The Tower, the Eye, comic books and Halloween cake.

I booked us rooms at a hotel very close to where I used to live, near Aldgate East. Far enough from the touristy sites to be reasonable in price, and an area I still feel roughly familiar with. There were similarly-priced places in West London, but I couldn’t judge whether the area would be reasonably safe and clean or not.

In the morning we had tickets to the Tower of London. Most major sites require advance booking of timed tickets these days, and the Tower is no exception. The Tower was walking distance from the hotel, and it was surprisingly not raining at all. But first, a quick stop by the building where I used to live. It’s still there and looks more or less like before, except the building opposite our apartment gaining a few floors and blocking what used to be our view. Not that it matters anymore.

Then through St Katherine’s Docks to the Tower. Getting there early in the day was the right choice – there were no crowds at all. Wise from previous experience, I took us straight to the Crown Jewels, which I knew would gain massive queues later in the day.

The crown jewels themselves are almost unreal. Royal crowns encrusted with hundreds of priceless jewels, giant diamonds. Orbs and sceptres and whatnot. Unfortunately but understandably there’s no photography allowed in there.

We spent a couple of hours wandering around the Tower itself, visiting the various exhibitions, checking out old armour, reading about the menagerie that used to be housed here, etc etc.

If I was utterly filthy rich, I wouldn’t mind having a castle of my own, with plenty of picturesque passages and spiral staircases and wrought-iron details.

It was nearing lunchtime when we felt done with the Tower. On Adrian’s “to do” list for London was proper English fish and chips. Instead of a pub, we headed for Borough Market. It is – like most things – much more touristy than it used to be, but I still like the vibe.

I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to eat. Nothing sounded quite right, until I saw this risotto place, and immediately knew that that was what I wanted for lunch. It was delicious.

The fish was good but greasy, Adrian said. The mushy peas were the best part of the meal.

The ergonomics of eating on a bench were so-so.

Next up: comic books. We browsed comics in the basement of Gosh! Comics…

… and then browsed some more at Forbidden Planet.

By now it had been a couple of hours since lunch, and we needed an afternoon snack. I wanted a smoothie, Adrian wanted good cake. Both were willing to consider ice cream instead. We wandered around in the Neal Street and Covent Garden area, Googled, still couldn’t quite find anything that we really liked. Finally we ran across a cake shop that immediately pulled us in with amazing-looking Halloween-themed cakes in the window, called L’ETO.

And they had smoothies as well! Smoothies seem to have a strong healthy eating vibe in London – every single one had some fad food in them. This green one sounded the fruitiest, even though it had kale in it. Tasted less detox-y than it looked.

The cakes looked even more amazing up close. Adrian’s was called “Feel the beat” and was decorated with an anatomically correct heart (as far as I could judge). The inside (raspberry and pistachio) was good but not amazing – could have more flavour, he said. We’ve been spoiled by delicacies we get at Spånga Konditori.

My “Poison Apple” had a shiny outside and a core of ginger spiced apple compote inside.

We topped off the day with a twilight ride on the London Eye. Eye-wateringly expensive, but not quite so bad that I would skip it

London at night looks pretty awesome.

Adrian and I are on a short break in London.

I went with Ingrid six years ago (to see saw Hamilton and various sights). Now it’s Adrian’s turn.

The weather forecast promises rain for all of our four days here, although the prognosis has been improving the closer we get. Just a few days ago, the forecast for Friday and Saturday was torrential downpour; now it’s down to just fairly rainy. It was raining as we got to our hotel, but the afternoon was supposed to be one of a few dry-ish periods, so we headed out to see the town. To get the proper London experience, we took a double-decker bus from East London through the City to Trafalgar Square.

Saw Big Ben and Westminster Abbey; walked past Whitehall and a guard change, then onwards through St James Park. Debated whether the large white birds we saw in the distance were really pelicans, which seemed unlikely. Adrian argued that they were swans, but the shape was all wrong. It was getting dim and the birds weren’t posing very well, but Google confirmed that there are indeed pelicans in St James Park.

Buckingham palace, then along Piccadilly to Chinatown.

