Posetta Baddog trying my patience

Someone please explain to me why, when there are three super luxe dog beds in the house, Posetta Baddog finds it necessary to curl up on the contents of my overnight bag? Specifically on my cashmere scarf and sequinned cocktail dress.

Things I am going to do in London: part one

Most importantly, I HAVE to get my hair cut. (I'm heading for the dreaded stripper hair - way too long.) And possibly coloured too. I’m a natural blonde and usually I rely on the summer sun to perk up my hair. This year I spent way more time in the sun than normal - a few months in California, and then on my return to New York, I promptly left the city for the countryside. That meant I wore a huge sunhat to ward off the evil wrinkle forming rays every day. The annoying side effect of that is rather dull looking hair.

Thing is I haven’t had my hair cut in London in three years, and I have no idea where to go. I’ve also got an inbox full of LLG reader emails all wanting to know where they should get their hair done in London. Anyone got any bright ideas? And, dear readers, if you can hang on, I’ll report back once I’ve taken the plunge.

Eat so much Vietnamese that I end up with a food baby. Hackney here I come. Song Que, Viet Hoa, Huong Viet: I intend to eat in all three as much as possible.

Find the squishiest sofa in Shoreditch House, hunker down and make it my London office. (And mumble occasionally about how great it is that they have a gym there, with absolutely no intention whatsoever of crossing the threshold.)

Go for a very long walk on Hampstead Heath with lil’sis & Posetta Baddog, followed by lunch outside at The Italian at Parliament Hill Fields, with PB tied to our table as she growls at all comers.

Go dancing. I’m thinking the Guilty Pleasures Black & White Ball at Koko for choice. In a black lace mid calf ballgown, black elbow gloves, proper pointy toe stilettos, masses of necklaces & birds nest hair. (Think 80s, think Madonna c. Like A Virgin)

Get my eyebrows threaded at Blink before they take over my face.

London here I come...

I’m feeling rather sad at the thought of leaving New Jersey. It’s been wonderful getting to spend proper time with J& Y, and with les Bassets, and I shall miss them very much. And what am I going to do without those silky Basset ears to play with?

After my stressful bolt around Manhattan yesterday, we have had a calm evening, eating Y’s delicious homemade cauliflower au gratin off our laps, and watching the Star Trek movie (a second time for both J & me; we were just geeking out by watching it again), teaching Y how to do the Vulcan hand salute & eating Magnolia’s chocolate devil’s food cake.

J remarked that I seemed quietly excited about my trip back to England and he was right…sort of. It’s always lovely to see family, friends and dogs, but I don’t really want to be in England right now, not one bit. But my mother is feeling mis & I think we both need to regroup.

So I’m sugar coating the pill by arranging lovely things to do instead. The basic plan is that I will spend the weeks writing & clearing attics with my mother at the family home in the countryside near Banbury, and the weekends in London, until I return to NYC at the beginning of January.

Highlights so far include a Tweetup in London this weekend with various of my blog & Twitter acquaintance, seeing New Moon with my best friend Miss P, and the prospect of dinner & a stay at the new Dean Street Townhouse hotel from the Soho House stable, which opens next week. There's also a chance I may get to see the wonderful Tania Kindersley as we serendipitously find ourselves in the same part of the world. (Tania lives in Scotland and I in America, so this is luck indeed.)

Whilst I am on the subject of Tania, her & Sarah Vine's most excellent book Backwards in High Heels
would be the perfect Christmas present for intelligent and loved girlfriends. Read about it here & buy it here(It's out in America in the New Year.)

Now, where was I?

Well, it’s all go here in the East Coast’s version of Stepford (my fellow blogger MTFF lives in the West Coast’s). I did dusting today in preparation for our pre-Halloween supper party tomorrow, and managed to finish the ironing which has been on top of the washing machine for two weeks. (All of you who came here for tales of fashion-related New York glamour may leave now.)

Our Halloween pumpkins are carved and they would have been in position on the front door step, looking suitably scary, but for the ravening local wildlife which took a large chunk out of the bat pumpkin overnight.

