Wednesday 4th August

Things get off to a flying start in the office this morning. Feeling unusually refreshed and work-focussed I leap out of my particular trap and rattle off a decent proportion of my entire week's work before lunch. Of course, taking sandwiches on board can slow up proceedings - and indeed the afternoon is less productive. Especially when we all get a little distracted in the Department and chat nostalgically about times we've been to the Edinburgh Festival, which of course starts this week.

Having lived in Edinburgh for 9 months-or-so when I first went to uni and having been a regular visitor since I was a little kid, I assumed the anti-festival posturing of the locals for a while. Everything becomes more expensive, students try and convince you to come to their earnest but doubtless rubbish play and it takes half an hour to walk from the Grassmarket to the top of Cockburn Street when usually it would take about 2 minutes. There was a guy I liked who worked behind the bar in a pub on the Cowgate who would invariably and defiantly wear his "Fuck the Festival - I Live Here" t-shirt all month long.

But of course the Edinburgh Festival is brilliant - and it's great that it happens and gets bigger and bigger every year. It's great for comedy, for music and live performance of just about everything; and there is definitely a special magic in the air for the duration - it's just too easy to fall into the "grumpy local" mentality when you know the city so well at other times of the year. K and I are going up at the end of September to do the usual round of family visits, and I'm already excited about the amazing view of the castle that greets you as you walk up the ramp from Waverley Station.

Tonight we've planned to do a rare Orange Wednesday cinema trip - one I usually avoid because they're inevitably busy - to see Inception at the Cineworld in Wood Green. K gets back from work and has a quick dinner before we head out, aiming to get to the cinema around ten minutes before it's 8pm advertised time. This was bad judgment, as when we meet up with the other five or six people we'd been meaning to watch the film with we learn that the 8pm screening is long sold out. Desperately, we walk up to Wood Green's other cinema, only to find that the next showing isn't til 10pm - meaning that we would get out of the 150 minute film at around 1am. Unwilling to consider this or spend £6 to fall asleep somewhere warm, we stand idly chatting on the street for a while before all heading straight home again.

Back at home we stick Sherlock Holmes (the Guy Ritchie version) on the TV - which K had seen at the cinema but I wanted to check out having had my interest in Conan Doyle's stories rekindled by the ongoing BBC series. It's an enjoyable film, if at times clearly displaying attempts to crowbar in unneccessary Ritchie-style directorial tricks (the bare-knuckle boxing scene being a particularly fun-but-pointless example) - though Robert Downey Jr. is great and his accent surprisingly convincing. We scoff the sweets that K had bought to sneak into the cinema, and reflect on an evening that hasn't gone how we planned, but worked out quite nicely in the end.