I feel like it’s back to the future these days: sta­ble, sta­ble, sta­ble! After the brief respite of the spring, where it was Sat­ur­days only, I’m back to spend­ing three days a week fer­ry­ing Avery to the barn. It’s so easy at Ross Nye Sta­bles, though: smack in the mid­dle of cen­tral Lon­don. Don’t you love this pic­ture of lit­tle Richard Nye, grand­son of the founder of the sta­ble, com­muning with his dog? Yes­ter­day he had on a t-shirt that said, “Here Comes Trou­ble,” and sure enough he was tear­ing around the mews, beat­ing up on his older brother Henry, wreak­ing havoc. I love the horsey and peo­p­ley feet in the back­ground of this pic­ture. And I really love that Avery is not only wel­come to take care of the ponies, she’s MADE to. At the sta­ble in New York, the lit­tle hot­house flow­ers that were our daugh­ters were led straight to a pony that had been groomed, tacked up and pedi­cured by sev­eral pro­fes­sional grooms, put on the pony’s back, given a les­son and taken directly off the pony, where­upon it was led away to its stall to be cos­seted some more by the grooms. Here, Avery is def­i­nitely expected to help with every aspect of the pony’s exis­tence, most of which make me highly aller­gic just to think about. She mucks out the stalls, fluffs up hay to sleep on and straw to eat (or is it the other way round?), cleans tack, picks dirt out of hooves with lit­tle picks, sweeps the mews clean. And of course she loves every minute of it.

We have had such fun hav­ing John home with us this week; he’s been able to go every­where we go and really be part of Avery’s life, as opposed to his usual mode where he is updated by me on Avery’s life! We’ve found every con­ceiv­able rea­son to get in the car and go some­where, and looks of envy at lit­tle Orange Emmy fol­low us all around the city. At dropoff yes­ter­day morn­ing, we pulled up to the school just as Mrs Davies came out to mail a let­ter in the post­box out­side the Chi­nese embassy (did you know it’s one of the most frequently-emptied post­boxes in Lon­don because they’re afraid of bombs?! so com­fort­ing, that). She looked at the car and said, “Well, now THAT’S a lit­tle bit of all right!” Emmy makes even traf­fic jams fun, espe­cially if we can put the top down. But today it’s been tor­ren­tial rain all day, so it may be a bit of a killjoy at pickup. So John’s been hang­ing out with us at rid­ing lessons, skat­ing lessons, the Form V Cof­fee Morn­ing yes­ter­day, held inex­plic­a­bly in the local cof­fee bar and so com­pletely point­less: no one could hear what any­one else was say­ing and in any case we were all slung around a t-shaped hasty table arrang­ment so even if it hadn’t been loud it would have been impos­si­ble to have a con­ver­sa­tion, but oh well. John looked a bit like a big fluffy owl sat down on a tele­phone wire full of lit­tle wrens, tucked in between Elizabeth’s and Sahra’s moth­ers! I don’t think there’s ever been a dad at a Cof­fee Morn­ing before.

The screen­writ­ing class is heat­ing up. We’re being told inter­est­ing things like this: most films have a 20-minute setup, a 50-minute con­flict, and a 20-minute res­o­lu­tion. Did you know that? I didn’t. And a page of script equals a minute of screen time, in gen­eral. So to pro­duce a whole industry-standard film you need 90 pages of script. Yes­ter­day we watched the open­ing 20 min­utes of “The Full Monty,” an absolutely hilar­i­ous British film about a bunch of age­ing York­shire men who decide the only way to make money is to start a strip club where they’re the fea­tured del­i­cacy! It was fun to watch the film with an eye toward the setup of the whole plot, the devel­op­ment of the main char­ac­ters, the hints at sub­plots. I have ever more respect for peo­ple who can num­ber one, think of a plot, and num­ber two, actu­ally craft the story suc­cess­fully. It’s harder than it looks! I’m really enjoy­ing my class­mates, a very var­ied group of every nation­al­ity you can think of, unlike my cre­ative writ­ing class that’s all Brits and me. It’s such a lux­ury to sit and be taught some­thing new, ask ques­tions, for­mu­late the­o­ries, lis­ten to everyone’s ideas.

