Why I love a good vide-grenier

Collapsible stables: 2 euros
Two small ponies: 20 cents

One small child happily washing/grooming and racing ponies: Bargain.

It's all gone very green down on the allotment...

Here's the two main culprits from the current glut: courgettes and runner beans


The latter I've pickled, in a desperate attempt to stem the tide.

In other news, we've got sweetcorn. Hurrah!

Work, motherhood and a balancing act

A fantastic post on having it all, working for yourself, and balancing work and motherhood over at Superhero Journal:

"I have been living with the belief that I can probably have everything I want, just not everything at the same time. Right now, I am choosing my creative work with Mondo Beyondo and time with family over most anything else. This means that we eat a lot of macaroni, takeout thai food and drink a lot of coffee around here. Our house isn't grand or exactly how we want it, but we live next door to a park and we spend a lot of time outside. In the end, I want to know that I didn't miss this time with Ben. I also want a rich creative life, to do work I love, and to enjoy how things are right now."

Me too.

Happy Birthday!

Following on from the multi-coloured coat cake, and the strawberry cake, may I present the princess palace in all its sticky glory...



Note to self: next year, it might be a good idea to try something a bit less complicated if you're going to assemble it in the middle of a windy beach in Northumberland...

The rest of the birthday celebrations were equally popular. We may have hit horse obsession.

September resolutions

* I will stop whinging about how cold and grey this summer has been up north, and start looking forward to windy beaches for flying kites, frosty spider webs, the leaves falling off the trees and hunting for conkers.
* I will try and start collecting all the Recipes for Millie together, to make a book for her.
* I will dig furiously at the allotment, and get rid of all the weeds.
* I will bake and bake and bake to get rid of all the courgettes.
* I will finish my knitting project (fat chance).

Wake me up at the end of the month, and I'll let you know how far I've got...

Autumn's a-comin

We went to the Bellingham Show yesterday, to be entertained by Northumberland wrestling, the building of the Taj Mahal by moonlight (using the medium of straw bales), much horse jumping, lots of sheep, and the world's best industrial tent (my favourite was the octopus made from vegetables, closely followed by the carved walking sticks). All for the bargain price of £5.

It was wild, windy and freezing cold - so cold that we had to be revived by doughnuts and coffee halfway through the afternoon. Autumn's definitely round the corner.

Glut

There's definitely a theme to this month's recipes over at Recipes for Millie: courgettes. So far since coming back from holiday we've eaten

• ratatouille
• courgette and goat's cheese pancakes
• courgette, chickpea and filo pastry pie
• the smaller ones sliced raw in salads
• the larger ones diced and thrown into any recipe that requires vaguely Mediterranean veg
  

It's all a bit of a novelty, really, having so many of the things. The last couple of years we've grown them from seed, and then planted them on the balcony in large pots, where the slugs have promptly eaten them, or the courgettes themselves have turned yellow and dropped off. Turns out what we really needed to do was get a couple of cheap plants from B&Q, chuck them unceremoniously in a flat bit of the allotment with a bit of manure, and leave to their own devices. Maybe ignoring more plants is the way forward?

Anyway, next on the agenda: courgette and cheese loaf, piccalilli, and possibly courgette chutney, if I get round to it. Then it's onto the potato mountain...

I don't know, I go away for a couple of weeks...

and slugzilla here takes over the front garden. I'm guessing there's been a bit of rain? It's done nothing else since we got back, that's for sure.

Mystifyingly, there's also what appears to be owl dealing going on in my local Sainsbury's car park.

I turned up on Saturday shortly before closing time to find two slightly dodgy looking hire cars parked in the far corner and a few blokes clustered around some cardboard boxes. I know I was parked a couple of rows over, but I swear one of them took out what looked like an owl from a box and stuck it on his gloved fist. The owl flapped its wings for a bit, before hanging upside down. The bloke stuck it upright again. The owl fell down again (obviously not a top quality specimen) and flapped about. Money changed hands. The owl was shoved back in the box, and placed in the back of the car.

At this point I made a swift exit and went home for a large glass of wine. Foolishly I Twittered about my owl dealing experiences. And now, I am being spammed on Twitter by a man who shouts OWL FOR SALE a lot, and followed by a lot of people who like owls.

