The bright warm sunshine that streamed in through the office windows – whilst I was hard at work on Friday afternoon – vanished in time for the weekend, true to form. Up here in my little corner of the world, the one gripe that we all – rich, poor, cab driver, CEO, native born or immigrant – share, is the weather and its propensity to turning on a whim at the most inopportune of moments.

 For the last hour of work, I had fantasised about the weekend, and all the fun exciting things I was going to get up to – an hour at the gym, lunch and then a movie with Q., a house warming party at O.’s and an extended video editing session at the church I do life at.

It was only 8.30am before my genuine enthusiasm for the weekend was worn away by the weather, leaving my well laid plans in tatters. It was classic wet, cold and windy, and just the sight of the fog rolling in over Pittodrie from the relative warmth of my kitchen window did my lethargy no end of good. I did manage to drag myself to the gym on Saturday morning – thanks to the tenacity of my god daughter. She and her dad O. attend early start swimming classes at the city gym I use, and the one time I didn’t plan on being there at the same time that she would, I ended up being squealed to over the phone. In fairness to her, she’s one of my biggest fans, bragging non-stop to her Mom and Uncle about how fit I have become – burgeoning belly keg or not.

 Gym done and dusted, it turned out my friend Q. was no longer up for a movie – we’d wanted to see Man of Steel- so I did the next best thing for me which was to head home and grab lunch. Lunch was a cup of oats with skimmed milk, microwaved, whilst I looked out of my window at the foggy horizon.

Lunch done, I ended up on my couch, curled up with a book, and an eye on the TV and re-runs of The Big Bang Theory. The book was Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s ‘The sound of Things Falling‘ (Telegraph review here), a meandering tale of chance encounters, a disillusioned law professor and an ex-convict somehow ending up with intertwined lives in the aftermath of Columbia’s drug wars and the death of Pablo Escobar.

By the time I was wrapping up the book, it was well past 11pm – the house warming party had been missed and dinner ended up being another (bigger) bowl of cereal, which was how I ended up spending well nigh all of my Saturday indoors.

The plus side was I’d finally completed a book in 2013 – it’s been a piss poor year (non-academic) reading wise for me – and I felt well rested…

Life’s good…