Tuesday

Back to work after another long weekend and straight into a week of catching up and preparing for our next month's sales kit. There is plenty to do that's dull and time-consuming - though I suppose time consumption is what I'm after in the long run. There's nothing worse than having time drag in a silent office, the working day can feel interminable.

At least 11 minutes of my day is consumed on the phone to Haringey Council chasing up my polling card for Thursday's general election. Friends and colleagues who live in the area seem to have had theirs ages ago; and while I know you don't actually need the card itself in order to vote, I do need to know where my polling station is. I am placed in a lengthy queue to speak to someone in the Electoral office - but when I get through they are very helpful and happy to confirm that both K and I are correctly registered and that we should just turn up on the day.

In the evening, we watch the much-praised recent British film An Education, having downloaded it on the back of a raft of recommendations. It tells the story of a 16-year-old girl at a posh school studying hard to get into Oxford, who meets a dashing older man who introduces her to a world of glamour and romance and trips to Paris and so on. As she gets more involved in his life, her schoolwork suffers and she contemplates throwing away her education to be with him - seeing him as a shortcut to the life she wanted after university anyway. I really liked it - it's one of those films that are just impeccably well-made, with no extraneous detail and extremely efficient storytelling.

The central performances are brilliant and Nick Hornby's screenplay is typically witty and believable. Funnily, it's a very similar story to last year's Fish Tank, a film I loved, albeit a very middle-class retelling of the tale. In short, though,it's just nice to see great British films still being made, especially at a time when our television drama is being massively overshadowed by the US.