sarahx

Just noticed I've not posted anything since 16 April. Must. Do. Better.

Arrived safely in Shanghai, which is blanketed by a layer of fog (or, more likely) smog. Hotel is suitably comfortable - although it's next to a building site, and they're busy building even though it's Saturday afternoon.

Off out for a bit of a wander now in the hope that it might wake me up. Not convinced it will.

102 all out. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Butterscotch Angel Delight. Yum.

Back from Barcelona. Back working. Too much to do. Will probably add more re the trip later on when work is doing my head in.

However... I guess the smutty-sounding headline in this story doesn't sound smutty in American English. A most unfortunate acronym......

There is a LOT of sawing going on in the kitchen o_O

We're now in Franschhoek in the Winelands. It proudly claims to be the foodie capital of South Africa, and from the evidence so far, it might well be justified in that claim.

On the way up here on Saturday, we visited Moyo, a huge restaurant with a spectacular buffet on the Spier wine estate between Cape Town Stellenbosch, for lunch. We got 'attacked' with white paint... which doesn't show up very well in this photo...


The estate is also home to cheetahs. They say they're cuddly and you can go and pet them – apparently their tendency is towards flight rather than fight – but we resisted the temptation to get up close and personal!


We're staying at a place called Le Quartier Français, a small (and not exactly cheap – thank goodness for the three nights for the price of two offer) hotel with 15 rooms set around gardens and a pool, and a handful of cottages. This is the view from just outside our room...


The town is in a truly stunning setting with mountains on all sides. Looks even better in the sunshine, and thus far we've been really lucky with the weather. We ate in the hotel's bistro restaurant on Saturday night – though we probably didn't need to after the amount we'd eaten at lunchtime!

On Sunday, we went wine tasting at the Môreson winery nearby, and had lunch at its very lovely restaurant, Bread & Wine (yes, we managed both), followed by the wine tasting. We left the car at the hotel and got a lift, and T was seduced into buying some of their finest brew, which should turn up at home once we're back there. More gratuitous pretty mountains...


For dinner, we went to Reuben's, just across the road, where the food was astonishingly good, and the bill came to about £50 – OK, so we did have wine by the glass rather than two bottles, but still, two courses and wine of that quality for £50? Not complaining there. My skate wing cooked in chilli and coconut milk was bloody lovely.

Another good thing about this place is that the room has a log fire, and there's an extensive DVD library at reception, so both evenings thus far we've ended up back in our room watching a daft movie with a bottle of wine in front of a blazing log fire. Bliss.

Beautiful sunshine again this morning, and we took ourselves off north to Paarl just to see where it is. There's not much there, though there is a rather bizarre monument to the Afrikaans language on the hillside. So we pootled up there to check out the view. And it was spectacular.


That's Table Mountain in the distance – judging by the map it's about 60km away. Lucky it was such a clear day.


There had also clearly been a bush fire recently – there was a fair bit of scorched land and quite a few blackened trees to get arty with.


On the advice of my bro Nick, we stopped off for lunch at the Boschendal winery on the way back. And then chilled out by the pool back at the hotel. Or at least I sat and read my book and T lay there dozing off and feeling rubbish (no prizes for guessing he's finally managing to relax – the inevitable cold has come out – though of course he's trying to persuade me it's actually swine flu). And one of the two hotel cats decided to come and join us, and spent a happy couple of hours snuggled up on my lap.


She even followed us when we came back inside and settled down for a nice snooze at the end of the bed! Cheeky tinker...


And now we're contemplating getting ready for dinner. This is the reason we came to stay in this place – the other hotel restaurant, The Tasting Room, which regularly features in the lists of the world's best restaurants. Eight course tasting menu, with matching wines, coming up. Here's hoping T's swine flu doesn't impair his senses too much...

Next stop, three nights in Hermanus. It's whale-watching territory, but not whale-watching season. Can't have everything, I guess, and I dare say the views of the sea from our room will be dramatic even if devoid of whales!

