Today me a Jessica have been going out for 15 months! We celebrated yesterday as today is Matt’s birthday and we returned to Croydon to make him a cake. Cake making is now complete, and its huge! I will add pictures of the cake to the 15 months section of the photo gallery.

Yesterday we went to Syon park which is close to Jessica’s house. It is a really nice place, there is an old house, conservatory, garden centre, butterfly house and a tropical house. We visited the last two. The butterfly house was fun but also a bit unnerving as the butterflies had a tendency to land on my head. Jessica managed to shelve the memory of her mum crushing a large butterfly in the same butterfly house and I think she enjoyed herself. There were also some leaf-cutter ants parading along a rope and a separate section with some exotic birds. One bird looked like a robin but was the size of a blackbird – I tried to capture this mutant robin on my camera but the picture does not portray the scale.

The tropical house had a lot of terrapins along with a big crocodile and a caiman. Outside there were some parrots, one of which was allowed to fly free… thankfully it seemed to enjoy its perch and there were no parrot related incidents. We were just in time for an “encounter” session which let you get up close with some of the animals. The first one was a red tarantula from the desert but thankfully it is an itchy beast and we could not touch it. All the other animals could be petted to a degree so we saw (and felt) a Thai water dragon, a small caiman and a corn snake. The snake was a constrictor which I bravely wore around my neck – Jessica declined.

For our evening meal we finally got round to visiting “Fat Boy’s” in Richmond. This is a Thai restaurant and the food is very nice… I prefer Anna’s in Croydon purely because they serve my favourite dish (Sweet battered chicken in a Kikkoman sauce) MMmmmmm! The waitress seemed alarmed when we ordered a whole bottle of wine to share – it was a Thai wine called “Monsoon valley” – will have to look for it in the supermarket.

Hopefully the cake will go down well later.