The other day I whipped out some lube

and applied it liberally to my bike's chain, which was starting to sound a little dry and rattly. Pleased with my handiwork, I cycled stealthily to work. At lunchtime I jumped on the bike again to head over to Leith Walk to buy some lunch. The sun was out and I was enjoying the break after a particularly taxing morning; I gazed around at the dog walkers, smokers on their breaks and the pastoral scene in general and let myself relax into the rhythm of the pedalling and the warmth of the day.

I then shat myself as a middle-aged woman walked directly into my path from behind a parked van. I rammed on the brakes, tipping up on the front wheel and barely avoided body-checking her. I plopped back down onto the back wheel and stared at her, all of a foot away.

We mutually and profusely apologised and set off on our respective ways. I reckon we'd been about half a second from broken bones, but there we went, off for lunch or a meeting or whatever. I had a compound spring/twitch in my step for the rest of the day.

It's been a bit of a week for birthdays: Ash's was last Tuesday, so we went out for a little meal round the corner with a bottle of Tesco's finest (very definitively a lowercase 'f') left over from the dinner party a couple of weeks back, and came home both surprisingly early and surprisingly drunk. CSI is our current TV drug of choice, what with the Virgin/Sky spat cutting off our supply of the highest grade, and we settled in to loll off the wine. Incidentally, Mogwai seem to get fairly regular outings on CSI and I was prompted to dust off Young Team for a few listens. Glaswegian neds they may be, but they can rock the ambient-prog-soundscape (ack) genre with the best of them.

On Saturday morning Ash and I did a bit of hurried antique shopping, and managed to buy a set of six 'Ercol' Windsor chairs for the downright indecent price of £42.50 for the lot. These bad boys are '50s design icons that go for upward of £200 new. They're curiously small (if they were Ikean they'd be called Bilbo or Frodo) but with the addition of some cushions they'll make excellent dining room chairs...and I've just spend a paragraph talking about furniture.

That afternoon I drove over to Fife with Jeff and Devon for the second of the week's birthdays, this time Bryan's, deep in the heart of Methil. It was great to see him again, and the supporting cast (cousin after cousin and a corpulent neighbour - "Youse guys have waistlines, ah've got a coastline,") kept us entertained while the weather switched arbitrarily from cold to hot to wet and back again. We made our excuses after a pleasant afternoon and headed home, the sky visibly brightening as we crossed the Forth Road Bridge. I'm going to miss Edinburgh!