Weekend doing

Marvelling at Alexander Rodchenko at the Hayward...



Giggling with Juan Muñoz at the Tate Modern...



Lunching on a cheese and ham toastie for M and steak pie with mushy peas for me at the Hayward's new terrific Concrete café... Browsing rugs, furniture and camcorders on Tottenham Court Road... Dining on kimchi, fried chilli chicken, deep-fried oysters and dolsot bibimbap at Bi Won on Coptic Street... Being both captivated and appalled by Woody Allen's neglected masterpiece Interiors on DVD... Savouring pears poached in a vanilla syrup and served with fresh raspberries, prepared by M... Flicking through back issues of Living ETC and Elle Decoration dreaming of each and every room in our new house... Breakfasting on clean-tasting Portuguese goat's cheese brought back by M from Lisbon... Finishing Don DeLillo's cinematic debut novel Americana and starting Natsume Soseki's The Tower Of London... Burning my tongue on the lime and chilli pickle that accompanied our lunch of samosas and dahi bora... Shamelessly being sucked into the irrepressively lighthearted and saccharine Pollyanna DVD with Hayley Mills... Sorting through, binning and filing away several months' worth of paperwork, from banking to work... Shortlisting removal and cleaning companies... Dining on homemade Hungarian goulash and potato salad with M and his sister, followed by blood oranges, passionfruit and dark cherry chocolate while perusing the cookbooks, as my sister-in-law is also a big foodie.

Exchanged

We've finally exchanged contracts on our house today. Bearing in mind we first had our offer accepted late in October of last year, this has been an unusually long process. We could have pulled out months ago and relooked for a place to buy, but to be honest we weren't in a terrific hurry to move and as we had found our ideal (for now) house, we were willing to wait. But last week we decided enough was enough and that we definitely had to move in before my maternity leave began. We gave all concerned a deadline for completion, after which we said we would pull out. And the threat seems to have worked. The solicitors have said we can collect the keys next Friday. Hurrah!

Unfortunately, M is in the States for two weeks thereafter but this gives me time to arrange for a removals company and for a cleaning company to come into the new house and give it a good scrub and other necessary things. All I care about, to be honest, is having those keys in my hands.

Very excited.

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.

One February...

One February in 2005, a handsome young man leaned over and kissed me for the first time as the closing bell rang in the Soho bar we were in. Later, on Regent Street, we couldn't stop kissing as I waited for the bus to arrive to take me home, alone.

One February in 2006, in a hotel room on the 57th floor by a picture window overlooking the glittering Thai city of Bangkok, the handsome young man began covering my neck with tiny kisses before whispering, "Will you marry me?" into my ear.

One February in 2007, I looked into the eyes of this handsome young man and began crying as I pledged my life to him in front of our nearest and dearest.

And this last weekend of February in 2008, my handsome young man will celebrate one year of marriage with me.

February is now one of my favourite months of the year.

I love you, M. What a blessing you are in my life. My lover, my best friend, my co-adventurer through life. Happy one year anniversary xxx

25 weeks

• The other morning, M spooned up behind me in bed and I fell back to sleep in his arms as his hand cupped my belly. I must have dozed for a good half hour and when I came through again his hand was still there. He told me that he and Little Planet had been playing "call and response" through my tummy. Incredible - father and daughter playing together and yet I didn't feel a thing - I was simply the conduit!
  
  
• This afternoon, I had a routine midwife check up at the hospital. Unless a woman is under- or over-weight, my antenatal unit never bothers with weighing sessions, but I requested to be weighed because I was convinced I'd put on a stone, at least. So I was shocked to discover I've put on just 5 pounds of weight. My midwife told me it is fine because the baby is the correct size for her age. But I feel like an elephant.
  
  
• It was lovely hearing her heartbeat again - unlike the last time, the midwife found it easily as Little Planet wasn't racing around inside of me.
  
  
• Though I am due on 3rd June, I'll officially leave work on 16 April - my 33rd week because I am also taking a chunk of annual leave. It's early I know, but we'll be in the new house by then and I want to nest and kick back and read childcare books and watch chick flicks and buy nice things online for the house and generally potter and prepare for the biggest adventure of my life. Because after the birth, I will get little if any time to myself (ever again?!?).
  
  
• This is the adventure that dwarfs all the other big adventures in my life, from living on an American Indian reservation with a medicine man to struggling through cancer.
  
  
• I'm also considering a number of baby books now that my pregnancy is two-thirds along. I'm going to buy and read a handful of classics though fully mindful that at the end of the day I will respond to my baby in a way that suits her (and me) best. Anyway, let me know your thoughts on these (and perhaps suggest others): The Happiest Baby On The Block by Harvey Karp; Secrets Of The Baby Whisperer by Tracy Hogg; The New Contented Little Baby Book by Gina Ford; What To Expect The First Year by Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi E. Murkoff, Sandee E. Hathaway.
  
  
• The one thing I haven't been able to bring myself to think about in too much detail is the birth itself - ouch! I have to look away if I see birth scenes on TV. I need to start thinking whether I want to give birth in the midwife-led birthing unit attached to my hospital or on the consultant-run labour ward. Though I have no problems with drugs and conventional birthing techniques, I have bought a set of natal hypnotherapy CDs and my NCT antenatal classes start in a month. Will have to start preparing myself for it all soon.

