Tuesday

As expected, getting back to work after four days off means an absolute mountain of stuff to do and deadlines getting tighter. Thankfully we are back up to full-strength after two players return from spells on the sidelines, but I end up having to stay for an extra hour to get material organised for a big meeting tomorrow. This puts me in a less-than-brilliant mood, but getting home to a jacket potato smothered in last night's Chicken Tikka sorts me out a treat. I watch a couple of episodes of the latest series of 30 Rock which is always enjoyable, and download the latest South Park which is probably the best one of the series so far - in which medicinal marijuana is legalised in Colorado and Randy (by far my favourite character) deliberately gives himself testicular cancer in order to qualify.

Later on I stick Barcelona v Arsenal on the iPhone while doing some writing. Arsenal manage to take the lead after starting brightly, but it takes the irrepressible Lionel Messi just two minutes to equalise. 20 minutes later Messi has his hat-trick (his fourth of 2010, incredibly) and becomes Barcelona's all-time Champions League top scorer. At the age of 22. He adds a fourth in the dying minutes making it 4-1 to Barcelona, setting up a semi-final clash with Mourinho's Inter Milan. At this rate, I simply can't see Barca not winning this competition.

K gets home as the football ends and we sit down to watch Control, which is on Film4 - the film based on Deborah Curtis' Touching from a Distance, which I read a couple of weeks ago. It's a film I've seen before, but at the time I had no real idea who Ian Curtis was and had never really listened to Joy Division. Now that I've read the book and know Unknown Pleasures and Closer very well I got a lot more out of the film and, obviously, enjoyed the soundtrack much more. I was also more appreciative of Corbijn's beautiful and unsurprisingly photographic directing style than I had been before - it's amazing that someone who met Curtis and the band and photographed them actually went on to make the man's biopic some 30 years later.