It’s been a busy few days, well what I mean by that is that I have been doing something in each of the three evenings and now on Thursday I am doing my mid-week writing for the diary and the podcast journey.

Bridge on Monday evening was a mixed bag again, and as Alan says we won plenty of coconuts, which by that he means outright bottoms, disaster hands. We had a much better second half, having thought at the mid-session tea break that we were hovering around the 20% mark or worse. It turned out that the first half was a bit better than we thought, my raise in spades to game with 1 high card point (HCP) when we only had 15 of the 40 between us, gave us a good result although we didn’t make the 10 tricks required. By the end of the evening, we managed to scrape over the 50% mark.

Bridge online on Tuesday was a splendid result, 1st again as we did the previous week, with 13 tables. The last hand was a slam against us watched by the talented Anoyrkatis family. Sally who runs the sessions and does so much for bridge in North Devon was dummy and we were able to review both that hand, with praise for my defence, and an earlier particularly difficult slam hand. In that hand the lead against us made the problem difficult for Alan and afterwards examining the hand it took me several minutes to fathom out how it was possible to make the contract. Anyway, I went to bed pleased with myself for a change.

There won’t be much bridge for the next six weeks as Alan will be on holiday for most of it. This suits me because I’ve got a podcast to launch and some videos to work on.

On Wednesday I had a late round of golf with Peter starting at half past six and making it round to the 16th on the East course. I don’t recall seeing anyone else on the two courses after we were halfway up the first hole. Lovely to have the course to yourselves and not being held up, as a result you get into a rhythm and there was little looking in the now longer rough for a ball. The wind was quite strong at probably around 20mph, which is enough to make for a miserable round if you are not striking the ball correctly. The result was 5 pars and nothing worse than a double-bogey and a round that if continued would have been at my handicap. So, I went to bed pleased with myself for a second night.

At work I’ve been looking into the software, equipment, and workflow for making videos, and have taken the first of the podcast episodes and converted it into the content for a small video with slides. On Thursday I received a long box which contained an enormous green screen which is wider than the three-seater leather sofa, which had me thinking that we could do a “Friends” sketch and superimpose it on a scene from the Central Perk coffee bar. It was only a momentary thought which came about because the green screen at 2.2m, is wider than the sofa, and I had placed the box on top of the sofa before starting to unpack it.

I also received a metal tray for a projector or laptop that can screw into the top of my camera tripod. This should give me a more stable base than a laptop balanced on my thick cocktail book which lies on the footstool, which was on top of a chair, on top of the flower vase stand, an arrangement not destined to stay vertical for long, but nonetheless managed to get the webcam up to eye level so that I could do some tests to ascertain the size and width of the green screen.

When I posted some photos of the box and then the assembled green screen on WhatsApp there were a few family comments like can’t you send it back for a smaller one and also why don’t you use the old study as a studio. Now that was a good idea, as it is quite dark, but the green screen is a few inches too wide for the room. It would take a lot of effort to clear the old study as it has become the dumping ground for many items apart from the collection of debris of work stuff which would take me ages to work through to make sure there is nothing worth saving. But I will park that idea for a while, and if the videos take off then I might come back to it.

On Friday afternoon I did a bit of recording, and the green screen was high enough, but only just. The Blue Yeti microphone placed below me and just out of the field of view of the video, was quite acceptable when I watched the video clips. There are things to learn, but I think I can take what was recorded and turn it into a completed video for internal review.

Victoria and Reggie returned from Twickenham just as I was sending the 4-minute video to Danny, our companies’ owner. Reggie went bonkers when I came downstairs and joined them in the garden, hurling himself at me from a few feet away, tail wagging frantically.

Saturday was a day of gardening, hand-weeding the left-hand side of the back bed in the morning and getting on the mower in the afternoon while Victoria and Reggie disappeared for a walk, and with Reggie gone I could then leave the gates open. Unfortunately, I started the mower a few seconds after the visiting bell ringers started to pull the first bell as a countdown for the others to join them. I don’t know whether they could hear me, but the couple of others who were left outside probably thought fancy him starting to mow right when we are starting our practise. Truth be told, it had been raining on and off in the morning and you must pick your moments to mow the lawn, otherwise Reggie needs to stay indoors.

Victoria went off rowing late afternoon, and Reggie and I had a nap. We have no TV at the moment, well we have a TV, but the cable is now buried in the wall so we can’t use it until after the decorating is finished and the floor needs to be sanded and sealed first. Victoria read a book, and I did an hour on the Podcasting Journey before it was time for bed.

On Sunday I was down to Mole Valley early to get a few things including another 6 bags of landscape bark. After unloading it all I got the hand-mower out and started to mow the lawn edges and the bank where we no longer take our lives in our own hands and try to traverse it at an angle.

Again, while Victoria and Reggie were off for a short walk at noon, I took advantage of mowing the top of the new path down past the gate into the top part of the valley and stopping at the old fence that separates the two paddocks. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could cover this distance in 35 minutes and without completely filling the yellow delivery box that can take several full grass boxes from the mower. If I can mow up by the new hedge without ploughing into the saplings, then I reckon I can complete a whole circuit in less than 90 minutes and perhaps with the eventual grass paths in the valley area this might all be achieved in a little more than two hours which would be fabulous, and less than I would have expected.

Having wondered why I decided to strim and mow a path all the way around, one week on and I am now wondering why I hadn’t done this 20 years ago. The grass path has also been endorsed by Victoria as a great idea and you can see that Reggie loves it.

On Sunday we spent time deciding what colours to short list for the paint for the Playroom and Victoria returned from Barnstaple with a few tester pots. I don’t think either of us has a particular gift for colours and we must have both grown up surrounded with beige or white with a hint of something or other. The three green test pots are all darker than we would be used to with the really dark one being ruled out by Victoria because it reminded her of army camouflage paint. The middle colour which we will go for at the bottom of the walls below the dado rail reminds me of the colour of the transmitter that I crawled under as an apprentice when I was working in the environmental labs at Marconi.

Golf on Sunday with Peter was a mixed affair, starting great and gradually getting worse until I finally lost the ball on the 18th. I had six pars, but this was balanced by several double bogeys and two holes worse than this. The greens had been cut short for Captains day and having made it to within 70 yards of the green on the 15th in two I then proceeded to chip successfully to the very top of the slope to wait 30 seconds or more before the ball was blown off the green to end up first in the right-hand bunker and then a further four times with the ball ending further and further from the pin rolling past my feet. Five attempts to land the ball on the green, all of which in normal circumstances would probably have stayed on the top level waiting for my putt. But with 6 pars I did count it as a round of golf rather than a walk in the countryside.