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.

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.
  

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.

Weekend snapshot

A gloriously sunny weekend / Fighting the crowds along a jam-packed South Bank / Chowing down on Portuguese hog ciabatta sandwiches stuffed with hog meat, rocket salad and apple sauce / Looking up at the now drying out lawn Flytower / Watching the fantastically bathetic, melodramatic, comical and powerfully performed The Rose Tattoo at the National, surrounded by OAPs because it was a matinee performance / Lazing around in the long grass in Hyde Park - reading books, newspapers, people watching and sleeping / Wandering around the over-priced, lacklustre Photo London exhibition full of bland, derivative photos trying to ape the likes of the mighty Hiroshi Sugimoto, Martin Parr and William Eggleston, who also featured / Zoe Strauss (above left) stood out with her photos focussing in on the details of the urban American landscape / As did Saul Leiter's American street photography from the 1940s and 1950s / As did Sunil Gupta's photos of gays and lesbians in contemporary urban India / A better, more imaginative exhibition was the Tate Britain's How We Are: Photographing Britain / Fergus Heron's photos of pretty, faux cottage and mock tudor leafy suburban developments stood out for me / As did Susan Lipper's photos of bed and breakfasts / As did Paul Graham's documentation of Little Chefs, petrol stations and underpasses along the A1 road / As did Paul Reas' images of people shopping in retail parks, DIY centres and supermarkets (above right).

Weddings, tarts and Nyonya

Rafta Rafta at the National Theatre today was laugh out loud hilarious. Set in a cramped two up, two down terrace in Bolton, British born Indian Atul is unable to consumate his marriage on his wedding night and for six weeks thereafter due to the close proximity of his loving mother and overbearing father in the same house. You see, Atul is still financially dependent on his parents and can't afford to leave home despite now being married. When the distraught virgin bride Vina confides in her own parents about her new husband's inability to perform, the news spreads to Atul's parents too. They are shocked and ashamed, and the revelations that unravel in their lives are so entertaining that I wish the play had focussed entirely on them.

Harish Patel plays the father who is bitterly disappointed by his unsuccessful (in all senses of the word) son and Meera Syal plays Atul's more understanding but acerbic mother. The chemistry between these two on stage electrified the entire performance and we had a truly entertaining time because of it.

Crossing the Thames on our way to the Tube we entertained ourselves trying to count all the life-size sculpture casts of Antony Gormley's body scattered along the horizon. To me they looked depressed and suicidal. Indeed, some people have alerted the emergency services in a panic seeing the lonely figures perched precariously on top of the high buildings. On the other hand, sometimes the figures looked self-contained and at peace or even defiant.

We then grabbed light and fluffy Portuguese custard tarts and coffees in Soho's Fernandez & Wells on Beak Street. The interior was an interesting mix of rough wood floors, white-washed walls and a clean concrete counter. The menu was refreshingly spartan - no more than necessary but what they have is done to perfection. Witness this adorable heart swirled through my latte, for example:

We ate dinner at the "home style" Peranakan restaurant Nyonya in Notting Hill. According to Nyonya's table mat, "Nyonya, meaning ladies from the descendants of the Peranakan which is the intermarriage between the Chinese settlers and the local Malays. From this intermarriage, came the birth of a unique colourful culture, tradition and most of all, the famous nyonya cuisine. Nyonya usually spent most of their time in the kitchen preparing food from the combination of a variety of herbs, spices, tamarind and coconut cream. To the older generation nyonya, this is an accomplishment, an art to be proud of. Thus, recipes are only handed down from generation to generation."

For starters, we ate lobak (pork marinated in five spices, wrapped in a crispy tofu skin and served with chilli sauce) and otak-otak (sliced white fish wrapped in banana leaves and steamed with coconut milk, herbs and spices). For mains, we ate char mee (fried yellow noodles with prawns, fish cake, squid and greens in a gravy sauce) and Singapore laksa (rice vermicelli, beansprouts, prawns, dried tofu, fish cake, shredded chicken and half a boiled egg in a spicy coconut sauce). Dessert was a traditional selection of steamed "pastries", some based on rice, others on coconut.

Our choices looked and tasted so good that the middle aged couple sitting next to us on the long tuk panjang table simply said to the waiter, "We'll have everything they're having!"

The food was deliciously robust in flavours and textures and the setting clean and modern. They could easily open a few more branches across London. I would suggest Soho and Green Lanes for starters!

Zipping around

Yesterday, we saw loads of drawing-based animation films at the Momentary Momentum exhibition at the Parasol Unit in Old Street. Much of it was too whimsical for my liking, but there were a few I particularly liked: Paul Bush and Lisa Milroy's Geisha Grooming about a Geisha preparing herself for a night out on the town, from powdering her face and cleaning her ears with buds, to tweaking the position of her hair grips and putting on her headphones to listen to music as she heads out; Avish Khebrehzadeh's Backyard - a poetic Persian garden landscape through which children, old men, young lovers and animals move as if in a dream; Christine Rebert's Brand Band News, projected inside a wooden shed, in which two sisters fade away to be replaced by a cowboy, a galloping horse and then a theatre to the backdrop of a country song. My favourite was Jochen Kuhn's eerie Sonntag 1 (picture above), in which a bored middle-aged man strolls through a virtually deserted German city on a Sunday morning upset that nothing captures his imagination or is worth noticing anymore.

We also popped next door to the Victoria Miro for the late Ian Hamilton Finlay's The Sonnet is a Sewing-Machine for the Monostich. The luminous neon wall texts pulsating from the huge blackened upper gallery were particularly atmospheric and drew our attention to the artistic nature of words as images.