We brought them indoors for safety this evening, only to discover a few hours later that the puppy had chewed out the bat’s eyes. There’s obviously some Sophoclean metaphor to be drawn from this but frankly I can’t be arsed to work it out.

I’m still ploughing through the Gmail inbox of hell. I managed to clear out the LLG one last week, which was relatively simple as I only had 452 unread emails and most of them were press releases pushing soap powder, erotic chocolate, and designer collaborations thought up by FMCG marketing gurus with giant cheque books and dumbass clients. I have created a folder called ‘Lunatic Story Pitches’, the contents of which I shall no doubt regale you all with one day.

Unfortunately I have 958 unread emails in my work Gmail account which is more daunting, as not only do they have to be read but most of them require some kind of action to be taken. I’m quite surprised that I have any friends left, given that the chances of my replying to their email, let alone writing one off my own bat, before I have dealt with the work backlog, is less than zero right now.

I’m also planning England: The Return. It’s not a permanent one, thank Christ, but I am flying back for six weeks or so before/over Christmas to finish The Great Attic Clearance™, remove my mother from the iron grip of divorce-related neurosis, drive my sister to the point of insanity by spreading my possessions over all surfaces of her one bedroom flat, acquire some more parking tickets for my father's car, and prod the faithful hound.

Cheering miniature dachshund photo

Right enough with the navel gazing. Here's a picture of Posetta Baddog to cheer us all up.

Heinz Baked Beans: English style

There aren't that many foods I miss over here in America. I'm certainly not one of those Englishwomen abroad who spends her days dreaming of playing supermarket sweep in the sausage section of Myers of Keswick on Greenwich Street before sipping cups of cruelly over priced Earl Grey in Tea & Sympathy, (surrounded by curious Americans) and moving onto (a portion of) fish & chips (vinegar, wrapped) at A Salt & Battery just up the block.

But Heinz Baked Beans get me every time. I've ranted about it before but I really do object to paying several dollars for imported cans of them over here. (American Heinz Baked Beans are a very different beast: more molasses, very sweet, very odd to an English palate.) Which is why I eat a lot of them when I go back to England. Babysitting for C the other weekend, she realised there was no supper for me.

Not a problem, I replied, lead me to the larder.

And, sure enough, as in all proper English homes, was a supply of the red gold. Even more impressive were the new microwave portions: I know they aren't very environmentally friendly but for a one person supper, they are super convenient.



I cooked them for twice as long as recommended, so they went super-sludgey, then toasted thick white sliced bread, which was then slathered with an inch of Kerrygold. Boarding school days means I also like beans on bread as opposed to toast. Why choose? I muttered.



Heaven. Especially considering American white sliced is DISGUSTING. Instead of the floppy fresh stuff we get in Britain, it's hard, almost stale in both feel & taste. And as for the butter...it just doesn't taste very buttery. I am reduced to buying Kerrygold for $4.99 a packet and eeking it out.

August wasn't quite what I expected. Part One

August has been a rollercoaster. Still homeless in America, through an unfortunate combination of other’s caprice and my fiscal incompetency, I was living in New Jersey with a pair of heavenly hosts and two Basset Hounds when the call came to tell me that one of my mother's oldest friends, my godmother's husband, & a man I loved very much had died.

My father very generously bought me a plane ticket home and, three days later, I was being driven to Newark at 6am to catch a flight to Heathrow. I had booked it a day and a half early to avoid any delays – the weather on the East Coast has been atrocious this summer, with electric storms turning airports into hi tech plane parks most weeks.

Arriving late into London, I headed to the post-work calm of Clerkenwell, and the loving welcome of old friends.

I spent the first morning in my home city in back to back meetings, followed by an epic eleven hour lunch fuelled more by streams of converstion than by rivers of booze, although I’d be lying if I said we weren't well-lubricated. I blame Charlie McVeigh for choosing lots of delicious wine for our meal at his glorious Café Anglais and setting Mrs Trefusis, IK & myself off on the path of badness, which ended up with plates of chips and guacamole at Lucky Seven at some very advanced hour, via seats in the sun & buckets of wine at The Westbourne.

