Working backwards through the UK’s 4-day weekend, a recap of what happened:

Easter Sunday: Kitchen Flooding and a Convivial Dinner

Like her pseudonymous namesake, my friend Bridget works in publishing, is beautiful, single, unnecessarily obsessed about her weight, has a disturbing enthusiasm for trashy pop culture, an insane mother, gets on extremely well with men but suffers from an unfathomable, oft near fatal blind-spot regarding tall, dark, handsome outright total bastards in the mould of Hugh Grant.

I’ve known her for almost 20 years now, so we’re good enough friends that there is now absolutely no chance of our ending up in a relationship together except possibly of the Autumn Of Your Lives, God With His Comedy Sense Of Timing, Raddled-Pensioners-Propping-Each-Other-Up, sort.

An utterly tragic loss.

She’s also started reading this blog in the hope of encountering herself, so let’s make it a good introduction, eh? 😎

Bridget invited me to dinner, and who would I be to turn down such a wonderful invitation, especially since the wench owes me 50 quid for topping up her cellphone during a recent business trip to Italy.

To this end I woke on Sunday morning with a list of tasks to perform: after 16 weeks idle, charge the DRZ400S‘s battery; check the electrics, lights and horn; turn engine over to lube it; clean lube and adjust chain, check all tyre pressures and check for wear, fuel it, start it up and test ride it – and then, ride it to Oxford for dinner.

I got as far as the “fuel it” bit, then came to a complete stop as however much the engine merrily turned over, nothing could persuade it to catch. I ran through everything that I thought could be wrong – fuel pipe blockages, loose wires, etc – when just before I was considering removal of the tank in order to get at the sparkplug, the thought struck me: bleed the carburettor.

Tap tap tap, twist twist twist, drain off a half-teacup’s worth of petrol and pollutants (most likely water) and Voom! the engine caught upon the very next blip of the starter. Superb, and with half an hour left to spare!

Thus I dashed upstairs, packed a tankbag, got kitted up and came downstairs… to find three bucketloads of water on the floor, and more spewing forth from under the washing machine.

Damn, it must have heard me talking about replacing it with a Dyson.

Having thankfully failed to dispose of them yet, I threw some old rag-rugs into the soapy pools and began the mop-up process; I got it into a fit state – no standing water – and set the dehumidifier running on maximum blast. Good enough to go. I leapt – literally, it being a trailbike – onto the Suzuki and pootled through the garden mud in the same manner which the BMW so spectacularly failed to achieve on Friday.

Reading, Didcot and Cowley flew past, and I arrived perhaps only 30 minutes late.

Gosh, the DRZ is a hoot; I’d forgotten what a fine little engine it has, plus the advantage of being less than two feet wide at ground-level when negotiating roadworks and filtering through other traffic. In the course of the day I put 80 miles on it, and enjoyed every foot of them.

I arrived, parking the bike on the garden path, and was immediately furnished with tea and – surprise! – an Italian chocolate egg, attractively wrapped and rather nicer than its British peers, the which I generally avoid.

Conversation was pleasant – friends, family, relationships, religion versus atheism, catholicism versus “real” religions, that my washing machine may have a soul (or may at least be very very miffed at me), and so forth. Also an explanation of blogging, discussion of my work, her work, people at my work, people at her work, and a tactful introduction to the general applicability of one of Dave Levy‘s favourite (or at least most frequently invoked) aphorisms.

The evening drew on, we managed to completely avoid reality television and talent shows, but not the titanicly inevitable “what actually is it with men and women?” discussion.

Not a bad batting average, not at all.

A fine dinner of roast pork and crackling, coarse-mashed swede, turnip and carrot, steamed spinach, apple sauce, and gravy. The apple sauce was an interesting twist – you don’t often get it in Britain but growing-up in Pittsburgh I could very nearly have subsisted upon it.

And just a little more chocolate egg.

I regretted having to be so sober and leave so early, however I had an appointment in Swansea to keep for the next morning; but nonetheless I rode home through a pleasantly chill but dry night, lit by a bright moon.

There are compensations.