Isolation Journal 11

Supergroggy again this morning, went straight to "work" rather than having breakfast and ate cornflakes and had black coffee around 10am.  Work has been ridiculously busy this week and we've had more jobs come in this week that we would tend to expect in a "pre covid" week.  

I worked solidly on a few tasks and didn't end up having lunch until around 2pm.  I had a jacket potato with marmite and a salad with avocado, tomato, lettuce and carrot sticks. 

I carried on working away and spoke to lots of people and drowned in more emails.  I've really got to get on top of my emails as it makes me feel perpetually anxious when I know that I have too many - today there are over 700 that I need to get sorted.

I've also got lots of prep work that I need to do for the new system that we go onto in July - I've been with the company for over 12 years, so I have a lot of data to get validated and right.  I've also had a work dilemna that I need to sort out and will play on my mind unti l've resolved it, I've not done anything wrong, but someone misunderstood something and I need to explain it in a way that means they aren't unhappy.

I listened to the Daily Briefing which was pretty uneventful other than the fact that more people need to wear masks in more situations (I ordered a couple of masks from amazon this morning) and the R rate is likely to be more than 1 in both the South West and North West.

I finished work just after 6pm and got into my running gear as I wanted to get a run in before I listened another Arvon Reading.  I ran for half and hour and did just over 6K as I still need to get my vitality points.  I managed to have a quick shower and put my clothes on and get ready for the reading.  

This time it was Jo Brand and it was warm and engaging and funny.  I cooked tea as I watched on my laptop and made haloumi with roasted peppers, aubergine, corgette and red onion along with some left over bulgar wheat and brown rice cooked with vegetable stock. I then opened the mint chocolate box that I'd been given for my birthday. 

Qubit has spent the day in the same amazon box and Maya has been in and out all day, she came running in when it randomly started haling.

We watched some Picard and drank some Jim Beam and ginger beer and then moved onto the final series of Friends as my brain needed something easy.  Weirdly my left leg has started to be numb this evening, I hope it's just a weird anomalie, it feels different to when the nerve was really sore.

Isolation Journal 8

Today was a pretty exhausting day, another day of work starting with a 9am kick off meeting.  Again I had a couple of black coffees and some cornflakes for breakfast and during the 9am meeting I learned that having worked at 80% hours for the past 2 months we are going to have this reviewed and I could potentially go back to 100% or stay at 80%.  I have found having more free time has been good over the past 2 months, it's allowed me to do more focussed work for Guides and runclub as well as tidy the house, train and do blogging and the creative writing last week.  In the last couple of days at work though it's been signficantly more busy so I'm thinking that I could easily fill 5 days of work, there's is plenty to do.  I'm not sure what I'll decide or exactly when I need to have decided by, but the whole lockdown situation has made me value having more time at home and less time commuting.  

After the 9am meeting, we then had a temp update meeting and I helped one of my team in preparing a proposal for a client which I found out later this afternoon was accepted which is a big relief.  

I knew I had a busy evening this evening so I went out to post a letter to a friend and go for my run at lunchtime.  I had shared a tweet over the weekend from Postsecret about someone's biggest fear being able to not be with their pet if they had to be put to sleep because of the Covid situation, it is a huge fear for me and I hadn't realised that one of my very few twitter followers who I'm friends with in real life had been through this.  I felt bad, although I don't think she thought I'd done it intentionally so I sent her a card with some seeds to plant to remember her kitty and also a dribble that I'd written about cats.  I hope she likes it and it doesn't upset her more.  I also remembered that I'd planned on sending a tangle to one of my colleagues who mentioned she'd been really picking at her hands with all the anxiety.

My run was fast today, I managed to get a PB on a segment near me and was onlyl 8 seconds off being the fastest woman to have run it, I did just over 5K in just around 26 minutes.  I grabbed an orangle lolly out of the freezer and a pint of orange squash with ice and a bit of salt thrown in to cool down.  I was then straight back onto another teams call to launch an BD session for the afternoon and then a meeting about the housing sector and another about government and then a wrap up call - it was exhausting!  I managed to pick up 2 leads for colleagues in the North West that will hopefully turn into jobs and so it wasn't completely meeting focussed thankfully.  I realised that after signing in for the call straight after my run that an hour passed before I realised I'd not eaten so I quickly prepped a carrot and cucumber into sticks as well as cheese (coverdale and goats) chutney and a couple of slices of serrano ham.  

