One fine day......

Please, somebody, take the buns away.......I can't help it, I love hot cross buns, but lets face it, what's not to love, hot from the oven, butter splattered or for the healthy option, topped with blackcurrant jam, packed with all that vitamin C (oh just taste the difference.....) and really, all this hideous weather is any good for is eating. Thank God it's the chocolate season.

However, in the name of taste and safety the sugar fest has to stop. So, in a grand attempt to embrace Spring and prepare for the, apparently 'hotter than '76' summer that's on it's way (how many times have we heard that, for any of us who can remember that sweet, sweat-sticky summer we know there can never be another...) I headed off to my local green market to fill my home with delicious produce, packed with vim, vigour and health. Of course the joy of living in a big city is that I can actually walk to a market to buy my home-grown, hand-picked, lovingly crafted fruit and veg complete with all their muddied roots and artfully tweaked leaves intact, that lie along side the hand-reared pork, beef, lamb and chicken, surrounded by pretty pictures of their picturesque hutches, coops, barns and styes, their family and friends beaming from the long-grass where they too once roamed free. Unlike my poor friends in the country who have to drive miles and miles and miles in their mighty 4x4s, to shop for their vacuum-packed rashers and mean white eggs in the hyper-markets and monumental Tescos that have replaced the farm shop...go figure. Despite having just returned from the tropics ( I know, I know...) I feel tiered, bunned-out, heavy-lidded I'm wearing my bags for life, so I decided to buy green: cabbage, kale, spring greens and rocket, apples and pears....they're greenish. I've done juicing and lets face it, it's horrid, and messy, but a plate of steamed kale with a hearty squeeze of lemon juice or a bowl of pan fried spinach and garlic....now you're talking. And with puy lentils, sun-dried tomatoes and goats cheese.....better than any multi-vitamined power-shake.

Already feeling fit after lugging all that deliciously leafy goodness home I phoned a friend: the-most-uncomfortable-gay-in-the-city (at 44 he thinks he may have made a mistake....) who happily jumped at the idea of spending a Bank Holiday Monday in the pursuit of art. First we went to the National Portrait Gallery to take a turn around the Irving Penn and oh what a joy, that's what photographs should look like, all those hours of painstaking development, experimenting with different techniques, come to extraordinary life. It's brilliant, really, go eye to eye with Audrey Hepburn and Richard Burton or wonder at how Irving backed Wallace Simpson into a corner, where she becomes the Red Queen. Can the same effect really be achieved with a digital camera? Will you just be able to download the Irving Penn software, or the David Baily package, and hey-presto..........

Then it was off to the cinema and if you're in the mood for something odd and French look no further than 'Lourdes', if you like slow and weird and foreign, and I do, it's brilliant........I shan't tell you what happens, I don't want to spoil it.

After all that, there was only one thing left to do: a fine glass, or 3, of red in the shiny and new 'Dean Street Townhouse', an all-day dinning-room and hotel in a four-storey townhouse, with a long bar and delicious nuts, sort of private members club lite: great service and no costly membership. And once I've lost all the weight embracing the Easter Bunny put on, I want to go back for dinner because the skinny chips looked excellent.....

Top tip: 30 Rock....if you haven't seen it get the box set and laugh yourself into summer....