Of all the nights to go to Kew Gardens, we picked the one where the rain fell and fell, first fine and misty, then—once it really decided to apply itself—with admirable gusto.

Still, that didn’t stop us, me and Suzzan and Thush, from spending a good part of three hours there Monday, meandering about in the great glasshouses, where Chihuly sculptures mingled with the greenery. I’ll say I like Dale Chihuly well enough—his glass is a little like fantasy, a little like candy, a little like joy bursting through, innit?—but really the thing that made me buy tickets to Night Lights was the promise of JUGGLERS and FIRE EATERS. So, yes, I really took to the fanciful collection of multicoloured glass floats on the pond just upon entering the gardens; and I did appreciate the is-it, isn’t-it game among the cacti, where sometimes you couldn’t tell if you were looking at a creation nature-made or man-made; and the exquisite curlywurly chandeliers amazed me each time we came across a new one—but the fact of the matter is, I wanted, also, to be perfectly honest, to see some goddamn fire eaters.

We asked a man in a florescent vest, finally, where the circus was, and he said, “Oh, they’re mobile”, and immediately I was quite distressed to think it was possible that we’d maybe been twenty paces behind them all along the path. But then he tipped us off that there might be a juggler over there, leftward, near the Temperate House, so we shuffled off again in the rain. Sure enough, all too soon we saw the neon clubs spinning in the air above a gather of heads, and heard the wacky commentary of a travelling showman: “It would help if you’d cheer and clap quite loudly, maybe even throw your children in the air.”

The ride back to the city was damp and wearied, and it was closing in on ten o’clock, and we were wet and hungry, like little rats on a slow boat to China. Happy fortune, then, that it wasn’t China but Chinatown ahead of us, and the Hong Kong Diner on Wardour Street open till four in the morning. The Hong Kong Diner did us well, as always, with jaunty Cantopop over MSG wantan soup, and unnamed greens stir-fried in garlic, and a spicy sliced beef dish, with spring onions—y’know, the classics. I will tell you a secret about the Hong Kong Diner, and it is that Kim Jong-Il moonlights there. I know it sounds crazy, but you come visit, and I will show you the man with the disdainful eyes and the wild, curly hair, this man who will not seat us in the upstairs dining room, and you try and tell me he is not a Korean dictator.

It rained on Suzzan and me as we shuffled home, and through the rain we looked at a young man in his room across the backyards. He was sitting, reading, quietlike—(well, it was quiet from where we peered out of my living room)—and the light in his bedroom was warm and yellow like butter melting on the stove. “That’s nice,” I said. “He’s all calm and reading in the rain.” And Suzzan, she takes a beautiful thing and does, well, she does something to it, Suzzan said: “Maybe he is looking at porn on the computer.”

It rained as we talked into the night, and it rained as we went to bed. By morning, though, the sky was clear, and the breakfast menu read: CAKE. It is not always I have cake for breakfast—in fact I don’t know that I have ever had cake for breakfast—but for reasons of my birthday, (twenty days ago now, my little nitpickers, but you know how it is with birthdays in this house), (and anyway the presents are arriving still, why, just yesterday the packages in jolly yellow, and tied in red ribbons), and for reasons of Suzzan in the city, it was all systems go.

Down the street—

and I am the sort who says “the other day” when I mean “that one time that summer two years ago”, so here I mean “down the street and down another street and ’round the corner”—

down the street in Soho, the cake displays at Amato were gleaming like a birthday welcome. And I say we had cake for breakfast, but “cake” is a mere abbreviation, for we had a slice of chocolate-blueberry cream sponge (species: cake); a chocolate brioche (hardly a brioche, but that will teach us to order French in an Italian bakery, and in any case, species: bread-like); a palmier (species: biscuit); and a squat doughnut filled with cream, SOAKED IN RUM, and then topped with cream and fresh fruit, including a beauteous fig (species: unspeakable heaven). Suzzan raised her arms in the air and said: “Happy birthday!” in the only way one can, when there are four varieties of baked good fighting for room on the table. The phrase explodes, up front, like a celebratory firework: HAP-py birthday!

Like Girls Gone Wild because of a birthday, we went to see the new Wallace and Gromit movie in the middle of the day just because we could. The Odeon cinema in Leicester Square is so swank that even the daytime reduced-price ticket costs a painful seven pounds, but truly that is a cinema of fancypants and lushness. Like a birthday, like a holiday, like a midday movie, inside, among the seats of plush leopard print, there were kids with balloons—fidgety kids whose sticky hands, every now and again, let go of their catch so that it floated, free, past the regal gold relief on the walls up to the ceiling.



Cake for breakfast is nice and all, but it meant that my stomach started getting growly during the movie, somewhere in between the floating bunnies, and the candy floss tumbling by. We headed for Chinatown after the movie let out, and fought our way into the bustling Kowloon Bakery for a char siew so and a plain sponge cupcake. The unexpected treat was the arrival of three lians, the lianest lians in Lian Town, lians the likes of which have never been seen before, and even Suzzan, dear, sweet Suzzan, who is not only a nurse (that is, loving and giving, even if she wasn’t born on a Friday) but also loved by all, Suzzan whispered and pointed. I don’t know how they achieved it, the three girls, with neither Cucci bags nor Fendo purses, with nary a single LV print in sight, but they, in their wet-look perms and shiny, tight-fitting black pants, they encapsulated lian-ness in a way one could only step back and admire.

