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Woke up to find the garden under five inches of snow. Granted that’s not a Greenland statistic, but it’s deep for here.

Looking out of the window now, the reserve is full of people building snowmen and throwing snowballs. I’m sitting in the study working from home; the cat is asleep in the bedroom, having already been out, got himself a chill and thrown up his breakfast on the duvet.

It’s always nice to work from home now and again. You get so much done when your phone isn’t ringing and there’s nobody hovering by your desk waiting to ask a question. Today it’s forward-planning and feature writing, and it’s fortunate that there is someone in the office to email out some documents.

What this kind of weather does show, though, is that despite the fact we spend our days working with words and layouts, you still can’t quite produce magazines from an entirely remote location. Not yet. That’s a shame as it would be so much better if none of us had to get on the trains twice a day.

The chickens were freaked by the snow. It was only when they realised they could eat it that they got over their fear. Now they’re trying to clear the whole of their run by mouth. Greedy things.

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It’s been bitterly cold. The hosepipe is frozen solid, and when you unhook it from the reel it stands up in mid-air with the spray on the end, like a cobra ready to pounce. Entertaining, but not much use when you want to clean out the chickens.

They don’t seem to have noticed it at all. We’re still averaging two eggs a day, which is a slight disappointment after we were briefly getting three a time. Gerry’s the lazy girl. We get one pink egg from here for every four or five brown and cream ones from the other two.

The trains, needless to say, haven’t enjoyed the cold. A breakdown or delay almost every day have made riding to work and back no fun at all. It wouldn’t be so bad if they told the radio, but the travel reports talk of gloriously empty and smooth-running lines every morning.

Not so.

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It was fancy dress.

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So he came home and we worked from here.

Working at home is a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand you don’t have any of the distractions you get in the office – no ringing phones, nobody wandering up to your desk, no half-heard conversations going on at other desks. It means you get a lot done, and since eight this morning I’ve popped out 3,840 words, including most of a feature for the next issue.

So that’s all good.

But on the other hand you have to try and keep up with your other jobs, do your emails through a browser rather than a proper client and sit by a window looking out on the garden where you’d rather be pulling up carrots or harvesting this year’s beetroot or playing with the chickens, who have been standing at the front of their run looking up at the study window waiting for someone to come down with some corn for them to peck at.

You also end up working much longer as there are no defined ends to the day. I’m just packing up now, at gone 7pm, having not spotted that the end of the day – technically 6 – passed an hour ago.

So, let’s keep our fingers crossed for better trains tomorrow. For one thing it’ll get us away from the fermenter. We’re brewing wine this week, and its air lock is sputtering out a vaguely winey gas at regular intervals from where it sits in a corner of the kitchen. The cat’s not too keen on the noise and I can’t say I’m too enamoured with the smell. I’m sure we must have the whiff of a wino whenever we leave the house.

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Last night was our awards for this year. Today, the expo. They always coincide.

The Awards came back to central London – we took over the Ballroom at the Grosvenor House Hotel – from the Hurlingham Club where we’ve been for the last few years. The food was excellent, the comedy very funny (Stephen K Amos – I’d not seen him before, but the demo we picked him from was great) and the ambience pretty spot on. I didn’t get to bet until four this morning and even then there was still a good crowd in the bar, which inevitably meant there were some very tired faces at the expo today.

Perhaps the fact the expo was so small this year was a blessing in disguise. We were the only magazine with hospitality which meant we had an almost constant stream of visitors, giving us an excellent excuse to break up the trips around the show floor with plentiful teas and coffees with the other exhibitors back on our comfy chairs.

The most interesting conversation of the two events, though, wasn’t one I had with anyone at the expo, but with the woman who looked after the awards. I asked her what she did when she wasn’t being a trophy hander (or trophy girl as she put it). She said she was a singer, model and advert actor and gets a lot of work from DFS. Why? Because she’s short, and they like to use short people because it makes their sofas look big.

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In fairness, my main reason for going to the Gordon Brown event two weeks ago was that I’d see inside 10 Downing Street. David Cameron’s editors’ drinks tonight, I went to because that I’m pretty sure – regardless of my own political leanings or the boost Brown’s getting from the economic meltdown – that he will be the next prime minister. So I wanted like to see what he’s like.

Turns out he’s very nice.

The drinks were in his office in Portcullis House, the enormous governmental office building opposite the Houses of Parliament. It’s an impressive construction. From the outside it is a great glass and metal hulk with a hundred redundant chimneys. Inside, as you come in through the front door, past the stern and very visibly armed security that far outweighed those guarding the prime minister (automatic rifles slung over shoulders), through the metal detectors, x-ray machines and gates where they take your photo, you walk into an airy atrium; home to shallow pools of water, neat rows of trees and an impressive glass roof that arches high above the canteen.

