birthday treats

I invented my own birthday breakfast tradition a while back. Each year I think I will deviate from it, but then the lure of cherries, strawberries, raspberries - with granola and yogurt, or some bread and cheese - and always a little espresso, pulls me back. What could ever be better on a newborn summers day?

This year the berries were from the Bloomsbury farmers' market. The cherries were from the enormous and fertile tree in my neighbours' garden, its branches so wide and the boughs so laden, that at least half lists over onto my patch.

The weather was straight from a Laurie Lee poem.

Lunch was a surprise, and I love surprises. We sat in the open window of Randall & Aubin in Soho, refreshing ourselves with champagne and oysters. Such pretty little soft oysters, tinged sunrise-pink with shalotty-red-vinegar. I have so often passed this place and peeped in to see the (to my imagination) terribly sophisticated diners, sitting in the cool shade; how novel to now be inside, looking out of the open windows into a sunny, dusty street.

As if this didn't sate my senses enough, we then lounged over some tapas in Blacks. I say tapas, but you know it involved a chorizo scotch egg just oozing red pimento oil, with a rocket jumble of salad; olives, bread, oil. I was grateful for the bitter little espresso which jolted me awake from the lounging reverie I had fallen into, as we draped and murmured amongst threadbare and lumpy sofas, in an old townhouse in the middle of a working day, in high summer.  

I needed three hours with my girl friends and a stiff gin in the dusky evening, just to come down from the sensory high of the day.  Magical.