Yes. The sunset was indeed very nice, as evidenced by the fact that there’s been no Photoshop trickery on that picture.

So, it was the bank holiday weekend, and with a half promise of good weather, we decided to take the tent to Norfolk. It’s over a year since its last outing, so it deserved a chance to stretch its guy ropes somewhere more interesting than the loft or the garden.

Saturday was, undoubtedly, the best day for weather. We cruised north on empty roads in the scorching sun. It blazed all around us, forcing the pigs of East Anglia to seek shelter in deep puddles of mud. The further we got from Chelmsford, the more agricultural the views (and the smells) became, until we plunged into the depths of the 90-square-mile Thetford Forest, our course set for Swaffham.

Interestingly, there’s we passed a place, not so far from Swaffham, called Podmore. Why interesting? Because Podmore was the name of the butler in The Hippopotamus, by Stephen Fry, which was set at Swaffham Hall. I wonder if he had to look far for his inspiration…

We ended up at Holkom. I wanted to see the miles and miles of beach, which were used for the closing shots of Shakespeare in Love, but we diverted to the hall in search of food, and then back to Wells Next The Sea (now a mile from the sea due to silting up) in search of somewhere to stay for the night.

It was about twoish by now, I’d guess, and the place was heaving. Everywhere we looked, every spare spot of bench or wall or quayside was covered in an unfit lump eating chips – a trend that continued for all of our time in Norfolk. Each night we would pass long queues of people outside chip shops, and every morning, in the run up to lunch, it was queues just as long outside the bakeries.

Unfortunately, there was a similar queue at every camp site. I had been worried that we might have left it too late, and my fears were confirmed when we ended up being sent 15 miles or so out of town to a ‘working farm’ with non-working drainage further along the coast at Weybourne.

Now Weybourne isn’t that well known, but its neighbour – Sherringham – can boast the biggest duvet machine in North Norfolk. Now if that’s not enough to keep you awake at night with excitement, I don’t know what is. We did try and glimpse it through the launderette windows, but unfortunately we’d spent too long walking along the pebbly beach, and it was closed.

We consoled ourselves with dinner, then headed back to the farm, now ablaze in the light of several dozen fires set worryingly close to the tents. We played cards and hoped for rain to put out the flames before they consumed us all.

Sunday was grey. They’d predicted as much, but it still cut down our options. We decided to try and see the seals, but their end of the headland was closed until August, and so instead we drove out to Holt, the end of the North Norfolk Railway.

Its fliers say it was voted the best tourist attraction in north Norfolk, much like Sherringham’s duvet machine is the biggest in north Norfolk. In fact, thinking about it, a lot of things were the most ‘xxx’ in north Norfolk. It feels like a very separate part of East Anglia to the rest of Norfolk, and there are pools of Union Jacks here and there, and our ‘working farm’ has a big UK Independence Party board poorly hidden at the back of one of its barns. This is obviously a very proud bit of the country.

So anyway, the railway. There are four stations and plenty of trains and ten and a half miles of track. It takes about twenty minutes to get from one end to the other, and in the great tradition of British railways, it set off five minutes late.

It was a very relaxing way to spend a morning. We trundled through the countryside, the sun peeping through the clouds, on seats far more comfortable than the ones they put in modern trains. It’s pitiful that 50-year old trains can run better and be more comfortable than the ones we have to ride to work each day.

We had lunch at the station in Sherringham (which was starting to become a bit of a regular spot for the weekend), let two trains go and then rode the third back along the line to Holt where the station yard is full of old junk from broken down trains.

We tried Wells again, but it was still too full to sit down, although this time the quayside was full of people catching crabs, their hooks bated with bacon, so spent half an hour driving along to Hunstanton, where we watched the sun go down over The Wash. It was a fantastic colour, starting out yellow and running through every shade of orange and red until it finally sank down into the sea woke up the Japanese.

That made up for the grey day. I think I’d quite happily have cloudy days every day if you could guarantee such a spectacular ending.

There was no such joy today. I was up by six and went for a walk around the farm. That turned out to be a bit of a mistake, as it soaked the only shoes I had with me, and I ended up feeling wet all day.

The weather was foul. It poured down – really poured – so we headed for home and, after a missed turning, didn’t see anything familiar until we got to Thetford, the thick-tongued town that turned out to be closed. Even Boots was shut. No coffee. No sandwiches. We ended up sitting in the car eating Garibaldi biscuits and drinking Dr Pepper.

Hmmm.

Poor Omar. Skipping through Michael Manske’s Slovenian blog, I came across his entry about this year’s Slovenian entry: Stop by Omar Kareem.

