HELLO, SAFERIDE

MY NEW BEST FRIEND: Mr Squizzle! Every day I'm at my desk, I spend ages watching, what I assume is the same squirrel each time, dashing along the neighbours' wall and up and down the trees in front of the window. The other day, Mr Squizzle fell out of a tree, which was pretty harrowing to watch and may suggest the one that's been back since isn't him, but still, it's nice to have a daily visitor.

This week marks the beginning of a super-busy time for us; my TV work couldn't have ended at a better time.

This week, my great friend from home, Jacqui, came to stay with her sister-in-law Joanna, then next week(!) is the election, then Mum and Dad come to stay, then we go to LA for Thanksgiving with Tom and Bambi, then Kate comes to stay, then it's Christmas and Richard and Judy are coming over. Yikes!

While waiting for Jacqui and Joanna to arrive this morning (they were driving down from Canada - like Thelma & Louise, but hopefully wrapped up a bit warmer), I was tidying up my desk and idly looked over a flyer we got from the Swedish Embassy, with a view to throwing it away. Only to discover... my favourite band in all the world (Hello Saferide) was playing a free concert at the embassy this very evening!!

The initial giddiness of excitement gave way to dispair, as I realised that I couldn't possibly abandon Jacqui and Joanna to go to the gig and it wouldn't be fair to drag my guests to a concert by a band they'd never heard of. But when I called Max for moral support - how could two such fun things land on the same day? - he pointed out that of all the grown ups who are likely to want to go to a random gig at the Swedish Embassy, Jacqui and Joanna are easily the most likely, so I should ask them and just see what they say.

Still unsure, but with a glimmer of hope alive, I tried to find more info about timings and stuff, but when the Swedish Embassy website fell pitifully short, I checked the Hello Saferide website, only to discover - must. breathe. - that Hello Saferide have a new album out!!!! Wonder of wonders.

A brief pause for some background: Hello Saferide are a Swedish band who Max and I saw quite by chance at the Latitude festival last year. I liked the sound of their description in the festival catalogue, so we went to see them purely on spec and within minutes I was weeping tears of joy, so brilliant was their music and so beautiful their lyrics. I promptly snapped up all their recordings - an excellent album ('Introducing Hello Saferide') and two EPs - and have listened to little else since.

The band lineup seems to change a lot, but the one constant - not unlike Evan Dando in the Lemonheads - is the singer/songwriter Annika Norlin, who manages to delve into my head, extract my deepest thoughts, express them in a more articulate and witty way than I could ever imagine and then set them to the most excellent pop music either so upbeat that you you bounce off the walls of whichever room you're dancing around, or so moving that you sit in a corner sobbing, wondering how a stranger can 'get you' so well.

So that's Hello Saferide. Back to this morning. I obviously bought the new album online immediately and listened to it constantly until Jacqui and Joanna arrived this afternoon.

The album did nothing to dissuade me that me and Annika would be the best of friends if we were to meet - lots of the new songs sound like a mix between Bruce Springsteen and Coldplay, one of them talks about how 'God Only Knows' by the Beach Boys is her favourite song and in the sleeve notes, she thanks someone for lending her 'The Wire'. Good grief.

It was great to see Jacqui and Joanna, looking as glamorous as ever, despite having driven from Canada. They made the foolish mistake of saying they wanted to experience our world here in DC and do whatever it is we would normally be doing. So I sheepishly mentioned the gig and they loved the idea!! Yeeeaaaaayyyy!!!

I took them for a walk around the neighbourhood, stopping off for some ice cream to satisfy Joanna's sweet tooth (and like a good host, I joined her. Such a hardship) at a place on 18th St called Maggie Moos, where they mix awesome flavours just like that place in LA, where it looked like the lady was making sushi. Mmmm, ice cream.

For dinner, I drove the ladies into Georgetown, picking Maxy up on our way. Jacqui was quite convinced I was going to kill us all, as she's got it into her head that I'm a bad driver (thanks, Kel). I hope she and the New Hampshire state trooper never meet... In the words of Rainman, I'm an excellent driver!

A few gasps and white knuckles later, we parked up in a multi-storey (which becomes relevant later) and headed to the trusty Kafe Leopold for supper. There was no-one there, but we created our own atmosphere, thanks to some hearty cocktails (I had a far too minty blueberry mojito - most disappointing).

We then hotfooted it to the Swedish Embassy, via the Georgetown waterfront, which has been opened up after lots of construction and was really nice to walk along, albeit very quickly, to ensure we didn't miss my beloved Hello Saferide.

As ever, Jacqui and Joanna were excellent sports and were up for going right to the front of the crowd waiting for HS to come on stage. There weren't very many people there at all and so it was really easy to get right to the front and we had loads of space around us - so civilised, the Swedish.

