Hookahs and hookers

Who's Queen?  Well the Queen is queen, obviously, but apart from her, who is Queen of Cakes?  La Reine des Gateaux - I'll rule France as well while I'm about it.  My cake ensemble was a great success and some bloke I recognised off the telly ate many an icing rose.  Marianne looked wonderful for someone of 80 and there was a grand reunion of us college girls.  It was great to hear what everyone was up to - I seem to have produced the most unenterprising children of anyone.  I made my electrician and my film boy sound dedicated and wonderful with bright futures rather than useless layabouts performing the mere minimum.

I came back by tube from Edgware Road which I can tell you is just the strangest place on a Sunday night.  It is a hive of Arab activity and I did not feel as though I was in London but in a middle eastern city such as Beirut without the bombing.  Outside the Arab restaurants there were men seated at tables smoking hookahs and ladies selling their daughters (the ones with lots of make-up and no headscarves). There were ladies selling jewellery, men selling carpets and suitcases, lots of women swathed in black robes pushing prams and there, in the midst of this hubub, was me, a bit lost at 11.30 on a hot Sunday night, the only person not in a nightie, thinking I'd accidentally been transported to another part of the planet.  I didn't know how I was ever going to get back to my real world as the District Line was closed.  I had to walk back through Dar-es-salaam via Cairo to get to the Bakerloo line for Waterloo where I caught a train back to the familiarity of leafy suburbia.  It was so lovely to get home to snory Mr Smith .... and that pile of washing up.