I know the odds weren’t that good: one place I saw online just before the contest was giving 50:1, but Michael found odds of 229:1 which, as he points out, means

To put that into perspective: You’ve personally got a better chance of dying via “accidental poisoning” and “exposure to noxious substances” than Omar had of succeeding.

Poor Omar. He was one of my tips for the top.

When it comes to trains we live – very much – in a third world nation.

Chris of the Brennan is soon to be a married man, so the team is heading off to Leeds for the weekend to see it all happen, and so that Aston can wear clown shoes, as he has always promised (I’m hoping he’ll also wear one of those big pairs of trousers with a waistband made out of a hula hoop (of the non-potato, dancing variety)).

So, of course, the simplest thing is to make a block booking.

Well, you’d think.

Jenny of the Phin tried to do just that, but it seems that if you want to do it online you have to commit to buying there and then – before they tell you what it’ll cost – and then cough up whatever they demand, whether it’s a fiver of

Having finished Casino Royale, I decided to carry on with the Bond books for a while and see how they panned out. Having been such a fan of the films for so long, I thought I really ought to see what inspired them.

I’ve read a few before: Diamonds are Forever and You Only Live Twice years ago while I was working at Thorpe Park, but I remember very little of them. So, I’ve been keen to see how close they were to the film versions.

Which brings us to Thunderball.

The basic plot is the same. Spectre has hijacked an RAF jet, murdered the crew and stolen two atomic bombs. They then proceed to hold the world to ransom, demanding £100,000,000 for the safe return of the weapons. The main baddy is called Largo, and his girlfriend is Domino, just like in the film (or films, I should say, as this book was re-filmed in 1983 as Never Say Never Again – a dreadful Bond immitation, with Kim Basinger as a floppy and unconvincing femme fatale). Blofeld is the head of Spectre – again, as he was in the films.

The back of the book, though, would have been more accurate if it had been reviewing Thunderball the film, rather than Thunderball the work of literature. ‘Hair-raising underwater battles,’ it promises, but in actual fact the battles, such as they are, amount to a small one-on-one skirmish beneath Largo’s boat, and then a brief scene at the very end, from which Bond quickly departs, taking the reader with him. All very disappointing.

What you notice about these books when you read them now, though, as they approach their 45th birthday (Thunderball was written in 1961), is how much more leisurely they are than a modern thriller. There are long, weaving tracts in which little happens, and character descriptions can run to a page or more. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not actually bad. In fact, it’s quite good, as it’s so relaxing, but I can’t believe many publishers would take them seriously if they were submitted for publication now.

Perhaps the strength is in the plot, though. It has aged well, and still seems relevant today:

Bond reached in his pocket for another cigarette. It couldn’t be, yet it was so. Just what his Service and all the other intelligence services in the world had been expecting to happen. The anonymous little man in the raincoat with the heavy suitcase – or golf bag, if you like. The left luggage office, the parked car, the clump of bushes in a park in the centre of a big town. And there was no answer to it. In a few years’ time, if the experts were right, there would be even less answer to it. Every tin-pot little nation would be making atomic bombs in their backyards, so to speak… This was the first blackmail case. Unless Spectre was stopped, the word would get round and soon every criminal scientist with a chemical set and some scrap iron would be doing it. If they couldn’t be stopped in time there would be nothing for it but to pay up.

I am 31, yet it took me until this weekend to finally see Return of the Jedi. Admittedly, it would have been even longer had Aston not told me I’d enjoy the ‘furry things’ in it.

Ho-hum.

It’s… hmmm… well, I found half way through that I was just waiting for it to end, really. Fortunately, as the rest of the world already knows, it picks up from about a third of the way from the end, when the battles start to break out, but hold on – isn’t it the same ending as The Phantom Menace?

It may be several years since I saw it, and I was jet-lagged at the time, but all I seem to remember is an annoying floppy character and about three battles raging at once.

And the PR woman beside me snoring.

Swap the floppy for the ewoks and transpose Pantom’s three simultaneous battles for the ones in Jedi, and there you go… identikit film making.

Still, it was fun mindless entertainment. And probably something I should have done years ago.

Perhaps that was the problem…

What a bizarre Eurovision – as much for the fact that it went with the predictions as much as anything else. How (how, how, how) did Greece win? It’s beyond me. Such an average, ordinary song, it didn’t come close to some of the more innovative, interesting entries.