It was almost too exciting for words when the band came on. We were right at the front and I swear Annika was looking right at me a bunch of times, perhaps spotting a potential new BFF (Best Friend Forever, Mum and Dad)... I was mightily relieved that I'd bought their album that day, as their entire set was all new material.

Jacqui and Joanna loved it and were rapt, much to my relief and glee. I came over all faint at one point and had to go to the bathroom, but was determined not to miss anymore, so soldiered back in for the end of the set, when they encored with 'The Quiz', one of their old songs about her interviewing a potential new boyfriend about whether he does stuff like talk in the middle of Seinfeld and what records he likes.

Awesome.

The funniest thing was I think the only person as into it as me was was a really old white-haired man standing in the front row, taking photos on his mobile phone and grinning from ear to ear.

After the gig, we were milling around and I noticed that the white-haired fanboy had cornered Annika and was chatting to her and so I wanted to go over and say hello and say I like 'The Wire' too and aren't the Beach Boys great and let's be BFF, but I came over all British and shy. After much goading from Jacqui, Max and Joanna, I plucked up the courage to go over to her, just as she disappeared behind a door, leaving old man grinning from ear to ear. Grrr.

With me floating along on a cloud of Saferide cheer, we headed back to the car, only to discover that the way we came out of the multi-storey car park was closed. We walked around and around, trying to find a way in, until eventually I went into a bar to ask and was told we had to walk through the bar, into the mall that the bar was attached to, go down in the lift, walk to some other lifts and they would take us to the car park!

So the four of us filed through this bar, then found ourselves spat out into the fancy Georgetown mall, which was all closed up. Resisting the temptation to fulfill my 'Mannequin'-inspired fantasy of spending the night in a mall, trying on all the clothes, sleeping in a tent and, in strict adherence to the film, hangliding through the empty halls, I led the merry band on this ridiculous odyssey up and down in several lifts, until we finally found the car park and the car, only to find that I'd left the window of the car open!! I was mortified and had to stop letting myself think what might've happened, because it made me feel sick.

What a night!

PHOTOS: MONUMENTS

Click HERE for photos of our day wandering around the DC monuments

MONU-MENTAL

It was such a beautifully stunning day when I got home from church that we decided to make a second attempt at walking to the Old Post Office building, to look at the view from the top.

The weather was gorgeous and it was lovely to wander through the DC streets in the sunny sunshine.

The view from the top of the Post Office was pretty good and really made me realise just how small DC is.

the FBI (in the foreground, on the left) and Capitol

As it was such a lovely day, we walked from the Post Office to the Mall, then along to the Washington Monument and on to the Lincoln Memorial. It was so much fun to wander around, taking photos, because everything looked gorgeous in the autumn sunshine.

the Lincoln Memorial, reminding me of stately homes from Jane Austen novels

the Washington Monument and Capitol

I was particularly excited to see the Korean Memorial, which I hadn't seen before, and found enormously moving - quite the best war memorial I've ever seen, for evoking the war it commemorates.

The Korean War Memorial

As the sun went down, we decided to head to the cinema, to see what was on and arrived just in time for 'Rachel Getting Married', which we've both been really wanting to see. Much has been made of Anne Hathaway's amazing, against-type performance as the recovering drug addict who sabotages her sister's wedding with her inadvertently self-obsessed ways, but I wasn't blown away by her or the movie. I figure you put dark eyeliner on anyone and get them to play someone coming out of rehab, they're going to be kind of the same as how Anne Hathaway played it. And the whole film was just so thrilled with its bohemian aesthetic that the prolonged party scenes felt really self-indulgent.

Rosemarie DeWitt was brilliant as Rachel and their father was played by an amazing actor, who Max has since found out is a Tony-award winning stage actor called Bill Irwin, who trained as a clown and was the first person to be awarded a five-year McArthur Fellowship, aka the Genius award, which is a huge money prize given to people who are just exceptional - you don't apply for it or anything. Cool.

SATURDAY SUPERSTORES

We were meant to be going to a Renaissance Festival with Patrick and Leanna today, but then we realised that we'd be paying lots of money that we don't have to go to a mock up of the country we come from.

So we sacked that and went shopping.

Yes, I know we have no money BUT we went to Alexandria, to the Gap Outlet store, where everything's basically free! Unfortunately my accountant must've called ahead, because when we got there, there was disappointingly little of interest to me and by no means did I repeat the wondrous pre-Costa Rica haul.

On our way home, we stopped off at the massive mall at Pentagon City, to try to find Max a winter coat and some trainers, but were told in no uncertain terms that it's too early for winter coats(!!) and couldn't find anywhere that sold anything other than sporty geek trainers.

