Numbers

Hello dear stranger! How are you? These joyful Christmas photographs were taken about 18 months ago. Wait. No, they were taken only three weeks ago. How is that even possible?

How was your Christmas (if Christmas is your thing)? Ours was really lovely, full of friends dropping by and delicious food and very excited children and at least one new tradition.

How was your New Year (if you mark your days by the Gregorian Calendar)? Ours was… actually, we were all in bed before the New Year clicked over. I heard the fireworks, though. And they sounded pretty impressive.

A month ago I took a little break from this blog to catch up on some writing and painting and other life tasks that were building up in the spare-room cupboard of my mind (turns out there’s a fine line between clutter and hoarding, even when it comes to internal to-do lists).

Somewhat predictably, I failed to complete everything on the list. But here’s what I have managed to do since we were all last here:

1 Christmas done and dusted, in a most enjoyable fashion

1/2 a turkey roasted to perfection

28 mail-art letters sent to blog readers

34 replies made to recent mail

5 fruit mince tarts consumed

1 truly adorable letter sent to Father Christmas

3 days spent in Bendigo, pretending be tourists

7 (min) walks of the dog per week (that is a record, post-kids)

15 letters posted regarding a super-secret project for my father’s upcoming birthday (I’d love to say more but he reads this blog. Hi Dad!)

27 hours spent on other elements of said super-secret birthday project

8 times Mr B's favourite Elvis record ("Elvis sings Flaming Star”) was played

3 mojitos on a 43-degree day

43 dumplings drizzled with soy sauce

2 visits to the gym

11 hours spent playing tea parties and constructing toy train-sets

11,400 words of my “new motherhood” e-book written

2 illustrations completed for the e-book

136 pages into the book I’m kind-of reading. I’ve really lost steam on this one

1 dear friend giving birth to a beautiful baby girl

90 cups of tea and 30 coffees, down the hatch

How are YOU? How is your summer going? Or your winter, depending on where you are right now? What do you have planned to 2015? Is it too late to talk about plans and resolutions and fresh starts? Does the year feel tired and middle-aged to you already? I hope not.

I haven’t made a New Year’s resolution since I was about 12, but I have made some exciting plans for the year, and I can’t wait to share them with you as we go along. See you tomorrow. It’s good to be back!

14 tips for a first birthday party

A first birthday is tricky, you know, because you can't focus on the child's age. So you can't plan party games because they'll most likely be too old for some of the kids and too young for the others; but you can't have no games at all because then you'll have a lot of bored kids (and nobody wants that).

Same goes for food: you've got to cater to the adults AND the kids. You've got to plan around nap times, and factor in the limitations on your time and energy when it comes to cooking and cleaning and being the perfect host in general.

We had planned a picnic for Ralph's first birthday, and figured we'd order in pizza and have some cakes and slices made and that it would all be super easy and super fun. I intended to hang paper lanterns from the trees, and put out croquet and petanque for the adults, with bouncy balls and bubbles and - let's face it - a whole playground for the kids. Easy, right? But three days before the party, the forecast was for heavy rain and 30 kilometre winds, and we had to make an emergency dash to an indoor venue instead, so everything changed.

Here's what I learned.

1. Get creative with the invitations. If you want to do something similar to ours (above), you can buy one beautifully laid out and designed by Particular Paper. By the time I found this design it was too late to order the invitations, so I painted my own. Not as pretty, but the personal touch was there!

2. Arancini balls. Everyone loves them! The mums and dads, the babies, even the fussy toddlers! Make or order loads and loads. Ours were even more popular than the mini burgers and fries

3. If you live in Melbourne, don't plan a picnic unless you have a really good wet-weather option

And on that…

4. Before you hire out an expensive "kids' party cafe," or book a community hall months in advance only to find yourself having to lug everything there on the day and then clean up for hours after… talk to your own local cafes to find out if they have a back room or an upstairs area you can use. We moved the 'picnic' to upstairs at the Paragon, and it was a fantastic venue (plus no room hire fee, and we were packed up and out of there half an hour after the party ended)

5. Music. It doesn't really matter what because once the party gets going you won't hear it, but music makes the room feel like a party when people first start arriving

6. If you find yourself short of children's entertainment (for example if you'd planned on having the entire resources of a park at your disposal and instead found yourselves locked indoors with a bunch of sugar-hyped toddlers), face paint and balloons are a great fall-back. I called We Love Facepainting literally a day before the party, and they sent the beautiful Julia who spent the entire party making balloon animals and painting faces (plus she had a Working With Children check and public liability insurance). We had kids at our party ranging in age from 10 months to 12 years, and everyone was happy without me needing to provide any games

