2) At work a project manager asked me to come and look at and comment on an email received from Mr xxx*. I replied "fine - but who's Mr xxx?" She gave me a "ha ha very droll" kind of look, so I had to follow up with the explanation: "I'm not being flippant. I really have no idea who Mr xxx is"

*I'm using xxx not only to preserve anonymity, but also because I can't remember the real name.

3) Also at work, a moral dilemma when a loose-colleague (by which I mean someone who works for the same company but not directly with me, although we cross paths from time to time) caught me in the canteen and asked me if I wanted to join him for lunch. In the space of three seconds I thought "I don't particularly like this bloke; we've got nothing in common; I can't imagine what we will talk about; how can I get out of this one?" and decided... Well, what would you have done? I'll tell you later what I did.

4) Saturday was warm, so we did the traditional British thing when the sun stays out for longer than eight hours and had a barbecue: "It tastes quite nice when you get through the charcoal".

5) Sunday was another short walk. I told CGF's Sprog 3 that we were going to look for wildlife but I don't think she was expecting that the wildlife would include giraffe, zebra, and ostrich. Amazing what you can see in the Hampshire countryside, if you know where to go. Later we did some more gardening (after being nagged by the same sprog), and filled another six garden sacks, plus a boot-load of branches and stuff. At least no one can accuse CGF's garden of being overgrown any more. Not growing, maybe, but not overgrown.

6) The village we walked from had a couple of picnic tables on a green that would have made a nice place to eat our sandwiches when we got back if other other people hadn't got there first. One party was well posh - they had even put a table cloth on the table. Who puts a table cloth on a picnic table?

7) Spoke to Mum at the weekend. She wants a "proper" photo of my award ceremony from last month. "But I haven't got any proper photos," I explained; "only the ones I sent you."
"But I want a photo I can hold"
"Well, print one off"
"No, I want it better than just on a piece of paper"
"Well print it onto photo paper"
The upshot is that I am going to print a photo onto photo paper and mail it to her. Seems totally bizarre and illogical to me, but that's mothers for you. Anyway, she's in Alaska now, so I've got a few weeks to sort something out

8) Saw bits of Britain's Got Talent on Saturday (as few bits as I could politely get away with). One third of the contestants weren't actually from Britain, which must go some way to vindicating my nickname of "No it hasn't" for the show.

9) I heard a report on the radio about a lady who had triplets and thought it would be fun to give them names beginning with the same letter. When they reached 18 they discovered that the various authorities, credit reference agencies, etc. couldn't cope with the concept of three different people with the same initial, surname, date of birth and address, and mixed their records up. I suppose that naming decision goes down as a "seemed like a good idea at the time" decision.