The Languid Goat Is Always Thin

An entry on Martin's journal about public holidays with special reference to the Civil Service was about to give rise to my usual muttering of "for this I pay my taxes" when I learned that I am actually one of only three in our office today. This doesn't improve my mood significantly, already suffering as I was with a monstrous headache and several sets of yet more monstrous instructions.

I have been attempting to cheer myself up with crappy music, including Rolf Harris' version of Stairway to Heaven (a genius re-interpretation of that hackneyed and trite piece of pomposity) but it hasn't taken me very far.

Spent the first half of the bank holiday weekend being a Catholic at Westminster Cathedral and the latter half being an uncle in the wilds (and I do mean wilds: two miles to the nearest other building of any kind) of County Durham, where my sister and her brood have settled. Gorgeous countryside and they have an enormous decaying farmhouse, three acres, a bunch of chickens, a few sheep, and no television, which seems to suit my nephews and nieces (the latter just became plural, it was the christening that actually dragged me the length of the country for the first time... enduring a closed Kings Cross, a GNER train that had to be caught at Finsbury Park an hour or so before kick-off of an Arsenal game at home, and three and a half hours on the bloody thing for nearly a hundred quid). I think I'm too old or too young to live that much in the middle of nowhere for the present though. And lovely though they all are, how my sister manages to deal with one child, let alone five, a dog, two cats, the sheep and the chickens, in the wilds of nowhere, when she's actually fairly unwell, is beyond me.

Ho hum. Back to disentangling CPR Part 64...