Post-Christmas

January-February 2016 

Winter in London isn't too bad... until Christmas is over. Then it feels cold and dark all the time. 

So we tried to keep ourselves entertained during January and February, while trying not to look at all of the photos of picturesque, warm and sunny New Zealand on Facebook. 

December felt pretty warm, but January felt like proper winter. There was even a light dusting of snow at one point, and some of the ponds froze over.

Snow outside at 3am

Ice on a pond in Battersea Park

Lumiere London was on in January, on what felt like one of the coldest nights of the season. We walked around with numb hands admiring the lights. While they were cool, we actually preferred Wellington's 'Power Plant' lights festival in the Botanic Gardens with Tony and Carol.

We were pretty skint in January and February, having booked our travel for the first half of the year so tried to keep entertainment cheap. Luckily, a walk along the canal nearby is fairly cheap, maybe not so much if you finish it with a pint or three at a canalside pub.

Duke Fluffington has taken to biting us a bit more recently - once even drawing blood.

He seemed pretty happy eating chocolate...

...so Rach must have been at fault here.

We spent Valentines Day walking around Hampstead Heath, and finished off with Peruvian themed dinner at Ceviche.

We managed to get cheap tickets to The Railway Children, a play based on the hugely popular British children's book. We must have been the only people in the audience who didn't have a clue what the book was, or what would happen next. It was really good though.

A friend of ours, Steve, called me at short notice and asked if I wanted to go to a concert by a band called Foals that night. I'd never heard of them, so said yes. And a few songs were actually pretty good, so well worth it.

We did "dine out" a couple of times - we had some really good burgers at Hache, bacon naan at Dishoom, and I (not Rachel) had a Danish herring sandwich from Snaps and Rye, just down the road in Notting Hill. We paid a visit to the pop-up Creme Egg cafe, where we had a creme egg toastie and a Creme Egg chocolate slice. And also played in the adult-sized ball pit.

We finished off the month with the immersive, almost overwhelming Secret Cinema. We were Dwane Lawson, Official, US Government, and First Lt Dorothea Collins, LOD.
  

Next up - Morocco!