Tons of tourists everywhere. It’s autumn break in more places than Stockholm, I guess, although a lot of the tourists were not of an age to be there for a school break. I wonder if there is any space for locals left at all in central London. It definitely wasn’t like this when I lived here. I am contributing to the problem myself, and this does rather confirm my general preference for holidaying in less popular spots, outside of big cities.

We stopped by Fortnum & Mason on our way, and it is now more of a tourist attraction than a department store. Hysterically garish, rather crowded. Worth it, though – I now have an authentic English Christmas pudding for this Christmas!

This trip was for Adrian’s sake maybe even more than mine (although I do love London) and one of his wishes was to eat typical British food. We had Pret sandwiches for lunch, and ate dinner at an Indian restaurant in East London. (That one was too dim for photos.)

No afternoon tea, but we did treat ourselves to very decadent donuts at Donutelier

It’s the end of October and still warm enough to sit outside, even for me.

Finally got started with that loose pocket I’ve been thinking about for ages.

Designed and cut and measured and started assembling. I got the horizontal seams done today so the structure is all there now. There will be a open pocket space, big enough for a phone, and a small zippered inside pocket for keys. Just the vertical seams left now.

The outer is piece of scrap fabric from the local charity shop. It may have been a small tablecloth in a previous life. The lining is a piece of an old fabric dying experiment that I have inherited.

This is a slow sewing project. Constructed from scratch and hand-stitched. I especially enjoy making tiny little whip stitches to secure a folded edge.

One of my favourite Estonian foods is karask, a barley bread with sour milk.

It wasn’t a staple when I was a child, but my mum made it a few times. Now it’s come back as a commercial product – not in every supermarket, but some do sell it, as well as some artisanal bakeries and food market stalls.

For some reason I’ve never tried making my own, until very recently. I made a first batch a couple of weeks ago, and another one this weekend.

What made this one even better than a standard karask was the addition of quark to the batter. Barley is great, quark is great, the combination is even better.

These days quark is a health food: all low-fat or no-fat, marketed for its high protein content, homogenized into a smooth, creamy mass for easy consumption. Back when I was a child, Estonian quark was a solid, dense, rich product. The richer version was 12% fat, I believe, while the skinny kind was 6%. It was sold in paper-wrapped pats, kind of like you’d buy butter today.

I ran across old-school tvorog at the Baltic store. Sold in one-kilogram blocks, grainy and solid, just like it’s supposed to be. Not Estonian but Latvian, I believe (didn’t look to closely at the packaging) but still – what a find. Half of the one-kilo package immediately went into a double recipe of quark karask. The other half is in the freezer for when I bake another batch.

Served warm, with butter and – by suggestion of the recipe page – honey. I never had honey on my karask before but why not.

Near miss #1: Adrian and I are going to London for a few days during autumn break, which is this week, and I was this close to missing the fact that you now need a permit to enter the UK. I know they’re out of the EU but for years that didn’t actually mean anything for travel, and somehow I’d missed that this had changed.

The confirmation email from airline even mentioned it, but the new permit thing is called an ETA – a most unfortunate naming choice, I have to say. As I skimmed the email, I saw the term in passing, naturally interpreted it as “Estimated Time of Arrival” in the context of a flight booking, and didn’t pay any more attention to it.

Today I finally noticed it for real and had a minor bout of panic because it can apparently take days to get an ETA (“Electronic Travel Authorization”, why couldn’t they just call it a visa) and we don’t have that many days. Spent a good chunk of the afternoon going through an online application process only to realize, when my payment didn’t go through, that I had landed on a scam website and had to start all over on the real site.

The process required photos and face scans and scans of the passport and whatnot. I got the applications in just before Adrian had to leave for his week at Eric’s, and thankfully got an approval back within 10 minutes, so our trip was saved.

Near miss #2: Due to the ETA panic I nearly forgot the fact that I had a concert ticket for this evening, and almost missed a concert with Grigori Sokolov. Missing it wouldn’t have been quite as sad as missing a London trip, but still, I’m glad I remembered it in the last minute. Beethoven and Brahms. Just the thing I needed to get my adrenaline levels back to normal again.

