Wine, Warmth, Genevieve.

It's been a long week. A good one, on balance, but a long one. Crisp fine autumn days have been interspersed with periods of drizzle and murk, turning piles of golden leaves along Library Road into a slick auburn mat and back again. On Tuesday I left my bike on Campus and caught a lift back to Earlsdon with a friend. When I walked back onto Campus on Thursday I did the same, following a late night working session in the computer lab. Thus Friday morning found me walking in for my lecture, cutting across Hearsall Common. The ground was waterlogged, as usual, and halfway across the common I realised three things: first, that I had forgotten my safety boots for my lab work that afternoon; second, that I had also forgotten that my hiking boots need to go to the cobblers; third, that I was standing in what was effectively a small pond.

I turned around, squelched home and changed my boots.

One bus ride later (which, while not bad per se, was enough to remind me why I cycle) I arrived on Campus for my two hour lecture, in which the lecturer explained to us what Lean Supply chain management was, and I and all the other manufacturing engineers who had studied Lean last year bit through our pencils in frustration as he perpetuated the same myths that Western/Conventional management have spouted since it first appeared (I am aware that as a naive undergraduate I have no real experience of industry, unlike the lecturer, but some of the definitions he gave were simply wrong).

Following that I had a session in a workshop grinding carbon fibre samples dressed in a noddy suit (dust and grime everywhere - I have a new respect for anyone who works with the stuff), an hour long break to grab a cup of tea and a few biscuits in the chaplaincy, and then a three hour long robotics lab. Starting at four. On a Friday. Needless to say none of us there were firing on all cylinders, as it were.

I found my bike and cycled home, stopping briefly at Tesco, and when I reached home I put the radio on and began to cook dinner. While the sauce was bubbling away I found a pan and emptied in the box of wine, sugar, water, spices and fruit I had bought, and let it simmer. Then my housemate and I sat in our living room drinking mulled wine and listening to Radio Two play the themes from old British comedy films - The Ladykillers, Carry on Constable, Genevieve...

This morning I came downstairs and found the pan, pips lying among the citrus peel like shiny rubies. I lifted it to my nose and inhaled cinnamon, vanilla, orange, cloves... the scent of childhood Christmases and New Years, hanging on the edge of the kitchen counter as grownups ladled sweet red heat into glasses and mugs, filling the house with the smell. I looked out the window and saw that the drizzle had stopped, and brisk autumn breezes were sweeping the clouds aside for blue sky.

That's how you draw a line under a long week. Wine and warmth and the music from old films. That's more like it.