Saturday 4th September

I leave a desperately hungover K in bed and get up super-early, heading to Tesco for much-needed bread and bacon. I even come home and cook the breakfast myself, such is my heroic status this morning. We watch a bit of rubbish telly and faff around for a while in the morning before K heads out to run a few errands. I occupy myself by beginning to re-fill the cupboard under the stairs with the things we were forced to remove by the gas company when they came round to move our gas meter. There is a Tetris-style awkward rectangular logic to filling the cupboard (which is a weird shape and has some odd nooks and crannies) but I am pleased to get a few extra things in there that had been bugging me. The gas men also managed to make a bit of a state of the carpet, so I hoover around the place, being sure to finish before Football Focus comes on and K comes home to make lunch.

The plan this afternoon is to head into town on a cultural trip - having earlier in the week vaguely planned to check out the Churchill War Rooms, but also because "Apple-F" Mike and his girlfriend, Sarah, have suggested going to see the on-the-way-out forgery exhibition at the National Gallery. We get the tube to Leicester Square for about two and find Mike and Sarah sitting on the grass outside the Gallery - where we join them for a few minutes before heading into the labyrinthine gallery. We eventually find the exhibition on the lower basement floor, and find it to be an interesting insight into how paintings are updated, restored and forged. It's a very text-heavy show and the paintings themselves don't do a lot for me, but it does get me thinking about our approach to preserving that which we consider to be beautiful or valuable - even if that preservation involves intervening on the work whose creator we so admire. Perhaps, sometimes, it would be better to let the art of old decay and disappear naturally. There'd certainly be more room in the galleries.

After wandering around the gallery we walk through Trafalgar Square (stopping to check out the ship in a bottle currently on the Fourth Plinth) and across to St Martin-in-the-Fields church to have a look around the crypt, accessed through an incongruous glass cylinder adjacent to the church building. In the event the crypt is not much to see - it's mostly a big cafe, from what we can tell - but there is an exhibition of potential future Fourth Plinth designs that you can vote on.

Later we walk down Whitehall, past the humble entrance to Downing Street and the Foreign Office towards the Churchill War Rooms. This had seemed like a great idea - but by the we get to the door the price of entry seems a little too steep for us and we elect to go for a little walk in the park instead. Tomorrow is Boris's 'Skyride' event, a mass bike ride through the centre of the city, and much of this part of town is taken up by preparations. It's all fairly interesting though, and after sneakily stealing ten minutes of sitting down on the scattered deckchairs (running away when the man who collects the money appears on the horizon) we head away from the park and back to Trafalgar Square.

We stop in at The Chandos, a surprisingly nice Sam Smith's pub between Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square, and have a couple of pints - before getting on the Piccadilly Line and heading to Holloway Road. We've been invited to some sort of art launch at the Islington Arts Factory which involves a friend of a friend of friend, but the venue seems to have no one on the door and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of red wine in plastic cups. It seems like a crazy policy to me, and sure enough the place is rammed with people, but we stick around until around 9 chatting and bumping into fellow freeloaders pretending to be interested in thoughtful illustration.

The next port of call is The Big Red, where I finally get my chilli nachos and a couple more pints, before it's time to call it a day and K and I stop by the inexplicable all-night bakers on the way to the bus stop.