The end and the beginning

What an historic day! The first black President. The highest voter turnout in 44 years. Vast numbers of young voters. The end of the conservative era.

Today is the day my Little Planet becomes a telly addict as I am glued to the BBC News 24 channel.

Zoo life

On Friday, our entire company took a half day and celebrated a belated Summer Party at London Zoo. I haven't been here since I was a child, and to be honest I would be torn to return again if we have children. Seeing the monkeys, fish, parrots, sloth bears and more was undoubtedly a treat. I understand the benefits of captivity for species that would otherwise be extinct or endangered. I can see that London Zoo is doing its best to re-create natural environments in limited spaces.


But I did feel a little uneasy ogling the animals while they looked on bored and paced or swam around and around in their confined spaces. Of course I see the advantages of zoos, both for animals and children, but there will always be a tension between the pros and cons of enclosed zoos for me. I can't help it.


After a few hours, after much food, drink, chatting and animal watching, we clambered into barges and floated down the Grand Union Canal to Little Venice. In this very chilled and salubrious part of west London, we spent the evening supping mojitos, Champagne, beers, wine, anything and everything really, and picked at endless rounds of canapes at the excellent E Bar opposite Warwick Avenue.

As the day was being planned, I had thought 10 hours would be far too long to spend in the company of loads of people drinking too much. Though I like to drink, my body can't tolerate lots of alcohol. Work parties always involve huge groups and lots of drunkenness and I invariably slip away before 10pm. But as I get older, I get more confident - more confident to pace myself, to take off if it gets too hectic, to sit in smaller groups and chat, to not chat if I need a breather and simply need to sit back and take it all in. In these ways, I survived a long day and had a fantastic time. And I left after 10 - just!

Friday night in

What a strange day - a defused car bomb in Piccadilly, helicopters circling around above our offices on Oxford Street, police sirens blaring, cordoned off sections in central London, the police cordoning off Fleet Street and instructing offices there - including my husband's - not to leave their buildings and to stay away from the windows... We were supposed to go to Whole Foods Market in Kensington after work and buy sun blush tomatoes, olive bread, Gorgonzola, goats cheese, a good bottle of wine and some other goodies to take home for tonight's dinner, but no one felt like going out on the town tonight. By 5.30pm, I was ready to go home before the ever-threatening downpour resumed or tube stations closed, mindful of 2005's experiences.

I popped into our local shops on Green Lanes and bought Alfonso mangoes, blueberries, raspberries, a 2002 bottle of Rioja, some very cheesy magazines - Woman & Home, Oprah and Grazia. M is back in an hour or so - his office evacuation meant he's got a lot of work to catch up on before the weekend. So I will settle in until he comes home and veg out with the magazines, some blogs and a cheesy Bollywood movie - Salaam-e-Ishq, about six very different young couples and their negotiations with love. When he returns, we'll most likely dine on yummy, greasy fish and chips from our local chippy.

Now I'm safely home, I feel chilled to the core. Such a lovely feeling to be inside and at home. It's the weekend!

To take, or not to take...

... my future husband's name. That is the question I've been toying with for some months now. Various thoughts, for and against, have been surfacing - the usual ones to do with identity, sexual politics and familiarity. If I take his name, I face the slightly daunting prospect of having to defend the decision to some very political friends - all of whom have kept the surnames they were born with (their fathers' names). Most likely they would consider such a decision to be politically incorrect. Others would think I'd be losing my hard-earned professional identity. It troubles me a little that people Googling me with a new name will find no record of my pre-married life: the conference papers, the small publication record, my professional life as a charity campaigner.

A recent Harvard University sudy suggested that the proportion of educated professional women choosing to take their husbands' surname is on the rise. I've built an academic and charity sector career with the name of my father. Now, for the first time, I've moved into the corporate sector and am starting over. A new name is exciting to me - it not only denotes a change, a commitment to another person, a new life as part of a loving unit... but a whole new phase in my professional life too. My old name will be forever associated with academia. My new name will now be associated with my new life in the corporate world.

It's terribly exciting - this chance to both be myself and another. To renew myself. And, hey, I'm taking that most traditional step and getting married - from there it's not much of a leap to change my name too.

Diverse

We returned yesterday to Anselm Kiefer's transformative and uplifting Aperiatur Terra at the White Cube gallery in Mason's Yard. We also visited the Photographers' Gallery in Covent Garden to view this year's Deutsche Börse Photography Prize exhibition featuring Philippe Chancel's crisp and dispassionate photographs from inside North Korea, Anders Petersen's photographic essay from the margins of Hamburg society a la Christer Stromholm, Walid Raad's photos of ravaged Beirut, and Fiona Tan's individual and family portraiture. Perhaps it was because I was still feeling tired from a busy work week, but none of the prize entries moved me. I liked Chancel's work, but I felt I had seen work like Petersen's and Tan's many times before.

We ate delicious assorted dim sum at Laureate on Shaftesbury Avenue and then walked up to Oxford Street where at Office I found pretty silver shoes to wear with my wedding sari and at Accessorise I found a cute silver and sequin clutch bag to carry on the day too. Then we watched Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest movie Climates at the Renoir about the breakdown of the relationship between a bored and jaded middle-aged university lecturer and his younger, fiestier TV art director wife - both main characters played by the director and his real-life wife Ebru Ceylan. A pensive, subtle meditation on middle class relationships in decline with wonderful shots of the Turkish landscape.

Though I'm not a fan of the fusty, middle-aged atmosphere of the Renoir, it struck me as comical that a largely English audience waiting to view a modern Turkish movie were forced first to sit through a short art movie ranting on in very simplistic terms about how globalisation leads to cultural homogenisation. Cultural homogenisation was also not to be seen at dinner back on Green Lanes at the restaurant Mesopotamia where the owners were Turkish, the waitresses were Eastern European and the clientele were English, French and Bangladeshi.

At the restaurant, M (English-Polish-Jewish) ate a meaty, succulent grilled sea bream with salad and I (English-Indian-Catholic-Hindu-Brahmo) had a rather oily diced lamb dish with yoghurt, garlic and aubergines. I think I will stick to the much better Anteplilier and only return here for the undoubtedly delicious fish dishes. I can't, however, fault Mesopotamia for its warm and attentive service though.

Being 'racial'

What I find interesting about the recent Celebrity Big Brother affair is not what was said against rich Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty - "Go back to the slums", "Shilpa Fuckawallah", "Shilpa Poppadom", "You don't know where those hands have been" - but that such comments have, rightly or wrongly, been branded racist by the media.

Comments similar to these were constantly levelled at me and my family during the 1970s and 1980s when we lived in Kent and were "the only Indians in the village" and we called it ignorance not racism.

It's interesting to me how definitions have hardened and narrowed to encompass a broader range of activity, language and intent in recent years. I would define many people as racist and as people to fear, but I wouldn't even call Bernard Manning let alone the Celebrity Big Brother contestants anything but stupid, ignorant and perhaps more than a little jealous.