The semiannual crafts festival. I was going to take a half-day at work and come her yesterday to avoid the crowds, but other things turned up, so today it is.

I was also thinking of just skipping it because it’s not like I need more fabric or yarn. But it’s not so much about the buying as it is about inspiration. I come home with one or two purchases, and a dozen photos and notes of things I could try. Sweater design ideas, little things I could sew, or otherwise make, etc.

On the buying side of things, I went in with a plan. I have learned that impulse buying doesn’t work for me. I end up with yarn I don’t know what to do with, or too little yarn for the idea I later come up with, etc. This time I knew I wanted material for a thick, warm, green sweater or cardigan, and this one jersey fabric that I have been looking at for years now because it is so lovely. I don’t know what or when I will use it, but the thought of the seller maybe discontinuing this fabric without me having a piece of it was not making me happy at all, so now I have a piece of it.

Fixed the chest. It turned out that Eric had already done one round of fixing years before: there were strips of wood attached along the long edges to keep the bottom in place. Now there are similar strips on the short edges, so unless and until the bottom actually cracks under pressure, it should stay in place.

Then I had to fit all the fabric into the chest again. Plus a bit more, because I had one or two recently bought pieces that I hadn’t packed away yet. It was stuffed to the brim before. How will it all fit?

I threw out a very few pieces, and moved scraps that were only good for rags into a separate rag bag. (You never know when you need a soft fabric rag for polishing something.) Re-folded much of the rest into flatter, wider shapes, and somehow managed to fit it all in there again.

Linens and solid woven cottons on the left.

Jerseys and printed cottons next to those.

Upholstery fabric and entire garments (shirts and trousers in good fabrics).

Wools, furs, and shiny fabrics.

Bags of small scraps on top of everything.

I own pieces of actual rabbit fur. Whatever will I use them for? No idea, but they don’t deserve to be thrown away, that’s for sure.

My sketch for this project had rough, thick lines for the oval shapes, and I wanted to recreate those in embroidery. Paper string, maybe, or a thin ribbon, couched. That’s where I paused at the last embroidery club meeting.

In the intervening two weeks, I had completely forgotten this plan, and was only reminded of it when I took out and unfolded the fabric. I did not remember it at all when packing my backpack this morning. Grabbed the embroidery project bag and that was that. No paper string.

Not willing to compromise with my vision, and also not interested in making up some random time-filler task for today, I improvised. Went on a material hunt through the community centre. Found a crumpled-up paper bag. Cut off a thin strip, coloured it mostly-black with an ordinary pen, and twisted it into my own black paper string. Not as durable as the store-bought stuff, but it doesn’t need to hold up to anything, so it’s all good.

Brewery tour and beer tasting evening at Omnipollos kyrka with Active Solution.

Kind of fun, mostly because this brewery is fun and irreverent in their approach to everything. It was founded by two people, one “beer person” and one artist. Now the beer person brew experimental crazy beer, and the artist person makes art for each new beer. Apparently the first beer they submitted to Systembolaget caused serious head-scratching because the label they sent over was just art and didn’t even include the name of the beer.

We had dinner (with beer), then a tour of the brewery as well as of the atelier in the attic. Then a long beer-tasting session, which I abandoned halfway through. Most beer is undrinkable to me, and I don’t much enjoy drunken company either.

They had some interesting alcohol-free beer, one with mango flavour and one with blueberry. I did enjoy those with my dinner. Sadly but expectedly, those were not part of the tasting.

All I wanted was to find some fabric scraps for sewing a small loose pocket.

As I lifted out a stack of fabric from my fabric chest, I realised that the bottom was this close to falling out. The chest is about thirty years old and somewhat cheaply made to begin with. The fact that I sometimes press the lid down to compress the contents hasn’t helped its structural integrity. The bottom is a thin sheet of plywood, held in place by grooves in the sides. Pressure has made it bend, and it’s really not staying in those grooves any more.

I have my sewing materials now, but I also have a living room corner heaped with fabric, and a DIY project waiting for me.