A great weekend. The second bank holiday in a row with good weather, and we certainly made the most of it.

Saturday, as usual, we pootled around town, went to the market with the newly-refurbished shopping bike (with panniers), did some work in the garden and sat on the lawn drinking gin by the chickens. Really quite idyllic.

Sunday, though, was our day of adventure. We had planned on riding up to Little Waltham, which is only a couple of miles away, and sitting outside the pub watching the cricket on the green.

Not to be.

We got to Little Waltham alright, but there was no cricket, and not much more activity at the pub, either. So we decided to cycle on to Great Waltham instead and try out luck there, only we never actually got there. Somehow we took a wrong turn through Howe Street and ended up in Pleshey, quite a few miles from home.

Turns out Pleshey is a bit of a cyclists’ hub, and we joined a rather more professional-looking group in proper cycling garb on their day out from London in the garden of the Leather Bottle pub. The woman at the bar declared us all mad for being out on bikes on a day like this. A proper scorcher.

We couldn’t have picked a better day for it, and sat in the garden for half an hour, taking pictures of the ducklings waddling across from what’s left of the castle moat watched, with a certain amount of envy, by the flock of yellow-grey birds at the back of the garden.

From there we cycled on through the Chignals, across Chelmsford and up the hill to Galleywood. All told, we did 27 miles. Not bad considering we were only setting out for a gentle ride to the next town. And best of all, no aching the next day – just tired legs.

Monday – bank holiday – it was Sue and Tom’s wedding down in Kent. We were only going to the evening bit, so we did jobs for the rest of the day. I dug in the garden, replaced the bean plants that had been broken in the wind and fiddled on with the salvage shopping bike to stop the panniers catching in the spokes of the back wheel. I think I fixed it.

All told, then, one of the best weekends in ages, and all because we had time to get out and indulge ourselves for a day. More of the same, please.

…spent Sunday doing this:

…and this:

Summer at last.

Well, I have a bit of humble pie to eat. The UK came fifth. I still don’t think the song deserved it, but I have to admit that she did sing it very well, and in our own scoring we put it joint seventh with Denmark.

We all knew that Norway was going to win it – we said that when we first heard the song four months ago, before he’d even won his place in the semis and the country was still dithering over whether or not to pick him. On the night, though, we actually put the Ukraine slightly ahead of him, but Europe had them miles apart, with Norway storming home with five times the number of points the Ukraine garnered. Shame.

I’m so glad Iceland came second. It was a great song brilliantly sung and I wouldn’t have been sad to see it win.

Of the above points, ours are out of a possible total of 130 for each act, and the actual points are out of a possible total of 504.

We spent it at Mark’s, as we do every year – 13 of us crammed into one room to score and sing along. His poor neighbours. It’s only a terrace. After that, the night slipped into watching old TV, embarrassing Bill with old clips of him presenting That’s Life in his green velour suit, and putting on the 2006 preview DVDs, which are always good for a sing-along.

The only slight downer was the exhaust falling off the car on the way back, still a long way from home. We had no choice but to carry on, with it dragging on the floor, scattering little orange sparks like a shuttle on re-entry all the way back, with every car that passed slowing down to point out what we already knew.

Quite hoarse on Sunday morning.

An impressive stat from the Independent about this year’s Eurovision, following on from this round up of what the papers are saying:

Local media reports say $42 million is being spent on the 54th year of the competition… Moscow is using 30 per cent of the world’s entire stock of LED screens on its lavish stage, said a spokeswoman for the Swiss-based European Broadcasting Union (EBU), an association of broadcasters from 56 countries which runs the contest.

If you’ve ever wondered why the UK puts in such awful songs for Eurovision, the answer could be purely financial: it costs a lot of money to stage the show, which we’d have to stump up if we won. Russia, for example, apparently spent £30m on the stage alone this year (and in fairness it was money well spent).

Eurovision bags the BBC a lot of viewers, so by not winning it, it’s a double win: it gets the audience without having to cough up for the staging. Don’t believe me? Check out the Telegraph for the lowdown on how the BBC hoped to come Rock Bottom in Eurovision Song Contest

[BBC minutes from meetings in 1977] stated: “[BBC governor] Mr Howard said that when it seemed that the UK would win the contest (and have to pay for it again in 1978) BBC faces at Wembley had grown longer and longer.

“But they had cheered up when L’Oiseau Et L’Enfant won the prize. Lord Greenhill thought the set up had been ugly; Professor Thompson regretted that Angela Rippon had lost her poise at one moment and Doctor Hughes’ only comment was that the whole occasion had been one of ‘grasping vulgarity that he could not bear to watch’.”

Source: The Telegraph

If you’re off to a Eurovision party, then food should be a big part of the mix. We all used to be allocated a country from the contest and bring along food from that nation, serving it when its performer was on the stage. A Eurovision Food Contest points us towards another group of bloggers doing the same thing:

“…millions of people will be watching, some may even be throwing parties. One group of food bloggers in particular have come up with a whole new way of dragging some excitement out of the foetid corpse that is the Eurovision Song Contest and, at the same time, conduct an interesting experiment about the multiculturalism of our capital city.

