Outdoor furniture and new phones

On Saturday Paul and I ventured out to Ikea at Wembley to get some outdoor furniture for the terrace. We picked up some wooden furniture but it hasn’t been oiled so after putting it together on Saturday evening and putting it outside, we then brought it in for the night in case it rained. I put it out Sunday morning and enjoyed my breakfast out in the sun.

Then lots of clouds came over so I brought it inside again – Luckily because it then started to rain really heavily and continued for the rest of the day! We really have to buy some oil and paint it this week so we can leave it outside! We’re also going to buy some kind of lounger – because I really want to lounge outside in the sun while reading. We got a lift home from Ikea with the guy who was delivering our furniture and he was a crazy man! He broke SO many road rules – if I was a religious woman I would have been praying. He was a Somali guy who had lived in Finland for 25 years and is now working in the UK. He said he has 8 children and he asked us about our attitude to gender roles, which we happily discussed!

On Sunday I was quite slack and didn’t bother going to the London Zine Symposium or the anti-Racism concert that was on in the East of London (although Patrick Wolf is the only performer I recognised in the line-up!). Instead, I accompanied Paul into town (Oxford Street) where we were going to get new phones for both of us but they only had one in stock of what we wanted so now Paul has a new MDA Vario III which is the T-Mobile version of the HTC Tytn II. I will probably get one next weekend. It is very cool!

I’m trying to convince Paul that we should go to the Hay Festival for the second long weekend in May. It actually goes for ten days but we could see heaps of really interesting writers and speakers if we just went for that weekend. Plus it will cost us about £100 each day for the both of us to see all the sessions we’d like (each individual session is ticketed!). Some of the people speaking are Naomi Klein, Christopher Hitchens, Will Self, Cherie Booth, Gore Vidal, Fay Weldon, Salmon Rushdie, Jimmy Carter, Boris Spassky, Eoin Colfer, plus lots of scientists and the former UN Under Secretary General for Communications talking on Iraq. It looks really interesting.

And I started reading Beloved by Toni Morrison on the weekend and I’m really enjoying it!