Rather excitingly, ‘the book‘, which has been one of the many things consuming so much of my otherwise-blogging time over the last few months is now printed and in my publisher’s hands.

And more importantly, some copies of it are heading my way, due to arrive ‘in a few days time’. Apparently.

That’s an impressively quick turn-around when you consider I was still checking the corrections just before the week off.

We were so lucky with the weather. After half a week of moving Rich’s belongings from Ipswich to Chelmsford, we took off with the tent and two camping virgins for the north Norfolk coast.

Our pitch, it turned out, was still a pig farm four years ago, but some judicious turfing, hedge-planting and building of shower blocks had erased any memory of the site’s previous use. Now it’s just a clearing in the woods rubbed bare in parts by muddy feet and waxy groundsheets.

We were trying out a new tent. Our two-man home-from-home is fine for short breaks, but we both wanted to be able to stand up inside (which it won’t let you do), so had upgraded to a six-man one that turned out to be so big you could easily park two large cars inside and still have room for a clutch of bikes on either side. It had three rooms and a cavernous living area in the middle that was so tall and wide it developed its own ecosystem. We woke up each morning to the sound of rain, not on the outside of our canvas, but falling from the inner surface of the dome. Still, it meant we had plenty of room for carrying in the table each night to eat and play cards in the light of our wind-up lanterns, so long as we sat there wrapped up in jumpers, coats and blankets and didn’t spend too much time envying the caravan owners lounging in their t-shirts.

It’s a long time since I last camped in north Norfolk, but very little seems to have changed. Sheringham is still campaigning against Tesco, and the steam train still runs from there to Holt. We caught it on Saturday afternoon and walked into the town. The coast was lost in a fog the whole way there and back, but in Holt itself the sun was bright and hot enough for us to sit outside at eat lunch. As we had done with breakfast each morning, and for fudgey snacks on the beach in the afternoon.

It was probably the last weekend of summer, symbolically capped by a burst of heavy rain as we finished folding the enormous tent back into the car yesterday afternoon.

I suspect it will also be our last (and first) weekend of camping this year. Perhaps in April we can dig out the enamelled mugs and bowls again. In the meantime, we finished off the trip by watching Carry on Camping last night, having forgotten how little of it is actually set on a camp site.

Libraries are closing down at an unprecedented rate. 40 closed last year according to this story in The Times. But rather than stick to their guns and provide the kind of services a library should - a quiet area in which to read and work - the Society of Chief Librarians and ‘other cultural bodies’ have been advising libraries how to change if they want to stay in business.

Their idea? Introduce Nintendo Wii consoles, lift the ban on talking, welcome mobile phones with open arms and allow people to eat and drink among the stacks.

Camden, north London, is going to be one of the first to implement changes along these lines, lifting the mobile phones, snacks and drinks ban next month.

Hillingdon is going one step further and introducing Starbucks outlets to all of its libraries between now and this time next year.

If there’s one thing guaranteed to hasten the demise of the public library, it is radical, knee-jerk changes of this sort. If kids of today would rather play Wii, let them - in their homes.

The Times tested the new approach yesterday at a library in Whitechapel, East London, which has been renamed an Ideas Store and diversified to attract a different clientele. The noise inside was almost as loud as the din on the street outside, with a series of public information stands set up in the foyer. Health professionals were taking blood for diabetes tests and recruitment officials chatted to people.

Read the full story here.

We generally avoid London at the weekend. It’s usually a bit of a disappointment and the journey back is horrible. So this time, as we’d planned a Sunday night out, we decided to do things differently, and booked ourselves a ridiculously cheap hotel for the night. It was £40 between two. It should have been four times that.

What a difference it made. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I was actually quite excited about going into town. We trundled up late on Sunday afternoon and checked in to our small top-floor room. It was hot and basic but clean and comfortable, and somewhere to leave our bags as we headed down to the South Bank.

We’d booked tickets to see Saint Etienne, about which I know very little and Rich knows an awful lot. The last time we’d seen them was as they performed the live soundtrack to This is Tomorrow, their film about the Festival of Britain. A big part of that festival had centred on the Royal Festival Hall, and the film was a behind the scenes documentary on its first big renovation, more than 50 years later.

Anyway, that wasn’t yesterday’s concert. Yesterday it was part of a three-night festival celebrating the Heavenly record label, called Forever Heavenly. I’d not knowingly heard of Heavenly before, but as well as Saint Etienne it was the musical home of the Beth Orton and Edwyn Collins.

Neither had I been to the Queen Elizabeth Hall before. It’s not too large to be impersonal, yet blends well with the concrete brutalism so characteristic of much of the South Bank. As such, even though we were in the upper half of the seating, we still felt fairly close to the stage, even after a big surge of fans had seen half the audience relocate to the aisles and walkways down at the front.

