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Romance is not dead
Feb. 13th, 2012 09:32 pmWe don't celebrate Saint Valentine's day in this household (though it was my uncle Ted's birthday). Instead we celebrate an anniversary on February 13th. For the benefit of anyone who may be contemplating some romantic gestures, this is how we spent our day:
We rose at the normal time, with the normal amount of grumbling, breakfasted and spent the morning at work. Late morning we went out to purchase a romantic gift: a new computer for me.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler has for some time been suggesting that the unreliability of the wifi connection to my desktop may result from the age of the computer rather than from any flaw in the wifi itself; buying a new computer seemed to me like an extravagant way to test this hypothesis, but it has been growing more and more reluctant to start in the mornings, having to be coaxed to life with much application of ALT-CTRL-DEL. And it gave us a very nasty scare yesterday. So we ran a hasty back-up, and this morning we went down to Dot.Com Systems to order its successor.
Then we went out to lunch. 43-44 Saddler Street, a double-fronted old building clinging to the steep scarp up from the riverbank has been empty for altogether too long (we toured it once, back in the seventies, when it was on the market. The estate agent loaned us a torch, and we explored room after room, floor after floor. We could have bought it, just, but the selling price was the least of the expenditure it needed). Now it is an Italian restaurant called Zizzi, part of a chain, and joint winner of the City of Durham Trust's Architectural Award. All good reasons to check it out, and we had a very pleasant lunch (I had arancini, salad - a huge pile of rocket and watercress interspersed with beetroot, creamy ricotta, charred artichoke hearts and toasty pine nuts - and a pleasant cakey dessert; Marlborough sauvignon to drink).
We walked home via the Oxfam bookshop, along the riverbank = was the grey heron standing below St Oswald's church one of the pair who live by the ice rink, or are there more of them around? - and over Prebends Bridge. This brought us home in time to watch Countdown, then a pot of tea and back to work. Monday evening is an interminable series of University Challenge (no, seriously, they've worked out some Byzantine system whereby everybody plays everybody else, and then all the runners up get another chance. Fortunately, we enjoy it), so we stopped for a little something in front of the television: cheese scones, and there may have been more wine...
And now I'm here, writing about it. And so we celebrate, because actually I am very lucky to enjoy my life, day to day.
We rose at the normal time, with the normal amount of grumbling, breakfasted and spent the morning at work. Late morning we went out to purchase a romantic gift: a new computer for me.
durham_rambler has for some time been suggesting that the unreliability of the wifi connection to my desktop may result from the age of the computer rather than from any flaw in the wifi itself; buying a new computer seemed to me like an extravagant way to test this hypothesis, but it has been growing more and more reluctant to start in the mornings, having to be coaxed to life with much application of ALT-CTRL-DEL. And it gave us a very nasty scare yesterday. So we ran a hasty back-up, and this morning we went down to Dot.Com Systems to order its successor.Then we went out to lunch. 43-44 Saddler Street, a double-fronted old building clinging to the steep scarp up from the riverbank has been empty for altogether too long (we toured it once, back in the seventies, when it was on the market. The estate agent loaned us a torch, and we explored room after room, floor after floor. We could have bought it, just, but the selling price was the least of the expenditure it needed). Now it is an Italian restaurant called Zizzi, part of a chain, and joint winner of the City of Durham Trust's Architectural Award. All good reasons to check it out, and we had a very pleasant lunch (I had arancini, salad - a huge pile of rocket and watercress interspersed with beetroot, creamy ricotta, charred artichoke hearts and toasty pine nuts - and a pleasant cakey dessert; Marlborough sauvignon to drink).
We walked home via the Oxfam bookshop, along the riverbank = was the grey heron standing below St Oswald's church one of the pair who live by the ice rink, or are there more of them around? - and over Prebends Bridge. This brought us home in time to watch Countdown, then a pot of tea and back to work. Monday evening is an interminable series of University Challenge (no, seriously, they've worked out some Byzantine system whereby everybody plays everybody else, and then all the runners up get another chance. Fortunately, we enjoy it), so we stopped for a little something in front of the television: cheese scones, and there may have been more wine...
And now I'm here, writing about it. And so we celebrate, because actually I am very lucky to enjoy my life, day to day.
