The weekend’s gone by in something of a blur, perhaps because of last night’s late night, which wiped out the whole of this morning.

As usual, Mark had gathered an impressive crowd. Writers, actors, radio presenters, road menders… and we all convened at his at half seven - just in time to head off again in the cars and get lost between there and a restaurant a mile away.

The restaurant was in a hotel, which in itself is inexplicable, as Mark lives in South Woodham Ferrers, which won itself 33rd place in the league of Crap Towns in Britain for being one of the most boring, soul-less places in the country. Mark’s road was even photographed. Why there would ever be a need for a hotel there, I don’t know.

We made it there in the end, although admittedly by way of thirty-odd roundabouts, and sat at a long dim table in a corner where four of the lights had blown. I ended up beside BBC Bill who when he realised he had someone with the same name on either side pointed out with glee that that made him a “willy in a pair of nicks”.

Clearly a joke that works better when spoken than typed.

Anyhow, the blown lights ought really to have been a clue, as the food was slightly less than mediocre. Bill’s French onion tart turned out to be a quiche, and my mushroom risotto was nothing more than long-grain rice. The flat, frilly mushrooms looked like the collapsed lungs of a whole family of rodents.

Gerbils, I think.

Somehow I managed to bite a chunk out of my tongue, which was about the most appetising part of the whole meal.

Anyhow, the food wasn’t really important as the company was excellent. Bill had been sitting in for Clive Bull over Christmas so we had plenty of LBC gossip. It seems he’d recently embarassed himself on The Weakest Link, too, much to the amusement of all who’d seen it.

Now I learnt a very interesting fact at that meal, which makes me wonder whether I’m in the wrong kind of journalism, and that was this: restaurant critics get all their bills paid for by the local tourist board. And I mean all the bills. For example, your mag or paper sends you to review a restaurant in Edinburgh, so the Edinburgh tourist board pays for your travel, a hotel, and your meal for two (because if they pay for two you get to nibble at your friend’s food, too, so you can do a more thorough review).

Of course I guess junkets to the far east are pretty much the same in IT journalism, and being a food critic would undoubtedly mean I expanded until I was the shape of a space hopper, but the whole idea sounds just so unbelievably fantastic I’m very tempted to dip a freelance oar into the water and see what happens.

Only trouble is, not eating meat would rather limit the range of menus I could sample. Hmmm… thought is required.

We trooped back to Mark’s and filled the ground floor of his house as best we could. Being 18 in number there obviously wasn’t enough room for us all to sit down, so we split between the kitchen and the lounge and played Bingo. Sarah, as ever, was an excellent caller (”four donuts on a plate, 88″; “a walking stick and a pair of breasts, 13″ etc etc) but the four of us in the kitchen were soon lagging behind.

Fortunately, being split off from the main group made it very easy to bend the rules a little, so we started crossing off the numbers on our card if they were within three of the number called, and in the end wrote down every number played until we had enough for it to be plausible that we might have won, and then called ‘house’, reading back numbers from our notes to ‘prove’ we had won.

Ja collapsing into a fit of giggles as he got to the last number gave us away, and in the end we ended up coming last, which I suppose was only fair.

It all went on long into the night and I saw no sign of bed until some antisocial hour this morning, so the first I really knew of Sunday was noon, the sun coming in through the window. One shower, a lunch packing and a short drive out with the camera later, the clouds had come over and it was pouring with rain; not a single frame had been shot.

I made up for it by gymming. 550 calories gone in 66 minutes on the treadmill. I feel kind of good about it now, but tomorrow it will hurt.

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