Christmas is coming!

I hadn't realised quite how long it has been since my last posting, but this is symptomatic of how busy November was, for both of us. I gave a conference paper (in Berlin), a gallery talk and 5 lectures (4 of them on the same day! a study day to the Birkbeck Alumni art history society - I was the study day!) all in the space of a two week period! The day I was giving my conference paper in Berlin, K was giving a lecture to the Hereford Historical Association! So, when the lecture was done, at least he got to spend a relaxing weekend at home with his parents...

Since we finished with all that craziness we have been trying to catch up with ourselves and start winding down a bit. By the end of December, I still have to read and write a report on a Spanish PhD thesis, write an article and a book introduction, but I am choosing not to worry overly about all those things - I am feeling completely lethargic at the weekends, and all I am capable of doing is wandering around shopping in Brixton Market, trying more of the food joints we haven't gone to yet. Mama Lan was a recent high point - the new Chinese dumpling place. We sat at the counter eating our lunch, watching the chefs making and cooking more of the dumplings we were eating - can't get much more freshly prepared than that!

There are quite a lot of pre-Christmas markets on at the weekends at the moment, which is quickly getting us into the Christmas spirit - last Saturday we went to visit our friend Lisa who was doing her first ever stall at the Workshop Sale in East Dulwich. We cycled over there, and picked up a few nice things for Christmas presents. Yesterday we wandered round the Crafty Fox Pop Up makers' market (I have discovered this is the phrase of the moment for craft fairs) and Brixton Makers' Market, which is a now monthly happening on Station Road, though I have to say the first one - which I stumbled upon quite by chance, back in October - was the best so far.

Today we bought a Christmas tree! (see above) And once K had struggled with getting it to stand up straight without falling over, we decorated it! I am sitting looking at it as I write - it feels very cosy in our living room now. We even put up a few pictures properly. We are doing Christmas here in the new flat this year - my parents and sister are coming to us, and we're planning the menu: so far the only fixtures are goose, and a mocha chocolate roulade. We both have two weeks off work, to catch up on sleep and exhibitions and write those articles and prepare for what is going to be another busy year - at least for me the next 6 months are going to carry on being pretty crazy - but also to spend some time in the flat and properly figure out where pictures and furniture should go, and replace those things we've been living with temporarily, and just be home-bodies for a while in our own home... Only two weeks to go!

Meet Juan, the camel-herd, and José, the potter - our mini-belen figures, bought in the Plaza Mayor Christmas market in Madrid, where there is always an enormous and highly complex belen, or Nativity Scene (though this does not really convey the true glamour of the Spanish version!), which the Christmas shoppers queue up to process past and enjoy! Of course the caganer is the most notorious of the Belen figures (Google it!) but there are all sorts of fun minor characters which make up the Bethlehem cityscape! We chose these two for a secular 'Nativity Scene' - though having put them out for the first time in a while, it is looking a bit bare. It's obviously about time to go back to Madrid to get a few more!!

Local Greens

For a long time we've wanted to get one of those veg boxes that gets delivered to you once a week, full of seasonal veg locally sourced from a nearby farm. The problem with the service provided by Abel & Cole and such companies, is that when you live in a block of flats in London, there is just nowhere for them to leave the box during the day, even if you trust your neighbours. A few years back, Tescos introduced one which we got a few times - but though it was convenient (delivered in the evenings alongside your weekly shopping), it was disappointing as most of the veg seemed to be flown or shipped in from somewhere far away, so was hardly supporting local farmers. We stopped that pretty quickly - and we can't have been the only ones, as I think they quietly adandoned it...

So imagine our delight when on a recent wander through Herne Hill we discovered a new local initiative called Local Greens, run by a small group of local ladies, supplying weekly bags of seasonal veg sourced from small and organic farms as close as possible to this part of London. Instead of delivering it to you at home, the bags are left at several local collection points and you go along on a Thursday evening after work to pick it up. And when we saw they were about to institute the Brockwell Lido Café as one of the collection points, which is at most a 10 minute walk from us through Brockwell Park, we signed up!