I then had 15 mins away from the laptop before running my virtual #runandtalk meeting for the run club, we had 6 people sign in and a nice chat about how we were finding things.  I was hungry so I'd grabbed a granny smith apple and cut it into chunks and a babybel light. I then had a call with my friends Hayley and Sam for a catch up for about an hour and a half.  and Alan very kindly made Beef Ragu for tea from Hello Fresh.  We talked about how we are all still very nervous of being out and about, even if we are allowed more freedom at the moment.  Hayley also told us about a commission she's working on.  I tidied the kitchen, grabbed another glass of white wine and a gu pudding and had a sneaky couple of slices of serrano ham.

I read a lot more about the unrest going on in America today, I blacked out my facebook and Instagram for #blackouttuesday and I'm still trying to read and learn more about how I can support black people better.  I feel ignorant, I feel ashamed, I feel guilty and I'm confused as to what I can do, so I'm going to do my best to learn more and try and support more.

Isolation Journal 7

First day back at work after a week off today.  I woke up before my alarm and felt groggy as it took me a while to fall asleep and it was pretty late by the time we'd got to bed.  I had 2 coffees and a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast.  I got the milk in from outside, we get 1 pint of whole milk, 2 pints of semi skimmed and one of orange juice and tend to get through it very easily.  I start the day with a MS Teams call so I dialled in at 9am and caught up with the team.  Usually after a week off there is an avalanche of emails and work to get through, but it was half term which usually means it is quieter for me.  I don't usually take half term off, but given we can't go anywhere it was a sensible time to take off and the weather was great.  

The first part of the day was spent catching up on emails and returning calls and then I'd booked a virtual meeting with a new contact and one of my colleagues in the afternoon which went well.  I then as usual fell into a more productive mindset and got far more done in the last couple of hours and in total it was a pretty productive day.  

I read Why We Sleep - by Matthew Walker, well when I said read, I listened to it on the commute to work, well most of it... and one of the takeaways I found was that there are two types of people morning and night people as developed in times when we lived in tribes and had to sleep 8 hours (the ideal amount) and the morning people would go to bed earlier by 4 hours and get up 4 hours earlier.  If you are an "evening" person (definitely me) you are likely to naturally choose a later bedtime so a 9 - 5 world unfairly disadvantages you if you have to get up before you 8 hours of sleep is completed.  Before we were in lockdown I was averaging around 6-7 hours of sleep a night, I'm now closer to between 8 - 9 and generally feeling good for it.  The important thing the book points out if you are an evening person and you get up early is that you if you have 6 out of 8 hours you don't just lose 25% of sleep, you actually lose 85% of the REM sleep as much of this happens in the last 2 hours of your 8 hour cycle.  I'm worried about what will happen when we go back to having to commute how I'll cope on 6 - 7 hours again.

We also had a discussion about when we might be going back into the office, originally it was set to be September, but it could be July and that makes me nervous.  It seemed to make Alan angry as his company are still completely working from home all around the world and he is saying that if I have to go into the office too soon he'll sleep in a separate bed.  Our CEO has said that we won't need to go back in until we feel safe, and no one will be forced, so I don't think that I'll be forced to make a decision about this hopefully.

At 12pm I had my online pilates class and it was really warm!  We had a bit focus on core, I'm terrible at core exercises.  Alan then made some new dumplings for the stew and so I had stew and dumplings for lunch on a very warm day.  I also booked onto a reading and Q&A session with Jo Brand via Arvon on Friday evening at 7.15pm so something cool to look forward to.

I finished work around 6.45 as I was finishing of writing an advert (not my favourite tasks as there are so many drop down boxes to choose!) and I had over 60 applications to my last advert.  

Alan made smoothies with a pineapple, banana and mango that I'd had delivered from Delifresh about a week and a half ago that were going a bit soft.  We took the smoothies and went on a 4.5k walk around the fields and I found a really cool green stone and the light was beautiful and it was really warm.  

I then made a Hello Fresh dinner of roasted pork with lentils and creme fraiche and Alan served up some rum and raisin ice cream, with cream for dessert and I had a glass of white wine that's been open for a couple of weeks that was actually still really good.  

We watched friends and Qubit meowed loudly until Maya came home at about 11pm.

