My weekend in brief

On Saturday, Zoë and I were on the radio and recorded what would have been the most outstanding of potentially award-winning radio programmes. That is, except the computer recording it crashed. Badly. Losing everything it had recorded. Perminantly. And just in case there weren’t enough full stops in those sentances, here’s a few I had spare: …….

Yesterday we were at a wedding for a couple of good friends down in Cambridge. It all went down rather well, in the rather nice setting of Magdelene college on the banks of the river Cam. They were lucky too with the weather, just as Zoë and I were three weeks ago with ours, and the sun was shining very nicely for them all day.

I seem to be doing a lot of travelling at the moment. On Saturday I went to Chorley and back, on Sunday I went to Cambridge, today I came back, and tomorrow I go to Lutterworth in Leicestershire and back. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t really like driving. Actually, I suspect I came to that conclusion a long time ago. At any rate, the roads are too overcrowded, and there are too many morons with no ability to drive properly or safely. I much prefer driving at night; at least the morons are safely off the roads with only a few exceptions by then (can you tell I’m not really a people person yet?).

I’ve been experimenting with higher and higher tyre pressures on my car. It sits on low profile sporty tyres, and I’ve in the past always run them at around 32-35PSI. More recently I upped that to 38-40PSI, and for this trip I went to 42PSI on all tyres. The tyres are rated as safe up to 50PSI, so no danger of blowing them out there. The difference to the rolling resistance that it makes, and therefore the fuel economy, is quite staggering. Even with my foot down all the way home, we still averaged for the entire trip 37.6mpg, which from a large Swedish tank is not far off the record of 39.6mpg that it acheived whilst being driven by a Nun. Well, me driving like a Nun at any rate; I swear too much to be a real Nun. Oh, and I like lingerie and don’t care about religion – that tends to disqualify you from being a Nun too I find.

Tomorrow’s trip to Lutterworth is for a big job interview for the day job. Fingers crossed that I get it as it means a lot more money, job security and working hours that I know well in advance. Fingers crossed. Unfortunately any job that might come from this interview might impinge on the time I have for doing my writing, which isn’t so hot. But needs must when times are hard in a recession. I haven’t heard from the agent yet; I sent the last manuscript out over a month and a half ago. I’ve chased him up at least three times now with no answer, so I’m going to call it a loss and send out to other agents. I’m disappointed, but I’ve found in the past too many agents who promise the moon on a stick, but then struggle to even deliver the stick and even then only after many months of let downs.