Taking it easy

We spent much of Saturday morning at Tate Britain in Pimlico, viewing the Peter Doig and The Camden Town Group exhibitions. The latter was interesting more for the subject matter (everyday life in bustling London) than the rather derivative painting methods (aside from the brilliant Sickert); but the former blew me away. I only became aware of Peter Doig a couple of years ago at The Triumph Of Painting show at the Saatchi Gallery and my excitement over his haunting, large-scale natural and built-up landscapes has not waned.

We lunched at the bustling Japan Centre and then bought groceries from Lina Store, Arigato, the Algerian Coffee Shop, Nicolas, Yauatcha and Fresh & Wild all in Soho. We rushed home - partly to catch the disappointing (for us) Arsenal v. Manchester United game on TV and partly because I was feeling quite weary: as my pregnancy progesses, my pelvic area is getting more achy, due to the hormone relaxin that's released during pregnancy to soften the joints in preparation for the birth of the baby.

Afterwards, we made homemade pizzas with artichokes, olives, sunblush tomatoes and mozzarella and desserted on blue tea, matcha lime and kumquat macarons from Yauatcha.

We've taken Sunday easy, spending most of it reading and now we're chilling out with M's mother and sister who will stay for a dinner, cooked by M, of roast lamb with rosemary and garlic. Tomorrow, we meet up with Oxford friends for dinner in a local Turkish restaurant - K who's completing her PhD and couple D and J, who have three children under 5 and will no doubt be sharing with us many birth and baby tips. And this is a four-day working week for us as we're coming up to our 1 year wedding anniversary and have taken a long weekend to celebrate together in London.

Hope you are having a good weekend - it's still not over!

Candlelit Valentine's

Happy belated Valentine's one and all. We spent the evening eating assorted goodies - antipasti, fresh pasta, amaretti biscuits and rich chocolate cake courtesy of Carluccio's near my work - by candlelight at home.

Last year, I forgot all about Valentine's Day until my soon-to-be husband presented me with a card. Careless of me as a soon-to-be wife!

This year though, a blissful, chilled night away from it all, just the two (well, three) of us.

Mr and Mrs Planethalder

M on the left and me on the right - just a few months old, yet look at all our hair! Inspired by Broom.

I tag 30in2005, Southways, SilentOne, Prema, Mallika, Tommy, Jean, Olivia, Leslee, Sprink, Hypatia (if you're still there, Hyp) and Choxbox - in fact anyone who reads me. Photos of you as a baby or you and your partner as babies please and leave a comment so we can check you out!

Wretched

Most of my weekend activity took place on Friday night and Saturday, when I felt relatively fine - well, better than my sick day on Thursday. I was back at work on Friday and out and about on Friday evening, all day Saturday and on Sunday morning. Then by Sunday evening I was coughing and retching and feeling wretched again.

I spent all of today at home in bed, alternating between sleeping and watching Buffy, only dragging myself out of the bedroom to heat up milk or Heinz tomato soup. I couldn't even switch on the computer until now, thus feeling especially guilty for not being able to compensate for not being at work by checking work emails.

I have enormous amounts of energy and rarely get colds and when I get even the hint of one I beat it down with paracetamol and megadoses of vitamin C. With a baby inside to think about, I'm now even afraid to take a decongestant. I know there are things I can take while pregnant, but it's simply too much effort to seek them out.

Apparently colds last longer during pregnancy, perhaps because the immune system slows down to protect the baby - a foreign object - from immunological rejection. So, for the sake of my baby, I have to suffer. Something tells me that, as a mother, it will always be like this from now on (suffering for the sake of the children).

Some good news today though - it looks like the guy whose house we are buying has finally sorted out the complications around the flat he wants to buy and the chain we're in can finally move again. His solicitors tell us we should exchange before the month is out. I'm holding my breath and crossing all fingers and toes.

This weekend

This weekend, we've watched Robert Altman's sprawling and superlative Shortcuts on DVD, set against the backdrop of middle class Los Angeles and inspired by short stories by Raymond Carver.

This weekend, we've eaten gyoza salad, ohitashi, chicken katsu don and miso soup at Toku in the Japan Centre on Piccadilly; tarte aux fraises and cheesecake at Patisserie Valerie on Old Compton Street; organic sausages and mash with onion gravy at The Honest Sausage in Regent's Park; dark chocolate and caramel millionaires slice and Portuguese nata at Fernandez & Wells on Lexington; Indian snacks from Ambala; homemade macaroni cheese and spinach; and homemade Persian mixed vegetable stew.

This weekend, we've strolled through Regent's, Finsbury and Priory parks in North London in the glorious, bright yellow sunshine.

This weekend, we've bought candles from Muji on Carnaby Street; chocolates and fruit fondants from Liberty; organic cherries and milk from Fresh & Wild on Brewer Street; lotus root, tofu and a brown rice mix with aduki beans and millet from Arigato on Brewer Street; wine from The Vintage House on Old Compton Street.

This weekend, we've browsed gymwear in Uni Qlo and Niketown; and prams and pushchairs in Mothercare at Marble Arch, finally deciding to go with the Bugaboo Chameleon (though we still may change our minds as I'm also toying with the Bugaboo Bee).

