Saturday 21st August

I wake up in the night with Matt and Ellie's cute-if-slightly-menacing cat Tealeaf nibbling at my elbow. She seems pretty persistent, so I reluctantly get up and chuck her out of the bedroom door. This doesn't prove to be much of an obstacle, however, as she easily paws the door back open and sets up camp somewhere near my face for a second time. This time I need rid of her, so I put her back outside and place my laptop-weighted backpack against the door. She bangs away at the outside forlornly for a few minutes, before giving up and finally letting me sleep. I'm not particularly fazed by this behaviour – back in Bath, our cat Daisy had a penchant for behaving as a furry alarm clock for me personally (probably because, as the only student of the house, I was the one at home feeding her during the day and she developed a characteristically feline dependancy on me) – so I let her get bored and wander off.

In the morning, however, K gets up for a shower and instantly Tealeaf is back inside and on my case, curling up in the crook of my arm or between my legs, meaning that any movement on my part would disturb her snoozing unforgivably. I stroke her head for a while and finally concede that I'm going to have to get out of bed if she's going to leave me alone. It's nice that cat's tend to like me, but sometimes I feel completely under their control in their presence.

Ellie, remarkably for a committed vegetarian, cements her top host status by rustling up a mean bacon sandwich and scrambled egg breakfast, and we sit for most of the morning chatting and watching crappy Saturday morning TV. I even manage, in a house full of people resolutely anti-football, to take advantage of a momentary distraction to flick the telly onto Football Focus. The upshot of this, though, is that it becomes clear that we should go for a walk.

The plan is to head through the woods and over the hills towards a nice little pub by the river in Calstock. This sounds like a great idea to me – the only thing nicer than a stroll in the countryside is a stroll in the countryside that ends with a pint, after all – and we head out at 1.

The weather is not great, but it's not tipping it down either. The early stages of our little ramble involve much slipping in the mud on my part (apparently Nike skate shoes aren't made for the countryside, who knew?) but thankfully we hit a nice tarmacked stretch before long. Less thankfully, this coincides with an enormous hill, which cruelly gets steeper and steeper as it goes on. When we reach the top though, struggling for breath, Matt reliably informs us that it's all downhill from here. The view is probably amazing, but the mist hides it all from us – so we are left to be content with the sight of a dead frog on the road, which K stops to photograph for reasons known only to herself.

The hill down to Calstock is steep, and ends in a picture-postcard Cornish village full of winding streets and pretty buildings. There also seems to be some sort of regatta going on on the river, so we take a seat on a bench outside the as-promised rather nice Tamar Inn. I order a home-made Tamar Inn burger and take my first refreshing sip of lager of many to follow.

Lunch is great, and we continue to chat and buy rounds of beers for most of the rest of the afternoon. At one point a large stag party arrive, then leave, on some pub crawl between probably remote taverns, and various locals wander around cheering on kids in boats. After a remarkable five pints though, we decide it's probably time to leave – especially as we have the enormous hill we walked down to contend with, this time half-cut.

The hill proves itself to be a bit of a bastard when you're swaying slightly, but luckily we get a break halfway up when we come to Matt and Ellie's allotment. We wander in to collect vegetables (broad beans, beetroot) for tomorrow's roast dinner, and I fulfil a lifetime ambition by getting in with the chickens (carefully crossing the electric fence) to liberate a solitary egg from their little coop. I hand the egg to K for safekeeping – joking that if she can keep it safe for the rest of the journey home then I will agree to let her carry my child one day. I'm disconcerted to see her moving to put it in her back pocket – fearing for its safety when we get back to the house – but she does a sterling job and the egg makes it home unscathed.

We're all a bit tired when we get back at around 7.30 (and oddly sober – the long walk having soaked up a lot of the alcohol we've taken on board) and it's all we can do to watch the first 90-minute edition of this year's X-Factor. Which is crap, obviously, but after some cider and red wine on top of this afternoon's beers, I'm approaching a sedate enough state to deal with any amount of banal television.

We stay up to watch an odd, Richard E. Grant-led adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles on ITV, (which proves oddly impossible to age, looking both dated and modern) before all clearly needing to get some kip. Looking back, X-Factor aside, this has probably been my ideal countryside Saturday – and I wouldn't change a thing about it.