Double-flack and grapevine

Sadly, my boxercise class is on a break until mid-September, so to plug the gap I went tonight to a huge cheese-fest that's called Body Attack in Tooting Leisure Centre.

The place is great, buzzy, quite modern, nice toothy receptionists, toilets that flush. But the class.... I no like.

Body Attack, I now know, means trying to copy a load of barndance-style moves to cheesy pop-dance, with the thirty or so women who make up the rest of the class gracefully perspiring as they prance and clap and jive and spin and clap and wilt and gambol. All the clapping!.......how it grated - clap clap, spin your arms, grapevine, clap and whoop - all this balls. It made me sweat and, because I got almost every routine wrong, feel horribly self-conscious. I doubt I'llgo back - the headset, the mirrorball, the naffness of it all.

It's now made me question the whole array of "Body-X" classes that all the local leisure centres put on. "Body Combat" sounded good but like this one perhaps you need to go a few times to understand what the hell's going on before you can actually exercise properly. And by that time boxercise will be back on.

I've been to a different class once before, when boxercise was on a break for Christmas, and both times now it's made me realise what a punishing class it is, with better music, a better instructor, and more opportunities to endanger your classmates. It cannot return quickly enough.

Sorrel good, garlic bad

The garden is ripe with good stuff at the moment and we're now reaping huge rewards from the raised beds. They've turned what was a nondescript paved patio cluttered with plastic pots into a fruiting, shooting paradise.

The good: Tumbling Tom Cherry tomato nibblers, Aurora bush tomato cookers, a snaking squirming green frond of glorious acorn squash, which threatens to make it to the top of the metal staircase and overwhelm the couple in their flat upstairs, stubby rows of lettuce, Little Gem and Salad Bowl, rocket, a patch of perpetual spinach, spray of chives, a flowering peppermint tub, two verdant rosemary bushes, a heady lavender, a sorrel patch (the find of the season - sorrel is a thick salad crop, a perennial, strong taste of lemon/apples/gooseberries) a fence-long barcode of Trail of Tears French beans, like rich exclamations, and two mini-greenhouses full of sweet and chilli peppers, some of which are deep green and wrinkled. I'm hoping these'll ripen a bit before the insects tear the life out them.

Defensive / companion planting has done well this year - I sacrificed some sweet peas in amongst the beans, and also some marigolds, which gave their lives so that the coriander might live. The nasturtiums, which are planted in the walking boots that pounded the round globe with me for a year, just look nice.

The bad: The garlic has fallen over and wilted to death through nothing more than utter neglect, some of the squash haven't taken so have started to rot and wither on the vine (remedied by an early-morning nudge with a big phallic paintbrush, which does the fertilising), left-too-long flowering oriental leaves which taste bitter and unkempt.

It's been a good productive season this year, without the sorrow of male-only courgette flowers. Hats off to The Real Seed Company who specialise in heritage seeds and early cropping varieties and show you how to save your seed. The River Cottage Veg Patch handbook has been bloody useful too.

This winter: keeping my spinach up for as long as I can hold it; and finding lettuce that'll withstand the first frosts. Next year: how to encourage the strawberries to fruit with a bit more vim.

Passerby Poker

Rach and me developed this to idle away the strides on our morningside meander.

Jackie O is a painted lady, thin, pale, fabulous clothes - swings her arms, chews gum. She's almost always there though - Ten of Spades.

The Heron, balding, dips an angular beak into a daily book, always perched - another regular - Nine of Diamonds.

The Queers - latterly, The Preggies (although only one was packing) - naturally a Queen Pair - Clubs and Hearts. They used to be just Eights or Nines, never sure which, but they're hardly ever seen these days.

Disco is about twenty-three, swings arms as well (normally good walkers, this pack) - always colloted, always sleeveless, always ALWAYS with a big pair of cans on her head - always see her - Ten of Clubs.

Two Smoking Ladies - both near the Estate - Smoking Lady One was only a Six, so reliable was she, but she went missing for ages - elderly - retired? - she most recently appeared in the August light, in apron - these days a Spade, a Jack, to fall in rank if her appearances stack up. Smoking Lady Two was never without fag - always dragging at the same allotted corner - an Eight at the time. But now the holidays are on, or perhaps she's wheezed her last - she'd have to be another Queen (Spades).

There's The Monk - a curious article - dwelling residentially in the mother-sphere I don't doubt - preening along, hovering round St Paul's, or the Bridge - reliable as clockwork like only a Six of Diamonds can be.

Piotr is also ranked pretty low - an Eastern ex-pat with a Man U fixation, broad-shouldered, diabolical - Seven of Hearts, if only to anger his Devil. And Patch? - Six of Clubs. Sorry fella.

An Ace is reserved for a wholehearted Dreadnaught - shuffling gait of a beast, swarming lips, beige danger in an angelic black head - a sentimental Ace of Clubs. He makes it in regularly - because dogs are walked - but he's truly the symbol, the token of esteem, the flower of beauty. The hand is irredeemably poorer without him. The Guy With The Neck - Dreadnaught's apprentice, lead ever to hand - doesn't score.

The Ace is pretty difficult to award, as it goes to the rarely-eyed, a beautiful chimera - someone you may only see once, the equivalent of betting on Red 37.

We're still looking for a good King and another Ace. Maybe it's the stiff-eyed girl with her perfect partner.

Leon and the Century Egg

Lovely day today in some unexpected hot sunshine, fresh red AURORA tomatoes gleaming in the salad, if slightly mushily, Steve showing my how to clip the car seat into the car, which I achieved albeit clumsily (...if a baby had been sitting in it, it would have had its small face crushed against the nylon fabric of the seatback), and the titular new arrival - Sir Leon of Cadwallader, fresh from the steaming lakes of the North Island, affable and latterly tired, having uncranked his limbs from an overnight jumbo, spending shaded time in repose with a bottle of wifebeater.

There's always a changing clan around at our place, when the family came over, but the great thing is that they're always nice and they're always friendly. This time we had Leon, Pat - memorable in a tartan-reversible - and the whole of the Khoo-Giles pod (Charlotte, Steve, Ava and Sharon - Ava mischievous, sniffing lavender and padding around on slightly stiff stilt-like legs - she has trouble negotiating stairs but has become mobile incredibly quickly). To my delight Sharon had made good on her promise to treat me to a Century Egg, a vile-looking fermented egg with a black albumen and a sticky, grey, melting, oyster-like yolk. It smelt repulsive, like some decaying fish, but slipped down easily with a sliver of pickled ginger. Apparently it will either elongate or dessicate the penis depending on the flavour of the moon.

The Century Egg is a Chinese delicacy. Chinese traditions always loom large when the clan come over, and today was no exception - I stumbled into half a conversation about the Chinese lunar calendar and learnt that our baby's going to be born into month 7, the month of Hungry Ghosts. This seemed to be an altogether bad thing. All I know is that it clashes with the Oval Test - something which will surely see me howling like a rudderless banshee.

Took some photos too with a black and white film camera, museum piece, my Praktika hierloom - thanks dad! I bought loads of black and white film to take some lovely arty soft-focus (out of focus?) shots of Rach and Manuel, but I'm in the habit now of rushing through the reels because the urge to get them quickly developed and rip open the photo wallet is almost unbearable. Hopefully I can stop myself taking five 'atmospheric' pictures of the net curtains 'just to use up the film' this time round, though.