I was 30 last week. Great. The good thing was that we got a last minute cancellation The Fat Duck in Bray and were there like a shot for dinner service on my birthday itself.

Everything was just perfect - the food utterly out of this world (and I think would have been even more amazing if I didn't know quite a lot of the courses already), service impeccable, decor was muted yet somehow suited the mentalness of everything else.

I didn't take pictures of every single course (most people did take cameras though) but I snapped a few. You can see other peoples' up on Flickr.

Even though it was £130 a head (goes up to £150 in January) I still think this represents amazing value for money. We had 15-odd courses and were there for 4½ hours. I've had three courses at other places that were nearly as expensive.

Go. Do anything. Sell an organ, anything! Just go!

I spent the last week up in Derbyshire with some friends, although it mostly comprised an entire family clan. The weather was perfect for lots of walking and biking.

Stupidly I pushed myself too hard on one of the days and ended up with some eye trouble. Many hours in various hospitals later I was diagnosed with a Branch Retinal Venous Occlusion - essentially a small stroke leading to haemorrhaging - by the fantastic people at Sheffield Hallam's eye casualty. This isn't in any way normal for someone that isn't crusty so I'm now being seen by Moorfields. Hopefully the haemorrhages will clear in the next couple of weeks and restore the vision in that eye.

Clicky.

Sorry about the photo quality, I only took my compact with me on this trip.

Not only does it have a funny name, but they suggest that you "Drink Yourself Happy"...

I passed a very well built sliproad on the M4 just before J13 today. What really caught my eye was the trusty enigmatic sign "Works Unit Only" albeit done in the military red pattern.

A quick check on Live Maps found me my sliproad - following it up the hill reveals RAF Welford, the largest munitions dump in Europe (apparently).

Cool :)

From France:

From Kew:

I've posted some photos of NY up in the gallery - sorry the quality isn't great, they were taken on my phone as I didn't want to bring my SLR with me. Hopefully i'll get back here sometime soon when I have more time on my hands.

Oh, and if you're looking for a Gallery2 upload client for Vista, take a look at Pix2Gallery2- it's not entirely bug free, but it'll do!

As I happened to be passing Niketown on 5th Avenue this morning, I popped in and enquired when I'd be able to get my mitts on the new Nike running watches (Aero+, Flight+ etc.).

The guy there told me "within the next two months, but I'm not supposed to tell". Oh well :)

Two months to wait then!

Well, we're just back from a couple of weeks in Curacao for our honeymoon (a post about the wedding to follow) and you can see the pictures up in the gallery.

I'm going to write a travel guide for Curacao in the near future but to summarise it: nice weather, nice people, nice landscape, crap taxi drivers, poor food.

Our honeymoon is booked, and we're off to Curacao in the Dutch Antilles.

It's a very, very long way away and we're both looking forward to it immensely. I can't wait!

Just in case you have no idea where it is:

My boyfriend and I saw them at the Edinburgh festival over the summer, they were excellent :)

There are some pictures from my trip to lovely Amsterdam up at LokiFoto - only a few of them, but they're pretty good I think :)

When you find an old memory stick on your camera, you never quite know what you're going to find. I've posted the rather electic mix up in the gallery - there's everything from Edinburgh at night and a rather sparkly new Atomium in Brussels to sheep in a city farm...