Happy New Year (of the Pig)

One of my colleagues brought in some Chinese goodies to celebrate New Year – my fortune cookie said “Practice friendliness – it is the path to happiness”. There were also little sweets – some labelled Milk Candy that were like Werther’s Originals, and some labelled Eraser Tea Candy! Photo on Flickr when I bring my camera to work (camera phone was too feeble).

Today we headed down to London because the V&A was doing some things for Chinese New Year, and managed to combine it with meeting up with E, O, M and F. The map at the V&A was possibly the least helpful map in English I’ve had to suffer, and the signs weren’t much cop either – we had to resort to Brownian motion plus asking staff when we could see any.

We finally found the correct room, where there were Chinese costumes and masks to try on, musicians to listen to, dragon dancers to watch and a calligrapher to admire (and get blessings from). The cafe was packed, so we used the steps of the Natural History museum to have lunch. Unfortunately it was packed inside, so the planned visit to the hands-on bit had to be turned into a trip to the park (Hyde Park), admiring the clutch of churches on the way (Brompton Oratory, Holy Trinity Brompton and an Orthodox Church) and various cathedrals to capitalism like Harrods and Emporio Armani.

At the park I played the midfielder to Katy’s striker in helping spread the word to another family about the power of slings. The little one was grizzly and then Katy showed his mum how to tie him on with a wrap and he instantly fell asleep! Another convert.

On the way back we stopped off at one of my favourite places to eat – Food For Thought in Covent Garden. Everything plopped onto bowls or plates school-dinners style, jugs of water on tiny tables, mostly downstairs but the food is amazing.

The actual journey back was a game of two halves. L threw a full-on tantrum (screaming and kicking) while in the carrier on my back, which made the packed tube trip nice :roll:. Sanity and calm were restored by the time we got to King’s Cross and we managed to get a set of seats around a table and so could easily share take-away pudding from Food For Thought :). After that we remembered the maths books we’d brought for the journey down (which hadn’t been used as we’d had to sit on the floor all the way :roll:) and the next exercise in each was polished off pleasingly quickly and with good humour. I got my retaliation in first with J ready for the next time he says that maths is boring and pointless as he was doing some division and one of the questions was about dividing some sweets equally among some children – a useful life skill, built on a foundation of maths!