At the weekend we celebrated our six year wedding anniversary.
On the Saturday night we had tickets for night two of Blackpink’s Deadline tour at Wembley. Now admittedly, this was much more for me than for my husband, but he’s a very good egg and, in the absence of me having friends who are Blinks, came along with me.
I’m probably not your typical audience for K-pop, but I have lockdown to blame for my interest.
While unable to leave the house, others were baking banana bread and getting into sourdough, but I couldn’t ever get any flour because our Sainsbury’s were always sold out by the time I was able to go and queue up after work. So baking was out.
Instead I leant into Netflix and, because I love a documentary on basically any subject, ended up watching the documentary Blackpink: Light Up the Sky. At this point I had probably heard of BTS but that was the extent of my K-pop knowledge.
At the time, their most recent single was How You Like That (released a few months before) and I quickly became obsessed with the visuals of their dance performance video and fell headfirst into a Blackpink wormhole.
I didn’t get tickets for their Born Pink tour the other year (I missed the boat for cheap tickets and couldn’t justify the cost for those that were available) so when they announced they were touring again, I was on it.
And those girls put on a hell of a show. Even my husband had to admit that. I caught him nodding along to the beat throughout, even though he was by no means as familiar with most of the songs as I am.
Highlights were their new song Jump, Rosé doing APT and an encore of Wannabe (the Spice Girls being the last girl group to play Wembley). My little 11 year old Spice Girl fangirl heart being so incredibly happy, full and surprised at that because they had not done that during the night one encore.
On Sunday my husband had booked us in for a late lunch at José Pizarro’s Lolo in Bermondsey. Bermondsey is one of our favourite places to eat out. Lahpet have a branch there – Lahpet Larder – and we also love Flour and Grape for pasta.
Although Flour and Grape is our usual go-to there for anniversary celebrations (we went to Italy for our honeymoon), this time we decided to change things up. Lolo only opened a year ago and so it’s not just new to us but still a relative youngster. Ideal for a late lunch, it offers all-day dining and modern European food.
We opted to share a few small plates to start – sourdough with extra virgin olive oil, and a burrata with heritage tomato and pesto:
Courgette carpaccio with pine nuts and slow roasted tomatoes (zingy, fresh, summery – perfect for a hot sunny London day):
And tuna crudo with pink peppercorns and coriander:
Followed by two mains – beef shin ragu with polenta and basil for me:
And what was meant to be a baked cod fillet with pisto for my husband, but they were having issues with the oven so they offered to pan fry it instead.
We also got sides of baby potatoes and green beans with almonds.
We finished up by sharing an olive oil and almond cake served with peach and yoghurt and two glasses of dessert wine.
Not cheap (the total came in just under £200 including a cocktail, glass of wine and spritz) but absolutely delicious, unfussy but beautifully presented. It felt like one of those places you have in your back pocket and go to with people that you want to casually impress in a low-key way.
Afterwards we headed to see what was on at the nearby White Cube Gallery. We’ve previously seen some great stuff there, they had a fantastic Tracey Emin exhibition there last time we went. This time there were two exhibitions on – Alien Shores: landscape, once removed and Sara Flores Bakish Mai. Both really interesting. The former featured a variety of artists and media and included the below Anselm Kiefer works (we saw his Finnegan’s Wake exhibition at the White Cube two years ago).
On the walk back to Monument Tube station we passed the London Glassblowing Centre and popped in. The London Glassblowing Centre is really cool because if you visit not in summer (when they turn their furnace off), you can also see them blowing glass or working on something.
I can date our first visit back to August 2023 when we decided to venture in on the way back from another anniversary lunch. We fell in love with two sculptural glass ‘birds’ made by Bruce Marks and I took the below photo to remind us about them in the future.
We’ve been back since but it’s never been quite the right time to pull the trigger on a purchase. The original birds are quite big and our house is quite small, so I thought we’d probably need to commission slightly smaller ones.
This visit, the stars must have aligned for us. Or we gained some serious karma points on the way there when my husband helped a woman with a pram navigate the steps and I spotted a spider on my husband’s shoulder when we were on the tube and we managed to find him a little home at Bank Station. Yes, we temporarily became the Tube weirdos as we let this spider run over our hands (to the silent amusement and also slight horror of a woman opposite us).
On display this time were two smaller birds… and even better, they were ever so slightly discounted as part of the show that they had on.
Possibly still a little buzzed from drinks at lunch, we decided that it was meant to be.
They arrived mid-week and although we need to find a permanent place for them, they’re looking pretty happy on their temporary shelf. We love them already. Two together.
