The rather marvellous artnouveauho  and myself arranged to meet up for a spot of tea and tubewhoring in the posher middle bit of the District and Circle lines around Kensington on Friday. This meant a simple enough journey via a change at Earl's Court up one of the District lines multiple spurs - the District Line has many odd branches and wiggles all of which involve dickering about at Earl's Court but at least the Platform indicator boards are still willfully ancient and arcane, like some fairground divination game:




we then completely failed to get tea as the place we were aiming for was closed, but wandered via Notting Hill and all the chazzas in between to a strange little Italian place with delicious rice balls where we were seranaded by a very peculiar singer in a pinstriped suit, slightly off key and with the oddest, plastered-down hair - like it had been fabricated all of a piece from rubber.



He was fantastic entertainment but for all the wrong reasons, and very distracting when we wanted to gossip - and, being a singer herself, eventually his off-keyness was becoming physically painful to L - so we left for tea and gingerbreadmen at her house via Sloane Square - which was a twinkly fairyland with Christmas lights - so three done!