My hankering for bargains was satisfied at Express, where I picked up some things for not very much, and then we headed to Target, to stock up on goodies for our Halloween party.

We've (actually, I suspect it's just 'I've') decided to really get into the Halloween spirit this year. It's a really big deal in America and front yards everywhere are bedecked with ghouls and ghosts and pumpkins, so we're throwing an old-school scary party and turning our flat into a haunted house.

The tradition in America is for girls to use fancy dress parties at Halloween as an opportunity to dress like a slut (see here), but we have stipulated that we want ghosts, vampires, brides of Frankenstein and maybe the odd Sarah Palin dressed as Tina Fey. Once Alison had clarified that 'fancy dress' doesn't mean black tie, I think everyone was on board.

So, because Target were having a sale, we headed there to stock up on pumpkin fairy lights, bouncy eyeballs, a cool strobe light you can put inside your pumpkin (Jean Michel Jarre, eat your heart out!) and creepy crawlies to strew about the place. We did however resist the tombstone multipack, despite it being terribly good value!

On the way home, we followed a lead on a skater trainers shop off U St, which was in a scary neighbourhood, but which furnished Max with some very smart new trainers, to replace the ones he left in a taxi ages ago, when it was raining really hard.

Tonight, Anne and Hugh came over to chill out, eat pizza and watch 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall', which is pretty much my dream evening. Although it was tinged with sadness, because Anne's moving out! Her and Megan's landlord has insisted they sign a year's lease and Megan's pretty sure her and Jonathan will want to move in together sooner than a year's time and Anne doesn't want to find another flatmate when that happens, so she's moving out to find somewhere by herself! I'm bereft! Fortunately, she's looking in this area and even saw a place today on our street, but it won't be the same as having her just next door.

The evening was further tinged with sadness, or rather annoyance, when it transpired that Hugh - the fortysomething screenwriting student - likes to narrate the film that he's watching! So throughout the movie, which is far from subtle or nuanced, with absolutely no subtext or hidden meaning, Hugh would be explaining what was going on! But not even in a highbrow screenwriting student way, just in a kind of stupid childlike way! Grrr.

LAND OF THE NOT-SO-FREE

MOST RIDICULOUS OCTOBER BEHAVIOUR THIS WEEK: I had to put the air con on yesterday! It's been so sunny!

Ok, I really need the dollar to go back to being really weak now, please. Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. I thought the American economy was in crisis - doesn't that mean its currency is worth very little in the world?

Apparently not. Or at least if it does, then the pound is much bigger trouble. When we got here, it was 1.98 dollars to the pound, hence our absurd amount of eating out, seeing two movies in a day, waltzing off on weekend trips and generally never wanting to go back to the UK so long as I could spend £100 at the Gap outlet store in return for an entirely new wardrobe. Times were good.

Now, just as my regular work dries up, the dollar is 1.42 to the pound!! So whereas before, the £1000 we get paid into our Bank of America account every month used to equate to nearly $2000, we're now only getting $1500 or so. Uncool.

Not a lot has happened this week, other than me finishing off my TV work (that's the end of my five week contract) and the last presidential debate, on Wednesday. It was nice to get Max at home for the morning again, and then I walked him to work as it was freakishly sunny that day.

I found the debate enormously tense, with McCain and Obama sitting right in each other's faces, and got really frustrated that Obama just sat there and took McCain's slurs, without really standing up for himself. Sometimes I want him to unleash the full extent of his intelligence and articulation in banging McCain to rights for the lies that he tells about him.

Anyway, seems like taking the high road does work after all, as Obama is unanimously considered to've won this debate, giving him a clean sweep against McCain. Ha.

Also on Wednesday, I read about this awesome tool from Google, which helps prevent you from sending emails when you're drunk, by making you undertake a simple arithmetic test if you try to send an email after a certain time of night. Brilliant!

It was bliss to have the day off today and catch up on emails and things. I even treated myself to an afternoon DVD - something I've hardly done, despite it being top of my list of things to do while having no job to go to - and watched 'Red Eye'. I had to see it during the day because Max said he was too frightened to watch it, but in fact it wasn't that scary. Rachel McAdams is great - I wish she made more films.

Then tonight we made dinner here for Max's colleague John and his wife Susie and they bought gorgeous Louis along, too. I hadn't met John before, but had heard lots about him from Max, cos they used to work together before Max joined the news website, so it was good to put a face to the name and he seems really nice. I still don't get hugely warm vibes from Susie, but really like her and would like to be friends and of course love little Louis. Awwwww.

PHOTOS: NEW ENGLAND

Click HERE for photos of our trip to New Hampshire, Boston and Marblehead.