7. Themed parties are great, but sometimes they're more trouble than they're worth. I THOUGHT about making Very Hungry Caterpillar cupcakes and fruit and lollipops… but it all got too much for me. Instead, I chose a sunny colour scheme of orange and yellow and let that guide my decor, and that was enough to pull everything together

8. Pick one thing to create "wow factor" in the room decorations. I chose giant balloons and made tassels for them (then I failed to put enough helium inside the balloons and they kind of sat weirdly on the table instead of floating up high on long strings, which I actually thought was kind of cool), and ordered some more balloons filled with confetti, which the kids all LOVED

9. Use your fancy china plates and cake-stands for the dessert table. Give it height, give it interest. That will make things look special, and you can still make do with paper plates and cups (to save on washing up!) for the rest of the party

10. A croquembouche birthday cake may seem like a good idea at the time, but too much toffee and that baby will be impossible to dismantle and pass around. Just sayin'

11. Be prepared for a LOT of presents. A first birthday often involves a lot of adult friends, many more than are likely to come along to any subsequent birthday parties, and suddenly you'll find yourself needing a "present table" and it will look like Santa came early

12. Related to the above, consider a toy cull in the lead-up to the party. Use this as an excuse to give away or throw away all those soft toys and teething rings and rattles that your baby doesn't use any more

13. Do the whole wedding thing and make a note of who gave your baby what gifts, so you can properly thank them later.

14. Give the party an end time. Not only does that politely protect you from folks who are prone to linger (after all, you have a baby who is probably in desperate need of a nap), it also gives people a sense of what to expect and how they can plan their day without finding it dominated by your party

(Photos are mostly from before the party, just to give you an idea of our simple, picnic-adapted decorations, because I didn't want to show other people's children and almost every picture included someone else's child. It was a good party that way!)

That's all I've got for now. Have fun!

Christmas magic?

Sometimes do you go along to something that has so much potential but it just falls short? And you're left with a bit of an empty feeling and you think, "This could have been SO GOOD, why didn't the organisers take it there?"

Yeah me too.

I spent the afternoon on Saturday imagining how I would create a Christmas wonderland for children, the way I felt Santa's Magical Kingdom SHOULD have been. My imagined North Pole was truly amazing: a place of wide-eyed wonder and play and magic that both children and adults would want to explore.

So I sat in the car on the way home from the real Santa's Magical Kingdom and regaled Mr B with my ideas, while the children slept. And Mr B listened patiently for a not particularly long time, before saying something along the lines of "Stop, my ears are bleeding." And also, "You needed to marry a billionaire, because your ideas make exactly zero commercial sense." This was rather insensitively practical of him, so I pushed my argument further with an irrefutable "But imagine how amazing it would all be!"

And I'm pretty sure he agreed, but all he said was "My right ankle hurts," which was open to a fair bit of interpretation.

Mr B and I had been anticipating this trip to Santa's Magical Kingdom with almost breathless enthusiasm. We'd heard people rave about it, and couldn't wait to take the children along, especially since Scout this year was old enough to properly understand and appreciate Christmas.

Neither of us said so while we were there, but by the time we staggered into the car at the end of our three-hour session, we both agreed that the whole shebang had fallen a fair bit short of our expectations. I had expected North Pole snow and Santa and magic and Christmas joy. What I experienced was a neon-lit Christmas-themed sideshow alley. For the not exactly bargain basement price of $40.27 per adult and $35.68 per child.

I dunno. People rave about this experience, it has won awards, and I realise Mr B and I are probably in the minority in our rather damning assessment. Have you been along? What did you think? I don't think Scout will beg us to return, and Ralph is too young to really care but, to be fair, they certainly didn't seem hate it.

Later that night, when I was looking through the photos on my camera, I could see some of the beauty of the event that I'd missed while I was inside it. And I could see Scout smiling quite a lot. So, maybe I just wasn't the target audience (Santa forbid!) and the organisers got it right after all.

