With the days getting noticeably longer and it feeling like there were a few days without rain, I can only blame laziness for the fact that I walked a lot less in April than in March – nearly 60,000 few steps overall and only reached 10,000 steps on 3 days. As I only even got in the car three times and only went out on the bike three times, it sounds like I spent a lot of time indoors during April.

All of which makes it quite surprising that I don’t seem to have watched a lot of TV. On top of the few stapes like Pointless, I just watched the new series of The Cleaner and the two Murder Mystery films on Netflix. I did read quite a bit – eleven books on the Kindle; all fiction – and did find myself getting carried away and knocking out tranches of VBA code some evenings, but the truth is that I have felt really tired for most of the month and sometimes realise I have spent an hour just sitting.

This year I started reading Lee Child, Mark Billingham and Val McDermid and six of the books I read in April were by them, but I also took a chance on a couple of new (to me) authors and got round to reading the new Jonathan Coe book Bourneville, which I can thoroughly recommend. My relationship to Coe’s books is similar to how I feel about Quentin Tarantino films. Each time there is a new one I don’t get gripped by the premise and have to force myself to watch it, and then really enjoy it and wish I had watched it sooner, and I am the same with Coe’s books. Even though I have never read one that I didn’t like, I imagine I won’t like the next one, and then prove myself wrong.

It is not all doom and gloom though. I went and booked a holiday in Greece for later in the year, so we have something to look forward to, and I won another £50 on the Premium Bonds, which will at least get us a few cocktails by the beach. And talking of alcohol, I had my second drink of the year, another tin of Kopparberg.

Feeling in a generous mood when I got paid my bonus this year, I forked out to treat the grandkids to a day out at Thorpe Park, which they enjoyed nearly as much as me and their dad. We went on all the ridiculously extreme rides, and were in the park from the time it opened until just before it closed.

I may have only got out on the motorbike three times, but it was for more than just a few miles round the block to keep the battery charged up. I had a nice little run around East Sussex, and had a trip out to the East Grinstead record fair, where I picked up a few LPs. I also treated myself to a couple of shiny new LPs by Porcupine Tree and Iron Maiden.

With Jayne working an odd shift pattern, we do not find our days off coinciding too much, but apart from the day at Thorpe Park we also managed get out to Essex for a day to visit the ancestral bungalow in Wickford. It was a nice day, ideal for taking the bikes and thus saving four quid on Dartford Crossing tolls and beating the queues for the tunnel, but we had promised to take the dogs for a visit so had to take the car. I am increasingly finding South Essex to be a depressing place, but it is always good to catch up with mum.

I have just realised where a lot of the time went in April. I treated us to new phones. Nothing too flashy, but a sightly newer version of Android, so lots of little changes to get used to and a lot of messing around getting everything set up as close to the way it was before.

To be honest, the weather has been relentlessly dreadful for most of 2023 and the first four months feel like a bit of a write-off, with me just waiting for the year to start properly. Maybe that will happen in May.