At the White Cube in Hoxton we saw Eberhard Havekost's brilliant photographic paintings of random scenes from everyday life, from a lounge chair and the side of a clapboard house, to the close-up of the face of a man in combat taken from the TV news and the spiky fronds of a palm tree.

A quick scoot around the SCP interiors store on Curtain Street and then across the road for a satisfyingly greasy lunch of bacon cheeseburgers, fries, potato skins, colas and vanilla milkshakes at The Diner.

We then walked to Bethnal Green for a couple of boring shows at the Maureen Paley and Herald Street galleries. Much like Old Street, Hoxton and Shoreditch, only pockets of interesting bars, restaurants and shops exist in Bethnal Green - the rest is entirely derelict space devoid of people or personality.

We cabbed it to Chinatown and Soho to stock up on vital provisions for the week ahead:

• Kiehl's scrub soap (for him) and Ren shampoo and conditioner (for me) from Liberty. Truly, my hair has never been in better condition since I started using Ren products.
• Green tea powder to make ice cream from, block tofu and daikon from Arigato.
• Pasta, block parmesan and gooey Gorgonzola from Lina Stores Delicatessen.
• Pak choi, groundnut oil and another lidded tea mug from Loon Fung.
• Indian Mysore coffee beans from the Algerian Coffee Store.
  

Tired out, we zipped back home to dump our purchases and chill out with glasses of iced pomegranate juice and then it was back into town again for an amazing night with the sexy-as-ever Jessica Lange in The Glass Menagerie at the Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue. It's been a while since we've been to the theatre. The performances from all were enthralling and the stage sets and lighting were suitably dreamlike and atmospheric. The final plaintive gesture of the character Laura blowing out the candles leaving the hall in total darkness brought tears to my eyes.

Today, we're staying local. M's at the gym and the laundry is on full throttle. I've discovered the joy of reading blogs via Google Reader on the mobile phone in bed with my morning coffee. We'll nip out to the local shops for a few more bits and pieces like detergent and stuffed vine leaves. We may make some green tea ice cream. My mother-in-law is in town, so we'll be having either lunch or dinner with her and M's sister later on. The sun is shining again. Another wonderful weekend.

A blessing and a curse

'A sister is both a curse and a blessing'

Last night M joined me for another Kali's Asian Women Talk Back festival play at the Soho Theatre: Behna by Sonia Likhari. The play is set in the hothouse confines of Cheema's Southall kitchen and explores sibling rivalry across two generations - between the Punjab-born mother and her sister, and the mother's two British-born eldest daughters. It opens with the family celebrating the pre-wedding Ladies Sangeet Night of the youngest of Cheema's three grown up daughters and over two intense hours explores the sibling rivalry and love unfurling across a year or more.

Cheema and her sister share memories of childhood together and chide each other over the way they've brought up their children. The sister is particularly wary of the way Cheema lavishes attention on her nephew Raju - the only boy in the family - and it is later that we discover Cheema had secretly donated her egg to the sister. The sisters bicker between themselves and with their mother Cheema who goes on about having wanted a boy; but one sister defends the other against taunts of being "hello Moto" fat by the other's own husband.

A taut and explosive drama that was far more engaging in its myriad intercepting relationships and emotional touchstones than the previous night's Deadeye.

Afterwards we ate raw papaya and peanut salad, meaty, boneless fillets of pomfret fish in a pineapple sauce and beef with ginger and spring onions at Malaysian-Thai restaurant Malaysia Kopi Tiam further down the road on Dean Street. The guys at the next table proclaiming exploits in Bexleyheath and recounting various SciFi movies they had seen drove us from our seats. Bellowing boys aside, it was a great night.

Tonight, I had drinks with colleagues after work where we each proclaimed what we would do if we won Euro Millions tonight. I was the dullest for wanting to invest half of it immediately and stay at work because otherwise I would quickly be bored, but redeemed myself when I declared I would also buy an apartment on the Upper West Side, another one in Bangkok and a house in Notting Hill or Hampstead. I would also stay in the most chic and expensive hotels wherever I travelled, indulge in lots of spa treatments, especially those that involved my feet, and would buy our parents lovely homes right round the corner from where we lived.

Then I met up with M in John Lewis where I camera-snapped the Dualit toasters, Le Creuset pots and pans, Global knives, high thread count Egyptian cotton white duvet covers, and Egyptian cotton bath towels we both liked as a reminder to put them on my wedding gift list. I'm such a cliche!

Now we're back at home. I've chatted to my mum and dad on the phone. We've just eaten spaghetti with artichokes and parsley and walnut pesto that M made from scratch in his new mini food processor, and now he's making mojitos for us to drink while watching The OC.

This is the life.

Deadeye

Last night I saw a play at Soho Theatre as part of the Kali's Asian Women Talk Back festival showcasing new writing by British Asian women. The centrepiece of the festival was Amber Lone's Deadeye, about the tension between family loyalties, traditional cultural values and individual freedoms. Brother and sister Deema and Tariq are keen that their lives do not end up like that of their parents - sitting around dreaming of things that can never be theirs, but they are constantly battling their own parents' expectations of them to live by traditional Indian values. The father dreams of buying million pound houses in the Cotswolds and quick rich schemes whilst sitting at home pontificating from his sofa; his harassed wife nurtures Kashmiri plants in her Birmingham garden while growing ever frustrated by the telephone and electricity being cut off and being deserted by her children; the son Tariq living a life of oblivion hooked on drugs and booze and moving in currupted circles; and daughter Deema, going to college and applying for jobs she fears she'll never get because she is desperately trying to cover for her brother as well as turn his life around. So well-acted by the small cast that I ended up loving and hating each character intensely.