The one with the secret supper and blackouts...

Last weekend we went to our first Secret Supper Club, held by Green Onions. For those of you who don’t know what a secret supper club is you can visit http://england-travel.suite101.com/article.cfm/different_dining_at_a_london_secret_supper_club to find out more. Basically it’s a guerrilla restaurant scene – chefs set up a one-night-only restaurant in someone’s home, you get a restaurant standard three course meal for a set price. It’s such a brilliant idea, it’s something that we’ve want to go to for a while but they’re really popular and you’re lucky to get a place. I had Thursday and Friday of last week off work and I happened to spot that Green Onions had a good menu for Sunday and a couple of cancellations, I rushed off an email requesting the spaces and they were ours. I planned it as a surprise for Raine and she thought it was brilliant – she had no idea what was going on, but kept thinking it was weirder and weirder when I made her take the train to suburbia on the other side and London and insisted that we stop off for a bottle of wine along the way. She was very happy when she found out what we were doing. It was such a chilled atmosphere, we were just in someone’s flat, temporary tables had been put up in the living room, we shared the table with three other diners and we all sang happy birthday to one of the guests, while a surprise cake was presented, at the end of the meal. The food was excellent and we had lots of fun, it’s definitely something we’ll do again and would recommend to others.

I’ve been playing a lot of music lately. I’m planning to home record a mini album of six songs before the summer. I have a title for it and we’re going to be taking shots for the front while we’re in Blackpool this weekend.

We’re heading back to Blackpool over the Easter weekend, we’re visiting family and friends and we will be out at our usual haunts on Saturday night so give us a shout if you’re around and want in!

Most exciting news of this blog - we’ve booked to go on holiday next month. We’re off to Fuerteventura for a week - we’re going All Inclusive which is quite exciting for me. I’ve never been on a package holiday before and I am like a small child thinking of all this unlimited food and alcohol on offer:-D I’m going to put all my weight back on in a week! We are going to be doing quite a lot of surfing while we’re there, so hopefully that’ll help keep some of the lbs at bay. This is only our second holiday abroad in the whole time we’ve been together, so we’re really excited – we decided that we just wanted to go somewhere sunny and relax for a week. We’re also planning to go to Australia for three weeks in December, fundage permitting!

We want to do a festival this summer and we’re open to suggestions, preferably one that doesn’t get cancelled on the day it’s meant to start…still not quite over last year’s festival disaster! We’re not sure we want to do a big rock festival. We could be convinced to do a day of Leeds/Reading: Friday (Reading) or Sunday (Leeds), but not the whole weekend; we can’t keep up with the kids any more – camping in a war zone doesn’t hold the attraction it once did… sad, but true. I’m attracted by Latitude, but I’m holding out on buying tickets until the Cambridge Folk Festival line-up is announced.

We went to see Waiting for Godot a couple of weeks ago. That was pretty amazing. We got to see Ian McKellan (and Roger Rees) in action and he was brilliant – he really blew everyone else off the stage. Matthew Kelly was also in it, in a bid to be recognised as a serious actor rather than that bloke from Stars in your Eyes. He did an ok job, to be fair – but he didn’t match up to McKellen and Rees.

We’re going on a mystery theatre trip when we come back from Fuerteventura, courtesy of Paul, we’re intrigued and excited!

Final news – our flat took Saturday’s Earth Hour deadly seriously… the power went out (in the whole of our building) at 8pm and didn’t come on for around 15 hours… There was some problem with the power lines and the electricity company had to come and dig up the road on Sunday morning. It meant that we spent Saturday evening in darkness and realised that we need to buy some candles for the new place… Earth Hour was known as Earth 15 Hours in our flat.

The one with the big move and the big news

I’ve been living and working in London for a month now and it’s all going really well. Raine moved down here permanently a couple of weeks ago and she started work - at the University of London – on Monday. In the end we only had to spend three weeks apart (this broke our four and a half years of not spending a single night apart, but it was a lot less time than we’d originally feared), one of those weeks was a half week and we saw each other every weekend. On Raine’s final day in Lancaster I secretly took a day off work, spent seven hours creased up on a National Express coach to Blackpool and arrived in Lancaster in my dad’s car. Raine was outside our house packing our car; I got out of my dad’s car and asked if she needed any help – big hugs followed! Who says romance dies after the first couple of years!?;-) We spent that weekend ooop north together before heading back to London.

I’m enjoying my new job. It’s a very quiet time in the office and I’m looking forward to things getting a little busier, but the people I’m working with are really friendly and the office is very chilled out. My biggest work based problem is deciding what to do with the enormous amount of leave I get! I get seven weeks paid leave, on top of University closures and bank holidays. We are thinking of going to Australia for three weeks in December. We both have a week booked off in April and we’re planning to go abroad surfing, either to the Canary Islands or Morocco.

Things are going pretty well down here. Having one room of our own, rather than a whole house takes a bit of adjusting to (though it’s luxury compared to our first two years together, when we lived together in a single student room), but the accommodation is really great. The location is excellent– the area feels really safe and we’re only two miles out of Central London. We can either get the tube or a bus from outside the door into Central London. It takes me 20 – 25 minutes to get to work in the morning, which means I can go to the gym (which is in the basement) or have a good lie in on weekdays – I don’t start work until 10am. The accommodation’s social space rocks – we have a gym, a cinema, table tennis, fuse ball, a lounge (with three games consoles) and a patio with a BBQ. There are drinks for all the flatmates each Wednesday and other events through the month.

I think London’s everything we imagined before we moved here. There’s always something to do – which is what we wanted. We’ve been to the theatre several times and the shows we generally want to see don’t break the bank. We went to our local theatre last Monday; unfortunately the play: The Dead School, was a bit disappointing, but the theatre is really cool – fairly progressive and innovative, it tends to get plays by new writers. We’ve enjoyed both shows we’ve been to at The National Theatre. Most recently we saw Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves A Favour. A full orchestra was incorporated into the production which made for really interesting viewing. We’re going to try and see Waiting For Godot whilst it’s on at the Theatre Royal, we both really like the play but have never seen it together before.

People ask us a lot if London is expensive… I think the only thing we’re really feeling the cost of is cinema, you pay the best of £10 (if you’re lucky) for a cinema ticket, which is hard to justify. We’re going to try and get to Orange Wednesday showings, but everyone has the same idea so it’s always packed and hard to get tickets on a Wednesday. I feel like I should make a stand. There’s this advert that they show at the start of every film, an incredibly patronising woman comes on and tells us that Piracy is killing cinema…I’m going to make an advert for the cinema owners, telling them that their prices are killing cinema.

We bought a couple of DVDs the other day, rather than going to see MicMacs – the two DVDs were considerably less than two cinema tickets. We might start making movie nights a home affair (though it seems sad), we’re thinking of investing in a flat screen TV, as the TV we currently have in the room is miniscule and the one we’ve left up north is gigantic and bulky and would almost involve a whole car journey of its own.

We’ve found some great places to eat out and there’s a wonderful music venue in Camden. Richard Shindell’s playing there in August (one of the few artists I love but have never seen live) and Eric Taylor is playing there in the autumn. They also have an Open Mic every Sunday, which I’m planning to play fairly soon.

Finally, the most exciting piece of news – I got to sing with Nanci Griffith in Belfast last month! This is a life time ambition come true and I still can’t believe that it happened. We sang Well Alright and If I Had A Hammer together. I kept opening my eyes whilst I was singing, seeing Nanci and thinking, ‘Oh My God – that’s Nanci Griffith!’