Carnaval del Pueblo is a huge Latin American festival held in Burgess Park, south London and was indeed huge with 3 large sound stages, endless, endless food stalls, over 100,000 people dancing and picnicing and stalls selling all things Latin American and of course face painting! The festival is in its 10th year and is great fun – I even got to park nearby which was amazingly lucky. I should of course have cycled as London’s new cycle scheme started this weekend. We have new shining bike stands everywhere and once you’ve registered you can use a bike for your journey, taking it from one bike stand and returning it to another. I’ll have a go v soon but in the meantime loved this photo of the bikes all parked and ready to go the night before it all started.

The very friendly people at Fire and Stone pizzas kindly invited me to their pre-opening session for London bloggers at the new Shoreditch branch. They gave us a demo of how they make their pizzas and bases and enthused about their emphasis on fresh ingredients from good suppliers. The kitchen had been fired up with it’s pizza oven and pizza kept appearing so we tasted a slice – well several actually, then we were given the chance to make a pizza ourselves! Not as foolish as it sounds as we chose a one off their menu and assembled the ingredients on the base with the help of one of the chefs, so no too much room for making a mess of it. There was a competition for the one that looked most like it should have and somehow I won so here is a photo of me with my fabulous ‘Marrakech’ (all their pizzas are named after towns and use typical ingredients from that place). The bases are different from normal dough as they have to carry quite a weight of toppings and are very tasty I must say. A fun morning and felt immensely full afterwards as we also had to taste the puddings – ‘had to’, yes, would have been rude not too so for those who like to drool over food photos, here’s a pudding one – yummy brownie. Got a doggey bag – had to eat it – still feeling full – all my own fault…..

We’ve all moved on from the World Cup (as quickly as possible!) and it’s pre-season friendly time so I went to see Spurs play Villa Real courtesy of some complementary tickets which was just as well because a 4-1 loss didn’t feel very friendly. Spurs’s ground is not the best looking or easy to get to and there is talk of them trying to take on the Olympic stadium after 2012 which would be good except that the team is Tottenham Hotspurs not Straford Spurs! One photo of Spurs almost scoring a 2nd goal….

Kings Place is a new-ish arts venue near Kings Cross and was the venue for pre-Edinburgh comedy at the weekend – the wonderful Chris Addison from The Thick of It. He did a great set and is up there with my other favourites now. I’m off to the Edinburgh Fringe in a couple of weeks so I’m looking forward to getting a few new comedy names on that list. Kings Place has a canal side setting with bar and restaurant and hosts a great range of events and exhibitions throughout the year. It’s easy to get to except at the moment when the tube lines I use seem to be closed for renovation just when I want to use them – thank goodness for buses.

Restaurants this week included Camino near Kings Place – really good tapas and the bar was absolutely rammed with people who’d clearly been there for some time but no trouble at all.