It’s always fun writing something new, and although I’ve done the Guardian before, I’ve not done its columns and opinions site, Comment is Free.

Until today.

So, it was a nice end to the week seeing Tim Danton vs Nik Rawlinson up there just before I headed for home. To see what we were arguing about, click here.

It quickly garnered a fair few comments from readers, including this less than complimentary offering from CupofTea:

I can just picture these two uber-geeks having their little PC’s vs Mac’s argument. Can’t you? Two middle-aged men who are still living with their parents staring each other down across a table adorned with a cardboard castle, a painted moat, thousands of hand painted orcs and a big bag of donuts. Hair lank and unwashed with generous bellies shoe-horned into Red Dwarf or Buffy the Vampire Slayer t-shirts. A copy of that new Tolkein book next to each bed. Eyes bleeding after 16 straight hours of World of Warcraft. Knobs blistered from eight years worth of masturbating over Photoshopped images of Trinity from the Matrix trilogy.

So, yesterday no beans. Today… six beans, the tallest a good 10cm out of the pot. Wonder plants.

Apart from that early update, when the first shoot of the leaf salad popped up above the compost, I’ve barely written a thing about the garden since planting began.

It’s going great guns.

The tomatoes are poking through now, although they took longer than I thought they might. Two or three weeks for the first shoots to appear, and another week or so for them to get to a centimetre high. They’re quite weedy compared to the tomato plants on sale in B&Q, and still far too small to handle yet. The chives are doing well, and the onions are quite long and stringy, although what’s going on under the surface, I’m not entirely sure.

Beyond the chives, I’ve planted another four herbs: basil, coriander, lavender and mint. Admittedly lavender is more of a flower than a herb, but you can bake with it, although the last time I did that the consensus was – in the office at least – that the results tasted of old ladies’ talc.

Beans. No sign yet. I planted French and Runner a couple of weeks back, but they’ve not yet put anything up through the soil, so I don’t know what’s going on there.

Rich and I planted sunflowers, mushrooms and strawberries on Sunday morning, and already – after just two days in their pots – the strawberries are starting to flower. They’re also about half as big again as they were when we put them in, and one has a white bloom on it, an inch across, from which I presume it will eventually give fruit. That’ll be weeks away yet, but it still looks promising.

And that brings me to the last crop of the year so far: potatoes. I’m growing them in a large black dustbin, as an experiment, as the garden is still in no fit state for planting out. You can apparently get 50 or 60 potatoes from just five tubers growing them like that, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for home-grown Charlottes, which I’ll eat with the mint, assuming it grows.

Here and there, the rest of the garden is starting to spring some surprises. Flowers that went unnoticed in the overgrown beds are now coming into bloom, and I’m starting to notice quite how extensive the bramble is along one of my borders. I’d like to find some way to keep it so I can make blackberry jam in the autumn, but it does tend to spread quite a bit, so it’ll have to be trimmed if nothing else.

I find it all very relaxing, and the experimentation is quite exciting.

For April, the weather is unseasonably warm. The weekend has been wall-to-wall sunshine, and hot with it. The trees are heavy with blossom, the skies an electric blue, and it feels for all the world like summer is here already.

So, deciding to take advantage of it while it lasts, we spent Sunday zizzing back and forth along the coast between Orford and Sizewell, and walking through the gauze heaths to Thorpeness.

I first went to Orford and Sizewell about this time last year. Orford – and more specifically the Ness – was the site of Britain’s earliest experiments into nuclear armaments, and many of the original test buildings (and some unexploded ordinance) remain in situ. Sizewell is the site of a large nuclear power station, no doubt built near the sea to provide a quick and simple means of cooling (and so it could breed double-headed fish for the lucrative Billy Bass market).

Unfortunately the Ness isn’t yet open for public visits this year, so we could only walk around the village this time around, and stopped in at the smoke house where you can take your own meat and fish and have it hung and smoked to your own particular tastes. The smoked stilton was very tempting, but I didn’t think it would stand up well to a day in a hot car, and so we left it where it was, took pictures of the fish smoking away in the open air, and took the car up to Sizewell.

The stretch of beach that passes by the power station there is pebbly, and although not the country’s best it is clean and doesn’t shelve too steeply. Behind the pebbles and the thin strips of sand are wide stretches of gauze-covered heath, which at this time of year are full of yellow bright flowers that have a delicate smell of coconut.

From there you can walk for a leisurely hour or two along the coast to Thorpeness, the bizarre little town with a massive man-made lake which is never any deeper than 3ft, the House in the Clouds, which towers above the trees on a tall wooden foundation, and a life-size concrete crocodile waiting to snap from the trees.

So we headed that way, passing some fearsome pigs fighting each other in great clouds of dust, lambs plucking leaves from the gauze bushes, the decaying shells of wartime defences and more rabbits than we could ever possibly count.

But the most interesting find of the day was a seal washed up on the beach.

A single droopy eye aside, it looked to be in perfect condition. Dead, of course, and starting to smell if you got downwind of its tail, but perfectly preserved.