We're still getting into the swing of figuring out what to do with unusual vegetables (ideas for celeriac anyone?), mostly because this has been an unusually busy month for us - with me in Houston, back for a few days before going to Granada (see below), then back for a few days before K went off to Paris for a conference... But today I have been trying to catch up a bit. The clocks went back this morning so it has been the usual slightly odd, jetlaggy kind of day when it feels later than it is, so what better than to spend the afternoon cooking. I have made some stock out of a couple of chicken carcases that we had kept in the freezer, and have roasted the beetroot that came with the veg bag, and tomorrow night we will have borscht for supper. Since my cold-addled brain (I came down with a really nasty one this week and even took time off work, which I hardly ever do) mistook a freezer tub of egg whites for something else, and therefore defrosted it, I have made meringues too!!

Yes, I spent last weekend in Granada, attending the opening of the exhibition 'Owen Jones y la Alhambra', which I co-curated. The exhibition design looks fantastic, and it was just wonderful to think of Owen Jones and his work 'coming back' to the place that so inspired him in the 1830s... A really happy weekend.

Houses of Horrors

I knew Halloween was a big deal in the States, but I hadn't realised quite how big until this visit to Houston. On Sunday it poured with torrential rain, all day - in fact those words do not really capture the amount of rain that fell on Sunday, the first rain they have had in Texas for months, stuck as they are in the grips of a terrible drought.


My plan to visit the MFAH collections at Bayou Bend and walk through the gardens along the riverbank to the Rienzi, another satellite house-collection of the MFAH, was somewhat scuppered by the fact that whole riverside area was likely to have turned into a swamp, let alone that I would get drenched the moment I stepped out of the hotel's porte-cochère (they love these here). Just as I was pondering what to do with my day, Francesca - the curator here - phoned me up and we made a plan to drive up to the Rienzi in her car.

This is a 1950s house in the neo-neo-Palladian style, filled to the brim with a collection of European decorative arts from the 17th and 18th centuries, put together by the Mastersons and given to the MFAH on their deaths. They had a rather fun display in the dining room showing the table laid for an English noble banquet from the 1760s, with all the dishes based on recipes in Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) - I feel I need to obtain a copy of this. The bad weather had kept other visitors away so we had a personal guided tour of the house from one docent, then a personal explanation and discussion of the dining room with another docent - great fun actually.

Since the rain had calmed by the time we had finished, Francesca drove us around the River Oaks neighbourhood where the Rienzi is located, and we gawped at the ridiculously ginormous mansions built by Houstonians with more money than taste. Some of them were in a kind of American colonial style which at least felt like it had some local roots, but many others were attempting to be French châteaux or Renaissance villas of various kinds... But the best thing of all was their extravagant Halloween decorations!

I think this one is particularly creative...


This one lights up at night and even has ghostly sound effects!

Quite amazing. The amount of money they must spend on these decorations! Other places we saw had dozens of pumpkins of various sizes, some of them huge, 'landscaped' around people's gardens - just left to rot...

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Food waste is a major issue here. I mean it is bad in England, but the portions that they serve you in restaurants here are simply gigantic, and too much for a person to consume in one sitting! If you put your knife and fork down for a pause, a waiter will appear and ask if you are "still working?" - like it is a struggle you are forcing yourself through to eat everything on your plate. I guess it is a form of conspicuous consumption (literally) - but for a state as wealthy as Texas, Houston is not a cheap place to eat out. Or perhaps it's just this area.

I haven't ventured particularly far afield. I did not make it to the Space Center, unsurprisingly. The farthest I have walked is up to the Menil Collection - about half an hour from the hotel - and I am getting to know Montrose Boulevard pretty well, where most of the 'nearby' restaurants are located. What is frustrating is that there are no shops. I can't pop out to buy a bottle of water (and I am not paying $6 for a hotel bottle!) or a coffee or snack. The nearest shop is the drive-thru CVS pharmacy a 15-minute walk away.

Walking is the other thing that's weird - though not quite as bad as our experience in Fort Worth (my previous Texas experience) when walking from Downtown, where we were staying, to the Kimbell Museum where we were installing, which was probably another half hour walk, drivers would pull over and ask us if we were all right! There is certainly no disputing the friendliness or hospitality of Texans. But walking to and from dinner the last few nights, I am pretty much the only person I see on foot. The only other pedestrians are people walking their dogs or out for a run in the cooler evening temperatures.

And it is a bit cooler after Sunday's rainstorm. A little less humid as well. Apparently in the summer they can have 100 degree F and 100% humidity - it must be unbearable. In the high humidity of the first few days I was here, papers I left on my desk were damp when I picked them up.

