Monday

This ludicrous weather thing seems to have had a word with itself and in a funny way it's actually nice to walk to work in shorts and t-shirt when it's barely 17 degrees and spitting with rain. We have a quick meeting this morning to discuss what's on the agenda for the week and it dawns on me that I still have rather a lot to - a lot that was delayed by last week's slightly bigger thing. Again, though, it's nice to have a good chunk of stuff to get stuck into and, eventually, cross off the unwieldy to do list.

After work there is a leaving do for one of our sales reps, so a fairly large group of us meet in the Shisha garden at the Duke of Edinburgh for the best kind of beers: those bought out of petty cash. Various falafel and hummus type foodages are brought out of the kitchen and Susie and I chatter mostly about weddings - since hers is a few months before ours, all being well - and our various, divergent plans. I also discover that she met Britain's strongest man, Terry Hollands, at a hippy tea party at the weekend. This is terrific news - to know that I am only two handshakes away from one that could probably crush me.

I make my excuses pretty early, as I had arranged to meet Alex at the Salisbury on Green Lanes to have a crack at their pub quiz. The Salisbury is notable for being the first pub I went to having moved to London back in 2008 - it being local to the house I stayed in briefly. I haven't really been back there since moving out later in 2008, so drinking there and smoking on the step outside the front of the pub brings back lots of strange memories. My life is certainly very different than it was the first time I stood there - despite having the same job and basically living in the same area again.

The quiz, as they often do, starts out easy and gets ridiculously hard. I am most pleased with guessing that 'an unpleasantness' is the collective noun for a group of ravens in the collective nouns round - but less pleased that I didn't know that 'a skulk' refers to a group of foxes. We get a couple of decent answers and feel mostly pleased with ourselves - but end up finishing around fifth in both parts of the quiz, out of a room of 16-or-so teams. You can't win them all, it seems.

We walk home up Green Lanes and, funnily enough, bump into K as she returns from the gig she's been at. Alex says goodnight and K and I head home for a very late bite to eat before bed.