Fantasy £200

With less than five weeks before Christmas, we decided to begin to get into the festive mood by visiting the London Finnish Church's Christmas fair this afternoon. We browsed through the clothing, housewares, crafts, and packaged food

before choosing some treats from the substantial array of hot and cold, sweet and savoury treats on offer. The left pastry is a Christmas bun, made from filo pastry with a great plum centre, and the goodie on the right is a Karelian pie, which the woman working at the cafeteria (rightly) convinced me was a must-try of Finnish treats:

A rye crust with a rice cake embedded in the bottom of the pie, after proper coaching, I applied the egg and butter topping to the base and Bob and I shared its savoury goodness. Although we don't regret not trying to fit more into our Scandinavian itinerary this summer, we do still want to visit Finland one day, and tonight's browse through Finnish goods (both edible and non-) didn't hurt that desire at all! After our snack, we made our way across town to the Royal College of Art for its RCA Secret 2007 show, where 2,300 postcard-sized original works of art are available for sale, all at £40 each. So, why the excitement? Well, until Saturday's sale, the postcards are being displayed at the RCA without the artists' names (signatures are all on the backs of the cards), and the range of artists includes recent RCA graduates as well as professional (and in some cases, downright famous) artists. It's only after you buy the work that you can see whose art you've bought. The sale bit of the show is apparently a bit nuts and when we left the gallery tonight, we noticed four tents already queued outside the front door in preparation for Saturday's sale. To keep things slightly fair, you can only buy postcards in person, on Saturday, and each person can only buy four cards. A full list of artists is on display at the gallery so die-hard art freaks can try to guess which work belongs to which artist. To give you an idea of the type of value up for grabs, cards bought at earlier RCA Secrets done by Damien Hurst and Peter Doig sold later at auction for £15,600 and £42,000, respectively--that's a pretty good investment! The crowd around the list of names was too big when we arrived, so we just wandered through the cards, noting ones we liked, and looked at the artists' names on our way out. While we were just looking for fun, there were many people for whom this appeared to be serious business, and let's just say that people were shielding their notepad picks with just the slightest bit of fierceness! Some of my favourites included: 362, 377, 837, 931, 974, 1054, 1062, 1465, 1523, and 1858. If I had £120 to spare, I'd buy 837, 1062, and 1465 from my list. Bob's favourites included: 63, 796, 1029, 1150, 1216 (which I loved after Bob pointed it out, but somehow I didn't notice it on my own, so I can't claim it as one of my favourites, even though it is!), 1227, 1439, 1488, 1740, and 2075. I don't know which ones he holds as favourites from that list, but if I added another £80 to my hypothetical £120, I'd buy 1216 and 1488 from his list too. I guess we'll have to wait until Saturday to find out whose art we liked!