Saturday, May 06, 2006

Home and away

Dominic, Jonathan and Brigit at Brockwell Park.
Birthday girl Georgie, with Dom and Jonathan.A few weeks ago, we took a stuffed bread antipasto picnic to Brockwell Park with Brigit and Dominic, and lounged round on the grass. Having found a taste for that, Dom invited us round for a picnic in the sun at a park across the road from his place in Forest Hill, then we did an indoor picnic for Georgie's 29th birthday - Kiwiana pav (with sliced kiwis on top) courtesy of Brigit, choccie cake and bacon and egg pie by Georgie.
Jonathan does The Shining in Hampton Court maze.And Georgie frolics by the fountain.
The weather is really picking up now, so on Monday Georgie and I paid a visit to Hampton Court Palace and the maze. There was a demonstration of Tudor cooking - beef and leek pies, essentially - but we were happy to stick to our packed picnic lunch in the gardens. By mid-week it was hitting 24 degrees Celsius. I was able to enjoy a coffee in the sun off Oxford St, but Georgie had to work.

And here are some more cellphone shots ...
Ben and Georgie and an iPod mini, at a pub on the bank of the Thames at Hammersmith.Gaye and Jonathan, across the table at the pub.
Jonathan. Outside Alpha House.Cooking. In kitchen. At home.

[Working title]

Jonathan. In Bath. The town. Fish and chips in St Johns RoadWe do have jobs you know. It's just that we don't usually have a digital camera with us to record them. Yay, then, for cellphone cameras. That one on the left is me stopping in for fish and chips in St John's Road, Clapham Junction, partway through a day researching food packaging dates in supermarkets, or cosmetics price-fixing (article here), or something along those lines for the Sunday Times. Above right is me paying a visit to the lovely old cathedral town of Bath to interview someone for the Herald on Sunday. It was a nice day, the interview went well, and I was enjoying myself - though you'd hardly know it from the dour look on my face. A Hummer, about 15 metres long, outside the World Snooker Championships at the Crucible in Sheffield. And down here on the right is just last week in Sheffield for the Sunday Times, chasing down foreign criminals who should have been deported (article here). I know, the photo at the top right looks more like a dodgy foreign crim than the one down here. That's actually a stretched Hummer, about 15 metres long, parked outside the Crucible in Sheffield where they were playing the World Snooker Championships. And rather conveniently, I had the odd bit of down time when I was able to sit in the sun in the square watching the semi-finals on a big screen.

Georgie and her Hackney Hubby.Georgie and the most tidily stacked recycling bin ever.Yay, also, for prof- essional photo- graphers, like the one who took these shots of Georgie and put them on three metre wide illuminated billboards all over Hackney for a council recycling campaign. That's her Hackney hubby in two of the shots. I didn't see the billboards till I visited Hackney for the first time for Georgie's farewell drinks from the council, and afterwards she and her workmates gave me a tour past the billboards. I never thought I'd see Georgie three metres wide. Dear reader, I can't offer you that spectacle, but if you click on the images (as with most of the images on this blog) you should at least get something approaching full screen.
The neighbourhood that recycles together...

Georgie is enjoying her new job as PR manager at Zone Vision - so much so that today (Saturday) she's hopped on a launch down the Thames to Greenwich to have lunch with her boss, Kevyn, and her predecessor in the job, Jane. On Wednesday she is off to Milan for three days' work, which will involve plenty of time for shopping and sightseeing. And I've been keeping reasonably busy writing for the Sunday Times (1,2,3,4,5) here (as well as the Guardian (1,2,3,4) and the Financial Times occasionally), and the Herald on Sunday (1,2,3) and Sunday Star-Times back in New Zealand.