It is slightly weird to be surrounded by so much Spanish. And that the Latino Spanish here is slightly different from the Castilian I am used to - shifts like elevador rather than ascensor for lift. But the entire service industry is Hispanic - every waitor or anyone you see doing any kind of manual labour, housekeeping in the hotel. The Texas economy would surely collapse without the Latino community, yet anti-immigration nutters want to keep them out.

The other thing I always find weird when I come to the US is the enormous size and great abundance of the churches. I think there is one on each corner, opposite the (metaphorical) Starbucks.

The hotel shuttle service, complete with horned buffalo skull. This service will take you anywhere within a 5 mile radius for free and come and pick you up when you're done. It seems to keep the engine running all day to keep the interior chilled and air conditioned for these Texans who seem to be allergic to warmth...

And last but by no means least, the bonkers Hotel Zaza where I am staying. Check out the website - it really does look like that! It is right next to the museum so it is certainly convenient, but this is a self-conscious rockstar hotel. It also claims to be one of Houston's premier night spots and though I am on the 7th floor, the bar is right below my window and there are speakers out on the pavement, which actually means the disco never stops. I am not exactly sleeping well and this might be why! That or the ridiculous number of pillows on my claw-footed luxury bed - one of two in my room!

Well, it has certainly been an experience. The installation is rather stop-start so I have been catching up with quite a lot of work that I brought with me, which is good. But tomorrow promises to be a busy day - when I need to install more than half of the pieces I am responsible for - and then I am travelling back to Blighty overnight on Thursday, so over and out from Houston.

Howdy from Houston

The fourth largest city in the United States, in terms of population and sprawl, though it doesn't really feel like it from this little pocket of the Museum District, where I am staying for 10 days installing our loans to the Gifts of the Sultan exhibition - which promises to be a visually rich and glamorous show. I arrived in the States on the day that Steve Jobs died and Sarah Palin announced she wasn't running for the White House - both momentous events in their own ways.

It is three years pretty much to the day since I last visited the States, arriving in New York for my six-week fellowship at the Met - what an amazing treat that was - and it is really nice to be here. Houston is perhaps not my number 1 holiday destination, but it is actually surprisingly civilised! There is lots of cultural stuff going on here, including some interesting museums. Also the Rothko Chapel is here, which I have been wanting to visit pretty much all my life, and finally got to yesterday evening after finishing my installation work for the day.

Photo courtesy of the art daily blog

It's a deeply meditative space, and the particular deep purple colour of some of the canvases really draws you in and you start to see mysterious shapes and whole worlds in the brush strokes. I sat in there for half an hour while other visitors came and went in a few minutes. (For more posts on my obsession with Rothko, see here.)

The Rothko Chapel is a small satellite building of the Menil Collection, the private collection especially of modern and contemporary American art formed by the Texan couple John and Dominique de Menil and now housed in a Renzo Piano building and visitable free of charge.


I had a walk around one of the wings, intending to go back up there over the weekend to see the rest of it and visit the other satellites, which include another chapel housing Byzantine frescoes from a church in Cyprus. I was the only person in the galleries for much of the time, apart from the security staff, which was a bit disconcerting, given the quality of the collection.

Unexpected treat: one room of the galleries house alternate canvases for the Rothko Chapel. Different, and I don't know why these weren't used. Up close and in a comparatively small gallery space, the canvases are truly monumental. This is what I was inspired to write in my notebook:

"These have a deep burgundy red and large black squares at the centre. Impenetrable black. You stare up at them - they're giving nothing away. In fact they seem to be staring back at you. They're Giants. Like Gods. But implacable, not benevolent. Is this the revelation that drove Rothko to suicide?"

I find I can't get away from thinking about his death when I look at his paintings - especially topical since the Rothko Chapel was dedicated a year after he died.

The de Menils also bought up houses in the neighbourhood surrounding their museum building which are all painted the same shade of 'Menil grey' and it has a really nice feel - traditional clapboard houses, quite small, but cosy-looking. A nicer area to walk around than the gigantic villas in some of the other residential parts of Houston!

I think K will probably want to live here...

I walked from here to meet some of my fellow couriers at the 'English pub', The Black Labrador, which has a red telephone box out front and a mannequin dressed up as a Beefeater inside! After that we went to Nelore Churrascaria, a Brazilian steakhouse, for dinner - which was an expensive but rather amazing experience! The waiters wander around with massive skewers of differently prepared meats and if you turn the card on your table over to green - for go! - they keep coming by (it's all you can eat) and slicing off bits from their skewer which you grab with little tongs. It was delicious but filling, though some people were really letting their plates pile up!

