I was expecting a proofreading assignment this week, but it didn’t come in after all. Just as well, really, because if I had been sitting at my kitchen table with a pile of paper and a red pen, I surely wouldn’t have had time to bake a batch of butter biscuits and play mad scientist with a couple of bottles of food colouring. It is unlikely, had I been at the table with the papers and the red pen and some Post-its and a large dictionary, that I could have made it to as many grocery stores as I did, working my way up the supermarket hierarchy from Tesco through Waitrose, for presents for Frenchies – cream cheese and hippie cereals and a smart Stilton in a ceramic jar.

(Item! French people are wild for the smooth, smooth whip of a tub of Philadelphia cream cheese!)



Tomorrow, with the cheeses and the cereals, I’ll be on the 05h27 Eurostar to Paris. The biscuits, too, iced, and in a glass jar, and with a big red ribbon tied around the lot. This is gonna be great.

Through the curtains Sunday morning there was a hint of sun – a muted, suggestive hint, coloured like a round-cornered photograph from the Seventies, of daylight and a cloudless sky. “Il fait beau?” I said, and I closed my sleepy eyes, and Olive looked out and he said, “Ouais.” “J’ai une bonne idée,” I said.

Outside the garden shop on Church Street, the mistletoe was out, and the pavement was lined with Christmas trees. The air was crisp and scented of a gnome’s forest of pine.



We took a bus and a train and emerged on a hill in Hampstead. At Gail’s, across the street, the poppyseed muffins were in bloom in the window. Flask Walk, narrow and low, opened out into a sweet lane and its handsome brick houses. Here is imaginary London – its warm brick homes, its curving streets, its ageless porcelain tiles spelling out street names in brick walls.

We took Willow Road to the heath, keeping an eye out for No. 2. No. 2 is Erno Goldfinger’s brick-and-glass layer cake of a Modernist house, a creation so offensive, they say, that Ian Fleming, a Hampstead local, was driven to name one of his fictional villains after the architect.

Past No. 2 and down the street, the heath was grand and wide and green. We watched the ducks on the pond, and the dogs, and the ducks again. We climbed Parliament Hill, and on the top a kite with a rainbow tail swooped and swirled and loop-de-looped. We squelched in the mud and walked through the long grass, and afterwards we watched the gulls arrange themselves like baubles on a festive branch.

Our fingers were very cold, later, and we warmed them on a toasted mortadella sandwich from the fancy deli on the high street. There were surprises in there: a gherkin. A sundried tomato.

These are the days the sun comes in through the curtains.

Some months ago I interviewed a couple of book editors for an industry rag. They were both editors of illustrated books – they worked with authors and art departments and photo agencies, they worked with photographers and stylists, sometimes, as editors of cookbooks, too, they worked, starry-eyed or no, with chefs.

“I’m working on a cookbook by Ottolenghi,” one of them mentioned when we spoke on the phone. She was a sweet-sounding woman who was generous with her time and loved, it was clear, her work. Her name was Sarah Lavelle, which surely is the name of someone who must deal with icing and biscuts on a daily basis.

“Ottolenghi!” I said, and I was enthusiastic, because Yotam Ottolenghi runs one of the best little restaurants in London. His rack of lamb melts in the mouth. His roasted aubergines and pomegranate seeds are sweet and tart and soft and crunchy all at the same time. His Jerusalem artichoke purée is to be cherished by the spoonful. I could go on. I will. His French beans and mixed mushrooms are a fine mélange of crisp and slippery, the high notes of green tempered with the earthiness of warmed and gently wilted mushrooms.

With French beans and mixed mushrooms in mind a couple of weeks ago, I was trying to make a reservation at Ottolenghi when a curious coincidence knocked at the door. I’d already made a reservation for three and now wanted to up it to four, so I called, and listened to the girl on the telephone page through her reservations book. “There is no reservation for Stellou,” she said, confused. The pages flipped back and forth noisily. “Are you sure you even have a reservation for three?” “Yes,” I said, and though I also wanted to say, “And it was you who wrote it down, yesterday,” I did not. “I only have,” she said, “Sarah Lavelle down, a party of four, at 7:30... but no Stellou at 7.” She made thinking noises down the line while something slowly clicked in my mind. She eventually found my reservation, made a note that we would be four, and said they would look forward to seeing us.