I think I need to go back to France.

In which Captain Jack endures yet another costume change

This one's for the South Pole, apparently.


To make up for recent indignities, he does, however, have a rather pimped ride:

In other news...

I'm over at Enjoy the Ride for the next two weeks, with a series of tips on kids and gardens.

In which Captain Jack dons a multicoloured cape...

and channels his inner Rick Wakeman.

Druridge Bay

It all looks rather Mediterranean, doesn't it? It being Northumberland and July, I still kept my fleece and long trousers on. Cast na'er a clout and all that. Oh.

We finally got the flexifoil out today - it's been in storage rather a long time (flying an 8ft powerkite isn't really recommended while pregnant, and we've been rather occupied with bucket and spade work ever since). I'd forgotten how much fun it is - today was a nice light breeze, but you could still make the kite travel pretty fast and pull a few stunts (and make your arms ache like billy-o).

We didn't abandon the bucket and spade though:

196 recipes and counting...

It's almost a year since I started Recipes for Millie, and I'm nearly up to 200 recipes. That's not bad, considering there's some things I make quite often, we eat out occasionally, and we've been on holiday for a couple of weeks too.

It's fascinating looking at my virtual shopping list - I've tagged each recipe with the main ingredients, to make everything more searchable. Here's my top 5, and the numbers of recipes they're mentioned in:

chicken (18)
lemon (17)
tomato (14)
courgette (12)
apple/cheese/leeks/onion (10)

It'll be interesting to see how the produce from the allotment skews the recipe collection - will I have 95 recipes involving potatoes, or will it be rather like the gooseberry glut (where all I've done is make jam)?

Hello, world

Just a quick hello *waves* to anyone visiting from Enjoy the Ride, where I've been interviewed about blogging, cake and all sorts of other stuff. My first interview - I'm dead chuffed! Nice to meet you all, anyway. Do make yourselves at home, peruse the endless gardening/cake photos, and generally have fun.

A day out (not in the rain for once)

It's come to a pretty pass when your three-year-old takes better pictures than you do (although she's rather more fascinated by things on the floor than I am). Here's a selection of her recent work at Souter Lighthouse. It's a fantastic place to visit - a great pirate ship and train outside to clamber all over, fancy dress pirate/princess costumes, and a tower with more steps than you can shake a stick at.


For once, it wasn't freezing cold and raining, so we had a picnic. It's amazing how nice cream cheese and pickle sandwiches taste in the open air, even when you are surrounded by two bus-worths of small schoolchildren who also happen to be visiting on a day trip.

Allotment mosaic

The tomatoes get a new home

It remains to be seen how long their plastic fortress lasts, given the force 9 gales that seem to sweep through on a regular basis...

Car parking, 1960s style

More photos from the Manors car park - I love the little jaunty man icon!



So much to post about, so little time - visiting the new Great North Museum, two camping trips in the Rapido, and lots of interesting design exhibitions. I'll get there in the end - in the meantime you'll probably find more up-to-date ramblings on twitter.

Spot the difference

March 2009


May 2009

Mint and potato frenzy

This has rather turned into the allotment blog at the moment - blame the fact that (a) as ever work has taken over my life, and it's nice to post pretty pictures of vegetables (b) I'm avoiding the knitting as it's lurching from one crisis to another with rows having to be painfully unravelled and (c) it's allegedly summer. Normal service may resume around December...


It was fantastic though, coming back to the allotment after a week in France - everything's grown, especially the mint and potatoes (which will hopefully taste fabulous together).


In fact, I'm feeling rather pleased with myself gardening-wise, as yesterday we managed to use lettuce, parsley, mint and bay leaves from the back yard and front garden, and planted some dwarf broad beans and nasturtiums. Let's hope the evil slugs leave this lot alone - our tactics so far at the allotment seem to be working:

Days out

The woods near Durham Botanic Gardens were carpeted with bluebells.

Manors car park

It's a timewarp in Manors car park in Newcastle - and the 1960s signage is wonderful (unlike the photo, which is pretty terrible. I promise to return with a proper camera soon).

