So the last few days caught up with me. I woke up late yesterday morning, having slept through the alarm, and rode the train to London with Midnight Weatherman. It’s always nice to do that - we can catch up on missed gossip - but the downside is that whenever it happens it means I’m going to be over an hour late arriving in the office.

I slunk in quietly, sipped at my tea and deleted my spam, then remembered the chocolate I’d brought back for the team and added it to the pile of treats from California, Portugal, Spain and Taiwan that have arrived in the office after press trips over the last three or four days. We’re clocking up a fair few thousand air miles between us, but it’s surprising we’re not all as fat as pigs.

After that, and an all-afternoon meeting the day fairly flew by, so that before it felt like even lunchtime we were gathered in the middle of little our editorial area and heading out together, early, for BRB on Gerrard Street to celebrate the mag’s redesign.

It was just gone half five when we arrived, but it still took a good ten minutes to be served. K and I drank Cosmopolitans, like Carrie in Sex in the City (not that we’re easily influenced by pop culture). Most yummy. I forget what was in them. Absolut Citron, grapefruit, something and something, poured over ice and served in a short glass with two fine straws. They went down far too easily and were swiftly replaced, only to be followed as the evening progressed, by wine, more wine and eventually champagne from a seemingly never-ending supply of bottles.

Much of the night was spent shouting at increasing volumes over ear-splitting music. We munched on pizza, hammered the bar tab quite mercilessly and took almost 100 incriminating photos of the great and the good of magazine journalism (and the waiter with the lovely strong arms). It didn’t feel like that many at the time, but when I got home, having missed the train I wanted by ten seconds and finding myself stranded for the next thirty minutes on Liverpool Street concourse, I downloaded them all, squeezed them up and loaded them onto a clandestine site for office consumption this morning.

Looking back on them, bleary eyed, with a throbbing head and ears that still rang, I did consider whether making them all (internally) public was a wise idea at all, but then the only ones who’d see them were at the party anyway and, in most instances, in the photos doing something they’d rather forget.

Not surprisingly, nobody made it in on time this morning. I was there by half ten, and was far from being the last, and much as I’d expected pretty much everyone had forgotten their worst excesses, until we relived them through a browser, the whole team crowded around my desk.

Unfortunately I couldn’t hang around long, as Ems and I were slated to be out of the office testing all day testing kit. We took a tube to Waterloo, and walked along the South Bank, past the London Eye and as far as the Tate Modern. As we walked, though, and paused every few minutes to test out the kit, we looked up at the sky, and every time we did it seemed only to have got darker and a little less friendly.

We pulled our coats tight around us, but as we reached the Tate the clouds started to spit, and within a minute it had turned into a full-blown downpour. We ran inside, soaked, the hole in my trainer already letting in plenty of water. My feet and socks were soaked, and already, in the short time we had been out in the rain, it had crept through my jacket and sweatshirt.

We mooched around inside the galleries, waiting for it to pass, spending a lot of time down on the turbine hall floor staring up at the immense red sculpture, Marsyas, that fills the whole space. 150m long, and half the height of the 4.2 million -brick building, it is like two enormous fallopian tubes, deep-blood red and open at each end and in the middle. If you stand beneath it in the dead centre it feels as though you are being landed upon by a spacecraft. Strain to peer in through the 30m wide openings at either end and it looks like the petals of a giant orchid. Stand half way along one of its arms and you are nothing more than a spec of human life beneath a vast piece of art, bigger than an entire office block, longer than a school playing field, and made up from over 7km of PVC. (There’s a detailed description of how it was built here.

It is, without doubt, the most impressive piece of art I have seen in my life. Better, even, than Damien Hirst’s carefully dissected cows.

The rain showed no sign of letting up, and the cafes in the gallery were full, with people queueing out of the doors. So I put on my hat and Ems wound her scarf around her head and we went back out into the rain and east along the river until we found a pub where we stopped for a disappointing lunch. The only consolation was that the warmth of the pub dried us out, but when it came time to leave again our coats were still wet through, and within minutes we were soaked again - before we even went back out into the rain.

We made for London Bridge, stopping in at Borough Market along the way, where headless hares hung from meat hooks beside deer and turkeys that had suffered a similar fate. All still had their skins and fur, and the site of them hanging there above a slowly growing puddle of blood was quite off-putting.

So we returned to the office, saving what remained of the testing until Monday morning, and sorted our mails. Some more of the team had arrived during our absence, and looked at the pictures of the party. We drank tea and talked about last night on and off until it was time to go home. I made a swift exit, due at mum’s for dinner at 20h so I could pick up Jessica and bring her home for the weekend. Snappy cats and newly-walking visiting 1-year-olds are an unwise combination.

Of course, she didn’t much like being shut up in her cat box and she wailed all the way in the car, but she’s here now, and seems settled and now that she’s found her food and litter we’ve even had a little purr.

It’ll be fun having her around for a couple of days, but I’m sure I’ll not want to take her back.

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