Praise the Lord; this has been a quiet week.
Knackered from little sleep, I went into work on Monday morning to do the glad handing of the latest member of the team. I had the afternoon off and rolled in the following day after a good long sleep feeling much more refreshed.
For the past three months, the first 90 minutes of my working day has been spent organising printing, typing up last minute materials, deploying the troops, sorting out problems, etc, etc. Tuesday morning I got into work and it had all been done for me. It was great. I just left the workers to get on with the work and I set about doing the admin. I shifted a great pile of paper off my desk and pruned my Inbox down from over 850 emails to something nearer 300.
And that was something like the pattern of the week at work, whilst at home we took things very quietly. Ross was busy doing project work in Sefton schools, three of which were for kids with special needs and two for mainstream schools (what with me working with unemployed people and him involved in integrating art into the broad curriculum at school, it's a very socially committed household at present).
Most evenings, I cooked and then we were in bed before 9:30pm. We've started listening to Anton Lesser reading Dickens's Little Dorrit and it is utterly spellbinding, except for the fact that we were both so tired that we kept falling asleep half way through an episode and had to keep rewinding the audiotape the following evening.
All of the good television seems to have arrived at once. Mind you, we did not watch Philip Olivier having his buttocks massaged on The Match or Jeff Brazier's buttocks or even Jeff Brazier's morning erection on The Farm. Luckily there are plenty of people out there on the Web who are willing to watch hours of crap television in order to cap the odd moment for you and I to see.
Instead, we have been videoing and watching Michael Palin's Himalaya, Spooks and Alan Titchmarsh's A Natural History of Britain, all of which have supplied informative and/or enjoyable entertainment.
The big surprise has been a show called A Thing Called Love. Admittedly, we
started watching it on the off chance that Paul Nicholls might discard his clothing.
Unfortunately, the show has resolutely failed to exploit this young actor's fwah
potential. Even worse, it has turned out to be a highly watchable drama with a good
turn in humane comedy. So, we're hooked.