Isolation Journal 2

After another late evening writing before bed so we were woken up with a start at 8am by Amazon delivering a parcel for Alan.  I got back into bed and fell back to sleep for a bit and it was probably around 10am before we got up.  

We had cornflakes for breakfast (which apparently provides you with 50% of your daily Vitamin D needs which I'd never focussed on as much until I knew it can help your body be more resilient to Covid, well apart from when I binged on it after I broke my shoulder in 2018)

I listened to another Hay Festival Lecture on vaccinations (well half before I had to cook lunch) and again I'll finish listening again.  We had gnocchi fried with chorizo, courgette and spring onion and Alan picked and prepped some of the artichoke that we've been growing in the garden.  He used garlic oil and roasted them in the oven.  We've been really enjoying the Artichokes as have the ants and the aphids, it's hard to clean them all off!  We ate outside and it was really hot!

I wrote 2 cards/letters one to my Dad's cousin Polly who I know is living by herself and I'm guessing might be finding lockdown more challenging and also one to my friend Gloria who is turning 40 - I found a weird inspo card from the 90s that I've had in my possession since it was being thrown out by the worst company I think I've ever worked for.   The card said "Desire breeds Power" and I think she'll enjoy the oddness of it.  

As a CIRF part sponsored by my running club Hyde Park Harriers I had set out a plan to deliver marathon coaching this year, but with all the marathons postponed and not being able to run in groups I've been preparing some session plans for people to do whilst they are running by themselves.  So far I've done a session on intervals, a progression session and today was a hill reps session.

I also listened to a parkrun podcast that has been continuing in lockdown - With Me Now as I tidied out the awkward cupboard in the kitchen to put in the new pans that arrived from Amazon at 8am this morning.  Alan also watered the garden with the hose and accidentially knocked off the water to the dishwasher and then subsequently fixed the dishwasher.

We decided to go for a run to post my 2 letters and took it steady as it was warm and Alan is regaining his fitness after some time out from running.  I also twinged my Piriformis and so was taking it a bit slower.  It took us a little longer than planned so I ended up dialling into a weekly call that I have with my friends Hayley and Sam via zoom at 5pm whilst we were still walking home across a field.  

I had a good chat and catch up with Hayley and Sam and then I debated whether to do the Wednesday evening online Zumba class with my friend Gui and I did and took it easy.  Qubit arrived in the middle and meowed loudly.

We then had Hello Fresh for tea - spicy meatball curry and rice and then rhubarb crumble and vinetta for dessert and caught up with Have I got News for You 

I'm now currently enraged by my Mum sharing a post defending Dominic Cummings, which I really don't understand when she is far more negatively affected by government policy than I am, I could say a lot more on this, but I'm currently engaged in a row with my mum on messenger.

Isolation Journal 1

I really should have started an isolation journal back in March, but I'm guessing that I'm not the only person feeling like this.  At the time when everything started to change, it changed fast and even though I had more "time" my mental energies were a bit frazzled.

For me as I've mentioned in my previous post it all felt (feels) a bit like a dream, we flew out to a tropical island and by the time we flew back my reality was very different, but rather than try and distill the past 10 weeks into a journal entry, I'm going to just think about today as part of the weekly challenge from Curtis Brown Creative.

Last night I went to bed fairly late as I have this week off as holiday, I'd decided to participate in a creative writing week with my friend Lauren and so I didn't end up getting into bed until around 1am as I'd been up doing a freewriting challenge.  Annoying my laptop decided to freeze and omitted half of what I'd written!

It meant that I woke up after around 7.5 hours of sleep and finally dragged myself out of bed after 9am knowing that I needed to get myself ready for a cycle ride.  I'd arranged to meet my cousin for a socially distanced catch up at Towton Battlefield and swap cakes.  My cousin is gluten free so I decided to make some chocolate cornflake cakes and used my favourite life hack ever of melting chocolate with a hairdrier.  I ate a banana for breakfast and had a black coffee from our lovely new coffee machine.

