My family are the greatest. A phone call from my mum and a long MSN chat with my brother, and I’m feeling on top of the world. I guess it’s easy to romanticise Chinese New Year when you’re not around for it and haven’t been for 5 years, and I definitely remember things I disliked about it, but there are many things I miss: the camaraderie, the food, the festive feeling and the red, and sitting round the steamboat on New Year’s Eve with the fishballs and oyster sauce strategically in front of my plate.

London’s big, full-on celebrations in Chinatown and Trafalgar Square aren’t till next week, so it’s all been strangely muted so far. I took myself out for a saunter down Regent Street yesterday. It was decked out for Valentine’s and I spotted a mind-boggling number of people, girls and guys, with bouquets and roses in hand, as well as an inordinate number of shop windows with hearts in them. I grabbed a pre-dinner flat white from Sacred at Kingly Court, one of Time Out London’s top coffee places, and sipped it slowly as I walked. For a non-Monmouth coffee it was pretty impressive. People-watching comes naturally when you’ve nowhere to go; you learn all over again the pleasure of walking for walking’s sake, not as a means to an end but the end itself, doing the whole Victorian flaneur thing as you stroll down the pavement scoping out the buildings and the rush of the crowd around you.

It started pouring down with rain later in the evening, so I retired to Euston where I camped for a good hour or so with a copy of PopCo by Scarlett Thomas. I finished The End of Mr Y late-ish last year and enjoyed it, but I’m liking PopCo even better – it’s really a book of puzzles wrapped in the guise of an smart, sassy, very adult story, and if you, like me, enjoy lateral thinking, games, codes, paradoxes, the Monty Hall Problem, and the occasional mathematical stumper, PopCo is your book. It also contains a recipe for a vegan cake, which I fully intend to try out once I am safely relocated into an oven-friendly household.

Today’s my last day off till June so I am planning to enjoy it to the fullest, which naturally involves gaming (check), Monmouth Coffee (planned for this afternoon) and reading in bed (planned for tonight). In between I’m also hopefully going to settle this question of moving out once and for all, with a second visit to my prospective new house this evening, and perhaps starting to re-pack my things once again. How surreal, all this nomadding about. Hopefully this will be the last move for a long while.