I was going to blog earlier this evening, but I was hungry and couldn’t think. “Il n’y a rien dans la maison,” Olive said, and in my mind I saw the one open packet of parsley in the vegetable drawer. Tomorrow we go to Paris, and there will be tables of festive foodery, I’m sure, glistening in the candlelight. But tomorrow is tomorrow, whereas tonight there is cold risotto stuck to the bottom of the Tanyu pot. “There’s some stilton in the fridge,” I said, because I knew we had bought his parents a half-kilo of cheese. And then – I have bright ideas, you see – I remembered the party treats for Maud’s Christmas Eve dinner, and I said, “And we have two tins of fancy biscuits.” I remembered more gifts we were bringing, and I said, “We have prosecco!” “You are mad,” he said, and we went out for burgers. Big, fat stacks of burger, and a bowl of chunky chips for two. I was hungry, and then I wasn’t.

It has been a mad couple of weeks. I worked and worked, and then I worked some more. Then we went on the slides. I tell you! You think slides are slides, but I was funny in the head and weak in the knees at the end of it all. I took the slide from the fourth floor, with its sharp dip at the top the moment before gravity grabbed me by the ankles. I went “uhhHHHHH” all the way down. We wobbled all the way home.



Another day we took the slow bus to Little Venice. The barges were red and green and purple on the Regent’s Canal. It was very cold, but the birds were taking it well – I guess being a goose is like being swaddled in a goose down duvet all day. Our noses were icy-tipped by the time we fell into Damien Hirst’s curious collection at the Serpentine. Five black pots posed next to five black medicine balls. (Art.) A pair of sneakers sat on an air vent. (Art.) There was a mattress attached to one wall. It had been doused in blue paint, which had dripped down to the floor, and dried in streaks. “This art makes me want to smack someone,” I said, and Olive ducked.

One room held a sculpture of three larger-than-life hunks of flesh. They were a dirty pink and lined with thick layers of fatty tissue. There was blood on the floor beneath and around them. Some hapless show attendee had stepped in a puddle of blood, his telltale shoe prints first dark, then lighter, then lighter still as they curved away from the work. The gallery assistants grinned at each other and rolled their eyes before one of them came back with a roll of kitchen paper.

We went outside to Sarah Lucas’s shire horse pulling marrows in the mist.