3 highlights * Fast-moving lines * Riding with Scout on her first carousel * Decorating (and eating) gingerbread men

3 low-points * The world's slowest, most boring Ferris wheel (we were stuck on that thing for about 25 minutes. Scout was crying. I was carsick) * The circus - probably good for older kids but after waiting 20 minutes for everyone to find their seats, we had to leave 15 minutes in because our little ones just weren't that engaged with jugglers and they were starting to lose it (to be polite) * The snow area - this was the section I was looking forward to the most, but the "actual snow" comprised two areas not much more than a metre in diameter each, with a tiny bit of slush falling from above

Bring on the photos.

3 advent calendars

It's almost time for the official count-down to Christmas to begin. The advent calendar was one of my favourite Christmas activities when I was a child. Normally my aunt or my Nanna would give us a calendar, and we couldn't wait to open the new little window each morning. All that anticipation. WHAT will be behind the window? What's in the picture? Sometimes the calendars had chocolate behind the windows but to be honest that wasn't such a big deal. It was the surprise and the anticipation that made the advent calendars so special.

There are three advent calendars in our house this year.

1. The North Pole Express

This lovely wooden Christmas train was a gift from my parents last year. The idea is that you hide little ornaments or sweets in each drawer in the train. I don't want Scout and Ralph to go straight for the sugar without understanding the anticipation so, this year, they'll get a Christmas story instead. I'll hide a slip of paper with one sentence of the story in each box and we can read it together every morning.

2. The Victorian calendar

This traditional calendar will be our main advent calendar. The cardboard tree folds out and stands on your table. The snow-scene picture is filled with numbered windows, like a traditional advent calendar. There's a tiny cardboard tree-ornament behind each window, which the children can then take out of a morning and place on the cardboard tree.

3. The children's book

The Christmas Mystery by Jostein Gaarder is a favourite children's story of mine, with 24 chapters, named to match the advent. A little boy finds an old, dusty advent calendar in bookstore. When he opens the first window, a tiny story falls out, about a little girl who followed a lamb back through time and across continents, to the origin of the Christmas story. This year I'll read The Christmas Mystery (again) myself but, when the children are older, I'll read them one chapter a night until we reach Christmas Eve.

What are your favourite advent calendars?

If you're a fan of the homemade variety, I still love this punch-it-through calendar, and this one made out of old match boxes.

Thankful for...

The growing semblance of sleep at night Air conditioning Being loved My lemon tree The exquisite, unbearable heartache of motherhood The morning's first cup of tea Creative freedom Creative inspiration Peace, in my corner of the world The opportunity to contribute Turkish Delight

On the weekend our family shamelessly appropriated the North American custom of Thanksgiving and adapted it for our own purposes.

In our case, that meant gathering together a group of friends and family, eating way too much INSANELY GOOD traditional Thanksgiving fare (cooked up by the good folks at Gerald's Bar, who truly outdid themselves), and talking and laughing and shouting and joking and eating and drinking and eating some more, all afternoon.

The motivation was that Em was leaving for the UK at the end of the week and wouldn't be back until after the New Year. We were a little bit devastated to miss out not only on Christmas with Em, but on the usual summer holidays we would get to spend with her. Em, likewise, would miss out on seeing all the family she normally spent time with at Christmas. So we held the whole shebang a month early and thought "what the hey, let's call it Thanksgiving."

I was over the moon because I have been trying to get my family to give this particular holiday a go for YEARS. It was such a special time for me when I lived in the US. Here's what I wrote about understanding Thanksgiving a little while back.

This was such a fun and stress-free lunch and, unlike Christmas, it was loaded with exactly zero family dramas or expectations. I guess that's one of the best things about taking on a holiday (or elements of a holiday) that belong to somebody else's culture, huh. Clean slate! No expectations! So we plan to do it again next year. And every year.

Next time I might even remember to bring the camera.

What are you thankful for?

Photo credit: Todd Quackenbush (licensed under Creative Commons)

Handmade Halloween tea-treats

On the spectrum from trick to treat, I'm hoping these friendly little handmade Halloween tea-spooks definitely fall on the treat side. Next year, maybe I'll get my act together and pair them with some skeleton gingerbread men. Or gingerbread cats. Or something. This year, I packaged them up with yellow craft paper and posted them off to these lovely blog readers.

If you need a last minute, slightly-more-grown-up treat to give to friends, a set of these little guys will take you about five minutes to make.

1. Download the template 2. Print or photocopy it onto thick paper or cardstock 3. Cut out each friend, then attach them to teabags with staples or tape

If you have a bit more time, get fancy with some lovely herbal blends, or even create a teabag of your own with a little ball of loose-leaf tea in a square of muslin, secured with string.

