What is it with this waking up early? How am I supposed to service my dashing lifestyle of late nights when I keep on waking before the alarm goes off. This morning, awake after just six hours. Wide awake. No chance of any more sleep. The only thing to do is to sit in bed writing emails and sipping tea with the window open so the birds can sing at me.

It amazes me every time I come to stay here how loud and chattery the birds are.

I am also amazed every time at how crap dial up connections to the Internet are. Broadband very quickly turns you into a soft surfer and after having it for three years it’s a shock slamming on the breaks with a regular modem. I also can’t get my head around the idea of actually having to wait for a dial tone and a load of beeping before I can check my mails.

Hmmm… Perhaps living in the countryside isn’t so good after all.

Anyhow, that wasn’t a problem for much of the day, as after several abortive attempts over the course of the last year lunch with Ursula and Mike finally happened. We were so lucky with the weather, which was hot bright sun from my hideously early waking up until the end of the day, and we ate outside for the first time this year.

Actually, second time, but first time was just a snack. This was a proper meal.

We had yummy mushroom risotto and long cool glasses of Pimms. It was almost like being away on holiday. We even walked through the park and looked out across London. The view stretched for miles across houses before hitting the high-rise blocks of Bank and Docklands. I was surprised that from where we were, just a couple of miles in from the M25, we could even clearly make out the London Eye and BT Tower.

It was so relaxing I really didn’t want to leave. We got back and I could have flopped around on their settee with tea until bed time.

No such luck, though, unfortunately. I had stuff to prepare for tonight’s feature on Through the Night. Settled on quotable quotes from politicians, and in particular Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the eternally Iraqi Minister of Information. Since he’s gone missing he’s gaining cult status in the British media, and he’s even got his own fan site that quotes him at length. I found his explanation of the booby-trapped pencils particularly insightful:

“The authority of the civil defense … issued a warning to the civilian population not to pick up any of those pencils because they are booby traps,” he said, adding that the British and American forces were “immoral mercenaries” and “war criminals” for such behavior. “I am not talking about the American people and the British people,” he said. “I am talking about those mercenaries. … They have started throwing those pencils, but they are not pencils, they are booby traps to kill the children.”

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