Hap­py Birth­day, Cousin Ellen!

Drat these time dif­fer­ences! It’s been so hard to find the prop­er time to call Avery’s Cousin Ellen for her birth­day. By the time she gets home from school her grand­par­ents are asleep, here in Lon­don. Today we can call, though, because it’s Sat­ur­day. Hap­py birth­day, dear. We hope that before you’re a year old­er, you’ll have made it to London.

We spent the entire sun­ny, crispy day today at our beloved Por­to­bel­lo Mar­ket. This is a clas­sic thing to do with John’s par­ents, because as I have hint­ed before, they can SHOP. We all for­got, how­ev­er, to bring very much cash, so our spend­ing was cur­tailed, but I can still safe­ly say that we brought home some trea­sures, some secret things, to make Christ­mas a lit­tle more fun. I think we’ll exchange gifts tomor­row evening. The Mar­ket is the only place I can think of where crowds are more fun than not. There’s some­thing cel­e­bra­to­ry, albeit it crazy, about strug­gling down the pave­ment with half the world’s pop­u­la­tion, peek­ing in past the out­door bits on sale to see if it’s worth duck­ing inside. And it usu­al­ly is. After our last din­ner par­ty here, I decid­ed that my car­bon-steel cut­lery, though sharp and also love­ly (19th cen­tu­ry Russ­ian), it is not prac­ti­cal. The blades just dark­en and get nasty to eas­i­ly. So at the mar­ket today I found some real­ly nice stain­less-steel blades with ivory-col­ored Bake­lite-ish han­dles. Six for five pounds! Not bad. So I got a dozen, and now I can have ten friends all come to din­ner and I won’t have to lie awake the night before plan­ning on food that we don’t all have to cut at the same time, a rather ridicu­lous sit­u­a­tion before a par­ty. If I only had cheese knives, I’d be all set. Someday.

I spent some con­sid­er­able time in a but­ton shop (near­ly as won­der­ful as The But­ton Queen in Maryle­bone), look­ing in vain for but­tons with lambs on them for our farmer friends in Con­necti­cut. Two years ago, Avery fed the baby lambs with milk from Coro­na beer bot­tles, and then the next Christ­mas Rol­lie’s wife Judy knit­ted a hat for Avery from wool from the babies she’d fed. Alas, no but­tons to be found. Although the sight-chal­lenged pro­pri­etor offered up some that he was pos­i­tive had great impres­sive bucks on them. Now, I did not tell him that first­ly, I did­n’t want bucks, I want­ed sheep, and sec­ond­ly, the ani­mal on his but­tons was… a bunny.

Avery mad­ly bar­gained for what she want­ed, and came away with a fab­u­lous stamp album. She spent all of lunch perus­ing it and now wants to go through the album her Grand­pa Paul gave her for her birth­day, and see if she has any coun­tries he did not have. She has grand plans to alpha­bet­ize them all, as well. That’s the sort of thing to do on Christ­mas vaca­tion, espe­cial­ly when your best friend has jet­ted off to Africa for the dura­tion. I hope Anna and her fam­i­ly are hav­ing an incred­i­ble time. We col­lapsed for a late lunch at Eclipse, which although it is a chain through­out Lon­don, is remark­able for Amer­i­can-style burg­ers and Bloody Marys, should you be in the mood. Although the tra­di­tion­al french fries are replaced by fried wedges of pota­toes, do not despair: they are crispy, incred­i­bly hot, and dust­ed with nice flakes of sea salt. Yummy.

Avery and her Non­na are watch­ing “High School Musi­cal,” for about the hun­dredth time for Avery, and the first for Non­na, who feels it is de rigeur for being a granny to three small girls. I felt that watch­ing it once was quite enough, so I’m up here mon­i­tor­ing my chick­en soup. Last night, how­ev­er, we all gath­ered around the tele­vi­sion set to watch the Puis­sance event at the Olympia Horse Show. Oh, my, that wall was high. The con­cept is that a wall is built out of light col­lapsi­ble bricks, begin­ning at 5 feet 9 inch­es, I think. Then the rid­ers and hors­es who can accom­plish that go on to attempt an even high­er wall, and so on until the wall reach­es over sev­en feet, if any­one gets that far. In the case of last evening, it was a tri­umvi­rate of Whitak­ers includ­ing Avery’s beloved Ellen (she stalked her on Thurs­day and got her auto­graph again!), and one lone Swiss fel­low. Won­der­ful sport! Just as long as Avery has no inten­tion of ever doing any such thing…