Inspirational stuff

A couple of links for you, on a grey and chilly Bank Holiday:

• Andrea Scher, on being good enough
• Matthew Childs' 9 life lessons from rock climbing

(Thanks to Brian for the last one.)

It's fruit-tastic

Lots of nice things happening on the allotment today - currants (above - not sure if they're black or red) are starting to form, the gooseberries are inflating by the day, and the strawberries are flowering.


On the down side, my spinach is being nibbled by the evil slugs. I've covered it with those plastic cartons your tomatoes etc come in at the supermarket (I don't have enough plastic bottles), so we'll see if that helps.

The rest of the weekend has been spent in the depths of North Yorkshire, which was equally sunny. We trooped off to Filey on Saturday, to marvel at the 1970s-ness of it all (actually, a lot of it probably hasn't changed since the 1950s). There were shops selling sticks of Filey rock, endless tea shops full to the brim with elderly ladies, more buckets and spades than you could shake a stick at, and a rather natty giant lobster in the middle of the crazy golf. M had a donkey ride on the beach and came back with a grin a mile wide. It were good, like.

Allotment frenzy (4)

Spent a happy afternoon down the allotment today - the perfect way to recover after my stint yesterday as the back legs of a pantomime horse (don't ask).

The latest additions - sugar snap peas and broad beans that have been quietly growing on the window sill and in the cold frame. Let's hope the slugs (and the pigeons) leave them alone.


I also planted some coriander and speedy salad leaves, and started off some runner beans in the cold frame. Now all I need to do is remember what I've planted where...

Beach art

Rolf Harris, eat your heart out.

The folding beast in action

Down:

Up:

Despite forgetting to take the instructions with us on the inaugural trip with the Rapido Confortmatic, we didn't do too badly...

Allotment frenzy (3)

Gill found this round the back of the shed during a clear out. I think it's been there a while.


As opposed to these, which M and her Dad made last week, in an attempt to keep the pigeons off. Sadly, they appear to have no effect on slugs (I daren't tell M that all her precious radish leaves have been munched).

Stardom beckons...

Courtesy of www.internetsubtitling.com

Allotment frenzy (2)

Here's what we have to work with. It's slightly less weedy now, as I spent a couple of happy hours in the sunshine with the girl this afternoon, pulling up the dandelions hiding in the strawberry patch.


Every allotment needs a shed, preferably one held together with string and sticky-backed plastic.

Point Hotel, Edinburgh

Fluorescent lights at the Point Hotel, where I stayed this week (I was blogging at the JISC Conference 2009). The place is looking a little shabby these days, but the lighting is still fun.

Allotment frenzy

Yes, it's finally happened. I now have shares in an allotment, courtesy of my friend Gill who was wise enough to put herself on the council waiting list when she moved here around three years ago. It's a lovely plot, which has been really well looked after by an old couple - so there shouldn't be too much of the horrendous digging to start off with.

So, it's time for a little light website reading - I thought I'd start with Jane Perrone, and move on to Alan Titchmarsh (if the pink shirt, Estate Agent Capitals and apostrophe misuse on his site don't drive me mad in the meantime). Has anyone got any other suggestions?

Update: The RHS Grow your own veg site has an excellent calendar of what to plant each month. Might be time to get the onions in, I think.

Why three-year-olds are rather lovely

Ghosts of Paris past

Lurking on my dining room bookshelf is a Paris guidebook. In fact I've got several, as Paris is my favourite city, but this one's always intrigued me.

It's called Muirhead's Paris and its environs, and it was published in 1921, as part of the Blue Guides series. I picked it up in the Oxfam bookshop in Newcastle a few years ago for £1.99, mainly because I loved the maps inside. They're not in the most amazing nick (one or two have obviously seen some heavy use), but the sheer detail (and wonderful design of them) more than make up for it.

The text is also fascinating, particularly because it was written such a short time after the first world war.

"Paris, with the added prestige of the late ordeal of war heroically borne, is, more than ever, one of the most interesting cities in the world and has already practically resumed her normal state. But though the traces of the War are not conspicuous, its effects still linger in the uncertainty attending many points of practical detail. The tourist will be principally affected by the disorganisation of prices, which prevents any but the most general hints being given on this important topic."

