Making crowns

I have pretty much spent the entire day with other people. I did a morning of work before Philippa and my god daughter, Deia, came up to Highgate to meet me for lunch. We ate at Papa Dels. A nice plate of pasta. Then Philippa went up to the Village to have her teeth whitened whilst I took Deia back to our house to do some crafting.

I like crafting. We made crowns out of wire and then coated them with papier-mâché made from different coloured tissue papers. One for Deia and one for Deia's sister, Silver. We had a lovely, messy time, and I thought the crowns looked really rather good at the end. I am so paranoid when dealing with young people, however. I spent about half an hour coating all the wire with layers of masking tape in case any of the joins had sharp edges!

It was a lovely day, so I stuck some sun cream on Deia's face and arms and we took ourselves to Highgate Woods for a walk and a lollipop. We played I Spy and I showed her the tree stump where the bumble bee nest used to be. We walked into the cafe in the middle of the wood via its little garden and were instantly confronted by about eight enormous black dogs. Each seemed more enormous and blacker than the one before. I'm really not a natural parent. It didn't strike me that the dogs might frighten little Deia who was about the same height as one of them! It was only when I turned around to open the gate that I saw she was trying to keep as far away from them as possible with a slight look of panic in her eye. I asked if she was okay. She pretended to be brave.

We walked across the glade to the wonderful adventure playground in the wood, which I'd obviously never explored before. It's full of rope swings, wooden climbing frames and zip wires. And who should be walking past with his son, Flynn, but Mr James Fortune. We had a wonderful time together, swinging and sliding, and catching up on old news. James has terrible hay fever at the moment, which made me realise that Nathan hasn't been as bad as usual this year. That's what you get for a crappy summer!

Philippa arrived with teeth gleaming like sticks of chewing gum. Actually, she looked fabulous. I was assuming they were going to make her look like something from The Only Way Is Essex, but her teeth looked subtly white and very healthy. Now I want to have my teeth whitened!

The crew departed at about six, and, at just gone seven Harrison from the cast of Brass came over for a natter about his exciting forthcoming finals project which is related to Brass. We ate pasta for tea and it was only when I started tucking in that I realised it was my second pasta dish of the day!