The friendly spooks will reach their arms around the edges of your tea cup while the tea steeps.

Happy Halloween friends!

ps. Christmas tea-friends

How to create a winter woodland picnic party

When I carried Madeleine into her playroom at 6.30 on the morning of her second birthday party she breathed "The park!" in wide-eyed wonder. I put her little sock-feet down on the grass where she was used to feeling floor-boards and she slowly spun around, taking in my dodgily-drawn toadstools, wonky painted fir trees and floppy crepe-paper grass. "Wowwww. The park!" she whispered. And just like that I felt like Picasso.

Winter in Melbourne means Madeleine will probably always have her birthday parties indoors. But she loves - she really loves - the park. So we created the a picnic-in-the-park party for her in our home. It wasn't that difficult, or that expensive, and I imagine you could make this bringing-the-outside-in scheme work for all kinds of woodsy party themes, like a teddy-bears' picnic, a fairy kingdom, or a woodland creatures party.

1. On a budget

Most of our decorations were home-made for just the cost of cardboard, paint and some masking tape; or found around the house:

* A back-drop of fir-trees painted onto butchers' paper

* A green trim of crepe-paper grass around the skirting boards

* Red and white toadstools painted onto cardboard and stuck around the room

* Cardboard cut-outs of bees, butterflies and ladybirds, also stuck around the room

* Blue and white cardboard clouds, strung from door frames and other high places

* Red and white polka dot paper cups and plates

* Red and white paper bunting, on loan from the lovely lady at Mint Jelly

* Autumn leaves, collected from the park with Madeleine several weeks earlier

* A picnic rug

* Two fibre-glass toadstool stools, on loan from my Mum

2. A little bit more

If you can spend just a little more, helium balloons will always be well appreciated by little ones. We (and by we I mean my generous parents who wouldn't let me pay them back) purchased a helium kit from Spotlight. I chose to use only yellow balloons as I wanted to create a "sunny sky" effect and blue would have made the room too dark (that's why the clouds were partly blue instead). I dangled some of the bees, butterflies and ladybirds I had made from the balloons, to make it look as though they were flying around the room. As you can imagine, these were very popular.

3. Your one extravagance

Our one big splurge was three sheets of 1m x 3m synthetic grass, and we went back and forth in the lead-up to the party as to whether or not we would go there. Originally, I thought my idea to use the synthetic grass was genius. I figured that off-cuts would be a super-cheap, easy way to create a "wow factor" in the room (I REALLY wanted to earn that soft "Wow" from Madeleine), and make it a snatch to clean up. I was right about the wow-factor, and the easy clean-up. But this grass is surprisingly expensive. At one point, we were thinking it would be cheaper to just lay real turf in the playroom!

In the end we decided to go ahead and get the grass because we would use it afterwards in our courtyard, to create a bit of a softer, 'garden' area for the children to play until we could afford to pull up the tiles out there and landscape (that could be years).

So there you have it. Madeleine's "winter woodland picnic" themed birthday party. Games were mostly parallel play (because have you ever tried to get a bunch of two-year-olds to do the same thing when you want them to?), with a bit of stop-start dancing and a mini treasure hunt thrown in. Add some cake and chocolate and surprisingly-popular healthy snacks into the mix, and your party is done and dusted, right there.

Madeleine's diary - the Easter edition

Day 1, Good Friday 7am: Have woken up thinking about my sister Emily. Daddy said she would be here when I woke up. Must go check. Need to get out of this cot pronto. Mummmy! MUMMMMYYYY!

7:03am: Mummy, you took ages to get here. Is Emmy here? She is? Hooray! She got in at 2am? Well then I imagine she will be ready to play by now. I'll just run down to her bedroom and check. Emmmy! EMMMMYYYYY!

7:06am: I'm a bit over playing the "let's pretend to sleep" game, Emmy. Think I will eat some breakfast instead. Is it Chocolate Egg Day yet? Mummmy? MUMMMMYYYY!

7:07am: Oh listen to that, Harry's awake. I wonder who woke him up.

10:30am: We are going for a walk in the RAIN. This is very exciting. I will wear my rain coat. NOBODY HELP ME I WANT TO CARRY THE UMBRELLA ALL BY MYSELF. Why are complete strangers ducking and weaving away from me?

2:30pm: Hot cross buns are my favourite.

