New Year Greetings

Happy New Year all of you! Staying with my sister and her family in the outer reaches of London. Have been buried under a deluge of Christmasness for the past week which has passed in a glorius haze of overindulgence - these are folks who believe in doing the whole thing properly. My chef brother-in-law, Michael and sister Tess, cooked above and beyond the call of duty - so I've just been drifting from one gormet meal to the next. (Goose, turkey, roast lamb, fresh salmon, game soup, Christmas pudding, Christmas cake, mince pies, sticky toffee pudding, caramelised orange trifle ... )
I got the snow you wished me, thanks - little flurries of it just after Christmas. Enough of it to turn a walk in the woods surrounding the former home of librettist W.S. Gilbert into a Narnian dreamworld. Enough to create magic when we took the kids iceskating in front of historical Somerset House. But it didn't settle for long and the rest of the week has been the usual December mix of wet miserable days and days so bitingly cold that the thoughts seem to get stuck to the inside of your brain. On the coldest day so far we bundled up and went off to the Tower of London with its hundreds of years of grissly history. Today we are off to Tate Modern to have lunch in one of Michael's restaurants and to take in the exhibitions.

Wishing you all the best for agreat 2006!