After a long long swim on Monday night and then the gym last night I woke up this morning with pain in my shoulder. To be honest, I think it had more to do with mousing around my screen than dragging myself up and down a swimming pool, but either way it’s probably just as well I never made it back there this evening.

I was intending to… honest… but kind of got waylaid in restaurants and pubs and coffee shops and ended up in no fit state to drive, never mind work a treadmill. That meant a long walk home, which at least made me feel a bit better about the lack of workout.

So, it was Leo’s official leaving do, a fortnight or so before he leaves us, and he very generously took us all out to lunch to mark the occasion in a smart Italian on Poland Street where my asparagus which looked innocent enough as it was served sprang to satanic horns the moment it was cut.

We stayed there… oh, I don’t know. A long time - certainly long enough for the room to start spinning and the floor to go all spongy, and then we stumbled across to the tea shop where the guy we thought had died after we’d accidentally hexed him turns out to be not dead at all, but back from holiday. So, who it was that died we’re none the wiser.

We stumbled back to the office, tea in hand, relieved that we’re in the tween-issue slack days when our deadlines are still a long way off and we have time to think about what we are doing. I wandered over to what will be my new desk as of Monday to try it out for size, and see how I felt about the view. It’s not a patch on what I have at the moment, but perhaps it’ll grow on me.

As the afternoon drew on the various rooms around me sorted themselves out and firmed up so they weren’t swishing so much, and everything was pretty much in order just in time for us all to retreat to the pub to celebrate the third consecutive day of sun with jugs of Pimm’s for the next four hours.

Where did the time go? I remember we arrived and took a table by the door. I remember we played some word association game for an hour and a half and then realised, when it had all got very silly, that we hadn’t decided how it would end. Then I remember the tube, the train and listening to a-ha very loud on my iPod as we streamed through the Essex countryside and my eyes fought with the words in my book.

So, that’s why my car is still trapped at the station and I had a long walk home, which will probably happen again tomorrow after the after-hours party at London Zoo.

I hope they let us pet the meercats.

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