Sugar and spice and...

From the children's rhyme:
Little boys are frogs and toads and puppy dogs' tails, but
Little girls are sugar and spice and all things nice.

From a mature perspective, I'm now thinking puppy dogs have cute tails, nothing nasty about them at all.

Now, about that SUGAR. The only salt I know I consumed yesterday was in the butter on my toast, which was then covered with Nutella chocolate/hazelnut spread.
And the bit I sprinkled on my pesto, tomato, mozzarella, and basil focaccia sandwich. I had a hot chocolate with that, completely forgetting I was scheduled to keep up the hot chocolate tradition with Philippe that evening!
Then when I returned to the office after lunch there was a small marble cake sitting on my desk! Three of us had to finish it, and I was sooo full after that. No space for dinner.

Met Philippe outside of the Häagen-Dazs Café in Leicester Square. And then I went for broke. He had a very tall glass of chocolate chip ice cream layered with chocolate sauce.
I had another hot chocolate and a refreshing lemon tart...*sigh*

As a result, even hours later, I was probably buzzing. I don't really get hyper, but my eyes kept popping open and I didn't get to sleep until about 2am. *Yawn*

Oops, I just made myself yawn!

Today by about 11am my body was begging for salt and all I could think of was what tasty dish I would have for lunch, so I went out to the Thai restaurant up the road where the owner now knows my name and my taste in food. I had crispy spring rolls and mmmmmmmmmmmmmm a gorgeous warm glass noodle salad with the usual - lime, coriander (cilantro), lemongrass, chili, peanuts, onion, ground pork.

"Strangers on a train" - that's how Philippe and I met, on the Eurostar from Paris to London. He'd never been to England before but came over to study at UCL (and now he's getting his Master's at Imperial). We got talking, and I never got around to reading Le Petit Prince, and we've been in touch ever since. As I said, we do hot chocolate, and since introducing him to H-D, nowhere else is as good.
P is usually a pretty good taskmaster when it comes to practising my French - I think I'm beginning to speak faster when I remember the words or don't translate in my mind first, but I still listen like crap, so thank goodness P speaks so clearly. Quite unlike the garbled Parisian accent - he's from Bordeaux. However, he's attempting to improve his vocabulary (as if he needs to!) and it's a bit of a see-saw, English usually outweighing French. C'est dommage.

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A former football trophy cup was sold today for a cool half a million pounds to an anonymous telephone bidder (ooooh), making it the most expensive item of football memorabilia ever sold.
That's all I have to say about it. I daresay Rebecca knows more, as it took place at Christie's South Kensington, where she works!

Lovely to read the catalogue entry. It's long, as it's their star lot, but essentially that's how we learned how to catalogue at Christie's Edu, for hours in the afternoons, object after object.
It's this thorough training that gives me such a hard time when I try to label the pictures at Lebrecht. When cataloguing, we were taught to plonk down everything we possibly could about the object, while still being CONCISE and following a prescribed pattern. When labelling, I must hold back on description, and so much which seems important must be left out. That's how it feels to me. Bit of a dilemma - having spent so many years trained in the sciences, I was a pro at brief phrasing. Then I found the cataloguing descriptions a real challenge, although I could always get flowery when telling a story. And now, returning to brevity is a new challenge, especially when it comes to art historical images.

On Wednesday I labelled some gorgeous images of George V and Queen Mary, to be scanned from a 1935 publication of the Illustrated London News Silver Jubilee commemorative edition.

In other news, the London Eye is in a ground rent wrangle. (Say that 5 times fast.) I imagine the City of Westminster (Is that where it stands? Or is it Lambeth?) has raised the rent - to a million pounds. It is the most popular tourist site in the world. Can you imagine that? What was it before? And as such, I doubt London would elect to lose it, so there was mention of it moving to Hyde Park. Actually it would be interesting to move it every 5 years, giving visitors a new outlook over the city!
Just like la Tour Eiffel after the Paris Exhibition of 1905 (?), the Eye was meant to be dismantled after the Millennium celebrations, but it was so popular the revenue was an obvious benefit.

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True to my new habit, here is your daily dose of amusement:

More Blackadder II:

From the infamous turnip episode:

Baldrick: Not to worry my lord, the arrow didn't in fact enter my body.
Blackadder: Oh good.
Baldrick: No, by a thousand to one chance my willy got in the way.

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Edmund:
It's green.

Percy:
Yes, my lord!

Edmund:
Percy, the colour of gold, is gold. Whatever you have discovered if it has a name would be called green.

Percy: [on discovering the secret of alchemy]
Oh Edmund can it be true, that I hold in my mortal hands a nugget of purest GREEN??

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Percy:
Oh, yes, I touched her once.

Edmund:
You touched her where?

Percy:
In the corridor.

Edmund:
I've never heard it called that before.

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Queen:
Then he's vanished. Completely vanished.

Percy:
Like an old oak table.

Queen:
'Vanished,' Lord Percy, not 'varnished'.

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As you can see, neither Edmund Blackadder's servant Baldrick, nor his cohort Percy, are very bright...

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Engrish - provides hours of silly laughter, I promise. I mean really, I am sure they lock the creative teams in a room with an English dictionary and a thesaurus. Eenie meenie mynie mo....

True meaning of the word HORSEPLAY

A taste of things to come: A very revealing Ultrasound