This weekend, we've viewed Modern Chinese Art - The Khoan And Michael Sullivan Collection, Part 1 at Asia House; and Catherine Yass' mesmeric but too short film installation of the Three Gorges Dam in China's Yangtze River at the Alison Jacques Gallery on Berners Street.

And we've played "call and response" with Little Planethalder in the womb - she'll kick and then we'll tap or call back in response and she'll kick back again. It'll be wonderful when we can encourage her to kick at any spot on my belly we touch.

23 weeks

The picture above shows how much the internal organs are already being pushed upwards at 20 weeks. I'm now 23 weeks and 3 days and I can really feel my uterus pushing against my skin and above my belly button. The lifting upwards of the uterus has certainly relieved pressure on my bladder and lower pelvic cavity so I feel relatively more comfortable than I've felt before. But I am more breathless and have heartburn. It's extraordinary how hard my belly is - like a round football, but larger, thrusting outwards from my body like an alien growth. M and I keep marvelling at it.

Apparently, Little Planethalder now weighs about one pound and is approximately 11.5 inches head to heel - the weight of a large mango and the length of a banana. Her facial features are beginning to develop and she's likely to be able to open and close her eyes now, hear things on the outside and suck her thumb. She's certainly enjoying herself inside of me - kicking and punching and twisting and turning. M can now feel her kick from the outside which has made the whole experience something we can finally and concretely share.

Yet, like adults, she has her active days when she enjoys her acrobatics and her inactive days when she prefers to chill out and take it easy - either that or she's kicking towards my back, which I can't feel, or against my colon which feels like internal popping wind. On Tuesday, I had a routine checkup in the hospital and asked them to check for her heartbeat with a Doppler. Only that morning both M and I had felt her kick but the anxiety over her well-being never diminishes. My heart leapt into my throat when the obstetrician couldn't find a heartbeat and yet she could hear the swishing of the amniotic fluid inside suggesting the baby was moving around. So they did an ultrasound and there she was, heart beating strongly away, kicking her legs and punching out her fists and squirming every which way. The relief was immeasurable.

Today, I am at home sick with a sore throat and a mild fever - sleeping, reading magazines, watching property programmes on daytime TV, periodically checking and responding to work emails, sleeping again. The time at home has afforded me this luxury of writing a rare weekday blog post, which is a lovely change as this was beginning to read like a weekend activity blog only.

And I'm beginning to think about my newborn baby shopping list. I'll post it here soon and seek the advice of any interested readers (mummies or not) on what to buy and not to buy for the first few weeks.

Eastward bound

After a long working day, we met up on Friday for a simple, light and aromatic dinner at the Thai Garden Cafe in Bloomsbury. We started with crab cakes and spring rolls before moving on to whole sea bass roasted with lemongrass (M) and beef red curry (me). We bought desserts of creme brule (M) and sticky toffee pudding (me) from Waitrose in the Brunswick and then ate them back at home in front of last week's laugh-out-loud Curb Your Enthusiasm. Really, the 6th season is shaping up to be as hilarious as ever.

On Saturday we ventured eastwards. Under a crisp blue sky and pale yellow sunshine, we strolled along the canal, periodically dodging earnest cyclists eager to claim the path as solely their own. At the Parasol Unit we viewed Darren Almond's black and white photographs of crystalline, snow-covered Siberian forests (above). Though the ravaged, stripped trees on show were testimony to the brutal effects of nickel mining, there was an eerie beauty about the photos and their composition that made for a magical if conflicting viewing.

Also on show was Almond's fourteen-minute, three-screen film shot on the Qinghai-Tibet railway - the world's highest train route. The barren landscape viewed at a hurried pace through the train's window contrasted sharply against the meditative chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks filmed in the Samyey monastery in Lhasa. For Almond, the train is supposed to symbolise the penetrating force of China upon Tibet, but again I was conflicted - this time by my sense of excitement watching the train speed through the wondrously undulating and stark landscape, and by the inevitable if fraught coexistence of the industrial and the spiritual in the modern world.

We continued towards Old Street. I find the Old Street area of London a curious mixture of derelict dead zones and colourful quirkiness with just the right amount of interest to draw me back again and again. What I dislike about Old Street is the endless waiting at traffic lights as the ceaseless traffic drones by. But luckily the galleries draw me back, as do the places to eat and the small boutiques. In Hoxton's White Cube, we saw more of Darren Almond's photographs - this time of the British landscape where the exquisite subject matter (left) was rendered flat and dull by highly conventional photographic techniques that wouldn't look out of place in a tourist guide.

We returned to my favourite burger joint, The Diner on Curtain Road, for lunch where this time I was only just able to fit inside their leather and formica booth. This is definitely the last time I will be able to gorge myself on their deliciously fat-laden bacon cheeseburgers, fat fries and coleslaw as my pregnant belly had just half an inch of breathing space before it pressed uncomfortably against the edge of the table. I kid you not! I savoured my food while skimming the Saturday newspapers and chatting with M, while eavesdropping on a dull young man who would not stop yapping away as his girlfriend tried to stave off her boredom by eating without stopping to breathe, while stealing glances at a couple eating their burgers while their adorable little baby contented herself with her milk and toys and gurgled gleefully at her parents. I can't wait to bring Little Planethalder to places like this!

