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Not being much of a one for birthdays (in spite of the evidence of last year) I was quite glad only Julian knew about it at work, and he forgot all about it when it finally came around on Friday. So, the only extraordinary thing about the day was the number of people missing from our team. We were down to five, which is pretty much half rations, and the whole day was strangely quiet.

I got away at seven, which was earlier than I’d expected, and so called Paul to arrange with him, Jon and Trevor to head out for dinner. As tradition dictated, we let ourselves get waylaid in their conservatory, and sat there drinking drinks and nibbling crisps until the last moment when we had to make a mad dash up to Galleywood in time for last orders. The guy behind the bar was clearly pissed off that we’d arrived in time to catch the kitchen, and bullied us into making quick choices, demanding to know which table we would be sitting at even though you can sit wherever you want and they’d not yet given us an order number.

Still, the food was good, and after Trevor had finished showing us his pictures of cute puppies the size of a flip-flop I handed around that day’s Press Gazette, which includes Seven Days in the life of Nik Rawlinson.

(Open this scan as a 95KB popup)

So all in all it was a fairly early night for a birthday - sometime around twoish when going back for drinks and coffee and more fatty nibbles were taken into account - and this morning was a slow start, followed by an even slower wait in a very long queue at the bank that made me remember why switched to doing the whole money thing online.

The net effect was a late arrival for lunch around at mum’s, where the house had been taken over by a very well behaved seven-week-old, which was putting on some very successful sentry duty and keeping the cat out of the lounge. Eventually it fell asleep and the cat came for a cautious prowl and sniffing session as we ate lunch. I think she (the cat) was quite glad when she (the baby) was loaded back into a car an driven away, in spite of the fact she (the baby) has been immaculately behaved the whole time she had been here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 25th, 2004 at 11:19 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.