Down Gerrard Street we popped into the New Loon Moon Supermarket—in the grand tradition of anglicizing oriental names, the grand dragon’s gate (lóng mén) has become a silly bird squawking in the maudlin night—we popped in for a bottle of soya sauce for Suzzan, and we came out with, well, I think Suzzan came out with a bottle of soya sauce, but I came out with some egg tofu, a slab of fish cake, a packet of genmaicha, a bag of lychee White Rabbits, (yah! lychee rabbits!), a small box of milk-flavoured Pocky (“226.33 mg Calcium”), and a plastic take-out container of pandan–water chestnut coconut-milk kueh made in an unidentified local kitchen, yum yum. I’d pointed to one box of green-and-white delicacies and another box of green-and-white delicacies (they are, of course, all unmarked, save a nonchalant ingredients list) and said, “What’s the difference between these two?” and the countergirl’d said, “One is jelly, and one has water chestnut inside,” which made it so the choice was clear: Jelly is jelly but water chestnut inside is Hidden Treasures to be Discovered (with a Satisfying Crunch).

We were heading home, then, with so many treats as to include half a roast duck, when I thought it imperative, some doors down, that we pop, also, into the Wonderful Bakery, because (a) clearly, and (b) from the street we could see piles—piles!—of coloured confection. Upon closer inspection, the piles revealed themselves to be boxes and boxes of moon cakes and daifuku mochis, now that’s what the word “galore” was created for. Never was a shop so aptly named, and there were rainbow sponge cakes and Wife Buns and lotus seed biscuits and Traditional Wedding Cakes like no wedding cake I’d ever seen, for they were small shortcrust pastries filled with red bean paste, AND they were pink. You know I was reaching toward them with claws for hands, but Suzzan was sensible enough to keep her wits about us both. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, I forget that I can come back another day.

Back home, we cobbled together a late lunch to worthy the efforts of Joseph—no, wait, Joseph was a carpenter, not a shoesmith, oh, never mind—

we cobbled together a late lunch of zaru soba, roast duck, and sweet tomatoes, and who woulda thunk it, Japanese and Chinese and Italian go together no worries. PS, I know one of these days I am going to come home from Sainsbury’s with a bunch of water-tasting tomatoes, and then I will shake my fist at the sky, and then I will know to stop buying the fruit till summer swings ’round again, but for now we seem to be doing okay.

OH. I am forgetting—

I know this is already the longest blog entry in the world, but what can you do, we were celebrating the birthday, and the activities kept coming, one after the other, and it was just one of those friends-in-town sprees that was good feelings all over, enough to write down and store for a gloomy day—

I am forgetting that Suzzan also got, in Chinatown, a bag of tapioca pearls for bubble tea, which was an exciting moment because who makes bubble tea at home? We do, apparently; oh, Suzzan, you are a brave and an adventurous one, and you walk out into traffic without a care in the world. But, so. The bubble tea. Surprisingly easy, but also surprisingly time-consuming. FYI, you really need to boil those buggers for a good long while. You boil them all through the lunch preparation, and then through the eating of lunch, and then you boil them some more. We put them in glasses with jasmine green tea and sugar and semi-skimmed milk for a tasty treat, but still not rivalling the real Chinatown deal. We think maybe more sugar, and full-cream milk, or maybe condensed milk, who doesn’t love condensed milk. Next time, then.

Grace came by to pick us up, and she fondled my floor lamp and said “We love him”, which is why we like Grace.

(I knew a guy once who asked why I said “we” instead of “I”, but this guy, he showed up, unannounced, at my door at four one morning, so what does he know.)

Hem.

May I just say, about the lamp—the only things with which I have adorned the living room are Mr Lamp and a big white Ikea cushion. Otherwise, we are talking bare and spare and I like it like so. I like the lamp wire trailing, unabashed, like a line drawing, from the wall socket, and I like the big space in the middle of the room so I can lie down on the floor under the skylight. It looks like truth—because it looks like I just moved countries, and it looks like sometimes all I want to do is to be still, and read.

Grace? She came by to pick us up, and then we three headed up to Bloomsbury to adore Stephen Fry. The man was in a red bowtie, and a green cardigan buttoned over a comfortable belly. The jacket could have been tweed, or it may just have suggested it, I don’t remember. The hair flop, well, of course. He is a delightful one, that Stephen Fry, and he knows stuff. He makes the case for formality in poetry—to pay respect to tradition is not to become mired in it—and for the useless things that make a life worth living. Sometimes when a day without a job offer is followed by a day without a job offer and then by another day without a job offer, it slips my mind that I came here for the nebulous intangibles. I forget, sometimes, (I have a mind like a sieve, which is why I write—to remember), I forget that I have met a boy who makes me laugh, that today I had lunch with a tailor of bespoke shirts, that tomorrow I will learn to bake a ricotta tart, that next week I might be translating French on a film set, that in a couple of weeks I will get to watch Anthony Minghella’s “Madam Butterfly” at the Coliseum, that in a month I will be in Paris again.