Something in the garden is being killed and eaten in a very noisy manner. That’s one of the downsides of living out here for the week. The upsides, though, are too many to count, but centre primarily on being able to lay out in the sun this afternoon and doze off, and then come inside to sit in the conservatory with coffee and a book.

The garden also looks great at the moment. It’s full of colour. I’ll be quite sad to go home when the week of cat sitting is over, I think.

Other than that, it has been a very messy bank holiday weekend. My nose is about ready to drop off, it has been blown so much, and the cat has been sick so many times I’m starting to think she’s bulimic. On the stairs. On the duvet. Just outside the back door, where I stood in it with bare feet. Ugh.

I would be worried, but all of it seems to have sufficient quantities of freshly harvested vole in it to be obvious that it’s not some kind of illness – just overindulgence in the field at the end of the garden.

I’m hoping the worst of the cold is over now. I’ve been finding it hard getting motivated to do just about anything. All I want to do is flop around or sleep. I slept in the conservatory for half an hour in blazing sunshine, and woke up feeling completely desiccated. As a result, I’ve spent the cloudy moments inside watching old videos I’ve been clearing out from the attic.

Watched two episodes of Talking Telephone Numbers, both with me in, and on both occasions where I had the pony tail for which I should have been shot. Ugh. It looks awful. What was I thinking? Still, I was 21 and a student at the time. It looks particularly crappy with the baseball cap they made me wear with a number 1 on the front so I could be in a game to generate a random number. Fortunately I lost, or else there would have been a hair disaster close up that I’d still be trying to live down to this day.

Watched Captain Correlli’s Mandolin this evening. Utter pants. It was like a load of famous actors putting on stupid voices for a pantomime. Rewatched Mars Attacks last night and found myself constantly worrying about the volume and turning it down, then remembering I’m not in the flat any more and turning it back up.

It was surprisingly amusing after all this time. I never realised it had so many famous people in it. (Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones, Natalie Portman).

Assuming this cold clears up in the next couple of days, I might take advantage of the fact I’m effectively out in the countryside here to go out for a run on the road before work one morning, rather than in the gym. How I’ll manage without a TV to run towards, though, is another matter.

Cat sitting. Traditional for spring. It means I get to move home for a week, where there’s space to sit in the garden, more TV channels that you can watch in a lifetime, and a well stocked kitchen. And a cat, obviously. There’s also a loft full of my old belongings. All the things that won’t fit into my flat.

Actually, a lot of it is rubbish. Probably. Maybe, only it’s difficult to tell. I went up there this afternoon, having already rifled through a cupboard full of old videos and rewatching five episodes of the Mary Whitehouse Experience, and emptied some boxes across the boarding.

So, three undeveloped rolls of film, one still in an old old camera. Two penknives. Some walkie-talkies the size of baguettes and several folders full of old coursework.

That coursework included a batch of photos I’d completely forgotten about. Black and white ten-by-eights taken during rehearsals for Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush for a project about people in their workplaces. The negatives were in another box, slipped inside a folder and ripe for scanning. The results are online here.

Bleurgh; a sore throat. That put paid to swimming this morning, which was particularly annoying as I’ve managed the last four days out of five in a row. Total distance, just under four miles. Not a lot, I know, but we’re getting there.

So, I woke up an hour and a half after the alarm went off, then pootled into the office, somehow still managing to arrive early, which is just as well, as lunch, which I’d been expecting to be a dido do (dip-in dip out do), turned out to be a three hour break in the day.

Very nice nonetheless, as it was at L’Escargot, a war-era eaterie on Greek Street I’ve not been to in ages. The top floor is set out for private dining. The walls are covered in old prints, the roof is a long glass arch. The food is fantastic. I ate truffles for the first time, but can’t see what anyone sees in them.

It was three hours of bizarre conversations, starting out with the guy who said he saves on hiring freelancers by copying content from MacUser (knowing full well who he was talking to), swiftly followed by London’s dullest man, the highlight of whose conversational skills extended to asking if I’d managed to catch much coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show so far.

Apparently the commentary this year is ‘marvellous’.

Hmmm.

A good day, I think. Plenty of PR whoring, though, and an uncomfortably early start. I was in the pool by half six and swam done a mile fifty-somewhat minutes later. It’s a strange time to be there. Full of inconsiderate lumpy women half the time, swimming diagonally, or flailing like spastic starfish so they invariably smack you in the ribs as you cruise past. The rest of the time, it’s pretty much empty.

Oh, and there was an idiot man walking up and down the length of one of the lanes, putting it out of action for everyone else. Why do that when there is a perfectly good treadmill upstairs. Or a cross trainer.

