It rained all week, almost – and today, still, the rain is coming down like gangbusters. My rubber boots have chosen this moment, this wet and unrelentingly rainy moment, to defy their principle: they have holes in them, one in the left boot and one in the right. Rainboots with holes in them are like, I don’t know, a mouse without a squeak, or chocolate cereal that’s good for you. My feet are wet and cold, I tell you, and now I remember, with narrowed eyes, and feet wet and cold, the bag of German chocolate cereal sitting – languishing, almost – in the cupboard. It is “Amaranth Chocolate-Muesli”, and the bag is heavy and silver, and speaks of the promise of dark chocolate and honey, of apricots and dates. “Can’t be bad,” I must have said when I picked it off the shelf at the giant and wondrous Whole Foods down on Kensington High Street some weeks ago, though my understanding of amaranth was fuzzy at best. “A wonder grain,” the packet reads, and I was sure, holding this package (remember, it was silver, and heavy with promise), that I had read about this amaranth somewhere, was sure it would make me thinner somehow – taller, even.

Eating this cereal is akin to eating packing material. Sometimes a chocolate flake bobs up on the surface of milk, and then I scoop it up, raise it high and eat it with ceremony. Otherwise it is a breakfast of champion resentment.



Last night we said farewell to Marc and Em at the Queen Boadicea in Clerkenwell. Boadicea, also known as Boudica, was queen of the Iceni in what is Norfolk today; in AD 60, Cassius Dio recounts, with “the glance of her eye most fierce” and “a great mass of the tawniest hair [falling] to her hips” she roused the natives to revolt against their Roman occupiers. Last night we were roused to drink up and wish them well, our little travellers, for next week Marc and Em will pack up a van and drive to Paris.



There is dark and luscious wallpaper of thorny roses up at the Queen Boadicea, and the seats are higgledy piggledy and low. Outside the great glass windows a girl with hair the colour of raspberry syrup had a large fur hat – a fat ferret of sorts – pulled down over her eyes as she smoked a cigarette. I have already directed Marc to make sure my room has wallpaper in it for when I come a-visiting.