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It was Katy's birthday last Friday. Did you all remember to send her love?

We went to London for a few days of pre-xmas R&R. We got there on Thursday morning and went to the hotel to drop off our bags. When we got there, we were told that our hotel was closing for the holidays because they didn't have enough guests to warrant staying open, but since it was part of a large chain, they relocated us to another hotel just 5 minutes down Tottenham Court road (the Radisson Kenilsworth). Got checked in and went walkies.

We ended up in Soho and found the pub where we had a snack the last time we were in town (it's called the Brewmaster. Nothing fancy, just good cheap pub food). We wandered around Leicester Square and went to Chinatown in search of a tea shop where I could buy a tea boat. We never found one, which is surprising really, but we found tons of shops that sold Peking duck (most of which was hanging in the window).

We went to Fortnum & Mason to gawk at stuff that was too pricey for words. F&M is a shop that must be seen to be believed. The xmas display is new each year. Last year was Dickens' Christmas Carroll. This year was Alice in Wonderland. It's impressive. It's completely over the top. Given the snootiness level of the shop, it's completely appropriate. F&M is a playground for people who have so much money they don't bother about little things like prices and if they can afford the stuff anymore. They have things that I can't even put a name to or even begin to contemplate a purpose. When even the props they put on the sales display are out of our league. I mean, who the hell needs a full size leather rhinoceros??? Don't even get me started on the hand-decorated soap bars! And the food! The food… If you want to buy overly posh, snootily exclusive, overpriced and hunted to the brink of extinction things, this is the place. True story that made me laugh my ass off. Food Uncut, a cooking show, recently reviewed 3 xmas puddings by doing a blind taste test. They were testing cheap (Morrissons, £3/kg), moderate (Waitrose, £10/kg) and ludicrously expensive (F&M, £35/kg) puddings for taste and texture. Unanimously, all the testers raved about the cheapest one and slagged off the most expensive one. Made me giggle :)

When we exited la-la land and went back to the real world, we walked to see the lights on Bond Street and Regent Street. Last time we were in that area, Katy drooled at the sight of a pastry display in the window of the Patisserie Concerto on Piccadilly Street. We decided to go in for a tea break this time. It smelled really nice and the menu looked really promising, but we already had dinner plans so we decided that we'd come back for lunch tomorrow and settled on some tea to get warmed up.

Our dinner plans were to go to Itsu, the sushi restaurant chain that gained notoriety recently for being the last meal of the ex Russian spy who got poisoned with polonium a few weeks ago – though not the same branch, for obvious half-life decontamination reasons. That place was a real letdown. It looked pretentious – the type of restaurant where the sushi goes around on little conveyor belts and you pick what you want and hope for the best. Also, since all the stuff is made in advance, it's no good for me because all the rolls had sesame seeds on them and apparently (Katy asked), all the dipping sauces have garlic in them. So yeah. No sushi for us. We were disappointed, but the evening was saved when we found a little hole in the wall called Niko Niko that served really good sushi and soba for dirt cheap. It doesn't look a lot from the outside (and the inside is nothing to write home to mom about either), but the food is good, not pretentious and you get a lot of it :) My kind of place.

The following day, we went back to the The Tea House, on Neal Street in Covent Garden. We'd gone there the previous day but it was so packed that it was unbearable. This early in the morning, it was possible to buy a cast-iron japanese teapot that I'd spotted the previous day and fell in lust with. I also got some orange-flavoured oolong tea that I'm keen to try. We returned to Fortnum & Mason because we wanted to get some clotted cream fudge that we'd noticed in one of the xmas hampers the previous night. After 30 minutes of looking around and not finding anything, we grabbed some poor floor clerk and got him to do the looking for us. Poor guy was sent from clerk to clerk and nobody seemed to know (or care, really) where the damn thing was. In the end, he said that they were sold out on the floor but he could have a look in the storeroom. I wasn't really looking forward to waiting another 15 minutes for him to go and come back saying he couldn't find any, so we left it (though Katy did buy some nice biscuits that subsequently had to be rescued from her mom a few days later).