So anyway, it was a good start. I felt springy and bright eyed all morning, and ended up PR lunching across the road. That was a bit of a mistake. What kind of a restaurant doesn’t put chicken on the menu when describing chicken dishes. Roasted red pepper, olives and rocket tagliatellie, it said. What it meant was pepper, oliver, rocket and chicken tagliatellie. I dived in, not having eaten chicken for years and years and thought it was goats cheese or halloumi or something. Ach. It took about three mouthfuls to realise what it was.

I carefully picked at the rest after that, eating around the chickeny bits until it was polite to stop.

Fortunately the food was far more easily identified this evening. A preview evening of a photography exhibition in a poky gallery in Hoxton, which certainly lived up to its bohemian credentials. Not a bad selection, although there was some rubbish mixed in with the decent stuff.

Anyone can take a blurred picture of the back of a woman’s head while she’s using a computer. Or a vault of gold. Or a settee and half an arm chair in a tastelessly decorated front room.

The pictures of Japanese farming communities, Peruvian streets, thunder storms over Sydney and a communist outpost on a mountaintop somewhere several thousand miles east of east London, though, make it all well worth while.

The chicken was clearly labelled chicken. The prawns retained all their prawn-like credentials and the rest looked like what it was: cheese, tomatoes and olives. Precisely what I thought I’d been having for lunch.

Cambridge today. I’m sitting in Nero, drinking coffee, having just spent ten minutes rearranging the magazines in the newsagent next door so MacUser is on the top of three stacks. I’m reading a piece in the Sunday Times that feels remarkably familiar. For a moment I put it down to deja vu, then I realise there’s a far simpler explanation: I wrote it.

Of course, there’s no byline so nobody will know, but it’s a reprint of some freelance writing I did a couple of months ago, changed just enough to not quite match my original words. All above board, of course: it carries a picture of the cover of the magazine from which it’s been repurposed, but a vague surprise nonetheless.

Sitting there reading my own stuff felt a bit vain, so I folded it away and took out a guidebook to Eastern Europe, which is looking increasingly like this year’s summer trip destination. Starting out in Venice, if all goes well, and heading north, hopefully as far as Warsaw, time permitting. My only misgiving (and it is slight) is the state of the eastern European railways. The memory of the whole day spent trying to navigate the Czech network remains fresh (in spite of the fact it’s about five years ago now).

The trick is in finding the fastest routes. Ljubljana to Budapest looks like it should be quite easy, but it seems to be faster if you detour through Vienna, stop there a couple of nights and then carry on. It’s a bit of a zigzag route, but it should eventually end up in Warsaw, which would be a good starting point for the next leg of the trip some time in the future. Slowly, I’m working my way right around the continent. It’s just a shame I don’t have time to do it all in one go.

Other than that, it’s been a fairly relaxed weekend. Ended up double-booked last night, but after not going to one of the two things in favour of a night out with friends, who subsequently had a last minute change of mind, was left with space for a night of pasta and films, as it was too late to return to plan A by then. I think, in all honesty, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to spend some time kicking back and switching off.

Yesterday: much swimming. Today: none.

So last night was the Macworld awards. Time to roll out the ironed shirt and the newly-bought tux, which will pay for itself the next time it’s worn.

Our driver got lost on the way there. I don’t think he’d been north of Westminster before, and ended up driving us back and forth around the leafy suburbs around Abbey Road, reading out the name of every gallery we passed. Eventually, we found where we needed to be, paid him off and tumbled out onto the pavement, where a suit at the gate turned us away as things were running late.

The pub next door was full of similarly attired people, all waiting for things to get underway, so it seems we weren’t the first.

The turnout was pretty good, and once we got into the venue it was difficult to find anyone. In fact, I didn’t see anyone from Epson – who had invited me – until we sat down to eat. The actual prize-giving was done at breakneck speed. The first lot were done before we’d finished the starters, and by the time the next course arrived me were passing Epson’s exceptionally heavy award. After several drinks it was barely liftable, and would be a good candidate for breaking toes if you dropped it.

All things considered, it was a pretty good evening. The music was a bit dodgy (including Five Star, which now seems to have only three members, none of which has aged particularly well) but pretty much everyone was there, so I got to catch up with Rachel, Will and Mark.

I left some time around oneish, I think, with Chris of the Brennan, and we worked our way slowly across London by various modes of transport to his snazzy new flat in Woolwich. Very big, very smart, and with a fab view across the Thames. It took us about two hours to get there, but it was easier than getting home (which at that time of night would have been impossible).