And what happened to the big four? The UK, France, Germany and Span filled the last four slots, yet each of us is guaranteed a place in next year’s contest because we pay so much to fund it. Isn’t it time that came to an end? Shouldn’t we have to qualify like everyone else? None of us produced anything particularly good, yet we forced out four potentially better entries from the semis by having our guaranteed slots.

It’s strange, actually, that our entry and the one from Greece were almost identical, which proves once and for all that it’s more to do with the stage show than the song itself. Greece had elasticated pant strings that the singer played like a violin, after which nobody had a chance.

Of course, it should have gone to Romania or Hungary, each of which was infinitely better than the Greek entry. Romania didn’t do so bad, but Hungary didn’t even score enough to save itself from having to get through next year’s semis again.

The actual scoreboard moved around all over the place, and for a while it looked like next year’s contest might go to Latvia, or even Moldova, which would have been an interesting turn of events.

Ystabub should have been happy, though. He was given Greece as his nominated country, so brought haloumi to the party again – like last year. I had Spain, so did olive tapenade, which was perhaps not such a wise move, as most of the other fell into the ‘hate’ camp when it came to love-them or hate-them olives.

I did text a vote for Hungary. Looks like I was in the minority, though…

It’s always nice to end the week with some happy nuts smiling up from your keyboard.

Disaster. What happened to Omar? He looked very uncomfortable up on stage on his own there, and half the time he seemed to be signalling to someone to turn up the music, as though he couldn’t hear it. All distracted, and looking all over the place, he barely moved an inch until the very end when he ran up to put his arm around the lady opera singer on the podium. He didn’t even qualify for Saturday’s final, so I guess that’s the last we’ll hear of him.

Hungary got through, fortunately, winning the first slot of the night, although Nox wasn’t nearly as good on stage as in the preview tapes. Kind of weak and sharp, but ultimately salvaged by the dancers.

It’s strange how different the songs can be without their videos. I still enjoyed the Icelandic entry, but it wasn’t nearly as good on stage as it had been on the tapes, which is perhaps why it didn’t get through. Neither did a lot of other worthies, like Lithuania or the Netherlands.

Fortunately Ireland is out in the cold, which is precisely where it deserves to be after entering that abysmal piece of rubbish.

So, how did we do with our predictions? Well, we gave Romania top marks, so it was good that they got through, and they are now my joint favourite to win, alongside Hungary. If Nox doesn’t get some singing practice in between now and Saturday night, Romania could well walk off with first place.

We also agreed on Switzerland, which got through, despite the drummer dropping his stick half way through the act and then almost falling right through the drum set as he bent forward to pick it up. Moldova, too, got through, just as we suspected, and very much deserved it for being so different. I can’t see it taking top spot, though.

It’s a shame countries like the UK automatically quality, as it means they don’t need to make an effort. As usual, our entry this year is a load of derivative, unimaginative drivel, yet because of the amount of money we put into the contest we have a guaranteed place. And of course we won’t win. And of course that means the usual quarters will complain that it’s because of the war in Iraq again.

If we actually had to fight for our place, perhaps we’d turn out better songs.

Just a thought.

So today we closed the issue, which is always a nice day. Well, actually, the day is never nice because it’s always horribly busy, but the end of it is good, when it’s all behind you and you know that tomorrow you start on a new one.

This one, though, has left me feeling utterly shattered, so I don’t know why I’m still up now, when it’s closer to midnight than it is to 11. I don’t think last night’s late night out helped. I crept in at midnight-o-something and managed to crash the door into the wall, probably waking up the whole road and rather negating all my efforts to tip-toe through the house.

We’d been out to celebrate K’s birthday: K, Ems and me, as Ems and I can’t make the official party tomorrow night. We had the most expensive drinks in London at the Long Bar in Sanderson. £2 change from £40 for just three, but they were so yummy. Lemonberry somethingorother, I had. It was like a warm sorbet with a kumquat on the side. Ems had something pink with olives, and K sipped down a tiramisu cocktail that was like a pot of double cream with coffee beans on top.

I had thought they might not let me in with my t-shirt and combats, which were dripping with tea from where I’d managed to pour a whole mug over them in the kitchen half an hour before.

The Sanderson is a very special place. It used to be a wallpaper factory, and still looks like a boring, anonymous office block from the outside. Inside, though, it’s beautifully decorated: all shiny and reflective, and they say (although I have no proof) that there are no walls around the toilets in each room: just a lacy curtain. If you weren’t pee-shy already, that would be enough to dry you up for a week.

Bizarrely, though, I can’t find its web site – only links to reviews or booking agents. Could it be that it needs the publicity so little that it can actually do without one?