Ball breakingly expensive

I have been with Julie Clare all day today. We went to the knitting shop in Crouch End where we met Tina and looked at yarn, needles, buttons and all sorts of craft-related trinkets and bits and bobs. 

We went shopping at Budgens opposite the old town hall. It's a bewildering supermarket. Everything it stocks seems to be in the wrong place. All the fruit and vegetables are laid out in fancy baskets and nothing looks like an ordinary shop. It's also ball-breakingly expensive. I spent £50 on a single bag of shopping, which shocked me profoundly. Yes, there was some Hagen Dazs ice cream in there, and a couple of packets of Parmesan, but still...

I don't know when Budgens went all "high end." It was our local big supermarket in Rushden when I was growing up and I don't ever remember it being fancy or prohibitively expensive. If anything, quite the opposite. Kids used to hang out in the  car park with their bags of chips, boom boxes and stolen cars, before spending the evening joy-riding the country lanes out towards Cambridgeshire. 

We came home and made home-made pesto whilst watching the final of The Voice with Abbie. For the record, the blind girl should never have won, and it was really weird how the 2nd and 3rd placed contestants were whisked away without being congratulated for doing so well. We all know the person who comes second in a reality show is likely to have the most interesting career! 

There was a brilliant "show and tell" towards the end of our evening when Nathan revealed an assortment of recently-knitted creations, Julie played us all a film she'd been editing, Tina gave us a fashion show demonstrating dresses she'd bought to show off her new slimline figure and we played everyone our new song. Sadly, in the process, we realised that we'd written something with far too great a range. After the girls had gone, Nathan and I tried to work out how best to remedy this situation. It very speedily became incredibly stressful with both of us coming up with solutions which the other one hated, and we ended up having a terrible argument as a result. I suspect the stress of the last few months is finally beginning to work its way to the surface and I worry I'm not dealing with it quite as well as I might. 

So, a rather lovely day has gone slightly sour, all because of a silly song. I guess Nathan and I are rather aware of how good the song is and simply want to get it right, which is why we're both getting so sodding passionate about things! Ah! The creative temperament.  

It's raining. I can see it thundering down under the lamp post outside. The BBC weather suggests it ought to be dry. I know this because Tina asked just before we left. I assume she was wondering if she could leave some washing out on the line over night. I am astonished at how awful the BBC's weather forecasting is. Our shoot was seriously compromised by their inability, not just to forecast the weather, but seemingly to work out what was going on outside at the very moment they published their reports!