4pm: We are painting eggs. RED! I WANT RED PAINT! Wait, Daddy has blue. That's it, BLUE! I WANT BLUE! Emmy, what colour do you have? Green? THAT'S THE ONE I WANT. I WANT GREEN. Mummy, stop trying to help, I can do it myself.

3.15pm: THERE IS GREEN PAINT ON MY HAND HELP HELP GET IT OFF GET IT OFFFFFFF.

Day 2, Saturday

12pm: Grace and Kiera are here and we are having an Easter Egg hunt. I don't know what that means but I am VERY EXCITED. Aaaaargh this is very excellent, I am going to run as fast as I can on the spot and yell "yeah." YEAH.

12:05pm: We are in the courtyard. There are chocolate eggs here. OH MY GOODNESS THERE ARE CHOCOLATE EGGS EVERYWHERE IN THE COURTYARD I KEEP FINDING THEM EVERYWHERE I LOOK THIS IS THE BEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME.

12:07pm: FRENZY! FRENZY!

12:10pm: Chocolate Easter eggs are my favourite.

12:11pm - 3:30pm: Chocolate, toys, games, friends. Grace is 11 and she lets me boss and drag her around everywhere I think I will kiss her. Lunch, toys, games, friends. I will drag Grace into the hall and make her pretend to be a puppy with me. Peppa Pig! I SKIPPED MY NAP. BAHAHAHA. Dessert, toys, games, friends. Grace is tired, I wonder why? I will sit on her lap and call her mummy. Chocolate!

4:05pm: I am feeling a little bit delirious. Think I will do a spot of spinning in the lounge room in front of all my friends. I keep falling over. I don't care. Delirious! Frenzy! Frenzy!

Day 3, Easter Sunday

7:03am: CHOCOLATEEEEEEE. The Easter Bunny left chocolate in my bedroom! I am so happy. This is the best morning of my life.

7:08am: WHYYYYYYYY? Why can't I eat my chocolate for breakfast? This is the worst morning of my life.

10:20am: We are walking so that Harry can sleep in the pram and Mummy can get coffee. Why does she always say she needs coffee? I don't understand.

12pm: Mummy and Daddy found the Taco Truck, I found a park with swings and a slide. Harry is still asleep. We are all very happy.

12:03pm: Oh look! I found more Easter Eggs hidden at the bottom of the slippery slide! Hooray!

12:04pm: WHYYYYYYY? Why can't I eat food I randomly found on the ground of a deserted and slightly derelict-looking park?

2:30pm: I'm not even tired I definitely don't need a nap. Oh wow, Daddy is cuddling me on Mummy and Daddy's bed! This is so much fun. Daddy wants to sleep but I will never sleep. I am going to play and make him laugh, it will be so much fu-- zzzzzzzzzz.

4:30pm: Mummy why are you waking us up? I don't want to get up. Ooh a bottle! I will let you give that to me and read me a story while I drink it, if it makes you happy.

6pm: We are going out for a night-time picnic. And Emmy is coming too. This is CRAZY good. We are outside, walking, and it's dark! I can't believe my eyes! It's dark! I must keep reminding Mummy how amazing this is. I will say "Night night!" every few seconds, to make sure she doesn't forget. Now I will tell Emmy "Night night" too, in case she hadn't realised.

6:20pm: The park! The park! I love the park, and now we are in the park. At NIGHT. The park, at NIGHT! Wowwwwww!

7:01pm: We are on our way home. In the dark. At NIGHT. In the dark. We have been in the park. At NIGHT. This is the best night ever. I am never going to sleep again.

ps. Madeleine's previous diary entry

On the rooftop

The Spiegelworld show "Empire" returned to Melbourne last week, and I was lucky enough to be invited to go along to opening night. It's so rare that I get to leave the house after dark these days. Going out is a real treat. I took my friend Tons along and we arrived on Crown Rooftop (yes, they pitched the Spiegeltent on a rooftop, it's an incredible location) just in time for a glass of champagne among the hammocks in a sheltered little garden, before the show started. People are always talking about how folks have become desensitised in this day and age. (Did I really just type "in this day and age"? What am I, 80?) We are told that computer games, the nightly news, the Internet and goodness knows what else have made us impervious to the true horrors of war, to the complex realities of love, to the fact that the kid who rode his bike into a duck pond on Funniest Home Videos actually hurt himself.