We had reserved tickets to the London Eye, so we made our way to the waterfront. On our way there, we walked passed a woman who was having her chauffeur pack the boot of her Rolls Royce. She was the stereotype of the socialite, and again, it reminded us that we're so not even in that game that we don't even want to think about it. We stopped at Trafalgar Square so that Katy (i.e. bladder woman) could go powder her nose. I snapped a few pictures of Nelson's column and developed a heartfelt relationship with a pigeon, and then we were off to the eye.

The trip itself was a lot better than I thought it would be. My vertigo never really kicked in, even though the cabin we were in went through a 360 degree revolution around its center axis while the whole thing circled around the eye. The engineering of the thing is freaky. It was still a bit foggy, so we didn't get the best view of the city but it was fun nonetheless. What was funny though is that I'd forgotten that they do a search of your bags and the same restrictions as air travel apply so the Leatherman that always lives in my back pocket would have been a problem… if they'd seen it. They were too busy harping at the fact that I couldn't bring my tripod in the cabin and I had to take it out of my bag now please!!! to bother actually running me through the metal detector. Apparently, a tripod is considered more dangerous…

After the eye, we went to eat at the Oxo Tower for Katy's birthday. I think they thought we'd lower the tone of the restaurant, so they stashed us completely at the back of the restaurant. I didn't really mind though, cause it was nice and quiet. The food was good and the company was brilliant. A nice evening all around :)

We were a bit tired the next day so we took it easy. Bought another teapot and crashed at an internet cafe to waste a few hours. We had tickets to go see the matinee showing of “We will rock you” at the Dominion on Saturday. That was Katy's birthday present. She'd been wanting to go see that show ever since it came out. The show was… ok. It's a musical that uses Queen songs to score a story. The plot revolves around the following premise

On Planet Mall all musical instruments are banned. The Company Computers generate the tunes and everybody downloads them. But Resistance is growing in the form of the Bohemians – rebels who believe that there was once a Golden Age when the kids formed their own bands and wrote their own songs. Legend persists that somewhere on Planet Mall instruments still exist. Somewhere, the mighty axe of a great and hairy guitar god lies buried deep in rock. The Bohemians need a hero to find this axe and draw it from stone. Is the one who calls himself Galileo that man? But GlobalCorp is also looking for Galileo and if they get him first they will surely drag him before the Killer Queen and consign him to oblivion across the Seven Seas of Rye.

The idea is good, but the implementation left me bleh. I found a lot of the performers to be, well, annoying would be a good word. Still, Katy loved it so I'm happy. We got our bags from the hotel and headed home.

Katy's parents and uncle were coming down on Sunday to spend xmas eve, day and boxing day with us. We were hosting our first ever xmas dinner and I was doing all the cooking. I'm glad to say that it went really well. We had waaaaaaaaaaayyy too much food.

Let me re-emphasize this.

We had a STUPID amount of food.

As in, half of it is now frozen because there's no way in hell we can eat it all before it goes bad. Even with having handed out leftovers. Even with not having thawed out food to begin with.

We had too much food, but it was damn good!!!

My cooking was well received, which made me happy. It's a good thing too, because I spent most of my time in the kitchen preparing stuff :D Everybody ate their fill (and a bit more) and we had a good time.

Katy had to pop into work for a few hours on xmas day, so we waited for her to come back before we attacked the mountain of presents underneath the tree. As a side note, that tree managed to survive the cat, but just barely – poor battered thing. Santa's been really generous this year. I got a mountain of chocolates, some cookbooks, Bobbles snow globes, a new wok, a hand blender with a bajillion attachments, season 1 of Rome on DVD and an ipod with Shure E4C headphones. I've been hemming and hawing for those for the last year and I finally have them. My preciousssss!!!

We discovered that the cat is a catnip fiend. Katy had bought catnip tea bags from Whittards. They send him completely batty! We had to wrestle the bag away from him cause we were afraid he was going to have a fit or something :)

Katy's family left yesterday afternoon and we both crashed for a nap. It's been hectic, but now it's all quiet and should stay like that for the foreseeable future. We're going to be spending a quiet new year's eve because Katy is working on the 1st. We don't have plans to go anywhere or see anybody, and to be honest, I like that. I'm not a hermit by any means, but I like spending quiet downtime with my wife. (my wife, hee hee, that still makes me giggle).