MARBLEHEAD

CHECK OUT JIM & ELAINE'S AMAZING HOUSE: click here to watch video

Fortunately we weren't kept awake by noise from the sports bar downstairs and got up early to go and explore Boston a bit before being collected by Max's dad's cousin Jim, to go and spend the weekend with him and his wife Elaine at their house in Marblehead, just outside Boston.

It was another gorgeous day and even the leaves in Boston were beautiful oranges and reds, prompting the question was it worth going all that way to New Hampshire to peep at leaves?!

My liking for Boston grew as we wandered through pretty little streets to the big park in the middle of the city and then into the kind of Georgetown-esque neighbourhood of Beacon Hill, with pretty houses and cobbled lanes.

We saw the Cheers bar on our way back to the hotel, but couldn't linger long, because we were running late for Jim.

Jim and Elaine are really fun and we had a great weekend with them. Jim is a professor of political statistics (or something) at Harvard and Elaine used to be a professional potter but now makes jewellry. Their house is incredible - they spent two years completely refurbishing it with astonishing good taste and amazing vision. They have a floating staircase in the middle of the downstairs, with the steps wedged in panes of glass, and everything is ultra-modern and minimalist but also manages to be deliciously homely and comfortable and warm, too.

The house is right on the water in Marblehead, which is one of the oldest towns in all of the US and just a short drive outside of Boston.

the view from Jim and Elaine's front porch

There's something incredibly calming about being at Jim and Elaine's - it feels like a real sanctuary where everything is peaceful and easy-going. It helps that Jim and Elaine are both really laid back, but there's something about being able to see the sea from all their huge windows and not having any traffic whizzing past that makes it a lovely place to just relax.

After lunch, we went for a wander around Marblehead, which is a beautifully quaint town, with lots of houses made from wood slats that have been painted bright colours and little winding streets that suit walking more than dashing around in a massive car.

Again, the leaves were beautiful and we popped in to the local museum to see 'The Spirit of '76', a painting depicting the Americans beating the British that is apparently a big deal.

Jim regailed us with stories of local life as we walked up to a park that overlooked the Marblehead shoreline, telling us one story about how the chopped up body of someone's wife was found by a fisherman just off one of the islands nearby. The thing that caused most consternation amongst the locals wasn't the brutality of murder, but that foolish culprit had disposed of his wife's remains on entirely the wrong side of the island! Everyone knows that if you want to dump your wife's body, you dump it on the other side, where the water is deeper and the tide doesn't get too low! What worried Elaine is the number of people who'd clearly thought long and hard about how they were going to dispose of their wife's body!

On our way back to the house, we visited Jim and Elaine's lobsterman, who'd been saving some lobster specially for us, in his trap. So we went and got super-fresh lobster from the sea, while talking to him about how hard he's been hit by the troubled economy and how, despite being a life-long Republican, he'll be voting for Obama, as he's the only one who seems to know how to handle the crisis.

After drinks on the front terrace,watching the sun go down, we cooked the lobster (they were alive as they went into the pot! Gnarly) and sat with the sea just outside the window, enjoying a nice long supper of chatting, drinking and eating. Max got to hear lots about his grandfather, who died before Max was born. It was particularly nice for Max to also hear about his granny before her husband died, as when Max knew her, she had depression (not that mini-Max was aware of that) and really wasn't herself.

We also talked lots about Jim and Elaine's son Adam, who Max had been pals with when they were little, but who had since developed schizophrenia and saw his life take a very different path from the super-high achieving path it was on. When I first met Elaine, at a wedding shortly after Max and I first got together, I remember her being at her wit's end and in a real state about Adam. But now, he's married, found good medication, has a job and is even working to overturn legislation concerning mental illness in Rhode Island, so they're really happy and relieved.

We had such a nice evening of intimate conversation and delicious food and slept the sleep of the dead in a massive bed, before lurching to the sunny front terrace for some breakfast while basking in the sun and watching the world go by, accompanied at all times by Priscilla - Jim and Elaine's excellent dog. She has the temprement of a cat - really calm and fond of basking in the sun and only occasionally in need of the odd pat, rather than dashing around like a mad thing, as is more typical of dogs.

After lunch, we were going to go to Salem, which is just up the road, but there wasn't time, so we took another turn around Marblehead, hearing all about Jim and Elaine's ridiculous struggles with the local Historic Society, who carefully monitored their renovations and seeing the house where they used to live, which Max visited when he was younger.

(not Jim and Elaine's old house, but another pretty Marblehead home)

By the time we got back to Boston airport, it felt like we'd been away for ages, far longer than a weekend, and the horrible Baltimore/speeding ticket fiascoes were a gleefully distant memory. We got back to DC feeling refreshed and relaxed and longing to go back to Marblehead!