Today was supposed to be post camping relaxing day, but instead I spent the whole morning re-painting our house's iron gates. These three days flew like no other camping before which reflects the great time we had. We did nothing extraordinary except that we had a newcomer, the girlfriend of one of our friends. Now that camping has become second nature to us, we are elaborating food significantly. On Friday we had rabbit in gravy which was absolutely delicious, Saturday was fried chicken with broth day, and on Sunday we had choice of Bolognese pasta and White sauce pasta.

We spent most of our time talking and smoking since I've become fixated with my pipe again, after an abstinence of about 2 months. Obviously no camping is complete without Pictionary, Game of Life and some swimming. We also gave a try at customizing poker according to the different variants each one of us knew, but I had no time to teach them Texas Hold'em Up.

By the time we were camping dad returned from a three day trip to Turkey. He went to visit a tailoring company for the company's uniforms. It seems that he liked it very much because he kept on talking about Turkey for hours yesterday. He said that people are quite fair, very slim and not well off. Most things are quite cheap by European standards (5-star hotel 60Euro p/p) and there are lots of things to buy in Istanbul even though they tend to sell items in packets of 5.

To help us compensate for the lack of football, yesterday we rented The Ring (Reviews) starring Naomi Watts and Martin Henderson. Director Gore Verbinski succeeds in creating a psychological horror (paranormal) movie based on a story rather than gore and blood. The story puts Rachel Keller a journalist, investigating the death of her niece and a group of 4 friends who died 7 days after watching a video tape. The cinematography is used to great effect to portray a spooky cold dark atmosphere which keeps looming well after the end of the film. 3.5 Stars.

My intent of buying a new expensive pipe got superseded by this morning's Amazon buying frenzy spending a total of £100 on:-

• David Attenborough's Life of Birds (DVD)
• The Land of Green Plums – Herta Muller, Michael Hofmann (Translator)
• Grammatically Correct – A Stilman
• The Pipe Companion – David Wright
• A Question of Blood – Ian Rankin
• The Chancellor Manuscript – Robert Ludlum
• Secret Agent: The True Story of the Special Operations Executive
• Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps