Peculiar Lie-Ins

For what feels like the first time since, ooh, somewhere around puberty, B. and I managed a weekend off this past weekend -- strictly no work, no writing, no unpacking, and no house-related fretting permitted. Instead, relaxing, lying around in bed, going out and eating nice food was the order of the day. Except Saturday morning, when the broadband engineer was coming -- but hey, we coped.

(You can read B.'s own account of the fun on her new LiveJournal, Irregular and Incoherent Musings, which she's just started under the splendid LJ username titaniccapybara.)

So, Saturday was spent lounging around, playing the Settlers of Catan card game (the rather fine Wizards and Dragons expansion which B., of course, won), welcoming the broadband man and keeping him away from the cats, and then playing with the shiny new PC connection. In the evening we watched Wilde, which we'd recorded during the week, and went out for a fantastic meal at Glasnost, a restaurant within only slightly overstretched walking distance of our new house.

Glasnost is fab -- arty in ambience without being painfully trendy, combining a very decent selection of gorgeous veggie food (they also do meat and seafood, which I'm assured are just as adequate) with access to a mindblowing Bailey's and Maltesers cheesecake, and flavoured vodka shots. We came home late, full and somewhat glowing. Very pleasant.

On Sunday, after more lounging around, we headed to Bristol Zoo, via a very nice all-day veggie breakfast at a café (unwebbed, so far as I know, and I can't actually remember the name) in Clifton.

The zoo (once famous for housing a popular elderly elephant, Wendy, who sadly died a couple of years ago) contains numerous excellent animals. We particularly like the colony of penguins (including a gay couple, apparently), the very cute red panda and the lions, who a couple of years ago produced a beautiful cub (now resident somewhere in Germany). The zoo also houses two specimens of that most excellent rodent species, the capybara, who are effectively giant bone-idle guinea-pigs and can't be sufficiently commended for their lifestyle of lying around in straw, eating and taking the occasional dip.

Once we'd left the Zoo, we indulged ourselves with insanely rich hot chocolate and further chocolate cheesecake at the most excellent Bar Chocolat in Clifton, one of B.'s favourite locations in Bristol. The cheesecake was to die for, but I didn't think the dark chocolate pecan slice worked terribly well.

We then went to see Collateral, which was violent but vacuous fun. (It wouldn't have been our first choice, but we couldn't get to either Hero -- B.'s preference -- or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow -- mine -- at a sensible time.) Then home, followed by some decent enough ready-made curries from Tesco's, and bed.

This is my half-term week -- although it's going to be broken up by a day's course in library computer systems, annoyingly -- so with any luck I ought to be able to finish the short story and get down to some substantial work on the novella. Certainly this weekend has helped prepare me for it.