We’ve had a really lovely couple of weeks weather-wise and I’ve been trying my best to make the most of it, despite having that pesky work thing to go to. I’ve spent most lunchtimes outdoors and those bits of evening or weekend I’m not outdoors have found me sat near a window enjoying the long light hours.

Last weekend for a friend’s birthday we went to the seaside. We took the train to Weston-super-Mare, which for those who don’t know it is a properly cheesy seaside town. There’s a pier, fair rides, ice-cream stalls, donkey rides and about a zillion people crowded onto the beach. We ate fish and chips, built a sandcastle and admired the rather more impressive works in the annual Sand Sculpture Festival. It was a lot of fun.

This weekend we booked a hotel for our New York trip later this year and to celebrate I started reading Joan Didion’s essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This book is actually mostly about California but to me she is a quintessentially New York writer. As it was also Dewey’s 24-hour readathon this weekend I called myself an honorary member (I probably read for at most 7 of those hours, but that’s still not bad going) and did some cheering on Twitter.

We went out for a pub Sunday lunch today and lingered over the New York Times crossword (not prep for our holiday; we do it every weekend). As we walked home through the sunshiny park I had one of those moments of feeling truly chilled out. It doesn’t happen often.

How was your weekend? Did you take part in the readathon? Or did you find some other way to relax?