Saturday

We get up early and after a hearty breakfast of scrambled egg on toast and a spot of tidying we jump on the tube and head to Waterloo. We're on our way to Gillingham in Dorset - K's home town - for a wee visit and to make ourselves known at the Gillingham and Shaftesbury Fayre, which is run by K's dad and takes place tomorrow.

We get to the station pretty early and amuse ourselves by pottering around M&S grabbing lunch for the 2 hour journey and a couple of drinks - but by 11.30 we're on our way out of London and into the lush countryside of southern England. When I've spent a few unbroken weeks in the city it really registers when I'm out of it again. It's sometimes worryingly easy to forget that there's other stuff going on outside of the M25 - but always nice to be reminded that the world of underground trains, kebab shops and Shopping City is not all there is.

On the journey I pull out some proofing I hadn't had time to do at work yesterday, which is a drag but also quite good to get out of the way, then crack on with reading Alan Warner's new novel The Stars in the Bright Sky - the sequel to his excellent The Sopranos. I feel like I'm flying through it, perhaps because I haven't read fiction for a long time and find it so much easier to flick through than some of the denser non-fiction stuff I've been involved with in recent months - but also because Warner is one of my favourite authors and an absolute joy to read.

We arrive in Gillingham to a sort of second lunch laid on by K's mum - which is thankfully light enough that it doesn't seem like too much on top of what we munched on the train - then head up to K' dad's show field to lend a hand with the setting up process. After numerous sun-baked and cack-handed attempts to build fences and hang signs on tents like the foolish city-folk we have inevitably become, we leave K's dad behind and drive across country to visit her Nan - who happens to live on a dairy farm. I'm not sure I've ever properly set foot on a farm I hadn't paid to visit, so to see it in action is quite a treat, even though I'm sure the cows are staring at me. We get a tour around K's grandmother's well-stocked vegetable garden and check out the impressively old parts of the house and the moat it once had.

By 6.30 we're exhausted and make our way back to the house, where K and her sister get a barbecue going while me and her little brother grab a beer and prepare to watch the England game (my full thoughts on which, and all other World Cup matters, can be found here).

Having been delivered delicious sausages, burgers and beers throughout the football like some terrible chauvinist, after the football it seems that the girls should get to choose what's on telly - so we settle down with a few drinks and watch American Beauty, which I realise I haven't seen for years, but don't end up having the stamina to watch all the way through.