Pendon Museum is so much more than a model railway layout. Its aim is to capture the scenery of the Vale of the White Horse (which runs roughly from Didcot/Abingdon to Swindon) from the 1920s and 1930s. All the buildings are models of real buildings, built to a scale of 4 mm to 12 inches. If this sounds like a strange mix of metric and imperial measures just remember that it is the unofficial British standard to use metric for small measurements and imperial for large measurements.

The models and entire diorama (and how many times am I ever likely to have cause to use that word) are incredibly detailed, both inside and out. One story is that when it was surveyed a large cobweb was seen in a barn. A miniature of that cobweb made it to the model. A guide told us that it had taken half a day to place the sheep on the fields, until a sheep farmer was happy that the models had been placed in a pattern in which sheep were likely to arrange themselves.

Of course, it is also my birthday this week. Like the queen, I am having two birthday celebrations (though, unlike the queen, I am not expecting marching bands for either of them). My actual birthday was/is/will be a low key affair and probably no different to any other day. My official birthday will be at the weekend when I have presents and cake.

Sunday I did some more work in CGF's garden. I thinned out the spinach and chard (if it continues to grow at the speed it has done so since planting there should be a good crop) and we ate the thinned-out seedlings with lunch. I also pulled out the dying off seasonal bedding plants (which gave more room for the spinach and chard), cut the lawn and started to paint the fence. I completed the gate and one panel until the paint and my enthusiasm ran out. Weather permitting I will continue this weekend - possibly using Tom-Sawyer tactics to get CGF Sprog 3 to help me.

We also watched the Kenneth Branagh film of Much Ado About Nothing. It's quite an old film (possibly 1993) but I'd not seen it before. It was possibly the first Shakespeare play I have actually understood.

Yesterday I had a meeting with a customer over a copy of coffee (well, he offered to buy and it would have been churlish to refuse). When we finished, I walked back to the counter, explaining that while I was in the canteen I would buy a sandwich for lunch. However, I had left my wallet in the office, so had to abort that idea. When I actually went for lunch an hour or so later, I passed the same person in the canteen. The paranoid part of me thought he would think either that I am a pig, having two lunches, or that my "going to get a sandwich" was just an excuse so I wouldn't have to walk back to the office with him.