I left work today full of the joys of spring. I left a bit early, you see (well, is it early? I work an hour extra every day, so leaving 15 minutes 'early' is really just less late), because I have a week's flexi time built up and things are quiet, so it's a good time to work fewer hours (I also arrived late, actually: I went to the post office to drop off Ian's box of brewing kit so got there at 10).
Anyway, I left work earlier than usual, and to my immense delight, it wasn't fully dark yet! I got some bonus daylight! Oh frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

So full of joy was I that I rang Sam (Andy was driving back from Sheffield and it's illegal to drive and make phonecalls) to share my joy. He was quite good at sharing joy, although he quibbled with me over whether I could be full of the joys of spring or not. He says spring doesn't start until March. What a typical British thing to say, why do they insist on prolonging winter unnecessarily? Spring starts with St Brigid's Day, which was a whole three days ago now, and I'm not waiting until March for it. Otherwise, what's the use of February? Sam says November isn't winter, it's autumn, but I disagree. I know that makes August autumn, but otherwise the system fits quite well.

What we did agree on is that the whole world is nicer when the days start getting longer. Except for in January, what a rubbish month. I'm getting barely 20 minutes of daylight each day at the moment, and I don't even get any daylight through the windows as work because the buildings around are too tall and I'm too far from the window.

Tomorrow I'm off to Rome with Andy. I have to get up at 5am, well before the crack of dawn. I'm supposed to be packing for Andy, and I really did try, but it's so hard to anticipate what he might want to wear. He should be home any minute so hopefully he won't be too tired to cope with picking tshirts etc.

A very happy thing happened this morning. I like to listen to Magic FM in the morning - they don't blabber on like that annoying man on Radio 1, they play a variety of music unlike Capital FM, and they don't depress Andy by grilling all their interviewees about the world's woes like Radio 4. They've been running a mystery voice competition for 19 weeks. At first it was intriguing, then someone got the first of three voices, then I found it very tedious, then someone got the second voice, then since then I have been puzzling over who the third voice is. You see, the prize is £100,000, and I could have a lovely house if I won £100,000. But it was not to be (or Toby): this morning when I switched on the radio, an overjoyed and befuddled man was talking to the presenter, because he had just correctly guessed the third voice. I'm glad he won it, he seemed like a very nice man, and he said the first thing he was going to spend the money on was restoring a vintage tractor which seemed like a lovely thing to spend money on.

Oh, here's Andy, ttfn.