The rest of yesterday did not go well. I tried to stay awake for when Max got home from work late after the primaries, but eventually had to throw in the towel at 1am. However, when I got to bed, there was the loudest, most word-for-word TV noise coming from Stompy's apartment above our bedroom. Aaaarrrggghhh.
It was so loud and I so wanted to go up there, but I was just so snoozy I couldn't bring myself to get out of bed. I did compose a very angry note in my head though, which I wrote and took upstairs this morning. Stompy wasn't in, so I just put it under his door. The note made it clear that old buildings like this are obviously going to be rubbish when it comes to noise travel, but that to be woken up at 6.30am in the morning and kept awake until after 1.30am is deeply uncool.
With war on Stompy waged, I went to meet Max for lunch in Dupont Circle, where he told me he'd just seen a cool clip of a cooking travel programme starring Gwyneth Paltrow in which Gwynnie appears to be a really fun person! Who knew? I always thought she was kind of uptight and boring, not unlike a strict prefect, with her macrobiotic diet and dislike of interviews and stuff. But no, Maxy's right - check it out.
This evening, we went for dinner at the flat of Jonathan Whitney - news editor at the BBC Bureau. Apparently he's very important, but I just know him as Whitters, the chap who's super-fun and really friendly whenever we go out with the BBC lot. He's here for two years, but his girlfriend Katie isn't coming over until September. She's visiting at the moment and this was a chance for us to meet her, as she and I will hopefully become daytime buddies when she moves here.
Whitters' apartment is AMAZING. It's in an interesting part of town - about 5 blocks down from us, just off U Street. It's next door to Busboys & Poets, which is something of a DC institution (not sure why yet - will investigate). The reason it's interesting is because on his street, you can see the tidemark of gentrification. Literally, the wave of redevelopment kind of stops with his fancy new glassy apartment block and beyond it is rundown, paint peely tenement buildings.
The apartment itself is up on the 8th floor and is this really modern open-plan flat with exposed brickwork and big metal duct piping running around the ceiling. It's all furnished in blacks and reds and one whole wall is a window looking out onto a colossal balcony with a west-facing view from the Washington Monument right round to the National Cathedral. It's absolutely stunning and we watched the sun set behind the cathedral while drinking wine, which was lovely.
Whitters and Katie are away all July and have said we can have their keys and come up to the apartment on 4th July or for sunbathing. Awesome!
We had a really nice evening, with fun chat and nice food. Turns out Whitters was in Soham coordinating the BBC's coverage of that tragedy, and then also in Praia del Luz last summer, coordinating the coverage of Madeleine McCann story. We got interesting insights into both of those and I was amazed by how jolly he is, despite having been in the middle of horrible things. He spent a long time in Northern Ireland, too.
It wasn't quite as much fun as hanging out with Alison and Erik Love, but Whitters and Katie are really nice and I was very happy to discover that I've got my baking mojo back as we tucked into my first successful effort at brownies for dessert (third time lucky... I think the answer was the actual baking tin I bought the other day).
I was very proud that we were able to hop on a bus home, just like when we used to get the 94 home from Tom and Bambi's house if we were feeling snoozy. We're true locals! (erm, the fact that we just had to get straight down U St kind of diminishes our achievement).
We got home to find a long and mortified note under our door from Stompy. Except it very obviously isn't Stompy! The person who wrote the note - having received mine - is a lady called Paula who lives alone upstairs. I met her briefly a week or two ago, when she helped me get my bike through the front door. Turns out she is in the flat directly above us. But she can't possibly be Stompy, because the petulant stamping feet are definitely those of a heavy person, not a 5'2" lady and we regularly hear a male voice. Also, she mentioned in her note that she rarely listens to music, and we always hear music coming into our apartment. Oops! Paula was so nice in her note, totally accepting responsibility (despite the fact it very obviously isn't her who's disturbing us) and promising to take her shoes off when she walks around her flat. I feel awful and am now intent on finding the real Stompy.
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