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After a lengthy week, Jen and I went for drinks with Frances (whose birthday it was) and then a meal with Olly and Lars (who are very soon to have a baby). I learned that Lars’ surname translates from German as “heifer shit-heap”, amongst other things.

On Saturday, a bit of breadmaking was followed by a train journey to Ramsgate, to stay with Gail, Jen’s old friend from way back. She and her husband Charlie have a very amazing house, and they cooked us amazing food, and we got amazingly drunk playing pool.

One thing about their house is that it’s really old, and it has a safe in one of the walls that holds the original hand-written deeds from the 1700’s… which slightly blew my mind. Wish I’d taken a photo of them.

The next day we walked around Ramsgate a bit. You can tell that it used to be a very popular place to go… parts of it feel a bit like you’re in a time-warp. We walked to the end of the harbour wall and surveyed the ocean, and it was dangerously cold.

We went to a great Belgian bar and had a glass of Belgian beer, and that was a very good idea wrapped up in a bad idea. The journey home and the rest of the day was a slow-burning hangover of epic proportions.

The week was another good’un. Lots of diagrams were drawn, and extensive discussions had.

Work this week has been… interesting. Let’s leave that there.

In other news… Jenny has been training as a yoga teacher for the last 18 months, and passed her first teaching assessment. This involved a number of friends taking a class taught by her, all watched by an assessment person. She passed with flying colours, so, true to the original yoga philosophy, we all went and got pissed.

On Saturday we went to visit my mother’s mother, who is fast catching up with my father’s mother’s 90-ness. We ate food, did the diificult science clues left over in her crossword, and talked at length about nearly everything. I took some photos in the garden, which is now getting on for 30 years older than it was when I carefully painted the walls with a bucket of water and an old paintbrush.

I continue to plan a shed of my own… although it’s unlikely to be as sturdy or large as my Grandpa’s one. I’ll start as soon as it’s warm enough to go outside and stroke my beard about it for more than 5 minutes at a time.

Finally, I picked up next month’s issue of Dazed & Confused, which includes a very excellent article on young Benjamin Northover.

This week featured one thing which made everything else pale into insignificance, and that was the spectacular weekend visit to Suffolk for Grandma’s 90th birthday.

The entire family assembled (for the first time since the arrival of its latest member) for a couple of nights in Walpole. We had a big meal on Saturday, at which I got drunk enough to not take any decent photos and make a short speech (which wasn’t nearly as tricky as the speech I’ll have to make later this year as Simon’s best man. Shit.)

On Sunday we went for a long walk which is usually longer because usually most of Suffolk isn’t flooded. The “Eel’s Foot walk” goes from Minsmere, through forest and heathland, to a pub called The Eel’s Foot. Here you have a pint of Adnams, and then keep going round to the coast and back up the beach for a while to where you started. We had to cut out the last bit and retrace our steps, which involved commandeering a passer-by’s bike to get us through the floodwater.

Work was relatively uneventful. We’re building stuff, continuing with our mission to make everything really good generally, one way or another.

The team’s Project Manager, Karen, on the other hand, has been having less uneventful times recently, having become an internet phenomenon with her blog about her husband’s sleep talking. She was on ITV during the week, explaining it all. We all gathered round and watched. She doesn’t normally wear that much lipstick.

In other news:

• it’s not snowing anymore
• I haven’t really been paying attention
• Etc.

This week, time seems to have accelerated back to its usual high speed. The xmas break was pleasingly long and gradual, and I managed to forget everything to do with nearly everything, which is good. Now, we’re back to the familar mix of trying to wake up, commuting through London (through the snow, this time), working, commuting again, eating, and finally sleeping. Hopefully it’s just the contrast, and it’ll all settle down.

But it’s not been a great week. I have discovered again what I do for a living, and it seems to involve existing in a fractal version of ‘Groundhog Day’.

Thankfully, it’s not all work-work-work (remember this?). I made lots of things Sunday, including bread, chocolate brownies, soup, and a blackboard. Bread I do more-or-less every week, but it gets better every time. Brownies were actually a first… I misjudged the timing slightly and they ended up more liquidy in the middle than I wanted, so sadly we had to scoff the whole lot in a very short space of time. Soup was… for lunch. Blackboard was for Kai, who makes things too, and who made me a pair of bike-helmet ear-warmers last year.

I have decided to set up a way to sell these blackboards somehow… I think they may appeal to a certain sort of person. We shall see.

Other things from this week, in no particular order:

• Grandma (the Peggy Vesta Northover) was 90. We are all descending on her place in Suffolk for a party at the weekend.
• I went for a meal with my dad and brother, which was good. We usually meet for a pint at The Angel in The Fields in Marylebone High St, which is a good pub. Good.
• Went for a meal with Hannah and Vincent (that’s ‘Vansarn’ with a French accent, mind you), and ate waaaay too much cheese. It was a Raclette party, though, so that was the general idea.
• It was still snowy, and dangerously icy, but it seems to be melting now.

And, as they say, so on.