Sunday

Up pretty early today. K's little brother stayed over last night having been at Twickenham for the first day of the IRB Rugby Sevens, so we get up and all have breakfast together. Having done park drinking and pub drinking and caught an awful lot of sun (I am appallingly semi-pink in the bathroom mirror when I go for a shower) I'm not feeling 100%, and with temperatures set to top yesterday's I am ready to stay in for much of the day.

K takes her brother back to Twickenham this morning for the second day, so I spend much of the day mooching around and playing video games. At 3pm I resolve to take my book up to Ally Pally and sit and read in the shade - encumbered by that great British need to make the most of the sun because you never know when it'll go away for another six months. I end trying to jump from shade patch to shade patch and make it as far as Priory Park before I abort the Ally Pally mission and walk back through Hornsey. I'm out for a little over an hour and it's literally as much as I can take today.

Into the cooler, more civilised evening, Alex pops round and the pair of us wander over to The Tollgate - where they have Old Rosie on tap for under £3. We'll only need a couple of these, so we drink slowly and eventually get chatting to a completely rat-arsed old Irish woman who feels the need to interrogate the pair of us in an inimitably amusing drunk Irish way. She asks us what we each do for a living, and as Alex and I always do in this situation, we invent new lives and personalities for ourselves. We've done this a lot before - not to be cruel or take the piss out of the person we're talking to, more just to see who can keep a straight face and see what mythology we can invent for each other. In the event I'm a successful sports writer and she's a talented, dog-obsessed painter. After a while though, the old lady becomes tiresome and repetitive and we make our excuses.

I grab a bottle of wine for the neglected K on the way home and we sit and watch the first part of Money, the Martin Amis adaptation starring Nick Frost. It seems very good - part two is on Wednesday night.