Saturday

Despite the relatively small amount of booze we consumed last night, we both wake up feeling a little rough, but with a long lazy weekend ahead of us (or ahead of me at any rate) there's no real reason to worry. After breakfast we potter for a while, watching the venerable Ace of Cakes on the Good Food channel - which is, to all intents and purposes, exactly the same format as Miami/LA Ink, substituting cakes for tattoos. Luckily we both like cakes and tattoos (fancy that?), so the viewing experience changes little.

At around lunchtime we're finally feeling well enough to crack on with the day's usual house-admin stuff, wandering down the Passage to Sainsbury's and getting the bus home with an enormous amount of food - before preparing a delicious egg salad sandwich (which will forever remind me of the opening scene of The 40 Year Old Virgin - what a perfect weekend activity) and doing a bit of hoovering.

A little later I get on Facebook and discover that my younger brother has foolishly broken his arm - in what he terms, under the photograph of his bandaged limb, as a "volleyball accident." I give him a call to probe for further information and discover that he had in fact been trying to kick a volleyball net which was on the ground into a heap, and slipped over. It adds to his long list of lame semi-sporting injuries (a few years ago he broke his wrist as a result of standing on a stationary football), and serves as a grim reminder that no member of my family should ever approach any sort of sporting arena. The closest I have to his laundry-list of pathetically-shattered bones is the one and only day I went to a summer Soccer School in Rochdale and received a football full in the face within five seconds. My fledgling career as a combative, Mascherano-style holding midfielder ended that day, in approximately 1992.

In the early evening K heads off to a gig in South London, leaving me with no particular plans for the evening beyond sticking Watchmen on the DVD player and going round the corner to buy some cans of lager. I give Will a call and suggest he come over so we can go to the pub - but when he finally pitches up at 9.30 there seems little point in trekking all the way to Crouch End and so we just grab a tin each and watch the usual Saturday-evening string of comedy panel shows. Mock the Week is, as ever, acceptably funny, as is Would I Lie To You? and Have I Got News For You and on and on. Eventually we stick on Team America - one of my favourite American comedy movies ever, I would say - which Will and I had actually seen at the cinema together years before - and I fall asleep way before the end. A rock 'n' roll Saturday night? No - but I managed to get through a whole Saturday having spent a grand total of £5. Now that's unusual!