Yesterday, when blah blah blah

Pooch took me out for an extremely posh and nice dinner last night. I basically killed it in knee high red boots and an original 1964 clutch bag Mater had given me for my birthday.

Because yes, it was my birthday yesterday. I had a pretty awesome day. Multiple presents (that's the way uhuh uhuh I like it uhuh uhuh) including a solution to the cat conundrum I had not previously considered from my sister.

Plus the aforementioned bag.

Isn't it amazing? Look at this attention to detail. Little divuts cut out where the shoulder strap finding pops out if you choose to use the shoulder strap.

They don't make em like that anymore. Not in Primark anyway.

The day itself was spent in leisurely pursuit of a tidy flat and a few more rows on the lace shawl. Both achieved and having suited and booted myself I was off to Hawksmoor in Guildhall (near Bank). It was well lush. Lush that is until about 3.30am this morning when I started feeling somewhat uncomfortable. Pooch tells me it can't be food poisoning because we shared everything and he had a lot more of it than I did. But I dunno. Seems like a big coincidence timing wise for it to be a stomach bug.

That said it was a glorious meal for which I am truly grateful. I stand blog before you now as a 34 year old woman, no pets, no kids, divorced and dating her ex-husband.

I have always much preferred even numbers.

Books #27 - #31

So much for blogger saving draft posts. This is the second time I've written this. Curse you blogger!
 

#27 Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance
by Gyles Brandreth

A rather odd story full of juxtapositions - sexuality vs abstinence, poor vs rich, adoration vs loathing, london vs paris etc. Oscar starts the book by discovering a murder but doesn't tell anyone or report it until the body has been removed and the netire room stripped and polished. With beeswax. Conan Doyle again turns up and Oscar's similarity to Sherlock and then Mycroft Holmes is emphasised as he jumps about coming to all sorts of conclusions. The charactors in this are well written but I have some toruble believing that so many of them could be such good liars. Lies are very tiring and hard to keep track of, in my experience.

#28 I am the only Running Footman
by Martha Grimes

A Martha Grimes book and a good one. These books all look like they'll be typical 'cosies' until you get into them. They're intelligent and well written with wit and good character development. By the end you expect to find out whodunnit but it's not always the way with this series and this is one where I ended up reading the ending a few times over because it was so ambiguous. After reading four in a go a few years back I was astonished to find out the author is american and lives somewhere like Texas. She writes of London and the countryside with utter conviction. These tend to be out of print in the UK but are current in the US. If you find one in a second hand shop I'd definitely recommend it.

#29 Bryant and May and the Memory of Blood
by Christopher Fowler

Oooof, I do love these books. Again these are set very firmly in England but usually very much in London and the author is himself a Londoner this time. The last two were based more or less within the underground tube system while this one keeps us above ground and plays around with the Punch and Judy stories. A powerful man - is he being punished or is he living out his own passion? The usual inhabitants of the Peculiar Crimes Unit are in place along with several favourites including the amazingly long suffering Alma who explains very calmly at one point how being Bryant's housekeeper is her way of showing respect to God. I would recommend this series to anyone at great length.

#30 The Case of the Murdered Muckraker
by Carola Dunn

Oh dear. Sometimes an otherwise reliable author drops something like this into the mix. Personally I try to tell myself they had received an unexpected tax bill or needed to pay a ransom or something, because otherwise they never would have wanted this published in their name. Daisy is in some part of america - her husband is in another. I can't remember why now. It's not really important. Except I think they're on honeymoon. I wish I'd honeymooned somewhere different to where Pooch did. Anyway. She sees someone get shot and fall down a lift shaft. And so she drags herself into the investigation and gets in the way and some stuff happens and they end up flying cross country in a plane piloted by...a black woman pilot! I almost stopped reading this one. I'm just glad it was a library book because it would have depressed me to have bought it.

#31 The Lamorna Wink
by Martha Grimes

I only finished this one last night so it is still very much with me and kind of echoing around my head as I go back over what happened. My only criticism would be that there wasn't enough Jury. But in his absence you got to see how the individual characters acted without him so it was quite clever to do that. Melrose has gone to Cornwall to view a property he saw in a magazine and to try and get away from his ghastly Aunt. Two small children drowned there with their bodies found hand in hand four years earlier and now there has been another death and a disappearance and Macalvie is on the case. As with #28 these books are a delight. This one does have a definite culprit but how things were done and turned out the way they did is multi-layered and complicated and haunting. It sounds trite but these are the kind of books where you regret they have finished and miss their absence.

Shoppywoppydoodah

Sister 1 came to visit this weekend. It has been pretty epic and is not over yet. The goal was the acquisition of her wedding shoes (she gets married in December). Goal acquired.

We celebrated the finding of the shoes (Irregular Choice) in somewhere I didn't even know existed outside of Brighton. Choccywoccydoodah has a shop and cafe just off Carnaby Street. For the sake of my ever expanding wasitline it is probably best I didn't know it was there.

The shop contains examples of their fantasy cakes. The cafe upstairs is like somewhere vampiric, chocolate-loving, ladies-who-lunch would hang out.

Sian looked like she was about to be crowned by the ludicrous lampshade.

We had accidentally found the wedding shoes in the first shop which theoretically meant game over, go home. But no. Five shoe shops and a Beyond Retro later and my plates of meat were doing the tendinitis tango and I had to head home. Sian bravely carried on. She's a trooper.

She got back to find me knitting. What else. She asked me about cross-stitch. "Is it difficult? Could I do it?" Never ask an enabler if you can do something. Thirty seconds later she had aida, threads and a pattern of a dog that looks like her dog.

She carried on with it this morning and free style embellished.

I am *SO* freaking proud. She's ordered a kit online to do more. This is already the best day ever. My sister. Crafting. Squee.

Speaking of the lace.

Going nicely. No counting either which I am a big fan of. As long as each half ends on the end of a pattern repeat you know you're doing fine and you stop when it's big enough. Nice.

The Sianathon didn't end with cross stitch. We decided to order a little sushi for dinner. I almost passed out with joy when I saw it arrive.

It's from Poppy Hana in Bermondsey which does free delivery over £15. So good. The eating doesn't end there either. This being a blowout weekend we are off in about 45 mins to eat Dim Sum by the riverfront in Canary Wharf. I can almost hear the pork buns calling me from here. My only sadness is that I won't be travelling there dressed like my hero.

:(