The next morning I dressed carefully and caught a train from a heaving Kings Cross, packed with children and tourists and police, arriving in Sandy in the rain.

I handed out my mother & sister’s birthday presents from the back seat of the condensation filled car and we headed to church.

The next few days I spent at home in the country with family & other animals, before heading to London to see, variously, Miss P and her family playing on the grass in Regent’s Park, BA & her husband M in Chelsea for a Saturday dinner party at their glass & light filled first marital home (I had been a bridesmaid at their wedding in Cap Ferrat last October and hadn’t seen them since).

I forced literary L to Shoreditch House at an unearthly hour for a Sunday, and we spent the morning slathered in conditioner & moisturizer in the steam room, before hunkering down on an outside bed on the sun terrace. Lunch was spent with C at Dim T in Highgate, wedged between two delightful infants, each of which carefully laid a sticky, loving set of paws on the arms of my new silk shirt. The joys of Godparenting.

Which continued next day, when they considerately checked that I was awake bright & early. After all, I wouldn’t want to miss a single moment of the dawn, now would I?

The continuing adventures of LLG...

I spent a good part of yesterday morning at Towcester Police Station trying to persuade some lovely policemen that it was perfectly normal that I should have 500 rounds of live ammunition on the front seat of my convertible, and that there was no pressing need to call the bomb squad, and the afternoon sitting tear stained on a plush kneeler in the side chapel of a country church at the funeral of a friend’s adored mother.

Today was merely miniature ponies, a flat battery, lost wallet and a Good Samaritan stranger knocking on my sister’s door to tell me that the upstairs pensioner neighbour was in the Royal Free, having had a bad fall, and could I possibly hunt down her husband? Cue me sprinting up & down the street in the rain, knocking on random doors looking for the daughter, about whom I knew only that she had a white window box.

Tomorrow has a lot to live up to in the way of drama.

Hampstead Heath Ladies Pond

Before I moved to America I swam nearly every day in the Highgate Ladies Pond on the east side of Hampstead Heath. The pond, unheated & home to ducks & plentiful aquatic life, looks a lot like murky brown soup. Somehow this doesn't detract from its appeal.

I was determined to get at least one swim in this trip, so on Sunday morning we palmed the infants off on C's husband P, whilst C & I walked to the Pond from Highgate Village, down Merton Lane, past the ice cream van,



and right onto the shady narrow lane that edges the Heath. It's here that the transition from urban noise to bucolic tranquility is complete:



There’s been swimming on the Heath since the 1860s and today there are three natural swimming ponds, fed by the River Fleet which runs underground, south from Kenwood House underneath all three ponds.

The Corporation of London tried to argue for the closure of the ponds in 2004, citing water quality & maintenance issues. Defeated by public opinion, the ponds remain gloriously open, with the Ladies & Men's Ponds being the UK’s only life-guarded open-water swimming facilities open to the public every day of the year.



As you turn off the lane into the Ladies Pond grove, the path passes a tree encircled sunbathing lawn where women joyfully roll down their swimsuits & doff their bikini tops to dry off in the weak sunshine.

At the end of this path is the entrance to the Pond itself. A thrust out pontoon houses the facilities: lifeguards' hut, loos and disabled hoist. There is an open air changing room with narrow wooden benches & simple hooks for bags & frocks. No lockers, no privacy.



Don't be taken in by the sign below: 20C is bloody freezing. The pond is silted up, so you have to enter from ladders down into the water. It's deep, so there's no choice but to launch yourself into the water, swearing under your breath or shrieking, depending upon temperament. The truly hardy swallow dive but I am a lesser woman, and edge my body off the ladder, holding my breath as the cold bites into my fingers & toes.

You can't stop suspended in the water: the cold takes your breath away. The only solution to strike out forcefully, swimming forward to acclimatise as quickly as possible.



There are lifebuoys floating off towards the sides, for grabbing onto after treading water whilst chatting becomes exhausting, but these are for the dilettantes. Proper Pond swimmers head for the far end, scything through the water, trying hard not to drink in any of the murk. I fall somewhere in between, adopting a leisurely breast stroke, usually in tandem with a girlfriend I've persuaded to the Pond, handily forgetting to mention just how bloody cold it is.



