Tonight was the Philharmonia Orchestra’s memorial concert for Sir Charles Mackerras. I have to say, I’ve rarely been to such an awesome concert. To start with, it was HUGE. A massive programme – 2 intervals – and everything was just perfect. Add to musical perfection the vast numbers of Mackerras family who turned up – Djelibeybi’s sister worked out that there were representatives from every branch of the family there, which is really saying something, including several who had come over from Australia just for the concert. So lovely to see everyone. And great to see Alex (Briger) conduct in a concert hall again – I’ve only seen him once before (conducting Mahler, and actually making him plausible, which in my book is a vast achievement as usually I’m bored witless 5 minutes in) as mostly we see him conducting opera. And he did a fantastic job of Charlie’s Cunning Little Vixen suite, the final scene of the same opera and then an absolutely sparkling rendition of the overture to Pineapple Poll as an encore. A very fitting memorial. Charlie would have loved it.

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With parents gone to the Isle of Wight and Djeli home with man-flu, I decided to take a mental duvet-day myself. Watched TV (finally saw An American Werewolf in London), tended to Djeli’s needs for lemonade and Lemsip, went to my physio appointment and knitted a bit. The hat’s nearly complete now but, alas, I have run out of yarn with a mere 5 very short rows to go, so it’s on hold now till I can go out and buy a little more.

Oh! And I also made the Buttermilk Oaten Bread out of my new Teatime Baking cookbook. Verdict: Excellent flavour, but oven is totally mad. Before it burnt everything. This time it never even reached the temperature on the dial so the loaves didn’t cook through properly and ended up a little doughy. Flavour really good though, so they’re definitely worth another try.

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Low-achievement day today – I went to the dentist for a check-up and to see what’s going on with this tiny abcess I’ve had on my gum, coming and going in the same spot for about a year and a half. Last time she gave me antibiotics which didn’t really do anything, and this time *sigh* she did a full-mouth x-ray and discovered that a filling my Australian dentist did was drilled too close to the nerve, so it’s irritating the nerve which is causing the abcess. So I need root canal. *waaah!* On the plus side, there’s nothing actually wrong with my teeth, which is kind of comforting. Anyway, the whole experience kind of put me in a little grey hole. So I baked brownies for a lovely friend who my parents are meeting up with while they’re away. Hope they turned out OK. This oven’s really quite insane…

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And good golly, it’s been a long time since we just hung out together on our own. Parents went off to see the London Wetlands Centre (and gave it two very enthusiastic thumbs up – must get there sometime) and I did some doodling about trying to make the notes I have turn into a proper opening for the quintet (fail) then Djeli and I sauntered into town to inspect microwaves. We didn’t actually buy anything, but we came away with knowledge and a ball of wool for me to knit myself a therapeutic hat with (Auntie Madge’s Wisp scarf is driving me insane – the point at which I thought I’d nearly finished turned out to only be halfway there so I need something different to knit – a quick win – before I start in on my mother’s scarf which is a chunky-weight chenille version of the Wisp pattern). Then Djeli made his fantastic shepherd’s pie for us for dinner and we all watched My Family and Other Animals and then Slumdog Millionaire. All in all, a tip-top day

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A pretty good day, aided by excellent coffee (Monmouth), superb cheese (Neal’s Yard Stinking Bishop – wow!) and some great shops where I didn’t buy an orange overcoat, £30 vintage leather jacket or the score of Martinu’s Sextet. Very restrained of me, I think.

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My Da’s birthday! And the first I’ve got to spend with him in 6 years! He asked to go to the Tate, so we trundled off, late as always, and just sauntered about the hallowed halls. I got my card replaced (seeing as I never got the other one because they’d written down the wrong address for me) so we’ll actually be able to get to the Gaugain sometime soon.

We had lunch at Paul by St Paul’s, sitting outside in the sun.

The Da found a painting by Cy Twombly that I hadn’t seen before, which he didn’t much care for but which kind of blew me away – huge swirls of bright red paint on an oatmeal-coloured background (sort of the colour of our walls – wish Twombly’d come and do something like this on them!). And the paint had been allowed to drip down from the top of each loop, so it was a bit like standing inside a thicket of fiery willows. LOVED it.

And then we got home far too late and I proceeded to cook a roast paprika & lemon chicken (which took far longer than it ought thanks to the vagaries of this oven) with roast potato, sweet potato and garlic, followed by homemade chocolate cake with extra thick double cream. The masses had to wait a long time for their dinner but ultimately they seemed to think it was worth it.

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Tomorrow is the last day of my contract at LBi. I’m really sad to be leaving – absolutely love my colleagues to bits, have had an awesome time with the team I’m on, done a bunch of work and learnt soooooo much, as I do every time I’m at LBi. On the flip side, though, I’m looking forward to having a chance to rest and mend the ankle properly, work on some personal projects (finishing caitlinrowley.com, finishing writing my book and turning Deconstruct: Point, line, plane into an orchestral piece for starters) and hang out with my parents for a few months. Anyway, it wouldn’t have seemed right to have left without some sort of baking extravaganza, so last night I made brownies (because a largish chunk of Team ID seem to be taking long weekends this week and won’t be in tomorrow) and tonight have made a vanilla butter cake with Mexican vanilla buttercream frosting, to be decorated with sparkly red edible glitter I think that makes for a suitable farewell cake!

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It seems quite hard to believe, really, that I’ve never experienced a sushi train before. They always intimidated me a bit because I’m not terribly familiar with Japanese food, plus I’m a fussy eater, so grabbing random dishes without really knowing what they are kind of put me off a little. But it was great! We ordered a dish each of chicken katsu, and pulled a few random things off the train (unidentifiable squishy balls of… something, some salmon teriyaki, a raw fish and broccolini thing, custard-filled pancakes with raspberry sauce and a little fruit salad) – most enjoyable!

Afterwards we wandered through Hyde Park with the World’s Best Ex-Boss chatting about this, that and the other – old friends, web CMSes we have known, HTML 5 and mobile web dev, among other topics. Really perked me up.

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at lunchtime, with a friend – the longest I’ve done since the accident – just over 4km!! I tested out the My Tracks application on my phone too – very cool! Showed where we’d been, how far it was, how long, how fast we walked – all sorts of things!

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Met up with a friend in Notting Hill for the Grand National and a meal (it started out as being supposed to be brunch, but can it really be brunch at 5pm?) – we wandered around a bit and ended up playing Uno in a gelato shop. Totally revitalising

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