THE GLASS BELL

Here is a snapshot of our current visit in Sydney featuring Jacqui's parents. Naturally, I was a bit nervous before meeting them, but as they are such nice people and have made me feel so welcome in their home I had nothing to fear. However, situations like the one described below will always come up at some point. So watch this space as I'm sure there will be more embarrassing moments worthy of being captured in black and white.

THE ACCOMODATION

Last weekend we drove for 2 days south from Sydney. We stopped halfway in Canberra and went for a visit to parliament and got a sneak peak of the Australian Question Time. One of the ladies of the opposition got expelled for 1.5 hours for insulting the Speaker and there was general shouting and booing every now and again. Entertaining. Then we went on to Melbourne and the house of a friend of Jacqui's from her student days in Paris.

THE COFFEE

We are currently in Australia, and together with New Zealand there is no better coffee-making people in the world, so one of the first things I did when we landed was to find a good coffee place to sample the goods. I also met some of the locals.

THE SILENCE

There was a small invasion of people from the Ma family this week....

THE VISITOR PART 2

So the infamous eye infection has changed its tune, and has turned into a version that makes it pretty scary waking up in the morning next to a creepy looking red-eyed monster.

This is the sequel to The Visitor... as the name might suggest.

THE VISITOR

Jacqui woke up the other day looking like a zombie who had befriended 'The Blob' from the film with the same name starring a young Steve McQueen. It turned out to be an eye infection (conjunctivitis) and it's a nasty one. Good timing as it is Halloween.

So, Happy Halloween everyone.

THE WEEKEND

This weekend has been like a social tour of London. And here it is in pictures.

THE BREAKFAST

I love saturday mornings. We usally go down the market to pick up some delicious Bahn Mi (vietnamese baguette) from the girls down the road at Bahn Mi 11, but this morning we decided to have a chilled out breakfast at home.

This is fresh from this morning's breakfast conversation. I'm starting to think we should not be left on our own for too long at a time.

THE SNAKE

This is a snapshot from a recent trip to India. We went to Goa and drove around on a scooter. It was such a great way to get around and to see the area up close. Sometimes a little bit too up close.

JEEVES THE COCKTAIL CAB

The other day was 'first thursday', which is when loads of galleries on Vyner Street in East London are open for private views. Our friend Tim Stevens had an exhibition with his paintings in his studio. We had been talking for ages about doing a pop up cocktail bar, so we entertained to crowds by serving cocktails from our black cab Jeeves parked in the yard.

We themed the cocktails to Tim's paintings, which are all about coast lines and rivers. They were all really good, but the winner was definitely the Thames.

I made a little menu with some illustrations to put up and hand out as flyers.

Jeeves the Cocktail Cab Menu

Tim also made his own beer for the private view, and I drew some labels for the bottles.

The beer label for Tim's home made beer

Some of the tasty homemade beers

Here we are serving our cocktails from Jeeves the Black Cab, or Jeeves the Cocktail Cab as he was for the evening. We found some great navy army dresses in a great army surplus shop in my hometown of Umeå, Sweden, and thought they would do well for the occasion.

Behind the bar of Jeeves

THE FAST

We had been talking for ages about doing a fasting or detox. I'm not sure how we started talking about it, but my mum and dad used to do it when I was a kid. We have all these pictures in the photo albums of them pulling horrified faces whilst drinking unspeakable vegetable juices in order to detox themselves. But this was in the early 80's in Sweden which was in the firm grip of the Green Wave, so I'm sure no one bat an eyelid. When we told our friends what we were doing we had mixed responses, from morbid fascination to blank glazing over of the eyes.

We went for 7 days only drinking juices and the dreaded potato water and herbal teas. It should be called Slowing, not Fasting. We spent the first two days alternating between euphoric happiness and wanting to bite each others heads off, but then it became quite easy and by the end of it we were really happy that we did it and we actually felt very healthy in a way I don't think I've felt since I was a kid. But I wouldn't recommend doing it more than once a year. It's too hard on your friends.