Hottest night ever

The weather turned a bit nasty this morning and went all cloudy and overcast whilst remaining stupefyingly muggy. I walked to my osteopath in Borough just as it started to spit with rain, which, for an hairy man is the worst sort of weather possible. Within seconds I couldn't tell what was rain and what was sweat.

Last night was surreal. I've seldom encountered such a hot night. Hardly surprising. Yesterday was the hottest July day in the UK on record! I slept above the duvet and still felt like I was lying on an electric blanket. At about 5am, I went into the sitting room and lay on the sofa with the telly on in the background. I think it was some sort of house decorating show on Channel 5 presented by that posh bloke, Alistair Appleton, who seems to have shaved his beard off again. I drifted in and out of consciousness, wondering whether I shouldn't just acknowledge defeat and get up. In the end, I went back to bed, and slept in a hallucinatory state until about 9.

My osteopath today was a bit of a Yoda figure (I've never seen a Star Wars film and have no idea what Yoda is, but one of his students described him in those terms, which I took to mean someone with perception and great manual dexterity.) He basically grabbed my neck, effortlessly clicked it in two places and then the rest of my back suddenly felt all supple and wonderful again. There's magic in some fingers!

I went up to Kentish Town after lunch and worked in a cafe. At the moment, I'm trying to get a sense of what it was like to be a radical student in the early 1960s. We all know the issues which got young people all excited in the late 1960s, but what was happening before the summer of love and the massive student uprisings of 1967 and 1968? Did British students really know what was going on in Vietnam in 1964, and if they did, did they care? I'm actually wondering if British students got their knickers in a twist about anything at all. So if you're reading this, and you were a radical student in Britain between 1963 and 1965 (ish), please get in touch!

At 4pm, we had a lengthy meeting with Uncle Archie and Cat about our television project later in the year. I'm afraid I've signed a non-disclosure agreement, so from now on, there may be a lot of rather tantalising passages in this blog where I say things like "I was filming in Durham today" without being able to talk about anything but the journey up and what I had for tea. Suffice to say the project has been green lit and will be happening at some point between now and February. Readers will be the first to know about it.

We walked home over the Heath. There's a route I know which seems to avoid the incredibly steep Highgate West Hill. It's funny, you still end up at the top of Highgate Hill, so it can't actually be any less steep a walk. Perhaps the gradient is softer over a much longer distance. Anyway, the Heath looked particularly green and majestic in the late afternoon sunlight.

We came home and started busily tidying the house. We're going away on our hollibubs on Saturday and want to come home to a nice clean and tidy flat. How ludicrous is that? The strong desire to have a tidy house when you're away, just so you don't feel like terrible sluts when you return! We really went for it. Hoover, polish, bleach... We're exhausted! Still, I had a Mel and Kim album to keep me upbeat, so I'm not complaining. Get fresh at the weekend, people!