This was the prime sirloin - house specialty apparently!

Well I had better get on with the day, or I will miss the hotel breakfast! I haven't really figured out what I am doing today - K is insistent that I visit the Space Center, but it is 25 miles outside of Houston and there just seems no feasible way of getting there by public transport! I will think about it over a cup of coffee... More anon.

The Challenges of Home Ownership, Part 2: The Plumbing

And in case you missed the first part - the hilarious and heart-warming story of the pigeon which got stuck up our chimney - you can catch up here.

Monday was our 6-month anniversary in the new flat - I think it's safe to say that we feel pretty well at home here now (though it took longer than I thought it would), but one thing that has been the bane of our lives - and I can't believe we actually managed to put up with it for 6 months - has been the barely-functioning shower. The bathroom is small - when the flats were built, around 1902 - the bathroom, well toilet I should say, was in an outhouse out back. Anyway this means there is not much room and the vendors took out the bath and installed a shower cubicle - ie there is no other means of washing, apart from a flannel in the washbasin and water all over the floor. The bathroom was one of the last rooms the vendors did up before selling on the flat, and it is barely a year old - when I first saw the flat, it looked far too glamorous for us, with stone and tile and mirrors everywhere and a shower like you might expect to find in a 5-star hotel.

They warned us about the fact that when you turn it on, you have to run it for a goodly while before enough water started to flow to actually shower in. To start with this meant running it for about 10 minutes, but gradually it got worse, meaning we often needed to leave it running for half an hour before enough water was flowing to wash in. I hated the waste of water. And even once it did start flowing, it kept cutting to a heavy flow of cold water, which meant you had to leap out of the way and squeeze into the corner of the cubicle, until it started flowing warm again. For a while this was preceded by a noise in the pipes - an increase in pressure or something I suppose - which forewarned you that the cold was coming, a bit like the noise the Fireswamp makes in The Princess Bride before it incinerates you.

Basically after a few months of this, the hot water stopped flowing all together and turned into a dribble, which alternated with a heavy flow of cold water. For a moment when the hot dribble turned into cold flow or vice versa there would be a flow of hot water, for about a millisecond, which is when you could rinse shampoo or conditioner from your hair - though I am not sure it ever really got properly wet!

And that is how we have been washing ourselves for the last few months, often ending up leaving late for work as it has taken so long to have a shower in the morning. And this is not for want of trying to get it fixed. The most frustrating thing about it all has been the difficulty of getting a plumber to come and look at it, to diagnose the problem, and of course we had no clue - the frustration of learning what you don't know about when you own a place... I made contact, one way or another, with about 5 different plumbers, got 5 different opinions on what the problem was, made arrangements to come and look at it which were never honoured. I learnt that the good plumbers don't need to call you back, because they have no shortage of work. The recommendation from our old neighbour Sue of Martin the Polish Plumber eventually paid off - but having called, texted and emailed, when I finally succeeded in speaking to him, he was about to head to Poland for the summer!

In the end, he was here until 10pm last night, and touch wood, it now seems to be working. You turn the shower on and - miracle of miracles! - water comes out and it's hot and it keeps coming out and it stays hot! The problem was differential pressures for the hot water (coming from the mains) and the cold water (coming from a tank in the roof), and he tried a series of things until one of them worked. Counter-intuitively a pressure-reducing valve for the hot, to try to level out the pressure - and then simplest of all solutions, installing a brand-new shower and tap which were suited for low water pressure. It seems the vendors had installed high pressure taps.

Sorry to go on about this, but it has been a real nightmare, and stupidly difficult to get sorted out! But hopefully normal life can now resume, and we can turn our thoughts to all the other things we want to do in the flat that we haven't been thinking about with the part of our brains consumed by shower frustration - like putting up some pictures!

A Week at the Edinburgh Festival

Just back from a week in Edinburgh, visiting my sister, celebrating my birthday, and Doing the Festival! This is what we did, each with a mini-review in case you're thinking of going to any of them yourself:

Monday:
Walked along the Water of Leith to Dean Village (beautiful) to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to see the exhibitions of new work by Hiroshi Sugimoto and a retrospective of drawings and sculptures by Tony Cragg. Thumbs up for Sugimoto (who I like anyway) especially for Lightning Fields, which manages to capture forms from bursts of energy which seem to be alive, like weird sea creatures from the bottom of the ocean... Photogenic Drawing (blow up prints of Fox Talbot images from the 1840s) seemed more of an academic experiment. Take-it-or-leave-it thumbs for Tony Cragg - I like those weird sculptures that look like lots of faces in profile but after a while it is all the same.

