Tuesday

After work the girls in the office suggest a drink down at the Duke of Edinburgh on the corner of the street our office buildings is on - to briefly celebrate me and K's exciting news, but also because we don't do this sort of thing nearly enough. The Duke of Edinburgh was closed for renovation two years ago when I first started working at the company, but I was reliably informed that the pub, the closest one to the office by a long way, was a bit of a spit-and-sawdust shithole at any rate.

It finally reopened last year under new management, but a lot of people in the office were still reluctant to check it out. It seemed to offer the same Turkish food that you get at 90% of the cafes and bars in Wood Green, as well as a new outdoor Shisha bar - neither of which, I must say, particularly appealed. But eventually last year a group of us bothered to check it out - and it's actually a perfectly decent pub. There's a big garden with, yes, plenty of sweet-smelling hukkahs about the place, but also a big outdoor telly and even blankets for when the girls inevitably get cold.

So it's taken quite a while to get the rest of the department to even consider coming here for a drink - but here we are, and it's rather nice. As ever with these after work things, though, everyone has places to go and people to see - and we only manage the one before heading off our separate ways. The fact that it's not payday until tomorrow puts a bit of a dampener on things too.

I get home and spend the rest of the evening relaxing - mercifully, given the exertions of the last week - with K and her brother, while watching a little of the Spain v Portugal game - the last of the second-round games before the quarter-finals start on Friday - which Spain win 1-0. While it's not nice to see any team dumped out of the World Cup, it actually is nice to see Portugal get knocked out. There's nothing like a sad, frustrated Cristiano Ronaldo to lift the mood of a Tuesday night.