Sunshine Sandwich
13 June

Well, first it was cold and miserably damp. And everyone complained.

Then we had, out of the blue, a week of scorching weather; temperatures into the 30s (80s), everyone complaining that they couldn't sleep at night, soaring hayfever, etc.

Then it rained and everyone complained about the rain, so honour was satisfied.

In the middle, I enjoyed the fine weather les beaux temps. Ross and I sat out in the garden and read and ate. I found that I drank more alcohol. I don't know if I should be worried by that. I don't drink to excess. But the feeling that I have to have a drink - even if all that amounts to is a pint of lager or half a bottle of wine - perplexes me. It's the have to that bridles.

Mind you, it has been one of those weeks at work. Steve has been off ill. He's completely exhausted and run down. So, a stray bug has simply laid him low. However, it was during the final week of our Networking module - which caused us a distinct problem.

When it came to Wednesday morning and he quite obviously wasn't going to be in for the rest of the week, we had two choices. Either to abandon the course schedule or to press on. I decided to bite the bullet and press on. I am by no means a networking technician but, when I thought back, I have sat through peer to peer networking a couple of times and there was a handout and so just how difficult could it be at the level we needed for the assignment so we went for it. And I have to say that I am well chuffed with myself.

The weekend was scorching and so little was done. The best part was having a drink with Roland out at the Red Squirrel near Ince Blundell. We sat outside and I lay on the grass and looked at the sky and the trees - it feels that I haven't done that since I was a lad.

My hayfever is just monumental this year and so I'm sleeping badly and feeling completely clogged. I've just started with some homeopathic tablets which I hope will help but we'll see.

Monday was more showery and overcast. We'd been planning a trip out and very nearly put ourselves off. But common sense and wisdom prevailed and we used our National Trust membership cards to visit Erddig near Wrexham.

It was truly excellent.

We spent an hour or so in the gardens which are laid out in the eighteenth century style for both pleasure and produce. Garden walls are plastered with espalier-style fruit trees including apple, pear, apricot and fig. Borders are full of herbs and plants for cutting for the vases in the house. There's a big pond housing many carp. The produce would have fed the family, the staff and many more beyond.

And that set me thinking to how the best of the English country houses replaced the monasteries as the centre for social welfare in many rural areas. There are good and bad aspects to all employment and, unlike the teachings of my youth, life in service was certainly not all bad.

Once in the house, we discovered that the family here and the staff seemed to have had a very different sort of relationship to the one normally portrayed in literature (where I suppose extremes must abound). There were far more photographs of the staff than of the family and the young sons of the family over many generations were give to writing poems in dedication to the workers on the estate.

The house also was quite lovely. We spent about an hour in there as well. Then there was a very pleasant lunch in the restaurant. We shall return. There is a play there in August and there is the Apple Festival in early October.

In terms of recreation, I'm back onto non-fiction again. Of the current crop, John McCarthy's Bible Journey is absolutely outstanding. McCarthy was a hostage in Beirut back in the 1990s along with Terry Waite and others. The Bible was one of the only books which he was allowed as reading material during that time. This Radio Four series is, in essence, a series of meditations on the content of the Bible, the Middle East, the archaeological and historical evidence and the moral source of the texts.

I've been riveted twice by this lucid and heartfelt personal account.

Hard on its heals, I'm now engaged on Testament: The Bible and History by John Romer which covers similar territory but in more academic depth. For example, it compares the two Genesis creation stories with contemporaneous Messapotamian legends and looks at the archaeological evidence for both the Flood and the Exodus and finds traces of neither. But its big argument is that the Old Testament must be read as nation-making myth containing a truth beyond shards of pottery and that the real story is of the development of the relationship between Israel and Jehovah.

It's very good to my religiously untutored eyes.

And over in Germany, the World Cup has begun - Again. Actually I don't have that many recollections of the last one. Looking back in the EJ, I find that we beat Denmark and Michael Owen scored and that we lost in the Quarter Finals to Brazil. Four years earlier, there were even fewer mentions.

I suspect that there will be even fewer this time round apart from this photographic evidence to show that our lads are holding their own in Germany.