Tickets, Money, Passport?

I'm such a city girl at heart that since moving from a big (ish) suburban city (i.e. Perth) to a large urban city (London) I've developed a child-like delight for any kind of critter. And by critter I don't mean bugs but rather small furry animals, birds and pretty much anything you'd find on a farm or in the wild but not in a big city.

So it is with glee that I often traipse off to Hackney City Farm for a point and coo at the animals, either with willing or sometimes unwilling friends. I can ignore the small children and pretend I'm not slightly scared of the giant turkeys, I can stand the smell in the small furry animals enclosure (chinchillas, rabbits, guinea pigs) and I can lean on a fence and point at the cows and sheep and pretend I'm in my own bucolic wonderland. It's all rather fabulous.

My musing on the subject of wild animals comes from a very pleasant afternoon I spent with Pen & Mike doing Open Squares stuff on Saturday. A last minute decision on Friday afternoon, pegged down through the magic of text and a late night call when we arranged a rendezvous at St Joseph's garden in EC1. A small garden dedicated to the memory of Cardinal Basil Hume. It was lovely. We moved onto Postman's Park, most recently used in the film and play, Closer and ended up at Russell Square. Russell Square used to be, quite frankly, rather grim. Unkempt, unloved, shabby and a square you'd walk around rather than walk through. Now after a major revamp it boasts a very welcoming cafe, lots of grassy areas, shady trees and on Saturday because of Open Squares a display of fantastic owls, hawks and kestrels to name a few. They were magnificent, tethered regally to their perchs they watched us with almost as much fascination as we did them.

All in it was a very pleasant afternoon, we obviously stopped for tea which translated as coffee and finished with a walk up to St George's Gardens where we all decided Bloomsbury was somewhere we could live.

Not together that is.