millionreasons | So we'll walk down the avenue, yes we'll walk down the avenue

Friday, Alice and Steve came around for the second of our At Homes/determination to never leave Stoke Newington etc etc. for a feast of stuffed portabello mushrooms, spinach roulade, raspberry pavlova and plenty wine. No recipe books were needed, Jamie Oliver.

Saturday we went, for some reason I can’t recall, to watch the Grand National in a rather nice pub in Goswell Road. I texted my friend who used to bet when we were at school (and came away from a hen night at Donny Races £40 up) to see who might win – I’ve never been into a bookies in my life. She had Liberthine. Dave had Simon. Simon is not a good name for a horse. A cat maybe, but not a horse. I don’t think I’ve ever watched the Grand National before and the idea had to be explained to me. No doubt it will have to be explained to me again next year – my brain is full of the rules of cricket, French irregular verbs, précis of Buffy episodes and what exactly I was doing this time last year. There is definitely no room in there for horses. We watch Watford lose to ManU, a result I am pleased with, not because I admire Giggsy, Scholesy, Ronaldoy or Sir Alex, but because I was worried a draw would delay Dr Who. Afterwards, we retire to Allan’s studio, eat chips and watch youtube videos, including dreadful raps by Jonathan King, in which he blames the media for his incarceration rather than his breaking the law. Satruday night in a live/work space in Clerkenwell and youtube. How very now. Or maybe how very 2005. I want to write that the LDN is a Victim song is kinda hilarious, but I’m sure it’s so last week. Oh this London/media/naughties/culture/30-something anxiety. Here’s the American version of white people who want to be black instead. Laters, yeah.

Back at Angel we bump into Kate and her beau at the bus-stop, the first Stoke Newington people I’ve accidentally seen since we moved. Maybe the others will come out of the woodwork now.

Sunday, we head east again into Suffolk to do a walk around Dedham Vale, Constable country - although we see a grand total of 0 haywains and 0 leaping horses. We stroll down a picturesque river which features every local nightbclub bouncer with his top off in a rowing boat. Cross the Stour at Stratford St Mary, over the county border into Essex where every van and high-heeled shoe immediately becomes white. It’s gorgeous though, lanes of bowering blossom, furrowed fields like melting chocolate, wild-flowers bursting into bloom, country pubs with baby rabbits in the beer garden, cows painted white, dark and milk, giggly lambs, a wild duck filled estuary and pretty sailing boats. We end up at Manningtree, exhausted, and find out that it’s shut for the evening. 3 pubs, all closed. It’s a mile back to the station but the station buffet (pub) is open. It’s the sort of place, with its open fire and dark wood furniture, that Laura Jesson and Alec Harvey might have shared a penny bun. Unfortunately there are no buns, only the worst egg sandwiches I have ever eaten. These are the sorts of places which drive London-based food writers into furious apoplexies as they compare them to French roadside cafés (which, in my experience, aint all that).