I have just cooked my Mulberry Roxanne Tote on the stovetop. There was a bit of smoking, and the smell halfway betwixt a steak charring and a bit of burnt toast, and I looked over the the (usually stone-cold but now redhot) electric elements where I had plonked my bag, Luella wallet, nappy wipes, new tin of Smith’s Rosebud Salve from my sneaky trip to Anthropologie (new-to-London NY store) and iphone. All was cooking at a rapid pace. Mulberry bag now looks like this:

And it smells funny. I am hoping there will be some genius burnt-Mulberry-bag-type-fixer-person at Mulberry HQ who will sort it out for me. I am numb with sadness.

Counter-balancing this fug of regret and despair is the fact that on Monday we all get up at 4:30am to fly to Crete. [Burglars, at this point, please take note: Charlotte, Houseguest with Extras, will be here to fend you off with swords and forks and pointy plastic toys which she will line the hallway with and if you so dare to pop in, believe me, you will bang into a scooter and trip on some Hunter wellies and slide facefirst along our dirty corridor into the pile of dirty washing and you will WISH you had stayed AWAY.]

So, we have to get up and find our way to Gatwick for a 6:25am flight. This part of the holiday plan is truly truly terrible. This part may break us. Presuming it doesn’t, however, we shall ply the bigger children with DVDs once poured into the teeny tiny easyJet seats and one of us will patrol the skinny aisles with Custard, the Screaming Wonder, pacing up and down and keeping him from exploring the toilet bowls/other people’s hand luggage for about four hours. I am hoping the Custard Monitoring will fall on the parent who is not six and a half months pregnant (that’d be Mark, then) but I suspect there shall be some clever ploy awaiting to shift that particular problem onto me. “Ohh, I would help you, but I am wedged between the children and I have to make sure the dvd keeps running smoothly” or “You know, I feel a sinus headache coming on” or “I will have my turn very very soon” then falls mock asleep. And so on.

But then, we get to our holiday villa with a spa pool and 5 acres and the beach nearby and a venetian town to explore and tavernas to eat out in and feta to hoover down. I will not cook, just give the children bread and olives. But I will be BAGLESS.

After my trip to Anthropologie yesterday, I had a very quick cup of coffee and a bit of chocolate financier cake and a leedle round blueberry muffin at Sketch. Custard had a fluffy milk, which unfortunately was mostly scalding with a tiny bit of unfrosted fluff. There was an enthusiastic gulp followed by a very red chest and much screaming. Cafe staff the world over: babies only need the fluff – the boiling milk is not entirely warranted. If only we had some sort of police-type character to school us in the way of hot beverages.

Anyway, here is Custard lounging about in Sketch before the fateful gulp:

And here is me, slurping from vintage china cup. Please avert eyes from the wayward runaway breast making a dash for it:

I said eyes AVERTED! (As if you could – there is something almost medically wrong with the one on the right…)