Jolly nice weekend

Friday - Nick and Toby came round and respectively cleaned and tidied the house for me and built up the Klein as a singlespeed. It feels like the best it's ever been set up - that short conrod stem and the Pablo Escobars make it feel really nice and chuckable. Shame the rear brake isn't plumbed in yet, but that should be achieved Tuesday.
Went for a drink down the Oval on Friday night with Jason - felt like death, got home about midnight, had an interesting dream about signals intelligence interrupted at 2am by the cat howling at me. Put it out, went back to bed.
Ran 4.5 miles in 37.5 minutes, spent the afternoon feeling awful and reading Falling Angel. Which is ok, but if you know the twist, the whole book seems like an exercise in form and nothing else.
Further, because it's written in such pared-down language, you never feel enough of the horror that the latter parts should engender in you.
But maybe that's just how it is; I remember missing the first half hour of Angel Heart and thinking how increibly dark and mysterious it was. And then I bought the DVD and realised I hadn't missed the first half hour, I'd missed the first 5 minutes, and it was an awful lot less than I'd given it credit for. Oh well.
To Covent Garden in the evening to see the Camden Chamber Orchestra (James T playing violin). Some Mendelssohn - very nice, and I was familiar with it for a change, which helps. But then some Shostakovich, where the solo cellist kept getting lost (not hard, given how tough the piece sounded) - although since it was Shostakovich, if she'd just barrelled on, probably half of us wouldn't have even noticed. As it was, the frequent pauses and discussions with the conductor made it clear that Something Was Up. And the cellist did look Very Cross. Very muscular too though - I guess that's all that frantic bowing for you.
Had two pints of Stella, got drunk very fast - didn't eat enough on Saturday, and I felt blindsided to have gone off and been cultural, and then had wife-beater foisted on me. Got home about 1 am, meddled with the internet, went to bed.
Up at 7.30 on Sunday, drove to play tennis while not really capable of seeing straight. Lost 6-3, 3-1, I think - bit blurry towards the end. Then drove at pace to Jonny's. Was racing a Ferrari some of the way there - nice to see that you can keep pace in a beat-up old Golf, but then it wasn't the open road. Had some hilarious aggressive driving from Jonny's place in Tooting to Aston Hill (didn't die! woo!) and then did 8 runs.
I must have improved a bit, because 6 of those were on the Black Run, and while the drop off in the woods still fazed me, everything else was fine. I even managed to get over the big root near the top - something that always used to pull me up short. Pathetic that it's taken 3 years to be able to do that, but it's nice to think that I have got better. Plus a lot less brakes on all the rest of it (until cocaine alley, at least). So maybe 6 months off the bike wasn't such a bad thing after all.
Jonny, meanwhile, thinks I look thin. To the point of laughing at me for having spindly little arms. So perhaps I should start fattening myself up again. Or take a set of photos to record spindliness over the year.
Back to Tooting via M40, huge plate of onion bhajia and curry, then back to Beckenham, and home to bed, via an episode of Peep Show. Woke up today feeling shattered. Ah well, good work.
27 press ups Friday, 28 Saturday. Should do 30 today.