Farewell Fox Corner, Hello Saltburn

...with your strange and irritating quirks, your excessive rent, and your permanent gloom. (Warning: never rent a north facing flat on a sunny day. Never again will it seem so bright).

And hello Eden Street, with your lovely view of a church.

Behind this church sits a fish and chip shop - one of the top two chippies in Saltburn.

Hello to my little sister, and her twin boys, and her lovely husband. They live at one of the houses on the right of the below picture. We live a bit further along on the left. Convenient.

And hello to this view, which greets me when I push Lady P's chariot around the long way on my walk to the coffee shop:

All things considered, this move was not too painful. And as I hope my snapshots demonstrate, well worth the minor upheaval. It's going to be a lovely summer by the seaside.

Well, we haven't killed her yet, so...

I've gone all 'hands over ears shouting "la la la I can't hear you la la la" again. A bit like I did at the end of my pregnancy. From lapping up the newborn advice to, frankly, being ungratefully deaf to it.

There's just so much of it about. And again, I solicit it half the time, with all my tweeting and blogging about Lady P. But so much of the advice just seems impossible to follow. Especially the stuff in those goddamn baby books.

The only advice I like are recommendations along the lines of: 'I'd just go with the flow if I were you, you won't kill her' (though as we know, it'd be awfully easy to). I've gone from consulting every baby book available and constantly googling all Lady P's movements and 'symptons' to a rather more laissez faire approach. We recently switched formula, for Lady P's late night top-up feed, based on the fact our nearest supermarket didn't have the brand I had so carefully researched. It's safe to say we're relaxing a little bit here.

I'll leave you with a great example of a piece of baby care advice I am happy to ignore:

A separate baby kettle - because life isn't complicated enough!

Genetic inheritance

Good news! Not only is she incredibly advanced in many ways. Lady P also has royal lobes.

Royal lobes are, according to The (half Korean) Love Of My Life ones where the lobe is separate from the rest of you. Like Buddha, only less exaggerated.

TLOML, whose Korean heritage is a noble one, has them. That's where she gets them from, I suppose.

I, being of sturdy Anglo Saxon stock, have fully attached, serf-like lobes:

Little Lady P is a lucky girl indeed. I hope she picks up his athleticism, spatial reasoning and olive skin too.

Baggage

It's an interesting process, moving house. It makes you look at your possessions in a new light. It makes you examine stuff to see whether it's worth moving. You also reminisce about some objects' former lives, the purposes they've served or the spaces they've filled in earlier homes. There are a lot of sentences that start with 'Do you remember when we bought this..?'.

One item that surprisingly, became the subject of just such a conversation is this:

Yes, that's right, cling film.

We moved it here from New York, in the Spring of 2011. There's also some debate about whether we actually moved it from Malibu too. 'I'm sure we bought that in Gristedes when we arrived in New York.' 'Really? I thought we had it in Malibu.' Weird conversation to have about cling film, isn't it?

Either way, it's been with us for some time, this cling film. It'll run out some day I suppose - and we'll be all nostalgic when it does. Not least because I bet you can't even buy rolls that big here.

Gumbo, Fox Corner style

Readers who remember my attempts to make gumbo in New York may be interested to know that I recently made it again.

It was tricky enough buying the right ingredients in Manhattan  - with the sassafras being particularly difficult to find. Trying to source all the requirements in Gospel Oak, on a whim, during the Bank Holiday weekend, was a bit of a fool's errand.

On reflection it wasn't the best thought out meal. It came to mind because we had a tin of crab meat that needed eating. We're trying to use up food from the larder and the freezer, before the move next week. Translating a surplus tin of crab into an elaborate Cajun was a bit of a leap, I'll admit. To complete the recipe  I needed to buy some shell on king prawns, Andouille sausages, okra, and sassafras (and some other, less exotic stuff). The otherwise excellent Budgens of Belsize Park fell short, unsurprisingly.

So I made do with some Cumberland sausages, frozen king prawns (some of which I boiled in lieu of shells to make the stock), and frozen okra. A generous dash of cayenne made up for the lack of heat from the spicy Andouille sausages.

English gumbo ingredients

It may not have been entirely authentic but it was still jolly good.

Chuck enough okra in and it looks like the real thing

And now, instead of a tin of crab meat which needs eating, we have half a bag of frozen okra and another of frozen king prawns. Brilliant. Really helped clear those cupboards ready for the move.