The light on the Heath

Today started, rather surreally, in the bath, listening to the live stream of an early morning gig by goth rockers, Placebo. Plainly, I wouldn't normally kick things off with indie rock, but Fiona plays and tours with the band and sent an early doors text to say she was going to be on the radio, so I tuned in. I was rather pleased that I had. They're a really tight band, they make an incredibly exciting sound and front man, Brian Molko was making some wonderfully sardonic quips. It was just so bizarre to be listening to them with my bowl of Frosted Shreddies. And PS - Frosted Shreddies are minging. We bought them by mistake and it's like eating Stevia-coated cardboard. They have the after taste of Diet Coke. Thank God we're nearly through them!

I've been slowly coming down with a cold all day. I woke up sneezing, assuming I had some sort of bizarre Autumnal hay fever and was perversely quite relieved when I started to get a sore throat, dry lips and a hot forehead!

I don't feel I've achieved a great deal. I worked on Em, I practised the piano, I went to the gym, I did a shed load of admin relating to an agent I'm about to sign with...

Fiona met us in the early evening, and we had a somewhat magical stroll across the Heath. Standing at the top of Parliament Hill as the sun set was a proper treat. We took photographs with the mirrored back of Fiona's iPhone reflecting the sun and generating massive flares across the camera lens. The glass buildings of Canary Wharf on the horizon were glowing, first orange, then red, and then a sort of pinky-mauve. At one point we joked that they looked as though they were on fire. I took a picture to send to Brother Edward to see if the buildings looked as luminous in close-up. He was in the middle of a Spanish lesson at the time, but agreed that the photograph had made the buildings look rather beautiful.

We walked down to the toy boating lake where they've been doing extensive landscaping over the past year to create a set of ponds which wouldn't cause a catastrophic flood should an abnormal amount of rain fall on the Heath in a short period of time, as happened in 1975, when the ponds turned inside out and flooded scores of neighbouring houses so badly that people actually drowned in their basements!

What they've done is really very attractive. They've made one of the ponds a great deal larger, and created an island with trees on it which used to be by the side of the pond. It's going to be a wonderful safe haven for wildlife.

We had a lovely tea at the Turkish restaurant in South End Green. There was much hellim (which is the Turkish equivalent of halloumi) and borek, which, in Turkey, has an unpronounceable name, with far too many letters in it!