A truly memorable weekend ended on a sad note when Calliope confirmed that Brenda had indeed passed away on Sunday evening. Still thinking of ya....

Friday night saw what is now fast becoming the International tradition of a night out on the first Friday after payday. A number of us set up camp in the Lounge at around 5.45pm and didn't move a muscle, except to refill our glasses, until 11.15pm when I insisted on going to get some food. Left Abi, Avi, Bekah and Rach at the door of O'Neill's just before midnight as I was driving home. Would you believe, I only missed out on O'Neill's playing Macarena, although the girls had the good grace to phone me and leave a message on the answerphone with the tune in the background!

Saturday was a wonderful sporting and social occasion at the Powergen Cup semi-finals in Cardiff that not even Bath's agonising one-point defeat against Llanelli Scarlets could spoil. We motored up to Ross-on-Wye to pick up sister-in-law Ali and her chap Tony then onto Cardiff to meet up with Tony's dad Mike and his family and friends to pick up the tickets. Cardiff was awash with colour as supporters of the four semi-finalists descended on the city centre, the green, white and red of Leicester, the blue, black and white of Bath, the black and yellow of Wasps and the, erm, scarlet of Llanelli! Mike's friend Gordon is a season-ticket holder at Leicester Tigers and he'd got the tickets for us, so we found ourselves sat among the Tigers fans and allied ourselves with them against the mutual enemy, Wasps. What a magnificent theatre the Millennium Stadium is!! It wasn't quite full, there were around 51,000 there but you wouldn't need a Wildean imagination to suspect that, when Wales are at home and on song, roared on by a capacity crowd, it would be a wonderful experience. Sadly, Tigers couldn't quite prevail against a Wasps side who were outstanding in defence and scored a scorching breakaway try near the end to seal the win. So it came to the second semi-final and although we couldn't persuade our Welsh friends to join us in supporting Bath, we all enjoyed a enthralling encounter. When Bath scored an excellent try early in the second half to take a 23-10 lead, we allowed ourselves to start planning the route to Twickenham, but the Scarlets fought back wonderfully well to score two tries themselves and clinch a nailbiting 27-26 win. We took some good-natured ribbing from the jubilant Scarlets fans but not even defeat could spoil the day. Back in Ross, we staggered round the corner, still in our colours, for an excellent Indian at Cafe ZamZam, the town's new balti house.

Sunday morning dawned cold but gloriously sunny and we took the opportunity to go walking round Ross along the picturesque River Wye. It's not uncommon to see the local rowers out on the river and yesterday was no different. Ross Rowing Club has a very smart boathouse and a couple of single scullers and an eight were just taking to the water as we wandered past. Stayed for lunch and then headed home, a simply cracking weekend.

Following on from last week's thoughts about continuing my advance into the 21st century, Mrs Momus and I purchased a digital camera online last night to take to the Lakes this weekend. Luddites? Pah.....!

Last song on the iPod: Arctic Monkeys - When The Sun Goes Down