After lunch, we popped over the road to browse the furniture and interior knick knacks at SCP before cabbing it over to the Barbican for the superlative tale of murder, revenge and meat pies to die for that is Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street. Murder, mayhem, mouth-watering meat pies and a tortured Johnny Depp who channels David Bowie through his singing voice - what more could a girl like me want. I enjoyed every second of this musical and can't wait to see it again. Though perhaps not at the Barbican's Cinema 2 which, unlike its Cinema 1, is cramped and uncomfortable.

Afterwards, we walked to the Bloomberg Space on Finsbury Square to see Sarah Beddington's Places Of Laughter And Of Crying film installation featuring near-still footage of interior shadows, drifting jellyfish, a Lebanese skyline, fluttering plastic sheeting, raindrops on concrete and more. Plus her 29-minute, four-screen footage of modern Shanghai. We had just a quarter of an hour to immerse ourselves in the installation before the gallery closed, so I'll do another review when we return.

And then to dinner at the Vietnamese Song Que Cafe on the Kingsland Road, where we enjoyed sugar cane prawns, beef wrapped in betel leaves, beef and tofu soup and beef stir-fried with lemongrass and rice vermicelli. We were also entertained by two of the staff's children who were excitedly engrossed in a computer chess game on the new Samsung laptop they had just been bought. M doesn't play chess and I can't wait to teach Little Planethalder the game so she can play with me - after all, like marriage, isn't having children all about having a permanent playmate to have fun with?!

In a Johnny Depp mood, we returned home and watched the first Pirates Of The Caribbean on DVD while eating Green & Blacks cherry chocolate. This time Depp was channeling Keith Richards to hilariously ultra-camp effect.

Today, Sunday, we didn't drift too far from home. We lay in late, drank coffee and read in bed, shopped for groceries and laundered clothes. M went to the gym. I stayed at home and finished off reading the last few pages of a number of books. If I have just a few pages left of a novel I tend to put it aside to start reading a new one. I do this because I know I will finish the book on my commute into work, leaving nothing to read on the commute back home. Rather than carrying two books with me, I bring a fresh new one and leave the unfinished one behind.

M can't understand why I don't carry the two books with me, or finish the other one later at night back at home. I can seldom read two books at once and if a book doesn't grip me in its fictitious vice then I tend to forget about finishing it once I am immersed in another story. As a result the unfinished novels pile up until I get round to finishing them off in one reading session. Curious habit I know, with little reason or logic behind it.

Anyway, this Sunday was my day to finish all those books: Douglas Coupland's Eleanor Rigby, Anne Tyler's Digging To America, Amulya Malladi's The Mango Season and Manju Kapur's Home.

On his way back from the gym, M picked up some samosas and kachori from Ambala. We don't have a famed Gupta near us but these satisfied us perfectly. M came back from the store with tales of little children with their dads choosing what they wanted to eat. He said we should make such trips our own Sunday morning ritual when we have our own little family. But I cherish my own childhood memory of my mother batch-frying homemade samosas on the weekends - filling the air with exciting smells and aromas - and I would love to establish this as one of our weekend rituals with our daughter when she's old enough to enjoy the experience.

There is so much to dream about... this new future of ours... this whole new life...

Now M is cooking our dinner of poule-au-Bouillon - whole chicken boiled with leeks, carrots, turnips, celery, bay leaves, thyme and other aromatic seasonings. He may serve it with fried or mashed potatoes. Perfect comfort food to ease us back into the busy working week.

Artistic delights

Our weekend began on Friday night when we met up to eat at Eat And Two Veg in Marylebone. The building was wonderfully cavernous with high ceilings, exposed brick and dark wooden furnishings, but the food was a little too stodgily vegetarian for my liking, featuring such old school ingredients as textured soya protein and quorn. I much prefer the fresher, more modern and imaginative vegetarian delights cooked up at Mildreds in Soho.

Saturday began with a rushed perusal through the Royal Academy's spectacular From Russia: French And Russian Master Paintings 1870–1925 From Moscow And St Petersburg exhibition. The place was so tightly packed with middle-aged and elderly out-of-towners that we were able to see very little, so we will return one Thursday after work when we're more likely at least to stand and admire paintings from Cézanne, Gauguin and Matisse to Kandinsky, Tatlin and Malevich at greater leisure.

Edward Burtynsky's magisterial photographs of large-scale quarries around the world (above) were on show at Flowers Central on Cork Street. This Canadian photographer is fascinated by the architectural possibilities of geography and landscapes transformed by industry, but despite this it is wonderfully unclear whether he is an environmentalist, an industrialist or simply a documentarist. The vast scale of his photos and their flattened, geometrical preoccupation reminded me of that other magisterial photographer Andreas Gursky.

Tim Simmons' elaborately lit photographs of snow at The Fine Art Society (above) on Bond Street were haunting, enigmatic and extremely cinematic and could easily be hung alongside contemporaries such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Gregory Crewdson.

