Surprisingly, I managed to honour my promise to be in before 9.30 (admittedly cutting it quite fine) and had stuff to do which kept me occupied all day. I didn't even have time to do any trading! Mind you, when I did log in to Datek at 2.30pm I was mildly concerned none of my stocks were doing anything until I realised the time difference had changed. Duh!

The advantage of being in work on time is that you get to go home earlier as well - always useful. I was in Sainsbury's buying stuff for the week when Jon sent me a text saying he was cooking dinner and had enough for two, so I bought some salad and wine bits and pieces and headed over to eat gorgeously cooked salmon with sautéed potato and stuff. Drank lots of wine (we threw a coin to see whether Mildred would spend the night and was naughty and had some cigarettes.

The one proviso was that I would get to watch Voyager whilst he cooked. Jon isn't really a big Star Trek person.

After dinner, I headed up to Newbury's new "members" pub, The Wellington Arms, vaguely staggering after the wine at Jon's. Drank a while in there (which really finished me off) before ringing Matthew and slurring at him for an hour or so. We have agreed to go to Paris for Easter, if he can get away from parental commitments. Probably not quite as extravagant as a night's clubbing in Sydney, but fun. Richard pointed out in the office this afternoon that he couldn't comment about things like that as last year he flew to Toronto to watch Star Wars.

The Wellington Arms is quite nice. There are some scrummy staff and a handful of French students who, as I was pissed, seemed a perfect target for my now legendary pissed Francophone attempts. They were nice and sat and chatted for a while before we were all thrown out at closing.

My suggestion at work that our army have better things to do than dig holes and that we should ask the Germans to help because they're better at it than us was met with claims of bad taste.