Work in progress

Somehow, when changing my profile picture to be the WGA strike banner, I managed to lose all my carefully gathered bloglinks. Oops. I'm in the middle of the rather slow process of rebuilding the list.

Meanwhile, here's something nice to distract from the messy page:

We had a splendid baking day yesterday, and A is rather proud of her chocolate biscuits and almond macaroons, and rightly so because they're delicious. I made our Christmas cake (bit late, but it will be fed with brandy and it'll still mature nicely) and half a dozen little fruit cakes. These will be marzipanned in a week or so, then iced a week later - if I remember, I'll do "before and after" pictures.

Quick trip to London last week for a conference at Lord's cricket ground; the bonus of staying all day and not skipping off at the tea break was a tour of the ground to the first 20 people to sign up. My strategy of sitting near the back of the room paid off! We went in the media centre, and then round the museum, where the original Ashes trophy is kept; then into the Pavilion, through the Long Room, and into the England dressing room, and took turns to stand on the balcony - very cool bonus indeed. We weren't allowed to take pictures though. Our tour guide was very entertaining and very knowledgeable - well worth going on the full tour if you like cricket.

The night before, I saw "Some Kind of Bliss" by Samuel Adamson at the Trafalgar Studios, a solo performance of a piece written especially for her by Lucy Briers. It's very funny in places, and shocking in others, although at times the play feels a bit too forced, as if the writer is trying to cram in as many odd events and coincidences into 80 or so minutes as he can. However, it's worth seeing for Lucy Briers, who has great comic timing, and manages to be both hopelesly naive and smartly insightful as her character Rachel and the other characters in her world - husband, ex boyfriend, Dad, uncle, and Lulu. And the bonus was that afterwards I got to speak to Claire Price, a very fine actress I've admired many times at the Crucible.

This week's dilemma is whether to zip over to Sheffield for one last night at the Crucible before it closes for the main stage to be redeveloped. It'll have to be Thursday - and I'm off to London on Friday again. The joys of a job which requires travel - interview with top Department of Health bloke in the afternoon, "God in Ruins" at Soho Theatre in the evening, Donmar on Saturday, and someone else is paying for my fare.

And now back to fixing broken links.