I dragged M into Fenwick department store so I could use the loo but then used it as an excuse to also check out their baby department. And then we replenished our tea supplies at Postcard Teas on Dering Street. We bought second flush Darjeeling from the Fairtrade-endorsed, family-run Goomtee estate (left), some Japanese sencha from the Wazuka hills of Uji and a new tea we've never tried before from southern Korea - Hongcha. We love visiting this small tea shop because the owner regularly encourages us to taste his teas and has a story for each one. He told us how his Hongcha tea tasted remarkably and radically different when drunk in east and west London and we spent some time discussing how the different PH levels, chemical composition and processing techniques of London water affects how delicate teas taste.

After our disappointing experience looking for shirts on Jermyn Street a few weekends ago, we were extremely impressed by the Brooks Brothers store on Beak Street. Though the menswear and womenswear are a little too preppy for our tastes, the store had a wider variety of shirt collar styles that better suited M's preferences. The service was impeccable also and the store was uncrowded making the whole shopping experience much pleasanter. The best discovery was their fabulous Thom Browne collection (above).

We revived ourselves with chorizo and cheese (M) and Dorset ham and Montgomery cheese toasted ciabattas at Fernandez & Wells down the street, then walked along Great Titchfield to the Marco Bohr photographic exhibition Floating Cities at the Mummery + Schnelle gallery. The photos echoed the washed out, melancholy glaze preferred by many of the contemporary Japanese photographers I have seen and featured amateur musicians practicing their craft along the banks of the Tamagawa river on the outskirts of Tokyo - one of the few places they could play without disturbing others or being disturbed.

By this time, I was finally exhausted so we went home and chilled for a few hours before I had to head out again, back into town, for my friend R's 30th birthday celebrations in the St Alban on Regent Street. R looked fabulous, as usual. We used to work together at a development agency in London several years ago and bonded over the fact that we blatantly did not fit in with the non-profit, activist world (where I had to hide the fact that I enjoyed Coca Cola and occasionally shopped in Gap). Like me, she moved fully into the corporate sector before throwing in the towel for a life-enhancing trip to India and Hong Kong. Now she's back home in Ireland working in the corporate sector again and assessing her options.

St Alban features high-end comfort food such as charcoal grilled skate with capers, lemon and pine nuts and veal t-bone with olive mash and slow roasted Norfolk black pig with savoy cabbage and roasted quince. I had a moreish dish of slow-cooked lamb with chillies and chickpeas. The food was very nice, though a little too salty for my taste and I found the individual ingredients tended to overpower one another. But the company and the restaurant environment - featuring wall art by Michael Craig-Martin - were terrific and I was especially impressed that the car service the restaurant offered to ferry me back home (hey, I'm a pregnant woman, I'm allowed such luxuries!) cost exactly the same as a black cab.

Sunday was a quieter, more local affair. As usual, M went to the gym. I cleaned the house, did some laundry and read the weekend papers. Then I met up with M outside his gym and we browsed the local Mothercare. From Ambala we bought some sweet and sour, crunchy namkeen and from our favourite Indian supermarket we bought homemade vegetable samosas, pakoras and potato and pea kachori which we lunched on back at home with sweet lime and chilli pickle, that made Little Planethalder dance around inside me, and a clean and crisp raita M made (above).

M prepared a knuckle of lamb with whole and crushed black peppercorns, sat it on some whole garlic and shallots then popped it into the oven to slow roast at a low temperature for five hours or so while we vegged out for the rest of the afternoon with the engrossing and epic 10-part World War II drama Band Of Brothers on DVD. This TV series is incredibly addictive. I love the high production values, the washed out, metallic hues and how each episode focuses on a particular aspect of the war - whether it is the impact newcomers to the battlefield had on the more seasoned, battle-weary members of Easy Company, or the role of medics, or the effect fear in the battlefield had on all.

Our dinner guests at night were M's sister and one of her best friends - a recently qualified doctor who entertained us with all sorts of gruesome stories from her night shifts at A&E. M served the roast lamb with pumpkin mashed with chillies and cumin and a salad of watercress salad with peas (above). All so delicious. M's sister remarked what a lucky woman she was having a brother like M. I can only agree!

Oh, and here's my belly at 21 weeks and 5 days. That's all baby, promise...

Clueless

Most of our grey and rainy Saturday was spent wandering through Marylebone - buying crisp white cotton bed linen from The White Company; lunching on salads of smoked mackerel and white beans (M) and chickpeas, goats cheese, roast squash and sun blush tomato pesto (me) at The Natural Kitchen; and browsing the Scandinavian designer tableware and furniture at Iittala. Laden down with goodies, we cabbed it to Covent Garden where we watched the terrifically tense and brooding modern Western movie No Country For Old Men (photo above) by the back-to-form Coen Brothers.

In Marylebone, we also popped into Daunt Books, where M picked up Mario Batali's mouthwatering collection of simple, everyday Italian recipes Molto Italiano (photo above), and I headed straight to the Pregnancy & Childcare section. The first book I bought was Dr Miriam Stoppard's First-time Parents: What Every New Parent Needs To Know, with chapters on how to change a newborn's nappy, how to bathe and dress it (photo below), how to feed it, how to soothe it when it cries, and other basic guides.

This morning, M and I were lazing in bed (those days will soon be gone) chatting about how neither of us have ever changed a nappy, how I've never even held a newborn baby (and M can barely remember if he has). Basically, we have no clue. How can we bring new life into the world?