For me the pleasure comes in a complete abandonment of London: apart from the planes above on the Heathrow flight path, one could be anywhere, but least of all a scant four miles from Oxford Circus. Occasionally I catch a flash of cobalt, as one of the resident kingfishers flies by, sometimes a heron perches on the fallen tree at the far end, eyeing lunch, and always there are mallards tipping their bottoms in the air & courting dragonflies wheeling above.

C & I swam six lengths of the Pond, we reckon about 600 metres, before admitting defeat and hauling ourselves up the slippery, rope clad ladder to the dock. We dripped brown water on our way to the lawn, where we stripped to the waist, and basked on an ancient, faded towel in the 27C sunshine.

As we lazily chatted and flicked hoverflies off our skin, we watched the women around us. There is nothing, absolutely nothing as reassuring as the display of female bodies at the Pond. There is all female life there, in all its lumpy, bumpy, cellulite-y, hairy, gorgeous variety.

We were so lost in contemplation that we lost track of time, before coming to our senses, removing bits of pondweed from our cleavages as we speedily pulled on shorts & tops and marched south on the Heath, past the Fishing Pond,



and the array of tightie whities & tighter buns in serried ranks by the Mens Pond, before exiting at Parliament Hill.

And so to Kalendar to await P & the marauding infants for a well earned lunch.

My beautiful friend

I have had no children, frankly am not entirely sure about the whole process but, one thing I know for sure, is that if I knew I was going to glow like this ravishing creature at six months up the duff I'd be very happy indeed.



I tried to force feed her a Konditor & Cook organic chocolate brownie that I picked up at Kalendar on Swains Lane in an attempt to make her look like a human being, but it didn't work. She still looked like a goddess afterwards, even with cake crumbs around her chops. Sigh. Some people are just naturally drop dead gorgeous, six months pregnant or not.

Look: there's a bump!



ps I forced her to pose for me at the base of Parliament Hill by sticking a camera in her nose until she acquiesced. She had zero choice in the matter.

pps Okay - I've had a few messages, pointing out that my friend is slim, and I appear to be promoting slimness in pregnancy. As a woman who has never had a baby, I have no view on the matter.

My point here, & I am sorry if I did not express it clearly enough, was that I think her face is beautiful. I think her face glows with even more joy & beauty than it does normally, & I was not referring to her weight or size or suggesting that that is something to which other women should aspire. Each woman must do what she feels comfortable with, surely? When referring to eating I just meant smeary chocolate & mess, rather than gaining weight...and I am sorry if anyone thought otherwise. LLGxx

Kalendar, London N6: Vegetarian English Fried Breakfast

Is there anything as beautiful on the plate on a Sunday morning as a traditional English breakfast? This is the vegetarian version, as I am trying to be a little bit healthy, with poached eggs and a vege sausage, substituting for piggy bits & fried eggs.

I am quite aware that the term 'healthy English Breakfast' is an oxymoron, so I attempted to redress the balance with a basket of buttered granary toast and the bowl of excellent fat chips.

This particular breakfast was courtesy of Kalendar on Swains Lane, just by Parliament Hill in North London. C & I repaired there at lunchtime on Sunday to await the arrival of the tiny terrorists & their father, after our wonderful (infant-free) morning swim at the Highgate Ladies Pond on Hampstead Heath.

Sitting outside in the 27C sunshine, but protected from the direct heat by an awning, we ordered the large meze plate to get us through the wait, which featured upfront skewered slabs of marinated & grilled halloumi which elevated it from plain old squeaky cheese to salty, chewy heaven, and great puddles of smoky aubergine dip, houmus, & tzatziki, accompanied by skewers of grilled chicken, fat queen olives & brilliant tabouleh with each ingredient coming to the fore rather than the overdressed mush so common in London.

Because we have great big saucer eyes even bigger than our stomachs, P & I plumped for trad breakfasts, mine as above, P with porky products, whilst C had a textbook halloumi wrap and the infants shared a deep bowl of perfectly al dente penne with peas & home made pesto.

