It’s Friday. It’s so nearly the end of the week that it hurts. In a bid to get the most out of my Friday evening, and thus maximise my #childfree weekend, I decide to stop off on my way to work to pick up much needed cat food and litter. I then get to work and find there’s only two of us in, which makes for a day that is at once leisurely and productive.
Before I leave for home, Rachel messages me, offering to drive Beryl home. We usually alternate this job on a Friday evening, the task typically falling to the #childfree parent. This is a welcome and unexpected bonus and will give me about an hour back. However, I do want to make sure that I see the kinderbesten before they disappear for the weekend, so I arrange to meet them all at Beryl’s house–which is conveniently just down the road from work.
On the way home I have the urge to replenish my wine cupboard, so I stop at the bottle shop to pick up a few reliable favourites. I do my Friday evening cleanup, and opt for a lazy freezer-based dinner. However, despite the vast swathes of time that have been cleared in my Friday evening, I’m somehow only just sitting down to dinner when Seb arrives for Fridate.
I’ve had a few exciting deliveries during the week, which we entertain ourselves with for a bit. The first is a new bluetooth speaker (a Harmon Kardon Onyx) which demonstrates some truly thumping bass given its size.
Next is the real prize: a pack of old Target Doctor Who novelisations that I picked up via eBay. I used to collect the books when I was [much] younger, and when they were still being produced. Even then some of the first editions, with the awesome Chris Achilleos covers, were out of print before I was able to get my hands on them back in the 1980s. I’ve dithered for several years over whether I wanted to try collecting some of my favourites or not; then, the other week, I see a set of 21 books on eBay which more or less includes all of the specific editions that I’ve been covering all these years. Including shipping, the set came to $100. I asked myself whether I wanted to spend $100 on old books, but the answer quickly came back as a Big Yes. The package arrived on Monday, but I saved it for Fridate so that Seb and I could spend some happy minutes admiring the books and thinking back to our fading childhoods.
After that we settle down for Fridate Horror. This week’s selection is Tales From The Crypt, selected mainly because Vault Of Horror was so much fun.