Midnight till 2 am: 'Political Animal' at The Stand, politically satirical stand-up hosted by Andy Zaltzman. His bits in between the guests were the best and funniest thing about it so if you're not sure and don't want to stay out late then I'd go for his 'Armchair Revolutionary' show instead! But it fulfilled all my expectations of the Fringe! Late night comedy stand up in basement bars... So worth it for the experience alone.

Tuesday:
'The Proceedings of that Night': Excellent. This will probably turn up on Radio 4 at some point. Short single-hander play about an actor recording a ghost story for radio, inexplicably all alone late at night in an isolated recording studio... As he reads it the ghost story starts to fight back. Truly spooky!

'Blood and Roses': also really good. A promenade play, where we turned up to a meeting point in St George's West church and were given headsets to listen as the play played out in our heads, while we followed an usher who led us round nearby streets and into spookily dressed staged spaces. A love story through different times and places, with some witches thrown in for good measure.

Wednesday:
'The Queen: Art and Image' at the Scottish National Gallery. Not that I'm a patriot but I thought this was a really interesting exhibition - about celebrity, the developing image of the Queen over the long period of her reign, how this image is manipulated according to political events or popular opinion, especially the need to make her increasing accessible to her subjects... Plus many of the world's greatest artists have photographed or painted the Queen and there were some iconic and beautiful images. In particular I was struck by 'Lightness of Being' by Chris Levine (do a Google Image search), the accidental portrait taken while the Queen rested her eyes between long exposures while he worked on the actual portrait. Both are in the show and are holographic, so the reproductions don't really capture how the images follow you around the room...

Explored the craft market in the graveyard of St Johns church. Bought a cheese knife with a handle made from bracingly scented juniper wood as a memento.

National Museum of Scotland - which has recently reopened its doors after a major refurbishment lasting more than a decade I think. They have done major work on restoring the Victorian building, and the natural history displays are spectacular - particularly as they have a contemporary feel yet are inspired by the original Victorian approach - and I spent quite a lot of time in there. However I found the rest of it - the, er, art - disappointing and I am sorry to say the Islamic displays were risible.

Thursday:
A discussion at the Book Festival about Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, marking the centenary of his birth this year. This was K's choice and it was nice to do something at the book festival - most of the interesting talks were happening the following week... I hadn't read any Czeslaw Milosz - had hardly even heard of him - but it was a really interesting session, with some of his poetry read out, in English translation as well as in the original Polish, and I certainly will investigate him now.

'The Conference of the Birds': this was Isla's choice, a student production (we had had lunch that day with the Islamic history tutor of some of them!) which used a lot of physical theatre to depict this allegory of the world's birds undergoing trials and tribulations while they search for their king, the Simurgh (for which, read God). But it was really well done, and really nice to see something quite experimental - took me back to my own days of student theatre.

Friday:
My birthday! I am officially in my late 30s now. We took a trip to the seaside - driving along the East Lothian coast to Gullane where we had a wonderful 2-hour walk along its sandy beaches and back along its dunes, before heading for North Berwick for lunch - a feast of lobster and chips from the wonderful and much-to-be-recommended Lobster Shack at the harbour... We saw the lobsters being delivered (still alive of course) so they were totally fresh and absolutely delicious!



Pudding was Signor Luca ice cream (made with all local ingredients) while sitting on the sea wall looking out to the sheer rockfaces of the Bass Rock with its colony of tens of thousands of seabirds... It was gorgeously sunny and warm so K and I got a bit burned while Isla just went a deeper brown as she always does!

Back to Edinburgh in time to see 'Cowboys and Aliens' at the cinema - there was some low-brow activity as well!

Saturday:
'Me, Myself and Miss Gibbs': a really original show put together by Francesca Millican-Slater, which tells the story of a postcard she picked up in a junk shop in Devon, sent on 15 July 1910 to a Miss L. Gibbs, instructing her to 'Be Careful Tomorrow'. Francesca became obsessed by the postcard and about trying to track down Miss Gibbs and why she should be careful tomorrow... It was a really interesting little detective story, beautifully presented (best use of an OHP I've ever seen I think), told from the perspective of her personal journey to find out what she did, how she felt about the 'historical stalking' she was doing, who she met along the way... Really excellent.