Altho, if truth be told, O-Monster homed in on my frankly ambrosial chips which I handed to him one at a time, coated in lashings of ketchup, in obvious preference to his delicious & nutritious lunch.

Kalendar is the kind of neighbourhood restaurant you wish existed in every part of London. With meat from Elite Meats just down the parade, cakes from Konditor & Cook & cheeses from Neal's Yard, along with free range eggs & organic bread, you'd expect the prices to be higher - but my vege breakfast was just £6.95.

Kalendar, 15A Swains Lane, Highgate, N6 6QX

Photo: by me, me, me

Lil'sis and Posetta Baddog: a Dachshund love story

If anyone doubts how much lil'sis and Posetta Baddog love each other, then these pictures should do the trick. They're a bit out of focus, and normally I'd bin them, but I couldn't resist their expressions:







ps Baddog isn't trying to escape in the last picture: what you can't see is my father waving slices of bacon around about twelve inches from her nose. She is modelling the well known Dacshie fixed stare of evil intent here.

As usual Blogger has chopped the RHS of my pics. No idea how to change this, but clicking on the images brings them up full size on Flickr

Staying put for another week

So I am in London for another week owing to some bad news. I miss Finch, my boys & America.

Trying to fit everything in

I’m still trying to work out exactly why I thought it a brilliant idea to arrive in London at 10pm from New York, and then get up for a 9am breakfast the next morning.

I set an alarm for 0730hrs. It duly woke me. I stared at it, turned it off & went back to sleep. Not ideal. Still, in the fifteen minutes left for getting ready when I was finally ejected from my duvet by a concerned M, I managed to scrape together a veneer of professionalism, thanks to high heels, warpaint and curling tongs. Although, if given a few more minutes to get ready, I maybe wouldn’t have worn short shorts, given the knee freezing temperatures outside.

I tripped out of my black cab in Golden Square and into the clean, quiet & empty surroundings of the Nordic Bakery for my breakfast with the delightful features editor of Food Illustrated, who was sitting in solitary splendour. We split a rather good glazed cinnamon roll, the size of a baby’s head, and I sucked down an Americano, chosen for its jet lag beating properties.

As we talked the place started to fill, and by the time we left women in heels and alarming frocks, and shaven headed men talking production deals and scripts surrounded us. Just an hour later than anyone in Manhattan would consider taking a breakfast meeting.

Power walking to Goodge Street afterwards, I cursed the lack of cabs – and the sudden sunshine, as I started to overheat. My shorts started to seem like a clever idea. Meeting number two at a production company went swimmingly well, and it looks like I am now going to be working on my first original television script with an executive producer with whom I know I can collaborate. Whether or not I have any talent for it remains to be seen.

Then it was into a black cab and off to meet an agent who had contacted me recently. She was utterly charming too, so charming I suddenly realised that, unless I scooted out of their meeting room tout suite, I was going to be unforgivably late for lunch at the superb Café Anglais. Of which more later.

So, a good morning in all. As I remarked to a friend at lunch, how could it have been better? I got to spend the morning talking about myself to interesting people feigning interest. Lovely.

Everything changes

So. England. It’s already Thursday and, although I’ve been writing blog posts in my head, there hasn’t been space or time to type them. Each day has run onto the other, leaving me so drained & jet-lagged that I slept until 1pm today.

The journey over here from Newark was a model of ease. Slathered in moisturiser, coddled in cashmere, pretending I wasn’t travelling in Goat, I read, watched crap films (17 Again & something I can’t even remember), fended off the flirtatious advances of the man in the aisle seat by wearing headphones even though I wan't listening to anything, even managed to choke down the microwaved egg & cheese breakfast bagel (hmm, Virgin you are really spoiling us) and was off the plane and on the Tube within 20 minutes of landing.

That miracle turnaround was because I’ve had my irises scanned so don’t have to queue at Immigration, and because my huge Tumi came out first at Baggage Reclaim. Joy all round. I immediately hopped it to the Underground and thence to Farringdon Station in Clerkenwell.

