L— got a flat tyre cycling home – the first time in at least seven years – in an inconvenient location nowhere near public transport. Her bike is a Brompton, so I attached my bicycle trailer and rode the fifteen minutes to Burgess Park to pick it up while she rented a Lime bike to get home.

At least, that was the idea. I arrived and realised that I had brought the trailer but left my pannier in the garden (again), and the straps I’d packed to attach the bike to the trailer were in the pannier, and as my trailer is flat I can’t carry anything without strapping it down. Sometimes, having a flat trailer is convenient, but based on my experience I’d say get one with a box, even if you aren’t as forgetful as I am.

After another half an hour I caught up with her again a bit further on, and we carried out the plan. It was better than pushing it the whole way, but I could have saved half an hour and a lot of unnecessary effort.

I laid down a jar of damson liqueur using some of the fruit I harvested from a tree nearby using my gizmo (a long stick with half a plastic bottle and a wire hook on the end). I’ll know how it turned out in a few months. I’ve put in a relatively small amount of sugar, because my last batch came out sweeter than I’d prefer and it’s easier to tweak that at the end.

I spent Thursday in an office with some of my colleagues. It was useful and enjoyable to be in the same place. However, it wasn’t entirely convenient: I didn’t have a pass, and ended up trapped in a kind of no man’s land between the toilets and the office when the others went out to buy lunch. Someone let me back into the office and I read a book while I waited.

If I were designing an office, I’d make it so that grown adults could take a piss unaccompanied, but that is, apparently, just me, because I’ve been in quite a few modern office buildings with access controls that make it very difficult to be a visiting biological organism.

We also got to experience the prelapsarian joy of going for a pint after work. Working in an office isn’t always enjoyable. Commuting can be an ordeal. But other people aren’t always a Sartrean hell: they can be the best part of work.

I finally fixed up the hundred-year-old banjo-ukulele (or ukulele-banjo, or banjolele, or whatever you want to call it, I can’t even decide myself) that I picked up in Deptford market a few weeks ago

A ukulele-banjo on the floor

Restored to playability and in great shape for a centenarian

I filed down the sprouted fret ends, levelled and profiled the frets, rounded the ends, adjusted the nut, put on new strings, and filed the bridge to have clear witness points. It sounds surprisingly sweet for such a maligned instrument.

The resonator still needs a bit of work, but it’s fully playable.

I learned to play When I’m Cleaning Windows. It was inevitable.

We watched Much Ado About Nothing at the local Surrey Docks city farm on Friday, outdoors (the weather co-operated, fortunately), performed by the Putney Arts Theatre. Much Ado is a fun play, and the whimsical production suited it well. It was an amateur production, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and nor was it here. The play was well-rehearsed and polished, and much better than some professional productions I’ve seen!

A cornucopia of links for you this week: