, where we viewed Yutaka Sone's Secret For Snow Leopard exhibition. Sone's latest work reveals an intense fascination with natural phenomena - intricately carved marble sculptures of icy landscapes, crystal snowflakes and models of dense green and mossy jungle; and yet the man-made world is also etched out in exquisite detail in the undulating terrain - houses, skyscrapers, roads and ski slopes.

We lunched at Life on Old Street where M ordered the cake set consisting of adzuki bean cream and green tea ice cream, and I ate a beautifully presented French toast with Japanese sauce and green tea and adzuki bean ice creams. The service was attentive and we shared the large bare brick, wood panelled space with three very cute toddlers with wild black hair, and their more refined mum.

To the Barbican to pick up a birthday card for M's sister and then a cab to the Chisenhale Gallery for Hiraki Sawa's mysterious and meditative multi-screen video footage combined with subtle digital manipulations capturing the shifting light of a cultivated forest surrounding a Shinto monastery, birds flocking over churning waste water being pumped into the sea, a moon rising over and fireworks exploding above a nuclear power station set at the ocean's edge, land and sea and skyscapes morphing into one another... This rates as one of my favourite pieces of video art I've viewed in recent years, along with Runa Islam's Timelines, Yang Fudong's No Snow On The Broken Bridge and Pierre Huyghe's A Journey That Wasn't.

We walked back along the Regent's Canal towards London Fields, admiring the multi-coloured Autumnal leaves, but it was not as leisurely a stroll as we'd hoped because we spent most of our time dodging manic, earnest cyclists. Onto Broadway Market and lemon and ginger tea for M (or lemonade and ginger tea as our waitress kept saying) and Rooibos tea for me at the Gossip cafe, where I got out my diary and we firmed up a daily itinerary for Tokyo and Kyoto. Then we met up with the birthday girl herself for melt-in-the-mouth 10oz Argentine fillet steaks, thick-cut chips, Serrano ham with palm hearts and a variety of empanadas at the busy Santa Maria Del Buen Ayre.

Back to ours for Arsenal's match against West Ham on Match Of The Day and hot honey and lemon drinks as M's sister is also nursing a cold.

On Sunday, we left the house just to stock up on provisions - chicken from our local butchers, miso paste and daikon from our local Japanese store, vegetables and fruit from our local Turkish grocery. Then we spent the rest of the day at home. For lunch, M grilled a couple of salt-coated mackerel and served it with grated daikon and miso soup with wakame. He had a long bath with lots of essential oil of ginger for his cold and I settled in with some books, some magazines and the internet. I also reviewed my packing list for Japan and started putting a few things into my suitcase.

For dinner, M has cooked a lemon-stuffed roast chicken with rosemary and will serve it with roasted sweet potatoes and broccoli. Then we will settle in to re-watch Café Lumière on DVD - the tender and contemplative portrait of a Japanese reporter named Yoko who researches an article on a Taiwanese musician and copes with an unexpected pregnancy and impending single.

What a chilled weekend.

Things keeping me happy this week

Lunching on crayfish and lime glass noodle salad from Abokado / Walking in the rain when a glint of sunshine hits me from above / Snuggling into my husband on the sofa with our feet and legs intertwined - watching a movie or reading or chatting / Leaving the house early so we can breakfast together on hot coffee and warm croissant with ham and cheese in town, before work / Catching myself in the middle of a hectic day and realising everything is just as it should be / Popping into the Ben Brown Gallery on Cork Street to pick up a book we'd ordered and stealing a few minutes to savour Candida Höfer's monumental photos again, even though I really need to rush back to work and my bulging inbox / Coming home and taking off my heels / Slipping beneath freshly laundered, pure white bedding / Hearing my parents' voices on the other end of the phoneline / Cooking spinach, garlic, chickpea, chorizo and tahini soup and eating it with thick slices of toasted white bread / Simmering tomatoes with loads of garlic and basil and spooning the sauce over gnocchi from Lina Stores / Watching Lost In Translation on DVD just because it features the hotel we're staying in in Tokyo next week / Thinking of all the outfits, day by day, I will wear on our trip / Loading my iPod with music I haven't listened to in a while - Nine Inch Nails' Fragile, Audioslave's first album, David Bowie's Let's Dance - for our 12 hour flight and for the Bullet train journey to Kyoto / Hearing my husband wash up in the kitchen while listening to Talking Heads as I type this.

A flowering day

I love Fridays - not only do you have the weekend to look forward to but usually people tend to take extended lunch hours together (a full hour as opposed to a hasty 15 minutes) or leave slightly earlier than usual (at 6 rather than 7 or 8), especially if the weather is fine. This Friday morning, M and I got off a few tube stops earlier at Russell Square and strolled through Bloomsbury before parting for our respective offices. This is a sweet, lovely habit I want to stick to.

Later, during lunch, we met up on Tottenham Court Road and popped into a few computer stores as we're looking to buy a new PC. The laptop we have, though just 2 years old, just doesn't cut it for all the iTunes downloading and home movie editing I want to do. 2 years of course is the computer equivalent of 80 human years! Then we popped over to Charlotte Street for a quick meal at Josephine's - the Filipino restaurant. M kept his Blackberry on the table as we tucked into noodles with prawns and chicken in peanut sauce with fresh coriander.

We'll definitely come back here for dinner - the menu was packed with fish and seafood dishes, plus many with black pudding which surprised me at first but then I remembered that the Philippines were once a Spanish colony. Even without the Spanish influence, some east Asian countries such as Korea, Taiwan and China have some variation of blood sausage. I've always enjoyed black pudding. This always grosses most people out, but one of my favourite food experiences in South Dakota, aside from the sublime fillet mignon - the Dakotas being cattle ranching country - was on the Cheyenne River reservation where a medicine man-cum-carpenter (medicine man by night and during holy seasons and carpenter by day) made me a savoury sauce of beef's blood to dunk my bread into.

Back to London... Charlotte Street was heaving not with tourists but with office workers. Restaurants, bars and cafes pack themselves into this street. The sun was blazing, everyone was smiling, making the most of their extended lunch breaks too. Last summer, I remember overhearing an American tourist walking down Oxford Street moaning, "There's nowhere to eat in London!" I should have pulled her by her brightly coloured rucksack and said, "Turn left into Soho or right into Fitzrovia and you'll find a diverse wealth of places to eat, you lazy cow!" All she had to do was to stray a little off the beaten track...

In the evening, we met up in Farringdon at the bratwurst cafe Kurz & Lang for beers and hearty German sausages with fried potatoes, sauerkraut and mustard. Perched on high tables and stools outside, we watched the City boys and girls try and outdo each other with braying banter and copious amounts of booze.

This would have been enough for an evening's entertainment but earlier this year I had booked tickets for John Adams' A Flowering Tree at the Barbican. I booked them because I was very conscious that apart from Philip Glass and Steve Reich, I know very little about modern classical music. I had always read about Californian composer John Adams and had heard snippets of his famous Nixon In China. And we had great centre front seats in the stalls.

A Flowering Tree is a modern opera influenced by Mozart's The Magic Flute and based on a 2000-year old Tamil story about the redemptive love between a prince and a poor girl who transforms herself into a flowering tree in order to shed her flowers for sale to support her aging mother. But the girl's jealous sister-in-law persuades her to transform in front of her friends and they break off her branches, leaving her limbless and unable to transform herself back into human form. Separated from one another, the prince and the limbless tree girl languish - the pain of separation unbearable. But eventually they are reunited by servants. The tree girl is nurtured back to health and humanity and their love is restored and deepened.

Highlights for me were the lighting, which pulsed through blood red through turquoise blue to iridescent green; the tree girl soprano's exquisite voice that sounded like undulations of crystal clear water coursing up and down and through my body; the dramatic mixed choir from the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela dressed in traditional rainbow-hued Indian dress.

I've heard that John Adams was once considered a minimalist, but I would never have guessed. This was an unabashedly rich and romantic, multi-textured and shimmering performance.