It was massive – eight feet in length – and the shape of a hairy, furry slug laid out on the pebbly sand. I never realised what luxurious coats seals had until then, and although neither of us touched it I’d imagine it to feel like a short-haired retriever if you ran your fingers through its coat.

We sat by it for a while and watched a small dog timidly creep up and sniff the tail. As soon as it caught the smell coming off the slowly decaying body its courage returned. Recognising that there was no danger from this lifeless form, it stood up proud and gave a loud, single, decisive bark, then scampered off along the shoreline.

We took that as our cue to leave, and headed off in the same direction, leaving the dead seal’s fate in the hands of the next high tide.

OK, so it’s small, but this is the first of two shoots already popping up in the greenhouse. I didn’t expect to see anything so soon (we only planted them on Sunday) but as I briefly dropped in last night to squit them with water, there they were, poking their heads up through the soil.

It’ll be leaf salad when it’s fully grown.

We went to see William today. My first nephew. And, if Sal’s threat that the next one will be adopted is more than idle banter, perhaps my last, too.

He was tiny. Really, really tiny. And much smaller than I ever imagined. We’re talking the size of a small hand towel bundled up inside a shawl with little pink ears still squashed up, and far deeper breathing than I ever imagined babies could have.

I’ve never been a one for babies or children, but I guess it’s a bit different if they’re part of the family, as I did find him incredibly sweet, and enjoyed sitting with him in my arms, which I never thought I’d have said. In fact, Sal swears that I said something along the lines of babies being better than pets, which is most out of character, and Rich said he ‘saw me melt for a minute’.

He had a little pointy nose and tiny mittened gloves, and soft yellow sideburns and, despite doing a little baby fart while dozing in my arms, was the most perfectly behaved new born nipper I’ve ever seen. Also the youngest, at less than three days old.

There was something quite magical about holding someone so young and new, and I only really realised quite how young we’re talking when it struck me that by the time he’s my age, I’ll be past the age of retirement.

Rich finds the switch that turns on Lucy’s mouth

The crashed van has now been moved into the street, and the electricity is back on. I know that because all the lights came on in the middle of the night and woke me up.

Anyhow, even before I’d exchanged on the house I knew I wanted to grow my own fruit and veg. There’s a greenhouse, and a handy corner of the garden that’s just right for cultivating your own food; neither too hot nor too dry, and with a fairly even spread of sun and shade throughout the day. Except this year – my first – it’s too much of a mess to use productively, so I’m resigned to growing things in the greenhouse for my first season, and moving out into the garden proper next year, or in time for the winter crops.

So this morning we took propagators and seeds and a big bag of compost left behind by the vendor and laid them all out in the greenhouse, ready for planting. I’m starting with salads.

So, while Rich planted out three different kinds of yellow and red tomatoes, I started on the sweet peppers, onions, chives and leaf salad which, if the packet is to be believed, should be ready to harvest in three weeks or less.

It’s stupidly exciting. After all, it’s not like I haven’t had home-grown tomatoes before. This is the first time they’ll have been my own, though, and although the house is still more of a house than a home, I do like the fact that they’re growing in my own greenhouse.

Mum, Andrew and Viv arrived soon after we’d covered them over and dropped the lids on the propagators, for olives and Pimms in the sun. Viv took us all out to lunch, and then we headed back home for an afternoon of games, simnel cake and playing with the horses. Rich managed to find a hidden switch on Lucy’s nose that made her turn up her lips. We thought it was a fluke at first, but every time you touched it she would gurn like she’d just sucked a lemon, and stick out her neck and head.

I don’t think I did so well at the games. I won Newmarket, lost the pick-up game, and claimed one victory out of four at Rummikub.

It was late and dark when we got back to the house, but still not cold, and so we poured some wine and went out to look at the seed trays. One of the most enjoyable Easters for years.

No kettle this morning. It was broken, presumably by some kind of power surge, as the orange-jacketed workmen were out and up the poles as we woke up, fixing the damage caused by yesterday’s crash.

Rich tried to switch it on, but all it did was spark and buzz, so he made tea in a saucepan, and when we’d drunk that we headed round to mum’s for breakfast.

We had planned to spend the day geocaching, so picked out two caches we thought looked fun and, after I’d written a short eulogy for a funeral on Tuesday, headed out in the car with the GPS. Thirty minutes later we were in the wilds of Essex.

Essex often gets maligned as an ugly, spoiled county, but only by those who don’t really know it. South of the A13, or along the train line out of London and up towards Suffolk isn’t really all that nice, but in between, and further north, you have some of the nicest countryside you could ever hope to find.

And so it was through this that we found ourselves walking, striding through fields of bright yellow rape to a small church with a battered graveyard, pitted by rabbit holes out of which scurried a small band of rats. We picked up eight further clues there, being careful to keep away from the rodents, and found the treasure, after a couple of hours hiking, without too much trouble.

There wasn’t much for the taking, so after looking through the stash we hid it again where we’d found it, and followed the GPS back towards the car, passing an old Ford Anglia, abandoned among the trees. It had been there a very long time – perhaps 20 years or more – and had been so subsumed by the trees that there was no way it would ever be removed. One tree had even grown up between the front bumper and radiator, and was pushing them apart and, as Rich said, it was this, not the stash, that was the real treasure.