But then my day went from the sub­lime to the ridicu­lous! As I left the class, John called me on my mobile to say that Avery’s new babysit­ter had told him that she had to leave the sta­ble at 5 to get to a class. OK, it was going to be dif­fi­cult to get there in time, with the floods of rain mak­ing an empty cab an impos­si­bil­ity. But add to that, Avery had per­suaded Anna to go along to her les­son, so Chrisa couldn’t just leave once Avery was on her pony. John raced to meet me in Hanover Square and drove me to the park, where we saw Avery com­ing along on her pony with her instruc­tor, but no sign of Anna and Chrisa. “Avery, where are Anna and Chrisa?” I asked, stand­ing in the mud under my umbrella in the pour­ing rain. “What do you mean?” she said with a puz­zled frown. “I mean, where are your best friend and your babysit­ter, who brought you here?” I clar­i­fied through clenched teeth. “I really haven’t the faintest idea,” she said, and if she hadn’t been high in the air on an ani­mal that weighed ten times as much as I did, I would have shaken her. She rode off uncon­cerned, and John and I drove to the sta­ble where we found Anna and Chrisa hud­dled under an enor­mous umbrella, soak­ing wet. “They were going to ride around the park, so we stayed here,” Chrisa explained. So she went off and Anna and I had the choice of stand­ing in the rain, or stand­ing in the sta­ble cor­ri­dor, which smelled like a com­bi­na­tion of wet dog and wet horse, filled with the boys’ school clob­ber and cov­ered with hair of var­i­ous kinds. I called Becky to come get Anna, and just stood in the door­way, unable to be inside because of my horse aller­gies, and not want­ing to be out­side in the pelt­ing rain. I felt sorry for myself, already with a cold and now with feet soaked through and bare legs! What had I been think­ing, to wear a short lit­tle skirt and no tights?

Becky came and then we heard the clip­clop of hooves on the cob­ble­stones, and Avery arrived, glow­ing and happy from her ride. “I see you found Anna!” she said. Becky and I just looked at each other. She kindly gave us a ride to Marks and Spencers where I dashed about get­ting last-minute things for our din­ner with John’s work friend John (a bit con­fus­ing, that), fol­lowed by Avery who I have to say looked adorable in her jodh­purs, waxed cot­ton coat and hel­met. We strug­gled home, Avery insist­ing that I take the gro­cery bag she was car­ry­ing since it “so didn’t go with my out­fit,” and the looks on the Johns’ faces told me I needed to freshen up, so I changed into dry clothes and joined them for a nice warm­ing Scotch and really good con­ver­sa­tion. The other John is one of those Yale-educated peo­ple who knows a lit­tle more than a lit­tle about just about every­thing, and so can talk about physics, pol­i­tics, restau­rants and children’s books with per­fect aplomb. Avery came rush­ing in ask­ing, “When was Cather­ine of Aragon dethroned?” and the other John whipped out his Black­berry and in no time had the Wikipedia page up and the ques­tion answered.

We sat down to com­fort­ing shepherd’s pie and a really good salad, inspired by Vin­cent over the week­end: water­cress, lamb’s let­tuce and baby rocket. There’s noth­ing like shepherd’s pie on a cold, rainy night, sur­rounded by can­dle­light.
Lord Peter Wim­sey has gone vis­it­ing. He popped out into the cor­ri­dor the other day when I opened the door to the Fedex guy, who had also buzzed our next-door neigh­bor whom I had never met. This nice lady propped open her door with a slip­per and in went Wim­sey. “Whoa, mis­ter,” I said. “That’s all right,” she said in an Amer­i­can voice, “we’re old friends. We met this sum­mer, with your hous­esit­ter. Also,” she men­tioned, “I know of you from another source.” Another les­son: never lie, even exag­ger­ate, or pre­tend to be any­thing you are not, because your next door neighbor’s hus­band works with your daughter’s god­fa­ther. This city is CRAZY small.

I must close. Tomor­row to the Horse of the Year Show in Birm­ing­ham. We can either take Avery, or a pic­nic, but not both because Emmy is so small. Just kid­ding. Sort of.

