Zoo, Rossopomodoro and St. James's

Posted on 2016/01/20 22:00:49 (January 2016).

[Saturday 16th January 2016]
I'm not entirely sure I understand the enduring appeal of the zoo for Erika, as quite often when we go there she seems fairly disinterested in the actual animals. In particular I'd assumed over the winter, when there's not so much on (no face painting, no bouncy castle) that she wouldn't be so keen, but somehow regardless it seems to still be a pretty much weekly occurrence. I suspect it's something to do with having my undivided attention for a while, and also partly the ritual of the gathering of snacks from the cupboard before we go, getting the bus to go there, and often eating the majority of the snacks on the bus. Last thing at night Erika usually asks where we're going tomorrow (and of course most of the time I have to tell her I'm going to work) and similarly first thing in the morning she'll ask where we're going today. Quite often at either or both of these times she'll also put in a request to go to the zoo at the next available opportunity. As she had asked several times this week I felt compelled to take her there this morning.

This time she seemed keen to go and see the giraffes, so we went straight there after getting in, and in fact we focused mainly on that side of the zoo - the meerkats, the rainforest bit, the lemurs etc. Other than that we pretty much just did the obligatory turn on the carousel, said hello to the penguins, then spent the remainder of the time in the shop. Which suited me on this occasion as it was warm in there.

I managed to persuade her to not have lunch at the zoo, so as we've done once before, we went from there to Rossopomodoro in Camden, where we met Chie for lunch. It wasn't quite as successful as previous visits, the service was rather slow which seemed to rather get on Chie's nerves.

I wanted to pop down to St. James's to do a bit of shopping in the afternoon, so I set off by myself after lunch, and had a lovely hour or two wandering around St. James's, and succeeded in my main objective of buying a pair of grey flannel trousers, from Hilditch and Key, of all places. I also bought some toiletries in D. R. Harris - which for some reason I'd never actually been into before, but became an instant hit - and of course violet creams from Fortnum and Mason, wherein I had a chat with the lady behind the chocolate counter on the subject.

As I'm planning a trip to Cheltenham at the end of this month (for the Festival Trials Day) I also had half a mind to look around for a new tweed suit - the two I currently have are, ridiculous as it sounds for tweed suits, just not really country enough. They're both from Walker Slater who seem to have a very different target market than, say, Cordings - far more eccentric dandies about town than the traditional country gent. When at Cheltenham last time I looked on enviously at the bright green tweeds which are absolutely unequivocally only for countryside use. Walker Slater's tweeds tend to be a much more muted palette. So I did pop into Cordings for a nose round, but their stock seemed a bit depleted, and it seems they only sell full tweed suits for a small range of their tweeds, none of which were quite what I had in mind.

Before heading back home I went to Chinatown and bought ingredients for dinner - Erika really like duck pancakes (mock duck in our case) and we'd recently ran out of the pancakes themselves, so I stocked up on those. At dinner we somehow managed to work our way through 18 pancakes. Erika may well have eaten 9 of these. Perhaps I shouldn't let her get too fixated on one type of food like this, but given the ordeal we normally have to go through to get her to eat anything at all, it's a joy to be able to put something on the table which she'll just eat all by herself without us having to intervene.

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