A friend, who’s recently moved a few miles nearer the Norfolk coast, wondered plaintively if it’s always wetter in Broadland?  The weather, that is, not the Broads, obvs.  But it’s wet here too, it’s hardly stopped raining all day.  So Dave and Alex are planning to come and mend the shed roof on Wednesday morning instead of tomorrow.

Poor Eloise is searching the carpet for the spider she’d been stalking.  I quietly picked it up and chucked it into the safety of the porch, and she can’t think what’s happened to it.  She’s darting behind chairs and pouncing, in the hope of flushing it out.  She’s a keen spider-hunter, which I mostly tolerate, fond though I am of spiders.  She and Rummy have become great chums and she encourages him to play kittenishly.  Roses watched them this morning, when she hid behind a curtain and swatted him when he came to look for her.  Later, they came through here and she jumped on a chair, so as to be able to leap on him from a height.  He doesn’t seem to mind.

I needed a new notebook for my meeting this morning and resorted to an old desk diary from 2005, which I thought was unused.  When I opened it again, however, I found that I’d written my itinerary for Russell’s benefit while I was in India in January of that year.  Sadly, the itinerary was changed, because Wink and I had been due to spend part of the time in Sri Lanka, but were prevented from doing so by the tsunami on Boxing Day.  I’ve remembered now that, as Russell and I were both so busy, I’d had the idea of having an extra diary, so that we could both put down our appointments and maybe manage more time together, or at least not double-book.  I was the only one to ever write in it, though so, apart from regular events that I’d filled in at the start of the year, jottings petered out around March.  We must have gone back to our usual method, of having a conversation (I know, radical!) on a Sunday evening to compare diaries.  Now, I suppose, we’d just share them on our phones.

Which reminds me, I checked my bank account this evening and there are still four people who haven’t paid their cheques in since the auction.  I’ve a total of £2,161 in there that doesn’t belong to me.  Annoyingly, it’s in my personal account rather than my business one, because the bank didn’t send a cheque book in time.  I had to use my personal cheque book, then put the money in from the other account.  I’ve still got the profit sitting in that one, I suspect I’ll use it to pay my tax bill.