What I did | My 26th birthday

If you read last Wednesday’s post, you’ll know I celebrated my birthday the week before in London with my best friend Laura. We began the day at Balthazar in Covent Garden. Although a typically French brasserie, we enjoyed a glass of prosecco and traditional cream tea. There’s a boulangerie next door to the restaurant, so the scones were incredible: so fresh, not dense and probably the nicest I’ve ever had. We even got fresh berries with the cream and strawberry jam. It was a really nice start to the celebrations – especially as I hadn’t eaten all morning.

We head straight to the hotel near Aldgate to get ready and luckily we had plenty of time. The prosecco was flowing again and we sang along to the Spice Girls, amongst other old hits. My dress was a gorgeous berry pink number from Little Mistress. I’d had my heart set on the most beautiful mesh and bandage black dress by House of CB, but it was sold out by the time my measurements were confirmed. I was happy with my back-up choice though. I even had time to curl my hair, too.

Dinner was booked at The Darwin Brasserie at the Sky Garden – which was amazing! The views were absolutely incredible, although it was a shame we couldn’t go out onto the observation platform, due to the weather. I thoroughly enjoyed the food and wine, even if too much of both were consumed. There’s just a really nice relaxing atmosphere about the place and I’m so glad I got to finally tick it off my restaurant wish list. You can read more here.

After dinner, we went straight to Dirty Martini for – you guessed it – martinis! We went to the Bishopsgate bar, where I had my favourites: porn star and espresso. Jumping into an Uber, we made our way across the city to House of Ho, for some Asian-inspired cocktails. The place was completely surreal; it was like the living room of someone’s house with sofas and a fireplace. The night concluded at Ruby Blue, although I remember very little. A quick check of my receipts the following day showed that I had bought the first round, including a giant porn star martini!

The following weekend (Saturday 16^th) was my actual birthday and it was a lot more civilised/chilled out, with plenty of family time. The Saturday night we just had takeaway sushi, prosecco and ended up watching Match of the Day. On Sunday, my dad had booked a family lunch at one of my favourite places in Essex: The Bell at Horndon on the Hill. It’s somewhere we’ve frequented a lot over the years and it’s not really changed much. I’ll be blogging about that later in the week, but I had the loveliest roast. My dress for that occasion was a black beauty from River Island and it received plenty of compliments on Insta, which was nice. Of course, no birthday is complete without tea and cake – and we had that to look forward to at home afterwards.

Love, Lucy xx