As well as the usual 'how to get there' niceties (including regular air services from London's Croydon Aerodrome), there's a wonderful section of general hints.

"The traveller who knows no language but English can get along quite comfortably in Paris, though he may have to pay in cash for his ignorance. Even a slight knowledge of French makes the visit not only cheaper, but also much more interesting and more intellectually profitable."

No change there then.

I also love the section on politeness and the wearing of hats:

"Forms of politeness are more ceremonious in France than in Great Britain or America. Men doff their hats in restaurants and cafes, and frequently also in shops, picture-galleries, and the like, though in the theatre they keep them on until the curtain rises. They greet each other by raising their hats. Gentlemen are expected to uncover to a lady before she bows to them, and , in speaking to her, to remain uncovered until requested to resume their hats. The hat is raised also to any lady passed on the stair of a flat and when a funeral is passed in the streets."

But the other thing that's fascinating about the book, is the letter that's taped inside the back cover, which was written by Findlay Muirhead (the editor of the book and managing director of Muirhead Guide-Books Limited) on 9 June 1922.

Dear Mr Haigh,

Will you and Mrs Haigh accept the accompanying 'Blue Guide to Paris' as a small wedding gift, with my most cordial wishes for your prosperity and happiness, not only in Paris but all down the long road of life?

If you notice any inaccuracy, however small, in the book, I should be most grateful for a post-card pointing it out; and I am always open to receive hints as to new ideas fo the these guides.

Litellus seems to have had a fine time in Glasgow; he arrived this morning full of his experiences.

I am very truly yours

Findlay Muirhead

From the address at the bottom I can work out it's a Mr Philip Haigh, who seems to have been staying at the Grosvenor Hotel at the time. Litellus is Litellus Russell Muirhead, Findlay's son. (I love the non-sequitur paragraph about him!) But I'd love to know more - were the Haighs resident in Paris, or simply visiting on honeymoon? How did they know Findlay Muirhead? How on earth did this book end up in a Newcastle Oxfam shop?

Sadly, I suspect it'll have to remain a mystery.

Stealth reporting

I came across some interesting stuff today about how to deal with the increase in blogging and twittering at conferences.

Having liveblogged JISC's Innovation Forum last year, I'm off to JISC09 in a couple of weeks to do a similar thing, so it's interesting to see the presenter's perspective covered...I'd never really thought about how intimidating it could look from up there on the platform, to see a raft of folk looking down at their laptops and typing away (me included).

It'll be fascinating to see how this year's speakers interact with the laptop audience, and whether they go down the route of actively incorporating material from the backchannel, especially as Twitter usage has become more widespread (and this is a fairly tech-heavy conference).

Hopefully I will have my exciting new netbook by then, so following what's going on on twitter and on the blogs (as well as the speaker) should be a lot easier - the laptop has a tendency to die with loud beeping after about 30 minutes, which doesn't do much for the stealth reporting.

Letters

I'm a sucker for typefaces (especially Helvetica - although after my experience last year of watching the Helvetica documentary, my opinion may have dipped somewhat). I got sent a link to the rather wonderful Periodic Table of Typefaces today (via Patroclus), which reminded me of a few things I've been hoarding for a while:

• some lovely posts from swissmiss on fonts, including the Periodic Table of Typefaces
• Read Regular, a font designed for dyslexics
• scarily, you can turn your handwriting into a font for use on your computer. Help. I've spent so much time writing shorthand or typing that my handwriting has become appalling, especially if I'm trying to write fast. (Sorry to anyone who gets one of my illegible Christmas cards - you needed to have known me at school, as I had beautiful handwriting then.)
• 13 ways of looking at a typeface. I like No1 - Because it works. Sometimes using a font just looks right.

By the way, I know I've got the most appallingly boring font on offer here in Blogger. I'll get round to changing the design at some point, but I can't find one I really like.

The perniciousness of pink

We've been watching a bit of Charlie and Lola this week, the girl and I (blame it on the chicken pox). As merchandised-to-hell kids tv shows go, it's rather good (and in fact, the tv programmes work much better for me than the books, which although beautiful to look at don't seem to flow dialogue-wise).