I spent so much time in EC1 in my twenties: eating in Cicada right back when it first opened, getting film biked to & from Metro (I started my career as an art assistant on a magazine), dancing in Turnmills, borrowing chairs from Vitra from shoots. Walking past all these places felt so nostalgic and so distant. My life has changed so much since then I can hardly recognise the person I once was.

As I turned onto dimly lit & empty Northburgh Street, H appeared simultaneously from another side road. I stuck out my tongue at him and he stopped for a classic double take. Wonderful timing. Especially as he then lugged my case up the entrance stairs.

M was home too, and we sat around the big dining table in the vast open space living area laughing and catching up, me shoveling in buttery Marmite toast and drinking Campari & tonic, H making his supper. As we talked, I thought about the hedonism that had gone on in that apartment before H met M, and how it has become the home of two of my most favourite people who are now building their new life together.

We’ve all changed so much (for the better), even in the short two and a half years since I moved to America.

Apologies in advance for any break in blogging

I leave for London at 8am tomorrow morning. I wish I were going under happier circumstances but, equally, I am glad that I am able to say goodbye properly to Uncle Ian. I've picked out my brightest print dress to wear to the funeral. It seems appropriate to celebrate him.

My trip back also coincides with both my sister's and my mother's birthdays, which fall on consecutive days, so it'll be lovely to be able to see them then: the first time in years I've been around for both.

I'll barely be in London, for a few days at most, and will be taking meetings when I am there, with little time for catching up. This really is a fleeting trip, so apologies in advance to those I won't get to see.

Hotel review: Mother daughter bonding at The Halkin, London

It’s weird living abroad. On one hand it’s quite useful being thousands of miles and five, sometimes eight hours out of sync from family arguments, squabbling infants and the overly familiar quotidian grind. On the other it is rather miserable not being able to give & receive comforting hugs. Playing on Facebook does not make up for proper face time.

So when I go back to England my first priority is to spend proper time with my family & see as many of my wonderful friends as I can possibly manage. There are always godchildren & bundles of new infants to prod, plus there’s usually a wedding I’ve missed or engagement to celebrate.

I’m like a bunny out of a trap as I land at Heathrow, usually whizzing straight to my sister’s house in Kentish Town for an intensive debrief, and then getting up at 7am to do a stream of breakfasts, lunches, coffees, drinks & suppers, all woven between meetings & work stuff. It's trickier seeing my parents as they don't live in London, (or together for that matter), so I have to grab any opportunity to see them.

Last month I landed in London the day before my mother flew in from Verona, so I persuaded her to spend the night in London with me before heading to the country. I always find it’s best to book a hotel together for the proper mother-daughter bonding experience; we always end up squabbling when together en masse in my sister & Posetta Baddog's one bedroom London flat.

My mother, being of the Birkin bag & Chanel pump-ed persuasion, doesn’t really do anything outside of London's W or SW postcodes unless forced so when I was offered a suite at The Halkin in Belgravia, just behind Hyde Park Corner, I jumped on it. I used to stay at its sister hotel the modernist Metropolitan on Park Lane when I was an NY magazine editor (convenient for 8am appointments to visa wrangle at the US Embassy), but had yet to experience the minimalist taupe experience of The Halkin.

And goodness, it is taupe. And beige. And sepia. And pale cocoa. And other synonyms I can’t be bothered to look up. From the Buddha in the entrance hall to the Como Shambhala aromatherapy products in the bathroom, it may well be the most calming environment in which I have stayed. It’s so tranquil that it’s the hotel equivalent of Prozac. They should have a Halkin in Milan or in Paris for stroppy fashion editors to stay in during the collections.

The calmness was equally good for a mother/daughter stay because we are quite capable of going from smiles to snarls to smiles in seconds. But we seemed unable to have one of our signature blow ups here. It probably helped that when the Front Desk rang to say she (& her luggage) had arrived, I poured us glasses of super chilled Champagne and drew her a deep bath using scoops of fragrant bath salts from the oversized jar in the oversized bathroom. I do find pre-empting maternal requests tends to diminish potential snappiness.

Lulled & cosseted into inertia, leaving the hotel was far beyond our capabilities. Not that this mattered: we had reservations downstairs at Nahm, David Thompson’s extraordinary Michelin-starred Thai restaurant (more of this to come later).

