Watty says:

My Monday morning routine has got to change. I've been in the office for an hour now, and most of what I've done has been reading blogs, catching up with MC games, and Sluggy Freelance. I really ought to be doing some work. But equally, I have not posted here for a week. Harumph.

What I did last week:

On Wednesday we went to see Minority Report. I have reviewed this elsewhere, but I liked it. And I like it even more in retrospect. I think partly I liked it because of what it could so easily have turned into - especially after the disappointment of AI.

On Thursday I spent the evening sweating in the attic (sidebar: when I was young, our family called it the loft. Zoë's family called it a roof space. I've wobbled between the two for years and I realise with a start that I now call it the attic - I thik it's living in England that does that.) looking for my Turkish textbooks. The Teach Yourself Turkish is exactly where I thought it would be; I find several potentially useful books to send to Nicklas; I find my old OS map of Aylesbury & Leighton Buzzard; I find the copy of the Scotsman newspaper from June 1984 which has the list of all the Linguistics graduates from my class (I note that my degree hasn't improved over the years); I cannot find the Turkish Grammar. Which is most odd, because it (along with my two Norton anthologies) was the only academic textbook which I kept on my bookshelves after I graduated - I think it was an introverted form of showing off - it should be with all the dictionaries and so on, but it's not. I shall not rest until I find it, however.

On Friday, I made a break for it at about 3pm. It was a wonderfully warm day, and I wanted to spend the end of it in the park. Trekked through the usual rail nonsense, found a post ofice to send the phonetics books to Sweden; made it to St. James' Park tube. From there, it is possible to walk to Lancaster Gate crossing only two roads - The Mall and South Carriage Drive (and Rotten Row, of course). I strolled, I watched the tourists turning pink; I dodged the rollerbladers; I went the long way across Green Park, lost in thought; I stopped to smell the roses; I watched the ducks on the Serpentine; I saw Tom Paulin holding forth in the Serpentine Gallery pavilion; I went in to the Serpentine Gallery and saw the Gilbert & George exhibition (which just goes to prove how much times have changed since 1977 - it's not even remotely shocking now); I strolled past Peter Pan; I probably trod on nat; I wandered through Paddington, and then I went and had dinner with PaulWay, nat, and Simons Mith. It was better than my usual Friday afternoon by an order of magnitude I cannot even begin to describe.

On Saturday the boys and I got caught in a thunderstorm and felt most elemental, and yesterday I took my sister back to the airport through what appeared to be a police cordon. I can only imagine that someone extremely important was arriving at Luton airport yesterday.

And now I've spent half an hour doing this, instead of more work.