After this we wandered up to the Farmers' Market on Castle Terrace, catching it just before everyone packed up for the day, and had the most amazing Aberdeen Angus beefburgers! Followed, somewhat later, after some lazy wandering and provision-purchasing (can't leave Scotland without some hot-smoked salmon, though the preferred Hebridean Smokehouse variety - smoked in peat, yum! - was not in evidence), by a tray of macaroons at Valvona & Crolla's VinCaffè...


That evening, opening night of 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' at King's Theatre. This was the only thing we did as part of the actual, original 'International Festival'. My sister and I both really loved Haruki Murakami's book, though K hadn't read it so I think he spent most of the performance wondering what on earth was going on. It was really well produced and staged, with lots of interesting projection and puppetry, and I enjoyed the mix of Japanese and English language... K said the next day that the memory of the performance seemed like a hallucination which was exactly the nature of the book, so an amazing achievement, really, to capture its surreal nature.

There was much more food, drink, meeting up with friends, chatting, walking, exploring my sister's new neighbourhood (she now has her own flat off Leith Walk)... It was exhilarating and exhausting! Back to work for a rest!

Five days later

This was Foot Locker in Brixton on Wednesday morning, totally torched in the riots on Sunday night. There were a couple of crime scene investigators still at work on it, but by the end of the day it was being boarded up. Many of the shopfronts on the high street have their windows boarded up now, so you are faced with a cityscape of plywood when you walk down into town, but otherwise everything seems totally back to normal.

Everyone is sharing experiences - you overhear snatches of conversation in the market. We chatted with our upstairs neighbours, who were much more alert than us and started noticing via online forums that it was all kicking off in Brixton on Sunday night. One of them is a journalist and actually went out and had a wander around - he said that the mood was more like a carnival than anything particularly aggressive, but he was depressed about the fact that most of the kids doing the looting were young teens. The other neighbour said she had looked out of her front window at one point and seen kids running down our street laden with flat-screen TVs and other gear from Currys round the corner. She had heard, though, that these kids were subsequently mugged by older kids with guns - kind of worrying to have confirmed so baldly what you have always suspected about the neighbourhood but never really wanted to think about.

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On a lighter note... Because K was working at home today, we went and had lunch in Brixton Village, fulfilling our resolution to always have lunch in the market when we're around (more usually at the weekend).

View down 4th Avenue, with the quirky lampshade installation designed by local artist, Charlotte Squire, who has her studio in the market. Read more about the work here.

Last autumn I blogged about the total transformation of Brixton Village, but didn't know much about it at the time. I now know it's the amazingly successful result of a deliberate policy of regeneration, the brainchild of an agency called Spacemakers that hasn't been going for long but specialises in urban regeneration projects: you can read about their project for Brixton Village here. That part of the market was so rundown that parts of it were derelict, but they arranged with the council and the property managers to let out 20 market stalls rent-free for three months, and held an open evening to attract interest, which was massive. They allocated the stalls to independent small businesses run by local people or who would source their supplies, especially food, locally, and only agreed to projects which would not threaten the already-existing shops and stalls. And now it is totally buzzing!

We have been back many times since, and it seems like there are new places every time we go. We try to eat at a different place every time: we've tried Etta's Seafood, Cornercopia, though I must admit we have been three times to Kaosan, a really delicious little Thai place which was highly rated by the Observer's restaurant critic, Jay Rayner, also a local resident (we used to see him taking his kids to school when we lived on Brixton Hill). The first time we went it was empty - just us and a second table were occupied - but ever since his rave review, the place has been totally packed and you're lucky to get a table! (They do really gorgeous lemongrass tea)


Today we tried the Japanese place, Okan, which specialises in okonomiyaki, Japanese street food - which I had eaten in Japan and it tasted just as good and delicious here in Brixton. I love how all these restaurants have benches outside, and you can watch the market life going on around you. It's really nice to go on a Friday, when it is quieter anyway but feels like locals only, whereas on Saturdays now the market is full of people who come in from outside Brixton - we've even spotted some tourists! It's all great for the local economy (though I know some fear it heralds gentrification - though actually Brixton has always been pretty wealthy and gentrified, until the post-war years...) but it is also nice to feel you're a local there.

And supporting your local businesses and community seems like the right thing to do at the moment, after the trauma of the riots.