What's really nice though, is having a heroine who isn't a princess, doesn't wear pink all the time, and certainly isn't obsessed with fairies. Lola seems pretty normal - she goes to school, she has an imaginary friend and a best friend, and likes wearing shiny red shoes, going to the park and watching tadpoles. Hallelujah.

I'm so fed up of the whole pink princess girly thing, and M's only three. God knows what'll happen when she's older - we were speculating the other night whether she'd turn into a goth at some point (as opposed to a Goth, which might be rather worrying) in sheer rebellion against the pinkness of it all.

I don't remember it being quite so nauseatingly pink when I was small (although I'm pretty sure I did have a pink stripy top and skirt at some point) - but now, if you go into any high street store it's wall to wall pink/lilac/purple for small girls, complete with fairy wands, sparkly shoes and princess tiaras. Nice some of the time, yes. But some choice (and also the idea that you can achieve more in your life than being a princess) would also be good.

Yearly anti-pink rant over. I'm off to bake a (not-pink) cake.

Links to more work stuff

Here's a couple more things I've found while on my travels (Twitter is turning me into a dangerous procrastinator at times).

• a very funny blog post about writing number-based headlines
• an excellent piece in January's Wired (yes, I know it's March and I'm slightly behind...) about self-help time management books and freelancing. Sounds dull, is anything but, because author Chris Hardwick is also a stand-up comedian (and procrastinator).

In other news, M is still covered in spots, but we are no longer a plague house. Hurrah! We can now go out to enclosed places, which is rather a bonus considering it snowed this afternoon.

Bits and pieces on writing

• A lovely article from Lee Hall (writer of Billy Elliot and the Pitmen Painters) about the culture of the mining communities in the north east.

• Jakob Nielsen on writing content that can be used in different ways and in different contexts (eg headlines, summaries). He's got some excellent advice on assuming your information will be read out of context - you can combat this by modularising, and using specific language or keywords so it's searchable.

Success!

See, I do actually get round to things:

• chocolate and beetroot muffins were a success, if a little bizarre.
• Studio 60 and Mad Men series 1 have arrived. Hurrah!
• complicated walls climbed - but there's still a bugger of a route that I can't get. If only my arms were a couple of inches longer...
• Tynemouth Long Sands beach was fab on Sunday, if a little chilly. Rather strangely there were a bunch of folks (studenty types) racing up and down pulling a plough, creating deep furrows in the beach. This was all being captured on film by an Andy Warhol-esque character, with a shock of white hair. I am none the wiser.
  

Confessions of a book junkie

It's the covers (and especially the spines) that do it for me. I can be browsing in a bookshop, or a library, and it'll be the font on the spine that jumps out at me, making me take it down from the shelf. Then there's the cover to consider...before finally opening a couple of pages, scanning the text, and seeing if I fancy reading it.

I know. I should have a more literary method of deciding what to read next.

For fellow enthusiasts:

• there's a lovely exhibition on at the moment at my local art gallery, the Shipley, all about 70 years of Penguin design. They've got covers (and penguins) galore, and some rather covetable notebooks covered in images of spines.
• 30 novels worth buying for the cover alone
• redesigns of famous novels
• the Pelican project
  

Wish list

At last, the big work project comes to an end, so blogging can resume. There's only so many words you can summon up in an evening when you've spent all day editing someone else's.

Here's what I'd like to get round to in the rest of the month:

(a) make a bit more headway into the research for the radio play I'd like to write.
(b) bake some cakes (chocolate and cherry muffins were good, but I've got a stack of beetroot that I think I need to disguise in some chocolate brownies too).
(c) watch some more telly - I've just ordered Studio 60 and Mad Men (series 1) from Amazon, and I'm rather liking the new sitcom Free Agents on Channel 4. Mind, at the rate I watch telly, this lot could take me til 2012 to get through.
(d) climb some complicated walls (they've reset the holds at Climb Newcastle, and there's a couple of routes that have me foxed at the moment, much to my annoyance).
(e) start thinking about what seeds I want to grow in the veg planters this year.
(f) go to the seaside in the sunshine, and eat salty, vinegary fish and chips.

As there's only 12 days left, I reserve the right to roll this over into March...

