Well Brussels was v much fun. And I even had Brussels Sprouts, which was appropriate. They arrived disguised as an ingredient in a middle-eastern wheat and lentil dish, so I’m not entirely sure they were authentic, although they were indeed yummy. It’s far too long since I last had them.

But it was also cold. On Friday night, our first night there, it snowed harder than I have seen it in many years. It was coming down thick and fast, and being blown sideways by the fierce wind that was cutting up the wide street on which we eventually found our hotel. We had been told it was about two steps from the Grand Place, but it was more accurately two stops on the metro.

We ate far too much of the typical Brussels diet (read: fatty and very sweet), one night sharing our table with a tiny little mouse who scurried around by our feet, looking up at the table as though begging for food. We should have pointed him out to the waiter, but the last time we did that was in Vienna and now, no doubt, we have the little rodents’ death on our hands.

So, it’s still there, in one of the little eateries on a corner in the Rue des Boucheries, where we shouldn’t have eaten on account of it being a shameless tourist trap, but ended up anyway because it was recommended.

We spent Sunday in Bruges, where the town was welcoming in Fr Christmas. He arrived on a boat, ploughing slowly up one of the canals with a TV camera crew in hot pursuit as he threw sweets to the kids on the canalside. In the big central square they had erected a skating rink that was rapidly starting to thaw, with the skaters finding themselves transitioning from hard ice to wet slush almost as quickly as they simultaneously transitioned from upright gliding to horizontal face scraping, much to the delight of the sadistic onlookers.

The Eurostar, as always, was fabulous, and the people, on the whole, friendly, although the drivers could do with watching out for the crossings now and then. Particularly when there are people on them.

It’s much too long since I was last there. I hope it won’t be so long again before I’m back.

Of all the nights I could have done with a good journey home, this was the one. I have to be up at 4am tomorrow to catch the Eurostar to Brussels, so arriving at Liverpool Street this evening to find a red strip of delayed signs across the departures board, and not a single train allocated a platform wasn’t really what I was after.

I walked around in the cold for a while, and then sat in McDonalds drinking coffee for an hour until two screaming kids came in with their poor harassed mother and forced me out.

In the end I managed to get on a Southend train, and jumped off at Shenfield where Paul waited to pick me up and drive me the rest of the way home.

It’s strange, but you can tell when you’re not on your own home line. Somehow the people are different. Maybe it’s because, in years of travelling down the same stretch of track day after day (21 years with a year’s break for me now), you get to recognise some of the faces. Even if you don’t know them you could probably nod a hello in their direction if we didn’t all suffer from a cripling British reserve that forbids us to even make eye contact.

It’s silly. I know the man who sits with the PowerBook on his lap doing technical drawings. I know the man with the mad hair who looks like Einstein. I know the man with the bulging head who seems to be reading a new book every day.

Except of course I only know them by sight. None of us would ever speak. Tutting and raising our eyebrows in mutual frustration when the driver announced another delay would be about as far as any of us would ever dare go.

I wonder how they got home tonight.

Without me.

Just how desperate are the mobile networks to keep you on their books?

I rang up to cancel my phone on Friday. ‘Oh, no, don’t do that,’ they said. ‘Let us put you on a lovely new tariff. How does

I met Will for lunch at the cafe in Russell Square. It came highly recommended and lived up to expectations. Walking back to the office, I passed a squirrel sitting upright in one of the flower beds that line the edge of the square. It had its little fists balled up and it stared at me. I stared back. We stood there for about five minutes watching each other, neither one of us moving.

And then he got down on all fours and walked over to me. He came right up to my foot and looked up. It looked like he was asking for something to eat.

I almost bent down to touch him, but then an image of him running up inside my trouser leg slipped into my mind and I jumped back. He jumped back, too, and scuttled off back to the bed to stand upright again and watch as I walked away.

He must have been getting hungry in the cold. Probably couldn’t get his nuts out of the ground.

Winter is starting to bite. We drove over to Galleywood for dinner last night, and it was already minus numbers before we set off. By the time we left, full of good stilton and baked potatoes the roads were covered in a dusty silver grit that sparkled in the car headlamps and made the tyres fight for a grip.

Today was much the same. Clear blue skies slashed by sharp white contrails, a brilliant sun that got redder and redder as it closed in on the horizon, and shadows so long that much of the longest grass was never exposed all day. We went out walking down by the river, across the millpond and up the other side towards the Braintree road, passing by all the now frozen carcasses of the unpicked blackberries, and the verges were crispy with white frosting.

Two ducks and seven rabbits was all we saw in the way of wildlife. Even the birds were keeping hidden from the cold. The rabbits scampered around, barely touching the frozen ground as they shot from burrow to verge and back again. Can’t say I blame them. I’d hate to live outside at this time of year.

We picked rose hips, which I’ve put into an empty vase to dry so we can make tea by Christmas.

They say weather is a British obsession, and certainly it’s become that at home since we installed a weather station at the end of the garden. Now we have up to the minute read-outs on the wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, height of the clouds, dew point, wind chill and all manner of other facts you can’t live modern life without having to hand.

And it’s all published online.

More impressive than our own weather pages, though, is the implementation through Weather Underground. This is a global weather reporting network, with far more sensors than the ‘professional’ networks. Our station is the only one reporting for Chelmsford and, as Chris of the Brennan pointed out, it’s now overlaying its databases with the Google Maps service to provide aerial views of the locations of each one. You can even click on Chelmsford and see what’s happening in our garden.

The full Weather Underground details for our station and all of its historical records are here.

It was -0.3 degrees Celcius at 05h11 this morning.

