Everything I've done in London (and beyond) this fortnight

We’re on week three of the 7-gazillion-day holiday and I have already become someone I hate. Or, at least, someone who hates everything. I don’t know if it’s spending every. waking. hour. with my children, having to deal with THE PUBLIC when during termtime I exclusively spend my days in the company of my cat, or bog standard perimenopausal rage, but let’s just say I know what Lana Del Rey was on about when she wrote ‘Summertime Sadness’ — which, FYI, is an expression I was using long before she wrote “I just wanted you to know that, baby, you the best” (a lyric so terrible I feel physical pain every time I hear it).

There have been occasional moments of joy in amongst those of blind fury. 1. We went to a new playground! Or, at least, a major refurb of an existing one. I love playgrounds so much I’ve written two books about them and regularly geek out over my hardbacks on playground design Soviet-era playscapes, but they also make me sad since once my children (soon) outgrow them I’ll have no business spending time in them — and yet it’s a subject I know I’ll always find endlessly fascinating. 2. I swam in the sea! Or at least I stood far enough out that my shorts were wet for the rest of the day. The sea also makes me quite depressed. I can’t explain it. The coast is quite literally the end of the earth and there’s something about that that I find completely suffocating. 3. We went to IKEA and ate plant balls! Then I got sad that I will never take my girls to Big Topshop, because it’s now an IKEA! I am a bundle of contradictions. Perhaps that’s just parenthood. Or perimenopause.

Anyway, I can’t really complain too much because last Wednesday we went to a preview of the new and improved Diana Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens,