Hypatia Avenue

You Can Read The News Or Make The News... You Can't Do Both

Hello, it's me! I am alive, I am well, I am brimming with tales of adventures and activities that have kept me from adding to my series of The Happy on Hypatia Avenue and generally brain-dumping here. I think I'm spreading myself rather thin as I have recently discovered that Twitter and Facebook can actually be good for new friends and very old, long-lost friends that I thought were lost to me forever but are actually only a few clicks away on a social networking site. I'm also still very involved with Londonist and the dayjob which is inching ever closer to the exciting new offices so I'm spending leisure time offline more often than online, just to allow myself to recover from intensive form-filling, spreadsheets, charts, minutes from meetings and seating plans. I close my eyes and see those seating plans.

A list then, for the memories when I come back here on a quiet day and wonder what I got up to as the seasons turned from autumn to very distinctly winter...
... I went to the Francis Bacon exhibition, the Turner Prize and the Rothko: I was deeply moved, indifferent and frustrated, baffled and awed respectively
... I embraced nature and went for a long walk in the soggy autumnal woods around Stanmore and Harrow, visiting Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan's house and saw the lake where he died
... made new friends at a graveyard where there were readings of ghost stories and far too much free rum punch and then pubs with ridiculously priced but oh so tempting Talisker whisky
... sewed black velvet bean bags for a different set of new friends with immense pride and a surprising amount of sewing skill
... finished reading Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago and only fully enjoyed the last 50 pages; also read The Alice B Toklas Cookbook and loved it from the first to the last page
... I saw a one-woman performance based on The Alice B Toklas Cookbook and ate sandwiches, drank very good white wine and took great delight in the Gertrude Stein puppet that was wheeled on stage then beaten up by a frustrated, suppressed Alice
... I've seen plays and written reviews, I've coached new writers onto Londonist and watched them flourish
... I've cooked, I've read about cooking, I've talked about cooking and I have also dreamed of cooking. I think I'm obsessed - and I'm not resisting it
... I've been very happy and busy and happy to be busy

I'll be back, I'll write more, with links and photos, once the giddy whirl has slowed down a bit. Until then, hold tight - we're off into adventures again!