So, should I carry on as if nothing has happened or should I explain my absence?

An eventful weekend. Dinner with friends on Friday; real Swiss cheese fondue with a real Swiss person on Saturday (and Swiss chocolate); Storm damage in garden ignored on Sunday; Dinner with other friends on Sunday night followed by huddling in cold dark house due to power loss; Power back, but no running water on Bank holiday Monday; Some storm damage repair undertaken.

And the clocks went back.

I was more than a little irked about the power failure. We're supposed to live in the top twenty of mumble something nations and a little wind knocks out the power for 24 hours! Grr. This is probably an unreasonable position to take but I'm taking it anyway.

I cooked today. Roast pork with roast potatoes and roast carrots and parsnips and not roasted broccoli. Paddy, the little bollox, ate very little. Ingrate. I made chocolate cake on Friday. Maybe I'm discovering my inner caterer. I like cooking, and we have a well equipped kitchen. I should do it more.

And there are days when I'm Dynam-nick (which is hard to pronounce) and I zoom about the house and garden doing Stuff That Needs Doing, but those days seem to be vastly outnumbered by the ones where I lie under the two duvets and hope that someone else will get Paddy out of his cot and just ten more minutes in bed, thank-you.

In recent news, Ireland voted to accept the Treaty of Nice. There was some genuine dialog and questions asked and answered about what the EU was and what we wanted from it (a huge unaccountable bureaucracy and more money, respectively). In a couple of years time we will be asked to ratify a European Constitution and I hope that the discussions that were started by the Nice Treaty are still going on then. Then we will be in a much better position to decide what we want to do.

I for one would like our sacred cow, neutrality, to be given thorough scrutiny. We are philosophically and economically aligned along very obvious lines and it's about time that we said so. A lot of furore was created by the bringing into being of the EU's rapid reaction force, all of which stressed that our neutrality wasn't undermined by it, but none of which questioned if our neutrality was worth protecting.

I don't, however, expect this to be discussed by many (or any).

On the pop culture front I have acquired the first series of Buffy the Vampire slayer on VHS (that old format). I know, I'm so far behind, but I'm willing to learn and I may even end up seeing what all the fuss is about.