Sunday Smile. But on Monday

The sun seems to extract happiness from everyone, its all that vitamin d that's floating around. This picture is from Greenwich when it was bitingly cold, but that's beside the point, it was sunny then as well.

The ukelele society's first gig yesterday was pretty immense, though I don't know quite which was my favourite song, either the rendition of last night by the strokes or the particularly exquisite finishing number, the lyrics to which involved something like spreading the ukelele love. Because if you have love to give, there surely has to be ukeleles involved.

I'm quite tempted to join next year.

Today I did manage to get back to reading and get back to nature. Packed a towel and a bikini and headed up to Hampstead Heath with a friend. In an entire sitting, I lost myself in another Murakami novel, this time 'South of the Border, West of the Sun'. It was a bit heartbreaking to be honest, with a particularly beautiful quote about the sun setting being like blue ink seeping onto paper, resonant passages about the need to look forward. I think its always easier to lose yourself in a book when you are in a different environment. Hampstead was this. Masses of flowers, buttercup strewn fields, parakeets, magpies and geese flying overhead at any given moment. Getting back to nature was a bit more difficult than I anticipated, namely because I don't think I've ever truly been acquainted with it properly. I have two insect bites on my thigh and pond hair. The pond was pretty spectacular, yet even bearing in mind the heat of the day it was still ridiculously cold, it was a challenge enough to keep afloat considering how deep it was and a race to the nearest float culminated in a mascara stained face and a near loss of dignity with my bikini top. The choco leibniz biscuits restored my energy though. It was a monumentally great day, one of those spontaneous days where you go where the moment takes you (it took us to Nando's incidentally) and it is filled with conversation that you want to last forever.

The day also saw us lounging around in the long grass, dipping into A.C. Grayling's 'The Meaning of Things'. He has some insightful things to say about love and leisure, the idea that leisure is something better than being a counterpoint to work, it is 'the opportunity to work for higher ends', looking into Aristotle's ideas that well used leisure is a time that should be used to enjoy what makes us flourish, to enrich and better ourselves, 'to pursue the arts, to reflect, to deepen understanding, and to pursue excellence.' It's something that I hope I embrace this summer, along with endeavouring to build a matchbox pinhole camera. That excites me.

In mid conversation, Faithless came up on the agenda. We came to the conclusion that it probably would be pretty great to make mad love on the heath. Yes.