Grrr

What she said. Thank you Patroclus - my thoughts entirely.

I spent the first two years of my daughter's life looking after her at home. It was a full-time job. Like many people, I talked about my job...

Another day out in the big smoke

I rather like London in the snow - not quite as romantic as Paris, but pretty good fun.


It was a gorgeous walk through Bloomsbury, Russell Square and King's Cross - not a bus, taxi or car in sight. In fact it was eerily quiet, apart from the squidge of shoes on snow, and the thud of the odd snowball. There was even a snowman waiting at the traffic lights in Russell Square, which made me giggle.

The knitting frenzy (not) continues

Avid readers may remember that I'm in the process of knitting a messenger bag - then again, it appears to have passed me by too.

In July last year I was reporting that I'd got halfway up the first side - six months later and I'm not that much further on. The bag bit is finished (hurrah!), but the interminable strap is underway. Next time I decide to make something, will someone please read the instructions for me, and point out that 175 centimetres is really really long...

This may be the last felted object I make for some time - I don't think I can really handle the fact that all my hundreds of rows of beautiful stitches will be deliberately shrunk. And anyway, M has already demanded that the next thing I knit should be a dress for her. At this rate, I'll need to make it in a size 10 and it'll be coming back into fashion by the time I finish it.

In the meantime, here's some beautiful knitting needles to drool over. Like I really need them...

Recipes for Millie

As some of you may know, I write another blog called Recipes for Millie. It's a simple idea (and one nicked largely from the Sainted Nigel Slater whose Kitchen Diaries are marvellous) - I'm writing down all the things I cook (maybe over a year or two), with a view to parcelling them up in a book at some point, to give to my three-year-old when she's grown up.

I'd love to know what my Mum fed us in the depths of the 1970s on a daily basis - I know about the fancier dishes that she made like spaghetti bolognese and her special fishy pizza - but even then the versions both she and I now make have probably become corrupted over the years. There's probably a lot more olive oil sloshed around the place for a start. So I thought M might enjoy looking back on the sort of things we ate in the late 2000s, when she gets to a nostalgic sort of age.

The blog's been going since July 2008, and gets a fair amount of random traffic via Google - not surprisingly it's mostly people searching for recipes. At the moment, staying in must be the new going out, because visitor numbers tend to peak on Fridays. And parsnips are surprisingly popular.

The current top 10 recipes are:

1. Chicken, ham and leek pie
2. Bacon and parsnip pasta
3. Smoked salmon, lemon and courgette pasta
4. Roast pork with especially crispy crackling
5. Black halibut and parma ham parcels (sounds very poncey this one, I do admit)
6. Toad in the hole
7. Onion and goat's cheese tart
8. Lamb, aubergine and apricot tagine
9. Chicken and spinach pie
10. Pork tenderloin stuffed with prunes

Of course now I've gone and skewed the results by linking to them, but you get the picture. It just goes to show that (a) you can't beat a good pie and (b) there's a lot of carnivores out there.

Captain Jack gets married

Although he wasn't wearing the outfit he'd initially imagined...

Screenwriting and all that

I'm currently reading the Dr Who tome (The Writer's Tale), in which Russell T Davies spills the beans on his working methods. It's fascinating - much more so than I expected, especially the bits where you get to see the script in progress. I'd never really gone in for much reading of scripts before (apart from a couple of volumes of The West Wing, the odd Shakespeare play, and those really dull things like An Inspector Calls that you have to look at for GCSE English), and it's been a revelation.

For the first time I've seen how the directions work (the stuff that isn't the dialogue), and enjoyed reading them. Often I've not necessarily seen the actual episode (my Dr Who viewing is best described as patchy), but the pace and drive of the directions is spooky - it enables you to run the scene in your head as if you were watching it in real time. Previously I'd thought much of the success of Davies' scripts was down to the dialogue, but now I'm not so sure - the forcefulness of the directions (and some of the most succinct useage of words I've seen in a long time) gets across the story amazingly. It'd be interesting to hear from the directors of the various episodes whether they feel they've got much room for manoeuvre with scripts like that - do they really get much artistic input into the final vision?

I suppose I should really get round to watching some of the episodes in question. I did catch the rather good Planet of the Ood while babysitting this week, but that's a rewritten rather than an original Davies.

