Enjoyable visit from Annie at the weekend: some socialising, a bit of culture and a bit of companionable silence with our books. Jan and Mark came for dinner on Saturday: I'd got the butcher do cut me some nice thin slices of topside for beef olives, and it worked better than the rump steak I got from the other butcher. Martyn made his celebrated bruschette for starters, and Mr Morrison procured a couple of French tarts for us. We were surprisingly ready for roast beef for lunch next day at Jane's! That was a nice little gathering: she had invited a former fellow magistrate as well, so the six of us enjoyed a good chatter, finally rising from the table at 6:00 pm!

On Monday we went to an exhibition of English watercolours and drawings at the Courtauld, via the Café Rouge in Wellington Street where, since we'd been eating so sparingly at the weekend, we got stuck into steak-frites, puddings and a bottle of merlot. Life is hard, I tell ya.

What else? After a week of dry weather, the grass was just dry enough on Saturday for me to get out and cut it. The motor mower is not all that easy to operate, but I'm starting to learn its little ways, and it is easy to start. I'm not sure whether I grizzled here last year about the price of getting the hedges trimmed. Some of them I can do myself, but the tall ones across the back and at the side are a bit much without specialist kit. In 2009 I took our usual chap on trust, and he came back with a bill for £190. This year I asked the fellow from the nearby farm to quote, and he charged us £70 for a job that was every bit as good. So, with the garden returning to life and a shade more kempt and shevelled, it's looking good out there. I must make a start today on pricking out the vast numbers of seedlings: the achilleas, lobelias, antirrhinums and some rudbeckias have germinated well, so I have a lot of work to do.

I was to have been in court on Monday to finish a part-heard trial that we began last December, and that was already 18 months after the matters complained of. I am trying to find out at whose instigation it was 'vacated'. Didn't help that I've lost today's sitting as well, since the courtroom was needed for a yoof trial. I have sat in the Magistrates' Court precisely once in the past three months, and I was terribly rusty last time. Oh well, I have an extra at the end of the month, since I have taken over a new Magistrate for his last two mentored sittings, his original mentor being unwell.

I see that the Orbieu has been up to its tricks again, though the graph started to flatten yesterday at a little over 3 metres. Fortunately, I hadn't been watching it, so the danger had come and gone by the time I was aware of it. Of course, even if we'd flooded to the first floor, it would be a little local difficulty by comparison with the awful events in Japan.