It's Been a Week #2

Dec 23, 2024

An experiment — a weekly blog in bullet points.

This week (accidentally) features a lot of cake.

Happy Christmas!

Until next time,
Katie x

Kipper the dog bolts, running the length of the dog park. I catch up with her — my calves burning — by the park gate where she is patiently waiting for me
Like butter wouldn’t melt
I’m still trying to catch my breath. It has been twenty minutes.
Have a quick flick through some cookbooks I need to post and see a wonderfully bossy instruction at the end of a recipe: “I have taken it for granted that you already cook to an average standard, and as all ovens vary, it is better that I leave this to your own discretion — you are bound to know your own oven and its moods better than I!”

A large portion of our lives has been taken over by the work we are doing for our son’s school prospectus (shooting it, designing it). As I walk around the school with my camera, a visitor’s badge stuck to my chest, I’m suddenly struck by how the children see me; an adult, a classmates parent. Which is exactly what I am. And yet this is somehow an extremely shocking revelation to me.
Have agreed to print my zine on Friday. There is no zine. It does not exist.
I am now writing said zine.

I’ve become obsessed with the idea of baking a mini cake - a proper cake, with two layers and buttercream, but big enough for just one person. I know I’m not reinventing the wheel here but it makes me so excited I end up baking until 10pm

Today while working I actually put a pencil behind my ear, as if I am about to draw up important blueprints and not a silly little zine about Christmas food
A neighbour’s house —

Head to Lewisham to print my food zine. I truly cannot believe we pulled it off, especially as I had a minor breakdown the night before. But it’s so much fun seeing it pop out of the risograph machine that I immediately start planning the next one. I guess making a zine is a bit like having a baby, in that you forget everything you went through because the end result is so frigging cute
Paper options!!
I’m in Notting Hill this evening for a belated birthday dinner with Sara. It’s hard to believe I lived here for 16 years. In the 3 years since I left it’s changed beyond recognition. I wander around quietly shell-shocked. We eat at Brasseria, — a nice place if you are a tourist, I guess.
I make Sara a mini cake — a two layer chocolate sponge with buttercream icing. A classic. I buy flowers to decorate it with only to realise it doesn’t quite fit the sweet lil box I’d bought for it —
Sweet lil box
I listen to The Rest is Politics on the bus home, which is about the driest podcast you can choose to listen to after a Friday night out

The foundation of what I believe will be an insanely decorated house in a couple days time —
Way Bakery looks like heaven on Earth
First Pret Christmas baguette this year. Also it’s now almost 6 quid?

Bill Nighy is standing in for Iggy Pop on 6 Music and I make a startling discovery — Bill Nighy is pronounced Bill Nigh. Wow.
We have a mini pre-Christmas lunch at ours with my sister and her kids and I serve mini cakes I’d baked the night before (at 11pm oops). They’re sloppily decorated but the kids luv ‘em —

Franz Ferdinand on Tim’s Listening Party podcast talking about their debut album. I cannot tell you how much I loved that album
While walking the dog we pass by the Mickey Mouse house and yep, he’s smashed it —
The latest missive from Haley Nahman drops and, as usual, I feel every word So Deeply. “It’s not that I have nothing to say, I’m just not sure what to say about motherhood. This is at complete odds with how passionately I feel about it, how changed I feel by becoming one, how many germs of ideas I jot down in my notes, now languishing on my phone unrealized.” Yep.