We took a wrong turn on the walk back to the car and found ourselves crossing a farm as the farmer walked out of his barn. He had a trap by the side of the road, inside of which a large magpie was dancing in wild frustration, hopping up onto a small perch, then down again onto the ground, back up onto the perch and then down again on the other side. It went on the whole time we were there.

I asked him if it was a pet.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s a trap.’

‘Why do you trap them?’

‘Because they kill the birds.’

There was some logic in there somewhere, I’m sure, but as the words floated out between his sepia-stained teeth I was having trouble seeing it. This bird would be killed to stop another from dying. Somehow I couldn’t see how that would benefit the bird population overall, but as we were trespassing on his land I didn’t want to argue, so instead agreed that it was a Very Good Idea Indeed, and asked for directions back to the car, blaming our minor miscalculation (ie following the footpath signs on the fence posts) on a multi-billion dollar network of defence satellites.

‘Bah, those things never work,’ he said, immediately discounting several thousand man-years of expensive research, before pointing us past his battered pick-up towards the road.

We eventually got home just before mum, who had spent the day visiting her new grand child, and was full of stories of tiny fingers and poky toes. We promised we’d visit on Monday.

Still no power. The house alarm doesn’t like it; it spent much of the night bleeping in pain.

A very exciting day. A launch, a police chase and a birth, all in the space of 24 hours.

It started after breakfast, when I picked up Rich at the train station and we buzzed up to Harold Hill for the launch of Link FM. It was the first radio station on which I ever had my own show, fifteen years ago.

Of course, back then it wasn’t a full-time station, but I was back every summer to do what became a regular slot, and helped out with the first application for a full-time license. We failed. And then again the second time around. And the third. Finally, though, it’s got itself a full-time broadcasting license, and today – Good Friday – was launch day.

It came into range as we crossed the Havering border, and we listened in to the countdown on the test transmission as we got closer and closer. We arrived at 11h58 – two minutes to launch – so sat in the car to hear it go live and then headed inside for a glass of champagne and a chat with familiar faces in the studios.

It felt good to be back, even if I wasn’t on the presenting roster this time around. But we had jobs to do, and so stayed only for an hour to see Dave get into the 13h news, then headed back to Chelmsford for DIY supplies for the house before Andrew came around and pulled the worst of the straggly plants out of my flower beds. He spent two hours weeding and trimming and mowing the lawns and by the time he left, three mugs of tea later, the place looked a whole lot better.

Mum was very excited – Sal had texted to say her waters had broken.

Not long after they’d gone, as we were getting ready to head out, we heard a muffled crump. I was looking out of the back window, and as the crump sounded, all the electricity poles leading off down the road shook wildly, the cables swinging back and forth. The neighbours rushed out into the street, and a man tried to walk casually through them from the direction of the park. They tried to stop him, but he broke free and ran off, pursued by the men while their wives pointed the police, in hot pursuit, in the same direction.

The women walked down to the end of the street to inspect a van that had crashed into the electricity pole, and been the cause of all the wobbling and swaying, and when we went out ten minutes later we passed another policeman speaking into his radio, explaining to the station that the van had been stolen, and crashed by the thief.

We walked on into town, past two further police cars just pulling up, to meet with the usual Good-Friday-meal crowd. Spanish this year, after last year’s disappointing Greek tragedy (we’ve already pencilled in Armenian for next year).

By now I was getting hourly updates on the labour as Sal texted mum from the hospital and she relayed it to me. Arrived at hospital, contractions every ten minutes… Contractions five minutes apart… Still on the maternity ward. No beds available… Contractions three minutes apart. Moving to delivery room…

And then, just gone 11, a call, instead of a text, to announce that I was the uncle of a healthy baby boy called Will. Seven pounds 11 ounces, born at 22h23.

I should probably have bought champagne, but instead I drained the sangria, finished reading The Hungry Caterpillar, which had been brought along to entertain Jude and wasn’t nearly so intellectually engaging as I had remembered, and then stumbled off down the road to find my bed as we all said goodbye on the banks of the river, agreeing to meet up again on Eurovision night.

All in all, then, a highly eventful day, as I say.

An expensive and busy weekend. Expensive because I was buying furniture. Busy because… well, I was buying furniture.

The first things I bought were probably the least important: deckchairs. I sat in some in the Norwich John Lewis a couple of weeks back, and despite the fact it was a rainy grey day I knew there and then that I wanted some. I’d not sat in one for years, and they were so much more comfy than I remembered. Besides, I’ve got my first garden now, and I needed some way to enjoy the sun without sitting on the fox poo littering the lawn.

Anyway, they were the cheap bits. The wallet-denter was altogether heavier, more substantial and made of reclaimed teak, which is pitted and rubbed and has a bit of history to it. It won’t be coming for ages, but it’ll fit the room and it looked like it had a bit of character, so after a couple of hours’ hesitation I paid my deposit and booked a delivery for this time next month. I have a lot of paper stripping, floor levelling and wall painting to do before then.

But it was fun.