Cherry, cherry...she got the way to move me, yeh

Never mind that on Good Friday when we were in town, it rained, sleeted, and hailed in between sunbursts - at Minamoto Kitchoan, my favourite gourmet Japanese sweetshop, it was spring, and that means seasonal cherry sweets.

As gorgeous as the jellied ones were, I thought they'd be a letdown - cherries in gelatine? enh. - so I chose some other cherry-flavoured confection, only to be told I was pointing at an expertly modelled display fake, and the guy who had swaggered up in front of me had bought the last two. Hmph. So I nosed around a little more...oh, no, don't make me browse the artisanal imported sweets, anything but that...

...and I finally settled on the Hakuun-no-Hotori: milky flavored white bean paste wrapped in Japanese cake. Somehow I exercised the self-control to keep them til Easter Sunday for us to have with tea while watching The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency debut on telly.

They were luxurious and vanilla-sweet, executing a soft, smooth crumble on the tongue. Not a dipping kind of sweet, but excellent with tea. I would have liked another, but they were pricey.

Also caught up with lechatlunatique for mezze and craft- and girltalk that day, and she later led me to Lovejoys, a gem of a bookstore that sells bargain editions of literary classics, cookbooks, obscure old flms on dvd, and other assorted goodies. Thing is, it has a dirty bottom (porn in the basement), which accounts for the name, I s'pose. I could not resist The Golden Bough (abridged) for £3. How could anyone?

I reunited with Dan for the Minamoto expedition, then we headed to the Mayfair Curzon to see Love in the Time of Cholera. Nope, not linking to it, because it was bloody awful! It's my favourite Gabriel Garcia-Marquez novel, and I didn't even recognise the story on the screen.

I knew we were in trouble from the first word, as it was in English. And sure enough, it's an American production. Doomed from the get-go, with vertiginous plot-hopping and total lack of grace. Except...well, maybe except....Javier Bardem as Florentino was outstanding. But one well-cast actor does not a good film make. Not even a passable one.