All this is making me want to attend the Story Engine conference that's running in Darlington next month - especially as one of the speakers is James Moran, who's written a Dr Who episode. I'm just up to the point in the book where he's being rewritten...

London calling

I headed down to London yesterday for a meeting, and got the chance to do one of my favourite things - walk.

I love looking at London's streets and buildings, as they're nothing like we get up here. Gateshead's city centre is pretty brutalistic 1960s concrete all round, although Newcastle is rather more classical, especially in Grainger Town and Grey Street. It meant I had a fantastic wander down from King's Cross to Covent Garden, marvelling at the sci-fi Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury (I quite fancied one of the apartments, which had a beautiful terraced garden), a detour to the always elegant British Museum, and then a brisk stroll along Southampton Row and Kingsway to the delights of Bush House.

I also had a twirl around Covent Garden, which as ever was overpriced, twee and disappointing - and bizarrely full of 1950s-style cupcake and sweetie sellers. What gives?

It was also quite fun wandering around Drury Lane and the theatres, although the large pictures of David Tennant et al in the RSC productions are rather unnerving at first glance - when you're used to watching people on the telly or iPlayer, suddenly seeing them 8ft high is rather disturbing.

Anyway, the meeting was good. And I found Paddington Bears galore to photograph for the three-year-old, and brought home some of the best croissants in the world from the Eurostar station at St Pancras.

All in all, a good day.

Arts Corner: Christmas telly

Happy New Year and all that. Hello 2009!

Right, that's the formalities out of the way. Now down to the important stuff: Christmas telly. For once we managed to sit down and watch some. Hurrah!

(Although I have serious doubts over whether it can be called telly if you're mostly watching it on the BBC iPlayer?)

In no particular order:

Strictly Come Dancing: 7/10 (Severrrrrrrrrrn!) I had to watch this, as the three-year-old was pretty insistent, and got her sparkly red shoes out. Poor old Rachel Stevens. Never mind, her pop career will no doubt resurrect itself.

University Challenge: 8/10 Interesting documentary - I didn't realise it had been going for quite so long. There was some rather amusing footage of a very young Stephen Fry, some good talking heads (including Bamber Gascoigne) and some amazing hairdos.

Starter for 10: 9/10 Followed on from University Challenge, and was rather sweet. But ooh it didn't half bring back the horrors of freshers parties in all their gory detail. Argh. I was that girl in the corner (albeit 10 years later and at Durham not Bristol), stuck with the bloke wittering on about his gap year in India. Sadly, there wasn't anyone as fanciable as James McAvoy lurking by the drinks.

A thing about cathedrals that I fell asleep halfway through: 3/10 Nothing personal (the first 10 minutes were pretty interesting), it's just I'd been up til 2am the night before, and I'm not much good at that sort of thing any more. Maybe that's what happens when you hit 35.

Lost and Found: 10/10 Gorgeous - a lesson in how to take a book as your source material for animation, and then expand on it without losing the essence of the original.

Father Christmas: 10/10 Ditto. And I loved Mel Smith. Far better than The Snowman.

Dr Who Christmas Special: 10/10 Mainly for David Morrissey who was fantastic, and has the most delightful voice. We also watched the Dr Who confidential, which was fascinating on the production process (although it did rather feel like watching two or three programmes shoehorned together in a random order - what's with that?). I'm reading the Russell T Davies/Benjamin Cook book, Dr Who: The Writer's Tale at the moment, so it was interesting to see how everything panned out on the screen. (I'm only up to about chapter 3 at the moment, but boy is it good - definitely recommended. Interesting stuff on how to lay out a script and on the whole rewriting process.)

Shrek 2: 6/10 Mildly amusing - and much better than the first one (if you're an adult - the three-year-old got a bit bored). Antonio Banderas as Puss in Boots pretty much steals the show.

Erm. That's about it, bar BBC Breakfast News in the Northeast and Cumbria (we like to say hello to Colin in a morning) and the odd moment of Shaun the Sheep (the new Washday DVD arrived for Christmas - thank god).

Now, where did I put the rest of that Christmas cake?

