Wednesday, November 10/2010

To Jean's in West Harrow. Happily, it's dry, though there's a chill wind. Warm inside, though - and a lovely Asian feast as well as good conversation. We're lucky Jean could fit us in, as she has extra practices for a coming concert. Shanthi joins us after work. She's lucky to have her new jog, having survived the swingeing civil service cuts that saw out many of her colleagues, but the new position is pretty stressful, involving the design of further cuts and redundancies. She's brought aubergine and chicken korma to add to the lamb cury and all the vegetable dishes - sweet potatoes, green beans and leeks - as well as dhal and cucumbers in yoghurt and fragrant rice. The table looks like it's set for Thanksgiving - and we're nearly, but not quite, too full for the apple crumble and custard.

And to top it all off, we leave with a borrowed book by Alan Donaldson one of my old professors. And yes, he does look old in the photograph at the back, but probably hasn't aged any more than the rest of us over the last 40 odd years. I didn't think of him as being especially young when I was a student, but he must, actually, have been only in his mid-thirties.