Alan came with me which was helpful as I'm still a bit nervous about cycling and despite googlemaps claiming it was 4.5 miles it ended up being 6 miles.  We met just after 11am and had a nice long chat whilst some farmers were laying out some cabling across the field.  We had the new awkward scenario of how to exchange cakes whilst keeping a social distance, it almost looks like a very small hostage exchange.  I felt bad on the way back as Alan pointed out that we'd not actually gone for a stroll around the Battlefield especially after reading my favourite 1 star review.

boring field

I like to come to the old battle fields. This battle field is the most boring one out of them all there is nothing to see but boring old fields. I payed a tone of money to get there and when i got there all it is, is fields after fields and the best moment was the trip there and back!!!!!!

I made some pasta for lunch with some roasted courgette and yellow pepper and chorizo and made some marmite sauce for mine after my friend Lauren had told me about it - basically cook the pasta and save some pasta water and mix it with butter and marmite.  It was very salty, but delicious.

Whilst I was cooking I listened to half of a talk from the The Hay Fesitval online by Devi Sridhar above the Covid-19 pandemic and I need to finish watching it because she was giving some really balanced critique of the UK handling including the observation that countries with less strong health systems were more rapid and robust with their responses and consequently experienced less deaths than those who on paper were better set up with strong health systems and so perhaps delayed their decisions to respond longer.  

We ate lunch and I watched another event from The Hay Festival live by Daniel Davis on immunity and Covid-19, Lauren was also watching and we both found that it was very science based in explanations and for me I need to re-watch it!

Lauren and I then had a video call to talk through the writing that we had done and to compare some notes about how we'd found the writing exercise.  It was really nice to actually do some writing and have someone else give some feedback.  I had written a piece of freewriting and thought about the concept of freedom in lockdown and Lauren had written a piece inspired by the writing prompt He knew she’d never come back.  Lauren had written with pen and paper and it made me think that I might like to try doing some writing that way as I think typing and writing use slightly different parts of your brain.  We're going to do some more writing and discussion over the week and have both booked onto a "flash fiction" course with Arvon on Thursday.

After I'd finished the call I watched the Daily Briefing from Downing Street which had two of the questions from the public that I would be asking if I'd been given the chance - Will people fined in similar situations in lockdown looking to access childcare now be able to appeal their fines in light of Dominic Cumming's behaviour being described as "legal" and also a question about if we can go shopping for non essentials why and when can we see our families?  Matt Hancock gave a more consistent briefing than we have seen over the past couple of days, but was extremely dismissive of the media and didn't allow follow-ups on their questions.  I'm worried about why we have the highest death rate and yet we still don't have a robust test, track and trace system set up and what is happening with the app?  It amazes me that people are still willing to defend our government without question as we are so far behind the world in being able to get back to some sense of normal life.  

After the briefing I decided to go for a run, I'm aiming to run around 1000 miles in 2020 which sounds like a lot, but is actually only 4.4K per day when you break it down.  I also wanted to take some pictures for the photo competition that one of the ladies from my running club has set.  I took pictures for the "bugs eye view" and "red, blue or yellow" categories.  I was going to go for a run up and down the hill on the road next to the house to keep an eye out for an amazon pantry delivery, but it had been left by the door when I went to set out for my run so I unpacked it and set off.  I ran 5K in 27 minutes.

Alan made dinner and we had a Hello Fresh recipe of Lamb Kofta and he even made a rhubarb crumble which we had with a bit of vinetta that was delivered with the Amazon Pantry order.  The biggest issue I have with lockdown is just how much sugar and puddings I'm eating, generally I've been healthier in terms of sleep and excercicse - I'm running, cycling, zumba and walking as well as Pilates classes, but I definitely need to try and cut down on the sweet things!

Whilst eating dinner, we watched a very odd film that promised more in the description than it delivered.  The Voices - A likable guy pursues his office crush with the help of his evil talking pets, but things turn sinister when she stands him up for a date.  It gets 6.4 / 10 on IMDB, but I would probably give it 3 - 4 as it really didn't have a very coherent plot and was just a bit gross, but not in a funny or contributing to the plot way.

We then put Friends on again in the background whilst I started to  write my isolation journal...

Holy Pushkar and Camel Safari

Another early start for a 6am train which meant it was trusty breakfast biscuits again although I did make it even less healthy by adding a bottle of Pepsi and packet of salt and vinegar crisps that I bought at the station.

The TukTuk ride in the dark was quite a scary experience - at least the driver seemed able to predict and swerve the potholes!  The train was more like our first train ride and assigned seats and more room.  

4 hours on a well worn seat did make me glad to be off although the station was almost more crazy than Delhi with and I think our taxi driver fancied himself as a getaway driver overtaking cars to skip through what appeared to be a roadblock!