David Cameron‘s office is in the building next door – an older building that smells like a school, connected to Portcullis House by a glass-covered walkway that cuts through a smokers’ courtyard with tables and chairs and a note of complaint from the non-smokers.

It’s modest and all the more welcoming for it, like a gently ageing hotel room with a bulky little TV stood on top of what looked like a mini bar.

At the other end of the room was his desk, bedecked with family photos. Two awards sat on the shelves among the parliamentary records and a couple of leisure books, including Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. A carefully positioned prop for tonight?

It was wonderfully low-key. Cameron himself was the most casually-dressed among us, milling around without a jacket or tie. No doubt it was carefully stage-managed, like Steve Jobs’ black top and jeans, but it gave the impression that he had just finished a long day at work and then actually chosen to spend his social time hanging around with us. He hadn’t, of course.

He worked his way through the room, and when he got to where I stood by the cucumber dip he shook my hand and looked at my badge. ‘Ah, MacUser,’ he said. ‘I know Macs’.

He didn’t use one at work (I asked). Turns out the Parliamentary computers are as tightly locked-down as those in a regular office and like everyone else there he used a standard-configuration PC.

‘So you have a Mac at home?’ I asked.

‘I used to,’ he said. ‘My first computer was a Mac.’

We didn’t speak for long, but I was impressed by the way he could chat knowledgeably and in a very relaxed manner on pretty much any subject. I was stood there with a former editor of Drapers, the fashion industry must-read, and Corrine who edits a medical journal, and he spoke to us all in turn about our specialist areas, asking questions that not only made sense but were genuinely interesting.

Within the hour he was gone, called away while talking about our clinics, Macs and fashion hot tips, but he was far more impressive than Brown, if for nothing more than the fact that he spent more time walking around the room and making an effort to talk to everyone there. Brown, of course, was pushed for time, and as we discovered the next morning he’d spent the rest of that night reshuffling the cabinet, so he’d clearly had more important things to think about than a room full of editors.

Cameron was a worthy ambassador for his party; Brown, that night, was less so. But then Cameron has more time to do that – it’s his job – while Brown’s job is to run the country, for now, and so comparing the two like-for-like is perhaps unfair. And perhaps impossible. The impression I took away with me, though, was that while Labour – as a party – is more appealing than the Tories, Cameron is a more appealing leader than Brown.

I left just after he did, to be escorted out of the building and have all evidence of the fact I’d ever even been there – lanyards, ID, name badge – confiscated at the door.

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Tonight’s event – drinks with the Prime Minister – was smart dress, obviously, but other than that it was very casual. I didn’t wear a tie, and that put me in the majority. The staff were very normal and not at all well-spoken or posh. Even the prime minister, who wandered around the room shaking hands and saying hello, was very off the cuff and unprepared when he did a little talk to us all. He cracked a surprising number of jokes for a man in the middle of a financial crisis, and everyone laughed. I don’t think it was out of politeness, either.

So what’s it like? Well, getting onto Downing Street itself was a lot easier than I’d expected. I took my passport as proof of identity, and I was on a list that had been finalised well in advance, so no doubt there had been some kind of secret service checking up going on beforehand, but it took less time to get through all the checks and scans than it does to get onto a plane.

Speaking to the other people there (all members of the British Society of Magazine Editors), everyone had been a bit nervous beforehand, and there was some excitement as we walked up the famous street, past number 9 – the first address on the street – to number 10, the most famous (number 11 is the last address on Downing Street). The policeman who stands outside said there was once a very rough pub on the corner – one of the worst in London – but he didn’t know where numbers 1 to 7 had disappeared to. Neither did he know what it was like inside Number 10, despite working there. He asked us what it was like when we came out and explained that there was a definite divide between the staff on his side of the door and the other. He was police; the ones inside were government security (yes, it was a real gun, yes they were real bullets and no he hadn’t shot anyone yet).

I’d been led to believe that once you get through the door you’re up against a wall of steel bars and that the door is only ceremonial, but it’s nothing like that at all. You actually find yourself in an airy hallway with a fire to either side (unlit), a disabled toilet to the left (the window above what looks like the next door down the street is actually the window of that loo), a long corridor down to Number 11 and another leading straight ahead. That goes to the Cabinet Room, apparently, but although Gordon Brown invited us to pop down and have a sit at the table we couldn’t; he’d forgotten that he was supposed to be having a cabinet meeting in there, and as soon as he was done chatting with us he was sucked straight into it.

