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We picked up a travel bug on Saturday, under a gravestone in a little park by St Paul’s. I already knew where the cache was hidden, as I’d dug it out before, but Rich had never seen it, and as he walks past it on his way to work every day without even knowing it, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

So today we headed out to move it on, and help it complete its mission. There’s a string of caches hidden along the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation Canal, which runs east out of Chelmsford town centre and on past Maldon to Heybridge. The first seven sit between us and the A12 on its wide, graceful diversion around the town, so we took out our bikes, dug out the GPS and printed out the six that were still open for business.

They’d been very cleverly hidden. One was a small lunchbox, but the rest were slim canisters, like elongated film containers around which the owner had wrapped camouflage tape. They’d been slid into the the ironwork supports of bridges across the river, hidden in the hinges of heavy gates, and stuck using magnets to the backs and bottoms of fences.

Only one had any treasure in it, and that was just an orange rubber fish that we left in place and supplemented with a little parachuting soldier, but it made for a good ride out through the fields along the river and down by a little knot of young horses who seemed interested in our bikes.

We still have the travel bug, though, so will have to move it on next weekend. The perfect excuse for another session of cache hunting.

Emilie joined the rest of us on the older side of 30 this month, so to celebrate we all headed for La Trouvaille on Newburgh Street, perhaps the Frenchest French restaurant in London.

She’s booked out the whole of upstairs where the rooms are airy and light courtesy of some breezy sash windows, whitewashed walls and a preponderance of mirrors. It’s much more comfortable than the restaurant downstairs where we had our team Christmas lunch there a couple of years ago and half of us ended up sitting on the windowsill, our backs against the cold glass.

Excellent food. Guinea fowl, halloumi, sea bass, creamy cheeses, rich chocolate mousse scooped out of a generous kitchen bowl and dropped in front of you with a satisfying squelch… it took us five hours to finish our meal, and by the time we left the shops of Carnaby Street were locking their doors.

Rode home with a pounding head; the wine hadn’t stopped flowing from the moment we arrived until we headed back down the stairs. We thought the walk across town, back to the station by way of the buzzy South Bank might have done us some good, but it actually just made our knees ache as much as our heads.

Dry Ryvita for dinner: a necessary evil.

We picked up the chickens on Saturday morning, so the coop is no longer echoey and empty. Barbara, Margot and Gerry, after a little bit of hesitation, are now clucking happily around the garden, pooing on the lawn and plucking at the grass.

This is Gerry. She’s by far the most friendly, and happily sat in our arms as we had pre-dinner drinks on garden chairs on Saturday night. She almost went to sleep as we tickled her neck.

This is Barbara. She has the softest feathers of the flock, and while not quite so forthcoming as Gerry she’s in no way a shrinking violet. She really tucked in to a carrot top we plucked out of the plot for them to nibble on.

And finally this is Margot. She’s both the biggest hen in the flock, and the most timid. She has dug a wide shallow bowl at the back of the run that she spent most of yesterday having a dust bath in. I think she’s going to be a bit of a stand-offish diva.

No eggs yet - they’re too young for that, but in just a few weeks we should be cracking our first.

I have never known animals with such a capacity for either producing poo or destroying a lawn. In just a day they had the over-long grass in their 6ft x 3ft run shorter than I usually manage with the mower.

We’ll be tracking their progress, starting tomorrow morning, over at Blagger.

You can see Hanningfield Reservoir on the weather map. It’s in the middle of Essex, usually just near the forecaster’s left hand as the country sweeps by on the BBC.

It’s the second largest reservoir in the county, taking over 200 days to fill from empty, and its construction required the destruction of a grand stately home and small village. I rather hoped that they might all still be down there under the water somewhere as it’s not very deep and their roofs might poke up above the surface, but sadly they were all knocked down and the spoils carted off before the great natural bowl of the reservoir disappeared beneath the waves.

One of the digging machines was left in there, though, and concreted over to stop its fuel and oils leeching out into the water.

It’s owned by Essex and Suffolk Water, which not only pumps its purified contents to thousands of homes, but also maintains its shoreline as for walkers, anglers and bird watchers, runs a visitor centre, and oversees a cafe perched on the water’s edge. That cafe, rather obviously, is the Cafe on the Water.

We’d have known nothing about it if we’d just thrown away the junk that accompanied the latest water bill, but in with the daunting total was a little booklet of information, and in that booklet was an ad for the cafe.

Tracking it down in the car - it’s too far to cycle - we found the fishing lodge with the cafe and its decking tucked away at the back. It was cheap and cheerful in every sense of the word, so we took seats outside and ordered coffees, teacakes and muffins, and took in the view.

It’s not spectacular - this is Essex we’re talking about, not Northumberland - but it is long and wide, and extremely relaxing. Just in front of the decking there’s a little wooden pier where the fishing boats are tied up, and nearer at hand the ducks pad around on the muddy beach, pausing now and then to clean their feet.

We’ll certainly go back, but next time we’ll probably park some way off, at the visitors’ centre, and walk to the lodge through the woods at the water’s edge. The cafe will make a good stopping-off point before we turn around and retrace our steps.

It’s just a shame it isn’t a little closer to home, or it would make a good bike ride, too.

Birmingham City Council has admitted sending out leaflets which showed its US namesakes skyline instead.

About 720,000 pamphlets praising Brummies for their recycling were sent around the city at a cost of £15,000.

But instead of showing landmarks such as the Rotunda and the new Selfridges building, it showed downtown Birmingham, Alabama, instead.

Full story on BBC News.

I don’t know what’s more worrying - the stupid mistake or the fact that to celebrate the city’s impressive record in recycling the council printed almost three quarters of a million leaflets saying thanks… which will then need recycling.

Hardraw Force

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

A giant inflatable dog turd created by the American artist Paul McCarthy was blown from its moorings at a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a window before landing in the grounds of a children’s home.

Full story at guardian.co.uk