I remember my good friends D and J telling me of the day they brought their firstborn home. All the well-wishers had departed and they were left alone sitting on the sofa holding a newborn who wouldn't stop crying and all they could say to each other was, "What the hell do we do now?".

My mum emailed me this morning telling me that she and my dad had no clue either and it was worse for her because none of her family was around. She wrote that, "We even didn't know how to raise a little baby. When you used to scream with tummy ache due to wind and refused to feed I used to cry. But we coped, didn't we? You became so nice and sweet." This, despite being a paediatrician. She just muddled through and it all worked out in the end.

I guess we'll just have to take it day by day, but believe me I am now doing a lot of reading - witness all the magazines I have bought... and that's just half of them!

Another book I picked up at Daunt Books was Ann Pleshette Murphy's The Seven Stages Of Motherhood, which explores the various shifts in identity a woman goes through as her child matures from a fetus in the womb to a toddler, from a school child to a young adult. Its focus is not on pregnancy, birth and child-rearing but on the woman as mother, and I'm enjoying it because it begins with defining motherhood as an identity that begins at conception.

On Friday night, I also downloaded from iTunes an audiobook of Deepak Chopra's A Holistic Guide To Pregnancy and listen to it at night as I drop off to sleep.

Now that I've passed the 20 week milestone, I feel more secure in imagining a life beyond pregnancy and the life of our baby. The Chopra and Murphy books are very meditative and are provoking all sorts of feelings and thoughts in me, which no doubt will gradually surface in this blog.

Mid-pregnancy notes

• At 20 weeks, I'm still feeling tired but not as fatigued as in my first trimester when I was coming home, going straight to bed, only surfacing for the dinner my wonderful husband made (despite his long day in the office too), and then going back to bed again.
  
  
• I'm craving just apple juice and fruit. Sometimes at work I go through two large M&S fruit bowls a day - expensive but it's what I'm craving. Odd, since before my pregnancy I hardly ate any fruit, being a savoury girl. I'm also eating more vegetables and carbohydrates in general and far less protein than I'm used to, which again is odd as pre-pregnancy I was a protein-a-holic. Having said that, I can still chomp on beef all day long if I am given the chance.
  
  
• Until 19 weeks, the baby was still an abstract object inside of me and it didn't really feel real until I started to feel its movements - just tiny, dull tap tap taps at the moment, but signs of life nonetheless. I've noticed the baby is particularly active after a glass of ice cold milk, which I've been drinking twice a day since I've become pregnant.
  
  
• I'm drinking not a drop of alcohol but am drinking a mug of coffee a day and a can of cola every so often for sanity. I'm not beating myself up for eating pre-packed salad leaves or soft-rind cheeses (albeit pasteurised) occasionally but I'm trying to avoid the usual suspects - it's only 9 months of deprivation after all.
  
  
• Our October trip to Japan last year marked the early weeks of my pregnancy. I was so nauseous in Tokyo and Kyoto, that I couldn't even bring myself to blog about our trip properly. I certainly struggled to enjoy the food there and still now I can't quite stomach Japanese food - once my favourite "food group"! You may have noticed we no longer eat out at Japanese restaurants.
  
  
• All this time, we have visualised the baby as a boy. Not because we wanted a boy as opposed to a girl, but that is just the pattern we slipped into. Despite this, by my 18th week I had a hunch, deep down, that the baby would be a girl. I did a frivolous Chinese Gender Predictor test online, which took my age and the month I conceived and predicted I would have a girl. This was confirmed in the 20 week scan, but I still slip up and think of "she" as a "he".
  
  
• We had our boy and girl names chosen even before we conceived - both Indian names beginning with R. Our surname is English so the Indian first name makes it a perfect combination. Neither M nor I have middle names so the baby will have just the one name (which is good, because we're too lazy to decide on more names).
  
  
• The worrying never stops - each twinge, or lack of, I take note of, and, until the 20 week scan at least, I still felt my breasts for tenderness to prove the pregnancy was still viable. It didn't help that in my so-called "blooming" second trimester, I no longer have the usual pregnancy symptoms of nausea and extreme fatigue or even spots.
  
  
• My stomach feels like a brick and is rock hard. And I think I'm finally past the "just fat" stage and am looking properly pregnant now.
  
  
• I am walking around like an elephant. I feel sorry for our downstairs neighbours (well, not that sorry - they are horrible people) as I am thud thud thudding all over the flat and simply can't help it. Another reason I'm anxious to move into our new house.
  
  
• I'm very protective of the bump. I don't like anyone touching it apart from my mum and my husband and I find myself shielding it in crowds. If someone bumps into it then I feel an instinctive surge of anger.
  
  
• The most worrying moments so far in this pregnancy were my nuchal scan and nuchal blood tests (which ended up being fine with a risk factor of 1:6560) and bleeding at 16 weeks (which ended up being due to an infection affecting my cervix, unrelated to the baby). My colleague, who is pregnant with her second child, says the worrying will never stop even when the baby is born, so I may as well get used to it!
  