The Halkin really is a boutique hotel for grown-ups: it feels discreet, the scale is intensely intimate (but not claustrophobic), there are no spread out communal areas, soaring atria or chattering tourists, the service is beyond charming. The suite ticked nearly all my demanding boxes: the best soup-plate showerhead I’ve come across in a hotel anywhere, generous toiletries, a proper well-lit dressing table in the bedroom (as opposed to a mirror-free desk or expecting us to balance warpaint on the side of a basin) and plenty of cat-swinging space.

Sure the Asian chic interiors are a little disconcerting inside a Georgian stucco fronted townhouse, but somehow it all comes together. And, best of all, less than half a mile from Knightsbridge, Horrids & Harvey Nicks, cradled in our temporary taupe universe, we felt as though we were on holiday in London. And, as dyed in the wool Londoners, you can’t get better than that.

LLG was a guest of The Halkin Hotel (but if she thought it sucked, she would say so)

Luella as Minnie Mouse

I find this photograph of my godson Oliver's little sister at her 3rd birthday party in London last month just the most immensely cheering thing. I also covert her Mouse ears.

I had very few days in London on that trip, spending most of my time in the country with my mother and the hounds. But I did sneak away for 24hrs, to lunch in the garden with Tara & her family, and eat her wonderful homemade strawberry ice cream,

to play in the garden afterwards with my goddaughter Amelia

and her baby brother,

to go dancing with my girlfriends at Guilty Pleasures, and then to see A & A and baby Carter, before finally heading for infant overload and Clare's BRILLIANT homemade birthday cake.

And then I slept for two days.

Euphemism of the day

One of the things that I miss about England is the way we hide behind words. That's not to say that I don't like the American way of being direct, of having no social fear about asking how much? with who? or why?, but that there can be a beauty in euphemism.

I passed this sign on a pub on London's Shoreditch High Street, on the way to the epic six hour lunch on the Shoreditch House roof deck that I, Belgian Waffling, Mrs Trefusis, MTFF and India Knight indulged in back at the beginning of May.

(If you haven't seen one of these signs before, it means it's a strip bar.)

Cooking in the English countryside

I grew up in a kitchen: my mother is a truly exceptional cook, and all my earliest memories (from the 70s) revolve around food.

Muv making chicken liver patés in deep stoneware bowls to sell in the local deli, coming home from school on Wednesdays to discover the entire kitchen surface covered in cooling wire racks of cakes & biscuits from Delia Smith’s Book of Cakes, getting my first cookery set from my godmother when I was five and learning how to roll out my own pastry, the endless files of cutout newspaper recipes to thumb through by Marika Hanbury Tenison, Katie Stewart, Jane Grigson, Josceline Dimbleby Caroline Conran et al, playing with Arabella Boxer’s brilliant ringbound First Slice Your Cookbook, and packed lunches that had my schoolfriends speechless with shock: chunks of fresh mozzarella cheese, cold slices of gratins & homemade pizza, olives & halved kiwi fruits.

It’s not surprising that I equate food with happiness, and that feeding my friends & family is my favourite occupation. But it’s been a challenge in New York. I’d heard all the stories about Manhattan kitchens and their shoebox proportions but nothing really prepares you for a cooking space less than a metre wide – and that includes the storage. Especially when I’d designed & fitted my perfect London kitchen just a year before I moved to New York.

Cooking there was simple: my kitchen has two eight foot-long prep counters, lots of deep drawers full of esoteric equipment, my collections of serving dishes, pretty glass & piles of linen, electrical sockets everywhere and room for twelve people around the huge table for midweek suppers & long wine-fuelled Sunday lunches.

In Manhattan, I have nowhere to entertain, and counter space to plate for just two people. It’s not quite the same.

Now I am back in England until June, but my London flat is let and so I am staying with my mother in the Northamptonshire countryside for the next ten days. This makes me very, very happy.

There is this: And this:

And this:

And this: And that's not the half of it.

Imagine the joy of wanting to cook, well, anything, and having ALL the equipment and specific ingredients to hand, whether aesofetida or apples.