It’s here, it’s here! After drop­ping Avery off at school, fever­ish with the pos­si­bil­ity that we could be Mini-ful by school pickup time, John and I hung around the HSBC bank in Oxford Street and with­drew a scary amount of cash, watched with avid curios­ity by all the other peo­ple in the queue at the teller’s win­dow. Wouldn’t you think they’d have the brains to do some­thing like that in a pri­vate room, instead of count­ing it all out doggedly right before everyone’s eyes? We felt like Bon­nie and Clyde. Hap­pily, by the time our teller (who looked about 14 and as if his fin­ger had got caught in a light socket, caus­ing his hair both to stick up all over his head AND turn a green­ish white) counted it all even the most tempted of would-be rob­bers had had to go on to what­ever was meant to occupy their day, and we were able to stuff the enve­lope in John’s back­pack, which imme­di­ately looked to both of us as if it were com­pletely trans­par­ent, with a glow­ing wad of money inside for all to see.

To Euston Sta­tion where we boarded a train for a lit­tle town north of the city called Berkham­sted, actu­ally a lit­tle vil­lage. There we were met by a nice lady called Janet, in this BABY which is now ours. She drove us around, demon­strat­ing all its lovely qual­i­ties includ­ing most impor­tantly a cabri­o­let top. Whoopee! “We don’t get down to Lon­don as much as we used to, when the kid­dies were tiny. Now, what with see­ing a show, and din­ner, it’ll set you back 120 quid, a day out will. We feel lucky to live right here in Berkham­sted, wouldn’t want to live any­where else.”

Then we went to her house to set­tle up. Her lovely hus­band John got out all the paper­work includ­ing the slightly twee “iden­tity pass­port” BMW give out with each “cher­ished Mini.” OK, it’s more than slightly twee. How­ever. Poor John spent seem­ingly hours on the phone with our insur­ers, while I cra­dled the fam­ily cat, a Russ­ian Blue called Boris (nat­u­rally). Boris fell in love with me instantly, which emo­tional state he con­veyed by drool­ing copi­ously all over my cash­mere sweater, a lit­tle div­i­dend which threw me into a huge aller­gic attack as soon as we were shut up in the car on our way home. The insur­ance non­sense took long enough for me to get a tour of their bun­ga­low, com­plete with framed prints of var­i­ous Euro­pean sights, and copies of semi-famous Vic­to­rian paint­ings, with swirly car­pets on the floor and many, many pic­tures of the two grand­sons. “They’re the kid­dies of our Dave,” Janet said. “Hon­estly, the elder one, he’s seven now, he was edi­ble when he was tiny. Pos­i­tively edi­ble.” She made cups of tea, but I was impris­oned hold­ing Boris for the dura­tion of our visit and so I could not imbibe. Finally my John was fin­ished with his trans­ac­tion and we took our leave. “Con­grat­u­la­tions, and you all enjoy her, now,” Janet said. “It’s our wed­ding anniver­sary tonight,” John added, “so we’ll take the money and go see what we can get for it in the way of a slightly larger car, with a proper boot. It’s got to take Mother’s wheel­chair, now she’s bro­ken her hip.” It was like being in an episode of one of the British soaps, hear­ing peo­ple talk like that, and see­ing such a cot­tage. I asked, “Well, how many years have you been mar­ried then? And con­grat­u­la­tions to you, too.” John said, “Well, now, it’s been 41 years since we were mar­ried. Like I say, 23 good years.” We laughed. My John said, “Were the 23 good years at the begin­ning or the end?” “Well, they were spread out, like, so I can’t keep track of ‘em.”

With many exhor­ta­tions to enjoy our­selves, we were off. Imme­di­ately put the top down, and were just set­tling down for a fab­u­lous run down the M1 to town, when… it began to rain. Just a driz­zle at first, so we ignored it, but then a proper down­pour. The Mini won’t let you oper­ate the roof whilst mov­ing, so we had to pull up and get our­selves pro­tected. Still, a dar­ling baby of a car. We’ve just brought Avery home from school in it, unfor­tu­nately in yet more rain so no top down, and she’s chris­tened it… Emmy. Wel­come, Emmy!

Not that I was whip­ping out my cam­era and pho­tograph­ing our meal with our friend Vin­cent, but it just so hap­pened that right before hav­ing lunch with him, Avery and I brought home the most amaz­ing haul from the Maryle­bone Farmer’s Mar­ket. OK, OK, I brought home the most amaz­ing haul while poor Avery stag­gered behind under the weight of her overnight bag from her sleep­over with Jade, just up the road. They had a per­fect time, Amy’s mother reported, and Avery is wel­come any time. Isn’t that nice to hear? There was Nin­ten­dog, there was disco danc­ing, French toast (“home­made, mind you, dipped in egg and fried in but­ter, yum” was Avery’s exact food review), and a bless­edly early bedtime.

