Eggciting

I've been drinking tea and eating cake pretty solidly all day. Looks like I might need to fast all day tomorrow to keep the weight loss going in the right direction! 

Still, it's my day off, I've been working really hard, I've been with friends, and when confronted by  a beautiful banana loaf, it's rude to turn one's nose up!

The day started in a greasy spoon with the lovely Michelle, who stopped off in Highgate for a cup of tea and a gossip on her way to her singing lesson with Jem up the road.

We went to the greasy spoon for breakfast. Poached eggs. Lovely. 

Nathan's sister, Sam, arrived just after we'd started rushing around the house, trying to tidy up because we were so embarrassed at the mess it was in when we woke up. There were heaps of clothes in every corner and massive piles of crockery waiting to be washed up. It looked like an episode from a documentary about hoarders. Mortifying. 

We whisked Sam off to Julie and other Sam's house in Catford where craft and cake was being held, and sat in the garden whilst the sun baked our foreheads and hundreds of bees and butterflies buzzed and fluttered around the flowers. I adore bees, but the most exciting sight of the day was almost certainly the Peacock butterfly which seemed to be having a lovely time on the raspberry bush. Peacock butterflies were a fairly regular sight during my childhood but I haven't seen one for years. I felt rather privileged.

When the heat had evaporated from the day, we went upstairs and watched the final of Britain's Got Talent. I was thrilled to see the act from Hungary winning; another finger in the eye to dreadful xenophobic campaigns run by trashy newspapers about Britain (and Britain's Got Talent) belonging to the British. Highlight of the evening, however, was undoubtedly the arrival of a violinist from the onstage "orchestra" throwing eggs at Simon Cowell whilst laughing like a loon. No doubt some kind of protest against the quality of music in these talent shows. I know quite a lot of those string players and they get treated pretty badly by big labels and these large talent shows. I've heard stories of viola players being taken out of ensembles cus "their violins look too big" or because they're not pretty enough and heard shocking tales of players going unpaid because concerts have gone bust and record labels haven't honoured payments.

We've just seen a trailer for the film about Liberace starring Michael Douglas. It looks particularly entertaining and I'm told Douglas is astonishing. I just asked my friend Tina, who's sitting next to me, if she'd like to come to see it with me. "I don't really do cinemas," she said, "they make me fall asleep." I started laughing. "No" she said, "it's terrible. I'm not lying when I say I saw Groundhog Day five times!" I laughed like a drain.