Monday 6th March 2017

Welcome to the working week.

I say this with a lightness of spirit, as in a new spirit of not wanting to spend 38 weeks of the year away, I now only try to travel every other week. And so this is a week at home.

So go does this sound, it makes my heart sing almost like a week off, as not having to travel to either airport or tunnel, and being home on the sofa seconds after finishing for the day. And if that wasn't enough, I have the cats fussing around me all day. Even if I do complain about them when they do this, I wouldn't really have it any other way.

There is the usual routine in the morning; coffee, feed the cats, check the internet and the sun rises outside than the birds wait outside for me to put food out for them. I find that if my new mobile phone runs out of power, the simple act of charging the battery does not switch it back on. So, imagine my surprise to find I have not been connected to the project or work since Saturday morning. But it also seems that no one missed me, and I could answer my mails without anyone realising. In fact, my manager calls me at seven in the morning with an update, so I thought may as well get the start of work out of the way, then have second coffees and breakfast.

Outside it is a glorious warm and sunny morning, I do take time off to go out with a camera to inspect the new growth that has happened over the weekend. Spring bulbs are drooping due to the large amount of rain and dew left over from Sunday, and at the bottom of the garden, the sticks we planted hoping we would get raspberries, loganberries and redcurrents all have new shoots of green showing. Everything else seems to be in rude health, using the copious amounts of rain water of the weekend to spur on even more growth.

No sign of the yellow rattle yet, but after exchanging tweets with a botanist over the weekend, I know what to look for now.

I had planned to go out for a walk later, had the sunny intervals continued, but as expected, thicker cloud rolled over and so, no walk. Although I could have walked in cloudy or even rainy conditions, the photos would have been poor. So, hope that makes sense to non-photographers!

In the afternoon there is a two hour webinar on a new computer system for doing our annual appraisal. I could lie and say how interesting it was, but listening to someone explain why, for two hour, IT fails to work, or laugh at a joke out of earshot is painful. I could poke out my eyes with a pointy stick. Or something.

Now, it is just March, but with sunshine and longer hours of daylight, I decide not to have the heating all day, so to encourage me to do some phy at half three before the heating switched on. So, I sat in the semi-cold working. But, as good as my word (to myself), at half three I did go upstairs and did a session on the cross-trainer. It was hard, and my back grumbled all the way through, but it is a start.

Scully, all the while, lay on the spare bed looking at me, rolling over hoping I would tickle her tummy. As soon as I finished, meow? Time for dinner she told me.

So I go down to feed them cats, then after showering, begin to prepare for dinner. Sometime in the midsts of time, I bought a cheap rolled joint from the butcher, for a cheap mid-week roast, and with there being some veg in the house, thought i would cook it. Just not sure from which animal it might have come from. I assume its lamb, and so normally, the meat is filled round some mince, I further assume this is one of them, thinking at only half of the 2lb weight was lamb, and calculating the cooking time on that basis.

That it was all lamb meant that the centre was probably pinker than I would usually have liked lamb, but after rolling the joint in freshly milled salt and pepper before cooking, making fresh roast potatoes, Yorkshire Puddings and a cream sauce for the vegetables, I have to say it was a darned good meal. Especially with a Monday bottle of fizz to wash it down with.

Now, over the past five years or so, I have been going up to that London snapping the churches of the City of London, I have been working my way round visiting all that I can. And once I have visited them, snapped them, I post the shots on line and filing in a folder called "City of London Churches". As of yesterday, there were some 1150 shots in the folder, in a chaotic order, so I began to create new sub-folders and add each shot to them. I do this to enable people to find them quicker, but also because I am that minded so I actually enjoy this sort of task.

Anyway, five hours later, I have created folders for 49 City churches, most standing, some ruins and some I have only seen the outside of. Plus three just outside the City boundaries. Phew.

If that sounds bad, I am in the process of doing the same for the Kent churches, and there are nearly 6000 of those shots from nearly 300 churches, so a much bigger task. I guess I am a third of my way through that task.

There is some lamb and a few roast (not crispy) left over, so I cut them up and put them out for the foxes or badgers to feast on. Maybe they won't like roast lamb, but I suspect they will. Morning will tell.