We arrived at our very nice hotel and ordered lunch and settled in - I had another shower as my hair is still full of oil from my massage yesterday!

Lunch was pleasant enough, but more basic to some of the food that I've become accustomed to and was a very mild palak paneer and vegetable Biriani.

At 4pm as it started to get cooler we headed off for our camel safari.  I was nervous because I've never ridden a Camek before and they are so tall! It was actually great - my camel - Maharaja was so placid and well behaved (until his few detours on the way back to eat flowers) and it was much easier to get on and off than I had anticipated - the key is to lean back when they stand up or sit down.

Our safari took us through the village into sand dunes where we stopped so that the camel handlers could start a fire and boil up some chai.  We all had a little cup of chai and a biscuit whilst the camels had a rest and some gypsies who'd spotted us came over to play us some music.

We set off again to get to Pushkar and have a city walk.  We stopped briefly to visit a very holy temple of Brahma which was interesting, but strictly no photos and then we walked through streets with many weapon and clothes stalks as well as some selling creepy looking dolls!

Pushkar is a holy city which means no meat or alcohol and the most holy place is the lake.  

To get back to our hotel the quickest route was via the lake, but we had to take our shoes off to walk past it and cross a footbridge!

I took another shower before dinner and signed up for a voluntary early start for a sunrise hike tomorrow.  Dinner was a bit disappointing as the "kebab" I ordered was more like a dry veggie burger, but the Gulab Jalam dessert was delicious!

New Delhi Old Delhi - Sensory Overload

Sleep wasn't really happening for me last night and with a 4am wake up tomorrow I should be asleep... But sadly not!

Breakfast at the hotel was a mix of western cornflakes and toast with (what I chose) Indian coconut noodles, paratha and banana.  We met as a group at 9am for our walking tour and made our way down to the Metro Station.   On the way we passed a school where I watched the joyous faces of children under umbrellas and raincoats dancing under open hoses.  

The Metro was certainly an experience I'm used to the tube in London impact that this was something else! Security is much tighter and to even enter the station you had to go through security scanners similar to in an airport.  There are separate carriages for women which I'm not sure how I felt about, but were certainly more pleasant than being crammed in with multiple men!  It's probably one of the only countries that I would feel tall living in!

We arrived in Old Delhi and it was very much sensory overload!  Walking through the streets you could smell at any one point in time urine, the heady sense of sweet incense, marigolds flowers, disinfectant, rotting rubbish and tasty street food being cooked.  You are surrounded by street vendors, men, women and children on their daily commute via TukTuk, motorcycle, rickshaw or car and the poverty stricken beggars offering to weigh you in exchange for money.  It was simultaneously overwhelming and amazing.

We walked through the crowded and chaotic streets of old Delhi stopping briefly for various explanations on buildings and to sample samosas and jelebee sweets from authentic vendors.

We walked up to the red temple or Jama Masjid - Delhis oldest mosque.  We had to put on even more clothes to enter the mosque despite being fully covered and it was interesting inside, but what intrigued me the most was the group of women and children trying to ask me to take the photograph in exchange for money.   however I've left my camera outside because it cost £3 to take photos inside.  

We then wound our way across Old Delhi to the Sikh temple - Sheeshganj Guruwara which was plush but not overly  ostentatious inside.  What was most intriguing about the temple is that it wasn't just dedicated to worship, there is a whole mass production kitchen attached where people were queueing up to eat ready for lunch.   Some of the group got to try their hand at making chapatis.   We had to remove our shoes to enter the temple and as we walked across the marble in bare feet we were aware of just how hot the day had become.  At the end of the tour we decided that we were all hungry so our leader Raj recommended a restaurant in New Delhi called United coffee house.

United coffee house was icy cool with air-conditioning and very plushly decorated. I stuck to my theory of eating vegetarian food and had a very interesting cauliflower dry curry with fresh coriander and rice.  We had a quick wander through the market to take on some of the atmosphere and then took our guides advice and jumped into TukTuk back to the hotel.  We went to the pre-booked police TukTuk station, but we're still beset by touts trying to earn our business.  It was a 20 minute ride back to the hotel and very much an experience that is hard to describe, although very similar to the traffic in Nepal!  Needless to say I don't think I would ever be able to drive in Delhi!

