Bright blue skies. The sun shining down. A freshly mown lawn. Lunch on the patio. I could quite get used to this acting lark. We even started at the very civilised time of 11am.

The studio was one I’d not been to before. We used to record at Zen Studios in Heybridge, but as that has relocated, or realigned or re-something since we did the last episode, we were in a nice new purpose-build recording studio in a brand new building behind some guy’s house in Great Totham, deep in the countryside.

It was fairly small, but far better equipped than the old one, and tha garden, patio and endless free drinks were a bonus.

And so there we sat for half of the day, taking it in turns to wander across the lawn to say our lines, or stay on the patio and chat about everything and nothing in particular, depending on what the scenes required. Philip asked our advice on CD players. He is about to buy his first, feeling that the market has now definately settled on a format that may last for some time. He’s also keen to finally hear some of the hundreds of CDs he owns.

By lunchtime it was so hot that just sitting outside was enough to have the sweat rolling down our faces, so we sheltered in the conservatory where England was playing Denmark on the television. We won 3-0. Lots of cheering from some of the group, while the rest of us looked on beamused.

I left just gone half three, having expanded my initial role of ‘news reader’ to also take in the ranther non-descript ‘machine’ and the Emmy-nominated ‘Voice on answering machine’, and did Sainsbury in a dash, picking up most of the things I needed for this evening’s dinner. I forgot flour and mushrooms, which were essential to the dessert and main course respectively.

I’m never particularly good at working out how long it’s going to take to cook things when I have people around for dinner. Fortunately, though, I started out on this evening’s meal as soon as I got home, and a couple of hours later was washing up, more or less everything done with half an hour to spare. Not bad.

It went down well. We ate, got full, then sipped tea and vodka and taught Ursula to play Rummikub. The tiles were against her, though, and I won by a comfortable hundred-or-so point margin. It would have been over three hundred, but I’d suggested we scrubbed the first round and called it a practice hand.

It’s a game that can certainly gobble time. We played three rounds, during which we listened to three whole CDs, we talked about everything from the stolen picture incident to where we were all going on holiday, and we munched through buscuits and mini hula-hoops until we were pretty much ready to burst.

A very fun evening had by all, I think, but as it’s taken three or four months to settle on a date we (Ursula, Mike, me, Paul) were all free it felt like it came to an end far too soon.

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