In my case, I can add to that list "amazing feats of strength and skill and cheating death." If you show me acrobatics on television, for example, I'll say "Wow" but I'm not really there, if you know what I mean.

You can't be desensitised inside the Spiegeltent. It is all just too close, too intimate. You can actually hear the artists hold their breath before a particularly difficult lift. You can see the sweat of effort trickling between their shoulder-blades. At one point, during which two acrobatic artists on roller-skates defied gravity in a terrifying spin, I whispered to Tons, "These seats may actually be a bit too good." Because if just one thing went wrong, the both of them could have hurtled into our laps at 100 kilometres an hour.

Empire calls itself "a love letter from New York City." Inspired by the vintage days of vaudeville, it is a no-holds-barred performance. Announcements are made before the start of the show to the effect of "Please do not use flash photography or you will kill our artists." And that pretty much sets the tone. The acrobats defy death and wonder and creativity and dreams. The singer belts out those notes. The audience has goose bumps. That drag-queen comedy duo did NOT just say that (they did). They did NOT just do that (they did). We are roaring with laughter one moment and biting our lips the next.

In the finale act a man slowly, painstakingly, balances a feather on a stick. Then he balances the feather and stick on another stick. And so on and so on, each stick getting bigger and bigger. The whole process takes forever. You'd think it would be boring, but the suspense is palpable, and the entire room is on the edge of its seat.

Desensitised? We are the opposite of desensitised. We are inside the performance, every one of us terrified, willing him not to drop that feather. The applause when he lifts that precariously-balanced, complex weave of sticks and single feather into the air is thunderous. It sounds crazy when I write it but you really had to be there.

Honestly, you did have to be there. If you haven't seen Empire yet, it runs in Melbourne until 30 March. If you get a chance to go along, take it! You'll love every one of the 90 minutes. (Just leave the kids at home, those jokes are not for the little ones). Tickets are on sale here.

In the interests of full disclosure, you should know I received the tickets to see Empire free of charge. But I was under no obligation to write kindly about it, or indeed to write about it at all. They didn't even ask me to. That I did willingly because this show was amazing. Thank you Spiegelworld!

Here's a sneak preview of the show. And remember, this is the Spiegeltent. So as close as those cameras appear to be, that's how close you'll be too. Yikes!

Update: I've just been told the show has been extended to 11 May 2014.

Melbourne dispatch - Fat Tuesday

Happy Mardi Gras! It was Fat Tuesday yesterday, according to the good folks at Gumbo Kitchen, so they threw a shindig that involved bands and buskers and dancers and beads and picnics and sunshine and a second line marching band that led everybody, Pied Piper-style, down the tree-lined path beside the Melbourne Cemetery, and back again. ↑↑ We arrived just as the sun set and the band was warming up, so we were all over the marching and dancing right away. Madeleine busted her best "twirl" moves, which made forward motion somewhat challenging, so I had to keep picking her up and running through the grass to catch up with everyone else.

↑↑ Back at the cemetery gates, we settled in for a picnic while buskers entertained us from under a nearby tree and the sun set behind the little semi-circle of food trucks that kept everyone happy and well fed.

I'm recovering from a stomach bug so wasn't eating, but for everyone else, there was delicious fare from Gumbo Kitchen (of course), Beatbox Kitchen and the Brulee Cart for desert. Mr B opted instead for a piece of giant, doughnut-shaped cinnamon cake that was dressed in purple, green and gold icing. Is this a Mardi Gras thing? Does anyone know?

↑↑ You've never seen a child happier with three strings of coloured beads than my little Madeleine, but she was generous enough to share them with her baby brother (despite his mild consternation and ultimately-futile protests).

↑↑ When Way Past Bedtime started to take its toll on both children, we bundled them into the pram. Jazz bands were preparing to take to the main stage, a few people were already up and dancing again in the grass. It looked like loads of fun.

That night, walking through Carlton North under old trees and past even older buildings, the ferocity all gone out of the sun and cats starting to roam the alleyways... walking with my family as Mr B hummed and Harry sucked his fingers and Madeleine waved her beads in the air... that was one of those sublime "grateful" moments that took me back here all over again. Perfect.

ps. About the photos... Apologies that the quality isn't great. My camera is in being repaired so I borrowed my father's old camera, BUT I managed to bring the good lens and forget to bring the actual camera, AND earlier the same day my iPhone died... so I was snapping away on Mr B's old phone.

ps2. Want to see us at Fat Tuesday, last year?