After a brief freshen up at the hotel we met as a group to discuss our next days activities and decided to go out for another bite to eat together. I decided to sample the strong elephant beer which was pretty strong at 8%!  I also had dhal with rice which was delicious and enjoyed getting to know the other members of the group much better.  After the meal we decide to stop at The Perfect Hotel for a rooftop beer and drink before bedtime.  

It's now midnight and I've packed my bags ready for a 5 AM departure from the hotel, but once again I am not sleepy thanks jetlag!

Acclimatisation

I've decided there's only so much time I can spend relaxing... Even on holiday!  So after trying to catch up on sleep, I decided that I should have a late lunch and ventured down to the hotel reception and was pointed me in the direction of the restaurant in the basement.  

I was the only person there and the room was a bit dark and dingy with a hugely loud fan, but I had a lovely meal of mixed vegetables, dhal makhani and vegetable pilau rice - under recommendations from my friend Jenny I'm trying to limit my intake of "saucy curry" but the dhal was quite saucy!  I loved the flavours of coriander and cumin seeds in the rice - apparently it was a "little bit spicy" for me - it wasn't!

I had a much needed coffee and a salty lassi to finish and then went back to my room for a nap!

The orientation meeting was long!  I got to meet some of my fellow great companions a good mix of people mostly from the UK but with some from Australia, Germany, Ireland and Italy.  We learned a bit more about what we will be doing in the days ahead and all agreed to go out for a meal together for our first evening.  Our Guide Gauraj seems passionate and organised - so we should have fun on our trip.

This was my first venture out walking along the streets of Delhi and actually it wasn't too dissimilar to what I expected from visiting Nepal.  You have to walk with confidence and purpose and assume that you get driven round by the constantly beeping from tuktuks, rickshaws and cars!  Lying in bed with the beeping horns outside my window I could almost imagine if it wasn't the sort that I was in New York.  People use their horns here correctly - to make other road users aware of their presence rather than an aggressive act of annoyance!  There is noise strange smells food and bright colours everywhere you go it's fantastic!  There were men stringing marigolds together into garlands, fruit and veg stalls with unusual looking fruit and rats running through litter into the drains - a colourful mix of sights.  

At the restaurant I had a mixed set of vegetable starters and vegetable Biriani for my meal coupled with the Kingfisher ultra beer and it was delicious.  

The restaurant had an unusual Indian TV program playing in the background with lots of (I assume) celebrities gyrating in some sort of dance off as well as cherubs painted all over the ceiling it was an interesting place!  It was nice to get to know some more of my trip companions over dinner and I look forward to our first proper sightseeing at 9 o'clock tomorrow morning.

California Dreaming - High Flyers Style - Day 1

Once again there has been a big hiatus in my blogging (well on here anyway, I've been keeping a more private journal online with some of the thoughts that are going around my head at the moment, but it's best to keep them separate from day to day stuff I feel)

Anyway, I couldn't go on holiday and not fill everyone in on the minutia of details of what I've been up to.  The post title is a bit of a clue...I'm currently in California and have had a really interesting week so far, but fairly limited time to sit and reflect and record exactly what has been going on.

First of all, this will be (for what I've managed to do so far) a fairly cheap holiday for me as my flights were paid for (bar a £65 amendment fee) as well as the first 3 nights of accommodation, food and activities for 3 days.  How you might ask?  Well I ended up doing pretty well at work last year and qualified for an incentive that we call in our organisation "High Flyers" although i'm not sure whether more accurately it should be "High Fliers"?

Anyway, when you are a High Flyer, it means that for 4 days you are treated a bit like a VIP/Royalty and given 2 extra days holiday and flown out to a destination with other High Flying colleagues.  There were about 15 of us in total that went on the holiday - more had qualified, but some couldn't make the dates.  We also had 3 directors with us to "supervise".  We met at Heathrow and made introductions and then shortly boarded the plane to LAX.  Being the extremely well coordinated person that I am, I managed to throw an entire Bloody Mary complete with ice down my jeans within 30 minutes of takeoff - I had only tops to change into, no change of trousers.  It dried eventually and I ended up smelling of tomato until I managed to get changed at the hotel.

