Owning a car in London can be extremely impractical, especially for working professionals with no kids and living in a place with no free on-street or off-street parking. Plus, for those who are under a certain age, even if you did have use for a car, the car insurance would cost over a thousand pounds a year.

I’m a big fan of tamagoyaki, which is a Japanese sweet egg rolled omelette – such a simple ingredient, a chicken egg, turned into something delicate and full of flavour. It was delightful then to find what is arguably the best tamagoyaki in London at the Soho Japan restaurant, although it breaks my heart that it might never be on the menu again.

To mark distinguished physicist and cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday, the Science Museum has opened a new display in his honour. Fittingly situated in the Exploring Space section of the Science Museum’s ground floor, the display looks to celebrate not only Hawking’s birthday, but also ‘his life and achievements’.

I love a good afternoon tea, and when a friend of mine invited me to go try the afternoon tea at the Espelette Restaurant in the 5-star The Connaught Hotel in the middle of Mayfair, I had to say yes.

A couple of years ago, I booked a Top Secret Hotel through Lastminute.com, where you don’t know the actual hotel until you book our stay – but in return you get great hotel rates that you wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else.

The Leggera pizzas at Pizza Express have been a great success since they were introduced, and they’ve just been refreshed with new types! I’ve never had a Leggera pizza before, so I went to a blogger’s night they were holding to launch the new range.

While The London Insider is normally focused on the more social aspects of London, sometimes it’s worth highlighting some of the more serious events that happen here. A talk earlier this week by the Governor of the Bank of Japan, Masaaki Shirakawa, at the London School of Economics was very relevant to one of the most important issues affecting the UK right now – the credit crunch.

After a unseasonably warm December and a so far pretty decent January, any dreams of a snowy or icy winter in London is quickly fading away. However, for two days, the magic of ice sculptures will be at Canary Wharf, at the 3rd annual Ice Sculpting Festival in London.

I finally stopped procrastinating and went for a Secret Cinema event. I know its taken me a while, but when I first heard about it all those months ago, it looked as though it might be one of those fads that stayed for a couple of months, and then moved on.