After we got back from Italy Emma headed off to Finland for a work conference and then took a few days afterwards with some workmates to do some walking. I spent the week at home wishing I was on holiday still and wishing I hadn’t decided £350 wasn’t to much for a ticket to Finland.

We then entered into June where we had the three weekends filled with activities starting off with Epsom Derby Day. We sat on the hill with picnic blankets cider and the obligatory bottle of sauvignon blanc/rose/champers dont you know. I think I might have won a few quid but when you are betting the princely sums of up to £3 a race its easy to lose track of these things.

The following weekend we took a bike ride out to see our friends Laurie and Anita and their kids. We planned to cycle a circular route called Chiltern Heritage Trail that we found on the Chiltern Council Website. This was ideal as Prestwood where Laurie and Anita live was around half way through. After finally finding the start (It all looked much simpler on the PDA phone) it was a really good ride. The terrain was nice and varied and thre were loads of quiet little villages and country pubs to stop at. The reason for our visit was the end of season football bash with a covers band, really cheap beer and dancing till the wee hours. The next day after a cooked breakfast supplied by Laurie we continued on our way around the rest of the circular route back to Amersham.

The next week was filled with some frantic present buying for Emma’s birthday which was actually kind of easy as we travel light the rules were strict nothing big and everything needed to be practical. So an SD memory card and a solar panel along with a few cycling books it was. The following weekend we went to a Silent Disco at the South Bank Center where Andrew Weatherall was playing as part of the Massive Attack curated Meltdown festival, which was very awesome. Being able to have loud thumping music one minute then order a beer in a normal voice then jump back on a different channel for some nice electro and breakbeat. Ive done this once before at Glastonbury but adding the sophistication of the South Bank Centre was very nice.

The evening of 22nd June saw us at Radiohead in Victoria Park which was another very awesome night. Im a Radiohead convert via Emma so I cant say I recognised every song but the ones I knew were awesome and theres nothing like being pushed around in a mosh pit by kids half your age to make you feel like an old man, who is hopefully still young at heart.

Interspersed amongst this fun stuff we have decided to move out of our flat a combination of other flatmates leaving and very difficult to deal with estate agents have driven us to this. Normally we use The Gumtree website when flat hunting but this time as we wanted to search a few different suburbs I decided to write a little screen scraping code to merge a few different Gumtree website searched into a single search result set. Its still pretty rough and ready but does the trick and I find it much easier to read than the main site.

For those of you who last saw me bearded and shaggy headed Im now clean shaven and close cropped but not gonna scare you with any pics of my ugly mug.

Also been doing a spot of country walking in last few weeks trying to make the terrible UK summer last for just a little bit longer. Both walks so far very successful with pub stops half way.

Way back earlier in the year a few edited highlights include:

• Trip to Lisbon with a day cycling to Sesimbra and night in Sintra
• A trip to Morocco with Cat and Graham
• One very wet, very muddy, very rockin Glastonbury 2007. Not many pics as my camera stayed quivering in its dry bag the whole festival
• Discovering we have foxes in our garden
• Going to some amazing music gigs
• Loads of cycling around London, Isle of Wight, Cambridge and various other day trips over summer