[pen] Not bad, thanks, except my team lost twice, including a shut-out on Sunday. re - what you were saying about job prospects... I'm now following up an internal vacancy as a junior press officer.

[pen] Weekend was tolerable considering I had to work from 11am till midnight friday, saturday and sunday. Thankfully have today off to recover/revise. How was yours, pen?

[pen] Owwww, my head hurts - hence, yes I had a great weekend, thanks.

[Lib] Full, thanks! Thursday night = new salsa class (made my legs ache - a good thing); Friday night - party in a bar in Soho to celebrate west end transfer of a play directed by a 'friend' of mine (pay £6 on the door to buy expensive drinks in a room full of people all trying to work out who's famous); Saturday - Tennyson Society service in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, followed by lunch and a visit to the Dickens (yawn) museum on Doughty Street; then out for a chinese meal with the Bloke; Sunday - light shopping in Ealing, and my second parking ticket of the week :o(. I am not going out this week!

[pen] Going out just causes more problems than it solves, in my experience. And oddly, I've just remembered we have nothing defrosted for dinner. Curses.

[nights] I have a blog called : "So What Are you Having For Tea Tonight?" which is meant to address that problem, but I haven't written enough of it yet.

[nights] Can't you just stick something in the microwave? Or get a takeaway.

[penelope] Was the Ealing trip to seek out/purchase a light? Or do you have varying degrees of shopping gravitas? And you should avoid parking illegally, IMHO.

[Phil] We didn't KNOW we were parking illegally! The sign was tiny, high up and camouflaged against adjacent scaffolding. And I have various degrees of shopping gravitas. In fact, I bought a test-piece of cookware - a black Columbian earthenware pot that can be used on the hob or in the oven. I have to 'season' (or do I mean 'temper'?) it tonight by boiling water in it for half an hour in the oven, to stop it being so porous. Lord knows how that works.

[pen] I do sincerely hope you didn't get the two parking tickets at the same place ;-) Seriously though, aren't there yellow lines and so on in your area?

Phil, I'm not daft. I got one last weekend in Notting Hill due to lying naked on a couch still having a very expensive facial at the time the parking ticket ran out, and another in Ealing on Sunday due to parking on a single yellow line on a Sunday afternoon. Anywhere other than London, Sunday afternoons on a single yellow would be OK, wouldn't they?