Sad that Clement Freud has died. He wrote my Desert Island Book – the kid's book Grimble. It still makes me laugh so hard it hurts. The conceit is that his parents go off on a trip to Peru without telling him, leaving him cups of tea in the fridge, sandwiches in the oven, notes with instructions on around the house, and a list places to go to cook himself dinner (which I seem to remember Freud did when reading it on Jackanory), all of which were curiously deserted when he got there.

Highlights include a telegram from his parents telling him there was a message in the airing cupboard; said message was written in green ink on a squashed fly biscuit and said 'Do not eat this biscuit because eating green ink is bad for you'. His response? 'If that's a grown-up joke, then I'm glad I'm not grown up.'

Then there's the football game called Twinge – one of the school's goalposts went AWOL in a firework-related incident so in the first half one whole team went in goal while the other team fired shots at them, and they swapped round in the second half. Grimble's team lost 61-2.

He also writes poems. My favourite:

My Situation, by Grimble

When parents go to Peru
And leave cups of tea in the fridge
It's jolly hard to know what to do
And I wish I could think of
a useful word ending in idge.
The End.

Closely followed by:

Women, by Grimble

Men are easily the best people I know
Men are sensible and intelligent and good-looking
Some of my best friends are men – like my father
And I'm jolly glad I haven't got a sister.
The End.

It also has fab Quentin Blake illustrations. I suspect it's been out of print for many years. Which is a shame.

To say I am pissed off with all things technological today is an understatement.

Last July, I had a hard drive disaster, and lost the entire Cambridge magazine that was at the final page proof stage, meaning I had to start again from scratch.

Thanks to copying glitches, when I cloned my older machine onto the replaced hard drive – the only way I could get Quark XPress onto it without paying for an entire new version as the old installation disks were non-OSX-friendly and I'd had an online upgrade since then – Quark didn't work and I had to have a forced upgrade to Quark 7. Either this (or Leopard) wouldn't recognise the magazine's main body copy fonts, so I ended up having to put the pages together on the very flaky old machine that should really have been put out to pasture in August 2007.

That machine now appears to have given up the ghost entirely. I'm in Cambridge today and one of the IT boys is trying very hard to dig the file off the hard drive, but isn't having much success, and I'm not entirely hopeful.

At least this time all the text and photos are on the hard drive of my new machine, and also on a flash drive that I was using to transfer them between the two. Unfortunately, I had failed to take the precaution of dropping the work-in-progress pages back on the flash drive. So I now have to start laying them out again from scratch.

About half the pages were fully done and subbed, and I do have printouts of them all. However, the font problem that forced me to do the pages on the old machine in the first place is still there. So I'm going to have to find a similar font that does work, remake all the templates and, of course, re-sub everything when I import the copy because it won't fit any more.

Pissed off = understatement.

Doesn't help that I was already really pushed for time to get all that and the other work I need to get done before going away for a week on Tuesday night. I think the magazine will probably now be Very Very Late.

Damn.

I've just ordered a new kitchen and booked the builder for while we're in South Africa. All paid for out of my $ earnings over the past couple of years – I turned the $ into £ a couple of months back when the rate hit 1.36, a bargain as a large proportion of them were earned at about 2.00!

We've ordered these units – direct from the manufacturer, Crosby Kitchens, where my dad worked back in the 1970s (that job being the reason we moved to Sheffield) and where his best mate still works, so we got a pretty good deal...


We've run a little mad on the oven, but I'm rather excited about it. I've just ordered one of these Rangemaster beauties from John Lewis... love the right-hand oven which is tall and thin and has four shelves, including a plate-warming rack!


Pretty much all of the rest of the electrical stuff is remaining – it's almost all less than two years old as the decade-plus old stuff has been conking out. And finally I'll get the tumble dryer out of the spare bedroom where it currently resides.

It's unlikely to be completely finished by the time we get back from Cape Town, but the worst of the building work – plastering, floor tiles etc etc – should be done.

Hurrah!