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Friday August 5 
 Hotel Rwanda finally arrived from our mail-order DVD rental service. (I've identified the flaw in mail-order DVD rental: you stack up your choices in a queue and they promise to send you whichever title is available. This usually means they skip the newest and send you the older choices, which is why we've been waiting this long for Hotel Rwanda - it kept being leapfrogged by older, or less popular films. It's a good system otherwise, and I love the way you can keep the films until you feel like watching them - we've had Land And Freedom on the coffee table for about six weeks, patiently waiting until we find ourselves in a Spanish Civil War mood. It's the future. Let's hope they turn all the high street rental chains that go out of business into independent butchers and bakers. That is my dream.) A really admirable film, by the way, and exciting too. I learned a lot about Rwanda and the shame of non-intervention by the West, and the fact that we started the conflict with our colonial adventures, and Don Cheadle compensated ten times over for his shameful performances in Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve. Our very own Sophie Okonedo was very good too, although she had less to do: mostly looking vexed and then screaming. Nice to see the reassuringly famous white actors (Joaquin Phoenix, Jean Reno, Nick Nolte) playing only minor roles, since that was undeniably the case in real life. How profoundly it all fell into place when Nolte's good-hearted UN peacekeeper explained to Cheadle's hotelier why the white man was not coming to his aid: "You're not even a nigger. You're an African." Tough stuff.

Saturday August 6 
The terrorists beat me today as I was forced to take the Tube from the BBC to Victoria at the end of my 6 Music Chart shift. However, we learn that Tube use is down 30% at weekends (and 15% in the week), and it's certainly quieter down there and easier to eye other passengers up, so perhaps we, the brave 30%, are beating them in our own way. I was in a hurry because, happily, we were off to a barbecue this evening in a small village the other side of Tunbridge Wells in Kent. In the event, it only took 45 minutes to drive there. I never think of myself as so close to Kent. Sarah works at Radio 4, and I used to see a lot of her when I presented Back Row, but less since, even though she's only two floors above 6 Music. She moved out of London to the semi-rural sticks earlier this years and recently acquired two kittens, Daisy and Leonard, who helped precipitate our visit and dominated it, because we're soppy like that. (Cat "owners" are just as bad as parents!) Arrived at 8.30, when certain among the first shift of guests were getting ready to leave, but a happy quorum stayed and the barbecue was still hot, there was plenty of food and the kittens were full of fun (at one point escaping into next door's garden). It's a long time since I've had chance to muck about with tiny cats. You forget how light they are, and how investigative. Stayed up talking (about everything from films and Dan Brown to mobile phone masts) until gone 1am, which meant we weren't home until 2am. That's one late night for me in my old age! Highly sociable. And good to spend a whole evening without looking at a screen.

Sunday August 7  
Not much to report. Enjoyed meeting John Foxx again - he was in to do In Your Own Time on the Sunday show, with a new ambient album in the shops tomorrow, Cathedral Oceans III, a rather languid and relaxing track off which we played, it being a Sunday afternoon. What a gentleman he is: softly-spoken but with an inquiring mind and a quiet sense of humour. He's currently modelling himself on Cary Grant, so he said, and recommended the book The Wisdom Of Crowds. A rare treat to have my showbiz friend Simon Day in to review the papers, too, especially when he offered a rare glimpse into the world of Vic Reeves' wedding, which he attended, plus, we had some top-grade material to play with, not least the News Of The World 's thorough exposé of Phil Mitchell's "dogging" activities. (Simon was in as a favour. Richard Herring is in Edinburgh, in common with every other comic in Britain and half of the staff of the Guardian.)

Watched the tape from yesterday of Foyle's War - it's a repeat, but we hadn't seen it, having come to the programme late. Yes, it's another detective series (meat and potatoes in our house), but it's set during the Second World War, which is a good hook. Michael Kitchen, who always plays Prince Charles whatever he's in, is tremendous as the low-key, ruminative Foyle, as is the unusually named Honeysuckle Weeks, who plays his jolly-hockey-sticks military driver and number two. It was either this or a career in porn with a name like that.

I understand England won a cricket match that nobody expected them to win. Good.

Monday August 8 
I got up early this morning as the skip was being delivered and I heard the unmistakable rattle of a skip lorry at 7.30. I went out to investigate (as our house isn't very clearly numbered and delivery vans usually go past a couple of times) and found the bloke setting down his skip in next door's drive. He checked his itinerary and had the right address - it turned out we were both having skips delivered (what are the chances etc.). Anyway, ours didn't come until 10am, so I had an extended breakfast period, during which I was able to give the Guardian a good read. It was mostly draconian terror laws and Edinburgh, but what a surprise when I turned to Elisabeth Mahoney's radio review in G2. Without warning, she had dedicated the whole column to my Sunday show, and was very complimentary too. I wont bask; read about my "soft centre" here: 

You don't get reviewed much when you present live music radio (it's mostly plays and documentaries, or Five Live during national crises), so it was a weird feeling, reading all about myself. She even mentioned this blog in favourable terms. Elisabeth Mahoney, whom I've never met, is my Woman of the Week. Apologies to Honeysuckle Weeks.