  
• As I've commented in the previous post, I've never been a broody person - I've never yearned for a child, so it should feel entirely strange having another heart beat and a new life growing inside of me. But in fact it feels entirely natural in reality. I'm surprised at how normal this is all feeling. Of course, I'm only halfway there. I expect as the baby grows bigger and stronger and I become better able to feel it kicking and moving around inside of me then it will feel odd. Watch this space...

It's a...

The baby wriggled around incessantly, kicked and punched me endlessly and did round upon round of head-over-heels until the sonographer, my husband and I were doubled up with laughter. I was scanned three times with gaps of 20 minutes between each scan, but eventually all necessary measurements were taken and my stubborn, active, playful baby was declared fine and dandy. It had passed the big, scary 20 week anomaly scan with flying colours and "it" was pronounced "she".

Yes, we're having a baby girl!

Kolkata beef and coconut curry

It's been a while since I posted a recipe here on Planethalder. When it was still fashionable, I thrived on the protein-rich Atkins diet. Beef is my favourite meat and I nearly always choose it if it's on the menu. Steak done rare is my ultimate dish and it is what I ate, with rocket and sun-blush tomatoes dressed with balsamic vinegar and parmesan shavings, at Caffe Caldesi in Marylebone on Friday night after work. This weekend, we visited my parents in Suffolk. One of the wonderful things about visiting my mum and dad is the fantastic, home cooking. On Saturday, my mother cooked us an array of mouth-watering Indian dishes: dal with sultanas and fresh coconut pieces, curried mixed vegetables, plump cod steaks in a spiced coconut and mango sauce, and this dish - Kolkata beef and coconut curry...

Sunflower oil
450g/1lb diced beef
2 medium tomatoes sliced
3 medium sized potatoes diced
1 medium onion thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic crushed
1 tsp cumin seeds
3 tsps coriander seeds
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 tsp crushed red chillies
1 tsp sugar
2.5cm/1in piece fresh ginger peeled and finely chopped
1 tsp tumeric
1 tsp garam masala
Salt to taste
100g/4oz creamed coconut dissolved in half pint hot water
Juice of 1 lemon

1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan, add garlic and onion and fry for 3-5 mins until the onion is golden brown.
2. Crush the cumin, coriander, peppercorns and red chillis in a pestle & mortar and add to the pan. Fry for 2 mins, stirring continuously to blend with the onion mixture.
3. Add ginger, tumeric, garam masala and tomatoes and fry for another minute, stirring well.
4. Add the beef and stir well to coat with the spices. Fry for another 5 mins, stirring well to seal the meat on all sides.
5. Pour in the stock, bring to the boil, then reduce the heat, cover and simmer for 10-15 mins.
6. Stir in diced potatoes, bring to boil and simmer for another 20 minutes, adding more water if necessary.
7. Pour in creamed coconut and lemon juice and stir well. Cover and simmer gently for 40 mins until the meat is tender, stirring occasionally.

Serve with basmati rice.

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).

In and out and about

Thursday turned out to be Indian Treats day for me. During my lunch break, I walked down to Drummond Street near Euston to pick up some paneer for the evening dinner when I passed by Diwani Bhel Poori House and thought, "Why not?" The place was packed due to the restaurant's buffet lunch special but I managed to find a table for one. I had bhel puri, of course, and then malai kofta with paratha. The food was not as tasty as my favourite Ravi Shankar Restaurant next door, but it hit the spot. Then I popped over the road to Ambala for a tub of their very moreish Ambala Mix. And then later, for dinner, I cooked paneer and peas curry.

On Friday, I discovered our company had changed their maternity regulations for the better. Instead of providing just the basic statutory rights, they are offering three months full pay, three months half pay, back to work bonus and all benefits including health, dental, pension and gym membership left intact. Apparently the company decided to make the changes because they didn't want to lose valuable female staff - since just three of us at work will be going on maternity leave soon it left me feeling very chuffed and valuable!

After work, I went out for drinks with colleagues and then met M for dinner at Hong Kong Diner in Chinatown. We ate chicken kung po, beef and spring onions, stir-fried greens and egg fried rice. At home, we ate some Ben & Jerry's vanilla ice cream with some thick dulce de leche poured over the top.

On Saturday, we visited Alicia Dubnyckyj's Two Cities exhibition at Sarah Myerscough Fine Art in Mayfair. Dubnyckyj took snapshot photos during trips to San Francisco and New York City then manipulated them on her computer before painting the images onto MDF with gloss paint. The results were interesting though a little too "paint by numbers" for my liking. We also popped into the Aicon Gallery to view their Winter Moderns exhibition (Jamini Roy, right), but once again nothing jumped out at me and I felt that much of it wouldn't have looked out of place in the wall art sections of Habitat or Ikea. That was my instant reaction anyway. However, with hindsight and longer reflection I realise now that at the time - early 20th century - these modern Indian masters really broke new ground within India in bringing a different artistic aesthetic to public attention. With that in mind, I will try and return to view the works with refreshed eyes.

We lunched on open rye bread sandwiches at the Nordic Bakery - M had pickled herring and I had cheese and pickles, plus the obligatory cinnamon bun. We browsed shirts for M on Jermyn Street but were disappointed with the quality and styles. I think he'll stick to his usual Jil Sander, Dries Van Noten, Martin Margiela and Gieves & Hawkes. Though he may also check out bespoke.

