I’m still on my pro-active trip. Whether it’s the sun, the continuing feeling of NY, or just that a random and hidden positive gene has suddenly burst into life I don't know, but I’m still incredibly optimistic about life. 

My good friend Ellen is particularly surprised by my change of attitude. She is the type of women that has boundless energy, revels in life – even when it seems it’s thrown her a bad deal, and sweeps into life with a wave of positivity. She works hard and plays even harder, one of those girls that works all day and then, whilst the rest of us tiredly drag ourselves home and collapse on the couch, takes herself out to dinner at the newest restaurant, descends on down hearted friends to cheer them up or continues to build her property empire. She really has unstoppable energy.

This Saturday I’m lucky enough to be going to see Stomp. Nik, a true soul mate if ever I found one, managed to get some tickets for cheap and is taking me for my birthday. I’m very excited to see this award winning show, to be truthful I don’t know much about it and am eager to see what the fuss is about. Afterwards – and this is where the hermit himself was proactive – I decided that we should go out for dinner and I have booked reservations at “The Loop”, Oxford Circus. Me, book reservations for dinner?! I shocked myself! 

Ellen introduced me to a wonderful website. At Top Table you can check out thousands of Britain’s top restaurants using various categories from cuisine type to price to consumer rating. It’s a fantastic site, allowing surfers to sign up, get offers on some of the most trendy and upcoming restaurants around and even build up points for booking through the site and then returning to write a quick review. 1400 earned? Free meal! How wonderful, and its not as hard as you think, you get 200 points alone for signing up and then another 200 for each booking so within a few minutes I already had 400points. Another great little tool, which is one that really made it stand out, was an organising feature where you can pick restaurants, input friends emails and arrange meals out and bookings through the site so that everyone coordinates for the right date. I had to laugh when I text Ellen asking for the name of the site and she, upon realising what I was doing, sent back the text “Geoffrey, going out, what on earth has got into you?”

I’m sure this streak can’t continue, I’m sure I’ll soon slip back into the hermitage ways. I’ve even been snubbing Neighbours and that’s unheard off. This is the man that when he went to Ecuador for 5 weeks recorded the whole lot of missed episodes and watched a complete Neighbours Omnibus when he got back! I won’t even start to delve into the hideously geeky attributes with this, but the fact now, that after 20 years, I’ve chosen not to watch in favour of leaving my home and doing other things, now that’s BIG!   

Well, what I thought was going to be a very pleasant morning at work turned into an annoying nightmare! Its glorious in London, sun’s out, 26degrees, and so I finally set out to stain a clients deck that I’ve been promising to do for ages. I normally use Cuprinol but for some odd reason I decided to try Ronseal – that was the first mistake, I even fell for the “easy to stain applicator” labelling that was smeared across the packaging. 

Two hours later, I was in a complete mess. The stain supposed to cover 20msq had only just done about 10msq, it was thin with no substance and the easy to stain applicator was broken after I’d thrown a tantrum, hit it against the ground in frustration and snapped it in half! Now I know this is probably not the correct way to use the item but I’d have never bashed it if it had worked in the first place – every time you used it to slide up and down the boards the handle would simply slide off the head so you ended up with wood stain in blotchy puddles, dirty hands and feet from holding the darn thing together and very irritable temperament!

And what's even worse is that I'll have to do a second coat and I've only done half the decking! So I have several glorious hours of irritability ahead of me! Wonderful!

Use it at your peril – you’ve been warned!!