Sunday 28th November

Having been in no way disturbed by the baby in the night (the same is not quite true for the parents, alas) K and I sleep well and wake up at a leisurely hour - playing Angry Birds in bed for a while before getting up and joining everyone else for breakfast.

Later on we grab all our stuff and head out in two cars to a fancy hotel nearby which happens to contain (oddly) a Japanese restaruant which serves a well-regarded buffet on a Sunday lunchtime. We take our seats and plates and then head up to grab miso soup, tempura vegetables, cod cakes, chicken and noodles. It tastes great and I go back a couple of times - and follow it all with two bowls of creme brulee. The second is, at best, ill-advised and I end up feeling a little full and sick for much of the rest of the afternoon.

After lunch Nick drives us back to Reading (the trains still being down), a journey made lots of fun by scrolling through the dreadful one-hit rock wonders of the late 90s and early 2000s stored on Nick's iPod. What is less fun, though, is that the train back to London is a mere three carriages long and completely rammed full of people. The rail companies really put a lot of thought into this stuff don't they? We manage to squeeze on after a bit of a ruck as the disappointing train arrives, and stand for the whole of the thankfully short journey back to Paddington.

The tubes aren't running much better but eventually we're at home - where K cooks up an amazing cottage pie (something I'm only just ready for after the Japanese/creme brulee binging has been processed) while I get a bit of writing done. Later on we watch the next part of the very good Any Human Heart on Channel 4 before exhaustedly heading to bed.