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Mark’s traditional Eurovision party last night - an annual event where we are each assigned a country and make our way to his house with food from that nation to cheer the contest on. I took Danish pastries - far too many of them - to represent Denmark. Ja did chips for the UK. Mark baked a Maltese cake and whoever was doing France went to Sainsbury’s and bought tarts.

Russia, whoever that was, turned out to be a bowl of chopped beetroot for some reason. It went down about as well as their song in the contest. Alison had just got back from working in Poland that afternoon so brought along an enormous slab of Polish chocolate but with so much food on the go that was one of the many things we never got around to opening.

Mark was playing his preview videos as we arrived, so that we would be familiar with the songs before the voting began, and by the time we crowded into the lounge with food and drinks in time for the 8pm start who we voted best hung less on the song than the performance.

We each go around the room, scoring the songs from one to ten, but it’s very rare that our marks coincide with the winner. This year, though, we matched, putting Latvia at the top. We tried calling it through on the voting line but it was so busy we had no chance.

I’d picked Lithuania and Denmark in the sweepstake - the two countries that came last, and along with three others have been disqualified from next year’s event. The UK did surprisingly well. I didn’t think we had much of a chance but we finished in the top five. Higher than we deserved. Finland was the big surprise of the night. A powerful song and a great performance but abysmal scoring saw it, too, knocked out next year. Our voting put it second. Slovenia - the men in air hostess outfits - deserved to do better than it did, too.

It finished at eleven but we got into listening to CDs, including my atrocious acting as an automated autopsy device in Soldiers of Love. Hmmm. I left not long before three and arrived home to be met at the door by a very vocal Jess, clearly annoyed at me for having stayed out so late. There is a lot of activity in Galleywood at that time of night. Badgers, who I always imagined to be slow, methodical animals, were running across the road, caught in my headlights. A large ginger fox, too, jogged happily across the lawn, clearly not expecting to come across any humans so early in the morning.

Something in the garden was screaming as it was no doubt finished off by another fox or large animal of some kind. Jess heard it - it was difficult not to - and hid beneath the bed.

Didn’t let myself sleep in too late. I had proofs to read so sat in the conservatory and kept the doors propped open to keep the temperature down. It only took one cup of coffee for the weather to change, though, and for a soggy Jess to come sprinting in from the garden, miowing loudly at the torrential rain.

That was pretty much the pattern for the rest of the day. Blazing sun, downpour, blazing sun, downpour. I stayed in and worked, sketched out the start of a site I’d agreed to build and then gave up and had a very sociable session at the gym where I bumped into Trevor, Kate and the neighbour whose name I can never remember.

Back to Galleywood by way of the flat to pick up some bits and pieces and indulge in ten minutes of broadband. Much as I love staying up here for the week, using the Internet through a dial-up modem is a painful experience when you’re used to always-on.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 26th, 2002 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.