Of course, after that nobody was in much of a state for working today. Lots of people drifting around being very quiet, clutching their foreheads and trying not to move too quickly.

About the most energetic thing we did was build an enormous hamster cage. Don’t ask why – it was for a feature. It could house about 50 of the things and still have room for them to breed. Oh, and of course we checked out the pictures we’d all been taking last night, not all of which were flattering.

Gosh, how grown up. I spent last night, what remained of it after sending the last few pages of the issue off to print, ironing a shirt. Anyone who knows me will know what a big deal this is; I’ve only ironed about three times since I moved out of home six and a bit years ago.

The rest of the time I wear vaguely crumpled t-shirts.

Anyhow, ironing. Two shirts. Almost an hour. They look good, though.

It was in honour of tomorrow night’s Macworld awards, on account of which I ended up buying the remaining parts of the black-tie garb I’d not shelled out for at our awards last year. Being as I don’t even own a suit it all feels very grown up.

It’s a good couple of days for parties, actually. That’s tomorrow; tonight was the launch of Office 2004 at Sanderson, one of the snazziest non-hotel-looking hotels in London. It used to be a wallpaper factory and still looks like it. In fact, doing a quick hunt through this blog on its name I see that last time I went GQ had just declared it the world’s hippest hotel, perhaps on account of the lack of walls between the bed and the toilet up in the rooms.

Fortunately, we all stayed downstairs where there are plenty of walls and the toilets are like a girlie dressing room. And yes, I did go to the gents.

It all finished rather early, unfortunately, but it was good to catch up with names and faces, and have a rather extended chat with someone I’d apparently had an equally extended chat with at our awards. I remember nothing of it, so I guess it was fairly late on.

I wonder what I said…

Looks like I missed the Chingford train by almost 15 hours, then.

It’s funny how different people remember the same event in different ways. We were eating lunch at our desks when Chris of the Phin saw a mouse run across the floor. None of us believed him, of course. Normally they’re just outside the window, scampering around on the pebbles that soak up the rain and looking in at us as we swelter in the dry. After scrabbling around on the floor beneath the art desks, though, we somehow dislodged it from beneath a shoe box and it shot out in my direction.

It’s at this point where recollections of what happened next start to differ. The way I remember it, I flinched slightly, and let out a controlled ‘oh’. Very manly.

Chris of the Brennan, though, swears there was some kind of floppy-wristed pirouette, accompanied by a glass-shattering squeal, at which he laughed very hard as the mouse continued its scamper towards what it thought might be safety.

I think we can safely agree on what the next few seconds brought, though. As Chris of the Brennan admits himself:

There was a mouse in the office today and it attacked me! I have to say I was very controlled and as it came scurrying toward my neck I simply screamed like a girl and jumped into the filing cabinet.

Actually, ‘attacked’ is a bit strong. Ran across the floor three feet from his feet is more accurate, but then perhaps that’s me not remembering things quite right, either.

Fortunately we have a hamster cage in the office, so using all the initiative a dozen management training courses have taught me I threw in some sandwich and propped up one end with a hilighter to trap it, but it took no notice.

Four grown men and a long grippy rod were called for before we finally managed to eject it from the building. Poor scamp.

It’s still cantering back and forth past our windows, happy as Larry, but there was a lot of suspicious rustling going in in the plastic bags beneath my desk tonight.

I’m wondering whether it’s laid some eggs down there or been feeding some babies or something. Springtime must surely be the perfect time for producing mini meeces.

I have a feeling this is going to be a long one, so I may break it up with random pictures of people with cake and explain what it’s all about later, depending on how it goes. We’ll see. Last night, though, was Eurovision, and it was one of the noisiest, campest and most eccentric contests for several years.

As tradition dictates, we all bundled around to Mark’s, bringing with us food to represent the country we’d been allocated. After two months of complaints about the Maltese entry I was perhaps justly been allocated Malta as my food country. Traditionally that means bringing Malteesers (chips for the UK, vegetarian bacon for Denmark, pizza for Lithuania, dips with 1000 island (“Ireland”) dressing for Ireland…) but bucking the trend I opted instead for Malt loaf, which gummed up everyone’s teeth within the first five minutes.

Anyhow, as the rest of the group slowly drifted in we watched the preview DVD of all the qualifying songs (including the distinctly stage-school-like Albanian entry which was clearly filmed in a church hall somewhere) and filled ourselves with sugary sickness.

Mark distributed the score sheets (above) and biros as the contest opened and we did our usual communal marking to decide who we’d be voting for at the end. On the whole we didn’t do that well. Although Mark and I liked Ukraine the best (and Mark won