April showers, it certainly isn’t. When you think of April showers, you see a bright sunny day with a few sprinkles to keep the garden happy, but this is anything but. The sun only came out for a few hours on Friday and has disappeared again. It is just another miserable Monday morning. The sky is as grey as it can get and the atmosphere is thick with moisture and seems as dreary as I feel. I try to find ways to cheer myself up as I drive to work once again avoiding the potholes. I still manage to clip one. I cast myself to the previous day.
It was little Lakshmi’s second birthday party. She was in a vibrant mood and chatted away as we joined her in the back seat of her parent’s car. She showed us her new dance moves with pointed fingers moving up and down to the rhythm of the latest popular music.
We parked close to the restaurant. A floating restaurant on the banks of the Thames River in Canary Wharf. It isn’t actually a floating restaurant, just named so because the interior decor gives the impression of being on a boat. The invite was for family only. Apart from one everybody else turned up. Lakshmi opened her cards and presents. Most of them were ‘Peppa pig’ themed, her latest craze. She even got a little Peppa teddy. She was quite happy playing with it, but got upset when she thought she had to share her balloons with Peppa. She kept saying “my balloon” and “my two”, for the ‘two’ shaped balloon. It was a little early for lunch and we had dim sums followed by a “Peppa pig” birthday cake. We didn’t stay long. The restaurant was packed and there was a big queue waiting to get seats.
As we drove home, I saw a sign saying ‘Gandhi Chaplin Memorial Garden’. I wondered what it could be and looked it up. In 1931 Gandhiji and Charlie Chaplin met at a house in Canning Town. To mark this meeting a memorial garden was created near the location where they met and it was opened in 2015.