Anyway, the skip, which I mistakenly announced as a 12-yarder last week but is in fact a ten. That's big enough. We had paid for a permit and ordered flashing lights from HSS, assuming it would go on the street, but the bloke was able to stick it on the end of the drive, a far more conducive arrangement. (I rang and cancelled the lights, saving a lot more money than you might assume four flashing lights would cost to hire for a week.) I spent the next three hours filling the skip with rubbish from the garage, the shed and what we lovingly call "the junk room", which meant a lot of breaking up of knackered IKEA furniture into its component parts and saving all the screws. It also meant disturbing an awful lot of spiders who had made homes among all the stuff in the garage, some as big as my protective gloves. I was the Surrey equivalent of St Francis of Assisi and rescued as many as I could, gently removing them and putting them back into the dark recesses of the garage, including a lady spider with loads of unhatched eggs on her back (which means I saved about 100 spiders in one go). I don't do this for congratulation, I firmly believe it is my responsibility.

There's nothing like a day of honest, physical activity to reconnect you with yourself. I wasn't thinking about Word magazine or my book or Lee Mack or the column I have to write for Front Row, I just acquiesced to the demands of hard work. Plus, I actually achieved something. The skip is full, the shed is empty, there is almost room for a car(!) in the garage. And no insects were to my knowledge harmed in the making of this picture.

As a reward for my achievement, I treated myself to a pre-dinner DVD, Friday Night Lights, a superb American Football saga with Billy Bob Thornton as the obligatory inspirational coach and nobody famous as the 17-year-old college football players from the arse-end town of Odessa in Texas. True story. Highly recommended. (It was recommended to me by Adam Smith, who he is even less interested in sport than me, which tells you something.)

Having missed the entire Amanda Burton reign on Silent Witness (1996-2004) except what turned out to be her final episode, we're now making up for lost time with the new incarnation, with Emilia Fox and Tom Ward in the main roles. They all come in two-parters, like most BBC cop shows, and because of tomorrow's football we have to wait until Wednesday for the concluder to this one, which involves the garroting of seemingly random victims (including a hapless pizza delivery boy and a gardener) and a magazine with 200 subscribers called Ethics Today. It could be my new favourite programme. Followed by a thrown-together documentary without a question mark called Why Bomb London. It was basically about how we allowed extremists to use London as a base with the tacit, unwritten agreement that they wouldn't blow us up. Nothing I hadn't read in the New Statesman cover story from last year ('Londonistan') but I aim to beat the terrorists by understanding them. Recorded tonight's The New Al-Qaeda for future viewing. I also aim to understand how you spell Al-Qaeda. I am knackered by the way. Good.

Tuesday August 9
As if hooked on the endorphins of physical activity, I did a 30-minute workout and found myself overcome with the desire to mow the lawn. It was, after all, another lovely day, and we have visitors on Thursday. If it stays fine (and I realise it may not, this being England, and this being Reigate), we'll sit in the garden. I actually mowed until the petrol ran out, leaving a conspicuous strip down the right hand side, but that's character.

Managed to write and deliver two radio columns - that is, authored essays for radio programmes - one on films being better than books for Front Row, one on the current epidemic of remakes for the Today programme (I was as surprised to get the call as you are reading about it). I hope to record both of them tomorrow and thus only go into London once this week. That is my dream. We'll see if they can find a studio for me.

More terrorism tonight: The Cult Of The Suicide Bomber, first part of a two parter by Robert Baer, ex-CIA with years of experience in the Middle East, who rather brilliantly spoke in Arab dialects as he interviewed parents of martyrs (as suicide bombers are known) in Lebanon and Iran. An authoritative and unsensational documentary (not bad for one authored by an American - and one who lost friends and colleagues in the bomb on the US Embassy in Beirut 1983 - if only there were more like him).

What a lovely day for sitting out in the back garden and eating cold meats and salad with friends you haven't seen in just over a year.

Watched the second Nip/Tuck this evening (even better - it was the one where Christian thought he was HIV positive, the ultimate punishment for Miami's plastic surgery Lothario, and Sean has his face carved up by a serial killer), after Extras (the Les Dennis one, which I found creepy rather than enjoyable - I'm not sure how I feel about the series as a whole yet) and Catherine Tate, more cringing-embarrassment-as-comedy. Then, rather than go to bed without any terrorism, I caught up with part two of The Cult Of The Suicide Bomber, which brought matters up to date via Israel-Palestine, September 11 and the London bombs. We live in dark times. Perhaps dark drama and dark comedy are what we deserve. Discuss.

I'm back on skip duty again tomorrow.

The views expressed in this column are the views of Andrew Collins and do not neccesarily reflect the views of the BBC.