Whitney and I have been married for six years today. We went away for an overnight stay in a hotel suite in Portsmouth in New Hampshire yesterday, where we spent most of the time in a very large bathtub, and today I'm recharging using the two bonus holidays I got off from work as a reward for barely sleeping for three weeks.

Portsmouth reminded me pleasantly of St Andrews - I don't think I've ever seen a town of its size in America before, as the landscape usually seems to be one very big city that changes its name every few miles, with a vast expanse of unsettlingly square sections that look like a possessed Atari between the coasts. For our anniversary dinner we were in a restaurant which was set up in a building that was at various points in its life a mansion, hotel a library, and has a wonderful aesthetic where you sit among the shelves and the bill is presented to you in an actual book. Sadly the meal itself was less spectacular - I always ask for a "medium" steak because everyone seems to have a slightly different definition of what "medium" is, and this one was dangerously raw at one end and dangerously cremated at the other. It was admittedly "medium" on average.

As worried as I am that we seem to accidentally be turning into mini-golf aficionados, we stopped at an outdoor activity place called Kimball Farm on the way back, where we'd been for a work day out a couple of weeks before, and went around one of its two courses, where was as spectacular as you would expect from American miniature golf - it was like one of the physically unlikely ones in Rollercoaster Tycoon, winding around a mountainous rock with waterfalls pouring off it and forming parts of the course as the streams made their way down to the boating lake.


Some of the holes are inventively intimidating without being nasty - this one had a fissure that you had to fly over, without hitting it so hard that you bounce off the back and then fall into the water anyway.


As it is impossible to tell from this photo, one of the holes is designed so that you have to go against all your instincts and punt your ball into the water - the fast-moving current takes it down to the rock you can't see at the top left, where the water pours down a grate, letting your ball roll forwards and into the green area.


And this one was just ridiculous - you start on the bottom layer and have to hit it as hard as possible into the dark cave in front of you, and then your ball turns into Sonic the Hedgehog and launches up a half-pipe at the back that deposits it out on the floating island above.

Another one of the unexpected great moments of the weekend was finding an Irish/Celtic shop that had some imported foods in it, and discovering that strangely, British chocolate seems to be very popular in New Hampshire. So we bought a cooler from a nearby pharmacy and came back from our anniversary weekend with a cargo of pies and Curly Wurlys.