Now, there’s no starker realisation that the toddler years are over than when you take your baby girl to see a show and she is laughing uproariously at a well-placed F-bomb in the first scene. There are many well-placed F-bombs in this show, including one that’s backlit and giant as part of a hashtag so I would emphasis the age rating – 12+ – and gently nudge anyone who’s after proper toddler content towards Tales From the Shed or Little Angel Theatre. That disclaimer out of the way, I’ll go for another, which is that I booked this on a whim because I could not get the trailer song out of my ..read more

This is the shocking post you’ve all been waiting for. This blog turns 13 today, on 13th July and in honour of that milestone, I am renaming the blog once and for all. Welcome to….London With a Teenager The mathematically-inclined among you will have figured out the reason for this dramatic change. If I had a toddler in July 2011 then it kinda stands to reason that I now inexplicably have a giant GCSE student. And an almost-as-giant tween coming up to take the mantle in a year or so. It’s not like I haven’t dropped some hints over recent years. Things like sword fighting and escape rooms aren ..read more

This is our third visit to an ELSF production in Highams Park. The first year was “Twelfth Night” in blazing sunshine, to the point that we were having to create shade for the kids to sit in: Last year was “Romeo and Juliet” and it was a little damp around the edges: What would it be this year? As we sat on the train home from church, watching the torrential rain, I wasn’t feeling optimistic. Neither was I as I dashed home to grab umbrellas and camping chairs while Roo babysat my halloumi fries in V’s Burgers. But we were hardened Shakespeare goers and Eva is now a part of the ELSF youth th ..read more

It’s taken me a little while to write this one up because, really, what can you say about escape rooms? You can’t give away too much otherwise they’ll find you and lock you up for real. But I’ll try to give you a flavour of the experience as best I can. First though, the flavour of lunch. You can’t lock three teenage boys and a tween girl up in a room without feeding them first. Roo wanted to try Grab Burger, which was at Dalston Junction, just opposite the escape room. Sadly it was closed so we walked up to Honest Burger near Dalston Kingsland. It wasn’t super quick service but the staff we ..read more

I mean, not permanently..what the heck kinda move do you think this is for an anniversary post? Though I do have a bit of a blogchange coming up which will surprise and shock you all. But that’s still a week or so away, so watch this space. No, I’m talking about leaving London for a weekend or maybe a short break using one of our eight glorious railway termini. Yes, that’s the link to the 800th post. It’s a bit lame but it came to me as I was on my way to Leeds at the weekend, which slightly doing anything more practical for the 800th post. Eva and I travelled about 400 miles in total so if y ..read more

I know – I’m getting adventurous in my middle age. Not content with Disco 2000ing in the evenings every few months, I’ve now taken to over 30s daytime clubbing at Scala. Wild times indeed. And in that spirit, we started the afternoon with a nice margarita from Sons and Daughters in Granary Square. In case you hadn’t worked it out by now, this was a childfree excursion. My kids might be ageing rapidly but last I checked neither of them were quite in the over 30s bracket yet. So we started almost as we meant to go on – I must admit, getting trapped on the wrong side of a cycle race wasn’t in th ..read more

It’s a Sunday afternoon before a Bank Holiday and I am doing nothing in particular but it’s given me time to write about what we got up to the last Sunday before a Bank Holiday. Which was also nothing very exciting but it was un-exciting in a geeky music fan way. The short version is that we found St Charles Square, which has recently been memorialised in a blur song: The “why” of this story is a bit longer. Blur have featured on this blog a few times – from a trip to France where I referenced every song on Parklife to actually seeing them in the flesh at Wembley last year (albeit from ..read more

It’s been a couple of years since our last trip to Legoland but as soon as I started planning, I remembered the drill. Harvester breakfast, check: We still miss the pre-Covid buffet but you can’t dwell on the past indefinitely. Trolling the kids that we weren’t actually going to Legoland and were planning on staying in Harvester all day for the free coffee refills, check. They didn’t believe us when we tried to tell them that this *is* Legoland, Windsor: Tickets bought with Clubcard vouchers, check. Parking bought online, check. Ridiculous amounts of snacks, check. Legoland itself did throw ..read more

So this might be an unusual post for me because I’ve got lots of pictures and not too much to say whereas I normally rabbit on for pages about complete nonsense. This time though, the story is simple – we went to Canary Wharf, we found some fake dogs, we petted some fake dogs. What more is there to say? You wanna get a load of the fake good boys and girls dontcha? Wish granted! We only got round two of the areas on the “Paws on the Wharf” trail as they’re quite spread out but we picked up all the ones in Jubilee Park and outside the Elizabeth Line tube. At one point, we found a roof garden o ..read more

A scene from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare @ Shakespeare’s Globe. Directed by Lucy Cuthbertson. ©Tristram Kenton 02-24 It’s funny – when someone mentions a modern-day adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet”, a  lot of people my age will automatically think of the 1996 Baz Luhrmann version. I even saw it mentioned on Facebook just the other day. But it’s depressing to think that 1996 was almost 30 years ago and even that film probably looks dated to today’s teens. So it’s time to reboot the reboot and that’s where this gritty, urban production comes in. The language is (nearly) all Sh ..read more