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It’s Saturday evening and there’s still two days of weekend to go. Long Easter weekends are great. I’ve moved back home after the week’s cat sitting, getting reaquainted with my own tea bags, my own furniture and an unfamiliar blue that seems to have developed on one of my monitors while I’ve been away.

Hmmm…

It seems my plants have got themselves organised to welcome me back in style. The orchids have held onto their flowers, and two pots full of violets have gone into full bloom.

So all in all it feels good to be back, no matter how much I enjoyed sitting down by the meadow eating my breakfast in the sun and wishing the week could go on for ever. It’s like a holiday - fun while it lasts, but you welcome the change when it’s over.

Now all I have to do is spoon-feed the washing machine a week’s worth of clothes, and reply to the dozens of emails that were overdue an answer even before I went off for the week.

I’d expected last week’s views of foxes, badgers and phesants to have inspired my writing, but apart from a late session on Thursday night, going on until about two o’clock yesterday morning, I’ve been very slack this last week. I’m temptingly close to my 50,000 monthly target, though - 48,500. One and a half thousand words is barely enough to fill a good writing session, so I suspect next time I sit down and tap away I’ll have done it.

I didn’t take a huge number of pictures last week, either, even though I took two cameras with me. I got some nice moon shots through the trees, but they’re a bit too dark. Snapped a couple of nice landscapes yesterday on a walk with Paul in Tollesbury, out near Mersea.

We walked across the marshes where grounded boats found themselves stranded many years ago and are being slowly consumed by the land.

The wind coming in off the water was fierce. It ripped at our ears and sucked the breath out of our nostrils. Now and then it was all but impossible to breathe, and we found ourselves jumping down the steep grassy banks to the flood plain on the landward side of the sea wall for shelter. Down there, where the wind couldn’t reach us and the sun beat down I almost regretted bringing along a sweat shirt.

We walked miles and miles to the posts that mark the furthest point of the land from which you can look out across the water to the nuclear power station at Bradwell. It looks like two huge car batteries dropped on a beach.

Came home with just enough time to feed and tickle the cat, and sit down with a mug of tea and some toast before going our separate ways. I headed out to meet with Alison, Andy, Mark, Mark, Mark, Ja, Vince and Niall for curry. It seems I’ve eaten more curry than anything else this month. Service was exceptionally slow - the point where we started hiding crockery in clandestine locations around the restaurant and I taught everyone how to fold your napkin so it looks like a plucked turkey hanging up in a butchers’ shop, as demonstrated by Niall, below.

We got served about ten in the end - an hour and a half after we’d arrived, and were still there gone midnight, by which point they were keen to have us out, perhaps because by then we’d hidden all of their crockery. We mooched back to Mark’s for apple and cinnamon hot cross buns and to watch his latest film. Apparently they had a big screening for it up in London last weekend, but most of us had missed it.

It’s one of his best yet, but it’s bizarre seeing Alison blown up by a car bomb and Philip laying dead on the table with an exit wound in his head. We watched it through twice, then listened to this year’s Eurovision entries. Tatu, singing for Russia, is favourite to win, although it sounds just like their other stuff so I’m not so sure.

Ours isn’t too bad.

Last year I correctly predicted Latvia would win, but I’m not too keen on making bold claims about this year’s contest.

Other than the fact that Austria will be this year’s nul points candidate.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2003 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Journal, Picture story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.