Just checking ...

Hello dear reader,

I'm just checking that you've seen I'm after your money ... please! from a short while ago in which I grovellingly try to solicit money from you for a worthy cause.

• Sorry it's a bit unglamorous, just some Ugandan kid with smashed-up legs and a surgical bill. I mean, who cares about him, right?
• Obviously I would rather be trying to help fund heritage cinemas or establish a better walking route through the wildflower meadows of the West Midlands Orchid Preservation Zone, while amusingly discussing the government's latest faux pas over a balsamic latte in the intellectual hotbeds of Muswell Hill. Nevertheless, some tiresome little Imp of the Right Shoulder is telling me I have to have another bash at this and so, darlings, despite the tedium, I'm asking you to have a quick dekko.
• I promise that normal service will soon be resumed and I will stop trying to be nice or anything. See it as just a temporary aberration, OK?
• If you have already coughed up please accept my thanks, and sorry for bothering you again.
• If you do go and look at the post, please also look at the comment where I explain what to do about the Zip code on the donation form if you're not in the USA.

Thanks!
Thanks a lot!!
Thanks a big lot!!!

Bl**dy English weather!!

OK I'm sorry about Corfu. I promise: I'm sorry, OK??

You've made your point. Now enough. Really.

Location:Buckingham Rd,Tottenham,United Kingdom

It's my best friend's birthday today!

xxxxx

:)

Location:Parkfield St,Islington,United Kingdom

Brilliant!

There's an interesting-looking fish restaurant, "Fish Fish" on Archway Road, on the corner of one of its eastern junctions, maybe Causton Road or Cromwell Avenue.

It would be an excellent place for a rendezvous. Why? Because instead of any more complex description, or even its name, you would merely have to say, "I'll meet you in the place with the lighthouse on the roof." That should pretty much clinch it, I feel. In Highgate, anyway.

I think we will probably have to go and eat there, even though I am weird about fish. How could you not want to? It's got a lighthouse on the roof! I mean, come on.

Note: it was apparently called - and I know this is going to come as a bit of a shock - The Lighthouse when it opened, but since then the proprietor has massively expanded his restaurant empire and has this branch and another in Temple Fortune, that legendary destination in the far far west. Since I started writing this on the 43 this morning, I've looked at the website and, more particularly, the menu, and we are not probably, but definitely, going to have to give it a go. Oh yes.

Blogging

I find myself in a strange situation this morning. Some readers of this blog will know that the Infanta Marfs has been away gap-yearing in Africa for, er, a year.

I should write about this; that's not, though, what I'm thinking about right now - it's a big topic. No, it's something rather lower-level than that, more of a side-effect.

Briefly: while Marfs was in Africa I wrote to her every week. I got - surprise! - a bit obsessional about this, feeling that I must do it. It would be possible to debate endlessly the rights and wrongs of this but don't worry: I'm not going to right now.

What it does mean though is that with Martha home I'm currently sitting on the bus with a slightly odd, empty feeling where I would have usually been working on a letter. It turns out that letter-writing is quite time-consuming. Well, duh, indeed.

So, to cut a long story short, do I enjoy a bit of a break from the slightly driven feeling of needing to write something every day(ish) or do I try to rechannel the "spare" energy (if that's what it is) into something else? Or some perhaps-uneasy compromise between the two? And what's the "something else"? It could be this blog, or that difficult zeroth novel, or job applications or … whatever. Tsk, decisions decisions. I have lots of thoughts and no plans. We shall consider this matter. In the meantime, please have a nice cup of tea and a ginger snap.


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Mobile, hence terse.

Location:London,United Kingdom

Nottenham

The location tools on my iPhone think that a LOT of places are in Tottenham. It's most odd.

I have moaned at Google about their mapping, which I think is the root of the problem: the blogging app on the iPhone picks the text up from its location services and somewhere in Google maps it thinks - I conjecture - that most or all of Haringey is Tottenham. I did get an acknowledgement saying they'd deal with it but on past performance this could take, literally, years.

In the meantime, it doesn't really matter that much, which is fortunate. I think the location data is sometimes fun but never important. Please accept my apologies if you're annoyed by this silly inaccuracy.


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Mobile, hence terse.

Location:Archway Rd,Islington,United Kingdom