Today is the first day in a long, long time that I can remember not having to set an alarm or otherwise being awake before a sensible hour and it’s wonderfully delightful. I rouse around 10.30am and roll out of bed, leaving K to doze a bit while I catch up on the blog.

I head to the loo and to make coffee and discover that K’s been awake for over an hour and has been sat in bed reading, having heard the typing and thought I was busy writing proper stuff (rather than a pointless blog). I feel bad, as we could have had a nice lie in together, so I head to the kitchen, make us a tea and a coffee and then grab K’s laptop from the living room and we settle into the bed to watch the ITV-Catchup of Ben Shepard’s new Krypton Factor re-do.

It’s actually pretty similar to the old one and just as entertaining, although I’m annoyed that they’ve dropped the flight-simulator round from it in favour of an extended obstacle course. I still can’t do most of the tasks – at least the mental ones you can do from the sofa. I’m sure I’d rock at the ones you can’t try from home.

Once we’ve watched that and a couple of other bits and pieces, we drag ourselves out of bed and get showered and dressed to pop over to Mum & Dad’s to catch the football – Saints playing Man Utd on Setanta.

Sadly, it’s not the world’s most legendary game. An upset was never really on the cards, but we acquitted ourselves well given the fact that we had a man contentiously (although, I argued rightly) sent off and a penalty that really, truly wasn’t given against us, too. 3-0 is by no means an embarrassment to the kids who make up the modern Saints team, but it’s still disappointing.

After the footie we hang around for a dinner party with some of the ‘rents friends, which is really nice as I’ve not seen many of them for quite a while.

While Mum’s getting ready to serve, we get a call from Tim, which brightens everyone’s mood, then we sit down to eat and by the end of the meal (and the wine) the discussion is getting deeper and deeper into the politics of Afghanistan, America, the UK and the Taliban and everyone’s inter-relationships with Pakistan and other places.

I feel a bit out of my depth, as I often do in political discussions, but I still wade in with my opinions, mostly gleaned from things I’ve heard through other people, particularly my bro. It’s interesting how people’s views can differ so vastly and it just served to highlight the fact that none of us really know what’s going on over there.

We head off about 9.30, on the hunt for an early night. We drop one of Mum’s friends home on our way past, drive through a massive flood which seemed entirely out of keeping with the current amounts of rainfall, then get home, jump into comfy clothes and sit in front of The Recruit on TV for a while, until I’m too tired to stay awake and I call it a night.