Rite of passage alert: yesterday evening I set an Out Of Office email for the first time.
OK, that might not seem like much, but that’s only because a small number of rites – things like ‘your first kiss’ and ‘having a baby’ and ‘dying’ – have long exercised a grossly unfair stranglehold over society. It’s high time we busted open this restricted market, opening it up to unrestrained competition between rites large and small, so that ‘out of office reply’ can seem legitimately exciting. And it is legitimately exciting, because it marks the fact that I’m (finally) going on holiday again! To Berlin! Hurrah!
The past couple of weeks have been quite lovely – a combination of the sun and a general return of people back to the metropolis. So Joshua, Robert and I could while away a Sunday afternoon in the William IV beer garden, and Tash is around to hustle coins for the Mayhew from me outside the Kensal Rise flea, and Grace and I can have impromptu cocktails and ice creams and Buffy. (There are a couple of things wrong with that sentence – including weird tense shifting, and the fact that Buffy is hardly very summery, but I have to get up at around half 4 tomorrow morning so maybe we can let this pass?) I was also really glad that Oliver and I made it up to Cambridge again for Bill and Sharon’s wedding reception. Any couple whose honeymoon plans explicitly include a train museum are, of course, awesome 
