We were up late last night, Tym and me, giggling up a storm. The mouse came out from behind the fridge – to see what the hullabaloo was about, I suppose – and did a quick brown-grey U-turn when he saw us. Tym calls him Moses now, too – she says they are on a first-name basis because of that night they slept in the same room – but she says she is also humouring me by pretending that there is just one mouse in the house. The thing is, I am quite aware there is more than one mouse in here. I’m sure they are high-fiving and slapping palms behind the fridge like the whole thing is one big relay race. I know that while one mouse is out on the frontlines, the others are jogging on the spot back there, warming up, punching the air. They have their headbands on. The air behind the fridge sounds like “Eye of the Tiger.”

We were up late last night, Tym and me, giggling up a storm, while Olive, who works hard for the money, slept. He’d cooked us a beef compote and plied us with prosecco and red wine. There’d been Carluccio’s strawberry and chocolate slices for dessert, and fancy mint teas. We eat well, you cannot say we do not, even though there was that first dinner upon Tym’s arrival, where she’d suffered the misfortune of a mediocre pie. The gauntlet had been thrown down that night, I guess, and I felt those first, firey beats of a challenge. We have been moving onwards and upwards since then. Ottolenghi welcomed us with a bread board and an array of salads. At Abeno Too, with the Japanese pancakes following a screening of the melodramatic and triumphant Hula Girls, the okonomiyaki boy brought us a bowl with maccha ice cream and a bowl with a rabbit print. From Borough Market – we’d met Suz for a coffee and a gander, and Suz had said, seriously and curiously, in the manner of an anthropologist peering, “Do Raffles girls like to eat?” – we bought a selection of Pieministers to nosh on at home with a herby green salad. “Are you underwhelmed?” I asked at dinner that night. We’d stopped in the grocery store on the way home for some salad leaves and had come out with strawberries and a pot of cream and a box of meringues. We’d picked up beer and a bag of Haribo. “Are you underwhelmed?” I asked, as she tucked into her pie, and she said, “No, no, I am whelmed.”



Sunday at UpMarket, we sat on the curb in the sun with a falafel wrap for one and yakisoba for the other. My dress, with a halter-tie, was striped red and pink and yellow and green and four shades of blue as if my name is Carmen Miranda. We strolled about in Spitalfields and admired Japanese T-shirts and handsewn wallets and aviator sunglasses and felt headpieces and beribboned party dresses – then we sat on the curb in the sun with a lemon-sugar crêpe for the other and a Nutella-banana for the one.