A night in

Tonight I'm experiencing something I rarely have since moving here. I'm having a night in. Somer's down at 55 with a few other women for the first night of their knitting club, and I've just put the girls to bed. Pretty strange feeling, actually. Not sure what I'll do...maybe a little Family Guy. Or maybe something a bit more productive.

Weekend - Art and the Heath

We went to Hampstead Heath yesterday for a leaf-hunt. The girls collected leaves from different kinds of trees, and we brought them back to do rubbings, which we made into a leaf book. Andi says that I should also write about our lunch: we went to a burger place on the way up there. Below are a few pics. Today I'm meeting with an artist about an art show we're putting on in December. We're trying to gather local artists to sell some of their works to benefit the cold weather shelter in Camden, and this guy is willing to help us.

Conga Police

I was down at the market today, having a jacket potato from the potato guys (true, that's not their real name, but that's what I call them. They're two young guys trying to make a go of it by selling potatoes with anything you could want on top: sausages, chili, mushrooms, tuna, coleslaw, whatever). Anyway, I was chatting to them and

eating my lunch, when this appeared in front of me:

Quite strange, actually. I think it was some sort of publicity appearance for the local news. Something about putting more officers on the streets. I suppose I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I certainly feel safer when I'm walking the girls home from school and there's a pair of officers nearby; but at the same time, I don't see how the council could possibly ever put enough officers around to curb the drug trade and the disorderly weekend behavior. They just end up pushing the dealers to different areas or making them wait until the officers go off duty. Maybe their hope is to simply push undesirable behavior into areas and times when most people who aren't involved in such things wouldn't be around. Which is an interesting way of looking at policing that I'd never thought about. Instead of trying to 'catch the bad guys' - you just hold them at bay long enough for ordinary people to finish their business, then you let them roam free.

But who knows? I just live here, and probably the police are doing a whole lot more than I realize. In any case, I certainly appreciate having them around; they've got a tough job, no matter how many of them there are.

Turn Left, or Fly

We live smack in the middle of two supermarkets. OK, that didn't sound right - we don't actually live inside the supermarkets; let's try that again: Our flat is equidistant from the two local supermarkets. One is a four minute walk to the left. The other is a four minute walk to the right. For some reason, we always go to the one to the right. Probably because the store is a little bit nicer, more spacious, a little better quality meats, etc.

Why am I rambling thus? Because our regular supermarket has closed down for the week while they renovate it. So what was my initial reaction? It wasn't "Oh well, I guess we'll shop at the other store". It was "Oh no, what are we going to do? Maybe we should go on vacation until they finish the work".

As it happens, the week coincides with half-term, so the girls are out of school, and we could in theory go away. But that's not the point. Sometimes we are able to look at a problem and see the easiest and most obvious solution (in this case Turn Left!); while other times we tend to fixate on a particular solution that may be complicated, costly, and a bit irrational (I actually started to look for cheap flights to Prague...but we couldn't find any).