Any­way, just take a gan­der at this pur­ple broc­coli, and the goat cheese! At first I was happy to sam­ple just the plain chevre, lib­er­ally crum­bled up in a bowl for us all to taste (so pleased not to see a lot of silly “health and safety” non­sense, the irri­tat­ing reg­u­la­tions that seem to make every­thing fun for­bid­den; every­one sim­ply picked up lit­tle bits and seemed happy to live with the pos­si­bil­ity that another actual human might have come into con­tact with the bit adja­cent. How­ever, once Avery and I had both had the plain, the lady behind the counter said, “Now lovey, if that is to your lik­ing, just get on the out­side of this bit, with the chilies,” and it was divine, and maybe even bet­ter was the log rolled in chives. Mmmm! So I bought both. I also bought a kilo of tiny, tiny toma­toes, and a big bunch of basil. I think that with a lit­tle angel hair’s pasta the cheese, toma­toes and fresh pesto will be just the ticket tonight.

This all put John and me in the per­fect mood to drop Avery at the sta­ble and run out to Hol­land Park for lunch with Vin­cent. It was worth titling a post after him. We were great friends 15 years ago in New York, then he ended up here mar­ried to an Eng­lish girl with whom he had two divine lit­tle girls, Estee and Ines. They are now divorced and Vin­cent is hap­pily with Pete, who co-hosted our lunch. The house is absolutely stun­ning: gut­ted and done up from scratch with double-level new win­dows on the ground and first floor, poured con­crete floors with ther­mal heat­ing under­neath, the per­fect kitchen with every pos­si­ble impor­tant appli­ance includ­ing a waist-high dish­washer. So smart. We had brought cham­pagne, so we started on that and caught up on gos­sip, work news, the all-important con­ver­sa­tional cat­e­gory “Real Estate Ven­tures I May Get Involved With,” child talk, etc. Then we were onto a home­made tarte with feta cheese, red onions, tiny toma­toes, fava beans and chives. And a quiche with lar­dons of bacon and ched­dar cheese. Plus a peer­less salad of baby rocket, baby spinach and water­cress, with a dress­ing of mus­tard, lemon oil, olive oil, bal­samic vine­gar and oregano. A cheese board with Saint Andre, Brie, Stil­ton and Ched­dar, and an enor­mous bowl of black­ber­ries, rasp­ber­ries, blue­ber­ries and straw­ber­ries tossed with vodka.

Vin­cent of course is, in addi­tion to advis­ing the sheik of Qatar on his invest­ments, pur­su­ing a side­line in dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, very arty and hard for me to under­stand, but obvi­ously really sophis­ti­cated. He has been assid­u­ously if gen­tly courted by art deal­ers to make a pur­chase, and was sorely tempted by an Antony Gorm­ley, but then so wouldn’t we all be. Imag­ine, hav­ing to shore up the foun­da­tions of your floor­ing to acco­mo­date the weight of a sculp­ture. “You know, Kris­ten, there is vir­tu­ally no rep­re­sen­ta­tion at ALL for young Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­phers, or even mid-career pho­tog­ra­phers. They sort of stop here at Irv­ing Penn, so there is a real niche.” He’s earnestly try­ing to per­suade me that it would be great fun to build a gallery in the East End in some aban­doned ware­house, keep my over­head down (while pre­sum­ably try­ing not to lose my actual head to armed ban­dits in this waste­land of real estate). Vin­cent is one of those peo­ple who makes you feel that your din­ner choices are always above aver­age, your per­sonal style not to be despised, and any­thing you might ever want to do entirely within your reach, and prob­a­bly, at that, your own aspi­ra­tions aren’t nearly cool enough for your capac­i­ties. A lovely, tall, hand­some, urbane, superbly enter­tain­ing man. We’ve missed you, Vin­cent, and now that we’ve got you back we aren’t about to let you go. Peter is hav­ing his own adven­tures try­ing to make friends with Estee and Ines, and it all seems to be work­ing quite beau­ti­fully, as any­thing Vin­cent turns his hand to would. It wouldn’t dare otherwise.

