After four nights of visitors the house needs a cleanup, the garden needs a flamethrower and weird booze abounds such that I don’t know what to do with it.

Well, that’s a lie. “Drink it” is probably a good start.

Valerie was astonished – nay, horrified – that I had never before encountered something called Margarita Mix which we eventually tracked down at Waitrose; the consequent bottle of Jose Cuervos Especial (it’s hard to find anything different in UK booze shops, aside from bottles that have embarrassing plastic sombreros instead of screwtops) now adorns my kitchen countertop alongside the Bombay Sapphire which is used to make G&Ts.

Oooh! The sunset is a pretty pink/orange tonight!

So, yes, a day at work and a customer site, and I’m now home, enjoying a drink, looking forwards to a weekend of gardening, perhaps also going into town to stress-out my optometrist and get some new glasses.

Nitpicking the catalogue for polycarbonate lenses in materials with low relative dispersion and high index, ground for myopia and astigmatism and hardened with anti-scratch and anti-reflection coatings… I tend to buy expensive spectacles but make sure the sellers have to work hard to justify the price. They know me by sight, now. 😎

Looking back on the week, the best bits? Possibly the wildlife. Certainly sunday evening sunset at Silchester was enlivened by the enormous deer bounding across the fields, and being woken thursday morning by the dog fox which tripped the light in my garden. Frogs in the garden this evening, as I cleared nettles from the corner.

It’s a good thing there aren’t any bears in the UK, at least in my part of the country.