My attention span wasn't great, so I managed to watch 2 films, but they were fairly low brow and I have to say, not very good at all.  In brief I watched For a Good Time Call it was incredibly predictable, but also really quite poorly characterized  so you didn't really care what happened to the characters who weren't at all realistic or in a realistic situation.  I then watched Smashed which was much more realistic and actually very sad - a mutually alcohol dependent marriage that changed when the wife decided to get sober.  Probably not the best preparation for a holiday where we'd be frequenting some high end bars - although it was a good sense check.

So we landed at LAX and took a long time to get through immigration, but fortunately we all made it through.  We were met by our rep who showed us to our transfer coach and then after a short journey we arrived at the fabulous W Hotel Hollywood.  We were welcomed with a cocktail and a seat outside as we walked through the truly awesome lobby.

We had about 45 minutes to get freshened up and accustomed to our hotel rooms before dinner.  The rooms were fairly spectacular - very white, bright and clean and with a very exciting, but expensive mini bar selection!

We went up to the rooftop restaurant of the hotel and had a really lovely meal which included 4 courses - although I had gone to bed by the time they brought out the desserts!  I particularly enjoyed a melt in the mouth steak with garlic mashed potatoes (although it probably had a posher name!)  The view from the rooftop was brilliant and the atmosphere was really good too, however at 10.30pm (equivalent to about 6.30am UK time) even an espresso couldn't keep my eyes from closing and drifting into mini sleeps so I snuck away and went to bed in my huge comfy white bed switching on the wave sounds machine to block out some of the partying noises from down the corridor.  I think that the rest of the guys were out pretty late - although everything in Hollywood does close at around 2am so not that late, but the equivalent of 8am for those who hadn't slept on the plane!

Cupcake Baking and Decorating Class

So back in the Autumn my friend Jenny suggested that we buy a Living Social voucher that she had spotted for a 3 hour cup cake baking and decorating class for £22 from Zarina's House of Cakes.  We booked it for today to give us something to look forward to after Christmas and it was really good fun.

First of all we had a look at some of the cakes that Zarina had decorated whilst we waited for the rest of the class participants to arrive and were offered a coffee.  We were then shown through into Zarina's lovely (and huge!) kitchen where all our ingredients were ready and laid out for us - just like on a TV cooking programme!

  
There were 4 of us in the group in total and the first thing that we had to do was to bake our cakes after we'd been talked through the recipe - similar to a sponge recipe, but with the addition of cornflour to make it a smoother mix.  The recipe from memory was as follows:

4 oz self raising flour
4 oz stork / butter
4 oz caster sugar
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons corn flour
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence

All the ingredients were added into a bowl and then whisked for exactly 1 minute.

If you've ever wondered how to make cupcakes that don't bake too high...then we learnt how to do this - using an ice cream scoop you fill it 2/3rds full and then use the scoop releaser to put the cake mixture into the cupcake case.

The cakes then went into bake and Zarina showed us how to make our fondant icing decorations to go on top of the cupcakes.

First of all we blended two blocks of white fondant icing with our chosen colour pastes.  I went for Tangerine and violet and Jenny went for claret and ice blue.

We then used Zarina's huge array of cutters to cut out decorations for our cupcakes.  The cutters we used included butterflies, shoes, stars, flowers and geometric shapes.  Some of the cutters just cut out the shape, but others emboss patterns on top.  We also layered up the decorations and used just a drop of water to attach the icing pieces together.

After we had made enough decorations for 6 cupcakes, we took our baked cakes that were almost perfectly flat and Zarina showed us how to ice them with very smooth and perfectly whipped butter cream icing.  First of all we were shown how to "Flat ice" the cakes - spreading the butter cream icing over the top of the cake and using a palate knife to neaten up the edges.  

Zarina then showed us how to pipe butter cream roses onto the cakes - simple, but a definite technique required to make them look like roses.  Then when we had iced our cakes with butter cream roses or flat icing techniques we placed our fondant decorations on with some really lovely results - even if I do say so myself.  (Mine are on the left and Jenny's on the right)

Zarina then gave us a cupcake carrier box to put our cakes in and I think that they are almost too pretty to eat!

We then went back to my house so Jenny could see my decorating efforts on a larger scale (I've just repainted my entire lounge - photos and post to follow shortly) and I introduced her to the wonder that is Kirkstall Morrisons with the best salad bar in the UK (only rivals I've found would be in New York!).  Jenny is here looking very pleased with the selection.