Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday, Vol-in-Law!

I've taken the day off work to cater to my husband's every whim (well, not really...). We're first off to our local caf, the greasy spoon where we'll have eggs cooked up by a Polish short order cook. We'll peruse the cafe's collection of tabloid "Red Tops", the Sun, the Mirror, the Express and Star while we eat - taking in a collection of photos of topless women (I shall just skim past that), celebrity gossip and tragi-comic tales of the lives of the British underclass.

Then we're off for a walk in Richmond Deer Park. It's the Vol-in-Law's favourite place to go in London. It should be a lovely walk. It's foggy and cold this morning. I can't remember such fog in the time I've lived in London - it's almost like the movies - a thick inversion, a real pea-souper. To be fair, it's not quite as thick and cloying as the old fogs, those fogs that killed, a combination of natural fog and thick black domestic coal smoke, inner-city power station smog and manufacturing emissions, but I've been waiting a long time to be able to say "a real pea-souper", so I will.

We'll come back home to have some ready-made lasagna I bought in moment of madness (I don't normally do that kind of thing) and salad with The Texan. That will be followed by my very own apple-spice cake, still warm from the oven, baked at the ViL's request. It requires buttermilk which I had to buy from the weird French-Muslim halal butcher that's opened up recently in our neighbourhood.

Happy Birthday, Vol-in-Law