Wednesday

It feels really very spring-like today. It also feels about time - I'm not someone who particularly feels the cold what with my ample padding and thick Scottish blood, but this Winter has felt long and pretty miserable.

However there are still people who do get virtual pneumonia at the mere sight of a sub-10C temperature, and for those people we must have the heating on at all times, mustn't we. As a result the office is uncomfortably stuffy today, and the day is made all the more uncomfortable as later in the afternoon every awkward publisher request and irritating online job seems to come through, and implicate, me. Sigh. I should stick to my own tried-and-tested policy and never answer the phone. It only leads to trouble.

In the evening the plumber finally makes it round to assess the state of play before tomorrow's scheduled boiler installation. It's rather an exciting moment in that the plumber actually came to the door, rang the doorbell and entered the house (he rarely mananges all three) and that we can hopefully, finally, bid goodbye to the rubbish showers we've had to put with for the last 2 months. The water runs lukewarm for 20 seconds, then cold for another 20, rinse, repeat for ever. It puts me in a weird mood every morning and I'm looking forward to standing in a stream of absolutely scalding water for 15 minutes later this week just because I can.

K comes home later and we stick Che: Part 2 on the Blu-ray player as it arrived from Lovefilm a few days ago and we still haven't got round to watching it. It, like Part 1, is a very beautifully-shot and quietly stunning piece of filmmaking - though when you're already a little tired on a Wednesday evening it can be positively soporific. We gave up after an hour, pledging to watch the rest at the weekend.

I carried on reading Touching from a Distance and am generally enjoying the parts about Ian Curtis's childhood (did he really have anything else?) and teenage years, though surprised to find that he comes across as a bit of a dick and that Deborah (his wife and the author) is very open about how pathetic she is in the face of his tyrannical control over her. Toyed with the idea of giving up reading it but it's not a taxing read and I should see it through to the end really. I suppose the nice thing about reading a biography of a man you know died when he was 23 is that there's only so long and drawn-out it can be.