Number 10 has often been described as warren-like, and that’s very apt. It really is huge, with a little garden in the middle decked out with tables and umbrellas.

We walked up the famous staircase lined with the black and white portraits of former prime ministers (they’re running out of space – Tony Blair is already lined up with the top step) and into the Pillared Drawing Room. The photographer, merrily running around snapping pictures of us in front of exhibits from the Government Art Collection, told us to go wherever we wanted so long as we didn’t open any closed doors, and so we walked through to the State Banqueting Rooms (tall ceilings, Trusthouse Forte-style panelling, lots of candelabras and rather impersonal), and the White Room, where the Prime Minister meets visiting dignitaries. Whenever you see him (or her) photographed meeting with another prime minister or president by the fire, it’s been taken there.

We (two of us) got chatting to one of the Downing Street staff, who was quite happy to natter about all sorts of things. We were on the first floor, he said; below us were offices, and above us was the Prime Minister’s flat. I asked him if there was a bunker beneath Number 10, and it turns out there isn’t; it’s under Number 11. Someone else asked if there was a special toilet just for the Queen and he said there was, kind of. Did we want to see it, he asked. Of course we did.

So he walked us down a corridor to a rather ordinary looking little bathroom which we used, just so we could say we’d been in the Queen’s toilet. It was two rooms, with the loo in the inner room, its walls floor-to-ceiling gold mirrors, and three orange lights up through the extractor fan. Very strange; it felt like a very posh airline toilet. The soap was Carex (although I opened a drawer and found some Moulton Brown) and one of the taps was missing its turner. Mrs Thatcher apparently had it jazzed up when she lived there, and it was certainly very 80s.

He was quite happy to talk about the people that worked there. Gordon Brown did a lot of work; Tony Blair went to Chequers every weekend; John Major always worked sitting at the cabinet table, which sounded too much like working at the dining table for my liking.

You really couldn’t fault any of the staff: they were friendly and approachable and put everyone at ease, and the food was good enough to forgive the rather abrupt half eight drying-up of the wine.

I wish I could have taken in a camera or a phone, but they all had to be left at the door, which perhaps explains why you never really see pictures from inside 10 Downing Street. As we all traipsed out at the end of the night, though, we stood by the famous door in front of the inscribed letter box (‘First Lord of the Treasury’, as if anyone needed to know you lived there) and had our pictures taken for posterity. Everyone was a bit self-conscious about it, of course, but as the policeman said everyone did it we soon got over the embarrassment.

All in all, an excellent – and very unusual – unusually ordinary night out.

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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.

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It’s been a bit quiet around here of late. Things have been busy, but most importantly we had a week away. Volkswagen lent us a car from its press pool and we took it to Yorkshire with the rest of the family to buzz around the Dales, drinking tea and eating scones in the little hillside villages (below) in between treks up muddy paths to take photos of the waterfalls (above).

We’ve been watching All Creatures Great and Small, so naturally we hunted out the spots that had featured in the show – tiny little Langthwaite, for example, where Seigfried and James could be seen driving over the humpy bridge in the show’s opening credits, and to Askrigg, which was the setting for the surgery at the fictional Skeldale House, and then to Bolton Castle where James – in the series, not real life – proposed to Helen, and she said yes. One day we drove out of the Dales to the real surgery in Thirsk and visited the World of James Herriot, which turned out to be an excellent little hands-on museum, and where we discovered that he wasn’t really called James Herriot at all, but Alf Wight (he wasn’t allowed to use his real name as it would have counted as advertising).

One day we visited the Black Sheep Brewery and came out smelling of hops and yeast from the vats of beer that put our own brewing efforts to shame.

And eventually, of course, we had to come home and back to day to day life. The cat was very glad to see us.

And day to day life is quite full right now, which is the real reason why the blogging has been so quiet. The proofs of the book, which comes out in either September or November, depending on who you listen to, have just come back from the publisher and so needed reading and correcting while we were away. I’m working my way through those connections now, ready to send back at the end of the week. It’s already sold over 1000 copies in the US on pre-orders, and looking Amazon’s UK listings it’s apparently the 61st best-selling digital photography guide.

The second edition of the Independent Guide to the iPhone has just been published, after several weeks of re-writing and editing. And we’ve all just finished working on the Independent Guide to the Mac.

So it’s been a busy time, which means blogging has taken a bit of a back seat, both here and over at Blagger.

Hopefully, as things settle down, that should all change. Typing fingers crossed.

Low Row

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