Oh, what a difference a sunny day makes. From morning until night we had bright sunshine and no clouds. It was bitterly cold in the shadows, but that didn’t matter. As long as there is sun you can smile and feel good.

Mooched across to Holborn for coffee with Sam at lunchtime, and chats about Sunday’s show. We sat in the smoky upstairs next to a woman eating muffins and soup and nattered for a good half hour. Things seem to be shaping up nicely - as ever she is putting together a great list of guests. Tomorrow night’s programme is looking fairly healthy so far, too.

Spent the afternoon writing little bits of filler copy - boxes and snippets to fill in the gaps and give some features a bit more variety, and left pretty much bang on time after filing tomorrow morning’s breakfast show story.

I’d arranged to meet Kevin for the gym again, so stopped off at his on the way round from the station to pick him up. To be honest, we didn’t get all that much done. We decided to swim rather than run. Neither of us are particularly good to start with, and most of the pool had been comandeered by the local hippos to do some kind of water aerobics, leaving just two crowded lanes for the swimmers. I got told off for slipping under the lane rope and into the potentially hazardous kicking and swirling area where the aerobics was going on, and after that we both rather lost interest.

Even moreso when the hippos started pacing around the pool in a big wide circle and making a current it was impossible to swim against. We retreated to the jacuzzi and alternated between that and the steam room for the next hour, willing the over-energetic instructor to slip into the pool for the comedy value.

She never did, though.

Topped things off in the sauna, then headed for home to play with my Linux again. I’m slowly working it out. I’ve upgraded Netscape using the command line and diagnosed a problem with some DTP software I was trying to install, which probably won’t be fixed until I upgrade to the latest version of SuSE, but I still can’t quite figure out Corel Photopaint, which seems to have installed but resolutely refuses to run.

I’m hoping it’s happier after a reboot. We’ll see.

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