Decorations (part III)

Terrible pic (mobile phone again), but you get the idea...

UPDATE: recipe here

Decorations (part II)

(or how to entertain your small child on a cold and damp afternoon no 4,167)

Decorations (part 1)

(or how to make your dining room look like Top of the Pops)

Durham

We spent the afternoon pottering around in Durham today - tea and cake in the Undercroft, a pootle round the craft fair, and a look at the reindeer in the market square. Lots of tinsel, some beautiful Christmas lights, and, of course, the cathedral, which is one of my favourite buildings.

The others being, in no particular order:

• the Eiffel Tower (for sheer lunacy and its breathtaking views)
• the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco (it's painted red - what more do you need? And Orb asked me to marry him in the middle of it)
• the Pompidou Centre in Paris (again with the breathtaking views, but this time escalators rather than lifts)
• the Angel of the North (less a building more a giant sculpture, but when I see it I know I'm home)

But back to the cathedral. It's the massive pillars down the nave that do it for me - they are just monstrous and beautiful, and contrast so well with the thin tracery of the stonework behind the high altar. I could witter on about it for hours, if I could remember much of the course on early Northumberland and its history and buildings that I took in my third year at the university.

Sadly, that was quite a while ago, as we realised today. Where did the last 16 years go?

Tweet tweet

I've been playing around with Twitter for the last couple of days (the more observant among you may have noticed it's appeared in the Empire of Me sidebar). It's early days yet, but I'm reasonably impressed (mainly because the lovely Patroclus directed me towards TweetDeck, which is a rather less clunky method of reading and organising Twitter updates than the original).

It's good mainly because it is so stripped down - it literally is all about what people/organisations are doing. I'm on facebook too, and what really bugs me there is the extraneous tat that you have to find out about - so and so has fed their pet fish and gained so many star points, someone's scored 500 in a movie quiz...bleurgh.

It's also much broader than facebook, in that you have access to everyone (which in itself raises interesting dilemmas when everyone has access to you - what you post to where, personally and professionally, particularly if you don't have a pseudonym?) It can make for interesting reading (fancy following Stephen Fry? Join the other 26,000-odd people who already do...) or for total tedium. I guess you have to pick carefully. But you get the chance to reply or ask questions of people who might not ever consider reading an email from you, which could be an interesting prospect professionally.

I also like the way many content providers (eg MediaGuardian, or our own more local bdaily) are using it as a news feed - somehow it's easier to read snippets like this (especially via TweetDeck) than it is in Google Reader.

Anyhow, the experiment continues. Here's to minutiae.

Sneak preview

Painting a giggling three-year-old's hands with glittery yellow paint was definitely the best bit.

Decisions, decisions

There's an interesting article on Hamlet skulduggery over at the Guardian - it turns out that David Tennant's been using a real one for the graveyard scene. I rather like the idea of leaving your body to a theatre company, rather than to science...but maybe that's the exhibitionist in me talking.

I once had one of the RSC's prop skulls in a box under my bed, which was a little macabre. It had been Ken Branagh's rehearsal skull for the RSC's 1992 production of Hamlet...so presumably looked a lot like this one:

(via the branaghcompenium.com)

I was stage managing a student production of Hamlet at the time (we're talking 1993, I think), probably due to the fact that I'd actually seen Ken in all four and a half hours of the RSC thing, and had been totally bowled over by it.

Rather pleasingly, the guy who played Hamlet, Adrian Fear, has gone on to become a pretty successful actor (even if he now has far less hair than he used to). He had stage presence, even then.

Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree...

...how spooky are your branches.

And angels...


This just goes to show the dangers of taking pictures on a dodgy mobile phone, rather than being bothered to get the actual camera out.

This is just M's tree - the small one that goes in the living room. We're off to the Forestry Commission tent at IKEA soon to get the large one for the dining room that gets decorated in the tasteful stuff. Hopefully this year we'll pick one that isn't too enormous...we always think it'll be fine, and then I end up sitting in the middle of a forest in the car on the way home.

Last year we really thought we'd cracked it - the tree fitted in lengthways; I didn't have needles up my nose...and then we got it home and it turned out to be about 7ft wide as well as tall.

This year I'm taking my measuring tape.