Last night once again, we used a book as an excuse to eat, drink and be merry (with heavy emphasis on the eating part - there are definite advantages in having Sharon among our number whose other half is a whizz in the kitchen - delicious glass noodles were the result!) .

It has to be said that the book (Antoine de saint Expury's Wind Sand & Stars) was not the evening's main topic of conversation. The fact that a number of us had struggled to get much beyond page 30 and others thought that it was "nice" but nothing more didn't do much to fuel the discussion. What we did agree on was that the age of such adventurous aviation is definitely behind us and that all of us hop on planes as easily as we hop on buses, and that as such the level of exploration, isolation and discovery that enhances the book is something that is missing from our hectic modern lives.

Although de saint Expury had his life-changing experiences when he crashed his plane in the desert, the subject of mind-altering experiences brought us neatly on to one of the hot topics of the evening... Sharon's attendance at the "Burning Man" festival in the Nevada desert. Sharon, if you can put us in touch with the owner of that Orgasmatron chair, he'll have at least 7 definite customers! (For the non-attendees, it appears that one of the more popular attractions at Burning Man was something that women literally had to be peeled off. I'll leave it you your imagination).

Which then brought us on to the Jim Rose circus (on at the Ancienne Belgique on Monday Sept 20th incidentally), a freak show to which a policeman once brought me on our first date. The merits of dating policemen and other individuals whose profession/ lifestyle is different from one's own, Europeans' freakish habit of getting degrees in languages, Sioban's move to Cranfield in the UK for her masters and Sharon's move to Bonn to bring a bit of life to some dull German ex-civil servants were all also up for discussion.

As you can tell, a cerebral, intellectual, philosophical debate was not really on the cards. We live in hope...