On Saturday M knocked em dead in Kew, then on Sunday we sallied forth to IKEA on the bus to get a few bits and bobs for the flat. It's been so long since we've had the time to do this kind of pottering, it was great. Bathmat, new cooker knob and magic silent drawer-closers for the kitchen, seventies-style lotus-blossom lampshade for our bedroom, and some dill herring. The main purchase was a genius idea of M's - a stepped wooden unit with grooves for plastic drawers, which fits beautifully in my half of the wardrobe under the hanging clothes (shirts over the tall part, dresses over the low part). This means that my underwear, t-shirts, jumpers, tights, shoes, boots and scarves how have their own homes, rather than just being shoved into the bottom of the wardrobe anyoldhow.
The ITV Andrew Davies adaptation of Northanger Abbey (which is, slightly perversely, my favourite Austen novel) got effusive previews, so we watched it - but it really wasn't that great. Emmur Grundy beyond Ambridge was fine, but it was poorly paced and clunky in places, and the cast couldn't agree on the pronunciation for the eponymous Gothic pile.

Sunday was a Mothers' Day and birthday double-whammy, as M's mum celebrated her sixtieth. We spent the day with M's family out in Kent: here I am with the out-laws having our pre-enormous-golf-club-lunch drinks.


Things should calm down for us a little bit now that M has submitted a draft to his publishers; we're both very relieved that he can finally ratchet work down a bit so that he's not writing or thinking about Edward I 24/7.

After a week of mostly-just-work punctuated by Man of Mode with S at the National (great dancing and set but a slightly unconvincing leading man, he was just too young to be a real rake), I spent Friday and Saturday in Oxford, doing some Japanese research on Friday, then catching up with F from OUP, then dinner and generous overnight accommodation with E, who is living in the same Merton grad block I lived in for five years, so it was all very evocative. Even went along to an MCR party...
Then on Saturday I went out to visit J and family for the day, which was lovely, then wrapped up with a quick appearance at T's birthday party, seeing some other old Mertonians too, before getting the train home. Today (Sunday) is going to be a quiet, stay-at-home, make-soup-for-history-boy, read-the-papers sort of day.

From the archives - this time last year, S and I went to the orchid festival at Kew to convince ourselves that spring was coming. It rained on us a lot IIRC, and I was tiresomely trying to take close-ups of the flowers, there's something wonderfully anatomical about them.

Went to see Agrippina at the ENO with AJ, Mum and Dad. It was quite successfully 80s-styled, which fitted with the whole "greed is good" sentiment, and allowed Nero to be a slouching coke-snorting teenager in oversize leather coats which also allowed the female soprano playing him to convince as a young man - at least, from where we were in the balcony half-seats. You can't get the castrati these days. Lots of fun, though I do wonder what the line translated and primly surtitled as "fuck fuckety fuck fuck" was in Handel's original Italian.