Starting to suffer from a real lack of music here now. No piano, no flute, the CD player in our house is *shudder* a Sanyo AND doesn't work. I lack my CD collection, my record collection, except for a few choice samples on minidisc and MP3. And too much work so I can't even get to the midday concerts at St Bride's that I've been looking forward to ever since I started. Heigh ho. On the bright side, the pressure at work should calm down a bit in about a week (I hope) and I discovered that PwC have a choir, which I've asked to find out a bit more about - apparently they do a Christmas service at Southwark Cathedral.

I seem to have finally finished with my photos from Belgium. I had no idea there were so many to post! But at last I can move on to all the 1Gb+ of photos I've taken since... now *there's* a pet project!

# posted by minim @ 10:17 PM 0 Comments

I've been here for a couple of months now and absolutely loving it (although I seriously need to start investing in woolly clothing of every variety). The one thing I'm having real difficulty with though is how impossible it is to find good lean meat here. Everything's so fatty! I'm having to skip mince altogether (we're contemplating grinding out own) and sausages look like going the same way. Is it because of the cold climate perhaps? Maybe in Australia the meat is always lean because the weather's too warm to handle all that fat. It's too much for me anyway - and the Australian wife of a friend who just arrived back here apparently is finding the same thing. Good to know it's not my imagination though... We're thinking of maybe ordering in some high-quality organic meat (Welsh lamb or something) over the internet to see how that is.

Our first trip to the supermarket took 3 hours though, as we had to keep stopping to read labels and try to compare brands about which we knew nothing. Just picking out a washing powder took 45 minutes!

We went out to dinner for my friend Pam's birthday last week to a Thai restaurant, where I fully expected to be ordering my usual rice and water - but they actually had food I could eat! Thai food without either coriander or lemongrass or excess chili! And it was very nice too.

One thing I'm finding absolutely amazing here is the availability of ready-meals that are actually made from Real Food. Astounding. A trip to a Marks & Spencer foodhall is just one long round of drool. Also fabulous is how easy it is to find really nice organic food here - and for the veg it's not even that much more expensive than the normal veg. We're being absolutely spoilt rotten (strawberries that dribble when you bite them!) and loving it. Going to be terrible going back to Australia (except for the meat thing of course!)

# posted by minim @ 3:02 AM 0 Comments