Daylight savings must have been thought up by a very bossy person. It is quite impressive to be able to force a whole country to get up an hour earlier every day. The long evenings will be nice, but oh, this first early-rising day is grim.

The weekend was good, though, albeit – as usual – not long enough.

We took the kids to see the new Mr Bean movie on Saturday. Mr Bean was on good form, so we all enjoyed that.

Then we thought we’d go for a bit of educational uplift, so we watched The History Boys on DVD in the evening. The kids didn’t get much from it – it sent them to sleep, in fact, but Bobs and I quite enjoyed it. A bit dated, I thought, and too much a play that's been filmed, but it had some good moments.

And then on Sunday we went for a long (well, it felt long to me, though Bobby said it was trivial) and rather muddy bike ride, which I enjoyed very much.

Sophie needed to readjust her bike helmet here ...



And here's a picture of a field that I took while we waited (and waited, and waited, and waited...) for Soph to get the helmet just right.



This is one of the reasons that I love living where we do – it's easy to get in to London, but we are also just minutes away from some really beautiful green spaces. There's a huge park almost on our doorstep, and just the other side of it is farm land and woods. And the public rights of way and common access laws mean that we have access to all those places. What's odd is how arbitrarily we chose to live here. When we were looking for somewhere to live, our only criteria were "reasonably close to Bobby's work", and "good schools". So we looked at the school league tables within ten miles of Bobby's work, and then got in the car and drove around various towns until we found one - this one - that had a good feel. So really, we could quite easily have chosen any number of other, equally pleasant little towns, and never set foot here at all. Or, if Bobby had picked another job, we could have ended up in a completely different part of the country. We considered living in Barnstaple, in Devon, for instance, and also considered Harrogate, which is up north near York. I wonder how different our lives would be right now if we'd gone with either of those options.