I am a year older

...which is pretty much bleurgh. Can I stay 30 for ever? Or even better 22? Last weekend I went to LFA2011 again and this week I had training at work (which was a lot of condescending rubbish) and last Thursday my mother came for a visit. So now I am enjoying a lot of arguing going on between my mother and my grandmother. Fun, fun, fun. Yesterday was my birthday! For my birthday I went shopping down-town with my mother where I made her get me the loveliest waterproof mac from Hobbs.

It's gorgeous, isn't it? Afterwards I had booked a table at Rosso Pomondorro (an italian restaurant) in Covent Garden. It was a nice restaurant, with good food and they put up with me changing the number of people the reservation was for multiple times. But on the other hand, the service wasn't the best. Maybe because it was Saturday and they were too busy and harassed? In any case, not the best service. I had a small gathering of eight in the end: my sister and her boyfriend (who got me a lovely book from Dover books with Kay Nielsen's fairytale illustrations and some adorable postcards with ink drawings of anthropomorphised animals), Natasha and Theo (who got me a cute ethnic cushion) and my friend Amin from Paris - who had come over to present a paper at a conference in Cambridge - who brought two friends of his with him. We had fun and it was a laugh. Not a bad birthday gathering. My only wibble was that I was sort of hoping to share a birthday with Natasha's any minute to be born baby boy. But it was not be. He's still not ready to come out.