Friday Night Dinner: The Surprise
We were determined not to do a "Valentine's Meal", you know, the ones that are cringe, start with a welcome glass of cheap fizz, have a special overpriced set menu, and are just a bit cheesy all round. Instead of that, my wife had booked a table at The Surprise, a gastropub in Chelsea that decidedly did not have a Valentine's Day Menu.
We were set in a small back room, and getting there meant wrestling through a throng of people hanging out at the busy bar.
As our starter, we shared chicken and blue cheese croquets, which came with a delicious thyme mayonnaise. We ordered a bottle of Riesling, partly because my wife didn't want to pronounce Gruner Veltliner to the waiter. It was nice and crisp, and we enjoyed it while waiting for our mains to arrive.
I chose the pan-fried cod. Unfortunately they no longer had that, but after going back-and-forth with the kitchen, it turned out they could do the same dish with monk fish, which I indeed had. It came served with mussels and prawns, some smoked tomatoes and risotto. The ingredients worked well together.
My wife picked the butternut squash gnocchi, which was a little crunchy on the outside offering a nice texture, and was served with kale and pine nuts. It also was a dish that was well put together.
We were still a little peckish, and henceforth decided we wanted some pudding. Our wine had run out though, so with our desserts — the affogato for her, an orange cake with chocolate sorbet for me — we also enjoyed a glass of dessert wine: A sauternes to go with the affogato, and for me a tokaji to go with the cake and sorbet.
The food was excellent, although the service was a little slow. The staff did apologise for this, while commenting that this was due to it being Valentine's Day. It's a great vibrant place for a meal, so we'd go again.
Life Line
TIL that Kingfishers can hover just like hummingbird. I'll hopefully have some reasonable shots after I've gone through my nearly thousand shots today...
I hiked 9.8km in 3h40m47s
Updated a restaurant
Updated a vacant business
I walked 7.1km in 1h16m56s
I walked 3.9km in 45m56s
I walked 1.1km in 10m47s
I think this was my favourite photo of the set that I took. It's not at maximum coverage, but it does have a sun spot group (4508) just on the cusp of the terminator.
#eclipse #eclipse2026 #SolarEclipse #London #Astronomy #AstroPhotography #Photography
No totality here in London, but still had a great evening out in the local park and taking some snaps.
I did have a nice Solar Filter that I made for my lens, and had many conversations with people from different backgrounds. Kids loves to look through my filter after I was done (ran out of battery power).
More photos later...
#london #eclipse2026 #eclipse #photography
I walked 0.9km in 9m28s
I walked 1.2km in 19m05s
Merged pull request #1100
Fixed issue #2267: Application slow when debugger is not listening on…
I walked 4.7km in 48m18s
I walked 3.0km in 1h10m24s
Is there somebody who runs PHP on native windows (with Xdebug) and can run a simple script for me?
It must be in a file (`test.php`):
```
<?php
echo microtime(true), "\n";
xdebug_connect_to_client();
echo microtime(true), "\n";
```And run like:
php -dxdebug.log_level=11 -dxdebug.log=c:\temp\xdebug-i.log -dxdebug.client_host=localhost -dxdebug.client_port=9111 -dxdebug.mode=debug c:\temp\test.php
With the port 9111 not open.
Would love to see the output and log file (in a DM).
I walked 5.5km in 55m06s
@harry_wood This is this list of 100 Go-mistakes that I was talking about: https://100go.co/
Updated a crossing
I walked 2.1km in 20m08s
Enjoying my afternoon and evening out at Lords for some cricket!
I walked 3.2km in 38m54s
I walked 9.1km in 1h34m28s
Updated a gate
Updated a bakery shop
Shortlink
This article has a short URL available: https://drck.me/surprise-jd3