It was a short concert, but a good one, and I recognised more than I’d expected and I’d certainly not hesitate to go again. Even the supports were good, and they both opened our ears to some music neither of us had heard before.

As we came out at half ten, it felt great to know we didn’t have to catch the train home, and we celebrated with a drink at the Skylon, before catching the last tube (to our albeit temporary) home.

To Mark’s tonight with Rich and Bill to watch the 1981 Eurovision Song Contest. Yes, a strange night out, but good fun. Back then Eurovision was a very different beast to the show we now seem incapable of ever winning today. There were just 20 contestants, the only one from Eastern Europe being Yugoslavia, which of course doesn’t even exist any more.

There was no Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland… just the countries that now complain about unfair block voting from the former Soviet Bloc without ever entering a song that deserves of beat them.

1981 was a good year for the UK, winning the contest with Bucks Fizz’s Making Your Mind Up. The image of the guys whipping off the girls’ skirts is one of the most enduring of all Eurovision moments, perhaps because at the time it was still so daring. Don’t believe me? Here it is in all its tacky velour brilliance.

Pretty tame these days, isn’t it.

But Making Your Mind Up wasn’t the best song by a long shot. The one we all went home humming was Johnny Blue, from German singer Lena Valaitis.

Back in 1981, when the Eurovision backing tracks were as live as the singers’ voices and played by a studio orchestra, the rules still stated that every country must sing in its own language, so Lena was clever to slip in a few familiar English words in the form of a proper noun. No-one could complain about that.

It would be so much better if that rule still applied, but perhaps also unfairly advantageous to the UK and Ireland, since English is a second language for more people in Europe than any other, so more people would understand (and perhaps vote for) our songs than any other.

Prize for the best stage show has to go to Denmark. The dancing is just fantastic when they get to the point where the women have clearly farted and need to waft it away before someone smells them. Watch their arms start flapping about two thirds of the way through this.

And the night’s best costumes were worn by Ireland. They were the hosts that year and they’d clearly spent their whole budget on these sparkly outfits rather than the set, which was as dodgy as a ramshackle barn. They couldn’t get the door open properly to let Buck’s Fizz back on the stage to enjoy their moment of triumph, and when they’d squeezed through it slammed shut on the camera trying to follow them.

Here is the Irish entry with their song Horoscopes, all about the fatuous nature of newspaper predictions. Those costumes are probably worth half of RTE’s annual budget for live programming.

And if there were a prize for the song guaranteed to get stuck in your head and drive you mad for the rest of the week it would go to Portugal. Click play on this one at your peril.

What I didn’t remember about this particular contest was just how close things were at the end. Going into the last round of voting we were just one of three contenders who could have walked off with the dubious honour of taking the Eurovision crown.

It looked for a while like there wouldn’t be a winner at all. Austria was first to vote and leapt in at the five point notch, ignoring one to four. They got a serious telling off by the adjudicator. Other countries’ reps apparently wandered off while hanging on to give their vote (all done by phone back then - no satellite video links) and the controllers of the decidedly cranky board at one point gave Ireland a boost of 300 points. Not bad when they’d garnered only 28 points by them. No doubt it was purely coincidental that they were also the host nation, and thus charged with working the board.

So, a classic Eurovision? Yes, if such a thing can be said to exist. It was probably Britain’s last meaningful win, as it launched four musical careers, which is more than can be said for our next trumph, Katrina’s Love Shine a Light late on in the next decade.

After two days of walking around the coop in a half squat, Barbara has laid her first egg. In fact, the first egg of any chuck in our flock. She was inside an egg herself 21 weeks ago, so that’s not bad going.

Poor thing looked like she’d had stomach cramps since yesterday, and had tried desperately to poop it out in the nesting box where it should have been, but in the end gave up and came back down the ladder into the run where it just kind of fell out on the floor.

It was still warm when I picked it up.

The moment it was out, she couldn’t care less, and she headed off to the feeder for some breakfast. Some mother she would make. Gerry and Margot were intrigued, though. That picture up top is Margot trying to claim it as her own, shortly before I had to reach in with a broom and sweep it towards the door where I could reach it.

Chickens, it seems, don’t like brooms.

Anyhow, that’s the first one out, and I feel like a proud parent. Albeit one with his fingers crossed in the hope this will spur the other two girls into action, too.

I wrote to the paper and it got published on 7th August. This is what I said:

And in this week’s issue they printed a reply, thus:

Except that’s not what the Highway Code says at all. The actual law says:

When using segregated tracks you MUST keep to the side intended for cyclists as the pedestrian side remains a pavement or footpath. Take care when passing pedestrians, especially children, older or disabled people, and allow them plenty of room.

So there’s nothing about ‘passing pedestrians (on a cycle path)’ as he or she says. The brackets and the contents are all his or her own construction.

The question is, do I bother writing another letter pointing it out, or does that just make me a grumpy old man?