While in town, we also picked up some Korean Sparrow's Tongue and 2nd flush Darjeeling tea from East Teas; black rye bread and smoked Gouda from Fresh & Wild; Medoc and Malbec wines from Milroy's; a Korean cookbook and some Charles Dickens novels from Foyles; an umbrella from Muji; some tofu, daikon and miso paste from Arigato; and some dried macaroni from Lina Stores.

Back at home, M cooked baked macaroni with cheese, bacon and spinach - inspired by our lunch at Automat last weekend - and then we vegged out on the sofa with the weekend papers, books (The Old Curiosity Shop for me and Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games for M), and magazines.

On Sunday, the weather was bright and sunny and crisp with clear blue skies, so we went down to the Southbank and strolled a while along the river, peering into all the strollers as we went along. It seemed there were so many other young, mixed Indian-English couples out and about too with their Indian-English babies. We had fun wondering how ours will turn out - what colour skin tone, what colour hair, will he or she look more Indian or more English, how much hair will she or he have (alot I think, judging from the fact that M and I were both born with masses of thick dark hair).

Then we snuggled into the large, comfy armchairs at the Benugo cafe inside the BFI, for a couple of hours waiting for our movie - Wim Wenders' Alice In The Cities - to start. We lunched on deli sandwiches, thick-cut chips with ketchup and rice pudding with raspberry sauce, chatted, read the papers and people watched. The space at Benugo is great for families with strollers and there were many babies, toddlers and children around which will be terrific for us later on in the year. The Tate Modern members room is the same - great for parents with young children, complete with changing facilities. And the Barbican of course has parents and babies film showings most weekends. I'm beginning to file it all away!

The film was excellent - shot in grainy black and white, the film follows a blocked reporter who ends up on the road - travelling across America and Holland - with a nine year old girl in search of her mother who has deserted her.

Then back home, where M cooked a spicy lamb bhuna with crushed fennel, fenugreek, coriander, cumin and mustard seeds plus crushed dried red chillis, ginger, garlic and tomatoes. His first attempt at cooking a curry for me and it was superlative. When my mother found out she said, "How am I going to cook curries for him from now on?" as she knows how well my husband cooks. Don't worry Ma, I am sure he will gobble up all your delicious curries next weekend when we come visit you. Besides, you have decades more experience of cooking Indian food than him!

He also tried his hand at okra curry (above) and we ate the Indian feast together with his father, sister and sister's friend who came for dinner.

Delicious, M!

New Year notes

• I have so much to be grateful for in 2007 - my husband, our romantic wedding in February, my ever-deepening relationship with my parents, gaining a new family, getting two pay rises and a promotion in a career and company I love, my husband enjoying his new job also, getting pregnant, re-visiting NYC, having two honeymoons in Japan and India, getting our offer on a house accepted, having another year of good health.
  
  
• My life has not always been so blessed and joyous, and I know enough about how life works to not expect such blessings and joys so fulsomely all the time. But this was certainly my year for happiness and I am savouring it all.
  
  
• I suspect 2008 will be just as busy and so I am again not making any New Year resolutions. When I recovered from cancer a few years ago, I vowed I would make the most of life and not just seize opportunities as they came to me but create opportunities for myself, without thinking too much and over-analysing and having the moment pass me by. It was the biggest resolution I could make to myself and has served me increasingly well over the years.
  
  
• Having said all that, there are a few bite-sized resolutions I want to keep for 2008. I am guilty of never having read a Charles Dickens novel and as I love London so much I want to rectify this pronto. I want to get back into the habit of reading the current affairs sections of newspapers and magazines rather than contenting myself with the Arts or Lifestyle sections. I want to keep in better touch with family and friends - even if it simply means remembering to send birthday cards out on time. I want to make sure I slather on the body lotion each and every morning after my shower.
  
  
• We saw the New Year in quietly at home, with a leg of lamb slow-roasted with rosemary and garlic and served with a salad of baby lettuces, sliced pears, orange segments, coriander leaves, pomegranate seeds, toasted pine nuts and roasted beetroot. M found the salad recipe in a local Austin newspaper from his business trip to Texas a few weeks ago. Then we watched Jools Holland on BBC2 and the sensational fireworks on the River Thames on BBC1 and soon after midnight phoned both sets of families - one in Suffolk, the other in Loughborough - to wish them a Happy New Year.
  
  
• This may very well, God willing, be our last New Year together before we are joined by Little Planethalder so it was extra special seeing in 2008 just the two of us - M with his California syrah and me with my elderflower cordial. Hugging, kissing, being in love, being together.
  
  
• And then today, the first day of 2008, we went walking across Hampstead Heath, where we were married earlier this - whoops, last year. One of my favourite places on earth and so close to home. Our boots sinking into the wet, squelching mud. Stopping for bangers and colcannon mash and bread pudding for lunch at Kenwood House.
  
  
• At home, we began to watch Akira Kurosawa's medieval epic Kagemusha, but were so shattered from the walk and fresh air we collapsed into sleep.
  
  
• Now M is preparing shepherd's pie from the lamb leftover from last night's roast and reading last weekend's New York Times and I'm catching up online.Tomorrow, it's back to work for both of us. Happy New Year one and all!