A Week in the Life: Saturday

Waking at 7.30am is a sure sign of it being half term. While my internal body clock seems to think six and a half hours' sleep is sufficient my brain does not want to agree. Nevertheless, after trying to get back to sleep I give up and have a pot of tea at 8.15am.

Sorting out the washing, checking e-mails, setting the video timer for the next week, eating a bowl of cereal, and generally pottering around takes me until 10.00am.

I seem to fill the morning with odd little bits of faffing until our friends arrive at 12.10pm. We have coffee and then at about 1.45pm we go out shopping for comestibles (including a sneaky lunchtime scotch egg from the butcher's) while our wives go to enjoy a massage in town.

We are home by 3.00pm having shopped leisurely at the butcher's and Waitrose, and duly spend a pleasant hour chatting about our lives, current affairs and some of those things that keep us pre-occupied in our working lives. Wives duly arrive home shortly before 4.00pm, and my wife then dives out to the Cathedral to sing as the Cathedral School's half term means that her choir is on duty.

We start preparing dinner at about 4.20pm and then leave home to walk down to the Cathedral to listen to Evensong shortly after 5.00pm. I always find it a little odd to be in the congregation for any act of worship, but there is also something more relaxing about feeling no responsibility for any part of the service.

Home after the service for gin, and a relatively simple supper of scallops with celeriac purée and black pudding, rack of lamb with dauphinois potatoes, and sticky toffee pudding.

A lovely evening of conversation, conviviality and cookery ensues, and as 12.30am rolls around, it is generally decided that it is bedtime. It is at this moment that I realise that I have to write today's blog.

1.00am appears and I have written and checked today's post; considering the five bottles that I put in the recycling bin a couple of hours ago, I acknowledge that it might still not be completely error free. While I know it is a shorter entry that the past few days, today has been a quieter, and more relaxed day, and I go to bed hoping not to wake before 9.00am.