Excellent food writer Andrew Webb has created Eating Eurovision bringing together 25 bloggers whose task it is to eat the traditional cuisine of all 25 nations in the final of the competition, within the M25, within 25 hours of the competition itself…”

Source: The Guardian

The Times has profiled French entrant Patricia Kaas, whose song is very French and very good but not, I don’t believe, a winner. What a shame, then, that the paper’s writer claims that:

If Kaas cannot do well, there’s no hope for the Eurovision contest.

Source: The Times

That rather presupposes that only her kind of music – serious ballads – has any merit, which is patently untrue.

Meanwhile, a word from our entrant: I expect to be in the top five.

“Everybody has been really positive and they are happy and relieved we are finally taking it seriously. I have been really enjoying the build up. I expect to be in the top five and I want to be number one.”

Source: The Guardian

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! She’s so funny.

Actually, the Guardian has done loads of stuff on this year’s Eurovision, and has a dedicated Eurovision section, although the tone can be quite negative in parts, which is a shame. The chart showing Britain’s scores over the years laid against its actions in Europe and world is interesting, but ultimately flawed. It says of Andy Abrams’ deservedly poor showing last year:

Diaspora voting, Balkan collusion, racism and soviet bloc voting were just some of the many excuses offered for Andy Abraham’s disastrous last place finish. They may all have been true.

Source: The Guardian

The last of five reasons why the UK won’t win this year’s Eurovision Song Contest (aside from the dismalness of our own entry) is Hungary’s Dance With Me.

Now admittedly a lot of its appeal is in the great video, in which the same guy – Zoli Adok – dances throughout, but it’s still a catchy tune that gets in your head and stays there. And that’s no bad thing.

As with all five challengers I’ve highlighted, he might not make it to the final on Saturday night, as he has to qualify on Thursday semi-final, but I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed. You can see why in this video:

The first semi is tonight, through which I’ll be flying flags for Sweden and Montenegro (with a little pennant run up for Iceland, too). On Thursday I’ll be cheering on Hungary, Norway (my favourite to win), Estonia and the Ukraine (my favourite song in the contest).

The UK can only vote in the first semi and, of course, in Saturday’s final.

Check out numbers one, two, three and four in our list of five reasons why the UK won’t be winning Eurovision this year.

Why do people ask silly questions like ‘Can I buy it for £30′ when you’ve started the auction at 99p and given it a Buy It Now price of £75?

The answer, of course, is ‘yes – if you bid that much and nobody outbids you but, in the meantime, as that’s at least £35 less than comparative products are selling for, bugger off’.

And to those who ask ‘If I gave you £60 and came to pick it up, would you end the auction early,’ you can only really say ‘picking it up saves you the postage, not the selling price, moron’.

But of course you don’t. You email a sweet smile and politely send them back to the listing.

I’d forgotten how many fools come your way when you sell stuff online.

This time it’s Estonia. A real break from the traditional Eurovision sound, this one. It’s a real grower.

That could be a problem as the phone voters only get to hear a song once before they must make their choice, so its saving grace could be the fact that 50% of the points for each country will be awarded by national juries this year. The jury members will probably all have heard these songs plenty of times already and half made up their minds on where their points are going.

Urban Symphony is sung by Randajad, who looks like a longer-haired Lily Allen.

Play it more than once to fully ‘get’ it.

Check out numbers one, two and three in our list of five reasons why the UK won’t be winning Eurovision this year.

Last year’s absolute guaranteed winner was Ani Lorak with Shady Lady. Until she lost, of course, to a far inferior song from Russia. Ani was from the Ukraine, and that country’s entry this year had a certain Lorak-ish style to it.

A guaranteed UK-beater, I’d say, the main body of Be My Valentine by Svetlana Loboda is quite different to the opener, so stick with it until after you see the big pink cake roll across the stage, at which point it all kicks off.

The real reason for watching this, though, is the video, which is a visual masterpiece. Sadly they won’t be able to replicate it entirely on the stage, but of all the videos submitted this year, the Ukraine’s is without doubt the most ambitious.

Check out numbers one and two in our list of five reasons why the UK won’t be winning Eurovision this year.

Our look at five reasons why the UK won’t win Eurovision this year moves on to reason number two: Alexander Rybak.

Catchy song, great stage show, excellent performance. Norway has clearly spotted that Eurovision is about mixing styles, introducing something a bit different (a violin-playing singer, in this case) and giving you something to watch even if you don’t understand the words.

I’m sure this one will do very well, and should play well in Eastern Europe, which is becoming more important each year. Google seems to think it will do well, too. Its new Eurovision site is tracking search traffic for the acts in this year’s show and using the data to try and predict the result. Alexander Rybak is at the top of the list as I type.

Check out reason number one in our list of the reasons the UK won’t win Eurovision this year.