happy birthday, little person!

Yesterday Stuart and I had a good excuse to visit Fortnum & Mason’s new ice cream parlour. On the way, we stopped to look at all the red lanterns strung across Gerrard Street in Chinatown.

On request of the Little Person, we popped into one of the sweet shops and gawped at the lovely packaging, and then took photos of two cute kids outside in matching dresses in front of the smelly durian fruits.

Ice cream! The combo of one ‘Choc Tot’ ice cream sundae, an shared adult ‘Dusty Road’ sundae, tea for two and a Coke worked out to over thirty quid, so we won’t be going back, but it was a lovely one-off treat:

We ran a few laps around the National Portrait Gallery, the stated intention of LP being ‘to get totally lost’, then got told off big-time for running the wrong way down this marvellously long escalator, undoubtedly built just for that purpose.

We also visited Britain’s largest bookshop, where LP was allowed to buy one book. Not easy, there must be nearly a million book there! I was curious to see what she’d choose, and after some hard thinking, she eventually made a very resolute decision to get Happy Birthday, Blue Kangaroo by Emma Chichester Clark, with an enclosed audio CD of the book read by Joanna Lumley. She read it aloud to me on the bus ride home, so lots of people got to hear Blue Kangaroo’s story.

Then Little Person had a terrible tummy-ache, probably from too much ice cream and being overtired.