Unfor­tu­nately just as the last bite was swal­lowed and the last sip of Beau­jo­lais Nou­veau drunk, we had to dash away to get Avery from the barn. There she was, crouched on the floor of the sta­ble with all her lit­tle friends, eat­ing a black­cur­rant iced lolly. She had a bit of an adven­ture in the Park with a run­away Rowan in a lead­er­ship con­test with naughty Horace, and filled me with con­fi­dence in the super­vi­sion at Ross Nye when she gig­gled, “Of course the only instruc­tor, Sofia, was busy with a lit­tle girl on lead­line, so we all just went crazy.” Harumph. What can I do.

Last night while Avery was at Jade’s house John and I went out for a good if rather too salty Chi­nese meal, and came back home to watch “The DaVinci Code.” Yawn! Dou­ble yawn. I thought Tom Hanks was woe­fully mis­cast, the plot totally impos­si­ble to fol­low, Ian McKel­lan briefly res­cued it and then turned ridicu­lous. Audrey Tautou was of course adorable, but she could do only so much. A rather wasted movie oppor­tu­nity, espe­cially since I’m meant to be study­ing films now! I had a great screen­writ­ing class, watch­ing the first five min­utes of three films and analysing the devel­op­ment of the main char­ac­ter in those five min­utes: “Mid­night Cow­boy,” “Wall Street” and “Fargo.” Of the three, the only film I’d cross the road to see is “Fargo,” and I gather I am the last per­son in the world to see it. Maybe on DVD. The Sat­ur­day course, “Cre­at­ing Fic­tion,” is also heat­ing up. This time we lis­tened to three peo­ple read their pieces and totally slagged them off (love that new slang word), then spent a half hour writ­ing a piece on “The worst evening you can imag­ine and an unex­pected pleas­ant sur­prise at the end of it.” These set pieces are sur­pris­ingly dif­fi­cult to do! Far more dif­fi­cult, how­ever, is my task for Octo­ber 21: I have to come in pre­pared to read 2500 words, or 15 min­utes, of my own orig­i­nal fic­tion, and pre­pare to be slagged off. Con­sid­er­ing the fact that I am not cur­rently in pos­ses­sion of even one minute of orig­i­nal fic­tion, my work is clearly cut out for me. The instructor’s most inter­est­ing advice yes­ter­day was “go in late, come out early,” which means that nine times out of ten, the first 40 pages or so of the novel you are writ­ing will turn out to be garbage, and not nec­es­sary to set up the story, except that it’s nec­es­sary to cre­ate them in order to have them to throw away. Like­wise with the end; the last 40 pages will turn out to be rub­bish, only you don’t know that till you’ve writ­ten them. Intrigu­ing. I’d like to have even 80 pages of rub­bish, instead of the big fat zero I have right now. My dear dar­ling brother-in-law Joel is patiently think­ing up plots for me, and he’s really good at it, so I had bet­ter get busy writ­ing them down, even if I end up throw­ing them away. The tutor also men­tioned some of the pit­falls of writ­ing in the first per­son (clearly my pre­ferred method): “end­less whinge­ing can become indi­gestible.” Doesn’t sound real appeal­ing, for sure, and I have a sneak­ing feel­ing that many of the read­ers of this blog know just how likely a pit­fall it can be, sorry. But as soon as I try to write in the third-person I feel arti­fi­cial, like I’m just nam­ing myself “Kate” and try­ing to dress dif­fer­ently on paper. There must be more to it than that.

Right now Avery is slav­ing away on her home­work, John is tak­ing a nap, and I’m con­tem­plat­ing mak­ing my pesto for din­ner. In the way that you do when you’re writ­ing a cook­book (which sadly involves fig­ur­ing out how to write things down for OTHER PEO­PLE and not just mak­ing it up dif­fer­ently every time for your­self), I have bought two more duck breasts so I can per­fect the roast duck salad. If you haven’t tried it yet, you must. I have to find some­one else to talk food with while my mother-in-law is spend­ing three weeks in East­ern Europe. Some­thing tells me my own mother would fall asleep on the phone if I tried to work through a recipe for onion tarte with her on the tele­phone, poor dear. Now, get her started on some For­mula One race dri­vers and she’d be all set. Wait: maybe one of them has a recipe for onion tarte?