The clocks moving forward fooled both Paul and myself on Sunday morning, so it was a shock when we realised that we were having breakfast at twenty to two, not the slightly more respectable (although still rather late) 12:40 we thought it was. As Mark was coming down from London mid-afternoon, that left us with considerably less time than we expected to get ourselves sorted out. So, while I cleaned cat sick off the carpet Paul headed off home to finish putting his kitchen back together now that the painting is finished.

The plan had been for him to catch a train some time after four and arrive just before five so I wasn’t paying too much attention to my phone until I checked for messages half way through getting things ready for dinner and found a text to say he was on an earlier train and about to arrive.

I threw everything back into the fridge and scooted across town to the station, arriving around five seconds before the train. We drove back in a rather more sedate fashion and did the inevitable ‘how was your journey’ chat. Perfect, apparently, which rather knackers my excuse of bad trains for being late in the office from now on.

I carried on with dinner when we got back, and sat Mark in front of the Xbox. In the next 27 minutes, he managed to get to the point in Halo that I have just reached - after four weeks of play. I thought I was doing pretty well, but now I see that I am not.

Hmmm…

Well, at least it means the game will last longer. For me, anyway.

Paul arrived at seven and we ate too much to stay comfortable, which was perhaps the first dodgy call of the evening. The second was choosing the Fox and Hounds over the Army and Navy. Now that’s not something I would normally say, as I have no particular liking of the Army, and the Fox has a lot of happy memories. In spite of it being a good 45 minutes drive away I used to make the trip there every Saturday evening.

It’s out in the middle of the countryside and has three distinct areas - the traditional pub, the dancey-clubby bit and the patio for cooling down, complete with urinals hung high on the wall to hold plants and flowers.

Every weekend, apart from the last Saturday of the month, it is packed, the music is loud and fun, and the crowd is friendly. Yesterday, though, it was practically empty. We were expecting to have to park on the road but the car park still had plenty of spaces free. When we got in, there was perhaps two dozen in the bar and another two dozen on the dance floor.

The irony of overweight people dancing limply to ‘So Macho’ was not lost on us. (Incidentally, as an aside, a search on Google for ‘Sinita So Macho’ returns an archived BBC News story as its first result. The story is about a group of Essex girls who started up their own online band and recorded So Macho. Called Angels Online, they charged visitors to www.aol-girls.com $10 each to listen to them sing. AOL, the BBC reported was not happy about their use of the initials AOL. Visit their site now, and where do you get redirected? Yup - AOL.com).

Anyhow, the Sinita incident aside, it was a relaxing evening. We sat by the fire and got distracted by the newly installed telly screens, read some tatty magazine and chatted about nothing of any importance. We stayed for two rounds then headed back to Paul’s. He has the most beds so it seemed sensible to stay there for the night. In spite of that, we found a Day Today double bill so it took a while for us to make it up the stairs.

This morning, then, started at a fairly leisurely pace as we munched our way through enough hot cross buns to feed a family of 17 and watched War Games on BBC1, a film that managed to use the line ‘What you see on these screens up here is a fantasy; a computer enhanced hallucination’ without even smirking.

It was very tempting to stay there when it finished, but we’d planned yesterday that we would head out to Southend, and as the sun was shining it seemed a shame to stay indoors.

So, we wandered around to mine to pick up my car, then took the new road south. Things were going well… until we hit the A127. It seemed the weather had brought out most of Essex, and from there to the town centre we crawled at an agonising pace. All the while, motorbikes were screaming past us between the two lanes of traffic.

This was nothing compared to the town itself, though, which was clogged with traffic. We drove, slowly, back and forth along the sea front and around the back roads and eventually found a residential street without any yellow lines. It was quite a way off from the town centre, but by that point we were beyond caring. All we wanted to do was stop and get out of the car.

We walked back down to the front then along to the pier, the longest in the world, and rode the train to the far end. The tide was in and even at the shore end it looked deep. Out at the end, a mile and a third closer to Kent, it was windy and the waves against the burnt timbers left after the fire were quite vicious.

We took shelter in McGinty’s, the cafe that calls itself ‘World Famous’, although how it can claim that and get away with it I don’t really know.

Beyond that, there is really little else to do at the end of the pier so we rode the train back again, then wandered along the High Street to buy ice cream at the Rossi’s stall (as reviewed in Lewis and Fiona’s Crazy Hosteling Adventure: ‘if you do go there, make sure to get an original Rossi’s 99 Flake - Rossi’s is an ice-cream maker in that region and the 99 Flake is their tasty combination of a cone of Rossi’s and a Cadbury’s chocolate Flake bar. REALLY yummy!!!’

By now it was getting on and Mark needed to get back to London. Both he and I have columns to write, so we headed back to the car (in itself quite a hike away by now) and braved the traffic heading north once more. It certainly wasn’t as bad as it had been on the way down, but even so we only just got back to Chelmsford before six.

I popped home to pick up the remnants of last night’s meal, which I heated again for dinner this evening, then came back to mum’s to make my apologies to Jess, who stalked around the kitchen miowing loudly with her tail held straight up in the air like the pole on the back of a bumper car.

She game me a little nip on the hand, but I think she’s forgiven me now. She was frustrated because a large ginger Tom was parading itself on the patio in the full knowledge that she could not get out to see him off. Cruel thing.

As I sit here and write this I feel completely exhausted, so perhaps there are some spelling and grammar hic-ups along the way. At the moment, though, I’m too tired to go back and hoik them out.

An early night is called for, I think.

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