Whoa - nothing like stepping out of your building in the rain at 3 in the afternoon to realise that your flat’s entrance and half of your street has been turned into a crime scene overnight. Forensic people walking around dressed in astronauts, two blood-soaked sweatshirts on the pavement and the whole perimeter blocked.

‘Serious stabbing’, said the policeman. ‘Please give your name and address to leave and enter the scene. Did you hear anything last night?’.

Oh, great.

Yesterday I headed to Kew Gardens to meet with Raphael, Marie-Pierre and Odette to spend an afternoon looking at odd exotic plants, eating Victorian sponge (very much liked by the little bird pictured below who pestered me for more) and climbing on the tree-top ladder. I am cultivating a growing interest in gardening, and I really want to sign up for this course, but given that my free space is a balcony and tiny terrasse, it’s probably not going to work.

The area around Kew Gardens’ tube station is unbelievably beautiful (think Gilmore Girls setting, complete with little books and flowers shop, French wine store and bakeries), but such cuteness filled my with rage. I mean, fuck, Bethnal Green is painfully ugly/smelly/dirty and yet everywhere I go during the weekends (Hampstead, Epping, Bermondsey, Belsize park, Primrose Hill - you name it) people seem to live in Victorian houses with huge gardens and quiet streets. How did that happen? How yeah, maybe it’s because nobody can afford a council estate house until they’re 50 nowadays and I have to live near dusty hipsterland with cheap rent instead. Fuck that.

I keep on thinking of my mother who kept on telling me, when I was a lone teenager glued to the interwebz all day, that one day I would regret not hanging out in our lovely garden in Tours an awful lot more. Mom 1, Jess 0 + crying.

Bitterness aside,

In french we call this ‘une bouture’ but I am not sure of the English equivalent. It’s surely one of the most amazing experiment done with gardening: take a stem, wrap it in mousse and plastic to conserve the moisture and leave it to grow, turning into another branches which can be later transplanted.

My obsession with benches continues. Someone get me one somewhere nice when I am no more, please.

Oh and plants, gardens, cakes, jam making and homesteading?  I guess that’s what they call being old, and yet I haven’t hit 25. Clearly there’s something wrong with this picture, because everytime someone says”festival” or “clubbing” I cringe. Give me white wine and a quite space instead please. I guess London will do that to you.

Is there such a thing as Sunday depression? For as long as I can remember I have always been feeling down, bored and vaguely blue on Sundays. The excitement of having days off is gone, the weather is always gray if not worst, I don’t watch to TV anymore (if at all, really) and the only thing which could potentially warm my heart is a book. With loads of caffeine.Today would be good as any to start breaking this tradition, and I decided to get busy instead. I made a free-form nectarine and apricot pie with almond and two cans of raspberry+apricot jam. If the happiness subsides, I might finish that blog entry about Jezebel and slip under my new bed sheets (something to put on my ‘10 things to make me happy list’) with a boyfriend, a cat and The Wire. I would love to start a sewing project but for now I am too intimidated by awesome sites such as this one.

Free-form nectarine, almond and raspberry pie

Ingredients

- 340g shortcrust pastry (you can make it or buy it if you are lazy, like I did today)

- 3/4 teaspoon ground ginder

- 2 tablespoons ground almonds

- 2 nectarines, 3 apricots, handful of raspberries

- 1 egg white

- 3 tablespoons soft sugar, 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar

- 1 tablespoon of raspberry jam (I used my handmade strawberry-rhubarb one)

Roll the pastry to a 30 cm diameter and set aside. In a bowl, mix the fruits cut in pieces, ginger and sugar. Take the pastry and make a circle of 8 cm of diameter in the middle using the jam, and add the ground almonds on top. Add the fruits n top of the mix and fold the pastry over, as pictured. Sprinkle some sugar on top, and brush the pastry with the egg white. Add almond flakes on top if you feel like it.

Bake in the oven @ 250 degrees for 35 minutes, serve hot or cold.

Wanstead park in Epping: the best London discovery we’ve made in a long time - except of course when we got lost and had to walk an hour between highways, Presbyterian churches and depressing nursing homes.

Yes, I suppose there was something quite nice in biking home after work under the absolute pouring rain, Patrick Wolf’s Stars blasting away in my headphones. Next: trying out my new sewing machine.

Last week I received an e-mail from a nice researcher working for The Listening Post, a tv show broadcasted on Al-Jazeera english. She had read my blog entry about Sarkozy and the media and wanted to know if I was interested in talking for a few minutes about his influence on the French media. I said I was of course interested in principle, but when she phoned back the next day and had me spend 10 minutes blabbering away about my hate for the president, I thought she’d never call back. Too often, I am an embarrassment to no one but myself (see also: Bicycle Mark’s podcast).

But I was asked back today and said I would spare the team the commuting pain and pay them a visit in person. As it happens, the show shares a building with CBC Canada (droll), and I was welcome by a lovely and very interesting intern and a very funny cameraman/producer, who was in panic because he forgot his pregnant’s wife wedding anniversary. We chatted for a few minutes and they told me to speak for a couple of minutes, in front of the camera, about my opinions. And how do I put this? I am horrible at being interviewed for podcasts, and even worse on camera. I was thinking about the poor editor who would have to work on the footage, deleting my ‘errrs’ and my awkward pauses, and I ) blushed 2) wanted to stab myself in the eye. I profusely apologized but they both said it was absolutely fine and what they were looking for.

As I left, she said she’ll let me know when the footage is online. I thought, fuck me, I hope I’m so bad it never airs.

Lesson learned: stick to blogging.

In Angel

The HIV data is horrible, but seriously - they totally got this ad wrong.

I would love to have a boat similar to these.

My dear friend.

Well, if you ask me she may sound like a nutter novelist, but her remarks are fair enough:

I don’t mind paying my tax, I want hospitals and schools, and police and firemen, and street lighting and rubbish collection, but I minded funding the Iraq war, and I mind funding fiscal incompetence. We are getting to the point where we can’t afford the things we need – like schools and hospitals and social care, because all our money is being spent on buying bombs and bailing out banks,
That’s masculinity gone mad – get the girls in as fast as possible.

Lord help me – I have reverted to capital letters and BOLD. A sure sign of the nutter at the typewriter.

A while ago Jeanette Winterson wrote a good editorial for the Guardian food - defending organic products, local farming, etc. More interestingly, she not only talked about quality, but proximity: little shops are a pleasure to shop at, a trip to while Tesco is not really stepping in smiles-and-friendship land. Winterson owns a deli in Spitalfields -near my own neighbourhood- and I still have yet to go there. Maybe that will be my week-end plan.

Saturday afternoon was spent doing touristic activities.

Tomorrow will be spent looking for a job, waiting for a very intimidating interview on friday.