“Olive,” I said later, and maybe I already had a tone in my voice that made him nervous of what was to come. “This girl I spoke to that time,” I said, “this editor, this Sarah Lavelle. She is going to be at the restaurant when we’re there! What are the chances! I should go up and introduce myself! I mean, we’ve never met, we’ve only talked on the phone, and now I could look out for a party of four at 7:30, and I could go up to her and say, ‘Are you Sarah Lavelle’? And then I could tell her the story! This is a great story! I mean, what are the chances?” He was still looking at me, Olive was, because he is a patient man. “Or,” I said, “I guess it could be weird, like I was stalking her or something.” Here he said: “Yes.” “Yes what?” I said, and it is likely I was wild-eyed with possibility. “Yes,” he said, “it would seem like you were stalking her.” “Oh,” I said. “Well,” I said, “fine.” I was already, inside, wondering what she would look like. I was wondering what I would wear.

That Saturday night of the reservation came around, and we were me and Olive and Laureen and Hens at the long white table at Ottolenghi, with the candlesticks burning bright. The bread board was piled high as if we were farmers celebrating the harvest.

“You have to go up to her when she comes in,” Laureen said, when I told her the story. “It is,” she said, “a great story.” Laureen and I have been friends for a long time.

It was nearing 7:30 and we were all four of us keeping an eye on the door.

“But what if I go up to her–” I began to say, and Olive took my hand – for support, I thought, and I thought he was a sweet and kind man – and he said, “You will not.”

Sarah Lavelle was in a party of four at 7:30, and she was seated not twelve feet away from us. We shushed one another, me and Hens and Laureen, we looked at her out of the corner of our eyes like spy school drop-outs, we giggled and snorted and hushed one another again. Olive, I think, just shook his head. He probably wished he was sitting with Sarah Lavelle.

“I really think you should go up to her and say something,” Laureen said, egging me on. “It would be a great conversation starter.”

“I can’t now,” I said, and I offered my arms, palms out, for inspection. “My half-glass of prosecco has turned me all red, and if I go up to her now, she’ll think I’m some random drunk person. I will lurch all over her, going, ‘Rrarr you Srrarah Lavrelle?’” – here, Sarah Lavelle’s husband looked up, startled – “and it will not be the best first impression.”

Giddy we were, one silliness piling up on another, and we were, during the crab cakes and the red cabbage, through the duck and the seared sirloin and the taleggio polenta, unstoppable.

We were paying the cheque, finally, and casting a final eye around before we left. “These are nice napkins,” Laureen said thoughtfully, and we fondled the thick white linen, admired the red line running down one side. “Put ’em in your bag,” I said. “Can you imagine?” I said, “if I were to steal these napkins, and they caught me at the door?” “In front of Sarah Lavelle!” I said. “The shame!” “They’d say, ‘Excuse me, madam,’” I said, “and they’d ask me my name, and I’d say”

– and by now we were doubled over, we had tears in our eyes –

“Sarah Lavelle.”

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.

Saturday we go to the Saturday market, where the air smells of sausages on the grill. Yesterday the wind whipped about my knees, between where my skirt ends and my cowboy boots start. It lifted, the wind, the corners of the hand-knit scarves on sale and the edge of the mushroom man’s foraging hat; it blew through the playground, the wind did, and we shivered as we picked out eggs and potatoes and mutant organic carrots. One carrot is shaped like a pair of pants. I think about that carrot with its chubby, tapering legs, and I think about it climbing out of the bowl once we get home, and creeping about at night, rearranging my books and hiding the last tin of plum tomatoes.

Em was in the ’hood for a haircut later, at my haircutting place. “The storefront is purple,” I’d texted her, but then I walked past it and it was green. My mind remembers what it wants to remember.

I’d gone to the salon for the first time a couple of weeks ago. The head massage was lovely, the fringe was looking fine. At the end of it, I stood by the counter up front and didn’t know whether to tip. Do you tip your hairdressers, people of England? I stood there and fiddled with my wallet and pretended to look for my debit card while I thought about it. The questions grew: If I tipped, how much would I tip? And was I to tip the shampoo girl? Yes? How much? And how long had I been standing here now, pretending I couldn’t find the card I was hiding with my calculatedly posed hand? I capitulated, and paid only what was asked for.

I’d asked Emily later if I should have tipped. “When I left,” I said, “they didn’t scream at me or spit at me or anything.” “Next time you go back,” Em said, “they will spit in your shampoo.”

Em was in the ’hood, I was saying, for a haircut, and then she said, so innocently she said, “Come with me to Waitrose.” How I long for someone to say these words to me! Olive’s eyes, I know, had already glazed over at the thought of the wide aisles, the fancy brioche loaves, the thick cuts of organic beef, the bottles of pulpy orange juice tasting like the sun, freshly squeezed. “Come with me to Waitrose,” she said, and I felt like a mouse on my way to America, where the streets are paved with cheese. We stuck our arms out for the little 393 bus and jiggled and bumped up Highbury New Park while the chavs in their sweatpants practised pull-ups on the bars.