You couldn’t hope for a better cast than we find in The Wrong Arm of the Law: Peter Sellers, John Le Messurier, Bernard Cribbins, Nanette Newman… It’s a snapshot of British cinema, 1962.

The premise is simple, yet clever. Three conmen, newly arrived from Australia, are moving in on the territory of London’s two biggest gangs; one headed up by Sellers, the other by Cribbins, who is in his element, and surprisingly versatile, as an Irish crime boss. When either gang does a job the trio is there, posing as policemen, confiscating the loot and making off.

Now the gangs are the victims, and a meeting is convened. The city’s pick-pockets, forgers and petty thieves gather to vote on the best course of action and settle on a coalition with the police, working together to catch the despicable characters stealing their ill-gotten gains.

But of course it goes awry. The police put too much faith in the gangs; they second one of their staff to them, they set up a sting, and they collude in staging a robbery in the hope of setting a thief to catch a thief.

And yet the most criminal aspect of this film is the underuse of its leads. Sellers switches effortlessly between cockney crime lord and his wannabe French fashion designer cover throughout the film, adopting a far better accent than we ever heard from Cluesoe’s lips, and yet despite his pivotal role, his impact is small. Perhaps it’s that we now expect too much of him, in the light of later, more memorable performances.

Le Messurier doesn’t appear until the latter half, and then more or less plays Wilson, straight out of from Dad’s Army. Cribbins takes second billing to Sellers, despite the fact we’d like to see more of this role wears like a second skin. Newman is the female interest, without whom the film would have no story, yet her role is used for nothing more than pushing the plot along.

Of most interest, then, is the cityscape, in this film set largely out of doors. We see the Battersea Park Carnival (with Michael Caine apparently in the background as an extra), cutting-edge cars with 1962 tax discs, ‘hip’ London streets dark but for the glow of white-on-black neon, planes we’d dread using today because they boast neither the comfort nor the safety of a modern jet.

It is a simple story, at heart, competently told at a steady pace, but over the intervening 40 years it had become little more than a historical curiosity, showing modern day viewers what Britain was once like, how some of our best-known stars spent the early monochrome years of their careers, and how gentle and inoffensive comedy used to be.

Hmmm… Monday already. somewhere back there there was a weekend. Let’s think… Saturday morning, I worked, which was OK because it was interesting stuff and I had a good reason to stop at lunchtime: Phil was coming over.

We’ve not seen each other for… two years, I’d guess. At least. But we’ve always left long gaps between meeting and been able to pick it up again like we’d seen each other the week before. So of course he’d not been to the house before, despite the fact we’ve been here over a year already.

We ate lots of cake and drank lots of tea and went out for a walk in the cold down to the mill to watch the water racing under the bridge and into the mill pond, which looked on the verge of bursting its banks. It really felt wintery. The sky was blue and bright, but the air had a bite that has done nothing bit get more fierce every day since. This morning the weather station was showing -0.4C as we left the house, but it was -2C before we woke up.

Saturday night we motored over to Graham and Roger for dinner with Trevor and Jon. Roger had promised we’d be eating cuckoos, but it turned out he meant couscous. Somewhat relieved, we ate more cuckoos than we knew where to put then slumped in the lounge until all the taxi firms started to shut up shop and forced us to spend an hour longer than intended fighting off sleep in comfy chairs.

Sunday, we made best use of the blue skies and drove to Suffolk. We never make good use of Suffolk. It’s so close and so pretty (and so very very flat) yet we get there perhaps twice a year, and always end up in Snape.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s homely and fresh and riddled with crafty shops.

We came home with new oven gloves.

In terracotta orange.

Rosie ably demonstrated last night what I would look like if I had more hair.

I think the slightly thinning naturat state is more suited.We were at the Porterhouse Bar in Covent Garden for Luke’s birthday and Rory’s leaving do. Rory was the last person I interviewed when I was at PCW and he’s already done two years there. I don’t know where the time has gone.

It’s surprising how many of us are still in the same jobs now as we were back then. There has been very little movement on any of the magazines, and whenever we go out – for fun or on a press do – you can be sure it’s the same group of people every time, which is nice.

I don’t think many of us had been to the Porterhouse before, as it’s down in Covent Garden, and we spend more time in Soho, but it’s a big place with about four levels underground, with us at the very bottom, by the loos and the bizarrely-named bottles of beer.

As usual, there was a proliferation of cameras, and the night seemed to be lived through a lens. My poor little Ixus put in a sterling service, despite the fact it’s been dropped, dented and bashed around at pretty much every one of these dos for the last two years.

Sitting in the conservatory having breakfast this morning, I looked out down the garden and watched a squirrel on one of the bird feeders.

An hour later it was still there, so I went upstairs to get my camera, and leant out the window to take a picture. Except from up there, and through a decent lens, it looked nothing like a squirrel.

Not quite sure what it was, I went out into the garden to investigate and found not a furry rodent, but a terrified bird, wedged inside the food cage.

Poor thing was still very much alive, but with its legs pinned to its sides and its head stuck through the bars it could barely move. As I unhooked it from the end of the pergola and laid it does on the grass it did its best to flap its wings, but all they did was make a silly rattling noise against the bars.

Wearing garden gloves, then, Paul held it still and covered its face so it couldn’t see what we were up to while I went to the shed and collected the secateurs so I could cut it loose. It was so tightly wedged I was worried I might end up cutting its legs or skin, and every time I snipped through the wire it snapped with a loud crack that, for the bird, must have been close to deafening.

About ten minutes after we’d first lifted it down, though, we were able to peel back the cage and step back. It flapped its wings, perhaps for the first time since dawn, stood up and shook, and then launched itself off across the lawn.

It chirped as it flew.

It sounded for all the world like it was actually saying ‘thank you very much’.

And then it was gone.